Some of the parents employed by Indigo Commercial, with founder Tarrsha Watkins (middle)
'We built what was missing'
Tarrsha Watkins has spent 18 years in building, is managing director of PROTEK WA, and mum to a toddler and a baby. In April 2026 she launched Indigo Commercial, a Perth company built around six-hour, school-aligned shifts, and the applications have not stopped coming. In the first organisational story in our Parenting Out Loud series, Tarrsha explains why a significant part of the answer to construction's workforce shortage has been there all along.
The moment Indigo Commercial began was Easter weekend of this year, and Tarrsha Watkins was at home with her two small children, one eye on the kids and one eye on the laptop, working through the problems in front of her. She was tired, in the way you are when you are running a large business and raising a family at the same time. It was not an unusual way to spend an evening.
'Running a business is like that,' she says. 'Constantly integrating work and home.'
Tarrsha has worked in building for 18 years. She is managing director of PROTEK WA, the company she bought from her parents in 2023, and she knows the rhythms of the industry as well as anyone: the 12-hour shifts, the five and six-day weeks, the culture that treats those hours as simply what the job is. But it was only after the birth of her second child, she says, that she fully understood what those rhythms mean for a parent.
'You would have to be crazy to combine that schedule with raising children.'
Most people would leave the thought there. What Tarrsha did instead was run an experiment. The industry was desperate for staff, she reasoned, so why not offer roles built around family life? She placed two sets of advertisements on Seek. Under PROTEK WA, she advertised roles on standard terms: full-time, eight-hour days. Under a brand-new company, Indigo Commercial, she advertised the same kind of work on a family-friendly roster of six-hour shifts, five days a week.
The PROTEK ad drew 30 applications. The Indigo ad drew 2,700.
'People aren't lazy, they want to work hard,' she says. 'But they also have families they need to take care of. From an employer's perspective, I think it is better to have people working for six hours a day rather than no hours.'
Since Indigo launched in April 2026, the applications have kept coming: around 7,000 at last count, for general labourers, roofing labourers, carpenters and administration assistants. Recently she advertised for an executive assistant, because, in her words, it has got a little busy.
The model itself is deliberately simple. Staff are employed directly by Indigo, on hourly rates, and choose from a set of rosters designed around real family logistics. There is a 7am to 2pm shift for parents using before-school care who want to be free for pick-up. A 9am to 2pm shift that sits neatly inside school hours. A 9am to 5pm shift for families managing drop-off with after-school care. On some sites there are afternoon, early-morning and night options too. Indigo manages the shift patterns so that working parents fit within clients' standard operational hours, jobs are completed on time, and productivity holds. Her job ads carry one more deliberate line: female applicants encouraged. 'To make half of the population feel welcome,' she says.
For someone picturing a construction site, a school-aligned roster might sound impossible to run. Tarrsha's answer is practical: like many in WA's building industry, her company has contracts that need to be filled with good people, so she changed the standard shift pattern to fill them. What it gives her clients, often other builders, is access to a larger, engaged, quality workforce.
The applications have come from further afield than even Tarrsha had not anticipated. It is not only mums and dads of young kids. It is also older, highly skilled and experienced men who left the industry because of burnout.
'Burnout is a huge issue for building, as we all know,' she says. 'People shouldn't be under pressure to work 12-hour days, seven days a week, with little time off. But this is sadly the norm in our industry, an industry I love.'
PROTEK has supported MATES in Construction in WA for many years, and Tarrsha cites a statistic that has driven her involvement: construction workers in WA are nine times more likely to die by suicide than in a workplace accident. 'I don't want anyone overworking so their mental and physical health deteriorates.'
Six-hour shifts, she points out, work for more people than parents and caregivers. They suit mums juggling small children and their own health. They suit older workers managing the physical toll of manual labour. And she expects more and more young people to apply, using the roles as an entry point into the industry. 'Just because someone can't work 12 and 14-hour shifts doesn't mean they are not valuable on building sites.'
The people Indigo has hired since April are proof of this. A step mum trading FIFO swings for school pickup. A single mum who was balancing the needs of her children and preferred blue-collar work over an office role. An experienced health, safety, environment and quality professional who wanted flexibility and a more hands-on role. One single dad has been employed as a carpenter and other men are interested too.
Tarrsha is clear that the model was never only about women. 'It's not just about getting more women in the building industry,' she says. 'I'm hoping many workers who have left will also return.'
The pay matters as much as the hours. Blue collar roles typically pay more per hour than admin or retail, and for some single mums and single dads, she says, the combination of a workable schedule and higher wages is life changing.
None of it works without safe sites and good training, and Tarrsha is direct about that. You can't learn trades from a laptop, she says, and new workers, men and women alike, need experienced people around them. At Indigo, newcomers enter a well-supported environment backed by experienced leaders and a team that values respect, safety, teamwork, reliability and opportunity. She describes it as introducing people into initial opportunities that could lead to well-paid, lifelong positions. It is the same instinct behind her second term on Master Builders WA's Construction Council, where she wants to keep pushing for good safety culture and conditions on WA sites.
She is already thinking about where the model goes next. Indigo has developed a certification mark so other organisations can be recognised for implementing the same workforce practices, and she wants to build more accessible apprenticeship pathways for parents, carers and mature-age entrants through partnerships with registered training organisations. The ambition is straightforward: for school-aligned shifts to stop being the exception and start being normal.
Ask her what she would want another organisation, or another parent, to take from all of this, and her answer is this: 'don't always accept the traditional pattern or script,' she says. 'Sometimes you can achieve amazing things by trying new things.'
Tarrsha is proud of her parents' legacy at PROTEK, and proud of what both companies have become since: strategic, growing, female and family-friendly. But the thing she keeps returning to is the 2,700 applications that arrived when she asked the question differently. The people were there all along.
What was missing was the shift that let them show up. So, she built it.