Q & A Episode 46 - “Dad, Why Do You Build Houses?” A Father’s Day Q&A with Mark & May Williams
Episode #46 | Q&A with Mark D. Williams | “Dad, Why Do You Build Houses?” A Father’s Day Q&A with Mark & May Williams
What happens when your nine-year-old becomes the podcast host? In this special Father’s Day Q&A, Mark’s daughter May takes the mic to ask the big questions about business, building, and freedom. It’s sweet, insightful, and unexpectedly hilarious—from chucking lumber out windows as a kid to explaining why relationships matter in custom home building. A fun, heart-forward listen for curious entrepreneurs and parents alike.
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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I mean, you've heard me talk a lot about miso Hoos, right? Yes,
Mae Williams 00:06
yeah. I was wondering why you only need that house and like none of the other houses, well,
Mark D. Williams 00:10
because usually building a house for somebody else, right? I building May's house or Simon's house or whoever's house, but this house doesn't have a family yet. I'm building it, you know, so someone needs to buy it. Oh, yep, so that's different. I don't normally do that.
Mark D. Williams 00:31
Welcome to curious, bitter Podcast. I'm Mark Williams, your host today, I have a very special guest for a 20 minute Q A I have may Williams, my nine year old daughter. Hi, Mae, hi. So I thought it'd be kind of fun that you can ask questions that a kid would have, or anybody would have, about owning a business or anything like that. So take it away. You are now the official host of this session of the curious builder.
Mae Williams 00:55
Okay, what made you want to start a business? That is
Mark D. Williams 01:00
a good question. So grandpa and grandma had a building company, and so did my uncles and my grandparents, and a lot of people around me own their own business. So I just thought that was normal, and because I never saw anyone else have any other job. And so when I was in when I was a little kid, when I was your age, 910, years old. I used to go to the job site with grandpa, and I would sweep the house. Well, Dad was for my dad, grandpa. Your grandpa was, excuse me, was, you know, talking to the electricians and the plumbers. And I would make the house clean. So I that was something that I could do. I could go around, and grandpa would pay me an hour. I don't remember what it was, four or five bucks, seven bucks, I have no idea. And I would go around, and I would bring a garbage can, and I would pick up, like, two by fours and scrap metal. And my cousin Jason would also help me sometimes, and Uncle Johnny would help me too. So in the summer times, when we were off of school, we would go to the job sites. Sometimes we'd ride our bikes and we would just go and do whatever. I remember this one time, we were not very good employees. We were, you know how I always like to make everything a game. Yep, I can Yep. I saw uncle Jason. And I were up on the second floor of a house, and it was all they call it, like the scrapping phase. So it's like sheet rock and two by fours. And there was a dumpster out in the yard, and it was too boring for me to put it in a garbage can, haul it down the stairs and then dump it. So can you guess what I was doing?
Mae Williams 02:27
You dumped it on someone? No,
Mark D. Williams 02:31
no, I started chucking it out the windows. So I would, so there's no windows in the house, right? There were just big holes because the windows hadn't been put in yet. So Jason and I would see if we could take a two by four, and we would throw it outside the window and fly through the air. And sometimes it would go in the dumpster. Sometimes it would go next to it. It was just all over the yard. So uncle, my uncle, your great uncle, Jeff, came back from for to bring us lunch, and the whole yard. He was so mad at us. The whole yard was just full of garbage, but the house was cleaned, so we had to go around and clean it. But to the original question is, I guess I was sort of had a little small business. I would always go to the job sites. I'd mow the yards. And then when I was old enough, I had my own little lawn mowing business. And so I would go mow all the neighbors yards, and I made these little green cards that said professional lawn mower. And I think I had maybe seven to 10 accounts big yards, like three, four acres, so like 10 times bigger than our yard at home. So really big, and it would take me a couple of hours to mow it. And so that's what I would do all summer long. So I kind of had a small business in high school and in college, and then I worked one year in sales out of college. And then I thought, You know what, I don't really like working for somebody else. I kind of miss working for myself. Grandpa and Grandma had already retired, they stopped building. And so then I was like, You know what, maybe I'll start building a house. And I started building a house, and halfway through, I'm like, This is so much fun. I love it. So I sold my car and I bought a truck, because that's what you're
Mae Williams 04:02
do, if you're a builder, right? Were you the only one in your business at that time?
Mark D. Williams 04:05
I was, yeah, it was just me. And so then, and then I built the one house, and grandpa gave me good advice, and grandma helped me do some interior design, because I was only 2023 so I was pretty young, so a little younger than uncle Kyle. And so then after halfway through, I'm like, This is amazing. I went and got my building license, and then I decided to quit my job, and at that point, I hired her. Name was Margaret Hanson, so that was grandpa and grandma's old office manager. That's right, okie dokie artichoke. She had always these funny little sayings, but she was really good with bookkeeping and paying bills and certificate, certificates of insurance and all the stuff you need to do to run a business, and that was really kind of the beginning.
Mae Williams 04:48
Okay, thanks. Thank you. Next question, all right, what do you do when you don't have a house in progress?
Mark D. Williams 04:58
That is a good question. So. So grandpa used to always say there's two ways you can either be busy being busy or busy getting busy. So basically, if you have no work, you really got to hustle. And it's not very comfortable, because I don't if I don't have a client, or if I'm not building a house for somebody, that means i We're not making any money. And so it's really stressful for any business owner or a dad, because, like, you're a kid, like, these are things you don't have to worry about, right? Like the house we live in, or the food we have, or the gas we put in our car, those are all things that happen when you own a business. But so when I don't have a lot of homes, and then I'm making a lot of phone calls, I'm doing a lot of marketing, and I think this that not the secret, because every business owner does this, but you're always you always have to dedicate time to getting sales and getting leads, and you know that always has to be part of your business. So sometimes what happens is you get really busy. So let's say you have, for me, we're a small company, but let's say we get like, three or four really big homes. Right now, we spend so much time in those couple homes, and those homes might last for a year, year and a half, but if I focus only on those homes, and then all of a sudden, they're done, but I haven't spent any time in that last year and a half, you know, getting getting new jobs, then when it's done, I've got nothing, and it takes about six months to a year to sort of get new work, and that would be a long time to not work, right? So you kind of always have to spend some of your time getting new leads and getting sales, because you it's called feeding the hopper. You got to make sure you always have new people you're talking
Mae Williams 06:30
to. Yes, do you ever like deal with the same client, or are they always like different?
Mark D. Williams 06:36
That's a good question. Building a custom home just because it's really expensive, most people only do it once in their in their lifetime, maybe twice. And Minnesota is not a vacation spot, you know, like, when we go to like, you know, where Kyle lives down in Arizona, it's warm. So sometimes, because Minnesota gets cold, right? Yes, and seems like they call them snowbirds, like grandpa and grandma's age, like, sometimes people get tired of the cold, and then after they're done working and they're retired, they have a house here. But then in the wintertime, they Snowbird, they go to Florida, or they go somewhere else, like a second home. But because Minnesota, most people don't leave, most people aren't leaving Arizona to come here in the summer or the winter. It's not a vacation destination. It's a great place to live and to raise a family, and I love being from Minnesota, but because of that, you don't get a lot of repeat business, because it's usually just a primary home. But sometimes I've built homes for people when they had a young family, like our family is, and then, let's say like, because you're nine, so in 10 years, 11 years, when you graduate high school and you go to college or whatever you decide to do in your life, and your brothers go at some point. They call it empty nesters. When mom and I don't have kids in the house anymore, kind of like I'm on a gong right now, then our house might be too big. So then sometimes you build a smaller home, and then you might build another home. But anyway, it's something that all custom home builders would like to do more of, because we have a great relationship with someone we built for and we'd like to build again. Yes,
Mae Williams 08:04
okay, what's the easiest and hardest part about building?
Mark D. Williams 08:09
Oh, boy. We're gonna need five podcasts that are 10 hours long to get all those questions.
Mae Williams 08:17
Well, we can get through some of them, like the ones I really want to ask you,
Mark D. Williams 08:21
sure. All right, well, the hardest part, I don't think there's one hardest thing or one greatest part. I just think, well, like, what's the
Mae Williams 08:27
easiest? Like, what's easy and what's hard? Like, is there anything that's difficult?
Mark D. Williams 08:32
Yeah, there's a lots of things that are difficult. You're right, okay, I think the most, there's a good way to reframe the question. I think the most difficult part is expectations with a client, right? It's a relationship. And so even when you have a good relationship, sometimes there's conflict, like, obviously I love mom, right, but sometimes we argue, right? And so yeah, client, you can have a great client, but sometimes the way you communicate, you need to work through communication. So having the ability to set expectations and make sure that you communicate a lot and kind of say, Hey, this is what's happening this week. That's probably when I say the hardest that's probably the most important thing, because you imagine, like, if I didn't talk to you for, I mean, I just, you can't imagine this, but if I didn't talk to you for like, a whole month, like, that would be kind of weird, right? What if I just ignored you? How would you feel
Mae Williams 09:24
the opposite of good? I guess, yeah. But do you ever have like problems with your team members, too?
Mark D. Williams 09:32
I I've been really lucky. We have really good team members. I have, I've never really had an issue. I, you know, everyone's you know everyone. Some days people have good days, some people, sometimes people have bad days. And you just have to be patient with people, right? Like today, you heard him on the phone on the way driving in here, like Mike was sick, right? But that's not his choice. He just got sick. Like life happens. Sometimes people have their parents and they're not doing well, so they need to spend some time with their personal family. And as a small business, we really. Care about the people that we're with, and I've had people that you know, that I've known for a long time, or they call me and say, Mark, you know things are really difficult right now. Can you help me out? And so we try to help each other, because it's like a family. So really, I mean, nothing really stands out, like we've never had anyone steal from us, or we've never had anyone lie to us or anything like that. So we've been really lucky.
Mark D. Williams 10:29
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Mae Williams 12:09
Okay, how long does it take for you to build a house?
Mark D. Williams 12:13
Wow, that's such, yeah, it depends, but I would say most of the homes are probably between 10 months and 12 months. So just around a year,
Mae Williams 12:22
I see, what does it mean to own a business? For you,
Mark D. Williams 12:27
what does it mean to own a business? That's a great question. I think it means freedom. You asked me one time a couple weeks ago. You said, you know who's your boss? And the truth is is nobody's by boss, but everybody's my boss. And so I, you know, if you own a business, it's true, you can do whatever you want, but if you do whatever you want all the time, then you're not really listening to other people, right? And so like, if we're gonna go out to eat, like, there are certain places I like to eat, but I'll ask you, like, hey may or do you and your brothers want to go eat? Right? So it's really, again, a relationship. The part of that I love about is the freedom to be creative, to explore, to try new things. I mean, you've heard me talk a lot about miso Hoos, right?
Mae Williams 13:12
Yes, yeah, I was wondering why you only need that house and, like none of the other houses,
Mark D. Williams 13:16
well, because usually I'm building a house for somebody else, right? I'm building May's house or Simon's house, or whoever's house, but this house doesn't have a family yet. I'm building it, you know, so someone needs to buy it. Oh, yep. So that's different. I don't normally do that a lot of builders in the in the country, that's called spec home speculation. So you're speculating that somebody will build a home or a model home, that someone could come by. So I wanted to create a whole brand around it, because, you know how I like to run and be really healthy and things like that, so I thought it'd be fun to build a house around being really healthy. And so that's, that's why I did it that way. And so anyway, going back to your the original question, which is, why? Why do I like owning a business? It's freedom, you know, you get to be creative. You get to kind of shape. It doesn't always mean you'd make good choices, right? Like, you know, if you, if you could eat anything you want, right now, you'd eat a lot of candy,
14:07
right? Chips,
Mark D. Williams 14:11
yeah, and nerds and clusters and all that stuff, right? But then it's up to us as parents to kind of help provide, make sure you eat healthy, right? And so the, reason that we do that is, if you left, if you were left to only your own decisions, then you would want to always make the best ones, right? And so sometimes many people around us. So when I say freedom, we still have to listen to other people, because we can't just do whatever we want all the
Mae Williams 14:34
time. All right, one more question, Did you always want to be a builder, or did you have, like, other thoughts,
Mark D. Williams 14:40
I think, or you have to ask grandma and grandpa that answer that question, because I don't remember. I never was like as a kid. I never had this moment where I was like, oh, I want to be a builder. In fact, I knew I didn't want to be a builder because I didn't want to be like grandpa and grandma. I want to do my own thing. So grandpa was a builder. My uncle Jeff was a builder. You know, my. Ian Holly, they built commercial buildings. So I didn't, yeah, so I didn't, I don't want to do what everyone else did. I want to do something different. And then when they retired, I felt like I was doing my own thing by myself, even though I asked them for help, and they were really good at giving me advice. I really wasn't doing it because of them. I was doing it for me. But when I was a little kid, like a lot of kids, you know, I thought, you know, being an engineer or being an astronaut, or, you know, all the kind of the cool, fun things. What do you have any thoughts on what you'd want to be when you get
Mae Williams 15:28
older? Well, I mean, it changes every now and then, I guess, like me and Simon always like playing music together on the piano or stuff like that. So I don't really know yet, there's not like, like you said. I don't really have like, one that I really want to be. It's just they're all like, oh, do I want to be this, or do I want to be that? You know,
Mark D. Williams 15:47
yeah, I think that's good. I think you just try a little bit of everything. Remember, grandma used to always say, broaden your horizons. Nope, nope. She always told that to me. That's why I always have you guys try different foods and do different things, just to try something new, because you never know what you might like, and so you try a little bit of everything. And I think that's like work too. I think it's important to try a lot of different jobs to see what you might like or what you might not like. Yeah, yeah. Well, just respect everybody's time. We'll end the Q A session of today's podcast. Thanks for coming
Mae Williams 16:18
on May. Thank you for having me. We've
Mark D. Williams 16:21
had the podcast now for two and a half years, coming up on three, and I get questions all the time through DMS, on Instagram, emails, as well as to our account. Maybe we've had a guest on where a question has come up that really triggers an idea for you. If you didn't know, we have a one to one consulting session through the curious builder platform. On our website, curiousbuilder.com or curiousbuilder podcast.com you can click on the one to one and schedule one hour of my time, and we will simply just sit down have a virtual call, and we'll talk about any business idea that you want, marketing, branding, operations, really, anything that helps you and helps your business. Maybe it's a guest that you want an introduction to. Maybe it's a guest we've had on and they brought up something about scaling, or hiring and firing, or anything that might resonate with you as a business owner, that you want to expand and talk on. We'd be happy to do it. If you're interested in that, please reach out to us at the curious builder podcast.com 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.
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