Editorial
Front Page - Friday, October 16, 2009
Local home builder lays foundation for success moving forward
David Laprad
One might call James Pratt, president of Pratt Associates, a hard working man.
As evidence, one could point to the more than a dozen residential developments in and around Chattanooga in which Pratt’s company is involved. In some developments, Pratt purchased the land, put in the infrastructure and built, or is building, the homes. In others, someone else owns the land and he built, or is building, the homes. Then there are the developments in which Pratt is just one of many builders helping to create a neighborhood. In each case, it’s easy to spot the old-fashioned charm and trademark quality for which Pratt’s homes have come to be regarded.
So one would be correct in assuming Pratt works hard. But the facts don’t tell the whole story.
Many people assume a man who’s worked hard has made sacrifices, usually at home. But as Pratt tells the story of his success, a unique portrait of a man who remained equally dedicated to his family emerges.
“Let me take you all the way back,” he says, sinking into a chair in his model home at The Overlook in Hixson, one of his new projects.
“I was born and raised in a small Mississippi town called Inverness. Archie Manning and I were in the same class. I played ball against him in high school,” Pratt says with a mild Mississippi Delta accent.
After Pratt graduated from Ole Miss with a general business degree, he returned home and worked in a small bank for four years. When Pratt’s father asked him to become part of the family retail propane business, Pratt agreed on the condition his father would let him grow the business.
“He was conservative and didn’t want to borrow money, but I knew we’d have to take on some debt,” says Pratt. “At the time, we had two stores in two towns. We grew that business to seven stores in different towns and expanded into wholesale gasoline and diesel fuel distribution.”
Growing up, Pratt spent portions of his summer vacations in Monteagle, Tenn., where his family owned a vacation home. When Pratt became an adult, many of the parents from his region began sending their
children to Baylor and McCallie. So when Pratt’s oldest son,
Win, was in eighth grade and about to change schools, Pratt began thinking about sending him to Chattanooga as a boarding student.
“This is where it gets interesting,” Pratt says. “We came up here and liked Baylor, but my son wasn’t crazy about being a boarder. So I got this wild idea to spend the summer with him in Chattanooga, thinking I could get him comfortable with going to school here.
“My propane business was in good hands, so I brought Win up here and played baseball with him all summer. As our time here wound down, though, he still didn’t want to come up here and board, so we drive back to Mississippi thinking Chattanooga was in our rearview mirror.”
Pratt couldn’t get Baylor off his mind, though, and one day told his family they were moving to Chattanooga. A friend told him he had two communities thinking he’d lost his mind — the one he was leaving and the one to which he was moving.
After moving his family into a rental home on Signal Mountain, Pratt took flying lessons, purchased a plane and began flying back and forth between his home in Tennessee and his business in Mississippi. He also purchased a propane business in Cleveland, Tenn., which grew in leaps and bounds.
“In 1995, I sold my business in Mississippi, which allowed me to spend 100 percent of my time here,” says Pratt. “So I simplified my life.”
The pieces of what would eventually become Pratt Associates started falling into the place in 1998. First, some out-of-towners showed an interest in purchasing Pratt’s latest propane business; around the same time, Pratt purchased a 12- acre property, simply because he thought it was “a decent piece of land.” In 1999, he unloaded the propane business and started his first full-blown housing
development.
Six months later, Pratt parted ways with his partner on the project and asked Win, a biology graduate from UT Knoxville, to join the business. After Win signed on, he told his father he was unhappy with their lack of progress on the project. “The builder was just dragging around,” Pratt says. “My son told me we could do a better job, even though we’d never built a house before.”
Win was right. While he learned everything he could about building houses, Pratt traveled to Florida to research different kinds of communities, the pair convinced some of their original subcontractors to stay on the project and five years later, Pratt Associates completed work on its flagship
development.
In the meantime, their work on the project drew interest from out of town, and Pratt Associates soon found itself involved in similar projects in Nashville, Tenn., Bowling Green, Ky., Knoxville, Tenn., Savannah, Ga., and in Chattanooga’s East Brainerd area. “It was going to be a sideline project for me,” says Pratt, “but it mushroomed. We did really well.”
When the subprime mortgage crisis hit in 2007, however, Pratt was caught with too many spec houses in his inventory and suffered a major setback. But by diversifying his approach to projects, modifying his product line and expanding his offerings to include a portfolio of around 100 homes along the entire price spectrum, Pratt survived.
“We’ve done well this year,” Pratt says, citing improvements in the economy and federal incentives as the reasons behind their renewed success.
“It’s a wild and crazy story,” says Pratt, “but those are the facts.”
When asked if he ever considers simplifying his life again, Pratt says he second-guessed himself when the economy went bad, but in the end, he knew he’d rather work through the difficulties than quit. “I’m not a slow down kind of guy. When I get up in the morning, my engine is running and I’m ready to make things happen,” he says. “You can’t look back. You have to look forward and figure out how to work through the bad times.”
Pratt has emerged from the recession with a tighter focus on Chattanooga and a renewed commitment to treating his clients the way he’d want to be treated.
“We’ve got name recognition in Chattanooga, but when you take that to another market, it doesn’t have the same degree of credibility,” says Pratt. “So our plan is to get out of our development work elsewhere and be the best we can be in and around Chattanooga.”
With the economy showing more and more signs of improvement and his middle son joining the business, Pratt has every reason to be optimistic. “It’s fun to go to work every day with two of your children,” he says.
Pratt looks back on his story with wonder, thinking about how a decision centered on his son, rather than his business pursuits, started him down the path to where he is today. If he’s paid a price for his success, it was a small one. “Business stole my golf game,” he says, laughing. “If I ever slow down, I’d like to pick it up again.”
Pratt slow down? Don’t look for him on the links anytime soon.
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