Tendency to seek opportunities helps push Las Vegas entrepreneur

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Kenneth Smith showed an early knack for entrepreneurship.

As an undergraduate in Provo, Utah, Smith started up a frozen-yogurt shop. In two years, while studying for his business-management degree, Smith grew the business into a three-store operation. He sold the company after his senior year and financed his Harvard graduate degree with the proceeds.

Smith has spent the 22 years since in real estate, planning, developing and selling projects on the East Coast and in Utah. Smith has settled in Las Vegas, where, as president and managing partner of Glen, Smith & Glen Development, he’s overseeing planning and building of the 16.5-acre Sullivan Square. The southwest Las Vegas community will have 1,300 condominiums, 45,000 square feet of retail and 12 acres of open space upon its buildout in 2009.

Question: You started your first business in college. At what point in your life did you feel you wanted to own a business? Why did that become a goal?

Answer: If you go back, (the Yogurt Station) wasn’t my very first business. As a kid, I had paper routes and I sold Christmas cards. I was one of those kids who was always out working. I’d have three things going all the way through junior high school and high school so I guess I was intrinsically wired to look for opportunities and own businesses from the very start. It all just kind of came naturally to me.

Question: What traits did you have that made entrepreneurship natural for you?

Answer: I like the freedom to get things done how I see fit, and I don’t thrive in situations where people have preconceived ideas of how things should be done.

Question: Why did you decide to pursue real estate as a profession?

Answer: It seemed to fit my skill set. I’ve always really enjoyed creating physical forms, even from the time I was a kid in the sandbox building little cities and roads, and building huge forts in the back yard. Creating spaces has always been in the background.

In grad school, I thought real estate looked like a career that really fits my personality. It’s a lot of freedom, and it’s a lot of risk with a lot of payoffs when it’s done right. It’s not a really structured industry. There are a lot of entrepreneurs out there doing real estate.

Question: The market has changed significantly since you arrived in 2000. How has your job become more challenging in the seven years you’ve been here?

Answer: The growth of our company. I never intended for the company to be this big. We have 22 people. When we were at five people, I told my partner we’d never be bigger than 10. The challenge when you’re growing a company as fast as we have grown is to maintain a culture of quality. When you add one person and there’s already a strong culture, and everybody knows the ethical boundaries and the quality expectations, that one person just assimilates. They don’t overwhelm the culture. When you’re actually doubling and the new people come in with their own backgrounds, it’s very difficult to maintain a strong culture.

Question: How have you dealt with that?

Answer: We make our expectations clear to the next management level down. We choose the right management and we expect them to disseminate those expectations. We have company meetings where we vocalize who Glen, Smith & Glen is and what we are about. It’s very important to make our values known throughout the organization.

Question: What is your biggest professional success?

Answer: Building Glen, Smith & Glen. It’s a really good company, and I don’t say that as a reflection on me. I say it as a reflection on the people who work here. We really have a company here that works hard and plays hard. People enjoy working here, and we are bringing some very exciting products to Las Vegas and enjoying it along the way.

Question: What was your biggest career failure or disappointment?

Answer: I have a hard time looking back that way because I don’t stay disappointed or harbor a lot of "coulda, woulda, shoulda" feelings. But I have had some very disappointing projects that did not turn out as I would have liked. I’ve definitely had my fair share of real estate projects that performed less than optimally, but none stand out as grand failures.

Question: What did you learn from the projects that didn’t work out the way you planned?

Answer: The biggest thing I learned was to go with my instinct. In almost every case, there were early warning signs and they were mostly intuitive. It all looked great on paper and it should have worked. I could go through the checklist on the logic side, but in every case there was this underlying gut feel that something was off. The more I learned to trust that gut feel, the better a developer I became.

Question: You commission art for each project you develop. Why do you do that? What does it contribute to a project?

Answer: Life happens in the projects we build. We take that very seriously. That has a lot of implications, only one of which is the art we put in our projects. Art is a quality-of-life aspect that lends a development a certain feeling and fabric that would otherwise not be there. It’s a very strong influence on the environment we’re going to end up with. Art adds a dimension of beauty and culture. Whether you like it or not, you’re talking about it. And getting local artists involved is a great thing to do, because I believe we as a society need to support our artists. I think we’re in danger of losing public art in the United States, and that would be a shame. When you come from how can we make for a better environment, then adding art was a no-brainer.

Question: What are the long-term challenges in Las Vegas?

Answer: We need to really keep up with the infrastructure, and we need to look at culture. If we’re going to build a great society here, then we need to be able to attract young professionals and give them a lifestyle that will retain them, and culture is a very important factor in that. We need to look at sustainable development. There are some relatively inexpensive and simple things we could do immediately that will make a big difference. At Sullivan Square, we’ll save 45 million gallons of water a year by recapturing 100 percent of the water and reusing it in landscaping and cooling towers.

Question: How much more does it cost to build that way?

Answer: Only about 1 percent more. If you get right mechanical, electrical and plumbing engineers who know how to draw a green building from the start, the cost is almost negligible.

Question: What are your long-range goals for Glen, Smith & Glen? Where do you see the business headed?

Answer: Glen, Smith & Glen is at a transition point. For the last six years, we’ve been known mainly for our office parks, but we’re moving things to a whole new level. Our future projects are all much larger and more comprehensive.

They’re neighborhoods, they’re communities, they’re opportunities for us to create whole environments, not just 8-to-5 office environments. Sullivan Square is a way of living and a new choice that really hasn’t been available in Las Vegas.