Tired of bad news? Want to hear a dramatic success story that doesn't start with "Once upon a time ...?"

In the middle of one of the worst meltdowns in the history of U.S. housing, Anderson Homes, a Raleigh, N.C.-area builder, jumped to No. 259 in 2008 from No. 354 the year prior in the Professional Builder Giant 400 Report. Anderson also had closings that were up a whopping 28 percent. In 2007, a record year, Anderson Homes and its semi-custom division, Vanguard Homes, sold more than 350 homes. Despite the overall 25-plus percent market downturn, the 2008 projections show that Anderson will see its closings rise another 15 percent to 400. Anderson homes sizes range from 1,100-square-foot townhomes to 3,200-square-foot single-family homes, priced between $110,000 and $400,000 in 17 communities.

How could they be putting up these numbers when everyone else is struggling to keep the lights on?

The answer, strangely enough, is Red Robin restaurants.

Anderson Homes’ Cobblestone Pointe model in Clayton, N.C.

Anderson's Workforce

Anderson has 65 employees. They carry 12 site supers, 15 in sales, 9 in design and another 36 or so sprinkled among purchasing, estimating, warranty, marketing, accounting, IT, land development, property management and executive management. When the team saw the downturn coming, they brought in a highly skilled sales and management consultant named Chris Stark of Pivotal Resource Group to see what he could do. Interestingly, Chris' background isn't home building. It's restaurants, and he was a senior executive at Red Robin, a nationwide restaurant chain. At Red Robin, he used to challenge himself to determine what was wrong with a distant location by going in cold, and — never having been there before — walking around for 25 minutes. In that short time, he would be able to tell the manager where he needed to improve his purchasing, production, quality control, sales, customer service, scheduling, communication, supervision and leadership.

All that in 25 minutes. What was he looking at?

It is more difficult than it sounds, because as he walked around, he carefully noted certain critical metrics that were on display throughout the restaurant. The metrics could predict — on a minute-by-minute basis — the current state of the operation, the service, the staff and well beyond.

Now Chris is focused on home building, and he has developed a set of metrics that he can use as the same "walk-around" technique to determine the condition of the home builder.

"What I am doing at Anderson Homes is bringing the sense of urgency of retail and the key performance indicators from manufacturing into Anderson's operations. Any home builder can benefit from this," Stark says. "What I did at my Red Robin with my 25-minute walk-around appraisal is frankly far more activity analysis than any home builder I've met ever does. I am just bringing an out-of-industry approach to management."

Where home building operations differ from a restaurant location is that the activity metrics — those leading indicators that can prompt you to intervene and quickly redirect staff — are very widely dispersed — in Anderson's case, among 17 communities. But they're dispersed categorically as well, with some crucial metrics contained in a written sales record, some in the BlackBerry of an affiliated Realtor, and some in the mind of a site super who just turned back a load of oak flooring because of water damage. So any "walking around" would have to be done virtually, not physically, and could be done only after the metrics had been digitally harvested. So, Chris set out to implement a virtual general manager, or VGM system.

Easier said than done.

After Chris and his Pivotal Resource Group team arrived, and after extensive due diligence, they developed a crystal clear idea of what metrics they needed to determine the health of Anderson Homes. For some of those metrics, they discovered that there were no live feeds, and no dashboards available to view them in a meaningful and unified way. So, Pivotal Resource Group acted as a general contractor by bringing in technology specialists whom they worked with to get the data identified, isolated and flowing toward a to-be-determined VGM tool. Yet, for a time, Chris was still stuck on how to integrate it and present it.

He then turned to a tool called Business Process Management, which is software that can map, integrate and link disparate databases through a highly configurable drag-and-drop process-mapping tool. Business Process Management not only maps the process, but in the background it automatically writes the "C#" code required for these databases to talk to one another and to do such things as send alerts, stipulate a sub's payment requirements, push information and metrics to the VGM portal, and just about any other critical path activity. Chris worked with top outside professional services people to set up Business Process Management to grab the metrics and feed his VGM dashboard. Using VGM, Chris and the leadership at Anderson Homes can "walk around the restaurant" to view critical metrics that determine the health and status of the departments on a minute-by-minute basis. And it looks as though Anderson's sales numbers in this tough market have proved him out.

"The best part of this story," said Stark, "is that we are only 15 to 25 percent of the way into the implementation. There is substantially more upside here, and we're going find every bit of it for Anderson."