Shownotes
It takes a great leader who understands his team and the company’s purpose to deliver great service. Paul Sutton, the Founder and President of Paul Sutton’s Peak Structural, Inc., shares what his business is all about, who their clientele is, and the services they specialize in. As the company grows, so does the pressure and the demand for more employees. With this, Paul talks about how they cope with their growth, confront their weaknesses, and unleash their people’s fullest potential to achieve their company’s mission and vision. Know more about Paul’s method in rearing his team and leading his company to greater heights in this episode.
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Growing Your Company By Unleashing Your Team’s Full Potential with Paul Sutton
We’re at the headquarters of Peak Structural with Paul Sutton. He’s the owner of Peak Structural. Paul, thank you for taking time out of your busy day.
I’m happy to be on the program.
Tell us about your business and who you serve.
We serve a primarily residential clientele. Literally, 90%-plus of our work is going to be on, around or underneath the home. We do some light commercial work as well, but most of our products and services are geared toward the residential market space. Geographically, our area covers upwards of Longmont on the north side of Denver and up there in Loveland, Boulder, Westminster, all the way through the Denver Metro and then all the way south down to the New Mexico border. It’s quite a footprint. It’s quite a large sandbox that we play in.
For the folks that aren’t in Colorado, that’s a stretch with traffic.
That’s several hundred miles north to south along the interstate corridor. You’ve got a major metropolitan area with Denver, Colorado Springs up and coming and then Pueblo to the south. The three different distinct metro areas amongst a lot of other suburbs and hamlets scattered in there as well.
What are the problems that you guys solve?
Sometimes we’re initially confused with some steel erection company. We put up skyscrapers or something like that, but that’s not the case. Our company specializes in foundation repairs, permanent solutions to foundation problems that homes here in Colorado can get into and elsewhere in the country as well. It’s certainly not unique to our climate here, but we do have some very active soils here in the front range. That can lead to instability with the home’s foundation itself; it can sometimes settle or crack or even heave upwards, and then an ancillary service that we work with is concrete leveling. Before a foundation is ever going to move, you’re going to see movement in a concrete slab typically. Driveways, porches, sidewalks, stoops, patios- those things readily move.
When they do, oftentimes they can create trip hazards and become more of a nuisance, even become a real hazard to health for folks coming and going. The concrete leveling is another aspect of ground movement that we provide services to mitigate against, correct those problems, put a long-term warranty on that as well. We’ve got two other services that also pertain to the underbelly of the home. That would be basement waterproofing, which goes hand-in-hand with structural problems. If you have too much water present around or underneath a foundation, it’s going to find a way in. In many homes and other structures, if you’ve got finished space below grade, you’ve got a problem.
You’ve got wet carpet or moldy sheetrock or damage to furnishings; things like that. From the health aspect, when you’ve got a very humid or dank environment in a basement, you’re inviting and encouraging mold to grow, which can be a real health concern for folks. We want to come in and install a permanently designed solution that’s going to provide everything that’s needed to keep the whole basement dry all the time, as we like to say. The fourth service line would pertain to crawl spaces. It’s typically in those areas of the home that a lot of people may not know a lot about or may not want to go and get involved and get their hands dirty in a nasty crawl space. What we’ve learned over the years is the research on building science has shown that dirt crawl spaces are a really bad idea and they were provided for the building code for decades. The thought was if we put vents on, we can get the air moving through it so that it won’t accumulate moisture and cause problems with mold, rot, things like that. The research has actually shown that the opposite is true – that the best thing you can do for a crawl space that has those problems is to seal up those vents, put in an insulation system and then have a thick vapor barrier to isolate the home above from the damp earth below.
We completely encapsulate the crawl space, which does a lot of things that lower the humidity and prevents mold from growing. It’s a conditioned environment so that the main floor above it is not cold in the winter anymore. You don’t have that cold winter air blasting in there. You’ve got a conditioned, much more comfortable space. Those are the four things in terms of what we’re known for and what we specialize in, structural foundation repair, concrete slab leveling, basement waterproofing, and crawl space encapsulation.
I think I’ve had all of those between a house here and a house in Tennessee where there’s a lot of moisture, flooding, a tornado shelter, had heaving driveway from all the years and whatnot and all the issues. The one thing I know from the house in Tennessee is that it’s for sale and anytime you get anything that remotely resembles anything in a foundation that a potential buyer goes up and left quickly. Your house is virtually unsellable until you solve the issue.
The good news though in that is most people find when they look at their options and see what’s out there and consider, “What might be the best thing to do for this house before I sell it?” Generally, what people find is that the cost of the repair, the well-designed engineer repair that is going to be permanent will be far less than the discount taken at the closing table. If you go ahead and market that thing with the unknown structural defect, you can take a beating on the price. In some cases, you’ll find that your typical owner-occupier, single-family home dweller is not interested in buying that house. It becomes an investor opportunity, of course they’re going to be grinding hard to get that price down. The good news though is that the repair will normally cost you far less than selling the house and getting beat up on the price because of the defect that you left unaddressed.
Do you think the average homeowner knows that?
Unleashing Team Potential: The cost of a well-designed engineered repair will cost you far less than selling the house and getting beat up on the price because of the defect that you left unaddressed.
It’s hard to say. That’s something that we try to educate folks about. Some people may say that’s self-serving. How convenient that you can repair my home for weighing the economic scales as you’re describing, but that’s the reality of it. Housing values vary drastically depending on who’s listening to us and where in the country. Let’s say you have a $300,000 home, nothing extraordinarily out there in terms of price or square footage, a reasonably modest home that you might find in many markets in North America. That thing’s got a structural problem. As a seller wanting to liquidate, wanting to move on and sell that place, you could be looking at a 10%, 15% maybe even 20% discount off the cost of that property if you market with that defect. You’re looking at $30,000 to $60,000 discount you’re going to take. Those dollars will go a long way. There are relatively few structural problems we run into that get into that kind of money.
I think the buyer has the uncertainty that they deal with, “I have no idea what it’s going to take to repair,” or it’s the investor and he goes, “I know exactly what it’s going cost to repair and I can discount it and make this work.” For the uncertainty of the purchaser, that’s one more uncertainty you don’t have to answer. In my personal experience, it’s a whole lot better to address the problem than not.
An alternative to the seller fixing the problem first may be the seller provides a proposal from a company like ours to the buyer and says, “We have this issue, but here’s a credible company that can take care of it. Here’s what it would cost.” Let’s adjust that off the price. If you’re the buyer, you’re like, “Is that all that’s wrong? Is that the complete scope of work that’s needed?” There’s that skepticism that’s going to probably translate into maybe a less robust offer. Whereas if the seller takes care of it, it’s past tense, it’s done. Here’s the contract, here’s the warranty behind the company. I took care of this so that you wouldn’t have to.
You guys have been around a long time.
We’ve been around since 2002.
We were talking a little bit before the show and you have a general contractor background before you decided to start this business. When you started this business, how many folks were involved in the business?
It’s like so many other American small business stories – we’re very typical in that sense. My wife and I started the business with a little home office and a rented storage locker. It was myself working most actively in the business with a handful of two to four other individuals initially as you tend to do. In starting so many small businesses, you’re bootstrapping it; you’re doing a lot of functions yourself. Everything from marketing to estimating to sales to scheduling to production, installation, accounting. That’s how it sometimes goes in a lot of small businesses. The initial few employees were crew members. I needed some help and some skilled labor so that was what it looked like at the very beginning.
Reality has a way of talking to you and telling you what you need to hear and where you need to make changes.
To contrast, how many employees do you have now?
We have 84 employees now.
I think about that transition over the years and go, “That’s a fairly large percentage increase of employees.” As you look back over that journey, was there a point where you said, “We need to take and start thinking differently about the company or about expanding or how many employees we have?” Was there a point where that came to mind?
There have been a series of points along the way. Reality has a way of talking to you and telling you what you need to hear, what you need to adjust. I find that not only does that reality exist within the mind and emotions of the entrepreneur, the pressures that they’re dealing with and the problems that they’re solving. It also exists in the mind of the customers and the general public out there. One of my mentors told me years ago, he said, “The marketplace is an incredibly efficient feedback mechanism.” If we ever forget about that as a business owner, we maybe feel like, “This customer’s being a little bit unfair about the situation or what have you,” I find that all it takes is to flip the tables around, to put me back in the customer’s shoes, which all of us are customers every day.
We’re buying and we’re consuming services and products so we’re always the customer. We’re never far away from that role. We can easily remind ourselves and recall how quickly we may get our hackles up over something less than stellar service or something less than a good value in a product that we bought. We know what that’s like to feel like, “I put that in my good hard-earned money here and I don’t like what I got for it.” Sometimes we need to be reminded of that as business owners that folks will tell us where we need to improve and we can ignore them to our own peril because they’re trying to help us become better.
I feel in providing a better service, a higher level, a more consistent service in our company, in the case of a company like ours, which is entirely service-based in the home improvement space. It’s always about the service. The market will give us lots of feedback, lots of signals, as well as the stresses within the organization as you grow. To relate to your question about some moments of awareness may be where you begin to have these a-ha moments and say, “Things were running pretty smoothly last year at X level, but now we’re at X 1.5 level and I can see that we need to do some redefining of how our systems work internally. We need to change our internal communication. We need better training for our employees.” As you begin to grow and scale-up, the pressures of that growth finds the cracks and weaknesses in your structure and forces you to confront them.
I think about that and as you’re faced with that, you either have a mentor or you have an inventory of tools or you hire an outside coach for lack of a better term. For you guys, I was going through your website and looking at the reviews and so on. You have an awesome culture within your team. I can see it in the reviews and you wouldn’t have great reviews if you didn’t have a good culture. How do you take and transmit that culture from top-down throughout your service teams?
Unleashing Team Potential: As you begin to grow and scale up, find the cracks and weaknesses in your structure and force yourself to confront them.
That’s a big hot topic these days. Every organization is for the most part highly aware of and focusing on building that culture. There may not just be one answer to that question. First of all, I think that for the owners and depending on whatever the team or organization looks like, probably there are some other key leaders, influential people that are looked up to within the organization. It certainly starts with those at the top. We believe that people are what matter most, beginning with our team here, our employees, our family here, they matter most. We actually have one of our big stated ideas that we run the company on is our purpose which is to redefine our industry by growing our people to their fullest potential.
I believe that. I get energized by that. I hope that I have attracted a handful of leaders and managers here that also share that same value, that same genetic predisposition if you will, that we want to do some good in this world. There are financial realities and every business needs to be profitable and those things are always there. Once you get a little bit beyond that as far as you’re driving and what’s motivating me now when I come into work and you begin to think about it at a little bit higher level. For us, it’s about the people here. One of the current gurus, is Simon Sinek, who famously said, “Before customers can love a company, the employees have to love the company.”
We believe that culture begins with taking care of our people, training them, growing them, developing them, holding them accountable. There’s a hard edge and there’s a soft edge. The soft edge is training. It’s an encouragement. It’s a relationship. The hard edge is, at the end of the day, every human activity in a business can be reduced to a number. If you doubt that, take a look at your paycheck. Those are the hard edge aspects of the culture that we are here to perform. We are here to get results for people. We care about each other on a personal level and we want to nurture those relationships and so forth. At the same time, we’re here to get better together. Iron sharpens iron. We’re here to improve our skills and our abilities together so that we can be more effective for our customers. I could talk for hours on culture, but what I’m trying to get at here, I hope, is that culture starts with owners, shareholders, stakeholders, leaders and managers within any organization. If they don’t believe it, it’s not who they are on the inside. It’s not going to happen. It won’t manifest within the organization.
I was thinking as you were talking of measurement and leadership and leaders. I was at a big talk for some guy who knows something. He was talking about the difference between engagement and being fulfilled in your work. You can be busy and yet not find meaning in your work or being fulfilled by the work, which I think is what you were touching on when you’ve got the folks who are believing in the mission. The other thing that struck me is as a client of some of the repaired space where it quit leaking, the absolute relief that you experience when you go, “What do you mean it’s not flooded now?” No, it’s not flooded now. “What about tomorrow? It’s not flooded tomorrow?” No, it’s dry again. For you, that’s an extraordinary tangible result from really good work that your customers experience.
There is that emotional sense of relief and confidence. I don’t have to worry about if I go out of town over the weekend and we’re in a rainy spell. What’s happening in my home when I’m not there? I don’t have to have that worry anymore because I’ve done what’s necessary to ensure that I’m not going to have a problem there. Whether it’s [2:00] AM and there’s a thunderstorm rolling through or whether I’m home during the day or whether I’m gone on the weekend, whatever it is. It’s gratifying to be able to give people that peace of mind and know that valuables and potentially heirloom materials or memorabilia that they have stored in their basement, they don’t have to worry about. We love being able to do that.
For the folks that have never had that problem, I don’t know that they can quite grasp how good it feels. From having had the problem, I’ve belabored the point I’m sure, but it’s amazing how much better you feel as if, “It rained hard.” Everything’s dry. Don’t worry about it. That’s a big deal.
As you have alluded to, if you haven’t had the problem, it may not feel as tangible. The magnitude of what that’s like to have your home invaded with water and have all the damage and all the loss of furnishings. It’s a little bit hard to put yourself in that person’s shoes if you haven’t had that experience yourself, but it is no fun.
Culture begins with taking care of your team and training, developing, and holding them accountable.
