at the direction of Mr. Drake

At the direction of Buddy Drake I placed my first call to my former employer Wacho Bank to see if I could get a fuse lit to launch this project. Wacho is the lien holder and is owed about a million dollars on the wood lands that Buddy was preparing to develop into building lots when the market crashed. We needed to get them to do two things and I'm not sure which one was going to be the most difficult. They would have to subordinate their lien to a conservation easement which means that they had to essentially release their collateral and once the easement was recorded and gifted to the land trust, they had to help us find investors who would buy the tax credits. Buddy (and the investors) would take the proceeds from the sale of the tax credits and pay off his loan. The bank had to believe that he would default on his loan and they would be forced to sell the property at a huge loss to be motivated enough to want to participate. But Buddy had told me an obscure fact a month ago that I remembered and thought that I might be able to use to our advantage.

Buddy's loan officer at the bank was a woman named BJ Watson. BJ had been at the bank longer than I had and while I didn't know her well, I knew that she was smart, thorough and took great care of her clients. I also knew that she now hated her job. The wonderful bank that we had both been proud to represent had, through a series of mergers become a greedy, uncaring place run by consultants and Wall Street analysts that were indifferent to both client care and employees. The grand culture that had made that bank the envy of the industry 10 years ago had become such a wreck that it failed, requiring the federal government to orchestrate a merger, more like a shot gun wedding to a bank in California - Wells Largo. I was willing to bet though that BJ still cared about helping her client, Buddy and would champion our cause. I was about to find out if I was right.

BJ and her colleague, James Marston met us and spent almost 2 hours exploring our process and exactly how we suggested that it would help Buddy and them. We talked strategy about how to prosecute our case through the rat's maze that was this huge bank, now run by people in California that none of us knew. But we identified the resources that we did know and agreed to keep in close touch. Then Matt and I left to go talk to the accounting firm Peat Maverick, with whom I had made a contact during a Sunday school party a week earlier. Peat Maverick was Wacho bank's auditor and I was hoping that we could accomplish two things there. Narrowly, I wanted them to recommend to their client, Wacho Bank that they employ our strategy in cases like Buddy's and broadly, I wanted them to see us a a solution for their other client banks problems. How I got to them is an interesting story.