Video Case: Modern SHED: Designing Adaptive Organizations

Video Case name: Modern SHED: Designing Adaptive Organizations

Video Case script: as below

Modern Shed: Designing Adaptive Organizations >> Gosh, my earliest memory would probably be when I was a kid, you know, six, seven, eight years old. I had a great big train board with little houses on it and loved to just sort of move them around and to play with the idea of space and buildings. And something about making little things was always fascinating to me as a kid. And so, I just loved that process. My name is Ryan Grey Smith, founder of Modern Shed. We started something called Grey Design Studio. We were doing architectural work here in Seattle. We had someone come over and they were doing, at the time, they lived in an old, old house, hundred-year-old house in Seattle like half the homes are here, and we were going to tear out the business or lift the house up or do an addition and we were talking about something that was 150, 175,000. And literally it was the client that came by, and he just looked at our shed here and he said, I just need this in the backyard, and I can work. Modern Shed really came from that, taking what we did on a local level here and turning it into something that we could sell, you know, out of state. [ Music] Yeah, not definitely, I mean if we had, if when we started, we had many employees that were full-time we would not be the same today, or even possibly here. [ Music] I mean you can kind of imagine if you need to do a business organization and you wanted to bring it all in house, you’d have to have the accounting position. You’d have to have the organizing position, the person that’s going to answer the phones and the people who are going to do the thing. And you must have all these positions, and you just can’t do that when you start a company. It just absolutely doesn’t make sense. We’d get busy one month. The next month, you know, we weren’t as busy. You know and it’s just the way business goes. You know it’ll come and go like that. So really the most logical way to start anything is to just find the people that can help you out and work out an arrangement. And so, we have, within the organization right now, we have five, six, seven– there’s about, there’s about 12 to 14 people between kind of manufacturing and the office and sales here in Seattle. Outside of Seattle we have about 12 sales reps and 35 dealers across the states. >> Well I’ve never considered myself a salesperson. Years ago, my wife had just given birth to our first child, and I had just been laid off from the turbulence of the early 80’s sales and loan fiasco and needed a job. I’m Scott, and I handle sales and marketing with Modern Shed. So, I answered an ad to sell raw land in North Central Washington. Well one of the key things that attracted me about Modern Shed is that I came from the real estate industry which has absolutely been decimated throughout the country. The company that I used to be with in fact did sales and marketing for multimillion dollar projects. That industry is going to be asleep now for about three to five years. Modern shed has positioned itself so that we’re essentially insulated from what’s going on in the general marketplace. >> It’s very interesting, that window wall, window wall, window wall. >> We kind of changed this. The, we changed the siding, but you heard that conversation about the corrugated? >> Yes, yes. >> Well that’s — >> Eric Johnson is our fabricator and he’s actually set up to support not only Modern Shed but other companies that may have a penalization component. He actually comes from the panelizing world for home builders. Well because that industry has really fallen off because of the economy, we become a solution for Eric because, interestingly enough, Modern Shed has not been affected by the downturn. In fact, if anything, our sales are increasing. So it works out really well with the fabrication being something that’s third party, off-site, and we have no financial interest in. [ Music ] The dealer network is really set up to take advantage of markets that we think we’ve got an initial, logical fit with. And so the dealers are essentially folks that also represent other products, they just aren’t directly competitive to Modern Shed. So they’re complementary. Now on a monthly basis we’ll actually have conference calls with the reps and the dealers about either new product, new promotions, changes in pricing, new opportunities for them in terms of their marketing. So again it’s a very, very lean and unstructured because all those folks are independent contractors. So a great example of the flexibility that we have as a company is we were recently approached by a nationally recognized home and garden expert who wants us to create an entirely new product line of Modern Shed. In about six weeks we’re actually going to create the product and potentially have it on the client’s site for filming. So the fact that Ryan can just drop everything, which blows me away, and can focus on this, get the team focused on it, and actually come up with a brand new product in under eight weeks is phenomenal and could not be done unless the organization was nimble like we are. >> We’ve had to adapt every year. I mean we, there’s things that we adjust to based on different areas we’re selling in or different trade shows we’re doing, and marketing things that we might get involved with. And so we’ll bring someone in to help us with that and then we’ll change that or they’ll go and do something else. I think we’re learning a lot about that still. I mean any, you know anybody would be lying if they said they had it all figured out. You know it’s not easy. You just don’t know. You don’t know what’s going to work. You try things. But I mean that’s how I’ve felt comfortable making decisions about moving Modern Shed forward. I mean the very first decision that I wanted to do with the small structures– it was so tempting, oh yeah we’re going to do these big, you know, structures. I said no we’re going to do, a box. We were at a trade show in ’05 in Los Angeles and people would come by and you know just like no one was doing these small structures like this. And they’re just like well you know do you do anything bigger? It’s like, well we can but we’re, you know, we’re making this work. You know there’s a lot of work in these, this little box. And there’s a huge level of thinking and detailing had to go on. Once we got comfortable with that little box, then we could expand. We can make that footprint bigger ’cause we understand how it works. It’s, you don’t want to go the opposite way and go too big and you can’t figure it out. And so you can use the analogy for organizations and people as well as structures. If you go too big, you don’t understand it. Please solve 1-6