Ari Meisel swears he has a social life. Between his real estate development company in Binghamton, New York, his chairmanships of two local boards, and his phone calls from Hillary Clinton—yes, that Hillary Clinton—he insists that he still has time to enjoy his life. But the 2003 Wharton grad (who actually graduated a year early) concedes he doesn’t sleep much.

An over-achiever? Seems that way. But because of Ari’s energy and vision, the city of Binghamton has been rewarded with a real estate development plan heralded as a blueprint for economic revitalization. The plan: transform abandoned factories into mixed-use properties with lofts and commercial properties. Fortunately, the 22-year-old isn’t some young Bambi taking his first steps into business world. Ari started his first company before he could drive and juggled three throughout high school.

We talked to him about becoming a teen titan, taking business calls during lunch period, making friends with a former First Lady, and bringing a little bit of home to upstate New York.

[laughs] Well, my parents are both entrepreneurs, and I like to attribute it mostly to that.  I started my first company when I was 12 or 13. Well, actually, I was a magician when I was 6.  I was doing birthday parties. I’ve always worked. I was a model after that, and then I started my company. It was a web site design company. I started by doing a web site for my dad’s gallery, and then he showed it to one of his friends and that guy asked, “Will you do a web site for my company? I’ll pay you $500.”

That’s a lot of money for a kid.

Yeah. I’ve done about 100 sites since then. I’ve done sites for $6000 up to $10,000. But web sites don‘t really interest me anymore.  That was really just my start.

What was next?

When I was 16, I started a company called menus-to-go.com, which is an online listing of take-out and delivery menus in New York City—that was a fun project. I never was too big on internet companies, but I wanted to try it. I did it with two friends and it was working, but we were 16. We didn’t have the know-how to take it to the next level and work with a venture capitalist.

The next company, which turned out to be my biggest at the time, was TEK, a technology consulting firm. It also developed out of someone saying, “If you do this for me, I’ll pay you.” It started with me doing computer systems for homes and businesses, and then networking, and then it moved into home theater and communication systems.

How old were you when you started that?

Probably 16. That was the most fun, definitely. I had some pretty famous clients. I got to play with gadgets and do all sorts of great stuff. I prided myself on being a one-stop shop for technology.

How did you work in the
time to be a teenager?

I didn’t sleep much. [Laughs.] I was running three companies in high school. I was sleeping three hours a night during the week and then would crash on the weekends.  I had a cell phone when I was in seventh grade so I could take calls and deal with clients at lunch, between classes and stuff like that. I was always working on something, always pushing myself harder. It was that nothing-is-ever-good-enough attitude.

Honestly, did you have a social life?

I definitely had a social life. [Laughs] I have a work hard/play hard attitude. I’ve done pretty well.

So how did you get clients to
take you so seriously at that age?

I always tried to conduct myself in a more professional manner than I felt anyone else I was dealing with did. I also went that extra mile. My tech company was all about customer service. People could call me 24 hours a day. Regular companies won’t let a client call them at 5 in the morning because their TV doesn’t work, but I did. Going 10 steps beyond everyone else is the only way that young entrepreneurs, at least in my experience, are able to get themselves taken seriously. 

Did you keep up the businesses in college?

I knew that when I got to college, I was going to have to take the academics a little more seriously.  Wharton was amazing; I had such a great experience. I got to learn the fundamentals and the theories, even though I already knew a lot about the practical aspect of things.  In my negotiation class, for instance, people gave an example of a negotiation they’d been through.  A girl would be, like: “I went to this thrift shop and I negotiated for a pair of jeans that cost $5.”  Or this guy would be like: “I negotiated for this stereo system from the guy who had my apartment before me.”  And then it gets to me, and I’m like: “Well, I had a litigation with a client who was suing me for extortion, and I ended up suing for libel, and we ended up settling out of court.”  And everyone was like, “what?”  [Laughs]

So was going to college worthwhile?

Wharton was fantastic. The people that I met, the friends that I made, the connections that I made are totally invaluable for the rest of my life. And it’s really amazing when you go into a meeting with someone and you tell them that you went to Wharton, everyone is sort of wowed. It just sets the tone. It’s great. 

Penn was the only college I liked. I told my parents—and in my application to Penn—I said if I didn’t get into Penn I was going to join the navy. I figured that if I didn’t get into the one school I wanted to go to, I was going to join the navy and fly off aircraft carriers. [Laughs.]

How did you approach the
working world after college?

I graduated a year early, which was a last minute decision. I got to the end of junior year and I had two classes left—and I didn’t even realize it.  A few weeks before graduation, I got a job. An American who has a real estate development company in Japan wanted me to run his Texas operation in Austin. It was right up my alley: I would get to have my own hours, travel a lot. I ran the whole operation and reported to this company in Japan.

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Why didn’t you just start
your own company?

I wanted to do my own thing, but I guess I was grounded enough to realize that it would be stupid of me to come right out of college and do something without getting real estate development experience. So I started working with this guy, and it was really cool. We would speak twice a day because he was in Japan. I was there for six months. 

Why’d you leave?

About four months into it, one of my dad’s artists called me up and said, “Hey you should come up to Binghamton”—that’s where he lives and grew up—“there are these buildings, it’s just like Soho. You’ve got to come check it out.”  So I flew up to Binghamton and he showed me these buildings. I walked into this old, industrial building that used to be a meat factory and I just saw lofts. I made an offer that day.  A couple of months later, I talked it over with my boss, and we realized that it made sense for me to resign because I was going to be focusing on the buildings. I closed on the buildings in February and the next day I put on a hardhat and went to work.

You mean physical work?

College kids in Binghamton ask me what they should do if they want to become a real estate developer, and I tell everyone: do construction. Do the lowest job you can find because you need to learn it. I’ve done everything. I worked with every one of my guys, and I have the most loyal, respectful crew I could possibly have—guys who worked for me on Saturdays and Sundays and late, without me even asking and without them asking for overtime, because they believed in what I was doing and they wanted to help me.

I learned every single trade and I did it every day. I started getting up at 5 a.m. every morning to do paperwork and bills, and then I’d be on the jobsite at 6 and my guys would be there at 6:45.  I’m a big believer that you can’t run people and tell them what to do unless you know how to do it, or unless you know what it entails. If I tell one of my guys, “That wall doesn’t look right. You didn’t do the mortar right and it’s out of square,” they’re going to know that I’m not just some suit walking around the job who thinks he knows what he’s talking about. They’re gonna know that they taught me how to do it, so I know what I’m doing.

I assume that loft-living is a new addition to Binghamton. How are you selling it?

There are three phases to my project. In this first phase, most of the interest is from people out of town.  I’m doing all the selling myself. There is rarely a matter that I don’t handle in any business that I have.  So I still don’t sleep much. [laughs]

And your social life?

The social life has been great. That’s another funny thing. Binghamton’s not literally a small town, but socially it’s a small town. You know, everybody’s business is everybody else’s business.  I hate saying it because it sounds cocky, but I’ve basically become a celebrity in Binghamton. People come up to me in the street and say: “Hey you’re ‘loft-boy.’ You’re revitalizing the city. Thank you.”  I’m the chairman of the Architecture Review Board of Binghamton now.  I’ve only been in Binghamton a year-and-a-half, and I’m 22 years old, and every architectural project in Binghamton now requires my approval. It surprised me.

Do you wish you were doing this
in a bigger market, like New York?

If I were doing this project in New York it would be no big deal. In Binghamton, it costs significantly less than it would in New York and I am able to make a name for myself because it is having an economic impact. And that creates a reputation so I can eventually go and do this again somewhere else.

Do you think you will?

Probably. I’m always going to do real estate development. I’ve also branched into consulting, and I’ve been doing a lot of motivational speaking engagements.  When I had an article in The New York Times come out about me, Hillary Clinton’s deputy chief of staff called me, and he basically said, “Hillary saw your article. She’s really impressed. We love what you are doing in upstate New York, and we want to see if you can do this in other cities.”

It totally blew me away. A couple of months later, this group in Binghamton did a DVD showing what’s happening in Binghamton. They included my lofts, and Hillary Clinton did a 30-second speech about how Binghamton is an upstate New York gem. It was incredible. Then about a month ago, she came to the DVD release and gave a speech and said, “I want to thank Ari for having the vision to come up to Binghamton to do this.” I was flabbergasted.

So what else do you and Hillary chat about?

I spoke to Hillary Clinton’s people the other day, and they were telling me how this can be a model for other cities. It got me thinking. Loft development and loft culture have proven to be an economic engine in over a hundred cities in America, starting with Soho in the late ‘60s. And there’s Soma in San Francisco, Loto in Denver, Soto in Seattle. There’s Sohos all over the country.

Any time a group comes into a dead area of town, with dead industrial buildings, and revitalizes them into living and working spaces, it has, without fail, revitalized that area of the city and sometimes the entire city. We saw that in downtown Manhattan.  These industrial buildings were the driving forces of those cities, then industry sort of died. Now, in the modern day, people are the economic engine of the world. You have people downtown, you have people shopping and living and working, it creates economy. It’s a multiplier effect.

I was saying that this is replicable, and upstate New York is particularly good because it has all of these old, industrial buildings.  But there’s a gap between what it costs to develop and what the local residents of these towns are ready to spend on them. You can get over that, but I was talking to Hillary’s office about creating a federal program to subsidize loft development when it’s starting out and make it more affordable to the consumer just to get it going. That’s something that I’m working on with them now.

You must be really proud of all you’ve done.
And you’re so young to have done it.

I’m very proud of this. I do think about that sometimes. But I’m always looking for more. I’m always taking on more stuff. Yeah, I am 22, but now is the time to do it.  I don’t think someone twice my age would have the—it’s not even the energy. It’s like I don’t know any better.  I guess that’s one way to put it. I don’t know enough not to work 20 hours a day. But I love what I’m doing, I love every moment of it. I’m my own boss. I control everything.

And I get to play golf whenever I want!

Do you think you’ll stay in
real estate development?

I love real estate development. I love building and construction, and I feel like it’s something really tangible. In the lofts right now, there’s a bar on the ground floor and there’s a bakery going in soon, and I worked to build the bar. I pulled three all-nighters in a row right before the bar opened. It’s amazing to me to be able to sit at a bar that I built in a building that I own and be able to say “I did this.”

That’s the best part for me: to be able to say I built that and people live there and work there. Someone’s life has been changed because of something I did. As small a change as it might have been, I feel like I’m really impacting something. There’s a tangible monument of my achievement. So that’s the most exciting thing for me. And because of that, I do plan to stay in real estate development for a long time.

Do you have any advice for someone who
wants to follow in your footsteps?

The best advice that I could give to someone is: You have to understand every aspect of what you do, and that means you have to work at the bottom, which is not the same thing as starting at the bottom. You can’t feel that you are above anything that is involved in your business. I’ve done everything, including digging ditches. If you want to own car washes, you need to wash cars.

I also think it’s important that you figure out how to balance your life, because if you can’t balance it when you don’t have a family or kids, then you’re not going to be able to balance it when you do. To be a business person you need to be personable, and I think if you remove yourself from any social abilities, that that really creates a problem. If you become a slave to your work, then that’s not fun. You need to be able to control that, maintain a healthy mind, and keep your balance.

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