How Builders Can Raise the Standard
Andrea and Brian Seymour started their company on their honeymoon.
Not by plan. Brian’s previous company folded while they were away. They came home, started an LLC, and figured it out from there. Ten years later, Springdale Custom Builders is still standing — growing, evolving, and now building software to help other contractors do what took them a decade to learn.
The two of them joined Reece on Builders Budgets and Beers to talk about what it actually takes to run a construction company well: how to sell without feeling like you’re selling, why your financial discipline matters more than your build quality, and what the industry gets wrong that it could easily fix.
The bidding problem nobody talks about honestly
Andrea’s been thinking about this for a while, and she didn’t pull punches.
The default in custom home building is still three bids. Clients have been conditioned to shop contractors against each other on price. Industry partners still encourage it. And the result, almost universally, is a race to the bottom that doesn’t serve the client, the contractor, or the relationship.
“When you start a conversation with ‘show me all your bids,’ that’s not a good experience for anybody,” she said.
The structural problem is that competitive bidding creates an incentive to underprice. The contractor who wins on a low number either cuts corners to protect margin, or loads the back half of the job with change orders. Either way, the client ends up worse off than if they’d picked the right builder from the start and trusted their estimate.
Brian’s take on what clients are actually trying to accomplish: they want to get comfortable with a large number. They want to vet people. They want to know if the relationship is going to work. None of that is unreasonable. But price shopping isn’t how you answer any of those questions. It’s just how you generate anxiety and erode trust before the job starts.
The shift Andrea is pushing for — and what Springdale has built toward — is an industry that educates clients to choose a builder based on fit, trust, and process quality rather than who came in lowest. The estimate should be the beginning of a real relationship, not a document you throw together to survive a round of bidding.
How they actually run their sales process
Springdale’s intake isn’t accidental. Andrea owns it and she’s built it with intention.
It starts with a lead form. Every question on it is there for a specific reason. From there, a 10-minute introduction call. The vibe check runs both ways — if it’s not right for Springdale, they say so and, where possible, send the client in a better direction.
If it moves forward, a 30-minute site visit. Brian and Andrea, together, at the property. They get into specifics. And then, before any numbers are put together, clients complete a proprietary finish level assessment that covers every major category — windows, shingles, doors, hardware, countertops, plumbing fixtures — on a scale from basic to high-end.
The subliminal message, as Andrea put it, is not that subliminal: “We care. We’re listening. We’re addressing your specific needs. We’re not just throwing numbers at a wall.”
It also protects the estimate. When you know exactly what a client wants before you price it, the number you give them actually means something. There’s no guessing built into it. That’s what earns trust — not a low number, but a number that reflects reality.
Brian’s contribution to this process was simple but important. He had to learn to say no. As a builder, the instinct is to say yes to everything — solve every problem, take every job, figure it out later. Andrea helped him get comfortable telling clients what Springdale couldn’t do. And it turns out that being honest about limitations is one of the most effective things you can do in a sales conversation. It signals that when you say you can do something, you mean it.
The financial discipline underneath all of it
The sales process is visible. The financial discipline that makes it possible isn’t.
Brian was direct about this. When Springdale made a major market shift — pivoting from one type of project to another — it hurt. The pipeline took time to rebuild. The sales cycle was longer than expected. They planned for it, they had retained earnings set aside, and they made it through. Contractors who don’t have that cushion don’t get a second chance.
“You can never mask a problem with another sale,” Brian said. “That’s not going to solve your problem. Then once you’re doing that, you’re done.”
The mechanics are straightforward. Know your overhead — not an approximation, the actual number. Know your margins on every job. Build retained earnings deliberately by treating profit like a bill, not a reward. And close your books on a monthly basis, on a real timeline, not whenever the reconciliation finally catches up.
Springdale partnered with Adaptive four or five years ago, and Brian pointed to it as a turning point. Before, month-end close was a process that dragged well into the following month. By the third week of the current month, the previous month is done. Clean, sealed, done. That cadence — knowing where you are before you’ve already made the decisions that would have benefited from that knowledge — is what makes everything else possible.
Brian also spends two hours every Tuesday going through his financials. Not because he enjoys it. Because it’s how he knows what’s real.
The curse of the unknown overhead
There’s a quieter version of the low-bid problem that Andrea and Brian touched on, and it’s worth naming directly.
A lot of contractors underprice not because they’re trying to win at someone else’s expense, but because they don’t actually know what it costs to run their business. Overhead gets underestimated or ignored. Margin targets are intuitive rather than calculated. And the estimate that goes out the door is less a financial document than an optimistic guess.
The contractor at the bottom of a competitive bid isn’t always being manipulative. Sometimes they genuinely believe that number. And they’ll lose money on the job because of it.
This is part of what Andrea means when she talks about the industry needing to raise the standard collectively. If more contractors understood their real cost of doing business — and priced accordingly — the range of estimates clients receive would compress. The low outliers would stop distorting client expectations. And the builders who are doing it right would stop losing work to people who are accidentally subsidizing their clients at their own expense.
Hire for the human, build from there
Succession and scale both start with people, and Andrea has a simple rule she hasn’t found a reason to abandon: hire for the human first.
Skills can be taught. Show-up, grit, genuine care for the client — those can’t. She sees it constantly in the industry: project managers who know construction but can’t communicate, or people who are technically competent but aren’t the right fit for the team.
“I can teach somebody XYZ skill most of the time. I cannot teach you how to be kind to our clients. I cannot teach you how to want to be here.”
The corollary, which she’s equally clear about: hire slow. Always have positions posted, not because the team is unstable, but because the right person rarely shows up on the timeline you need them. Keep feelers out. Know who’s in the market. So that when the moment comes, you’re not choosing from whoever’s available — you’re choosing from whoever’s right.
Building something that outlasts you
The software Andrea and Brian are developing grew out of a gap they couldn’t stop seeing. Construction project management software is almost universally analog — it does what you tell it to, and nothing more. For a small custom builder, that means someone always has to be there pushing buttons, managing the process manually, keeping everything moving.
The business you build that way has a ceiling, and it’s exactly as high as your personal bandwidth.
Andrea put it plainly: “If your business is heavily reliant on you pushing a button, you’ll never be able to exit that business. Ever.”
That’s not an exit planning observation. It’s a design principle. The more your business runs on documented, repeatable processes — and eventually on intelligent automation — the more valuable it becomes, both to you while you’re running it and to whoever might come after you. The builders who struggle to exit aren’t usually failing because their revenue is too low. They’re failing because the business is them, and nobody can buy that.
What Springdale is building is intended to give contractors, especially those in years one through five, a running start on the operational infrastructure that most builders spend a decade figuring out through trial and error. The goal isn’t to eliminate the hard lessons entirely. It’s to make the most expensive ones unnecessary.
Peers, not competitors
The conversation closed on something Brian said that’s worth holding onto.
A fellow contractor told him, after he’d absorbed a painful financial hit on a job: “Congratulations, you paid your tuition.”
It’s the kind of thing only someone who’s been there can say, and only someone who’s earned it can really hear. The construction industry has a lot of that knowledge sitting in the heads of experienced builders, being transmitted slowly, inconsistently, through relationships that take years to build.
What’s changing is that more and more builders are deciding to share it. The appetite for peer collaboration — contractors in different markets talking openly about what works, what doesn’t, what nearly broke them — has grown noticeably in the last few years. The ones who are doing it well are finding that there’s no shortage of work for everyone who’s running a tight operation. The market is big enough. The problem is builders, not enough of them running their businesses the right way.
“There’s enough sunshine out here for all of us,” Andrea said. “The people who are doing it right will always have sunshine.”
Andrea and Brian Seymour are the co-founders of Springdale Custom Builders and are currently developing new software for custom builders and design-build firms. This episode of Builders Budgets and Beers is available wherever you listen to podcasts.