Several years ago, on a quiet Saturday morning, something profound happened that I wasn’t expecting but knew immediately to be true.
That morning, as I was thinking through the events of the past week and those to come, everything we had done and still needed to do as a company, I watched Naval Ravikant compare building a truly great organization to climbing a mountain.
“Imagine,” I remember him saying, “spending a good chunk of your career climbing a mountain and you’ve made tons of progress and are two-thirds of the way there, and you look up, and you realize you’re not going to make it. You’re on the wrong path.”
The video stopped me cold. Terrane was about to change forever.
Naval explained that the challenge with this scenario is that you’ve spent your career getting all this way, and it can be very challenging to return to the bottom and take a different route to the summit. But that’s exactly what you must do if you want to be one of the best. You need the courage to forge a new path.
It took nearly two decades to scale Terrane from a two-person crew into a dominant player in our space. We were doing incredible work with top-notch clients. We had a solid team.
But as we scaled, I could see cracks forming in the foundation, evidenced by the fact that we were struggling to honor a core value of delivering for clients on time. I was learning an important lesson. There is a massive difference between building a company from scratch and preparing that same company to compound value, at scale, for the clients we love serving.
This was a time of maximum effort, with a tight focus on improvement. We wanted to make everyone happy. Every client. Every employee. That was the intention. But it wasn’t effective. And it wasn’t working.
I knew that if Terrane were ever to evolve from a solid company into a truly great one, it was time to level up.
On that Saturday morning in the middle of winter, I made a promise. Terrane would no longer attempt to be all things to all people. We would decide who we served and why.
_
I’ve always had tremendous appreciation for builders and developers. Glass, steel, and concrete. Wood and stone. These elements don’t come together on their own. Strategic analysis. Lot scoping. Site restrictions. Juggling designs, materials, financial outlay and risk, and lots and lots of people—all while adhering to the wider vision. None of it is easy. And I’ve been lucky to have a front row seat, assisting on thousands of these projects every year, watching builders and developers do their thing.
Aurum is the outcome of the decision I made that winter morning a few years ago. To go all in for the builder-developer community.
