Transcript:
But it was that, it was that kind of opportunity and ability thing that came together with with my new boss, who said, you know, I’m motivated to hire you.
Are you motivated to join me? And I said, yes, we check that box. I’ve got opportunity. Are you interested?
Yes.
But you know, I know I’ve got an ability gap that’s going to impact it. How can we fix that? And he immediately sent me to law school. I was operating mainly in the operations, sort of the back room of the bank and I had a team and I was doing some things and you know getting some notoriety for what I was creating and doing operationally.
And one day one of the senior executives walked into my office. He was head of our real estate portfolio about at the time for our we were a regional bank, but our real estate was about $5 billion in asset value and.
He said, I’ve been given permission to come talk to you. I I need you to come. I want to build a an operations group in in my department, which is kind of rare and different. But they told me I could talk to you and see if you’re interested.
And I said, yeah, I’m interested. But I got to tell you, Steve, I don’t know a thing about real estate transactions, you know, papering them, the law, the legal ramifications.
And, you know, we’re talking high end commercial stuff. And he said, I’ll fix that. And he picked up the phone and he called our lead attorney at our bank next door. And he said, I found my guy, he’s going to run my admin group.
You know, we’ve been talking about this. He said, I want him to come to your office for however long it takes for you to give him a primer in real estate law. Nice.
And over the next, it was about a six month journey. I went over once a week and I sat in this guy’s office literally for a couple of hours. And I I shadowed him and and we got to ask questions and we got to negotiate.
And I essentially did a cram course in law school for six months. And I have, over the decades, When I’ve had opportunity to be involved in those kind of transactions, I’ve had opposing attorneys ask me where I went to law school.
Wow. And I’m not one for the record. I’m not an attorney. I don’t practice law, but I’m willing to talk shop with you anytime, any day, you know?
