Work record / Stories

Nine months of cold calls for a town with no budget

Greensburg could not afford high-performance materials, so I spent nine months asking manufacturers to donate them.

An EF5 tornado had flattened Greensburg, Kansas. The rebuild had nothing in the budget for the high-performance materials its thirteen planned homes called for. Trimming the spec to match the empty budget was not an option for me. Instead I spent roughly nine months cold-calling national manufacturers, asking each to give materials rather than sell them.

Charity alone will not move a manufacturer to underwrite a town. What many consumer manufacturers cannot purchase at any price is a place in a nationally covered rebuild of a destroyed American town. So I never framed the call as a handout. It was a trade of materials for exposure and a shared mission, pitched to the people with the authority to agree.

The supplier partnerships I negotiated were behind more than $30M, at wholesale value, in donated sustainable materials. They served thirteen high-performance homes and a group of commercial buildings. DuPont gave the most. Discovery Channel, Planet Green and Build It Bigger all filmed the effort, and I honestly rank it as the best business development of my career.

With no budget, what you offer a partner is seldom cash. It is a story they want attached to their name. Find the story and ask for what you need, straight out.

Nine months of refusals came from people who owed me nothing, for a town where I knew nobody before. I kept going because I believed the work mattered. Effort like that, sustained and unpaid, on behalf of someone else, is a human choice and not a contract term.

Story details

All stories · Work record