Question Everything: How to Innovate Construction Materials and Methods | Ep. 393

Sam Fertik ran a 20-course tasting restaurant in Manhattan. Now he builds homes out of eight inches of concrete and steel that he says will last a thousand years. The company is Carbon Custom Builders, and the whole thing started with one question nobody in homebuilding wants to answer. Why are we still doing it this way?

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From Tasting-Menu Chef to Concrete Homebuilder

Sam thought he’d be an architect as a kid. He had the little drafting board with the strings and the slide rule. Then he got into cooking, trained at the Culinary Institute of America, and ran a corporate catering operation that served tens of thousands of meals a week.

Then came what he calls his quarter-life crisis. He bought a building with his family in 2018. His father-in-law asked who was going to do the work. Sam said he would. Eleven months later he’d restored an 1850s building with eleven apartments and five retail units.

That job changed how he saw the whole industry.

Why We Still Build Houses Like It’s 1850

Sam was tearing open walls that hadn’t been touched since the building went up. Real two-by-fours. The same framing his great-grandfather would recognize.

“We all walk around with more computing power in our pocket than what they landed a man on the moon with. And we’re still building homes the same way almost 200 years later.”

His brain couldn’t compute it. So he went looking for a better way and landed on ICF.

What Is ICF? Insulated Concrete Forms Explained

ICF stands for Insulated Concrete Forms. Think of a Lego block with nubs on both sides. You click the blocks together, add rebar, brace it, and pour concrete inside. The form is the insulation. It’s also the mounting system for your finishes. It all comes in one product.

It’s not a weekend project. You can’t grab a load at the lumber yard and slap up a shed. It needs engineering, bracing, and a real understanding of what you’re doing. But once you know the system, Sam says it becomes a math problem. So many rebars every 18 inches. This mix of concrete. This many feet per day.

That’s the part that hooked him. A typical wood-framed house is closer to an art project. Sam wanted a science problem. Repeatable. Predictable. You know what the building will do before you build it.

Building Homes That Last 1,000 Years, Not 30

Sam quotes a figure that the average American home lasts about 30 years before it gets remodeled, damaged, or torn apart by water and rot. Open up an old wall and you’ll find mouse excrement, bugs, mold, and mildew.

“I build houses that last a thousand years. I don’t want you to ever think about the guts of your house again.”

Behind his own walls there’s eight inches of concrete and a bunch of steel. A scuffed wall is cosmetic. He grabs a paintbrush and the anxiety goes away. Better air quality. Better sound. Lower energy use. His pitch is simple. Why wouldn’t you do this?

Asking “Why Do We Build This Way?”

Here’s the thread that runs through the whole episode. Sam drives a BMW. So do I. Cars came a long way from the Model T. But we still live in houses that are basically a carriage pulled by a horse. Why? Because nobody stopped to ask if we could do it better.

He calls it a dependency loop. Cheap lumber created cheap labor to use the cheap lumber. The loop cycles through generations. You meet a framer whose dad was a framer whose granddad built houses. It got a little better each time. Nobody stopped and asked if wood was the right material at all.

“We’re using firewood. Stuff’s great for heating, campfires and roasting marshmallows. Why am I living in it?”

The Chef’s Lesson: Turn Art Into a Repeatable Recipe

This is where the cooking background pays off. In a restaurant, the creative work is the new dish. After that, it’s a recipe. You test it, you change it, then you implement it. You don’t change the dish in the middle of service.

Construction works the same way and most people miss it. The architect and the client do the creative part. Then it becomes a recipe, the plan set and the specs and the submittals. The builder cooks it. Follow the recipe and it comes out the way the client wanted.

Go to the Biggest Problem in Your Business

I brought up the visionary-versus-implementer split. Sam says he’s both, and he has to be. Small business owners don’t get to live in la-la land.

We both landed on the same name when we talked about owners who go to the source of the problem. Elon Musk. He slept on the factory floor. He didn’t need to. He just knew it was the only way the thing was going to happen.

Sam admits he doesn’t always do enough of that himself. But he asks the question every day. What’s the most important thing for me to work on right now? Here’s the takeaway for you. Where’s the biggest problem in your business? Go there.

Why Sales Is the One Thing That Kills Small Firms

Sam has a hard line. There’s one thing that kills a small business. Sales. Stop selling and you’re out of business.

I pushed back. If you’ve got a great product and you deliver it well, won’t sales take care of themselves? Sam’s answer is that custom luxury construction hasn’t been productized. He’s working on changing that. Spec homes built to the same standard as a client breathing down your neck. A brand you can point a buyer to. The science on the website, the heart on the Instagram.

What He Looks For When He Hires

Sam’s first two employees are still with him. Very low turnover. His hiring rule comes from Danny Meyer’s book Setting the Table. Hire people who are better than you at something.

But he says most CEOs take that wrong. “What you need to find is someone who’s willing to look at numbers all day long because you’re not willing to look at them all day long.” It’s not about finding a bigger genius. It’s about finding someone who’ll do the role day in and day out.

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Sam asked one question and rebuilt his entire business around it. If this episode got you thinking, subscribe to Construction Genius wherever you listen, leave a rating and a review, and head to constructiongenius.com for more.