Dennis Oz: Hello everyone and welcome back to the Remodeler Success Podcast, where we share the real stories and strategies from successful remodeling and construction businesses. Today’s guest is an incredible leader with decades of proven results, so that’s why I’m so excited today. Well, just to give you a little bit of context about him, he’s been running a company that’s been going strong for 37 years. Yes, it’s almost like four decades, and they’re delivering high-quality results with residential remodels across the whole Santa Clara Valley in California. And he learned the trade from the family. So it’s just like a family business starting, working in the field from the 1970s. Folks, I’m talking about real experience here and creating a reputation for full-service remodeling from whole home transformations to kitchens and baths and everything that you can talk about. We can even talk about aging in place. And I would also like to mention being a universal design certified remodeler. We will be bringing a lot of knowledge and expertise to the table for today’s session. Please welcome Greg May, the President and owner of May Construction. Greg, it’s great to have you here.

Greg May: Thanks Dennis. Uh, didn’t realize I was quite that old until you start bringing up how long I’ve been doing this. I’ve been doing this a long time. Did it with my dad from, boy, probably from about six years old. He was always buying fixer uppers and then I just stayed in the business. Uh, yeah. It’s been a long time.

Dennis Oz: Well, exactly. Yeah. I can imagine. Greg, let me ask you this, really pretty straightforward. It’s been four decades in the business, and I’m sure that you’ve witnessed a lot of economic shifts and the economy changing. Maybe trends are changing and even the customer expectations are evolving. What’s been the biggest constant in your approach to running your company through it all?

Greg May: Boy, um, you know, my dad started the business in the late seventies. He was buying homes, fixing ’em up, selling ’em, and then the economy kind of crashed in the late seventies, and so he moved into doing construction on small projects and then it kind of grew from there. But he was always pounding it into me: do it right, treat the customer right, treat the project right. I’ve always said he’s probably got the highest morals of anybody I’ve ever known, and he just constantly said, “This is the way you do it. This is the way you treat the client.” He stayed in the business till about ’95. And since then I’ve come to realize that everything matters. It’s the client, it’s the project, but it’s all the little things that happen around that too. It’s how do you treat your employees, your subcontractors. We probably spoil our subcontractors to a point. But in return, if I ever have an emergency or we put a nail through a water pipe or something like that, I can pick up the phone and the plumber will almost always drop what he is doing to come out and do something for us. So we’ve built those relationships over the years too. A lot of people burn bridges, blow up relationships. We’ve always tried to cultivate and improve relationships with everybody that surrounds us. If everybody around us is happy, then it just makes our job that much easier too. And you maybe don’t make as much money day in and day out, but in the long run, everything runs smoother, less stress, and it’s just good for everybody, including the clients.

Dennis Oz: This is very important. I can see that because, well, the client perspective is something very important that you have to take into consideration when we are running our businesses. For sure. I just would like to talk about your sales process. In 2025, selling remodeling projects today means more than just giving a quote. There are budgets, client expectations is another part of it, and also there should be alignment there as well. So how do you structure your sales process to keep clients really committed and projects also profitable?

Greg May: You know, a lot of the industry experts, so to speak, will tell you, “Oh, you gotta go out and get three bids for every project.” And I always compare that. I always talk to clients and I compare it to purchasing a car. If I said, Dennis, can you go buy me a car? Or, how much for a new car, Dennis? Okay, yeah. It’s a thousand or 200,000, right? They all have four tires. They all have a steering wheel. But do you want something with performance? Do you want something that gets better gas mileage, leather interior? There’s all kinds of options available. So even if somebody comes to me with a set of blueprints, there’s still a million decisions that need to be made.

So, you hear this competitive bid process. I can easily write a contract for a $500,000 job, and the bottom line says $400,000. Anybody can do it. But if you work through all the details with the client, find out exactly the products they want, what are the pains, what are the issues that we’re trying to solve for them—are family members moving in, what’s life gonna be like for them in five years or 10 years—then we can tweak the project a little bit here and there to make sure we’re meeting all those expectations for them.

What exact products do they want? Plumbing fixtures—you can get a $100 faucet or you can get a $1,000 faucet. Tile, flooring, even the type of paint job you want, type of trim you want. They’re all potentially big numbers. So we like to work through all of those details with the clients. Do we need some sketches of what the tile layout’s going to be, so I’m getting an accurate estimate from my tile guy? So it does multiple things. We call it a cooperative bid process where the client and us, and maybe the designer, some vendors, subcontractors even—we’ll bring them in at times to tweak design. HVAC systems: architects will lay out an HVAC system, but maybe they didn’t really talk with the homeowner about what their needs are. So we’ll bring our HVAC guy out and he’ll talk with them, and almost always that gets tweaked a little bit to fit their needs.

So in the end, you’ve worked through all these details. You’ve got exact numbers for the plumbing fixtures, the tile, the floor, the cabinets, everything. What do you want in your cabinets, all that stuff. So then we can get exact numbers. The client gets to go see and touch and feel and make the decisions on all those little bells and whistles. Then those exact products get put into the estimate with the exact number. The subcontractors that might be affected by it get it too. Here’s a good one: years ago, we did an estimate for a client and they didn’t have the plumbing fixture information. Got a quote from my plumber, he gives me a quote to do the project. Well, then it’s time for the plumber to show up. He shows up and we pull out all the boxes for the shower control system. We had two shower heads and multiple valves, all these bells and whistles. He says, “You know Greg, this is gonna take me about a day longer than what I expected. I need another…” I forgot what he said, $800 or something like that for a couple of guys. And it was like, well now what do I do? Do I go back to the homeowner and say, I got a big change order? Do I eat it?

After that I was like, okay, from now on, not only are we gonna get the client to make those decisions upfront, but we’re gonna send it to the subcontractors when they’re actually providing the estimate. So nobody can come back to me and say, “Hey, I didn’t know I’m installing this.” Or the tile guy can’t say, “I didn’t know there’s a liner with diagonal set.” All that gets sent out during the bid process. So it’s a very accurate estimate. So when we start our final bid process, we make sure we’ve got all the information. Sometimes you’re missing a little bit of something here and there, and you’ll include an allowance for the work. But in general, I like to work through all the options with the client.

Here’s another good one too: sometimes you can frame something a little bit different and save thousands of dollars. We have a project I just looked at about two weeks ago, and it’s for an ADU. Getting the sewer, water, and electrical out to this thing is going to be potentially a nightmare. Might even have to go under a road. Could be over $100,000 to do this. So the architecture’s all done, but the architect hasn’t checked to see what it’s gonna take to get the sewer, water, electrical. Maybe they said they want gas lines out there too. So I started looking around. Before I even start the bid process, I’m going to bring the plumber out, see what it’s gonna take to get to a sewer line. Can we do it without going under the road? Can we get electrical from the electrical company without going under the road? Same with water. This is potentially a $100,000-plus item that, if you didn’t research it up front, you could be into the project day three and go, “Oh, wait a minute, we gotta cut a hole through the street, and we need all these other safety devices for traffic control and all that. I need another $100,000, $125,000 before we can even think about moving ahead with your project.”

So we try and go through that whole process too, and offer options and look for opportunities to save money.

Dennis Oz: Wow. Well, this is very interesting, because this is folks, I think you hear it from experience when Greg really explains that. Greg, there’s a story I learned. They’re asking a painter to paint a picture. And he paints it in two minutes and they say, “Oh my God, how did you do this in two minutes?” He says, “It’s not two minutes. It’s 40 years plus two minutes.” I think that’s what you said over there. Just saving thousands of dollars with some of the projects. This all happens with experience, folks, when you have a team. Also, we’re going to talk about team management today. I have some questions for Greg to answer about team management. But yeah, the experience is where the real magic happens, and I think you learned a lot from Greg’s answers today. So thank you so much for this one, Greg. Yes. Let’s talk about team management, because once the sale is made—you have this amazing process—once the sale is made, everything really hinges on your team, your subs, your vendors, and your staff. They have to execute. I just want to ask you, what have you learned about leading and managing teams that actually deliver on high expectations?

Greg May: Wow, that’s a lot. I’ve learned a lot over the years, and I think that’s one of the most important things in a successful business that’s going to grow. You have to commit to constantly learning and creating a culture where everybody’s willing to get uncomfortable and ask, what’s the next step? Not just for me, but for my employees and the business.

So we’ve always—I remember my wife used to work for a big financial firm, and she had a manager that would say, “You always give your employees whatever they need, the tools, the information, whatever.” And that really stuck with me. So when we do—so we’ve sold the job, let’s say we’ve got the contract signed, we’ve got all these estimates from subcontractors and vendors and everything—all that gets organized into a process that the field guys can have access to. We usually use Dropbox. But we’ve also trained, we build processes, and the processes aren’t just something that I have built. There’s an idea, somebody has something happen, or there’s an idea, and then we all sit down and work together. The billing department talks with the production department, and I sit in on it. “What works best for you? What works best for you? Well, I’d like this. Well, that doesn’t work for me. Well, let’s find something in the middle that’s gonna work best for the company.”

And then making sure that the process has steps that everybody can follow. And if you’re the third person, you know who was supposed to take the second step, and that they’ve done it properly, and that the first step was done properly. So then the people in the field that are actually producing, they’re confident in the information they have. They can access the information they need, they have what they need, and they have been trained to do whatever they’re supposed to do, and we make sure that they’re comfortable doing it.

And I’ve always tried to—I think I mentioned—push people. I like to know what people’s limitations are, where their comfort zones are. We all have strengths and weaknesses, and we talk about this all the time here. Some people are really good at certain things, and some people are not good at them. So how can we offset that? Or at least be aware, okay, this person isn’t good at taking notes, maybe, so we don’t put ’em in a position where they’re having important conversations with the client. But maybe they’re good on the phone and meeting subcontractors. So we might bounce ’em around: “Okay, plumber’s showing up, here’s the paperwork, make sure it’s getting done.” So it’s recognizing people’s strengths and weaknesses as well.

The goal for us—you know, we talked a little about cooperative bidding and what that allows us to do—I have a saying: I’d like a project to be so organized that it has the best chance of success. And I always say, “the best chance of success.” Ideally, once a project is signed and it’s organized, we actually start—I always tell the clients, “You could go off to Timbuktu for two months and we’ll be able to run your project. We’ll get on the phone with you, maybe a Zoom call. But we’ve got everything laid out. We’ve got the roadmap, we’ve got all the products, they’ve been ordered.”

We had a client—man, it’s probably been 15 years ago before Zoom—where we did that with them. Had a whole booklet for the project. They were living in Florida and we’re out here in the Santa Clara, Silicon Valley area. We did the whole project without them seeing the house. We would take pictures, email ’em the pictures and things we were gonna talk about, and we’d have our weekly meeting and go over things with them. That was probably the smoothest project I ever had because the client had already worked through everything and wasn’t second-guessing things.

But it’s just making sure you’re really organized and your people all understand what their step is, the next step they have to prepare for, and the step after that.

Dennis Oz: This is amazing to know. Thank you so much for sharing these golden nuggets with us. Greg, I just wanna take the conversation to a little more of that common saying—being in the business or being on the business. Because as remodelers, we often struggle to really scale because sometimes we’re stuck in the business. You know, we want to deliver the actual work instead of managing the teams. When did you really shift from being the guy in the field to leading through a business and also a team?

Greg May: Boy, I had a good friend, or have a good friend, that has a huge framing company. We used to golf together and he’d give me some advice. He says, “You gotta read this book.” And this is 20, 25 years ago maybe. So I bought the book and my wife was looking at it and she said, “Why don’t you buy two of them and I’ll look at it too.” So we go on vacation to Mexico. Here I am in Mexico with my wife. I should be sitting at the swim-up bar—and we did sit at the swim-up bar for a while—but we both had this book. So we spent this whole vacation—I can’t remember if it was a week or two weeks—we spent the whole vacation going through this book. We had fun too, but we spent a lot of time going through this book, making notes. It was all about building systems and processes.

And even going back before that, probably close to 30 years ago, I was trying to do everything. I was out in the field still, and then I was trying to sell the jobs and do the books and do payroll and everything else. And my wife had a pretty good job, and we made kind of a leap of faith. She quit her job, came to work for the company, and I think day one she found three mistakes that I’d made in the books. It saved me about a thousand dollars—you know, people hadn’t paid or I missed this or something like that, missed a billing. So it’s kind of like, alright, somebody’s telling us this is a good idea.

So very quickly I realized, okay, now this whole part—I was doing all this stuff—and now she’s taken on this stuff. And so it allowed me to take on some more important things. So it was kind of an eye-opener. Shortly after that, I hired my first business coach and he was always pushing me: “You don’t have to be the guy that answers all the questions.” And there’s a couple of good books on that. Instead of answering questions, you ask more questions. And most people, if they’re already working in a particular part of the business, they probably have the answer. Or maybe with just a couple of nudges here and there, they can figure it out.

So instead of constantly answering, I kept asking questions. And it was amazing how fast things changed. I was getting 10 to 20 calls a day, sometimes with silly questions. Within a month it was down to three calls a day. Within six months, these people that were now running jobs were so confident in things. Sometimes they would just call me every other day and say, “Hey, oh yeah, we had this problem, this is what I did for it.” “Oh, that’s a good idea.”

And then encouraging your people too, making them feel good about taking on the responsibilities, making sure they’re trained of course, and making sure they understand, if you ever get stuck or have a question, give me a call. But you pretty much know what you’re doing out there. Go for it if you’re confident in what needs to be done.

So that was—there’s a lot of stuff there—but just making that commitment. The first step is taking the little things that are easy to hand off to people. And then once you get that off your plate, maybe that gives you an hour a week of free time. Now you take that hour of free time, you train up the next level of stuff. Maybe that just took two more hours off your week. And you just keep building up that ladder. So all of a sudden, this bandwidth that you have is moving up into more important things—running the business instead of the business running you down here on the bottom.

So it’s kind of a long explanation, but—

Dennis Oz: That was amazing. Yeah. Well, I’m sure that everybody else here, Greg, is enjoying your answers as much as I do, and thanks so much for sharing all these nuggets. Well, folks, I have more questions for Greg. I’m not letting him go, so don’t worry about it because I would like to talk about AI and we will also talk about marketing. So just stick with us. Just bear with us, please. So let’s take the conversation to AI talk. Well, it’s transformation right now. Even the GPT-5 has just been released a couple of days ago. AI is really transforming everything from design to client communication and also marketing. People use it for automation, sometimes everybody uses it differently. And I just wanna ask you, are you using AI in your business right now? And if so, what’s the biggest impact there? How do you use it?

Greg May: Yeah, we don’t use it too much yet, but I, you know, it’s moving so fast. We have a company that helps write our blogs and they use AI quite a bit. They’ll write up something and then they send it to me and then I proofread it, add, delete, and fine-tune it, and it goes in. So that does save some time there. I’ve had a couple of clients that are real techies. I’m not a techie. I mean, I know how to send emails. I know Excel and Word, and I can use my Apple phone and say, “Take me to this location.” But here in Silicon Valley, everybody’s talking AI. All my good friends are techies and talking AI, and I’ve had some clients that have done some pictures of what they want it to look like using AI, and there are some benefits to it. I’ve seen some odd things too, but I can definitely see it adding to what we do. I’ve got some young people here that are probably going to be the ones that drag me kicking and screaming into the new stuff. It might be one of my grandchildren. I don’t know.

Dennis Oz: Because the younger generations just are so lucky. And I was watching Sam Altman, who is the CEO of OpenAI. He was saying, “I wish I would be the guy who’s just graduating from college, because I have amazing tools under my command.” And I was just thinking about this, Greg, because we all—in university—I was just going to the lectures and learning from the professor. I had no chance to talk about someone else, like you know, you’d have to pay someone to be able to learn a lot more about the university courses that you are studying at that moment in time. Well, right now there are tools, even for the students and for your grandkids and our children. It’s an amazing time. But yeah, you say if you have the younger generation, they’ll find a way to use it. That’s what you say?

Greg May: Yeah. No, that’s amazing. One of my grandsons is 13, and I remember him at like one or two years old. My daughter gave him an iPad and he just—you know, he grew up going. It’s just light years ahead of where I was and even my own kids. It’s just amazing what they’re learning. And now AI—I have some really good friends I golf with, they’re all techies, and we’re sitting around afterwards having a beer after a round of golf, and AI is probably the number one topic of conversation right now. Two or three of ’em are retired and doing consulting work, and it’s a big deal. Last year it was self-driving cars that they were all talking about. Now it’s AI.

Dennis Oz: Yeah, well, pretty amazing to see this transformation and it’s really great to learn these amazing things from you as the business owner—how you react and what are the use cases. Thanks so much for sharing with us. Well, let’s talk a little bit about marketing because, Greg, with all these years in the business, I’m sure that you have seen it all. You’ve probably tried print, digital, even some—you know, I’m sure maybe you have some referral marketing. I just wanna ask you two questions. What is the best marketing channel right now that you feel is bringing you the best qualified leads, and what is the biggest headache today?

Greg May: We don’t do a lot of marketing. You know, all of our business is word of mouth. Now we do—before we start a job, we do a mailer to the nearby neighbors: “If you have any problems, traffic, any issues, please call us.” And that started out as—if a neighbor’s upset about something, we want them calling us, not going to our client saying, “Hey, your guy parked in my driveway,” or something like that. We’d rather get the information ourselves and deal with it. And then at the end we send another letter out saying, “Thank you for putting up with us,” basically. So there’s some marketing with that.

We do occasionally—my wife will—there are a couple of magazines around here that’ll do a two-page spread. And so she does the pictures and everything. You know, we make sure we get our referrals, ask people to post on Google and Houzz and things like that. But you’re never gonna hear us on the radio or TV. I’ve had people say, “Oh, you gotta put a sign up at my kid’s Little League.” We’re somewhat picky about the clients we take. They have to fit into our processes and systems.

You know, if somebody wants the absolute cheapest job—like I said before—I can write a $500,000 job and put $400,000 on the bottom line. But at the end of the day it’s gonna be a $500,000 job, or the expectations aren’t going to be met. So you’ve got to make sure that the clients understand that and are willing to go through that process.

So I would say maybe the biggest headache is sometimes you’re working with one of these magazine guys and they aren’t getting things put in the right spot. But I don’t deal with that. That’s just not my forte. I talked about weaknesses and strengths, and that’s definitely not one of my strengths. English was not my best subject in school. I was a math and science guy growing up. So I kinda let Debbie, my wife, deal with that and Donna here in the office deal with that stuff. And like I said, we’re not a big marketing firm. We have been pretty blessed to have great referrals and great clients.

Dennis Oz: Sometimes when you are in the market for many, many years, the phenomenal delivery that you give to the community, of course it’s going to bring you natural leads that you don’t need to put your name on TV or spend thousands of dollars on radio ads or something like that. You just need to be there when they ask you. And just like Greg said, sometimes decades of experience and also the legacy will bring you clients on autopilot because there are some happy people. Of course, all our listeners know here the importance of word-of-mouth marketing. That’s also good marketing because you do value your referrals, Greg. That’s what I’m seeing here. That’s what you do when you have years and years of experience. Obviously we can see that the amount of marketing budget that you have really shrinks with the years that you’ve gained experience. So that’s amazing. I would say one of the key points from your answers, and thank you so much for sharing this one with us.

Well, Greg, I just wanted to ask you maybe one last question today. Then we’re gonna be wrapping up. I would like to talk about the mindset—the mindset shift that’s happening. All these entrepreneurs and all these remodelers out there, all these construction company owners out there. Sometimes, especially when starting out, we focus on the craft but not the business. Right? I would like to ask you: that one mindset shift or piece of advice you wish every remodeler would adapt early on—what is that?

Greg May: That’s a good question. So almost everybody that goes into the trades went into it because they knew how to build a house, or, you know, the plumber could do pipes. I was real lucky with my dad. When I was younger, we did everything—we poured concrete, framed it, did the electrical, did the plumbing, the drywall, we painted, we did the roof. I mean, we did everything. So the advantage there is that I understand a lot about construction that maybe a general carpenter or plumber or electrician probably doesn’t know.

But usually, especially in the trades—and even if you’re working at McDonald’s and you work your way up to manager—you probably got there because you worked hard and you could do these things and get a lot done, but it was you getting it done. When you own a business, you only have so much bandwidth. There are only so many hours in a week. You can only do so much. So at some point you have to have a mindset shift from “I’m a doer” to “I’m somebody that makes sure that things are getting done, and how do I get those things done?”

So if I only have 40 hours a week, if I’m a doer, I’m only gonna get 40 hours’ worth of work done. But if I’m somebody that’s looking at it like, “How do I get 200 hours of work done?” Okay, I gotta hire a plumber, I gotta hire an electrician, I gotta hire a foreman. I gotta this, I gotta that. I gotta build some processes and systems.

You look at Tim Cook of Apple—I mean multi, multi-billion dollar company, I think their cap is over a trillion dollars now. If he was trying to do everything, the guy would be building one Apple phone at a time, probably every month he might be spitting out a phone. But they’ve got all these different products all over the world, and it’s all these layers of leadership and training and production lines.

In my business, obviously on a much smaller scale, you still have to have that mindset. I need to get it done, and the next step up is I have to have people underneath me that I’m training to make sure it gets done, and not be doers anymore. John C. Maxwell has a great book called The Five Levels of Leadership, and it’s kind of that first step: congratulations, you own a business, or congratulations, you work at McDonald’s and you’re now the shift manager. But you don’t have any experience. You have to learn to be a leader. The next step is you have to learn to train leaders underneath you, and then the next step is those leaders have to be trained. The next layer down, you know, and then inside there you have the processes and systems that you trust and you continually fine-tune. You have to be continually fine-tuning. And then on top of training, you’re encouraging your people and patting ’em on the back when things go well.

And when they don’t go well—and this is important too—everybody makes mistakes. And I always tell my people, you’re gonna make mistakes. We all do. Please tell me when you do, especially if it’s something on a job site that we need to fix. I always say, somebody once told me the most dangerous employee is the one that hides their mistakes. I mean, the most embarrassing thing that could happen to me is a client calls me up and says, “I got home and there’s a big scratch in my brand new hardwood floor.” Oh man, now I’m running around. Does the client think we’re trying to hide it or something?

But I actually had an employee years ago that scratched the floor and he immediately came over to me and said, “Greg, I put this big scratch on the floor and it’s right in a big doorway.” I said, “Oh man. Alright, thanks for letting me know.” And we immediately called the floor guy. He came out the next day, but I called the client and said, “Hey, just a heads up, this is what happened. We’re already taking care of it.” And the client relaxed. They weren’t happy about it, but they knew that we were already taking care of it.

Greg May: Uh, so that’s kind of a long answer to things, but in a nutshell, I would say the mindset has to change from doing everything—you know, physically swinging a hammer, trying to do your books—to getting it done by hiring somebody to do the books, training people to lead and manage, and finding good subcontractors that you can trust, that will follow your systems and have the same commitment to making the clients happy that we do.

Dennis Oz: Wow. That was an amazing session today with you, Greg. And thank you so much. I cannot thank you enough for sharing all this wisdom and your experience that you are bringing from the industry to our listeners today. That was amazing. If someone has maybe a follow-up question in the future—we are, of course, a B2B show, but sometimes some homeowners also come across our show—if they are living closer to you, what is the best way to get back to you? Is that your website, or what’s the best way?

Greg May: Yeah, if you want to go to our website, it’s a long name. It’s mayconstructioninc.com. So you gotta remember that INC—mayconstructioninc.com. Otherwise, I think you’d get some guy in South Carolina or something like that. But yeah, we’ve got some good resources on there as well. It’s information about the company, information on our processes, our design process. It’s fairly detailed, and we’ve got some nice pictures on there too.

Dennis Oz: Great. Perfect. Well, again, thank you so much for everything that you shared today. I am sure our listeners got real value from today’s session. Well, folks, that was another episode of Remodeler Success Podcast. We’re gonna see you next time. Goodbye.

Greg May: Thank you.