Merging Natural Building & Modern Manufacturing with Evan Ryan of Croft

The construction industry is at a turning point. Pre-manufactured housing seeks to disrupt conventional building methods due to labor shortages, weather delays, and material waste, as a faster, more efficient alternative. But efficiency shouldn’t come at the cost of health or sustainability.

In this episode, Neal Collins sits down with Evan Ryan, a founding member of Croft, a company pioneering a new approach to homebuilding. By integrating the speed of manufacturing with the benefits of natural building, Croft is able to produce homes that are actually carbon negative. Their homes use locally sourced straw for insulation, actively sequestering carbon rather than emitting it. On average, each Croft home locks away 146 tons of carbon, while conventional homes of the same size release between 120 and 260 tons of CO2.

Join us as we dive into Evan’s journey, the company’s vision, and the challenges and opportunities in reshaping the future of housing. If you care about regenerative design, sustainable materials, and creating homes that are both high-performing and healthy, this episode is for you.

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This podcast isn’t just about ideas—it’s about action. From these conversations, two organizations have emerged to bring regenerative real estate to life:

Latitude Regenerative Real Estate is the world’s first regenerative-focused real estate brokerage, dedicated to aligning values-driven buyers and sellers. With a strong presence in the Pacific Northwest and Great Lakes regions, Latitude also supports purpose-driven developments across North America through strategic marketing and branding services. If you're looking to buy, sell, or amplify a regenerative project, Latitude is your trusted partner.

Hamlet Capital is an investment and development firm committed to building resilient communities rooted in working farms. If you’re developing an agrihood or conservation community, we’d love to hear from you. Together, we can turn visionary ideas into thriving, place-based investments.

Transcript

>> Evan Ryan: 0:04

I think the architects are looking for opportunities, especially the folks that are maybe more on the cutting edge of the space on finding new systems to work with that allow their buildings to be highlighted as energy efficient or net zero or passive house or in our case, carbon negative. Right. You know, there's more and more organizations and firms that are looking for solutions to provide to their customers and to their institutional partners to say, look, this thing that we're designing is not only a beautiful building, but also couldn't be healthier for our planet.

>> Katie McCamett: 0:43

Welcome to the Regenerative Real Estate Podcast, a show about human environments and how they can be used as a force for good conversations that educate and inspire people looking for a different way to do real estate. I'm Neal Collins and on this episode I'm joined by Evan Ryan, a co founder and partner of Croft House, a company that creates beautiful pre manufactured carbon negative buildings for homeowners and developers. The winds of change are sweeping through the construction industry. More and more people are waking up to the fact that the way we've been building homes is inefficient and overdue for a major overhaul. And it's no surprise why. Between the skilled labor shortage, weather delays and material waste, traditional construction is riddled with challenges. That's why pre manufactured housing is gaining traction as a faster, more efficient way to build energy smart homes. But here's the thing. I also have a deep love for natural building and bio based materials. If manufactured housing is the fast food of construction, natural building is the slow food farm to table approach. These homes have a presence that is soothing and rich. And beyond their beauty, they're non toxic, high performing and support our health and well being rather than undermining it. That's why I'm so excited about the work that Croft is doing. They're merging the speed and efficiency of manufacturing with the integrity of natural building. By sourcing straw from local farmers for insulation. Their homes don't just reduce carbon emissions, they actively sequester it. On average, a craft home locks away 146 tons of carbon, while conventional homes of the similar size add anywhere from 120 to 260 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. In this episode, I sit down with Evan, one of Croft's founding members, to dive into his backstory, the company's growth and the challenges and opportunities they're facing as they scale. If you're interested in the cutting edge of construction, passionate about healthy homes and regenerative agriculture, and drawn to beautifully designed spaces, you're going to Love this episode. Evan, where did you grow up?

>> Evan Ryan: 3:24

So I grew up in Connecticut. My family lived in the coastal area of Connecticut outside of New Haven, sort of a small summer home cottage in Maine growing up. And so every summer we would spend coming up to Maine for two or three months, just you know, that sort of like traditional vacation land by the ocean, but also camp style living in Maine, which is kind of why we, we landed here. For me it was always a happy place. As a kid coming up to Maine, you know, just felt like miles away from where we grew up. And then, you know, we developed a little community up here, you know. And just thinking about it, as I was growing up, Portland, as a town, as a city, Portland, Maine started to get this kind of edgy, artsy, food culture vibe and it just felt like a good place to be. So I think I tried to move to Portland maybe three times over the course of my like post college life and just couldn't ever make it work until finally we moved back from California and decided, to settle down as a family. And my wife's family all moved up to Maine because her brother married a gal from Maine.

>> Katie McCamett: 4:25

So I was looking at your, your resume on LinkedIn and I'm curious, whenever you, you were in college, you went to Brown. Great, school it and, and you've got a pretty diverse resume. Like what, what were you thinking your career path was going to be like?

>> Evan Ryan: 4:45

What was I thinking is, is a good question. you know, I grew up in a family of architects and engineers, so for me the built environment has always sort of made sense. As a kid I was always on job sites. That's sort of how I made my money. My parents had me working from, you know, 13 years old. Just there was an independence component to that. Just get out there, do your thing, learn how to work hard. That was part of our family value system really. And then my grandfather was an architect and engineer wartime came back and worked for couple of the huge engineering, firms in New England. And I just, I followed him around as a kid. You know, he built both of his homes by hand, you know, with his family. And it felt like it's in the blood. So, you know, in school I did some engineering work and right out of college I decided to jump into that space. So I moved out to California in 2000. I think I graduated in 03 and spent a little bit of time in New York, but then pretty quickly went out to California. I knew that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. You know, it's A lot of the stuff I did in school was learning, you know, about small business and focus between engineering and economics really is what I focused on for school. and so putting those things together with the passion for the, for the home building space or construction space, I jumped into this prefab company out in California at the time that was making, you know, it was this sort of green building wave that existed back in 2004. And the USGBC, U.S. green Building Council, lead, you know, certification platform was just being developed. And at the time we had designed and built the first lead platinum home in the country. So we got a lot of nice press doing that with that small company and spent the next four years building it until the market crashed. You know, to answer your question, I, I've always had this entrepreneurial focus on everything that I've done. You know, I like small companies, I like building things from the ground up. I like innovation space. But I never felt pressure to really focus on, you know, one industry. I sort of knew that the threads for whatever I picked would be connected through the learnings that I wanted to get right. So after the, the 2008 market crash, you know, the company did okay. Was the amount of customers obviously shrank significantly. And at the time, I use that as an opportunity to go up to the Bay Area. And then I spent 10 or 15 years playing around with different technology businesses. Tech enabled businesses. I think you're, you're kind of, you find your way into that in the Bay Area, somehow. And I didn't stop pursuing the construction, real estate stuff. I just did it more on the personal side. And then when I eventually moved back to the east coast was an opportunity for, for me to reset and get back into this, into the space. You know, worked for Wayfair for three or four years to gain some experience in, the leadership roles. And you know, really wanted to challenge myself. Like I said, up to that point, I had really only done startup or entrepreneurial work. And I wanted to see if I could get in and operate at a large company, run a big team. So the next thing I did would have some experience with growing this company from small fledgling to a larger company that can scale. And then I guess we have like 20, 20, 20 21. It was very clear to me that the labor market was really struggling everywhere. where I'm based in Maine, you know, the labor market in particular was having a hard time, but also the housing market was doing pretty well. And I don't know about other states, but In Maine, the state government talks a lot about the deficit that we have on housing in Maine. I think, you know, the numbers they throw out are 84,000 units in the deficit to where we from, where we should be today. And so if I you know, just stepping back, I knew that I wanted to get back into the prefab space. You know, I could see the housing market was strong in knowing this housing need was, it wasn't really going anywhere. And so the prefab space made a lot of sense to me because it was an opportunity for us to get in there and start building more homes faster. And then I've always been a bit of an eco nerd. So you know, way back when I moved to California I was working with that prefab company, but that prefab company was really a green building company. And then as I gained more experience I got really interested in natural building techniques, so biomaterials and using more natural materials to impact the sort of embodied carbon of the spaces that we build and live in. And this venture with Croft was an opportunity for us to combine all those things.

>> Katie McCamett: 9:04

Evan, share, share more about that genesis. Because if I'm looking at your background, particularly knowing that you have experience coming out of the Bay Area, California, like kind of venture backed startups, larger corporations, and you're looking at prefab, which I think is inherently an industry that you're deciding, okay, we can actually scale this. Maine is not the first market that would come to mind for me at least I would probably be looking at a larger metropolitan region. What was those ingredients as, as you were. Do you have co founders? You know, how, how did you start to put that together? And, and particularly location based out of Portland.

>> Evan Ryan: 9:44

Yeah, you know Portland and Maine in particular has this history of craftsmanship. Surprisingly, we talk a lot about the high performance construction industry and so not everybody knows that term. Generally when you're talking about high performance, you're talking about building homes that are fairly airtight based on really sound building science principles. And Maine has a really great network of builders and businesses that, that have been doing that for decades so far. So in a weird way main was an easy place to do this because we, that network of builders and that expertise already existed. On top of that, you know, there is this timber industry that Maine has always been a part of in just the natural forests and landscape that we have here. I'm sure it's similar to the Pacific Northwest in that way. And so you're sort of naturally tied to that timber industry in Maine, in one way or another, you know, we have the coastal, you know, an agricultural space, but the, timber industry is a big piece. And so, you know, know, it was an easy spot for us because the materials are there, the expertise is there, and finally the interest. Right. New England is a space where people have always innovated. There is a, a strong sense of respect for the environment in New England. There's lots of natural, space out here for, for building. And you know, there's generally a decent amount of wealth to be able to build different style homes and buildings, within New England. So all those things made sense to me. I also, you know, I've lived in cities. I lived in New York, I lived in San Francisco, I lived in Los Angeles. You'd think that the markets there are ripe for this kind of innovation and that there's more money in those markets, but also there's so many other players playing in that space that it sometimes makes it hard. not to mention one of the biggest challenges, I think, in the construction industry in the US is just all of the regulatory hoops that we all have to jump through depending on what municipality we're working within. Right. And one thing I do like about Maine and some of the other states in the Northeast is that, you know, you still have a bit of an old school approach to some of the, the way people review and approve buildings and the willingness to do things that are a little bit more outside the box. So Maine, Maine made sense to me for a lot of reasons for that.

>> Katie McCamett: 11:56

So California was out.

>> Evan Ryan: 11:58

California was a little bit out at that point. Yeah. And, you know, and I think after 10 or 15 years there and sort of experiencing, hitting those roadblocks, it was nice to come back to New England and feel like there was a real supportive environment for doing things differently.

>> Katie McCamett: 12:13

It's really interesting. I, you know, whenever we came across Croft, like you showed up at a gathering and, and I was looking at your website and just really blown away because I, I'm studying the prefab market because, and I think a lot of people are like, is this the way that we can actually build faster and build cheaper? But you're taking this and adding a little bit. Is it complexity with the natural building or is it ethos driven? Why do you really go in that direction and what was the inspiration to do that?

>> Evan Ryan: 12:43

Yeah, and I should, this is actually a good opportunity for me to talk about my business partner, Andrew Frederick. So when I was thinking about leaving Wayfair to get into the prefab industry, I should say back into the prefab industry. At the time I was planning to do a panel business and I was really interested in natural building techniques. So we were looking at insulation material in particular things like hemp and natural sheep's wool. You know, there's advantages and disadvantages to whatever natural materials you have out there that you want to use in the construction industry. And I was leaning towards hemp and looking at spaces to rent to start, just doing simple buildings, simple ADU spaces and saunas as a place to start. And I kept hearing this name, Andrew Frederick, who was out there doing some really interesting things with straw. And you know, Andrew had trained as an architect in school and then spent, his years as a tradesperson on job sites and running other prefab facility shops. And we just hit it off immediately. You know, half an hour conversation turned into a three hour conversation. We realized that we're both sort of tracking towards the same things. And, you know, my business and entrepreneurial skill set, I think blended really well with his engineering and design skill set. And the two of us, along with a few other folks that were in the business early on, just had had an opportunity to jump in and start scaling this thing. And Andrew had at that point probably been into it about a year, maybe a little more, testing straw as an insulation material and using different compression systems to figure out how to do essentially straw bale building, but in a modern high performance wall system. And to more directly answer the question, I think what he saw, what Andrew saw, what I saw, what guys like Chris Magwood have talked about for, for quite a while now, is the difference between operational carbon and embodied carbon. So a lot of times we think about in the green building space, how do we make this building more efficient, how do we make it more operationally efficient? You know, and that's where I think a lot of the things from renewable energy sources to heat pumps, there's a big program, you know, in Maine called Efficiency Maine, that's all about incentivizing and giving rebates to people that want to utilize more energy efficient mechanical systems. And I think that's great. But the reality is that over the course of a building's lifetime, like let's just assume conservatively, a building is going to be around for 100 years, if you compare a conventionally built home to one that is, you would call sort of the highest level of green building, you might save 15% over the course of that 100 years on something that's more efficient, even at the most, with the most efficient systems. And a lot of that has to do with the fact the payback on that doesn't really hit until year 75 because of all the embodied carbon in the building. So the thing that stood out to us so clearly is this idea that all of the materials that we put into our buildings utilize so much energy and so much resources to extract, to produce and to distribute and transport to wherever they're going that by the time you get to the actual construction, you can't really make a dent by saving money or efficiency with the sort of operational efficiency of the building. The iceberg, you know, under the water is really the embodied, embodied carbon of the building. And you know, if you think about some of the materials that we're talking about, straw has been around for thousands of years. It's, it's been a construction material. It's incredibly performant material. It's why we, you know, as human beings have used it for thatched roofs forever. The Egyptians used to use it, you know, in their clay cob style adobe building. there are homes in the US, in the Midwest that were built, you know, late 1800s, early 1900s out of straw that today when you take out a section of wall and put it on the ground to, you know, put in a new window, the cows will come up and start eating the straw. So, you know, this material is a, is a proven material that's been used forever. I think what we're doing with Croft is just figuring out how do we take that material, you know, that is a natural material that's produced locally, and put it into our buildings to replace some of the materials that are, that are harder to produce, that use more energy to produce and ultimately are more toxic for us and for the environment.

>> Katie McCamett: 16:37

How do you find this, this intersection? Because it, it seems like not only do you have to crack the prefab nut, and I've seen a lot of really well capitalized and brilliant people go after that, but then you're overlapping with the natural building, which has come from. And I'm going to generalize and if this is unfair, I'm sorry to the people that are like really natural building enthusiasts, but it's kind of crunchy. It's very grassroots. It's, it's this like, what are the words that I'm looking for? It's almost like anti capitalist, because we can actually go out and put this together and do a village building convergence and build our own houses. But Croft is blending this design forward beautiful home aesthetic with this natural building technology and really creating something that is not in the marketplace. And so I'm curious how, how you're finding this demographic, particularly coming from a marketing lens of identifying that target customer and who that is and what they're interested in, why they get really excited about, your product that you're bringing to the market.

>> Evan Ryan: 17:45

That's a good question. You know, another reason why I felt like it was a good time to get back into this and in particular to dive into this natural building space. You know, I think the market's ready for it. I think for years we've talked about prefab. I think, you know, we finally got to a place where prefab is not thought of as sort of traditional modular box that people think about, you know, most. The trailer park double wide concept that people think about. When you think of modular building, prefab has now gotten to a place where people related more to quality control and speed and efficiency. And so I think the market has opened up so that the, folks that are looking for prefab are looking for high quality structures that they can afford that are done fast. And there's a bigger part of that market now that is seeing the value of where those materials are sourced. People are starting to care more and more about where the materials are coming from. They're caring more and more about the health of the materials for themselves and for their families. I think we, as individuals at Croft, are very interested in that naturally. And I think part of what we did in the early days was just to get out there and start building things and proving that we can do. You can utilize these techniques and these materials and compete with the traditional models that are out there that we've been working with for the past hundred years or so in the U.S. you know, to answer your question, I don't think we had any idea that, that we had a big enough market for craft to survive. I think we had enough interest in the space to say, let's just do the first one and prove it and get it out there for people to see. And if that resonates, then we'll do the next one and then we'll do the next one. And so after three or four years of doing that, we now have, you know, some momentum. That flywheel has started to turn a little bit without even us doing much. You know, we don't really market ourselves. And this is really, you know, this is an area we have to get better at because there's a lot of people that don't know Croft. And when they think about Croft, they think about the sort of like niche, bespoke, like you said, crunchy, natural builder. it's easy for, for anybody to look at us and think that that's what we're doing and at our hearts. I think that we, we all care about that stuff. But ultimately what Croft exists to do is to demonstrate to the world that we can build carbon negative buildings and compete with any other system or process out there so that we can eventually get it to scale. The past three years has been, you know, in particular prove that we can build these kind of homes with this material. And then the last year and a half, two years has really been, now can we start to scale it? You know, this year we ended up doing, I think, 18 units, individual units for projects. Some of those projects had multiple units in the same project. But for us to get to that scale after doing only one project two and a half, three years ago, demonstrates to us that we're starting to get to a place where we can do more of these and that this becomes less of a niche product and more of a, an opportunity that more people can take advantage of.

>> Katie McCamett: 20:39

What is your theory on growth here? Because whenever I look at cropped, and I'm not trying to criticize here, but you're, you're speaking to a couple different audiences. Like you're, you're talking to homeowners, but you're also mentioning builders. Very different needs and desires and considerations, also very different marketing. Who's purchased those 18 homes that you've delivered? And then really, where do you want to take it? Is it, is it still very bespoke, working with homeowners, or is it trying to go in the direction of working with builders?

>> Evan Ryan: 21:08

In the early days, it's been mostly working directly with homeowners. I would say in the first two years that was 100% of our work. This past year it's 60 to 70% of our work. So more and more builders are starting to come in and architects on behalf of their customers and finding craft and working with us directly. So I think the future of the business is going to start to skew more towards builders, developers and architects that understand the system. One of the things that we're doing in the background, Andrew, and some of the other folks in our team in particular, are focused on creating, you know, this design language, you know, this panel library or set of guardrails that we can hand to a builder, an architect and say, look, building with Croft is no different than any other high performance system you might see out there. And if you want to design with this, here are all the things that we can do. And these are the guardrails that will allow you to take the most advantage of this system. and so I think we needed to prove to ourselves that we could do it by selling direct to consumers. I think the nice thing about doing that in the early days has been there are a lot of folks out there that we call owner builders. These are people that are scrappy, that maybe have a tighter budget, but really are excited about the idea of working with Croft to get this weathertight shell up really fast. Most of our buildings we can build in less than a month. And typically our average time to install them to get from a flat foundation to fully weather tight is a three to five day install process, depending on the weather. Right. So these things go up really fast. And for somebody that wants to gc their own project or manage some of their own finishes, this makes high performance building really accessible to that market. And then they can take as long as they want to finish out the building. So that really allowed us to get the wedge in the door that we needed to then prove and figure out how to grow it beyond to this sort of developer, builder, architect market.

>> Katie McCamett: 22:56

That's fascinating that, that it's going in that direction. What, what do you think the builders and architects are, are seeing in Croft to, to start to open up that market for you?

>> Evan Ryan: 23:07

Well, let's talk about them individually. Right. So from the builder standpoint, there are a lot of builders out there now, you know, especially in places like New England where there's a certain season for building, most of that building is happening between April and November, December these days. And as you get on those shoulders, it's a really uncomfortable environment, especially in a place like Maine, to be hammering nails in 20 degree weather, you know, with a snow storm looming a day later. And I think a lot of the builders that we've worked with are actually happy to hand off the shell or the, or the envelope of the building to somebody else so that they can focus on the site work and the finish work, which is the stuff that they enjoy doing more and tends to be a little bit more of the high value work. The thing that we like to talk about is, you know, everybody gets nervous about the budget for building. It's expensive to build these days. Right. But if you think about the shell of the building or let's think about like the components of a project, right. So just super high level and Maybe oversimplifying it. You've got the site work to get the site ready. So you're going to clear the land, you're going to figure out your foundation system, you're going to get utilities to that, to that site, and you're going to build your foundation. Let's put that in one bucket. The next bucket is sort of the framing and shell of the building. And the way we think about that is, you know, the framing and insulation and weather tightening of the building. And then the sort of last bucket would be your, your finishes and utilities and, you know, just getting the building done. Right. Of those three things, the shell in the middle is the one where you have the least amount of flexibility on budget.

>> Katie McCamett: 24:42

Right?

>> Evan Ryan: 24:42

Right. So if you compared our building, the shell of our building to a, two by four conventional wall, that sort of thread on how much you can spend or how little you can spend is pretty narrow. Right. But if you think about the finishes of a project, you can slide and toggle that up and down as much as you want. Right. You can go really tight on your finishes or you can go really luxury and high end on your finishes. And that where, that's where you're going to make or break your budget. The reality is you don't really make or break a budget on the shell of the building, but what you do make or break is the performance and satisfaction and comfort and efficiency of the building. And so, you know, I would say for the last 50 years at least, in the construction industry, especially in the residential space, we've put way more of our focus on the finishes of the building than the actual quality of the shell of the building. And I think a lot of the organizations these days that we work with, you know, in the high performance space, but also just in general across the country, building science and figuring out how to build homes that have sound principles as it relates to thermal transfer and moisture management, you know, this is becoming more and more important. Right. So the builder says, okay, you guys are really great at building the shell. It's hard to build the shell anyway, especially, you know, in these weather windows that are sort of on the edge of our seasons. So let's just let you do that. And that, that speed, efficiency and quality is something that's really attractive to a builder because they know that when they come in, when we hand them the baton, that building is ready for finishes and all of those tolerances and the quality of that structure is going to be at, the highest it can be. So it makes their job easier. On the back end or even also on the front end. But in general, I think that's what's attractive to builders. I think the architects are looking for opportunities, especially the folks that are maybe more on the cutting edge of the space, on finding new systems to work with that allow their buildings to be highlighted as energy efficient or net zero or passive house, or in our case, carbon negative.

>> Katie McCamett: 26:37

Right.

>> Evan Ryan: 26:37

You know, there's more and more organizations and firms that are looking for solutions to provide to their customers and to their institutional partners to say, look, this thing that we're designing is not only a beautiful building, but also couldn't be healthier for our planet.

>> Katie McCamett: 26:57

This episode is brought to you by Hamlet Capital, an exciting new endeavor I founded to to invest in the future of thriving communities. If you're developing an agrihood or conservation community, you know how complex these projects can be. From land acquisition and master planning to entitlements and securing investment capital, there's a fine line between a stalled out vision and a thriving built reality. That's where Hamilton Capital comes in. We provide development, advisory and investment solutions that align financial returns with environmental and social impact, helping bring projects to life in a way that's both financially viable and deeply impactful. So if you're working on a project and need guidance or capital, or if you're looking to invest at the intersection between real estate and regenerative agriculture, reach out and let's build something lasting together. Visit us at Hamlet Capital. Evan, as you're talking, what comes up for me is, is actually wanting to peel back the onion a little bit on you and Andrew's entrepreneurial process. Because when what you're talking about with builders and architects is you're leaning towards a construction technology firm rather than if you're going with something like a home builder or homeowners, you could actually go in so many different directions of like what if we in house design and, and like squarely considered ourselves like custom home builders and delivered these products? You know, like your organization, especially in these early days, is so plastic it can really mold it into almost whatever you want to the almost detriment of if we try to be too many things, we just confuse ourselves. How do you guys work together to really find that line forward to, to say look, let's not do this. I think that's the real challenge is to say no.

>> Evan Ryan: 28:54

I think you just defined, every one of our strategic discussions for the last path forward in that question. Yeah, look, I think there, there's huge opportunity in the construction space right now to figure out how to do things differently. And it's a growing space that needs that. And so every day we look at the landscape and say, we could go in that direction, we could go in this direction. And it's hard as entrepreneurs to not want to basically pull each one of those threads. So it takes a lot of constraint. I think in the early days, we realized, and this is maybe coming from my own entrepreneurial background, a lot of mistakes I made along the way. We said to ourselves, let's prove that we can do this. We decided, up to this point, we've not taken any investment whatsoever, on the equity side, because we wanted to prove to ourselves that we could create a business that. That works operationally, that it could pay for itself. and so I think by making the decision to not raise money or to not bring in too many partners too early on and to really just stay focused on doing what we do best, it almost forced us to say no to things because we knew that we had a certain amount of operational overhead that we had to cover every month. And to do that, we just had to get incredibly good at working with customers, at selling the vision for what we're putting together, at, you know, executing on this in the shop, you know, getting everything to site and delivered in the way that we promised, that customers walk away happy. And everybody, you know, sort of talks about the idea that innovation is what makes or breaks, you know, the entrepreneurial space, that everybody's looking to innovate and to do something new and to do it different. But at the end of the day, I think for us, we realized that no matter what technology we're doing, no matter how cool our system might be or what. What new technique we could be using, none of that matters unless we can execute on it well. Right. So the operational capacity of our team became much more of the focus, which kept us, I think, honest and kept us small in our thinking. Now that we've gotten to a place where, you know, we're typically booked eight to 12 months in advance, which is, you know, we see. We feel incredibly grateful for that, and we, don't do a ton of marketing today, I think we'll start to expand that, now that we've got our feet on the ground a little bit, but we are starting to look ahead and say, okay, what about two years from now? You know, what can we do with Croft that will not necessarily distract us, but might be complimentary to some of the products that we offer today? So today we're building the shell of the building. Right. So really we have wall panels, floor panels, and roof panels all insulated with natural materials and timber coming from, you know, local main lumber yards, essentially. But there are a lot of ways that we can innovate on the types of panels that we offer, the types of projects that we can do. So we're expanding into the multifamily space, into the commercial space. We're looking at partnerships with timber framing companies, which is a really popular technique, in New England. And I think we'll have lots of opportunity to expand what we do, but we don't want to do that until we've proven the existing business works. Right. If I can make my business profitable every month with the current form of it and prove to ourselves that we can do that again and again with a team that's excited to do it. Okay, great. Then we can start to think about what's next.

>> Katie McCamett: 32:10

You really departed your entrepreneurial history, especially from. From the west Coast. I. I can't think of any startup prefab company that has ever been able to get to. To the point that you're at without raising equity capital. I just. It. I'm like, flabbergasted. First of all, that. That you can do that. Like, how do you go from an idea to we're going to do prefab natural building high performance without raising capital?

>> Evan Ryan: 32:39

I think my business partners early on would have asked the same question, you know, and I, and I, and I. And we had some really hard conversations in the beginning, and also we had some really hard months. You know, there were, you know, thinking back to 20, 21 and early 22, there were multiple months where we didn't pay ourselves, you know, and not everybody could do that. Honestly, I don't think we really could do it if we didn't have partners and roofs over our head and a willingness from the entire team to just be scrappy and figure it out, you know, And I would say that there was definitely, like, a ceiling to how long we could do that. But in my experience as an entrepreneur, I always felt like, you know, without making it too uncomfortable for yourselves or for your teammates, the pressure to figure out how to make the business work as quickly as possible is only good for your business as long as you can endure the pain that that might bring with it. And so I think Andrew and I and some of the other folks in the team were just committed to trying to figure it out early on, and we stuck with it. That's credit to our team and the Passion that they have to do this thing that is really hard. And it forced us to figure things out very quickly. I would say the other thing that's benefited Croft, and this is maybe more of like a business philosophy question as it relates to scale. We recognize the value of scaling our business, and we recognize that if we are going to prove a system that's different, that is more carbon negative than the traditional systems out there, that we have to be able to do it in a way that we can get more of these buildings to the market. Any company in Croft's position could probably make a really nice business selling luxury homes and doing four of them a year. And there's sort of no judgment on that. You know, actually we've even thought about that as a model. I think it could be a great model. I think for Croft currently. You know, we've been really challenging ourselves, though, to think about how do we scale it Most prefab businesses, and this is kind of finally getting to your question. I think in the past have thought about the idea that scale equals, like, megafactory, right? How. How can we create a machine, you know, similar to the car industry in the US that cranks out panels all day long and that our through and the way we make more money is to increase our throughput, which I think is, you know, is. Is an interesting and. And valid strategy if you can do it well. And there are some companies out there doing that. I think what Croft is challenging a little bit is to say if we commit too much on automation and machinery, then we need to go out and raise a bunch of money because that equipment is really expensive, not to mention all the sort of supporting tools and equipment around it, right? You have these big machines that can cut things really fast to scale, and you can put that all together in the sort of traditional industrial model. And I think that does work. But when you commit to that model or that system, you do need a lot of money in the beginning to make it work. And so what Croft said is, what if we don't put all that money into machinery right away and instead we figure out, you know, how to work with the local labor force, how to find people that are really psyched to do this and to get those folks in the shop. And, you know, nine times out of 10, when we compare ourselves to other shops that are more automated, our team of people are moving just as fast. And the thing that we like about it is that it also gives us some adaptability. Right. I think we want to be careful as we grow as A business not to over commit to a certain system. Because if we over commit to a certain system and we buy a bunch of, a bunch of machines, machinery to support that system, then we sort of locked ourselves into that thing, that widget, right. Or that panel. But if we stay more flexible and we utilize great humans and, and, and, and bring them onto the team and get them inspired about what we're doing and, and you know, acknowledge that, you know, we can build great things, without having huge machines in the beginning, like for us that's really worked out well because it's allowed us to, to move really fast, innovate quickly without over investing in the system. And then the last thing I'll say on that is that doesn't mean that we're not supportive of automation. It doesn't mean that we're not supportive of the right piece of equipment at the right time in the right part of the process. In fact, like there are certain parts of our process that we have developed equipment for that we think is incredibly valuable to the system, but we just don't want to over commit to it. And I think that's helped us to stay lean and to not invest too much in the beginning.

>> Katie McCamett: 36:59

And I think it makes you a lot more resilient too. I mean think about the transition that we've made since you've opened your doors. I mean 2020, we're going into Covid super strong real estate market. If you're raising all this capital and then you hit an interest rate environment that more than doubles in a six month period, you know, a lot of prefab companies were struggling, a lot of construction technology firms, you know, just like general contractors across the board. It was like, oh man, what is this going to do to the industry? And very quickly I think you could have gone out of business if you hadn't gone that route. I know that you have a lot of intellectual curiosity as well as you know, a long history on, on the green and the eco side. How do you see this really fitting into the regenerative landscape?

>> Evan Ryan: 37:47

I love the, the term regenerative, even though I feel like it's been watered down a little bit recently in the same way that sustainability, you know, was watered down, you know, a couple decades ago. When I think about the regenerative landscape, I think about building spaces and places that have evolutionary capacity.

>> Katie McCamett: 38:04

Right.

>> Evan Ryan: 38:04

You know, the one thing I always hated about the, the term green building or the, the term sustainability is it almost felt like we were trying to take a slightly better thing in our case, homes or buildings, and put it on a piece of land, you know, sort of drop it there and, and think that we're doing a good thing, right? Because that building is going to do slightly less harm to the environment. And oh, by the way, maybe we'll throw in some walking trails and, you know, we'll call it a sustainable community. I think the intentions of that were great. Right. But what I like about, you know, the work that your team is doing, the folks out there, like the regenesis group, you know, people that are really promoting this idea of regenerative thinking, you know, within the built environment, is this idea that we have to build places that can adapt and evolve how as the world around us changes. When we think about how the infrastructure of a community fits into that regenerative landscape, we think about what is this building going to do if the climate 30 years from now is totally different. Right. In Maine, you know, we have a huge swings in temperatures and climate. You know, you can go from, you know, right now a day where you get 2ft of snow to the next day it's 55 degrees and raining. Right? That's, it's such a drastic shift these days. Sometimes our summers are 100 degrees outside with 100% humidity. And so the buildings themselves need to, you know, almost have like a living capacity to it. Right. And we think about our buildings. One, of the things we think about from a building science standpoint is can this building system evolve with the world around it? Can it not only, support our, the lives that we live and be comfortable and be enjoyable to be in, but also if the landscape and the climate around us shifts, how is that building going to evolve with it? So one of the things I think is really unique about Croft's building systems, it's totally vapor open wall system, which means the materials that we use. Another benefit of the natural materials is it allows moisture to move out of the wall if it were ever to get moisture in it. Right. So, with a, high performance building, you're typically looking to try to build a building that's airtight, you know, so that you can kind of control how the airflow moves through your building. And a lot of that's to make sure that you're not getting too much cold air coming into your building, which is then increasing your, the need for your mechanical systems. Or you have a certain pathway that's going to create a dew point inside of your wall or inside of your building, which will ultimately condensate and turn into Mold like those are things that we're trying to avoid.

>> Katie McCamett: 40:38

Right.

>> Evan Ryan: 40:39

And with the extremes that we're seeing in our world these days, our system is designed to be adaptable to that. Right. So if the humidity does go way up, the wall can get wet, you know, on the outside, but still. Still dry itself out very quickly. If there was to be some sort of leak in the wall, the wall is smart enough in the materials that we use to allow that moisture out, but to prevent it from coming back in. and so all those things, in my mind, are just really trying to work, in concert with the rest of this regenerative development idea that you all talk about so much. Right. So the building is just one piece of the communities that we're trying to build in a regenerative capacity.

>> Katie McCamett: 41:17

How do you think this fits in within the regenerative design framework that somebody like the Living Building Challenge has put out?

>> Evan Ryan: 41:25

We think a lot about the different systems that are out there for, you know, I think of them almost like as. As guides or ways, to do things slightly better. And there are a lot of systems. So Living Building challenges, one, obviously, people do net zero, people do passive house. All of those are really, really great. And I think if we just took all of the certification programs off the table and we said, how do we make the highest quality building that we can make with materials that we feel are comfortable for the humans that. That live in the spaces and that are coming from our natural environments in a way that's only supporting how those materials are grown and processed and delivered to us in the construction environment. We care most about that. Making the highest quality buildings with the highest quality materials that we can. And if that fits into programs like the Living Building Challenge, then that's great. I think in some ways, we're holding ourselves more accountable than some of these systems, are. Are holding us accountable as well. So when somebody comes to us and says, hey, we really, you know, we live in a community where the HOA requires every building to be net zero energy, that's great. You know, we have no issues or concerns about that. The only thing that's challenging for us is making sure that we're tracking everything appropriately so all the certification and documentation can be done correctly. But I think that by forcing ourselves to build the highest quality buildings with the highest quality materials, that we sort of naturally fit into whatever programs out there to. To hopefully support the same thing, but on a broader scale.

>> Katie McCamett: 43:00

As you begin to scale, Evan, how does that supply chain start to change? You know, I I've seen construction technology firms, especially builders that are utilizing cross laminated timber, really start to, to face this question of like, where are the resources coming from? You know, are they coming from forest out of Maine or the Pacific Northwest, or are we having to get them out of, Scandinavia? And that to me starts to really skew this conversation of growth at what cost? One thing that I see out of the New England area that is so special, and I'm envious because I would have thought that the Pacific Northwest, where we are, is going to rival what you guys have, is just a really strong ecosystem that is understanding supply chain of natural building to a degree that, that is spectacular and such. And maybe I'm just like judging from afar, judging positively. can you speak to that of what you've got going on in New England and where you see that if you were to start up, in the Southeast or in the Pacific Northwest, how you start to view resource and supply chains differently?

>> Evan Ryan: 44:06

Yeah, that's a great question. In fact, even though New England and the Northeast has some really great resources, we still struggle with that. Right. The other day we were, we had, you know, some issues getting this spruce lumber that we use for all of our framing because one of the lumber yards that we partner with changed hands and the priorities for what they wanted to focus on also changed. And so then we had to scramble to figure out, okay, where's the rest of our spruce coming from? And we're ordering thousands of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars every week of material to keep the production running. You know, you sort of hit these moments where, you know, you think that you have this really deep supply chain, but things can change in an instant. And that's even in a space, like you said, that has really great resources. One of the things that Croft is trying to do is demonstrate that using these materials can get you the same level, if not higher quality for a similar cost. And if we can prove that, you know, Croft and the other companies that are pushing towards this, then it's only going to support the rest of the ecosystem. Right. So if we can demonstrate to these lumber yards that getting local spruce into these buildings and, you know, finding opportunities to grow more of that material, their customer base is going to grow and grow as we continue to prove that out.

>> Katie McCamett: 45:21

Right.

>> Evan Ryan: 45:22

And I think like you said, the cross laminated timber is another good example of demonstrating a high level of interest, which then promotes that resource within the market and allows new businesses to spring up or allows lumberyards to put more of their attention and focus on the things that we really want to do. I'll also say from, you know, one of the things I think is really special about the material that Craft works with is the connection back to the agricultural system. So in the US that most of the time we hear the term regenerative, we're talking about agriculture, right? So we're talking about these systems of agriculture that are really focused on treating the health of the soil first and foremost as a way to make sure that the system that we're building, you know, has this regenerative capacity. You know, I think it's interesting that Croft can potentially deliver infrastructure and buildings to regenerative communities, but we're getting our, resources and the insulation space from regenerative farms. And so there's a really nice circular economy thing happening there for us where, you know, we can go to a local farmer and say, look, whether it's a farmer that's already taking. Let's just start first with a. With a, you know, a farmer that's already using organic regenerative practices. So for those folks, you know, they're already growing these materials as cover crops or when they're, you know, their field might be fallow over the course of a season or two. And we're saying to them, look, this is a material, this straw material that you can cut and extract as hay. You can grab the seed head and you can have that to sell for the market in the form of wheat or whatever else you might be, you know, oat straw, whatever it is that you're selling. And then we'll take the byproduct, you know, we'll take the chaff, which is the stuff that doesn't have any of the seed head in it, and we'll make use of that as well. And so now we can say to a farmer, this is material that maybe would have just sat in the field and. And, you know, biodegraded into the field, which is also, you know, obviously it's good for the soil, but if we can give them an extra revenue, stream by buying their straw from them, then it allows that farmer to have a little bit more security, a little bit more subsistence in the way they do things. And it also promotes these regenerative practices because now we're saying, hey, you're not just growing the grasses for your. For your cows, but when you're growing it as a cover crop or when you're growing it in a fallow field, we can actually also support you and pay for that. And the beauty of These grasses is you can do two cuts a year. You can do a spring cut and a fall cut. Those, farmers can make more money. And then for the folks that are not yet using those practices, Croft is working with some organizations locally here in Maine that are supporting the agricultural system. You know, you have organizations like Maine Farmland Trust and farms out there like Wolfs Neck Farm that are doing some amazing work to educate farmers and to make sure that the farms that exist today, that might have been third or fourth generation farms, when they turn over, go back into the hands of new farmers that want to do this. And Croft can come in and say, look, we're going to help you figure out how to make these farms viable. And we want to be part of that ecosystem. So in some ways we have to also promote the supply chain by saying to those farmers and to those lumber yards and folks in the timber space, we have a market for your goods. And we, we can work to expand that market. And then for, for the organizations that want to do this in other parts of the country, you know, we have to find a way to get the materials in the places that they do grow down to those areas so they can use it, or we have to innovate on the kinds of materials that we can use that might grow more locally there. So.

>> Katie McCamett: 48:44

Good. Evan, I just, One. I think you're so eloquent in the way that you're describing this, and it brings up a question that I want to actually end on. And I want to preface that with I want this to be a chapter end and not, not the bookend, because I would love to come back in, in the future and really understand like what this path is that that you're on and you might not have, have ever put headspace into what I'm about to ask you. And so there really is no wrong answer. But I, I think out of anybody, you would have a pretty solid grasp of this. But it's. If I was to give you a hundred million dollars with this thought of I want to invest into regenerative, I'm, looking at the landscape of regenerative does capture a lot of people's attention. On agriculture, you span that, but you're also spanning the regenerative development side and construction, how would you allocate that capital to really see that whole supply chain really come to life?

>> Evan Ryan: 49:37

Man, I guess I'm gonna have to write an article on this and come back to you with it. I think what we have to start with is finding municipalities out there that are really Excited about the idea of creating more longevity and more regenerative capacity for their communities. One of the things that Andrew and I talk about all the time in our business is who are the regulators out there? They're living in the towns and cities. They're looking out at this landscape for construction and for how they want their cities and communities to evolve and saying, what can we do better and what can we do differently? I think I would probably take that investment and find five or six community partners in, you know, municipalities, towns and cities that are willing to welcome, you know, a group of developers and builders into their fold to say, okay, look, we've got 600 acres of available land across this municipality and we're trying to figure out what to do with it. And, and that land is zoned in many different ways. How can we put our heads together as a team and figure out projects that will demonstrate how we can actually do this for other cities?

>> Katie McCamett: 50:43

Right.

>> Evan Ryan: 50:43

I think if you get one city, we talk a lot about the city of Rockland, Maine, because that's where we're based. But there are so many other towns and municipalities across the state that I think would be open to this. Lewiston, Maine comes in as another option. Some of the towns down in southern Maine, Biddeford is another one that's doing some really interesting stuff. You know, I think this is maybe a call to those regulators to say, how can we work with you? How can we find land and opportunity to build spaces, whether that's affordable housing or workforce housing or intentional communities that might be more urban centered and prove out that we can build this stuff with local labor, local materials sourced from the farmers, fields and forests of our region, building it for the people that we that want to live here, that want to be part of this economy, and then use that as an example for the rest of the country on how we might be able to do this? And we're not going to get it right right away, but one of the things that we're putting out to, as a challenge to the regulators in our state at least, is what if we could look at things with a little bit more of a common sense lens. There are so many hurdles that we've put in front of ourselves to make sure that we have all the checks and balances in the system. But those hurdles, even though a lot of times they're based in safety and trying to make sure that we have the right rules and regulations, we get all that. But there are some times where we, we've layered them so Much that now we can't actually do anything right. And I'll give you an example. Really quickly, we've been looking for land as a way to do some example, multifamily projects, you know, in this affordable and workforce housing space. And there's this beautiful piece of land that came up in one of the towns near us, and it was right on the edge of a quarry. It was a nine acre piece of land. And it's perfectly accessible. You know, you could bike to downtown. It's, sits up on a hill. You know, it's got all sorts of beautiful views. And when we dug into it, oh, and by the way, it's commercially zoned. It's rural, residential, commercial. So it's sort of got this unique combination of zoning which for us felt like, oh, what a great opportunity here. You know, there's this old commercial business and it happened to be an old mechanics site. So there is this kind of brownfield question mark to the, to the place. And we got into the, building department, we just said, look, we'd like to do something with this land. It could be a beautiful property. We're willing to put some time and money into remediating the soil if we need to do that. And what we got back from the building department was I think, a list of 10 or 20 reasons why we couldn't actually do the project because we had to go through all these different hoops to get there. And our response was sort of like, look, you know, I get that we have these rules and regulations in place, and a lot of, them are there for good reason. But we can't speak out of two sides of our mouth. We can't say that we want to build 84,000 units across the state of Maine. And then anytime somebody comes with an idea to do something slightly differently and to make a site better than it is today, we slap all these regulations on them to make the project impossible. So that money that a hundred million dollars that you would invest, I think would go towards trying to work with municipalities to unravel situations like that so that we open the door for developers and builders like Craft to go do more work. I think this is maybe what separates the natural building industry in the US from the natural building industry in Europe. They're a little further along. They've been doing it for a longer time. But also the way they manage their regulations is a lot different than the U.S. i feel like we saddle ourselves with way too many things here, and we need to figure out a way to make it easier for builders to do the right thing and to open that up a little bit more.

>> Katie McCamett: 54:08

Evan, this has just been an absolute pleasure. It's so interesting to not only see what you're building, but to learn the methodology and the thought process that's gone into it. I hope that Croft continues to go through all the success that you're envisioning for it. I am remiss that we can't just easily work with you right now to really get homes in the ground where we are in control of projects in the Pacific Northwest. Hopefully that won't always be the case in the near future. Yeah, we will get there. In the meantime, I am curious, because we like to direct people to reach out to you, visit your website. Who do you want to hear from? I mean, there are people that tune into this podcast internationally. it's certainly North American focused. Are you looking for folks that are within Maine, within New England, or are just trying to understand what the pulse of interest is in the world right now?

>> Evan Ryan: 55:02

Yeah, I think that's it. I think the latter. I think we want to hear from anybody and everybody that's interested in what we're doing. I think, in particular, people that are excited about, you know, bringing projects to their communities. You know, folks that have some. Know how some. Some land, some capital to do really interesting projects. Obviously, we're. We're really open to that. You know, I think for Croft, anybody who's passionate about this space, we're excited to talk more, too. We do have a really strong education and apprentice program that we're working on. So we're constantly educating our. Our team. We're looking for other folks in the market or in the industry that want to learn, and we're. We're more than willing to share what we know and get more folks out there that can build this kind of stuff. So, yeah, please reach out. We're an open book and we're excited to collaborate with people. And again, we just want to prove to the world that this stuff is possible.

>> Katie McCamett: 55:53

What's the best place for people to find more about Croft?

>> Evan Ryan: 55:57

Yeah, so our website is right now, Croft House, spelled H A U S. And we've got some updates to, that website coming in the new year, so stay tuned. And then on Instagram, I think we're Croftco 2. We're just excited to keep doing this and keep, keep meeting people. I think we try to have a learner's mindset and know that, like you said, we want to stay adaptable and continue to grow so we can only do that with the other people that challenge us and other folks that bring their minds to the table.

>> Katie McCamett: 56:29

That is a wrap on Today Today's episode. But I don't want this to be a one way conversation. I'd love to hear about the projects and ideas you're working on. The best way to connect with me is on LinkedIn. Just search Neal Collins. And if my team at Hamlet Capital or Latitude Regenerative Real Estate can help bring your vision to life, whether it's buying or selling a home or developing a community integrated within a farm, do not hesitate to reach out. Let's build something meaningful together.