A Considerate Curiomaker
Kitchen Design and Construction Consulting in Cape Cod, Massachusetts
Deb Paine came to us by way of a website that we built for another client. Isn't that how it should be? Your work should be central to how you build relationships, right? But we digress. Deb thought they had a beautiful website that deeply captured the personality of the people and company and she had a pretty extensive change in mind for her own company as well.
As she said it "I've been doing something for a long time and now I want to reinvent myself around who I really am for the next decade."
She was the preeminent home contractor on Cape Cod with a 35+ year strong reputation for designing and building some of the most stunning homes around. She did it all, from concept to trim, site planning to paint samples. An artist, but recently buried under the demands of an ever more demanding industry. We met at a moment of decision; could work bend to the needs of a real human life and personality? Could her experience be focused and compressed down into just the lanes where she finds great satisfaction?
Finding Focus
By virtue of her knack for learning any skill she needed to and her insatiable work ethic, she had sort of worked herself into a corner of being everybody's go-to person for everything. But while she was approaching an age where many people would think about hanging up their spurs, retirement wasn't for her. But she was tired of all the hassle of full-on contracting and felt that, while she was known as the best contractor around, she wasn't really known or appreciated for her favorite work, and more importantly, who she really was. Deb is the kind of person that is always going to keep working so she wanted to sunset her career doing things she appreciated. "I’d rather just be Deb Paine instead of another contractor, and ultimately be appreciated for the real value that I bring." She was going to take a very risky and brave step: just being who she really was. Imagine if we all did that!
So in conjunction with us at Pivotol we walked through the process of really nailing down what that was. What parts of construction fed her the most, what parts drained her, why did she like what she liked, and vice versa? She really embraced the terrifying mantra we have at Pivotol that if you really are a good company, you can tell the authentic truth about yourself and you will do well because of it. It was our great privilege to pull together from her and her best clients a clear and thorough telling of the Deb Paine story. And from this process emerged a very narrow and tailored scope of skills and services she would offer and a specific picture of the kind of clients she wanted to work with.
NEW NAME
The first step is always: listening & distilling. And then, we needed a name. We worked through her heartbeat to create a filter for words and metaphors, ultimately landing on “Method”. A surprisingly unused word in her field, and a perfect preface to her brand story. Deb is all about the approach, maximizing creative and practical thinking and taking methodical steps to bring ideas into the realm of tangibility with excellence and beauty. Deb is all about the Method.
EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN
From there we were off to the races developing a beautiful design for her website filled with language that told the world who she was and what she was about. We loaded up her blog page with a starter set of stories from her career illustrating her unique method-based process, her creativity, and her range of skills. Through these media, we laid out a hand-crafted invitation to the best kind of clients to engage in a few focused areas of the construction process that were truly one of a kind, as one of a kind as Deb.
Deb and her method are the cure for the madness of construction.
