Person of Interest

By Ted McIntyre

Multi-dimensional Mike Memme brings his razor-sharp focus to OHBA’s Chair

In a world where energy efficiency is front of mind for the home building industry, Mountainview Homes has the built-in advantage of Mike Memme as its co-owner and operations manager. In case of a power shortage, they can plug Memme in and he’ll light up the Niagara Peninsula for a week.

Maybe longer.

The 56-year-old St. Catharines native’s boundless energy feeds his two to three nights a week of men’s hockey. It sustains him on snowboarding and skiing trips. It fuels his passion for producing music in his home studio and entertaining a steady stream of friends and relatives at his family’s new lake house in Wainfleet on Lake Erie. It has charged his past 25 years of OHBA volunteering, and it sparks his absorbing office meetings—particularly with a dry erase marker in hand at his boardroom’s whiteboard.

And yet Memme could power down, abandon hockey and those other activities, take up a sedentary lifestyle—stuffing his face with potato chips while streaming Netflix—and he’d still have barely 6% body fat if he did nothing but attend his favourite music events.

Understand that we’re not talking Neil Sedaka or even classic rock here. This is singularly aggressive electronic stuff—head-banging, plaster-splitting industrial metal bands like Combichrist, Rammstein and Ministry. Leave Memme in the mosh pit long enough at one of these concerts, and he’ll stomp a hole deep enough to provide the foundation for Mountainview’s next multi-unit project.

West End Home Builders’ Association CEO Mike Collins-Williams bonded years ago with Memme over their kindred artistic tastes. “The thing about this form of hard-hitting music is that you don’t really have passive fans who are just sorta into it,” Collins-Williams explains. “There’s a degree of passion involved, and from my and Mike’s perspective, this music needs to be experienced life—ideally when sweat is dripping from the ceiling and walls. In March, we had back-to-back nights in Toronto where we saw Canadian electronic artist Excision.

WEHBA President John Anthony Losani joined us for that one — 5,000 person, just a wild show—and Mike was in the very front row, hands on the barrier in front of the stage. He literally wrung out his shirt; it was so drenched in sweat.”

At those moments in time, it might be hard to envision Memme as a studious University of Waterloo civil engineering graduate ravenously poring through the latest iteration of the Ontario Building Code, or at the podium of housing industry seminars, or as someone who turned down an opportunity to go to law school at Queen’s. But Memme is all of that, with more intriguing sides to him than a diamond as he prepares to ascend from OHBA First Vice-President to the one-year term of Board Chair later this month when the association gathers for its Annual Conference and Awards of Distinction at the Niagara Fallsview Casino Resort.

Convening over lunch at Moxie’s in Hamilton’s east end, he is asked a question that often trips up male spouses: When were you married? “August 9, 1997,” Memme responds without hesitation. “There’s a trick to it: 7-8-9—seventh year, eighth month, ninth day,” he explains. Memme’s brain functions a little differently than most. While typical teens were hanging out at malls, Mike was designing computer games—almost selling one to a Toronto firm at one point. “I was a terrible employee on construction sites because I was writing code in my head for all 10 hours and couldn’t wait to get home and type it into the computer and test it,” he admits. “Then I hit this moment where I thought, ‘I’m a social person, but I’m not being social.’ So I walked away from the computer industry.”

But he still gets his fix. To this day, Mountainview’s entire operation, save for accounting, is run by a computer system that Memme has programmed continuously over the past 30 years.

It’s not for everybody, but it’s certainly more interesting than watching grass grow—which felt like part of the job when Memme was a youngster, and his family owned a sod farm and landscaping company in Wainfleet. “We got all the crappy jobs no one else wanted,” remembers Mountainview co-owner and president Mark Basciano, Memme’s first cousin and his next-door neighbour in their youth. “At ten years old, we were crawling under benches, picking weeds in the greenhouse. At 12, we’d take a wheelbarrow, broom and shovel on weekend mornings to clean the streets and curbs in front of all the model homes before they opened. We spent pretty much every day of our childhood together, whether working or horsing around.”

Some of the lessons learned at that age remain vivid to this day. “I was exposed to things that caused me to look at the world differently than would have been natural for someone like me,” Memme recalls. For example? “I’m about 10 years old, and my uncle Nick calls up my dad and says, ‘Tell Mike to be ready at 4 a.m. tomorrow.’ My dad says, ‘He’ll be ready.’ My uncle picks me up and I see Mark in the back seat and hop in, and we go for a drive. About 45 minutes later we pull up at a locked gate of a fenced-off equipment yard. My uncle turns off the engine and the lights. About five minutes later, a truck pulls up, and a guy jumps out with bolt cutters and cuts the chain. My uncle jumps out, swings the gates open, jumps back into the car and pulls into the yard. The other gentleman pulls in, then a big flatbed truck pulls in and they start hot-wiring tractors and loading them on the flatbed. Then we take off, head back to the farm and unload the tractors behind the greenhouse.”

Why did Memme have to be there? ”Because I needed to see it,” he says. “My uncle said, ‘We delivered loads of sod to this landscape company, they’ve gone bankrupt and can’t pay us and we’re going to lose everything, so this is what we have to do. Do you want to lose your house?’ The police eventually came, and my uncle said, ‘I don’t know how these tractors got here. They must have dropped them off because they owed us money.’ Was it the right thing to do? They owed us money, and we never got everything we were owed. But it probably wasn’t the right way to go about it.”

Learning Curve

Some things needed to be taught, but other key aspects of Memme’s makeup were innate—curiosity among them. “While I was a teenager in high school, my father and I would have one- to two-hour discussions, and I’d spend the majority of the time opposing his views, even if I agreed with them, just to see how he could stretch me to understand a topic further,” Memme recalls.

While Mike’s father Frank and Uncle Lou would compose two-thirds of Mountainview’s founding fathers in 1979, Nick Basciano was the first to leave the farm and enter the homebuilding world. And it was Nick who “took Mike under his wing and showed him the ropes—how to do this and that and how to deal with banks and customers and trades,” Frank says.

The seed took root. Although he was accepted to law school at Queen’s, Memme chose the family business after graduating in Civil Engineering in April 1991. He started working on co-op housing projects as an assistant site superintendent, then superintendent.“A year later, Mountainview started up a general contracting company just as the market crashed,” Memme notes. “I was running that company at age 22. We were bidding on jobs in a tough market with a staff of four and were awarded the contract to build the St. Catharines Humane Society and then the Smithville City Hall. From day one, we never lost money. Then in 1994, our homebuilding side was in trouble, with the bank calling our loans, so it was all hands on deck. We wound down the contracting company, and I went into the home building to help the family survive. I had to walk away from my baby two years in, having achieved things I probably didn’t think were possible.”

Deep Thinking

We’re standing at Mountainview’s new head office in St. Catharines. It’s a dazzling reinvention of a building originally created for Social Services of Niagara, for which Memme served as site construction supervisor 30 years ago. Memme is in his trademark black T-shirt and jeans. His hockey equipment is in the car for tonight’s game, and he can’t wait to get there and trash-talk his fellow players.

It’s one of his two happy places. The other is at the computer keyboard of his home studio, composing electronic music. He’s close to completing his first song in 20 years. (Given that it has been 18 months in the making, it’s clearly more about the artistic and therapeutic journey than the actual destination for this man.) Entitled “Am I in Control,” there’s a rhythmic dance beat to it, but the topic is serious—an exploration into the mind of someone with an addiction. “It was inspired by Gabor Maté’s In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, an excellent book about addiction,” Memme says. “I read a lot about human psychology, and that book got my mind going.

I’ve been critical of those who are addicted, always assuming they have a choice, but since reading that book, I’ve become less critical.” Another book, Rocket Fuel by Gino Wickman and Mark Winters, helped Memme better appreciate why he and Basciano continue to work so well together after 30 years despite being two very different individuals in many respects. “I’m a very detailed person, Mark’s very big-picture,” Memme says. “Mark looks after sales, marketing and land development and is the face of the business. I hide in the cellar, doing the budgets, scheduling the work, pricing the product, hiring the trades. Rocket Fuel talks about how you need a visionary and an integrator—the big picture person who, on their own, will run in a million directions if not pulled down to earth, and the integrator who will organize something to such an extreme that nothing will happen. But if you put the two together, they’ll stretch each other, and the business can take off like a rocket.”

Memme cites Mountainview’s expansion into mid-rise development as a case in point. “I was scared as hell and didn’t want to do it, but Mark dragged me into it kicking and screaming, and now I’m very happy he did.”

Basciano analogizes their personality differences: “If Mike and I are both on a cliff and you hand each of us a bag that contains everything you need to build a hang glider, Mike will take everything out, lay it on the ground, label every part, look at the instructions and start to build his hang glider. I will jump off the cliff and try to figure out how to put it together before I hit the ground.  “The differences make us stronger, ”Basciano assures. “We use each other almost as tools to work toward the same goals. But we also share common values, including our belief in philanthropy and that our company is much larger than Mike and me.”

Memme cites piecing together the Mountainview team as his proudest professional achievement. And what distinguishes the company itself?“We’ve nailed the value proposition,” he says. “For a production builder, we’re putting things into our houses that I’m not seeing other production builders doing, like better sound attenuation and drywall with a lot of metal to ensure it’s flexible and has straight edges. It costs us more to construct our houses than it should in a competitive environment, but if I had to give up some of the things we do to make our houses the quality they are, I couldn’t put my name on them.”

Basciano appreciates Memme’s drive. In fact, he shares it. “There are times when we’re exchanging emails at 2 a.m., and I’ll write, ‘Mike, why are you emailing me at two o’clock in the morning?’ And he’ll respond, ‘Why are you answering me at two o’clock in the morning?’”

Is Memme’s energy as boundless at home as it appears from the outside? “Oh my God, yes—it’s exhausting,” replies their wife, Leslie, a retired elementary school teacher. “His brain just doesn’t shut down. So when my brain is tired and I want to sit and have a coffee, he’ll be talking about the news or the newest health craze or how he’ll solve this problem for the world—and I just want to drink my coffee and look at the beach.“Mike thrives in noise and busyness,” Leslie says. “But he is also great at going from 100 to zero and shutting down. And when he plays, he’s all-play. He’s able to find that balance we all look for.”

All in the Family

It’s an enviable balance, to be sure. But for all of Mike’s successes, it’s not easy to stand out in the Memme clan. And it’s not like his father stole the spotlight. Sister Tanya was a former Miss World Canada and TV host and is now a popular Los Angeles-based keynote speaker and on-camera coach. Brother Jeremy is a Technical Program Manager at Google in Seattle. Mother Beverley Barber became a registered nurse as a second career while her kids were in school, then indulged her artistic flare at age 50 and is now a painter/ sculptor.

As for Memme’s two children, both briefly worked at Mountainview but are now living independently and working full-time—Matthew (24) in Vancouver and Alex (22) in Ottawa. Should either choose to return to the company, staff will respect that they’ve already made it out on their own, Memme figures. “Nepotism earned is less egregious than nepotism given,” he philosophizes.

For his part, Memme acknowledges his role in affecting the Ontario Building Code, educating builders and other decisions that have helped improve Niagara and the province. Basciano has seen it first-hand. “After being OHBA president (in 2007-2008), I went on to serve 10 years at Tarion,” Basciano relates. “While I was chair there,

Mike was chair of OHBA’s Technical Liaison Committee with Tarion. I watched him work as a link, bridging the gaps to make the warranty program better while at the same time looking after the industry— having a firm knowledge of the technical aspects of building and an impressive understanding of the issues, and formulating practical, workable solutions. There wasn’t a time when he wasn’t at the top of his game.”

The heavy lifting is just beginning for Memme. Chuck McShane, Executive Officer of the Niagara HBA, sees ensuring solidarity among OHBA’s 28 chapters as the primary challenge for the association’s incoming chair. “Dave Depencier has done a great job over the past year—he’s worked his ass off—and Mike will have to keep the pressure on to make sure that all the locals are on board,” McShane says.

“OHBA is going through a renaissance,” Memme says. We have a new CEO. We have begun hiring the human resources required to deliver increased services to our members. But you need a financial model that allows for that. There are things we’re still working on—the fee structure, the governance structure, how the board is structured. But we have a plan and we’re executing it.

“The government announced a consultation on illegal building this summer. That’s something (former Chair) Louie Zagordo banged the drum a lot for and that I’m passionate about,” Memme continues. “I think we might finally have a government to address the problem, and I’m looking forward to being a part of the solution. “The other thing I want to communicate in my presidency is that there’s a misconception that there’s a housing affordability problem,” Memme declares. “I do the numbers for our price lists and look after the budgets and our construction costs are not an issue—they’ve simply been rising with inflation. We have a land and tax affordability problem, not a housing affordability problem.

Once you have the land and pay the taxes, people can afford the cost of building a house.  The simple part of the solution is “to just open up the tap,” says Memme. “We’re going to be in a huge housing shortage for the next 30 years. Right now, the number of starts is almost as low as in the 1990s. Land values aren’t dropping. Why is that? Because the farmer goes to sell a piece of land that just got into the urban boundary and people from all over the world immediately get into a bidding war over it. Our kids are suffering, so watch what they’re going to do with land supply in another 25 years when they form government.”

And what does Memme want his legacy to be when his term as Chair is complete? “I hope they say OHBA is back and strong and that it’s the industry representative we always wished it could be,” he says.

McShane doesn’t expect Memme to miss a beat. “Mike’s a leader—a former president of Niagara HBA and Member of the Year of the NHBA and OHBA. He’s incredibly prepared before he walks into a meeting. And he’s the most detailed guy I’ve ever met. I call him Mr. Sticky Notes. You walk into a meeting, and he has a little square pad of sticky notes. He’ll write something on one and stick it on the page. And then two or three on the next page, and so on.”

“I’ve known him almost 20 years. He’s just a ball of energy and exudes positivity. You can’t help but want to be around him,” says Collins-Williams. “He has a deep knowledge of our industry, but he’s got an inquisitive mind and asks a lot of questions; he never assumes that he knows any issue inside and out. Around a boardroom table, that invokes a collaborative approach to understanding diverse perspectives on any issue. And that’s how you do government relations and be a leader. This is a man whose moment has come, and he will knock it out of the park.”

“I honestly think he’ll be a rock star as OHBA Chair,” echoes Leslie. “Once he decides to do something, he’s all in. There is no ‘partway Mike.’ He’ll do the research, read through details others won’t read through, and talk to people whose opinions others haven’t sought.”

You can’t understate Memme’s unbridled curiosity and enthusiasm for listening to—even embracing—alternative views while fully investing himself in the moment.

Those who doubt it should join Memme in the mosh pit at the next Rammstein concert.

And bring him an extra shirt.

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