WEST CHESTER TWP. — Jason Clarke devotes his life to safeguarding people’s houses after damage happens or turning their obsolete abodes into the home of the dreams.
Clarke Contractors, 4475 Muhlhauser Road, got its beginning in West Chester Twp. 20 years back, offering remodeling, recovery and remediation solutions, with two individuals along with a truck.
The business currently includes about 50 workers and providers over 1,800 customers per year from Butler, Warren, Hamilton and Clermount counties, in addition to the Dayton area and Northern Kentucky.
Clarke, today the corporation’s CEO, started there in a support role shortly after it started.
“My brother came to me using a cardboard box of receipts and invoices along with a checkbook and he said ‘My girlfriend just left me and now I don’t know how to do this, ””’ Clarke stated. “Once I offered to help him with it, it was very part-time and only enough to pay his 10 or 20 invoices weekly and be sure that he had money to buy his materials and stuff as he was running a couple of jobs at one time.”
Recognizing that Clarke Contractors can be an even workable company with some promotion, he provided to tackle that facet of the business, Clarke stated.
“Back in the afternoon, it was fairly easy to do a little bit of Internet marketing and get email addresses for each and every insurance carrier out there,” he said. “I’d essentially a massive e-mail blast 17 or 18 years back and that burst turned the tiny itty-bitty (company) into Clarke Builders Inc. (on Dec. 13, 1999).”
Clarke Contractors’ effort have branched out in recent years to include remodeling, ” Clarke stated.
“Now I’m able to help provide the tools which individuals want to get their dream houses,” he said.
Clarke, a Lakota graduate and Liberty Twp. Resident, said he worked at Arby’s to pay his way by University of Cincinnati’s Carl Lindner Business School, where he gained a degree in marketing and management.
That is where he met Debbie, his wife of 19 years. “We fell in love on a curly fry; it’s the big joke in our family.”
They have three children: Ben 14, Maddie, 12; along with Ethan, 7. Clarke said being part of a locally owned company is important to him.
“I have a great deal of friends and family in this area,” Clarke said. “I employ a good deal of people who I’ve known over time. I work for a whole lot more. To be a part of the community in which I was growing up and raise in really is pretty special. I truly enjoy helping individuals in our community which have been through some traumatic events like water or fire damage. It is all stuff they didn’t anticipate.”
He said he devotes his entire life “my high power, family and then my work.”
“My high power revolves around a God that reveals me his will every day, in and out, as long as I wake up willing, honest and also with some humility, I’m able to stick to which can,” Clarke said. “My faith in God is incredible and its something that’s grown over the years.
“I know that my will over my organization, my employees, my customers, won’t ever take precedence over God’s will and that is a thing in which I wake up every day and I hit my knees and beg that I will be of maximum service to my fellow and follow His will in everything that I do.”
Clarke said he was not always intent on becoming the recovery and remediation enterprise. Initially, after school, he also followed his entrepreneurial spirit by opening a advertising department for an present wholesale furniture enterprise.
Even though the company was only a “break-even-at-best” kind of endeavor, it enabled him to learn the intricacies of their day-to-day functioning of a little company and put to use the lessons he’d discovered at UC.
Challenges with that firm helped prepare him to direct a business, Clarke stated.
“I heard that a lot of that in school,” he said. “I moved to the Carl H. Lindner College of Business down at UC and majored in marketing and that I did a 3-year co-op using GE in their lighting branch and was responsible for the supermarket accounts. So coming from school, I knew for sure I didn’t wish to select the corporate course.”
“If I was going to do anything that I would enjoy doing, I had to find something that I could do and build my own or with a partner.”