Before you scroll, here is what you are walking into.
Scott Hochuli, Founder. In the trades since 1992, running this company since 2001.
Read the transcript
If you're watching this, means you are good at what you do. And somewhere along the way, you worked for a company that didn't deserve it.
You noticed the cabinet reveal was off and you stayed late fixing something that was never yours to begin with. Nobody above you noticed either way because the check had already cleared.
I've worked those jobs. I got into the trades in '92 and started this company in 2001, mostly so I would never have to work at an average one again.
So, here's what I'd tell you about this place. Quality is not our standard. It is the entry fee. We assume you can build it or design it or manage it before you ever even walk in the door.
What we are picky about is whether a homeowner is still telling somebody about you 6 months after you've handed the keys back.
That's a higher bar than most companies will ever ask of you. It's also why the pay is sitting right here on this page instead of making you sit through two interviews to find out.
So, scroll down. It's all there. What the jobs are, what the pay is, exactly what happens after you apply, and a list of who should not bother.
If you're still reading after that last part, we should talk.
What is it like to work at Hochuli Design & Remodeling Team?
Hochuli Design & Remodeling Team is a family owned design build remodeling firm in Scottsdale, Arizona, running $100,000 to $500,000 remodels across the Phoenix metro since 2001. Every position we open gets its own page carrying the actual pay, the benefits, and the parts we have not solved yet, so nobody has to sit through two interviews to find out what a job pays. Everyone we hire is measured against the same five values our clients are promised.
Open positions are listed further down, each on its own page.
Remodeling Careers at Hochuli Design & Remodeling Team
Caring more than your boss does gets old.
You are good at this. You have been for years.
You have walked jobs where the schedule was a work of fiction. Where the drawings showed up half finished and you were expected to solve it standing three feet from the homeowner. Where the trade before you left a mess and everyone above you shrugged, because the check already cleared and nobody was going to make them come back.
You are the one who noticed the reveal was off. You are the one who stayed late to fix something that was never your fault. And somewhere in there you started to wonder whether caring that much was worth what it was costing you.
You did not get worse at your job. You ran out of places that deserved it.
Every position we open gets its own page, and every one of those pages carries the actual pay. Not a range wide enough to mean nothing. The number, before you spend an afternoon finding out whether this was worth your time.
None of the jobs here are easy. That is on purpose.
Quality workmanship is not the standard here. It is the entry fee.
Every remodeler in Phoenix will tell you they do quality work. Most of them mean it. But nobody brags about their electrician because the lights turn on. That is just what is supposed to happen.
So when we say we are picky about who we hire, we are not talking about whether you can build it. We assume you can build it. If you cannot, this page is not going to be the thing that trips you up.
What we are picky about is harder to put on a resume. Whether you lock the side gate at the end of the day without being asked, because you noticed there is a two year old in the house. Whether you spell a client's name Devan instead of Devon, every single time, because that is how she spells it. Whether the client tells someone about you six months after we hand over the keys.
The work is the minimum. The experience is everything.
That line is on the wall in our office and it is the whole job description. Not a slogan we printed after a strategy meeting. The five values below are how we measure it, and they are the same five things we tell homeowners to hold us to. If you have been carrying that standard on your own at a company that never asked you to, you already have the job most of the way done.
Five values. Same five we hand our clients.
Homeowners read these as a promise. If you work here, read them as your performance review. This is what you will be measured on, and it is what you will be paid for.
Create a Memory
You are looking for the ten second thing nobody asked for. The kid on site who gets a hard hat with his name on it. The gate that gets locked every night. You are not going to find these in a scope of work, which is exactly why they matter. Anybody can do what is on the list.
Act with Purpose
You know why before you touch it. When you lay Ram Board over new hardwood, the edge sits one inch off the wall so the base can land on the wood and not the tape, and the tape runs 100 percent so nothing works its way underneath. Not because it is a rule. Because you know what one rock under that board costs three weeks later.
Be Authentic
You tell us when something goes wrong before the client finds it. That is the entire test, and it is the one most people fail. Nobody here has ever been in trouble for surfacing a problem. People have been let go for sitting on one.
Follow Through
You do what you said you would do. You return the call when you said you would return it. If the tile guy is running two days late, the homeowner hears it from you before she is standing in her kitchen wondering where everybody is. Every award on our wall traces back to this one, which is a strange thing to say about something so ordinary.
Have Fun
This one takes care of itself when the other four are happening. We have had kids swing a demo hammer before school. We get invited to housewarming parties. This industry can be hard and thankless, and for us it mostly is not. That is not luck.
Each of these has a longer story behind it, told the way we tell it to clients.
See the Full Core Values Page
What we are hiring for right now.
Each one has its own page with the actual pay on it, the benefits, the parts we have not solved yet, and who tends to do well in the seat.
Field Superintendent
Assistant Superintendent
What we know we are going to need next.
These are not open. We could post them anyway with a vague description and a pay range wide enough to mean nothing, which is what most companies do. We would rather name them plainly and label the parts we have not worked out.
Project Development and Estimating, with a path to General Manager
Somebody technical enough to develop a scope from a conversation, measure a space accurately, open a wall and work out whether it is carrying load, walk that scope with a plumber so he can price it right the first time, and sit in on the estimate rather than receive it. Then help run the job. It is wide on purpose, because whoever does it well learns this business from the scope up, and that is the seat we would want to grow into a general manager. Not settled: the title, the pay, and where the line sits against the design department.
Design and Sales
Take the first meeting, develop the design and the scope together so the two never drift apart, keep the project on the number, specify everything, then stay with it through construction. Not settled: the commission structure. Until it is, publishing a pay range would be a guess wearing a number's clothes, and this whole page argues we do not do that.
Estimator
We are not busy enough for a full time estimator and we are not going to pretend otherwise to make this page look bigger. For now that work lives inside the two roles above. When it is enough to fill somebody's week, it gets posted here with a number on it like everything else.
Content and Video
Somebody who can shoot, edit, and write. We publish more than almost any remodeler in this market and we intend to publish considerably more. If you have watched what we put out and had opinions about how to make it better, that is the conversation.
None of those four are open. All four are real.
If you read one and thought that is me, do not wait for us to post it. Tell us which one and why, and what you have run. It takes two minutes and no resume. We have built a seat around the right person before. We would rather meet you two years early than write a job description around somebody else.
This is not the right job for everybody, and we would rather you find that out here.
We could leave this section off and get more applications. We would also spend the next two months in conversations that were never going to work, and so would you. Neither of us has the time.
You should probably not apply if any of these are true:
- You want to be left alone to do your thing. Every project here runs through a design department, a production department, and an owner who is going to walk your job. If autonomy for you means nobody looking over your work, this will feel claustrophobic.
- You think client communication is somebody else's job. It is not a department here. It is the job.
- Your instinct when something goes wrong is to fix it quietly and hope. We can work with almost any mistake. We cannot work with finding out about it from the homeowner.
- You want a single job to disappear into. Most roles here carry more than one project at a time. If the thing you loved about your last job was going deep on one thing and tuning out everything else, this will feel like an interruption machine.
- You need this to be a stepping stone. Most people who work here have been here a long time. We hire slowly because we are trying to hire once.
- Doing something the right way when nobody would notice feels like wasted effort to you. That is a reasonable position. It is not this one.
None of that is a character judgment. There are good companies where every one of those is fine, and people who are happier at them.
We are not trying to talk you out of it. We are trying to make sure that if you are still reading, you already know.
Why the pay is published when almost nobody else publishes theirs
Most remodeling companies will not tell you what a position pays until they have you on the phone, or sitting across a desk. And even then you are likely to get a range so wide it tells you nothing, or a question about what you are looking for so they can work out whether they can get you for less.
I have never understood that.
We publish what a kitchen remodel costs on this website, in dollars, because homeowners deserve to know before they spend an afternoon with us finding out. It would be a strange thing to do that for a client and then play games with the person who is going to build it.
So every position we open gets its own page, and the number is on it. If it is not enough for you, you have lost four minutes instead of two weeks. If it is, you already know we are the kind of company that tells you things before you have to ask.
These apply to everyone. Anything specific to a role, including the pay itself, lives on that role's page.
$50 for every five star review, to everybody
Every five star review pays $50 to every person in the company, not just whoever happened to be on that job. A remodel goes right because design, the office and the field all did their part, so we do not carve the bonus up.
Paid time off
Eight paid holidays, plus sick pay and vacation pay. We would rather you take it than bank it.
A company phone number
Client facing positions get a business line on your own phone, the way Devan and I do. Clients reach the company instead of your personal number, and you get to put the work down at night.
Tools and training
We maintain your hand tools. Certifications, dues and continuing education are ours if they make you better at this.
An annual review that happens
Once a year, on the calendar, with your pay on the table. You should not have to ask for it.
A small company that intends to stay one
You will know everybody's name. The owners walk your jobs. Nothing here routes through four layers to get an answer.
And the thing we do not offer yet
We do not have company health insurance. I am not going to bury that in a benefits list and let you discover it on your start date.
Here is the truthful version. We are a small company, my wife and I pay for our own family coverage out of pocket like everybody else here does, and I have not yet built a price structure that carries a group plan. I am working on it, because I think it is the right thing and because I would like the people here to stay for twenty years. I am not going to promise you a date I cannot hold.
What I can tell you is that the pay on every role page is set with that gap in mind, and that if it changes you will be the first to know rather than the last. If health coverage is the thing your family needs most right now, I understand completely, and you should weigh that carefully before you apply.
Exactly what happens after you apply.
You have probably applied somewhere and never heard anything back. We are not going to do that to you. Here is the whole thing, start to finish, usually a couple of weeks.
You apply, and you hear back
An email with a short video from me. Not an autoresponder telling you we will be in touch. An actual explanation of what happens next, so you can decide whether you still want it.
A short call, twenty minutes or so
Phone, Zoom or FaceTime, whatever is easiest for you. Usually Devan, our general manager, sometimes me. Short on purpose, because there are three or four things that would end this either way and we would both rather find them out fast. What you are making now, what you need to make, when you could start, and what went wrong at the last place. That last one is a safe space. It will not hurt anybody's feelings.
Time at our showroom with an owner
We will walk you through real projects, including the ones that did not go to plan and what we did about them. Come with questions. The people who ask hard questions in this meeting are almost always the ones we end up hiring.
References, then an offer in writing
We call three people. Then the offer comes on paper with the number, the benefits and the start date on it. Nothing gets negotiated after you say yes.
Then, if it would help you decide, come spend a paid half day with us
Devan will take you to a job site or two, you will look at a real schedule, and you can see how we actually run a project rather than how we describe it. Paid either way. Some people want this and some do not, and both answers are fine.
Most companies make you audition. We would rather put the offer on the table and then let you check our work.
And if we go a different direction at any point, you will hear that from a person and not from silence. You took the time to apply. The least we can do is close the loop.
We are always looking for trade partners who are tired of chasing payment.
You know the shops that call you when they are desperate, argue over the invoice, and pay in ninety days. We are trying to be the opposite of that, and the way we do it is not complicated. Your scope is defined before you walk on. You are paid on our regular cycle without you having to call about it. And nobody on our team is going to hand you a change you did not price.
In return we are going to hold you to a standard. Our clients are living in these houses while you work in them. Show up when you said, clean up when you are done, and tell us about a problem the day you find it.
Currently seeking
- Plumbing contractors
- Framing contractors
- Finish and trim carpenters
- Cabinet installers
- Concrete contractors
Also happy to hear from
- Electrical contractors
- HVAC contractors
- Tile and stone setters
- Drywall and texture
- Painters
What you need to work with us
A current AZ ROC license in your trade, commercial general liability insurance, and workers compensation coverage. No exceptions on any of the three. We will ask for certificates before you set foot on a job.
Before you apply
It depends on the role, and every open position says so on its own page. For anything that puts you in front of a homeowner in their own house on day one, no. There is no version of that where we are training you on the fundamentals at the same time. We do hire apprentices and carpenters at other times. If that is you, use the form and tell us.
On the page for that position, before you talk to anybody. Every role we open carries its actual pay range, what comes with it, and the parts we have not solved yet. We are not going to make you sit through two interviews to find out whether it was worth your time.
Most of our work runs $100,000 to $500,000, and the average project is around $200,000. Kitchens, bathrooms, whole home remodels, additions, and guest houses across Scottsdale, Paradise Valley, Phoenix, Tempe, Chandler, Gilbert, Mesa, and Ahwatukee. Roughly 90 percent of the work on any project is performed by trade partners, which shapes almost every role here.
For field roles, roughly 35 minutes, and this one is firmer than it sounds. Our projects sit in the central and east valley and you are on site early every morning. We have watched good people take a job with a long commute, do well for eight months, and then burn out on the drive rather than the work. If you are in Buckeye, Surprise, or San Tan Valley, the commute is going to beat you before the job does, and we would rather tell you that now.
Field days start early. We tell homeowners the work window on a job site is 7 to 5, but that is about when trade partners may arrive rather than a shift anybody here works. Design and office work has more flexibility, though client meetings sometimes land in an early evening because that is when working homeowners are home. Weekends are not a normal part of any job here. If we are working a Saturday, something has gone wrong, and that is on us to fix rather than on you to absorb.
Field positions get a company truck if you live inside our service area, and the fuel is ours. If you live outside it, you get yourself to the first job site of the day and we cover every mile from there. Bring your own hand tools and we pay to maintain them. Job site consumables are ours. You should not be funding our projects out of your own pocket and waiting to be paid back.
Not yet, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. We are a small company and we have not yet built a price structure that carries a group plan. The owners pay for their own family coverage out of pocket the same as everyone else here. It is something we are working toward because we would like people to stay here for twenty years, but we will not promise a date we cannot hold. The pay on every role page is set with that gap in mind. If health coverage is what your family needs most right now, weigh that before you apply.
Usually a couple of weeks from the first phone call to a written offer. There are five steps and all of them are published on this page. What we will not do is leave you hanging for a month while we keep looking.
No, and we think that gets it backwards. The paid half day is offered after the written offer, not before, and only if it would help you decide. Most companies make you audition. We would rather put the offer on the table and let you check our work. Some people take us up on it and some do not, and both are fine.
Not without your permission, and not until you are at the reference stage and have told us it is fine. Phoenix remodeling is a small world and we have no interest in costing you the job you currently have. Anything we schedule works around your existing hours for the same reason.
Use the same form, choose the last option, and tell us what you do and why here. We have created positions for the right person before and we will do it again. Companies trying to hire once rather than often tend to stay open to a conversation even when nothing is posted.
High standards. Published pay. No chaos.
I have been doing this since 1992 and running this company since 2001, and I can tell you the thing nobody says out loud about our trade. The hard part was never the building. Anybody with a decade in can build a beautiful kitchen. The hard part is doing it in somebody's house, for months, without ever making them regret letting you in.
Most companies never solve that, so they hire for the easy part and hope the rest works itself out. It does not, and the people who care end up carrying the whole thing on their back until they leave.
We built this company the other way around. Which means when you get here, the standard is already high, the systems already exist, and you are not going to be the only one holding the line.
You will not be the person who cares the most anymore. You will just be one of the people who does.
Scott Hochuli, Founder. Hochuli Design & Remodeling Team, Scottsdale. Est. 2001.
Where to go from here
Everything starts on a position page. Each one carries the pay, the whole hiring process and the application, so you can decide before you talk to anybody. If nothing open is the right fit, or you run a trade business, there is a button further up this page for you.
Or skip all of it and call the office at 602.451.0323 and ask for Devan.
See the Open Positions