With the complexity of restaurant design came the contractor issues. I soon found that finding a contractor able to handle restaurant construction was not an easy task, and many of our restaurants were compromised by poor quality, substitutions, and mistakes. With so many issues I was encouraged by the firm’s owners to outsource some of the smaller complex projects, and handle them on my own, so they would be done correctly, as intended, and on time. After several of these small projects became extremely successful, I decided it was time to start a construction company to handle some of the smaller restaurants from start to finish. Partnering up with long time college friends, Angelo Russomanno and Chris Balasic, Division 9 Design + Construction was born. The Name Division 9 is derived from the architectural specifications guide which is broken up into 16 divisions, and Division 9 is the “specialty construction “ division.
Currently Division 9 or “D9” is a mid-sized construction company focusing on restaurants ranging from 100k flips to multimillion dollar complete ground-up projects. I still work on day-to-day operations with D9 focusing on obtaining new projects, as well as, acting as the in-house designer for our design build projects.