About Us

Beard & Associates is small on purpose. We do not advertise and we do not chase work. What we build, we mostly build for ourselves and then sell. The rest comes by word of mouth.

A little history

Chris grew up in the construction world and never really left it. He is a licensed homebuilder, and the company he builds through, Homeland Construction Company, Inc., has been completing homes since 1980. Second generation.

For close to sixteen years he has also worked the other side of construction, as a lawyer handling defect cases and the contract disputes that come with them, for builders and homeowners alike. This unique experience means he has read a great many contracts that looked perfectly fine right up until somebody had to rely on one.

The two halves feed each other. Building houses teaches you what a defect actually looks like standing on a job site. Watching them turn into arguments teaches you which shortcuts come back four years later, and which single sentence in the contract was the one that mattered.

For twenty years Chris was also in high volume dentistry, operating across four states as both owner and consultant. That is where the fractional CEO and CFO work comes from. Running multi-site operations teaches you quickly what a business needs from the people at the top, and what it looks like when it is not getting it.

He also handles mergers and acquisitions, so he has sat on both sides of a sale: the operator getting a business ready to be bought, and the one taking it through closing.

Real Estate

Vickie has been selling real estate for more than twenty-five years, across metro Birmingham and the 30A stretch of the Florida coast, twenty of those years in Birmingham. Design has run alongside it the whole way, mostly on high-value homes.

What she enjoys most is not the transaction. It is that she now sells to the children of her original clients, and in some cases to their children too. A career long enough for that to happen is its own kind of reference.

She also sees a house the way a buyer at that level sees it, which is not how a builder sees it. Knowing what those buyers notice, and what they will not forgive, is a skill of its own.

What we do with it

We build for ourselves to resell. Beyond that, we consult and entertain taking on specific installs.

Most homeowners take on a build or a major renovation once, perhaps twice in a lifetime, across the table from people who do it every day. The damage usually happens in the process rather than the workmanship. The contract nobody read closely. Allowances that were never realistic. A change order priced in after the work was already done. The thing everyone agreed to sort out later. Construction is wood and nails; it is not a perfect science, and it should not be a race to the lowest price.

We have seen it from the builder’s side, the design side, and from the end where it has already gone wrong. If it would help to have someone in your corner who already knows where it leads, we are glad to talk.