Cameron's Process
Three hundred dollars, three documents, and the system that runs twenty jobs at once.
Cameron charges three hundred dollars to show up.
That's the filter. Someone calls and says they want an ADU in their backyard. Before drawings, before permits, before anyone fires up a CAD program — Cameron drives out, walks the property, and charges three hundred dollars to tell them what they're looking at.
"It's just weeding out the people that are serious," he says.
It sounds blunt. It is blunt. But when you're running twenty jobs at once across half of Southern California, you learn fast that the biggest waste isn't material or labor. It's time spent on people who aren't ready.
The site visit produces three documents. A full inspection report built on a custom iAuditor template — measurements, photos of all four sides, notes on everything from lot coverage to where the gas meter sits. A preliminary plot map — satellite image with one of his eight standard layouts dropped on top. And a proposal.
All of this from one visit. Three PDFs. By the time the client signs, Cameron already has the job mapped.
He doesn't do his own design work — he subs that to a third-party team who laser-measure the site and build proper construction documents. Everything feeds into Buildertrend. Twenty active jobs, each at a different stage. Without a system, you drown.
Then comes the part where the system breaks down.
The design team submits to the planning department. If you're lucky, the city reviews it in sixty days. Then the corrections come back — a PDF formatted like it was exported from a portal built in the late nineties.
"You can systemize it as much as possible," Cameron says, "but there's always gonna be cities that require different things, and they'll come back with corrections."
The part that gets him is the avoidable stuff. The correction that says "specify what type of stucco." The note asking you to add governing codes to the cover sheet. Things that could have been there from the start.
"Why don't we specify that in the beginning?" Cameron says. "Just so we don't have the correction. Let's get ahead of the horse here and put as much information as possible. That way, there are no corrections. Because every time there's a correction, it's another sixty days for them to review."
Sixty days. For a stucco label.
Cameron's not building ADUs. He's managing information flow between people who don't share the same tools, the same timelines, or sometimes even the same version of the rules.
His whole process — the three-hundred-dollar visit, the iAuditor template, the satellite plot map, the Buildertrend pipeline — is an attempt to front-load as much information as possible so the handoffs go clean. When they don't, it's almost never because someone screwed up the engineering. It's because a piece of information that someone had didn't make it into the document that someone else needed.
The thing about Cameron's process is that it already works. Twenty jobs, a third-party design team, Buildertrend holding the center. What it doesn't have is a way to catch the corrections before they happen — to run the plan against the city's actual checklist before the sixty-day clock starts.
Cameron's already doing the hard part. He just doesn't have the pre-check.