Richard Hensel is the principal of Hensel Associates, Inc. — a U.S. military veteran, developer, and construction consultant with more than 50 years of experience across 70+ countries. He has never bid on a project: every engagement is negotiated on reputation and referral, and roughly half of them are rescues of projects other people gave up on.
“I’m 29 — but I’m only 81. I’ve been retired all my life. I enjoy what I do.”► Watch His Story 2 min · narrated
Last updated August 2026
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Raised on a Minnesota farm with 2,500 sheep to feed through winters that don't negotiate. Up before dawn, done when the work was done — a work ethic that never learned to punch a clock at five.
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Drafted into the U.S. military; two years in Okinawa as a combat medic on a missile site. A licensed pilot at eighteen, he flew in C-130 cockpits and landed in New Delhi aboard a C-141 on an embassy run. The firm remains veteran-owned.
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Two years of engineering school — until they tried to teach him poetry. He walked out and started building. Within two years he owned one of the largest industrial parks in southeast Washington and had brought in Coca-Cola bottling. Then came build-to-suit lease-backs, his own retirement homes, a 30-lot subdivision, and post-embargo Vietnam.
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Known for pulling a rabbit out of a hat: a hospital laundry financed, built, and delivered two weeks early on a 90-day clock. Today roughly half his engagements are rescues — projects upside down with structural failures, contractor defaults, or lawsuits. He has never bid on a project; every engagement is negotiated.
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Over half the firm's projects are humanitarian — schools in the Marshall Islands and St. Lucia, an orphanage in Guatemala, clinics from India to Africa. “Do it right, be ethical, and the money will take care of itself.”
The firm's independent design associate is led by a professor of architecture — a Notre Dame-trained land-use master planner fluent in five languages, lead planner for university campuses and major corporations from New York to the West Coast and into Central America.
Richard's architect collaborator across decades of projects — still active at 99, and still taking his calls.
A daughter and son-in-law who are professors of architecture, and a son who serves as project manager for the largest healthcare group in southwestern Michigan — four hospitals and forty medical clinics.
David R. Hensel — Richard’s brother and longtime collaborator — was an engineer who began at Boeing before turning to construction, serving six years as lead engineer in South America for the Seventh-day Adventist church group. Together the brothers built more than $60 million a year in senior-care work. His legacy includes U.S. Patent 8,808,537, “Self-Contained Transportable Water Treatment Systems,” and Engineering Excellence Awards for the City of Alamogordo tertiary wastewater plant and an aquifer storage recovery pilot. He passed away a few years ago; his standards remain the firm’s.
See the work they built →