Case study ยท Fractional COO
From 140 days to 11: how a Gold Coast builder went modular
How a Gold Coast builder took build time from 140 days to 11, without adding to the team.
CLIENT Gold Coast builder
Traditional on-site build
New modular system
This Gold Coast builder has completed hundreds of secondary dwellings. When Tayne Watson, the Managing Director, brought me in, on-site builds were running at around 140 days. The business had grown, but the systems and processes behind it hadn't kept up.
The problem
The obvious fix for long build times is to push harder on the existing process: more people, tighter scheduling, faster trades. That gets you a few days. It doesn't get you from months to days. Getting there meant rethinking not just how the business builds, but what it builds.
The turning point
Working through the build sequence, one comment summed up the problem:
"We can't even get paint to dry in time."
The usual response is a faster-drying paint or an extra painter. I asked a different question: why are we painting at all?
Switching to prefinished linings took painting out of the program entirely, and with it a stage that everything else had to wait for. That became the pattern for the whole project. Rather than squeezing a slow step, we changed the product so the slow step no longer existed.
What we did
The work was a reset and rebuild of how the business operates:
- Production SOPs and quality control systems
- Scheduling tools
- A government tender
- A new modular system, designed and set up to be built by the existing team
- The full go-to-market: the open day, the marketing and the sales sequence
Every piece was built to be run by the team. My job was to build their capability, not to become a permanent part of it.
The result
The new modular system is built in 11 days, compared with around 140 days for a traditional on-site build, delivered by the same team.
And it sells. At the tiny homes shows, the modular system has drawn more than 60 enquiries a show, and the Cleveland show led to 12 confirmed sales within three weeks.
What happened next
Once the modular system was running, the business brought me straight back to apply the same thinking to its on-site builds, this time targeting a reduction from 20 weeks to 8.
That work is now an ongoing Operational Improvement Program, running two days a week across eight workstreams, including company structure, customer journey mapping, build timeline analysis and NSW licensing. The business is now fully licensed to build in NSW, and has the capacity to deliver $20M of work a year.
"Every phase has produced real deliverables, not reports sitting in a drawer. If you are a builder or manufacturer who needs someone to come in and build the system rather than just tell you what it should look like, Drew is your man."
Tayne Watson, Managing Director, Gold Coast builder
Client name withheld at the client’s request.
What this means for your business
Long lead times are rarely a people problem. More often, the product or process has been designed around a step nobody has questioned in years.
If your lead times are costing you work and you're not sure whether the problem is your people, your process or the product itself, guessing won't fix it. A 1-Day Operational Diagnostic gives you a clear view of what's actually slowing you down, and what to change first.