Phil Del Titto from WD Constructions spent four years as an apprentice carpenter. He came out qualified, handy with the tools and ready to subcontract. Then he sat down to write his first invoice and realised he had no idea how to do it.

“I wrote a Word document and I kind of had to pick other guys’ brains on site and go, hey, how do you do it,” he told The Good Builder Podcast. “Felt really embarrassed.”

That was two decades ago. Phil is 35 now, has been in carpentry and building since he was 15, and runs a renovation and extension business across Melbourne that has never spent a dollar on advertising. His view is that the gap he fell into has not been filled.

“When you’re quoting, how you invoice, what a purchase order is. I had never even seen one. My whole apprenticeship.”

From a pre apprenticeship at 15 to a business built on word of mouth

Nobody in Phil’s family was in construction. His grandfather ran a farm, sold potatoes and pumpkins to Woolworths, and put a teenage Phil to work with tools during school holidays. That was enough. At the end of year nine he told his parents he wanted to be a carpenter. His mother agreed on one condition: a pre apprenticeship, done properly.

He started WD Constructions in 2018, just before COVID. The decision was not a plan so much as a moment. He walked out of a site meeting, quit, and had a week of work lined up at a mate’s house. His partner was pregnant with their first child.

“I had no idea how it was gonna go and I just knew in me, I was just like, what I’m doing is a waste of my skill. That was all I knew.”

Since then the work has come entirely by referral. Phil has also built an Instagram following of more than fifteen thousand, at the time of the conversation, by pulling plasterboard off walls and showing what is actually behind a quote. One post questioning how a fast build was being marketed to buyers reached close to half a million views.

The business skills nobody teaches

Phil’s central argument is not that trade training is bad. It is that it stops at the tools and leaves out the part that decides whether a business survives.

He wants quoting, invoicing and basic business administration built into trade qualifications as standard modules. Not as an elective, and not as something you pick up by asking an older bloke on site.

The gap shows up again at the next stage. Phil says even the builders licence process was oriented around solvency rather than delivery, which is closer to the reality of running a building business than most training acknowledges.

“The emphasis was on not going broke. It was more so, what’s the longevity of your business? Are you gonna be here in ten years time?”

His position is that the same thinking should apply much earlier, and to subcontractors as well as builders. If a carpenter is going to finish their time and go out on their own, they will need to write an invoice long before they need to pitch a roof.

The eleven o’clock quote

Phil is direct about where he has lost money, and the answer is not on site. It is at the desk, late, under pressure.

“I don’t do quotes late at night anymore. I don’t rush them through. If a client is pushing for a takeoff, I’ll just say, look, can you just give me another day? I just want to go over it. That’s where I’ve personally been caught out the most.”

The example he gives is recent. A job he priced at eleven o’clock at night, when his kids were sick and he was tired, ran six weeks and returned nothing. He honoured the price anyway.

“I quoted this at eleven o’clock at night,” he said. “Well, it is what it is. I’m here now, so let’s just finish it and move on.”

It is a small operating rule with a large effect, and it is the sort of discipline that sits underneath keeping a building business solvent. A price set while exhausted is carried for the length of the job. Phil’s fix costs one day of client patience.

A narrowing definition of qualified

The second gap Phil identifies is inside the trade itself. He says the carpenters contacting him for work increasingly hold a qualification and a narrow band of experience behind it.

“I have guys and all they’ve done is hang doors and glue aluminium skirting boards on,” he said. “I can’t have you come in to a million dollar renovation and you’re gonna not know what’s going on.” His concern is not attitude. It is that a framing crew produces framing carpenters, a fix out crew produces fix out carpenters, and the quality of work on site suffers when nobody has done the whole job.

He points to roofing as the marker. A post about a well known roofing reference book drew around forty messages from carpenters who had never heard of it.

“My trade school teacher said to me, the difference between a carpenter and a handyman is roofing. That’s stuck with me to this day.”

Tooling has moved in the same direction. Profiling skirting and architraves has largely gone. Door frames arrive prefabricated. As Phil puts it, you are clipping stuff together like Lego.

What the completion data actually shows

Phil believes apprentices are being pushed through too quickly. The national data does not support that reading, at least not on the measures it captures, and the honest position is to say so.

The National Centre for Vocational Education Research published its Apprentice and trainee completion rates 2025 on 28 July 2026. It shows the six year trade completion rate for the 2019 commencing cohort at 58.7 per cent, up again and rising for every cohort since 2015. Construction trades workers sat at 59.4 per cent. Carpenters and joiners recorded 63.7 per cent, up 2.9 percentage points, one of the strongest improvements of any major trade.

Apprenticeships are also taking longer, not less time. Average time to completion for trade apprenticeships rose from 2.8 years for the 2012 cohort to 3.5 years for the 2019 cohort, roughly nine extra months.

Two figures do point Phil’s way. The four year trade attrition rate for the 2021 cohort was 42.1 per cent, the highest recorded across cohorts, and almost one fifth of trade apprenticeships end without completion inside the first twelve months. Completion also tracks with employer size. Micro employers of up to four people, which is where a large share of residential training happens, recorded 55.3 per cent. Employers of 200 or more recorded 65.9 per cent.

The more useful observation is what the data does not measure. Completion rates count finished qualifications. They do not measure whether a qualified carpenter can set out a roof, or write an invoice, or price a job without losing six weeks. Phil is describing breadth and capability. The statistics describe throughput. Both can be true at once, and the gap between them is roughly the gap he is talking about.

On prefab, display homes and the expectations being sold

Phil has been publicly critical of how one fast build project was marketed. He is careful about the distinction. His objection is not to the method.

“Don’t take this for what they’re selling it as,” he said. “A house is someone’s life savings. It’s basically the biggest investment.” His concern is that a buyer with no construction background hears a delivery time and cannot assess what it might cost them in five years. On whether the method holds up, he is unwilling to guess. “I think we’ll know in a few years.”

The same theme runs through his view of display homes, which he describes as the industry’s shop window. Walking through recent examples, the word he lands on is disappointing, and it is the finishes rather than the structure that give it away.

“If someone scuffed a wall with a bag or their shoes in a walkthrough on the weekend, we were there that week rectifying it. You’re trying to sell your product. You need to put your best foot forward.”

The through line is consistent. Phil’s complaint about marketing, television renovation shows and display home standards is the same complaint every time: someone else sets an expectation, and the builder standing in the client’s kitchen has to explain why reality looks different.

What Phil is seeing in the Melbourne market

There is work available, in his assessment, but the next twelve to twenty four months will be hard for operators trying to hold a crew together on a steady pipeline.

“I think that guys got stuck riding the wave from COVID,” he said. Through that period there was as much work as you wanted and pricing power to match. That has gone, and he expects a further round of businesses to be pushed out.

The national picture is more mixed than that suggests. Construction insolvencies fell for the first time in five years in 2025-26, though Victoria still recorded the second highest state total in the country. A fall from a record is not a recovery, and it does not tell an individual operator much about their own next quarter.

Where Phil is more confident is the shift in work type. He expects renovations and alterations to run hot as investors sell, move into a primary residence and spend heavily on it. He is also seeing clients behave differently at the quoting stage.

“I get asked the questions now. I never used to get asked about insurances and that sort of stuff. People are switching on and they’re wanting to know where their money’s going.”

What makes a good builder

Asked the question this publication asks every guest, Phil did not reach for systems or software.

“Care factor. You have to treat it like your own. You have to walk out of there going, I’d be happy to live in this. Otherwise what’s the point?” It is a different answer to the Brisbane operator who deliberately capped his own growth to protect quality, but it arrives at the same place. Both are describing a limit they have set on themselves that nobody would enforce if they did not.

Phil is also clear that he learned this the expensive way, and that there was no shortcut available.

“You have to make mistakes. You have to underquote jobs, lose money, stuff something up. You never wanna feel like that again.”

The point he keeps returning to is that none of this needs to be learned alone. He remembers finishing a day of stumps at midday as an apprentice, driving past a site, and his boss pulling over so the crew could help the chippies frame for an hour. He is not nostalgic about the conditions. He is nostalgic about that.

“I grew up where construction was a community and I’d love to see that happen again.”

There is a practical version of that sentiment sitting inside everything else Phil said. A carpenter who has never seen a purchase order is not a training failure in isolation. They are a business failure waiting three or four years to happen, and the industry currently leaves it to individuals to work out on their own, late at night, after the kids are asleep. Phil already paid for that lesson. The argument he is making is that nobody else should have to.

Frequently asked questions

Listen to the full conversation with Phil on The Good Builder Podcast. Sources: NCVER, Apprentice and trainee completion rates 2025, published 28 July 2026. ASIC Insolvency Statistics as analysed in previous Good Builder reporting.

This article is general in nature and is intended for informational purposes only. It reflects the views of the interviewee and publicly available data at the time of writing. Readers should seek independent professional guidance before making decisions based on the content of this article. The Good Builder does not accept liability for any loss or damage arising from reliance on information published here.

Author: TGB Editorial