Happiness, empathy, and finding and motivating the right employees, architects, and clients. Those are the secrets David Edwards, a finalist for the Fred Case Remodeling Entrepreneur of the Year Award, credits for Earth Bound Homes' staggering 100% growth rate (from $2M in 2017 to $4M in 2018; he plans to grow an additional 150% in 2019 to $10M).
"I listened to my Remodelers Advantage Roundtable group and went to counseling," David says. "I learned from that (and a lot of reading) that I am the only thing that can make me happy. Everything else followed. Success follows happiness, not the other way around."
Don't confuse this internal sense of happiness with a self-centered focus, however. Rather, David, explains, "it's fostering an ability to feel whole and to be able to put 100% of your care towards helping others feel that same happiness." It's anything but just "me."
By turning outward, David says he learned to love selling, a chore he previously hated. "I get paid to help people find their happiness, by providing a great product," he says.
The key is providing an open, transparent preconstruction process that encourages trust, collaboration, and empathy. "We were always struggling to get clients to make decisions in preconstruction," David explains. "We tried and tried to get them to understand the benefits to their making decisions before the start of construction, and by then, everyone involved was late, frustrated, and stressed. The results were unhappy clients and frustrated subs. And no profit."
To overcome this, David designed a preconstruction process that tracked all the decisions necessary for a job to go to completion. Using Power BI, a business analytics platform, he and his team created dashboards for the client to see the results of every decision completed, its effect on business performance (a commitment to absolute transparency), and the benefit to the client on how the job would progress. "The results were vastly superior to what we could have hoped in our wildest dreams," he says. "It is a win-win-win for everybody."
