From Napkin Drawing to the Pacific Coast Builders Conference, Persistence Marks the Road

When starting a company, certain terms carry power and we hear them a lot: disruptive, innovative, game-changing. Those of us who have pushed a dream from a napkin sketch to a tangible solution know the value of those terms and cultivate them. As SigmaDek begins its next phase of growth, I consider what terms and their values got us to this point. While we use many terms – reinventing, game-changing, sustainable, quality, safe - to define our product, the one that defines our attitude is persistence.

Like most good solutions, SigmaDek started with a question: Why mount composite deck board with a 25-year guarantee on substrate that deteriorates in seven? It was a ridiculous situation that confounded consumers, contractors and retailers alike. Once that question landed on our radar, we saw all of the other issues surrounding wood decks: customers purchased a product that was not sustainable, easy to maintain or safe; contractors used expensive labor on time-consuming, messy and sometimes dangerous construction (cutting wood in the field takes its share of fingers). Retailers were stuck in the middle, with no alternatives to suggest.

We knew it wouldn’t work to solve just one problem, we had to solve them all. We compiled all of the problems heard over 18 years of selling decks and decided to end them with one meticulously engineered solution.

For me, finding that solution was the result of everything I’d learned on the job. I’d moved from yardman to district manager for a lumber yard and quickly discovered that most people shop more for solutions than products. After developing over 20 products that functioned as solutions, that question and all its connected issues bothered me. I was ready to put the nagging deck question to rest.

So SigmaDek was born. We started as a ragtag band of brothers with limited resources and a great design. But even the best ideas come with unseen obstacles. What we thought were ideal solutions nearly upended us when source materials from China became overladen with duty fees and our factory in Thailand ended up under eight feet of water after a flood.

That was where persistence kicked in. After years of development, planning and climbing mental and financial mountains, those setbacks might have ended us had we not made one clear, simple decision at the start: No quitting. We would persist until the road ended, period. Once we made that one important decision, every decision after that was about plowing forward.

By persisting, we were able to pivot and bring resources and manufacturing to North America, where we could leap hurdles with greater speed. We were able to bring green hydroelectric energy into the picture, find partners in Mike Holmes and Home Depot Canada and build a sophisticated solution to a very big problem in a building category that tops $8 billion. We were able to showcase our product at PCBC last week in California.

Revolutionary ideas need time to grow. They also require luck, imagination, serendipity, hard work and something as simple as a drawing on a napkin. But to turn ideas into reality they need one simple, unshakeable decision up front: Persist, don’t quit.