GuildQuality

Between developing I’On, a 244 acre community in Mount Pleasant, SC, and a handful of other great neighborhoods, my brother Vince has racked up a good bit of experience in communicating vision. It’s one thing to come up with a plan, and it’s quite another to rally people around it.

As my father, brother, and I approach the end of our official role as I’On’s real estate developer, we’ve been ruminating over what to do with the remaining five undeveloped acres in the neighborhood. In the video below, Vince does an excellent job reaffirming our vision for the neighborhood and presenting a plan for the final phase of I’On: a proposed Garden District.

The audience for this video is the people that live in I’On and surrounding Mt. Pleasant, but I think any developer (or business leader) can take some inspiration from the way he presents the creative process of real estate development as something that’s relevant, compelling, and thought-provoking to the people that should care about it.

Yesterday, we updated the notifications options in your account to enable admin users to opt-in to survey activity notifications, and specify how frequently they’d like them delivered (weekly, biweekly, or monthly).

The notification emails include handy links to the customer information for surveys we’ve sent since your last notification, as well as surveys scheduled to be sent in the near future. This notification is designed specifically for your administrative user(s) who is responsible for regularly sending GuildQuality your new customer information.

To set up your email notifications, visit Notifications in the Preferences section of your account.

Today is Carolina Day. 235 years ago, in one of the first major conflicts of the Revolution, the 2nd South Carolina Regiment defended the port city of Charleston from invasion by the most powerful military force in the world. In this American Thermopylae, 435 young and inexperienced men, low on gunpowder, battled the British navy from a fort in the dunes that they’d hastily constructed of palmetto logs.

And the stakes were high. The British had, by this point, blockaded the northern ports. If the South Carolinians lost, they’d not only lose their lives, but Charleston would fall and the Revolution would end before it had a chance to blossom.

They won, of course. But not without sacrifice.

On this day, as South Carolinians celebrate Carolina Day, I encourage you to reflect on your own victories in the face of insurmountable odds. At some point in your career, you’ve likely battled with limited gunpowder from behind your own palmetto ramparts, you’ve faced incredible stakes, you’ve persevered, and you’ve overcome.

It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future. – Yogi Berra

This report contains a summary of the feedback received from our members in the Q2 2011 Market Predictions Survey conducted during the week of June 15. This survey is a continuation of the survey we began in October 2008. In this and prior surveys, GuildQuality requested feedback from the owners and operators among our hundreds of home builders, remodelers, contractors, and real estate developers that use our service. In each of the surveys, more than 100 people provided feedback.

Guildmember Confidence Index

The Guildmember Confidence Index is a forward looking indicator that summarizes the predictions of the members who participated in our survey. A positive number suggests that more members predict improvement than decline. 100% would indicate all respondents forecasted improvement; -100% would indicate all forecasted decline. (more…)

Today I begin the task of signing all of the Guildmaster Certificates.

When it comes to the design and development of our public website, reporting application, and emails, I presently do the bulk of design and David (aka GuildQuality’s engineering department) builds everything. Occasionally, we engage designers to work on specific projects or offer fresh perspectives.

We work quickly and don’t spend a lot of time monkeying around with wireframes. We almost always favor reducing scope if we’re threatened with stretching beyond the time we allotted for a project. We like to launch quickly and iterate. This has been working well for us for a few years, but we believe we can make stronger strides with the addition of a talented designer/developer. David’s doing both application development and front-end development, and as a result, we’re not moving as fast as we could if we had a single person responsible for each.

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About six weeks ago, we quietly launched print-friendly versions of our Member Profile Pages. Since that launch, we’ve heard from a number of members about the things that they’d like to see that we hadn’t included. Thanks for that feedback! Updated print-versions are now live.

When you click the “Print” button in the upper right-hand corner of your profile page, we execute some fancy gymnastics maneuvers to generate a PDF that’s smarter than what you’d receive if you simply selected FILE → PRINT. Most significantly, the new PDF is paginated — so that every page has the appropriate header/footer and comments aren’t broken mid-paragraph. The bars that summarize your published  performance metrics only display on the first page, below which we show all your reviews and published comments. Of note, for formatting reasons, if you publish more than 10 metrics, the PDF only displays the first 10. If you like, you can rearrange the display order of your metrics in your account.

Nick Cogliani, owner of Newpro, recently sat down with Jim Cory for a Q&A. Read the whole interview in Replacement Contractor. Here are a couple excerpts:

Customer service, or customer care, is [the strongest part of our organization]. We’ve recently become disciples of the book Delivering Happiness. We’ve instilled in our culture the idea that customer service includes every department in our company. Customer service was something we always thought we did well, but we realized there was lots more you can do to improve the customers’ experience…

…More than ever customers want to be sure they’re receiving real value. To address that, we’ve focused on building and expanding our reputation through social media channels and online review sites to let customers speak for us. We’ve initiated a new position — our Newpro customer concierge — to make sure every comment, request, complaint, or whatever is addressed and the loop closed. We’re using our family more prominently in our marketing. And we’re relying more on feedback from third-party surveys via GuildQuality.

Thanks, Nick, for the mention! A few weeks ago, my father recommended Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness after seeing him speak. Your endorsement just bumped it up a notch on my reading list.

Remodelers Advantage has a Master Your Remodeling Workshop in Baltimore, June 21 – 22. I’ve heard great things about these workshops, so when I spotted this in the RA newsletter, I thought it was worth sharing:

If you find yourself up at night worrying about your business, it’s time to take action and create a solid plan for success. What are your issues? Generating leads? Selling business against low-priced competitors? Knowing how to adjust your business to avoid losing money? Being able to pay yourself enough to support your family? These are exactly the kinds of challenges we discuss at this lively, high energy workshop.

So take action today and join Remodelers Advantage and 50 of your peers for two days of strategizing, learning, sharing and networking with top industry consultants like Linda Case, Victoria Downing, Paul Winans, Judith Miller, Tim Faller and more. You’ll leave with a set of actions that will help you immediately increase control, efficiency, productivity and profits!

It’s coming up soon so register today! Click here to learn more.

If anyone would like to stop by and say hello, GuildQuality’s very first employee would be very pleased to see you.

P.S. Luna turned nine years old on Monday.

I don’t really have a clear idea of how we’ll handle this, but if any of our members want to pay in Bitcoin, we’ll figure it out. What am I talking about? Read more here from NPR.

We’re polishing off some new GuildQuality and Guildmaster logos and badges. The objective was to develop a family of logos that work well in a variety of settings at a variety of sizes. We have a little more work to do, but I thought I’d go ahead and share a preview:

Last week, I attended the Housing Leadership Summit in Chicago. While the summit’s focus is relevant to what we do here at GuildQuality, it’s especially relevant to my work as a real estate developer. The agenda was impressive, so I decided to go at the very last minute (literally the Friday before the Monday conference). Lodging at the conference hotel was sold out, so I booked a nearby room — in someone’s apartment — via AirBnB.

I’ve been following AirBnB for some time and I like what they’re doing, so the conference gave me an excuse to test them out first-hand. Overall, AirBnB provided an incredibly simple and affordable way to find a great place to stay.

If you follow the tech world, you’ve heard a lot about this startup and, given their press, you would likely think they are a shiny new venture-backed overnight success. But that’s only because, in the beginning, they were nothing. And after that, they were practically nothing — a couple guys struggling every day to build their business. And then one day last year, they woke up and realized they were a big deal and you started hearing about them.

This morning, someone sent me an interview with their Founder/CEO Brian Chesky, and I gave it a listen on my way into the office this morning. If you’ve got an extra twenty minutes, fire up the interview. One of the gems:

Today, looking back at those early days, Brian is pretty sure that lack of money has defined the company and its culture of frugality. That lack of money also made Chesky and his cohorts get used to rejection, which only helped steel their resolve…Being broke and being cheap brings incredible amount of focus. “When you don’t have money you cannot have five strategies and you have to pursue one strategy,” says Chesky. “You cannot build things people don’t really want.”

Exactly what they went on to do isn’t necessarily what you need to do (or have done over the course of your career), but their creativity, their scrappiness, and their moxie should be an inspiration to you, and you’ll likely see a little of yourself in the AirBnB history.