LEFF Design Build Director of Operations Morgan Thomas is tired of ineffective, boring meetings. At LEFF, Thomas has learned—and taught—how to maximize everyone's time through engaging, productive meetings. After all, design-build remodeling thrives on communication, so you better do it correctly.

"What we are offering our clients is this highly collaborative team that is working together for the success and health of the project—but the only way to really do that is through a lot of meetings," says Thomas.

Industry advisor Mark Richardson says the most important sales tip in today's remodeling market is to focus on the right client. On this episode of Remodeling Mastery, he offers 9 other tips to improve your closing rate.

Identifying the right client comes down to understanding if you're a priority or merely another option.

"You can ask yourself, 'Am I an option? Or am I a priority?' If you're a priority for them, the likelihood of that sale happening is going to be so much greater," says Richardson.

You’re tired of saying no to clients because a project is too small. You’re considering ways to protect yourself in case the market declines. You want to add value to your business. You’re looking to strengthen your warranty program, or maybe you hope to enhance the client experience. You might want a handyman or a small projects division.

Many remodelers continue to play around with artificial intelligence, still not finding where it can best serve the business. In that environment, Digs sits pretty—the AI-enabled platform thinks it’s found that sweet spot for construction and AI.

Digs says it provides the tools remodelers (and builders, and even homeowners) need to guide clients through a project. Those tools serve the needs for planning and design collaboration, communication and punch list management, digital hand-offs, and warranties.

As a 20-year remodeler who came from the tech sector, I’ve been driving the adoption of software in our business from day one.

When we started, we had a reasonably good CRM, a robust, but complex, estimating system, and we used QuickBooks as our accounting platform. The rest of our business processes and tasks employed a combination of offline spreadsheets. We also used a mix of cloud-based general purpose tools, along with traditional job binders.

As a child, Josh Sparks didn’t have it easy. He was 10 when his mother, who was addicted to heroin, went to prison and he entered foster care. After 17 different schools, the young Sparks landed in Milwaukee. It was there that his life changed when a friend offered him a job roofing. 

“It was incredibly hard work ... and at the end of the summer, I thought myself proficient enough to try to handle suppliers and sell my own job,” he says. “And so I did that.”

Jenna Jackson

Director of Operations

Acadian House Design + Renovation

Baton Rouge, La.

CompanyCam

Read a graph of the NAHB/Westlake Royal Remodeling Market Index (RMI) and you’ll see that it tells a story. You will see the deep dive brought on by the uncertainty at the beginning of the COVID lockdown. The storyline continues with the post-COVID remodeling boom. More recent quarters reflect a solid market, tempered by inflation and lower household savings.

The great salesman and motivational speaker Zig Ziglar once told me: “There are really only five obstacles to the sale and they don’t change. Those are: No need. No desire. No money. No hurry. No trust.”

He’s absolutely right about that, but for those of us in the home improvement industry, how we overcome those obstacles does change over time. 

We have to be thinking constantly about what our customers really want. And that means asking, “What do prospects expect from me today that they didn’t three, five, and 10 years ago?”

Nothing is more important to my success as a remodeler than the quality of the crews I put in the field. They’re what keeps customers returning and new ones coming in. But, as we all know, it’s not always easy to find that next hire.