Builder nails market for student housing.

• Author: Brown, Kathy
• Position: People

When Mel Morris meets with bankers, talk always turns to football. His partner in Greensboro-based Bostic Construction Inc. is Jeff Bostic, who played 14 years in the National Football League, including three championship seasons with the Washington Redskins. "Jeff always brings one of his Super Bowl rings to meetings and lets people try it on if they want to--and they always want to," says Morris, 62, the company's president. "We spend five minutes talking about a deal and the next 30 minutes about Super Bowls."

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Bostic and his brother, Joe, who also played in the NFL, started the company in 1991 with designs on developing and owning multifamily properties. The Greensboro natives hired Morris that year as construction manager. He became president and a partner in 1998 and now owns 67%. Jeff owns the rest. Joe sold his stake to them in 2003.

The Bostic name opened doors for the company in its early dealings with financing partners. Now its hallmark is speed, a strategy Morris cultivated. It recently took just five months to build a 192-unit complex in Auburn, Ala.--a project that would take most builders a year.

When Morris became president, he moved most of Bostic's materials procurement in-house and appointed product managers for everything from plumbing to doors and stairs. The company builds framed models of each new design in a 14,000-square-foot building adjacent to its headquarters to catch flaws before site construction...