Design Development

What if the incentive package isn't what decides where a company goes? Kyle Touchstone grew up in South Mississippi, the kid of a hardware store owner who watched one large manufacturer change what a small business and its employees could afford. Today he is Director of Raleigh Economic Development, a program of the Greater Raleigh Chamber that provides business recruitment, retention and expansion services on behalf of the City of Raleigh. Kyle says the Raleigh area is growing by about 100 p...

Founders can run a real estate firm on heroics for a while. At some point, the business needs a system. In this episode of Design Development, Leslie Cohen, Founder and Principal of Ops Alchemy, talks about strengthening operations, reducing founder dependence, and preparing a business for growth and leadership transitions. Leslie shares how she approached becoming the first COO at Samuels & Associates: establishing a cadence around the operating budget, listening to people throughout the...

What if the most valuable thing a window cleaner brings down from the side of a building isn’t clean glass — but information? Matt Pierce started his career pounding the pavement, walking into restaurants, car dealerships, and storefronts selling recurring window cleaning. Today, he leads PIERCE Property Services, a roughly 120-person company providing maintenance, waterproofing, restoration, roofing, and broader building-envelope services. The leap between those two businesses wasn’t part of...

Most business owners go through a pivotal moment—their first real look behind the curtain at how buyers value companies. For Rens Hayes, that moment came when he went through a sale and due diligence process for his father’s structural steel business. What he learned from that experience completely changed how he approached building and scaling his own company, H&O Structural Engineering. In this episode of Independence by Design™, Rens and host, Ryan Tansom, break down how he engineered ...

For roughly 40 years, developers looked at a six-acre oceanfront site in Long Beach and couldn’t get it done. Then B2K did. In this episode of Design Development, Jon Weiss explains what finally unlocked the 1.2-million-square-foot Superblock - and why getting a project built often has less to do with the idea and more to do with timing, local buy-in, construction strategy, and understanding the economics early enough to make the right decisions. Jon is a fourth-generation builder and partner...