A Gold Coast husband-and-wife painting crew has a name for what builders pay when a trade cuts a corner. They call it the FAFO tax, and their argument is that the cheapest quote on paper is almost never the cheapest job in the end.

Brendan Kelly has been painting for the better part of 27 years, and he has watched the trade change in ways that have nothing to do with paint. The brushes got better. The rollers arrived. Then the spray guns. What changed most, though, was the pressure. More work, fewer hands, and a race to get in and get out that too often leaves quality behind.

Kelly and his wife Haley run XP Finishes on the Gold Coast, a business they have built together over roughly two decades. In 2025 they were named Gold Coast Trade Business of the Year. But the number that matters to them is a different one. When they hand back a house, they are not thinking about the award. They are thinking about whether they will need to come back and fix it.

Speaking on The Good Builder Podcast, the Kellys laid out a view of the trades that will resonate with any builder who has ever had to call a subcontractor back to a site. Their argument is simple. The cheapest job on paper is rarely the cheapest job in the end. And they have a name for what you pay when you get it wrong.

They call it the FAFO tax.

What the FAFO tax actually is

The phrase came up almost in passing, but it captures something builders deal with constantly. FAFO stands for exactly what you think it does. You cut a corner, you find out later, and someone pays for it. Usually the client. Sometimes the trade who did the original work and lost the relationship. Often the builder whose name is on the contract.

Haley put it plainly. They have paid it themselves over the years, learning products the hard way. But the point is that the tax is avoidable, and the way you avoid it is unglamorous. You prepare properly. You use the right product. You do not water the paint down to make it stretch.

“I’d rather walk away knowing that I’ve done the right job knowing that 10 years from now they’re going to be holding the test of time,” Brendan said, describing a recent job where XP was priced identically to another painter, yet the two results were nothing alike.

That comparison is where the FAFO tax stops being a joke and starts being a business problem. Same price. Same brief. One job built to last, the other spray finished as thin as it would go, sealer coats skipped, ready to need a full repaint inside two years.

Same price, two completely different jobs

The Kellys are careful not to bag out other painters. Brendan says he wants to lift the standard, not tear people down. But he is direct about what he is seeing on site, and it is worth builders paying attention.

The pattern, as he describes it, is a squeeze. There is a lot of work and not enough people, so the compromise becomes speed. Quick gets prioritised over good. Paint gets watered down. Sealer coats on ceilings get missed. And because most clients cannot tell the difference standing in a freshly finished room, the shortcut is invisible until it fails.

“Go slow is good, good is great,” Brendan tells his team. The logic runs the other way to what most people assume about efficiency. Get the prep right and the painting becomes the easy part.

“Everything’s in prep with painting,” he said. He compares it to his brothers, who are plumbers. To run a pipe properly, the frame has to be there and the joints have to be glued right. Get the groundwork wrong and everything downstream suffers. Painting is no different. XP will pull the spray gun out for the first coat, back roll it, then finish by hand. The guys who are struggling, in Brendan’s view, are the ones running around trying to get the paint on as fast as possible.

For builders, the read is straightforward. When you are comparing quotes from finishing trades, the number on the page is not the whole story. A cheaper price almost always means a step is being removed. The question is which one, and what it will cost when it surfaces.

The finishing trade is where a build gets judged

There is a reason the Kellys are so focused on this. Painting is the last thing that happens on most jobs, which means it is the first thing a client sees when they walk through the finished door.

“You can tell how a house can be just from how the paint job is finished,” Brendan said. “It can either win or sell a house.”

That puts the finishing trades in a strange position. They carry a huge amount of the emotional weight of a build, the moment a client walks in and feels that the house is now a home, yet Haley says the finishing trades are routinely undervalued relative to how much they make or break the final result.

It is a fair challenge to throw back at builders. If the paint job is what a client remembers, and what a prospective client sees in a display home, then treating it as a commodity to be bought at the lowest possible price is a false economy. The finish is not where you save money. It is where the build either lands or falls flat.

Respect for the trade is not a soft issue

The conversation kept returning to a theme The Good Builder has covered before, most directly in our look at what makes a good trade-builder relationship. The Kellys framed it as respect, and they were specific about what a lack of it looks like in practice.

Brendan pointed to a habit he keeps encountering on newer builds. Windows and internal joins siliconed everywhere, well beyond where silicone belongs. It looks clean on handover. But you cannot paint over silicon. So when the next owner wants a repaint in five or ten years, that decision adds thousands to the job, because every bead has to be cut out, patched and redone.

This is the part that matters for builders. The trade who has been doing the job for 20 years can see that problem coming. The trade who is new, fast and focused on clean lines often cannot. And when the experienced voice on site gets ignored, the cost does not disappear. It just gets deferred to someone down the line.

“People don’t want to listen to the trades getting around and say, hey, that’s not how it needs to be done,” Brendan said. His warning to younger builders setting up companies was blunt. Listen to the trade who has done it longer than you, or you end up with a revolving door of crews because nobody wants to work with you. That is the same message that runs through the practical side of retaining good trades in 2026, and it starts with treating experience as an asset rather than an obstacle.

It also sits at the heart of the whole lifecycle of managing subbies, where the difference between a reliable network and a string of disputes usually comes down to how the relationship is handled long before anything goes wrong.

Why the design hub exists

XP’s response to all of this was to build something most painting businesses do not have. At their headquarters they run a customer facing design hub with painted walls, sample boards and an in-house space where Haley works through colour and texture with clients, designers, builders and architects.

The reason is education. Specialty finishes like lime wash and French wash are moving into Australian homes fast, often specified by designers who have seen them overseas without fully understanding how they behave. Lime wash, Haley explained, is a living material. It moves with the seasons, blooms in cooler weather, dries back in summer. It is not simply a different brush.

Get it wrong and it fails, which is why XP spends time pushing products to their breaking point before they use them on a client’s wall. Brendan described diagnosing a lime wash job in a below-water-line basement, working out the exact humidity and temperature the product needed, running three fans to draw moisture out and changing his whole application technique on the spot. Most crews, he says, would have walked away or charged the client to fix a problem they created.

That is the FAFO tax again, viewed from the other side. The knowledge to avoid it exists. It just takes an operator willing to do the work of learning the product properly rather than reading the data sheet and hoping.

Building a business, not just a crew

What separates the Kellys from a standard subcontracting outfit is that they have stopped thinking of themselves as a painting crew. The best trade operators, like the best builders, are run like businesses. They think about the whole picture. The industry, the trade, the client, and their own team.

That last one is deliberate. At their HQ they have set up a gym, a bath and a proper meeting space, and Brendan talks about the business in terms of where his people are headed. He described the pride of signing a young painter up properly and picturing him ten years out, taking long service leave, still with the business. The goal is not a revolving door of cheap labour. It is a crew that has his back on site because they believe in how the work gets done.

It is a reminder that culture, systems, pricing and standards all pull in the same direction. If any of those slips, the FAFO tax is usually not far behind.

The takeaway for builders

Ask the Kellys what makes a good builder and, interestingly, they land somewhere close to where a lot of experienced operators do. Not the slickest Instagram. Not the loudest marketing. A builder who runs a profitable, well-organised business, respects the trades who deliver the finish, and does what they say they will do.

The finishing trades see everything. They are the last ones on site, which means they inherit every shortcut taken before them and get judged on the result regardless.

The builders who treat that relationship as a partnership get crews who protect their reputation. The ones who chase the cheapest price on every trade end up paying the FAFO tax, usually at the worst possible moment, in front of the client.

The paint on the wall is the easy part. Everything that determines whether it lasts happens before the brush ever touches the surface. That is the whole argument, and it is one worth carrying onto your next site.

The Good Builder Take

The FAFO tax is a useful way to price a decision most builders make on instinct. When two finishing quotes come in at the same number and one is noticeably cheaper, a step is being removed: prep, an extra coat, a sealer, or the grade of paint. That saving does not vanish. It gets deferred to a callback, a repaint, or a client conversation you did not want to have.

The builders who come out ahead treat the finish as where the build is judged, not where the budget gets trimmed, and they treat experienced trades as the people most likely to flag a problem before it costs money.

Frequently asked questions

Listen to the full conversation with Brendan and Haley Kelly on The Good Builder Podcast, available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Last updated: 13 July 2026

General information only. This article is intended as general industry information and does not constitute legal, financial or professional guidance. Builders should assess their own circumstances and seek appropriate professional input where required.

Author: TGB Editorial