I watched construction companies collapse around me before my husband was forced to close his... this is the simple change we need to make now to help save the industry

An Aussie mum and entrepreneur is looking to shake up Australia's construction industry after watching her husband's subcontracting company collapse due to a common yet dodgy practice.

Louise Stewart and her husband were unable to keep their Perth-based company from caving under the weight of personal debts that accumulated after the GFC when a number of builders failed to pay their bills and were made insolvent.

The industry had become oversaturated with builders taking advantage of the then-Rudd government's $14billion primary school building program that was intended to kickstart the economy.

Ms Stewart said she saw builders try to pay off their debts by taking on new projects before blowing money on other builds or even personal expenses.

The industry's house of cards soon collapsed under the weight of snowballing debts, leaving homeowners, subcontractors and suppliers out of pocket.

The mother-of-two saw the Morrison government about to make the same mistake with the Homebuilder Scheme in 2020 and urged them to outlaw the practice or face another wave of insolvencies.

Her pleas fell on deaf ears and the yet-again bloated industry was hit with skyrocketing costs, and led to 2,975 insolvencies across the 2023/24 financial year.

Without government legislation, Ms Stewart took on the task of fixing the payment processes in the industry to mitigate the risk of insolvencies.

Ms Stewart had worked for international technology companies and made millions off the sale of her business, Revive Group, before her husband's company collapsed.

Despite the success of her own business and her husband having owned his for over two decades, they concluded its debts made it unsalvageable.

'When you have so many builders collapse and not pay you, it is literally impossible for you to run a business in that sort of environment,' she told Daily Mail Australia.

'This issue of builders collapsing and subcontractors haven't been paid, and whoever the project owner is is just left with financial losses is a very big problem that has existed in Australia for a very long time.'

She said her husband 'wasn't the same' after his company went into liquidation and spent the next few years struggling to pay off loans taken out to keep it afloat.

The issue has similarly affected a number of other small business owners who have had their lives ruined by mountains of debt.

'(Subcontractors) get forced into this debt trap of getting expensive financing credit cards or they have loans where the family home is offered as security to have the working capital to deliver on projects,' Ms Stewart.

'They hope that they get paid later and then too often they get paid 120 days-plus later, or they don't get paid at all.'

She added that she was seeing the same trends that impacted her family were now surfacing again, and looked for a way to make payments more secure.

Ms Stewart launched ProjectPay in 2019, which allows for subcontractors and builders to be incrementally paid for the work they have done on a project.

The buy-now-pay-later style company takes the onus of confirming the costs are for works on the project and paying the bills, allowing the client to pay after the build is finished.

It means clients won't be at a loss if the builder becomes insolvent while subcontractors will secure more frequent payments.

'What we've built is a technology platform that removes any risk of money being lost to to build a collapse or misuse,' she said.

However, Ms Stewart took off to London in 2020 after seeing more interest in the company from the UK Government than in Australia.

She was then made part of the UK's global entrepreneur program and given funding to help expand into the country.

After winning awards for innovation and best small business payments in the country in 2022 and featuring in the UK Women in Fintech Powerlist, Ms Stewart is looking to bring the company back to Australia.

She said she was disappointed the government hadn't implemented laws similar to the United States that protected subcontractors and clients.

Trust statutes in the country protect any money paid to a company is protected if it becomes insolvent and makes it illegal to spend that money on anything other than the agreed-upon project.

Ms Stewart said the company has since seen large amounts of interest from banks, subcontractors and clients in Australia seeking security from insolvencies.

'Even if your bank is delayed in releasing your loan payment, we're going to keep paying your bills and your subcontractors so your project can still continue,' she said.

'And so now what we're finding is we're being approached by very large banks in Australia, saying, "We want to work with you, because we want to do an end to end payment process".'

A project manager based in Sydney said he would be 'interested' in seeing how ProjectPay works in practice, but raised concerns over the benefits for builders.

'Every builder already has their own system in place and it'd be hard for a client to come to me and say "I want you to use this one",' he told Daily Mail Australia.

'Learning this new system and uploading invoices to it and what not sounds like a lot.'

He did note that security in the industry has become increasingly important, but said that builders need to be enticed.