I realized that the basics of business are straightforward. It’s largely about risk. If you’ve got a big downside and a small upside, run the other w… - Sam Zell

Attracting investors is as much art as science. To gain an advantage, I get creative. These guys see ten presentations a day. They are inundated with seemingly great companies to invest in. To them, I am just another face in the succession. I have just forty-five minutes to make a pitch, answer questions, and leave an impression, so I create custom T-shirts to help seal the deals. I gained a reputation for doing IPO road show T-shirts with memorable, often tongue-in-cheek, spins. They are the calling cards of our sponsorship. And while I didn’t do the road show for Vigoro, I did commemorate the deal with green T-shirts that read: “People Shoot It, Spread It, Sling It, Step in It and Let It Happen . . . We Make Money with It.

So I wrote an article titled “From Cassandra, With Love” and it ran in the March 1988 Real Estate Issues. Cassandra was a character in Greek legend cursed by Apollo with the ability to make accurate predictions that no one believed.

Jay taught me to use simplicity as a strategy. He had an uncanny ability to grasp an extremely complex situation and immediately locate the weakness. He always said that if there were twelve steps in a deal, the whole thing depended on just one of them. The others would either work themselves out or were less important.