Developer Choppin Builds on Traits of Certainty, Sincerity
Michael J. Choppin doesn’t like the story of the whirlwind courtship because it makes the business deal of his life sound too easy.
Choppin and his future Japanese partner did not know of their common interest in building a world trade center until a corporate matchmaker told each of the other in 1983.
Within days, Choppin met with Kajima Corp., a giant construction firm. And the next day they agreed to jointly bid for the trade center contract.
Two months later the job for the Greater Los Angeles World Trade Center was theirs, and Choppin had been catapulted into a new international league of real estate development.
“It was the classic ships in the night, only this time someone made the connection,” said Choppin, 48, the self-educated chairman and president of IDM Corp., a $100-million Long Beach company.
Choppin, who is leery of interviews, wants no misunderstandings.
“They had looked us over. I don’t want it to come out that they spied on us, but they clearly knew who we are,” he said. “Sometimes I don’t want to be quoted. . . . because the Japanese are very sensitive. They’re very relationship-oriented. That’s why I’m careful about how I phrase my words.”
Crisp and formal in a dark blue suit, he leans forward on a leather couch in his oak-paneled corporate office, his back to a panoramic view of Recreation Park and the ocean beyond. He knows precisely what he wants to say and in what context.
So, for an hour, he makes a speech about the world and regional forces that have made the World Trade Center, just under construction and at least a decade from completion, a near-certain success.
He also makes it clear that the trade center project, and not Mike Choppin, is the topic of the meeting. “There are a lot of people who seek identification and publicity. I’m not one of those. It’s why I chose to call the company IDM rather than the Mike Choppin Company.”
The interview, friends and acquaintances say later, is typical of Choppin, the managing partner in development of the 2.2-million-square-foot trade center, probably the most important commercial building in the city’s history.
Confident of Success
It was the same sure focus, care for detail and certainty of success that allowed an intense and authoritative young Choppin, a one-time newspaper boy and aircraft assembly worker, to found IDM in 1969 and quietly develop or acquire 62 projects worth about $900 million across Southern California.
“He is a man who likes to be in control of the situation,” said Connie Smith, IDM vice president for communications.
“He has a protective aura about him,” Harbor Bank Chairman James Gray said. “When you deal with Mike, it’s a very honest and direct kind of relationship. It’s not the kind where you call him up and say, ‘Let’s have a drink.’ But if I wanted to put 10 people together to solve a problem, he’d be one of those 10.”
Volunteer Problem-Solver
In fact, despite his reserve, Choppin in the last half dozen years has evolved into one of Long Beach’s premier volunteer problem-solvers. He is a member of 11 civic or charitable organizations.
He was one of three people appointed by the mayor in 1985 to help pull the Long Beach Symphony out of debt. He served prominently in 1986 on a special committee that recommended a full-time mayor. And he chaired one of the city’s Year 2000 strategic planning task forces.
He has brought to those committees an ability to readily grasp the essentials of a situation, say those who have worked with him.
“There is a certain Jesuit feel to his basic character. He takes certain basic principles, business and moral . . . and applies them to the facts of a particular case and makes them work,” said attorney Charles Greenberg, a member of the full-time mayor committee.
Thinking Called Clever
While on that committee, Choppin “was surprisingly quiet until he could distill in his own mind a set of precepts about the issue,” Greenberg said. “But once that happened he became quite a forceful fellow. His thinking was clever. It sometimes departed from political reality. But it was always imaginative and interesting and fit into an overall fabric.”
Intensely private, Choppin will say little about his wife and four children, his passion for sailing and flying, or the satisfaction he must take from his success after starting with nothing as an immigrant from England in 1948.
But he will talk about his business, and, after a while, the business of character building.
Factors in Development
His was built, he said, by a positive-thinking father who sold cars, by St. Anthony’s High School (in whose alumni Hall of Fame his picture now hangs), and by his success as an Army paratrooper.
He remembers his father taking him to motivational seminars and to a Toastmaster’s club. Though just 12 years old, he was called on to speak about “why I wanted to be president of anything. And I spoke for two minutes. . . . It was that kind of training that made me believe in myself.”
Paratrooper jump school, however, was the supreme test. “I found I could do a lot more than I ever thought I could,” he said.
His higher education was in “the school of hard knocks,” he says. But success in real estate came quickly. He sold a duplex the first week he had a license. He was only 21.
Self-Image Important
“The largest determining factor in our lives is our self-image. It is more important than how big we are or how smart we are or how educated we are,” he said.
Within a year, he had bought a house and moved into the apartment above its garage. He rented the house, which paid the mortgage. “This made a big impression on me. . . . I began to fully understand that the nice thing about rental properties is that the renters pay the freight while the property appreciates and the mortgage is being paid down.”
For the next decade, he sold property and invested in small apartment buildings with others before founding IDM--which stands for investment, development and management--in 1970. He had a core of loyal limited partners who repeatedly invested in his projects.
Nobody Lost a Penny
Those investors now number 4,000, “and we’ve never lost anybody a penny,” Choppin said.
That performance approaches Choppin’s own strict definition for success: “It isn’t what one’s peers, family and the world think. It is obtaining any worthwhile goal that you have set for yourself.”
Choppin’s goals now, he said, are to help IDM continue to grow, eventually into other Pacific Rim countries, and to be profitable, he said. And he has little doubt that it will happen.
Indeed, Choppin is such a believer in “self-image psychology” that once a year he shuts down IDM except for the switchboard and joins all 145 employees (up from just 17 in 1978) at a motivational retreat.
Problems Are Challenges
As a result, at least some employees--all top executives have been there at least five years--refer to company problems as challenges. “I do think that way,” spokeswoman Smith insisted.
Choppin speaks of working hard to accomplish goals “day by day and hour by hour,” of the negative thinkers who are “mesmerized” by problems. And, to him, “luck is where opportunity meets experience.”
“Deciding you can do something is half the task,” he said. On his office desk, a motto proclaims, “It Can Be Done.”
Perhaps Choppin’s greatest strength, he said, is also the trait of a positive thinker--the ability to look at something for what it one day can be.
Personal Inspection
Though it is now the job of others at IDM to find sites suitable for development, Choppin said he still serves as “the company dreamer.” Before any land is bought for development, he personally inspects it, he said.
“I’ll drive by a site from different directions and visualize the building already in place,” he said. “I remember one time there was a structure on a site; I climbed up on it and tried to imagine I was up in the building looking out a window at the view. The more you can visualize, the greater chance you have of making it come to pass.”
Choppin has been visualizing projects on some of the city’s best sites for years. IDM has built 28 projects in Long Beach alone, including its six-story headquarters in eastern Long Beach and an office building in Bixby Knolls that bears its name.
Projects Not Left Undone
In recent years, as its growth has spurted, IDM has bid on eight of the best sites in the downtown redevelopment zone. It has built two office buildings there, has just won a court ruling that could clear the way for a third project and is proceeding with the World Trade Center. In those early, difficult years of redevelopment, as many other developers backed out of deals, IDM gained a reputation for finishing what it started.
Some city and port officials now say, in fact, that they believe IDM may be losing bids for development sites partly because it has been so successful and officials want to scatter investment among other strong developers.
“Mike tries like heck to get them all, and we understand that. But I think it is a concern of people that IDM may have bitten off about all it can handle for a while,” said Harbor Commissioner C. Robert Langslet last month, after an IDM hotel proposal lost to a less ambitious one by Trusthouse Forte Inc., the world’s largest hotel chain.
No Limits Accepted
Choppin sees no such limits for IDM. He is cultivating his Japanese contacts and has recently completed a six-story office building in Garden Grove with Kajima, his trade center partner. A month ago, IDM and Sumitomo Corp. announced joint-venture construction of IDM’s second office building at the traffic circle on Pacific Coast Highway.
“The future is a case of U. S.-Japan Inc., of cooperation and joint ventures,” he said, citing popular books on the subject. “We have expectations that other (agreements) with Japanese companies will come to fruition, initially in Southern California and possibly beyond that.”
Success No Accident
IDM’s success with Japanese companies is no accident, said a businessman familiar with the trade center project. “In the early stages of the project, when he didn’t know very much about how to do business in Japan, he went out and retained an expert.”
Langslet said Choppin has been successful with Japanese and others “because he’s a super salesman and very aggressive, but he also has the art of being very sincere. . . . There’s nothing phony at all.”
Choppin also “notices things” that help him later. He noticed that one side of the business cards of port officials was printed in Japanese, and now IDM executives distribute cards that identify them in Japanese, Langslet said.
Dependability Sought
“There’s another interesting phenomenon” with IDM, said Langslet, a millionaire developer in his own right. “The Japanese have been burned so many times when getting into deals, they are really looking for someone they do have confidence in and can depend on.”
(Kajima officials declined comment and referred questions to Choppin.)
Choppin said he likes doing business with the Japanese because they are “relationship-oriented,” not “transaction-oriented,” as are many American companies.
“You have to have just as much substance to the transaction with the Japanese, but they’re looking first to the people in the relationship,” he said.
Choppin and the Japanese also share a common belief that the real money in well-located real estate is made through property management and equity, not construction, Choppin said.
Local Knowledge Valued
“They’re not looking for earnings by next Tuesday,” Choppin said. “Have you heard of (the Japanese word) fudisan ? Well, fudisan means asset that doesn’t move, and that will tell you something about their attitude about real estate.”
The Japanese are also interested in companies like IDM because of their local knowledge of business practices, said Michael F. Ross, a principal architect of the World Trade Center and the matchmaker for IDM and Kajima.
For example, the trade center deal was consummated because each company needed the other, he said.
“Neither could do it alone. Kajima could have proposed, but they wouldn’t have known their way around Long Beach. IDM could have proposed, but they wouldn’t have had the international contacts,” he said.
Choppin agrees, but also looks at the trade center deal in a different way. “It’s the start of a relationship that may go on to many other things,” he said.
