Episode 30 - Jake Knoth, BarnPros

Update: 2022-05-26

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Prefab Review

Hi, my name is Michael Frank and this is the Prefab Pod presented by Prefab Review where we interview leading people in companies in the prefab housing industry. Today, we're speaking with Jake Knoth, CEO of BarnPros. Welcome, Jake. Well, as we were just sort of talking offline, I think it sounds like you are, I don't know, a pseudo-family business. So it'd be great to learn a little bit more about the history of BarnPros.

BarnPros

Absolutely. Yeah, I would call it generational. You might say the history of our company is pretty interesting. Basically, we have been around for just over 30 years. We had our 30th birthday about a week ago. Actually, so a little bit before that, our 2 founders had been working together. But it basically, looks like this: throughout the late 80s, our founders met and were working on a number of spec projects and a few custom homes together. And throughout the 90s, this is just outside of Seattle, Washington, on the east side, if you're familiar with the area. They began to build homes. Realistically, they had built their first barn together and this story becomes really interesting. I'll try to keep it short for the podcast. But basically, that barn went really well, they fell in love with the post and beam style of construction during that process and they began to do more. It started to catch on in our area and then really, as Seattle grew, especially as say Microsoft moved in a couple of towns over, we kind of got on their bulletin board and then all of a sudden, we began to really catch on in our area. And so, throughout the 90s we became kind of a large regional general contractor specializing in barn construction. And really do barns. We would do indoor riding facilities. We would do shops, but the focus was really on these high-quality, high-end barns.

Prefab Review

And was this 100% on-site at that time or was there sort of a kit component the whole time?

BarnPros

So this was 100% on-site. They were really, you could say, going through the motions, but the learning as it pertained to doing the same thing continually, but they were doing it on-site. And this is over dozens and dozens of projects. Towards the end, they had about 3 full-time crews operating.

Prefab Review

Yeah, yeah.

BarnPros

But eventually, they opened a warehouse locally where they started to do some of their door components - the things that took them a long time on site. And they realized that they could do it faster and more securely in a contained environment. You know, you're environmentally controlled. You're inside. It's warm and you know, that was the advent of a little bit of prefabrication for us 25 years ago. So where the story gets exciting, is in the early 2000’s about 2002, we opened our first website, and if you go to the way-back machine, it's pretty interesting to go see it back on Microsoft Front Page, but they began to advertise. And they did so with paid search in like 2003 way before it was cool. And it really exploded for us. What happened was, we were advertising supposedly locally but it was so new that it was getting national traction and so we'd have folks calling up from back east saying, “Hey. I'd love for you guys to come build for me.” And for us, we're sitting here in Western Washington going, “Wait, you know we can't really service Georgia?” And it became kind of this confusing thing because the internet was so new for everybody. And so basically, our founders looked at each other, their names were Jeff and Steve, and they looked at that and said, “you know what? I bet we could provide the value that we have here in terms of architectural experience. Probably hundreds at that point it's hard to say, but hundreds of iterations gained in terms of, again this was primarily horse barns at that time, so stall configurations, sizing, what the components needed to look like, what made for a high-quality horse stall.” All sorts of stuff that's pretty deep into the equestrian world, but offer that value on a national scale. And so that was the first time that they began to do kits. That was in 2003. And from 2003 until right up to the recession in about 2007, we grew almost in a couple of years over 100% per year. Literally four or five years in a row. So, it was an incredible timeframe moving in.

Prefab Review

Was this all barns? We'll get to your products, like you do barns, but you also do all sorts of other sorts of barns and things. Was this all barns at that point?

BarnPros

Certainly. Yeah, at that point it was all barns. That's correct. And a quick note on that, so today barns are the heritage. They are the namesake. They are the style but true equestrian or equine facilities are probably 30 to 40% of our overall project base if you will. The vast majority are residential and but it’s barn-style homes, right? And then there's a lot of shops in there and a lot of our favorite projects. We do a ton nowadays of breweries, wineries, event venues, wedding venues, yeah pseudo commercial. That's a really interesting topic in terms of permitting and the technicalities.

Prefab Review

Right? Commercial stuff.

BarnPros

You know, commercial versus not. But anyway, yeah, the barn-style wedding venues were definitely a fun ride for us over the past decade or so. As that really was in vogue and becoming very popular. But yeah, so the recession came around and it slowed down a lot of builds for us. It curved the say 100% year-over-year growth to something more normal, twenty-thirty percent. Still great. The advantage that we found during that time was because this is a package or kit, we call it a materials package for a couple of reasons, but you're leveraging the expertise of a local contractor, or back in the day, you know twenty years ago, permits were not handed to you but they were a little bit easier than they are now and general construction practices were simpler for a number of reasons.