The I Love CVille Show With Jerry Miller! - Alison Williams, CEO At Of Place, Joined Hillary L. Murray On "The Juicy Details"

Episode Date: January 17, 2024

Alison Williams, CEO At Of Place, joined Hillary L. Murray live on The Juicy Details! The Juicy Details airs live Wednesday from 2:15 pm – 3 pm on The I Love CVille Network. Watch and listen to The Juicy Details on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, iTunes, Apple Podcast, YouTube, Spotify, Fountain, Amazon Music, Audible and iLoveCVille.com.

Hey friends, welcome to the third week of the Juicy Details. It's been an exciting start to 2024. We've had in week one, award-winning journalist Jeff Tang join us, who turned into a career coach. He inspired us all to live the best versions of ourselves. Week two, we had Dana Lewis, who is a nutrition coach, and she wrote about how we need to stop faking fine. And that was a really great conversation. If you didn't listen, tune into both of those. Today, in week three, we have Allison Williams joining us. She is partner and CEO of Place, which of Place fosters destinations that define communities. So we're going to have a great conversation.

Allison, thanks for joining us. Thanks so much for having me, Hillary. What a treat to spend some time with you today. It's always fun. I know. Should we start with how we met? I would love to. Do you want to tell the story?

No, we should start with a loomy shot. So we always start with a loomy shot so that we get our dose of real fruits and vegetables the way nature intended. Love you mean it. Love you, mean it. Love you, mean it. So mine is a gold rush turmeric shot with lemon, ginger, pear, and cayenne, which means it's going to be spicy. Yeah, it's going to make you feel like gold. Okay. Woo. So good. That's my favorite one. Is it? Yeah, it helps with my inflammation. That's right. Good. Thank you. As you taught me. I did teach you that. Over 10 years of programming has gone into that advertisement from Alison Williams. Thank you. Okay. So let's, why don't you start? Because this is your show,

you're my guest and I'm just here to listen. Okay. So I am an overachiever, and I decided to sign up for early programming at Darden. So you had an opportunity to kind of like discover yourself through testing of, you know, doing a Myers-Briggs test and what have you. And so they, it was two weeks or something before school officially started. And I'm sitting in this early programming class next to this woman. And the teacher says to everyone, okay, we're going to get different groups together. Everybody find your dyad partner. And Hillary and I picked each other to be partners. And about 30 minutes later, they said, okay, time for for a break let's go get a snack we walked out into the hallway and they had a giant tray of donut holes for us to eat and harold returns to me and she said we were supposed to be diet partners and they're feeding

us donuts and i said diet i think there's a dyad partners and I thought I was really not a smart person at that point. I actually think that you knew exactly what you were talking about and you were just being hilarious as you always are. No, I actually legitimately did not understand that they said dyad partners. It's kind of like mixing paint colors. I had no idea. I literally thought they said dyad partners, and I was confused on the definition of it,

but that just demonstrates how auditory processing is incredibly important. Also, though, why were they feeding us donut holes? Did they want us to take a nap after class? Maybe they wanted to get some sugar intake. I see. We needed carrot sticks and loamy juice instead. Maybe some tequila. There you go.

Okay, so tell me, so that was Darden, that was 2011. So before Darden and going into the creation of Place, you've done, you've done a lot of things. Why don't you walk us through your career path? What's been inspiring to you and kind of what made you decide to create a company that fosters tangible communities that you can explore and be in? Yeah. So I started in real estate development. I followed in the footsteps of my mother who worked in the real estate development business and really focused on retail leasing. And I didn't intend to follow her footsteps. I thought I was going to be a doctor and then ended up in a really complicated physics class in college and thought, I just don't know that I have the wherewithal to go about doing this. And I loved my psychology classes and I love my business classes. And so

I went pretty quickly into the real estate industry after undergrad and spent years. I luckily ended up at a company called Federal Realty, who you guys might know from Charlottesville because they own Barrick's Road Shopping Center. Probably make no money at all. Probably make no money at all. It's really a productive piece of real estate for them, which we can maybe talk about a little bit at some point, the fundamentals of real estate. But so I had the joy of working for a company who really focused on what the experience was like for what we now have a place called a ground plane for the consumer. So what happens not only in the retail,

but in the public realm, and how does that space create value upstairs? So in your multifamily apartments, in your office building, in your hotel, making sure that you're getting that ground plane experience right can add immense value upstairs. And frankly, I think if you don't pay attention to it, it's dilutive to value. It's never a neutral thing. And so wait, what goes

into a ground plane? So it's about how your sidewalks are functioning, how your road widths, is the scale of the building. I hope city council's listening to this right now street trees lighting talk about lighting we could talk about lighting a lot because i hear that we've got some lighting challenges um in certain places and uh street furniture and the storefront design uh of your retail spaces or not even your retail, but your businesses that are facing the street, your public realm spaces. So many of our plans have created parks that are disconnected from commercial spaces. And so, you know, one of the things that's really amazing in Charlottesville is the downtown mall, which has had ups and downs over the many years that it's been around. But something that's really wonderful about it is that it has retail and restaurant space that spills out onto it

and kind of allows the community to engage with itself. And it's not kind of enclosed businesses inside of their own spaces. So I had the pleasure of working for this company that was really focused on how do we make sure that the retail and... Did you do Stonefield too or is that a different company? No, that was a different company. Okay, sorry. Keep going. Yeah. But very similar kind of mindset, if you will. And so I had the pleasure of working for that business and then when I came to grad school and then started exploring working for other real estate development companies, I quickly realized that that mindset didn't really exist everywhere. That this kind of like place first mindset was unique to companies whose background was in retail.

And that often apartment developers were sort of thinking about the retail and the public realm second. Sure. They were sort of saying, we'll build it and then we'll just give it to a broker who will lease it up. And so there was an opportunity there to really... So there was like no fields of dreams were like...

No fields of dreams. There was no mission. However they were going to build it, it was just like a box that they were putting up. Well, and I think there's often this misconception that good design has to be more expensive. And I just don't think that that's true. I think that it just takes,

it requires you to be thoughtful up front in the process about what we need, what is our strategy, who is our customer, and how can we create something that works well for them, which we can talk about a lot today. and how can we create something that works well for them, which we can talk about a lot today, this idea of really tailoring your strategy to who your customer is, which you've done extraordinarily well through Lumi.

And I think the idea of I'll just give a retail space to a broker at the base of a multifamily building wasn't really working for a lot of businesses. Because what ended up happening is you end up, you know, selling a really high-end apartment building, but you've got, I'm not going to pick on a retailer, a retailer that you don't like at the base of it. And then, you know, the person that's coming to lease an apartment, which is like buying a car,

that's how much money goes into renting an apartment, has to live with that crappy business at the base of the building or an empty space at the base of the building. And so there was a missing piece in that space that people weren't paying attention to. And so OfPlace really started because we were thinking

there's an opportunity to create some value here. So as opposed to just giving it to a broker to rent out, your philosophy is, let's think of what the community needs. That's right. I mean, frankly, there are extraordinary brokers out there who do a phenomenal job, but they're really not incentivized to spend time putting together strategies for how the spaces are going to perform best. Sure. And so sometimes

there's just a need for someone to come in and say, let's be really thoughtful about what we need here. Now, I think it's, there are many hurdles to being successful in that. Like what does the community really want? Doesn't always match up with what will the bank underwrite? And what can the, what is the landlord interested in having at the base of their building? But I think if we all do a better job communicating, we can find some wins in there. And we often find ourselves really trying to be sitting from the perspective of the owner's seat in our relationships with our clients so that we can help them be really thoughtful about what the spaces are that they're creating and how those businesses can ultimately be successful there um so that's awesome well so you've created of place with your mother and your brother i did talk to us about building a business with you know the stresses growing pains etc but also doing it with

family members I um I always joke a little bit that truthfully my mother made us go to family therapy a lot growing up that's fun so you already had the dynamics figured out so she's culturally Jewish and so that was just ingrained in us. We did a lot of family therapy, and we're really good at communicating with each other, which doesn't always mean that we communicate without arguing. It means that we argue a lot, and then we still love each other and can work think that early in the business we have a few people who work with us who would like hide under the desk we would start yelling at each other like what are we what are we doing here you guys are yelling at each other what's gonna happen and over time we've kind of tempered that a little bit but it was really fun to start a business with my family. Um, I,

I was really nervous about it, to be honest with you. I wasn't sure I, the thing that actually I was the most nervous about was that we were all putting our eggs in the same basket and sort of thinking about, um, also if I'm, if, if I'm helping lead this business and it fails, we can talk about what failure means. I have different perspectives on that now after a number of years. And it fails, then what are we all left with at the end of that? And I was really nervous about that. But it's been a real honor to spend the time that I've been able to spend with my mother and my brother.

I don't think at all that we would have spent the time together that we have or built the type of relationship that we have with each other if we hadn't done this together. And we're really lucky that we have a great communication style. You spend some time working with your family. What do you think about that? Well, I've also spent some time with your family and I believe that your family and working with them

and working with your mother who is like so inspiring and then your brother George is fun and great and has a good personality and a wonderful salesperson. And I think that you guys three together, the dynamics are teed up to be a very successful combination. And when you go to build a business, it is extraordinarily powerful

to have partners that have your back, are your cheerleaders and are going to make things happen with you alongside of you versus working alone. So you don't feel alienated. That's right. I think we've talked about this a lot with your own business. It's this finding the right partner. It's really starting a business is having a partner in a business is like a marriage. Yeah. And I always feel like the key to that or the key to any relationship is communication, which is why I started talking about communication. Yeah.

Because I just think we all... It's the beginning of community, too. It's the beginning of community, too. Exactly. We all just need... I know that my family is... We're all working towards the same goal. And, you know, my mother was so funny when she hired my brother. He's my younger brother, although he's almost a foot taller than

I am. So not my little brother, but he's my younger brother. When we hired him just a couple months after starting the company, she said, you guys are going to make the same salary. And I was like, what are you talking about? I'm going to make the same salary. And I was like, what are you talking about? I'm going to make the same salary as him. I have an MBA. I have, you know, 10, 15 years of experience in this industry. He doesn't have any. What was he doing before?

He wasn't doing anything in real estate. No, he was a tech salesperson. Yeah. And he is an extraordinary salesperson. George is very talented and very strategic. And I'm so lucky to have him as my business partner. And yet she just said, you know, this is going to be fair. There are two of you.

We're going to make it even Steven. And it's really helped us be aligned. I commend her for doing that for us. I don't know that I would have made that decision. I would have paid him less than myself, but I'm glad that we make the same. I would have been paying him less than you. But I think that's important. One of the things you said about, you know, he came from tech sales. One of the things Jeff Tang talked about two weeks ago was that your skills are

transferable. So if you are thinking of career switching, something like sales, if you're able to understand and learn a product, it's about building relationships with people. It's about building community and learning how to sell ideas. And I think all of you and your family are natural sales humans. I appreciate that. I also think, um, I can't remember if Jeff said, said this exactly, but I I've talked to him about this before. Just this idea that I hire for great humans. Yeah. Um, and not necessarily because the person has the exact technical skillset that I need, because I really think that I can teach people if they're smart and hardworking and fun for me to be around. It's harder to teach people if you

don't enjoy spending time with them. Exactly. I hear you if they're not fun. Okay. So, so that's interesting. How big is your company now we have 14 people okay and before covid we sat around an eight person table in one room and i thought of us as this like co-working collaborative unicorn company and we're just going to break the mold on all of the like traditional business things and what are the all of the traditional business things. What are the traditional, in your mind, business things? Power suits? Power suits.

Because I'm here for power suits. I do love a power suit. I was going for power casual today. Yeah. But I do love a power suit. No, I just, I feel like there was a lot of time in my work life spent on the politicking inside of an organization. And it just felt like a waste to me. I love efficiency. And although some people on my team would probably laugh at me saying that because I'm pretty inefficient at times but if I can find a path to efficiency

great and I just feel like all that politicking again is a lack of communication so let's be clear about what we need and what we want and if we can figure it out we'll figure it out I had a woman who used to work for me who I absolutely adore to this day.

She's not with us anymore, but she wanted to work in hospitality. And when she left, I said, I know. Well, particularly in like hotel development and we weren't doing hotel development. Not like she didn't want to be a waitress or... A server. Yeah.

Or server, yeah. Yeah, that's okay. No, no. But that is a great job. I did love my time doing that. I think that's great training for... Sales. Sales, yes.

And disaster mitigation. Exactly. When you spill a glass of wine on somebody, you really have to learn how to communicate. Have you spilled a glass of wine on someone as you were serving their table? I mean, you haven't? No, I haven't. I have not. Just once.

Then you learn quickly to not ever do that again. My nickname is Hillary Spillery, and I do spill often. I tend to keep it on myself. Yes, exactly. Or people's white couches. But I, you know, the beauty of being a small business is I, I said to her at one point, like, you know, whatever you're passionate about, talk to me about it. If you want to do something different than you're doing, I still say this to my team

members. Let's talk about what you love doing. There's a woman on my team who we hired because she's an extraordinary project manager. She's been crushing it. And this past year she came to me and said, I'm getting a taste of branding. I want to focus on being a creative director of some sort.

And I said, let's see if we can kind of fit our business around enabling some of those services within our company so that you can excel here because she's a phenomenal talent and what a great opportunity for me to continue to push that. Now you're charging lots of money to build landing pages for people. Is that what came from it?

We're not charging lots of money, just a little bit more than you were paying for your landing page. Yeah, perfect, perfect. Okay, that's awesome. That's so great. So you're fostering talent within, understanding people's goals and objectives. Yeah. Oh, so what I was going to say about this, you were asking about kind of like how many people are we now.

So we used to work around one little desk and then COVID. Like as big as this desk? It was smaller than this desk. Okay. Smaller, eight people smaller than this massive desk. I mean, there were five of us at the time. And then COVID happened and we all went home. And this is really funny coming from a real estate company to say this,

but this remote working really was working for us. And I know that it's a controversial subject right now in the real estate industry because it's really starting to create hardships for our cities to have vacancy or lack of occupancy in the office buildings. But my team is remote, and we have co-working spaces in different cities where we are so people can have touchdown places, but I just started hiring for talent instead of geography. And so my team didn't have to be in D.C. My team is spread out all over the country right now,

and it's extraordinary. And it's challenging at times because we don't get to spend a lot of face-to-face time together, which I feel like is invaluable. But we get everybody together a couple times a year, and we do a bunch of team building. And it's really fun. And I think people really appreciate the flexibility to live where they want to live. So talk to us a little bit about vacancies. You mentioned that of specifically corporate vacancies, you mentioned that, of specifically corporate vacancies.

So when you guys are building places, are you focusing on more residential and that, what did you call it, the ground plane? Yeah. So we're focusing on the retail and the public realm spaces that are sort of the interstitial spaces in a place and not, we're not focused on the apartments or the office, but our clients are the people who are developing apartments and office and might be coming to us to say, I have an asset that needs help and how

do we make this better? Or they may be coming to us to say we're creating something from scratch and we need a strategy to make sure that it's successful and we're de-risking this investment and I think a huge challenge that we have in the business right now and frankly I think in society right now is sort of this question of how do we everybody's sort of asking how do I create a vibrant place and what does that even mean well yeah I think they just want people yeah it was like I remember I worked in multi-family development for a little bit after Darden and the Ace Hotel had just opened in New York so trendy so. So trendy and awesome and fun. Great sandwiches. Great sandwiches, great lobby. Oysters, everything. And everybody was hot to go to the Ace and have their project

feel like the Ace. And everyone wanted the lobby of their apartment building to feel like the Ace. But it's so dark. It's in Manhattan. Yeah. Yeah. But that area, I lived in that area in my early twenties. And let me tell you I lived in that area in my early 20s. And let me tell you something. When that hotel opened, it was dead. Like that, the area was dead. So it brought life to a part of Manhattan that had not been cool since the Flatiron Building was made. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, but also the reality is it's in a place that is so dense. It's just dense. There's so many people there so you know if I'm trying to build an apartment building in Charlottesville um it's just it's really hard to get that many people into the lobby of my building because there's aren't as many people here and so it has to be you have to be a really really compelling um you have to build a really compelling place for to bring the people in.

I think part of the challenge is everyone has been saying, I want a really, really vibrant place because I think that will make people more excited to be here. But there just aren't enough. We're trying to build too many of those vibrant places. And so we start to kind of cannibalize ourselves and dilute the value of the really wonderful places that we do have. And I'm not, I also think part of the challenge is like, what creates vibrancy? Is it,

does it have to be commerce? Does buying things or spending money at a restaurant or going into a retail store, does that, is that really what's compelling people to go there or is it I might bump into my friend Hillary on the downtown mall because I know she might be here because she loves spending time here with her kids because there's a phenomenal natural playground space here there's this like there's a collision that of that people, I think, really want, and I'm not sure that we've done a great job from a planning standpoint thinking about how to facilitate creating spaces where people can collide with each other and become friends with each other well i think you see that right here if you were in charlottesville but the the corner is this like mainstay of uva and then you go down main street and you have the hospital and then you have all these buildings that got bulldozed to put up high-end luxury student apartments which is sad because those retail spaces are chain restaurants um or great cycle, workout studios, and then no parking to facilitate anyone else from the community who can't maybe walk there to come and use it.

And so you have, like, I'll walk from where I live next to the university all the way to the downtown mall. And then there's this like desert land of traffic and boredom that isn't creating any community. And people don't want to walk. So this is what you're solving for. What do you think the answer is? Well, I think it's, well, I'm not a specialist like you. Yeah, but it's not rocket science. I'm sure you have a gut instinct about this.

I mean, there's a lot of places that aren't free here, right? Like, everything costs money. It's an ice cream store. It's a, you know, a park would be great. Like look at Central Park. It's vibrant. There's concerts in it. The lawn, the UVA lawn's vibrant. There's things going on all the time that don't cost money or you're there, but then, you know, am I hanging out with the students? They don't want to see me there, you know? Although you still look like one. So young. Thanks.

What else? So, I mean, I think we did a, I think you have finite resources and you've got to plan around them. And I think what your company is doing is so inspiring and I wish that more cities and people would call you to make spaces livable in a community. Because even though you might be working remotely, I'd want to work remotely fun, somewhere fun. Because sometimes you have to get out of your house.

And I think no one here understands all the projects that you've done. I know about them. I think it would be really cool for you to talk to us about some of your favorite projects and how you've really revitalized different towns and cities that needed serious leg ups and your designs have created those run-ins, those meet-cutes, those vibrancies, those moments of vibrancies that are beyond an Ace Hotel. Isn't that, it's like what everyone wants. I feel like I have friends who are still

single in their early 40s and they're sort of like, well, you met your husband at a bar when you were 21 and you can't meet anybody anymore. You know, it's like, it's not the bar's fault. It's like our cell phone's fault or something. I don't know. I had a flip phone then. Of course I did. I was talking to people. Yeah, this is a very important lesson in community. Let's put our phones down and get out there. I've got this. I want to go to a restaurant where they make you check your phone at the door.

Most political events that are high-ticket donor events are cell phones at the door. Really? I haven't been to a high-ticket donor event yet, but maybe someday. Maybe one day. Can you get your checkbook out? All right, keep going, keep going. So we've had the honor, frankly, and this is really my mother's doing and kind of laying the groundwork and i think reputationally the business continues to do well because of this groundwork but really her

relationships um over the years throughout her career helped lay the groundwork for for our company and so we've had the honor of working in places like Tampa, Florida, helping kind of revitalize their town through a project called Water Street Tampa. And again, you know, it's not real estate development takes many, many, many partners and extraordinary teams working together to make something successful. It is not a business where you can kind of just do this on your own. It takes the city. It takes the landowner. It takes the development company. It takes the businesses that want to occupy your space,

and you really have to think about it as an ecosystem. You guys were talking about gut biome on the last podcast and sort of like how do you reach homeostasis within your body and how it's so healthy. And I think about communities and neighborhoods the same way. We talk a lot about, in my business, we call it merchandising plans, sort of like the plan for what types of retailers will you have where and how do they all work together. And I really think it's ultimately

that plan is a really thoughtful, needs to be a really thoughtful approach to how the ecosystem of businesses work together. Now, let me be clear. This is not something that you can control. You know, like the downtown mall, for example, there are how many different owners of real estate downtown. So if I own a building next to... Our boy Jerry Miller might be able to answer that stat, but... So Jerry's sitting here. He's not near Mike. Jerry, what is the stat? How many different owners own the downtown mall here in Charlottesville? There's very few. There's very few.

Oh, interesting. So there's been consolidation over the last decade or so. It took me a while. You might have to tell people. It took me a while to get this one. And there's very few on the downtown mall. I would say less than 2,000. So there's less. few on the downtown mall. I would say less than 2,000. So Jerry Miller here, who is a

real estate person in Charlottesville and the county of Albemarle, says that there are less than a dozen. Oh, less than two dozen, excuse me. Owners of the downtown mall, but there's probably about, what, 60 buildings? Oh, more than that. More than that.

Okay. So here's the example that I was going to use. So Water Street, Tampa, there was one owner and talked to us how much acres he owned in downtown Tampa. Water Street was a really unique case because Jeff Vinnick, who is an extraordinary philanthropist. And he owns the Tampa Bay Lightning. And financier. Go Lightning. Bought the Tampa Bay Lightning and amassed about 53 acres of mostly parking lots around the arena.

He's a really great dude. Extraordinary human being. Yes. And has done a lot for the Tampa community. I think they have one of the best fan experiences. And I think a lot of it has to do with the philanthropy that they do through their organization. But so anyway, so yes, Jeff, and then Jeff brought in a partner to help him with the equity on that deal. Ultimately, the entire project will be about 4 million square feet of real estate.

Or sorry, 9 million square feet of real estate if it's all built out, when it's all built out someday. But these things take, I mean, we started working on that project eight years ago. Somebody has been working on that project for 15 years. And you're still working on that project eight years ago. You know, somebody has been working on that project for 15 years. And you're still working on that project. We're still working on that project. Yeah. And it will take another 15 years before, you know,

real estate development is a long, long, long game. Yeah. But the point that I was going to make about the downtown mall was, you know, say I own a building next to Jerry's building. I'm glad someone's keeping us focused. I'll try to keep you a little focused. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So say I own a building next to Jerry's building. I'm glad someone's keeping us focused. I'll try to keep you a little focused. So say I own a building next to Jerry's building and I've got, you know, I decided, oh, I want my favorite little bike store.

Let's use a coffee shop as an example. I've got my favorite little coffee shop that's run by Hillary, who's now decided to turn Lumi into a coffee and juice company. Just loving you. And co-working space. And I put that in because even though... Career coaching. Even though she wanted to pivot. Stop faking fine.

Stop faking fine. Thank you, Dana, for that sage advice. I knew that having that adjacent to my residential lobby or my office lobby was going to create a bunch of value upstairs. And Jerry owns the building next door, and Dunkin' Donuts calls him and says... Oh, I thought you said put in a vape shop. Okay. Dunkin' Donuts. Dunkin' Donuts calls him and says, we're willing to pay you X to rent that space and the bank says to jerry who he has a loan with just like a mortgage you do on your own property at home at your house um that's great i will we would love to underwrite that and jerry puts in dunkin donuts and loomy coffee shop goes out of business and this happens all the time and i think you of that is just like capitalism.

That's great. It's important for us to kind of have free markets and the ability for businesses to kind of do their best and survive the way that they're supposed to. And people will demand whatever they're going to demand. But there's also a piece of like the downtown ecosystem needs to function well. And how do we work together as a community you can't regulate whether or not jerry puts a coffee shop in next door to my coffee shop well there are towns that do like woodstock vermont for instance you can't have um you can't

have any chain everything else and by the way not to be mean to Dunkin' Donuts. I love Dunkin' Donuts. Dunkin' Donuts is great. You know, great coffee. Definitely love a Dunkin'. Yeah. Yeah. So America runs on Dunkin'. Yes, they do. This is not paid media, but Dunkin', I'd take it. I'd take it. I can't keep going.

Sorry. No, but what you were saying was, so there's a town where they kind of do regulate. Where they do regulate it. And that's something, too, where you look at the corner, the UVA corner, which has been a historical landmark for a long time, and you now see, is it Raising Cane's they just put in? And there's a Starbucks now, and 10 years ago, there weren't chains, and there had been a time where cities could choose to regulate to help entrepreneurs. And yes, maybe that doesn't help the real estate entrepreneur who wants to get the biggest bank for their rent per month. But maybe that's where you could enter a new idea that you briefly said that brokers are not held accountable

for performance of what goes in there. But there are rental agreements that do depend on performance. And when you have a higher value add spot that has higher margins, can you share that as opposed to a Dunkin' Donuts, probably cheap money might make more money. Who knows? I don't know what the economics are, but is there a way to create a real estate system that isn't just selfish. I actually, I don't know that it's, I wouldn't blame it on the brokers. I wouldn't blame it on anybody in particular. But I do think what's really challenging

in the real estate business is what the banks hold you accountable for. So, you know, if I said to, okay, Hillary's Lumi Coffee Shop to kind of put that back on the table for this sake of this story, um, it's not a real thing. It's not, don't run to the downtown mall. It's not happening. Um, you can order it to your house though at LumiJuice.com. Code HM20, we'll get you 20% off. All right, keep going. Sorry. Uh, what's that code again? HM20 we'll get you 20% off alright keep going sorry what's that code again? HM20 so

to use that as an example so say I'm the landlord and I say to you I really want you to be here I know it's a lot of risk for you to open a business say Duncan was there already and now I'm asking you to open next door to them right it's a lot of risk for you

you might not get the sales that you need. Instead of charging you a rent that is quote unquote market for this area, how about we charge you a lower rent and then we'll do what's called a percentage rent, which means you're paying me a percentage of your sales if you hit a certain threshold. And then we both get the upside of that. And that often works well for people, especially if you can kind of put a cap on it. Like if you're doing better, I'm doing better. There's like a win-win there. Banks have a really hard time underwriting that because they don't know how you'll perform. And I don't fault the banks for not really understanding how to underwrite that because none of us can really underwrite that. We're all just kind of taking a risk. But then what happens is the bank says, that's not really going to work

for me. I can't put Hillary's, you can't put Hillary's business in there because I don't know how to underwrite this. And so then it makes it harder for small businesses to go into spaces that have traditional loans on them. Well, I saw that with even my manufacturing space for Lumi Juice here in Belmont in Charlottesville. No bank wants to give you a loan when you're an entrepreneur and when you're starting because they have no concept of how to value that because the death rate is so high for those individuals.

And even with farming, which Allie met one of my friends, Erica, today, and she's doing more work for regenerative agriculture. But the same thing, it's a dilemma of, you know, what works, don't, if it's, if it, what is the saying? If it works, don't fix it. If it ain't broke. Oh, that's it. Don't fix it.

And so. But I like your version better. It's probably more chromatically correct. Okay, I don't know. If it works, don't fix it and so what i like your version better it's probably more chromatically correct okay i don't know if it works don't fix it if it's working it doesn't need change there's no there's no real space for innovation here but then it's not allowing the hurdle to entry is much higher that's right yeah. I wish that there were better. I wish that there were more creative ways to kind of work around finding capital for small businesses. And that's a really big challenge. We've been really lucky that we have not had to take on any debt in my company. That's awesome. Congratulations. Thank you. I mean, I think it's, you know, a benefit is that we started first with a consulting model,

which is, you know, there's low, it's human capital overhead. So you kind of just pay for yourself, really. But I think that that's, that's a huge challenge for many small businesses. It's kind of needing to take on that capital constraint and then not being able to kind of meet the demands of that financing. For sure, a lot of people go out of business because of it.

I didn't realize we were going to be talking about real estate all day. Well, what do you want to talk about otherwise? We can talk about anything. Let's talk about building companies. Yeah. Tell us, let's start it out. How, what was some of the more challenging times for you in building your, one of your many businesses that you've built? The most challenging thing is, is always people, right? You can't control other people. And so no matter how hard you personally work, if you have all of your pieces finished, it doesn't mean that everybody has all of their pieces finished.

And I think when I see other entrepreneurs in our lives and people building businesses, their number one frustration tends to be like, I'm just waiting on this from this person. And, you know, you can't control other people's work ethics. You have to just, you have to motivate them. And I was really lucky. And I've told this story before when I was building out the Lumi factory, I needed, you know, a 400 and something volt transformer from Dominion Energy. And I needed that for the high pressure processing machine to run.

And so I worked with the head of economic development for the county. And she called Dominion Power, the person she knew. And instead of being last in line, because I was just a small, young entrepreneur in my 20s that was just building this random factory, they worked with me to help move me higher up in line and actually pay attention to my requests because it was the first ever of its kind high pressure processing and manufacturing facility in Virginia. It was pretty cool. So everyone got to help out. And if you are really excited about what you're building, people want to, they want to come along.

What I love about that story is that it was about a relationship that you had. It wasn't about you kind of like grinding it out in your basement by yourself. Yeah. I think that the key to success for me has been in the relationships that I've built through industry organizations, through Darden, through various community groups that I've been involved in and creating those friendships and kind of knowing like, oh, if I need something, I can call this person or I can call that person because Google doesn't have all the answers, it turns out. Not to poo-poo Google either.

They have a lot of answers. You're really poo-pooing big business today, Ellen. I didn't mean to. No, I mean, that's a good point. I mean, even like the Tampa Bay Lightning are one of my clients with Lumi. And, you know, their strength and conditioning coach has been one of my biggest cheerleaders and advocates of Lumi for eight years. And so has the team in-house that handles paying their bills.

They pay me on time. And they're great. And they call me when they need something. And so it's been that sense of community where you can pick up the phone and call people is really important. And together, everyone achieves more. Your team is not just the team you build within your organization. Your team goes out in spiderwebs

and it's your sorority sisters from college. It's your friends from business school. It's the people you meet on the street. My mailman, Roger, man. Gosh. And Belmont. Mine is Charles. He is clutch.

My dog barks at him every day, though. Yeah, we have five minutes left. We have five minutes left? I know, I know. Are you drunk yet? I don't remember what the right answer is to not be forced to take a shot in this very moment. I'm okay. That's the right answer. So Allie's mom has a game, and she would ask you if you're drunk.

And if you say no, then you have to do a shot. And if you say the right answer is always, I'm okay. So I did bring a bottle of tequila for Allie to take a shot. If she wasn't going to get that answer right. However, she did ride here with me and did see the bottle. So of course she got it correct. Next time I'm going to get you Allieie. Next time. Or maybe I'll get Robin, your mother, someday. I'll get her on here and ask her if she's drunk. I'll just use. I know there's a full bar here at the I Love Seville podcast station here. So next time I'll just sneak it on and not bring my own in.

Anyway, okay, so let's go back. Well, Roger, my mailman, was the one when I lived. Shanique was my mailwoman now, and she's awesome. But, you know, I think a mailperson, you create community with your mailpeople too, and they help you out. I'd be on the road or I'd be at Lumi for like 16 hours, and so Roger wouldn't leave anything on my front porch. He would just text me and tell me, or he'd drive it over,

even though it wasn't at the end of his shift. He'd drive it over to the factory and come say hi and do a drop-off for me. So anyway, what about you, though? I was thinking about this. I was listening to your conversation with Dana last week about sort of being vulnerable and open to relationships and friendships and kind of how much do you share about what you're going through as opposed to just saying, like, I'm fine.

I'm fine. Everything's amazing. And I think in leadership or in any kind of community I think there's a it's a hard line to find I you asked about kind of like what's the difference in our business I I try to be open and vulnerable with my team because I want them to be open with me about what's going on in their lives. Not because I need to know all of the juicy details of everything that they're going through,

but because I want to find empathy for what they're dealing with. And I want them to learn how to find empathy for what our clients are going through. and I want our clients to be building places that are conducive of creating empathetic spaces I just said that I've never said that word before but like I just I am that I had this idea in my head of you know a kid kind of jumping off of a bench and somebody saying, oh, let me help you. And it's a stranger as opposed to kind of reaching for their phone and ignoring what's

going on. And I feel like if we can kind of help create communities that are conducive to those experiences, that's where we've really won. But we can only do that if we are ourselves being open to having my man Charles, who my dog always barks at, poor guy, having a relationship with Charles or having my next door neighbor Arlene come over and borrow some mayonnaise. Those things are,

I feel like maybe it's because I sort of come from small town neighborhoods like that, that I value that so much. But I feel like there are ways to create that community within any community that you're in or any business that you're in. And I just, I believe that if we can do that and spread that a little bit more,

that we'll all be better for that. So on the juicy details today, it's about putting your cell phone away and jumping in. And talking to your mail person. Jumping into community. And hugging the guy at the Whole Foods like Hillary does on occasion.

Yeah, I do. Yes, yes. Love hugging people. So if occasion. Yeah, I do. I, yes, yes. Love hugging people. So if you see me, hug me. All right. Well, love you mean it. Thank you, Alison, for joining us today. We had so much fun.

And Judah, thank you as always to help direct the show. Jerry, thanks for allowing me here. Love you mean it from the studio to your house, wherever you're listening. And we look forward to seeing you again on the Juicy Details next Wednesday at 2.15 Eastern, coming live to you. In the meantime, feel free to send me a message, tell me what you want to hear, and share all your Juicy Details. See you later. Hello, ladies.