Q&A: From leading a church to business development

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It’s safe to say that Dan Collison had a less-than-traditional way into working in real estate and business development.

Sure, Collison’s most immediate work prior to becoming a senior director for Sherman Associates, in charge of business development and public affairs, was working with the Minneapolis Downtown Council and helping make East Downtown and the North Loop what they are today. But when you look a little further back, you start to see how diverse of a career Collison has had.

Collison’s initial degree leaving school was in music performance. He traveled Michigan playing in various orchestras. Then he went to divinity school, and for most of his career he worked as a pastor of First Covenant Church in downtown Minneapolis, which was right next to the eventual spot of the U.S. Bank Stadium.

After a while, as Collison recounts, he became bi-vocational. He worked with the church but also worked a lot with various business associations in Minneapolis, volunteering and becoming more and more involved with workings of real estate, housing and other issues.

Collison sat down with Finance & Commerce to talk about his career before his role at Sherman Associates, his belief around human flourishing and what his role looks like now, as senior director of business development and public affairs.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Could you talk a little bit about [your work] for the Downtown Council, along with the NuLoop, and how that brought you to where you are right now?

A: One other reason why I went into real estate is working with a nonprofit developer now called Trellis. Elizabeth Flannery is the CEO and president. She was a very early mentor of mine to learn how affordable housing works and ultimately delivered a $42 million affordable housing project at the church site that has been a really important piece of the housing puzzle in downtown and success for Trellis. Ultimately, in that journey, I learned my role was solving that cross-sector paradigm where you need city support, you need county support, you even sometimes need state support, as well as the development community that engages capital markets to get things built. What started with East Town Business Partnership, which was not just a traditional business association, but a connectional place for politics to get done, for projects to be supported, took place also for the NuLoop partners.

It was nearly eight years of full-time work that I did for the Minneapolis Downtown Council, leveraging these associations on the growing edges of town and along the way, of course, there was tremendous mentorship, not only from developers and designers and architects, but also from city planners and policy wonks. I still am a Humphrey School of Public Policy Fellow, where the political framing of issues sort of came into play, and I really was mentored in this.

I’ll say, just to kind of wrap that question, why I fell in love with real estate. Because business association leaders do a lot of things, right? They focus on policy. They focus on, literally, street-level vibrancy, advocating for businesses. But in the downtown, it’s not just businesses, it’s also nonprofits, and its social impact agencies, and it’s a really interesting mosaic of groups that have sometimes competing interests, but if you can reach up to collective impact, you can find their commonality and get things done.

Q: Could you talk to me a little bit about your current role?

A: When Sherman Associates hired me, the business development side of the company was largely being done by George Sherman, the founder, owner and principal, and also Chris Sherman, the president and also principal of this company. They had grown to a point where they weren’t able to cover all the bases, and of course, they’ve used some specialists along the way to help them in their journey, but they really needed leadership to guide business development in all markets. We own properties and assets in six states, with Minnesota being principally where we have our largest amount of assets and holdings.

There was a need to bring senior leadership to the business development side that’s basically tracking. I mean, right now, I’m tracking 17 projects in our originations pipeline, and I’m tracking many more projects that are sort of in the actual pipeline, that we have our teeth in and always supporting. Any time we have pursuits, or we have political engagement or neighborhood engagement, I’m at the table.

On the public affairs side, in some ways, its traditional public affairs responding to outreach alongside our corporate communications team. Sometimes it’s engaging in community. If things arise around our properties that need really personal touch and engagement, or engagement with leaders around those properties. Other times, it’s traditional government affairs, as you heard me testifying at the Capitol. I’m at the Capitol a lot and provide leadership to our efforts there to speak to housing policy, speak to specific projects that are incredibly important for public value, and I think, and we think, merit public support and where they’re asking for resources.

Q: Your career as a church leader and your background in theology — how does that inform your current work? I’m curious specifically about how the theology ends up you think impacting your current work.

A: I was a Collegeville Institute Fellow, which is an ecumenical Christian cross-denominational work that comes out of St. John University. And it’s a yearlong journey where you work with other senior clergy ranging across the Christian religious perspective and the center point for that your journey is something that’s called “public theology.”

What I loved about that journey of being mentored and exploring what is public theology is that this is what I believe any religion — but in my case, Christian religion – is at its best when whatever it’s doing actually enhances the public. While sometimes things like theology and doctrine and all the things that go into church leadership in various denominations, just how do you translate that? It’s like a different language the highest-level principles absolutely need to translate to not only helping the world become a place where more humans flourish, but a place where your religion is bringing help and healing and not harm or exclusion.

In that time and thereafter, I really dug into how the principles of the Christian faith best serve the public regardless of what they believe or if they don’t believe anything. And it really helped me develop an ethic, even while I was a full-time minister and a full-time business association leader focused on real estate; human flourishing became my through line. Human flourishing became a place of meaning for me that helped me, I guess, be integrated so that when I would lead the church, even give sermons, I would expect anyone from the business community or the electoral community could hear anything I say, and they would see me as coming from a place of generosity, a place of human flourishing to advance communities, regardless of people’s beliefs.

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