Builders earn twice as much with us. Robert Young explains

So I brought new Jim's Building and Maintenance slash Jim's Handyman to New Zealand five years ago.

And we're the market leader in New Zealand now, according to Google Analytics.

In Wellington, we're probably the market leader.

And in Christchurch, we're close to it, or at least one of the market leaders.

And we're just starting to think about the regions now.

So, yeah, it's been going really well because what I'm seeing is particularly at the moment with the advent of AI, is that in the next five to 10 years, the only way to secure your family's income is to actually have your own personal customer base.

If you're working for someone else, you're really putting yourself at risk.

There's a lot of automation coming through.

There's going to be a lot of people looking for work because there's a lot of middle management and process-driven people out there in the in the business world at the moment they're going to be coming onto the market people who can actually fix things and actually get things done i think are going to be the new lawyers and accountants while you use ai for your lawyers and accountants the other thing i'm seeing with this the nature of things changing is the customers really want to pay the person swinging the hammer who's actually delivering the value people no longer want to pay for say a builder and the builder's boss and the builder's boss's boss and his admin person in the marketing division.

And, you know, when a customer pays you a dollar, they want to pay it to the person who's actually delivering the value to them personally.

So the person delivering the value and the customer, this is where the value is and this is what's important.

And the way to secure your family's financial future, particularly even in building, because there's going to be a lot of automation coming in there as well, a lot more factory involvement in actually putting up these houses, ever increasing will only multiply exponentially in the next 10 years i believe so the way to secure your future is to have a thousand of your own customers that know you so that you've got that real resilience and how many like for instance in the last four years in new zealand we've been pretty steady in a recession we were just climbing out of it earlier this year and it was looking real good uh and and with the situation around and the oil prices we've slipped directly back into what was normal last year which is I'm getting calls all the time from tradies who have got no work and are really suffering.

And we've got everyone's busy.

Everyone's got plenty of work.

And the reason for that is property maintenance.

So property maintenance has really proven its resilience over these years.

I mean, we still get the odd value add like your decks and your kitchen renos.

and so on but they've really become pretty scarce and highly competitive where the maintenance has just got to be done i always compare it to sort of dentistry right if you something wrong with your tooth the longer you wait it's just going to cost you more you know you've got to get it done now and that's what maintenance is and it's proven itself so all of the guys have built businesses and their teams around the fact that there's actually quite a lot of predictable maintenance work coming in leaky windows roof repairs guttering repairs and replacements or converting internal to external gutters, all that sort of stuff, if you're unlucky to have one of those houses.

And this is what's kept all the team busy, productive, and making money through this time.

And of course, the next exciting thing that's going to happen in the next five to 10 years is there will be a recovery.

The houses in New Zealand have gone backwards about 25% since the recession commenced.

So it's given the house prices actually a bit of headroom, and it really comes down to positivity.

And what I've seen in New Zealand, this is about my fifth recession or something in New Zealand, If you count COVID as one as well.

When we're in recession, we often find that people think it's going to last forever.

And if you remember when house prices were doing this, everyone thought it would go on forever.