Nina Tran on Growing Waypoint Homes
Nina Tran, an advisor to the Women in Leadership program, is CFO of Veritas Investments, leveraging over 25 years of experience in real estate and financial management. In her talk to the students of the Women in Leadership program, she held up a magnifying glass to a pivotal part of her career: her three-and-a-half-year role as CFO of Waypoint Homes.
As Ms. Tran explained, the company was started by Doug Brian and Colin Wiel, who began buying, fixing, and renting out single-family homes during the 2008 financial crisis. At that time, most single-family rentals were owned by small ‘mom and pop’ businesses. “There were no institutional operators at all in this sector. There was nobody operating at scale. [So] there was a lot of opportunity for a company like Waypoint to be able to take a slice of that pie.”
In 2012, they decided that if they wanted to continue the company’s growth, it was time to go public. That’s when they brought in Ms. Tran. “When I joined, I had six months basically to clean up the books, get us ready to go public. I basically didn’t sleep.” Ms. Tran walked the audience through slides from her company’s roadshow — the presentation they gave to potential investors describing what the company was and what they hoped to achieve.
They soon realized, however, that it wasn’t the right market for them to go public on their own. Enter Starwood Capital Group, another company that dealt in single-family rental homes. “We had the operating platform, but we didn’t have the capital. They had the capital, but they didn’t have the operating platform. It was sort of a natural marriage to merge the two companies.” The company would see two other mergers, combining with Colony American Homes and, after Ms. Tran’s departure in 2016, with Invitation Homes.
During the Q&A session that followed, Ms. Tran delved into the skills that had made her and her company thrive. What did it take for her to be the CFO that Waypoint needed?
“I think part of being a successful, IPO-ready type of CFO is you’ve got to be very organized,” she explained. “You have to make sure that you’re thinking ahead. The role is almost like a quarterback because you have to coordinate so many things internally. You want to be a very proactive communicator to make sure everything stays in line.”
She explained that these skills extend to any form of leadership. The techniques that have never failed her? “Being proactive and staying organized and staying ahead of the game.
“If you don’t know something,” she elaborated, “try to research it before you go into a meeting. Have the right players in the meeting with you. And if you don’t have the capacity, make sure you hire the right people, so you can delegate and have a team around you to be able to pull that weight.”
Having a good team is critical, because to Ms. Tran, “It’s always the people around you that’s going to make you successful.”
“When I look for my team members, I want to make sure that they are autonomous. I want to make sure they’re going to own their area of responsibility,” Ms. Tran said. And, she said, her top priority is not always technical skills. “What I look for is the emotional intelligence of someone who’s going to be able to jump in, figure things out, be empathetic to his or her own team members, and reach their hands across different departments. With an IPO or with an M&A you can’t anticipate everything that’s going to happen, and a lot of times you’ve got a loose ball on the field and someone needs to jump on it.”
To be a strong leader in a fast-moving industry, you can never be done learning. But Ms. Tran left the listeners with her advice on the fundamentals: “Organization. Know who to hire. Make sure you know the roadmap. And just work your butt off.”
For more information on the program, please visit Women in Leadership Program, CBE.
