Posted on Sun, May. 17, 2009
Steven Mungo making his own way — in a big way — in family business
By KRISTY EPPLEY RUPON
krupon@thestate.com

CAPTION: The Mungo Co. is celebrating the 50 year anniversary of it's first subdivision, Whitehall, this year. Here, Steven Mungo, left, and Stewart Mungo, right, are the sons of Michael Mungo who started the business. In the background is Rosewood Hills, a partnership with the Columbia Housing Authority.

- Tim Dominick/tdominick@thestate.com

Steven Mungo never wanted to join the family business.

He envisioned a career traveling the world. “I was going to make my own way in life,” he said. “I was one of those kids that thought life had no limits.”

In a sense, Mungo — who has been compared to “the kid that always hustled after every loose ball” — did make his own way.

And it was, unexpectedly, in the family business.

While brother Stewart has taken on a public and sometimes adversarial role pushing Mungo company projects, Steven is more behind the scenes, building relationships with other companies and focusing on finance and strategy.

“Anything on the economic side, I usually go to him. A lot of people do,” said Mark Nix, executive director of the state Home Builders Association. “He’s a great resource. He keeps up with everything.”

One way Steven Mungo does that is through his involvement in the National Association of Home Builders 20 Club program. Since 1994, he has met twice a year and communicates regularly with 19 other builders from around the nation and Canada.

“They become your business soulmates,” Mungo said.

He credits advice and knowledge from members of that group as a “springboard that vaulted us into the success that we’ve had.”

Like his brother, Steven Mungo, 49, helped out as a teen-ager with the family business, usually at work sites. “I raked every rock off of Coldstream Country Club in 1967. It was just expected. You worked in the summertime.”

He headed for Wofford College in 1977, but it proved a difficult year. His mother, Mary, was sick with breast cancer. She died during his second semester.

Weeks later, his father had a debilitating heart attack.

Brother Stewart was newly married, so the responsibility to move back to care for their father fell to Steven. He enrolled at the University of South Carolina for the next 1½ years before transferring back to Wofford to finish college.

As a senior, Steven was fluent in Spanish and spoke passable Portuguese and Italian. He had visited more than 30 countries with his mother and had dreams of working at a foreign embassy to experience more of the world.

But the Iran hostage crisis put a damper on that calling. The recession of the early 1980s sealed his fate.

“Almost all of my classmates went to graduate school because, why not, you couldn’t find a job,” Mungo said. Graduate school didn’t appeal to him, so he went where there was work — the family business.

Steven and Stewart today share side-by-side offices in Irmo. They have managed to work together successfully since the early 1980s, Steven said, by staying out of each other’s way.

Stewart’s role is land development, which supported the company for years. Steven oversees home building, which has become a stronger part of the business in the past decade.

The brothers’ biggest strength in business is that they trust each other, Steven said. Suspicion about motives kills a lot of family businesses, he said. “He and I, luckily enough, have never had that doubt about each other.”

Steven says his biggest hobby is work, but he takes time to go deep-sea fishing with his son, Ward, and Stewart’s son, Matt. And he spends time at the Mediterranean-style home he had built two years ago by Sovereign Homes, The Mungo Companies’ custom-home building branch.

Traveling the world, though, is still a passion. He and his wife, Maria, along with Ward, 19, and their daughter, Emily, 16, go to Scotland every couple of years to visit his wife’s family.