Creature’s founder and chief executive officer shares his thoughts on our origins, evolution, and future.

For most of my career, I ran a traditional General Contractor (GC)/Construction Manager model in my business. However, after some time, I felt that our results and success were being limited within the confines of the traditional AEC industry. This feeling started a journey spanning multiple industries and years – one that would permanently change the lens of my work.

As many in the AEC industry do, I recognized the tremendous waste generated in the traditional construction model. Through those inefficiencies, though, I also saw the opportunity to create a differentiated business model — or even an entirely new industry. Over the years, I experimented with several different strategies to do so, but they only yielded incremental improvement in production, instead of the dramatic improvements in speed, quality, and cost I was after. I hadn’t yet found that ‘secret sauce,’ that hidden formula.

In 2009 we were approached by Chris Giattina, a lifelong friend and (at that time) CEO of GA Studio, to join forces on a 42 unit, 4 story, senior living apartment project in North Port Alabama, for Methodist Homes. Chris wanted to complete the project using the idle mobile home manufacturing capacity that was the result of the ongoing financial crisis. This pioneering project shed light on what is required to develop a strategy that would allow for dramatic improvement of speed, quality, and cost of traditional construction.

Chris and his team contracted directly with Franklin Homes, a custom mobile home manufacturer, to deliver 84 tubes that constituted the 42 units. Our job was to complete the sitework and foundations, set the units, and then tie them together to create a complete building.

During this project I saw the stark differences between manufacturing and traditional construction. We were faced with pricing the framing, drywall, mechanical, electrical, and plumbing connections using traditional GC methodologies. This is where the siloed, bureaucratic techniques that have been embedded in the AEC Industry for hundreds of years first unveiled themselves to me in a light that allowed me to see the waste in the process. Traditional Trade Contractors were not interested in providing lump sum pricing for the scope that was significantly less and not clearly spelled on traditional drawings. The trades were so delineated and siloed to mitigate risk from the GC, so there was not a meaningful work package that could be created making the project much less attractive to the traditional trade contractors. To solve this issue, we did at the time the unthinkable: we set the tubes then asked the trade contractors to provide us skilled tradesmen on an hourly basis. We used our supervision to manage the work and that allowed us to tie the building together, quickly, and economically.

A few years later while attending a Modular Construction Conference at the University of Florida in Gainesville, I had dinner with several pioneers in the modular space. I was in a conversation with one of the partners in Gluck Plus Architecture, and he shared an insight with the group that changed the course of my career and Creature’s future. He revealed that, in his experience, making volumetric modules was not the hard part of completing a modular building; it was ‘stitching’ the modules together that posed the most significant challenge. Because of my experience with the modular Methodist Homes project years earlier, his sentiment resonated with me deeply.

In 2019, I received another call from my business partner, Chris Giattina – who created the Design Manufacture Construct (DMC) process, an entirely new way to build. At that time, his company, Blox, had a large contract to build modular primary care facilities for Walmart. At the client’s request, he went to the traditional GC healthcare builders to ask them to stitch these facilities together. Reflecting on our experience with the Methodist Homes project, we both felt certain the traditional solution was not our answer.

When Chris received the estimates, which were significantly higher than the cost to traditionally stick-build the primary care facility, our suspicions were confirmed. The traditional builders couldn’t, in their business model, separate the labor needed to tie the facility together from the resources required to stick-build the primary care facility. For the traditional GC, this way of operating seemed nonsensical when they had so many more high-paying opportunities in their sights - but in Blox’s revolutionary DMC method, the modules are designed, built, and finished before they even leave Blox’s campus, meaning that Chris only needed to pay for the labor and expertise required to tie the facility together. Yet again, the inefficiencies of the traditional AEC industry surfaced. There had to be — and was — a better way to build.

At the time, we were in the early phases of building out an integrated platform that would be able to take a project seamlessly from design to completion, including the integration of mechanical, electrical, plumbing (MEP) and finishing tradesmen. Chris inquired if we could assist with lowering the cost and, with Methodist Homes, the Gluck Plus story, and our new platform in the forefront of my mind, I told Chris we would give them a price to “stitch” the modules together. Mike Gibson, the Chief Design Officer, studied the plans and suggested a redesign of the foundations. We then took a crew to the site and worked hand-in-hand with them to execute our first Stitch project – this was a monumental moment. We were able to deliver the project for approximately half the traditional GC’s price! Thus, Creature’s differentiated building platform was proven to be able to break down traditional silos and utilize modular construction to harvest value.

Since this initial project in 2019, we have stitched over 30 healthcare facilities, learning and improving with each one. Part of this process includes site adapt work, where we prepare the site and ensure we adhere to local building codes. We then use our in-house, multi-disciplined trade team to efficiently stitch together all of the structural steel, drywall, mechanical, electrical, and plumbing connections that are required to create an entire, functioning facility.

Within the Creature Building Platform, we manage or aid in program management, architecture and design, site adapt and entitlement, and stitch volumetric modules together. This has been achieved on a large scale across the country for multiple large, for-profit healthcare companies. As our process has been continually refined by repetition, we have tangentially improved the cost and the speed of the projects.

If your capital project could benefit from our expertise with traditional construction, utilizing modular components, or full, volumetric modular construction, let’s talk.