Partner in Excellence Award: VanTrust Real Estate

Every great city has to have a great hospital. Anything we can do to help facilitate that, I think it's our civic obligation.

Bob and I had the opportunity to work with Dave Harrison a number of years ago, when we were looking at our campus, and not just our campus, but certainly the areas surrounding our campus,

We've already proven that people will travel to come to Kansas City for their care. But the care isn't just what happens on this campus. It's where are they going to stay? Where are they going to eat? Where are they going to get entertained when they're not actually in our facility? And that's a body of work that we've been working on.

VanTrust has been they literally have been involved in our economic development efforts since day two. Part of this partnership that we look for are companies that want to come alongside, help us in our mission achieve great things and chase excellence. And VanTrust has absolutely done that.

Our core business is not building buildings. And while we've done some amazing projects to date, we have a lot right now on our plate, and they're becoming increasingly more complex and challenging. VanTrust has been extremely adept at being able to truly take all of those complexities and bring in a project that is going to be on time and on budget for us.

Dave Harrison really encourages people to think broadly and think boldly about the vision for the future, and that's what he's done just with us.

We have a holistic approach all the different components that really make up great real estate. Sometimes they're not on a spreadsheet. Almost always they include the human element. And how do we influence the result, make the success more probable?

VanTrust and Dave coming alongside what we were doing has added a tremendous amount of value to help us get further faster in what we're doing in and around the academic medical center campus.

We're gonna open up a new cancer building. They have been involved with us with that cancer building, and so OK, what role do they play? Well, you've got contractors, you've got engineers, you've got architects, you've got all these people. And what VanTrust has done is kind of come in and given us a discipline and given us a structure in these complex building situations.

VanTrust has really served as our owner's rep on the cancer building, and that has been invaluable to us, to be able to take all these complex pieces of a project that has multiple owners of different pieces and owners of land and parking and other needed services that support the building and really try to look at it holistically.

It's a fantastic project, and it puts the health system, more importantly, all of Kansas City, on the map because of the unbelievable work that's going to be done inside that brick and mortar.

I think it's well beyond expertise that they bring to the table when they work with us. They have gotten to know us. They've gotten to know our values. They know where we're headed, and they have adopted some of those things into the way that they're working with us. They understand our culture. That's really important to us.

We're tasked with doing great real estate, doing it with people we like and having fun.

They love to have fun. They have really great sayings, like, "We have to go slow now so we can go fast later." And that really resonates for us. And we have a really big vision for growth.

When we created the partner in excellence, what we wanted to do was truly differentiate between vendors that we do business with and those that become more connected to our organization.

They are clearly a partner in excellence at our place.

I couldn't be more excited. I get a chance to work with them every single week, and they are they're wonderful people.

VanTrust just received the national recognition as the best developer in the country. Why not partner with the best? And that's what we've got with VanTrust is a well-respected, skilled resource to help us.

I'm so excited that we are recognizing VanTrust as one of our Partners in Excellence this year,

I'm honored on behalf of all our people. We have to continue to earn that thanks going forward.