Brandonbilt Foundations’ capabilities include driveways, garage floors, foundations, basement floors, patios and pool decks.

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President Jerry Brown of Brandonbilt Foundations Inc. has seen his concrete construction company grow along with the clients he first served at its inception in 1994. “We’ve got long-standing relationships with the people we’ve been working with,” Brown says. “Most of these guys we’ve watched grow from the start with just one or two houses a year to 50 a year.”

Brandonbilt Foundations has operations in Fredericksburg, Va., where it performs residential concrete construction for small- to mid-sized homebuilders, as well as for individual homeowners. The company’s capabilities including driveways, garage floors, foundations, basement floors, patios and pool decks. Ninety percent of Brandonbilt Foundations’ business is based in residential construction; the rest consists of commercial construction such as warehouses and office buildings.

Brandonbilt Foundations also offers many types of decorative concrete options, including stamped decorative concrete, stenciled concrete overlay, stamped overlay, acid staining, colored concrete and exposed aggregate. The company can install the latest in waterproofing and drainage systems, as well.

The company works within a 30-mile radius of Fredericksburg with 110 employees. It also boasts the trucking equipment required to self-perform the work, including dump trucks, a backhoe and a bulldozer.

“Everyone at Brandonbilt Foundations understands that time is money and proves it by providing fast, friendly service in a turnkey package that starts with excavating and ends with [customer] satisfaction,” the company says.

Brown recently took time to speak with Construction Today about its longstanding relationships with customers, remaining profitable in a depressed housing market and Brandonbilt Foundations’ future in the industry.

Construction Today: How important are your relationships with your clients?
Jerry Brown: Our whole model has been based on developing relationships with the customers that we service. We actually do no advertising and don’t even have an ad in the yellow pages, but we have 80 percent repeat business.

CT: How is the market changing?
JB: It has dropped dramatically with the housing slump that we’ve had. To top that off, in the counties around here, they were limiting residential building even prior to the residential slump.

CT: What was the reason for the imposed limitations?
JB: The area has grown so fast, there weren’t enough roads and services the county could provide to keep up with the demands of the housing boom.

CT: How did Brandonbilt Foundations adapt to the slump and limitations?
JB: One of the things we did was to move into the commercial sector, and we also expanded our service area.

We also expanded the services we provided. We went from strictly a concrete contractor to excavating, draintile, waterproofing, runoff containment and dumpster services.

CT: Is there future growth planned for the company?
JB: One of the benefits of this area is we’re adjacent to the Quantico Marine Base. Due to BRAC (Base Realignment and Closure), they are expecting 3,000 new jobs in this immediate area. Defense contractors are already starting to move in.

Six million square feet of office buildings are planned to accommodate all of this in the next three years With the influx of new jobs, there will be a definite need for housing.

Brandonbilt will have a major role in building these houses, as well as obtaining some of the work on the offices going up.

CT: What distinguishes Brandonbilt Foundations’ work from the competition?
JB: I would say it’s the attention to detail we put into the work we do.
    We’re a full-service turnkey operation, so we’ve got a good understanding that the builders’ time is money. So, of course, we try to save them both.

CT: Can you describe a project that best shows what your company can do?
JB: Freshwater Estates in Louisa County, Va., is a housing development built around Lake Anna that has demanding needs as far as grade, access and containment to make sure the development didn’t pollute the lake.

CT: What was your role in the project?
JB: There were 10 homes we worked on – we got called in for the tough ones – at $30,000 to $40,000 per home.

CT: What qualified your company for this work?
JB: We’ve got a reputation for the tough stuff. Sometimes, engineers don’t plan on these kinds of problems when they get to the lots; they find that the water table in the ground is too high and there are underground springs they need to deal with. Of course, we have to fix this so it becomes a solid foundation.

CT: What challenges did you encounter?
JB: Homeowners wanted a lot of cantilevered decks and limited supports because they didn’t want to obstruct their views of the lake.

CT: What has your company learned from this project?
JB: This told us why we really want to be involved in the process early (on) and to work to maintain real close contact with engineers and homeowners – so we do it right from the start.