Every Wednesday, the project executives, project managers, and a superintendent or two gather for a catered lunch meeting, to which the company invites an outside expert to make a presentation. Today the presenters are a couple of impressively authoritative guys from a wood flooring subcontractor. They expound on subfloor moisture content (nearly as important as that of the flooring material itself) and compare the wear characteristics of water-based and oil-based polyurethanes (converging due to improvements in water-based poly and stricter VOC standards on oil-based finishes). Later the meeting turns to the regular weekly task of updating the construction checklists, keyed to CSI codes, that comprise a rough master specification for the company’s projects. Today the category is exterior trim. Hobbs suggests adding a provision that the company build a full-size mockup showing typical trim conditions and paint-color selections. Someone else suggests specifying that all butt joints in trim be joined with biscuits. Then the topic turns to fasteners: galvanized for typical use, stainless on projects by the shore. “Shouldn’t we just go with stainless everywhere?” someone asks. Hobbs nixes the suggestion over cost, but he would like to see a nailing schedule for flexible trim. “If you nail it at 16 inches on center it looks like hell.” He also wonders whether roof brackets and lookouts should be covered under framing or trim, and points out a simple thing that can drive a stickler like him to distraction: “What about ‘No joints over the front door?’” It takes about a year of such meetings for Hobbs and his team to comb through all of their checklists, and when they are done, they’ll begin again. “This is a perpetual process,” he says. “We just keep looping back.”
“We try to capture all our information as a company, all our lessons learned, and make it available,” says Hobbs, describing a philosophy that is reflected at every level of the company. The superintendent corps meets monthly at one of the company’s jobsites to review the work in progress, share advice, “and more importantly, get to know the other supers.” With projects lasting two years and more, the meetings offer a rare opportunity for the superintendents to meet in one place, and are essential for developing shared standards and a sense of teamwork. To transmit company values to the next generation of employees, Hobbs says, “We implemented a mentoring program. All new employees are assigned to a mentor who will follow them for the first year.” Hobbs himself writes a quarterly newsletter, delivered via e-mail to everyone in the company, that covers sales, production, and current company initiatives. Safety director Mark O’Connor publishes a biweekly newsletter that focuses entirely on worker safety. It is part of a comprehensive program—including new-worker orientations, weekly jobsite inspections and safety talks, and incentives for improved performance—that has produced impressive results. “We went a stretch of 1996 to 1999 where no Hobbs employee was injured. We’ve since had a couple of lacerations that required stitches,” O’Connor says. “We are the only residential contractor that our insurance carrier would write a policy for—nationally—and that was based on our safety record.”
This is an extraordinarily informed, methodical, and professional approach to building houses. Of course, one can be informed, methodical, and professional in building houses that are quite ordinary, but Hobbs houses are anything but ordinary. The company’s average new home contract is in the $4 million range. “But that gets skewed by a few homes that are close to eight digits,” Hobbs says.
That fact soon becomes clear on a tour of a Greenwich, Conn., neighborhood where Hobbs Inc. has done repeat business over the years. Here, investment bankers and hedge fund managers tend to buy the extravagant homes of corporate CEOs and celebrities, then tear them down to build something better. “It’s got to be one of the most exclusive in the country,” says Ian Hobbs, casually dropping the names of a few famous neighbors. Here, under Ian’s supervision, superintendent Bruce Laskay is well into the finish stage on a limestone manor house that overlooks a small crescent beach. The owner wanted a no-maintenance exterior, so the stone building is roofed with massive slate tiles, with cornices and rakes formed of lead-coated copper. The front door is approached by crossing what might be taken for a moat, but is actually a pond for koi, a highly prized Japanese carp that can fetch thousands of dollars apiece. The house’s interior is even more impressive. Wood trim, like the wood floors, is all quartersawn white oak. The kitchen cabinets, all custom, are “blue” oak, salvaged from river bottoms. There are four mill-work subcontractors working on this house. “We almost always break up the millwork on our projects,” Ian says. As the tour proceeds, the reason becomes apparent. The living room/dining room/library, a vast space with three limestone fireplaces and a view over the sloping lawn to the beach, is finished like a baronial hall, with carved oak beams and heavy, carved oak window and door casings. The lower level, its ceiling a quilt of shallow intersecting vaults, is devoted to a spa-like indoor pool area. Ian finds a pallet stacked with cartons, opens one, and lifts a sheet of the 1-inch-square aquamarine glass tiles that will line the pool and its surrounding deck. “I think this is $14,000 worth of tile,” he says. A room nearby, looking something like a distillery, holds three separate water filtration systems: enzyme, ozone, and ultraviolet, Ian explains. “All for the fish pond.”
At the site of another project, an 18,000-square-foot Shingle-style house on the waterfront in Southport, Conn., vehicles fill a gravel parking area that supplements the main driveway. Superintendent Scott Hutchison built the temporary drive to handle parking for all the people working on the job. “Today, there’s probably close to 40,” he says, as if apologizing for idleness. When the millwork comes in, he promises, the crew will grow to “100, 130.” With the exception of Hutchison, none of them will be Hobbs Inc. employees. On its new home projects and major renovations, the company subcontracts virtually every operation below the superintendent level. (The company’s dozen or so finish carpenters staff the PEM division, which doubles as the punch list and warranty crew.) Doing business this way depends on an abundance of first-rate local trade contractors, says COO Walter Lorenz, who is the executive in charge of this project. “This area is really blessed with great craftsmen. There are so many mill shops around.” Still, the ability to pull this much manpower onto a single job—to say nothing of the other 15 or so major projects underway—reflects the muscle that Hobbs Inc. exerts in the subcontractor community.
Despite the scope and intensity of activity under way here, the site is as neat as a pin. At the house’s main level, Hutchison has built long racks on which the trim carpenters, plumbers, and electricians store their materials. And this house will consume a mountain of material: 79,000 lineal feet of LSL studs, 1,300 sheets of ¾-inch plywood, 2,525 lineal feet of cedar crown molding, 1,730 dentils. Hutchison schedules mechanical work in sweeps from one end of the house to the other, so that subcontractors keep out of one another’s way. Before the insulators are finished, the Sheetrock crew will be closing up walls behind them. Directing the forces required to build this much house is a complex task, but as Hutchison tours the building he seems relaxed and completely at home. And well he might. He’s Hutch’s son, one of two second-generation supers in the company, and he has been with Hobbs Inc. long enough to get comfortable. “Half my life,” he says. “I’m 44.” Standing on the saltwater dock out back, he runs through his resume. “I was a truck driver, swept the floors.” He joined the carpenters’ local where his father was shop steward, then started to do small jobs for the company. “And,” he says, smiling back at the house, “they just kept getting bigger.”
Leaving the jobsite, Lorenz talks about the crucial role of the superintendent in the company’s process. “These supers just become a part of the family with these clients. They’re the problem solvers. They’ll watch the dog; they’ll watch the kids. Sometimes extracting them at the end of the job can be difficult.” But the corps of supers at Hobbs Inc. is more than a collection of skilled construction pros with extraordinary people skills. The past five years have seen the retirement of three supers who were hired by Ted Hobbs. Perhaps a dozen of the current 16 superintendents came up through the ranks under their tutelage. The line of descent really does reach back three generations. And if Hutchison looks completely in control out on the job, Lorenz points out, it is in part because he has such a strong organization behind him. “The only way that kind of thing happens is if you have someone back in the office to feed that beast. Without a constant flow of contracts, materials, and approvals, this grinds to a halt out here.” Each super has the backup of a project manager, who has the backup of a project executive, who has the backup of the boss. Project executives, who do all the selling, also have the support of full financial and estimating departments and a human resources director who manages the never-ending search for new talent and monitors compliance with an ever-growing maze of employment law. “That’s what we sell,” Lorenz says. “We’re organized like a commercial company.” A shiny pickup with a contractor’s logo on the door drives past. “There’s our competition: some guy with a truck. ‘I’m just like Hobbs.’We hear that all the time. ‘I’m just like Hobbs.’” Lorenz just shakes his head.
“We think we’re so different from our competition that we have a hard time conveying that to our clients,” says Hobbs, back at the office. When builders with less talent on the bench promise clients their full attention, he says, they might also add, “‘Except when I get sick, or go through my divorce, or if my kid has a drug problem.’ Here we’d miss a day or two, but not much more. By having size we have some redundancies.” Because the company backs its commitments with the capability to follow through, Hobbs says, “We’ve never been involved in any legal action with any client in over 50 years.” Size also bolsters what Hobbs calls “the family idea of doing right by your employees.” More than once the company’s heft has provided enough momentum to carry it through a lull in the market. “We’ve never been through layoffs of important people. And we don’t intend to; we invest too much time and energy on key people to let them go for a temporary slowdown.” One doesn’t build a legacy like that overnight—or even in a single generation—but to do it justice, one must keep building it every day. Still only beginning his generation’s turn at the helm, Scott Hobbs has already proved himself more than up to the task.
