TBD's New Focus On Excellence Event Gets Underway In October

John McManus -

The best and brightest of homebuilding's business leaders have a secret. They learn from others of the best and brightest in the homebuilding business. That's a big part of why we started The Builder's Daily three years ago today.

If you're a homebuilding organization owner, principal, founder, strategist, or leader, please join me at our Focus On Excellence workshop in Austin, in October. You can find information and register here: The Builder's Daily Focus On Excellence

A friend and source of guidance on our Focus On Excellence workshop notes:

I think that John’s upcoming workshop is an exciting event for home building executives to network and continue to learn. I also believe that we have a real void in the 'people side' of our management consulting." – Jim Lemming, President, Partners In Building

The Builder's Daily and Focus On Excellence's stripped-down reason for being is about your performing better – sustainably – by building regenerative high-performance teams that keep learning, solving, and learning more in a time of accelerated change and turbulence. Your pain points, chronic challenges, and the inverse massive opportunities that go with their solutions – that reason remains the same, albeit the dollar figures for everything are leaps and bounds higher than just 36 months ago.

The pain points then:

Here are five harshly-framed views of today’s structural symptoms, risks, and challenges. They don’t even count for the uncertainty, doubt, and threat of today’s health, economic, and social crises, which may intensify their impact and add to their urgency:

  • Household income growth has failed to keep pace with costs to produce new residential structures and communities. Results: Underbuilding by well over a million new single-family homes in the past 10 years; average selling prices that price-out homeownership for more than half of today’s households, and make new home prices — averaging over $340,000 — inaccessible for more than three out of four working households.
  • Outdated methodologies, processes, and sourcing of critical resources trap unproductive practices, operational models, and productivity. Results: Productivity in construction lags every other major manufacturing sector, and remains paralyzed — a big constraint on financial equity growth.
  • Local electoral politics and real estate developers’ interests have reached stalemate or worse, with elected officials, who often win votes by promising ever-more draconian controls, fees, design guidelines, approval delays, and encumbrances on would-be developers and investors. Results: 30 cents of every $1 of Average Selling Price for a new home reflects regulatory cost burden weighing on home prices.
  • Skills and talent deficit, on the job-site and in the office and back office, organizations large and small face an ever-more-intense, expensive, and critical constraint resulting from ineffective competition for the nation’s best new entrants into the workforce at the skilled-labor level, data scientists, materials engineers, and business strategists. Results: 6 skilled and experienced tradespeople retire for every new entrant into the residential construction field, representing a talent cliff that puts all future business models at risk of massive cost and production variance.
  • Business operations and strategic models that focus on their own resources and processes first, and only secondarily on solving consumers’ living challenges. Results: Housing and its business enterprise leaders remain anchored to cyclical swings rather than developing planning, resource investment, and predictability models based on achieving excellence in consumer pull rather than supply push.

The macro context that frames these chronic challenges and the pursuit of their solutions is one of humility and learning. It's an unwavering conviction: We all have more to learn than our current knowledge combined. We all have to learn what it means to perform better in a world of nonstop change, data and A.I. engines, an exponentially evolving consumer, and an entirely new challenge in residential real estate and construction's capital channels.

It's also the conviction that we – a community of driven souls whose livelihoods focus on people's homes and neighborhoods – can do some of this solving together, even if our companies, customer targets, resources, and interests compete or conflict.

It's this belief: We can do better through better leadership

Today, The Builder's Daily has 3,000-plus opt-in stakeholders. On a daily basis, 900 or so of the business community's leaders and value-creators engage, interact with, and learn from the voices, insights, initiatives, and solutions peers, colleagues, and competitors are bringing to those five great challenges of our time. Each week, 4,500 TBD community members – an outsized share of them strategic-level leaders, owners, CEOs, and C-suite executives and operators – affirm a healthy hunger to learn, to keep vigilant, and to remain resilient, come what may.

From the outset, we've had three primary rules for our engagement:

Rule No. 1: Just be present. Be real. Be here. Be constant. Show up consistently and prepared. Be the place you’d want to come home to every day.

Rule No. 2: Believe. Despite building’s bad rap of being “unimpeded by progress,” and its array of chronic, decades-long challenges, people in the field across the business ecosystem are solvers at heart. At The Builder’s Daily, we’re believers in the power of your character, time- and stress-tested through good times and bad in housing, the economy, and life.

Rule No. 3: Learn. Listen. Discover. Ask the better question. Reframe the challenge. Don’t quit before the magic of action, of community, of culture get a chance to play a role in how things might improve.

In light of those three rules of engagement, Team The Builder's Daily is taking an exciting step forward to foster a culture of capability and business resiliency among homebuilding owners, key strategists, and operational leaders.

We're hosting a new executive leadership, learning, and networking workshop, Focus On Excellence, October 28-30 at the Hyatt Regency Lost Pines Resort and Spa in Austin, Texas. Focus On Excellence is a new, one-of-a-kind, hands-on leadership learning summit that will bring together an exclusive group of principals, presidents, strategists, and key stakeholders from top US homebuilding firms as they plan for 2025 to 2035.

Focus areas include:

  • Customer care and customer segmentation insight
  • Growing People/Talent To Meet Today’s and Tomorrow’s Operational Challenges
  • Capital access and value creation
  • Operational improvement
  • Asset-Lighter Land Strategy and Tactics
  • The 2025-to-2035 Consumer Landscape
  • Business Model Innovation, including For-Sale-For Rent Hybrid operational models
  • The Affordability-Sustainability-Profitability Axis
  • Evolving Product Design, Development & Engineering
  • Best practices in growing businesses during a downturn

What's more, we are excited that we get to collaborate with our partner Constellation HomeBuilder Systems whose team will host the 18th annual Build Smarter conference, where smart builders come together to explore homebuilding trends, technology, and innovation in the same time and setting in Austin.

Here's a sampling of our speakers to date:

  • Ron Brownstein, Senior Political Analyst/Columnist, CNN, The National Journal, The Atlantic
  • Chris Graham, President, Constellation HomeBuilder Systems
  • Cory Boydston, Former CFO, Ashton Woods
  • Don Dykstra, President, Bloomfield Homes
  • Deborah Flagan, Vice President, Community Engagement & Giving, Hayden Homes
  • Joan Webb, Former CMO, The New Home Company
  • Ken Pinto, Founder, Kenzai USA
  • Larry Webb, Co-Founder, and former Executive Chairman, The New Home Company
  • Tony Avila, CEO, Builder Advisor Group
  • Scott Davis, Former Regional President, Trumark Homes

Focus On Excellence is setting out to help fill that "real void" Jim Lemming mentions above. It's about building tomorrow with people, processes, and practices in a place where leadership, trust, and friendship work together in the building.