Great Day Improvements is the parent company of Patio Enclosures, Universal Windows Direct, Champion Windows, Stanek Windows and Apex Energy Solutions. Blue Olive Partners Executive Chairman Ed Weinfurtner got involved with Great Day back in 2014, when it was just Patio Enclosures and Stanek Windows.
Brand awareness and product quality were two attractive factors Weinfurtner saw in Great Day. As he became more engaged in a process, he liked the product the interest and the ability to run a business model whereby, with the right investments in spending, marketing and advertising, product promotion, it seemed clear that the company could generate continued interest in the product brands.
"I viewed it as an opportunity for growth," he says. "At that time, the company was underperforming. And so I felt that with the right operating focus and attention that we could really accelerate and ramp things up."
But because the company was underperforming, there was a question about how confident his team was that they could get it on track.
"These things are about the team and the team of people that's there and building the right team," Weinfurtner says. "And so, in the early stages, it was really assessing the talent that we had. We were thinking in terms of driving a fairly aggressive growth agenda and a change agenda. And the question is, who was up for that? Because it's hard work."
Operating from the primary tenant of trying to create scenarios where everyone understands the challenge, Weinfurtner says getting Great Day where they wanted it to be was first and foremost a collaborative approach. Some of the earliest work involved identifying the goals and objectives and creating scenarios where everybody can win. Then it was a matter of getting focused on what needs done, how fast it could be accomplished, whether they have the right investment strategy to feed and fuel the business.
"In the case of Great Day, the storyline is actually quite interesting in that we were able to fairly quickly get things on the right footing," he says. "A lot of it was re-establishing some fundamentals with the business, and for us and for me it was really mapping out and validating the business model."
That model, he says, is direct to consumer home improvement. That means they own the relationship with the customer.
"We reach out to them, we advertise with them, we interface with them; there's a lot of things that we do to engage with consumers in the process of they're evaluating and deciding what they want to do, because they have lots of choices," Weinfurtner says. "And then once they engage with us, helping to share and craft a vision for what the project is, then carry through once a product project has been finalized."
Another positives with Great Day is the company is a vertically integrated manufacturing business. So, not only do they design and sell the products, they manufacture them and install them.
"It's all start to finish and that's really key, especially in today's world," he says. "One of the things that was important to us was because we have this relationship with consumers is to really map and track how we're doing."
To that end, he says as a company they're very focused on reviews and customer satisfaction and the data behind that.
"We instituted a whole series of in-process surveys to understand how different parts of the process were going," he says. "And because we're direct to consumer, we can collect that information, use it, measure ourselves, work to drive for the themes of continuous improvement."
Weinfurtner spoke on the Smart Business Dealmakers Podcast about building the family of Great Day brands. Hit play to catch the full conversation.
