Jim Warmington Jr. represents the fourth generation of his family to lead The Warmington Group, whose homebuilding division,
Warmington Homes, made a name for itself building classic estate
homes for Bing Crosby, Henry Fonda and other legends of the silver screen.
But while Warmington carries on the legacy, the $560
million company itself hasn’t always had such consistency. During
the housing boom from 1998 to 2002, Warmington nearly doubled
the number of homes it was building in California and Nevada.
While the company was enjoying the unprecedented growth, little
problems kept creeping up. When Warmington asked the leaders
of each of his six divisions to send him the documents they used
to make contracts with homebuyers, it became clear that something had to be done.
“We had these six stacks, and every one of them was different,” he
says. “Not only were they different, some of the documents were
from the 1980s, some were brand-new and recent. Some had been
copied so many times that they had that fuzzy, ‘I’ve been copied 20
times’ look to them.”
Warmington showed the whole mess to his in-house risk management counsel, whose professional opinion was, “I can’t even
believe we’re having people sign this.”
As Warmington saw it, the sad state of the contracts was just the
most egregious example of an ongoing problem. As the company
grew, each division had gone off on its own tangent. The informal
culture of high ethics and integrity that worked so well when the
company was smaller needed an adjustment to work at its new
size.
“Everyone thought they were doing the right thing,” Warmington
says. “But in reality, we had grown so fast, we had lost control of
some of these important things, like the documents.”
At the height of the boom, Warmington set out to fix the developing disconnect between the company’s offices. He wanted to set
a cohesive, overarching mission statement of sorts, which once
agreed upon, it would get the formal corporate stamp of approval.
