What does it take to go from cashing paychecks at a currency exchange to co-founding a thriving real estate private equity firm? In the latest CSuite podcast, Seth sits down with Frank Campise, co-founder of Jab Real Estate, to uncover the humor, hustle, and heart behind his remarkable story.
Growing up in Chicago as the first in his family to graduate college, Frank shares how he turned early influences and big dreams into actionable steps. From his days at Arthur Andersen to making his first real estate investment with just a 3% down payment, Frank’s journey is a testament to resilience and creativity.
He also dives into navigating the Great Financial Crisis, turning roadblocks into opportunities, and the secret sauce for building a cohesive, empowered team—spoiler alert: it’s all about shared ownership and collaboration.
Whether you’re an entrepreneur, investor, or simply love a good success story, this episode is packed with inspiration and actionable takeaways.
🎧 Ready to be inspired? Listen to Frank Campise’s incredible journey on the CSuite podcast, now available on Spotify.
Episode Transcript
Seth Deutsch: Frank, how are you doing?
Frank Campise: I’m doing great, Seth. How are you, my man?
Seth Deutsch: I’m great. Welcome to the Diners and Deals Podcast. We met a few years ago, and we’ve become friends more recently. That’s through our trainer, Pat. We do need to get Pat dating.
Frank Campise: Tall, red, and lonely? Yes. We do need to get Pat dating. And for any of the women out there, he’s six foot two, 225 pounds, about 2% body fat and a broken puppy. So, no offense, Pat, but we’re going to get you on the righteous path.
Seth Deutsch: We are. We’re going to get him going. And then we also happened to go to the best diner in the world, which S&G Diner, and this is where, we were going to do the podcast there. We tried it a few times. We couldn’t get the sound right, so we moved here to the vocal lounge, and it’s worked out just fine. But you’ve been going to S&G for how long?
Frank Campise: Oh, my goodness, probably 20 years. And I used to take my girls there when Johnny was still there, but now it’s Fran and Maria, and over the summer, they have their girls there. But I do encourage anyone who’s listening to this that lives in the city of Chicago or is coming to visit the city of Chicago, if you do want an old school diner experience with good food and a great vibe, you need to go to the corner of Lincoln and Southport and say a midgetized Sicilian sent you there.
Seth Deutsch: That will get you in the door.
Frank Campise: It’ll get you also a free cup of coffee.
Seth Deutsch: There you go. I love it. So, before we get into Jab Real Estate and what you’re doing and some of the new things that you’re working on through that platform, what we like to talk about here a few things. The first thing we like to talk about is your origin story. We kind of think of it as your superhero origin story, and did you always think about becoming an entrepreneur? Was that something that happened to you later in life? But I want to talk about kind of like your early influences, what you did in your career, and what ultimately got you to set out on your own with your partners.
Frank Campise: Sure. So, the interesting thing is I grew up in the city of Chicago, so not the Chicagoland area, but in the city, and I’m 56 years old. So, the city of Chicago years ago looked a lot different than it looks right now. So, if you think of like the Blues Brothers, gritty urban environment, no $2 million homes or any of that stuff. So, my career path was, being the first person to graduate from college in my family, my career path was supposed to be either a doctor, lawyer, or an accountant. And I chose the latter, and I was an accountant, but I always was interested in real estate because when I started college is when the city, so you’re talking 1986, the city of Chicago was in the early stages of urban renewal. And in the neighborhood I grew up in, which is Lakeview, I remember distinctly that I was a freshman, and I left my book bag in my car. So I go to the car, and I’m looking in the car to see if my book bag’s in there because I’m freaking out. Did I leave it at the library? I mean, what the fuck did I do? I’m going to be screwed. And I’m looking in the window of my car, and before I know it, I’m being slammed up against my car by CPD. And they are pulling up my sleeves to see if I have tattoos. And CPD was doing their job. I have no problem with CPD. I grew up in a gang infested neighborhood at that time, and they were doing their job. But what I did realize is I looked up, and there was, I’m not saying that they called the police, but there was two little what we would have called in the 80s and 90s yuppies looking at this happening across the street. And I realized literally at that moment, I did not belong in my own neighborhood. And if I were to stay in my neighborhood, I was going to have to invest in real estate because the neighborhood was changing, and I was going to have to leave if I wasn’t in a position to invest and have a beachhead in my own community. And that’s what planted the seed. But I was so unsophisticated. I think you’ll love this. I was so unsophisticated, I graduate from, so this is in the back of my head. I graduate from DePaul University where I got my undergrad degree. I take a job at Arthur Andersen, which at the time was the largest public accounting firm in the world. And for the first six months, I was cashing my check at a currency exchange. No one in my family ever had a bank account. I had no idea.
Seth Deutsch: Was it the one on Southport and Diversey?
Frank Campise: No, it was on Ashland and Irving, right on the corner, right across from Lakeview High School. But one of my friends at Andersen’s like, hey, knucklehead, there’s these things called banks, maybe you should explore that. But six months after that, so a year, about a year after graduating from college, little under a year after graduating from college, I bought my first apartment building. So, I had a little bit of money saved, I took a cash advance out on a credit card, and I put 3% down and bought a little three flat. And that kind of started that process. So, I stayed at Andersen for a while, and then I went to business school. I went to Northwestern, so again, I never left, I’ve never left the city. So I went to Northwestern, did some bankruptcy consulting, and basically 10 years after having graduated from school, I had finally had enough. My wife, who you know, Darian, who’s the complete opposite of me, California chill.
Seth Deutsch: Yeah, my wife is quite the opposite of me as well, and an accountant, but yes.
Frank Campise: Yeah, we both married groovy nerds. No offense Darian or Nadia. But she says you’re miserable at what you do. Now, why don’t you do what you really enjoy and that is real estate. So that’s what… so the original thing was kind of seeing the power of gentrification and the power of investing in real estate. And then it was really just having the confidence and a little bit of capital, so I could do it as a full-time endeavor, not as a part-time endeavor.
Seth Deutsch: What did the first launch point look like? Was that you or were there other partners involved?
Frank Campise: No, the first launch point, so from 2000 until 2008, it was just me, and I was just buying and selling apartment buildings, renovating, doing a little bit of real estate brokerage as well to generate the capital in order to buy and invest. And then it wasn’t until ’08 that I partnered up with my business partner now, Jim Jann.
Seth Deutsch: What brought you all… how long had you known each other? What brought you all together? And what made you feel comfortable, and I’m curious to know, if he had had partners in the past as well?
Frank Campise: Well, there was a third, he had a partner, this gentleman, Ron, and they were developers. And I was buying and selling buildings, and I had bought a portfolio of- well, I had a portfolio of properties under contract, and prior to closing, I had sold off a number of those properties, and one of the buildings I had spun off of that acquisition was to Jim and Ron. And we’re at the closing table, and Ron looks at the settlement statement and says, let me get this straight, you’re going to make as much on selling me this contract then I’m going to make on developing this property? And my answer was, well, you should get ahead of the deal, motherfucker. I did the hard work. I mean, the guy who hustles eats. And then I sold Jim and Ron another building, and then I sold them another building. And Jim said, why don’t you develop a building with us? So I said, fine. I mean, they were nice guys, we got along, so at that point I’d known him a couple years. And I developed a building with him. It was successful.
Seth Deutsch: Was that the first time you had done development?
Frank Campise: That was the first time I had done a condo development, yes. And it went fine, and we made money. Our investors made money, which is more important. And then we were looking at another opportunity, and of course, September ’08 happens and the whole world splits in half. Which I think is actually a really important point to drive home when you’re an entrepreneur, when you have something like the Great Financial Crisis happen and there’s COVID and now we’ve had a spike in interest rates, and there’s always going to be some event, and it’s really how do you react when there’s a catastrophic event. You can turtle up. Or you can try to look for the opportunity, because every time the system breaks, there’s an opportunity. So we decided to raise some money to go out and buy distressed assets. And that’s what we did. We raised a teeny tiny amount of money. We raised $5 million, and we went out and bought some properties. And then we did another capital raise, and then that was kind of the beginning of Jab Real Estate in its current form.
Seth Deutsch: Take me forward now to the organization today. What does it look like today?
Frank Campise: Well, we’re still a small, I would say micro, I mean, I think that would be an accurate description, micro real estate private equity firm. So our capital raises are normally and purposely, we’ve kept them at or under $75 million. The reason being, if you’re going to do a bigger raise, you need to go institutional. And when you go institutional, it just changes the dynamic. It doesn’t mean it’s better or worse, it’s just different. So, for what we did and for the risk we were willing to take, so when you do, again, when you go institutional, I don’t care what kind of private equity it is, you’re going to have lower returns because you’re competing with some of the bigger shops.
Seth Deutsch: Absolutely. And that’s in any market in private equity. Absolutely.
Frank Campise: So, we like the small to lower end of the middle market space. And so now I think we have 12 employees and maintenance people that are third-party contractors, but actual people under our umbrella, we have 12 people. And we’re about to do another capital raise and again around 75 million. So, we may need to add another couple people, but I like it nice and manageable. The great thing is in real estate, and you can look at the newspaper or I guess online these days, the best of the firms are giving back keys on buildings because that’s part of their- it’s not part of their model to give back keys, but part of their model is leverage, and they’re not really buying real estate, it’s more of a bond. It’s more of a financial instrument that just happens to be wrapped around with bricks, where we’re still buying bricks. So we’ve never given back a building, we’ve never missed a mortgage payment throughout this entire significant disruption in interest rates. Our returns aren’t what we would have liked them to be given the circumstances we’re dealing with. But our main focus is to make sure our investors get back all their money and make a return. And as long as our investors are making a return in what is a horrible time in the real estate world, we’re pretty happy. So that’s kind of our mindset.
Seth Deutsch: That’s fantastic. And so, 12 people. And so, beyond your partner, what does the rest of the team from an organization look like? One of the things we like to talk about here is the importance of a really good CFO, in some cases, the importance of really good operations, property management, property maintenance team. What is the balance of your team? Like who are the key people on your team? And how have you thought about balancing your strengths and weaknesses as you’ve built that team, if you were going to share that wisdom with other entrepreneurs?
Frank Campise: Yeah. So obviously for small companies, it’s a little bit different than bigger companies. So, my and my business partner’s approach has been we want a real collegial environment. We’re a flat organization, which is great if you have the right culture. So, our culture is, and it’s always hard for us to hire somebody because personality and character are as important, if not more, than intellectual horsepower or skill set because we can train somebody, but you can’t train somebody to have the character or the personality to fit within our culture. So, we really instill on our team that: This is your job. You own this. You’re empowered to do your job. And your job isn’t a silo. So, if you think of our company, if you’re our controller, Dan, how Dan executes and ensures that our financial statements are where they need to be and our books and records are where they need to be impacts our ability to borrow, impacts our ability to… which means impacts our ability to acquire, impacts our ability to refinance property and get capital back to our investors. So if Dan’s not doing his job, then our asset manager, Matt, doesn’t have buildings to manage. And if Matt, who is our only remote employee, so for everyone listening, if you have a small business, everyone needs to be at work. Nobody should work from fucking home. Nobody’s working from home in Europe. No one is working from home in Asia. And they shouldn’t be working from home in the US, but I’m sorry.
Seth Deutsch: That’s okay. Frank, I told you, you can say whatever you want. Anything else you want to say about Pat before we…
Frank Campise: I’m going to leave Pat alone. He’s bigger than me; he might break me in half. But if Matt doesn’t do his job, then we don’t have the ability to refinance an asset because it’s underperforming. So everyone has their roles. Everyone’s role is their ownership. And at the end of the day, being a flat organization, they all work together and collaboration is huge. And really, they report directly to me or my business partner, Jim. So, it just depends. So, from our organization, Jim deals with investor relations. I don’t have the disposition to deal with them. I really don’t. And I’ll tell you a funny story about that, which you might chuckle. And Jim deals with construction execution, which for what we do is huge. I deal with acquisitions, financing of the assets, disposition of the assets, and management of the operations. But underneath me would be Matt or Dan or our head of financial analytics, Donovan, and then Jim has some construction folks under him. But a quick sidebar. So, division of labor is really important, especially when you’re a small company.
Seth Deutsch: Listen, I’m just going to interject and say that everything you’ve described, I don’t care if it’s small or large, some of the things we talk about here and that we talk to all founders about, a lot of the companies we meet with here and that we talk to are also doing buy and builds. And I think that is one of the hardest things to do because how do you screen for culture? How do you test culture? At the end of the day, I don’t care what it looks like on a spreadsheet, if you can’t bring people together and get them aligned, hold people accountable and get them to understand the interdependencies of their roles, you’ll have organizational friction. The more that you can create that closeness and that understanding accountability, understanding where we’re all going and how we go there together, I don’t care if it’s large or small, it’s very hard to do. It sounds like you all have done it effectively.
Frank Campise: Yeah, I mean, I worked for a bit at a bankruptcy consulting firm called AlixPartners, they’re based out of Michigan. And Jay Alix, who’s a brilliant man, really blew up that business. I mean, it’s huge. It’s huge. When I was there, it was very small. But he had that mindset. And that’s kind of where I saw it in practice for the first time. I mean, he ran, and I don’t know what his level of involvement is, I’ve been gone for years, but he ran a wonderful, beautiful organization, and everyone got it, and they understood that, which I learned from him, if you have a successful event, like so when we have a successful closing of a fund and we finally get our carry, we’re the last people to get paid, we share our carry with our employees. So we want everyone to know that, look, we’re in this together. Jim and I aren’t going to take all the money and just pay you guys a salary. If we win, we all win, and if we lose, we literally all lose. So I couldn’t agree with you more on that.
Seth Deutsch: You were going to go on a tangent.
Frank Campise: Oh, I’ll stay off my tangent.
Seth Deutsch: Are you sure? You have one tangent, and then I’m going to get you out of here so that you can go do fantasy league.
Frank Campise: Fantasy football with my team.
Seth Deutsch: Yes, it’s critical. I promised you we’re going to get you out of here quickly.
Frank Campise: I’ll skip my tangent for another day.
Seth Deutsch: Okay, okay. I’m going to ask you about kind of your outlook just generally in your industry. It sounds like you all have stuck to your knitting very well, but you’ve also gone to some other markets. As you think about your firm, you look out five years, what excites you? What confounds you? What are you still trying to figure out? Whatever you feel like sharing about where you feel your market is going, where you feel your firm is going, where you feel you may have to go to or return to, to drive returns to your investors.
Frank Campise: So, what excites me is, unfortunately, when you’re in the investment world, and again, I don’t care what you’re buying, but for me, when you’re buying property, what excites me is when a market’s disrupted. So right now, because of elevated interest rates, and even though they’re coming down, there’s still going to be people that are going to be having problems for no fault of their own, just that they borrowed at too high of leverage, and now they have to recapitalize or sell, and the world isn’t just where they thought it would be. So, for our investors, that provides a great opportunity. So, there’s going to be deals that we have done that we’re not going to make very much money on, but now looking forward, there’s deals that we have done recently and that we will do over the next couple years where we’ll have outsized returns. So that excites me. As I said, I’m 56. So what else excites me is beginning to transition myself out of the firm and some of the folks that work for us, for them to have a bigger equity position. So in a perfect world, I am gone in five or six years. I’ll always invest in real estate, but I would like to put the firm in a position where the younger folks that are at the firm, and by younger, I’m talking 30 to 43, where they could take it and then they can do whatever they want, them and Jim, and Jim’s my age. So you’ve met Jim waddling around on the pickle court. So, I don’t know where they take it, but Jim and I both want to put them in a position where they’re starting on second or third base and then they could take it from there.
Seth Deutsch: We could spend an hour just on that. So much to learn on how you plan out and develop people and develop succession in the business.
Frank Campise: And here’s the interesting thing. I don’t want a dime. I’m not selling my interest. I’m not interested. All I want to do is put those folks in a position to run and then go on my merry way. It allows me to have a cleaner break too because I don’t feel… I’ll feel a moral obligation to answer questions they have, but I won’t feel, if I sold them something, I don’t have a fiduciary obligation. Just a moral obligation.
Seth Deutsch: I understand.
Frank Campise: And then what confounds me…
Seth Deutsch: So there are a lot of things that confound you. This could be three hours.
Frank Campise: But what confounds me is in my space, we left – we didn’t leave – we expanded out of Chicago and went into growth markets. So, we looked at every growth market or every market in the country that was over 200,000 people, and then settled on cities that we felt, through a variety of metrics, kind of had the best opportunities, and those being Denver, Salt Lake, and Phoenix. Now there’s other cities, Dallas is a wonderful city that’s growing like weed, Austin, Nashville, whatever, whatever. We wanted, because we like to be in the middle market, those cities didn’t necessarily have enough middle market buildings where we felt we could have critical mass. So, we picked those cities and they’re good cities, but every growth city in the entire country is suffering from oversupply. Because like anything, when there’s margins, it brings in all kinds of competition. And so every growth market in the city is overbuilt. So as a result, rents are down. Rents are down in Austin, rents are down in Nashville, they’re down in Denver, they’re down in Salt Lake. I mean, it’s horrible in Phoenix. I’m happy that Denver and Salt Lake, our year over year rents are down about 1%, which is not bad at all. So what confounds me is I say, okay, Denver has an oversupply problem, Denver has a governance problem right now, so they’ve made it very difficult to be a landlord. So their mayor is a great mayor. I really do like their mayor. It’s just some of their governance isn’t good for my business. It doesn’t mean it’s not good for the residents. It’s just not good for my business. So now I’m trying to find another market in lieu of Denver. But when I look out over the landscape, I mean, the tri-county area of say West Palm, Fort Lauderdale, Miami, they have over a hundred high-rises coming, planned. So, there’s oversupply there. There’re governance problems in California. So, what confounds me is where do I go? Where could I find not spectacular but predictable rent growth and know that a dollar today is going to be worth something more than that tomorrow? The funny thing is Chicago actually has done extraordinarily well as of late actually because of governance. The way to manage pricing is to flood the zone with units. Now they’ll never do it in Chicago, so the funny part is Chicago has become a good place again to invest. It’s not landlord friendly, but the underlying economics make sense here. But still, we don’t want to be concentrated in one town. So that’s what confounds me. Where do I go next? And there’s a lot of folks that are every bit as smart as us. So, everyone’s asking the same question. So that’s the frustrating thing.
Seth Deutsch: Fascinating. Well, listen, we could go on for hours. I want to have you back. I want to go over one of the big things I’d like to spend time talking about is this succession plan with the firm and whatever else you want to talk about. But right now, we have to get you to Fantasy Football. Thank you for coming to Diners and Deals. I hope it was fun.
Frank Campise: It was a lot of fun. I mean, I enjoyed you keeping me on point. And I look forward to seeing you on the pickle court.
Seth Deutsch: Of course. And the weight room, wherever else we’re going. And let’s get you on to more important things. We’ll have you back here soon.
Frank Campise: All right. Take care, Seth.
Seth Deutsch: Thank you. Bye.