The hard part about leadership in 2025, 2026, and beyond isn’t just managing through the noise — it’s seeing and hearing beyond it.

Mortgage rates, land costs, material tariffs, capital constraints, climate risk — they’re all loud. What matters is who inside your organization can quiet that noise long enough to focus on what endures: people, systems, and trust.

That’s what makes Jim Francescon, executive VP of Century Communities, such a compelling voice for next week’s Focus On Excellence Leaders Summit and Workshop in Denver.

You can register here now.

His story — and his company’s — isn’t just about scale. It’s about stewardship: the transfer of values, accountability, and curiosity from one generation of leadership to the next, even as the business retools itself for a radically different future.

We’re in a business that demands consistency, transparency, and the courage to keep improving,” Francescon tells me in our prep conversation. “That’s what my dad and uncle built here, and that’s the standard we hold ourselves to every day.”

A Bridge, Not a Break

Century Communities — founded and led by Dale and Rob Francescon — is one of the few national builders that has managed to stay both entrepreneurial and disciplined as it’s grown. That balance is not accidental. It’s a deliberate design, one that Jim Francescon and his peers are now shaping for the next decade.

In a market defined by generational hand-offs — of capital, knowledge, and leadership — Francescon represents the connective tissue between founders who built through grit and instinct and a rising class of executives trained to think in systems, data, and integration.

Our responsibility now,” Francescon tells me, “is to protect what makes Century Century — our culture of doing the right thing — while building new muscles in technology, efficiency, and customer experience. That’s how we’ll stay a builder of choice.”

That “builder of choice” phrase isn’t rhetoric. It’s the core of a companywide operating philosophy: be the partner, not just the counterparty, whether with land sellers, trade partners, investors, or customers.

Century’s inclusion on Newsweek’s 2024 World’s Most Trustworthy Companies list didn’t happen because of a PR campaign. It happened because trust is an operational system — baked into how deals are made, how homes are built, and how relationships are maintained.

Earning Trust by Evolving

At Focus On Excellence, Francescon will expand on how Century converts that philosophy into tangible results:

• Investing in automation and digital-twin construction platforms (through partners like Diamond Age and Digibilt) to compress cycle times and reduce waste;
• Scaling click-to-buy home sales technology that brings transparency and convenience to first-time buyers; and
• Pursuing smart, relationship-driven acquisitions like Landmark Homes of Tennessee — a move that deepened Century’s Nashville presence while exemplifying what “fit” really means.

Every acquisition, every new process, comes down to people,” Francescon says. “If we can trust them and they can trust us — that’s when integration actually works.”

That clarity about trust as a business asset separates Century from competitors chasing the next headline or quarterly target. For Francescon, trust is not a passive value; it’s a throughput — the invisible infrastructure that holds capital partners, field teams, and customers in sync.

And it’s no coincidence that this focus on reliability dovetails with Century’s push toward industrialized construction and AI-enhanced design. The same discipline that keeps promises to land sellers also governs data integrity, predictive analytics, and supply-chain coordination. Francescon calls it “a different form of construction — one that starts with building credibility.”

The Human Thread in a Digital Future

Century’s leadership evolution is as much cultural as it is technical. While automation and robotics redefine workflows, the company’s leadership insists that the “human systems” — the habits of communication, the instinct for fairness, the bias toward action — remain at the center.

Technology is powerful,” Francescon says, “but without the right people and the right culture, it doesn’t mean much. What matters is how you use those tools to create consistency and confidence — for your team and for your buyers.”

That perspective echoes across the company’s newer initiatives, from its Century Complete entry-level brand to its Century Living multifamily platform. Both embody a willingness to expand into new business models without losing operational DNA. They are, in effect, laboratories for the future of homebuilding — data-driven, customer-obsessed, and grounded in trust.

Francescon’s leadership style reflects that same equilibrium: pragmatic, data-literate, but deeply relational. He talks about “building trust through transparency” as naturally as he does about digital twins or modular assemblies. The connection between the two is no accident. For him, both are systems of reliability — one human, one technological — and both are required for a builder to thrive in a volatile world.

From Legacy to Learning

What’s striking about Francescon’s approach is his refusal to treat legacy as nostalgia. He sees it as a foundation for experimentation. Under his watch, Century has pursued partnerships that might have seemed implausible a decade ago — with robotics firms, automation start-ups, and AI-driven design platforms — not because they’re trendy, but because they align with the company’s north star: operational excellence that earns trust.

The market will always change,” he says. “Interest rates, materials, labor — none of that’s static. What doesn’t change is the need for your partners, your customers, and your people to know you’ll deliver.”

That’s the bridge Francescon embodies: the connective span between the founders’ hard-won credibility and the next generation’s data-driven confidence. It’s a bridge every homebuilding organization now needs to build for itself — before the next downturn tests who’s ready and who’s not.

Why Denver, Why Now

Next week’s Focus On Excellence gathering at the Four Seasons Denver is designed precisely for this kind of conversation. Leaders like Jim Francescon won’t be giving PowerPoint presentations. They’ll be talking — candidly, personally, and practically — about how to keep homebuilding’s essential mission alive: to make housing accessible, attainable, and trustworthy in an age of turbulence.

This isn’t a gathering about slogans and bragging rights. It’s about solutions – solutions to ever-harder challenges. It’s for builders who understand that excellence isn’t a one-and-done initiative — it’s a daily discipline, it's a habit built of love, of sweating the small stuff, of pride in the work only a fully-engaged and synchronized team can accomplish.

If you’ve been waiting for the right time to invest in your team’s future, stop waiting. The moment is now. The leaders who show up in Denver will leave with insights — and relationships — that help them not only survive the cycle ahead but shape the one after it.

Last chance to secure your seat.

Join Jim Francescon — and a generation of homebuilding leaders reimagining what trust, innovation, and leadership look like for 2030 and beyond.