176 The One-House Rule of Marketing Investment - Don Dykstra and Cassius Adkison Aug 2 2023

Episode #176: Don Dykstra and Cassius Adkison

Greg Bray: [00:00:00] Hello everyone 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 Zonda Livabl.

Greg Bray: And we are excited today to welcome to the show, two guests. We've got Don Dykstra, the founder, and chairman of Bloomfield Homes, and also with us is Cassius Adkison, the marketing associate at Bloomfield Homes. Welcome, guys. Thanks for being with us. Well, let's start off by getting to know you guys a little bit. We'll start with Don. Give us that quick intro and, and background a little bit about yourself.

Don Dykstra: Well, 40 years in home [00:01:00] building, 17 years with one of the brand X national builders, and 19 years with Bloomfield Homes, which was our garage startup 19 years ago. And we're now running about 2000 houses a year in Dallas Fort Worth.

Greg Bray: Awesome. Cassius, how about you?

Cassius Adkison: Well, I've come from a marketing background, 13 years in digital marketing. Fairly new to the home building industry. Bloomfield is the first home builder I've worked for. I started back in 2020. Really just now we're learning the ropes and getting my knowledge of digital marketing paired with the home building industry.

Kevin Weitzel: That is way, way, way too much business for first thing in the morning. Don, let's start with you. Give me one fact about yourself that people will learn about on our podcast that has nothing to do with home building.

Don Dykstra: Well, in October, I'm taking a 16-day kayak and raft trip through the Grand Canyon.

Greg Bray: Ooh, fun.

Kevin Weitzel: What? So, in summertime, it's not super crazy rapids, [00:02:00] right?

Don Dykstra: They've had a lot of rain, so we'll see this year.

Greg Bray: Is this your first time or have you done it before?

Don Dykstra: I have hiked to the bottom twice and said I wasn't gonna do that again. So, I am excited about 200 miles on the river this time.

Kevin Weitzel: That's a lengthy trip. All right. And this is the kind of thing where you camp along the way and.

Don Dykstra: Camp along the way. No phones for two weeks, which is the longest I've gone without a phone since they were invented.

Kevin Weitzel: I don't think that's humanly possible. Are you sure you're being honest about this trip?

Don Dykstra: That's what they tell me.

Kevin Weitzel: Cassius how about you? Let's hear something personal about you that people will learn about on this podcast.

Cassius Adkison: Oh, that's a good one. Well, actually something that hardly no one knows, so when I was younger, I was very interested in playing the saxophone. As a child, I was pretty good. I made all-city band and eventually, I just moved on to other things. I've had a recent interest in picking the saxophone [00:03:00] back up, and actually, this past Christmas, my wife bought me a saxophone for Christmas. So, I am in the midst of taking sax lessons and hopefully can get as good as I used to be.

Kevin Weitzel: Alto, tenor, bari, what do you got?

Cassius Adkison: Alto.

Kevin Weitzel: Alto. So, besides Thelonius Monk, who's your favorite sax player?

Cassius Adkison: Oh, man. I would definitely say, Coltrane is on the top of my list.

Kevin Weitzel: All right. All right.

Greg Bray: Okay. Well, when you get that first club gig, you give us a call so we can come. All right?

Cassius Adkison: Oh, I definitely will.

Greg Bray: Well, Don, why don't you tell us a little bit more about Bloomfield Homes, what type of buyer you guys are targeting, and the area that you're building in?

Don Dykstra: We're also a developer as well as a home builder. Our niche is typically the nicest neighborhood in a perimeter community around Dallas Fort Worth. So, we have 50 active subdivisions with decorated [00:04:00] model homes. Our sale when we're doing this marketing is to actually get somebody to come out and visit our community and see us. So, that's kind of been the challenge with Cassius, and he's introduced a lot of new marketing ideas for us over the last few years.

Greg Bray: And you mentioned starting in the garage. What made you decide you wanted to start a building company back in the day?

Don Dykstra: Well, as with many companies, it starts with getting fired and you need work. So, three of us, you know, built our first houses, put our office in the garage, sold 'em ourselves, walked hundreds of customers through the houses, got their ideas on the floor plans, made a lot of tweaks and changes to 'em. America is awesome. I mean, we funded this company with a hundred thousand dollars. It's the only money that's ever gone in. We crossed a billion in sales last year, so we're a true, I guess American success story. A lot of us still remember back to what we call the [00:05:00] garage band era with fond memories.

Greg Bray: All right. And you probably had a saxophone in that band, I'm guessing. Well, well, Cassius, you mentioned that you're newer to the home building industry, coming from a marketing background. What brought you into home building?

Cassius Adkison: Well, I started in marketing about 13 years ago. And I started with my own company, a digital marketing agency, and I love marketing. Really after doing that for a number of years, I got married and decided to just calm things down a little bit and take a little bit more time for family and starting a family. So, I started looking for opportunities that would give me more personal time.

That led into working for a number of different companies, leading marketing and doing marketing initiatives for a bunch of different companies. Due to the pandemic, that led me to Bloomfield Homes. Through the interview process, got connected with Don and I instantly knew that we shared a very similar entrepreneurial mind. When [00:06:00] it came time to just choose a company to work for, Bloomfield, hands down was the company that I wanted to work for.

And ever since I've been here, just learning from Don, learning the business. We've gone to city council meetings and presented new communities to different cities and it has been a blast. I'm a person that loves to learn. I love to soak up knowledge. So, just to hop in a truck with Don and drive around and just to learn the business. With my experience and knowledge in marketing just to be able to marry a lot of different ideas and see how creative we can get with selling houses, it is been a lot of fun.

Kevin Weitzel: Well, lemme ask you this. You said that originally you wanted to find a job that had more flexibility so you'd have more personal time. In your particular scenario now, are you a remote worker or do you work hybrid? Are you in the office 24/7? What's your mix now?

Cassius Adkison: I would say mainly, we're in the office most of the time. I love working for Bloomfield because there [00:07:00] is flexibility. So, if I have a doctor's appointment for my child or my wife needs anything, I am able to commute to work from home to, you know, say, Hey, I need to take a half day and everything that we do in office is, you know, accessible remotely. So, if I need to, I can work remotely, which gives me so much flexibility. It's really provided a unique experience. I haven't had many opportunities where if I needed that flexibility, it was available.

Kevin Weitzel: In a follow-up, are you a one-man show, or how did you configure your team? Do you have a team?

Cassius Adkison: We have a marketing team, a small team. It's four of us currently, and we have interns, five, including our internet sales. So, we have an internet sales manager and a four-person marketing team. We all have different responsibilities. Mine, primarily, is our digital marketing and our advertising, both digital and print. So, that's pretty much my domain.

Greg Bray: So, [00:08:00] Don, from that top executive level when you're saying, Hey, I need a marketing team, how do you decide how much you wanna build in-house versus how much you wanna kind of go out to maybe agencies or partners and figure out how to do that? What's kind of the logic and thought process there?

Don Dykstra: We tend to be very spontaneous and entrepreneur, which I personally like being able to just walk over there and there's four people kind of in a group and we just kind of brainstorm. For instance, this billboard thing we did. We said, Hey, what if we could get 50 unused billboards all over town? We wanna communicate that we've got a bunch of inventory available that we can do interest rates in the fours, and they're good-looking houses.

So, with that challenge, Cassius just got a list of I think hundreds of billboards, screened through them, negotiated a rate, something like $300 a month. We designed the collateral. You go put it out there, and amazingly, if the [00:09:00] board doesn't get released for another year, you just have your message out there for a year for $300. And then we use the same messaging across our social media as well, so we're getting it consistently out there.

But we really wanna communicate, Hey, we've got 300 plus homes that are available, we can get you an interest rate in the fours, and here's a picture of a house. They're good-looking houses. And that's something that we went from an idea to billboards are out there within 30 days.

Greg Bray: You like having those folks right down the hall where you can throw these ideas at them and watch the magic happen?

Don Dykstra: You know, there's a positive energy from being together and doing it. And our marketing team tends to be younger. Cassius is actually probably, you know, the most experienced as far as years doing it. So, it tends to be people fresh outta school. They have good technology, they're creative. They don't know home building, so they're still discovering it and they're still kind of learning. I guess we're still all learning cuz it keeps evolving what people's buying process [00:10:00] is and relocation. And also supporting, you know, we've got 50 communities out there that are sort of on islands that we're trying to drive traffic to them and let them know we support them.

I'm really a believer in the positive energy that you get by being in close proximity with other people, so. Not to say people can't do it remote. And we do have one person in the marketing group that she moved outta state and she works primarily remote doing our like MLS listings and that type of stuff. But I'd be curious of Cassius' thoughts too on remote versus the energy of the office.

Cassius Adkison: I agree 100%. You can definitely tell a shift when you're working remotely and communicating primarily via Microsoft Teams or Zoom, rather than being in the office, being able to pop over to each other's desks, share ideas, collaborate on different marketing objectives.

We have a phenomenal [00:11:00] person that runs our social media, and with me being over our social media advertising, me and her work together all the time. Our internet sales manager, being able to pop in her office and discuss lead generation and how lead increases and just to be able to just pop in and have that discussion. I mean, it makes work a lot more fun, a lot easier.

Don Dykstra: Plus, as you could tell, we like each other.

Greg Bray: Yeah, I can definitely tell that.

Don Dykstra: Yeah. And we feed everybody on a regular basis.

Cassius Adkison: That's true.

Greg Bray: Food in the office. That's how you get 'em in there, right?

Cassius Adkison: Exactly.

Greg Bray: [00:12:00] Hey everybody, this is Greg from Blue Tangerine and I just wanted to take a quick break to make sure you know about the upcoming Home Builder Digital Marketing Summit that Blue Tangerine is hosting together with OutHouse, October 18th and 19th in Denver, Colorado.

This is gonna be an amazing event full of digital marketing insights, knowledge, best practices, and most importantly, some fun. So, be sure that you get registered today and come hang out with us, an amazing team of speakers and presenters that are gonna be together. Again, that's October 18th and 19th in Denver, and you can learn more and get registered at buildermarketingsummit.com. We'll see you there.

Well, Cassius, let's tap into that camaraderie that you guys have together, which is coming through loud and clear. With your experience with digital and Don is experienced in home building and has seen a lot of other ways to market over his career, what kind of conversations do you guys have where you try to bring something new that maybe you guys haven't done before? How does that go back and forth as you try to say, Hey Don, maybe we should try this instead? You know, billboards are great, and I'm not saying they're wrong, but you know, have you ever thought about this other thing that we could do? Tell us a little bit about how that goes.

Cassius Adkison: Well, it really is open communication and being able to partner newer [00:13:00] concepts with concepts that have been tried and true for years. Definitely coming from a primarily digital background, when Don approached me last year in regards to, Hey, we wanna focus on our Google Ads, we wanna focus on advertising in-house more. Rather than solely relying on third-party advertisers, we wanna really control our lead generation.

At the same time, seeing that foresight and saying, okay, we can build an internal lead generation system using online advertising, and we can tie that into our CRM. We can track conversions, we can really build something great and tie it into our social media, tie it into our website, our MLS listings, and we can also connect it with internet sales and really build something that can be the primary lead [00:14:00] generation tool for Bloomfield Homes.

Every month we have a marketing meeting where we all get together and discuss communities, and we discuss new marketing initiatives. And being able to get that feedback, it's great. Especially being around as long as I have and working with companies where you don't get that feedback and everyone doesn't have that open collaborative method of communicating is really refreshing. So, us being able to have that open door, that open area of communication is just great. It's been phenomenal with our digital marketing efforts.

Don Dykstra: You know, we look to him to make decisions on, how am I gonna spend that money? How am I gonna generate the most traffic? How can I track that traffic from maybe their cell phone all the way through them making a deposit through an ACH connection off our website where you can take the same device and track it all the way from they clicked on an ad to they gave us money on a contract. [00:15:00] So, we've really moved forward a lot.

We have something we call the one-house rule where you go try something and you figure it'll sell at least one house that'll generate say 50,000 of net income. So, if you throw 25, 50,000 at some idea that maybe you haven't ever done before, we use what we call the one-house rule and we'll go do those experiments and do those things that maybe no one has done before.

Greg Bray: All right, Don, I gotta jump on that because I think that's amazing, this one-house rule. Because I talk to so many builders who look at marketing as an expense and not an investment. What you're saying there is, gosh, we only have to get one more house and it pays for all of this. I just feel like that's a pretty enlightened view. Am I just the one that's seeing that, or, or have you found that some of your colleagues in the industry don't kind of see it that way?

Don Dykstra: They don't see it at all because everybody comes from different backgrounds, but a lot of people come out of a construction [00:16:00] background where it's all been about controlling costs and beating down costs. I come out of more of almost a land acquisition, capital investment background. Exactly like you said, marketing is an investment. We certainly expect to get a payback for our investment, but we look at it as an investment.

Greg Bray: I think I'm gonna go trademark the one-house rule I think that's awesome.

Don Dykstra: It's gonna be a chapter in the book I haven't written, but it goes all the way back, we used to do this back in the nineties. In 1995, we built our first website, which was one of the first builder websites ever built. It was pultytexas.com back in 95, and we built that website for $20,000 using the one-house rule, and we sold two houses off it the first weekend.

Greg Bray: Nice. Nice. That's amazing. Ninety-five is when I started building websites, but I wasn't in home building till 2000, but yeah. It is amazing that if you track it, you can see the impact and it does pay for itself if you're doing it [00:17:00] right. Now, yeah, sometimes you gotta experiment and you might not get the return every single time. But so many folks don't even track it to be able to tell. So, kudos to you guys for that. When you guys are trying to track this, what are some of the things that you look at on these campaigns, Cassius, that help you kind of measure the effectiveness of what you're trying to do?

Cassius Adkison: Well, currently, UTM codes have been great for us with tracking clicks and going all the way to our CRM, pulling reports specifically for UTM codes. And that's been working for us on the digital advertising side as well as organic SEO. Every community we have, we have a Google Business listing set up with them. We use UTM codes on our Google business, social media. We want to track pretty much everything.

Every interaction we have on our website, every signup, we wanna be able to say, okay, these customers, this traffic to this community, [00:18:00] came from our Google Ads or came from Facebook. So, we're starting to track organic Facebook, Facebook advertising through UTM codes and making sure obviously, that everything is set up with the changes with Google Analytics and all of the new updates. But it has been amazing. So, being able to track those leads and track conversions really put us in a place to see, okay. This is how much traffic, this is how many sales our investment is generating.

Greg Bray: I love what you're saying, how you're tracking the UTM codes all the way into the CRM because I think I see builders track them to the website and to like the lead form submission, but then they stop and then you're not able to say, this sale was connected back with this lead. And I think that's a huge opportunity that's missed by so many builders is being able to connect the final sale back to the actual [00:19:00] advertising efforts and and marketing efforts.

Cassius Adkison: It's really a two-part equation. Like you said, most builders and most marketers focus just on the first part. They focus on the traffic to the website. You may go to Google Analytics and get those reports on those UTM codes and be able to get that data, but to turn around and say, okay, we need to be able to track the website to our CRM and see exactly what's going on in each one of our communities, what's going on with each customer, and how many customers, how much interest, how many leads are we getting from these different digital marketing campaigns that we want?

Greg Bray: Well, guys, we appreciate your time. Just a couple more questions here. For those builders that you know, what type of things do you think they should consider about their digital marketing that maybe you've seen that they aren't paying attention to, beyond just kind of tracking the, the sales a little [00:20:00] better?

Don Dykstra: I think you need to understand what you're trying to sell. Are you trying to get someone to write a contract online to buy a house? In our industry still, we could sell a house to someone completely remote, and we've done it in some isolated instances. And I think everybody has, you know, stories about a sale they got to some military person stationed overseas or something, and that's great.

But we're selling 200 plus houses a month and the great majority of them are still, somebody's gonna come out, they wanna physically pick a lot. They want to physically walk through a floor plan, and kind of think about, is this room big enough or whatever else? And we do have the ability to do digital walkthroughs and all that, but I think most of the time what we're really selling is we're selling an appointment on-site or them just going there on their own.

Maybe the intermediate step is we run almost entirely off cell [00:21:00] phones. So, our community managers or salesperson, their cell phones are on our website. So, they can text them, they can use chat, they can email. But I think builders need to understand what they're really selling is getting somebody maybe to reach out to that salesperson. But ultimately, we need them to get in their car. We need them to visit that community. I think, 99% of the time, it's gonna take that visit to end up in a sale.

Greg Bray: So, if I understand correctly, then when you say, remember what you're selling, it's the fact that there's a process and steps along the way, and our goal isn't to sell the house today, the goal is to get the appointment today?

Don Dykstra: Exactly. That is a transition for what it had been in the past. I think a lot of people have a misconception that selling a new home is about sitting in your model and waiting for somebody to come in. Really, to a large extent, it's telephone sales or it's digital or online sales now, where you're trying to [00:22:00] convince somebody to come out and visit you.

Greg Bray: Awesome. Well, Cassius, what's something that you have found in your transition from digital marketing into home building that you think most building marketers may not have seen because they maybe haven't had the same journey that you've had?

Cassius Adkison: Well, it really piggybacks on what Don was just saying. Coming from an agency background, your priority is to prove. You want to prove your data, your analytics, you want to prove that your ads are working and that it is leading to sales. In the home building industry, as Don said, the goal a lot of times is to get that customer to a model. You find it more difficult to be able to track those when you're running a Google ad and someone is clicking on directions to a model home rather than filling out an online form and becoming a lead.

One of the first things I noticed with running our online advertising is that we were getting [00:23:00] far more clicks for directions and clicks to call our sales managers than we were getting online lead submissions. It really causes a shift in a marketing perspective to say, Hey, our focus is on appointments, is on getting people to our communities, to our salespeople. And even though you can't track those as well, the focus is that.

So, having people click on, you know, directions and going out and seeing that traffic generate more. Even though we can't track those all the way to the sale, we are looking at that as, okay. This is success for our digital marketing ads, our digital marketing initiatives. We are seeing an increase in traffic, in foot traffic, in appointments, and we can definitely contribute that to our online ads, [00:24:00] even though we can't narrow it down to the sale, as we could when they fill out a lead submission and it gets sent to our CRM.

That has been that shift in mindset. Instead of, Hey, let's run as many digital marketing initiatives that we can easily track to let's consider everything as a whole. And now my focus is store visits, is getting people to our communities, getting people to our model homes, and seeing that traffic increase rather than seeing our online lead forms being submitted more. It's really looking at the company as a whole rather than just our digital marketing initiatives.

Greg Bray: Don, one last, question for you. You mentioned earlier that Cassius is one of the, uh, how shall we say it? More mature, more experienced people on the team. You've got some younger folks there, right? How do you go about kind of balancing the [00:25:00] ideas that come from kind of the different generation, right? I don't wanna call it gap, but viewpoint that they might have, and sorting through the recommendations of what you're comfortable with moving forward versus things that you say, well, let's maybe go this way instead.

Don Dykstra: I think we've got some core stuff in our industry that we know we need to do. We know we need to be in MLS. We know we need to have quality write-ups in MLS that someone's gonna sort through and they're gonna pick those houses to go visit. We know we need, you know, decent model merchandising. But I'm also a big believer that you need to let people chase what they're passionate about.

And if they believe in social media posts, I don't, you know, go review what they're posting out there. You want 'em to put something out that they're passionate and feel good about. We let a bunch of different people post on our behalf. So, it gives you a pretty good variety of what's going on. Honestly, I'm always surprised by what's out there.

You know, it could be somebody's holiday recipe. It could be [00:26:00] some human interest story. It could be, you know, this wild turkey was pictured in one of our neighborhoods and the kids gave it a name and you know, they're putting this story out there on it. I think it makes our social media more interesting and, you know, I kinda let him run with.

Greg Bray: Well, 2000 homes a year, something's working.

Don Dykstra: You know, you do fall into that. You kinda say, okay, Cassius, you're spending X dollars per month. Our sales are still trending up, which is unusual for this time of year. So, something's working right. Collectively, you know, 60, 70% of the people still come with a realtor involved as well. So you could say, well, is the realtor generating the sale? Is, Cassius generating the sale? Is it our signage generating the sale? Is that our exceptional salespeople? I think it's a combination of all of them. A lot of times we do operate by gut more than, I don't know, pure qualitative finance.

Greg Bray: Well, we'll give Cassius all the credit while we're here today, but, but yeah, I, I [00:27:00] agree. It's the, it's the sum of all the exposure, right? It's the collection of all of it, for sure.

Well, gentlemen, thank you so much for being with us today. If somebody wants to connect with you guys and just have additional conversation, Cassius, what's the best way for them to get in touch with you?

Cassius Adkison: C A S S I U S @bloomfieldhomes.net.

Greg Bray: And Don, how about you?

Don Dykstra: I'm don@bloomfieldhomes.net. Reach out on LinkedIn. I'm fairly active there. Follow Bloomfield Homes and hey, we appreciate it. I've been doing this a long time. I do believe in paying it forward. So, if someone's got questions, ideas, you know, even on starting up a home building company or something, feel free to reach out. I'm always willing to help.

Kevin Weitzel: Speaking of paying it forward, I do have a fantastic idea of sinking a one, just one house into my MG Midget. I've got an old collector's car that could use a good solid 50 grand. So, let's do this, Don.

Greg Bray: Well, thank you everybody for listening today to The Home Builder Digital Marketing Podcast. I'm Greg Bray with Blue [00:28:00] Tangerine.

Kevin Weitzel: And I'm Kevin Weitzel with Zonda Livabl.