Cornerstone’s 9-Day Design Build Process (ft. AJ Ballantine) – Pt. 1

Logan Shinholser
Welcome back to the Contractor Growth Network podcast. I’m Logan Shinholser, and today we have a really cool episode. In fact, when we recorded this, it was so long that we decided to break it out into two different episodes because this is going to be something that you’re going to want to re listen to time and time again. I’m excited for it. We have AJ Ballantine from Cornerstone Remodeling, who’s actually from my original neck of the woods agent has put a ton of time into his design process where he’s able to turn around designs super quickly because he’s so dialed in, but also not lose that customer experience touch. 

Logan Shinholser
So this first part is all about what he was dealing with, why he was dealing with, which is really going to set the stage for how the actual process works, which comes near the end of this episode and then into the next one. But without further ado, let’s go ahead and jump on in. Aj, let’s go ahead and start off, man. And can you give us a bit of a. Your background and how Cornerstone came to be? 

AJ Ballantine
Yeah, absolutely. My background is both from a design and a build standpoint. So finding myself in the design build space, pretty natural. You know, how I grew up, my dad’s side of the family was all contractors. My mom’s side of the family was all artists. So when I began my journey, you know, young kid, I was always in my grandfather’s workshop working with tools. Then of course, when I went to college, I went for architecture. I loved the design side and ultimately found myself hating being locked into design studio for 40 hours a week. And so then I left and I went and looked for a job in a design build company here. Pretty local. They’re no longer in business. They actually retired several years back. But that’s where I really found my passion for design build. 

AJ Ballantine
I love the ability to design a product, something that doesn’t exist yet and be able to see it clearly and capture the vision for that to my clients and walk them through that whole process. And of course, I love the build side as well. I wanted to see that vision, that design come to life. And so the design build space has been, you know, just a. A soul satisfying endeavor for me. So ultimately, the entrepreneur side wanted to step into a. What we saw was a. A common pain point in our industry was homeowners need a lot more assistance through the buying journey. You know, with remodeling, there were a lot of pains that we saw unanswered with the last Remodeling company. I was a part of that. We felt like we would better suited to answer. So we launched a design build company. 

AJ Ballantine
When I say we. I had a business partner at the time, just a colleague, and he and I wanted to start our own company. So back in 2011, we did just that cornerstone, remodeling. We became pretty. Pretty well known pretty quickly through really good just marketing tactics and so on, being the millennials that we are. And quickly got a foothold. We started winning. Aw. You know, from the best remodeler at Howard county local place to best in Baltimore. It’s more regional and of course winning some national awards too, along the way. But yeah, so that’s. That’s my. That’s my journey. And I always said I feel like I’ve had a company since 2011, but a business since 2020, because I really never treated my company as a business. It was always a passion. There’s famous. I call him famous. He’s famous in my world. 

AJ Ballantine
Doug Howard, he’s a good consultant in the space. Has a consulting firm that focuses on the passion behind the business. Right. Or the business behind the passion. And that’s ultimately what I’ve been driving in my organization over the past four years, has really been how do we perfect the business that operates and continue to really knock the passion component of our business out of the park. And it’s been a dance, I’ll say, over the last couple of years, really perfect a business model while you still keep that really high touch, white glove experience for the clients and preserve that intact. Because I’ll tell you what, the design build space is not meant to scale a sales process very well just because of how lengthy and arduous it is. 

AJ Ballantine
But we feel like we’re making a lot of strides in that department, which is, I guess, why I’m here today. 

Logan Shinholser
So with that, what I guess, how did you just view the business from 2011 up until that inflection point of 2020? 

AJ Ballantine
Well, part of it was an experience in running a business. The other part was knowing what I needed to do, but not necessarily how to do it. So a lot of the advancements, a lot of the growth that we wanted to see in the company was it was a mix of passion and ambition mixed with some basic business knowledge that we had in the space. But really putting the two together, starting in 2020, we really started to understand a little bit more about, okay, you hear the phrase systems and processes all over. It’s almost like, makes me want to gag when I hear it because it’s like, nobody really knows what that means. You can’t just say, oh, I’m about systems and processes. It’s like, you know, no, you’re not. How, how are you about systems and processes? 

AJ Ballantine
Because to be about to be a business that really prioritizes systemizing the entire organization building processes that support those systems, you have to think outside of the box. You can’t just document your business and expect it to do really well. You have to document your business, scrutinize it, simplify it, and then streamline it. And that whole process, that three step process that we go through, it’s continual. You’re never stopping because you have to look at everything that your business does and say, well, can we do that better? And we have really come into some. We’ve had a crisis of faith a handful of times throughout the last four years where we really started to poke holes into the business as usual. We’ve always done it this way and this, and we know that were successful doing it this way. 

AJ Ballantine
But we always ask ourselves the question, like, can we do it better? Because if you think about how competitive this space is for modelers, you know, too often, I mean, that’s why, you know, marketing is such a, it’s a game in this space because everybody’s out there preaching the same thing. What’s really a unique identifier about your business? And don’t give me the, oh, we do quality work. Oh, well, we, you know, we win awards, we do quality work. We’re, we do great at this and we do great at that. It’s like, yeah, everybody’s great at that. Like, what truly defines your business as unique? And for us, it was, well, can we be a high touch white glove boutique design build company in one of the most competitive markets in the United States and offer estimates? 

AJ Ballantine
The thing that our clients want the most when they’re out to figure out, you know, this next remodeling journey that they’re on, how much things cost, can we deliver an estimate to them in less than seven days? And can we do it in a way that helps our business grow? Because yeah, we can. We can offer estimates in seven days. But are they accurate? Are they fulfilling the client’s needs? Do we know what they want? How do you get to the bottom of what they want? And how do you do it without dumping so much of your time and energy with your sales team? Because that’s ultimately what we found to be the problem with design, build. And sorry, this is a very Long winded answer. 

AJ Ballantine
If, you know, telling you what, you know, what we’ve been focused on for the past four years, what that switch was for us is just questioning everything and doing something completely different. 

Logan Shinholser
But why? I mean, if the first nine years of it, I mean, were going as they were, I mean, was there something that, I mean, 2020, obviously, like, there was a big boom in the market and stuff like that. Was that what spurred this whole thought process of, can we do this better? Is there a better way of going about this? Or was that just like intrinsically is always kind of there, and now you just finally decided to rip the band aid off? I guess. Like, what was like the final straw that broke the camel’s back when you said, okay, let’s stop treating this like a passion project and let’s start to question what we’re doing. 

AJ Ballantine
A few things. I’ve always had an ambition to grow, right? So growing a design build company is painstaking at best because you can’t really scale it. Like I said, you know, when you want to grow a design build company, a remodeling company in general, but especially design builds, you have a lot of overhead, and that overhead gets tapped pretty quickly. It is very limited based on the output of your team. So when I set out to try to grow, obviously, 2020 hit us hard. You know, everybody. Everybody has their own story through that. And 2020. 202021 was the opposite. Everybody was like a gold rush. But we really started to, like, ask ourselves, how do we go to the next level? At the time, went from 3 million, 2. 2 to $3 million during COVID to $6 million in 2021. 

AJ Ballantine
And we really started to see cracks in our operations when we doubled in size that year. And for me, a lot of the work that we did after that was more just like reinforcing, like making sure that the cracks are superficial at best, you know, or at most, and trying to figure out how we can just make the operation work a little bit more cohesively. But then, of course, I still have this underlying desire to grow and continue to not just be a $6 million, but 8 million and then a 10, 12, $20 million remodeling company. Obviously, the more that you scale the business outside of that comfort zone of that two to $3 million, wherever that glass ceiling is for your organization, you have to treat your business differently. 

AJ Ballantine
You can’t be a $20 million company estimating projects out of your back pocket and expecting your subcontractors to know what’s going on you need an HR department. I never thought I would have an HR department. How do you have an HR department? How do you support financially an HR department in your business? We started to bump up against all these things, and that’s really when we decided that we needed to make sure that this business could operate more like a business than it ever has in the past. 

Logan Shinholser
So talk with me a bit about how that, I guess why the design process was like a thing that you wanted to really hone in on and put under a microscope to figure out what we’re doing here and is there a better way of doing it? 

AJ Ballantine
Yeah, the design process. So we look at the design process as part of what we call our sales motion. Right? So it’s part of our sales life cycle. Our goal is to take a lead that comes in and sell a build contract. And the way that we do that is our sales process. Part of our sales process is like, obviously we’re infusing design, the creativity in that. It takes forever to get somebody to understand what a remodeling project is going to take, both from a financial perspective, but also from an impact perspective. You know, when we’re putting these projects together, really the customer expectations are, if you show me something pretty and I can afford it, then I’m just going to do it. But there’s so many nuances in there that requires a team of people. 

AJ Ballantine
And we have a whole staff of people that are dedicated. We have a designer that’s working with them, making all their selections. We have an estimator, we have an architectural designer that all the eyes are dotted, the T’s are crossed. When we’re taking these things to the county and pulling permits, those things are very expensive for us to provide. Now we can do that really well at a 3, 4, $5 million company and be perfectly fine coasting right there. We have our staff, we’ve got all our. All of our numbers figured out, our metrics. But if we wanted to grow past that, were talking about doubling literally everyone. And how do you. How do you just take, you know, a staff of five people in the office and just go to 10 overnight? Well, you can’t. 

AJ Ballantine
You know, there are a lot of stepping stones that help you grow out of those little, what I call the glass ceilings. You know, if you want to take your $2 million company and go to 4 or 5, you need to start thinking about things like this. If you’re an owner, operator, what jobs do you do around the company? For me, it was, I’m the Marketing director. I’m the sales director. I’m the design director. I’m the HR manager, I’m the production manager. Well, I just listed five positions that I can’t do twice the amount of as a, you know, from a 2 to 3 million dollar company as a, you know, 4 to 6 million dollars company, I’m looking at hiring at least half of those positions. Well, there’s more overhead. So now my metrics no longer work. Right. 

AJ Ballantine
The metrics that work at two and a half million dollars, me paying for the things that I’m paying for. If I just hire additional people to get to that next level, the numbers begin to break down. And that’s why a lot of companies figure out that when they grow, they’re making less money at a higher revenue, like less actual dollars. I’m not just talking about percents, but I’m talking about actual dollars are making less money on the bottom line, doing twice the amount of revenue that they were. And that’s where a lot of companies that feel like they fall back because they get scared. How do I support a company this large for much longer if I’m making so much less money? And then there’s the intrinsic piece of this too. It’s like, what am I really doing? 

AJ Ballantine
You know, I’m sacrificing my family time to grow this business. You know, I’m spending so much time at work, I’m working twice as hard, dealing with twice the amount of drama for what? Less money at the end of the day, that all of those things combined drove me to figure out, okay, how do I actually grow the company without growing the expenses? How do I grow this company without growing the staff, the office staff? And so there we started diving in deep on the sales process. How do we get better? And it was all numbers. You know, I’m not a huge numbers guy, but ultimately, if you think about your sales cycle, you have a certain amount of money that you spend on marketing to generate a certain number of leads. We call that the conversion percentage. 

AJ Ballantine
Right, so you’re talking about cost of acquiring a lead. Well then what happens to that lead when it comes in? Well, you probably pre qualify some of them out and then keep the rest. Well, they move to a particular stage where you’re interacting with them. Now you’re presenting either a design agreement or an estimate or whatever it is that your company does. Right. Well then how many move forward from there? So you trickle all this thing, all the, all of this down and you start to understand that if my staff is closing At a certain closing percentage, I’m getting a certain number of leads, with a certain number of marketing dollars being spent to acquire those leads, then I know that I can produce X. That’s it. Like, that’s a cap. 

AJ Ballantine
By dumping this amount of money, I can handle this amount of leads and I get this amount of customers in the end, and that’s all that I can handle. And to be able to adjust any of those numbers, right. So the one that we had the most friction with was, okay, the output of my staff, because that was fixed, I can’t make them do any more than they’re doing now. They’re at 100% capacity. So the lever that we pulled was how do we increase the output of that exit of that same staff? So if my team can handle twice the amount of leads that they can handle now and still maintain their closing percentage and their quality of work life balance, right. We don’t want to work them 80 hours a week. 

AJ Ballantine
Well, then I just solved probably the biggest pinch point for a lot of design build companies that’s right there. Because I can spend the extra money to bring in the leads if my office staff can handle twice the amount of leads and we’re still closing the same number of those leads. The other one was, obviously, you can increase your closing percentage. You know, you’re not handling as many leads or you’re handling the same number of leads, but just closing more of them. How do you close more of them? It’s a big question mark for a lot of design build companies. You know, whether they want to grow or just stay kind of where they are. Closing percentages are always something that we’re looking at. So all of those data metrics are supporting this whole notion of perfecting this sales model. 

AJ Ballantine
How do we do it? How do we do it? 

Logan Shinholser
Well, so with that said, where did you, I guess, begin? So you kind of realize you have some limitations and you’re not wanting to double the size of the team. And that’s a super common thing. I hear a lot about, of like, you know, if I want to grow, I got to add another crew. And it’s like, well, is that the only way that you can grow is to add more people or is there other opportunities here where, you know, you could just raise prices or be able to do things a little bit differently? So now you’re adjusting more of the margins than you are, like adding more people on. So where did y’all start with this whole process of we want to be able to grow Top line, without increasing headcount process engineering. 

AJ Ballantine
That’s where we started. We knew, we knew that the goal here was to enhance our processes. So the first thing we had to do is understand them. And part of this exploration and figuring out our actual process, the business process, was looking at it from different perspectives. One was internal. How do we see our processes working? How do they benefit us internally, our staff and so on and even our brand and how we’re presented in the market. But then we also had to put the shoe on the other foot. And this is where this exercise of empathy mapping really came into play was we had to understand our business processes from the client’s perspective. 

AJ Ballantine
And I think that change for us really helped us refine a lot of the things, or at least make decisions on refining some of the things that we knew were broken about, you know, kind of things that were self serving. Now we want to close more deals, we want to increase our volume, we need to increase our average sale price, you know, things that were really benefiting us as a business. Well, how did our customers perceive that? You know, this exercise of empathy mapping was critical for us to begin this journey. I mean, this is basically where we started. We had to basically put together a client journey map where we started to understand a little bit more about how a homeowner begins this remodeling journey. 

AJ Ballantine
Far before they reach out to a remodeling company, the needs associated along the way, you know, they change and their perception of remodeling companies changes along the way. And we really started to ask ourselves, you know, how does a client see a remodeling business from afar? Empathy mapping kind of put that into perspective. I don’t know if you know much about empathy mapping. I know Logan, you probably do. But for people listening, empathy mapping is a, is just an exercise where it helps you understand your customer perspectives. I think the exercise is when you get into a room, you get, come into a room with, you know, your leadership, you know, with your team, perhaps your marketing team. You’re basically drawing like a four piece map on a board on whiteboard, right? 

AJ Ballantine
And you are basically putting on their think, feel, see, hear and say. So there’s five things on the board and you’re starting to ask like questions about what are your clients thinking when they want to start over modeling projects or when they’re in the middle of it, right? What are the things that they’re experiencing? And when you map all this out, when we did this, we identified very specific Pain points that our clients had that they felt like they did, or clients don’t want to be taken advantage of, or they don’t want to have the appearance of being taken advantage of. So they are bewildered. They don’t know even where to begin. They’re a little frightened by the experience. Too many options. How do they solidify a vision for this even? How do they pick a contractor? Right. All of these things. 

AJ Ballantine
And, you know, they desire interpersonal interactions. You know, that’s something that I think we all, no, we like to shake the hands, look them in the eye. And this is a very personal, relationship building type of environment that kind of solidified exactly what they were looking for in terms of that interpersonal journey. They don’t want to be left in the dark. You know, that’s an obvious one. They, they prefer faster and convenient sales process. And this is something very key on Millennials too. Kind of dive a little deeper into how the millennials, being a force, have really altered our processes as well. 

AJ Ballantine
But all of those things combined helped us to kind of look at our entire sales process and say, okay, if we want to be faster, if we want to, you know, increase our job size and, you know, and push these things through faster, you know, shorten our sales cycle. You know, some of these things compete against what I was mentioning with what the customers feel. They don’t want to be a cog in a wheel. They don’t want to feel like they’re taking advantage of, you know, and when I talk about raising sales prices and pushing them through the pipeline faster, we’re starting to get that, like, car dealership vibe. And that’s not something that you want to promote your business as, especially not one that, you know, does these higher end, you know, boutique types of remodels. 

AJ Ballantine
So weighing all of the decisions were making about our sales motion, you know, we’re keeping this empathy mapping thing, you know, clear front and center. And all of the things that we did to perfect our sales process were weighed against this empathy map exercise that we did. 

Logan Shinholser
So with the empathy mapping, what is funny, because when this comes out podcast wise, we would have already had a podcast out about ideal client avatar and then unique selling propositions. So this should play into it pretty well because it talks a lot about really not only understanding who your favorite clients are, how they think, how they operate, the stages in your journey, working with them, what they enjoyed, what they didn’t enjoy, but also what makes you unique. This would be very fitting. But when you’re going through this whole empathy mapping side of things, are you guys just for everybody listening, like, are you just sitting in a room, just you and your partner going through this stuff and just talking out loud? 

Logan Shinholser
Do you have a guy during this, like an outside source going, well, hold on, like, you know, are people really calling you because you’re a fourth generation builder and that’s what they’re saying, or is that just what you guys think? Like, I guess what was like the facilitation of these conversations? Like, because this is super important and just. It is, I’d imagine. 

AJ Ballantine
Yeah, you’re going to want somebody who has done it before, you know, some sort of guide. You know, I say look to your marketing team. You know, we had a great marketing partner still do, you know, that kind of facilitated the discussion. You know, they were very familiar with this exercise and how to have, you know, a successful time. I think it was two or three hours that we spent kind of working through it. And they basically distilled this as we, after Lauren, my general manager and I were there for the exercise after we left, they distilled all the information and boiled it down to say, okay, hey, look, here are the commonalities of things that we saw that your customers are thinking, feeling, hearing, seeing and saying. 

AJ Ballantine
And these are the most, these are the biggest ones to pay attention to as you look at, you know, changing the way that your brand looks, changing your website and working through sales process. All those things were informed by what the marketing team was able to distill from that exercise. So I would say, yeah, you definitely want somebody who is skilled, you know, has done that kind of exercise before. I’m sure ChatGPT has a lot of resources on that. If you just want to have one internally, like less formally, but definitely do some more reading up on it. I think, like I said, there’s a lot of information on ChatGPT, you know, that can kind of fill in the blanks for you, maybe even provide some outlines for you to go for. 

AJ Ballantine
But there are plenty of articles out there on the web that can, you know, kind of steer you in the right direction if your marketing team, you know, isn’t available or doesn’t have, you know, the ability, the capacity to do all this. I know you guys do. 

Logan Shinholser
Yeah, it’s a, it’s very beneficial. It’s a pain, truth be told. It’s like we, like, we call clients, which is like a, I don’t know, it’s like running like many focus groups around this stuff to really understand, like, what, hey, how do you feel about this company? Like, how are they positioned in the market and stuff like that. So it’s super helpful from a marketing side, but it also is, it’s a relatively big lift, but it’s one of those things. 

AJ Ballantine
It is. 

Logan Shinholser
Once you, yeah. Once you knock it out, like, you’re good for a while, then you at least have a very strong base. But just getting to like that. 

AJ Ballantine
Right. 

Logan Shinholser
Foundation of like, let’s really understand because like, we hear the same stuff as you as like, hey, what makes you special? It’s like, well, we do what we say we’re gonna do. We’re professional, we’re client focused. And it’s like, that sounds great. What percentage of your competitors say the exact same thing? It’s, it’s 100%. Well, they don’t all do that. And I’m like, right, but who says it? Because that’s really what we’re talking about here is, you know, is anybody coming out saying, hey, we do okay work and we’re semi professional? Or does everybody say, we do great work and we’re really professional? 

AJ Ballantine
So a lot of, yeah, trust was a big one. You know, so of course no client’s going to believe like, you could do all those things. They’re not going to trust you just because you say that you do all those things. Even if you do, you know, Google reviews. I know you guys talk about this at CGN a bunch. And I mean, we, we harp on it as well. The reviews are driving businesses these days. So if you’re not getting a review from every single customer, I think you’re falling short. Get, you know, I mean, we’re not getting reviews from every single customer still. I mean, it’s painstaking, but it’s a priority. We drive after getting these reviews and making them public on go social media. It’s incredibly important. 

Logan Shinholser
Yeah. So we, you guys sat down, you did the whole empathy mapping. So at this point you understand pretty much. And correct me, like, when you guys went through it, did you. Were they going through like, not just, hey, when they call you, let’s start there. But are they talking about all the preconceived notions around? Okay, so at this point, can you walk me through just like the gist of like, for Cornerstone, what your client journey looks like? So then that way everybody has a frame of reference because as we go into the design process, everything I’M guessing is based around how does this tie into the customer journey, making sure that they walk in lockstep with each other. 

AJ Ballantine
Or the client journey really begins as soon as the need is realized. So if it is, my parents are getting older and I don’t know if we should put an in law suite in. Do people do this? What does that look like? How do you. And even things that are not necessarily remodeling related, but they start to plant the seeds, right? How do people live with their in laws? You know, that’s a philosophical question, right? How do people live with their in laws at my age. Right. Well, that starts to frame the conversation around what the remodel would look like. You know, if it is, I’m going to build an in law suite. And they start to inquire like, okay, they’re starting to think about how do I live with my in laws. 

AJ Ballantine
They’re going to start answering questions in their own head pretty quickly on whether or not they would want to share a kitchen with their in laws. So now that in law suite needs a kitchen, right. Or that in law suite needs space, it needs to be detached from my house. You see, I’m getting further and further away. I love my in laws, by the way. But they start to ask questions very early on. As soon as the seat. It’s almost like the movie Inception, right? You’ve probably seen that they, the need is born and then all of a sudden it starts to turn into like this exploration education dump, right? They’re doing some research and part of that research then ends up turning up articles, blogs. And this is where obviously the marketing content’s really key. Right. 

AJ Ballantine
But there’s a lot of preconceived notions about the remodeling industry that we kind of uncovered. And a lot of them are pretty self explanatory. They think that contractors are, you know, can be slimy. They can, like I said, they don’t want to be taken advantage of. So they don’t know much about costs. They feel a little overwhelmed at how the process even gets started. And one of the things, I’ll say that I think contractors make a huge mistake often by promoting the hell out of their processes in their company on their website. Homeowners don’t care about your processes. They’re not going to read through this, you know, six page bulletin. They want to know 1, 2, 3. I start here, I go here and then I’m here. Okay, great. I’m good with that. 

AJ Ballantine
You can overwhelm them pretty quickly on because again, part of that empathy mapping exercise was helping us understand a little bit more about how overwhelmed are they really, especially on the early part. So our goal was just to take the stress out of it on that initial exploration piece. And this is how do we market our company better? How do we put materials out that benefit the homeowner? They’re not really, you know, they’re, of course they’re beneficial for us on the back end, you know, they’re keyword rich and so on. But were making sure that were putting content out that was really helpful for homeowners. How do you understand how to, how like, what’s the cost look like? You know, transparency is key. 

AJ Ballantine
So making sure that’s out in the open, how do we give them tools to look for like zoning regulations in their area? And we’re starting to like give them a little bit more in terms of like what they’re really looking for early on. Again, that was part of that. The empathy mapping exercise was, you know, discovering that need, you know, and you go through that entire journey, right? It’s, it starts there, but then of course it goes into every touch point they have. Like as soon as they reach out to your company, what are they thinking, feeling, hearing, seeing and saying when they’re getting competitive bids, same five apply. When they’re working through that sales process, you know, just like in the actual construction phase, you know, they reach kind of a high and then they reach an all time low. 

AJ Ballantine
Usually it’s like 2/3 of the way through the project. Homeowners are like a bare bottom, you know, bare bottom level. That’s when they’re emailing you, they’re frustrated because things are getting missed or they’re not being communicated with. Same thing happens in the, the sales journey as well. You notice that, you know, three quarters of the way through you might get some customers that are like, you know, starting to get like they’re twiddling their thumbs because they haven’t seen an update from you in a while. Or like, why is the county taking so long? You know, all of those touch points with your company are part of that whole buyer journey. And we wanted to make sure were addressing every single one of them. And again, just kind of boosting the value of what our company provides them was key in all of that. 

Logan Shinholser
So with you going in with this framework of, you call it empathy mapping, but it really is understanding and empathizing with your clients at every stage of the process. What is your, what does your process look like. So let’s say at this point the marketing is doing its thing and somebody either calls you or fills out a contact form, I guess. What does that process look like in. In Yalls world? 

AJ Ballantine
Yep. So when someone reaches out the cornerstone, usually it’s done online. They end up getting into a discovery call. Whether it’s the Zoom call, it’s a 30 minute, you know, discovery exploration. Like we’re trying to find the mutual fit. Right. So we’re allowing them to interview us, but we’re also interviewing them, make sure that this is someone that we really want to work with. Part of the discovery that we had on the sympathy mapping was just friction. Too much friction early on made customers feel a little bit left out. Right. So we actually removed the friction from the earliest part of our sales process. You know, we get, we had the 20 question, you know, form on our website before someone emailed in because we wouldn’t know they were real. Do you have, what’s your budget? What’s your timeline? 

AJ Ballantine
What kind of project are you doing? Please explain in a short essay. So we removed all of that. We said, if you want to book an appointment with our team, here’s how you do it. Use calendly. We noticed that it was easier for us to track down these particular homeowners and cancel their discovery call if we found out that they didn’t have a good budget or they weren’t in our area, than it was to pick up the phone on a Monday morning and answer the four or five inquiries that came in over the weekend. Right. They were already on the calendar. It was easier for us to take them off rather than try to track them down. So that discovery call is set up via Zoom. We end up interviewing them. We send some material out ahead of time. 

AJ Ballantine
You know, we basically prime the conversation, say we’re going to want to talk about these things. We’re asking you to come prepared and we give them some material. You know, we’re going to talk about your budget. Here’s why, this is why it’s so important, because it’s going to help drive the overall experience from here on forward. Here’s how to come up with a budget. We give them a budget guide. We go through. We want to talk about the prioritization of your project. We send them a MoSCoW report, something that they can fill out on a Google form. And then after that discovery call, if we find out we’re a mutual fit and the budget seems reasonable, and of course the project is up our alley, we’ll actually schedule an in home consultation with them. 

AJ Ballantine
We want to actually, again, this is the piece that I tried to leave out. This is where again, that process refinement comes into play. We started by completely chiseling that in home consultation out, but now we did add that back in because we felt that was really important to kind of solidify that relationship. You know, during that consultation, that’s when the designer is really hammering out that MoSCoW report so that we can get a really detailed list of priorities. And after that is filled out and that consultation is over, we make it very clear to the homeowner that the next step is them signing a design agreement and paying a 1% retainer for us to be able to provide for them that next deliverable. So we break our deliverables out to two sections. The design agreement covers both of them. 

AJ Ballantine
The first is for a 1% fee, we will deliver to you an estimate and a design conceptual design. We call it a low fidelity design within, we say within two weeks. But our target is seven days. I think our average is nine. At that point they can decide whether or not to move forward with the full design retainer. And that’s a full 5% fee on the designated price of the project. And at that point we have 100% closing rate on all the projects that end up moving forward from that point on. But that’s what the sales process looks like step by step. 

Logan Shinholser
So let me go back through this and then I want to ask you more specific questions, especially when you’re throwing out like a MoSCoW report. Most people probably like, what are we talking about here? So, so lead comes in and they’re going right to the calendar to pick a time that works best for them. 

AJ Ballantine
Them. 

Logan Shinholser
Are you on that? Like, are you giving them, hey, anytime between today and the next 364 days, you pick a time that works. Or like, I guess, what are the constraints around when they can book times with you? 

AJ Ballantine
It’s around Robin calendar. So it does choose specific people from my office. And so it keeps the availability pretty clean. We don’t allow any appointments to be made the same day. I think it might be 48 hours, but it might be the next day. I have to go back and look at that. But ultimately we want to make sure that as we walk into a day, we’re not going to be kind of slammed with last minute appointments. We allow it for up to three weeks out. We don’t want anybody booking appointments further out because those are less reliable for us. They’ll Forget about as much as we will. And then, of course, yeah, we basically limit the calendar based on availability of our team. If we have, like, company meetings or, you know, holidays, we’ll kind of pull those. 

AJ Ballantine
Block those dates out so that way nobody can get in at a time that no one’s going to be able to feel that call. But it keeps the calendar pretty open and provides a wide range of availability for the. For the client to choose from. 

Logan Shinholser
And I know just from, like, my side like that, like, I would love that way more personally than just, like, a normal form, because it’s a lot easier, I know, like, from when my wife and I went through, like, our bathroom addition. Essentially, it was just getting on the same schedule was a pain between the two of us because both of us would have to take off work. And this is all pre baby, so that adds a whole factor into it. But, like, being able to do a zoom call versus, hey, that sounds great. Let’s meet up at your house immediately. I mean, I. 

Logan Shinholser
I had a lot more pushback on meeting up in personally, because I didn’t want to take time off to figure out that if AJ is going to come in and estimate my project, you know, maybe we’re way off base here. Maybe he smells terrible, and we’re about to have, you know, a long process of working intimately together, and I’m gonna have to, like, you know, mask up just to, like, you know, so there’s so many different, like, things that I’m thinking through that a zoom call makes it so much easier. You know, my wife and I are both millennials. We both work full time. So, you know, maybe we’re just in that sweet spot, and it’s different than somebody who focuses primarily on, like, aging in place where they’ve got plenty of time and they’ve. They want you to come over. 

Logan Shinholser
But at least for my wife and I, like, that was a big thing, was being able to work with somebody that prioritize. Excuse me, using technology to help us make sure this thing happens efficiently. So. 

AJ Ballantine
And it is huge because at that point, the, you know, the first impressions are. Are pretty low velocity. You know, I don’t have a huge investment in making a dramatic first impression with you. Right. So that was number one. But there’s a couple other kickers in there, too. I mean, obviously, we wanted to make sure that our clients knew that. Again, part of that empathy mapping exercise was how do we differentiate ourselves in this area? Keeping the client’s perspective in full view. How do we make it as easy as possible for the homeowner. Right. So again, it’s removing stress. Well, you know, you can read all the books in the world about time management, and a lot of them, like Jim Collins talked about the Zeigernik effect. 

AJ Ballantine
It’s when there’s an open loop, something that’s, you know, you started a process you started that you haven’t been able to complete, and it kind of distracts your brain a little bit and kind of have a lot of things rattling around. But we kind of look at that as far as the signup journey goes too, for the homeowner, if they can go on our website and book that first appointment, it’s done. They’re already further along with us than they are with any of our other competitors. Because if they’re out looking for making three appointments in the same day, they’re going to email two other contractors, they’re going to wait 24, 48, 72 hours or perhaps never for a response. But with us, it’s already done, so instantly already done. So it’s. 

AJ Ballantine
And of course, with that impression of being stress free, we also want to build the perceived value that the client is so much further along with our firm than they are with anybody else. So why not continue and look at how fast they’re moving along with our firm versus anybody else’s? So that is, as we talk a little bit more about my process, that you’ll see that’s a recurring theme through every step, is you’re already so much further along and so much faster than you are with anybody else. So we drove it home with those calendar appointments. 

Logan Shinholser
Good. Love it. So you guys, then, you know, they hop on the calendar, they have a zoom call set up. What are you guys talking about on that? First, I know you said it’s a little bit of like, you know, us interviewing them, then interviewing us. Like, what are you after in those first 30 minutes when you’re doing these zoom calls with us? 

AJ Ballantine
We are purely after making sure that we’re a good mutual fit with these particular homeowners. Right. We’re asking questions about, you know, how long have they lived in the home? What are they really after? You know, of course, getting some project details. You know, is it a type of project that we want to take on? But really, the meat and potatoes of that initial discovery call is one discussing the budget. We want to make sure that they have a reasonable frame of reference for how much this project is going to cost. They don’t have to have a number in mind, but we need to know that they’re understanding that it’s probably a lot higher than they expect. And then two, what we’re really trying to do is make sure that the priorities of the particular project can align with said budget. 

AJ Ballantine
Someone can have $200,000 to spend on a renovation, but what they expect $200,000 to cover as well, and beyond what we know it can cover. So $200,000 budget is great, but not if you want to build a three story addition. So we’re out to establish parameters for the scope of work within a certain reason. So we’re kind of giving them tools to be able to do this. Like I said, we send over a pricing guide, like a budget guide, to kind of help them, you know, more like classifications on how much things cost, very broad and generic. And then, of course, we send this MoSCoW report and tell them this is a helpful tool for you to align your priorities. You know, MoSCoW, I know you’re going to ask this question next. What does MoSCoW stand for? It’s an acronym. 

AJ Ballantine
It’s must have, should have, could have, and will not have. You think about it in that order. In terms of a remodeling project, your must haves are, if you’re going to spend any money on this project, what do you have to have it complete for you? We have to expand the kitchen. We need more storage. Okay, that’s a must have. I need a home office space. Okay, must have. I’d like to have inset cabinets. We changed the language there. It’s now no longer a need. I’d like to. So how important is inset cabinets versus full overlay? Well, it’s a design thing we’d really like to have. So we’ll put that in the should have. Right. We’d also like to update the foyer and update the fireplace. All right. 

AJ Ballantine
Are those integral to getting this entire project done for you, or are those things, like, maybe lesser on the list? And if we start to do this exercise with them, we start to have all these must haves appear, the should haves and the could haves, or the fireplace and the foyer and the will not haves. We kind of leave that blank. We just kind of leave that in there. It’s like a, hey, there will be things that are going to end up in this category, and we’ll advise on those things. So we help the customer understand that the priority list is really what we’re going to design this particular project on. And this helps with the budget conversation. So think about it. This way, you get a client that says, we want to do the kitchen, we want to have a bigger island. 

AJ Ballantine
We want to take it down the wall between the kitchen and the dining room. We want to do the foyer, the fireplace, and, like, the whole first floor. Well, right there, you’re going to say, well, that’s two to $300,000 project. Is that what you’re willing to spend on this? And the answer is most inevitably, well, no, I wasn’t planning on spending that much. Well, how much were you willing to spend? That’s the hardest question to get answered from a client right there. So we don’t lead with that. We don’t say, well, how much are you willing to spend? We say, all right, well, based on your entire MoSCoW report, you’re looking at, like, a 2 to $300,000 renovation, you know, or 3 to 400,000, whatever it is. And usually the answer is like, ooh, yeah, we don’t have that much money. 

AJ Ballantine
Like, okay, well, hey, look, if we just focused on the top two categories, your must haves and perhaps some or most of your should haves right there, we’re probably somewhere between 150 and 200. Does that sound like a more comfortable budget for you? Well, that question is a lot easier to ask than what is the most amount of money that you are willing to spend? Right. We’re looking for a comfort zone, like, are you comfortable spending 150 to 200? If we’re just exploring these upper two areas. And the answer is either yes or need some modification, Right? So we’re kind of finding our way through there. But by the end of that call, we’ll have their comfort zone. All right, how much are you comfortable spending? Right. 

AJ Ballantine
And if that aligns with the scope of work that they highlighted on their MoSCoW, we’ll say, like, hey, look, we’ll knock out everything in your must haves. And, you know, we’ll. We’ll give you an allowance for your inset cabinets, but that’s something that you could lop off, right? We’ll give you an option for that. But now, guess what we just saved ourselves from doing. We’re now no longer exploring pricing on alternative plans that look at the foyer or the fireplace or the living room. It’s core focus, must haves and should haves. And now we have a budget range. If they say, yes, we’re comfortable with that. What we do is we say, okay, well, hey, between 150 and 200, we’ll set a target of 175. That 175 is, you know, we’ll look at everything between 100 and 200, but focus on 175. Right. 

AJ Ballantine
We’ll base the 1% on that. So for 1750 dollars, will now provide for you a proposal that will be within this range and also a conceptual design that shows you what you can get for that amount of money. And now the client knows what they’re going to expect. Right. They’re not expecting an addition for the same price, because that’s something that’s common, I think, in this industry, is that you talk about priorities and then you establish a budget, and then they’re still disappointed when you send the estimate in and they’re saying this doesn’t have all the stuff that I asked for. It’s like, well, no kidding, because we lopped all of it off because your budget wasn’t that big, but still, it doesn’t matter. So that MoSCoW Report helps us really fine tune exactly what to look for when we’re designing that initial. 

AJ Ballantine
Like putting that initial design together. It’s our best foot forward. They are clear. We are clear on the expectations of what to expect. We’re delivering it fast. All because we’re not spending all this time exploring all these rogue options and so forth. That was a lot of words. I’m going to pause there to ask if you have any questions on that. Yeah. 

Logan Shinholser
So going. Going back to that 30 minute Zoom meeting. Who is running that in your office? Because, I mean, this is like, the whole thing is. I like when I did like that workshop for Kyle Hunt’s group when they were here in Charlotte, I brought up, I was like, look, guys, you know, as somebody who has hired a remodeling company and who. Who actively hires a lot of just contractors? I mean, we repainted our house this year. We did our columns, did our whole front yard. Like, all this stuff. Like, a lot of what you guys do is it’s a performance and a show where it’s. You got to be on the whole time and just recognize that you’re almost a performer and the audience is like the prospect. So you got to be polished during a lot of this stuff. 

Logan Shinholser
So with that said, who. Who is. Who’s doing this 30 minute Zoom call? Is it only going to be salespeople that are trained in how to communicate, or are you also having like, your lead carpenter hopping on the phone going, well, it’s my turn to talk through this stuff? 

AJ Ballantine
No, no, you want to polish. Do you want people that understand the process and the more refined your sales process is and more clear it is, you know, from a visual perspective too. We’ll talk about flowcharts and all that. The more confident they’re going to be to get you what the, like the desired result of that meeting. So for us it is our sales staff and our sales staff is really two designers and I have one project developer. He’s our more construction related sales guy in that sales process. So think of it this way. If you’re a smaller company, you know, your owner, operator, right. So your owner doing most of the sales likely be you and a designer or just the designer. So it’s a mix. 

AJ Ballantine
Usually the larger projects, if we see an addition come in, we’ll have the designer and the project developer on the call. We feel like that really is like the, you know, kind of the icing on the cake is when you have the construction guy as well as a designer. But you know, it can vary. If it’s a small project, the designers are usually the best. They’re the ones that make the connection with the client the fastest. And you know, they, the clients latch onto their designers, you know, so we make sure that designers are on just about every single one of those calls. 

Logan Shinholser
So with this they come and they do the 30 minutes and are you building out this MoSCoW report with them live or are you just having a, the conversation, you know, based on what you learned in Sandler or some other sales training that is really just sussing each other out? And then MoSCoW comes later. 

AJ Ballantine
We make sure that they have the MoSCoW report at hand and we’ll pull it up and we’ll review it. If they, a lot of times they don’t fill it out prior to that meeting. So a lot of the things that we hear during that discovery call will actually begin filling out. We’ll look, we’ll list for the keywords, you know, like or need and we’ll begin filling this out and we’ll share it with them and say, hey look, this is kind of what we’ve gathered. Does this look right in terms of priority? We’ll get feedback, you know, move things up or down the list. But yeah, that is happening on that call. And of course at the end of that call we do like I said, we like to have the in person consultation as a follow up. 

AJ Ballantine
Well, we’ll reiterate that MoSCoW report and just make sure that all of the things that they are really seeking in this remodel are on that report somewhere. That way there’s no like blind expectation of Something that they didn’t share with us early on that they were expecting to be all the way up at the top. We make sure, hey, look, we’re only looking at things that are on this report, so give it to us now. 

Logan Shinholser
So do you send out that MoSCoW like a blank MoSCoW report when they fill out like a contact form? 

AJ Ballantine
It’s a Google form. Yeah. So it goes out in an automated email. So at a follow up, we call them flips. So it goes out on an automated email when the calendly appointment is confirmed by my team. So again, if a calendly appointment comes up and they are out of our area or they’re looking for a project that we don’t do, we’ll cancel the appointment. But if we confirm it, that’s when the automated email go out to, hey, we’re just confirming your appointment. Here are some materials that you need. We’re going to talk about these things. And attached here is our MoSCoW report. We’re going to go over this in that initial call. Be great if you could get a head start. It’s a Google form. It goes out, they can put their email address on it and it comes back to our team. 

AJ Ballantine
You know, they’ll, you know, it’s just a short form. It’s like four questions. It’s pretty easy to follow, easy to understand. 

Logan Shinholser
What percentage of prospects that you would say are qualified prospects are actually filling out that form ahead of time? 

AJ Ballantine
Probably about 25% of them. So not, like I said, not a huge number. Usually it’s during that discovery call that our team is filling in the blanks. 

Logan Shinholser
So at that point, discovery call happens, Discovery, whoever’s running it is, hey, A.J. You know, we have this MoSCoW report that we’re going to be going through together on this call to make sure that I’m capturing everything that you’re actually looking for. And then we can start to kind of prioritize to figure out, hey, if we end up coming out to the house, what we’re really looking at here. We’re not just daydreaming when we’re out at the house as well. 

AJ Ballantine
Yeah, okay. Yeah. So yeah, we, when we had the MoSCoW report especially filled out, or at least the bulk of it filled out on the discovery call. It helps that initial consultation, that in person consultation stay on track. We’re not looking at everything, you know, if it’s low on the priority list and we kind of establish that there are some things that, you know, they might come and say we want to do the first floor. We want to do the bathrooms and we want to do the basement. Those consultations were getting long, lengthy because were kind of like, you know, entertaining these things. We knew in our heads like, oh gosh, they’re not gonna be able to afford all this. But we would entertain and make them feel comfortable that were listening to them all the way through. 

AJ Ballantine
It makes those in person consultations excruciatingly long. And we wanted to keep them short so that we could do more of them in a week. Again, think about output of my team. They’re doing two, three hour consultations multiple times a week. We’re capped at five, six consultations. But if we can keep them at a half an hour, oh gosh, we can do 15, 20 of them in a week. And that was the idea. So it keeps those consultations a little shorter when we can not have to entertain all those, you know, extracurriculars on that Oscar report. 

Logan Shinholser
So when you’re doing this 30 minute intake call, essentially filling out this MoSCoW report, is that when you’re then establishing like, hey, we kind of have our list based off of this list, you’re looking at 100 to 200. Are you guys bringing that up prior to doing the in home or is that happening at the in home? 

AJ Ballantine
The, the price conversation is happening on the discovery call. 

Logan Shinholser
Yeah, just talk about like the budget ranges. 

AJ Ballantine
Yeah, that’s happening on that discovery call. And that’s how we kind of determine whether or not that we would set up that, you know, that in home consultation. Right. So if we can establish some of those parameters and make sure that they would actually spend, you know, 150 or 200 on a particular project. You know, if they say no, we’re really trying to keep this below 60, we do not proceed any further. You know, that’s ultimately a lead that got through is qualified. We track those separately as well, you know, on our churn. But we kind of close the door right there, like, hey, look, we’re not even gonna come out your home, you know, if we can’t determine a good mutual fit on the budget. 

Logan Shinholser
So, all right, so you establish 100 to 200 and then you go, I’m guess like, do you typically do like at the like upper or third quartile as like your percentage that you’re going off of for that design? 

AJ Ballantine
So it depends, it really depends. It depends on how big that comfort zone budget truly is. You know, a lot of times our customers really do want to focus on trying to find one you know, one good plan to go after. We always thought, well, give them three plans or give them two plans and let them pick. Well, again, coming back to empathy mapping, a lot of those were information overload, too many options, they didn’t know how to proceed. And then they would want you to explore both mutually in a further direction, which was now two jobs I’m trying to bid and design when I’m only going to win one of them at best. So we wanted to make sure we could give them one plan, one good direction from the start. Doesn’t mean that we don’t provide them multiple options. Right. 

AJ Ballantine
So there are some cases where we’ll come up with like an alternative plan, especially if the. But it’s all based on the comfort zone budget. For example, if you said, you know, hey, we need some extra space, our kitchen’s too small, but your idea of making the kitchen larger was putting kitchen addition on the back, we would have a conversation about the budget and you may say, like, look, I would be willing to spend 400 if I could have the kitchen addition and make the living space larger. Right. But if I can’t do both of those things, I’m not going to spend 400 just on the kitchen addition. So then we start having a conversation. What would you do if you couldn’t make both things happen? How much would you spend? Well, your budget might be half of that, right? 

AJ Ballantine
I wouldn’t spend more than 200 on this renovation if I couldn’t get the addition. It’s okay. Well, if we explore everything between, you know, maybe we’ll explore both of those plans for you between 200 and 400. We will set the target range for like 350. Right. We’ll, we’ll try to figure out what we can get to work at that higher end. But we will also give you a plan to show you. Okay. If you didn’t do the addition, what could things look like? And at that point, we are giving you two different plans, but the design agreement is really based on the higher priced version of that plan. Does that answer your question? 

Logan Shinholser
Yeah. And just so I’m clear, the point of you charging 1% of the proposed total is not, I’m guessing you guys are not taking that and then going off and celebrating that you just made 1% of a project. Like, what’s the overall goal with charging them 1%? 

AJ Ballantine
Overall goal? I mean, it starts in the loss leader. You know, it’s just, you know, a little bit of a hook to get them to show that they’re serious. Right. But it was less of that for us and more of the increasing our value. Right. So if were doing all of this for free, what does that say about us? That we’re the guys who are trying to sell themselves just to, you know, get the next project right? No, no. We’re a formidable company, and anybody who sees the value in what we do is willing to pay it. You know, it’s just a matter of how much are they willing to pay before they know what they’re going to get. So that’s why we broke it up into two phases. 

AJ Ballantine
It’s hard for somebody to come right out of the gate and spend $10,000 on a design build company. There are those that do, right? There are plenty of companies in the space that are charging that amount out of the gate. But for us, you know, were just stepping into this arena where we’re charging more money, and it’s hard to. It’s hard to go from Nothing to like 10 grand and expect that you’re just going to get all these people that are paying all this money. Sorry. We had to perfect this process. Right. So when we started to do this, we started to understand how much was a customer actually willing to spend to get what. And we did this whole value engineering exercise. 

AJ Ballantine
You know, I spoke about this on the Kyle Hunt podcast, where we put together, we did this whole whiteboard session with my sales staff, and we wrote down everything that. Every task that we complete as a remodeling company for a homeowner. I mean, we got granular. Very, very granular. And we started to, you know, we took that whiteboard, we condensed it into an Excel spreadsheet, and really started to move things up and below aligns. Okay, what do we do for free? What do we do for a minimal amount? And what is that? Minimal amount is like an X, right? We don’t know what that is. We’re trying to discover what X is. And then we have, like, our full retainer. Like, that’s the amount of money that would actually pay for my office staff to work on what they’re working on. 

AJ Ballantine
But that middle piece, you’re never going to make enough money, you know, just selling those because it’s not really paying for a whole lot. It’s not really hooking the customer a whole lot either. At least not in the real sense. And that’s not ultimately why we’re in business. We’re not in business to sell design agreements. We’re in business to Sell remodeling projects. So we started to look at what was a client willing to spend and for what. So we said, what are they truly after? Right. So we started to do this whole exercise where they’re after an estimate because they feel compelled to get three. So they have to pay for an estimate, especially because estimates take forever. But they’re not going to pay $2,000 for an estimate. They’re just not. There’s not enough value in an estimate. 

AJ Ballantine
Tell me I’m going to spend $2,000 on a spreadsheet now. Come on, get it, get out of here. Well, what if we dressed it up with a couple of extra, you know, little accoutrements, throw a 3D design in there like that, makes it a little bit more valuable, you know, show a little bit more. And so we came up with a really healthy idea of how we could sell particular items for a little bit more, but deliver what the customer is really looking for, which was that estimate. And we came up with a first pass proposal and that’s ultimately what we deliver as a response to getting that 1% retainer. They get a first pass proposal and that includes an estimate and some 3D designs for what the space could look like inside of that proposal. 

Logan Shinholser
So you’re going out. So at that point you have this 30 minute meeting, you say, look, this sounds great. We’ve agreed upon a budget range. We have our MoSCoW report fully filled out. So we know when we come out to the space, we’re not looking at the nine different rooms that you brought up. We’re really only focused on this one room because that’s what we determined is your, you know, must have and you should have is all for this room. We know what the budget is now based off of that. It’s going to be 1%. And for that we’re going to come out and we’re going to walk the space with you, I guess. What exactly are you doing in that in home consultation? 

Logan Shinholser
That continues to go off of that whole idea of the empathy mapping and understanding what are people feeling when you’re coming into their space? 

AJ Ballantine
Oh, gosh, that’s a loaded question. That’s where I can get really long winded. So it started off by, you know, if they sign that design agreement, pay the 1%, that’s when the real work happens, right? That’s where we get messy. We were going out to their home, were measuring, doing a whole field measure, were putting together some mock concepts and designs and putting together the proposal. Right. So the client felt very well taken care of in this process. And it was really helpful for us too, to kind of like really fine tune what this project is actually going to look like. But we realized were spending way too much time doing that piece. And this is where the process engineering minded me comes in. It’s like, how can we be doing this faster? 

AJ Ballantine
I don’t know if you want me to share my screen, but I have our iterations of our sales workflow. I pulled them up right before this call. Here, I’ll share this. Yeah. 

Logan Shinholser
Then obviously, if you guys listen to the podcast, just. It’s all on YouTube, but we’ll do our best to like describe some elements of it if it needs descriptions. But yeah, pull up whatever you got. That’d be great. 

AJ Ballantine
Here we go. So this is our. This is how I was building our, you know, sales. Sales process. You know, it started. Let me actually move over here because I don’t have it in this software, but this was our original sales process. And you can see it looks like a spaghetti map. So when we started this journey, we started to try and simplify. And you kind of see went through several iterations. Standard rule of thumb, when you’re developing a process, you should limit it to 12 steps and make it as linear as possible. You should never have loops and squirrely lines through it. So, 12 steps. So we began to streamline this process or simplify it, I should say. 

AJ Ballantine
And you kind of see we ended up down here in this second iteration, you know, where were getting a lead, were doing a phone interview or a virtual meeting. This is where, if you recall me saying earlier on this call, were not going out in person. We’ve since added that in. So you kind of see that we added that down here is that a lead comes in. We will do a phone and interview call. And then for most of them, we’re doing a visit in person visit. Then get to this design agreement. We were scheduling time to go out and visit a measure. We were developing design concepts and then a first pass proposal. So all that was happening as a result of that design agreement, that 1% fee being paid. 

AJ Ballantine
You can kind of see the checklist here that we do the MoSCoW report. We get basic measurements on that initial call. And then of course, were not taking formal in depth measurements. We were not taking story pole dimensions of the exterior. We weren’t doing anything like that. These were just interior dimensions that were trying to get kind of to push the design Concepts through. So design concepts. These were low fidelity. Again, we wanted to have a new plan, a basic layout with basic notes. We were not putting together kitchen layouts, tile designs, colors, finishes. These were purely just to give them an idea of what the space could look like, flex our muscle a little bit. And then, of course, providing the 2D floor plan and the estimate with allowances and a single 3D overview or some images. 

AJ Ballantine
This was taking us, honestly, this says two to three weeks, because that was our target. This was taking us four to six weeks to prepare. It’s excruciating. And mostly it was not just the amount of time it’s taken us to prepare it, but it was the amount of scheduling time in between. You know, from the time that we signed a design agreement, were getting back in touch with the homeowner, trying to schedule a second visited out to their home, coordinating it with our architectural designer, who was the one who’s set to go out there and actually measure the space. And that process alone sometimes took two weeks. It was a week or a week and a half. 

AJ Ballantine
And then, of course, it’s the time to have him put the drawing into the chief architect is our CAD software that we use and to kind of build off of that. So this was taking forever, and it was killing. We weren’t seeing any increase on our closing percentages. We were still capped at the amount of. Of leads that we could take on a certain week. Because if you think about it, if all these leads are hanging out here for an extra three or four weeks now, I’ve got. Instead of, you know, 10 or 15 that I’m entertaining, I’ve now got four times that. Right. So I now 60 jobs that are rattling around at different phases of this project. This one needs an estimate. This one needs the designs input. It was nuts. 

AJ Ballantine
So we simplified this a little bit more down to this guy. And so we now do interview and a visit and. 

Logan Shinholser
All right, so. All right, so, A.J. So you’re. You’re pushing for two to three weeks to get all that stuff happening, and you’re saying it’s happening. It’s actually taking about four to six weeks to get it done. You have all these projects kind of bouncing all over this process. Are you, like, calling prospects to say, hey, I know it’s been three weeks. We still have another couple weeks going here, I guess. Like, are you doing anything to try to, like, bridge the gap from when you first started this? 

Speaker 1
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we. We pride ourselves on communication. Again, every contractor does. We. We executed well I mean, were always keeping the customers in the loop. You know, a lot of the initial part was just us working through the schedule to try to get that initial measure done. 

AJ Ballantine
And of course as were starting. 

Speaker 1
To put things in, were keeping them posted on our progress and so on. But nevertheless, that wasn’t really the issue. The issue was how long was actually taking us to actually produce these first estimates. I think the industry average is 26 days to get a, to get the initial estimate and design out to a particular client. 

AJ Ballantine
26 days. 

Speaker 1
You know, it wasn’t very clear from my marketing research whether that was business days or actual calendar days. 

AJ Ballantine
And I’m pretty sure it was business days. 

Speaker 1
And were kind of right in that 26 day mark. 

Logan Shinholser
What was taking so long? Like why four to six weeks to get some of these? I mean, I guess like the rendering, I mean like what was there like one main issue of, hey, it was the actual like 3D design that took the longest or I guess how’d you go about that? 

Speaker 1
Yeah, there were actually a few components there. So one was collecting the measurements was a big pain. It took forever. Creating the as built inside a chief architect was also a pain. It would sit in my architect’s queue, you know, and he would have to put that in before the designer could begin working on it. The design piece really, we felt like were kind of executing that well because of the MoSCoW. We were only really entertaining a specific set of a specific scope of work for that particular project. But then it was delivery mechanism. 

AJ Ballantine
Right. 

Speaker 1
So were building estimates, the estimates were taking longer and of course packaging all of this up, you know, if someone’s going to spend $2,000, you know, we don’t want to send them an email with a bunch of attachments. 

AJ Ballantine
Right. 

Speaker 1
So were building a proposal with, you know, it was a beautiful proposal of like all of these things together, which was also taking a lot of time. So when we began, you know, again, the, my three step process for, you know, for developing really good processes, scrutinize, simplify, and then streamline. So we felt like we simplified pretty well. But how do you streamline all of those things? And that’s where technology really came into play. 

Logan Shinholser
So and just before we jump into the tech side of things, from my understanding. So this thing that you’re trying to get together, if that 1% is taking four to six weeks, this is the same thing that you now have dialed in down to nine days, correct? 

Speaker 1
Correct. 

Logan Shinholser
Okay. So walk me through. Where do you go from there as far as. Because I, I do want to go into like, what. What do you guys do for the additional 4% for the design, but for just this sake, what do you guys. What have you done to take it from four to six weeks down to nine days? 

Speaker 1
I’ll show you. So we began to ask questions again. Like I said, we kind of asked ourselves a lot of hard questions throughout this entire process. Now we’re doing things completely differently than we thought they could be done. You know, I started to look at this measure as so time consuming, scheduling all that time in between trying to get it back out to the homeowners, you know, back out to the homeowner’s home. What if we did the measure here during this first visit? I cringed when I thought about this because it took so long to capture those measurements that again, that initial consultation, the in person consultation cannot be an hour and a half, two hours. It just cannot be. 

AJ Ballantine
We don’t have any. 

Speaker 1
The client has no skin in the game. We don’t have a design agreement in place. And that’s not scalable. If it lasts that long, how do we keep it at 30 minutes, but get measurements of the home? That’s where, you know, we started to say, okay, we move the measure here. We just saved ourselves two weeks on the backside. Now how do we get better at the design and estimate piece, building that proposal? And that’s where we started bringing other tools to kind of help us build those faster. So by the time we started to do that, this is our final version. So we do the Zoom interview. It kind of like how I. Let me make this a little larger here, let me hide this zoom in, make this a little larger. We do an interview via Zoom. 

Speaker 1
We do the visit and we scan the home now with render, of course, a little plug. Right. But ultimately this changed our sales process. Like, probably one of the biggest improvements we made was accepting the reality that we did not need measurements down to that eighth of an inch on that initial measure to get as far as we wanted to go, we needed to be within a couple of inches. Render gets us in to within an inch, but we can scan an entire first floor in three or four minutes. And we have literally everything we need. 

AJ Ballantine
We would take, you know, we’ll take. 

Speaker 1
A couple of quick key measurements like around the kitchen sink and so forth and jot those down. We’re not measuring that entire first floor, but we have all the measurements for the first floor. So that was huge to get those measurements early on when we get into this design agreement. Now, like I said, we cut out that measure piece and we’re creating the as built. So this is what I spent a lot of my effort at render doing, is creating integrations with CAD software. So to answer, a personal need that I had was, okay, well, it’s. It’s all good and well to measure quickly, but I still now have to build this in Chief Architecture 2020. So I went and got integrations with those two companies so that I can quickly dump my render scan directly into my design software. 

Speaker 1
So instead of it taking me 90 minutes to build out an as built, I can do it in chief architect in three minutes. 2020 is even faster, you know, so that. That took more time out. So now, if you think about it this way, before, when we signed a design agreement, it was about two weeks before my designer could get started on that project because we would have to schedule to go out, and then my architect designer would have to actually put. 

AJ Ballantine
The drawing in so that the designer. 

Speaker 1
Could start working with it. We cut that all out. So now when a design agreement signed, my designer can go and grab that render file, drop it into chief architect, and start designing within five minutes. So there’s two weeks right there that we just cut out the conceptual designs we’re doing in Chief Architect. We strip those out. We’re doing, like I said, low fidelity. We’re not putting in tile textures or anything like that. Another thing that took us a long time was actually creating layouts in Chief Architect. Anybody who’s chief architect knows when you’re building layouts, it’s setting a lot of cameras up. It’s building a layout like using templates and setting all these cameras up to be the way that you want the views. 

AJ Ballantine
And I’m. 

Speaker 1
Gosh, it would take my designers about an hour, maybe two hours sometimes, and some more complex ones to get the layouts all, you know, done really well. We’re not doing those anymore. We’re actually clipping photos, like screen, you know, just a little quick little screen grab. We’re just clipping. We’re set a camera in, clipping. Paste, clip and paste. We’re building an estimate in job tread. We have templates built for all types of projects and different tiers of projects. So we have templates for the kitchens, whether small replacements, modest remodels, first floor remodels, first floor complex remodels. We have them all in there. So now we have our one person from our staff who was Never in the estimating game, but she has an attention to detail like no other. 

Speaker 1
We actually have her now putting the estimates together because she was so quick at it and she loves the data side. And now she’s providing these estimates for my sales team. Again, it’s one less thing that my sales team now has to do. And then now we’re creating our first pass proposals in Canva, which is a design software. It’s sort of like Photoshop, but it’s on steroids. It’s cloud based, it’s templated. So we actually build this beautiful first patch proposal. Looks like a mill billion bucks, but everything inside of that proposal is just placeholders. We can drag and drop images, drag and drop our proposals into these templates. And again, they look like a million bucks. It looks like if a client is working with us, it looks like we just spent an entire week working on nothing but their project. 

Speaker 1
And all of these things. You can kind of see that we’re timing how long we have invested in each of these particular spaces. We’re spending roughly six to 10 hours to get from this interview to the time that we’re delivering that first pass proposal. Six to ten hours of my staff’s time invested on each one of these. 

AJ Ballantine
Projects that gets this first pass proposal. 

Logan Shinholser
All right, so that was awesome. And the reason that I really like this is we do a lot of this at our own company at cgn. Like, we do marketing strategies, and we’ve spent a considerable amount of time trying to get this stuff dialed in and. And to hear somebody else in a different industry take that same amount of time and effort into it like it’s music to my ears. So I loved it. I think it’s super systematic. And honestly, I’m excited for you guys to listen to part two. Thank you so much for joining us. 

AJ Ballantine
On this episode of the Contractor Growth Network. This episode of the Contractor Growth Network podcast is hosted by Logan Shinholser and produced by Logan Shinholser and Dane Appleyard. Today’s guest was AJ Ballantine. If you have any questions from today’s episode, please reach out to the podcast at info@contractorgrowthnetwork.com.