Today we’d like to introduce you to Alex and Anderson Morgan.
Hi Alex and Anderson, so excited to have you both with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
Our business story is tangled pretty tight with our love story so to understand our business you probably need to first learn about us as individuals and how our relationship developed.
Just Friends stage:
Anderson and I (Alex) have known each other since we were around 11-12 years old. Both of us were born and raised in Cincinnati, OH. Our younger brothers were friends in grade school and high school. I went with Anderson as his date to his senior prom in 2008 (just as friends). Anderson likes to joke that I acted like I was too cool for him by not responding to his random texts while we were in high school and college. And to be honest, he’s probably right. In college, we both stayed in Cincinnati but lived pretty different lives. Anderson at MSJ (Mount Saint Joseph) where he received his bachelor’s degree in Business and me at UC: DAAP where I received my bachelor’s degree in Fashion Design: Product Development. Product development is the business side of the fashion world, focusing on the customer rather than the ego of the designer. These details matter because it relates to how we both had the desire to create our own business with the goal in mind to focus on the end user/client. We were both in our own worlds in college, Anderson playing lacrosse and me focusing on developing my own clothing brand and future business model. Honestly, we both agree we never would have made it as a couple if we started dating any earlier than we did which leads me to our next stage…
When we officially started dating:
After Anderson graduated, he moved to Dallas, TX where he worked nights and weekends as a lacrosse coach and during the day first as a security guard and soon promoted within the company to a gold and silver commodities trader. I also ended up in Dallas a little after Anderson for work as well. I first started as a design intern while in my last semester of school for Fossil. We met up on my first night in town and from that night on we were inseparable. I officially moved to Dallas full-time after I graduated a couple of months later. At that point, I began working as a textile designer creating designs used for blankets and pillows that were sold in stores like HomeGoods and TJMaxx. I believe this work I did was a stepping stone for me to get into the home design and décor industry and mindset. I truly believe that my life calling along with being a mother is being an artist with a focus more on connecting design with the emotions of the buyer/client. The actual medium isn’t really the focus for me, it’s more about how I can create a product that makes someone feel a sense of happiness. Even though apparel is what started me on this path, I believe as long as I’m being creative and working with people to see their immediate world or environment in a brighter way than I’m doing my job in this life. But back to our story at hand. After about a year of living together in Dallas, Anderson knew he wanted to propose to me soon. He wanted to be close to family for when we eventually wanted to add to our little family of just 2 at the time. So together in 2015 we made the decision to move back to Cincinnati with no real plan for work. I personally always had a vision of being in California and working in the fashion world there. But as the saying goes, “man plans, God laughs”. We both took a leap of faith in each other and listened to our callings in life at the moment while also working hard to figure out our bigger-picture goals. Our main goals were to create a life where our future children thrived and had close connections with both of us while also enjoying the work we did not just to make money but working to create meaning for ourselves and other people.
Rock bottom stage:
I call this the rock bottom stage because when we moved back to Cincinnati we really started from nothing. Anderson had some money saved so that we could buy a house and do a very low budget remodel on it. We stayed in his parent’s basement for a couple months until we found the first house that we bought together. If you can imagine a tiny completely fixer-upper house, this was it. It was a small, 2 bedroom and 1 bathroom house. It had a total of 5 rooms (2 bedrooms, 1 bathroom, a living room, and a kitchen) all on one level, about 950 sq. feet. It had bugs, a gross dungeon basement, disastrous gravel and broken blacktop backyard, dirty smoky walls, no curb appeal and the bathroom and kitchen needed to be completely gutted. We lived in this house as we fixed it up. So yeah, we had no kitchen or no bathroom while living in it for the first couple of months. We sold our nice jeeps and bought a used beat-up truck that we shared for a year so that we could save our money and focus on figuring out what exactly we were going to do with our lives. We did all this while not even married yet. Anderson must have been a good salesman to convince me to go through the hardships we did. Really though, we both put a lot of faith in each other, made compromises and sacrifices and learned a lot along the way with the goal in mind to create the life we envisioned for ourselves and our future children. We learned not just about how to remodel a home but about ourselves as a couple. I’m not joking when I say we had some hard times and even today we still are working towards these bigger picture goals. But we joke that if we could make it through that first remodel and still be together we can make it through anything.
Transition stage:
For work, Anderson worked for 6 months at his grandparent’s heating and air company learning different skills while working inside customers’ homes. He also worked for my parent’s concrete and construction company where he learned skills useful to the exterior of homes. Anderson wishes he would have learned a lot of these more hands-on skills earlier on in life instead of being stuck at a desk in college. My 5 years at DAAP and 5 internships taught me a lot of the skills that I still use today. But during this time while he was working for his grandpa and my dad, I had created an Etsy shop where I made custom apparel items and sold them to people all across the US and some internationally. I loved working with customers and listening to their vision of what they wanted and bringing it into reality through apparel. I created these custom apparel items while working inside our home. Our second bedroom served as my workspace. I made about $40k in sales the first year and around $60k in sales the second year (note I didn’t say profit) and I was really proud of that! Anderson eventually got his real estate license and wanted to test out working in the home-flipping business since we did a decent job remodeling our own home. We partnered with his cousin Craig for a couple different reasons 1. we were still broke and 2. Craig was also interested in investing in the housing market. There’s a saying that goes something like be careful getting into business with friends or family but for us Craig was/is a great partner and we will always be thankful that he trusted in our unique skills even back in the very beginning! Anderson had a vision for that first house we flipped so for the most part I continued to work on my Etsy custom orders unless he needed help from me. We got married, flipped another house and I started a photography business to go along with my custom apparel business. Soon after, I got pregnant with our daughter Cali Jude. I started to slow down my custom apparel-making business because we knew the workload of it didn’t align with our future plans. I focused more on my photography business during this time because it gave me more flexibility. Anderson had some old lacrosse connections contact him about helping them remodel their kitchen because they had seen our house flipping work. I remember him telling me we only profited around $2k off that job and if you divided up the hours he put into it it was well below minimum wage but it jump-started his idea to do more client work. At the time though, he didn’t really know how to make it profitable for us both to live off successfully.
Our big break:
Against my better judgment, Anderson found another complete fixer-upper property in Walnut Hills. It honestly scared me but I supported his vision that it had potential. It had been abandoned for over 10 years and was not in the best area. We bought it for $90k which we had to borrow from his old boss in Dallas, God rest his soul. We remodeled the entire 3 story building and turned it into 2 condo units. We learned a lot during this bigger deal. We sold the bottom unit which paid off our debt to the hard money lender we used to do the construction and kept the upper unit. We turned the upper unit into an Airbnb property and I did all the decorating, managed everything that went into running an Airbnb such as the customer service side, marketing/branding, and making sure it was stocked and cleaned to a high standard. We did really well with it. We were still flipping houses during this time and every now and then remodeling a client kitchen. I became pregnant with our second daughter and realized that our little starter home soon was not going to work for us. We searched for a new house to buy and remodel. Anderson found the perfect property for us and even though we originally planned to just remodel the existing house in the end we decided to tear the whole house down and test our skills in doing a new build (minus the original foundation, we kept that and just added on to it). It might sound easy to do this but it takes a lot of proper planning, budgeting, and coordinating to do a new build. Anderson really has a special set of skills in handling these tasks that can be overwhelming for the average person. For me, during this 2nd pregnancy it was getting harder for me to take care of a toddler, maintain the Airbnb, help with any remodel work we were doing, do the design work for our new house we were building, manage my photography business, and just taking care of myself in general. So we decided to consolidate and work solely as a team in the areas that we both were strong in. For me it was design, branding, marketing, and customer service. For Anderson, it was construction management, dealing with all the numbers in finding the perfect deal and making budgets, hands-on construction work, and having a vision for kitchen and bathroom layouts.
The start of Chasing Cali Home Design
When Anderson first decided to start a business flipping homes he named his business CAM III Enterprises LLC, based on his full name Charles Anderson Morgan III. I told him if we were really going to do this together and make it legit we needed to rebrand and come up with a name that worked well for both of us. One where our clients could connect with us and knew what it was that we did. Coming up with a unique business name that two people can agree on is easier said than done. But eventually, I came up with the idea to name our first business together after our first child. Naming her together was a task in itself as well, so might as well go with what works right?! So Chasing Cali Home Design was born. It also reflects back to our bigger-picture goals, chasing our dreams with our children at the center of it. Here’s a quick about us that can be found on our website that I built a little over a year ago! (www.chasingcali.com)
“We’re a husband and wife team that started doing home remodels in 2015. We find distressed properties to buy and bring back to life for other families to enjoy again, remodel live-in and new client homes, help clients with decor details, and lastly did our first new build 2 years ago! Construction & installation are Anderson’s specialties and design & decor are mine. You will get to know us both very well during this process as we work closely together to make sure your visions come to fruition!
We have 3 little ones. 2 girls Cali (CJ) and Josie (JoJo) and 1 happy go lucky baby boy Cam who inspire us every day. They teach us to have patience, to be creative, and to always be loving. These are also our driving forces while we create family-oriented environments for our customers to enjoy for years to come!”
In today’s news:
Currently, we still love doing client home remodels! We love creating new spaces in our client’s homes that better suit their daily lives. It fills our hearts to hear our clients tell us things like “We’re so happy, seriously you guys have changed our lives in this house.” We are also looking to expand our business in new ways, which we will keep secret for right now until we fully decide on this new direction we are working towards! We are always growing, changing, and obviously never staying still for too long but all while staying loyal to our friends and family that need help with remodeling their homes! We’re always chasing our dreams, wherever they may lead us!
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
It has never been an easy road. HGTV makes it look easy to do a DIY remodel but they rarely show the amount of tears and sweat it takes to successfully do one. Most times with no fault to the people trying but it’s almost impossible to do alone because of the amount of knowledge it takes with knowing electric, plumbing, and framing just to name a few. We have been lucky to have multiple mentors in different fields teach us different sets of skills in regards to the workings of a home but again it was a rough road with a big learning curve.
Another challenge that I might not have covered previously is the challenge of working as a husband and wife team. Anderson and I have very different strengths which in the end is what makes our company more well-rounded but on a day-to-day basis, we can sometimes forget to appreciate what the other one offers. Communication is so important and we can at times struggle to figure out the best way to communicate so that the other one doesn’t feel under appreciated. We have our days where we fight like any other couple. We try to have weekly check-ins whether that’s us just getting dinner without the kids so we can talk without being distracted. But I’ll be real with you, most nights we fall asleep from pure exhaustion (3 kids aged 3 and younger will do that to you) and connecting with each other can be pushed down our to-do list. We still have hard days/weeks where we have a lot on our plates. We aren’t perfect but life is all about learning new ways to evolve into becoming our best selves. We are both natural-born leaders so working together where we both can lead and not feel inferior can be challenging at times. Setting concrete roles has helped us over the years. But again, some days are easier than others!
Currently, it’s a challenge within itself having 3 kids and me working from home, and Anderson being the one on the job sites. I can’t easily get up and go like I used to or have the time to work 5 days a week on the business. I work while taking care of the kids so having patience with each other is important because we are creating environments not just for us but for other people so we need to be on top of our game at all times. Some days Anderson has to handle a lot more of the business decisions. And this can lead to more of a challenge for me personally because I have also had a business mind set ever since I was a little girl. I never envisioned myself taking a back seat at times when running a business but motherhood is a whole other monster of a job that I won’t get into right now. But when people refer to our business as “Anderson’s business” it feels like a knife being stabbed into my heart but I get it. Most people don’t understand the work I do as being just as important as his.
We’ve been impressed with Chasing Cali Home Design, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
We specialize in creating custom spaces & products that provide comfort, style, and individuality for the modern family. With the real estate market as it is right now many families would rather update their homes to have a modern and fresh feel rather than buying a new build that most likely is out of budget. We also have younger families that are buying older homes that are in their budget but need work done like updated kitchens and bathrooms and come to us to help them. It’s not easy to remodel an entire home on your own when you have never done it, trust us, we did it years ago when we first started and don’t recommend it. People watch HGTV and think it looks easy but it’s a lot of hard work and takes years of practice with a lot of mistakes along the way to know what you are doing.
We are different from other bigger companies that do essentially the same thing as us by offering a more personalized and family oriented approach. We care about our clients and want to understand their needs first and create an environment that supports them as a family and within their budget. We enjoy connecting with them as friends as well!
We currently offer complete kitchen and bath remodels or whole house renovation/remodel. We handle every step for our clients including; demo, framing, drywall, painting, flooring, and tile installation, cabinet design and installation, and fixture installation. We handle everything from A to Z. We work with our clients to create their kitchen design layout as well so they don’t need to hire an interior designer or architect. We also help our customers with all design decisions such as providing them options in regards to cabinets/vanities, tile, cabinet handles, lights, faucets, and any other finishing fixtures. We really pride ourselves in being a well-rounded husband and wife team that makes the process of updating our client’s homes run smoothly! Not all construction contractors are made equal and it’s important to trust the people you allow in your home. We know how it is to get let down by contractors so we aim to never put this stress on our customers!
Our personal design style is a combination of a modern farmhouse and a contemporary beach house. We are drawn to black, shades of grey, and white paint colors, distressed wood and woven textures, greenery, and clean lines. Our customers tend to have similar design styles so a lot of our work is relatable and it’s pretty obvious when you see a kitchen or bath we did to know it was done by us.
We’d be interested to hear your thoughts on luck and what role, if any, you feel it’s played for you.
We have been blessed/received good luck with being born into the families we have because on both sides they have helped us in our daily lives and in business. My dad has never-ending knowledge in regards to construction since my parents have run their own businesses for over 30 years. Anderson’s grandfather also has given us advice along the way with his knowledge from having a family-owned HVAC business.
We also have received good luck in the fact that we have a loyal and trustworthy friend that works for us. His name is Pat McClanahan and we are so thankful for all his hard work over these past 2 years while working with us! During the week, he is Anderson’s right hand man when on the job sites. Pat also went to MSJ and played lacrosse with Anderson so they have a great team work background that is honestly hard to find in today’s world. We were lucky that Pat wanted to make a change in his life at the same time that we were looking to expand and find someone we could trust to work along with Anderson. We also love and appreciate his wife Jess and his 2 little girls Rowan and Rylee! We value Pat and his family so much and love that we can all grow together on this wild ride of parenthood on top of working together!
We have been blessed with 3 beautiful children who inspire us to be the people that we are and provide family-forward service to our clients.
We are thankful that any “bad luck” we might have had or have in the future will look at it as a reason to pivot and figure out what we need to do to get back on track to having the life we are happy and proud to be living.
Pricing:
- Our pricing really depends on the project. I’d say our average kitchen remodel costs between $40k-$70k but there are a lot of different factors that play into the price of a project like the size of the kitchen, how much the layout will change, etc.
- Our average en suite bathroom remodels cost around $20k-$30k. But again this number depends on the size and what the project entails.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.chasingcali.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chasingcali_homes/
Image Credits
Jen Thamann Photography and Alex Morgan
