You can’t miss Bill Van Orsdel’s signature project. West Glen Town Center grabs you by the sleeve as you make your trips to the megamall down the street, Jordan Creek Town Center, and holds your attention whenever you pull in.

Finding his downtown office, that’s more of a challenge. If West Glen is a searchlight slicing through a night sky, Van Orsdel’s retreat is a penlight. With old batteries. Hidden away on the second floor of a modest entrance in a building that’s mainly a warehouse, it’s not where you would expect to find one of Central Iowa’s wealthy movers and shakers.

“It’s perfect. It’s 180 degrees from what people imagine me in,” Van Orsdel said. “It’s off the beaten path, so it’s hard for people to find me.”

You might think a deal-maker would want people to find him, but at the age of 62, Van Orsdel has all the business network a person could need.

The Business Record is honoring the former insurance executive as one of the Central Iowa Business Leaders of 2006 for his leadership in the development of West Glen and in recognition of his remarkable leap from one industry into another.

It was an unplanned leap, according to Van Orsdel.

He and Gary Kirke, friends since eighth grade, made a huge success of the Kirke-VanOrsdel Inc. insurance brokerage and sold it in 1998. At that point, Van Orsdel’s plan was to manage his sizable portfolio of investments.

One of those investments became the West Glen you see today. Van Orsdel was part of a group that developed the Glen Oaks residential neighborhood, and the West Glen site was leftover land. “We always felt the location was superb,” he said. “We knew the Department of Transportation would put an interchange there someday.”

But he didn’t expect to become consumed by the planning and construction of a multi-building commercial development. “When I became the day-to-day manager of West Glen, it evolved into an unplanned, full-time responsibility,” Van Orsdel said.

“It has taken a lot more time than I expected,” he said, and he doesn’t expect construction to be complete until 2009. It might take even longer.

There’s more to keep him busy, besides the financial news streaming across the television next to his desk. He’s a silent partner in an East Village project and also is involved in a retail center and an affordable housing center in Colorado.

So is he officially a real estate developer now? “It looks like that’s where I’m headed,” he said. “I’ve got to continue to work; it’s one thing that keeps me going.”

“He’s always been a driven man,” Kirke said. “When he was a linebacker at Roosevelt High School, he was a hard-charging guy with a lot of energy. When we sold KVI, we were relatively young. I’d go crazy if I retired, and Bill is the same way.”

Kirke was in the insurance industry in Chicago and Van Orsdel was working at a stock brokerage in Washington, D.C., when they got together at a D.C. pub one day. “He said he was interested in the opportunity to make a lot of money, and I told him I was getting into a new area of insurance and wanted somebody without an insurance background to go in with me.”

They joined up and decided to come back to their hometown; it’s an insurance center, it’s centrally located, the work ethic is strong and they could do business with people they knew, such as John Ruan III at Bankers Trust Co.

Now Van Orsdel finds himself in the development game at an ideal moment, with strong development momentum continuing in Greater Des Moines. “Everything we’ve talked about in the last 30 years is becoming reality,” he said. “The energy level in Greater Des Moines is the highest I’ve ever seen it, and that will attract more business and entrepreneurs.”

He may be hard to find in person, but young people with a dream do manage to find his phone number and tap into his experience. “Every week I get calls for advice from entrepreneurs,” Van Orsdel said. “They’re going someplace they’ve never been before, and any illumination helps them formulate their plans. It’s always fun to talk to entrepreneurs and see what they’re thinking.”

He says his own mentors in the real estate business have been Denny Elwell and Richard Margulies.

Ask Van Orsdel what makes him most proud, and he’ll say it’s his family. He and his wife of a dozen years, Wicker, share a blended family of five.

In the business realm, Van Orsdel now has two major accomplishments to take pride in. First he helped build a successful insurance company and now it’s West Glen, where the first phase is filling quickly.

“You’re proud of anything that you built from nothing into a success,” he said. “And especially when it’s an industry where you didn’t know anything when you started.”