“Hey, get in the car.”
“Maybe. Where we going?”
“Just get in the car.”
“Okay, but where are we going to go?”
“Will ya just get in the car?”
“No! Why would I get in the car with you if you won’t tell me where we’re going?”
“Okay! Well, we’re just gonna go drive around.”
“I’m out!”
Does this feel like conversations you’ve had professionally? Does it feel like some marketing messaging? Does it feel like “Because that’s the way we’ve always done this?”
Yeah, it does. It is directionless. It’s vague. It’s difficult. It's pushy.
Unless we remove ourselves from the maelstrom of the day-to-day and our siloed situations, we may never see that the way we do things is no longer getting it done.
That’s my job. To get outside of the situation and look at it and determine whether it’s working as planned, and if not, what do we do about it?
I call it the satellite view. Get up there and see how what we are doing fits within the entire context as a system.
What I saw seven years ago has changed dramatically.
There was a significant Supreme Court decision in August of 2018 that changed how states can tax incoming goods. That added nearly 14,000 taxing jurisdictions into our little basket of complexities. We got past that.
Then, there was the Covid 19 experience that changed all humanity.
There was a ship that ran aground in the Suez Canal.
There was a freeze in Texas that shut down resin production (oil-based product in the oil capitol of America), and thus, plywood and other wood product production got halted and prices shot up. Did you know that one?
Oh, our development company in India got shut down and then dispersed to laptops and crappy internet coverage.
There was personal illness.
There was internal sabotage, or at best, willful wrongdoing.
There was massive inflation of building materials while people were stuck at home trying to remodel because they couldn’t go anywhere.
There was chronic loneliness and isolation, especially for children.
People “had to” shop online. Okay, they found that learning that was easier than risking potential contamination from other humans. But their buying habits changed.
Our staff diminished. Most could not endure the financial austerity of a long-term startup struggle.
Our technology in ReCapturit could not change easily. Home Depot’s Chief Information Officer put together online ordering and curbside pickup within three weeks (so I read). We were not that able to do that. We barely survived.
We only survived due to the kindness and abundant generosity of people around us, outside of our company and within. I cannot even type this without my throat clenching from the feeling of gratitude that truly overcomes me because I cannot believe the selfless contributions that so many brought to us and continue to bless us with ceaselessly. Thank you. You know who you are, and hopefully, I tell you.
Things were different when we came out of the Covid cloud. Some contend we are still in it.
Here is good news, though. Without ALL of that, I could not have been in the position to need to go back up to that satellite view.
Here we were. Things had changed and we could not survive as-is.
From that satellite view, it became obvious that the old model of distribution of recaptured building materials was inadequate and intransigent. (sorry)
I had steered our ship based on what I believed at the time, but I missed by a level of magnitude. We built a marketplace to serve the existing market, the old model., not The New Model.
I asked good questions. I did my market research, but I did it within the old model, and that was wrong. It was wrong because I saw where a new model was needed. But I thought we could serve the current audience with a new model of marketplace within the old model of the ecosystem.
That might have worked had we opened in 2018. Maybe.
But the world changed.
We had to change and now we were not financially able to do much.
That birthed the opportunity!
Coupled with the experience and vantage point to envision The New Model, I got to see the solution. The New Model approaches what I have called the “sleeping dragon of demand.” This huge sleeping dragon is the sector of Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC). Add to that Developers and Real Estate owners. These are the audience of The New Model.
We must speak their language. We must merge with their systems, because frankly, reuse does not have a universal language of technology nor operations that can scale (grow by multiples).
Here’s what else changed. Technology. Now, there are technologies that can translate the language of reuse into AEC-speak.
There have also been new tools of reuse introduced, like our friends at Urban Machine. We have a list of new tools. We have assembled dozens of companies and experts ready to help facilitate the development of The New Model.
So, back to that lack of direction at the beginning of this article: that is so achingly hard to follow, yet often we do.
But, when you have a plan and a direction and an objective, it’s easy to follow.
That is why people are joining us in this so quickly. Amazing people. Brilliant people. People with excellence in many facets of The New Model, who did not have a new meta-model to plug into.
Like a carburetor without a car, these parts simply were not yet pieces of a plan, a comprehensive plan that could embody and utilize and communicate the benefits of what their solution does when it is part of a bigger plan to power up a whole new ecosystem.
That is The New Model: putting together the pieces that fit together like they were built to fit together, in a New Model, a machine of the future, that is not that far off.
Stay tuned. Ask a question. Talk with us. Riding the wave is more fun than trying to catch it.
Larry
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