There is never time to start with AI. Behan started anyway, and built a website Q&A tool on the day.

Who is Independent Building Advice?

Independent Building Advice, or IBA, helps people in Perth design, build and renovate their homes. As Behan put it at the workshop: "We guide and design people when they're building and renovating." The business works from a home base in Subiaco.

Its services cover custom home design, finding the right builder, independent advice, and contract review and negotiation. Clients choose from a network of 21 trusted builders, each checked against IBA's own criteria. The team brings more than 20 years of construction industry experience, and its website features a client's home that won a 2024 Master Builders award.

Clients move through five stages: a first catch-up, design and planning, finding the right builder, negotiation and contracts, then support through the build. The company also runs The Home Building Podcast, published on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Where was IBA with AI before the workshop?

Behan was already using Claude, and he taught himself. He could build simple tools inside it, like one that takes a home's floor area and suburb and estimates its rent return and what it would sell for. But nothing was connected yet: no email, no CRM, no skills and no agents.

Like a lot of business owners, he felt the pressure to do more. On camera at the workshop, he said: "We hear about AI from everybody." Then: "I think there's a lot of guilt around there. It's like, well, where do we start?"

Time was the other problem. On our first call he told us: "I'm always busy. I haven't put enough time aside to actually research into the options and what we should do."

Where does the team's time go?

A lot of it goes on keeping clients informed. As each client moves through the stages of a build, someone follows up, sends status updates, collects feedback and passes any issues to the right person in the business. Most of it happens by email, and most of it is done by hand.

IBA's CRM doubles as its client portal, and the stage-by-stage update emails are sent from it manually. New enquiries are similar: follow-up is handled by hand, by the consultants and the marketing team. Behan's own inbox is busy too.

Behan wants AI to take on much of that routine client communication. When we first spoke, in August, he said he wanted to start working on it straight away.

Why did Behan bring his marketer?

Because Riley runs the side of the business Behan wanted to grow next. Riley is IBA's full-time marketer, looking after paid ads and content. In Behan's words on the day: "I brought Riley with me today. He's my marketer, and he knows a lot about AI."

Behan booked his own seat on our first call, and added Riley as a second seat soon after. His main worry was pace. He knew from experience that a course can end up moving at the speed of its newest beginner, and he wanted both of them to get the most out of the day. Ours is built so that does not happen: each person works on their own job, with us in the room to help.

Before the day, we ran one setup call with both of them. Behan got the Claude desktop app and Claude Code working, and connected Claude to a tool that links it to hundreds of other apps. Riley planned to set up the same connection on his own machine.

What did Behan build at the workshop?

A Q&A tool for IBA's website. People can ask questions about IBA's service and what it offers, and the tool gives them the information back. Behan got a working version done on the day.

In his words, the tool means "we can ask questions on our website about our product, about what we've got". And on how the day went: "I managed to achieve it, so it was great."

The idea grew out of our setup call. Behan wanted something that answers people the way a person would, pulling the relevant details from the company's own articles, rather than sending them a list of documents that may not help. The tool is not on IBA's public website yet. We will update this page when it goes live.

What is IBA building next?

Two bigger builds are planned. The first is a customer onboarding and handover tool that keeps clients informed at each stage of their build and collects what the team needs from them. The second is a pipeline that turns each podcast episode into more content.

The onboarding tool is aimed at the client communication described above: the follow-ups, updates and feedback that come with every stage. The approach we talked through on our first call is to connect Claude to the company's email and CRM, start with draft replies the team checks, and only let it reply on its own once the drafts are right.

The podcast pipeline would take each episode of The Home Building Podcast and turn it into edited video segments, blog posts written from the transcript and social carousels built from the blogs, all linking back to each other. The team had already been trying to build something like it. We flagged that AI video editing is still hit and miss, while the written side is simpler.

Could this work for other advice and service businesses?

Yes. Any business that answers the same questions about its service again and again, or walks clients through the same stages, can hand part of that work to AI. Brokers, designers, consultants and builders all spend hours on this kind of communication.

The way to start is the way Behan did: pick one thing, build a working version, then move to the next. When a tool like this needs to run for every customer, we help build it through chat and voice and AI automation. If you want your whole team learning together, see our corporate AI training.