(upbeat music) - Hey everyone, welcome back to the Contracted Growth Network Podcast. I'm Logan Shinholster, and today we have a really, really cool episode. In fact, when we recorded this, it was so long that we decided to break it out into two different episodes, because this is gonna be something that you're gonna wanna relisten to time and time again. I'm excited for it. We have AJ Ballantine from Cornerstone Remodeling, who's actually from my original neck of the woods. AJ has put a ton of time into his design process, where he's able to turn around designs super, super quickly, because he's so dialed in, but also not lose that customer experience touch. So this first part is all about what he was dealing with, why he was dealing with, which is really gonna set the stage for how the actual process works, which comes near the end of this episode and then into the next one. But without further ado, let's go ahead and jump on in. (upbeat music) AJ, let's go ahead and start off, man. And can you give us a bit of a your background and then how Cornerstone came to be? - Yeah, absolutely. My background is both from a design and a build standpoint. So finding myself in a design build space, pretty natural, you knew how I grew up. My dad's side of the family was all contractors, my mom's side of the family was all artists. So when I began my journey, you know, the young kid, I was always in my grandfather's workshop working with tools. Then of course, when I went to college, I went for architecture, I loved the design side and ultimately found myself hating being locked into design studio for 40 hours a week. And so then I left and I went and looked for a job in a design build company here, pretty local. They were no longer a business, they actually retired several years back, but that's where I really found my passion for design build. I loved the ability to design a product something that doesn't exist yet and be able to see it clearly and capture the vision for that to my clients and walk them through that whole process. And of course, I loved the build side as well. I wanted to see that vision that design come to life. And so the design build space has been, you know, just a soul satisfying endeavor for me. So ultimately, the entrepreneur side wanted to step into what we saw was a common pain point in our industry. It was homeowners need a lot more assistance through the buying journey, you know, with remodeling. There were a lot of pains that we saw unanswered with the last remodeling company it was a part of that we felt like we would be better suited to answer. So we launched a design build company. When I say we had a business partner at the time, just a colleague and he and I wanted to start our own company. So back in 2011, we did just that cornerstone remodeling. We became pretty well known pretty quickly through really good, just marketing tactics and so on being the millennials that we are. And quickly got a foothold. We started winning awards, you know, from the best remodeler at Howard County, local place to best in Baltimore. It's more regional. And of course, winning some national awards too along the way. But yeah, so that's my journey. And I always said, I feel like I've had a company since 2011, but a business since 2020. Because I really never treated my company as a business. It was always a passion. There's a famous, I call them famous. He's famous in my world, Doug Howard. He's a good consultant in the space has a consulting from the focus on the passion behind the business, right? Or the business behind the passion. And that's ultimately what I've been driving in my organization over the past four years has really been, how do we perfect the business that operates and continue to really knock the passion component of our business out of the park. And it's been a dance. I'll say for the last couple of years, really perfect a business model while you still keep that really high touch, white glove experience for the clients and preserve that intact. Because I'll tell you what, the design build space is not meant to scale a sales process very well. That's just because of how lengthy and arduous it is. But we feel like we're making a lot of strides in that department, which is I guess why here today. - So with that, what, I guess, how did you just view the business from 2011 up until that inflection point of 2020? - Well, part of it was an experience in running a business. The other part was knowing what I needed to do, but not necessarily how to do it. So a lot of the advancements, a lot of the growth that we wanted to see in the company was, it was a mix of passion and ambition mixed with some basic business knowledge that we had in the space. But really putting the two together, starting in 2020, we really started to understand a little bit more about, okay, you hear the phrase system in processes all over. It's almost like makes me want to gag when I hear it because it's like nobody really knows what that means. You can't just say, oh, I'm about systems in processes. It's like, you know, no, you're not. How are you about systems in processes? Because to be about, to be a business that really prioritizes systemizing the entire organization, building processes that support those systems, you have to think outside of the box. You can't just document your business and expect it to do really well. You have to document your business, scrutinize it, simplify it and then streamline it. And that whole process, that three step process that we go through, it's continual. You're never stopping because you have to look at everything that your business does and say, well, can we do that better? And we have really come into some, you know, have a crisis of faith, you know, a handful of times throughout the last four years where we really started to poke holes into like, the business is usual, we've always done it this way. And this, and we know that we were successful doing it this way, but we always ask ourselves the question, like, can we do it better? Because if you think about how competitive this space is for modelers, you know, too often, I mean, that's why, you know, marketing is such a, it's a game in this space because everybody's out there preaching the same thing. What's really a unique identifier about your business? And don't give me the, we do quality work. Oh, well, we, you know, we win awards, we do quality work, we're, we do great at this and we do great at that. It's like, yeah, everybody's great at that. Like what truly defines your business as unique? And for us, it was, well, can we be a high-touch white glove boutique design build company and one of the most competitive markets in the United States and offer estimates, the thing that our clients want the most when they're out to figure out, you know, this next remodeling journey that they're on, how much things cost? Can we deliver an estimate to them in less than seven days? And can we do it in a way that helps our business grow? 'Cause yeah, we can, we can offer estimates in seven days, but are they accurate? Are they filling the client's needs? Do we know what they want? How do you get to the bottom of what they want? And how do you do it without dumping so much of your time and energy with your sales team? 'Cause that's ultimately what we found to be the problem with design build. And sorry, that's a very long-winded answer if, you know, telling you what, you know, what we've been focused on for the past four years, what that switch was for us is just questioning everything and doing something completely different. - But why? I mean, if the first nine years of it, I mean, we're going as they were. I mean, was there something that, I mean, 2020, obviously like there's a big boom in the market and stuff like that, was that what spurred this whole thought process of, can we do this better? Is there a better way of going about this? Or was that just like intrinsically there's always kind of there and now you just finally decided to rip the bayonet off? I guess like, what was like the final straw that broke the camel's back when you said, okay, let's stop treating this like a passion project and let's start to question what we're doing. - Few things, I've always had an ambition to grow, right? So growing a design build company is painstaking at best because you can't really scale it. Like I said, you know, when you want to grow a design build company, or a modeling company in general, but especially design builds, you have a lot of overhead. And that overhead gets tapped pretty quickly. It is very limited based on the output of your team. So when I set out to try to grow, obviously 2020 hit us hard. You know, everybody has their own story through that. And 2021 was the opposite. Everybody was like a gold rush. But we really started it like, ask ourselves, how do we go to the next level? You know, at the time we went from $3 million, to $3 million during COVID to $6 million in 2021. And we really started to see cracks in our operations when we doubled in size that year. And for me, a lot of the work that we did after that was more just like reinforcing. I make it sure that the cracks are superficial at best, you know, and are at most and trying to figure out how we can just make the operation work a little bit more cohesively. But then of course, I saw this underlined desire to grow and continued to not just be a 6 million, but 8 million and then a $10, $12 million, a modeling company. You know, obviously the more that you scale the business outside of that comfort zone of that two to $3 million wherever that glass ceiling is for your organization, you have to treat your business differently. You can't be a $20 million company estimating projects out of your back pocket and expecting your subcontractors to know what's going on. You need an HR department. I never thought I would have an HR department. How do you have an HR department? How do you support financially in HR department?
apartment in your business. We started to bump up against all these things, and that's really when we decided that we needed to make sure that this business operate more like a business than it ever has in the past. - So talk to me a bit about how that, I guess, why the design process was like a thing that you wanted to really hone in on and put under a microscope to figure out what we're doing here and is there a better way of doing it? - Yeah, the design process, so we look at the design process as part of what we call our sales motion, right? So it's part of our sales lifecycle. Our goal is to take a lead that comes in and sell a build contract. And the way that we do that is our sales process, part of our sales process is like obviously we're infusing design, the creativity in that. It takes forever to get somebody to understand what a remodeling product is gonna take, but from a financial perspective, but also from an impact perspective, when we're putting these projects together, really the customer expectations are, if you show me something pretty and I can afford it, then I'm just gonna do it, but there's so many nuances in there that requires a team of people. We have a whole staff of people that are dedicated. We have a designer that's working with them, making all their selections. We have an estimator, we have an architectural designer that all the eyes are dotted, the teeth are crossed when we're taking these things to the county and only permits. Those things are very expensive for us to provide. Now we can do that really well at a three, four, five million dollar company and be perfectly fine coasting right there. We have our staff with God of all our numbers figured out, our metrics, but if we wanted the growth past that, we were talking about doubling literally everyone. And how do you just take a staff of five people in the office and just go to 10 overnight where you can't? You know, there are a lot of stuff existence that help you grow out of those little, what I call the glass ceilings. And if you wanna take your two million dollar company and go to four or five, you need to start thinking about things like this. How, you know, if you're an owner operator, what jobs do you do around the company? For me, it was the marketing director, I'm the sales director, I'm the design director, I'm the HR manager, I'm the production manager. Well, I just listed five positions that I can't do twice the amount of as a, you know, from a two to three million dollar company as a four to six million dollar company. I'm looking at hiring at least half of those positions. Well, there's more overhead. So now my metrics no longer work, right? The metrics that work at two and a half million dollars be paying for the things that I'm paying for. If I just hire additional people to get to that next level, the numbers begin to break down. And that's why a lot of companies figure out that when they grow, they're making less money at a higher revenue, like less actual dollars. I'm not just talking about percent, but I'm talking about actual dollars, they're making less money on the bottom line doing twice the amount of revenue that they were. And that's where a lot of companies that feel like they fall back because they get scared. How do I support a company this large for much longer if I'm making so much less money? And then there's the intrinsic piece of this too. It's like, what am I really doing? I'm sacrificing my family time to grow this business. I'm spending so much time at work. I'm working twice as hard dealing with twice and not a drama for what? Less money at the end of the day. That all of those things combined, drove me to figure out, okay, how do I actually grow the company without growing the expenses? How do I grow this company without growing the staff? They all staff. And so there we started diving in deep on the sales process. How do we get better? And it was all numbers. I'm not a huge numbers guy, but ultimately if you think about your sales cycle, you have a certain amount of money that you spend on marketing to generate a certain number of leads. We call that the conversion percentage, right? So you're talking about cost of acquiring a lead. Well, then what happens to that lead when it comes in? Well, you probably pre-qualify some of them out and then keep the rest. Well, they move to a particular stage where you're interacting with them now in presenting either a design agreement or an estimate or whatever it is that your company does, right? Well, then how many move forward from there? So you trickle all this thing, all of this down and you start to understand that if my staff is closing at a certain closing percentage, I'm getting a certain number of leads with a certain number of marketing dollars being spent to acquire those leads, then I know that I can produce X. That's it. Like that's a cap. If I dump in this amount of money, I can handle this amount of leads and I get this amount of customers in the end and that's all that I can handle. And to be able to adjust any of those numbers, right? So the one that we had the most friction with was, okay, the output of my staff, 'cause that was fixed. I can't make them do any more than they're doing that. They're at a hundred percent capacity. So the lever that we pulled was how do we increase the output of that same staff? So if my team can handle twice the amount of leads that they can handle now and still maintain their closing percentage and their quality of work life balance, right? We don't wanna work on 80 hours a week. Well, then I just solved probably the biggest pinch point for a lot of design build companies. That's right there. Because I can spend the extra money to bring in the leads if my office staff can handle twice the amount of leads and we're still closing the same number of those leads. The other one was obviously you can increase your closing percentage. You're not handling as many leads or you handle the same number of leads, but just closing more of them. How do you close more of them? That's a big question mark for a lot of design build companies. Whether they wanna grow or just stay kind of where they are, closing percentages are always something that we're looking at. So all of those data metrics are supporting this whole notion of perfecting this sales model. How do we do it? How do we do it well? - So with that said, where did you, I guess, begin? So you kinda realize you have some limitations and you're not wanting to double the size of the team and that's a super common thing I hear a lot about it. Like, if I wanna grow, I gotta add another crew. And it's like, well, is that the only way that you can grow is to add more people? Or is there other opportunities here where you could just raise prices or be able to do things a little bit differently? So now you're adjusting more of the margins and you are like adding more people on. So where did y'all start with this whole process of? We wanna be able to grow top line without increasing head count. - Process engineering. That's where we started. We knew that the goal here was to enhance our processes. So the first thing we had to do was understand them. And part of this exploration in figuring out our actual process, the business process was looking at it from two different perspectives. One was internal, how do we see our processes working? How do they benefit us internally, our staff and so on and even our brand and how we're presented in the market? But then we also had to put the shoe on the other foot. And this is where this exercise of empathy mapping where they came into play was we had to understand our business processes from the client's perspective. And I think that change for us really helped us refine a lot of the things or at least make decisions on refining some of the things that we knew were broken about, kind of things that were self-serving. No, we want to close more deals. We want to increase our volume. We need to increase our average sale price. Things that were really benefiting us as a business, well, how did our customers perceive that? This exercise of empathy mapping was critical for us to begin this journey. I mean, this is basically where we started. We had to basically put together a client journey map where we started to understand a little bit more about how a homeowner begins this remodeling journey far before they reach out to a remodeling company and they need to associate it along the way. They change and their perception of remodeling companies changes along the way. And we really started to ask ourselves, how does a client see a remodeling business from afar? Empathy mapping kind of put that in perspective. I don't know if you know much about empathy mapping. Oh, I know Logan, you probably do, but for people listening, empathy mapping is just an exercise where it helps you understand your customer perspective. I think the exercise is when you get into a room, you come into a room with your leadership with your team, perhaps your marketing team, you're basically drawing a four piece map on a board, white board, right? And you are basically putting on their think feel, see here and say, so there's five things on the board. And you're starting to ask questions about, what are your clients thinking when they want to start a remodeling project or when they're in the middle of it? Right, what are the things that they're experiencing? When you map all this, that one we did this, we identified very specific pain points that our clients had. They felt like they did, well, clients don't want to be taken advantage of or they don't want to have the appearance of being taken advantage of. So they are the will, they don't know even where to begin. They're a little frightened by the experience. Too many options, how do they solidify a vision for this? Even how do they take a contractor, right?
All of these things, they desire interpersonal interactions. That's something that I think we all know. We like to shake the hands, look them in the eye, and this is a very personal relationship, building type of environment. They're kind of solidified exactly what they were looking for in terms of that interpersonal journey. They don't want to be left in the dark. That's an obvious one. They prefer faster and convenient sales process. This is something very key on millennials too. I'm a little deeper into how the millennials being a force have really altered our processes as well. But all of those things combined help us to look at our entire sales process. If we want to be faster, if we want to increase our job size and push these things through faster, short and our sales cycle, some of these things compete against what I was mentioning with what the customers feel. They don't want to be a call going to wheel. They don't want to feel like they're taking advantage of. When I talk about raising sales prices and pushing them through the pipeline faster, we're starting to get that car dealership vibe. That's not something that you want to promote your business. Especially not one that does these higher end boutique types of models. Weighing all of the decisions we were making about our sales motion, keeping this empathy mapping thing clear front and center, and all of the things that we did to perfect our sales process were weighed against this exercise that we did. So with the empathy mapping, what is funny is when this comes out podcast wise, we would have already had a podcast out about ideal client avatar and then unique selling propositions. So this should play into it pretty well because it talks a lot about really not only understanding who your favorite client star, how they think, how they operate, the stages in your journey working with them, what they enjoyed, what they did enjoy, but also what makes you unique. This would be very fitting. But when you're going through this whole empathy mapping side of things, are you guys just for everybody listening like are you just sitting in a room, just you and your partner going through this stuff and just talking out loud, do you have a guy during this like an outside source going well, hold on, are people really calling you because you're a fourth generation builder and that's what they're saying or is that just what you guys think? What was the facilitation of these conversations like because this is super, super important and just imagine. You're going to want somebody who's done it before, some sort of guide. I say look to your marketing team, we had a great marketing partner, still do that kind of facilitated the discussion. They were very familiar with this exercise and how to have a successful time. I think it was two or three hours of spent kind of working through it. They basically distilled this, after Lauren, my general manager and I were there for the exercise, after we left, they distilled all the information and boiled it down and say, hey look, here are the commonalities of things that we saw that your customers were thinking, feeling, hearing, seeing and saying. These are the biggest ones to pay attention to as you look at changing the way that your brand looks, changing your website and working through sales process. All those things were informed by what the marketing team was able to distill from that exercise. I would say yeah, you definitely want somebody who has skilled, has done that kind of exercise before. I'm sure ChatGBT has a lot of resources on that if you just want to have one internally like less formally. But definitely do some more reading up on it. I think, like I said, there's a lot of information on ChatGBT that can fill in the blanks for you. Even provide some outlines for you to go for. There are plenty of articles out there on the web that can steer you in the right direction if your marketing team is available or doesn't have the ability, the capacity to do all the stuff that you guys do. Yeah, it's very beneficial. It's a pain, truth be told. We call clients clients, which is like running many focus groups around this stuff to really understand how do you feel about this company? How are they positioned in the market and stuff like that? It's super helpful from a marketing side, but it's a relatively big lift. It's one of those things. Once you knock it out, you're good for a while, and you at least have a very strong base, but just getting to that right foundation of like, that's really understood. Because we hear the same stuff as you as like, "Hey, what makes you special?" And it's like, "Well, we do what we say we're going to do. We're professional. We're client focused." And it's like, that sounds great. What percentage of your competitors say the exact same thing? 100%. It's 100%. Well, they don't all do that. They don't like right, but who says it? Is anybody coming out saying, "Hey, we do okay work, and we're semi-professional." Or is everybody saying, "We do great work, and we're really professional." So, it flips it. Yeah, trust was a big one. Of course, no client's going to believe, like you could do all those things. They're not going to trust you just because you say that you do all those things. Even if you do. Google reviews, I know you guys talk about this at CGM, a bunch. We harp on it as well. The reviews are driving businesses these days. So if you're not getting a review from every single customer, I think you're following the short. We're not getting reviews from every customer still. I mean, it's painstaking, but it's a priority. We drive after getting these reviews and making them public on Google, social media. It's incredibly important. Yeah. So, you guys sat down, you did the whole empathy mapping. So at this point, you understand pretty much, and correct me like when you guys went through it, did you, were they going through like not just, "Hey, when they call you, let's start there," but are they talking about all the preconceived notions or rounds? Okay. So at this point, can you walk me through just like a gist of like for cornerstone what your client journey looks like? So then that way, everybody has a frame of reference because as we go into the design process, everything I'm guessing is based around how does this tie into the customer journey, making sure that they walk in lockstep with each other. Or the client journey really begins as soon as the need is realized. So if it is, my parents are getting older and I don't know if we should put an in-law suite in. Do people do this? What does that look like? How do you, and even things that are not necessarily remodeling related, but they start to plant the seeds, right? How do people live with their in-laws? You know, that's a philosophical question, right? How do people live with their in-laws at my age, right? Well, that starts to frame the conversation around what the remodel would look like. You know, if it is, I'm going to go to an in-law suite and they start to inquire like, "Okay, so I'm starting to think about how do I live with my in-laws?" They're going to start answering questions in their own head pretty quickly on whether or not they would want to share a kitchen with their in-laws. So now the in-law suite needs a kitchen, right? Or that in-law suite needs a space. It needs to be detached from my house. You see, I'll get further and further away. I love my in-laws, by the way. But they start to ask questions very early on as soon as the seed is almost like the movie inception, right? You've probably seen that. The need is born and then all of a sudden it starts to turn into like this exploration, education, dump, right? There gives some research. And part of that research then ends up turning up articles, blogs. And this is where obviously the marketing content is for the key, right? But there's a lot of preconceived notions about the remodeling industry that we kind of uncomfortable and a lot of them are pretty self-explanatory. You know, they think that contractors can be slimy. They can, like I said, they don't want to be taken advantage of. So they don't know much about costs. They feel a little overwhelmed at how the process even gets started. And one of the things, let's say that I think contractors make a huge mistake often by promoting the hell out of their processes and their company on their website. Homeowners don't care about your processes. They're not going to read through this, you know, six-page bulletin. They want to know one, two, three. Yeah, I start here. I go here and then I'm here. Okay, great. I'm good with that. You can overwhelm them pretty quickly on because again, part of that empathy mapping exercise was helping us understand a little bit more about how overwhelmed are they really, especially on the early part. So our goal was just to take the stress out of it on that initial exploration piece. And this is, you know, how do we market our company better? How do we put materials out that benefit the homeowner? They're not really, you know, they're, of course, a beneficial for us in the back end, you know, their keyword rich and so on. But we were making sure that we were putting content out that was really helpful for homeowners. How do you understand how to, like, what's the cost look like? You know, transparency is key. So making sure that that's out in the open. How do we give them tools to look for like zoning regulations in their area? And we're starting to like give them a little bit more in terms of like what they're really looking for early on. Again, that was part of that empathy mapping exercise was, you know, discovering that need. And you go through that entire journey, right? It starts there. But then of course, it goes into every touch point they have. Like, as soon as they reach out to your company, what are they thinking, feeling, hearing, seeing and saying, when they're getting competitive bids, same five apply, when they're working through that sales process, you know, just like in the actual construction phase, you know, they reach kind of a high and then they reach an all time low.
usually it's like two thirds of the way through the project at home ownership, like a bare bottom level. That's when they're emailing you, they're frustrated because things are getting missed or they're not being communicated with. Same thing happens in the sales journey. So I'll you notice that three quarters of the way through, you might get some customers that are like, you know, starting to get like their twill in their thumbs because they haven't seen an update from you in a while or like, why is it how they're taking so long? You know, all of those such points with your company are part of that whole buyer journey. We wanted to make sure we were addressing every single one of them. And again, you know, just kind of boosting the value of what our company provides them was key in all of that. So with you going with this framework of, you call empathy mapping, but it really is understanding and empathizing with your clients at every stage of the process. What is your, what is your process look like? So let's say at this point, the marketing is doing its thing and somebody either calls you, it fills out a contact form. I guess what does that process look like in in y'all's world? So when someone reaches out to Cornerstone, usually it's done online, they end up getting into a discovery call with a zoom call. It's a 30 minute, you know, discovery exploration. Like we're trying to find the mutual fit, right? So we're allowing them to interview us, but we're also interviewing them to make sure that this is someone that we really want to work with. Part of the discovery that we have on the empathy mapping was just friction, too much friction early on made customers feel a little bit left out, right? So we actually removed the friction from the earliest part of our sales process. You know, we had the 20 question, you know, form on our website before someone emailing us. We would have known they were real. Yeah, what's your budget? What's your timeline? What kind of project you're doing? Please explain and, you know, a short essay. So we removed all of that. We said, if you want to book an appointment with our team, here's how you do it, use Calibri. We noticed that it was easier for us to track down these particular homeowners and cancel their discovery call if we found out that they didn't have a good budget or they weren't in our area. Then it was to pick up the phone on a money morning and answer the four or five inquiries that came in over the weekend, right? They were already on the calendar. It was easier for us to take them off rather than try to track them down. So that discovery call set up via Zoom, we end up interviewing them. We found some material out ahead of time. You know, we basically prime the conversations. They were going to want to talk about these things. We're asking you to come prepared and we give them some material. You know, we're going to talk about your budget. Here's why. It's so important because it's going to help drive the overall experience from here on forward. Here's how to come up with a budget. We give them a budget guide. We go through, we want to talk about the prioritization of your project. We send them a Moscow report. Something that's even still out on a Google forum. And then after that discovery call, if we find out where mutual fit and the budget seems reasonable and of course the project is up our alley, we'll actually schedule a home consultation with them. We want to actually, again, this is a piece that I tried to leave out. This is where, again, that process refinement comes into play. We started by completely chiseling that in home consultation out. But now we did add that back in. I felt that was really important to solidify that relationship. You know, during that consultation, that's when the designers really hammering out that Moscow report so that we can get a really detailed list of priorities. And after that is filled out and that consultation is over, we make it very clear to the homeowner that the next step is them signing a design agreement and paying a 1% retainer for us to be able to provide for them that next deliverable. So we break our deliverables out to two sections. The design agreement covers both of them. The first is for a 1% fee, we will deliver to you an estimate and a design conceptual design. We call it a low fidelity design within, we say within two weeks, but our target is seven days. I think our average is nine. At that point, they can decide whether not to move forward with the full design retainer and that's a full 5% fee on the designated price of the project. And at that point, we have 100% closing rate on all the projects that end up moving forward from that point on. But that's what the sales process looks like step by step. So let me go back through this. Then I want to ask you more specific questions, especially when you throw it out like a Moscow report, most people probably like what are we talking about here? So lead comes in and they're going right to the calendar to pick a time that works best for that. Are you on that, like are you giving them, hey, anytime between today and the next 364 days, you pick a time that works or like I guess what are the constraints around when they can book times with you? It's around Robin calendar. So it does choose specific people from my office. And so it keeps the availability pretty clean. We don't allow any appointments to be made the same day. I think it might be 48 hours, but it might be the next day. I have to go back and look at that. But ultimately, we want to make sure that as we walk into a day, we're not going to be kind of slammed with last minute appointments. We allow for up to three weeks out. We don't want anybody booking appointments further out because they're less reliable for us. They'll forget about as much as we will. And then of course, yeah, we basically live at the calendar based on availability of our team. If we have like company meetings or holidays, we'll kind of pull those blocks, those dates out, so that way nobody can get in at a time that no one's going to be able to feel that call. But it keeps the calendar pretty open and provides a wide range of availability for the client to choose from. And I know just from like my side, like that, like I would love that way more personally than just like a normal form because it's a lot easier. I know like from when my wife and I went through like the bathroom edition, essentially, it was just getting on the same schedule, was a pain between the two of us because both of us would have to take off work. And this is all pre-baby. So that adds a whole factor into it. But like being able to do a Zoom call versus, hey, that sounds great. Let's meet up at your house immediately. I mean, I had a lot more pushback on meeting up in person, partially because I didn't want to take time off to figure out that if AJA is going to come in and estimate my project, you know, maybe we're way off base here. Maybe he smells terrible and we're about to have a long process of working intimately together. And I'm going to have to like, you know, mask up just to like, you know, so there's so many different like things that I'm thinking through that a Zoom call makes it so much easier. My wife and I are both millennials. We both work full time. So, you know, maybe we're just in that sweet spot. And it's different than somebody who focuses primarily on like aging in place where they've got plenty of time and they want you to come over. But at least for my wife and I like, that was a big thing was being able to work with somebody that prioritize, excuse me, using technology to help us make sure this thing happens efficiently. So we, and it is huge because at that point, the, you know, the first impressions are pretty low velocity. You know, I don't have a huge investment in making a dramatic first impression with you, right? So that was number one, but there's, there's a couple other kickers in there too. I mean, obviously we wanted to make sure that our clients knew that again, part of that empathy mapping exercise was how do we differentiate ourselves in this, in this area keeping the clients perspective in full view? It's not only making as easy as possible for the homeowner, right? So again, we're moving stress. Well, you know, you can read all the books in the world about time management and there's a lot of them like Jim Collins talked about the, the Zygrinick effect. It's when there's an open loop, something that's, you know, you started a process you started that you haven't been able to complete and it kind of distracts your brain a little bit and kind of have a lot of things rattling around. But we kind of look at that as far as the, the sign up journey goes to for the, for the homeowner, if they can go on a website and book that first appointment, it's done. They're already further along with us than they are with any of our other competitors. Because if they're out looking for making three appointments in the same day, they're going to email two other contractors. They're going to wait 24, 48, 72 hours or perhaps never for a response. Well, with us, it's already done. So instantly already done. So it's, and of course, for that impression of being stressed free, we also want to build the perceived value that the client is so much further along with our firm than they are with anybody else. So why not continue and look at how fast they're moving along with our firm versus anybody else. So that is, as we talk a little bit more about my process, that, you'll see that's a recurring theme through every step is you're already so much further along and so much faster than you are with anybody else. So we drove it, drove it home with those calendar appointments. Good. Love it. So you guys then, they hop on the calendar, they have a Zoom call set up. What are you guys talking about on that first? I know you said it's a little bit of us interviewing them, then interviewing us. What are you after in those first 30 minutes when you're doing these Zoom calls with them? We are purely after making sure that we're a good mutual fit with these particular homeowners. We're asking questions about how long have they lived in the home? What are they really after? Of course, getting some project details, is it a type of project that we want to take on? But really, the meat potatoes of that initial discovery call is
is one, discussing the budget. We want to make sure that they have a reasonable frame of reference for how much this project is going to cost. They don't have to have a numbered mind, but we need to know that they're understanding that it's probably a lot higher than they expect. And then two, what we're really trying to do is make sure that the priorities of the particular project can align with said budget. So I'm going to have $200,000 to spend on a renovation, but what they expect $200,000 to cover as well and beyond what we know it can cover. So $200,000 budget is great, but not if you want to build a three-story addition. So we're out to establish parameters for the scope of work within a certain reason. And so we're giving them tools to be able to do this. Like I said, we send over a pricing guide, like a budget guide to help them. So we don't worry about classifications on how much things cost, it's very broad and generic. And then of course, we send us a Moscow report and tell them this is a helpful tool for you to align your priorities. Moscow, I know you're going to ask this question next. What does Moscow stand for? It's an acronym. So must have should have, could have, and will not have. If you think about it in that order, in terms of a remodeling project, your must haves are, if you're going to spend any money on this project, what do you have to have it complete for you? We have to expand the kitchen. We need more storage. That's a must have. I need a home office space, must have. I'd like to have insect cabinets. We changed the language there. It's now no longer a need. I'd like to. So how important is insect cabinets versus fallover leg? Well, it's a design thing we'd really like to have. So we'll put that in the should have. We'd also like to update the fire place. Are those integral to getting this entire project done for you? Or are those things like maybe lesser on the list? And if we start to do this exercise with them, we start to have all these must haves up here, the should haves, and the could haves, or the fire place, and the fire. And the will not have. So we leave that blank. We just leave that in there. It's like, hey, there will be things that we're going to end up in this category, and we'll advise all those things. So we help the customer understand that the priority list is really what we're going to design this particular project on. And this helps with the budget conversation. So think about this way. You get a client that says, we want to do the kitchen. We want to have a bigger island. We want to take it down the wall between the kitchen and the dining room. We want to do the floor, the fireplace, and the whole first floor. Well, right there, you're going to say, well, that's a $200,000 to $300,000 project. Is that what you're willing to spend on this? And the answer is most inevitably, well, no, I wasn't planning on spending that much. Well, how much were you willing to spend? That's the hardest question to get answered from a client right there. So we don't leave with that. We don't say, well, how much are you willing to spend? We say, all right, well, based on your tire Moscow report, you're looking at a $200,000 to $300,000 renovation, or $300,000 to $400,000, whatever it is. And usually the answer is like, oh, yeah, I don't know. We don't have that much money. Like, OK, well, hey, look, if we just focused on the top two categories, your must-haves and perhaps some or most of your should-haves, right there, we're probably somewhere between $150 and $200. Does that sound like a more comfortable budget for you? Well, that question's a lot easier to ask than what is the most amount of money that you are willing to spend? We're looking for a comfort zone. Are you comfortable spending $150,000 to $200 if we're just exploring these upper two areas? And the answer is, either, yes, or need some modification, or we're kind of finding our way through there. But by the end of that call, we'll have their comfort zone. How much are you comfortable spending? And if that aligns with the scope of work that they highlighted on their Moscow, we'll say, hey, look, we'll mock out everything that your must-haves. And we'll give you an allowance for your insect cabinets, but that's something that you could lop off. We'll give you an option for that. But now, guess what we just saved ourselves from doing. We are now a bit longer exploring pricing on alternative plans that look at the foyer or the fireplace or the living room. It's core focus must-haves and should-haves. And now we have a budget range. If they say yes, we're comfortable with that. Well, we do as they say, OK, well, hey, between $1,500, we'll set a target of $1,75. That $1,75 is-- we'll look at everything between $100 and $200, but to focus on $1,75, right? We'll base the 1% on that. So for $1,750, we'll now provide for you a proposal that will be within this range and also a conceptual design that shows you what you can get for that amount of money. And now the client knows what they're going to expect. They're not expecting an addition for the same price. Because that's something that's common, I think, in this industry, is that you talk about priorities and then you establish a budget. And then they're still disappointed when you send the estimate in. And they're saying, this doesn't have all the stuff that I asked for. It's like, well, no kidding. Because we lopped all of it off because your budget wasn't that big, but still doesn't matter. So that Moscow report helps us really fine tune exactly what to look for when we're designing that initial-- putting that initial design together. So our best foot forward, we are clear all the expectations of what to expect. We're delivering it fast, all because we're not spending all this time exploring all these rogue options and so forth. That was a lot of words. I'm going to pause there and ask you any questions on that. Yeah, so going back to that 30 minute Zoom meeting, who is running that in your office? Because I mean, the whole thing is-- I wanted to do that workshop for Kyle Hunt's group, and they were here in Charlotte. I brought up, I was like, look, as somebody who has hired a remodeling company and who actively hires a lot of just contractors-- I mean, we repainted our house this year. We did our columns, did our whole front. All this stuff, a lot of what you guys do is it's a performance in a show where you had to be on the whole time and just recognize that you're almost a performer, and the audience is the prospect. So you got to be polished during a lot of this stuff. So with that said, who is doing this 30 minute Zoom call? Is it only going to be salespeople that are trained in how to communicate? Or are you also having your lead carpenter hopping on the phone going, well, it's my turn to talk through this stuff? No. No, you want to polish. Do you want people to understand the process? And the more refined your sales process is, and more clear it is, from a visual perspective, too. We'll talk about flow charts and all that. The more confident they're going to be to get you what the desired result of that meeting. So for us, it is our sales staff. And our sales staff is really two designers and have one project developer. These are more construction related sales guy in that sales process. So think of it this way, if you're a smaller company, your owner operator, so your owner doing most of the sales likely be you, you and a designer or just the designer. So it's next. Usually the larger projects, if we see an addition come in, we'll have the designer and the project developer on the call. We feel like that that really is like the icing on the cake is when you have the construction guy as well as a designer. But it can vary. If it's a small project, the designers are usually the best. So the ones that make the connection with the client, the fastest, and the client's latch on to their designers. So we make sure that designers are on just about every single one of those calls. So with this, they come in and do their 30 minutes. And are you building out this Moscow report with them live? Or are you just having a conversation based on what you learn in Sandler or some other sales training that is really just sussing each other out? Then Moscow comes later. We make sure that they have a Moscow report in hand. And we'll pull it up. And we'll review it. A lot of times they don't fill it up prior to that meeting. So a lot of the things that we hear during that discovery call will actually begin filling out. We'll look at the key words, like or need. And we'll begin filling this out. And we'll share it with them and say, hey, look at this kind of what we've gathered. It's just look right in terms of priority. We'll get feedback, move things up or down the list. But yeah, that is happening on that call. And of course, at the end of that call, we do, like I said, we like to have the in-person computation as a follow up. Well, we'll reiterate that Moscow report. And just make sure that all of the things that they are really seeking in this remodel are on that report somewhere. That way, there's no like blind expectation of something that they didn't share with us early on that they were expecting to be all the way up at the top. We make sure, hey, look, we're only looking at things that are on this report. So give it to us now. So do you send out that Moscow, like a blank Moscow report? What do you feel like a contact form? It's a Google form. Yeah, so it goes out in an automated email. So the follow up, the call flips. So it goes out in an automated email when the currently appointment is confirmed by my team. So again, they have a currently appointment comes up and they are out of our area or they're looking for a project that we don't do. We'll cancel the appointment. But if we confirm it, that's when the automated email goes out to hey, we're just confirming your appointment. Here are some materials that you need. We're going to talk about these things and attached here is our Moscow report. We're going to go over this and that initial call be great if you could get a head start. So Google form, it goes out, I think put their email address on it and it comes back to our team. They'll just sort of form. It's like four questions. It's pretty easy to follow, easy to understand. What percentage of prospects that you would say or qualified prospects are actually filling out that.
that form ahead of time. - I'll probably go 25% of them. So not a huge number. Usually it's during that discovery call that our team is selling in the blanks. - So at that point, discovery call happens. Discover, whoever's running it is, hey, AJ, we have this Moscow report that we're gonna be going through together on this call to make sure that I'm capturing everything that you're actually looking for. And then we can start to kind of prioritize to figure out hey, if we end up coming out to the house, what we're really looking at here or we're not just daydream and we're out at the house as well. - Yeah. Okay. - Yeah, so when we have the Moscow report, especially filled out, or at least the bulk of it, filled out on the discovery call, it helps that initial consultation that in person consultation, stay on track. We're not looking at everything. If it's low on the priority list, and we kind of established that there are some things that they might come and say, we wanna do the first floor, we wanna do the bathrooms, and we wanna do the basement. Those consultations were getting long, lengthy, 'cause we were kind of like entertaining me since. We knew in our heads, oh gosh, I'm not gonna be able to forward all this, but we would entertain and make them feel comfortable that we were listening to them all the way through. It makes those in person consultations like excruciatingly long. And we wanted to keep them short so that we could do more of them in a week again. Think about output of my team. They're doing two, three hour consultations multiple times a week. We're more capped at five, six consultations, you know? But if we keep them at a half an hour, then we're gosh, well, we can do 15, 20 of them in a week. And that was the idea. So it keeps those consultations a little shorter when we can not have to entertain all those, you know, extracurriculars on that Oscar report. - So what you're doing this 30 minute intake call essentially feel like I've got this Oscar report, is that when you're then establishing like, hey, we kinda have our list based off of this list, you're looking at 100 to 200. Are you guys bringing that up prior to doing the in-home or is that happening at the in-home? - The price conversation is happening on the discovery call. - Yeah, just talk about like the budget ranges. - Yeah, that's happening on that discovery call. And that's how we kind of determine whether or not that we would set up that in-home consultation. Right, so if we can establish some of those parameters and make sure that they would actually spend, you know, 150 or 200 on a particular project, you know, if they say no, we're really trying to keep this below 60. We do not proceed any further, you know, that's ultimately a lead that got through as qualified. We track those separately as well, you know, on our turn. But we kind of close the door right there. Like, hey, look, we're not even gonna come out your home, you know, if we can't determine a good mutual fit on the budget. - So, all right, so you establish 100 to 200, then you go, I'm guessing, like you typically do like at the like upper third quartile, as like your percentage that you're going off of for that design. - So, it depends, it really depends. It depends on how big that comfort zone budget truly is. You know, a lot of times our customers really do want to focus on trying to find one good plan to go after. We always thought, well, give them three plans or give them two plans and let them pick. Well, again, coming back to empathy mapping, a lot of those were information overload, too many options that didn't know how to proceed. And then they would want you to explore both mutually in a further direction, which was now two jobs I'm trying to bid and design when I'm only gonna win one of them at best. So, we wanted to make sure we could give them one plan, one good direction from the start. It doesn't mean that we don't buy them multiple options, right? So, there are some cases where we'll come up with like an alternative plan, especially if the, but it's all based on the comfort zone budget. For example, if you said, hey, we need some extra space, our kitchen's too small, but your idea of making the kitchen larger was putting a kitchen addition on the back. We would have a conversation about the budget. And you may say, like, look, I would be willing to spend 400 if I could have the kitchen addition and make the living space larger, right? But if I can't do both of those things, I'm not gonna spend 400 just on the kitchen addition. So then we start having a conversation, well, what would you do if you couldn't make both things happen? How much would you spend? Well, your budget might be half of that, right? I wouldn't spend more than 200 on this renovation if I couldn't get the addition. So, okay, well, if we explore everything between, you know, maybe we'll explore both of those plans for you between 200 and 400, we'll set the target range for like 350, right? We'll try to figure out what we can get to work at that higher end, but we will also give you a plan to show you, okay, if you didn't do the addition, what could things look like? And at that point, we are giving you two different plans, but the design agreement is really based on the higher priced version of that plan. Does that answer your question? Yeah, and just so I'm clear, the point of you charging 1% of the proposed total is not, I'm guessing you guys are not taking that and then going off and celebrating that you just made one percent of the project. Like, what's the overall goal with charging them 1%? Overall goal, I mean, it starts in the loss leader, you know, it's just, you know, a little bit of a hook to get them to show that they're serious, right? But it was less than that for us and more of the increasing hour value, right? So, if we were doing all of this for free, what does that say about us? That we're the guys who are trying to sell themselves and get the next project, right? No, no, no, no, no, we're a formidable company and anybody who sees the value in what we do is willing to pay for it. You know, it's just a matter of how much are they willing to pay before they know what they're going to get. So that's why we broken up into two phases. It's hard for somebody to come right out of the gate and spend $10,000 on a design build company. No, there are those that do, right? There are plenty of companies in the space that are charging that amount out of the gate. But for us, you know, we were just stepping into this arena where we're charging more money and it's hard to go from nothing to like 10 grand and expect that you're just gonna get all these people that are paying all this money. Sorry, we had to perfect this process, right? So when we started to do this, we started to understand how much was the customer actually willing to spend to get what? And we did this whole value engineering exercise. You know, I spoke about this on the Kyle Hunt podcast, where we put together and we did this whole whiteboard session with my sales staff. And we wrote down everything that every task that we complete as our modeling company for a homeowner. I mean, we got granular, very, very granular. And we started to, you know, we took that whiteboard and condensed it into an Excel spreadsheet and really started to move things up and below aligns. Okay, what do we do for free? What do we do for a minimal amount? And what is that minimal amount is like an X, right? We don't know what that is. We're trying to discover what X is. And then we have like our full retainer. Like that's the amount of money that would actually pay for my office staff to work on what they're working on. But that middle piece, you're never going to make enough money, you know, just selling those. Because it's not really paying for a whole lot. It's not really looking the customer a whole lot. I either at least not in the real sense. And that's not ultimately why we're in business. We're not in business to sell design agreements. We're in business to sell modeling projects. So we started to look at what was a client willing to spend and for what? So we said, what are they truly after? Right? So then we started to do this whole exercise. Where they're after an estimate because they feel compelled to get three. So they have to pay for an estimate. Especially if the estimates take forever, but they're not going to pay $2,000 for an estimate. They're just not. There's not enough value in an estimate. How many of them spend $2,000 on a spreadsheet? Ah, come on. Get out of here. Well, what if we dress it up with a couple of extra, you know, accoutrements. Throw a 3D design in there. Like that makes it a little bit more valuable. Show a little bit more. And so we came up with a really healthy idea of how we could sell particular items for a little bit more, but deliver what the customer was really looking for, which was that estimate. And we came up with a first pass proposal. And that's ultimately what we deliver as a response to getting that 1% retainer. They get a first pass proposal. And that includes an estimate. And some 3D designs forward space could look like inside of that proposal. So you're going out. So at that point, you had this 30 minute meeting. You say, look, this sounds great. We've agreed upon a budget range. We have our Moscow report fully filled out. So we know when we come out to the space, we're not looking at the nine different rooms that you brought up. We're really only focused on this one room, because that's what we determined is your, you know, must have and you should have is all for this room. We know what the budget is. Now based off of that, it's going to be 1%. And for that, we're going to come out and we're going to walk the space with you. I guess what exactly are you doing in that in-home consultation? That continues to go off of that whole idea of the empathy mapping and understanding, what are people feeling when you're coming into their space? - Oh gosh, that's a little question. That's where I can get really long-winded. So it's started off by, you know, if they sign the design agreement, pay to 1%. That's when the real work happens, right? That's where we get messy. We were going after their home. We were measuring, doing a whole field measure. We were putting together some mock concepts and designs and putting together the proposal, right? So the client felt very well taken care of in this process. And it was really helpful for us too, to kind of like really fine tune what this project is actually going to look like.
But we realized we were spending way too much time doing that piece. This is where the process engineering mind in me comes in. It's like, how can we be doing this faster? I don't know if you want me to share my screen, but I have our iterations of our sales workflow. I pulled them up right before this call here. I'll share this. >> Yeah, then obviously if you guys listen to the podcast, it's all on YouTube. But we'll do our best to describe some elements of it. If it needs descriptions, but yeah, pull up whatever you got. That'd be great. >> Here we go. This is how it's building our sales process. It started, let me actually move over here because I don't have it in this software, but this was our original sales process and you can see it looks like a spaghetti map. When we started this journey, we started to try and simplify. You see we went through several iterations. Standard rule of thumb when you're developing a process, you should limit it to 12 steps and make it as linear as possible. You should never have loops and squirrely lines through it. So 12 steps. We began to streamline this process or simplify it, I should say. You see we ended up down here in this second iteration. Where we were getting a lead, we were doing a phone interview or a virtual meeting. This is where, if you recall me saying earlier on this call, we were not going out of person. We've since added that in. So you see that we added that down here. Is that a lead comes in? We will do a phone and interview call. Then for most of them, we're doing a visit in person visit, then get to this non-agreement. We were scheduled to go out and visit and measure. We were developing design concepts and then a first pass proposal. All that was happening as a result of that design agreement, that 1% fee being paid. You can see the checklist here that we do the Moscow report. We get basic measurements on that initial call. Then of course, we were not taking formal in-depth measurements. We were not taking story pole dimensions of the exterior. We weren't doing anything like that. These were just interior dimensions that we were trying to get kind of to push the design concepts through. So design concepts, we were low fidelity. Again, we wanted to have a new plan of basic layout with basic notes. We were not putting together kitchen layouts, tile designs, colors finishes. These were purely just to give them an idea of what this space could look like. Flex our muscle a little bit. Then of course, providing the 2D floor plan and the estimate with allowances and a single 3D overview or some images, this was taking us, honestly, this says 2 to 3 weeks because that was our target. This was taking us 4 to 6 weeks to prepare. It was excruciating. And mostly it was not just the amount of time it was taking us to prepare, but it was the amount of scheduling time in between. From the time we signed a design agreement, we were getting back in touch with the homeowner, trying to schedule a second, to visit out to their home, coordinating with our architectural designer, who was the one who set to go out there and actually measure the space. And that process alone sometimes took 2 weeks. It was a week or week and a half. And then of course, it's the time to have him put the drawing into the chief architect as our cat software that we use. And to kind of build off of that. So this was taking us forever. And it was killing. We weren't seeing any increase on our closing percentages. We were still capped at the amount of leads that we could take on a certain week because if you think about it, if all these leads are hanging out here for an extra three or four weeks, now I've got instead of 10 or 15 that I'm entertaining, I've now got four times that. Right? So I have now 60 jobs that are rattling around at different phases of this project. This one needs to estimate. This one needs the design's input. It was nuts. So we simplified this a little bit more down to this guy. And so we now do interview in a visit. And all right. So, so, so, so you're, you're pushing for two to three weeks to get all that stuff happening and you're saying it's happening. It's actually taking about four to six weeks to get it done. You have all these projects kind of bouncing all over this process. Are you like calling prospects to say, hey, I know it's been three weeks. We still have another couple of weeks going here. I guess like are you doing anything to try to like, bridge the gap from when you first started this? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we pride ourselves on communication. Again, every contractor does. We executed well. I mean, we were always keeping the customers in the loop. You know, a lot of the initial part was just us working through the schedule to try to get that initial measure done. And of course, as we were starting to put things in, we were keeping them posted on our progress and so on. But nevertheless, that wasn't really the issue. The issue was how long was actually taking us to actually produce these first estimates. I think the industry average is 26 days to get the initial estimate and design out to a particular client. 26 days, wasn't very clear from my marketing research whether that was business days or actual calendar days. And I'm pretty sure it was business days. We were kind of right in that 26 day mark. What was taking so long? Why four to six weeks to get some of these? I guess the rendering, I mean, what was the one main issue of, hey, it was the actual three design that took the longest? Or how'd you go about that? Yeah, there were actually a few components there. So one was collecting the measurements. Was a big pain. It took forever. Creating the as-built inside a chief architect was also a pain. It was a sit-in-my-architects queue. He'd have to put that in before the designer could begin working on it. The design piece really, we felt like we were kind of executing that well because of the Moscow. We were only really entertaining a specific scope of work for that particular project. But then it was delivery mechanism. So we were building estimates. The estimates were taking long. And of course packaging all of this up. If someone's going to spend $2,000, we don't want to send them an email with a bunch of attachments. So we were building a proposal with, it was a beautiful proposal of all of these things together, which was also taking a lot of time. When we began, again, my three-step process for developing really good processes, scrutinize, simplify, and then streamline. So we felt like we simplified pretty well, but how do you streamline all of those things? And that's where technology really came into play. So just before we jump into the tech side of things, for my understanding, so this thing that you're trying to get together if that 1% is taken four to six weeks, this is the same thing that you now have dialed in down to nine days, correct? Correct. Okay. So walk me through, where do you go from there as far as, I do want to go into what do you guys do for the additional 4% for the design, but for just this sake, what have you done to take it from four to six weeks down to nine days? I'll show you. So we began to ask questions. Again, like I said, we kind of asked ourselves a lot of hard questions to have this entire process. Now we're doing things completely differently than we thought they could be done. I started to look at this measure as so-time consuming, scheduling all that time between trying to get it back out to the homeowners, back out to the homeowners home. What if we did the measure here during this first visit? I cringed when I thought about this because it took so long to capture those measurements that, again, that initial consultation, the in-person consultation, cannot be an hour and a half, two hours. It just cannot be. We don't have any decline. There's no skin in the game. We don't have a design agreement in place. And that's not scalable. If it lasts that long, how do we keep it at 30 minutes, but get measurements of the home? That's where we started to say, okay, we move the measure here. We just saved ourselves two weeks on the backside. Now, how do we get better at the design and estimate piece, building that proposal? And that's what we sort of bring in other tools to help us build those faster. So by the time we started to do that, this is our final version. So we do the zoom interview. It's like how I can only make this little larger here. We hide this. Zoom in and make this a little larger. We do an interview via Zoom. We do the visit and we scan the home now with Render, of course, a little plug, right? But ultimately this changed our sales process. Like probably one of the biggest improvements we made was accepting the reality that we did not need measurements down to that eighth of an inch, all that initial measure. To get as far as we wanted to go, we needed to be within a couple of inches. Render gets us into within an inch. But we can scan an entire first floor in three or four minutes and we have literally everything we need. We would take, you know, we'll take a couple of quick key measurements like around the kitchen sink and so forth and jot those down. We're not measuring that entire first floor, but we have all the measurements for the first floor. So that was huge to get those measurements early on. When we get into this design agreement, now, like I said, we cut out that measure piece and we're creating the ASPILF. So this is what I spent a lot of my effort at Render doing is creating integrations with CAD software. The answer a personal leave that I had was, okay, well,
all couldn't well to measure quickly, but I still now have to build this in Chief Architect or 2020. So I went and got integrations with those two companies so that I can quickly dump my render scan directly into my design software. So instead of it taking me 90 minutes to build out a NAS built, I can do it in Chief Architect in three minutes, 2020 is even faster. So that took more time out. So now if you think about it this way, before when we signed a design agreement, it was about two weeks before my designer could get started on that project because we would have to schedule to go out and then my architect designer would have to actually put the drawing in so that the designer could start working with it. We cut that all out. So now when a design agreement signed, my designer can go and grab that render file, drop it into Chief Architect and start designing within five minutes. So there's two weeks right there that we just cut out. The conceptual designs we're doing in Chief Architect, we strip those out. We're doing like I said, low fidelity. We're not putting in tile textures or anything like that. Another thing that took us a long time was actually creating layouts in Chief Architect. Anybody who use Chief Architect knows when you're building layouts, it's setting a lot of cameras up. It's building a layout like using templates and setting all these cameras up to be the way that you want the views. And I would gosh, it would take my designers about an hour, maybe two hours, sometimes and some more complex ones to get the layouts all done really well. We're not doing those anymore. We're actually clipping photos like screen, you know, just a little quick little screen grab. We're just clipping. We're set a camera in, clip in, paste, clip in, paste, clip in paste. We're building an estimate and job tread. We have templates built for all types of projects and different tiers of projects. So we have templates for the kitchens, whether small replacements, modest remodels, first floor remodels, first floor complex remodels, we have them all in there. So now we have our one person from our staff who was never in the estimating game, but she has an attention to detail like no other. We actually have her now putting the estimates together because she was so quick at it and she loves the data side. And now she's providing these estimates for my sales team. Again, it's one less thing that my sales team now has to do. And then now we're creating our first patch of proposals in Canva, which is a design software. It's sort of like Photoshop, but it's on steroids. It's cloud based. It's template. So we actually build this beautiful first patch proposal. It looks like a million bucks, but everything inside of that proposal is just placeholders. We can drag and drop images, drag and drop our proposals into these templates. And again, they look like a million bucks. It looks like if a client is working with us, it looks like we just spent an entire week working on nothing but their project. And all of these things, you can kind of see that we're timing how long we have invested in each of these particular spaces. We're spending roughly six to 10 hours to get from this interview to the time that we're delivering that first patch proposal. Six to 10 hours of my staff's time invested on each one of these projects that gets this first patch proposal. All right, so that was awesome. And the reason that I really like this is we do a lot of this at our own company at CGN, like we do marketing strategies and we've spent a considerable amount of time trying to get this stuff dialed in and to hear somebody else in a different industry take that same amount of time and effort into it, like it's music to my ear. So I loved it. I think it's super systematic and I'm also excited for you guys to listen to part two. Thank you so much for joining us on this episode of the Contractor Growth Network. This episode of the Contractor Growth Network podcast is hosted by Logan Shinholzer and produced by Logan Shinholzer and Dane Appliard. Today's guest was AJ Ballantine. If you have any questions from today's episode, please reach out to the podcast at
[email protected].
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