Greg Meerbaum and the money after the money

Greg Meerbaum once kept an account that had nothing to do with dollars. He remembered favors. Who had helped whom. Whether the balance seemed fair. In June 2026, the co-founder and CEO of Coastal Investment Company described that habit as something he had needed to unlearn. An investor admitting to a troublesome ledger is a promising place to begin.

His reflection supplies a small, revealing entrance to a career usually described in the language of private equity and real estate. Meerbaum works in a world where accounting matters. Yet his public writing argues that professional generosity suffers when every helpful gesture becomes a receivable. Friendship would be a rather exhausting business if everyone sent a statement at the end of the month.

That tension runs through his story. He has built companies, sought help investing his own capital and worked with people whose connection to him predates the current firm. The numbers belong in the account. The people have a longer history.

The proceeds were the beginning

Meerbaum describes a turning point after his largest liquidity event. Having reached that moment, he began looking for help protecting, preserving and investing the money. He established a private family office in Winter Park, Florida, and assembled consultants, accountants, financial planners and attorneys. The entrepreneur now had a different kind of work on his desk.

There is something usefully ordinary about the question beneath the arrangement. A business owner can become familiar with selling a product, managing employees or negotiating a transaction without having the same familiarity with private investment structures. Money arriving does not bring its own instruction manual. The next decision still needs a person to make it.

His account of this period moves through syndicated real estate and venture capital, with tax considerations part of the discussion. Friends who had also achieved business success were interested in opportunities they had not known how to reach. A private search began to acquire a wider audience.

This gives Coastal’s origin a particular shape. Meerbaum had approached the problem as someone with his own money to place. The business that followed grew partly from sharing the opportunities and expertise he had assembled. Its founding question was close enough to touch: what should happen after the proceeds arrive?

Old friends, new paperwork

Before Coastal Investment Company, there was Coastal Media. Meerbaum and Tyler Bloechinger established that business in 2014. Keith Ahrens joined the leadership team in 2017. The continuity matters: a new line of work was taking shape around people who already had experience working together.

Coastal Media’s business categories included sales promotion, call centers and lead generation. That earlier work gives the later investment company an entrepreneurial backdrop beyond property alone. A call center and an apartment development have different operations, but each needs a business organization around it. Meerbaum’s move between them helps explain his interest in the people who run a venture. His career contains experience creating a company with a partner before it contains the current investment platform. The partnership with Bloechinger also survived that change in subject, carrying an established working relationship into a business with different decisions to make.

The investment company’s Florida legal entity was filed in May 2021, effective that June. Gregory Meerbaum appears as CEO, Bloechinger as CFO and Ahrens as COO. A filing records the formal arrangement. The earlier Coastal history explains why the names on that arrangement were already familiar to one another.

Another connection reaches back to the University of Central Florida. Meerbaum met Carey Sobel there. In their Coastal Collective conversation, he remembers rugby, fraternity life and working at bars. Those are recognizably student memories, pleasantly distant from a discussion of sponsor evaluation. A future colleague was first a college friend.

Meerbaum also says he did not complete his degree. The university nevertheless remained part of his working life through its people. His route offers a less orderly version of the campus-to-career story, with the relationships continuing after attendance ended. Years later, those friendships would be visible inside Coastal’s leadership.

A dinner with a development plan

On March 28, 2023, Meerbaum and Madison Capital’s Ryan Hanks discussed a substantial equity investment at an investor dinner at Flagler Steakhouse at The Breakers in Palm Beach. The setting was polished. The business under discussion involved capital for distressed and opportunistic development projects across the Southeast, including projects needing help reaching completion.

Meerbaum’s explanation came with a nautical wardrobe. He spoke of rising interest rates, a receding tide and wetsuits that had spent long enough in the closet. For a firm named Coastal, the metaphor was certainly on brand. Its point was his belief that difficult financing conditions could produce opportunities for capital willing to enter.

“The tide has gone out and we’ve had our wet suits hanging in the closet long enough.”

Greg Meerbaum, March 2023

The episode puts a face and a place on a working partnership. Meerbaum and Hanks were discussing an investment with people gathered around them, connecting a capital decision to development work. It is a useful snapshot of Meerbaum’s role: bringing investors, operators and a proposed project into the same conversation.

Apartments, and a place to park the boat

Two transactions associated with Meerbaum and Hanks in 2024 make the real estate side of the story concrete. In Canton, Georgia, a multifamily development at 591 Jackie Moore Lane was recorded at $68 million, with 252 residential units. Meerbaum’s Coastal role was identified with the equity investment; Hanks’s Madison Communities role with development.

A second transaction concerned boat and RV storage at 24501 Production Circle in Bonita Springs, Florida. The recorded price was $5 million. The project included 200 covered parking spaces under the Bluegate brand, with Coastal taking an equity position alongside its Madison partnership.

Housing and recreational storage serve different purposes, but both bring the investment vocabulary back to everyday use. Someone needs somewhere to live. Someone else needs somewhere to leave a boat when it is out of the water. A spreadsheet can describe each project. It cannot replace the work of operating either one.

Car washes added another practical business to the picture. In 2024, Coastal and Madison announced Go Wash It. Meerbaum described a five-year ambition of 150 to 250 locations. That was an expansion target. Its interest here lies in the choice of business: another place where land, physical operations and repeat customer use meet.

The person across the table

Meerbaum’s public reflections increasingly return to the people responsible for those decisions. In his May 19, 2026 essay on portfolio relationships, he frames trust in the team as a central concern. He connects company culture to the quality of client service and describes leadership as something expressed through conduct.

Those are his stated standards. They are also more revealing than a broad claim to care about customers. How a leader treats a colleague, handles a difficult interaction or responds when circumstances change can affect the next conversation elsewhere in the company. Culture has to travel through actual behavior if it is to mean anything.

One anecdote he shared concerns a mentor who declined a significant piece of business because the prospective client’s goals did not match what the company could deliver. Meerbaum says he did not fully understand the choice at the time. Later, he came to see the refusal as an expression of the company’s values.

The remembered decision is modest in scale compared with a property transaction. That is part of its appeal. A leader can reveal a standard while passing up an opportunity, without a ceremony or a speech. Meerbaum presents the story as a lesson in the smaller decisions he now considers when leading.

Growth gets a number

In 2026, Coastal finished first in UCF Alumni’s inaugural Ever Upward ranking. The competition measured cumulative percentage revenue growth across 2022, 2023 and 2024. Twenty-five Knight-owned or Knight-led businesses were recognized. Coastal’s position gave the company a defined result, tied to a defined reporting period.

Its alumni leadership included Bloechinger, Ahrens, Sobel and Travis Barr. For Meerbaum, the personal significance lay in the university’s influence on his partnerships. He publicly credited UCF and expressed pride in the team’s recognition. His own unfinished degree made the connection more interesting, rather than less.

“UCF has had an undeniable impact on Coastal.”

Greg Meerbaum, August 2026

The award offers one measure of the business. It also returns the story to the people who kept in touch after college and continued working together. Growth receives a rank. The friendships behind it have a chronology of their own.

Time, without the stopwatch

In another May 2026 essay, Meerbaum examines investor behavior when conditions become uncomfortable. He emphasizes preparation, longer-term goals and the value of a trusted advisory relationship before someone makes a change. The focus is on how people respond to uncertainty, rather than on a prediction of where a market will go.

His Coastal Collective discussion extends that interest to patient capital, operator selection, due diligence and incentives. He describes wanting an environment where the people around the company can develop personally, professionally and financially. The aspiration gives the investment business a human horizon beyond its next transaction.

Return, finally, to the ledger of favors. Meerbaum’s willingness to discuss that earlier habit supplies a fitting companion to his financial story. He sought expertise for his own capital; he continued working with old friends; he now writes about trust and the limits of keeping score. The accounts still need balancing. He seems increasingly interested in the people who remain at the table afterward.