Dan's journey in boat building started young. His apprenticeship was split across two employers, and the first taught him something harder than carpentry or composite technique: work ethic.
"I was doing a lot of under-boat care. There wasn't much boat building. The owner didn't prioritise us as apprentices. But I learned so much from that boss. He was really hard-working. The expectations were high. And that instilled in me a relentless work ethic."
At year two, Dan could have stayed. Instead, he left. He moved to a bigger operation on the Central Coast—a business building 105-tonne trawlers for clients like the Sultan of Oman. He got sent overseas to Oman for months to assemble the finished product. He learned what quality looked like on a global stage.
Then he started his own thing. Hybrid Composites. Solo. For seven years.
That's where most boat builders stay. They build, they work, they survive. Dan did something different. He learned to see the business hiding inside the work.
Ten years ago, boat building didn't look like a business. It looked like a job. Dan had enough work. He could feed himself. He could keep growing if he stayed on the tools.
He couldn't take on bigger projects alone. He couldn't do the work and the business at the same time. And he couldn't see how to fix it because he wasn't tracking the numbers that mattered.
That's when Dan did what the best trade owners do: he surrounded himself with people smarter than himself. He joined Tradies Success Academy. He started working with coaches. And he learned to see his business the way a real owner should.
Within months, he wasn't just running Hybrid Composites anymore. He launched Mahi Boats as a separate brand. He hired his first general manager. Then an operations manager. Then the team grew to 20.
Tradies Success Academy gives you the frameworks, systems, and coaching to build a business that works without you.
Here's what Dan discovered when he started tracking real costs: boat building has no margin for error.
A typical Mahi Boats project runs 18 months and costs millions of dollars. You quote a price. You lock that hourly rate for the duration of the contract. Then you discover you didn't account for something.
"Knowing your numbers is critical. You've got to understand your hourly rates, your overheads, the cost of downtime. If you don't get that right on day one, it compounds across an eighteen-month project."
On his first big build, Dan got lucky. He quoted cost-plus, meaning the client topped up a float as work progressed. He had room to breathe. He learned what he didn't know: the cost of procuring materials, the expense of bad logistics, the price of every hour his team wasn't being productive.
By the second and third boat, Dan had to get it right. Because this time, the margin was his problem.
When you're working solo, you can hide from your numbers. You're making something. You're busy. You call that success.
Find the right program for your trade and your stage of growth.
Dan didn't plan for Mahi Boats to exist. It emerged because demand outpaced capacity. Hybrid Composites does composite specialist work—production vessels, advanced techniques, high-end finishes. Mahi Boats does bespoke custom builds.
Then he had to run both. Same facility. Overlapping team. Two separate P&Ls he needed to understand.
He thought: "This will be fine. It's just another business." It wasn't. It was double the work, double the complexity, double the leadership burden.
Dan hired a general manager for Hybrid and kept Mahi for himself. He set up separate P&Ls so he could see which business was actually profitable. He built distinct roles so he could show up differently for each company.
You can't run two businesses the same way you run one. You need clarity on YOUR position in each—are you the GM or the director? Without that clarity, you slip between both and own nothing.
Hybrid has a GM, an operations manager, a lead boat builder, a team leader, and staff. Mahi has Dan as GM, a foreman running the project, juniors, and a project manager coming in to relieve the load.
Here's what solo builders don't see. Here's what Dan learned the hard way:
When you scale from one person to twenty, your factory cost doesn't scale linearly. You've got rent whether the team is billing or standing around. You've got insurance, equipment, facility costs. In boom times, that's absorbed. In slow times, that's blood.
"Downtime is expensive. Really expensive. You have to understand that when you've got a team of twenty, you're paying them whether they're billing hours or not. That changes how you approach quoting, scheduling, and project planning."
Dan's first mistake: markup on materials was too small. Lock yourself into a contract for eight months at 15% margin on materials, and a price increase halfway through kills you. He's learned to build in buffer. He's learned to read contracts before signing them. He's learned that eighteen months is a long time to regret a bad decision.
The second mistake: not accounting for the actual cost of overheads in your hourly rate. A team of twenty isn't twenty workers. It's twenty workers plus the rent, plus the manager to coordinate them, plus the system to track them. That compounds.
Dan's learned something most owners learn too late: the cost of a bad hire is bigger than you think. Not just in cash. In distraction, in rework, in the hours you spend following them around to make sure they don't break something.
You hire someone. They're not right. You spend the next six months watching them, correcting them, redoing work. It's not that they're bad. It's that they're not the fit you need in that role.
Dan found the best hires came to him. People who wanted to build boats with him. Not people looking for a job. The motivation matters. A skilled person with wrong motivation will cost you more than an unskilled person who cares.
Once Dan got clear on what he needed from a general manager versus an operations manager versus a foreman, he knew who to look for. He stopped trying to clone himself and started hiring for what the business actually needed.
A bad hire might actually be a bad onboarding. You can't drop someone into a complex operation and expect them to figure it out. Systems, documentation, clear expectations—these matter more than skill sometimes.
"You don't need another you. That's actually the lesson. You might meet someone that's very similar to you, but they might not be the best fit. You're potentially the problem, or you're not seeing things the way they need to be seen."
Dan has three kids. He's building two companies at once. He could tell you how to hit numbers, how to scale, how to manage overheads.
But the most important thing he's learned has nothing to do with boats.
Dan starts every day at 4 AM in an ice bath. Then the gym. Then healthy eating. That's not because he's disciplined. It's because he learned that the harder you make the first decision, the easier the rest of the day gets. If you can jump in ice water at dawn, a business problem at 9 AM looks small.
But the real framework he's working with is simpler: you can either pass down wounds or wisdom to your kids. And that decision changes how you show up everywhere—as a partner, as a boss, as a leader.
"Nothing's that serious when you've got your family. You can get pretty caught up in business, but when one of your kids is sick or you walk home and see their smiling faces, everything else just dissolves."
Dan's working on something called the Core Four—position descriptions not just for your business roles, but for your life. How do you show up at work? How do you show up for your family? How do you show up for your partner? How do you show up for yourself? Get clear on those four positions, and you stop drifting between them.
Don't guess. Calculate it. Account for overheads, downtime, materials markup. Get it wrong on an eight-month contract and you've subsidised the whole project.
When you go from solo to twenty people, your overhead doesn't disappear when work slows down. It compounds. Build it into every quote.
If you run two businesses, give them separate P&Ls. You can't see which one is actually profitable if they're mixed. You can't manage what you can't measure.
Are you the GM or the director? Are you doing business work or project work? Without clarity, you drift between everything and own nothing.
The best hires come because they want to be there. They want to grow. A motivated person with some skill beats a skilled person with no motivation.
Surrounding yourself with tradespeople who care about their craft means the project quality compounds. One bad subbie on an eighteen-month build is expensive in rework and reputation.
Dan used coaching, systems, and frameworks to transform Hybrid Composites and Mahi Boats from solo operations into thriving businesses. Get access to the tools that helped him understand his costs, build his leadership, and scale without losing control.
This episode applies differently depending on your business stage. Here is the specific action for each phase.
Get weekly financial visibility in place before anything else. 30 minutes every Friday: what came in, what went out, what is your margin. Build the habit first, then layer systems on top. Start in the Learning Hub .
Your first hire for freedom is a qualified tradesperson, not an apprentice. Cost every job before you quote. Track hours against every job. Follow the scaling loop — proactive hiring, never reactive.
Delegate the weekly numbers review to your operations manager. Your job is now strategy and work generation. Systemise the Financial Visibility Loop so it runs without you.
Dashboards, not spreadsheets. Margins tracked per job, per team, per division. Hire decisions backed by data. You are optimising a machine, not building one. If you are still firefighting, the system is broken.
This episode applies differently depending on your business stage. Here is the specific action for each phase.
Get weekly financial visibility in place before anything else. 30 minutes every Friday: what came in, what went out, what is your margin. Build the habit first, then layer systems on top. Start in the Learning Hub.
Your first hire for freedom is a qualified tradesperson, not an apprentice. Cost every job before you quote. Track hours against every job. Follow the scaling loop — proactive hiring, never reactive.
Delegate the weekly numbers review to your operations manager. Your job is now strategy and work generation. Systemise the Financial Visibility Loop so it runs without you.
Dashboards, not spreadsheets. Margins tracked per job, per team, per division. Hire decisions backed by data. You are optimising a machine, not building one. If you are still firefighting, the system is broken.
The frameworks in this episode are the same ones members use inside Tradies Success Academy.