Pure Will

Trouble found Pat Neal in the seventh grade in the early 1960s, back when he and some buddies pulled some shenanigans in Ron Givens' English class.

Neal and three other boys would hijack their teacher's flowerpots and move them to the roof. They poured salt in his plants. When Givens turned to write on the blackboard, the foursome would stand up out of their chairs.

But one day Neal's history teacher, Edward Johnson, lectured the young man about excess energy and messing around. The teacher called Neal an “unguided missile.”

Neal listened to Johnson. He focused his energy on school and becoming an entrepreneur and small business owner. A half-century later the shenanigans are gone, and now Neal, 65, is widely considered one of the leading homebuilders on the Gulf Coast, with projects in four counties and 16 communities. His firm, Lakewood Ranch-based Neal Communities, has built more than 9,000 homes since 1970.

A onetime state representative and senator and maybe-someday again politician, there are multiple factors behind the hows and whys of Neal's success. Timing, guts and savvy land deals play a big part. But it was those days with friends and mentors and first jobs in Des Monies, Iowa, and later Manatee County, working with his dad, that shaped his career.

There's also Neal's pure will, his ability to outwork everyone on every deal. His oldest son, John Neal, says the elder Neal would often get up at 3 or 4 a.m. on a Saturday, work five hours, then come home for family time. He'd be back at work by late evening. “The difference between Pat and everyone else is preparation,” says John Neal. “He never procrastinates.”

One sign of Neal's star power: Homebuilders in the Lee-Collier market took sharp notice in early 2013, when Neal Communities announced it would begin to build homes in places like Estero and Fort Myers. Longtime area real estate consultant Russ Weyer says Neal's presence in town is like stamp of validation in the market's viability. “Pat is real good at finding niches in the market,” says Weyer, president of Naples-based Real Estate Econometrics. “He's done very well here.”

There's also some serious growth to back up the anecdotes and accolades. Sales at Neal Communities, with about 125 employees, have more than doubled since 2011, from $110.9 million to an all-time, 44-year high of $230.3 million in 2013. There's also the 77.3% growth in sales over three years starting in 2009, when the company was at $62.52 million. Neal was named Entrepreneur of the Year in the Business Observer in 2012 and 2005.

Longtime area homebuilder Carlos Beruff, with Medallion Home, says the best thing about Neal, beyond sales figures, is his integrity — thoughts echoed by many others in the industry and the developer community. “When he agrees to something you can count on it,” says Beruff, who has partnered with Neal on several deals. “He has built that reputation over the years.”

The mentors
But what makes Pat Neal Pat Neal goes back, in many ways, to the relationship with his father, Paul Neal Jr. They started the business together. The duo's first five projects were on Longboat Key and Holmes Beach.

Paul Neal was a born salesman, his son says, a life-of-the-party kind of guy. The elder Neal was also a lawyer and site selection executive for a Holiday Inn franchisee in the Northwest. “He didn't sweat the details, so we were a perfect match,” says Neal, known for his hyper-focus on every fine point of a project. “We could communicate without talking.”

The Neals also discovered two shared traits: An unrelenting persistence to complete a project and an instinctive mathematical mind, which came in handy for land deals. “My dad,” Neal says in a written response to questions about the firm's early years, “was the best land buyer of all time.”

Paul Neal, the son of parents who went broke twice, once in the Great Depression, also refused to risk big sums of his money in the fledgling homebuilding business. He instead cultivated partnerships and other relationships to secure financing.

That lesson rubbed off on Pat Neal. He says low-debt projects have keyed Neal Communities' long-term success. Neal Communities borrows some money through the Community Development District (CDD) process. But it mostly finances communities on an as-it-builds basis. Neal is the sole majority owner in the company with one minority investor, his longtime business partner Frank Cassata, now retired.

Neal cites many other mentors in his life, people he admires and emulates, usually without their knowledge. One is his mom, Patricia Neal, an English teacher at Des Moines Technical High School and an avid reader.

Other mentors range from morally upright teachers like Johnson, who taught Neal the skill of engaging in others, to Sgt. Kalehici, his commander in the U.S. Army. Kalehici, says Neal, excelled at being able to turn mundane tasks into fun competition and games. That, says Neal, included low-crawls on the dirt in Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., in the late 1960s.

“I learned that life was just a game,” Neal says. “Zoning, for example, can be considered as a test of wills, skills and patience. If you look at it as a game to be won, just like a ping-pong game, you can see that winning is fun.”

Youth power
The mentors helped shape Neal's business acumen, but it was two jobs in Des Monies that formed his entrepreneurial spirit.

His first job was delivering newspapers for the Des Moines Register and the Des Moines Tribune. He quickly figured out the only way to make the job worthwhile was density: more papers and a shorter route. His first route was a lot of walking for only 58 papers, but he talked his way into a route that include an apartment building.

“I have always been able to keep track of time and costs,” says Neal, “to assure they were always considerably less than the income.”

More ambitious jobs followed. Neal sold Swipe laundry detergent and Fuller vegetable brushes door-to-door. He started his first business that had employees, Youth Power. The firm, Neal and up to eight employees, all fellow teens, started with mowing lawns.

Then, in a foreshadowing moment of Neal's future ability to quickly seize market opportunities, the startup soon added all sorts of services. Neal and his crews would clean out garages and sell scrap. They sold railroad ties and set up fair booths at the Iowa State Fair for churches. They painted homes for a short time.

Neal learned another lesson at Youth Power that served him well decades later: the value of good and loyal employees. The first time he encountered the issue was when he realized some Youth Power employees cut him out to work directly for customers. Neal paid them anywhere from the minimum wage at the time, 85 cents an hour, to $1.25 an hour. But they bolted anyway.

Neal realized he could pay better and still make a profit. He put that theory into practice at Neal Communities with employees and especially with subcontractors.

Long-term focus
An important facet of Neal's success, how he deals with setbacks, is something he learned later in life. In his 30s and 40s he internalized any real or perceived failure, he says. He often took it too personally.

But Neal says he began to incorporate an Eastern philosophy to overcome setbacks, where he focuses on the positives. “It's how you frame it,” says Neal. “I wouldn't call it a setback. It's a challenge and something you need to overcome. I taught myself to use that concept.”

While Neal is currently focused on the long-term growth of the company, he's at an age where logical “what's next” questions arise. That goes both for his plans for public office, if any, and the succession plans at Neal Communities, where both his sons, John and Michael Neal, are employees.

Neal is coy about his future plans for public office, and he's only a little more open about succession. The firm works with a leadership consultant about the transition to the next generation.

Yet retirement doesn't seem like a word, or a concept, Neal will easily embrace. “I told my sons,” Neal quips, “ that I will be around long enough to be a problem for them.”

Revenues
Year Revenue Growth
2011 $110.94 million
2012 $139.4 million 25.7%
2013 $230.3 million 65.2%

Employees
2011 82
2012 101
2013 126

Source: Neal Communities