Tel: 804.864.1100

Tel: 804.864.1100

Jared Burden

Richmond’s Commercial Real Estate Market Still Robust

GreeneHurlocker’s commercial real estate attorneys, Andy Brownstein and Jared Burden, along with more than 200 real estate industry colleagues, attended the Greater Richmond Association for Commercial Real Estate (GRACRE)’s 2020 Real Estate Market Review on February 18, 2020. What’s the verdict on the health of the local commercial real estate market in the Richmond MSA? Good, with few reservations.

Among the six speakers we heard plenty of optimism about the area’s ability to absorb more commercial real estate space, including apartments, office, industrial and hospitality. However, a consistent them was that is both finite demand, given the middle-market nature of Richmond’s business environment, and finite supply, given the lead time (up to 36 months) in developing commercial property. As a result, given shifting interests rates and other financing considerations, projects will have to be carefully planned and developed.

News coverage in the Richmond Times-Dispatch of the event is here.

Richmond’s rise in the Metropolitan Statistical Area ranking (now 45th) due to its population growth (1.3 million), of which 54% are of prime working age, along with relatively constant rates of space absorption, suggests commercial development has not reached saturation. Even older office developments, such as Innsbrook, are getting seeing good demand rents due to redevelopment and improvement of old commercial stock.

If there was one property class that is especially hot, it would be multifamily. Eric Phipps of SNP Properties cited properties in Scott’s Addition and Manchester as continuing to be in very high demand. He also suggested that the West Broad Street corridor and Jackson Ward to be ripe for future commercial development, and that Richmond could consistently absorb 1,500-2,000 a year for the next few years.

Nick Patel of Kalyan Hospitality discounted the potential for multiple casinos to be developed in Virginia in the short term, even if the proposed development in Richmond goes forward, but said he felt up to 1,000 additional rooms could be built in the greater Richmond market. He did not believe the downtown hospitality market would not see any luxury hotel development until average room rates approached $200, up from approximately $150 today.

While retail is still a challenging asset class, there are a number of exciting projects underway in the Richmond area, including the redevelopment of Regency Square and Virginia Center Commons, Carytown Exchange and the Sauer Center, showing that there is still an appetite for retail development under the right circumstances. Nikki Jassey provided a window into the shifts created by the rise of Amazon and different approaches taken by retail tenants and developers.

Finally, there remains a strong demand for industrial properties, especially along the interchanges of Interstates 295 and 64 and Interstates 295 and 95. We have benefited from strong local transportation infrastructure as well as the growth of data center demand without the downsides of locating in Northern Virginia.

It sure was good to run into a number of our friends and colleagues in the real estate business and hear some promising news about the future at GRACRE. If you would like to know more about what we learned, or discuss commercial real estate opportunities in Richmond or other parts of Virginia, contact Andy (804.864.1100)  or Jared (703.258.2678) or any of GreeneHurlocker’s Virginia real estate attorneys.

February 19, 2020 Andy Brownstein, commercial real estate, entrepreneurship, Jared Burden, Recent GreeneHurlocker News, Virginia, , , , 0 Read more >

Ideas Are Just That: Part 3

We’ve been sharing a series of blog posts and videos here and here about how an idea is just that: an idea, and how there are some basic, critical things a high-potential start-up technology company founder must do in order to make any idea worth having and building upon. As I said in my first post, the fact is, most ideas suck. So a founder needs to be sure this idea is worth making it the most important thing in her life for the next months or years.

My third suggestion for the immediate post-idea step is: Focus obsessively on creating a minimally viable product.

Don’t get caught up in the romance of the wonderfulness or inevitability of your idea, the greatness of your team, or the exuberant free feeling of having decided to jump in with both feet. The fact is, you haven’t yet accomplished the whole reason for doing this in the first place, which is selling something to people who want to buy what you have to sell. The excitement is going to wear off and then it’ll be time to get to work. If you don’t get to work immediately, you probably will have lost your opportunity.

It is all about speed.

Too many startups begin with an idea for a product that they think people want. When it isn’t resonating with customers, it is often because the founders never spoke to prospective customers and determined whether or not the product was interesting. When customers ultimately communicate, through their indifference, that they don’t care about the product, the startup fails.
The truly most important question you need to start asking yourself is the following. It’s the first thing you should ask yourself even before you swing your legs off the edge if the bed to get up on the first morning after to you come up with your great idea.

“Should this product be built?”

And then, soon thereafter, maybe before you brush your teeth, you need to ask “Can we build a sustainable business around your product?’
At this point it’s really only about two things: a first product that you know the world needs, and a plan for how first product can actually get customers. The team needs to be focused brutally on these things. Let the customers be your source of accountability.

The new company should be focused on quickly developing a minimally viable product and then learning as much as possible about its weaknesses and opportunities for improvement. Iteration upon iterations, pulling your hair out from anxiety that you’ll never get it right, near-all-nighters and lost weekends — all of that fun stuff. The point is to do all of this on the front end, quickly, and always being in dialogue with the customer, not stuck in an echo chamber of a founder team that may be overly enamored with the original concept.

When a founder focuses on figuring out the right thing to build—the thing customers want and will pay for—she need not spend months developing a prototype or waiting for a beta launch to change the company’s direction. Instead, she can adapt her plan incrementally, inch by inch, minute by minute, moving fast, boxing out the competition.

A couple of years ago I spent three days in the James Madison University’s Icehouse facility with about 24 entrepreneurs who had agreed to lock themselves in and spend that whole weekend developing companies based on pitches that they made on the first night. These people , for the most part, had never met each other. Groups coalesced around about eight ideas big and small. Through the weekend there was a compressed process of honing the original idea and creating a business plan and readying the product or service for the launch. I remember several of the teams were stumped by this question: Will customers want this? Only one of the groups spent the first night doing customer demand research – one group had thought to do this out of eight. That may be somewhat reflective about what real companies do when they go out into the real world. I hope not.

The founding team members need to relish being sponges for crucial information gleaned from the only people that matter: potential customers. This is never more true than at inception and in the earliest weeks and months.

Watch for our next post on “Ideas are just that.” Meanwhile, if you have any questions about startup steps or business law, just reach out to me or any of our Virginia business lawyers.

January 27, 2020 business law, entrepreneurship, ideas, Jared Burden, The GreeneHurlocker Blog, Virginia, , , , , , , , , 0 Read more >

Client Conversations

Just prior to the holidays, we stopped by to see Randy Seitz, CEO of our long-term Harrisonburg client Blueline, to check in and get his opinion on what is important to his company in working with their law firm. This short video includes the things we talked about. Call or email me if you want more details.

January 2, 2020 business law, Harrisonburg, Jared Burden, The GreeneHurlocker Blog, , , , , , 0 Read more >

Ideas are Just That: Part 1

That moment you realize you have an idea worth a business is a great moment. Sometimes it’s an epiphany on the road to Damascus. Sometimes it’s a slow dawning after a grind lasting several years. But however it happens, it’s time to sit back and go “huh.” It’s an achievement.

Most large corporations interested in continuing to exist generate ideas all of the time, as a matter of course. These ideas, generated by scientists or creatives, are noted, catalogued and vetted. With the promising ones, perhaps the inventor/employee fills out a patent disclosure form and a provisions patent application is filed.

But the rest of the ideas? They are just embodiments of the old adage that you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your prince or princess. You never get to the good ones unless you generate a lot of bad ones.

The fact is, most ideas suck.

I’m not writing to talk about bad ideas, though. I want to write about what high-potential start-up technology companies should first do with their good ideas.

Joseph Lassiter of Harvard Business School says a high-potential technology startup is one that plans to hit the $50 million per year mark in new product/service sales within 5 years.”
A new one-off auto battery retail store down the road, no matter how impressive the owners are, is not a high potential technology startup. But, the company that holes up in a garage in an industrial park developing an electricity storage product that is based on an idea that came out of a major university technology transfer office and could disrupt the solar energy marketplace probably is one. It almost certainly wants to sell its products to every big or small solar energy producer anywhere in the world and will do whatever it takes to get there.

Ideas are just that: Ideas. Even the ones that are good are worthless – at least on the day they’re are created. You can’t patent an idea, you can’t trademark an idea, you can’t copyright an idea, and your idea by itself doesn’t make a very valuable trade secret.

We tend to focus on ideas, on genius and creativity, the light bulb, the “Eureka” moment. But let’s be honest. There’s very little more poignant than the unfulfilled “Idea Person,” the person who thinks she could have been a contender in business if she’d just had the time/just had the money/just had the team to fulfill all of the dreams in her head. You have to do something with an idea, and chances are our “Idea Person” just didn’t stick with it – if only to get to the liberating point of understanding that the idea was not, really, in fact a contender.

I’ll be posting a series of blogs laying out five top things a high potential technology founder needs to do immediately if she wants to deliver on all of the high potential her idea might possess. I’ll be addressing the founder as “you.”

Number 1: Decide if you want a co-founder.

The direction here may have something to do with just how big is your idea. If this is the big idea, and if your high potential idea means someone has to develop the app and someone has to sell the product and someone has to be able to do the magic that quants can do with Excel, and this is all starting from scratch, then maybe you don’t want to start off alone.
This very first decision – whether to go it alone or bring one or more trusted folks into the founder’s tent – ties in completely to what resources you have available to you.

When founding a company, there are three basic assets you can make use of: human capital, social capital, and financial capital.

  • Human capital means knowledge derived from formal education and the skills derived from prior experience. A founder with a great amount of human capital can reduce the chances he will get blindsided by something he really should have known could happen. Some call it “wisdom.” I believe you can have a lot of wisdom even when you’re 24 if you’ve studied a lot and worked a lot and kept your eyes open. And there are loads of people my age (which is older than that) who are don’t have wisdom. Point is, if you don’t have it, your human capital is less than optimal, and you may want access to it from someone else.
  • Social capital means the benefits that come from your place in information and communication networks. A startup must project itself outward, whether it’s to hire people, raise money, sell, or any number of other things. If you are an industry insider, or if you just know a lot of people, or you just love networking events, then you might have a lot of social capital. If you’re someone who just doesn’t get out much, then maybe your own social capital is, shall we say, lacking.
  • Financial capital means, well, I think we know what that means. For a founder, if you have “screw-you money,” if you can quit your job and pay for all of the costs of the new company until its projected time to become successful or not, then that’s a blessing. It’s a fairly rare blessing.

A major reason you co-found is to make up for the kind, or kinds, of capital you lack.

One researcher’s long-term study found that solo founders accounted for less than 20% percent of technology startups.
If you are a person with an idea, a sober-minded business plan might lead you to the conclusion that you need one or more cofounders if you are going to create a real business, and you might already know who they are. Or you might need to go looking. Either way, there’s someone close to coming up with the same idea in Portland, so best to get moving.

I’ll follow up soon with the 2nd action a founder needs to take after deciding to make a go of their great idea. Meanwhile, if you have any questions about the content of this article or on any business startup issue, please contact me or any of our business lawyers.

November 10, 2019 business law, ideas, Jared Burden, OPENgc, The GreeneHurlocker Blog, , , 0 Read more >

Five Essentials To Bring an Idea to Life

Jared Burden leads a session in the business track at Valley TechCon 2019.

Jared Burden, Harrisonburg partner, led the kickoff session in the Growing Your Technology Business track at Valley TechCon September 25, held at the Hotel Madison and Shenandoah Conference Center in Harrisonburg, attended by about 160 company executives and entrepreneurs. His presentation laid out the five essential things a founding team needs to do immediately in order to turn an idea into a company. His slide deck is here.

If you’d like to have Jared reprise his presentation for your company or organization, please contact him. If you have questions about this topic, Valley TechCon or any issue of business law and growth, contact Jared or any of our business lawyers.

September 27, 2019 business law, Harrisonburg, Jared Burden, Recent GreeneHurlocker News, , , , , , , 0 Read more >

Knowing Where to Start

Clients wonder sometimes what they are getting into when they ask a lawyer to draft a contract. Maybe their fear is that their attorney will sharpen up his metaphorical pencil, lean his chair back to think deeply on life and law for an hour or two (on the clock), and then pull out the laptop and sit down to drafts things up from scratch, like a composer writing out each note to a (very boring) symphony. The client may fear that the lawyer views every deal is different, that everything about every deal is new every time, that everything needs to be tailored like a bespoke suit.

Every deal is different, it’s often said – I’ve heard myself say it a hundred times. That’s because the facts are different, and that’s because no two people and no two companies are alike or have the exact same priorities. But that doesn’t mean that two deals – say, two leases of refrigerated warehouse space, or two agreements for the purchase of the assets of small businesses — happening 500 miles apart (or 5000 or 5) — can’t be done with forms of contract that are 90% the same.

In fact, they probably should be done that way.

And your attorney shouldn’t be spending a whole lot of time going for the Pulitzer Prize for creative nonfiction and drafting that 90% (just a percentage used for illustration purposes) from scratch.

Unless we are speaking of some sort of business deal where the industry is utterly new, the parties are utterly idiosyncratic, and the risk tolerances are off the charts (one direction or the other), or all of the above, the same basic forms work across the board. I remember Internet 1.0 – the days of AOL and Pets.com — and the ways that lawyers were trying to draft “application service provider” contracts that expressed the concept of software programs being accessed over the Internet (what we now call Software as a Service (SaaS)). But even in that time, when the Internet was beginning to utterly change the way the world operated, the contracts were pretty much built right on top of software, consulting, joint venture and financing contracts that had been around for decades before that.

The majority of the text in a contract from 1975 (the year of the room-sized computer) – for example, events of default, remedies on default, representations and warranties, indemnification, assignment, the boilerplate at the end, and the general flow and sequence of the document — was essentially the same as the text in a contract drafted in 2000 (the year of the Pets.com sock puppet). The same is even more true for commercial real estate contracts, and even holds true for many types of intellectual property agreements.

And it goes without saying that 90% of the text in an accounting SaaS services agreement from 2017 is going to be the same as a payroll SaaS services agreement from 2019.

Anyone who tells it differently is trying to create mystery where there really should be none.

That’s my candid and honest observation How does this insight relate to you?

As outside corporate general counsel, under our OPENgc service offering, GreeneHurlocker is keenly focused on saving a client time and money while still delivering the legal assistance a client needs, when they need it. We avoid reinventing wheels. We’ve been practicing enough years, in widely varying industries and for companies of all sizes, to have an experienced, intuitive sense of what works and what doesn’t, and how the work we’ve done before may apply to the work we are doing for a client now. When a client picks up the phone and asks for an individual contract to be done or an entire deal to be quarterbacked, the client can rest assured we are not starting from scratch. Instead, we’re applying all the knowledge and work we have already done.

We’re here to guide you to the end of your deal. But we also know where to start.

June 15, 2019 business law, contracts, Harrisonburg, Jared Burden, The GreeneHurlocker Blog, , , , , , 0 Read more >

We’re Helping at First Fridays…This Friday

GreeneHurlocker is proud to sponsor a special First Fridays Downtown event this Friday, April 5 put on by its landlord, the Arts Council of the Valley (ACV), in GreeneHurlocker’s building at 311 S. Main St., Harrisonburg VA. ACV is kicking off National Poetry Month Friday from 5:00-8:00 PM, with a presentation and readings by Virginia’s Poet Laureate, Dr. Henry Hart. You’ll also experience A Cup of Sun, paintings by Kim Juda Souder, and Inspired by Nature, works by Robert Bersson.

First Fridays is one of the reasons GreeneHurlocker is so happy to be in downtown Harrisonburg. Stop in for a beverage, to say “Hi,” see our offices, hear some great poetry and see some wonderful art. For details call our Harrisonburg partner, Jared Burden.

UPDATE: The event had the highest attendance in recent memory, about 230 people attended and enjoyed the artwork, networking and the chance to hear and talk with Virginia’s Poet Laureate Dr. Henry Hart. Pictures below.

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April 21, 2019 community service, Firm News, Harrisonburg, Jared Burden, Recent GreeneHurlocker News, , , , 0 Read more >

Great Client, Great Coverage

The Washington Post’s coverage on Sunday of our good client Shenandoah Growers of Harrisonburg affirms their rise from a small, family-owned herb farm to a national leader in flavor-forward produce selling in 23,000 stores, including 16 of the country’s top 20 food retailers. Take a look at this profile in the Washington Post Business section last Friday. The company’s process innovations and tight focus made them a great subject for the Post and an ideal client for our OPENgc legal expertise. Relentless innovation and a profound understanding of the market are the main reasons they have been successful — and among the many reasons we have been glad to serve as their general counsel for several years

If you have any questions about the services we provide to entrepreneurial and growing businesses, contact Jared Burden or any of our Virginia business lawyers.

February 11, 2019 business law, Harrisonburg, health foods, Jared Burden, Recent GreeneHurlocker News, Uncategorized, , , , , 0 Read more >