Independent streak pays off for Jensen
Picture a boy playing in the back yard on his family’s Iowa farm. He’s the youngest of five brothers, which is probably enough of a challenge right there, but he’s looking at some other problems that need solving, too. There’s no spare cash in the family budget, so if he wants to play with farm toys, like the machinery his dad uses on weekends, he has to build the tractors and implements himself out of dowels and scraps. If he wants toys like the equipment his dad drives as part of his weekday road construction job, he has to build those, too.
And when the boy first wants to hit a golf ball around the yard, the only suitable tool he can find is a croquet mallet. Eventually, as part of the family’s one big recreational luxury, a $100 annual membership at a nearby nine-hole course, he gets to use real golf clubs – but he has to share one set with all of his brothers.
Flash-forward to today, and you find Dickson Jensen at the age of 41, working at a super-sized desk in a new office building in Ames. His company, the Jensen Group, constructed the building, and it’s surrounded by acres of houses and apartment buildings that he built, too. In the past 10 years, “I’ve built 200 houses, 1,000 apartment units, strip malls, banks, convenience stores, churches, gyms,” Jensen said. Plans and mementos of the luxurious Harvester golf course that he created near Rhodes decorate the office.
And hanging high on one wall is a weathered, paint-free croquet mallet – the one he used as a little kid back in Audubon.
AN INDEPENDENT STREAK
Jensen has made a mark on Central Iowa by going his own way. He left a well-paying job as an engineering instructor at Iowa State University in 1993 after he built his own house – he designed it and did a lot of the carpentry, concrete work, painting and so forth – and realized that there was a $30,000 difference between the cost and the finished value.
He decided he would enjoy building houses, he could make a living at it — and he would love being his own boss. “That’s very important to me,” he said. “I’m made that way.”
Two houses a year would be just right, Jensen figured. Within six months, he was thinking: How about four per year? The number kept doubling, and these days, the Jensen Group takes in approximately $20 million in revenues annually, by his estimate, from construction and property management.
Over the past seven years, Jensen has concentrated his construction efforts on the southwest corner of Ames – at the opposite end of town from Interstate 35 and the proposed shopping mall. “This land was for sale for quite a long time,” he said. “People didn’t think it was the right spot to build.” But he studied the city’s infrastructure and transportation system and decided to take a chance. “It was very risky. I pushed beyond where I should have, “ Jensen said. “But I do that on a daily basis.”
Jensen built The Harvester in southwestern Marshall County instead of closer to the most populated city in Iowa, because that’s where the right piece of land happened to be. “God made the golf courses,” he said. “You’ve got to find them.”
SEEKING ‘GREATNESS’
As the last of five children with “D” names, Jensen was named “Dunn” at birth. As in, we’re “dunn” having kids. But after a few days, his parents changed their minds and invented the name Dickson. He grew up poor in a one-bedroom house on his family’s 160-acre farm, but Jensen insists that money isn’t what drives him. “I don’t put any value on the money I have,” he said. “I put value on greatness. Society today is content being average, but I don’t like being average. If you work longer, harder and smarter, you can beat your competition.”
Jensen lists church, his basketball program and his golf course as the passions that motivate him.
A “born-again believer,” Jensen donated a piece of prime real estate at the intersection of I-35 and U.S. Highway 30 to be the site for the Cornerstone Church.
A sports fan who still thinks he could have made the Professional Golfers Association Tour if he had been able to learn the game on a first-class course – with his own set of clubs, perhaps – Jensen now has a gymnasium at home and operates All Iowa Attack Basketball, an organization of 10 teams playing AAU basketball. To run it, he gave former Iowa State University star Jake Sullivan a full-time job.
Then there’s The Harvester. It’s somewhat isolated and it’s expensive by traditional Iowa standards, at a cost of about $70 for a round of golf. But it’s beautiful.
“If I want to make money, I’ll build apartments,” Jensen said. “At the golf course, I want greatness.”
THEY’LL REMEMBER THIS
The Harvester opened in 2001, and the master plan calls for a second 18-hole course on the 2,100-acre site — maybe even a third — but for now, Jensen is holding back. “The second course has been designed, but we’re still trying to find all of the golfers who will appreciate our course at the price,” he said. If the customer numbers grow sufficiently, “that will drive us to build the second course.”
Jensen has lowered the fees slightly for the 2005 season in an effort to draw more players. “We’ve got to find the right balance,” he said. “We could cut maintenance to save money, but I don’t want to do that and become average. I’m unwilling to compromise.” Evidence of that showed up recently, when Golf Week magazine placed The Harvester 55th on its list of the nation’s 100 best courses.
On the other side of U.S. Highway 65, opposite The Harvester, lies a piece of land that Marshall County economic development interests want to turn into Clear Creek Lake. Jensen hopes they succeed. “We need things like that to keep people in Iowa,” he said. “They could live on a lake, play golf on a great course right across the road and be just 30 miles from the city,” he said. “In my mind, God wants a lake there.”
Lake or no lake, Jensen plans to continue building 10 to 15 houses a year at The Harvester. So far, about 50 houses and townhomes have been completed, and he said just two remain unsold.
His “middle of nowhere” golf course concept attracted plenty of criticism, and his development activity in Ames has had its detractors, too. “There’s all sorts of resistance to everything we do, because it’s high-profile,” Jensen said. “It gets old, and it’s frustrating, but you have to listen. It all depends on the attitude they come with.”
Jensen and his wife, Luann, live on 55 acres on the south edge of Ames with their five children. Another child died in 1990 at the age of four months. “Tragedies help you understand what you have,” Jensen said. “Our church family had gotten very close, and we desired to stay around this area because of that bonding.”
And now the golf course connects him to the area even more firmly.
“When I die, my kids can see the apartment buildings and look at my bank account, and they’ll say, ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ but that golf course is something people will remember, generation after generation,” Jensen said. “That’s one thing that compels me.”