Janelle Nader

Janelle Nader is the founder of Clearspan Consulting, a specialist advisory practice for the NSW residential construction and development industry. Her career began not in a boardroom, but on the office floor — learning the trade as an architectural draftsperson before going on to co-found her own residential construction company, where she ran the entire pre-construction function, including contract execution. From there, she has spent the remainder of her career working across some of the largest builders in NSW.

That firsthand experience is the foundation of everything Clearspan does. Over the following 25 years, Janelle moved into senior operations leadership — managing a large team with 20 direct reports and serving as SME and co-designer of a large-scale paper-to-digital transformation for a major NSW builder, before culminating in a role leading teams of up to 34 people across five pre-construction functions — drafting, estimating, colours, customer care and permits — for one of NSW's largest residential builders. She has also been personally entrusted with the business's most sensitive and legally complex client matters.

Janelle's understanding of the planning system runs just as deep. She has successfully argued planning grounds — drawing on Land and Environment Court principles that councils themselves apply when determining disputes — to secure an outcome for a client. She has also lobbied council to amend the DCP in a particular area to prevent unliveable homes, an outcome significant enough to make the local paper, and found a creative, near-impossible solution when a build went wrong days before a family's move-in date. At an HIA industry event, she publicly raised systemic planning issues directly with the NSW Minister for Planning's office — the kind of advocacy that comes from having actually worked inside the system, not observed it from outside.

She founded Clearspan Consulting because good people deserve good systems — and because she had seen, over and over, that businesses which treat people and process as one ecosystem, not two separate problems, are the ones that get better and stay better.