In the current AI boom, I’m feeling blessed to have landed in an industry that still requires a considerable amount of manual labor at the end step that delivers value.
Many industries deliver value through software and knowledge work. That used to be hard to put together, because of the high cost of skilled office workers needed to produce the research, the decks, the PowerPoints, the codebases, the APIs. Now AI has come and taken all of that, and reduced the cost of producing those deliverables significantly.
The construction industry, the built environment, sits on the other side of that shift. It aligns with what many influential thinkers are saying: the value has come back to companies focusing on hardware. Or in my view, to companies delivering value on the ground.
A low door into a big house
Starting a renovation company, for me, had always been a low-barrier-to-entry, positive-cash-flow business that sets the ground for the next evolution.
And that next evolution is what’s exciting. The accreditations that benefit an interior design company, and the soft skills and capabilities acquired inside the firm — project management in the built environment, safety, design, documentation, client management — all lend themselves to adjacencies beyond interior design and renovation.
You could branch out into implementing technology-enabled IoT hardware. All with a much smaller workforce, and without an engineering-heavy founding team.
Building the capabilities while small
For ourselves, we’re already building internal tools with AI, eliminating the need for a third-party ERP suite. We get to tailor it to how we believe our client experience and designer experience should work.
We’ve also used AI as a layer for knowledge capture and knowledge delivery, with a repository of all our learnings saved to a central wiki that designers can access.
I won’t ramble on too long. But we’re very excited that, as a small company, we’re building many of the capabilities that will help us scale in the future.
And we’re thankful for the ability, and the foresight, to build this fast while the company is still small. It goes back to my earlier thoughts about migration: when a company grows, change gets much harder, because people have learned the old ways. Starting fresh with the new ways isn’t just exciting. It’s effective.