The Builders Ladder: Business Growth Strategies for Residential Construction Businesses
Jun 30, 2026 · 25 min · 11 segments
Phil Brown from Xact Accounting specifically targets the massive industry flaw of builders bouncing between disparate data spaces to calculate their cash position. Many owners try to be too clever by…
Phil GrahamGuest
Marti AmosHost
There's a few different threads I kind of want to pull on there, but I guess the first one is what made you choose the building and construction market? How did y'all land on that niche?
It took us about six months or so to work out, you know, if we're going to grow this business, what's the ideal pathway for that? And we decided that building and construction just had this beautiful mix of, A, the business model is really hard.
There's challenging margins, challenging operating environment, but the people who are running those businesses, there's a real gap in terms of their knowledge about how they run the business and particularly in the financial space.
So when it comes to, say if we're in medical, the doctors who are doing really well, they don't need a lot of accounting help.
But builders, building, construction, trades, manufacturers that feed into the industry, there's a lot of help and there's a lot of work that needs to be done.
Structuring to bookkeeping to financial control and managing monthly accounts and all that sort of stuff.
a lot of opportunity to provide different types of services and then the final thing was just pretty straightforward no one's specializing it's very hard to find an accounting firm that just just does building and construction we're almost unique in that in that way And so when it comes to differentiating yourselves, like we talked about builders, what do you do? I'm a builder, you know, but really, what do you do? Oh, well, I do, you know, custom resis from one to five in northern suburbs
And so this idea of differentiation was the final part of why we decided to go into building construction.
And that makes so much sense, too, because, I mean, we see that all the time at TPB is, you know, people come in fantastic builders, but, you know, business is a totally different skill set, right?
Like, you know, they're not across their numbers, maybe loosely, but, you know, they don't think about, you know, how much is coming in, but how much is going
There's a few different threads I kind of want to pull on there, but I guess the first one is what made you choose the building and construction market? How did y'all land on that niche?
It took us about six months or so to work out, you know, if we're going to grow this business, what's the ideal pathway for that? And we decided that building and construction just had this beautiful mix of, A, the business model is really hard.
There's challenging margins, challenging operating environment, but the people who are running those businesses, there's a real gap in terms of their knowledge about how they run the business and particularly in the financial space.
So when it comes to, say if we're in medical, the doctors who are doing really well, they don't need a lot of accounting help.
But builders, building, construction, trades, manufacturers that feed into the industry, there's a lot of help and there's a lot of work that needs to be done.
Structuring to bookkeeping to financial control and managing monthly accounts and all that sort of stuff.
a lot of opportunity to provide different types of services and then the final thing was just pretty straightforward no one's specializing it's very hard to find an accounting firm that just just does building and construction we're almost unique in that in that way And so when it comes to differentiating yourselves, like we talked about builders, what do you do? I'm a builder, you know, but really, what do you do? Oh, well, I do, you know, custom resis from one to five in northern suburbs
And so this idea of differentiation was the final part of why we decided to go into building construction.
And that makes so much sense, too, because, I mean, we see that all the time at TPB is, you know, people come in fantastic builders, but, you know, business is a totally different skill set, right?
Like, you know, they're not across their numbers, maybe loosely, but, you know, they don't think about, you know, how much is coming in, but how much is going
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