Winning Back-to-Back NADRA Awards – Clark Crosson of Crosstek Construction | FDM Mastery Podcast #53

Clark Crosson has run Crosstek Construction in Huntsville, Alabama for exactly ten years, growing to nearly eight employees before deliberately downsizing back to a one-man show with a trusted, exclusive sub crew because it is far easier to manage and oversee quality.

As a general contractor he does mostly kitchens, bathrooms, covered porches and insurance restoration, building only three or four decks a year — yet he won first place in the closed porch category two years running at his first two NADRA competitions.

He credits the back-to-back wins to being a GC: the fine details his porches carry — stone fireplaces, fancy ceilings and multiple trades — set his entries apart from projects by dedicated deck builders.

Professional photography is, in his view, the single biggest differentiator in a submission; he sequences photos to tell a matched-angle before-and-after story, believing judges score on the images far more than the written description.

In hot, buggy Alabama, covered and screened porches are in far higher demand than open decks, and most local decks are still built from treated wood rather than composite.

Over half his business comes from referrals and repeat clients — including insurance-restoration work funneled through a trusted local State Farm agent — and his best jobs often start as one project and expand, as when a kitchen job grew into a bathroom plus the award-winning porch.

His advice to newcomers: invest in professional photos and consider a drone, simply try entering, and start in the less-crowded lower-end categories like wood decks where competition is thinner and the odds of placing are better.