Getting to Know Craig Evans-CEO, DBL Capital | Part 1 #857

Each one of us dreamed of becoming someone when we grow up. We made plans, walked paths toward that dream. Some of us made our dreams come true, some dreams changed along the way. Did you envision your current position, or is it different from what you originally planned? If it's not what you planned for, could you have imagined ending up where you are today?

Let's hear it from Craig Evans, CEO, DBL Family of Companies.

In this episode:
-How Craig built business partnership and personal connections.
-Career changes, Construction, Real estate investing and business ownership.
-Entrepreneurship, business growth, and decision-making.


The Norris Group originates and services loans in California and Florida under California DRE License 01219911, Florida Mortgage Lender License 1577, and NMLS License 1623669.  For more information on hard money lending, go www.thenorrisgroup.com and click the Hard Money tab.


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Transcript

Craig Evans: 0:00

This is The Norris Group's real estate investor radio show the award-winning show dedicated to thought leaders shaping the real estate industry and local experts revealing their insider tips to succeed in an ever -changing real estate market hosted by author, investor, and hard money lender, Bruce Norris.

Bruce Norris: 0:21

Thank you for joining us. My name is Bruce Norris and today we have a very special guest Craig Evans. Craig is the CEO DBL Family of Companies. Craig Evans is a licensed building contractor in the state of Florida with nearly 3030 years of construction experience including residential, commercial and municipal. Third-generation builder he has worked frontline activities through management as a subcontractor, laborer, foreman superintendent, project manager, mid level manager and executive management, truly learning the business from the ground up. A dynamic leader, Craig on several companies, the first of which is Douglas Brooks Homes that specializes in workforce housing in southwest Florida. He also owns Trinity Building and design a full service site work company. But his newest endeavor is a private equity firm called Douglas Brooks Legacy Capital LLC or DBL Capital for short. DBL Capital raises funds through investors that have a desire to be in the real estate and investment world but do not have the time nor ability to actively manage hard real estate assets. DBL Capital raises of funds and employs them through a diverse blend of real estate assets. The goal is to create a legacy of generational wealth for DBL capital investors. In 2021, Douglas Brooks Homes won Investment Housing Builder of the Year from the American Institute of Investment housing. In 2022, Douglas Brooke Homes was INC's 5000’s 10ht fastest growing private company and this year 2023 Craig Evans was named Construction CEO of the Year for the state of Florida by CEO Monthly. Greg is a devout man, he and his wife Stephanie have two lovely daughters guy use his time with his family and encourages his employees to do the same. Craig, welcome.

Craig Evans: 2:16

Thank you, Bruce. It's good to be here.

Bruce Norris: 2:18

Doesn't seem like we've known each other for like a lot longer than we have?

Craig Evans: 2:23

It does. It does. My wife and I were talking about that this past weekend. Just she and I were spending some time together. And that was one of the things that we're talking about is it did it. You know, it feels like you and Aaron and Joey had been in my life a lot longer than three years. I mean, it feels like we've been friends for four decades. But, you know, we've battled some storms in these last few years.

Bruce Norris: 2:47

Yeah. And I think, you know, I thought about that, when I thought about opening with that is, because how we met was very unusual circumstances. You know, I had a a contractor that had, you know, misplaced a lot of money. And what was common to the people as they were getting their payoff checks at a discounted amount. Thank God they did, by the way, that was very nice of them. Your name kept coming up, why don't you just use Craig Evans? And I thought, yeah, that would probably be a good idea.

Craig Evans: 3:22

You know, Bruce you and I've talked about this a lot in the aspect that, you know, our relationship as men and within business started just getting really to know each other, because let's face it, both of us were coming to know each other, from a place of distrust you were coming from a relationship with another builder that wasn't going well, that you were literally at the at the meetings with, with your trade partners trying to, you know, work through the payment of them that you were paying other people's bills for them. And I had just been through with another builder that for one of my other companies for Trinity, that had not paid me and so here's two people coming to know each other that was wanting to know each other from an arm's distance because of both coming through being burned to some degree, you know, and here we are today, regardless of business friends, and that means the world to me.

Bruce Norris: 4:20

Yeah. And that's, you know, when you want to pick somebody that will take over the Norris group, my legacy characters, everything, you know, because of how we've treated people. So, you know, during the journey that we've gotten to know each other, I think we both have seen those moments where, okay, that's not a normal response to that circumstance, you know.

Craig Evans: 4:51

Exactly.

Bruce Norris: 4:52

Yeah. So that's been a real special start. I want to go back to your beginning when you're young, so who's who's the first person in your family that was in

Craig Evans: 5:06

So, it was my grandfather on my mother's side. So, let's go. Let's say are you 18, and you're working for the construction? He did large civil projects. He was one of the major contractors on the original sunshine bridge and up in Tampa. He built the original causeway going over to Sanibel here in southwest Florida. And then built several large airports throughout the country did a lot of big civil stuff. Then my father, when he was in his early 20s, got into construction, primarily doing large commercial things quickly grew within that to where he was doing 30 to 50 storey buildings in larger cities, Chicago, did a lot of stuff in Cleveland, Ohio, up on the Great Lakes. And before I was born, they decided to slow down, if you will, so they moved to Georgia. I know you think this accent is probably from New York City, but it's not. So when we moved to Georgia, and my dad got into residential construction. So literally, I was the kid, you know, going on the weekends, or the afternoons with my dad into homes and walking around and playing on their plans, tables and getting into trouble and sweeping floors. And that's what I grew up with since I was you know, since I was born, that's what I was around. family business? Well, so I've got a few college degrees, because by partway into I guess my freshman year in high school, I kind of was hitting the point of I didn't want to be in the family business.

Bruce Norris: 6:58

Okay.

Craig Evans: 6:58

My dad was still making me work with him on the summers and things like that, you know, we had a several master carpenters and master craftsmen that work for this. And so, you know, one of the earliest projects that we did, we built a 1800 square foot two-story workshop out behind my parents house. That was no nails, just all pigs, all mortise and tenon. So, you know, you had to know how to put that together, you know, everything was tough with hand tools. Because they wanted me to know how to build something that would last. And while I enjoyed it, you know, I was ninth grade, 10th grade, I wanted to be out playing basketball and doing fun stuff. So, I quickly kind of said, I'm not going to do this. So you know, or I didn't want to grow up doing that. But I went to school got a degree in actually in Hotel and Restaurant Management. And then I went to school for music as well. But pretty quickly, I ended up making my way back into construction. I did commercial construction when I was younger. Because again, at that time, my dad was doing residential and says I'm gonna go play with the big boys. And so we did commercial construction. And I was very fortunate did some big projects. We have some, I think the largest project I was on was about 354,000 square feet as a total project. So I've had a fortunate career to do some some fun stuff within the world of construction.

Bruce Norris: 8:33

But you also got out of the construction world and started hair salons. Now, what age was that?

Craig Evans: 8:41

Let's see. So that would have been 23, 24 somewhere around there. I got into the beauty industry because again, I was just I think my dad wanted me to be in what he was doing so much. And I was kind of running from that. And so I just kind of ran from it all and said, You know what, forget it. I'm going into the beauty industry. And so I was single at the time, and I realized that hey, I can be around beautiful women and make a good living. That was the era for me. You know, so we had a we had a really good time. That was a great career. I did that for 24 years I think it was before I still owns salons and spas at the time we've sent sold all of our, everything that we owned in that industry. We sold all of those businesses but because we had salons and spas we had haircare lines we had makeup and skincare lines that we sold in 18 different countries and so a we had a lot of stuff that we did and that but we've sold all that and started back in 2012 back into construction and I semi retired from that and was taken some time I'm off and so we had a good time we started back into construction. And actually Bruce, it was funny when I first started back, you know, started the business. And it was it my truck and a trailer. And I was actually strapping on a tool belt and going out and physically doing work again, I had been through so many portions of life and so many opportunistic, you know, businesses and situations that we generated a lot of revenue out of, and, and it was one of those things, I wanted to get back to physically building something and doing something to see the fruits of your labors. And so I enjoyed that. That was for about the first year it was just me before I hired my next set of employees.

Bruce Norris: 10:52

What's interesting when I when I think about you, I think of the word scale. Okay. So, you know, you just didn't cut some hair. You had a chain, like you said, and product in all different kinds of countries. And you were cutting stars hairs, right?

Craig Evans: 11:08

We did, I was the, I did the work for several celebrities. For some of them, I was in that world for about six years of doing celebrity work. We did, I did hair for fashion week in New York for several years and worked on several movies. So we we had a good time we you know, I played a lot when I was young.

Bruce Norris: 11:36

Alright, take me to what happened in New Orleans. There was a, you know, that gigantic flood and hurricane. And somehow you got involved in helping them solve that.

Craig Evans: 11:52

Yeah, we, when Katrina came through, I was living in Tennessee at the time. And a friend of mine, we had a large portfolio there a rental product, we had, I don't know, 1100 doors, I believe it was right around 1100 doors. And we Katrina hit. And I remember I was in Ohio that weekend. And he called me and said that another friend of his that did a lot of work for us. His lot of his side equipment was down, that he was off, you know, he had a period of that it was a quick was not going to be used for work. So the friend of mine, he and I literally I flew back from Ohio, we jumped on a plane and flew to Louisiana flew into New Orleans. I think we were there day three or day four, I forget right after Hurricane Katrina had left. And we saw several things that a lot of what was happening was that was really one of the first storms of that magnitude since Andrews in 91. But But even with that, I mean the stuff that was going on in Katrina, it was pretty devastating. There was a lot of stuff that I saw there that you don't want to see, you know. And so within about 48 hours, we collectively mobilized by 120, I think 128 trucks and equipment and piece of stuff that we brought in from Tennessee. And, basically because of the insurance riders part of what was going on, and people were trying to figure it out through FEMA, how to get work done. And so much of that work was getting locked up. Because in the storm, what we call the storm chasing world of it. It's all dependent upon your insurance rider and how much insurance you have. So with the stuff that we were doing, and with the site work contractor that was a friend of ours that we brought in underneath this. We had a large insurance policy that we were able to put together. And so we went in as a tier one contractor for FEMA. And, you know, so we get down there and one of the things that we realized is where are we going to park 128 vehicles and on all of this equipment. So there was a facility there was a small church that just gotten destroyed, they were trying to figure out how they were going to rebuild. We spoke with the pastor there worked out some scenarios to we would help them rebuild if they would let us use their facilities through rebuilding so we fenced it up put security there to make sure nobody was coming in and stealing our equipment or vandalizing our equipment. And we were able to house all of our equipment there for the entire time we were there.

Bruce Norris: 14:57

When you say equipment you're talking about big earthmoving equipment?

Craig Evans: 15:02

Yeah, this was we the biggest thing that they had was trying to figure out how to demo all the houses because so much of the stuff was completely condemned. So we were going in, and we were demoing houses, we had five crews that were demoing, we would demo anyway, each crew was responsible demo anywhere from three to four houses per day. And demo it remove it, haul it off, that all had to be water controlled, because there was so much as bestest in those old houses. So we had water trucks that came and we're constantly spraying equipment and trucks, we had to line the trucks with a liner between each hauling method, we ended up buying houses about 45 minutes away, 15 minutes away for all of the workers to be able to stay. Because we had so many people working and there was literally there wasn't it was a full time operation just trying to keep people working, because there was no food, no water, no place to stay. So, you know, we're finding houses that we could just buy, and there would be four or five people living in every room, you know, we bought mattresses and that's just what we did. You know, now, people made the guys that worked and worked hard, they made a lot of money out of it, you know, but it even got to the point to where we had to start regulating how much our employees could work. Because, you know, it quickly became past the point of just making money and trying to clean it up to the point of, we've got to make sure that we're taking care of the sanctity of our employees and their marriages. And like, you know, so we forced them every three weeks, they had to go home for a week, at a minimum. They couldn't just stay you know, that was part of it. If they came on, they had to go home every three weeks and spend a week. We only let them work so many hours a day, we had to you know, we had to start kind of managing that because the amount of destruction and devastation that was there was a it was a tough process to handle and comprehend when you've got entire neighborhoods that are just gone, you know?

Bruce Norris: 17:05

Yeah.

Craig Evans: 17:05

I never forget the first day that we were there. We were riding through the Lower Ninth Ward. And one of the the large cemeteries that was there in the Lower Night. We're looking and it just looks, it looks strange and kind of up here. Like it's been a lot of upheaval. And what I realized I could see down at the end of the far end of the cemetery, all of the caskets had been had floated, and they were all at the other end pushing through the fences, and some of them floated down the street, some of them they never found. So there was a lot of stuff that you just, you couldn't imagine the amount of water, you know, we're driving under an underpass. Overpass was probably 35 to 40 feet tall. There were boats wedged into the underpinnings of the underpass or the overpass. You know, so when you think about there's 30 or 40 feet of water rolling through this area. We lived that just a few years ago, or last year with Hurricane Ian, you know, and we had 21 feet of water there. You know, when you're talking about 30 to 40 feet of water coming through a bowl that New Orleans is, that was an interesting time.

Bruce Norris: 18:16

Here a tier one for FEMA. Is that a is that hard to come? Is that hard to achieve? Let's ask that.

Craig Evans: 18:26

It is, it's now becoming a tier one operator for FEMA is next to impossible. You you've you've really you got to know people, and you gotta have just hundreds of questions, they have 10s of millions of dollars of insurance abilities. Even then, it was very difficult because honestly, other than Andrew, we really hadn't experienced storms like that. And, and so FEMA was really through Katrina, there's a lot that has gone play taking place from storms and how you the preparedness of storms since Hurricane Katrina, because Andrew showed us, we've got to change how we function, you know. And so Katrina was a big was a big changer of that. Obviously, Sandy came to Hurricane Sandy up in New York came behind that we, we did work in Sandy. But Katrina was the biggest one that we put a lot of time we were we were in New Orleans for about a year and a half.

Bruce Norris: 19:26

Prior to that, you said a pretty large number of rentals. How did you come about owning 1100 rentals none of this is normal, by the way, right?

Craig Evans: 19:41

But you know what? My wife laughs at me, to me, this is normal. Because if, if I'm going to do it, we're gonna do it. I'm not gonna, I'm not interested in owning two, you know, if I want to own rentals, I want to own 1100 rentals. I don't want them two. If I'm going to own Companies, I don't want to own two companies. I want to own multiples. And, and like you said, I think it's interesting that you started out with a word scale. Yeah, we just the friend of mine, he and I started looking through and working through with what we were doing and realized that we had a knack in that market at that time for really finding the deal, so to speak. Let's face it to pull 1100 doors off, you got to figure out how to how to work that. We found several apartment buildings that were distressed units that we went in that would have, you know, anywhere from 50, I think our largest that we had was about 127 or 28 doors. We actually bought some, some small 30 to 40 door, motels that we turned into, you know, really nice. I mean, they were still, you know, workforce housing, you know, we tried to stay in an affordability rating that people could afford to live. But we didn't want our stuff torn up. We truly tried to get quality tenants. But we just realized we had the knack to grow that we figured out how to finance it and made the right partnerships within from funding sources to start doing that. And we worked hard to keep our debt to income ratios and a healthy range. We didn't want to over leverage. We really stayed at a healthy point of leverage when I sold out my half of that I think we had a 47% leverage point on it was already right. So we're less than 50% on that. So it was a really strong point of where we're at our rental rates were market rates. And that was a fun time.

Bruce Norris: 21:50

So let's go to 2012. That's an interesting year to get back into the building business because you couldn't build anything. Because the REOs were so cheap. And they were going to be that cheap for right, next three years.

Craig Evans: 22:02

Right.

Bruce Norris: 22:03

So,what did you do?

Craig Evans: 22:05

So again, I think as a business owner, I was really, when I opened it up, I just wanted to get out and work right, I needed to again, I could sit earlier, I wanted to do something with my hands and just work. So the first six, seven months of the of that was literally me taking some jobs stuff for friends, I would go in and do remodels on their homes and I'll honestly Bruce, I was taking a lot of that for next to nothing because I made a lot of money, right? I was very, I was I've been very fortunate to have good careers and what I touched. And I just wanted to get back out and do something, to see the fruits of my labor, kind of instant gratification, you know, you go in and you put a floor down. And while the homeowner comes home and the floor is done, and they're hugging you and kissing me because their house looks fantastic, you know. And when I went and got my license, actually, you know, I was thinking, I'm not going to compete with the big builders. You know, we're going to do some remodels, we'll maybe do one or two custom homes here or there. And that's all we're gonna do. I mean, I was I was thinking I was gonna start pushing towards retirement, you know, I mean, what was at that time? 38 years old, I guess are 39 years old, you know, I'm thinking I'm gonna start pushing towards retirement, you know. And because we still own some of the salons at that time, I had managers who were doing that we hadn't sold everything out there. And so I was looking at it and thinking, you know, let's have some fun with it. So we were I was taking some jobs, I ended up getting a few employees that were helping me do some stuff and started realizing some of their skill sets that they had. That would be beneficial from a concrete side of things. So again, as a business owner, I started looking at the niches in the market, where the market was currently suffering from what builders were struggling in providing services for and where the speed of builds for them were at because the one thing I knew is from it builders perspective, time is your enemy. And so if we can solve the problems of time for the builders, we can help them be more profitable. So that's where we opened up. We started with the shell construction doing their concrete in their block. And clinically, you know, that turned into us, you know, we started seeing their next problem was their site work and their dirt and how to manage that because they were waiting weeks for that to get going and well I can fix that problem. So you know, kind of like you and I've talked many times before you go into solutions mode, you know, and what's the best solution to solve these problems. So within probably six weeks, I'd started a shell division within the company and hired employees for that and All of a sudden, again, from a scale perspective, you know, I started talking to other builders and growing that and, you know, now within Trinity, our shell division is actually one of our largest, I mean, our site work division, or there's one of our largest divisions. I mean, we, we do lots of lots of work out of those components of stuff. But that was really how we started, you know, we just started looking at how do we solve the problems and the niches of those builders. And once I, once I realized is like, Hey, listen, you know, I'm not doing this because my dad did it, or because my grandfather did it, I'm doing it because I want to do it. And this is where I want to be. I had to be realistic and say, okay, while I love doing the work, that's not what I'm best at. And where I know I'm good at is working on growing and building a business, and providing good jobs and, and providing a good product. So that the end of 2012, my wife and I sat down and and started brainstorming and putting the plan together. And we started working that plan, you know of what did we want to start? What was the succession plan of from from a scalability of businesses. And we knew we wanted to grow Trinity and then grow that into owning Douglas Brooke Homes, to where we build homes. And from there, we knew our end goal was I knew I wanted to own a fund, instead of just owning a portfolio, which I had already done that and been successful in that I wanted, because I knew the scale on that would kept me at a certain point. I wanted to be able to scale that even further. And so in that process, you know, as I started working with friends of mine that own very large, successful private equity firms, I mean, some of these guys are in the billions of dollars, you know, some of those people. And in that process of working through that, knowing long term, that was my ultimate goal. Because that's going to develop multiple things, that's going to be; One that's going to develop a healthy stream of revenue, which provides lots of jobs. I love being a job creator, I'm passionate about being a job creator. Secondly, I want to be able to build a product that is affordable, that our country and the people that work in our country can afford. And those are the things that we set out from the end of 2012 is kind of the direction that we wanted to start pushing through. And so far we've been hitting those goals.

Bruce Norris: 27:44

Absolutely. You very often, you know, you mentioned you kind of meet with your wife and discuss things. So she doesn't have a building background. So why is that an important part of how you process and make decisions?

Craig Evans: 28:05

You're right, my wife, she doesn't have a building background. She doesn't have a financial background. But two things she is my wife. And first and foremost is my mate. I respect her. I love her. I cherish her and I believe that God's given her an intuition and a wisdom that most often she's holding me in check to say, 'are we sure'? And secondly, Bruce, you know, I'm unashamed of this. I'm not a perfect person, I will make mistakes every day. But I'm unashamed to the fact that I'm a Christian. And I love Jesus Christ. So a lot of the time my wife and I spent a lot of time praying over decisions we're going to make and is it the right timing, and I'm praying for peace and wisdom to make wise decisions. You know, I think I said this to you the other day. And I've said this a lot. Sometimes what seems like the greatest decision is not always the wisest decision. And that's, that's typically what we're praying for is not to make the great decisions. I'm trying to make the wise decisions. Because now you know, Bruce, we're over 100 employees. We're growing. We're, you know, January one is a big day within our family of companies because we bring another company on board. And that means we bring more employees and there's there's a responsibility to them. That means that I have to make wise decisions to keep sustainability. And so that's a lot of times my wife and I spend a lot of time just talking through and praying through for wisdom, praying through that we make wise decisions.

Joey Romero: 29:44

Thank you for joining us. That's gonna do it for part one of our interview with Craig Evans, CEO of the DBL family of companies, you're not going to want to miss part two. See you next year.

Narrator: 29:57

For more information on hard money, loans and upcoming events with The Norris Group, check out thenorrisgroup.com. For information on passive investing with trust deeds, visit tngtrustdeeds.com.

Aaron Norris: 30:12

The Norris Group originates and services loans in California and Florida under California DRE License 01219911, Florida Mortgage Lender License 1577, and NMLS License 1623669. For more information on hard money lending, go www.thenorrisgroup.com and click the Hard Money tab.