A little over a year ago, March 27, 2017, we were staring at an empty building with mounds of dirt - dirt that had to be relocated in order to pour the foundation (and there was a lot of dirt!) While we had a vision of what the store would become we were a long way from “seeing” it. I was listening to a podcast (Masters of Scale) earlier this week featuring the founders of AirBNB, and I was reminded again of the process involved with starting something new. If you are unfamiliar with AirBNB, the company operates an online marketplace and hospitality service for people to lease or rent short-term lodging. The founders, Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia, started with their loft in San Francisco, offering up three inflatable mattresses and a home cooked breakfast for $80. Ten years later the company is worth $31 billion, the second most valuable startup in the world behind Uber. Don’t get me wrong, I am not comparing Cape House to AirBNB, but they had plenty of dirt to move too! A year and a half into their operation AirBNB was only averaging 50 people per day on the website and 10-20 bookings. So they got creative. They went door to door (literally) of their hosts and found the answers that allowed them to improve the user experience and eventually scale to a global brand. They had a saying, “do everything by hand until it was painful.” We haven’t adopted that saying but we have had our fair share of pain. Moving dirt was painful, but it was the beginning of the process. There will always be dirt in the way of your dreams. Are you willing to pick up the shovel and start the work?

10 Do not despise these small beginnings, for the Lord rejoices to see the work begin… Zechariah 4:10 NLT