I actually went to Florida State University on an athletic scholarship. When I got there, my family had always been in the retail business specifically department stores and I thought that that was going to be my career path. As I got into the school I realized that fashion merchandising wasn't for me. I took a couple of grad classes in real estate and I got very interested in real estate, and I went to the real estate school at Florida State. And when I graduated, I moved down to South Florida and started down there getting into real estate development and real estate brokerage. That's kind of what really shaped my career path for me. Since then, which was back in 2003 I've been in real estate development and a couple of sectors I've been and retail I've been and multi-family, and last several years I really had a focus and convenience stores.

At Brookwood, we have two different funds. We have one that is really focused on commercial real estate and specifically in suburban office product. And then the other fund that we have is for convenience stores, which is what I work on. Our convenience stores are called Yes Way. Although we just had a very large acquisition of a company called Allsops, and so we go by both brands right now. Within my job what I'm doing a lot of is I am going and finding opportunities for portfolios of convenience stores. I am looking to see which ones would be a good fit for us to acquire, and it might be small just a single store, and our recent Allsops transaction was over 300 stores so anything in between of what we look at. So its mergers and acquisitions platform and my real big role and responsibility are to go in and underwrite these deals, look at the real estate and then actually trying to put the deal together, going diligence and then hopefully acquire the convenience stores. When I started working there were about 10 convenience stores and as of today, we are over 420. As far as hours, things are a little different right now with COVID, I am at home and we're not in our offices right now. I do travel quite a bit for my job. I would say that either one or two nights every other week I am flying somewhere and looking at a deal or attending conferences or meeting with our team at our Boston headquarters. I would say as far as how much I'm working, I work a lot like 50 60 hour work weeks, it doesn't really ever stop. So I'm up early working and at night a lot I'll be sitting there in bed with my laptop open, trying to hammer out emails and get ready for the next day. It's a lot but it's something I enjoy doing so it is beneficial and it's something that is fun for me too.

The big part of my job that I look at is putting deals together. We work through these deals and you kind of become a firefighter because you're constantly putting out a lot of different problems that arise throughout a deal. It could be a number of things an example is that one time we found a portfolio of stores that we really liked and we felt like we negotiated a good deal on it. When we were underwriting the deal, we received all this company's financials. So we felt like we had a good financial grasp of what we were ready to invest in. We got into the due diligence process with the deal. We started getting actual invoices or with like the fuel it's called the bill of lading we started getting those. We realized that those numbers did not match up with the financials that the seller originally gave us, and this caused obviously a challenge because we went from what we felt like we had negotiated a good price on to now we were overpaying for the deal because things didn't line up. So then it was incumbent upon me to go in and restructure the deal based upon the real true numbers and not the numbers that the seller had originally given us. It was a fun conversation. It was a very challenging deal from start to end but at the end of the day we made it work and then the acquisition happened.