“The most important thing
we ever did was establish the core values that we agreed would not be compromised,”

Ed Horne
Wilshire Homes

Success Stories

Ensuring a Path to Growing Your Home Building Company

Serving your customers should be “job #1” for all home building employees. That’s because the surest path to growth is a strong customer base, and the surest path to a strong customer base is exceeding every perception of customer value. Easy to say, harder to do.

What are you doing that is providing huge value to your customers? Do something that is difficult for your competitors to copy and then extend that across your product lines. The key is to involve everyone in looking critically at company assets — people, pro-cesses and structure — and in imagining how they can be used better.

Some companies won’t go through the human and intellectual investment to achieve real changes. They may be too big to make nimble changes or are saddled with leadership and staff who are comfortable with the status quo. But, done right, the results are worth it, as Wilshire Homes of Austin, Texas, spotlighted later in this newsletter, can attest.

“With major help from Mike Hollister, SCG Vice President, we put together a process that allowed our people to determine what the company is going to look like and that is a powerful, powerful tool,” said Ed Horne, CEO of Wilshire Homes.

“If the strategy is clear to your employees, their work everyday is far more rewarding because they know they’re part of making a company great,” reflected Hollister.

“The most important thing we ever did was establish the core values that we agreed would not be compromised,” said Horne. Honesty, integrity, trust and respect, teamwork, entrepreneurial spirit, excellence and continuous improvement are the values now embraced by all employees at Wilshire Homes and are the basis for all decisions.

The employees knew where they’d been, and where they wanted to go. Their collective energy determined the initiatives that would let them win the game. They were empowered to deliver a buying experience that was second to none, allowing the company to differentiate itself in the marketplace and capitalize on a program of customization — giving buyers what they want, the way they want it with real time pricing readily available.

This proactive approach allowed the company to not only compete with the big builders entering the market, but grow the company amidst increasing competition.