Don Tomlin, President of Tomlin & Company

MidlandsBiz:
You are well known in town, but people don’t seem to know much about you.  Do you intentionally try to stay out of the spotlight?

Don Tomlin:
Luckily I got politics out of my system at a young age.

In 1965, I decided to run for student president of A.C. Flora High School here in Columbia.  It was a very competitive high school and I was not your typical student president type (I was little bit fat).  But man I worked hard!  I got out early in the morning and late in the evening, campaigned, shook hands, and did posters. I was elected president of the student body and was able to accomplish a lot of things with extra-curricular activities at the school, and I also dealt directly with the city and the school board.

I said to myself, self, it just doesn’t get any better than this, and at the ripe old age of 18, I decided to permanently retire from the public spotlight.

MidlandsBiz:
Where were you born?

Don Tomlin:
I was born here, grew up here, and got a fabulous education in public schools here.  I also  received a degree in business management at the University of South Carolina.

MidlandsBiz:
Outline some key events in your formative years that shaped your career.

Don Tomlin:
My first meaningful job was at age 13 picking peaches on a farm in Lexington County because I just couldn’t sit around doing nothing all summer.  By the time I graduated from High School, I had a pretty good resume, and an even better one by the time I got out of college.

While at USC , I joined the navy to become an ROTC officer. After my junior year I dressed up in my suit and decided to drive to Washington, DC and march right into the Pentagon with my resume in hand.  A receptionist told me that I needed to go and speak to this person, and little did I know that it was a full blown Admiral.  But I didn’t know who he was, so I wasn’t scared at all!

I showed him my resume and he told me what to put on my Navy Officer Assignment preference form.  The Navy sent me to the best public relations school (PR) in the world and I was sort of on my way. Nobody at Carolina particularly liked that I had been to the Pentagon, I got yelled at – heavily, in fact – by the captain of the ROTC. Turns out I should have started at the Navy Annex in Washignton, DC but I didn’t know any better.

I had a wonderful three year career, working virtually straight through without many breaks, and learning a vast amount.

MidlandsBiz:
What did you do for those three years?

Don Tomlin:
I was stationed in the Mediterranean as a PR practitioner during some real tough, Cold War times for our country.  It was a new field and the senior officers were terrified of it because if they were ever misquoted, it could be a career killer.

I was expendable in that sense, so they put me on the front line with the press answering difficult questions about our country’s aircraft carrier issues and a number of other critical  politically loaded controversies.

It’s different today.  With more training, the press is now handled by the Senior Officers, but I got to do all that when I was a young kid.

MidlandsBiz:
How old were you?

Don Tomlin:
However old you are when you graduate – 20, 21 years old.  Thinking back, it was amazing; I got to work with come of the best journalists in the world.

MidlandsBiz:
After the Navy, give us the Reader’s Digest version of your career.

Don Tomlin:
Wow.  Well, when I came back to Columbia, a bank president called me up and said that he wanted me to come down and talk to him about doing workouts.  I asked him, What’s that? and he said, That’s why I want you.  You don’t know anything bad about real estate finance.

Workouts are loans that have gone sour for whatever reason – developments built without the right marketing concept, or that have significant legal problems, etc.

My first experience with real estate was unscrambling other people’s eggs, learning about the market from the ugly side of the world.

Eventually, a few things came along that were so bad that the bank told me they would lend me the money to buy the properties myself, and that’s how I got started building my own capital.

I was focused on doing workouts until 1989.  With the changes in real estate taxation in the 1980’s, I started to sell all of my real estate holdings and pay off debt and when the worst crunch came in 1990, luckily my real estate holdings and debt were minimal.

In 1989, I started investing in media assets and restructuring media companies.  I eventually sold that portfolio in 1997 for a very nice profit.

MidlandsBiz:
Are you still involved in media today?

Don Tomlin:
I am very much interested in all types of media still and I consider myself a frustrated journalist.  I am also frustrated at the lack of comprehensive business coverage that we have in this city.

Good writing is the key to business success, as far as I’m concerned, and I try to do whatever I can to help promote good writing.  Nobody knows how to write anymore!  Joe Taylor and I started a statewide award a few years back that is given to recognize outstanding achievements in investigative journalism.

I like what is being done here locally by the Free Times.  I think it’s the best city coverage that we have in town.

On a business level, I have also done several billion dollars in mergers and acquisitions and debt placement for a company out of Birmingham, Alabama called Community Newspaper Holdings, Inc.  They are the largest in America in terms of titles and we have helped them buy almost everything they have bought and sold.

One strategy has been to concentrate on small town newspapers where the Internet is not the monster that it is in larger cities.  We have helped assemble about 3 billion dollars worth of community newspapers that are still doing great, tonning it, so to speak. That’s been a lot of fun.

MidlandsBiz:
But you have also built back up some significant real estate assets.

Don Tomlin:
We have been very lucky.  We have branched out to do some city-sized  community developments.  I did a development called Park West in Charleston with my younger brother, Pat Tomlin, and also here in town, we are very proud of Lake Carolina.  Park West is almost finished except for  the marketing of a portion of the property on the Wando River.

We have done three city-sized developments in the last decade including an amazing mixed-use, business and neighborhood  called Ayrsley in southwest Charlotte.

MidlandsBiz:
Do you have any other business interests?

Don Tomlin:
Yes, we are building an exciting new company called Portrait Innovations.  We have a store here in Columbia at Sandhills.  As of the end of this month we will have 120 stores across the country, and we are continuing to open one store a week.

It’s a new paradigm in portraiture where a family can come in and within 15 minutes walk out with high quality pictures.  We hire mainly journalism students who have trained on this sophisticated Fuji camera.  We put them in a state of the art camera studio and let their creativity really shine through.

We photographed  over 600,000 families and did 70 million dollars worth of business last year.  It’s a really fun outing for a family.

MidlandsBiz:
What is your involvement USC Technology Incubator?

Don Tomlin:
We funded the Incubator for its first three years and we have helped mentor companies.  We are really proud of the Incubator and of the role that Joel Stevenson plays down there.  It’s a business model that has cost the city, and the county, a nominal amount per job created.

MidlandsBiz:
Why did you fund the Incubator?

Don Tomlin:
There wasn’t anybody that understood what an Incubator was when I was asked.  The Dean of Engineering at USC came to me and said that we will fail in long-term professor recruiting if we don’t have a place where we can take the research and inventions and help turn them into viable businesses.

Compare this stat: Companies that are professionally incubated have a 91% chance of success.  And generally speaking companies that try to do it on their own have a 80% chance of failure.

It’s the cross incubation among companies, or water cooler incubation, that is the real magic.  You have a problem; well the guy next to you can help you because he has been through the same thing.  And don’t underestimate the pipeline that Joel Stevenson has into the business community statewide.  If an incubator company needs something, we’ll find help.

You look at the diversity of the young people and companies that are in the program, and particularly the access they have to Midlands Tech and Carolina – that’s what’s awesome.

MidlandsBiz:
You are also involved in some innovative downtown housing projects here in Columbia.

Don Tomlin:
We were asked about 4 years ago to work on quality, affordable, 21st century workforce housing in the city.  If we are going to build the knowledge-based economy in Columbia, we need a vibrant downtown housing market. The company we formed to accomplish this goal is called Hallmark Homes and it is doing extremely well.

We are also working on a project on the land wrapped around Bible Way Church out on Atlas Road.  We studied some developments out in Texas where housing has been built around mega churches.  People want to live around the churches because they have something going on 24/7.

Bible Way has approximately 10,000 members.  Darrell Jackson, the pastor, runs a church that has streaming video, wellness centers, women’s health centers, counseling centers, computer classes for 80 year old women, and classes for kids that want to excel and break through.  It’s an incredible enterprise.

We are tickled to be building houses around it.  They will be affordable, and first class.

MidlandsBiz:
What advice do you give to young entrepreneurs?

Don Tomlin:
Don’t see walls.  Lawyers can see walls.  Engineers can sure see walls.  But an entrepreneur just ignores them and just blasts right through. An entrepreneur is a person who can’t see impediments to what he wants to accomplish.  If you look up and see walls, then you never get started.

The second piece of advice is You’re the Expert.  An entrepreneur, properly informed, is a person who makes his own decisions. Don’t go to your lawyer or accountant and ask them to make decisions for you.  Seek advice, listen and then YOU decide.  Never relegate your decision making to a third party.  You’re the expert.

The third thing is keep your switch on 24/7, your brain on 24/7.  If you go home at night and find that you are daydreaming about classical music, then go and get a job for someone else.  An entrepreneur needs to constantly soak up all the information around him and be constantly thinking about his business.  You need to load your relational database all the time –  keep loading it up.

MidlandsBiz:
True or false.  Columbia will become a dynamic place to live with a world-class knowledge-based economy?

Don Tomlin:
Here’s a quote from a senior bank officer around town.  We are standing on a burning platform in this city.  If we don’t realize the urgency of the situation, then we are going to be eclipsed by Asheville and Augusta, just as we have been eclipsed in per capita income by Raleigh.

Asheville just recently landed a huge contract with the NOAA because one of its congressmen had the foresight to go out and obtain an internet communications backbone of Biblical proportions.  So when NOAA came looking for a place to locate, guess where they decided to go?

Now with the medical infrastructure that they have in Augusta and their relationship with Georgia Tech – with the focus that they have!  You watch.

How is that going to feel here in Columbia to watch another neighboring city eclipse us economically?  That disturbs me and drives me to want to be involved in the knowledge economy here

MidlandsBiz:
So what are the roadblocks?

Don Tomlin:
Somebody needs to make a list of the 20 people that are holding Columbia back.  Wouldn’t that be a great story!

MidlandsBiz:
What business accomplishment are you most proud of?

Don Tomlin:
We had a ground-breaking the other day for the new dormitory at Allen University – that is my proudest accomplishment.  I would put it in the category of nearly impossible to get done, but somehow our team managed to pull it off.  The entire project was an enormous collaborative effort. We had a historic house to deal with, the Waverly neighborhood, the University, the city, the design committee, and the Department of Education.

We were very delighted to close a 19 million dollar loan generated by the Department of Education.  A modern dorm will transform the college and dramatically improve their cash-flow.  It is interesting to see how a university can change its model; how dorm revenue can help to supplement a college’s cash flow.

MidlandsBiz:
What are some of your passions in life outside of business?

Don Tomlin:
Three little kids ages 3, 5 and 8 – they keep me busy.

MidlandsBiz:
Can you tell us what lies ahead for Don Tomlin?

Don Tomlin:
I can see myself with an investment in a housing company dedicated to putting affordable housing in cities like Columbia, Newberry, Florence, and Sumter.  It’s fun after years of being in investment banking and intangibles to be able to get in the car and go out see things being built, to see people getting their first home.

When we look into buying into small local newspapers, we get to see first hand good housing happening in the cities again.  Ridgeway, what a charming little town, for example!  That is a town that will explode one day and is well suited for someone to focus on.