What Will David Hoffmann Do Differently to Save Lee Enterprises?

Article 21: What Will David Hoffmann Do Differently to Save Lee Enterprises?

In my last article, I wrote that David Hoffmann’s investment in Lee Enterprises and his likely control of the company was a potential boon. Instead of cost-cutting, Hoffmann says he wants to reward growth. One thing we can observe consistently at his other companies – on paper at least – is a respect for the communities and newsroom employees that was previously lacking at Lee where newsrooms are being hollowed out and content increasingly regional or from wire services.

Some other billionaire investors in the news have said similar things, then acted very differently. So, what do we know about Hoffmann that might help us anticipate what he is likely to do at Lee? Very little information is readily available. His Hoffmann Family of Companies (HFOC) is private and does not publish its financials. From the HFOC website, we discern that it has 200+ brands and companies, 22,000+ people in various businesses, and 400+ physical locations, but nobody has tried to systematically assess what patterns emerge across this range of operations.

We will examine websites, press accounts, court records, and other materials that might give us a sense of how he runs his companies to project how he might run Lee. I have been able to track down 135 separate purchases of entities now owned by HFOC, and I have examined 235 of the company’s commercial real estate holdings.

What are the Bare-Bones?

The man himself is rather interesting. Born in 1952, David Hoffmann grew up in a modest family in the small town of Washington, Missouri, roughly 45 miles west of St. Louis. His father delivered milk while his mother was a waitress (click here). The family did not have hot running water until David’s sophomore year in high school. He married his high school sweetheart around 1972 and received a BS in industrial safety and occupational health in 1974 from the Northeast Missouri State University (now Truman State University). Initially, he relied on a sports scholarship, but injuries forced him to abandon both football and baseball. He also worked a variety of jobs to help pay for school.

Upon graduation, Hoffmann took a job with the Clark Equipment Company (now owned by Doosan International of South Korea) in North Dakota. The next year he moved to the Chicago area to work in the executive search business. He worked in this niche for 15 years before founding DHR International, later renamed DHR Global, in 1989. (The name David Hoffmann Recruiters, Inc., shows up in various state corporation lists to possibly account for the acronym.) He put two mortgages on his house to start the venture and he convinced 30 colleagues to join him (click here).

Hoffmann sold DHR International to rival EPS Solutions in November 1998 – becoming a director and later CEO – but he took the company private again in 2001. (EPS went out of business shortly thereafter amid allegations of fraud.) At that time, DHR was considered to be the fifth largest recruiter in terms of revenue from search firms. DHR Global is now considered by Forbes to be one of the best executive search firms in the world.

Hoffmann’s 2+ years in the leadership of EPS appear to have turned him against public companies – at least in the field of executive recruitment. He confided to a Wall Street Journal reporter: “The pressure to increase revenue and trim costs, both shareholder priorities, distracts recruiters from attracting and building relationships with clients, the key to success and an activity that sometimes requires big outlays in an industry that closely tracks the economy (click here).”

DHR appears to have been the vehicle to both Hoffmann’s wealth and his varied assets. He purchased another executive search firm, Jobplex, in 1996 as well as The Strattford Group, a management consultancy, in Kentucky, in 2001. The next year he created Osprey Capital, a private equity group (now a family office) that he has used to purchase companies over the next 24 years. In 2002, he also founded a company called Peregrine Capital about which we have little information. Likewise, he bought Hat-Trick Assurance, and again we have little information here.

Hoffmann has heavily invested in real estate. At age 24, while living in the Chicago area, he purchased a 9-hole golf course in Washington, Missouri. Then he bought several apartment buildings in that town, and became the largest owner of commercial real estate in Washington (click here). While living in the Chicago suburb of Winnetka, Illinois, he bought several properties in the town in hopes of revitalizing the downtown, and by the early 2020s owned 28 buildings (click here). The Hoffmann Family of Companies currently owns 52 properties in Illinois, 25 in Winnetka itself.

Hoffmann also bought up properties in Beaver Creek, Colorado, resort area, not far from Vail, where he has a vacation home. Hoffmann Commercial Real Estate purchased most of the commercial real estate in nearby Avon in 2013.

Starting in 2013, Hoffmann turned his attention back to his hometown. Over the next 12 years, he bought 91 properties in Missouri; 12 in his hometown of Washington; and 55 in the wine-making town of Augusta.

Hoffmann and his wife Jerri moved to Naples, Florida in 2015. According to Hoffmann, they saw a downtown in need of revitalization. In the next ten years, the HFC became the largest owner of commercial real estate in the Naples area with 69 properties and companies.

Between 2014 and 2024, HFC purchased 64 properties in upper Michigan, near the Canadian border. Greg Hoffmann, David’s son who is the CEO of Hoffmann Commercial Real Estate, suggested that the family “stumbled upon” the beautiful area.

HFOC began to invest in assets outside real estate around 2018. They bought up 16 companies in 2018, 15 of which were in Naples. In 2019, they acquired 9 companies, all in the Naples area. In 2020, they purchased 8 companies, 5 in Florida. in both 2021 and 2022, the company acquired 20 companies, spread across 4 states. In 2023, HFC purchased 8 companies in 5 states plus the United Kingdom. In 2024, they ramped back up to 20 purchases in 10 states as well as Canada. In 2025, they bought 16 companies in 8 states and Canada. The companies for the most part are small, and in the hospitality, tourist, boutique farming, and entertainment industries.

Hoffmann has invested in other parts of the country, but on a smaller scale. In California, HFOC owns an herb farm and a luxury transport company. In Texas, they own a trailer manufacturing facility and another luxury transport company (becoming the largest private owner and operator of a black car fleet in the country). In Minnesota, they own a cruise company and a custom woodworking company. They are in the process of buying the Pittsburgh Penguins professional hockey team.

Investment Strategies

On its website, HFOC states its investment approach: acquire “good businesses or good properties, with really good people behind them – all with the potential and drive to be better.” A close examination of the company and its acquisitions finds at least five common themes.

1. Diversity. At least in the areas where they have concentrated investments, HOFC’s strategy appears to seek diversity around clusters of businesses. They look for strong business with a potential to grow and improve. Their goal appears to be to have significant footprint in core areas while looking for profitable opportunities in others.

The businesses purchased by HFOC tend to be small and focused on amenities in the area around its real estate. For instance, in the Naples area, they own two golf courses, two farms that grow flowers, a minor league hockey team, the arena in which that team plays, at least three tour boats, a marina, two water sports rental companies, an electric bicycle store, a Segway rental company, a high-end women’s clothing store, a photography studio, and several restaurants.

Much the same could be said about investments in Illinois, Missouri, Colorado, and Michigan. In the Winnetka area outside Chicago, HFOC has bought greenhouses, an ice cream chain, a farm, and they have built a community sculpture park. In Missouri, HFOC invested in five vineyards, a trolley system three nurseries, two bike rentals, a tour boat company, a golf course, a high-end women’s clothing store, a bakery, a deli, a biker bar, and a five-star restaurant. In Colorado and Michigan, the investments have so far been more modest. In Colorado, HFOC invested in a hotel and luxury transportation. In Michigan, it has invested in a ferry service and ferries, docks, and a restaurant.

2. Go solo. HFOC also likes to work on its own. In the 1990s, Hoffmann partnered with Lee Iacocca to build and market electric bicycles. Disagreements among the partners led to failure: Iacocca wanted to sell them in auto dealerships while Hoffmann wanted a broader retail distribution (click here). Since then, the HFOC have used only family assets to buy companies and real estate. (The Lee private placement muddies the water, since he will be a majority investor but not the only investor.) Keeping it all in the family has enabled David Hoffmann to relinquish leadership of HFOC to his two sons, Greg and Geoff, who have been co-CEOs since 2022.

3. Long-termism. Hoffmann believes in holding businesses for at least ten years to be able to achieve sustained investment and improvement (click here). His distaste for public companies, with a quarterly emphasis on financial returns, came from his experience at EPS. HFOC holds onto investments. It did sell 27 properties in Naples in 2023 to “re-balance” its portfolio to focus more on acquiring businesses and reducing its real estate holdings. I came across only one small company that he closed – Signcraft Signs, a small sign manufacturer in Naples – but a month later he purchased the larger Ziglin Signs in Washington, Missouri. HROC could not find a way to make Signcraft profitable in the four years it owned the company.

4. Reward employees. David Hoffmann believes it’s important to offer tangible incentives and to pay his employees well (click here).His advice:

Once success is achieved, I believe you have a responsibility to give back. Be generous, treat others the way you want to be treated. Empower others and support them when you know they are trying their best. These are the ideals that I live by.

This is what he says. I am still looking for concrete evidence. I explored the recruitment site Indeed – and these sites should not be believed because they can be easily gamed – and found a mixture of good benefits but below-market wages from unidentified sources, but I was unable to talk to a real employee.

I also could find no union presence at any of the Hoffmann companies nor any attempt, via the NLRB, to organize. How David Hoffmann will deal with the unions in Lee’s newsrooms is a big unknown.

5. Community-focused. His investments in Winnetka, Illinois; Beaver Creek, Colorado; and Naples, Florida, were driven by a desire to renew downtowns in “need of revitalization” (click here). HFOC seeks sufficient enough density to justify cultural amenities to increase community enjoyment: “You’ve got to have a significant enough footprint … to put in the things you want to put in, to have a sculpture walk, to have events to attract people to the downtown” (click here). Although he does not say so explicitly, he appears to be trying to reverse the downward spiral of neighborhood degradation, population exit, increasing crime, and urban decay. This is the “Hoffmann virtuous cycle” of urban revival. Local journalism plays its part by keeping people informed.

He also encourages local engagement:

I would encourage everyone to get involved in their local communities, be it on a local level, a state level, a national level. If you want to effect change, and you should … get involved and try to effect change. Either become a politician, support politicians, or let the politicians know your views.

Media Investments

Hoffmann has invested only recently in the news industry. In the last four years, HFOC has made six acquisitions, mostly in areas where HFOC already owns commercial real estate.

• In July 2022, he purchased the Florida Media Group, the publisher of nine weeklies with a combined circulation of 220,000.

• In March 2023, HFOC purchased Maurer Publishing, the owner of two small newspapers, one a seasonal paper, the other a weekly, in Saint Ignace in northern Michigan.

• In October 2024, it purchased the Napa Valley Publishing Company from Lee Enterprises. The company owns four publications – the weeklies Napa Valley Register, The St. Helena Star, and The Weekly Calistogan.

• In June 2025, HFOC acquired the Missourian Media Group, based in Washington, Missouri, publisher of the bi-weekly The Missourian.

• In September 2025, HFOC purchased two weeklies - The Telluride Daily Planet (re-named since to The Telluride Times) and The Norwood Post, as well as two regional Colorado magazines.

• In December 2025, HFOC announced the acquisition of the Aspen Daily News, also in Colorado.

J. Pason Gaddis, former owner of the Florida papers and now CEO of the Hoffmann Media Group described David Hoffmann:

I learned he has an affinity for community journalism. He’s from a small town in Central Missouri, and many of his business connections were through the community newspaper. As we started to discuss the industry and our business model, he was perplexed by news voids, closures and consolidations in hometown newspapers.

The Hoffmann Media Group gives both editorial and financial autonomy to the local news outlets under the assumptions that local publishers know their markets, readers and advertisers best, and give them the latitude to operate as local conditions require (click here). A good example is The Napa Valley Register. Under Lee, it was a daily paper, home-delivered, that migrated to online and print three days a week, delivered by mail. On the off days, the online version was exclusively AP content. After the Hoffmann Media Group purchased the paper from Lee. the California publisher was allowed to run a survey of readers and found an overwhelming desire for local news and no special taste for the AP material. As a result, the paper transitioned to exclusively local coverage and once-a-week print editions. The reduction in print enabled the paper to hire an additional local news reporter (click here).

What are the Implications for Lee Enterprises?

Extrapolating behavior in one part of someone’s life to predict possible actions in another is always dicey. Such projections inevitably miss certain variables. They are also subject to wishful thinking. Still, given the fact that Lee has regressed in its ability to provide local content, I believe it is worth the risk. What are the implications of Hoffmann’s future leadership of Lee?

First, David Hoffmann appears to have a commitment to long-term value. Therefore, he is likely to be less amenable to quick cost reductions to boost EBITDA for each quarter. This could get him in trouble with other shareholders, and a frustrated Hoffmann may want to buy them out completely and take the company private. In opposition to an owner like Alden Global Capital, he is likely to use cash generated by local publications to improve those outlets and not to siphon them off for other investments.

Second, Hoffmann is relatively new to the news business. He recognizes that he does not have all the answers for the revival of local journalism, but he will appoint leaders who understand their markets and give them free rein. This is the exact opposite of the chains, USA Today, Inc. (formerly known as Gannett), MediaNews Group, and Tribune Publishing. He is likely to decentralize operations and empower local managers.

Third, his investments in small, local businesses could provide the various publications within Lee Enterprises some important cross pollination. What HFOC knows about vineyards, tour cruises, restaurants, bicycle shops could inform how Lee will now approach current and potential advertisers. He also has a sense of what people in the towns and small cities served by Lee might want. Here I am not talking about St. Louis (Post-Dispatch) or Buffalo (News). Rather, Fremont, Nebraska (Tribune), city population of 28,190, or Winona, Minnesota (Daily News), population 26,173.

Fourth, Hoffmann’s commitment to community revitalization suggests that he believes in the importance of local news. He has stated several times that he wants more coverage of local sports (click here and here) Such an emotional connection to local journalism could sustain his commitment to the project through difficult times.

Fifth, David Hoffmann is willing to take calculated risks with his own capital. He built his wealth by betting on himself, and he used debt (two mortgages to found DHR) to help him achieve his goals. His negotiation with BH Finance to lower the annual interest rate on Lee’s debt from 9% to 5% suggests he understands the power of strategic financial restructuring to give that bet on himself a better chance of success.

David Hoffmann brings a rare combination: substantial financial resources, a commitment to the product, a commitment to local communities, and a track record of revitalizing struggling assets through patient investment and local empowerment.

Running a public company will be a challenge for Hoffmann, however. How he navigates this tension between his patient investment philosophy and public market expectations will define his chairmanship. Will his private company instincts translate to a public company context?

Billionaires have elicited wild expectations for individual companies and outlets when they entered the news business, and many of them have been disappointing for both their newsrooms and their audiences – Patrick Soon-Shiong (The Los Angeles Times) and Jeff Bezos (The Washington Post) being among the most recent. Let’s hope David Hoffmann has a different approach with more positive outcomes for local news.

The special meeting of shareholders to approve the private placement to Hoffmann will take place on February 3 per the proxy statement.