Starlight Capital Chief Executive Dennis Mitchell made an important long-term career decision after mangling a knee he suffered in his first chosen career of football.

"Six knee surgeries later, and here I am," said Mitchell, whose Toronto-based company is a wholly owned subsidiary of Starlight Investments, which manages $25 billion of real estate. While the injuries made Mitchell change his dreams, he kept his competitive drive to come in first: "What I really missed was the competitive aspect and camaraderie of high-level sports. You want to be the best."

After college, Mitchell was looking for a chance, so when a real estate opportunity opened in research, the chief executive — and chief investment officer — of Starlight Capital was ready to learn the business.

"I had no prior experience. I had never said I wanted to be in real estate," said Mitchell, whose first job in the industry was as the research analyst covering real estate infrastructure at Sentry Investments. "It was six years of writing one-page reports and five-page reports. When I finally got my chance, I didn't care if it was in real estate, oil and gas or financials."

Mitchell thinks back to when he had no idea what net asset value or adjusted funds from operations meant, only that it was a job on the "buy side" that got him into the industry.

"It would eventually lead me to become a portfolio manager, so I wanted it," said Mitchell about his start at Sentry Investments around 2005.

Before Sentry Investments was acquired by CI Financial Corp. in 2017, the firm had 45 mutual fund mandates and over 19 billion Canadian dollars in assets under management. When Mitchell started, the firm had an $8 million real estate fund, and his team expanded that to $1.5 billion and dominated the buy-side for real estate in Canada.

"I spent the first three to six months reading everything I could get my hands on and meeting as many people I could and figuring out as much as I could about real estate in Canada, U.S. and globally," said Mitchell. "It was fun because I wasn't a portfolio manager who had to manage the fund. All I had to do was just learn."

He learned quickly that what is good for residential real estate is only sometimes good for office fundamentals. Today, he uses what he learned in his early days with his new employees.

"You have to attack things systematically. I had two co-op students this last term, and the process I run with them is the process I built for myself," said Mitchell, The students start out by studying residential, move to senior housing and retail, and "eventually you get to industrial and office. The residential REITs are the simplest from a comprehension standpoint," Mitchell said.

Mentors are often crucial to succeed in any industry. Mitchell said Neil Downey, now chief financial officer of First Capital REIT but previously head of equity research at RBC Capital Markets, taught him about how to value publicly traded REIT. Dori Segal, a former chief executive of First Capital, also is credited by the executive.

"Neil was tremendous, and Dori taught me the difference between quality real estate and commoditized real estate. Not just about how you acquire real estate now but how it will compound. The two of them were really consequential."

His advice to younger people starting out is to have a plan. "If you don't have a plan, then you are part of someone else's plan, and you might not like the plan they have for you," said Mitchell. "It doesn't mean the plan you had at 12 is the one you will have at 30."

Everyone in commercial real estate had to start somewhere. CoStar's First Job column explores where careers began.