When Heather Dosch joined a Builder 20 Club during spring 2012, she and her husband, Kevin, were in the midst of transitioning their company, John F. Buchan Homes, from being a production and spec-home builder to constructing custom houses as well.

“There’s a whole different way that you need to communicate and different systems you need to adopt when you’re going from building a house the way we want to build it to accommodating all of the unique requests—crazy or otherwise—for clients,” says Dosch, who is the CEO of the Bellevue, Wash., builder. She took the reins of her parents’ business a couple of years before joining the Builder 20 Club and says that while Buchan Homes had some built-to-order experience, having offered production-home customers the flexibility to customize, she noticed that the build cycle for custom projects was taking longer than expected. So she presented her dilemma to fellow builders at a club meeting, and their feedback convinced her to adopt a new policy that has since shaved 30 days off Buchan Homes’ build cycle.

Dosch says, “One of the things that came out of that discussion [with Builder 20 members] was, ‘Heather, you’re allowing the clients to start construction when they may only have a handful of their selections made. You need to get them to, if not 100 percent, at least 70 percent complete on the selections when construction starts.’ Just hearing that the majority of the group requires almost all the selections to be done before construction starts was one of those eureka moments for me.”