BenHOGan

Roger Staubach won the Heisman, served in Vietnam, won two Super Bowls, and made about $25,000 as an NFL rookie. Thirty nine years after that rookie season, he sold his company for $613 million. And here's the part almost nobody knows. By the time he sold it, he only owned 12 percent of it. Start at the beginning. Staubach won the Heisman at Navy in 1963. Then he honored his full military commitment, including a tour in Vietnam, before he ever played a down of professional football. He joined the Dallas Cowboys in 1969 as a 27 year old rookie. Salary: $25,000. By the end of his career in 1979, after two Super Bowl wins, five Super Bowl appearances and an MVP, he was making around $160,000 a year. That's the whole football fortune. Total NFL earnings estimated around $600,000. So starting in 1970, after his rookie season, he got an offseason job. A Naval Academy friend connected him to Henry S. Miller Co., a big commercial real estate firm in Texas. He started in the insurance division and talked them into letting him work the real estate side. His words: "I worked every offseason until I decided that I wanted to make real estate a future for me, outside of football." Every single offseason. For a decade. While quarterbacking the Dallas Cowboys. He retired from football in 1980 and formed The Staubach Company in 1982. His idea was unfashionable at the time. Everybody in commercial real estate represented landlords. Staubach decided to represent TENANTS, the people looking for space, whose interests nobody was protecting. That's now standard practice across the industry. It's called tenant representation. He essentially built the category. By 2008 the company had around 50 offices in North America and over 1,100 employees, and a 52 percent market share in Dallas. That June, JLL bought it for $613 million. Now the equity thing. Over the years Staubach had been giving stock away to his own people. More than 300 employees held equity in the firm. By the time of the sale he personally owned 12 percent. He could have kept it all. Instead, when the deal closed, hundreds of longtime staffers got life changing payouts. His own read on it is that the company only reached that valuation because those people stayed and worked like owners, which they were. He stayed on as executive chairman of JLL's Americas division until he retired in 2018, at one point earning around $12 million a year, which made him the highest paid retired NFL player in America. He's now in his eighties, worth several hundred million dollars. A guy who made $25,000 as a rookie because he spent his twenties in the Navy instead of the NFL. He built the thing on Tuesdays in the offseason, and then gave most of it away before he sold it. For more stories like this, follow us on any platform @thesportsontap