It feels like if you can get through the last 6 years as a startup in the new residential construction industry you can get through anything that lies ahead.

Material price shocks and shortages.

Labor disruption from Covid.

Permitting and inspection slowdowns.

Supply chain and logistics chaos.

Financing and contract exposure.

Cash flow whiplash.

Hi. My name is Brand and I am the founder of Everywhere, and we are still alive and kicking somehow.

Everywhere was something I dove into head-first because I wanted a challenge. I always wanted to design homes when I was younger but my High School CAD teacher told me I would never be an architect because my grades were so bad in school. So I gave up on it right out of high school because I thought High School teachers were smart. I took a different path of design and code and learned the ins and outs of marketing, branding and the internet.

In 2017 I launched Everywhere as an experimental business traveling around the West in a modified 30 foot travel trailer. We created a branded social media road trip before it was cool or even a thing. We went viral and grew our Instagram following very quickly. People were so impressed with our little tiny home on wheels that our family was living out of, we thought it made the most sense to start building really cool tiny homes based on the demand and feedback we got through our travels.

We started posting concept designs on Instagram and people were really excited. It seemed like a no brainer at the time. Tiny homes were just starting to catch fire and it was exactly what we just came from so there was no one more qualified to make something happen than us we felt like. Long story short, we created a design for a tiny home, found someone to create 3D renderings for it and we prepared to start figuring out how to build these things. The only problem was the demand exploded overnight, Dwell Magazine ran a feature on the best tiny home companies in America, used our rendering, and put us at the very top of their list. We weren't ready for it at all.

My vision initially was actually the opposite, but a lot of times in life, the opposite outcome is what happens.

We quickly realized that focusing on tiny homes was not going to work out. Banks wouldn't fund them, HOAs wouldn't let you park them and counties wouldn't permit them. It was a dead end. So we had to respond immediately.

I designed the Ayfraym and it was an instant success. Similar to the Dwell Magazine feature, I posted a rendering on Instagram and it received 25,000 likes in 24 hours and our emails were flooded with requests. I quickly learned though that too many eyeballs on an idea is not always the best thing.

Right as the Ayfraym was getting popular and we were starting to figure things out more, Covid happened. Materials price shocks hit. Demand for new homes, especially rural cabins, spiked almost overnight, and people came to us in numbers we'd never seen. We were growing quick and I needed help fast.

I made a catastrophic mistake that almost killed Everywhere.

I hired someone to run operations and let them manage the rest of everything. The bank account. Hiring their own team. Everything. Gave them too much power. I wanted to focus on the design and software while I thought I could just have someone else build the operations side. This operations guy hired a bunch of his local high school buddies and told me we were going to crush it. I believed him.

I was totally wrong.

We had close to $10M in pending contracts and started taking deposits on them. We thought we could stay on budget for these clients but when the materials shortages happened and increased costs started going through the roof, it changed everything. We grew our team to close to 20 people, so payroll wasn't cheap. Now we had payroll and we had bloated materials pricing and labor shortages all at the same time.

It was like a bomb went off.

We had to get back to clients and tell them we were way out of budget now. We had salaries to cover. Increased materials costs. I was renting a house and the landlord immediately wanted to sell the house due to Covid housing pricing so we were essentially kicked out of the rental house and had no place to go.

I made the decision to offer refunds back to all of the clients we had taken money from, instead of filing for bankruptcy.

Then, out of the blue, a lead came in from the Arizona Cardinals, and we won the bid to build 10 VIP suite casitas in the endzone of State Farm Stadium. Because of that we were able to start refunding back most of the funds to the clients we promised refunds to.

Building these casitas and delivering them for install inside an NFL stadium under a hard deadline, with an organization that doesn't tolerate excuses, forced me to rethink how our process works. Not "trust the guy with the high school buddies" processes. Real ones.

I ran that project myself, start to finish. Every decision, every vendor call, every deadline went through me directly. No operations layer in between. It came in on time, on budget, no surprises for the client. That wasn't luck. That was the difference between having someone else own the outcome and owning it myself.

Once we climbed out of that hole, I made a decision: I was never again going to let someone else own the parts of this business that could sink it. Design and software could scale through other people. Contracts, cash flow, and client commitments could not, not until they were bulletproof enough that they'd survive me handing them off.

So we rebuilt from the ground up.

We fixed who we work with. Back in the early days, virality brought us everyone: dreamers, tire kickers, people who loved the rendering but had no financing, no site, no real plan to build. We said yes to too many of them, and it cost the clients who were actually ready. Today, we qualify before we engage. We're built for people who are prepared to build, not people who want to window shop a rendering. That single change did more for client experience than almost anything else.

We fixed the visibility. I spent the last two years building our own software backend from the ground up, tracking every phase of a build, every decision, every update, visible to the client in real time. No more wondering where things stand. No more finding out about a change three weeks after it happened. The client sees what we see, when we see it.

We fixed who's accountable. There's no operations layer between me and the decisions that matter anymore. If a client has a problem with budget, timeline, or scope, it comes to me directly, fast.

None of this makes construction easy. Materials still move. Weather still happens. But the difference between Everywhere in 2021 and Everywhere now isn't that the industry got calmer, it didn't. It's that we stopped being a company that could be knocked over by its own growth.

Brand Winnie
Founder of Everywhere