This is the Pro Perspective from Houzz Pro, where homebuilders, designers, and industry experts share their views on running a modern firm.

Liza Hausman: I'm Liza Hausman, vice president of Industry Marketing at Houzz, and I'm excited to introduce you to the Pro Perspective, our brand new podcast from Houzz Pro. As someone who's passionate about helping businesses thrive, I believe that building a better business starts with the right perspective. That's why we're bringing together thought leaders in residential construction and design to share their expertise and insights on a wide range of topics. From sales and project management best practices to future-proofing your firm, we'll dive into the topics that matter most to you. Join me on this journey as we explore new ideas, challenge assumptions, and uncover fresh perspectives to help you build a better and bigger business.

Speaking of fresh perspectives, in today's episode, we're speaking about the challenges of keeping you and your team energized, even for day-to-day processes. How do you keep passion and enthusiasm and focus on results? Join us as I explore this question with Melissa Kennedy, president of Meadowlark Design + Build. Hello, everybody. I'm Liza Hausman, vice president of Industry Marketing here at Houzz, and I'm so excited to be joined today by Melissa Kennedy. Melissa is president of Meadowlark and has been part of Meadowlark's growth and development for a decade and a half in various positions over the years.

I'm particularly excited to speak with Melissa today because she has such an industry background. When I do talk to lots of folks in the industry, they often come from different backgrounds and bring lots of different experiences to bear on their positions. I think Melissa brings a really unique perspective and a unique background that I like to frame really as passion meets process. Melissa, welcome, and thank you for being here.

Melissa Kennedy: Thank you for having me.

Liza: I'd love to just get a little background. Tell us a little bit about Meadowlark, the company, and then a little bit about how you ended up joining.

Melissa: I would love to tell you. Meadowlark is a design-build company. We're in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and it's on its 20th year anniversary this year, so that's an exciting thing to celebrate. I have been here for 16 years, just the other day I celebrated that, and it has been an engaging ride the whole way through, and we will definitely be talking more about that. We do residential design-build, so we have a design department and a build side.

Unique to Meadowlark is we have a full framing crew that we have on staff and project managers and a trim carpenter and designers who help conduct the front end of the process. We do a various mix of projects. We're about a $13 to $15 million revenue company right now. People who are listening have an idea of where we want to grow to. Our goal in 2030 is to be around $20 million, so growing a little bit each year.

Currently, we do about three to four custom homes a year. We do 25 to 35 remodels, and those remodels really do vary in size, from $100,000 projects to $1.5 million remodels. Then more recently, since COVID hit, we decided to start offering what we call our Encore Services. It's really small, think handyman-type projects to our former clients only. That's been a fun way to keep engaging with the clients who we really enjoy working with. We're quite relationship-based, so we don't just design neighborhoods and build them. It's for individual homeowners, and that's the part that we love.

Liza: Love it. I thought it'd be fun maybe to start a little bit on the passion side. I know you're an endurance athlete, and then you're also a mom with an architecture background. Maybe talk to us a little bit about your life passions, the things that drive you.

Melissa: Yes, I really enjoy challenges. If we go way back, I started getting interested in architecture when I visited the architecture school and the engineering school at Michigan. When I visited the engineering school, I left thinking like, "Oh, that feels pretty boring." Then I went to visit the architecture school and thought, "You can do this? People can do this?" I applied to the architecture school here in Michigan, right in the town I live in now. I went to architecture school, and it was wonderful. Getting out of school, I had high hopes and dreams of going to Seattle, but as life does, it takes its own course.

Just a clue on some personal life happenings for me is my father at the time, he had some brain aneurysms. I got out of school and was quickly confronted with the reality of life that was just so unexpected and really, really challenging. I think the challenges, at least for me, really started getting out of school. It was also '05, so work was plentiful. Then as I was taking care of my dad, who was just really in a poor position, given the extent of the toll that the brain aneurysms had on him, after a couple years, '08, '09 hit, and what happened to the economy then, and architecture firms, work wasn't happening.

The architecture firm I worked in was in the commercial space, and my dad was really quite sick and eventually passed away. Then I needed a new job. I got into starting working at Meadowlark. While I started working at Meadowlark, which was in the upstairs of the garage at the time, right around the corner from my house, my friend said, "I'm doing an IronMan, and you should too." I thought, "Well, why not? Let's do it." I needed a new challenge. I needed something else to focus on that was also hard, but almost hard by decision. My dad getting sick was not a decision I could make. I got into Iron Man. After I got into Iron Man, I got into ultramarathons.

That has really fueled a passion and a desire for really figuring out what we're capable of. Not only physically, because at a point when you're in an ultra, and the longest I've done is a 115-mile race, but at some point, your mind really starts to take over. You just realize how much your mind controls how you feel and how you attack problems. As I've been with Meadowlark for these 16 years, we really changed as a company. What has really, I think, shaped my development and involvement and continued engagement is this understanding of how our minds have such a strong control over what we do, what our output can be, and where we can dream to be in the future.

Liza: I love hearing you talk about this. I had a very similar experience after having children and getting back into tennis and finding that competing made me mentally stronger in business and in work in general. I found that being able to coach yourself, being able to overcome difficult situations, or coming from behind, or being an underdog, all of those things are part of that mental discipline that you build up when you're able to do it in a safer space, I think in sports in some ways, and then take it to the rest of your life.

Melissa: Yes. A safer space is a great way to describe it, wherever you find that safe space. For me, it's trails. I think that's a great way to describe it because it's almost the relief to-- and I don't know if you play double tennis or singles, but for me, it's the relief of not needing to rely on really many others to be able to run these races. For so many things in life, raising kids, a career, a marriage or partnership, it does take many people to get things to happen.

When I'm out on the trail, it's just one foot in front of the other. I feel like it's that fortitude and that clarity. When you're in a safe space, you can think so clearly. Your defenses are down, you're not in your reptilian brain, it just allows for a different level of thinking. Then I feel like, and maybe you feel this after your competition, there is that high inhalation that lasts beyond it that then helps impact the rest of the world around you. For us at Meadowlark, it's really the relationships. I think my passion for doing endurance events has really fueled a desire to have healthy relationships everywhere and really figure out what we can do.

Construction is just a difficult space, as you know. It's complicated. You rely on so many people to do what they say they're going to do, to show up when they say they're going to show up, or something to arrive when it needs to arrive. When you're dependent on so many people, there is something quite freeing about being on a trail to your own step, your own process.

Liza: 100%. It was singles, for exactly that reason, just sort of feeling like you're in total control. In some ways, you only have yourself to rely on. It's empowering, but also an extra challenge, because when you do overcome it, you know you did it without any help from somebody else. You're right, all the other parts of our lives are so team-oriented and cross-functional, et cetera, and we've all gotten really good at that.

I want to hear more about, particularly, how this is translated for you because you've put such incredible discipline and processes in place at work. I think a lot of that comes from seeing the results of having disciplined training, et cetera. I do think for me also, it's helped me be a better coach or leader in a sense of being able to feel confident that when you tell somebody they can do something that you really believe that that's possible and it's in them to do it.

Melissa: Yes. I think, and probably for you too, it's like, whether or not it's tennis or running, find that thing that gets you into the space so that you feel fueled and energized and know and believe what you're capable of so that you can then bring it to work and people around you. That's the exciting thing too, is helping people find that thing that puts them in that space.

Liza: 100%. Let's talk a little bit more about how that discipline is translated into how you're organizing and leading your team at Meadowlark. I know we've talked a little bit about business maintenance. If you can talk a little bit about how you define that, because I don't think I've heard anybody really describe it in exactly that same way.

Melissa: Yes, this idea of being in a maintenance space at work came to me because my husband's an entrepreneur and had started multiple businesses. I joined Meadowlark soon after it started and felt very much like a startup when we were in the upstairs of a garage which had no bathroom, by the way. We had to go to the owner's house to use the bathroom when we were in the upstairs of the garage. In summer it was not so bad, but it's winter a lot here and then it was pretty painful.

In the startup phase, there's a certain energy and excitement and endurance that you can bring and that staff bring to that phase of a project or of starting a business. Then after that wears off and people are looking for compensation increases or better healthcare benefits or more days off, then the company really has to get into this phase of like, what are we promising and how do we maintain? There's a bit of tension, because you want to be able to provide for your employees. The tension of the unknown of the future is also always there.

For design-build, for us, we really secure work for the next six months. Custom homes, it's a little longer, but we don't do very many of those. For us, predicting the future is quite challenging. You exist in this tension of trying to see the future as best as possible, but also trying to balance what employees need and creating a culture that really helps you to [unintelligible 00:12:50] people stay or at least feel fulfilled by their work too, and feel and know that they're cared for.

This idea of maintenance came up, and I relate it to the discipline of exercise, which I'm sure you can relate to. I didn't just start running 115 mile races, and I didn't actually just start signing up for Ironman. Growing up I remember my mom kicking us out of the house to go outdoors and get exercise, and parents who had a discipline early mornings of reflection and prayer time and then exercise.

It's these disciplines for maintenance that we put in place, not because the reward is necessarily that day, but because the reward comes in decades. The discipline of managing your health, like getting proper sleep, getting exercise, all the things that we know are good for us to do are relevant in business too. It's not always glamorous. Yes, it takes time. Yes, it's probably committing to some weekly meetings that you have to have on a consistent basis. Keeping consistent with those practices and showing up and holding people accountable is this maintenance phase that is not for quick, short-term goals, but really for long-term goals.

I think it relates to design-build, because it's not an industry that has a lot of change in it. If there is change, it's quite slow. It's not that we're releasing a new product in a couple years, that's going to take off or we're hoping it will. It's a long slog of relationship development of training and coaching. In the Midwest, everyone's pretty aware that there's a real dying art for trades.

The new technologies, AI, there's things like that we can start to introduce, but really, for us, it's about preserving the art of construction, and what comes along with that, and what and who knows how to construct things well, and making sure that there's training and processes in place to make sure that we don't lose the knowledge that goes with the older generations of people who have stuck with construction and quality and doing things in a way that lasts and is sustainable. This idea of maintenance related to personal life and to Meadowlark is what keeps me excited.

Liza: Tell me more about, you talk about these are for long-term goals. What are those long term goals? What are you working towards? Given that it's such a long-term outlook, how do you keep people aligned and thinking about those things? What is that discipline that allows you to have that two-year, five-year tenure outlook and have folks stay engaged?

Melissa: I think Meadowlark is an interesting story in this, because it really, I think, starts with the owners too. The owners named Meadowlark not after them, but because they really cared about building sustainably on this earth, they studied Native American practices in the forest, so they flipped open a bird book and decided to name their company Meadowlark.

I actually do think this idea of long-term legacy started with them and their decision to name our company Meadowlark. When I started off at Meadowlark, it was an owner-operated company. The owners, Doug and Kirk, were very much involved in all of the day-to-day. Doug sold all of our work, we designed it, and we've transitioned that. That's not very sustainable. If an owner-operated company, it usually dies with the owner, but we've worked to transition our sales team into sales designers, so that the owner Doug really doesn't sell anymore. That's a process. That's a process of building a company that can stand beyond the feet of the owners.

Now we have a full sales design team that does all of our selling for us. The next step that we're looking into and researching, which several design-build companies across the country have done, is an employee-owned business. How do we offer things to our employees that are beyond the owners and keep the legacy of Meadowlark alive? In the day-to-day practices, it's weekly meetings, it's consistent communication, it's establishing templates and emails so that the client experience, regardless of who they interact with, is very similar.

I recently heard a process described as guardrails. Let people be people, let them choose their vehicle they're in, let them choose the lane they're in. I wish I could remember who said this, it was from an EOS conference. They said, think of processes like guardrails. I think that's so relevant. The way that we maintain is by keeping guardrails on, but letting all the unique individuals in our company and their unique abilities shine within those guardrails. That's how we can deliver a consistent experience, still grow, still be moving on the same path as those guardrails are directing us, but make sure that we're keeping the internal culture and the client experience similar.

Liza: One thing I liked that we talked about earlier was the concept of having the energy of an amateur, but the wisdom of a pro. Can you talk a little bit about that and how that, I guess, manifests itself in your work and your team's work?

Melissa: One of the wonderful things that a startup brings is this energy, this really eager and fun and lively energy of something new and not being daunted or hindered by the fallout of what actually happens. It's important to me-- We deal with warranty issues, we're absolutely not perfect, but it's important to me that we keep looking at failure in a way of doing better. Keeping this energy alive.

When we were in the startup of the garage with Doug and Kirk, it was animated. It was exciting, it was lively. Sometimes there was laughter, sometimes there was shouting, but it was not dull in any way. It was very exciting. I think that energy, being around that type of energy, especially in design-build, where every project is different, every client is new, we get this wonderful ability to be in new spaces and affect people's lives many times throughout the course of the year. Over the course of 20 years, hundreds, maybe even thousands of times.

Keeping that energy alive and looking for the opportunities, while also learning. Having wisdom is learning from things that set you back before failures that you've made and come across. Having that wisdom to guide with some certainty, but an openness for just innovation and invention.

Liza: Do you have a good example, maybe a failure example that you then learned from and how did the team learn from it? How did you, I guess, implement that learning from failure culture?

Melissa: I have a great example. It's me who failed several times. I was relatively new at Meadowlark. I think it was within my first year, maybe second year, but it was in '08, '09, '10. The work didn't abound. If much about construction, the margins are not always that high. We had a project, it was a window project, a window replacement wall. I'll never forget when I got the call from our framing manager and he said, "Can you confirm the size, the height of these windows you ordered?"

I looked up what I ordered and I told him, and he was like, "They're about three feet too tall." I'm like, "Three feet too tall?" They would have extended beyond the roof. They weren't going to fit. I felt sick to my stomach. In those days, it was Meadowlark's fifth year. Things were really challenging. The owners were arguing over paychecks and I just made a thousands of dollar mistake. I was sick to my stomach over it. I still remember that walk home.

Then even worse, I did it a second time. For the grace of the owners at my company, we learned from it. We made a process. We now have a window checklist and sign off so this mistake isn't going to happen again. The way that we teach people on this is we do have an onboarding process. On the onboarding process, we take them to visit the owner's house. The owner, I'm grateful for this, he used the windows in his [unintelligible 00:21:42]

Liza: I was going to ask, I bet you designed something with these windows, yes.

Melissa: Yes. They went into the owner's house and on every onboarding, we drive past that garage with no bathroom that we worked in and we take them to the owner's house. It's a great lesson on, it is your choice to decide how you handle failure. You can either learn from it and prevent somebody else from making something similar, or you quit, you walk away, you feel ashamed of it.

Thankfully, the culture and the environment they built at that time and have maintained is that we got to go learn from this. If you are familiar with construction, there's a lot that can go wrong on a job site. There's a lot. That is part of onboarding, which also impacts our culture, because then it's a culture of not blaming. "Okay, what could I do? Even if somebody else made a mistake, what could I have done to communicate better to help prevent that mistake?" It's a beautiful thing and I'm so glad they kept me.

Liza: We didn't talk about this before, but hearing you speak and knowing that you started this company as it was a startup in the garage, how would you describe the different life stages of the company to this point? What were the key inflection points, and maybe in the framework of that maintenance or the culture decisions? What were those sorts of milestones or inflection points and what did you have to change in terms of what you implemented to go from being that owner-operator to where you are now?

Melissa: I think it's right before COVID, what stands out to me is 2018. It was 2018 rolling into 2019. I had my third child and I went on maternity leave and I came back and I could tell things were not going well. At that point, the owners had decided that something needed to change. We got to that point because we grew, we grew really fast, and that growth was exciting. Growth is exciting. Until we got to the end of the year and had not much to show for it. Revenue is one thing, profit is totally different.

Then, usually your numbers are an indication of behavior issues. Our culture wasn't good either. We were all working really hard, but not gaining any traction. In 2019, the owners decided to invest in a system called Entrepreneurial Operating System, EOS. It was at that point that I feel like we really made the decision to get in a different car and drive a different way, that we were excited about the growth. We didn't want to stop growing, but we weren't growing in a way that would make us proud or build a company that would even resemble what they wanted.

Those were hard conversations. When you're working hard and not really going anywhere, or worse, going in reverse, that is not a fulfilling workplace for people. The owner's decision to do that really involved them getting a different leadership team involved to really say, "We are beyond the point of our ability and now we need help with it." Investing in EOS was a really big financial commitment at the time for us and one that we've never regretted since. That was a major milestone, especially that was right before COVID, a year before COVID, we decided to make that investment. I do believe that the things that we've learned and how to operate under the EOS guidelines have really just helped us to get clarity and move in a much stronger direction than we were headed in previously.

Liza: What were the signals or the signs that things weren't going well? Because it's been challenging. For many years, if you were giving advice to someone, what would be the warning signs to look for that it was time to think about building a new system, working with a different system, or just rethinking how the company is run? What are those red flags?

Melissa: Yes, for our company, it was looking at cashflow, where is cash flow going? Then looking at our gross profit on projects. The real indicator and the first indicator is unhappy clients. When you have unhappy clients, the time you need to put into those relationships and mend them and help try to solve them is priceless time, but it comes at an opportunity cost of doing another job. When you have unhappy clients, it's typical that the data either follows or doesn't look as good either, at least from what we've seen in our history.

When you're a small local company, you really get a lot of work based on repeat and referral business. The future, when you have unhappy clients, looks really grim and it doesn't look good. Those were some pretty quick indicators.

Then the other one to pay attention to is if your clients aren't happy, what about your staff? This is a very labor-intensive, communication-heavy job. You're dreaming about something that isn't built yet. You're talking about things on paper, you're talking about materials, maybe even just from pictures, and you're moving it into something so tangible. That's why it's so rewarding. That's also why it's so complicated. It's clients' feelings about your company, internal feelings about your company, and then the data.

Liza: Great advice. I think it's a good segue to asking a little bit more about how do you get client feedback? Obviously, sometimes it's easier to know if your clients are unhappy, because they'll be explicit about it. Sometimes they're quietly unhappy and complain online later or it causes other issues down the road. They're afraid to complain because they want the work done, and they're afraid if they complain that there'll be an issue with how the work gets completed. Tell me a little bit more about how has that client feedback process evolved, for you?

Melissa: Our owner has always done client closeout meetings. I do client closeout meetings now. Client closeout meetings are so helpful for me because, and I've done these for years, so I get to see how the complaints or the problems or the issues or the communication shifts. That's always encouraging to me. The behaviors drive how a client feels in the end. That's been incredibly helpful feedback for me.

If you get feedback from a client, you also have to have a culture and employees who can hear the feedback and make change from it. Feedback is so helpful, but when you get the feedback and don't know what to do on it or feel pretty helpless with it, that's a terrible feeling. You want to make sure that when you get the feedback, you have people on staff that care enough to make change and change behaviors and not just get defensive.

There's a line that we were taught from one of our mentors, Mark Richardson, and he said, "It's your job to communicate, not theirs to understand." I bring that to every client's communication, because it's true, our clients will change forever, but our communication needs to meet the need. I've seen communication change dramatically over the 16 years I've been here. I also had the privilege of working with an 80-year-old architect at my first job. He saw so much change. Contracts were handshakes. I really do embrace, and we have a culture of embracing, it's our job to communicate, not theirs to understand.

Along with the closeout meetings, I was starting to get frustrated because I was getting information at the closeout that I thought, "Gosh, if we knew about this sooner, we could have made change." Like you said, nobody really likes confrontation or wants to [unintelligible 00:30:28]

Liza: Nobody likes conflict.

Melissa: Yes. I'm an Enneagram 8, the challenger, so I actually do. I like getting to these meetings and getting feedback that I felt pretty helpless, like, "Oh, we really could have made a change." We started doing something called a halftime hurdle. We do a halftime hurdle internally and with clients when drywall goes up. That's usually a good halfway point. We ask for open and honest feedback. It's a little bit less about the tangible things in the project. It's more about, "What's this experience like for you? Is my communication making sense? Is it misaligned with anything you're hearing otherwise? How are we doing at dust-protecting your home?"

Many of our clients live in their houses. I was getting complaints about their light fixture getting dust on it or not being protected. I'm like, "That's totally preventable." We have these halftime hurdles just to ask if there's something that we could do better. That's been extremely helpful because we can change behaviors. If clients are really happy, it's a huge boost for the team. It does two things.

Liza: That's really nice to hear. I'm curious, do you have these meetings at your office? Where do you host them? Are you sitting there taking notes during the conversation? How do you document what's happening?

Melissa: Yes, every Wednesday, we do 10-minute internal hurdles on every project, where the design lead meets with the project manager. I facilitate those just to make sure we're getting what we need, the projects moving along. We always give an internal rating of how happy we think our client is. Then for the halftime hurdle, it's the project manager and the design lead. They meet with the client at that point to say, is there something we could do differently or better? Then at the closeout, it's just meeting with them.

Liza: Just you. Got it. Seems like, again, a good process with multiple checkpoints to make sure that right things aren't falling through the cracks.

Melissa: It creates a culture of feedback, which I think is just imperative for improvement anywhere. It's a time where they can even talk to the trades. We use trades on all of our jobs, similar trades. If one client's having an issue or sees an issue, there's a good chance it's affecting other projects too. It's a great chance to give feedback, not just to us and our staff, from the homeowners, but to our trade professionals and people we partner with on jobs too.

Liza: Makes sense. Switching gears to you a little bit, you mentioned your Enneagram 8. Curious if that's something that you use with all your employees? Do you use it to give them more insight into how they interact with people? curious, and what you do with that knowledge that you're a challenger and maybe tell people a little bit about the Enneagram system.

Melissa: Yes, I should probably wish I knew more for this. I know that Enneagram has a number system. Of course, like any good assessment, you can take a test and find out what you are too. I think that the Enneagram was something that my church did. I got interested in that and had the leadership team here at work take it too. We do disk testing across the company. We do plot everybody on the wheel and see where is everybody at. Then the more recent finding I've had that I've been really interested in is Patrick Linceoni's working genius. It's about the six geniuses of how you move from a problem through the finish line, and where your geniuses or your gifts align in that process.

Liza: That's super interesting. Yes, I think there's this combination of that self-knowledge, "This is how I tend to interact. This is how I react to feedback." There's all kinds of information, I think, that can be helpful as both a manager and an employee to figure out how do you function best in your company. That sounds super interesting, too, because you figure out where you want to make sure you're contributing, at a project, but also where you might be able to maybe step up in a place where you have a natural tendency to dig in and be a genius in one area, but you probably could develop your genius in other areas as well.

Melissa: It is, it's fascinating. They talk about, if you're living in your geniuses, it's those things that you do that you lose track of time doing. That's fun to know, too. The assessment also tells you your frustration, so which part of the process do you really not like, which I think is very insightful.

Liza: That's super insightful. I'm curious how-- I guess, I see you're a structured, disciplined thinker. Is that something that you apply to your life outside of work? Between training for endurance and the running and family everybody is challenged to make time for this, especially folks leading companies. I guess, do you apply a similar discipline and structure to fit everything in? What do you do to make it all work, or does it?

Melissa: Yes, I do. It's hard to know nature versus nurture. I, growing up, my parents never let us sleep in. Saturday mornings, I think we swept out the garage. It's hard to know what I was brought up with and what I've just enacted. I know I function better on routine. I know I like the peaceful morning hours when you can see the sunrise. Yes, I'm quite disciplined at home.

I like to think you can be disciplined and still fun. I hope the discipline still is fun. I do, I think, I, yes, I think knowing what we need, and who we want to become is really important to spend time thinking about. I do spend about an hour every morning and just like quiet time in solitude. I, the more responsibility I have, the more I've really craved that time of reflection, and even dreaming.

I think I've learned at Meadowlark early on with the windows that you learn so much quicker through failure than successes. Spending that hour reflecting, and even thinking about how I showed up to my kids after a stressful day, or how I was available or unavailable to my husband, not that it was good or bad, just more of like, what was overriding those moments of how I interacted with them, and then who I want to become.

Doug and Kirk early on, the owners of Meadowlark, brought us to a visioning seminar that Zingerman's, a local company here that does a lot of training, and especially on vision, envisioning. There's the deli bakery that got into more business things that's exciting to follow. The visioning, and spending time thinking about a point in time in the future and who you want to be, and what you want to do. you can, you can put goals to it. I think more importantly, the visioning is really who you who you want to be.

We do this as a company, like who do we want to be? Data is one thing, but what do you want it to feel like when homeowners walk in the doors? What do you want it to feel like when guests walk into your house? What do you want it to feel like when your kids come home from school? There's that energy, that presence that we all give, that has an impact on the spaces we're in. Not dwelling on failure or mistakes you made in the past, but really thinking about who I want to become, who you want to become, what you want that to be like when people are around you, has been a really important focus for me for a long time.

I think some of it is because-- my dad passed away at 52. It was completely unexpected. I think when you're faced with the finality of life in such a way, while that's such a grieving and something so sad, you do get the opportunity to look at life in a completely different way. I think going through that, when I was at a point of graduating and excitement, and then confronted with a major health issue for somebody who I admired so much, just really makes you think a little bit differently. I do think that has impacted all of my decisions. Thankfully, I think, in a healthy way.

Liza: Do you think it gave you a greater desire for control, or do you think it's still the more of that, yes, passion for discipline and control?

Melissa: Yes, I think more so, it almost was faced with the reality of control, what we can control, but there's a whole series of things that we can't. That's even the attitude that I bring to closeouts. I can control what I can control, Meadowlark's experience, but I know that when people do projects, they have whole lives going on outside of our construction project. They have kids, they have relationships, they have work, stressful careers that they're trying to navigate too. If I can take back and Meadowlark can control what we can control and know and be proud of us doing our best, then that's all we can do in an effort to keep growing and learning and engaging and communicating. We're just one piece of the puzzle.

Liza: That's lovely. Are you an early riser? Where do you fit this hour in in the morning? I'm very curious.

Melissa: Are you? I'm sure you are.

Liza: I'm an early riser as well. Yes, there's quite a bit. I don't think I have as much discipline in terms of setting aside a specific hour just for reflection. Although I do find, for sports and maybe you do it while you run, you find you're solving problems and doing things when you have that time when nobody's talking to you, talking at you. It's nice. I probably fit it in more in those times.

I think it's such an interesting concept to make that space. Just having time to be present for other people or be present for yourself, I think is a really great concept. You feel like you're rushing from one thing to the next typically in a day. I think your idea of maintenance I like in the sense that-- and for me, it is part of being in control. It's not that I'm just reacting day to day with what's happening. There's a plan, there's a longer-term framework and structure here.

When we fail or when things go wrong, we have a way to revisit them and apply and make a change to the bigger framework rather than feeling like everything's falling apart because one bad thing happened and we're not sure where to fit it in into the bigger picture. I think, as you said, it's a difficult industry. I think there's a lot of stress from cash flow to not knowing all the things you can't control; what's going on with the economy and the housing market, interest rates. It's so many things that people don't have control over. Figuring out that bigger picture, how do we make sure we're building that buffer in or building a company that can manage within the things out of our control. That's not easy. I think you mentioned Mark, but I think he's good about doing that, revisiting what's happened, what changes do we need to make?

Melissa: Yes. We, probably since COVID started, really paying acute attention to surprises and do believe no surprise is a good surprise. Potentially that hour I carve out in the morning, it's usually from 5:00 to 6:00, occasionally earlier, but usually that hour from 5:00 to 6:00, you know there's probably not going to be a surprise. It is that calm, reflective time. I know my kids aren't going to wake up. I know I have it to myself. When you start thinking about surprises and trying to eliminate them, it's amazing how your behaviors change. You do think no surprise is a good surprise. Steady and reliable and consistent is typically more helpful in this industry where there are surprises you can't control.

Liza: And in life. [laughs] Love it. What inspires you these days, Melissa? What are you excited about? What gets you out of bed in the morning? Anything new?

Melissa: Yes, I don't know if you get these emails, but 3-2-1 is an email from James Clear that he sends on a regular basis, and it's full of quotes. My recent inspiration comes from a lot of quotes. I'm an avid Bible reader, so I'm inspired by that. My reflection time ends up usually being pretty inspiring. I'm surrounded by really great people at work and life, who are all engaged, have a growth mindset, not sick. That's just fun to be around.

I read a quote recently that challenged me to find something that delighted you every day. When you start looking for the little things-- yesterday I looked at the clouds and I'm like, "Those clouds were beautiful." It's like, we're surrounded by little things all the time, that can be inspiring. You just have to notice them.

Liza: Couldn't agree more. I think feeling grateful or humble for something every day is always a good way to approach the day. It gives you some perspective when-- there's always something going on. Same thing, working great. You're working in a company, there's always some chaos. There's always some sort of fire drill or something crazy going on. It's good to say, "Okay, but overall, I really like my-- I'm in a good place." [laughs] [crosstalk]

Melissa: Yes, the mindset.

Liza: [crosstalk] things, yes.

Melissa: It's the same mindset I bring to mile 80 on a 100-mile run. I feel good. That's part of the way our minds work and the ability that they really can have in controlling how we feel. In those late miles of the race, I tell myself, "you're good, your knee doesn't hurt, your feet feel great." This sort of mental belief of like, "I can do hard things. This is it, I'm doing it. I'm going to finish this race."

I don't think I mentioned this yet, but I spend a lot of time before my races visualizing crossing the finish line. It's almost as if when I get to the race, I'm like, "Oh, I've done it. I've crossed the finish line." I bring that to difficult client conversations or difficult meetings with staff. It's like, what do I want this to finish like so that you can then dictate your behaviors to just get that outcome that you wanted?

Liza: What's left on your bucket list or your goal list or the who I want to become list, Melissa? I'm very curious for you, whether it's personally or professionally, what are you hoping to do with the next 5 to 10 years?

Melissa: What's on the list?

Liza: What's on the list? Travel, anything.

Melissa: Yes, there's countries to travel to. I have three boys. I think raising them to be kind humans is high on my list. I'm in a marriage, I've been married for 17 years. Talk about the maintenance phase. There's a maintenance phase for that. That's important. Relationships are important to me. As far as Meadowlark goes, I think really just we have a three-year vision that describes what we want it to feel like and what type of company we want to be. Achieving that is high on my list.

Then I've got a 200-miler in there at some point. Those are becoming more and more popular. That's on the list somewhere. I think more importantly is maintaining a mindset of curiosity and continually believing that, again, communication is our responsibility and really delivering, continuing to just deliver an experience that makes homes and construction beautiful and quality built and well-designed, because we really do, and I really do believe that we are strongly impacted by the spaces we're in, whether in nature on the trails or at home at the dinner table. Continuing to deliver exceptional quality, good design, and good service is high on the list too.

Liza: Wonderful. Thank you, Melissa. Hearing your passion for life, your passion for people, your passion for what you do, and how you've married that to some structure that really allows you to be successful on all these fronts is really inspiring. I thank you for sharing your experience and wisdom with us today. I hope to speak with you again soon.

Melissa: Yes. So enjoyed talking with you. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

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