114 Merging Offline and Online Tools - Shawn Corkrean May 25 2022

Greg Bray: [00:00:00] Hello everybody, and welcome to today's episode of The Home Builder Digital Marketing Podcast. I'm Greg Bray with Blue Tangerine,

Kevin Weitzel: and I'm Kevin Weitzel with OutHouse.

Greg Bray: And we are excited today to welcome to the show, Shawn Corkrean, the owner of Griffith Homebuilders of Iowa. Welcome, Shawn. Thanks for joining us today.

Shawn Corkrean: Glad to be here.

Greg Bray: Well, Sean, let's start off. Just help people get to know you a little bit and tell us a little bit about yourself.

Shawn Corkrean: I'm a father and a husband. I have a great wife. We're coming up on our 30th anniversary here this year, which seems like a long time to be married, but she's a fantastic [00:01:00] woman. I've got two great kids. Been a home builder for, and real estate for most of my life. I don't really have any hobbies, which drives my wife crazy, but business building is what I like to do most of the time, so.

Kevin Weitzel: So, being that you're from Iowa, are we talking Cyclones or Hawkeyes?

Shawn Corkrean: I'm definitely a Cyclone fan. Yeah. Yeah. There you go.

Kevin Weitzel: Hey, you know what? I've got family in the far west side, near the Omaha side of Iowa and everywhere in Iowa you go, their either one side of the fence or the other. There's really no in between.

Shawn Corkrean: I went to Iowa State a long time ago and yeah, yeah, it's definitely the way to go.

Greg Bray: Well, Sean, since you said 30 years, any marital advice that gets people through before we get into the good stuff, right?

Shawn Corkrean: Do what your wife tells you.

Greg Bray: All right. I think that's one to live by. We can wrap up now and move.

Shawn Corkrean: You're right.

Greg Bray: Well, tell us a little bit more about how you got into home building as a career and what's your past been?

Shawn Corkrean: A little bit [00:02:00] unique. My father was in real estate brokerage growing up. There was five of us kids and you learned it by osmosis. We all kind of learned to sell quite frankly. We would answer the phone. You know, they would transfer the phones to our house. You'd work in the office. You know, you're always basically selling something. Whether you were selling to get a listing or selling to get a sale, and so we learned that and then took a little bit of a different route after school. I got into nonprofit work. Spent about 10 years there, doing some different stuff there.

It was kind of a detour and hit about 30 our son was born around there and kind of realized it wasn't paying so well, and while it was really enjoyable and felt like you were kind of making a difference in the world. You kind of had to step back and say, ooh, maybe we need to regroup, and so we moved back to Iowa, the Des Moines area, and got back into home building.

My dad was doing some spec building. He said, there's a real opportunity here. Would you like to jump in and join with me? You know, I've definitely come at it from a sales and marketing perspective and had to learn the construction side, which was challenging for someone [00:03:00] who's not overly handy, quite frankly.

Greg Bray: So, you grew up learning in the office, not out on-site with the hammer in your hand.

Shawn Corkrean: Very much so.

Kevin Weitzel: That can turn the whole building into a very lacking in profit excursion there.

Shawn Corkrean: The early days were challenging to be honest with you. You know, you had to figure it out.

Kevin Weitzel: Yeah, you can burn a lot of cash, just figuring stuff out.

Shawn Corkrean: You start in real small, You know, you start in small and you said let's figure out how this works, and you make mistakes like anything else. You get in and get after it. At the end of the day, home building is about as much psychology as it is the building.

Greg Bray: Well, Sean, tell us a little bit more about your company today, where you're building and what type of buyers you're serving?

Shawn Corkrean: Yeah, so we serve the Iowa area. We do central and Eastern Iowa. We're a little bit unique. We're a scattered-site on your lot builder. We're growing right now, but we're doing about 30, 35 houses a year, roughly. We're small, very small. We do modular. So, with modular it's, you know, we're building on rural acreage is basically, in the country. We do some residential, but our buyers are kind of all [00:04:00] over the map as far as age and situation in life, a little bit of everything. You know, our price point, not counting land, typically runs in the low 300s. It's not counting the land. It's a nice house, not a mansion.

When you do on your lot building, you know, I heard this described at the IBS show this past, I think it was January of this year we went. Somebody described it as when you're an on your lot builder, you're like the fifth wheel. You know, it's the homeowner and their land, and you've been invited in for a very temporary basis to improve their situation. It's a very different relationship than spec building or residential building.

Kevin Weitzel: So, actually, could you go a little bit further into the modular aspect of it because there's a lot of different definitions of what modular building is. I mean, there's some people that they think of modular buildings as double-wide trailers. There's some people that believe that they're just dropped in, prefabbed homes. Are you looking at just offsite panelization? What is your overall definition of it?

Shawn Corkrean: There's a lot of confusion sometimes with manufactured versus modular. Manufactured is essentially mobile homes built to HUD code. Modular is basically stick-built, but it's built off-site and then portions of it are [00:05:00] transported to the site. We transport in sections, you know, have large cranes lift them onto the foundation. We're a full-service builder. So, we take it from just bare ground to handing the keys to the finished house. You know, it's all built to standard building code. It's essentially stick-built we just get there a different way, quite frankly.

Kevin Weitzel: Love it.

Greg Bray: And from a sales and marketing standpoint, Shawn how does that resonate with buyers? Is that something that's a roadblock that you feel like you have to do a lot of education to overcome or do most people don't care or don't even know the difference or what's the situation there?

Shawn Corkrean: You know, I've been doing modular for about 15 years. When we first got into it, we kind of had the marketing tactic of it's as good as stick-built. It's just a different process. That kind of thing. The more we got into it, we just scrapped that whole idea and just, you know, embraced modular.

You put up a model home and you say, walk around and people walk around and go, this is really nice. I want to live here, and you just got over it. Then you realize that from a, quite frankly, from an SEO or marketing approach modular is kind of the way [00:06:00] to go. There's limited competition.

Modular is basically, for lack of a better way to say it, it's labor arbitrage. There's places where it's difficult to build just simply for contractor labor pool. If you're building an urban residential area where there's 50 framers to choose from modular doesn't make any sense, but if you're building in a rural acreage where, you know, that's not a lot of choices and the ones that are there, you never know what the quality is. There price sometimes is it's awfully high. So, what you're simply doing is taking the labor, pooling it into an offsite construction facility, and then bringing a more finished product to the site.

A lot of people view modular as it's just straightforward. Buyers of modular view it as less stressful, more straightforward. We don't go after high-end homeowners. One of our biggest challenges is dealing with customers that got priced out of like, they want to build out in the middle of nowhere. They want to build a really larger, bigger house. They get their stick-built prices back and then they go, oh, I can't afford that, I want to come to you, and you're like,[00:07:00] no, we're not really situated to do all the things that you wanted to do. We're a little bit more straightforward. We have very structured options.

We're somewhat similar in a production builder that way. We don't just run off and grab anything you want off the shelf. We have very specific things we offer. We work with a company called Homeway Homes. They provide us our modular sections. They have been really very good to work with.

Kevin Weitzel: And are you designing the overall layout of the home or are you just going more along the lines of their prefabricated, predesign setups?

Shawn Corkrean: We have about 50 to 60-floor plans that we start with, and ultimately a customer chooses one of those and then custom modifies it. So, it's semi-custom.

Kevin Weitzel: I like that.

Shawn Corkrean: Yeah, again, that goes back to the heart of that customer feels a little less stressful, a little easier to jump in on.

Greg Bray: It is interesting, Shawn, how that whole modular has been growing, and yet there's still that confusion a little bit in the marketplace with some buyers, at least of what it is and what it really means. Interesting that you're not really having to do lots of work there. That's great to hear.

Shawn Corkrean: We used to try to do [00:08:00] that and you're just like, I am swimming uphill every single day. We just quit and we decided to say let's just swim downhill with the flow of people that want modular and that's seems to make our life a lot easier since we made that change.

Kevin Weitzel: Well, that's an interesting point you make. Are you finding that you're getting enough people that are educated before they even knock on your door to come to you to say we want modular?

Shawn Corkrean: Yeah. I think it really depends on where you're at. If you're in the Midwest, rural Midwest, definitely. If you're on the east coast, I think there's a demand there. It's a little more of a higher, you know, infill lot, higher market, higher value home. I think you go down to the Carolinas. There's an area there. It's growing with custom modular, higher-priced houses. It's back to my labor arbitrage things. You go in other parts, you go into Florida and Texas and things like that, there's just no financial advantage from a builder standpoint to do it.

Kevin Weitzel: Less waste and more accurate plum walls, but other than that.

Greg Bray: Without some weather delays too, right, on some things.

Shawn Corkrean: Yeah, very much so, but you know, we suffer from all the similar production delays and materials problems as anybody else. You go into the [00:09:00] Florida, Texas, it seems to be, from what I see, the construction deficiencies, as you're pointing out, don't seem to be slowing down the buying public, so what's the motivation?

Kevin Weitzel: The frog in the pot boils, no matter what you do. You know you can change the market. You can make it as uncomfortable as possible. You can make this as inefficient as possible, but as long as people keep stepping up to the line. Look at Disneyland. As long as Disneyland keeps raising their prices, but they keep selling out every single day. They don't need to lower the price. They don't too. Why do it?

Shawn Corkrean: Absolutely. I agree. Yeah. Yeah. So, that's essentially why we shifted to the modular centric is we lead with that in our marketing message simply because why do I want to try to change the world here? Why do I want to convince this buying public that modular is great? I can sit and talk to you all day about why it's great. That's a hard education piece and I'm not really in the business of education, we're in the business of home building.

Kevin Weitzel: Off the marketing topic because obviously I love modular building, but do you hit better HERS index ratings? Are you closer to net-zero with the type of construction that you're doing?

Shawn Corkrean: We have done some [00:10:00] testing on the HERS. We do score really well on that. I'll just be real blunt with you on some of that. I make fun of the Texas, Florida builders, you know, like it just isn't that strong a demand for that product. I got 50 things a day that are driving me crazy, and you know, you gotta choose your battles.

Kevin Weitzel: Yeah. Yeah.

Greg Bray: So, Shawn, as a smaller builder, you know, in that 30 to 40 a year range, how have you chosen to kind of structure your sales and marketing within the organization as far as team and what you do in house or what you do with partners and things like that?

Shawn Corkrean: Coming out of COVID, we're really doing a deep dive, rethinking what that means. What I mean by that is we're finding that people are far more accepting of digital interaction and maybe they always were, and maybe I was a problem. Maybe we were the problem. I mean, it's probably a little bit of both, but we're really trying to do a deep dive now.

We went through all of 2021 and I kept thinking, like, really? Those people are okay with a Zoom meeting on this. Like really? I never would've thought that. You see enough of that and you kind of go [00:11:00] like, huh? Maybe I'm the problem. You know, or maybe my fear of basically at the end of the day you lose a sale. Ultimately that's what drives a lot of it is. You're afraid you're gonna lose market share or lose sales.

So, we've really tried to go back to first principles. What's the whole situation? What are we dealing with here now that we're coming out of COVID? What's it look like? We've simply said, what's the decision buying process, the new home decision buying process? What's that look like? For all the change and all the stuff that's going on in the world, I still don't think people, that process, how they make a decision to buy a new house or build a new house, has changed that much.

The way we do it. Definitely, but the decision process, and what I mean by that is there's a life change. Somebody's got a new job. They moved. The kids graduated and moved on from the house, or they had a new baby or whatever. I think those are still the main drivers in a lot of what we do when it comes to buying new construction, new homes.

So, if you start with that premise, and then you kind of move to the notion of, okay, now, how do you apply technology to make that more efficient and more effective? I guess when I look at that and I say efficient and [00:12:00] effective, both from a builder and a buyer standpoint. So, when I buy a book, I look at a book and I say okay, I can buy this book for X number of dollars. It's so much easier just to click on the link and buy it now versus how I bought it in the past. You had to drive to the bookstore and all that kind of stuff, but how I came to buying that book, hasn't really changed that much. I was like, oh, I heard it from a friend. I had a recommendation. I saw somebody who suggested I buy a book.

I think we have to think about it like that, and I think when you move to this notion of this buy online or buy now button, you know, as you've try to move everything online, I just think that's a terrible framework on what to use because it creates this notion of online, offline. We kind of work off this premise that we got to change and creates this anxiety. Like, I've got to change how I do things.

Greg Bray: All right. Well, Shawn, you've been talking about how you're seeing the buyer's expectations evolve. You're talking about how the process of how they make their decisions may not be different, [00:13:00] but maybe the interactions with the company are different and more digital, but yet it doesn't have to be an either or situation. We can move them back and forth, right?

Some people still go to a bookstore, believe it or not, and read the first chapter while they're standing there trying to decide if they want it and some of those things. What type of feedback are you getting from your buyers towards some of these changes? Alright, they're comfortable with Zoom meetings, but as you look at some of the other interactions, what are they telling you?

Shawn Corkrean: They're saying, just give me a path to do this, and I'll be more digitally oriented, and so that's, I think, the trick that we're trying to figure out how to do. Like I said, we're doing this deep dive and we're trying some stuff, and some of the things we're seeing work in some I don't know if it's working or not. To the buy online button, the nature of that is I think, is it creates a dichotomy or a false framework. It's like online, offline. I think that's a terrible mistake to view online, offline. It's a merger.

I read somewhere a time when someone talked about electricity. When electricity first came out, they'd say things like will you be using that with electricity or without? Probably accurate at the time, [00:14:00] right? Now it's wallpaper. We don't pay any attention to it, and I think that maybe is a path or a framework that we can use for looking at digital application into the home buying process.

I heard definition technology, anything that was created after you were born. Okay. So, let's just figure out how to use that, and how do we make it efficient and effective for our customers? At the end of the day, when you buy a book it's efficient and effective for Amazon because they don't have to open the store and have this giant overhead. That's great, but it probably wouldn't have worked unless it was efficient and effective for the customer as well.

So, I think what you've got to find is that common ground of application of technology works for both. I fall back to kind of the old sales sales funnel. I don't know if that's still in vogue, but it's still the framework I view the buying process of how people go through that. How do we apply the technology? Well, at the end of the day, everything drives to your website, but at the beginning, they're doing general research. So, you say like, okay, I'm going to get into SEO and paid search and all that kind of stuff, but once they get there and figure it out, they're wanting to know a lot of things.

They're going to say, okay, I want to know the price is, and they say, okay, I can afford it. Then they want to [00:15:00] say, okay, I will look for a floor plan. Okay. I found that. How do I figure that out? Is it presented properly? Do they have virtual tours? All that kind of good stuff. Now, I think what we're finding is they're starting to move into things like selections, options, different things. It doesn't take very long for that customer, once they've decided they want to pick out their kitchen faucet, they want to know, well, what are my choices? Oh, and what's standard? That one's nice. What's it cost?

You go into that mentality of like oh, do we need a shopping cart? I will say as recently as a couple of years ago if you would have said shopping cart to me in this business, I would have said, there's no way in hell that's going to work. This doesn't work that way. This is home building. Stop. You know, we're not buying socks on Amazon. So, I do think that creates a real opportunity.

Then they move into touch. This is where I'm going to sound a little older school. There still has to be some level of seeing the product or a product that's in person. They got to see it, smell it. Even if it's just for five minutes, quite frankly. We always say that our model homes, they're like the most expensive marketing tool we have for five minutes. They walk in and they look at it. [00:16:00] I'm not making fun of anybody cause I do the same thing. You know, I walk in and I go okay, I could live here, not my floor plan, not my color walls, not my layout of the kitchen, but okay, you're good. Let's go back and sit down and talk or let's get back online and talk or whatever, and then ultimately they get to the bottom of the sales funnel and they buy.

What we're trying to do is figure out what's a hybrid path to apply that technology because it used to be in our business, people would show up at the model home, pure marketing people are going to hate me saying this, but we used to think like when they opened the door to the model home, marketing stopped and sales started, I know that's not completely accurate, but it's kind of a concept. I think that now this hybrid path of marketing and sales, where does one start and where does one stop? I'm not sure because if you're online and you're standing there going okay, I'm clicking through and I like that floor plan and oh, let me look at the kitchen faucets. Let's stay with that example.

I want that kitchen faucet. I'm going to put that in my shopping cart. Okay. So, you captured an email. You got somebody's buy-in cause they created a shopping cart. So, they're attached to you. They may be off the market, [00:17:00] from a sales standpoint, so that's marketing. Oftentimes, if they go down the buying process, they're going to expect you to remember that they put that faucet in their shopping cart and they're going to want you to follow through on that and be ready and ultimately to install that faucet in their new house.

The challenge, I think as we go forward is this seamless nature of this business. Like, you've got to create a seamless experience. Online sales consultants now seem to be from my understanding of it in larger builders are basically appointment setters. You ever call, like to get your cable fixed or a health insurance issue and you call and on the same call, you have to give your account number three times. It's just oh.

Kevin Weitzel: No. I've never experienced that Shawn.

Shawn Corkrean: They're just screaming that we don't value you. We don't pay attention to you. When you're dealing with your health insurance or the cell phone company, you just take it. What are you gonna do? So you just grind through it. I don't think people are going to grind through it on home building. I'll just say our company is trying to figure out what's the boundary between sales and marketing because now it seems really blurred and I don't know what that means going forward.

Here's what gets really kind of twisted and [00:18:00] complicated. If you put that kitchen faucet and they put in their shopping cart. Well, now you better know what that thing costs. You better know that you're people can buy it, you can get it because if you don't, you just quickly turn into the home building version of the health insurance company who asked you what your account number is three times. You do a big fireplace or a ceramic shower, people build their houses around that. If they walk in and you say, oh, we don't offer that anymore. We don't have it. Or, oh, by the way, the price went up $3,000. It can be a little off-putting, to say the least to a customer.

Kevin Weitzel: Al Bundy built his house around a commode. So, I totally get where you're coming from, but I'd like to challenge one thing you said. I'd like to challenge one of your statements and the fact that you said that OSCs are basically appointment setters, and I'll tell you that I come from the auto industry and I've watched in real-time.

I was actually part of it in real-time. How OSCs went from answering email questions to setting appointments to they are now the digital sales teams of auto dealers. What they can do is they can get away with hiring greeters on the floor [00:19:00] instead of sales professionals and have 80% of their sales falling through that OSC, if you will. They have a different title in the auto side, and then they just cut their commission process in half. There's a pathway that home builders can even save money by utilizing OSCs.

Shawn Corkrean: I think so too and I guess it depends on what your definition of OSC is and I probably was giving maybe a more traditional or historical.

Kevin Weitzel: General.

Shawn Corkrean: Yeah. We're actually moving to that. You know, I mean, we're getting to the point, we've sold a couple of houses here lately where we did not meet with the people in person until they were verifying their selections. In fact, we're just right in the middle of redoing our website to put our selections on with the shopping cart on, and hopefully by the end of the week, we'll actually be functional at that level, or at least somewhat. I'm fascinated to see what the response is going to be. So, you know, all this stuff I'm saying it's a work in progress. It's an experiment. I don't know. Maybe you know, in six months, I'll say, oh, that was a disaster.

Greg Bray: Well, Shawn, it's really obvious that you've spent a lot of time pondering these things, and you've been [00:20:00] doing some of the step back and looking at what does the customer want and where can we meet them and where are we not yet ready to meet them? You talked about things like accurate inventory and pricing and some of those things. Those are real challenges for a lot of people. You can't do that with sticky notes or even Excel sheets, right? You got to have some technology in the back office to have that data even available. It's clear that you've been putting some work into that. So kudos to you and your team for spending that effort to really figure it out.

Shawn Corkrean: We're putting it out front. I still very much feel like it's an experiment. I think the other thing is that you got to meet the customer where they're at and the customers are all over the map. So, I think we're going to have a certain degree of people walk in the door. They'll say this is my account number. I've picked all my selections. I'd like to go through your design center just to verify the resolution on my screen. I'm not picking out what I thought was brown when it's really red. That will really simplify the process and make it more efficient and effective, and for everybody.

I think there'll be some people that'll hit the print button and walk-in and oh no, we don't want that. One of my fears, quite frankly, is a little bit, is just the opposite. They'll walk [00:21:00] in and they'll say, oh, I don't want that kitchen layout or this kitchen cabinet. Well, that just throws everything into a tizzy. Now I got to change my countertops and oh, where did I start? Oh, I picked this at home. Did I pick this at the center? That kind of thing. I suppose that's just the nature of people's decision-making process, but I also think there's also people that you just still have to set up with the old school, we've got a design center, come in and sit down. Let's make a three-hour appointment. We'll grind our way through here.

Kevin Weitzel: Well, there's also people like me Shawn that I have zero fashion sense. If you haven't seen me in person, trust me, I have zero fashion sense. So, you do not want me doing my own design selections. It's just that simple. I want the process, I want the handheld process of somebody that knows what they're doing to take me through and say, ah, you do not want that nasty old countertop on these cabinets. You know, just not gonna happen.

Shawn Corkrean: Right. We spent some money a couple of years ago and did a kitchen layout where you could, you know, hit a button and the color of the cabinet changed and the flooring would change, and it was just kind of a straightforward kitchen layout, and [00:22:00] I spent hours and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. You know, you go to Google Analytics after six months of it, and apparently, I was the only one thought it was cool. So, just the traffic and the usage was not there, and we also tried things you know, with color palettes or vignettes. So, you'd say like, color vignette A. It's all professionally chosen for you. I don't know, we just didn't get a lot of response to that either. You make a good point there. Like, we might spend all this effort and time and find out that people want somebody to come in and tell them what to buy.

Greg Bray: I don't think you're giving yourself enough credit for the way you're experimenting though. I mean, the things that you're learning because it takes some effort to put all that together, to get it out there into the wild and see what kind of reaction you get, and it's not free. It's not fast sometimes. So, it's really frustrating when it doesn't quite work the way you hoped it would. You know, are there any other ones that like surprised you that you've been working on?

Shawn Corkrean: The kitchen layout and the vignettes, just the lack of interest in that just was really surprising. On the pleasant side, surprising is we put our pricing online about a year and a half ago, two years [00:23:00] ago. Again, you have to figure out what all your costs are and what your standard features are. It's a little easier for us cause we only basically build in one market, so to speak. So, it's a little easier for us to do that.

That was just, for us, it was a resounding download and lead capture which, you know, translates into MailChimp and follow on and all that kind of stuff. That surprised me. The level of people willing to give an email for that cause I just wasn't sure, but it seems to be very little reluctance to do that if you give value. That's really what we say is if you'll give us your email, we'll send you this and we promise never to ever sell that, use it, send you crap. In fact, we tell them we're going to send a monthly newsletter and three follow on emails. That's it. You know, we're very specific about that and that seems to have worked really well.

Greg Bray: Nice. Well, Shawn, you've shared a lot of thoughts with us today. We want to be respectful of your time. Just a few other questions though. Besides the buy online, are there other things you're watching that you see coming that you're trying to get ready for?

Shawn Corkrean: Rising interest rates.

Greg Bray: Yeah. Yeah.

Shawn Corkrean: That's quite frankly, you know, the [00:24:00] biggest issue, and what's that going to affect? I know that's not marketing.

Greg Bray: Fair enough though. I mean, it is marketing in the sense of are we going to have to change our messaging? Are we going to have to change how we approach people based on what the impacts of that are for sure?

Shawn Corkrean: I don't know. If you figured out a solution to that. Let me know. Will you?.

Greg Bray: Well, Shawn, do you have any last thoughts or words of advice that you want to share with our audience today?

Shawn Corkrean: We're trying stuff and we'll see what works, what doesn't, and see what happens, and we'll keep pushing the envelope and see how it goes.

Greg Bray: Well, I guess one follow-up question to that. How do you decide if something's worked or not? What are you looking at to evaluate some of these initiatives?

Shawn Corkrean: I'm a home-building capitalist, so at the end of the day it's sales. That's what drives a good share of it, but customer experience and just watching them, talking with them. Just popping in and saying, hey, what'd you think of this? We ask now in the plan process, how'd you get to us, how'd you find us? What'd you think of that page? It's all anecdotal, but I guess we're small enough that I can continue to do that. Just watch that [00:25:00] customer experience quite frankly, and see how it goes.

Greg Bray: And just ask them. There you go.

Shawn Corkrean: They actually have an opinion.

Greg Bray: Well, Shawn, if someone wants to reach out and connect with you, what's the best way for them to get in touch?

Shawn Corkrean: My email is Shawn, S H A W N at Griffith Home Builders, G R I F F I T H homebuilders.com.

My LinkedIn profile with my name. Shawn Corkrean.

Greg Bray: Awesome. Well, we, again, really appreciate you sharing with us today, and thank you everybody for listening to The Home Builder Digital Marketing Podcast. I'm Greg Bray with Blue Tangerine

Kevin Weitzel: and I'm Kevin Weitzel with OutHouse. Thank you.