Maurice Coleman is a managing director for Cherokee Investment Partners LLC, an organization that literally began its life as a brick and mortar business. Well, actually just brick.
The enterprise has come a long way since 1984when a group of investors purchased four brick plants and merged them to form Cherokee Sanford Group. Ultimately, the group became the largest privately held brick manufacturer in North America.
By 1990, the group was the largest soil remediator in the mid-Atlantic region. The achievement of that goal began just four years earlier when petroleum-contaminated soil was found at one of the plant sites and a process for decontamination was developed. Since then, Cherokee has continuously grown its institutional capital. Coleman is responsible for evaluating and understanding macro economic trends that impact real estate investing and recommends portfolio allocation strategies to maximize return on a risk-adjusted basis.
Cherokee Investment Partners LLC is a private equity real estate firm with $2 billion of committed capital from institutional investors. A portion of Coleman’s responsibilities is to ensure that the organization’s investors are kept up-to-date with investment activities and overall fund performance.
Coleman is also working with Cherokee’s foundation, Cherokee Gives Back, in New Orleans to help people rebuild their homes.
After earning his bachelor’s in finance from LSU in 1986, Coleman went on to receive an MBA. He worked for Delta Air Lines for 14 years, in a number of financial capacities.
“Over the last eight years of my career at Delta, I worked as risk manager of the pension fund, and then served as director of alternative investment (non-public securities) with a total asset value of $1.7 billion,” Coleman said. “My decision to leave Delta to work for a private equity firm was a natural growth opportunity for me.”
Coleman became familiar with Cherokee through his investment activities at Delta, and that ultimately led to an opportunity for him to become a partner in the firm.
“Cherokee was growing and had a unique business model of acquiring, meditating, re-entitling, and ultimately selling brownfield sites,” he said referring to land within an urban area on which development has previously taken place.
Now a member of the E. J. Ourso College of Business’ Dean’s Advisory Council, Coleman hopes to provide a “real-time feedback loop to the college on overall program strengths and opportunities on which we can capitalize.” His leadership abilities were recognized while he was at LSU, and have allowed him to flourish.
“My MBA allowed me to grow personally and professionally,” Coleman said. “I had an opportunity to become involved in the LSU MBA Association and was fortunate to be elected president. I also worked as a graduate assistant in the product development department of Premier Bank (now Chase), which gave me tremendous learning experiences in post-regulated industries.”
According to Coleman, those experiences, coupled with natural group interactions in the Flores MBA Program and its strong curriculum, helped prepare him to begin his career as a corporate banker.
As an alumnus of the Flores MBA Program, Coleman is most certainly fulfilling his perceived duty of alumni in the professional world.
“I believe the role of alumni is twofold,” Coleman said. “Alumni should be an extension of the business college’s recruiting process and, wherever possible, should provide professional growth opportunities to students in a competitive environment.”
In addition to being a Chartered Financial Analyst charterholder, Coleman is also a member of the Pension Real Estate Association and the Urban Land Institute.
