Brian O’Neil

Brian was 16 the first time he set foot on a job site — sweeping floors and hauling materials for a friend’s father who’d just bought a contracting company in Evanston. It was supposed to be a summer job. Instead, it became a career. Two years in, he’d already worked his way from laborer to Lead Carpenter.

That kind of momentum doesn’t stop on its own. Brian spent the next five years as Vice President of Operations, running crews and learning the realities of what it takes to build something well. It’s the kind of experience that’s hard to fake — and it’s exactly what set him apart when he moved into design.

For the past nine years, Brian has built homes’ second acts: additions, renovations, full transformations. His background gives him an instinct most designers don’t have. He doesn’t just draw a layout — he knows whether it can actually be built, and how. Problems other designers might call impossible, Brian treats as a starting point.

Today, as Director of Sales and Marketing at Design First Builders, Brian oversees sales, operations, HR, and client experience across the Gallop family of brands — a role that draws on every chapter of his career so far.

Ask what he loves building most, and the answer is immediate: basements. To Brian, a lower level is pure potential — a home theater, a bourbon tasting room, a golf simulator, whatever the space is asking to become.

Away from work, Brian is outnumbered at home by four kids and their sports schedules — baseball, basketball, volleyball, you name it. He’s usually at the grill or sneaking in a round of golf when he can, and come March Madness, Masters weekend, or the World Series, he’s not to be disturbed.