Chris started in construction before he could legally drive — helping his grandma landscape her backyard, then learning to frame, sheet, and install steel barns alongside his uncle, who paid him in paintball guns and Xboxes. By high school he was building decks and fences. Just before turning twenty-one, he was framing custom home structures full-time as a cut man.

From there, he took a job as a laborer with Sterling Custom Homes — and was promoted to superintendent within six months. After a few years there, he moved to Joubert Development, a small boutique builder in Denver, where he was the only employee for a married-couple ownership team and learned estimating, sales, and the full client-facing side of the business.

He then spent time consulting and running projects for Marc David Homes and Elk Grove Custom Homes — both companies recruiting him directly off relationships built at Sterling and Joubert. Across every stop, Chris was learning the same thing from a different angle: what trades actually struggle with on a job site, what clients actually complain about after the fact, and what a better way of running a build would look like.

It was clients at Elk Grove who first told Chris and Brooke they should be the ones running the show — not just executing someone else's projects. That feedback was the final push. Chris asked Brooke to be his partner, and Divergent Custom Homes is what came out of it: the best practices from every company Chris worked with, plus years of direct client feedback about where contractors typically fall short, built around one core idea — treat every client like a partner, and do the work to actually change the stereotype around contractors who perform poorly, whatever form that takes.