What You Need to Know with Joe: KDI Design
This spring we rolled out our first, “What You Need to Know with Joe” video where we discuss the current economy and have conversations with our business owner clients. In our first video, we sit down with Ginny Rosso of KDI Design. KDI has been a long time client of Coveted Financial Services. Their firm offers commercial interior design and furniture. Given the pandemic and the current increase of work-from-home scenarios, they were the ideal client to sit down with first to discuss how they’ve navigated the current economy. We’re so proud of their continued growth!
JOE PRIOLA: Thank you for coming today ,Ginny Rosso with KDI Design.
GINNY ROSSO: Thanks for having me.
JOE: I appreciate you doing this. Ginny's been a client of Coveted for a long time. Can you give us a little about your background?
GINNY: So, I graduated college and took on a part-time job, but quickly thought that it wasn’t going to work for me so Mom and Dad (Kit and Jan of KDI Design) enticed me to come here and 11 years later I’m still here. I’m the vice president of the company. I am client facing and I’ve got a team behind me that handles the design and project management, but I really am kind of the face of the company at this point.
JOE: My first question… most people don't even know what a fractional CFO does but you've gotten to grow up with this and now you really have a finance background!
GINNY: I’ve always had an idea because of my dad being the CFO here… like we've openly talked about money. That's just been something that's been very normal in my family… so we've always had open dialogue about it, but to say that I understood it before coming to KDI, I could not confidently say that.
JOE: You're now grasping these concepts of what it means to be using your financial knowledge to help you run your business…
GINNY: Well I think to that point though it helps when somebody dumbs it down, right?
JOE: Right!
GINNY: We meet monthly and I feel like from where I started to now you have talked in such layman's terms so that it isn’t in a way that is over my head.
JOE: Agree!
GINNY: And I feel like you've done a good job of bringing it down. I mean we do design and furniture, we're not in finance here. So to talk about it in a very common way has been very helpful.
JOE: Clients like yourself that are in construction or related to the industry are really having to deal with cost increases and trying to get the project done on budget and on time like I’ve never seen before.
GINNY: Yeah!
JOE: So, if you could share some insight of what you're doing on that that'd be terrific.
GINNY: Yeah! I mean I think the biggest thing is setting their expectation with the client. Nobody is oblivious to what the world is going through right now, but it's our job to set that expectation.
JOE: They may act like they are.
GINNY: They might, exactly! It's our job to unfortunately tell them this is the reality and you're going to have price increases, you're going to have long lead times. But to hit it off you know at the head and not surprise anybody at the end, I think is the most important thing. We’re building in cost contingencies from the beginning so we’re saying “here's our proposal cost and you should probably expect 10 percent over this in some capacity, whether that be labor, materials, storage fees.” I’ve never had to do that before as I’ve mostly dealt with manufacturers that typically are only increasing prices once a year.
JOE: Right!
GINNY: Now you're seeing them like three times a year!
JOE: Yep! Everywhere.
GINNY: So proposals that used to be valid for 30, 60, 90 days are a couple weeks at this point…you just have to be really transparent about that, here's the cost increase and here's your total price but if you were to bite the bullet and purchase it now before you're ready for it.
JOE: Right!
GINNY: And pay for storage at our local installer, so we're ready for you.
JOE: Right!
GINNY: When you're ready what's that cost difference.
JOE: Right!
GINNY: And surprisingly, a lot of times storing it is less expensive than the cost increase.
JOE: That’s awesome, it’s brilliant.
GINNY: So you have to do that, you know?! You have to do that exercise. It’s more work but it's worth it in the end, especially if the client saves thousands of dollars it's totally worth it.
JOE: A great idea about the contingency line amount on the bottom.
GINNY: Well and what a great feeling in the end that if you don't eat into that 10 percent contingency, you've budgeted for over what you're actually going to spend that's a way better feeling than coming at the end with a change order for 10 percent over what you thought you were going to be paying for… that's a kick in the butt.
JOE: So, what I’m seeing is you say “you need a thing and it’s just backorder you can't get it.”
GINNY: Yep!
JOE: They're having to go find it somewhere else and it's always more expensive.
GINNY: Always, or you've got clients that you’ve put together this awesome palette, it's perfect, it's priced very fairly, well they wait and don't make a decision and then it's six months down the road and now they're ready to pull the trigger. Well either those materials aren't available, they're more expensive, or you're now in such a time crunch that the lead time of 12 weeks is no longer doable, so now we have to go value engineer it with other products that's not appropriate for the space and you're probably spending more money and it's not the right product so like what…what is the benefit of waiting at this point we're kind of in this…um this game.
JOE: A tornado, it's a tornado.
GINNY: It is…it's a tornado and you've got to make decisions really quickly.
JOE: Right! So I want to ask one more question. You know we have our meetings monthly.
GINNY: Yes.
JOE: At the meetings, I know what I want to talk about…but at the meeting it rarely goes that way.
GINNY: Yes.
JOE: It seems like it just goes in directions that are necessary.
GINNY: Yep…yep.
JOE: Is that how you feel too sometimes?
GINNY: But I think when it comes to you, like you come in monthly you're a sounding board for us and we go over the budget, we go over our monthly financials and we go over things that are pertinent to the business. You are really great at steering those questions to things that normally we wouldn't even think to ask.
JOE: Yeah so a lot of times it's the first thing we do, looking at the numbers is the last thing we do.
GINNY: Yes…yes.
JOE: Because there are things on my mind or on your mind and we start going in a direction. It's not just how did we do last month.
GINNY: Right, exactly.
JOE: I always go into a meeting thinking about what I would think if I was you.
GINNY: Well and we don't know what questions to ask. You know there's a reason that we bring you in, you know more about this stuff than we ever will.
JOE: That's just simply because I get to work with so many owners right!? And I’ve also been doing this for like 37 years.
GINNY: Yeah.
JOE: My happiest place is to watch you guys be successful.
GINNY: Yeah.
JOE: If you were to say in a really quick couple of sentences what distinguishes you than others in this space, what would you say?
GINNY: We've gotten a few jobs lately that a client has literally said “you guys care more than any other person on the job” and it sounds so cliché, but I like what I do and I’ve been brought up in this business to do the right thing for the client. It is the backbone of why we do what we do. So many businesses are experiencing difficult times…labor is short and people are short on resources and I think that they use that as a little bit of an excuse as to why things fall short. I just don't believe in that. Clients take precedence over everything so, you know I think from…from a heart standpoint that's why we stand out, from a services standpoint you know we're design and furniture, so we're super unique in the market. You typically have design firms and furniture dealerships - they're completely separate but they work together. We're control freaks here so we like doing it all and it works out best for our clients. Some people want the big dealerships, the big design firms but if you want a firm that really cares about what they do and can see you from beginning to end, that's us.
Transcript has been edited for grammatical purposes.