VALLEY CITY, N.D. (NewsDakota.com) – He was born and raised in a small town in Barnes County, North Dakota. Gary Tharaldson has worked his way up the ladder to become one of the leading entrepreneurs and philanthropists in the state and nation.
The following is a portion of an article written by Forbes about Gary Tharaldson.
Reached by phone in mid-June, Gary Tharaldson, North Dakota’s richest man, had a quick response to the news that Forbes was pegging his net worth at $1.0 billion.
“Obviously we wouldn’t sell for that. … I would say it’s very conservative,” he quipped. Tharaldson, a former gym teacher from a 100-person town about an hour and a half west of Fargo, North Dakota, adds that his net worth is besides the point. “The money is not the factor. I work because I love what I do.”
Even if the valuation doesn’t match what Tharaldson thinks he’s worth, it’s still a Midwest milestone. Thirty-seven years after Tharaldson bought his first Super 8 motel in 1982, the hotelier ranks as a billionaire, making him the first and only one in North Dakota. Forbes estimates that 40% of his wealth is still tied to hotels, mostly extended-stay properties like Staybridge Suites. The rest of his diversified empire comes from developable land, groundwater and, in his own state, an ethanol plant.
“He is a prototypical North Dakotan: humble, generous, hardworking, down to earth,” says Doug Burgum, the state’s Republican governor and himself a successful entrepreneur. “If you saw him walking on the street, you wouldn’t think of him differently than any other North Dakotan.”
Tharaldson has been a fixture of North Dakota business for decades. Now 73, he got his start teaching high school physical education and bookkeeping immediately after graduating from Valley City State University. He began moonlighting as an insurance salesman and, after realizing he could make more money in that industry, he quit his other jobs and got into insurance full-time at age 24.
That’s also around the time Tharaldson first dabbled in real estate. To lower his taxes, he opted to invest some of his earnings in motels. By his early 40s, he owned 16 small properties.
When tax policy changed in the 1980s, eliminating most of the tax benefits of hotel investing, Tharaldson doubled down, working with local banks in small towns to build new low-cost, no-frill motels at a time when others were getting out. Instead of the industry-average 100 rooms, Tharaldson’s hotels opted for 60. He started his own construction company to keep building prices down and would pay maids not by the hour, but by the number of rooms they cleaned.
When Forbes first profiled him in 1997, Tharaldson, then worth an estimated $500 million, explained why he thought his strategy would work: “Everybody likes to stay in fresh and new products.” He spent the next couple decades innovating in hospitality, building a reputation as a master of cutting costs without hampering guest experience.
The article was written by Forbes.