I love listening to podcasts about entrepreneurs' success stories. Podcasts like ‘How I Built This’, ‘Hitting the Mark’ and ‘Wisdom from the Top’ are a few of my favourites. These are all interviews shows with a host talking to CEOs and founders of some of the biggest and most influential companies in the world. 

The reason I love these podcasts is that they reveal the stories behind the success. Each and everyone of these incredibly inspiring people has some kind of heroic story of overcoming huge hurdles, navigating massive uncertainty and purservering through epic failures before they finally got some traction, understood their calling or sore the light!

I’ve drawn great strength from hearing these stories. It’s all too easy to see successful businesses, companies or people and compare your lack of (perceived) progress to them. It's encouraging to hear that the path to achieving big goals looks more like a zig zagging rollercoaster rather than a smooth curve of growth.

If I was to write a book about our experiences as a prefab building startup, I would’ve dedicated a whole chapter to this week. I can’t think of a clever chapter title right now but something like ‘It's ok to cry at work’ or ‘At least you have your health’ might work.

This week started off well. The pump we needed for our form machine arrived and Matt had blocked out some time to get it installed. We’d put out a call to our network to see if anyone is interested in working with us and we also got a message from our landlord that they are going to let us stay in the factory! This was a HUGE relief for us as we are only on a 12 month lease. Things were looking pretty bloody chipper!

Fast forward a few days we got a call from the bank saying that they can’t give us a personal loan for the timber we need to build our house because they have to go off last year's tax return. They’d explicitly said to us that given Covid, they were willing to look at this year's financial projections and previous years records but decided at the last minute to only go by the latest tax return. 

The next day the landlord rings up and says that they’d like to increase the rent by 10% - a million bucks in our mind considering how little money we have right now. The final straw was when we went to confirm the price of the timber we wanted to get with the personal loan and it has gone up by 65%. 

The week that had started with so much excitement has ended in a giant pile of uncertainty. I know enough now to stop asking Matt if we should just pull the plug and call it quits before we get in any further. It’s happened 3 or 4 times over the years, after weeks like this where I genuinely feel like there is no more fight left in me. No more money, no more energy, no more strength. I joke that Matt’s spent so much time in Bunnings that he’d make a great employee. We could sell everything, work for other people and slowly pay back all of our debt. It would suck but it would also be easy, precidtable and less of a the total mind fuck than what we are dealing with today. 

I know what Matt's answer will be because he knows why he’s doing all of this. His purpose and mission is so strong that while any other person (myself included) would give up, throw in the towel, call it quits, he is simply driven to push harder. 

The why is simple. It’s to build affordable, high quality, energy efficient homes. 

I often joke that our competition is Metricon, but Matts is not joking. He sees no reason why an average family can’t afford a well built, well designed, quality home that doesn’t cost a fortune to keep liveable. The way he does this is by creating software and systems that help automate the building process. From programmes to help calculate the amount of raw materials required to a program that maximises the layout of the building elements for the CNC machine. We’re basically a tech startup.

In Simon Sinek's book ‘Start with Why’ he argues that all businesses are essentially the same and it is the WHY that sets them apart. Take Apple for example - they make computers but so do stacks of other companies. What makes Apple different is their why: Think different. While every other computer company is showing off about the size of their RAM Apple is showing images of cool teenagers making music in their bedroom.

Sineks uses ‘The Golden Circle’ to illustrate why we need to start with why. Here's a few quick definitions…

WHAT refers to what you do. Every single business can answer this one. We make prefabricated building elements.

HOW refers to how you do the what. Most businesses can answer this one - it normally appears as your ‘unique selling proposition’, what makes your WHAT different from others. In our case we’ve developed software to streamline building processes.

WHY is why you do the what. Few businesses can answer this question. The why is your purpose, your mission. Why does your company exist? In our case it’s to build affordable, high quality, energy efficient homes.

Most businesses start from the outside in - focusing on the WHAT, then the HOW and lastly, if at all, the WHY. Sineks points out that the most inspired businesses work from the WHY to WHAT. Using Apple as an example again, they have used ‘think different’ to take the lead in computers, mobile phones, music players (iPod) and even totally disrupt the music industry itself with iTunes - they didn't invent the MP3’s but they nailed the selling of them. They are always led by their why: Think different.

After a week like we’ve just had, I’ve had to refocus on the ‘why’ but it's not hard…

I woke up this morning to the stretching of rats in the roof. I walked over the threadbare carpet avoiding the potholes from missing floorboards to the bathroom. I had a lukewarm shower because the water pipes are so old and shitty that they literally scream if the water is too hot. We pay some jerk $1500 a month to live in a house that they would never consider livable. It's going to cost us $450k to use our prefab building system to build a completely insulated, beautifully designed 4 bedroom, 3 bathroom home with a rooftop garden and external studio office. The repayments on our mortgage will be the same, if not less, than what we’re paying right now.

That’s our why. To create space for a family to live in and be proud of.