Finding purpose and building relationships with Jeff Sawyer

Tom Houghton:

You’re listening to “The Building Code,” your guide for a better way to run your business. I’m Tom Houghton.

Paul Wurth:

Hey, Tom. I’m Paul Wurth.

Tom Houghton:

Hey, Paul. I was going-

Paul Wurth:

I was going to ask you the same thing because we never do that. We always just go straight into it because we always have great guests here, but I’m going to ask you, how’s it going?

Tom Houghton:

It’s going well, as well as things can go in this pandemic that we’re still having six months past, six, seven. I don’t know. I’ve lost track of how many months it’s been. COVID time, it’s a thing.

Paul Wurth:

Yeah. Sometimes you try not to talk about it because what if this huge fan base we have wants to listen to it two years down the road. Maybe it’ll still be around, who knows? Why don’t we just talk about it?

Tom Houghton:

Well, let’s hope not. It might be around. Just hopefully it’s around in a different way, I guess, in a better way.

Paul Wurth:

I guess we’re through, we’re at an important phase, which will date this program, because school just either just started for you and your kids, or you just started being a teacher for you and your kids.

Tom Houghton:

You’re doing homeschool now. Yup.

Paul Wurth:

It’s been a rough week for some people, so we’ll give everybody a break this week.

Tom Houghton:

Yeah. It’s good, it’s good. Well, let’s get going with our guests here. We’re really honored to be joined by Jeff Sawyer of TruNorth Construction, they’re based in Connecticut. And Jeff’s business, TruNorth Construction, has a number of accolades under their belt. They’ve won Hartford’s Best, I think 18 and 19, probably 20, maybe we’ll knock on wood. That’s probably still coming out soon. And then, Remodeling Mag’s Big50, they won that. So, lots of great accolades. We wanted to get Jeff on the podcast to talk about building relationships in your community, because this is something that they’ve done extremely well as a business. So, we thought it’d be helpful for other listeners to take the lessons that they’ve learned and how they’ve done this so successfully. Jeff, welcome to the podcast.

Jeff Sawyer:

Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

Tom Houghton:

We’re excited to have you on. First and foremost, give us a rundown of the business. We always like to ask too about the names if somebody’s got a great name like TruNorth, love that. Let’s talk about your name first.

Jeff Sawyer:

Our name has come from the fact that we’re obviously based in the Northeast. Me and my business partner, Matt Powers, we enjoy everything about the North. We just thought of wanting to come up with a good name that signified what this area means to us because we’re all trying to work very community-based. And we wanted to use it in a marketing tool, to find your true North. We created a really good logo. People love to wear our stuff. We give it out all the time. People are constantly asking for our hats and shirts and stuff, but really it was just driven from our love of the area in the Connecticut, New England in general. So, that’s where we came up the name.

Tom Houghton:

Awesome. And you mentioned your co-owner there, Matt Powers. You both started it together or can you give us some background on how you got started together?

Jeff Sawyer:

Yeah. And we had an interesting story. I had my own real estate development business and Matt was more on the remodeling side of his business. So, we had two separate businesses. I lived in Atlanta for many years in the 90s then I had the opportunity to go back to help a previous employer rebuild his company for a year. So, I decided to just do that, packed my stuff up, moved back down there. But before I did that, we actually did a couple of projects together. Matt and I were… I would sell the job, I would go and meet with the customer, design the project, and then I would turn it over to Matt, and Matt would run the job. And we both said it was too bad I was leaving because we felt there was a big connection between him and I. He liked to do the things out in the field, and I like to do the customer service and the design stuff. So, we had a perfect scenario.

Jeff Sawyer:

After that year in Atlanta, I called him up and said, “Hey, Matt, what about getting together and starting that business we talked about?” And I came back in April and we hit the ground running and haven’t stopped. So, it’s been a great, great marriage. We found our niche where Matt likes to do certain things, and I like to do certain things, and we manage the business that way and it’s turning out to be great.

Paul Wurth:

Yeah. If you check out your Instagram page or go to the website, you have North all capitalized. Some of the old school Buildertrend users that are listening will remember, our first generation of our name was BuilderTREND, capital T-R-E-N-D.

Tom Houghton:

That’s true.

Paul Wurth:

I think everybody and probably the ownership, number one, just got sick of that after five or six years and they dropped it, but interesting call.

Jeff Sawyer:

We’re sick of every time we try to tell someone what our name… Like our email, we should’ve put the E on, because we’re constantly having to say TruNorth with no E, but it does set us apart a little bit. So, it ended up working out all right.

Paul Wurth:

I bet there’s so many business owners that share that same story. Man, if I only would have known that I have to say this every time I say my company name. A lot in the beginning with us was Builderstrend. All day long, we’re having to tell people that. Everybody’s got that story. That’s cool. Just filling out the profile, how many jobs a year do you guys typically do? What’s your average range and how many employees you guys have?

Jeff Sawyer:

We started out with just me and Matt and that was four years ago. And we started… I think our first year we did 25 jobs. We’re probably up into 70 jobs per year now. And our cost of job is slowly increasing. So, we’re doing bigger jobs as well as more volume. We’re up to 11 full-time employees now. Me and Matt, we have a couple of project managers and a lot of carpenters. We have a couple of different guys that can do a little of everything. We have one sales guy that’s running our roofing division now. And then, we have a couple part-time people.

Jeff Sawyer:

So, our jobs can range anything from decks, roofs. Average deck is probably $12,000 to $25,000. But we span from residential remodeling all the way through commercial remodeling. And so, we’re now doing an $800,000 renovation in an area called Farmington, Connecticut, an office. Our jobs can move from residential to commercial. And obviously when we’re doing the commercial, the commercial jobs tend to be a little bit more expensive, but we’re all over the place in terms of our project ranges. So, it can go down from, like I said, $10,000 to $800,000.

Paul Wurth:

Nice. I guess I started this by talking about we’re still in the pandemic, been about six months as Tom said. For you and your business partner, I guess, what some of the challenges you faced or maybe the hardest challenge and what surprised you?

Jeff Sawyer:

We got really lucky we timed it where we were actually… We had four outdoor projects when this all hit. And so, we were doing an addition in a couple other little projects, a pavilion and outdoor showers. So, we had the ability to stay outside. And in Connecticut, construction was considered essential. So, we were able to work through it. What we’ve noticed in this whole process is people are staying home, they’re not going on vacation. So, they’re starting to spend money on their houses. It’s just opened up… The first probably three or four months of the pandemic, we were doing strictly like decks. Occasionally, a homeowner would let us in their house and do their kitchen, but we’re really seeing an increase of calls.

Jeff Sawyer:

We are almost to the point where we can’t keep up with them on a cost. A lot of decks, a lot of exterior work, siding, roofing, that type of stuff in the beginning. But now it’s starting to get back into where a lot of people are allowing us back in their houses. So, we have a ton of stuff planned for the fall to get in to do bathrooms and kitchen. We were afraid, we were nervous. We got the PPP loan that helped us get through it. But we were nervous that the work was just going to stop, but it’s actually been probably one of our best years. So, we’re fortunate.

Paul Wurth:

That’s great to hear.

Tom Houghton:

That is great to hear. Let’s spin off that success with another success that we want to talk about, which is your ability to build relationships in your community. We actually just started talking off-air about how you were just featured on your local Fox station there, Fox 61. One of the things we noticed, again, following in on social media. If you’re listening right now and you’re not following TruNorth on social media, you can find them on Instagram, would be one place you can find them. And that’s just @trunorthconstruction without the E.

Jeff Sawyer:

There you go.

Tom Houghton:

T-R-U, and then north construction. But we noticed on there that you… Obviously for those people, again, listening and not aware of the weather patterns of the United States, of course, big storm season coming in here. And even though you’re in Connecticut, a lot of people think like Florida or Texas with all the hurricanes, but (Hurricane) Isaias came through, really heavy and hit the area really hard. And we noticed just the way in which you reached out to people on social media. I just thought it was so great how you phrase stuff and how you were really just saying like, “Hey, we’re a part of this community. We feel the impacts of this too. Let us know how we can help.”

Tom Houghton:

It’s hard because obviously in the marketing game you feel like everything could seem disingenuous, but it didn’t, it felt very genuine. And it felt like… Again, everything that we’ve seen doing some research and background on your company is that you’re a part of the community, you give back. So, I’d love to talk about all of those things. How they got started? Especially to how you’re giving back to the community, just take us through it all.

Jeff Sawyer:

Yeah. I’ll start from the beginning. Matt and I, when we started the business, we literally sat in a conference room where we just got done reading Simon Sinek’s book, “Find Your Why.” And we sat in this conference room and we said, “What is our company why? What are we going to… Why are we doing this?” And we both were some people that played sports and were involved in team efforts. And we both just said relationships, we really loved the interaction between the client, our trades, our suppliers. And we love that part of the business. And that’s what’s driven everything… It’s really what set the tone for our business. Everyone wants to focus on profit and how great everything… What their quality work is, which is part of it.

Jeff Sawyer:

But we really focused on developing relationships with our clients that when we get done with a job, we always say, “We’re going to end up being your friend.” And we end up being friends with our clients. We’re always someone that they can call at any time. And especially in times of when we’ve just had this hurricane come through, where most of us lost power for a week, and we had tremendous tree damage. And so, people right away were calling us because we had done previous projects performed. And I think when you can create the relationship, almost a friendship, it just helps you in the long run, but it also gives you tremendous amount of referrals. And we focused on relationships, we’re focused on quality of work. We treat people right. We do a really good job, and that’s how we got this company kicked off, but it’s also morphed into other things.

Jeff Sawyer:

It’s gone from just our subcontractors, and our contractors, our suppliers and everything. We do a lot of group events where we’ll take our contractors and our suppliers out on fishing trips or take them to a hockey game, baseball game, because we want people to interact. I think it makes for a better team environment. Besides that, we also got involved with a bunch of community things. We’re heavily involved in an area up here, it’s called Coventry. We do Coventry Little League. We sponsor Coventry Little League. We built their scoreboard, we built their batting cages, stuff like that. It just gets us back in the community, people see us. And we love doing it, we all grew up playing sports.

Jeff Sawyer:

But the big one we really are involved with is, we reached out to a guy that actually worked for us for a summer. He started a company called Open Doors Outdoors, and it’s a company of non-profit that helps veterans get back out into nature and understand what nature can bring you. So, he takes people on hikes, he takes underprivileged kids on hikes. We’re a big sponsor of that, and we feel like that’s one of our proudest things that we do is to give back to veterans. So, we really wanted to pinpoint things that really meant to us. We are a part of the Cancer Society. We do Real Men Wear Pink. We do that in October every year. We wanted to find certain things that affected all of us. And we came up with these three or four things that we really put our time and our focus into.

Tom Houghton:

That’s awesome. That’s extremely commendable too that you’re doing that and that you figured out what that why is for your business. And it almost sounds like from day one you’ve had that as your TruNorth of the business.

Jeff Sawyer:

Exactly. Yeah. Honestly, parts of our slogan is simply… The most important thing we build is relationship. We build quality and honesty, but the most important thing we build is relationships. And it comes out in our marketing, everyone that is involved in our marketing, our Instagram, our Facebook people that make our content and do our post, they understand what our goal is, and that’s coming from a relationship-based goal. And I think it really shows in our Instagram and anything we do in the community.

Tom Houghton:

Absolutely. I wanted to talk briefly too, because again, your marketing team or you yourself, you’re doing a great job getting all this information out there. So, one of the things that we talked about tipping off into this category was your appearance on the local news station. I’m curious if you could share a background on that story, just because again, that’s such great publicity for your local community there for you to be seen as a subject matter expert for your local community. So, maybe give us some background on how you got into that.

Jeff Sawyer:

Yeah. We stumbled into that, we got lucky. I was at my high school reunion. I’m not going to tell you how many years it was. But we happened to meet one of the girls I went to high school with. Her and her partner own a law firm here in Hartford, they’re divorce attorneys, and they’re on TV regularly. And I saw him at the reunion and I just said, “How can you guys get me on TV? I wanted to start to building our brand in different ways.” And we came up with this crazy concept of remodeling through a divorce. So, they brought me on as an expert. And we talked about different ways to help when you remodel through a divorce, whether it’s taking care of the kid’s rooms. And I mean now you’re managing two homes. So, we spun it into a pretty neat topic, and we got a lot of great feedback for that.

Jeff Sawyer:

That was the start of it. And then, I guess I did all right on it. I did a pretty good job on it. And they invited me back to be an expert on… Then we came up with the top three projects you can do to create value in your house. And then, the three projects that you should stay away from that you’re going to spend money and lose value. We’ve been fortunate where we just stumbled into that, but they really enjoyed us. And the Fox News one, obviously that came about actually yesterday because of the storm damage and how our response has been in terms of the storm damage and trying to help people get through this and navigate. There’s so many questions, so many things that come up, you’re just not sure how to handle it. And so, we tried to layout some basic things for people.

Tom Houghton:

That’s fantastic. And we’ll put a link to some of those articles that you talked about. And if the show ends up putting the clip on the air, on the website somewhere, we’ll put that in our show notes. So, check out buildertrend.com/podcast for links to TruNorth Construction to their Instagram, Facebook, their website, and some of those articles that we’re talking about there, so that way you can follow along at home when you’re listening. Make sure you check that out.

Tom Houghton:

I wanted to talk about as an owner of the company, your focus on making sure that all of these messaging is coming out clearly and that it’s a priority. We were just talking about strategy in another podcast and as an owner, of course, you’re thinking about, “Okay, where are we going to next?” But also you got to figure out what we’re doing right now to make sure that we get to where we’re going to next. How do you juggle all of this? Being in front of the camera, on the air, working with your marketing team on this stuff, and then also handling all the day-to-day operations or is that why you have a co-owner as you’re splitting the responsibilities there?

Jeff Sawyer:

Yeah. I handle all the marketing and all this stuff to do with the client-based stuff or Instagram, Facebook, but I have a great team behind me. I have a guy that I hired that used to be a director who did some small movies. And he does a lot of our video content. And then, I have this wonderful girl that helps me with all the postings and coming up with some of the written stuff, but we really met with them, and we want to just tell them and we developed this plan of what’s important to us and why are we doing this? What are we in this business for? And really, we hammered to them that it’s all about relationships.

Jeff Sawyer:

Now, we do have fun on our Facebook. We started out with our videos, we’re more an HD-style video, where we’d walk around and talk about our project. But our video guy happened to just have a camera sitting on me and Matt, and we didn’t know we were on being filmed. It was off-the-cuff and he posted that and we got more likes and more people following it just on some of the stuff we were… We were just talking randomly about joke, we were joking and stuff. So, we changed on what we were doing because we figured out everyone’s doing the HD style. So, we do mixed in some fun stuff, we do feature videos of all our guys that are fun. We came up with an interesting concept. Matt, my business partner makes the goofiest faces. And so, actually have t-shirts that say Faces of Matt Powers.

Jeff Sawyer:

And we put out an Instagram post every month with some kind of saying on and we have fun with it. There are sometimes we even swear. We think the content is probably not appropriate sometimes, but we have fun with it. We just want to be ourselves. We want to have people when we show up to see their jobs, that they already know who we are and what kind of character we are and what kind of personality we have before we even step in their house, and I think that shines. They may not go and look at a job, but they can see what kind of personalities. I think that helps you sell because it’s part of building the relationships. They’re going to see that we’re really good people. And I think that’s been our main focus. I do have a really good team behind me that helps me do all this stuff. So, I can’t take all the credit, but we always go back and forth with just different concepts and different ideas.

Tom Houghton:

Yeah. That’s great. We’ve obviously talked in a number of episodes before about building a great team, and it sounds like you are privileged to have a great team. So, keep up the good work in that area. Again, you’re doing a great job of that. And obviously, from an outsider’s perspective, it’s something that I think all of our listeners can learn, and see, and observe, and feel a part of that you… You’re absolutely right, I know you without actually having to meet you in person. We already know you a little bit because we’ve seen everything on social media. So, it’s extremely important for business owners to be doing that, so that way it’s not just another name like TruNorth Construction that we actually know you and we know Matt from watching that stuff online. So, that’s extremely important.

Jeff Sawyer:

The video part, to me, is the most important part. I mean, everyone can post pictures of their work, but when you can actually get in front of a camera and just have some conversations and talk about different topics, I think it really helps. And you got to keep it light and have fun with it. But we get… 9 out of our 10 leads come from Facebook right now. Up here, I don’t know where you guys are, but we have these… Every town has their own local little Facebook group, and you get one person that you’ve done work in there before and someone says, “I need to redo my bathroom.” We get referrals that way, hands down, more than anything. So, we spend all our money and our time and effort on Instagram and Facebook. We don’t do any advertising on TV, radio, or anything, that’s strictly social media.

Tom Houghton:

And so, it sounds like it’s all spreading word-of-mouth, which speaks to that relationship component, right? You don’t have that without the relationship component. So you put that first, and then this is just naturally part of the success that comes from that.

Jeff Sawyer:

Absolutely. That’s exactly how we aligned our business relationship first and everything else has fit that into we’re exposed to.

Tom Houghton:

That’s fantastic. Good stuff. Well, Jeff, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and answering these questions about building great relationships. I mean, again, you guys have done a fantastic job of doing this. So, we hope our listeners have enjoyed this episode, talking with Jeff and just taking some key takeaways from this conversation about making sure that you know your why and why you’re doing what you’re doing, that’s a huge first step in that. So, that’s definitely a good key point to building great relationships and knowing where your business is going. Well done, Jeff, keep up the good work. We wish you continued success in your business and thanks for your time joining us on the podcast.

Jeff Sawyer:

Thank you very much, guys. It was a pleasure.

Paul Wurth:

Thanks, Jeff.

Tom Houghton:

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 show notes 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.”