Kiwi Business Story: Joshua Ireland and Jed Keir at KLS

 
Joshua Ireland and Jed Keir are co-Directors and Project Managers at KLS (Keir Landscaping and Structures) and Owner Manager Programme alumni. 

This Kiwi Business Story is based on a podcast from 3 November 2022 and all figures and facts quoted are from that time. You can enjoy the complete podcast here.

What is your career journey?

Josh: I've come from the trades. I left school, did a bit of plumbing and drain laying and then moved into the building construction sector. I've had a couple of other businesses and then Jed and I decided we'd have a crack at this.

We’re both passionate about the industry and building some pretty cool stuff in some pretty amazing spaces. [KLS] allows us to facilitate some pretty cool people as well, growing them and their skills.  

Jed: I've got more of a civil construction background. I was drawn to this because roading construction can be overrun with regulation, and you don't get a lot of room to move. 

We’re brothers and best mates. We went our own way in our teenage years but ended up working at a same company, but in quite different areas. So we understood each other's experience in the construction industry, and when we bought this business and got an opportunity to build a wharf on Kawau island. 

What does KLS offer?

Jed: We’re a construction company that is comfortable taking on logistical problems – landscaping and structures – we're happy to build anything that's a little bit difficult and interesting. 

Do you have any tips for brothers deciding to go into business together?

Jed: It’s about having some awareness of what complementary skills you have and where you really excel, and then supporting each other in those areas. [Also] channelling that competitive attitude to the team, and creating a team that is really excelling rather than us competing with each other.

Josh: And communication too. To be fair, I think a lot of Kiwi males are terrible at it, but we’ve gotten a lot better! If I don’t know something and Jed knows it better, I’m not afraid to go and get Jed involved in that.

What’s your philosophy?

We’ve had reasonably organic growth and a lot of that has come from biting off more than we can chew, and then chewing real hard and finding a way to make that work! We’ve done that for five years now and it's got us here, and we’re still pretty keen to keep doing that.

Why did you both jump on to the Owner Manager Programme (OMP)?

Jed: There's a third person involved in this company, our old man! He had done it, 10 or 15 years ago, and he really valued it at the time. So I guess it was a recommendation from someone that we trust. 

Josh: I didn't really know what to expect, but you don't know what you don't know. I was a little apprehensive going into it, but I found it amazing. 

We were really lucky in the sense that Jed got to go on OMP five months later. I'd be bringing [ideas] back after each block, and when I finished, we really nutted out our direction and five-year plan, and Jed was able to take that into his OMP.

Jed: That was intentional – Josh did ‘version one’ of everything and I did ‘version five’. So we refined a lot of our direction. You get to put it through this massive filter. [I loved] the workshopping and all of the content. I feel like we've got solid direction at the moment, in terms of where we're going.

Josh: We owe a lot of that to The Icehouse. You know what you need to do, but you find other things to do instead of actually focusing on that. Since we've done that five-year plan, and really figured out what we're doing and where we want to go, it's been huge.

Anything else?

Jed: It’s interesting how you [have to] free up mental resource when you're running a business. It’s something that's really valuable and, going through the programme has allowed us to refine, get that plan in place, and then free-up a whole lot of mental resource for doing other stuff, whether that's personal or driving the business.

Josh: It creates a flow as well, because you know where you're heading. So it becomes a lot easier because once you start it just keeps going.

Jed: It was also invaluable being around other business owners – effectively being able to throw ideas around and just see how other people respond.

It's really important to sort of build relationships that are much broader than your own industry and I got a huge amount of value out of that exposure and those conversations.