Don't Underestimate Her — Part 2 — Tarah | Activate Construction

When the guys get stuck on site, who do they call? The women in the office.

In Part 2, Tarah gets into the realities that don't make the highlight reels. The buyer beware side of property flipping, what happens when people treat a home like a one-and-done purchase instead of something that needs maintaining, and why the building industry's reputation problem isn't as simple as dodgy builders. Most of the time, someone's cutting corners because they're being undercut.

The conversation that lands hardest in this episode is about women in the industry. Tarah's female apprentice Jewel is nearly finished her carpentry trade and is already showing something the guys often can't, the ability to look at a renovation and adapt when what's on the plan doesn't match what's in the wall.

And when it comes to being dismissed, talked over, or redirected to the husband? Tarah's take is sharp: there is nothing more powerful than walking into a room and being underestimated and then proving them wrong without making a scene.

Don't underestimate her. She already knows more than you think.

Tarah didn't come from building. She was a beauty therapy until a breast cancer diagnosis changed everything.

The trauma insurance payout became a deposits for a house that her and her husband Adam later flipped.

That flip became Activate Construction, a developer-builder business operating within 6km of Brisbane's north, building high-spec homes.

When Tarah sells a home for 2.5 million, people do the maths on what she paid for the land and assume she's made a fortune.

What they don't see is everything in between, the holding costs, the stamp duty, the GST, the materials, the build itself, the staging, the agent commission. And that's before factoring in the increases in build costs since COVID.

The number people see at settlement and the number that actually lands in Tarah's pocket are two very different things.

In Part 1, Tarah talks about what it really takes to operate as a developer builder. The speed required, the process obsession that gets a six bedroom three bathroom home from slab to handover in seven months, and why that speed never comes at the cost of quality.

She talks about the community backlash when you knock down a character home in Brisbane's inner north, the headache of heritage overlays and pre-war regulations that force you to maintain timber homes that should have been replaced twenty years ago, and the reality of being structurally accountable for seven years after handover.

She also gets into why women are actually the ones buying homes, how livability trends have shifted over two decades, and what it looks like to hold your ground with a buyer who wants to customise your product before settlement in ways that has the builder potentially wear the liability.

This is Part 1 of 2. And it starts exactly where it should, with a woman who built something remarkable from the worst year of her life.

This is the second half of my conversation with Claire Perham from Axiom Construction Group, and it's about what running a building business actually costs you.

I asked Claire what the hard part has been over the years, and surprisingly she said "The building itself, the selections, the ordering, that's the easy bit".

The hard bit is the insecure feeling when you don't know where your next job is coming from, and that gut punch when someone tells you they can't afford to build.

We talk about the money side and how projects can run to a million dollars and you're only allowed a five percent deposit, so you're carrying labour and materials all the way through to slab stage before you see anything back.

Anyone who's waited on a progress claim knows exactly what that feels like.

Claire and Jay were in business through the GFC, and they were in Christchurch for the earthquakes.

Part of their work over there was consulting to construction companies that had taken on too much and were failing.

So when COVID hit and people were lining up at the door wanting houses built, they said no, the same way I did, because we both knew we didn't have the trades to deliver it.

She shares what she'd tell a builder who's only ever experienced the busy times and is about to face a quiet time.

She said to watch what debt you take on and what it's actually for.

Look hard at your overheads. And make sure your margin is a real margin, worked out from what it costs to run your business, not a percentage you've tacked onto your materials and labour.

Then we spoke about how as women we always want to look like we're coping, and that very rarely does she feel like she's on top of everything.

It gets lonely, and you end up believing you're the only one feeling it but you're not.

That's the whole reason I started this podcast.

We finish on why builders are so insular, why we don't talk to each other along with Claire's awards, including 2024 Women in Building for Master Builders Brisbane Region and Queensland.