Brian: This is BUILT, the podcast where you’ll meet creative leaders in the commercial real estate industry and hear how they do what they do.

I’m your host Brian Maughan, Chief Innovation and Marketing Officer with Fidelity National Financial.

And those of us in this business, well. We know the buildings. But how many of us know the stories of the people behind those structures?

In this episode, we’re talking to Darren Woodson. You may know him from his celebrity status as a Dallas Cowboys safety. He was one of the best in NFL history, with 813 career tackles and a reputation for his versatility on the field.

Dallas Cowboys Archive: Ladies and gentlemen, #28, Darren Woodson! 

Today, he’s a Managing Principal at Cresa Commercial Real Estate, a tenant-centered commercial real estate firm with over 2,000 clients and more than 80 offices worldwide.

With Cresa’s Dallas-Fort Worth branch, Darren helps clients find and manage the perfect office or industrial space in North Texas. It’s a field we all know has changed immensely since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Darren: There's so many companies right now that have to face the realization that a lot of their employees are going to work from home. So we've had to endure change and work along with my partners. 

You know, a lot of what I've learned on the football field, I can apply this into my own office for our team. And, you know, my second year in the league, I was the captain of the defense. So I've always had to have tough conversations. I've always had to work on my leadership skills, ask a lot of questions, have some humility when things aren't going right. And that's similar in a lot of ways here because I have, man, almost 30 brokers here within my office. Almost 500 brokers around the world. But in my office alone, look, I have to be the leader. 

Brian: The Dallas area has been home to Darren for over 30 years, since the Cowboys drafted him in 1992. And since then, he’s been an integral part of the community. These days, as that team leader with Cresa.

Darren: If you look at the mindset of the leadership here in Texas, it is a pro-business mindset. And you know, Texas is not short on land. It continues to grow. And I think this speaks to Dallas Fort Worth and the Plano and Frisco areas. They're on the forefront of growth.

Brian: To continue growing—rather than remaining stagnant—means practicing flexibility. It means having the strength and perspective to navigate meaningful change. 

Throughout his multi-act career, he’s not only triumphed over obstacles and hardships, but accepted them in the moment.

So when Covid hit, Darren knew what to do.

Darren: I have to go along with the change of what's happening in our industry now. So what are you providing your employees? If I’m adamant about bringing in my employees and having them work in the office, well, you better have some resources for those employees. If not, they'll go somewhere else.

Darren: Look, we have our wins and losses, and we have to take responsibility for those wins and losses.

Brian: The path to success, Darren says, starts with learning from those past mistakes, and then you have to be resilient enough to keep moving forward. It’s “the bounce back”. 

It’s a skill he’s exercised throughout his remarkable career. 

Brian: Let's go back to that origin story of Darren Woodson… You're in Phoenix. You're playing high school ball. You were a linebacker, but you became this strong safety. Tell me a little bit about that origin story.

Darren: I was actually a better running back than I was a defensive player early on, and all my life I had been—even in peewee—had always been the star running back. But I loved to tackle. So at my time at Maryville High School in Phoenix, I played both ways. And I was getting recruited on both sides of the ball, as a running back and as a linebacker through most of the colleges around the country.

I ended up committing to Arizona State, which is a long story in itself… Like, I had to sit out my first year at Arizona State, and I was basically what they called back then, a Prop 48, where I couldn't play on the football field. All I had to do was focus on my academics. So I got my academics right in that first year.

When I got on the football field, my position coach at the time is the head coach of the Houston Texans now, Lovey Smith. And he knew early on, he said, “You're not a running back. You're a hitter, you need to play some defense.” And that was my transition. And while I was there, Brian, Lovey Smith had me do a little bit of everything to be an all-around player, which, on draft day, everyone out there knew that I could make that transition.

Brian: On draft day, Darren’s friends made sure he was out of the house, not glued to the TV. They took him golfing for the very first time. His friend Floyd Fields, who was drafted the year before by the San Diego Chargers, promised to page him when the results came in. Because, hey! This was the ‘90s—no cell phones!

Darren: We pull up at the golf club right there on Arizona State's campus. And right when we all get out, [snaps fingers] pager goes off! So I walk into the clubhouse and the young kid at the clubhouse says, “Hey, you can't use our phone.” Well! I got two, three-hundred-fifteen pound defensive linemen that were with me to go play golf that day. They said, “Oh no, he's going to use the phone.” So they allowed me to use the phone, I call Floyd up. He says, “Hey man, I got good news and bad news.” And I said, “Give me the good news.” He said, “You just got drafted. You're the 37th pick in the second round. You're the 37th pick overall.” And I was like, “Oh, we're celebrating!” I'm high-fiving my buddies. And he's like, “Hey, hey, hey, hey. Gotta give you the bad news.” 

And he says, “Them [damn] Dallas Cowboys drafted you.” And Brian, I was not a Cowboys fan. Trust me. I grew up a Steelers fan. Whoever the Cowboys were playing, I wanted that team to win. Back then.

Brian: My goodness. What a great story. So take us then forward to when you had a career-changing moment from your NFL career with the Dallas Cowboys?

Darren: There was one that stuck with me from when I first came in. And thank God I went through this moment... 

Brian: It was January 31, 1993, and the Cowboys were playing the Buffalo Bills in Super Bowl Twenty-Seven in Pasadena, California. In the TV broadcasts from the game, you can see Number 28, young Darren Woodson, tackling the Bills in the second half.

But the moment that changed Darren’s perspective happened after the game.

Here’s the NBC Sports coverage after that final whistle: 

NBC: What a performance by this young Dallas Cowboy football team. They go back to “Big D” as Super Bowl champions. Dallas, 52. Buffalo, 17. No distractions, but a great quarterback and a great young defense.

Darren: We had just won the Super Bowl and of course, back then, you could have alcohol in the locker room. So we had champagne and we're popping bottles and all that. And I can remember two guys, a guy named Bill Bates, and another guy named Mark Tuinei, who came in the league with Bill Bates. And they both had been in the league for 12 or 13 years. And I watched Bill Bates play as a kid, watched him play, right?

But after the game, they're on the ground and they're hugged up and they're crying. They're really emotional. And of course, I'm 21 years old, man. I got these bottles and I'm spraying the bottles, like, “Man, get up, get up!”

Brian: At the time, the team had recently experienced a big shift. The legendary Coach Tom Landry, had just been fired when the Cowboys came under new ownership. Coach Landry was replaced by Jimmy Johnson after three decades of leading the team.

Darren: Yeah, this brings back some emotions, man. But one of our old equipment manager’s name was Buck. Buck had been here with Coach Landry. And Buck grabs me and he's like, “Hey, let him just hug it out.” And I'm like, “Man, what's the deal?” And he's like, “Look man, these guys… were drafted by Coach Landry. They saw the great Coach Landry get fired. Jimmy Johnson comes in and takes over the team. He cuts all their friends. They have to buy into a new system. And 12 years later here they are.”

“This is your first year son.” And I was like, wow. That stuck with me. That stuck with me in a sense of first of all, you know, don't take this for granted, one. And then secondly, just to see what these guys have been through in a 12-year period. And here I come in my first year and I'm popping bottles. And I’ll tell you: it was the reality… Because the reality is, yeah, we had some early success in the first four years, but man, we hit that desert brother and that desert was those years that they went through. I went through five coaches in my time here with the Dallas Cowboys in 13 years. So. You just gotta take the good with the bad, man.

Brian: Amid the ups and downs, Darren soared. During his second year in the league, in 1993, he earned the record for second-most tackles in a single game in Cowboys' franchise history. By 2002, he became the Cowboys’ all-time leading tackler. 

Darren: I've always been a fighter, man. And my entire life has been, you know, that. Of resiliency. Of getting knocked on my butt and popping back up, right? It's the bounce back. The bounce back makes you who you are.

What we're talking about is what happened as far as my career, but my personal life was even that much more of overcoming some of those things. So, you know, they basically parlayed each other.

I grew up in an inner city in Henson projects. My mom was a single mom. My father wasn't in my life. I had two brothers and a sister that were older than me. Didn't know what poor was, man, until I showed up one day in second grade and the day before, my sister Monica takes me across the street to the supermarket and there's a hose in the back of the supermarket, throws soap on me and sprays me with the water hose there. Cuz we couldn't pay the water bill. And then I go to school the next day not knowing that I'm poor—it’s like, “Hey man, it’s part of it, whatever.” And I had soap all along the back of my head and the kids are making fun of me and I'm like, “Okay, I am poor.” But that didn't stop me. And I knew my mom was doing everything possible to put food on the table. I saw that sacrifice. 

I've had to overcome some things. But you know, that's a part of life. And that's the same thing that I've dealt with on the football field. You win games, you lose games, but the next morning, guess what? The birds are gonna chirp and either you get your ass up or you don’t. And that's the part of the resiliency that I've had that has helped me through transitions. Whether it be, you know, going from 13 years in the NFL to 13 years at ESPN as an analyst, and then transitioning to my own real estate firm.

BM: Darren found his way into commercial real estate through football. His agent, George Bass, was a Dallas local who was the CFO of a real estate development firm, and moonlighted as a sports agent.

Darren credits him as his first teacher in commercial real estate. Under George’s guidance, Darren made his first investment in a real estate office during the off-season from football.

Darren: And then I started to really understand the model of real estate my second year of having this office. And it was in that time where I just felt like, “Hey this is something I could do possibly after football. Okay, there's success outside of these walls.” I mean, I'm not wrapped up into this identity of “This is who I am.” Especially in the football world, Brian, as you well know, the reality is most professional football players only play a couple of years and then life starts for them. And I’ve watched that for years. 

So I knew that was gonna happen to me at some point, whether it be the Cowboys are going to cut me, or injury, or father time was gonna catch up. So, I figured I might as well prepare early on. I had a balance of my mother who was really strong in the fact of keeping my focus on life instead of just football.

Brian: For Darren, his focus was on his newest investment—that very first office space—and learning as much as he could about this new field. This was Darren’s first step toward eventually joining his current company in 2017.

Darren: Over time I started to learn the development side of the business even while I was playing. And when I retired from playing, I came into my own and was recruited by this firm, called E S R P at the time. Now we just got acquired by a bigger firm called Cresa. But the partners wanted me on the team and I joined the team, man, with a lot of humility. I mean, I got my butt kicked in this business for the first two and a half years. And, finally, started getting some wins under my belt. 

Brian: That first time you took office on the off-season and you wanted to learn the business… Is there something you've learned in commercial real estate that is like, wow, I never would've guessed that.

Darren: I would say the e-comm. I'm so used to the old retailers and there was so much brick and mortar that was out there and we've seen since 2019—I think Covid really elevated this is that—people are ordering. Amazon's become the monster and people have been ordering gear or equipment or whatever it is. And because of that, you're starting to see a lot of these industrial buildings just pop up and you know, you got the industrial buildings and you have the last-mile buildings. You got so much that's popping up due to the e-com business. That’s one of the things, as I step back, and look back over the years, Dallas-Fort Worth has been heavy on the retail side, and hopefully it continues to grow.

Brian: If you think about pre-pandemic, we had some great years in commercial real estate, lots of clients looking for different ways to grow. Then we go through this whole pandemic, which changes the landscape. How do you help your clients? How do you create a solid foundation, even with all this change going on?

Darren: Well, I don't know if you could ever really create a solid foundation, because every client is different and every client is trying to overcome their own challenges. At the same time. What you can do, and what we have done here, is that we're strong on the data analytics. We want to take out all the guesswork. And of course you're gonna have to fly blind at times. But we want to take away a lot of that. And we provide a lot of resources. 

And I think the one thing that's really helped us, uh, in time is understanding that with disruption, there's opportunities. I can tell you right now, Brian, before Covid hit, I was on a plane visiting clients every week. Covid happens and there's this thing called Zoom that comes along and allows us to communicate and look, I mean, I know there's a lot of things that were going on through Covid, but then if you look back and you peel back this onion, how many things came about just through the disruption? And through that disruption is having a mindset to say, “Okay, now Zoom came along. How can we provide assets?” That I don't have to be in front of you. Now, I can present this via Zoom. So we started our own in-house software development firm just through disruption, where our clients can see it and go, [Snap!] “Got it. Here's a playbook.” This playbook never would exist if I had to get on these planes over and over. 

Brian: Darren is also thinking about how commercial real estate can change the playbook when it comes to who they hire and who they nurture.

Darren: That's one of my mainstays right now. How do we diversify… We don't have enough people of color in this industry and it's because they haven't had the experience of knowing what's going on in this world.

And it’s my job, man. Look, if I'm here, it is my job to push and to give people an understanding that there's opportunities out there. And for the employers, those who are even my competitors or ourselves in this office, we need to come in with open arms and do a better job of recruiting people of color, period.

Brian: You're spot on. There are so many opportunities to be successful but to your point, you've gotta show 'em, right? You just kind of need to show them the way and then be willing to help them through that. 

Darren: That's right. I work with a program called C5 Texas here in Dallas, Texas. And there are a lot of inner city kids who come from some tough circumstances and we're looking for leaders. We mentor kids from seventh grade all the way up to their senior year in high school. 

And yeah, I had to go overcome this and overcome that, but I'm seeing 13 year old kids, man, whose circumstances are way worse than mine ever were. I'm watching them overcome family issues and death and all these things, and they get up and go, man. And it is so inspiring to me to watch these young kids. And all I need to do is provide an experience for 'em. Show 'em what a real estate broker looks like. Show 'em what a doctor looks like. Show them what a pilot looks like. Look. If you show it to 'em now, they're like, oh my god—there's a way. And that's my job. That’s who I am today.

Brian: That is fantastic. 

Darren, I can't help but think about your trajectory, right? Your path. A lot of people have watched you play football. And maybe didn't have any idea your story, right? But were inspired by you nonetheless.

What advice would you give maybe someone making a transition into commercial real estate? Maybe someone trying to wade through the changes that are in our markets now… What advice would you give them from your perspective?

Darren: One of the things that have really helped me out in my life over the last 10 years is that I've set my core values.

I know what's important to me, and work and business is important to me because it does provide me something and I like to see people prosper. But along the lines of my life, my core values are my faith in God and my family. If there's anyone listening to this man, I mean, look, take care of home. I'm telling you. Because home is where it is.

And through those transitions that I've had, the reason why I think I've been able to bounce back and get through those transitions is because … in the end, it's those same people that are gonna love on you when it's all over. And there’s nothing going on in your life. Those people are going to be there. And that's what's made me the person that I am today.

Brian: Darren, again, thank you so much for taking time outta your busy schedule and your busy life to sit down with us and tell us a little bit about yourself and your career. I appreciate it.

Darren: Ah, no problem, Brian. Thanks for having me on, man. Means a lot. 

Brian: Thanks for tuning into season three of Built. We have more great stories coming up…with our next one in two weeks, about investing in locally-sourced renewable energy.

You can find all Built episodes wherever you get your podcasts.

Built is a co-production of Fidelity National Financial, PRX Productions, and Goat Rodeo. From FNF, our project is run by Annie Bardelas. This episode of Built was produced by Jay Venables with Megan Nadolski. Our Senior Producer is Genevieve Sponsler. Additional support from Sandra Lopez-Monsalve. Audio mastering by Rebecca Seidel. 

The Executive Producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales. 

The archival clips you heard in this episode were from the Dallas Cowboys Archive and the NFL Archive, featuring NBC Sports. The music was from APM Music. 

I’m Brian Maughan. 

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