SOPHIE & SIMON, THISTLE BUILDING COMPANY

When we first met Zac, Thistle Building Company was an owner-operator partnership with just 1 excellent project manager and 3 building teams. Just three years later we are a different company! We have a management team of 5, a sales team and 12 building crews (which will grow to 15 by the end of the year, to keep up with the demand we’re experiencing). It’s an understatement to say Zac has helped us with a strong growth trajectory: we have quadrupled revenue, we’ve started a second business, and this year we’re realising a dream: launching Thistle Building into a new region.

We thought it would be a much longer journey to get to the size we are and are surprised at how quickly it’s all happened but we put a lot of it down to working with Zac.

Three years ago, we were all wearing far too many hats and felt constantly exhausted and time poor. As a husband and wife team, we knew we needed a fresh perspective on the business — someone we could work with on an ongoing basis who didn’t have any emotional attachment to Thistle like we both did. We researched  business coaches and Zac stood out from the rest. We admired his wide business knowledge and the fact that he worked with a lot of different businesses. We liked his integrity and felt from the first meeting that he understood Thistle and that he talked our language — we have never felt out of our depth with Zac but we have learnt so much.

Zac’s really good at listening. Simon’s practical and Sophie is more business focused and Zac takes both our angles and molds them together to get us moving forward so neither of us come away feeling like we’re not being listened to.

There are so many ways Zac has helped us, both with the business and personally. He has helped us with the structure of the business and the operations of it. He’s helped us lift our profitability which has allowed us to continually invest for future growth. He’s got us thinking differently about leadership, being more strategic and more confident in our own qualities. He makes us think critically and creatively and his guidance has given us huge confidence in our decision making. He’s also taught us that it’s better to spend more money getting the right person; that having an A+ player team means we’ll get the business where we want it, faster.

Even more importantly, Zac has fuelled our passion again. We now have other staff members in place to take some of the weight off which helps us concentrate on the big picture stuff and means we’re not so burnt out. We now have a crystal-clear vision of the big picture for Thistle — where we’re heading and how we’ll get there. We feel the business is way more bulletproof as a result of working with Zac and implementing the tools and techniques he shares with us. We just wish we had taken the plunge to work with him sooner — we feel that under Zac’s wing we are going from strength to strength.