Growing up near Detroit, I know that old plans are like old cars —sooner or later they start costing you more money than they are worth. It is tempting to hold onto a previous best seller and keep it in the system for no other reason than that you have the bugs worked out. The contracts are set, the variances are low, and the trades know what to do.
The problem arises when the sales start to get soft for the old workhorse; as its sales velocity drops so does the price. The plan is no...
As I write this week’s blog on a plane from Detroit to Vegas, I happened upon an article in the Delta in-flight magazine about healthy eating and guess what? All the things we know about eating eggs and egg yolks, common knowledge learned during the 80’s and 90’s that persists to this day – are flat out wrong. Eggs do NOT raise your cholesterol. They are, in fact, a virtually perfect food, full of protein and raising HDL (good cholesterol) reducing LDL (bad cholesterol) and helping...
When we talk about sustainable home building we focus on energy efficiency and green.
But another level of sustainable building is ensuring that every component of the home was locally or at least Made in the USA! A local builder in Bozeman MT did just that.
Follow this link to the story.
The SMART acronym is an excellent way to evaluate your goals and objectives.
Are they Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely
Specific means that the goal is clear and unambiguous. You will need to consider the following.
During the housing boom, new products were being introduced into the home building market at a staggering rate.
According to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies (and oft-repeated by our columnist Mark Richardson), in a recent three-year period there were more products introduced than in the previous 100 years for the home building industry.
We’ve seen great innovations in efficiency, design and technology, to name just a few areas, over that time. While some companies have...
If you knew that were losing at least $5K per unit due to one single item of waste in your houses, would you do anything about it? How about $10K? The money is there, inarguable and undeniable, and we have the proof, yet a tiny percentage of builders understand it, let alone try to correct it. Even worse than that, most are afraid to confront it.
Am I claiming that in this market, where every cent counts, that your company is overlooking that kind of money?...
Disorganized and untidy job sites are covered with destroyed or damaged materials, reflect chaos between trades, reduce productivity and send the message to those homeowners beside and near your homes under construction just how their homes were built, not to mention are safety violation and injuries just waiting to happen. From another perspective, how much do you spend on marketing? Well after all of that annual cost from billboards to radio, TV, newspapers, model homes etc those...
Headers, headers everywhere! Nearly every builder I have ever worked with (regardless of geography) initially had far too many headers and/or headers that were way oversized in their homes.
Code requirements are typically 250 percent over failure, so designing above code is typically a waste. An exception is that there are pocket markets where customers require joist design a bit above code to avoid perceived floor deflection or bounce.
It’s easy to do a quick check.
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We spend a lot of time and effort training our teams and developing them in our culture and so the retention and ongoing development of our talent is critical. But to retain and continue to develop our teams does not just mean spending more money, which in this economy we don’t have. Treating people with respect and listening to them has a huge impact.
So often it can be a zero cost issue to recognize and reward our team for their outstanding efforts. Simple efforts such as...
The construction industry dramatically impacts the environment, with buildings consuming 17 percent of the world’s fresh water, 25 percent of its wood harvest, and 40 percent of its material and energy flows.
For years, the construction industry has practiced social responsibility by focusing on sustainable buildings in the commercial and residential sectors that incorporate renewable energy sources, energy-saving methods, water efficiency, improved indoor air quality and the...
