Father’s Values Continued For Charles Kushner, chairman of the Kushner Cos., real estate is in his blood. While he was growing up, talk around the dinner table never was about baseball or basketball. It was always about business, says Kushner. “I was brought up in the business. Any time off was spent on jobs. My father really brought us up very much in the mud, on the jobs and involved in all elements of the business, and it was just something I always enjoyed,” he says.
His father, the late Joseph Kushner, a Holocaust survivor, immigrated to the United States in 1949 with his wife and oldest daughter. Even though J. Kushner had no education, no money and was unable to speak English, he got a job as a carpenter soon after his arrival. Carpentry was his trade in Russia, says C. Kushner.
J. Kushner started as a carpenter and eventually became a builder of single-family homes, which evolved into the development of garden-style apartments. The Kushner Cos. was officially founded in 1954.
At the time C. Kushner joined the family business in 1985, there was a shift in philosophy, he says. “There’s very little that my father owned that he didn’t build. When I came into the business in 1985, I had already done quite a number of acquisitions while practicing law. With my father’s blessing, I started doing more acquisitions. I realized that we don’t have to build everything we own and we can expand our portfolio at a much more rapid pace.”
While the company’s philosophy on how to achieve growth has changed over time, the core values of the company continue to be the same as when J. Kushner founded the business – expect employees to be devoted to the company, and the company to be devoted to them and their families, says Richard Stadtmauer, managing director of Kushner Cos.
“People gave his father a chance,” explains Stadtmauer. “If his father didn’t get a chance, Charlie wouldn’t be where he is now.”
C. Kushner, therefore, is a firm believer of giving people a chance. “The company’s philosophy is to give everyone a chance,” says Stadtmauer. “We do a lot of that in the terms of people we hire. Some of our best employees are people that wouldn’t have been hired at another company, because they were down on their luck or they didn’t have a certain skill. We’ll take that chance.”
C. Kushner shares his father belief that it is important to be charitable, both on a personal and corporate level. So, the company and C. Kushner personally give back to the community. The one project that most people point to is his role in the development of a new campus for the Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy in Livingston, N.J. “We used the full resources of our company to really make that project happen,” says C. Kushner. Employees from the company volunteered their own time to help get approvals, bid things out and coordinate the entire effort, he says.