Q & A Episode 47 - Part 2: Profits, Purpose & Positive Tornadoes: A Q&A with Mark
Episode #47 | Q&A with Mark D. Williams | Part 2: 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 00:04
fear never stopped death, but it sure stopped living. I think the way I'm going to take this quote is, I hope you enjoy being an entrepreneur. I hope you enjoy owning a business. I hope you enjoy working with your clients. I hope you enjoy getting better. I hope you enjoy learning to try to get better. If you don't find joy in the process, you know, perhaps you're in the wrong profession.
Mark D. Williams 00:33
Welcome to curious third Podcast. I'm Mark Williams, your host. Today is Thursday, our Q and A, and we're going to keep rolling with quotes. So we've done a few episodes with some great quotes, and I won't go into why I love quotes. You can go back and listen to last episode, but just there's all these quotes that seem to have a lot of business and or entrepreneur life advice that they mean a lot to me. I use them a lot in business, a lot of times, in sales calls, a lot of times to understand, like, how to handle certain situations. So I thought I'd keep going. I have this big list in my phone. I keep ahead of time I hear a good one. So here's another one. This one actually is very a lot of quotes, obviously are similar to each other. This one is, don't tell me what you can't do. Tell me what you can. Reminds me a little bit of one we had a few weeks ago, which was present solutions, not problems. I think this is you can use this a couple of different ways. One is when you have an issue with one of your trade partners, maybe there's a concrete foundation where there's something wrong, or there's a framing detail that got done incorrectly. What are some things that you can do? And it's funny, because I've done this now for 21 years, and there, there's sometimes there's animosity between certain trade partners and what the design calls for, and it's up to us as the GC to to really run interference. And at some I hear a lot of stories where it's actually the builders the problem. There's a number of times where I've heard builders that don't want to work with architects because they think they know it all. And so they sort of throw architects under the bus saying, hey, they don't know this. You're designing something that can't be built. And they sort of make fun of the architect for being creative. I think that's a very narrow minded point of view. I'm not saying that they're wrong at service values. I'm not saying that sometimes something is drawn that can't be done, or I shouldn't say can't be done, that is challenging, but the we're in the job of, what can you do? And I have yet today in knock on wood, I've never met an architect that wasn't willing to listen to their partners every and I've This was used to be a stereotype that is so heavily traveled that it must come from somewhere, but I think, like a lot of stereotypes, I think they need to be undone and to be challenged, because every architect that I've met and worked with has been amazing, over the top of deferential to their partner, saying, Help me understand so that we can solve this together. And I think that's the real value of a partner. The architect as a partner, the designer is a partner. The trade partners, or partner is that together as a team, you can solve the design intent, the issue, whatever it might be, but it's really hard to do it alone. And Linda Engler is a very talented interior designer here, I just met her. We're working on a project together, and I give her credit for this quote is one of my favorite quotes, which piggybacks on this one a little bit, which is she had kind of mentioned about making sure the team was aligned, that the architect and the designer and the client and the builder were all in the same team. Because her comment was, is that the project is going to fight you no matter what, so you might as well be US versus the project. And let's say you have a couple separate teams now you have like, a three way shootout or a standoff like that. Doesn't work very well. And her comment was, is the project is always going to present challenges and things for the team to fight, make sure that the team is unified, so that the only person you're fighting is the project. I just think that's really well said and very wise, and I think it does go in line with, how do we present solutions and not problems? And really, the root of this quote of, don't tell me what you can't do, tell me what you can do is most people are open to that. If one of my trade partners comes to me and says, Mark, I can't make the wood do that, I'm going to accept that. I'm like, Okay, if this was my golden question, if this was your home, how would you solve this problem? 99% of the time we do whatever the next thing out of that person's mouth is, I can't think of a time actually, where that wasn't what we did, because they're not doing it to be confrontational, they're not doing it to be a hurdle. They're trying to solve the problem. They're just bringing it to your attention. And it might take a while certain companies. May not make access that easy to them. I would say, if you're an owner where it's very hard for people to get ahold of you, you might rethink that. And I think we also need to empower our team to make decisions on our behalf. And I think this is where culture another great quote is culture Trump. Strategy or culture eats strategy for breakfast. And if you have a culture of relying on each other, if you have a culture of re of helping each other, if you have a culture of community, of communication, you as the owner, don't often have to deal with a lot of these things, because your team, and by extension, the team, I mean all the people you work with, including your trade partners, architects, designers, like they're all creatively trying to solve it as well. And so because very rarely, in my opinion, does the owner of the company have all the answers, they might be the bottleneck of all the answers. I know for myself, I haven't say I don't really know that much. Someone the other day was commenting in a negative connotation. They're like, Well, Mark doesn't pound any nails. He doesn't he's not actually a builder. He can't build anything. That's true. I can't build anything physically with my hands. I'm also not interested in doing it either. That doesn't mean I'm not a builder. Because Henry form isn't in the assembly line building every single one of his cars. Does that mean his cars don't drive? No, they drive. Absolutely did. Steve Jobs have his hand in every single thing that happened with the iPod, with the iPad, with the iPhones that he created. No. He had a very No. Was he instrumental? Of course, without Steve Jobs, most of that stuff never happens. But Johnny Ives was his designer. He has a whole team that put it all together. So to say that that a company is only the sum of one person is completely misrepresenting the whole point of a team. Tom Brady won a bunch of championships incorrect. His team won a bunch of championships. Now, was he a major reason for it? Absolutely, but he'd be probably the first person to tell you that he couldn't do it if his center wasn't snapping in the ball, if his wide receiver wasn't catching it, or if his running back wasn't holding onto the ball like none of this works without a team aspect, and I think it's at our own detriment if we a make ourself the bottleneck to our own success, which to be clear, I think a lot of us do. I know I have made that mistake many, many times, because I think it's something that naturally happens, unless you actively fight against it. I think teaching your people that they can make decisions by themselves, teaching your people that they that you will support the decision, and it's hard to support it when it's wrong, but then really just offering a path forward. So anyway, we went a little sideways on that quote, but you didn't tune in this podcast if you didn't know it's going to go sideways. So that's on you. Okay, let's see Scottish proverb, good job. Be happy while living, or be a long time dead. That was good. That reminds me of one I just saw yesterday, which is, fear never stopped death, but it sure stopped living. I think the way I'm going to take this quote is, I hope you enjoy being an entrepreneur. I hope you enjoy owning a business. I hope you enjoy working with your clients. I hope you enjoy getting better. I hope you enjoy learning to try to get better. Because if you don't enjoy it, if you don't find joy in the process, you know, perhaps you're in the wrong profession. A long time listener of the show John, you know who you are, if you're listening, people kept asking him all the time about being retired, and he called, he said the R word. He goes, I hate the R word. And he said, I don't want to retire. I don't like to be retired. I have no interest in being retired. He's in his 70s, and he had this great quote. He said, if you're constantly thinking about retirement, perhaps you've chosen the wrong profession. And I just think that is an amazing quote. And he's right. I think when you are really passionate about what you do, and if you really enjoy it, that it's you can live and you can enjoy while you're doing it. And I think that's important. I think it's important to find people on your team in your community, in this case, building like that's one of the one things I love about the curious builder collectives or the contractor coalition is it's so empowering to be around other like minded people, and you can grow your business, and they can grow their business, and so anyway, there's a lot of life there. Great quote, oh, I've said this many times in the podcast. It's Next up on my thought list. But boundaries create freedom. Discipline equals freedom. Is the one Jocko Willick always says as well. But you know, I want if you've listened this podcast, you've heard me talk about this quote, but I'll give it its day, and it really just boundaries. If you set boundaries, you don't have to make a decision. You've already set the boundary. For me, I know that every morning I'm going to be exercising because physical health is important. I have a lot of goals around certain races that I want to do, and that's the time of day that I can do that I know that. You know what I drink and what I eat and all those things fuel performance. So again, it's creating a boundary for me in this season of life, like I know I'm going to bed pretty much every night between 845, and nine, because I can't get up at 459, or 420 or whatever time of the week that I'm getting up at unless I go to bed early. That's a boundary as it relates to business. I've spoken on this many, many times because it's been so helpful for my own career, which is, I don't take client meetings at night or on the weekends. I have a young family, and honestly, even if I didn't, I still don't think it's healthy, because you need to show up Monday excited to work like today is my. Day that I'm recording this, that, yes, this episode will air on a Thursday, but like, I was jacked to get in the studio. Like I was chomping at the bit, and I was sick, which is very rare,
Mark D. Williams 10:09
last week, I missed a few days at the office last week, and I was like, I'm ready to go and so, but you can't do that if you're always working. And I think it's been a long time for me to sort of trick my brain into not checking emails on the weekends. I don't always do it. I talk a lot about trying not to do it, and I struggle. I go through like anybody. I go through seasons. There'll be right now I'm in a season of probably a couple months where I don't work on the weekends at all, and then there are some times where I feel like behind the eight ball and I really just need to catch up, so maybe an hour or two on Saturday or an hour or two on Sunday over the kids' naps or something like that. But by and large, those boundaries, the freedom that you get in return is you get the energy to apply to the things that you want. And it's kind of like work hard, play hard, live hard, sleep hard. I don't really have a problem going to bed, thank goodness, because I'm exhausted and I wake up ready to roll the next day.
Mark D. Williams 11:09
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Anyway, I think these boundaries really do lead to freedom. It could be maybe you set precedences on like, until I get the sale, I'm not going to do this. I used to have, whenever I buy a truck for the company, I would always try to pay cash for it. And if I couldn't, I didn't like financing things long term. And so what I did for me was I like, kind of like a progress so I would buy, like, an f1 50. And let's just say, back then I was 5070, grand, whatever it was, I'd put like $30,000 down. And then every time I'd have a successful closing, I'd put 10,000 down towards that truck. Just pay it off. That was a boundary, like I didn't want to take the profit. I want to take it off. And Michael Michalowicz is a well known business author who talks about profit first, and basically taking profit out of every paycheck. That was that's a really helpful principle of a book. If you haven't read it, I'd highly, highly recommend it. It's a great read. This one's from Jim Carrey. Great quote. You can fail at a safe job, so you might as well fail at something you love. That's a great quote. I again, I was just speaking about like, I hope you love what you do. I think if you're gonna fail, but you love doing it, like, that's okay. I don't think anybody wants to fail, but if you are really passionate about an idea about the pursuit of something, like, it's okay to fail. As a parent, I'm telling my kids that you don't win all the time, and that's a difficult thing to teach a child when they want to play a board game, and if they lose, they pout all those things. And honestly, as adults, I don't think we're any different. Most of us have a hard time dealing with losing, but I think adversity is going to precede prosperity. I think you need adversity in order to grow and to get better. You can't get stronger unless you break down your muscle tissues and get strong and build up that muscle. You can't run faster unless you get sore and you suffer from the training. I think businesses like that too. I think you can't just have success after success after success. You need failure in order to have bigger steps forward. Hopefully it's not one step forward, two back, one forward, two back. I mean, no one wants to do that slow. Blog. I think we all have, but hopefully it's not forever. It'd be nice to have like, hey, five or six successes, one or two failures, three or four successes, one failure. I mean, obviously that would go a lot better and easier to handle mentally. But I think again, if you're gonna fail, fail at something you believe in. And I think even if you're thinking about starting a business or a side business. If it's something you really are passionate about, you can will it into existence. I sometimes wonder what's more impressive, like the idea or the will behind it. I kind of think you need both, because it's, yeah, I don't know if I could say like without the because without the will, the dream will not come into so I probably the will. Because if you a lot of people dream, but then don't do anything about it. I think if you the willpower to make the dream a reality is far more rare than it is to just dream. I think lots of people dream. You think about inventions and inventors. I think some people are serial inventors. I know some people that have, like, four or five businesses, impressive. They're really good at creating things, but I think what they're probably really good at is building a team, but I think they're also really good at willpower and that they're willing it into existence. I don't think your clients, whatever you're creating, whether whatever business model you're creating are telling you what it is. It's like you're informing the clients what you are, and it's your pulse on what the client that you're trying to attract that you hopefully you get that right, and especially for presenting something new. Anyway, this one's funny. Dead fish go with the flow. I think that's just kind of funny. Number one, I just picture these dead fish floating down a river, which is what the quote is. But I think of like life. Life is a struggle. I think of like salmon in an Alaskan stream, like they're swimming upstream to spawn, they're fighting the current. And there's another quote that comes to me right now that it was like in matters of style, swim with the current. In matters of principle, stand like a rock. And I used to think about that a lot spiritually, the things that I believed especially foundational things like, those are rocks. Those are rocks in your life. Those are boundaries that create freedom. Like, you know what you're going to do. For me, it was reading and praying. Those are things that are important to me, and they're things that I believe in. So like, they're non negotiables. It's what I'm going to do and but then, in style, you can moderate in the current in this example, in this quote, but I like that too. From a business standpoint, you are, I think, if you're always swimming, in this case, let's say you're a builder, and you're doing everything that anyone else is doing all the time. Like, what's different? How are you different? One of the things that's the most energizing is putting a lot of thought behind something you believe and something that's different, and now you've got a really a one two punch. One of the things that I'm most excited about, if you've been following our curious or the Mark Williams Custom Homes, either Instagram account or what we're doing, was we have this house called misah, who's and it's our first spec home in 1516, years. In the whole home is based on wellness. And it's, it centers so much around what I personally believe, but it also centers a lot around my craft and what I'm passionate about, and creating this whole brand about it that's different, like it's, it is a market disruptor, because it is definitely different. And I tell you what people are noticing, I can't tell you. I can't tell if it's the idea or the marketing or the willpower that we've put behind it, but one of those three things is definitely working, because the amount of people that have asked me about it, that have reached out clients that are interested in the home or the concept or the philosophy, has been really encouraging. And so, yeah, it does take a lot of effort and time to think about something that's different. And I think there's a lot of pressure sometimes to think outside the box, to be super creative. And many people don't think that they are creative. I would challenge you that I think you're most people are more creative than they think, or they see a good idea. I mean, most I think, what's that other good quote, which is, necessity is the mother of invention. Most innovations happen because we're trying to solve something else, or we're trying to fix something, and along the way, we come up with a better way to do it. And so maybe your innovation, or your creativity, is solving a problem and then sharing that solution with other people. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I think that's a great way to look at, what is your marketing plan, or what do you want to do differently? Maybe it's how you service your clients. Maybe it's how you communicate with your clients. Maybe it's hospitality like, what how do you treat your clients during the build? They don't have to be these huge, grandiose industry shakers. I mean, sure those are great, and those are nice and those are amazing, but it could be small things just and I think one of my favorite books last year was unreasonable hospitality. I've spoken a lot about it on the podcast, but what dawned on me while reading that book is that hospital. Fatality doesn't always take a lot of money. What it does take is a lot of thought. And I think if we can show thoughtfulness towards our clients, towards our peers, towards our employees, towards our partners, like that alone could be the market disruptor, because if people have a choice of who they want to work with and they know that's how you conduct yourself. You have a huge competitive advantage. Have you ever had a question that you really want to know the answer to and dive really deep on it? Or have someone that you feel like is in a safe space that maybe is even outside of your state, where you can really ask any question, knowing that they'll be honest and open and help you Well, you're in luck. The curious builder is available for one on one consulting. You can go to the curious builder podcast.com and book a time with me for one hour under the one for one page. I look forward to talking with you soon. Thanks for
Mark D. Williams 20:53
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21:11
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