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.

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