We kept adding trades until there was nobody left to blame.

The company began as an excavation crew. That is a useful place to start, because excavation is where you find out what the rest of the building is going to cost. We spent years digging holes for other people's projects and watching the same failure repeat: the site work finished, the concrete contractor was three weeks out, the framer had taken another job, and the homeowner was on the phone to four companies trying to build a schedule none of them had agreed to.

So we hired a concrete crew. Then a roofer. Then electricians and plumbers, because those two are where a shortcut turns into an insurance problem years later. Interior, bathrooms and basements followed the renovation work. Landscaping came from the number of finished basements that flooded because nobody had looked at the grading. Snow removal came from commercial clients who wanted the same company in January that they trusted in June.

That is eleven trades and 15 years. It is also the reason our quotes tend to be longer than everyone else's — we are pricing the parts other contractors leave as somebody else's problem.