
Operating partner at Common Ground
Jesse Fowler builds things that take years, and sits in the operating seat in between.
I’ve been building since 2004. Between projects I work inside other companies as their operating partner, usually when something is changing hands or just getting started.
Two places
LÏEF is where I build. Common Ground is where I work inside other companies. Everything else on this site runs through one of the two.
The work
Projects I built, seats I held, and the call I made in each. The full story of every one is on the work record.

Chronicle News
ConceptIndependent media venture built for the next generation of local news.

Tellus Design + Build, 2004 to 2023
LegacyOrange County's first green design-build firm. Design, estimating, construction and our own crews under one roof, through 2008 and COVID. It carried into LÏEF.

Oakley
LegacyOffice and retail design through Tellus, including the orange shipping-container build.

HGTV
LegacyOn camera as the builder on construction shows, then a series-development consultant on sustainable community building.
A licensed cannabis operator, 56 stores
ActiveSupply chain, warehouse, inventory and compliance on one screen for every store, after a store-by-store read of how each one runs.
About
I’ve been building since 2004. Tellus Design + Build in Orange County, and now LÏEF Development in Phoenix, is one practice under two names: design, estimating, construction and our own crews under one roof. It got us through 2008 and through COVID. Development was always the core business and it still is. These days it’s a few bigger projects at a time, and the good ones take years.
Between those projects I sit inside other companies as an operating partner, as COO or CRO, whatever the problem needs. By the time an owner calls me the obvious fixes have been tried. If they’d worked we wouldn’t be talking. So I listen first. It’s almost never what anybody thought going in, and a lot of the time it comes down to a person, not a process. Find the rock everything is piling up behind and move that first.
That work runs through Common Ground, five operating partners who each own a seat. We run our own companies on AI we built ourselves, and it does the reading and the first drafts fast. It’s great at telling you what usually happens next. The call still comes from somebody who has made these mistakes before and knows what it took to fix them. That’s the seat I take, and my name is on it.
The full record, project by project, is on the wiki.

Open to
Operating partner seats
Fractional COO or CRO for owner-led and PE-backed companies that are changing hands, starting up or stuck. I take the seat myself.
Buy-side diligence
For buyers and sponsors. Run the cheapest test first, so the answer that can kill a deal costs the least to find. Then the operating plan that has to hold after close.
Development partnerships
Feasibility, entitlements, estimating and the build. Lock the classification before the unit count, and raise the capital last.
Questions
Because I've been doing it since before anybody called it AI. At Tellus in 2014 I built an estimating algorithm so we'd stop waiting on trade bids. Kanopi is that same engine with AI inside it now. The rule hasn't changed either. A number we can't check doesn't leave the building, and the only accuracy claim Kanopi carries is the one it earned pricing bids it had never seen.



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