Getting Started with Smaller Deals to Gain Traction
JUL 31, 2022
Description Community
About

Welcome to How To Scale Commercial Real Estate, our guest today is Glenn Hanson, Glenn is the Found & CEO of Colony Hills Capital with 30 years of multifamily experience, managing complex organizations, and is a creative entrepreneur, his former CEO and chairman of a multi-million dollar company, he Co-founded River Valley Investors, Angel Investment Group.
Glenn has formerly invested in 25 varied startups. 

 

[00:00 - 07:51] How to solve problems without litigation

  • Glenn Hansen is an entrepreneur and started and funded 25 companies from plastics, and manufacturing to aerospace, FinTech banking, medical, and real estate.
  • Glen says that the key to success as an entrepreneur is to focus on a solution and not get angry or vengeance in litigation.
  • Glen's real estate company has scaled to 1.4 billion in assets under management.

 

[07:51 - 15:26] How to Avoid Litigation When Scaling Your Business

  • Glenn shares that Stephen Covey's book, "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People," was a key inspiration for starting his own business.
  • He ran his company using the seven habits of highly affected people and provided training to all of his direct reports.
  • He says that litigation is not worth the time, money, or emotional stress and recommends avoiding it by being prepared to just write a check.
  •  He transitioned his business from an LP fund to a GP fund and raised 20 million dollars in the process.
  • They own all the assets of their GP fund and use it to acquire deals"

 

[15:30- 20:06] Tips in selecting your partners. 

  • Glenn shares that it is important to carefully pick who you want to be a partner 
  • He adds to take note of contracts made sometimes there are trip levers where they only have the opportunity for them
  • And as we scale there are always people trying to take advantage of the newbies coming in.

 

[20:06 - 21:46] Closing Segment

  • Reach out to Glenn Hanson
    • Links Below
  • Final Words

 

Resource Mentioned: 

 

Stephen R. Covey - The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

 

Tweetable Quotes

“How do you solve that without litigation? The first thing you might wanna do is be prepared to just write a check and be done with it and move on. So we approached it from the standpoint of litigation, but we don't do it with vengeance or with anger. We just do it as a tool to get to a solution” - Glenn Hanson

 

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Connect with Glenn Hanson visit their website at www.colonyhillscapital.com

 

 

 

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Email me → sam@brickeninvestmentgroup.com



Want to read the full show notes of the episode? Check it out below:

 

[00:00:00] Glenn Hanson: How do you solve that without litigation? The first thing you might wanna do is be prepared to just write a check and be done with it and move on.

[00:00:08] Glenn Hanson: But this was too big. We couldn't, we didn't have that kind of cash. Right. So we approached it from the standpoint of litigation, but . We don't do it with a vengeance or with anger. We just do it as a tool to get to a solution. same thing with issues on the property. Just focus on a solution

[00:00:24] Sam Wilson: Glen Hansen is an entrepreneur. He started and funded 25 companies from plastics, manufacturing to aerospace, FinTech banking, medical, and real estate.

[00:00:44] Sam Wilson: And today he's got multifamily real estate with 1.4 billion in transactions. Glen, welcome

[00:00:50] Glenn Hanson: to the show. Hey, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Sam pleasure is mine in

[00:00:55] Sam Wilson: Every guest who comes in the show asks the same three questions, which are, where did you start? Where are you now? And how did you get there?

[00:01:01] Glenn Hanson: Oh, wow. In terms of real estate or in terms of business.

[00:01:05] Sam Wilson: Oh, and I left one part out in 90 seconds or less wherever

[00:01:08] Glenn Hanson: you like. All right. So I started in a family business when I was, out, came outta high school and I latched onto that as a. Machine tool maker. And I grew that business with my brother from 73 and we sold it in 1999 and we grew it from nine employees to 400.

[00:01:29] Glenn Hanson: Wow. So it was significant in size. As a result of that, I retired at 47, 2 years past my targeted retire. Goal and bought a bell jet ranger, helicopter flew around the country, got bored. And I called it my Winnebago in the sky. And, I got bored. So I started funding startup companies in 2001 and did that progressively for several years.

[00:01:55] Glenn Hanson: And then. One of the companies I started was a roll up of pet cremator and that's where I was reintroduced with the concept of scaling a company and focusing on the segments of success that I found, which is that the company can't go to China, wildly profitable, scalable doesn't need skilled labor and is recession proof.

[00:02:16] Glenn Hanson: Multi-family investing apartments. Real estate fit that formula. So that drove me into the real estate business on scale. We, my wife and I, we had bought two families for 20 years prior and never made any money at it, aggravated with investors. I mean, with intent with the tenants. So, we never saw that as a place to go in business.

[00:02:40] Glenn Hanson: We, we learned about scale. We learned about the industry, my experience at, up till 2008, when we started gave me the skills I thought to dig in and grow the real estate company. So you

[00:02:53] Sam Wilson: started investing in multifamily in 2008.

[00:02:56] Glenn Hanson: Is that what I mean? Yes.

[00:02:58] Sam Wilson: Yeah. and that of course was right when everything was just, going the markets were going south in, in, in a hurry.

[00:03:03] Sam Wilson: I mean, what gave you the confidence then to say, Hey, look, I think this is an excellent place to be, and

[00:03:07] Glenn Hanson: we need to be buying.. Yeah. So 2008 September when I launched the business, the Lehman brothers were still in business a few months later is when they fell apart and the world tumbled. and as a result I had, I was funding 25 startups.

[00:03:23] Glenn Hanson: So I was feeding a lot of capital into multiple companies in different industries. So I recognize that I didn't have enough B. To maintain that. And so some of those would have to be jettisoned or find their way without me. And I had to find a source of significant capital to satisfy my lifestyle.

[00:03:44] Glenn Hanson: And, the pet cremation business I mentioned earlier was ongoing and I had operators there. We sold that in 2016, but I was able to focus on the real estate business and what gave me the confidence was, the experience in the past, recognizing that recessions passed, I never anticipated that the downturn was going to be what it was.

[00:04:06] Glenn Hanson: So it was three years from the date I started until we bought our first deal. And the first transaction was a 35 million dollar property. And, the irony there is we bought it out of, receivership from. General electric and they wouldn't even let me bid on it because I didn't have experience.

[00:04:26] Glenn Hanson: So I said, I may not have experience, but I know how to run a balance sheet and the guy you took it from had experience and he failed. So, maybe you could gimme a shot. So they said, if I can, if I could show proof of funds, they would let me bid on it. So anyways, we did that and, we got a shot and we won the deal.

[00:04:42] Glenn Hanson: Wow that got us started. Yeah, that's a heck, that's a big deal. Heck of a

[00:04:46] Sam Wilson: first start. I mean, most people who are buying their first multi-family property, don't start with a 35,000,001, let alone one in receivership. obviously you got a significant experience in business, but how did you know, Hey, this is even a good deal.

[00:04:59] Glenn Hanson: Yeah. So the first thing I did was I hire. A fellow he's still with me today and he is a partner now, but I hired a fellow that worked for a competitor in the area that had scaled a real estate empire to 25,000 units. And he was an acquisition person for them. And so he came on and he knew what to do.

[00:05:16] Glenn Hanson: I hadn't, I did not know it was his doing that created our success for sure.

[00:05:21] Sam Wilson: That's amazing. That's amazing. Yeah. You're bringing on talent from another another organization that has the industry experience to say, Hey, this is what we should be doing.

[00:05:29] Glenn Hanson: Yeah. Yeah. And it's all about the team.

[00:05:32] Glenn Hanson: Right. And even today what we do I guide the team, but I'm not the expert in any segment. They I've got people that have come from the industry and know what they're doing.

[00:05:42] Sam Wilson: Right. That's amazing. Yeah. I think one of the words that you use, or two words that you used before we kick this off was something you said programmatic scale.

[00:05:50] Sam Wilson: Can you give

[00:05:50] Glenn Hanson: some more points to that? Sure. In my tool and dye business that I scaled to 400 people is statistically average size of the company. And that industry is 10, 10 people. Wow. And to give you an idea that what can happen and through the process and, The disciplines, when I say programmatic scale is that what you need to do is set the goals in place, get the team involved and then believe your own story that you're going to do it.

[00:06:17] Glenn Hanson: And then you have to talk it up, share it with. Other people, tell people what you're going to do. And what happens is the dream becomes bigger than life or the people involved, including myself and you build momentum. But inside of that, building of scale, you need systems and procedures and that's the hard part.

[00:06:36] Glenn Hanson: And we're struggling with that today. I mean, we're, we have, significant amount of properties under management and we use third party managers. We have to manage them tightly. it's for us, it's worked and we're in multiple states. So it, programmatic scale is what, that's all about.

[00:06:55] Glenn Hanson: What I just described, keeping that into control.

[00:07:00] Sam Wilson: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I've heard, somebody say that it, that problems never go away. They just change,

[00:07:05] Glenn Hanson: actually. Yeah. It's all the same. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Right.

[00:07:09] Sam Wilson: I think every entrepreneur wants to solve all the problems on their desk and then it's like, well, by the time you make it to, I guess you guys are at 1.4 billion in assets, under management, you're still going, oh wait, there's just

[00:07:19] Glenn Hanson: different problems.

[00:07:20] Glenn Hanson: Yeah. Yeah. Well, we don't have 1.4 billion under management. We've sold this. We've gone along. Okay. We have today we have about 500, probably 500 million. Okay. Under management, but, we've traded. And, like I mentioned, our average labor IRR is 37% on the portfolio, so that's and no losses.

[00:07:40] Glenn Hanson: Yeah.

[00:07:41] Sam Wilson: That's absolutely fantastic. I love that. You, you said earlier that, that you have. Really, it sounds like developed a formula for success. Can you talk to me

[00:07:49] Glenn Hanson: about that? Yeah, I can. that started in 1991 when I read Steven Covey's book, seven habits of highly affected people. And I ran, I started running my company using those strategies.

[00:08:04] Glenn Hanson: At that time, I had 27 direct reports and, I trained all of them, myself and the. Procedures and systems and provided the manuals and the books that we all carried every day. And we followed that discipline and that's the magic for me of being able to scale.

[00:08:22] Sam Wilson: Got it. When you think about your, your, over the course of your business career, what are some things that maybe you didn't get right, or that you did wrong, that you could help other people avoid?

[00:08:32] Sam Wilson: Repeating.

[00:08:33] Glenn Hanson: Wow. I did a lot wrong. that's let me think of wrong

[00:08:39] Sam Wilson: or a mistake you made, you said, man, I, I could have

[00:08:42] Glenn Hanson: avoided that. Well, litigation. I've had litigation that I could have avoided. and I would say that when I started this business, my attorney told me he knows people in it.

[00:08:51] Glenn Hanson: And the first thing they do is set aside a budget for litigation. and it's too easy to get caught in the ego of litigation. And I would. Today. My, my view is run from any litigation. Okay. It's just not, it's not worth the time, money or emotional stress. So that, that's probably the most current, I mean, What else?

[00:09:12] Glenn Hanson: What else can I share? Well, yeah, I,

[00:09:15] Sam Wilson: if you can give some color to that, I mean, cuz there are people, obviously they're scaling their portfolios and when you say, Hey, set aside a budget for litigation is there and I'm not asking for particulars necessarily, but is there a scenario or something that you think of when you say that you say, Hey, here's a way either to avoid it.

[00:09:31] Sam Wilson: Something you could have set up differently. Was there was it just, some of the crazy stuff where we here, where somebody got shot on your property and then they,

[00:09:38] Glenn Hanson: it ranges from property issues and more, more directly to the financial community. For instance, we had a closing that a property, didn't receive the.

[00:09:50] Glenn Hanson: At close to pay the taxes from the seller. So lean was put on the property by the state and we had to go back and get the seller to. Give us the money. They wouldn't do it. So obviously that leads to litigation. Right. Got it. So how do you solve that without litigation? The first thing you might wanna do is be prepared to just write a check and be done with it and move on.

[00:10:12] Glenn Hanson: But this was too big. We couldn't, we didn't have that kind of cash. Right. So we approached it from the standpoint of litigation, but . We don't do it with a vengeance or with anger. We just do it as a tool to get to a solution. same thing with issues on the property. Just focus on a solution.

[00:10:28] Sam Wilson: yeah, that's great. That's great advice. Yeah. And those are things that, I mean, some of those you just can't avoid. It's like you

[00:10:34] Glenn Hanson: can't yeah.

[00:10:35] Sam Wilson: They show up. Yeah. And that's that's really interesting when you said, Hey, just start setting aside a budget for it.

[00:10:40] Sam Wilson: Cuz it's, at some point when you get enough assets under management enough people, enough property it's probably just bound to happen is what it sounds

[00:10:47] Glenn Hanson: like. Yeah. By the way, I didn't say set the budget aside. It was my attorney when I started the. Told me, that would be a good idea. And I'm, thinking my brother and I ran, we ran 38,000 contracts over 30 years, 35 years.

[00:10:59] Glenn Hanson: And we have one Indi indication, one incident of litigation. And that was it. So I said, we're not gonna have any litigation. Well, the real estate industry seems to attract it for sure. Yeah. So, yeah, beware.

[00:11:14] Sam Wilson: Absolutely. Absolutely. And there are things that are beyond your control. I mean, there are people I gave earlier, I've known some people who've had.

[00:11:21] Sam Wilson: Violence that happen at one of their properties and suddenly yeah. They're being drag into court and it's like, wait, I didn't, I had nothing to do with this. And yet, here I am, how did this, how did I get here? This is great. Right. So, yeah, that's wild. You talk about talk to me about funds. You guys have multiple funds that you're running now.

[00:11:38] Sam Wilson: And I think earlier we talked about what you called seven years of struggle.

[00:11:42] Glenn Hanson: Maybe yeah, sure. we started out seven years ago to raise 150 million in an LP fund. And I hired a series seven employee that was, came from a large institution, had raised billions of dollars and, she was unsuccessful and, it was largely due to the fact that we were a first time.

[00:12:05] Glenn Hanson: We couldn't get any traction and especially at 150 million dollars. So along the way, we tried different approaches and we failed. And then along the way we, we converted it to a GP fund and we lowered the amount that we wanted to raise to 10 million. we were able to get traction on the 10 million from our own family and friends to get started and break escrow so that we could go ahead and continue the raise.

[00:12:31] Glenn Hanson: And we raised 20 million for our first fund and that 20 million, we bought 380 million worth of real estate. So there we were able to, as a GP, take a GP piece, right. That's what the fund was. We were able to leverage that money to a significant. Amount of, real estate. So fund two, which we're in the process of raising now is a $30 million fund, same model.

[00:12:57] Glenn Hanson: And we're at, we'd launched in January and we're at $15 million raised so far. So, what I learned from that is start small and, make sure when you start, you can hit your target, even if it's 5 million. And then that gets, the confidence credibility out there. I also learned that they're very expensive to manage.

[00:13:16] Glenn Hanson: There's a lot of regulation around the administration and accounting. So, that's perhaps why people don't wanna get involved with somebody doing the first time fund is you don't realize when you start how much work it is outside of running the real estate empire. It's almost its own. to keep the fun.

[00:13:36] Glenn Hanson: Going

[00:13:37] Sam Wilson: right. Tell me the transition. I just want some clarity around, you said you started it initially as an LP fund and then said, right. That's not working. Let's move it to a GP fund. Yes. Can you clarify

[00:13:49] Glenn Hanson: that for me? Yeah. So LP would be a different part of the stack capital stack than the GP. So, the GP fund funds only the GPS, which has the higher risk and higher return.

[00:14:02] Glenn Hanson: So our fund documents say that we're targeting a 20, 25% internal rate of return and an 8% cash on cash. So you can do that when you're in the GP stack. So when you

[00:14:16] Sam Wilson: guys come in, you're coming in, cuz obviously, if you set aside, let's keep this easy numbers here and I'm sorry if I'm getting into the weeds on this, but let's say it's a million dollar raise.

[00:14:24] Sam Wilson: And just again, make making this easy numbers. That is the limited partners equity, but then the general partners may be throwing in a half, a million dollars themselves. So that maybe they told. And so you guys are coming in and so the total raise, let's say it's 1.5. You guys are coming in as the $500,000 GP

[00:14:40] Glenn Hanson: side.

[00:14:40] Glenn Hanson: Yeah, we have to part. The fund is considered, liquidity. We can use, it's considered capital that we control, but they still, to this day, they still want, me and my partners to put money in the game. Absolutely. So.

[00:14:57] Sam Wilson: with that fund, are you guys going out and acquiring your own assets or is it something where you're working with other general partners to go and find deals?

[00:15:06] Glenn Hanson: No, that we own all the assets. Got it. Got it.

[00:15:09] Sam Wilson: Okay. Okay. Yeah. Very cool. I like that. And then also, so, so I guess on that front then, how are you guys funding the limited partnership side? Is that something where you're just going out and just raising. One on investors, one, one at a time.

[00:15:21] Glenn Hanson: Yeah. So prior to this interview you sent me a list of asking me what's the hardest thing I've ever done.

[00:15:26] Glenn Hanson: Yeah. And it's raising tens and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of capital for what we're doing today. That is the hardest thing I've ever done. And we're, we're out there. We're hard on a deposit. We don't have all the money yet, and we've got to perform and out of 37 transactions, there's only one time we couldn't close.

[00:15:46] Glenn Hanson: And, so we've, we've been successful, but it is not easy. Sam, it's hard. It is

[00:15:53] Sam Wilson: absolutely hard. Yeah. I think people underestimate that. How difficult raising capital can be. I always just say it's like herding cats. It's getting everything done and across the finish line, everybody signed everybody's money and everybody wired.

[00:16:05] Sam Wilson: It's like, man, this is, this is a lot like work.

[00:16:07] Glenn Hanson: It is, it is real work it's, but yet after you get going, it's, it's, the easiest thing I've ever done once you're once it's operating. Right. I mean, try running a machine shop with 400 people and 1800 custom parts. That's pretty tough. this becomes easy, I guess, at

[00:16:24] Sam Wilson: that point that's absolutely incredible.

[00:16:26] Sam Wilson: Tell me about that one deal. I'm really curious. What did you learn from the deal? You couldn't get done?

[00:16:31] Glenn Hanson: Yeah. So we were working with aggressive money, which we seemed to find occasionally not always they're disingenuous in terms of their, their approach to, you've probably heard loan to own.

[00:16:42] Glenn Hanson: Yeah. So we've run into some of those kind of. Targets. And, we were short 1.8 million on a 36 million deal. And, the CapEx budget was 12 million. So it didn't matter that we were short 1.8, we could have continued raising the capital after. Sure. But they wouldn't let us, they, they said, if you don't have all the money, we're not closing.

[00:17:05] Glenn Hanson: So, we couldn't close

[00:17:07] Sam Wilson: can you clarify that? Who, who wouldn't let you close? I mean,

[00:17:10] Glenn Hanson: certainly, yeah, the, the partner, the partner that was putting up the cash. Right? What happens is the game is once you sign with these guys, they're exclusive. So you can't go out and get competitive money while they're controlling your calendar.

[00:17:25] Glenn Hanson: Right. Got it. So you get to the end, then if they decide they don't wanna fund, what are you going to do? You haven't talk, you haven't been able to talk to anybody else, so you either better have. 12 million bucks to. Take their place. If that's the number or yet you're forced to give up the deal. Wow. So, well, that's a

[00:17:44] Sam Wilson: risk.

[00:17:45] Sam Wilson: I think we should all listen and learn and

[00:17:47] Glenn Hanson: avoid well that's the thing that, I wanted to share with everybody is be careful who you pick as your partner. When it comes to finance, I mean, you have to be sure they're genuine. Number one, number two are they are there Satan clauses inside their contracts that are gonna trip their are their trip levers where they're deliberately targeting, an opportunity for themselves.

[00:18:09] Glenn Hanson: And you wanna watch for that. And as we scaled the business, we got exposed to a lot of people. And, many most are fine, but there's always somebody that's trying to take advantage of the new, the newbie coming into the game.

[00:18:23] Sam Wilson: Yeah. That's, a painful lesson learned. I think, like, like I said, a painful lesson learned the hard way.

[00:18:28] Sam Wilson: I mean that nobody wants to be in that position. How would you identify. That money partner like that. Now, how would you pick 'em out of a crowd?

[00:18:37] Glenn Hanson: Yeah, you can see it in their term sheet. When they send the term sheet over, you can see the language will jump out at you. If it makes you cringe in your stomach.

[00:18:45] Glenn Hanson: Feel upset then you found it , it shouldn't be that it shouldn't be hard. Right, right. It should be. It should be. They want to do a deal with you. They wanna make it work. Obviously, if you break certain rules or you can't pay your bills, they've gotta take over the property. We get that. Right.

[00:19:02] Glenn Hanson: Right.

[00:19:03] Sam Wilson: It'll be right there in the term sheet. I like

[00:19:05] Glenn Hanson: that. Yeah. Yes. You can see it. You can see it right out of the blocks and then just guard yourself against it and don't accept exclusivity at that point, for sure. Absolutely what we've been able to do is write in a, breakup fee.

[00:19:18] Glenn Hanson: And if we don't like it the way it feels as we get into it, we pay the fee and find another partner.

[00:19:24] Sam Wilson: Interesting. A breakup fee. That's yeah, that, that's very cool. I love that. Thanks taking the time to share that with us. One last question here for you. The markets are crazy. Multifamily has experienced incredible cap rate compression.

[00:19:37] Sam Wilson: We've seen prices going wild. Where do you see risk in the multifamily market right now, if you see any and then how are you protecting your guides yourselves against that?

[00:19:47] Glenn Hanson: Yeah. I was a, during my stint of retirement, I traded my own book of business in commodities. So I traded the indices and everything else you can imagine.

[00:19:57] Glenn Hanson: And I learned that nobody knows where it's going to go. Sure. So I think the biggest risk is by not continuing with your business plan. So we're still buyers. We've just found a better way to finance and it's, we couldn't do. The way we did three months ago, we had to change the way we looked at the capital stack.

[00:20:13] Glenn Hanson: But the risk is that people are pulling in their horns, thinking the world is going to end. And, the reality is that people still need a place to live. The Democrats or Republicans support housing, and the interest rates will come down. And as long as we're buying cash, Which we are. So what, we just have to wait.

[00:20:31] Sam Wilson: I like that. I like that. And that's that's what I keep hearing over and over right now is that as long as we're buying cash flow, who really cares. So that's absolutely fantastic. Glen, thank you for taking the time to come on the show today. Certainly learned a lot. It's been a, a very interesting interview just from your history in the, in the tool and dive business and growing that to, as you called it, programmatically scaling your real estate holdings.

[00:20:55] Sam Wilson: You've done some really cool things and, and I think learned some hard lessons that you were, willing to share with us today. So thanks for helping us avoid those mistakes ourselves. Certainly appreciate it. If our listeners wanna get in touch with you and learn more about you, what is the best way

[00:21:06] Glenn Hanson: to do that?

[00:21:08] Glenn Hanson: Yeah. Reach out to colony Hills capital.com

[00:21:11] Sam Wilson: colony Hills capital.com. We'll make sure we put that there in the show notes, Glen, thank you again for coming on. Certainly appreciate it.

[00:21:18] Glenn Hanson: Yeah. Thanks for having me. I appreciate that too. Take care, Sam.



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