Ten years in real estate before going out on my own.
Hard money is where I started, and it's a useful place to start, because a short loan against real collateral doesn't leave much room to be wrong. Ten years later, after real estate and private equity, I do the same work on my own.
Most of that time was underwriting, but underwriting was never the whole job. I built the acquisition models, ran the diligence, abstracted leases, normalized T12s that had been massaged before they got to us, sized debt, structured waterfalls, and then turned all of it into the OM or investor deck that went out to raise the capital. Same deal, start to finish, which is how I learned that the model and the materials can't be built by different people without something breaking.
Now I do that work independently, for sponsors and syndicators, funds, private equity firms, and operators financing a building with bank or SBA debt.
Finance, University of Michigan.
Across hard money lending, private equity, and independent advisory.
Multifamily acquisitions underwritten.
SBA-financed assisted living acquisition, built to the lender's coverage test.
Over the years, I've learned that every deal has an assumption somewhere doing more work than the others. And for how much rides on it, it's rarely the one getting debated in the room. More often than not, it's the quiet one buried in the model, the one everyone accepts without asking whether it actually holds.