Passing Wisdom and Unlocking Opportunities in Commercial Real Estate

Matt Waters: Hello and welcome to The Lease Alert where we have conversations with the smartest, most interesting people at the intersection of real estate, leasing and accounting. I'm your host, Matt Waters. 

Let's learn something together. 

Let's dive right in. Neil, I know you're now a successful prop tech entrepreneur. You're the founder of nVision. We're going to talk a lot more about that in a few minutes here.  

First off, I know you started out in a very different profession. If you're watching this, instead of just listening, you can see that Neil has a hat on that mentions the US Navy. 

So that might be a clue, but tell us about your first job, Neil, and actually how you started your career.  

Neil Uebelein: Technically, my first job in high school, I was a journalist. My first degree choice was journalism, which is far apart from what I'm known for now, which is more engineering and systems and math-oriented things.  

My first real job, to your point, was the US Navy on board nuclear submarines. I was a nuclear power plant operator and - point of trivia – in I think 1986, which gets you a wealth of experience by being a little bit older.

But 1986, the first day I saw the sun was March 3rd. All of January and February underwater. That kind of [experience] as a young person gives you a little bit different perspective. But that's where it all began, technically.  

Matt Waters: Wow. No kidding. Three months underwater. Tell me a little bit. What did you learn as a part of that experience? You mentioned it’s vastly different than what you do now, but what did you learn in the Navy that you've carried with you for these years after that? 

Neil Uebelein: I think looking back it's an interesting thing. It was after I was out of the Navy, a friend of mine shared with me that one of the life lessons or one of the training lessons is that nukes are trained to learn. If you look now going forward, in this day and age where most careers begin, we are thinking about, you're probably going to recycle your job content five different times, six different times over the course of a career. It's not like the old days where you became an accountant and you did a narrow set of accounting for an entire career. A big one was just trained to learn.  

Another one was that there was absolute accountability. In the Navy nuclear power program - I went in at 19 just to give you an idea - you're basically taking 19-year-olds and over the course of a year or two training them such that they can go out and run an incredibly complex machine underwater for months at a time and you were expected to have absolute knowledge. 

One of the real things is that you were taught to really have instincts to recognize what you don't know. I think that's 1 of the biggest parts of learning. What do you do and not even in software. Now, we look at what's changing, how things are changing, but really just the ability to go out and acquire knowledge. 

It's being trained to learn, being able to recognize what you don't know, and then an absolute accountability for knowledge factors.  

Then the last piece of that: Because we were running a nuclear power plant, there's all kinds of integrated interrelated systems. It's knowing everything has a primary effect. You're going to turn a switch. You're going to do something. We were expected to know what's every secondary impact of that. We get quizzed on it, drilled on it. We think now in terms of system design, we're looking at everything as an integrated system and integrated whole. You have to have a holistic view of how these pieces come together. 

I think in some ways, still, that's probably a formative experience that defines what InVision is as a company, as a software company. It's still kind of rooted in those principles taken from that long ago.  

Matt Waters: That's great. That's something to take with you. Nukes are trained to learn. And when you say nukes, you're talking about a nuclear submarine operator. 

Would that be accurate?  

Neil Uebelein: There's three primary disciplines in there. There are mechanical people that work on the fluid and water and hydraulic systems, electricians, which is I was at 20 years old, working on high voltage electrical distribution systems that supported the running of a reactor plant, and then electronics controls and the fine-tuned controls around it. Those were the three disciplines long ago.  

On the submarine It's a little bit eerie. The submarine I was on, which I've actually aged better than it. We debated whether I could show this, but in the shipyards walking out a welder tucked a piece. I'm aware of one other officer who was gifted one of these. I'm assuming it's okay to have, but you can see the water side with a little bit of rust.  

Unfortunately for me, on the people side of that hall, you look at the logo in the background. Kind of the circumference of the whole, it's a couple of inches of steel that separated about 150 people of all disciplines. Sonar communications cooks from the water from the safer space inside.  

Matt Waters: Oh man. Unbelievable. You know, this reminds me actually of a book I read recently. The book was called “Thunder Below” and the author is Admiral Eugene Fluckey. I think that is the right way to say that. Are you familiar?  

Neil Uebelein: Not that book. 

Of course, when I got out, as I was getting out, I think around that time, “Hunt for Red October” and some other books fictionalized a life on a sub. My favorite submarine scenes, which of course was not accurate at all was from the old 1960s, 70s Batman movie. 

The best question I would ever get is people to ask, what can you see out from it? And I was like I was like, no, no, it wasn't a window. When you're down there, it plays with your head a bit I think the first time we submerged.  

It's interesting cause you're in that for 60 some odd days and long periods. 

The first time I went in, I had about 15 minutes of just feeling unease and you felt everything was close to you. There was no moving out and outside of that kind of tucked it away in your mind and it just became a workplace and just jobs to do very specifically.  

I got out, I was in enlisted in an initial six year enlistment. I came out all of a sudden as I'd done a little bit of school before, but I was a 25 year sophomore and I was good at math and engineering. I dropped the idea of journalism and went hard into undergraduate and finance. 

My MBA was an emphasis in investments. That's really what my go to skill set is finance. A real estate professor who chaired the finance department - I went to the University of Iowa - pulled me aside and asked if I'd ever think about real estate.   

Interestingly, I talked about the “Hunt for Red October” and movies, kind of movies like Wall Street, movies like that were out and I was going to be a securities analyst cause I was really good at math and wanted to be on the business side. He suggested real estate and that appeal made him a really formative person in my early career. He wound up getting me a job at principal financial group to work in real estate investments. 

He said in real estate, when you work, any decision you make sets it on a unique path. When you're trading a stock, you can always see how things would have happened. But once you make a real estate decision, it's a unique decision and the future you can only talk about. You don't know what the other path would have been. It’s said real estate's the intersection of strategy, accounting, your discipline, finance, my discipline, legal, negotiation, marketing, all the elements of business come together and are present really in almost every business decision that you make, which is where I've specialized over time. 

Curious what other Lease Alert guests specialize in?

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Curious what other Lease Alert guests specialize in?

Matt Waters: I keep going back in my mind to the book that I mentioned, so I'm going to just plug it one more time. “Thunder Below” by Admiral Fluckey. They called him Lucky Fluckey.  

He was a submarine captain in World War II, and he went on to become the most highly respected decorated living US service member in his life for a time. He was the most highly decorated and he did that by being the captain of a submarine called the U.S.S. Barb in World War II. What he did was he used the submarine the traditional way. You know, which just sneaking up on the convoys of enemy ships. 

He also used the submarine in new ways. For example, he talked somebody somehow into allowing him to mount a rocket launcher to the deck of his submarine, and then he snuck into harbors and in enemy territory and took out defenses and harbors. At one point, they took out a train. Then used rockets to destroy a bridge and the train crashed. 

All these things that basically he was he was outside of his normal discipline, right? I bring it up again because I'm just so fascinated with the way that in your time in the US Navy, you learned on submarines that you need to constantly be learning and reinventing yourself. That apparently is exactly what Admiral Fluckey learned. 

You just tied it in beautifully with the business world. You might've studied finance to start with but if you know things about real estate, about law, about accounting, HR. I could go on and on. It's going to help you as you continuously reinvent the way you do things and ultimately help you be more innovative in how you do your job. 

Neil Uebelein: It's an interesting thing. It closed the loop on a submarine having heard your depiction of the book.  

Like I mentioned, my wife and I have 12 kids, so generationally, and I won't indict the 12 kids, but you look to the next generations, and you always feel like the next generation is softer and softer than the one that preceded you or the one that went before. 

In the submarine world, when you talk about World War II submarines, we looked at it like I was on like a luxury liner or a tour bus. Compared to what the accommodations and the hardship and frankly, the operational danger that existed in World War II.  Just to close the loop from a trivia point of view, most of my time was underway on the larger ballistic missile submarines. 

I was on number 620, the USS John Adams. When we decommissioned it, I went in the shipyards and took that apart and took it out of service. I had only about a year left in the Navy and didn't have time to go and qualify on an operational command. A submarine was coming into Puget Sound Naval Shipyard across the sound from Seattle and I was coming into dry dock and I got assigned to that crew and it actually was the USS Barb.  

Matt Waters: No way.  

Neil Uebelein: It was a rename in honor of the USS Barb World War II submarine. One of the early nuclear fast attack boats was the USS Barb hull number 596, SSN 596. If you're not familiar with how the Navy names its submarines, the Barb SSBN or SSN and it was 596 and it was the Barb in honor of that World War II, but I didn't realize the book, so it just kind of closes the loop there. 

Matt Waters: That's so cool about the Barb.  

We want to talk more about nVision and how Neil ended up with his office being the nicest home gym I've ever seen on a conference call. Let's talk about it. You majored in finance and then you started working at a big corporation, right? 

Take us from the big corporate world to how you ended up founding nVision and what kind of needs are you addressing in the industry?  

Neil Uebelein: One of the advantages, when I first got out of school with the emphasis investments, it was that same real estate finance professor that I had in college that recommended real estate actually referred me into and helped me get in place at Principal Financial Group. 

At the time, basically my kids, they were younger and they would ask what I did. I said, I basically played monopoly for a living.  

We would buy properties. We would lease to corporate tenants. We had portfolios and we managed as equity owners, investment portfolio, built new buildings, got to work with our leading architects and design and construction and land planning. We had a lot of different job functions, overseeing service providers.  

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One of the markets that I covered for Principal Financial Group was the mid-Atlantic coast, like Washington DC. Before that I handled Kansas City, which is where my wife and family live now, but it's very different because now most of the work we do is corporate side. 

One of the unique parts about that job is 90 percent of our time was spent externally with service providers and tenants and things like that. You built a large network of relationships. I know you and I, Matt, when we've talked frequently, we talk about what advice can you give to a younger generation? 

One of the things I found later in my career on the corporate side, is that a lot of times our work is internal or inward facing so all of our relationships are inside. Yu don't build that rich kind of network of relationships that can be a real asset later on, both from the perspective of benchmarking, training yourself, but also just career wise, making sure you have the right people, the right opportunity to grow and apply your skills. Because we tend to be a little bit more insular in the corporate real estate side, but my time there took me to being hired by one of the service providers.  

I ran a large master planned office park again. A lot of development, underwriting, a lot of working, overseeing design and construction, oversaw property management organizations, sales and marketing. I started putting together this view.  

Again, if you go back to talking about submarines, this whole notion of integrated system knowledge, and I started putting together these experiences now that I was working with a service provider. Then I had the opportunity to go run one of the brokerage firms, the Kansas City office for one of the brokerage firms. 

I kept putting together these blocks and building pieces. Later on, when I coach younger people about jobs, it's build a technical skill, be really good at something, have a go to reference point that kind of anchors everything. From there, just keep building all those adjacent knowledge sets. Become multidisciplined and build your knowledge base, but then also your relationship set.  

One of the relationships I had in Kansas City began in the dotcom growth era. Sprint at the time was headquartered out of Kansas City. A friend of mine was head of strategic planning for the real estate group and I wound up with the opportunity to go in as Head of Finance and headed up finance performance analytics within a corporate real estate group. I did that for two or three years at the time.  

There's a large industry trade organization that exists, CoreNet Global. We were very well known. Sprint's team was really highly regarded in those circles. We talked to a lot of panels, a lot of summits, a lot of different industry events. We were highly recognized for what we were doing with early uses of technology. I had a chance to chair the Technology Steering Committee there and started looking at all these different systems that come together to allow you to plan and make decisions, which is where my focus was and outside of that, then I had an opportunity to go work directly on the CFO staff. 

I saw then that the senior most decision making at the corporate level had a great vantage point but it was a very turbulent time for telecom.  

The other thing was, and it's an area we've spoken about a lot, is that just the demands I mentioned earlier that my wife and I have a lot of kids, 12 to be exact. By that point we continued to have kids and I was up to eight kids. I was working for the CFO of Sprint, knowing that it had some headwind challenges in front of it and, decided to just unplug.  

I had been in an environment where you'd done sales and all these different things, and I literally unplugged from Sprint, bought a laptop, registered with the state of Kansas, created a company 20 years ago called nVision, and it really was in pursuit of kind of working on my own midlife crisis. 

The other thing was that I needed the flexibility to work when I wanted, how I wanted, because I couldn't keep that corporate schedule. I was a big work from home advocate long, long before it, it became the most common thread in the real estate forums of LinkedIn.  

Matt Waters: I want to dig in a little more about the work from home and what you're doing now, but just to go back a second, you mentioned constant learning and applying different disciplines which we talked about a little bit already. You also mentioned the value in your case of CoreNet, but the value of being involved in a professional organization and sharing knowledge in that way, also while you could have at, at Sprint, for example, you could have been very internal focused, right? 

I'm sure you had business partners all over, sounds like in the real estate department, I'm sure operations and in the finance team under the CFO. You could have spent all of your days talking with your counterparts within Sprint, but it sounds like you kind of flipped the script a little bit. 

You talked with people outside of your organization quite a bit, which again is very similar to talking about CoreNet, which is an opportunity to talk with people and network with people outside of your immediate circle where you work now, and it sounds like to me - and correct me if I'm wrong - but it sounds like those connections and that network really gave you the platform that you needed and the contacts that you needed to start a company. 

That's now been going strong for 20 years. Right?  

Neil Uebelein: It’s an interesting thing because being small, right? One of the hardest parts is any service provider walking in is to establish credibility. I had the good fortune of the Sprint team being fairly recognizable. One of the things that I know we've had a relationship - you and I being instructors for their educational program - CoreNet’s Masters of Corporate Real Estate Continuing Education. 

In 2005 going way back, I had just left, I was out on my own for about a year and I got a call and they were looking for instructors for a finance course. In the better to be lucky than good category, the couple of the first people they reached out to had recommended they contact me. 

I began teaching a real estate finance course years later created a technology course for them and then had a chance to sit in on the accounting side. What it's led to is that I’ve probably taught maybe a hundred classes. There were years where I did eight or nine. I've gotten to teach in Hong Kong and Tokyo and all over the world, but the network that you develop out of that, and as a small company, what it did for me is it established credibility. 

It allowed me to stay current and see what topics and the questions that came and just the opportunity to listen and learn just where companies were making decisions. Building a network of relationships that included service providers, whether it be architect, engineering, contracting firms service providers, other end users, but I just continued to just gain a perspective and also, over time, obviously share more of what I had learned and picked up. It has been very important in that regard.  

Matt Waters: That's so encouraging. Honestly, it's been a recurring theme, not by design, but this season of The Lease Alert. I've heard from so many of our guests about having a robust professional network and participating in industry trade groups for multiple industries where there are some for corporate real estate.  

You mentioned CoreNet, but there are some more focused on the tenant side. One I'm specifically thinking of NRTA. And from the accounting perspective, we've had a guest talk about the AICPA, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. 

You're right on the money. It's actually an amazing theme that's developed. I'm glad you shared that as well.  

Now you mentioned 20 years, you mentioned working from home, you and your wife having 12 kids and raising those 12 kids now into adulthood might be more impressive than the nuclear submarine part. 

Neil Uebelein: It's become the bigger “tell me something about yourself that you wouldn't know.” And usually it’s the easy one, the 12 kid thing, because that's fairly uncommon.  

Matt Waters: Well, you founded nVision and started working from home out of necessity, but now what a hot topic in the wake of COVID, right? 

Work from home, this hybrid concept or return to office, whatever you call it. It's a major hot topic and folks are really still adjusting. I think you probably have some lessons learned from nVision and working from home for 20 years now. What have you learned along the way? 

Specifically, related to balancing a professional presence and having to meet with people. It's a relationship business but also working from home as your primary office.  

Neil Uebelein: Mine are I think a lot of the lessons that you pick up as you go over time. 

Looping way back to the beginning. We're talking about the importance of learning and the importance of growth, right? Obviously I've dropped enough dates that if someone sat down and took a piece of paper out and did the math, they'd realize that I've been around doing this a while.  

But things that people usually are surprised about is - I was talking to somebody yesterday – so, at nVision, we don't get hired to manage things that are already going right. We're like tip of the sphere. We only deal with things that people think are impossible or hard to do. We are constantly finding out ways to innovate and kind of push the boundaries. 

A big one is continuing to learn. I will still invest 12 to 15 hours a week on top of a busy schedule, just learning, absorbing. A lot of times it's technical, it's software, things like that, because it's always changing. But a lot of times, to your point, reading, acquiring knowledge, relationships, growth, personal growth on that side. 

That's hugely important. The hard part with me, kind of being more established and doing this for a long time, it's easy for me. I'm a person that's described as never working and always working at the same time, so you try to always be available and prioritize what's around you, but work routines, but the biggest one for people to work from home is to stay connected. 

A lot of times out within that personal network, people that push you, people that give advice, kind of check you in, are just critically important, but it's having a balance in a variety of your time, because don't wind up as a node, like a spoke that's removed from the hub and take work from home and then become disconnected. 

You have to find ways to stay engaged, both relationship wise, learning wise, and obviously the content and what you produce.  

Matt Waters: Fantastic. Great advice. So Neil, tell us. If somebody wants to work with nVision, they've heard the podcast, they're like, “I need to work with Neil, but where do you plug in?” What are you helping corporations with right now?  

Neil Uebelein: Well, ironically, because of the finance side, one of the things coming from the investment side, which was very, every dollar out the door was very measured. How productive is our money? That's the nature of investments. 

There's a lot of very detailed and deep financial analysis was kind of built into the very fabric of working on the investor side. When I came over through the service provider route into the corporate real estate side, and now I teach, like I said, the corporate real estate finance course for CoreNet. 

One of the things was that the finance discipline actually is fairly slow in a relative sense. It's not that on the corporate side is less challenging. It's the fact is we deal with a lot of different things interacting with business units, the design of buildings, wellness, productivity, and building operations. 

There's a lot of different topics, but on my side, a lot of what we do is finance themed. It's decisions. We wound up focused on how companies plan and make decisions because traditionally corporate real estate organizations, you may need to consolidate from 3 buildings to 1 in Dallas and you organize a team and you go in to do that. 

You've got somebody working on something in Dallas. You've got somebody working on something in London. You've got somebody working on something, maybe in San Francisco or Seattle.  

Those projects, having run the performance analytics groups at these companies, you've got all these underlying systems that impact decision making. You've got all these isolated projects impact decision making. Even in the time we're taping this, spreadsheets are the dominant tools. Let's extract all that information and start to work.  

Years ago, we started building planning methods and tools. Going back, we were very early adopters of BI, business intelligence and dashboarding, as early as 2006, we were putting portfolio modeling into individual tools that were well ahead of our time. 

Now, it's turned into all the data science, the big data, the ability to take data from all those source systems. Building portfolio planning and what was fortuitous for us is we were starting to look at attendance and demand behaviors and how much space you need and tying that together into portfolio plans before COVID. 

Coming off of COVID, you could build one plan for everybody coming back to the office. Then the executive asked the question, what if far fewer people come back in the office? Or what if specifically, these people don't come back in? And it has a huge ripple effect across your whole plan. 

Well, if it's built manually in spreadsheets, it's hard to communicate, hard to consolidate. We take care of all that. We do in minutes what a lot of other groups, frankly, take weeks to do manually because we just run scenarios. By using, leveraging a lot of data science in that we had a lot of great clues on where to start.  

One of the design features we do is we're just not at a point where we trust the black box yet, whether it's AI or data science driven approaches. We let those types of things create scenarios just like another planner would create. If I'm next to the system generated versions of what we do, I can simply clone copy and perform the act. 

It'll create a plan just like a planner would. It's to a point that we can drop in and just as another planner, we can think “let's not keep that lease. Let's do a different one.” A lot of tools like AI side and everything like that just comes to real estate. We tend to blackbox the actual algorithms. 

You get a result, share it with a business unit. They tell you they don't like it. You're done. You can't touch the middle. And in our, in our approach, you can get at it and do everything manually as a planner if you want to take and refine and iterate based on feedback or unique factors that didn't make it into your models. 

Like I said, we don't do the easy stuff, but we're able to take and speed up decision time and make better decisions built in financial analysis, of course, because that's the basic wiring. That's always the go to that preferred high technical skill.  

Matt Waters: Well, that's incredible. I can see how that is quite in demand in today's environment.  

I know you're really busy. We're going to give contact information in the show notes if anybody wants to learn more about nVision.  

Neil, thank you so much for joining me today. It's been a pleasure talking with you.  

Neil Uebelein: I appreciate it always, Matt. 

I think it's great that you share this out because I think we talk a lot about the connected side, we'll where do people go to learn? How do they stay with an external perspective? I appreciate you taking the time out of your calendar and doing this, not just with me, but everyone else you've done in this series. 

Thanks again.  

Matt Waters: Happy to do it.  

Thank you for listening to The Lease Alert. I'd be grateful if you would like and subscribe wherever you listen. Until next time, keep learning and leasing.