Part 3: The Only Way Out is Through. And It's Going to Hurt.

Introduction

I’m writing a multi-part series about finding happiness, in work and in life, and how that shapes the way I think about architecture and the built world.

• Part 1: Going on an Adventure

• Part 2: Into the Valley

Where we left off:

What kept us going?  It damn sure wasn’t happiness.  I’d have quit two feet deep into that hole and never come back. 

No, it was the blossoming of something new in our lives: meaning.

We knew we were working towards something, even though we didn’t know exactly what it was.  But we were aiming up, orienting ourselves towards a vision, putting our best foot forward. 

And at our lowest points, something would always happen to give us some encouragement.  Some breadcrumb of hope.  I don’t know how to explain it, but it was always just enough to keep us going.  Gifts within the valley, in the darkness, goading us forward.

The Only Way Out is Through. And It’s Going to Hurt.

Serendipity Strikes

I worked tirelessly for two years.  If not on the jobsite, working late nights and on weekends at home, teaching myself design, and doing the best I could to figure out how to launch a business.  

I launched Building Culture in 2017.  My first investor?  The landlord of a garage apartment we’d moved into in Carlton Landing during my apprenticeship.  We couldn’t afford the rent, but he and his wife took pity on us and agreed to let us stay there for what we could afford if we also tended the yard.

We ecstatically agreed.  Moving into Carlton Landing was a game changer from the meth-filled neighborhood we’d come from fifteen minutes away.  It may have been a garage apartment, but it was new, nice, and felt like we had a real home, for the first time in a very long time.  Sarah nicknamed it the Garage Mahal.

This is what I mean by ‘breadcrumbs of hope’ that kept us going through the adventure, right when we thought we couldn’t anymore.  Little miracles along the way.

One night, the owners had us over for dinner (they’re kind people like that), and the conversation turned to what we would do next.  I didn’t have an actual plan, but I simply told them I wanted to launch a construction business afterwards.  I still, at the time, had no idea I could design.  I was a little over a year into my apprenticeship and my Sketchup skills and design sensibilities were still…immature, to put it nicely.

I still remember the look they shared with each other when I told them I wanted to start a business.  They’d recently had a liquidity event and were looking for young people to invest in.  

A few months later a deal was starting to shape up.  Unbelievable.  

The remaining six months or so of my apprenticeship were a combination of euphoria, terror, and practice in patience to stick out the time I’d committed to with Clay.  I needed another six months of experience, frankly.  As well as another six months to plan.  But making $12/hour, doing hard labor, with a strained relationship, and the tantalizing possibility of being my own boss, was something I was desperately ready for.  It was a painful six months.  But, thankfully, I stuck it out.

Launching Building Culture

I launched Building Culture in 2017.  It was exhilarating and exhausting.  Starting a business is hard.  It’s extremely stressful.  There are so many unknowns.  So many decisions you have to make, without experience, without a clear path, and without enough resources.  But you just have to start moving and figure it out as you go.

My first project out of the gate was The Bend, a pocket neighborhood.  Looking back, this was an incredibly ambitious undertaking for my first project. You can see the concept video I made here to guide the project.  Thankfully, the investor paired me with another young, but more experienced builder, when he invested.  We each ran our own brands, but shared resources, and he helped me a lot those first couple of years.  Those two shingle houses?  Those are his.

In addition to just starting the business, actually delivering a high-end product for the first time was an immense amount of stress and work, too.  It was a firehose of learning those first few years, and profoundly uncomfortable.

But in the midst of the discomfort and uncertainty, I was also solidifying a vision, and discovering so many things about myself and the world.  I discovered that I loved design.  I mean, really loved it. I’d wake up in the middle of the night with ideas and have to get them out.  I’d get up at 5 am just to design without interruption.  

Finally, five years later, after searching since 2013, I’d discovered something that I genuinely loved.  Design.  Or more precisely: creation.  This discovery was a treasure, more valuable than gold, and worth every year of pain and feeling lost, in the end.  

And I was good at it.  Which, frankly, shocked me.  I’d grown up playing football and majored in accounting.  I didn’t do anything artistic growing up.  I was a jock.  The best thing I could draw was a stick figure!  

In my wildest dreams I’d never considered this could be a real possibility – that I could be capable of something like that.  This was like discovering some great truth about myself.  Who I really was, underneath what I thought I should be all those years.  I cannot express how profound this is.

I was not miserable at KPMG because accounting is bad.  I know brilliant and creative and happy accountants. I work with some!  I was miserable because it was not an expression of who I was.  It was…false.  Incongruent.  I was on someone else’s path, with the world (and my well-intentioned parents) cheering me on: “You’ve got a great career ahead! Just keep going!”

While I’m a big believer in seeking wisdom, I’ve also come to realize: no person can tell you what you should do with your life but you.  

I think that’s what becoming an adult is: taking responsibility for your life.  I can’t believe how long it took me to really figure this out.  It’s really easy to offload that responsibility.  I still try to do it sometimes. Wanting someone or something to be able to tell me what I should do. There is perceived security in that. 

But no one else can know who you are.  In fact, I’m not sure you really know that.  It’s for you to discover – and that’s part of the adventure of life.  

But I also know this: you won’t discover anything without looking, and going looking is risky because there are no guarantees.  You don’t know what you’ll find.  I think this is why the concept of God is so important, because it’s really an act of faith.  All of it.  Stumbling into the unknown and hoping, trusting, there will be something valuable on the other end to make it all worth it.  

The past seven years of searching since college had led to some profound discoveries that lent meaning and purpose to my life.  I’d uncovered hidden talents and passions.  But I’d also uncovered meaningful problems that I could devote my life to solving.  Things I cared about.  

I was beginning to see who I was, and what I could uniquely contribute to the world.

It was the combination of a crystallizing vision intertwined with self-discovery that gave me endurance.  Some solid footing.  I had something to build off of and work toward.  

Yet, there was still no “lived happily ever after” moment.  The pain wasn’t done with me yet.  In fact, it was about to get a whole lot worse.

Into the Valley

My first houses in The Bend were pre-sold months ahead of completion with full cash offers.  I was thrilled.  We were already looking ahead, buying up new lots and making plans for the future.  Things were going even better than I could have hoped.

Then the economy in Carlton Landing tanked.  

All of the sudden, there were 42 houses on the market out of 200.  It’s a resort community for those not familiar, like Seaside, FL, and I quickly discovered niche economies can be very dangerous.  

The year before I started The Bend, there was no inventory on the market and high demand – we couldn’t build fast enough.  I didn’t get greedy or overbuild – we were just responding to the market as best we could.  But with nearly ¼ of the houses on the market, all of our future plans were scrapped, projects on indefinite pause.  We were putting great lots we owned up for sale, hemorrhaging interest.  I took on jobs I didn’t want to bring in income, and paid myself just enough for us to survive.  

What started off as a smash success quickly turned into an act of pure survival.

I’d worked tirelessly for two years, four including the apprenticeship, just to get slapped down by a market I couldn’t control.  I felt powerless, and for a year I went to bed each night wondering how we were going to make it.  

Next Steps

I always knew I wanted to get out of Carlton Landing to pursue my ultimate vision, but the timetable got bumped up.  Now I needed to get out in order to find work and survive.  And while survival was the immediate concern, I also knew I needed somewhere less volatile, where if a downturn happened I could at minimum rent out the houses to cover most of the mortgage – an impossibility in a second-home resort community.   

But first, I had to break up with my arranged business partner.  While the arrangement had been really helpful the first couple of years, we were going on divergent paths, and I had to have some uncomfortable conversations.  We had to walk through splitting up the business, and I had to negotiate with my investor on a deal that didn’t go as well as we’d all hoped.  Navigating through all of that was painful. 

I moved the business to Oklahoma City in April 2020.  Yes, that April 2020. The Pandemic.  Talk about timing.  I was splitting my weeks between Carlton Landing and Oklahoma City (a 2 hour commute), wrapping up homes in Carlton Landing while getting projects off the ground in a new city.

We had our first baby April 8, 2020, our dear Amelia.  I was in Carlton Landing when my wife got test results back showing we needed to induce immediately due to dangerously high blood pressure and preeclampsia.

I rushed home and with our home birth plans shredded, I took Sarah to the hospital.  It was the first day they invoked Covid policy (masks, couldn’t leave room, no visitors, etc).  My wife came rather close to dying.  It got pretty scary for a time.  But in the end, Sarah and Amelia were healthy.  Thank God!

Starting Over

Trying to start a business over in a new place, one that relies on relationships, was an incredibly difficult task.  I was overextended trying to wrap up projects in Carlton Landing, trying to find people to work with in Oklahoma City, and trying to navigate a new set of the basic bureaucracies that are unique to each municipality.  

I was making relationships with banks, working on a new insulated brick wall system, performing remodels, and taking on any job I could get.  And I can’t overemphasize just how hard it is to run a business.  In addition to all the design work and managing the build – you know, the actual product, I had to keep up with accounting, insurance, contracts, taxes, clients and hiring new employees.  All while figuring a lot out.  Creating every system and process and document, trying new software, finding vendors and contractors that may or may not be good.  It was unbelievably difficult.  

Then with Covid, supply chains got wonky fast.  Materials delayed, prices skyrocketing, massive trade shortages.  I remember calling a dozen cabinet shops, each one telling me the same story: we’re 40 weeks out, and we’re not even talking to anyone who’s not an existing customer.

I cannot count how many times I heard something along the lines of, “I’ve been in this business for 45 years, and I’ve never, ever seen anything like this.” That went on for close to two years.

I was accustomed to working 60 hour weeks since 2015, but now I was consistently hitting 80 hour weeks, working throughout the weekend just to keep afloat.  

When I finally got our first brick house permitted in Wheeler District, I called to get our brick delivered.  I’d just spoken to them.  They called me back and told me they’d talked to the plant, and my brick had disappeared. It was now a ten month lead time.  

Utterly devastating as I’d already sunk $200k in with the lot, foundation and mechanicals. There was no way out but through. 

I’m just giving you a fraction of 1% of the things that made 2020 and 2021 the worst years to date.  Liens, theft, inflation, delays, an ice storm that cut power for 12 days in October, toxic mold, personnel issues, difficult conversations.  So many extraneous factors beyond the normal difficulty of starting a business plagued me those first two years in Oklahoma City.

I was exhausted and running off cortisol and stress.  My sleep was absolute crap.  I was operating at my limit and hitting the danger zone.  But I could also see the light on the other side.  There was hope.  I just needed to endure a little longer.  

Then I got hit by a bus.

To be continued.

Next Post: Part 4: DEATH. Of the Mostly Metaphorical Kind.

Conclusion

This story is unfolding as I write it. I hadn’t intended to go into this much detail, but…it feels right. And, ultimately, I’m sharing my worldview, and setting the stage for how I think about architecture and the built world, which has been shaped deeply by my experiences.

If you’ve been enjoying this, I’d love it if you share it with a friend :) And leave a comment or hit reply and I’ll see your message in my inbox.

Thanks, and talk soon!

Austin