Q. What are your primary responsibilities?

A. To oversee the company's real-estate development projects, ranging from projects in the Kapalua Resort to affordable-housing projects, and planning new communities, both at Pulelehua and Hali'imaile. In addition, I'm responsible for planning and executing the Maui Land & Pine's strategic transactions, a lot of our joint ventures and different initiatives to grow the company.

Q. Do your responsibilities include the agricultural side?

A. Primarily the land development side. We have an executive team, and we're constantly collaborating with each other to address the different business issues that come up. Our company is organized in three divisions: We have the agriculture division, which is primarily the pineapple and diversified ag; resort division, which is responsible for golf courses, retail, basically the operation side of the Kapalua Resort; and our community development division, which is the land-development side.

Q. Is it unusual for a person your age to be in such a position?

A. It could be unusual, but I think I have the background and I've put in a lot of hard work to get to where I am now. It's exciting to be young and work with more experienced people because every day is a new day on the job and learning from different executives that I'm around.

Q. Any advice to others who have dreams of being young executives?

A. It takes a lot of hard work. What's led to a lot of my success is not sitting back and just going with the flow. Don't be afraid to challenge ideas, promote new ideas and stand by what your instincts are telling you and go with that. If you spend your career just doing what you're told, you're not going to rise to a leadership position.

Q. How did you go from living on O'ahu to Maui?

A. I lived on Maui in the early '90s, and I wanted to get back here and enjoy a little more of a rural environment than the business of Honolulu. I did work in Downtown Honolulu for a few years, but my wife is originally from Maui and we wanted to get back to the Neighbor Island. What's great about the company that I work for is we're the largest company with headquarters based on Maui and to get the excitement of working for a large company, while still being in a rural area.

Q. Your company has announced it will eliminate pineapple canning. What is the future of pineapple on Maui?

A. The company is bullish on ag in Hawai'i. Yes, we have to make the change on the canning side. But over the last four years, we've invested about $40 million in our agriculture company and about $20 million of that in a new, state-of-the-art fresh-fruit processing line that's on the same property that the cannery is. So that's still going full-speed ahead as we shift more to the fresh-fruit side and focus on the higher premium pineapple market with our Maui Gold brand of pineapple.

Q. Maui Land & Pineapple reported higher first-quarter earnings following two quarters of declines, any reason for that?

A. The challenge is the pineapple side and in our agriculture segment. The resort is going through a transition with a lot of new development and redevelopment in the resort, so the earnings on the resort side are down a little. But on the development side, because of land sales, we typically have lumpy earnings when you compare year over year. So for our type of company, it's a poor way to measure performance because you may have a big sale in one quarter versus no sale in the next quarter.

Q. Anything you can do to get earnings to be more consistent?

A. I think it's getting some of our real-estate development projects entitled, where we can have a more consistent flow of real-estate product to deliver to the market, not only in the resort, but in the local housing market. The company has done a lot of affordable housing in the past for our employees, but we're really branching out beyond the resort with our first local housing project called Pulelehua, and we're in the change-in-zoning process and hope to have that completed by the end of this year and under way next year. Additionally, we're in a big planning endeavor up in Hali'imaile Upcountry Maui for a new community up there that will be targeted to the local housing market. That's a new outreach of our company to branch out besides the resort.

Q. Is that the future of the company?

A. One of our visions for the company is creating and managing holistic communities. Some developers are more interested in building the homes and moving on. We really look at a sustainable, recurring place in the community, whether it's being in the resort, operating the golf courses and the retail, or being in a new community and hanging on to the retail component and having that recurring revenue in operation. We're really not planning to build a neighborhood and abandoning it — it's sticking with it throughout the life of that community. A holistic community is everything from the agriculture being grown there to living there to working there to retiring there. So our communities are not targeted at one specific group. We're looking at all groups and in all of our communities we'll have a significant portion of it intermixed with affordable workforce housing. Rather than isolating the workforce housing in one area, we'll have it blended in throughout the community and we think that will lead to a ... healthier community and better social environment.

Q. What are the challenges that face you and the company?

A. The biggest challenge is the rapid rise in construction costs. Over the past few years, it's gone up there where it's made projects less feasible. What it's done is we really work hard with the architects and designers to keep costs under control to be able to build it. The construction boom the last few years has been great, but on the down side it's getting to a point where construction costs are getting so high it's making it difficult to go forward.

Q. Where do you see yourself in the next five years or so?

A. Hopefully continuing in a leadership role with Maui Land & Pineapple. It's a great company and we're working on a lot of exciting things here on the island and in the state. The largest endeavor that we have is the revitalization of the 30-year-old Kapalua Resort. It's gotten to be a little tired over the years and it's needed a lot of upgrade.

We currently have about $500 million in projects under way in the resort that include our largest project — the redevelopment of the Kapalua Bay Hotel into the Residences at Kapalua Bay — a new 28,000-square-foot spa, a beach club, and upgrades to our restaurants. In addition, on July 2 the Ritz-Carlton Kapalua Hotel will be closing for approximately six months to undergo a $100 million renovation to keep it at the five-star level that it is. We have a new retail village planned and a new golf course to get under way shortly to replace the Village course that recently closed. So you'll see in a few years time a completely new face on the Kapalua Resort, and we feel this investment is important to keeping both Kapalua and Maui at the pinnacle of the hospitality industry.

Reach Curtis Lum at culum@honoluluadvertiser.com.