Bart Mendel Title: President Company: Stonemark Construction Management, Westlake Village Born: 1956, Dallas Education: Attended University of Texas – Austin Personal: Married with two sons Most Admired Person: Winston Churchill Hobbies: Teaching mediation, meditating, spending time with family There are two sides to Bart Mendel reflected in the dual businesses that he founded. First, there is the professional who has worked in construction for more than 35 years and who started Stonemark Construction Management in 1997. The other side is the Buddhist and meditation instructor who, with his wife and a group of entrepreneurs, started Mindworks, a nonprofit promoting the benefits of meditation. Although he grew up Jewish, Mendel came to Buddhism as a young man. “I just missed the ’60s, which was a terrible loss for me personally,” the 62-year-old Mendel quipped. “So, I spent the ’70s trying to recreate my own personal ’60s by going to a meditation center.” Jacklyn Wolf, manager of business development at Stonemark, said that in the 20 years she has worked for Mendel only a handful of timess has she seem him judgmental. “People do not hide what they have done wrong,” Wolf said. “It is really very practical.” Mendel met with the Business Journal at his Westlake Village office to discuss his career in construction and how Buddhism has influenced his time on the job. Question: What motivates you? Answer: I think people, relationships and wanting to help people with whatever it is that they need. I spend my whole day helping people lining up in my office, trying to solve problems. Helping people and having a lot of fun in those relationships. How? Well, professionally, creating a helping culture. It starts by listening. You have to understand the problem. Most of the time people try to jump to a solution without understanding the problem. Usually the problem is deeper or more subtle. It doesn’t mean it’s harder to fix; it may be easier to fix. It’s just that you have to listen to what people are saying. I find that a lot of people in my business, high-end construction for residential and commercial, people are talking about all kinds of different things and they aren’t necessarily communicating. You can find a solution if you really listen. Can you give an example? A lot of times a contractor will listen to a client and the client will be complaining. The contractor immediately jumps to, “This is going to cost money.” The wall comes up. Really, what the client wants is to be listened to. They want to understand how did this happen; how did you make this decision? A lot of time it is looking for blame. I like to say in the construction industry, people go to school, and they get a four-year degree on who to blame (laughs). That’s the main thing they learn, unfortunately. That doesn’t solve problems. A lot of times a client is saying something totally different. They don’t mind paying for what they want. How did you get into the construction business? When I was a kid, I started doing renovations at a Buddhist meditation center where I lived. I was on the building crew. I learned plumbing, electrical and framing because we were constantly building stuff. I realized I had a passion for it and worked my way up from there. Was this in Texas? I grew up in Texas and I lived in Vermont for a while and on the East Coast. Most of my construction experience has been in California. That has been some 20-odd years. How did you start Stonemark? I recognized in my mind there was a gap between what people needed and what was available. We manage difficult and unique projects for residential and commercial clients. So, I had experience with big-time commercial projects. I worked for a very large general contractor in Boston and they had a program management division. Everybody knows that if you are going to build a hospital or an airport, you hire a construction manager. But for smaller projects, meaning under $50 million, construction managers are not so prolific. And so, what I did was bridge that gap and create a business model to provide that kind of professional level of service to smaller (commercial) projects which morphed into ultra-high-end residential projects. What are some interesting projects you have worked on? A lot of them are under (non-disclosure agreements) so I cannot mention them by name, but we’ve done a lot of exclusive, high-end homes in Beverly Hills, Bel Air, Montecito and Malibu. We’ve also done hillside projects. We are about to start our first winery, which is very interesting. We have a residential project in Montecito where the clients wanted something built using the most modern software. It is a very expensive home built out of architectural concrete, multiply curved in different dimensions. Another museum-quality structure. To me the high-end residences are the most unique and interesting. Why is that? The architects challenge themselves and each other to come up with unique designs that haven’t been done before. Clients love that – they love the art, the uniqueness. At that level, they are interested in something like an architectural marvel. What is your specialty? Generally, we gravitate to stuff that is really hard to build. On a hillside, not enough room. That’s where a construction manager like Stonemark really adds value. Otherwise, in high-risk, things go wrong. That’s how we add value, how we make our money is by preventing stuff from going wrong and creating a successful project even though it is very difficult. What is a typical day like for you? I spend most of my adult life convincing people to do what they’ve already agreed to do. A lot of time on the phone. We do lots of conference calls and web meetings. Of course, I go to job sites and go to client meetings. I go into L.A. to client meetings a few times a week, and wherever the projects take us. Most of the time we go 500 miles per hour. The project managers are lined up outside my door asking, “What do we do about this, what do we do about that?” They are very good, high-quality staff so the stuff they bring to me are doozies. I find that challenging. I like solving problems and I have no dearth of them in my world. What is the hardest part of the job? The most exciting and the hardest is people management. I like to say that buildings would be easy to build if there weren’t people involved. Everyone has their own perspective. That’s the value of a construction manager in general. We don’t have an agenda, we don’t do the design, we don’t do the construction, we aren’t doing the engineering, we aren’t the owner that has an emotional impact or desire on what they want. We are able to see the big picture. We have to listen to what everybody is saying and then create a well-oiled machine to execute. What is your favorite part of the job? Solving problems. The ability to come in and rectify a situation where the wheels are falling off and screwing them back on so that we keep going in the same direction is very satisfying. I love going to the job sites and seeing what we are building. There is a lot of satisfaction. It’s not like selling insurance – there’s nothing wrong with selling insurance but it’s a financial product. You go out (to a job site) and there’s actually a building. They are works of art often and there is a lot of passion behind it. I can share in the passion. There is a great sense of satisfaction with that. Any interesting stories from the industry? We had a project we worked on in Boston, it was for a Boys and Girls Club. They had a program that would not fit on the lot. It was an urban neighborhood and the neighbors were complaining about the size of the building. The big problem with that design was there was an Olympic size swimming pool. The architects had designed an addition to house the swimming pool. That made the addition huge. I actually suggested putting the pool in the crawl space under the existing building. Everybody laughed. Then of course we figured out it could actually fit, we could excavate under it, we could shore it. What ended up happening is that is where the pool went. Therefore, the addition got smaller, the neighbors got happy, the budget went down and everything worked. How does Buddhism influence how you do your job? I think it has a tremendous influence. When I was younger, I tried to keep that separate from my professional career. As I grew older, they become intertwined. I don’t even distinguish between them at this point. The Buddhist practice based on mindfulness and awareness is a lot of things that I have already talked about. Like the idea of listening. You can listen because your mind is clear. When I say we don’t have an agenda, the meditator’s mind doesn’t have an agenda other than being open to the present moment. It really infuses my view on how to work with people. I think it’s a large measure of how we are successful in what we do. … There is a degree of calmness that is really important. Because in this industry there are things going wrong all the time. You have thousands of people on these projects. People make mistakes. It does not help to get angry. So my Buddhist training and my daily meditation practice really informs how to help our clients and do great projects. How did you become a Buddhist? I have been interested in spirituality since I was a teenager. I looked around and thought is this all there is. Did you grow in a religious home? I grew up Jewish. I was bar mitzvahed. I went through that whole training. There is nothing wrong with the Jewish tradition. I have a lot of respect for it. I felt I needed a real way to practice how to work with my mind. Buddhism is not a religion per se. It is a psychology of how to work with the mind, how to work positively. Everybody’s mind has tremendous qualities that we don’t really access that much because we are so busy with our thoughts and agenda and emotion that bury all of this. When you allow yourself to be present and unwind these things, the positive qualities come out. To me it felt like something I needed to do. It has become my life’s work, really. That has informed everything that I do. How did you start the nonprofit Mindworks to promote meditation? I recognized that my Buddhist training was beneficial to me but it was somehow not being translated to people who really needed it. So, my wife and I and a small group of entrepreneurs developed Mindworks. There are many mediation teachers, but we pulled together the best mediation teachers from around the world to create an online platform where people would have access to this mediation training in a non-religious, non-cultural way without jargon, without any special training. Even though it is Buddhist-inspired and certainly all the teachers are Buddhists, we don’t talk about Buddhism. You don’t have to be a Buddhist in order to benefit from the wonders of meditation practice. How do you juggle being a meditation teacher with the construction business? Excellent question. Just as my philosophy on the two are intertwined, the two businesses are intertwined. I work on both all the time. I find that I obviously spend my nights and weekends on Mindworks and some of the time during the day. Because I am working some of the day on Mindworks, I’ll spend weekends working on Stonemark. (laughs) I’m a meditator workaholic, I guess. It is a juggling act. Basically, it is two businesses. One of them is well-developed and mature, and the other is a startup. What are your hobbies outside the workplace? I have three hobbies – Mindworks, Mindworks and Mindworks. Other than spending time with my family and working out, I spend pretty much all of my time teaching meditation, meditating and building up Mindworks as an offering to the community. It’s kind of a profound hobby. Who is someone that you admire? Winston Churchill is one of my heroes. I love how he took on a challenge singlehandedly and was able to steer Great Britain. He had such courage, at the same time he was so human. He had so many faults. And a great sense of humor. He wasn’t ashamed of who he was. He had tremendous courage to be who he was and he was able to really lead. Is there anything you would have done different in your career? I think with age, I would have loved to have known then what I know now. I could have saved myself a lot of time. I guess the integration of my two sides, the Buddhist mediation side and the professional side, knowing what I know now, I would have worked harder to integrate them sooner rather than keeping them artificially separated. When I was younger, I thought people thought Buddhism was weird. In a way, we are in a different time; there is a lot more acceptance and mindfulness is all the rage. The Buddhists have discovered the science of mind that mindfulness had come out of, so it’s much more in the public eye.