BUILDER BACK IN BUSINESS

Feature Story

Call it good luck or call it foresight, but however it happened, builder Mason Mayhew picked a pretty good time to get out of the construction business.

“I got out in about 2008,”he said.“Right when things went south. Just by sheer luck, to be honest. I was ready for a break. I was hearing from some of the elders some rumblings of something coming. But it was sheer luck. And I have other things. We have an oil and gas business. I’m third generation in that. That’s in my blood, but I had other things to fall back on, thankfully.”

Building is in his blood, as well, and even during his time away from the business, Mayhew couldn’t make a clean cut.

“It’s always been one of my thoughts every year,”he said.“Never to necessarily start again, but I’m always looking at building trends and design trends. It excites me. I’m a big believer in faith and I honestly believe it’s God’s timing.”

Several years ago the itch started developing to build again and it was something that eventually he couldn’t pass up.

“I started kicking around the idea about 3½ years ago,” Mayhew said.“My decision for getting back in to it was, basically, it’s in my blood. I can’t get it out. I’m passionate about designing and the construction aspect of it. Just seeing and making plans come to life.”

But this time around, he wasn’t going to stretch himself in a number of different directions, instead keeping things small and manageable.

“I’m doing a larger house, that’s what I’m trying to stick to,”Mayhew said.“Three projects a year, that way I don’t have to hire employees and

I can do things on my own. Clients like that better, as well, as the builder, being involved every day running the job.”

It’s also better for his piece of mind. “I’m being more selective this time around,” he said. “I don’t want to be as busy as I was. I was pretty busy, building a lot of homes at once. My family is pretty important to me. I have four kids. They’re young. I want to stay involved in their lives every day, sports activities. If I get too busy, I can’t do that.”

Mayhew also wanted a new business plan and spent a year developing it.

“I took a good 12 months and I met with a bunch of people here in town that I trust who are in the business,” Mayhew said of creating that business plan. “I just bounced it off of their brains and see what they think. They all came to conclusion that I could probably make it work. It was a fresh new approach.”

That fresh new approach was centered on a new way of billing customers.

“A big part of my decision to come back was that if I was going to do this again, I wanted to do it completely different,” he said. “I didn’t want to use the same methods as have always been done. The construction business never seems to have evolved beyond the construction aspect and so I basically came up with the idea of separating out the costs. My profit, the builder’s profit, is separated out from all building costs.”

This gives the home buyer a clear picture of where their money is going, Mayhew said.

“The basic reason for that is to remove any friction that goes on during the construction process between the builder and the home owners,” he said. “And that is, everything is always marked up by the builder. Homeowners never know what they’re paying. Homeowners always know that when they go to pick something out, they are going to be paying my best cost, the builders’ best cost, wholesale pricing. They’ll never pay a cent over that price.”

Removing the mark-ups from items not only saves money and headaches for the buyers, it also puts Mayhew in good standing with his suppliers.

“Besides making the homeowners happy, it makes the suppliers happy too because they’re the ones who are always in the middle of that battle of what’s the real cost, how much is he marking it up,” he said. “I’ve basically thrown all that out. I have a fee that I charge based on the square footage of the house and that’s it. So they can make as many change orders as they want, upgrades.”

It also simplifies Mayhew’s book keeping.

“I don’t have to track all the changes and how much I’m going to charge, or making sure they sign off on it,” he said. “This way, from the get go, they know. Of course there are some items that are out of my hands. Lumber prices are one, especially this past year. Lumber prices have been up and down, all over the place. At times, it’s doubled.”

When Mayhew came back, gaining business had changed so much, making the internet not just a nice thing, but an integral part of the operation.

“I just had to develop a new brand, to start with, something that would be recognizable,” he said. “Even though I’m starting again, I still had my previous track record that was still intact, which I was happy to find out. But I also wanted to find a really good platform to jump off from. That’s where I discovered Houzz.

The online company recognized Mayhew as a “Best of Customer Service 2018.”

Building an attractive and effective website was a big part of that equation, he said.

“Before I actually developed a website, one thing I noticed after doing a bunch of research on local builders was that no one had a really good website, if any at all. And those that did, did not stand out. I wanted to create a wow factor on the internet for that presence because today, that’s where all searches start from. I did a lot of research on what future websites will look like, what are the new and upcoming things and tried to incorporate those things into the website, like video.”

Mayhew hopes that these tools, along with his past performance as a builder will help him stand out in the custom home marketplace.