Tom Dillard has crafted success with Dillard-Jones Builders and a number of other Upstate businesses
Tom Dillard, owner of Dillard-Jones Builders, took some years to find his career direction, but a decade ago he discovered it as a homebuilder and entrepreneur. Since then he has helped establish several Greenville-based businesses.
After surviving the real estate industry’s collapse – although his company didn’t fall as far as many – he now helps craft the recovery in the Upstate as the economic recovery gains strength.
“I think the market has recovered to normal,” Dillard said, adding his worst year was 2010 when he built only four houses. Currently, demand for housing outstrips new supply.
Dillard said another sign of the housing recovery in the Greenville area, which has seen 31 consecutive months of improvement, is that the out-of-state builders who fled when the industry plummeted returned to the Upstate.
On any given day, he has 300 people working his projects. Many of those are not employed directly by him but by his subcontractors.
The Upstate real estate recovery began with starter homes and has moved up to custom-built housing, said Dillard, 43. But he sees a difference – baby boomers building a new home want it smaller than they did in the early 2000s, but they demand as much quality as ever.
“That’s more challenging” than finding room for all their desires in a bigger house, he said.
Dillard partners with others to establish some of his businesses because, he said, “I’m a big-picture person. I need somebody to help with the details.” But other companies belong solely to him. The Greer native, a mechanical engineering graduate of Clemson University, spent years working in sales in corporate America, often handling capital projects.
But he kept changing corporations – he worked for GE, Schlumberger and WestPoint Stevens, among others. Nothing was really the right fit for him, he said. But he learned from those jobs.
For example, “when you’re in textiles, you have to learn a little bit about everything,” he said.
Finally, he was in Austin, Texas, for a meeting. The room was full with 3,000 sales people “just like me,” Dillard said. That’s when he decided.
“The problem was me. I needed to do my own thing,” he said. “I look at my boss and said, ‘I’m going home.’” The boss was shocked, but Dillard had made his decision, deciding to go into homebuilding – something he had started exploring with a friend.
They opened Dillard-Jones around 2002. The company has work in South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia, he said. He had been around construction as a kid; his engineering knowledge helped and his corporate work often involved capital projects. But “I had a meandering path” to find the right career, partly because he had no examples of entrepreneurs in his family.
When the two began, they had $50,000 – and bought a lot for $49,900 to build a speculative house in a Greer neighborhood, he said. Fortunately, back then banks were lending money readily to builders. So they were off.
The business grew and as it did, it changed. In 2005, Dillard-Jones hired a designer and made the move from speculative houses to custom-built houses, where the house to be built has an owner before construction. By that time, the company was building houses in the $500,000 range. Currently, his houses range in price from $300,000 to $3 million to $4 million.
Another big move for the company, owned by Dillard since 2008, has been its association with Southern Living magazine and its showcase housing program. Dillard has built six houses in that program over the years. The first house brought in 2,300 visitors and was the beginning of a strong association.
Kathy Vass, owner of Vass Marketing, “really moved this forward for us,” he said.
But all has not been easy. During the recession and the downturn in new-home building, Dillard-Jones Renovation helped keep the doors open, he said. “That’s one of the ways we got through,” he said, adding that another was the location.
“We’re lucky to live in Greenville. People always wanted to move here,” Dillard said.
Dillard listens to his clients and what they want.
At a show house in the recent past, “about 100 people came up and said, ‘I love your homes, but I want a smaller one.’” Those comments led to the creation of The Cottage Group, launched last year in a Verdae community. The houses, which usually are built to already-existing designs, are marketed to baby boomers in their 50s, 60s and 70s who want quality houses that are a little smaller than the houses Dillard-Jones typically builds.
Other changes in Dillard’s companies have included a shift to more design-build work. “We picked up some really good people from other companies” and now have two full-time designers.
He also built an All-American House, with 97 percent of its products made in the United States. He likes the idea of American-made resources for his industry. If builders used only 5 percent more U.S.-made products, it could generate an additional 250,000 jobs, Dillard noted.
This year, Dillard and Vass have partnered on Blu-Sky, a marketing company that works with builders to showcase their homes. In addition, he partnered with an account to form Edge IT Professionals.
