Building Better Communities with Bob Hart - Episode 10: Willy Walker

Thanks Bob, always great to see you. I wish I was seeing you in person rather than over a Zoom link, but I'll see you soon enough in person and super appreciative of you having me.

So we both have been fortunate enough to be adorned with swag from one another. What we should do is have a subtext on the swag and it comes out after the Sun Valley, to put 'remember when'. You know, there's always some fun thing, 'remember when Jan Lee upstaged Willie or tried to', or 'remember this or that'. You know, because you always have such epic conferences and it's really been a true leadership for you in the industry and you make it fun and it makes it, you know, it's great contextual information and good sharing.

Conference? Oh boy Bob, in its current sort of incarnation it's probably been going on since about 2010, but it started as a get-together of a bunch of Walker & Dunlop, or Green Park Financial, which was our old Fannie Mae DUS company. It didn't have a direct sales force, we took loans through to Fannie Mae at Green Park through mortgage brokers across the country. And so that meeting actually started out where our correspondents would get together in Sun Valley for a kind of 'let's talk about the markets and see how everyone's doing'. And so it was a small group gathering of, you know, 25 people. And then I made the decision when we started to build up our own sales force and, not, I shouldn't say move away from correspondents because we still have correspondents to the company, but we really started to build up our own client base. And in the process of that, that conference got going and started at 100 people and then moved to 300 people and now is at 600 to 700 people and as you rightfully say is a really great annual gathering of people in Sun Valley.

And I know why you like Sun Valley increasingly more, one flights like people like you Bob, but we'll leave that on the side.

You know, the idea behind it Bob was the Allen & Company media conference which happens every year just before our conference. And I looked at that conference and the investment, and I remember very clearly when I first decided to put serious money into our Sun Valley Conference, I had a lot of pushback because the bankers and brokers at Walker & Dunlop were used to, they thought that taking a client to play golf or going to a fancy dinner or whatever the case was, that kind of one-to-one marketing was far more valuable than some big event that we were putting huge amounts of money into. And I had to do some real internal convincing to say if you invest in the broader event you're going to get more people and it's going to be more memorable than that one-to-one interaction. That was not an easy sell to be honest with you, but in hindsight it's clearly, it's not only paid off in the sense of the brand and the experience that our clients have, but I would also say that we've been super lucky as it relates to the guests that we've been able to bring into Sun Valley. And quite honestly, just like the Allen & Company conference, not have to pay for them. There are clearly those guests that I write checks to with people that I don't know, but there are also a lot of people as you remember from last summer, I had both Barry Sternlicht and Strauss Zelnick, two amazing CEOs, come in and talk to us. And they're both friends, you know, and so they don't charge me a speaking fee and we get all of their incredible insights and comments without me having to write a big check. And doing it because they like the firm, they like us, they like engaging with the people who are there. And that's an incredible testament to the company and to the friends we've made both in our industry and outside of our industry.

Yeah, had so very interesting people. I will say Condoleezza Rice was quite something. I'm actually working on my 25 speakers right now and I can't, I don't have, there are two people that I'm working on right now that I have a pretty good line of sight that they're going to say yes but I don't have them in the boat yet. But very much in the vein of someone like Condoleezza Rice, she was incredible. And just her perspectives, but I mean, you know, as you know we've had generals, we've had Nick Saban come talk about coaching football, we've had former politicians, existing politicians. We had Paul Ryan who came out and spoke right after he stepped down as Speaker of the House to give us a sense of where things were. And I think one of the interesting things about that Bob, as you recall, someone like Paul Ryan could be far more open and insightful on the politics of the day having just stepped down as Speaker of the House rather than if we'd gotten him when he was the acting speaker because he doesn't have the ability to speak openly at that time and he's got too much politics involved with what he's doing and what he says. So that was a wonderful timing of that. Kevin Warsh, who was on the Federal Reserve Board and was just discussed to be Treasury Secretary by incoming President-elect Trump, Kevin Warsh came and right after he stepped down from the Federal Reserve we had him come out and he could talk about rates in a much more open way than if he were still on the Federal Reserve Board. And so it's those types of engagements that I find to be super interesting. And again, without tipping my hand, I'm working on two people who are just very much in the midst of power who will be out of power and hopefully have the ability to come talk to us with a little bit more liberty than they would when they were in their previous roles. So we'll see.

Well, so first of all Bob, just like you, I've been really fortunate to build great teams. And while Bob Hart has a huge name in our industry and there are plenty of people who both watch the Walker webcast and who look at what I've done as CEO of Walker & Dunlop and say, you know, job well done, it is honestly due to the team that we've built and the people that I've been really fortunate to bring into W&D and help me build this enterprise. I think the other thing that, as you extremely well know having run public companies as well as private companies, the path and the journey that you go down, it's rarely charted. It's not like, oh, this is exactly where we're going to go, we're going to do this. There's a lot of reactive management as well as proactive management. And I think that for us, one of the great things that I was able to bring to a family company was having worked in other industries and in other companies for a decade before I came to the family business. I didn't really have any interest in coming to Walker & Dunlop to be honest with you when I got out of undergrad and got out of business school. I had been doing anything but mortgage finance and commercial real estate. I took one course at Harvard on real estate and that was basically it. And I don't think people really thought that I was going to come to Walker & Dunlop at any point. The fact that I did and it's turned into the company that it has is great and fun.

It's funny, it really, it was, I'd spent a decade Bob basically living in Latin America and in Europe, right? And had thought that my future job was going to be CEO of some Fortune 500 company nowhere related to commercial real estate. And we were living in London and had just had our first child. And after having spent my entire life and career sort of not feeling like I had to be home or close to where my parents were or whatever else, all of a sudden this sort of homing device went off inside of me that sort of said, hey, you've got your first child, maybe be a little bit closer to your roots and where you grew up. And so we were thinking about coming back to the States and I was on the board of Walker & Dunlop at that time.

Prior to it going public? Oh boy, way prior. As you accurately say, it was 46 employees and we thought the company was worth about 25 million, fully private. And I did an offsite with the senior management team and we did it out by Dallas airport. I'd flown in from London to do it. And as I was leaving to go back to London, I turned to my dad and I said, you know, there's a lot you can do with this company. And he said, and I said, I think I could help you. And he said, well, I've always known you could help me, I just didn't think you had any interest in it. And it was that combination of me sort of saying to him, I think I could help you, and us just having had our first child. But when I came back to Walker & Dunlop, a lot of people thought that I was coming back just to sell the firm and that I was kind of coming back to be, did the opposite. And well, it turned out to be the opposite, but I will tell you it wasn't like there was some grand plan. Other than what I didn't want to have happen was that I came back and people sort of said, oh, you just kind of came back to be a steward of the family company. So I came back with a very sort of ambitious growth objective to sort of say I'm going to put my mark on this company. I would say in hindsight I probably sort of, I was a little bit too aggressive in all of that. I didn't, my father should get great credit for having put up with me being very assertive and stepping in and taking control of things long before quite honestly most people would have allowed me to do it, right? But I will say because I'd gone out and run significant businesses before coming to Walker & Dunlop and Walker & Dunlop was much smaller than businesses my dad had seen me run, he had confidence that I'd figure it out.

Very much so. But as you know, let's be honest about it, if you look at it on paper and you look at the success and a 25 million company turning into a 5 billion dollar company, everyone says, oh, that's all UPS. Believe me, there were plenty of days that were difficult decisions and could be 4.8 billion today and 5.2 tomorrow. But I know you don't look at the stock price anymore.

Well, the bottom line on it all is that I give my dad great credit because I think one of the other things that he learned, because he stepped into a family company, worked for his father who did not relinquish control to him, did not give him the ability to run the company until my grandfather was much, much older. And I think that my dad saw the difficulties in that when he was coming into Walker & Dunlop and so he wanted to make sure that he didn't commit the same mistake. And look, in hindsight he did exactly the right thing. But I also want to say that at the time, I'm also reflecting on it knowing that my dad was a very mature and thoughtful leader in allowing me to do the things that I did.

Well, when I was at Kennedy Wilson, and he'll deny it when he's on my podcast, but Bill used to say, Bob, you got to sell something, we got to do something, get the stock moving. I'd sell something, the stock wouldn't move. I said we should have held it longer. So there's a lot of demand pressures that the public markets put on you. So I guess there are a couple things. One, I was just, my eldest son turned 22 yesterday and in going back and looking at old pictures of Jack's birthdays, I came across the picture of us going public on December 20th, 2010. So exactly 14 years ago today was the day that we went public on the New York Stock Exchange.

Yeah, and I was, we're doing this today, it's a fun photo. I have a little bit less gray hair. You don't have it handy, do you?

Yeah, it's right on my, I actually have an email that I was, you say, gee, to the viewers, see it, I was going to send out to all Walker & Dunlop employees today.

It's fun, it's right there. Oh look at that, yeah, we're, okay, and you can see December 20th, 2010 right there in the middle.