The new general manager of the Sunshine Coast surface protection business has spent a career in hardware, paint and building products. His first read on the market is that builders skipping protection are not cutting costs. They are taking a bet.
A $5,000 bathtub gets damaged before handover. It is on the second storey.
To get the replacement in, the tile work comes off, a window comes out and a crane goes up.
By the time the job is closed out, that $5,000 bathtub has cost $20,000.
Mark Sutton heard about that job the week he started as the new general manager of Goop Guys, and he uses it deliberately. It frames how he reads the current market.
“I don’t know whether to do goop or not do goop is a cost cutting exercise. I think it’s more like a risk taking exercise.”
From a hardware store counter to the GM chair
Sutton’s appointment brings a long run through hardware, paint and building products into a business that has grown from a garage on the Sunshine Coast into a national franchise network. He has held senior roles at Wattyl, Everhard Industries and Crimsafe Group, and worked in and around the major hardware channels along the way.
He starts the story much earlier than any of that.
“I started out working in my dad’s hardware store in Cleveland in Brisbane,” Sutton said. His father was a paint man. The affinity stuck through university and never really left.
What drew him to Goop Guys was not the product. It was the shape of the job.
“I’ve always loved enabling and growing businesses,” he said. “Setting up businesses, structures, programs, products, and then seeing them thrive and grow.”
Goop Guys was founded on the Sunshine Coast in 2001. Shane Copley developed the water based peelable coating, and he and Kirstee built the business out of a cleaning operation they had been running through the late 1990s. Franchising started in 2006. The product is still manufactured in Australia.
The number that matters is not the invoice
For a builder watching every line item, the instinct is to read protection as a cost. Sutton’s argument is not that it is cheap. It is that the comparison being made is the wrong one.
He puts the cost of protecting a typical home at somewhere between $500 and $1,000.
“What’s an average home these days in Australia? It’s a million bucks,” he said. “Five hundred to a thousand dollars to protect that investment and stop that rework and stop you delaying all your other projects. It’s sort of like an insurance policy.”
That million dollar figure is a finished home, land included. On the construction side the number is different but the point holds. Across the financial year to June 2026, the average approval value of a new house in Australia was $516,752, calculated from $62.69 billion of approved building work across 121,312 houses in the ABS building approvals data. Five years earlier the same calculation came to $382,064.
That is the build value a builder is contracting to deliver, and it has climbed by roughly a third in five years.
Sutton’s point is that the damage bill does not scale with the protection bill. It scales with what got broken and where it sits in the build. A bath on the ground floor is a bath. A bath on the second storey is a crane.
Rework does not stay where it happened
Sutton’s second observation is about sequencing rather than cost, and it is the one most site supervisors will recognise fastest.
Damage does not stay contained to the trade that caused it. A bricklayer who marks a window has created a call back for himself and a delay for everyone queued behind him, and he probably has thirty jobs lined up already.
Az described walking onto a site while contracting for Goop Guys and hearing the cleaners start cheering. He assumed briefly it was for The Good Builder. It was not.
“They said anytime that Goop come on and do a job, it’s so easy to clean,” he said. “You just peel off the thing.”
On the same site, the bricklayers pulled their pallets back to let the application go through first.
“Helps everyone keep moving,” Sutton said.
That is the argument in four words. Where trades are thin and programs are tight, protection shows up in the schedule before it ever shows up in the defect list.
The Good Builder ran an informal survey of its own community on the cost side of this question some time ago. Average reported damage to protectable surfaces came back at around $27,000 per home. Az has said he wants to run it again now the audience is considerably larger, and the number should be read as indicative rather than as industry data. The direction of it is consistent with what Sutton describes.
The question is not what the boss knows
Sutton has spent seventeen years volunteering at Wynnum Wolves FC, the 105 year old Brisbane football club. He is a former vice president and now coaches two sides, a senior women’s team and an under 14 girls team. He talks about the club and the business in almost identical language.
“What’s the team like you’ve got? What are they really good at? What can they do? What’s their capacity?” he said. “And then making sure that you’re putting them in a position where they can be successful.”
Applied to Goop Guys, that starts with naming what he does not do.
“I don’t know everything about goop, or about construction. I’m not a specialist builder,” Sutton said. Shane is the product thinker. Kirstee runs the administration. Jordan and Dave run manufacturing.
“So how do I make sure that I’m not getting in the way?”
It is a framing that turns up repeatedly in how experienced operators run a building business. The question is not what the person at the top knows. It is whether the people who know more than him are free to act.
Where the network grows next
Goop Guys currently services the east coast. Sutton says there is open territory in Sydney, parts of Melbourne and regional Victoria, and central Queensland, with Adelaide and Western Australia in the longer term view. Some of that is being pulled by builders already using the service elsewhere and asking for it on their other projects.
Franchisees run their own territory with full support behind them. Sutton says the profitability holds up for an operator who runs it properly.
Alongside that, the business also runs a licensee model aimed at existing trades. A cleaner, painter, stonemason or waterproofer can take a licence and run it alongside their core work.
“When you’re running a business there’s always the highs and lows,” Sutton said. “This goop licence could be something that you could run parallel and keep your team busy.”
The logic is retention as much as revenue. Quiet periods are when good people go over the road. One Brisbane North franchisee already runs a successful waterproofing business alongside the Goop operation, and finds the two feed each other on the same projects.
On Australian manufacturing
Goop is manufactured on the Sunshine Coast and shipped to customers overseas. Both men spent the back end of the conversation on what the last few years taught the industry about supply chains, and Sutton was measured about it.
“You can’t flick a switch and then recreate a steel industry,” he said.
He does not think Australia retreats from regional trade, and he is not interested in the culture war version of the argument. He thinks the useful work is in capacity.
“Build your capacity and have multiple supply chains,” he said. “Don’t just rely on that container coming in.”
What makes a good builder
Every guest gets the same closing question. Sutton’s answer started with project management and finished somewhere more interesting.
“Communication, transparency, lean in when things don’t go right,” he said. “But also the risk mitigation piece as well.” He described a builder as trying to get everyone in the orchestra playing their part on cue, across thirty or forty moving pieces at once.
Then the part that landed.
“You don’t have to pretend you own the thing you’re building. But have some care for it, and then that shows through to your customer.”
He has been on the receiving end of the alternative. When his own four bedroom home was near completion, a trade put a backhoe through some piping. The site supervisor told him he would need to pay for it. When he asked why, the answer was that he could pay, or he could wait for his house.
Sutton’s read on that is not that mistakes are avoidable. It is that they are the test.
“Nobody has a hundred percent completion rate all the time,” he said. “It’s how you react when things don’t go to plan. Do you lean in, or do you go missing?”
The Good Builder Take
Sutton is not the first person to argue that prevention beats rework. What is more useful is the way he separates two decisions that usually get treated as one.
Cost cutting is a decision about price. Risk taking is a decision about probability and consequence. They feel identical when the invoice is in front of you and they are not remotely the same thing.
Most builders under margin pressure are told they are doing the first. Sutton’s read is that a fair few are quietly doing the second, without ever pricing the downside. That distinction runs a long way past surface protection.
The full conversation with Mark Sutton is on The Good Builder Podcast on Wednesday or check out the full video on our Youtube Channel
Frequently asked questions
Temporary surface protection is a coating or covering applied to finished surfaces during a build to stop them being damaged before handover. Goop Guys uses a water based peelable coating that is applied like paint and peeled off at the end of the job. It is used on windows, benchtops, bathtubs, tiles and flooring. The coating sets in about an hour in the right conditions and can stay on the surface for up to twelve months.
Mark Sutton has been appointed general manager of Goop Guys. He has held senior roles at Wattyl, Everhard Industries and Crimsafe Group, and started his working life in his father’s hardware store in Cleveland in Brisbane. He joins founders Shane Copley and Kirstee, who started the business on the Sunshine Coast in 2001.
Sutton puts the cost of protecting a typical Australian home at between $500 and $1,000. He compares that against the cost of replacing a damaged item late in the build, using the example of a $5,000 bathtub on a second storey that cost around $20,000 to replace once tiling removal, window removal and a crane were factored in.
Because access drives the cost, not the item. Replacing a fixture after surrounding trades have finished means undoing completed work to get the new item in. It also pulls a crew off other jobs, delays the trades queued behind it and pushes out handover. On imported items, lead times can add months to the delay.
Sutton says the network currently services the east coast, with franchise and licensee opportunities open in Sydney, parts of Melbourne, regional Victoria and central Queensland. Adelaide and Western Australia are described as longer term expansion targets.
A franchise is a standalone territory business with full head office support including marketing. A licence is aimed at an existing trade business, such as a cleaner, painter, stonemason or waterproofer, that wants to add surface protection alongside its core work. Sutton describes the licence model as a way for those operators to keep teams busy through quiet periods.
This article is general information only. It does not take into account your business circumstances and is not professional, financial or legal advice. Figures attributed to individuals are their own statements as made on The Good Builder Podcast. Australian Bureau of Statistics figures are current as at the June 2026 Building Approvals release. Goop Guys is a commercial partner of The Good Builder.
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