Transcript:

If you're going to switch account managers or builders or whatever on them, introduce them to the new person. That's just polite before they randomly meet them.

Hello, hello, hello. It is Saturday evening, December 8th, 2018. And first, I just want to give a quick shout out. Happy Birthday to Richard Matthews. There's an inside joke going on that he's got a fan club starting, so I definitely want to participate. He's also one of my favorite people.

Today I have a little bit of rant because I'm a little annoyed. So we're building a house, right. And I don't know if you've ever built a house but I grew up around construction so I'm pretty familiar with the process. So the build process takes a while, right? And that's okay. It should take a while. To take awhile to build anything worthwhile and that's, you know, I can give you all kinds of similarities and analogies between construction and online marketing or software development just because I've lived through both worlds a lot, but I got this email today from the woman that's helping us get the house built now.

Not our builder. So the way that it works is that, these are semi custom homes. It didn't like come from scratch and get an architect and custom design. There were plans, we picked some, we tweaked it a little bit. We had seven. We can make seven change requests. What's means, you know, I wanted, one of them was to add an extra cabinet. I wanted to a cabinet that was tall for my brooms because I didn't want my brooms in my pantry. Things like that. So we get seven of those requests. We used all seven. But we're building a really nice house and I'm super excited about it. I'm super excited about it. We were getting five bedrooms and I've already got three of them super filled up for next year. Which are three guest bedrooms.

So we're building the house. Now along the way, they did a couple things. So in this process, the first thing that you do is you have a pre-construction meeting and then with that you could sit down with your builder and the plans from all your change requests. So the drafting team built up the plans for your house on your lot and you get to sit down with the builder and walk through these. So we sat down with our builder, walked through them, went through all the stuff, made notes on them, and then these plans magically disappeared. And we switched builders. Okay. We weren't informed, we were switching builders. So there's mistake number one. So first of all, if you're going to make changes to your customers, let them know, okay? If the person working on their stuff, you've presented this person to them, like you have a team member and they're like, “You're going to be working with this account manager, right?”

Don't switch it on them and not tell them. Okay? Because then when we finally did get to meet our builder for the first time, which was the pre-drywall. So in building a house, you put up all the wood frame and then you do all the wiring and the electric and the plumbing and stuff so you can sort of see inside the walls at this phase before they put up the pretty stuff you see on the walls, right? And that stuff's called drywall. So you're going to pre-drywall meeting and then. So the pre-drywall meeting, hello, new person to work with. were like, “Okay. So you did in the cabinet I told you about.?” Well, the way our floor plan is designed, we have a nice kitchen and then we have, that's the kitchen, there's an eden area.

We pushed that eden area out two feet as well, so we can have a little bit more room because it goes right to our back deck. Like, there's a door that goes out to the back deck and it's actually a super beautiful space because there's woods out there. It's gorgeous. And we knew we needed a little bit more room because one of the things that we want to do in this new house is entertain a lot. So, we're really looking for a nice big table and so there's between the end of the cabinets and that wall that we pushed out two feet. So I remember I extended my cabinets and extended the wall. There's three windows. So in the pre-construction meeting where we locked to the plans, I made it clear that those three windows need to be centered. Did they get centered? No, because we switched people. So in the pre-drywall, he knows like “My windows aren't centered.” Okay.

And this is why I'm homeless because it took six weeks to fix that. Okay. They actually ended up adding a fourth window. They're still not perfectly centered, but I can live with that because there's not like this huge gaping wall space over there. And we get more light so I can handle that fix. Right. But it took six weeks for them to fix it. So they're behind on our house. Okay. Now here's my other rant. I'm just ranting about this. Basically if you create a problem, fix it as fast as you can. Do not wait six weeks. Right? Because now you've created a gap for me where I'm living with our friend. Thank God he's amazing and doesn't mind actually.

He seems to like having us here, which is good. But so if you, if you create a problem for your customer or fix it immediately. Okay. Or as fast as you can. I get that they had to wait for the window to come in, but six weeks, really? I don't believe you. You're putting these windows in every house down the street. And this is a huge construction area, right? They're building houses like crazy. Okay. So now we're supposed to walk the house on the 11th in preparation for close on the 18th. Okay. You're gonna be hearing a lot about this house because it's a big deal in my world right now. So we've been at the house, right? Because like the concrete just got pulled two days ago like, you know, and we don't have a back deck built tile. Work isn't finished.

This house is not ready. And so this house is not ready. It's not far. And I know construction well enough to know if they hustle it can happen. We're at Saturday, we're supposed to look at it Tuesday. Right. And so we went and looked at it last night and there's still a lot to be done. So we get this email today. “Oh Hey, the builder didn't have time to call you, but could you please stay out of the house this weekend because he wants to get it ready.” Okay. First of all, it should already be ready. Okay. Totally. Should already be ready. This house presentation is on Tuesday. There shouldn't be like- our back deck got built. We saw it got built on Friday. They poured the concrete on Thursday. I mean this stuff should be done.

There's no landscaping done. So we've got keystones over the garage. It's like you have the garage and you have the pretty little center thing. They're not centered either. I don't know who built this house, but they cannot send her anything to save their lives and my OCD can't handle that. I'm not Super OCD, but I need that. So this email literally says, literally says, “I know it's hard to stay away– and I'm looking over here because my screen is here- but seeing your faces on Tuesday is a great treat for the builder.” Guess who I do not care about? This builder who has messed up my house and made me homeless for six weeks. Right? So if you're gonna screw up, don't turn around to your customer and say like, “Oh well we're trying to make it a good experience for the person who screwed up your stuff.”

Simple, right? Like this to me is not rocket science. I'm spending a lot of money on this house and, I don't really care what he thinks. I'm not walking that House tomorrow with a pad of paper and writing down every little thing that is messed up in preparation for Tuesday's Walkthrough. They're insane because they have done nothing but proved to me they don't know how to treat their customers. I'm just so frustrated. Anyway, but I got that email today and was like, “This is going to be my live. I'm going to rant about how to treat your customers because this company has just, time and time again, show me that they really just care about building houses fast.” And that's fine. I think that at the end of the day the house will be amazing and I will love it.

I love the location. I love the floor plan. I love a lot about it. So as much as I'm ranting, I'm incredibly grateful. I don't rant that much, but this email just set me off. I was like, “I don't care what he wants, I care what I want.” And he's messed up my house multiple times. So what, I'm going to trust him to get it right on Tuesday. You got to be kidding me!

Anyway, so those are my lessons on how not to treat your customer. If you're going to switch account managers or builders or whatever on them, introduce them to the new person. That's just polite before they randomly meet them. Also, if you're doing a transition, hand off properly so that mistakes don't get made. And, your customer does not care about your team. Okay. Especially after your team has mishandled their stuff.

Right? So just think about that for writing an email. That's all. All right, thank you for listening to my rant. I would love to hear like if you've had some bad customer experience stories and what you've taken from your business for that because I definitely am going to use this as a reminder not to do these things in my business. We actually, spend a lot of time and energy treating our customers well in our business. And I'll give you an example of that sometime. One time we did an affiliate deal with somebody who had a software and the software didn't work after a month later or something. So we bought an entire new software to give our people. We had an obligation to do that. That is how you treat your customers and keep them coming back because we do have some of the best customer service, my current company with my partner Ben. We've got Ashton who knows everything and we've focused on that for a long time.

So I guess that's why this brand just like makes me so mad because it's been such a focal point for the last four years of this business I've had of like, you know, give good customer service and do whatever it takes to really keep our customers happy. That, when I get emails like this, I just want to walk up and be like, “Really? Are you serious? You think this is going to make me leave you a raving review because it's going to be the opposite.”

Okay, rant over. I think I said that three times now, so I would really stop. All right. Have a happy Saturday night. I'm going to go have a delicious dinner that's cooked by the lovely man that is letting us stay at his house. So he's even cooking for us tonight, so he's the best. Alright, bye.