Spec houses with Jared Phifer: Revolve-Design Build

Tom Houghton:

You are listening to “The Building Code.” I’m Tom Houghton.

Paul Wurth:

I’m Paul Wurth.

Tom Houghton:

And joining us today is Jared Phifer from Revolve Design-Build in Denver, Colorado. Welcome to the podcast, Jared.

Jared Phifer:

Howdy.

Tom Houghton:

Howdy.

Paul Wurth:

Howdy. Well, the funny thing about Colorado and Jared, you can take this, but there’s definitely some farmland in Colorado.

Tom Houghton:

There sure is.

Paul Wurth:

There’s ranches, right?

Tom Houghton:

Yeah.

Paul Wurth:

Besides, Denver is all microbreweries and hipsters, right?

Tom Houghton:

Yeah.

Jared Phifer:

Yes it is. And electric scooters.

Paul Wurth:

Oh, electric scooters too.?

Jared Phifer:

Yeah.

Tom Houghton:

I feel like those are taking over everywhere though.

Paul Wurth:

They are.

Jared Phifer:

Oh they are.

Paul Wurth:

Has there been a revolt in Denver for the electric scooters?

Jared Phifer:

Oh yeah. There is all sorts of …

Paul Wurth:

People like throwing them? Hands on. Well, howdy.

Tom Houghton:

Well, let’s start off first just by getting to know Revolve Design-Build. So tell us kind of your company stats, what projects you work on, how big is your team? Just give us the rundown to get our listeners familiar with you guys.

Jared Phifer:

Yeah. We primarily design and build new construction homes, Denver metro area. We like to build Passive House to the Passive House standard. Myself and one other guy on our staff are both certified Passive House builders. So we push the high energy and performance of homes in our design. But we do all sorts of designs, obviously we’re working primarily for clients and so we’re building their dream home.

Tom Houghton:

Nice.

Paul Wurth:

So how long have you guys been in business, Jared?

Jared Phifer:

We’ve been in business 13 years.

Paul Wurth:

Well, we want to talk about a spec home, that’s going to be kind of the theme for this podcast. But when you started, can you talk a little bit about what types of projects you were looking for, what sort of got your foot in the door in the industry there?

Jared Phifer:

Yeah. Getting my foot in the door was actually just doing a remodeling. I started loading trash, started framing, started tiling, doing finished carpentry. And I said, “Man, I love this. I could do this the rest of my life.”

Paul Wurth:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jared Phifer:

So that’s what I decided to do. And just kind of built, each year added employees. And then being a design-build firm is actually pretty early or pretty late, the last four years. So we’ve been designing and building almost for about four years now.

Paul Wurth:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). And how has that changed your business?

Jared Phifer:

It’s been amazing because just being in on that front and we’re able to actually achieve budgets and keep projects on time, which has been, I love being in the driver’s seat because it helps.

Paul Wurth:

Yeah. The advantage of a design-build company is just sort of that involvement from go, right?

Jared Phifer:

Correct.

Paul Wurth:

Does it give you an advantage when it comes to the sales process? Like, “Hey, I’m a design-build firm and otherwise you’d have to go to an architect and then another GC”

Jared Phifer:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. Not everybody understands the value right off the cuff. If it’s their first home, they might not understand the value. Usually if it’s their second home, they always understand the value of a design-build firm. And that’s usually from that experience of designing a house that costs too much to actually build and having to go back to the drawing board redesigning, and then starting over again with the permit process.

Paul Wurth:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jared Phifer:

And now you’re six months behind, so you’re framing and you wish you were moving in.

Paul Wurth:

Yeah.

Tom Houghton:

Yeah.

Paul Wurth:

So it seemed like a very important transition for your business to go to design-build.

Jared Phifer:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Paul Wurth:

If there’s a listener right now, that’s a GC and they’re sort of where you were four or five years ago, how does one get into design-build? Is it as simple as hiring an employee that does design or can you take us through a little bit of how you got there?

Jared Phifer:

Yeah. I think it would be just having a connection with an architect designer of some kind. So that could be in a subcontractor role just, or a partnership even or it could be in-house where you bring someone on staff and again drawing in the same room.

Paul Wurth:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jared Phifer:

So I took the method of hiring on in-house and we still actually go out to third-party architectural firm to get guidance as well and have them come in, look at our plans. We’re always trying to refine everything we do. So I think that’s still important.

Paul Wurth:

Yeah a lot of the more successful guests we’ve had on this podcast, either cultivate really good relationships with architects locally, for sort of that first part of what you were saying, or they bring it in-house. And I think you could probably do both at the same time.

Jared Phifer:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah.

Paul Wurth:

I assume it’s less overhead and less risk just to start cultivating those relationships in your market, them wanting to work with you, you wanting to work with them kind of thing.

Jared Phifer:

Absolutely.

Tom Houghton:

I’d say the other thing that sets our guests apart too, is that they’re doing what you just mentioned at the end is that they’re always looking for ways to improve their business.

Jared Phifer:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Tom Houghton:

So we love clients like that who are always continuing to look, to figure out there’s got to be a better way to continue doing this.

Jared Phifer:

Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Paul Wurth:

You’ve got to evolve or revolve.

Tom Houghton:

Revolve there you go.

Jared Phifer:

That’s great.

Tom Houghton:

Yeah. That was good.

Paul Wurth:

That’s a question we ask a lot of guests, not all of them, because some names of businesses are pretty straightforward like John Smith Homes, not a lot of stories when we talked to John.

Tom Houghton:

Give us the story.

Paul Wurth:

Yeah. What’s the story behind the name of your business?

Jared Phifer:

Yeah. I didn’t want it to be a last name, just so that it could be its own thing.

Paul Wurth:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jared Phifer:

I don’t think I had this clear of a vision when I first started it, but now I feel like I do, that my goal is to pretty much be the Apple of our industry. So like Apple computers. So when you see our logo, you can expect that quality of a home, et cetera. And so if I could boil it down that simple, that’s what I would say. And so I wanted a name that stood out like that, that was unique and made people rethink. I like the re in everything. I like any word that starts with re for some reason.

Tom Houghton:

You’re a big fan.

Paul Wurth:

That’s interesting.

Tom Houghton:

Reopen, rebuild.

Paul Wurth:

I could throw a couple of darts in that one. I’m sure there’s a couple of re words out there you’re not really happy with, but I don’t think so. You do have a cool logo. We’ll get a shot of your hat because you got a camo hat with your R logo on there.

Jared Phifer:

There it is.

Paul Wurth:

I think it’s pretty sweet. So we’ll put that on the shownotes page.

Tom Houghton:

Yeah. We’ll also put links to all of your social media and website as well. So people can check it out.

Paul Wurth:

Sweet.

Tom Houghton:

Let’s continue on talking about one project you currently worked on. You decided to build a spec home. It was your first one and we’d love to kind of, for you just to share your experience of what made you say, “Okay, now it’s time to do a spec house.”

Paul Wurth:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Tom Houghton:

What was that process like? And tell us about the end result.

Jared Phifer:

Sure. We had done a few fix and flip home remodels and a few additions for some other investors. We kind of pulled away from that because their focus it’s always money. How cool can we make it look on the outside for how cheap?

Paul Wurth:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jared Phifer:

And so I pulled away from that and focused on working for clients building their dream homes, doing high quality work. This home popped up in a nice area in Denver that’s real hot area. And it was the perfect scrape. It was just pretty much condemned. And so we said, “Hey, what would it look like if we built our own house, sold it in this area? I bet we could do pretty good. I’ve done it for other investors, but it is outside of my comfort zone, but I’m a risk taker, so sure let’s do it.”

Jared Phifer:

So we took on that project and we also wanted to just take something from, start to finish all in-house, buying the property, scraping it, designing the home, getting it through the building department, building the house and then selling it. So we did it all in-house just to kind of get the full experience. And there’s obviously areas that it’s like now I felt the investor’s pain when I had the budget to work with. I’m like, “Now I understand why we have to make some sacrifices here and there on the design and or pulling back square footage.” Those sort of calls. But it was nice to be in the driver’s seat and be able to make those calls and just decide what was important to us.

Tom Houghton:

Awesome. And so how long did it, if you don’t mind sharing, how long did the process take from buying the property to having it ready to go, if you don’t mind kind of giving the behind the curtain look at that.

Jared Phifer:

We bought the property in, I think March is when we made the offer of 18, closed on it sometime in April, we began design and then began the demolition process. And then we broke ground in the fall and then we wrapped it up last week in May of this year.

Tom Houghton:

And you guys are calling it the Techno Barn, is that right?

Jared Phifer:

Yes. And I can’t take credit for it. The neighbors pin that name. The neighbors to the north, they said, “We really like the Techno Barn you guys built.” And I said, “I’m going to use that.”

Tom Houghton:

Perfect. I’m going to write that down real quick. Good stuff.

Jared Phifer:

Yeah.

Paul Wurth:

So part of the appeal, just to recap, so part of the appeal for you was for you and your team to get this holistic look at, start to finish how to do a job and maybe get some experience in some areas of the business that you didn’t have yet.

Jared Phifer:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Paul Wurth:

And then also, what can we do with it, with our own vision and will this thing sell? Will we make money? Those are all sort of gambles, right?

Jared Phifer:

Yes. For sure.

Paul Wurth:

So for the listeners,

Tom Houghton:

Did it pay off?

Paul Wurth:

… did you sell it and did you make any money?

Jared Phifer:

We did sell it and we did make some money.

Paul Wurth:

There you go.

Tom Houghton:

Awesome. Congratulations.

Jared Phifer:

Thank you. Didn’t make as much as I thought we could. So it wasn’t as profitable as with that, but we didn’t lose and the experience we gained from it, I think it’s priceless. We got to also sit in the seat that our clients sit in and I think that’s a really important seat to be in, in our industry too, is to understand what the clients go through.

Tom Houghton:

Sure.

Paul Wurth:

Sorry, Tom.

Tom Houghton:

It’s okay.

Paul Wurth:

That’s an interesting way to look at it. Nick from NS Builders talked about this in one of our episodes, which is you may not have to make money on every job, but you’re learning lessons that in a year or two, we’ll help you make money on jobs. It’s almost like an investment in the business.

Jared Phifer:

Yes.

Paul Wurth:

Obviously you want to make money on every job, but you want to stay in business, but when you don’t make money or even when you lose money, if you look at that through the lens of what we learn we’re not going to do that next time. Then in some ways it’s sort of an investment. Right?

Jared Phifer:

Absolutely.

Tom Houghton:

So would you do it again now that you’ve kind of gone through the whole process?

Jared Phifer:

Yes.

Tom Houghton:

Definitely, yeah?

Jared Phifer:

Definitely.

Tom Houghton:

Okay. And then I guess maybe you could give some takeaways of what you learned, one or two takeaways that you learned that you’re like, “Okay, if we did it again, this is what we would change for next time to try to make it easier or better.”

Jared Phifer:

I think I would like to actually take more of a risk and go even more high-performance.

Paul Wurth:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jared Phifer:

We were concerned we wouldn’t get the ROI on that. And so we kind of kept it somewhat just builder-grade. And so if I did it again, I think I would actually take that risk. I think with everyone we had show up to our open house at the end and kind of the traction it made and impact it made on everybody there. I think everyone received a lot of the minor high-performance things that we did really well. And I think people are understanding that more and more. And so this being our first one, I was like, “I’m not going to go all the way to the other side.”

Tom Houghton:

Sure. Okay.

Paul Wurth:

Yeah. I’m looking at it online, you mean the builder-grade as relates to probably insulation and some other stuff you’re doing, but the interior, the finishing and things like that, that’s by no means builder-grade. That’s very high-end. It’s got modern sort of look to it.

Jared Phifer:

For sure.

Paul Wurth:

Was the design in-house by somebody within your business or did you sort of outsource that part of it?

Jared Phifer:

Yeah. That was in-house as well. So my wife actually does Interior Design and so her and I actually worked on it together.

Tom Houghton:

That worked out well.

Jared Phifer:

Yeah.

Paul Wurth:

She did an awesome job. It’s very appealing.

Jared Phifer:

Thank you.

Paul Wurth:

I did have one question and obviously we’ll throw the link up there it’s called the Denver Mod House? Is that correct?

Jared Phifer:

Denver Mod Haus.

Paul Wurth:

See and that’s my question. Okay? So at what point does a house become a haus?

Tom Houghton:

Haus.

Paul Wurth:

H-O-U-S-E to H-A-U-S.

Jared Phifer:

Well, it’s the German word for house, but the Passive Haus Standard.

Tom Houghton:

Exactly. It’s true.

Jared Phifer:

Everyone’s pushing Passive Haus usually uses that kind of phrasing. They push the haus, the German house word.

Tom Houghton:

We spent the whole episode, episode 34 talking about Passive Houses. So if you want to learn more about Passive Houses, go check out that episode. Little shameless plug there.

Paul Wurth:

I believe we talked about Jeremy in that, didn’t we?

Tom Houghton:

We did. We talked about the origins of it.

Paul Wurth:

Awesome. Awesome.

Tom Houghton:

Our listeners should hopefully be familiar with that. That’s a great trend. I’m curious to know if you could pick one high-performance trend that you feel like you’re seeing a big ROI on what would that be?

Jared Phifer:

Good question.

Tom Houghton:

Thanks.

Jared Phifer:

In Colorado I would say solar.

Tom Houghton:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jared Phifer:

We have probably the most sun of all the states year-round.

Tom Houghton:

It’s interesting I just read that Zillow did a study of all the homes and homes that have solar in themselves for at least 4% more than ones that don’t. So when you’re kind of calculating those ROI, the ROI on actually putting it on your house, that’s a good number to kind of have in your back pocket.

Paul Wurth:

Yeah. Especially in California you wouldn’t have rolling blackouts. You’d be the popular neighbor.

Tom Houghton:

Party at your house.

Paul Wurth:

Hey come and bring all your refrigerated goods to my house. I’ll take 10%.

Jared Phifer:

That’s probably a little more energy answer. Sure it is like performance. If I had to pick one, I would say windows, triple pane. You’ve passed about standard windows. There’s a local company here in Boulder called Alpen Windows and they do an amazing job and everything’s acclimated to the climate as well.

Tom Houghton:

Sure. That helps for sure.

Jared Phifer:

Yeah.

Tom Houghton:

We’ll put a link to those guys in the shownotes as well so you can take a look at them there.

Paul Wurth:

The shownotes?

Tom Houghton:

The shownotes.

Paul Wurth:

What is that link by the way?

Tom Houghton:

Buildertrend.com/podcast.

Paul Wurth:

Because I think we say show notes all the time, but for all of our thousands of new listeners every week who want to read the show notes, there you go.

Tom Houghton:

You can find the show notes, buildertrend.com/podcast.

Paul Wurth:

Jared, you’ve been a Buildertrend client call it six years? Since 2013-ish? What’s your experience been and sort of has Buildertrend always been a part of your business operations process or did you gradually sort of make more and more of it or can you kind of give us just a little rundown of that?

Jared Phifer:

Yes. I’d say Buildertrend created our process. I didn’t have one until we started using Buildertrend. And so by not already having a process in place, I think it helped us to be all in with Buildertrend.

Paul Wurth:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jared Phifer:

So we use it for every aspect. There’s some areas we don’t, we don’t use to the full extent, like surveys I feel like we lack on getting that post-construction surveys out the door and all that follow-up work. So there’s some areas where we’re heavily in, but we’re all in. We run our business on it.

Paul Wurth:

That’s awesome to hear. We take a lot of pride and we understand how important that is, and I think in general, if you talk to any one of our thousands of users, nobody’s using 100% of Buildertrend and that’s okay. I do think that we made a really good point though. I mean, I would say 90% of the businesses we speak to before they use Buildertrend, don’t have a process at all. They have a thought, they have a way of doing things, but it’s sort of a concrete… I always say this to somebody, if you were to hire somebody tomorrow, how long would it take you to explain how to do things that your business does? It would take a long time if you don’t have a central place Buildertrend. And that’s what Buildertrend does. It’s not perfect by any means, but it does give you that one central place to say, “That’s where we schedule. This is where you put your daily log, add photos here, look for documents there, send a message here.” And it really boils down to that. Right?

Jared Phifer:

Yeah, absolutely.

Paul Wurth:

That’s great.

Tom Houghton:

And obviously I was out there actually a few months ago. I actually have been inside the Passive Haus, the Mod Haus.

Paul Wurth:

Haus, the Germans.

Tom Houghton:

Yeah. Which it was beautiful. And we did a little video with you about your integration with QuickBooks. So we’ll make sure we put that in the show notes as well just because obviously you guys are using QuickBooks.

Paul Wurth:

You guys friends?

Tom Houghton:

Yeah. We’re friends, Jared and I we go way back.

Paul Wurth:

Wow.

Jared Phifer:

We go way back.

Tom Houghton:

Yeah.

Paul Wurth:

It’s amazing.

Tom Houghton:

BFFs.

Paul Wurth:

We got to have you to Buildertrend University in Omaha.

Tom Houghton:

Yes.

Jared Phifer:

Yes, please.

Paul Wurth:

Come have a beer.

Tom Houghton:

You got to come out.

Paul Wurth:

Learn. We’ll talk.

Tom Houghton:

Bring a few of the guys from the office.

Jared Phifer:

Yeah.

Paul Wurth:

We’ll passively talk. Has anybody ever made the joke like aggressively passionate about passiveness?

Tom Houghton:

Christ aggressively passive? Passively aggressive about Passive Houses?

Paul Wurth:

I’m really aggressively into passive housing. You know what I mean?

Tom Houghton:

There’s a little bit. I don’t think anybody’s made that joke.

Paul Wurth:

Probably because it’s not very good.

Tom Houghton:

You said it, not me.

Paul Wurth:

We’ll go ahead and cut that. I think there was a joke there somewhere.

Tom Houghton:

There is we just didn’t find it. Maybe next time.

Paul Wurth:

I got to workshop that into like standup.

Tom Houghton:

Yeah, we’ll work on it. That’s good. Awesome. Well we covered a lot here. So thanks for sharing your experience with us Jared, about the spec house again, congrats on selling it. That’s awesome.

Jared Phifer:

Thanks.

Tom Houghton:

We look forward to seeing the next one. We’ll be following along on social media. And if you want to as well listeners check out the show notes page because we’ll put a link to their social media accounts in there. You can follow them on Instagram and Facebook.

Paul Wurth:

Yeah. Jared, do you guys have your next lot or house picked out?

Jared Phifer:

We don’t.

Paul Wurth:

Okay.

Jared Phifer:

I’m looking at several right now, but not any offers yet.

Paul Wurth:

All right we are going to follow you on Instagram, myself, Tom, producer Kayleigh and the listeners. And I want you to name the project and let’s do Instagram stories every week so we can follow along.

Tom Houghton:

Yeah.

Paul Wurth:

It’d be a little series.

Tom Houghton:

A little adventure together.

Paul Wurth:

We’ll do it together.

Jared Phifer:

I like it.

Paul Wurth:

Cool.

Tom Houghton:

Good stuff.

Paul Wurth:

All right Jared, thanks so much for your time.

Jared Phifer:

All right thank you guys.

Paul Wurth:

All right appreciate you.

Jared Phifer:

All right.

Tom Houghton:

Thanks. Love what you heard? Don’t forget To rate and subscribe to our podcast so you can hear from more guests that will benefit your business. Also, please check out our shownotes page for more information on what we discussed on this episode, you can find it at buildertrend.com/podcast. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next time on “The Building Code.”

Speaker 4:

We appreciate you.