Business View Magazine May 2023

46 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 10, ISSUE 5 of things I didn’t like about it,” Van Lear recalls. She quickly decided to sell the company which had become quite successful and took a new route down the manufacturing path with the establishment of a company specializing in housewares, picture frames, door knobs, and anything related to household decor. It was around this time that Van Lear developed an interest in house flipping and used capital to put into flipping houses as well as further hone her skills in all aspects of construction; tiling, framing, and sheetrock among other skills. “I wanted to do something a little more hands-on,” she relays. “I now knew enough that I could tell if someone else was doing it wrong and before I knew it I had about 10 properties I was working on.” “So I sold my manufacturing company and started doing the renovations full time,” Van Lear adds. With the housing crash in 2008, flipping was no longer an option and this propelled Van Lear towards the formation of what is now Level Craft Construction. “There was no random house flipping anymore and people over the years that I had encountered always commented on the good job I was doing and would I do it for them,” she says. “ I had been saying no, and now I was saying yes and this is when I launched Level Craft Construction and got my contractors’s License.” Describing the scope of the home and commercial side of the business, Van Lear highlights, “We are not the investors. We don’t own the project. We are the hired help. We work with the designer and the existing commercial space and build out inside the restaurant.” “For example, we are working on permitting for one right now that’s a restaurant, but it is in a huge building on what we call the Beltline in Atlanta in a Plus property, so there will be 10 to 15 other restaurants in there,”