If your construction business is not running the way you want it to, you don't need another report you'll never read. You need someone with on-the-ground experience who can help you work out what is really going on and help you fix it.
Shannon Drew and Rachelle Hare created Blaze Business & Legal so they could deliver combined Management Consultancy services and Business Advisory services to construction business owners and executives. They draw on more than 50 years of combined experience working inside Tier 1, 2 and 3 construction businesses.
Speak directly with Shannon and Rachelle about what your business needs. We recommend a Strategy Session first so you can tell us what is going on and we can both make sure we are a good fit for each other. We will give you verbal advice during the meeting, then you decide whether you want us to give you a quote for full written recommendations plus help implementing them in your business.
Management Consulting is the work of looking at your whole business, working out what is holding it back, and putting in place the changes that get it running the way you want it to. This is real work on the things that drive how your business performs, not a coaching session or a slide deck.
For a Construction Business, the work touches almost every part of your operation, including how your business is structured, how you win and price work, how money moves in and out, how your team makes decisions, how risk is managed across your Projects, and how leaders are held accountable.
Most Construction Business owners who come to us already sense that something is not working. Margins are thinner than they should be, or estimators are quoting at numbers the Project team cannot deliver to. Maybe you are in the business 60 hours a week and still cannot take a day off, let alone a holiday. The numbers come in late and never quite tell the same story twice.
None of these are problems a coach or a strategy day will fix. They get fixed by sitting inside your business with you, working out where the gaps are, and putting in place what is missing.
You do not need another Report you will never read. You need someone with on-the-ground experience who can help you work out what is really going on and help you fix it.
We have lost count of the number of Construction Businesses where the owner says "we just need a contract reviewed" or "we just need our cash flow looked at", and within an hour it becomes clear the contract is the symptom and the structure, the operations or the commercial side is the real issue.
Management Consulting for a Construction Business is the work of looking past what you came in for, working out what is actually going on, and putting in place the things that fix it for good. It is rarely just one fix. Most are a sequence of changes that build on each other, and most of them are in places you did not know to look.
Rachelle Hare and Shannon Drew, Blaze Business & Legal
Our Management Consulting work is built for Construction Businesses turning over $5M to $200M, with the strongest fit at $5M to $30M for owner-led businesses, and $30M to $200M for businesses run by a Managing Director or a Board.
We work with three patterns of Construction Business especially well. If you see your business in any of these, the work we do is built for you.
You jumped in, won work, hired people, took on bigger Projects and grew quickly. Now the systems that worked when you were a small business are creaking under the weight of the larger one you have become.
To get to the next stage of growth, you need to restructure, redesign your operations, fix your numbers and put proper governance in place. We have done this work many times.
You are working full days on site or on Projects, then doing the business at night and on weekends. You are not insolvent, but you can see where things are heading if you do not make changes now.
You need someone who can help you work out what to fix first and help you do it before the problem gets worse. The earlier you bring us in, the more options you have.
You are bidding for Brisbane 2032 work, planning a sale or succession, taking on a Project that will double turnover, or stepping up from Tier 3 to Tier 2 work. The systems you have now will not carry the new scale.
You want to install what is needed before the work arrives, not after the cracks have started showing. We help you get ready, not catch up.
When you bring us into your Construction Business, the work usually crosses several of the eight areas below. You probably came to us about one or two of them. By the time we have spent an hour with you, it is usually clear that the answer touches four or five of them.
The eight areas are Strategy, Structure, Business Operations, Project Delivery, Finances and Cash Flow, Commercial, Risk, and Governance. Each one connects to the others, which is why fixing one in isolation rarely sticks. We work across all of them when we need to.
When you bring us in, our work usually crosses 4 to 7 of these 8 areas. Fixing one without considering the others rarely works.
Each area covers a body of work that comes up regularly when we work with Construction Business owners and executives. Below we explain what is involved in each area, with some of the questions and outcomes you can expect, and we have noted at the bottom of each card who from Blaze Business & Legal usually leads that work.
Most Management Consulting engagements touch four to seven of these eight areas before the work is finished. Strategy work pulls in Finances. Operations work pulls in Risk and Governance. Project Delivery work pulls in Commercial. The work crosses areas because the issues do.
Strategy work for your Construction Business is not a slide deck about vision and values. It is about looking carefully at where your business is, where the market is going, where you want to take it, and what has to change for that to be possible.
Many Construction Businesses are structured by accident. The structure that worked when you started as a Sole Trader is still in place when you are turning over $20M, and it may now be exposing your family home, leaking tax, blocking the bank from lending and creating director liability you have not thought through.
Business Operations is everything that happens in your business outside of delivering Projects. It is how your business actually runs day to day, from how decisions get made to how your team works together to how systems and processes carry the business forward.
Project Delivery covers how your Projects get from contract signing to handover. It is the work of running each Project commercially and operationally, so margin is protected, time is managed, and risk is held by the right party.
Construction has a cash cycle that runs months out of step with the work. Money goes out for materials, labour and Subcontractors before it comes in from the Principal. Retention sits on your balance sheet for months. A late Variation can swing a Project from profit to loss.
Commercial work sits between Project Delivery and Legal. It covers how you price, bid, win and run your work commercially. Many Construction Businesses lose more margin to commercial slippage than to bad estimates. Commercial work is where Rachelle's six years as a Senior Commercial Manager on Defence and Tier 2 Construction Projects shows up most clearly.
Risk work covers identifying, ranking and managing the risks that can take your business down. It also covers the compliance that the Construction Industry runs on, so you are not surprised by a regulator at the worst possible moment.
Governance is not just for listed companies. Every Construction Business with a leadership team, Director obligations and a real Project portfolio needs governance that works. Without it, you stay stuck in daily Project firefighting and the business cannot grow past you.
You probably already have an Accountant. Maybe a Lawyer. Possibly a Bookkeeper. Sometimes a Business Coach. Each of those advisers has a clear role and they each deliver something different.
Your Business Adviser is the role that sits across all of them. A Business Adviser looks at your whole business, holds the strategic picture together, and makes sure your other advisers are working towards the same outcome rather than working in their own silos. This is the work Blaze Business & Legal does best, because it is what we built Blaze Business & Legal to deliver.
Your Management Consultant is the role that brings change. Where a Business Adviser oversees how your advisers work together, a Management Consultant works on the structural fixes that produce commercial outcomes: strategy, operations, Project delivery, numbers, pricing, risk and governance. Both roles are different, both are needed, and both are delivered by Blaze Business & Legal.
A Business Adviser sees the whole picture. A Management Consultant brings the change. Both work alongside your other advisers.
Most Construction Business owners wait too long. The earlier you bring us in, the cheaper the fix and the smaller the disruption. If any of the patterns below sound familiar, it is time for a chat.
From the moment you call us, the process is built so you know what is coming next, what each step costs, and what you will get out of it. Each piece of work is delivered jointly by Rachelle and Shannon on a fixed-price basis.
You book a 60-minute Strategy Session. We sit down with you in person or over video, you tell us what is going on, and we both make sure we are a good fit for each other. You leave with verbal advice you can act on, plus a clear view of where your business stands.
If you want to keep working with us, the natural next step is a Deep-Dive Diagnostic. There is no pressure either way. Some clients act on the verbal advice from the Strategy Session and come back to us later. Others move straight into the Diagnostic.
A 2-hour working session with Shannon and Rachelle covering the relevant areas of your business. You receive written findings and prioritised recommendations across the eight Areas, plus an implementation plan you can act on.
If the work needs more depth than a Diagnostic, we give you a written scope and a fixed-price quote for a larger piece of work covering the priority areas. We work with you and your leadership team to deliver the changes.
You choose how much help you want during implementation. There are three ways to work with us, set out in the next section. You can pick the one that suits you best, and you can switch between them as the work progresses.
We come back at agreed intervals to review what is working and what is not. The issues you are dealing with in your business do not go away, so most clients keep working with us in some form once the initial work is done.
Once the work is scoped, you choose how much support you want during implementation. The three options below differ in how much of the work we take on for you, and they price accordingly. You can switch between them as the work progresses, and most engagements blend two of the three over time.
You take the recommendations and run with them yourself. We are available to answer questions as you go, and we check in at agreed intervals to see how the implementation is tracking. The lowest-cost option, suited to leadership teams with capacity and experience to deliver internal change.
We work alongside your leadership team to deliver the changes together, sharing the work between us. This is the most common engagement. You get senior support during the heavy lifting, and your team builds the capability to maintain the changes after we step back.
We do most of the work for you, with your team supporting where needed and signing off the outcomes. The most hands-off option for owners and leadership teams who do not have the capacity to lead implementation themselves but want the changes delivered.
Each piece of work we deliver is fixed-price. You see the price before any work starts. There is no clock running on phone calls and emails. Scope changes are agreed in writing before they get done.
A 60-minute session with Rachelle and Shannon. You tell us what is going on. We give you verbal advice during the meeting. Most owners come in for a Strategy Session before any larger piece of work.
A 2-hour working session with Shannon and Rachelle covering the relevant areas of your business. You receive written findings, prioritised recommendations and an implementation plan you can act on.
For deeper work across one or more of the eight Areas. We provide the scope and fixed-price quote after the Deep-Dive Diagnostic, once we know what the work actually needs to cover.
A monthly retainer for businesses that want Rachelle and Shannon working alongside the leadership team to implement the recommendations from a Deep-Dive Diagnostic or a piece of Scoped Work. Reviewed quarterly. Done-With-You delivery.
Fractional means part-time. Instead of hiring a full-time CFO, Commercial Manager or General Counsel, you engage Shannon as your External CFO, or Rachelle as your External Commercial Manager or External General Counsel for an agreed number of hours per week or days per month. The work is delivered remotely. You get senior expertise at a fraction of a full-time hire.
A second-generation Civil Contracting business turning over $42M came to us concerned that margins had halved over two years even though revenue had grown by 30%. The owner suspected pricing was the issue. After a Strategy Session and a Deep-Dive Diagnostic, the picture turned out to be very different.
Pricing turned out to be a small contributor compared with the larger problems we found across Variations, Project Manager capability and overhead recovery. Estimating was accurate at tender stage, however Variations on every Project were under-priced, late, or not claimed at all. Project Managers had no commercial training and no support, and Subcontractor management was inconsistent across Projects.
Overhead recovery was being calculated against a Project mix that no longer matched the actual work the business was winning. The structure was a single trading entity with no asset protection, exposing the family home and the IP. Cash flow was reactive, and the owner was checking the bank balance daily to see whether payroll could run.
We worked with the owner and the leadership team over five months. We installed a Variation discipline that captured the Variations the business had been giving away, and Shannon rebuilt the management accounts and the cash flow forecasting so the leadership team could see Project P&L weekly and run the business off real numbers.
We restructured the business into a holding-and-trading group with proper asset protection and engaged the Accountant on the tax. Rachelle ran a contract review on the standard Subcontract suite and rewrote the Special Conditions to fix the risk allocation issues that had been costing margin. The leadership team met fortnightly to a structured agenda and held the Project Managers accountable to the new commercial discipline.
Within nine months margin had recovered most of what had been lost over the previous two years. The owner had stepped back from daily Project firefighting. Variations claimed and recovered in the first six months alone exceeded the cost of the engagement many times over. The owner told us the most valuable part of the work was that the leadership team could now run the business without him.
Construction Business owners choose us for the combination of Construction Industry depth, senior delivery, integrated capability and fixed pricing. None of those four things is unique on its own. The combination is what we deliver every time. You can read more about Blaze Business & Legal and the broader reasons clients work with us on our About page.
Combined Construction Industry experience between Shannon and Rachelle, working inside and alongside Tier 1, 2 and 3 Contractors.
Rachelle and Shannon do the work themselves. No junior team, no offshore back office, no template playbook.
Eight integrated areas covering strategy, structure, operations, Project delivery, finances, commercial, risk and governance.
Every piece of work quoted in writing before any work starts. No hourly billing and no scope changes without written agreement.
"We had an Accountant, a Lawyer, a Bookkeeper and we had been through two business coaches. None of them did what Rachelle and Shannon did. They came in, looked at every part of the business at once, told us what was actually going on, and worked through the fixes with us. The first six months paid for the work many times over. They are now part of how we run the business."Robert F Owner, Civil Construction Company, Brisbane and Sunshine Coast
"We grew fast over five years and got to a point where the business was running us, not the other way around. Shannon rebuilt our numbers so we could actually see what was happening on Projects, and Rachelle worked through the structure and the contracts. Within twelve months we had a real leadership team, real numbers, and I had my weekends back."Martin K Managing Director, Mid-Tier Building Contractor, Queensland
"I was on the tools full-time and running the business at night. We were not insolvent but we were heading there if I did not act. Rachelle and Shannon took the time to understand what was really going on, gave me a plan I could actually use, and worked alongside me while I implemented it. Without them I am not sure the business would still be here."Sam T Owner, Specialist Trade Contractor, South East Queensland
Management Consulting is the work of looking at your whole business, working out what is holding it back, and putting in place the changes that get it running the way you want it to. For your Construction Business that work usually covers strategy, structure, business operations, Project delivery, finances and cash flow, commercial work, risk and governance. Most of the work touches four to seven of these areas because the issues you are dealing with rarely sit in just one of them.
The difference is the depth of Construction Industry experience we both bring. Rachelle has 25+ years working inside and alongside construction businesses across Construction Law, Commercial Management and Management Consulting. Shannon has 25+ years as a Management Accountant, Costs Accountant and Fractional CFO inside and alongside Construction Businesses at every scale. A generalist Management Consultant who has worked in retail or technology cannot bring that depth to a Construction Business.
We work with Construction Businesses turning over $5M to $200M. The strongest fit is at $5M to $30M for owner-led businesses and $30M to $200M for businesses run by a Managing Director or Board. Smaller businesses are usually better served by our Small Business Management Consulting page. Larger businesses may also engage us where Construction Industry depth is the deciding factor.
A Strategy Session is 60 minutes. A Deep-Dive Diagnostic is 2 hours plus written recommendations and an implementation plan. Larger Scoped Work typically runs three to twelve months depending on what is in scope. Ongoing Fractional roles such as External CFO, External Commercial Manager or External General Counsel run on a monthly retainer for an agreed number of hours per week or days per month.
Each piece of work is fixed-price. The Strategy Session is $550 to $750 plus GST. The Deep-Dive Diagnostic is $1,950 plus GST. Larger Scoped Work is quoted in writing after the Deep-Dive Diagnostic, once we know what the work needs to cover. Ongoing Fractional roles are scoped to your business on a monthly retainer. There is no hourly billing and no scope changes without written agreement first.
Business Advisory is the broader umbrella role. A Business Adviser looks at your business as a whole and oversees how your other advisers (Accountant, Lawyer, Bookkeeper, Coach, Management Consultant) work together. Management Consulting is about bringing change. It is the work that fixes what is not working and installs what is missing. Most clients use both because the change work is more effective when there is a Business Adviser holding the whole picture together.
A Business Coach works on you. A Management Consultant works on your business. A Coach focuses on mindset, accountability and goal-setting. A Management Consultant focuses on the structural work that produces commercial outcomes: strategy, operations, numbers, pricing, risk and governance. Both can be useful at different points in your business. Owners who have done coaching and are now ready for the structural fixes that coaching could not deliver are a typical Management Consulting client.
No. Shannon is a Management Accountant, Costs Accountant and Fractional CFO. He works on management accounts, Project P&L, cash flow, pricing and the financial reporting you need to actually run your business. Your Accountant prepares your tax returns, BAS and IAS, and year-end statutory accounts. The two roles are different and they work together. Shannon will work alongside your existing Accountant on most pieces of work.
For Construction Law and Commercial Law work, Rachelle is a Construction Lawyer and Blaze Business & Legal holds a Queensland Law Society practising certificate. For specialist work in family law, employment law, intellectual property law or other areas outside Construction Law and Commercial Law, your existing Lawyer continues to do that work. Most clients keep their existing relationships and use Blaze Business & Legal for the construction-specific legal and management work that no general practice firm offers.
Yes. Blaze Business & Legal is based in Brisbane but works with Construction Businesses across Queensland, New South Wales, the ACT and other states. Work is delivered through a mix of in-person sessions and remote work, depending on what is in scope and what suits your team best.
Book a Strategy Session with Rachelle and Shannon through the website, or call (07) 3063 3373. The Strategy Session gives you a clear view of where your business stands and what would need to be covered if you decided to engage us further. From there, the natural next step is a Deep-Dive Diagnostic, after which we put a written scope and a fixed-price quote in front of you for any larger work.
Our Management Consulting work connects to a wider set of services for Construction Businesses. Click through to read more about each.
Book a 60-minute Strategy Session with Rachelle and Shannon. Fixed price, no obligation. You leave with a clear view of where your business stands and what would need to change
