Rod Gibbs has spent his whole career inside three construction businesses. He has just been appointed General Manager of Construction at Bold Living. On The Good Builder Podcast he set out the thinking he is bringing with him, including an argument most builders have not properly reckoned with: the site supervisor job has roughly doubled in workload since 2016, and very few businesses have adjusted the job numbers to match.

Ask most builders what is squeezing their business right now and the answer usually points outward. Trades. Materials. Finance. Approvals.

Rod Gibbs points at something closer to home. The role of the site supervisor, he says, has changed more in the past decade than almost any other job in residential construction, and the businesses that have not resourced for that change are quietly paying for it in turnover, quality and burnout.

Gibbs would know. He has just been appointed general manager of construction at Bold Living, the South East Queensland builder headquartered at North Lakes. He arrives after 13 years at Plantation Homes, part of the Henley Properties Group, where he moved from supervisor to construction manager to building manager. Before that he did his apprenticeship at Glover Building Group on the Sunshine Coast, became a partner alongside Jamie Glover, and spent more than a decade building one or two homes a year from the slab to the letterbox.

Three employers in close to thirty years. In an industry where display home staff turn over fast enough that you can meet the same person at three different brands, that is unusual on its own. It also means Gibbs has run a build program at two homes a year and at more than nine hundred.

Why Has the Site Supervisor Role Become Harder?

The clearest thing Gibbs said on the podcast was also the most measurable.

“When I talk back in 2016, 2017 with 16 supervisors, what their task was back then compared to right now. Their workload has doubled.”

He is not talking about a vague sense of pressure. He lists the additions. Designs have become more complex, with curved facades and detailing that did not exist in the standard range a decade ago. Compliance has layered on. And independent inspections, which barely featured in volume housing a few years ago, now consume real hours.

“There’s four or five inspections where they’ll meet the client on site with the inspector. If that’s an hour inspection for five stages, there’s an extra five hours just in that job.”

Multiply five hours by fourteen or sixteen live jobs and the arithmetic stops being abstract. Gibbs is careful to say independent inspectors have lifted standards, particularly among trades who were not keeping up. But the time has to come from somewhere, and in most businesses it has come out of the supervisor.

His view is that the failure is not the workload itself. It is that the job description kept expanding while the number of jobs per supervisor stayed where it was.

“You continue to add more tasks on your supervisor. And if you keep them running the same amount of jobs, workload is a huge problem.”

The fix he describes is unglamorous and entirely internal. Move work off the supervisor and put it somewhere it can be done once rather than fourteen times. Scheduling handled centrally with suppliers. Forecasting on frames, slabs and kitchens done in the office. One point of contact with key suppliers rather than sixteen separate conversations. Gibbs says that model was starting to work in his previous business and that other builders are moving into the same space.

The alternative, in his framing, is a supervisor who physically cannot be everywhere, followed by a resignation, followed by a recruitment process, followed by the retraining bill.

Growth Diluted the Bench, and He Says He Should Have Seen It

The most useful part of the conversation is where Gibbs turns the criticism on himself.

He stepped into the building manager role just before COVID, inheriting 16 supervisors and three construction managers. By his own description it was as good a team as he has worked with. Long tenure, deep experience, almost no recruitment, minimal churn. That is a rare position for a growing building business to be in, and it is exactly the position where standards slip.

“It was a really happy, harmonious place with a lot of experience and everyone was doing their thing.”

Then HomeBuilder arrived. The same business today runs roughly 36 supervisors, eight construction managers and three regional building managers. Close to fifty people where there were nineteen.

“As that’s grown over time, the capabilities obviously diluted down. You’ve got a greener team. And if you do get complacent, you can get left behind.”

His regret is not about the growth. It is about what was not built during the calm period before it.

“The moment you sit on your hands in this game and you wait for it to blow up in your face, then you’re playing catch up.”

Continuing to improve systems while the team was already humming, he says, would have left the business in far better shape when trades and labour went scarce. That is a genuinely uncomfortable point for any builder currently enjoying a stable patch.

The Five Out of Ten Player

Gibbs played semi professional cricket in the United Kingdom, has run eleven half marathons, and talks about team building in language borrowed straight from sport. It is not a gimmick. It is the clearest framework he offers.

The hardest team he ever captained, he says, was the one with the most talent, because everyone wanted to open the bowling. The teams that consistently won were the balanced ones.

“You find the five out of tens are more important, if not more important, than the eight or nine out of tens, because they’re the ones that are good for your culture.”

In a construction business, that person is recognisable. They are the one who answers the group email. They will collect the delivery. They run the induction nobody else wants to run. They are also, in Gibbs’s experience, still building a good house.

The point he is making is not that ability does not matter. It is that a team stacked entirely with high performers who are optimising for themselves will underperform a balanced one, and that most hiring processes are not built to identify the glue.

What Should Builders Look For When Hiring a Supervisor?

Gibbs is blunt about what can and cannot be trained.

“The technical side of things, that’s the stuff that you can teach. But you can’t teach someone to give a shit.”

A trade background helps, he says, but it is not decisive. Some of the best supervisors he has worked with did not come off the tools. What he screens for instead is attitude, whether the candidate talks about what they bring or only about themselves, and whether their values line up with the business. He is a strong believer in doing that assessment face to face rather than on paper.

He tells a story that makes the point. A candidate was knocked back twice, then kept calling and asking for a shot. Gibbs asked one of his construction managers to meet him informally downstairs rather than run another formal interview. They hired him. He has since been promoted to construction manager.

Natural Progression Beats Ambition

Gibbs says he never set out to run a construction team. He set out to do whatever job he currently held to a standard that made him the obvious pick when a role opened.

“I wasn’t ambitious. It wasn’t about the role for me. It was about setting an expectation for me and doing every job I can to the best of my ability.”

He adds a caution that will land with anyone who has promoted a strong performer into a role they were not ready for. Being excellent at one job does not mean you will be excellent at the next one. Managing people, he says, is a different game to building a house or drawing a set of plans. The values carry across. The skills do not.

That is an argument for building career pathways inside a business rather than waiting for a vacancy and hoping the best available person is also the right one.

The Trades Notice the Difference

Gibbs is clear that the supervisor is the most visible person in the build to the customer, but that the actual quality lands with the trades. His view on how builders manage their subcontractors is that the relationship is the whole thing.

“If you don’t treat them with respect and make them feel valued, they’re not going to come and finish the job off on a Saturday.”

What he describes as the industry drift is a shift toward the purely transactional. Pay the invoice, get in, get out. When that happens, he says, the one percenters disappear, the bare minimum becomes the standard, and the trade turns up to somebody else’s job first. Builders who are serious about retaining good trades tend to be the ones who never let that relationship become purely a rate.

Quality Does Not End at Handover

One of the more useful shifts in Gibbs’s thinking came late in his previous role, when he picked up the warranty side of the business.

“You can hand the keys over and finishing the house is one thing. But from a business perspective, your job’s not finished there.”

He compares it to a restaurant. A customer might eat somewhere for ten years, have one bad meal, and never come back. The last touch point carries disproportionate weight, and in home building the last touch point is warranty, not handover.

The same logic runs backwards through the business. Gibbs talks about the quality of the drawings, the estimating and even the paperwork attached to a deposit before it moves through the office. Every department is setting up the next one, and the standard he applies is deliberately simple.

“Don’t accept anything you wouldn’t accept yourself.”

He also puts a discipline on the front end that a lot of builders have learned the hard way. Before a design is offered to a client, three boxes need ticking. Will the customer want it. Can it be drawn. Can it actually be built. Skip the third and you get a hold on the job, an alternative to price, an extended rent period for the client and a customer journey that never recovers.

How Far Ahead Should Builders Prepare for Code Changes?

Gibbs has served on the Housing Industry Association technical committee, which he says gives an early read on changes to the National Construction Code before they arrive on site.

His reference point is NCC 2022, and the seven star energy and accessibility provisions in particular. Some builders acted early. His own team, he says, stopped display construction and changed designs so that what was on show reflected the incoming code rather than the outgoing one. Others waited to see whether the deadline would move.

“There was builders scrambling, like literally pulling bathrooms apart for accessibility.”

The part of that worth sitting with is his point about scale. Pulling one bathroom apart hurts a small builder as much as pulling fifty apart hurts a large one. The financial impact is proportionate either way, which means the size of a business is not a reason to delay preparing for a code change.

With a large pipeline, he says, the preparation window is roughly twelve months before the change takes effect, because work sold today lands on site well after the contract is signed. The committee also runs the other way, feeding builder and certifier experience back before provisions are finalised.

Leading in a Way That Lets People Say They Are Struggling

Gibbs describes himself as a calm leader rather than a yeller. What he says about mental health in the business is more practical than most.

“You can’t expect people to put their hand up and say hey, I’m struggling, whether it’s work or personal, if you’re not going to show some empathy yourself.”

His approach has been to be openly vocal with his team about his own hard periods and how they affected him, on the basis that leaders who present as bulletproof will never hear from anyone who is not. He is candid that this was difficult for him to learn, and that it remains difficult for a lot of men in the industry.

Running is his own outlet. He is direct that it clears his head and holds him steady, and that everyone needs some version of it.

What He Is Taking to Bold Living

Gibbs was open on the podcast about why the move made sense. The role is closer to home for a Sunshine Coast local, and it came after a deliberate break following a long and demanding stretch in his previous position.

“I’ve been appointed as the general manager of construction, which is really exciting.”

What he describes is not a brief limited to the construction team. He talks about working alongside the other managers on the condition a job is in by the time it reaches site, and on what happens in the departments upstream of the supervisor.

“It’s about pulling it back from the start. How a job comes to site, the condition it’s in, hearing and seeing the challenges that the supervisors face.”

That is the same argument he makes about workload, applied to a specific business. If the drawings, the estimating and the paperwork arrive clean, the supervisor spends their hours on the build rather than on repair work created three departments earlier.

He is careful to frame the role as adding to something already in motion rather than arriving to fix anything.

“They’re already doing a lot of good things, and they’re working on lots of changes, which is really positive. So how can I come in and put my spin on that too, and add value to that?”

His stated measure of success is the one he has applied throughout his career. Support the team, give them the tools to do the job more easily, and let the customer experience and the numbers follow from there. He is also direct that relationships come first, and that he would rather sort something out over a coffee than over email.

Asked what he wants to build there, his answer was characteristically plain. He wants Bold Living to be a good builder, and the employer of choice for the people who work there.

What Makes a Good Builder

Asked The Good Builder Podcast’s closing question, Gibbs named three things. Quality, running through every department rather than sitting with the site team. The customer journey, and making the client feel part of it. And communication, which he defines narrowly and usefully.

“Don’t sit there and send an email to Johnny over there. Just get up and go talk to him.”

Underneath all three sits the same point he made about cricket teams.

“I’d much rather go out there and get a duck and win. Whereas the other guy would rather go out there and get a hundred runs and lose. Because he’s in it for himself.”

The Thing Worth Taking Away

It would be easy to file this conversation under leadership and move on. That would miss the operational argument sitting inside it.

Gibbs is not saying builders need better people. He is saying the supervisor’s job description changed, the inspections and compliance and design complexity all landed on the same person, and most businesses never adjusted the job count to match. That is not a market condition. It is not a government decision. It is a resourcing choice, and it sits entirely inside the fence line.

Which makes it one of the few problems in this industry a builder can fix on their own timeline. It is also, on the evidence of this conversation, the first thing Bold Living has just hired someone to go looking for.

Listen to the full conversation with Rod Gibbs on The Good Builder Podcast.

Frequently asked questions

Disclosure: Bold Living is a commercial partner of The Good Builder. This article was produced independently by the TGB editorial team and Bold Living had no editorial input into its content.

General information only. This article summarises views expressed by a guest on The Good Builder Podcast and general industry commentary. It does not take into account the circumstances of any particular business and should not be relied on in place of guidance from a suitably qualified professional.

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