not all consultants are alike

I can't quite put my finger on it but being busy, makes you feel productive and when you feel productive, even little disappointments don't seem as much like set backs. My really sharp friend from Sunday School, Britt who worked for Peat Maverick Consulting had told me that Terrance Bray was the Managing Partner of their banking practice and that guy was in position to really change our world. He had worked for one of the largest banks in the country, rising to the level of Chief Financial Officer before "retiring" and taking the job that he had now. he had dozens of bank clients and if he liked our strategy, he could effortlessly recommend that his clients consider it. I continue to be interested in finding an easier way to promote our process than by calling banks and developers, one at a time and this seemed a realistic opportunity. And for once, a person in such a responsible position actually called me back and agreed to meet at his down town Atlanta office tower. I should have been a little bit put off when the day arrived that he'd told me that he'd call me to confirm, he didn't. Then, when I called him he agreed to take 15 minutes at 5 o'clock and meet us not in his office but in the food court downstairs in his building. Those seemed the foreshadowing of being dismissed. I was right. this was a nice guy and he claimed all of the resume that I'd been told but he was an accountant, dullish and unimpressable. He listened politely to our description of our process, suggested that it all seemed reasonable and he even told us the name of a guy from his previous employer in North Carolina who might take a meeting. He also dropped two names of people in their tax practice but he was simply not capable of getting excited about anything. Our conversation never got to the level of his even acknowledging that they had the opportunity to collaborate with us on a process that made money. He simply had too many problems of his own, I guessed. We agreed to keep in touch, which I knew would be my complete responsibility and to what end, I wasn't sure. We left feeling like we'd wasted our time.

up on the hill

Jill and I are members of a Sunday School class that operates in a discussion format that encourages group participation. There is a very talkative couple in the class, Britt and Rachel Pitell. They are extoversive guys, willing to talk about all of their child rearing issues. She is an executive in a commercial real estate firm, which was mildly curious to me while his role as a consultant with the global accounting firm, Peat Maverick really got my attention. One of the hundred insecurities that I have is that I have little experience in working as a consultant. I feel like I need a lesson in selling consulting services, accounting for such services and knowing how to transform a transaction-ally oriented relationship with a client into a long term one. The sad irony is that, I always believed that it was consultants - like Peat Maverick that ruined the Wacho Bank but I also saw my former employer rely heavily on them, pay them unimaginable sums to think through strategies that we had people smart enough to imagine and, for the most part, they remained independent. And, as I have felt the unexplainable hand of Providence nudge me in one direction or another, I was open to that possibility again when we got invited to a dinner party at the Pittel's home. It was a snap waiting for my opportunity to talk with Britt and I wasn't even surprised to find that he consulted specifically with banks. I was able to get him to tell me the names of his superiors and enlist his help in representing our process as a solution for them to advocate to their clients. I was even more delighted by the realization that our conversation was being over heard by a woman lawyer from the consulting firm Rat - Glassner, who also consulted with banks, and the federal government. Was this our entree to the FDIC? Before the evening was over I had two important conversation streams to prosecute. Come Monday morning, I placed calls into both resources and had follow up appointments scheduled in a matter of hours.

Still fighting back the anxiety to keep committing time to resource building, instead of calling on prospective clients, I knew that I had one more Land Trust to go see. The Georgia Trust had been prominent in all of the reading that I'd been doing and their Executive Director, Kathleen Eden had a super reputation. She was a Wall Street lawyer from Alabama who eschewed all of that, returned to Auburn University and had gotten a Masters degree in Forestry and now ran the largest land trust in the state. I had called her 90 days ago and never reached her but that morning, while checking e-mails I saw one, to me, from her. She never referenced my earlier attempts to reach her but said that I had been recommended to her. I was flattered and noted the coolness of this being the first time that someone had reached out to me. And this was an important someone. We agreed to meet at her office in Preston, Alabama later that week. (The Georgia Trust and it's sister, the Alabama Trust share offices in Preston, Al because that's Kathleen's family home and she negotiated that when she took her job. The Ga Trust also has offices in Savannah and I had made a contact there a while back and look forward to meeting those guys too, but Kathleen was the undisputed boss.)

To keep it from being an entire week of talking with no one who was going to actually pay us, Matt and I dropped in on our prospective client Richard Dings at the One Georgia Bank. He hadn't seemed especially receptive the first time we met him but he had encouraged us to keep in touch. This time he told us that if we wanted to go look at a tract that they owned, which seemed to fit our model, we could but he made no promises. As Matt needed to do something else, I took the directions to this property in a far, northern suburb of Atlanta and started out. I found the property easily enough and was aghast to see "blue pipes", as far as the eye could see. These pipes, indicative of utilities in the ground with their access stubbing sticking straight up in rows reminiscent of corn has given the them the slur name of blue pipe farms. Clearly, One Georgia Bank was not the only owner of this kind of distressed property as there were at least 4 subdivisions contiguous to this one. As luck would have it, the road was blocked by a chain and massive pad lock, so access was, by car wasn't possible. And I was disappointed anyway because the graded lots, with curb and gutter and asphalt streets hardly looked like a conservation eligible site. But I pulled on my parka, stepped around the end of the barricade and started walking down the deserted street imagining what this hill side must have looked like before the bull dozers and what it might have looked like after 145 houses were built and occupied. The reality, as if in some parallel universe were homeless lots and streets that went to no where. But, at the bottom of the gentle grade, a full half mile for the entrance was a magnificent flowing stream, the Settingdown creek which bordered this and the other derelict developments. The stream, a tributary of the Etowah river that would be completely dead in 5 years following the construction and occupation of the houses yet to be built. Fertilizer, waste of all kinds, storm water run off from the asphalt all would have polluted this stream and harmed a primary drinking water source for the city of Atlanta, or so I was thinking as I trudged back up the hill. Then, as if on cue, my cell phone rang and it was my bankrupt friend from Sunday School who had been a developer and whose father and mother had been lured to Atlanta but the promise of prosperity in the real estate boom. My friend, was just calling to check on me but while we were on the phone he asked me to do something for him. He asked me to get to the top of the hill and to turn my ear into the wind and tell him what I heard. On that frosty cold afternoon, in the slanted light of the remains of the day I told him that I didn't hear anything but the wind. "Exactly," he grimmly proclaimed. 12 months ago, I would have heard carpenter's nail guns and the good natured, rapid fire Spanish chatter of landscapers. I would have heard bulldozers churning and dump trucks rumbling. I would have heard the sounds of people working. Despite the lure of honorable ecological conservation, my friend begged me to recognize the staggering human cost being born by legions of people now unemployed by the depression in the home building industry. There was no more eloquent evidence of the confluence of these two realities than the silence I observed on that hill.

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.

working the network

Button Gwinnett was a revolutionary war era cotton and peanut farmer who owned a plantation north west of Atlanta. This noted land owner, farmer and merchant was also a signer of the Declaration of Independence. What he could have never imagined is the amazing amount of suburban sprawl that raced from Atlanta to the north, primarily following World War II and swallowed up every inch of ground for 40 miles out from the city center. The successful real estate developer and former bank client of ours, Buddy Drake who had offered to let us explore the economic impact of conserving Gwinnett county land that he had planned to develop and where I had seen the huge deer a week earlier, seemed eager to get started. While that was refreshing I knew in my heart of hearts that we didn't have a land trust in our consort that would take only 23 acres nor had we successfully opened a communications line with his bank, the mortgage owner. And as truth is often stranger than fiction, the bank was my former, 20 year long employer who I knew had the capacity to be capricious and unresponsive. But I remembered my mantra, you eat an elephant one bite at a time and I set out to find a land trust in Gwinnett willing to work with us.

From the directory of Land Trusts approved by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources I found Carol Hasslin and the Gwinnet Range Land Trust, a name I found ironic as there certainly isn't any range land in the midst of that suburban sprawl. The refugee from the 60's who was in her 60's and the part time director of this pitifully small trust delighted in that ironic fact as well and over coffee one morning told me her story and that of her employer. I could have guessed that she'd been an activist her entire life and 11 years earlier, when the developers of the Mall of Georgia, certainly one of the most grotesque examples of the power the consumer was being planned, she helped form the trust to do battle with the developers. She lost that battle and the war also as in over a decade the Gwinnett Range Land Trust had only managed to conserved 750 acres. We had that much property in play already in only 7 months. Even though she seemed to be a caricature of a conservationist right down to her Walla bee shoes and tie dyed shirt (worn smartly under a leather jacket trimmed in fur, of which I wondered what the animal rights people thought) I admired her conservation spirit and determined to show her how to conserve Buddy's land, if I had to do it myself. Her board was scheduled to meet in 3 weeks so I gave her the survey so that she could find the real estate, I promised to attend her meeting and I left wondering how best to tease the bank into conversation.

From that meeting, Matt and I headed for Wilkes County, a little over an hour east of Gwinnett. The week before, in a moment of real inspiration, Matt had seen a newspaper advertisement offering 250 acres of timber land for sale. He had cut out the ad and gotten me to compose an e-mail to the seller suggesting that he explore the economics of conservation, as opposed to an out right sale. Well, the land owner took the bait, called us up and invited us out for a look. It was a long way to go but as we had so few prospects off we went. With only a little struggle we found the country store where we'd agreed to meet and introduced ourselves to this country fellow about our age who had been a timber broker in better times and was now just a buyer and seller of land. We climbed into his 2 ton pick up truck and drove all over his large land holding which proved to be wholly unexceptional but majestic in the quiet of that clear, winter afternoon. While Matt extended himself to impress Mr. Pollock in how much he knew about timber land management - which is nothing except a series of buzz words like "chip and saw" and " saw timber" I sat in the back and wondered if this was a good use of our time. In the hour we were together though I got Pollock to tell us that he had graduated from UGa in Forestry and knew everybody in Georgia in the timberland business, something that I filed away for future reference. I knew I'd made a friend when we got talking Georgia football and we stopped at yet another country store for a wedge of hoop cheese, crackers and a cold beer. Matt sat in the truck and talked on his cell phone to God knows who. We all agreed to keep in touch as Matt unnecessarily gunned his Mercedes out of the gravel driveway of the store and headed for Atlanta.

to complete the trip, you are going to have to help some people

Since nearly the same week I left the bank, Jill and I have been hosts of an adult Sunday School class that is designed for parents of younger children. The church believed that such a demographic needed the support of a network of friends in similar circumstances, given the size of both Atlanta and the church itself and the reality that most lived far from families that once provided all of the interpersonal support needed. While initially I felt like the oldest rat in the barn I quickly got over that and just relaxed and started enjoying the people and stories that arose out of the discussions. In deed, the class proved to be a nice outlet, a useful distraction and we began making new friends instantly and that's always a bonus even if it meant extending ourselves. Anything worth having is worth working for. During the slower weeks (for Sunday schools anyway,) over the Christmas holiday the class invited the head of the church's crisis counseling center to come speak about managing holiday stress. The speaker was a retired Presbyterian minister who split time between our church and the Veterans Administration hospital in Atlanta where he worked with veterans, especially those with substance abuse problems. I found him to be a tad bit old fashioned and only barely able to resonate with this younger, generally more confidant crowd. But I also identified with him and wanted to contribute where I could so I spoke up publicly for the first time about being without gainful employment as Christmas approached and how we were handling the stress. After the class concluded that day, a fellow that I knew only as Max came up to me, shook my hand and admitted that he was going through much the same thing only he wasn't a confident enough public speaker to have talked in class. Max had been a real estate developer of some type, before the current economic collapse so I invited him out for breakfast to see if he had anything to offer our enterprise. Honestly, I liked the guy and though I was determined to keep focus on my work, I wondered if he just needed a friend. Because of his real estate experience, I thought that I could sell my sabbatical to Matt - like I had to. Matt couldn't have cared less who I saw over the odd breakfast hour.

Max and I met bright and early at a popular spot, had a bagel and then got in his pick up truck to look at property that he'd developed. Riding out there he told me that he'd grown up in North Carolina, attended Wake Country Day School, went to Davidson and on to UNC for his MBA. Our NC backgrounds attracted me instantly. Then he finished the story. Following Business school he'd worked for UPS as a traffic manager but saw other people making so much money in the real estate business that he wanted to try that. His dad was a very successful builder in Cary, NC and encouraged him. In fact, dad loaned him the money to buy his first tract, in Cobb County which he showed me. It had been a very pretty field, which he bought, rezoned and sold 90 lots to a home builder and doubled his dad's money in less than a year. Emboldened, his dad doubled down his bet and put up stocks and bonds to collateralize a still larger development loan. Then, as he and his wife were approaching retirement anyway, they put their Lake Gaston estate up for sale and bought a very expensive house in suburban Atlanta so as to be nearer their 3 grandchildren and to explore going into business here with his son, Max. The rest is history. The housing market collapsed, they couldn't sell a single lot, the bank foreclosed on dad's stock accounts, the expensive old house on Lake Gaston wouldn't sell and Max's parents were struggling to afford the mortgage on the new house outside Atlanta. In the mean time, Max was terrified that his wife was loosing faith in him on the grounds that Max wasn't working hard enough to find a new job (in the worst economy in a hundred years) We'd stopped in a church yard to drink coffee and talk and I realized that it was almost 11 o'clock and I hadn't even thought about my own problems, as I listened to this fantastically terrible story. Through it all, though I discerned that this was a very bright, thoughtful guy who - like lots of others had just gotten caught in the rip tide of this awful economy. I wondered what it might be like to have him in our association but I couldn't guess how Matt might react to having someone so obviously smart around. Then I remembered that I hadn't made a dime yet. I was getting a little ahead of myself even thinking about needing to staff up. The good news was that Max wasn't looking for another speculative job in real estate and hoped to go back to UPS or someplace respectable and stable. It was hard to admit that my little company was neither.

trust for mountain land

While Matt and I are blasting away in Atlanta, my old friend Dallas hasn't entirely dropped out of sight. Out of the blue he calls me the next day and asks if I would come talk with Realtor friends of his who work in the mountain counties of north Georgia. Shortly thereafter, I have a cup of coffee with Tom and Jo, a husband and wife team who are representing a very unusual property just outside of Jasper, Georgia. I make a follow up appointment to meet Tom Lawrence in Jasper and we go see Elk Lodge. Elk Lodge is a 450 acre tract that has been in the hands of a prominent but eccentric family since the early 1950's. We learned that the matriarch of the family is old, ill, lives in South Carolina now and rarely even visits the property. We wound up a steep and curvy mountain road until we can to impressive stone gates. Inside, we traveled a paved drive that reminded me a little bit of the road up to the Biltmore House in Asheville. The forest on both side of the drive way was virtually manicured it was so lush and one could see 12 foot chain link fences that secured the perimeter of the property. Apparently, from 1965 until the late '70's the owners of the property rescued animals of all kinds and the fenced area that we drove through had once upon a time contained the only elk herd east of the Mississippi. The driveway ended at the steps of a 20,000 square foot log home that was literally perched on the edge of a gorge. We toured the home itself and despite its massive size, it was wholly unexceptional and needed serious updating if it were to ever live up to its billing. The site tour resumed as we descended into the gorge to a remarkably wide and flat, grassy flood plain that was the valley floor. A creek ran the lateral half mile of the plain and it had been dammed up several different places by beautiful rock walls creating pools, waterfalls and eddies where, again once upon a time giraffes, hippos and other exotic animals, saved from bankrupt zoos or private collections had roamed. There was a stone mill house with a water wheel, aviary for raptors of all kinds even a bear habitat, now all empty and derelict. Tom took us up a very rutted and muddy jeep trail to a wind blown field of wild flowers and broom straw on the ridge line opposite the old lodge itself. It was cool, breezy and beautiful there but more importantly, I could get a cell signal so I called Dave Kookenbach at the land trust we'd gotten close to to tell him about this site. Dave immediately warned me that Pickens County, Georgia was not only a poor county but a very disorganized one. He doubted that there was any long term steward available to hold an easement on such a tract that size and politely suggested that we stick to looking for broken subdivisions. As it turned out, upon learning that our process didn't involve actually buying the land (and paying him a commission,) Tom the broker went remarkable chilly on us and wasn't even willing to give us the appraisal documentation that he had on file. We tried to discuss how we might compensate a broker who brought us a transaction but it was clear that we hadn't thought it through and he wanted none of it. Broker sponsored opportunities were simply going to be a problem, I feared. That afternoon might have only been entertaining except I learned where downtown Jasper was and that happened to be the home office of the Trust for Mountain Land, a small but respected land trust to which I had been referred. Several days later, Matt and I were in the car, headed back to Jasper to meet Robert Rankin, the executive director.

Dr. Rankin held a PhD. in Biological Studies from Wake Forest, was a former Navy Seal and was a direct, super intelligent force of nature. He occupied a cramped office on the second floor of what passed for an office building in Jasper. Despite his modest surroundings - relative to almost anything but especially the plush, corporate offices of the Trust for Urban Land, Dr. Rankin was impressive and grabbed our concept immediately. It didn't take long to process that though he seemed marginally employed he was in a job that he loved. His was a small organization founded by wealthy Atlanta businessmen who had vacation homes near there and had wanted to conserve the forest around their conclave to protect their investment. They had founded a land trust to do just that he'd been hired to expand their scope of service. Two ambitious guys from Atlanta who needed his expertise suited him perfectly. And from him, we heard for the hundredth time, that we were absolutely onto something. Different from Kookenbach at the huge, national land trust, this guy was innovative, dedicated and maybe most importantly, he was hungry. He processed immediately how important Belmont Downs was to us (all) and offered to do a preliminary study on the conservation possibilities there that might help us push that rock up hill with the bank. Very different from Kookenbach, he offered also to see what the long term stewardship options really were in Cherokee County and that was bound to put some face cards in our hand. Over lunch, I learned two other things about him that seemed to cement our relationship. He grew up in Mt. Holly, North Carolina not more than 2 miles from my family's home and he did something that, in 30 years of work in professional settings I have never seen any one do. He drank 2 beers at lunch!

banks in georgia

While pleased with the progress we were making assembling the team of people necessary make our process work, I can't shake the feeling that actually getting business is going to be my responsibility and I can't afford to spend too much time on activities, however important that aren't business generating. So, bright and early Monday morning, I start a communications stream with people I know at 2 different Banks. Linda Pressley and I worked particularly well together 10 years ago. She is 6 or 7 years older than me, has never married but managed to avoid the all too familiar trap of letting her work become her life. I always admired how responsibly she treated her relationship with the Presbyterian Church and she had an elegant demeanor about her that always appealed to me. She and I always seemed to connect personally so I felt sure that she would help me if she could. She is now a senior credit officer with a bank whose business model it has been to buy small community banks and allow them to run, virtually autonomously, rather than fold them into a single brand. I guessed that meant that they would have member banks that had done plenty of real estate lending and would be suffering now, as a result. Linda happily took my call and we had a productive cup of coffee a day later. She told me indeed that her bank had $500 million dollars worth of bad real estate loans and gave me the names of several of those responsible for the management of that portfolio. I started e-mailing and calling her contacts immediately, using Linda's name hoping to get past the inevitable defenses erected to defend against sales people.

Concurrently, I put a call into Penn Ackerman. I never knew Penn especially well but he had been a journeyman executive at several banks and recruited me for a job some years ago while he was at Bank of America. I'd seen him around socially, knew that he was a regional executive with a bank based out in Gwinnett County and felt sure that he'd remember me. He did remember me and while we didn't speak over the phone initially, we did communicate irregularly by e-mail for several weeks.

In the case of both banks, I learned that problem real estate loans were devastating their performance, monopolizing their executives time and that neither seemed to have the first intelligent human resource necessary to re imagine solutions for these issues. Both banks assigned personnel to these broken deals that had made the bad loans in the first place and seemed astonishingly clueless about how to fix them. Each had as their core strategy, the belief that one of these days, somebody was going to come along and simply buy their problems from them. Nobody impressed me with their willingness to entertain an innovative solution. Consequently, I had to be tirelessly persistent in my follow up, I had to force myself not to take their rebuffs personally and I had to reorganize my approach to each bank as I ran of momentum with a particular name I'd been given as a contact person. Oddly, this just seemed like a game to me and I never got too frustrated. I believed in what we were doing (or more accurately, planning to do), I had the strength of my convictions and I believed that if I persevered, somebody at one of these stupid organizations would, sooner or later listen. That didn't mean that they would hire us but I was relying on an old business maxim that stressed that if you make your calls responsibly, sooner or later you'll make your goals.

new and different activity

Not altogether sure where this would lead, Matt and I resolved to call an odd, former client of ours who had been a real estate developer when we knew him several years ago. The real estate economy had gotten so bad and he was approaching retirement age then, neither of us knew if he would be much help. As it turned out, he was gracious and charming and delighted to hear from us. We went to lunch and he told us the amazing story of how he'd seem the coming collapse and had managed to sell off most of his properties and kept millions of dollars of profit. He went on to say though that he had still got caught with one tract that he had bought from a farmer, gotten rezoned and permitted to build 50 or 60 houses but had done nothing else to the 25 acres. He liked our idea and offered to try to work with us. He also offered to pay for lunch, a gesture that I appreciated but Matt grabbed out his (our) corporate American Express card and paid the bill as I grimiced at the unnecessary expense. Despite the fact that the tract size was small we agreed to take a look.

On a frightfully cold afternoon we found the very pretty woodland tract, nesteled between 3 ugly and, more or less broken subdivisions. When I was in the 7Th grade, our class read a book called "On the Beach." this was a terrifying account of the end of the world. Armageddon had occurred and a group of survivor sailors on a submarine was traveling around the US coastline dropping one another off at their home states so that they could die at home of the radiation sickness that would eventually kill everyone. The images of the desolation were so vivid that I'm reminded of that book occasionally. Today was one of those days. The builders in those adjacent subdivisions had just walked off the job months earlier. Derelict tools and half finished projects were everywhere. There were no workers anywhere, just tattered marketing tenants, falling down sighs of welcome and muddy asphalt. But while standing in a never to be used drive way and looking at our prospective site I saw something amazing. I saw 3 of the largest deer I had ever seen. Horse size really and prancing playfully in the woods. They were magnificent and I remembered in a flash that when we're successful we'll be saving their habitat. I left there resolved to find a way to get this project to work, to help this old friend and to hopefully see those deer again.

I had relationships of all kinds in my years at the bank and on the following Friday afternoon, as Matt - again had decided that he need the afternoon off I got my Rolodex out and started to see who else I could get some inspiration from. I had called Dave Kookenbach at the Trust for Urban Land and, as I feared the site that we'd just seen was too small for his group to consider. I had to find another land trust to help us with such smaller scaled opportunities. My first call was to Jim S. the executive director of the Atlanta office of a national environmental advocacy group. It seems an extraordinary coincidence that I had one, longstanding relationship with a legitimate expert in the field I found myself in so I was bound to determined to lean on him for advice. The advice I really wanted was "who else can I put into my net work." He gave me 3 names of influential people. Hans was the director of an environmental "think tank" associated with the University of Georgia. (as my daughter, Mary had graduated from there and I had grown very fond of that place, I was warmed by that lead.) Jim also told me about the largest Georgia land trust that had a sister organization in Alabama. I made a special note that this group, The Trust for Georgia Land also operated in western North Carolina, my home state and familiar also. The director of their coastal initiatives was a close friend of Jim's and he entreated me to call him with our most thorny problems as he was a "genius." Third, he told me of the Director of a land trust in North Georgia that was small but resourceful and was run by an ex-Navy Seal who was a character that I would either like or not. Lastly, he mentioned a very small trust in Gwinnett County - the county that I had worked in the last 7 or 8 years of my banking life, so I was particularly familiar with the human resources that group used and since the woodland tract that was now our next best hope for an engagement was in Gwinnett County, I conscientiously wrote down the director's name and contact information. I thanked Jim for his help and called each of these people even though it was now late on a Friday afternoon. I was only able to get Hans at the think tank in Athens but he was just a s helpful as Jim knew he would be and he gave me much food for thought. What he gave me in sufficient measure though was encouragement.

Silence isn't always golden

No matter how many times I tell myself that setbacks are bound to happen, I can't seem to recover as quickly as I'd like when they happen. Following a series of, what seemed to me to be productive meetings with Bill B. at First Community Bank, then a conference call with his board and a few key advisers we've entered into a period of radio silence. They'd asked for a final proposal, they'd asked questions about our fees but made no mention of them being unreasonable and they'd even wanted to know what we would do first. But now, nothing. Last week I tried twice to get Bill to tell me where they were and got a deafening silence. Such discouragement leads to all kinds of second guessing and self recrimination. Honestly, no matter how good I feel about our progress and the righteousness of our intent, until somebody validates us by hiring us, in the dark recesses of my mind I know that we are just another of the universe's good ideas that we weren't good enough to sell.

Hayden wrote a choral work that I can't get out of my head called "The Creation" that thematically explores the Psalmist's lament, "out of the depths, I cry unto Thee, O Lord. Lord hear my prayer." Prayer habits are some of the most private affairs of all, I guess because, despite the cultural acceptance of corporate prayers, congregational responses, table graces and prayers offer at a child's bedside, nobody talks much about it. And despite the Apostle Paul', and my own mother's entreaties to "pray ceaselessly" my own experience has been wholly more inconsistent. Until recently. No, that's not altogether true, there have been a few periods in my life when the stakes seemed so high and my personal sense of dread so disabling that I prayed ceaselessly for a favorable outcome. And such episodic influences has enable a cultivation of a more or less regular, ritualized routine of prayers of thanksgiving for blessings that seem undeserved. Over time, I've come to reflect prayerfully on the richness of the experiences that I've had and how I've learned from them. I attribute the opportunities for success in this and other endeavors to the accumulation of such insights and have been sincerely thankful for them. But these days, I am in near constant need of Divine reassurance that I'm not going to let everyone down, that I'm not going to fail miserably, that I'm going to find the strength and fortitude to keep going. I've got two friends, one close one casual who are both struggling with terminal illnesses. I know them to be strong guys with spiritual groundings. I imagine that they pray ceaselessly for deliverance from their illnesses, but sadly neither seems likely to improve. I watch my partner Matt, valiantly try to keep up appearances when I know that his heart is broken, still I'm selfishly terrified enough of our present circumstances to insist that he row the boat harder, notwithstanding his distress. Where's my compassion? Then I realize that I've spent my whole life cultivating the ability to feel sorry for myself and to use that as an excuse for insufficient effort to legitimately succeed. The role of the victim of some circumstance is deliciously tempting. When one is a victim, the pain of responsibility is more easily shifted, denial possible. But in my heart of hearts I know that prayer seems designed to change me, not the world. So I pray for the strength and the wisdom and the fortitude - maybe so as to remember that I claim each, in some measure and I go back in and face the day, as bravely as I can, not feeling very brave today.

new challenges along down the road

Bob, Matt and I spent our first working hour together in the Trust for Urban Land's corporate offices in a tower in downtown Atlanta. For what seemed like the thousandth time I told the story: For years now, as Atlanta's economy boomed and jobs were plentiful developers had bought river fronts, hill tops and other desirable locations and made plans to build huge numbers of houses there. An army of investors and community banks had sprung up to profit from and cater to these developers and home builders. Add historically low mortgage rates and no natural boundaries to confine it, the city of Atlanta and its suburbs sprawled like no other. Then the Sub-prime mortgage problems began to infest the larger banks, which led to a full blown credit crisis that all but stopped the economic growth of this, and most other regions - the interdependent banking and home building industry machine that had evolved here began to creak then seize up completely. By January 2009, finance and housing, especially in Georgia were in a state of economic depression. I believed that this confluence of historic events created an unprecedented opportunity to build a company organized to take back the river fronts and hill tops from the development industry and conserve them for posterity. And, it just so happened that the Georgia legislator had passed a law in late 2008 giving tax credits for those who purposefully conserved natural resources - especially water shed maintenance oriented projects as a persistent drought and uncontained growth had added a water crisis to the list of problems with which the region grappled. We imagined that such tax incentives would inspire investors, who were not in the finance or home building businesses to beat a path to our door. All we had to do was perfect a mechanism to identify the development land that had legitimate conservation opportunities and which were owned by investors or banks in the most distress and we should be able to have the wind at our backs to be that change agent. We were boldly proposing to use the circumstances we found ourselves in to build a business, out of whole cloth that would change our corner of the world. Bob Kookenbach was mesmerized. What's more, he was capable of helping us. His company had worked to conserve places like Golden Gate Park and the Okefenokee Swamp and while we didn't anticipate conservation opportunities quite as unique, he easily got the vision that we could turn Atlanta into a model of conservation and perhaps even smart growth. He was delighted by the prospects. I also saw something in the gleam in his eye that I hadn't anticipated. I saw an entrepreneurial spirit in this liberal, tree hugging, environmental bureaucrat. We could use this guy and his experience to give legitimate weight to our process and he could use us to promote their environmental agenda. In the following weeks, I met with Bob, often by myself a half dozen times to pick his brain and to build an interpersonal relationship. In no time, we had collaborated on how to reliably save Belmont Downs and the handful of others that we were now beginning to identify. The credibility of the Trust for Urban Land gave me confidence and I sensed that we were now beginning to get some meaningful traction.

To the office here we go

Having rationalized that an office might be the thing to put our efforts over the top, I packed a small box of essential office gear, i.e. a box of pens and 2 legal pads left over from the bank, my I-Pod docking station and the most effective Christmas present that I'd gotten this year, a new Rolodex. I know that sounds silly but over the last couple of years I had collected hundreds of business cards from people with whom I (we) had interfaced. These cards had been kept bound by rubber bands in no particular order and I'd gotten inspiration many times perusing these names/resources when we'd had a problem. Well, Jill recognized how I valued this "network" and sought to enable me to organize it by getting me an old fashioned Rolodex file as a Christmas present. As it turned out I need 2 of them to hold my professional universe of contacts in orbit and armed with both I bravely moved into the office. Two things occurred in the first hour that depressed me even further. Matt has a friend that seems to me to be nice but wholly unsuccessful professionally, personally etc but who "knew" computers, so he got him to come assess our technology needs. Needs that would have been effortlessly resolved in the office complex that I'd researched. Seeing this stumble bum coming in to work with us, if only on this project reminded me just how far we had to go. And, Matt - who had moved into the "nicer" of the two small offices and promptly began to argue with his estranged wife with over the telephone took an afternoon off to tend still more personal affairs. All alone in the dreary space I drifted into the office that he was beginning to assemble and I saw his pitifully small stack of business cards. Where I had the organized contact information of 500 regional professionals that I counted on, he couldn't have had more than 30, and of these he had cards from automobile mechanics, a plastic surgeon and several duplicates of ones that I had of human resources that I counted as friends of mine. In that moment I fully processed that getting this business out into the marketplace, a market run exclusively by human beings, I was going to have to be exclusively responsible for the penultimate aspect of our effort, that of marshaling the specific network necessary to build a business around. I resented that burden and for a pathetic moment, again wished for the institutionalized network that orbited me at the bank. But given the hugely valuable self reliance lessons that had been imposed on me over the previous 6 months, in that moment I accepted that responsibility (still knowing full well that I was going to have to share the credit for success, if there ever was any) and I returned to my desk and forced myself to began making calls.

I absolutely loath to admit this but not more than a day or two later, I began to sense that we were getting traction that we could possibly have gotten living and working in entirely separate spaces. While we had phone now, though no one knew the number we also had work spaces, windows from which to look at the busy street below for inspiration and wall to bounce stress balls off of and brainstorm our next moves. These are silly thing on which to rely but they offered creature comfort and I begin to be able to visualize a fully functional business. Still, Belmont Downs was our only realistic client and though I felt very good about the progress that we'd made strengthening our relationship with them we had no contract. Painfully aware that we were holding ourselves out as experts in a field in which we had only related knowledge I redoubled my efforts to systematically reach out to genuine authorities. An important one was Don Kookenbach from the nationally recognized, Trust for Urban Land. Don had been referred to me by the appraiser of Belmont Downs and he was impressive. he managed a staff of 20 people in a downtown office building and had a remarkable resume of environmental accomplishments. Over the years, the Atlanta office of this 50 year old, national land trust had raised hundreds of millions of dollars to conserve river fronts, historical places and ecologically sensitive tracts. He was going to be an important guy to us.

new office space

The aftershock's of Matt's revelation were felt for a while and manifested themselves in all kinds of unexpected ways. The first, and most important was that now he (we) needed a real office and nothing would do but we get one. Now, it is true that when we worked at the bank together, we used to throw a tennis ball against the wall and trouble shoot problems each other had. We both considered that our most productive time together. We had a partner in an other deal that owned some small office buildings and Matt had, from time to time needled him about making us a deal on some space. 4 or 5 months ago he'd even toured some places but they were either dumps or too nice for us to be able to afford. And since we were living on our savings' accounts, an office seemed like an complete extravagance to me. But Matt had been working from home and as he was moving out he had to have some place to hang his professional hat. When I realized that he was serious this time and that unless I did something in a hurry, we were going to end up in either a dump or someplace too expensive, I got busy. Rather than tend to our business affairs one morning I went on the Internet and found several locations of a service that provides a small office space, a receptionist, a conference room, all Internet accessibility, copier, coffee maker etc. for one very reasonable price. In fact the first place that I looked at was so pretty, cheery and professional that I instantly felt good about it. They required only a very small deposit, offered state of the art facilities and what I liked the best was, we'd be surrounded by professional looking people making a similar economical choice in offices. The hour I was there, someone had ordered a large pizza and was busy offering slices to the others sharing the space. Very friendly.

But I couldn't get Mark to even go look at it. He had made his mind up to move into Buckhead, Atlanta's most fashionable business neighborhood and our "friend" had indeed made us a bargain offer but it was on space they couldn't rent at any price. I felt like we were getting stuck, no - I felt like I was getting stuck. The space came with some used furniture, old carpet but they were willing to repaint in institutional gray. It had no phone system, no pre-wiring for Internet, no technology of any kind and we'd have to answer our own phone and bring our own Mr. Coffee. All I thought the space offered was the chance to get out of Starbucks and begin paying rent. I hated the idea and Jill already nervous about how we were plowing through our savings was flatly opposed to it. But what was I going to do? mark was just as adamant. It's days like these that i want to scream and scream. I was just beginning to feel as though we had a fighting chance to get this business launched and I'd get stressed about money and keeping everybody else from jumping off a bridge that I didn't know where to turn. But, I decided that maybe the professionalizing influence of an office would be what we needed so I went along with it.

Catching a break

With all of these personal issues swirling around I feel myself even more motivated to get a deal on the books so as to sense the relief that my business plan is actually going to result in income. As Belmont Downs is really the only piece of business that is any where close at hand, the next morning I call Bill B, the President of the bank to see where we are. Again, I'm anxious as I can possibly be dialing his number as I just know that he's going to growl that they're not going to proceed but, yet again he takes my call, is polite and agrees to take a meeting in 2 days. Wanting to pull all of the pieces together even closer, I suggest that we meet at the big accounting firms office, fingers crossed that it will work out with Rick B's schedule. In any event, it gets Bill off of his home court and the accountant's offices are big and beautiful with 180 professionals rushing around I thought that it would lend us some badly needed street credibility. Well, to my surprise and delight everybody agreed but the day of the meeting Bill's office called to say that he'd gone home sick and would have to call into the meeting. This was not as good a deal but what choice did I have. But at the appointed time, we all pulled up into a sleek, glass conference room, got Bill on the phone and proceeded to work toward a deal. We rehashed many of the increasingly familiar process details which I can now articulate easily but with the accountants on the phone I am encouraged that we're not missing anything. Then, what seems like a very important point arrives. Toward the end of the 45 minute call, Bill asks to speak directly to Rick (who he actually knows from a transaction years before) and asks him pointedly if hiring us to solve the huge problem that he has with the non-performing loan on Belmont Downs is what he should do. Rick tells him that "its the only thing he can do and that he is squarely behind these two guys." Encouraged, Bill tells me that he will deal with the developer, Tim and his reluctance to provide us with the information we need and we finish the meeting more confident than ever that we're about to close our first deal. But, significantly - its still not completely decided

What they really don't teach at Harvard Business School

There is a great old book called, "What they don't teach you at the Harvard Business School." Its all about negotiating and getting ahead in office politics, etc. Today, I got a huge dose of extracurricular stress that seemed to come out of no where. I share my virtual business world with one of my partners Matt. Since leaving the bank, he and I have met everyday, sometime spending the entire day at Starbucks or similar places thinking about what to do next. We worked closely enough over the years that I've come to know him extremely well, or at least I thought I did. We'd come to rely on each other and while one might expect us to be closer friends after spending such enormous time together we're nearly joined at the hip. Recently, as I've been so stressed I've become more and more critical about his work habits etc. For my own sanity, I need him to work as hard,as well and as effectively as I perceive that I am. In a two man company there simply isn't any place to hide. Recently, his effort has been getting increasingly erratic, he's given to spending hours mindlessly surfing the Internet and insisting that's somehow helping us by copying ads for exotic financing companies or brokerage firms with whom we have no access... and playing with his on-line stock portfolio - anything but effectively working on our business affairs. Now I know that we have complimenting skills and that his computer abilities and intuition about most business things is reliable but I was about to get really frustrated with his contributions. Then, over breakfast, trembling and almost about to cry he tells me an almost unbelievable story about his wife abusing him. Once he got started, he talked for 2 hours about her, who I've known socially for 10 years and have always thought was elegant and sweet - in a country girl, gone city -chic sort of way. Well, she has always been a spendthrift, something my Scotch upbringing considers a genetic character flaw. Apparently, I had no real insight into how terrible its been. While she rails at Matt for not being man enough to be truly successful, she's spending thousands of dollars a month on clothes, accessories etc. I'd heard that she'd gone and bought a Mercedes SUV and taken the money from their savings account - paying cash and putting the car in her name alone and I knew that she'd insisted that their home (second marriage for both of them and they lived in her "old" house, be put in her name when hey refinanced a couple years ago.) But today Matt told me that not only has she verbally abused him since the day they were married 5 years ago, now he is convinced that she's having an affair with the contractor that has completely remodeled her house. He has discovered huge envelopes full of cash hidden in her closet and that he had a GPS monitor put on her car by a private investigator and yesterday the car had gone to a contractors store for 2 minutes then gone to their mountain house for 5 hours, then back to that same store for 2 more minutes and then gone home. A trip that she completely denied. I was floored partly by the allegations but also because I had no idea that the home life of someone that I worked side by side with for almost 10 years was so completely awful. He had been so embarrassed by her incessant accusations of him being a looser that he's hid it all very well.

Clearly, we weren't going to get much done this day so when Matt tells me that he wants to drive up to his mountain house and change the locks on the doors I agree to ride along so we can try to get some work done in the car. However, during the 2 hour trip all he wants to do is purge. He talks nonstop about the most unbelievably flawed relationship I've ever experienced. She has been hateful to him in private while seeming to be a good, even doting wife in public. But the flaunting of the relationship with the contractor, right under Matt's nose was more than he could take. Apparently Matt had come home one afternoon to see the worker leaving the neighborhood and his wife, flustered but sitting in an odd chair, naked except for a robe and wet as if she'd just stepped out of the shower, which apparently they had. And another day where she cooked supper for the contractor and his son, in Matt's own kitchen without inviting Matt to join them... Well, we go by Home Depot, buy 3 new locks and go to the mtn house (in the absolute middle of no where) and proceed to change them. Once that's done, we sit down to rest for a few minutes and I hear someone at the backdoor. The hair on my neck stands straight up as it is dead quiet up there on this freezing cold, clear day - there should be no one trying to get in but through the window I see that its his wife! Matt lets her in and she mumbles something about needing to get a picture upstairs that needs re framing and I see that there is about to be an explosion so I excuse myself and go find a yard chair behind the garage. Its eerily quiet for 15 or 20 minutes, then they start hysterically screaming at each other. I feel like I'm an extra in a horror movie. I have no idea what to do, there's no cell service up there so I can't check my e-mails on my blackberry, I am stuck. The argument eventually spills out into the yard and Matt yells for me to come get in the car, even though when I do, she leans in the window and shrieks some more that she's done nothing wrong, Matt is the sick one etc.. We leave the gravel drive sideways, tires spinning and a ton of dust spun into the air as he aims the car for Atlanta. All the while I'm thinking, oh my God, now what am I (we) going to do?

A quick eloan cannot save everyone

The day after Christmas I experienced something that, again seemed like a providential nudge. I woke up with the feeling that it was time to act, as opposed to study and think about acting - what I'd been doing virtually since leaving the bank. Intuition told me to take Dallas and not Mark but early as I dared, I called Bill B. the President of First Community Bank that held the note on Belmont Downs and asked him for an appointment to discuss what we had been planning. Tim, the developer had told me terrible stories about this man. Tim, in his defense would think of him as terrible in that his professional life was in the balance as he was in default on a huge loan on which this banker could foreclose anytime he wanted, ruining him. But, we suspected that the bank hadn't foreclosed because the size of the note was so large, relative to their capital base that recognizing such a loss would cripple them. This was something of a Mexican standoff. Bill B was polite on the phone but insisted that I tell him what this was about so, I launched into a summary of 4 months of work like a shaky graduate student at an oral exam. I passed and Dallas and I went to his office that afternoon at 1. Bill B struck an imposing figure. He was 6 feet 8 inches tall and must have weighed 325 lbs, built like a pro tackle. This man was huge, with a deep voice and a disarming directness. He was also preppy, mean and clearly very smart. I would learn later that he had developed a reputation around Atlanta as THE man a Bank Board would bring in to straighten out a poorly run bank. He'd started a half dozen banks himself and was running 3 simultaneously now. But he admitted that Belmont Downs was in the ditch and that, for the life of him he couldn't figure out how to fix it. Our conversation was cordial and he seemed unconvinced but remained open to the possibility that our plan could work. He directed us to go talk with Tim, as he was still the land owner not the bank and make a proposal. We left feeling like we'd gotten a fair hearing, like we'd been well prepared and most important like we had the prospects of an engagement. IF this worked out, it would mean that somebody would actually pay us to help solve their problem and what better test case than this one - the banker that everyone feared/respected. When I got back in my car my hands were shaking. I admit to having been afraid of big Bill but I had been even more afraid of not being bold enough to march into that guy's office and declare that I was smart enough, shrewd enough, skilled enough and tough enough to have stet up my own business to do this for a living. But I had been and it seemed to be working. Once I calmed down, I was elated.

The follow up meeting with Tim didn't go particularly well. He believed that he now knew what we were going to try to do and he had digested the information from an earlier meeting and clearly had been in the marketplace trying to figure out our strategy and implement it himself. He'd even approached Cherokee County about the possibility of creating an easement on his property and selling that easement to them - something they were considering according to Tim. He directed any further inquiries to his lawyer and told us that unless we wanted to give him a purchase contract in roughly the amount of $10 million dollars he was through talking with us. I felt sorry for him as I drove away from that meeting. I knew that he was desperate and days away from financial ruin. Foresters call it "dead on the stump," a tree still standing but already dead. But upon reflection it occurred to me that it was now or never to act and that if we dithered any longer trying to perfect our process we might loose the first real opportunity that we had. Then I got mad. This twerp who had ruined everything that he had touched in the last 5 years was standing in the way of me feeding my family. OK, maybe I wasn't that melodramatic but I knew that only one of us was going to survive this and that I finally felt ready to press for the engagement. But I had to be smart and act quickly. Intuitively, I called Rick, the accountant that my lawyer, Tony T. had introduced me to. I told him that we had the opening to grab this "consulting engagement" to couch it in accountant's vernacular and pressed him to join us in making the case to the Bank, its Board and their investors - an opportunity I bet he wouldn't pass up as it meant exposure to so many wealthy and influential people. He agreed and we decided to arrange another meeting with Bill B. and this time we would ask for the business.

And time goes marching on...

There was something that I felt some urgency to get done before year's end that I hadn't gotten to and really had to apply myself if it was going to happen. I remembered that my old client, Rick S. was in the habit of spending the Christmas holidays at his home in California and I didn't want him to be gone for 2 entire weeks without having touched base with him again, so I made a pilgrimage out to see him at his office. This time, I went especially well prepared. I photocopied a dozen different articles, made complete records of the meetings that I had and even put together a notebook of my thoughts concerning conservation easements. I wanted this to be something of a technical conversation, coalescing all that I'd learned. In retrospect, I might have been using the occasion of meeting with someone I respected to demonstrate my consolidation of all that I'd learned in the past 4 months. In my own mind I passed the test because, even in from of this extremely accomplished real estate magnate, professionally trained accountant I had become a self taught authority on the subject of the tax benefits of conservation and this was saying something as we had generally found few articulate spokespersons for the field. Oh there were lots of lawyers, accountants and ecologists that knew about easements and their effectiveness but we hadn't met anyone who had actually built a business around the concept. Rick acquiescence that we were on just such a track and that the admission that he might be willing to invest in it were two goals that I had for the meeting. I thought that we had both by meeting's end as he agreed to change a appointment that he had made for the day before Christmas eve to join us at a meeting with the only investment banking firm that we could find in Atlanta that made a secondary market in conservation easement tax credits. We adjourned for the weekend confident that he was about to make us an offer to set up an office in his complex, be able to use his company's medical benefit program and maybe even collect a salary - evn if that meant giving up a big percentage of the profits from our own efforts. (OK, I'll admit that we hadn't made a dime yet, but by now we all felt sure that we'd get hired as soon as the new year began - by somebody) I can't entirely explain it but I still felt the need to have an institutional presence around me, despite all of the bad experiences that I had had with banks. I wasn't convinced that I could create a business out of whole cloth that would pay all of the bills just like a parent company would. I was about to get a very abrupt wake up call.

Monday morning of Christmas week - a pretty quiet week traditionally Mark and I met at a now very familiar, Einsteins Bagel shop to go over our presentation material for the investment bankers and my e-mail chimed. I looked at my Blackberry to see that Rick S. had sent me a message that fairly succinctly said that he'd thought about it over the weekend and that he was now unconvinced that our business proposition had sufficient promise for him to devote any more time to it. He wasn't coming to the meeting that morning and he thanked me for offering him the insights that I had but, as of now he was utterly, out. We went on to the meeting, which was inconclusive but encouraging and then went home to begin the Christmas holiday. While I was completely stunned by Rick's position, I was even more surprised by my own response. I was actually relieved. I had almost too much energy invested in seeking his approval for what I was doing and somehow it made me mad that he was being so obtuse. In no time I made my mind up that he was the one that was wrong and that we, I could do this without him or his money. I grew up a little bit that day, having weathered an emotional storm that I hadn't seen coming. I am still amazed at how I relaxed and enjoyed the rest of the week off, after such turbulence.

keeping up with my sanity

By mid-December Mark had begun to wonder out loud about the efficacy of the equestrian piece of the puzzle and his logic gave me still more heartburn. I give credit to Dallas for reaching out to me at just the right time and he inspired me with talk of well heeled investors from the Rolodex that he's built from decades of transporting horses for some of that sports most glamorous participants. He also spoke to my heart with his reverence for the land, his perceptive insights about the people around us and his resourcefulness that he attributes to life on a completely self sustaining ranch. Yet, Mark and I had been together a long time and I had come to trust his business acumen. Its true enough that Mark struggled with an apparent addiction to the pain killers he took to help him through the misery of a marginally functional back, despite remarkable success in our early real estate dealings he'd been responsible for little productivity lately and I knew that he was having marital problems, he was seldom wrong about business things. The model that we were now using was Belmont Downs and at the end of the day it was true, that neither the developer nor the bank absolutely needed to have a horse farm on the property in order for our plan to organize a conservation effort to produce tax credits sufficient to reward investors to come into the transaction and pay off the existing loan. It was also true that four and a half months into trying to tease a business out of the souring economy we both saw Dallas as a formidable net worker and one was a consistent source of encouragement but not much in the way of ideas that got us any closer to making money. It was also true that in this era of virtual businesses, Dallas had other sources of income that seemed to sustain him. Mark and I didn't and we were singularly pouring ourselves into this. Yet, I needed both of these good guys in my midst to keep me psychologically composed and that neither of them Fully shared this predisposition about the other, worried me. But in true Scarlet O'Hara fashion I chose to worry about that tomorrow.

I'd read somewhere that during periods of great stress, exercise was unusually important. I suppose that beyond the ordinary good that exercise did, that of increasing heart rates, enabling weight maintenance and assuring that appetites remained normal, exercise helped in some inexplicable way to keep one sane. Since adolescence, I have skied, played tennis, ran 10Ks and 2 marathons but now I ritually walked 3 miles a day, usually at some absurd hour in the morning. Stress effects everyone differently, for me it robs me of the ability to sleep. So, I was often up at 4:30 or 5am, I might as well use that time wisely and get some exercise. What was accompanying me these days on my predawn regimen was one of my most prized possessions, my I-Pod. Like most teenagers, I collected record albums as a kid and kept up the practice until I was well into adulthood. The most cherished of these recordings, the ones not easily found or rarely heard on the nostalgia stations I had put on CDs and later transferred to my I-Pod. I like to think of it as the complete soundtrack of my life. I not only held in my memory the recollections of trying times long past and obviously endured, I had dozens of albums that bolstered me during those same difficult periods which served as an especially effective reminder of historical events and reminded me that, or how I coped with each phase. As I had begun to deconstruct this as yet another phase in my life, having my music with me was especially comforting, though during the mornings of especially difficult days I might ultimately reject even this most familiar distraction and just take my thoughts with me and I bundle up and trudge on, hopefully toward revelation. This particular year it was the expansive collection of Christmas music that kept my spirits buoyed. While I have the standards that everyone would expect, my collection includes contemplative arrangements of hymns and carols, orchestral works, both contemporary and ancient, elegantly simple works of piano, cello and organ and choral masterworks, some secular but mostly sacred. Again with my wife's full compliance we'd worked to shed the materialistic expectations from our Christmas experience this year leaving us with just family, food, OK - a good bit more wine than usual and this very special music. With all of this and good health in hand, Christmas wasn't simply saved this year, it was priceless and thankfully experienced.

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

Possibilities of the conservation easement

Even as I slogged toward the Christmas holidays the business bug kept buzzing around. By now, Dallas, Mark and I had a clear idea about the possibilities at Belmont Downs. We were going to propose to Tim and the First Commitment Bank - the bank that held the $10 million dollar, non-performing note but on which they could not foreclose due to the bank's own solvency problems, that they reserve 10% of the property for exclusive home site but put everything else, all 400 residual acres in a conservation easement, give the easement to a land trust and harvest the tax credits and deductions for use by bank investors who had a vested interest in seeing that the bank stay in business. The problem now became, what land trust? There were lots of them chartered in Georgia but was there a perfect one? The answer came, as so many of the big ones had so far: from a remarkable source. Mark and I were eating breakfast together one rainy morning and I was looking at the survey and the appraisal that Jim Rice had given me. Having had some prior experience with appraisers, I decided to call the guy who had done the work on Belmont Downs and go pick his brain. His name was Dennis and he turned out to be an odd but remarkably articulate fountain of information on easements. he volunteered almost immediately that the Trust for Public Land and their local Director, Ken was who we needed. I liked Dennis right off as he had a big sign beside the door to his very cluttered office that read, "Nobody gets to see the Wizard, Not Nobody, not No How." he was the wizard alright. And man, was he right about Ken. The Trust for Public Land is a huge, old land trust that has as its mission "Land for People." And Ken was a disciple of the religion of conservation but he had a can-do attitude that seemed to suggest that he could think in technicolor. He listened carefully to our plans, made a few thoughtful suggestions and gave us every indication that we could count on this land trust to help execute Belmont Downs and perhaps many more. In his office in downtown Atlanta, I saw for the first time that our process could work, it could work in lots of different settings and circumstances and we could make money helping people with broken land deals either using the equestrian facilities idea or not. The outline of an evolving business was emerging right in front of us.

It seems the right time to say that i am a firm believer in a variation of the Protestant work ethic. My theory goes: work hard at something constructive and something good comes from the effort. it might not be the good you intended, but it'll be good never the less. My idea of starting a business to save broken real estate projects, and community banks in the process was picking up momentum and I was beginning to believe it, despite the fact that we had no proof that it would even work outside a couple of exotic examples

Runnin' on Empty

The first of December brings a confluence of emotions, feelings and worst of all, apprehensions. We'd had a pleasant Thanksgiving having actually succeeded in not thinking too awfully much about my economic fortunes. But, as December came on, frigid and bleak my mood began to mirror the weather. I had been off the payroll for 4 months now. The Christmas season was in full boil and I was flirting with the blues in ways I hadn't in years. When you spend most of your professional life working, even conscientiously in a bank its easy - no, I'll go so far as to say normal to lose track of what it means to be truly, economically productive. In a big, mature organization transactional business happens largely because customers know to call when they need a financial problem solved. A responsible bank employee simply takes the call and fashions a response from the ample resources that employee has at his or her disposal and that's called "sales". By using just a little initiative that employee might even qualify for sales rewards - a trip or a campaign prize and if you're really well employed, incentive compensation. Well, during my banking career, I had come to fully understand how that process worked and was, not only paid enough to keep my comfortable life style in tact, I'd gotten completely used to making bonuses on top of the ordinary compensation that did everything from enable consistent philanthropy, to treating my family, including young adult children to extraordinary trips and of course living well. (By upper middle class standards, anyway) But there is a dark psychological aspect to becoming accustomed to receiving such compensation without ever truly processing what it means to earn it. Its called entitlement. I had come to believe that I was entitled to be so compensated and that the things I chose to buy, creature comforts, admiration from others for doing so "well," a tangible sense of accomplishment and above all a feeling of security all get rolled together. I had become a person disconnected with self reliance because my well respected employer assumed that position. Now, all of that was gone. Only now was I beginning to understand how a slave could get comfortable with his circumstances and not want to change them, even if he could. The hardest reality though was my professional identity, my professional self concept was dissipating before my very eyes and, on the darkest of days I was terrified that I didn't even begin to know how to get it back. I realized that the irrevocable loss of such self respect meant certain failure. On some days this reality motivated me but by early December I was nearly depressed, longing for the salad days of working at the Bank, planning the office Christmas party, looking forward to shopping for others, the Christmas feeling. The only person who seemed to understand as well or better than me was my wife, Jill. its a long story but her adolescence was rudely interrupted when her Dad, a well respected football coach lost his job and simply couldn't find another one. Her nuclear family nearly disintegrated as a result and each carries the scars from that trauma, even to this day. The prospects of a merry Christmas seemed just as remote to her as it did to me. Oddly though there was real comfort in knowing that my wife understood. And, comprehending that she too was suffering psychologically was completely motivational. I simply could not let the blues over take me as I had too many looking to me to solve this problem. Of all the things that I couldn't afford, feeling sorry for my self, the ages old indulgence of the entitlement generation could not be the option I chose. I had to find some way to force-ably reject that.

Running on empty
Everyone I know, everywhere I go
People need some reason to believe
I dont know about anyone but me
If it takes all night, thatll be all right
If I can get you to smile before I leave

Looking out at the road rushing under my wheels
I dont know how to tell you all just how crazy this life feels
I look around for the friends that I used to turn to to pull me through
Looking into their eyes I see them running too

Running on - running on empty
Running on - running blind
Running on - running into the sun
But Im running behind

Just a ways down the road...

Tim turned out to be a small man, about my age more or less who had been trained as a Bell South sales manager but had stumbled into real estate development later in life. He's put together some small projects and then got a chance to buy these 400 acres from an acquaintance. He told us that a farmer friend of his family had just clear cut his property of the Georgia pine trees that had grown there for a generation and was now ready to sell the land. He bought it for a steal and got the bank to go along with an ambitious development plan to assemble 502 lots. he talked wistfully about the go-go days 2003 - 2005 when developed lots anywhere in greater Atlanta we red hot. Builders from all over the region had crews in town building for the insatiable appetite of the never ending population of people flocking to the prosperity Atlanta offered. Armed with prescient insight, he talk about how easy it was to borrow $10 million dollars from a consortium of community banks, built strictly for the purpose of capitalizing on this boom. And finally, he talked about the unbelievably cheap mortgage money available from the legions of mortgage lenders spread out across the country to feed this monster. He and two partners had thrown themselves into the furiously flowing credit river and now were drowning in debt. Then, in an instant he gathered himself, defended his actions and spoke just as passionately about the promise within those hills. He clearly loved his land and seemed to be the last man standing to believe that it could really become a shining city on the hill. He defiantly argued that they had not borrowed too much money - he in fact tried to retract the exact amount that they owed. He said that it was worth every bit of the $15 million dollar asking price and insisted that we jump into his four wheel drive Toyota truck for an off road tour. the tour itself was interesting as he told us every detail of the development process. he drove us through what seemed like miles of pine trees now just a head taller than the truck. To the previous owners great credit, he'd replanted the pine forest that was, sure as the world re-generating almost perfectly. indeed, one day this tract would be a magnificent example of a managed forest.he lamented all of the evidence of human disregard for the land - the four wheelers neglect of erosion control measures, the hunters disregard of posted "no trespassing" signs and the eyesore of the weekend party-ers littering of the tracts most scenic views.

Have you ever seen the rain?

I never had the clearest of ideas how Rick S. ought to be involved in this initiative but being associated with someone of his reputation and intellectual horsepower seemed like a good idea. For his part, Rick S. seemed happy to meet every 10 days or so and be brought up to speed while he mulled his options. He was, after all a real estate developer and this was a real estate oriented endeavor. My long time partner, Mark - who had by now gotten on board this train was consistently wary of Rick S. as he wasn't sure enough of his motives to suit him. I suppose down deep, I was still resisting the notion of going out on our own without the financial backing of some institution or at least and institutionally sized individual. I had enough cash to keep body and soul together for 6 months, I estimated and I had not, as of yet committed myself financially to this wholeheartedly. The cold hard truth was, it was approaching Thanksgiving, we'd been at it virtually full time for 60 days now and I still couldn't see how I or any of the rest of us was going to get paid.

Dallas , Mark and I were meeting at least once a week at a Starbucks on Lake Lanier, as that was roughly central for each of us. When I met Dallas, he was considering buying a 100 stall barn in Acworth, Georgia due north of Atlanta. Part of my first impressions were formed in the enormity of a barn that size. having little frame of reference in the equestrian world, I'll just say that one could easily park a 747 Jumbo jet in it! Well, as that purchase had fallen through and Chuck's admonishment to look for a failed subdivision instead of a farm, we began to ponder our land options toward the lake and closer to Atlanta's equestrian heart, an area call Birmingham Highway, in Alpharetta. In another of what seemed like Providential intrusions, one day I was wandering back from our Starbucks, looking for a scenic route back to town and I stumbled onto Birmingham Highway. As I had time on my hands, I drove north until I came to The Canton Highway (Ga. 20) and randomly turned toward home. In just a minute or two I came over a hill and there stood "Belmont Downs." Truth is stranger than fiction.

4 years ago, I was with a bank client who was trying to market a development called Belmont Downs. I remember it because my hometown was Belmont, NC. Here it was right in front of me and it was beautiful. There was about 2000 feet of frontage on Canton Highway that was lined with 4 rail, black creosote fencing, just like the modern farms in Kentucky are fenced. behind the fence was 30 acres of bluegrass and then a sweep of pine trees that ran over the hill and out of sight. The gate of the now derelict subdivision was locked but a faded sign had the developers name and phone number. Believing that I might just have found, or been pushed toward the exact site we needed, I called the number and got the developer, Tim Rice on the phone and made an appointment for Dallas, mark and me to see the property.

Someone told me long ago, there's a calm before the storm,
I know, Its been comin' for sometime
When its over, so they say, it'll rain a sunny day
I know, shinin' down like a water

And I wanna know, have you ever seen the rain - John Fogerty of CCR

real estate team ASSEMBLE!

As if I needed any more motivation to succeed the incentive stock options that I had earned during my career that were worth $500,000 at the start of the year had fallen to a value of less than $50,000 during the first month that I was thinking about what to do with the rest of my life. I had earned an old fashioned pension too but had no idea if that had any value any more. Facing the loss of most of my retirement assets I resolved that I had everything to gain from succeeding. So, on I marched...

My next call was to a tax lawyer with whom I had worked often, Tony. Tony and I are contemporaries, both from North Carolina and our business relationship had always been super. We have even had a few personal/social outings that were fun as well so I felt like he'd give me the straight scoop on what it was that I was trying. After exchanging voice mails for a week, we finally connected and he was encouraging but deferred to an accountant with whom he worked often who had directly relevant experience. Rick B. is the managing partner of a 180 person accounting firm in Atlanta and he called me back promptly. As it turned out, he had a client several years ago who was developing a 200 acre tract on lake Oconee, about 90 miles from Atlanta. The subdivision was a complete bust so, at Rick B.'s direction he put a conservation easement on all but a hand full of acres, went from 200 building lots to 20 and went through the elaborate process of having the state certify the conservation effort so that he could get the tax benefits designed to encourage land conservation. Additionally, he master planned an inexpensive equestrian facility for the easement property to attract land buyers who enjoyed such amenities. As luck would have it, he sold all of his lots (at a much greater price than he was asking originally) and when combined with the tax benefits that ultimately did come - the venture was a roaring success. Now, three years later the whole transaction is being audited by the IRS but they all feel as though their defense is air tight and they will not only prevail but they'll pave the way for folks like us to similarly succeed. Realizing that having a super qualified resource like Rick B. in my corner, I made plans to cultivate his friendship and get him squarely on our team.

In my experience, there is no better way to demonstrate our serious capacity than to introduce Rick B. to the richest guy I knew. That guy was Rick S. I met Richard S. several years ago and had been moderately successful in getting him to move his investment management relationship to me. Rick S. was 63, had grown up in California where he was a practicing accountant - a "good fact" in the grand scheme. He had worked for one of the state's largest audit houses then left to start his own firm. he built that into a regional player in California finance in the 1970's. During this time his wife had bought a dress shop that was struggling financially. he assumed control of it and when they sold "it" 6 or 7 years later they had 240 retail stores on the west coast. In the late '70's Rick S. sold all of his interests and started developing real estate. Well capitalized, he survived the recession of the early 80's and had the foresight to buy lots of property in the then depressed part of north Dallas, Texas. In the mid '80's when the oil patch was beginning to boom he sold his properties without developing a single one! He took his second fortune and bought then depressed real estate in north Atlanta where he built over a thousand homes and 10 million square feet of industrial space.When he and I met he was worth $100 million and looking for the next thing. He liked my idea but needed confirmation. I was willing to bet that Rick B. would be a credible source of such confirmation and would be interested in meeting such a successful prospective client. My hunch was right and they hit it off beautifully. I now had a confederacy with Dallas, Chuck, Tony, and two different Rick's. I was a long way from imagining how to make money at this but it certainly felt as though I was on to something.

A Step In A New Direction

In continuing with my new opportunity...

Dallas grew up on an 18,000 acres ranch in West Texas. His family was in the horse transportation business though he seemed to be some kind of self styled entrepreneur. He was well bred and spoke of much business experience but drove an old Ford Explorer, lived up stairs in a barn and had none of the trappings of success. It was really hard to tell if he was real but he was so earnest and nice that I trusted him effortlessly. He wanted to build an Olympic quality barn, stable and breeding facility for $1 million dollar horses but claimed that he needed help pulling it all off. He spoke of legions of possible investors that flocked around the posh equestrian facilities that his family managed in Palm Beach and in Del Mar, California. It all sounded interesting even though he offered no concrete plan to actually get it all done. I supposed that was why he needed me. For my part, I have lots of second hand experience managing relationships involving successful people and their ventures. I could do research as well as anyone and arguably the most important thing; I believed in myself. I was hoping that there might be just enough meat on this bone to build an enterprise around. I was willing to give it a shot, not even fully knowing what I was getting into.

A professional associate suggested to me the I talk with Chuck, a well known land broker to discuss properties that might be for sale, as a first start. With only a little trouble I found the guy and pressed him firmly enough to get an appointment. Providence seemed at work as this turned out to be one of the most important associations of this effort. Chuck and I met at Starbucks in Atlanta early one morning and talked about what it was that we were going to try to do. That being buy an existing horse farm and manage it to a much higher level. My new friend, Chuck was unconvinced that we could make the math of such a venture work but he liked my description of Dallas so he agreed to take a meeting. The 3 of us met a week later and spent several hours talking about horse farms, land availability and other options. Chuck, a disciple of Eastern medicine - so much so that he and some partners of his just leased a farm in China offered us advice that not only sounded plausible, it sounded like the basis of a business. He suggested that we not buy a farm but a "broken subdivision." Find land," he said, "that is zoned and platted for many homes that can't be developed due to the ever worsening economy and crashing home building market. He then said, "put a conservation easement on the property, secure, then sell the tax credits that Georgia allows for such conservation and we might have enough money to capitalize our efforts." I believe, and this seems especially important to note, that I understood immediately the full sweep of the possibilities and went to work enthusiastically exploring the concept with as many of my professional associations (numerous from my banking life) as I could get appointments with.

Banks aren't the only ones in trouble...

It was a hot Thursday afternoon in mid August, 2008 when I was scheduled to meet with the President of our division. I cant remember his name now but he'd come down from New York to personally meet with each of the business development people in the Atlanta office because the market and our sales performance had been bad all year. It seems important to point out that I was in my 18Th year as a business developer for the Wealth Management area of a Bank and I had become a Senior Vice President and a Team leader precisely because I knew what I was doing. But that afternoon, I was to be in the hot seat - like everyone else.

I should have known something was up when I reported to the conference room and the HMFIC wasn't there but in his place was my social climbing, weasel supervisor and the Chief Operating Officer, a thin, insecure woman who had consistently impressed me regarding how little she actually knew about operations. Grim faced, they stopped me from making my well rehearsed sales report and told me right away that they had bad news. Bad new for me, anyway. The sub-prime mortgage crisis had slashed 30% from their stock price and the Chairman, making a statement to Wall Street had decided to let 10% of the company go. I was being laid off, sacrificed to the God of expense ratio management. I had loyally worked every day for 18 years being the best I could be. I had attended every training option, I had cross sold every stupid new product and I had allowed myself to think that I was entitled to the relative prosperity I had come to enjoy. I thought that I had tenure. I was wrong. In the time it took to make coffee, I was escorted back to my desk, given 2 minutes to collect the personal things that I could carry and shown the door. It happened too fast for it to even sink in.

I resolved to take a month off before beginning the job search just to give myself time to grieve and secretly, take all of the time I wanted to feel sorry for myself. The indignity that I felt was crushing. I admit that I had been feeling really unenthusiastic about my job for a while, though I might have rather left on my terms not theirs. But, the fools that were blaming the office's poor performance on me had also given me a month's pay so I was going to take that month at their expense and relax. As it turns out, two huge things happened in the following days to change my plans entirely. One global and one personal.

At roughly the same time, the banking industry in the US was melting down. The sub prime problems caused an avalanche of bank failures as the stock prices of nearly all of the banks in the country collapsed. Clearly, there wasn't going to be a bank job available for me to try for. My professional life line was being severed. Facing the terror of starting over at 50 years old was something I wasn't sure that I even had in me. Second, on day 2 of my forced sabbatical my phone rang and it was a former client that I'd befriended. I'll tell you more about him in a minute but he went to some effort to find my home phone number so as to be able to tell me that he liked and admired me and wondered if I'd be open to helping him launch a business that he was planning. I liked him too and began to wonder if starting a business, even in the worst economy in 50 years was absolutely the best way to keep from becoming completely depressed. I agreed to consider it.