The Builder's Daily Thanks You For 2 Magical Years, & Counting

More than 700 The Builder's Daily original posts and two magical years ago, I invited and challenged you to regard yourselves in a fresh light, as solutions-seekers to housing's "echochamber" challenges, ones that go hand in hand with epic profitable private enterprise opportunities.

You're familiar with them and the impact true solutions could ignite in local, regional, and our national economy:

Affordable access to home
Homes and neighborhoods that feed back into nature's balances
A renewable stream of incoming talent and skilled frontline workers

We outlined here, three simple "rules of engagement," as a promise and a standing challenge for all of us.

Here they are very briefly:

The Builder’s Daily’s No. 1 rule is this. ... Just be present. Be real. Be here. Be constant. Show up consistently and prepared. Be a place you’d want to come home to every day.

The Builder’s Daily’s rule No. 2 is this. Believe. Despite building’s bad rap of being “unimpeded by progress,” and its array of chronic, decades-long challenges, people in the field across the business ecosystem are solvers at heart.

The Builder’s Daily rule No. 3 is this. Learn. Listen. Discover. Ask the better question. Reframe the challenge. Don’t quit before the magic of action, of community, of culture get a chance to play a role in how things might improve.

As first principles, these work. We'll take them forward as they are as we grow value. But this moment, for just one moment, is about your giving us a shot at being a "who" in your life, rather than just a "what."

From Day 1, the heart and soul of The Builder's Daily would be one an the same as the heart and soul of a community of people whose daily impact and influence and empowerment of lives, livelihoods, economies, and culture can not be measured in any financial terms.

Back then, on April 15, 2021, we started at exactly zero.

Now there are 3,400 hundred people – most of you principals, owners, strategists, executive level stakeholders – who make up the core of who we are.
Now a website that didn't exist has started to generate engagement and reach across a wider range of stakeholders.
Now, typically, 3,600 people each week open and engage with The Builder's Daily newsletter, more than 46% of our total opt-in audience on a daily basis.

You are The Builder's Daily.

It's what you dream about, strive for, resolve to accomplish, and learn from that we awaken to each day as a hard promise of purpose and worth. Your stories and struggles, your setbacks and comebacks, your moments of honor and glory and the ones you'd like to learn from and move on ... the very human dimension of innovation and constant discovery and improvement – on the ground, in every nook and cranny of America's geography, and at every economic level -- is the fire in our bellies that never dies.

What's more, you've given us something even more rare than inspiration and motivation to serve your efforts to improve each day. What's that? Why, we love doing this, every single day, and we're having a lot of fun while we're at it.

So thank you for being the reason we're here, and for holding us to account to you. Now that it's settled, and we're not going away, it's time for us to, thoughtfully, start adding more – product, experience, ways to connect and interact, and our chief focus point, lifelong learning for business community leaders – in the months ahead.

What you – TBD folks – have affirmed and supported through your presence is the opportunity for TBD to be a who, not just a what in your information, insight, and discovery journey each day. That's a powerful launching pad, and we can't thank you enough for that.

None of this would be possible, of course, without financial and business support from partners – in every single case – who saw "beyond-the-click" and ventured to join a ground-up community platform with literally no conventional digital media pedigree or key performance indicators from which to base their commitment. Instead, they invested in a fresh opportunity to have a voice at the table with a highly valued strategic decision maker – you – without arbitrary walls that typically separate media "church and state."

In our conversation, solution-seekers engage at every level of the challenge, and the sole credential for participating is that epic commitment to work collaboratively for solutions.

Two years ago, we started with three bleeding-edge partners who got behind us immediately:

Matt Ogden and his team at Building Industry Partners, Gerry McCaughey and the Entekra team, and Carol Ruiz and her team at New Ground PR & Marketing.

Today, Matt and the BIP team and Carol and her New Ground team are still here with us. However, now, our debt of gratitude extends deeper, to teams of people seeking solutions across architecture, strategic advisory, analytics, talent, capital and land strategy, strategic sales and marketing, technology, manufactured consumer products, homeowners insurance, interior design and merchandising, customer insight and placemaking, etc.

Support from our partners has taken us this far, but has also fueled and ignited our strategies to develop an even greater value offering in the months ahead. We're so excited that at a young age – ha, ha! – we're looking at evolving fast to keep pace with a business and industry sector that is transforming in real-time.

A couple of more people to say thank you to by name. Maggie Goldstone, TBD's design director and UX whiz, has singularly given the site its most unique and powerful approach to its purpose. Her graphic portrait illustrations – including that bald guy at the top of this page – have worked magically to both humanize and lend humor and fun in TBD's people-focused approach to our insights and solutions-seeking. Maggie is a long-time colleague and at every turn her creativity and energy serve as daily doses of inspiration to try new things.

Frank Anton, whom many of you have known for years, is the closest thing I know to a "lifelong learning and discovery" masterclass in real-life. Frank's curiosity and honesty – together with the rare gift of using the English language in its simplest, most elegant form – make him a partner I never cease to be grateful for.

Scott Cox, whose contributions to The Builder's Daily elevate our value with every installment, has allowed us to convey the wisdom and experience of one of residential land and capital's intelligence treasures. And Teri Slavik-Tsuyuki, a force of nature in placemaking, human-centered design thinking, and storytelling, has opened up an entirely fresh channel of focus on health and well-being as bedrocks of neighborhood and home design, engineering, and programming. Ken Pinto, a long-time friend and one of construction operation and sourcing's brilliant practitioners, gave us an early look at how to transform homebuilding's supply chains. We can say we knew Ken when, back before he was the rock star he's become.

Branka Minic, ceo of Building Talent Foundation, has also served as a sounding board and agitator for workplaces and job sites in construction that can become magnets for talent and skill. Her ideas, practical game plan, and quickly growing initiatives around the country amount to a game-changing outlook for an industry sector where hope was the only strategy.

So, thank you for giving us two years that eclipse our wildest dreams and, hopefully, some years ahead that allow us to continue with the mission. You'll notice that those three "echochamber challenges" are still there, awaiting solutions. We continue to view them as private enterprise opportunities, and that people like you are going to be the ones to illuminate just how they'll make that transformation from challenge to opportunity.

That's what you do. That's why there's The Builder's Daily. The only way it gets better than this is for us to cover, in real-time, those transformations as they occur.