Campworks

I designed a trailer carefully and inherited a company by accident. That is the honest summary.

We did real things. A composite manufacturing partnership, national press, a product people still buy. And underneath it the thing I had not designed at all — how work got allocated, how decisions got made, who carried risk, what the people at the contract manufacturer were paid for putting their hands on our product.

I pushed on that, and that push is the reason I am no longer there. The company changed hands rather than closing; it is now owned and run by someone who bought a trailer before he bought the business. I want it to do well. Under one owner's focus it gets to be a genuinely great overland trailer, which is the whole story it should have had.

What I take from it is that operations are an interface with users, failure modes and a real cost when they are ugly — and that equity is a structure, not a policy. You cannot bolt fairness onto a system whose incentives were designed without it.