South Mountain Company

Martha’s Vineyard’s integrated design/build company

This blog provides up-to-date news of goings on at South Mountain Company and occasional musings from John Abrams (and others).

Small Business

South Mountain’s New Path To Ownership

By South Mountain Co. |

On a rainy September day, 18 South Mountain (SMCo) non-owner employees gathered in our meeting room. After two years of collaborative design, our Communications Coordinator, Abbie Zell, stood in front to unveil our new Path to Ownership program.

It includes 33 experiences designed to give new employees, over a seven-year timespan, a complete picture of what South Mountain is, how it works, and how to be an effective owner. The purpose is two-fold: to develop active and engaged SMCo Owners and to strengthen relationships within the company.

SMCo transitioned from a sole proprietorship to a worker co-op in 1987. There are currently 21 co-owners. In the worker co-op realm, we are known to have one of the longest waiting periods before Ownership eligibility: five years from the start of employment. What happens during those five years has just changed dramatically. Not in terms of training and work progress – SMCo has always had a robust employee evaluation system and some degree of Ownership preparation. It’s the experience leading to Ownership that has changed with this launch. Our newest employee, Jake Martin, said that it made him feel that he had joined an organization that doesn’t perceive him as a worker but rather as a member of a community. Mia Esparini, hired in 2019, said, “I love it; I’m so excited to see it unfold over time.”



ORIGIN

Abbie tells about the source of the idea:

“In 2019, Deirdre and Siobhán attended a four-part webinar on Open Book Management hosted by The Democracy at Work Institute (DAWI). During one of the segments, Jen Briggs (formerly of New Belgium Brewing) presented the social system New Belgium uses to support Open Book Management and promote greater governance participation.

At the time, we had just made three second-generation hires. We could envision all of them as future Owners and knew there was more recruitment ahead. The size of that ‘incoming class’ posed a significant opportunity to improve upon an important process.”

Deirdre elaborates,

“Becoming an Owner has historically happened mostly by osmosis; by the time you had been at SMCo for five years, you were assumed to know what you needed to know. We wanted to encourage more active preparation, particularly during the two years before Ownership, hoping that would develop more engaged owners.”



DEVELOPMENT

Deirdre remembers,

“We charted a seven-year progression (five before Ownership, plus two after). We thought specifically about leadership development – how to cultivate a culture of taking responsibility for the company every day, in every way, no matter your role.”

Abbie continues,

“Ready to take this further, we formed a working group (Deirdre, Siobhán, myself, and John) and started brainstorming:

    • the essential experiences which would foster an appreciation for South Mountain’s culture

    • The technical knowledge required to be an informed owner and good decision-maker

    • The opportunities we’d like to provide new employees during their early years

I had become an Owner less than one year before this. By contrast, Deirdre, John, and Siobhán had lengthy tenures. We each brought something different to the table, and after a couple of months, we had a comprehensive list and cohesive concept to present to SMCo’s Leadership Team and then to our graphic designer (Magnifico Design).”



CONCEPT & ACTIVITIES

Abbie explains,

“We chose Path as the central metaphor because it has a clear beginning, can meander, has progress markers along the way, a guide when necessary, and a reward at the end.

The Trail Map (click here to view in full) is a physical manifestation of the Path. It is the size and style of a national park passport and works along the same lines. Each new employee will get one; when they complete an experience, it will be initialed by their instructor. Everyone will work through the booklet left to right until there are no experience left… at which point, they’ll be a seasoned South Mountain Owner!

Experiences are dispersed among six levels: Basecamp, Setting Out, Exploring, Practicing, Achieving, and Mastering. Approximately half the experiences will be undertaken alone; the others will happen in groups.

The full program involves 34 hours spread over seven years. Fifteen current owners will guide participants through their areas of expertise, and I will oversee the program and act as liaison between participants and guides.

We’ve folded Path to Ownership into our onboarding process, so those hired from now on will start the Path on their first day of work.”

As Abbie distributed the 4×5” “Trail Maps” and explained their significance, there was palpable excitement in the room. Abbie’s joyous presentation style provokes that, but the concept and content speak for themselves. One new employee, Nic Esposito, said, “it was so great to gather and be exposed to that so early in my tenure. I love the passports – classy and tangible – that we will use to chart our course.”

This is a remarkable new initiative. Over time, I predict, it will alter the culture of the company – making the experience of being an employee (and an employee-owner) richer and more complete. It will build trust, encourage cross-pollination, and spread knowledge across our four departments. It will prepare developing leaders and new owners for the future in an intentional way.

It’s clearly going to be a lot of fun too. It makes me wish that instead of retiring at the end of the year, I was a new employee just being hired! (“We’ve got this new guy applying for the open carpentry job. He’s 73. Should be a perfect fit!”).

Two Stories About David McCullough

By South Mountain Co. |

Photo by Steve Senne of the Associated Press

As you know, David McCullough died last week – an immense loss for the Vineyard and our world. I want to tell two stories about the consummate storyteller himself.

During the last days of January 2000, South Mountain Company’s 25 employees, along with several friends and planning experts, spent two days thinking about the future of the Vineyard. Our goals were several:

  • to sketch the outline of a future we would like to see;
  • to decide what commitments we, as a company, were willing to make to achieve such a future; and
  • to share our findings with the Vineyard community in ways that might inspire similar inquiries, create dialogue, and lead to action.

We called the session “Future Sketch,” and invited a few people from outside the company to broaden our perspectives. We invited David to open the meeting. He agreed and addressed the group early on a Friday morning.

He spoke about the Chagres River, which was the major obstacle to the building of the Panama Canal, but which was eventually used in a simple but ingenious way to become a part of the overall engineering solution. He related this to the “river of money” pouring into the Vineyard which, he said, was “undoing a way of life.” He expressed two ideas that became central to our discussions:

  • We must re-direct the river of money (that causes such harm) to restoration of community; and
  • Our future is a design issue – it should be the result of intent rather than circumstance.

In the same way that he set the tone for the first Islanders Write event in 2014, and those that would follow, David’s presence set the tone for our retreat.

A few years later, when the Island Affordable Housing Fund was leading the first significant effort to address the Vineyard’s affordable housing needs, we invited David to speak at a fundraising party. His assignment: to convince the Vineyard’s seasonal community to embrace an idea that was novel at the time – that they should be responsible for funding affordable housing efforts.

On a clear summer night, the well-heeled crowd gathered on an expansive lawn overlooking the Edgartown harbor. David took the microphone. He spoke again about the Panama Canal and the Chargres River and “The River of Money” and how we must use it to improve, solve, and resolve problems. This is, in part, what he said:

“We’re failing here on Martha’s Vineyard. We’re failing in a more serious way than we know. What we came here for, what we love about the place is eroding before our very eyes. The essence of civilization is continuity, and continuity must exist for everybody.

It ought to become socially unacceptable among people of affluence on this island not to take part in helping to solve these problems. We ought to be saying to everyone, to ourselves, if you want to be here, you want to be a citizen here, you want to own a home here, you want to take part in the community here, open up your wallet and pay your part proportionately.

Because if the people who need to live here, year-round, who do the work, who make it work, can’t live here, it’s all going to collapse. Simple as that. And this isn’t charity. Let’s forget that. This isn’t charity. This is reality. This is being members of a great community. And it’s emblematic of the oldest, simplest truth in the world: if you want to be happy, do everything you can to make other people happy.”

There was a dramatic silence when he finished as people absorbed his message. Then the audience began to clap and cheer. The people who were clapping and cheering had just been admonished by the famous author and biographer. Many of them went on to become strong supporters of affordable housing; some of them still are today, even as the crisis he addressed 20 years ago is more pronounced than ever before.

Those are my McCullough stories. I’m sure many others have their own, which will re-surface as people share their memories of this influential but modest man. He was soft-spoken and un-assuming, but his message was always powerful.

A Design/Build Breakthrough

By South Mountain Co. |

For many years South Mountain has engaged in master planning and conceptual design efforts for island non-profits – Martha’s Vineyard Community Services, MV Museum, Island Grown Initiative, The MV Public Charter School, Featherstone Center for the Arts, The Nature Conservancy, and others.

But when these organizations moved from planning to design and construction, our design/build commitment (we don’t build what we don’t design and we don’t design what we don’t build) left us out in the cold. Non-profit Boards of Directors, with a fiduciary responsibility to their donors and organizations, generally feel that the conventional project delivery method – i.e., architecture firm designs, builders submit competitive construction bids, and a contract is awarded – is the only viable path. Our design/build method (architecture and construction by the same company) contradicts their allegiance to the perceived financial efficiency of the traditional approach. Even though some board members are attracted to the potential efficacy of single entity responsibility, it’s understandable that they would be concerned about eliminating the financial control of a competitive bid process. This has been a tough obstacle to overcome.

The Breakthrough came in 2017 when we were helping Camp Jabberwocky plan renovations. Camp Jabberwocky is the oldest sleep away camp in America for people with disabilities. It’s a magical place where dreams come true and nothing is impossible. It’s been that way for 65 years.

The main building on their campus needed major change. After some initial programming work, we spoke to their board about the possibility of hiring SMCo for architecture and construction services. The same old problem surfaced. Not long before, we had been hired to develop a schematic design for the new Martha’s Vineyard Museum and had been disappointed when they elected not to accept design/build for the next phases.

This time, we had an idea.

We developed an important clause to add to our design agreement. Essentially, it said that:
• At the completion of design we would prepare a detailed cost estimate for construction.
• Then Camp Jabberwocky could elect to hire an independent professional estimator to provide a comparative estimate.
• If the independent estimator’s construction estimate was close to, or higher, than ours, the construction contract would automatically be awarded to us.
• If it was more than 5% lower, there would be a reconciliation process to assess the reasons for the differences and reach agreement on a final price.
• If the parties were unable to agree, Jabberwocky could use our plans to get bids from other construction companies.

This suggestion breached the dam; we signed a construction contract, and the project was built. Since then, two other boards – Martha’s Vineyard Community Services (MVCS) and Island Grown Initiative (IGI) – have agreed to this approach for major projects. The result: three of the most rewarding endeavors in our history.

It’s notable that by the time we completed the Jabberwocky design, enough trust had been built that their board decided to forego the comparative estimate opportunity and directly engage SMCo for construction.

MVCS is the island’s umbrella social service agency; it provides an array of services to thousands of islanders each year. Just after the Jabberwocky project was completed, we created a master plan to replace the dilapidated and insufficient MVCS buildings – to make a new campus – and completed the design for their Early Childhood Center, the first phase of the campus re-build. Their board took a more conservative approach and hired an outside estimation firm, whose pricing turned out to be higher than ours. They signed our construction contract, and we completed the project on time and on budget in 2021. The organization and the families the building serves could not be happier. We begin design of phase two this fall.

Meanwhile, we will soon complete design for a new Education and Innovation Center, three units of staff housing, and extensive infrastructure improvements at IGI’s Island Grown Farm. When we complete our construction estimate in the fall, we do not know how the board will proceed. Either way (the Jabberwocky way or the MVCS way) works for us.

One way or another, we are thrilled by the prospect of building this project, about which longtime land planner and sustainability advocate Rob Kendall recently wrote in the Vineyard papers, as public permitting hearings proceeded at The Martha’s Vineyard Commission (MVC), “This is a gift from the Island community to itself. The plan has the long-term educational potential to move the island closer to a more sustainable food and energy future.”

We are looking forward to IGI construction, to MVCS Phase Two, and to more of this mission-driven institutional work in the future. Using SMCo’s integrated design/build approach, we are bringing high performance and high-quality development to a sector we respect and organizations we cherish. This trilogy of exemplary projects embodies our values and allows us to contribute to and synergize with our community in a very public way. Our staff loves the opportunity to explore different building types and scales, new ways to practice our craft, and the purpose and meaning embedded in this work. We are humbled by the great work these organizations do and proud of our modest contributions to their success.

And it’s all because we stopped seeing our approach as an obstacle, gave up
trying to convince boards to take us on faith, listened carefully to their concerns, and devised a way to alleviate them. There are lessons here: saying no to no is valuable, finding the heart of an impasse can inspire innovation, and making minor method adjustments can produce major harvests.

In this case, a simple solution caused a quantum leap.

On Building Second Homes

By South Mountain Co. |

This piece was written for and published in Fine Homebuilding. Thanks to Kevin Ireton (former FH editor) for the idea and his stellar editing. As always, he held my feet to the fire.

“How can you justify devoting so much time and energy to building vacation homes for rich people?”

It’s a good question,and one that I’ve heard often during my nearly 50 years on Martha’s Vineyard. In resort communities, many don’t have a first home. They’re scrambling to find stable housing while more than half the houses sit empty much of the year. That’s a problem. And in light of our climate crisis, the significant materials and energy dedicated to building and operating those houses compounds the problem.

When I came here in the 1970s, designing and building homes was so thrilling that I was content to build anything that developed new skills and knowledge. Working with head and hands gave me great pleasure; the idea that people would pay me to do it felt like a bonus. After a few years, however, the joy of the work and the satisfaction of the results were no longer enough. By then second homes had become a staple of our company, South Mountain, and my colleagues and I began to ask ourselves how we could justify this work.

The answer came in 1980. It began with a phone call from a woman named Madeline, who asked if I would look at a piece of land with her. She was a 60-year-old librarian whose husband had recently died. They had no children, and they had always lived in rented apartments. Her dream was to own property. She had $7,000 in cash. A realtor showed her a lot priced at exactly that, but her friends advised against buying it due to its topography and location.

The steeply sloping parcel was adjacent to the main road from Vineyard Haven to Edgartown. Traffic on the road was noisy and constant. The property faced due south toward a beautiful little valley. Except for the proximity to the road, it was lovely. I suggested an earth-bermed, partially underground house and told her we could design the noise of traffic right out of the picture. She was excited. She bought it.

At about the same time, I was approached by a single mother who owned property in West Tisbury and wondered whether we could build a house she could afford. Her budget was too small, but we had heard that the Farmer’s Home Administration was providing 1% loans to those with low and moderate income. We hoped to bundle a nice passive-solar house for Cathy and the earth-bermed house for Madeline, though the Farmer’s Home fixed-expenditure cap did not take into account either the Vineyard’s high construction costs or the long-term energy savings our houses would realize. We applied anyway.

We created plans for simple, compact houses and submitted them to Farmer’s Home with a request that they raise the mortgage limit (from $40,000 to $48,000) on each house due to the energy savings, which we analyzed and documented. After some bureaucratic wrangling, the increase was approved. Unfortunately, it still wasn’t enough to build the houses, unless we cut our overhead and profit to nothing and reduced our labor rates to below cost. Additional subsidies were needed.

Enter David and Pat Squire, who had purchased land in Edgartown and designed a second home with a Boston architect. They asked if we would be interested in bidding on the construction, and I told them that South Mountain built only those projects that we designed and that we didn’t bid on construction projects. They persisted, and a radical thought occurred to me: What if we gave the Squires a bid that had an explicit “premium” built in to subsidize the two Farmer’s Home houses? I shared the idea with the Squires, and they invited us to submit such a bid.

Our bid, one of three, was roughly $40,000 more than the next highest. They chose us nonetheless, and we built their house. We also built the two small houses for Madeline and Cathy by making up the shortfall with our extra earnings from the Squire project. Dreams came true, and mortgage payments were under $200. The Squires’ philosophical alignment with our purpose led them to become strong supporters of affordable-housing efforts on the Vineyard. Years later, when the Island Affordable Housing Fund was established to raise money for affordable housing, David became an important board member.

That was the first and only time that South Mountain inflated the cost of a project to support affordable housing efforts, but the experience inspired an idea that shaped the future of our company. If we could become a reasonably profitable enterprise, we could devote a portion of our earnings to affordable housing work for our community, and we could engage our wealthy clients in the issue.

At that point, the work of building second homes became meaningful. From then on, I often told new clients that they could count on me to ask them, in the future, to help with the Vineyard’s affordable housing problem (which they exacerbate, of course). I have done that now for 40 years, and the response has been heartwarming millions of dollars donated for attainable year-round housing.

Building second homes also allowed us to experiment and take risks. One of these occurred in 1987 when, in response to a request from two long-time employees for a greater stake, I sold South Mountain to my employees (and myself). We became a worker-owned cooperative and began to introduce new values to our business activities. For example, we committed to the creation of lifelong living-wage jobs and family-first policies, such as flexible work arrangements and stellar benefits. We began to codify our commitment to our community by donating to essential nonprofits and engaging in pro-bono work. We became a triple bottom line company long before we’d ever heard the term, measuring our success not just by our profits but also by effects on people and the planet.

Our journey since then has been influenced by many others, but particularly by Patagonia, the outdoor clothing and gear company that has become the gold standard for corporate social and environmental responsibility. Just like our second homes, many of Patagonia’s products are nonessential. Not everyone needs a pair of $300 ski pants or a lifetime wetsuit. So the company balances that reality with its social and environmental contributions, its political advocacy, and its important innovations, such as pioneering the use of organic and recycled cotton, and buying back old garments to refurbish and resell for far less than new ones.

Inspiration from Patagonia and others, combined with our own cantankerous sense of justice, has helped South Mountain become at once a profitable business, an active agent of community change, and a supporter of the local economy that supports us.

Today our second-home work is unusual in several ways. First, we restrict the size of the houses we are willing to build. Only on rare occasions, on very large parcels, have we designed and built houses over 3500 sq. ft.

We also use our second-home work for de-facto research to advance the building industry, especially with regards to energy performance, comfort, health, and durability. By experimenting with the homes of our well-to-do clients, we’ve learned a lot about high-performance building. As a result, we set minimum performance standards for our buildings that are well above code. Now we mostly produce net-zero-possible buildings. We use reclaimed materials extensively and are beginning to reduce embodied carbon (a work in progress with net-zero carbon as the ultimate goal).

By elevating performance standards, we make models that others can emulate and that we can incorporate in our affordable housing work. For us, truly affordable housing differs from luxury housing in only three ways: it’s smaller, it’s less detailed, and it’s differently financed. The performance and quality are uncompromised.

Perhaps the biggest step we have taken with our second-home work is doing less of it. Over time, we diversified South Mountain’s work into five parts; here’s a rough breakdown over the past year in terms of dollars per category:
• Limited-use second homes: 10%
• Year-round, fully occupied homes: 20%
• Attainable workforce housing: 10%
• Institutional work for nonprofits: 35%
• Solar for homes and businesses not built by us: 25%

This is only one year, and it happens to be a year with an uncharacteristically small amount of second-home work, but it indicates a direction: less harm, more good. Causing no harm is impossible — we are part of the problem too — but we share our experiences and hope others will join our push to turn some of the negative impacts of building into positive benefits for communities and the environment.

An added benefit of our business practices is that the second-home clients we attract tend to share our values. We love working with them. They go from being clients to becoming partners in our efforts to make the Vineyard a better place. Many have become friends for life. The rewards of this work and these relationships have become deeply ingrained in our core purpose.

Coming Back Around

By South Mountain Co. |

The only time I ever built a physical model of a house was for the Chilmark house my late wife, Chris, our son Pinto, and I designed in 1982. He was 12, and our daughter Sophie, who would be born on the night we moved in (in late 1984), had not yet been imagined. I wonder what became of that foam-core model.

We built that house, lived there until Sophie was 15, and sold it in 1999. In those days, South Mountain’s shop, offices, and my family home were all located on our property adjacent to the Allen Farm. The company was growing, and we needed more space. We couldn’t expand on that site. It was time to move on. We migrated to West Tisbury to develop our current campus and Island Cohousing.

In 2011 I took the South Mountain architects to see the Chilmark house. Some of the younger ones had never seen it. “It’s very dynamic – the levels, the light, the textures,” said Matt Coffey.

The reason for the field trip was that the house was going to be torn down by its owners to make room for a new one. Only 28 years old, it was bulldozed, taken to the landfill and replaced with a high-end contemporary and pool.

It was one of my best buildings. It was hard to see it go, but we had experienced our emotional parting when we sold it 12 years before. Still, it was sad.

After the house was completed in 1984, for a time South Mountain’s work veered off-course. My colleagues and I had been on a design path that combined several threads: a “vernacular modern” style characterized by passive solar, natural daylighting, and dedication to craft and fine materials. But the vernacular and the craft began to take over; modern and solar took a backseat. It was to be a lengthy detour, at least 10 years, before high performance (in terms of energy, daylight, comfort, health, and durability) re-gained prominence in our work.

(Our country was charting a parallel course. Reagan was in office. The solar panels Jimmy Carter had installed on the White House were ridiculed and scrapped. Frivolous and tasteless post-modern design was all the rage – goofy pediments and all).

In 2005, I was working with Ryan Bushey (then a young architect, now our Director of Architecture & Engineering and one of my co-owners), on a zero-energy home. The site and solar opportunities were similar to that of the Chilmark house. I took Ryan to see it. Several aspects of his 2005 design were modeled after my 1983 design, but Ryan took it to another level.

The Chilmark house (where my family lived for 16 years) and another one completed in 1981, several miles away (that has been extensively remodeled in a way that took the soul out of the building) are, I think, the best examples of early SMCo work – both designed and built about 40 years ago.

One’s gone. One is a shadow of its former self. Fortunately, there are other decent examples of our early work, but those two have a special place in my heart (absence really does make the heart grow fonder).

I suppose I could have kept and cared for the Chilmark house. But I didn’t. It was important to make a break. The results of the development of Island Cohousing signified that SMCo was all the way back-on-track. And the Cohousing neighborhood was good place to live. It had its downs and ups. Chris succumbed to cancer in our house there in 2017; shortly after Sophie got married on the pond.

One of the prominent features of our Chilmark house was that it was built into a hillside and stepped down the hill in three levels. The lowest step was only 17”, the height of a chair. This was the dining area. A special round table with a large lazy Susan and a laminated semi-circular wood bench on the upper level provided some of the seating (the rest was chairs on the lower level). Everyone loved that table and space. Kids loved the lazy Susan. Dogs loved it that if someone left food on the table it was right at their height, ripe for poaching.

Before the house was torn down, the owner gave that table – lazy Susan and all – to a young neighbor, who grew up playing with Sophie. A few years ago, he passed it on to her. Our Shop Lead, Jim, restored and re-finished it, and replaced the lazy Susan bearings. Now Sophie, her husband John and their three young kids gather round it. Their twins, Bodie and Turner, born just two months ago, will know that table from birth, just as she did. Her three-year-old, Rockland, will probably ride the lazy Susan and tax those bearings just as she did. Maybe we’ll replace them for the third generation.

We find our calling and our path. The journey is complex. Along the way we stray. We find the way again. Things are dismantled and things are saved. Some circle back around.

There’s poetry in that.

P.S. The sweet little horse barn we built for Sophie and her friends on the Chilmark property remains. All is not lost, ever.

Riding Toward A New Future

By John Abrams |

More than 25 years ago, I was in a room somewhere organizing a conference for the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association. There were two new faces among the group – Marc Rosenbaum and Bruce Coldham – who were engaging and appeared to know their stuff. Not long after, The Wampanoag Tribe asked SMCo to design a new Headquarters, the first building they would raise as a tribe in 300 years. I was excited, but knew we had neither knowledge or capacity to take this on alone. I asked Marc (a mechanical and systems engineer from New Hampshire) and Bruce (an architect from Western MA) if they would collaborate. They agreed; we did that project together and several more after. Although we collaborated deeply on all aspects, at the heart of our shared work, Marc was Numbers, Bruce was Pictures, and I was Words. Together, a seamless composition.

Thus began a relationship that has endured. For several decades, Marc was our go-to consultant about all things energy and systems. He taught us so much about buildings that we wouldn’t have known otherwise. He still does!

Ten years ago, our relationship changed. Marc and wife Jill moved to the Vineyard. He became an SMCo employee, and later an owner. His contributions to the company, to our buildings, and to our institutional knowledge ever since have been entirely remarkable. He thinks in a way that is unlike anyone I’ve ever met. The thing about Marc is – he cares. About truth, excellence, people, life, and impeccable data-driven information. It matters to him to make a difference; he’s committed to improving conditions for people on our planet. He does – consistently, relentlessly, and generously.

At the end of this year, our relationship will change again. Marc recently announced to our leadership team that he will end his time as an employee-owner and transition back to being a trusted consultant. He has other endeavors he wants to combine with his SMCo work, so he wants to be more independent and flexible and . . . well, you know, unemployed. He’ll still work with our architects, engineers, solar team, and production staff on most of our projects. It really won’t be much different (since he’s not in the office these pandemic days anyway). We’ll still be asking “Hey Marc…” on a regular basis. He’ll still be finding the best intelligence, dreaming up new solutions, and teaching us all. We’ll still have the benefit of well-filtered know-how from his extraordinary nationwide network of experts. He’ll still be pointing out my typos and making bad puns.

He’ll still be here. We’re very lucky and very grateful. We all hope that his path forward is all-the-way fulfilling, as we’re sure it will be. After all, he’s never been one to waste opportunity.

Our mutual friend Jamie Wolf illustrates this point with an early NESEA conference story. He remembers this guy in the front row at every presentation. Invariably, his hand would shoot up to ask penetrating questions. “I first met the back of his head,” says Jamie. “Inquiry, scrutiny, mastery. That was his method. He embodied that – it’s the NESEA ethic, but we learned it, as much as from anyone, from Marc.”

About SMCo, Marc wrote after his announcement, “ . . . This community of people is extraordinary in so many ways. . . . . I’ve never been in a group where dedication to excellence, and doing the best one can, has been so prevalent. The richness comes from the diversity of what we define as excellence. That diversity leads to differences of opinion about what should be prioritized, but the commitments we bring are the foundation of goodwill that allows us to, together, create something profoundly better than any of us could do alone.”

The first time I visited Marc and Jill in New Hampshire, decades ago, I stayed in their finished basement. Hanging on a sheetrock wall in the hallway at the foot of the stairs, where you’d expect a painting to be, was a bicycle. I asked him about it. “Oh, that’s a bicycle I built for my senior thesis at MIT. At the time, it was the lightest bicycle in the world.”

Buildings are one of his passions. Bicycles are another. He’ll surely find time for both in this new chapter – The Rosenbaum Chronicles, part three.