Connecting Work and Life
That solution might sound draconian. But it’s in line with how HearthStone gets the most from its 85 employees.
Trade Secrets
The company's reputation enhanced by its warranty policies and advertising that extends to billboards and local schools.
A combination of circumstances and skills helps the North Carolina builder take advantage of the downturn.
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The Omaha, Neb.-based builder has some very definite ideas about managing its jobs and people.
Owner Smith is a disciple of “spiral dynamics,” a philosophy that examines past forces on people’s lives with an eye toward eradicating negative baggage. At HearthStone, he enforces a “whole systems” approach that links his employees’ personal and work lives. For example, HearthStone doesn’t open on Sundays because “our associates’ families were being undermined … by the work level that our sales associates had,” said Smith in a 2006 interview.
The builder requires all associates to go through a week-long training course conducted by the Academy for Coaching Excellence in California. The builder also has counselors on staff who help associates through such means as “mediation, massages, and Eastern healing methods,” explains Vogtman. Taking advantage of this internal coaching is voluntary, he adds. The goal, say Vogtman and Kincaid, is “to discover the hero in everyone.”
Smith’s philosophy isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and has cost the company employees and even some legal hassles. But while he’s been handing off day-to-day management duties to Kincaid and Vogtman, Smith remains the abiding force behind HearthStone Homes. He reclaimed the presidency late last year after his handpicked successor—Kent Geschwender, a friend who had worked for First Horizon National Corp., a mortgage company—resigned after two years on the job.
Keeping Ahead
However unorthodox the company’s corporate culture may be, HearthStone continues to find growth opportunities where other builders have not. It wants to expand beyond Omaha, where it has 13 communities, and has looked at lots in Des Moines, Iowa, that had been controlled by now-defunct Regency Homes. HearthStone typically develops where it will build, but lately it’s been building on other developers’ lots, mostly because it can take them down cheaply.
The company’s long-term prosperity, say its officers, could also come from staying on the cutting edge of technology. “In home building, innovation is showing up more than ever,” says Kincaid. “Builders that adapt are the ones that will thrive. We always have to be looking to take the next leap.”