In business and philanthropy, investors like ROI, return on investment.
Benjamin “Ben” and Carmela Du didn’t have to wait long for their gift to Hoag Hospital Irvine to pay off.
“First day we opened for business, a patient came in, and our doctors and nurses saved [a] life,” said Flynn Andrizzi, president of Hoag Hospital Foundation.
“Would we have saved that life in the old facility? Maybe, but who knows?”
Word of the “instant ROI” got back to the Dus. “Heard the story. Made me very happy,” Ben said.
The longtime, successful manufacturing entrepreneur and his wife of 53 years have been giving their time and treasure since they sold the company they founded in 1974, industrial-pump maker Flojet Corp., to ITT Industries in September 1999.
“We’ve been blessed to have the good life since we moved to Orange County,” Ben Du said. “We wanted to give back to the community.”
After the sale, the couple set up their donor-advised fund at Newport Beach-based Orange County Community Foundation.
“They wanted to apply the same strategic mindset and informed approach that made them successful in business to their philanthropy,” said Shelley Hoss, OCCF’s president since 2000.
The $5 million gift for Hoag Irvine’s Benjamin & Carmela Du Emergency Pavilion, the beneficent couple’s largest reported gift to date—and the sixth largest donation in Orange County last year, according to this week’s Business Journal’s Largest Charitable Gifts of 2018 list—deviated slightly from that “strategic” approach.
Sort of accidental philanthropy.
Unexpected Gift
Andrizzi and other executives were taking potential donors on a tour through the under-construction site of Hoag’s emergency facilities in the Spectrum area, “throwing out the usual hints, ‘with this we can do that,’” Andrizzi recalled.
There were some Hoag Hospital Foundation board members like Ben in tow.
“We didn’t expect it [the gift] to come from our board,” Andrizzi said. Especially when the Dus had just given $2.25 million to Hoag Hospital Newport Beach in 2015 for the Benjamin and Carmela Du Endowed Chair in Urologic Oncology—for treatment and research into prostate cancer, the second leading cause of cancer death in men.
But a few hours after the tour, Andrizzi’s phone was ringing.
“In this current campaign we weren’t expecting anything close to or beyond that level … and here he’s touched, inspired.”
Du’s recollection was characteristically humble.
“We had a tour that briefed us, and I was impressed with it and I thought, ‘What a great opportunity to show our appreciation.’”
“Sure enough it seems very busy,” Du said.
Indeed, the number of emergency patients just keeps rising at the hospital Hoag took over from Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare Corp. in 2010.
When the hospital was built, it was thought “that maybe there’d be 50 emergency patients per day. Now it’s over 100. Why? That’s where the growth is, South County, and there was such a shortage [in space],” Andrizzi said.
The Dus’ gift, along with $1 million from fellow civic stalwarts Missy Pace Callero and Chris Callero, and another $1 million from David and Michelle Horowitz, enabled Hoag to increase the size of its emergency facilities five-fold to 17,000 square feet, while exponentially increasing the number of beds at the facility, not to mention installing state-of-the-art robotics for telemedicine and other services.
It opened Oct. 31.
“Largest gift in the history of our Irvine facility and it meets the need for emergency medicine not just for Irvine but all of South County,” Andrizzi said.
Meeting the needs of the county has been an animating goal for the Dus’ philanthropy since they immigrated to Orange County.
“We’re more influenced by the community, we see the need and we have the capabilities to address [it],” Du said.
That’s because the Dus built and sold not one but two successful companies since arriving here in the mid-1960s.
Western Adventure
The couple grew up on a province in the central region of the Philippines called Cebu.
The collection of about 170 islands and islets make up Philippines’ second largest population center after Manila. Ben was a mechanical engineer at the Cebu Institute of Technology, while Carmela’s expertise was in finance. While Cebu was a relatively prosperous port province, the couple jumped at the chance to move to America.
Carmela recalled the move several years ago, on the occasion of the couples’ oncology gift to Hoag.
“It was an adventure. We were so young, and we didn’t think of the consequences. We just did it.”
They devised a plan. Ben received an MBA from California State University-Fullerton, and then worked for a division of ITT Corp. for six years—the conglomerate would buy Ben and Carmela’s company 25 years later.
They opened their first business in Westminster with Ben as the chief engineer and product designer while Carmela handled the books.
“Started from scratch, pooled resources, sold our house and just started very small and kept growing,” Ben recalled. “We were lucky to have good products, well-engineered products.”
They moved the company to the Irvine Spectrum area and also applied their joint financial and business acumen to real estate—the Dus bought their new facility. The business was called Flojet and it made positive displacement pumps, engineering-speak for systems that efficiently move liquids, especially beverages.
They leased the 107,000-square-foot building back to ITT in the 1999 sale.
There were lots of applications—including chemical and medical—but the big business was soft drinks.
“We were supplying Coke and Pepsi,” said Du, “from the backrooms to the front [of restaurants, bars] and we were very profitable.”
The sale to ITT was at an undisclosed price. ITT was on a mini buying spree in the industrial pump space, buying Orange-based Hydro Air Industries Inc. that same year. When the lease with the Dus ran out in Foothill Ranch, ITT Flojet moved to Santa Ana, and today it’s part of the 2011 spinoff Xylem Inc. (NYSE: XYL), which has a $12.7 billion market cap.
By 2011, the Dus were well into running their second business, while firmly entrenched in OC-focused philanthropy.
Du It Again
When the Dus sold Flojet, they were ready to slow down and travel the world. They got the last part right, stamping many passports and at press time, just embarking on a three-month cruise that includes ports in Australia, New Zealand and Sri Lanka.
But they had already started another manufacturing company, Providence Enterprise Ltd.—based in Hong Kong, with sales and domestic headquarters in Newport Beach, and manufacturing in Shenzhen and Ganzhou, China.
It grew to be one of China’s largest contract manufacturers, making highly-engineered plastics and a full range of electro-mechanical devices.
Several trade websites reported the company at over 3,000 employees around 2010. Providence turned out to be another nearly 20-year run for the Dus, who sold their controlling interest in the company last year to a private equity firm in China.
This time around, Ben says he’ll retire better.
“Yes, I’m through with running an active business. I’ll try to enjoy my retirement and just do passive investments. Then again, I may just be bored. We’ll see.”
Ben and Carmela seem to have plenty to keep them busy when they’re not traveling and at home in Newport Coast. In philanthropy as in business, the Dus are partners.
“We’ve been married over 50 years and have always done things together,” Ben said.
They started with the arts, a particular love of Carmela’s.
Their lifelong passion stems “from the joy music gives her,” Hoss said. “They definitely invest their time and presence along with their philanthropic support.”
The arts support has included Opera Pacific, Pacific Symphony and Segerstrom Center for the Arts, where Du was a board member in the early 2000s.
Du says he’s had great counsel and colleagues in philanthropy and community involvement.
He was a founding member of the centrist Republican group New Majority, which includes Paul Folino and Gen. William Lyon. They became connected to OCCF through Peter and Ginny Ueberroth and Richard and Hyla Bertea, and originally to Hoag through fellow Segerstrom Center for the Arts, formerly called Orange County Performing Arts Center, board member and longtime OC financier, Roger Kirwan.
“Roger said, ‘I have a great candidate for you,’” recalled Andrizzi, whose foundation board like other nonprofits has term limits.
“Roger is a good friend; he did introduce us to Hoag. I know a lot of these people,” Du said.
Ben is now in his sixth year on the Hoag Hospital Foundation board.
“They’re extremely nice individuals,” Andrizzi said of the Dus. “You can tell they care about people … a presenter comes in [to the Board] and Ben’s question is, ‘What will be the impact?’”
The Dus have also given to social causes, like Irvine-based Human Options, which supports victims of domestic violence.
And they haven’t forsaken their heritage—providing assistance to the poverty-fighting organization Gawad Kalinga in the Philippines. They last visited one of the nation-building groups’ villages in 2016.
They are a “true American success story, and have never forgotten their roots,” Hoss said.
Hoag’s Front Door
Planting the flag in emergency services not only saves lives, it’s good for the hospital business.
“It’s on the backside of the building but it’s always the front door to the hospital,” Andrizzi said. “What they’ve done is committed resources to where the majority of the people come into the hospital—as much as 50%.”
The gift could impact Hoag’s newest hospital in ways beyond emergency services.
Andrizzi is a development veteran, closing in on 25 years of fundraising, 15 years with universities before arriving at Hoag in 2010.
“The Dus’, gift is significant … I come from academia and have raised nine-figure gifts,” Andrizzi said. “There’s a tiered system to fundraising … this raises the bar for Hoag Hospital Irvine.”
