Jorie Scholten
Manager, Design
Hogan Design & Construction
Geneva, Ill.
Opening a new department: Two years ago we started the design department. Since then, we have completed 160 designs with a production sale ratio of 76.25%. Creating a department from scratch has been challenging, rewarding, and profitable. We’ve always been a design-build firm, but it was more from our project managers in construction working through the design with the customer as the construction was going, which was working out, but a little bit inefficient. We’ve developed three different design contracts, depending on how comfortable the customer is with their own thoughts on designing their project themselves. I am a very analytical person. I use a lot of spreadsheets, I pull a lot of reports from the software that we use to make sure that everything is going the way that it should be going that we’re not overusing our hours on a certain project. So data is a very big point for me.
