USA Today had an article about the world’s largest hotel company, Marriott, using factory produced modular construction to build up to 50  of their hundreds of new hotels this year.  The guest room and/or the bathrooms are produced in a factory on a production line and then transported to the prepared construction site where they are erected by cranes. The plumbing, electrical and finish work then occurs. The theory is that this method of construction can reduce the time it takes to build a new hotel by several months. Thus, the hotel opens sooner and can make a higher return for its owners.

Is this new, you might ask? No, like most things in this world it is not new. In my book, The Business Zoo, I tell a similar story that occurred forty years ago. My old company, Donn, signed a deal to build one of the first modular hotels for the world’s largest hotel company, Holiday Inn. Our U.S. government even got involved to promote low cost housing  through the new department of Housing and Urban Development which was headed by a George Romney, father of, you guessed it, Mitt. The belief was that factory produced,  modular construction would revolutionize and change conventional, on-site construction forever.

What happened to this bold experiment those many years ago? It did not turn out so great. The timetable took just as long as conventional construction. The idea of just hooking these up on the site was a disaster with a lot of additional work required. And my old firm, Donn, lost several million dollars when that was a lot of money in general and specifically for a small, private business. The big company, Holiday Inn, did end up with a nice hotel, but having learned a few lessons, stayed away from modular construction. Modular construction never totally disappeared but it certainly did not replace or change the way hotels or apartments were built.

Will this new attempt be more successful? I am not sure. Construction  is one of our most localized industries. Local zoning and building codes vary by community and can offset some of the anticipated factory produced savings.  Construction is one of those businesses that are still highly unionized which can also impact costs and building codes.

What I do find fascinating is how sometimes business, like other things in life, goes around in a circle. Modular hotel construction in the 1970’s repeats four decades later. Sometimes the patterns and the results are similar and sometimes things change. The space shuttles of the 70’s now are replaced with Elon Musk’s rockets aiming for Mars but we really have not gone very far in space in all that time.

The famous writer George Santayana said, “those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”  Mark Twain said, “history doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme”.

I say,  there are a lot of Circles in both business and life so be careful out there!