Ahead of the 2026 Women in Residential Construction Conference, we’re revisiting a conversation from the 2025 event.

In her talk at the 2025 conference, Allison Guido of Hanover, Mass.-based remodeling firm Almar Building & Remodeling shared lessons she learned from the book Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson. She tells the audience that staying ahead in the residential construction and design industry means learning how to adapt as market conditions shift. 

Welcome back to Women at WIRC, where our editors from sister media brands Pro Builder, Pro Remodeler, and Custom Builder sit down with standout women across home building, remodeling, and design. We'll share their stories, their business insights, and explore how women are reshaping the residential building industry.

Allison: Thank you for having me back. A lot of you sat through the roundtable, where we started talking about change. This is a little different.

Have any of you read the book Who Moved My Cheese? Good, so some of you have a basis for it.

This presentation and workshop came out of a meeting we hold as a team every year, where we talk about what's working, what's not working, and what work goals we're going to set for the next year. I try to include a personal development or educational component to that, and this is what my team talked about last year, because we were getting ready to go through a lot of change. We talked earlier about the fact that I came back from Pinnacle a year and a half ago and said to my team, we are going to burn down our sales process and build it back from the ground up. So they were not excited about change.

I came into my family's third-generation business, and it was one of those typical situations: dad was really smart, couldn't get out of his own way. He was a really good guy in a truck, but didn't have systems. So that wasn't going to be me. I started in the vinyl siding world as a vinyl siding installer, and then moved into taking over the office.

When we start talking about change, and why I wanted to talk about change with you guys and with my team, it's because we're always in the midst of change. One of the best things about our team, and about the team here, is that we're always looking to improve. You wouldn't be here if you didn't want to get better for yourself and your business. And one of the things we want to talk about is what we can learn about who we are and who we need to be so that we always have cheese, and how we need our team to grow, or for us to grow as individuals, so that we can grow together.

I know enough to be dangerous on this, guys, but here's the basis of the story, if you haven't read it. There are four characters that live in a maze. There's Sniff and Scurry, two little mice who quickly adapt when things change, and Hem and Haw, two little people. Hem resists change and feels entitled, and he starts to grow fearful when things start to change. Haw eventually overcomes that fear and learns to adapt.

In the story, they live in this maze and go to the same cheese station every day, and there's tons and tons of cheese. There are more leads than you could ever imagine. It's super easy to sell a job. People are just shoveling money right at you. Then one day they show up, and the cheese is gone. There are no more leads, no more sales, and they don't know what to do.

The cheese represents happiness, leads, whatever you want the cheese to represent. Job security. What happens is, Sniff and Scurry, who are monitoring the cheese, are looking and seeing that there is less cheese today than there was yesterday. This cheese on this side of the pile is a little bit moldier than it was. It doesn't taste quite right. Something seems a little off. But Hem and Haw continue to grow comfortable. There's always cheese; we show up every day, and there's some cheese here. But then it disappears, like I said.

So what happens is Sniff and Scurry immediately run out of the cheese station and start looking for other cheese, while Hem gets mad. He's like, "What? We've always been coming to this cheese station. There's always been cheese. I want my cheese back. I deserve the cheese." Haw starts out following Hem's lead, but then he starts to think, "Why am I being angry? Why am I sitting here?" Eventually he starts to learn to change, and as he goes, he's writing some of these lessons on the walls.

Sniff and Scurry are observing the change. They are anticipating the change because they've noticed there's a little bit less every day, a little bit more mold on it than there was, and they're able to adapt quickly when they notice the cheese is gone, because they've been monitoring it. Even after finding new cheese, because they're running through the maze, they continue to monitor the environment and see what's happening. They stay positive because they're always watching around them.

Hem, like we said, gets mad. He's entitled. "I've put all this effort in, I've been here a long time, I deserve this cheese. For the last fifteen years, I've been able to do this and get the leads. Every day I get up, and this happens, and that happens. I don't know what to do now." He's paralyzed by fear. He doesn't know where to go, and he's shocked things aren't going his way. He initially follows along the same path, seeing his senior leader saying, "Well, this is how we have to act." But eventually he starts to think, "Well, where did Sniff and Scurry go? Why are they not still here? Why are they out doing something else? Shouldn't they still be here with us? Maybe I should start to move out. Maybe Hem isn't doing exactly what we need to do."

So he starts to go out and investigate on his own, and starts to say, "Okay, I didn't really want to leave, but this isn't so bad." He finds a couple of crumbs here and there, moves along in the process, and eventually finds a new cheese station.

Thinking about the characters, which one are you? Are you monitoring what's happening? Are you looking ahead, anticipating these changes? Are you shocked when something happens, and you didn't realize it was coming? Are you just moving along and bumping into walls? Are you discussing and deliberating and contemplating what's going on, hemming and hawing at first and then changing? Are you a little bit of everything? I think in some ways we're all a little bit of everything. Nobody can be just one thing. There are times we're going to be here, and times we're going to be there.

Thinking internally, what do I do when something comes up that takes me by surprise? Are we looking ahead? Are we monitoring? We're all in different stages of business, and different stages of life. We talked this morning about the fact that we've got people in the workforce who are ready to retire, and people who are just coming in, and how we manage change is going to be different depending on where we are in our own personal journey and path.

There's a lot of lessons we can learn from this little book. If you haven't read it, grab it on Audible. It's a forty-five-minute read, maybe an hour. There's some lessons that are timeless and transitional. So now that you've got the base of the story, we're going to share together, and even though this isn't a roundtable, we're going to chat because we're going to help each other.

Change is inevitable at home and at work. We need to adapt quickly to change, because it can lead to more success and more happiness. Resistance to change can cause fear and stagnation. We're afraid of what's coming down the pipeline. For the last three days, I've been terrified about getting up here and talking to y'all. But it's fine; you guys are great, everybody's lovely.

Being proactive can give us a competitive edge. We may have been saying AI has been around for a while, but we are still on the leading edge of figuring out how it works for our industry, and we're still setting the tone for how it's going to work going forward. There are some people in here who are amazing and said a lot of words I didn't understand; they are early adopters, and I'm just hoping I can catch up before the rest of the people behind us catch up. Embracing flexibility can help us overcome obstacles and discover new opportunities.

Let's start with anticipating change. Like the mice in the story, the cheese was getting old. Our team needs to be aware of industry trends, client preferences, potential changes. One of the things I noticed was that the way our clients were buying was changing, the type of client we had was changing, and our sales system wasn't meeting the needs they wanted. Change is constant in our world, so we need to figure out how to be proactive in our planning and adjustments, and roll with the punches.

Odds are we'll have to change our plans at some point. It's okay to have your five-, 10-, 15-year plan and adjust it based on what's happening today, or what's happened in the world. We had great plans before COVID hit, and we all had to adjust because we couldn't do what we were doing before.

So what are you doing, or what could you start doing, to monitor change? Leslie, how do you guys monitor what's going on?

Audience: Just tracking.

Allison: Tracking. How do you track them?

Audience: JobTread.

Allison: All right, what else are you guys doing? How do you monitor what's going on?

Audience: Questions.

Allison: Okay.

Audience: Feedback loops.

Allison: How are you guys monitoring the data you're collecting, so you know when you need to change? We have an Excel spreadsheet, super fancy, with data that goes back to 2002 for our leads, our sales, and our volume. So we can go back. But I thought, when we were in your AI session, could I throw that spreadsheet into AI and ask it to look for trends? How can we take the data we've been collecting for twenty-five years and throw it into something new, to monitor things in a different way?

Some of the things we're doing now to monitor what's happening are going to have to change: dashboards. I was like, it's been like twenty years, and, oh my God, a dashboard, that's a great idea. You know, all of you have been doing that a long time. I'm just catching up. I know enough to be dangerous.

Embracing flexibility. The mice who thrived were willing to adjust their routines. Sniff and Scurry knew the cheese wasn't always going to be there, because they could see the writing on the wall. Our team should be open to changes in our systems and plans, and we've talked a lot in our roundtables about how you navigate those changes, what's worked and what's failed. It comes down to the same common thing: communication, checking in, because eventually we're all going to hit a roadblock or stumble. What are we going to do to get around those roadblocks? Getting out of our comfort zone and adapting to that change. The difference between being successful and unsuccessful is whether you're able to move on rather than give up.

So are we embracing flexibility? We talked about that as a team last year, and we were kind of wishy-washy about how flexible we were being. What could we do to be more flexible?

Overcoming fears. We talked in the roundtables again about fear. People don't like change because they're afraid of the unknown. They're afraid it's going to cost them time, cost them money, hinder progress. We were talking about one very popular online program: well, we can just work around it; it's easier than trying to learn a whole new operating system. But we need to encourage each other and our teams to face that fear, so we can view changes as an opportunity for growth. Fear that you let build up in your mind is often worse than it is in reality. I knew I was going to be fine, but the fear of getting up and putting yourself out there and talking in front of all of you feeds the curiosity and helps everyone see things in a new, positive way.

We talk a lot about staying positive when you're going through change. How are you going to reward yourself for the little accomplishments you make along the way? Keep pushing yourself to the next thing, visualize your end goal, and focus on that. We are at a point in life where I love my business, I love my kids. What am I going to do when I grow up? A beach house might be nice, and if I keep walking toward the beach house, all those other things are going to come along.

How can you support each other and embrace change as an opportunity? What do you guys do as a team? What support do you need from other people, seeking new cheeses? When you change what you believe, you change what you can do. You've got to see the advantage, see the reason why. We talk a lot in our team about why we're making a change, what we're doing. As Erica said last year, we talked a lot about friction, and how do we change our system to take the friction point away from our team? These might be finding new solutions and opportunities, new materials, new vendors, new trade partners, new locations, or ways to streamline the process.

If we're thinking about work, or thinking about happiness, what are the cheeses you need to watch out for? Artificial cheese. People are worried: is the artificial cheese coming for their jobs? We can embrace it, in certain ways, to make our jobs easier. Jess and I have a whole list of things we want to try out, but in the same instance, I'm like, I could just stick with the bookkeeper forever; I might not need somebody to analyze the data for me.

What other cheeses are coming down the pipeline that might be concerning? If you're building a business, cheeses coming down for you might be: how do we keep the pipeline full? How are we making those new connections, getting those leads? Our business is changing, our type of project is changing, the average job sale is changing, which means our client type is changing. Does that mean the marketing I'm doing now is going to work? I feel like I've got this entry-point person, and this one job that's maybe three times as big as we've ever had before. Is that going to be my new norm? What is she asking for that my previous clients weren't? How does my system have to change?

Communication and collaboration came up every time we talked about this. We need to have open communication with our team and be willing to support each other, collaborate, and be honest with each other. In our annual meeting, we try to talk about not taking things personally; we're trying to address system problems so we can make the team better. If there's a personal problem, that's a separate conversation; we try not to point out that you're a jerk and you can't follow the system.

There's a difference between being active and being productive. Are we busy, or are we getting things done? That goes back to utilizing AI and other things to figure out whether we're just filling our day with busy work, or actually being productive, and that's somewhere we need to be watching for improvements.

Is everybody hearing the right message? We talked about that with the generational things, and I hadn't really thought about the fact that just because I'm saying it doesn't mean you're hearing it. We start every meeting talking about breaking contractor stereotypes through communication and leadership, but just because I'm saying it doesn't mean they're actually hearing it. When they parrot it back to me, I'm not always sure if they're being snarky, but at least they're parroting it back.

We need to understand how to communicate in a way that's positive and doesn't hurt people, understanding their personality, whether you're using DISC or something else. I'm a high C, checklist-oriented, and apparently my emails sometimes come off as cold. So now I have to put a little happy face emoji on them, so people know I'm not cold. It was great feedback, and it hurt my feelings, but it was good feedback. Now when you get an email from me, there's a happy face on it.

Celebrating success. We don't do that enough. We talked about the Tilson Group; they've got a whole new system coming in, and they asked, how do we keep people positive? I said, what are some of the little milestones along the way that you can celebrate? If you're using the Traction EOS system, and you've got a big project, you don't want to wait until the three-year mark before you celebrate. What little rocks along the way can you celebrate?

We have a little star trophy that goes around our office. If somebody does something good, they get the star, get their picture taken, and I stick it in the newsletter. We do high fives, good job awards, and we just call people out. How else are you guys celebrating your team or yourselves? When we do goals, sometimes I'll suggest, okay, if you get this goal finished, let's go to lunch. It can be as simple as buying cupcakes because we lost five pounds. It doesn't cost a lot of money to celebrate people and celebrate the successes, the core values that you're meeting.

So what are our cheeses in business? Leads, our sales systems, design systems, energy codes. I'm in New England, so we've adopted the stretch energy codes on top of the state building codes, on top of the national codes. Accessory dwelling units, which we mentioned earlier, are a big thing, especially in the Boston area, where people are trying to figure out how to get more on one lot. That's not fully part of our system, so we've got to go research that cheese before people ask us questions we don't know the answers to.

Zoning is another one. Massachusetts has lots of little towns, and every town, every part of town, has different zoning laws. Your cheese could be something at work. Your cheese could be, what are you going to do when you grow up, where are you going next?

This is a challenge, and a direction to work through some of these things on your own, to ask yourself so that you could get there. What would you do if you weren't afraid? Would I be in remodeling? I don't know if I'm not afraid. I don't know what I want to be when I grow up. I just want to come back and do this with you guys every year.

These are links to our website if you want to reach out. Craig and I also do a podcast called Married with a Business, about working in a family business with your spouse, so feel free to check it out. If you work in a family business with your spouse, let me know, because I find everybody's story super fascinating. That's time, but I'm around if anybody has questions.

Thanks for listening to Women at WIRC. This podcast is a spinoff of our annual Women in Residential Construction Conference, which we've been hosting since 2016. You can learn more about the conference and see when we'll be in your area by visiting womensconstructionconference.com. Women at WIRCis a production of Endeavor Business Media, a division of Endeavor B2B. Until next time, keep up the good work.