As remodeling companies grow, owners face the challenges of deciding when leaders are needed, how to find them, and train them to be good leaders. In this episode of PowerTips Unscripted, Wayne Ottum discusses these challenges and provides tools and methodologies for facing these challenges head-on. In addition, he talks about how he helps owners create a business that works for them.
Wayne Ottum is a senior consultant at Remodelers Advantage. Wayne has over 30 years of experience, with 15 of those years specializing in the remodeling industry. He helps create clear and compelling paths for owners to meet their goals.
On this episode of PowerTips Unscripted, Jody McLeod joins the show to answer legal questions, including whether companies are set up to withstand a legal challenge. Jody discusses the best way to ensure having a complete personnel file for each employee, including documentation of conversations and key facts, so that you can support yourself and your company during a legal trial. Jody also advises business owners to help them avoid lawsuits through a complete onboarding process and proper training for all managers.
Jody, an attorney, and former Fortune 500 legal executive is the Founder and Principal of McLeod Legal Solutions (MLS). MLS partners with business owners to protect their business during HR and employee relations disputes with direct access to litigators, employment lawyers, and legal executives from Fortune 500 companies. Jody specializes in employment law, litigation and litigation management, compliance, investigations, and training.
A personal vision statement charts your course — in life and in business. If you don’t have one, you might as well be lost at sea when you’re making decisions.
For Dave Bryan, his personal vision statement serves as his North Star, allowing him to plot his course through his life. “There are a million ways in any given day to get knocked off course,” he says. “Everything you do should be in support of your life, and having a personal vision statement can help you stay on the path and keep on track.”
In this meaningful episode, Dave talks to Victoria and Mark about the genesis of the idea for him, how he did it, and gives tips for how you can write your own. Most importantly, he shares his reasons why you should.
Dave president of Blackdog Builders, with offices in Salem and Amherst, NH. After starting his business in 1989, he’s built Blackdog into a strong, consistently profitable business, with several diversifications under its umbrella. Dave is an entrepreneur who is known for the discipline and care with which he runs his company. Dave is also one of our popular Roundtables facilitators, where he shares his story with the groups.
Being an entrepreneur can be lonely, with no one to keep you accountable. Planning your life and using a personal vision statement can help define your goals. Dave’s path to writing his own statement began with the recession in 2008. “It was brutal,” he says. But defining the goals and intentions for his life going forward was a turning point.
You’ll hear Dave’s personal vision statement and learn why he won’t share it in written form. But you have to do the work yourself for your own, he says. Dave covers how to develop your personal vision statement, and what it can do for your life and business, including:
Reviewing employees in the remodeling world is, at best, a struggle.
It is often an employee’s opportunity to ask for a raise and an employer’s opportunity for frustration.
Tim Faller joins Mark and Victoria to talk about the necessary fundamental shift in the employee review process. Tim makes the transition from podcast host to guest to talk about his efforts towards reworking the employee review process in this episode.
Tim is a senior consultant here at Remodelers Advantage and known throughout the industry as the “Guru of Production.”
Do you remove your shoes when you visit a customer’s home? How do I control others’ first impressions of me? Is it ever appropriate to begin eating before everyone is served? Find the answers to these questions and more when Daniel Post Senning joins the show.
Daniel is the great-great-grandson of Emily Post and discusses the importance of etiquette and how you can use it while interacting with affluent clients who expect a certain standard of conduct. He explains that etiquette is really a combination of manners (language), plus principles (consideration, respect, and honesty), and how they guide behavior and how that behavior impacts others.
Daniel Post Senning is from the Emily Post Institute, which is a fifth-generation family business that promotes etiquette tips and techniques based on consideration, respect, and honesty. Daniel is also an author and co-host of the Awesome Etiquette podcast.
In this informative and fun podcast, Victoria, Mark, and Daniel talk more about:
Table etiquette for any setting
Business advice that can help you control customer impressions
In this episode, we take a closer look at the sales process. We are always looking for fresh ideas and concepts that apply specifically to remodelers and those in the building community.
Our guest Jen Neige is adamant that you should be selling to design, NOT designing to sell, and she shares how you can improve your closing ratio, gain more control of the sales cycle and earn a design fee within two hours.
Jan Neiges is a National Kitchen and Bath certified Kitchen Designer and on the nine-member board for NKBA. Jan brings her 20 years of experience as a kitchen and bath designer and her 40 years of sales experience to share the selling process that she has developed.
Victoria, Mark and Jan talk more about:
Background on how Jan began working on this process.
Why this process is so important for remodelers to consider.
What some of the issues are within the industry faces that drives the need for using this process.
Today on PowerTips Unscripted, Lane Cooper joins the show to discuss the large project sales process. Price is a process like design. Setting our clients up for a successful pricing process is critical to large remodeling projects moving forward through design into construction. Lane walks us through his pricing process to manage clients’ price expectations.
Lane Cooper is the President and founder of COOPER Design Build in Portland, OR., and is a valued Roundtables member. COOPER Design Build specializes in large remodeling and addition projects.
Victoria, Mark, and Lane talk more about…
Scope Creep
Challenges of selling and pricing major additions and whole house remodels
Determining if the project is suitable for your company
As remodeling companies grow, owners face the challenges of deciding when leaders are needed, how to find them, and train them to be good leaders. In this episode of PowerTips Unscripted, Wayne Ottum discusses these challenges and provides tools and methodologies for facing these challenges head-on. In addition, he talks about how he helps owners create a business that works for them.
Wayne Ottum is a senior consultant at Remodelers Advantage. Wayne has over 30 years of experience, with 15 of those years specializing in the remodeling industry. He helps create clear and compelling paths for owners to meet their goals.
Today on PowerTips Unscripted, Mark and Victoria are joined by Michael Hodgin to discuss using the financial review to pivot to profitability. A complete understanding and review of your company’s financials is a practice that requires a disciplined effort. However, with this practice in place, an owner will be able to use the information from these reviews to pivot when and where necessary to be more profitable year over year. Using his expertise as a former business owner and a business coach, Michael talks about how he examines a company’s financial statements, including what KPIs to review and whom to review the financials with.
Michael was an owner of a successful remodeling company for over 22 years. He has since left and is the owner of Maestro’s Toolbox, where he works with owners of design-build companies across the country to help them build better companies and, therefore, better lives. In addition, Michael has been part of the roundtables as an owner, a facilitator for roundtables meetings, and part of the Remodelers Advantage Business Coaching team.