Steve Smith might have been Michael Myers’ first business partner, but he sure wasn’t the last. Over the years, there were dozens. Not that he needed partners to succeed.

“I think he wanted partners,” Smith said, “because it’s more fun to do business with others than by yourself.”

Myers died Dec. 3 at the age of 57. The cause of death was heart failure, but it followed a years-long struggle with a neuromuscular disease that had made it difficult for him to walk and talk.

He leaves behind a successful home-building business, Regency Cos., which he built from scratch during a time of steady population growth in Central Iowa.

“I think his goals were very high,” said Smith, who met Myers when both men were buying inexpensive houses to renovate, rent and eventually sell. “If he would have remained healthy, his business would have been even more phenomenal.”

Myers grew up on the north side of Des Moines and received a degree in construction engineering from Iowa State University. He and Smith formed MyersSmith Inc., then he went on to form Stylesetter Homes and later Regency, in partnership with Richard Moffitt.

“Dick Moffitt was a framing contractor, and Mike admired the way Dick worked,” Smith said. “When we would stop at a job site, Dick would climb down off a ladder, run over and run back, all business. Mike said, ‘I’m going make that guy my partner,’ and that’s how they started Regency.” Moffitt is now the company’s chief executive officer.

Jerry Stanton became a Myers partner after answering a blind newspaper ad. “I called the number and talked to a guy for half an hour, then found out it was Mike Myers,” Stanton said.

Now a distributor of building materials, Stanton had remained a partner and friend of Myers since they got together more than 20 years ago.

“There’s a quote that was hanging in Mike’s home,” Stanton said. “It says, ‘The ultimate accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.’ Nobody blurred that line better than Mike. He absolutely loved what he did.”

In Stanton’s view, Myers was a visionary. “He could see how a piece of land could be turned into something, how a building could be rehabbed,” he said. “He also could do that with people. He was so willing to assist people in going forward.”

Stanton’s favorite example is John Gamble, the chief financial officer of Regency. When Myers met him, Gamble was a salesman in a computer store that soon went out of business.

“Now he has risen in the company, and he’s a tremendous CFO of a hundred-million-dollar enterprise,” Stanton said.

As he struggled with health issues, Myers devoted more and more time and money to advancing the cause of medical research. Over the past six years, the Regency Homes MDA Golf Classic has raised $1.375 million for the Muscular Dystrophy Association; half of the money has gone to research, the other half to local MDA programs.

“Early on, his commitment was to make the tournament as successful as possible,” said Muscular Dystrophy Association Regional Director John Claes. “[When it’s] a guy with his position in the industry, a commitment like that goes a long way.”

Myers also donated his own money in very direct ways. “Mike has pledged several million dollars to Johns Hopkins University,” said David Greenspon, yet another friend and business partner. “He basically underwrites the research work of one man, Jeffrey Rothstein.” Rothstein is the director of the Robert Packard Center for ALS Research at Johns Hopkins and a professor of neurology and neuroscience.

“The amount of giving goes beyond hospitals and whatever,” Greenspon said. “He would write checks to strangers who needed money. He would send people with cash to do little deeds he thought were necessary.”

Even in his last years, Myers would bring people to Florida to spend time on his big boat. “He bought a huge boat so he could invite all his friends,” Greenspon said. “He had a stainless-steel custom-fabricated chair at the bow; he would get strapped in, let the waves hit him, and he loved it. I told him he looked like a hood ornament.

“He loved giving so much,” Greenspon said. “It would have been nice if he had lived until Christmas.”