Stories from the work

A good answer to scope that quietly grewThe architect on 301 Osborn, originally contracted for investor-facing CAD floor plans, sent back a full schematic design set and his own building code synopsis, way beyond scope, plus a request to also take on the projeTeaching moment Betting the schedule on one architect's authorityThe building was too dark to scan any way but LiDAR.High-stakes save Building it in house instead of paying for it twiceOutside architecture firms quoted $300,000 to $400,000 to carry LIEF's Midtown Phoenix tower conversion through design development.The small detail Choosing the architect who draws over the one who watchesI had investors interested in a Midtown Phoenix building, and they wanted a full architectural set.Strong opinion Correcting your own bad news the same day you find out it was wrongA code and condition analysis flagged the building's parking garage as a top tier structural risk.Mistake and repair Deciding to broker his own building's saleA buyer surfaced for a LÏEF project.Strong opinion Reading the fine print on a deferred payment that never actually endedAn architect we brought on in February 2026 needed part of his fee structured as deferred compensation, because the equity raise was moving slow.The honest call Rebuilding a tower off the wrong building's blueprintsThe Revit shell rebuild for 301 W Osborn had stalled.Mistake and repair Running the comps before answering the cell tower offer301 W Osborn came with an existing T-Mobile rooftop antenna lease.High-stakes save Selling the easement, keeping the buildingAfter we signed a letter of intent to sell an 85-year rooftop easement at 301 W Osborn, the draft language granted the buyer an exclusive easement over the entire rooftop.The small detail Teaching the system to catch its own mistakeRunning architecture in house meant our own team, not an outside firm's second set of eyes, was responsible for catching our own errors before they became expensive change orders in the field.Teaching moment The nine and a half foot error the agents caught themselvesOn the Midtown Phoenix tower we built an agentic system to run architecture work.The small detail The wrong buildingWe had a Revit model running for 301 West Osborn, and for a while nobody caught that the machine had actually been referencing a 1971 structural set for the building across the street, not the one we owned.Mistake and repair Trusting a model because it looked finishedBefore the blind second pass was a rule, I trusted a model because it looked finished.Mistake and repair Winning a fire code appeal by refusing to touch the buildingThe 1971 building's underground parking garage runs past the distance fire code allows for truck access, and the structural columns on the parking deck don't leave room for the turning radius the trucks need.The small detail A vote is an opinion; a review is an analysisIn July 2026 an FDA advisory committee recommended six peptides for the 503A bulks list.Standing on principle Origin: AXT / Axe HausI had a warehouse in Costa Mesa sitting underused, and axe throwing was catching on in other cities with nothing like it in Southern California yet.Pivot Permitting a category that did not exist yetI wanted to open Southern California's first axe-throwing venue, in a Costa Mesa warehouse I already had, but the city's use code had never contemplated the category.Insider truth Origin: LÏEF DevelopmentLÏEF came directly out of the wreck of Aycre Capital.Redemption Building it ourselves so we could try to break itMy infrastructure partner brought me a blueprint for the systems we'd need going forward.Strong opinion Moving the CRM twice in three weeksCommon Ground's contact book sat in pieces across a lead list, a phone, a message history and an inbox.Mistake and repair Nothing until you winMost advisory work in my category is sold as a monthly retainer for nebulous deliverables, brand work, strategy decks, things a client can't tie to a number they'd measure anyway.Strong opinion Correcting your own number out loudThe Canyon Corporate Center bid went through multiple client-driven revisions.The honest call Let the partner with the track record answer for himselfAn investor group was evaluating a HUD-financed deal on Canyon Corporate and asked our Strata partner directly to lay out his own general contracting experience with HUD deals before the group met.Standing on principle Reading the competitor's bid before writing your ownLIEF's Strata partners had three bids to turn around the same week, including a big office campus job where word came back that an out-of-state general contractor with no local crews had already put in a competing bid.Insider truth A fifteen-by-forty-foot mural that turned into a four-year relationshipThe relationship with a performance car brand's California hub started small.Teaching moment A sealed wall, not a sheet of plasticThe Shelby retail store in Gardena was built out in one corner of a working licensing office.The small detail Cut the hole before the plan is approvedThe back of the Shelby building in Gardena had been Carroll Shelby's old apartment and a patchwork of offices, and it was going to become the Snake Pit VIP lounge.The small detail Sixty days to the car showCarroll Shelby International came to us about four months before its annual car show at the Gardena site, and they wanted the store open for it.High-stakes save The mural we painted without askingThe Shelby relationship did not start with a contract.The small detail Every reporter's call is a backlinkTellus wanted to own search for its category in Los Angeles.Insider truth Six cents a clickGreen building barely existed as a search term when Tellus opened.Insider truth Choosing which grinders to bet onThe show was about unranked golfers grinding on the mini tours.Insider truth Pivoting the format when the money said something differentI'd built a story-led golf docuseries around a competitive, elimination-style format for developmental golfers, and signed real production and media partners to the concept.Pivot Starting with the golfer nobody else would signAthlete representation as an industry chases already-famous names.Insider truth Rebuilding a brilliant founder's pitch around the buyer instead of the engineerA technically brilliant founder in a nuclear adjacent scientific field could not close deals.Pivot Turning three days of trade-show questions into search authorityDay one of the convention felt discouraging, honestly.Insider truth Greensburg: what went wrongThe tornado wiped out Greensburg, a town about a mile wide.Mistake and repair Nine months of cold calls for a town with no budgetAn EF5 tornado had flattened Greensburg, Kansas, and the rebuild effort had no money for the kind of high-performance materials the thirteen planned homes would need.High-stakes save The Greensburg rebuildIn May 2007 an EF5 tornado leveled Greensburg, Kansas, ninety five percent of the town gone.High-stakes save Bringing a dead restaurant back from scratch, then finding the one person who could carry itA restaurant that has been dark does not reopen.Redemption Choice beef, and the cut nobody noticesAt Greensleeves the steakhouse served grass-fed beef.Insider truth Origin: Greensleeves SteakhouseI bought Greensleeves Steakhouse 50/50 with a partner: a shuttered 1892 landmark in Redlands, the old Joe Greensleeves.Redemption Taking over a shuttered 1892 landmark and bringing back the people who ran itWhen we took over Greensleeves in November 2016, the easy move was to start clean: new name, new team, pretend the place had never gone dark.Standing on principle The steakhouse's parent company became Common GroundI started Three Trails in 2019 as a consulting and holding entity.Origin Design the outreach for the adult who refersWhen I was volunteer president of H.E.E.A.L., the board assumed a good program finds its own families.Insider truth Origin: H.E.E.A.L. Santa BarbaraFor five years I was president of a small Santa Barbara nonprofit called H.E.E.A.L.Teaching moment Passing on a bid that penciled, to save the attention for home turfXtrata's operations lead wanted to know if our building system could hit an aggressive per square foot target on a 121 unit extended stay hotel shell in Texas, well under a conventional framing budget.Walked away A little better each dayA phrase from a high school basketball coach stuck with me long after high school ended, and over the decades I had to decide whether to chase big, visible wins or build a habit of small, unglamorous daily reps.Teaching moment Catching his own five-times overcountAfter I overhauled the estimating engine to measure directly off a drawing's own vector geometry instead of a desktop approximation, I needed a real proof point.Mistake and repair Nothing ships on one passI sell estimates and takeoffs for a living now, and the number on that document is the whole product.Standing on principle Selling the safe product now, gating the risky one behind his own buildingI had two products ready to talk about in the same breath.Standing on principle Sending an unverified bid to a competitor, and owning the mistake instead of hiding itI sent a Kanopi built residential addition bid to a competing general contractor referral partner as a comparison exercise before I'd personally reviewed it for errors, and the competitor's bid came back both lower and cMistake and repair The Job Posting That Caught UsMy team and I applied to what looked like a normal LinkedIn job posting from a company called Capital To Keys.Pivot The VP who asked, 'Can we buy this from you?'A building materials manufacturer's VP of Operations ran three same day blind takeoffs against Kanopi to see whether it could match his own team's internal estimating process.Strong opinion The bug he built the gate forAn early version of the estimating engine shipped a bid for a quick-service restaurant with a markup calculation error baked into the pricing.Mistake and repair The formula that was quietly underpricing framing by six and a half timesWe ran an audit crossing dozens of the estimating engine's pricing formulas against a corpus of real bids.Mistake and repair The markup stack that broke in MayIn May of 2026 I shipped a bid for a quick-service restaurant client off the estimating engine I built, and the markup stack was wrong.Mistake and repair Keeping an NBA team's building open while we rebuilt itTellus did the general construction and design on a sixteen month renovation of an NBA team's practice facility.High-stakes save Origin: Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)LACMA is the most prestigious name on my whole civic record, and I got there as a volunteer, not a paid vendor.Standing on principle Phasing a build so an NBA team never had to stop trainingAn NBA team needed its practice facility redesigned: locker rooms, performance and rehab space, training and coaching areas, a player lounge.Teaching moment The change order that was not a changeI had an advisory seat reviewing bids and change orders on an interactive sculpture installation at LACMA.Standing on principle Let the client argue with a live modelThe group came to us through our capital partner, under NDA, before its real data was available.Teaching moment You see a good practitioner in retention, not reviewsWe were running an operating audit of small medical offices, three to eight employees each.Insider truth The long way around the guestWe had a small patio renovation at the Ritz-Carlton Laguna Beach.Insider truth Contract only the trades that keep workingWe were mid-build on a heavy-concrete custom home when COVID hit.High-stakes save Origin: Save the World Air, Inc.Around 2011 I got pulled into a small Santa Barbara public company called Save the World Air, ticker ZRO, working on technology to move oil through pipelines more efficiently.Unlikely relationship Running a build in a state where he wasn't licensed, trade-direct, with no GCA performance car manufacturer needed its Las Vegas facility relocation delivered, but Tellus wasn't licensed as a contractor in Nevada.Insider truth Walking a negotiation back to zero when a landowner's paper didn't check outI was structuring a term sheet and equity position on a large equestrian land community, and the landowner offered part of my compensation in shares of a thinly traded public company he also happened to control the treasStanding on principle Walking away from a live deal after diligence found a fabricated fundA sponsor came to Common Ground wanting help structuring capital for a large land community.Wrong about a person Answer the money question on the first callLA's mandatory soft-story ordinance put small landlords on a clock for work that adds no rent and that no bank will lend against.Insider truth Everyone called it collections. It was maintenance.My first fractional seat was a four-month run as chief operating officer of a three-practice cosmetic dermatology group in California, in 2015.Insider truth Origin: Sublime MedicalSublime Medical was my first fractional seat, in 2015: three cosmetic dermatology practices, full schedules, and a back office that could not turn the work into cash.Insider truth I was the clientA body of hard-won expertise was being filed as personal and therefore unusable: multi-state surrogacy legal coordination, representing himself in family court, and twenty-five years of self-designed training, thermal anStrong opinion The contract I grew up insideMy father's company held the property management contract on Village San Juan, a 446-unit community, for about twenty-two years.Origin Building a scoreboard to solve a people problemProject information was scattered across disconnected trackers, no shared picture of what the team was actually working toward.Teaching moment Building the pricing model instead of trusting the gutLIEF's bidding relationship with a patented prefab wall-system manufacturer had grown into a real pipeline.Insider truth Holding the bid back to control how it landsXtrata's broker asked me to bid the shell for a 6-plex project for one of their clients, and the scope shifted twice before I could finalize a number.Insider truth Narrowing the bid on purpose, then catching your own math errorAn early bid for a new Filiberto's location went out as a full general contractor number, off a plan set that was only three sheets, no structural or mechanical drawings behind it at all.Mistake and repair Sending a bid you can't sign yetThe structural bid for a roughly 32,000 square foot project was ready, but there was no engineering behind the structure yet.The honest call The pipeline was lying to usOur project trackers were showing statuses, bidding, awaiting funding, that didn't match reality anymore.Mistake and repair Turning a free trial into skin in the gameKyle Barichello, VP of Operations at Xtrata, ran a three project trial on our takeoff work, and speed was part of what he was scoring.Pivot Two versions of the same bidA trucking company needed a construction bid to hand to their lender, while our own internal estimate was still mid-review with the project architect and the Strata subcontractor hadn't even been engaged on that portion Insider truth A record in ninety daysMy first job outside the family job sites, outside the deliberate nine-month sequence, was auto-policy sales at AAA.Origin Assume the buyer has a model openReviewing how the engagement documents would be verified, the question came up of what standard they had to meet before shipping to a marketplace where corporate buyers screen consultants.Strong opinion Banning round numbers from the bidA residential bid needed a defensible price per square foot story, and the fast, simple math, total price divided by livable square footage, was spitting out a number that felt too low and wouldn't hold up next to a compStanding on principle Branding as a business model at TellusI started Tellus as a differentiator.Origin Bringing design in house to own the schedule, not to sell designTellus started as a plan expediting service, run at a loss, aimed at making permit approvals predictable.Insider truth Building the bench instead of doing it aloneAfter nineteen years running Tellus mostly by myself across every function, I started what became Common Ground Ventures.Origin Building the estimating algorithm a decade before AI could do itEvery trade prices its work off a repeatable metric, room count, linear feet, square feet, but the standard industry process was to send drawings out to trades and wait weeks for bids to come back.Origin Building the product he needed, at a lossOperating from San Diego to Santa Barbara, Tellus had no reliable way to forecast when a project would actually clear a city's permitting process.Insider truth Cutting The Fleet Down To What Actually Earns Its KeepBy mid-2026 I'd built a wide fleet of scheduled AI routines, briefings, outreach, content, audits.Standing on principle Cutting the Cheap Number Even Though It Sounded GoodA draft of the new Common Ground website described the four principals as having '100+ years collective' experience, and led with a headline claiming they were 'the only ones' who could do all three of the firm's lanes aStanding on principle Graduated Trust After A Real MistakeI wanted automated help scouting and drafting LinkedIn comments in my own voice.Mistake and repair Hearing the bigger business hiding behind the pitchA mattress topper founder pitched me and a partner.Insider truth I Already Paid For These Mistakes, You Don't Have ToWhen a partner stood up a new shared operating stack for the whole company, I ran my own migration onto it first, before my other two partners touched theirs.Teaching moment I sent the bid flawed on purposeAn analysis flagged me for shipping a takeoff with known issues to another bidder, reading it as a failure of my own verification rule.Insider truth Is that the problem or the solution?A plan to make me findable by AI models treated my many concurrent company affiliations as an entity resolution problem, too many names attached to one person, to be trimmed down so a model could pin me down.Strong opinion Make the check repeatable before the contentOur first prospect data room was built decision by decision: folders, access, layout, write-up style.Teaching moment Mapping the process before automating it, for a client seven states wideConstruction estimating across my own companies traditionally took about six weeks per job.Insider truth Naming The Gap Instead Of Hiding ItBidding as construction manager on a public affordable housing project in Santa Cruz County, my firm had real relevant experience but a genuine gap: no direct track record with that county or with a public housing authorThe honest call Naming the credibility gap out loudWith Tellus, we sat on the first page of Google for ten years, and I never had to think twice about whether people believed our track record was real.Insider truth Nobody was really buying greenMy first client at Tellus cared, more than any client I had met, about what she would be breathing and touching inside her own house.Insider truth Our own record does not get to be shy about our own workThe partners' copy of the wins ledger went out with every acquisition row stripped from it.Strong opinion Pricing the tradeoff of being fast, with his eyes openOnce Tellus could turn around a detailed, well reasoned estimate in two days instead of the standard three weeks, a new risk showed up.The honest call Refusing to sell a negotiating budget as an engineered certaintyA landowner needed a road cost figure to underwrite a lot purchase negotiation.The honest call Sound pods first, soundproofing when they askedKeller Williams wanted a roughly 5,000 square foot LA office near LAX, mostly open community space.Teaching moment Style is countable: measuring my own voice before letting agents use itCopy written by agents was going out under the partners' names and reading like a machine.Strong opinion Taking Tellus Design at a loss to control the timelineEarly in Tellus I made a call that looked wrong on paper.Pivot Telling a friend his dream house cost six to twelve million more than the market would pay backA personal friend asked me to help a couple navigate their general contractor's budget on a custom mountain home, at a schematic design stage where the vertical construction alone was pricing well above comparable homes The honest call Telling prospects the email was written by an AIThird party outreach tools were clunky and unreliable, so we replaced them with a custom AI and scheduled tasks system.Strong opinion The 2 a.m. tellI was weighing a significant career opportunity and needed a way to separate real conviction from talking myself into something that looked good on paper.Teaching moment The Fourteen-Day RuleThe old system let to-do items quietly auto-archive after seven days.Standing on principle The Machine I Thought Was Idle Was The One On FireI run my own work plus a growing fleet of scheduled AI tasks across three machines and two separate subscription plans, and I had a clear mental model of which plan carried which machine's load.Mistake and repair The domain was burned, and nobody had said it out loudOutbound email was bouncing across multiple inboxes, drafts were quietly disappearing, and the team kept running campaigns and tweaking messages like the problem was the writing.Mistake and repair The keyholeAsked how much of his history was ready to ship, the system reported roughly twenty engagements with usable backup.Story The macro numbers goA week of ledger work went into reconciling career totals.Strong opinion The nine-month methodI left college on purpose, no plan anyone around me would've called sensible.Origin The overnight blitz that corrupted its own proofI ran a certification blitz overnight across two machines.Mistake and repair The speed camera at the stoplightClients regularly asked me why they should pay for an owner's representative on top of a general contractor they already trusted.Insider truth Trust the trend, not the pointAn Oura ring and an Apple Watch report the same body differently, and the ring throws outliers that are just wrong.Strong opinion Two brands, two speedsWe were running two very different offers under one roof.Insider truth Two words and four months of noticeSomeone close to me was taking a green interior design course, and one class handed her two words that changed my career path before the night was over.Pivot Vertically integrating so nobody could point fingers but himI started Tellus in 2004 as a green construction company.Pivot Walking away from a deal that kept changing its own numbersA longtime architect relationship, Brian Fracasse, forwarded me a request to help fund completion of a cannabis cultivation build-out in Phoenix.Walked away We are not a free salespersonNuWay wanted a new U.S.Walked away What 2008 actually taught meI built Tellus into a real design-build firm in Southern California, and then 2008 happened.Redemption Whose Number Is It, ReallyAs Common Ground's public sites, wiki pages and resume materials multiplied, small factual drifts started compounding.Standing on principle Zero red lines, never our own stampI set a specific quality bar for the virtual architecture bench we were building, structural, mechanical, civil, plumbing, HVAC, fire, landscape, jurisdictional review, all feeding into the plans our system produced.Standing on principle