Left to right: Jo Anne Estes, CFO and controller; Kevin Estes, president and CEO; and Patricia Troxler, quality manager
Credit: Andy Reynolds
Kevin Kevin Estes, a second-generation builder, started
Estes Builders with his wife, Jo Anne, in 1990 in Sequim, Wash. Even then, with just the pair of them juggling all the roles, the focus was on systems and continuous improvement.
“Being a system-driven company allows us to keep our promises,” says Jo Anne, who is the company’s controller. “When we tell a homeowner it will take six months to build their home, we want to make sure it takes six months. Our systems are checklists and touch points and forms, so we know when we have a walk-through with a homeowner [that] everything on their plans is there and in the right place, and we get paid on time. We do what we said we were going to do. … When we find something that is not working, we go to work on fixing it.”
Today, the company is a two-pronged operation, offering both production and custom homes, primarily to out-of-town, active adult buyers looking to retire to Washington state’s Olympic Peninsula. Even though Estes Builders is only a nine-person operation, systems help the company implement “many of the recognized best practices of large-volume builders,” it wrote in its America’s Best Builder entry.
“We’re a really diligent, continuous improvement company,” Kevin says. “We’re not a whiz-bang company, but we tend to execute pretty well. Like the tortoise and the hare, we just get a little better every day.”
It’s paid off handsomely for the company. The only National Housing Quality–certified builder in the state of Washington, Estes Builders also is a two-time winner of the National Housing Quality (NHQ) Award, taking silver in 2005 and gold in 2007. It legitimately boasts that it has delivered 99 percent of its homes since 2002 with zero known defects and markets itself as the Olympic Peninsula’s award-winning builder.
THE POWER OF PARTICIPATION
One of the powerful lessons Kevin has learned from the pursuit of continuous improvement is that a very small adjustment can yield tremendous results. At his regular meetings with trade partners, for example, Estes has them sit in the order in which they work on his houses.
“It gets them talking,” he says. “It’s amazing what just doing that does.”
Even though he knows that he’s going up against companies that dwarf him in revenues and resources, Estes says it’s well worth it to enter such competitions as America’s Best Builder and NHQ. They give the company an objective, external measurement tool.