Too many deals at once for new company

[Samuel Eastling]

Hi everyone,

I have a strange situation.  I work for an architectural firm in the DFW. We work almost exclusively for churches/non-profits (schools, church related programs i.e. shelters ect.).   Now that you have that as a referrence, here is what last year looked like for us.

We worked with 100 organizations (churches) in 83 cities across 25 states last year.  Here is where it is exciting:

SInce Covid, a lot of churches found themselves in financial distress due to lockdowns ect.  This got a lot of churches interested in doing something with excess land on their church campuses.  There are some churches with 50 acres, some with 4 acres but in the heart of some of the largest cities across America.

I have the great priviledge to lead this company into the development world.  We have access to more deals than is reasonable to do.  To start I want to simply get into some deals with other developers and grow our network of partners across the nation. I dont need the lions share of the equity. I just want to help my company grow its book of business and track record. 

The heart of it all is helping the churches build additonal revenue streams, whether they want to get a large influx of cash or JV on a project to get income on a consistent basis. I have the backing of my company but we are so busy in our normal operations. It is best to treat this almost like a start up. We can get architectural or desing work done on our projects but the normal team has their hands full.

I have had the pleasure of working in real estate for a few years in my past.  I know that at the end of the day. There are a million people that can do a pro-forma or do some underwriting on a deal.  What matters the most is who you know and trusting those you work with.  So, what might be a good place to find and build relationships with people especially as I am sort of bootstrapping this R.E. dev. department. I know that is a silly question but regardless, you got to ask silly questions to learn and grow, eventually getting to the right questions.

You are awesome!

Thank you,

Sam Eastling

[Henry Clark]

You need to eat the elephant one bite at a time.

Predefine both your success and your failure.

1.  Dissect the projects.  Complexity.  Resource demand.  By locations. By long term client size for repetitive work.  
2.   Based on the above decide upon the service package you can and plan to deliver.  This is where you define your success and failure.  If you try to do all of the projects to the same degree you will fail since your are not structured for that new volume.

3.  Decide upon immediate income or equity versus long term relationships for your firm.
Walk your management team through this prioritization and
Action plan or you fail.    
4.  Now ask your original question.  You will want a different solution and plan by each category.