Scott Sedam, president of TrueNorth Development (www.truen.com), spends most of his time working in the trenches with builders, suppliers and trade contractors. His Lean Builder blog appears weekly at HousingZone.com. He welcomes your feedback at scott@truen.com.
It has been long been said that “homebuilding is a local business” and as much as I’d like to think that Lean always transcends locality, that is not always the case. Last week during one of our LeanWeek events in Austin, the head of a drywall installation company asked about using 54” width drywall—aka “stretch board”—in lieu of standard 48”...
As often happens in my articles and columns in Professional Builder Magazine, I set out to write one article, which quickly morphs into one, two or three … or in the case of the Quality Management Series, that will soon be up to six. I wrote my first article on the coming trade shortages last October about the perils and politics of...
When I travel with my wife, or sometimes just run to the grocery, cleaners or hardware store, she frequently has to remind me, “Scott, remember, you are NOT in charge here.” Many of you fellow Leanistas know the drill. You hardly ever see a restaurant, a checkout, a meat counter at the supermarket, a parking lot or God help us a TSA line at the...
My December column just came out on HousingZone.com and you can read it here: http://www.housingzone.com/scott-sedam-how-do-you-lead-leader or in the Professional Builder magazine.
I hope you will give it a quick review (it is a short one) and offer some feedback, ideas, successes, and failures – whatever you have experienced on the topic. The...
I travel this country meeting with builders virtually every week and between my monthly Professional Builder article, my weekly blog on HouzingZone.com and our Lean Building Group on Linkedin.com, I hear from many more. As housing is picking up in most parts of the nation, I am beginning to hear a lot about labor shortages. Just last week I...
Todd Hallett and I are running a LeanPlan Workout session this week in Tennessee with one of my favorite builders. In the years I have known them they have grown from #11 in their market to #2 last year and this year there’s a good chance they will be #1. They are beating all the nationals. These guys truly “get it” and accomplished all this...
The 5th article in my series on Quality Management was just published by Professional Builder Magazine and appears concurrently on www.HousingZone.com. It is titled “10 Steps to Mastering Field Quality” and at the end of the piece I offered a PDF with all 5 of the articles in a single document. I have since been deluged with more than 30 requests...
I have spoken at PCBC, the big West Coast building conference most of the past 15 years and I always enjoy it. The event has been very well-run, quality of programming is excellent, the staff is great and you can do a lot worse than hang out in downtown San Francisco for a few days. I have been there so many times that I know all of the streets...
My son Tyler (second of 4 children), age 29, is taking a new position with a homebuilder after having two good building industry jobs in the past, both of which vanished in the housing recession. Despite the previous disappointments, he sees this as a great opportunity with a real chance to grow with a good company. It got me thinking about all...
During an orientation recently with a room full of suppliers and trades for one of our “LeanPlan Workout” implementations, I was interrupted by a woman who clearly did not appreciate my message. Despite my saying it 6 different ways and illustrating with numerous pictures, she was not buying my story that Lean is not about “dumbing down” the...
Flawed, unnecessary, and costly regulations burden small home builders by raising expenses and slowing the home building process. These hurdles ultimately rob builders of...
Towns experiment with different approaches to stimulate new-home building during the recovery; Home builder bonds still draw speculative grades; Ontario’s...
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