[00:02:47] Clay Finck: And even if it meant being on my own, that’s the opening line from the book, am I being too subtle by Sam Zell. Sam explains that he is best known for creating some of the largest companies in the commercial real estate space and for helping establish the 1 trillion public real estate industry. But most of his investments are actually in other industries from energy to manufacturing, retail, travel, healthcare, and more.

[00:03:13] Clay Finck: Many would consider Sam to be an investor or a capital allocator, but Sam views himself as an entrepreneur at heart. He focused less on specific industries or niches and more on where he found the best opportunities. He tells one story in the book about his travels to Nepal in South Asia. He was having lunch with some American expats.

[00:03:36] Clay Finck: One of which asked him what he does for a living, to which Sam replied, he was a professional opportunist, and that’s a term he used for himself over the years that lied ahead, a professional opportunist. Above everything else, he was an expert at understanding risk and understanding the potential downside.

[00:03:56] Clay Finck: When it came to the real estate industry, he became known as the Grave Dancer. The Grave Dancer was the title of an article he wrote in 1976, and the nickname stuck with him ever since. Sam looked for neglected and often beaten down assets in any industry, and he looked for ways in which he could buy these assets and give them a new life.

[00:04:18] Clay Finck: Throughout his career, he would find himself being the only bidder for some assets that have been left for the dead, leaving him as the asset’s last chance to be resurrected. He writes here. I’m not claiming to be altruistic, just optimistic and confident that I can turn those assets around. That, in my definition, is an entrepreneur, someone who doesn’t just see the problems, but also sees the solutions, the opportunities. End quote.

[00:04:46] Clay Finck: As you can probably tell, Sam Zell is quite the contrarian when the crowd is running in one direction. He wants to run the other way, whether it was commercial real estate developments in the seventies and eighties, the tech craze in the nineties or the subprime mortgage mania of the two thousands. He made it a point to shut out the noise and do whatever made most sense to him, not to other people.

[00:05:09] Clay Finck: He wanted the opinion of others and was open to hearing it, but at the end of the day, he wanted to trust his own judgment. Sam believes that one’s reputation is their greatest asset. He believed in building long term relationships and leaving a little bit on the table in every single deal he made. Some of his employees would work for him for decades.

[00:05:30] Clay Finck: There were many people he made many different deals with over many years. He writes, everything you do, everything you say is a part of your permanent record. Your name reflects your record. No matter how successful I got, I never forgot that lesson. I’ve always strived to be a man of my word. End quote.

[00:05:51] Clay Finck: There’s a story later in the book about how he ended up getting roped into this investigation with the IRS. And got indicted with no intention of doing anything wrong. And his indictment made it difficult to get some deals through in the future. And the relationships that he had built up to that point had been incredibly invaluable to him.

[00:06:12] Clay Finck: For example, Irving Harris backstopped one of his deals to help him ensure that the deal would end up going through. And that just shows the loyalty and trust that he had built with a number of people in the real estate industry. As someone who had built up a net worth of billions of dollars, he didn’t do business just for the money.

[00:06:31] Clay Finck: He saw money as a way of keeping score. And he really enjoyed the experience of sifting through problems and finding the right solution. He wanted to test his limits. And instead of making one plus one equal two. He wanted to figure out how he could make 1 plus 1 turn into 3, or 4, or 6. For most people, there’s this distinction between work and fun.

[00:06:54] Clay Finck: To Sam, work and fun were one and the same, as solving problems, intellectually challenging himself and constantly learning were all things that were fun to him. Early in Sam’s life, he adopted what he called the 11th commandment, which was, thou shalt not take thyself too seriously. So these large business deals, could of course get very heated.

[00:07:17] Clay Finck: So if he wasn’t having fun in that process, he just didn’t want to be a part of it. People would often ask him, when are you going to retire? To which he would respond, retire from what? He approached life with this attitude that every day is an adventure. So let’s get into how the story of Sam Zell exactly unfolded.

[00:07:38] Clay Finck: So Sam came from a Jewish family and his father pulled off what Sam refers to as the impossible. His father escaped Poland on the last train, just before the Germans had bombed the tracks. He then led Sam’s mother and their two year old daughter on a 21 month trek to safety. Because his father had pulled off what seemed like the impossible, Sam was brought up with the attitude that he could really do anything in life.

[00:08:06] Clay Finck: So Sam’s father was well aware of the potential danger that lied ahead for Poland. And his mother sewed jewelry into the lining of some of their clothes should they need to escape Poland and then use that jewelry as currency and savings. When they ended up escaping Poland, they managed to get a lot of their assets out of the country, which was something that was illegal to do at the time.

[00:08:29] Clay Finck: And it was also a very risky thing to do, but his father and his mother wanted to do what they felt was best for them. It was on August 24th, 1939. Sam’s father had read a headline that Germany and the Soviet Union had just signed a non aggression pact and he suspected that with Poland being right in between Russia and Germany, they would be invaded from both sides.

[00:08:54] Clay Finck: So he went home, that was about at 2 p. m. that day, and he told his wife that they would be boarding the train that was leaving at 4 p. m. that day. On their way out of the country, they had begged their relatives to leave with them, but they all refused to do so. So at dawn, the Germans had invaded Poland and the couple and then Sam’s sister got out of the country, out of the northeast that went into Lithuania.

[00:09:20] Clay Finck: On their way to the U. S., they even had to venture all around the world. They made their way to Japan and a Japanese vice council broke the law to write thousands of transit visas. In May of 1941, the couple had stepped foot in Seattle, and that was when Sam’s mother was pregnant with Sam at the time. The couple settled in Chicago, and that was where Sam was born in September of 1941, just two months before Pearl Harbor.

[00:09:49] Clay Finck: Sam’s parents ended up losing almost all of their family members back in Poland, which is extremely unfortunate. And then Sam’s parents escaped to the U. S., of course, and played a critical role in Sam’s life. His parents were determined to help set Sam up for success. Sam’s family had a really deep appreciation for the United States and the opportunity that it brought to everybody.

[00:10:12] Clay Finck: And in Zell’s view, in the U. S., there were just no limits to how much you could achieve and how far you could go. So, his parents, of course, had a huge impact on him, as they were very disciplined, they focused on work, achievement, raising their children well, and they even housed Jewish refugees to help them get their footing in the U. S. as well. As a teenager, Sam had gotten more exposure to the city of Chicago while they lived in the suburbs. And he just loved it. He described the city as enticing, crowded, fast, and fascinating. His analytical mind just couldn’t get enough of the action that was happening all around him. His first entrepreneurial venture was when he picked up a provocative magazine for 50 cents, and then he showed it to his friends back home who were obviously quite interested, and they wanted to buy it.

[00:11:02] Clay Finck: So he offered his friends 3 for this magazine, and his friends quickly agreed. So, he started this little magazine business that taught him the lesson that when there’s scarcity at play, price is no object. Sam learned pretty early in life that he wasn’t born to fit in with the guys to talk sports. He decided that fitting in wasn’t really that important to him.

[00:11:26] Clay Finck: He was more comfortable standing apart and embracing his tendency to go against conventional wisdom. Sam is often asked if he was self made, which is a roundabout way of asking if his parents were wealthy. They certainly weren’t rich when they landed in the U. S., and over time his father had built up a very successful jewelry business that left them well off in their later years in life.

[00:11:49] Clay Finck: But Sam writes that the most important things his parents had given to him wasn’t money. They pass down these critical and important traits like intelligence, curiosity, drive, resilience, and self determination. They pass down the importance of continuous learning and how you can apply what you learn to real life.

[00:12:08] Clay Finck: In many ways, Sam considers himself self made. But he likely wouldn’t have become who he did without the invaluable upbringing his parents had given him. In 1959, Sam enrolled at the University of Michigan. Academics really didn’t seem to be something that Sam really excelled at. And I think there’s this belief amongst some people that you need to get good grades to do well in life.

[00:12:32] Clay Finck: And I believe that just simply isn’t true. Sam ended up getting a D in one of his accounting classes, which is quite ironic given how successful he ended up being in business. What he really didn’t like about school is that it seemed to have these strict rules that he believed were just nonsense. So Sam was really wired to operate by his own rules.

[00:12:53] Clay Finck: So it’s no wonder that he would very quickly go out and start his own businesses. To help give a sense of Sam Zell’s free spirit, he decided to enroll in UCLA’s summer courses after his sophomore year in college. And he told his parents it was an eight week course, but it was actually six weeks. Then he ended up spending the extra two weeks hitchhiking across the country.

[00:13:15] Clay Finck: And he didn’t tell his parents about this because he didn’t want them to be worrying about him. He had gotten rides from all sorts of random people to get around the country. And then he eventually made his way back to Chicago. In the middle of Sam’s junior year, he got word from his friend that his landlord was going to tear down a couple of buildings and then put up a 15 unit student housing building.

[00:13:37] Clay Finck: And Sam told his friend that they should pitch that person to manage the property for him. At the time, they didn’t know a thing about real estate at all. They didn’t know how to manage apartments. They didn’t know anything about renting these out. He writes, I had no clue what it entailed. It just never occurred to me that I couldn’t do it.

[00:13:56] Clay Finck: If you’re not aware that you’re not supposed to be able to do something, the barriers to do it are lessened dramatically. That desire to take a risk, test my limits, to ask why not was part of my DNA. And I don’t think I’ve changed much since end quote. So the owners ended up hiring Sam and his friend to manage this apartment and they didn’t see through this little brochure they had put together that looked somewhat professional.

[00:14:24] Clay Finck: Sam and his friend just acted purely out of logic and gut and the whole thing just worked. The landlord then went out and bought a second property and then a third and the boys had more and more tenants to manage. Jumping ahead here, Sam got married 10 days after he graduated to his wife, Janet. And I’ll mention here that he ended up getting married on three different occasions throughout his life.

[00:14:47] Clay Finck: And I don’t touch too much on this during the episode. And then after graduation, he had enrolled in law school because his parents had pushed this idea of going into a really good profession. And to no surprise, he just hated law school. But to my surprise, he ended up finishing law school at the University of Michigan.

[00:15:07] Clay Finck: And he said that his law degree was invaluable throughout his career as his business and his real estate deals got more and more complex. That law background seemed to be a really good foundation for him. And it really helped him understand the rules of the game and where the lines are drawn. So he could try and stay within those lines.

[00:15:26] Clay Finck: He bought his first property, which was a three unit apartment building in his second year of law school that was in 1965 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He paid 19,500 with 1,500 down that he saved from the apartment management business. He repainted all of the interior, replaced all the furniture in the units, and then doubled the rent.

[00:15:50] Clay Finck: And right off the bat, he started doing deal after deal in the real estate business. He had been working on buying an entire block of land so he could tear down all these houses and then build up a big apartment complex for students. And one after another, he would be knocking on doors, telling each house that they weren’t going to want to live next to this loud complex full of college students, so he’d sort of talk them into selling the house to him.

[00:16:16] Clay Finck: And when he got to the last one, it was a double lot that many developers had wanted and the people who lived there didn’t own it. It was a relative who lived in Chicago that actually owned it. So the guy in Chicago, Sam went and visited him and he said he was fine with moving his niece to somewhere else who lived in the house.

[00:16:37] Clay Finck: And he just told Sam that he didn’t want to have to put any money down. He didn’t want to have to pay any taxes and his niece had to be happy with the new place she would be moving to. And with that, Sam considered the deal as good as done. He wanted to try and create these win win situations and whatever people wanted, he would try and deliver that to him so Sam could get what he wanted.

[00:16:59] Clay Finck: So the man’s niece, she wasn’t the easiest to work with and they talked through dozens of places she could move to. She was very picky, but Sam made sure that that deal was going to go through. So with each new request, the niece brought up. Sam simply just said no problem. And he went on trying to find the solution to that problem.

[00:17:22] Clay Finck: The niece’s brother had also lived with her and that just really complicated things as well. And since the brother had a drinking problem, they had to live a few blocks from downtown so he could walk home. So Sam ended up building a one bedroom apartment specifically just for him on the house that he got the niece into.

[00:17:42] Clay Finck: And he designed it just the way the niece wanted, and it was just a situation where he had created a win win for everybody involved. Sam wrote here that I remember this event so clearly because it was at this point in my career that I fully realized the value of tenacity. I just had to assume that there was a way through any obstacle and then find it.

[00:18:04] Clay Finck: This is perhaps my most fundamental principle of entrepreneurship and to success in general. But my experience with Mrs. D was also about the value of really listening, which is at the heart of any negotiation. Understanding what’s truly important to the other person out of the dozen or so things they might tell you.

[00:18:24] Clay Finck: Mrs. D’s brother had to be taken care of. That was her bottom line. Homing in on that got the deal done, end quote. So since Sam owned the entire block with his father and another partner that ended up pitching in money as well. This also highlighted the benefit of scale when it came to real estate. With each additional house he acquired, this left room for a bigger complex.

[00:18:50] Clay Finck: That would become more and more economically viable for student housing. Sam had started to develop the thesis of buying properties in up and coming college towns across the country, and they had a relatively lower cost for construction. Plus there was little competition in these smaller cities relative to major cities that is dad had invested in like New York or Los Angeles.

[00:19:12] Clay Finck: And then Sam ended up graduating law school in 1966 at the age of 24. He had 250, 000 in the bank. He made 150, 000 dollars that year. Now, when you inflation adjust that to 2016 dollars, this was equivalent to him making 1. 1 million while in law school. So he certainly built a very strong foundation for his family as his son Matthew was born that year and then his daughter Joanne was born two years later.

[00:19:43] Clay Finck: Upon graduation, Sam didn’t want to be a big fish in a small pond and he wanted to test his limits. So he sold off his properties in Ann Arbor and then he moved to Chicago. After moving to Chicago, he had trouble getting a job in law since his resume largely focused on all of his real estate deals, so he ended up getting a job with a smaller firm, and to no surprise, he lasted just four days.

[00:20:11] Clay Finck: Maybe the other 43 companies that turned him down knew that they were dealing with someone who wasn’t particularly passionate about having a career in law but his boss ended up telling him to just keep his office where he had it and then keep doing his real estate deals and then send the company the legal work related to that real estate deal. So any legal work that he brought into the firm, Sam would get to keep 50 percent of it, which was a standard commission at the time.

[00:20:39] Clay Finck: Well, this deal wasn’t exactly designed for lawyers who were capable of bringing in just tons of business. And the firm quickly realized that Sam’s referrals were growing at an alarming rate. So they had quickly reduced the commission from 50 percent to 35%. And then within just one year, they cut it to 25 percent within 18 months of being with that firm.

[00:21:05] Clay Finck: A junior partner had called Sam into his office and he was pretty upset. So the junior partner, he was working 80 hours a week and making 25,000 a year. And Sam was making over three times that just through those commissions he was making. So Sam was just somewhat oblivious as to why someone with a lot more experience was so upset because Sam was just doing exceptional work, but he quickly recognized that he really just needed to get out of Dodge.

[00:21:36] Clay Finck: So he turned in his resignation letter at that firm at the age of 25. So we lasted something like 18 months, which is pretty funny. And it just shows how driven and how good he is at making all these, these deals and creating win win situations. He stuck with the thesis of investing in college towns, and he had built up a group of 20 investors at that point to help provide him capital.

[00:21:59] Clay Finck: In 1966, he had closed on his first major asset, which was a 99 unit apartment building across the street from the University of Toledo in Ohio. And this investment ended up yielding 20%, which was significantly higher than most real estate investors would get on such a deal. So when Sam went to do his second deal, he had a long list of investors willing and able to give him more capital.

[00:22:24] Clay Finck: One of the early partners that Sam got connected with was Jay Pritzker. And he was well known for being the founder of the Hyatt Corporation. Jay was 17 years older than Sam, and he was based in New York. And Jay would go on to become a multi billionaire as well. Sam’s only true business partner, though, was Bob Lurie.

[00:22:44] Clay Finck: He attempted Bob to also leave Ann Arbor for Chicago. He writes here, Bob liquidated the apartment management business in Ann Arbor and came to Chicago. Neither of us could have imagined how rich and how rewarding our partnership would become. Bob and I both saw business as a puzzle to be solved. And we both had an insatiable intellectual curiosity and quote, now the real growth of their investment firm, equity group investments or EGI that started in 1971 in the way Zell puts it, Bob and I believed in creating a meritocracy, an entrepreneurial organization that was based on transparency, initiative, creativity, trust, and the alignment of interests.

[00:23:30] Clay Finck: We paid people enough salary to live comfortably, but all of their ups came from participation in investments. In other words, the real money was in the deal residuals, the percentage of profits each deal earned and not from their salary. So here you can see that in order for Sam to get the outcomes that he desired, he would put incentives in place for his employees to help deliver those desired results.

[00:23:56] Clay Finck: So the higher the profits that came from a particular deal, the more his employees would end up getting paid. Each employee had a piece in everyone’s deal, and it really created this culture where everyone was more than willing to help each other on every deal, even if they weren’t necessarily the designated person on that deal.

[00:24:15] Clay Finck: From a high level, Bob served as sort of the grounding voice for EGI, and he focused internally as the operator. Whereas Sam, he was really the face of the organization as the salesperson, at least initially Sam was the optimist and Bob was the pessimist. Now chapter four of the book is titled Grave Dancer.

[00:24:37] Clay Finck: He kicks it off here. We were having fun and we were doing extremely well. I realized that the basics of business are straightforward. It’s largely about risk. If you’ve got a big downside and a small upside, run the other way. Always make sure you’re getting paid for the risk you take, and never risk what you can’t afford to lose.

[00:24:58] Clay Finck: Keep it simple. A scenario that takes four steps instead of one means there are three additional opportunities to fail. I often went back, and still do, to what was written up on the blackboard when I first walked into Econ 101. Supply and demand. In fact, much of my career has been about understanding in acting on this basic tenant, whether it’s in real estate, oil and gas manufacturing, or whatever.

[00:25:24] Clay Finck: Opportunity is very often embedded in the imbalance between supply and demand. End quote. Now, of course, there are a number of ways in which this can be applied to stock investing. Perhaps you find a business that has such strong demands for its products and little to no competition. That’s a rare business, and it may mean that it has substantial pricing power that they’ll be able to utilize going forward.

[00:25:47] Clay Finck: Unlocking a ton of shareholder value or for the gravediggers in the stock market. If there’s zero demand for a stock and it’s extremely beaten down because of poor sentiment, then just the slightest change in sentiment could potentially lead to asymmetric upside for investors who are willing to purchase those stocks that have been left for the dead. Zell claims that his commitment to the fundamentals of supply and demand is what inadvertently led to his nickname, the Grave Dancer. By the early 1970s, his investment thesis on high growth and smaller cities had run its course, so he shifted his strategy to financing new property development and avoiding all of the risks that he saw in actually being the developer himself.

[00:26:31] Clay Finck: Capital was pouring into multifamily and apartment units in cities all over the US and Zell felt like there was an oversupply of units. There was too much capital chasing too little demand rather than capital being utilized when there was strong demand. The availability of capital is what drove the decisions for new units being built across the industry.

[00:26:54] Clay Finck: So because Zell had high conviction that there was an oversupply of real estate. He stopped buying assets and got ready for what he believed would be the greatest buying opportunity of his career. So in the meantime, he set up a property management firm that would focus on distressed assets, but times were good and occupancy rates were high.

[00:27:14] Clay Finck: So others thought Sam was just crazy. One year later in 1974, it turned out that Sam was right and he was able to start buying assets for 50 cents on the dollar. He got in on restructuring deals that weren’t cash flowing. So for example, if an apartment had a loan at a 7 percent interest rate, but it could only service the debt at 4%, Sam would step into that deal to ensure that the borrower wouldn’t default.

[00:27:41] Clay Finck: Between 1974 and 1977, Zell’s firm bought roughly 4 billion in assets and they put down virtually 0 in capital. That’s one of the powerful things about real estate is that you can buy these great cash flowing assets with other people’s money, whether that be other investors or money coming from the bank.

[00:28:00] Clay Finck: In general, Zell looked for a few things in the properties. First, they had to be available at a price below their replacement cost. Second, they had to be good quality assets that were well located. And third, he liked when properties had deferred maintenance. The structures of the properties were good, but the repairs and upgrades had been neglected, which left room for him to improve the properties and raise rents.

[00:28:25] Clay Finck: Zell also benefited massively from essentially going short the dollar. So he took on 4 billion in fixed rate debt at an average interest rate of 6%, and then inflation was around 9 percent throughout the 1970s. He didn’t expect inflation to be so high during this period, but it ended up being icing on the cake and getting these great deals structured.

[00:28:46] Clay Finck: During the 1980s, Sam and Bob came to the conclusion that they weren’t just great real estate investors. They were also great business people. They set the goal of having half of their portfolios in real estate and then half of their portfolio in other investments by 1990. When the real estate market was hot and it was difficult to find deals, this meant that they simply shifted their time and their energy to where they found more attractive opportunities, be it real estate or whatever else.

[00:29:13] Clay Finck: The Economic Recovery Tax Act was passed in 1981. And this allowed companies to carry forward their net operating losses from prior years to offset current year’s taxable income. So previously, companies could carry forward seven years of losses, and then this was increased to 15 years. And this act was intended to help struggling companies.

[00:29:36] Clay Finck: And overall just help stimulate the economy as well. What Sam noticed was that after this law was passed, the share prices of a lot of businesses that were publicly traded did not react positively to this news. So he went bargain hunting. The thesis here was to find companies that were undervalued that he felt were underutilized in terms of its profit making potential.

[00:30:00] Clay Finck: And then after purchasing these companies to then maximize the value of that asset from there. So they ended up purchasing Great American Management and Investment Corp. Or G A M I. And this was the sixth largest REIT in the country. GAMI would serve as the holding company that they would go out and buy more businesses in the future.

[00:30:20] Clay Finck: So through this holding company, Sam was buying up a bunch of boring businesses like Eagle Industries. Eagle Industries was an air conditioning manufacturer. And another great thing about this strategy is that succeeding with these types of purchases of carrying forward the losses and then using this tax strategy was actually extremely challenging and very complex.

[00:30:42] Clay Finck: And there were tons of rules and regulations one had to understand to really succeed with these types of investments. So as a result, Sam was dealing with very little competition. He writes here, frankly, there was no substitute for limited competition. You can be a genius, but if there’s a lot of competition, it won’t matter.

[00:31:02] Clay Finck: I’ve spent my career trying to avoid its destructive consequences. Competition skews people’s assessments. As buyers get competitive, the demand for assets inflates prices, often beyond reason. I jokingly tell people that competition is great, for you as the consumer. For me, I’d rather have a natural monopoly.

[00:31:24] Clay Finck: And if I can’t get that, I’ll take an oligopoly. End quote. So here in a few weeks, we have an interview going out with Dev Kantesaria from Valley Forge Capital Management. And if you look at Dev’s portfolio, he essentially owns eight companies that just have incredible business models and are natural monopolies or duopolies, for example, MasterCard and Visa.

[00:31:46] Clay Finck: So be sure to check out that episode as well. That should be coming out in early December. And if you’re not aware with why a monopoly is just so attractive as a business owner, it’s because you have no competition and it’s competition that is going to drive down your returns as an owner. Monopolies on the other hand, oftentimes have significant pricing power and they can have sustained higher returns.

[00:32:08] Clay Finck: You know, think about a company like Google, they get really high returns in their search business because they essentially have monopoly in that industry, at least for the time being. Now in these purchases, Sam became essentially an activist wanting to drive change in these companies. In 1981, a company called Itel filed for one of the largest bankruptcies in the history of the country.

[00:32:30] Clay Finck: Sam bought 22 percent of the company on the public market and was eventually elected the chairman and CEO. And there was another story where to make one of these deals work, he needed to buy a 17 percent stake in Santa Fe, Southern Pacific. And he got a seat on the company’s board. This company had 30 directors, many of which Sam described as being past their prime.

[00:32:53] Clay Finck: And Sam was someone who almost always dressed very casually. So he’d show up to these meetings in blue jeans and had a motorcycle helmet in hand. And he was just ready to shake up the establishment. During his first annual meeting. He described this really boring setting where executives were taking turns to speak and there was no questions or really discussion taking place.

[00:33:16] Clay Finck: So it was really just a formality. So after the CEO had mentioned the 250 million planned expense for CapEx, Sam jumped in and he wanted to know what the expected return was on that CapEx. And the CEO was a bit confused because he wasn’t used to getting questioned at these meetings. So he just said that these were railroads and they needed upkeep to keep them in operation.

[00:33:42] Clay Finck: And then Sam explained that CapEx should be related to profitability and return on investment. And if you’re pouring money into projects that aren’t profitable, then that’s a poor business decision. So, the head of the railroad and the CEO looked at him as if he had two heads, and they were unable to really comprehend this basic concept that Sam was explaining.

[00:34:03] Clay Finck: Then they moved on without even answering his question. He writes here, the experience was shocking. I realized then the danger of boards that were biset by cronyism and inertia. As if an appointment to a board was a perk, a retirement benefit, or a no stream gift to golf buddies. My philosophy on board composition and culture is the antithesis of what I saw on the Santa Fe board.

[00:34:29] Clay Finck: So Sam actually made use of boards and he wanted to generate robust discussions. Getting down to the truth of the situation. And as a result, his companies would benefit from the combined wisdom and contributions of the board members. Sam was also huge on alignment. If Sam sat on the board of a company, he would typically own a sizable stake in that business.

[00:34:52] Clay Finck: And that way, shareholders knew that he had skin in the game. He believes that you shouldn’t depend on people unless you understand their motivations and you’re confident that your interests align with their interests. When it comes to the investments, Sam was involved with he wanted everybody to be aligned.

[00:35:09] Clay Finck: A lot of the issues on wall street are a direct result of misaligned interest, whether it be the executive compensation issues. The options backdating or even look at the great financial crisis. So chapter five is titled into the Inferno, which gets into some of the challenges that Sam faced in the 1990s.

[00:35:29] Clay Finck: So, first is that his partner, Bob Lurie, had passed away in 1990, and at the age of 46, he had gotten advanced colon cancer, which led to him passing away two years later. This was really hard on Sam, as he was quite close to Bob, and they had built their lives alongside each other over many, many years, and then all of a sudden, Sam had lost him at an early age.

[00:35:52] Clay Finck: And it wasn’t until his final months that Sam was told that this was going to happen because he kind of kept it a secret for quite some time. And then after the loss of Bob, Sam’s business was also thrown for a loop as the economy entered a recession and then the savings and loan crisis struck. And then this led to the loss of dedicated real estate lenders. Sam’s business, along with many others, weren’t able to get refinancing. And given that his business was asset rich and cash poor, his companies ended up struggling to even meet payroll. So to help improve the liquidity situation, he did his very first IPO, which was Vigoro in 1991.

[00:36:35] Clay Finck: And this was a fertilizer company. He then gained an appreciation of the liquidity that public markets offered. So when he exited his stake in Vigoro in 1996, the asset delivered more than 900 percent return from the original purchase in 1985. And he hated seeing how the investment bankers would do the IPO process.

[00:36:57] Clay Finck: So he learned everything he could about the IPO process and would eventually run the whole thing himself when he took these companies public. Throughout his career, he would do hundreds of IPO presentations for various companies all over the world. In the 1990s, Sam also partnered with Chilmark Partners and he formed a 1 billion distressed opportunity fund.

[00:37:21] Clay Finck: Sam and David Schulte spent seven months raising capital for the fund, pitching the idea that they could find good companies with bad balance sheets and help them grow out of those troubles. One of the businesses Zell and Schulte bought was a well run Cincinnati based radio station called Jacor. From 1992 to 1996, they invested 79 million for 90 percent of the business.

[00:37:45] Clay Finck: At the time, no company could own more than 20 radio stations. So the way Sam saw it, if they were going to only own 20 of these radio stations, they wanted to own 20 of the best ones they could get their hands on. So they were shuffling around these stations, buying and selling, trying to upgrade their portfolio.

[00:38:05] Clay Finck: And then all of a sudden, Congress passed the telecommunications act in February of 1996. And this eliminated the 20 station limit and replaced it with a 50 percent market share ceiling. And then immediately, Sam told his team that this was an opportunity of a lifetime and they needed to go by every radio station in America that they could get their hands on.

[00:38:27] Clay Finck: So go buy them and Sam will figure out how to finance it. Timing and execution in this situation just made all of the difference because By the time Jakor got to 118 radio stations, the rest of the industry had caught on and the prices of these assets started to increase. And then Jacor kept buying radio stations, but they were doing so at a slower pace.

[00:38:50] Clay Finck: So over three years, they went from 20 stations to 243. Jacor was a business that Sam would have liked to hold on to for decades. But since this investment was through a private equity fund, he had promised liquidity to his investors. So he ended up selling it in 1999 to clear channel at the top of the industry cycle for 4. 4 billion. And this amounted to a total return for him of 1, 237%, which is just phenomenal. So in total, the Zell Chilmark fund made investments in 10 companies across all sorts of industries, and they generated a compounded annual return of 23. 5 percent from 1990 to 2000. And after their last investment in 1998, one of the investors asked them when they were going to launch their next fund, to which Zell responded, there is no next fund.

[00:39:44] Clay Finck: Knowing fully that the investment environment had changed and the opportunity set had shrunk significantly. Throughout the 90s, Sam’s team also ended up doing seven IPOs and that totaled 2 billion. Jumping here to chapter six of the book is titled Cassandra. Cassandra was a Greek legend cursed by Apollo with the ability to make accurate predictions that no one believed.

[00:40:09] Clay Finck: In March of 1988, Zell wrote an article titled From Cassandra with Love, where Zell, he presented this dire warning to the real estate industry, which not surprisingly, nobody took seriously. Some called Zell a pessimist and he just really thought he was being a realist. In 1989, he went out and raised 400 million to prepare for the markdowns in real estate in the future.

[00:40:35] Clay Finck: And once the early 1990s came around, Sam’s predictions came true. And most of the private real estate was leveraged 80 to 90 percent and there was falling occupancy rates and falling rents. And then by 1995, they had put together a collection of office buildings and they were considering taking the portfolio public as a REIT.

[00:40:55] Clay Finck: And he ended up taking another real estate company public in 1993. And it’s just a reminder that this guy’s got so many deals going on. I’m not sure how he was able to manage it all and keep track of it all. The company was known as Equity Lifestyle Properties and it was one of the early companies to list as a REIT in the modern commercial real estate era.

[00:41:16] Clay Finck: And as of the time of writing, ELS was one of the largest manufactured home communities and RV parks in the country. And it produced returns of 17 percent per year since the IPO. It was one of the highest performing REITs to ever exist. Mobile home and RV parks are yet another example of Zell making a very contrarian bet that most professional investors wouldn’t even think to touch.

[00:41:41] Clay Finck: But it was just a great pond efficient. It benefited from the NIMBY effect or the not in my backyard effect. So once one of these parks was built in a neighborhood, the odds were very low that there was going to be another one across the street. And the turnover at these parks was very low, typically around 1%.

[00:42:00] Clay Finck: Now, Zell certainly didn’t invent the REIT industry, but he did help give it legs as he established strong corporate governance to help position REITs as an asset class to be allocated to in institutional portfolios. In late 1992, Morgan Stanley had created what was called an up REIT structure, which allowed large holders of real estate to get access to liquidity without triggering a taxable event because the ownership of the property would be transferred to REIT shares.

[00:42:31] Clay Finck: Zell had seen what works and what doesn’t work on Wall Street. And he had told the National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts that REITs had to be transparent. They had to be predictable and they had to have solid corporate governance and accountability. This would create trust with shareholders, especially when you add high quality properties with good balance sheets and sponsors who had skin in the game.

[00:42:56] Clay Finck: So with the help of Zell’s influence, the REIT industry went from 7 billion in early 1990s to over 1. 5 trillion here in 2024. REITs are highly desirable, especially by investors more focused on income, as REITs are required to distribute at least 90 percent of their taxable income to shareholders as dividends.

[00:43:21] Clay Finck: And then as if the sale of decor just prior to the peak in 1999, wasn’t enough. He also timed the market perfectly with a whopping 39 billion sale of equity office. That was in early 2007. And I’ve heard for years that you shouldn’t try to time the market, but Zell just certainly crushed it throughout his career, finessing his way through these market cycles.

[00:43:45] Clay Finck: But he claimed that despite him thinking that they were towards the end of the cycle at that time. That wasn’t the reason that he did the deal. He claimed to have just received an offer that he couldn’t refuse since he felt a duty to shareholders to deliver satisfactory returns. Equity office was the largest REIT in the country and their team spent a decade acquiring an irreplaceable collection of over 500 of the best office buildings in every major market in the U. S. Zell was just a huge advocate of reducing redundancies. So if he owned two buildings next to each other in the same city, then the same crew could say, do the cleaning, or you could have the same maintenance team for both and they could buy things in bulk for cost savings, et cetera. And this really brought economies of scale to his business.

[00:44:36] Clay Finck: So with equity office, the thesis was the bigger they could get, the better. When Zell was looking at the overall valuation of equity office, he believed that Wall Street consistently undervalued the REIT. Analysts would determine the value based on comps, rents, vacancies, and all these metrics. But the metric that Zell thought was the most reliable in determining the underlying value of the properties was the replacement cost.

[00:45:03] Clay Finck: He believed this because the replacement cost determined the price of future competition. So you can see sort of the value investor side of Zell here, because I think about how Warren Buffett, he saw so much value in the Coca Cola brand, for example. Because it was something that had an extremely high replacement cost.

[00:45:20] Clay Finck: So Buffett’s famous for saying, if you gave me 100 billion and said to take away the soft drink leadership of Coca Cola in the world, I’d give it back to you because it can’t be done. When there’s a company out there that’s just so special that it can’t be replicated, even with massive sums of money.

[00:45:38] Clay Finck: And talent, then I think you have something quite special and quite valuable. And even better, if that barrier to entry or moat is widening, then that particular company’s pricing power and strength is increasing in tandem with the passage of time. So Zell thought that equity office was worth at least 40 a share.

[00:45:59] Clay Finck: And then Blackstone bought it out at 55 and 50 cents a share for a transaction value of 39 billion on February 6th, 2007. The REIT initially went public at 21 a share in 1997. And then along the way shareholders also collected 16 a share in dividends in aggregate. So it was one of the more successful deals that they’ll did throughout his career.

[00:46:23] Clay Finck: Now turning to chapter eight in the book here. Many people think of investing as a risky endeavor, which is certainly can be, but Sam believed that he was more comfortable with risk than most people. And part of the reason for that is that he did everything he could to understand risk in the deals he got involved in.

[00:46:42] Clay Finck: People love focusing on the upside. Sam was much more interested in the downside. He would ask himself what the outcome would be if everything goes wrong. What actions can we take to help prevent those outcomes and could he bear the cost of such outcomes and still survive? Now I can see why Zell put so much focus on the replacement costs because I think this could also be estimated as your liquidation value should you need to sell the individual assets for whatever reason.

[00:47:13] Clay Finck: There was one deal he did in the 1990s where he had one of his guys visit the company for due diligence to help determine how much the assets would be worth, and he had purchased shares in a company called Carter Hawley Hale. And he estimated their downside to be around 20 percent if things go really bad.

[00:47:33] Clay Finck: And that’s the way that things ended up panning out. It was just a horrible investment for three years and they ended up losing 20 percent of their original capital. And from Sam’s perspective, he considered that a win because he had properly assessed his risk upon entering that deal. And investing is a probabilistic game and you can’t necessarily know ahead of time if the positive or the negative scenario is going to play out.

[00:47:57] Clay Finck: If you make dozens of investments throughout your career, you’re bound to see both the positive and the negative outcomes, whether you’re Warren Buffett, Sam Zell, or just your everyday retail investor. But there are always risks you simply can’t a hundred percent account for. Another company that Sam got involved with was a company called American Hawaii Cruises and they merged with another company called American Classic Voyages.

[00:48:22] Clay Finck: American Hawaii had these cruise ships that did tours around the Hawaiian islands and then after the 9 11 attacks, air travel to Hawaii came to a halt. And this led to substantial losses for the company and sell ended up personally losing a hundred million dollars. Sam was someone who enjoyed exploring the world and for much of his life, he was intentional in learning about other parts of the world and really immersing himself in different cultures.

[00:48:50] Clay Finck: For example, when he heard that high end retailers were opening stores in Mongolia, which had a population of just 3 million people, he got interested and he visited the gold and copper mines that was growing their GDP at over 20%. Zell launched another private investment firm called Equity International that was in 1994 and that focused on international markets.

[00:49:15] Clay Finck: He saw the growth in liquid real estate in the US and he wanted to be the first mover in international markets that other investors would deem untouchable. But there was a good reason for this. Oftentimes with foreign investments, you’d be trading a good rule of law for better valuations and more growth.

[00:49:33] Clay Finck: So finding good properties in these foreign markets Was probably more important than it even was in the U. S. One company he invested in was BR malls in Brazil and his team invested 86 million dollars into them and they acquired dozens of malls and they IPO in 2007. After the IPO, the firm delivered a 26 percent annual return to shareholders.

[00:49:57] Clay Finck: And when Zell’s team exited in 2010, they had achieved a 48 percent annual return since they had held it for a shorter time frame. One thing that appealed to Zell in these emerging markets was simply their population growth. He viewed it as investing with a tailwind at his back. So these countries like Mexico, Brazil, Columbia, India, and China on the flip side developed countries like UK, France, Japan, Spain, Italy, they had aging populations and they had flat or negative population growth rates.

[00:50:30] Clay Finck: Zell also loved the relationships he had built when he was traveling all over the world. So he had met the prince of Abu Dhabi, for example, which is the capital of United Arab Emirates. And he had heard that Sam just loved riding motorcycles. So they would go out late at night together on motorcycles and just have a great time transitioning here to chat about more of some of these deals.

[00:50:54] Clay Finck: Zell described himself as the chairman of everything in the CEO of nothing. He stuck to what he was good at, which was vision, direction, and strategy. And that’s where he added the most value. He doesn’t involve himself in the day to day operations, and he picks great people to run these companies for him.

[00:51:12] Clay Finck: Here’s what Zell wrote about culture. I’ve always kept one thing at the forefront. The idea that culture is king. The environment you spend most of your waking hours in reflects who you are and the type of people you want working with and for you. Culture can either inspire ideas or stifle them. It can lay the basis for relationships that last decades.

[00:51:35] Clay Finck: Or flip through them like a deck of cards. It is the heartbeat of your company. At our core, we are a meritocracy, an environment that Bob and I cultivated in the early days. A meritocracy gives you the freedom to be yourself by eliminating superficial markers so you are measured only by what you produce.

[00:51:57] Clay Finck: In essence, it is an equalizer that focuses everybody on what’s important so you have the opportunity to reveal your best. Once you’ve worked in a true meritocracy, it’s very hard to settle for anything else. Beyond that, our culture is driven, creative, playful, effective, and smart. We encourage confidence and nurture the ability for you to have an opinion and to back it up intelligently.

[00:52:25] Clay Finck: I often say we have an open kimono policy. No secrets, no whispers, no closed doors. Everything is on full display, and that’s one of the key ways we manage risk. I think this one chapter on culture is just well worth the purchase price of the book, as there’s just so much wisdom relating to the inner workings and the DNA of a well run and a successful business.

[00:52:49] Clay Finck: Having worked a couple of different jobs in my career, I can certainly resonate with Zell’s point that those cultures that remove the superficial and focus more on what’s actually important is better both for the employee and better for the firm itself, creating this win win relationships that aligns the incentives.

[00:53:08] Clay Finck: TIP also has a policy of radical transparency where you can get information about pretty much anything. And of course, there’s a few exceptions, which are understandably more confidential. I just asked dig the other day, my cohost about our revenue, what it was for the previous quarter. And he was happy to send along numbers and answer any questions I had.

[00:53:28] Clay Finck: I also think a lot of other firms will say that they have an open door policy, but they don’t really have a culture that invites criticism invites, feedback, and new ideas. Zell writes here, as a risk taker, my greatest fear is not having information that might protect me from making a mistake. The only way I can do that is to create an atmosphere where there are no silos, where everybody knows everything that’s going on.

[00:53:54] Clay Finck: I tell people no surprises, and I mean it. I’m confident enough to believe that if I catch a problem early on, we’ll be smart enough to fix it. So don’t hide things, relax. We don’t kill the messenger around here. At the same time, I run an entrepreneurial organization. I empower people. I love self starters.

[00:54:15] Clay Finck: I want people taking the initiative, pushing the edge, questioning, challenging. Of course, that kind of freedom comes with responsibility. So good judgment is critical. Fortunately, I’ve always been a pretty good judge of talent. I have a pretty good radar on people. Once I decide to trust you, I back it up by giving you a lot of responsibility quickly.

[00:54:36] Clay Finck: I’ll take a risk with you, like Jay Pritzker did with me. If I’m right, you’ll work incredibly hard to prove to me and yourself that you’re up to the challenge. You get a chance to stretch in ways you likely haven’t before. It’s addictive and I’ve been told it engenders fierce loyalty and that loyalty goes both ways.

[00:54:58] Clay Finck: I tell people who join my company, once you work for us, you’re never going to be happy working anywhere else. And I believe it’s true. We have people who never leave. And many who do try to come back. The length of tenure for our employees is unusual. Many of my people have been with me for 20 or 30 plus years, from my assistant to middle managers to CEOs.

[00:55:22] Clay Finck: There’s always new opportunity here. Every time we change direction, we create new ways for people to grow. You’ll often see our employees moving from one equity company to another for a new position that gives them that chance, end quote. I mean, when Sam can get talented people who want to work for him for decades, you know, he’s really built something quite special.

[00:55:46] Clay Finck: I can’t speak for everyone, but I’m personally wired to work in an organization that is just free of a lot of the bureaucracy. I just think of bureaucracy, just slowing things way down. It stifles innovation and it just makes people unmotivated. I think in a lot of ways, Zell had met this guy named Peter Zalasi, who helped him take his creativity to the next level. He of course wanted to surround himself with people that went the extra mile. And that’s what Peter was in the creativity department. They would do these year end gifts and some of these off the wall ideas to remind people that they were doing business with people who just thought differently.

[00:56:28] Clay Finck: Peter created Zell’s quote unquote business card, which was this little red booklet of what he calls Sam isms, such as trying to be right. A hundred percent of the time leads to paralysis and conventional wisdom is nothing other than a reference point. We’re getting to the end of the book here. Zell talks a bit about his passion for entrepreneurship.

[00:56:52] Clay Finck: So he wanted to establish an entrepreneurship program at the University of Michigan. But after 20 years, they never called him in 1999. They established the Zell Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies at the University of Michigan. They also launched the 10 million Zell Founders Fund to help launch new student led companies.

[00:57:14] Clay Finck: At the time the book was written, Zell would do about 40 speaking engagements a year and roughly half of them would be at universities. And he would often get the question, you’ve clearly accomplished so much, but there’s less opportunities today. What are my options? And then Zell would say that there’s always opportunities.

[00:57:33] Clay Finck: You just have to be actively looking for it and you have to do your homework and assess the risk and reward. It takes guts and it’s not easy, but if you’ve got the stomach for it, it’s a great ride. Sam’s parents taught him that you can never truly be successful without philanthropy and giving to others.

[00:57:51] Clay Finck: So that was clearly something that was very important to him. He felt that he’s been quite fortunate with the cards he was dealt and that he had the opportunity and the personal obligation to have a positive impact on others lives. Turning here to the final chapter, it’s titled Go for Greatness. Zell had an investment in the Chicago Bulls in the 1990s, and he was having dinner with Phil Jackson, who was the head coach at the time.

[00:58:17] Clay Finck: During the 90s, Phil Jackson coached the Bulls to six championships, and on the court, they were of course led by Michael Jordan. Phil and Sam were discussing just how great an athlete Michael Jordan was. Phil had said that what really made Jordan so phenomenal was his ability to make everyone around him better.

[00:58:37] Clay Finck: Think about how powerful of a trait that is, especially when you’re leading an organization that has thousands of people in it. And then when we look at the coaching side and how that might carry over into business, I think the best coaches also have an ability to just get the most out of their players.

[00:58:54] Clay Finck: So Zell’s driving purpose in life was just simply to make a difference. Everyone has gifts that they’ve been given in life and some people are good at art. Some people can dance. Other people might be a great janitor for Sam. He was obviously very good at recognizing opportunities. And figuring out how to make the most of it.

[00:59:16] Clay Finck: That might just be a fancy way of saying he was just really good at making money. He finishes up the book with a few of his key philosophies that helped him do just that. His first principle he shares is to be ready to pivot. Sam never hesitated in pursuing a new opportunity just because he hadn’t done something similar before.

[00:59:35] Clay Finck: He believed that just simply having the belief that you can do something Already gets you over one of the biggest hurdles to actually achieving it. So even though he’s known for being a real estate investor, he’s actually pretty industry agnostic. And he never lets his love for doing deals stop him from doing what’s most rational.

[00:59:55] Clay Finck: Sometimes you should be the buyer in the deal. Other times it’s better to be the seller. Sometimes he’s involved in the equity side and the other times he might be providing the debt. When there’s a flood of opportunities, he wants to do his best to capitalize on it and raise capital from outside investors if needed.

[01:00:12] Clay Finck: If deals start to become scarce, then he knows he needs to be more selective. His second principle is to keep it simple. He thought about these simple concepts like supply versus demand and liquidity equals value. I’m reminded of Sosnoff’s law, which Chris Mayer and I discussed on the podcast. Sosnoff’s law says that the thicker the research stack required, the less likely it will be a successful investment.

[01:00:37] Clay Finck: Oftentimes the best investments are the simplest. I just recently met up with Chris and had lunch with him, and he mentioned Sosnoff’s Law as one of the reasons that he sold one of his funds investments. So the name that he sold, it just took too much of his time, too much of his headspace. And this was a good indication to him that it may be time to sell it as it was just causing him too many headaches.

[01:00:58] Clay Finck: Next here is to keep your eyes and mind wide open. You never know where the next opportunity might come from. Since Zell is always taking in new information, filtering out what isn’t important and retaining what is most useful is of utmost importance. He would read at least five newspapers a day and five magazines a week.

[01:01:19] Clay Finck: The problem nowadays is that information is everywhere, so being able to filter through that and retain the right information is a critical skill set. Another principle here is to be the lead dog. He likes to control the scenery in every deal he enters and be the market leader in what he does. He says that if you’re not the lead dog, you end up spending your whole life responding to others.

[01:01:43] Clay Finck: You can see this in a number of the companies that Zell owned, which he outlines in the book. One of his favorite League Dog stories was Adam’s Respiratory. Zell got involved in the business in 1999, and it capitalized on the pharmaceutical advantage where if a company created a significant improvement in the development in a particular drug, then they would get a monopoly position on that improvement.

[01:02:06] Clay Finck: And this encouraged investment into the space, of course. Adam’s Respiratory was successful at just that they grew sales from $14 million in 2003 to $332 million in 2007 when the company was sold in 2007. Z’s initial investment grew by 15 fold, from 26 million to 380 million, and being the lead dog isn’t just a business strategy.

[01:02:32] Clay Finck: It’s a mindset, and he believed that that’s part of what makes America so great is because a bunch of entrepreneurs have this sort of attitude to dominate their field. And in America, everybody has a shot at being the lead dog. A couple more principles here. Another one is to do the right thing. Zell had the opportunity to invest in a payday loan business, and he figured it would be a great investment, but he decided that he didn’t want his name associated with that business.

[01:03:01] Clay Finck: He couldn’t live with himself investing in a company that would charge 300 percent interest for people to borrow money for two weeks. Zell believes that the world’s big enough that you should be able to align your ethics with your investments. And there’s always another deal out there ready to be made.

[01:03:19] Clay Finck: Then his last principle here I’ll mention is to go all in. He writes the minute you acknowledge that a problem is insurmountable, you fail. If you just assume there’s a way through to the other side, you’ll usually find it and you’ll unleash your creativity to do so. I equate this fundamental truth with an entrepreneurial mindset.

[01:03:41] Clay Finck: It’s tenacity, optimism, drive, and conviction all rolled into one. It’s commitment to get it done, see it through, make it work. In my world, I call this being an owner. For me, that means investing time as well as money. It means giving whatever it is, a company or project space in my head. I constantly think about it, how to make it better and how to introduce it to new opportunities.

[01:04:07] Clay Finck: All with the goal of making a difference, affecting a positive change. So Sam would tell his kids that their responsibility is to maximize the skills they were given and whatever they decide to do with their life. They should invest everything they have into it to excel. So Sam Zell is clearly a great example of someone who bet big on himself and he chased after what he really wanted in life, just relentlessly, and he continued to set the bar for himself higher and higher throughout life.

[01:04:39] Clay Finck: So I really enjoyed this autobiography from Sam Zell called Am I Being Too Subtle and putting this episode together for you guys. There are just so many great takeaways. I think all of us can just apply to our own lives. So if you missed the interview that Sam Zell did with our podcast here with Trey Lockerbie that was on episode 552.

[01:05:02] Clay Finck: It ended up being Sam’s last interview before he passed away just weeks after the recording. So thanks so much for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, I’d really appreciate it if you share it with just one person to support us. It would really mean the world to us. And if you’re looking for a network of like minded value investors, you may consider checking out our TIP Mastermind Community where Stig, Kyle, and I host weekly live zoom calls.

[01:05:25] Clay Finck: We host a few live events throughout the year in New York city, Omaha, and London. And we talk about stock ideas with our community of 100 plus vetted members, which include private investors, portfolio managers, and high net worth individuals. With that, I’ll let you go. And I hope to see you all again next week.

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