Episode 6: Growing A Building Company With Robert Carroll

In episode six of the Professional Builders Secrets podcast, our host, Bosco Anthony is joined by Robert Carroll, owner of Carroll Constructions based in Louisiana, United States. Throughout this episode, Robert shares his journey on growing his building company. 

Carroll Construction is a family owned residential construction company serving the Greater Baton Rouge area and surrounding parishes since 1992. In 2007, Robert joined the team and is now a Co-owner and full time builder/remodeler. 

With a degree in Construction Management from Louisiana State University, Robert brought new ideas to the company for energy efficiency and aging-in-place principles. Additionally he has made it possible for Carroll Construction to offer a personalised website for each of their customers that helps track the progress of construction.

Tune in to the episode to hear Robert share the key milestones for Carroll Constructions and uncover tips for other builders who are on their journey to success. 

 

Robert Carroll - Co-owner of Carroll Constructions

Robert is a Co-owner of Carroll Constructions. In December, 2019, Robert received the Builder of the Year Award from the Louisiana Home Builders Association, the premiere organisation for the construction industry in the state.

Connect with Robert

 

Timeline

1:03 About Robert and Carroll Construction.

2:00 How Robert got into construction.

4:09 Robert’s initial struggles.

7:11 Robert’s ‘ah-ha' moments.

11:55 Robert's transformation.

15:16 Robert’s journey with APB.

17:58 Running a building company: Robert’s loves and hates.

24:57 Robert’s company today and in the future.

29:29 Why builders have to niche their company’s.

34:21 Robert’s advice to his younger self and other builders.

35:43 Robert’s perspective: The future of residential construction.

40:50 What success looks like to Robert.

 

Links, Resources & More

Carroll Constructions Website
APB Website
APB on Instagram
APB on Facebook
APB on YouTube

Join the Professional Builders Secrets Facebook group for builders & connect with professional builders world-wide.

Bosco Anthony:

Hello, and welcome to the Professional Builders Secrets Podcast, a podcast by the Association of Professional Builders (APB) for building company owners, general managers, VPs and emerging leaders. Here we discuss all things running a professional building company, from sales processes, financials, operations and marketing.

Bosco Anthony:

Hello, and welcome. Today I'm joined by Rob Carroll from Carroll Construction. Rob is the owner of Carroll Construction and you're based in Louisiana. Is that correct?

Rob Carroll:

That's right. 

Bosco Anthony:

Well, welcome, Rob. Thank you for being here. Let's start off with a little bit about you and Carroll Construction. Tell us a little bit about this.

Rob Carroll:

Well, first of all, thank you for having me on today; I really appreciate it. I've enjoyed my time with APB so far, so I'm looking forward to a few more years growing the company. To tell you a little bit about our company: we're a scattered site custom construction company located in a rural area of Louisiana. We're just outside of the Baton Rouge, Louisiana metropolitan market, in a small parish. We've got about 20,000 residents so far. We work in a fairly large area between East and West Feliciana, Louisiana, as well as the northern parts of East Baton Rouge. We are a company of about $2,000,000 average revenue a year, and currently we have four employees, in addition to myself.

Bosco Anthony:

Did you choose this path, Rob? Did it come to you naturally? How did you get started in the industry, looking back?

Rob Carroll:

Well, looking back, actually it was one of the things that just happened. I never grew up thinking I was going to be a builder. I was in a career that I didn't like. I was actually adjusting life claims and looking at death certificates every day. We had a catastrophic event that was nationally known; that was Hurricane Katrina. At the time, it just devastated the entire southeast region of Louisiana, including Baton Rouge.

Rob Carroll:

As a part of that, the company I was working for ceased to exist. At that point, I had to sink or swim. I had to find a new career, and my family had always done construction, so I made a bargain with my father. I said, "Hey, do you still want some bragging rights? Nobody's ever graduated from college; are you interested in sending me? If you pay for it, I don't have a job, but I'll go and get a degree."

Rob Carroll:

So I hopped into construction management at Louisiana State University. Apparently that was my father’s cue to jump in and say, "Hey, would you like to join the company?" And the rest is history. Hurricane Katrina, of course, was in 2005. It was 2007 when I ultimately was approached by my father to come into the company. In 2009, I was set to graduate. And at that point, he was saying, "Hey, it's a waste."

Rob Carroll:

As I recall, there was a global recession that was coming in. I simply told him, "Look, I'm not looking to make a killing. I'm just looking to make a living." At that point, it was just something to do. My wife has got a couple of habits that I like. I think they're fairly healthy. She likes to have a roof over her head. She likes to eat meals, and she likes to be clothed. So long as I can keep that going, we'll do pretty well.

Bosco Anthony:

That's quite interesting, because I remember I was in Canada in 2008, when the recession hit and it literally wiped out markets. Tell me a little bit about what it was like starting out. Did success just hit you at the time? Did it take some time to get there? What were some of those struggles and obstacles that you had to overcome?

Rob Carroll:

In Louisiana, construction is an older industry. Typically, your average builder in Louisiana is 55 plus. That tends to be just because of some of the obstacles to getting in. We don't have a large production, or we didn't at the time.

Rob Carroll:

The majority were small, single-family builders. Three to five homes a year would be their average construction volume. What ended up happening over the time is people would typically retire out of industry and then get into construction. I was young at that time and coming into it, so that was probably the biggest struggle, because you're asking someone to entrust you with their life savings to build their home.

Rob Carroll:

Thankfully, because it's a family company, I was able to have the backing and that support coming in. But it was a small-town bootstrap company. We didn't have the marketing structure; we didn't have the sales process; we had what was typical. We could build a house, we could make it pretty, we could do it at a good price. We had the same message as everybody else, so there was really nothing unique about it.

Rob Carroll:

When that was combined with the global economy, I would say that scrappiness is really what got us through. I was just explaining this today to one of my customers. We were just talking about one of the situations that had happened back then. We were actually approaching banks to fix up homes that other builders had gone bankrupt on. Then we got a real estate licence, so that we could jump in and then sell the house for the bank afterwards; we solved the problem for them. And that got us into the renovation side of work.

Rob Carroll:

Before I came into the company, we were more of a spec [speculative] builder, where we built a couple of homes. Occasionally we'd get a semi-custom home that we would do for a client on their land, but we mostly built spec homes. Because of the change in the global economy, we saw the writing on the wall. We were not going to be able to compete with the big builders, so we had to find a new model, and that's when we started doing the scattered site custom, along with renovations.

Rob Carroll:

Putting those two products together helped us to get something that would generate cash flow, and turn around what was not a great looking situation. Thankfully, we've generated a positive income every year – or so we thought until we started looking into what the actual costs were to run the company. 

Bosco Anthony:

Let's talk about the numbers, and let's talk about some of the classical mistakes that building companies make. What were some of the insights and aha moments that you must have had while you were going on this journey? You must have discovered some things here that made you think, "Oh, wow, I could have done this differently." Tell me a little bit about the mistakes that you might have made. And how did you overcome them?

Rob Carroll:

A lot of what happened is because you don't know what you don't have. There are four stages of learning, which is one of the things we talk about in our company. There is unconscious incompetence, when you don't know what you don't know. That's what we were. Then you move into conscious incompetence, where you learn that you absolutely have no idea about what you're doing. Then you hopefully move on from there to conscious competence. And the goal is to ultimately get to unconscious competence, which many people refer to as expertise.

Rob Carroll:

At the time, we were just figuring things out. It's not Jeff Bezos [Chairman of Amazon], or another one of those large start-up companies. Some people say that innovating and building a company and scaling a company is like jumping out of a plane and building the parachute on the way down. That was our story.

Rob Carroll:

Some of the early mistakes that we made were really not leveraging the technology that was there to differentiate ourselves. But we started and tried. I really think that we thought we could tell that the clients needed more information, more clarity, more transparency. So I, in my infinite wisdom, started saying, "I know Google's got these free sites." So, we started creating a website for every client and cobbled together the Google Calendar to create them a password protected schedule; then we used Google Sheets so we could show them their allowances; and Google Photos, so we could show them daily photo updates of the job.

Rob Carroll:

It was great. I was so excited about this. I was sitting in a meeting for the NAHB [National Association of Home Builders] that I was serving as a delegate for at the time. Another builder looked at me and said, "Man, you really need to go see this company [CoConstruct],” because I was excited and telling him about what we were doing with clients. He said, “You need to go do this."

Rob Carroll:

I found the company, CoConstruct, that was doing everything that I was doing in a fraction of the time that it was going to take me. At that point, we were starting to really understand that perhaps I could utilise my time for something a little bit more efficient, a bit more effective. That was the first big jump that we took. 

Rob Carroll:

Because we were an early adopter, and no one else in the area was doing it, we were able to jump right into CoConstruct and learn in an area where there was plenty of room for mistakes – and we made lots of them – especially with trying to onboard your subcontractors and figure out what they were interested in, how they were going to interact. Anybody who's ever tried to onboard project management software understands exactly the biggest issue is you can have the greatest system in the world, but if nobody uses it, does it really matter? You're just creating work for yourself.

Rob Carroll:

Out of all of that, we realised that we needed to spread our reach and not be afraid to invest in the company. Rather, we needed to use additional funds to have a capital outlay, instead of simply trying to bootstrap everything that we did, and make everything work out. You can do it and it sounds great and makes a great story, but you're going to take a whole lot more time to do it this way than if you just found the right pressure points, the right technology, the right pieces that you can cobble together.

Rob Carroll:

It’s important to make sure that you know your costs. We really didn't know our costs. We were typical of many builders that are going through the pricing changes that are happening right now. I know that Russ and Sky [Stephens, Co-founders of APB] talk a lot about people who are going to realise at the end of the year, or whenever the bills become due, what the company actually costs. Many builders don't find out until 1 January, when their accountant tells them, “This is how much you didn't make this year, or you did make.” They never know; they don't do monthly reporting or key performance indicators (KPIs) or try to measure these specific metrics.

Bosco Anthony:

It sounds like there’s a lot of awareness that builders typically need to have. You said a really classical sentence here, which is, "You don't know what you don't know." Let's talk a little bit about that path to awareness and that path to transformation, because it sounds like you have to transform your business as well. From what I'm gathering here, you mentioned that you had to be scrappy to survive, I guess just after the recession as well. So how did you transform the business to what it's like today? You talked a little bit about awareness and numbers and you talked about CoConstruct as well. So, there was a little bit of automation there in the industry; did you start adopting those methods?

Rob Carroll:

I wish I could say it was a straight line, and that we just woke up one day and had this amazing epiphany and this was it. But it wasn't. If there was one book that I could recommend, if anybody's considering getting into self-employment, there's a book called, Boss Life [by Paul Downs]. If you look it up, it's a great story about a furniture maker, who makes executive desks.

Rob Carroll:

He goes through the year of an entrepreneur. He talks about the ups and the downs, and he monitors the cash flow. I read that book. It was just one of these things that I identified with; I recognised that that's exactly what I was going through. It's a fun book. I think the biggest thing that it pointed out to me was he gets about three quarters of the way through the year, and sales are tanking. He can't figure out what's going on, why aren't the phones ringing?

Rob Carroll:

He's talking to his employees about what it's going to look like in the next month. The next thing he realises is that he's got his advertisement set up improperly, and his advertising budget is going on his non-target clients before noon. He realised that none of the decision makers were making that decision about the advertising. He made a small tweak and suddenly the phones started ringing. It was awareness of such a small thing.

Rob Carroll:

That got me on a path of reading and just devouring content. Of course, The E-Myth Revisited [by Michael E Gerber], that's classic literature that gets everybody where they need to be. Emma Shinn actually wrote a book on construction accounting that was just transformative [Accounting and Financial Management for Residential Construction]. It talked about setting up the chart of accounts and really understanding the numbers. Then of course, I started getting these emails from APB, and they were sending me spreadsheets. I looked at them and thought, “Okay, this is good stuff.”

Rob Carroll:

This was back in 2015 or 2016. When I started to get interested, I’d get one and I’d download it, and I would do like a lot of us. I’d think, “Okay, that's really good. But I'm not ready to buy.” They were giving this content away. By the third or fourth email, they were educating me about interruption marketing the whole time that they were doing this, and I wasn’t their client. So, I jumped into the Membership Program, and it was an extension of me devouring as much information as I could possibly get, because they’re people who have figured this stuff out. 

Rob Carroll:

That's where it comes down to not trying to do everything on your own. That was the appeal to me when I joined APB. There are some templates and information and yes, I can adapt those to my process and to my company. But I don't need to start from scratch. I think that's the biggest mistake some companies make; they try to reinvent the wheel that's already been invented 100 times. You just have to find the resources.

Bosco Anthony:

Tell me a little bit about the journey with APB. You started to get some emails, some content and you started applying this. How did that relationship blossom?

Rob Carroll:

I mentioned that APB was educating me about the process. I had heard about email campaigns, drip campaigns and things like this. Sometimes the best way that I learn is hands-on and just immerse myself. It was a safe zone for me. I thought, “Okay, I'll go ahead and give you my email address.” Then I started getting the content. I could see how these emails are structured, how long they are, so I'm learning from it.

Rob Carroll:

I saw them doing it well. We have all received an email that takes you 45 minutes to read, but I watched how they broke their information down into small pieces. I was just intrigued, so I called up Andy Skarda [Head Coach with APB]. We scheduled just a consultation, where I told him about our business and he presented some information. At the time, I wasn’t ready to jump into a full mentorship. APB had a product at that time where we could go month to month and just get access to the training. So, I got access to the training, learned about the Work In Progress Accounting Adjustment (WIPAA) and learned about the KPIs.

Rob Carroll:

I admitted to Andy one time that when he showed me a spreadsheet, I would take a screenshot. Still not learning my lesson, I’d try to build all of this on my own. I’d get back home and I'd make this KPI dashboard; I had a pretty solid dashboard. Andy laughed; he'd probably laugh about it now, and he probably remembers the conversation. The great thing was they allowed me to grow my company beyond the point that it was from a small start-up.

Rob Carroll:

The reality is, it takes finances in order to run a business. Smaller companies like myself, at the beginning, you may just have to start by cobbling together the pieces of the stuff that you need. So, I became a member of APB. I did the training; I learned everything. I did the testing and started implementing it in our company. I stayed with Membership until we got to the point where revenue started growing. Then APB started focusing on profit margin. I asked myself, "Okay, wait a minute, how much are we actually making?" We realised it wasn't very much once we accounted for all the costs of running the business. That's the one thing that The E-Myth does; it tells the story of somebody who's going from just a job to actually running a business. That was appealing to me, and I saw a lot of that in the process with APB.

Bosco Anthony:

Looking at where you are today, what do you love about running a building company, and also what keeps you up at night, if anything does?

Rob Carroll:

I could probably give you a much longer list right now about what keeps me up at night in this economy. I mentioned I wasn't originally in construction, but once I got into it, I realised that I was made for it. I heard something one time: somebody told me, “If you can do anything else besides running your own business, go and do that. But if you go and try to work for other people, and find that it just doesn't work for you, then you need to be self-employed.” That was how it was for me; I had a certain set of values, and it was very difficult for me to work under somebody else's value set. 

Rob Carroll:

When I came into the company, I really took the lead from day one. My father was ready to retire; he was backing out, so he pretty much gave me free rein to reshape and create the company however I wanted. So, I had a unique opportunity from day one. I just jumped in and let it be a playground: try this, that broke, don't do that. Try this, that worked. I tried this. I didn't sleep for three weeks after one mistake, and reiterating through that.

Rob Carroll:

I had the freedom to shape something; to build and to be creative within the company itself. I also had the opportunity to become something I could be proud of, at the end of the day, because it matters. I love the fact that many of my former clients of my custom building company are my friends on Facebook, and I'm watching their kids grow up. The cool thing is whenever I see their Christmas cards, when I see all the images of their kids playing, the background is something that our company created for them.

Rob Carroll:

I recognise that it's amazing. I scroll through that Facebook feed and I don't even see the kids. I don't see the parents. I know the house. I remember the struggles we had on that home. It's the war and the pain, but also it's that reward at the end of the day that I'm going to put something on this earth that's going to last for generations. It's not just going to help this family, it's going to help the next family and the one after that, so I’d better do a good job. Because I'm self-employed, I'm in full control of that. I can change this. And also, it pays well to be in construction.

Bosco Anthony:

Fair enough.

Rob Carroll:

To be able to be paid well and to do what you found that you love – it's a great package.

Bosco Anthony:

What keeps you up at night right now, if you had to sum up? Obviously, you have a lot of different things that keep you up, but if you had to sum up the recurring thought, or the one thing that you tend to just go, "I’ve got to really focus on this in the morning when I wake up," what is that?

Rob Carroll:

Unintended consequences; I think that'd probably be the best way to summarise all of them: the unintended consequences. Right now, the world's nuts. I actually purchased the balance of the company in 2020. I'd been a 50% earner since 2011, but on 1 January 2020, I became the full owner of the company. In March, there was this strange virus that started to spread around the world, and then they shut down the world. And then the supply chain started going through chaos.

Rob Carroll:

But we become an essential service. So, everybody was moving and saying, "Okay, let's build, let's get a project going. Let's move ahead." Then we moved into 2021 and the supply chain really ground to a halt; the ports were clogged. In the meantime, the price of lumber was going through the roof. It was insane. I remember in November, we were looking at lumber futures at $780 per 1,000 [board feet]. I'm looking at the clients and saying, "Look, it's bad now. But let's just keep going forward, because it can't get any worse than this."

Rob Carroll:

All bets were off when it hit $1,500, and then ultimately $1,700 per 1,000 board feet before it started dropping back down. We just wondered what was going on. I mentioned unintended consequences: we immediately jumped in and we were proactive; we could see what was on the horizon. We made a lumber agreement, and this is just one example of decisions we made.

Rob Carroll:

We said, "Okay, we're going to adjust everything right before we start constructing the home. We'll sign a contract with that.” We made a deal with our clients that we would only pass on any increased cost of lumber after we start the construction. That's cost; we're not going to add margin or anything. And that way, we weren’t trying to profiteer off this, we were really just trying to deal with a crazy situation.

Rob Carroll:

At the same time, we agreed that if the price went down, we'd give the clients a credit on that cost. It was a win-win in both scenarios, so everything was going great. We had some clients who got a little bit of a credit, we had some clients who had a bit of overage. I've got one client right now who is probably going to see a $20,000 credit. Unintended consequences: we signed these agreements eight months ago, and I had one contract where the lumber escalated $23,000 during the construction.

Rob Carroll:

The clients were, in large part, responsible for that cost. It was just our agreement. As we got through the construction, we hit one at the wrong time. Everything escalated during that contract, and so we saw an additional $20,000 of cost that had to be absorbed on a contract that was already signed. 

Rob Carroll:

One of our core values is ‘if we said it, that's what you get’. Because of that, the client didn't see a dime of that escalation. I look back and think, “How could you predict any of that?” So, we just tried to stay on it. Those are the things where I wake up the next morning and think, "Did I think this through all the way? Have I protected myself, have I protected my client? Have we come to the best agreement that can work for everybody?" Sometimes you nail it, sometimes you don't and you just try to get up the next day and craft a better agreement and move ahead.

Bosco Anthony:

That's really insightful. I don't think I've ever heard anyone call it unintended consequences before. But I think we all stay up at night thinking about things that occur on a day-to-day basis, whether it's life happenings or work happenings, but it's a really strong label when you call it that. So, tell me a little bit about your company today. Obviously, it's grown in size. I'm assuming it's grown in people. What does that look like now? And also, what are you focusing on now moving towards the new frontier and the new future ahead of you? What are some of the things that you're looking at to grow the company?

Rob Carroll:

We've grown on our margins; that's been the largest thing that has taken place. And of course, that's allowed us to take on additional manpower. When we started out, it was my mother, my father and me. We hired our first employee about three years ago to come in and help out with some administration. It just turned out that she was an absolute genius with numbers and liked them, and so she became an estimator.

Rob Carroll:

Then we realised we needed somebody to clean these lots, because our clients expect that. So, we hired a young man to come in and start cleaning. Now our job sites are spotless. Again, it's value enhancement. It's not just growing margins, but it's also providing better value at the end of the day. We just hired our fourth employee. She will soon learn estimates, since we've grown a purchasing department.

Rob Carroll:

As a result of all of this – I think this is actually a key point, especially for people who are wondering what it looks like to grow a business – it's not always in gross revenue. At the end of the day, we're probably only about $600,000 higher in revenue now than when we started four years ago. But our margins are such now that they pay for the additional value that we provide and pay for the services.

Rob Carroll:

That was a real focus point that we had to understand, because at one point, we were offering a lot of services, but at the end of the year we had a negative profit. It's because it cost us so much in order to do this. So, with that being said, what we're focusing on today is really the production, the supply side of things. We've developed a great sales program; it's documented and it's solid and it speaks value to our clients.

Rob Carroll:

We have an interior designer who is part of our package, and she goes and provides hands-on service with everybody. We've got all these mechanisms in the office that can allow us to get out and work with our clients. But what really needs to take place now is we need to expand the capacity, so that we can grow the revenue, ultimately, and take on additional projects. Currently, we do seven to 10 custom scattered site projects a year, ranging in value from $400,000 to $800,000. 

Rob Carroll:

We're very happy with that price range, but we'd like to be doing somewhere around 20 to 30 new custom homes annually. To do that, we're going to have to learn how to train up these production managers. Anybody who's ever hired will know that it's one thing to hire somebody, it's another thing to train them. Then it's another thing to adapt them into the culture of your company so that you can send them out and trust that they're going to make the right decisions.

Rob Carroll:

Of course, they're never going to be you. As an owner, sometimes you have to take that choke hold off and say, “Eighty percent accomplished the way that I would do it can be good, as long as I don't abdicate my responsibility, and I am providing the oversight.” Learning to be a better employer is definitely going to be one of those positions. It's an adventure every day, especially when you start bringing in new personalities; and they're all different.

Rob Carroll:

We're very blessed; everybody who we've brought into the company has just locked in. I know there's a lot of people who can't say that. Maybe that's conservative nature; we're very slow to hire. But whenever a new employee comes in, we use the same process to try to repel the wrong person, so that we can attract the right person. We’re just very honest and upfront. Then whenever they come in, they have no illusions about what it's like to work in a small business. Then we can start working on the important things.

Bosco Anthony:

Let's talk a little bit about what struggles builders face today in the industry. You've talked a little bit about some of the challenges that, obviously, you're facing with the current times, but as a new builder tell me a little bit about what some of those challenges were outside of the logistical unintended consequences. What are new builders, or builders that have been in this game for too long that need change, what kind of struggles do they face and obstacles that they need to overcome?

Rob Carroll:

If there were one thing, honestly, it would be understanding the value proposition and how to craft something that is unique in the face of everyone else that's out there. Everybody builds a quality home at a great price. But every builder’s sign says, “We're building dreams.” If there's nothing that makes you unique, then the only thing that people can compare you on is cost. That's been the norm in the construction industry for too long and it's a race to the bottom; that’s ultimately what it is. It’s been who can build the cheapest product possible.

Rob Carroll:

I’m not knocking production companies; they have a product that meets the need of a particular clientele. But so many small businesses try to compete on that model, and it just doesn't work. You can't scale the way these guys work; you don't have the capital backing the way these guys have. So, you have to get creative and find unique ways to offer something that nobody else is offering.

Rob Carroll:

We are a design build company, in a rural area. When we started out, we were kind of that same picture. But we have now taken to the online web space. I said, about four years ago, “I want to own the web space in my rural parish. I don't own anything else. I want to own the web space.” Whenever somebody in Clinton, Louisiana, does a Google search for a builder, I want Carroll Construction to come up number one every time.

Rob Carroll:

When they go to our website, I want them to find so much content and quality information, that it's a no-brainer. I want people to say, “Why wouldn't we use Carroll Construction, nobody else is going to provide this information. Nobody else is going to help us through this.” I'm operating in what we refer to as ‘chuck in a truck’ territory: a builder in a pickup truck. It’s a model, and that's great. But it lacks the professionalism that I think this industry deserves.

Rob Carroll:

These houses are not the same homes that our fathers and our grandfathers built. They're complex systems. They've got interactions that are rapidly changing, so you have to have a support structure, and that's a huge challenge. It can be something as simple as a website posting your best practices.

Rob Carroll:

For every product that you put into your home, are you going to go and read the company’s website and their best practices? Well, maybe. Maybe you've got the time to do that. But if you're running a business, do you really? So, you're going to have to surround yourself with people who understand and who can guide you through that and cut through the clutter. For example, about a year and a half ago, we had a best practice statement that showed up on our website and the client held our feet to the fire on it.

Rob Carroll:

This was something that can change in an outside environment, that you don't have control over, going back to the unintended consequences. Maybe something changed last week, but it's still on your website now, and you're being held accountable to a standard that you didn't realise you would be held accountable to.

Rob Carroll:

If you can communicate value and expertise, when it comes down to your company, you're not going to be in competition with the person who says, “I can do it for less.” The clients are not going to go to that person. But you have to figure out how you get to that point, because if you don't, you're going to be steadily chasing bids. We don't bid for work anymore, we quote work.

Rob Carroll:

It was a challenge for our company even to get to paid quotes. Once we got to that, it started eliminating a lot of the people who were simply looking. For example, we just had a hurricane. Right now, every builder is getting calls from people saying their insurance company is telling them they need three bids. You look at it, and think, "Well, sure. I've got nothing else to do." It's insane. But that's the expectation that's set out by a professional industry. I want to be concise on that. But I would say that the value proposition, just circling back to this, if you can figure out how to communicate the value proposition –  what makes you unique to your particular product and your industry and your local market – then other people can't provide what you do. You've got to niche.

Bosco Anthony:

Tell me a little bit about your perspective on yourself and also on other builders. What advice would you give a younger version of yourself, looking back at your illustrious journey and career? Would it be the same advice you'd give either new or veteran builders out there?

Rob Carroll:

That's a tough one. Definitely to my younger self, I have to go back to what I said earlier. Don't try to reinvent everything. Find the resources, find the people, get involved, and put yourself with people who are building their business the way that you want to emulate.

Rob Carroll:

If you can't find the people in your local market, go outside your market; travel, go meet people, get involved with professional associations. Find a way to get yourself in same room with the people who are doing the thing that you aspire to. For an older builder, I would have to look at it and say, “Stop doing things the same way that you've always done them, because that's the way you've always done it.”

Rob Carroll:

This is going to sound harsh, but I don't intend for it to be harsh, because I say it with all care and concern. If you're not passionate about the industry, then it's time to retire, or go and do anything, you owe it to yourself to do something other than be in the construction industry, if you're not passionate about it. But if you are passionate about this, if you love what you do, then put in that extra effort because the payoff is infinite. It is exponential.

Rob Carroll:

I do not sweat the same things that I did when I first started with the company. Gosh, I remember those early days, and they were tough. It's tough to be the new kid on the block. Everything that you have is critiqued, because you have not established that expertise. So, the faster that you can establish yourself as an expert, and truly be an expert, and get that education, the better. Everything else falls into line, but the education aspect of construction – and of any professional industry – cannot be understated.

Bosco Anthony:

What do you think the construction industry in the US is evolving to? What is it moving to now? I mean, it's obviously changed so much. But where's it going?

Rob Carroll:

Production builders are going to move into the semi-custom space. That space is going to disappear from the market, because it's too easy to scale that particular process. Production companies are much better at scaling things than we are; we don't think in those same terms. So that's bad for people who were in this model of buying a few lots a year and building spec homes. I think market share is going to shrink; it's going to get less and less.

Rob Carroll:

But for people who niche and set apart themselves from the rest of the market, I think there's always going to be opportunity. For example, Apple was crazy, whenever a new product came out. Say they were going to offer a $400 phone. We all thought that nobody's ever going to pay for that. But then Apple made their phone so unique and so different, that they were able to grow the company and scale. Now in their particular case that phone became a production model, but it was a high-end production product.

Rob Carroll:

I don't imagine the custom companies are going to disappear, because of the complexity of the product with every single option available out there in the world. I don't imagine that production companies are going to turn into a huge scale. I think there's always going to be a place for the custom builder to be able to set in.

Rob Carroll:

I hope I'm right, because I'm hanging my hat on it. But I've seen the rise of production companies across the US. Let me qualify this. Louisiana is a very unique market. We have never had production builders in our market and suddenly Hurricane Katrina changed that. I immediately started looking around the country to see what it looked like everywhere else, because there are markets all over the US that are just filled; there might be six production companies in the same market.

Rob Carroll:

Yet, in every one of those markets, you can find top quality professionals doing top quality work. It's the reason why there are companies like Rolex – people want quality. It's the reason why there's a market for the MacBook versus the PC. It's the reason why there are any highly custom products. I mean, there are companies that sell custom office pins for $200 apiece, inlaid with marble.

Rob Carroll:

There's a market for that, because people want it. You just have to understand the market realities of that. I hear a lot of people talking about things like 3D printing and other innovations. As a matter of fact, I think in Austin, Texas, they just announced they're going to do a large 100 lot development of all 3D printed homes. I think it's novel. But I think that the challenge is going to be whenever people go to remodel those homes, they're going to say, "Wait, this was 3D printed. I just want to move that switch."

Rob Carroll:

Suddenly, the renovation costs go from what they are now to triple, because now you've got to bring in a structural engineer to evaluate the integrity of that. I think there’s a place for modularisation. Panel build systems, I think, can definitely have a place, again, within the production community, but probably not so much within custom buildings. I just don't see there being a cultural shift, with the exception that maybe custom gets pushed a little bit further into the higher price range for people who are able to purchase this, and they're able to have an exclusive product. Maybe it's a smaller pool of people. But they'll always be there; there's always going to be somebody to fill that market.

Bosco Anthony:

It's been a really insightful interview with so many different thought processes going through. My final question for you today is what does success look like to you today, looking back on your journey? It has really been a journey for you through some really unintended consequences as well. But what does success look like to you today?

Rob Carroll:

For those of you that don't know, you get a chance to look at the questions before these interviews. When I got to that one, I really had to stop and think about it, because it's changed over the years. When I first started, I remember telling my wife, "I've made it whenever we can build a house that's big enough that I can fit a Lay-Z Boy chair in." That was success for me at the time of starting out.

Rob Carroll:

As a matter of fact, we're getting ready to break new ground, so I’ve got to make new success goals. We're rebuilding the house, hopefully, over the next few months. I would say that, really, it's evolved into the phrase IOU: inwards, outwards and upwards. Inwards success for me is if I can stay at peace inside myself, as I go through running a custom business, and growing and learning to be a better employer, and all of these ups and downs and the waking up at 2am because I remembered an unintended consequence.

Rob Carroll:

Outward success is for me remembering that it's not about just my business, my company. When we first started building, I had my daughter, who is 11 now. Now we have four kids. My interests are divided. It's very easy as a self-employed individual to focus in on the company and to get lost in it. I've seen too many families fall apart. Success is for me to navigate self-employment and still protect the integrity of my family, provide for them and to keep that perspective.

Rob Carroll:

Upwards success, of course, is just humility. Because with success, with growth, if you're so focused on the goals and you're knocking them out of the park, it's really easy to think that you've done great things, just awesome things. But remembering that as great of a company as we build and as hard as we press. I couldn't have you done any of this, if it were not for my Creator. So I have to maintain that. It’s important to keep a really solid perspective of humility. And so inwards, outwards and upwards would be success for me. If I can make it through this life and this career, and maintain that perspective, I’ll feel like I've made it.

Bosco Anthony:

Do you feel you've hit that balance as well, Rob? A lot of builders work late at night and work on weekends; do you feel like you're getting a better handle on balancing that?

Rob Carroll:

Is there such a thing as tri-polar?

Bosco Anthony:

Maybe.

Rob Carroll:

I don't think anybody holds all three of those and spins those plates at the same time. Obviously, they're dropping, but part of the humility side of things is recognising that you're human. Stephen Covey, in his book, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, talks about that balance.

Rob Carroll:

A lot of people talk about the holy grail of work-life balance. But the reality is, how do you maintain a work-life balance? I don't mean to get super serious here at the end, but there are people dying of COVID. I've lost count of the memorial services we've gone to. You don't have work-life balance in that. You stop what you're doing and you go and comfort the family. Whatever it means for the business, it means for the business.

Rob Carroll:

Whenever things are going great and your kids are happy, and they're running and doing things that don't need as much attention, you're focusing on the business. Whenever you realise you've been working to the bone because you're so passionate about what you do, or because your fear of unintended consequences has got the better of you, then you rebalance and realise maybe you should be getting into the gym and start working out.

Rob Carroll:

I would say that, no, I'm definitely not at that stage. But the focus for me in that, is not necessarily balance, but rebalance. Every day, wake up, rebalance. What do I need to be today? Wake up the next day and don't assume it's the same as yesterday. Rebalance; you just wake up every morning and you rebalance and shift your attention and then be okay with that. That does not meld well with my type A personality. I like the boxes. I like everything going in the box, nothing overflows, the boxes are full. Maybe that's a male thing, maybe not. But focusing on inwards, outwards and upwards success helps me to realise that it doesn't always look the way that I thought it would look. But that's okay. I can rebalance.

Bosco Anthony:

Rebalance is a really good way and a good emphasis of focusing on where you're going. This has been a really insightful interview. I've truly enjoyed asking these questions, getting to know a little bit about your insights as well. Rob, I want to thank you for your time. To our listeners as well, I really appreciate you tuning in. I know you're in the midst of a weather condition out there. So really appreciate you making the time for us as well. And I look forward to having you back on our podcast in the future.

Rob Carroll:

Thank you so much for having me. I've enjoyed talking with you and getting to know you as well. And I look forward to hearing more out of your podcast. It's been really great.

Bosco Anthony:

Awesome.

Bosco Anthony: 

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