Leading first development deal?

Alright OP, new day new me. Let's try this again (with me making sure to CTRL+C my response before posting).  

1. First, you need to get comfortable with asking intelligent questions of your consultants. Yes, they have more specific knowledge than you, but it is your job to extract the implications of that knowledge and consider how what they're saying impacts the deal as a whole. When presented with a topic on a call or in a meeting, questions like Who is responsible? What is the schedule impact of this decision? Why does this need to be done the way it currently is? Where will this addition provide the largest impact? When will this be complete? How much will this cost? will not only allow you to learn, but be able to weigh decisions appropriately, and also hold the consultants responsible for their budgets, schedules, and deliverables. There are dumb questions, mind you, but extracting important details from those who are paid to deliver them to you is the exact opposite – it is essential. It is also your job to see the big picture. I think it was the Steve Jobs movie where Michael Fassbender says, “I don’t play the violin; I play the orchestra.” That is you. You don’t need to know as much about architecture as your architect, or sales as your head of leasing, or construction as your GC. You aren’t there to play a 30 second trumpet solo. You are there to bring the best out of everyone, take the information they give you, and synthesize it to get the best outcome.
2. Second, you should be making genuine relationships with these consultants. This can be a bit harder as a younger person if they are older, but far from impossible. Right or wrong, it is human nature to work harder for people you like, and there will come a day multiple times in a job where even the best planned developer needs to ask one of their consultants for a fire drill. This can be as simple as asking your overpriced attorney nicely to stick to a much lower budget on a deal than she normally would or as important as begging your surveyor to bring you to the front of a line when he has a 3 week lead time on an ALTA survey and you need it in a week, or sweet talking the city manager into letting you submit your application to meet the deadline even though you don't have half of the required backup yet because if you don't, you need to wait until next month's agenda and you'd end up behind. If they say they’re out next week on vacation, ask them about where they’re going and when they get back, remember to ask them about how it went. Send them a note on their birthday, or a Christmas card for the holidays. Make work friendships with as many people as you can and they will run through walls for you when you need them to.
3. Maybe this one is more relevant for my ADHD brain, but take write down everything important, track every single actual expense and projected expense against your budget religiously, and use whatever method works for you to organize your day. It is incredibly easy to have 30+ things to do in a day, with a wide variety of levels of time required for each and brainpower required for each, and you don’t get any credit for the 28-29 you remember to do if you leave a big 1-2 out. Checklists save your life. There are so many useful tools out there these days, but for me, Outlook runs my life, oddly enough. If a meeting isn’t on my calendar it doesn’t happen, and  I also specifically schedule blocks of work time on specific things I need to get accomplished so that someone else doesn’t see an opening and throw some bullshit in there. I also put every single deadline, whether it’s PSA related or entitlement related or vendor deliverable or anything on my calendar and make sure it notifies me both a week ahead of time and a day ahead of time. I also fucking hate having notifications on my phone, so when I’m going through my email, if I see one that requires a response or an action that is beyond one sentence on my phone, I re-mark it as unread because lord knows I’m not letting that stay on unread for more than 24 hours. Track everything.
4. Act like the owner. I don’t mean this in a go out and buy a Porsche and an Omega douchebag type of way or inflate your ego to the point that you end up on a meme account, but in a sense that when it comes to this project, there is functionally no different between you and the owner of your company or the head of your division. You aren’t an analyst or whatever your title says. You are a developer, and that comes with responsibilities big and small. I develop multi and mixed use, so these examples are geared toward that, but a big thing for me is that while the architect sees my project as a design and the GC sees it as a job site, I always focus on the fact that the second my first tenant moves in, this is someone’s fucking home, and it is my sole responsibility to make sure that person, my client, has a brilliant experience. That means if the GC thinks they’re starting work at 5:30am while people are living there, they’re in for a rude awakening. It means that if they aren’t keeping their site clean, they’re going to hear about it, because a messy construction site means lost or damaged materials, an inefficient construction, which means I’m losing money (even if it is, again, not actually my money but my boss’s.) It means if I tell them that I don’t want to see a subcontractor parking their dirty ass trucks in resident parking anymore, and they still do it, I’m towing their fucking trucks. It also means, however, that if they kick ass and get me COs on time ahead of a hectic move-in week, I’m buying as much BBQ as I can fit in my trunk and feeding everyone in the trailer lunch. It means that if they are genuinely getting fucked by materials like electric switchgear getting delayed 6 months out of their control, that I’m a teammate of theirs, not a constant antagonist, and we figure it out together. Similarly, if I’m walking the site with the management team and I see trash in the landscaping, I’m picking it up, and I’m making a big deal about picking it up because although it’s not my job to pick up trash with my bare hands but you need to set the tone that it’s actually everyone’s job to keep the site clean and next time I come I better not see trash there. It means that if the leasing office entrance looks lame, I’m getting some balloons out there and I’m calling my landscaper for a flower refresh. It means that if we go two weeks getting only 1-2 leases when we need to be getting 5-6, and I’m frustrated with the leasing team but I see they’re all down about it, instead of coming down on them, I’m telling them that if they get 5 this week I’m giving them all $500 gift cards and if they get 10, they’re each getting $1,500 gift cards, and I’m watching their eyes light up at the potential. The team is yours to motivate and come down on as you think is necessary to accomplish your goals, because…
5. You have to have the mentality that absolutely nothing happens unless you make it happen. Again, that doesn’t mean you have to physically do it, but you have to make it happen because ultimately, you are responsible if it doesn’t get done. The absolute most difficult situations you will be confronted with are when you need to get someone to do something and you have no power over them whatsoever and they do not give two shits about you. Architects and GCs are easy to bribe/sweet talk/yell at/etc., but you’re not getting anywhere with a utility company or a government employee or an union elevator guy that way. About 3-4 times a job, something absurd will occur where say you need to move a few power lines intersecting your site for construction to start, and like a good little developer you have been coordinating with AT&T, Comcast, and the Power company for months. However, a week before construction, AT&T has suddenly ghosted you completely, the Comcast engineer who you had a great relationship with got reassigned and the new guy can barely string sentences together, and the Power company refuses to even start until the telecom guys are off the poles. If you don’t get this done on time, the entire job starts off behind schedule, and lord knows the GC will use that excuse every single time you call them on being behind, so you better get it done. What do you do? Another example is your interest reserve is going down way too fast because of interest rate hikes. Earlier in the project you maybe could have moved some money around or VE’d something, but the job’s been done for a few months and the capital budget is spent. If you don’t get 30 people to move in, by the end of THIS MONTH, you’re out of money and either can’t pay debt service or the property falls behind on invoices and start digging your hole deeper. What do you do? 3-4 times a job, there will be a seemingly impossible situation put in front of you that you simply need to figure out, because failing isn’t an option and no one is coming to bail you out at the top. You are the one who solves it, you are the one who makes it happen, and when you can be the person who doesn’t panic, and doesn’t freak out, and doesn’t think woe is me, but you’re like that scene in The Matrix (please google it if you don’t know I’m 36 I can’t take someone telling me that haven’t seen it) where everything slows down for Neo and he does things that no one can do, that’s when this job is fucking awesome. You don’t solve the impossible sometimes, you solve it every time, and it feels great.

If you stretch a little, you can even take this specific thread as a good example of how to work through a problem. I posted two responses that didn’t go through, and I could have just thought “eh fuck it half of this stuff I’ve said before maybe they’ll find it somewhere else” and x out of the window. That doesn’t solve the problem though. Instead, I tagged the site owner and told the OP to dm me, I’ve been working with the site dev team to correct the issue, and I made sure this time to write this in Word and copy/paste it over so that if it happens again, I don’t lose time. Now it’s posted – mission accomplished.

10-50 times a day you will be confronted with a random issue in development that you will have to overcome. Some are so simple that it’s annoying people can’t solve them without you. Some are so complex that if you weren’t driving it, it would never get done, and it is not overdramatic to say that the entire deal could fall apart and people would lose millions of dollars. You make sure you ask good questions of your experts and your elders, forge genuine relationships with them, write down everything and organize your life and budget so that nothing slips through the cracks, and approach each project like it is your personal project and without you it will never be successful, and you’ll succeed. You’re in the big leagues now, regardless of your title. Go kick some ass.