Speaker 1 (00:02.986)
Welcome to another episode of Marketproof Marketing where we have a fantastic guest with us today, Kim Sandoval, the Director of Corporate Marketing for Classic Homes. Kim, thank you for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

So how long have you been lying about how long you've been in home building? Because I looked at your LinkedIn profile and I was like 17 and a half years just at Classic and then there's all this other experience. How long have you been in this space?

actually been in the real estate marketing from either a developer or builder perspective since 1999, so roughly 26 years. First as a consultant, I worked in an ad agency for a number of years and then branched off and opened up my own boutique marketing consulting firm prior to joining Classic.

Got it. Yeah, I think I saw about eight years of your time there was as like an outside advisor. I'm sure you were in the middle of it all and we'll get into all of that. But let's start with the origin story. You said you started at an agency. Was there a particular focus that that agency had in terms of industry or type of marketing?

Speaker 2 (01:24.43)
No, it was actually a very well-rounded ad agency. The client dynamic ranged everything from fast food advertising to casino marketing to banking. So it was one of those agencies that had a very deep client list. And I had the luxury of, you know, just the opportunity there of starting from the very ground level.

I actually started out in the ad agency world as the front desk person. I was the person who answered the phones and tried to dabble little bit in bookkeeping and a lot of administrative tasks. And that was my entree into advertising.

I always like to ask people who have a job like that out of college, do you remember anything hitting you as like, that's not how I thought the real world worked. If for that role in particular.

Yeah, in that role, it was interesting because I always had this vision when you go through marketing classes in college and you think, I'm going get this marketing job and it's going to be kind of like Mad Men and you're going to have this whole office environment where everything is always creative and just everything runs really smoothly. Well, back when I started in the ad agency world, technology wasn't there yet.

We were still doing paper proofs. We were still doing a lot of, a lot of match prints, a lot of different things like that. So some of what I spent my time doing was doing a lot of cataloging of ads and proofreading, copywriting. And it was, it was just a different time. But I do think that what was different about it was that I didn't expect that agency work would be in such a silo that you would have.

Speaker 2 (03:23.16)
people who really specialized in account work that were different than the people who actually wrote the ads, that was still then different than the people who actually booked the media that went with the ad. So for me, it was a paradigm shift because I always envisioned, while was in college, I envisioned that there was this one person who was just this genius who did everything and handled the account from start to finish.

In my role, I had the opportunity of working with a lot of account executives, a lot of media buyers, a lot of media directors. And so early on, I knew that I wanted to learn everything about the business so that I could figure out where I fit. But I knew that I fit in marketing and I knew I fit in the ad world. I just didn't know where.

Yeah. And so then you decided who's the most difficult kind of customer that I currently work with from an agency perspective and how can I make my life more complicated and more chaotic and you chose home building.

Yeah, was, it was hands down. was actually a funny journey because everything I just talked about on how we had such a diverse client list, when we picked up the Classic Homes account, so I should rewind there. When I was working at the ad agency, Classic was one of our accounts. And I just found it intriguing from the humanizing like of homes. You always think of a home.

When you're not in the business, you think of it as a box, right? It's a place where you live. In working on the account, I learned very quickly that this was so much more. was more about families. It was more about authenticity of this is the place people come home to after a long day. It's just kind of where you unpack everything. And so when I gravitated to that right away, I still worked on a lot of other accounts. didn't.

Speaker 2 (05:18.604)
And again, I started out as a receptionist. in that role, I grew into many, many roles very quickly with that particular ad agency. And I had done everything from media buying to media direction, eventually went into account direction and PR, and then really became more of an account supervisor. And that's when the classic piece of it in the home building element came into play. And yeah, super high-paced, fast.

cyclical, seasonal, all of the things that you would expect and that we all know now having sat in this chair for a long time. But there was this human element to it and the people who were running the company that I just really connected with. And it just, felt like home. felt like it was the right direction to go. And so that's when I, it was 2008, great year, right? It's the year everybody should branch out.

and start their own consulting company and specialize in real estate.

Yes, if LinkedIn had been around in 2008, everyone, I'm already thinking about like probably 65 % of our audience has already had to go back and look up what a lot of the words you mentioned related to print advertising mean. But if LinkedIn was around in 2008, everyone would be reintroducing themselves from the industry. It would all be saying, here's my new pivot. Here's what I'm gonna try differently. Here's where I'm going. So when you went from an agency,

to now being inside of a home builder, kind of embedded, what were the things that hit you at that point of like, that's not, like I was working with them, but now that I'm inside, this isn't quite what I expected either.

Speaker 2 (07:06.667)
You know what?

Good or bad, everyone always thinks when I say that I mean what was like bad expectation, but there's, you can be surprised at the upside too.

Well, when I branched out and I went off on my own and did more of a consulting approach, I had a handful of clients that so I had the I had home building, had land developers and I had a couple of mortgage companies that I picked up along the way. And it wasn't immediately. I mean, I built up to that. When I first started, I probably had one or two clients by the time, you know, over the eight year tenure, I had about eight to ten solid clients and then a lot of project work.

The one thing I noticed about when you went into more of a narrow targeted audience or a narrow targeted industry is that there, well, there are a lot of synergies between home builders. You know, they're, you're all kind of doing the same thing. You're building homes for families and you're, you're kind of creating new product as you go. The one thing that struck me as I started really thinking about it was more on the community development side and

That was kind of my aha moment that I hadn't connected those dots because everything I've done prior to starting my own firm had more to do with we have these homes in this community. We're ready to sell them. Here's what they look like. Here's who are

Speaker 1 (08:30.959)
Forget everything that's come before it just magically happened. This stuff's ready for you. Now you take it from here

Exactly. And that's how I started. So I never really thought about the backside of it on what, how do you get the land? Where did it come from? You know, I never really had to think about zoning. I never had to think about entitlements. I never had to think about what, what, what the land was prior to it being developed. And that was the moment where I really started to get intrigued with the industry. And I started thinking bigger than

advertising and bigger than marketing and bigger than at the time I would have called them spots and dots because we did a lot of broadcast. And I really started thinking about how do you convey this community engagement side of it where you start to win hearts and minds of people who are moving into homes because they have choices, right? They have a lot of builders to choose from. They have a lot of different geographic areas in which they can live.

And so I really started thinking deeper and more strategically kind of right out of the gate. And it was really because I had such a phenomenal client list of local home builders in the Colorado Springs area that I could start to see where one picked up and the other left off, where somebody builders weren't trying to be all to everyone. And it's such an urban sprawl here that you, I mean, you don't have this.

area where everything was concentrated. So I really started digging deeper into the industry itself. And that was that was my turning point. And I realized it's hard.

Speaker 1 (10:11.368)
Yeah, it's hard because there's so many facets to it. The first thing I, when you were talking about everyone's doing things kind of the same way. I think what you mean by that is like everyone who makes chocolate bars is like 95 % of it's the same. you don't see Hershey's, I've never seen a commercial that Hershey's or any other chocolate companies ever done that says, this is our factory and this is how the machines turn. we now,

there could be an element of trying to make yourself appeal as more organic, more luxurious, more artisanal chocolate. But like the factory isn't why you buy chocolate. And there's this kind of incessant focus on we have wood in our homes. And it's like, yes, I hope you use straight wood. And we're kind of saying things the consumer doesn't really care about. That is the same.

So I think that's just a really interesting observation that you make. And I want to make sure if you're listening again in the audience, we know that every builder has uniquenesses, but do they actually really, do they know what their uniquenesses really are is always a surprising one when you start working with a builder. And the other one is, do they know how to talk about it really? Or is it just so like, this is what we do that you become kind of, well, it's like a sales rep.

you know, the sales rep who goes to their own model home every day doesn't notice the paint chipping in the corner. Whereas of course, when, when your boss shows up and is like, Hey, what's wrong with you? Why isn't that paint in the corner? Touch that up. It's like, well, I've become desensitized to it. So it's some really great points that you make there. And then, then when you talk about the complexity of everything that comes before it, um, this is as I've spent more time with, with Carla and our creative team, and we just did this, um, event.

called Rise and Design for creatives. I keep coming back, Kim, to sorting through all that and taking the time to make decisions intentionally and thoughtfully is tiring and hard mental work. And we just still don't give enough credit to it.

Speaker 2 (12:31.852)
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. It's funny that you went that direction considering, you know, you and I are just chatting for the first time on this. That was a pivotal moment for me when I was consulting because I had, like I said, I had a very, very healthy client list. And there was a point in time where I started thinking about it and I thought, you know, I really want to focus. I want to dig into the hows and whys and where and

you know, what is making people purchase more than I was able to because you're running thin when you're consulting, you're running thin between, you working with freelance graphic designers? Do you have PR people? It's just, there are so many moving pieces and parts for not just the company, but the entire, your client base. You're trying to do something different for each one. And there came a point where it was about 2015 and I was running really hard and it was as long hours

really long hours, long days, trying to match up different designers and artists like, know, Carla, the Carlas of the world with the right client, because my job was to make sure that everything looked different. It needed to have its own persona. And it's really easy when you are in that world to let those lines blur. And so I feel like I was very good at saying this builder XYZ is going to have this persona.

because this is what they've told me, this is what I've learned about their customers, this is what I've learned about their product. And then you move into the next builder and you try to really create that differently. What I started learning was that I had this affinity for Classic in general. There was something about the way they built their homes, the way that they approached the customer relationship. I'll never forget that it was...

probably 2014, 2013, when the CEO said something in a meeting and it was so random for him and probably something he had said a million times. But he basically said, in our company, the best idea wins. It really doesn't matter where it came from. It doesn't matter who brought it to the table. If it's a good idea and we feel like it's going to push us to that next level, we need to hone in on it and focus on it.

Speaker 2 (14:51.138)
And I thought about it and I said, you know what, that's exactly what I need to do at this stage in my career. And then for whatever reason, the planets aligned, I'm not sure how it came together, but the very next year it turned into something where it was, the company was getting really busy and it was a time when they were feeling the same as I was. And they thought it's probably a good time to ask if you want to come in house and become a full employee. and never looked back. mean, it was a big decision.

And I would say any business owner who has done that, that's a big decision.

Yeah, but you're drawing on all the things that you have this broader exposure. And then there's this focus that comes, okay, I'm going to focus on classic and I'm going to focus on what they need to continue to go to the next level. But you had to have this period of expansion before that focus could really have true impact forward. I think what's really important for

for some folks listening is you can tell yourself that I'm gonna have this narrow focus from the beginning. You could have graduated school and say, I'm just gonna go work for A-Builder and I'm gonna go. And you could pull it off and you could do great work. But almost by definition, you would never do as good of work in totality as if you had that broader exposure. And I think maybe this is because I have a daughter.

who's a freshman in college and another daughter who's a junior in high school getting ready for college soon. they're just so focused on, have to pick the thing and I'm going to go. And I, again, I'm biased Kim, cause I have a liberal arts background myself of like you had to take history and math and, and, and it's this route well-roundedness that lets you then pick and choose from the most important relative things that you have practical experience with and have studied.

Speaker 1 (16:50.23)
and then choose a focus to really bring all those things to bear.

Yeah, and I think and I think so much of what I hearken back to is that at the time I was, you know, I wouldn't say struggling, but at time I was really thinking through this and thinking, OK, what does the future look like? And this opportunity was in front of me. I really then started thinking that, you know what? My world is actually not changing that much. I'm going to go take an in-house full time job. I'm going to be able to focus, but.

look at all these projects I have in front of me now because Classic is a builder and a developer. So I still got to open all of the new communities and helped launch all of the new collections and all of the new series. And so a lot of what I brought in-house to the company was an ad agency mentality where my marketing team, can now, we can function in some silos where we can focus

laser sharp on a specific community and a specific product because the team that we've assembled here is used to that. I tapped into some of my ad agency world from a graphic design standpoint, photographers. And so we really became more of an in-house marketing arm, which worked out great because our leadership team and our ownership group, have a lot of verticals.

But from a home building aspect, is what everybody really wants to hear about, is like, how does that come together? I think from a marketing leadership standpoint, if new and emerging leaders who are coming into this world and this space, and they kind of have this big idea of what do I really want to do? What is my focus?

Speaker 2 (18:44.524)
I think it's really important to keep your eyes and your ears open because sometimes the thing you think you're most focused on and the thing you think you're best at, it may just be what you're comfortable doing. Yeah. It's the other stuff that is intriguing to you and it's interesting and somebody knows something more than you do, but you're still interested. And I really think as emerging leaders, you have to keep a very open mind and look for people who are smarter than you.

Look for people who know more than you. Look for people who have more experience. Heck, in this day and age, look for people who have less experience with what you do, but more experience in the digital space, or they have more experience in a PR space. But I think it's just this continuous growth that sometimes I think as marketers, when we get so busy in the daily grind and we get so busy with the deadlines and the lot releases and the home collection releases,

It's very, very easy to get into a very tactical, non-strategic mindset where suddenly instead of thinking outside the box, you're becoming the box. And you have this way that you do things every single time and it works and it gets results, but you don't try to stretch the imagination to how can I make it better? How can I make it the best idea?

Yeah, and so the thread that I'm picking up through all this is you talked about when you started in the agency world, had a lot of curiosity and was just absorbing as much as you could, as many different places as you could. Then you have this period of expansion, you're focusing on home building. Then you've got this expansion because of all the different customers you're working with.

then you're focusing again in classic, and then within classic, there's still this expansion. And so it is this constant give and take, and the expertise comes the longer you do this, during those periods of expansion, identifying the things that you can focus in on that are likely to produce impactful results to the company, versus potentially just getting distracted with whatever is the hottest, latest thing.

Speaker 1 (21:00.867)
but you have that ability to, when expansion comes, to kind of pick the needles in the haystack, so to speak.

Yeah, you do. And it's interesting because I think the longer you stay in home building, whether you enter in marketing or architecture or sales, I don't really think it matters where you enter the industry. I think the longer you stay in it, the more curious you become about all facets of it. So I go through phases. There are phases where my biggest interest is dirt.

Yeah.

I want to know more about the land that we're building on. I want to learn more about the engineering side of it. I want to learn about what our land development managers go through. And I'll do that for a while. And then I'll go into another phase where I really want to dip into what the trends are. What are people putting in their homes? Why are they doing that? What are they moving to? What are they moving away from? What's their dissatisfaction? I mean, I go through these things.

And then I get into this phase where it's like, well, gosh, now I got to really think about the product. Are we designing product that meets the needs of our customers based on all of that? And it's an interesting journey because it all leads back to marketing. You look at all of the things I just talked about, and it's still just a very small portion of it. But if you look at it all, it comes back to one thing. We need to attract the right people.

Speaker 2 (22:33.934)
to the right product, to the right community, at the right time, at the right price. And that's a lot to think about. And I think it's a lot for people who come into this industry because it's the biggest, we all know this, it is the largest purchase we're going to make in our lifetime. And some people are gonna do it over and over and over again because of how you move and just the life cycle. So I think for young emerging leaders,

It's just come in eyes wide open and really, really hunker down and look at what everybody else brings to the table. Because what I will say, if I go back to my ad agency world when we were doing anything else other than home building, there really isn't another industry that is a cog. It's a wheel where if one of those cogs come out at any given time, the wagon's gonna, the wagon's gonna have some trouble.

There are other industries where it's easy to pick up pieces where somebody leaves off. And this is not one of them. So it is hard.

It's fine. Exactly. Right. I mean, that was my own experience too. When I went to go work for the builder in Pittsburgh, I was only there. I was hired to create the newspaper ad and kind of run advertising. And it was only six and a half years later that I was running the entire company. And I think I always like to tell that story to people who are new to the industry because it being cyclical.

Within the year itself and then just generally a cyclical industry a lot of times people come in and they they really struggle with like timing matters so much and and longevity matters so much and if you would have told me you know in 2007 if you stay here for six and half years, you'll run the whole company and you'll be picking locations for communities and having land teams that work for you and and Doing the whole thing and like that's that's crazy

Speaker 1 (24:38.894)
But there's also this other part of you as a younger person where you're also just impatient. So the six and half years, I don't know. You might've told me that and be like, that's a long time. I don't know if I'll be here that long. But it's not really that long. the metaphor that came to me when you were describing the curiosity and all the different areas is kind of juggling as a skill where your mental capacity to juggle all of that. You pick up 10 balls and you've never juggled before in your life. They're all gonna hit the floor real fast.

But if you master juggling two, then three, then four, it's not... The other thing that made me think of this, Kim, is I have four kids. And a lot of times people's reaction to that is, holy crap, how do you do that? I said, well, we started with one, then we had two, then three, then four. If we would have had triplets out of the gate, it would be a whole nother story. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, it's and you know what you learn I think the longer you stay in this industry is you learn that the longer you stay there are other people just like you that have been in the industry the same amount of time in different roles and you start to realize Wow, these people are really really good at their job and the second you realize that because I think

I think, I've seen this, I I saw it when I was running my own company and I, you know, I don't see it as much today because I fortunate enough that at Classic, we have a very long tenure. So people have been here a long time. And so we all know how to work with each other. But when I was consulting, I ran into a lot of occasions where people thought they knew the client or the industry better than the client did. And sometimes that's true.

But you really have to listen because people who are in positions for a long time, it comes so natural to them that they don't always remember to teach you how they got to where they are. But you have to be inquisitive and ask the questions. And so I have learned through my career that I have been fortunate enough to be surrounded by very smart people who are very talented, who have skill sets that I'll never have.

Speaker 2 (26:55.382)
And I have to remember that I might be better at marketing than some of the people that I work with or all of the people that I work with. But every department leader in our organization, man, they're just good. They do their job. They love their job. And they genuinely are caring about the rest of the team. But more than that, when you have that kind of dynamic in a home building company, the customer is the benefit.

And from a marketer standpoint, that it doesn't get better than that. You know, it's it just doesn't. That's I think I always go back to when times are when it's really busy or we have projects in front of us that I feel like is just a mountain and I'm not I'm not going to get through this. You know, it's it's going to take a lot of effort. I always remind myself of why we do this. And it really does go back to that customer centric attitude that

I think it's more obvious in a home building industry than it is in any industry I've ever worked in. Just because the impact of what we do as marketers and home builders, what it has on families, there isn't anything that compares.

Yep, exactly right. That's why when I was in school thinking about what I wanted to do with my degree and my love of marketing, I thought I only want to work in healthcare, banking or housing because of the impact that it has on the people involved. I you can be fantastic at selling jeans, marketing jeans, but yeah, another pair of pants. Okay, let's shift to...

a section that I like to call brag on yourself. In your 16 years of working with Classica, or Classic, sorry, what are you most proud of that the team has changed or developed or how it's evolved over time?

Speaker 2 (29:00.59)
You know what, and it's something we're going through right now, but it's an excellent question and there are a lot of things on my list that I could put up there. But I would say right now, I would say that the synergy that we've developed within the company in terms of product development, community development, and just this very...

It's this very shorthand way that we're able to work with one another.

I know exactly what you're talking about.

And it's just, it's something that I'm proud of. I'm proud to be part of it. And I like to, I'd like to think that I contributed toward us getting to this point, but I feel like the dynamic between product development and architecture and our design studio and our marketing team and our community development, I feel like it's stronger than it's ever been. And I may have also said that two years ago.

that it's stronger than it's ever been. And my point with saying that is that it just feels like it continues to get better. And it's one of those things where I know some people, there are some people out there in the world that have a job that they come to and they just are, it's a job and that's what they do. We have really formulated this family over the years that when we come to work, one picks up where the other leaves off.

Speaker 2 (30:31.916)
we can see each other's struggles. So some of it is from the standpoint of just the synergy of working together. But beyond that, the products that we have created at this company in the last five years, but just the home collection lines, we have unveiled six brand new collections that we weren't building in 2019. And it has just been the whole team coming together to really fill the need of

the struggles that people are seeing with housing right now from an affordability, attainability, call it what you want. There's a need for different types of product. Prior to 2018, Classic was very much traditional homes, ranch plans, two story plans, family kind of oriented plans. And since 2019, we've brought on small cozy cottages that are under 800 square feet.

We've brought on duplexes, we've brought on ADUs, we've brought on townhomes, we've brought on Alleyload product, we've brought on these pull apart townhomes. And so we really have broadened the scope and that's something that, you know, it's not bragging on me because I didn't design them, but I had a hand in helping shape it. And there's so many people in this company that were directly involved and it was a very big team effort and it's working.

And so that's something I think to be proud of and you're getting it to the market. And that's where I come into play where the number of people who know that we have these six collections in six short years, that's pretty incredible.

It is incredible and people discount the upside of that. Of course, it's a lot of work and of course, and maybe that's part of the, insight there is you wouldn't be able to do it if the team wasn't able to work in this shorthand way. And by that, mean, you really trust each other. You don't have to over communicate and over convince and just kind of do all the politicking that you might have in a, in a company where everyone's newer or younger or

Speaker 1 (32:43.31)
Less experience working with each other. You might not, but that again rings true from my own experience of the product development cycle at Heartland Homes was incredibly tight in compared to other competitors. And one of the builders I work with in what has historically been one of the hottest markets in the country, about three years ago, I was talking to them and someone just mentioned like, we're still building the same plans we've been building since

you know, the mid nineties in most of our communities. And I thought, okay, well, you but but you know, Kevin, we're having great years of sales. Well, this is twenty one, twenty two. Most people are. And now it's it's just they don't have another differentiation to go to other than price, which is, of course, extremely painful when you have to continue to try to differentiate on price in what has historically been a hot market and is now.

one of the tougher markets in the country.

Yeah, yeah. And you know, just to kind of on the same lines when you're talking about things you're proud of this year. Well, this moment in time is a big it's a big deal for us right now. We decided late last year that we were going to come out into the parade of homes this year. You know, everybody loves a parade. Well, we decided we're going to do nine homes because of what I just talked about. One of the strategies was

let's get the collections out there. know, these homes we've been working so hard on designing and just, you know, really showing off what we can do. You know, a moment of being proud is when you can put into a local parade of homes, which it's big in every market, homes that range from $360,000

Speaker 2 (34:38.67)
to one that's $3.85 million and everything in between and feel like you put your best foot forward in all of those verticals, that's a big deal. And so that's something that the entire team for getting that to the finish line should be proud of. But again, like I said, it all still goes back to marketing. It's great to build them. Now how are we going to get people to see them?

Yeah, and how do I feel like that's episode number two at a future date, Ken, is there's nothing negative or overly positive about the parade in of itself. It's how you leverage it over time. like, how can we use this as something beyond a single event over a period of weeks or days? And obviously you do have to get them sold. I remember that pressure too. Yeah. But that's a...

That's gonna be awesome. I mean, the opportunity to have that many homes for the public to see and to be able to showcase and then to have live on digitally is gonna be a big deal.

It sure is. it was one of those that was really a marketing strategy. It's like, yep, we're going to do this. We're going to be shooting photos for the rest of the year.

Well, Kim, thanks so much for coming on and sharing your journey and some of the lessons you've learned. I know it's going to be impactful for everyone listening, but especially those who are earlier on in their career and maybe thinking like, I don't know, this industry is getting a little tough. Maybe I should switch. Don't switch.

Speaker 2 (36:16.044)
Yeah, would say the same. Don't switch. Just spend some time and really figuring out where you fit because it may not be in marketing per se. You may actually be good at something very, very different.

Yep. Awesome. Kim, thanks again.

You're welcome. Thanks for having me.