Mark Mitten  0:03  
In this episode of Better call Paul. Paul and his wife Julie, tell stories about the dynasty that his main lion kitscher design,

Unknown Speaker  0:19  
music.

Paul McAlary  0:32  
Hello everyone. Welcome to better call Paul today we are going to have a little bit of a different podcast. I'm sitting with my lovely wife, Julie, and we are going to tell some stories about mainline kitchen design, how it started in kitchen design, stories in general. Because, surprisingly, I found that actually telling stories is a great way to communicate with customers. One of the early customers I had, that was an acquaintance of mine, actually complained to me that it took too long to buy a kitchen from me because you had to listen to the same stories over and over and over again. And what I told him was, if you are listening to the same stories for me, over and over and over again. It's because that's the gentlest way I know how, and I'm not a very gentle person, but that's the gentlest way I know how to try to tell you you're making a poor decision or a bad mistake. And if you're listening to these stories that over and over, it means you just keep going back to these same poor decisions without further ado, maybe we'll talk a little bit about some of the interesting stories Julie. For those of you, probably most of the people on the podcast don't know all that Julie does for our company. Julie edits my blog. Julie really rewrites all of the blogs, just as Mark takes out all the ums and the ahs and any nonsensical things that come out of my mouth, and he's engineering and editing the podcast. Julie does the same thing with our blogs, which is why both are probably much more popular than they would be otherwise. But Julie also helps make major decisions. I mean, obviously she's my wife, so she helps make life decisions, but she's also a marketing professional, and so or has been, over the course of her career for a long period of it. So she helps us make marketing decisions. She's been instrumental in some of the marketing mainline kitchen design has done, and she's also made fun of me sometimes if I've wanted to advertise paying for things that she thought weren't particularly valuable. For example, She has a Do you want to tell the audience what you call magazine ads and magazine stories that we might advertise in

Julie  2:55  
that would be birdcage liner? Yes.

Paul McAlary  2:59  
So Julie is not a firm believer in print advertising, at least as far as kitchen design is concerned. But one of the most interesting stories that I tell customers over and over again involves Julie, to a great extent, actually, before you even tell the story about our customers, and it's a very important story in learning about how we have a process that customers have to adhere to. But before I even tell that story, I want to talk about how mainline kitchen design actually even started. Julie and I got married in 2010 and no sooner did we get married, rip out half of the second floor of our house and begin a major renovation, making a master bedroom bathroom renovation. But it was right during the height of the housing crisis, 2009 2010 and for the kitchen market, especially for the company I worked at the time, that was a harrowing experience, the company went from $16 million in sales all the way down to $4 million and just after we got married, there were massive layoffs, during which I got laid off, which gave me more time to work on our second story renovation, which in some respects was good, but also made me Consider where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do. I brought up to Julie, you know, once we finished the renovation upstairs, that I should then start looking for another job, another place, and that it was probably going to be hard, especially doing such a gigantic downturn.

Speaker 1  4:36  
So I suggested that you start your own company. We'd just been married, so you'd never been part of a team before, and you had a partner to support you while we had startup and that type of thing. And your response was,

Paul McAlary  4:50  
I said I'd already had my own company when I was a general contractor, and that it was very hard running your own company and stressful, and that's the whole reason. I left being a general contractor is that I hadn't put any money in my 401 K, sometimes my health insurance would lapse. I didn't want to expose our family to that kind of financial stress. And the ups and downs of having your own business, To

Speaker 1  5:14  
which I responded, Well, why would you be a general contractor? You're a kitchen designer and you're a pretty good one. And then what happened

Paul McAlary  5:22  
when Julie brought up the fact that being a general contractor is is a hard profession that I was in, and there's lots of general contractors as far as kitchen design was concerned, she was right. I mean, I considered myself much better than most of the other kitchen designers, if not almost all the kitchen designers that I knew. So starting my own company designing kitchens and selling cabinetry might not be the struggle that being a general contractor was, which convinced me to actually start the company and incorporate and start all the paperwork and all the processing and the registrations with the state and everything else that you have to do to start a company in the the very beginning of this process, one of the first things we had to do after we were ready to actually start the business was you certainly at that point in time, in 2010 you needed a fax machine. That's really how you communicated with the cabinet companies and placing orders and things like that. So we had to set up a fax machine, and then we set up an office for myself upstairs in our home. This is right after our whole second floor renovation was done, and I had this whole little office back there. And we set up the fax machine. And one evening, before we went out to dinner, Julie and I stood at that fax machine. I sent out the test, and then part of the test was getting a printout back for color and whatever, and then sending a fax out to a fax checking company, and then then sending a reply back. And we both sat there waiting for that fax to come back, telling us that we were now communicating with the outside world.

Speaker 1  7:04  
So we're in this tiny room, and the fax machine is balanced on the arm of an old armchair. You remember that chair? And we're sitting there, watching it like something was going to happen, and seconds later, the fax comes through, and the paper comes and what did I tell you? Why don't you say what you said? The facts comes through, and we're watching the paper, and we're very pleased with our electronics ability. And I looked at Paul and I said, it's a dynasty.

Paul McAlary  7:31  
And so that it's a dynasty quote is often what we say now, almost jokingly, when we reached a million dollars in sales for mainline kitchen design. Maybe we went out to dinner that night, or that weekend. We go out to dinner so frequently, it's it's hard to it wouldn't really be much of an event, since we go out to dinner probably six nights a week. But when, once we reach the million dollars, that will be my quote to Julie, it's a dynasty. And every time we have another whatever milestone that we passed that's our internal joke of between us, it's that it's a dynasty, because it was certainly far from it when that first fax came through. Stories and me communicating to our customers via stories is important because it sort of gets them on the right track.

Speaker 1  8:20  
It's also your style. You refer to mark a lot because he's a valuable part of the company. Mark's wife at our wedding called you, I forget the name of the author of Angela's Ashes, Frank McCord. Mark's partner, Hannah, called you a frank McCord with a good childhood

Paul McAlary  8:40  
storytelling is my nature. One of the stories I tell many customers, one of Julian, of my favorite customers. I don't want to use their real names, so we'll call them Dick and Jane. So Dick and Jane were customers that first met mainline kitchen designer, first heard of us from a library tour that has kitchens in it. People go on this tour in the area where we live. It's called the Ardmore library kitchen tour, and they showcase beautiful kitchens that were done in the last year by a bunch of different companies and contractors. And we would always try to have one or two kitchens on this tour, because it really showcased some of the nicer kitchens in the area, and we got a decent amount of customers from the kitchen tour. But

Speaker 1  9:28  
as much as you like to tell stories, you don't like to be standing there talking with the people. So that fell to me.

Paul McAlary  9:35  
Yes, I'm much less of a people person, and I'm also, not only less gregarious, but also maybe more threatening. So Julie is a much better representative to talk to people and ingratiate herself to them before they maybe meet me.

Speaker 1  9:53  
So I'm manning a kitchen on a tour this gorgeous kitchen, and. These tours got lots of people. I mean, I would meet over 100 people in a two hour period, and this couple comes in, and they're looking at the kitchen, and they have these questions, and they were there a long time, and they had a lot of questions, and I would discuss the process and talk about how you get started and the whole thing. And they said, Well, you know, we've been making plans for years and years. I'm like, great. And they said, we have a whole binder of ideas. And I said, Well, that's all good. And whatever designer you work with, it might be Paul is going to want to hear your ideas, but the first thing you do when you meet with Paul is say nothing. Let him talk first. He'll look at your ideas later. But trust me, say nothing. And I was pretty successful at these tours. I would come home and people would be calling already and have appointments, and Dick and Jane called, if not that day, the next day, and they had an appointment with you in a couple of days, and you had the appointment with him. And I came home and I said, How'd it go? How did it go? Paul

Paul McAlary  11:06  
and I explained to Julie that when I arrived, they had been planning on this kitchen, and Dick had this huge folder, and he was planning on doing an addition on his house as part of his kitchen design, and he had all kinds of drawings and everything else, and he'd been working on it for 10 years. And he was actually a physician, and it was important to him, and he'd been working on it for a long time, and, you know, and I explained the process of me measuring and then us working on the design together, and my showing him my ideas for his kitchen first. And he said, Well, that's fine, but I've really been working on this for 10 years. Let me give you my binder. I have another copy. And then I told him that, no, I didn't want to take his binder. We could talk about it after I worked on his kitchen, but it, to be honest, it wouldn't be something that I would even look at when I was working on his kitchen, just because, just from talking with him, I knew he wanted to eat. He was okay with putting an addition on his house. If that was okay, I knew what kind of budget he probably was thinking about. We should let the starting point be. What would the professional do with the space first, and then, as we made changes to the space together, maybe with his input, he could and his wife's input too, they would better understand what things they were trading off to get one thing that they wanted versus another. And then he was very adamant. He said, we'll just take the binder with you, please. I've spent so much time on it. And I assured him that I said, Dick. I just really wouldn't even look at it. It's not the way the process works. And I guess I was far blunter and far more caustic than Julie was, because he and his wife just sort of both shook their heads and said, You're really nothing like your wife. Are you

Speaker 1  12:52  
I was I was so concerned that I came to their second appointment. Do you remember that, uh, showed up at their second appointment to make sure it was going all right. Oh, okay, second or third, maybe I could. But I came to an appointment. I definitely

Paul McAlary  13:05  
came to waterpoint, both of them seeing Julie, certainly. And other times when the whole project was done, they saw Julie. Anytime Julie was there, they were 100 times happier than when they were just with

Speaker 1  13:19  
Millie's here. But we got you to end too fast. Tell them what happened. But the

Paul McAlary  13:23  
plans he wanted me to take this thing. And I said, No, maybe one of the first designs I wanted to show him was, what if we didn't do an addition? What if we just took out the wall between his kitchen and dining room and maybe saved himself 50 or $60,000 on doing an addition that probably if he's really thinking about doing a dedition, we should at least investigate that so he could see what that would look like. And then he was adamant. He said, Listen, I've wanted to do this edition. I like our formal dining room. I don't want to take out the wall between my dining room and kitchen. Please don't do that design. Do the addition. Do what I'm asking you to do. And I said, All right, well, I'll tell you. What I'll do is I'll actually do two designs. I'll do a design with an addition, and I'll do a design taking out the wall between the dining room and the kitchen just so you can see bulk. And he said, Please, well, don't waste your time doing the dining room and kitchen thing. That's not something we would be interested in. And I said, I'll take five minutes of your time. It's the first thing we'll show you when you come into the office, and then we'll just go on to the the addition design. And he protested, but then we left it at that. And then, you know, a week goes by and they're back in our office. Julie said she was there for that appointment, but I don't think, I think she was there for the third appointment. So at the second appointment, we sit down, and I said, Okay, I know you don't want to see what this kitchen looks like without the wall between the dining room and the kitchen, but let's just waste five minutes. I'll show it to you. We can throw it away, but I think it's important to see, because it's going to be 50, $60,000 at least less than any addition we might do, possibly saving even more money than that. He protested again. Finally. His wife said, Dick, please, let's just see it and move forward. So finally he says, Yes, I bring up the design in three dimensions on my computer so he can see it, and he's looking at it and he's looking at it, and he says, well, this doesn't look anything like I thought it was going to look like. And I said, No, because, well, this is a really beautiful kitchen. And I said, Yeah, it is. He said, Are you telling me that this kitchen would be 50 or $60,000 less than a kitchen I would do with an addition? And I said, Yeah. I mean, it's certainly an addition. Is incredible amount of money. The back of your house is stone. And sure it would be at least that much less. He said, Well, if this kitchen is 50 or $60,000 left, we don't need to do an addition. So, all right, let's work on this kitchen. And I started to laugh, and I said, we all right, we can talk about this kitchen later, but let's go look at the kitchen that with the addition. He said, I don't need to see the addition kitchen if it's 60,000 or 70,000 or more, at least $60,000 more. This is a beautiful kitchen. This meets all of our requirements. We don't need to throw away another $60,000 so I said, Listen, I spent an hour on this one. I spent two, over two hours on the other one. You're definitely gonna see it. And then the wife laughed at that point, Dane, and said, Dick, we have to look at the other kitchen, which is the thing that he did for us. So I said, Sure. So I brought up the kitchen, and then Dick said, that's not the addition I was thinking about doing at all. And I said, I know. I mean, you told me you were thinking about putting an addition for the seating area. I said, I didn't do that. I moved the whole back of the house back four feet so that we created a much deeper kitchen that created a much more spacious look. It's very different, I guess, from what you were thinking. And he goes, this is spectacular. Are you telling me that this kitchen is only 50 or $60,000 more than the other kitchen? And I started to laugh, but I said, Yeah, probably. He goes, Well, I think that's worth it then and lo and behold, ultimately ended up being the kitchen that they got. But at every step of the way, they were fighting with me, telling me what things not to do. They didn't want this. They wanted me to implement their ideas, etc. And then when we got down to the nitty gritty, we did. We added a pot fill, we added the kind of lighting that they wanted. The color scheme was what they wanted. All kinds of decisions. Their laundry room, we changed the doorway to their laundry room to go directly into their garage from a different location that worked way better, that was close to the powder room. Many, many different changes, some of which been part of their original design, most of which were not, but certainly the style and everything else that they were picking was and so that's really an important part of the design process. And the story of Dick and Jane, I tell our customers all the time, because so many of them tell us, we don't want to take out the wall between the dining and the kitchen. I don't want to close a window. Well, if I tell them I want to close one of their windows, we want light. We don't want the window closed, but if we maybe take out the wall between the dining room in their kitchen, they'll get light from the dining room windows, and we'll lose a little bit of light if we close off some other crummy window in their kitchen. But now the stove can go there and lo and behold, all of a sudden, they get a normal kitchen without all kinds of funkiness, and that's the thing that makes it a success. But if we actually let people direct us in the beginning of the process, they never see the best kitchen they could have. Ultimately, it's a give and take process designing a kitchen if you start with what the expert thinks is maybe the best use of the space that will never be the kitchen somebody gets, but it's the best starting point. If you start with the thing that the customer thought about their own, you'll never get away from it, because that's the thing they thought up, and they'll stick to it and not want to make changes to it, or the changes will be very minimal, and they'll end up with a far different kitchen that's only the best kitchen they could have thought of on their own, instead of a kitchen that was beyond what they could have thought of.

Speaker 1  19:06  
And so because they had an open mind and they proceeded with the new ideas, they were thrilled with their kitchen, they had to put their two cats on diets because they had to shut them out of the kitchen while the kitchen was being built and the cats were getting less exercise in the house, so they gained a couple of pounds, but the kitchen also won a regional Design Award. Yes, it did, and two years later, when we had a kitchen on the Ardmore library kitchen tour, it was their kitchen, and they were there with me, welcoming people

Paul McAlary  19:42  
and being effusive and declaring that the design process that we used, well, seemingly crazy to them initially, was a great way to do a kitchen. And Julie just brought up a picture of we won't say their real names, but Dick and Jane on our phone. Have pictures of them as they're holding the design award that we won for their kitchen, and it it brings back great memories

Speaker 1  20:06  
that we have done other kitchens on their block too. Yes, we

Paul McAlary  20:10  
did a next door neighbor's kitchen several years after that, and Dick came over and he wanted to show me not the kitchen that we had done, but he had done some beautiful outdoor barbecue patio with a beautiful stone wall, and they had just really done an incredible amount of landscaping all off the back of their kitchen that had all this light and these sliding glass doors, all of which that had been incorporated into the addition that he had done. And they had really created a wonderful whole backyard out of the kitchen that we first created together,

Julie  20:44  
one of the dynasty's many successes.

Paul McAlary  20:47  
I hope that's a little bit illuminating. But telling stories to customers, you know, and that story in particular, is trying to get them to maybe not be so adamant. Let us help you. Let us show you what we can do, and then we can. We can't make people buy kitchens they don't want. No one's going to do that. But if they open their mind a little bit and let us maybe show them things that they didn't or hadn't considered, then that's the thing that makes them get better kitchens. It's like I said, we can't make them buy a kitchen they don't want. So all the choices that they choose if they see something that they like more, and they choose it, well, they're happy with that, certainly they chose it. And if they don't like it, then we discard it and we move on to something else. But it's really the give and take, and it's really allowing us to show them things they couldn't have ever thought of on their own, that really creates the great kitchens that mainline kitchen design creates. And all the designers that work for me, I say it to them over and over and over again on the first pass through, just do the best thing you can think of. And then when they show me designs, sometimes the designers will backtrack and say to me, Well, I was going to take out the wall, but they told me definitely they didn't want to, and then I I have a little bit of a meltdown, because that's the whole premise. If there was some really strong reason why you should have done something, don't just ask a customer, go out of your way, do the extra work, do the design. Maybe do two designs, like I did for Dick and Jane, just so that they can at least see the thing they think they don't want because, surprisingly, a lot of the times that's the very thing that they do pick. That's our stories about stories, honey. It was great having you on the podcast for the first time. Maybe you won't be the last maybe we'll have other stories to tell. There might be other stories that ends our podcast. Episode 46 for mainline kitchen design, goodbye. 47 You're right. It's episode 47

Speaker 1  22:43  
one final comment, yes, you mentioned that your wife was marketing help, but this podcast was the conception of your stepdaughter, Riesling.

Paul McAlary  22:52  
That's true. My stepdaughter Riesling was the one that said to me, one that I was doing a helpline every week to answer questions from people all over the country, because that was the only way we could get them off the phone. So many people were calling from all over the United States that we would have, sometimes two and three of our designers answering questions. And Riesling finally said, You're doing all this work. Why aren't you recording it? Why aren't you making a podcast out of it? And lo and behold, not only did it become a podcast, but the great part about it was it was intimidating enough that it discouraged some of the callers, and we didn't need three and four designers answering the lines anymore. I could do it myself. And then so it actually freed up time for the other designers, and I think people also listen to the podcast. Now instead of actually calling in, there may be getting a lot more ideas, but then the other thing that Riesling said is now that we have this podcast that's recorded, and now that we have hundreds and hundreds of blogs that also are in posterity on our website, and our podcast is being translated by a translator. At some point in the next couple of years, we'll be able to have a helpline on mainline kitchen designs website that will answer questions for people, and if we want, it can answer questions in my Brooklyn accent, because we have so many hours of podcast tape using AI and so possibly the mainline kitchen design website will be going on with me answering questions after I'm gone, if Chris, who will be the owner of it at that at that point, ever, ever decides he wants to listen to my voice or wants our website to be talking to people in my Brooklyn accent?

Julie  24:37  
Stay tuned to find out.

Paul McAlary  24:38  
That's right. Stay tuned to find out. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll see you on episode 48

Julie  24:43  
possibly we're going out to dinner.

Mark Mitten  24:47  
Okay, let's test this. Ai out. Paul bot, tell us how the kitchen design process works. You.

Paul McAlary  25:01  
Where's my brain, where's my brain, where's my brain? Where's my brain? Where's my brain, where's my brain?

Mark Mitten  25:07  
Hmm, thank you for listening to the mainline kitchen design podcast with nationally acclaimed Kitchen Designer Paul mcalary. This podcast is brought to you by Brighton cabinetry, high quality custom cabinetry at competitive prices. For more on kitchen cabinets and kitchen design, go to www dot mainline kitchendesign.com,

Transcribed by https://otter.ai