With an opening statement like that, coming from a man who has built a virtual empire in commercial real estate services, development and telecommunications with annual revenues around $25 million – there's hope for every entrepreneur. Aside from having built 6 million square feet of commercial properties, and providing corporate real estate services to companies nationwide, he is the leading retailer for Cingular Wireless in five states, having grown to more than 90 stores from a dead start couple years ago.

In fact, Bill's life-story is a testament to facing obstacles and overcoming them – be they of his own making or an act of unfortunate providence.

The man has literally had misfortunes that he shouldn't have survived. More on that later; first a little about how he started building his company and some of his early missteps.

After his divorce, Bill took a getaway trip to Dallas in 1982 and found a real estate guy's nirvana. "Buildings were being built on every corner," he said. "I had a passion to be in a bigger market and wanted to earn a name for myself apart from my father. I thought, what better place than Dallas?"

He did great for a while, but then the commercial real estate market took a nosedive. After the Dallas real estate market crashed in the mid-1980s, Bill went to work for the Bass brothers in Fort Worth. "I didn't enjoy it because what I was doing was calling on my peers who were in trouble, taking their last dollar off the table," he says.

Undaunted by the market conditions and tired of what he was doing, a  year later Bill launched his own firm, Cawley & Associates, which he ran from a bedroom in his house. Business was slow. It took six months to save enough to buy a fax machine.

As technology developed for companies to track costs more closely, they started seeing they had no focus on real estate cost. So around that time companies started making decisions on real estate more centrally, at the corporate level.

"I started calling on Fortune 100 companies. I flew up to see any one that would see me and talked to them about handling all their real estate. I learned that they'll see you, but they won't do business with you if your company is too small." Bill said.

For 12 months he traveled, calling on big companies, and didn't get a dime's worth of business.

In desperation, he turned to local startups and smaller companies.

"These were companies that, when I called on them, they had three employees – a CEO, CFO and secretary. No one was calling on them, so they wanted to do business with me," Bill said.

Bill would provide them with whatever corporate real estate services they needed, from simple lease negotiations to cost analysis to site selection.

Sometimes it would take a while for the relationships he built to become truly profitable. But as these startups grew in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he grew with them. The relationship had been forged.

"We went from doing zero business to millions in revenue in the course of four or five years," he said.

A year's time, opportunities with the right clients and lots of travel money.

"It got to the point where I was living off friends. As broke as you can be. I even had my gas meter pulled."

What happened

Sometimes you have to take small bites

Bill was right about how real estate needs were evolving. He was right that he could provide the services the Fortune 100s needed. He was right about everything but the fact that often, large companies don't have much faith in smaller companies to provide services.

"I was right about everything but who my proper target was, so I spent a year chasing rabbits," he says. "Big companies will talk to you even though they have no intention of doing business with you because they have people who are paid to talk to you anyway."

Finding Himself Along the Way – At the Bottom of a Ravine

By 1996, though, as the height of the 1990s real estate boom in Texas was approaching, Bill faced a setback that was of his own making, but it taught him his most valuable lesson in business – and life.

Bill was in Colorado on July 5, 1996, zipping down a two-lane road near Aspen on his new motorcycle. He tried to pass a car and a dangerous game of chicken ensued. Cawley hit the brakes to avoid an oncoming car and was catapulted over a 30-foot cliff at 60 miles an hour. The impact crushed both of his arms and his right leg. His head, held together by his helmet, felt like it was in a bucket.

"It was an accident I shouldn't have survived."

"I believed in my heart that I was taking my last breath," Bill said. "Everything that seemed important to me before then – all the leases I hadn't signed, all the deals I hadn't done – didn't matter anymore. My family, my children, the legacy I was leaving behind as a person, all became incredibly important."

"Then I began to think about God," he says. "I realized if I died, I wasn't sure where I was going to go."

About 20 minutes later, Cawley heard the voices of his two riding buddies on the road above him. Realizing he had a chance to survive, he used his one good leg to thrash his way up the hill and collapsed at the top. He was flown to a hospital where he went into surgery – for 19 hours.

The next morning, a male nurse used a piece of rubber to stick a spoon in Bill's bandaged fist, trying to get his patient to eat some cereal.

"I was just starting to realize how bad things really were, and I started crying," said Bill, who was then 43 at the time. "The nurse put me in a wheelchair and took me outside to get some fresh air. He sat me under a tree and left me there. It happened to be next to the entrance where paraplegics get dropped off for their daily therapy.

"For four hours, I watched people struggle to get out of their vehicles and into the building," Bill said. "It was the last pity party I ever had."

The real estate broker's yearlong recovery involved nine surgeries. He spent most of the time in bed. He couldn't brush his teeth or bathe himself. He needed help to go to the bathroom.

During those 12 months, as Bill was flat on his back, his company went horizontal, too. Bill had always had his hand in everything at his company, but without him, others in the company stepped up to help lead things. The full-service real estate firm was transformed from a vertical organization into a flatter one.

In the process, by letting go of his need to control every aspect, he and his company began to flourish.

Iron-fisted control of his company

What happened

Playing Chicken on a Motorcycle is Not A Good Idea

He remembers lying in the hospital bed thinking he was going to go broke. But everyone really stepped up. The people he thought he always needed to direct knew their jobs, and he had invested them with a sense of ownership in what they did.

"It made me realize I didn't have to be involved in every little detail. In fact, my company did extremely well without me. It was a humbling experience, but it was also a very rewarding experience," Bill says. "I learned to delegate because I had to, and when you have the right people to delegate to, it works better than anything."

Bill took it steps beyond that. He learned to put people in roles where they only had to do what they liked to do and what they were good at.

He didn't have to be the rainmaker like he was before. Didn't have to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders if he had the right people.

"I put in place ways to find out what people's strengths are. Most people don't even know what their own strengths are. We test people to determine it. We don't base a whole lot on interviews because the best interviewees may have call hesitation or other issues. Some people's greatest strengths are job interviews. References are good, but don't put too much stock in them. Too many companies are just passing around their old junk. They either want to be rid of someone with no hassles or they are fearful of lawsuits."

Part of Bill's process in finding new talent is to find people who are successful in other industries besides real estate, who have a focus in sales. He finds the ones who have the skill sets he needs and who are in a job where there is a ceiling on their earnings.

"The negative is you have to feed that employee longer and it's longer before they become productive, but when they do they are happier and they are loyal. I've brought in people making $200,000 a year and within a year or two they were making $2 million," Bill says.

None of Bill's other life-lessons are as dramatic as that, nor were they as life changing, but they are wise words for the entrepreneur seeking equity partners.

Bill got burned on a money deal a few years before his accident.

It was the mid-1990s when the economy was just getting good again. He had secured a development site but didn't have enough money to close on it. He went looking for money partners and found two potential ones.

One had a great reputation and track record, but was difficult to deal with. They weren't giving Bill a very big piece of the opportunity and the cost of the money was high. (In real estate development deals like this one, the equity partner takes their portion first, and then splits the remainder of a profit with the developer.)

The other negotiated until the 11^th hour, but offered Bill a bigger upside with one caveat attached – they wanted the right to terminate the developer without cause. Bill – and keep in mind this is before his motorcycle accident so he laughs that he can't blame it on the blow to the head he took – chose to go with the one offering the better upside. And, the watchful reader will have seen a nearly universal theme – he didn't do any real background checking on the equity partner.

"It was a better money deal, and I didn't expect anyone would do what they did," Bill said. "They let us educate them, and start the project, and then they terminated us."

About $2 million.

What happened

Check Backgrounds. Check Backgrounds. Check Backgrounds.

"I went for money instead of the right relationship. If I had checked them out with people in town, I would have found out he'd screwed other people over before," Bill says.

There was even an early tell-tale. At their third meeting over dinner, this equity person – who was married – brought to the dinner as his guest his girlfriend.

"If you're going to cheat on your life partner, you're going to cheat other people," Bill says. "I should have known."

As a closing note, the reader should know that not only did Bill recover from all his obstacles financially – he's also back in fighting shape and has full use of his legs and hands again.

In rebuilding his company and his body, he also rebuilt relationships with his daughter, Kelly, and his son, who now works at his company. He met and married his second wife, Keely, and traded in his motorcycle for a convertible. 

He also developed a deep spiritual relationship with God, which he says now guides the way he runs his business.

QUESTION

How well do you know the market you targeting?  Is your company in the right position with respect to size, capital, and product offering to effectively tackle that market?

Are you choosing between several potential joint-venture partners?  Do they conduct themselves in a way, both personally and professionally, that would make you proud to be associated with them?