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Having No Choice Led to Good Choices at Brandywine Homes

When Jim Barisic started Brandywine Homes in 1994, hiring family members—or any employees—wasn’t really an issue.

“I couldn’t afford anyone,” said Barisic, whose Irvine-based company focuses on building homes in largely developed urban areas in Orange, Los Angeles, and San Diego counties. “I did everything myself—I cleaned the ditches and handled the accounting.”

Barisic was half of the team at Cunningham-Barisic Development Corp., a Santa Ana-based developer that closed up shop before he launched Brandywine.

When his new venture needed to expand, Barisic turned to college labor in the form of his three sons.

Mark Whitehead joined the company out of Chapman University in the late 1990s, moving up the ranks from a project superintendent to head the company’s construction and purchasing.

Brett Whitehead, who graduated with a finance degree from Loyola Marymount University, took over accounting from his father when he joined in the mid 1990s. He eventually became Brandywine’s chief financial officer. Now he’s president and heads up land acquisitions.

Dave Barisic, a graduate of the University of California, Santa Cruz, now heads up marketing and sales of the company’s projects.

“We all wear two or three different hats,” said the elder Barisic, the company’s chairman. “We grew organically, which I think is the reason we’ve been successful.”

Brandywine received the small business award at the annual Family Owned Business Awards lunch hosted by the Orange County Business Journal and California State University, Fullerton’s Family Business Council on Nov. 18 at the Hyatt Regency Irvine.

The company ranked as the 12th largest builder in OC, with 45 sales here last year, according to the Business Journal’s February list. It was its highest ranking on our list so far. Brandywine, which has about 12 employees, cracked the top 25 for the first time in 2008.

Brandywine has built or developed close to 600 detached and attached homes since starting. Recent local projects have gone up in Westminster, Stanton and Garden Grove.

A slow-and-steady approach is what has brought the company through the downturn unscathed, Jim Barisic said.

While other builders overextended themselves with larger projects in more open locations, Brandywine decided to stick with what it knew: urban infill projects.

Homes built by the company typically compete with existing homes rather than other new developments. They can command premiums of 20% or so compared to existing homes in the same area, Jim Barisic said.

Current projects have price tags running from about $400,000 to $800,000.

Weekly board meetings among the four family members have helped the company from making any ill-fated choices, Jim Barisic said.

“Everyone has to be on board (with a decision), even if it’s reluctantly,” he said. “It doesn’t necessarily mean that we all agree. But it means that everyone has a say.”

Decisions pushed by the younger family members—including some that weren’t initially embraced by Jim Barisic—have ended up helping the company immensely, he said.

The elder Barisic once was against selling a 36-home Stanton project that K Hovnanian Homes was interested in buying.

“I wanted to keep it. But the boys said we could do two or three more projects with (the proceeds of the sale),” he said. “I acquiesced, and was bowled over by the (positive impact) it had on us—it affected the entire year’s income.”

More recently, the sons have been pushing the company to look for infill projects in South County as well as northern San Diego and eastern Los Angeles counties.

“They told me ‘you don’t want to compete against yourself,’” Jim Barisic said.

The company currently has about 300 home lots under its control, which should keep it busy for another 30 months or so.

Barisic said the company aims to boost home sales to the 200 to 250 per year range in the next three to five years. It’s not looking to get too much larger than that, he said.

“We’re not looking to build a thousand homes every year,” Jim Barisic said.

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Mark Mueller
Mark Mueller
Mark is the Editor-in-Chief of the Orange County Business Journal, one of the premier regional business newspapers in the country. He’s the fifth person to hold the editor’s position in the paper’s long history. He oversees a staff of about 15 people. The OCBJ is considered a must-read for area business executives. The print edition of the paper is the primary source of local news for most of the Business Journal’s subscribers, which includes most of OC’s major corporate and community players. Mark’s been with the paper since 2005, and long served as the real estate reporter for the paper, breaking hundreds of commercial and residential real estate stories. He took on the editor’s position in 2018.
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