Brian narration: This is Built, a new podcast series where you’ll meet the people behind some of the biggest transactions and investments in commercial real estate, and hear how they got to where they are today.

I’m your host Brian Maughan, chief marketing officer with Fidelity National Financial.

 Those of us in this business, we know the buildings...but how many of us know the stories of the people behind those structures?

Today, we’re gonna meet Lynne O’Brien. Lynne was director of corporate real estate at Coca-Cola for two decades until her retirement at the end of 2019. She was based in Atlanta but Coke being a global company, Lynne worked with people all over the world.

But when she left law school in the 1980s, real estate was far from her mind. Still, she was intrigued by open positions at Coke and snagged an interview. At one point the interviewer asked her to compare herself to another interviewee, a woman she happened to know.

Lynne O’Brien: He said, ‘well, I'm interviewing another woman who has a lot more experience than you. So why should I hire you?’ And it threw me for a second, but then I said, well, I said, I know you had a lot of candidates for this job. And I said, I'm really good at what I do. I don't apologize for that. And I said, I must be really good because I said, if she's got a lot more experience, it's down to me and her then I said, I think my resume speaks for itself. And he's like, OK!

Now they hired her instead of me anyway. But that was OK. And it was a good thing because I don't think ultimately I was the right fit for that job. But then a week later, they call me back to interview for another job that was right down my alley based on my background, because I have a science degree and it was in the Patent and Technology Law Group. So that was a slam dunk that I got that job. But it just kind of makes the point that you shouldn't - never sell yourself short in an interview.

Brian Maughan: Well, OK, so you've joined Coca-Cola, and you're beginning your career in this great beverage company. How do you make that transition from your initial job into commercial real estate and directing Coca Cola's real estate investments and real estate holdings?

Lynne O’Brien: One of the things that we also did in the patent group was we also did construction contracts, so I did my fair share of working on those types of contracts. And we had a separate real estate practice group, but it only had one lawyer in it. And when he elected to retire, the company decided that they didn't want to backfill that position.

Brian narration: Instead they moved all that lawyer’s work into Lynne’s group, and being the newest person there, she ended up with most of it. But she learned a lot, and got to work with that lawyer as he wound down his career.

Then, Coke’s in-house corporate real estate director began relying on Lynne to help him with his work...ultimately he asked her to make the jump from the legal division and come work with him. Her transition was complete.

Lynne O’Brien: And I will say I'm huge on transferable skill sets and always, all the people that I mentor always talk to them about, ‘Don't ever underestimate what you do and how you can take those skills and translate them into another role, use them in another role, because that can really help you get from point A to point B when you might not have some of the other experience.’ If you're, if you can learn and you're smart and you've got those underlying skills, I think that you can almost always make the leap to another job.

Brian: Yeah, I'm always amazed at the, not only the other duties assigned, right. That's what we learn how to deal with is the next job or the next request. But also the fact that what we learn in one part of a career, one part of an industry, can directly relate to the next opportunity that's in front of us.

Lynne O’Brien: Well and you never know. I'm huge on networking, too, and you never know where contacts that you make in one job or one role may still help you or benefit you when you move to another role. I believe that, you know, a lot of the things that I brought to the table at Coke was the power of the network and the number of people that I knew or that I had the ability to connect with quickly.

Brian: Wonderful. Describe for me the work that you did at Coca-Cola with real estate. What kind of holdings does Coca-Cola have? What kind of properties were you involved in?

Lynne O’Brien: We had a lot of office space globally, some that we leased, some that we owned for all of our employees, we have obviously a lot of industrial space, that would be manufacturing facilities and warehousing facilities.

Brain narration: They also had some retail spaces, and the World of Coca-Cola, their museum in Atlanta.

Lynne O’Brien: I always liked kind of the challenge or the opportunity to add value to a property, to take something that a lot of times ‘cause real estate a lot of times in a lot of companies is kind of an afterthought. It's just a means to an end. You've got to have a building for your people. But being able to help our senior leadership understand the value that's locked up in the real estate and what that really means? That was something that I enjoyed, helping them actually understand the portfolio, actually understand what we had, what it was really worth, and then other properties like, you know, OK, what can we do with this, you know, say in a - if we were closing a plant that was in a small town or something is like, what can we do to help repurpose the property? Like, a lot of - we owned a lot of vacant property around the United States. And that was one of my favorite programs. We actually ended up donating a lot of that land back to the local community, like for softball fields, soccer fields. So I enjoyed also using our real estate to help benefit local communities.

Brian narration: She had some favorite buildings too. Take 711 Fifth Avenue in New York City, where Coke had executive offices. It’s a 15-story limestone building built in the jazz era, complete with huge arched windows, cornices, and Corinthian columns. Lynne says it encapsulated the timeless elegance of 5th Avenue.

Lynne O’Brien: I loved Seven-Eleven. I mean, it was a great building. It was very iconic. And so that was a fun property to work on just because of where it was. I always talked about it like it was a grand old lady. And I said, you know, it was fun to take care of her and make her shine there. We did a facade renovation and a lot of things to improve the look of the building. And so that was fun to kind of bring an old building back to life.

Brian: What happened with that building?

Lynne O’Brien: It’s still there. we just don't own it anymore. That was the pinnacle of my career I would say. We sold the building about five months before I retired for a record. It sold for a little over 900 million dollars. That was a great deal because that's a once in a lifetime opportunity. Those kinds of buildings don't sell very often.

Brian: I remember that there is another project that you worked on. I think it was a land assemblage project in Atlanta that had to deal with the land associated with the aquarium and the Human Rights Museum and also the World of Coke...

Lynne O’Brien: Mmm hmm. That was roughly a 20 acre parcel of land that we actually began assembling prior to the 1996 Olympic Games. And that was where Coca-Cola had its attraction during the Olympics. It was Coca-Cola Olympic City, and that was our Olympic venue. And then after the Games, we were trying to decide what to do with it and we were approached about doing the aquarium there, so we decided that we would donate the land for the aquarium, and then we decided that we would move the World of Coke from its former home in downtown Atlanta out to that site as well.

And then Neville Isdell, who was our chairman at the time, was also, had a huge commitment to human rights. And it was very important to him that we do something to acknowledge that situation. And he and Shirley Franklin, the then-mayor of Atlanta, were great friends. And so they partnered together to bring the Center for Civil and Human Rights to the other piece of the property there. But at the time we put it all together, for a while it was the largest undeveloped, but fully assembled piece of land in the urban United States.

Brian: Talk with us a little bit about that land assemblage process or maybe some of the challenges that you had to face as an attorney, as the director of corporate real estate at a large company. What might be behind the curtain, if you will, on that project that maybe people don't realize that the largest beverage company in the world had to deal with in order to pull that off?

Lynne O’Brien: That was a crazy one because there were over 40 pieces of property that we had to bring together to make that deal happen, and some of them were - there were little businesses that had been there for years that had lots of environmental problems because there were like little, you know, garages that had been pouring oil out on the ground in the backyard for 50 years before environmental rules and regulations came into place. So we had a lot of environmental issues we had to deal with.

Brian narration: There were also streets running through the area. They had to work with the Department of Transportation to close a lot of those... and the power company to re-route all the utility poles.

Lynne O’Brien: Every time we kind of thought, OK, we're done, we’d finally gotten over our last hurdle, something else would come up and we had you know, there were several property owners. There were still some residential homes down there at that time, believe it or not. And those people had been there for a long time. And they were, you know, they were hard to negotiate with because they didn't want to leave. They had certain opinions about what they thought their property was worth. And we had certain opinions about what we thought it was worth. So it was a lot of negotiation and just, it was a good learning experience because a lot of things, OK, how do we do this?

Brian: So you’ve worked all over the United States and all over the world, and you mentioned kind of the different business environments, the different cultures, and places like you mentioned where you held land for development or smaller communities where you had bottling companies. Talk to me a little bit about that diversity of your experience of working with land, but in these unique areas, working with people in these unique parts of the United States.

Lynne O’Brien: I grew up in a small town, and that's one thing that I totally understand. If you're working in a small town, you know, big corporate America doesn't blow into the small town with their big city lawyers and tell the local people how it's going to happen, because usually the local people will look at you and say, OK, we're going to tell you how it's going to happen and you can get back on your plane and fly back wherever you came from. So it's, it's a lot about building relationships with people and especially, and I think it's universal, but I think it's truer when you're working directly with local communities and local governments, is trying to understand what it is that they want and what are their drivers and see if you can't find a common ground to say, OK, well, here's what we want. Here's what you want. And how can we instead of just putting a stake in both sides, this is our camp, this is your camp. How can we then mutually work together and collaborate to get to something that's going to be a win-win for both sides of the equation?

Brian narration: She says she’s worked with some difficult landowners over the years, worried about the changes Coke might bring.

Lynne O’Brien: We would always try and hire local counsel wherever we went so that... because a lot of times they understood the local politics, they understood some of these people because, you know, in some towns there's always the same person that's always going to be the pot stirrer. Doesn't matter who's, who's doing it, there's always the one person that's going to object to everything that anybody does, no matter what. And so they would understand who those people were so that we could come in and kind of already be a little bit ahead of the game, because we already understood what some of our obstacles might be.

Brian narration: I knew Lynne felt strongly about mentorship, and that she had plenty of career advice for younger people coming up in the industry. So I asked her to lay out some key points.

Lynne O’Brien: I think one of the biggest things that I tell people is you have to understand your value proposition. You have to know what you bring to the table. And I've asked people that before and they just look at me, and I'd say, well, if you don't know what value you add or what benefit you're going to be to me, then how am I supposed to figure it out? So the people that can come in and assess a job that they're interviewing for and say, OK, here's what I can do, here's how I can hit the ground running and here's how I can help you day one, I'm all about that.

Brian narration: She’s also a big fan of networking. She says meeting new people and keeping in touch with former colleagues will serve you well.

Lynne O’Brien: The power of your network is huge. It allows you to get information quickly. And people also say information is just a commodity today, it's not as important as it used to be. I believe if you can go out and source information and you can find things out quickly and accurately, you're going to be super valuable to whoever you work for.

Brian narration: Then there’s communication. Lynne admits she worries about this. She says younger co-workers prefer texting or messaging over other ways to connect.

Lynne O’Brien: The one thing they don't want to do is talk to you face to face or over a phone. And a lot of times problems can be solved and avoided if you'll just pick up the phone and call somebody. Because you can misunderstand, you can misunderstand a text, you can misunderstand an email, and if you would take five minutes and pick up the phone and say, hey, I read your email and I just want to make sure that I really understand what you're saying, instead of responding to something in writing that I might not really understand. And it also goes back to the other thing, the networking, it goes back to building relationships with people.

Brian: How important is it for you to build a team? Internal as well as external, how important is that concept of team building and building a team that you can trust?

Lynne O’Brien: I think that's really important and that was one of the things that I think that I excelled at at Coke was building a team and I could put teams together very quickly, is I think that I had the analytical ability. If I knew what the project was going to be, I could very quickly say, OK, this is this is what I need. I need these kinds of expertise. I need these kinds of skills. And then I would just have to, once I kind of figured, OK, these are all the buckets that I need, then I'd say, OK, who's the best person from the different resources that I have? Who's the best person in this particular case? Because not everyone is right for every project.

Brian narration: Getting back to the buildings themselves, the environment is on everyone’s minds these days. I wondered what influence Lynne thought sustainability should have on corporate real estate as we go forward.

Lynne O’Brien: I think it already has an important role and companies have already acknowledged that. I mean, Coca-Cola has an environmental and sustainability program, I mean, we certainly look when we're building buildings, we look to meet LEED certifications for those buildings. If we're renting space, we look to go into buildings that have LEED certifications. We look to try and manage responsibly how we use water now, how we recycle water in our plants.

The problem becomes, at some point some of these things become cost prohibitive. So you also have to be, use some common sense about how can we do this in an environmentally friendly, sustainable manner, and get a good return on the investment and not go build something that at the end of the day is not really going to help the environment that much. And it cost us a lot of money to build it.

Brian narration: Plus she says sustainability can come about in other ways, for instance, re-using buildings that were originally constructed for one purpose...for something completely different.

Lynne O’Brien: Like whoever thought people would be going into these old industrial buildings and turning them into these super cool lofts and things where people live now, or repurposing these old buildings. So I think that the creative people are actually looking when they design and build buildings now, I think some of the smart designers and I've seen a few, they're actually saying, OK, how might this building evolve over time? And could we take this building 10,15, 20 years from now if no one really wants to use it this way, could we design it so that now it would be easier to turn it into something else and repurpose it a different way?

Brian: People and buildings, they both need to evolve. And it kind of goes back to your first comment about transferable skills as an individual. You have to build that capability to evolve within a changing industry or changing career. And certainly in real estate. All right. Um - a couple more quick questions. What is your favorite Coke beverage?

Lynne O’Brien: [Laughs] That's easy. I'm a Coca-Cola Classic girl all the way. I just like, I like the real thing. The original. That's me.

Brian: And, um, favorite Coca-Cola commercial?

Lynne O’Brien: I like ‘I like to teach’...see, that was my generation. I like ‘I like to teach the world to sing’ and I like mean Joe Green. Those are probably my two favorite ones. Although I do like the polar bears. I have to say, I've always liked the polar bears.

Brian: Very good. Lynne, thank you so much for spending time with us today. Thank you for sharing with us the stories about your career, your stories about Coke. It certainly has put a smile on my face. So thank you very much.

Lynne O’Brien: Thank you for the opportunity.

Brian narration: Thanks for listening to this episode of BUILT, we hope you enjoyed it. We’d love to hear your feedback - email us at built@fnf.com. We’ll be back in a couple of weeks with another show.

Built is a co-production of Fidelity National Financial and PRX Productions. From FNF, our project is run by Annie Bardelas. At PRX, our team is producer Ashley Milne-Tyte, Senior Producer Genevieve Sponsler, production assistant Courtney Fleurantin and intern Claire Carlander. Audio mastering by Rebecca Seidel.

The Executive Producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.

I’m Brian Maughan.

Every story is unique, every property is individual, but we’re all part of this BUILT world.