CLIENT PROJECT - Morse Construction Inc. - 4 Step Process

Well, there's a 4-step process that we use that, or we call them, dream, design, coordinate, and build. And essentially the whole process starts with the client's dream. They have a desire to build a home, they have something they may have dreamt about for years, a certain style, certain features, and so we spend a lot of time with them talking about what their dream is, and then we put all the bits and pieces together to come up with the home design. Once we've spent a fair amount of time talking about what they like, what they don't like, what their dreams have been, the kind of features they want in their home, the style of their home, what rooms they want adjacent to what rooms, is it an open concept, is it a closed-off set of rooms, Is it 2 stories, is it 1 story, is it a bungalow on a slab, does it have a basement? All those kinds of things that we need to know from the dream stage, and then we sit down and we do the design. The beauty of doing it that way and spending a lot of time on the design stage is that we make very few changes once construction starts. And that's one of the things that most people who build a home, or a lot of people who build a home, get frustrated with is that then they start making changes. We rather spend a lot of time with the client up front tweaking it to the point where everybody's satisfied with what we've got, and then we proceed. The third component of the process is coordinating it all, putting together the prices. We get every trade to price everything they're going to do for us. We don't estimate any of our figures because we want to be comfortable that we're providing a client with a price that's going to be a good price, a fixed price, and there won't be any surprises at the end of the day. And that's not to say that some clients don't make the odd change, but it's an informed change. They know what they're getting up front, and they're not making a change because they didn't know what they were going to get originally. They simply decide later on that they want a different feature than what they might have thought about originally. And then the final component is to actually build the home, and although there's a lot of coordination that goes hand in hand with that, That's the coordination during the actual construction process. And building the home is something that takes usually anywhere from 4 to 6 months depending on the size of the home, the features that are being built into the home. We have a process where we like to meet with the homeowner, the client, on a regular basis so that they're not wondering what we're doing. They have an idea what they can expect to see done over the next couple of weeks. And at the same time, if there's anything that we want to discuss with the client, then we have the opportunity to do that. So we generally set up a regularly scheduled time every couple of weeks to have those kinds of conversations and to look at what's being done in the home.