Bruce Case, 56, is president and CEO of Case Architects & Remodelers, the Bethesda-based home improvement firm founded in 1961 by his father, Fred (the namesake for the handyman division of the company), who passed away in December. The company has six locations, with about 170 employees, Bruce says, and some 800 renovation projects on the books each year—ranging from two-hour repair jobs to $1.5 million overhauls. But making the company bigger isn’t necessarily the goal. Here’s what Bruce learned when another builder gave him a meaningful book.
About five years ago, John Murphy, a fellow remodeler from the St. Paul,[Minnesota], area came to visit and happened to talk to me about a book he had read that affected him. It was Think Big, Act Small [by Jason Jennings].
What I got from that is … you can be humble—you know it’s not all about how big the business is and things like that. It’s about quality and the balance of life and those kinds of things, and it really hit a chord for me because there are people in the business world who are thinking big and acting big. Sometimes they get the most attention, but that’s just not who I aspire to be.
It’s the ability to work with employees to create a culture.It’s more than just about sales and being big, big, big. It dawned on me gradually, and it’s something I’ve thought back to frequently when I make decisions.
How we treat our employees is key. Then COVID comes—how do you treat your employees, especially in a business like ours, where we’re in people’s homes? Some people would slash and burn and make pretty tough cuts, and we didn’t. We wanted to stay humble, focus on what we do, focus on the team, focus on the culture. And then through COVID, we grew—a lot.
Now we’re back to pre-COVID levels [of staffing and revenue] and some people said, ‘Oh, that’s too bad,’ but my view is that it’s nature, it’s the way the world works. Businesses get bigger, they get smaller, but I don’t—and I hope my team doesn’t—have ego or pride attached to just the size of our business. It’s about the quality and the culture.
Thinking about a book like this helped me realize it’s not just the size,the sales, the revenue and ‘bigger is better.’ I’ve given that book to a few people over the years. I could probably give it to more, to be honest.
—As told to Buzz McClain
This appears in the March/April 2025 issue of Bethesda Magazine.
