Q & A Episode 65 - Behind the Scenes at Sauna Camp 2.0: How Builders Build Community (and Sweat Together)

Oct 29

Episode #65 | Q&A with Mark D. Williams | Behind the Scenes at Sauna Camp 2.0

In this Q&A episode, Mark gives us the scoop on Sauna Camp 2.0, the buzz around the epic 45 White Oak build, and what's happening with his own Mysa Hus project. He opens up about leadership hiccups, the ups and downs of running a construction team, and why wellness and good vibes matter when building standout homes. If you're into behind-the-scenes stories, practical builder tips, and a few laughs along the way, this one’s right up your alley!

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 00:00
We're excited to announce that we're bringing back Sonic camp 2.0 on March 20, from two to 8pm we had this last year. We had 42 owners. This year, we're maxing out the capacity of the camp, which is going to be 60 people. We're going to have a wellness panel with some Everest summiters, as well as some iron men and women to compete and all about wellness and how they prioritize their health and wellness, not only in training, but in their lifestyles and in their business. And then we're gonna have a two hour window of sauna and cold plunging in the lake, and then an amazing wood fired grill, Mediterranean style food at the end of that. So if you're interested, please head to cures, builder.com under retreats, you'll find everything there is about sauna camp on March 20 in Minnesota,

Mark D. Williams 00:47
anytime you're doing a spec home, like the juice is burning. And so, you know, the days of construction really matter. I mean, they always matter. I mean, whether you're spending your money or clients money like it matters. And so I'd like to think that in general. You know, I think our building community does a really good job of tracking the schedule.

Mark D. Williams 01:12
All right, welcome to here's builder Podcast. I'm Mark lunsha house. Today is Thursday, our little QA session got some new updates, which will be kind of fun to talk about here for the next 20 minutes. One is we are launching sauna camp again, 2.0 so last year, in January, we did sauna camp. We had 42 builders that came and joined. We're out at Camp Donna doing on Christmas Lake. Amazing experience. We had Dr Mel Krug led us through some breath work for a half hour. And then we did sauna cold plunge in the lake. And then had this amazing Mediterranean style meal after I think that was the highlight everyone was just maybe because everyone was so hungry from salt deprivation in the saunas, the food tastes amazing. So we're running that back. That's going to be March 20. We just updated the website so tickets are now available. If you're interested. We do expect this to sell out. Last year we had 42 this time, we bought out the camp at 60 people. That's gonna be a different location. It's at Lake independence, which is about 30 minutes west of the Minneapolis area. We had probably five eight people that flew in last year, so we're starting to get some people that really love our winners. I know in Minnesota, we're leaning into them. So we hope to see you there. What's really cool about this particular sauna camp is decided to do a wellness podcast before the sauna camp. So we've got Ryan Rivard. He's climbed Mount Everest. He's given talks about it. I know he talks a lot about addiction and overcoming it, things like that, as well as he's an Ironman finisher, Leadville 100 finisher. He's got a ton of athletic achievements. And so I just want to talk about, you know, how wellness has impacted his life, and how he uses it in his business. We have also have Alex Larson, who's a professional nutritionalist, and Iron Man finisher as well. I should say Ian woman finisher. She's amazing and and then we're gonna have one more person we have yet to name. I believe they're a psychiatrist. We're still working through what the angle is there, but I just thought it'd be really fun to have a different angle on the podcast. So that'll be to that small audience. We'll, of course, record it and re air it for the audience at large. And if you're interested, please go to cures builder.com and you can join us at Sonic camp on March 20. We'll also be seeing that in our newsletters here, going out as well if you subscribe to our newsletter. So if you don't, I'd recommend it, because that's where you're gonna find all the updates and kind of the sneak peeks and promo codes that we send out there. We are a week and a half away. Actually, by the time this episode airs, we'll be eight days away from contractor Coalition. We are essentially sold out, which is amazing. I think they've had a streak now of three and a half years of selling out contractor coalition Summit in Chicago, which is amazing. There's also our next one is going to be next spring in Denver, which is going to be great. So we'll give it a little probably 3040, days of breathing. You've heard me talk a lot about contractor coalition, but the next one will be, I think it's in April. We'll be in Denver, so that'll be a great location. And then I'm really excited. I'm actually heading out to Boston this week. A lot of people know. Friend of the show, Nick Schiffer from NS builders. He's my business partner at contractor coalition Summit. He's been building this house for last couple of years called 45 white oak if you oak if you haven't checked it out, head to ns builders.com it's an incredible house. I've never seen a house with this much attention to, not only detail, but really just the depth of execution and the in the depth of vision that Nick has had, you know, to what he wants to build here. And so I'll report next week, after I go out there about the things that really impressed me. We're gonna actually do kind of a ride along video where I'm going to be miked up, Nick will be miked up, and we'll kind of be doing kind of not really a podcast episode, but kind of almost like a ride along. And it's just going to be curious. Builder takes a visit to Boston and gets a check out this incredible house. So he's probably 3045, days away from being 100% finished. And if you've been following along on his Instagram feed, that you know, this home is something really special. I think one of the things that identifies it the most is like, you know, he took a trip with his team to Germany to like the Black Forest, a single. Source all the white oak in the house. I mean, who does that? Nick does, evidently. And so I'm just so excited. I know his thought process and his just commitment to what he wants to bring forward to this highest level of not only building science, but execution of design. I'm just really, really excited to see, you know, the lessons that he's learned. I want to see in person, of course, and there are some, there are quite a few parallels between what I'm what he's done, and what I'm doing at Misa, who's here in cottagewood, Minnesota. So Misa, who's we just did a live podcast last week to all the sponsors, which is really, really encouraging. We had, we closed it down. It was just to 27 of our brand partners, and I interviewed Mark Cabrera and Mark Brandon Hoff from Pella windows, as well as Rockwell and Huber. And really it was just, just to show to our community and to our sponsors what it is we're doing. We'll air that podcast in a couple of weeks, and I think this is something I probably want to do on a more regular basis at the homes that we build, you know, I sort of benefit from the fact that I don't build that many homes, meaning that we build really high end homes, but we only build a handful of them. So we're building probably anywhere from four to seven projects. Obviously, these projects takes a long time. So you know, if they're on a year and a half cadence, you know, I might only actually close three or four a year. We might be working on five to seven, depending on where they're at design. And so I just like this idea of we shut the job down for a day, and, you know, we've got snacks and food and lunch and all those things, and just really take a time out to really appreciate, you know, what we're doing and what we're accomplishing that was really gratifying. We'll also do a couple more at the end. And so right now, my mind is, you know, Nick is about a year further advanced than I am with 45 white oak he's announced the sale price, I think it's in the $12 million range. He's announced, you know, what his goals are. He's getting ready to stage it. He's got the New York Times interested in doing an article in the mansion sections. He's got, you know, photographer flying out of country so that they can appeal to a worldwide base, because, you know, Nick's ultimate goal is to build the coolest homes in the world, all over the world. And so this is really his proof of concept. It's quite a bit different than what my concept is with Misa, who's but again, a lot of similarities. And he and I are actually, if you're going to contractor coalition in Chicago, Nick and I are doing a tandem talk for about 45 minutes all about branding. And Nick's going to talk about 45 white oak and all the things that he has tried to do in terms of branding and what it means to have a clear vision and how the team coalesces around it. And as a leader, how do you convey your message to not only your people, your trades people, your craftsmen, your architecture designers, all your partners, but also to your end user. And I'll talk about the same thing that I'm doing for Misa, who's you know, for me, specifically, I took about it a little bit now, is I didn't want to come to market, like most homes are brought to market. I wanted to do something creative, something unique, something different. And so for me, when you build a spec home that's for sale, there's no end user, and so you really have to pick, is it? Is it an empty nester couple? Is it a young family? And it's hard if you appeal to everybody, you sort of appeal to nobody, in my opinion. And I felt like I if you get too specific, then you sort of alienate everybody anyway. And so I, for me, what really unlocked it was wellness, and because of sauna camp, because of boot camp, because of, you know, all the natural interests that I have in natural health, and just how I feel like I felt like this house was sort of a manifestation of all the things that I personally value, in terms of, like a wellness, but also on a structural design. On those levels too. It's like the two meet together. And I'm really I couldn't be more excited about this house, and which is sort of interesting, because it's not all sunshine and rainbows like obviously we market what we're doing. If you haven't followed us, you can go to our Instagram page. You know, it's Misa, who's h, u, s, obviously you see it on our M, D, W page as well, and our curious builder, because we're doing a ton of cross promotion between all three brands. But come to find out, granted, we're at we just finished all the rough ins, and we're insulating, and it kind of came to a head. I got an email last week from one of our trade partners just saying how frustrated they were, you know, with the project, and I guess it's falling in line with our fail Thursdays. I guess I'm going here now. And it was, it was really disheartening, because I love this house. I'm having the time in my life. I could not be more proud of the home and how we're executing on it. And I know I've picked just the best people, the best trades, the best designers. I mean, we are just everyone is putting forth a effort. There's no bad actors here. But when I talk to my project manager, and Mike is very quiet. He doesn't, you know, rock the boat too much. He just kind of gets through it. And he just said, yeah, actually, all the trade partners have been frustrated with this house. I. And I was like, Really, all of them, and I talked to the architect, the designers, everybody's frustrated, evidently, except for me, which kind of reminds me of that old adage that you know, if you walk into a room and you don't know who the idiot is, it's you. And so I guess maybe I'm the problem. And I think I know, I think I know what the problem is. I

Mark D. Williams 10:26
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I you know how we talk on the podcast all the time, and I know I've certainly talked about it that if we change our operation for a client because we're trying to, you know, the client says, hey, I want to be involved with selections, or I want to do project manager, you know, whatever ridiculous scenario as a custom home builder or someone who's an entrepreneur like you should not let your client dictate how you run your job like they're attracted to your company because you do good work, and your body of work represents why they're attracted to you. So if they want the same body of work, if they want to fulfill the dream that they see in you, then you need to tell them how this ship rolls you. Christopher Columbus didn't let the passenger drive his ship like he was driving the ship. I think the mistake that I made was and this is my fault. I took 100% ownership of this. I sent out an email to every trade partner, my design partner, my architect partner, and I just said, you know, this is my fault. And I think what it was, it was a gap in leadership. And you think, Well, how could that be? I'm talking about Misa, who's day and night, like, how could i How is there not leadership there? And I think what I did was I, I was so aware of how I wanted the pro of I assembled the team and I and I still believe I had the best team. So it's not that, it's just that I essentially delegated the decision making to, you know, essentially unfairly to my design team, and it wasn't fair, because I said, Hey, you make all the decisions and just go. And that would be fine if they could actually do that. But they sort of had one hand tied behind their back, because we're working on a lot of brand deals. I'm working on a lot of other national accounts, trying to bring awareness to what we're doing here. And, you know, we're doing a lot of trade for materials, things like that. And so, you know, they would go out select something, I would see the pricing like, oh, that's way too high. Or, Oh, guess what? I just got a new, new partner, and now we need to figure out this. So it was, it was a little chaotic, not a little chaotic, a lot chaotic. And it really wasn't fair to the design team, because they now are have the responsibility of being the designer and the GC. And that's not fair, you know. And I apologize to them. That's my fault. And so, you know, even today, in our operations meeting, like we're essentially as a team, we're huddling getting all the decisions back in line, and saying, hey, you know what? Going forward, this is how we're going to proceed. Like to think, after 21 years of doing this, you learn your lesson. But you know, here i i Here, I did it again. I We keep on making mistakes. So anyway, this is, I guess my mea culpa, my my apology to my team. Podcast wasn't meant to be that. But I guess here we are so, but I'm I'm still excited. I'm still completely undaunted. Everyone's, you know, there, everyone's on board. Everyone wants to do their best work. And so it just reminds me again, that as much as we communicate, we can just, we can never not communicate enough. You know, no one is ever going to say, you know, stop communicating with me. You're communicating too much. They could ignore you or delete the emails or phone calls, but no one's ever going to say, no one's ever complained and said, Oh, you've communicated too much. So anyway, back to where I was going with this with brand. Is I'm excited. To basically do this presentation with Nick, you know about Misa, who's and just talk about what we're doing with brand, and kind of really get into it. Because I would love, obviously, the proof is in the pudding. We'll see when we get to the end here. The home is gonna be finished in May for Misa house. It'll be an artist in home tour in June. And we have a we're gonna do a number of live events there. We'll probably do five or six different events. Like, I'm really heavy on the entertainment side. One thing I've noticed is just, I mean, I love to educate and I love to entertain, and doing both is obviously magic. And so I know I believe heavily in, you know, how can we how can we entertain? When people come through our home, I think it's a little bit like, if you have guests over to your house, it's not like you just feed them dinner and then you go eat in the living room while they, you know, eat in your dining room alone. That'd be weird. Like, you know, there's a there's the art of how you entertain your guests. And, you know, I think it's really no shade on, however, the builders like to do it, but I have just found so much success and honestly, enjoyment in engaging with people differently when they come through our homes. I love giving them something unexpected, a little gift, a little something. From me to you, to remember this home buy, you know, maybe it's a bag. Maybe I've heard seen people do custom cookies. I love live music. I mean, there's just so many things. I don't think it's one thing. I think it's a series of things. Also, community involvement. How can you get your local, cities and communities and towns or kids involved? You know, we've done in the past where we'll do, like a kids scavenger hunt, where we'll, you know, we'll have kids, come on. You got to be a little careful with this one. You can't have too many and, you know, obviously there's some, probably insurance issues, you should check with your insurance provider, which is, oddly enough, my insurance guy, Caldwell, is having this podcast. He must have known I was going to do something that would be a little risky. But I love we all want younger generations involved with homes. And you know, I remember asking an excavator one time, like, at what age do people sort of do kids like, stop being super interested in excavating equipment. His comment was, like, somewhere around, like, nine or 10 years old. So like, those early years, though, like, everyone wants to be a digger, and everyone wants to, you know, see the construction going up, which is great. Captivate on that energy. Involve the kids in your community. Involve them in your home. And we try to do that consistently. You know, on all of our homes, really, we'll send out like a letter to all the community and say, Hey, apologies in advance for disturbing. We do a lot of tear down so disturbing your neighborhood. We're really excited to build, you know, a home in your community. We'll be here for the long haul. Please reach out to us if you have any comments and concerns, but just kind of getting ahead of that messaging and letting them know that you care about what you're doing, and you have to obviously do it. If you don't, it's going to show up pretty clearly. So anyway, you know, back to to the branding side of it. I'm, I'm just really excited to see, you know, what are some of the lessons that Nick has learned? There's also the part of it where you've got finance, anytime you're doing a spec home, like the juice is burning. And so, you know, the days of construction really matter. I mean, they always matter. I mean, whether you're spending your money or clients money like it matters. And so I'd like to think that in general, you know, I think our building community does a really good job of tracking the schedule. I think one thing I didn't do a good enough job on earlier on my career is setting realistic expectations, both with the homeowner and even with our team, you know, so now I usually ask our my, I mean, I have my I don't set a schedule. I haven't set a schedule in five or six years. And it's really up to the project management team to convey, like, how much time do they need? I mean, a lot. I'm, you know, getting far and farther away from the day to day. It's not fair for me to go in there and say, Oh, I think you should be able to do drywall in seven days. When they've already talked to the partner, they already know it's going to take 13 take 13 days, and then an extra day for touch ups, things like that, so like, trust your team. The thing that's probably been the most helpful in terms of timing is that 30 day window at the end. I spoke about this before, but I'll speak about it now, because it's I was just looking at my schedule. We're going to be done in May, and then I have this 30 day period before the tour starts in June, which is great. Allows us to get photography, final cleaning, you know, take advantage of some, you know, some marketing, you know, maybe some television, things like that, because now you have a finished home where it seems like we're always just finishing right before the House is ready, and it's always just really stressful on the team and on the people. And so it's nice to have this 30 day window. So a couple years ago, actually learned this for learned this from I can't remember if it was Brad or Nick at contractor coalition summit, but they talked about this 30 day. I think it was Brad. This 30 day finished schedule, and we have it built right into our builder trend schedule, where it says that whenever you get your certificate of occupancy from the

Mark D. Williams 19:39
city, it's 30 days after that that you can move in. And I remember for the majority of my career, call it 18 years. You would the clients would move in within four or five days of having that CO I mean, there is you're just as we all know, in construction, you're going up to the last minute to get it done. Then you do a final walk through with. A client, and they give you their list of things that they don't find satisfactory, or you've gone through and kind of pre punched it out. But now you have like, four days, you know, you get it done on a Monday. They move in on a Friday. You got four days to do like, three weeks worth of work, like it's just not going to happen. And then you spend six months scheduling around their schedule. Now they're in the home. Their movers dinged up some walls, but guess what? You'll just take care of it. So it's costing you money. It's costing you a ton of time, but honestly, it's costing you a ton of capital with the client, because no matter how good you do it, it's not very efficient, and no matter how you do it, it's really inconvenient for the client, and they just want to be done. They've been building and designing with you for a couple of years, like they want to live and enjoy their house. So if you tell them on the beginning before you ever start, like, Hey, this is our normal protocol, and we have 30 days at the end like they don't bat an eye, never had a client question me, and guess what? Now we don't have to chase it. Now, anything that happens after they move in, no problem, goes on the One Year list. That's not called that's not punch list items, that's callback, that's one year performance. So it just goes on the list, and then after one year, we do our performance walk through. I think I even want to change how that is. I think we should really schedule that one week punch list, you know, for like, a week when they're out of town, and just say, hey, we need you out of the house for this one week. Can we schedule around one of your vacations? We'll just, we'll, we'll come in, obviously, ahead of time, document everything you let's know when you're going to gone. We'll come in, we'll knock it all out, have the house cleaned. You move back in. Everything's done. It's so difficult to go in and out of people's homes, especially if they have young kids, you know, babies, things like that. It's just not the best and so just thinking about different ways to make sure that a client stays happy. So anyway, a little bit. You got the variety show today on the Q A this what happens when I don't have a guest, I'm just distracting myself. So you got a little bit of everything. Hope you enjoyed it. It's an update from the curious builder. See you next week. Thanks for tuning in the 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.