Toll brothers recruits, then grooms the next generation of leaders with assistant project manager training program.

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“[Each community is] 100 percent managed by a Toll Brothers project manager,” Downs says. “It's an awesome and all-encompassing amount of knowledge we expect them to learn.”

The project manager system is one of the reasons Toll is very selective about its college recruiting efforts, Downs says. He focuses on high-performing grads from such top real estate management MBA programs as Cornell University, New York University, Stanford University, University of South Carolina, and Columbia University.

“We have to pay a little more to get them, but they're a top caliber of employee,” Downs says. “They get up to speed fast and end up being good employees with long-term potential in the company.”

To fill the demand (each community will have an assistant project manager in charge of each product line, which Downs acknowledges sounds labor-intensive, but is necessary to meet the customer service demands of luxury buyers), Toll recruits 100 to 150 assistant project manager trainees annually. The trainees spend their first year with the company learning everything from land acquisition to warranty operation. In addition, they're assigned a mentor who helps them build critical skills. About 40 percent of the assistant project manager trainees also spend four months with the internal audit division (the division only has space for about four people at any given time).

The fieldwork is augmented with monthly formal sessions with mentors, who typically are senior project managers and who have been with the company five to 12 years. The mentors track their trainee's performance and their grade, which—along with the division vice president's comments—becomes the trainee's first evaluation in his or her personnel file.

The one concession to classroom training is a project manager orientation session that's done at Toll's corporate headquarters near Philadelphia within a few months of joining the company.

“They get taught things you don't focus on in the field,” Downs says. Staff from the mortgage company, corporate planning, human resources, marketing, legal, architecture, and finance make presentations, and they tour one of Toll's manufacturing facilities to see where and how trusses and wall panels are built. More importantly, though, they put names with faces and make important contacts.

“Corporate isn't a distant unknown Byzantine elephant,” Downs says. “They get to know the corporate players. In that sense, the company isn't so enormous. It's still a private, centrally run company.”

While the training program is demanding and intense, attrition is less than 5 percent, Downs says, and it helps the company retain key managers.

“In the project manager ranks, our turnover is in the low teens,” Downs says. “That's pretty good. Once they're trained, they're hot commodities and they can get a lot of calls from head hunters.”