80 Lessons Learned - Volume II - Business Lessons

Thomas Beyer arrived in Canada in 1986 with less than $1,000 in his jeans to pursue his MBA at the University of Alberta. Building multiple businesses—including one with more than $100 million in assets today—was not just far from his mind, it had never even occurred to him then. Working his way through various software engineering and technology marketing careers he left IBM in 1997 to grow a software and consulting firm with a partner in California. He eventually arrived at real estate investing, in parallel to his software start-up career in earnest in 1997, after 10 years of saying, “Gee, I should really do something in real estate.” He started with a single rental pooled condo for $80,000, then grew the initial successes with his own money, and later investor & operating partners into an investment group with more than $100 million in assets with around 1,000 suites, and an associated property management company managing over 1,600 units. The author now lives with his wife in Vancouver, BC, Canada but travels frequently to Alberta to inspect the group’s holdings, to visit their two adult children in Edmonton and to smell the clean, conservative, low tax and non-unionized air.