Claire Perham runs Axiom Construction Group and holds her own builder's licence, and she still gets asked to show people her hands when she tells them what she does.

In this first half of our conversation, Claire talks about growing up around construction in New Zealand with a builder for a father, and how trades simply were not offered to girls in the eighties and nineties.

She went travelling, fell into admin and bookkeeping because they came easily, and then took those skills into male dominated industries.

It took her mother-in-law handing her a stack of Home Beautiful magazines and saying you can actually do that for a job before she considered anything else.

She got the diploma in interior design, pictured herself as something quite fancy, and then discovered she would much rather be on site talking to the plumber and working out when the materials need be onsite. That turn is where the business really started.

We get into the misconception that follows women in family building companies, the assumption that the wife is the one quietly doing the admin and the invoicing in the background.

Claire finds the clients, quotes the work and presents to the client. Her husband Jay holds the technical knowledge. Both of those are real jobs, and they built the business so that both of them could be present for their kids, whether that meant Claire on site at seven or Jay doing uniforms and lunchboxes.

Then there is the licence. Claire had been running the business for sixteen years, and it still took her four years to work up the courage to apply, and Jay putting her in the car with her paperwork to get her to the QBCC counter.

My own application sat on the bench for two years before someone finally asked me why I had not lodged it.

We talk about what the QBCC definition of a builder actually is, why a builder is a coordinator of a building project rather than the person swinging the hammer, and why that voice saying you are an imposter turns up even after the licence is on the wall.

If you have ever wondered whether the work you do in your building business counts as the real work, start here.