Southwest Florida—based luxury home builder BCB Homes just celebrated its 25 year anniversary last month. The company was founded by a group of second-generation home builders with a vision of raising building standards in their community.
Although the company began solely as a new construction provider, BCB Homes has expanded to offer remodeling and estate management, along with other construction and remediation services. The builder now has a staff of more than 120 employees and has built and remodeled more than 350 homes throughout the area.
BUILDER spoke with BCB Homes’ CEO and founder Joe Smallwood to see how the company has survived in the industry for more than 20 years, what sets it apart from its competitors, and his predictions for the years to come.
1. Tell us a bit about BCB Homes—what types of projects is it involved in?
Founded in 1993, company ownership includes seven partners who actively work at the company on a daily basis. We have over 150 employees and recently purchased a roofing company and launched a construction solutions company that specializes in diagnosing and implementing corrective actions to eliminate building failures caused by faulty construction.
BCB Homes works on projects of all sizes, from remodeling a kitchen to building a 20,000-square-foot home on the beach. Our clientele typically is someone who has a second residence in Naples. Our custom residences range from $1 million to $15 million.
2. What business strategies have allowed BCB to succeed in the industry for over 20 years?
Customer-centric strategies and our commitment to build the best residence possible have contributed to our success over the years and has been essential to our growth. Our goal of providing an unparalleled level of service starts with a relationship beginning with us well before construction starts and extending long past home completion. Our innovative processes, craftsmanship, and attention to detail have set the industry standard for the highest quality construction available. Our customization, exquisite designs and our use of the finest materials, paired with a personalized customer experience have been the hallmark of BCB Homes’ success in exceeding our clients’ expectations.
3. What sets your company apart from your competitors?
We always strive to build a better home: process to performance to sustainability. We constantly look at every category of the home and year after year try to get a positive improvement and performance. Building a high performance home with a very organized and enjoyable process is something we have been doing since our inception and will continue to do.
4. How does BCB build homes 25% faster than other builders in the Naples area?
We apply an open dialogue throughout the building process making our process more precise and streamlined. This eliminates the need to backtrack as we plan everything out in a very strategic manner. When information flows well, it makes the process so much better. We gather all of the information that we can up front, and then sequence the home in the most logical order. This is how we build faster and more efficiently.
5. What building issues has BCB identified, diagnosed, and resolved in construction?
The only way to verify the true performance of the systems in the home is to test them. Products don’t always perform as advertised. Existing structures can pose very complex problems that require innovative ideas to repair the visible issues and provide solutions for the root cause of the problems, which are generally not visible until discovered through diligent investigation. Our team of professionals work to accommodate these different issues, and in turn, can make the home perform extremely well. The knowledge we have gained has allowed us to forensically learn how to fix homes that we did not originally build.
6. What is on the horizon for the next five years?
We plan to increase our core business, and continue to expand our newly created construction solutions enterprise. Our goal is to provide solutions to homeowners with residences that we did not build, with the assistance they need to get their homes properly repaired. We want to leverage our expertise to bring BCB's level of construction to existing homes.
