How One Successful Custom Home & Renovation Business Owner’s Quest Led to a Better Business
“A system that allowed us to have multiple offices, make more money, and work less? Not possible!” —or so this owner of a 9M revenue Custom Home & Reno business thought.
“I wanted a better business. I just didn’t know how.”
Growing up, Kevin always knew he wanted to be his own boss. He had seen his dad start companies for other people, and work his tail off to make them successful, only to then get laid off. After graduating from Clemson University with a degree in Horticultural and Turf Grass, Kevin worked on golf courses with developers and architects and eventually migrated into construction. Kevin has now been building homes for 17 years and is the owner of Alair Homes Clemson in South Carolina. We’ll discover why Kevin knew his company needed to change even though his revenue, before the Alair transformation, was $9 million and how he is now working fewer hours yet making more profit. We’ll also see how Kevin will be adding two new offices this year, and how he defines his new life with the Living Better Starts Here™ Alair company tagline.
“We saw the writing on the wall. From the outside looking in, we looked like a great company, but I had known for some time that we needed a change and it needed to be drastic. We just didn’t know what that change was.”
About 3 ½ years before Kevin transformed into an Alair office, he and his wife tried to come up with a plan to make things better. He even had outside industry consultants come in to look at his company to tell him what he needed help with. “They said that we looked great, and that was with a 4% net profit! I was tired of working so hard to make such little profit and tired of not having the company I really wanted, but no one had the answers, at least not until I was approached by Alair,” says Kevin. He was struggling to keep up with client communications, managing professional and personal relationships, and was running all the projects himself, which was a huge bottleneck, also as his subcontractors grew so did the oversite of jobs because of new help. Staff culture and morale was low, and clients just weren’t enjoying the process. Kevin states, “Basically, it was no longer fun, for anybody, but you just get into the habit of doing what you’re doing for so long, that you just don’t know how to get out.”
Shane Duff
Market Development Director
239-529-4889
