Morgan with American Dreamers Renovations
Episode 56: Welcome to the She Builds Show, I’m your host, Stefanie Olson. Today, I have an incredible guest, Morgan Kumpfmiller! Morgan is an award-winning general contractor, interior designer, and the owner of American Dreamers Renovations – a boutique home construction and renovation company serving Pittsburgh, PA and surrounding communities.
Listen in…
SHOWNOTES:
• The shopping is a big portion of it, we look at the price of the kitchen, the cabinets and the countertop, or would take up the majority of that cost… Right. So once they have that estimate, we then start show rooming, we go on a journey to find the things that they like. So second visit with American Dreamers is always in the showroom, and we kind of think of it as window shopping. Okay, so you’re going to pick out what that door style looks like, the colors that you want, do you want custom colors? How custom do that you want them? Do you want them to be in the Sherman Williams pallet? We can use a code number or are you just going to bring me a Swatch or something that you found on the internet? How custom are we talking? What type of door style do you want? What kind of cabinet style do you want? We go through the whole thing. What kind of insights have you seen on Pinterest that you can’t live without? (4:02)
• That is mostly the process and it is the longest process, especially because when you’re looking at some sort of a CAD drawing or a 3D drawing, or something. We want it to be creative and we want people to think really in-depth about it and how it looks and what it’s going to be and make edits. You know, go home, sit on it for a bit, don’t just pull the trigger because we do want it to be spectacular. I have a few clients that say, Look, I only know what I know, I would like to do something different and unusual that maybe hasn’t happened often or at all yet, what can we do there? And so in those instances, that gives us a chance to really be creative and there’s only paper sketches and it doesn’t get to go into CAD and I can’t show it. (7:21)
• I think when you own a business, okay, you automatically start setting your kids up with expectations of your availability. And that’s super important because we want their mindset to be that this is for them, although, that you aren’t there all the time, what you’re doing is building a future for them. And in order to do that, you can’t be home every single day, right? And so I had the most interesting conversation, I heard amongst my kids, because I’ve got step kids and then I’ve got a daughter. Okay, so the boys were split, I have two boys, the boys were more of this belief that if you’re not home all the time, then you don’t love me as much. And my daughter had stepped up to bat that one day because, Brandis’ youngest boy our best friends… Okay, which isn’t always great to have your kids be able to team up on you, but nevertheless. And she says to him, Well, she goes, How do you think that we are going to be able to go to Disney World? And all, they call us the parents, because it’s not exactly Mom and Dad, and she goes, how do you think the parents are going to afford to take us to Disney World and all these cool vacations if they don’t get to work, she’s like Dominic…They’re out there making money so we can have nice things. (26:50)
• You can’t just say, Well, I like to X, Y, and Z. Why don’t we expand upon that? Okay, why do we have to focus so much on where the missteps are, because honestly, it drives us down as a whole… It does. So that has always been a really big mission of mine, it’s my mission, on top of seeing more emails to be interested in construction… Right? That’s always one. But yeah, I go to local tech schools and I talk about this, we want to build each other up, I said, You want to look around the room because you don’t understand the person three chairs down could be a building inspector one day, right? And two chairs down, might be the foremost master carpenter in his industry and he may be looking for a job one day, and you’ll have the inside scoop to scoop him up, because you know him, right? So watch what you say, try to really air on the side of being positive because it really is a reflection of our industry, not just us. (34:09)
ABOUT MORGAN KUMPFMILLER:
Morgan is an award-winning general contractor, interior designer, and the owner of American Dreamers Renovations – a boutique home construction and renovation company serving Pittsburgh, PA and surrounding communities. It’s Morgan’s mission not only to improve the construction industry through quality work and service but to build and grow the industry by inspiring women to pursue careers in trade. Morgan is rarely not working – she’s either in the field, in the office, teaching classes, doing Mom things, or speaking at industry events – during that occasional down time, she’s dreaming.
CONNECT WITH MORGAN:
• Website: https://www.americandreamersrenovations.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AmericanDreamersRenovations
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/americandreamersrenovations
WAYS TO CONNECT WITH STEFANIE…
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