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