Matt Risinger: The New Ways to Sell Building Supplies to Builders – EP.272

(00:00:00) – Intro
(00:01:26) – Matt’s journey: From builder to YouTube star
(00:07:33) – The birth of The Build Show
(00:13:06) – The importance of customer service in building
(00:19:58) – Changes in the building supply industry
(00:26:15) – The future of semi-custom home building
(00:28:42) – Challenges in window and door sales
(00:33:10) – The importance of detailed orders and communication
(00:37:44) – The role of content in builder-supplier relationships
(00:40:18) – Introducing the Build HD standard
(00:45:45) – Upcoming events and reflections on the industry

Alex Bridgeman: Thank you Matt, for coming on the Think Like An Owner podcast. This show’s all about how the most ambitious CEOs are growing companies and you’ve grown, uh, at least two companies by my count, through rising our builds and now build show.

And I’m excited for your Build show live conference this Friday and and Thursday in Dallas. So that’ll be a ton of fun. I’m excited for that. The first one was great. This is only our second one. It’s hard to believe. Time flies. The first one was a lot of fun. I really, I really enjoyed that. It’s pretty packed too.

You could tell the demand for in-person content connection and stuff like that was, is pretty strong. Yeah,

Matt Risinger: yeah, for sure. We had great, uh, first, I mean, straight outta the gates. We had 2000 people at our first brand new conference, so that was amazing.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, that’s, that’s pretty amazing. I’m excited to chat with you all about suppliers and how home builders are, are purchasing products today and for their work.

But I wanna make sure we start with some of the background in Risinger builds and then Build Show and how the two businesses kind of overlap, because I think that influences. A lot of your thinking around how you look at the supplier side of the industry. So can you start kind of walking through how you became a home builder with Risinger and then where Build Show came from?

Matt Risinger: Yeah. I’ll give you the quick story so we don’t bore people, but I’ve been, uh, I’ve been building houses for 30 years now. I started right after college with a big national builder and built with a national builder for seven years, and then worked for a semi-custom builder. For three years before starting my own company 20 years ago now I’m a custom builder in Austin, Texas.

So we, we do typically relatively exp expensive projects. You know, our usual sweet spot is something like two to $5 million projects. Mostly new construction, but we do some, some remodel as well. And we’ve done a few more expensive than that and a few less, but that’s kind of our general sweet spot. And when I started my company in 2005, I was new to Austin.

This was my wife’s hometown. I had built in the east coast and then I built in the west coast. And we moved here when we were pregnant with our first kiddo, my wife’s hometown. And, and that was kind of my chance to, to finally flex my entrepreneurial muscles that I’d always wanted to do. So I started this home building company and I was like, oh [00:03:00] my gosh, what do I, I don’t really, I don’t know that much about running a business, even though I had 10 years of construction background.

I didn’t know that much about business in general. So I started this home building company, and one of my early challenges was like, how do I market myself? I’m, I’m brand new to Austin. No one knows me. I don’t know suppliers, I don’t know people. So I joined the Local Home Builders Association and relevant to this conversation, I also joined a purchasing group.

It was a branch of this larger national purchasing group called C-B-U-S-A, custom Builders, USA. And so I had, I had this kind of. Friends that I was builder friends, let’s call ’em at the HBA Home Builder Association. I was meeting and then a branch of them asked me to be the chairman of their brand new chapter here.

’cause I knew I had more time in my hands than they, than they did. And so myself and seven guys started up a, uh, purchasing group. Or, or I should say a branch of a, a larger national purchasing group. And as part of the Home Builder Association, one of the events that I went to was this national speaker in marketing, this guy David Meerman, Scott, and David said to Matt Reiser in 2006, traditional marketing is dead.

You should market yourself at the time. He said, with a blog, because blogs are the way of the future. You know this, this search engine called Google will send people your blog and you will find leads basically for free. And so I started blogging in 2006 and seven and found very quickly that even though I was getting, you know, 15 people to read my blog post that I’d had up for a month.

The right pe, one of those people was a prospect. And so people that. That I was interested in building houses for, they would, they would Google me, basically. They’d find my blog, they’d read a bunch of my blog posts, and I would go into meetings instead of being cold, like, who’s this shady builder? Let me find out about him.

Someone referred him, but he has not built anything here. That to all of a sudden I was a little bit of a, an expert like, oh, this guy, he’s smart. He writes blog posts about construction. So then fast forward about a year later, and a friend of mine said, oh, you should try my flip video camera and post some videos to YouTube.

And I thought, oh, this is great. I won’t have to write my blog anymore. I’ll just, I’ll just make a short video on YouTube and I’ll post that on my blog. And so I put my first video up in, uh, 2008 on YouTube. This, you know, at that point it was still relatively new. It wasn’t owned by Google yet. And it kind of turned into its own thing.

It wasn’t overnight. It’s, it’s take took years for me to get there. But now I went into meetings and I would have a video that had, let’s say 50 views and I’d be like, oh, honey, you won’t believe it. My, my video that I published, you know, a month ago is 50 [00:06:00] views, 50 people watched it. I’d go into a meeting with a, with a prospect that maybe got a referral or maybe an architect told them I was a good builder and now instead of, you know, kind of a wet fish handshake, oh, you’re the guy who writes the blog.

They’d be like, oh my gosh. Matt, I watched a couple of your videos last night. I really liked how you could tell me the difference between double glaze and triple glaze windows and why I might wanna spend more for the better window, or you help me understand the difference between fiberglass windows and wood windows.

And it was just enough encouragement for me to go, oh, this video thing, this is a big deal. Like people connect with people on video much quicker than they do writing. I mean, you, you may have a favorite sports writer or you know, maybe like Barry Weiss, the former New York Times free press writer, but I don’t even know what she looks like, frankly, you know, if, if I saw her in a meeting, I, I wouldn’t have any clue, even though I like her writing.

Right. But video on the other hand, you know, video’s super connective. You know, instantly someone that you’ve watched videos for. You know, just like the first time I met you, Alex, a year or two ago, you kind of knew what to expect of my personality before we met. And so it was really that early kind of success that I was like, oh, I should keep doing this.

This is free marketing that’s providing, uh, a really good, not necessarily leads, they weren’t necessarily leads to my company, but they were like proof points that I was. Someone that, that they might wanna work with. So it was really connective. Fast forward a few years and my current CEO, this guy Don Lisa came to me.

His brother had been working for me for a while and said, Hey Matt, this is like 20, I don’t know, 16 or 2017. I think we could turn your YouTube channel. Which at that point had maybe, I don’t know. 25,000 subscribers or something. I think we could turn this into a bigger company or bigger organization. And he kind of, he’s the one who dreamed up this whole idea of builds show network.

And so we got the.com build show network.com, and then we invited other like-minded builders and an architect. And now we’ve got about 15 people on the site that are publishing content on a weekly basis. And in recent history in the last. Even we’ve added some other YouTube channels to publish to our site as well.

So now we’re, we’re almost 20 new videos a week on our platform, and it’s all geared towards building better houses. Like we have this slogan around here, no, better build better. So it’s, it’s really fun. That’s, that’s the slightly medium version of, uh, of my history.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah. And now you’re up to 1.2 million YouTube subscribers.

So, you know, it’s been a while since you just had 25,000.

Matt Risinger: Yeah, we’ve gotten bigger, but, but an even better stat for me that I really enjoy is we get more watch time on our website overall every [00:09:00] month than we do on our YouTube channel. And that’s really cool. We’ve gotten great domain authority. Every single video we publish, we publish transcripts so that Google can crawl.

Transcript and know, hey, we’re talking about insulation or we’re talking about this nerdy detail in construction, or this hardware or this, whatever. And so people that are putting those search terms in, in some way, shape or form, we’re getting really, we’re getting ranked right up there with YouTube for, uh, for domain authority.

So we get really high top 10 results on just about anything we publish, which is really fun.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, that is pretty fun. And I, you and I have talked a lot about all the things you can do with being able to search across your site and connect with products, connects products to YouTube or products to the content about that product.

There’s gonna be a lot of fun things, especially with AI search generators that you can use. There’s a lot of things you can do now.

Matt Risinger: We have some cool things in the works that, that aren’t quite there yet, but we’re, we’re working on behind the scenes. Alex, and, and actually to tie a bow on this real quick to say I’m in a weird spot where I’ve got a home building company and I’m a 50 50 owner.

I really only spend probably 10 or 15% of my work hours on the home building company every week. But then I’ve got this other company, which is a video production company. They’re about the same size. They’re about the same revenue currently. One company uses suppliers to build houses, and the other company has typically, not necessarily the local supplier, but more like the national manufacturers as our customers.

So it’s can, it’s been kind of fun to see things from both sides. You know, we, uh, for as a for instance, you know, I’ve bought Pella Windows through Builders First Source, my supply house. As a builder, but now I have Pella windows as one of my big customers for my video production company. So I’m, I’m seeing kind of all sides of that particular supplier slash manufacturer’s world, which is fun.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, no kidding. You’ve had a lot of, you had a lot of different experiences with, with suppliers on all kinds of different angles in that relationship. What was buying and building supplies like when you first started rising or when you’re small? You, you mentioned there’s not much reputation. You’re the new guy in, in Texas.

What is that like compared to, you know, jumping ahead once you’ve got some content, you have an audience and there’s a little bit of, a little bit of cachet with your name?

Matt Risinger: Yeah. I mean it’s a whole different world 20 years ago than it is today, Alex, on on many fronts. But you know, that’s also a big reason why we decided to start that purchasing group because I was regularly meeting with other builders that were just doing a couple million dollars of business a year, and we were finding that.

We, we kind of had the sense that we weren’t getting the best pricing or the best service. The, the bigger guys were getting that reserved for them, whether it was a plumbing supply house or a [00:12:00] lumber yard or whatever. Um, and so we, I guess it was 2007, 2008, started this purchasing group and realized, oh, you know, we actually, if we, if we say together as a group, hey, we’re looking for really good service first.

But then beyond that, we want to be treated as a group with good pricing so that I’m not just buying, you know, three or $4 million worth of supplies a year, but if we get together with 10 of us or 15 of us, we’re really building, you know, $50 million with the houses a year. Well, that, that got some people to, to say, oh, you know, I might, I might be interested in working with you guys on some better pricing.

Knowing that you would favor my company over others, assuming I get the same good service to you. So that’s, a lot of that has changed over the 20 years I’ve been in business.

Alex Bridgeman: What did good service look like? What was the current experience you were having, and then what’s the, the better service, the, the model you were aspiring to be a part of?

What did that look like?

Matt Risinger: Yeah. You know, a, a lot of companies have what I would call outside sales reps, or a lot of times they’ll call ’em o srs and then they’ll sometimes have some inside sales reps as well. And the quality of that relationship and that particular person means the world to a builder who’s not a national builder.

And I would say that’s still just as true today as it was 20 years ago. As, as a quick forward example, I had this, this guy Richard, at Builders First Source. They used to be called BMC back then and they got bought, but Richard was my outside sales rep and I, I don’t remember who my inside guy was necessarily.

I didn’t necessarily get great pricing at the time ’cause I, I think I was in a, in a low volume category, so I probably had a higher margin on things. They were making more money off me than they were another builder. But I was really loyal to them because I always got great service from Richard and felt like, Hey, if, if I needed something, he would turn it around quickly for me.

Like, Hey, I’ve got this window package coming up. Bidding on this house, let’s say, can you bid this for me as a Marvin Essential package? And also give me a, a quote on, let’s say, moving to a, a jelled one 200 series. And I would get, he’d be like, yeah, well I think we can turn that around in a week. I can get that back for you Monday.

And I always got great service. He always kind of made good on his promises and so I stuck with him, even though I kind of had this sense that I wasn’t necessarily getting. Uh, most favored nation pricing, for lack of a better term, because the service was so good. And I would say that the same is very true today.

Whether it’s a purchasing group, whether it’s, you know, big builders, small builders. This is still definitely somewhat of a relationship business. And there’s [00:15:00] other things that have come into play now in terms of ordering and pricing and takeoffs. You know, being able to get pricing online, all those kinds of things, we, we’ll talk, I bet we’ll get into that.

But it’s still ultimately a personal business and people want to do business with people they like, they wanna do people business with people that they feel like care about them and their business and their success. So, you know, good old fashioned customer service is not out the window in an age that you can order anything you want from Amazon in two minutes on your phone.

Alex Bridgeman: No, no, that’s not going anywhere. If anything, with AI making more things appear, maybe human, maybe fake, maybe written by a computer, I bet that human to human connection is probably gonna make a, if it hasn’t already made a big comeback, I, it’s probably gonna be pretty strong for a long time. I totally agree.

I totally agree. Going back to like the, the co-op or the, the buying group, what was it like running that? How is that still around or did that get combined into something different?

Matt Risinger: Yeah, no, that’s still around. They actually got bought out by a bigger organization and I, I’m not in leadership anymore.

It’s been quite a few years since I’ve been in leadership with them. But they’re going strong. They’re doing really well on a national basis. They’ve, they’ve moved from. Kind of making local deals to now they have a bunch of national partnerships, like if you wanna buy Rena water heaters. You can get a rebate on Rene and kind of buy it from wherever you want, but you can apply for this, this pretty decent rebate back from them.

But it was always an, it was interesting when we started that group, Alex, that there was a, there was a little bit of a rub between not all the builders necessarily cared about getting the best pricing, if that meant that they were gonna have to go to a supplier that didn’t have good service. So there, there was some rub between the group, you know, we had.

I dunno, a dozen or so when we started at maybe 20 or 25 when I left the board a few years ago and there was, there was a little bit of a like, oh, are we gonna really use that supply house? Who doesn’t have the best relationship? Just ’cause they gave us the best price. And a lot of us like me, were like, no, I’m not gonna use them just because they’re the best price.

Price is only one. Consideration for me as a builder and, and people think, oh, it’s all about price for builders. I don’t think that’s necessarily true. I would, I’d be willing to venture that that’s not even true for the big national production builders. Uh, with the caveat being sometimes the decisions are made without the input of the field.

That was actually something that frustrated me as a field superintendent for a big national builder, was that corporate made decisions that I thought were made by. An accountant, not by a builder, without my input or without field input. So we did some things that I didn’t like as a national builder, [00:18:00] and that was frankly part of the impetus for me starting Mountain Company.

Alex Bridgeman: Did you notice that there was any correlation between the size of the supply house and quality customer service?

Matt Risinger: Ooh, that’s an interesting question. I would say that’s probably still true to this day, that typically. The smaller suppliers gave better customer service and the big national suppliers didn’t always.

As a quick, for instance, there’s a, uh, a specialty lumber yard in town here in Austin called East Side Lumber and Decking, and when I started in Austin, they were called Texas Redwood. I don’t know if they changed ownership or not, but East Side Lumber and Decking has a giant amount of custom builders that do mostly cost plus work.

Could kind of, it’s not that they could care less on pricing, they certainly do, but they’re passing the pricing on to clients. And so the difference between a $10,000 package of, you know, whatever, let’s say a exterior trim and a $13,000 package doesn’t even make the radar screen. What they care about is, can I get it there on Tuesday at 9:00 AM before my carpenter start?

Oh, by the way, if I need a hot shot, which is a industry term for, hey, we need something quickly, like, can you get it out to me? They were always, the guys were like, oh yeah, no problem. We got you Matt. We’ll have a guy there by one o’clock. You know, by the time the guys finish lunch, we’ll have that needed, whatever that you forgot to order out to the job site.

So there is still very much a place for a specialty small supplier. To compete with a big national supplier, a hundred percent.

Alex Bridgeman: So if the human to human customer service relationship that’s been, that’s still a huge, hugely important and crucial piece of any builder supplier relationship. What notable things have changed in the last 10 years?

What’s different? If I’m following you around for a week at, at Rising our build, you know, today, verse 10 years ago, as you talk to suppliers, what would I notice that’s different?

Matt Risinger: Yeah. You know, I think. I think what’s interesting is if you look at just 10 years ago, it was just 10 years ago that we had customers, especially on the custom builder side, that couldn’t necessarily price out much on their house, but they could price out, for instance, plumbing to buy it online.

And so when I presented bid packages to customers. They had no idea what paint costs were or labor for this or that, but they could actually take Kohler, part number X, Y, Z, and go find a price online and go, oh my gosh, Matt, you’re way overpaying for this Kohler toilet, or whatever it is. You know, I could find this piece online that has the same part number at 20% less or even [00:21:00] worse.

I can find this other brand that looks just like it for 60% less, and we had a solid, I don’t know, at least five years, where it was a fight with every client to say, no, we don’t want to order your plumbing package from this online retailer. We want to order it from our local supply house because they’ll give us good service and if we have a problem, we can get a part, we can get whatever.

I think it’s interesting we’ve, I wonder if we’re coming full circle on that. Like if you look at Amazon today, you can get 10,000 faucets in stock for overnight delivery. And so, and Kohler all the way down to the knockoff, you know, made in China version that looks just like the Kohler, but is. 70% off or you know, whatever.

So I have a sense that, that, that may come around again. And another quick, for instance, you know, 10, 10 ish years ago, the big box stores, I don’t want to name their names, were going after Builder business. They had like pro desks and all the pros are like, are you kidding me? Not only no, but heck no, I’m not using those guys.

And you’d have a client, you’d be like, oh, I priced it out at the pro desk and they’re gonna give. Whatever these parts and pieces are, sometimes even lumber at a much better price, and we’re like, no, absolutely. We’re not doing them well. If you look today, the big orange guy has not only a pro desk, but they have an outside sales rep who’s been hounding my people about giving us a chance, and apparently has an entire yard just in Austin.

It’s a pro yard that’s stocking all the same stuff that the big boys that are dedicated just to builders are stocking. So it’s gonna be interesting to see what happens on, on that front, but, but another interesting thing that’s happened, I would say in the last 10 years, that’s changed a lot on the supply is.

10, maybe 15 years ago when I had a set of plans, I would take it to some of my, my suppliers and say, Hey, can you give me a takeoff on this? You know, for instance, lumber, which is a huge part of construction, you always said lumber was about 7% of the cost of the build. So if you think about a lumber pack, that’s a giant amount of money.

So I was taking it to the lumberyard and saying, Hey, gimme a takeoff and then gimme a price today. Companies like Cedar Build, uh, who you may or may not have heard of. They’re a local startup in Austin. Hi Arc. Do you know those guys? They’re crushing it. And then even like Builders First Source has gone big time into this.

They call their suite of, of, uh, software, digital tools. All three of those companies are giving a full amount of information to me as a builder that I don’t have to request the takeoff anymore. I know exactly. What’s going on in the house? Every Simpson Strong tie, joist, hanger, every hold down, every two by four, every eye joist, I know all the kid apart, and I could in theory [00:24:00] take that somewhere else.

Or I, now that I know this kid apart, I can get a full breakdown price from Builders First Source, let’s say, on either that lumber package that my guys are gonna assemble on the field or on a Ready Frame package, which is basically a precut. Framing package. So it’s companies like those three that I think are really changing the, the landscape on certainly production builders, and that’s trickling down in a good way to custom builders as well.

Alex Bridgeman: So you’re saying there’s a way you could take your, your documents, put them into one of these software platforms? I, I met Mark last week at hierarchy. He was awesome. No, you did. Oh, awesome. Yeah, he’s, he’s great. So you could take your, your plans, put ’em into this software platform, which would look at your plan and then figure out exactly how many of each type of product and part that you need.

And then you can essentially give that, I guess is it a spreadsheet? Like what do you give that sent? You can send to the supply house and then they can itemize you A big giant quote.

Matt Risinger: It’s essentially a spreadsheet. It’s essentially a spreadsheet. As a side note, I think that that’s, that’s something that we’re used to as builders.

A lot of builders have their own proprietary spreadsheet that they’ve developed over the last. 15 years. That’s kind of their quick estimate spreadsheet that they’ll use. Like, Hey, I’m gonna give you not just a, a high level, oh, it’s $600 a foot to build this house. But they’ll input the square footages and the quantities, and then they’ve got a giant proprietary spreadsheet, which is nothing more than an Excel spreadsheet that’s, that’s been updated with pricing over the years that they can spit out a pretty good ballpark.

When I first moved to Austin, there was this guy, Russell Upright. I know if he’s around anymore, but he had one of these. Like giant spreadsheets that I was fascinated with when I moved here. ’cause he, he could have someone come into his, he was like a semi custom builder. He could have someone come into his model home and he had 20 plans that were his basic plans.

And he’d modify ’em however you want, but he could spit out a really close price for you to sign a contract. And then for him to know that he was gonna make his margin. On that build, starting at, you know, let’s say 90 days from now, 60 days from now. And I think that actually is back to the future with today.

I think companies like High Arc are gonna allow production builders, you know, the, the current versions of Russell Upright that are maybe doing 30 to 50 homes a year, semi-custom builders, for someone to come into a model home, take something that’s been relatively pre-designed. Modify it, spit out a contract price and them to know down to the penny how much it costs because all their suppliers are linked in digitally.

To that BI model, basically building information model to say, here’s exactly what my supply house is charging me for everything. And by the way, I can give you a photorealistic rendering of exactly what you want Mr. Customer, so that you know [00:27:00] precisely what you’re getting. And the same’s true with the, you know, BFS, their digital tools.

And if you look at the renderings that we did for a project recently called The Rising Bill, we did a full. Video series on the renderings that were done 12 months prior to completion looked. Stunningly just like the finished product. It was crazy. So, I mean, just like Chevy can build and price your heavy duty, you know, truck that’s getting the, I’m trying to think of the high end models, the, let’s call it the XLT or the Lariat model, you know, now you can do that exact same thing with house.

How crazy is that? And customize it too potentially.

Alex Bridgeman: How do you think that affects, you know, a couple more years down the road? How do you think that affects the builder supplier relationship? Does it make it more commoditized because now I can compare quotes vary directly across, or does that customer service still hold strong and like, you might see different prices, but it just gives you more pricing transparency, but the service isn’t gonna be really affected by any of that.

So maybe the, maybe the effect is. Transparency, but not transformation

Matt Risinger: transformative. I think that’s right. I think it’s the latter. I think there’s gonna be better transparency, and in fact, I think it’s actually gonna make tighter relationships in a lot of ways, because you’re gonna have preferred partners that you like working with, and you’re gonna say, Hey, link my backend with this, this, and this supply house so that I get their pricing.

’cause I like that company. I like their service, I like what I get. And it depends too on, on the, uh, on the product. Uh, how much high touch is needed. I mean, for instance, a window and door sale as a builder, if you’ve ever had one go wrong because you had a not so good salesperson, you’ll never go back. I mean, once you’ve had a bad experience, I could think of at least one or two window and door suppliers in Austin that got a bad reputation and went out of business simply because they were not great at ordering.

Understanding the process. And so you, you don’t have many chances with builders. Once you, once you make us look bad once, or make us lose money on a project because of something that happened, we’re done. We’re never gone, we’re never gonna give you a second chance.

Alex Bridgeman: Explain it to a building supply rookie.

So what? What goes wrong in windows and doors? That is exceptionally challenging.

Matt Risinger: Yeah, I mean, windows and doors are such a technical sale. You know, if, if you look at a window on a plan set, you know, it looks like a two foot wide by four foot tall window, that’s maybe a double hung. But if you order that as a Pella, if you order that as a, uh, a Marvin, as an Anderson, I mean, I could, I, I don’t even have, I had enough fingers and toes to tell you how many options there are on.

What could fill that hole and the price [00:30:00] ranges on those options are ridiculous. I mean, you could buy a window for three $50 and you could buy a window for $3,500 that fits that same hole. And not only that, you have so many options in between there that making sure expectations line up with reality is super critical.

I mean, if you’ve got, especially if you have a custom home where you have a buyer involved, right? Where it’s not just show up and I’m buying a finished spec house, let’s say. Somebody who’s saying, Hey, I’m expecting jam extensions pre-painted. I want the steady set where I install it from the inside. I want this brick molding style on the outside.

I want these integrated screens. There’s just so many options and there’s, there’s so many, uh, possibilities for failure, especially on a window because it’s these days. There are no stock windows. Everything’s a hundred percent custom ordered, which means I can, I can get a rough opening size to an eighth of an inch for whatever I want.

So now that information from the window order to the field has to be super detailed and super critical. ’cause if I’m off in some way, shape, or form, the window’s not gonna fit. I’m paying my framer to resize the, the opening. There’s a work stoppage, there’s a slowdown, there’s extra charges, there’s a window that did meet a buyer expectation.

There’s a finished carpenter that’s gotta do a jam extension later that I didn’t order correctly the first time. There’s a remodel on a new construction window. There’s just so many things that can go wrong. You’ve gotta have a really good, not just customer service person, but a really kind of nerdy.

Sales rep who understands all those details, understands code too. ’cause they also need to make sure that windows meet the correct egress issues that they may be wrong in the plans from the architect and then window suppliers, the one who has to make sure that I know, Hey, this, this window you’re trying to order for this bedroom doesn’t meet code.

We gotta change something here. Or this window in this hallway needs to be tempered. It’s not shown as tempered on the plans. Your inspector’s gonna flag it. And if you put a nont tempered window in, and now I gotta order a tempered window, it might mean that I’m not closing on the house for three weeks because we have the wrong window in place and I’m not gonna pass my final inspection.

So there’s just, it’s fraught with, with all these minor details that could be a big problem. And they’ve, and they’ve gotta have a really, really detailed order. It’s, it’s one of the most expensive pieces in the house. It’s also one of the most detailed pieces in the house. But at the same time, you know, I’ve got two suppliers right now that are fabulous at that, that I like either one.

But at the same time, those two suppliers only have a limited catalog of things that they’re really good at. So if someone comes to me and goes, I want you to order this, uh, x, y, z brand of window, if I’m not gonna [00:33:00] get that brand from one of these two suppliers, I’m really hesitant to install that brand because I dunno it, and uh, and I might not get it right.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah. And your supplier through all of that has to be incredibly organized as they get, first off the, the list of products that you want in that home, and then all the changes, and then all the ways that those changes might be communicated. Maybe you see ’em in person or there’s a, there’s a, there’s physical notes you’re taking, whether it’s a phone call or a string of emails.

A text, like there’s a hundred ways that changes are gonna be like inputted to that supplier that they have to keep track of and when things are getting delivered. And that seems like an enormous challenge. So like as you, as you talk to more, especially larger national suppliers through build show, what did the challenges sound like from that side of the table?

What, what do they talk about as their top challenges and kind of how they’re trying to stay organized and focus on them?

Matt Risinger: Yeah. I mean, I, I think that those good detailed outside sales reps are hard to come by. Right? That’s, that’s a tough one. We need just like, we need young people to come into the trades.

We need new, young plumbers and electricians. We frankly also need yo young people to enter the lumber yard to be able to come to that position and understand. What builders are talking about when they order those things. So I think labor is a, a big issue in supply house, just like it is for builders as well.

And some of these tools we’re talking about are gonna help with that in some respects. You know, I’m pretty, I’m pretty bullish about where I’m seeing companies like High and Cedar take us because they’re so organized. They’re helping builders who have traditionally been two decades behind on technology, get up to speed on it.

And so now if I, if I can give my people in the field really good and detailed information, and maybe even, and I don’t know if this is true, but I suspect it is, maybe even h has in their plans the full pellet catalog so that they can actually get that order, that takeoff super dialed. Such that now all I gotta do is take that to my sales rep and go, Hey, here’s the full Pelle takeoff, including all the orders, and H is actually connected to Pella’s back office, so they know all the latest and greatest with their catalog.

All the you need to do is give us lead time and pricing on that, and then of course provide good field service and delivery and all those other things. Maybe that’s gonna be able to reduce that additional step. That’s happened so much in the past. That’s been a tripping point.

Alex Bridgeman: So you’re saying that when there’s a change to the build, it can happen in Hayek with your takeoff and then your supplier’s already notified of the change and can start planning for it.

Yep, exactly.

Matt Risinger: Exactly. That’s pretty cool. I [00:36:00] think that’s probably already happening. That’s not happening on my builds yet, but I suspect that’s happening already in some of the more organized production builders.

Alex Bridgeman: So how do builders build that relationship with the supplier? Like what, what helps that relationship be more fruitful for them over time?

Matt Risinger: Yeah, that’s a good question. I, I think a big thing that’s helping is communication. If you look at some of our main suppliers in my home building company, I see their outside sales reps and sometimes even their upper level management at our office on a somewhat regular basis. Meeting with our team, like saying, Hey, here’s some of the new stuff that’s coming down the road.

It’s one of the things we love. Hey, here’s some of the new stuff that’s coming out, uh, that’s gonna be available for you in 2026. We can order this as of January, so if you have projects in the pipeline that you think would be a fit for this, whatever, this new product, this change in product, this new feature.

You know, ke keep these in mind for, for those projects. I love it when we have that good communication. I think it’s a two-way street though. Builders also need to be able to communicate on a regular basis. Hey guys, here’s what’s going wrong, or some things that we need to be better at, but also here’s some things that I really think are going well in our relationship.

What am I missing as a builder? How can we be a better customer of yours? So that we can make sure you’re profitable and maybe you can even reduce my pricing by a point or two because I’m a good partner with you, right? It’s kind of the golden rule. If I’m being a good customer, then you’re gonna be a good supplier, and vice versa.

Alex Bridgeman: As a content guy, where do you see a content? Affecting behavior on both sides here. Now that you’ve got, you know, many, many years of YouTube and experience working with different products and showcasing them and getting feedback on them, how is all of that changing the builder supplier relationship?

Matt Risinger: Yeah, it’s changed a ton, Alex, and I think content’s a big part of that. But our, our, our kind of slogan around here is know better, build better. And I think that’s really happened when it comes to supplies, you know. We’re putting out the information, uh, pro to pro, but what ends up happening a lot is we’ve got both customers and suppliers watching as well and learning that information and taking it into the field through all their channels.

So for instance, you know, sales rep’s going, Hey, I saw this on the build show. This is a new product. You guys should think about this. They’re forwarding a video, they’re sending a newsletter, they’re forwarding a social media clip. We’ve got customers that are sending it to builders. Hey, I’m seeing this, this, and this.

Are these options for my house? You know, what’s my air tightness gonna be? Are we, are we considering triple glaze windows for this house? What’s our [00:39:00] exterior insulation strategy? I’m in climate zone five, and it’s required in the 2024 code that I suspect we’re gonna have to build under. You know, what, what are we gonna do?

Are we gonna use zip R six? Are we gonna use some exterior rock wool? Are we gonna buy a power wool from warehouse and use this on the outside? What’s, how’s that gonna affect our window package? Are we gonna buck our windows out? And builders are like, what? You know, I, I never had a client ask me this 10 years ago, and now all of a sudden I’ve got clients that are.

Bringing Materialists in with them and saying, I want to consider these windows. I wanna consider this HVAC uh, technology. I wanna make sure I’ve got an ERV in my house, not just a old school fresh air system. It’s crazy because we make our videos expecting it to be another builder watching, but yet.

There aren’t 1,000,002 builders in the United States. Uh, and that’s our subscriber count on the build show on YouTube. So that means we’ve got at least a couple hundred thousand, if not three quarter million subscribers that are homeowners, that are engineers, that are architects, that are people that want to build a really good house and want to know and understand the process better before they enter it.

And so those are the people that are ultimately changing the market. And that gets me excited because another, uh, big piece we’ve got coming down the pipeline, Alex is this new, I think I may have told you about this briefly, but we’ve got this new standard for construction coming out called the Build HD Standard.

And you know, we’ve been making videos now for just shy of 20 years on how to build a good house, but we’ve never codified, like, here’s all the things. That we feel like need to be done differently or better than code to lead to a house that’s gonna be a really durable, a really lasting, a really comfortable, efficient house, frankly, that’s gonna have really good resale, that’s gonna have really good health for your children to be raised in that house.

For you to be able to sell that in 20 years and someone go, oh man, this is a. I would pay more for this ’cause it was built to these standards than this other house that was built last year to a lower standard. So we’re calling it the Build HD standard. It really won’t be available to the public per se, until sometime in Q1 of 2026.

But we’re given a sneak peek to the builders at, uh, build Show Live this coming week. And you’ll see us talking about it on social, but we’ve got some really high level conversations happening with. Several of those companies, as I mentioned, as well as, uh, the International Code Council and ANSI as well, about trying to actually get this adopted potentially into the code as an alternate path.

Alex Bridgeman: I love that. Yeah, I, I was, I was telling you on the phone how excited I am for this standard for a whole bunch of reasons. One, it’s kinda like a ratings agency for homes. So there’s a rating you can give a home based [00:42:00] on build equality that allows you to compare apples to apples across different homes.

That, as a home buyer, I may not be familiar with all the nuances of products. And then, you know, as I, you know, become more successful over time and wanna build a nicer home. And I’ve lived in a number of homes that were, you know, old or had bad windows or bad hvac. Like, I’m starting to, if I’m gonna build one from scratch, like I wanna make sure that I address all those things.

So is there a standard that’s. Above code that’s gonna focus on quality and, um, you know, air and water and all this other stuff to make sure that it’s as good as it can be. And is there a standard that I can adhere to or at least point to and say, Hey, you know, Mr. Builder, can you build this to this standard that Matt’s talking about Over here, there’s, there’s a hundred ways you can use, that’s our idea,

Matt Risinger: and we’re trying to make it, we will be made fully public that you can decide to follow or not, but at least it’ll be good guidance.

Uh, for you. So that’s, that’s our plan is to really make this as adopted as possible. But frankly, as of all our information on our website’s, a hundred percent free, we do everything that’s manufacturer sponsored rather than paywall. So we really are trying to get as much of our information on building better to the general public as possible.

And so I’m excited about this for that same reason that I think we’re gonna reach a whole nother new audience that maybe has this. General understanding that houses have changed and they don’t quite know why and they want to build to a higher standard.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah. They see all the, the home building lawsuits and they’re like, well, how do I, how do I avoid that?

How do I, I don’t wanna buy a home that falls apart or melts in the sun within a week of buying it. There’s, there’s a lot around there that you can probably help with. No doubt. That’s the idea. It’s a good continuation of the content focus too, like your content focus of know better, build better, but the content focusing on education over time and now too.

It’s still, it’s still very much an education focus, but it’s, it’s more like implementation, like in, in practice. So out in the wild can I use, can I benefit from Matt’s knowledge of home building in my own life in a way that doesn’t require me to watch, like I could probably spend the rest of my life watching all of the build show YouTube videos and eventually become smart enough.

To do it or to at least like understand like what’s going on. But is there a faster way where, you know, if I wanna build a home in a month or a couple months or a year from now, like I probably don’t have time to do all that. I’ve got work and kids, so how do I take advantage of all the knowledge you have about building high quality homes and be able to implement that in my own life without spending the the time on content specifically?

Yeah, that’s the

Matt Risinger: idea. That’s what we’re trying to do. Distill it down to is. As basic as we can, which at this point is 10 pages, single spaced of, of, uh, [00:45:00] spreadsheet data. It’s, it’s pretty, it’s pretty extensive. Uh, I’m not sure it’s gonna grow any smaller either. It, it may only get bigger, but, uh, still to have 10 pages of, uh, of good data on, here’s where you should start.

I think it’s gonna be helpful.

Alex Bridgeman: You can even interact with, you know, a platform like HI and have selectors for, Hey, I wanna build at the, you know, build HD platinum standard and check that box and it adjusts all your products in your home. Build up to that standard. There’s all kinds of different ways that you can take this, you know, the 10 pages of spreadsheet and actually implement it into something that’s, you know, malleable and modular.

Yes. Hundred percent. It’s gonna be pretty exciting. Matt, thank you for coming on the podcast. I’m super excited to see you in Dallas this week as well. It’ll be of fun for

Matt Risinger: looking forward to seeing you, man. We’re gonna have, I think, 160 manufacturers there, so it’s gonna be, uh, some great conversations and I think we’re, I think we’re on track to break our people count.

Last year, as of this morning, I saw 1,750 registered, but last year we had about four or 500 that registered at the door. So if that’s the case, we’ll wind up being 10 or 15% more than last year. So that’s great. That’s good. That’s good growth numbers. We’re excited about it.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, that’s a good year. Do you think Dallas has been a better market for it versus Austin?

Or do you think it’s not affecting numbers necessarily?

Matt Risinger: You know, I think it’s actually affected and for the down, unfortunately, I really wish it was in Austin again this year. Austin’s such a cool destination. With amazing barbecue and other restaurants and sites to see. And of course we have a great home building community here that I think is very high performance focused.

Dallas, I would say as a general rule, is about 10 years behind Austin when it comes to, uh, good building practices. Not that they’re a bad place to build a house, but there just seems to be less interest in building science there than there is in Austin. So we’ve got. You know, we’ve got good and bad news there.

It means that there’s a lot of builders that need education and so that’s a good thing. I hope that we’ll get some builders that maybe aren’t in our ecosystem out there currently to kind attend the show and maybe, uh, start to know better. So they will build better. But at the same time, it’s, it’s a heavy lift ’cause we don’t have as, as good of, uh, contacts there.

As a side note, like our local HBA was all on board for us promoting locally and. We did a Covet, but the hu but the Dallas chapter, I don’t wanna disparage them, but they were like, no, you know, we have our own show in July and so we’re not interested in helping you promote yours. We’re like, really? Like we’ve been, we’ve been members for 20 years here.

Like we’re, this is a great event for builders. Just ’cause it’s not your show, uh, [00:48:00] doesn’t mean it’s not gonna be beneficial. And they’re like, no, I’m sorry. So it’s, it’s those kinds of things. You’re like, dang it, come on guys. I mean, we’re all a rising tide floats all boats. We’ve always been inclusive.

We’ve always seen really good partnerships with even competing companies out there. I mean, if you look at our friendship with fine home building or journal like construction, we’ve great contacts there. We promote each other even though maybe we have some of the same advertisers, let’s say. Uh, so I was, I was a little disappointed in some of that old school mentality coming into Dallas.

I’m hoping that that won’t dampen the numbers coming in. But, you know, I forget that not every town is, is as collegial as Austin is. I mean, I feel like Austin builders like each other. We’ve also had a lot of work here and so, you know, we may be competitors, but we can still be friends. And I don’t know if that’s the case at every market.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, that may be a little bit different. The other thing too, that the HD standard will play into is I can look at my local home builders. So here in Chapel Hill, if I wanna build a home, and I want, obviously you’re not gonna fly your whole team out to Chapel Hill to build my house, but if I can find someone who follows your standard and can say, we can build you the.

Bronze, gold, platinum, whatever, standard for build show for hd. That’s, that’s a good indicator for me. That helps me out too. Yeah, that’s right. Exactly.

Matt Risinger: Alex, really good spending time with you, man. I hope that we’ll get to spend some time up in Dallas. Thanks for having me on your awesome podcast, Dave.

Alex Bridgeman: Thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed today’s episode of Think Like An Owner. If you enjoyed the show, please consider leaving us a review and telling a friend to help more folks find, think like an owner. For full episode transcripts in our weekly newsletter, please visit our [email protected].