The lead investor of the company that acquired Community State Bank was a finalist for the Florida EY Entrepreneur of the Year, wrote a Wall Street Journal best-selling book and leads a company that has been on the Inc. 5000 “Fastest Growing Private Companies in America” for 10 consecutive years.
Don Wenner is the CEO of DLP Capital whose motto is dream, live, prosper.
Last week, the organization’s banking arm: DLP Bancshares, announced its acquisition of Starke-based Community State Bank.
“Community State Bank is a tremendous asset to its community, and we have plans to honor its rich history of quality and client service while at the same time contributing additional capital to position the bank for growth,” said Wenner in a news release announcing the acquisition. “We are excited to welcome all the employees of the bank to our DLP family while installing an exceptional board of directors to oversee the bank’s future success.”
Wenner planted the seeds of DLP Capital while a college student at Drexel University. He sold real estate for Keller Williams. However, the real estate crash in 2009 gave the Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania native, an opportunity to acquire single-family residences on the cheap, which led later to purchasing multi-family units.
By 2014, the company had grown to over 600 properties and 100 employees.
Wenner said that he then decided to focus on what he calls workforce housing. In addition to acquiring and managing properties, he also moved into lending.
That same year, he relocated the company’s headquarters from Pennsylvania to St. Augustine, a move he said helped the company achieve a more than 50% growth rate year over year.
The company now owns properties in 24 states, with most of its housing units in the south.
In March 2021, DLP announced it had acquired Sunnyside Bancorp in Irvington, New York. However, a private equity firm later outbid the real estate company for the bank, and DLP had to settle for a termination fee for its efforts.
Following the Community State Bank acquisition, DLP Bancshares said it made a significant capital contribution to the bank to increase its lending limit, support its balance sheet objectives and enhance the range of services offered to its customers.
“In addition, DLP Bancshares will provide resources to strengthen and expand the bank’s technology investments, enhancing the products and services offered to the communities it serves,” DLP said. “The bank will continue to play an important role in the local community, having a long history of serving the region dating to its founding in 1957.”
Wenner told the Jacksonville Business Journal that he plans to integrate the bank into his other businesses by referring DLP’s 2,250 investors to its services and by using it to fund DLP’s growing real estate portfolio.
“We’re really in a great position to build a great bank balance sheet, and owning a bank is the lowest cost of capital in the world,” he told the publication. “Having a really low cost of capital that allows us to invest in workforce housing and support and help developers and operators grow is a pretty exciting opportunity.”
In Wenner’s 2021 book: “Building an Elite Organization: The Blueprint for Scaling a High-Growth, High-Profit Business,” the author teaches the system he says fueled the growth of his own organization. He writes that his Elite Execution System instills discipline, structure and accountability into organizations.
In a January interview he gave to Real Estate Daily Beat, Wenner said poor execution, the malady his book addresses, is the primary reason real estate projects fail.
“Over the past decade, the deals gone bad haven’t been a fundamental real estate issue; rather, it was a matter of execution. Developing land, vertical construction, putting in the right infrastructure, and managing hundreds of residents, there’s a lot of execution risk associated with it.”
DLP Bancshares also announced new board members for the bank, which include:
Lisa Mead, a former executive of AmSouth Bank (later Regions Financial) of Birmingham, Alabama;
Frank Rodriguez, chairman of debt and equity investment firm Miramar Group and former board member of the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce;
Bob Peterson, chief financial officer of DLP Capital with 40 years’ experience in commercial and residential real estate finance.
The bank’s new board chair, Al Hatfield, was formerly a mergers and acquisitions executive with General Mills, CEO of a housing supplies distribution company sold to North America’s largest building materials company, served in the Marine Corps, and is the chair of a bank holding company in Minnesota.
The current CEO of Community State Bank, David Bridgeman, will remain in that role and on the board.
Also remaining on the board is attorney Eric Smith, a former member of the Florida House of Representatives and former president of the Jacksonville City Council.
