We talk a lot about relationships at Crawford, and there’s a reason for that. When you hire a builder, you’re entering into a working relationship that could last anywhere from 6–12 months, sometimes longer. During that time, we’re going to talk, a lot.
We’re going to discuss your budget. We’re going to make hundreds of decisions together. We’re going to walk your property together, work through selections, discuss changes, solve problems and have conversations when something doesn’t go exactly as planned. And we understand the weight of that. For most homeowners, building a home is one of the largest financial decisions they will ever make. You’re trusting a team with a significant amount of money and with something you’re going to live in every single day.
You need to know who you’re doing business with. And we need to know you.
That’s why we prioritize the relationship from the very beginning.
Construction has a lot of moving parts. There are subcontractors, suppliers, schedules, selections, inspections, weather, material lead times and decisions that have to happen at the right time. Good communication doesn’t mean nothing will ever go wrong. It means when something changes, you know about it. When you have a question, you know who to call. When a decision needs to be made, we work through it together. We want our clients involved and informed throughout the process because we believe that makes the entire project better.
A good builder/client relationship also requires trust on both sides. Our clients have to trust that we’re making decisions with their project’s best interest in mind, managing their money responsibly and being upfront when something needs to be discussed. At the same time, we have to be able to communicate openly with our clients about budget, expectations, timelines and the realities of construction. That relationship matters when things are going great, but it matters even more when there’s a difficult decision or unexpected issue to work through.
There’s another reason relationships matter so much to us: we build where we live. We build in Nacogdoches and throughout East Texas. These are the same communities where we buy groceries, eat dinner, raise our families and run into our clients after a project is complete. We’re not interested in doing a job and disappearing. Our name is attached to what we build, and we want to be proud of that work five, ten and twenty years from now. The homes, businesses, developments, utilities, roads and other projects being built today are becoming part of East Texas for decades to come. We take our part in that seriously.
You can have good plans, good products and good processes, but construction still comes down to people working with people. That’s why we care so much about who we have on our team, who we partner with and the relationships we build with our clients.
We’re going to spend a lot of time together. We’re going to make a lot of decisions together. And we’re going to be responsible for a very important investment.
So yes, we take the client relationships seriously. We think every builder should.
