Interview Series Part 1 - Jennifer Thomas with United Country Real Colorado Properties and Nicole Leonard with LOOK buildings.
You can see the full video here. https://youtu.be/qFkGfCDKKok
Jennifer: Hi, I'm Jennifer Thomas with United Country Rural Colorado Properties located in Delta, and today I'm with Nicole Leonard with Look Buildings. We're here to discuss how Look Buildings started and what brought them to Delta County.
So Nicole, what started LOOK buildings? What brought this whole vision together?
Nichole: Well my business partner is Brian Johnson and he actually was working at a local truss company. He managed it out there and during a slow period coming out of the recession, essentially he was trying to come up with something that could bring in more money and, and produce something else. And also he's always liked innovating things. So the, the idea came from, was actually derived from trusses, most framers and builders do see that when they look at our wall panels, they think it looks like a truss. So he, he was able to come up with it while he was at the truss company and actually started out there before he moved on to his own and set up his own business.
Jennifer: Nice. So you're talking about your partner's background, but what about your background? What brought you into the construction field and what role do you play within Look Buildings?
Nichole: My background is a little bit diverse. It started in real estate and commercial real estate. Then it moved to a hardwood flooring company and learned a little, started to get into the construction a little bit there.
Then I ended up in assistant purchasing for new homes being built. So that's where I really started to learn construction and the whole process of how everything worked. We were doing over 200 homes a year. So it was a really fast paced environment and I really enjoyed it. I was living out of the state at that time and my dad had actually purchased a look building from Brian.
He is the one that introduced me to Brian because Brian had mentioned how he wanted to grow and needed some help. So when I met Brian, we just kind of went over his business plan and it took off from there. He hired me.
So I had moved back to, to help him reach his goals and grow the business.
I've been able to gain a lot more knowledge from him, the construction side of things and what we do.
Jennifer: That's great news, obviously that she's here, but now we know that Brian is also kind of semi retired.
So what do you do here?
I mean, are you like the boss?
Nichole: Essentially, yes, yeah, Brian no longer lives here.
So he's not in the office or the day to day work environment with us, but he is a great consultant and I definitely keep him in the loop with everything and and still to this day after 8 years, ask him a lot of questions, he's very helpful and knowledgeable.
Jennifer: Great. So now do you do the own quoting process or do you guys have a team that does that?
Nichole: So I'm still a little bit in all of the different departments, but I'm trying to step out of that because as you know, being a CEO, you never really get to play that role or work on those important things if you're still stuck in all the departments. Thankfully, I've doubled our team within the last year and we have a really great team.
I'm really excited about the team that we have. I have a couple of salespeople and designers, and so it's all going through them. There are still a handful of builders and customers that I do work with in the whole quoting process and design, but I'm slowly stepping out of it.
Jennifer: So with your quoting process, what does your team do from start to finish? How long does that normally take for somebody to come in and do floor plans and then approve it? I mean, is there a set time or it just depends on what the project they're working on?
Nichole: It definitely depends on the project. It can go anywhere from...we can have something put together in a week, or it could take several months.
It definitely depends. The whole process is someone will bring to us either a little sketch or design idea of what they want, or they have a simple building. They can tell us the size that they're looking for. And we have a system that we can punch in that number, the size of the building and essentially some codes that will give us the approximate quote.
Sometimes that does include labor. And so we, we give them an approximate idea of what that building should cost them. If it's within their, their budget or if we either have to make some changes then, or, they can move forward, the next step is the design process. And that's where things really start to get real.
We have an in house designer. So we start with the full drafting of the project. And once that's done, it goes into another step of design, since it is the patented wall system, they're uniquely designed. So then we put it into another software and design it from there. And it's really neat, when built, the customers get to see their full framed building in 3D.
It really helps visualize even more aside from the drafted plans. And then once that design is all done, that can take anywhere from 1 to 2 weeks again, depending if it's a residential, sometimes, you know, customers are wanting multiple changes. So things can continue to go on.
After the design process is done, we're able to itemize a quote and put a nice quote together for them. So they break it down in case they need to, maybe they want to add more, or they want decide to make changes and see what costs more than what they thought. So we try to help them see all of those things as well, and definitely try to help our customers in that aspect.
Then it goes to engineering if they want to move forward with that. There's definitely the engineering process of their foundation. If there's a septic involved seeing what their county or city requires, and then go from there.
Jennifer: It's awesome. My next question is, as I see we have some samples here of stuff that can be used for the outside.
So, You don't necessarily just do like farm and ranch buildings, you can do a residential, right? Correct.
Nichole: Yes, we can do all different types of buildings, anywhere from residential to agriculture to commercial. Residential buildings, you can do anything from a small two car garage to a huge barndominium, shop houses or agriculture, you know, shops.
Anywhere from 40 by 60 is common, you know, 60 by 80, 60 by 100. We can do pretty large shops for ag buildings as well, or three sided buildings. Now, our buildings are meant to be put on a permanent foundation. So, when it comes to ag, a lot of people they do think that we do pole barns and we don't do pole barns.
We have in the past a few, a few times, but essentially. We have pulled away from that and focus our panels are meant to be put on a permanent permanent foundation.
We also do commercial buildings. Recently we've done a 12, 000 fertilizer commercial building,
12, 000 square foot. Sorry, and then we've done a couple of 4, 000 to 8, 000 square foot commercial distilleries.
So we can definitely do an array of buildings. They're all custom designs. There are a lot of different things that we're able to do with our panels.
Jennifer: And what areas do you cover? I mean, is it just Delta County, or do you guys go farther out?
Nichole: We definitely go further out. We've sold a handful of them out of state.
And we, we cover a lot of areas in Colorado. We can cover, we can send our building our walls anywhere. It just depends on really the contractor and getting a general contractor in those areas. We do have a builders network and which essentially we have a referral of builders that we would send to our customers, or we can take care of it in most areas up to the labor up to dry in but we do have a couple of general contractors too, that really help cover a lot of area from the full Western slope to the front range to Southern Wyoming.
Jennifer: Wow, well, that's pretty impressive that you go that far. So, speaking of that, where do you guys see look buildings going?
I recently saw something about Petite homes. Can you explain, like, what that is? What a difference is from like a tiny home to a petite home that you guys are looking into doing
Nichole: So they are two different companies completely. Look building's goal, In our our vision of where we plan to go, is obviously to to get further out nationally, we have done some testing on our wall panels in house to see just how strong our wall panels are. Our panels are called sturdy lock for multiple reasons. Obviously, they are a lot sturdier than conventional framing and then when you put them together, they are sturdier especially with all of our winds. Yeah. So our in house testing has proved them to be anywhere from 20 percent to 240 percent stronger.
Jennifer: Oh, wow.
Nichole: And we've tested them against a conventional 2x6 sheathed wall. We tested, 20 percent to 240 is a wide range, but we have such a varied testing. Varied panels to work with, so that goes anywhere from a 2 by 4 wall not being sheeted is 20 percent stronger than a 2 by 6 sheeted wall conventionally framed up to we have sheer panels, and then, if you sheeted our panels, those were up to 240 percent stronger than conventionally framed. So our goal is. To get the actual engineered calcs on those and figuring out how to put it into our software that way it it's easier to work with with other engineers that have never seen it and they don't understand it or they need to have the calcs.
So that's going to help us go national a lot easier. So looking into some actual wall testing facilities. And being able to show the actual strength, we know it. And our engineer has also been out here during that testing time and saw it. So he was able to see some of the numbers as well. So that's our goal there.
Jennifer: With Petite homes, I know you said it's a secondary, maybe a sub kind of, or your partnership. Is that what you're thinking?
Nichole: So that's mine with a different partner.
Jennifer: They would still use the same products, correct?
Nichole: They're still using the same products. It's actually coming from Look Buildings. And they only focus on, we only have a number of floor plans that we're offering at this time, and they're not custom.
Look Buildings is custom. So, those kits are fully, it's a full kit and they come out fully sheeted, or you can just buy the plans. The plans are engineered, which most tiny home plans or kits that you purchase are not engineered.
So, right now, we're only selling selling in Colorado, because we also engineer the foundation. So it's not something you definitely find with other kits and tiny homes. So these. Kits come out in sections, 8 foot sections where the, the roof rafters and the exterior walls and the floor system come out sheeted already.
And we have, we also send out the connectors and have the full installation guide of basically just connecting these sheeted panels together and into a kit.
Jennifer: Wow, that's pretty cool.
That's good for somebody that's looking for affordable housing. I do know that Nicole and Look Buildings will also do a mountain property. So all of you that want cabins, we can also do a cabin. So, that's what this new material here is, right?
Nichole: Yes, yes. And a couple of years ago, we did a really neat cabin over in Crawford, Colorado. And it had the same design. This material completed and it's a metal log siding and there's actually insulation behind the logs.
And this comes from a manufacturer north of Denver actually. And so this metal cabin that we did out there or metal siding cabin, it turned out really neat with a wraparound porch. It's a beautiful cabin, but this is called true log, and it's one of our metal vendors. They have the log siding and they also have board and batten.
They actually now also have a metal lap siding and all of their siding is a wood tone and would grain with the exception of a farmhouse white, which is really popular. And then, they now have, I don't have the sample here, but it's like a driftwood. So it has a real, a more like rustic rustic kind of yeah, lumber feel to it.
It's a really neat product. So that's with true log we do a lot with a local company that we work with is Delta metals and they have a variety of different profiles as well. A common one is called Delta Max Rib, but most people compare it with like a pro panel. They have standing seam.
They also now have board and batten. The nice thing about their board and batten that people like is that comes in multiple colors. So you don't have to just go with the wood tone, even though this is very popular now as well. Very low maintenance for anybody
Jennifer: that has a cabin or mountain property.
Nichole: Absolutely. Yeah, you don't have to
Jennifer: stain it.
Nichole: Exactly. Yeah, and And that's the one tough thing. So it's going to be a little bit more expensive up front But if you do look at the long run of maintenance Long term maintenance and whatnot, or even just the cost up front to stain or painted. You eventually save over time with purchasing the metal up front.
We also offer, rock. You could do like a rock wainscot or a full rock wall. We have a couple of different options that we have here. So we have a wide variety of different metals.
Jennifer: It's not just a standard one color.
Nichole: Right. And it doesn't have to look like a barn.
We do a lot of residential places and you can mix and match, I mean, you can do stucco on our buildings. So you do have to sheet, of course, behind that our, our panels are designed to where the sheer strength is actually built within them. So the, the point of the sturdy lock panel and the patent itself is the sheer strength is built within the panel. You don't have to sheet them and they're self raised as they go up. So, aside from being all stronger than conventional frame, a lot of our buildings with certain metal applications, you don't have to use the sheeting and it's a good cost savings, especially during the pandemic when, when the OSB went sky high.
But, so we've had customers that do two sides of their building and stucco and the other side that. People don't see in metal. And so, you know, cedar siding all you can do any type of siding
Jennifer: Wow, that's pretty amazing All right. I never even realized that you guys offered that many outside options.
That's awesome. Absolutely. So what what's the best way for our audience to get a hold of you? Would it be a phone call? Do you guys take walk ins? What are your hours?
Nichole: Yeah, absolutely So, we do walk ins and we're located here in delta 515 West 7th lane. Our hours are from 730 to 4 o'clock Monday through Friday.
If you can only make it here in the evening or on the weekend, we definitely can do appointments. As well.
Jennifer: Do you guys do site visits to see the property? If somebody has a question, whether or not something like this would work for their property? We do.
Nichole: Yeah. So we also have a project supervisor who works closely with our network of subcontractors.
And so he does a lot of the site visits for us. If it's not in our area, we, but we still have that general contractor, then we would send that general contractor to the site to work with the customer from there. But yeah, so you can do a walk in, you can email us we're on Facebook, we're on a bunch of different social media platforms, or you can call us.
Jennifer: Awesome. Well, this was a great interview today to discover something new here. Not really new, but new to you. Here in Delta County. So if you guys are looking for property, I would be glad to help you. But if you want to build on it, Nicole would be the one to talk to. So obviously they offer a wide range, not just a barn or a shop.
You can also do residential. So please feel free to reach out to Nicole Leonard. Anytime at Look Buildings. We will attach her phone number at the bottom of the screen for you and you can give her a call. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you.
Comments
Post a Comment