Wiki

Common Ground

How Common Ground built Lïef Builders' site and record

Years of owner's-side work got a public home in the Lïef family, a site that search and AI engines can read, and a record of the decisions behind it.

Jesse Fowler had spent years on the owner's side of the table: a Las Vegas relocation run without a general contractor, two years as a volunteer owner's representative at a museum, a tornado rebuild in Kansas. Lïef Builders is where that experience now lives as a practice, with services that run from project advocacy and insurance coordination to cost control and preconstruction.

Common Ground's decision was to treat Lïef Builders as a company site in the Lïef family, on the same company brand as Lïef Development, and to put the owner's-side work on the record as stories with the decision and the reasoning in plain view. The brand system behind the family was a team effort.

What Common Ground did

  • Built liefbuilders.com in the Lïef company brand. Jimmy Khounlavong made all 12 commits to it between March 29 and September 23, 2026, from the initial commit through search setup, analytics and the footer credit.
  • Committed a change to both Lïef company sites on July 17, 2026 that writes every route out as a static page with its own canonical address, so search and AI engines read the page itself and not an empty shell.
  • Put the owner's-side work on the Common Ground record: the Shelby American relocation delivered without a general contractor, the LACMA owner's representative seat and the Greensburg, Kansas rebuild. Each is told as a decision and the reasoning behind it, with the three-condition test for going without a general contractor in the open.

What came of it

  • liefbuilders.com is live with its services, capabilities, markets, team and a published fact file for AI engines.
  • The owner's-side record is public on the Common Ground wiki, linked from this page.
  • Jesse Fowler's description on the record is a general contractor and developer who has held every seat on a project, with owner's representation as one of them.

Credits

  • Common GroundCreated by Common Ground. Site, search and AI readiness and the owner's-side record.
  • Jesse FowlerPrincipal behind Lïef Builders and the owner's-side work on the record
  • Jimmy KhounlavongBuilt the site and its search and AI readiness layer, as part of a team effort on the Lïef family of sites

Lïef Builders' problem is that the party doing the work is not the party paying for it, and the payer cannot check what they are told. The same problem shows up across Common Ground's work in other industries: diligence before an investor sees a page, an audit before a rebuild, a fee that pays only when the client wins.

A medical device enters the US: diligence before the raiseDiligence, a data room and a go-to-market plan for an Irish medical-device company's US entry; five findings surfaced before any investor saw a page.A PE-backed medical group: one map before any platformFractional COO running a 90-day operations and efficiency audit for a PE-backed multi-office medical group: map first, govern second, build third.A short-term rental manager's launch: a fee an owner can say backAdvisor on the business model and launch of a boutique short-term rental management company in Phoenix: one flat fee and the controls it needs.Ground Truth Peptides: the site that earns its gradesA free, independent, evidence-graded reference for 42 research peptides built because honest information did not exist; sells nothing, takes no vendor money, and does not change a grade when the news changes.

On the record

About Common Ground

Common Ground is a principal-led venture group built around one premise: we build. It builds, funds, operates, automates with AI and protects companies from the inside, and it carries the work from strategy through execution instead of stopping at the recommendation.

The group works across related industries on purpose. Construction, capital, brand, technology and law sit in one room, so a developer's problem can borrow from a product launch, and a deep tech company's sales plan can borrow from how a builder wins a bid. Every engagement is a chance to carry what worked somewhere else into the next company.

Common Ground grew out of two practices: Jesse Fowler's fractional work, running since 2016 and as Three Trails since 2019, and Lip Loi Creative, since December 2019. The principals brought them together as Common Ground in April 2023, when Alex Prince and Prince Capital came in as well. Zen Aegis came in the same way in December 2025.

Jesse Fowler, Execution and Development · Alex Prince, Capital and Investment · Jimmy Khounlavong, Brand · Robby Prochnow, Technology and AI Architecture · Nick Scavio, General Counsel