This article developed from a conversation I had with Tim Faller as he readies to retire in the fall of 2024. Tim's journey from a youth minister in Georgia to a remodeling industry Hall of Famer is a story of passion, learning, and an unwavering commitment to excellence. I am honored to be able to share these insights from a man who has not only reshaped the remodeling landscape but has also touched the lives of countless individuals through his expertise, kindness, and mentorship. —Greg Woleck
Greg Woleck: Let’s start at the beginning of your career. How did you get into construction and remodeling?
Tim Faller: When I got out of college, I had a degree in agriculture with a specialization in dairy genetics from The Ohio State University, but I was really involved in a church there. I moved to a small town in South Georgia and worked as a youth minister for about three years. It wasn't quite the church situation that I was hoping for. Still, it worked well, for me; I'll say it that way. There was a fellow at the church who was “flipping houses,” as we would say now, and he hired a very skilled carpenter by the hour. He hired me by the hour to work with him. So that's how I got started. I already had some tools; I had some skills. But I spent probably a year working with this carpenter stripping the house completely and doing every aspect of it: plumbing, wiring, drywall, the whole deal. And then at a certain point, somebody asked me: Can you do this? And I said, “Sure,” because I didn't know what I didn't know. But I was pretty resourceful and figured it out as I went along. And whenever I didn't know what to do, I'd go ask the fellow who I’d worked with, or I'd go to the lumberyard and ask “How do you do this?” I basically learned by doing, and, I think, for the most part, the projects that I did in that part of the world are still standing. I do wonder sometimes when someone comes along to do a repair, if they're going like, “Who in the world would do it this way?” [laughs]
At a certain point, I decided that I had to either make it a career or go back to working for the church. And I decided that construction would be my career. I moved back to the Washington, D.C., area, where I’d grown up, and went to work for a company called Hopkins and Porter, and worked as a lead carpenter, which was also my introduction to the lead carpenter system. Eventually I became the production manager when the production manager quit very suddenly.
GW: How did you get into training?
TF: The company I was working for was run by a partnership between Mike Danker and Guy Sims. Guy was the president of the local NARI chapter, and he came back from a meeting one day, stuck his head in my office, and he said, “Hey, Tim, I volunteered you to speak at the Remodeling Show.” And I went like, “Wait, what?” I had no idea what a trade show was. So, at the very first Remodeling Show that was ever done in Pittsburgh, I did a 20-minute presentation on production. I had somebody come up to me afterward and say, “Man, it's nice to hear a production guy that can talk.” It might have been a year later, maybe six months, same boss, pops his head in my office, says, “Hey, I volunteered you to help start a training program for lead carpenters.” I literally said, “What do I know about that?” And he said, “Well, you know, a lot more than you think you do.” And so, I worked with three other people, and we started doing training for lead carpenters, which eventually became some of the core for the certified lead carpenter program that NARI has. At a certain point, the three other people dropped out. I really loved doing these presentations. I created a workbook and basically said,” Hey, this is mine.” I then started speaking at many, many trade shows on the lead carpenter system.
GW: I know how much you like to be around people. Was it the lead carpenter system that meant so much to you, or was it just the training in general that you enjoyed?
TF: That's a great question, because I think it was more training, in general. I'm very much a people person. [laughing] I was watching an episode of Cheers this morning, and you know the theme song “where everybody knows your name.” Part of the enjoyment in this whole thing was going to the JLC Live shows and walking down the corridor, and somebody going, “Hey, Tim, how you doing?” I was a fixture at those shows.
But as companies matured, through the 2000s, there was a lot of uproar about the lead carpenter system, with people saying it is dead. It's now “project managers.” But what was going on was job sizes; they were escalating, and lead carpenters couldn't do $500,000 projects effectively. At that scale, there has to be a project manager and perhaps a lead carpenter doing the carpentry work. As I started seeing that happen, and took a little criticism on the side, I realized I'm not talking about lead carpenter, I'm talking about project management. So, I shifted my terminology from lead carpenter to project management. I really don't care whether you're a project manager who never picks up a tool, or a lead carpenter that has to do both. But this is project management in the remodeling world. So to answer your question, it wasn't specifically the lead carpenter as much as I enjoy sharing information. If you look at my personality profile, one of my primary motivators is helping people. I joke (I think it's a joke, maybe it's not) telling people, “If I was independently wealthy, I would do this anyway.” Because I love seeing the lights come on. There's nothing more fulfilling to me than sitting in a room and talking about, for example, profit and overhead. And you just see the lights come on in these carpenters’ eyes when they realize how important it is and that they can save a little bit of time on the job site, and how that impacts profitability, and (I hope) their bonus. It's exciting to see people learn things, especially things that are not natural in their world.
GW: I've had the opportunity to shadow you for the last five or six months. One thing that stands out is your focus on the finances of a project. At what point did the financials, did gross profit, net profit, become such a focus for you?
TF: This is interesting, because my bosses at the time when I was a production manager welcomed me, and they said, “Here's your office, here's your computer; we're so glad you're here.” With all due respect to both (they were fantastic bosses), they never educated me on the numbers. I was making decisions daily about how much to charge for a change order, asking do we have money in the budget for this or for that, making all these decisions that a production manager needs to make, and I didn't have any clue on how it would impact the company’s profitability. I'm guessing, as I don't remember the exact dates, but I think about two years into being production manager, my boss said, “Tim, I just want to show you where we are financially as a company.” We were doing probably 3 million at that time, maybe 3.5, but only doing about 1%. Net, right? And I'm going like, “That's kind of small, isn't it?” It was at that moment the lights came on for me. I still didn't know how to explain it to other people, but I understood that wasn't enough money. And that my decisions and the decisions of my lead carpenters, as well as getting the estimating, right – all of that started kicking into gear. I'm not super educated in math, but I love figuring things out. And so when somebody throws a problem at me, I love sitting down with a spreadsheet because it'll do the math for me. The questions I was trying to answer were things like: “Why is 10% net profit so important to a company? Why can't we just shoot for 3%?” “How much comes out for taxes?” And “What about this labor burden that just keeps escalating?”
In my presentations, asking about the numbers gets people thinking. For example, I ask “If your 15-minute break takes 20 minutes every day, and there's eight people on the crew, what does that cost the company?” Nobody ever thinks about that, but we can do the math, and the light goes on: “Wow, that's a big chunk of money.”
I think one of my strengths is the ability to put things in terms that project managers and lead carpenters and carpenters can understand it. If they talk to an accounting person, or even the boss, it may go over their head.
GW: One of my favorite examples that you use is looking at a $3 million company as your illustration to understand just how quickly a 10% profit can disappear. That was a good example to see as an employee.
TF: There's an impression among almost all employees that the boss is getting rich off the sweat of my brow, so to speak. I have learned that bosses should be paid respectfully, not just skimping by, because they take on a lot of risk. The fragility of a 10% net profit everybody needs to understand. Just because we put $300,000 in the bank, taxes will take part of it. It also costs a lot to run a company that size. It costs a lot just to pay everybody, and to have cash to pay for the materials and everything else. If we don't have money in the bank, you're not going to get a paycheck because we've run out of cash. And so, I think that's important for everybody to understand. If they think, “Oh, the boss just got lots of money, so it doesn't really matter if I go to the lumberyard three times a week.” I try to show them that all those trips to the lumberyard add up and make a big difference to them, as well as to the boss.
GW: Let’s look at production management in general. What would you consider one of your success stories over the years of training?
TF: Most of the success has really come through the Remodelers Advantage Production Manager Roundtables. I don't think it's all about me, but I was the catalyst for some positive change. There's a fella in Atlanta, who came to one of the meetings that we have, and hardly said anything; basically did nothing and disappeared before I could even say hi to him at the end of the meeting. I thought “He's gone, he's never coming back.” But he did come back and now he's the general manager of about a $10 million company, and they're hitting around 13% net profit. He constantly pushes me to think of new ideas and new processes. It's partly due to my ability to challenge him to grow, but it’s also his desire. He's definitely one of those people who pushes himself. And I find that to be true across the board: You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink. You can put great ideas out in front of a lot of people, and they go like, “Okay, that's cool,” and nothing ever changes. It really will depend on people picking up the ideas that ring true for them, and making them happen. I do know, there are some companies that are, you know, have sort of teetered on the edge of bankruptcy. And in working with their production manager, primarily, they were able to dig themselves out of a big hole, and then start hitting the numbers that they've always wanted to hit.
One of my big things right now is how do you get production and sales design working together. Because that's one of the big conflict areas within a company. One of the most important parts of any process is sales and design communicating effectively with production. That's been a big push over the last several years, just to try to get people communicating and talking to each other more effectively.
GW: One of the things that impresses me about you is your kindness, and I mean that from the bottom of my heart; you're just a kind person. Another thing that really impresses me about you is your eagerness to continue to learn. I am fortunate to spend this time with you as you're planning this transition. But you're still developing new stuff. What motivates you to do that? What keeps you excited?
TF: I will confess that I think it's fairly restricted learning. I don't read every magazine or every book. For example, I know, you're really engaged in energy retrofits and high-performance building. And I'm fascinated by it, but I'm really not going to dive deep into it. The things that drive me are the things that I think will help somebody else. Like looking at the numbers. If I'm looking at a training presentation, I'm thinking, “What will help somebody else?" If I go visit with a company to do a two-day consult, I’m thinking, “How can I help them think through this problem or this challenge?” There’s an awful lot of stuff that I know I can already help with, but often I have to really think it through because it’s a new challenge. There are times when I'll say, “Look, I need to do a little more thinking on this, I'll get back to you.”
This fella that I mentioned from Atlanta called just a few weeks ago. He called me up and they were talking about the problem of trying to hit an $8 million budget for the year. In order to do that, they had to produce $8 million worth and if they left $200,000 until the next year, then, they really only sold and produced 7.8. And that's going to dip their net profit. So, we got to talking about this, and I went like, “Oh, this is cool,” right? Because I get to think about this problem. If you sit me at my desk and say, “Hey, Tim, create an Excel sheet about the cosmos,” it's like, “no, not going to do that” and I'll find something else to do.
GW: Another thing I appreciate is your wife's a clinical social worker and you have brought a lot of her world into this world with things like goal setting and being assertive versus being aggressive. Can you tell me more about that relationship and how it helps in your presentations?
TF: There's a lot of humaneness in the world that I live in. It isn't just about money. It isn't just about building a product. It's about the people who build the product.
My wife is a very accomplished counselor. She's very good at helping other people to be good at their jobs. And there are, I don't know if you call them techniques or processes or just the way you interact with people, that helps other people understand themselves – that’s the best way I can define it. Now she cannot tell me about her clients, right? I want to make that really clear: We never discuss her clients. But we do discuss how people think. And we do discuss how you motivate people to want to change instead of just telling them what to do. So I get this great interaction with her. Particularly since we started the Production Manager Roundtables, I've dug into a great number of books on managing people. I get to read these books and then talk to her and a number of other folks about them. Through all this, I’ve learned that there are really good ways to deal with people, and really crummy ways to deal with people. Business owners often complain about retention of staff. And it almost always comes down to them talking about money. But all the studies have shown that it's not about money; more often it’s about personality conflicts and communication. When I see the interaction between a business owner and their employees, I think, “Is that good, or is that troublesome or toxic or difficult?” Some of the business owners are just really good with people, and they have very loyal staff that interacts with them and does whatever needs to get done. And then there are others that are just not very good with other people, and they have employees that aren’t very committed. I've gotten to see maybe 300 different companies and have seen all these business owners interact with their employees. You can just see where there's trouble spots based on personality and based on how people communicate with each other. The production manager’s role is about developing process, but it's also very much about how you deal with people, and business owners need to understand that it's about the people. If you don't have the people, it's really hard to do the work.
GW: We always talked about customer service. But you've taught me it's a lot more than that. And customer experience is something that is important to you. Can you say a little bit about that?
TF: It’s recently occurred to me that what’s important is how the client experiences your company and your product. Most of the companies that I work with are accomplished. They know what they're doing. They’re not hackers, you know. And so, they do clean up, they do try to keep a schedule (that's always a real challenge for everybody), they do have weekly meetings, they communicate. But then they get this agitated client and they throw up their hands, like, “what are we doing wrong?” What I've tried to emphasize to these companies is that every one of the people that hires them has an expectation. They’ve heard about what your company does. To give them a great experience, you have to think about what's going to push their experience beyond what you normally do. That takes real effort.
We did a did a podcast with a guy who was an emergency room nurse and then became a production manager. One of the things he shared with us is, “If it's not written down, we don't know it.” I thought, “That's gold.” If we don't write down a plan to give the client a great experience, we will automatically revert to our natural habits. Now, they may be good habits. But we won't really give that client the experience unless it’s planned. I think this also explains why some companies can make really big mistakes. And the client comes out the other end goal and like, I wouldn't hire anybody else. There's nobody in town that I would hire other than these people. Big mistakes happen, you know, big trauma happened, but and then you have other companies where you know, what happened, somebody forgot to close the door, the back door, and the dog ran through the screen. And so the screen had to be replaced on a $500,000 project. This is not a big deal. But they are absolutely against that company. For some, it's something else, we're gonna blame it on the store, the door, and the dog and dismiss it like they're just irrational. But something else happened, where they're not getting the experience that they need. So they'll go bragging about your company. And so, I think we have to shift. I think we have to shift from customer satisfaction to what's the experience that they're going to have. And unfortunately, to some degree, it's a little bit vague, because you can't nail it down to three things.
GW: You mentioned the podcast The TIm Faller Show. How did that come about? And is it something you ever saw yourself doing?
TF: The origin was a staff meeting at Remodelers Advantage very shortly after I joined the company in 2017. We were sitting around the conference room discussing how we were going to get more people aware of Remodelers Advantage. And somebody in the room said we need to be doing podcasts. Then somebody looked at me and asked, “Tim, would you do a podcast?” And I said, “Sure.” And then there was like a three-second pause, and I went, “What's a podcast?” I had no idea what a podcast was. Honestly, I had not paid attention to anything going on in that type of arena. After that, Steve Wheeler, who became the co-host initially, put together an outline of how he thought the podcast could go. The first two or three, we stumbled through, and Steve goes, “Tim, it sounds like you're just reading stuff; you need to be a little more animated and natural as you go through it. That was easy for me; I'm a public speaker. The hardest thing—this came later after we had 100 or so – has been finding new content and guests. We like to have a guest almost every show. A lot of those come from listening to the stories that people tell about their businesses when I go visit a company. For example, one company said they have a four-day workweek. I go, “We got to do a podcast on that.” And somebody else says, this is the way we got production and design talking to each other. So we did a podcast on that. Just being around the industry, I pick up on a lot of different things. And, occasionally we hit gold. Like once some headhunter sent me an email that says, I represent Christine Mills and she'd love to be on your podcast to talk about listening. She's been on ABC; she's a keynote speaker for all these companies, so my first reaction was “How much?,” right? And they go, “Nothing. It's free.” So I said, “We'll do it.” And we hit gold. I mean, this is somebody who's not in the industry, but learned enough about us to be able to apply what she teaches to the world in general about listening to other people. Both Steve and I got done with the first one we did with her, and we went like, “Wow, that's one of our favorites.”
I've loved doing it. Again, one of the things that is good for me, and I tell this to everybody, is if you listen to the podcast and I get excited about something, I am not faking. This is not Tim trying to get ratings. This is Tim. “Yeah, I love that idea. That's amazing.” Maybe I'd never heard it before. Or maybe I had heard it, but maybe not just that way. Going back to comments we were talking about earlier: Learning things that I'm going to share with other people is exciting for me. It's exciting that I have a forum where people are willing to come on and talk to me about what they do, so that I have the opportunity to share that with other people. That's been a huge motivator for me.
GW: JLC Live. Is it true you been to all of them? How many is that?
TF: I don't know the number; I lost track years ago, but I have been to every one. I've been in attendance for every single JLC Live that's ever been done anywhere in the country. So that includes the West Coast, the central part of the country, and certainly the East Coast. And for those of you who know, it used to be called CBTC, Construction Business and Technology Conference. Then they turned it to JLC Live. The second one of those I attended, but I didn't speak at. But otherwise, I've done presentations at every one. I'd like to keep my track record going, although, at a certain point, maybe I won't be as attached to the industry as I am now. And I may not have as much to share, but we'll see how long we can keep it going.
GW: So, what are the plans for retirement?
TF: Oh, wow, it's hard to know., I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be building widgets in my garage. I know one fella who posts pictures of the bowls and plates he's making on his lathe. That's probably not going to be me. I will say, though, that, I gotta have something to do. I think there will be some helping friends with projects, maybe a new kitchen, maybe a new bathroom, not doing all the work, but managing those things for them. I'm sure at the church we're currently going to that there'll be projects. I want to stay engaged in the industry. I will say that getting on an airplane at this point is not as exciting as it used to be. It's just become harder, particularly since COVID. I'm looking forward to being home a little bit more, but I will have to stay busy, I will have to stay active just to maintain my sanity, is the way I'll put it. Summer times—mid-April through the beginning of October—is probably going to be about lobsters and fishing. I'll burn more gas in the boat than I ever have previous summers. But hopefully we'll be paid with the fish and the lobster that I catch. I'm sure that will be part of it.
GW: So outside of those months, I'm hoping I can rely on you as a sounding board.
TF: Oh, no problem with that. Whatever you need me to do, I'm more than more than willing to do it. And probably during those months, too. There will be some things. You know, I can't go fishing every day, you know, I can't afford to go fishing every day. That's for sure.
GW: How would you like to be remembered by the remodeling industry?
TF: People have come up to me and said things like, “We follow your lead carpenter system. We're really glad you invented that. And I tell them, “Look, I didn't invent it.” I think I'd like to be remembered for giving legs to production management as a system. And I think if nothing else, I made it a recognizable profession in the remodeling industry. I think it's always been there in new homes. I think if nothing else, I've given it some sort of professional status, where that level of management within a company is recognized as a professional, they're paid as a professional, and they have the responsibilities of management within a company—that mid-level management.
Then maybe just that I help people. That might be a lot of different things: It might be financially helping a company, or it might be helping straighten out some conflict that's going on, or it might be giving a company a vision for where they can go, that sort of thing. But I think it does come down to: He helped me. I don't know how else to say it.
GW: Any final thoughts you want to share?
TF: I will say that I think the idea of companies being more of a team is super critical. There's been a transition In the past; it was, “I'm the boss, you go to work, you do what you're told to do. And I'll pay you for what you get done.” For whatever reason, there's been a huge shift in the way that people are motivated. Business owners need to learn how to manage people more effectively. Maybe “manage” isn't the right word; maybe the idea of leading people is more important than managing. You get the best out of somebody with them feeling things are good. In other words, you want somebody to perform at their maximum, and they want to do it happy, with some satisfaction, instead of, “I just have to get this done.” Moving into being a business owner, or even into the production manager role, requires really learning people, learning how to get the best out of people. And then, you know, really, really enjoy it. I had somebody once tell me that they they really respected my management ability, because I had the ability to tell people to go to hell, and they would enjoy it. Now, I would never tell someone to go to hell. But this came out of a site visit with a subcontractor who was watching on. We got things straightened out and the subcontractor was ready to go back to work. They were motivated to go back to work, but it wasn't like I demoralized everybody by yelling and screaming. That's an important skill: to learn how to work with people in a way that you get what you want, but they feel great about it. That's becoming more important these days than it's ever been before; this is a shift in the way business is done. There still are businesses that are top down, and you better behave or you're out. But more and more people are looking for a business where they can enjoy themselves as well as produce.
It's been an amazing journey. You know, I think that's a important thing for everybody to understand. My kids grew up comfortable. We have a nice home now, our cars are paid for now ... for kids to expect to have that right out of college is unreasonable. Not only is there a learning experience that goes into that, but there's all kinds of other things that become part of that. People feel like everything ought to be great right away. And I mean, I feel like I've had a lot of breaks and a lot of good things have happened in my life that have helped me get where I am. But there was a lot of work that goes into it. And there were times when I wondered about, you know, paying the bills, that sort of stuff. But I loved what I was doing and I worked hard to be beneficial to other people. It was definitely a learning curve. I learned from a lot of people; as I mentioned earlier, I picked little things up along the way that I started implementing myself. And didn't give up when times got tough. Now I did not have it as tough as some folks. When I started out, I couldn't say, “This was my goal.” This was not even in my mind. But just being willing to work at it and learn. It'll pay off in the long run.
