How Graceland Is Rebuilding The Shed Business For A Tougher Market PART 1

The shed business looks simple from the outside, but the inside math is getting brutal. More competitors are fighting for a market that is not growing at the same pace, cities are tightening planning and zoning, and customers expect a cleaner online buying journey with fast quotes, clear financing, and reliable delivery. From our seats, the biggest risk is pretending the industry is still operating like it did five or ten years ago.

We’re in Cunningham, Kentucky with Greg French, CEO of Graceland Portable Buildings, and we go deep on the forces reshaping the portable building industry. Greg shares how his technology leadership background taught him what real disruption looks like, then connects those lessons to sheds: inventory built to “keep plants busy,” labor shortages that threaten quality, and why manufacturers and dealers need systems that can scale up or scale down quickly. We also talk manufacturing automation, CNC-driven processes, and why a 3D shed configurator should do more than look pretty, it should connect to how buildings are actually produced.

On the dealer side, we unpack what saturation looks like on the ground: unmanned lots, shrinking attention, and higher operating costs that demand better execution. We also hit pricing and volatility, including lumber spikes, diesel pressure, and why percent-based models can create circular problems when costs move fast. This is Part 1 of a two-part series, and it sets the stage for what comes next for dealer networks that want to stay healthy through a shakeout.

Come back Friday for Part 2, share this with a dealer who’s feeling the squeeze, and leave a review if you want more real operator conversations like this. What’s the biggest change hitting your shed business right now?

For more information or to know more about the Shed Geek Podcast visit us at our website.

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This episodes Sponsors:
Studio Sponsor: Shed Pro

Digital Shed Builder
Velocity 360
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Shed Suite

Transcript

INTRO 0:00

Hello and welcome back to the Shed Geek Podcast. Here's a message from our studio sponsor. Let's be real. Running a shed business today isn't just about building great sheds. The industry is changing fast. We're all feeling the squeeze, competing for fewer buyers, while expectations keep climbing. And yet I hear from many of you that you are still juggling spreadsheets, clunky software, or disconnected systems. You're spending more time managing chaos than actually growing your business. That's why I want to talk to you about our studio sponsor, ShedPro. If you're not already using them, I really think you should check them out. ShedPro combines your 3D configurator, point of sale, RTO contracts, inventory, deliveries, and dealer tools all in one platform. They even integrate cleanly into our Shed Geek marketing solutions. From website leads, to final delivery, you can quote, contract, collect payment, and schedule delivery in one clean workflow. No more double entries, no more back and forth chaos. Quoting is faster, orders are cleaner. And instead of chasing down paperwork, you're actually running your business. And if you mention ShedGeek, you'll get 25% off all setup fees. Check it out at shedpro.co/ShedGeek. Thank you, ShedPro, for being our studio sponsor and honestly for building something that helps the industry.

GRACELAND PORTABLE BUILDINGS 1:37

Hi, this is Greg French, CEO of Graceland Portable Buildings. In celebration of our 20th anniversary, we're excited to announce the launch of our Next Gen Dealer program. The Next Gen program cements our commitment to the growth and solvency of the Shed Dealer Network. As part of the Next Gen program, Graceland dealers can earn commissions over 17%, and through our new Flex Commission program, can earn over 20% on Select Inventory. But this is just the beginning. We provide marketing reimbursements, zip code level paid marketing, access to our training programs through Graceland University, where you can earn dealer certifications and grow your business. We provide free marketing materials and monthly trainings from our top performers. We have a dedicated leads department that provides leads and can even close them for you. That's right. You get the commission. We have an online commission sharing program. If a customer buys a building online, you get the commission. In addition to our Next Gen dealer program, we're excited to announce our recent acquisition of ShedSync, a state-of-the-art software system that not only provides each dealer a website, but a complete marketing solution with a built-in dealer website, CRM, lead manager, and it allows automatic post creation and submission for Facebook posts, Facebook Marketplace, Instagram, and a growing number of social media outlets. The investment our dealers doesn't end there though. We have the best dealer support program in the nation, a regional support team that's dedicated to you. This includes a dedicated business operations manager, customer support team, regional sales manager, dispatcher, customer service department, and more. If you want to learn more about our Next Gen Dealer program, visit yesGraceland.com. We would love the opportunity to be your portable building supplier.

Back To Graceland And Why

Shannon 3:34

Okay, welcome back to another episode of the Shed Geek Podcast. Very excited to be here in Cunningham, Kentucky today with uh someone and a company that I admire, uh, where I even got my start, and we'll talk about that. But just a few ways to stay plugged in with us over here at the Shed Geek Podcast. Give us a call. Uh, you can call me directly at 618-309-3648. Uh message us at infoshedge.com or check us out on our website at www.shedgeek.com. Uh feel free to give us a like and a follow on YouTube and on uh Facebook or any of the social media. And for those of you who uh use the call-in landline or have someone who would like to uh call in on the landline for the playing communities, the phone number is 330-997-3055. Hot item of the day. Oh gosh.

Cord 4:27

What a beautiful office.

Shannon 4:28

Big conversation and business. Yeah, what a what an excellent, you know, like conference room and really just a uh a conversation I've been looking forward to for a long time today. Uh, we're here with Greg French from Graceland, uh Portable Buildings, and really where I got my start in the shed industry. Um, you know, working in this office about uh, I don't know, 10 steps away over here uh in purchasing and procurement. Uh and it was a really growing season for me too, Greg. It was also a growing season for me in in like in like my faith. Uh I remember listening to like Bible apps every day on the way to work and back. And this company helped provide a foundation for that too, because they welcomed uh things like faith and it became part of the conversation in business. So, I owe a lot to uh the folks at Graceland, Jonathan Rentfro, a shout out to our childhood friend who even mentioned it as he was working here. So back to where it all started, really, here at Graceland. Spent a solid year here before going to work in ministry. Really thought a lot of the company and still do. So, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. I'm glad to be here. It's uh it's much anticipated. I'm excited for this conversation.

Cord 5:49

Uh we've been trying for a while.

Shannon 5:51

Yeah, we've been we've been knocking on his door.

Greg French 5:56

Finally got the schedule.

Shannon 5:57

No, it worked, it worked out good. We're excited to have you on, obviously. Um yeah, excited to talk about the shed space and what it what it looked like, what it looks like now, what it's gonna look like in the future. And I don't know, maybe we can uh start with a just a high overview of what do you see from the captain's seat here at Graceland?

Rapid Change In Sheds And Sales

Greg French 6:17

Yeah, I see really an evolving industry uh very rapidly. Uh the rate of change in terms of not only consumer behavior, but also you know how we sell sheds. So, the variety of different mediums of how people shop, um, I think is going to continue to challenge us into the future, the way that manufacturers build the buildings, the labor force metrics that are impacting them, capital outlay and how you manage cash, the rent-to-own industry, and how it plays a factor into it in regards to financing. And I think also uh the planning and zoning side of every city that we're in, in terms of their openness to sheds, they seem to be, you know, making it more difficult to sell sheds in towns. At the same time, you've got incongruent uh things happening with you know opening up accessory dwelling units to go into cities. And so, at the same time, they seem to be pushing sheds out, and they're welcoming in the very industry that would support that. And so I think all of those things are gonna be have a big impact in the future. How we sell, how consumers buy, how we build, how we ship, uh all those things are rapidly changing, and I think you just need to buckle up because it's not gonna slow down. Yeah, I would agree.

Cord 7:38

And are cutting different directions, right? You know, the navigating uh each of those individual things sometimes actually comes into conflict with one of the other pieces. Um you know, I was I was uh impressed talking to uh Brad, Mr. Doll here, obviously yourself. I mean, the level at which you all talk about these things is really impressive. If you don't mind, I mean, obviously yourself, you know, kind of maybe just a little bit of background. I just feel like everyone around here are brainiacs. You know, like you guys are so sharp and so smart. Like, how did you, you know, I know you've maybe not been um I don't know if visible is the right word, but like, you know, you may not have been to uh some of the events and stuff. You guys, it feels like you all have had your heads down working, planning, doing some really, really smart work around here. Am I getting the right vibe?

Greg French 8:35

I think you're

Greg’s Tech Background And Faith Pivot

Greg French 8:36

getting the right vibe. I will say, me personally, um, I came to Graceland 10 years ago as the chief chief executive officer, and that was actually a pinnacle point in my own career where I made a decision to change industries based on my family and my faith. Um and so I had spent, you know, I was really more of a tech technological leader at that time. And so, I uh had spent seven years before I came here um in the educational technology space. And so, um moving to sheds uh was a little bit unique, but I had been a chief information officer, um vice president of innovation at ecampus.com. I ended up spinning up several companies for them at ecampus.com and found myself traveling all over the United States, helping schools, businesses, universities make changes to their systems, leaning back on my CIO technology background. You know, I've owned my own web design company, email marketing company. Um, you know, so I've what landed me here, there was a long pathway that we could spend a lot of time talking about me, but uh what I did find was that I was blessed to have the opportunity to come to Graceland as the CEO. And it was the perfect opportunity moving from the president position that I had in the company I was at to taking on this company that I felt like the experience I was bringing in aligned almost perfectly. And so we talk about things that are kind of providential. The shed industry itself and Graceland in particular was providential in my life. Um I definitely leaned on, you know, lean not on your own understanding. Um I leaned not on my own understanding because you know I moved my family five hours just for this company, just for these people, just for this industry. Everything was going great in my life. There wasn't something I was running from, but you know how you're in a position where you like the job, you like the people, but something doesn't feel settled in your spirit. You don't feel like you're where you're supposed to be yet, and you can't really define it, you can't put your finger on it, but you just know that you've not landed yet in the thing that is where you're meant to be. And I feel like Graceland is where I was meant to be. And so, the job I was in, part of it was it was so broad. I was raising capital, I was traveling from coast to coast, from Santa Monica to New York City, and trying to chase through the growth, chase the things that you want to do. And I had a couple things that happened that just brought into focus to me that the industry that I was in was so incredibly disruptible by bigger players that it made you feel um like everything that you do could just simply be undone. And I'll I'll give you an

Big Tech Disruption Lessons For Sheds

Greg French 11:50

example. Um one of the projects we worked on for three years was a learning management system for schools. And so, at the time you were seeing this big shift in the educational space where they're starting to, you know, the iPad one came out, um, all of a sudden, the things like Chromebooks were becoming cheaper. And so now schools are able to maybe start shifting some of their, for better or worse, shifting some of their classrooms to having more technology in the classroom. But the problem is you don't have the mediums there, you don't have the infrastructure at the schools, you don't have the ability to deploy all these Chromebooks, these tablets, these iPads, and you don't have the software there to manage it. Like, for instance, if you went to college, you might get Blackboard as a learning management system. There really wasn't anything focused on the K-12 parochial space, which is where we were trying to find our way. And we actually went and developed a uh a learning management system, put three years of development into it, hired a team of developers, brought in educators, and made this thing for exactly what an educator would want in this new world. And as part of ecampus.com, we're gonna we're gonna go launch this product, and you turn around and Google goes and creates something called Google Classroom and makes it free. So now you've just put all your RD into a product that somebody else can make free. And how are they doing that? Not necessarily with having a better product, they're doing it with advertising dollars. So, how do you compete? How do you compete with that? Uh we we launched um online bookstores where traditional bookstores that were at a university couldn't really afford the carrying capacity of their books anymore. We helped them turn into spirit stores, and then you turn around and you put in um total digital book ordering. So, you're tying it into their to their uh their CRM or their ERP for the for the university, tied to student aid, and we would go around and you would respond to these RFPs, and we're one of the leading- edge companies doing virtual bookstores. Go to the University of Massachusetts, um RFP. Guess who's standing there uh ready to get involved? Amazon. That's what I say. Oh, they bring lockers you can open with your phones. They and they got into the space for a few years, then got out of it when it didn't work. Right. I can tell you story after story where in that space, the software type of space, and now with AI driving so much of it, you can take everything that you just worked on, can go poof like this by these billion dollar trade billion-dollar traded public companies. Um another example would be I mean, I'll use eCampus.com again. We were selling books and things like that to um college students.

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Greg French 16:06

Book goes out the door, but people's loyalty was to Amazon.

Shannon 16:10

Yeah.

Greg French 16:10

So, they're going to Amazon and they are putting in an ISBN number for a book, for instance, and they're gonna buy it from them without price shopping anywhere. Anywhere. Guess what we went and did? They went, took our books and went and put them in fulfillment by Amazon and put them on Amazon shelves and Amazon's books. And so, I think that disruptibility of those industries is, can make you not sleep at night. And so, they're still going strong, they're still doing well, but I think I'd felt like, okay, the IT technology side of that was a great fit for me. But in terms of organizational leadership, um, you know, I'm one I like to lead things and see them be able to grow. And the shed industry represented to me a place that had a lot of growth opportunity, but also it matched me very well with what I wanted in my personal life.

Shannon 17:04

I feel like Barnes and Noble learned a lot about that relationship with Amazon and the power that the online e-commerce marketplace could have immediately uh because they disrupted that and then pretty much got out of it. But they, you know, even Amazon uh, you know, like was they were sharp in the beginning, you know, like they were they were named um, was it Amazon that was named Backrub because they were trying to use backlinks? Right? Terrible name for a company, right? Then they changed it to Amazon because it not only sounds powerful, but it actually indexes quicker on Google because they were indexing at that time alphabetically. So, now that you have all of these different ways that Google is, you know, choosing to index companies, which is a real thing in the shed industry, and we can get into that, but like uh, you know, how powerful is your is your website? You know, what what what kind of funnel is it actually providing to the customer? Um it's interesting to, you know, can you get in front of people with your website? A lot of people say I've got this beautiful website, and it's like having an awesome shed lot in the middle of the country. Like, did you put a highway to it? Uh these are different services, and we've learned that just through our marketing efforts, that there's a lot of education that still needs to exist, we feel like in the industry. And we try to do those, just to be clear, we try to do those. Like, not everything's for gain, some of it's for give. I mean, you have to um with any level of success, I feel like there's also this, you know, this natural like ability to want to give back to others, also. And I think we can do that. And we're using advertising dollars today to do that too, correct?

Greg French 18:37

Fantastic.

Shannon 18:38

You know what I mean? What a what a great time to talk about some advertising.

Greg French 18:42

What I what I don't think's gonna happen is I don't think you're gonna have Google get people free buildings. No, so so yes, is the shed industry have the ability to have some disruption in it? Absolutely, it does. And could you have bigger players get involved? I think you're already seeing some private equity groups have bought other companies, and their behavior's been very different than maybe companies that aren't um you know owned by these larger private equity groups where they're truly just an investment. You know, most of the core companies in this industry, Graceland included, were just privately held and it's just family owned.

Cord 19:16

And uh the core value system, the the core value of building sheds doesn't have some uh immediately disruptible thing out there, right? Uh, you know, Lenar home builders could decide to start building sheds tomorrow uh according to everything that I've read. They probably would not build very good sheds. My brother's gonna hate that because he does he does real estate uh evaluation that sometimes winds up in Lenar builds, but um you know we were kind of talking before, but I think you know, for the listeners, Greg, how then do you feel like you've implemented you know all of that experience in technology, um, all of that sort of high-level evaluation and strategy? Um how do you feel like you have aligned Graceland with where the industry is going? Because it just from the outside looking in, obviously we deal with um, you know, have conversations with and do podcasts with and just our friends with lots of people in this space. And I think Graceland is taking one of the more unique approaches that we've seen. I would agree. And I have a feeling it's because it is very intentional.

Greg French 20:29

It's very

Competition Surge And Market Cap Reality

Greg French 20:30

intentional. I think you have to go back that you all you all have talked to ad nauseum about how those COVID years with the stimulus checks really did impact this industry. But I can tell you that even myself, um when I came in fresh, and I think that's something unique for me, is I came into the industry 10 years ago, really not having any preconceived notions about it. I own I and I certainly before I accepted the position, I did a lot of due diligence. And what I saw there was something to me that looked disruptible. Um and at the same time, I saw something that didn't have a ton of competition. And so, I will tell you the little town that I grew up in. I grew up, you know, in a farm family. My parents were educators, my grandparents had farms. I grew up working on my grandparents' farms and local farms in my town. That was that was my world that I grew up in. And so that same town, I went I went to the University of Kentucky and got my bachelor's degree there, went on and got a master's degree at Eastern Kentucky University in uh organizational leadership, got a master's at UK. And so I had been off in an educational phase of my life where I was trying to figure out what degree do I need to do have to do what I want to do. Well, it helps to know what it is you want to do. Yeah. But as I found myself in the shed industry, when I accepted this job, the town that I grew up in had zero shed dealers. So, I'm thinking, oh man, it's Graceland. Is not even here. There's nobody here. That same town, 10 years later, has like six shed dealers. That has been the biggest change from the time I got here to now. And so, when I evaluated Graceland and came to Graceland, it was very much operating and had grown in the south and the west and the east coast. Um with in an environment where there was two or three shed dealers in a town. And so that shift, I think, is gonna lead to what we're doing for the future right now, as you kind of mentioned. So the stimulus COVID environment where everything's sold off the shelf. You're basically it's making the industry almost look easy. It opened the door for a lot of people to enter it. Either A, to spin off the manufacturer they already had into a new company, or to um come fresh into the industry. Maybe you were a builder at another company and you went and launched it. Well, they've kept doing it and they've kept doing it. And so you're at a point now where you ask yourself, okay, where at what point are we reaching carrying capacity? You know, at what point there is purely a market cap. And that market cap is identified as how many billions of dollars of sheds get sold in the United States this year?

Cord 23:30

Yep.

Greg French 23:31

And what piece of that does each company have, and how much do you have to have to be healthy? And then you have your regional players, your small- town players, and you have a company like Graceland that is, I would consider one of the larger companies that um has a dealer-centric model around manufacturing. And so, as I mean, early on, me getting here in 2016, you were immediately already seeing new companies launching the day I got here. And so, they were breaking off of other companies and launching their own, and that was already pro proliferating. Companies like Premier and Stor-Mor um right when I got here were kind of fledgling, I guess you would say, um when I became on a CEO. And we and I quickly saw that that we were gonna have a shifting environment in the future. And so, we have adapted to that. One of those things is that I started looking around the industry and saying, what are some of the symptoms that we are seeing that tell me we may need to make some changes for the future? And so, if you don't start looking at those little symptoms that are showing up early on, you'll be way too late to making the change. And there's a few of those that we see, and some of them I see today that I think are going to be very impactful.

Inventory Bloat And Plant Economics

Greg French 24:57

The first one was the tendency to see inventory getting built in the industry for manufacturers. So what I mean by that is you should really only in any business build inventory for the customer.

Cord 25:16

Yep.

Greg French 25:17

So, supply and demand should be in effect. What is the supply needed for the demand that's out there? But what happens is when you have a lot of plants, and that was some of the bigger companies had tons of plants. Each one of those plants has a certain number of sheds that they need to build per week to make it. Yep. And if your sales don't support it, you got a decision to make. Either A, you roll them back like you should and don't only build what you need, or you let them keep building those sheds so that you keep them afloat. You're basically subsidizing them by building the sheds. Well, that probably was happening in pockets around the shed industry. Now go take your market cap. The market cap certainly would have lifted over time over the past 10 years. There's more people probably buying sheds because there's more awareness of it. They're more visible to people, but there is a point where the market cap stops going up. The population of the United States isn't going up. Less people are building houses, there's more people going into apartment complexes. So, do the math for me and explain to me why the market cap would rise. What's going up is the other types of storage where you have storage units. So, you're looking at these things and you're going, okay, number one, it's very, very unhealthy to build inventory that is not just for your customer. Who's subsidizing it, who's paying for it, and then it ages, and you know all those things that happen in the discount. You discount them down the road. And so, you've got to be really careful. So, at that same time that we are watching these types of behaviors where you're building for the plant, you got increased competition. So, competition is rising. Does the plants need for a number of buildings per week change? No. Maybe they can reduce a builder in a bay. And so I saw that shift early on, and we started thinking, okay, what's that going to look like in the future? And then you go and you and you move into the to the to the dealer side. Now all of a sudden your dealers are calling you. I used to only be one of two in town. Now there's seven dealers in town. I mean, here in Paducah, Kentucky alone. Oh my goodness gracious.

Shannon 27:42

I mean just saw another one pop up the other day. I don't know, going down the the, I think it was like on the the belt way there, like on the belt line. Like there was like three sheds sitting in the middle of a community, and I didn't even see it branded. And I was like, Where what's that one from? That's a new one. That's like number 13. And then I just saw one of the oldest ones shut down, too, you know, over on the south side.

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Greg French 29:18

But the there's still a lot of sheds out there. And so, I think that was one of the things was we looked at manufacturing and we said, okay, in the future, you know, what happens if you've built this whole entire area and many of these contracts from you know the manufacturer for you, they got like 90-day clauses to terminate the manufacturing agreements. Yeah. There was a lot of that in this industry. If you looked at other companies that were for sale, you looked at their agreements and you go, man, you could the whole thing could fall apart really easily. That's a scary place to be, and especially if you have any kind of scale that's there.

Cord 29:54

Right. Well, and the tough part is how coupled those plants have historically been to, I mean, you know, people use different metrics, but uh 150 miles, 200 miles, right? So, like, you know, the decisions that people were making back then, and I mean, to be frank, are making today, um, are more like are we choosing to abandon that radius? I mean, that's what people think. And so, then it turns into um, you know, how do you acquire? How do you wind up servicing 300 miles, 400 miles? I and that's what it has to be because to your point, you know, rising competition with a market cap that is not rising at the same rate as competition, if not capped out. Now, I would kind of say that the one part of the industry that um seems to have a whole lot of promise and a whole lot of growth potential left is that ADU tiny home, tiny home show. Certainly. But but then it's I mean, that's a whole different model. It is that's a whole different model.

Greg French 31:00

Yeah, and I think, you know, hey, I will tell you Graceland is where it's at because of the partners they had, the plants that they had, the people that they had, and many of those have their own companies now.

Shannon 31:13

Yeah.

Greg French 31:13

I mean, I could start naming you the companies that ultimately spun off from Graceland. That's part of that saturation. You probably could do the same. Go pick your company and how many have spun off. That's where it's at. And a lot of that, you know, plants they own, things they owned, were being part of the company they were with.

Shannon 31:32

Like, even some of the products and services. I mean, we see that from the advertising network as you begin to connect with people that say, well, we started here, we started with Graceland. And it seems like, you know, the uh the um need is you know still the innovation driver. And a lot of times that's what happens. You know, I make the argument constantly that you know, it's very um, I don't know, some people have used the word cannibalized in the industry. Nepotism is obviously a huge thing inside of different uh organizations. And uh um there they're because innovation drives the need and a product and service exist, and then it's like, hey, I don't just need it for myself, I can sell this to other people in the industry. And then it gets very convoluted when it's kind of like, oh, am I buying from my competitor? Where does that line, where do I draw that line, whether it's a product or a service? But I mean, you guys are doing a lot of things leading innovation-wise. Like you're not just I don't know, I don't want to use the word not in the industry because you are, but you're set apart in some sense uh because to Cord's earlier point, you put your head down since you come in 10 years ago. I'm sorry I missed you. I hate it. I wish I would have like known you and got you. We passed, yeah, just a couple of years off, but um, you know, it seems like the company's been in really good hands, obviously, since you've been here. And some of that's been taking the previous experience you talked about already here and putting it to work. And so, what are those, what are those things?

Labor Shortages Push Factory Automation

Greg French 33:04

Well, so let's take that manufacturing industry and a couple experiences I had early on here at Graceland. One is that you mean you're you're over there killing it in sales. Your your plant in a bay-based environment, they could lose one bay builder and they might lose 25% production like overnight while this bay builder left or started their own company. Or um we were seeing some problems like that. And then we also started seeing labor force issues at some of our plants. Plants that used to be staffing it with, like you said, maybe friends and family, people through their church network. All of a sudden they're having they're fighting for labor. They can't get labor. And so when they did get labor, the startup from getting somebody who's never built a shed to um building a shed to completion in any kind of speed, I mean, that is a hard job. It takes talent and to do it fast is a I personally believe it's a young person's game. Yeah, you don't see a lot of people over 40 out there banging out sheds uh rapidly. Telling me I'm not young. Uh, you know, I believe you. I do. I believe that you and I would have trouble get getting up in the morning if we built sheds off them. I hear that. Um so that led to the manufacturing side, which is that over time, as uh for whatever reason that plants went and did their own thing, they you know, we found ourselves saying, okay, we've got to be able to build these a different way. So, that maybe comes back to, I don't know if I said this earlier, but when I when I came here to Graceland, I made a very specific decision to not look at how everybody else does it. I said, please insulate me from the way that everybody does it. I just want to look at it fresh and not be confined by the way that it is currently being done because you could be missing some opportunity. And so, I will tell you that the way we currently, you know, we currently um own about 90% of our manufacturing. We build in the line manufacturing, we use CNC saws, you know, automatic tables, crane systems, and everything that we have done has been about the future. It's been making an assumption that labor force issues are going to be very difficult. And it's also been about maintaining quality because we were actually seeing a dip in quality because of the labor force wasn't there anymore. It's shifting, they're bringing in a new builder. So, though we love you know the idea of the handcrafted building, the person building it, if you actually went and saw the plant and what some of their labor struggles were, you weren't sometimes getting that same craftsman that maybe was there early on, or that you maybe even seen in the Mennonite and Amish communities where truly they're craftsmen building your shed for you. We're trying to recruit somebody and to teach them to be a shed builder. Yeah, right. So, that's given us a lot of opportunity to scale, and we consolidated our manufacturing down so we're servicing the exact same area, the same number of dealers with less than half of the plants that we needed. And so, we had to change our distribution model, our transportation model. But all those decisions were made about longevity because we looked around and looked at how many sheds were in each around us and said, you're not gonna be able to get as much of a market share. It's not possible. You're gonna have to do it differently. You can say it's possible. You can't have you can't go from three shed companies in the town to seven or eight and assume that the market cap arises at that rate. It it doesn't make sense that it would. And so, that's given us a lot of opportunity to do things differently. So for instance, when it came time to do our own 3D configurator, well, there's a couple 3D configurators that I'm sure are great that are getting used in the industry, but they didn't do certain things that we needed them to do. We needed our 3D configurator to talk to our C and C saws that cut every single board exactly as it needs to be cut, that marks it, tells you exactly where to put it. We can train somebody up in our plants to build buildings in a day. And they just got to learn one job. They work a door jig, they work the window jig, they work the table. You can work till you're 70 or 80 years old, and it's cross-gender.

Cord 37:29

Yep.

Greg French 37:30

So, a lot of those hard labor jobs, they just tend to be, you know, mostly run by men. That's just typically who applies for the jobs.

Cord 37:39

And young men.

Greg French 37:40

And young men.

Cord 37:41

To your point, right? By the time you get good, yeah, you're just about can't do it anymore.

Greg French 37:45

We went and visited.

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Greg French 38:44

Multiple plants that build homes. We went to one plant in Florida that built 40 homes a week out of their plant. Wow. We put in place that same technology to build sheds for Graceland. And so now we have the capacity to build a lot of sheds. We're not even close to the capacity we could build with the infrastructure we put in. But what that took was a lot of investment. So we talked about it. You dream of doing it. Now you got to go figure out are we willing to put our money towards that investment? And luckily we were willing to do it. And I think, honestly, I think that's going to give us longevity and a really consistent product and the ability to scale really rapidly when we need to, and the ability to scale down really rapidly when we need to. And so that led to the distribution side having to make changes in how we distribute the buildings so that we can service a bigger area.

Hub Model And Expanding Delivery Radius

Greg French 39:38

So, we made huge changes to our serviceability in terms of transportation. We went to a hybrid model for transportation where we rely about 50%, 50-50% on independent contractor and our own corporate fleet. And we intend to do that time immemorial. So, we don't see a pathway where we'll never, we won't use independence. We absolutely we were at the shed hauler bash.

Shannon 40:02

Yeah.

Greg French 40:04

At the same time, to move them further for a hub and spoke type of model that we use, we've got to be able to do that at cost. Yep. And so, we tend to move a lot of our inventory out away from that core plant to the hubs. And then from that point, we utilize independent contractors to do a lot of that work.

Cord 40:21

The same problem that you always hear about last mile. Now we're not literally talking about last mile because these are big things. So, you still need them to be organized in an area. So, maybe it's last 50. I don't know what you got what you guys' model is, but um it's the same problem that uh shipping faces, which is you have all your independent contractors at that level. Right. They're the ones that make sense to be able to actually independently decide what their staffing model is. You know, they know their town, their service area better. Same idea, I presume, which is, you know, for time immemorium, you know that you're not going to have necessarily a full-time job, then moving from hub to delivery. So, there will always need to be that complementary role in the middle. Um that makes so that makes so much sense. And, you know, I think to what we were saying earlier. So, you know, as you expand that radius, whatever you officially, and I'm sure it's a different based on geography, but it sounds to me like using that hub model, maybe you can do, I don't know, 400 miles, 350 miles.

Greg French 41:33

We can't. Oh, yeah, we can go out. I mean, we go out probably eight hours from our plant, essentially. That's our and we can double hub even further. We're doing that out west. Now, there's a trade-off. So, we've consolidated out of manufacturing, we've got to be able to move those buildings further. We had to invest in real estate. So, we own real estate all over the United States now. We have a big real estate portfolio of just locations to be able to do that. So, the dream of doing it and the ability to invest in it are two different things. We invested in it. And it was all about longevity and our dealer network and our ability to, you know, have something we felt would last forever and that wouldn't just phase out when you know a particular family decided to get out of the business. And we still have several plants that are bay building, but that is the minority now. We still support that. We, you know, right now, if we were gonna launch in a new a new territory, and we would still potentially do that with a bay building environment, but that's not our core. Right. Our core is that in our core areas, we control our destiny for the future. And that gives us the ability to service everyone better, to service our dealers better. Uh, we weighted a lot more of our pay on the independent side to the actual installation of the building. Um, you know, we're trying to pay top of the line for actually installing for that customer. And so, there's a lot of we could talk, I mean, we literally could talk days about these items. But there were some inherent things early on that maybe still exist in the industry that I think most companies have unwound.

Pricing Math And The 10x16 Problem

Greg French 43:12

One, you know, and this is just kind of storytelling, but when I first got to Graceland, we did a look at every single building and gross profit margin on each building. Because I looked at the cost of a 1016 shed in this industry and couldn't figure out when you did an analysis of it, square foot, dollar per square foot, no matter how you ran it, how are they making money on the 1016? It seemed to be the stalwart building that everybody had priced low, like it's the competitive building. Well, when we ran those analyses, nobody in the industry was making money on their 1016s. They were maybe making money on the rent to own side, on the origination fee side. Yep. You know, there's maybe there was. A pathway. But I think most of them are probably looking at their profit and loss statement at the end of the day, going, all this stuff that we sell, at the end of the day, we're making money. So, we're all good. But that is not a good way to run a business. Um it's not a, you know, some people say, well, it's a loss leader. There's no loss leader. You're not, they're not buying multiple things.

Cord 44:21

Yeah, exactly.

Greg French 44:22

You only have a loss leader when you're making your milk cheap and they come in and buy three dollars or groceries.

Cord 44:28

Yeah, your loss leader has an eight or ten year lead time or whatever, right? Yeah, that's exactly. Like, well, when they buy their next one, like, well, what if they buy another 10 by 16? You know, I mean, you know, you're right back to the same problem. Uh I'm curious how these uh, you know, all these changes make so much sense from like the big G standpoint. Um, but you know, how does this hit? How does the dealer experience hit if you are I mean you've you know you got a map over there? If you're uh if you are a uh Graceland dealer in, you know, on out a couple, you know, hubs away or whatever that might be, right? New dealer, a couple hubs away. Um, like how is this how are these changes hitting with the dealers? And I mean, I guess do they like it? Do what's their experience?

Greg French 45:23

Early on, uh early on, you know, we had some hiccups getting that implemented, but now they shouldn't really know the difference. Because we actually did some more unique things is that we those hubs act as inventory locations and they have access to sell off of that as well. Oh, that's awesome. So, I mean, our dealers not only get to sell the inventory on their lot, they get to sell the inventory at our hub locations. And that's smart. It's works really well. And so, we're getting better and better at it. And we'll get into in a minute what we've done on the dealer side because that's where we've really, really rapidly changed our approach. But, you know, just talking about the trying to tenure transformation of the shed industry, because I think we've all seen it. Um, I was here when it was done the way it had always been done, and I've been here through the change. And I think in many ways we pioneered some of it for ourselves. Um, ultimately, I'm here to represent Graceland for us to be to do great, our dealers to do great, all the people that rely on us. Uh we have over 300 employees just uh that actually are W-2 employees for Graceland, and not to mention the 1099 employees that are 1099 contracted workers that sell buildings, deliver buildings, uh, all those things. So we have a, you know, I feel responsible for every single person's livelihood out there. And so we think, you know, every shade company should chest thump. You should chest thump. We should, we, you know, if I didn't think we were the best, that we are for the best service level, the best program for dealers, the best program to be involved with, I wouldn't be doing a very good job as the leader. Right. If I came in here and said, Oh, I think we're just okay, I think we're doing well. No, we were doing the very best we can to grow. But why did we do those things, I think is the key. Yeah. Uh I'll take you back to 2017.

Lumber Volatility Breaks Old Percent Models

Greg French 47:08

And this will show you how a model that works for a long period of time can start to shift. And I think everybody had to shift with it. So, if you look at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, a thousand board feet of lumber that gets traded on a daily basis, that if you go look at that for a 10-year, 20-year history, you will see that the price of lumber on a thousand board square feet barely fluctuated for over a decade. From 2006 to 2016, it was from $300 to $400 for a thousand board square feet. Well, in 2017, you had one of the first spikes in that that the industry had seen during its growth phase. So, let's say during that time you're seeing some of these companies grow, more regional players, more Ma and Paw shops that are coming out, the lumber had stayed flat. Well, that's great because you're not having to worry about it. And everything is getting paid off percentages. Only industry I've ever heard of that does that, that's what they didn't did. You get this percentage of retail, you know, the manufacturer gets X percent of retail, the driver gets this percent of retail. That works great when costs are stable.

Shannon 48:26

Yeah.

Greg French 48:26

So, you had that year, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, 1,000 board square feet of labor, we call it the CME, jumped. Let's just say, well, I think it went to 700. But let's just say it went up 30 percent. So, what do you have to do to go fix that? You've got to raise your prices. In every other industry, if you raise your price, you're raising your price to cover the thing that went up. In the shed industry, if you raised your price, you raised all the prices. That is gonna create a cyclical problem. You ever had done a spreadsheet where you get a circular reference? You're changing this, that's changing that, and it'll say, You can't do that. That's a circular reference. That's what we had. We had a circular reference. I keep raising that, it raises this cost. And so, I think most companies have kind of adapted to that over time, but that's how it worked. And so that doesn't scale. Now take it to the years of COVID where that CME went to $1,600. It's sitting at $586 today. Wow. Okay. The days of it being $400 or $300 are long gone, which is why the prices of everything are higher. Um, so those things scared me. Saying everybody's operating like this thing never changes. It's going to change someday. And so, we've seen that now. Now we're in a more mature place as an industry saying it's more volatile. We've seen this with trade embargoes, with tariffs, with now the price of oil and diesel. You know, honestly, we've had going on five, six years of unsettled spirit in the shed industry because nothing's sort of staying stable for us. And so, I'm sure everybody's adapting, changing. Could hey, could we just get one year where something just stays stable? I mean, today it's diesel prices. So that's that sort of manufacturing transportation side for us that we shifted. And it kind of excites us for the future because we can scale, like we just picked up um some increased manufacturing need down in um the southeast, and we were able to increase our manufacturing in a week. And so, we needed to produce about a hundred units, and we got it done in two weeks, um, on top of what we were already building. So we could have never done that before. Uh we can do it now.

Shannon 50:52

Would have had to hire a lot of bay people uh quickly, and now you're trying to teach them how to build if they don't know how, but you're trying to teach them how to build the speed.

Greg French 50:59

And now, I mean, um, I'm handy enough, but you probably wouldn't want to hire me to build the shed at speed. I would hire an expert in it, but I can go do every job that's on our line. You know, with just being taught. I mean, there's some things that take some technique like painting, you know, the guys that are you still have people putting metal roofs on. I mean, those things still take the same skills, but we've designed it all to make every job as easy as we possibly can make it be and as safe as we can possibly make it be.

Shannon 51:28

Scalable and it's uh it's able, like you said earlier, it's able to move. Uh you're taking that wide Airbus turn, you know, in the air, uh, you're shortening it up where you can like scale up or scale down quickly instead of this long-term move. We talk about the long-term a lot of times, and some of the things that we're we're trying to do is uh they turn and then they move quick. That's right. You know, the burners get on and it's like, oh, now we've got to move very quick. That that seems like I don't know if that's a business trait, uh, because I haven't been in a lot of businesses, right? Or if that's a conservative trait in some ways, because our industry tends to lean that way. Of course, technology and a lot of other things. I say this all the time, and I'm probably gonna get in trouble for it eventually, to say, you know, we are so conservative that, you know, anybody who says I've got an idea, we say it won't work. We won't it won't work. Right. And then they like to hear the idea. Uh it's just it's just sort of natural. We criticize what we don't understand. You guys didn't criticize what you don't understand. You went and learned it and then you implemented it, and now it puts you into a unique position. Um I mean, like are you know, are you open to building for others?

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Greg French 53:30

I mean, we definitely have that door open for us. I think, you know, we got the capacity to build, and so um, you know, we assume that there's always gonna be competition in the industry. And so we have the ability to build to spec for other people. You know, we're open to that in the future, potentially. Um, one of the things we do is we separate our sales organization out. So, the sales organization, their job is to go. We got a great product, a great program. You go sell, you go sell, you go sell. Over here, we manufacture buildings. And so, we've actually set our company up into a manufacturing group, a hauling group, and the sales group. That sales group has a lot of independence to go grow and do what they do. Um, and so I think we definitely there's partnership possibility for Graceland in the future, as long as my sales groups get to keep building their Graceland building to spec, because I think we've kept the quality of the Graceland building in check. We we have we hold a pretty high price point out there because of that. But we feel like that kind of quality mantra, we really try to live it and breathe it. Uh at the same time, we recognize that not every customer values that. So, we you know we had to create additional lines of buildings so that we touch every price point. But we still, 75% of what we sell is still our top-of-the-line building where we're buying the highest grade material, the highest grade lumber. We're not using smart LP siding, we're using other products that cost us more, quite frankly, per sheet. And so I always tell everybody it's not out of pride. As long as the consumer demand is there, we will go do it. Let's not ever be prideful if what the customer wants is the LP siding, they can get it everywhere. Right. And that's why we've tried to differentiate a little bit, saying, well, you just kind of look like everybody else. I'm sure the LP product's a perfectly great product. Um, it's just that it's sort of a synonymous with the shed industry, same groove depth. It's hard to identify one shed company from another. I think when you drive upon a Graceland a lot, just there's a it looks different. Whether you like it or don't like it, it definitely looks different because we're using different products for our buildings. Um But those are just those are little things. There's not right, there's not a right or wrong way to build sheds. There's not a right or wrong reason way to do it. There is why are you doing it the way that you are doing it? And do you know why? And do you know your cost? And do you know how that's gonna help you in the future? And then you're doing all your what-if scenarios, you all know like a SWOT analysis, your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Are you able to identify each one of those quadrants so that you know how this will work in the future? I'm beholden for Graceland to be here for the next decade and the next decade. And so our decisions are more forward thinking. We've done things where we spent money that depressed our ability to earn so that we would be built for the future. And that's kind of where I sit today. Um, hopefully we'll get into maybe our dealer program as well, but we've made huge changes in how we do what we do.

Shannon 56:49

I'm curious about your your your thoughts on the dealer program because I feel like we probably have I don't know, 50% matching ideas, and there's probably 50% like and so I I want to get into it. Uh you know, we're not gonna ring the bell and challenge today because I'm not in the mood to lose, but um but I'm curious what you guys what you guys are doing. I see some things, obviously. Shed sales professionals page, you know. Uh for those who don't follow it, go join it. Uh, you know, ask and we'll sign you up as long as you work in the industry and you can be there to help share ideas and thoughts too. Uh, but I see some of these things getting posted, like uh dealer commissions increasing and things like that. Makes me interested. Raises an eyebrow because it's like, where does it compare with the rest of the industry, where they're going, what they're doing? You know, we're seeing higher sales than we've ever seen, but we're also hearing from those companies that there's lower actual amounts of buildings being sold. This kind of goes with your earlier point of you know, the volatility and market cap and things like that. What do you what do you think the future is for the dealer network in the industry and even for Graceland's dealer network?

Dealer Engagement And The Coming Shakeout

Greg French 58:00

Yeah, and I'll I mean, I'll start here is that this may be a controversial statement to some degree, but the eye test and we actually do some of our own analysis, the industry's overbuilt. So, there is too much inventory out there versus what I think the market cap is. I could show you the data on that, that's internal for us, but we survey across the United States every town, the number of shed dealers that are in the town, the rough amount of inventory value that we think is sitting in that town. And then we say how many of those are manned? So, they're actually out there trying to sell it. If they're not manned, what are they present in the selling environment, such as Facebook Marketplace or other marketplaces? If they're not manned and they're not even trying to do that, we don't even consider them a part of the ecosystem there. They're just an inventory holding location for somebody. Some investor yet doesn't know that their investment is probably just rotting. That is a truth in the industry. Yep.

Shannon 59:12

Advertising is the main value it holds, is you know, a roadside billboard, if you will, for but so many of them don't even do that. I know.

Cord 59:20

I mean, like so many of them just look at it.

Shannon 59:22

It's a because it's the independent, it's the independent side, right? Like in my opinion, it's that independent side versus that W-2 side.

Greg French 59:30

We battle it. So, we're doing everything we can to keep engaged dealers. We measure dealer engagement. Um, are they posting? Are they out there? We've invested. So, if you're in the shed industry, you're an investor in people to sell your shed. So, if you're doing the dealer-centric model where you're going out and you're investing in that dealer, I'm hey, I'm gonna put $150,000 of inventory out. Would you ever buy a $150,000 billboard and just let it sit? That's what that's too expensive.

Shannon 1:00:02

Yeah, not unless you're Buc-ee's. I don't know.

Greg French 1:00:04

So well, they spread it out over $500. Buc-ees. I mean, every time one of my employees goes, We were on a trip recently and we'd pulled in a Buc-ee's and they're like, look what they look what they pay at the car wash, you know, manager. And I'm like, should fly. Yeah. That's a I mean, you're not gonna offend me to fly for Buc-ee's car wash manager today. Uh great line. Yeah, you should. But they're doing well. They're doing well.

Shannon 1:00:32

I mean, when you could put a billboard 834 miles away and say nearest Buc-ee's this way with an arrow, you turn 800. If you turn around. That's a bold marketing statement, if I've ever seen one.

Greg French 1:00:44

It is. So, I think you pull back in the shed industry and you go, everyone knows that that stuff exists.

Shannon 1:00:50

Yeah.

Greg French 1:00:51

There's, and I think in some ways that's that's caused some of the planning and zoning problems we're having. Is that the really good shed dealers that keep their lot looking great, that are there running it like a business, have signage up, have open signs, hours posted, all the things you'd expect a shed dealer to have, those things are welcoming communities. When you start having them sit there and the grass is growing up around them, the planning and zoning starts tightening. Already planning and zoning across the United States doesn't appear to be very business friendly. That's a problem. I don't know who they want to come in and do business in their towns, but they're not making it easy uh to do so. And so though those cost prohibitions have led to a lot of the changes we've made. The cost that it cost, the rising cost to run an actual dealership, has led to a change in how we do business. The ability and acuity that it takes to actually sell buildings now, as compared to it would have been 10 years ago, 15 years ago, even five years ago, that has changed, which has led to us changing our model. Um, the number of competitors that you're up against and their offerings have led to us to change our model. So we looked at that and said, if we're just doing the same as everybody else is doing, you're gonna only be doing as well as what everybody else is doing, which in a hypersaturated market is gonna be just okay. Just okay is one step away from being sick and ill and having problems. The number of shed dealers you see out there, the number of unmanned lots, would lead me to think that there is some um unhealthiness in the industry that is going to create a shakeout period. So, if you if you go right now and you just go Google, you know, a graph for the life cycle of a business, you will see in that life cycle of a business that you have early growth, early adopters, places like Graceland, Daniel Burnett, and you know, dreaming the dream and the energy just growing it. And then more and more people are entering the market, it's getting more and more saturated. That steep increase that you're having, almost exponential growth of it, now starts to taper off. It starts to flatten out and it will go down. And that period where it sharply declines in the same way that it went up extremely rapidly, is called the shakeout period. And I personally believe we're in a shakeout period. Yeah, I think you're gonna see over the next five years a 20% shakeout because it's not gonna be able to support it. Market cap could rise, but where is it gonna rise? It's probably gonna rise in accessory dwelling units, it's gonna rise in some of these other areas that there are, you know, people that are shifting their companies into those areas. Hey, good idea.

Cord 1:04:01

But it's challenging.

Greg French 1:04:02

It's challenging.

Cord 1:04:03

Right? Like it's challenging to make that pivot. It's capital intensive to make that pivot. And you're up against products. They don't care to look at the company. The cost starts to outrun what's reasonable for the baseline of operation in this industry, RTO, and has to start to run into finance. So, then when you have these combined companies, you know, like Graceland, right? Like when you have the companies that are doing both sides, you have to be healthy enough from a balance sheet perspective to actually make that pivot without stressing uh the company itself. So, I agree with you. I mean, I think that I think that it has to, and you have to figure out how to decouple. So, we talked about the manufacturing side already. Um, you know, how do you cover a bigger region to make sure that you are genuinely, you know, if you're a whatever, if you're a 3% market cap company in a 250 mile radius, well, that's plenty, honestly, to live off of. But you better be prepared to truly service 250 miles, right? And so those who are adopting the efficiencies, the strategies um today are gonna be the ones that are the 80% that are left in. But I totally agree with you, the especially the what I would think of as medium-sized players, the manufacturers out there that are currently setting at you know twelve to twenty five loc you know, dealer locations, like there's gonna be a lot of challenges going forward.

PART 1 1:05:44

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