Photos courtesy of the Kiwanis Club of Birmingham.
Stancil Starnes, left, and William “Billy” Hulsey are both included in this year’s inductees to the Birmingham Business Hall of Fame.
Jim Dixon said when he thinks of his father-in-law, William “Billy” Hulsey, the first thing that comes to mind is his integrity and commitment to fairness.
“That’s the motto of our company — integrity, not compromise — and that describes Billy to a T,” said Dixon, who serves as president and CEO of Arlington Properties, a role formerly held by Hulsey for decades.
When Dixon was working for Hulsey, he said he “never had to worry about what direction we were going because of his natural commitment to fairness and integrity in everything we did.”
Dixon said he remembered one incident where they had a disagreement with someone who was buying one of Arlington Properties’ apartment communities and Hulsey gave him some advice about how to handle it.
“He said, ‘Remember — be more fair to them than you are to us,’” Dixon said.
Because of Hulsey’s impact on the community over the years, the Mountain Brook resident is one of three local businessmen named to the Birmingham Business Hall of Fame this year.
Fellow Mountain Brook resident Stan Starnes, retired CEO and executive chairman of ProAssurance Corporation in Homewood, is another, and Robert Earl Kelly, founder of Kelly Road Builders and Kelly Natural Gas Pipeline in Birmingham, is the third.
The three will be honored at the 26th Birmingham Business Hall of Fame event put on by the Kiwanis Club of Birmingham at the Harbert Center on Aug. 20 from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. with a coffee reception at 11 a.m.
Honora Gathings, executive director of Kiwanis Club of Birmingham, said they are excited for the event to return to a midday gathering, as it has been held as a dinner in recent years.
Gathings said as they choose the hall of fame inductees, in addition to looking for exemplary leadership in business, they look for “those who are true servant leaders, who are finding time in their busy schedules to give back and to continue to show love and invest in a community that means so much to them.”
Hulsey, who currently serves as Arlington Properties’ chairman, said he is surprised by the recognition.
“I have always liked to work, and I’ve always tried to do my very best, but I’ve always had good people who worked for me, and that’s what has made the business successful,” he said.
But event sponsors shared that Hulsey is known for his visionary leadership that transformed his company into a “leading force” in multifamily housing development and management. That in turn contributed to Birmingham’s economic and community development.
Hulsey also has a passion for the arts — he endowed the William Cary Hulsey Curatorship of American Art at the Birmingham Museum of Art. And he’s held leadership roles in a variety of educational and healthcare organizations over the years, including the Birmingham Area Chapter of the American Red Cross and the Eye Foundation Hospital.
Starnes has led ProAssurance to expand to writing insurance products in all 50 states. Each year he was CEO (from 2007 to 2019), the company was named one of the top 50 casualty insurance carriers in the nation out of more than 3,500 carriers.
Starnes served as the company’s executive chairman until 2022.
Before his work at ProAssurance, he had a lengthy career in law and earned numerous honors on the legal front. He had great success defending physicians, hospitals, universities and national and international businesses in the courtroom. He served for more than two decades on the Supreme Court of Alabama Advisory Committee on the Alabama Rules of Civil Procedure and was named Chairman of the committee in 1998.
He wrote the Alabama Medical Liability Act, which was enacted by the Legislature in 1987.
Catherine Crosby, another of the Birmingham Business Hall of Fame event co-chairs, said there are “probably few people who haven’t felt his impact” in some way.
She said she’s looking forward to celebrating him, Hulsey and Kelly at the Aug. 20 event, which she said is special to Kiwanis members.
“We hope as many people as possible can join us and have a great lunch and learn about some pillars of the Birmingham community,” she said. “All of our nominees have touched Birmingham in different ways, and I’m super proud that we get to celebrate that.”
For more information, call 205-251-0032 or visit kcob.org/events/bbhof.
