ALEX

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of The Build Project. I am hoping to get some serious momentum behind this now that a few other things that have been consuming my time are wrapping up, and hopefully that means some consistency. I hope I don't regret saying that now, but I put it out there, so therefore I have to follow through.

Nonetheless, this episode is a fun one for me. It's not uncommon that some of these guests are friends as well as peers in the industry or people that I work with, but this particular one happens to be with Mark Schaefer. He is one half of FS Woodworks. The other half is Theo Farver, who maybe we'll convince at a later date to do the podcast as well. Mark's a friend. We've joked before that when him and I get to talking, it's never a five-minute conversation. It tends to run over the time limit that we both should adhere to.

FS Woodworks is arguably, in my opinion, one of the best finish carpentry companies, not just around here in Boulder, but arguably the state. And when I say that, I mean it in a way that doesn't just provide commentary on the quality of their work, but also the way that they do it and the culture that is an integral part of it. Every single person that's ever been on one of my sites working on behalf of FS Woodworks is somebody I would not hesitate to call a good human being. I know they work hard to make sure the people that are part of the FS Woodworks family are taken care of, and it comes through in how it feels to have FS on a site for us. Couldn't say enough good things, and I try to pass along the good word about them whenever I can.

Mark and I in this conversation hop all over. We talk some of the geeky details of finish carpentry, and things that consume both of us on a frequent basis. Beyond that, we get into where we see value in this process, what Mark thinks, having worked for such a wide variety of builders over the years, lends itself to a high-caliber job. And then we start talking about the trades. We cover all the bases. It's a longer one, definitely worth a listen, but one of the more enjoyable ones I've done. So without further ado.

I would say out of all the people I've had on so far, you might be the one I've got the longest-standing relationship with. Well, maybe Michael's the exception, but you're probably the one I talk to the most. So this will probably be a little different than some of the other episodes, which is nice, because for better or worse, every time we run into each other we end up talking probably longer than we should.

MARK

But I'm excited to be on here. This is exciting.

ALEX

And the other side of it is that finish carpentry is something I care about a great deal, so I'm excited to have the conversation. Most importantly, why don't you introduce who you are and what you guys do, and we'll go from there.

MARK

Great. My name is Mark Schaefer. I'm 50% of FS Woodworks. My business partner, Theo, is not here today, but I'm super stoked to be here and talk about what we do as a company, what I would like to have as a culture and what I think we have as a culture, and some of the relationships we have with guys like you in the industry, and what it means to me. Sometimes it feels like I work more than I do anything else, and working in this business means the world to me, and the guys that I do it with mean the world to me. So far it's been a lot of fun.

ALEX

The name FS Woodworks kind of speaks for itself, but what's the typical ideal project for you guys on the millwork side of things? High-end, architecturally driven, right?

MARK

Yeah, for sure. We get asked that a lot, and the biggest thing for us, our bread and butter, I would say, is new construction for general contractors. That's what we do the most of. I'd like to say we're a high-end trim company, and what we do is work on high-end homes. That being said, we also find ourselves working on jobs time to time where there is a budget and things need to get expedited and done in a timely manner. And then there are other jobs we go on where they have a way higher budget, and we have four to six guys on these jobs sometimes for a year plus.

ALEX

One thing that segues from that, something I've talked about with John, who for context is somebody that works for you that's been on a couple of my projects, is how to balance productivity versus quality. Sometimes when I'm talking to people that aren't in the industry, or haven't worked for higher-end clients, they think, oh, it's a $6 million project, money's not a thing. And that could be true in some ways, in some value propositions. But if anything, you have to remember: if somebody has $6 million to spend, they're probably really good with money. That's how they have $6 million to spend. Budgets exist within these scales of economy. The thresholds are still there. It doesn't mean that time is limitless or that funds are limitless.

MARK

Especially on the super complicated stuff, it can be super hard. So what we try to do is get as much information as early as possible and come up with an educated guess on how long we think these projects are going to take. And you're absolutely right. These folks that have a $6 million budget, a $10 million budget, they have that budget because they're really good with money, and they're smart with their money. We've never really been on a project where we've been sat down and told, look, we don't care what we spend. Now, we have worked on projects where people are down to throw as much money as it takes to make it look the way they really want it to, but we still always have the mindset that we need to figure out a way to have it come out as nice as possible and as efficient as possible.

And there are times where we're given tasks that we can't really put a very accurate number on, or a hard bid, because if we did, we'd have to figure in for things going less than perfectly, and then that number would be so inflated. But if we figure for things going perfectly: things never go perfectly, so then we'd lose our ass on it.

ALEX

What percentage would you say is fixed versus T&M?

MARK

It's getting higher on fixed bids, and I feel like as we've grown as a company, we can do that more. But for the contractors we've worked with for ten years or more, a lot of times those guys prefer for us to sit down early on, sometimes even before they're awarded the job, and talk about how much we think this is going to cost. Then we put in those cushions, and we work toward that. A lot of times when it's starting to go over, we have these biweekly or monthly meetings, sometimes weekly, and nine out of ten times when it's going over, it's super obvious why. Sometimes that falls on us, and we can absorb that as a company when it's on us. But most of the time it's because some sequencing issue happened and we're having to work around it.

As a company, we have a sequence we'd really like to perform at. A silly example: if we're doing a big house and we start with six guys, sometimes we can have two guys start in the basement, two on the main floor, and two on the second floor, and everybody works toward each other. If floors are ready at different times, we can have three guys start in the basement and work up to the third floor. That's in a perfect world. But a lot of times we show up on these jobs, and it seems like after COVID, everyone has gotten pretty comfortable with the chaos. We as a company have found we can work in that chaos a little better than we thought we could. We just need people to understand: bring on the chaos, but things aren't going to be as efficient in it. If we're waiting for floor guys to finish a room, or we can set two doors on one floor and then move to the basement, and then go back up to the third floor, all that running around slows things down.

ALEX

It's actually interesting, because I was just doing scheduling for a future project and comparing it to a smaller one you guys were on in Boulder, overlapping the schedules. And I'm like, wow, this is literally twice the square footage, but the schedule assertion I'm making is not that different, because I'm actually planning on sequencing. It's so big, at 4,600 square feet, that we can sequence over here first and then move to that side, so I can overlap you guys a little. But when you're on a small thing, guys have got to have room to work.

And on knowing budget drift: something I've struggled with personally is that on the smaller stuff, it's hard, because with rates nowadays, say it's a million-dollar project and somebody goes three days over. That's nothing in the scheme of things. But in terms of wages and proportion to that budget, it could be 10, 15% of that line item, right there in three days. That means maybe somebody packed up ten minutes slower over the course of the first two months than what we originally projected. It's such a tight margin that it's really hard to execute on. I use that as an explanation for why we're cost plus and don't do fixed. I get both sides of it, and as a GC I love it when we have fixed numbers. But knowing what it's like to be on your side of the equation, it's such a hard thing to give in the finish world, because you're so reliant on a lot of other parties before you.

MARK

And thankfully, we've been sitting down with a lot of general contractors in the higher end, and they've been telling us the same thing. What you guys are up against is so hard to put pricing on. And I'm not saying what we do trumps any other trade, because we are completely set up by all the trades before us, and more importantly, when the painters come in after, they make or break what we do.

The other thing we struggle with a lot lately is the details, especially in Boulder and Denver: the mobilizations. These trimless doors, trimless windows. Depending on the size of the job, we have to set up with three guys, sometimes for a couple of weeks, to hang doors prior to drywall, hang doors prior to floors going in. I don't know how much of the nitty-gritty, geeky details you want to get into.

ALEX

Oh no, it's good.

MARK

Something we're always talking about now: when we have to hang doors before drywall and before floors go in, it goes against sequencing in building residential houses that has been in order, for a reason, for over 100 years. As a trim company, when people ask us when we'd like to come in, it's typically a very simple answer: after the floors are in and when the walls are primed. If you don't want to prime the walls, that's fine, but we have found that when the walls are primed, the house is less dusty.

Now there are these trimless doors where we're coming in prior to flooring and prior to drywall. What happens there is everybody wants the door jambs to look like they grew up out of the floor. And a lot happens when you drywall a house. Most of the drywall guys are getting paid by the board, so the faster they get the drywall up, the more money they make, and God bless those guys. They have ways they've been doing it forever that make installing drywall fast, but sometimes it bangs around the door jambs. The next piece is you turn the house into a rainforest when you bring in 300 boxes of drywall mud and start slinging it around, and our wood doesn't like rainforests.

And then the next piece we get asked all the time: how do you guys like to do the doors? Do you want me to get you a piece of flooring? We set the door jambs on a piece of flooring, then remove it, and when the floor guys come in, they slide their flooring under the jambs. Well, a sixteenth of an inch doesn't sound like a lot, but if the flooring shows up and it's a sixteenth thicker, now we need to cut a sixteenth off the door jamb in place.

ALEX

And that's moisture, a sixteenth.

MARK

Yeah. And underlayments seem to be changing quite a bit. A glue-down floor. All these little things don't sound like a big deal, but to us, and to the contractors and homeowners with really high expectations: in a traditional house, a lot of times we're scribing the door jamb to the imperfections in the floor. When we do these other sequences, with flush base, no trim, this sequencing is becoming normal now, so we're coming up with systems, but there are different details drawn out, and we're having to reinvent it every time.

ALEX

I love the modern details. I also just think most people on the customer side don't quite realize: it's meant to look minimalist, but it's actually ten times more work. And when you see the number, sticker shock puts it mildly. It also has to be part of the design from the beginning, because otherwise, I've been part of projects where you see Z reglets trying to solve a problem, as opposed to it being an initiative from the beginning where you're designing around how to make it efficient. For the project in Loveland, you and I talked at one point about doing flush base. Thank goodness we pivoted away from it. But the first part of that conversation isn't about drywall. It's about sequencing, and how we would want to do that reveal bead to allow for minimal mobilizations while still allowing for scribing to take place. It has to be intentional, because it has to influence the specifications of the other materials being used.

Otherwise you're acting from hindsight: well, we called out this style of reglet here, so now we have to do it this way, or now we have to be scribing offsets with a laser to get the base in, as opposed to putting in stop blocks. Something I'm trying to be more outward about in educating clients is that it's all prototypes. Even a regular house remodel is still a prototype to a certain extent. Nobody has done this exact thing before in this exact setting, and when you get into these crazy high-end details, that gets amplified times ten. There's an amount of risk you're taking on by being iterative in the application of these details. It can all be done. But the expectation that Mark's going to give a number within X percentage points, without a crazy amount of contingency inflating it artificially: I don't know how realistic that is when these designs get as ambitious as they can be.

MARK

So Theo and I were just working with a contractor, and the contractor asked: the homeowner would like to know the cost difference between a regular applied baseboard and a baseboard completely flush with the drywall, with a Fry reglet that ties in and miters up the door jambs. And Theo and I said it's three to four times more expensive.

I have this email now, and none of our emails are boilerplate, but there's basically a warning email. It's very frank and to the point, and it's gone out to a couple of contractors, changed up a little. What we have to do for flush base is so over the top that it's important to us that the person who's going to be living in that home wants it more than almost anything in the house. Because three times the cost might not even be enough sometimes. It's one of those details where, when it's done as close to perfect as possible, you almost don't notice it. But when it's not done right, you might as well make it hot pink with flashing lights under it. And "not right" has some to do with us, but it doesn't have everything to do with us.

We beg people: I realize that LSLs and engineered studs are not always in the budget. But if they're not in the budget, then maybe flush base shouldn't be in the budget. There are happy mediums. But as you know, you can shim and shave a house, and if it rains, things twist and expand, and there's nothing worse than flush base and a wavy wall. It's funny, because when you walk away from it, it doesn't look like that much. And it is really cool. I wouldn't necessarily want it in my house, until it's time to push a piece of furniture up to the wall. Then it's really cool. And around the doorways, it does look cool. I'll say that.

ALEX

You talked about drywallers. Being from the East, my interpretation of a Level 5 finish is a little different than what my experience has been in Colorado. I remember the first time I had Level 5 done here, it was told back to me that it was meant for the paint, so the paper didn't show. And I'm like, that's kind of a side effect. It's flatness. And you're dependent on guys that are constantly being, maybe the word marginalized is a little aggressive, but it's probably accurate at the same time. As costs of construction go up, everyone's trying to make the cost more affordable, even at the high end somewhere, and I often find it's those guys, the framers, the drywall guys, even the painters, that end up getting the short end of that stick. But when you try to execute something like flush base, you are equally as dependent on those guys as you are on the finish guys.

MARK

100%. Lots of people involved, and that team has to be 100% on board. There's risk that comes with that. It can be done, but people have got to be aware of it.

ALEX

What's your favorite way to do flush base, if you had to choose?

MARK

We've reinvented this wheel several times, and we've walked away being like, this is going to be the best one we've ever done. It's still a huge pain in the ass. But what we like to do is beg the contractor to let us come in, and we spin lasers and put a target board up. We thought we could first do it with just a piece of one-by-two nailed to the studs. The drywall guys were like, this is amazing, it's a stop for us. And it slid down a little bit, differently everywhere. So then we graduated to a two-by with two screws in every stud, and that goes nowhere.

Once we have that target board, the drywall guys come in, and the target board is a little higher than it needs to be, but enough that the aluminum covers it. It's funny when you look at the prints: you can be like, well, it's five-eighths drywall, so we need a piece of five-eighths base. But with mud buildup and the thickness of the aluminum, we now always order the base too thin and then go and shim out. We've used those reverse-thread composite deck screws to move it in and out.

ALEX

The poor man's version of those GRK screws.

MARK

Very much so. They're unbelievable. We use them for so many things, and any carpenter that listens to this podcast knows exactly what they are. Just not trying to get too cute with making anything perfect, and thinking you're going to reduce a bunch of work by just slapping this stuff in, is where we've gotten ourselves in trouble. We've also had contractors save money where instead of a Fry reglet, they use corner bead, and the reveal is a rabbeted piece of base, and that's worked out well. I like that detail personally. That's worked great, as long as you can keep that corner bead straight as an arrow, because a lot of times we find ourselves scribing it to the floor and to imperfections in the drywall line.

ALEX

It's interesting you say that, because after the Darley project, for the next one here in Lyons, I don't want to use those vinyl beads anymore. I know they're the thing right now, and they have certain applications I'm okay with. But it just doesn't maintain that flatness, because you can bend the damn thing. If you've got some guy throwing it up there that doesn't realize he still has to push it tight, or even as they're applying the first coat, it moves a little bit.

The detail I did save for the Loveland project, if she wanted to go a little more flush-concept: five-eighths Sheetrock obviously, but a three-quarter-inch base, so it's still a little proud, with a quarter-inch rabbet, half-inch deep into the base. You still have a little bit of a proud shadow line, so you don't have the same tolerances for perfectly flat.

MARK

Whenever we hear the word flush: there are things that should be flush, but what I try to explain to people is that overlapping trim and reveals are there to look intentional, but they're also there to kind of hide imperfections. Every single step in a house is built by humans, and there's a little bit of human error in everything. Hopefully less, but it's always there. When you put in these reveals, they look very intentional, and when you walk away, it looks great. There's nothing that drives me more up a wall than seeing something that was supposed to be flush, and it's either not flush, or it was sanded out and primed and later on you see that line through the paint.

So flush is beautiful, but when it's very hard to achieve, sometimes impossible to achieve in a timely manner, I personally would rather see that little, very intentional step. If the base sticks out an eighth of an inch past drywall, you're still going to be able to push your furniture up against the wall.

Another thing I've seen on a few houses is drywall going straight down to the floor with a little eighth-inch reveal. That's great, but I also like to think about these houses being lived in. Being vacuumed, being mopped. All these things in the house are there to look good, but they're also there as a function that has been in place for a really long time. Baseboards and stair risers get their ass kicked every day in a house, whether you have kids or not. They get kicked, they get mopped, they get hit with the vacuum.

ALEX

I sometimes struggle, working with a few architects, because at that price point, for those people, it's probably perfectly okay; I'm assuming that's not their only house. But when you take that same value proposition and apply it to somebody's family home, without articulating what it means: hey, there's going to be a maintenance factor here you're probably not aware of, or this is not going to hold up the way other homes you've lived in have. Or even, hey, we're going to remove the eaves. If there's a risk factor associated with that, we can execute it at a high level, but eaves have existed for hundreds of years for a reason, and you should be aware of that. I don't know how transparently that's always communicated. On one end of the spectrum, I think it's totally okay. But when somebody's coming in for an actual home for a family that they're going to have for the next 20, 30 years, I struggle with that on a personal level.

MARK

We talk about that quite a bit. The joke is: what's it going to feel like in this house when you're walking from your bedroom downstairs to get a glass of water, in bare feet, in your boxer shorts? Are you going to feel like you're in a spotlight where all your neighbors can see you? Is the floor going to feel nice on your feet? Are you going to feel like you're in a home, or are you running through an art installation?

Sometimes it feels like the architect is drawing their house, and the homeowner just gets to live in it. I've never hired an architect to draw a house for me, and this is the stuff I wonder. Does the homeowner know that in some of these houses, the water on a flat roof gets brought through the kitchen, through the whole house, and then leaves the house? You brought up eaves. I framed for a long time. I don't frame anymore, but the whole objective of this whole thing was getting the water as far away from the house as quickly as possible, and now they're getting away from some of that stuff. There are all these details in the houses now, not every house, but some, that are very hard to pull off. And those are the houses where we wind up spending the most time, to make it look like there's no trim in there.

The contractors we see pull these details off the best are the ones that geek out about all the termination points. Because there are five different materials that sometimes all meet together. You have polished concrete floors, sometimes baseboards, sometimes just drywall. Then you have drywall that meets up to stone. Then stone that meets up to metal. Then sometimes plaster that meets drywall, but you don't want to know where the difference is. Some contractors look at that and go, the drywall's going to hit the stone and they'll mud up to it. But then you have some contractors that, while they're pouring the foundation, are drawing this stuff out at their desk. What if we make an intentional curb for the stone to sit on, where that metal curb receives the concrete floor perfectly, and it looks like a ledge the stone sits on?

All these termination points. When we're doing a T&G ceiling that's supposed to look like the ceiling was done first and the beams are holding it up, we have some contractors that are just like, oh yeah, you're going to scribe every end cut to the beam. And other contractors are like: no, the ceiling framing is packed up with a piece of plywood the thickness of your material, and I'm not going to order that material until two weeks before you guys get there, which is six months from now, so we'll know exactly how thick it is, and you guys are going to slide it in.

ALEX

You just cut install time by 50%, and it's going to look like it grew there.

MARK

When it's pulled off really, really well, it shows. And then there are some of these other termination points where it's just impossible to make it look right. You see this on Instagram all the time, where carpenters scribe into stone. They take all this time to scribe around stone that is super irregular, they go into the grout lines, and it shows talent. Sometimes it's super satisfying to slowly slide that piece into the stone with no gaps, and it looks money. But I personally like when the contractor puts a piece of three-quarter-inch plywood there, and the stone guys stone up to that, and then pull it out.

ALEX

It looks better.

MARK

It looks way better. It's less busy. It doesn't catch your eye. And those are the things that need to be thought out way ahead of time.

ALEX

It's wild to me, because not only does it look better, but most guys could scribe that in if you gave them three days. They'll figure it out, maybe a burn piece or two to practice. That's not really the product, though. The product is balancing that with a certain level of efficiency, to the point that it becomes in alignment with the project as a whole. The budget, the design. How that value is asserted through all the different arms of the tree is different, but the product is not one thing or the other. It's the balance.

It's also why I've known I need to be more involved in the shop drawing process from the beginning. For a lot of people that's the norm, but it's not for an overwhelming majority. And for the consumer, they're like, wait, you have to hold an allowance in the budget to be drawing for 100 hours before any of this? I thought that's what the architect did. And I'm like, yeah, they're taking it this far, but now we've got to make sure we can communicate this efficiently to the team, and that we're accomplishing it in the most efficient way possible. There's no other way of doing that than drawing it to the level of detail that is literally how we're going to build the damn thing.

MARK

I do sympathize, especially with the client here, because the contractors have gotten used to it. But a lot of times we have a client that has paid an architect a lot of money, and they think their house is completely drawn up and ready to build off those plans. And it is, for the most part. But when the architect has drawn a simple set of elevations, we deal with that a lot, and it's shop drawings. These clients spend good money on architectural drawings, and the house can usually be built. And there are also a lot of instances where the client pays for an interior designer, and in combination there are usually really good elevations that the homeowner can get very excited about. And then we have to come in and present them with a fee for shop drawings, and they're like, what do you mean?

But we can't bring these beautiful elevations into our shop and hand them to our guy and say, here, build this. What that takes from us is going to the job site, field measuring. Theo is really good at shop drawings, but they're very time-consuming. Theo is actually building each project on the computer, and it's really cool for me, because I'm kind of a caveman with the computer stuff. When I'm looking at a drawing and I say something like, what about this part, Theo will just remove a layer, and all the answers are there. Everything's there, where the guy in the shop, typically Jared, our shop guru, can order material from it and build exactly what Theo has drawn. Thanks to Theo and Jared, our track record of things fitting has been really high.

I understand: if it were me, and I had paid an architect and an interior designer, and you have all these drawings, so many pages, it's like, what do you mean I have to pay for another set of drawings? You have the drawings. We know what you want now. But Theo has to draw the instructions on exactly what to build in the shop.

ALEX

It's always interesting, because I recently had somebody, I wouldn't say push back, but it wasn't even a big number for my shop drawings, and they were just like, whoa. And I'm like, in the shop drawings, the amount of times I find conflicts that we wouldn't have found if I hadn't taken it to that level of drawing. This is why, going back to T&M versus fixed number: somebody's figuring this out. Do we want the guys there with their tool belts on, six guys billing us hourly, standing there scratching their heads asking how you want this done? Or should we spend the time, spend the money, now?

It's scales of economy. On the bigger projects, that's a small percentage, even with the time those shop drawings take. But I would argue it's actually even more important on the smaller stuff, because you're trying to mitigate risk, and if you don't go through those same processes, you can blow that budget in three days of wasted time.

A question I wanted to ask you, because you guys have worked on so many different sites, for so many different builders, under so many different architects. I ask this for me, but also because it's so interesting to me how rarely consumers ask the people they perceive as further down the chain.

MARK

The food chain.

ALEX

For lack of a better way of phrasing it. What makes a successful project from their perspective?

MARK

That's a really good question, and we ask ourselves that a lot. The biggest thing for us as a woodworking company: we have some people that call us and say, hey, I've got another one, it'll be ready in two weeks. And we're like, whoa. If it's a big project, we would like to know about it as early as possible. Tell us about it before you even break ground. We don't need to talk about every single detail, but tell us about it before you break ground. Send us the prints if you have them, and we can start looking through areas we think are going to take more time, and what areas we want more detail on. And the funny thing is, when we're given a set of prints early for pricing, a lot of times every detail of the interior woodworking isn't even in them, because the architect and the homeowner and the contractor just want to be able to start. But to start, they need a budget, and then all the questions we have can't even be answered yet. So we don't like to overcomplicate things that early. But as early as possible, let us know about the project.

Another thing we notice is very helpful, and I understand this doesn't work for smaller jobs, is there's a certain dollar amount or square footage that then has a full-time site supervisor or project manager on it. The jobs that run the best for us are the ones that have someone there, dedicated, at all times. Even if we're trimming off the prints, things usually change so much by the time we're there that a lot of these details are either in one person's head, or it's a constant discussion every day about why this is different than it was drawn and what we're going to do about it in this moment. So full-time site supervision, for us, is huge.

And then the jobs the guys like to be on the most are the ones that are clean. Very clean. Not over-the-top, eat-off-the-subfloor clean, but organized. What we've found about neat job sites is that it sets a precedent. When we roll up on a job and there are piles of trash in every corner, the dumpster's overflowing, and every trash can is full, it makes it hard to recover from that. But when you roll up on a job, and construction is always going to be a mess, but there can be this mess at the end of the day where everybody wants to pitch in and make it clean, so when you roll up the next morning you have this sense of ease that you're starting in a nice clean space. It kicks productivity up a notch, and it seems like every trade in there is more likely to keep their space clean. That can be hard without full-time site supervision.

And because we consider ourselves to be a teaching company, we always try to have at least one newer guy that is learning. We've had some guys get into construction whose first construction job is working for FS Woodworks.

ALEX

That's kind of a wild intro.

MARK

Dude, it's a wild intro to me too. I've explained to them, and I've also started to explain this to my 12-year-old son, who claims he wants to be a carpenter: starting with us is almost doing you a disservice, because a really well-rounded trim carpenter can look at a wall and know exactly what's behind the drywall. Depending on the arrangement we have with the general contractor, with some of the greener guys I'll explain: on this job, your job is to continue to learn, continue to help, continue to be the support to all the carpenters here. Hold the dumb end of the tape measure. But it's also to sweep up. It's also to empty the trash cans. It's also to do whatever the heck the site supervisor tells you to do.

And I explain to some of the contractors we work for: short of wearing your T-shirts, which we do wear sometimes, we want to become an extension of your company. That means if the plumbers aren't there and a truck full of plumbing fixtures shows up at 4:00 in the afternoon and the site supervisor is by themselves, you have four guys there that are going to help you unload that truck. That means if you realize there's no blocking in for something that has absolutely nothing to do with us: we're here, chop saws are set up, we're here to do whatever the hell you need done. Now, that comes with a cost, and some of this stuff you don't want to pay premium trim carpentry rates on. But we will do whatever you need us to do, as long as we feel comfortable doing it. I don't want to do a big drywall patch. We won't do drywall patches, we won't do painting. But a lot of contractors today are just one guy, and everything is subbed out, and there's a lot of stuff that happens in between the subs.

ALEX

Big pain point.

MARK

If it were me building the perfect job site, I would love to see a laborer there full time to help out.

ALEX

I was talking about subs in general with Michael. I have a lot of companies we work with where I know we're paying a premium, and I want that premium, because I want that outcome. I argue a lot of times there's a cost savings in paying that premium, because we're not carrying the same level of risk in terms of delivery, unknowns, or standards of professionalism. I said to Michael, number one, paying that premium for good, established companies that get it is almost always a better financial decision for the project. It's just hard to rationalize on paper to somebody who doesn't understand it. And I'm trying to move toward only projects that have a dedicated site super. It's expensive, as it should be. You've got a guy whose salary you should be making money off of at your company, dedicated to a project.

MARK

You're adding the salary of someone to the cost. But when you roll up to a job and you see the lead on the phone and two other people waiting for answers: you can only sweep the floor so much.

An example of doing anything for a contractor: one we find ourselves doing a lot is floor protection. It's like the door jambs with the flush base: we have a way we like to do it, and they're coming out with all these crazy new products, some of them awesome, crazy new tapes. I can't tell you how many times a contractor tells us, don't worry, I'm going to do the floor protection. And then they run the floor protection all the way to the drywall, and it has to get cut out for us to scribe the baseboard in. Flush or applied, it has to be scribed to the floor. And we've had floor protection backfire too. Six months later, no one thought it was going to be six months, the floor protection gets pulled up, and anything exposed to the sun got dyed by the sun. Or gravel gets under the floor protection and the floor gets smoked.

ALEX

You and I have talked about something Theo said about an architect once that really made me think, and you've said something similar about the concealed base. When it comes to floor protection: if you can't pay to have it done right, what are we doing here to begin with? We probably shouldn't have done the seventh bathroom, so we could pay to protect the damn floors. The risk that comes from not getting floor protection done right is going to manifest at some point, no matter how much you think about it. I like to do the Ram Board with the Masonite on top. A client was like, wow, that's a big number. I'm like, you know how big that number would be if we dropped a hammer? One guy accidentally misses his pocket and drops a hammer on that hardwood. You couldn't blame that guy in a million years. It's just an accident that could happen. That's the best money we're going to spend on this project outside of management.

It's hard from the GC side, and this is where I try to be better, to say: if you can't accept that we have to pay for the floor protection, and we have to pay for the management, don't do the damn project. In the past I've maybe agreed to bend my methods to align with different project briefs, and I can barely think of a single example where it actually panned out how I intended in the end. I'm sure on your side of the trim world it's similar. How often do you go, "he wants it done this way, it's not how we do it," and it just gets pulled out?

MARK

We have to do that a lot, though. I don't like saying I told you so to other people, so we don't. But Theo and I find ourselves having these conversations, like: this worked out exactly how we thought it was going to. Why did we think it was going to be any different?

Some examples of that are pocket doors. Pocket doors are these things where people just see a door that slides into their drywall, and what could go wrong? We're working on a house right now where, when we started talking about it 18 months ago, it was a 5,000-square-foot house that had 14 pocket doors. Thankfully, the general contractor had a conversation with the architect and the homeowner, and that's down to about six.

ALEX

Just the hardware bill. For good hardware, 14 doors.

MARK

It's like $2,000 a door, just for the hardware. And you'd be crazy not to buy the good hardware now. I probably wouldn't put the good hardware in my house. Isn't that a wild thing to say? But I probably wouldn't put a pocket door in my house.

So now, on most of the jobs we're on, I tell the contractor: unless you want to get in this blame game, you have us come in and set the tracks. It was a standard for the longest time that the framers just threw in the Johnson pocket door frames and the tracks, and we'd show up a couple of months later and hang the door, and it was very easy for us, when things weren't perfect, to say, well, we didn't set the track. So now, at least, we beg people: do not put a pocket door in a two-by-four wall. Sometimes you have to. But in a two-by-six wall, we can flat-frame them with thick conventional two-by, and do everything we can to make the track perfectly level. And even when it's framed out of engineered studs and it's perfectly level, we come back and things have changed.

ALEX

Settling of a house is something I'm noticing more, especially in these remodels. It settled the last 50 years this way, and now we just put a giant 2,000-square-foot thing on top, and it's settling in a different way. The question isn't how you plan for it. You can't. You want to develop systems knowing what you can't plan for, and I think that's an example of why you do applied trim, offsets, reveals.

A question I wanted to ask you on the interior side: if there was one thing you see on these houses all the time that you wouldn't do in your own house? For me personally, my biggest pet peeve is when scribes are caulked. I don't know why we paid for scribes if you're just going to slap a big bead of caulk on there. I will not allow that in the house I build for myself one day. The other one is probably a flush shower pan. I just see it cause a lot of problems.

MARK

Well, the pocket doors are a big one for me. We have tried so hard as a company to come up with systems, and every one changes. I don't want the trim carpenters listening to roll their eyes; the hardware is getting so much better. But they're usually a source of drama. What happens for us is the settling issue. Not all of them, but some.

And I watched a guy: the ceiling was done, he put the drywall piece up, slammed it to the ceiling, and then pushed in on the pocket door cage while he grabbed a screw from his pouch and started screwing it off. And why would you not do it like that, if your job is to hang the drywall? But what you're doing is gusseting a bow into that pocket door cage. So now, where we can, we put blocks inside the cage that we can pull out with a pry bar after.

ALEX

That literally happened, I don't know if you remember, on the second-floor pocket door at that Boulder project. Tim had to redo the whole thing. He was trying to do some expansion-wedge thing in the back to get the corner bead straight again, because the door was binding. Thousands of dollars worth of work.

MARK

And the other thing is, pocket doors are supposed to be removable. When you bring in these trimless details where it's removable but it's mudded in, I explain to people: if you want to service this pocket door, it is a micro-remodel in your house. We're definitely redoing all the trim, and if we have to get into that pocket, you're cutting a hole in the wall. That's paint, it's drywall, it's us. Hafele has come out with a new track system where the track is removable. I don't think I've ever ordered an entire pocket door package correctly on the first try from Hafele. I always forget one part. Their customer service is pretty good, though. I feel the same way about the Blum catalog. Thank God for Theo, because he's really got it figured out, and we have an unbelievable sales dude from Wurth Louis that saves our ass on all that stuff. You can lose four hours of your day on some of these websites just hoping you order the right stuff.

ALEX

Something I'll ask you that's actually more about how I run my business. When I was smaller, I was ordering everything for everyone: partly because I'm trying to specify something, but the other part is I was trying to avoid things getting double-marked-up. The big problem I have now is these things are just so complicated, and when we're doing multiple multimillion-dollar projects, it's either a full-time job for somebody in the office, or... Michael just called me out on it. He's like, who do you think you are, man? You think you're going to order all this stuff for every single project, and not mess something up? I accidentally ordered two light fixtures when we only needed one. Do you guys ever procure the cabinet hardware, the trim stuff, if I've specified it?

MARK

We will do as much as you want us to. A lot of times the contractor tries to keep every subcontractor away from the client or the architect, and that's fine with us. Sometimes that's even better for us. But there are also times where, if you're too busy or don't have the bandwidth, we're more than happy to set a meeting with the homeowner and help them make some of those decisions, if it's going to speed the process up or if we can explain something a little better. Theo and I have been doing this long enough that we know what to talk about with the homeowner and what not to. And then sometimes we would just appreciate ordering it ourselves, as long as we're not ordering something ten times more expensive than what you had budgeted. That's up to us to have that discussion.

The funny thing is, I was saying this to Theo the other day: I was a bags-on, in-the-field trim carpenter for more than half my life now. There's a part of me where that breaks my heart, but there's another part that is really enjoying what I'm doing. As a company we're doing cooler projects than I've ever done in my life, and I'm not actually getting to do them, but I'm getting to be a big part of them. When these guys are figuring out the pocket door situation: I've gotten all the material for our carpenters before, and it shows up, and they're like, yo Mark, what the hell were you thinking here? Why did you get me this? And I'm like, I just assumed. I'm sorry. So a lot of times now I'll say, hey guys, make me a list of what you need. I'm not going to make you drive down to Denver to get it. I'll get it, but pretend I don't know what I'm talking about. Tell me exactly what you need and how many, because they're the ones doing it, and they've either surpassed me or just do it a lot more than I have. So why would I guess for them?

As a contractor, I understand the double-markup thing. I'd worry about that too. You need to look out for your team, us, all the other subs, but you also need to look out for the client. But that's where hiring the right subs comes in. You need to know you're not hiring subs that are marking stuff up 50, 60, 100%. And you know that with the guys you work with.

ALEX

The double markup thing, while it's real, look at the other end of what could happen. Your guys' ability to execute your scope of work is dependent on material being procured by somebody else. That is, by definition, a critical-path item. The way I'm trying to look at it now is that I'm accepting that. If you guys don't have it, there is a no-questions-asked change in costs associated with it: you didn't have that material there, or it was wrong, or we need more. I look at that, historically, as being very expensive. I'm trying to get better at saying: this is just the way it needs to be done, and it needs to be budgeted, because it saves hard conversations from having to happen, and it sets people up for success. Plumbing's a really easy example. The plumbing fixtures go through Eli, so we can specify them in order for those guys to procure them, because oftentimes I'm chasing down information. And it's hard to rationalize to the guys in the field: hey guys, I don't have it because I don't know what to order.

MARK

That's an expensive situation right there. For sure. We sit down, we get all the specs, get everything figured out, and we provide all the material. It's just that a lot of times the contractors want to take ownership of that, for a couple of reasons, some obvious, some not. Some of them are a simple markup. Some of them are a control freak, and that's okay too, and there are a lot of reasons in between. That's when we have the conversation: hey, this could maybe have been prevented. But we're all human too. We've messed up door orders. We've had providers tell us stuff was going to show up and it doesn't. We've ordered the wrong thing. There are so many mistakes that can be made.

ALEX

On the business side, where I'm trying to improve, and this is a lot because Michael's challenging me: as a business owner, there are so many problems to solve that at a certain point you've got to choose which problem you're solving, intentionally. Should I be the one ordering the door? Or would it be better for me to facilitate somebody that has a better capacity to order that door, who is aligned to be doing it, whose critical path it's part of? So I can focus on the things that will in turn set that person up for success, or on selling the project with better expectations we can all execute on.

MARK

We have to get better at that too. There are times we're on a job, I set the guys up, we get the first run of materials there, and I say, let me know if you need anything. Then I get a phone call: I need two more pieces of one-by-four, some GRK screws, and two rolls of blue tape. And I find myself driving out of the way, late to a meeting, a meeting that's going to secure the next job for these guys, to get them two or three things I might even get one of them wrong. The other thing we're trying to get better at is streamlining. Sometimes you just realize you need something right now, and if we don't have it, run out and get it. But Boulder Lumber, dude: you can order two pieces of poplar one-by-four and they'll get it there in like four hours. So we're trying to get better at keeping everybody on site working. That's also why it's really nice to have some of the guys coming up learning this, where it's okay to send them out to get some stuff. Really, my job should be making sure the contractors are happy, which most of the time the guys on site are doing, and selling more work. It's a constant balance, because we chew through work so fast now that we always have to be selling more work.

ALEX

There is one question I know you're passionate about, as am I. You and I have talked about trying to get more young people in, specifically carpentry in the context of our conversation, and about trying to get apprentice programs going with the schools, which is really hard. I think you met Steven, my framer. We were talking, and I said, I feel like finish carpentry, through social media, has been conveyed as an art form now, which is elevating it. I don't know if the rougher trades get that same benefit so much.

MARK

A little bit, I think they are, but construction as a whole has. I'm extremely passionate about this topic, because, and we could do a whole podcast on my past and my adolescence, it probably wouldn't be this podcast, but I luckily stumbled upon a guy that took me under his wing and taught me this craft. His name's Kevin McIndoo. This was on Long Island. I was working on commercial fishing boats a little bit, lobster boats and clam boats, and working for my buddy's dad, who was a landscaper. By chance, I had a friend that worked for a framer, and they needed help on a Saturday. I worked on a framing job for one Saturday, and I was just like, whoa, this is cool. I worked for that guy for five or six years, on and off. I tried to go to college and failed out very quickly. Had this guy not taught me what he did, I have no idea what I would be doing. Not a clue.

Construction, no matter what you're in, if you work hard at it, you can be successful. You can make decent money doing it, and you can care about what you're doing, and work with a good group of people. When I grew up, I remember: if you don't go to college, you're going to be digging a ditch or a garbage man. That was the thing. So when I dropped out of college, I thought I was failing at life, and I instantly went back to construction. So for me it's so important, even though I'm not the guy in the field anymore. I tell everyone that works with us now: somebody taught you this stuff. Even if you're feeling impatient, or this is annoying, or you're going a little slower because you have someone less experienced with you: someone taught you this stuff.

And everybody complains that no one's getting into it. We don't have a long list of people dying to come work for us, and the guys that do the same thing we do say the same thing. We've tried to hire some younger kids recently, and that's been tough too.

ALEX

Do you think it's a cultural thing, almost?

MARK

I do. Not necessarily culture, but norms-in-society thing now. We're in a world of instant gratification. We have Thomas, who you know. He started off with us pretty green, and I've asked him a couple of times, what was the biggest shock for you? And he's like: how long it takes to get good at this.

ALEX

Everyone thinks it's over quick.

MARK

Like, I'm a carpenter for a year, and I'm top tier now. We're constantly trying to have green guys, and, other than having children and watching my kids grow up and become little individuals, second to that, watching guys start in this trade, learn it, get good at it, watch their wages double over a couple of years, start to buy tools, and get better at it than I am, has been the most rewarding thing in my life.

ALEX

I appreciate that so much, because I did go to college, and I still made the decision to get back into this. I was just talking to my wife, because owning a business can be stressful, and I said: you know what, though? I just couldn't imagine doing anything else. I just love making stuff. And I don't even mean by building. I just mean making cool things. And I wonder, in order to get people into it: the better types of talent, and when I say talent, I mean mindsets, people who take pride in what they do, value things, are good people. The more we can get that into the industry, the more sustainable it becomes. Rising tide lifts all boats. And I think it has to start with young people. Is it the pageantry? Is it the workplace culture you have to start with?

MARK

I hate to say it, but I think it's convincing people that you can make a really good living in this industry without owning a business.

ALEX

Right. One of my best friends, who was in my wedding, he's an incredible guy, so smart. The last thing on planet Earth he should be doing, by his own admission, is running a business. It's just not what he does. And he's making a great living in the union, working in construction. Probably a better living, especially once he retires, than an overwhelming majority of the people I know in corporate America.

MARK

Dude, there are union guys making big money right now. Colorado's not a good union state, but that being said, you can make really good money. I think there are guys on our crew that, some months, potentially make more money than the owners do. And that's okay. At the end of a pay period, when we cut checks and see how large they are, we're happy about that. We're trying to get them larger.

ALEX

This is what I try to tell guys that have worked for me. A PM came to me and asked for a raise, and I said, man, you need to understand something: I want to pay you $10 million a year. Because if you're making $10 million a year, that means we're bringing $10 million of value to somebody, which means I'm making X amount of money too. That's the goal. I want you to make as much money as possible. That requires us to ask: what do we need to do to be worth that? What do I have to do to bring that amount of value to a situation?

When we're trying to get better talent interested in the industry: in today's day and age, everyone's worried about money. Life's freaking expensive. You have to let people know that this is a sustainable career, and beyond simply sustainable, it is a good career, and there is a long-term path, and there are good companies out there that value you and treat you right. You might have to find them, and be intentional about doing so. Money is a motivator, but it's a starting place, to reach people who are constantly thinking about how little they have in today's world. And then you start to say: you can also learn to take an immense amount of pride in these things you do. There's good workplace culture. This is also a skill set you can use in so many different areas of your life. I've actually tried to get something going at the Lyons school here, and I've gotten a whole crash course on why that's so difficult. A lot of it may have to do with under-18-year-old kids and spinning saws, which is a very real thing. But there is risk with everything. AI is not going to build a house.

MARK

Not yet. It's coming, it's going to get incorporated, but it's going to be a long time before it's doing a lot of these trades. There are going to be robots. They're putting Roombas up on roofs laying asphalt shingles. But it's all still going to need to be supervised, and if anything, it's going to make some of it less backbreaking.

ALEX

That's my hope, actually.

MARK

It's still going to need to be run by individuals. And there are always going to be people that want custom, high-end stuff that is always changing, always getting better. If you are that kind of person, it is a good, honest living. People say if you love what you do, you'll never work a day in your life. I go home sometimes, and it feels like I'm working. But either way, I can still say, no matter what, I love what I do, and I love the guys I do it with. We have 15 guys on the crew right now, and this has been the best job I've ever had in my life. It's because of, one, my business partner, and two, the guys we do it with. The people. They're funny, they're talented, they care about what they do, they care about the company, the culture, the product, the relationships. I personally have had so many jobs where I get treated like I'm just another tool in the toolbox, and when the work slows down, you're gone. I feel very fortunate to be with the crew I'm with right now.

And I know this is going on pretty long, but I do want to touch on Theo real quick, because this business would be absolutely nothing without him. We are a very good example of yin and yang. Like I said, I'm a caveman with computers. He has a degree in architecture. He does all the computer work, the spreadsheets. We also have an unbelievable bookkeeper, her name is Molly, and she's so much more than a bookkeeper. She's like a controller. She's my adult supervision. So is Theo. Theo and I worked together side by side for six or seven years, and I could see he was getting ready to go off on his own, and I was just like, dude, I think we could turn this into something way bigger than just two dudes with a truck full of tools. It has turned into something I never could have imagined. His abilities on the computer, his vision of how things need to work, the systems that need to be in place, and the relationships we've built. We started the company in 2018, and I met Theo in 2012. What this has turned into is unbelievable. And it's not the money, that's for sure. If you had told me I'd be working on the projects we're working on, with this many guys on a crew, I would have thought it would be a little different financially. But it is by far the coolest working experience I've ever had. And watching the extremely talented guys that work for us get more talented, and the green guys learn this and get into it, has been super fulfilling. Not trying to get super sappy here.

ALEX

No, I mean, to bring it back full circle: I said, how do we get people into this? The other thing is that once people are in, there has to be a receiving entity on the other side that welcomes people in. I give both you and Theo credit, because you're willing to onboard somebody green. I know a lot of guys whose response, and maybe it makes sense, is that they just don't have time for it. But there has to be a willingness. If the industry is going to scream from the top of a mountain, "we need more good people," we also have to be willing to ask: what are we doing to get them? Come, let me teach you. Imagine if the person that taught you hadn't been willing to take that time.

MARK

Right. And there was a crew of people, through families and such, that took care of me and taught me stuff. So when I moved to Colorado from New York, I was like 24 years old. In New York, I was making like 20 bucks an hour as an employee. When I moved to Colorado, they were like, oh, are you a subcontractor? Do you have a trade name registered with the state of Colorado, and do you have liability insurance? And I was like, what does that even mean? And then the employers would sit me down and say, well, this is actually a good thing, because you're starting your own business, and you can write a lot of your stuff off. But what that really means, fast-forward 20-something years later: if you get hurt, I don't pay for it. I don't have to pay any workers' comp on you, any payroll tax on you. And when I don't need you anymore, I can just let you go, and I don't have to pay unemployment on you.

So when Theo and I started FS Woodworks, because we dealt with that as two dudes swinging a hammer around town: when people met us, it was, you guys are great, we've got more work than we know what to do with, come on, we'll bring you on. But as soon as it slows down: see you later. Adios. Good luck, we'll call you on the next one. When we started this, is it perfect? Absolutely not. It's really hard. We're trying. But at least: hiring W-2 employees, paid holidays, workers' comp. I know now why no one wants to do it, because it's expensive. If we didn't do that, we would be making double the money. But we'd have half the culture that we have. And not everyone's a W-2 employee, but they're not because they don't want to be. Anybody in that 15 that wants to be a W-2 employee has the option, and it's not the other way around.

ALEX

I've got to tell you, I appreciate that so much. When I debated starting this podcast, there were a lot of different reasons, but one thing I knew I wanted: I don't think I've ever worked for a client where, if I said, "Hey, do you want good companies on your project that pay their people well, that give them benefits, that give them paid time off?", they would say no. I don't think I've ever worked with somebody that would say no to that question when asked point blank. But on the other end of that spectrum, do I think people were aware that the way they were approaching the project as a whole was maybe not setting up an environment where that is sustainable? The way of combating that, in my mind, is putting a face to that piece of the puzzle for these clients. They know who you and Theo are. Hey, just so you know, it's not the only reason we engage with FS, there are lots of reasons, but the guys that are here are good people, and they're paid well, as they should be. They're taken care of. There needs to be, in some sense, a platform for the client to be educated that their decision-making process matters in making that possible. Without that, we're constantly going to be asking for more, while also asking for it to cost less and be done faster, and all this other bullshit we've all been up against forever.

MARK

And that's always going to be the case. But I also hope a lot of potential customers and clients listen to this podcast, and other podcasts, and realize what we are up against. Not just with the building department, not just with society: the whole picture. The expectations are getting higher. Sometimes the budgets are getting higher, sometimes they're getting lower. Everything's getting so much more expensive, including labor. How could it not be? We just spent $400 at the grocery store.

ALEX

I know. All right, man. I appreciate it.

MARK

This was cool. Thanks for having me on here.

ALEX

Thanks for coming. I only bugged you about it for, what, six months?

MARK

Maybe seven. Thanks, man.