Tiny homes with Mike Cheatham: Movable Roots

Tom Houghton:

You’re listening to “The Building Code,” your guide for a better way to run your business. I’m Tom Houghton.

Paul Wurth:

I’m Paul Wurth. Surprised as ever of the intro. You keep changing them on me.

Tom Houghton:

Well, that’s what you said, “2020, let’s change it up.” So that’s what we’re doing.

Paul Wurth:

I like that one.

Tom Houghton:

Oh, good. Thanks.

Paul Wurth:

I don’t think I could ever pull off the intro like you do. You get into your-

Tom Houghton:

I just go somewhere.

Paul Wurth:

You go to a different place.

Tom Houghton:

And then I come back.

Paul Wurth:

And you come back to the real talk.

Tom Houghton:

Exactly.

Paul Wurth:

All right.

Tom Houghton:

Speaking of the real Tom, let’s meet the real Mike. Mike Cheatham is joining us. Co-owner of Movable Roots. He’s got a massive following on Instagram, so we’re sure you probably know about Mike. But Mike, welcome to the podcast.

Mike Cheatham:

Thanks for having me guys. I’m excited to be on.

Paul Wurth:

Thanks for being here, Mike.

Tom Houghton:

Mike, why don’t you go ahead and introduce us to your company. But first we always like to ask people where they came up with a name for their business. So why don’t you start there and then give us a little background on Movable Roots.

Mike Cheatham:

All right. So the name from the business, basically, we started looking at the tiny home space about three and a half years ago. Initially, we weren’t necessarily looking to start a business. We were looking to build a home for my wife and I. At a point in our life where we were like, “We’ve had the big house. We’ve had a lot of different kinds of experiences. Why don’t we start looking at trimming down and do a lot more traveling and things like that.” So when we started looking at the space, obviously tiny homes are movable and we wanted the word home to fit into our name. We didn’t want to use the word home necessarily, so that’s where the word roots came from. We’re going to plant some roots here with a tiny home, and we might pick it up and move it and plant some roots here a couple of months down the road. So the idea of Movable Roots, the name right there.

Paul Wurth:

I like it.

Tom Houghton:

Yeah, that was good.

Paul Wurth:

That’s a good segment we have because everybody’s got a good story about where they’re getting… Most people do.

Tom Houghton:

Yeah.

Paul Wurth:

Unless it’s Jim’s Home. We get it Jim.

Tom Houghton:

We get it Jim. You ran out of ideas. Well, why don’t you give us a background on your company a little bit more, tell us who’s involved in doing the work and what it looks like.

Mike Cheatham:

Yeah. So I’ll give you a little bit start of the beginning. My brother and I basically started in construction as kids. Our dad was a general contractor. He owned a remodel business in Arizona and we pretty much, like I tell people, grew up with hammers in our hands. We were helping him whenever he needed help and just what I feel like construction and building was in our blood and it just came second nature to me. So out of high school, I jumped into framing crews, started framing with a crew here locally in Florida. From there, ended up opening our own framing company and construction company. And for many years did a lot of framing, a lot of building homes for quite a few years up until the market crash in roughly what, 2008, 2009 timeframe. Florida really, really, especially where we’re at in Florida, took a real hit from the market crash. Because not only did we have the market crash at that time, but NASA, if you remember, also shut down and we’re within 45 minutes of NASA.

Mike Cheatham:

So we had this market trend fall plus a bunch of people leaving the area, so new construction, which is what we were pretty much involved in at that time fell to the wayside. So we picked up our egos and our sorrows and said, “Let’s try something different.” We went different ways, got out of construction for a while and started jumping into a whole another realm. We had started CrossFitting at the time and believe it or not started a company where we were building CrossFit equipment.

Tom Houghton:

Wow.

Mike Cheatham:

So we were still building still designing, just a completely different thing. We opened a couple of CrossFit gyms and went a completely different direction and started down that road for quite a few years. I think that part of our life is really what started us looking at the smaller footprint, healthier life, big picture of the world in a different way, creating a smaller space that we need to live in rather than these huge 3,000, 4,000 square feet that we’re all paying to clean and AC and everything else and we’re only using a small section of it. So we got to the point where we had had enough of a little bit of the CrossFit equipment world. We were really competing against a major, major competitor that we could never really, truly compete with. So ended up having to break away from that. At that time is when my wife and I were looking to go down the road of going tiny. So my wife and I were doing some traveling and went to a couple of tiny home shows, went and visited a couple of tiny home builders.

Mike Cheatham:

At that time, really all I was seeing was the original, what I call the log cabin look, tiny home with no main floor master bedrooms. They were all about 24, maybe 28 feet long, and they all had loft bedrooms. So my wife and I were like, “Hey, that’s not really going to work for us. I’d much rather have a main floor master bedroom.” So we started doodling and sketching and figuring out what we wanted to do as far as the design and then came buying a piece of property. So we went to a… We bought a piece of property. Again, the whole idea was, “Hey, let’s find a piece of property that maybe we spend a little bit more money on, but it’s got an amazing view.” So we’re here on the East Coast of Florida. There’s a little bit of an intercostal here. So we found a piece of property that was on the water and we were like, “Hell yeah. Let’s buy this piece of property and we’ll put this tiny home on it.”

Paul Wurth:

Makes sense.

Mike Cheatham:

Yep. So bought the piece of property and then found out we couldn’t put a tiny home on it.

Paul Wurth:

Why not? Oh man. You think maybe you would’ve done a little due diligence there though.

Tom Houghton:

What happened?

Mike Cheatham:

So again, going into some of the barriers of entry for tiny home people. So people that are looking to have a tiny house on wheels or potentially have that smaller footprint. The issue that we had with this piece of property was that there was a minimum square footage requirement for the piece of property. So our tiny homes really are only roughly about 300 square feet counting main floor living square footage, so that didn’t meet the 750 minimum square footage. A big wall that we ran into there, right?

Tom Houghton:

Yeah.

Mike Cheatham:

So we approached my brother and my brother had a very successful business. He runs an office supply company down in Lake Worth in Greenacres area called Supplies Now. I approached him and I said, “Hey, bro. I’m thinking about getting back into construction, but I want to do it different. We’ve been looking at this tiny home space. You know that we wanted to build a tiny home for the piece of property and you know the issues that we’ve had there.”

Mike Cheatham:

But I said, “There’s a huge demand for these tiny homes, and the interesting thing about the market is they’re on wheels. So I’m not necessarily bound to central Florida for these. I can have them shipped all over the U.S.” So we really did a little bit more due diligence on the space and decided to jump in, two feet, full on tiny home builders. From there, we built our first home. My brother and I pretty much built it all together. He would come up here on the weekends and me when he could and my wife and I would work during the week. That first model we named after our older brother who had passed away and we named it after his middle name, the Henderson.

Paul Wurth:

Oh, nice.

Tom Houghton:

That’s nice.

Mike Cheatham:

2017 was when we broke ground with Moveable Roots. We took that model, and basically it was the model that we were playing around with building for ourselves, because we had already spent all this time sketching it and saying like, “Hey, we feel like the space is missing this.” So we built a very high-end tiny home, and that was our thought process in a two guys because was… If I only need 300 square feet of flooring, why not buy some really nice flooring? Some of the stuff that you would probably never buy for your 2000 square foot house because now that price just gets crazy on that square footage.

Mike Cheatham:

So we went into that build with that idea was that, “Hey, let’s go for that higher-end fit and finish and quality of work and design homes that are functionable.” People love the idea. They watch the shows and they see Tiny House Nation and all this stuff on different channels, and the idea of it is great. But then when you really start to think about downsizing your life in a 365 day plus timeframe, you really need to figure how that space is going to work for you and your family.

Paul Wurth:

Yeah. That makes sense. I have so many questions. So many questions about the tiny style.

Tom Houghton:

To sum it up though, what your business is offering is a really high-end product in a small form factor. Would you say that’s correct?

Mike Cheatham:

Yeah. Yeah. We’ve gone that higher-end, custom design tiny home. Because you’re going back to my previous comment, when we were looking for a tiny home, really the only thing that builders were offering was maybe a portfolio of 10 model options. So we had to fit into, or find something that fit in that at most 10 options. We really couldn’t find anything. Our experience now in this space is that most people that are really looking to make this jump and full-time go tiny, they really need that space to work for how their life works on a daily basis.

Paul Wurth:

Yeah. It’s actually correlated to the normal home size category as well. I mean, you’re seeing that from home builders, going from the mansions down to normal-sized homes or even smaller square footage, but higher finishes. We just had a guest on talking about that. So it seems to make sense that that’s just the trend here. Is going tiny the phrase we use?

Mike Cheatham:

Yeah.

Paul Wurth:

That’s the verb?

Mike Cheatham:

I mean, it is a catchy phrase, I guess. If you think about the idea of the RV industry has that tagline, “Go RV,” and somebody along the way of tiny homes dubbed that idea, “Going tiny.”

Paul Wurth:

Wasn’t that a Matt Damon film recently though?

Tom Houghton:

Going tiny?

Paul Wurth:

Downsizing?

Tom Houghton:

Downsizing it was. He did downsize.

Mike Cheatham:

Yeah. He did downsize.

Tom Houghton:

A little bit different. I mean, there’s some similarities, but a bit different.

Paul Wurth:

Yeah, a little bit. That makes sense.

Mike Cheatham:

Didn’t he downsize himself?

Tom Houghton:

It was more him than the… Spoiler alert right there. I think a lot of builders that we work with obviously build traditional size homes, is probably how I’d say that. What challenges do you face building in such a small footprint?

Mike Cheatham:

A lot of challenges, and it was a crazy learning curve on our first build. What I tell people in the residential worlds, we could have a plumber or an electrician miss a chase line or a drain line in the rough end stage, and we could shift a wall a couple of inches to hide that mistake and no one would ever know. It wouldn’t really affect anything. If there was a bearing wall, obviously there’s an issue there, but for the most part, you can shift things in a general home and not really affect anything drastically in the build. In a tiny home, if I move something a quarter of an inch, no lie, the couch might not fit. Our precision has to be just dead on. Our plans have to be well thought out.

Mike Cheatham:

Before we even break ground and start building our trailers, we’ve got everything outlined and figured out where it needs to be. If you think about what we’re doing, we’re basically a residential home with two by four exterior walls on top of a trailer. So we’ve got all of those residential style, home product inside it like all of our electrical rough-in, all of our plumbing rough-in, all of our mini splits. The mini-splits have the AC chase lines that have to be run all into that three and a half inch space from one into the other. So there’s a lot of stuff crammed into that compact space.

Paul Wurth:

Yeah. That makes sense. That being said, are you building these in a factory then? In a location that allows you to manage everything and you’re doing it all yourself?

Mike Cheatham:

Yeah, we are. We, again jumped both feet in. We got a warehouse. We said, “We see a demand here. The fact that our target market doesn’t necessarily have to be Florida, we can reach and send homes to California.” We have a warehouse. We have four full-time employees. My wife actually has come on full-time now. She handles all of our social media and does an amazing job with our website and literally keeps my schedule straight.

Tom Houghton:

Yes, she is doing an incredible job on your social media. I’m looking at the pictures on Instagram… If you’re not following Movable Roots on Instagram, you can find them at movable_roots on Instagram. They’ve got some fantastic photos of their work, just really great to follow along with the progress. So make sure you give them a follow and a shout out to your wife on that. Great job.

Mike Cheatham:

Yeah, man. She’s awesome with it. So she had a marketing background already, so we got to a point where we said, “We need somebody to handle this for us.”

Tom Houghton:

Yeah. So you mentioned your target market a little bit, obviously, not necessarily entirely being in Florida. Could you elaborate on that? Who is your target market and where are they coming from and how far are you sending your product out into the world?

Mike Cheatham:

So, great question. So we actually have two ranges of what seems to be our market. So we have the younger millennials who are either just getting out of college or going to college, starting their careers, but don’t really want to jump into a $250,000, $300,000 mortgage, but they still want to own. So we’ve got that kind of market and that kind of customer who’s also thinking that, “I don’t really need that much space yet. I’m not ready for that much space yet.” I know my son out of college, his job is somewhat transient. Some of these new sales jobs and marketing jobs that the companies are moving people fairly often.

Mike Cheatham:

You’ve got that demographic. Then we’ve got… Really, we skipped the full family stage mainly because I do really think that for the most part to go tiny and to live in that small of a space, at least with a young toddler into adolescents can be a little bit difficult. So we’ve got a little bit of a gap there in that demographic, and then we go back to the empty-nesters. A lot of the empty-nesters are really the bigger demographic that we have. So we’ve got those that are retiring, kids have just finished or gone to college and they’re on their own and they want to get rid of that house that they had for the family. They want to either travel or they want to spend time in different parts of the U.S. So we’ve got homes in California, Montana, Texas, Florida, up the East Coast, Tennessee. We’ve had the ability to get some homes out there and that’s just been phenomenal.

Tom Houghton:

That’s awesome. I don’t want to derail the conversation. We have a data report that’s out called Working With Digitally Savvy Homeowners in 2020, and I know that you mentioned in millennials in terms of generations, you mentioned some boomers in there that you’re working with as well. I know if you’re listening to this podcast and you haven’t checked it out, go to the link in the show notes, buildertrend.com/podcast, and you can subscribe. Well, you can of course, always subscribe.

Paul Wurth:

Always.

Tom Houghton:

We love subscribers. But you can also download the report as well. Again, not completely derail the podcast, but make sure you check it out because I think it definitely hits on some of those points that you were talking about. I’d love to shift the conversation away from that and maybe talk about some fun products that you would use in a tiny home. One of them specifically, there’s a specific type of toilet, and I’m not even sure how to say the name of this toilet. An incinerate?

Mike Cheatham:

Yeah.

Paul Wurth:

It’s an incinerate. It incinerates things.

Tom Houghton:

Is that basically what’s happening?

Mike Cheatham:

That’s exactly what’s happening.

Paul Wurth:

I’ve heard about this.

Mike Cheatham:

So not all tiny homes have to use that because again, going back to how the homes are used. So some people plan on traveling. Some RV parks are very open to the idea of tiny homes coming in. So some people travel and they plan their travel around RV parks that they can go in and have full hookups. So they can have a standard flush toilet and all the other regular amenities of home. There’s the other demographic of tiny home goers that want to be completely off grid. They don’t want to… They want to boondock. They want to be off the beaten path and do their own thing. In that case, you have to think about, “Well, what happens to the black water scenario for I’m living here? I got to do the deed.” That has to go somewhere.

Mike Cheatham:

A majority of these tiny homes don’t really have tanks like an RV. So they don’t have gray or black water tanks, because they are really designed to go into that location that has the hookups ready for them and spending more of an extended period of time there. I call it snow bird, that six, seven months to a year timeframe. So those that really want to be more off grid, they go to either a composting toilet, which you have to add an additive to it. It’s basically a toilet that… Without getting too crazy with it. It basically has a bucket inside it and the urine is diverted, but the number two is collected into this bucket with this additive. Then you have to use that in a composting gardening scenario.

Mike Cheatham:

So not everybody is into a composting or green thumb, wants to be out there growing tomatoes. So the other option is this incinerate toilet, and we actually just used it in one of our newest builds and we got to meet the owners of the company and they were super cool. They basically pretty much told us it’s at a level of sanitation that the coast guard uses them on shifts to the point where they can actually dump the waste into the ocean when it’s done. It basically burns all of the waste to an ash and that ash can then just be put into the trash.

Tom Houghton:

There you go.

Paul Wurth:

And that’s talking potty talk.

Tom Houghton:

Yeah. There’s a lot of toilet humor. We won’t stoop that low or go down that drain, but we’ll move on. So thanks for sharing your industry experience with that area. I’m sure the listeners finally got a kick out of that.

Mike Cheatham:

There was definitely some learning curves on that side of the job as well.

Tom Houghton:

Sure. To wrap up what’s the next phase look like for you in your business or in tiny homes? What’s the future look like?

Mike Cheatham:

We have two major barriers for point of entry for a tiny home goers. The two major ones are what we experienced personally, the land isn’t allowing me to do what I want on my own piece of property. I’ve got some restrictions by local zoning and regulations. Then financing. Financing can be a little bit tricky too, because it’s just such a new, somewhat emerging market as far as banks and financial institutions looking at them as options to finance. So we have created a relationship with a bank that is willing to finance them, but we still have that other kicker where it can be difficult to set up in a location that you want to be set up in. So we’ve done some things we’ve got on… I was asked to be on the board of the tiny house industry association, who has really been trying to do some things nationwide in getting into state and local governments and really starting to address the ideas of affordable housing and allowing more options and breaking down the code and saying, “Why can’t this work on this piece of property or in this general area?”

Mike Cheatham:

We’ve been helping with that. We actually did help quite a bit here locally. Even though our specific piece of property, we cannot still put a tiny home on just yet. We were instrumental in helping some of the local codes change here to allow tiny homes on some other areas in our county. So that’s been a huge thing for us as well. But really, to be honest, some of the biggest things that we’re looking at doing is more of that prefab modular manufacturing where we can still build on a very modern high-scale, small footprint, but the transport and the setup would be different.

Mike Cheatham:

So the transport would… It would still travel on somewhat of a trailer, but it would be designed to be removed from the trailer and set on a permanent foundation. That in some ways, fixes some of those barriers. So I can send two units out and combine them to meet some of the smaller minimum square footages, and the minute I place them on a foundation, I can help the customer get a mortgage as well. So we’ve got some big ideas and big picture things that we’re looking to transfer into in the next couple of years.

Paul Wurth:

Yeah. That makes sense. It would be a good dimension in one of our partnerships with Rocket Loans. Are you familiar with that?

Mike Cheatham:

Yeah. I am actually very familiar with him.

Paul Wurth:

So as the Buildertrend users know, who listen, we have a set of Pro Services. These are these programs that we have partnered with other companies outside of Buildertrend to offer some benefits to our clients. So they’re included in part of your subscription. So we have Rocket Loans, one that allows you to seamlessly offer financing to your clients. Definitely something to check out for that, for one of those barriers. But that makes a lot of sense. It sounds like you guys have doing it for a three years now, Mike, is that right?

Mike Cheatham:

Yes, sir.

Paul Wurth:

You guys got some nice momentum. Looks like you guys got some good plans for the future, so congrats to you, man. That’s pretty cool.

Mike Cheatham:

Thank you, man. You know, Buildertrend has been a lifesaver for us as well. It was initially introduced to us from another tiny home builder. When I realized what the system could do, it worked so great in our business model because again, our customers aren’t necessarily here.

Paul Wurth:

Right. Yeah, exactly.

Mike Cheatham:

So we have to build out in California where we never met the customers until it was time for final walkthrough, they flew out and they did their final walkthrough, but the entire build process, they were able to map and communicate through their customer portal with us, with all their pictures and videos and all the different stages of the build. So Buildertrend has been amazing for us and our customers and the entire process.

Paul Wurth:

Yeah. That’s a great use case.

Tom Houghton:

That’s awesome.

Paul Wurth:

You could say that we’ve cornered the tiny home market. How about that?

Tom Houghton:

There you go.

Paul Wurth:

Real good market for us.

Tom Houghton:

It’s good. Awesome. Well, thank you, Mike so much for coming on the podcast today and sharing your experience in the industry. We of course, wish your business all the best in 2020 and moving forward. Thanks for spending some time with us today.

Mike Cheatham:

No problem. We really appreciate the opportunity and thank you so much for having us on.

Paul Wurth:

Appreciate you Mike, thanks.

Tom Houghton:

Awesome. Thanks Mike. Love what you heard? Don’t forget to rate and subscribe to our podcasts so you can hear from more guests that will benefit your business. Also, please check out our show notes page for more information on what we discussed on this episode. You can find it at buildertrend.com/podcast. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time on “The Building Code.”

Paul Wurth:

Appreciate you.