Dexterity Talks with Damien Quinn
In early July we met up with Damien Quinn, Co-Founder and CEO of Visibuild (https://visibuild.com.au/) to discuss the business opportunities and challenges facing construction start-ups in 2024.
Can you tell us a bit about yourself and what you do?
I’m the CEO and one of the founders of Visibuild, a B2B SAAS product for commercial construction companies, which is designed to optimise their quality assurance program.
How did you get into construction?
I started my working life as a graduate builder for a major construction company. The projects were in the $100M+ range. I stayed working directly in the industry for more than a decade before starting Visibuild with the other founders.
How is your business progressing in 2024?
We are still experiencing significant growth. Our collective time in the construction industry led to our product having good market fit from its beginning. There is significant demand from construction companies to improve how they do quality assurance.
What has been your biggest challenge in business?
The demand has been there so the challenge has been how to meet that demand by scaling and increasing our offering. Finding the right staff who have the necessary skills, but are happy to work for a start-up has been difficult.
How did you overcome it?
There is no easy fix, you have to make recruitment a focus and take your time with it. You also need to make sure you are managing performance of the team as things evolve.
How do you think lawyers and other advisors can add value to start-ups as clients?
It is very helpful if advisors can offer a road map to you as to what to expect in the future. This was our first business so there were many unknowns at the beginning. Some of our founding team had worked as employees in other start-ups so were aware of issues that might arise, but I think that is where lawyers and other advisors can add real value.
What do you most enjoy about your role?
It’s the lightbulb moment for clients when they realise what our product can do for them. For so many construction companies their quality assurance suffers from becoming a tick box exercise. There are a lot of tech products that turn that manual tick box into a digital tick box. But where we have been able to make a difference is to take quality assurance and make it a management tool for the whole project. The client can get a lot more information about their build in an organised way.
Damien Quinn, thanks for talking with us!
Dexterity Talks is a web series of interviews with founders, investors and advisors in the Australian start-up scene. This interview was conduct by Pippin Barry (BA, JD), an Australian lawyer and the principal of Dexterity Law.
