In this episode of Second Chapter: Creating New Beginnings, Wanda McArn shares her inspiring journey from a successful career at Grainger to founding the Next Step Development Corporation, a mission-driven organization tackling homelessness in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Guided by the book Finding Your Ikigai and fueled by a desire to make a meaningful impact, Wanda reveals how she’s leveraging her expertise in sales, marketing, and consulting to champion affordable housing solutions, from tiny homes to emerging technologies like 3D-printed housing.
Wanda’s story is a powerful example of what happens when passion is aligned with purpose and bold steps are taken toward solving some of today’s most urgent
Video Transcription
Chapter Two: Creating New Beginnings
Taking on the Housing Crisis: One Tiny House at a Time
With Wanda McArn, Eleven Canterbury Consultant, Real Estate & Housing Expert and Dan Martin, Eleven Canterbury Program & Relationship Manager
Introduction
Dan Martin: Change can always be challenging, particularly when you’re moving from a very successful corporate position into something really new. Today, I am talking with Wanda McArn, who has had a major success in making that change. She’s going to share some of the things she’s learned and how she’s approached it.
Moving from a full-time permanent position with a steady paycheck, with customers who have money and problems that you can solve, to something completely new, as Wanda has done; she is now building sustainable housing to meet housing problems within the Raleigh area, I imagine it can be a bit daunting, maybe a bit challenging, but also exhilarating, exciting, enchanting, maybe not, monetarily enriching at the beginning, but certainly different.
So, Wanda, you were with Grainger for many years. You had a very senior position. They liked what you were doing. You had customers with money and problems that you could solve. Why’d you do this?
Wanda McArn: I know. Everyone wonders why I did this. To be honest, Dan, I loved my career at Grainger, and I still love Grainger, but I was feeling a little bored. There weren’t too many other positions within the organization that I could see myself doing. I’m very innovative. I’m always seeking new things to do and new ways to do them, and so I just started feeling this angst about doing something different and doing something different for the world.
In 2019 it really hit me, and I went to my leader and said, I’m retiring, and I don’t know what I’m gonna do, but I’m gonna retire and I’ll figure it out. And honestly, I did not know what I was going to do. I just know that since I was in college, I’ve always just been doing the next thing. There was not a lot of thinking and planning for the next stage of my life. I decided to do that, and I read a book called Finding Your Ikigai, which is why the Japanese people live to be over a hundred years old, as they take their skills and their passions and they marry them with their vocation. And they live a long life because they’re doing what they want to do.
I wrote down some things that were important to me. Helping to end homelessness, working with more knowledge about mental health and communities of color, and then just working in coaching young professionals were things that were important to me. So, I set out to figure out how to do it, and I came up with the organization, Next Step Development Corporation, to build tiny home communities for the homeless.
Dan Martin: It is pretty exciting, but it is quite a different kind of skillset, isn’t it? Going from a large corporation to a problem like homelessness is a very complex problem. It seems to me you’d run across multiple constituencies; many of whom don’t have the money you need to solve the problem.
Everybody has a different kind of drivers. The number of names in your telephone must have exploded. How did you go about doing all of that? Is that a skill you had at Grainger or a skill you developed?
Wanda McArn: It was a multifold one. My background, prior to coming to Grainger, and the reason they hired me was that I was in sales and marketing. So I have no problem picking up the phone, getting a new contact, getting “no” for an answer. So one, I had a long career in sales, and then the career that I had the longest at Grainger was in consulting. So my background was business process consulting. We spent a lot of time getting to know customers, from how they order their products to how they stock them, talking to C-suite leaders, and presenting to customers at conventions. So I had already had this background of digging deep into a problem. I wrote a lot of white papers and a lot of case studies, so I used that background that I had to just find out what the problem was. What is the problem across the nation that is causing homelessness to increase? And the bottom line is housing. It’s not mental health, it’s not any of those things. It is housing. It’s having enough housing and having enough affordable housing. And so I just started out looking at that, reading white papers, reaching out to people in the area who were doing the work already, seeing if anyone had tiny houses already on the radar.
And then you are right, my phone and my Instagram ,and my LinkedIn accounts have hundreds of contacts because I would say, well, if Dan is following him, why is Dan following him? What does he do? Well, I’m gonna follow him and I’m gonna reach out to him. And this is literally what I do every single day, is reach out to people who have common themes, maybe in development or housing or mental health. And, I try to talk to them about what my ideas are and why I really do believe that building tiny, which doesn’t mean building a backyard box. I’m seeing tiny home living as 350 to 600 square feet, which is the way we used to live anyway. So that’s what I’m trying to do, is build housing along those lines that are innovative and getting the word out.
We haven’t built anything yet, but we have definitely influenced the market. People call me the tiny house lady because we’re getting the word out that we need to add to the types of housing available, and that’s what my goal is.
Dan Martin: You sound a little bit like my son, who’s an economics professor who says that the problem is there’s just not enough supply.
What you’re saying resonates with me. We grew up with five children in a house that was probably about 900 square feet, sharing a room with my brother, which, I have to say, wasn’t actually the most exciting thing I’ve ever done in my life. One other thing that resonates is you’re doing what you love. It gives you a long lifespan, sort of runs in the family, doesn’t it? Your mom is not a hundred yet, but I think you told me she’s in her nineties.
Wanda McArn: Yeah. She turned 93 on Friday. Mom had a sister who lived to be 98 and was still cooking for herself. So, we have longevity in the family. My mom lives with me. That was a thing that happened that I wasn’t expecting during my retirement. Pre-Covid, I brought her in to live with me, so I’m a caregiver as well, but when I say caregiver, Mama is very self-sufficient. She plays cards, still gets her nails done better than mine. We look at baseball. I was not a baseball fan, but she’s got me in the Yankees and the Dodgers now, and she’s a Carolina basketball fan, which is how I became a Carolina basketball fan. So, I am blessed to have a mother who is a very active and keeps me active as well.
Dan Martin: When we were talking about next steps in small housing, you said you’re working a lot with 3D printed houses. This is a new opportunity that you probably didn’t know about before,is that right?
Wanda McArn: That’s right, that’s right. When I was early on looking at what type of housing we would build, I really did not want to use another tree to build a house. I wanted to look at innovative things like container homes or 3D printed homes or manufactured homes that could be done quickly so that we would not be dealing with tariff issues or supply chain issues. I wanted to look at that, and one of the companies that I had reached out to, Azure Printed Homes, I met with the president, Gene Eidelman, and we talked like three years ago. I saw a project that they were doing recently in California, where they’re building homes for people experiencing homelessness. And I reached out to him, and he said, Hey, Wanda, you know, I was gonna reach out to you. We’re looking for some ambassadors and business advisors, would you come along with with us? And I said, absolutely. Because I do believe that is the future of housing. We’ve got to do things quicker using the recyclable products that are out there right now. So I’m excited to work with them right now and hopefully we can bring them to Raleigh.
Dan Martin: It sounds like a really exciting time for you. It must be a good feeling of accomplishment. I really enjoyed speaking with you. I think I’ll be following up when you get that first house printed, I may be standing there in Raleigh watching it.
Wanda McArn: Thank you. I hope so.
Dan Martin: Thank you very much. Appreciate talking with you Wanda, and thanks for being a part of the Eleven Canterbury Network.
Wanda McArn: Thank you for inviting me in. I appreciate it.
