I was the cheapest homebuilder in America for three years. Then I quit.

I bought donuts in the morning and sold them at lunch to cover the cost of the donuts. Later I got into disc golf and bought a wetsuit so I could jump into 50-degree water in winter and pull other people's discs out of the pond. Twenty discs an hour, five or six bucks a piece. That was the education.

My first internship was at a mobile home park company. After that came a boarded-up 16-unit with pinhole leaks misting hot water inside the walls, and a 12-story, 200,000-square-foot building in Wichita Falls that sold for $189,000. I got the elevators running, got water to the third floor, and signed the first lease.

I built houses out of shipping containers. For three years running I was the most affordable homebuilder in the country, cheaper per square foot than a mobile home. One of them was four stories in a rough part of Houston. We got burglarized 13 times in 18 months and lived almost two years without a sewer connection. The tenants were a grocery store manager and a social worker. People with jobs who needed a place to live.

Houston had 34 separate inspections. I failed 60 or 70 of them, most through no fault of my own. I spent half of every day for three years on permits. At one roundtable the man across the table told me we had not submitted the forms. I told him he was holding them in his hands. That was the day I stopped building.

Estimating was on it. I hired an overseas shop, the same way you probably have, and the quality never got there no matter how much of me I put in.

Seven years later it is more than 200 people, trained on a 250-video program, organized by trade, with a walkthrough call at the end of every job. We do 75 to 100 house takeoffs and 40 to 50 multifamily takeoffs a month.