Today we’d like to introduce you to Chad Arendsen.
Hi Chad, so excited to have you on the platform. So, before we get into questions about your work life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today.
My genealogy is that of a fourth-generation builder, designer, and construction professional, but I fund my way to the industry by way of default. At the moment in time that I first began work in the construction industry, I was planning to go back to college to get my master’s degree in philosophy so that I could eventually write books and be a professor. My soon-to-be wife and I were living in a trailer park in Leucadia and had found out that we were going to be having a baby, and that made me second guess my plan to go further into debt and chase a dream as a philosopher with the prospect of being a father.
I was in the process of improving our little trailer and people had asked me if I ever did handyman work or side projects, so it was then that I slowly pivoted from being a full-time student with a retail job to support my educational habit, to taking the leap to start my own handyman company, Chad of All Trades. When we first started, I did all the work in every trade myself and much of it was self-taught, or from reading industry publications (this was still before YouTube). My wife, Amber, was my sidekick and helper until she was too uncomfortable from pregnancy to help anymore.
When our oldest son was born, we sold that little trailer and parlayed it into a new tract home that we could not afford (like so many others in 2002), and as I customized that home, Amber and I continued to build our business, as well as to explore the concept of real estate. Eventually, we hired employees and built our handyman company up to a team of 10 people, and at the same time, we sold our tract home and moved to a substantially smaller home back at the beach in Solana, where we have since moved through each individual neighborhood and have finally built what seems to be a long term home in Eden Gardens. Amber has a pretty rich and unique history with E.G., which is a story in and of itself, and our story of how we arrived here and found our way to Solana Beach, and this specific subset of the city is pretty awesome.
As we built our real estate prowess, the company continued to grow, and I became wary of spending so much time writing proposals for designers, realtors, and homeowners on projects that were ultimately awarded to other companies. At the same time, I observed a huge inefficiency in the way the industry was linearly designing projects, then getting bids, then going back to redesign for budget purposes, then eventually building and getting hit with expensive change orders, etc. It was just all backwards, and I herd story after story of poor customer experiences and there was just a general tenor of “construction isn’t pleasant” from many homeowners that I talked with.
So, we really started to focus on building a business model where we provided aIl of the design and construction in a more seamless fashion that focused on the customer experience, and that controlled budgets and design elements in a more holistic fashion. The business model was killing it and we were getting a lot of rave reviews, but I still felt like we were missing out on the higher-end projects, and I couldn’t put my finger on it. We ultimately decided that it was because of the name of the company. Even though no customer actually stated this, even when I asked, my belief was that even though everything was right, and customers wanted to award us those larger projects, they just couldn’t reconcile handing over a Million plus dollar project to a “handyman” company. now, we were far from that by this point of course, but the name that was great 15 years before, was no longer a commensurate brand to the work that we were performing. So, we finally rebranded as COAT Design Remodel. Most people don’t even know what COAT stands for (and they never ask), but it’s a fun nod to our history and how far we have come from that small single dude in a truck with his tools to managing and performing many dozens of projects a year at a very high level of quality, efficiency, and most importantly, customer experience.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey has been a fairly smooth road?
There are always struggles in business and the larger the business grows, many times the larger the obstacles. For me personally, the definition moment was in 2011 when I realized I just didn’t have enough business to keep up with the lifestyle that Amber and I were trying to create for ourselves. Don’t get me wrong, we still lived very humbly in an 800-square-foot home a block from the beach. But at that time, we had grown the handyman business to 10 people, and I was loyal and didn’t want to fire anyone, so we eventually decided to sell our home in order to pay the bills. It was disappointing because I always knew that home would be very valuable, and while we still avoided being a statistic of the short sale wave of that era, we only profited 50K on that sale (the home is now worth 3.5MM, haha, but you can never look back on business decisions and that was another lesson for another story), but literally the day we closed escrow, if I had not had that 50K, I would have had to fire all my employees and possibly would have even had to file bankruptcy. Some of these things are things no one knows, and it even took me time to tell Amber how bad it had gotten at that time.
Eventually, I helped some of our employees get their own licenses so that they could go off and be master of their own destiny, and some I even still work with to this day, and of course, we then pivoted and evolved the company.
The 10 years that it took for us to get from having to sell everything we owned just to stay alive until today was laden with lessons and education. The education I did not receive way back when I decided not to upsurge my master’s degree, I had received in spades, and at likely a much higher cost than what I would have paid than I stayed in school, haha. But alas, how many people have the opportunity to have million-plus dollar educations :).
Learning to navigate government agencies, employee retention, manage customer expectations and general liability of being in this industry are all marked themes throughout that time.
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
We build homes that people love to live in. Our company motto is Love Where You Live. This is the essential maxim for everything we do. How do we infuse love (unconditional love) into every aspect of the design and build process.
Our company culture is one of constant evolution and never settling for what is current. That concept of never settling and always finding ways to do more and do better is literally built into our mission along with the ideal that it is our responsibility to “save marriages”.
And what we mean by that is that there is some statistic that we read tied to the percentage of divorces that have occurred as the result of a remodel or building experience, and it is our mission to make that process so stress-free on the client that there would never be an outcome like that during one of our projects.
It is not our job to be council, but by taking the posture of providing a simple, informed, and empowered process from the get-go, we intrinsically provide this to our clients. We ask ourselves every single moment, and at every interaction with our client and their experience with the design and build, “does this add value for our customer, and does this help them attain their goals more simply.”
Additionally, we truly do provide solutions working backwards from the outcomes. All projects have a budget, even if it is unsaid, or sometimes unknown, so we do an excellent job of extracting that at the onset of the project in order to provide solutions for people that we know are tenable, as opposed to trying to show them an option and “timeshare sale close them.”
We are the sherpas for each individual client experience, and to make their climb to the top of the mountain as pain-free and safe as possible, we simply put them first and protect them from the pitfalls and day-to-day drama that is so prevalent in this industry.
In short, we design with love, we build with love, and if the results are not something that the client absolutely loves, including the journey to get to the end result, we have failed.
Before we let you go, we’ve got to ask if you have any advice for those who are just starting out.
This is a tough one for me because I coach a lot of upcoming entrepreneurs in this space, and one thing I always tell them is to not listen too much to other people’s advice. Yes, there is so much to be gained from other people’s experiences, but you only have one chance in business to be naive and often times naïveté can be a really powerful tool. That doesn’t mean being reckless or putting yourself or your clients in dangerous situations, but I see so many awesome innovations in process and technology and with application of tools and products simply because someone didn’t know how it was “supposed to be done.” The other thing I would offer is that taking things slow and really focusing on where you fit into the industry is a solid approach. We live in this world now where everyone hears success stories about being multi-millionaires “overnight” as YouTube stars, athletics, app startups, flipping homes, etc., but what is never told is the journey and story to get to that point. I think it was Mark Cuban that said, “it took me 18 years to become an overnight success.” Meaning that he had an 18 long story of struggle and figuring things out before he actually “made it,” and we always glamorize the success and forget to tell the story of how that person arrived there. So don’t chase the fame or the glory or the money. Do what you do to make it the absolute best that you can make it. Unrelentingly. Never settler for mediocrity, and never allow your client to either. Always do what you know is right and do whatever it takes to make it so. Sometimes that decision is hard because after all, we are all just out here trying to survive and make a place in the world. But that strategy long term will always pay in spades.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://linktr.ee/coatdr
- Instagram: @coatinc
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/@coatdesignremodel
Image Credits
Studio 512
