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Willie Kihle remembers clearly the day in 1985 he decided he wanted a different life. He was sitting at a construction site in Blue Ridge Summit, Penn., eating lunch with his buddy Steve. Kihle looked down at his blue jeans and steel-toed boots.
"I'm leaving," he said.
"Where are you going?" Steve said.
"I don't know, but I'm leaving," Kihle said.
"Nobody leaves here," Steve said.
Steve was wrong.
Kihle imagined himself in a life wearing a suit and tie and making deals, despite having never gone to college and spending more than a decade in the drilling and construction industries.
Two weeks later, Kihle loaded up his car and found his way to Wichita where his parents had settled. He was 28. On the advice of his mother, who told him she'd always thought he'd be good in the real estate business, he enrolled in a real estate school run by what was then called Coldwell Banker Dinning-Beard Realtors.
Sixteen years later, in 2001, Kihle became majority owner and president of the company, which is now Prudential Dinning-Beard Realtors. After a tumultuous first year under a new affiliation, he says, the company has emerged stronger and closer to claiming the title of the largest residential real estate company in the Wichita area. With 275 registered real estate agents, the company is now ahead of the 247 agents the city's largest real estate agency, J.P Weigand & Sons Inc., reported in February 2002.
But being biggest...