Q & A Episode 45 - Part 1: Profits, Purpose & Positive Tornadoes: A Q&A with Mark
Episode #45 | Q&A with Mark D. Williams | Part 1: Profits, Purpose & Positive Tornadoes: A Q&A with Mark
Mark’s back with a quote-fueled episode series that covers everything from why your best clients are often the most profitable, to how slow seasons can set the stage for big growth. Plus, he explores how overachievers thrive, why goals matter, and what business builders can learn from training for a race.
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About The Curious Builder
The host of the Curious Builder Posdast is Mark D. Williams, the founder of Mark D. WIlliams Custom Homes Inc. They are an award-winning Twin Cities-based home builder, creating quality custom homes and remodels — one-of-a-kind dream homes of all styles and scopes. Whether you’re looking to reimagine your current space or start fresh with a new construction, we build homes that reflect how you live your everyday life.
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Mark D. Williams 00:03
Service doesn't produce profits. Profits produce excellent service. And so I just think, look around at companies that you really like their service. My guess is that they're doing very well profitably, and that's okay. I think it's a little bit like I tell my clients, like, you want us to be in business. You want us to make money, because 10 years from now, you want us to be here to stand behind your product, and I think it's important for us to say that.
Mark D. Williams 00:33
Welcome to curious builder Podcast. I'm Mark Williams, your host. Today is our Thursday Q A session, and we missed last week because I was sick and lost my voice, and nobody wants to hear that, not even me. So I thought I would continue on with a bunch of quote reactions. There was, I think, last episode, I had just reacted to a number of my favorite quotes. Whenever I read a book or I hear a zinger, I usually write it down. I have a lot of them, and they come out a lot of in my analogies and sales presentations have just buried in there, and they come out in the most unexpected times. And I feel like the reason quotes resonate with me. Actually, back in college, I used to send out a quote of the day by email back in like 1999 2003 somewhere in that four year window, and I had a list of people that I would just send quotes to. I don't even know if they want to get them. And then I remember, I stopped, and then people started saying, like, Hey, how come I don't get my daily quote anymore? So anyway, I've always loved quotes. They've always kind of just stuck to my brain. So one of the ones that came to mind was, service doesn't produce profits. Profits produce excellent service. And this, actually, I've proved this to be true in observation a couple of years ago. I think if we think about our best clients, and I've asked this to a number of builders, remodelers, and I think just business owners in general, that their best clients are the ones that they not only service the best and get the best treatment, but they're also the ones that they did the best on, margin wise, or quote, made the most money on. And it's kind of an interesting dynamic. The client that the builder does financially the best on shows up to the job site with a little bit more pep in their step. They show up with a better attitude. They're willing to give more during the build as well. When the little ticky tacky things come up, they're you're more likely to say, You know what, I got this. And it's kind of this interesting cycle. I think sometimes we think of like a negative cycle, like a tornado, like, once it gets caught up, like it just keeps grabbing more and more stuff. And more stuff. But I think you can have a positive tornado. I think, like, they just keep adding up to a better and better experience. And I've proven this to be true a number of times, where some of my best clients are the ones that we did very financially well on and they were even happier. They were there are super fans. And I think it's because of a number of things. One is it really starts, I think, in the very beginning, that the client realizes that you're a human being and a person, and yes, you're a business, and they understand that they're paying for service, and that's fine, but they also realize that they want good service, and the clients that really try to beat you up on price and really try To negotiate super, super heavy on the front end, they are always disappointed with the level of service. And I'm not saying it's all their fault either. Maybe as the owners and entrepreneurs in the group, we need to stand a little bit more firm. And I think it goes back to identifying your ideal client. And again, not every single client is going to be your best client. It just can't. Otherwise, there'd be no bad clients. That'd be great clients. I think it's just the relationship. What do you expect out of it? In some clients just want a black and white relationship. They just want their house built. They don't need a bunch of touchy feely interactions. They don't want to be invited to your Christmas party. They don't want to get letters. That's fine. That's honestly, that's not who I am. So I don't think that's ever going to really be a thing. Because I think the way I like to build and the way that, I guess, what interests me about building a home is the relationship, and is the intimacy that you get knowing this couple or their families. And just the other day, we went to we built a home 10 years ago, we went to the graduation party, and I got to bring my four year old, right? I guess he's five. Now, I got to bring my five year old, and I'm like, five years before you were even born, buddy. Like, I built this house for this amazing couple, and their kids were your age, and so it was really fun to kind of have this continuity. You don't have that with every client, but it does make it really special. And I think it you get, you can give. You can just give more of yourself, and I think it really goes through the kudos to the clients that match up with the right builder, and they understand that, Hey, it's okay to ask for a discount, or it's okay to ask for a concession in certain things, but someone that expects the lowest price but also the best service. Yeah. I mean, that's like that classic three legged stool, price, quality and speed. Pick two of them, but you can't pick three. And so I think that's a little bit like service. And so anyway, I really appreciated that you look at companies that do very, very well, they kind of have like a company policy, like return. I'm thinking of like, let's say Patagonia or Rolex, or some of these high end brands, I don't know, but I'm guessing that most of them have a return policy that's very good, because they know that they probably a lot of their clients are not going to return stuff. But two, even if they do, they want them to buy again. And so many companies make it so hard to return anything or have any sort of good service that you're immediately turned off. And I think the really, the companies that really get it understand that once you have a client, keeping them happy is paramount. I probably to my own detriment, I do love marketing, and I spend a lot of time thinking about creative ways to market, and I enjoy it, and I'm good at it, but I had a project manager years ago, and he had worked for another company, and their only sales tool was to keep their clients happy no matter what. And I'm not saying it's wrong. It's actually I could probably do a little bit better job of just whatever it takes to make the clients happy. The only problem I don't like with it is it sort of parallels a little bit of this concept of perfection, or the client is always right. I feel very strongly that that is not true. And honestly, there's very few absolute statements, just like in general. And so I think it's the absoluteness of it, like they're always right. Like, that's clearly not the case. I think we all need some humility. I'm wrong plenty of times. And like, so are our clients. That's okay. It doesn't you don't have to be right all the time. I think this idea that everyone is right all the time is obviously not true. So why are we sticking to it anyway? We've gone away from that quote a little bit. So I think you can service your clients a little bit better. That quote, again, was, service doesn't produce profits. Profits produce excellent service. And so I just think, look around at companies that you really like their service. My guess is that they're doing very well profitably, and that's okay. I think it's a little bit like I tell my clients, like, you want us to be in business. You want us to make money, because 10 years from now, you want us to be here to stand behind your product. And I think it's important for us to say that this quote is kind of funny. Work on the dock while the tide is out. I think every business has a hard time with this. I know I've struggled with this. When you're really busy, when the tide is in, the water is high, floating all boats like you just have a you've got a lot on your plate. You are, you're managing everything, and it's not really time to work on the business, because you are. You've got all these clients, and you've got all these relationships you're managing, and you're trying to get them all successfully to the end. But building is a very cyclical business. There's ups and downs, hopefully not ins and outs. We don't want to be in and out of business, but there are definitely ups and downs, especially in construction, as we all know, in any business, frankly, and and then when things are really slow, like for me last year, things were extremely slow last year, and it's like, at that point in time, it's a great time to, quote, work on the dock. Well, the tide is out, like business is slow. You can work on operations, you can work on SOPs, all of those things. The problem for me is twofold. One is those things just cripple my creativity. I want to be selling and so and really, from the standpoint of my small company, like, if I'm not selling, the company's gonna have a very dark future. So my number one goal is to sell, put leads in the hopper, convert them, create your funnels. Really work on business relationships. Work on other businesses. I mean, the curious builder really flourished over the last year, year and a half, because I had a lot of time, because our building company was really slow. It'll be interesting. I've sort of laid that bedrock now for kind of a pattern of life for the curious builder. And now building is really busy, and the next year and a half looked to be maybe some of the best years that we have. A couple of really big projects coming up, and I'm really excited about them. We'll have to build our team actually, but I'm going to look back at that slow year, and at the time, it wasn't easy to go through, but I'm going to be very thankful that I had times to, in this case, create a whole nother business, and I had the time to do it.
Mark D. Williams 09:18
This episode of The Curious builder is brought to you by oliven vine socials, if you're a builder, a designer or an architect looking to grow your brand without dancing on Tiktok or spending your whole life on social media, listen up. Alvin vine socials specializes in Pinterest marketing, blogging and email strategy for luxury home brands that help you turn your beautiful work into a strategic SEO driven content that drives real traffic and connects you with your ideal clients without burning you out ready to grow smarter and not harder. Visit olivinvine socials.com and tell them the curious builder set you just so you know, I've been working with Alyssa over at Olive and Vine for three years. She helped us launch the podcast. She's helped us grow our brand at Mark Williams custom homes. I could not do what i. I've done without her help, and I'm more than happy to announce that she's our latest sponsor for the curious builder podcast, specifically for building, it was hard for me to what am I going to hire a new project coordinator and train them in before I have the work, not my personality? I'm not going to go into debt to hire somebody for the future. Now, I think if you get a couple of really big jobs coming up the line, you have to, like, I guess what I can just speak for what we did. We hired a new project coordinator about three months ago. We had a couple of big jobs coming up this spring and summer, and a big one in the fall, and so we knew we wanted to bring this person on. We had identified them, we interviewed with them, and they're a great fit culture. Culturally, they had worked with one of our employees as well. So it was just really a perfect, kind of a seamless match, kind of a unicorn. She's got an amazing talent set, so that made it pretty easy, too. And we started a couple days a week, like, let's just go part time. Well, within like two weeks, it was just like, oh man, the amount of work she's taking off of everyone else's plate was amazing. So we're like, Oh yeah, you got to go full time. Full time. And I had to figure out on our end how to make sure we can make our payroll every month and but that was a great time. But we knew we were going to head into a business busy season. And, like, even for us, like, as you look down the road, I think sometimes there are certain parts of the country where the permitting process is very far out. I'm talking to Brad Levitt down in Arizona. Some of their permits are a year out, which is pretty wild. So their pre construction agreements are pretty long, but they last for a year, and you're working on bidding and permitting and all that stuff. I mean, you know that these projects are coming down the pipeline, so it actually allows you kind of a nice runway, get all your selections done, get everything ironed out. So when the shovel hits the dirt like you were ready to go. So I sort of, I don't like that business model from you know, when you're ready to go, when you're slow, it takes a year to get busy. So that would be pretty painful. But for somebody like Brad, he's a couple years out looking at feeding his hopper. I remember a couple years ago when things were slow, I was thinking like, Hey, am I? What's my 30? Day, 60, day, 90, day window look like to get sales. And he was like, this was in 2004 or 24 and he was like, I'm really looking at 2027, and 2028, it's like, I am so not there right now. I am looking at the next three months, not the next three years. And but it is cool. I think as you scale up your business, you can think more long term. But anyway, I do like that quote. I think it's a good one. Work on the doc while the tide is out. I haven't proven it to be successful, but I do think it's wise. And so I think the real answer is always, sort of be working on the doc. Always be working on your business. I think I know, for me, the thing that works probably the best is making sure that I'm time blocking. If I'm not time blocking on specific tasks, they just don't get done. And in some ways, I think a simpler or less on your to do list is going to be better. You probably go further. And it's hard for somebody like me, where I just have so many ideas and so many things I want to do, like all entrepreneurs we do, but I think the real effort is, how can I get rid of meetings? How can I get rid of tasks and either delegate them or simplify them and really figure out, like, what are your key metrics and your key things that you want to move so anyway, I think that's enough for that the overachiever lane is never full. The account of this one is the underachiever Lane has is jam packed. It's a traffic jam all the time. I think, I just think that this idea of being an overachiever, I think if you're listening to this podcast,
Mark D. Williams 13:24
you're likely an overachiever. And I say that because you're probably a business owner, or you want to be one, and you're constantly thinking about how to improve. I'm curious, how do I get better? Like, those are all the marks of an overachiever. And I think when you go back and you look kind of post mortem at your past. I don't spend a lot of time doing this, but I think where you're at today, not that it can't change. We can, of course, make alterations, but I think if we were to be honest and look backwards, there's a lot of signs of things that have shaped our life and a lot of our attitudes that have sort of obviously shaped us who we are. I think sometimes, as an entrepreneur and someone who owns a business. We don't, I know I don't spend a lot of time thinking about it. Frankly, I know I talk about it on the podcast all the time, but usually the podcast is like my form of talking out loud about what I should be thinking about. It's almost like I used to say this that I finished my sentences so I know what I'm going to say too, because my mouth works way faster than my brain. And I'm not somebody that sits in a contemplative mood and just sits there and thinks about the future. I'm too restless, and I suspect a lot of entrepreneurs are like that. I used to always joke that I don't know how you could not have ADHD and be a business owner, because I feel like the majority of the ones that I know are handling way above what a normal processor can handle, and we could all benefit from probably relaxing a little bit, drop a few of the balls and just focus on a few of the ones that we do have and just make them better. But I like this, the overachiever lane is never full. I think, if you want to, I think the hardest thing I'm thinking right now this race I'm training for, I mentioned it earlier in January. I won't go into it now, but you know, my missou. These two it's a Japanese principle picking, like one thing. So I have one thing for building and one thing for my personal life. And so for six months, I'm training for this race. And it's it brings a lot of clarity. It's like, I know what I'm doing every single morning. I know how I'm eating and how I'm sleeping and the fluids I'm taking in. Like, it's all part of this one race. And I know it'll be the same as it was last year. I did a different race at a different distance, and when the race was over, there was like, the two weeks after was like, this big letdown, because I didn't have a goal. I needed to find a new goal. That's just me, maybe other people out there like that as well. And it doesn't really matter what the goal is. Honestly, it could be a 5k a 10k a marathon, 100 Mara. It doesn't matter. I think this idea that you have a goal, you're dedicated towards it. And I think, as an entrepreneur and specifically to building, we have a lot of goals. Like, I have a goal for the Andersons, I'm going to build their home. So all the thing that goes up to it is that home, and that home is complete, they move in, and now you reassess a new goal. And maybe, obviously, if you have four or five clients at the same time, you have four or five different goals. And I think maybe we're very especially in construction, there's like a seasonality to it. There's the beginning, there's the middle, and then there's the end, there's highlights, low lights, you got to get through it all. And so I think maybe, maybe just that goal setting is also very human. It's maybe even beyond entrepreneurial. It's just like it's part of start of living. I think you kind of have to set these milestones to keep you going. And it's the little changes a house, just like that old quote, Rome wasn't built in a day. You know, house is not built in a day. I often, I have this one homeowner. I love his enthusiasm. He calls me pretty much every Monday morning after we have a Friday meeting for like, a quick over the weekend. He's amazing. He's a great business owner. I think he's gonna be one of my favorite clients. I just love the way he thinks. And anyway, he always likes to get kind of like a download, like, what's happening, what's happened to him. Like, Rome isn't built in a day, buddy. It's gonna take some time. Like, this is definitely an ultra marathon. This is not even a marathon. Like this is gonna take a long time. There's not a there's not a lot of speed moments here. Things just kind of evolve. And so I think what I love about is how excited they are. And I think we can obviously relate to that, and I think that's great, but going back to the quote of the overachiever lane is never full. I think we can always set new goals, new milestones. And I think sometimes there's that quote of, I don't have to be the best in the world, I just have to be better than my competition, one of my favorite quotes that I wasn't even going to speak about this, but just comes to me now was I had a barber back in middle school and high school named Glenn. Can't remember what Glenn's last name was anyway, super funny from Chaska, and he had the funniest sales line. He said, Mark, I'm not the best barber in the world. And he would just pause for dramatic effect, but I don't know anybody better. And I used to think that was just the best sales line. And I think from a builder, remodeler, painter, window manufacturer, like, whatever it is that you do, like, you could have that same mindset. You don't have to be the best in the world, just be the best one that you know. And I think what's so encouraging about being in a market where there's a lot of really good builders is we can always overachieve. We can always sort of level up each year if you're not evolving, if you're not changing, if you're not improving, if you're not trying to do something different. And I'm not saying what happened in the past was even wrong. I'm just saying you got to keep swimming. You got to keep evolving. You got to keep moving. I relate a lot of things to physical activity, because I love it, but like weights, if you lift the same weight every single day, like your body adapts to it, it's not going to change. And not only the exercise, but also the weight needs to increase. I think that's why interval training and running is so effective at increasing your speed. You're giving your body multiple ways to adapt. I think that's true in business. I think sometimes you have to try some hard things, do some different things, and that's why I think having a community of builders and of your peers can be really encouraging. It's not meant to be discouraging. At the end of the day, we're all running our own business, and there is a competitive aspect to it, that if we are not staying at the front line of whatever our craft or our business or our special niche is, or whatever makes us unique within the market, the clientele will be disinterested. The homes that we built today are totally different than the homes we built 567, 10 years ago. I'm not saying the homes we didn't build. We're not proud of we're certainly proud of them, but like you have to grow, you have to change. And I think history is full of companies that don't evolve and don't stay in the overachiever lane. The one that comes to mind right now is Blackberry. BlackBerry was dominated. If you get the timing on this, someone can correct me, but it was it late 90s, early 2000s they just dominated Palm Pilots, all those things, and then just a handful of laters, they're gone. They went bankrupt. They didn't evolve. And I think as builders, that's the importance of going to international builder show the importance of being involved with things like the contractor coalition or the curious builder collectives around the country, listening to podcasts, listening to book tapes, interacting with your local building community, your design community, your architects. These are all things that take a serious amount of time and dedication. But if you're not doing them, it's pretty hard to grow, and if you're just completely alone. Growing alone. Not that it can't be done, but it's going to be a way slower rate. It's a little bit like training for a race. Everyone has to run their own race. Nobody can run your feet for you, but training with 10 or 15 people, five, six days a week like you will be way faster than if you train alone. I think the same is true in business. If you train if you evolve together, you will all have better businesses together as well. Thanks again for tuning in the curious builder podcast. Mondays are one hour episodes with builders, architects, designers from around the country, and Thursday is our Q and A if you have a question, please hit us up on Instagram, DM us or send us an email. I can find more information at curious builder.com We've had the podcast almost three years now, and we have a consulting page, one to one consulting you can book my time for one hour. Perhaps you've heard a guest where you like one of the topics. Maybe you want an introduction to some of the guests that I've had on. Perhaps you want to talk about branding or marketing or anything that we've covered on the podcast over the last two and a half years. You can book a time at curious builder podcast.com Hmm. Thanks for tuning in to curious builder podcast. If you like this episode, do us a favor. Share it with three other business owners. The best way that we can spread what we're doing is by word of mouth, and with your help, we can continue to help other curious builders expand their business. Please share it with your friends. Like and review online, and thanks again for tuning in. Ian.
