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.

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.

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

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.