The latest news from GuildQuality.

Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, a physician and professor of medical sociology at Harvard Medical School, produced a study showing that obesity was contagious. If you gain weight, the people you spend time with are likely to gain some as well.

This was no surprise to me. After all, I definitely followed suit during my wife’s two pregnancies. But I read a suggestion today that it’s not just obesity that’s contagious, but other character traits as well.

It certainly makes sense to me that if you hang around with motivated people, you’ll become more motivated. If you hang around with smart people, you’ll become smarter. If you hang around with exceptional entrepreneurs, you too will take on some of the traits that make them exceptional.

This notion–called Social Contagion–shines a spotlight on the importance of your peers. Your 20 Club or your Remodelers Advantage Roundtable dramatically impacts how you grow your business. The great homebuilders in your community challenge the others to improve. The top performing salespeople help bring out the best in the rest of the team. The project managers who consistently deliver an exceptional customer experience make everyone else bring it up a notch or two.

Who are your peers? Who are your employees’ peers? Are they the kind of people from whom you wouldn’t mind catching a serious case of Proficiency or Genius or Kindness?

I bought an iPhone a couple weeks ago and officially made the switch away from the Treo. I have used a Treo since the Handspring days, and have gotten pretty much every updated version in its history, so this jump was a big deal for me. And with the iPhone’s service limited to AT&T, my switch also forced my departure from Verizon. My summary judgment:

If form factor, user interface, and the internet are important to you (as they are to me) the iPhone is definitely the right smart phone for you.

If your iPod is a big part of your life (I listen to podcasts and audiobooks all the time) then you’ll really appreciate the iPhone’s advancements.

But, if seamless integration with a Microsoft Exchange server and Outlook are important to you, stick with your Treo (equipped with Good) or Blackberry.

I expect Apple will roll out some software improvements to overcome those shortcomings (the rumor mill is forecasting some big upgrades in the near future), but at present, I am having to juggle a little bit to make my email and calendar work like I want them to.

So, with all that said, is the iPhone the right device for a homebuilder or remodeler? If need to access a fully functional internet browser or review documents from your handheld, then make the leap. Want to check out your latest customer satisfaction survey responses? GuildQuality works great on the iPhone’s browser. Do you use Salesforce.com or Netsuite? Both work just fine. Need to review a proposal, word doc, spreadsheet, or pretty much any kind of document? I haven’t come across any kind of document that doesn’t display just fine.

If you’ve got one yourself, please share your experience. If you have any questions about them, don’t hesitate to post them here.

If you live in Atlanta, chances are you’ve heard or read about plans for Trump’s latest endeavor; Trump Towers Atlanta (left). A joint venture between Trump Inc, Wood Partners LLC (a GuildQuality member) and Dezer Properties Inc, Trump Towers Atlanta is a $260 million, 48 story luxury condo/hotel project located in the Midtown Arts District at 15th and West Peachtree. The towers add to an increasingly impressive Atlanta Midtown skyline. Mark Randall, managing partner of Wood Partners, says this won’t be the last we’ll see from the Trump/Wood duo citing potential plans for additional towers in either Seattle or Los Angeles.

Breaking ground only a couple of city blocks away is One Museum Place (right); a John Wieland Homes & Neighborhoods (a GuildQuality member) and OvertonMurphy Interests LLC venture. Located at 1301 Peachtree Street, One Museum Place will sit in the heart of the Atlanta Midtown Arts District. This 23 story, “condominium only” tower will be the first of it’s type for John Wieland. At a whopping $365 million, he certainly isn’t easing in. The tower will feature 96 luxurious units; each starting at $2 million. He endeavors to make One Museum Place his “architectural statement in Atlanta”.

For world-class architect and designer of One Museum Place David Chipperfield, this project will also be a first. The London based architect has worked on similar residential projects both in Berlin and at home in London, but never in the US. Plans for the second floor of this Atlanta tower feature a 14,000 square foot exhibition space. After 10 years of operation under the Wieland Family Foundation, the space will be offered to the High Museum at a price tag of $1.

It’s wonderful watching our quality-minded members continually deliver service excellence, especially, here in Atlanta. We will watch, in anticipation, as these towers stretch into the Atlanta skyline.

In January, we wrote about Guildmember Oakwood Homes on ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. We’re excited to report that another Guildmember, Legend Homes, has been chosen by the Extreme Makeover team to help transform the lives of the Byers family in Corvallis, Oregon. Taping recently wrapped up on the story of the Byers family whose children were at great risk living in a potentially toxic home environment.

Eight-year-old Jenessa “Boey” Byers has a rare form of cancer and requires a sterile environment following chemotherapy treatments. The air-quality in the home is also important to her 12-year-old brother Joe, who suffers from asthma.

Award winning Legend Homes was chosen by ABC, from a pool of dozens, because of their track record as a green-certified builder for over three years.

Thanks to the help of “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,” Rob and Rachel Byers now have a beautiful, 4,000-square-foot home that is “beyond green certified,” said Mara Woloshin, a spokeswoman for Legend Homes, the Oregon-based homebuilding company that led the project.

Congratulations Legend Homes on this accomplishment. We are proud to have quality-minded builders, such as you, as part of our community.

The July issue of Professional Remodeler includes profiles for 20 of the largest remodelers in 20 top metro areas. I was pleased to see five of our members among the list:

• Case Design/Remodeling, Bethesda, MD
• Crawford Renovation, Houston, TX
• Gardner/Fox Associates, Bryn Mawr, PA
• Marrokal Construction Co, Lakeside, CA
• Normandy Builders, Hinsdale, IL

The article also included an expanded list of 100 leading remodelers. Among those 100 were around 20 Guildmembers. We’re honored that so many of the nation’s leading building professionals rely on GuildQuality for their customer satisfaction surveying.

In June, Remodeler Online published an article titled Remodeling: CSI exploring the hows and whys of project “autopsies”. Leah Thayer’s article talks about how to fix and, ultimately, avoid remodeling projects that suffer from budgeting and scheduling problems. She “autopsies” a project from soup to nuts, identifying “pulse points”; checkpoints in the project where diagnostics should be performed and issues aired out. Advanced Kitchens and Advanced Contractors, interviewed in this article, give GuildQuality the nod as their tool of choice to gather the feedback that they need for their autopsies. Gruesome indeed …

Last week, Remodeler Online again referenced GuildQuality in an article titled “Simple Bonus Systems“. In the article, Tim Faller explains how bonuses “can help field employees achieve quality and profits alike”. He says that evaluation of production teams in the field “requires a good feedback tool”.

Companies such as GuildQuality can help you establish criteria and conduct surveys. You might assign a simple monetary award to “grades” of a certain level — for instance, for every job that gets a top rating in 80% or more categories…

It’s great to hear about how our members are leveraging our tool and, as always, it’s great to hear people saying nice things about us.

You may have noticed some changes on our website. Getting the most attention this go-round was the Qlist. It was late last fall when we first introduced you to the Qlist. The initial release focused, primarily, on getting our members started on the creation of their Qlistings. As we watched member participation grow, discussions of interface redesign began to surface around the office with increased frequency.

Over the last few months, we’ve put a lot of thought and effort into this redesign. To dramatically improve our users’ experience, there were two very low hanging fruits for us to grab; the first being site navigation and the second; how to visually represent data richness. We realized that, in order for us to be successful, these two goals needed to be interdependent. We wanted to be able to reward our users! Once we decided on maps as the way to go for navigation, it became pretty obvious that color gradients (for states and regions) and sized data points (for regions) would be used to represent data richness.

Also related, but aside (from a design perspective), we needed to indicate, on the Qlists themselves, which Qlistings were more interesting to look at than others, so, we also added a column headed ‘Qlisting’. This field also contained sized data points (middle dots) which scaled in size based upon a little algorithm which determined the richness of the company’s Qlisting (Hint to Guildmembers: publish as much material as you can).

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