The Grit Blueprint

Construction Industry AI and Brand Building with Stefanie Couch (guest episode on the Specified Growth Podcast)

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This is an episode recorded on the Specified Growth Podcast, where Stefanie was a guest.  Find out more here: https://tatstalks.com/specified-podcast

On this episode, Stefanie and host Tatsuya "Tats" Nakagawa, explore the journey of personal branding in the building industry, where individuality meets traditional business practices. 

The episode highlights the value of adapting to modern consumer expectations while staying true to oneself.

• The evolution from a conventional lumber business to innovative brand strategies 
• Embracing individual style within a conservative industry 
• Adapting to the digital age: why online presence matters 
• The power of AI in improving brand visibility and sales processes 
• Practical strategies for utilizing technology in traditional sectors 
• Importance of continuous learning and adapting in business 


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Tatsuya "Tats" Nakagawa:

All right,

Tatsuya "Tats" Nakagawa:

Stefanie

Tatsuya "Tats" Nakagawa:

, thank you. Thank you for coming on the show.

Stefanie Couch:

Well, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Tatsuya "Tats" Nakagawa:

Yeah, so excited about you, know your, your marketing, your sales background, talking about you know building brands and the buildings industry and stuff like that Certainly a topic I'm interested in. Love your shirt, the couch, the hat. Was this always happening or is it something that you know? You came up with more when you went off on your own?

Stefanie Couch:

Well, I've always kind of been really into, you know, having my own style in high school. I grew up in a pretty rural area in Georgia and most people are wearing, you know, jeans and a t-shirt to high school and I would wear like three piece suits and five inch stilettos to hit to work in the office at school and I kind of felt like I was running a political campaign at my high school. So I think I've always just been different and wanted to embrace my own style and that's kind of followed me along. There was a time in corporate where I tried to wear, you know, like a Columbia vest and some Carhartt pants, like all the managers, or khaki pants, and it just didn't ever feel right to me. So it's gotten a little bit more out of control with the hat collection and all the things. Since I've started my own business, for sure, and been creating more content, but yeah, so I definitely have an addiction to hats and it just is what it is at this point.

Tatsuya "Tats" Nakagawa:

Yeah, for sure, hats are fun. What does your collection look like?

Stefanie Couch:

Well, I have an office upstairs that has some stuff behind me with like a lot of different hats, but I have three just sitting here, two other ones sitting on my desk here, but most of them are kind of the same fedora style. I do have a lot of baseball hats as well. I like those as well. I wear those to the gym and you know when I'm out and about, but mostly this style and I have a lot of different colors. So if anyone has a great brand they want to tell me about, I'm always open to that very cool, all right.

Tatsuya "Tats" Nakagawa:

Um, so you started in, I guess, uh, lumber, building materials. Um, you're doing this now. I mean it was, was the, the lumber industry or or the buildings industry, always an interest, or were you doing other things before you got into this?

Stefanie Couch:

well, I was sort of born into it, so it chose me by birth. My grandfather and my dad had a lumberyard a retail lumberyard in Atlanta when I was born, real close to the airport in Hartsville, jackson area, and when I was five we moved up to Northeast Georgia and my dad actually started a second branch of his own lumberyard up here and I sort of grew up around it, stealing forklifts on the yard while he was inside, selling customers and driving them around the gravel lot and doing all sorts of stuff I probably shouldn't have been doing, but I worked there when I was young, so I actually would like boot people out of the way to ring up customers. From about seven on I really loved it and it was just always. Business was always very natural to me. I liked selling Girl Scout cookies, I loved being in the mix, and so it was never something I didn't think I would do.

Stefanie Couch:

And I grew up, went to college, came right back and worked for my dad during that time and then eventually went to a large Fortune 500 to sell doors and help them build up a startup division during that time and then eventually went to a large Fortune 500 to sell doors and help them build up a startup division of that business and it went from there. Now I have my own business. So I actually worked in corporate a lot longer than I thought I would, but I think it was because I was in a really fast paced environment where we were building a business that was pretty much from scratch and opening new branches and all those things. So I got that kind of aggressive growth that I like from that part of the business where typically a really large corporation doesn't change that much. It's pretty stagnant or, you know, growth at small scale. This was like 100x on the business in one year. So I got addicted and now here I am.

Tatsuya "Tats" Nakagawa:

Yeah, I mean that's a good point. I mean, just because you're at a bigger company or a company, even a midsize company, doesn't mean that you can't carve out an area that could be very, very entrepreneurial.

Stefanie Couch:

Yeah, absolutely, and some companies are really into that stuff. You know, they always have a little niche or two that are kind of doing something new, trying some new things. I think with AI and all the things that are coming out right now, it's going to really open up the floodgates for people who want to go out and kind of trailblaze a little bit, that maybe some of these companies are going to give them a little capex and say, hey, go see what you can do.

Tatsuya "Tats" Nakagawa:

Sure, absolutely. So you know you work for these companies. When was it the time or what made you decide to go off on your own?

Stefanie Couch:

Well, I actually left the company I was with for 10 years and moved to Florida for about five months and worked at a company. It was not a good fit for me or for them. I actually really did not like the job from like day three, and so I was ready to kind of go out on my own. We had started some businesses LLCs and about November of 2022, I actually got let go from that job, probably because they knew I hated it Like I mean, it was not, I was not hiding it very well, and so it just wasn't a good fit for any of us involved. So my husband and I actually went out full time. Both of us just burned all the boats at one time and said let's just see what happens and it's either going to be really good or probably really bad. And thankfully it was, you know, something that took off pretty quickly and I was able to leverage some of those skills and the relationships that I've built over the last, you know, 20 years of my career.

Tatsuya "Tats" Nakagawa:

Yeah, and you know, what you started at that time is pretty much in its form now, or did it evolve?

Stefanie Couch:

Very similar. So we actually have rebranded the name a little bit. We started out as Build Gen Next and I figured out that no one understood what I said when I said that it looked really cool on the logo but I was like no, it's Grit Blueprint. And we actually have been doing some sort of growth strategy and implementation for companies the whole time that we've been working with them. So we've done everything from software projects especially around the window and door, and building material softwares, and then we've also done websites, branding, growth strategy, really helping people figure out, you know how to grow their businesses, even really large businesses. So we've had companies that are 3 million a year and we have a client that's in the billions a year right now. So we've kind of ranged all through and it's been fun to work on those different projects. Some are super established companies, some are newer companies and even some individuals that we've worked with with personal branding.

Tatsuya "Tats" Nakagawa:

Yeah, I mean, can you share some stories? I mean you don't have to mention necessarily company names, but legacy companies that have done most of their business via word of mouth. You know, referral marketing.

Stefanie Couch:

That's really how the building industry works. Even today, people that are outside of our industry are like, what are you talking about? But then I say, well, these people still use fax machines. Like this is real and they don't believe me. But helping them figure out what does the business look like for the next five to 10 years because we know that it will be business in a digital way Somehow it might not be a hundred percent transition and so figuring out how to brand them in a way that they can continue to grow that legacy and the next generation of consumers and customers that will want to do research and probably buy online can do that. So we've really helped a lot of companies rebrand come to the 2024-2025 with websites, social media and also figuring out what is your true best customer. So a lot of these companies they do a lot of different things for a lot of different people, but maybe they find that their best customers are all in a custom home builder that are doing a lot of really intricate window and door packages and they want to lean into that more. And so that resource around what would they want as a customer? Helping them figure out what they find valuable and then allowing people to know that telling their stories is such an important part of our business, especially with our industry.

Stefanie Couch:

I find that people don't do a very good job of showing end product, which is interesting because we build beautiful homes.

Stefanie Couch:

You know there's amazing products that are out there, but in the building materials channel there's the end user, which is that homeowner or maybe the contractor that could get those pictures, and a lot of our customers are up the channel a little bit. You know. Maybe they're the manufacturer that's actually making the door, the window, the LVL, maybe it's the person who's the two-step distributor which is where I used to work and then the person under them is the dealer that that contractor's walking in getting the stuff, ordering it. So there's a lot of people in that channel that never see that finished product and so it's trying to figure out how to weave that thread through the entire channel to help everyone see what's going on and build that story around it. So we love doing that kind of work and sometimes we get to do some really cool projects with custom stuff and sometimes it's a standard two before that we're helping people sell. All of those products have to be a part of the building industry yeah, it's true and not um.

Tatsuya "Tats" Nakagawa:

The information doesn't always flow right to the building materials or from the contractor. I think a bunch of years ago I thought you know collecting field images was kind of tough. You know, maybe, uh, your challenges with the site. You know, uh, you know, people that you know may not be familiar or have the tools or the quality of the equipment at hand to take quality photos.

Tatsuya "Tats" Nakagawa:

I think for a while we're trying to coach people with sort of tools but, honestly, these days I think I see more and more, uh, people that are very good at it, they're aware of it, and even the companies themselves, like creating their own content and tagging the distributor, or the organization that has the internal marketing team, which is exciting.

Stefanie Couch:

Yeah, and with our cell phones now you know you might not be able to put that picture on a super high res like catalog or something that you would print, but you can use it for social media for sure, from a cell phone video or image. So it's really exciting that we have more accessibility to that and we love doing that.

Tatsuya "Tats" Nakagawa:

There have been any examples where you know you were able to convince or you were able to find people in the organization that truly had personality and put them forward Like you do that so well with your brand. You have examples of clients you were able to do that with.

Stefanie Couch:

There's been a few. It's really tough, truthfully, because people, especially in our industry, they don't want to be seen as flashy or show off, and it's kind of like, well, I don't want to be an influencer, and it said, okay, well, you don't want to be an influencer, but do you want influence? Would you like to influence your customers to buy more things? Would you like to influence people that might want to come work here, to come apply All these things? And so I think it's about really helping people.

Stefanie Couch:

See, we have a few clients that have started posting on, especially LinkedIn, that have started doing more speaking and positioning them in that manner. It's really about consistency, though, and that's where we find that people, a lot of times, just don't know what to say or what to do. So we do have some clients that we actually do ghostwriting and posting for, that we actually do ghostwriting and posting for, and so that helps some of these executives to see the option of well, if I'm not a writer, I'm not a social media person, I don't have to necessarily do that. We capture their stories and we get their words and we actually use their thoughts and words, but we just actually put it into the copy, post for it. So that's been helpful for a lot of our people that we do.

Stefanie Couch:

It's very unusual to find some sort of executive that's just going to love posting on LinkedIn all the time.

Stefanie Couch:

There are a few I've seen a few, but it's very rare so and they have a lot going on, so we like to help them do that. And one other thing that we are doing is a big problem in the industry that we see and a lot of our clients are asking us for is really training, that next generation of how to do all different things. So technical training like, for instance, how do you know what engineered wood product, like an LVL, is? How do you know the difference between an interior and exterior door or this roof versus that roof? Why is metal roofing more durable? Why does it last longer? Those types of conversations. So we're actually building out training, and one of the trainings that we're building out is around building your brand and building your influence, and so we're hoping that if we can really take people along the journey of how this could work without it being so intimidating, that that will help people want to do it more could work without it being so intimidating, that that will help people want to do it more.

Stefanie Couch:

Yeah, so just basically education, I guess Absolutely and some tools with AI to actually help you make the post and position yourself in that way. So that's what people get so hung up on. I've seen people spend and I've spent before when I was first starting hours on one post and most people are not going to do that for long-term if it's that hard. So with AI it's helped us sort of quantum leap a lot of those problems.

Tatsuya "Tats" Nakagawa:

Yeah, with AI. What does AI do well, you think, right now, and what is it not quite do well right now?

Stefanie Couch:

I think that most people don't know how to prompt AI or even maybe haven't even tried much to prompt AI. So I think most of the time the input is the problem more than what it does. Well, if you give it enough information and I like to use this example because I speak about AI a lot at events, if I told my husband, hey, go get dinner at the store, go get something to cook and he came back and he brought home you know, a salad and some bread and no meat, no, any of that I couldn't really be exactly mad at him. When I really wanted a rib eye steak with a baked potato and, you know, apple pie and ice cream for dessert, right. But if I told him that's exactly what I wanted and then he didn't come back with that, then I maybe could be upset.

Stefanie Couch:

So AI is the same way. If you prompt it in a very general way, it's going to give you back junk, for lack of a better word, or usually something that just isn't what you wanted. If you prompt it extremely specifically and then continue to nuance it, you're going to get a better output. So I think that's really the biggest thing. I think what it does really well is help you ideate. I think it does analysis on ideas that are SWOT analysis and even data analysis, extremely well. I think it gives ideas for creative pretty well and I think it's pretty poor at showcasing you and your story in a way that feels like you, unless you do a lot of prompting, which most people don't know how to do. So I think that you know you get the idea, you get the story, maybe you get a hook from it and then you write the rest. That's really where I'm at at this point.

Tatsuya "Tats" Nakagawa:

Yeah, I was curious. You said SWOT analysis with AI Interesting. I never thought about that. So what would you prompt? Like you know, just say a company name and do a SWOT analysis and I've never tried to prompt that.

Stefanie Couch:

Yeah, so I use that one probably more than anything else. So one tip is on chat GPT. If you have the pro version, which is like, I think, $20 a month or something, you can use what they call O1. It's version O1 and it's advanced reasoning, so that is the best one because it actually thinks and it uses these analysis parameters that are very much more involved than a standard version of that. So that's where I start with that version. And then a little pro tip is I actually speak into my chat GPT.

Stefanie Couch:

I don't prompt it with typing because it's so much more in depth. So you can add a Chrome extension to do that or you can do it on your app, on your phone, natively, through iPhone or I'm sure Android has the same thing. But this is how I would prompt that. I would say, hey, I want to do a SWOT analysis on I'm going to use my company, right? So I have an idea here's my go-to-market idea of this and I would actually let it ask me questions first to get all the information.

Stefanie Couch:

So the way I would start that prompt would be act as an expert interviewer and ask me questions one at a time.

Stefanie Couch:

Here is the thing I want you to ask me questions about with this business idea, and then you tell it some ideas you know that you have.

Stefanie Couch:

Let's just say, I want to do a course on how to start a podcast in the building industry and I'm going to do this price point this, all these things. And then, once it asks me those questions and it will ask you a lot of questions as an interviewer and it will be very in depth I'm going to do this price point this, all these things. And then once it asks me those questions and it will ask you a lot of questions as an interviewer and it will be very in-depth and probably things you would not have thought to have told it Then it will say you know, is there anything else you need to add? And you can say no. And then you can say act as an expert, and that works at McKinsey. You can even get super, super, you know deliberative about how you prompt it and say ask me everything that you would need to know to do a SWOT analysis on this and then give me the SWOT analysis and what it comes back with will blow your mind.

Tatsuya "Tats" Nakagawa:

Interesting.

Stefanie Couch:

Yeah, I do this all the time.

Tatsuya "Tats" Nakagawa:

Interesting. Okay, that is cool.

Stefanie Couch:

Yeah.

Tatsuya "Tats" Nakagawa:

Um. What are the other opportunities in the buildings or the construction industry in terms of people coming to you and asking for help?

Stefanie Couch:

Well, we do a lot of system optimization. So people have a problem with sales forces right now kind of being in a rut. They don't follow up on leads, they have too many leads, or the leads they have, they just are sitting too long and they lose them. I find that a lot of my clients have these salespeople that have been there for a long time. They're great people, they're good at what they do, but they're selling the people they know and that it's comfortable.

Stefanie Couch:

And during the pandemic, there wasn't really a whole lot of opportunity to go out and sell because we didn't have enough products to even feed the people. We already were selling to those builders and those you know dealers, distributors they were all really just begging for as much as they could get, and so why would you go set up a new account? But now in 2024, and even now in 2025, it feels like that same mentality, unfortunately, has sort of puttered along and we do need to be going out and hunting again. So I think it's helping people figure out what to go hunt for. What is your best opportunity? What are the 20% of people that would you know really be best for your business to sell? And then how do you go about doing that? So helping them strategize with their sales teams and also their executive teams of what is that messaging and how does that work? And then we also have some tools like AI that can help with that lead generation.

Stefanie Couch:

Follow up all of those things even from a perspective of a sales team, getting reminders about things like hey, did you talk to this person last month? Have you heard from them in a month? You know, it's more than just a donut run. I think the days of our salespeople going out and saying like hey, joe, hadn't seen you in a while. Here's the donuts. Or you want to go to lunch or whatever, once a month or quarter, it's not cutting it.

Stefanie Couch:

We have to be solutions-based selling and really helping our customers understand this is what we can do for you. That would actually make your life easier, it would make you more money, it would make your customers happier, and those solutions are probably going to be different than what they were three or four years ago. So figuring out what do we have to do as a business to make that valuable? And one question that I ask myself a lot and I think I hope every business owner does this is am I doing this because I think it's a good idea, or am I doing this and the market actually finds it valuable and needs this solution? And I think a lot of times we have a lot of great cool ideas and we waste a lot of time on things that the market has zero interest in. So it's figuring out. How do we test that and how are we getting feedback from our customers of what do they actually want and what do they find valuable from a product's perspective and a service's perspective?

Tatsuya "Tats" Nakagawa:

Yeah, no, that's very cool.

Stefanie Couch:

I like it, thank you.

Tatsuya "Tats" Nakagawa:

With the social media stuff. I mean, where do you sort of concentrate your activity? Linkedin, yeah, yeah, linkedin is your main.

Stefanie Couch:

Pretty much right now I'm with this podcast. I have a podcast as well called the Grit Blueprint that I've been, you know, kind of experimenting with, but this year we're doing a lot more episodes and we're going to be putting that on YouTube. I have some content with some of my clients that we're going to be posting like, hopefully, job site stuff and actually in the field, and I do a lot of speaking. So I get a lot of in-person. I do a ton of keynote speaking on AI, on branding, on, on just business strategy for our industry, and then I also post usually every day on LinkedIn.

Stefanie Couch:

So I try to do stuff that I can post organically on a newsletter and things like that. That's an owned audience as well as far as blogs, newsletters. But really LinkedIn has been my main focus, and mostly because I feel like that's where I've been able to own my audience as far as like really figure out how to make this work. Instagram is just a whole nother deal and I don't know that my audience necessarily is there. I think there is an audience there I could capture, but it just is a whole different world. So YouTube is really my focus that I'm going to start focusing on in 2025 as a second platform.

Tatsuya "Tats" Nakagawa:

Okay, yeah, very cool. No, I like all the things you're doing. Is there anything else that you wanted to share that I haven't asked you?

Stefanie Couch:

I don't think so. I mean, I really love this industry and the people in it, and I'm excited to see where technology and branding takes us. I think that the personal brand is going to be, and even company brands are going to be more important based on the technological changes. So that's the only thing I'll say is you know how you treat your customers and how you're seen is going to be more important as the technology levels the playing field on other avenues. You know.

Tatsuya "Tats" Nakagawa:

Perfect. Well, thanks for taking the time.

Stefanie Couch:

Yeah, thank you for having me on. I appreciate it.

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