He learned hospitality on a ski lift in the Swiss Alps. Forty years later, he was running a 1,000-person senior living company out of Omaha.
Richard Westin runs a senior living company on a hospitality philosophy he picked up babysitting tourists' children in a Swiss ski village in 1961. He has not changed his mind since.
Agemark, the company he co-founded in Omaha in 1987 with Jesse Pittore, now operates 28 communities across six states. Roughly 1,000 employees show up under his thesis: a senior living community is a hotel where the guest never leaves, so the day before today had better have been worth remembering. He led the company as CEO for 35 years. In 2022 he stepped back. On June 1, 2025, his son Forrest and Jesse's son Michael walked in as co-CEOs - the two founders' sons taking the wheel of the company their fathers built.
Berkeley is where he lives. Omaha is where the books are kept. Engelberg, Switzerland is where the worldview was bought.
1961 · Switzerland
The story begins on holiday. A young American books a stay at a Club Med village in Engelberg. When the holiday ends, he does the un-American thing of asking if he can stay on as staff. The owners say yes. His first job is watching the children of guests while they take ski lessons.
The next year, after meeting co-founders Gilbert Trigano and Gerard Blitz, he signs on full-time. He becomes the first American citizen to work for Club Med, a French company built in 1950 on the radical premise that vacation should feel like a village, not a transaction.
For seven years he moves around Europe on a schedule that reads like a postcard: ski instructor in winter, sailing instructor in summer, ski instructor in winter, sailing instructor in summer. He thinks he is teaching sports. He is, in fact, being trained.
The Lesson
"I thought I was teaching people how to ski and sail," Westin has said. "And I didn't realize that I was really learning the hospitality business."
Club Med's pitch to its guests was a sentence. Enjoy life. Have a great time. We'll help you if you need us. Westin would carry that sentence across an ocean, through law school, through a career in real estate, and into a category that had never heard anything like it.
In senior living, in 1987, the prevailing vocabulary was clinical. Beds. Units. Care levels. Westin's vocabulary was different. Memorable. Magical. Family. The category had to catch up.
Club Med's whole philosophy was: enjoy life, have a great time and we'll help you if you need us.
On the sentence that built a careerI thought I was teaching people how to ski and sail. And I didn't realize that I was really learning the hospitality business.
On Engelberg, 1961-62Whenever you say good-night to one of our residents it may in fact be good-bye. So, it is our responsibility to make sure that their previous day was magical.
On the daily standard at AgemarkOur core commitment over the years has been to treat everyone like family. That means both the seniors who choose to live with us and the wonderful employees who choose to work with us.
On the two kinds of familyAfter Europe he took the route a lot of liberal arts kids took in that era. A B.A. at the University of North Carolina. A Juris Doctorate at the University of California. The credentials of someone who fully intended to do something else with his life.
He never practiced law in the way the diploma implied. He went into real estate as a syndicator and an investor, which is the legal way of saying he learned how to put deals together and how to convince other people they should be in them. He learned the operating side of buildings. He learned how to count.
By the time he met Jesse Pittore, the two skills were ready to be put in the same sentence. Real estate. Hospitality. Senior living was the place where those two words could share a roof.
Two halves of one company
Agemark, founded 1987, headquartered in Omaha. Pittore on one side, Westin on the other. A real estate operator and a hospitality operator agreeing that the building only matters because of what happens inside it.
The math works because of the experience. The experience works because the math does. Both founders kept that contract intact for 35 years.
The number that travels best with the company is not units or rent rolls. It is the number of times someone has said the words treat everyone like family without irony.
Six states · 28 communities
A portfolio that crossed the country one community at a time. Twenty-four owned, a handful under third-party management agreements. Each one is run on the same sentence.
Distilled to three lines you could put on a tea towel and still mean.
Imported from Club Med, repurposed for residents who have a lot more life behind them than ahead. The verb does not change.
Every good-night is also a contract about the day that came before. The standard is magical, not adequate.
Residents and employees. The same word, the same expectations, the same emotional math.
Day one at Club Med, his job is to keep an eye on guests' kids while parents take ski lessons. He files this away as hospitality, not childcare. A career later, the filing system was right.
Westin and Jesse Pittore signed the deal in 1987. Their sons - Forrest Westin and Michael Pittore - signed the next one in 2025. The handoff worked because both fathers wanted it to.
1962. Club Med. The French hospitality empire has its first American employee. He is not a manager. He is a ski instructor. The rest is org chart.
Founder-run companies tend to grow into the shape of their founder. Agemark is shaped like Richard Westin's idea of a vacation. Long, comfortable, planned with someone else doing the thinking. A village.
What makes the company unusual in its industry is not its size. Twenty-eight communities is respectable, not astronomical. What makes it unusual is that the founder's hospitality vocabulary stuck. Memorable. Magical. Family. None of those are clinical words. None of them are the words a CFO would pick. They survived because Westin treated them as load-bearing.
He has been clear about why. The senior living business is the last business its customers will ever choose. The duty of care is not just to the resident but to the family member who picked the place. The product is reassurance dressed up as a building.
That is also why succession mattered. A hospitality company built on a sentence is fragile if the sentence does not survive the founder. Westin spent the back half of his run making sure the sentence was bigger than him. The 2018 FORTUNE Best Workplaces nod was an outside auditor signing off on that. The 2025 handoff to a second generation of family was the inside auditor doing the same.
The handoff is itself a piece of hospitality. The founders made sure the next generation walked in with the lights on.
Westin lives in Berkeley. The company keeps its books in Omaha. The vocabulary keeps its passport from Engelberg. None of that is by accident.
He signed on in 1962, the year after his Engelberg vacation. Met both co-founders. Stayed seven years.
University of California law degree. Career went to real estate syndication, not litigation.
Lives in Berkeley. Runs (ran) a business out of Omaha. The travel pattern is part of the worldview.
Westin and Pittore in 1987. Their sons Forrest and Michael in 2025. A 38-year relay race.
Enjoy life. Have a great time. We'll help you if you need us. Three lines, two languages, one company.
Where to find Richard Westin and Agemark on the record.