BUILDING FOR A HIGHER CAUSE

When Verlyn Rosenthal started Westwood Building Company in Colorado Springs back in the mid-1990s, he of course wanted to support his family and be successful. But he also toyed in his mind with another question: “What if, along the way, I built a house and gave the entire profit to missions?”

He talked it over with his wife, Valerie, who was positive. He then began approaching various subcontractors he knew well, who were Christians like himself—framers, roofers, painters. “Would you like to get in on this, too? You are entirely free to say no, and I promise it won’t hurt your chances of working for me on other projects. But if you want to jump in on this one house and do the work for no gain, come along. At the end, when the house sells and I see how much money is left on the table, we’ll all get together and decide where to give it.”

The subs were excited. Most told Rosenthal they would charge only for materials, with no mark-up; meanwhile, their labor would be free. Even one realtor who wasn’t a churchgoer said he’d chip in his commission as well.

Rosenthal managed to get the first lot donated free, in light of the ultimate purpose. The crews went to work. By the next year, the house was completed and sold for a little more than $400,000. The selling realtor (Valerie Rosenthal) donated her slice of the action. After all the bills were paid, the net profit turned out to be $100,000.

At a celebration dinner, the dozen or so participants gathered in a private room of a restaurant to talk about what they had accomplished. The receiving organization (Mission of Mercy) made a presentation, laying out several needy projects. Where should the $100,000 go?

Each contractor or other vendor was granted one vote. “But it didn’t take us long to decide,” Rosenthal remembers. “Being a bunch of construction guys, we all tended toward the project that had a building aspect to it!” They chose to put the money toward a school in Nepal that would serve nearly a thousand students. Land had already been purchased there and an ambitious foundation put into the ground. This new $100,000 would raise up two full floors, plus a separate residence for teachers. “All of that would have cost millions to build here in America,” says Rosenthal. “We went out of the restaurant that night absolutely fired up at what our earnings were going to do.”

The following year, Rosenthal and his friends organized a second “mission house” project, as they called it, in the same neighborhood. This time they were able to get the lot at a 50 percent discount. Once again, the project netted $100,000 in the end. The recipient this time turned out to be a school in Kisumu, Kenya.

A third effort in a different area of Colorado Springs—again, on a donated lot—sold for closer to $500,000, earning some $175,000. This money was put to use in an assortment of five different Mission of Mercy projects in needy parts of the world.

Rosenthal smiles as he thinks about people who have said to him, “Westwood isn’t all that big; you build only a handful of houses a year. How can you afford to build one whole house and not make anything on it?”

His reply: “Well, Somebody Else is keeping score here, and He has a different way of working the numbers. I’ve had houses that came in under budget, so that my profit line was bigger that what I had forecasted. I’ve been blessed with quick sales of my spec houses, which has saved me interest on construction loans.

“The truth is, it has gotten to the place where I’m thinking, ‘How could I NOT do this?’ My business has been blessed beyond my wildest imagination. The sooner I can get started organizing another project, the happier I’m going to be.”

Even subcontractors say to him at times, ‘Hey, Verlyn, when are we going to do another ‘mission house’?” They are as eager as he is to make a difference in human need.