Josh Tyrrell signed his franchise at 29 with no intention of becoming a volume builder. A decade on he has 18 staff, drafting and accounting in house, and a second office in the works.

Josh Tyrrell was 28, building his own first house, and entirely uninterested when the G.J. Gardner Homes network came knocking.

“I was never into the volume builder thing,” he told The Good Builder Podcast. “I was like, nah, not interested, mate.”

His father, an accountant, had looked at the model before on behalf of other clients and told him something that changed his mind. The franchises usually went to builders at the back end of their careers, because those were the only ones who could afford the setup. If Tyrrell was serious, his father said, he would back him.

He signed. The Warragul office opened in October 2016.

Ten years on, the business has built around 250 homes, employs 18 people, averaged a contract price near $800,000 on last financial year’s site starts, and is looking at property for a second office in the Traralgon area. Tyrrell chairs G.J. Gardner’s national franchise advisory council. He turns 40 soon.

The part he keeps returning to is not the building.

“I was still a builder then. Now I’m probably more of a business person. Building’s what we do. I genuinely enjoy the business side of it these days.” Josh Tyrrell

The shift from builder to operator

Tyrrell’s week is now spent on strategy rather than sites. A general manager runs operations. Beneath that sit a construction manager, a sales manager and an internal accountant.

What the office calls the downstairs team covers two sales consultants, a sales administrator, a contract administrator, a receptionist, two estimators and an in house drafting function. On the construction side there are three supervisors, plus a fourth who handles aftercare, maintenance and handover, picking up each job at fixing stage and carrying it through to the end of the maintenance period. There is also a labourer and a full time carpenter on staff.

That structure is the point. Tyrrell describes his own role in a single line.

“I employ people who do their job way better than I can do it. Could I do their job? Yes. Are they better at it? Absolutely.” Josh Tyrrell

His job, as he puts it, is making sure the general manager, the sales manager and the construction manager are set up to succeed. Set the targets, then clear the path.

It is a model of running a building business that plenty of operators describe and fewer actually construct, largely because it means paying for capability before the revenue arrives to justify it.

Why a builder brings drafting and accounting in house

Two decisions stand out from the last decade.

The first is drafting. Warragul is one of the few offices in the network that keeps drafting in house. Ng noted during the conversation that some large volume builders still send that work offshore.

The second is accounting, and it is recent. The business had used the same external accountant since day one and rates her work highly. But as turnover grew, so did what the business needed from her, and the arrangement stopped fitting.

A qualified accountant and BAS agent came inside about six months ago. The change brought cash flow forecasting, revenue targets and internal reporting under one roof, alongside the reporting regime the franchise network already requires on set dates.

“The bigger that bucket gets, some of those holes get pretty big too. So you’ve got to start plugging them.” Josh Tyrrell

He is equally clear that the move only works past a certain scale. As he puts it, the business has to be big enough to support the overhead before the overhead can help it.

Hiring before the work arrives

Warragul staffs ahead of demand rather than behind it.

“We’ve always employed early, to my detriment sometimes. If you’re drowning and you’re behind that wave and you’re trying to play catch up and onboard new staff, it’s brutal.” Josh Tyrrell

He is not claiming a clean record on it. The business has pushed its construction team well past a reasonable workload more than once, and he says so plainly. But the stated preference is to bring a supervisor in before the need is obvious, rather than six months after the team hit capacity.

Every proposed change runs through one filter first.

“The primary thing when we look at anything in business is, is that going to increase our client experience? And if the answer’s no, well then it’s not something that’s probably relevant to bring in.” Josh Tyrrell

A cost analysis still has to stack up after that. But the order matters. Client experience first, then the numbers.

Competing on the blocks nobody else wants

Warragul sits in Baw Baw Shire. The franchise area now extends across Baw Baw and Latrobe, and the business also builds through South Gippsland and the Bass Coast. It is a regional operation with an average contract price closer to metropolitan Melbourne than to most regional markets, and that is deliberate.

Rather than compete with the national volume builders on flat greenfield estates, Warragul went after the sites those builders avoid.

“It’s brutal to compete. But they can’t with me when we start talking about 10 metres of fall.” Josh Tyrrell

The referral flow runs both ways. Tyrrell says the larger builders actively send clients his way when a block is beyond what their systems handle, because they know it is not their market and they are not going to waste the time.

Most of the work is custom, and Tyrrell wants it at volume rather than boutique numbers. He is aiming at 30, 40 or 50 builds a year in that space, not five or ten. The business has also been taking on a growing amount of specialist disability accommodation.

The geographic spread proved its worth when conditions across the residential market tightened. Neighbouring franchise areas that sat vacant gave the business somewhere else to pick up work while its home patch slowed.

What running a building business at this size actually costs

Tyrrell is unusually direct about the economics, and about what the public does not see.

“It costs us like three and a half million dollars a year just to open the doors and turn the lights on.” Josh Tyrrell

On margins, he is blunt. Building businesses do not run on thirty or forty per cent, he says, and most of what comes in goes straight back out to trades and suppliers. You have to move a great deal of money to make any.

Then there is the personal exposure. Holding the insurance required to build means putting everything behind it.

“We leverage everything we have to be able to build. Our family home, everything we have is anchored to it.” Josh Tyrrell

It does not stop with his household. Eighteen families are directly employed by the business, and hundreds of trades and suppliers sit behind those. He is also carrying ten years of liability on every home already handed over, which does not disappear if he decides to stop.

When the pipeline is full and nothing can start

One year the business had roughly 30 jobs ready to go to site. Twenty five of them triggered planning permits.

Tyrrell says a job that triggers a planning permit in his area can wait around twelve months. The work existed, it was signed, and none of it could commence.

“We’ve got all this work, but we can’t touch any of it.” Josh Tyrrell

The business chose to absorb the cost rather than shed staff, on the reasoning that the work was real and the people would be needed the moment approvals landed. In his words, they ploughed a big hole because they were not prepared to get rid of the people.

Regulation has added to the load over the same period. Victoria’s 7 star energy efficiency and livable housing design provisions under the National Construction Code 2022 commenced on 1 May 2024, according to the state’s Building and Plumbing Commission, lifting compliance requirements for builders operating in Victoria. Tyrrell nominates that shift as one of the cost pressures of recent years.

What the franchise network is actually worth

Ask most franchisees what a network gives them and the answer is brand awareness and buying power. Tyrrell rates both, but puts the people above them.

In the early years that meant knowing what other operators were paying bricklayers, carpenters, painters and plasterers, and being able to ask whether an idea had already been tried and failed. More recently it produced something with sharper teeth.

When cost pressure returned after the COVID period, the network took a collective position on price rises. Instead of accepting permanent rate increases, franchisees negotiated temporary surcharges with a defined reversal point.

“We all know that if we put the rate up, it’ll never come back. If we accept a temporary fuel surcharge, we’re not changing the rate. We’re paying the same for concrete and we’re just paying extra over here, but that comes off.” Josh Tyrrell

The network also handed them comparative pricing. Tyrrell describes going back to a local concrete supplier holding rates from franchises across the country and pointing out that the surcharge being applied locally was the highest in the country. His summary of that conversation was short. You cannot dispute the data.

That collective view sharpened again when the brand moved from a state master franchise structure to a national one. Offices that once operated largely within their own state now compare notes across it.

What makes a good builder

The question The Good Builder puts to every guest produced an answer Aaron Ng said he had not heard in more than 300 episodes.

“A good builder will just take responsibility for what they do. If they get it wrong, they’re going to own it.” Josh Tyrrell

He does not frame it as a technical standard. It is behavioural, and it is unglamorous.

“Any bad situation that would come up, we could stop and reflect on that and go, you know what, we played a part in that. So let’s try and solve it.” Josh Tyrrell

That includes the expensive ones. He says the business has made significant mistakes and effectively built houses for free, and that the question afterwards is always whether they played a part in getting there before deciding who wears it.

The other thread running through the conversation is why any of it is worth doing. Tyrrell has two young children and structured the business so he can do the school run and take a day off when it is needed. He says he would rather add five years to the end of his working life than miss the years in front of him.

One more line from the early days has stayed with him, passed on by another operator in the network during his onboarding. The quicker you realise this is a sales business and not a building business, the better. It took him five or six years to accept it. Building, he says, is a process you follow step by step once a job is on site. Getting someone to trust you with the largest purchase of their life is the harder part.

The Good Builder Take

The most useful thing about this conversation is how undramatic it is. There is no pivot, no reinvention, no single decision that changed the trajectory. There is a builder who asked, repeatedly, whether a given change would improve the client experience, and who was willing to pay for capability before the revenue arrived to justify it. Drafting brought inside. An accountant brought inside. A supervisor hired early. A neighbouring franchise area formalised before someone else took it. Ten years of small compounding choices is a slower story than a collapse. It is also a far more common one, and it gets reported far less.

Listen to the full conversation with Josh Tyrrell on The Good Builder Podcast.

Frequently asked questions

This article is general information only and does not take into account the objectives, financial situation or needs of any particular business or individual. Figures, dates and operational details are as described by the interviewee on The Good Builder Podcast and have not been independently audited. Regulatory requirements vary by state and change over time.

Author: TGB Editorial