Live from BTU: Trunk Bay Companies – Modernizing a construction business through word-of-mouth marketing

Show Notes

Wes Trunk, project manager at Trunk Bay Companies – Bloomington, Illinois – joins us on The Building Code podcast during Buildertrend University (BTU), our two-day user conference. We cover with him many topics, from palm trees to Trunk Bay’s business and everything in between.

Started in 2001 by Wes’s father, Marty, Trunk Bay Companies completes custom home builds in Central Illinois. In recent years, Trunk Bay has made their business more efficient in more ways than one. The company has adjusted from ten employees to three, and they reset their annual home build expectations appropriately.

When it came time for Wes to join his father’s company after college, he joined when it wanted to fine-tune its core processes rather than expand into new markets. At the time he joined, Trunk Bay Companies had just started to use Buildertrend, compared to when he assisted in high school and business practices were more manual.

With no trade school or project management experience, Wes had one very important thing under his belt: people skills. His college communications degree gave him the perfect (although untraditional) skills to be a project manager, and his tech abilities were the perfect addition. In any case, Wes will be the first to tell you he wants to continue to learn all he can to become a better project manager, whether he learns from subcontractors, his father or through Buildertrend.

Speaking of learning through Buildertrend … Wes recently attended two days of Buildertrend University. What was his experience like? As far as classes go, “The teaching has been off the cart.” He also made more professional connections than he ever thought possible at the event

Trunk Bay Companies is a testimony to the power word-of-mouth marketing can bring. They never stop asking their customers to talk about their happiness with their project outcomes, and it works! And we may just see Wes back at another Buildertrend University session in the near future.

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Transcript

Tom Houghton:

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

Paul Wurth:

I’m Paul Wurth.

Tom Houghton:

And we’ve got Wes.

Wes Trunk:

What’s up guys.

Tom Houghton:

Wes is joining us from Trunk Bay. That’s your company’s name?

Wes Trunk:

Yes sir.

Paul Wurth:

Trunk Bay.

Tom Houghton:

Not a location. His location of course, Bloomington, Illinois.

Paul Wurth:

We’re live at Buildertrend University again.

Tom Houghton:

We are.

Paul Wurth:

So …

Tom Houghton:

Wes joined us for a lovely two-day Buildertrend University.

Paul Wurth:

Yeah. This one’s a little interesting because on day two, as people know who’ve been here, day one has the party at night. Day two is a bit of a different vibe.

Tom Houghton:

Day one had everything. Trainings, you meet your coach, the whole party thing at night, dinner. You’re going from seven to, well, whenever you want the night to end.

Paul Wurth:

So, I was asking you last night Wes, Trunk Bay, what’s with that name because it’s in the Midwest, right?

Wes Trunk:

Yeah. So, my last name’s Trunk.

Paul Wurth:

Okay. That makes sense now.

Wes Trunk:

So, Trunk Bay is a bay, a body of water in the Caribbean, on the island of St. John. My dad is a big time South Florida, Caribbean. He was studying marine biology. That’s where he studied biology and chemistry in college, ended up in construction. So, his company, that’s where we work for, you don’t got to do what you major in, so he always told me that growing up, I got a biology degree. So, Trunk Bay, he loves the warm weather, loves the South and yeah.

Paul Wurth:

It makes sense from a marketing point of view. If you’re in the cold Midwest, you’re going to gravitate to a name that makes you feel warm.

Wes Trunk:

That’s true. And our logo is a Palm tree and that’s what he always says is, push the palm tree because no one’s ever looked at the palm tree and thought sad thoughts, right?

Paul Wurth:

Yeah. That’s a good point. No bad vibes for Palm tree.

Tom Houghton:

That’s true.

Paul Wurth:

That’s something like falls in your head. That doesn’t happen.

Wes Trunk:

Yeah, it’s most palm trees don’t have coconuts. Fun fact.

Paul Wurth:

Oh, is that true?

Wes Trunk:

Yeah.

Paul Wurth:

Oh, I didn’t know that. Okay. We’re learning today.

Tom Houghton:

Exactly.

Wes Trunk:

It is a standing palm tree. So, it is good. It’s not falling.

Paul Wurth:

It’s not falling.

Wes Trunk:

Exactly.

Paul Wurth:

It’s good. That makes a lot of sense. So, tell us about, we ask everybody what’s the profile of your business?

Wes Trunk:

Yeah. So, we’re a fully custom design single-family homes, Central Illinois is a very ranging market, so we’ve been in business for about 15 years and anywhere from 30 homes a year to 10 to 12 and just recently last year, we’re slimming down to maybe five to 10 would be our target range. So, custom floor plans, we don’t replicate anything. Everything we do is bid out. Your house is priced for your house, nobody else has anything like it, so Bloomington, normal Central Illinois, where we build that, is a high reputation for cookie-cutter homes. We have State Farm insurance headquartered there, Country insurance, so people are moving and out all the time, relocations, things like that. So, homes there were just built to live in for a few years and then move on, not a whole lot of specialty new construction.

So, why we’re building there? I have no idea, but that’s where we were and it’s awesome. I have loved being a part of Trunk Bay, it’s been even better since I graduated college a couple of years ago and figured out they were using Buildertrend. I helped out a little bit in high school and it was a lot more manual and just a little frustrating. Our company was bigger at that point, now we’re slimming me and three people. It’s my dad, who’s the owner and designer. We have our office admin who runs our emails and purchase orders and helps our accounting department who we outsource there and then I’m our project manager.

Paul Wurth:

So, you’re in the field?

Wes Trunk:

Yes. Yes.

Paul Wurth:

And who’s in charge of client communication? Who takes the lead there?

Wes Trunk:

Tag team between me and my dad. So, we’re our sales team. So, we’re the ones meeting with prospecting clients, designing floor plans, we have people who draw up the floor plans so we space plan, we create and design custom homes that then we produce and bid out for our homeowners.

Paul Wurth:

So, when you say slim down, was that on purpose, and you’re looking for higher end stuff? Higher revenue jobs?

Wes Trunk:

Yeah. It was slimmed down in terms of our company used to be, I think 9 or 10 employees in the early 2010s. To process through people retiring, moving on to other things, we had a couple of guys to go start their own building companies, but then the market just … Again, we used to cookie-cut 300 homes a year. It was 300 homes a year from late ’90s through ’07, ’08 when the market crashed and slowly went from 300 to 225 to 150 to 80 to now where I think, this year we’re going to be in the 30s. It is a fraction of what it used to be, so you either adapt or die.

Paul Wurth:

But for some companies, less volume’s a lot easier, right?

Wes Trunk:

Yeah. So, definitely from a sense of getting used to the construction process, again, I’ve been in this about 11 months now as our project manager. So, getting used to the process has been a lot easier instead of … It’s a fine balance because, obviously, you want repetition and more houses, you can get used to the timelines and what you need in a certain point. But also it’s nice to only have one or two things to focus on at a time …

Paul Wurth:

Something custom and special and …

Wes Trunk:

Yeah. It gives you time to really think about your process, in a time where if you’re punching out 15, 20 houses a year, again, I’m speaking relatively for a company our size. If we were doing 15, 20 houses a year, we wouldn’t have necessarily the time to even think about our processes. We would just stay in what we were doing because that’s easier, it works and that’s generated the most revenue for us.

Paul Wurth:

And you have to do that to keep the wheels moving.

Wes Trunk:

Exactly. But now that we’re slowing down a little bit, we’re taking the time of saying, “Hey, is this really the best way we can bid out our houses? Is this really the best way our whole sales process, how do we do make five meetings, three meetings? How do we make 10 different adjustments and edits 8?” Stuff like that.

Paul Wurth:

Let’s talk about your journey with your company because that’s the most interesting thing for Tom and I when we were talking about you, is that you’re young, you came into the business 11 months ago, you said?

Wes Trunk:

Yeah.

Paul Wurth:

Coming from the generation that grew up with technology, moving into your dad’s company, but an industry that’s definitely not a made that revolution yet. What was that like?

Wes Trunk:

Well, stressful. That’s number one thing. Everyone says construction is not easy and they’re absolutely right there. There are a million details that go into whatever you’re doing, as small as a single family house, even smaller than that in remodels, there’s still a lot of intricate pieces of it. Taking the time to get to know that has been my biggest time consumer so far is, aside from getting used to my first job out of college, I also have to learn … I have a communications degree, so I didn’t go to trade school, I had a liberal arts university that we didn’t teach anything in framing or takeoffs or any sort of project management skills like that. All I have is, I know how to talk to people, I know how to look at a computer, and I look at a computer software and know where to click around to get what I need to get out of it and knowing the right critical questions to ask to get the answers I need.

Paul Wurth:

Right. Your dad could have taken that one or two ways, right? Like “Don’t come in here and tell me what I’m not doing.” Right?

Wes Trunk:

Absolutely, yeah.

Paul Wurth:

Or he could say, “This is really cool. Somebody is going to take a fresh look at my business and my processes and just give me an analysis.” Is that how it went?

Wes Trunk:

Yes. Ironically enough, my dad and I were in Florida when we first talked about the idea of me coming on and a lot of things went into that conversation. One, he told me one of his favorite analogies, this is a foxhole and I’m in a foxhole every single day, and I need somebody in there to back me up. That’s what this business felt like for him. And also we know we have a very open relationship communication wise, we can say a lot of things to each other. We’re both pretty open about conflict, so we can just tell each other, “Hey, I don’t think this is going to work. I’m upset by the way you did this.” Both ways. And he reciprocates that and listens pretty well.

But he said, you know what? This isn’t something that I want to be tied down to for the next 10 or 15 years. He always wants to be a part of Trunk Bay. He’s got the design eye. That’s his niche, but he doesn’t necessarily want to engage as fully in the process as … He would hire that help. He would hire the project managers. He would hire the people who would take the job from start to finish for him and he could just design the house. So, that’s where we start in our communication. He says, this is something that if you want to do, I’ll always be there to offer assistance and support but as much as you want to take, as much as you want to engage yourself, that’s how far the company is going to go because we were already on a downturn in terms of our staff and our numbers and stuff like that. We see the writing on the wall that, hey, we’re not growing for the next 15 years. We got to figure out how to be more efficient.

Tom Houghton:

It sounds like the ingredients that you have there, so you’ve got your dad who is open and willing to change. You’ve got yourself, who’s new but also open to trying to figure this out. So, you’ve got two people that are willing to give a little on the rope on this game of tug of war, right? So, I’m just thinking, for other people, how they can apply this, you’ve got to go into this open-minded when you’re bracing new technologies, new changes for your business. You’ve got to be willing to have those tough conversations that you’re having honestly.

Paul Wurth:

Yeah. You got to be able to, which is probably pretty hard if you don’t have a situation like Wes coming in, a change in your business, but you know you want to improve your business. You got to be able to step out of it and just really look at it with a fair lens like, “Is what we’re doing working?”

Wes Trunk:

And one of the biggest things that I would add is having a sense of humility was a huge part of me even being able to improve and grow the way I have so far in just 11 months. I have to go to our subcon … We’re a three-person company, so we don’t have a training process and we don’t have a, “Hey, you’re going to spend this three months shadowing your superior.” That wasn’t the case for us. It was, “Hey, go into it. This is a minefield. And when your arm blows off, you figure out a way to reattach it and then not do it the next time.”

Paul Wurth:

Right. Don’t step there.

Wes Trunk:

Yeah. I was going to say that. That escalated quickly there.

Paul Wurth:

Well, we’ve got a lot. We have foxhole.

Tom Houghton:

We’ve got a foxhole. Exactly.

Paul Wurth:

Were you watching some war movies.

Wes Trunk:

I wasn’t. But for some reason, that’s where we go to.

Paul Wurth:

That’s all right. That makes sense. Yeah.

Wes Trunk:

But I have to go to our subs a lot and be like, “Hey, explain this to me like I’m 10,” because this is my first go around through it. And yeah, that does take a lot of, I need to learn this and I can’t have a super high head about like, “Oh yeah. I’m going to manage this super well from day one.” No, I’m going to say, “I’m going to screw up left and right. But I’m going to get better and not do the same mistake twice.

Paul Wurth:

Yeah. You got to check your ego in your situation.

Wes Trunk:

Absolutely.

Paul Wurth:

That’s really great. It’s very similar to this place too. A very common question when people look at Buildertrend employees are, were you guys in construction? Or were the owners of Buildertrend, did you guys come from construction? And the reality is no, because we’re not in construction, we’re in software. You know what I mean?

Wes Trunk:

Yeah.

Paul Wurth:

You don’t have to necessarily be in the trade, but what you do like you, have to be very open, ask questions to your clients who are in construction like, how do you do this? And what’s the best way to create a software to help you do it?

Wes Trunk:

That’s what I’m super excited about. I’d say our Buildertrend software has all of the information you would need to go run your construction company but instead of somebody who has that knowledge, then pulling it out of the software to go do it. You have somebody who doesn’t have that knowledge attacking the software and investing in the software, immersing themselves in the scheduling, the POS all of that stuff too because it’ll run itself. You don’t have to think about the 30 different things that you had to 10 years ago.

Paul Wurth:

Yeah. So, for somebody like you, the software was a nice safety net for you, right?

Wes Trunk:

100%.

Paul Wurth:

Because you had no knowledge of what to do.

Wes Trunk:

That is absolutely what it is for me because I rely on that left and right to tell me what I need to know about the construction process. I don’t have another source of information like that.

Paul Wurth:

That’s why this is a cool interview because most people you talk to have been in construction forever and then they started using Buildertrend and applied Buildertrend to their business.

Tom Houghton:

Yeah. It all goes back to putting those processes in place. You got to have those processes in order to grow or in your case just to be more efficient at what you’re doing.

Paul Wurth:

So, talk about just a little bit, since we are live at BTU, what has your experience been? Actually, what was your expectations and then what’s your experience?

Wes Trunk:

No. I tried to come in with a blank slate. I did a lot of preparation as far as questions I wanted to ask, I’ve done seminars and conferences before, but seeing the office, first of all, understanding who I’m calling and where I’m calling, how the people talk to each other. Not only, obviously, do I talk with my coach, but if I need a question quick, I’m talking to anybody in here. I’ve met 10 people who I’ve talked to before this weekend so that’s been cool for me. I wasn’t expecting to meet and build as many relationships as I did. Even meeting you last night, Paul, and coming up and knowing my name. I was like, “This is employee number one,” and having that was pretty cool.

But as far as the classes go, the teaching has been off the chart. I wrote everything down that I could, and I have so much that I want to go back and again, start putting putting even more into the software. Don’t try to do everything all at once. Little doses because not only do I have to go communicate what this week was like for me, but I got two other people in my company who didn’t get the same experience who also don’t necessarily engage and build a trench to the level that I do. So, I have to figure out a way to impact them as close to as much as I was impacted this week in our own time.

Paul Wurth:

You have to distribute the information to the people in that. Once it’s now being passed down for a couple of hands.

Wes Trunk:

But you were saying last night, you got to figure out a way to get them here or something there to, again, help that process of sharing the knowledge. I think it’s true. We hear this from a lot of people who come here. Coming to the office, experiencing the Buildertrend culture, meeting your Buildertrend coach, which you did, you got to meet Marge who was a fantastic Buildertrend coach.

Paul Wurth:

She’s one of our best.

Wes Trunk:

So, shoutout to Marge.

Paul Wurth:

She’s right here.

Wes Trunk:

She slipped me five bucks to say that actually. Her whole team is great here. You referenced that. You’ve talked to the few people.

Paul Wurth:

So, how do we get dad here? Do I just need you to take a picture with a Palm tree? You know what I mean?

Wes Trunk:

Yeah. First of all, finding one in Omaha in which …

Paul Wurth:

We’ll photoshop. Yeah, we’ll just photoshop.

Tom Houghton:

Swim trunks and shades.

Wes Trunk:

Yeah, there you go. In a pile of snow that’s outside.

Tom Houghton:

Yeah.

Paul Wurth:

Yeah.

Wes Trunk:

Great.

Paul Wurth:

Well, he’ll definitely come in the summer. That’d be fun.

Wes Trunk:

Yeah. Omaha is not … I couldn’t really convince him to go, he moves South in the summer or in the winter, not laterally. So, it’s March. So, he’s probably got another month or two before he starts going East and West.

Paul Wurth:

Yeah. So, how do you guys market? What are those decisions? Are you out there advertising in papers, in video or buying stuff? What do you do?

Wes Trunk:

Yeah, so our biggest marketing tool is word of mouth. So, we try to deliver excellent homes and excellent customer service. We always put our clients first. Obviously, that’s true of a lot of people, but even as personal as our company is with each individual homeowner, we might only be building for five people a year. So, we have to have that relationship first, pre-sold are difficult for a reason. It’s because you have to deal with the people, so we try to make that relationship as easy as possible. So, word of mouth, we’re not in newspapers, billboards really, so we do a lot of Facebook, Instagram, photos of our houses, get a lot of activity because obviously the design element of Trunk Bay is one of its best features.

Tom Houghton:

So, tell us about this video you did. You did a marketing video, was it about your team or was it about your product?

Paul Wurth:

It was angle.

Wes Trunk:

Yeah, so we did one segment, maybe last summer when we closed a house. We closed a really nice custom house that we did so we actually got in there the week that it was clean and really nice, and it let us shoot some different angles. We did some introductions to our team. And then earlier this spring, we had a couple of our subcontractors and actually, a homeowner come in and talk about how we run our sales process, a little bit about Buildertrend and how they get to engage with the software and watch their house being built. So, shoutout to you guys, we …

Paul Wurth:

Hey, shoutout. Yeah.

Wes Trunk:

… got to plug you guys a little bit, but we’re hoping to be able to use this for, who is Trunk Bay? Who you’re going to work with? Who you’re going to see? What’s the house going to look like? We’re hoping to be able to replicate this for years to come.

Tom Houghton:

Yeah. That’s good.

Paul Wurth:

And people expect that, honestly. People expect to be able to go to a website, obviously, if you don’t have a website, that’s a must. But when you get there, like you said, you don’t need pages of content, you want visuals. Show me your work.

Wes Trunk:

I know you build houses, show me what the house looks like.

Paul Wurth:

And show me something about you.

Tom Houghton:

Yeah. I want to get to know …

Wes Trunk:

Show me the process.

Paul Wurth:

Because like you said, especially in your volume, it is a relationship and a long one and ups and downs the whole time. So, you got to feel good about who you’re in the foxhole with. That was a callback.

Wes Trunk:

That was. Yeah. The level of relationship that we get with these people, we just know there’s going to be stressful times coming along in the process. People are going to freak out about the way this looks, the things that we’re comfortable with, they won’t be, and they want somebody who’d be able to stand there with them and say, “Hey, it’s going to be all right. Don’t worry, give it a little bit of time,” or whatever. They need somebody they can trust, not someone they think got two fingers behind their backs trying to manipulate them.

Tom Houghton:

Yeah.

Paul Wurth:

Right. I’m going to go watch this thing.

Wes Trunk:

Yeah, I know. I sent you the link.

Tom Houghton:

Yeah. If we’d actually, we’d like to put it in the show notes if that’s okay with you …

Paul Wurth:

Yeah, we’re posting the show notes.

Tom Houghton:

… we will post this to everybody to check out. So, check out the show notes. You’ll see a link to this video that we’re talking about here and …

Paul Wurth:

One follow-up question I had for people who are listening because a lot of them are construction companies like you. When you talk about banking on your referrals or word of mouth, do you actually ask the homeowner or speak to that part of it when you close?

Wes Trunk:

So, this was something that I think my dad came up with a few years ago. He gives everyone a visual. He’ll tell this to them from the first meeting. He says, “Hey, I’m going to promise you a lot of things and deliver on every single one of them and more. If I do all of that, I’m going to spin your shoulders around and say, go tell people.” He’ll tell them that in the first meeting and then when we close the house, when we have our walkthrough the day it closes, he’ll say, “Hey, your house is beautiful. We’ve loved it. We’ve loved getting to know you guys. The best thing you can do for us is go tell … If anyone’s asking about moving, buying property, selling property, we’re also real estate agents so that helps as well. But just tell them that we try to serve people the best as we can. That’s really our book of business.”

Paul Wurth:

That’s amazing.

Tom Houghton:

That’s great.

Paul Wurth:

That is a great little tip.

Wes Trunk:

And really, he says, “That’s my salesforce. That’s my marketing tool, is all of our homeowners.” We created a salesforce without adding to Trunk Bay, because we just tell people, “Hey, anytime you get a chance to talk about your home, how beautiful it is, you’re hosting parties or whatever it is just let them know who did it. Let them know we’d be happy to talk to them if we can help out with remodels, whatever.”

Paul Wurth:

Whatever. And do you get feedback from your leads that come to you and say, “Hey, Mrs. X, Y, and Z told me about you.”

Wes Trunk:

Oh, yeah. One of the first things we ask people, really in the meeting is like, “Hey, how’d you hear about us?” And I’d probably say eight or nine times out of 10 it’s, oh well, I know this person down the street. My cousin or my brother built a house, or you built for one of his friends or something like that. People just talk and that’s how we do it.

Tom Houghton:

Yeah. This is the power of the customer testimonial, the reviews that real people are sharing of your work. This is what we talk about. The video class, it’s all about the power of the referral because that’s the best way you can sell your business is through somebody else.

Wes Trunk:

You can blast five stars. You can put inspirational quotes on your website. The best thing that you can get is somebody telling you, “Hey, I did it with those guys and they’re good.” And it speaks volumes.

Tom Houghton:

Wes, thank you so much for your time and joining us on the podcast today, we really enjoyed getting to know you, getting to know Trunk Bay a little bit, talking about a whole bunch of good stuff. I’m going to try to get back here, too. I already talked with some of the other coaches that I’ve spoken to and maybe if I come back, we’ll try to golf or something like that.

Wes Trunk:

There you go.

Tom Houghton:

Stay an extra day, things like that.

Paul Wurth:

Come back when it’s not winter. Yeah.

Wes Trunk:

You come here, you build your network. You’ve got these relationships.

Paul Wurth:

Come to BTU.

Tom Houghton:

That’s right.

Wes Trunk:

There would be one thing if I’m leaving this place with one thing, and I’m going to go tell it to my company, I would tell it to anybody. The only thing that would be better than working at Buildertrend is running a company that is utilizing Buildertrend to the fullest. That’s what I’m super excited about heading home.

Paul Wurth:

So, you’re going to max it out.

Wes Trunk:

Yeah. Absolutely. I’m going to try to work so hard, so it’s good.

Paul Wurth:

That’s awesome. Let’s cut that quote and put it everywhere.

Wes Trunk:

That sounds good. Sounds like a plan.

Paul Wurth:

Great. Thanks, Wes.

Wes Trunk:

Thank guys.

Tom Houghton:

All right Wes, thank you.

Wes Trunk:

Yeah.

Tom Houghton:

Thanks again for joining us. Don’t forget to rate and subscribe to our podcast, “The Building Code.” We’ll see you next time.

Paul Wurth:

Appreciate you.

Wes Trunk | Trunk Bay Companies


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