HistoryMaker did not start with AI, it started with the customer

HistoryMaker Homes was literally minding its own business. It didn’t set out to become an AI-ready homebuilder. The team’s leaders set out to ensure it would remain a relevant, going-concern homebuilder 25 years from now.That meant asking (and having a pretty damned good answer to) the two hardest questions homebuilding business leaders can ask themselves: Who are you? And who do you want to be?The rigor with which HistoryMaker Homes CEO Nelson Mitchell and his leaders answered those questions goes a long way toward explaining why President Zac Thompson’s account of the 77-year-old Fort Worth-based builder’s transformation matters right now.In 2023, HistoryMaker reached its 75th anniversary. Rather than treating the milestone strictly as a celebration, Thompson and his leadership team used it to face a less comfortable reality.“We realized if we wanted to make it to 100, what got us to 75 probably wouldn’t get us to 100,” Thompson told me.What followed was less a technology initiative than a personality transplant. For most of its history, HistoryMaker had succeeded as a low-cost provider, with affordable first-time-buyer housing at the center of its business. Cost management, cons...