Don't Underestimate Her — Part 2 — Tarah | Activate Construction

When the guys get stuck on site, who do they call? The women in the office.

In Part 2, Tarah gets into the realities that don't make the highlight reels. The buyer beware side of property flipping, what happens when people treat a home like a one-and-done purchase instead of something that needs maintaining, and why the building industry's reputation problem isn't as simple as dodgy builders. Most of the time, someone's cutting corners because they're being undercut.

The conversation that lands hardest in this episode is about women in the industry. Tarah's female apprentice Jewel is nearly finished her carpentry trade and is already showing something the guys often can't, the ability to look at a renovation and adapt when what's on the plan doesn't match what's in the wall.

And when it comes to being dismissed, talked over, or redirected to the husband? Tarah's take is sharp: there is nothing more powerful than walking into a room and being underestimated and then proving them wrong without making a scene.

Don't underestimate her. She already knows more than you think.

Tarah didn't come from building. She was a beauty therapy until a breast cancer diagnosis changed everything.

The trauma insurance payout became a deposits for a house that her and her husband Adam later flipped.

That flip became Activate Construction, a developer-builder business operating within 6km of Brisbane's north, building high-spec homes.

When Tarah sells a home for 2.5 million, people do the maths on what she paid for the land and assume she's made a fortune.

What they don't see is everything in between, the holding costs, the stamp duty, the GST, the materials, the build itself, the staging, the agent commission. And that's before factoring in the increases in build costs since COVID.

The number people see at settlement and the number that actually lands in Tarah's pocket are two very different things.

In Part 1, Tarah talks about what it really takes to operate as a developer builder. The speed required, the process obsession that gets a six bedroom three bathroom home from slab to handover in seven months, and why that speed never comes at the cost of quality.

She talks about the community backlash when you knock down a character home in Brisbane's inner north, the headache of heritage overlays and pre-war regulations that force you to maintain timber homes that should have been replaced twenty years ago, and the reality of being structurally accountable for seven years after handover.

She also gets into why women are actually the ones buying homes, how livability trends have shifted over two decades, and what it looks like to hold your ground with a buyer who wants to customise your product before settlement in ways that has the builder potentially wear the liability.

This is Part 1 of 2. And it starts exactly where it should, with a woman who built something remarkable from the worst year of her life.

This is the second half of my conversation with Claire Perham from Axiom Construction Group, and it's about what running a building business actually costs you.

I asked Claire what the hard part has been over the years, and surprisingly she said "The building itself, the selections, the ordering, that's the easy bit".

The hard bit is the insecure feeling when you don't know where your next job is coming from, and that gut punch when someone tells you they can't afford to build.

We talk about the money side and how projects can run to a million dollars and you're only allowed a five percent deposit, so you're carrying labour and materials all the way through to slab stage before you see anything back.

Anyone who's waited on a progress claim knows exactly what that feels like.

Claire and Jay were in business through the GFC, and they were in Christchurch for the earthquakes.

Part of their work over there was consulting to construction companies that had taken on too much and were failing.

So when COVID hit and people were lining up at the door wanting houses built, they said no, the same way I did, because we both knew we didn't have the trades to deliver it.

She shares what she'd tell a builder who's only ever experienced the busy times and is about to face a quiet time.

She said to watch what debt you take on and what it's actually for.

Look hard at your overheads. And make sure your margin is a real margin, worked out from what it costs to run your business, not a percentage you've tacked onto your materials and labour.

Then we spoke about how as women we always want to look like we're coping, and that very rarely does she feel like she's on top of everything.

It gets lonely, and you end up believing you're the only one feeling it but you're not.

That's the whole reason I started this podcast.

We finish on why builders are so insular, why we don't talk to each other along with Claire's awards, including 2024 Women in Building for Master Builders Brisbane Region and Queensland.

Claire Perham runs Axiom Construction Group and holds her own builder's licence, and she still gets asked to show people her hands when she tells them what she does.

In this first half of our conversation, Claire talks about growing up around construction in New Zealand with a builder for a father, and how trades simply were not offered to girls in the eighties and nineties.

She went travelling, fell into admin and bookkeeping because they came easily, and then took those skills into male dominated industries.

It took her mother-in-law handing her a stack of Home Beautiful magazines and saying you can actually do that for a job before she considered anything else.

She got the diploma in interior design, pictured herself as something quite fancy, and then discovered she would much rather be on site talking to the plumber and working out when the materials need be onsite. That turn is where the business really started.

We get into the misconception that follows women in family building companies, the assumption that the wife is the one quietly doing the admin and the invoicing in the background.

Claire finds the clients, quotes the work and presents to the client. Her husband Jay holds the technical knowledge. Both of those are real jobs, and they built the business so that both of them could be present for their kids, whether that meant Claire on site at seven or Jay doing uniforms and lunchboxes.

Then there is the licence. Claire had been running the business for sixteen years, and it still took her four years to work up the courage to apply, and Jay putting her in the car with her paperwork to get her to the QBCC counter.

My own application sat on the bench for two years before someone finally asked me why I had not lodged it.

We talk about what the QBCC definition of a builder actually is, why a builder is a coordinator of a building project rather than the person swinging the hammer, and why that voice saying you are an imposter turns up even after the licence is on the wall.

If you have ever wondered whether the work you do in your building business counts as the real work, start here.

Rooster one day, feather duster the next. That's how Tayla Gazic from One Bau Group describes life on the business side of a building company, and if you've lived it, you'll know exactly what she means.

Tayla came into the building industry from real estate, which gave her a head start on Xero and the P&L, though nothing quite prepares you for the day a concreter's invoice lands at fifty to a hundred thousand dollars.

She stepped into the business while she was home with her daughter, starting with the social media and growing into leads, admin and the numbers alongside her husband Adam.

In this conversation with Ange, Tayla talks about the fish out of water feeling that comes with terminology nobody explains, why she believes education is the fastest way for women to build their own confidence, and what she really thinks about the term "builders' wives" and the work behind the scenes that goes unrecognised.

Ange shares her own approach to never looking silly in a room full of acronyms, along with a practical tip for any woman wanting to understand her building contract better.

They also get into the sequencing and trade management that blows Tayla's mind, why you're only as good as your worst trade, what it's like working with your husband when you're both passionate, and the quality she's proudest of.

Women Behind the Build is hosted by Ange Scott, licensed builder, business coach, Master Builders Queensland board member and author of Better Clients, Better Profits, Better Life.

When a client pays a builder a million dollars, they assume the builder keeps it. The reality is closer to fifteen percent, and that fifteen percent has to stretch across a build that might run two years.

In this episode Ange Scott sits down with Em Jackson of Jackson Dwellings to talk about the money side of running a building company, and the part almost nobody sees. Em came into the business from a completely different career, learned the numbers the hard way, and built the systems that took Jackson Dwellings from fumbling through to one of the strongest names in her area.

Between them they cover what a million dollar build actually leaves the builder, the high interest loans and the seven years it took before Em's business was making money, the fifty thousand dollar credit card Ange hid from her husband to keep food on the table, why Em charges for quotes and holds firm when clients push back, how she built procedure manuals and a team from nothing, and what it's really like being the only woman at the table at industry events.

Both of them are honest about the parts that still sting, including the backlash Em copped online and the assumption that because he's the builder, he makes all the money. If you're the one running the business side of a building company, you'll hear yourself in a lot of this.

She stood next to her husband when someone recognises the business and watched them turn straight back to him.

She's put three kids in daycare to build something she believed in, carried the guilt of that, and wondered if anyone would ever understand what her role actually was.

Em Jackson is the woman behind Jackson Dwellings in Gisborne, Victoria Australia and in this episode she doesn't hold back.

We talk about the phone call she made in tears when the business was at rock bottom, the high-interest revolving line of credit and what changed everything.

If you've ever been asked "but what do you actually do?" this one's for you.