What are the advantages of design-build?

Having a single point of contact is a total game-changer and a very complicated process.

And doing a remodel or a new build is a multi-step, multi-party complicated process.

And I think a lot of people underestimate how many moving parts there are.

They kind of see it one-dimensionally and they don’t realize all of the things that have to orchestrate and come together to make a final executed product.

And so within design-build, that process is very different than the process of hiring your architect, your engineers, your designer, trying to get everybody on that same page and keep them from pointing fingers at each other when something goes wrong, because things will go wrong and they’re always gonna point fingers at each other.

And then also your contractor.

Trying to navigate and orchestrate that process is so much more difficult than simply hiring design-build and they’re handling all of that and they’re taking responsibility for all those moving parts.

I always take myself back into the customer’s shoes, because we used to be customers with our own houses.

You know, when we’re trying to build our own houses and we’re doing those things, I remember always lying to myself and oversimplifying.

You know, you might as well, or it’s not that big of a deal.

And then what you realize is that when you start lying to yourself and you start talking yourself into things and oversimplify things, all it does is create a very bad experience.

And I know that just because that’s what I used to do.

And the more that I’ve learned and the more we’ve grown into this company and established a really good design-build firm and having great designers, great in-house people, they’re able to take all that information, gather it together, all on the same page, and then when we go to execute it with our team in the field, everybody’s connected to it.

Basically nobody else’s fault, except for ours if there’s a mistake, which I love for the clients, because if there’s a challenge, it’s not, hey, your architect didn’t do this, or hey, your designer forgot to add these dimensions, so we’re not responsible for this.

It’s actually gonna be a change order now.

Or simple things like, we’ve had an engineer go, this engineering situation might not or might work, I don’t know yet.

And then we go out there and it doesn’t work, and he’s like, well, that’s not my fault.

I told you that wasn’t gonna be my fault.

So you get a lot of finger pointing like you were talking about, but that, I think, as a group of people and people who have never had this experience before, it’s easy to lose control quickly and it becomes very expensive.

And then a lot of lawsuits can happen on the back end of that.

So, to me, design build, the superpower behind design build is, it is our responsibility.

And that sets us apart from everybody else.

When we make the mistake, we wanna own it, and it’s our fault, and we will change it and fix it.

It just makes our team better when those things happen.

But that is, to me, the superpowers of the simplicity of all.

We are able to get this complex custom design and project, and we’re able to make it simple for our customers.

Obviously, by what you’re saying, it makes it sound like a no-duh.

Obviously, I would wanna choose design build.

Why do you think so many people get lured in to doing it the other way?

Because in their minds, they think they can do it cheaper.

They go, I can design it myself.

It’s not that hard.

You know, people are like, it’s just, no.

Design is way more than just picking finishes.

And I would say you can if you have much lower standards of what the finished product is that you want.

And the experience that you’re doing.

If you’re doing a rental property, maybe, or something really simple where you’re not having to live with it day in, day out, and your standards are lower on that product, yeah, you probably could just wing it.

And you could.

And it’ll be a bad experience in construction, no matter what.

This is what we did.

I’m going back to myself.

I can hire a cheaper designer.

I can hire a cheaper guy that can do this tile work.

I always tell our clients, I can give you way cheaper guys that probably won’t show up half the time, that will do a lot cheaper, that will do a really crappy job.

I can give you those guys all day long, but don’t be mad at me if your experience sucks and your quality sucks, right?

There’s always a cheaper guy that won’t really take responsibility for his work.

Exactly.

I can give you that guy.

If it’s important to people to have really high quality, have a good experience, have a home that is, I call them trophy homes, because we do trophy homes.

Our work is incredible.

If that’s the experience that you want, then we are the customer for you.

And if you don’t want to be into it day in and day out, managing it yourself, going through all the frustrations, if you just want to go to work or live your life and be able to pay somebody to take away all those problems, that’s who we are.

We take a very complex situation and we simplify it for our customers.

So let’s spend a little time on the attraction and the lure, because it is a lure, of oversimplifying it.

I would also say that it’s also a knowledge thing.

People don’t know that there is an alternative process.

They don’t know of the concept of design build.

They’re talking to a friend who did a remodel years ago and, oh, I hired this architect.

As soon as you go down that path, and I’m not saying architects are bad.

We hire architects a lot of times.

But as soon as you go down that path, a lot of times people, now you’re selling out money, well, you’re already committed to the path that leads to hiring your engineer separately, hiring your designer separately.

Some architects will have that all in house, which is great.

They essentially are design build.

A lot of times they’re missing the ingredient of the general contracting, who’s actually performing the work.

Unless you are really lucky that you got that right architect who can essentially do design build, people don’t realize that that first step that they take by that call to that architect comes with sequential steps that make it a lot more difficult to get what they want.

If you hire an architect that does understand those details and is willing to take that liability, they’re super expensive.

And that’s where we crush people on pricing.

Yeah, multi-six figures.

Yeah, multi-six figures.

We know it.

And in the custom home range, it begins to approach- Mid-six figures.

Yeah, mid-six figures for a good set of plans and for somebody who’s gonna take care of all of that forethought.

And give them completely, we’ve met with these guys.

There’s a few of them that we really know well.

They’re amazing.

They are.

But they’re 500 grand.

They’re three to 700 grand.

I’ve seen one, a million dollars for a set of plans.

Yeah.

And so when you think about that, that’s how important plans are.

We crush those.

When it comes to the high-end stuff with all the details and everything, we crush that industry.

Because we do it all in-house and we got the right team, we are the most competitive pricing.

And that’s where we do save our clients a lot of money.

It’s pretty overwhelming when you start breaking down all of the decisions you have to make.

I think another lure is almost like, it’s just procrastination.

Oh, I’ll worry about that later.

Let me just get my permit.

Okay, yeah, but then once you have your permit and you’re starting to lay out your slab, you’re moving dirt and stuff, and you don’t have details for how you want your slider door transition to happen, or how you want your showers to, do you want them to, do you want raised curbs?

Do you want them to be zero transitions?

So all of those things that you haven’t, that you procrastinated on making decisions about, now all of a sudden have real world consequences and you don’t want that outcome.

It’s a chain effect, right?

You all of a sudden procrastinate one thing.

Now your plumbing fixtures are now different, which changes the way the plumbing should have been installed in the first place.

It’s a major challenge and people are like, oh, it’s not that big of a deal.

No, it changes because now the contractors are gonna change over you, because now they have to get a drywall guy or the plumber.

Oh my gosh, now we have to chip out the concrete because that was in the wrong spot.

So things change really quick.

So it’s so important.

And you’ll end up spending more than what you would have had you planned it out better ahead of time.

More money and more time.

The real bait and switch is yes, poor plans will give you a more attractive introductory number from your contractor.

And it feels good until you get to the game time.

Until reality hits you.

And you will spend it and you’ll spend more.

And it comes down to, I’m a big sports guy, right?

It comes down to, if you’re not prepared for the game and you go in there not prepared and you do it half-ass and you’re not putting in the execution that you need to really do, when the game time comes, it blows up in your face and you will lose.

And it happens all the time.

It’s preparation, it’s power.

We really believe in that with Kingdom and Co.

We believe that slowing down, getting the details right, executing everything from the get-go, and then once it’s time to pull the trigger, we do win and we do execute.