If you are a founder, principal, or strategic home building executive and your firm built and settled on more than 165 homes during calendar year 2019, do two things. Now.
Don’t put them off.
One, is take the Builder 100 survey by clicking here. It’s an opportunity to count yourself–and your team–among the nation’s leading home building enterprises.
The other is register, today, for our newly relaunched Builder 100 Summit [click here], where you can spend time with other people who, just like you, are trying to take the right steps to make their leading home building enterprises fit for the 2020s.
Builder 100, you see, is not just about being big and growing bigger. It’s about being good, and improving. Builder 100 unit volumes are just a number–usually one that tracks upward for several years, and then plummets when downturns hit.
But we’re making Builder 100 more than rankings, more than a number. We’re putting the full commitment of our data, advisory, and editorial analysis behind this initiative, not simply to count and rank companies but to help them make themselves better, more resilient, more valuable companies in the months and years ahead. Home building, at its essence, is a value stream, a lifecycle of players, resources, materials, land, money, time, discipline, expertise, and focus.
To an unprecedented extent, the separateness of those resources, those pieces and parts, and discrete, siloed subcomponents, is disappeariing, blurring. The lifecycle–when you stand back a few steps, begins to render clearer as a system, fused, collaboratively inter-operating.
It’s a truism. Home builders live in the past.
But as is the case with partially factual and obvious statements, this one is unhelpful. It doesn’t motivate habit or behavior change, nor even a will to explore a potentially fruitful path forward.
But think about it. In whose interest is it for leaders of home building companies to view themselves as stuck in the past? In whose interest might it be advantageous for the talented, driven, committed people in home building to regard themselves as having dug in their heels, rejecting progress in favor of outmoded processes? In whose interest might it be that builders undervalue themselves by buying a view that they can’t escape their old-school ways?
Capital sources? Politicians? Big-time management consultants?
I don’t think–by and large–that builders have a living-in-the-past problem. I will tell you why I believe that in a moment.
I do think builders have another problem relative to time. It’s one they each have the power and the means and the talent and the grit to change. Today, if they want to.
The problem is always, a perpetual and inescapable merry-go-round that dizzies and lulls people into capitulation. Surrender to a force of inertia. Always is a far more powerful, paralyzing, and potentially fatal problem than preoccupation with what’s worked in the past. Always is our default; it’s how we ignore what’s here, now, ripe for exploration, ready to yield to our faintest show of interest.
Why do we choose always over the present moment for clues about what’s next? Because of the cyclical nature of the beast.
If executive strategists model their businesses on always, they miss the signals of the present. They can neither stand on the shoulders of giants in the past, nor stand, humbled, curious, and open to learning and discovering what the future may ask of us now. They’re stuck, forever, in expectations, self-fulfilling prophecies, and assumptions that when history repeats, it looks and works precisely as it did the time before and the time before that. Maybe, rather, it rhymes rather than repeats. Maybe history harvests not just what has happened but what will happen before it gels in our minds.
This is by way of saying to you, Builder 100’s mission and purpose is to serve as a tool for you to make better companies, not bigger ones. Companies with people who recognize that now matters as much as what has caused success in the past and promise for the future. Companies with people aided by data, by technology, to accomplish that which may have been unimaginable yesterday. People whose goodness, discipline, and personal investment devote themselves to these places of mystery, of belonging, of sanctuary, of comfort, of well-being, we call home.
The enemy is not the past. The past is a grace, a knowledge base, a gift that keeps giving. The enemy is always, which is an attitude. Always is a vicious circle, a self-perpetuating, self-fulfilling, paralyzing prospect. Always is defeatist, and it means that you don’t believe your firm, your team, your business can’t improve now, today, so that it’s there tomorrow, for another day’s challenges.
So, do two things.
- Take our Builder 100 survey. Complete it; hit send.
- Register today for the Builder 100 Summit.
Join us on the journey of constant improvement. It’s the one way to free yourself of always.
