When Leadership Finds You

Lauren Weber is a co-owner and general manager of Cornerstone Remodeling in Ellicott City, Md., but just a few years ago she questioned whether this was the right path for her. 

Weber had been a designer at Cornerstone since early 2015 and she loved that job. But as the firm’s two owners shifted their attention to their new tech startup, they sought new leadership for the remodeling business. In 2022, they tapped Weber to be the general manager. 

“I did not have any training or even aspirations to take on this role, honestly,” she says. But she saw it as an exciting challenge and a way to get out of her comfort zone.

Things would indeed prove challenging. Within her first year as GM, the company restructured its production and sales processes and introduced new project management software. 

A Company in Transition

“Our field organization was built for a different stage of the business, and we realized we needed a structure that could better handle market fluctuations,” she says. “Making that shift meant changing how we had always done things and bringing the entire field team along with us. It was a major transformation, but one that ultimately strengthened how we operate.”

The front-of-house structure also changed with the introduction of formal design and development agreements. “We had been designing and giving out beautiful renderings to anybody who was interested in working with us and we were not charging for our design services,” Weber says. “Getting used to selling that new structure was a hard thing for the front of the house team.” 

Another big change: the mood around the office. “It felt like no one was fully happy because everyone was feeling the turmoil and the stress of having to overcome things.” 

While these big organizational changes happened in a small amount of time and without the usual leadership, it helped that Weber was at the helm because employees knew and trusted her. 

“Painting the picture of why we were upending everything was kind of tough because everything was working fine as far as the employees were concerned,” Weber says. She acknowledged the firm’s growing pains and explained the reasons and purpose behind everything: Cornerstone wouldn’t be able to scale and create opportunities for its employees if it maintained the status quo. 

A Personal Path Forward

And while Weber was confident in the business decisions, she was less so about her decision to become the GM. “A friend suggested I put a date on the calendar, and if I still felt this way on that date, I would have to make some hard decisions,” she says. “I made a date a year from then, and thought, ‘Well, I can do anything for a year’ and I clearly have some growing to do, so if I didn’t feel any different in a year, I knew it wasn’t from lack of trying on my part.”

Weber says marking that date was a game changer. “What that did mentally was that it shifted everything I did because I started feeling like I had a lot more ownership and that everything was going to be OK.” 

She devised a strategy to get employees onboard with the new processes and make them excited about working at Cornerstone. And Weber acknowledges that change isn’t a totally unfamiliar concept for the firm. “We’ve always evolved, and we have an awesome team, and we joke that maybe this is the year we'll just calm down and let all of our hard work of years past work for us.”

Things haven’t completely calmed down for Weber but the excitement remains. At the end of last year, she and two of the company’s managers became co-owners of Cornerstone, buying out one of the two owners. “It puts the company in a much better position because the three of us are already operationally running the company,” she says. “We’re kind of keeping the wheels on the bus.”