As part of its efforts to promote entrepreneurship in Denver, the Jake Jabs Center for Entrepreneurship hosted McWhinney cofounder and CEO Chad McWhinney for its Best of Colorado Speaker Series on November 18 at the University of Colorado Denver Business School.
Known for being a visionary leader, Chad McWhinney started small in southern California. After helping harvest on the family berry-farm, Chad and his brother started selling McWhinney Berries to his high school classmates in 1986. After several years, they had over $1 million in revenue and were selling berries in 28 locations.
“All of our money went back into the business,” recounts McWhinney, “like buying equipment to harvest or move the berries. But that all depreciates over time. I didn’t want my assets to depreciate; I wanted to do it the asset appreciation way.”
In mid-1993, McWhinney saw an article in TIME about the real estate boom in Colorado. That September, McWhinney and his brother Troy left for Colorado.
“Denver is my lily pond. It takes about 30 days for an empty pond to be filled with lily pads. It starts with just one and doubles every day. So by day 28, it’s 25% full, then 50% on day 29. The trick is seeing the pond full of lilies well before day 28.”
In the past 20 years, McWhinney has acquired and developed over $1 billion in assets. Although this has drawn the attention of Wall Street investors, McWhinney said he would like to remain private: “We’re long-term focused; Wall Street isn’t.”
Following his presentation, McWhinney answered several questions from the audience. When asked about development of Union Station, McWhinney talked about long-term goals: “You have to know what success looks like before you start. We were in a meeting talking about what we could do with Union Station. Partway through, I had to stop everyone, ‘How are we going to measure this?’ After talking about it, we decided on ‘Wow’ strategies. Our goal was to have visitors say ‘Wow’ seven to ten times while they explored the station. Our mentalities changed from ‘I think it should look like this’ to ‘What can we put there that will make someone say ‘Wow’?”
For more information about the real estate developer McWhinney, visit its website. To learn more about Chad McWhinney, check out his bio.
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