Good friends are for keeps

In business as in life, or maybe they're all the same - human resources and relationships spell the difference between success and failure, sometimes both. I have no business relationship that's been more involved than my partnership with Mark. Its a long story but an interesting one. He and I met when we were both assigned to the same Wachovia team. I'd been at the company a long time but had picked up responsibility for a new team. He was an experienced banker brought on to add some age to our staff. I liked him right away. One afternoon we went to get a drink after work and he told me his story. He'd left home at 16, a product of a completely dysfunctional home life and worked successfully at odd jobs, never being actually homeless but coming pretty close. When he was in his 30's he managed an impressively large fur business for a department store chain that came with all kinds of stories about models, trunk shows and legions of women. Only occasionally would he tell me what life on the road with such an entourage involved. Along the line he'd gotten married and had a daughter but one day his wife disappeared and he raised his Marci by himself. Despite the rootlessness of his his past, relative to mine, there were times when his character was very evident and his resiliency and resourcefulness would serve him. Also about this time, two things happened that would affect him , and ultimately me profoundly. He was run over by a fork lift while in a warehouse crushing his back resulting in a lifetime of pain and pain management issues and he met his future second wife, Karen - a fur model. By the time we met, Marci was in high school and this longtime, single dad was about to marry his longtime girlfriend. Karen. against this backdrop our business relationship began.

Mark was a natural entrepreneur, that is to say he looked at risk differently than I ever had. When he came along, I was adjusting psychologically to the devastation of being divorced myself and the complacency of long term employment. This was the "right place right time" scenario to begin a business relationship. Mark had a friend/client that was building small, retail distribution warehouses for a former employer but was struggling to make a complete success of it. Mark bargained an opportunity to arrange to build all of the facilities his friend couldn't manage and invited me into the flow. All I had to my name was $11,000 of Duke Power stock that my successful granddaddy had left me a somewhat larger balance in my bank's retirement plan. But the opportunity to get in on the ground floor (only a neophyte businessman would use that cliche!) all I had to do was sell my stock - which somehow I knew my grandaddy would approve and borrow from my retirement account, then jump in. Well, I did and we pulled off a 3 year run that seems almost romantically successful in retrospect. While keeping up appearances at the bank, Mark and I managed to figure out how to acquire land, retrofit or build a dozen new buildings in towns all over the east coast. Once a building was finished, we'd lease it back to the parent company (on a prearranged basis) then sell the fully lease properties to investors that we'd find. I probably made $4 or 500,000 doing this, paying half of that back to the government in taxes but I learned, mostly from Mark how to think for myself and run a small company. After that played out, we went on to do a half dozen other "deals" and made a little more money and got a tad more experience but nothing with much consistent traction. We also both held on to our day jobs but neither had much enthusiasm after the thrill ride that had become our first real estate success. Eventually, Mark wandered away from the bank to devote himself fully to "Tundra Properties" our operating entity while I kept trying to stick to my now, all too familiar professional script but we stayed partners and met or talked every day. We had gone almost a year without any real estate success when the bank cut back and let me go and Dallas came along with his very thin estimation of what an equestrian oriented, real estate development endeavor could be. Mark was skeptical, mostly about my relationship with Dallas but as I needed to get focused on something positive and potentially productive and as he hadn't had any success on his own, he came along - reluctantly at first, but later fully invested.
Good Friends are for Keeps
Hey now don't let your empty
room ever get you down
You can fill the silence with a smile
And don't let the crowds on the street
Make you feel like you are
just a stranger in town
If you feel happy,
Or if you wanna weep,
Or you wanna warm word before you sleep

Remember,
Good friends are forever
Good friends are forever
Good friends are for keeps
-the Carpenters