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Print: Craft and Community - a winning combination The Martha's Vineyard Times May 19, 2005
On Martha’s Vineyard, there’s been a pretty consistent model for creating a construction company in the past half century. After a few years learning the ropes with an established builder, a 20-something guy gets a job on the side repairing someone’s shed, or adding a dormer to a friend’s house, and soon enough he’s painting his name on the door of a pickup and he’s in business. Whether he chooses to keep his business small and intimate — focusing on renovations, additions, and the occasional small house — or grow the company to handle larger jobs, the founder is usually inseparable from the company. Most construction outfits carry the founder’s name, in fact, or they use a local geographic name. So what were people to think back in 1975 when a couple of young longhairs who hadn’t apprenticed with an established local contractor hung out a shingle in Chilmark that read South Mountain Company? John Abrams, who founded the company with Mitchell Posin, seems to thrive on doing things his way, on pushing past convention. Maybe he had a different idea in mind when he and Posin, who now owns and operates the Allen Farm with his wife, Clarissa Allen, first started banging nails and taking barns apart in Vermont, in upstate New York, in the Pacific northwest, trying to connect with traditional ways of living on and off the land as so many young people were doing 35 years ago. After all, he did attend Marlboro College in Vermont, where half of everything that everyone did or thought was about a different way of doing or thinking. It’s a bit unusual for the principal of a small construction company to write a book, for example, but that’s the challenge that Abrams most recently took on — and conquered. The result is “The Company We Keep — Reinventing Small Business for People, Community, and Place,” just released by Chelsea Green Publishing Company. A builder and a writer In a conversation a few days ago at South Mountain’s office in West Tisbury, Abrams told me that he loves to write, whether reports, proposals, or magazine articles. With his daughter heading off to college two years ago, Abrams and his wife, Chris, decided to take a sabbatical from South Mountain, and Martha’s Vineyard. But this wouldn’t be purposeless down time, a state that may be alien to Abrams, who’s known for long hours at work and a deep reserve of energy. He wanted to write a book about business. And he wanted to write the story of South Mountain Company. In “The Company We Keep,” he’s managed to do both. First, it’s a compelling story, how the company has evolved from a couple of guys and a couple of trucks to some 30 people who are continuing to nurture what is now a very successful, innovative, and mature business. Abrams is quick to point out that the work is not done, that he looks at the progress so far as a strong beginning, and that lasting success will be measured in decades, not years. Still, a lot has been accomplished. After Posin and Abrams split up in 1985, the next big step was Abrams’s decision to transfer ownership of the company to a worker-owner cooperative corporation. The original three owners were Abrams, Pete Ives, and Steve Sinnett. Peter Rodegast soon became a fourth. This was the critical initial step toward setting the first of what Abrams calls the cornerstones that form the foundation of South Mountain Company. Called “cultivating workplace democracy,” this first step is joined by seven other cornerstones: challenging the gospel of growth; balancing multiple bottom lines; celebrating the spirit of craft; committing to the business of place; advancing people conservation; practicing community entrepreneurism; and thinking like cathedral builders. “The Company We Keep” is made up of 10 chapters, the first an introduction, the last a conclusion. Sandwiched between these two are eight “cornerstone” chapters. Choosing which cornerstones the company needed, and when and how to place them, was the product of research, experimentation, and sometimes raw invention. Not many of them just fell into place, although one often led to another as the business found its footing. More than a manual The book is dense, in a rewarding, thought-provoking sense. It makes you think, as Abrams and his partners have done continuously over the years, about things that have no directly apparent connection with shingles, with insulation values, or with recycled flooring. And it is much more than a manual about how to create a successful small business, although it is loaded with good tips, ideas, and even precepts. Chief among the latter, it seems to me, is: Don’t just do it the way it’s always been done because that’s the way it’s always been done. If you have questions or doubts about conventional practice, ask them, air them. You hear the 1960s mantra as a bass line here: challenge authority. Abrams and his partners must have devoted a tremendous amount of time and energy to grappling with the growing pains that occasionally cropped up during the company’s maturation. How could they avoid them when they were asking themselves questions like, “Can small business, supported by strong underlying principles, help make better lives and better communities?” The decision to share ownership of the company triggered a progression of steps and decisions and choices that set South Mountain on a course that would make it a different kind of local contracting outfit. As he describes this evolution — most of it on purpose, some by accident — Abrams also wonders why this path is not followed more often. “Entrepreneurs are risk takers, but perhaps giving up control seems like too great a risk to these pioneers who have already risked so much to build businesses that embody their personal values. I’ve come to believe that giving up control is the business risk that has the greatest potential to cause the greatest returns.” This passage embodies how the book works: Abrams constantly compares his experience against conventional business practice, on the one hand, and against what could be done in an ideal business climate, on the other. At times along the way, there have been temptations to expand South Mountain dramatically. That’s what makes a company successful, right? When he examined this maxim, Abrams concluded that Wall Street needs businesses to grow to nurture the investment industry, but that businesses don’t need to grow to stay healthy, successful, and profitable. In fact, he writes, “excessive growth may narrow our horizons and limit good things like invention, personal fulfillment, and the overall quality of our workplace and our products.” In the end he decided that the best path for South Mountain was to continue to follow its initial mission. “I think it’s important to know who you are and what you do well, and to stay focused on this.” And that takes him right back to where he started, learning and loving to make nice things with wood. He calls craft the central thread, the guiding star, of what South Mountain does. “Well-crafted projects, in our view, embody a collection of qualities: they are artful, calm, comforting, light and airy, durable, flexible and easy to change, energy efficient, healthy to live in, made from low-impact materials, surprising, uplifting, and, of course, satisfying to the needs and desires of our clients.” Sounds like a mouthful, until Abrams brings it back to earth with the next sentence: “Most of all we wish to make buildings that are loved.” Repaying the community Still, Abrams can’t resist looking out the shop window. To his great credit, he’s made a deep commitment to developing affordable housing on the Island. And he’s fashioned a clever kind of synergy along the way: the company devotes some of the profit it accumulates from building high-end homes for some of our super-rich neighbors to the development of housing that’s affordable for some of our super-regular neighbors — the teachers, nurses, police, and shopkeepers who keep the community chugging along. The company’s commitment is matched by many of its employees who donate their time and expertise to many worthwhile community projects. Listen to Abrams describe the way it can all come together: “I’ve learned that small enterprises, if driven as much by principled practice as by profit, can produce workplace satisfaction, support good lives, and help shape strong communities.” Commitment is important, as is determination, but working together toward a shared goal may be the key. On cooperating with municipal officials, and convincing everyday skeptics, he writes, “If we question rather than declare, understand the view from the other side of the table, and search out commonalities, collaboration is more likely than conflict.” Impossible? But why? Who could argue with guidelines like these? Maybe it sounds too good to be true, but it’s certainly a worthy goal. But there’s a long way between worthy goals and successful projects on the ground, and it takes a steady, practiced hand to bring people together in effective collaboration. It also takes someone with a tough skin. “Community entrepreneurism entails taking risks, taking public stands, and learning as you go, often under the glare of the local scrutiny of naysayers,” Abrams writes. Abrams may have offended some folks along the way, but the people closest to South Mountain — clients, neighbors, former and current employees, municipal planners — speak highly of the way the company operates. As quick as clients are to praise South Mountain’s craftsmanship and thoughtful designs, they also appreciate the fact that work is done on time and on budget. Planners find proposals creative and practical. Employees extol Abrams’s vision and sincerity. Neighbors talk about how cohousing simply works. Sure, South Mountain may have caught a few breaks here and there: running a business on Martha’s Vineyard is a far cry from surviving the urban jungle or suburban one-ups-man-ship. But the leaders of South Mountain Company have had the courage to experiment and they’ve taken the time to grapple with some truly vexing issues along the way, all in an effort to honor, in their professional lives, the values they’d adopted back in the old counter-culture days, and haven’t forsaken. And for this they deserve a lot of credit. Abrams’s writing wavers occasionally when he tries to draw global conclusions from one small company’s experience. At times I wished he’d just tell the story, and let the reader draw the conclusions. After all, it’s a great story — compelling, at times even inspiring — and well told. That ought to be enough. Then again, both in the book and in his leadership role at South Mountain, Abrams has asked the hard questions, and questioned the so-called hard facts at every turn — about growth, competition, profit, community service. His thought-provoking conclusions spawn as many questions as they settle — not surprising when you’re breaking new ground. The concept of reinventing, as mentioned in the subtitle, strikes me as a bit of a stretch, when applied to the company that Abrams and his co-owners are keeping, and not wholly accurate. To me, these committed men and women have developed something very unusual, even unique. And when you start brushing up against unique, you haven’t reinvented anything, you’ve created something new. The story of what they’ve done, where they’ve been and where they think they are heading is its own story, and a good one. Meet John Abrams at a book signing on Friday, May 20, 7:30 pm at the Mansion House, Main Street, Vineyard Haven. |
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