How to Build a Home Building Company That Runs Without You

You are great at building houses. Then you start your own company, and overnight you are also the accountant, the bookkeeper, the marketing department, the salesperson and the operations manager. Most builders I coach did not go into business to do all of that, and many of them are quietly buried under it.

I sat down with Matt Haynes, owner and managing partner of Tracewater Homes in the Florida panhandle, to talk about how to get out from under it. Matt has been in home building since he was 13, earned an accounting degree and an MBA in finance, and has served as CFO, run operations and led land development for builders. His specialty is systems. Here is the plan he laid out for building the business, not just the house.

Why do great builders get buried running their own company?

Matt described it better than I could. As a builder, you know the dirt contractor, the foundation crew, the framer, the plumber and the electrician. You know how a stairway fits in a plan. That is a huge amount of knowledge. Then you start a company, and suddenly you have to be good at a whole list of things you were never trained for. You get overwhelmed, and you get buried in the process.

Matt was honest that he has been guilty of this himself. Most of us start a business because we are good at something and think we could do it for ourselves. Our whole plan is that we will probably make more money than working for someone else. That is not a plan.

What should a business plan look like when you start with the end in mind?

Matt's first piece of advice for anyone starting out is to sit down and build a real plan, and to build it backwards. Where do you want to be in ten years? What is your exit? Then build the business to get there.

We also talked about the book The E-Myth Revisited, which makes a point I see everywhere. Running a business takes three kinds of people: a visionary who sees where you are going, someone who handles operations and execution, and someone who manages the financial side, including the books and cash flow. Most of us are strong in one, so-so in another and weak in the third. Your plan has to account for that.

Matt's practical tip: if he were starting a brand new company today, he would open ChatGPT and give it everything. What the business does, what he is good at, what he is not. Then he would ask it for a structured business plan and an implementation plan, keep feeding it information and refine it. Then comes the important step: sit down and evaluate it yourself. What is first, second, third, fourth? A great plan with no plan to implement it does you no good.

What are the top lessons for a business owner?

I asked Matt for his short list. He gave me six:

1. Start with the end in mind. Know your ten year vision or your exit, and build toward it from day one.
2. Develop your team, including the people outside your payroll. Who is your attorney? Who is your CPA? Is a family member involved? A good CPA is a partner who challenges your numbers quarterly, not just someone who files things.
3. Know your market and your value. What is unique about what you bring, and does your market even know you exist?
4. Know your numbers. What gross margin do you need for the business to work?
5. Know how to hire. Bring in the right people when it is time. Many owners are not the best interviewers, so use a process or tools to help.
6. Know yourself. What you are passionate about changes over 25 years. Matt gave an example of a team member in an operations role who realized the company needed a strong sales leader, and said the job was actually his. It was easier to hire an operations person than to find someone with his strengths in sales.

That last story says something about culture too. It only happens in a company where people feel safe enough to speak up. Matt pointed out that you want everyone, from the newest hire to the leadership team, comfortable enough to call you out if needed.

How do you run operations so the company works without you?

Matt gave me four rules for operations, and you can hear the pattern in them:

1. Have a system. It does not matter if it is as simple as an email every morning with the day's tasks. Just make it consistent.
2. Make sure everyone understands it and is trained on it.
3. Hold people accountable to the system.
4. Create a feedback loop. When something does not go according to plan, you need a process to adjust so it does not happen again.

That feedback loop comes from a question Matt's wife asks whenever something breaks: how do we never let this happen again? What process are we missing? If an inspection fails on a jobsite, why did it fail, and what was missed in the checklist? If a client sends a message that is less than enthusiastic, that is rarely the first problem. Something earlier did not go well.

He also told a story I could picture immediately. Early in a job running operations for a home builder, he rode along with a superintendent and asked how he managed his projects. The superintendent pulled out a spiral notebook, the kind you used in second grade handwriting class. He had one for every job. He had a system. But nobody else in the company knew what it was, so there was no way to repeat it, train anyone on it, or continue the job if something happened to him. Moving him to a shared project management system was easy, because he could finally see an electronic version of what he was already doing. The difference is that the whole company now did it the same way.

How do you manage by exception instead of sitting in status meetings?

If six superintendents each track their jobs a different way, a production meeting means talking through every project with every superintendent. Matt said that burns hundreds of dollars an hour in time, and it probably does not happen consistently anyway.

With one source of truth, you open a report and see every project in a five minute glance. You only discuss the ones that are behind schedule. If three jobs are right where they should be, you say good job and move on. This is managing by exception, and it works the same way for financial and sales numbers. As Matt put it, you cannot improve what you do not measure, and once you start measuring, trends appear that you could not see before.

How do you get past the fear of technology and AI?

I threw Matt a curveball on this one, and his answer was honest. He said he is a big believer in technology that lets you run a project from your phone, but that he was a very late and reluctant adopter of social media. His wife finally told him he was going to get more involved, and he had to shift his mindset from reluctant to enthusiastic because it is only speeding up.

He also described watching a friend use an AI app builder at dinner. They described an app while waiting for appetizers, and in about twenty minutes it was built, published and downloaded on Matt's phone. Something that might have taken years to write was done before the food arrived.

His advice for owners who feel intimidated: the things we are not good at tend to trigger fear, because we are used to being good at things. Look at yourself honestly, then bring in help. Matt called it an accelerant. His team is implementing a new system right now, and rather than spend a year or more on it themselves, they brought in an implementation team to work side by side with them, and expect to be up and running in about 90 days. The problem you have is almost never unique to you. Someone has already solved it and wants to help you skip the pain.

What should you never do when running a company?

Matt's list of what not to do was short and personal:

• Do not try to go it alone by brute force. He called thinking he had to do everything the thing that has hurt him most in business. And do not hire people but still keep everything running back to you. If every decision lands on the owner, you spend your days putting out fires in production while sales and finance get neglected.
• Do not hire out of necessity. Looking back 25 years, every time he hired because of an urgent need, he probably made a bad choice. Building and construction go through cycles of climbing and plateauing. Know where you are in the cycle and hire early, not late. The late hires are the bad ones.

On the owner-as-hero problem, Matt shared a simple habit. When someone brings you a problem, ask, what do you suggest? About 80 percent of the time they already know the answer and just want confirmation. Say go run with it, and next time they will not even need to ask. A culture where the first question is how do we solve it, not who do we blame, frees the owner to do the work only the owner can do.

What are the two takeaways?

I asked Matt for the one or two things every owner should remember. First: always be adapting, especially with technology. Look at your company and ask what you can do new, and what your industry is changing that will force you to change. Get ahead of it. Second: use other people. Bring on advisors, consultants and team members who fit your culture, rather than people you have to bring on in a panic. As Matt said, business is a team sport.