Foley Knows Empire-Building : Profile: Leader of group buying Karcher shares built Fidelity from tiny shop to one of country’s largest title companies. He might have his own ideas for Carl’s Jr. parent too.

IRVINE — William P. Foley II is an aggressive, no-nonsense entrepreneur who runs an efficient title insurance company, with few managers and a lean management staff.

His hands-on style has helped propel Fidelity National Financial Inc. from a tiny Arizona storefront operation 10 years ago to the nation’s fifth-largest title insurance company with 4,700 employees in 48 states and headquarters in Irvine.

He also has won plaudits from industry analysts who call Fidelity the best-run title company in the nation.

With such a reputation and with the wheels turning smoothly at Fidelity, it may be only a matter of time before Foley gets involved in shaping the direction or the operations of Carl Karcher Enterprises Inc. in Anaheim.

For now, though, his expected purchase today of about 400,000 shares of the fast-food company’s stock is strictly a personal investment, he said.

Foley, who received $1.46 million in total compensation last year as president and chief executive of Fidelity, said he intends to help mediate a reconciliation between the company’s founder, Carl N. Karcher, and directors who ousted Karcher as chairman two weeks ago.

Foley has emerged as the leader of a group of four Orange County investors who will buy 641,000 shares of Karcher Enterprises stock from the shares that Karcher has pledged to Commercial Center Bank to back a past-due, $4.8-million loan. The investors, who also include two stockbrokers and a real estate developer, are not acting in concert, he said.

Foley also hinted that he may play a role in helping Karcher with a much bigger problem, a past-due loan from Union Bank that, with interest, now amounts to $25.1 million. But Foley would not discuss what are apparently ongoing discussions with Karcher and his advisers.

In the title insurance business, Foley and his close-knit coterie of aides have made Fidelity the envy of the industry by achieving what no other major title insurer has done in the past five years--the generation of annual profits solely from operations. And Fidelity will do it again this year.

Foley and his managers leave little to chance. They constantly travel county to county, state to state, to keep tabs on local managers and keep them updated on corporate actions.

“There’s no room for comparison in my book. These guys are the best,” John O’Neil, an industry analyst with the Oppenheimer & Co. Inc. brokerage in New York, said in an interview two months ago.

A native Texan, Foley, 48, is an avid golfer and former Air Force captain who maintains the trim physique of his college days and the military bearing ingrained in him at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y.

With a master’s degree in business administration and a law degree, Foley practiced real estate and tax law for seven years in Phoenix and became a major investor in Security Savings & Loan in Scottsdale.

He joined the Arizona thrift full-time in 1981 and initiated its acquisition of a tiny Tucson title agency and a small Denver title insurer, recognizing how those operations could funnel customers to the thrift. He and colleague Frank P. Willey, who had been working at Foley’s law firm and at the title company, began acquiring small title companies, mainly in California.

At the end of 1984, Foley and Willey engineered a leveraged buyout of Fidelity, and continued to expand the company. They moved the headquarters to Irvine in October, 1987, taking the company public at the same time.

Foley hasn’t cared much for the two major investments he engineered for Fidelity.

In 1988, the company bought a 5.6% stake in General Housewares, a gift and housewares company in Stamford, Conn., but soon sold it as questions about its intentions arose. “We just thought it was a real undervalued company,” he said. “It was a poorly conceived idea. But we made money on it because the stock price went up.”

However, he still saw related businesses he wanted to acquire. In 1989, Fidelity bought a 23.6% stake in the Hammond Co. in Newport Beach, a regional mortgage banker, where Foley took a seat on the board. But the chairman, Thomas T. Hammond, wasn’t interested in selling the entire company. Fidelity eventually sold its shares back to the company for its original purchase price.

Barely a year later, Fidelity agreed to form a joint venture mortgage banking operation with Charter Savings Bank in Huntington Beach. The thrift, however, was ailing, and federal regulators seized it, killing the proposed venture.

“We thought that the mortgage banking business might be a nice adjunct to what we do,” Foley said. “In hindsight, it probably was not a wise investment to make in an industry that provides all our business to us.”

Profile: William P. Foley II

President and CEO: Fidelity National Financial Inc. (parent of Fidelity Title Insurance Co.)

Education: Bachelor of science degree, U.S. Military Academy, West Point, 1967; MBA, Seattle University, 1970; JD, University of Washington, 1974.

Background: Air Force, 1967-72; practiced law before joining Security Savings & Loan in Phoenix in 1981 and headed its real estate subsidiary, Land Resources Corp. In 1984, Foley and colleague Frank P. Willey formed Fidelity National Financial and purchased controlling interest in Fidelity National Title Insurance.

Source: Fidelity National Financial Inc.