By Gino Blefari
This week, my travels took me to Omaha, NE, a city smack in the middle of the U.S.A. and home to an organization we all know well, Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Before this year, I had only been to—or better yet, been through—Omaha twice before, years ago as a child on a family road trip from California to my home state of Massachusetts. I remember even then, as we drove along Interstate 80, Omaha was a study in contrast, a small, urban skyline surrounded by the quintessential Midwestern scape of flat, open land.
Now I’m a seasoned Omaha visitor, with three trips to the city in the past year, most recently to attend the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholders Meeting and then, just this week, to visit Vince Leisey and his team at Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Ambassador Real Estate. Each time I return I’m struck by the distinctiveness of the city and I get the recurring feeling that this place is unlike any other; it’s easy to understand why Berkshire Hathaway would be stationed here.