What I've learned about the world and applied to tiny homes.

JoAnna (my wife) and I tried long and hard to make business and life work out. 

It was all us trying ourselves, learning through the school of hard knocks. 

I’ve always had an insight for what could work, what was up and coming, or what was needed because was currently a gap in the marketplace. 

It seemed that the harder we tried, the deeper into debt we went. 

Life has taught us many things and has left us in the perfect position to be able to help others. 

All of of our trials were actually God’s blessings in disguise. 

It’s amazing what we can learn from situations by reflecting on them, and not just blaming everyone else and the world around us for the positions that we have put ourselves in. 

You and I have no control over what God and life throw at us, but we can control how we respond to that situation. 

JoAnna and I have learned to always look for the learning from a situation and make the next one better than the last, no matter what we are facing. 

This has only made us stronger. 

I went to university for civil engineering. 

I loved it while I was there. 

I loved the co-op positions that I held working in commercial construction management. 

Looking into the future, however, I could see that I was going to get bored. 

If there is one thing that I have learned about myself, it is that I am an ideas man. 

I am constantly thinking of new ideas and how to execute them (roughly). 

I am not a detail loving person. 

I didn’t quite know that about myself when I was in university, just that something wasn’t right when I was there.

It’s a good thing I got out of engineering when I did. 

However, I did learn a lot that I still use to this day.

Next, I joined my dad as a general contractor doing residential renovations. 

I like to say that together we took his company from doing small siding and roofing jobs to much larger upscale renovations and additions.

Again, I enjoyed what I was doing. 

But being an ideas person, I was always having new ideas about how to do things. 

My dad, not so much. 

He’d had his hay-day already, run with his ideas, and been burned. 

He was now much more comfortable being stable. 

I had already talked him into incorporating a design division (me and JoAnna!) into our contracting company, thereby selling design / build projects. 

It was a gap in the marketplace that I saw. 

Residential design was not being handled quite properly. 

Sure, there were great architectural designers, and great interior designers, but few of them knew enough about the other side of design to bring the ideas to life properly. 

We combined those two disciplines into one design contract. 

Then the recession of 2008 hit us. 

We were surviving, but only because my dad had saved up from the stable times for those inevitable tougher times. 

The recession and its effect lasted much longer than the savings did. 

Being the ideas man, I thought that if we started an entirely new design company, we could split to the two divisions into two companies, and have the marketing and sales of each company feed off of each other. 

My dad didn’t like that idea. 

So I left, and started the design company, White Willow Design, on my own. 

Wow, did I learn a lot there!

There was so much more to running a business than I thought!

And you still had to get some paying work done somewhere in there. 

I once worked out that I got paid $17 per hour during my first year in business. 

So I didn’t fail, but it was certainly a far cry from the stable secure weekly paycheque I had been getting when with my dad. 

JoAnna and I struggled for 10 years (and still going) with the design company. 

We had our great years, but had more mediocre years that more than made up for the great years. 

There were so many things we learned from it all, however. 

Remember, reflection and learning are at the centre of everything we do. 

Through all of that, we actually had another business running. 

In our spare time, JoAnna and I flipped houses. 

We would take everything we had, buy a rundown house, borrow a ton more money, fix it all up, and sell it again. 

On our last house flip, we completely gutted and redesigned, adding another level, and redid an entire in-ground pool system. 

And in all of this, we made some money, but never very much. 

With the last house flip we did, my accountant asked me when all was said and done, “What would you say if I told you you only made $9,000 on that house?” 

I replied with, “Then I still have never lost money on a flip!”

Mind you, that $9,000 was all we had to show for 11 months of our own sweat and tears… 

I decided there was too much competition already in house flipping. 

To do something great, do something that no one else is doing. 

After all that, we didn’t have enough left over to pay back all our debts we took on to do these renovations. 

So we sold all of our assets, many of our possessions, and moved into a rental apartment. 

Oh, but we bought a sailboat (a slight fixer upper).

We decided that we would like to spend all of our spare time and money doing something fun rather than flipping houses that didn’t get us further ahead financially anyways. 

And somewhere in all of that head space of not having to worry about a mortgage and maintenance and spending time out on the water relaxing, a sense of clarity arrived. 

We didn’t have a clue about how to manage money. 

No one taught us. 

We had had to learn the hard way. 

No wonder why we had been floundering in everything we tried. 

The biggest realization here was learning to live within our means. 

It seems that when people’s (us included) means increase, so do their “needs”, and today’s world seems to enjoy living just (of very far) outside of those means, however great they are. 

Learning to live within them and be happy was a huge step in our downsizing journey. 

And that’s the funny thing about happiness. 

We didn’t learn to be happy with less. 

Having less to worry about just made us more happy. 

And of course, worrying about less gave me the ability to have some more great ideas!

The design company had been slowly shifting gears a bit.

I noticed that we were getting more projects for duplexing houses. 

And once in that world, there was a lot of it going on. 

A normal person might have just taken those projects and called it good that they had work. 

I looked into and thought about why these projects were happening. 

It was the housing market growing. 

And then I thought about how we could help this sector even more. 

The answer that came to me was tiny homes! 

This is a sector that is far underserved. 

But even those serving in it are all doing the similar things. 

I have set out to do this differently

As far as I know, we are the only tiny home company building to the Ontario Building Code, instead of trying to get the powers that be to try to change the code to fit their buildings. 

So here is a list of some of the greatest things I have learned over the years:

• Live within your means, and happiness will arrive
• Bend the idea to fit the regulations. It might be tricky, but in the end, it’s easier than trying to change the regulations themselves. 
• Living well is a function of design. If you design the space you live in to reflect who you are, then you will be happy in it. Bending yourself to your area does’t work. This is not only your house space, this is your head space, your work environment, even what you do for a living. 
• Spend your extra time and money on things that are important to you. Don’t waste your life doing what the rest of the world thinks you should be doing. 
• And finally, there are as many ideas about off grid electrical energy as there are people in the world. Find something that works for you, champion it, and stick with it. (More on this later). 

Learn from me. 

I’ve already made many of the mistakes so you don’t have to.