Bryan Bercik has overcome adversity not once by twice being put through the system and being able to come out on top!
Check out his Bio below and tell me you CAN'T
34 years old I am from Pittsburgh, Pa. I worked for my dad landscaping for 13 years and moved up to crew leader of half the company after a while. Got into flipping houses around the 2013-2014 time frame. Didn’t waste any time and bought 2 houses immediately and learned like how most of us learn by taking action and making mistakes and fixing them along the way. Started learning the sales and marketing side of the business which has always been what I claim expertise. Realized I hit the ceiling working with my dad and he’s still pretty young so no company takes over for me for a while.
I got into some legal trouble again around late 2014 and found out my wife was pregnant with her first kid also around that time so pressure mounted up for sure. I didn’t make a lot of money working for my dad and flipping houses is a great hobby but hard to scale without a massive team.
Seen an opportunity in late 2016 for an acquisitions manager position with one of the largest flipping companies in the city of Pittsburgh. I had nothing to lose and I was already do acquisitions for myself on a small scale why not try it on a large scale and learn from a growing new company.
I landed a job with them and became very good at sales at that point. I helped assist that company for 2 years to grow to Pittsburgh’s top growing small business. I acquired over 100+ transactions between wholesaling and mostly flipping properties.
While I was working there I realized how much staff and marketing goes into running one of these companies. I liked making money in sales more than I like managing construction at the time.
So I realized the area that’s vulnerable and can scale in the Pittsburgh market and that was a home building which I have never done.
A good friend of mines cousin was branching out on his own and we all sat down for dinner for about 3 months and mapped this out and scouted for lots to try and see if we can make this work.
We found 2 lots close to where we live and decided this would be a good start. Again, never built a house before so putting a ton of faith in a guy I don’t really know a ton and he’s putting in faith with me to bring the funds and operations and take care of bookkeeping and we have another partner who runs the day to day construction. So we went out and borrowed at first about 600k for land and build. It was an amazing experience to see how this was done and how it can be systemized and scaled.
While we were in the middle building those we came across a great opportunity just north of Pittsburgh to buy more lots. So we borrowed another 600k and started realizing holding costs are insanely high. Short-form we finished all 4 of those houses and realized we have no brand so it wasn’t easy to sell the 4 specs.
At this time the company I am working for that relationship started to shift in a different direction for them as they changed the model once they realized it was unsustainable and we parted ways.
I called my partners and asked if they believe in this and if we can make money!
So we dove all the way into custom home building and realized building a brand is absolutely a must and we became Hemlock Homes in 2019.
