IAM1440 – CEO Specializes on Designing and Building Accessory Dwelling Units

Whitney Hill is the co-founder and CEO of SnapADU, a San Diego-based accessory dwelling unit construction company that designs, permits, and builds 50 ADUs a year with $15M in annual revenue.

Before getting involved in residential real estate, Whitney gained strategic & tactical experience as a management consultant for Bain & Company and as an operations manager for an industrial supply distributor. Whitney earned a bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Yale University and an MBA from NYU's Stern School of Business.

• CEO Story: Whitney had the entrepreneurial bug, but didn't know what it would be. She worked in the corporate for 10 years which prepared her for the role in the company she co-founded. Which led her to become the market leader in the design and build industry field.
• Business Service: Serving as general contractors. Lay out on their website, the prices, processes and permits, and any other important information.
• Secret Sauce: Challenging and finding a better way as part of their ethos.
• CEO Hack: App mention: Asana – task management, set up goals and strategies. Buildertrend – project management software.
• CEO Nugget: Focus on ruthless prioritization – focus on leveraging your time. Enjoy the experience of working with established companies, that will be your reference guide when you’re in your own company.
• CEO Defined: Knowing all the pieces put together so that you can best orchestrate that for the other people on your team.

Website: https://snapadu.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/snap.adu/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/snapadu

SnapADU Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/snap-adu/

Whitney Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/whitney-hill/

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Transcription

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00:22 – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

00:49 – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Whitney Hill of Snap adu. Whitney, super excited to have you on the show.

00:59 – Whitney Hill

A pleasure to be here. Thank you.

01:00 – Gresham Harkless

Yes, excited to have you on and talk about all the awesome things that you're doing. And of course, before we jump into that, I want to read a little bit more about Whitney so you can hear about some of those awesome things. Whitney is the co-founder and CEO of Snap adu, a San Diego-based accessory dwelling unit construction company that designs, permits, and builds 50 ADUs a year with $15 million in annual revenue.

Before getting involved in residential real estate, Whitney gained strategic and tactical experience as a management consultant for Bain Company and as an operations manager for an industrial supply distributor. Whitney earned a bachelor's degree in psychology from Yale University and an MBA from NYU's Stern School of Business. Whitney, excited again to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:47 – Whitney Hill

I sure am. Let's do it.

01:49 – Gresham Harkless

Let's make it happen then. So to kind of kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock. I know it touched a little bit on your background, but I wanted to hear a little bit more about what I like to call your CEO story. We'll let you get started with all the awesome work you're doing.

01:59 – Whitney Hill

Sure. So I'd always had the entrepreneurial bug, but didn't know what it should be applied to. And so I took the route of working in corporate America for 10 years. Took generalist type of roles where I learned business strategy, operations management, process improvement, people management, things that were just the nuts and Bolts of any business. And finally, a few years ago, as I was in real estate, more tangentially as an investor, I started to learn more about general contracting and then happened to be in the right place at the right time. In California, when we moved around the same time that the state was passing new regulations to make it easier to build an accessory dwelling unit, also known as a guest house or granny flat.

So throughout the state now, residential properties can add an ADU with just four-foot setbacks on the side and rear of the property. There are no minimum lot sizes and these ADUs can be between 400 and 1200 square feet, meaning whether you're looking to house a family member or looking for rental income, if you're an investor, there are lots of different reasons to do this and it's much easier and cheaper than it was before. So once those regulations were in place, I heard that night I could tell the next bottleneck was going to be general contracting capacity.

So I had my ear to the ground and I happened to be in the right place at the right time at a coffee shop working on my real estate business and I heard someone mentioning us. So I took the chance and went up and talked to that individual who later introduced me to my now co-founder, Mike Moore, who'd grown up at construction and had been running his own general contracting firm. So I got here by partnering with him and our skill sets were just very complimentary. We quickly became the market leader in design-build construction in San Diego for accessory dwelling units.

03:44 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. I absolutely love kind of hearing this story. And it sounds like you have an ability to kind of, for lack of a better term, see the forest for the trees. And even though you may not have known exactly this is how it's going to align, it seems like you were very strategic and very aware of the general information that you talked about. Knowing the different positions and being aware of the different laws and things that were changing. And we're able to kind of jump on those opportunities when they presented themselves.

04:10 – Whitney Hill

That's exactly it. And being able to investigate that quickly and not lose that window where it would just be much harder to enter the space now because there are just a lot more startups, we have the advantage of being one of the first to market here and now have a recognizable name. So you're right. And it was also understanding how my experience from past work in corporate America could then help us scale this because we started with Mike's business, which was about one and a half million dollars a year doing more like six to eight projects, which for a small operation, more of a mom and pop style is actually great.

But to scale that requires a lot of infrastructure and people. So we're now at 16 full-time employees, plus a whole host of independent contractors. So the infrastructure we built when we first were starting felt like we're building a very robust foundation. Too robust frankly, to just be doing like five projects. There was a lot of pushback where it's like, why are we building all this infrastructure? I can just email somebody or call them. So having that vision, I think you're right, was important. Where I'd seen best-in-class management and operations of businesses. So I kind of knew what good looked like. So when we started designing what we needed for the next step, we were also thinking about something that we would not grow instantly.

05:21 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. And having that experience. There's this phrase that I think someone actually said on the show where you dig your ditches before you need them. And it sounds like you've been able to kind of do that where you saying, okay, we know we're going to grow, we know we're going to scale. So yes, we might be investing more, doing more, but in, the grand scheme of things, going to allow us that opportunity to kind of scale and grow and do that a lot, a lot more seamlessly than you could if you didn't have those ditches in place, so to speak.

05:46 – Whitney Hill

Absolutely. It's a heavy lift though too. It's such an investment to get that, to dig that ditch. And at the time it feels like, why are we spending all this effort on it? But it pays those dividends down the road because then you can scale almost without effort because it already has those channels. It's also very hard to put those channels in place when you are too big because then there are just so many balls in the air. It's hard to step back and have somebody design the flow. So we took advantage of designing those things during COVID like when things were still just like six or eight projects in a year and we had the bandwidth to do it. If we were to look at it now and say, oh wow, we're big, we need this like it'd be so hard because we've got 50 live projects going, right?

06:25 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely. And that's just again, you know, being able to kind of have that foresight and that strategy and to be able to kind of execute on those things before you need them. And like you said so well you know, being a first mover is such a great advantage in every industry and definitely if you're able to kind of jump on that, as you all have been able to do so, you kind of touched on a little bit, you know, on how you're serving your clients. Could you tell us a little bit more about that? You know, the process, how that goes, essentially how you're making an impact for the clients you work with.

07:51 – Whitney Hill

I think we as general contractors have tried to break the mold a bit. Where that's historically a very opaque industry and it feels a bit like a used car salesman, where you're like, am I being taken advantage of? Like, I don't know what's going on. So we've really tried to change that and we put a wealth of information on our website. Everything from build prices to all the learnings of what the city-by-city regulations are, because they're all different. Everything from what permits, what processes, what things to think about with your family if you're doing this, and how to rent it out if you're an investor.

Everything we've learned we've put out there. And I think that also kind of goes against the grain where historically people keep information very close to the vest. I'm not going to share my pricing or anything. We're certainly not sharing our cost structure. But why not put out there what the client's going to experience when they see that price? That has a couple of effects. One, it lets us stand out because we aren't trying to have that information. Like, all right, this is great. Like they're so upfront about It. But two, it helps us weed out clients who aren't realistic.

So we aren't spending time talking to people who think that the ballpark cost to do this is just a very different number. So that's also helped us ensure that the leads coming through our door who do make it to filling out a contact form or picking up the phone always have a good idea already of what that number should look like. So that's really allowed us to kind of flip this on its head. The other thing that we do is offer standard plans for these accessory dwelling units. And since we are design-build, we're able to constantly update what that build cost is for that unit so that we know very closely what that's going to run over time, too.

We've also honed our focus to where we're only building a certain kind of accessory dwelling unit. You can actually convert existing space like a garage and make that into an accessory dwelling unit as well. So not only focusing on the ADUs, but then within that niche, focusing even more specifically on detached units. Starting with a standard plan and then allowing people to modify it, that's where we've really, you know, kind of distilled ourselves to our core.

09:49 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. I absolutely love that.

09:51 – Whitney Hill

So that's been another part of it. We're bringing in a lot of outsiders. Like, I certainly didn't grow up in construction, and my partner Mike now jokes that, like, when we started, you know, I'd ask questions about, like, why do we do it that way? And his answer might be because that's just the way it's done in construction. And, you know, he's gotten used to me, like, pushy and, like, does it have to be that way? So now, of course, he's thinking that way, too. And I think that's kind of part of our ethos, is just challenging those norms and seeing if we can bring in other angles.

10:15 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. I was going to ask you if that. Do you feel like that's part of the secret sauce? The thing that you feel either separates you or the organization makes it unique. And I was wondering that culture ethos, as you mentioned as well, too, that you start to really be able to disrupt things? It's a lot. It can be a lot harder to disrupt things if you're within the industry. This is the way that we've been doing it for the last 20, 30 years. But when you start to have people outside of the industry looking at things in a different way, asking questions, saying, hey, maybe that doesn't work, or could this be done better? Just really kicking the tire, so to speak, and understand that, hey, maybe there is a better way. Do you feel like that's part of your secret sauce?

10:54 – Whitney Hill

Definitely. And I also think along with what you're saying about me being an outsider to construction, that said, if I just tried to go this alone without somebody like Mike, no way would we be where we are. And I think that goes to say the same for him, where he wouldn't have been able to scale because he hadn't grown up in corporate America. So the two skill sets there were super complimentary. And I think if I had to broaden that to your audience of like a tip, then it's like, try to understand what, what your differentiators are and your own skill sets. What are you bringing to the table? And don't worry if you don't understand an industry. Like, where do I fit in and what would my compliment look like?

Right. Because of the supercharge you get there, it's like I walked into it not knowing anything about construction, but he's not going to let me make a stupid mistake. He's running construction operations, so there's kind of that safety net too. And I would also say that iterating on something like he was an existing company, he was actually running more construction and doing a broader scope of jobs but was starting to focus on adults. But because he did have something in place that we could then iterate on again, we were able to just grow much faster because we weren't starting from a blank piece of paper.

11:58 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have. What's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

12:10 – Whitney Hill

Yeah, I'd like to mention a habit and an app. Asana is a task management program that perhaps others have heard of, but what it's allowed us to do is to take those random thoughts you might have as a CEO or manager, and collect them somewhere that then you can immediately take action on. We've all had our legal pad at some point that has all the chicken scratches on it. But the problem with that is that you can't task yourself or others with it or put it into the ecosystem of the rest of your company. And so we've used Asana to set up each kind of department of our company with broader goals and strategies. And so we're always aiming for that. Admittedly, we'll sometimes fall a few weeks behind and we'll sit there and languish.

But we're still using our individual task management to collect those in a single place. And so we found that that's reduced the amount of just like mental anguish that you might have carrying some of that information around in your head or on a notebook or in different places because at least there's a parking lot for it. So I might have some amazing idea that I'm like, wow, we're just not ready for that. But down the line, you think about franchising or something and I have a place to brain dump that topic, to set a follow-up date for myself, and to collaborate communication with one of my co-workers on it.

So by using Asana for those kinds of company tasks and then also using our project management software called BuilderTrend for our jobs, we pretty much have a house for everything to live in. We don't have a lot of email exchanges like you might in another company where there's just all sorts of emails back and forth, documents. Like we have like a set place for both company projects and the actual jobs that we're working on.

13:44 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So now I wanted to ask you for what you might have already touched on what I call a CEO nugget. So this is a little bit more word of wisdom or a piece of advice. I like to say it might be something if you were to hop into a time machine, you would tell younger.

13:56 – Whitney Hill

Business owner, sure, I think I have a two-part answer for this one. The nugget would be focused on ruthless prioritization. And I mean that in the sense of the clients like we talked about, where you really understand who you're trying to serve and what your business focus is. But then turning that lens back on yourself as a CEO, being ruthlessly focused on what you are taking on and what you are going to ask others to do. There are so many things you could be working on at any given time and being very strategic about where you're going to allow yourself to engage is hugely important because it's so easy to get sucked into working in the business instead of working on the business.

So figuring out how to best leverage your time and just being very straight with your priorities I would say is key. All that said, you can't really do that until you have the perspective. So my advice to my younger self would be to enjoy building that experience working for established companies because that's going to become your reference guide when you go out to do this on your own. You're going to be thinking about, oh yeah, in that role at that company, we did this and that's actually perfect now. And it's such a fun thing then to be in your own company and you're getting to play on all these different experiences you had.

Some may have been fun at the time, and some may have not been, but when it comes to needing to implement it in your own company, it's just hugely invaluable because trying to come up with that from scratch without any frame of reference, it's just more time-consuming. You're going to run into dead ends more often. So enjoy that time, that first bit of your career when you are able to learn from the best. Look for opportunities to really see higher levels of that business. Whatever chance you can get in to sit on a meet, any chances you can get to play with tech, like all those learnings, you're doing that on somebody else's dollar so that you know by the time you jump ship to go do your own thing, you know what you're doing.

15:42 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely. I love that nugget. And definitely if you run into my younger business self as well, please whisper that to him too, because that's extremely valuable. And now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on this show. So, Whitney, what does being a CEO mean to you?

16:00 – Whitney Hill

I think to me, being a CEO is knowing how all the pieces fit together so that you can best orchestrate that for the other people on your team. So being able to see how the different skills, the different departments interplay, how to set that up with clear roles, is going to allow you to recruit and retain the right folks who will then be able to help you move the company forward. So to me, that's what it means to be a CEO.

16:21 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, Whitney, truly appreciate that definition. Of course, I appreciate your time even more. So what I want to do now is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know and of course, how best people can get a hold of you, find about all the awesome things you and team are working on.

16:37 – Whitney Hill

Appreciate that. Gresham, you can reach us@snapadu.com you can learn all about accessory dwelling units. You can also see what we've set up as far as the level of transparency and information that we put out there on that website. We're always looking for people who just want to talk about ADUs in California or you know, more broadly, or just people who want to talk about business. So feel free to reach out.

16:57 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. And to make it even easier, we're going to have the links and information in the show notes as well too so that everybody can follow up with you and find out about all the awesome things that you're working on. Thank you so much again my friend and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

17:08 – Whitney Hill

Thank you so much, Gresham. Really appreciate it.

17:10 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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