Our Story (Updated) How We Transformed Our Trade Business

Andy
We’re not just sharing this to pat ourselves on the back. We’re sharing this because we know so many tradies are going through the same struggles we faced, juggling bills, working long hours and wondering if it’s ever going to get easier. Or do you just accept that you now live in a permanent state of stress?

Ange
No, you should not accept that because there is a better way, but you won’t get there just by wishing and hoping. 

Andy
Or doing what most tradies do which is work harder, work longer, work harder, work longer. 

Ange
Your business gets easier when you understand proper business skills. You use the right tools, you have the right mindset, a supportive community and network.

Andy
And when you have a solid plan, which we’ll help you out with today. So grab a coffee, turn up the volume, and let’s dive into how we turned our mess into a massive success.

You’re listening to The Tradie Show. This is the podcast for trade business and contracting bosses like you, who want to lead with confidence, make more profit and create a better lifestyle.

Ange
We’re your hosts, Andy and Angela Smith, husband & wife team and co-founders of Lifestyle Tradie. Are you ready to have some fun? 

Andy
Hell yeah!  Alright, let’s cut to the chase. When was the last time your business worked for you instead of running you into the ground? If you’re sitting there thinking, Yep, that’s me, then we need to talk. I’m Andy Smith and I’ve been where you are. Long hours, cash flow, nightmares, no control. Does any of this sound familiar? But here’s the thing, you don’t have to keep living like this. There’s a way out and it starts with a game plan call. It’s just 10 minutes. We’re going to identify the bottlenecks holding your business back and map out a clear, straightforward plan to get you moving forward. Think of it as your shortcut to make more profit, more control, and more time to actually enjoy your life. And if you’re stuck with cash flow issues, team headaches, or just feel like you’re drowning in endless work, well, guess what? I’ve got your back. So here’s what you need to do. Head to lifestyletradie.com.au, hit the big green Gameplan Call button, or just scroll down on your phone. Listen, if a 10 minute call could save you hours of headaches, why wouldn’t you take it? Make the move. Let’s turn things around and get your business working for you. Not against you. Hell yeah!  

Back in 2021, when we launched this podcast, we kicked things off by sharing our story. At the time it was raw, real, and probably a little chaotic. Kind of like the early days of business, but here we are now, years later, and a lot has changed.

Ange
Yeah, like selling our plumbing business, Dr. Drip, in 2023. That was a huge milestone for us, not just because we sold the business, but because it marked the end of one chapter and the start of something new. 

Andy
Exactly. And that’s why we’re revisiting our story today. It’s not just about what we went through back then. It’s about reflecting on the lessons we learned, the journey we’ve been on since, and how our story can help you avoid the stress and mistakes in your business journey. 

Ange
Running a trade business is tough. In the beginning, you’re juggling being on the tools, doing the admin, managing the team and the workload, and let’s not even start on cash flow. We’ve been through all of that and worse, but we also found a way to turn it around and build a business that actually worked for us, not the other way around. 

Andy
We went from chaos to clarity and burnout to balance. And if you’re listening and thinking, I want some more clarity and balance and a healthy dose of profit, then buckle up because we’re about to show you that change is not just possible, it’s bloody achievable.

Ange
But we want to make it clear from the start that change is not possible by continuing to do the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. 

Andy
That’s the definition of insanity. Working harder and longer is not the answer. Never has been, and it never will be. What’s needed is a well structured system and all the pieces of the pie. That’s the recipe for a great trade business. 

Ange
Okay, let’s take you back to where it all started. Andy, you were a young tradie with big dreams and a lot more hair.  

Andy
Yes, I had hair down to my shoulders, who would believe? But let’s wind back the clock to the year 2000 and picture this. I’m a young, overly confident, good looking, body like a god. Uh, what else can I say but a tradie with a shiny van and a handful of tools, dreams of being his own boss and building an empire, that was me. We’d just returned from travelling and I didn’t want to work for anyone else. I’d been there, done that, not for me. 

Ange
Well, you were the typical one man show, but Not for long.

Andy
I started Dr. Drip from my parents house here on the northern beaches in Sydney. And you and I didn’t work together in those early stages, Ange. But I did, however, try and rope you in into doing my books, but you shut me down pretty quickly. 

Ange
Well, yeah, that was a hard no from me. I had my own career in marketing and absolutely no interest in bookkeeping. It was also not a part of my skill set.

Andy
And if I tried to do the bookkeeping at the end of a hard day’s work, like most tradies try to do, I would probably make a whole lot of mistakes. So I outsource that sh*t ASAP, it’s not for me. Now, in the beginning of Dr. Drip, things got busy pretty quickly. And within a few short years, the team grew to about six or seven guys. I was loving life and I thought I’d cracked the code to success. 

Ange
Little did you know, though, not having the right structure and systems in the business would eventually start to show. 

Andy
Yep. But at that stage, I still had my rose colored glasses on and everything was absolutely amazing. 

Ange
We eventually moved to our own place and became parents to our first baby. That was Hannah, but things quickly started to feel overwhelming running the business from home. 

Andy
Yeah. I remember those days we’d start the mornings at the house, the team meetings would be out on the back deck. Then in the office, there’d be guys sitting all around on the floor with job cards everywhere. It was a mess. 

Ange
Yeah, talk about chaos. This was still an era of paper and everything was still so manual. And that’s when we decided to move the business out of the house and into a big warehouse in our tarman, the heart of Sydney. And from there, things escalated quickly. We were in rapid growth mode and at our peak, we had 17 tradies, eight vehicles on the road and we were making exceptional money. 

Andy
If I was honest, I built my business all around ego. More work, more guys, another vehicle, more work, more guys, another vehicle. We bought the best of the best in everything we did. The best vehicles, the best equipment. Even the boys thought they were the best. And we had this big crazy sign that screamed Dr. Drip above our warehouse that shone right down onto the freeway. We thought we were top shit and I walked around with a real sense that we were bigger and better than everyone else. We were extremely profitable and past bosses and friends were like, you’re absolutely killing it. And I was like, yeah, I know. I know, everything looked amazing from the outside. 

Ange
Hmm, yes, from the outside. Behind the scenes was a bit of a different story though. The growth was happening so fast that we couldn’t keep up. Crack started to show because we built our business on shaky foundations. We lacked systems and in terms of financial management, let’s just say our approach was more like financial guesswork.

Andy
I was working insane hours trying to keep the wheels from falling off. My day would start at 6 a. m. and finish at about 8 p. m. But even then, I’d get home, I’d Sit down at the table and keep working. I had no time, no control, and no idea how bad things were really getting.

Ange
But I noticed. You were working stupid hours, and you know what? You just didn’t seem like yourself. You were stressed and always preoccupied. I was at home with our baby Hannah, and not in the office. So, I wasn’t really aware of the day to day operations, but I definitely knew that something wasn’t right. 

Andy
I thought I was pretty good at hiding everything, but behind the scenes, we weren’t just struggling. We went from making 50K a month to where we were losing 50K a month. We had a hundred and eighty eight thousand dollars in our outstanding invoices, which was a lot for a maintenance style business all those years ago. 

Ange
You also heard it pretty well from the team. You always put on a happy face for everyone, but I was starting to see the cracks. I remember dropping into the office one day. We had this warehouse downstairs and the office was upstairs and there were a few vehicles in the warehouse and I found these yellow job cards in the sun visor and down the side of the car. I thought, I wonder what these are. I took them upstairs to the office team, only to discover that they were jobs completed and not invoiced from over three months ago. I’m talking 8K, 12K, 18K, like seriously, money in but so much money leaking out with absolutely no control. It was an absolute mess. 

Andy
It was a bloody mess and I tried fixing all these things myself, but you know what my solution was?

Ange
Oh, please share.

Andy
I was secretly taking money out of our mortgage to pay our staff. I thought the tide was going to turn by itself and I thought I could hide it and maybe just fix it later, but borrowing from PETA to pay Paul, as they say, was definitely not the answer. 

Ange
Well, as you can imagine, the business stress started spilling over into everything. The arguments between us started. And we were just trying to survive one day at a time. 

Andy
And you know what I did? I continued to work harder and longer. 

Ange
You know what though? I think so many trade business owners can relate to this. We often think it’s the solution to any business problem, but It’s really the answer. 

Andy
Yeah, you’re right. And it wasn’t the answer for us. So I eventually admitted to myself that maybe I needed some advice from someone smarter than myself. I went to go see my brother because he’s a great businessman in his own right. So I sat down with him for a coffee and said, Hey man, I’m in real trouble. He was surprised and asked why. And I said, My business is just not running the way it should. And financially I’m in the sh*t, I’m losing money left, right, and center. He listened to me for about five minutes and then he goes, you know what, Andy, you are one of the best entrepreneur business owners I know. I talk to my friends. Everyone talks about you. I know you’ll be right. Just get back out there. Get on the horse and you’ll make it work. I walked away from that coffee meeting thinking, Oh my God, here I am crying out for help and people were just pushing me away. 

Ange
Well, I think it’s great your brother listened to you. He acknowledged your feelings and he was positive about the future of the business. But he wasn’t going to be your saviour. 

Andy
Exactly. So off I went to seek the wisdom of my old boss. And when we sat down and had a chat, he was like, Oh my God, Andy, you are growing so fast. What an incredible business that you have. But then I started to talk to him about my struggles. All of a sudden, a massive grin appeared on his face. And he said to me these words that’ll stick with me for life. So, the grass isn’t always greener, huh? I was thinking, F you, mate. I’m bloody coming to you for help and you’re just rubbing my face into it. But it’s what he said next that really pissed me off. He said, you can always come back and work for me, Andy. And it was at that moment that I vowed to figure this out no matter what. I walked away again thinking to myself, I have no one to turn to, and I have to say, that was a pretty scary thought, but I was determined to turn this around. 

Ange
The thing is, Andy, you did actually have someone to turn to, me, but you were so busy trying to hold it all together and pretend that you could do everything yourself. But we’re a team. You continued to stick your head in the sand for a while longer, working harder and longer, stressed out of your brain until everything came to a head one day when I said to you, I’ve had enough. We cannot continue like this. 

Andy
And my reaction was just to feel so angry. I was thinking. How could you say that after everything I’ve done for this business and our family? And I stormed out of the house and went straight to the headland to sit down and ponder, get the fresh air in my face and think, what are the next steps? 

Ange
I remember being at home, wondering if you’d actually come back at all. 

Andy
Yeah, I spent a long time just staring out at the ocean, trying to make sense of everything. At first, I was full of excuses. I’m doing this for the family. I’m working hard to provide. But the longer I sat there, the harder it was to ignore the truth. I was working myself into the ground, but it wasn’t sustainable. Not for me, not for the business and definitely not for us as a family.

Ange
I think that realization was the start of everything turning around. When you came home hours later, you looked like an absolutely different person.

Andy
I was. I walked through that door, I sat down, and I said, You’re right, Ange. I can’t do this anymore, but I just don’t know how to fix it. And that right there was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever said. Admitting that I didn’t have the answers, it felt like I’d fail.

Ange
But you hadn’t failed. Saying those words was the bravest thing you could have done. I like to call that our truth moment because it was the first time we really faced the truth together and that truth was the fact that the business wasn’t working. 

Andy
We had a choice. We could close the business down, we could move away to a place that no one knows who we are, or we could believe that the business was actually still amazing. It just seemed to have fallen apart somewhere along the line and we had to work out how to fix it.

Ange
The reality was, we had a team of 17. They were married, had children, mortgages, and we had a responsibility. So, in terms of truth, we had to start with what we actually wanted life to be like. What I mean by that is, if we’re starting at A today, Then our end goal, let’s call it B, would be 12 months from now. Then we needed absolute clarity about what the business needed to look like in 12 months time, the type of customers, the strength of the team, the skill set required, the attitude and behavior we wanted to see embraced by the team and how we were operating financially. 

Andy
We had to rethink everything. How to structure the business, how to systemize things. What do we actually want this business to look like? And what’s the end goal?

Ange
And with that agreed, we came back to reality. What does this actually look like today? What are we starting with? It’s not a fun process, I can tell you, but we looked at the business finances so that we could understand where all our money was.

Andy
We sat down and we reviewed every single line on our P&L. We looked at every single one of our tradies and said, if we had to fire the team today, who would we re-employed tomorrow? 

Ange
We literally pulled the whole business apart. We knew it was going to take some work, but at least we knew that those late nights would actually be worth it.

Andy
I remember that process so clearly, it was absolutely brutal, but you know what? We cut $300, 000 in expenses in that first month alone. It was like ripping off a band aid, but once we did it, we could finally breathe again. 

Ange
I just want to pause for a second and literally reiterate that. We were a multi million dollar business and we cut our expenses by $300, 000. I think that’s a lesson to every tradie boss right there. 

Andy
Absolutely, and it doesn’t matter if you’re a one man show or if you’ve got a big team. There’s so much sh*t you’re paying for your business on a weekly, monthly, yearly basis that you perhaps don’t even need and you don’t even know about it. I would say that for most trade business owners, that is the case. I could come into your business right now and strip $50, 000 minimum of expenses out of all of your business’s bottom line. 

Ange
It wasn’t just about cutting costs. That was just the beginning. For us, it wasn’t about having the flashiest trucks or the biggest team anymore. It was about building something sustainable, something that gave us time and profit and ultimately freedom.

Andy
It was then that we realized that to achieve this, we couldn’t do it alone. Education was the key. And I remember sitting down with you and saying, we need to learn from people who have been where we are and have come out the other side. So we looked around and we looked for a trade business coach, someone that could help us in our trade business. And back then there were none. 

Ange
So we did the next best thing and we worked with a general business coach. And within a few short months, we realized that we were teaching him. He just didn’t understand trade at all. 

Andy
So then we have to ask ourselves, what now? So we decided to seek out the best experts in marketing systems and team management. Just to name a few. And we soaked everything up we could. We attended workshops, courses, and seminars. We didn’t just dip our toes in. We went all in. 

Ange
I remember you spending months traveling, learning from the best of the best. And I’ll be honest, it wasn’t cheap. We’ve spent well over $250, 000 on education over the years. And it was the best investment we’ve ever made. 

Andy
And it wasn’t just about learning new skills. It was about changing the way we thought about our business. We realized we needed to stop working harder and start working smarter. 

Ange
We reviewed our cash flow, did a serious analysis on our customers and set a strategy to work only with those that were A grade customers. We also systemized everything from how we handled customer inquiries to how we managed the team on site. 

Andy
Systemizing was an absolute game changer. We created workflows for quoting, invoicing, and job scheduling. We implemented a job management system. No more yellow job cards flying around the office anymore.

Ange
And the impact was almost immediate. Within just a few months, we started to see the chaos ease. And within 13 months, we went from losing 50k a month to making consistent profits again.

Andy
Wasn’t just about the money though. For the first time in years, I felt like I could breathe again. I wasn’t chained to the business anymore. My head wasn’t glued to the phone 24/7. We had systems in place, a team we could rely on and a clear vision of where we were headed. And I was actually really excited about the business again. 

Ange
It wasn’t just you who felt the difference, Andy. Our team started to thrive too. They had clear expectations, better communication, and they felt like they were part of something bigger.

Andy
The biggest shift though, was in our personal lives. I wasn’t coming home exhausted every single night. We could sit down as a family, have dinner and actually enjoy each other’s company.

Ange
And then there was a moment when we took our first proper family holiday. Andy, do you remember what you said to me on the plane?

Andy
Yeah, I do actually. I turned to you and said, this is the first time I’ve ever felt truly free. 

Ange
You know what? That’s what it’s all about. Freedom. The freedom to choose life on your terms. To run a business that works for you, not the other way around. And that’s why we’re so passionate about helping other tradies. Because we’ve been there and we know that with the right tools and mindset, anyone can make that transformation. 

Andy
And once the business was back on track, we found ourselves in a new position we never imagined. Dr. Drip was running so smoothly and I wasn’t tied to the day to day operations anymore. I’d step into the office and the team would tell me, What are you doing here? We’ve got it covered, Andy.

Ange
I remember you saying to me one day, Ange, I don’t know what to do anymore. The business doesn’t need me. At first, it felt strange, almost like you’d lost your purpose. But really, it was a sign of success. 

Andy
That’s when one of our mentors said to us, if you’ve done this for yourselves, don’t you think you can help other trade business owners do the same? And it got me thinking about all the other tradies out there, people just like us, who were drowning in the same chaos we’d been through. 

Ange
And the truth is, we’d been lucky to find the education and support that we needed. But at the time, there wasn’t anything out there specifically for tradies. And that’s where the idea for Lifestyle Tradie was born. Our business coaching program and community specifically for trade business owners.

Andy
It started with one simple mission to make sure no other tradie had to go through the same pain that we did. We wanted to take everything we’d learned, the mistakes, the lessons, the wins, and create a roadmap for other tradies to follow.

Ange
And so we launched Lifestyle Tradie. At first, it was just an idea, a way to share our story and, you know, help a few people, but it quickly grew into something much bigger. A community of like minded tradies taking back control of their businesses and their lives. 

Andy
Since then, we’ve worked with thousands of trade business owners across Australia and New Zealand. We’ve seen marriages saved, businesses transformed, and lives completely changed for the better. And I’m not blowing smoke. These tradies tell us, I’ve had young blokes, Old blokes and husband and wife teams in tears, telling me how much of an impact being a part of our community has had on them. 

Ange
And that’s what drives us every single day, because this isn’t just about running a profitable business. It’s about creating change and building a life you love. So what happened to our business, Dr. Drip? Well, Andy, maybe you want to share that story. 

Andy
We sold Dr. Drip in 2023. We’d set up a systemized business that could run without us that was very attractive to prospective buyers. Actually, it wasn’t even for sale. But after being approached several times, you start to say to yourself, well, I guess everything’s for sale for the right price. 

Ange
But our mission hasn’t changed. If anything, it’s only grown stronger. No matter where you’re at in your business right now, no matter how tough things feel right now, with the right mindset, the right structure and systems, plus the right support, you can rebuild your business and your life.

Andy
We have a number of free tools to help you on your journey, including books, downloads, free events, and much more. Or if you want to fast track your success, make sure you book in a free game plan call so we can chat about where you’re at, what’s got you stuck, and I’ll give you a three step action plan to cut through the chaos. No bullshit, no fluff, just real practical advice.

Ange
If you’re ready to stop putting out fires and start building the business and life you actually want, head over to lifestyletradie.com.au, tap the Gameplan Call button or scroll down and lock in a time that suits. 

Andy
You’re closer than you think to building the business you’ve always wanted. If we can turn things around, you can too.  

Subscribe to The Tradie Show, wherever you get your favorite podcasts. Rate and write us a review or for more information about Lifestyle Tradie, head to lifestyletradie.com.au.