About seven years ago I was working at McDonalds. Now there’s nothing wrong with flipping burgers but I quickly figured out that I had other interests at heart that I needed to pursue

I was in the process of getting a business analysis degree from Christchurch Polytech and, to my surprise, it hadn’t filled me with much passion or interest. I was stuck.

Quitting McDonalds

At the time, I was keen to hand in my notice at Micky Ds and never go back, but my dad was old school – he told me I was stupid to quit without having another job lined up. And he was probably right.

So I called a friend Matthew Horncastle, who had just moved back from overseas, to see if he had any labouring jobs available. He had a small building firm and I thought he may need extra hands.

A few days later I was out of my Maccas uniform and into a hardhat working for Matthew.

Williams Corporation’s humble beginnings

After a short while labouring on construction sites, another opportunity came up. Matthew had started a company installing temporary fencing on construction sites before being called up to work in his family business.

He needed help running it, so I put my hand up and went for it. We did pretty well putting up fences, but both Matthew and I always knew what we really wanted to do was build homes.

After two years of fencing we finally did it – we built our first ever spec home using cobbled together equity and a profit share with a JV partner. We had plans to grow fast and build more, and within a short period of time, we’d built 10 homes.

Re-adjusting the formula

After we built our first 10 homes, the rebuild market tightened up. We’d ventured too thin and went from having multiple small companies, which all went from making a little bit of money each month to losing a bit of money each month. Trucks, diggers, fencing, spec homes, waste company, solar power. You name it and we had tried it.

To get ourselves back on track, we looked at what worked and what didn’t. We dived into all the numbers and established that property was what we were best at. We went through a 12 month consolidation period of closing the companies that weren’t working for us and we weren’t passionate about, and really focused our attention on property. The next year we did close to 30 homes and the year after that, did 60. From there, we broke into the medium density space with blocks of 5 – 10.

Last financial year we delivered 180 homes and this year are on track for 360. Our next milestone is to build more homes than any other developer in New Zealand – a milestone I reckon we’ll hit pretty soon.

After all that, I think the reason Williams Corporation has been successful is because both Matthew and I are obsessed with the business and passionate about what we do. I believe anyone can be successful if they find that same passion and obsession for something – the hardest part is figuring out what that thing is.