Hite “a firecracker” of business excellence

Don Brett remembers the huge hole in his back yard like it was yesterday.

“It was a crater actually,” he recalled. “I’m guessing it was caused by an unusually large number of firecrackers. It made an unbelievably loud noise. And there was no doubt in my mind who was responsible for it. When something like that happens, I know right away.

“Lee Hite is at it again.”

Brett, who recently retired after closing his highly-successful Meyer Jonasson clothing store last Fall, and Hite have been fast-friends since they were four years old. They still meet for dinner, along with several of their boyhood cronies, every Monday night at the Altoona Hotel. The “Pal’s Club” includes such notable renegades as John Kazmaier, Joe Stevens and former Senator Bob Jubelirer.

“We’ve stayed close,” Brett explained. “When you have dinner together once-a-week for 35 years, you pretty much know everything about one another. I can tell you this without hesitation. Lee Hite is a prankster. And he’s also a darn good businessman.”

It is the latter that will bring together a roomful of friends and colleagues on June 2 nd to see Hite acknowledged as much for his personal integrity as for his impressive business acumen. He becomes the seventh recipient of The Chamber’s Lifetime Achievement Award for Business Excellence. Based on the reputation that he has built in the business community and within the industry in which he competes, he could just as well have been the first.

“Lee Hite really embodies business excellence,” Steve Sheetz, Chairman of the Board of Sheetz, Inc. and the 2004 award recipient, believes. “He has a strong customer focus, a great knowledge of the business and outstanding leadership. He stays on top of the trends and he’s constantly asking questions, constantly learning. There’s little doubt as to why he’s had the success that he’s had.”

Yet there’s sometimes the feeling that in family businesses with steep traditions of staunch leadership that the primary role of each heir to the throne is not to be the one that screws the whole thing up. Robert Hite, Lee’s father, was well-respected for founding the business and setting it on the proper path. His son could do worse than to strive to maintain the status quo. But for Lee Hite, resting on his father’s laurels was never an option.

“His father was a smart man – as smart as Lee and with a tremendous personality,” Brett pointed out. “But when Lee took over the business he was determined to build on what his father had done and he’s taken it to an unbelievable level. His mind never stops and he’s never particularly satisfied unless something’s done as well as it can be. Look at his business and you’ll see evidence of that everywhere.”

High praise from a man who once had fifty people show up at his house for a yard sale that had somehow been publicized in the previous day’s newspaper without his knowledge.

“The ad even offered free coffee and donuts,” Brett laughed. “That was one of the worst things Hite ever did to me. Needless to say, I’ve reciprocated from time-to-time. I’m certain he’s got some of the same stories to tell.”

While admittedly the contest of “one-up-man-ship” has cooled over recent years, Brett isn’t about to attribute that to a sudden sense of remorse from past deeds or even to some late stage of personal maturity.

“It’s more likely that Lee’s success has created the need for him to display a higher degree of sophistication,” Brett proposed, rather tongue-in-cheek. “He can’t project the wrong image by pulling some of the pranks that he used to pull. And believe me, I’m grateful for that.”

Lee Hite may well be a prankster but he is also one of the people in the business community to which qualities like trust and compassion seem to be perpetually tied.

“Lee cares about people,” Sheetz acknowledged. “He cares about customers and employees and he’s built an organization of people who care. Is there really anything you can say about a person more important than that?

In a business community with so much at stake, there really isn’t.

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