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Building the product I needed, at a loss

Tellus could not forecast city permitting, so I built design and expediting in house and absorbed the loss.

Tellus worked from San Diego to Santa Barbara, and I had no dependable method for predicting when a project would clear a given city's permitting. Each jurisdiction behaved differently, and a bad forecast could break a schedule or damage a client relationship.

Guessing was not acceptable. So I pulled design, plan expediting and eventually interior design inside the company, and ran that arm at a loss on purpose. What I wanted was the forecasting knowledge it produced. The design fees did not matter.

When the market does not offer a capability at a price or quality you can trust, and your business's reliability depends on it, build it yourself, even if it never pays directly. Knowing which cities move fast, which ones stall and why becomes a lasting asset. No outside consultant can sell you that.

Tellus became fluent in how approvals ran jurisdiction by jurisdiction across four states, and later took plan-expediting contracts as a separate service line. The same forecasting discipline underlies the estimating and design systems I build now.

When nobody sells the tool you need, make it inside your own company, even at a loss, because what you learn operating it is worth more than the fee you would have paid. I took on a short-term cost for long-term certainty, for my clients and for my own calendar. A spreadsheet by itself would not have made that call.

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