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Acquisition and Development Analyst, Flywheel Capital

Go big or go home? Ezra McPhail knows a thing or two about that.

When he wanted a career change, he opted to leave work full-time to get an MBA, believing the network and internships he got would give him the best possible advantage in moving into real estate. And when he worked on a statewide case competition, he and his team pitched an ambitious, 7 million-square-foot project that got them to the finals of the challenge.

Ultimately, Ezra’s team lost to a less-enterprising entry, but he said the chance to go big helped him put what he learned in his MBA classes to the test.

“It was a risk, but we knew if we went big, we’d have to solve more challenges, and think harder and more critically about our choices,” he said. “We thought about scaling it back, but at the end of the day, we realized that we’ll never have an opportunity like this to define Denver’s future skyline.”

Ezra originally relocated to Denver from his native Wisconsin in pursuit of an advertising job, but it didn’t take long for him to realize he wanted a change. Real estate was long an area of interest—“growing up, I wanted to be an architect, but I can’t draw,” he said—though he realized he needed a blend of business and real estate skills to break into the field, and found his place at Leeds.

“I called alumni from the MS and MBA programs to get their feel of how it went for them—which helped me land on a full-time, two-year program, so I’d have a chance to do an internship,” Ezra said.

It also helped him land an internship as an acquisition analyst with Treeline Partners, which Ezra said was “a perfect place for me to start an internship.”

“Day one was, here is our model, here’s how we work at our model. Then, day two was, here’s five deals, I need them by the end of the week. I loved being thrown right into the deep end.”

Ezra knows all about being thrown in the deep end. In 2011, his world changed in an instant when he went to throw a routine check in an ice hockey game. But the opposing player ducked, which sent Ezra headfirst into the boards, resulting in a severe spinal injury. To this day, he walks with arm crutches, but he remains highly active on hiking trails and as an adaptive skier; he and his fiancée are planning to take up golf this summer.

“Up until that point, both school and sports came fairly easy to me, so adversity wasn’t something I was familiar with,” he said. “But while it was hard—it is hard—I found how important it is to surround yourself with people who keep you motivated, encourage you to look to the future and challenge you to strive for better.

“In many ways, it was like the MBA program—you only succeed by surrounding yourself with these driven, like-minded people who are there to both challenge and support you.”