Toughen up: StyleCraft Builders CEO on back-to-basics leadership

Homebuilding is hard right now, but that doesn’t mean it still doesn’t follow simple rules.StyleCraft Builders CEO Doug French sees today’s homebuilding business and operational hurdles – including rates, input-cost pressures, lot-price inflation, pervasive would-be homebuyer hesitancy, and other headwinds – as calls to simplify.As author and design innovation thinker John Maeda has put it, simplicity subtracts the obvious and adds the meaningful.For French, that means delivering homes on time, avoiding cost variances, keeping purchase orders precise, and buying lots in places where larger builders may not be looking, including smaller pocket neighborhoods rather than only large master-planned communities. It means building the second house better than the first and the 900th better than the 899 before it, and never handing a buyer the keys until the house is clean and the punch list is complete. Those are hardly Nobel Prize-caliber ideas. Their power lies in the rigor required to implement them consistently across an organization, especially when market conditions no longer tolerate mediocre execution. That is where a conversation about homebuilding fundamentals quickly becomes a ...