JEFF: I do the sales.

HATTIE: (Voiceover) Today Mike has a sales and customer service team. In fact, both Jeff and Ted ran their own businesses, but now work for Mike.

TED: This is my first job I've had in 30 years. And you would think it would really be difficult, but I'm probably working as hard as I ever had just because of the environment. If you talk to Jeff, he operates here with all the freedom that his talents allow him, so you would think you were talking to the owner.

HATTIE: One good decision you said you made was to locate your business on the highway where we were. And I think we're sitting in your next brilliant decision.

MIKE: As it turned out, it was a good decision, and it's something that was fun to do.

HATTIE: All right, tell me about how you building this house for you to live in impacted your business.

MIKE: Basically gave us a model that we could show. You know, we could show some of the ideas that we have that we were never able to sell to a customer. Well, at the time, we hadn't done a lot of character logs in a house, similar to this one, you know, with the lightning strike in it or a knot. See the indented knot there? When they see it, they like it.

Every five years National Home Builders puts on a contest, which we entered. We were given a form, we entered that. And they looked at pictures of the home, came out and looked at the home, we sent them a blueprint, you know, the floor layout. And it was--one day, we got a card in the mail saying that we had won an award. And they wouldn't tell us which award or what we had won. Well, as it ended up, it was the National Home Builders Best in American Living Award. So we went to Las Vegas to receive that award, and it was incredible. When we went--we were sitting at a table and they were showing these homes that had won on this gigantic screen and there was a fairly good reaction from the crowd on the stick-built homes.

(Voiceover) But when they showed this home, everybody just went, `Ah.' You know, just this big `Ah.'

HATTIE: (Voiceover) Perfect.

MIKE: (Voiceover) Oh, I melted in the chair. And from that time on, once we had won that award, our business just catapulted.