Money & Wealth w/ Don Peebles

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome the Money in Wealth with John Hobriyant, a production
of the Black Effect Podcast Network and iHeartRadio. Hey, Hey,
this is John Hobbrant and this is Money and Wealth Podcast.
This is the first podcast episode host US Presidential Election

(00:25):
twenty twenty four. I'm with my brother Don Peoples, who
is a legend in real estate and in business. You're
going to get to know him and his story and
what he has to tell you. But this we had
to reschedule this for a number of reasons tied to
our mutual schedule. But in many ways this is now

(00:46):
perfect timing and it ties into this moment. So let
me see I can set this up properly. When doctor
King was assassinated in nineteen sixty eight, before that happened,
he said, I'm here the soul of America from the
triple evils of war, racism, and poverty. He didn't say
I'm here to say black people. Even though his work

(01:10):
helped a lot of black people. He was there for everybody,
and that last movement of the Poor People's Campaign had
pivoted also to include poor whites, which were then and
now the largest population of poverty in America. And he
was assassinated on the eve of the launch of that movement,

(01:31):
but he had pivoted to economics. Ambassador Andrew Young, my
mentor my role model in many ways, the guy who
sort of helped raise me in my adult life, our
global spokesman in Operation Hope, who was on the balcony,
who helped to turn Atlanta, by the way to the
only international city in the South and the tenth biggest
economy in the US almost five hundred billion dollars in GDP.

(01:56):
He was there when Doctor King was assassinated and he
was the only remember his team to take that mandate
from Doctor King and pivoted into political realm to structure
power versus their protests for it, and then to turn
that into an economy, which was the city of Atlanta,
as I just mentioned, almost a five hundred billion dollar economy.

(02:19):
And don pivoting to you what Ambassie Young told me
a couple Actually wasn't a couple of years ago. I'd
say actually was about eight years ago, twenty sixteen. As
we had gotten the Freedman's Bank renamed on the White
House campus from the Treasury Annex building in honor former

(02:39):
slaves who've been at charter the Bank to teach free
slaves about money financial literacy, eighteen seventy five, Abraham Lincoln,
Frederick Douglass. He said, John, you need to stay focus
on your work. I never said this publicly now to today.
You need to stay focus on your work because if
ever we lose political power, if ever we lose the
rights that we hold, dear, and he said, I can't

(03:01):
imagine this happening, but if the only real power, potentially
is economic power, if ever we lose political power, social power,
even religious power, we'll only have economic power the lever
of economics to pull back on. You have got to
not diminish your work or get distracted from it, because

(03:22):
we need an economic infrastructure for the underserved of this country.
And it dawns on me that this is where we are.
That the only true freedom is I believe and Chris
Gorman a key back is the one who gave me
this quote. Is potentially financial and economic freedom because once
you have it, unless you screw it up, no one
can take it from you. And it is and we

(03:43):
live in an economic democracy. This country is I keep
saying a center slightly right, center slightly right. It's an
economic democracy. It's a inclusive I like to believe it's
inclusive capitalism because you and I came from nothing and
made ourselves to significant some things in America. I don't
know another country in the world where our stories would

(04:06):
have proliferated at the level that they have. We might
have worked for somebody, but you and I work for ourselves.
So I'm now turning to you because before we got
on camera, we got we had a very powerful and
important conversation, some of which I want you to recount here.
But what do you say to doctor King's vision that

(04:31):
he was pivoting toward the economic agenda? And what do
you say to Ambassador Andrew Young's criminition that at the
end of the day, one of the few things you
can rely on that you have some control over, it's
economic empowerment. And where are we with regard to that agenda?

(04:52):
And then I want to get, of course, into your
story and how you have built what you have built,
by the way, with those of you don't know. Don
Pebles runs people I call the People's Corporation, but it's
several entities within his company that's a billion dollars plus
in real estate development.

Speaker 2 (05:09):
Don Peeples well great, So you don't know. It's for
those listening to this. I I did not mention that
Don Peoples is a brother. He's black, He's not black
for a living. He's a great developer who happens to
be black. He's a great leader who happens to be black.
But he's proud out of his heritage, and so am I.
He's after America, okay, Don.

Speaker 3 (05:30):
People absolutely And in fact, I grew up during the
civil rights movement. I was born in nineteen sixty in Washington,
d c. Seat of our government, where many of the
major protests and demonstrations and the fight in the halls
of our government took place. I remember when doctor King
was assassinated. I was watching television about the assassination. But

(05:54):
and then the riots that followed were in my community.
My mother had to drive me through a commercial quarriter
near our home and have me duck down so that
I wouldn't be hit as a little boy. And but
and then, you know, I remember Robert Kennedy's assassination as well.
I remember, uh how you know, and and and Malcolm

(06:18):
X's focus. But I remember that, you know, there was
a time of struggle in the country for us to
have equal access to just basic civil rights, and how
we had to fight for those and now our fight
continues to be for economic opportunity. And doctor King understood it.
I remember his quote. It was what good does it

(06:40):
serve for the Negro to have a seat at the
lunch counter when they can't afford to buy a hamburger?

Speaker 4 (06:47):
And so that was all.

Speaker 3 (06:49):
The relevance here about economic empowerment. And so he started
to poor People's March and and and ultimately that's poor
People's initial and so forth to reset the table economically
in the country, because our democracy is a capitalism capitalistic
democracy was that economic opportunity must lead the way. He

(07:14):
set the pathway for Andrew Young and then uh Mayor
Jackson before him, and uh and what happened, yes, and
and and and and initially through Hartsville now Hartsville Jackson Airport.
Where as mayor he had a vision for Atlanta to

(07:36):
be a global city and having an international airport and
got a lot of support throughout the state for that,
but then people didn't realize what he had. Part of
his plan was to make it an economic engine, and
he had to fight to make it. To protect the
opportunity for minority business contracting. He required thirty five percent

(07:57):
to be for minority contract for black contractors, and ultimately
he fought won that and that started the pathway of
creating significant black wealth in Atlanta, and it made Atlanta
the mecca for black economic empowerment. But others followed him
and followed Ambassador Young Marion Barry in Washington, d C.

(08:20):
Harold Washington in Chicago, bar in New Orleans, Tom Bradley
in LA. So, as you so, that civil rights generation
knocked down these barriers economically for businesses like mine or

(08:42):
Bob Johnson at b E T, which would not have
been possible if it wasn't for him getting the cable
television franchise for Washington, DC. So the political power in
the nineteen seventies and eighties was used to help generate
economic powerman, And that's how.

Speaker 4 (09:01):
I got started.

Speaker 3 (09:03):
Without that and without that mindset, it would have never happened.
So I grew up in d C. My mother and
I My mother parents got divorced when I was five.

Speaker 4 (09:13):
My mother and I moved to Detroit five, okay, and then.

Speaker 3 (09:17):
Nineteen and so in nineteen sixty eight, when I was eight,
my mother and I moved to Detroit for her to
start a new life, and and she her sister was
living in Detroit because her husband was doing his internship
in residency and medicine. So my mother was a secretary
at the Urban League and on Capitol Hill in d C.

(09:41):
So she went to night school, got a real estate license,
and she started working in real estate in Detroit and
then within a couple of years had her own real
estate brokerage business.

Speaker 4 (09:49):
And that was an environment of black entrepreneurship was Detroit.

Speaker 3 (09:53):
And I remember my best friend who's still one of
my best friends in life.

Speaker 1 (09:58):
You know.

Speaker 3 (09:59):
I met him when I think I was ten, and
we were best buddies. His father, Barry Gordy. My friend
Kerry Gordy. So Barry founded Motown and was running Motown,
which was in Detroit at the time. And I remember
the fact that there was a black man running, founded
and ran Motown was very inspirational to me. And it

(10:22):
showed me early on that there was no limitation. So anyway,
I went back to Washington, d C. My mother thought
I should get involved in politics, told me I needed
to the city. In nineteen seventy four, when we had
moved back with getting the right to elect its own
government and for the first time because before it was
all appointed by the President of the United States, including
the mayor. So she wanted, yeah, so to think about

(10:44):
DC didn't have any rights to vote. The citizens of
seven hundred thousand residents could not vote for anybody. Wow,
And so they in seventy four they got the right
to elect their own government. And so there was a
big deal there. And so my mother told me that
I needed to go and volunteer and work for one

(11:07):
of the candidates who was running for chairman of the
city council, her former boss at the Washington DC Urban
League God named Sterling Tucker, and then I could pick
somebody else. And I was upset with her that she
was taking up my summer for this, and so I
did some research and I picked the most radical candidates,
and it was Marion Barry, who was the city council

(11:30):
and he was he was a part of the civil
rights movement.

Speaker 4 (11:33):
He was co.

Speaker 3 (11:34):
Founder of the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee SNICK and
was very active in the civil rights movement and then
also the fight for economic inclusion. So fourteen years old,
I volunteered for his campaign he won Sterling Tucker one.
They were since it was a new government Barry, they

(11:54):
drew straws for terms, whether it was two or four years.
He got a short straw, so he ran two years later.
I was more active in his campaign and got to
know him a little bit better. I was one of
the you know, advanced people for him. And then when
I was on my way to college and I spent
my last two years, my mother was big on politics,
so she had me become a page, one of her

(12:16):
you know, she used her relationships on Capitol Hill.

Speaker 4 (12:19):
I got appointed a.

Speaker 3 (12:19):
Page, spent my last two years of high school going
to school at the top floor of the Library of
Congress from six am to ten thirty, and then walking
across the street and working in the US Capitol.

Speaker 4 (12:30):
So I was a page on the.

Speaker 3 (12:32):
Floor of the House of Representatives under Tip O'Neil, the
speaker at the time, and then I worked in the
offices of Charlie Rangel, Ron Dillams and John Conyers. I
got a good sense of politics. So Barry and Sterling
Tucker run for a mayor to unseat the first elected mayor.
So three way race and Barry runs. I'd go off

(12:55):
to college and the primary he wins, and and then
I'm in college at Rutgers going into studying pre med.
And then after that, after my first year, I quit,
went back to DC and started working.

Speaker 1 (13:09):
You start you study pre man Why my uncle.

Speaker 3 (13:13):
I was very close to him. He was a role
model and he was a doctor, and he was telling
me not to go into medicine. But I wanted to
go into medicine because I wanted to look my mother
and I struggled financially.

Speaker 1 (13:23):
I wanted to have what.

Speaker 3 (13:25):
Would be a stable income stream. I really wasn't driven
to try to be alter rich. I was driven to
have a nice, stable lifestyle. Be it to take care
of myself, take care of my family, and that be good,
and then maybe an invest in real estate over time
and make some money doing that. But after my first year,
I decided that it wasn't for me, and I decided

(13:47):
to go back to DC and start working in the
real estate business. And I became a sales agent. But
interest rates were twenty plus percent. It was nineteen seventy nine,
so I.

Speaker 1 (13:58):
Could sell whod on. People need to hear that they
slow that down. First of all, in bach or young
and you have something in common. Don you have a
lot in common? But one thing. His father was a
dentist and had a nice middle class lifestyle, wanted his
sons to be dentists, and his brother became a dentist.
But in Bassie Young, after studying it for a bit,

(14:18):
it was like, no, that's your dream, that's not mine.
I don't want to be a dentist. I respect your dad,
thank you. I want to be a pastor and I
want to preacher it. And then when he when he
told us Dad he was going to follow doctor king Is,
Dad like literally rolled his eyes and like, you, what
have I done with What have I done with my
with sacrifices my life. Of course, the rest is history

(14:39):
of all that Ambassador Young did with his life, which
is the legacy, really living a legacy of this family.
You could have been a doctor because you saw somebody
who was a role model, who you admired, your uncle,
and that was enough for you. You model what you see.
We had talked about, we talked earlier about the power
of words and the power of we see and what

(15:00):
we feel and what we hear in our lives and
how that influences us positively and negatively. Your uncle influenced
you so much you went to pre medt the school
to maybe frame your whole life, and luckily you had
a strong constitution. Your mother also, what's her name, god
gressn Yvonne Willoughby Pool, Yvonne Willoughby Pool. Let's say her

(15:23):
name and let it live in history, because without her
you wouldn't be you. I say my mother's name on
Nita Smith because she reminds me of your story, the
same story. Divorced five years at age five, want to
go do her own things. We want to go live
with my auntie, not really my auntie, girl her girlfriend
to save to build her to buy her his home.
Now on your story, your mother interceded several times, including

(15:48):
getting you a page position. Is that right? Yeah? I
mean she's a bold, audacious, strong willed woman. It sounds like,
is that right?

Speaker 4 (15:58):
Yes?

Speaker 1 (15:58):
She was.

Speaker 3 (15:58):
Or she was very big on exposing me to what
the world had to offer, and so she really worked
very hard to let me know what was out there.
And so every chance she could get to introduce me
to someone else. And she was working in DC. She

(16:19):
met a real estate developer who was pretty successful and
asked if he would meet with me for lunch one day,
and he did, and I got a chance to meet
was a very successful developer over lunch when I was
maybe sixteen.

Speaker 1 (16:33):
Wow, how did your mother know? First of all, she's
still with us.

Speaker 4 (16:38):
No, she passed away about twelve years ago.

Speaker 1 (16:41):
Okay, my mother passed away a year. They've both been promoted.
Hopefully they're cooking gumbo together in heaven. But she certainly
left a great legacy with you. So how did she
know don to that relationship? Capital and exposure was so important.
Was there something on in her life and the way

(17:01):
she grew up and made his obvious.

Speaker 3 (17:04):
Yeah, it's an interesting story actually, because she learned it
from her father. My grandfather, and he was from North Carolina,
moved he and his brothers moved up to d C.
First New York and then d C for better opportunities.
He got a job as a dorman at the Warboro
Park Hotel and he worked.

Speaker 4 (17:25):
As a dorman for forty one years.

Speaker 3 (17:28):
But he d C was, you know, the government town,
so he got to know many of the members of
Congress and political people and so and then he would
take My grandparents had five daughters. My mother was a
middle one and my grandmother died with my mother was

(17:49):
a teenager. My so my grandfather really took care of
his daughters. Worked around o'clock, but he would bring them
to the hotel on Sundays for you know, a you know,
like a brunch, so they could dress up in a
little dress addresses and then go and sit down and
the segregated area of the hotel, but sit down and

(18:11):
and see something different. But so he was all about
exposing them. But also when you know, one of the
my father, for example, when he needed a job, you know,
he was my.

Speaker 4 (18:24):
Parents got married.

Speaker 3 (18:26):
He was an he was a car mechanic, and so
to make more money he needed a job. My grandfather
asked the congressman to do him a favor and help
him get a job, which he did, got a job
in the federal government. My my another one of his
daughter's husbands was going to law school. Needed a job

(18:48):
that could work you know at night and make money.
Got him a government job as an elevator operator. And
and so so he used his relationships to help his family. Yes,
and that was as a dormant to be able to
do that. So it was all about exposure. So my
mother taught me because what she did is she generally

(19:12):
you know, she was a relationship builder. So it was
never kind of about something for her. It was how
could she offer some value or help somebody else and
then build up a relationship and one day if she
needed help with me or something, she could yes. And

(19:32):
so I learned the value of relationships myself, and that,
you know, like I learned her. It was more valuable
for me to build learn politics and build a relationship
with Barry than it was to earn some money. So
I was doing it on a volunteer basis. So but
I benefit, I wouldn't be here today, but it wasn't

(19:55):
for Barry.

Speaker 4 (19:56):
Be no chance. Really, yeah, I think, and.

Speaker 3 (20:00):
I think I'm a capable person, But I mean, so Barry.
I go back to d C. Barry is mayor and
everybody and so he's he's mayor and he is in
his first term, and I'm working as a real estate agent.
And then I ended up going to work for my

(20:22):
mother as an appraiser because she had a conselling business,
and uh, and then I worked as a subcontractor for
another company. My aspirations were to have my own appraisal business.
Barry's running for reelection. I'm twenty two years old and
I understood politics, So I said, okay, I'm going to
help him. I lived in War three, which was a

(20:42):
had a big white population, and he had struggled over
at War three. So I did a Meet the Mayor
event with several of the community leaders and so we
had this large gathering of residents and then I also
did a fundraiser for him. He was running against Patricia
Roberts Harris, who had served in President Carter's administration as
Secretary put in hg W. So everybody thought Barry would
lose and and I thought he would win. And so

(21:06):
I did a fundraiser for him to get two days
after the primary. I scheduled it for because he could
You could you could deficit spend in DC. You could
run up a campaign debt and so and so I
have sent out an invitation to everybody who had given
Harris more than one thousand dollars and then other supporters,
and I got a little host.

Speaker 4 (21:26):
Committee together more you know, mature, more experienced.

Speaker 3 (21:29):
People than me, and uh and and we did this
event at the Capitol Hilton and d C on sixteenth
and K and you know, we were kind of struggling
a little bit to you know, but you know, and
at one point they were the campaign was going to
cancel it, but I got them to stick it out.
So Barry wins. He beats her by four to one,

(21:50):
crushes her.

Speaker 1 (21:50):
Wow.

Speaker 4 (21:51):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (21:52):
So two days later we have our event. It's so
big that they were bringing in extra table because all
the people who had given her Harris money were trying
to redeem themselves with him. Made raised a huge amount
of money and I got the chance to introduce him,

(22:12):
and that showed him that I was no longer the
little teenage guy that he had had, you know, working
as his advanced person as a volunteer, but I was
now somebody that could be helpful to him. Within a
matter of months, one of the camp, one of the
campaign team members called me. And what happened is many

(22:33):
of the people in the campaign transitioned to work in
the government. So one of them called me and offered
me a position on as president of the Real Estate Commission.
And ultimately I spoke to a person at the head
of boards and commissions and she said that that wasn't
the right position. I wasn't qualified for that position because
you had to be a broker, and I was only

(22:54):
a sales agent, but a proper assessment of pillboard would
be good for me. But they had just filled all
the slots and the appointees are on the Mayor's desk,
and my mother had served on that board, so I
knew that board. So I called the deputy mayor, who
happened to have been the mayor's campaign manager from the
time he ran for city council.

Speaker 4 (23:15):
And I was right.

Speaker 3 (23:17):
So I knew since I was fourteen years old. And
I went and met with him and asked to meet
with him, and I made my case and he said, okay,
let me look into it. A couple of days later,
the woman called me back and said, oh my god,
I just want to I've got good news for you.
I went into the Mayor's office and I told Mary,
you were such an impressive young man that we had
to appoint you. And he has nominated you for the

(23:39):
Property Assessment Appeal Board. And I thanked her. I knew
she didn't do it, but I thanked her for it
and thanked her for her support and so forth, and
so I served on the board the following year. The
chairman's position was a chairman with a term had expired,
and I asked Barry not to a reappoint him, and

(24:00):
I asked Barry to pick somebody else, and I made
a deal with one of the older members on the
board to pick him, but he didn't want to. He
said he didn't want to do it. So I told
the mayor my first choice was this guy, but if
he's not going to do it, I'd like to do it.

Speaker 1 (24:18):
How were you?

Speaker 3 (24:20):
I was twenty three. I love it, And and his
deputy mayor gave me instructions on how to make it
easier for the mayor to get some of the people
that I had met during the fundraising and so forth
who the mayor respected, to call the mayor and say
they thought I'd do a good job, which I did.
And so Barry told me that, well, you know that

(24:42):
you're the guy was supporting. His name is Ted Wade.
He said, you know that he is. That he's been
trying to get to meet with me, and he's been
asking and he's been telling people to call me because
he wants to be chairman, right, I said, But he
told me he didn't want it. He says, well, he
can't be trusted, so he said, so let me think
about it, don and and I'll get back to you.

Speaker 4 (25:04):
And I met with him in his big office and
so forth.

Speaker 3 (25:07):
And because I've been on the hill, I was accustomed
to the big office and so still I was a
little nervous, but I wasn't as intimidated because I'd been
exposed to it. But I was very you know, you know,
humble and respectful. But because of the deputy mayor, he
taught me. He said, look, you have to make You're
twenty three years old. You have to make this. This
is the most powerful board in the city.

Speaker 1 (25:29):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (25:30):
To make this easier for the mayor. Because him appointing
a twenty three year old young black man, that's not
easy to oversee all these real estate property owners.

Speaker 4 (25:43):
So you got to make it easier. And he showed
me how.

Speaker 3 (25:46):
And because of that, Barry calls me up and says, hey,
I'm going to you know, announce your appointment tomorrow. Wow,
I'm going to get to come down the city Hall
and and you know, and he asked his assistant what
time was it, and so any sence, you'll give you
all the details and I'll see them. And so it
came in and he announced my appointment and then swarm in.

Speaker 1 (26:20):
A couple of things that jump out. By the way,
I've got my own Mary Barry stories. Our backgrounds parallel
so much. And Marion Barry helped Operation Hope when we
went into Anacostia. He was a leader of one of
the wards there and I put a Hope inside my
first Hope center. We have fifteen hundred now. My first

(26:43):
on the ground Hope center which was eat with E Trade.
We built on good Hope Road. I believe it was
called her It was a Hope Road.

Speaker 3 (26:51):
My first building that I built was on Martin Luther
King Avenue just south of good Hope Road.

Speaker 1 (26:58):
Wow, coincidences. God's way remaining anonymous, But to stay focused
on this incredible story of yours. Your mother taught you
something else, and it's something that Ambassador Young has said
that I'm going to repeat. Men and women fail for
three reasons arrogance, pride, and greed. And of a quote

(27:19):
that I use that I did not create, but I
use in bast Young loves is quote from that I
use all the time, which is to talk without being offensive,
listen without being defensive, and always leave even your adversary
with their dignity, humility stepping over mess night and it
humility is really an underrated quality. And you said about

(27:40):
five minutes ago, basically I'm paraphrasing, being smart wasn't enough.
You said, I know I was smart, I knew I
was sharp. But I'm not going to get this position
just because I'm smart, just because I'm worthy. I need
to have relationship capital. I need to understand. I need
to read the tea leaves, I need to read the room.
I need to make sure I've got the right people

(28:01):
pitching for me, vouching for me. I need to make
the job for the mayor easier to tell me, to
empower me. Am I saying that right, You're saying exactly right.
And uh, there's some lessons here for the audience on success.
And we're not just storytelling here. We're giving you a

(28:23):
narrative and an inside channel. And again, keep in mind
that Don and I are two of the largest people
who happen to be of after American descent in the
country who are running big books of real estate and
businesses with hundreds of employees. I don't know any employees
you have done I've got four hundred. But you know

(28:43):
we're you know, this didn't happen by accident. And a
lot of his story so a lot of successes. It's
just good habits. It's good habits and discipline and execution.
But good habits is a big part of this. Don
had good habits from an early age. And for anybody
who's having a child or thinking about it, first of all,

(29:05):
you should delay it as long as you can because
you want to make sure you have a maturity to
give to that child. But you can't be a baby
mama or a baby daddy. You had to be a
mother and a father. If Don had a baby mama,
he'd been screwed. If you had a baby mama. In
other words, I got you, but I had you. But
I've got no whatever the streets chase you run you.

(29:27):
You know, I'm sort of concerned about you, but I'm
not responsible for you. No, no, No, he had a mother.
I had a mother. He talked about his grandfather. You know,
I know my grandfather R. B. Smith. I know my
second great grandfather, George Young, fought in the Civil War
protected Memphis. Know your story, Know your story, and if
you're gonna have a child, be a mother and or

(29:49):
a father be parents, because that's often who your children
are most influenced by. And so if it wasn't for
your mother being your advocate, and I think your grandfather
you said, well opening those doors in d C. Before her,
you wouldn't be who you are today.

Speaker 3 (30:10):
No, And look also my father, I mean my father
and I had a good relationship overall, and I got
my work ethic from him. Not only did he work
his full time job at the government, he also kept
a part time job as a carma catechut to set
up his own little business in the garage.

Speaker 1 (30:28):
Of our house.

Speaker 3 (30:29):
And so he always was willing to work for what
he wanted, and he worked to provide and he had
this great work ethic. And one of the things I
think about pride, and I look at it, I think
in some regards like my father, and I think my
grandfather did the same thing. My father was more so,
but he grew up very hard in segregated rural Virginia,

(30:51):
and so he didn't want to ask anybody for anything.
His whole thing is, I'll do it myself, and if
I can't provide it for me myself, then I'm not
I don't need it, but I learned a lot from him,
and also my mother's four sisters, they you know, all
got married, three of their husbands and the one that
was a doctor, the other one a lawyer, the other

(31:12):
one a school teacher. I learned from each one of them,
and they were models for me and role models for me.
And I happened to have grown up in an environment,
in a family where money was was not something that
was elevated or it was you know, worshiped. It was
more about, hey, you needed to take care of yourself

(31:34):
and be supportive of your family. But that there, you know,
your your existence and your you know, your contributions to
our society are very different and and and they don't.
It's not about money. And so I think that that
probably helped me quite a bit in terms of being
able to be grounded and so on. And one of

(31:55):
the interesting lessons I learned, one of the best lessons
I learned from Barry is in and that election for
his first campaign for mayor. And I didn't I didn't
witness this, but I told his story probably one hundred times.
So the most prominent black business person in the city
of Washington was supporting Stirling Tucker, and he was not
just supporting him. He was really speaking very nasty and

(32:19):
negative about Barry, saying, you know, he wasn't articulate because
he was, you know, grew up in the segregated South,
even though Barry had a degree in chemistry and was
getting a masters in chemistry before he left to fight
in a civil rights movement. But he dogged him, I
mean totally. And but the bank's biggest customer was the

(32:43):
city of Washington, d C. So when Barry won, this
guy was depressed. And so he, you know, got up
the next day, went to work, got in a little late,
and he walks in the reception area of his offices
at the bank, and Marion Barry is sitting in the

(33:05):
reception area really and he you know, stood up, shook
his hand and said, now can I have your support?

Speaker 1 (33:15):
Wow, Marion Barry did that.

Speaker 4 (33:18):
Marion Barry did that.

Speaker 1 (33:20):
Unbelievable. That's that's saying something I've heard. That's that's wicked smart.

Speaker 3 (33:30):
And that was Bill Fitzgerald, the banker who owned Independence
Federal Savings and Bank and Savings and Loan, which was
the largest black owned bank in the country at the time.
And throughout Barry's campaigns, and his you know, his scandal.
It was Bill Fitzgerald who was rock solid for Barry,

(33:53):
unyielding supportive of him from you know that point on,
and and it was that what Barry did is he
gave this man who was certain that he was going
to lose his custom the biggest client, and the mayor
of the city was going to put him on his
shit list and that would have been it, and he

(34:13):
wouldn't be able to do business. And instead Barry helped him.
And I learned that from Barry. And ultimately we used
to play poker as a group, and Barry included me
in their poker games. And so I became very friendly
with a bunch of different black business people because we
played poker, you know, once a week and so and

(34:33):
I did that probably from twenty five to you know
thirty something until I moved down to Miami. So but
I learned that lesson, you cannot be a sore winner.
It's bad to be a sore loser, but it's worse
to be a sore winner.

Speaker 1 (34:50):
That's right, step over mess, not in it. And realized
that you may be careful to toe you step on.
It may be connected to the rear end you got
to kiss later. We're all in this thing together, We're
all interconnected. And that is one of the messages that
Don and I were both trying to articulate before we
got on camera about how we all of us, everybody

(35:14):
needs to be gracious, uh and find a higher frequency
in the coming weeks and months, because there are four
countries that want to take us out China, Russia, Iran,
and North Korea. We're not each other's enemy. That's if
you want to have an enemy. I mean, honestly, anybody

(35:35):
is my enemy. If you want to say an enemy,
that's your enemy. They hope that we hate each other,
they hope that we that we kick it, they pick
each other continue to and so I'm really hoping that
we can find a higher frequency. And now we've had
we've had a uh, you know, potentially the election of
the of a lifetime here. And but as I said

(35:57):
to Charlottage and some others this morning on we were
trading text messages, where else in the world, Well, first
of all, said, where else in the world could you
and I our stories have come of age up from
literally slavery, where we control our own destiny. But where
else in the world could you have a superpower, yet
alone to sol superpower have an election of tens and

(36:19):
tens of millions of people. It's transparent, it's passionate, it's vibrant,
it's violent free, it's drama free, it's scandal free. It
appears it seems, it's unrigged, it's unboughketd It is what
it is. You can like it the outcome and not

(36:40):
like the outcome, but it is what it is. And
tomorrow today you get up and you go to work,
or you go to you have a conversation about it
and you figure out how you go. But you know,
you you express yourself. In Russia, you just disappear. China,
you just disappear. Right, So people, you know, people need
to understand that even in the Bible says you cannot

(37:03):
grow except through legitimate suffering. You cannot grow except through
legitimate suffering. Where would Andrew Young be if he hadn't
been fired from the U N A little known story,
but he was. You know, this vault is successful. You
know he was one of the most powerful black men
in America. Uh and uh and he was a you
he was the first black unimbassador in the history of

(37:23):
the country, and they fired him for talking to the Palestinians. Yes,
they fired him for talking to the Palestinians, something that
of course is just nothing but common sense. Now you
need to talk to everybody. And he had his hid
for a couple of days. Don his head was low
and he was wondering what the future hell. But he
he realized that God's is on the throne and guy

(37:45):
was not in any way through with him. But rainbows
follow storms, and he gets called to become mayor of Atlanta,
and uh, he wonders whether they should do that, And
this older lady says to him, you know, boy, we
wasted our time on you. We had you with doctor King.
We we supported you, we let you, we we we
were rooted for you and did this, you did that,

(38:06):
but then we need you. You just shrugged your shoulders.
We just wasted our time on you. And that turned
him around, that caused him to run for mayor. And
uh yeah, and and don last story even get back
to you, because I want to, ma, sure we spend
the last ten fifteen minutes on how you came from
where you are that to this billion dollar portfolio and
where it comes next, and how people can get the

(38:27):
art of how you did your uh your transactions and
grew your business. So in uh in in this is
a in this unique narrative of Ambassador Andrew Young. He
he becomes mayor and and grows this incredible portfolio of inclusion.

(38:53):
Gives his phone number to all the business people, say
anybody tries to bribe you, whatever, you call me if
you have any problems at all. Everybody had his home
phone number. And uh that he attracted seventy trillion, seventy
billion dollars of foreign investment to Atlanta on his on
his personal rapport UH and people and his and folks
and give him folks his phone number. Now, he couldn't

(39:13):
have done what he did without Maynard. Right, Maynard created
black wealth. But and Bashil Young really created the first
international UH city in the South. And but it was
a lot of his his he will say himself, it
wasn't it wasn't just a success as it was a
lot of his failures. He got a call from Quincy

(39:34):
Jones's dear friend, the black godfather, Clarence. He got who
I knew Clarence. So Clarence called him one day and
again I can't say it completely here. But so is
this a crazy negro? You didn't say negro? Is this
a crazy negro running for mayor? Black man running from
mayor at running for congress? Actually in uh in the
Atlanta for yes, are you not your mind? Are you

(39:57):
out of your dang on mind? He said, I if
you're crazy enough a run, I'm crazy enough to support you,
and did a concert for him in the stadium here,
filled it up and gave him the campaign money. He
was the first congressman from Georgia since reconstruction. And of
course you ambassador congressman mayor, and we know the rest
of the story. But it was not the successes. Is

(40:18):
how he managed the failures. It was gracious when he
won and when he lost. But also understanding his story
was not over. The narrative was this was a It
was a one hundred yard dash, not a marathon. It
was a marathon, not one hundred yard dash. And it
was a long game. So you've been playing the long
game in your life. And you have said on this call,
there's not about permanent friends, but permanent interests. I get

(40:43):
that right, yes, and and and so you went from
that humble beginning and setting it up the setup, and
the payoff was that you created now a business that
is one of the biggest run who runs by a
person of color in real estate, I'd argue in the world,
certainly in the US, tell us about that business, how

(41:03):
you built it, where you are now, and where do
you want to go and what and is is there
a lesson here for folks other than the narrative of
your life of how to do a deal that you
want them to know? Sure?

Speaker 3 (41:17):
I mean, I think the first thing is that you've
got to prepare yourself to be able to do deals
and to prepare yourself to be in business. And so
that means how you live your life, how you conduct yourself.
In terms of building relationships, you want people to root
for you. Most of the time people won't root for
successful people, but you want them to root for you
and and you, you know, want people to think you
know decently of you and you and you want to

(41:38):
be able to build relationships like I learned from my
grandfather and my mother. And so it's building relationships, not
making enemies. So the arrogance and having humility instead is
very helpful. But building some relationships now and and and
learning from other people and reading and understanding the business

(42:00):
to being somewhat of a student of it. That puts
you in a position to be able to be in
the mix and be able to be successful when the
opportunity comes, and then to put yourself in the mix
of where you'll see opportunities. I knew that by being
in the mix in DC politically, that was my pathway
to being more engaged in the business. Then when I

(42:20):
was appraising houses for HUT insured mortgages, that wasn't going
to do anything for me earn a living and me
to be and learn more about real estate but also
be being in touch with you know, where people are,
how they're living, and.

Speaker 1 (42:34):
So on.

Speaker 3 (42:35):
But it was the Property Assessment Appeals Board that put
me in the mix. It paid, you know, twenty five
dollars an hour when I met when we had board meetings.
I would have done it and paid them for it
because it was all about me learning and being able
to be a you know, a player in the business world.

(42:57):
So I was trying to build my own appraisal business
because I was a subcontractor for another appraisal company and
I need and the top clients were HUT. One of
the top clients for residential and so I tried. My
mother had had.

Speaker 1 (43:15):
An urban development. For those who don't know, the US
Department of Housing Urban Development, and.

Speaker 3 (43:19):
They ensure mortgages for moderate and low moderate income home purchases,
and then they also ensure multi family loans as well.

Speaker 4 (43:27):
So my mother had done't work for them.

Speaker 3 (43:29):
So I used to go in and drop off her
appraisal reports and so forth. I became friendly with the
staff there, so I tried to get on the on
the approved list there and I couldn't do it. By
that time, one of my high school classmates was working
for Ron Dellaps, so I asked him to ask him
to write a letter of recommendation for me and have

(43:50):
the Congressman sign it. And the Congressman and so signed it,
and then I say, and then also, can you make
a call for the congressman to speak to the area
director for the HUT director for Washington, d C. And
put in a good word for me. He did, and
I got a meeting with her, spoke to her, and

(44:13):
then I stayed in touch, and then you know, a
few months go by, I stay in touch, and then
I asked my friend to get the congressman a touch
base again, just see how things are going. Yeah, and
that he known me since I was sixteen years old,
et cetera, and I'm going to do a good job.
He's confidence. So ultimately I got my first client, started
my appraisal business. And one of the things that we

(44:34):
said was that if he's qualified to be chairman of
the Property Assessment of Pillboard in DC that reviews all
one hundred and sixty five thousand properties in Washington, d C.
He should be qualified to appraise some property for HUT
And that was so it gave me a little bit
of a building block, and then I use the relationship
and then from there I was there.

Speaker 4 (44:55):
Yes, so we built.

Speaker 3 (44:56):
I was building my appraisal business, but I wanted to
get into development. So I took a shot and a
couple of different deals that were parcels owned by the
government where I thought I had an edge and I couldn't.
You know, not that one of them became successful. But
I'd assembled investors and all of that.

Speaker 1 (45:14):
You took a shot. You're in DC. Now you know
all the players. You take a shot, you're on your
chairman of an important committee. You've You've gotten this relationship
through a Congressman. You've gotten this deal through hud You've
gotten this and now you take a shot at properties
that you understand control by people who you know. And
they didn't happen. The first two deals did not happen.

(45:36):
Please listen to me, everybody, listen to what Donna is saying.
This whole fantasy that you're going to be a microwave
success story overnight, or that you put a business card
and put CEO in your name and lease a car
and go to some fancy meetings and buy some suits
and take an Instagram shot of you being a successful person.

(45:58):
That's not the way it works. Only in the dictionary
does the word success come before the word work, because
it's alphabetical. Again, he did everything right and it still didn't.
He said earlier, being smart is not enough, being competent
is not enough. And he didn't give up. He takes
no provide im. It's just like me. So those two

(46:27):
deals didn't happen.

Speaker 3 (46:27):
Continue right, and those two deals didn't happen. And Barry
could have made either one of those happen, but he didn't.
And for and I understood why, different reasons and different politics.
So I happen to be in my office, my appraisal office,
and I'd sublet some space to a real estate broker.
And he comes into my office and he says, hey,

(46:48):
I got a piece of property he should look at bye,
And I said, okay, where is He says, in Anacostia.
I said, well, why would I want to own anything
in Anacostia. I mean it's a depressed community. I want
to build an office building in downtow Dow, DC says look,
he shows me this letter, and there's a letter on
the Mayor of Washington, DC's letterhead, and the letter starts off,

(47:10):
this letter constitutes a commitment on behalf of the District
of Columbia government to lease office space in your proposed building.
So letter, that letter was written to a white developer
who was trying who was working on buying this piece
of property in Anacostia from my subtenant's client. And I said, so,

(47:34):
what's the issue here? Why are you showing it to me?
It looks like the deal is all done. He said, well,
my client wants nine hundred thousand dollars for this property
and the developer won't pay more than seven hundred. And
I said, wait a minute. So they're arguing over two
hundred thousand dollars. It was like six fifty. I think
it was six to fifty, but they were arguing over

(47:56):
two hundred hundred fifty thousand dollars.

Speaker 4 (47:58):
You're kidding me.

Speaker 3 (48:00):
And so I look at the letter and I and
I said, can I have a copy of it? And
we make a copy of it, and I said, okay,
let me get back to you tomorrow. So I called
the investors that I had assembled for the other deal
and I.

Speaker 4 (48:12):
Called them up. Didn't happen, which failed, and didn't happen,
never got it.

Speaker 3 (48:16):
But I knew them, and I said, how would you
like to own fifty percent of an office building that
we will build is pre lease to the District of
Columbia for twenty years.

Speaker 1 (48:27):
Oh my god, Oh my god.

Speaker 3 (48:30):
And they said, what's the deal? And I said, well,
you guys put up all the money and I bring
the deal. I bring the land, and I bring the deal,
and uh and and so and you had own that
I owned fifty percent.

Speaker 1 (48:43):
Wow, okay.

Speaker 3 (48:46):
And so I set up a meeting with the owner
of the property and we had a meeting at the
offices of my investors, and we laid out a deal.
I said, you know who I am, because by that
time I was somewhat prominent. So you know that if
the mayor is going to do this for this group,

(49:06):
chances are he'll do a deal with me, especially with
my partners who are putting up all the money and
have the experience. But we can't buy your property until
we have a deal with the city. But the price
is not an issue. We're going to pay you exactly
what you asked for. You want a nine hundred thousand dollars,
We're going to pay you nine hundred thousand dollars. We're
going to give you one hundred thousand dollars deposit, and

(49:26):
if we don't close, it's yours. And calculated what it
costs to carry the property after ninety days, we'll pay
to carry the property. You got to give us six
months to make our deal, made a deal, signed a contract, partners,
put up the money, and then I wrote.

Speaker 4 (49:41):
A letter to the mayor, and I wrote them a letter.

Speaker 3 (49:45):
In fact, no, I wrote the city council member for
that district and the City of Washington's Director of of
Government Services General Services, wrote them a letter saying that
we own the property.

Speaker 4 (49:58):
We understood that they were and to lease it.

Speaker 3 (50:01):
And the rent that you all are proposing is twenty
two dollars and fifty CENTSUS square foot, triple net.

Speaker 4 (50:07):
We're going to do a building.

Speaker 1 (50:08):
Explain triple net. Don explain triple net. Plice.

Speaker 3 (50:11):
So triple net means that twenty fifty cents rent to
the owner. Net means that the tenant has to pay
the property taxes, has to pay all operating expenses of
the building, insurance, utilities, et cetera. So they have to

(50:31):
pay all the expenses, so that the developer or the
owner of the building gets twenty two dollars and fifty
cents per square foot and a net of all expenses,
so the tenant pays all operating expenses.

Speaker 1 (50:42):
For those listeners who don't didn't follow that and run
the tape back, listen to it slowly. That's a brilliant
deal because basically that meant that that don knew exactly
and his investors knew exactly what they would receive in
a return net of all expenses that could kill you,
property taxes, things that are that go up and down, utilities,
all that stuff. It was it was tripling. So he
had he had a twenty year lease with a credit tenant.

(51:05):
Credit means somebody you know is credit worthy. The word
credit comes on the latter of word credit credibility. You
knew that person was credit worthy. It's a government in
DC doesn't get a better tenant than that twenty year lease,
so you can get predictable income, which then gives the
problem the property a value for twenty years. Uh. And
he knew exactly what net cash flow would come to
him and his investors because his triple net and as

(51:28):
the government goes bankrupt, which was not likely and has
it h he had a great deal. This wasn't a
good deal. This is a great deal. He negotiated a
up great He negotiated success up front. He was financially literate.
Wasn't just a good developer, wasn't just smart, wasn't just lucky.
He created his own lucky. He was smart, and he
was financially literate, and he understood a budget and a

(51:49):
balance sheet. And he took risks because he cut the
deal before he wrote the letter to the council person
or got back to the mayor, he'd already he was
at risk if the deal gone sideways, the mayor changed
their mind city council person decide they didn't like him.
He's toast, okay, go ahead, don.

Speaker 3 (52:04):
So there and in fact there's there's some drama to it.
So we make a deal, and so we send a
letter to the city. The first argument I had with
the investors there were three white guys and who are
real estate investors, two Jewish guys and a Greek guy.
And they said, why in the world are we offering
eighteen dollars and seventy five cents a square foot. The

(52:26):
other the mayor wrote a letter saying twenty two dollars
and fifty cents. This is a minority deal. Those deals
always cost more money to do business with minorities. You
should be charging twenty five dollars a foot. I said, no,
you don't understand the reality of the world here, and
the reality of the world is I've got to be better.
There's no way we're going to get this deal if

(52:46):
I'm not better. One I'm black. Two I'm a friend
an ally of the mayors. So we have to make
this where they'd be fools not to take our deal.
I said, But we're going to do something smart. We
don't spend a money per dollars per square foot. We
spent absolute dollars. So we're going to double the size

(53:08):
of the building mhm. And we're going to have and
we're going to pitch that as a bigger economic development
impact on the community. And we're going to commit to
thirty five percent or better minority contracting.

Speaker 2 (53:23):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (53:24):
And you're a minority promising minority contractor.

Speaker 4 (53:27):
Yes, And and we were going to build a bigger building.
So the mayor, so, the so so all.

Speaker 3 (53:35):
So we send the letter to the council member and
probably within within almost hours, I get a call from
the mayor and the mayor said, Don, what are you doing? Further,
the way it happens is, you know, is his assistant Jerry,
and she says, hold don hold on for the mayor.
So mayor A, Don, what are you doing over in Anacostia?

(53:56):
I mean Native council member Nadine Winner just came up.
I came we just left my office. She was yelling
and all crazy in here, saying, you bought this property
in Anacostia and now you took it from you know,
some other people who were going to build a building
over there, and I.

Speaker 4 (54:13):
Guess they were friends of hers. Or something.

Speaker 3 (54:15):
And I said, well, yeah, mister Mayor, I did buy
a piece of property. I put it under contract because
the city was interested in leasing office space there. And
you want to have you want to help rebuild economic,
you know, neglected communities. And I know that you have
been an outspoken advocate of economic empowerment for black entrepreneurs.

(54:38):
This is anacostia, a predominantly black community in a commercial courter,
destroyed by the nineteen sixty eight riots, been neglected ever since.
I'm a black developer, and I figured that it would
be better if I built it in a community this
reflective of my people. And I'm doing it, and I'm
doing it on better economic terms. And I don't know

(54:59):
why she's mad. She should be happy. She's a black
council member and everybody's talking about how you all want
to help more black entrepreneurship.

Speaker 4 (55:06):
Okay, here you go. And he says, yeah, man, she is.
She is furious.

Speaker 3 (55:12):
And I said, well, and I shouldn't have said it,
but I said it. I said, well, mister Mayor, if
it's a real problem for you, I could walk from
the deal. And he paused for a second, and he said,
would you lose money? And one hundred thousand dollars. I said, yes,
miss May, I'd lose a lot of money and loves
a big opportunity and right, I said, but you know

(55:35):
you were You know, my relationship with you is extremely
important to me, and so in this thing, you know
what you want to do as a priority. He says,
all right, let me think about it. I'll get back
to you, and uh. And then a couple of days
later he calls me back up, and I'm all worried
calling back up and said, you know, we're going to
go forward with that deal. It's the right thing to do,
and you're saving us money and you're doing a better building.

(55:58):
And a counsel member whin is going to need to
get over it.

Speaker 1 (56:00):
Now. I like you to go down and.

Speaker 3 (56:01):
Meet with her and try to get her to feel
good about this. But you can go there knowing that
we're going forward. And and so I did that, went
in and and then met with her, got her on board.
But a few like a couple of weeks later, I
get a phone call from a reporter in the Washington Post.

(56:24):
I get and I was out of the office, so
I returned the phone call and I called the guy
up and.

Speaker 4 (56:32):
And he says, this is Tom Sherwood.

Speaker 3 (56:34):
I'm an investigative reporter for the Washington Post because I
thought it was a special interest story about a black
developer helping the black community. And he says that we
want to talk to you about this least deal that
you're doing with the mayor and that's above market rent.

Speaker 4 (56:51):
And so.

Speaker 3 (56:54):
And so he I want to talk to you about
it and so forth. And I said, well, all right,
well let me get back to you. So I called
the mayor's office, talked to his press secretary she and
then his inner governmental affairs person, and they tell me one,
I should do the interview, and then they talked me
through how to do it. And that was my first

(57:16):
real interaction with the media. And so I do this interview.

Speaker 1 (57:21):
How are you? At this point?

Speaker 4 (57:23):
I was twenty six unbelievable love, And so I go
and meet with.

Speaker 3 (57:31):
This guy and in my office and I recorded the interview,
and we do the interview, and I kept saying, well,
here's a letter that the mayor sent to some other
developer other than me, and it was for twenty two
dollars and fifty cents the square foot I'm reased in

(57:52):
eighteen seventy five square foot.

Speaker 4 (57:55):
My deal is better.

Speaker 3 (57:57):
So it's the market was what this person offered and
what the city signed a commitment letter for. He just
didn't control the property. And I figured out how to
control the prop by the property, and you know, and.

Speaker 4 (58:10):
I'm doing it for less money.

Speaker 3 (58:12):
So that got me some and I called a couple
of city council members and they were supportive of me
as well. And uh and and so a couple of
days later, from page to the Washington Post, right next
to Ronald Reagan's, I ran contra a fair issue where
they're trading, you know, arm or drugs for arms. It's

(58:32):
my little building in Anacostia, And it was a front
page story in the Washington Post, and they were trying
to make controversy out of it, but it wasn't. I
saw the mayor that I saw the mayor that day,
tell me, don't worry about it. But then I go
into this prominent restaurant where I started. I'd been going
with this Washington local business and political power restaurant called

(58:54):
Joe and Mose. And that was where, like Bill Fitzgerald,
the banker I talked about earlier, it would go every
day for line and all the power broke.

Speaker 4 (59:01):
Many of the power brokers would be there for lunch.
So I go there. I became more of a regular.
So I go in.

Speaker 3 (59:06):
Bill Fitzgeral standing at the bar. He gets up and
he comes over to me and he hands me a
glass of champagne, and he said, welcome to the club.
And what he told me is that there will be
no fans. Yeah, they will not there.

Speaker 1 (59:25):
You will not the.

Speaker 3 (59:26):
Washington Post in the establishment. You are now their target,
and you will not have fans, and they will not
be in your fan club. And but you're gonna have
to keep going and not lett none of this bother you,
and you just keep focusing, stay on your point, don't
do anything wrong, and you're fine. But I was like

(59:48):
worried that my deal was going to blow up. And
then Barry said he'd stick it out, and then it
was lingering. And then one of the council members who
had ran against him and lost, he said, look and
he designed the lease now and get it over. Just
put it in this now, and that was it. Got
my deal done and signed the lease in nineteen eighty seven.

(01:00:09):
I just turned in twenty seven and then built the
building in two years. We brother in early and that
building was my first building, and I was netting back
then about my share was about four hundred grand a year,
so I no longer had to work for a living.
And then I could start focusing and it was just me,

(01:00:31):
so I could just be helping my mother and I
could just focus now on what's the next step. And
then from that one building. Oh and I forgot to
get it financed. The National Bank of Washington did the
construction loan. And the way I met them is the
chairman of the National Bank of Washington with Barry's campaign chairperson.

Speaker 4 (01:00:53):
So Barry introduced me to him.

Speaker 3 (01:00:56):
I did the lung construction loan and found an insurance
company for me to take the construction loan out and
repay the construction loan and give me a permanent loan
for ten years.

Speaker 1 (01:01:06):
And so just for those to follow that he had
he purchased it, he needed a banker, a lender to
do a construction loan to get the building up. And
then with the construction loans not the final financing. You
need a permanent financing, a long term vehicle at firmly
fixed rates, so you know what the monthly outflow is

(01:01:27):
because because the construction loan offen is at adjustable rates
and is not very economical deal, you don't want to
keep it long term. But he got the construction loan,
which is typically you know, two years or less on
a building like that, and then he did a permanent loan,
which is what the insurance company he mentioned that allowed
him to finance it institutionally for the life of the building. Okay,

(01:01:50):
go ahead, and so that freed me up.

Speaker 3 (01:01:52):
And from that one building, it was a ten million
dollar project cost I built. I built a business that
where I had about ultimately about two and a half
million square feet of space in DC, you know, and
other sites I could build more. I expanded into Miami
and then other parts of the country. And so today
we do business in Boston, New York, d C, Atlanta, Charlotte, Roley, Durham, Miami, La,

(01:02:27):
San Francisco, Vegas.

Speaker 1 (01:02:30):
And all that.

Speaker 3 (01:02:31):
From the one building, so we've completed several billion dollars
of projects. A pipeline today is over six billion dollars
of development projects around the country. I'm trying to get
the rights to a site in New York City where
from the state government where I can build the tallest
building in the Western hemisphere. It'll be the first skyscraper

(01:02:51):
built by African American developers. It's age percent black owned building,
two point seven billion to build it, and sixteen hundred
and sixty seven feet tall, which would make it the
tallest building in the Western hemisphere. All that from that
one opportunity and if one opportunity, and being prepared to
take it, being not worrying about what I was going

(01:03:14):
to get up from very early, but building a relationship
of somebody that I respected, and being useful to him.
Even that building was a source of pride he did
and was there the groundbreaking and that building kick started
the revitalization of Anacostia, and today Homeland Security has a
three billion dollar headquarters there.

Speaker 1 (01:03:36):
The department that the building, Homeland Security is building.

Speaker 4 (01:03:39):
No, no, that's not the building.

Speaker 3 (01:03:41):
But all of that happened as a result of that
first investment, a catalyst to create all of that economic development.
And ironically the government after twenty years, the next mayor
renewed the lease for ten years and then and then
we renovated the building and the city he leased it
for another sixteen years and my son oversaw the renovations.

(01:04:03):
So after thirty years after me building it, my son
who was working is working in the company. He oversaw
the renovation of that building and the city another sixteen
years and still on it today. We still make money
off that building and have been making money off that
building for thirty five plus years.

Speaker 1 (01:04:34):
This has been a masterclass everybody. If you did not
know any about real estate development, he just walked you
through how he built an empire, and he unpacked a
critical deal which triggered every other deal in many ways.
He talked to you about humble beginnings. He talked to
you about his grandfather. His grandfather, a doorman, had relationship

(01:04:58):
capital because everybody coming in out of that hotel he
got to know. He talked about how his mother built
relationship capital and his father helped him. His father was
a hard worker. Don your story, my story is so
are so similar in so many ways. We don't have
time to go into it. But it is heartwarming to
me to know because I didn't know all this backstory.

(01:05:20):
How there's so much sympatico here. But he talked about
and this is the most important thing I want people
to listen to here, integrity. Integrity. He could have taken
the short route a couple of times. He could have
been about himself, But he told the mayor, the then mayor,
Marion Barry, if you don't like this deal, now he's

(01:05:41):
got the money at risk. Now. It is the second
risky thing he'd done on this property. First of all,
he went into the contract without having gone back. He
could have gone to the mayor in advance and tried
to reassure him that this was a good deal. He
could have gone to the city council purpose person, but
by the way they would have set him up. The
importers then could have suggested that this was some kind
of a cooked agreement, some kind of a not fraud

(01:06:04):
but bribery or whatever. They could have made something of all.
You gave them free dinners and lunches or whatever. He
stayed clear of all that. He did his deal on
the on the strength of the transaction went undercut. His
competition could have taken more money, but it wasn't greedy. Undercut.
It made it true, it was competitive, tightened it up,
put at himself at a risk, because you cannot do

(01:06:25):
anything in life without putting yourself on the front lines.
He backed his own deal. Then he went to the
mayor and then they had to wait and said, look,
if it doesn't work out, if you don't like it,
that's fine with me. I'll recover. But my relationship with
you is that important. I did the same thing with
Tony Rester Michael Arraghetty when I sold Promise Homes Company.
I could have sold it at at a much higher price.

(01:06:47):
I could have sold it a much lower price, but
I simply said, whatever you guys want to do, you're
my partners here. I want to honor my commitment to you.
Get you in and out in five years. And ultimately
they did exactly what you did with Marion. Barry said no,
we're with you, but I was willing to take much
less to keep my word. He did that. That was
a big deal I did on Promise Homes Company. He

(01:07:08):
did that on his first deal. And the way he
did it allowed him to talk to that reporter with
a straight face and with integrity. And it was nothing
that reporter could do but report the news. I mean,
there was no you couldn't make it up. It was
nothing to make up. Now it's you could they All
he did was give you great advertiser on the front

(01:07:28):
page of the local paper. Ultimately and made you the
guy made you part of the club. As the guy said, really,
welcome to the club. You've been hit at, you've been
knocked on your head. Now welcome to the club. So
another message for everybody. I rather you respect me and
learn to like me, then like me and never respect me.
And what Don has built is a global reputation of respect.

(01:07:51):
And people also like him. They know when you when
he shakes your hand, you've got a deal. He'll keep
his word. He is a man of integrity. So many
lessons here you had really a masterclass and up from
nothing real estate development and integrity and relationship management. Whoever
you are, where you come from. With no financial capital

(01:08:11):
at all, work ethic, hustle, your own developed relationship capital,
and your own innovation and creativity, you can be immensely successful. Don.
In the last couple of minutes, we have what comes
next for you? You got your son and your business.
Now I've met him is really impressive. I love your
whole family. What's come next for you? And what last

(01:08:32):
piece of wisdom do you want to leave with the audience?

Speaker 4 (01:08:35):
Well, I mean so and they both kind of both connected.

Speaker 3 (01:08:38):
So I think what was the one of the more
important things about you know, my trajectory, aside from the
building of relationships and a reciprocal relationship, I always wanted
to create value.

Speaker 4 (01:08:49):
I didn't ask Barry to mentor me.

Speaker 3 (01:08:51):
I made myself valuable to him, valuable as a fundraiser,
valuable did a great job on the property assessment of
pill abortion. I told him, you will never get a
call about this board. You will never see a bad
article about this board. This borders run and you will
look good, and it will respond to the average person

(01:09:11):
because they couch out to the commercial property owners, but
not to the people who voted for Barrier. I said
this board. I will take this board and it will
be an asset for you and not a liability. And
so I tried to always perform. But you know it
was my motivation to make money was really to be

(01:09:31):
able to pay my bills, to earn a living. It
wasn't hey, I needed to accumulate all these things. It
was more about I wanted to be comfortable, but I
also wanted to have a purpose, and a sense of
purpose is to knock down these barriers. I mean doctor King,
Andrew Young, Jesse Jackson John Lewis. They didn't fight and

(01:09:52):
struggled so that I could make some more dollars and
spend it on myself. You know, Doctor King didn't die
and give his life so that people like me could
just make some money and you know, keep it to ourselves.
And so I feel a greatest sense of purpose. And
so I use business as a tool of transformation. It's

(01:10:13):
a it's a tool where I can provide access to opportunities,
and ownership is the essence of power, and so I
want to hire a contractor.

Speaker 1 (01:10:24):
I can do that.

Speaker 3 (01:10:25):
When I built the last building we did in New York,
we just finished it a little while ago. I bought
it from the City of New York and and part
in a competitive process. And when we did the interview,
they said, you committed to twenty percent minority and women
owned business contracting. No one's the government can't even get
to those numbers. How in the world do you think

(01:10:45):
you're going to get to those numbers. You're not ever
going to get to those numbers. And I said, well,
we're going to really work hard to try, but I
think we'll get to the twenty percent numbers. And it's
our first building in New York and about a five
hundred and eighty million dollar project.

Speaker 1 (01:10:58):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (01:10:59):
So I brought in a construction company, a construction manager.
It's actually the oldest black owned construction company in the country, mckizac.
I brought in Gerald mckizac and I said, look, I
want you to oversee the contractor, and I want you
to make sure that we do better than twenty percent
minority in women owned business contract and so I'm hiring

(01:11:21):
your company to do that. And so we need to
set up a structure and a system that we can
excel it. And she said, well, how much time are
you going to be willing to commit? I said, well,
what do you mean? She said, well, one way to
do it. Part of this is going to be you
need to approve every contract so you can push it back.
And so ultimately we set up a system. I approved
every subcontractor came with a decision memo random that I

(01:11:44):
learned from Barry about here's a contract, here are the options,
and it would tell me who it was, what they did.
Were they a minority or women own firm and they weren't,
why not? What were the three bids and so on?
So I could send it back and so one of
the building, one of the one of the contracts we
looked at was the facade contract got came to me

(01:12:06):
and it was a nominated is done the exterior walls.
So it was a historic landmark building that was about
five hundred thousand square feet and the original New York
Life Insurance Company headquarters. And so we were restoring the
limestone facade around this giant building. And so the contract
to restore the exterior walls was forty million dollars. And

(01:12:31):
so just that contract, just that contract, and so the
lowest price wasn't wasn't with a black owned.

Speaker 1 (01:12:38):
Firm, okay.

Speaker 3 (01:12:39):
And but the contract that was submitted to me was
for the next lowest bidder, a non minority firm. And
the reason was because the minority firm couldn't, uh, you know,
they were not able to.

Speaker 4 (01:12:56):
Bond the job, so right, they couldn't.

Speaker 3 (01:12:59):
They they had a bond they could bond half of
their bonding capacity is about twenty five million dollars, and
the bank would not give us any relief on that
on the bond. So the general contractor wanted to pick
the non minority firm. But the schedule also it has
a schedule in the contracts, and everybody was around the
same time period about two years, right, So I said,

(01:13:22):
go back to I told my team, go back to
the minority firm and this firm that you want to hire,
and ask them if does that mean that half the
building gets done in a year. And so they come
back and they give us a schedule for half the building.
If they only did half, it's about, you know, a
fourteen months or so for each one of them, basically

(01:13:43):
around and the price goes up a little bit. And
so I said, okay, we're going to give we're split
in the building up and we're going to give the
minority contractor half and we're going to do the other
one half. And while it's going to take us it's
going to cost us a little more money, we're going
to make up for it because we're going to finish
this at least eight months earlier on the exterior, so
we'll be able to get the windows in and other

(01:14:04):
stuff faster. And so we did that and that's how
we were able to finish. And so we finished the
project and we had thirty eight and a half percent
minority contracting. And I was told I couldn't get twenty.
But that's why A big part of why I do
what I do, because it gives me the chance to

(01:14:24):
provide opportunities instead of standard that if my company can
do it, then the government should have the expectations of
all these other developers the same thing, and so changing
the marketplace and the expectations. But so I think that
if you're going to be successful, I think you want
to operate with integrity. You want to operate with a

(01:14:47):
long term view. My mother taught me to think long term.
I mean that's a big thing for her. Think long term,
not short term, long long term deferred gratification. And so
you want to look that way, but you have to
have a sense of purpose.

Speaker 1 (01:15:02):
Yep.

Speaker 4 (01:15:02):
I think you know.

Speaker 3 (01:15:03):
The purpose that I have is that I want to
expand economic opportunity for Black Americans. And so I'm willing
to continue to do this, have significant financial risk to
myself to grow the business because I believe if I
keep scaling the business up, it creates more and more opportunity,

(01:15:25):
and then hopefully the more developers like me and you
John that will do the same thing and we can
ultimately get our community to a place where we no
longer disproportionately carry the burdens of poverty. But we become
an economic factor in this country, and then many of

(01:15:47):
the issues that our community confronts will go away because
we'll have the financial resources to help ourselves.

Speaker 1 (01:15:54):
There's a quote that I love to use. Don This
has been by the way, this has been absolutely great.
This is technically the longest podcasts I've ever done for
this series, but at every moment, every minute of it
was worthwhile. There's not a moment of it. I think
people will not sit on the edge of their seats.
I often tell people who don't understand capitalism and free enterprise,

(01:16:14):
and they think money is everything. Even if you want
to distribute money like a socialist, you have to first
collect it like a capitalist. And that eighty eight percent
of all jobs in America are private sector jobs. So
the government gets their money from the private sector. And
so if you want to have influence on your government,

(01:16:34):
you want to influence on your school district, your border counselors,
your city council. You want to influence on the infrastructure.
You want to have influence on the trajectory of your
community and your world. You want to become successful as
successful as you can be. You want to be a taxpayer,
you want to be on record, You want to have integrity,

(01:16:55):
So people come to you not just for a check,
but come for your counsel the company. Because you build
bring credibility to any endeavor you assign your name to.
So anybody listening to this, I want you to listen
to this two or three times and take notes, because
he really gave you a masterclass on how to build
something from nothing. Don in the last word here and

(01:17:17):
by the way, I just do it just so much. Here.
One of the things that really my heart sung when
you said it, you hit thirty eight percent of minority
contractors versus twenty they told you couldn't do twenty. One
of the reasons I stayed and wanted to build my
real estate companies was the bigger I made it, the
more minority contractors plumbing, heating, lighting, and roofing, landscaping, both
employment and contracts multimi dollar contracts I could let to people.

(01:17:42):
Which is sustainable wealth creation. It's not charity. It's not
a one off check or one off government check or
one off charity check. I can give you a charity
check for one thousand dollars or ten thousand dollars one time, maybe,
but I can give you contract for tens of millions
of dollars if the business will sustain it and you qualify.
That's what we got to get. We got to get
enough infrastructure for companies like yours and Mind and Russell

(01:18:04):
Russell Family and others so that we are collectively doing
so much business that we can literally employ employ not
just Black America, but underserved America on a sustainable basis.
What's the total assets under management right now? Or how
are you you know, I know private equity looks at
this a little differently, but how do you equate your
current success platform? Is it develop amount of development you've

(01:18:30):
done or assets you own? Now, what's that benchmark that
you have? You can leave the audience with the employees.

Speaker 3 (01:18:37):
Michigan Cities as a company, we're focused more on our
pipeline because that really drives our revenue. That's six billions, yes,
and our goal is my twenty twenty six that we
have an ongoing pipeline of about ten billion dollars and
we just continue to add as we as we deliver

(01:18:59):
and add and so it as a as a it's
a development business.

Speaker 4 (01:19:04):
On that pipeline. Our goal has been to do just
under right around forty percent of that in profit.

Speaker 3 (01:19:13):
So if we you know, so that's about two point
four billion dollars and so and that pipeline is about
an eight year process, right, so you're adding and subtracting,
and but from beginning to end, all the that within
that pipeline now will be completed within eight years or less.
And so that's kind of how we measure. And then

(01:19:34):
we have been to grow our business that you know,
we really we we have developed for sale product, we
sold buildings, et cetera. And so now we're building a
series of businesses now. So one of the businesses that
we're doing is a where we are doing a series
one four a offering, which is a private placement that

(01:19:56):
ultimately will probably go public. But of our public private business,
which is a big core, about seventy five percent of
what we do, which I learned on that first deal,
we're doing business with the government. So either we're buying
building sites from the government or we're buying buildings from
the government and then redeveloping. And that's about seventy five
percent of our business part and that company is called

(01:20:17):
Affirmation partners and Raymond James is launching that offering next week,
and so that's one of the things that we're building.
We're also looking to build a private equity fund business
to deploy capital to black.

Speaker 4 (01:20:30):
Entrepreneurs and women entrepreneurs who.

Speaker 3 (01:20:33):
Have had very limited access to capital, so that we
can create more opportunities there. But then and then we
have a robust condo development business in Florida, and that
was kind of the keys of our business. But it's
about creating you know, economic performance and then you know,
growing our business to keep scaling it up and so

(01:20:57):
you know, so that's kind of how we measure but
we measured by a number of buildings and a number.

Speaker 4 (01:21:02):
And dollar amounts.

Speaker 3 (01:21:03):
I mean, that's right, the best example of kind of
measuring us in terms of size.

Speaker 1 (01:21:07):
So a developer will develop a project audience for their
own account but also for others, uh, and they deliver
those products through a pipeline of develop a development process,
and when they deliver it, they are rewarded for that.
And sometimes it's fee income and sometimes it's ownership, and
sometimes it's a combination of both. What you've heard is

(01:21:30):
literally a masterclass and Don and I he didn't know this.
I didn't know this about him. He know this about me.
But we both started with government service. We volunteered on
a committee, and we had integrity about that process. We're
about giving, not getting, and but we used it. We
built relationship capital serving on those volunteer boards and as
he said, we would have paid to be there. This

(01:21:52):
is John O'Briant, it's my friend Don Peeples. This is
Money and Wealth, and this is a special episode that
I probably is my first, other than my conversation with
Michael Milkin, probably is my first masterclass in a certain area.
And this is real estate development. I hope you enjoyed it.
Share it with everybody you know. Love and life. Let's

(01:22:15):
go Money and Wealth with John O'Brien is a production
of the Black Effect Podcast Network. For more podcasts from

(01:22:35):
the Black Effect Podcast Network, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
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