Pardon Our Dust 

An Empire Is Being Rebuilt 

The Mackle Family, my family, once had the inside track.  In 1958, it owned 2 racehorses in the Kentucky Derby, equating to the 2 public companies it founded that came to dominate the housing market in Florida - their competitors being mere imitators.  The companies built not only the houses, but owned and operated the water and electric utilities, becoming two of the largest utility companies in the state by mere happenstance.  None of this is to mention owning entire city centers and beachfront areas which were never to be sold.  

 

Increased restrictions on property use, as well as restrictions on the profitability of many of these innovations resulted in the slow demise of their viability as revolutionary corporations.  Access to the capital markets was restricted.  Their surviving competitors exit only in a small part of the marketplace as they succumbed in their own way.

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The model was broken.  The Mackle model.  The competition never really understood what it was they were copying, and even the thousands of employees could only tinker as they slowly failed.  

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The realization that an almost entirely new idea had to be created was too bitter to be acknowledged.  It would have been viewed as quitting, from people who only got to be who they were because they wouldn't quit.  A new product, never seen before, that would drive a new empire and grow and grow until that innovation was unseeable through the expanse.  It would take too long, be too hard, and probably never even be discovered. 

 

Fortunately, there was one imbecile who was willing to spend year after year testing new ideas until he finally made it all work.

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                                                                              James Mackle

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