Keystone Construction - Small Time Builder Turns Pro
“Though he has stumbled along the way, learning what works and what doesn’t, Lamar Crowell has turned a small startup with 10 houses a year into a 55-employee firm that builds around 300 houses annually on the formula of affordable, easy-to-build homes that appeal to first-time buyers.
Despite leading one of the biggest home-building companies in the area, Mr. Crowell knows he didn’t do it alone.
“I don’t see this being my company,” he said. “I have partners. We’ve got 50-plus people here who are critical to the company.”
He remains a relatively low-key person, happier to guide the company’s direction from behind the scenes - perhaps the reason he didn’t lend his name to his firm.
“I named it Keystone for a reason,” he said. “It’s not about me.”
The Startup
Lamar’s experiences made completing his first house easy, but building a business was another matter.
At a fledgling company, everything - from supervising projects to bookkeeping - fell onto Mr. Crowell’s shoulders, Mr. Gilliam said.
Though Mr. Crowell - who put in 50 to 60 hours a week - said he could handle the day-to-day tasks such as accounting, he has a short attention span and prefers the long-term-strategy work he does now.
As the company grows, Mr. Crowell has begun looking at other possibilities for Keystone.
The housing market in Augusta-Aiken, though slowing, isn’t in dire straits like Las Vegas or even Atlanta. The local market enjoyed growth during the housing boom, but it didn’t create a bubble that would later burst.
He said he expects to do as well as in 2006, when the company built 296 houses, possibly better. The key is to monitor trends, which he does by spending hours reading up on the market to stay ahead of the game, and meeting with builders from across the country.
The company plans to grow in volume but has no plans to move into higher prices, Ms. Oellerich said.”