I am now again addressing and evolving in response to my 4th recession in 28 years.
When I graduated from Texas A&M with a degree in Building Construction back in 1981 we were in the midst of a recession. I interviewed with many companies but only found a job thru a friend on campus whose dad owned a constructions company in Dallas. I was so grateful to have my first job with a salary of $17,000 per year.
I worked diligently for the next 8 years with this company, highly trained in their corporate structure and culture. I was a huge profit center for the company, managing numerous projects when the savings and loan sparked recessions decimated the Texas economy.
The company paid me to stay home for a year while I sent out over 3,000 resumes locally with no takers. I finally came to the conclusion that I would have to pursue a job in other markets and at the time Florida, Baltimore, and Charlotte were active so my bride to be chose Charlotte. I researched the local business journal and sent my resume to the top ten developers in town and was hired by Trammell Crow/Childress Klein two weeks later in September of 1989.
After managing over two million square feet of new shopping centers, Charlotte experienced a mild recession in 1991 and as the lone construction manager with nothing to manage, I was laid off. Now with responsibilities of a wife, daughter and one on the way and a new house, I had to ponder selling our home at a huge loss and uprooting my family again. Sound familiar?
That is when I made the conscious decision to stay put in Charlotte and form my real estate development outsourcing consulting business. I locked myself in our spare bedroom, pulled out the yellow pages and started calling everyone in the book. At least everyone in Charlotte knew who I had worked for and were familiar with the prestigious projects I had managed. Now having managed a gabillion square feet of construction, I landed a small management contract to sub divide a developers large commercial tract with a new city street.
After a couple of months I moved out of the house into a Keyman suite with other small business / developer types where I secured the management of several Eckerd’s projects. I subsequently managed over 15 Eckerd projects throughout the southeast for multiple owners.
My biggest break was when I hooked up with a group of young , aggressive brokers who wanted to start their own retail development company. Both of our companies grew as they developed over 17 Target anchored shopping centers in the last 20 years all over the southeast and Oklahoma.
Now here we sit in Charlotte, NC , the epic center of the bank debacle , tanked property values, low consumer spending and the worst recession since the Great Depression.
The moral of my story:
- Rely on your friends and close acquaintances with opportunities
- If time is crucial to your existence, be prepared to consider different geographic markets. Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma are doing much better than California, Florida, Phoenix and the east coast
- Utilize your “combined” experiences to think outside your comfortable box for opportunities
- For me, diversification of the type of projects we managed is required. With retail shopping centers at a standstill we are looking at projects that do have financing such as Veterans Administration Outpatient Clinic, HUD medical and apartment projects, senior living / active adult developments , rehab projects and anything that may require site work.
- Maintain my Dad’s adage “The harder I work the lucky I am”.
Check out my website at www.parisprojects.com for our scope of services and some of our completed projects
