‘Work together to survive’: Building boss’s stark message

Construction boss Scott Hutchinson has a stark message to the struggling building sector - work together or face going to the wall in the near future.

Construction boss Scott Hutchinson is urging builders to work together to survive the increasingly tough times facing the sector.

The chairman of Hutchinson Builders says that more than ever builders need “genuine working relationships” with clients and subbies to continue in business.

“There is strong demand for property, with builders struggling to keep up with supply, trade and material shortages and costs exacerbated by the impact of Covid-19,” Hutchinson says in the company’s latest newsletter Hutchies’ Truth.

“Ironically in these boom times many builders slip into negative profit territory as the rising cost of labour, products and services on fixed-price contracts present a real test of builders’ management skills .. as which some fail.”

Scott Hutchinson.

Hutchinson says the figures don’t lie with ASIC data showing the number of construction-related firms entering administration rising 73 per cent to 1672 across the country in the past year.

“Hutchies is surviving because it has good cash reserves, a strong and long-serving team and a loyal repeat business client base covering a broad spectrum of projects,” he says.

“In recent years, financiers demanded that developers look to builders with a sound balance sheet and subbies look to builders who pay on times and who they trust to be there at the end of the project. Hutchies has benefitted from this trend.”

He notes high-profile builders such as Probuild, Condev, Porter Davis and PBS were among the builders to collapse during the “loss-making boom”.

The Urban Developer listed Hutchinson as Australia’s top builder last year with 147 projects worth a total of $2.64bn. That beat giant Multiplex, which completed just eight jobs worth a total of $2.1bn followed by Richard Crookes Construction (31 jobs worth $1.85bn) and Lendlease (seven projects worth $1.83bn).

High notes

Watch out Mariah Carey and Missy Higgins, Brisbane PR executive Margaret Lawson may be stiff competition in the near future. Lawson, the boss of Cole Lawson Communications, has just made the semi-finals of the International Songwriting Competition (ISC) in the US and is headed to Los Angeles to talk to music industry contacts.

Lawson tells your diarist that she started taking songwriting lessons in 2020 during the Covid lockdowns and published her first ever song to raise funds for the Women’s Legal Service the following year.

This year one of her songs, a contemporary jazz number called Didya Think, made the semi finals of the ISC and was in the top 60 of unpublished songs globally against 15,000 entries.

Previous Australian winners of the overall competition, which is the highest honour in songwriting internationally, include Vance Joy, Tones & I, and Missy Higgins.

The judges include Coldplay and Mariah Carey, along with music label execs worldwide.

“I will be going to the US soon and spending some time in the music industry in LA where independent artist Myra Flynn will be recording two of my songs,” Lawson says. She added that all her songs have been recorded at Fortitude Valley’s Studio 4000, which was recently started by Tones&I’s producer Konstantin Kersting.

Margaret Lawson