Introducing the New Podcast to Navigate Homebuilding with Confidence.

Titled The Awakened Homeowner that's coming out here in Spring of 2025. It's all about how can we help homeowners tackle significant remodel or custom home projects.

And construction staff I started my business in 1992 out of Cupertino and Saratoga, California with one employee. Now that I've been doing it for 35 years, I thought I would try to share some of my experience and wisdom with homeowners.

The purpose of this podcast is really to help homeowners overcome the fears and anxiety, but really just to help people have a good time. With their most significant investment in their home it can be done I'm ready to tackle it, and eventually, I'm hoping to get on some guests, some architects I know, some contractors I know, and even some homeowners I know that have gone through this that can share their experiences.

It is directed towards homeowners. I've got one quote I wanna share that really stuck with me. It's a little long, but I'm only gonna say it once in this introduction, so I promise. This is by Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of my favorite authors. To laugh often and much to win the respective intelligent people and the affection of children to earn the appreciation of honest critics.

It is helping you breathe easier while you're trying to get through this potential horrifying hanging experience, which we're not gonna let that happen so that is a very quick background, you can go to our website, awaken homer.com and see a bit more information. The book and this podcast are gonna go hand in hand.

The most common homeowner challenges I hear, and it's a statement that I don't know it's actually not just specific to remodeling or construction, it's all over the place, it's almost becoming a cliche, but a lot of people just say, I don't know what I don't know. You've probably heard that statement before.

In fact, the whole book is about that. I start with certain stages of that what I call the discovery stage. We're gonna get into that in a minute. In the book I wrote a story actually, when I was working with my editors, I said, does anybody ever put a prologue and epilogue in a book, in a nonfiction book, I should say?

You look online and people say not really. You can have somebody else write it or you can try it, but so I did it and I wrote a story about two couples and my editor just loved it and said, you might want to think about writing novels. I said let's just stick with this for right now.

I invite you to go to the website I'll put a link at the bottom of the podcast here where you can go download the story for free. Even if you don't buy the book, that's okay. But the story's kind of fun to read download it read it and you can join our community.

I'm not gonna be one of these people that pound you with email and. Marketing a little bit here and there, but I'm not gonna be, I can't stand that, so I'm not gonna do that to people. But when it's important and relevant, I'm gonna do it. So download that story and get a kick out of that.

I paused and didn't know the answer. Long story short, that triggered a complete rewrite to build a book of knowledge and then. I'll talk about an action plan coming up here at the end of the podcast. But so I came up with these guiding principles and it goes like this, enlighten, power and protect.

So the idea here is to enlighten you with knowledge. Knowledge is power. We know that. Everybody knows that but the people that really take the time. To build their knowledge before they tackle something. Anything. Learning a new piece of software or learning how to work on your car, YouTube these days, you can learn a lot pretty darn quick.

So enlighten, build your knowledge, empower. So the power, the empowerment comes with the knowledge. So now that you are, you've got some knowledge in your, in the back of your brain on this, they go hand in hand. There's also gonna be a whole part of this book and a subsequent venture called Build Quest that's coming up soon where.

You are gonna be able to use this book to get way ahead of the game than most people. The last of the three is protect, enlighten, empower, and protect. All of this effort is to protect you, to protect your experience, to protect your family, to protect the quality of your job, to protect everything as you go into this process.

It can be fun, it can be rewarding and exciting to see a project at the end. We're gonna try to make it so it's not miserable for you. So that is the three guiding principles. And it's interesting. There's one other thing that it's a wrapper around all of this, of the three guiding principles and it's expectations.

How are we gonna be able to hold them accountable and even yourself accountable, frankly. To setting, maintaining, achieving expectations. So it's like these three guiding principles are all wrapped up with this term expectations. I use it all the time with my subcontractors, my suppliers, my kids and we're gonna be, this is gonna be in the back of our mind the whole time.

But discovery is a part that a lot of people. They might do it subconsciously, but they don't really think about it in a way that is valuable to themselves or others. Really the big part of the discovery stage is guided by those guiding principles and setting expectations at the end of the discovery stage.

you'll be able to assemble yourself and eventually the app's gonna do it for you or with you, I should say. The idea here is to build enough content and information that you can literally hand it off to somebody and say, this is who we are. This is what we have to work with. This is our dream, this is our budget.

Can you help? So we talk about dreams and visions and. All the ideas out there plastered all over the internet. Everybody's showing their pictures of their beautiful homes and there's guys out there showing all of the construction methods. And this is great. We love this stuff.

And that's great. You need that. That's called inspiration, but it's also daunting and overwhelming. I know many people that just give up and they just become overwhelmed. So we're not discounting any of those folks. But what, where my niche is that help you get there, how do you get there so it doesn't become a nightmare.

The knowledge and the tools are gonna teach you how to capture all of these inspirations in a way that is manageable so that you can then share it with your potential designers. Then I talk about, delusions and realities, I call it. There's all kinds of delusions out there that, that are going to throw you off.

So I have steps and methods in here. If your architect can see you within minutes of meeting you with this package that. The awakened homeowner methodology creates, you are gonna be so far ahead of the game. They're gonna love you, they're gonna understand you. So you're gonna share dynamics of your family, you, your kids, your spouse, your partner.

I already know who these people are. The tool I'm developing is you're even gonna be able to upload images and videos and whatever you want. And then the property profile is going to be there for you to give them a headstart on all the details of the property you wanna renovate, remodel, or build on, or a property you're considering building on that you don't even own yet.

Then a big part of the discovery is the almighty budget. This is the elephant in the room. This is the one that nobody wants to talk about. People don't even know. They need to think about it this early don't even know how to think about it. I have methods in here to first establish an investment goal.

But we're gonna first set an investment goal. Forget about the project for a minute. How much are you comfortable investing in the property?

Now everybody's got their own financial goals and objectives, and some people are more sensitive to resale than others, and it's very personal and everybody's financial conditions are different, but. What's important here is that you at least just start with this. If you wanna build a 4,000 square foot home and it's gonna cost you, $400 a square foot minimum, and plus a lot of other costs, you could be into it for 2 million bucks.

All that kind of stuff. That's what part one is. Part two is the world of design. I'm not gonna dive into too much details, but we touch on understanding design professionals, the design process. Design agreements understanding design limitations that are already in place that you don't even know about.

Your architect probably knows about 'em, but I wouldn't assume it. What our plans and blueprints, they used to be called blueprints. Now they're called plans, but understanding plans and the basics of 'em. We're not gonna teach you how to be an architect, but. You at least need to know how to look at 'em.

Estimating your project. How do you go about estimating your project? You are not the estimator, but you're the one facilitating the estimating, even if you're a DIYer. That wants to build your own house, you still are gonna end up hiring some people. Unless you do it all yourself, then gimme a call 'cause I'd like to hire you.

And then the con different types of contracts. There's different ways that these, that contractors price out projects and enter into contracts with customers. There is what's called a fixed price and cost plus, or time and material. And then we talk about managing your risk. With different insurances and things that you need to consider.

I talk about specialized options like owner builders and hiring an owner agent. I wish I had a thousand pages to put in this book. So I'm gonna be keep feeding this with more and more information through the blog and the podcast and the app. So that is very quick synopsis of the four parts of the book and the upcoming episodes are going to.

Dig into these deep, what I'm hoping I can get out of this is I'm really passionate about, I really just want to help people at this stage of the game. I've been doing this 35 years. I'm just hitting 60 years old, and I'm at a stage of life where I can step back and.

I, I really don't like that myself, but. If I do like somebody and they provide content that's important for me, I'll read it. Otherwise, if I get an email every day, you're dead. Me, I'm done. So you're not gonna get that. I encourage you to visit the website I'll put places on there for you to join the community.

'cause you might wanna follow along as I develop this app this could be a really interesting development. And I'm doing this like open, like I'm just showing people the progress and what's the expectation with this, with the application. I think I mentioned, I'm gonna call it Build Quest, and that's what we're doing, right?

If you're planning a project or if you're in the middle of construction I'll have a social media presence in Facebook and whatnot, and I may even come up with a Facebook group. But this is more of a private community. I'm really not interested in talking about a scratch in your sheet. Rock, drywall, finish.

This is more about deeper knowledge base. There's a lot of people telling you how to do drywall and what's good and what's bad, and I don't know, maybe I'll get into that. But this is really more about people that really wanna learn, that, wanna plan, that it will take the time to plan. I'm gonna be able to help you with that.

Thanks.