On this episode of TALKdesign, host Adrian Ramsay sits down with Mick Hawes to explore builders business coaching, client experience, leadership, AI, and what success really looks like for custom home builders.
Mick Hawes is the founder of Builders Business Blackbelt and has spent most of his life in and around the building industry. With more than 35 years of experience as a performance coach across business and elite sports, Mick now focuses that knowledge specifically on custom home building businesses, helping builders apply tailored systems, tools, and coaching to the challenges they actually face.
In this conversation, Adrian and Mick unpack one of the strongest ideas in the episode: a builder’s real product is not the knockdown rebuild, extension, renovation, or sloping block home. The real product is the quality of the client’s experience. Mick explains that clients expect quality work, yet what they truly remember and talk about later is how the process felt — whether they were listened to, guided, understood, and supported.
The discussion also moves into the changing role of AI and automation in building businesses. Mick’s view is not that builders should avoid AI, rather that they should use it to clear space for the human work that matters most. In a world where more communication is automated, face-to-face conversations, trust, listening, and emotional intelligence may become even more valuable.
Adrian and Mick also explore success, freedom, daily habits, sleep, shiny-object distraction, and why business growth often requires moving from information gathering into experience and, eventually, wisdom. For builders, designers, and anyone working with clients on deeply personal projects, this episode is a grounded reminder that better business starts with better leadership.
Wenna Privé
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