TOPICS WE COVER IN THIS BUILDHER PODCAST WITH AARON KYLE:

• [2:00]: How Aaron started working in the construction industry with a goal to move into property development. After 12 years, he had gone through many ups and downs and decided to study law, which is when Build Hatch began.

• [3:50]: Aaron's projects ranging from residential and commercial, civil works, infrastructure, hospitals and large commercial projects

• [4:25]: How going back to study law as a mature student was the hardest thing he's done but he really enjoyed meeting the people and how this impacted his family

• [6:00]: How Aaron's experience enables him to have the perspective of someone who's been in the industry and knows how much impact a challenging client or builder can have on the project

• [7:00]: How lawyers are trained to think differently to remove the emotion from a situation. Construction law is niche but has so many moving parts and it's about having the right attitude and understanding people as much as possible.

• [9:10]: How there's always something that can go wrong and being involved in a lot of projects gives you the knowledge to equip yourself. Aaron loves working with people behind the scenes.

• [10:50]: How having experience in foundational roles such as contract administrator and quantity surveyor helps you understand the full story of the build and how this experience helped Rebeka save $34k on the Rathmines project

• [12:45]: How people often ask questions about budget and the basics of planning their project and how we go by the ethos of project management by design

• [14:00]: The types of things we talk about in the 20-minute consultation to determine whether someone should build. We then work to educate people on what they need to know through our course, which they may not be told.

• [16:15]: How there are different people for different projects and so many variables to each project

• [15:50]: How the BuildHer community works, why we don't do referrals but teach our women to be independent and do a tender analysis.

• [17:30]: The different courses we offer and how we have a lifetime membership for our members. How the members benefit from the BuildHer community, the flexibility of what's being taught and the supplier discount list

• [20:00]: Our beautiful new book, and how learning about what's involved in the building process will help you avoid so much heartache in your project

• [22:00]: Building is imperfect and it's about having a customised and specific strategy to work through any issues that arise

• [23:40]: How in our BuildHer course, we speak to people developing for-profit to learn how they are actually doing it. It's about sharing knowledge and looking at strategy

• [25:20]: The range of people in our course and how we work with everyone to guide them through the whole process to produce a great product.

• [26:50]: How we learn from past projects and that each relationship brings a different variable into the mix. There isn't anywhere that says exactly what you should do, which is what BuildHer is about.

• [30:00]: Construction law can be extremely complicated. You can control the site and budget to certain extents but you can't control personalities which is why it boils down to relationships and the fundamentals.

• [32:20]: How building is a very stressful time as people as dealing with large amounts of money, managing working relationships and how the impact of Covid has added extra pressures

• [33:40]: Our fortnightly Q&A where we discuss issues that come up throughout the projects, the importance of not bringing your baggage to a disagreement and how we work with our members on contingency planning.

• [36:00]: How Aaron facilitates tender workshops to identify the risks of a project and how to mitigate them prior to commencing construction

• [38:30]: How every builder's experience is different and no one knows everything. Running a workshop would help to get everyone on board, build trust and gain knowledge

• [40:25]: So many things boil down to communication and how builders need to apply a unique perspective to managing each client. Aaron shares a story of a control freak client and how it was affecting the builder's management of the project.

• [43:00]: How contractual or financial disputes arise from something that happened in the past that could have been avoided. The residential and commercial industries could learn a lot from each other.

• [45:30]: How residential standards and expectations are very different from commercial which is why communication, understanding and putting a weekly meeting in place is important.

• [48:40]: There's a fine balance to understand how the industry works. Tradespeople are busy on the tools all day and don't always have the time or capacity to respond to emails or provide quotes.

• [51:00]: Working on a construction site is so foreign to a lot of people. BuildHer helps overcome this.