Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Best in business
We profile the Sun Sentinel Excalibur Award winners, starting on
A lot of South Florida landmarks bear fingerprints of Charles L. Palmer, the Sun Sentinel’s 2016 Business Leader of the Year in Broward County.
Yet it’s likely that the gregarious businessman’s deepest imprints are on the untold numbers of people he has influenced — as company owner, mentor, fundraiser, board member, diner patron and friend.
As president and chief executive officer of his family’s diversified holding company, North American Company, since 1972, Palmer, 75, has helmed real estate developments in Broward and Palm Beach counties and nurtured a wide range of companies across the nation for nearly half a century.
For his entrepreneurial success and community involvement, Palmer won the Sun Sentinel Co.’s 2016 Excalibur Award for Business Leader of the Year in Broward County. The award was presented Thursday at the Boca Raton Resort & Club.
North American’s holdings have included more than 30 companies, including a Chicago-based chemical manufacturer, a meat processing company based in Molina, Ill., and a Minnesota educational software company that marketed the once-ubiquitous program, The Oregon Trail.
But it’s in the community where he was raised that Palmer’s legacy will be felt for years to come.
With Palmer in charge, Sea Ranch Properties LLC developed and built about 1,500 condominium units and 2,400 single-family units in Broward and Palm Beach counties.
Among them is Sea Ranch Club of Boca Raton, a luxury waterfront community completed in the early 1990s. The 550 residences within its four 18-story towers range in area from 1,432 square feet to 6,500 square feet.
In Davie, a 9-foot bronze statue of Major William Lauderdale, after whom Fort Lauderdale was named, graces the entrance of the 620-acre, 2,000-home Forest Ridge subdivision off Pine Island Road. Both the statue and the development are products of Sea Ranch Properties, the real estate development arm of North American Company, the family business Palmer has headed since 1972.
Palmer’s company also commissioned the statue of Miccosukee war chief Sam Jones in Tree Tops Park in Davie.
In downtown Fort Lauderdale, the Broward Center for the Performing Arts sports a $58 million renovation that Palmer, as longtime chair of the center’s finance committee, oversaw through its 2015 completion.
“I like the diversity of what I do,” Palmer said in a recent interview. “And I like living in Fort Lauderdale. I grew up here. I know everybody here.”
Palmer’s roots extend to an era when Fort Lauderdale was another sleepy Southern Florida town.
His grandfather, Robert H. Gore Sr., owned the Fort Lauderdale News and employed Palmer in a variety of jobs at the paper, including selling copies to passers-by on Sundays outside St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, where his family attended services.
He’s even attached to that most famous of Fort Lauderdale exports — the pioneering Spring Break movie from 1960, “Where the Boys Are,” where he had a bit role as a member of the collegiate rabble at State Road A1A and Las Olas Boulevard. “I think I was paid $8.50 and got a box lunch. But I got to look at the pretty girls.”
The family sold the paper in 1963, and Palmer headed out of state, earning his bachelor’s degree at Georgetown and his Master of Business Administration at Northwestern.
Then he took a job with the venture capital arm of Allstate Insurance “which is basically like being a management consultant with money and you can make your own decisions.”
He stayed about seven or eight years before his grandfather “made me an offer I couldn’t refuse to come down here and take over the family business.”
Palmer’s companies made millions of dollars for his shareholders while Palmer served as mentor to emerging business leaders like Ray Fleites, who was a commercial banker early in his career when the two met.
Palmer hired Fleites to work for his private equity fund.
“He’s extremely intelligent and equally versed in marketing, accounting, financial engineering, operations — all aspects,” said Fleites, who now manages exports for international freight forwarder Sisto International in Miami-Dade County. “He’s good on his feet. He could articulate the most complex financial transactions to anybody very quickly.
“I learned everything I know from him.”
While protégés absorbed Palmer’s knowledge and experience, the community at large profited from the quality-of-life improvements that grew out of his philanthropic activities.
Kelley Shanley, president and CEO of the Broward Center for the Performing Arts, says Palmer was chair of the center’s finance committee when Shanley was hired as executive vice president 18 years ago.
Palmer isn’t your typical arts patron, Shanley said. “You’d more likely find him hunting than sitting in the theater,” he said. “He’s an unlikely supporter of the arts. But I think from the beginning, Charlie understood how important the arts are to the fabric of the community.”
Palmer brought his business acumen to his volunteer role and made the Broward Center stronger, Shanley said.
“He understands all the details. He would dig deep into the [financial] numbers and pull a number out and say, ‘How did this number end up looking this way?’ And we’d have to have an explanation.”
For a long time, Shanley said, the center’s finance committee would prepare for meetings trying to think of “What questions would Charlie ask us?”
“That kind of thinking kept us on our toes, kept us accountable for all the things that really mattered about how we were operating the business. Now it’s become second nature to us. We know the kinds of questions he's going to ask. And of course, now, we've always got the answers.”
When the arts center’s overseers decided in 2011 to renovate, Palmer volunteered for even more committees, Shanley said.
“Charlie served as both member of the [fundraising] committee — going out there, trying to support the campaign, get people interested and bring in others willing to support us.
“But he also served as chair of the construction task force. So his experience building buildings and managing construction was really critical to us ending up with such a great project that was on time and on budget and really has become a great new amenity for the Broward Center.”
Gesturing across his office, Palmer said he doesn’t expect to ever stop working. “I’ll probably die on that couch over there having a heart attack when I’m 85 or 90 years old.”
Currently he is partnered with veteran South Florida home builder Harry Posin in several real estate ventures, and is a managing member of The Wetlandsbank Company, which sells conservation land to developers to mitigate destroyed wetlands.
Palmer also owns a cattle ranch in LaBelle, between Lake Okeechobee and Fort Myers, where he feels as at home having breakfast in the local diner as in the boardrooms of the companies he controls.
“The ranch has gotten to be a real business because I’ve raised over 800 cows, 41 bulls, and have a lot of calves to sell every year,” he said.
Palmer has a daughter, Ashley, with his first wife, who died of cancer in 1998. He remarried in 2002 to his second wife, Laura. Daughter Ashley became a schoolteacher, married and had two sons.
Whether Palmer’s grandsons enter the family business remains to be seen, but it’s a good bet they’ve been exposed to Palmer’s work ethic.
“I don’t live anywhere close to the means I could but I wasn’t raised that way,” Palmer said. “The monetary rewards you get aren’t really important to me. It’s more the thrill of the chase, the fun of the game, and the ability to see whatever you did become successful.”
For younger businessmen who won’t have the good fortune to work for Palmer, he offers this advice:
“The one thing I learned a long time ago is never substitute your judgment for readily available facts. I’ve hired a number of Harvard Business School graduates in my career. The ones I hired right out of school never worked out, because they would never sit back and get the facts first. They just want to jump to a conclusion.
“Get the facts first. Then apply judgment.”