Mr. Nice guy in a hard hat - Terrystiles

South Florida CEO, Dec, 2003

With one million square feet of property under his control in the downtown--all of which he built--Terry Stiles is a hard driving developer. But he is also a down-to-earth patriot of the community--and an extremely flexible businessman who has stayed on top of real estate trends for decades.

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A tough thing happened to Terry Stiles when he was 23 years old. While traveling overseas in Singapore, his father, Howard Stiles, died of a heart attack.

The year was 1971. The Watergate scandal was in its infancy. Nixon was in the White House and America was mired in Vietnam. A student at the University of Kentucky, the surviving Stiles had no idea what to do with the small Fort Lauderdale real estate company his father had left him.

"We had two carpenters, a laborer and a girl who worked in the office back then," he recalls. "We were building spec warehouses, 15,000 square feet, and I thought they were huge. Matter of fact, when my Dad died we had one that was empty and I didn't know how we were going to pay for it. Luckily, I rented it."

Luck may have played a part. But fast-forward 32 years to the company Stiles had built--and to a veritable skyline of buildings from Fort Lauderdale beach to the Everglades and beyond. The half-dozen employees Stiles Corp. had in 1971 has grown to 450. This year, revenues are expected to top $200 million. The company owns a million square feet of space in downtown Fort Lauderdale alone, and has developed 20 times that. But to see how the young man grew his company, one needs to stay in that long ago year a little longer.

"Back then I was confronted with, 'What do you do?'" Stiles remembers, looking down from his 10th floor Fort Lauderdale office to the husk of one of his construction projects that will soon overtake his view, and at a competitor's 43-story high-rise that already has. "Do you keep this thing going, or do something else? Maybe look to some options, because Disney World was getting started at that time. I went up and interviewed with Disney because they had health insurance and all that stuff. But one thing led to the next and a couple of my Dad's friends allowed me to build some things for them and gave me a shot. ... I don't know if [continuing the firm] was a direct vision. It was kind of like just go in every day and fight your butt off to figure out what you're going to do the next day."

There was one valuable lesson learned early on from a banker who had served Stiles' father when he was growing the business. "I wanted to borrow 50 grand and the banker said, 'No. I'm not going to loan it to you. You figure out how to make the fifty thousand, because your Dad would do that.' So, I had to walk out with my tail between my legs ... [but I] kept fighting it out."

South Florida was a good real estate battlefield in those days, as it is today, with downtown Fort Lauderdale now looking like an Ayn Rand-inspired vision of higher, faster, better, with 11 separate high-rise towers under construction. Then as now, winning in the real estate war required planning, execution and allies that Stiles learned to put together like building blocks. Along the way, he would develop a reputation as a man's man, an ethical individual (in a profession that has more than its share of the other kind), a successful developer of office parks and a heavy hitter in his community. An anomaly of sorts: Mr. Nice Guy in a hard hat.

One can see a few key decisions in Stiles' rise to prominence in real estate. But two things he didn't do: He didn't go to work for Disney (although much later he would build the company's Orlando headquarters). And he didn't borrow the $50,000.

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"Flat-out, there is no better man than Terry Stiles," says H. Wayne Huizenga. And Broward's most influential business man is not just talking about business. He's talking about the person. "Not only is he honest and sincere, he's a real gentleman. He's a philanthropist and a great guy--and that's just on the personal side. On the business side, he's a great entrepreneur. Not only did Terry build a lot of stuff, but he made a lot of it happen."

Huizenga credits Stiles with keeping Blockbuster Entertainment in Fort Lauderdale during the rapid expansion years of that company a decade or so ago, when a $10,000 investment could turn to $1 million in five years. Huizenga also remembers Stiles, in his role as head of the nonprofit Museum of Science & Discovery, convincing him to donate $3 million to help build the "Blockbuster IMAX" theater (a short walk from Blockbuster Plaza on Southeast 2nd Street, which Stiles also renovated). In 2001, Stiles' company built a fountain downtown with 250 water jets and 85 colored lights which dance to music. The popular fountain is named for Huizenga.

When the office market was hot, which was not so long ago (Stiles Corporation's revenues grew 400 percent in the 1994-2001 period). Stiles was hot into developing office parks. When it was not, in the economic slowdown following Sept. 11, 2001, he got out of it, saved from the worst of the recession by diversifying into real estate products that were going strong--developing automobile dealerships on the heels of the biggest car-buyer incentives in history, and shopping centers anchored by major grocery stores.