Many people assume Gary Gorman hails from a privileged background because he founded a development company that has completed more than $2.8 billion in new construction and major renovations and brought 13,106 housing units online.

“That’s just flat wrong,” he says.

Gorman’s parents, blue-collar Mid-westerners who grew up on farms, expected their three sons to carry on their hard-work ethic, and they weren’t impressed with people who spent their time sitting in offices. Even so, Gorman decided to be a lawyer when he was in the seventh grade, only to realize, after earning a law degree from the University of Wisconsin and spending four years as an attorney, that law wasn’t his calling. He wanted to be a developer, but he didn’t have a balance sheet or a track record.

“I had to ask my parents to cosign a construction loan,” Gorman says. “That was humbling, to say the least, but they did it. And I give them a lot of credit for helping me start.”

Gorman launched Gorman & Co. in 1984 with two small renovation projects funded through the federal historic rehabilitation tax credit program and a mishmash of complex capital sources. “When you have no track record and no balance sheet, you have to show extraordinary returns to investors, and the historic credit in combination with some other things allowed me to do that,” Gorman says. But cobbling together funding from all those sources took enormous effort, and he ended up earning about $1.50 an hour on the projects.

Two years later, Congress created the low-income housing tax credit program to encourage affordable housing construction. Gorman immediately understood its potential. In 1988, he got his big break when Marie Keutmann, a Boston Financial investment banker who oversaw a fund for projects that generate tax credits, called and said she wanted to invest.

“I didn’t really know what a fund was,” Gorman says. “But I thought it sounded a lot better than making 500 phone calls to small investors who might invest $25,000. That was the first institutional deal I ever did and what really launched us into access to institutional capital.”

Some 20 years later, over drinks with investors and developers following a financial conference, Keutmann made everyone laugh with a story about a developer who listed his 10-speed bike on his initial balance sheet. That developer was Gorman.

He’s come a long way since then. Gorman & Co. is now a national developer with a home base in Wisconsin and offices in seven states. It hasn’t always been easy. Gorman vividly remembers a late-night conversation with then-chief operating officer Tom Capp in 2008, when it looked like the company might not survive the Great Recession. “It was a defining moment,” he says. “How would we handle the worst possible scenario and know we handled it as honorably as possible?”

Path to Success

For Gorman, reputation is everything. The first item on Gorman & Co.’s core values list is to build and protect the company’s reputation at all costs. “In 40 years, we’ve never defaulted on anything, and that has literally cost us billions of dollars,” Gorman says.

Gorman cites his team as the reason his company has accomplished what it has, and he works diligently to make sure every member feels valued and supported. He sends handwritten welcome cards to every new employee, and Rachel M. Snethen, Gorman’s director of development operations, says that’s just the beginning. When Snethen’s newborn son spent a week in intensive care, Gorman and his wife filled her refrigerator with groceries and fresh meals. He has supported her through the ups and downs of multiple sclerosis and helped her raise funds for advocacy work. “Up until working here, I had never had a boss like that,” Snethen says.

“There is something in his DNA, where he truly cares about people and their regular lives,” says Open Pantry Food Marts CEO Robert Buhler, who has been on the Young Presidents’ Organization Forum with Gorman for more than 20 years.

Gorman & Co. has also had to navigate misconceptions and prejudice about affordable housing, which are finally starting to crumble as communities realize they need workforce housing. “I tell our folks, our core competence is navigating complex political and financial processes to achieve feasibility,” he says. “It’s never easy. We don’t do easy stuff.”

Gorman’s key to success is irrational persistence—he never quits. “You don’t have to be that smart. You don’t have to be charismatic,” he says. “You just have to keep coming back and back and back and back. You have to keep going through adversity.”

The end result, building and rehabilitating housing that positively affects communities, is profoundly rewarding, he adds. It’s also key to attracting and retaining talented people who appreciate the mission.

Gorman is nurturing future affordable housing leaders by giving back to the school where he earned both his undergraduate and law degrees. He donated $1 million to endow a graduate track in affordable housing and sustainable development at the University of Wisconsin, where he also teaches a popular course on affordable housing development.

“Gary has already touched the lives of scores of undergraduate and graduate college students, with the numbers surely growing to the many hundreds if not thousands by the time he is finished,” says Tim Riddiough, a real estate and urban land economics professor at the University of Wisconsin.

In 2018, Gorman stepped down as president and CEO to become chairman of Gorman & Co.’s board of directors and created an employee stock purchase plan. Forty percent of the firm is owned by 28 senior employees, and 60% is owned by a family trust, which is instructed not to sell the company unless there are extreme circumstances.

Meanwhile, he has no intention of walking away from the company he built.

“I’m a lousy golfer,” he says. “If I sat on the beach for more than an hour, I’d shoot myself. My buddies and my wife tell me I’m failing miserably at retirement.”