Dan Mitchell has been on a job site since he was 6 years old, growing up in a family of builders long before he understood that construction would become his life.
He was born in Tennessee, but spent his early years in California, where he put himself through high school and college before moving back to Tennessee in 1993 and settling into the community his family had always called home, right at the foot of the Smoky Mountains.
That region, shaped by tourism and second homes and a landscape people travel from all over the world to see, ended up defining his whole career. He started out building log and timber frame homes because that was what people wanted when they came to the mountains, and watched those projects grow from small cabins into massive custom builds. Along the way he found himself solving a problem nobody had really named yet: how do you make a log home energy efficient? That question pulled him into research and innovation years before green building became a marketing term.
“That kind of took me down the path of energy efficiency before that was something that was cool. People started using it as buzzwords, green building and that kind of stuff. So I did a lot of research, a lot of innovation, bringing that into the log home and timber industry, and then that segued into what we’re doing now, which are kind of these higher-end modern mountain architecture homes.”
We spend real time in this conversation on something builders and homeowners often blur together, the difference between a performance home and a healthy home.
“A healthy home is completely different when we start talking about it. It’s about VOCs. It’s the off-gassing of materials that we put inside the homes. It’s about eliminating dust and outside debris from coming into the home. How do we make the house into like an Igloo cooler, to where we can keep the cold or the heat inside and keep everything else outside, that’s kind of the key.”
That distinction connects directly to the name of his company, Eagle CDI, and what those letters actually stand for.
“It stands for Construction and Development with Integrity. Everything that we do, we try to put quality of construction, but everything behind us is the integrity in which we operate in. For us, the definition of integrity that we tell our clients is this: when we’re working on a job site, they’re not there. But we are working hard to do the right thing every single day, and that’s the integrity.”
Dan also opens up about his path before any of this started. At 15 years old he was living on his own, an emancipated minor, working lawn jobs to put himself through high school and then college.
“As a kid, I was an entrepreneur. First paper route at 11 years old. By the time I was 12 years old, I had three paper routes. I had a lawn business. By the time I was 15, and I know this sounds crazy to people, I literally moved out of my house when I was 15 years old. I became an emancipated minor, so I learned how to live on my own quickly, which was unique.”
He talks about wrestling and the coach who saw something in him during a rough freshman year, and how the discipline from that sport shaped how he runs his business today. That thread of listening rather than pushing shows up again when he describes how he actually works with clients now.
“What I’ve learned more than that is to listen to my clients. They will tell me what they’re wanting, what they see, what they’ve learned, what they’ve been exposed to within the construction industry. And I try to dig that information out of them, the good, the bad, and everything in between.”
There are a few stories in here that really stayed with me. One involves a garage that ended up cantilevered off the side of a mountain in Gatlinburg because a client changed his mind three quarters of the way through a build.
“The house grew exponentially to what it started off with. It was gonna be a little 3,000 square foot unit… turned into almost a 6,000 square foot unit. Then the client comes and says, we’re three-quarters of the way with the house, and he says, ‘Man, I have to have a garage.’ And I’m saying, ‘Joe, we don’t have space for a garage here, we’re on the side of a mountain.’ And he says, ‘I gotta have a garage.’ So literally I designed and built a garage, a three-car garage at that, that literally hung over the side of the mountain.”
Another goes back to 1998, a lawsuit that threatened to end his company, and an unexpected offer of support from the National Association of Home Builders that changed how he saw his place in this industry from that point forward.
“They gave me $75,000. NAHB did. I’m a hillbilly builder in Tennessee, young guy, I was 30-something years old… The fact that they recognized as a member that I needed help and they stepped up to the plate and put that amount of money forward, that’s the moment that I realized I was part of something bigger. There’s an industry here supporting all of us that are doing what we did.”
And then there is 2019, a health scare that started with what he thought was a sore back.
“In 2019, I was put into the hospital, not knowing what was going on. I was at Disney World with my grandkids, and my back started hurting… By six o’clock that night, I couldn’t walk. I was kind of paralyzed. By six o’clock the next morning, I was on a med flight from Orlando back to Knoxville, and by that evening, I was in an ICU ward, and then I stayed in that ward for over 45 days. I got MRSA inside my spinal column somehow, it paralyzed me from the waist down, and I was told I was going to die.”
We also get into how referrals actually work in his business, and why 80 percent of his clients find him through word of mouth rather than any advertising he puts out.
“So we do what’s called a parade of homes here in the Knoxville region, and I’ve had homes in the parade of homes. But the irony is, my clients that I’ve built homes for even three and four and six years back still go to the parade of homes to see if my competitors are doing the things that I’ve been doing. And they go out of their way to tell some of my competitors, ‘Hey, well, Dan built our home.'”
By the end of this one we get into what Dan thinks builders get wrong today, why he still believes so strongly in being involved with his local and national home builder associations, and what more than three decades in this business has taught him about the difference between building a house and building something a family will actually live in for the next 30 years.
“I realized that my life is like a soccer game. The first 90 minutes went by, and now the referee walks out there, holds up the placard. I’ve got extra time. So my life now is on the extra time. I don’t know when that’s gonna expire. They didn’t put a number there, but I know that now I’m on extra time.”
It is a conversation with a lot to sit with, and I think you will walk away from it with a different appreciation for what goes into a truly custom home.
About Dan Mitchell
Dan Mitchell is a native of Tennessee and the owner and president of Eagle CDI, Inc., established in 1994. Eagle CDI specializes in unique, high-performance, energy-efficient custom homes and high-end log and timber homes, and is also known for panelized, concrete, and modular construction. The company has developed Knoxville’s first green community and consistently draws roughly 80 percent of its business from word-of-mouth referrals. In 2008 Dan earned the Certified Green Professional designation, and he also holds NAHB Master Builder and Certified Aging in Place Professional credentials.
Dan has held nearly every major leadership post available at the local, state, and national level of the home building industry, including President of the Home Builders Association of Tennessee, NAHB National Area 7 Chairman, Past Chairman of the NAHB Custom Builders Council, and current member of the NAHB Board of Resolutions. His recognitions include Sevier County Builder of the Year in 2006, Tennessee State Builder of the Year in 2019, induction into the Tennessee Hall of Fame Builders in 2020, and the 2017 SA Walters Award for Service Excellence, one of the highest honors NAHB gives.
Outside of building, Dan has worked with Operation Family Home to provide mortgage-free homes to wounded veterans, supplied materials to Habitat for Humanity, partnered with the local nonprofit LIVE to help low-income families with remodeling needs, and built handicap access ramps for elderly members of his community through his church.
EagleCDI website: https://eaglecdi.com
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