James Chen

Advisor

James Chen

Advisor

Kris Ramji

Kris Ramji graduated from SMU’s Cox School of Business with a Magna Cum Laude designation in Management Information Systems and a minor in Economics. Fielding offers from many of the top consulting firms, Kris chose to start his working career at PricewaterhouseCoopers. He spent the next two years learning the ropes of corporate life. While he excelled and performed well, something was missing. It was time to ignite his entrepreneurial spirit. As such, Kris left the corporate world and invested his savings in the dry-cleaning business. Within 3 years, he had purchased and built 18 stores across the DFW metroplex that were personally operated on a daily basis with 50+ staff members.

From there, Kris joined a dry-cleaning development partnership where the partnership developed a one-price dry cleaning concept that was environmentally friendly. An industry game changer. The next 8 years were spent selling and building this concept from New Jersey down to Florida west to Texas. Kris owned and operated some of these locations in cities such as Jacksonville, Birmingham and Raleigh along with existing locations in Texas. It was through this process that Kris learned so much about construction, permitting, lending, management and most importantly landlord/tenant relationships.

During this 10 year period, Kris dabbled in other franchises such as WhichWich, opened a Thai restaurant and flipped +/-20 foreclosure homes in the Plano/Frisco area. This was Kris’ first foray in the real estate world.

The next natural progression was into commercial real estate where Kris invested in and oversaw the re-development of his first shopping center in Irving, Tx. This was the start of learning the commercial real estate development business. Kris joined a local Dallas real estate development firm where he was the COO for 8 years. Kris ran overall development for DFW multi-tenant retail, medical and office where he personally oversaw the development of 500k+SF of ground up product with 100+ acres of planning and development including ground leases, pad sales etc. Kris is an expert in site selection, planning, entitlements, infrastructure installation, tenant procurement/negotiations, ground leases, pad sales, vertical construction and property management.

Kris started Slate Land & Development Co and Slate Real Estate Co in 2019. Slate currently has over 100k square feet of new product under development. Slate’s focus is multi-tenant retail, medical, office and multi-family. Kris is also a partner and investor in Galactic Glass which is a custom glass fabrication and installation company focused on residential new construction and remodels. Galactic Glass was one of the featured vendors in the City of Southlakes’s coveted Street of Dreams in 2020. Kris has also built a small portfolio of VRBO and residential rentals properties over the course of the past few years with many units around the DFW metroplex.