When I was 18 years old, I went on a
mission to Africa for two years. I had a mission companion who I didn’t
like very much because he had tons of money (among other reasons). My
family didn’t have the money to send me on a mission, but someone from
my church donated the funds so I could go. In order to buy some nice
shirts and shoes for the mission, I sold my only possession, a 72
Chevrolet Nova that barely ran.
I spent a lot of time with this
companion and discovered he had a lawn maintenance company. One day we
were walking—we’d walk miles and miles in the scorching heat—and I just
asked him, “So, are your mom and dad rich?” and he was like, “No.”
I had to drag it out of him, but
eventually, he shared that he had a lawn maintenance company. I
responded, “Oh, you push a lawnmower?” and he said, “Well, kind of. My
brother runs it for me right now. I pay him $10 thousand a month to run
this thing,” and that was back in the 1980s.
That’s when my companion planted a
seed in my head. He said, “James, all I hear is crutches or excuses.
Have you ever heard of a library?” I didn’t read very much, as I wasn’t
good at reading, but he continued, “Go home and read some books you
know, do yourself a favor. Take responsibility for your life.”
I took his advice to heart and came
home and did drywall, which was the only thing I knew how to do until I
had saved up $3,000. I used the money to buy a lawnmower and a truck and
start a lawn maintenance company called Muro. It was hard work, but I
grew it big enough to eventually serve large clients, such as golf
courses and hotels in Las Vegas. I also did a lot of work for Howard
Hughes and Del Webb. I built Muro until it was the largest landscape
company in Nevada, then sold at the right time and did very well with
that.
After my successful exit at Muro, I
started a chain of scrapbooking stores with my wife. We built that into a
large scrapbooking organization with an association and a buying group.
We also owned a paper company and had several magazines in the
scrapbooking industry.
For a while, I wore an apron with
pink gingham and talked about stickers and family history! The
experience really meant something to me in the sense that people were
using our product to document their lives and history and had something
to pass on to their children and grandchildren.
Losing it all…then bouncing back
In 2009 and 2010, I lost every dime. I
went from being the big man in town with a large home, houseboats, and
airplanes to losing it all. It was a very dark time for me, and I
emerged from that with a program we built to help children stay in
school, which was a little dog tag that kids were given on stage if they
had perfect attendance.
That program grew into a very large
company that made a difference for schools. If a kid isn’t at first
period, the school doesn’t get that $7 or $8 dollars that day. So we
built a program because, in inner-city, socioeconomically disadvantaged
areas, kids just don’t have the support of their parents as much to get
them to school, and the school misses out on funds they desperately
need.
At some point, the schools wanted the
dog tags personalized so we needed a machine that would cut tags out of
a laminate we created. I ordered this machine from China, which was a
disaster when it arrived. It was ugly and rusted, and I was so mad. The
machine ended up not working, and it wasn’t big enough for what we
needed, so we decided to sell it. My son and I spent two weeks grinding
and painting, then we put it on eBay—they called it a clicker press.
I had never heard of a clicker press
in my life, but there was such an interest from the eBay ad that as soon
as I had the money, I bought two more of those machines from China,
which led me to start CJRTec,
a clicker press distribution company. Clicker press machines can cut
PVC cards, fabric, paper, cardboard, leather, and rubber.
Today, we are partners in a factory
overseas and have a 70 percent market share. Sometimes I can’t believe
that’s how CJR started—this machine that I got all mad about, put on
eBay, got a ton of interest in, and I was like, “Maybe this is a product
that I could sell.” I found a good supplier, started ordering more
machines, and now I’ve got a half million dollars sitting in my
warehouse, which drug me into factories that are manufacturing and
making things here in America.
"Nobody
is building a smaller home for the girl who works at your local
7-Eleven and can only afford a mortgage of $300 a month—now our mission
is to see that become a reality."
At some point, I had a customer, 3M
actually, that said, “We want a robot that will put the stuff on the
machine before it cuts and pick up all the pieces, put the waste here,
and put the good stuff over here.” I told 3M, “I don’t do robotics. I’ll
send you a machine, but I don’t do robotics.” I told them to call the
Japanese companies and buy a robot that will do what they want it to do,
but they had bought a lot of products from me, and they said, “James,
you’re overseas all the time. Can’t you just go figure this out?” At
that time, I was overseas every other month throughout China, Japan and
Korea.
I started looking into robotics and
visited every robotic factory in China. I made a point to study
everything about automation and robotics, and that’s where my company, USA Botics came from.
I ended up finding a very bright
mechatronics graduate over in China. I bought a Chinese robot and said,
“I’ll be back in two months. Source every single part for this machine.”
I returned two months later, and he had two working robots—the one we
bought and copied and the other from components he could buy in the
industry, and the margin was outstanding.
Founding MudBots, a 3D printer for ‘affordable homes’
One day I was talking to someone who
told me about this Russian guy on YouTube who built a 3D printer that
prints concrete, and he suggested I look into it. I said, “Nah, not
concrete.” But he kept urging me. I eventually gave in, and I am so glad
that I did. I come from a construction background, so when I saw this
thing that this Russian guy used to build a castle in the backyard for
his daughter, I was like, “Oh my, this is going to be huge.”
I was doing very well then, so I
wanted to reach out to the Russian and ask him if he needed an investor.
I tried for two months to get a hold of him, and he never called me
back, not an email, nothing. I finally just took two or three of my
engineers and said, “You know what, build a small 3D printer, a 6X6, and
let’s see if we could print concrete with it.”
Well, building a printer was nothing
for us; it was super easy, but I had no idea what I was really getting
myself into. It turned out the software needed a custom-batch plant that
individually meters all of the ingredients. There’s a lot of chemistry
involved, so I became very interested in all the ingredients that do
different things with concrete. Eventually, we got a product we could
print layer by layer without falling over and steel-bonding to the
previous layer.
Now, five years and millions of dollars later, MudBots
is the only company in the world that is privately owned and held. I
don’t have loans. I don’t have government help. I don’t have grants from
colleges. I don’t have partners, and we don’t even have payables. Every
part we order for this facility is on a credit card, off eBay, Amazon,
or straight from China.
I pay for the parts, the labor, and
the machine. I pay for all the costs, but that employee has to donate
his time to prove it, to make it work, to write the operation manual,
and make the marketing videos for it. When it works, when it’s done,
that employee gets a royalty payment.
Most of the time, those royalty
payments are 30-50 percent of the profit of that part. Most of my
employees and engineers make more money from their royalties than they
do their salary—and that creates an environment where everybody is
always looking for a way to make it better or faster because they also
want their own little project. When I go downstairs and start handing
out checks to people, they’re like, “What’s going on?” and the guy
receiving the check says, “Yeah, every time we sell a machine, I get a
royalty check.”
MudBots: disrupting the building industry
MudBots is a technology automation
company that developed large-scale 3D printers (using cement) that can
solve the affordable housing crisis worldwide, not just in America.
Before MudBots, I was retired. I came
into the office two days a week, walked around, irritated people, asked
them questions, and went home. MudBots, I felt, gave me purpose and
excitement. I knew this was something I could take around the world to
offer a real solution for affordable housing.
Our 3D printers are used by a lot of
people as disruptive building technology because it replaces framing,
drywall, stucco, and a lot of aspects. Because of this, every once in a
while, I have people who give me pushback and say, “Well, you’re killing
jobs, James.”
My response is always that I’m not
killing jobs. Technology will bring more and more jobs to America. They
said the same thing when Bill Gates and Steve Jobs built computers. My
grandfather, clear back into the 1930s and 1940s, when the first
tractors came out, the men used to go and attack the tractor, pop the
tires, and pull the wires off it because this machine did the work of 50
men with shovels and they were afraid.
I’m going to err on the side of
technology because I know there isn’t a major city in America that
doesn’t have a deficit of 20-30 thousand homes, and people are living in
the street. In Los Angeles, there are 250 thousand homeless, and 2-3
people die every night. We have a tool that, for the first time ever,
can produce an affordable home in a third of the time for a third of the
cost.
With our technology, developers can
print any size home they want, providing a great solution for smaller,
more affordable homes and tiny homes for the homeless. Because our homes
are made in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost compared
to traditional homes, more people who need housing can get it.
In every city, you’ve got 20 guys who
can build 1200, 2500 square foot homes. Nobody is building a smaller
home for the girl who works at your local 7-Eleven and can only afford a
mortgage of $300 a month—now, our mission is to see that become a
reality.
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