Continuing the excitement of the Eccles Business Buzz podcast’s tenth season, host Frances Johnson talks with Clark Ivory, CEO of Ivory Homes, Utah’s Number One Homebuilder since 1988. Clark will also be inducted into the David Eccles School of Business Hall of Fame this spring.
The Ivory companies have built more than 25,000 homes and 4,000 apartments. Clark has also held civic leadership roles and helped launch efforts including the Utah Impact Partnership, Utah Preservation Fund, and Utah Community Builders. He and his wife Christine have funded 4,000+ scholarships, established the Ivory University House (housing 623 students with proceeds supporting scholarships, internships, and stipends), and cofounded Ivory Innovations with their daughter Abby to address housing challenges via the Ivory Prize and affordable housing projects.
Clark links education—especially literacy, citing only 50% of Utah third graders currently reading at grade level—to upward mobility, homelessness, and workforce needs. He also outlines his vision-goals-plan-accountability “success formula;” and emphasizes resilience, principles, and incremental growth through setbacks and market uncertainty.
Eccles Business Buzz is a production of the David Eccles School of Business and is produced by University.fm.
Eccles Business Buzz is proud to be selected by FeedSpot as one of the Top 70 Business School podcasts on the web. Learn more at https://podcast.feedspot.com/us_business_school_podcasts.
Eccles Business Buzz is a production of the David Eccles School of Business and is produced by University FM.
Episode Quotes:
How to develop communities through a business lens without losing sight of people’s needs
[31:24] The thing I love about Utah is that there are so many people that are willing to work together to solve problems and to come up with solutions. It's just so nice to be able to get together, collaborate, bring all the resources to bear, get the Gardner Institute looking at things critically, coming up with a new approach to governance for the state, which we did, and then nominating the right people to help lead out. And I think we're actually going to make some headway with homelessness. There's a lot of people contributing, but it's amazing how we've been able to get a much higher level of expertise in understanding the challenge and what can have a long-term impact that will actually move the needle instead of just throwing money at a problem or, you know, not ever measuring outcomes or understanding that we have to maybe re-look at the entire system and what's broken.
What the Ivory success formula means to Clark
[15:40] I just had opportunity after opportunity to do little things, and I had this view and this vision that I could become something. And I had this idea that maybe someday I'd go to a really top-notch business school. And that's the vision.And you always need to have a longer-term vision. And then if you do, it's easier to focus on goals that are one year or five year, and then you work harder to achieve your plans that you put together. So, that's been a process that I've shared with every organization I've been in and with all of my Ivory team members. And I ask them to share their success formula every year. And I always tell them, you know, "If you don't like my success formula, don't use it, but have your own." And the important thing is that you do have a great big vision of where you want to go, and then you aren't afraid to set goals. I always told all my kids, "It's always important to have goals, but you can change them anytime you want when they don't make sense, because circumstances change." You have to be able to be resilient and still be positive and say, "Okay, this has been ruled out, but now what is my goal? How am I going to adapt? What am I going to do differently?" And so, this has become part of our ethos at Ivory Homes and with Ivory Innovations and every organization I'm working with.
How Clark views affordable housing as key to economic growth
[36:57] If we can create great neighborhoods that really have a lot of people prospering, you know, people are so much more likely to graduate from high school, go on to college, have higher incomes, et cetera. And some of the zip codes and neighborhoods in the state are more challenged. And I love the fact that the University of Utah is really investing in the west side of the valley now, with this new hospital project that's going to get started soon. And we've also looked at neighborhoods out there and where we can really make a difference. I think we, like you have said earlier, we have to look a little bit earlier in the process of, you know, an individual's growth. And the earlier we can help them, the better. And then, of course, they're likely to avoid a lot of the pitfalls of life if they do get off to the right start. We're not going to be able to do it everywhere as a state, or we are not going to be able to do it in our own communities, but we all need to be heading in that direction.
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