Florio started his business with a second-hand truck and a sledge hammer, demolishing his first house by hand while making only one hundred dollars each.
After close to 15 years in the industry, he was eventually able to buy his own excavator, learning every day on the job.
"Every day we got smarter and learned by our mistakes," Florio told SBS.
"Mistakes of pricing jobs, under-pricing jobs and feeling lucky that we could get the jobs."
With his skill level and capacity improving, the majority of their jobs cost between 10 to 20 thousand dollars, until his business landed a game changing contract.
"We picked a job up for just shy of half a million dollars - it was very, very overwhelming but once we got it under our belt and completed it, and doors opened."
The last-minute contract was for the removal of a wall at Katoomba RSL, posing a danger to pedestrians if it were to fall the wrong way.
With business booming, all three excavators were booked up so Florio had to search for an extra machine to add to his fleet and reached out to Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) to make it happen.
Florio oversees a job. Source: SBS
"I called CBA and said I need a machine and they said no probs we can get the docs out in two or three days and we can get them signed and you can get the machine," he continued.
"I said no, I need it the machine tomorrow so they made it happen, I got the machine delivered the next afternoon, and it was working the next day."
Asset financing allows small businesses considerable flexibility in comparison to other lending tools because it can be applied to a wider range of assets - perhaps part of the reason for its increasing popularity with SMEs.
Diversifying the business
2016 saw the company move in a direction that would greatly increase their revenue by deciding to recycle a large proportion of the materials from the buildings they worked on leading to profit margins per house increasing from around seven per cent to 30.
“Turning over stock of about 50 thousand a month, we've now got contracts with Austral Bricks selling second-hand recycled bricks. We take all the bricks from a structure like this and we clean them all, re-pallet them and sell them,” Florio said.
“Believe it or not we demolish houses to get product to feed the salvage business which has superseded the demolition business.
It has been a win-win situation for Shane – with his business booming he has been able to offer customers a better deal for demolition, and his environmentally friendly approach has seen him get strong support from councils.
“Straight away as soon as we raised that we were recycling as opposed to just taking it to landfill they were all for it,” he continued.
“Things were just fast-tracked for us very quickly. The red tape was snipped… we're helping the planet and we're recycling and making money.”
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