Dell Loy Hansen: at the helm of a modern business empire.

AuthorBiton, Adva

Dell Loy Hansen is quick.

When he comes into a room, he knows exactly with whom he wants to talk, where he wants to go, whose hand he wants to shake. He's quick to laugh, quick to say what he wants to say. Asides, jokes, witticisms--those come quickly to him, too. And when it comes to business, Hansen's mind is at its quickest.

Love of business is threaded deep in Hansen's fibers. He started off as a boy from rural Utah who came to the big city--Logan--and became a home builder. Now Hansen is the owner, partner or principal of more than 45 companies with a total of nearly 4,500 employees, running 4 million square feet of office space with five downtown buildings and 76 apartment complexes across seven states. He is also the owner of Real Salt Lake (RSL), Utah's Major League Soccer franchise.

There is no venture, no stage in business, that Hansen is disinterested in learning. And his aptitude for doing so is well documented.

"I would characterize Dell Loy [this way]--he is, at his root, intense," says former governor Mike Leavitt, a longtime friend of Hansen's, under whom Hansen served nine years on the state's Board of Business and Economic Development. "If you could measure bits per second into and out of a mind, his happens at an astonishing speed.... He is able to calculate and envision three-dimensional equations in his head and see a picture at the same time. There is a lot of wattage with Dell Loy."

"He's brilliant when he sees a spreadsheet. He can look at a financial statement and pick it apart," says Steve Johnson, CEO of Hansen's Broadway Media. "He has an amazing ability to see the strengths and weaknesses in a financial statement."

Organization, efficiency, innovation and intensity--these are words that are high on Hansen's list of priorities in running a business. They also happen to be words that people have used to describe him. Everyone has a story about Hansen: RSL's chief business officer Andrew Carroll describes the time Hansen couldn't sleep and decided to read all 53 RSL partnership contracts, or the time he sat up at 6 a.m. to read Nordstrom s quarterly reports, for fun.

"Dell Loy can take a balance sheet or a contract and make it sing to him in a way that another person might look at a piece of art and gain understanding from it," says Leavitt. "[He] does love business. I think he loves the continuity of it, the mix of artistry and science. I think he loves the innovation that it creates. I think he likes what it does for people. It's a place where you can work hard and succeed."

Continuous Improvement

Dell Loy Hansen was born in Southern Utah. His father worked for the Soil Conservation Service, and his mother was a schoolteacher. Going to the "big city," Hansen says, meant seeing such bustling metropolitans as Cedar City, Dugway or Randolph. It wasn't until his seventh-grade year that his family relocated to Cache Valley, where Hansen's family finally laid down roots.

"I've maintained that my core roots are Cache Valley," says Hansen. His love for the area is strong. He seems to know every family from the area--in the Utah Business offices alone, to everyone's astonishment, he'd built one employee's childhood home, personally knew another's father, and inquired after the family of a third.

In college, Hansen began building houses. It seemed like a good way to make a living, until the savings and loan crisis of 1988. "The housing market imploded in 1988," says Hansen. "In October of that year, having worked all year to lose $100,000, I said, 'I'm not a home builder anymore.' So I closed the business."

Instead, Hansen...

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