The One Hour MBA

Good morning, everyone. We’re just going to let everyone kind of filter into the room here. I see the attendees for today’s webinar are being populated into the platform. And so as not to, you know, jumpstart this too quickly and somebody come in mid-sentence, we’ll just give it another 30 seconds or so and that way we can get this morning’s program kicked off. All right. First off, I’m Will Ruder. I’m your executive vice president here at the Home Builders Association of Greater Kansas City. I wanted to welcome you to this first presentation that we are providing as a benefit to your membership in the HBA, the One Hour MBA presented by Jeff Wilson and Robert August. We thought as an organization, you know, we’re looking at today’s market in Kansas City, and we recognize that there are almost endless opportunities, directions that this industry can go as we look to fulfill the housing needs in our very diverse and creative market.

You know, we are going to pull probably about 6,000 single-family permits a year as a metro. You talk to economists, those that pay attention to the Kansas City housing market, you talk to people that are paying attention to the housing market in Kansas City that live outside of Kansas City, and they look at this as a place that could probably withstand about 8,500 single-family permits in order just to satisfy current demand. And so as we look at that opportunity that is in front of us, and we look at, you know, the mix of building companies, tradesmen, supply chain operatives that are in Kansas City, we want to make sure that our membership and the industry writ large is well equipped to take advantage of the opportunities that are certainly in front of us.

And so one of those things that we can do is ensure that the strength of our existing companies, the financial strength, the management strength, the operational strength is what it needs to be in order to appropriately and adequately scale in order to meet tomorrow’s housing needs. And so that’s really what the purpose of this conversation is to get those creative juices flowing, identify some of the things that we can do today in order to take advantage of tomorrow’s opportunities. So I want to introduce with us today our Robert August and Jeff Wilson. First off, Robert is the president and founder of North Star Synergies, which is an internationally acclaimed firm based in Denver, Colorado. Robert has marketed or sold more than $30 billion worth of real estate and related products and services.

He’s also an NAHB past chairman of the National Sales and Marketing Council and the Institute of Residential Marketing and immediate past chairman of the NAHB Global Opportunities Board. Robert’s given more than 800 national and global presentations delivered since 1978, including at IBS. He’s in the all-time spike retention and recruiter with 4,000 plus spike credits to his name and has helped raise more than $100 million for NAHB through dues and non-dues revenue. His counterpart, Jeff Wilson, is the CEO of Loomview Enterprises LLC, a nationally recognized business consultant, award-winning business coach, author, award-winning salesperson, and speaker. He’s frequently sought out to speak to and advise businesses whose primary strategic goal is achieving and sustaining double-digit growth in profits, cash flow, and business market value. He graduated from the Wharton Business School with a degree in economics.

Jeff’s worked with thousands of businesses to develop, run, and implement strategic and financial redesign, marketing systems, software systems, advised on the sale and purchases of businesses, and helped hundreds of companies attract, hire, train, and retain employees at all levels. Combined, these two gentlemen have more than 100 years of experience. They’ve engaged with more than 536 builders and developers across the country. They’ve serviced 3,120 manufacturers, vendors, subcontractors, service companies, employers, and professional trade associations. And they’ve accelerated over $40 billion worth of value in the builder experience. And they serve more than 100 different industries. So those are the accolades that they have accumulated over the course of their very distinguished careers, both individually as well as combined efforts. And I’ll just say that based on the conversations that I’ve been fortunate to have with Robert and Jeff over the past couple of months, I really do think that this is an enormous source of expertise and experience that we’re honored to be able to bring to you as a member of the KCHBA, either past, present, or future member of this organization.

And so I trust these gentlemen, and I’ve seen what they bring to the table. And I hope you take as much value out of this as the HBA, your organization, has taken and been enriched by the conversations that we had. So without further ado, I’m going to kick it back over to Robert and Jeff, because Lord knows you didn’t come here on this webinar today to hear me talk. So thank you again to Robert and Jeff for spending a good chunk of your morning with our Kansas City builders, developers, and trade partners. Great. Thank you. Well, thank you so much. Thank you for the kind words. And we’re really, really excited. We understand there’s a really diverse group of participants in this webinar. We’re excited to share the material, and really want to thank everybody here for investing your time, because that’s really your most valuable asset, and it’s the only asset that you have that can never be replaced.

There’s so many challenges going on in business, whether it be supply chain, whether it be issues with COVID, whether it be hiring. But it’s really important that we’re here, Robert and I, have taken the time to distill the 10 best solutions that apply to virtually every business, because this is a unique, unique Home Builders Association in terms of the vibrancy, the high number of home builders, a high percentage of home builders that really participate and take an active role. But in today’s session, there’s home builders, designers, consultants, professional specialists, contractors, tradespeople. So really want to honor you, and our commitment is to give you something special. And let me say that this is not an educational webinar. It’s not for you to sit back and just hear our pearls of wisdom, though Robert has lots of them.

So you want to make sure that you have a pen and paper, you can use a pencil if you want, or on your computer, but better to write it down, because you’re not going to want to miss a word of what we say, and capture the best ideas that you hear. Just make a list, we’ve spoken to Carrie, there will be a recording available for everybody. But our goal is to help you solve your biggest challenges, and literally, literally convert them to your, to your biggest strengths. So I guess the other thing I want to really share with you is how you’re going to benefit most from this tomorrow. So the first thing I ask you to do, pay careful attention, take good notes, take lots of notes.

Any idea you think that resonates with you that could work in your business, write it down. Tomorrow, Carrie is going to send you a tool, an action plan, that will help you to distill all this, and to put it in a form so that you can have a tremendous success. And that is our goal. It’s not that we get great ratings. The best thing that everything, every person attending today can do for Robert and for me, and I think I’d have to say that for Will and Carrie as well, is grow your business, do a great job serving your clients, your customers, your buyers, your community. We want to help you to grow 10%, 20%, even 50%, and it’s really critical that we do that. So without further ado, I’d really like to introduce Robert August, and you heard just a little bit of what Will said about Robert.

Robert is truly a legend, and I learned, and I’ve known Robert for 40 years, I learn every time I speak to Robert, so I’m going to take notes as well. If you see me looking away, it’s not because I’m working on something else, I’m paying attention and I just got another great idea from Robert. Robert, please take it away. Thank you. It’s great to be here, and I’d like to extend a special thanks to Carrie and Will and the entire staff, and we’re ready to jump. So ladies and gentlemen, use your home builders association to your advantage, get involved on committees, get involved with councils, start making a difference, and also it’s time to recruit and retain members, so take advantage of that, and we’ll share some information along the way today that will help you sell more and more.

So as you reevaluate your marketing and sales plan, one of the key things that we want you to do is to really understand where the market is, and we’re only as good as our last sale that we made. Don’t rest on your laurels, you’ve got to go back into the marketplace and understand who are the buyers in your marketplace. Why are they buying? Why are they going ahead to make a purchase today, and how can you use that information to improve your product? Worked with a builder many years ago, and Bill Wall was the owner of Wall Homes, and Bill did formal and informal research himself, and I asked him, “How do you constantly understand your buyers?” And he said to me, “You know, that’s a really great question.

What I do is I constantly ask them what are the most important things for your specific needs?“ And lo and behold, he said, “They tell me,” and then he said, “I go through a period where after I’m under agreement with them, I ask the same questions again. Then after I close the home, I ask them the same thing, and then I meet with them in their home and I go through that product that they’re enjoying, which is now a home, and I learn what are the things that they’re so thrilled about, and what other ideas do they have for me that can improve the product?” Bill had built the same home 60 different times with improvements from his consumers, so it’s easy to work directly with your consumers.

Those of you who are in the home selling business or are selling products and services, get to know your real estate brokers too. Get to know your interior designers. Get to know people who are out on the line selling product, ask them questions, create focus sessions, and that will help you steer yourself to a much greater point. What is a focus session? Focus session might be something as easy as putting together five to 10 questions hosting different groups. We have found in our business practice by maintaining three focus sessions, whether we’re getting ready to do a master plan community, a small community of 50 homes, or working with the manufacturer, what we like to do is sit down with three different groups. We like to sit down separately with real estate brokers, separate real estate brokers from different companies, not two from the same company or three, and we find that doing that along with consumers and also manufacturers and vendors.

Those three segments give us a tremendous- Excuse me, Robert. How does that… I think research is really critical. How does that tie into branding for companies? I’m so glad you brought that up because what it does, Jeff, it gives us the opportunity to take unique selling propositions and unique marketing propositions from those focus sessions and reevaluate our marketing plan to understand what the market is today. It’s okay to change your direction in advertising, public relations, and promotion. It’s more than okay. You have to do it in order to understand how to bring the best brand to the public. You also want to make sure you’re consistent with the use of your logo. You may change, as Jeff is pointing out, from the research, you may change the branding into a slogan that really meets the needs of the market.

It could be something as simple as saying, “Our product has been time tested.” One of the things that we did years ago when I first got started, the first onsite residential neighborhood I had, we actually used the unique selling proposition of, we asked 100 homeowners what they wanted in their next home, and we built it for them. It was that simple. We became known as the consumers builder, and it was just that simple to integrating branding. Website is critically important. You have to evaluate your website, ladies and gentlemen, every single day. You’ve got to make sure that your prices are updated. You’ve got to make sure that all the information is accurate. You’ve got to make sure that the photographs are strong and that they’re resilient and that they offer you a great photograph, a great timing situation.

Most people in our business are visualizers. They don’t read as well as they can see and understand, and as a result, your website has to be easy to navigate, and you have to make sure that it’s working well. You need your staff to evaluate it. You need your vendors, your manufacturers, real estate brokers to look at your site and give you a critique, and then you take a pattern of those items, and you constantly improve it, but I would encourage you to at least evaluate it once a week and update it on a monthly basis, but any time that you change price, you have to do that. Pricing is critical in the marketing mix, and I’m reminded very quickly of a … John Danelian, an outstanding architect, shared this with me.

Those of you who are concerned about pricing as you prepare advertising, public relations and promotion, I’d like you to make a note of this. I think it’s clever. Price is only an issue when the value is a mystery. Think about that. Price is only an issue when the value is a mystery, so in essence, we’ve got to make sure that our product is priced right for the marketplace. When we introduce advertising, the purpose of advertising is to generate qualified leads. It’s not to sell a company, it’s not to sell a product or service or a home. What it is is to generate the most qualified leads possible. Pay attention to your consumers. This I want you to do. For me, if you’ve never done this before, never ask the question, “How did you hear about us when you first meet a customer?”.

You know that the sales manager wants that information, and you’re going to get just one answer, or you may just take one answer and move forward, but I will tell you this. I learned this in a viral setting, selling on site, customer, I forgot to ask that question in the beginning, and you know what? I asked that question while I was walking the folks back to their car, and I learned more about those people in that five minutes. What I did was I said, “Oh, by the way, how did you hear about us?” They told me four different ways that they heard about us, and then as I walked them to the car, lo and behold, they never told me that they had a kid and there was a baby seat in the back of the car.

They didn’t tell me that they were athletes, and they had baseballs and baseball bats, and even a tennis racket, and I’ll never forget the time that I walked a gentleman to his truck, and he had this huge truck, and in the gun rack, he had a tennis racket. You just learn so much about all of these people as they become buyers, you use this for advertising, and you make sure that your advertising is consistent. You want to be in a program of a minimum of eight weeks with a flight. You want to make sure that you’re consistently getting that message out in a wonderful way. Promotion. Oh, and advertising, lots of different ways. Digital marketing is key, of course. You have to evaluate the performance of your message, and you need to change the message if it’s not ringing and creating resilience of new qualified leads.

Promotion, you’ve got a parade of homes coming up. Parade of homes are unbelievable. If on Pella windows, and there’s a number of Pella windows that are here, Pella windows, you just don’t sell the windows. Ladies and gentlemen, you got to be inside those homes for the parade so that when people come out to you, you can further promote your products and services. Robert, doesn’t that speak exactly to your point about value? When you convey the value of all of the elements in a home, then price isn’t really the thing that people are concerned about. Yeah. Price is secondary. Price is tertiary. How does that tie to customer service? It’s important because at the end of the day, people will tell you the pricing is the most important thing.

What they’re really looking for is trust, integrity. They’re looking for individuals who can provide them with consistency and follow up 95% of every sale, every sale that’s out there in the marketplace. It’s never followed up. You’re losing customer service. When you tell a customer that you’re going to do something and you do it, they believe in you. I grew up in a family business and I was fourth generation and I’ve got to tell you, the first thing that was ingrained in me was follow up with every buyer because you paid that money for the advertisement to generate that qualified lead. Make sure that you fulfilled destiny and provide everyone with the most outstanding service. The other thing that’s important is that we’re going to talk a little bit later, but you provide outstanding customer service.

It reduces your advertising public relations and promotional costs. Why? Because you’re getting referrals because you’re going to ask for referrals and we’ll talk about that shortly. And the next point, collaboration, mastermind collaboration, create professional mentors. When I came to Colorado, as you can tell, my accent is a little bit different. I grew up in a suburb of New York called Philadelphia. And as a result, what I learned as a youngster is that ask everybody questions, never stop asking questions, open up doors. I surrounded myself with people who were smarter than I, of course, much smarter, very easy, but what I realized is to go after the best of the best, go after the best attorneys, the best CPAs, the best business development specialists. And by sitting down with them for 15 minutes, you know, it was amazing how I created a professional mentorship program.

And that’s helped me grow my business practice throughout the years. And everybody could you just take one minute and give everybody a couple of suggestions about how they can take advantage of the HBA of greater Kansas City to do that. Sure. You know, like in everything in life there, you have an outstanding trade association that’s regarded as one of the finest HBAs in the country. We have over 650. And when people speak about top notch HBAs, they refer to Kansas City. And why? Because you folks roll up your sleeves and you do it. You contribute to the community. So what you want to do is get involved with the movers and shakers. You want to get involved on committees and councils. People ask me, I sell a membership or two on a regular basis.

And one of the things that I tell them when I’m recruiting them, get involved with government affairs. That’s where the stakeholders are, the movers and shakers. If they can’t get land entitled and build homes, they ain’t going to be in business, nor are you. But you’re getting right to those people. You also want to get involved in other areas that will add value to you from other opportunities where there are significant people who are doing great in sales, who are doing great in operations, who are doing great in purchasing, who are doing phenomenally well in financing, whether it’s bankers, mortgage brokers, investment bankers, hedge funds, those people that are out there knocking the ball out of the park. You’ve got to sit down with them and understand why they’re doing what they’re doing and develop that network of excellence that you can, not only through the local, but through the state, not only through the state, but any HB.

It’s wide open for you to get involved on committees and councils. Do it, reviewing success. We have to debrief on a regular basis when we’re going through the opportunity. And what I would share with you by understanding your success, it will help you make a difference. Understanding your failures is also important. You need to, when you make a successful sale or create a successful negotiation, you need to make a note of those and create an archival file. The same way when you have failure, Rudyard Kipling teaches us that success is failure turned inside out. Success is failure turned inside out. So we’ve got to review our failures. So number one, we don’t make the same mistakes. I will tell you, in our business practice, our staff is never negligent.

Never. I mean, we don’t tolerate negligence. We’ll make mistakes, but there’s a difference. Those mistakes, we’ll be able to correct and improve upon them so we don’t make those again and create efficiencies, which Jeff will speak about shortly. So take your time, learn from your failure, accept responsibility, accept accountability, and make sure that you’re developing that because as you do, you’ll build trust. And then we need to put ourselves into a debrief situation so that we’re reviewing what we succeeded today and what we’re planning to do tomorrow that will make us much better at collaboration with all these people that we’re having the opportunity to visit with. I came to Colorado in 1978. I had a mentor until two years ago when he passed. He was a gentleman who hired me, a brilliant gentleman, Phil Nguyen, and Phil was phenomenal.

And he kept telling me over and over, the more you evaluate and the more you take the strength of other people to help build your plan of action, you’re going to be successful, especially when you execute, debrief, and evaluate and move forward, revise your plan of action, the best plan of action. Everybody needs to have a marketing plan or a plan of action for their business. And the best way to do it, if your program is two years, three years, five years, plan that out. But frankly, the best five-year plan or three-year plan is nothing more than a three-month plan. And so what you have to do is constantly reevaluate what’s working and you look for patterns. And when you see three or four things that are going wrong, you’ve got to change that plan of action and put a new plan of action into play, which will extend that period of time.

So if you’re in a community and you’re building homes and it’s a two-year community, you’ve got to prepare for those two years. If you’ve got another five years of your business that you’re working on, you’ve got to constantly update that plan and execute the plan of action directly with whom you’re working. And it’s going to make a big difference. And while you’re executing that plan, we’ve got to take the time to train, train, train. Preparation. What we want you to do is in every one today, one of the homework assignments for you for the rest of your life is to write down 100% of all the unique marketing and all the unique selling propositions. What’s a marketing proposition? On time, on budget, that might be one.

You need to make a list of all the things that set your product apart in your mind. And it could be the same as other competitors, but what you want to do is put that entire list down. Trustworthy, qualified, quantity, efficient, on time, effective, all the different words that you can think about and all the slogans that you can put into play. I mean, even learning from the past, progress is our most important product. Team building, team execution, team winning, those things that you want to put down, you’ll develop these marketing propositions and selling propositions, and you’ll use them in your presentation. They’ll reinforce your message, which will be very important. You all need to create an elevator speech. An elevator speech, I want you to think about a 15-second, 30-second, 60-second, and 120-second elevator speech.

My name is Robert August, I’m president of North Star Synergies. We are a marketing, management, and sales solution company specializing in the real estate and real estate development business. That’s a 15-second. Then you take it to the next step, use the same verbiage, you go on to a 30-second with more attributes. And those attributes might be, we get involved with the marketing mix, and we get involved with research, design, branding, packaging, pricing, and you go all the way through that. And then you go on to the next 30 seconds where you add more information about maybe a quick case study, some of our points, some of our customers are such and such. And then we round it off, and we’re ready to help you today, two minutes.

You’re right there, it relaxes everybody, it lets them know who, where, why, when, and how. And with that, I would also like you to make a note, Rudyard Kipling, one of my favorite authors, Six Honest Serving Men. When we talk about sales, it’s really important, the six most important questions are open-ended questions. Open-ended questions give us fact, truth, opinion, and a lot of information. A closed-end question is a yes or a no, which really doesn’t help us that much. So what we want to do is think of Rudyard Kipling, I keep Six Honest Serving Men. They taught me all I knew. Their names are what, and why, and when, and how, and where, and who. I send them over land and sea, I send them east and west.

But after they have worked for me, I give them all a rest. I let them rest from 9 till 5, for I am busy then, as well as breakfast, lunch, and tea, for they are hungry men. But different folks have different views. I know a person small, she keeps 10 million serving men who get no rest at all. She sends them abroad on her own affairs from the second she opens her eyes. One million howls, two million where’s, and seven million why’s. Use your open-ended questions. The more you ask them, the more people hear themselves talking. Your buyer’s talking. Guess what? They’ll buy you because the sweetest sound is their voice. So the more they hear their voice when they’re speaking to you, they’re going to be relaxed and give you all the information that you’ll ever want to close them and make them your next buyer.

So create that elevator speech, create team meetings. Make sure this is really important. We learned over the years, a team meeting isn’t just a rah rah session. We get involved with policy and procedure. That’s number one. Then we have a separate meeting where we meet with the sales team independently from the whole team, from operations to sales with a whole gross meeting where then, as I said, we meet with the second group, which is a sales team. Then we break it out to individual sales teams. Then we break it out to a fourth meeting, which is one-on-one with our individual sales people. And we always praise, we always do a special job of praising and of course, never calling anyone out that isn’t appropriate. One of the most difficult things that we also do in our team meetings is role-play.

Role-play is the toughest, the toughest sale that you can possibly make in front of, because it’s in front of your peers. If you can sell in front of your peers, you can sell anyone. And as a result, we really enjoy taking a product, a service, and having the salespeople stand up, get in front of their audience, get in front of their peers, and make that presentation. You can also do your own self role-playing by taking the D buyers. We have the A buyers are the best, all the way through the Ds that are sort of dead that aren’t really going to be buyers. And what we do is we practice on the Ds, and as we practice on the Ds, then we move it forward to the Cs.

And then as we get comfortable with our new presentation skills, we go on to the Bs and then to the As, and we constantly improve and practice new opportunities. So we also want you to read as much as possible. The more you read, the better you’ll be able to communicate and articulate points. You’ll be able to present much better. And as I’ve shared before, it could be a Marvel comic book, it could be Veronica and Archie go to the beach. Read as much as you possibly can. Learn from it. Evaluate your own performance. I’ve actually taken tape recorders, and while I was making presentations when I was in a slump, I would put a tape recorder behind an exhibit and listen to myself afterwards and couldn’t believe what I was learning.

So evaluate your performance through yourself and through others, and that’s why we have Jeff Wilson, who’s going to teach us more about how we can really understand what the key numbers are so that we can really get into the understanding of how to refine our business practice. Take it, Jeff. Thank you so much, Robert. Wasn’t that amazing? I took some notes, hopefully you did as well. So much there that we can apply in our business. I’m going to focus here, the first thing on the key numbers, and again, my degree is in economics. I grew up in a family business, as did Robert, and I love the numbers of business, and I believe that you can grow any business if you understand these key numbers. So I’m going to give you the top 10 key numbers you need to know so that you can grow your business.

The first one is the number of existing clients you have. So an existing client is anyone who’s paid you money for a product or service in the last year, or it could be the last 20 years, but you want to make sure that they’re in your database, that you may have a CRM, you may use software, you could use an Excel spreadsheet, you could use index cards if anybody knows what those are. But you need to have that list. You want to rate them, as Robert was talking before, A, B, C, and D. You really want to focus on those A ones, and we’ll talk about that later. You want profiles on each of them, and you want to be able to reactivate them and keep connected to them.

Absolutely critical. Next is retention rate. So you may have a lot of existing clients or past clients, but are they continuing to do business with you? In the home building industry, it’s said that people, Robert repeats to me, 16% of the people are in the market in any given year. If you work out the math, that means on average, people move every seven years. If you’re a home builder, someone who bought a home from you seven years ago is looking for a new home now, on average. When do you start to work on that? That’s how you work on retention rate. You need to have a contact policy. You need to have loyalty rewards. You need to have appreciation events for current and past clients. You want to stay relevant.

It’s absolutely critical. Next are leads, and Robert really says leads aren’t just people who contact you, but they’re qualified leads, new potential clients. If someone isn’t qualified, if they don’t live in your community, if they don’t have the money, if they’re not interested in the type of service or product that you provide, what good is it that they reached out to you? Focus on qualified leads. The number one thing to do with any lead is capture their information. If you’re an architect, you may have different questions than you would if you are doing concrete. If you’re a home builder, you have different questions and you’d want to capture different information than if you’re doing windows. So it’s absolutely critical that you understand what the key information you need, which is typically their name, email address, and phone number.

And then maybe you can get away with one or two other questions. That’s gold, because that’s going to enable you to contact them, because as Robert said, you’ve got to keep following up. People buy on average after six contacts, and that’s the same of whether you’re a lawyer, a CPA, or a home builder. I think Robert, you said that people on average will look at like four to 10 homes before they make a final decision on a home. Is that right? It’s even more. Because of the internet today, the numbers are increased as well as the number of imprints. So it now takes us 27 to 30 different imprints in order to create interest to reach out to you. And that’s why your website is so critically important to have all the ingredients.

So as people are learning about you, they can then understand how to make a better decision with you. And that’s how we can also improve our conversion rates. Right. So a conversion rate is the percent of those leads who become clients. The number one strategy, the number one strategy for improving your conversion rate is to have a formal sales process. If there’s only one salesperson, make sure you have a checklist and it could be an outline. I’m not a big fan of a memorized script, but I have an outline of key points and it doesn’t matter how many times I’ve gone over something, even 20 or 30 years of having conversations with people, I’ll look at my outline to make sure I don’t miss a point.

Why do you think on an airplane, the pilot and the crew all have checklists? Because you want to land safely. If you want to land the deal, if you want to deliver the best quality product and service, always have a formal process. Track it and remember that to improve conversion rate, it’s all about trust and relationship. Now you can improve in any business or service, the average number of transactions. Now you say, well, gee, I’m a home builder. How could I possibly sell more homes? Well, you may not in that given year, but you may for a lifetime, depending on how you, how you maintain that relationship. Alternatively in other businesses, you may be able to increase the frequency with a subscription model. You may be able to, instead of just selling a home, perhaps there may be an opportunity if you have a large enough property to have an outbuilding, that’s a separate transaction.

And there’s an increasing need in today’s markets, whether it be, Robert introduced me to the term, oh, we shed, it’s not a heat, is that a man cave? It’s not a she shed. It’s a we shed whether it be for a workshop, crafts, cars, outdoor recreational equipment, that’s another sale, another transaction. Think of how you can do that. How can you, what other additional items can you provide to them? Then what you want to look at is increasing the dollar value of every transaction. So it’s how much they pay you for every transaction or purchase. Essential is to offer different levels of products and services. So whether it be as an, an architect, as a, as a home builder, if you’re selling windows and doors, if you’re selling concrete services, a CPA, offer different levels of services and provide packages and products.

And number one thing, don’t discount. I’ll talk about that in a little bit, but I’ll tell you, you can probably imagine why, but I’ll share with you numerically, always look for opportunities to upsell, downsell and cross sell next in numbers is gross profit margin. That’s for every product and service that you sell. What percent of those dollars is profit? And that’s after all expenses to produce, deliver and provide that product to service. So you may say, gee, how do I do that? What, what, what is it? Well, the first step we do with every client is list out the top 10 selling items you have, and then do an analysis of the profit margins on each of those working with a client. We found their number one seller, which was 60% of their sales, they lost money on.

And they said, well, we needed to do it so we could get the sales. You can’t build a growing, healthy business by selling a product that much of a product that you lose money on. You have to look at how do you make money? So what, what do you do? We’ll tell you in a minute. The next item is look for those that maybe you can bundle up. Maybe you can increase prices. Maybe you can cut losers. Maybe you can create higher margins by creating a package. And in fact, that’s what we did with this client. Number one product was a loser. Number two was breakeven. Number three was a small profit. What we did with the number one product was built a very profitable package, sold a ton of it.

Their business skyrocketed. The breakeven product, there was nothing we could do, drop the line. The third one, which was a small profit, we were able to increase the price. We were able to make a minor improvement, dramatically improves the margins. You do that for the top products and services you offer. You’ll be amazed at what you can do with your bottom line and always figure out how can you do things better, more effectively, faster, so that you can reduce your costs in time. Next you want to look at your business overhead. We have a list that we work on with our clients, 50 strategies for doing this. It’s absolutely essential, but I’ll give you the top four. Business overhead are the business expenses that you have, whether or not you sell a single item.

It’s basically the cost to keep the doors open and the lights on. Number one thing, in most small businesses, and we have a number of larger businesses here, but some small ones too, make sure you’re paid appropriately. If you have a small business, we find very often business owners on an hourly basis are the lowest paid. Raise your salary and then work to build your business to make sure you earn your salary. Use systems technology and outsourced or in source to be able to improve your overhead. But look at every item, look at all the sacred cows. What can you do to improve? Taxes are critical and it’s what you pay any governmental organization and it’s based on income. Once it’s paid out 99.9% of the time it’s gone.

So there’s a, a catch 22 here, which means, well, you want to make more money, but you don’t want to pay taxes. That’s where great tax advisors come in. So I recommend every business owner who wants to build a highly profitable business did a very, very competent tax advisor. I’ve had over the years, eight businesses and six different CPAs every CPA I’ve ever hired for my businesses has always made me money. I never, their fees were not cheap, but they never cost me a dime. I always saved more in taxes and improved aspects in my business by having great professional advisors. And next increase the multiple what’s a multiple, a multiple is a number. This is used when you’re buying or selling a business. It’s applied typically to sales, gross revenue, EBITA, which is earnings before interest taxes amortization.

It could be after tax cashflow or some other financial results. And it’s used as a rough measure to determine the market value of your business. And to improve the multiple in your business, you have to have a business that runs well and grows without the top one, two or three key people. So you have to systematize, you have to build an organization and a great team and create predictable revenue streams. Now in today’s world, what we have found is that employees are one of the most valuable assets for any business. Well most businesses don’t clearly define what their expectations are for every role in the company. They confuse Sally with salesperson with the activities that that person does. No, Sally may also be handling your books, Sally may also be your operations manager.

Those are two different tasks. So you have to look at every task in your business and define it. Well Bob may be the facilities manager, but he’s also managing your production line. Those are two different tasks. Define them separately. And what you may find is that someone is really good at one specific area, but not in another. And then what you do is to look to say, is there someone on your team who can do it? Or do you need to find someone outside your team? Or do you have the right or wrong person? So what do you need to do? You need a title, you need to make sure you have the purpose of the job. What are their accountabilities? What are the necessary skills and attributes?

And who are the key relationships? Pardon me, there’s a lot of dust in my house because we’ve been doing some moving. So you can hear that in my voice. I apologize. Hopefully you can hear me clearly. The key relationships that they have to maintain. And then what do you do to measure their performance? So in measuring their performance, you have to detail for each accountability they have, you want to be specific about what they have to do, what must they achieve in each and every area. And the accountability is a heading. And the measure is an objective measure to evaluate how well they do that particular task. But I’m going to share with you the item that is absolutely critical. And that’s cultural fit. 81% of all employees who fail to perform in the first 18 months, and that’s what happens, fail in the first 18 months.

And most of the time, it’s because they’re not aligned to your core values, your attitudes, your priorities, and the environment of your business. They don’t get the DNA of your business. And they put your customers ill at ease. They put the other people on your team uncomfortable, they’re toxic, maybe even parasitic. And every business has them. And it doesn’t matter if you think that that person, well, they’re so fabulous, they get more done on the job site than any two other people. I can assure you that if they’re gone, the rest of your team will more than make up for it. I’ve seen it time and time again, whoever you think is a top performer who’s toxic is killing your business. So make sure they’re a cultural fit, which brings us to the next issue, which is to rate every employee A, B, C, and D. A is always great, you’d love to have 100 of them.

B, they’re really good, but that’s the B. They could be an A, but they have to develop or overcome some challenge. C is I can barely stand them. On a good day, they can be acceptable, but there are regular challenges. And D is dead to me or dead beats. They literally sucked the life out of me, the other people on the team, out of customers, clients of vendors, they are toxic. Then what you need to do is create a detailed step-by-step action plan for each employee. You don’t fix a D employee. I’ve seen it happen once out of a thousand. The best thing you can do for a D employee is have them work for your competitor. That’s kind of a joke, but sometimes they may fit in with your competitor, but if they don’t work for you, get them off your team.

That’s going to help you tremendously, but then jump to your A’s because an A player, if you invest a little bit more in your A team members, you’ll get much more than anything else you can do. I was sharing with Will and Kerry before we started today, an article I saw that paying someone 30% more to get a higher level of talent can add anywhere from two times to 10 times the performance. 30% more gets 100% more performance to 900% more performance. Do the math, that makes sense. Create that action plan and then work on the B and C players as well. Next is systems and technology, and we’ve talked about that before, but I want to focus on that for just a moment. Every routine activity, whether it be answering the phone, taking an order, walking someone through a home or through a showroom, walking them through an architectural blueprint or asking them how to design the home they want, what they’re looking for in their windows, have a system for every single action, everything that’s routine.

And then that’s going to be 80%, 20% of the things you just can’t plan for. That’s where you as the professional, as someone with years and years of industry expertise and specialized expertise with your company, you can help them with that, where the system is doing the routine aspects. And then what you have is systems that run your business and have the people. So again, we talked about A, B, C, D, when you have A people running your systems and you lead your people, you have an incredibly profitable high growth business. So what are the steps? First create a flow chart of every aspect of your business. You need to do build detailed operations manuals. And this can take a year, it could take three years, but each one that you do will improve the profitability of your business, it’ll improve customer satisfaction, it’ll improve customer retention, it’ll improve sales, it’ll improve conversion, it’ll improve longevity and lifetime value of customers, it’ll increase the lifespan of A employees staying with you, many more things.

And then it’s perform and continually, continually improve. So hopefully you got some great little tidbits there. I’m going to ask Robert to touch on the next subject, which is critical and he’s absolutely brilliant on, which is reconnecting the past customers and prospects. Thank you, Jeff. We’ve just learned a lot so much that hopefully we can put everything into action. One of the things that I also would like to continue to share with you is that you’ve done a great job of developing customers. And one of the first things that happens after we sell a customer, we sort of go away from them. And what I learned growing up in our business, our family business, I too was very, very fortunate. My father was third generation of our business and learned from his predecessors who were phenomenal business people, but he also rounded out that with academic education at the University of Pennsylvania at the Wharton School of Business, as did my father-in-law who was in the glass fabrication world and had 16 plants throughout the United States and hundreds of employees.

And he also was a Wharton grad. And what they kept telling me over and over again, your past customers are the lifeblood of your sales program. And I would say, well, what does that mean? My father explained to me, one third of your customers you’re always going to keep. One third will be in transition and one third for one reason or another, you’re never going to be able to take care of. So you want to look at those past customers and not consider them as past customers, but real customers, present customers, always keep them in the know. They’re building memories with you, they’re building success stories with you, and the more that you can teach them about what you’re doing with your new products, your new services, your new communities, your new opportunities for them, if they’re not ready to buy themselves because they’re a satisfied buyer, they’ll refer other business to you.

So we want you to always make sure that you connect. What’s so amazing, one of the worst things that happens in our industry, especially with our residential home builders, is that when we’re building a community, what’s the first thing that happens after we’ve sold our last home? We take down the signs. And then we don’t want anybody to know that we built there because we’re afraid of customer service. Well, if we did the job correctly and we service those customers, everyone who’s driving by would know that there’s 150 families living in that community that are thrilled with their homes. But no, the first thing most people do is just take it out. So Jeff, you have something you want to share? Just really, I think that’s a perfect lead into the next topic for you, which is, and you alluded to this before, is how customer service and reconnecting is a part and essential to every referral program.

Thank you. I think that the key is that we want to stay in touch with all of our buyers. Of course, there may be a buyer too that we’re not connecting to, but we want to stay in touch with everybody. And the more that we can do that, it’s going to make a difference. What we found that we create reward program, referral programs for each individual builder, each individual manufacturer we work with, mortgage companies, et cetera. And one of the key things that we want to do is stay in front of all of our prospects. We don’t believe that we have customers. We believe that we have buyers. And the more we think of everybody as a buyer, the more it’s going to help us grow our business platform.

And the other thing that we try to do too is understand each of the products that we’re bringing on board and use our past buyers as part of those focus sessions that we spoke about early on, because they’re already living and breathing our company, and they can share more information from a third party perspective that gives us more knowledge. So what we want to try to do is take the time to put the program together. One of our proteges, Peter Garvin, a former executive in a mortgage business, would tell us over and over again that in studies that he had done, you’re only as good as the last sale that you made. So in essence, what you need to do is go back to those individuals.

The folks that you just sold are so thrilled, and I’m going to share this with you. You earn the right to ask for a referral in your first meeting. You may not do it by saying, hi, my name is Bobby August, and no, by the way, who else do you know would like to live here? But you’re earning the right through your presentation. And when you do ask a buyer for a referral in the first meeting, it says to that buyer that you’ve already qualified that buyer, you’ve vetted that buyer, and you think that they’re so special that now you’re asking for referrals, well, guess what? They’re going to become much more comfortable with you. So in essence, that’s a tremendous opportunity. So the first meeting, every meeting thereafter, when you feel comfortable, ask for referrals.

Most people feel that you can’t ask for a referral until two or three months after the customers use your product or service. And I would tell you, my response would be, I don’t think that that’s appropriate. You’ve lost four, six, eight months of asking for referrals, and those buyers are excited about being in the prospect mode. They’re excited when they sign that agreement, and you’re giving them the pen after you’ve said whose pen would you like to use, yours or mine, to sign this agreement. What you’re then saying afterwards, and whom else do you know is ready to join you in purchasing the same product or a similar product from our company. What it’s doing is inviting those people right away. That reduces your marketing costs by getting to those referrals immediately.

And the other thing is, make sure that you service your customer. We talked earlier about customer service. When you take care of the customer, it’s also affording you the opportunity to ask for referrals. A little key point, always keep brochures in your car, in your truck, when you’re driving around because you’re going to run into a lot of different people and ask them for referrals as well. And also, never stop asking all of your customers. Those of us in the home building business, we’re dealing with trade, 75 companies to build one home. And those people, if they average 10, 15, 20 people, that means that there’s another 2,000 people in your trade network that can buy homes from you. So you’ve got an immediate opportunity. Yeah, Robert, that’s such an incredible point.

I just want to let everyone know we’ll be another five minutes, so I apologize. But hopefully, it’s worth it for you to stay on for another five minutes. Again, we do have an open question and answer, and Robert and I will be available to answer any questions you have, but we’ll be another five minutes. I think the next two points are really critical and essential, and it’s right after what you said, Robert, is that there are 75 trades that are involved in the building of any home. Work on your strategic alliances. The HBA is the perfect venue, the perfect nexus, for you to connect with other business owners, other professionals, other businesses to create collaborative efforts. So you may say, well, what do you mean by that?

And a strategic alliance is where two or more companies take a mutually beneficial project, and you each are still independent, but you work together, and you’re able to do something together that you could never do independently. And the Parade of Homes, which, Will, I think I’m correct and you’re welcome to jump on and do a quick ad, is starting September 18th, is a perfect example of the strategic alliance and how the HBA brings everyone together. And I have found in my own business career in multiple businesses that strategic alliances and between strategic alliances and referrals, it’s typically between 60 and 80% of all the business that I do. So if you are not, if you do not have multiple referral strategies, multiple strategic alliances, your business is easily one third the size it can or should be.

And finally, the last point I’d like to make is that it’s absolutely essential for you to continually revisit these points, everything that we shared with you today. Look at your business, and what you want to do is, first and foremost, monitor what’s going on, and then evaluate, measure everything, and have an objective process to evaluate, are we above budget? Budgeting is critical. It’s an essential, I mean, we could have spent this entire session and the next 10 sessions just talking about how important it is in budgeting for buying, for building, for supply chain, for marketing, for sales. It’s absolutely essential. So know your numbers, but you have to have an objective measure to evaluate. And then you need to revamp. What do you need to change?

What do you need to improve? How can you do things better, and then restart? Because you’re never over the game, at least for me, and I know for Robert, for sure. And for me as well, as long as I’m standing, I’m in the game. I want to play, I want to make it happen. Don’t you want to make it happen? And that’s really the key. What can you do to make better things happen for your business, for yourself, for your family, for your community, for your association, for the other businesses you work with? And with that, I’d like to say my thanks so much to Will for inviting us and asking us to meet with such a great group of business owners, of electrical contractors, of appliance dealers, and builders, I mean, I could go through, just really excited, and Carrie as well for organizing and having this work so seamlessly.

So really want to thank you so much. And Will, do you have any closing remarks? And then Robert and I are available for any questions and answers, any questions people may have. No, not much by way of closing remarks, but up on the screen is what I was going to offer up to our attendees by way of follow up as well as the contact information for these two gentlemen. Obviously, you don’t get an MBA in one hour. This is a course of study. And so there’s going to be homework, there’s going to be some reflection, there’s going to be an opportunity for penetration as we internalize some of the excellent points that were made in some of the new ways of thinking that perhaps we can adopt in our businesses.

For my purposes as an association manager, there was a lot in here, while I’m not by IRS standards, a for profit enterprise, I am always looking to continue to grow and to improve the services and the operations of this association. So there really is applicability within all of the contents of this information to apply those to both our businesses that we’re here representing today, but also the other organizations that we participate in. And so, please to our attendees, drop some questions in the chat box and the Q&A feature. There is one question that was posed by Darnell Blacklock, one of our Reese Nichols agents, about the appropriate size of a focus group that you talked about, and bringing these groups together to get some of that tangible feedback.

What would be an appropriate size for a focus group, or how would you go about determining what an appropriate size? Can I interject for one minute before Robert answers that, because I see Darnell, please, if you can hold on, you’re still on. And while we have everybody still on, I want to give them an insight to what they’ll be doing, and you talked about the homework everyone will be doing, Carrie will send everyone an action plan. And in that, from each of the topics we talked about, we’ll ask you to write the three top ideas, and from all of those ideas, so there could be on 10 topics, 30 ideas, the three top ideas that you commit to working on in the next 30 days, because if you don’t start working on it in the next 30 days, Robert and I will be disappointed because we feel you didn’t get the value we wanted you to get.

So I’m going to ask you, Will, because I love, this is my fun thing in life, to put people on the spot. Will, what are the three biggest ideas you got for your role as the EO of the HPA from our workshop today? You know, the part about the branding and the commitment to the branding and ensuring that you are taking a proactive approach to your presentation to the broader community was a big takeaway for me. You know, I think that’s always been important. It’s been increasingly important as the internet and mobile access has played exceedingly large parts and roles in our business lives, but it’s been even brought more to bear over the last 18 months or so as people have figured out different ways to participate in the economy.

And so, you know, enhancing and maintaining and always looking to improve upon our digital presentation. That’s someone’s first typically or their first exposure or first blush, first impression. So the branding was an enormous kind of aha moment for me, the light bulb going off, as it were. That’s a great point, Will, if I can interject, and I want everybody to learn from that is that many of the things that we shared probably aren’t new, but it’s like, wow, why aren’t I focusing on that? And I mean, you have a great brand, but I think it sounds like you have an accelerated commitment to that branding message, right? Absolutely. And, you know, I’m surrounded by talented people here at the HPA that are always thinking about these things.

And so to get everybody rowing in the same direction and to recognize their part in that branding, that this doesn’t fall on one person, this is a team effort, and we all have something to contribute. I think that’s something everyone can learn from about branding as well. What are two other points? Two other points is just overall culture. Culture is the most important thing in any organization. You know, you can have all the talent in the world, but if all of the pieces aren’t put together in the right way and they work together with one another, you’ve just got a box of really high quality parts and your machinery isn’t going to work. And so I think working on culture, camaraderie, team building was a key takeaway for us as well.

It’s going to increase our productivity and frankly, people want to like who they work with. And, you know, you don’t want to dread walking into the office every day. I’m grateful that that’s not the case. You know, I used to work on Capitol Hill and that wasn’t always the case, a lot of different personalities there. So being able to come in every day and knowing that, hey, we get along well together now, just think of how awesome it will be, something that you hop, skip and jump into the building if we’re all working seamlessly with one another. And then finally, the strategic alliances components. You know, as a trade association, we can look at our little box here and say, okay, we’re representing this segment of the segment of the of an industry.

But you know, there are other construction related entities around people that are also trying to boost workforce development and profitability within chambers of commerce, commercial construction, the heavy constructors. We are all, you know, the same side of the brain, albeit different parts. And so to lean into those strategic alliances and recognize where we may not be looking to increase our own profitability, but we are looking to increase our influence and become, to know who else everyone else knows. The answer to the question, it, it, typically it really doesn’t make a difference about the topic, but the number, a low number would be six and a high number would be 10 for a focus session. And the key there is that you want everybody to be able to express themselves.

And if you end up having more than 10 people, sometimes one or two people will dominate the session. Other people will pull back and it’s up to the moderator to really bring out the best of everyone, making sure that those people are introduced correctly and what the rules of engagement are so that we get, we get everyone’s important contribution. And a six to 10, is a very, very good number for a focus session. And just doing one is fine, but you get more information, by doing sometimes two and three. Great. Carrie, could I ask you please to pop up the first poll question while, we entertain the next question. And if there aren’t any others, there’s, there’s something I’d like to ask Robert, please if anyone raise your hand, if you have a question, hopefully there’s something that you’d like more clarification on, or could be on a, on a only tangentially related product.

We’d like to see that, everybody has a poll question, this would be really helpful for us. If you could take a moment to, to answer this, what I’d like to ask Robert, something that came up with, some of the preliminary questions, and maybe you can talk about this, with all of the different, industries and, communities that you’ve worked in building. What would you say is the absolute key things to, having, production time, decreased to be able to stay on track, to be able to deliver, at higher margins and ahead of schedule or on schedule, that’s a really great question. And I think that, you know, I’m going to give you an ambiguous answer.

You have to really, my, my educational background is in labor management relations, both at the, undergraduate and graduate level. And I would tell you that, it’s motivating your employees and keeping everybody on track. It’s really making sure that everyone understands their job description and that they’re fulfilling it, on a daily basis. And you’ve got to start the day, you know, more or less with, you know, with a discipline discussion of what we’re here to accomplish today, what we’re here to accomplish this week in this month, and you’ve got to stay on track and there are going to be issues that will come up. But I found that in doing that, it reduces, the, the, the, length of time, that everyone would work on a situation on a particular task, or requirement and time management as it comes up and it’s, posting here, you know, it’s quite obvious to me, you know, that by, attending to, your employees or your associates and making sure that they’re all on track with their responsibilities and their accountability, it’s going to help you, accomplish your goals so much faster.

We’ve, we’ve done a lot of work, and, and working with, business owners and executive teams exactly in the issue of time management, because, I mean, kind of, as we were talking before, will that in times such as this, where it’s hard to find talent to attract the necessary talent you need, it’s, you have to make the most and leverage the most of the talent you have. So what we actually do is a multi-step process. The very, the, the two first things we do is we have each person keep track on a 15 minute basis, just take 15 seconds every 15 minutes to write down what they did, and do that for two weeks. And when we look at that, a couple of things happen.

One, we find just people being aware of it and tracking it, their improvement in what they get done day one versus day 10 is typically an improvement of 16% because it’s an awareness. The other, Robert, just one second, the, the other is to look at those tasks and identify which ones can be delegated or should be delegated and work on a plan to do that. And in doing that with business after business, we found that the owners of the businesses, their executives have a, are more productive, profitability goes up. Their home lives are better, their health and blood pressure is better because they’re working at their greatest strength instead of the things that, again, always working in that frantic, Robert, you had something you wanted to say, the father of time management is Frederick Taylor.

And there was a great movie called cheaper by the dozen and, the, actually his studies took place, towards the end of the 18 hundreds, beginning of the 19 hundreds. And he found all of these points, another Wharton guy. And then in addition to that, you know, it’s really interesting. There’s a great psych industrial psychologist by the name of Maslow. And he has a law of hierarchy and, and you might think that the most important thing to an individual working in a company is how much money they’re getting paid at the end of the day. It’s their self-esteem that’s number one. And when you start focusing on, Maslow’s law of hierarchy, Frederick Taylor studies, and there were tremendous amount of studies done, in the 1930s, at Western electric, which at that time was the phone manufacturer.

And they found, that by identifying and defining, you know, what your job is and how you performed, you were being a part of a, you were belonging to a team, you were belonging to a group. And when you feel that you’re a part of something that’s bigger than you, you perform to the height of excellence and, and you give your ultimate best. And there’s less complaining, there’s less stress and there’s more team spirit. And when we look at, athletes and we look at companies that succeed, it’s because they’re driven together to work together in harmony. And if they have an issue, they sit down and they resolve it. They don’t sit and complain. They re they put the situation on the table. They sit down and they review the situation at hand and come up with viable solutions that are good for everybody.

And that buy-in creates that plateau of excitement to then build upon it and grow the success of the company. Excellent. Now, in terms of a supply chain and Robert, you and I have talked about this extensively, clients I have in and businesses I work with, experiences. I mean, it’s been a challenge for years and in the last year and a half, it’s been accentuated. Do you have any words of wisdom? I know you shared some with me. I don’t want to steal your thunder. So I’d really like you to talk to that. Talk about that in terms of your perspective of how you recommend that our attendees address those supply chain issues. Well, I can see, well, looking very serious and I’m going to make him smile.

One of the tremendous attributes of having a home builders association and related trade associations in our industry is that we, by joining, we get to know a series of companies. I mean, we’re, we’re blessed, you know, in the United States to have, many manufacturers, many different building products. What typically happens with a builder, when, when the average builder throughout the United States builds a home, we shared earlier that there’s 75 different companies that we’re working with and, and oftentimes we’ll bid out for a custom home sale or when we’re ready to do a, a community of project, we might bid out three companies at different times, but what’s happened is that today we no longer have 75, companies building one home.

We’re up to over 150. And why? Because the supply chain has been disrupted. And what I learned years ago in the first company that I worked with outside of her family business, I was in the customer service department of the largest building company in the world. And we shipped out packages and we shipped them throughout the Northeast and the South and into the Midwest. And we had, most people don’t know this, but, in 1974 through approximately are actually 1973 through 1975, we had a building boom. Like there was never one before in the history of the world, every country was building. And it was said that at the time that you could take all the trucks, and, and put them back to back to back from Tehran to Paris, and you’d still have extra trucks.

And what happened was that we couldn’t find products. Nobody sitting in this audience probably doesn’t know why white toilets, or, or, laboratories are white as standard. It doesn’t cost anything more to build pink or green or blue. And many of you who go into homes that were built in the forties and fifties, see these wonderful pink bathrooms, and you see these, these wonderful avocado green refrigerators. It doesn’t cost anything more to produce color. And what happened? We couldn’t manufacture. I mean, we were closing homes, if you can imagine, with an Ebony toilet tank with, with a white, toilet with a Baybury blue toilet seat and a, and a, and a harvest gold tank top in order to get a closing done and to get a certificate of occupancy.

So what happened was that everything became standardized, by 1974 white, because the manufacturers couldn’t keep up with all the colors. And so what we also learned that we had to do is think of variation and think of dynamic changes to disrupt the supply chain loss by standardizing colors, by making things simple for the consumer and sharing with them the term interior designer. And what happened, we had a tremendous growth as an outcrop, a silver lining was the interior design world, flourish like you couldn’t believe because people would accent their white bathrooms, with colored towels, with different appointments. But the other thing that happened was that we didn’t depend on one company. We didn’t depend on one company to provide us with windows. We didn’t depend on one company anymore to provide us with, we want to name brands, named brands were important to us companies that would stand behind their products and services.

But instead of talking to one concern, we would now talk to many concerns in order to fulfill that situation. And in order to get closings and create customer satisfaction, we never provided the product that was less. We always provided a product that was an equal or better than standard. And I will tell you this, I, in the ability to authorize local purchases, was trained to always in mis-shipments, damages, and shortages, always go to the next higher level and give a better product than what the customer anticipated because it created that customer service affinity with the consumer that helped us forevermore gain those, that, that acceptance by the buyer because we did something extra and it opened up the door for us to get the referrals. Thank you, Jeff.

Excellent. Well, I, I know we’re just about out of time, so I don’t, I, I want to thank everybody who has joined us today. Thank you for sharing your time with us. That’s a, it’s an honor and, hopefully you got your, your greatest compliment to us will be to grow your business, that you take these ideas and implement them. And in your case, we’ll understand that being a nonprofit, it’s not a business objective. It’s a tax status. I would share with everyone else as a parting remark, in order to, disrupt the supply chain, recruit as many manufacturers and vendors into the association as possible. Do it today because today’s buyer is tomorrow’s buyer. And the more that you learn to work with each other and grow the association, the stronger the voice, the stronger, the power of the association.

And you have a great, basis and foundation will, thank you and Carrie today and your entire staff, for affording us the opportunity to be with you and your membership as well. Thank you so much. Thank you, will. Thank you, Carrie. Thank you, Robert. Thank you. To learn more things from you. I’ll take my, I have my notes again. Thank you very much to both of you, for, for spending your time with us, just a couple of, of updates for our membership. Looking forward to seeing many of you tomorrow at the professional women in buildings, wine and whiskey pool at SVP, wood floors, looking forward to a great crowd and a lot of fun, opportunities to get together, with, with anyone these days are good, particularly, with our new PWB group.

So I’m looking forward to that tomorrow evening. And then we also have a new member coffee scheduled for September 9th. So please put those on your calendars and check kchba.org for all of the upcoming programming we’re bringing to you as your representation. So again, thanks to you out, Rob, Robert’s got his hand up. I’m sorry. Don’t forget the parade of homes. We, we talk about the folks from Pella, the customers that are coming through there. They’re just not coming to buy homes, ladies and gentlemen, they’re coming there to steal a few bright ideas. Everybody who may not be a home buyer is a remodeling buyer. So take advantage of the parade, be there, become active, earn more business and fulfill the destiny of the association.

Thanks so much. Great point. Robert, as I look at the, the, the professions of, of those who are attendance today, every single one could benefit from an involvement in the parade be there. All right. Thank you so much. Well, thank you. Carrie. Take care of you all. And thank you all to, to, to our membership for taking time out today, go out, be successful. And of course, let us know if we can ever be of any help. Thank you. Thank you.