 I think people way overestimate negative impacts of bad content. Welcome to the Smarter Building Materials Marketing Podcast, helping you find better ways to grow leads, sales, and outperform your competition. All right, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Smarter Building Materials Marketing. I'm your host, Beth Popmukolov. And in the house with us today, we have brought on Adam Steiner. He sits in a very interesting seat when it comes to the relationship of builders and homeowners and how their homes are built. I will let him explain it because he'll be able to do it better than I can. Adam, thanks so much for coming on the show. Thanks so much for having me. Happy to be here. Can you tell us a little who you are and how you have arrived to what you're doing now and really what that is? Yes. So I'm Adam Steiner. I'm a home designer primarily. I worked for home builders for roughly a decade and a half and then started my own design firm here in 2020. Feels like I just started, but it's a while back already. And working for those home builders, I was in an interesting seat where I was managing the office at one stop and in charge of what went into our selection center and help oversaw that, as well as I was the person that a lot of clients talked to. Like if something went wrong, if they weren't happy, if things kind of hit the fan, I worked for a family company. So when your last name matches the name of the company, you get those calls. Oh, yeah. And they're like, this guy has the power to make it happen. Yeah. So that kind of happened. And through that, I learned a lot about just how clients are feeling and what they're thinking and what does and doesn't work. And so when I started my firm, I started a podcast called Builder versus Buyer and the goal of this podcast was really to mediate the line between builders and buyers because I saw like just a growing divide where most of the buyers I knew were fair people that wanted a nice house and most of the builders I knew were great people that wanted to build a nice house, but it just felt like there was more and more animosity. Like I even did sales for a little while and I, um, sorry to auto mechanics, but I would call it auto mechanic syndrome where people walk in the door and they're like upset and angry with you and felt like they're, they're going to get screwed even before you talked. Yes. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I know exactly what you're talking about. Mm hmm. Yes. Yeah. So it was, it was really interesting to see that perspective and I really wanted to do a lot to bring the sides together as much as I could, right? Um, and really help explain, especially to clients, why a builder is thinking that, why they're saying that they may not be great at communication, but if I can help communicate for them, why, why you can't supply your own light fixtures to your home and why that's annoying for certain builders and stuff like that. I think there's just a lot of little stuff that falls through the cracks. Okay. So this is so interesting because you said something that from, from our perspective and how, you know, we really try to connect. So you're talking about what's the tension and we're talking about like, how do you bring them together at Venvio? That's our job, right? If you're a builder or a manufacturer and you want to target another audience, like our job is to bring those together. One of the things that we talk about a lot is something you're saying, which is homeowners, there is something intrinsic in them that when it gets to the labor portion of their building materials experience, they're like pre-programmed to expect to be taken advantage of. I would love for you to just tell everyone a little bit more about how right I am about that theory. I'm just kidding, but I, I've struggled to get data on it because it's a hard thing to get people to say out loud or to quantify, but we see it time and time again when homeowners are talking to manufacturers and then they're like, okay, but how much is the labor? Cause somewhere in them they're like, cause is it $700,000 labor? You know, for my sync, like, I think it's just this other world that they live in and they don't know how to get information about. The root of it is people don't know much about home building, right? Yeah. Um, yeah, I think people think they do. And if you install the sync in your kitchen one time on a remodel, you think you do. And I've designed homes for almost 20 years here and I wouldn't feel comfortable managing a house. Like it scares me. It should scare you, you know? Oh yeah. So I think the root of it is nobody knows what's going on. So when you don't know what's going on, it's really easy to freak out and, and people get a lot of weird and bad information. There's two sides to it, right? Where they talk to a handyman and handyman is like, oh, it should be, you know, 3,500 to put new siding on your house. And then, and then they talk to their builder and they're like, that's 30 grand. And then when you hear something like that, you automatically get tense and frustrated and then there's just mistrust through the whole build. Yeah, I think that's such an important thing to have in the forefront of our mind is when your audience comes to the table, just with this predisposition of distrust, which isn't the case in a lot of industries, right? But when you come to the table with the expectation of being taken advantage of, it tends to lead to the wrong conversations. We're getting hung up on the wrong details. And I think that also is like self perpetuating where we get so obsessed about not getting caught off guard by point A that we hyper focus on it. But then, you know, points B through D get completely looked over. And that's the places where the things fall through cracks. So tell me, Adam, how are you bringing together or what are you looking to find to help close the gap? You said you're seeing that ever widen. Is there anything that you see in your purview that would bring that gap between builder and buyer closer together? And one of the builders I was at made every sales agent call every single client every week. And it was, this was one of the builders I worked sales for. And I was like, it's annoying as a sales agent. Like, I don't want to be spending my time doing that, but it's just there's no time to fester and there's no time to freak out. So to be on top of that, I think is really, really key. And if I can stretch that out to like material providers, a lot of times the builders can't answer is because they're waiting on an answer from somebody, their plumber or plumbing supplier or whatever. So much of a builder's decision is based on just being their person and being able to get back to them. Like if you can be the provider that is awesome at communicating with your builder, you'll probably just win jobs, even if your price tire, even if your selections are worse, because that's builders. That's how they make their decisions. They don't have time to make them really any other way. First of all, I think you hit the nail on the head is the manufacturer and the supplier is often the first link in the chain. And, you know, I can hear tons of them being like, no, we over communicate. That's absolutely valid. Lots of manufacturers are really good at that. Those were the hard lessons learned in 2020 when you were starting your business, right? It was, you got to pick up the phone and you got to give the bad news because we're letting people fester. I love that the no time to fester. From your perspective, how are homeowners perceiving the relationship or the materials that they're getting from all the way to the manufacturer? Do they have significant influence? Is it really whatever the builder is bringing to them? And they, you know, they don't know if it was a coal or faucet or a fester faucet. Where are you seeing their understanding and awareness of manufacturers? That's, that's a great question. So there are really three types of builders and people don't usually know when they're buying a home, what type they're with. So it's custom, semi-custom and production, right? And so the answer is different. I don't think there's a great awareness on it. I think if you're spending more than a million dollars, you know, you're getting a custom home, but not a hundred percent. Yeah, I would say, yeah, if you're getting a custom home, you know, you're getting a custom home. Yeah. If you're, but if you're not. Every builder says custom. No builder is like, yep, we're production, you know? That's right. Yeah. And no builder says we're a tract home builder. Like that isn't in their marketing and even semi-custom, they don't say it much. So how I define it is if you're in a custom home, you should be able to dictate just about anything you put in that home. That's the custom process. So if you want to pick cabinets from Italy and get them shipped like your custom builder should be able to say yes to that. And if they're saying no, you're probably not buying from a custom builder. And so you're probably falling into a semi-custom builder where they have preset selections, but then a bunch of options and upgrades and things you can go with. And the scope is pretty wide, but you're not, you're not custom designing floor plans, you know, you're not tweaking everything. You're tweaking a lot of things, but not all the things. And then if you're building with a production builder, your answers are almost always no, right? They have preset selections. They're going to dictate your faucets. They might have three faucets you can choose from or even 10 faucets you can choose from, but they have a material contract with their faucet provider that's year to year and they're not going outside of that for you. You know, it's too expensive. It's too costly. There's just too many question marks for them to say yes to you, one homeowner when they're building 50 others with these exact faucets. Well, if communication is key, I have an idea about where we could start. Yeah, right. You need to know the kind of builder that you're getting into. Okay, let's talk about when those frustrations happen. Who is the homeowner frustrated at? Do you think is it the builder? I think it's primarily the builder. Okay. And this is why the communication from material providers are so important too, because the builder takes all the crap. So if architects expect something on the house that the builder can't get for a 20 week lead time, the builder is still the one taking the call. Or if the builder can't hear back from the material provider for that 20 weeks, the builder's still the one taking the call from the client. The material provider is not getting the call from the client. A good builder wouldn't throw their material provider under the bus. But even if they did, the client is still a little wary of that. You know, maybe the builder's just screwing me and that's something up. Yeah, I mean, I think that's what we often hear from builders. I think it depends on if it's the custom home, it's a custom home. And this is my dream faucet. It's really hard to feel like you can't just make it happen when you tell me that it's a 20 week lead time. But I agree. I think they're exactly right. If it's okay with you, I want to switch gears a little bit. And I want to get your predictions on where we're going from a home building and construction standpoint. First of all, there's a lot of talk about home starts, demand, all of the things. There was a huge, there was a huge surge in material costs that hasn't really gone down, right? And then if you couple that onto it, everything that's changed in our world and how consumers like are just constantly changing, Gen Z is about to become a major player in the home buying market. What are your predictions for how home design and home building will either change or stay the same over the next five years? I think in the immediate, and we saw this start last fall, summer, the lower end of that production builder, the under 700,000 house really got squeezed because those people are typically relying more on bank financing and so 2% matters a lot in their monthly payment and their purchasing power, whereas a lot of clients that I deal with that have more than a million to spend, like as crass as this sounds, if they have 1.2, they can spend 1.4, you know? Yeah, no, that's real. Absolutely. And so that fluctuation didn't affect that group as much. I've seen in my design for more of a shift to the higher end, the custom stuff than the production. I think builders are always going to be creative about what they can provide. We're seeing, like, smaller homes and floor plans and stuff come up. But overall, I'm hoping it's not too bad. I mean, this is my life. So, but yeah, as we pivot to the higher end, and as long as American population is going up, there's going to need to be more homes, you know? So I don't foresee that stopping anytime soon. So yeah, there will be, I think, continual growth there. I think if we lined up houses from like the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, the early 2000s, 2015, when Ship Lap was king, and like maybe right now, we could pick out what those decades are, right? You know, if it has a 75 foot long marble island in the kitchen is probably like a 2018 kitchen, do you know what I'm saying? What, what are your predictions from like the materials or the designs that will be in high demand in the coming years? Yeah, I, I think, I mean, obviously, we're going back to like some more brass and things. Um, I feel like brass is always coming back. Can I be honest? Like the amount of articles I've read for the past 15 years is like brass is happening again. I'm like, when did it stop happening? Yeah. It's always like a new shade of brass or like a new kind of brass. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, totally. Okay, brass is happening. What else? Um, yeah, good question. I, I think we'll still see a lot of prefabricated stone, like the quartz and stuff. I'm even getting some requests for clients to do like solid slabs in their shower, so they're not dealing with grout joints on the walls and replacing tile. I still think we're going to see a lot of glass, you know, in the, in the showers and stuff actually take that back. I think more and more people are getting tired of. Cleaning their glass and wanting to shift away from that. I know, but it looks so nice. It does. We're going to go back to curtains. What's the alternative curtains, glass or? It's more of a walk-in. Like. It's just a walk-in. It's like no, it's a no door. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm seeing a lot of that. Um, yeah, I, this is my personal opinion. I would hope there's just more of a lean toward craftsmanship. Like when we talk, talk about styles and trends and things, if it's designed well and made well, it doesn't feel trendy, but so much of the reason why, um, you know, ship lap feels like such a trend or the barnwood thing felt like such a trend is because people were just throwing it up everywhere and not really slapping it on. Yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah. Not really paying attention to the scope and design of it. And so I think that will happen with everything. But if you pay attention to what you're doing in your build, I think it's going to age much, much better. Yeah. Giant kitchen islands, stay or go. I think they're still staying. I'm not seeing any, I'm not seeing any decrease in island size. I know. I, I honestly look every year after it was on trend for like two or three years, I'm like, that thing's got to get out of here pretty soon. And I've been looking and I'm like, Oh no. I have seen a lot of people start to talk about, um, no top cabinets that they're like, yeah, that's got to go. Yes. Cause we're, unless you have an enormous kitchen, you're like, here's your four cabinets. Enjoy. Yeah. It looks really great on Instagram. I mean, that's just silly. Yeah. Less and less uppers. I could see some people experimenting with like thinner countertops going with like a little more European style. Oh yeah. Actually, I bet, I bet you're right about that. Cause yeah, the American trend for so long was just like, don't do the thin ones because they look cheap. Um, but again, I think if it's a nice material and it's thin and designed well with like that line and intention in mind, that's a win over just getting the thickest countertop because that's what you could afford. Yeah. So if you were a building materials manufacturer thinking about what's coming and what a home designer needs or a home builder needs to be successful, what would your advice be? Yeah. So I'm going to go out and say this, I'm probably wrong in this, so just, just, but this is how it feels from the outside, we love when our guests build up the confidence of our listeners. We really appreciate that. You can leave this part in. This is how it feels from the outside looking in because I've never worked for material provider, but it feels like material providers focus so hard on what the finishes and fixtures and materials look like, and they should, that's important. And like I was saying, the, the provider side, the actual human you have talking to the builder on a daily basis, that seems like less of a focus. And I know material providers know this and care about this, but here's, here's my background in it. And this was so, so annoying. When I was managing the selections for our showroom because I'm more of a creative type. And so I would see something in a magazine be like, this is awesome. These faucets are so cool. And our purchasing manager would be like, yeah, lead time, who's, who's providing it? What's it cost? Like didn't care, wasn't affected at all. And it's, I'm like, well, okay, I'll find out. And then come to find out, like usually price wouldn't be bad, but the person we got it through was like two steps away from actually the one that would be providing it on site, or you had to like mail order them and Amazon would drive them off. And he's like, this is impossible for us to work because our normal provider, you know, delivers to our site and checks that it's there. If Amazon drops it off, we don't have an address yet that Amazon delivers to do. We have to deliver it to the store. Do we have to pay one of our guys to ship it over? What happens if something is wrong with that? And so it was so annoying for me to be like, this stuff is cool. This is what people want. And our purchasing manager was basically like, yeah, it doesn't matter because it's so much worse for our bottom line. Like, do we really want to delay clients homes by two weeks to figure all this stuff out? Like, no, they don't want that. We don't want that. We're losing money in these things. And again, this was when my last name was on the company. You know, so like, I think every, I think every builder has this argument every day between their selection coordinators and their purchasing manager. And yes, you have to win at what clients want and what looks pretty, but you also have to win at our lead times are awesome. The person that will pick up the phone a hundred percent of the time when the builder calls and the stuff will be right when it shows up on site. Yeah, do that stuff and you'll get deals. So as a selection manager, were you being pitched by a building materials company and then figuring out they couldn't fulfill it? Were you researching and then figuring out, oh, wait, that's drop ship. Where did that start a little bit of both? Yeah. The biggest one I can remember is like Pottery Barn Lights. It was the age like 2010s, right? So everybody wanted Pottery Barn Lights. Remember Pottery Barn Hay Day? Totally, totally, totally, totally. That's all people wanted. I had multiple arguments over years with multiple builders about whether or not we would provide Pottery Barn Lights because again, you had to order them online. It was, you know, jump through all the hoops, but they were the best and that's what everybody wanted. And I know for a fact they would have just sold more if they if they had an agreement with like a local lighting supplier that walked the clients through. And I know that these decisions are bigger than my head, but they lost sales because they couldn't match because they didn't have a Pottery Barn Light. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's actually very interesting. And there were times when we told clients like, we'll just put a flush mount up, buy it after, you know, and I bet a few percentage of them actually did. Yeah. But it was just so frustrating on our end, the sourcing of it. Like have money will buy and they're like, no, we can't make it happen. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That's really interesting. I think you're bringing up a really good point though also because purchase managers can get a bad wrap where it's just all about the bottom line. And first of all, that's part of their job, right? Their job is to keep their company in the black hit the profitability margins. Those are just the facts of life. However, what you're saying is it's not the only factor, right? It's the whole package of how that not only impacts us as an organization, but how it impacts our homeowner because from a purchasing manager standpoint, a two week delay for one homeowner is maybe the difference between selling an additional house or not because they're going to complain to one person and that one person is going to be like, no, I'm not going to do it. Don't go with that guy. These other guys, they've never had a delay. You know, I mean, it sometimes is that tight of a margin. I think that's a good perspective. I like have a personal love for purchasers because they're like the opposite of marketers and I tell this story all the time. But I have a dear friend who's a purchasing agent at a like production home level home builder and walking the floor with him at trade shows is like walking through a concert with Mick Jagger. Like you get the red carpet rolled out. They bring them back into the special room. Whereas like a marketer, I'm just in there to talk to them for as long as I possibly can before they figure out that I work at an agency. And he gets all the good info, right? Like he knows all the real information and it's so interesting. It's not diametrically opposed, but it can't be a forgotten element of the whole purchasing process that you've got the selector being like this is going to go gangbusters. People are going to friggin love this and you've got the purchasing manager being like, hang on, hang on, hang on. Yeah, maybe, right? Like 100% that was my life. That's that's so, that's so, so interesting. Adam, this has been great. Thank you so much. If any of our listeners want to get in touch with you, what would be a good way for them to reach out? Yeah, I think through Instagram or follow me on TikTok. I'm at Burnham Design Co on both those or listen to the podcast builder versus buyer on wherever you get podcasts. All right, Adam, before I let you go, you may be the first person to ever mention on our podcast to come follow somebody at TikTok. We hit, we get Instagram, we've gotten a lot of LinkedIn. Other than Dennis, who you and I both love, I don't think anybody specifically said like, come follow me on TikTok. Number one, if anybody of our listeners go follow Adam on TikTok, I need you to send him a DM because I would like the credit for that happening. Adam, tell me about what you're doing on TikTok and the results that you're seeing. Yeah, so TikTok has been awesome. It's changed my design business. I'm a big Gary Vee fan and he was like, hey, get on TikTok. Like, okay, I'll just do it. And I started with the most basic, boring content, like time lapses of me doing AutoCAD and literally picking up my phone and recording my computer screen and being like, this is why I draw a powder room this dimension. And people started watching like, oh crap, like this is a thing. And it just kind of snowballed. And I've found a decent amount of success there. Just I'm getting leads and it's working for me in the background, too, which is kind of awesome. When you say leads, what do you mean you're getting leads through TikTok? So design clients, people that want a custom floor plan or have an addition or shut up. It's the weirdest thing, too. Cause like, hi, I found you on TikTok. I have this addition. No, it's not weird. It's been happening on Instagram forever. We talked to a marketing manager for a home builder somewhere in the Northern States and she said every contractor she has gets almost a hundred percent of their work through Instagram DMs. But you're right. It is a little weird. Like, hey, I found you on TikTok. Do you want to build a house for me? Yeah, it's, it's crazy. Cause I've been thinking about this a lot ever since you guys asked me to be on. It's like, how would I translate that to somebody who's providing building materials? And I think where I'll see a lot of building materials go wrong and I'm not talking to the, the collars and whoever, like you figured it out and you have thousands of colors on Instagram and all that, but like the smaller providers, I think what happens is they're big enough to have a marketing director, right? But the marketing director doesn't know anything about the product. They're, they're there because they're a marketing expert, not a product expert, right? So they throw up a couple of videos on like how the product looks and that stuff should be there. But then they kind of lose interest because none of those videos get traction and things. And I think what they need to do is really have the marketing director give them the authority to just like, Hey, you have the authority to walk around and follow anybody at the company and ask them what they're doing, just have your camera out. Use those videos to help explain your product and your process. Like, I know you're a marketing director and you're like, I need a call to action in this video. You don't, you don't, people will find out you don't need it. Just help people make a better decision. And if you are a vinyl supplier, let's say, you're like, what thickness is our vinyl? Does it matter? Does anyone care? Go to the factory and be like, Hey, are we doing testing? Like, why do we do this, the vinyl this thick? And they'll say, Oh, well, if you do it any thinner, it'll start to warble when the sun hits this many degrees. Like you can make a video out of that. That like that kind of stuff people care about and want to know. And so I think you just need to get in front of it and get the right, the right content out there. But just try because there's so, so much opportunity there. And you're just leaving a lot on the table. If you don't. I couldn't agree more. I think what is so ironic and frustrating about who's the most successful on social media right now is and if you think specifically B2B world is it is the opposite of what has been ingrained in anybody who has a marketing degree, especially if you got a marketing degree 10, 15 years ago. I mean, and then you got put right into a corporate job and you landed this really sweet gig. It feels like painful because you feel like you're doing the exact opposite of what you were always afraid people would think your content looks like because it shouldn't feel like marketing. If it feels like what you're putting out on social is collateral, people are going to move right on by it because the consumer is smart and no one wants to be sold to and even more so in the construction industry, right? Like this is a grungy industry and that and we love it for it. But like everywhere has dirt until the like the sighting goes on and somebody power washes it and the homeowners move in. I mean, but we don't show it that way. I actually was just in a customer interview recently talking about construction and they were like, I'm just I'm tired of manufacturers showing me their product on a project on a beautiful sunny day where everything is pristine. They're like, I don't I can't learn from that. And it's the same for our social media. You said something really interesting that I would add on to Adam, you were like, if you want to be successful on TikTok, just get permission to walk around and film literally anything. The thing I would add on to is like, OK, let's just say your organization doesn't believe in TikTok, that's a pretty safe guess in most instances. This is not the place where you're going to go all in. So just tell it like if you could just advocate for I'm going to get a handle and I'm going to spend an hour a week figuring out what kind of content to put on there, because it's 30 seconds that you're going to want your videos to be. So like you could do a ton of 30 second videos in an hour and just be like, don't look just don't look for three months. Yeah, I love it. And what like what would you do if no one was watching, because then if you do great, it's going to be awesome. And if you don't do great, that's fine. Like no one was there anyway. And it's not your mainstream. Like we're not saying move all of your content there. But to fight a thing that is happening, we're just missing an opportunity. Totally. And something you hit on there. I think people way overestimate negative impacts of bad content. I don't mean bad content as far as like you're saying something wrong. But like the stuff where it's like, oh, the video is in the air or the guy I talked to on site. It doesn't pop off camera. He's just kind of saying stuff. Yeah, like it's marketers doing that. And we're really sorry. Like it's it's the marketers who have talked to you down. You all need to stop. I think that's I know we do. Someone needs to tell me to calm down. I think that's a really good point, Adam. Just the algorithm does all that for you. If if it's bad, nobody will watch it and it doesn't matter at all. And it won't affect you. And no one will see it. It's so magical. Because if it does really good, the opposite happens exactly. I've left almost I've left pretty much all my videos up and go to my TikTok channel. There's a bunch of bad ones on there. They all have the lowest views and I'm it doesn't matter. It's not affecting me. Yeah, the more I've dug into it and when I talk to influencers, you can tell me what you think about this, Adam. What I constantly hear is like the more that I work on a video and the more sure that I am that it's just going to crush it, the worse that it does. It's the ones where I have a thought and I either pull my camera out and record a quick thought or I'm like, you said I'm doing a quick sketch and I'm like, you know, I'm just going to explain like why I design my things this way because I know most people don't and I just explain it. Like it's the more spontaneous on the spot because you're responding to something that, you know, has actual demand or could be interesting or has an actual point of view. Those are the ones that do the best. It's the more that we try to make it like like we have thought it all through and we know exactly what we're doing. Because a lot of what we do is also it's iteration, right? And it's brainstorming and it's comparison and it's thinking through how thick does my vinyl need to be for me to get the results that I want without it impacting the margins that I have? Like those are questions that our industry solves a thousand times a day. Creating content around that is what can get you traction way more than features and benefits. Who's your favorite TikTok that's at least industry adjacent? Dennis stuff is awesome. Yeah, that's cheating. Dennis is the best. What else you got? T-stud does a good job. What's T-stud? Pretty cool. It's a stud that has like a built-in thermal break in it. So this is really building science. That's cool. But yeah, that's probably where it's start. There's this TikTok that I love or these TikTok channel that I love. I think they're just called B2B Pros. It's just literally installers doing the most basic stuff. Like the one that I always show is it's a mason. Scooping masonry, tamping it down with a trowel. That's the post. It has like 70 bajillion trillion views because it's just so interesting. The paint, I love to follow painters. It's like that oddly satisfying where you like you watch them tape it out and then you watch them spread in. We have like a running conversation in our office about there's tons of building inspectors that have a following on TikTok that just share content and talk about like how they go through houses or buildings and what they're looking for and common issues. It's it's fascinating. It totally starts to fall into like building science and nerdiness. And I'm always I'm always here for it. That is some pretty basic normal content that we're talking about. Yeah. Time-watching is fishing a barrel. You know, yeah, you time-lapse something. I'm going to watch it. But it's also like it's just the the bar has come so low because people are so interested in different things that we're I think just I couldn't say it enough. What you said is we're overthinking it and overthinking even the impact of negative. I think that is that's spot on. Just do it. Do it afraid, Adam. Thank you, man. This was awesome. This was really, really valuable. We really appreciate it for our listeners. If you want more great content like this, head to venvio.com slash podcast until next time. I'm your host, Beth Popmukulov. Have a great one, everybody.