Willy Walker
Chairman and CEO of Walker & Dunlop
“The bottom line is long term, the blips of the ups and the downs, one good day of training or bad day of training isn't going to make that marathon that much better. It's the consistency of putting in the time and the effort over time. If you do that and focus on it, long term you will outperform. You will create that alpha.”
Summary
In this episode of Leadership Matters, Alan sits down with Willy Walker, Chairman and CEO of Walker and Dunlop, to discuss how leadership is more than just a series of big moments, but a continued, earnest effort over time that yields rewarding results.
Alan and his friend Willy discuss Willy’s early upbringing as the son of a White House photographer and a father who was CEO of Walker and Dunlop before him, as well as his time at Harvard Business School which inspired his love for running marathons and endurance sports, which continue to leave their mark on Willy’s leadership style today. Willy also discusses the indelible mark his near separation from his wife had on his life and how it has made him a better leader, husband, and father.
Mentions & Resources in this Episode
Walker and Dunlop – Click here to learn more.
Photography of Diana Walker – Click here to learn more.
Hoffman Institute – Click here to learn more.
“This Apartment Lender Is a ‘Money-Making Machine.’ And the Stock Is Cheap” by Daren Fonda (Barron’s, 3/15/2021) – Click here to learn more.
“Taking Charge of Anger” by Dr. Robert Nay – Click here to learn more.
Guest Bio
Willy Walker is chairman and chief executive officer of Walker & Dunlop. Under Mr. Walker’s leadership, Walker & Dunlop has grown from a small, family-owned business to become one of the largest commercial real estate finance companies in the United States.
He received the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2011 and was named “Financier of the Year” in 2017 by Commercial Mortgage Observer.
He received his master’s degree in business administration from Harvard University and a bachelor’s degree from St. Lawrence University. He currently serves on the board of the Mortgage Bankers Association, and he formerly served on the boards of St. Albans School and Children's National Medical Center. He is also a member of the Real Estate Roundtable.
He is an avid runner, skier and cyclist, and has run the Boston Marathon in 2:36.
Follow him Twitter @willywalk.
Clips from This Episode
Episode Transcription
Alan Fleischmann
Welcome to Leadership Matters. I'm your host, Alan Fleischman. Not many people can run a marathon in two hours, 36 minutes, but my guest today can: Willy Walker, who pushed himself to the 99th percentile of all male marathoners. It's the kind of competitive drive that has served him really well as he built his private family business into a public company, with a market cap of over $3 billion. As Chairman and CEO of Walker Dunlap, Willy Walker has grown the small real estate firm co-founded by his grandfather into the fourth largest lender to the US commercial real estate market. Willy's voice is an influential one. Since the onset of the pandemic, he has transformed a weekly all-staff email into a webinar series called the "Walker Webcast", channeling that competitive drive into helping others understand everything from market trends to effective leadership. His vision also carries weight and in Washington, leaders from both sides of the aisle have turned to Willy for insight on the real estate market. Willy's industry leadership has landed him numerous awards, including the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award, and the Financier of the Year Award by the Commercial Mortgage Observer. Walker and Dunlop itself has been repeatedly ranked among the nation's best workplaces by Fortune Magazine.
Meanwhile, Willy is someone that I admire. And we're going to get into a lot of topics today. One of them, and most importantly, is not only how competitive he is and how his strong sense of excellence has really played a role in his life, it's also how he has managed to actually make vulnerability and being open a real strong part of his leadership professionally, and a lot about how he's been a role model. As a friend personally, it is such a pleasure really to have you on the show today. Willy, you know, you've been a big presence in DC for many years. You grew up in DC, and your mom is probably one of the most interesting people I've ever met in my life. So is your dad – I don't want to exclude your father. But your mom was truly one of the great photographers of our time. She still is a full time White House photographer, and some of the most legendary photographs in modern history were taken by your mom. You live in Colorado now, but I've got to imagine the DC connection isn't lost on you, still, and on your three boys. So, tell me a little bit about your mom and your upbringing in DC.
Willy Walker
So first of all, it's a real joy to be with you, Alan. Growing up in DC, with a mom who covered the White House, it was an interesting childhood. Though just real quickly, the way the White House was covered back then, it's all changed with modern media. But back then, there were really only two major publications that would duke it out to see who was covering the White House the best. And that was Newsweek Magazine and Time Magazine. And both spent an incredible amount of time and money to have the cover shot or the photograph inside that differentiated the magazine from the competition. And so I have sort of endless stories about how Time and Newsweek would battle with one another to figure out how you got the inside access to the candidate or to the president and how they would get film developed, because back then it wasn't digital.
So I was with my mom once when we went down to Camp David, when President Gorbachev came over to visit with President Bush. And they set up a whole laboratory down in one of the one of the bathrooms at one of the little lean-tos outside of Camp David to be able to develop my mother's film, and then put it on this little machine, which back then was not a lot more than a fax machine. And it sat there and scanned this slide that they had just developed in the men's room of this national park rest area. And then they beamed it to New York, which took something like 10 or 12 hours, but it was quicker than running it to the airport and flying it up there. And it's just wild how technology has changed where we now take all this stuff for granted. But I watched the industry evolve. And I got to meet a lot of fancy people as a kid because I tagged along behind my mom. And you know, she would come home from the "office", which was the White House. And so every day the topic at the dinner table conversation was, you know, what happened at the White House and where the President was going to travel or what was going on from a foreign affairs standpoint. And so it was a pretty robust dinner table conversation, if you will. It wasn't sort of a "How was your sports practice?" to be honest, and I think that that was actually one of the interesting things about my upbringing.
Both my parents worked very hard and had very challenging schedules because my father was running Walker and Dunlop, and my mother was working at the White House, where she would travel every other month with the President. And when she was on the road with the president, she was basically gone. And so I was at a school in DC and actually loved being at St. Albans and was having a great time at St. Albans, which was the day school I was at. And my parents were like, do you want to go to boarding school? Because my brother had already gone to boarding school, and they were both kind of stretched from a schedule standpoint. And they also thought it would be a great experience for me. Let's not, let's not miss that. But I really didn't want to go and my dad and I – to this day – joke that my dad basically bribed me to go to boarding school by offering to give me a Sony Walkman. And this was back in 1988. So for the for the cost of a Sony Walkman, I went off to boarding school. But nonetheless, a wonderful experience growing up and that's lasted all the way through. I made great friends with lots and lots of people who I never ever would have met were it not for my mother and the great relationships she developed as a photographer.
Alan Fleischmann
And you maintain a very strong relationship with St. Albans, too?
Willy Walker
I just went off the St. Albans board. Yeah, I was on the St. Albans board for six years and loved it. But, I did maintain that relationship, even though I did not graduate from St. Albans.
Alan Fleischmann
Well, lucky for them. But your mom is legendary. Your father, obviously, was at that point taking Walker Dunlop to another level, right? At least in his generation, moving it forward. As you watched that, did a part of you say I want to be a photographer, the other part say I have to go into the family business? I know there was a period where you worked for the US ambassador in Paraguay. So there may have been a period where you said neither. I'm just curious, what was the gravity toward one over the other?
Willy Walker
So, there was never an interest to do either careers that my parents were in. I love taking pictures, but I never thought it would be a career that I would like. And quite honestly, I never thought about being a mortgage banker. I always wanted to be an investment banker. And I'd had the opportunity to meet a number of investment bankers growing up and thought that that looked really exciting and really sexy. And you can make lots of money. And boy, did I ever want to go to Wall Street. And I went to Wall Street to work for Morgan Stanley. And I had a nice time working at Morgan Stanley. But I quickly realized that investment banking wasn't all that it was built up to be in my own mind. But I never really thought that I'd come to the family firm, Alan, ever. I never sort of had desires to get out of college or out of business school and go to work for Walker and Dunlop. It happened to be kind of a confluence of a number of issues that were happening in my life, both personally as well as professionally, as well as my father's career at Walker and Dunlop and what he was doing from a succession planning standpoint, that sort of had everything come together at the exact right time in 2003. And had all the stars not lined up at exactly that time with sort of personal and professional issues on both my dad's side as well as my side, I don't think I ever would have come back to Walker and Dunlop and run the firm.
Alan Fleischmann
So you went and you did live in Paraguay for a bit, right? And then you came back?
Willy Walker
I did, I lived in Paraguay for three years, had an incredible experience there. Learned Spanish fluently. I didn't work at the embassy. But I was very, very close to the US ambassador and his wife, and spent a lot of time with them. I told the story just last week about how when the ambassador was leaving Paraguay, there was a going away party for him. And the President of Paraguay at that time was President Rodriguez, who I got to go know quite well during those years. And as the ambassador was leaving, at his going away party, President Rodriguez and I were talking, and President Rodriguez turned to me and said, Willy, when are you going to come clean that you're a CIA officer at the embassy? And I laughed hard.
Alan Fleischmann
I laughed, maybe I should have let you finish that story before I laughed.
Willy Walker
Exactly. But I was not in the CIA. I worked for a nonprofit foundation down in Asuncion. And then I ran a nonprofit foundation down there, applied to business school from Paraguay, and was fortunate to get accepted to Harvard. They wanted me to do a year of for-profit work before coming to them because I'd only done nonprofit work being in Paraguay. So, I came back to the States, did a year of consulting, and then went to business school.
Alan Fleischmann
Where did you consult?
Willy Walker
I worked for a firm in DC called National Strategies, which was a small boutique firm that did a lot of public policy as well as management consulting.
Alan Fleischmann
So if I remember this correctly, when you were in Boston at Harvard Business School, that's when you got the bug for marathons. But I think – honestly, you've been getting injured lately, so that's the only thing that gives me pause but I guess you just keep getting back up though and going for the next. I think of you on a bike, and I think of you as running. But the running started then, right?
Willy Walker
Yeah, well I ran cross country in high school and was recruited to run in college and I didn't want to run in college, so I focused on the schools where I could play lacrosse and not run and so I played lacrosse in college. But I got to business school and I'd been a runner, but nevertheless I ran because I like to run. And then two section mates at HBS – HBS has a class of 800 students, but they break us up into sections of 90, and you spend your entire first year with those 90 people and in my section was the former captain of the Brown University cross country team, who was also Irish National Champion and a really incredible runner. And then there was one other friend who'd run at Dartmouth, and so Fergal, Dave, and I started to run pretty much every day. So during that first year at HBS, we'd go out and run around the Charles River and we were quick and then Fergal said we're all going to run the marathon and I'd never run a marathon before. So I got into the Boston marathon, which you have to qualify for. And so I got a number by raising money for the Dana Farber Cancer Research Center, I got a number and went ran my first marathon and I ran a 2:45 in my first marathon and was like, "Hey, I think I'm pretty good at this.”
And so after running the 2:45 my second year was when Fergal and I really trained and a lot of people sort of hear me say that and they're like, What are you? What are you talking about, you obviously trained hard to run a 2:45. But the difference, Alan, between running a 2:45 and running the 2:36 that I ran my second year, that nine minutes, I underscore that not to talk about the times, but to talk about when you get to that level of performance – and I don't care what you're in, I don't care whether you're a chef, whether you're a businessperson, whether you're a marathon runner, or whether you're a pitcher – the difference between 'really great' and 'exceptionally great', that nine minutes between a 2:45 and a 2:36, was such a difference in the day-to-day training and preparation for that race that I look back on it and I just sort of say I was a total amateur doing a 2:45, and I became a pro in doing a 2:36. Even though it's only nine minutes. But nine minutes in a marathon is a huge amount of time.
And so it was it was a seminal event. I mean, for people who are listening to do the math on that, that's 5:59 miles for the entire 26 miles. So it's, you know, sub-6s and most people think about running a six minute mile, one six minute mile is difficult to do, but to do that for 26.2 is a long way. But it was one of those experiences that was just unbelievable. And I think that experience, like going to Harvard, Alan, made me sort of say, you know, you really have the capability to do some pretty spectacular things, whether it's athletically or whether it's academically. And I'd never been a great student up until I got to Harvard. And when I got to Harvard, I had this real kind of chip on my shoulder as it relates to how I'm the only St. Lawrence University graduate in my class. There was one other St. Lawrence graduate who was in their second year when I got there, versus you know, 30 people from Harvard and 50 people from Stanford. And you know, all these people like showed up there, like it was a class reunion from their Ivy League school, right, and so on the only St. Lawrence graduate and I wanted to make sure that everyone didn't think that I somehow got an HBS through hooking crook and didn't deserve to be there.
And so when I got there, I went and studied really hard and made First Year honors, and then I ran a 2:36 marathon. And to be honest with you, it was a real seminal two years for me as it relates to giving me confidence that I could do some pretty great stuff. I love this idea of the nine minutes – if there was a book to write, and there are many books that you should write, it would be a book that would be around that idea of the nine minutes. Because everything you do – I talked about this at my firm and I talk about this on the show – good is not good enough. If you're going to do something, let it be great. And if you're going to put yourself into something, and this is why you're so good at endurance sports and why you're such a good CEO, is this idea of "Let's set the goal. Let's make it be ambitious. But let's get it done." And with that nine minutes, that nine minutes is an enormous amount of energy, effort, focus, passion, but honestly physical endurance. I think the interesting thing about that, Alan, which is – you're spot on as it relates to the way that you run Laurel Strategies and that all of us think about long term outcomes – if you look at Warren Buffett's investment track record, it's this incredibly consistent, slight beat of the markets. It's not some massive year-in. year-out beating of the markets. It's this consistency of beating the markets over time that gives you that alpha. And so to be a Warren Buffett, it's not that you've had one great year or you've had one great deal.
I had somebody last week who – after Walker and Dunlop announced earnings, our stock sold off during the day and then it recovered on Friday. And this person, this investor wrote me a note and said it was really bad day for Walker and Dunlop. And I wrote her back I said, a bad day is when we lose a big transaction. A bad day is when someone leaves Walker and Dunlop to go to a competitor firm (which fortunately doesn't happen very often). A bad day is when we actually have a colleague of ours die as we had two weeks ago, tragically, a young man had a heart attack and died. Those are bad days. The stock market going up or down in our stock, losing 10 or 11% value in a day is not a bad day. And it's not like I look for it. It's not like I felt great that day.
The bottom line is long term, the blips of the ups and the downs, one good day of training or bad day of training isn't going to make that marathon that much better. It's the consistency of putting in the time and the effort over time. If you do that and focus on it, long term you will outperform. You will create that alpha.
Alan Fleischmann
And I bet there are many marathons that you have run where the weather wasn't as good as others. And you still did extraordinarily well. So there's also that great imagery that not every day is a beautiful day, but no matter what, you have to get up and do what you have to do. And you do that.
Willy Walker
Well, I guess the other thing – to stick with this analogy – I went for a bike ride last Friday, and there was a very, very significant headwind on my way climbing up into the Rocky Mountains, which I didn't notice. And I got to the top of the mountain and I was wrecked. And I mean, wrecked. I'm just like, wow, that really took a lot out of me. And then all of a sudden, I turned around to come home, and I look at my speedometer. And I'm going 45 miles an hour down the hill. Because I've got this huge tailwind to me, I didn't even know I was going into the wind as hard as I was on the way out, but I benefitted from it on the way home. And so the other piece to all this stuff is that if you just kind of put your head down and go after things, you might even not know how difficult it is. But you're gonna get that tailwind at some point.
Alan Fleischmann
That's great. I love that. So let's go back to when you join the family business. It's great, from a cultural point of view, from the DNA, what you built. I think of it as a family business, but don't necessarily think of it as the Walker family business. I think of it as the family that you've created at the company. Because you've gone through so many incredible iterations, and you've gotten to be so extraordinarily big, but there's something about all the stuff we're talking about that's infused in the culture. But you did come into a family business when you started. And I think you started as COO, if I'm not mistaken, but you came in, you worked with your dad, you never know that's going to go. I know that you're not a shrinking violet, so I imagine that when you joined, you know, you kind of join someone else's band, but you know how to play. So I'm just curious whether there were some patchy moments there, touchy moments? Or is it that your dad just knew for the company to get to this next iterations, he had to hand this off to his son and let him go.
Willy Walker
So there are 15 different variants that I could go down with that question, because there's a lot there. I think there are a couple core things that your listeners might be interested in. The first thing is that unlike starting a business, I had the great, great opportunity to step into a business that had an impeccable track record, and really, really great people. Okay, so that was a huge advantage that I had versus just going out, putting out a shingle and saying, I'd like to be in the mortgage finance business.
The second thing is that my father had been very, very successful at recapping his firms a number of times. And while Walker and Dunlop was relatively small, it was a very successful business, and had no need to necessarily scale. So the scaling of it was really me, not my dad, or any financial need to grow. It was that if I was going to come to the family firm and spend time there, I didn't ever want to be sort of accused of "Oh, he had nothing better to do, so he came back to the family business," right? So that was just what – going back to me and my neuroses and my insecurities of going to Harvard and realizing that I can actually play – that thought of going to a family firm and in every room having people say, "Oh, you know, he tried to do investment banking, or whatever else, and none of that stuff worked out. So he came back to the family firm." I never ever wanted that to be out there.
The third thing is that when I came to Walker and Dunlop, there was an extremely capable president at the firm named Howard Smith, who was running one of the businesses at the time. And if I hadn't been my father's son, and if Howard and I hadn't known each other for a long period of time, prior to me joining the firm, Howard likely would have left to go to a competitor firm when I came back, because most people like Howard who work their way up into the upper ranks of a firm, all of a sudden someone comes along and says, "I might be taken over the firm," they typically don't stick around. So to Howard's great credit, and believe me, Howard and I had some time at the beginning of kind of figuring out who's going to be on first and what's going to be on second and our working relationship, which now 17 years later, is about as fluid and as trusting and as just dynamic as you could possibly find in two partners running a firm, you know. The beginning, Howard was like, "what's this guy doing and he doesn't really know my business and blah, blah, blah." But fortunately, we figured out very quickly my strengths and his strengths. And we kind of divvied things up. And he said, "I'll take this," and I said, "I'll take that" and off, we've gone. So having a partner in Howard was super helpful.
The fourth thing is that when my dad came to Walker and Dunlop, his father was around for a long period of time. And so my dad had seen the frustrations of being a young up-and-comer in a family business and waiting for the rings to be passed to you. And so to my dad's great credit, the day I arrived at Walker and Dunlop, he gave me his office. That day, not like a year later, not 10 years later. The day I arrived I took the corner office and my dad moved into some small little office down the hall. That was a way for him to send a message to everybody in the office that there was a new sheriff in town – you know the old saying, it wasn't as if I walked around like the sheriff, but you know what I'm saying. The other thing is that my dad, he'd seen me run much bigger companies than Walker and Dunlop. I mean, my job before coming to Walker and Dunlop had 3500 employees in a $250 million P&L across Europe. I was living in London and running the European operations of a pretty big US multinational. So to go from that to a firm of 46 employees, my dad was, like "I've seen Willy run companies before" and so he basically said, "Go," like, here you go.
So I had an incredible sort of arrival in the sense that it was a great firm, it had strong financials, I had a great partner in Howard, and I had a father who had gone through a transition of leadership in his own relationship with his dad, who'd seen how to do it and how not to do it. That made my arrival fantastic. Now, I'll put one little caveat to it, and then I'll be quiet.
Alan Fleischmann
You also had to show that it wasn't a hobby.
Willy Walker
Yeah, well, believe me, a lot of people thought I was coming back to Walker Dunlop to kind of to clean it up and then sell it. Because they were like, why is this guy who's done all these other things coming back to the family company, if Mallory doesn't want to just turn around and have it be sold? But the one other thing that I would say is I've spoken a lot about succession planning, and families and lots of family offices have my dad and me come and speak and say, "how would you go about transitioning power in the company?" and "it looks incredible, you took a firm worth $25 million owned by your family, and you turned it into a three plus billion dollar public company, and did all of that seemingly without a without stepping wrong?" The bottom line is we all know there's a cover to the book, and then there's a lot inside the book. It didn't all go perfectly. There were times where relationships were going one way and not the other way. And there was some friction at various points. But the bottom line is, if you look at a 17-year growth from a $25 million company to a $3.5 billion company, it's all gone pretty fantastically well.
Alan Fleischmann
Yeah, I mean, it's amazing. When was the year that you arrived?
Willy Walker
2003.
Alan Fleischmann
You had some patchy years there – not yours, but patchy years in our economy – and moments where you were trying to do some extraordinary things. There were moments where you were looking to sell. And then prior to when you actually went public, that had to be a difficult family decision on your part. But also the timing, looking back, you must think that there was some great destiny that chose a different route, right? I mean, that's pretty amazing. You came pretty close and then something happened.
Willy Walker
Yeah I mean, when I joined, as I said, we thought the firm was worth about $25 million. About a year and a half later, we had an offer, and I was talking to somebody that you and I both know – I won't mention him by name – but somebody from DC who offered to buy the firm for $40 million, which seemed like a huge number to my father and his partners, I mean $15 million over a year and a half period. I thought we were moving in a really great trajectory. And so I went back and said, "No, we're actually worth $48 million, not $40 million." And they told us to go fly a kite. So we passed on that one. And then fast forward a couple years, and we had an offer to be sold to a big investment bank for $125 million, which from the $25 million to $125 million was a pretty damn great day at the office. But the Great Financial Crisis hit and that offer was rescinded and pulled back on the fifth iteration of the purchase and sale agreement. And then fast forward and we went public in 2010 at a $220 million value. So now we've gone from $25 million to $220 million over a seven-year period. And that seemed great. But then once we went public at $220 million, the opportunity to really scale and grow presented itself. And so we now had a currency. I didn't have the undercapitalization that we had as a private company. We got a lot of brand from being a publicly traded company. We were the first mortgage company in either single family or commercial to go public after the Great Financial Crisis. So mortgage was still more of a four letter word than, Alan, than it was a seven letter word. So, you know, we then started to grow.
The one thing that was really difficult for me was that, as you said a couple times – and I sort of think I should try and change the narrative on me a little bit – but you said that I'm very competitive. And a lot of people call me competitive. I like to think that in my older age, I've mellowed a little bit. But because I'm competitive, because I track things, because I watch everything, every data point as it relates to our sales and our costs, and I'm very deeply engaged in our business, I also watch the stock price every single day, multiple times a day. What I realized in 2018 was that I would get done with a day and the stock price would go up. And I may have done nothing all day. But if the stock price went up, I felt really good. I may have had the most productive day on the face of the planet for me, and then the Walker and Dunlop stock price goes down, and I felt terrible.
All of a sudden I went to something called the Hoffman Institute out in California, and during that week, you're completely shut off from technology, and I put my cell phone away. I didn't watch our stock price for the entire week. It was the first week since being a publicly traded company that I didn't watch the stock at all. And I thought about how liberating it was for me not to be watching the stock price. So I decided not to and I will tell you, I was like an alcoholic trying to give up alcohol during the first two months. I wanted so badly to just peer at my iPhone and take a peek and look at it. But after I got through that first quarter, and I just waited until we did earnings, and then two days later looked at it – then my team started redacting the stock price off of all of our internal documents. I didn't have it on my app, I didn't have it on my feed. Other than from time to time, while I'd be interfacing with an analyst or I'd have a friend who sees our stock price move dramatically up and they'll take a screenshot and send it to me, other than that, or when I go do TV stuff – typically when I'm on TV, they show the live the live stock price so I see it from time to time haphazardly – but the bottom line is I just said last week's stock price movement had nothing to do with the long term value of Walker and Dunlop.
So if I sat there all Thursday and watched our stock fall off, what good does that do for me or for Walker and Dunlop? I had a perfectly productive day not worrying about all that noise and focusing on where we're going. And that has been hugely liberating from a personal standpoint about my own stress, but then also from just a long-term outlook with the company. It's allowed me to really understand and live, that nothing that we're doing today is to impact the stock price tomorrow, what we do tomorrow, it's to impact what we're doing next quarter, and next year and five years from now, which is where real value will be created.
Alan Fleischmann
To guide you off that life rollercoaster ride that people can so easily be on, where it's just like "how did I survive today's ride?" versus "I'm actually on the road." Back to your endurance sports, you know, I've got my nine minutes to work on and you keep working on it to actually make it happen. But it is a different way of looking at competition. It's a different way of looking at it. I mean, I think of you not as much as competing with other people, I actually think of you really as someone who competes with yourself, and that's a very big theme of this. I have this great admiration for the story around the horse, Secretariat, that won the Triple Crown. What made that horse so remarkable, was not that Secretariat broke records every time there was a great competition. It was that Secretariat broke records when Secretariat was in training and that there was no horse behind him. And I kind of think of you and what you've built at Walker and Dunlop as a version of Secretariat where I'm sure you're competitive, you do look at your competition, but you've kind of broken through barriers where they were there were none. You were the first after the real estate market crash. That means you're not looking behind, you're looking ahead. I've gotta imagine that is part of your thinking and your leading. That has to be a big central theme.
Willy Walker
It is. I think the other thing to keep in mind, Alan, is that as much as I'm personally quite competitive with myself, if you will, I also have a spectacular team around me that has created a culture at Walker and Dunlop.
Alan Fleischmann
About 1000 people, right?
Willy Walker
Yeah, it's about 1100 today. There is something very special about the culture, and it is a performance driven culture. When we were a firm of 46 people, you could sit there and say, if I pulled everyone into a conference room and said, "hey, let's be performance driven, and focus on these types of things" then people would be like, "Okay, great. Well, I either like that or don't like that." But I could influence that size of a group. Today? There's no, there's no way. I can't. So what you end up getting is you get these people who've joined W and D, and who then live that every single day and who drive that into their own performance. Their own expectations of their teammates, their own sense of how we need to meet customer service levels. And when they all start to live and talk it and prophesize it, it's super powerful. And from my standpoint, that's the most fun thing. I could go completely give up on all the kind of stuff that I do today, even though I wouldn't, but I could. And I can guarantee you that the core culture of W and D would keep going, because people live it and breathe it every single day. And that's super exciting and kind of dynamic as it relates to long term value creation.
Alan Fleischmann
And I think of you also as a highly innovative company, and you're getting into areas and you've had recent acquisitions, for example, that are beyond commercial real estate. Do those things percolate across the company now where people come in and have ideas? Or is it a combination? Or is it a top down or bottom up or both?
Willy Walker
I would say that it's lateral, it's straight across the middle of the firm in the sense that it's really exciting, Alan, to have a team that is constantly looking at where we're going and how to kind of redefine what our business does and how we go about doing our business. And let's be honest here, the commercial real estate industry is not the most cutting-edge industry out there as it relates to everything from technological implementation to diversity and inclusion. When I joined Walker and Dunlop, it was a white male, go to the golf club, shake hands and go do a deal together kind of environment. That was the industry 17 years ago. And fortunately for the industry, for its participants, it has evolved dramatically to a heck of a lot more technology, a heck of a lot more transparency, and then also a lot more diversity. But on all of those benchmarks, it has a long way to go. And so one of the neat things has been to come in and take a small firm and turn it into a pretty good sized firm, create a money making machine – and there was an article on us in Barron's a month ago that literally called Walker and Dunlop a money machine, and in my world, if you get an article written about you in Barron's and they call you a money machine that's about as good as it gets. But because we have a money machine, we have the ability to go and invest in new businesses, invest in new people, invest in new marketing, and that has allowed us to innovate.
And the most important thing over the last year, from my standpoint, is not only how well we transitioned to remote work, which we did seamlessly and put up incredible financial results, but when George Floyd was murdered and when our country went through its gut wrenching racial justice, question, debate, demand, protest, we were already well down that path. We have two African American directors on our board of directors, both of whom you know very well: Michael Warren and John Rice. We have two women on our board of directors. And there was never a moment where I couldn't speak from my voice as it relates to what we need to do on these issues. And I had a lot of CEO friends, Alan, who called me up and said, I don't know what to do, if I say something, I'm going to be challenged, I'm going to be questioned, I'm going to be criticized for why we haven't done it before. And in every one of those instances, I said, you know, you just have to be true, transparent, and straightforward about where we are today, where you are today and where you want to go. But we have the great luxury of having worked on these issues ahead of time, so that when all this happened, we could really take a leadership voice in the industry. So we are pushing super hard on these issues right now, and that's where we start to make a real change. That's where we create new opportunities for people of color, for women. We've taken our diversity inclusion goals that are a five-year goal to increase the number of women and minorities, not only in management jobs, but in our top wage earner jobs, and we've put that into our proxy and tied my compensation to it and tied the compensation of all of our executive officers to achieving those diversity and inclusion goals.
I was interviewed by TD Ameritrade a couple weeks ago, and I mentioned that and the interviewer said, "I don't know that I've heard of another publicly traded company that's done that." And we did it this year, not like this coming year. It's in our proxy right now that was just published. So I take these issues really seriously. But it's also because we've got such a great dynamic company with great leadership that we can take leadership roles on these things.
Alan Fleischmann
You've also done something where you really were one of the first CEOs that I know of that came out and started having these critical conversations in the "Walker Webcast" and you brought some all-star people to W and D. I mean, you did. And you had conversations. And I kept thinking and I watched almost all of them and I loved them. I will say I kept thinking each time you did it, all your stakeholders benefitted. I mean, certainly those who work at the company benefitted, they were key constituent. For you to say these are the issues, this is how we're gonna get through this, this is what we're going to deal with, there's been a lot of issues that we had to deal with the last 12 months, a lot more to go in the next. But you also started to appeal to a much broader audience beyond the W and D world, not just your investors and customers, clients, and employees, but analysts, you've got fans now who were looking at this because they're looking for leadership. They're looking for people to have these critical conversations. But have you realized that? Do you realize the following you're getting?
Willy Walker
So, let's just talk about that following in a second, but one thing I do want to say is that you've understood this for a long period of time. You've held salons at your own house, where there's not a direct benefit to Laurel Strategies for having that group of people pulled together. And at the same time, because of the thought leadership, because of the insight that you provide, it's what I call lateral marketing. There's direct marketing, where you can come to me and you can say, Willy, Walker and Dunlop really needs to work with Laurel Strategies, and you and I can talk about that. And you can tell me all the great things that we can do. And that's direct marketing. Or you can go lateral marketing, where, because of your thought leadership, because of the people that I know, and because of interacting with your team, I make up my impressions about what working with Laurel Strategies is like, and then I basically call you and say to you, hey, Alan, I'd like to work with you.
That's what we've gotten through the "Walker Webcast" in the sense that we were really good at going out and meeting with borrowers and people who wanted us to sell their apartment buildings for them, and saying, "Hey, we're really good. We’re big and we've grown fast, and we got great, talented people." But what the webcast did was it moved us out laterally, and it created thought leadership that we have been able to take and then push out on a weekly basis through a digital marketing strategy, so that every single week, every banker and broker at Walker and Dunlop has content to share with their clients. And so while there's a certain webcast that might not appeal to anybody – last week, I had the CEO and founder of Whoop on the webcast, and there are plenty of people who don't know what the Whoop Strap is or why you need to wear the Whoop Strap. But I will say that Rory McIlroy was wearing a Whoop Strap when he won the Wells Fargo Invitational yesterday, and Matsukawa, who won the Masters three weeks ago, was wearing a Whoop Strap when he won. So if you want to be a darn good golfer, wear a Whoop Strap. But the reason we talked about exercise and fitness and sleep and health and that has nothing to do with commercial real estate and mortgages. People who tuned in and listened to me talk to an owner-entrepreneur about how he scaled the business and how he was true to his commitment to build this business and how challenging it was. Those are the types of things that create amazingly engaging conversations that people learn from. And then they sit there and they say, "Where'd I learned that from? Oh, it was when I was listening to the 'Walker Webcast.' Did we call Walker and Dunlop about that property that we want to finance because that'd be a great firm for us to use?" And so that kind of lateral marketing has been fantastic.
To your point about lots of followers – we actually, just last week when I was doing the Whoop podcast, we had our 1,000,000th viewer of the "Walker Webcast", which was pretty neat, and quite a quite a number for us to push through. And the Thursday of last week, I went to my son Wyatt's youth basketball game in Englewood, Colorado, and walked into the basketball court and had two fans walk up – behind my mask – and say, "Are you Willy Walker?" and talked to me about the webcast. And then my son's coach after the game was over said, "I missed the conversation with the Whoop guy, but the one you did last week was amazing!" And I said, when my son's youth basketball coach is listening, I'm in pretty good shape.
Alan Fleischmann
You know, it's amazing. I don't know if you remember, but the different times that I've actually posted something on social media about you and what you've been talking about, I've had an extraordinary response. And, you know, it goes back to this issue where we're looking for authenticity and we're looking for leaders who are willing to take on the tough conversations. We're not looking for you just the hollow anymore and there are a lot of people that can talk in platitudes. That's not your style, but you've certainly shown that you're willing to have those tough conversations and really dive deep and really bring some reputable people. We're looking for those reputable people. So I'm curious, in your mind, what stands out as qualities that make an effective leader? I would talk about you being effective leader, you've proved that. But when you're looking at others and you see someone you admire, someone you see as a current effective leader or a future one, what are those qualities you're looking at or you're looking for?
Willy Walker
I think the first thing is, back in 2007, I went to YPO (Young Presidents Organization) retreat down at the Inn at Perry cabin, and there was a gentleman there named Jack Daley, who's a sales coach. I looked at the schedule and it said Jack Daley talking about sales strategies. And I said, I really don't need to go listen to that. But it was happening. So I went in, sat down, and Jack gets up, and he's talking about all these different things. He says, the most important thing that a CEO needs to do is tell the people in your company where you're going. And he said, If I pulled out up in front of this place with a brand-new red Ferrari and opened the door and said, "Get in." Your first question is not "why did you pick red?" It's not "how much did it cost you?" Or "why'd you pick the leather interior?" Your first question is "where are we going?" And unless you can answer that question every single day and paint a picture for your team on where you're going, you're failing as a leader. And we've been pretty successful at Walker and Dunlop up until then. But I had not articulated a clear five-year plan for what this firm looks like five years from now. So I went back to the office after that retreat, and I wrote a memo, which I still have a copy of to my board, and I said, I failed you. This is four years into Walker and Dunlop, and I've already told you, we've gone from a $25 million value to a $50 million value to $125 million value in that period of time. So I said, I failed you, because I have not articulated clearly what the vision for Walker and Dunlop is. And so I then articulated a five year vision for the company, which I had people work with me on and we said, we're going to grow revenues, net income and EBITDA 5x over the next five years.
Mind you, this is 2007. So we said we're going to do 5x all three of those things. Well, the Great Financial Crisis hits. We go public, we acquire a company. And sure enough, we do 4.96 time revenues, we do 4.92 times net income and do 5.01 times EBITDA, almost landed right on the line, Alan, five years to the day. And I sat there and I said, "Wow, how powerful is it that we set this goal out there, all these things happen, ups and downs, and sideways, and people come and go, and we go public, and yet you get to right where the goal was?" And so that said to me, if you're going to be a leader, the thing you must do is show people where you're going and get people aligned by that vision. And we have turned around and gone and done two subsequent ones to that first one, and we've nailed them. And I mean talk about nailed them.
And this most recent one that we just finished at the end of 2020 was unbelievable. If the pandemic hadn't happened, I don't think we do the drive to what our 2020 vision was which we established in 2015. But in comes a pandemic, our volumes go off the charts. And sure enough, check, check, check, check, check. And if it hadn't been out there, we wouldn't even been in the fight to get there. So I think a vision is super important. I think the other piece to it is my father taught me from a very young age, and it goes back to those dinner table conversations that you reference, given my mom's career. My father has always been a very direct person. Some people would criticize him.
You and I have a mutual friend who's on a foundation board in DC who was out here visiting us in Colorado a month ago, and she said, "The thing I love about your dad is he never gives you the unvarnished truth. I mean, it's straight in there, it is no holds barred." And I said, "Yeah, my dad sometimes can be a little harsh and a little bit too straightforward." But I think one of the things that I totally learned from my dad was being very direct and open and transparent as it relates to where you're headed. And there will be someone in a meeting that doesn't like what you're saying. But as long as you're transparent in your thinking of how you're getting there, you can deal with that person giving you pushback. But if you wait until you make the decision, and that person hasn't been involved in the decision making, you're bound to have a problem. So I think being transparent and being very straightforward in the way that I think about the world and what I'm trying to do has been wildly valuable to allow me to deal with people who don't agree with me on things, and also be very understanding of other people's points of views and try and work them towards where we're all going in the future.
Alan Fleischmann
I think it's also knowing that you have to make decisions, which you're very good at. Sometimes making the decision is the hardest, but once you make it, you know you've done the right thing, and you can change your decision sometimes, but you've got to make it. I think of you as a person who will collaborate, get a lot of input, but you'll make the decision.
Willy Walker
At the end of the day, every CEO is ultimately responsible for the entire organization. I have an incredibly talented management team and I am exceedingly collaborative in the decisions that we make at Walker and Dunlop. But at the end of the day – last week, when we had to send out our 'back to work' memorandum, I'd sought lots of input and it had been edited and edited and edited. And then finally, last week, when it had to go out before our all-company meeting, I pulled it down, I edited it, I made a couple changes to it, which were controversial issues – everyone vaccinated or not vaccinated – and so there was a camp of "everyone needs to be vaccinated," there's a camp of "you don't have to require the vaccination." I had to make the call on saying we will not require people to be vaccinated to come back into the office for today. Now, we can always revisit that but someone had to make the decision about whether we were going to require it or not require it. And so it's getting that collaborative input but then also being willing that if all of a sudden that memorandum, Alan, had caused the entire firm to go up in arms, that we weren't gonna require vaccinations, I'm the one who made the decision. And I have to live by that. And they have the goods and the bads of it.
Alan Fleischmann
And at the end of the day, saying no is often the loneliest thing in the world to do. But you have to say no too, which you'll do too. I'm curious, when you interview people, and I'm assuming you do still interview people, what do you look for? And is there a quality or question that you ask? A quality you look for and a question that you asked actually is the most revealing to you?
Willy Walker
It really depends on the job. If I'm interviewing someone to join us for a technology role, it's a very different lens than someone joining us to take a sales role, somebody who's joining us to take a credit role, all of those different things. But the one thing I am really, very focused on is how much do they know about Walker and Dunlop? And are they interviewing with us because they're just trying to find the best job? Or are they interviewing with us because they want to become part of Walker and Dunlop? And if I sense that they're interviewing with us because they're just trying to find a great job and they want to work for a great firm, I don't have a whole lot of interest. If they show up and show me and demonstrate to me why they want to join Walker and Dunlop, I'm wildly more interested in them as a candidate. And it's so easy in today's world – remember when you and I were coming out of college, unless you were going to work for a publicly traded company, it was almost impossible to know what a private company did, right? I mean, you could ask somebody and interview around. But other than that, it was very difficult to find information on small firms.
If you asked someone in 1989, what Walker and Dunlop did other than one of my father's great friends, they'd be like they're a mortgage business, but you couldn't figure out what Walker and Dunlop did. Today, there's a plethora of information on private and public companies left and right. There are things that you and I say that are out in cyberspace for the rest of our life. If you really want to understand Alan Fleischmann, you can go – like what I do every week for my webcast and what you do for this show – you can go out and take down just treasure troves of information to understand who people are. And so the thing that I'm most interested in if someone wants to join us, either on the credit side, on the sales side, on the technology side, is that they've done their homework on what we're doing today and then express to me how they're going to help us take it forward.
Whenever I talk to college students or graduate students, I always say to them, if you show up for an interview and you don't express exactly why you want to go work for that company, there's no reason for them to select you. Because that's par for the course these days, as it relates to an interview tactic. I'm not very interested in the resume, I'm interested in what you're going to do to take Walker and Dunlop forward.
Alan Fleischmann
I feel the same way. You know, it's funny in many interviews with many young people I've had, they'll say, "I think this is the right place for me now," and you know, that's always a killer comment in an interview, but to talk about how you've done your research, to your point, you've done your homework, and that you see how you can add value to that company, as the company continues to grow, then you're talking in a way that allows you to be invited to a company. It is amazing, actually to win. I want to talk about something very specific in a second, but I wanted to ask you, with all of your recent acquisitions and a lot of innovation, if I were to ask you in five years from now what does W and D stand for today, what would it be? Would it be a slightly different company, a very different company, very much the same company but stronger, because you are innovating, you're getting involved in other things? Just curious where you want the company to go?
Willy Walker
Well, one of the challenges in all that is that I would have told you that I wanted to be the largest provider of capital to the multifamily industry five years from now and I'd wanted to be the largest commercial real estate finance company in the country, and given that we accomplished goal one last year of being the largest provider of capital to multifamily and were the fourth largest lender to all of commercial real estate last year, a lot of the scale issues have already taken care of themselves, if you will. At the end of the day, one of the things that I constantly am challenged with, Alan, is that there's that five year business plan, which is really just numbers. And then there's what do we stand for? What are we trying to do? What's the culture of the company? What's the broader mandate? And one of the things that we've been working on a lot recently is providing capital to the formation of communities where people work, communities where people live, communities where people shop, communities where people recreate. And there is something in all of that as it relates to supplying a lot of capital for affordable housing, supplying a lot of capital for green infrastructure. And so that whole kind of broader mandate of what we can do with W and D, given our size and scale today, are things that we're continuously presenting. I want to be a leader on ESG and diversity and inclusion, specifically in the middle of that ESG.
From a size and scale standpoint, a lot of my friends and colleagues at Walker and Dunlop are like "for how long you've been around Walker and Dunlop for, you've clearly been very, very successful, you don't have to work." Bottom line is, I love what I do. I absolutely love what I do. And there's nothing I'd rather do with my time. And so I often have said to people – and our market cap now is I think $3.3 billion – I've been like, if we get to be a $10 billion company, then you can talk to me about whether I'm going to retire or not. But until we get to being a $10 billion company, I'm probably not going to rest. And then I think the other thing is that we are innovating. We're using technology. Our industry, because it is so people focused – 17 years ago, it was a bunch of white males and blue blazers who'd show up at conferences and shake each other's hand and say, "when are we gonna go play golf with each other?" Fortunately, as I said, it's evolved from that. But at the same time, it's still very human resource intensive. So we're trying to introduce technology without messing that up. And so one of the things that we've used as sort of the analogy recently is that we're trying to create Iron Man and not the Terminator. In other words, we're trying to use technology to enable human beings to be more insightful, to be more efficient, to be more capable, but not disintermediate them. And that's a real trick of doing it to the degree where you're really putting technology into play, but you're not threatening people with their jobs because the technology is going to take over what they do. And so that's also a huge challenge.
But if you think about who we compete with, our biggest competitors are JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, CVRE, and JLM. Those are our four largest competitors. The smallest of all them is JLM with 75,000 employees. All the others have hundreds of thousands of employees. Would you rather have Walker and Dunlop's size and scale in the markets with 1100 employees? Or would you rather be one of those four big behemoths with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of employees trying to figure out how to implement technology as you scale down in size? I'd take our positioning every single day of the week.
Alan Fleischmann
The ability to be nimble. The ability to be personal.
Willy Walker
You got it.
Alan Fleischmann
That's awesome. Speaking of getting personal for a moment, I'm also a big fan of the woman you chose to be your wife and the family that you built with your three boys. But Sheila, I can't not bring this up, because it really truly was one of the most profound moments for me in every way professionally and personally. I think it was four years ago, when you went to your annual meeting of W and D, and you revealed through one of the most extraordinary speeches I've ever heard, your separation from Sheila and then your eventual reunion. When I said at the beginning of this show that you're also someone who with all your competitiveness and all your endurance qualities when you're in sports, you also are willing to be vulnerable. That wasn't a natural, easy path for you to take. Trust me, I know that because I knew you before. But you hit it. When you go vulnerable, you do it well. You shared something that honestly, I remember sitting there with my wife, Dafna and the two of us cried, and a mutual friend of ours, who's now a United States Senator, then Governor, John Hickenlooper. I called him on the phone. And I said, "Did you see this?" And his response was the same. We cried. Tell us a little bit about that, because honestly, I've gotta imagine that had to be tough, but it is truly what I think of you. I think of you as really to lead and break glass ceilings and do all that you need to do to show that endurance athlete that you are, you are now known to me and to many as someone who is willing to take on the most vulnerable and go personal.
Willy Walker
That was a true out of body sort of experience/moment. And I would say that the reason it was so powerful is because it was so antithetical to what people's perception of me previously was. I've told you a couple times throughout this conversation, that there's a pretty sort of intense fire burning inside of me. But a lot of that is to do with not living up to standards and not being the brightest guy in the room, not being the greatest athlete in the room, and kind of chasing those demons throughout my entire life. And that's pushed me to do a lot of things a 2:36 marathon, taking a company from $25 million to $3.5 billion, etc. But there was also a desire to never ever show weakness. And that manifests itself in always wanting to be the smartest guy in the room, the best athlete in the room. The most this, the most that, as I like to say that "er", that I was better, faster, stronger than everybody else, I had to have that "er" at the end. And when Sheila said that we were going to separate and she wanted to get divorced, that was the seminal moment where all of a sudden, the "ers" all went away. And the most important thing in my entire life, my family, Sheila, our boys, were not literally but figuratively walking out the door.
And it took that, which is really sad statement on where I was pre this crisis, but it took that to get me to wake up and realize that the "er" life was not a healthy life for my family, for my kids, for me, for our my relationship. And so the problem was that I've been able to always manage through problems. It's pretty clear, I lived 45, 46 years of my life, and any problem that would present itself to me, I could somehow figure out how to handle it and manage it and be in control of it. And all of a sudden, this was something I couldn't control. And this was something that was happening to me that I couldn't argue my way through, I couldn't reason my way through, I couldn't pay my way through, I couldn't run my way through. And so as I dove into that, and super, super dark moments, I realized – and Sheila pointed me out – that I had anger problems. That my desire for control over things and my expectations of people around me were such that when things didn't go the way I wanted them to, I would lose my cool. And it was mostly manifested in the home environment with both Sheila as well as our boys. And I was setting unrealistic expectations for my relationship with Sheila and unrealistic expectations for my boys. And it was ruining a lot.
And so as we were separating, she'll handed me a book written by a gentleman named Dr. Robert Nay, who actually lives in the DC area, called "Taking Charge of Anger". And I devoured that book. I was desperate for anything that would show me how I could get some control back over my life. And I worked with Dr. Nay one-on-one and really started to realize how out of whack a lot of my expectations about the world around me were and how those outrageous expectations were driving anger. Because there are lots of reasons people get angry, but one of the big drivers of anger is that they have expectations. And when people don't hit their expectations, they get pissed off. And so if your expectation driving down the road is that everyone's going to be as good a driver as you are, which I always add everyone ought to be able to be as good of drivers as I am, I'm probably a terrible driver, but I think I'm a pretty good driver. But if your expectation is that everyone drives as good as you are, if somebody cuts you off, you're gonna be pissed off, and you're gonna go up to them and scream and yell at them and cut them off and be vindictive. And that was what I was. And all of a sudden, through all this work, I realized that that's just a ridiculous expectation of the world around us. And that there are always going to be bad drivers, there are always going to be jerks who say something to you in an airport that you don't like hearing or act in a way that you just don't like, but it's not your role in this world to go put them back in their place or get mad at them or scream at them.
During that whole process where I was losing everything, I really, really dug deep. And fortunately in the deep dive, I opened up a whole new side to my life. And I realized that I'm not perfect and I realized that I'm a very flawed human being and that I could talk about that and I could be rea l. And the most amazing thing – I appreciate what you said about the speech, Alan, and it was a seminal moment. But I will tell you that I went and had lunch with probably seven or eight of my closest oldest friends. Every one of those lunches, these are people that I thought were my closest friends. And in every one of those lunches, one of my friends would share with me something about his life that I didn't know, a son who dealt with suicide thoughts, a wife who cheated on him, a parent who, whatever the case might be, something about them that I should have known that they had not shared with me. Because I had this veneer in front of me of "I'm the perfect guy." I'm the guy who, like, everything goes right for so no one felt comfortable sharing with me, and I look back on it. How awful is that? How much of a loss for me as a friend to know these friends? And with one of my buddies, I said to him, "I can't believe it. You're like the seventh lunch. And I've had where you're sharing this big thing. He's like, "Willy, I could never share it with you. Because you didn't have anything wrong in your life. So why do I want to give you my problems?" Like, you share with people you want to share with. And so this whole process kind of humanized me in a way that allows me to sit there and say, "I'm not very good at this. And I'm not very good at that."
And I'm willing to tell everyone, I've got anger problems. And I've worked on them. And believe me, I'm not anger free. I actually get pretty damn pissed off from time to time. But I work at it. And I apologize for when I do it wrong. And that's been an incredible process and evolution, salvaging, saving, and the unbelievable marriage that Sheila and I have today is something that I'm obviously wildly grateful for. And I think the other thing is that my relationship with my boys, as much as I think I considered myself to be an 'A' for effort father, but I was probably a 'C' for connectivity father. I'm really proud to say that, I'll give it to the boys side of it, not my side, but my connectivity with my boys is incredibly deep now. And it's all due to getting rid of the stupid expectations I had and loving them for who they are. And it won't come as any surprise to you, the moment I started to love them for who they are, and not who I wanted them to be, they turned into the people I wanted them to be, and their whole self-esteem and everything just flourished and took off. And they started to run and they have accomplished so much more because I let them be themselves and not who I wanted them to be.
Alan Fleischmann
You know, you and I are wired very similarly. And when you did make this speech, and I knew the journey that you were on, I saw how tough it was, there were so many revelations that I felt. One was the truest sign of love was you had a wife who, while you were separating, and on the road to separation, she then gives you a book, and she still tries to help you. And then when she realized that you were serious and that you really did put all of you in it, she actually, in essence, accepted you and with all that vulnerability, invited you back into her world, which could have been very destabilizing, frankly, because she had already kind of restructured her life, independent of yours. What you've done, though, you're no less confident in the way people look at you today than you were before. But what you have invited into your life is a narrative, which is pretty important, a genuine narrative, which is you've embraced humility, and while many people might have looked at your confidence as arrogance before possibly because you were that overachiever and you still are, you see an extraordinary gratitude in your everyday.
So the fact is, you know, how do we raise families? And how do we raise ourselves to not be arrogant? It is to be grateful. And I think of you as someone who where that speech showed it, but your life since then even more. You're just so grateful to be able to have the opportunities that you've earned and the opportunities that you've been delivered, and to maximize them and to be surrounded by the people who have that humility, that combination of humility with your confidence, and that gratitude, is still making you be that endurance athlete that you've always been and that crazy nut who will spend his weekend, destroying his body, probably, for the sake of competition, but leading a company into new change. But you've also shown us that being vulnerable matters and it's okay and that, I gotta tell you, has a ripple effect that I just keep sharing your story over and over again, because you allow me to. You allow all of us to.
Willy Walker
Alan, I appreciate that greatly. I would say that I don't wish difficult times on anybody, but we all have difficult times. I would not replay the videotape any differently, as difficult as that period of time was and anybody that I ever meet who is acting kind of the way that I was, who has not, sort of, met their maker either from a personal tragedy or loss of a business or something else, I always am somewhat now, in reflecting and seeing it, trepidatious towards them, because I know that at some point, something's going to happen. I feel so grateful. I feel so grateful to your point that I got to live through it. And I survived it and came out a better and stronger person on the other side, it could have just as easily gone the other way. And Sheila and I talk about it all the time, about what our lives would be like, had we not been able to work it out.
And one other thing I will say to you, your point about her giving me the book, there's a watch that people who are listening to this, they're not seeing it, but I'm holding in my hand. And when we were separated and headed towards divorce, Walker and Dunlop crossed a billion dollars in market cap. And that was always something that I wanted to do and had my eyes set on it. And to Sheila's great credit, even though we were headed towards the worst, she went out and bought me a really nice watch. And she put WD she put the date in November of 2015 on it, and she it says $1 billion. And what's funny is we've obviously gone from $1 billion to $2 billion to $3 billion, and as we've gone through the other, she's always said, "Do you want to get another watch to celebrate $2 billion to $3 billion?" And I've said nope, this one you gave me in the depths of the two of us being at, sort of, going the other direction, and you had the care and the deep love to take the time to go do that. And I'll wear this watch for the rest of my life.
Alan Fleischmann
I love it. You know, I'm very sad that this episode of the show has to come to an end. You have to promise me that you're going to come back. And the other thing I want to do is, I want to really work with you on these book ideas are or these article ideas, because you do have enormous wisdom, and you have incredible stories and the people that listen to the show – CEOs and aspiring CEOs, leaders – they're looking for someone who's going to tell them a little bit of the compass of life, and you're doing it and you're living it every day. So thank you, thank you so much for you and all that you do. Let's get that wisdom out there a little more, you know, with your humility, and with your gratitude. And that combination of confidence, you're making a difference every day, those critical conversations you're having are essential. And the kind of leadership you're defining is never been more important. So thank you. Thank you for all that you do every day. And thank you for joining us today as well.
Willy Walker
You are a dear friend, I'm grateful for you to invite me on and have such a fun and engaging conversation. And I look forward to talking to you about the the book "Nine Minutes". You've caught my attention now and I love the idea of "Nine Minutes".
Alan Fleischmann
Let's dive in on that together because that's an amazing book to have. It's an extraordinary book to write. Your next project.
Willy Walker
Thanks for taking the time.
Alan Fleischmann
Thank you.
