The Good Guys

House Rules Everyone, it seems, has a story about George Fritz (the man himself has a bunch too). But what allows George to be George is his opposite number back in the office in Crofton. After charging around with Fritz for a day or so, a visit with Joe Bohm in his small, cluttered quarters is like an audience with the Dalai Lama. Both men are built like bears, but if Fritz is a grizzly with a raucous sense of humor and a photographic memory, Bohm is more a koala with an MBA and a quiet, knowing smile. Bohm often jokes about the partners’ division of labor. “When I pick up a power tool, someone needs to call 911, because you know there’s going to be blood,” he says. “George does the sticks and bricks; I do the debits and credits.”

But just as Fritz’s technical expertise defines the company’s product, Bohm’s vision has charted Horizon’s success as a business. While Fritz devours building trade publications, tearing out pages on new technologies to investigate, Bohm is addicted to CNBC and The Wall Street Journal. “I’m a student of business,” he says, and he speaks with relaxed assurance about the business he has built in Horizon. “We’ve always been self-financing. Good cash flows, good profitability. We’ve been profitable every year we’ve been in business.” The core of the business, he says, is the bond it develops with its clients. “We’ve had relationships with people for 20, 25 years. It’s very important to us to have that kind of connection. We don’t spend a lot of money on advertising; we spend a lot of money on marketing. And marketing is going back and fixing things years and years after we built a project.”

The subject of a prototypical Horizon remodeling project, this in-town Washington, D.C., house dates from the early decades of the 20th century, bears an impeccable pedigree, and is associated with a notable area family. After a top-to-bottom rebuild, its venerable façade now seamlessly conceals a high-performance building envelope. Architect: Barnes Vanze Architects, Washington, D.C.; Photo: Celia Pearson. The company does a remarkable amount of business on good faith. “We do not take deposits,” Bohm says. “We will not take a deposit on a project. I do not want anyone to ever think that we’re doing something else with that money before we start the project. We’re always working with our own money, and always in arrears. It’s a financial cost to us,” he says. But it represents an investment too. “It sort of cements the handshake.” And for Bohm, a handshake counts for a lot. “We have started a multimillion-dollar project with literally three pages of drawings.” Speaking of one long-term client, he says, “We’re on our fifth project with him, and we’ve never had a contract.” This approach doesn’t reflect naivete, however. “Construction is a tough, tough, business,” Bohm says. “Our clients could crush us.” But if a powerful client chose to do so, even the best contract would provide only limited protection. “The character of the person sitting across the table from me is more important than any piece of paper we sign in a lawyer’s office. We’re not litigious people. Our motto is ‘You can’t go wrong by doing the right thing.’”

What clients see across the table from them are men so devoted to their work that one suspects they’ve sworn some kind of oath. “My dad was in the military for 30 years,” Bohm says, “and he told me that if someone looked three years older than me, I was to say, ‘Yes, sir’ or ‘No, ma’am.’” Fritz, too, is the son of an army infantryman, and both speak freely about the sense of duty they share—to their clients, to their employees, and to their community. With clients, Bohm says, “One of the things that we try to exude is that we’re serious people with their interest in mind. We’ve been painfully honest with our numbers, and we’ve lost projects on account of that.” In regard to the company’s employees, he says, “Some people have told us that we are too generous. To me that’s an oxymoron. You can’t be too generous.” Bohm and Fritz view providing employment as both a privilege and a solemn responsibility. “We’ve plowed back money into the business for years and years and years,” Bohm says. “For many years we took very moderate salaries, just to make sure the company was there.” The partners first appeared in this magazine in our July/August 2007 issue, when they earned a Pacesetter Award in community service for such companywide good deeds as sending letters and care packages overseas to troops without family back home and for delivering $30,000 in food, clothing, and other essentials to an inner-city Baltimore church for distribution to needy people during the holiday season.