Alli Thurmond Quinlan - The Field-Tested Guide to Terraforming Your City

Speaker 2

I have to be able to put some of my extra horsepower into caring about my local community and feeling like I'm making a difference. You have to put the time in to be known as somebody that's going to volunteer, that's going to care, that's going to be good for their word. But that kind of change is so accessible to people and your council and your commission can make those changes all the time. you

Speaker 1

Welcome to the Building Culture podcast, where we explore holistic solutions to crafting a more beautiful, resilient, and thriving world through the built environment. I'm your host, Austin Tanel. If you are in the market for high quality windows or doors, whether residential or commercial, new construction or remodels, I highly recommend you check out Sierra Pacific Windows, who we use at Building Culture on a lot of our projects, as well as if you are in the state of Oklahoma, check out One Source. windows and doors and want to thank them for sponsoring this podcast. I want to start telling you at the beginning of each and every episode why I'm having a particular guest on the podcast. If you've been listening to me, you probably know that I'm not just choosing, you know, random people that happen to be in real estate or happen to be a builder or whatever. And then just having a conversation, not knowing where it's going. I'm really inviting people on that I find very interesting or I have a question or an area of interest that I want to know more about and some people I know better than others and so I'll start this week with Ali and Ali is both an architect and a landscape architect working out of Fayetteville. So Fayetteville is pretty close to Oklahoma City. There's a lot of amazing stuff going on in Fayetteville, Arkansas for anyone that's heard about it or have done some tours. I think CNU, the next CNU is going to be in Arkansas in 2026. so I wanted to talk to Ali cause I think we're, like a similar age, in some ways, similar career trajectories. she's a really just prolific person, business owner. She's an architect and landscape architect. Her company does interior interior design and development. she's really involved with her city and, and, you know, I think she's been on planning commission and. And so the concept, this idea of like when I first wanted to reach out to Allie, it's like, know they've done a lot of great work in Arkansas. And so I wanted to talk about that. How has she financed her projects? How has she built her company? And also how has she built relationships with the people and built trust in the community to be able to do what she's doing now? Because I've been in business long enough to know when I see someone that's doing that much, they have to have built a lot of trust. And then one other aspect is her work with the incremental developer.

Speaker 1

Alliance, which I actually learned a lot about. I didn't realize how much it had changed since I first went to a workshop, I don't know, 2016 or something. And they put on a lot of amazing workshops for city staff and municipalities across the country, kind of like helping them understand the development process and how to get kind of towards the goal of more, you know, beautiful, walkable people first. neighborhoods and creating the conditions for that. So it's a really fun, interesting conversation about business, about terraforming your own city, about career trajectory and kind of not really fitting in a box in terms of your career, which I really resonated with. I hope you enjoy it. Ali, thanks for coming on the podcast. I'm excited to talk to you today. Hi. Yeah, you've got Austin, thanks for having me. Man, it's like, it takes a while to even explain what all you do because you do so many different things, which actually is very, I think in today's day and age is very unique because there's so much specialization out there. with, you know, a lot of times people think with all the complexity, we need to specialize, we can handle it. But I think that hasn't necessarily served us very well and certainly doesn't serve us now. And actually to do really interesting projects, it's good to have a more holistic So why don't you start by talking about all the different things that you do and have your hands into.

Speaker 2

Yeah, we've got a lot of hats. We made a funny little graphic in the office last year that's like a little Swiss Army knife that's all the way open. And it's got like little labels of all the stuff that we do in the office around it, which is been a good... It takes a minute to explain and so then it sounds insane. I can't decide if I'm a general specialist or I specialize in being a generalist. there's... One of the things that I... I work in housing. And so housing and development is... complicated and you've got to know a little bit about a lot of stuff. And I think it has been, there are so many people out there like that. I think the other thing is, you know, we've kind of been finding each other and banding together has been really satisfying. But I am, a licensed architect. I'm a licensed landscape architect. I checked the pseudo so I can keep doing this humble brag. I'm the only dual licensed architect and landscape architect in state of Arkansas. Serious? Wow, you are literally one of a kind. Yeah. Just with those two things and you haven't even added on all the other things. Yeah. Okay. We found that out because they signed up for a new software that doesn't work for you to have an account on both. And they just called the office and they were like, you're the only person this doesn't work for. So just call once a year when you need your new. You can do it manually. It's the only reason we know that. I'm the executive director for the Incremental Development Alliance, which is a national nonprofit that trains small developers. We trade about 8,500 people in the last 10 years. Sorry, 10th year since founding. And we train small developers and the cities that love them. So what we call ecosystem partners, city leaders, elected officials, housing advocates, builders, people who think they might want to get into the development, but they're not sure. I was a faculty member for a long time. I was on the board for a couple of years, joined as the executive director last year. I also have a practice, design consultation practice. So I've got a team of 15.

Speaker 2

And I'm in that phase of business that I think lots of people who have established businesses, like when I tell them we're doing this, they're like, yeah, I remember that. We're scaling and we're really intentionally and carefully going from like a team of six to like a team of 20. And it took about two years for me to even like wrap my head around what that was going to look like and how we were going to structure it and what those roles needed to be and how we needed to change and all the processes we were going to have to define. we're building that business right now. And I am a small developer. So I do new construction, small development. And then one of my specialties is I'll buy really big old houses and rehab them. We replace the HVAC, we rewire the whole house, we take all the cracked galvanized plumbing out and fully replumb them, insulate everything, kind of bring it up to modern standards, really do all of the systems updates that are so expensive and people have a hard time getting excited about, but really protect... the houses for another 50 to 100 years of good service. And then we do all the pre finishes. So we don't usually do a new construction and a historic project at the same time. Those are sort of like background, one at a time. And then I do a lot of speaking nationally about housing and how we can fix stuff. And so I get really nerdy about... I worked for banks a long time. I'm from a banking family. So a lot of interest in finance and how we finance things and how we make things compliant with... all of our federal underwriting standards and how we use existing products to do a lot of the small developer work that we're training. so, getting into finance has been the big one. The next thing that we're also talking about a lot right now is, if we can deep dive into my current hyperfixation, is the way that local taxation laws are actually the most variable thing that we see in communities. Inked Up trains everywhere. So 32 states, two Canadian provinces since we started. And so we're always all over the place in really different communities. And like 90 % of what people struggle with from a housing and development standpoint is actually like all the same everywhere. Like you can be a rural small town and you can be in New England or you can be like a really fast growing giant million person town in South, or you can be a big mountain kind of booming company town. All of the problems are like 90 % of them are the same.

Speaker 2

The thing that is really variable is how does the town pay their general funds and how do they pay for their schools? And what are all the little bizarre things that have come out of that from a policy decision-making standpoint that nobody is paying any attention to? So that's my current thing we're really interested in at Inked Out. It's making cities realize all the weird decisions they're making around what they're promoting and discouraging based on what they're taxing. Wow. Yeah. So this is I let you do the bio rather than me. I need to add a couple of things because you've been on planning commission before. Oh yeah. And you've been on the board of adjustments, right? So you've got city bureaucracy, know, public, you know, did you have to get appointed for Appointed. I don't think I could get elected to a public position, especially in my town. Have you said you're in, like have you said where you were at? I didn't. I'm in Fayetteville, Arkansas. been here for 14 years.

Speaker 2

Yeah, the major state universities here, we don't have a professional sports team in the state of Arkansas. And so our football team with the university here is like a professional sports team. So it's a big travel destination too. It's a hospitality town and it's a college town. It's up in the mountains, it's surrounded by national forest. And it's a really beautiful place. There's lots of hiking. It's been a really cool place since the 1800s. So there's lots of historic architecture, but it was a small remote place for a long time. And then, middle of the last century, a little company named Walmart was founded 30 minutes up the road. And in one of those interesting domino effect things, Fort Smith wouldn't give Walmart some sort of incentive, permission, something to relocate their headquarters there. Which they wanted to move there to be on the interstate because their entire business is shipping logistics. And so they were up a mountain road, two lane winding through the Ozarks road in Bentonville, couldn't get it done. And so they, in one of their foundational positions of the company stayed in Bentonville. And so they're the Fortune One company in country. They're double the annual gross revenue of Amazon. And the family that owns them is like individually, like six of the 10 wealthiest people in the United States. And they all live here. it's a town of 30,000 people, it's a metro area of about 500,000. And so it's this really specific economy that also everybody that sells a product at Walmart has to have a high level office in Walmart. The people in charge of the Walmart account, which were a lot of companies in the United States, is the bulk of their revenue. Cliff bars, one silly example, right? 75 % of the cliff bars that are sold are sold in Walmart. And so their most important sales office is in Bentonville. And that's true for Nike and DreamWorks Studios and Starbucks and all of these companies that make products have offices here. And so we're this really bizarre little economy that has changed a lot since I moved here 14 years ago.

Speaker 1

Yeah, it's growing really fast right now. Right. Growing very fast, you know, we just, can't keep up and we have the contractor culture and size of the town 10 years ago, which was half of the size that it was. And so, you know, it's this real challenge of we are hemmed in by topography. Sewer capacity is really challenging our regions along our ridge line. And so we've got like 14 sub watersheds, which for sewer and stormwater. in a growing region that is made up of lots of small towns, it's really complicated. It's not like one city government that is making all these decisions about growth. It's all of these different communities that were small towns until recently. We joke, and this is not a joke. This is real. One of the towns that is of our kind of 14, we've got five big towns and then nine to 11, depending on where you draw the batteries, small towns. One of them is like small enough. The mayor is also the dog catcher. It's small towns dealing with these giant pressures of growth and these huge incomes. It's an economy of really mismatched scales sometimes, which has been really interesting. But it does mean we've got all this education, we have all this money. If you have a great idea, you can usually find money to fund it. And so we've got a really interesting city government structure too with all these really educated people. committed to being on and being active in city government. And so a lot of the stuff that Northwest Arkansas has been able to do has been because people are willing and excited to try stuff. And so we can get projects with crazy variances through because you want to test it. And so there's a lot of good and there's a lot of bad. I love living here. also development in the fat spring region is hard. It's a lot of pressure. People get scared.

Speaker 2

And there's this really big divide between people who have houses and don't want anything to change, and people who don't have houses and need something to change. And how we meet the needs of both of them is really challenging on a day-to-day basis. I took... I'm taking a project right now, a big PCV. And I had my harvest city council meeting I have ever had in 12 years of doing this. And I've taken some really tough projects through. on Monday, so I might feel more salty than normal about that. I'll be interested to hear about that. I actually want to jump into a little bit that, but first I want to, because you, well, mean, maybe we're not as young as I like to think, but I still think that we're young, but you have so many, you've done so much already in kind of ad things. I'm just kind of wondering, were those things intentional from the beginning? I want to do this, this, and this, or how has your career unfolded professionally where you did end up in all of these different things and you kind of stitch them together in this really unique way. This is a story I've told on podcasts before, so people may have heard this before. I feel like I am young for where I am, but I also started early. So I'd say that my story as developer started when I was 16. I went to college when I was 16 and was too young to live in the dorms. And so bought a house with my sister and my parents helped and used my college savings to buy that house and then renovated it all through school. so,

Speaker 2

I had grown up with a really hands-on mom in a really rural place that was too small. I grew up a giant cattle ranch in Western Oklahoma, hours from anything. She was the middle of the way when she moved there. She couldn't figure out how to find anybody to come and work on house. She bought the only house in the market. Couldn't buy anybody to work on it. So just went and bought some books and taught herself to do construction. And so I grew up in a household that like that was, you know, if you couldn't find somebody to fix your roof, you just went and fixed your roof and learned how to fix your roof. doing minor electrical work was not a huge deal. And so worked on houses, flipped houses that I lived in starting when I was 16, graduated architecture school, got a master's in landscape. And so graduated from graduate school by 10 hours 22 was dual licensed by the time I was 25. And so went out on my own in 2015, same year, inked up was started, although I was not a part of it then. Big year. And so this is a big year, 10 years anniversary for both. my company, which is called Fullent Lock and for InkDev. And I think it was pretty accidental. I actually had a little bit of a hard time. I got the landscape degree because I graduated with an architecture degree in 2008. Wasn't really sure what to do with it. know, nobody's hiring for that. Nobody's doing anything. And didn't know how to make, I don't know, an impact in the world in a positive way. And so I actually bounced around a little bit. It felt like at first trying to find what felt like a good niche. And then I really got excited about the hands-on nature of small development. I started my first land development. I had enough money to do a rental flip that I didn't live in. Like 2013, 2014, sold it in 2015. And that's the money that I had to start my company. And then a year later had done well enough in my first year, exceeded what I was expecting to do my first year. And so used that money to buy an acre and a half downtown and did my first land development deal. So rezoned it, lot split it, put in a sewer line, built out an alleyway in the middle of the property and so turned what had been two, functionally two properties that were contiguous into...

Speaker 2

10 street facing lots and then a 12 townhouse, little courtyard project in the middle. And so I have been working on that since 2016, but kind of got into that because it was the next scale up. And I had a great opportunity. I would say I have been really opportunistic generally about work. so... I wanted to learn more about planning, so I got on the planning commission. I learned a lot more about planning and policy and politics and how to write zoning codes, how much impact one word and one sentence can have. I wanted to learn more about houses, so I worked on that. I'm like a little kid that takes apart a clock to see how it works. It has made me a better architect too. We take apart a lot of old houses, and so seeing what is still in good condition, what is not. I will not use blown cellulose insulation or fiberglass wall insulation because I've never opened up a wall that's not wet and disgusting. so we have really strong mineral wool wall insulation. I love mineral wool wall insulation. Rock wool, rock soul. You guys, I love you. Your product is so cool. That's what we use.

Speaker 1

yeah, I'm a big, that is our installation that we use that I'm a huge advocate for for multiple reasons. fireproof, the soundproofing is really good. It's literally rock and, you know, the salt rock and slag, you know, like metal and inorganic. easier breathable mice can't chew through it bugs can't come through it it's hydrophobic so That makes me sound smart. Yeah, it doesn't absorb water like a sponge.

Speaker 2

Yeah. And it like, runs down the face of it. And so like, you will get water raping your wall having something that is not just soaking it up. Such a big deal. So the funny thing is I discovered it because I was trying to figure out how to insulate our brick masonry walls, like within a mass wall system and realizing like you can't just put, you don't want to put insulation in that seals anything, that water mold and spray foam, people don't know this, spray foam, open cell, which is largely what's used at least in here, soaks up water and it molds. And I'm not saying it's a bad material, it can be used in the right way, but like I love mineral wool. We put that between our whys, which then... Yeah, close up.

Speaker 1

translated into conventional wood framing too when I realized just all the benefits, but. It's so great. It's so great. also love it. We do open cell up in a roof deck. So I feel really great. Because it's on a slope. It can't hold water. It will let the water run. That's what we do too.

Speaker 1

roofs are pretty good at not getting like shedding water, especially, you know, if you put the underline on them. Yeah. Yeah, moving into building science, which is the thing I feel like we could nerd out about alone at two, really, what was one of the things I liked about doing development, one of the reasons I did new construction development at first is I wanted to test a lot of ideas. We were trying to convince clients to do, and so it was really sort of an R &D project. And so we tested a lot of this stuff and found my natural inclination towards crawl spaces, because that's what all of our old houses have. completely reinforced. I would never do anything on a slab unless there's some insane reason to do it. Being able to go in and pop a floor box in someplace because your electrician can just crawl in the crawlspace and it's no big deal. Being able to fix a plumbing leak under a kitchen island without having to jack up the entire floor. The repairability of a crawlspace is incredible. I feel really strongly about a closed crawlspace. So closed crawlspace, closed attic, where they're both part of the envelope. We insulate the edge of the crawlspace, run a register into it so it's got a supply, and then it's got really good, you know, this queen lining so it's waterproofed. then it slopes to drain. So you slope the crawlspace to drain, and then you run a perforated pipe at your low point to slope out of the house. Gravity drain out, don't sump pump it. This queen over that so that the whole thing that's in the envelope is all sealed and insulated. you've got a way for water that gets in there to get out. Duct work down there, plumbing down there, all your duct work in the envelope because we put first floor down in the cross base, we can put second floor duct work in the floor truss between the two floors. And then all your duct work is in the envelope of the building is the single most impactful energy efficiency update that we have been able to find. And in our properties that we've done that versus having a slab and then ducts up in an

Speaker 2

that's not insulated is a 40 % difference in our product. Wow. Same unit, same everything, 40 % difference in energy efficiency. On your crawl spaces, do you sink them into the ground at all? Are they really like all above ground? You've got like your grade and then crawl space where you whatever it is the code 30 inches or something like do you sink them into the ground at all? So your house or you know, or is it just basically like, you know, off the ground by however high the crawl space needs to be? Here's where our markets are a little bit different. You know, I'm in the Ozarks. So if I put it at the minimum grade, above grade on the high side, I have four to six feet on the low side every single time. And so we usually have crawl spaces that you can walk into and have some storage in on the The flattest ones we've ever done, we still usually try to keep them up above grade. Got it.

Speaker 1

nice

Speaker 2

I like a slightly raised house anyway. A front porch looks better if you've got some stairs up into it. We generally can still get parking access pretty nicely. One of my other tricks that I really like that we've only done recently is when we have access, accessibility Asian place is a really important factor. What we like to do is I'm going to get nerdy and sketch this on post-it note for the camera here. All right. So we always do, we're a footer CMU, right? And so normally it means you're putting your trusses on top of the CMU. And so we need 12 inches below the wood truss for our soil and it's an 18 inch truss. So yeah, we're up at about 30 inches for your porch. If we get six inches at the door, it's only a couple of stairs at the front porch. We have a couple of houses that we've done though where like it's somebody in their 50s that wants accessibility. All right, so a new trick that we are indeed recently and tested and it worked great. is, okay, wait, I sketched it wrong. This feels like high pressure. I hadn't fully prepared myself for doing anything. Okay, so footer, 12 inch blocks on the bottom. And then we switched to eight and we hang the truss on the inside of the wall with a, it's sitting on treated two by four. So it's bearing on and this is a A little...

Speaker 1

CMU. Yeah, it's a CMU bond beam that it's sitting on. And then we do like a little gap, which is a great spot for mineral wool or some, you know, an air gap is going to work fine as long as you don't have contact between that truss and the CMU. But then you can pour your garage slab right up against that. okay, you know, it needs to bear, but you can have floor space and crawl space and garage slab all totally level for accessibility. And for us, this is going to be at grade. We can drain that crawlspace at grade without a sump because we're going to have enough slope, depending on where we're at the garage. But that's my new thing that we've done that has really opened up being able to drop that house lower and still have all the water reviews. That's awesome. Do you not have to, is 12 inches the minimum you have to have between the truss and the sole? For some reason, I was thinking you had to have like 30 inches everywhere so you could actually move around down there. What's the actual code? I mean you can't you can't get down there if you don't have 30 inches but for us because we usually have a couple of feet of fall the two houses We you know if we've got 12 to 18 on the high side then it's you know, you can stand up on the low side Our situations a little bit different than you guys where you probably do be 30 inches

Speaker 1

Got it, okay,

Speaker 1

Right, think that it's something about that because it's all flat. okay. Yeah, but you know, we've done, I for a long time have this like rule of thumb that I felt like the porch floor shouldn't be more than five feet above the sidewalk. Somebody told me that rule of thumb at some point, the idea being eye level is above the porch floor so it doesn't feel too high. it's not about that. We have a ton of great here. We've done some sites where, you know, it's a hundred and 120 foot deep lot and we've got. 18 feet of fall from one side to the other, front to back. And so we've got some steep lots that we've worked out. That's abnormal, but like eight to 10 feet is not weird for us. That's pretty normal. 12 feet even is okay. And so with that really steep grade, we end up sometimes, right? Like if the back of the lot is higher than the street, if it's not front to back, right, which is easy, we got to walk up base and that's fine. If it's back to front slope, that portion's up really high sometimes. we had some really high porches that we were a little bit nervous about and it's fine. Yeah. And have to work with the training that you have, but yeah, that's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. So it's one of the things that I find, like, I think unique about your story, which I kind of pointed to earlier in like the multidisciplinary aspect, but, you know, you really haven't let like this idea of a career of vocation be like your guide of like, I am an architect. I am a landscape architect. I am a developer. I am a builder. And I bring that up multiple times because I just think in

Speaker 1

2025 that's still so like common starting in school. It's like, yeah, you are this and they like society really wants to pinhole you here and like then you go get your job and like this is what you do. And so I find like your story like really freeing, I guess, to even hear like for people where you and I've got to like I started love a KPMG and then I'm like in the Peace Corps running around the jungle somewhere and then apprenticing, you know, but like you can kind of stitch together your own profession. and carve out your own really niche and then do really well. think it took me longer to get on my feet. It took me all of my 20s, know, but that's because also because I was making no money off in the Peace Corps and print and saying and stuff like that. But I think that's a really cool aspect about your story and your career. It makes you so interesting. think I actually did leave that one out. I do also have my GC license. I do GC my own projects only when it's a... The big historic houses are so specialty. No one else would care the same way that I do. And so I do a wee of dumb fewer of them the last couple of years. I probably haven't done one in two or three years because they're very hands on. I've done a few historic homes back in 2020 and 2021. I actually were doing a commercial remodel right now. I mean, they are, I mean, they are the first ones I did. I mean, you learn a lot. Yeah. Yes.

Speaker 1

I lost money because I wanted to do it right, you know, and just you get into it and you're like, wow, I would never buy a remodeled historic house from anyone unless it was someone like you, know, like on feel the same way. It's honestly worse if somebody has gone in and worked on it. The ones that I buy have not been touched in at least 50 to 60 years. Because I want to know that I'm replacing all the systems. The stuff that we have found... And so here's the interesting thing too, is doing the development ourselves, it's also sort of like, here's my toxic trait, right? apps.

Speaker 2

I do just want to be involved in everything and I have no problem being in charge of everything. I'll just jump right in. Somebody's going to mess it up. That might as well be me. And so our development projects, I am the owner and the investor and the architect and the general contractor. And just like I'm the only person to mess stuff up. The butt stops here. But it does mean that we can go in and do these crazy complicated projects that you could never coordinate all the way through. No. But the work ends up so good because there's no overhead of coordination between all of these different groups trying to do all these different things. But it's not really a replicable or scalable model. It's been the thing that also feel. That's true. Like it's not infinitely scalable, I feel you. mean, because occasionally we take on GC jobs, just the GC, but we're also design build architecture. don't have land. We don't do landscape. We're very involved with landscaping, but we're not landscape architects. pretty picky. But, you know, just recognizing when we do the GC jobs, we're not the architects. Like I cannot believe how much it slows it down. And even if they're great, I'm not even talking so... If you're talking about a bad architect, that's one thing. But even if you've got a great architect, it's like you're in the field, you do something and then you got to like stop and literally go to the architect and they got to go to the owner and you got to go to the right thing and paperwork and blah, blah. And it's just like, oh, and then two weeks have gone by and you're like, I knew what we needed to do and could have made that decision in the moment. And when we're doing our own stuff on design build, whether it's on spec or remodels or development, it is...

Speaker 1

It's amazing the speed at which you can go. so like the design build workflow, a real design build workflow, I think is just so valuable. One of the ways that we are trying to figure out how to scale that, because it's one of the things that I like doing the most. The thing that's really, calling back a little bit to what you were saying a minute ago, I do think that being really unconfined by the societal expectation of career is really helpful. And just doing the thing that makes sense right then and doing the thing that makes sense the year later, it's all going to be different all the time and all of us are just making all of this up. Really you're an entrepreneur is what you are. Like you're not like you're an entrepreneur because you're like, let me just pioneer like whatever the next thing is because I want to do this thing and we're going to. Yeah, whatever the problem is, we can just dig in and solve it. I've got a colleague here in Northwest Arkansas that I really like and respect who, wait, how salty are we allowed to be on this podcast? Completely. What's our audience? So, know, like the Ted Lasso believe up above the door that this is like the motto of that, right? So, they have that equivalent of their company. But instead of believe, it's...

Speaker 1

Yeah, can do salt too as you want.

Speaker 2

fucking figure it out. Because their whole ethos is like, I don't know, I would be Googling it. Can you like figure it out? You might be wrong. I might be wrong. Just go figure it out. And so I think that approach to, I don't know, go figure it out. It has been, I would say like the underpinning of none of this is rocket science. Every single thing that we touch and like, it's all specific and it's all complicated. Building code is complicated. Zoning code is complicated. construction techniques are complicated. None of them are rocket science. Like if you sit down and you're like dedicated and you like figure it out, anybody can figure this stuff out and then start to see the links between it, which I think is where it gets cool. But that design builds, it teaches you so much stuff. Also, like you're talking about the timeline of the projects, but I also want to reinforce to listeners too, like the timeline of your learning is so much faster because you're just seeing a thousand decisions and how they all impacted each other being on site and seeing how trades interact. if, man, we had our plumber come in before our HVAC guy and they're in the way of the ducks and we can't move that drain over. You're seeing a thousand things all at once doing the design build version that just take you years in an architecture office to pick up on. And by doing the design and trying to get to this really precise design and vision and then try to implement it in the field, you're also getting all this experience as a contractor that would take you years to understand working with really good designers, trying to understand that translation and execution of an idea that's good. So I think that design build model is actually one of the things that I like the most, but is like the least scalable because it's just me on site making decisions with tradespeople that I have relationships with for 12 years that we have a lot of mutual trust. we know a shorthand of what we're trying to get to and how to get there. And so it's actually one of the biggest things that we have launched this year as part of kind of that growth of company is launching an internship program and really trying to intentionally train a new generation of people. we've got a civil engineer, we've got a landscape architect, we have three people with an architecture background.

Speaker 2

They're all young women and we're cross-training all of them in all of it. That's amazing. You've got to do interior design even if you're a civil engineer. You have to go and figure out site grading, even if you're an architect, because part of this too is also like all of the... We've got these weird false divisions between stuff. You got to know how all of it works to make good decisions for your slice. Gosh, it's so reminds me of two things. It's funny because I'm on a similar trajectory. I think we've got six people right now. Yeah. And I think we will be growing to 20, not in the next. two years. I hear there's those little scales like, and then it's like, the next thing suddenly. And I hear 20 is actually kind of like, once you get like 20 is something and then beyond that, it's like 20, 50 completely different business even. No, we're at 15 right now. 16 on Monday. A new person starting. And it's a completely different company than we were at 6 or at 10.

Speaker 1

That's been really humbling. I believe it. I would actually like to talk to you more about that at some point, especially as we kind of grow our own business. Yeah. But what you were saying reminded me of two things. I don't know if you've heard this before, but I heard this a long time ago, like that the best rough carpenter, so framer, is a former trim carpenter. Yes. Because the idea is they actually understand what's coming after them and the problems they create, but you actually... want them to go fast. You want to know where they can be rough and where they can't be rough or don't want to be rough. And so it's kind of the same thing with the design build and especially when you add development. it's like develop, design, build. You're like, understand how all the pieces go together, like how things get financed and appraised and sold and comps and. In marketability. If you haven't been in charge of property management and leasing buildings and selling buildings and you haven't walked through stuff and heard people's complaints about like stuff you poured your heart and soul into and they're like, ugh, why doesn't have a second full bathroom? Like, please

Speaker 1

I always built two small closets. I always built two small closets because I'm like, I've never had a walk-in closet. Who needs a walk-in closet in a 2000 square foot house? Well, in Oklahoma, you better have a walk-in closet and it better be the size of a freaking bedroom. If you were selling small houses to college students, every single one of the students better have their own full bathroom or else. That is hilarious. Because even in my historic house, we have three bedrooms and one bathroom with two kids. And I don't have a walk-in closet. bathrooms. and not a walk in closet. That's funny. But like the marketability is also part of it because like we can we can tease about it. But like our business is building housing for other people, which means we have to care what they think. And so you've got to think about what they want all the way back at the design phase to be able to get it to appraise to be able to get the costs to be able to build it to be able to sell or rent it. Right. The carbonary analogy is perfect. Yeah, that's exactly right. I've always remembered that one. I'm going to share a little trick we use at building culture. So if you're designing a house, you have to have egress windows or egress in any bedroom, for example. And the problem with that is egress windows are very large, especially if it's a double hung window or something like that. And because of design constraints, sometimes we want a smaller window if it's in a dormer or just for the hierarchy of the elevations.

Speaker 1

Well, a really cool trick that we use with our Sierra Pacific windows is we'll take something from their urban casement line and we'll put what's called a piano hinge on it. And so rather than a of a normal casement that kind of slides open where only part of the window is open, this is almost like a door hinge. And so the entire window opens and you can meet egress with a two foot by four foot window, a 2040 window. It's the smallest possible egress window anyone makes. And that's a nice little design trick. If you're as nerdy as I am, you will actually think that's really cool. So check out Sierra Pacific Windows and if you are in the state of Oklahoma, check out one source windows and doors. We at building culture use both of them regularly. And something else you were saying, remind me of just something I've been thinking about this past year. There's, you know, especially as like growing a business, which my mind is just kind of a, a different place as. I'm still in the details, but I'm less in the details than I was in some ways because I'm trying to put together these other things and grow the business and all that. Brian Chesky, who's like the CEO of Airbnb, he was on, did this like founders mode thing at Y Combinator not long ago. And he was talking about like how all the Harvard Business School, they're like totally wrong because they're like, the CEO just needs to be like the manager and then you need to hire a bunch of managers and they manage all the specialists. And his point was, how are you supposed to manage anything that you don't know how it actually goes together? And so they're so focused on like their product, like in the managers they promote are literally like product people that literally turn into managers. And then even him as CEO, like everyone kind of like he's head of product in a sense. And everyone kind of like reports to him. And so he's like super involved. It's kind like an Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or even Steve Jobs or something that was super involved with the actual product, which actually helped them like they were, yes, they were CEOs and building the business, but they were like product focused people.

Speaker 2

that like a technical founder, which I think is one of the things that I'm trying to wrap my head around too, like as you know, the one of the things that's really humbling about building a business is that I use switch from one scale to another. You realize that everything that is wrong with your business is something that is wrong with you as a person. It's so true. It's so true. There's no one else to blame. Like everything that goes wrong, it's your fault. Ultimately. But one of the things that is true at a business of six, five or six people, you can still be a technician. There's a book from the 80s, which I actually really liked, business book-wise. It's called the E-Myth that talks about a technician is the person that is that technical skill set that is executing whatever the business is doing. And then a manager is managing the work and design process. Right. And they're two really different things. Right. And then the entrepreneur is the person like going out and having the big ideas and like getting everybody into trouble with too much work because they give it go things that they're trying to do. And everybody is like a little bit of all three. But that at some point you can't grow a business if you want to be the person that's doing all the technical work. Right. You have to teach other people to do the technical work. And then you have to learn to be a manager, which is a thing I'm really is a real personal growth opportunity for.

Speaker 1

There you go. Everything's a personal growth opportunity. I'm really growing. I've been doing all the growing. Yeah, me too. There are lots of pain and mistakes. Mistake. Which actually I want to come back to business stuff in a little bit because this is a pretty interesting topic. But you know, one of the things that is, I want to get into first is one of my friends who kind of brought on as a partner in one of our developments. He moved down from DC not long ago and he was talking about terraforming Oklahoma City. And I immediately was like, have you read Red Rising? And it was just fiction, like a sci-fi book. rising. Okay, so you know what I'm talking about. that for anyone listening terraforming, you know, they're going to Mars and terraforming it with helium three to make it habitable. And so he's talking about terraforming Oklahoma City into a habitable place for developers for good work to unfold. And it's the way we think about it too. And I know you do and this is what I want to get into about Fayetteville and kind of all the different things that you've done over time and even other people in Fayetteville doing this where

Speaker 1

It's not just you doing work in the private sector as an architect, as a landscape architect, as a GCE developer. That's great. But that's kind of like the hardware part. And then there's the culture part and the relationships part. And then the kind of playing the lawn game of changing codes, being on city council, knowing your counselors, knowing how to talk to people, knowing how to fight decisions that are you know, come from city staff or something like that that are incorrect. And I know you've done a lot of that and a lot of other people. mean, like Matthew Petty is there too, I think, right? There's a bunch of cool people in Fayetteville, like making it terraforming Fayetteville. And what I think is so cool about that is like you're so invested in your farm. And that's kind of how I feel about Oklahoma City is like we, you know, we might do some consulting and stuff outside and then you do ink dev, but like, you're like, we want to make this just the greatest place. And then also it helps other people do great development too. So could you kind of start talking, this is a broad question, but could you talk about where Fayetteville started, you know, and kind of where it is now and kind of your role in that and the things that you guys have done and even some of the people around you have done that have worked towards terraforming Fayetteville into a great human scale, beautiful city. I think there's always part of the story that I always feel self-conscious about not starting with the like, well, your first step that you should do is get a couple of billionaires that want to make your place a really nice place to live. Because the reality is, like Northwest Arkansas, we have so many cool people doing so many things that are 0 % funded by that. But the backdrop of everything that I think is happening in Northwest Arkansas is Walmart was competing with Google and Amazon for talent coming out of top schools. And as they were growing, 10 or 15 years ago, into making a full e-commerce transition and retail changed so much in the last 20 years, they were really having to compete for new employees in a way they never had to do before. And one of their big business model decisions was everybody had to live in Northwest Arkansas. so I moved here from DC. I was in DC for a number of years after grad school.

Speaker 2

I was working there doing multifamily housing mostly and then landscape architecture at a really cool little boutique firm. Moved to Northwest Arkansas. When I came in 2012, you couldn't buy alcohol between 9 p.m. Sunday and like 10 a.m. Monday morning. And restaurants were 100 % closed Sunday after church lunch until sometimes Wednesday. And so on Sundays, there was nothing like I moved from DC where I could like order sushi and have it delivered at two in the morning to my house. And even, you know, even in the early 2010s into a town that like there was nothing to do except go to church or go hiking on Sundays. Walmart might be open, but like the some of the big chain grocery stores were closed on Sundays. And that was so hard for work as a culture for work. recruiting people to move from San Francisco and recruiting people to move from Brooklyn. That was really tough. The family made a really big decision about, they called it the Home Region Initiative, that they spent a bunch of money making this place cool. We've got a world-class art museum designed by Moshe Safdie. There's an arm that just does restaurant backing. They've done a bunch of advocacy so that you can buy booze on Sundays now. Restaurants are open. it has become a cool, easy place to live because there was a group of people with like an infinite amount of money being really dedicated to making a cool place to live. And so it could be done in a different way, but I don't want somebody who's like in a community that doesn't have that kind of resources to be like, we're not doing a good enough job. We should be able to replicate this exactly. Like that's why I'm saying that is I'm saying that to give people the out of like our solution is not a hundred percent replicable. Although there are also a ton of places that do actually have those families that have enough wealth that has been generated in that community that they can invest. You've got plenty of oil money in Oklahoma City that you've got plenty of families that could write a check and make a change, but that's what it takes. You have to have those locals who are invested in making those changes. A lot of our changes came out of not just that investment in all of the advocacy policy, law changes that it took.

Speaker 2

right, which is identifying the specific problem of your place, which for us was this like holdover Baptist culture that was like, you shouldn't be doing anything except going to church and going to work and turning that into a place that people wanted to live. And so it was a really specific problem and then finding the solution, having the like resources to do it. This is sort of step one. But step two, it really did early on, was they invested in sending city staff to CNU. They- invested the city? The Walton's did. And so they have their family foundation sends 30 to 50 people a year to see a new and it's mayors and planning commissioners and city council members. And they are really trying to say there is a sort of best practices way of developing a place that people like that has worked really well nationally. There's a way to learn about it. And without this whole ecosystem being on the same page. having a common language, having a common understanding of what we're trying to do, it's really hard to do this stuff. And so we've got this culture of my baseline city planner at one of these small towns has heard of and probably worked with DPZ and understands why we're trying to get utilities into the pavement. they disagree with how we do it, but I don't have to explain the baseline. understanding of where we're at. We're all on the same page. We're just disagreeing about the best way to get commonly identified goals.

Speaker 1

They get the why. That is profoundly unique. I wish a wealthy family in every city were to send city staff because that is a huge problem. People don't understand how much power city staff has. Even if a city council is on board, even if planning, city planning is on board with senior, if other, the utility departments and public works and engineering and things and fire are not on board with the same ultimate vision of where are we going and why. it doesn't matter. then city councilors aren't going to overrule their staff when their expert staff is telling them something. They don't want to like put their neck out there. I'm kind of speaking generally, but boy, that is very cool. man, if I could make that happen, I would make that happen real fast. It's replicable though, I think is the other thing I want to say. So I want to start being very frank about the ways that we've been successful, some of which is replicable and some of which is not immediately replicable. The thing that I think any community can do and kind of tying into how InkDev, InkDev has the first place that we had more than one faculty member was Marfa Starkensal. Matthew Petty was a faculty member before me. brought me in. we really leaned in as an organization to training ecosystems, not just small developers by 2017. Because one of the things that we were seeing is how impactful that was in Northwest Arkansas. And so our trainings are based completely around building that common language, that common understanding, that common familiarity with Strong Town, so with Urban 3 and with all of these.

Speaker 2

really, know, things that our CNUers are going to think of as like really baseline, but there are people who've never heard of any of this. And if you start talking to them 10 chapters in, assuming they know all of that, it's really off-putting. And so starting from laying a baseline of common education, advocacy information in your community is something that is super replicable. One of the things that we did early on as a company, is I had some of our interns the first couple of years, I was really interested in our zoning history because the first year on the planning commission was like, well, we just have to change the zoning code. All the rest of this bullshit is meaningless unless we change the zoning code. And so I'm not going to sit in 58 committee meetings about what initiatives and committees and task force we should have. Until we change the zoning code, all of this is just like mental masturbation. go change the zoning code and come back to me in some way, which doesn't even mean you have to fully replace it. But like you can make tweaks and changes that will make a positive impact tomorrow, often changing a couple of words, right? And so Norman, Oklahoma, Matt Peacock, who I went to architecture school with, huge shout out. Matt Peacock was on city council and led eliminating parking minimums by changing the word required. to recommend we saw this. This was in the news lately, which is just like amazing. So good, so good.

Speaker 1

Because by the way, city councilors, no developer that's going to stay in business is going to build something that doesn't have enough parking in their own business. Yes, the bank won't even let you. So let the person who's running that business figure out how much parking they need. But that kind of change is so accessible to people and your council and your commission can make those changes all the time. And so that was a really impactful thing for me getting on council and being like, okay, we have to do this, which means we have to explain to people why we have to do this. And so I started in 2015 doing pretty in-depth research and education in my community. So I went and there was one copy of our urban renewal plan printed in paper in our library resource center, like the references section. was the only copy that was left. So we digitized it and we digitized all of our original zoning maps. And I went back and found all of the planning commission and city council meeting minutes where they talked about when they passed our zoning code. Cause our zoning code is still 80 % what was in there in that 1970s zoning code rewrite. And we pulled out all those key quotes, right? And I talk about them and present them in town all the time. When you you presented in town, what do you mean? Like in front of City Council, public comments or?

Speaker 2

put all of those documents, all of that research work is in one shared Dropbox folder that we host. And we sent it out to the whole planning staff and every city council member has it and the mayor has a copy. And so we've got all this information that otherwise they would all the Sanborn maps, everything that we could find that's useful about this stuff is pulled together. And then there's a presentation in there. When we are doing, I ended up getting asked to, I was at the housing crisis task force last night. me an extra salty. And that kind of stuff, when they're like, hey, will you come and talk to us for 10 minutes? I always just do slides. It's the same, you know, a couple of slides that I'm pulling from stuff and come with more information than people are expecting you to have. with data, come with receipts. Our urban renewal plan did a survey of our zoning code and found that there was a surplus of affordable housing. There was about the right amount of like... middle-class housing and there was an extreme shortage of luxury housing. And luxury housing wasn't illegal to build, people just weren't building it. They were choosing not to, even though was legal. And so the 1970s, Zoning Code Rewrite, they exclusively had all this really junky segregationist stuff in there, which is very helpful to be able to be like, if you are arguing for RSF4 in my town specifically, let me tell you what that was written to accomplish. And then let's see if you want to promote it. even just saying at city council meetings over and over again in public comment, get to where you've got a three minute section of slides that you can give during a public comment section about tangential things. You can go and give slides at your city council meeting anytime you want. When did you start doing that out of curiosity?

Speaker 2

when I was on the Flannery Commission and I realized like you sit through those meetings and you're like anybody can come and talk to us and most of the people who are coming to talk to us are coming and saying insane things. And so not everybody but like if you sit through a bunch of those meetings, right, a lot of our meetings are like six to eight hours long and they'll have 30 public comments and like half of the people are saying stuff that you're like you're on camera, you just said where your address is, you're on TV man, they're recording this. Do you want to rethink what you're saying? And so you also realize like the bar for public comment is like underground. So just go and exceed it. And it'll be so surprising to people that have to sit through all those meetings all the time to have somebody to like come and co-general it be like, okay, so here's the backstory, which receipts on screen. Here's my slides. It's really impactful. And so I did that enough and I'll be part of my job as entitlement. So I have to present to councils a bunch for work anyway. So I can also like tuck it into reasons I'm there, right? asking for a rezoning and here's why and the current zone is RSF4 and here's the history of that and we don't want to take that history forward. So we're asking for this rezoning for XYZ reasons. You know, there's a lot of like professional reasons I'm doing it too. I'm sometimes just annoying, but sometimes it's, you know, justified professional reasons. But you know, we did that so many times now, even people who like are NIMBYs calling in against a project will call in and be like, I mean, I know it's RSF4 and I know how problematic that is, but, and I'm like, making progress. Like I'm doing it. Even people that are calling to defend it know that they can't say they're just wholeheartedly defending it. They have to have all these other reasons, which means we're like starting to move the needle on people understanding what this like baseline that they think is normal is that actually is not like a tablet handed down by Moses. It's like, This bad idea experiment that got done in 1970s, the total opposite of the way we ever built cities before, that is getting a really bad result everywhere and that we could just get rid of.

Speaker 1

That is. think that's really empowering what you're talking about. it's funny, if you're not used to going in front of city council, you're like, city council? It's just so confusing. It wasn't that long ago where I was like, huh, what? But now, because I'm having to go before them more and more, I've started thinking like, man, I just need to go randomly at the exact same thing what you're talking about. I'm going to start going and taking three minutes to not berate. Because this is what one of the counselors told me is, You get a bunch of crazy people. mean, this is, you know, I won't say what council. like, so if you can just get up and cast like, Hey, here's what we want. Like a positive vision and blah, blah. Like that can go over really well. And over time, you know, especially if you're producing a positive body of work for people to see and realize, you know, that takes time. But I think anyone can do that in any city, you know, across the country. And it's so important if you want to do this kind of work, think like, yes, because I don't think people recognize like how powerful city council is like. Everyone's worried about the federal government and the state government a little bit behind that. And don't get me wrong, those are important. I care about those too. Your city councilors, whether it's five of them or nine of them or whatever, they run your city. They have so much power. And most of them, I don't mean this in like a bet, but they're not educated about these things. They're not expert urbanists. They come from different... professional backgrounds, maybe they're even politicians, whatever, and they've got a lot of people coming to them about a lot of different things. And if you don't come and talk to them, and so this kind of soft power part in the influence and culture and education that we wanna be doing, and I'm really inspired by how much you've done and wanna continue doing that. So really bravo to you for that, but also I encourage anyone else that's kind of like.

Speaker 1

trying to do this in the work. is a long game. It's not, let me go do my project. It is a long game. Part of what Intent talks about too in our trainings is you have to be a person that is dedicated to building your positive reputation and trust. You can't do a project that you're trying to get something over on the city and then have the next one go well. There's so much long game. There is so much reputation and trust building. The more that you can be known as somebody that hairs that is going to be reasonable, you know, within reason. And because I think too, I have to acknowledge too, I can be abrasive just as a person. I have such strong feelings about everything and right. Yeah, I burn real hot just as like when I'm really excited about it. I'm so excited about it. I'm so committed. Temperature goes up real quick. Speaker 2 (01:00:11.882) We had a city engineer leave his job reselling. And when I found out, was like, Ooh, that might've been partially me. That might've, I might've contributed to that. I might've pushed him over the edge. I'm so sorry, Josh. I'm so sorry. But I think, you you have to build up all those positive, you got to put the deposits in the bank by being the person that is volunteering on boards. I did it before I had kids. So Actually, my reaction to the first Trump election in 2016 was being like, can't focus on national politics this year. I have to be able to put some of my extra horsepower into caring about my local community and feeling like I'm making a difference. And so that's when I got most involved. I was going to stuff for work, but I got on the Planning Commission in 2016 and got, I was on like five boards that next year. I got very busy doing stuff. I didn't have kids yet. could go in the evenings and do that. And you have to put the time in to be known as somebody that's gonna volunteer, that's gonna care, that's gonna be good for their word, who's gonna, when they make mistakes, own it and say it and try to fix it. And I think you also have to be really consistent. And so one of the things that I'm gonna give as an example is we had a project that I was really proud of. We took three, was three oversized 50s locks. They were in our historic district. They had two really not great 60s split level houses on them that had not great stuff going on. It wasn't a great existing start. They were really oversized. And so we took them and we got a rezoning explaining, showed a little diagram being like, okay, well, if you have three lots, here's what they have to cost. And so then here's what a house on them has to cost. And as we try to provide workforce housing, that's 300 % AMI is the only thing we can build on this. So if you let us rezone, I can make 10 lots out of it and then they can sell, I can have 10 houses that each sell for this. And that's 120 % AMI. They kept this really dumb PowerPoint set of graphics about like what the map is and why we were asking. And, you know, really tried to do this core workforce project housing, workforce housing project. Looks like it's five duplexes. So it looks like five big historic houses. Speaker 2 (01:02:30.114) But it's 10 duplex townhouses parking in the back, metal or stormwater knee, know, met all the codes, all the things that we were so proud of that project. One of the neighbors absolutely hated it when 168 Facebook posts about how bad it was in like a year that tagged the mayor every single time. And then they finally got done that they sold. Three of the 10 buyers immediately turned around and tried to make them Airbnb's. And we had neighbors coming out being like, you said this was going to be workforce housing. Like, and now we've got like football weekend, Airbnb, properties. Thanks, but no thanks. And so we have to have a hearing for our short term rental licenses. And so I personally took time off. got a babysitter to go up to city hall during the hearings for the short term permits. And I went up and said, I asked special permission to build this for workforce housing. And that's what we meant it to be. and you have a permit process for a reason, and you can, and I would encourage you to say no, because that's not why these were built. And that was made clear to the buyers when we built them. And so this isn't the intention. The city has the power to do this. And as the architect of views, you have my support because that's not what we were trying to do. And so, you know, that has some political negative ramifications sometimes, but it also has some really positive ones. People need to be able to out on you trying to do the right thing for your community. And you just have to show up to a lot of meetings, which is free. Like I think a lot of times with InkDev, people feel like they have to have all this money and all this time and all these resources to make a difference. Then like you show up to meetings for free and you have to. And that's a cool story. And I think it does completely build trust. And I think that's what's lost on all this, whether it's people thinking they have to have money or it's just kind of about the thing that you do. So much of this, once again, comes back to relationships and building trust, which I'm curious because I've had, you mentioned Burning Hot a little bit, which I do too. And I joke with this, Matt Hayes, who's an architect on my team, director of architecture construction, that came on board three years ago. Speaker 1 (01:04:44.814) He's a little more even keeled. So when he gets upset, I'm like, Oh, that must have been a really annoying meeting. Um, but what have you done or, you know, maybe the situations and, and I don't maybe it's hard to answer, but I've had issues with city staff and I won't say like which municipality in Oklahoma where I'm going, like I, at this point, I don't know how to work with you. You won't respond to my emails. You literally won't listen to this. You won't listen to that. Like how have you successfully managed that? And frankly, Part of the thing that I'm getting is like, I'm realizing to do this, you want to be trustworthy. You want to build positive relationships. Also, you're literally going to make enemies and people that don't like you. And at least I think that's from where I'm landing because I'm just going, okay, well at this point, I can't let this person get away in the way of all this project. So I'm have to get a little tough. you know, I'm guessing you've dealt with stuff like this before. Do you have any thoughts or how you've managed that over time? I have thoughts, but like they're not really advice. Speaker 2 (01:05:50.466) That has been one of the things about, like this is gonna sound dumb. Let me say before I say it, I know this is gonna sound stupid, but it was really hard for me becoming an adult and realizing that I like couldn't do, if I did the right thing and if I did what I thought was fair and just and right and if I was like being a good person, there would still be people who didn't like me. That was really hard for me. Boy, it took me a long time to learn that, dude. It's kind of funny. feel like I'm, yeah. Yeah. And so I think that like, it was probably even within the last year or two. And it's still a thing that I struggle with, if I'm being really honest, like, you know, it's a thing that I hate when we get sideways with somebody and it happens, right? Like we have professional disagreements with people. We have a couple of people that we used to work with all the time and love that like we've gotten into what I think might be unresolvable professional disagreements and like can't work together anymore. I hate that as a person, right? Like, Again, to say something else stupid, I'm a Libra. I'm all about balance and beauty and harmony. Part of the reason I get really hot in conflict is I don't want to be in conflict. I'll do everything possible to keep the peace and to do the right thing. And so if somebody insists on going on the mattresses, man, am I going to be mad about it? Which is not the most helpful way to approach it. But with City Staff specifically, I would say I have three different approaches. Approach one is really dedicatedly try to build a personal relationship and common ground. And I would say about 30 % of the time that works, right? That like you can get to a place that like you aren't going to agree all the time, but like it can be kind of like funny, right? Like for both of you, but like you can acknowledge like, okay, we're going to butt heads about this, but like we can go out a beer afterwards and everybody. Speaker 1 (01:07:42.542) was about to ask that actually, like specifically. Do you ask some of them to a coffee or beer, a lunch? The thing that is tricky, okay, I want to say this. It's harder, think, maybe, being 30 and female and asking a male city engineer to go get a beer. It's harder to have that land in the like, hey, can we go talk about work and build it? Can we go talk about this thing that well, badly? It's possible, but I will say it feels like it's a thing I've really had to learn how to like. pull off in the way that I mean it. Yes. I also actually think having kids has been helpful for me in my town because I now see city staff as much like at soccer games and the playground as I do. When I was on a playing commission, we would always, as a commission often go get beers after a meeting that ended early. And sometimes city staff would come and sometimes applicants and the public would come, right? Like there's a old kind of towny spot. that's really big, giant tables, and open, really close to city hall. And so it's a place that people would go. And so that was a good opportunity to kind of in groups, ULI and like those kinds of groups that do social type setting events, I think are also really helpful because you can go and have more of a personalized conversation with people. I think that there's that like, these aren't magic numbers, but there's about a third of the time that you can build enough of a social relationship that when you butt heads, you can get there. When that doesn't work, there's about 30 % of the people that I just coexist with, but I am trying not to pick a fight. I am always making sure my I's are dotted and my T's are crossed and they're never gonna catch me doing, I'm always making sure there's nothing they can get me on, but we are tense. Speaker 2 (01:09:48.119) two predators staring across the plains at each other, neither one of them moving. Then I have some small percentage that are just like full on nemesis level, like mutual, mutual nemesis. If I have three people in my city that like, city staff specifically, that if they see our projects come through and they get assigned to those projects, it will take us six months long to get a permit. I had a project where To give an example of what this nemesis relationship is like. I'm like, it's people that I think would probably hit me with their car if they thought they could get away with it. That's what it feels like. That's the vibes. We've got one of them that we had drawn moving a power line pole. There was a pole that was outside of a easement. And so we negotiated with the client project. I was the designer. Because I'm the architect and the landscape architect, we're often doing the site planning drawings and the utility drawings and the architectural drawings. So we can coordinate. I want to... 20-inch eave here, so I need to move that power line over for setbacks from my building. So the site plans have moving power lines. Negotiated it with Swept Co. who's our power company. They're coming out. It's outside the easement. It's an old pole. They were fine. They moved it. It's shown in our permit plans. The fire setback from the building from the lines is determined by where the line is. They get done. We're 8 months into construction. I get a phone call that... one of our city staff has come out and geo-located the pole. And it's eight inches off of where I've shown it on my plan as installed by a third party subcontractor from the power company. Not someone I have any control or inspection or purview over. And it's a 12 inch pole that's eight inches away from where I showed it on a one acre site. And I was like, how'd you even find that? Speaker 1 (01:11:45.426) Like what level- of digging are you doing to find a third party contractor installing a power pole eight inches away from where it's supposed to be? So I have to really admit that I'm a real, you know, acquired taste. And there are some people that would not recommend working with me. And he is one of them. This might sound weird, like it's a little bit encouraging to hear this because I'm because I actually don't like conflict either. I want to get along with people. I want to go build these beautiful places that everyone can celebrate and, try to make the world a better place. you know, it's taken me a while because I just almost confused by it and try to be nice, try to be collaborative, try to be nice. And I'm realizing, OK, well, that's not working anymore. I've got someone that won't look at me. It appears like they can't make eye contact with me. And I'm like, one of the difficult things about government is I believe in good governance. I imagine you believe in good governance too. problem is, like some of the people that I've had to work with and continue to, it's like, if this was in the private sector, I would have fired them so fast if they treated me like this, you know? The thing about government though is somebody is in charge and could fire them and all you have to do is figure out who that is. Speaker 1 (01:13:03.278) Have you working on it. Speaker 2 (01:13:10.51) There are two people that I have this relationship with in the city of in the last 10 years, and I've gotten two of them fired. Yeah. Interesting. Well, no, you're just trying to get a project. Not by doing anything. In charge of what, in charge of firing them, what they're actually like. Just telling with evidence, know, finding that like perfect example story with something in writing that it can be proven and then making sure that the person in charge of knowing how that person's doing a work is aware of that. And often too, the thing I want to say is in city governments are full of absolutely wonderful people who also are trying to change the world for good. And it's not better for them to have that kind of person working there. Like it's not better for the rest of the city staff. And I can guarantee you are not the only person having that experience with somebody on staff who's not great. And so I think that's one of the other things that's useful is like part of the reason we inked up trains people in cohorts is that it is easier if you have a bunch of other people that you can be like, are you guys also having this problem with this person? And if there are 10 of you that can go and be like, okay guys. Speaker 2 (01:14:22.254) We're going to have to reassign this person if you want anything to happen. All of us have tried, all of us are having the same problem. This is not a personality issue of one person not getting along with them. This is a problem for everybody. Boy, this is interesting. I could keep going on this for a while, but this is actually really helpful to hear. So thank you for kind of sharing candidly about some of this stuff. Just getting back to a little bit of business stuff before we wrap up here. As you're growing, I'm just kind of curious from like a business perspective, what has that been like going from one to six to 15? people like what have been some of the biggest challenges for you personally and like growing a team. I would say I have been the biggest challenge to me personally in growing a team. I didn't want to do that. I really want to be a sole proprietor. I didn't think I was going to be good at being a leader. And I didn't know how to do it. I had never really... I didn't have a lot of good models of people that I had worked under that I'd seen how they did that well. And so I didn't really feel equipped or super interested in doing it. I got my team with six accidentally. I was... When I started having babies, I was a sole practitioner and so there was not any opportunity or support to take time off. And so when I got pregnant the first time, was a sole practitioner working on some big contracts. I was working on a really big city contract that took a number of months to finalize signing and I was really worried. I love my city. They're awesome. This is not a complaint. Speaker 2 (01:16:11.424) I was really worried if they found out that I was pregnant, then they wouldn't sign the contract with me because there was nobody else to do the work. And I'm South. And so I hid that I was married and hid that I was pregnant for seven months. And signed the contract and I was like, okay, so I will be on maternity leave two months from now. So sorry. And really realized... I ended up taking a two-week maternity leave. And that wasn't sustainable. And so I partnered together with two other female sole proprietors and we signed on to be backup for each other. We were going to share staff, we bought a building together. And there was this plan of this shared services cooperative so that each one of us, as we needed time off, had somebody to just... projects to you back and forth. And there was somebody to fill in when you were gone. But it's not like a soft way to tell the next part of the story. One of the partners died really suddenly. And it was awful. It was brutal. She was a good friend and she was nice. it was terrible. She had five-year-old at the time. And so I inherited like a group of people who had been working for three of us. The third partner decided that they wanted to, know, they weren't interested in continuing. And so I overnight had went from a sole proprietor with like a third of a part-time staff to having this building and having this team and it was October, 2019. And so we were, I had all of her projects and all of her work and we had to call her clients. We did call 40 times and say, I'm so sorry. She's passed away. What would you like to do? And then it was COVID like six months later. And you know, I had a 10 month old at the time. And it was just awful. And flip side of that is we had this remote work situation already set up. We had been hiring mostly people who were women coming back to work from having been home or we two employees who had really young babies who had come back from maternity who didn't have a job anymore. And so we had this really flexible, really dedicated staff. It was already all set up to be remote. And so we moved into COVID and my business double, you Speaker 2 (01:18:35.05) inherited all the inswork and then my business doubled just on the float lock side that first year of 2020 because we were getting a ton of referrals of work because we were still working at full speed because we were set up to be remote already. So grew an enormous amount during... Had not even caught our breath yet and had this incredible year in 2020. Doubled again in 2021 in terms of revenue and size without growing the staff any. And at that point, we were all just bird down. And so started to slowly grow to try to get to a sustainable place because we'd already fired all the clients that weren't awesome. We weren't working on anything that wasn't incredible work that was pretty lucrative. We were working with people we loved. And so there were projects we were going to say no to, which was like the first round of things that you do. And so then grew not realizing that six to eight would be a really big change. And then started to realize that we just needed more process than we had. At a team of six, you don't need a ton of process because everybody is hearing everything and everybody knows everything that's going on. And so you don't have to write anything down. At eight, we did. it took a while to figure out how to build that process of a slightly bigger company. And so we spent two years doing that. I had a second baby. And then I got divorced right afterwards, like three weeks later. which was another wild year. And then really, think finally got our feet under this to say, okay, this is its own self-sustaining thing, I think treating it like a design project helps. We're designing a company. We have to design what we want the experience to be like for us and for our clients. We have to design what our priorities are and what our process is. And then we have to write that all down and train everybody how to do it consistently. And so I think it has It has been a real whirlwind of growing a company. And I think this has been the first year that I feel like I'm getting to be really intentional about taking a step back and being really thoughtful and having the capacity to grow in a meaningful way. Because I think one of the things I really was resistive to was I didn't want to just scale up my problems. Speaker 2 (01:20:54.412) Like I could tell that structurally, like we weren't there yet. And I knew I could hire more people and like relieve the immediate pressure and that we would just immediately infect them with all of our bad habits that weren't working. Yeah, bring them into a more established system. Yeah, so we had to build the system before we could add the people to it because then we had, you know, we were adding them with this intention and with this system and process and theory and, you know, philosophy that we can explain and was documented. And we're still in that process. And, you know, it's been hard, I think, for some of our older staff who moved through, like, they worked for three different companies working for me, you know, in the last six or seven years. And so I think part of it is just all of this like leaning in together to, this is a little bit chaotic. We're trying really hard and we're still running a very busy business while we're doing all of this. So, you know, also being able to communicate to our clients what's happening and why, and, you know, really bringing them along with us too. really interesting. Do you have any tools or even like software or things like that where you're like, once you discovered it, you were like, my gosh, how was I not using this before? This is so helpful. Maybe it was a book or a process or do you have a few examples of things that you've just run a business? Speaker 2 (01:22:15.95) We have really been trying to work through our software structure. From the design practice side, we're still all on AutoCAD LT, which I feel really strongly about because we're doing site plans, we're working from civil, we do lots of master planning and the landscape as well as architecture. We mostly design really small, simple buildings. So everything being in 2D. And everything being able to be ones that have integrated drawings has been really important to us. But it does mean we have a little bit of a limitation of people who can work for us. Here in architecture, you work in AutoCAD, and you really like traditional architecture. Give us a shout. If you want to learn how to do development and construction, we also are trying to find somebody to be, I think, almost like a development intern kind of position, right? Somebody that wants to see a whole project soup to nuts and also can do some of the design, build, construction coordination. AutoCAD has been a little bit of a limitation for us and we've had some great people who are only Revit that aren't going to be good fit. ClickUp is what we ended up with in terms of project management. I know some people who feel really strongly about monday.com and Asana and Notion. So looking through those, none of them worked great for us. ClickUp has been really helpful, especially a lot of our projects are relatively replicable steps. right? And so there's 27 things that we need to remember to do in schematic design. That can be made into a template. And then every time you start a project, you're starting with all of the steps that you know that you did last time. And you're just adjusting timelines and who it's assigned to. And you can take a lot of notes. I have like, ClickUp is one of those, they don't tell you how to use the tool. It's really open-ended. And so it's overpowered probably for what most people are going to use it for. But I do think it's been a really good way to... aggregate a lot of information learning between projects, which is something we really have been trying to do. Speaker 2 (01:24:11.278) Slack has been something that we both love and struggle with a little bit. We're still a partially remote team. We have employees on the West Coast who are fully remote. We've had employees in town who are really introverted and just don't like coming in the office and work from home. And then we've got most of our team is in the office. And so Slack has been one way too that we really do still try to build this culture of having a home life and having a home work life balance and being able to be off. and be able to set your own schedule to some extent. And so one of the things that we try to do is have a hierarchy of communication that if you get an email, we don't have an expectation you're responding to that email for like a week because you're working and you're doing stuff. So, we never send emails that are really urgent. Slack is our internal communication method. And so you can Slack something to somebody at any time of day. and everybody is expected to have their Slack notifications turned off when they're not in the office. So if you get a Slack, the expectation is, I was working right now and I'm sending this to you while I'm working on it. I need you to respond next time you're working, which may not be right now. And so that's a 24 hour response time. And then we tell everybody, if you get a text, there shouldn't be very many of them, but it does mean, I'm so sorry to interrupt you. I do need something right now. And then, know, an unscheduled phone call is like something might actually be on fire. But, you know, part of this, I think, is us trying to just build this out. How do we all work? You know, we're a really young company. We've got kind of our series of interns. We're in our early 20s. And then we've got kind of our mid-age staff, our all mid-30s. And we've got a bunch of little kids, you know, combination of all of our team. And so us trying to figure out how to do that has felt like a real trial and error. But I don't know that we haven't found our software that feels like it's been lies changing yet. Might be the short answer. Speaker 1 (01:26:09.97) Well, no, that's really helpful because I'm always trying. We're having to try things that don't quite work. I just gave up on Sana actually and click up literally on my list for today. like, that's the next one. I've been through a few things. through the way that we use it sometime because it took us a while to figure out how to use it so I don't think we're using it right but we're using it in a way that's really helpful. Yeah. So I don't know how much email you have to deal with. But Superhuman has been one of my favorite apps for email. Oh, man. Okay. It's not even like so much AI generated. It's more like you can do everything from your keyboard. You don't have to leave it. I can set reminders in like two seconds. I can put calendar invites with Zoom links in like two seconds, schedule things, insert my... It's amazing how helpful it is for us. And Matt loves it too. Just... And our whole team. One of the coolest thing is... get... The coolest thing actually is... literally writing this down. Speaker 1 (01:26:57.902) Say you and I were emailing and you're a client and rather than like forwarding an email to someone, blah, blah, and interrupting all, I can literally comment to people into the thread from my team at Matt, at Mel, at Nolan. And they can see the whole thread and we can have a little internal conversation about the thread as that threads going on without disrupting the email or absolutely accidentally replying all or something. Super, super, super helpful. But so good, I'm going to try to up and I recommend superhuman. I don't get paid. I think I know I don't I don't get paid to say any of this except ooh, okay Intim did start doing product sponsors and I kept I pitched this to the board I was like this is the way AIA gets paid this the way it looks like ASLA gets paid I described to them that like my ideal product sponsor is somebody that I already feel really passionate about Right. It's like a product that everybody is using already and we all already love and so the example I kept using to our board trying to come in some this was a good idea was James Hardy And then I met a James Hardy rep and I was like, wait, would you guys sponsor us? they are. They're our new Small Bytes sponsor, which is our lecture series that happens twice a month, sponsored by James Hardy, which I'm just like thrilled by. Because if you look at photos of literally anybody's work, I'm like, you know what you see? I see some James. off Speaker 1 (01:28:11.95) Yeah, no, that's great. By the way, we use AutoCAD too. I don't use AutoCAD. I use SketchUp and AutoCAD. So that's all we use and it works so well because I designed in SketchUp and Matt will design in mainly AutoCAD but also SketchUp sometimes. But we'll kind of go back and forth like SketchUp 3D model back to AutoCAD to refine. Once it gets refined more, work out some code things, bring it back into SketchUp to like really see it and feel it and understand it and then back into AutoCAD for like final construction drawings. It's been fun to collaborate between us two. We use SketchUp when we have to do 3D stuff for, you know, we've got a couple of cities that'll want a 3D model of wanting to see what something looks like. Goes into SketchUp and it's quick and easy. Yeah. I agree. mean, am a software is a tool. It's not a solution, right? Like it's a hammer, but like the hammer alone can't build the house. you can have a better hammer or a worse hammer, but And what is the incremental difference, know, if it's 5 % better, it takes you hours and hours of time to onboard and teach other people. Yeah. Speaker 2 (01:29:13.486) That's also been my opinion about Revit is we work with a couple of we're doing some really fun partnership projects, which I'm loving. We've got some partnership projects with Chromebird, Jennifer Griffin and Tulsa and Providence. And like, they're so fun. I love all of them. Yes, it's it is like one of the most fun things that we're doing is doing more partnership projects. They're all all the way Revit. yeah. Speaker 2 (01:29:37.9) And so there are times that I'll be like, yeah, I'll just go in and change that Eve detail. Like I could do it on the call right now and send it back to you. And they're like, that's, that's not how Revit works. Like I'm going to have to schedule that and send it to a person. It might take them six hours to update this. And the products they're getting is better, right? Like the thing that they have at the end of it is a model that is a lot more information, but Revit is not able to, unless you were using it in really specific way to be able to do not all the information. You can't just sketch something in and be like, it's kind of like I have a working theory that the AutoCAD works better in a design build workflow because you are kind of involved in the whole process where you just don't need as much detail because you know what you're doing. And you still got to communicate to subs. You don't want to like have to have everything a conversation, but we work out, know what we, well, we're still getting, say we know, we're getting, but we're trying to find that balance of what do we need to communicate in a set of plans and what can we leave for the field? it's actually better that way. You know, we're in, so anyway, that's my little working theory. No, we struggle with it too, but I feel the same way. We're like, the product we're making is the drawings, but the drawings are just a set of directions. so if the directions aren't clear, it doesn't matter if the directions are pretty. And so we really lean into, as a company, putting a photograph of something in a set with a leader note on I mean, like, I didn't need to redraw this for you. You can see what I want in this picture. And so we've got... Right. Speaker 2 (01:31:10.53) You know, we get really nerdy about our building science details, but there's a lot of stuff, especially in renovations, that just like noted photos are so helpful to a contractor. And, you know, we're still, we're just about to probably grow out of this size, but we're still at the size that I am sometimes in the field drawing a detail on a piece of lumber in the field and then like taking a picture of it to send it to the owner. like, okay, here's what I just told your guys to do. Some of that's kind of fun too. Like, you know, it's hard to let go because you're like, feel like you're building something, you know? And I don't want to ever kind of lose that, that idea of there's that tension of having it all. You want enough worked out upfront where you don't have surprises, budget things that you didn't foresee, whatever. There's also the thing is if you try to impose and make every decision two years before the final completion, it's kind of like trying to write a book all at once. Like that's a process that happens. So I talk about like a project. is letting a story unfold. You don't impose the story, you let it unfold. But you might have the plot lines, right? You don't want to be just, maybe we'll see what happens unless you've just got a billion dollar project or something and the budget doesn't matter, time constraints don't matter. But anyway, something I think about. don't pick the like know that you're going to put wallpaper there but don't pick the wallpaper. 100 % time to order. And we just put an allowance in. We know about how much it costs and make it fit in the budget. And if it doesn't, maybe you can take it from somewhere else. Speaker 2 (01:32:36.13) Yeah, interior designing is the place that I find out the most. The times that we do interior design on something, and we've fixed all the hardware, we've fixed all the light fixtures, we've fixed the wallpaper, and then it's two years before they build it, and then I see it before they build it, and I'm like, I want to change everything. I don't like any of it. Yeah, I feel the same way. Planting design is the same way. often are not, like we're showing where beds are and giving rough quantities, but like we're not doing a full detailed planting plan until right before they plant it because it'll just get value engineered. Like we need to know how much money we have left. We need to know what changes got made to the building as we're going. And so we are often doing, yeah, what's, that's a very incremental thing, right? What's the minimum viable amount of information that we need to do a good job at this phase? and then what's the information that we don't need yet and we might actually be better off not picking yet, that we actually would be better off to have six months from now. because we'll know more. Yeah, that's cool. Last question. No, I agree. It is. It is a feature, not a bug. And once again, it goes back to that. I really love the design build workflow because it enables all of these things. If you're not in a design build workflow, if you're the architect, you have to have it all worked out basically. Do you have any examples of, I mean, growing a business, all the things you've done, it's hard as you've talked about. Speaker 2 (01:33:35.71) It's a feature, not a flaw. Speaker 1 (01:34:00.982) know, multiple things, whether it's projects that didn't go well or a bunch of clients getting dumped on you and then you're constantly learning and growing and making mistakes and trying new things, hiring new people, all that, realizing your own weaknesses. Do you have any, a really good example of like a failure or perceived failure that turned into something that really you're thankful for with success? Like maybe a favorite failure or something like that in kind of the past 10 years of your business. Yeah. I mean, I think I'm probably in it right now, right? Of like the realizing all of this stuff. Cause it actually, also feels like a real, you know, thirties or you're like decade of growth. I feel like I have had this series of realizations of like things that once you see that nearly, oh, that's really obvious. Okay, sure. No, can see how that happens and what happened there to make that. But I think I have really, not always been the most self-aware about how and why we're making decisions. I'm just always all the way in the weeds and excited and interested in the thing that we're getting into and being really entrepreneurial but also just really curious. And so getting us into all of these different kinds of business versions and Eric Krumberg and Elizabeth Ward and I are going to write a zoning code and now we're doing developer trainings and we're diving into all this stuff. At one point I had a business plan to start an art and antiques store called Ivy House that we were going to sell directly to designers. It's a beautiful business plan. would have been a great business. Maybe someday we'll start it. We're diving in all the time. It was really good for me to have to get to a place business-wise to be like, I'm making problems for myself and other people by not being disciplined enough. And that's both a great thing about me and that's a thing that I'm going to have to learn to be more structured about. And so I think that maybe my own self is probably my favorite failure of like learning to see the like all every pro has a con. Speaker 2 (01:36:12.012) Right? Like every strength is also a weakness and every weakness is also a strength, right? Like it, all of it, just, you have to be self-aware enough to come up with something. And this is something I also think is true about renovations and rehabs and adaptive reuse. You have to be able to understand what the building is to do something good with it. And so you have to be able to spot the strengths and the weaknesses and then design a good solution that getting you something good at the end. And you just have to be flexible and fluid about that, right? One of the things about development, I've made this joke a couple of times, so this is also something people may have heard, but I joke, I'm actually, I'm a very high strung person. I'm pretty anxious and pretty high strung, and I joke like I would be this high strung about being an accountant. And so I just picked a business that like real estate is hard and risky and changes constantly in the project. economics nationally aren't the same when you started, you when you end a project is when you start on a project and interest rates are now 8%. And now they're 3 % and changing. Now there's terrorists, lumber is going to double again. Like it's constantly changing. It's really high risk. It's constantly very high speed. And so you just have to learn to be really fluid and like unimpacted by that. Right? Like you do the best thing you can do currently. Another's terrorist. Speaker 2 (01:37:39.978) with the information that you have. And tomorrow, when you have new information, you'll do the best thing that you can there. But I think I have really leaned into in my 30s being able to spot both in myself and in other people and in buildings and in projects and in client company structures and things, being able to have a better curious, not judgmental understanding. of what is really happening so that you can then make intentional decisions to get to an intentional outcome. I think is a thing that has been like that process through design work and business work and construction work and personal relationships, I think has been a real theme of the last year or two, which is yielding really, really great results. that is a fantastic answer and like way to end too. So that's awesome. Gosh, I could keep talking to you for another hour and a half because we've got a lot of overlapping things going on. But for the sake of the podcast and listeners, we'll end here. can you... How do people follow you, get in touch with you, your business website, all of that? Yeah. So we've talked a bunch about InkDev because it's the thing that I'm spending quite a bit of time doing. membership is the best way to be a part of that. There is a Slack group for InkDev. You can visit incrementaldevelopment.org. You can follow us on Instagram at incrementaldev, D-E-V, LinkedIn, Incremental Development Alliance. We've got tons of trainings going on this year. got a national virtual boot camp that takes projects all the way through pre-development sponsored by James Hardy. It's kicking off next week on the 25th. So with four people with a development project idea that want to make their neighborhood stronger, we've got one kicking off right now, but we almost always have one coming up. My company name is Flitlock Lab. Right now, secret preview. It might not be 12 months from now, but right now. Speaker 2 (01:39:44.576) We're Floatlock Lab, L-A-B, which is Landscape Architecture Building. It's our website and our socials. And that's probably the best way to get a hold of me. I'm never able to, I don't check any of our socials, but we do have people that check those. If it was just me, I would never respond to anything. You have to know yourself, right? Solve around your own failures. Exactly. Totally, totally. can't do everything. Can't be good at everything. You're like a Renaissance woman already. So mean, the fact that you don't do social media is just, And it'll take me at least a week if he said me anyway. Just have that expected. That's best case scenario. That's our company policy. I want to check out Superhuman though. Maybe we'll get it down. Bye bye. Speaker 1 (01:40:27.288) Let me know. me know. Well, Ali, hey, really great to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on and sharing your thoughts. It's been a really fun conversation. Hey, thanks so much for having me. This was really fun. We will have to do a repeat talking about, think we're really similar places just in terms of trying to solve all this stuff. So I'm really excited to catch up again soon. Thank you so much for having me. This was really fun. All right, thanks. See ya. If you've been enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe and share with your friends. And if you're listening on Apple or Spotify, please leave us a five star review. Thanks so much for listening and catch you on the next episode.