Table of Contents Winter 2006

FEATURES

• Opposites Attract

  Geno Benvenuto is his affability. But he turns the oft-used quip about nice guys finishing last on its head. As owner of Benvenuti & Stein, Benvenuto has grown his Evanston, Ill., company from the blue-sky dreams of a 20-something carpenter to a profitable design/build company on course to take in $9 million this year.

   

• By the Numbers

  As a successful remodeling business grows from a one- or two-person operation to a company that warrants a dedicated sales staff, the owner must often assume the role of sales manager. But managing people who sell requires a different set of skills from selling itself. Though entrepreneurs tend to be good sales-people, sales managers also need to be teachers and mentors. The transition can be a tough one.

   
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  Room with a View

  During the months that it took David Shall and Susan Corzilius to get a $65,000 remodel of their master bathroom, one moment stands out as especially gratifying. It was an August evening in their Southern California home. After five months of planning — and the day before construction began — Shall, a lawyer, and Corzilius, a physician, took sledgehammers to their old bathroom tile. “It felt so good,” Shall says, recalling the destruction of the cream-colored tile with terra-cotta trim that a designer would later decry as “so 1970s.” “We hated the old bathroom so much, we wanted to take the first swings,” Corzilius says.

   

• Fine-Tuning Direct Mail

  When you're competing in a sea of upscale remodelers for homeowners already numbed by unsolicited mail, you might be tempted to save your money for another marketing medium. Bruce Wentworth opted instead to make a splash — an oversized one.

   

• Loft Lines

  This custom-designed loft project began when homeowners Nancy Moses and Myron Bloom wanted to move a wall in their Philadelphia condominium to widen the hallway. Their apartment is located in the Lippincott, a former printing house in Philadelphia's Society Hill neighborhood, near historic Independence Hall. The couple's apartment is one of 27 units in the building, which was renovated by architect Cecil Baker of Cecil Baker & Associates, Philadelphia.

   

FINAL TOUCH

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  Color Underfoot

  John Stefanowicz says that there are two truths about concrete: “It gets hard and it cracks.” His company, Stefanowicz Concrete, Wimberley, Texas, has been working with concrete since 1981, building residential and commercial foundations, driveways, sidewalks, patios, and using concrete in interior architectural applications. A sister company, Applied Color Concrete, has offered color stain options for flooring and other surfaces since 1991.

   

INSIGHT

• Shelter Activity

  Have you ever noticed that when you are looking for a comfortable place to sit, you often select a corner rather than the center of the room?

   

• Growing Your Return on Customers

  To grow your business, you can expand your client base, but why not also make money by seeking more business from existing clients? You'd save on selling costs and would have fewer discussions about pricing because the clients already have done business with you.

   

• Deliver “The Experience”

  Are “upscale” clients really different? Well, for starters, upscale clients usually don't remodel because they need to — they remodel because they

   

• Listening Up

  Are you a good listener? Dean Brenneman and Martha Rogers think you need to be. In this issue, both begin their stints with us as regular columnists by exploring the nature of your relationship with the upscale client.

   

INTERVIEW

Ten Minutes With...

• Gregory J. Furman of The Luxury Marketing Council

  Founded by Gregory Furman in 1994, the Luxury Marketing Council, www.luxurycouncil.com, is a nonprofit organization composed of leading marketers from major purveyors of luxury goods and services throughout the U. S. and abroad. The Council has recently embarked on efforts to form the Luxury Home Alliance, which will serve the luxury home market.

   

PEOPLE

• Handy Customer Service

  A remodeling company that takes care of its customers after the job is done is sure to get great referrals. That's why Classic Remodeling & Construction of Charleston, S.C., uses its handyman service to generate goodwill. The service is normally billed out at a rate of $80 to $100 per hour, but the company will sometimes drop the hourly rate for past clients, and in some cases it will do work for free.

   

• Bonus Plans That Work: Production Staff

  Ed Lane had run a successful remodeling company for 20 years before he hammered out an effective bonus plan for his project managers. The breakthrough idea, suggested by his production manager and finessed over a period of months, was to focus on actual job costs, rewarding project managers for each job they completed on budget.

   

PROCESS

• Price Gauging

  Sticker shock is universal, and clients each respond differently. It's up to you to manage expectations and present cost issues in a way that clients understand and feel comfortable with.

   
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  Guilded Age

  Construction defects … overshot deadlines … miserable owners shuffling into “finished” remodels with seven-page punch lists. For a group of master builders from the Boston area, the era of “bigger, faster, cheaper” must end.

   
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  The Whole Nine Yards

  Upscale remodels must be picture-perfect the day clients move back into their space. Anything sub-par —from landscaping to lighting — will downgrade client satisfaction and endanger the possibility of repeat business. “If an owner gets a bad landscape job, it's the last thing they remember about the whole project,” says Mark Peterson, president of M/A Peterson.

   

PRODUCTS

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  Product Trends: Fireplaces

  With the current lifestyle trend toward “cocooning,” fireplaces — alluring because they're a strong visual focal point — are a design feature in high demand. Makers have responded with increased variety, new features, and customization options.

   

New + Notable

• New + Notable: Outdoor Kitchen, Tile, Flooring, and more

  Outdoor Kitchen, Tile, Flooring, and more from Vintage, Eliane, Smith & Fong, Tiffin Metal Products, and NMC America.

   

PROFITS

• Inside the Ballpark

  Kelvin Pierce of Commonwealth Home Remodelers in Vienna, Va., can give accurate ballpark estimates on design/build remodeling jobs in about 20 minutes. How accurate? “Although we tell clients [that we can estimate to within] 10% or 15% of the final selling price, we're usually within 5%,” he says.

   

• Estimating Labor by Percentage of Revenue

  Most remodelers use historical job costs as part of their estimating process. Maryland-based Brenneman & Pagenstecher goes a step further, calculating labor costs as a percentage of a job's direct costs.

   

• Checking Customers' Credit

  The credit check is one of the most sensitive aspects of the relationship between customer and remodeler. In fact, not all remodelers take this step. “It's not prevalent even with some of the more sophisticated contractors,” says D.S. Berenson, an attorney with Johanson Berenson LLP in McLean, Va. But he and other lawyers who work with builders and remodelers say that it's a prudent one to take.