Peeks [ Persona ] Raising the Bar January 2007

by Dan O’Brien, Area President of Trilogy
Images by Russell Byrne

Trilogy developers are raising the bar for local living and lifestyle. Dan O’Brien conveys the attitudes and philosophies Trilogy brings to the task of developing their extraordinary communities.

I grew up in Milwaukee as the middle child of seven. My passions have always been focused in the arts. Especially music. As a youth, I taught myself guitar, keyboards, and drums and I enjoyed playing in garage bands. During high school I picked up spending money from bar band gigs. I sometimes wrote my own music, and one of the things I enjoyed most was watching people enjoy our performances.

Entertaining people and enhancing their lives is the common thread that connects those days in the band to the things I’m doing now.

Finding my way
I graduated from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. It offered the most liberal curriculum available and that was appealing to me. I intended to be a lawyer, but my mom derailed that goal when she told me, “If your legal plans don’t work out, you need something to fall back on.” And then suggested, “Try accountancy.” It was no random suggestion on mom’s part, since my dad was a professional accountant. I found accountancy to be natural and easy. I majored in that, along with computer science — back in the days when computer programs ran on punch cards.

I spent a few years as an auditor working with mergers and acquisitions in a succession of accounting positions. Life changed in a moment, it seemed, during a Christmas party in Chicago. I had a glass of wine with an incredibly charismatic individual named Mickey Sanderman, who was the first person I ever met from the home building industry. I hadn’t previously been aware that there was such an industry.

Mickey really was charismatic because by the time he had finished describing his business to me, I had made up my mind to quit my job and go to work for his company, which was called Sundance Homes.

Mickey Sanderman was influential in shaping my worldview. He became my mentor and my guide. When faced with some decisions I still sometimes ask myself, “What would Mickey do?”

Mickey was an out-of-the-box thinker. In Chicago during the recession that took place during the 70s, the housing market essentially died. Mickey not only figured out how to continue selling homes, but he was selling them with zero interest financing. Back in those days nobody ever did that.

I didn’t know when I joined Sundance that their balance sheet showed debts to be $13 million more than their assets. That was kind of shocking, but Mickey was a genius and we paid that off in six years. Sundance went public four years later and I worked for them three more years after that.

I left Sundance Homes because I found some homebuilders with a vision that went beyond merely building houses. I visited an active adult retirement community in Arizona where Del Webb was developing a Sun City project with a level of execution that transcended anything I had ever seen before. They had an attention to detail I had never previously experienced. 

It was incredible and I was hooked!

A Better Way of Doing Business
Del Webb had developed a revolutionary business model, but beyond that they had created a corporate culture superior to anything I had seen before. Sundance had been doing Guerilla Marketing, for example, and was good at devising unconventional methods to promote its business. Del Webb, however, had built into the core of its business a special sense in which people genuinely cared about one another.

I eventually became the General Manager of an effort to develop the first four-season Del Webb community in Chicago. I learned first-hand about the special energy that is generated in a start-up when people come together in the great creative act of bringing something out of nothing.

While I was in Chicago, Pulte Homes acquired Del Webb and I found myself out of a job with the merger of the management staff of both companies.

My professional path eventually led me to Shea Homes. I found Shea to be a great fit because I found that the qualities that I thought were so special about Del Webb were ten times more prominent in the corporate culture at Shea. For example, one of my first interviews in taking the job was with Peter Shea, the CEO. During the entire interview he probed into how well I would take care of his customers. He wanted to know if I would be a fit with his organization. He wanted to see at what level I would give back to the community. He said straight up that his interest was in knowing how happy I would make his customers if he gave me the job.

I knew I had found a home. I started working for Shea Homes on March 31, 2005, as the Northern California Area President of Shea’s Trilogy Division.

We are pursuing social purposes as well as business goals and have instilled a philanthropic attitude into the fabric of the company. Employees at all levels donate time and resources to civic efforts and human development projects. The company demonstrates that it is possible for a person to get something more out of work than a paycheck.

We discover all the time that standing shoulder-to-shoulder with fellow workers in performing acts of selfless service creates a different kind of bond among the members of a project. It seems like a paradox, but a group of workers that shares an outward focus of serving others develops inwardly in becoming a tighter and more effective team. “It is by giving that you receive,” someone said. And he was right! Our personal lives as well as our business benefits as we work for the community.

In Shea I had found a perfect cultural fit, and also discovered that I had become part of a genuinely innovative organization. Shea has a record of doing things that have never been done before stretching back to the Golden Gate Bridge and the Hoover Dam projects. Both of them were thought to be impossible feats, but the J.F. Shea Company figured out how to do what had never been done before.

Shea continues to use out-of-the-box thinking. This is reflected in our architecture. We take more risks than other companies. For example, the design of our clubs tends to be a little edgy. People are glad to belong to something that’s completely different than what they’ve seen before.

Innovation is one of Trilogy’s main cornerstones. It takes the philosophy into every community that it develops. Our business model is based upon innovation. We’re always looking for the answer to the question “What can we do in this community that we’ve never done before?”

The Vineyards — A Case in Point for the Trilogy Style
The Vineyards at Marsh Creek will feature a landscape of active vineyards and olive tree groves, a 31,500 square foot Los Meganos Club featuring Abby's Culinary Studio, Sawa Spa for Health and Wellness, and state-of-the-art Delta Athletic Club with resort style outdoor pool and a Junior Olympic indoor fitness pool.

Proposed amenities include a boutique winery, an outdoor amphitheatre, and 18 acres of adjacent commercial/retail development.

These are all premier amenities, and we are also developing the next generation of housing architecture by incorporating a “Living Designs” concept in which we’re building homes that will appear as if they had been on the site for several generations and had grown with room additions added over the years. Living Designs was a new challenge for our architects who are accustomed to facing challenges. It will result in houses of a type that’s never been seen before. Some think we’re taking risks in seeking to provide an environment where people can expand and explore, but we see it differently.

Our innovations are guided by marketing research. When we go into a community we will invest $150 million or more in a project before we build our first home. More than any other developer in this industry, we expend a lot of resources in asking consumers what they want. Last year we sent a 10-page survey to 20,000 people and received an extraordinary 25 percent response rate.

People were anxious to talk to us. Plus, on three separate occasions we conducted focus groups during which we sat people down and encouraged their input. We’re conducting marketing research over a large range of ages. For example, we’re learning what people in their 40s want so we can begin to accommodate our development to their expectations as they grow older.

Our first cornerstone is exploration. For example, our research uncovered a huge interest in learning more about culinary arts, so we designed a teaching/demonstration style gourmet kitchen. People will be able to sit around the island experimenting with various dishes and learning about such topics as wine pairings. Outside the kitchen will be our herb gardens.

We’ll work with local colleges and have guest lecturers speak at our Center for Higher Learning.

The second cornerstone is our emphasis on wellness. As a boomer, unless I look in a mirror I don’t think of myself as the age I am. I’m interested in improving my health and looking for ways of eating better, doing the right exercises, taking better care of myself. For the first time I’m thinking of putting skin products on my face.

Research shows that a lot of people share my feelings about this so we are consumed with the idea of providing wellness for our members. Our Sawa Spa, for example, is being designed with four treatment rooms. Features of the spa will resonate with the history and culture of the area.

The third cornerstone of Trilogy development is social connections. We are engineering our facilities to promote social interaction. All the mail will be delivered to our social club, for example. Social interactions will naturally take place as residents go to the club to get their mail. The person might stop for a latte at the cyber café and will naturally have social interactions with others.

A conference center will be available for catered parties. We’ll have card tables in the locker rooms where people can sit down and play cards.

Where do we go from here? We’re going to carry on emphasizing innovation in providing lifestyles that addresses wellness, social connections, and exploration into the future. We’ll continue enhancing people’s lives in remarkable ways.

One of the trends we’re working on is to move beyond wellness to actual healing. Current research into this is being encouraged by one of our Trilogy residents who discovered healing following the death of her husband through her community. What innovations could we create to do this more deliberately in the future? How can we design a community to lift people’s spirits or help people connect and make new friends? We’ll figure that out.

Who knows what we’ll be doing after that? I imagine that it will be remarkable!

In some ways I still feel like the kid with a guitar that I used to be. I’m engaging in a creative effort that is lifting the spirits of the people I’m serving. They think we’re great and that feels good! °