Tom Gipson
President, Thomas Gipson Homes
A Quiet Driving Force
Kevin Campbell wasn’t surewhat to expect when he moved his family from Americus, Ga., to Raleigh, N.C., to work with builder Tom Gipson on Habitat for Humanity’s Home Builders Blitz 2006.“I was thinking, ‘I hope he’s a nice guy since I have to work with him,’” says Campbell, who serves as Habitat’s director of industry relations to the home building business. What happened next has stuck with Campbell ever since. Gipson and his wife, Pat, invited Campbell and his family to dinner at their home. Shortly after they arrived, Gipson asked Campbell’s 15-year-old twin sons if they’d like to see some cars.
Heading downstairs to the garage, the boys were stunned to find a collection of vintage vehicles, including a 1966 Mustang convertible, a 1969 Jaguar XKE Roadster, and a 1947 Rolls Royce Sedanca de Ville.
Then, Gipson did the unimaginable.
“When you go to prom, you can use any of these cars you want,” he told them. They swung for the fence and picked the Rolls. “By the end of the night, they were calling it ‘the prom car,’” Campbell recalls. When it was time for Campbell’s son, Micah, to attend his junior prom, he and his date arrived at the dance in the Rolls with Gipson behind the wheel in chauffeur’s cap, ready to roll out a red carpet for their entrance.
That’s just the kind of person Gipson is—someone who takes delight in making people feel valued, and who doesn’t wait to be asked when he sees a way that he can make a difference. He’s also an extraordinarily generous individual, who has used both his own money from years as a successful home builder and an inheritance to establish a family foundation that has supported a host of local charities.
A Community Visionary
The list of charities that he has contributed to is extensive and includes Pan-Lutheran Ministries, the Food Bank of North Carolina, Muscular Dystrophy Association of Wake County, Grace Lutheran Church, the Assistance League of the Triangle Area, North Carolina Symphony, the Baptist Home for Children, and the Homebuilding Community Foundation.
One of his latest contributions is a $1.5 million leadership gift to the North Carolina Museum of Art to help fund its expansion. His gift will underwrite the entrance court, which will be the first thing patrons see when they arrive at the museum, a contribution that he initiated. That’s rare in the art world, where museum directors often spend years building relationships with major donors. Gipson offered to help without being asked.
“[Tom] identified himself as someone who wanted to help,” says museum director Dr. Larry Wheeler. “I’ve cultivated people for a dozen years and gotten far less.”
But by far, Gipson is best known for starting Habitat’s Home Builders Blitz, a five-day event in 2006 that drew 1,000 builders and trade partners to approximately 130 sites nationwide. The 459 houses that were built that week marked the largest single event in the organization’s history.
It all started in 2002 in Raleigh, when Gipson organized and led the first builder blitz of 12 houses, in large part because he had worked on Habitat houses and found himself stifled by the pace.
“It’s frustrating to go out and supervise church ladies putting down a floor in a day,” he says, “when I could do it with a nail gun in an hour.” If builders did all the work, he reasoned, families would have houses sooner and Habitat could build more houses. The following year, he did it again, doubling the results.
The National Stage
The next step seemed clear enough. If a group of builders could do this in Raleigh, imagine the impact if it were done nationwide.
Gipson could imagine it and took the idea to Millard Fuller, founder and then-president of Habitat for Humanity International. To the surprise of everyone—except Gipson, perhaps—it was accepted.
“It’s unprecedented for one person to come into Habitat,” Campbell says, “propose a national event, and get it approved.”
Habitat International’s involvement included sending Campbell and another staff person from its headquarters in Americus, Ga., to Raleigh to work with Gipson. For the next 18 months, Gipson traveled extensively—at his own expense—to meet with Habitat affiliates and builders, lining up participants by explaining how it worked in Raleigh.
Having Gipson, a respected, successful home builder there made all the difference, Campbell says. “It changed the whole conversation,” he says. “It’s hard to get builders to go to meetings. We made our first presentation in Charleston, [S.C.] Everyone said yes. The affiliate talked about 12 houses; the builders said they’d do 20. It’s an unbelievable concept to get that many people together to build that many houses in that short amount of time.”
A Different Approach
It’s no surprise at all that Gipson could make the builder blitz happen, says Tim Minter, executive vice president of the HBA of Raleigh-Wake County, where Gipson has been an active member for years.
“Tom is one of the most persistent people I know,” Minter says. “He’s a very quiet person, which is unusual for a project that big. He works behind the scenes, plugging forward. At the beginning, he got resistance from me. Every time we talked, he’d bring it up. It was always, ‘You got a minute?’ That’s where he’s so different. We’ve got a lot of Type-A personalities in the HBA. He’s an A-plus, but it’s a different approach.”
He also leads by example, Minter says, and has an ability to share his vision for an end result. “He’s able to paint a picture we’re all able to follow,” Minter says.
One of the first builders Gipson called for the original builder blitz—and every once since then, was Mark Massengill, a Raleigh-based custom builder who served as his co-chair the second year and as site supervisor for the 2006 blitz.
“I thought he was talking about a couple of houses on a Saturday afternoon,” Massengill says of his first conversation with Gipson about the original blitz build. “I wound up giving away three houses. … I don’t get up at 5:30 a.m. unless I’m going fishing. I was up at 5 or 5:30 every morning to make sure people had what they needed. It’s as good a tired as you can get.”
The result, Massengill says, has been 56 families in Raleigh—and hundreds more nationwide—who have homes who would not have had them otherwise.
“A little girl wanted to show me her room,” he says. “She’d never had one. The woman I built the house for was raised in the projects, but generations after her will do better. The outreach is huge. … It shows a builder who thinks he can’t afford it or do it that it’s not that big of an outlay.”
The Next Chapter
For Gipson, the result was more than worth the effort it took to make it happen.
“Without me, those 459 homes wouldn’t have been built,” he says of the 2006 blitz. “I gave 40 percent of my time for three years and got 459 homes worth $25 million. How can I spend my time and my talent any better?”
The answer is, by doing it again. Gipson is back on the road, recruiting for the 2008 builders blitz, scheduled for the first week of June. The number of sites has jumped from 130 to 200, despite the downturn in the housing market, a testimony to Gipson’s ability to show builders that if everyone does their part, they can make an impact.
