Chris And Calvin LaMont Share Details Of Their New Show Buy It Or Build It

First, how did you guys get into design and building?

Calvin LaMont: We always wanted to get into real estate. Growing up, it was athletics and real estate. Those were the two dreams that Chris and I aspired to. Then, when we came to Dallas, Texas, to start our company ... We weren't growing up building and doing construction projects. That's not how we grew up. We took that on as we started our water damage and restoration company up here. We started working with those projects and doing a lot of huge projects. We were tearing things down, putting them back together, looking at different designs. 

Then we started working with a lot of investors, and we started designing the entire projects — and that's how we learned through the experience when we were in our early twenties. By 27, we started doing our own projects, and designing and building all of those.

You've been interested for a while, so did you both get interested in this at about the same time?

Chris LaMont: Yeah. When we were in college, the football dreams were starting to go down, because we were a little smaller than we should be for the NFL. Once we realized that, we wanted to make a pivot. We were like, "Okay, we want to do real estate." That's something that we were interested in, because during that time, people were flipping homes, and we were like, "Okay, you make good money." But at that same time, in 2007, 2008 — it's when the market was going a different way, so we had to make a pivot.

We were out of college, so we had those college brains. "All right, let's see what we can do to be successful." And we thought, "Why not do janitorial and cleaning services or carpet cleaning?" That's something that has low barriers to entry, and we can start quickly and start making some money. Me and Calvin feel that if we got into a job or a career, we might get stuck in there and never get out. We wanted to be entrepreneurs from the beginning, so we stayed focused on that.