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.

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.