01 — Business & Goals
Who Goodwood is, who owns it, who runs it, and what "winning" looks like. The orientation layer — read this first if you're loading one file.
Company overview
Goodwood is a small NZ CNC manufacturing business based in Napier, Hawke's Bay. In plain terms: it buys timber and plywood, does something with it on CNC machines and a beam saw, and sells the result. Callum's own summary of the business model — "we buy timber, do something with it and sell it."
The company is roughly seven years old. It started as a side venture (cutting single sheets of plywood into animal traps on a 30-day credit account) and grew through a period of heavy paid advertising into a direct-to-consumer web business (~$1.1–1.2M/yr through the website at its peak — traps, beds, furniture, games). Over the last ~2 years it has been transformed by winning ABB Ltd (Napier) as an export-crate customer, which now drives the bulk of revenue and is forecasting the company to $3–4M this financial year.
Two things to hold in your head about the shape of the business:
It's a manufacturing operation, not a prefab-home builder. Goodwood makes flat-pack panels and CNC-cut kit-sets that get stacked on a pallet and assembled elsewhere — by a builder on a shed site, or by ABB packing their own product into the crates. Callum: "you're not a prefab home manufacturer, you're a flat-pack plywood-timber [maker]."
It's mid-momentum, not in crisis. Callum is adopting AI from a position of growth and opportunity, not pain. He's already built real automation himself. This matters for how you help him: the job is orchestration, reliability and architecture on top of what he's built — not "we'll automate you from scratch."
Ownership & the capex sign-off chain
Goodwood is majority-owned by BBI, with Callum holding a minority founder stake:
BBI owns ~70–75% of Goodwood; Callum owns ~20–25%. Callum put in $10k to start it; BBI matched (and capped) the founder contribution, and has funded the company via loans since.
BBI is owned by Brendan O'Sullivan (~80%) and Rory McGregor (~20%), plus a couple of smaller shareholders. (Rory is referred to in the recordings as "Ro" / "R.O. McGregor.")
BBI itself is a major building-products business — a plywood importer/distributor turning over ~$70–80M, selling plywood to PlaceMakers, Mitre 10, Carters and Bunnings across NZ, plus Australia and the Pacific islands.
Brendan O'Sullivan is also one of the owners of the Tumu Group — which includes Tumu Property, Killarney Capital, and Tumu Timbers — plus another 10–15 companies of similar scale. Goodwood sits inside this wider group's orbit (and, importantly, inside its IT tenant — see file 05).
Practical implication — the sign-off chain. For all intents and purposes Callum runs Goodwood day to day and decides what he likes. He signs his emails as General Manager. But large capital spending goes up to Brendan and Rory for sign-off. Goodwood is currently formalising this — putting proper capex fences and sign-off processes in place. So when the roadmap involves real money (a second CNC, a new beam saw, robot loaders), the relevant decision-makers above Callum are Brendan O'Sullivan and Rory McGregor.
Two useful facts that come with the ownership:
Best-in-country material rates. Because Brendan owns the largest plywood importer and some of the largest timber mills in NZ (Callum: "except for Red Stag"), Goodwood buys plywood and timber at rates almost no competitor — or builder — can match. This is a structural cost advantage on every product.
Tumu Timbers as a processing partner. Tumu Timbers can pre-process timber (cut studs, plates, sticks to length) that Goodwood then assembles into flat-pack panels — a potential way to scale panel output without adding Goodwood labour.
The team
Around 6 core staff, rising to ~8–10 with recent hires and casuals (headcount fluctuates; the discovery notes recorded ~6, the July audit had Callum describing 8–10). Roles:
| Person | Role | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Callum Macdonald | General Manager / owner-operator | Runs the company. Also does sales, CNC programming, drawings, cut-list fixes, QA, and general problem-solving. The deepest product/BOM/CNC knowledge lives in his head. Technically very capable — built the Power Automate flows and the Copilot Studio agents himself. Works ~60-hr weeks; ~10–20 hrs/wk of that is spare capacity to build new systems. |
| Matt | Operations Manager | Plans and lines up the work — tells the floor what to cut and when, coordinates machine time (e.g. "20 hours on the beam saw this week"). Background is furniture building; has technical/CAD/drawing skills. Explicitly tasked with absorbing Callum's tacit knowledge but isn't there yet (about a year in). More the "project manager" of the floor. |
| Jarrod | Team Leader | Runs the floor and the machines day to day; the "site foreman." Very fast and skilled with tools; has run CNCs for 15+ years; can edit G-code and keep machines running (but doesn't make big process improvements). Personable. Attendance was shaky a couple of years back (~3.5 days/wk) but is now on track — this is why he's a key-person risk to be aware of, not just an asset. |
| Hilton | Floor / CNC operator | Runs a CNC full-time. |
| Xavier | Floor / crate builder | Good forklift driver; builds crates from drawings (not from scratch). |
| + team members / casuals | Floor | Cutting, assembling, dispatching. "The boys." Fluctuates. Assembly is relatively unskilled and labour-scalable. |
| Christine (Callum's mum) | Admin | Handles the books: keys purchase orders and invoices in and out of Xero, and loads orders into Microsoft Planner. Part-time. Callum's explicit goal is to automate her role so she can retire without being replaced by a hire. She has headroom for ~3x current order volume before she'd wall (she processes ~5–20 orders/week now at ~20 min each; at 40 hrs/wk she could do ~120). |
Key-person risk is a running theme. Nearly all the deep product, BOM and CNC-setup knowledge concentrates on Callum — when a setup file is wrong, he's often the only one fast enough to fix it, and the floor waits. Several audit opportunities (the interruptions log, the training system, the sales/meeting memory) exist specifically to get that knowledge out of his head and into the business.
Sites
Goodwood operates from Napier. There are two showrooms referenced (locations/staffing to be confirmed — this was flagged as an open item at the audit). The main constraint noted on the physical operation is yard space — a real limit on scaling production in the current footprint.
The north-star: revenue of a 50-person company, run by ~15 people
Callum's goal, in his own words: build a higher-efficiency Goodwood — grow throughput and revenue without growing headcount to match. The vivid version he gave:
"Instead of growing a company to 50 staff and then saying 'let's automate,' we want to grow to the size of a 50-staff company using 15 people."
The measurable yardstick underneath it is revenue (or profit) per employee — aiming for roughly 2x a comparable business. His reference point: a company like BBI might run ~$500k revenue per employee; Goodwood wants to be twice as efficient.
The near-term operating version of that goal:
Currently ~$2.5–3M turnover with ~10 staff.
Wants to reach ~$5–6M without adding staff (hold at ~10).
Would only grow to ~15 staff at ~$10M (4x the current output on ~1.5x the people).
The bottleneck to that scale is understood to be machinery, not people — getting to $10M means adding a second CNC, another beam saw, and automated loading/unloading (robot arms), not a bigger team. See file 02.
The immediate proxy metric (what to score projects against day to day) is hours clawed back — time recovered from manual work that can be redeployed into growth. Every automation in the audit is scored against: hours back, margin made visible, growth unlocked.
Strategic priorities & direction
Product-line priorities (what's in, what's out):
Crates (esp. ABB export crates) — the profit engine and the growth story. Keep and protect. See file 04 for the concentration risk.
Sheds — the intended growth line: premium DTC product, plus a push to get sheds stocked through Mitre 10 ("one of M10's top-10 sellers"). Scaling sheds is the strategic bet — but gated on fixing the cut-list/BOM data quality and the true-cost blind spot first.
Games (cornhole) — the profitable, scalable DTC line Callum would pick if forced to grow one e-commerce product.
Cabins — being wound down, possibly spun out into a separate business. Scope shed-focused work to sheds, not cabins. Don't invest automation spend in cabin-specific flows.
Out / deprioritised: tiny homes / granny flats and go-karts are not priorities (the go-kart is "a lot of fun" but not a margin play). (Note: a new 70m² granny-flat building-code exemption from 15 Jan 2026 is a potential future angle for Goodwood's ~12.5m two-bed product and the Kererū/Kōkako small-cabin range — flagged as an opportunity, not a current focus.)
Growth posture: grow margin via the shed line + win share from competitors. Goodwood is also diversifying — picking up sheet-metal work from Italy, and has floated eventually manufacturing in the US themselves. Callum's competitive framing on sheds: "we can do what [a competitor] is doing for a fifth of the cost because we've got a fifth of the manpower."
Why AI / automation now (Callum's framing — worth quoting back to the team):
"We're not trying to get rid of anyone. We've got to lean into technology and use AI to grow the business — do more work with the same amount of people." He tells the team it's "job security."
A note on the ABB dependency as strategy. ABB alone could carry Goodwood to $5–10M over two years if nothing changed — but Callum sees the risk that it "falls out the bottom" in year three (ABB may shift crate volume to overseas plants with bigger footprints, and margin compresses on any design change). So the real strategic aim is to build ~20% of turnover from diversified sources (more crate customers, the shed/Mitre 10 push, reactivated DTC) so the business isn't existentially tied to one account. This is the thread that ties the growth plays in the audit together — and the reason for the companion export-crate call-sheet.
Related files
02-products-and-production.md — how the products are actually made
03-financials-and-costing.md — the numbers behind the priorities above
04-customers-and-channels.md — the ABB concentration and the diversification plays
05-systems-tools-and-constraints.md — the M365 stack and the IT-governance boundary