2002 Pacesetter Awards: Excellence in Customer Service

Michael Wood

Three years ago Mike Wood was one frustrated small-business owner. “I was building great houses, had a great reputation, but I just wasn’t making money,” says the president of Providence Homes. “I realized I hadn’t made progress in all the years I’d been building.”

He found a remedy for his situation in a book he read with his Builder 20 Club, The E-Myth Revisited, by Michael Gerber. The book’s theme is the problems that an entrepreneur faces when he can’t step back far enough from his business to see its flaws. It and its accompanying long-distance learning course, the E-Myth Mastery Program (which Wood is currently taking), recommend ways to make a company more self-sufficient and less dependent on its owner.

That’s exactly what Wood did. He wanted customer service to be consistently strong from project to project, so he hired a graphic design firm, 2C Design of Dallas, to create a brand identity for Providence. Along with a logo, Web site, stationery, and signage, 2C designed a series of five elegant, black-cloth-covered binders that guide each client through the design and building process. The binders blow everyday homeowner’s manuals out of the water with their polished presentation and attention to detail. Volume I, for example, which covers planning and design, includes a section with client-chosen photos of rooms in other Providence Homes projects. Next to the photo is a note specifying the elements of that room that the client liked.

The binders’ silver-paper-lined interior, embossed front logo, and organized appearance send a message to the customer that Providence is a first-class builder. And they give the owners the confidence that any information they’d ever want to know about their home is right at their fingertips.

Providence Homes, Fort Worth, Texas. Type of business: custom builder; Years in business: 20; Employees: 5; 2001 volume: $3.6 million; 2001 starts: 3