2010 HBAR PRESIDENT: Kevin McNulty

President: Lifestyle Builders and Developers

The President's Message: Giving Back 

 In the book, Small Giants by Bo Burlingham, there is a lot of discussion about a business’s “mojo.” Specifically, he says that “[M]ojo comes, in part, from an active appreciation of a business’s potential to make a positive difference in the lives of the people it comes into contact with.

 Recently I attended the dedication ceremony for the first “Homes for Our Troops” project in Central Virginia. At the ceremony the keys to a specially built home were presented to Army Staff Sergeant Dwayne Cole and his wife. In early 2007 Sergeant Cole was severely injured while deployed to Iraq. A bullet that entered his neck at extremely close range lodged near his spinal column, leaving him a quadriplegic. Lifesaving measures enabled Sergeant Cole to be airlifted to Balad, Iraq and eventually to Walter Reed Army Medical Center where he began his journey to recovery during his six month stay. HBAR Past President Steve Thomas of Stephen Thomas Homes led this volunteer effort to build a house for Sergeant Cole. The list of contributors was long. It included many members of our association, who stepped up to the plate to offer free our discounted products and services, in order to benefit a worthy cause.
 
Our company, Lifestyle Builders & Developers, recently made a decision to donate net proceeds from the sale of our Homearama entry at Patriots Landing to the Children’s Hospital Foundation. The Foundation helps fund the operations of Children’s Hospital which started during a severe polio epidemic in 1917 in the basement office of Dr. William Tate Graham (Virginia’s first orthopaedic surgeon). Since then the hospital has grown tremendously and now provides customized inpatient and outpatient pediatric care to nearly 8,000 children annually with facilities in Richmond, Bon Air, Glen Allen, Petersburg and Fredericksburg. Despite numerous challenges and changes since it’s founding, Children’s Hospital remains true to it’s original mission – to provide compassionate care in a family-centered environment that turns hope into healing every day.
 
Just like Stephen Thomas Homes, we are finding the generosity of our trades – the product and service providers – that make building a home possible, to be overwhelming. 
 
I am sure that these two examples of giving back to our community mirror what a huge number of HBAR members do on a regular and ongoing basis. There is simply not enough space in this newsletter to recap all of them. 
 
It may seem like a strange time to be making donations such as this. Times are tough for all of us in the homebuilding industry. Over time, however, the industry will recover. Families that have been touched by tragedy will live with those realities for the rest of their lives. 
 
Our association is about more than helping us be better business people. It is about community, service, and giving back. It is about the “mojo” of our companies. It is about business being more than business. As businessman Danny Meyer puts it (in Small Giants), it is about “business having soul. He believed soul was what made a business great, or even worth doing at all. ‘A business without soul is not something I’m interested in working at,’ he said.”
 
I am proud and honored to be involved with an industry that always gives back, even during tough times.