Selling Your Company's Unique Story

Every business needs a story. According to Stephanie Dailey, Steven Dailey Construction's story is its people, its reputation, and its community.

On this episode of Women at WIRC, Vice President Stephanie Dailey shares how the contractor shares its story to gain clients through its website, community involvement, social media, and more.

"We don't do any marketing. The most marketing that you'll see come out of us is my Instagram," says Dailey. "And even at that, you'll notice it's not a lot of promotion of our company. And it's definitely not purposefully directed to clients."

Listen to the full podcast or read the transcript below to hear the varied ways Dailey showcases the contractor's unique value propositions.

Timestamps

00:00 Meet Stephanie Dailey: A Construction Industry Innovator
00:32 From Architecture to MTV: Stephanie Dailey's Unique Journey
01:10 Returning to Construction: A Family Legacy
01:53 Building a Reputation: The First Female President of Utah Valley Home Builders Association
02:15 Innovating with Jobsite Codes: A Tech Venture
04:24 The Power of Storytelling in Client Relationships
07:08 Unique Business Practices: Setting Steven Dailey Construction Apart
11:51 Revamping the Website: A New Approach to Marketing

Transcript

Caroline Broderick  00:09
Welcome back to Women at WIRC brought to you by Pro Remodeler and Pro Builder magazines. On this podcast we talked to standout women in residential construction to share their professional insights and highlight the strong but small share of just 11% of the construction industry. Be sure to rate and review and like and follow our brands on all social media channels to stay up to date on everything, women and res.

This new episode is particularly exciting. Not only is it Women's History Month, so what better time for a new episode, but I get to introduce a Pro Remodeler Forty Under 40 2024 honoree, Stephanie Dailey of Steven Dailey Construction, and not only has she been recognized by PR, but she was just named Utah Business' 40 under 40, as well. So without further ado, let's get into it.

Caroline Broderick  01:01
I'm welcoming Stephanie Dailey of Steven Dailey Construction. She may seem familiar, because you've probably seen her in about one of the dozen places she's at all times. So that could be on Instagram at Stephanie builds it with more than 110,000 followers could be met rising girls build show, it could be, you know, representing her technology company Jobsite Codes. But before we get into all that, let's learn a little bit more about Stephanie. So at 16, she worked for an architecture firm, and that's where she thought her career would go till the recession hit. So she decided to shift gears and work for an MTV show.

Stephanie Dailey 01:39
So about 07-08 I left and there just wasn't a lot of business for a young female in the construction industry in that in that time, so I jumped into production. I worked for MTV, and a TV show called Nitro Circus. I learned all about production, I learned all about storytelling. I learned all about marketing and pitching who you are and how to show your value as a person or a business.

Caroline Broderick  02:07
But it was always back to construction for Stephanie. So she left Nitro Circus after a number of years and began working for a local semi custom home builder. She went back into architecture but got pretty bored drawing all the time as she puts it, and decided to get her real estate license and start selling homes for the builder. After what she describes as learning everything she can. She decided to go back and work alongside her father at Steven Dailey construction.

Stephanie Dailey 02:35
It was really important to me to have that before we started and to just try and build my own reputation a little more outside of being Steve Dailey's daughter,

Caroline Broderick 02:44
it's fair to say that Stephanie has absolutely established a reputation outside of being her father's daughter. She's also now the youngest and the first female president ever of the Utah Valley Home Builders Association this year. And as of late last year, Stephanie joined Matt Risinger as the Build Show contributing educational construction content. And in June of 2023, she even took the title as co founder of a tech company Jobsite Codes.

Stephanie Dailey 03:12
I had found a way to digitally organize my job sites with QR codes. I'm gonna posted some videos on Tiktok and Instagram about it. And they blew up, it ended up with about 26 million views. And at that point, I realized like, clearly there's an issue with the way that we're organizing our job sites and and displaying our spec books. So my whole life is all immersed in all things construction. 

Caroline Broderick  03:39
Seriously, except what really was crazy to hear just now in that rundown is one of the the only area you kind of pivoted away from the industry was to work for MTV, which is such an interesting switch there. How did that come to be? Is that like a separate passion that you had to? No?

Stephanie Dailey 03:58
Not in the least that I actually had no clue what Nitro Circus was when I started there. And they were just finishing their MTV contracts. So the production company that created Nitro Circus, which is called Godfrey entertainment, they are originally based here out of Draper, Utah. And I had grown up with the kids, the daughters and sons of the Godfrey families. And at that time, I was just hanging out with some friends at Godfrey entertainment. And it was just somewhere that I ended up every day hanging out and all the sudden it was like, hey, we need an extra hand we'll hire you come, come help out, learn to do production assistant or hold a light or whatever it needed to be. And it morphed into this really beautiful and amazing experience for me where I spent five years there learning the back side of how production companies really pitched themselves as a person and as a business to get money from investors to do what it is they wanted to do.

Caroline Broderick  04:54
That is such an interesting thing. And it really just speaks to your character of well here was an opportunity And I just kind of took it. And five years in, I learned so much. So you're you had mentioned your passion on Instagram is education and representation and your passion within the company right now as well as clients and your focus and your time is on clients or that client facing person, very critical, important position to be and, and something you've identified as an even more critical kind of part of this client relationship is storytelling. So I want to talk about that aspect a little bit more, can we just start? Why is storytelling so important to these client relationships? And what exactly is storytelling kind of in this aspect?

Stephanie Dailey 05:39
Yeah, it's, it's unique. I think that everybody runs their construction companies a little differently, which makes us all unique, and it makes clients pick one over another. But one of the things I've learned Steven Dailey Construction, we don't do any marketing, the most marketing that you'll see come out of us is my Instagram. And even at that, you'll notice it's it's not a lot of promotion of our company. And it's definitely not purposefully directed to clients. So for us, the biggest thing we can do is make the relationship between client and our company be the best experience that they have ever had, so that they turn around and tell their friends and their friends tell their friends. So first and foremost, is really just explaining to the client who we are, why we're the right choice. And what sets us apart from our competition, because there are a lot of incredible homebuilders here in the Salt Lake in Utah Valley that they would be in great hands picking any of them. But obviously, we would love to have them as one of our own clients.

Caroline Broderick  06:40
And so how do you actually kind of deliver this story? Walk me through that? 

Stephanie Dailey 06:47
Yeah, so one of the unique things about us is not every job that comes into our office is a good fit for us. From our side of things, I think we both and our entire team love what we do, we want to continue to love what we do. So we've learned through some hard lessons that sometimes there's just clients that aren't a good fit for us, there are some key points for us that usually don't come up, that are really important for us to express to the client, because they are key features that stand us apart from other people that really tell our story in a different way. So an example of that would be the way that we do our bookkeeping and finances, our deposit amounts that we take from the client originally are like, unheard of low, which is really odd. But it's just been something that my dad has done his entire career. And then from there, we work out of our own bank account, we don't work off the clients money. So it's very common for us to come out of our own pocket half a million dollars in a month to build a home, and then we'll build a client at the end of the month for what's been done. And that's just really rare in our industry. I think that my dad's done an amazing job of building a business that has this capital, you know, he he's taken a lot of time to reinvest into the company and sees the value behind that and sees that that sets him apart. The finances are a big one. And there's a handful of key pieces in the finances that really set us apart. So the first one is that deposit. The next one is how we do our invoicing every month, the fact that we work off of our money, not the clients money. The third one is we do not take a penny of profit until the house is done. So that's an interesting piece that I have never heard of another builder in our market that does that. But I obviously don't know all of their ins and outs. A little bit that I have heard. I know that's very rare. So the reason we do that is because when the house is done, we have every incentive to finish the house quickly, just as much as the homeowner wants us to finish it quickly for them to move in. Because we don't get paid till the house is done. So that really sets us apart a bit in a big way compared to a lot of other people. The biggest, biggest most important thing for our company is our team. I want my clients to know each one of our guys individually know who they are, know who their family is because it really creates this connection from client to team that then feels more like a friendship or a relationship than it does a homebuilder client kind of a thing, outside of numbers, because let's be honest, it's really not that big of a margin and home building and all the builders across this valley are within one or 2% of one another. So really what setting you apart is who you are as a company, your personality and your story. So that's kind of priority one for us as a team is building a story behind who we are and why we're the right choice and making sure that our clients can understand that story.

Caroline Broderick  09:47
And Steven Dailey doesn't just try to talk the talk when it comes to saying its team as an integral part of their story. On their website. Two tabs focus solely on highlighting the team. Obviously the first one is Is the Team tab here, you can click on the name of each team member, and it'll take you to a separate page just about them. But what's really cool about it is there's a professional high quality video that's a few minutes long of each team member, sharing tidbits about themselves. And it really allows clients to get to know them as a person to get to hear the person's voice, see them actually as they will be as if you're having a conversation in front of them. It's a different medium that you don't really see too often. The second tab or neighborhood doesn't have lots that they're building on or a subdivision they're building. It's actually highlights of personal stories, like a team member welcoming a new child, or an HBA project that gave back to the community. And Steven Dailey says they build where they live. So this neighborhood tab, what that really means is, they're saying, here's what we do for our community and who we are as your neighbors.

Stephanie Dailey 10:55
Because that's important to us. And it's important to us that everyone understands who these people are, that are working on their dream home that are dedicating all this time, because they also have a really hard passion for the construction industry. So the team aspect of it is unique. And I think that's a big piece of Steven Dailey Construction. We love to do charity projects, we love to be able to give back to our community. So in any way we possibly can, we'll do projects that you know, building wheelchair ramps, widening doors for people that need wheelchair accessible things in their house, we have a really good connection with a lot of the type one elementary schools here, so we're able to help them out with donations. Matter of fact, earlier this week, we just donated a bunch of stuff to Huntsman Cancer Institute, in honor of our old lumber salesman who passed away from cancer himself. And then from there, it's really simple, we we love to let people know, all the innovative things we're doing with building science and you know, the things that we're paying attention to during the construction process, we're building a quality home, not necessarily a quick, fast, cheap home. So there will be a price difference between us and some of your other builders. But this is why. And so just educating the client on, you know, how we build who we are, and why we build that's kind of the key important things.

Caroline Broderick  12:18
You know, as a client, if you're researching one versus the other, you're gonna go to the website, they're gonna build your, you're gonna look at every single page on that website. So taking the time to really build out that team page and kind of who we are, this is our area, this is how we care. You don't see that as often on on some contractor sites, they don't you know, they'll have a headshot they'll have a mini bio, but they won't go that extra mile.

Stephanie Dailey 12:43
Yeah, that's, that's a really important thing to us. And honestly, we did that last year, we hired grisly habits to come in and like redo our website and try and we had a very generic website prior that just kind of had photos of our projects. And that was it, we really knew that we had to do something different. And we were seeing the amount of attention that was coming from social media and just realizing that we had to translate what we were saying there to somewhere else in a place that people were going to access before they met us face to face. So we really wanted them because a lot of people could get on your website and look up who you are See you on Instagram, and just say, the personality doesn't mesh with me, I'm not even gonna call them. So it was really important to us that we could kind of display that personality across the board. So when we built the new website, that was one of the things that we we presented with was like, Hey, we should do these videos of the guys or each one of the team and put them on the website. And I can't tell you how amazing that was for even myself, I learned stuff about my guys that I've worked alongside for a long time that I never do. And so I think that was it was cool for the client. And it was cool for the the marketing aspect of it. But it was really neat for me to be able to kind of learn a little more about them. But in a way that I thought I knew quite a bit about my guys.

Caroline Broderick  14:07
But have you seen kind of any results come from your, you know, revamped website and that new kind of focus?

Stephanie Dailey 14:15
I would say in the last 10 months or so the clients that we've met with to talk to talk about building their new home, all of them except for maybe one or two. So maybe 80% of the people have made a comment about one page or another on our website. So clearly these people are getting on and they're learning about the company. And they're really trying to learn about who we are before they come to the office and meet with us. And so I really think that it has made a significant impact. And I think that not only that it's made a huge impact on our team members, because it gives them some pride to have their picture and a video about themselves on the website. These are carpenters these are builders. These are people who are getting dirty every day, and they now have a video about themselves on the end. are that which is a big impactful thing for some people. It's a very, it's a very motivating thing. And it's something that can really like boost your personality a bit. And I think we've seen our money back tenfold just on that, because it's, it's made a huge difference for everyone.

Caroline Broderick  15:20
Thank you to Stephanie Dailey, for joining me and thank you for listening. There is one topic that Stephanie Dailey I didn't talk about too much in this interview, and that is her career on social media. So what I went ahead and did is took a special snippet from our conversation and I uploaded it as a bonus track.

So go ahead and listen if you want to hear a little bit more about how Stephanie Dailey started on Instagram, her secrets to success and her advice for other contractors looking to do the same. Stay up to date on everything, women in residential and commercial construction, including our conference by signing up for our newsletter and heading to our website, women's construction conference.com all those links will be in the description. And until next time, keep the WIRC up.