Mark: Today on PowerTips Unscripted, we talked to Bruce Case, president and CEO of Case Design Remodeling, with locations in Maryland, Washington, D.C., and Virginia. You know, you could say a remodeling project is one long relay race with handoff points throughout. And just like a relay race, if you drop the baton, your race is done. Well, Bruce is here to share tips and techniques on one of the most critical baton passes of the entire project the sales to production.

Victoria: Hi, I’m Victoria Downing and welcome to PowerTips Unscripted, where we talk about tips, tactics and techniques to help you build a strong, profitable remodeling company. And I’m here with my co-host, Mark Harari.

Mark: You sure are.

Victoria: Hey, Mark, how’s it going today?

Mark: It’s going pretty good. How are you?

Victoria: Good. I love doing this, so it’s always fun and you know it’s on. Today we’re recording on a Friday, so we’re all even more chipper than usual.

Mark: Yes. It’s almost time for the weekend.

Victoria: You know, there’s. I think I’ve always tell people that I think that, business owners who own remodeling companies and can really make a good, strong, healthy, wonderful living are pretty darn talented because this is not an easy business.

Mark: I don’t believe that’s an understatement.

Victoria: Yeah, right. So many moving parts. So what we’re going to talk about today is particularly interesting to me because I, I, I agree with our guests that it is one of the few major linchpins in making all the other pieces work.

Mark: I think it’s probably I think I would venture to say that virtually everyone listening right now, this is their weakest link in their company.

Victoria: I wonder, I bet. Yeah, I think it could be.

Mark: Even if even if they’re pretty good at it, I would think that they could be better.

Victoria: Well it’s one of our earlier guests. Remember we were talking to Jeremy Martin. Not too long ago. And he was talking about that even though they’ve been really focused on this particular issue, the hand off that they still work on it constantly to try to tweak it and improve it and make it better.

Mark: Yeah.

Victoria: So let’s get going. Bruce Case is our guest today, and he’s the president and CEO of Case Design Remodeling Incorporated, one of the largest full service remodeling firms in the nation, with over 60 million in annual revenue. Operations are focused in the Washington, D.C. area, and they bring clients a unique mix of design, build, and home improvement services.

Victoria: Over the last 15 years, Casey’s extended its reach across the U.S. through a network of licensees and franchisees. Is working under Case Handyman and Remodeling Services, LLC. Finding these initiatives is a focus on inspiring team members and clients. Bruce. Welcome aboard. Thanks for being here.

Bruce: Thank you. I’m excited. Thank you very much, Victoria. Appreciate it.

Victoria: You know, it’s always fun to have you be one of our presenters and share some of the, insights you’ve gained over your many years of exposure to this industry. I mean, cripes, you started hearing about this at the dinner table probably when you were about four.

Bruce: Yes. Yeah. And it wasn’t it wasn’t the production to sales handoff specifically. But yeah, digging ditches and other things.

Victoria: Yeah. So why do you feel that this is such an important part of the process?

Bruce: You know, in listening to some of your other podcasts, Todd Jackson, and one of the podcasts talked about, I think he said, you make money in sales and you lose money in production. My view is if it’s a short term look, that may be true, but long term, I think it actually you make and lose money in both.

Bruce: So one is making money, you know, because as you say, it’s a hard business and all. But the almost, bigger driver for me is the client and the team experience. Because when that handoff is bad, nobody ends up happy. The carpenters, the project managers, salespeople, clients, importantly. And so it’s just critical.

Victoria: Well, so back up for a second. How do you define the sales to production handoff. How would you explain that to somebody.

Bruce: That’s a good question. You know, listening to Marc here in the intro of this podcast, he said it’s like a relay race and the handoff and it’s critical. And I’m even using the word handoff. Right. Or transition and and it actually in reality we try to not make it a true handoff. We try to make it more of a continuum because if it’s just production doesn’t get involved until they get the baton.

Bruce: In that relay race analogy, that’s too late. They need to be involved earlier on so that it’s a team sport. So, so in terms of my definition to your question, it’s it’s really about working together in a true design build format that we’re iteratively developing the project. So it’s not just the black and white handoff, you know, at a moment in time.

Bruce: It’s a more of a continuum.

Victoria: So what are what are some of the most important elements in your process of this transition?

Bruce: You know, in thinking about this call there, there’s certainly process things that we can unpack and talk about and I’ll share. But to me, one of the biggest things that that we try to do and we’re not perfect either, you said at the beginning, everyone’s still working on this, and we always are to, but is trying to equate empowerment and accountability because if we want to hold our team, our production teams, accountable for or find happiness or percentage of completion or things like that, we have got to empower them to to be involved again early in that process and not wait till wait till it’s sold and the package is done, and then it’s

Bruce: handed to them and say, go produce this, because then it’s too they’re not they’re sort of stuck. And I see that a lot. And we’ve been there too. So we try to involve them early on. For instance, for production managers in our world have to approve a sale before it’s presented to the client. They have to approve the whole package, the pricing, the the way we’re going to approach the project.

Bruce: And it yet slows down our sales process a little bit because they need a couple days to do that. But that’s an example of empowering our production team to have a say before. It’s so that I’d say that empowerment, accountability is one of the one of the big things for us.

Mark: So before sales can actually get the contract signed, production has to sign.

Bruce: Off on it. Exactly. Exactly. And literally we have them sign off on it used to be, oh, production needs to approve it and it’s evolved, you know, into no, they need to sign off on it and they get 48 business hours to to actually review it, you know. So we’ve formalized it a little more.

Victoria: So, you know, that’s that is a process that we’ve recommended often. But we hear from our roundtables members how difficult it is that sometimes it’ll slow down the sales process when jobs, you know, it’s not enough a backlog that a job needs to be shoved into production quickly. Or sometimes there’s that friction when the the production team is saying, well, heck, we can’t do it in that many hours.

Victoria: We need, you know, five more days in the sales teams or we can’t because then the price is going to go up. Or how do you how do you get around all that?

Bruce: Those are yeah, good frontline real world questions. Right. And we deal with some of those too, in terms of the turning it around quickly was sort of one of your issues, you know, points. And we run into that. You know, it might be January, February. Lead times are a little less on the production side and we need the job and all that.

Bruce: Honestly. You know, sometimes it’s if it’s a big enough complicated job, it’s it’s just no, we need to slow it down. I mean, we’re talking about a day or two, right? I mean, it’s not in our world. Again, I as I said, it’s 48 business hours, so it’s a day or two. It’s not weeks. But but there are times when, when we go to the PM and say, look, would you do us a favor?

Bruce: Could you turn this around in a day rather than two days? You know, and the goal is that that’s one out of 10 or 20 times that we asked for that night. Nine out of ten times. So right or wrong, that’s how we deal with it is, is, you know, realize it’s a day maybe two at most.

Bruce: It’s delaying things, but also that, you know, we can’t ask for exceptions once in a while. And then on the money side, which is another great point you brought up, there’s times when our PMS might say, I need twice the man hours, or I need 50 dumpsters on this, and the salesperson saying, like, I can’t sell it for that.

Bruce: And I disagree with you, right. So the way we deal with that one is we have an estimating system. And whether you use a, you know, a lot of listeners don’t use our estimating system because it’s proprietary. But, you know, most Remodelers have an Excel spreadsheet or some way they estimate. So we’ve worked hard to, to get that program and that those prices and those hours that are in there agreed upon by the team.

Bruce: Right. So we don’t every day go through the estimating system with every one and say it takes two hours to, you know, trim a window or something. But they know that we’ve spent years updating it, and then we try to make it as real as possible, and that if we see trends because we do job costing, obviously. Right.

Bruce: If we see trends where we’re consistently across the board, you know, not charging enough for exterior trim, they know that we will increase that if it’s a team wide thing, but we can sorted by team also. So if we see it’s just a team challenge, they know you know they need to improve. So the estimating system helps with the money.

Bruce: Question. But the other thing is if it if usually they can work it out. The salesperson and the project manager, you know, talk it through. But if they can’t then we’ll bring in me or some other leader in the company to sort of be a a neutral third party, if you will, that can can sort of appreciate the big picture that we don’t want to sell a job and lose money on it.

Bruce: On the other hand, we don’t want to, you know, be silly on the pricing. So that’s sort of our second tier is but, you know, we need to third party in the room. And then the third tier is we try to, with our sales team, really think about we need the right cost in the estimate. We need the cost, the job cost, right.

Bruce: The labor materials, subs and dump fees and other. But when it comes but that needs to be separate from what we the price we charge, the markup we charge. So in other words, if they’re like I can’t sell it for that, that’s a different discussion. Right? But the issues we need the the estimate and you all know this, but I’m just saying it for everyone who’s listening.

Bruce: The estimated cost needs to be as accurate as possible. And then if we can’t sell it for that, that’s a that’s talk about markup. And obviously we don’t like to adjust markup. But that’s where that discussion needs to happen. Not argue about the PM and try to beat him or her down on the ours.

Victoria: So does that that task to tie in then very well to the whole idea of gross profit slippage or when that happens favorably grip edge. So how do you how does this tie in to limiting that deviation from the gross profit goal?

Bruce: To me, honestly, it’s the biggest key to this meaning I assume you’re referring to the sort of the how production and the sales team relate and yes, the approval of a job before. So it is if I had to pick one thing that that production team involved, involvement at a at a certain level, they can’t go to every meeting and they don’t.

Bruce: And but you know, approval before it’s sold is deemed to be probably the number one thing that helps us with that. So we have a very, very small variance probably a 10th of a point really estimated in actual across all jobs. Wow. Across all. Now, if you looked at one job, you know, we’d lose some and make some.

Bruce: But it’s it’s pretty tight and some of that’s our estimating system and years of experience. But a lot of that is this by an issue. Because we all know most people listening to call, you know, if you’re an owner, you have those times when the project manager said, yeah, there was a lot of slippage on this project and I didn’t there wasn’t enough money for this, and they didn’t do this and they did.

Bruce: And I think everyone on the call who’s listening hates hearing that because it’s like, you know, there’s finger pointing and excuses and I don’t know what you know. Is that true or not? But with this, I can say, well, you reviewed the job. You know what I mean? You you signed off on it. Now, I’m not saying that in the mean way.

Bruce: Everyone makes mistakes, but don’t pretend like it’s just sales fall or vice versa, so it helps an awful lot. With that.

Victoria: So how do you, when you’re talking about pricing a job, how do you, fairly price remodeling projects so that they can be sold, but yet you are covering all those costs appropriately?

Bruce: So what we do is we try to to me, that’s a balance of obviously we need a certain amount of money as a company to, you know, survive and have money for a rainy day and make some money and all that. But it’s a balance of that with obviously consumer demand and what consumers are willing to pay.

Bruce: And we’ve seen a lot of change in that. You know, for instance, with the internet, right? I mean, our ability to acquire a toilet, you know, where the homeowner can go on Amazon and buy and get it to most toilets tomorrow. As an example, the consumers just don’t. They don’t see a tremendous value in our ability to get those products.

Bruce: You know, there’s some value. Certainly there’s things we do. But to mark that up, as much as we mark up labor, for instance, right. Our craftsmanship and we all know how hard it is to find great craftspeople or subcontractors or whatever, right? So, for instance, as an example to your question, we as a result of that, we said we need to mark up materials less and our labor and our craftsmanship more because that’s more value.

Bruce: That’s an example of a change we made over the last couple of years. It still gets us to our number, to your core question, our markup level that we need as a company. But we’re trying to get there in a way that, you know, consumers value it. Because I’ve seen enough businesses over the years when consumers paying X amount, and if they don’t value it over time, that the truth is going to come out.

Bruce: And, you know, just to mark up our ability to get a toilet too much isn’t sustainable, I don’t think.

Victoria: Also, but a lot of consumers would never see that in the way that many remodelers sell. They give a flat one price. So if you’re going to hit your margin anyway, if you were to give one flat price, they wouldn’t know that your markup labor more than materials. So you must share.

Bruce: Yeah. If it’s in. No, that’s a good question. If it’s in that format, you said like it’s truly like we give a fixed price like you’re saying, right? But then in the sort of real ly real, real life front lines messiness of life, a lot of jobs will have some allowances. You know, they didn’t pick, you know, the tub or what?

Bruce: We all know if there’s too many allowances. I think most people would agree that’s a problem. But, you know, a big $500,000 job might have 4 or 5 allowances, let’s say. And then all of a sudden, instead of the tub that we had an allowance for, they pick some Taj Mahal gold plated tub that’s twice as much money.

Bruce: And then all of a sudden you get into this game of, well, what’s the markup on the gold plated tub? And they might even have seen a price online for the tub. And then you’re charging this and you can’t do a change order and make your margin. And so that’s an example where we would run into it or a change order on a, on an ongoing job where, you know, we’re doing a porch or something on a screened in porch and they want a little upgrade on the door, let’s say, instead of this cheap screen door, they want something a little nicer.

Bruce: That’s a change order. That’s it’s kind of hard to bury the price of a door in the big job, because it’s an addendum that’s just for the door. And then we’re we’re twisted knots about it, which we shouldn’t be. We should say lock the door. Yeah, we mark it up some, but it’s this much. And, you know, it’s not that much.

Bruce: And but the labor is where we feel like we really add the value. So.

Mark: Bruce. So I love that you say we, we do not have a line of demarcation where it’s a hand off and we try to keep everybody is a team. And you illustrated that by having the approval by the production department. But what happens on the back end once, quote unquote sales are done, do they continue on the project or how far end is the salesperson stay in the process?

Bruce: Yeah. The good question. In terms of involvement, big picture, we’re involving, as you can tell, and I can talk more about it, but production in the sales process. But then and I’ll touch on this because your question we do involve sales in the back end too. But it’s involvement right. It’s here and there involvement. But in terms of leadership, there doesn’t need to be one person leading the charge.

Bruce: So to speak, because we’ve found over the years, if you have two people leading the charge, then no one really is leading the charge, right? So until the job is sold, the leader, if you will, is the sales person. And then again, the PM has to approve it. We have certain gates that have to be met, but the leader is the salesperson.

Bruce: Once it’s sold to your question, it’s the project manager. That is the point person on the job. But to your but in terms of sales involvement, then they become second chair. But they’re involved. So if there’s a change order over $5,000, the sales person has to, approve it, you know, sort of reverse, right? The PM can’t just write a $20,000 change order and not get approval from the salesperson.

Bruce: We have weekly meetings with the clients that the the PMS go to, and sometimes the salespeople will go to those they’re not required to go to all of them. But depending on the topics, we have a mid job huddle in the middle of the job where the whole team gets back together and hopefully to a point. We’re past drywall and we’re starting to get into the finished finishes and fixtures and let’s kind of all come together.

Bruce: Kumbaya. What are open items? You know, let’s talk a clear path to the to the finish line. If there’s any issues. That’s a good time to, you know, try to try to stare at the mouth. So again, we’re we’re trying to not make it like the relay race where now it’s the project manager and I don’t touch it any more from the salesperson.

Bruce: But they’re also, you know, in fairness, they need to sell other jobs too. So we’re trying to have touch points with them.

Mark: So what’s the well, actually, I should probably back up and get a sense for where our listeners give them a sense of of your company. What’s the type of projects are they all high end, mid-range? What size projects do you guys do?

Bruce: So we have two in the DC market. You know, for a company owned we have two, two main types of projects. One is design build, you know, which is obviously a customer comes to us. They truly want the full experience design, build, project management, the whole thing. Average job size, you know, is up and down. But right now is about $115,000.

Bruce: We’ll do, you know, large additions up to there’s a limit, but usually 800,000 is is, you know, the big job for us. We do a lot of kitchens and baths, so, so we’ll do a range of job size, but it averages at 115,000 or so. Then we have a, division called Fred, which is, more home improvement, which basically is if somebody doesn’t need design build, they just want build.

Bruce: They just they know what they want. I want my windows replaced. I don’t need a big design iterative process on that side. The average job size is around 10,000. And that process is a little different than the one I’m referring to because it’s more streamlined. They’re smaller jobs. So the salesperson is the project manager on those jobs.

Bruce: So it’s a little different.

Mark: So on the the design build projects is, is there ever a time where it’s maybe small enough or simple enough or easy enough that we can kind of bypass and shortcut this process?

Bruce: That’s a good question. We’ve tried that at times. So we’ve said, hey, if it’s a if it on the design build side, if the sale price is under $50,000, do we need the project manager to review it and sign off on it? You know what I mean? Back to Victoria’s question about well, it slows down the process.

Bruce: And it’s you know, it’s not that big a job. And it’s very interesting how that evolved because that actually came up from the sales team, as you can imagine. Like we need to be able to shock and drive and design and sort of exactly what Victoria said. Well what happened. So we as management, right or wrong, we said, okay, we’ll go with that, but we’re going to watch it.

Bruce: But what happened was some of them didn’t do it, and then some issues came up on some jobs. They could have been caught. Right. You know if there was a second set of eyes. So now the sales team voluntarily wants that review. So actually do you know what I mean? At first they saw it as a hurdle that they had to jump over the sales team.

Bruce: It’s again this is back to Victoria’s question, but now they see it as a as a value add. Now let me be real. They see it as a value add. Now to give the end Victoria’s question, there are times when the PM saying I need 18 dumpster pulls on this job and I need, you know, there are times it’s frustrating because they’re like, I can’t do all that.

Bruce: You what are you talking about? And then we have to, as I just described earlier, we have to get someone else involved. So long story short, honestly, this process I’m talking about the mid job huddle, the pre review and approval by PM is done on all the jobs. The only exception is is the smaller Fred you know home improvement kind of jobs.

Bruce: Because in that case the salesperson is the PM. So so they they feel the pain if they don’t do it right correctly.

Mark: So then actually that was a great point. You made it brought up another question to me. So it kind of gives the impression that, they’re going to production for approval before getting the contract signed. But do is there ever a situation where, production is over ruled.

Bruce: Yeah.

Mark: Yeah. So they don’t, they don’t actually.

Bruce: But so what typically happens is if I’m the sales person and you’re the project manager, let’s say. Right. Right. I give it to you two business days before I have my sales meeting with, you know, my, my meeting with the client to, to hopefully have them sign the contract, you review it, then you come back to me and say, Bruce, you know, these are 3 or 4 issues or, you know, you’re missing this or let’s talk about this, you know, 90, 90, 90, 95% of the time we talk it out, you know, it’s fine.

Bruce: There’s a couple of adjustments. Right. And we just do it right there, you and me. There’s no, you know, but once in a while, real world, the sales person is like, I disagree with you. What are you talking about? The PM holds firm and says, no, I need this. And that’s when somebody from Leadership Management will get involved and say, let’s sit down and spend a half an hour going to and let me understand your side and your side, and let’s try to decide.

Bruce: And the goal of that is to get the cost on the job right. There’s a lot of times I keep saying that because I sit in those meetings and, you know, not that often, but when they happen in the sales person, nine out of ten times, they’re saying, but I can’t sell it for that. Right? And then I again, back to my earlier comment.

Bruce: It’s there’s two issues here. One that we need to court cost. What are you disputing that it’s going to take longer to do. Well no, but I just can’t sell it for that. Well let’s put that in cost and let’s you and I have a separate discussion about markups. And, so I don’t know if that helps. Yeah.

Mark: Yeah.

Victoria: Okay. So we, I totally see how getting them involved would empower them and, and give them the impetus to really make sure they’re going to bring the jobs in for the cost planned.

Bruce: Right.

Victoria: And I like your process and your system of communicating with the clients. But do you have other internal processes, like weekly job cost or, excuse me, weekly production meetings, weekly job cost reviews or monthly job cost reviews? How are you maintaining that profits throughout the course of the project? You know, I mean, do you have regular checks to make sure?

Victoria: Sure.

Bruce: So a couple things we do, they are just a bullet point. We can unpack on how you want, but but one is, is compensation, which I know was a funny thing to bring up as relates to your question, but it to us it directly relates. So we pay our sales people and our PMS both on gross profit dollars.

Bruce: So salespeople is obviously on gross profit, dollars on jobs that they sell PMS or gross profit, dollars on jobs that they produce. So they’re first of all, that puts them both on gross profit dollars, which is nice. Back to this whole team. You know, we’re yeah, we have challenges with teams sometimes, but we work hard to create that team environment.

Bruce: We’re all in this together. Everyone’s focused on GG dollars. So it’s not oh how much do I sell. And that’s great. But also to your back to your question Victoria, that keeps them pretty focused on GP dollars and GP and you know, percent and POC as a result. So I’d say that’s a that is a big one. And then in terms of, of some other ways to monitor it in all and that we also get a bunch of eyes on it.

Bruce: Right? The salespeople don’t just ignore GP percent because they’re pretty tight into it. But also the head of production has weekly or every other week meeting, depending on who the person is, meetings with each PM and goes through each project and you know, certainly gross profit, schedule, work flow, client happiness, any challenges, you know, all of that.

Bruce: So so we do that and then once a month we do it. We call it the percentage completion report. I think in Remodelers advantage is more the whip report. I think it’s the terminology used. But at my level that is, an incredibly powerful tool that in two minutes I can look at and see, where are we? Way off.

Bruce: Because I’m looking more for trends and bigger picture. Not every little job. Right. But I can see trends and where we’re off and and, hey, there’s a couple jobs I want to I want to step into now again, that’s once a month. So, you know, it’s. But but the supervisor is more on it weekly or every other week.

Victoria: So I got two questions. I’m going to start out with this one. Then I’ll skip on. But with that focus on gross profit dollars. Do you risk isn’t there a risk that sales people will sell for less percent margin than you need to get the dollars, because they could sell a heck of a lot more projects if they were cheaper, right?

Bruce: Right.

Victoria: So they’d be.

Bruce: Right. I mean, it’s a trade off. I could sell a lot more jobs, but I might do more work and get paid the same amount. If I sold less jobs, a better margin, right? True. But you’re right. But what we do with that is, is we have standard markups that that we require the team use and that are in our estimating system.

Bruce: And then if there needs to be a markup adjustment, that has to be approved and signed off on by management. Okay. So it’s not up to the sales person to lower the markup that has to be approved by, you know, a handful of us. Right. And then we track it every month if we make any adjustments we have a a tracker that goes out.

Bruce: So for instance, I, you know, other somebody else might have approved a couple markup adjustments that I would know about or some of the leader would know about. So once a month we distribute this exception report so that we can see you. Hey, we made these five markup adjustments. Here’s who they were for. So we can see if there’s recurring trends with certain salespeople that are having a problem with selling it.

Bruce: The full markup we can see if there’s big ones. But also importantly for me, I want to see we budgeted a certain estimated percent based on the markups in our estimating system and all of that. And if we give too many exceptions, obviously we won’t. We won’t even be estimating, much less actual. But we wanted me to estimating at the right GP.

Bruce: So I want to see where the exceptions are. So that was a long answer.

Victoria: But you know, the question has come up recently from a number of our members. And I want to ask you, do you folks at case, do you use different margin goals for different sized projects? The larger project we do, the lower margin you do. Okay.

Bruce: Okay. We do. We have a we call it a sliding scale. Yep. You know, by exactly what you said by job by job size. And so some of that right or wrong, but just being open, I mean, some one reason we have that and it’s obviously a lower markup for the bigger job. One reason we have that is we feel like there’s more and more good competition, you know, at those big jobs.

Bruce: So we’ve got to be tight and, you know, most remodelers like the big jobs and a lot of remodelers will only do those. So so that’s one reason. But the other reason is we feel like there are true, you know, economies of scale, efficiencies on the bigger jobs versus like a whole bathroom, you know, the amount of work and effort that goes into that versus a $500,000 addition.

Victoria: So how many tiers do you think you have?

Bruce: Four.

Victoria: Okay. All right. Great. Thanks for sharing.

Bruce: That. Don’t ask me to quote the exact words, because I don’t remember to be honest with you. No. I got so many numbers and I’m getting old, but.

Victoria: I’ve got one other question for you. Your company has grown considerably meager at 60 million. What is your role? What is your time spent on? What’s a day look like in your world?

Bruce: I when I walk in, in the morning, I do. I really try to feel like my client is is our team members and then their client is the homeowner. And so just like with homeowners, you know, we all know who have been in this business a while, that doesn’t mean you, you know, you run around and catch up to them every second and all, just like I don’t with our employees, but it means you treat them a certain way.

Bruce: You know, at the end of the day, if they’re happy and feel supported and respected and got the tools they need, just like with a homeowner client, they’re going to be that much better. So. So I look at our employees as our as my clients, and I look at it as the collective. So the, you know, I’ve learned the hard way over the years, some, some employees might be performing really well and happy, but if they’re running over everybody else on the team and not working, we’re playing well in the sandbox with others.

Bruce: That’s an example where you know it’s not working. So. So one is, is that sort of my client is the team members and their client is there’s the the homeowners. And another thing, you know, I try to think about big picture is just trying to look six, 12 months out, because, you know, their focused on this month or their managers might be focused on the next 2 or 3 months.

Bruce: But, you know, I’m trying to when I can get look at it more 6 to 12 months, things we should be investing in or, you know, economy or, you know, tariffs and just other things like that. Now, I don’t want listeners to get the wrong impression. I mean, I was at a homeowner’s house this morning for two hours working through details.

Bruce: And so I will get into the mud, but I try to not let myself get too caught up in it. And I’d say the third hat I try to wear is is leadership. Because I with our company, we’re only as good as, you know, the people. And as a result, I think, candidly, we’re only as good as the leadership.

Bruce: And I’m not saying that because leadership is more important than anybody else on the team. But if the leaders aren’t good, we’re not going to have good people under them. And so trying to think about, well, is this person going to retire in a couple of years? And who succeeds them? Or what training can we give this person because they have pluses and minuses, you know.

Bruce: So those are three hats I try to wear as best I can.

Mark: So, Bruce, you’re going to be actually speaking at our Remodeler summit in a couple of weeks.

Bruce: Yes. I’m excited. Yeah.

Mark: You’re doing one of our extremely popular Ask Anything sessions where, everybody it’s not really a formal presentation. It’s just kind of a fireside chat.

Bruce: I love those because it’s just a chat. So, you know, it’s real informal and get into things.

Mark: And the attendees love it. Absolutely love it. Get to pick your brain. And I’m actually going to demonstrate that now with the Lightning round.

Bruce: Hopefully, hopefully you’ll be easier than they will be on a little.

Mark: And now here’s the Remodelers advantage lightning round. It’s a dry. Here we go. What’s your favorite business book and why?

Bruce: I got to I know that’s not the question, but I got to good to great because it’s all about people in people’s all we’re about. And I know it’s a little bit old, but I love it. Conversations on the Hudson is number two book weird, one that most people wouldn’t have heard of as a business book. Got it from Jeff Graham, who founded Gil Quality.

Bruce: But it’s about artists and craftspeople along the Hudson. But it brings you back to that love of craft, which I think can be forgotten sometimes in the business world.

Mark: If you weren’t the president and CEO of Case Design Remodeling, what do you think you’d be doing?

Bruce: I’d be a baker.

Victoria: Wow.

Bruce: That’s awesome.

Victoria: What’s your favorite.

Bruce: Bake? Bread. Wow, I love to bake. And my wife and I were actually considering starting a baking company years ago when I was in insurance, before I got involved with case, but we ran the numbers. You’d be very proud of us, both of you and Remodelers. I mean, we ran the numbers and we were like, yeah, we probably shouldn’t do know.

Mark: What are you not very good at?

Bruce: Patience. I hesitate a little because I work, I try, I’m trying as I get older to be more patient, but I just, I just sometimes my patience isn’t where it should be.

Mark: Your room, your desk or your car. Which do you clean first?

Bruce: I’m sort of OCD, so I struggle with this one because it’s kind of I try to keep them all, but I would say my room.

Mark: Do you apply the five second rule to draft food?

Bruce: No, it’s about 15 seconds.

Mark: If you had a time machine, would you go forwards or back?

Bruce: Forwards.

Mark: How far?

Bruce: Probably 20 years.

Mark: What do you think you’d find out there? Or is that oh my God.

Bruce: I mean, when you say that I think Apple and Tesla and how are they all doing and all that sort of geeky business stuff. But I think the biggest thing would be the earth not to be too dramatic, but just the oceans and the earth, and, you know, I mean, the weather patterns. And my honestly, I would hope that the amount of land space that we can have it is, is similar to now.

Bruce: But I’d be nervous about that.

Victoria: Yeah. You know what I’d be looking forward to? Self-Driving cars. I want self-driving cars so badly. I like to.

Bruce: Drive, though. You know, I’d like to actually drive.

Victoria: You know, maybe they’ll make race tracks for people like you. Or you just drive round and round around, you know, and get it out of your, like, a beltway.

Bruce: That’s what I do on the Beltway.

Victoria: Yeah. Ron. You really? That’s funny. Bruce, thank you so much for doing this. You know, I’ve known you for a long time and it’s really always wonderful to see the progress you’ve made with case and the neat things you’re doing. And very fun to always have you involved in the summit. So this is going to be your third or fourth year.

Victoria: I think being part of that. So that’s that’s really a lot of fun.

Bruce: Yeah. Thank you. And tip of the hat to what you all do for the remodeling industry, you know, really bring in professionalism and improvement to it. Thank you.

Victoria: For that. Certainly. Try. Now before we go anywhere, I want you to share your five words of wisdom with our audience.

Bruce: Characters as important as craftsmanship.

Victoria: And why are those your words of wisdom?

Bruce: Because I think, I don’t know, I see so often in businesses and I don’t mean remodelers or remodelers. I mean, I mean just businesses in America, at least sometimes it’s so much focused on like the numbers or the output or the stock price or growth or and sometimes I really feel like we lose sight. We meaning the big business stuff in America lose sight of the character side of it.

Bruce: The, you know, these are people’s homes we’re working in. These are employees families we’re dealing with. And sometimes there’s a tug to maybe bend some rules, you know, like we were talking about maybe sell the job tomorrow rather than doing it right and taking two more days to review it properly and saying, but no, you know, like the character side, just keeping that front of mind.

Bruce: I’m saying this for me. I’m not trying to preach to people listening, but for me that’s important.

Victoria: That’s great. Now it’s the really wonderful Bruce. We appreciate it greatly. Thank you so much, and we’ll see you in just a few short weeks at the summit.

Bruce: Can’t wait. New Orleans.

Victoria: Yes. You betcha. Thanks for.

Bruce: The.

Victoria: Bye bye. You know, that was kind of a cool set of words of wisdom.

Mark: Don’t you think? Yeah. Thanks.

Victoria: Out there. You know, there’s so much corruption and people just being greedy in such awfulness. When people step, they. When they forget about how important care is. Yeah.

Mark: You just got to kind of step back and think about why we do what we do. Yeah. And, it was, it was, it was good. Heartfelt.

Victoria: Yes. And, you know, it also fits so well in with our core values of the integrity that we talk about with our members and being honest and open and, and a lot of really good nuggets he shared throughout.

Mark: Oh yeah. Yeah.

Victoria: You know, I find it just fascinating to hear about people that do charge different margins at different sized jobs. It makes total sense to me. But on the other side of the fence are the people who talk about no, you should get the same margin because you’re just as much risk, you know, so I can take all sides.

Mark: I, I, I lean towards I’m a little surprised, but I agree with Bruce. Granted, he’s got a huge company, but it totally makes sense. I mean, it’s it’s the, you know, economies of scale. Again.

Victoria: So, well, a good one. And, you know, to think he’s my business partner, son, you know, is, Linda Casey’s son and ex.

Mark: Business.

Victoria: Partners, business partner.

Mark: That’s going to confuse everybody.

Victoria: That’s right. Ex business partners, son.

Mark: So it’s former.

Victoria: There you go. All that.

Mark: That sounds like you guys split up. Oh, that’s true. Former business partners.

Victoria: Son. So there you got a long legacy in the remodeling industry for sure. Yeah, yeah.

Mark: So shall we send it over to Naomi?

Victoria: Let’s do that. So I’m Victoria Downing.

Mark: And I’m Mark Harari. Thanks for being here.