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clear that we were rather good at managing full builds as a general contractor. As a result, two and a half years ago, we decided to focus solely on custom homes. We are a small team, and right now all our clients are coming from out of state, including Texas, Colorado, North Dakota, Minnesota, Arizona, and Washington DC, to build retirement homes or vacation properties here in the Black Hills region,” he begins.
Jason’ s route into construction is not the obvious one. His professional journey started out in mechanical engineering, shaped in part by watching the 2008 recession tear through the construction industry in the Flathead Valley of Montana, where he grew up.“ My dad was in manufacturing, and construction got hit very hard out there. A lot of the people we knew in the construction sector were heading to North Dakota to chase oil field work just to keep things going. So, I did not grow up thinking construction and real estate were great career paths. I went to school to get a two-year associate degree in applied science in machining, which is the type of manufacturing my dad does, then a bachelor’ s degree in mechanical engineering. As I worked in construction all the way through engineering school, I gradually started to see that there was a different, more secure way to approach it. We were building cool things, and I found it really enjoyable. All my siblings stayed in manufacturing, engineering, and robotics, so I am the only one who went strictly into building homes. However, I recently hired my younger sister, who has just started doing home design for us, so the family connection is back,” he reveals.
Effective technology
One of Jason’ s driving motivations behind starting iLevel was the desire to give homeowners a better building experience. Custom home construction has an oftenjustified reputation for going over budget or running late, which causes significant stress to customers and can leave them on poor terms with builders by the end of the project. Jason believed there was a better way to approach
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