Housing Giants - April 10, 2008 - (Page 18)

The firm’s advertising ham ising ha ng hammers it home: purchasing functions. “Unless those work processes are computerized,” Horne says, “mass customizing production homes gets really confusing, and people make mistakes that alienate customers and bleed away margin.” Horne and his team jumped into the search for the Magic Grail of 3-D design and specification software because they really couldn’t find a viable alternative to compete with the many public giants moving into the Austin market in the late 1990s. At the time, Wilshire was building 300 homes a year for $60 million in revenue. But Horne could see no future in competing with the publics on price. Wilshire was then still part of The Fortress Group, a public company created in 1997 by rolling up 13 local production builders around the country. Horne bought Wilshire out of Fortress in 2002, but in 1999, he was still managing the western region of that ill-fated experiment and looking for a way to pull the disparate parts together into one company with a unified corporate culture. That led to a year-long strategic planning process aimed, he says now, at “finding out what we want to be when we grow up.” ‘‘ Everyth we do is built around you!” Everything WHY CUSTOMIZE? Horne brought together a cross-section of his employees — not just managers — to develop a strategic vision, mission and values for the company. “It was a series of meetings, over the course of a full year,” he says now, “and we tried to develop a strategy within the context of all the trends we could see influencing society, not just nationally but internationally.” They found three big ones: 1. In consumer marketplaces around the world, people want it “their way.” “They aren’t willing to pay a premium price for anything unless they can put their own mark on it,” Horne says. “You can see this in the way Dell sells computers and the growing percentage of the automakers’ production that people ‘design’ for themselves online. The only way to beat the need to customize is to be the price leader. If you don’t offer choice, your product had better be really cheap.” 2. When people want a product, they want it now. “Speed matters,” says Horne. “They are not willing to wait. In housing, if you take six months to figure out how the house is going to look and another year to build it, by WWW.HOUSINGGIANTS.COM 18 HOUSING GIANTS.4.10.08 http://www.fortressgroupinc.com/ http://www.fortressgroupinc.com/ http://www.dell.com http://WWW.HOUSINGGIANTS.COM

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Housing Giants - April 10, 2008 Contents Viewpoint News and Moves Market CEO Spotlight The New Housing Demographics

Housing Giants - April 10, 2008

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