Chief Executive Officer · Founder · Owner

Origin

William Charles Kemper was born in Kettering, Ohio in 1965. His great-grandfather Charles Kemper owned a machine shop in Kettering and crafted parts for the Wright Brothers. His mother's lineage, by family account, traveled the Atlantic on the Mayflower; her father performed the first United States military aerial free-fall jump that occurred over Lake Michigan.

A note on the name: Bill is legally William Charles Kemper. For readers outside the United States, where the convention is less familiar: men given "William" at birth are commonly called "Billy" as boys, with the natural progression that they are called "Bill" as men. In Bill's own case, the change was deliberate — he chose to start writing "Bill" on his school papers at around 13 years old. A number of extended family members and old friends from childhood still call him Billy.

Early Years

Before high school, Bill was very active in the Boy Scouts and ran a string of independent jobs: delivering newspapers, lawn maintenance, snow shoveling, seed sales, and door-to-door magazine sales. As a teenager, he worked at Architectural Antiques in Dayton, Ohio — owned by an uncle — doing demolition, cleaning, sorting, and stripping paint from old woodwork. The business reclaimed, restored, and replicated old architectural ornamentation, and the experience built a deep appreciation for craft, Old World architecture, and freestyle creative discipline.

In high school he joined Distributive Marketing and Education Clubs of America (DECA), where he studied retail and marketing principles. Through entirely separate channels — none of them part of his public education — he left high school knowing how to run a structural framing crew in Gwinnett County, Georgia, and with a working sense of how architecture layers itself upon the planet.

Going Independent (1986)

In 1986, at age 20, after three years of part- and full-time learning the rough carpentry trade, Bill went out on his own as a structural framing contractor in Gwinnett County, Georgia. He had no partners with substantive construction background. His father was a manufacturer's sales representative for first-generation high-end medical devices — MRI, EKG, ultrasound, CT scanners.

The Halle Residence and Beyond

At 25, Bill had Mr. Claus Halle's residence at 1180 West Conway, Atlanta, GA 30327, under construction — simultaneously as framing contractor and building consultant. Mr. Halle was a former president of Coca-Cola. Bill integrated the work of the project's architect, general contractor, structural engineer, engineered-lumber manufacturer, and the 22-person crew on his own payroll. The City of Atlanta's building inspectors said it was the best work they had ever seen, and other building authorities have said the same of subsequent projects.

Concurrent with the Halle project, Bill was also managing another significant Atlanta-area residence at 4665 Riverview Rd NW, Sandy Springs, GA 30327 — known as Chestnut Hall, an 18-acre European-inspired English Tudor estate that has, at times when it has been on the market over the years, been named the most expensive home for sale in Atlanta. It was most recently listed in the neighborhood of $40 million.

Over the years, Bill developed an international reputation for complex roof cutting and the fabrication of radius and elliptical components. He was also a pioneer in using 3-D CAD on the jobsite — literally — in the early 1990s, producing precision production and assembly drawings for many of Atlanta's finest addresses.

In the early 2000s, at the request of Xybernaut (the wearable-computer manufacturer, since dissolved), Bill demonstrated wearable computing at Fort Benning, Columbus, Georgia. The philosophy was simple: get the 3-D information of a job site off the desk and into the field where it belongs. The job site has always been 3-D.

Document Discipline

Although he holds no legal training, Bill has been crafting highly custom proprietary contracts for over 35 years. His document portfolio spans sales and purchase agreements, commercial invoices, master fee protection agreements, sub-fee agreements, joint venture agreements, usage fee contracts, monetization contracts, trade contracts, general and sub-contracts, business plans, and KYC/AML pre-compliance packages — work that has earned the respect of owners and principals, suppliers, senior bankers, accountants, and counsel.

Decades of architecture, engineering, and construction automation experience — combined with tens of thousands of hours within financial, technology, and commodity markets — give Mr. Kemper an unusually wide vantage. He uses that vantage, along with his due diligence and packaging discipline, to help coachable parties work smarter rather than harder.

Introduction to Bank Instruments (2006)

In 2006, Bill was the victim of a Bank Guarantee buy/sell — sold to him as "business funding." The arrangement promised that $100,000 placed up front would return $10 million in business funding within 14 days, with full refund of the $100,000 if it did not perform. It never performed, and the funds were never returned. Two parties signed the contract: Theodore "Ted" Sweeten and Sam Banks. Both are accountable for that contract. Sweeten was subsequently sentenced to 48 months in federal prison in a separate, unrelated matter (see DOJ press release) — that federal case had nothing to do with Bill's contract with Ted and Sam, and is cited here only because it confirms that Sweeten was not the sound counterparty he had presented himself as. Bill is unaware of any charges against Sam Banks in connection with the contract he signed.

At the time, Bill did not know what a bank instrument was. He was operating under the impression that he was dealing with a private-side banking transaction — uncommon publicly, but consistent with the confidentiality his business plan (Magister Operis) was designed to require. The reasoning behind seeking the funds was the business plan itself.

The lesson proved expensive but valuable. Looking back at the contract today, Bill can identify the structural defects clearly: the parties were attempting to pool money to buy and sell bank guarantees, with no demonstrated proof of a real seller or a real buyer. In Bill's current understanding, most "sellers" in that market do not own anything to sell, and absent both verified ownership and a verified buyer, no managed buy/sell program can legitimately exist. That insight — and the broader one about private placement, high-yield trade platforms, and project funding — now informs the precision of his pre-compliance work.

REO, CMO, and Beyond (2008)

Bill's official involvement in REO, CMO, commodities, bank instruments, and private placement transactions began in 2008, when the son of a retired federal judge asked him to lead a group of intermediaries — primarily real estate agents and brokers — focused on REO and mortgage portfolios.

In the years since, Bill has observed the methods, conditions, mentalities, and patterns of brokers, intermediaries, and principals across a wide range of subjects. The pattern most often resembles the same carelessness and lack of awareness he had observed for years in architecture, engineering, and construction: significant time and effort wasted by people preferring to work harder rather than smarter. The receipts of that pattern are well-documented at many of Atlanta's finest addresses.

Legal Documentation Discipline

Bill's thirty-five years of proprietary construction contracts, subcontracts, and related legal documents have earned the respect of bankers, counsel, courts, and juries. Most attorneys are focused on litigation protection. Bill is focused on litigation prevention. Every legal document Magister Operis creates is crafted for win-win across all parties.

Magister Operis is glad to engage experienced attorneys and paralegals as collaborators, but does not require legal hand-holding to draft sound win-win documents. Most legal practitioners are more familiar with the impact of a retainer in their account than with the verbiage required to produce maximum result against a competent retainer.

Years in the financial and commodity sectors have stripped most things of mystery. Bill has been personally trained by a former top-tier global banker in real KYC/AML pre-compliance and in how senior international bankers actually think and operate today. Substantial outcomes become possible when parties are capable of that level of accountability — and one can only lead the horse to water.

Institutional Roles

Bill serves as a goodwill ambassador on behalf of an internationally respected institutional foundation, and as pre-compliance officer for its affiliated institutional investments operation.

Document Craft

Bill works skillfully across custom sales and purchase agreements, commercial invoices, master fee protection agreements, sub-fees, joint venture agreements, trade contracts, general contracts, subcontracts, business plans, and KYC/AML compliance packages. He researches legal terms and clauses, sources templates for modification, and drafts documents from scratch that contain the necessary elements of a legitimate contract.

Bill is not an attorney, and quickly raises the recommendation of a competent licensed attorney whenever consultation will add value, efficiency, or legal precision to a transaction. Once parties prove the key facts of a deal, Bill can blend the relevant relationships, contracts, transaction codes, and references into a single coherent structure. The result is highly custom, proprietary documentation, co-engineered across principals, partners, intermediaries, financial institutions, production partners, and legal consultants.

What Magister Operis Is — and Isn't

Magister Operis is not here to replace architects, engineers, or builders. The firm takes over where those professions typically leave off — at the seam between excellent design, sound engineering, competent construction, and the institutional, contractual, and capital structures that determine whether a project actually closes and operates well. True efficiency begins inside the art of master building, which is the definition of architecture itself.

Magister Operis™ is the evolution of what started many years ago.

"A MANSION IS AN ATTITUDE — NOT A MAGNITUDE."
— wck

A Note on Identity — for Due Diligence

A federal criminal case from 1990 — United States v. C. Kemper, 908 F.2d 33 (open record) — sometimes surfaces in name-based searches. The defendant in that matter is a different person. William Charles Kemper of Magister Operis is not that defendant and has no connection to the matter.

During the time frame of that case, Bill was simultaneously managing structural framing operations on Mr. Claus Halle's residence at 1180 West Conway, Atlanta, GA 30327 (former president of Coca-Cola) and another significant Atlanta-area residence at 4665 Riverview Rd NW, Sandy Springs, GA 30327 — both projects on file with the City of Atlanta and Fulton County. That schedule, and the physical record of the construction work it produced, is incompatible with the activities of which the other defendant was accused.

— Bill Kemper