About our Custom Home Building Team
Optimum started as a “friend deal”. Ryan and Kendrick bumped into each other on a job, and the rest is history. Now, friendship is a deeply embedded component of the Optimum Culture and it is what drives everything. Here, we don’t just work together, we actually like each other.
Ryan Lessard
Vice President
Ryan loves fine home building, he always has. As a young boy, he traveled south to work with his Uncle who was a finish carpenter, and the construction bug bit early. He’s too detailed for his own good sometimes, but that’s a fault that we ignore here. It means that everyone benefits from the fussy details being noticed. It means we’ve got someone with the eyes of an osprey watching over every construction project and home build.
Upon growing up, Ryan became certified in Green Building from Sonoma State and has a strong passion for upending conventional norms. He asks great questions and absolutely knows how to use his ears well. He’s intuitive and inspires an extreme level of confidence. His humor is pretty subtle, so pay attention!
Kendrick Ballantyne
President
What Ryan loves about home details, Kendrick loves about process and systems development. When it comes to making something that was sticky run more smoothly, he’s in his element. Kendrick’s also a die-in-the-wool people-person who has rarely met a stranger.
Kendrick was a Receiving Tight End for the Baltimore Ravens, then took a job as Construction Project Manager for Northeastern University. Upon leaving this role, he founded Optimum Construction in 2009. His emphasis as a custom home builder comes from his observations around the commercial construction level of professionalism. Everybody’s on best behavior on a commercial site, so why couldn’t someone get the same treatment in building a custom home? Shouldn’t the process be that clean and tight? So here we are, Optimum Builds Homes!
Faces we love to See
Our Optimum team
