We recently connected with Henish Pulickal and have shared our conversation below.

Henish, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. To kick things off, we’d love to hear about things you or your brand do that diverge from the industry standard

Our company slogan is “We Do That,” and it is an accurate description for what we can provide for our customers in San Diego! We started off as a great real estate company, which helps people buy and sell homes in San Diego. Additionally, we have been flipping homes and in the past 10 years, we have done over 130 homes. From that experience, and having the right people on my team, we created a separate residential licensed general contractor construction company called CalHomeCo Construction. Finally, in the past 2 years, I added a development company as well. There is a massive housing shortage in San Diego, so this company is focused on building more housing.

If someone has a need related to housing, it is likely we can help them, or at least point them in the right direction. I do not do this by myself. I have a team of twelve people on my real estate team. Our construction team consists of sixteen people, including four project managers, working on fifteen projects at a time. These projects range from large remodels to ADU builds, custom homes and small to mid-size multi-family projects.

Henish, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I grew up in Michigan and graduated from the University of Michigan in 2002. My first job out of college was with a mortgage company. I worked on underwriting, sales, mortgage servicing, and even selling foreclosed homes during the 2008 recession. That experience was a perfect foundation to start my own real estate and construction companies.

With real estate, we quickly found that the old-school tactics of talking to all the relevant parties, instead of only communicating via text or email, produced better results. When we are dealing with sellers, calling, and talking to the buyer’s agent would often result in higher offers, and counteroffers. If we represent a buyer, talking to the selling agent would reveal a lot of information regarding the preferred terms, and would give me the opportunity to explain why accepting my offer would be the best option for the seller due to several factors.

Additionally, I have learned many creative techniques to help with a transaction, like seller carries, lease options, long escrows and more, that can help get a deal done.

In our construction company, we understand the biggest concerns that our customers have. Typically, those concerns are the project going way over budget, taking much more time than promised, and having the contractor provide poor (or no) communication. To prevent budget issues, we do a lot of advanced work. The proposals we generate take us 10-15 hours to produce because we review the building plans in detail, input over 100 variables, triple check the outputs with our management team, and only then do we present the proposal to the client. On a recent review we found that our change orders are an extraordinarily low 0.2%!

With the project timing, all our project managers are very experienced, and know how to schedule a project so we can finish them on time.

Finally, we have our company pledge is that we will call you back within one business day. In reality, we’re communicating much more frequently with the clients and keeping them updated on work that was completed that week, and work that is planned to be done next week.

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

The most significant impact to my construction business has been implementing EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System) based on the book Traction by Gino Wickman. The system is used by nearly 300,000 companies worldwide to align goals, people, and resources to create a cohesive and effective strategy to run your business. This system has been extraordinarily helpful to us. Previously, we were running our company by dealing with the issues of the day. We did not make the time or put in the energy to create a strategy to plan our business going forward. Now we have a clear, concise vision for our business, with defined core values, focus, short-term and long-term goals, and much more. This type of structure has excited everyone in our organization. Even our field technicians love our core values, and we can see all our measures of quality and productivity increasing.
We have learned that people like to work for people they like, and they also like to work for a company that has values that align with theirs!
Recently, at our annual executive planning meeting, it was announced that our Senior Project Manager discovered a job site clean up solution that will save us $100k+ in the next year and keep our projects looking cleaner than ever before! This type of solution was hard to find when we spent all our time getting jobs done, and not spending time focusing on the bigger picture.

How did you build your audience on social media?

My goal with social media was to create awareness of me and my businesses, in San Diego. I don’t need thousands of followers from around the world. A few thousand followers that are real people and that live where I do business is my target audience. A significant part of my process is that I have hired a marketing manager that works for my companies to post on social media. I give him access to all my pictures, then he posts regularly highlighting my personal, family and business life! He also takes additional media from our projects and events to add to our content. All our content is totally authentic. There’s no filter, we don’t produce fake content for views. I just share what is happening in my day.
It seems to be working. I regularly hear from my friends in real life, “You’re killing it on social media!” That’s always great to hear, but the point is to generate conversations from those posts. Those conversations turn into business or referrals. It’s nice to have regular media to remind people what I do for a living. It’s easy to forget what a person’s job is if they only post pictures of vacations and fancy dinners. We balance professional and personal posts to keep it fun and interesting.
Occasionally, I’ll meet people who come up to me and say, “Hey, I follow you on social media! I feel like I know you!” I’ll respond, “That’s great! Tell me about you!” Now I can spend those moments learning about this online friend who is now becoming a real life friend and ideally a client too! This happens regularly in San Diego, but my favorite time was in Cabo last year. I guy came up to me in the street saying, “Hey, I follow you online!” We got drinks that night, and we are still friends in to this day.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://calhomeco.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hpulickal/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/henish.pulickal/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/henish-pulickal-6193101/
• Twitter: https://x.com/TheCalHomeCo
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@calhomeco
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/calhomeco-construction-san-diego

Image Credits

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