Grant Florence has just stepped down as CE of New Zealand Certified Builders Association after 10 years at the helm. On his second to last day, we decide to find out more about the journey that led him there.

After completing a bachelor in commerce at university, Grant started his working life as a banker and then moved overseas for 8-10 years. Upon returning to New Zealand, he was brought into Fletcher Residential to start a mortgage company. It was a time when mortgages were very hard to get and people who bought from Fletcher Residential housing companies could also apply and receive a mortgage. It was unique at the time and Fletcher grew to become the fifth-largest mortgage lender in the country. After a while, Grant wanted a change from banking and decided to jump the fence to learn about the construction industry. Grant notes that back in the early 1990s, the industry had a different set of pressures and was probably more fragmented. Fletcher was the largest homebuilder at the time but even then, they were doing less than 10% market share. It was less complex than now, that was the big thing. It was about the time of the financial regulations and slumps in the housing market. Building consents had dropped down to only about 13,000 a year compared to the current amount of around 50,000. Regarding his career and what interested him in the industry, he says he saw a gap in how homes were marketed when he crossed the table from mortgages to construction. Along with his managing director, he started a change project around building communities. The project was about planning, design and building consistency and introducing the first type of planned communities to be built. Up until then Fletcher Homes and the whole industry just built different houses randomly down streets and didn’t really care how it looked. Grant saw an opportunity to be smart with the product they built that could deliver a better product for homeowners. It had consistency, design, better affordability, and with people living in their home in a community rather than just a suburb. They were pre-planned so the homeowner could make a choice from six design types with some but limited options, but the core of the house stayed the same. Back in the 1990s, that was ground breaking. Grant mentions It is quite cool now 25 years later to drive around and see how some communities have matured and the things you planned earlier on have developed. Finding out what has kept Grant in the building industry, and he explains it is an old cliché but it’s the people. They are genuine and the end product is fantastic. In residential, you are building somebody’s dream and turning it into reality which is powerful. The building industry is a complex and fragmented industry, but the end result is where someone is going to live, grow and breathe. To walk through someone’s new home and see the pride that got it there is amazing. When asked how many emails Grant had in his inbox, he replied ‘heaps’ but said that was a good thing. He

has never had a near-empty inbox and would be concerned if he did. ‘You do not want to have an empty or up-to-date inbox because it means you are not doing your job and that would raise a red flag for stakeholders’. Grant has a discipline with emails and that is he never starts his day with them. He will only look at them once or twice a day, so he does not get bogged down. He likes to start his day off by reading trade journals or what is happening overseas. He often travels with over 125 flights a year, and this discipline still allows him to start his day off the same.

When talking about interests out of work, Grant notes ‘I don’t think I’m particularly good at a work/life balance’ (too much work) He lives by the beach and spends a lot of time in the water. I like to get in the sea at least two-three times a week or out on my mountain bike at least twice a week. ‘Work/life balance is a skill I’m still working on, but I’ve learned not to look at my emails on the weekend unless there was a critical issue in play.

When asked about his biggest accomplishments, Grant says one would be the work they did with the change project at Fletcher Residential. Fletcher went from building random houses down the street, to building communities. Getting the whole organisation on board to understand what was being done, changed the whole business model within the company and the way they operated. The second one was when he drove the launch of a homeowner’s guarantee and changed the landscape with that. This created a safety net for homeowners and their building projects when working with highly qualified and approved builders. The third one is seeing people who have worked for me, go on and succeed. Grant said, ‘It’s cool and fills the heart with joy’. He thinks it is a fantastic achievement to see staff go on and be successful in their own careers.

The world is a fast-moving place, as is the building industry. How do you approach change? I’ve always had a management philosophy to get out in front of it, rather than react to it. A guy called Jack Welsh who was the CEO of General Electric in the 1990s had a simple mantra of ‘change before you have to’. I have always loved change, personally, that means the start of something new and has always been enjoyable for me. I will always grab change or if I see it coming, I’m hopefully ahead of it. You can learn that, but I think you either embrace change or you get run over by it. What are the biggest changes you have seen in the building industry during your career? I think one of the bigger ones is the disappearance of the owner-builder. There was a time when people project manages their own build and that would have accounted for around 25-30% of all homes. Now that has gone which is a good thing. The other thing is the level of compliance. I think that has been the biggest thing in the industry. When I go back to when I started, there were a few regulations but nowhere near where we are right now. It’s compliance right across the industry, whether it’s driven through local BCA’s, regulation, health, and safety, or governance with pricing regimes. It is significant and costly to the industry and costly to the communities. We have moved to an ‘inspecting’ quality in the building process where everybody must rely on somebody else to make sure they are doing it right. Rather than people taking responsibility for their own actions. It is philosophical but that is where we have ended up. Where do you see the industry heading? I just want to see it get through its current crisis, it is the hardest I have ever seen it. The pressure on all those people in the building industry is immense right now, whether it is builders, officials, designers, or engineers. That is from the pandemic, shortage of skilled trades, and materials. I just want the

industry to get through that and I’m not sure how quickly that will be. That is the short-term challenge of the industry. In the longer term, I think there will be many attempts to bring in more prefabrication or modular housing into the industry. I don’t think it will succeed at scale because we don’t have a big enough market for it. There is a place for it but I don’t think there are great cost savings in it and in the end people still want choice but that type of construction does not always allow for it. This year the BOINZ conference theme is “Let’s talk about the future” and with that in mind – What would you like to see achieved, if you had another 5 years at the helm of NZCB? We started our own guarantee company, we need to develop that further. That would be something I would like to continue to see be achieved.

The other thing that we have just started doing, is a lot more business training. Builders in general are good at putting things together but managing those other things in their business they can do better. It is about providing education for our builder members to do the simple things in their business, which are nonbuilding. Whether that is pricing, administration, or human resource, we need to do more. That would be a major achievement, we have started the journey but there is still a long way to go. A third one would be a good, honest review of the consenting system as it is not currently ‘fit for purpose’ Finally, what advice would you give to someone just starting their career in the Building Industry? Understand your customer, communicate, communicate, communicate, and lastly manage and understand your costs. Successful builders do all these three things well. Also, don’t forget to rip into it and have fun!

As we were finishing the interview, I asked Grant what his plans were now he is stepping down from his CE role and he replied, “one or two weeks of holiday, some Board director work, and then trying to beat my wife at golf!”

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SEPTEMBER 2020