163: Build Your Dreams Into Your Home with Christopher Brement

06/24/23 • 26 min

https://youtu.be/qe4iE0vXtX0

Christopher Brement is the Founder and President of Bramante Homes, an employee-run custom builder that has been building quality, premium, and luxury homes since the 1980s. We discuss the secret source to building luxury homes, why people chose to customize their homes, and the cost of a fiduciary custom home builder.

— Build Your Dreams Into Your Home with Christopher Brement

Our guest is Christopher Brement, the owner and president of Bramante Homes that has been building quality premium and luxury custom homes in Albemarle and Augusta counties in Virginia since the 1980s. Christopher, welcome to the show.

Steve, thanks for having me.

It’s great to have you here. Christopher, let’s start this conversation by describing your journey. How did you end up running this company? This business was founded in the 1980s by your father, but you took over. What was this journey like as the son of the founder and taking charge of the rain?

Great question. Well, yeah, I was a much younger man in the 1980s and it’s definitely been a bit of a ladder climb. My first job at Vermont Day Homes was picking up trash. I was 12 years old. Later I was handed a shovel and later yet I was toting lumber and eventually swinging a hammer. I kind of glazed through the middle, but there are very few jobs that I haven’t done here. After studying economics at the University of Virginia and broadening my exposure to construction in the commercial world in Northern Virginia, I rejoined the family business in 2003, acted in a bit of a project manager capacity while gaining a little bit more leadership responsibilities with my father.

This is a two-generation custom home building business, and we had a lot of fun. In my father’s later career, he acted more as the project manager, and I enjoyed tasks more akin to selling, managing selections, and designing the homes. My father retired about five years ago and we’ve settled into a slightly more niche custom home building market and have put a lot of effort into growing into that space. And the community has. Then and the community has been kind and how they’ve received us.

You’re definitely an established part of this community here and very well known. So tell me a little bit about the experience of coming up in a family business. It can be really a fruit with challenges. The way I see many family businesses struggle to make the transition. The founder often are not able to really the father is not able to to handle where the reins they kind of linger and they suppress their off springs, not allowing them to really come into their own. And it can be very intimidating, especially when you have a successful father to feel that it’s going to be twice as hard for you to live up to the expectations. So what was your experience with that?

You know, I think the biggest praise that in multiple areas that I can give to my father is that he instilled in myself and my brother a great work ethic. And as as I was a bigger part of the company. In the second half of my journey with Vermont Holmes, after rejoining joining it in 2003, he was great at establishing expectations and following through with them. So he mapped out a path to retirement. We worked together on what that would look like, an ownership structure for me, and how he would kind of back away. And it was great to conceive and plan in that regard. And then also for him to kind of stick with the plan and follow through on that.

In terms of a fit working together, we didn’t overlap a lot. He loved being the craftsman and the client facing project manager more than he did being the financial and business part of it. So we were you know, we didn’t we didn’t compete in terms of what we wanted to do. And he established a plan or we wrote a plan together and he stuck with it.

That sounds like you had a good complimentary role and matching in the business, which is really fortunate. So switching gears here a little bit, I mean, the theme of this podcast, as you know, is managing blueprints. I’m always looking for mental models, some kind of frameworks that people, as they come up in the business and they look at the business from their own perspectives, they can recognize some different ways of looking at the business, simplifying certain things, creating maybe their unique way of dealing with a certain problem.

So do you have something that you kind of discovered in the bu...

https://youtu.be/qe4iE0vXtX0

— Build Your Dreams Into Your Home with Christopher Brement

Steve, thanks for having me.

So do you have something that you kind of discovered in the bu...

Previous Episode

162: Invest in Relationships with Leonard Mazur

https://youtu.be/dUha4UZciZo

Leonard Mazur is the Co-Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Citius Pharma, a late-stage biopharma company focused on the development and commercialization of first-in-class critical care products. We discuss the benefits of investing in your professional relationships, investment opportunities in biopharma, and ways to minimize the risks of your investments.

— Invest in Relationships with Leonard Mazur

Our guest is Leonard Mazur, our co-founder, chairman and CEO of Citius Pharma, a late stage biopharma company with a pipeline of anti-infective drugs in cancer care, oncology and stem cell therapy. Leonard, welcome to the show.

It’s a pleasure to be here and I thank you for giving me this opportunity to be interviewed by you. Thank you.

Well, that’s a mutual thank you as well. So let’s start, Leonard, with your journey becoming, I mean, you have a long story of an entrepreneur, but how do you end up in this sector, the biopharma business and running a company looking for a cure for cancer?

So how far back do you want me to go? It all depends. Put it in a nutshell. My journey began because I joined and became part of the pharmaceutical industry a long time ago. I absolutely love this industry. I think this is one of the few industries where you can be involved, not only on the business side, but also you’re on the life-saving side. That has its own rewards. And I think a lot of the people that I interact with in this business have that, share that same feeling. And I think that’s a real critical part to what we all do. And because of that, I’ve always taken a deep interest, a deep commitment. I am at, you know, biopharma and pharmaceuticals flow in my veins. That’s what I, that’s my blood.

All right. So, getting here, just like everybody else’s journey, you know, you start out in the beginning at a much lower level. And that’s when you really begin to, it’s really when you really begin to appreciate what this industry is all about because I started out in pharmaceutical sales and ultimately interacting with doctors and so forth taught me really right on the firing line what this business is all about.

And then ultimately progressing into marketing and then progressing into strategic planning, more acquisitions. So I was fortunate in that I had a great foundation that was given to me by the very first company that I joined. It was called Cooper Laboratories. That company, I spent 10 years there. Had an incredible CEO founder by the name of Parker G. Montgomery, and he was a dynamo. He made 150 acquisitions. So you can imagine what that environment was like. So it was a great environment to be in. The company gave you every opportunity to prove yourself, and if you did prove yourself, you were appropriately rewarded. So I had some really, really great exposure at an early age to deal making, to running a unit of the company.

I managed to even set up a whole little small group called Cooper Dermatology that focused in on a dermatologist. We had Aveeno as our cornerstone grant back then. So all of those were great opportunities for me in terms of my career and what I was able to build upon. I really built upon that platform and what I learned at Cooper Laboratories. It was really a great starting point for me.

That’s awesome. So, Leonard, we talked about, you know, all the experiences you had, well, not all of them, but some of the experiences you had, and that you evolved your own process, your own blueprint, so to say, to make a research-based product successful. Could you share with our audience what that is and what that looks like?

So, the research side of this business is a very complex side, and it has somebody that’s really, and I always like to tell everyone, someone that’s really your partner when you’re a company and that is the Food and Drug Administration. So you have to be very cognizant of that because all the rules, all the regulations, all the methods that are deployed by this industry getting a drug approved have to comport to the FDA and The way it’s prescribed and that’s done on a joint basis with that agency. So but in terms of Picking out and making selections. That’s a that’s a whole process in terms of picking a drug, how do you really go about starting from zero almost and saying, “Okay, this is something that I think we can invest in and it looks like it has a reasonable shot of getting approved.” Given the fact that 90 percent of all...

Next Episode

164: Bond by Sharing Your Stories with Manuj Aggarwal

https://youtu.be/9fW5mqPqrJ0

Manuj Aggarwal is the Founder and Chief Innovation Officer of TetraNoodle Technologies, a premier data science, and AI consulting company focused on helping SMB & SaaS companies unlock the power of data and AI. We discuss ways to effortlessly get people’s buy-in, learning to automate AI processes, and how AI can help grow your business.

— Bond by Sharing Your Stories with Manuj Aggarwal

Our guest is Manuj Aggarwal, the CEO of TetraNoodle Technologies, a data and AI consulting company that helps you harness the power of technologies like data science, AI, and blockchain for your business. Manuj, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me. Excited to be here.

It’s great to have you. And your topic is so topical, so to say. It’s really hot right now. AI, I’m going to talk about ChatGPT and other AI applications. So we’re going to get into that. But let’s first start with your journey and how you went from a $2 a day job in India to running a successful technology business in Vancouver.

Well, it has been an interesting journey. I grew up in a small town in India and in those days, like this is 30 years ago, India is still, you can say it’s a developing country, but back then there were limited opportunities in smaller towns. So I, my career started at 16 working in a factory, as you said, and I was working six days a week and 12 hours a day. And I was making $2 a day and had some inspiration to do something different with my life. Specifically, I was going through some business magazines one day during lunch hour. And I read these stories of these tycoons who had built empires worth millions and billions. And I thought to myself, if these people can do it, maybe I can change my life as well. But at that time I didn’t realize what I was going to do or how it’s going to happen. But anyway, I found my love for computers and programming and I knew that was what I was going to do for the rest of my life.

And then after working in computers for a short time, I came over to North America in 1998 and I got a job quickly because that was the dot-com boom time and then I lost my job because of dot-com bust and then I lost another job because of September 11th then another one Gulf War so all of these things started to happen and then I don’t think there is a something called job security in even in North America but I’ll just do things on my own so I started my consulting company back in 2000 around 2001, 2002. And I started consulting with a lot of startups, consulted with the Microsoft, IBM, Pearson education. So I got to see like how small businesses work, how large businesses work, different industries, healthcare, education, logistics, and I got heavily into blockchain, artificial intelligence.

So yeah, that was a journey. And today I have four patents in AI and I was just awarded, I recognize as a global thought leader in AI alongside with some really amazing people, world-class people. So that was my journey in short.

That is pretty much a Rex Rich story, the way we like it in America. It’s amazing. On this podcast, you always talk about some kind of business framework. And when framework and when we had our pre-call I was really struck by your framework, which has nothing to do with technology.

Yeah.

It was exactly the opposite. So, what is your management blueprint?

See, so obviously technology is something very near and dear to my heart but also I study a lot about human psychology and neuroscience and anthropology and history and all that. So once you start to learn about these things, you start to know what makes people do what they do. And one of the things that I had to learn the hard way in my professional journey was how to communicate with people, how to make them buy into my ideas, how to lead them basically. And some people who are listening may resonate with this that when you study in a professional like engineering, communication doesn’t come easy to you.

You are just fact-based and there’s no gray area like black and white, right? So once I started understanding human psychology, I figured out facts are very bad. People pay least attention to facts. Even if they pay attention, they forget about it. They pay more attention to like how I make them make their mind sort of behave in that way?

And then I realized that there are two aspects to building these relationships, building, getting peop...