Ray Brayford put his licence up in 1994 doing bathrooms and pergolas on the Lower North Shore. The first commercial job came in 2002 — a tyre workshop in Artarmon — because a client from a kitchen renovation had bought a building and didn’t know who else to ring.
His son Tom, a carpenter who’d spent six years with a tier-two builder, took over the licence in 2009. The business has roughly tripled since, which sounds impressive until you learn it means eighteen people instead of six.
That number is on purpose. We run three site managers, and we cap what each of them carries. When we’re full, we say so and hand you two other builders’ numbers. It costs us work every year and it’s the single reason our clients keep coming back.