This week on the podcast, Matt sits down with Zach Wiegert, Managing Principal and Founder at Goldenrod Capital Advisors. The episode begins with Matt and Zach diving into Zach’s journey from professional football player to commercial real estate to leading acquisition developments as Managing Principal and Founder at Goldenrod Capital Advisors. Zach shares how lessons from his football career have translated to business and how he helps his team solve problems on a daily basis. They then discuss some of the projects Zach has worked on over the years and what he has learned from them. The episode concludes with Zach offering advice for graduating college students.

There's a lot of areas that you study in, in

college that won't apply in whatever business you go into,

but the general knowledge of business applies to everything.

Excellence, professionalism, innovation, and

collegiality. These are the values the Sam M. Walton College

of Business explores an education, business and the

lives of people we meet every day. I'm Matt Waller, Dean of

the Walton College, and welcome to the Be Epic podcast. I have

with me today, Zach Wiegert, Managing Principal and Founder

at Goldenrod Capital Advisors. Thank you so much, Zach, for

taking time to visit with me today. I really appreciate it.

Absolutely, Matt, looking forward to it

Zach, you know, your background is pretty

remarkable. You formed Goldenrod back in 2005. So you've been

doing this for quite a while. But I'd like to back up and

start to talk a little bit about your previous experience. I

know, you had been in commercial real estate investing and

developing for 10 years before that. But before that you had

been in the NFL for 12 years. And you had played for the Rams,

the Jaguars, the Texans. I mean, just being in the NFL for 12

years is something you must be tough. But you also played

football at the University of Nebraska. And you were a part of

the undefeated University of Nebraska national championship

football team back in 1994. And I remember it well, because I

went to Penn State.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. For Kerry Collins and Kerry

Collins, Ki-Jana Carter, I know all those guys.

Yeah. But also last year, you were inducted into the

College Football Hall of Fame, which less than .02% of all

college football players and coaches have been inducted into.

So congratulations on that.

Thank you.

And of course, now you have led the acquisition

development of billions of dollars in commercial real

estate. You're currently overseeing a multi billion

dollar fund. So you've got you got a lot going on. And a

terrific background. I'd like to start just a little bit with

some very basics. I mean, you have an uncommon experience, you

had an uncommon experience in college. And I should mention,

you majored in economics, which, you know, that's a demanding

major, especially if you're playing football. Did you find

that to be demanding? And did you, you must have enjoyed it,

or you wouldn't have majored in it I suppose?

Yeah, I, you know, I think economics is something

that it's like, you speak the language or you don't, I mean,

it's supply and demand. And and you know, the more scarce

something is and the more people want it, the more it costs. And

so that's kind of how my mind went works. And kind of a

mathematical, I can remember numbers forever, I have a hard

time with names. It's kind of how my mind works. So it was a

good fit for me. And I think it's done me well in my whole

life, because it's really the basics that applies to

everything in business so

It really is, it's such an important, especially

getting the basics down like microeconomics, macroeconomics,

money and banking. Once you have that down, you can apply it to

so many different fields.

It's really human nature, it applies to everything

really not just in business. I mean it, you know, like it, you

see people waiting in line for an iPhone, it's, it's always

what it is they charge what they want, because that many people

want it, they only make so many at a time. So it applies to more

in real life than people think.

Absolutely. You worked for 10 years in

commercial real estate before you started your current

company.

Sure

Did that experience in college of having a lot going

on help you learn how to manage a lot of different kinds of

activities?

Oh, absolutely. I mean, it's, I guess a big thing

It's so true, having a schedule is so helpful. And then

I try to get across especially our younger employees is you

just, you know, you you make a schedule and you set your

schedule and when you have free time, get it done

procrastinating, it'll be there waiting for you at some point.

So you might as well just get it done. And what I found as as, as

as you set your schedule, if you just do it, attack the problems

and get them fixed and done, the more free time you have. So

sitting around knowing that homeworks waiting for you or

knowing you have to go to practice you just do it and do

your best and move on. And I think that applies and

everything in business, you know, now we have projects in 13

different states and you know, so what I do on a regular basis

as the general partners, a little bit different idea as

when I first started when I was managing all portions of a

project. And now I'm just in on the major decisions. You know,

structuring deals, things like that, because there's so many so

many hours in the day. So, it it really gets into time management.

addressing problems, as you said, as they come up, rather

than just sitting on them and hoping they disappear.

Yeah, they found they just don't go away. They just actually

usually the longer you let them sit, the worse they get. And so

we know our big thing with our meetings now and and in football

too when you have great coaches is the same thing. And I use a

lot of those lessons I learned playing sports to business is

you know, you fix the problems, if things are going well. That's

what you expect to happen. You look at film to fix the problems

you look at, and you go to meetings with your your people

in your company and say like no, no tell me the bad stuff. If you

don't tell me I assume it's good. So and you know, people

always laugh, they say, well, what's your job on a daily

basis, I go problem solving. That's what I do on a daily

basis is fix problems. So that's the best way to describe it is

that you know. And that applies to anything in life for your

listeners, there's an issue, the best thing you can do is, is

solve it as quickly as possible, because they most often just

disappear.

You know, this idea of the film's you look at in

football to see where the problems occurred. And in

meetings, your your metaphor to using a meeting to review what

were the problems? You know, some people are more inclined to

share those kinds of things than others. How do you get your team

to, to really get into that groove of sharing the problems?

Yeah, it's interesting, it's kind of a

learning process. You know, we'll have people managing

specific parts of the business or specific projects, and

something will come up, there'll be a change order in

construction or something will come up. And the more

inexperienced people, at least in our company will say, Well,

I've got contingency money, I'll make it up somewhere else, or I

can fix this on my own, or this and that. And obviously, you

want self starters that are willing to go attack the

problems themselves and fix them, but we kind of have a

rule, like if you don't bring it to the to the meeting, you own

it. So it's your problem until you share it with the meeting.

And so I think I have found that when you're in a room of other

smart people, if if the problem was brought up in a setting like

that, there may be as someone who has experience with that

specific type of an issue before they can comment on it, that can

really help you solve your problem. So yeah, absolutely.

You know, a lot of people, you don't want to come to the

meeting and admit you have an issue with something. But, you

know, the best we can we try to get people is like it's your

issue until you bring it up. And so the sooner you bring it up,

the sooner we get it solved and move on. I mean, there's always

going to be problems that come up in any business, it's just,

the sooner you can fix it the better, it's just like football,

do you have on film, if you have a weak part on your offense or

defense, the other team's gonna watch film and expose it until

you fix it.

This idea of exposing problems when they

occur, and then trying to solve them as a group. It's like, as

an individual, you can use your knowledge and your capabilities,

or you can use your network, your teammates. And if you as

you expand, even if you're have a very high IQ and very

competent, you get a few other people involved, you've already

exceeded that easily.

Right, right, especially when your team has

people with other core competencies. You know, we have

in house legal, in house accounting, tax. So there's no

one can be a master of all those things, design, construction. I

meean we we have all these people that's specifically what

they do all day. And a lot of times it's just you know,

they're on another project and experience something similar,

they were in a meeting heard how someone else fix that problem

before. So a lot of is just experience and you can read all

the books and be the smartest person in the world and they

don't know how to fix it because you've never experienced it.

So you you you had been doing some of your own

investing and developing for 10 years, and then you started

Goldenrod Capital Advisors. How is Goldenrod set up? Do you have

limited partners as investors? And are you set up like a

regular fund? Alternative Investment Fund?

Yeah, so we're a registered investment advisor

SEC registered investment advisor, which only like 3% of

real estate funds are because you don't have to technically

register but all of our numbers are audited. And we want to do

that just kind of separate ourselves from our competition.

You know, our all of our returns are audited. And so you can rely

on our numbers when we give them to people. And then yeah, we're

just a limited partnership. I'm the general partner of the fund.

And they're all the investors are limited partners. You know,

everyone gets their pro rata share of depreciation. Everyone

gets their pro rata share of returns, distributions, all

that. And it's really a central US focused fund. We've always

kind of done business from Salt Lake to Atlanta, Omaha to

Dallas, we have offices in Omaha, Dallas and Atlanta. And

in house, we have about 52 people that work in house and I

say in house, because if you counted all the people at the

property management level at the different properties, you'd be

in hundreds. But but that's, that's and we've we kicked off

our first fund in 2017. And now we're actually going to have our

first opening on our fourth fund here in July.

What is your waterfall structure in terms of

like 2%. And then

Yeah, it's pretty typical, I would tell people and

I was just meeting with some potential investors. So it's

basically return 100% return on capital of the investors, and

they get a 7% preferred return on their money that the entire

time until they get it all back. And then after that, it's 80% to

them, 20% to us. But the difference between us and a lot

of funds is our waterfall structures on the whole

portfolio. So in any given fund, we could have 12 to 20

properties. And all those properties have to perform above

that preferred return on the entire portfolio, a lot of funds

are set up where they do a waterfall per project. And I

tell investors to be careful of that because obviously the real

profitable stuff will sell early. And then they have what's

called a catch up, where on the back end, there supposed to be a

clawback monies they paid prefer if the other properties don't

perform. And you see a time and time again, you have a fund with

20 properties, they sell off the first 10 make a bunch of carried

interest or in the waterfall and then the other properties don't

perform and sit there and drag down the returns. And then they

have to go back after it and get there to get the waterfall back.

So ours is very investor friendly. And I'm a large

investor in my own funds as well. So I'm as motivated for

returns as our investors and anyone.

That's great. You know, after you had been

investing, doing your own investing for 10 years, your own

development, to create a fund like this, you had to learn a

lot, I would think you'd have to learn about private placement

memorandum and the limited partner agreements and all of

this kind of thing.

Subscription agreements? Yeah.

How did you learn that?

Yeah so, I'll give you just a little bit of

history. So I so I got drafted in 1995, in 1996, I started

doing real estate, I liked the idea of physical assets,

something tangible. And because I always said, well, even if

existing company in there, you still have a physical asset that

has value. I mean, there's only so much land, there's only so

many great locations. So I always kind of liked the idea,

there was something there were like a stock to me was air. And

so that's why I originally got into investing. And then when I

retired in '07, I had already acquired a pretty good portfolio

of assets over the time I played. And then from 2007, till

our first fund kicked off in 17, we did, I don't know about a

billion for real estate projects before we got in the funds. So

in 2015, I had a conversation with my partner and and he was

he had said, you know, they have a family office, it's large, and

they would like to put money into invest with me as a fund

because they're not really active business investors any

longer. And so I spent two years going to New York, San

Francisco, all over and looking at different types of funds and

structures. And like you said, you know, limited partner

agreement, draft subscription agreements, all the things you

had to do to do that. And you know, just kind of found like, I

didn't like funds that only focused in a single asset class.

So you'll see a lot of funds that only acquire apartments.

Well, in the last five years, it's really hard to acquire

apartments and make any kind of return. So that that didn't make

sense to me. I looked at funds that only did development,

ground up development, which prior prior to when I retired

until 2017, we primarily did ground up development work. And

we just found that was the highest return on investment.

And that didn't work because people like to get a

distribution. And so there's such a lag from the time you

start construction, complete construction stabilized and then

put on any cash flows. It's a long leg so basically got in a

fund that made sense. If you're going to build a diversified

portfolio for someone you do a mix of development and

acquisition. And then you know, you'd be diversified in

different product types, so office, multifamily, industrial,

medical, all those which we've done all those assets prior. And

then that gives you the ability to diversify portfolio in

different markets. different product types and the

acquisition which creates cash flow and development, which

creates growth of value. So basically, any one of our funds

is its own diversified portfolio of different asset classes,

different locations, construction, you know, ground

up construction and acquisition.

A lot of NFL players, I'm told, I don't know

this firsthand, a lot of times they don't necessarily use their

income as wisely as you did.

Yeah, I like to think I've done a good job

managing my income I, I wish where I got drafted and how long

I played and how many games I started. I make what they make

now. But I can't complain. It was a lot back then. So. But

yeah, I'd like to think I've done a good job growing, growing

my, my assets since I retired, I had one of the smartest real

estate gentleman I've ever done business with said, you'll make

way more doing real estate, you're going to just have a real

knack for now. So I was like, yeah, he must not know what my

salary is playing football. And he's right. And it's been it's

been good. And it's just, you know, it's so compounding with

real estate. And it's such a great after tax asset to be in.

So,

So Zach, what are some examples of projects you've

learned a lot from?

I have to say, I probably learn something on

every project. You know, as time has gone on, I went from when I

first retired to, you know, doing the architect contract

construction, contract financing, oversaw the

construction management of it myself, did the draws, you know,

every single phase of projects, when you're managing two or

three investments at a time, you can do that. To be more on the

structuring finance. The big you know big picture wise, I always

had a real and really liked getting into design, I always

thought I was I should have been architect at some point in my

life, I kind of see things in 3d. And so of getting into the

design construction piece is still really fun for me. I don't

get as much time doing it as I used to, but I still weigh on

every design and construction of our any projects we do quite a

bit. But yeah, you know, a sec we talked about earlier, you

learn from from failures, I found what we're good at. And,

you know, we need to stay focused on that, I'd say my

biggest, you know, bad investments, and these are my

own investments before I had a fund. You know, everyone was

building houses in Scottsdale, Phoenix area, and we thought

we'd get into do a single family development and build. So you

know, buy buy a, an area put in all the improvements and sell

lots off. And, you know, over a 10 year period, we got all our

money back, but it wasn't I would not call that a win by any

means. Another big retail development, we thought they'd

let us build basically, to what our plans were we submitted to

the city, and then they came back, and said we don't want

apartments, we want this, we want this want this. That was

you know, hey, when you're doing your due diligence on a

property, better make sure that the municipality is going to

agree with your plan before you close on the land. That's a big

lesson but it's not nothing's done until it's done, and

signed. So that's a big lesson to learn. People just you know,

taking someone's word for it never seems to work. And then we

had a unique deal, a bank actually got taken over by the

FDIC, and as you know, as in Lincoln, or my college town, so

I thought I knew it well. And I say like, we're buying this so

cheap from the FDIC, there's no way it can't make money. And

this was a lesson you learn in real estate about there's

certain locations, certain buildings and towns that just

have a bad reputation about them, and you can't you it's

hard to get over that. You know, and that was one of them as I

you know, people had a bad taste in their mouth about the bank

going under and how that what happened and it was hard to get

tenants to take it. And all three of my examples, we ended

up fine but you know, an IRR on getting your money back over 10

years isn't a very good return. So I count those as big losses

but those were three totally different situations and you

know, that didn't turn out the way you'd hoped. But they're all

huge lessons as far as for future developments that and

other projects we've done just learn your lessons on you know

getting all your I's dotted T's crossed stay in your lane don't

get into single family homes if you don't build single family

homes and you know, just because it sounds like a great idea and

they're just astigmatism is with certain areas and towns or you

know, a lot of time the bridge is a barrier in a town and on

this side of the bridge people just don't cross over this side

and places like Pittsburgh, there's boroughs all over and

people shop in that borough they don't go the other borough. It

means you just gotta learn. And that's why real estate is such a

local thing. You got to know the local partners to make it work.

Zach to close our conversation out what message do

you wish every graduating college student could hear?

I would say and this is just kind of my

personality. So it probably always more me is passion, have

passion for what you do. And I say that you're you may take

some jobs that weren't your dream job to start. But you

never know when the opportunity is going to knock. If you have

passion for what you do. You could be a waiter, wait tables

in a restaurant, and you meet up, you wait on the right

person, and you do it with a smile on your face with passion

that could turn into something as you go through life. It's

amazing how many times you run into people that you met before

in a position you never thought they were going to be in. And so

one you know, do things have a smile on our face, be truly nice

to people, but people can tell if you're passionate about what

you do. And to me all the people I know that are successful are

passionate about what they do on a daily basis.

Boy, that's so true. I've definitely observed

that.

You can take something that seems pretty

simple and be very passionate about it and can turn it into

something big.

Well, Zach, thank you so much for taking time to

visit with us, really appreciate it and it's a pleasure to get to

know you.

Very nice to get to know you as well and I

appreciate it.

On behalf of the Sam M. Walton College of

Business. I want to thank everyone for spending time with

us for another engaging conversation. You can subscribe

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