316 Inspiring and Leading a Home Builder Marketing Team - Will Duderstadt Apr 22 2026

Greg Bray: [00:00:00] Hello everybody, and welcome to today's episode of the Builder Marketing Podcast. I'm Greg Bray with Blue Tangerine.

Kevin Weitzel: And I'm Kevin Weitzel with OutHouse.

Greg Bray: And we are thrilled today to have joining us Will Duderstadt. Will is the CMO at M/I Homes. Welcome, Will, thanks for being with us again today.

Will Duderstadt: Hey guys, a real pleasure.

Greg Bray: Well, Will, it's exciting to have you back, but there's probably a few people out there you haven't had a chance to meet yet. So, let's start off, just give that quick background about [00:01:00] yourself for those who aren't familiar with you.

Will Duderstadt: Well, you're right, it's been, we calculated this four years, four months, and 12 days since I last hung out with you guys on the podcast. Like you said, my name's Will. I am the Chief Marketing Officer over here at M/I Homes. We are the 13th largest builder in the nation. We're celebrating our 50 years in business this year. It's where you insert the sound effect for cheering.

Greg Bray: Woo.

Will Duderstadt: You know. Yay. We build primarily across the east and central time zones. What I do is really lead an in-house agency of sorts, some really great, talented, skilled marketers that help our divisions bring all of the different marketing kind of assets to fruition in their local markets, SEO and email, design, point of sale, our physical stores, et cetera. And I absolutely adore this industry and it's so much fun to help our customers and our buyers ultimately find a [00:02:00] place where they're gonna love to live. And that's what we all deserve, right, is we all deserve to love where we live.

Kevin Weitzel: At least tolerate, like a relationship. You tolerate them.

Will Duderstadt: At least tolerate at least tolerate. Okay.

Kevin Weitzel: Alright, so before we get started and all that, and there's a whole bunch of stuff that I'm excited about today's conversation, but before we get started on that, we need an interesting factoid about you that has nothing to do with family, the home building industry, or work in general.

Will Duderstadt: Well, you didn't prepare me for that question, but I can tell you.

Kevin Weitzel: I know.

Will Duderstadt: In the four years, four months, and 12 days since we last hung out, I have undergone a fairly massive fitness era, I call it. Decided at some point along the way there that I wanted to start running a 5K every day. Mostly because it sounded good, and I'm a marketer. I'm a sucker for a hook. But also because most TV shows are about 30 minutes and I can get a 5K done in 30 minutes. So, it's my motivation to get on a treadmil. Haven't really fallen in love with the act of running, but I have fallen in love with the outcome [00:03:00] of running. So, there's a fun fact for you.

Greg Bray: 5K a day.

Will Duderstadt: Every day.

Kevin Weitzel: And I like the divergence of falling in love with the outcome, yet the process isn't necessarily something you enjoy. Because I hate running. I did it for eight years in the Marine Corps and I absolutely hated every single day of running. I would never choose to do it personally, but I have also suffered what happens when you don't exercise.

Will Duderstadt: Look, I think there's this false narrative that you have to just love everything, right? That every meal you eat needs to be Instagram worthy, that every activity is somehow your most favorite activity, that everybody turns their hobby into a side hustle that makes them millions. It's actually okay to do things every once in a while that you actually don't enjoy doing, but it is the building block to something better in your life. And getting uncomfortable, doing hard things, man, that's what pushes us forward.

Greg Bray: Well, let's take that a layer deeper, Will, into marketing [00:04:00] specifically. Are there things in the marketing department, so to speak, that we don't love doing, but we have to, to get the outcomes that we love?

Will Duderstadt: Hmm, Hmm. I think a lot of marketers probably think or desire for the big creative, abstract brand building kind of campaign that's focused almost solely on feelings and aura. Maybe they desire to go viral on social. Marketing, especially in this industry, is about influencing and driving real demand. For home builders, you do that primarily through either listings of your homes or literal facts of communities.

There's an ethereal part of community, that long-term vision of the neighborhood that you want to live in and how that plays a role in shaping and growing your family, but the treadmill part of marketing, let's say, [00:05:00] is the fundamentals of managing an amazing listings business. Because at the end of the day, that's what we're selling. We're selling those listings, and it's not quite the same. It's not quite as exciting as that brand building campaign, that think different era level kind of campaign.

Kevin Weitzel: You're telling me that it can't be elation 24/7. So, that the happiest place on earth.

Will Duderstadt: That's right.

Kevin Weitzel: You tell me that the people that work there aren't elated every single day they go into the office?

Will Duderstadt: Somebody has to pick up trash at the happiest place on earth.

Kevin Weitzel: That's a fact.

Will Duderstadt: Right? That's what makes it the happiest place, that as a guest as they would say it, you don't see discarded slushy cups and candy wrappers and all that stuff. It is pristine because somebody is doing the fundamental core on exciting work.

Greg Bray: Will, one of the things I've seen in some of your recent writings and such is that you've been really working to [00:06:00] help your team and others understand their role as marketers better. What are the things you say to your team to say, Hey guys, it's trash day, versus it's the rollercoaster day or do the Super Bowl ad day, or whatever it might be. How do you keep the motivation going from a leadership standpoint?

Will Duderstadt: Right. I think we really focus on what moves the needle, and then we try to get charged up by moving the needle, doing things that have a tangible next step, a visible outcome, a connection back to core business metrics. Like, Hey, as a marketer, I did this thing and I made the phone ring. That fuels people up, right? Hey, I spent a of couple hundred dollars on a Facebook ad and I was able to return a hundred thousand in revenue. That gets people lit up. So, it's taken focus off picking up trash, it's taken focus off the treadmill, and it's putting [00:07:00] your attention on the things that matter, how you feel when you get off the treadmill, how you feel when you walk around Disneyland and it's pristine.

Greg Bray: But wait a minute. The sales team says they just drove by and walked in.

Will Duderstadt: Yeah, of course, of course, of course.

Greg Bray: No offense to our salespeople, but.

Will Duderstadt: Okay. So, that's a really great point because, to a certain degree within any organization, perception becomes reality, and if enough people have a perception, right or wrong, it becomes institutional reality and it becomes treated as fact. So, I think one of the most important things that we can do as marketers is really, really get hyper focused on finding verifiable facts. And the best way to do that is to not rely on human generated metrics, or anecdotes, or feedback, which is generally what things like walk-in traffic or procuring cause [00:08:00] really is. It's a human, counting things or giving an opinion. And humans aren't good at counting things. Humans aren't good at math either, right?

What we love doing is let's go right to our consumer and let's ask our consumer questions, and let's not just limit ourselves to the buyer. Now granted, they showed the right behavior. They made it all the way through the funnel, right? But you might have some confirmation bias if you only ask questions of your buyers. Let's ask questions of prospects, specifically the ones who don't buy. Let's ask questions of our leads before they even get into a selling conversation. And heck, let's just ask questions of customers who might be thinking about moving next year. Because we, as marketers, do things that touch people along all those stages. We sure as heck should know what it is that they want to see and hear from us.

Greg Bray: Now that raises two questions for me, Will. First of all, how [00:09:00] do you find those people that aren't buyers to be able to ask them? Buyers are easy because we know them, and so they're a little easier to ask. And then secondly, have you done that and found something that surprised you in the past where you've been able to do that? So, sorry if that's two totally different questions.

Will Duderstadt: You're going to have to remember the questions for me, and keep me on task. So, how do you find people? Okay. So, this really depends on how mature your organization is and how many resources, dollars and time, that you're willing to invest into asking questions and learning. This literally could be as simple as stand on a street corner and just ask people when they walk past. That's like zero dollar, and other than your pride and ego, pretty darn easy to do, right? It could be your families and friends, asking them questions.

But if you want to get a little bit more serious about it, draft some questions, really apply some strategic thought to those questions, and put them into a formal digital survey, and start sending it to [00:10:00] people. If it's people that are in your database, they have qualified, to your point, of you already know they're at a certain stage. So, you can leverage platforms like Meta, Facebook, Instagram, and put a few dollars behind finding an audience that's, A, willing to take a survey, but you know, might qualify with a few of your questions of, are you thinking about buying in the next year or two years? Do you currently own? Right? Like, use those as qualifying questions. And again, you're in for maybe a couple hundred bucks and a couple hours worth of your time.

But if you're a larger company and you're more robust and you really want some rock solid feedback, you can engage in firms that focus entirely on market research. They can do digital surveys. They can put groups of people into a room. You can hide behind the little, you know, one sided mirror thing, pretend it's a police interrogation. You know, you can ratchet that thing up to 11 and go as intense as you really need to. [00:11:00] But I really encourage people to start anywhere on that spectrum. The key is ask your potential customers a question. Just find a way to do that.

Have I learned anything? See, I did a good job keeping track of your questions. Have I learned anything? Yes. For years and years and years, I think we did what every builder did when it came to rate. We just would plaster rate everywhere and assume that saying 4.75 or 5.25 or 6.5 made sense to a customer. Look we established five minutes ago. Customers aren't that great at math, right? I think I work with people that probably aren't good at math when it comes to mortgage rates.

But we made a simple, tiny little adjustment. Instead of leading with the largest font on the rate we led with, you can get a lower payment, and the number now becomes kind of irrelevant. It's [00:12:00] contextualized, right? It's thinking about greater than and less than symbols. That's it. Everyone can do that, right? Big alligator eats the big numbers, right? We remember that. Lower payment is attractive. Lower payment is what customers desire for. Lower payments solves a pain that customers are feeling. 4.875 doesn't solve anybody's pain.

Greg Bray: I love that. It's the whole like they're not buying a drill bit because they want a drill bit. They're buying a hole.

Will Duderstadt: That's right.

Greg Bray: I don't know what that drill bit gets me, you know.

Will Duderstadt: That's right.

Greg Bray: You have to show me the hole. Boy, that's a money tip right there, folks. We see the rate stuff everywhere, where people are just throwing big numbers on the screen. And even if I know the rate's lower and conceptually, I know that a 7% interest rate is not as good as a 6.5% interest rate. I know that, but I don't know what that means for my budget.

Kevin Weitzel: Does that change the affordability? Does that change at attainability? You're right, Greg. It's exactly right. And I don't think people get that number, the difference between the two.

Will Duderstadt: And I'll ask this as a rhetorical question to [00:13:00] you guys and to all your listeners who are all in real estate, keep that in mind. But this is a question you could ask consumers. Do you personally know the interest rate on your mortgage, and do you know the actual monthly payment that you pay on your mortgage? And I'm willing to bet, even those that are in the industry, are probably closer to knowing their monthly payment because there's repetition in that payment. There's a little bit of pain in that payment when you got to write a check or, you know, sign the digital transfer thing. That sticks in your memory. That's what you know, that's what you feel.

In our industry, if every single person working in home building does not know their own personal mortgage rate, man, chances are low our actual customers actually know theirs. And that's what we're asking them to do when we advertise a rate. Compare this rate to what you have today. We asked some of our home buying customers, what do [00:14:00] you think the current rate is? What's the current rate on your mortgage? And let me tell you guys, I got some wild answers. I got answers that aren't even real mortgage rates. I got people telling me one, I got people telling me 18. And I feel bad if 18 is true. It reaffirmed people don't know. It is not a metric that they're in touch with. It is the eighth inch carbide tipped drill bit when all they want is the monthly payment, the quarter inch hole.

Kevin Weitzel: Yeah. You're gonna have to do some reaming if you have an eighth inch and you're going to a quarter inch hole, you got to ream that drill bit.

Will Duderstadt: Thanks for catching me on that. Thank you.

Kevin Weitzel: You got to ream that drill bit around. You got to wobble it a little bit. I have a solid question for you because I truly do respect your opinion. I like the direction that you go. I like that you practice what you preach.

Greg Bray:Hey everybody. This is Greg Bray from Blue Tangerine, and I am so excited to let you know that the registration is now open for the 2026 Builder Marketing Summit. We're gonna be in Dallas, Texas this year on September 23rd and 24th, and we are working on an amazing lineup of marketing OSC and leadership content for you. Please check it out@buildermarketingsummit.com and get your registration in today. Remember, there's limited seats available, so don't miss out. Again, builder marketing summit.com. Can't wait to see you there.

Kevin Weitzel: But let me ask you this because with all the spreadsheets that we look at, all the listings portals that we have to be able to push to, and all the mundane trash picking up we have to do at the happiest place on earth, do you coach resetting? You hear a lot of [00:15:00] the rah, rah coaches out there. They're like, all you have to do is give 110%. You know, it's like, well no, 110% doesn't exist. Your eyeballs literally pop out at 110%. What do you do personally that allows you to reset, number one, and two, do you coach that on your team?

Will Duderstadt: My team knows and hears often that I ask them to be 100% on and 100% off. I do agree with you. I don't like improper math. A hundred and ten, a hundred and fifty, I don't understand it. That is probably my Excel nerd trying to rationalize through that one. But look, when you're here, be totally here, be a hundred percent here. And when you're not here, leave it all behind, focus on you. I think it's falling out of favor a little bit to have that division between work life and home life, but it's so important, it's so critical.

And if you can give a hundred percent when you're at work, well now your work week is reasonable at 40 hours. It's an intense 40 [00:16:00] hours, right? You're given every second of it. I would take that over someone trying to give me 50 or 60 hours. Hustle culture, so to speak, right? Because there is a point of diminishing returns. My team also hears from me that I believe the absolute best part of a vacation is forgetting what day it is. The only way you can do that is to truly, completely, totally disconnect.

When it's little things, right? When you're sitting on a beach or at a lake or you're in the mountains and you go, oh man, it's Tuesday at 11. I would totally be in that review meeting right now. Your brain's not on vacation. Your brain is still thinking about all those things. A real vacation, a real disconnect is when you're there and you're like, I'm not even sure if it's Wednesday or Thursday. I learned that from my parents who are both retired right now. And I asked them like, what feels different, particularly about weekends, when [00:17:00] you're retired? And the answer was kind of like this shrug of like, I don't know when it's the weekend anymore.

Kevin Weitzel: Right.

Will Duderstadt: Because it's just like always the weekend, right? I wrote a little bit about this. I was not always great at a reset. I was not always great at trying to build distance between those two. So, what started as a little bit of a mistake, I had gotten to maybe mid or late November, and I hadn't used any of my PTO. We have a use it or lose it policy at M/I. HR called and said, Hey, Will, heads up man, like you got a lot of PTO.

I had some really important things I needed to do to finish out the year. I wanted to maximize it. I wanted to use it. I didn't want to make a donation back to the company. I wanted to take care of myself. Most importantly, I wanted to set an example for the team who I tell, make sure you use your vacation time. And I ended up working maybe 10% of the month of December. It wasn't much. And again, as a marketer, right, I like a good [00:18:00] catchphrase. 5K every day. I coined the Winter of Will, and spent most of December forgetting what day it was, really just trying to do everything else. It's now become tradition.

So, I actually saved some of my vacation time, not all of it, so that near the end of December, which aligns really nicely with our business because not a lot of home buying activity. From an operation standpoint, things tend to slow down a little bit. It is harder to dig holes, especially like in the Midwest right, and start houses in the frozen tundra of a December. So, it all aligned nicely and it's become probably one of my most favorite vacation, and I air quote vacation, times of the year because I don't go anywhere glamorous. I just stay home, forget what day it is, and focus on doing all the things that we kind of think about doing the other 11 months out of the [00:19:00] year.

Kevin Weitzel: I hear two things on that and reflect on it personally. One, I just recently went on a cruise. I tried to forget what day it was, but every daggone day you walk on the elevator and they change these floor plates. And the floor plate says, Tuesday. It reminds you every single day when you're trying to forget. But a lot of people don't know this about me, Will. My dream vacation is a very remote Buddhist reset. A vacation where I just have to do nothing but meditate. No words are allowed to be spoken. It's a silence retreat, a time to just let your brain talk to you in its own introspective way.

Will Duderstadt: I love that.

Kevin Weitzel: I love flapping my gums, so I mean, it's going to be tortured to a certain degree, but can you relate to that with that Winter of Will at all?

Will Duderstadt: Oh my God, absolutely. Yes. And in fact, I think between the two of us, we're making some plans for next December to go on a silent retreat together. That's what I hear. I adore that, right? Because, A, I think silence [00:20:00] is underrated. A lot of people just want to fill the void, and when you fill the void, there's not as much value. You're just saying things to say things. So, taking that pause, that moment to sit with silence and to think and to be introspective is absolutely amazing.

I think it exercises muscles that we forget about. Self-control, self-awareness. I think you should probably practice some silent meditation because it could help you deal with seeing the day of the week in that elevator. A little serenity now kind of moment, right? So that you can tune out all the noise and all the things that are trying to take you off course as you focus on Kevin and being Kevin and improving Kevin. So, yeah, massive. Massive, yes.

Greg Bray: So, let's take that and now apply it to your team in a creative situation, right. It's hard to be, sometimes, creative on a [00:21:00] deadline, creative on demand, creative under pressure. So, how do you guys find this idea of the silence, the reset and everything, and then use it in your creative processes to find those opportunities to tweak the messaging, to connect better with the customer and get the message out there?

Will Duderstadt: I believe marketing is art. All art has some science behind it. Science is the mechanics of how things work. But at the end of the day, all marketing is really art. If you paint or if you're a musician, that is also art. We think about painting with watercolors versus oil paints. There's different rules, there's different constraints. So, to me, deadlines, constraint on what elements or tactics we can use in a campaign, those aren't bad things, right? Those are just basically the same rules of mixing colors with oil paints, or the same rules of needing a time [00:22:00] signature if you want to write a pop book. I think a lot of people are burdened by them. They see a three-day turnaround as I can't be creative. I see it as just another aspect of what we're going to try and do here, another thing to work within. So, the more of those that exist, I tend to think the better our team even does. I know I do better.

You can think about this, your listeners can think about this. It is probably harder to do things from a blank sheet of paper with zero constraints. Draw floor plan of your dream home. That's hard. But it's really easy if somebody else did a first draft and you're editing that floor plan. It's a lot easier to copy edit than it is to write from scratch. So, I embrace, you know, a lot of those things, and I think they need to become part of the artistic [00:23:00] process.

Kevin Weitzel: We chatted about one thing, and that was about that people don't understand math. They really don't. As much math as you took in your high school and college career, a lot of times people take the very bare bones minimum and they've forgotten more of what they've even learned. However, what people don't forget is how words make them feel. Now, you said that you had changed it from like 4.875 down to a lower payment.

Will Duderstadt: Mm-hmm.

Kevin Weitzel: I'm a big fan of getting rid of word tracks. I don't like word tracks. I think they're cheesy and people can see through them a mile away. But do you utilize certain verbiage or eliminate certain verbiage, like home site versus lot? Do you have those kind of in place, and what are your thoughts on the phraseology that your team uses?

Will Duderstadt: I would say within the marketing team, we treat it a little bit differently, and we hold ourselves, and each other accountable because we know we're on this bigger mission. Give you an example. Internally it was easy to just refer to licensed real estate agents as realtors. [00:24:00] And we all know, not every licensed real estate agent is a realtor. If you're in the industry, you get it. You know what people mean. But it is the incorrect use of a word. I also have wild, massive respect for people's trademarks and copyrights. That's where I give like a cheesy wink to the camera for the National Association of Realtors and say, gotcha.

Kevin Weitzel: Okay, I gotcha.

Will Duderstadt: But what we did internally is we just started correcting each other in a really friendly, normal kind of way so that we could all break each other's bad habit. If somebody was in a meeting, you know, this isn't even committing something to print or to web. If someone's in a meeting and they just say, realtor, someone else felt empowered to interject and they would correct. You mean agent, you mean agent you mean agent. And you do that enough times that it becomes part of how you talk.

I struggle to believe that issuing a dictionary is the right way to solve that. That's how some [00:25:00] organizations, larger organizations, tend to approach that. You got to bake it into your culture. You got to embrace internal words and phrases. You have to be able to catch each other and course correct each other. Just writing it down and, you know, shipping it isn't quite enough. With that said, we do have all of ours documented in a style guide from a marketing perspective, so it is a little bit easier to onboard someone. So, we have a reference document. We haven't talked about AI. I'm fine if we don't, but we also use our style guide to train AI when it's acting on our behalf.

Greg Bray: We might have to have you back in less than four years to talk about AI, Will. That feels like a conversation unto itself, and what you're seeing there and how you're using it.

Will Duderstadt: Not much is going to change with AI in the next four years, four months, and 12 days. I think we're good.

Greg Bray: Probably not.

Will Duderstadt: Yeah.

Kevin Weitzel: Not at all. It's going to stay in a set frame that it's in right now.

Will Duderstadt: That's right, that's right.

Greg Bray: But, Will, we really appreciate your time. Do you have any last thoughts or words of advice you'd like to get out there today to our [00:26:00] audience?

Will Duderstadt: I think it's really important for every marketer, every professional, anyone at any point in their career, to find influence, to find inspiration outside of what they do and the people that they interact with every day. We've talked a lot about how words matter and our consumers. I think I started on that journey by reading a wonderful book by Ryan Holiday called Trust Me, I'm Lying. He was a marketer for the company, American Apparel, if your listeners are familiar with that company. It was a polarizing, kind of controversial company, that did a lot of very interesting marketing things. Ryan had to come to terms with having done some of those and he shares those experiences in his book.

But that simple thought that as a marketer, we're manipulating how people think and feel. And a of couple years after reading that book, I was lucky enough to get it autographed by Ryan. And his inscription is really what [00:27:00] kind of set me on a path to just do better. The inscription was, use this book for good. Because he shared all these pretty wild, underhanded, questionable tactics that he used to grow American Apparel. It is important to know that those exist. It's important to know that those things are being applied to us as consumers. And then it's important as a marketer to decide if you want to play that game or a different game. I choose to play the different game.

Kevin Weitzel: Chasing Author Ryan. That could be a whole new movie for Tom Hanks.

Will Duderstadt: There you go. I'll work on the screenplay.

Greg Bray: Well, will thank you so much for your generosity and your thoughts today. If somebody wants to connect with you, what's the best way for them to reach out and in touch?

Will Duderstadt: So, here's what's cool. I have an incredibly SEO friendly name. It's just me. If you can manage to spell my last name, you will find me. I promise you that. I trust you guys will drop a link probably to like LinkedIn or [00:28:00] maybe my Instagram. You know, anywhere anyone wants to find me on social, I would love to be friends. I absolutely treasure every connection I'm able to make with people in this industry.

Greg Bray: I'm just going to throw in an extra plug. You should subscribe to Will's LinkedIn newsletter, as well. Don't just connect with him, but subscribe to the newsletter. I enjoy the stuff you put out there, Will. So, thanks for that effort too.

Will Duderstadt: Thank you. Thank you.

Greg Bray: Well, everybody, again, thanks to you Will for being here. And thank you for listening today to the Builder Marketing Podcast. I'm Greg Bray with Blue Tangerine.

Kevin Weitzel: And I'm Kevin Weitzel with OutHouse. Thank you. [00:29:00]