“The more you know, the better we look” isn’t just a marketing slogan, it’s a commitment to the education of Schumacher Homes’ customers.
President Paul Schumacher has grown his custom homebuilding business to 190 employees since its formation in 1992 with a well-trained staff and technology that helps customers understand the building process.
“Using a SMART board (an interactive whiteboard), we take customers through it,” Schumacher says. “At the end of that 1-1/2 hour meeting, they have an 18-page printout with everything in their custom home, individually priced, so they know where every dollar is spent.”
Schumacher Homes builds more than 500 homes each year in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Kentucky, North Carolina and South Carolina. The company was named among the top 200 builders nationwide last year by Builder magazine.
Smart Business spoke with Schumacher about how he creates a blueprint for success.
On customer communication
From the beginning of construction through their homeowner orientation, or walk-through, our customers are assigned a personal builder. When they are building a house, they have lots of questions. They have the cell phone number of their personal builder, available seven days a week, because it’s much better to have those questions answered immediately, as opposed to having to wait over the weekend.
Communication is huge in our business because we have a very complicated process and product. Customers don’t always understand it, so it’s important that they have access to the person with the answers at their fingertips.
Before, there was an office contact, but then we found that the person in the office isn’t out on the job site, seeing exactly what’s going on. At first, our builders thought, ‘You’re giving my cell phone number out to the homeowners. They’re going to call us all the time,’ and every single builder loves it now because their customers are so well-informed and so much more relaxed through the process.
On educating customers
We just did a 30-minute DVD on the entire homebuilding process, and we run a television show quarterly in all our markets.
To shoot a 30-minute television show, it’s really a big undertaking and a big investment but it’s all about aligning the customer’s expectations and taking the fear out of the process. It really works well. We just released this in the first quarter of this year, and it’s something we worked on for six months.
We do online design. A customer may be interested in one of our plans, but it’s not quite right and they want to redesign the interior. We will sit down and draw what they want right on the SMART board.
That gets e-mailed to our design department, and within 48 hours, they have their fully drawn floor plan with all the design criteria they wanted. It’s a very fast turnaround time, and it keeps the people engaged in the design process. We just launched this in the first quarter, and it’s gone really well.
On training employees
One of the things that we are 100 percent dedicated to — and that a lot of companies just talk about — is training. Our average employee receives over 90 hours of training a year, which is very high in any industry.
Every Schumacher Homes employee goes through what we call ‘Schu U,’ a 44-hour initial training program that takes them through everything about Schumacher Homes — who we are, how we do it, going out in the field, accounting, estimating, purchasing and design. We have a whole training day dedicated to customer service — what we expect in customer service, how we rate our customer service, how we survey, the whole thing. We’ve been doing that over the last eight years, and we find it critical to our success.
We’re in a complex business, and if you don’t give people the proper tools upfront to be successful, they won’t be. You’ve got to give them every tool necessary so they can be up and running, producing and contributing to the company goals. We have different ongoing levels, introductory training all the way through the most advanced.
On measuring performance
Everything’s based on performance. We have very defined, clear goals. Everyone has a scorecard, and that’s updated on a monthly, quarterly and yearly basis.
We’re very goal-oriented and performance-driven. At any point, any employee of Schumacher Homes can go in, pull up their individual scorecard and know where they stand or where their department stands in relationship to their goals. Their scorecard would include customer satisfaction, time of construction, variance percentage, number of starts — a builder would be expected to do X amount of homes a year.
Everyone wants to be part of a company where the vision is clear and the focus is clear. If you don’t have a scorecard, it’s like playing a football game and then asking what the score is in the fourth quarter; it’s kind of worthless. People want to know exactly where they stand at any point in time, and they want to know what their goals are, go out and achieve them. That’s what makes people feel good, and that’s why they like working here because they know their work contributes to the goals and they get to see the results of their hard work paying off.
On rewarding excellence
All the people performing at the highest level are recognized on a monthly basis. We also have company meetings, and part of the meeting is where we stand on our goals, how we are performing, and again, it’s an open book. Everyone’s results are flashed up on the screen next to everyone else’s so there are no secrets. People like that. The top performers want to come to those meetings and see their results at the top.
HOW TO REACH: Schumacher Homes, (800) 813-1116 or www.schumacherhomes.com
