Get to know your contractor - Owner of Havencroft
Bruce Weber grew up in a family that developed and managed real estate in Florida. While in college he worked as a mason's helper in commercial construction. After earning a Mechanical Engineering Degree from the University of Florida, he worked as a field engineer for General Electric.
He was part of the project management team engaged in power plant construction in Tennessee and Florida; projects that involved the direction of hundreds of skilled craftsmen. He helped develop GE’s computer based construction project tracking system, and used it for customer billing.
Then he was selected for a critical promotion to become one of only two people in General Electric using highly specialized knowledge and equipment to analyze the condition of massive turbine engines at customer sites; a service for which GE charged clients $1,200 a day, over 30 years ago.
Wanting to explore other possibilities, he spent over a year immersed in fine art photography. He entered and won 1st place in his first photography contest, but was drawn back to engineering and moved to Silicon Valley, CA.
He was hired as a reliability engineer at a semiconductor manufacturer. This new career led to experience also in Quality Control and Failure Analysis of Integrated Circuits. He developed new skills and was promoted to managing the materials analysis laboratory within the failure analysis group.
He then changed companies as a Senior Q&R Engineer, and used microscopic inspection, microprobes and curve tracers, a scanning electron microscope and energy dispersive spectroscopy to perform IC device analysis for process improvement and failure analysis on defects found in reliability testing.
He then recognized a developing market and left to become one of the founders of a Silicon Valley reliability test equipment company.
Serving as Chairman and VP of Engineering, Mr. Weber managed product development projects and transferred to production four new test and measurement products in three years.
He led the team that obtained a patent for a miniature high-voltage switching device. He also developed the production specifications and methods for all products. Two products, one manual and one automated, tested critical reliability parameters of Integrated Circuits.
The equipment was sold to Fortune 100 companies and government agencies like the National Security Agency. The company was sold in its fourth year.
At that point Mr. Weber became a California Real Estate Broker and started selling land investments, winning annual performance awards. He became a Regional Manager with salespeople located in both the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas. He then also joined a Residential Sales Office in the exclusive Silicon Valley executive town of Saratoga,California.
As the California Real Estate market contracted, Mr. Weber moved his family to the RTP area of North Carolina and became a Real Estate Broker in that state. Always cultivating knowledge about innovative housing, Mr. Weber decided to go back into construction. Before obtaining a Residential Contractor license in North Carolina, he took the time to learn the basics, selling new homes, and even working on a framing crew.
Mr. Weber then founded Havencroft Inc. and as President applied all the skills from twenty years of relevant experience to the task of bringing engineering skills to residential construction to create modern, energy efficient structures; homes that are truly custom; individually created to the exact requirements of the owners.
Starting in the passive solar niche, he showed houses in the annual parade of solar homes. In 1999 he was featured on page one of the Raleigh News and Observer Homes and Garden Section as “A New Light in Solar Construction.”
In 2001, 2002, and 2004 he became the first builder known to win silver or gold medals in each of his first three years entering the Orange/Durham Parade of Homes, with houses he personally designed.
Linville
Woodhaven
He moved far beyond this early success and continued to look for challenges to expand his skills and knowledge in the building arts with some larger projects in more exclusive locations. Havencroft remained on the cutting edge, developing and implementing proprietary energy efficiency design principals. Mr. Weber built some of the first sealed crawlspace houses in the area, and finished the first sealed attic design in Orange County in 2002 while in the midst of winning multiple Parade of Homes prizes. In 2007 he won Overall SIlver for his first home in a 100 home subdivision in Elon.
In 2011 he passed the rigorous course of study and exam to become certified as a Project Management ProfessIonal, and has continued to keep his training current since that time. In 2017 he undertook an even more rigorous course of study to become licensed as a National Commercial Building Contractor and was one of the founders of a new corporation with new partners, ready to invest in retail, office , and multi-family projects!
Hillcroft
