Creating Trinity: Blueprints of a Real Estate Entrepreneur & Investor

By Gary Chesson

Interested in a career in commercial real estate?

• Are you already in the field, but have no idea how to climb the mountain before you?
• Are you dreaming of investing and making millions, but don't know how to get started?
• Do you want to do it all while still having time for a fulfilling personal life?
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• Language: English
• Publisher: Lola Publishing
• Release date: Feb 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9798985464917

Book preview

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CREATING

TRINITY

Blueprints of a Real Estate Entrepreneur & Investor

by Gary Chesson

Charlotte, North Carolina | 2022

CREATING TRINITY

Copyright © 2022 by Gary Chesson

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Contact the author through Lola Publishing, Charlotte, North Carolina at [e-mail]

ISBN: 979-8-9854649-0-0 (Trade Paperback)

ISBN: 979-8-9854649-1-7 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021925094

Cover design by Tim Barber, Dissect Designs

www.DissectDesigns.com

Interior formatting by Becky’s Graphic Design®, LLC

www.BeckysGraphicDesign.com

Edited by Maya Myers

www.MayaMyersBooks.com

Proofreading by Katherine Bartis

www.KatherineBartis.com

Printed in the U.S.A.

This book is dedicated to David, Peter, and our perfect partnership; to my wife, Kim, who never doubted; and to my parents, who gave me everything and kept on giving.

Introduction

If I had to guess, I’d say at least three out of four ambitious commercial real estate professionals, brokers in particular, dream of owning real estate in order to build wealth. Some realize this early, while others become aware later in their careers that they’re not on the financial track to achieve their retirement goals, and they come to the realization that they should have been investing in real estate all along. And while not many brokers would say, Owning real estate is not for me, some might say that being an entrepreneur is not their thing. Maybe one out of four aspires to start their own company. Well, I’ve done both, and I’d like to tell you how it helped me thrive in my career and build wealth that exceeded my aspirations.

Starting and running a couple of commercial real estate businesses with my two business partners has been an exceptional experience. Our first company, Trinity Partners, has become a regional full-service commercial real estate firm with offices in four cities across the Carolinas. Trinity Capital Advisors, its sister firm, is a private equity real estate platform with offices in Charlotte and Raleigh; we have acquired and developed office and industrial buildings in seven states, with the majority of our investments located in the Southeast.

We’ve done a lot of things right, and we weren’t very good at other things, but in the end, we created two unique companies with a culture that has attracted and retained some of the best and brightest talent in our industry. Compared to what many other commercial real estate firms have achieved, our accomplishments aren’t necessarily impressive—but the companies we created were, and still are, extraordinary places to work.

An important part of our culture is transparency: we share anything with anyone who simply wants to learn. I spend a fair amount of time mentoring young people in our industry, helping them along their career paths and guiding them as they navigate this exciting and rewarding field, and I love it. That’s what led me to write this book.

For many professionals, moving from real estate broker to owner of commercial real estate is an intimidating step. I’m going to share how my partners and I went from blindly figuring out our first development deal to investing hundreds of millions in a single year—and then on to investing billions over our time together at Trinity. Rather than bore you with the nuts and bolts of each transaction, I’d like to focus on what made our firm unique, and how we went from dreaming about a concept to making it a reality. I’ll discuss the mistakes we made, and how we overcame being successful. That may seem like a strange concept, but as NFL coach Dom Capers once said, If I’ve met seven of ten people in my life that can handle defeat, I’ve only met one in ten that can handle success.

I’m also going to share some of the advantages that made our path materially easier. Luck played a big role, too; as I look back on my career, I see luck around every corner. While I’ve always embraced the Persian proverb Luck is infatuated with the efficient, it’s now clear to me that our hard work and determination has been buoyed by a lot of pure luck. There were times along this path when our mindset was provincial, and other times when luck, along with our drive and determination, produced exponential growth and profits. And there were times when we thought it would all come crashing down but instead, the years that followed turned out to be the best years in our firm’s history.

I’ve been on an entrepreneurial journey for most of my professional life. I’ll share how I went from a clueless twenty-two-year-old college graduate of average intelligence to a very successful entrepreneur by anyone’s standards. To make it this far, you have to do a lot of things right, and that involves thriving outside of work, too—having family with you all along the way, finding hobbies to keep you sane, and remembering that the world doesn’t revolve around you by serving your community and making a difference in the lives of others.

I’m hopeful that this book will give younger professionals the confidence and vision to excel in their careers. There’s so much opportunity in the commercial real estate industry today; part of me wishes that I was just getting started. Dream big dreams—it’s all out there for the taking.

1

David’s Going Home

That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.

—Emily Dickinson

On April 21, 2014, I was standing in the long porta-john line in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, waiting for the start of the 2014 Boston Marathon. I was listening to the Strokes, building my excitement to start the race in about forty-five minutes. Getting there hadn’t been easy—I’d had to convince my wife, Kim, and our two youngest daughters to attend as spectators. It was our twenty-fourth wedding anniversary, but that challenge was easy to overcome—the bigger obstacle to Kim’s attendance was fear.

We had both been there the previous year, me as a runner, Kim as a spectator, and we had both come too close to the bombs that had killed three spectators and injured over 260 others. Kim emerged from that close call badly shaken and wasn’t comfortable being around crowds for a year or more. I convinced her that this 2014 race was going to be one of the most secure events ever staged, and ultimately, it was.

As I waited for the race to start, my cell phone rang. On the other end was Peter Conway, one of my two business partners for the last sixteen years. Hey, Gary, sorry to bother you, but they just moved David to hospice care this morning, and I thought you’d want to know. It feels like the end is near. Our partner, fifty-three-year-old David Allen, had been battling pancreatic cancer for sixteen months. About a week before I’d left for Boston, he was still going out with his wife and three children to visit friends and spend time at his family farm, so I was shocked to hear that he’d gone downhill so quickly.

I asked Pete what I should do. He really didn’t know; this was new for both of us. With all my pre-race excitement gone, I just said, Okay, thanks for letting me know. Keep me posted. I decided to go ahead with the race: we were returning to Charlotte the next morning anyway, not to mention that if I didn’t run, I’d have to find someone to drive me the 26.2 miles back to Boston.

I ran the race consumed with the news. Throughout David’s cancer battle, we’d all been riding the roller coaster of hopeful surgeries, good news from chemotherapy and radiation treatments, and bad news revolving around the reality of his diagnosis. Around mile ten of the race, I pulled out my phone and called Peter back. Any news? I asked, and he replied that he hadn’t heard anything more. Why do you sound so out of breath? he asked, and I reminded him where I was. He and his wife, Sandra, got a good laugh out of me calling while I was running a marathon.

When we got home after the marathon, Peter and I made immediate plans to go see David in hospice. We arrived at a plain, single-story building on the fringe of an office park—hardly a suitable place to die. We recognized a few of David’s siblings and cousins in the waiting area and were asked to wait a few minutes while other friends wrapped up their visit.

David was barely lucid, intoxicated by a strange mixture of painkillers and other medicines used to make him more comfortable. Through my tears, I said, We’re going to miss you, brother, and without opening his eyes, David groggily responded, Where am I going? After chuckling at his deadpan response, we walked out and said a few words to his wife, Mari Ann, and then went home to await the inevitable news.

Later that week, I got a call from an Allen family friend. David’s going home, she said. I thought that was a polite way of saying he’d died, so I asked her to let me know when the services would be. Then she said, "No, David is actually going home. They took him off all his medications, and he woke up and said, ‘Where the heck am I?’ When they told him, he said, ‘I don’t want to die here. Take me home—please!’"

The next day, David went back to his South Charlotte suburban home. He took a shower, got dressed, and for the next four weeks, when he could muster the strength, he had visitors coming and going, saying their goodbyes all over again. Every day was a new gift, and we had no idea when this remarkable party might end. He spent more time with his wife, daughter, and two sons, and despite the shocking appearance of his 110-pound frame, he sounded just like the old David.

Once all his family had stopped by, it was our turn, so Kim and I drove over to visit with David and Mari Ann on their back porch. David wore khakis and a plaid shirt, his hair perfectly in place as always, but at eighty pounds lighter than normal, the clothes hung on his frame like they might on a hanger in a closet. We talked about the letters and calls he’d received, and how much he appreciated each of them. This visit was awkward for me; I didn’t really know what to say to someone who was about to die—to a brother and business partner I cared so much for. In hindsight, of course, I thought of many things I wished I’d said, but in the moment, I wasn’t very eloquent.

Toward the end of our visit, David turned to me and said, I’m jealous of you and Pete. You get to keep Trinity.

I knew exactly what he meant—our sixteen-year business partnership had brought us closer than a lot of real brothers ever become. The partnership between the three of us wasn’t perfect, but it was awfully close. We’d created two great companies that were thriving and still growing. And now he would miss out on that.

While I didn’t find many of the right words that day, in that moment I was present enough to say, David, you won’t miss anything. When you die, our perfect partnership will die too.

After starting with just the three of us as owners, by early 2014 our two companies, Trinity Partners and Trinity Capital, had nine partners in three offices. With our growth, the partnership dynamics had become more complicated and were no longer as easy as they had been in our early years together. We were about to lose David, both personally and professionally. Running our businesses without him was unthinkable, and frightening. It would never be as simple, seamless, and beautiful as it had been with the three of us, and I knew it. We hugged, and I drove off knowing that I’d never see David again.

2

Finding My Path

It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

—Ernest Hemingway

One of my favorite ways to pass the time in my car is to listen to podcasts. One of the best is Guy Raz’s How I Built This , where the host interviews highly successful entrepreneurs and delves into the secrets behind their startup success. Raz has talked with the founders of dozens of household names like Instagram, JetBlue, Robinhood, Ben & Jerry’s, Ring, and SuperGoop, and the thing most of these startups have in common is that they either had a big idea, or they solved some sort of problem that turned into a business. These podcasts are very relatable for me; they highlight the self-doubt, the bravado, and the grand ideas that these entrepreneurs wrangled when starting their businesses.

Very few of these stories are about entrepreneurs who built businesses in conventional ways. Admittedly, it’s probably not as much fun to listen to a story about a local money manager building a firm that dominates against its national peers or an HVAC servicing business that grows to four hundred employees. Or, in our case, hearing how we started two complementary commercial real estate firms in an established industry, competing successfully against entrenched national and global businesses that were hundreds of times larger than we were. None of these are as sexy as the stories you’ll hear in Raz’s podcast—unless you’re interested in a career in one of these industries.

Clearly, most entrepreneurs in our country aren’t going to launch the next Zoom or Peloton—they’re going to take a more traditional path, like I did. They’ll work for a company for a few years, then decide that they can do it better, and they’ll go start their own small business.

Like most people coming out of college, I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do, or even what I’d be good at. After growing up in Durham, North Carolina, and graduating from the University of North Carolina with an undergraduate business degree, I did what seemed familiar and followed in the footsteps of my father. First, I became a commercial banker at Wachovia, the same large Southeastern bank he’d worked for twenty-five years prior. As a commercial lender, I figured I’d see a lot of different businesses and perhaps one would be interesting to me.

In 1987, after going through the bank’s corporate training program in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, I had my first lucky break without even knowing it. At the end of the training program, I listed the top three cities I was most interested in being placed in, and I got my third choice—Charlotte. At that time, Charlotte was still sleepy, with no NFL or NBA teams, and it wasn’t much more than one of the top fifty cities in the US, population-wise. Few knew what a decades-long explosion of growth the Southeast as a whole, and Charlotte in particular, was about to experience. That region-specific economic expansion continues today.

During my three years of banking, I loved being in a production role, sourcing new commercial lending business for the bank. The financial analysis and underwriting I learned turned my lack of financial prowess coming out of college into a strength, almost a sixth sense. I had always been good with math, but my commercial banking experience served as a street MBA that substantially enhanced my nascent financial and sales skills. While I enjoyed my commercial lending experience, I didn’t love the standard 2 percent raises that came at the end of every year whether I was crushing it or not, so I picked my head up and started considering a career move. After three years in the stagnant but safe environment of banking, I was ready for a big change.

Real estate jumped to the top of my list for two reasons. First, I figured that my experience calling on CFOs and CEOs during my commercial lending tenure at Wachovia would translate well to commercial real estate. I’d be calling on many of the same cast of characters, so it would be a very familiar step for me, albeit I’d be wearing a different hat.

Second, my father was in the real estate industry, and I had grown up around it. Back in the 1970s, he had also jumped from banking to real estate, first getting involved in the residential side of the industry but also dabbling in the commercial side. He started his own residential real estate firm with a partner, and later he started a second residential firm on his own.

Even though I’d been on the periphery of real estate for many years, it was still a strange and foreign landscape to me. Despite the unknown, as a newly married twenty-five-year-old, I