We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Haley Ottmann. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Haley below.

Haley, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you tell us about an important lesson you learned while working at a prior job?

When it comes to a contractor/designer to client relationship (as you can imagine) there is a lot of communication involved in the process of bringing a project to fruition. There are approximately 10 million decisions to be made, as well as hundreds of balls in various courts being tossed back and forth. Unless there is a synchronized process of communication, there is a great opportunity for failed communication and lop-sided relationships. From the get-go Home Girls has sought to create a streamlined process to make the journey of a renovation project enjoyable and most importantly to build strong relationships along the way.

The most important lesson we’ve learned throughout the journey of partnering with homeowners of all different backgrounds and personality types is really very simple and yet completely essential. It is a lesson of the contractor-client relationship but it is also the story of any human relationship. It is summed up with the commitment to really dig in and listen. To use our ears and our minds and our hearts to discern what is being communicated to us, and to take the thorough steps to fully understand what the other person is conveying. In all ways we are counteracting surface level ‘hearing’, by engaging in meaningful conversations from design through construction as well as asking thoughtful questions to dig deeper into any concerns. This is how we are able to absorb real information from our clients in a way that we can then propose appropriate and workable solutions.

Good, honest, and transparent communication creates relationships built on a foundation of trust and understanding. It builds confidence that the other person has your best interest at heart. Isn’t that how we should all treat each other? Making that shift to actually understand the other person and not just hear the surface level is a commitment of time, energy, and most importantly relationship. It means taking the time to ask questions to get to the heart of the issue, and it means expending your energy and resources to find the right solution to the issue. Sometimes that means the amount of time spent doesn’t support the bottom-line, and that is okay. Sometimes it means making sacrifices that you didn’t plan to, and that’s okay also. Relationships over bottom-line every time.

However, the beautiful product of that time and energy, is a relationship built on trust. When it comes to our business we don’t really look at it as a business to client relationship. Instead, we see everyone as our friends, and work our hardest to treat each person exactly as we would our closest friends. That means talking about things that are hard and acknowledging mistakes you made along with solutions. It means celebrating the accomplishments and building a project together as a true team. It means playing to each other’s strengths and lifting each other up along the way.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Home Girls is a women-owned and family run, Design+Build renovation business. We started out as a mother-daughter team and have expanded to include Haley’s husband as well as some of our best friends to build out our dream team. Our projects focus on residential remodels including single rooms (kitchen or bathroom), to complete home guts and additions. We take clients from an initial consultation, through our design process, then into construction bidding and construction administration. We’re hands-on from day one of design, and our same hands continue through the entire construction process. This offers continuity of the project from beginning to end.

Our Mission: The Home Girls mission is to provide a transparent design and construction process for homeowners in the Houston area focusing on integrity, service and authentic relationship. The Home Girls approach begins by offering in-house design to prepare a comprehensive bidding package enabling a transparent bidding process empowering the homeowner to make informed decisions. During construction Home Girls’ cornerstone is building authentic relationships by cultivating trust through honesty in the construction process by consistently providing weekly construction update reports and a hands-on approach to construction management.

“Making beautiful spaces to call home, while cultivating relationships along the way is exactly what we’re here to do.”

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

We are so grateful that our best clients come to us because their friends tell them they personally loved working with us. We have been blessed with incredible clients (who have become friends) and share our name with the people they are close to. This is the greatest gift to a small business and we never take it for granted.

Over the years, as we have worked with clients and friends of all different career backgrounds (engineers, accountants, sales, banking, etc.), we’ve consciously absorbed information about the various wants and needs from different perspectives of what it looks like to have a successful renovation project. As we’ve collected this information over each project we have used this feedback to create the practical systems we use to organize our communication throughout the course of a project. We know that accountants need to see where every penny is going, so we have a spreadsheet detailing expenses every week of the project. We know the engineer is concerned about the project management and how we will handle decisions being made, so we have a weekly report designed to bring to the surface decisions remaining as well as outline what trades will be working and when. We’ve used the information gathered through our communication and relationships to work together to build the very processes that we continue to use (and tweak) as we gather new feedback to make them continuously better. These processes and weekly reports help to bring the transparency we seek into the inboxes of our clients every week. This level of communication and detail have been an essential tool to growing our relationships and trust with our homeowners.

How’d you meet your business partner?

We started out as a mother-daughter team, so we have known each other from day 1! Brigitte (mother), has always been involved in the renovation industry. She started her own faux finishing company back in the 90’s and painted for two decades. After being around the renovation industry for so long, friends started asking her to manage their renovation projects and she happily began general contracting many different residential renovation projects. Haley on the other hand, grew up with a mother who loved everything involving a beautiful home and became completely inspired by design and what a home could be. Haley studied Interior Design at the University of Texas Architecture school, then began her career as a commercial interior designer with a well known Houston based architecture firm. There, she had the opportunity to learn how teams work together and how the designer-owner-contractor relationship worked in a commercial setting. While there, she learned the process of design and how to oversee construction administration for large scale projects, including a 50,000SF headquarter project that she handled from start to finish.

After this commercial experience, Haley began to long for ‘home’ in terms of residential design as well as a new work-life balance with a new baby. At the time, Brigitte was managing residential renovation projects on her own, while reaching out to Haley for help with design drawings. Haley and Brigitte made the decision to officially join forces in the spring of 2018 and it has been the best decision both could have made.

Brigitte’s strongly forged relationships catapulted new project opportunities for Home Girls. After a couple of years, we needed additional hands to be able to take on more projects. At this point, Haley’s husband Robert joined the team as a project manager. It couldn’t be more fun to work with people you truly love and who want the best for you. We count ourselves incredibly blessed to work with family and friends serving our ‘new’ friends and clients along the way.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.homegirlsdesign.com/
• Instagram: @homegirls.llc

Image Credits
Lauren Holub Photography, Grace Laird Photography, French Blue Photography