Twenty-Six Years in the Same Community
A custom home building firm rooted in Pottsboro, Texas — and in the families, trades, and communities we have worked alongside since 1999.
How the Company Began
Tom Cece started building custom homes in the Lake Texoma region in the 1980s. In 1999, Scott Bates joined him, and together they formed Ceci Bates Custom Homes — the name drawn from both founders. In the early years, Tom designed every home the company built, and both of them went into the field to build it themselves.
What changed over the next two decades was not the values but the capability. Tom and Scott systematically replaced themselves in each function with people who could do that work better than they could — an architect whose design instincts transformed what was possible, a structural engineer whose precision elevated every plan, an interior designer whose presence from the first meeting changed how clients experience the process. The philosophy was simple: surround each project with the best people you can find, then trust them to do their work.
That philosophy produced the company that exists today — nine core employees, a collaborative team of specialists spanning three countries, and a process refined across more than a thousand homes.
“If you ask me what my number one trait is, it’s been selecting people to work with. That’s how I’ve gotten here. Selecting my partner, selecting the team members I have on the team, my clients.”
— Scott Bates
Two Decisions That Changed Everything
In 2006, Ceci Bates completed fifty custom homes in a single year — the highest volume in the company's history. It was also the year Tom and Scott realized that more was not better. The pride they took in their work came from the quality of each individual home, not from the number. Building fifty meant stretching resources, compressing timelines, and accepting a pace that left no room for the kind of attention they believed every client deserved.
When the financial downturn reached the Lake Texoma market in 2009, it forced a reckoning. Tom and Scott sat down with their core subcontractors — the framers, the concrete crews, the trades who carry the longest timelines on every project — and asked a direct question: how do we come back from this stronger? The answer was unanimous. Fifteen to twenty homes a year. Not fifty. A pace that matched the capacity of every crew involved, that gave each project the depth of focus it required, and that made Ceci Bates' work a meaningful share of each subcontractor's business — aligning everyone's interests around quality, not volume.
“We realized that really setting a limit on how many we would do was more beneficial than trying to just sell as many as we could. So, our focus is quality.”
— Scott Bates
That became the company's permanent operating model. Twenty-six years later, it still is.
The second defining moment came during the pandemic. When supply chains fractured and materials that had been available in a week suddenly had lead times of six months, Ceci Bates restructured how they procure and build. They began requiring clients to pre-select all materials during the design phase — not during construction — and issuing purchase orders at contract signing to lock pricing and secure supply before a single footer was poured.
The results were so effective that the system became permanent. Today, approximately seventy percent of every material used in a Ceci Bates home is purchased and secured before construction begins. The company now builds more complex homes faster than it built simpler homes during the pandemic — entirely because of the planning discipline that crisis demanded.
The People Behind Every Home
When a client begins working with Ceci Bates, they are not handed off from one department to the next. From the first conversation, the people who will design, engineer, and build the home are present — and they remain present through every phase.
Roberth Jordan is the architect and designer who conceives the initial vision for every project. He works by hand and digitally, translating what a client describes — and sometimes what they cannot yet articulate — into architecture that captures how they want to live. His ability to look at a lot, listen to a conversation, and return with a design that exceeds what the client imagined is the reason most projects begin with a moment of genuine surprise.
Heather is the interior designer who guides every material selection from the very beginning of the process — not after the walls are framed but while the design is still being shaped. She ensures that the stone, tile, wood flooring, fixtures, cabinetry, and hardware the client selects are not only beautiful but within budget and integrated with the architectural and structural plans. Her role exists because of a lesson learned during COVID: when materials must be secured early, clients need an expert beside them to make those decisions with confidence.
Bogdan “Bob” Taut is the structural engineer who elevates every project from a set of architectural drawings into a fully engineered building system. Working from Romania since 2020, Bob produces the structural plans that specify every beam, column, joist, and steel member — sized, located, and load-calculated — so that nothing in the field is left to guesswork. Scott credits Bob with elevating the company’s capabilities by approximately eighty percent.
In the field, three tenured superintendents — Steve Nelson, Brian Ward, and Tony Conklin — translate the precision of the design and engineering into the finished home. They have been with the company for years, and the quality standard they enforce day to day is what the client ultimately lives inside.
What makes this structure unusual is not the number of people involved. It is that they work together around each client from the start. Most builders in the region tell clients to hire an architect, get plans drawn, and bring them back. There is no team assembled around the client. At Ceci Bates, the architect, the interior designer, the structural engineer, and the builder are collaborating from the first meeting — each bringing a perspective the others do not have, and each ensuring that their domain of expertise is represented in the final result.
“They’re not just getting some salesperson. They’re actually getting the person that’s going to design the house, interior design the interiors, as well as us the builders.”
— Scott Bates
Part of This Community for a Generation
Tom Cece serves as the mayor of Pottsboro. Scott’s grandmother started an interior finish business in the area more than forty years ago — a business his cousins now run and that still performs all interior finish work on Ceci Bates homes. Other family members serve as subcontractors and vendors. The roots go deep — not because family gets preferential treatment, but because the same values that built the company were passed down through the same community.
In a town where you run into your builder at the post office and the restaurant, where a single conversation at a festival can reach every potential client in the county, there is no room for careless work. The company’s reputation is not managed through marketing — it is lived, daily, in a place small enough that every home is visible and every relationship is personal.
Over the course of twenty-six years, Ceci Bates has built more than a thousand homes in this region. At a recent open house for the new office and design center, over two hundred and fifty people attended. The vast majority were past clients. Some had homes built twenty years ago and still came to celebrate. That kind of return does not happen because of advertising. It happens because the work endures, and so does the relationship.
Twenty-six years. Over a thousand homes. The same community. The same care.
See Our WorkWondering if Ceci Bates is the right fit?
We work best with owners who value a structured process, a collaborative team, and a home built to last. If that sounds like what you are looking for, we have put together a straightforward way to find out.
Is Ceci Bates right for you?
What Drives the Work
After twenty-six years and more than a thousand homes, what keeps Tom and Scott doing this work is not the volume or the revenue. It is the relationships that remain long after the last walkthrough — and the knowledge that the homes they build are designed to outlast the decisions being made today.
“I could have done a lot of other things that probably made me a lot more money and probably been a whole lot less stressful. But nothing worth doing is easy, right?”
— Scott Bates
“Those homes mean more than any other home they ever would have ever had. And they also mean more than their money to pass on. So, taking that into account when you’re building one of those homes is extremely important.”
— Scott Bates
If what you have read here sounds like the kind of builder you have been looking for, we would welcome the chance to hear what you have in mind.
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