TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — Dallas Turner and his family have seen more than their share of football video edits, particularly in the recruiting process when he was a five-star recruit. But one sticks out above the rest. College programs make impressions on players with creative images and football-related stats (like their number of draft picks), but Alabama channeled another interest, and it made all of the difference.
The graphic featured a 17-year-old Turner on the cover of Forbes magazine with the title “All Business: From Being a Bama Baller to One of the Richest Self-Made Billionaires.” Given Turner’s family background, it resonated. It was the only graphic throughout the recruitment process that Dallas’ father, Delon, posted on social media.
“He worked on Wall Street, and was a wealth manager for other years,” Dallas said. “Seeing him and how he handled his business and the hard work he put in inspired me to get my feet wet in business when the opportunity presented itself. When (Alabama) sent me that edit, it was kind of surreal because my dad reads Forbes weekly. So seeing him read the magazine, then getting the edit, it’s like that can really happen in the future.”
Momma I’m on Forbes! RTR 🐘 pic.twitter.com/PbYxqZelwN
— Dallas Turner (@UnoErra) May 26, 2020
Three years later, Turner is 20 years old and is making strides to become that self-made businessman. He’s a potential All-America linebacker for the No. 8 Alabama team, and he’s a budding businessman with equity ownership in several companies, including his father’s venture capital firm, 7even Hills, in which Dallas is a limited partner, thanks to his name-image-and-likeness earnings. He’ll transition into becoming a general partner once he heads to the NFL.
“I’ve always liked doing business, selling things and stuff like that,” Dallas said. “Getting older (now), just viewing things in different ways and things you can branch out to, to become a successful businessman, especially today with E-commerce and everything being online. There’s a lot of opportunities out there.”
Dallas’ talent and business acumen and his father’s company have merged in an unprecedented way in 2023. Delon founded a neo bank: a direct bank that operates exclusively using online banking without a traditional physical branch called PoetrYY Finance. It signed Dallas to an equity NIL deal and negotiated an official partnership with Alabama to become the official digital bank of the athletic department.
PoetrYY operates as a typical bank with every feature but without a brick-and-mortar location. It serves any consumer. But the Turners, a Miami-area rooted family, saw an opportunity to prioritize athletics in the early years of the bank and through the current landscape of how NIL is affecting student-athletes through the potential pitfalls of improper financial management.
PoetrYY signed Dallas’ childhood friends and Division I football players Tatum Bethune (Florida State) and Kam Kinchens (Miami). And the plan is to continue expanding across college athletics.
“I can really say I’m proud of him for how far this has come,” Dallas said. “Dreams turning into reality, just being able to help in any way I can and help market and grow the business. It’s hopefully something that’s a multi-million dollar bank in the next couple of years. It’s just a birthright now.”
The Business Foundation Began at Home
Dallas’ business acumen began at a young age, with a foundation from his parents, Delon and Tonya, and cultivated by his desire to have his own money.
“My mom says I’ve always been a hustler,” Dallas said.
As a junior in high school, Dallas wanted a new television monitor to hook up to his gaming system. Knowing his parents probably wouldn’t outright buy it, he asked his mom for a $20 loan to buy baking supplies. Soon, he was running a bake sale at the school and turning a big profit.
“As the days went on, $100 turned into $200, then $400 then $800,” Dallas said.
Delon, a Florida A&M graduate who played professional basketball for more than 10 years overseas, worked as a senior portfolio manager and financial adviser through Merrill Lynch, overseeing nearly 50 professional athletes’ accounts during Dallas’ high school years. Delon made it a point to take his son to meetings periodically to illustrate the responsibilities and potential issues of managing money as a professional athlete.
“Just being around those types of guys, it kind of opened my eyes,” Dallas said. “It just kind of gave me an idea of how an NFL player manages their money and good ways to manage it — saving more than you spend. Seeing that kind of gave me a little more experience at a young age to know what to expect for when I get to that level.”
A member of Alabama’s 2021 recruiting class, Dallas was one of the first players who enrolled in college at the beginning of NIL legislation in the summer of 2021. Until then, he envisioned playing college football with no money involved. Football was, and still is the priority, but soon, he began his journey down both avenues.
He was a freshman All-American in 2021 with 30 tackles, 8.5 sacks, and 10 tackles for loss. He was part of one of Alabama’s early trading card deals in which several players were tasked with signing a few hundred cards. The first player to return them was Dallas in just a few days.
He’s a finance-turned-business management major with a likely NFL career: He’s the No. 7 prospect in The Athletic’s latest 2024 NFL Draft big board. Dallas’ options are open in the business world, but he sees himself following an entrepreneurial route. Ownership is important, and long-term value in business deals has become a regular part of his decision-making process with his father and the rest of his business team.
Dallas has negotiated deals with companies like B Generous, a credit marketplace for nonprofits, to an equity deal in exchange for brand promotion. He signed with Kane Footwear, in which he has an equity stake. Through his adjacent business team at LifeLine Financial Group, Dallas is set to become an equity owner in a professional sports franchise in an announcement that’s due on Nov. 29 alongside several other prominent investors.
PoetrYY provided the unique opportunity to combine family business with the university that he stars for on Saturdays to create a longstanding relationship long after Dallas is done playing in Tuscaloosa.
“What do you want to be, or what do you want your portfolio to look like? A lot of times (college athletes) don’t know,” Delon said. “I think these opportunities are going to start to grow to a point where kids are going to become more educated. They’re going to understand their true value as a brand new partnership, and they’re gonna demand for so many small businesses and startups: ‘I just don’t want upfront compensation, I want to be part of your company. As you grow, I want to grow with you.’
How Alabama, Turners Became Partners
As Dallas was on the precipice of becoming a standout player for Alabama in 2021, Delon was building a concept he hoped would take a variety of people into the digital age of banking. PoetrYY was created with the vision to serve communities that lack the necessary amount of brick-and-mortar banks relative to the population: known as “banking deserts,” underserved communities without proper financial literacy infrastructures, and more.
Once NIL entered the business space, Delon pinpointed an opportunity to utilize the bank’s mission to help young, emerging athletes who are coming into large sums of money for the first time.
“Education has to be the foundation, and it has to be the fundamental piece that drives your decision-making process,” Delon said. “I think what we did at PoetrYY was to have a space where we had an entry point that no one catered to, and we’d like to call ourselves the first financial service that actually caters to these athletes by providing them opportunities to learn and to deepen their experiences as they have income coming.”
Initially, Delon hoped to launch in 2022 and partner with a few prominent players from Alabama’s team, but the bank didn’t materialize quickly enough to launch last fall. By in September of this year, it was ready, and Dallas saw how much went into creating the brand and decided to help in any way he could — signing an NIL deal with the bank in exchange for equity.
The relationship with Alabama has grown over time. From athletic director Greg Byrne to the YeaAlabama NIL entity, everything the university does from a sponsorship perspective can be described as deliberate and calculated. The university did its homework, and the fit that PoetrYY can provide and who Dallas has been inside the program during the past three years created a deal that set a precedent.
“We use the word brand a lot, but a business lending their brand to a student-athlete, they have to do so with a lot of thought,” YeaAlabama director of content Aaron Suttles said. “You don’t see a ton of these deals with companies out there like a lot of people thought when we first started thinking about what NIL might look like because you’re really risking your reputational brand on 18-22-year-old kids.
“The fact that Dallas has put himself in that position speaks to how he was raised, what he’s done for himself, and the opportunities he created on the field, but also a lot of that is people trust him that he was a trusted entity in this partnership.”
The first step was a name sponsorship in Alabama’s football series “The Council,” a multi-episode YouTube series in August that provided a behind-the-scenes look at selected leaders of the 2023 team. Dallas was featured in the series’ second episode.
In late September, Alabama opened the Advantage Center, a state-of-the-art NIL facility to help its student-athletes maximize their earning potential. One of the features is a studio where commercials are filmed and edited, and YeaAlabama approached the Turners about being one of the first to use the space for a PoetrYY advertisement.
The commercial, starring Dallas in official Alabama-branded attire, promotes the family-owned bank, and Dallas recognizes the privilege of having an official business tie with his future alma mater that will last for years to come.
“It’s a blessing,” Dallas said. “Having those ties with my dad’s bank and the school, everybody doesn’t have those opportunities. So it’s my job to try and open the doors for a lot of (other athletes) to start focusing on making good financial decisions and looking into financial education as well as financial literacy.”
The process of finding the next wave of collegiate athletes to continue pushing the brand is underway, and it’s going beyond football. Delon says the plan is to venture to men’s and women’s basketball and potentially other schools besides Alabama, Florida State, and Miami.
The goal is to become a leader in the neo-bank space and to provide a service that complements what schools are already doing. Collectives and other university entities drive revenue toward the athletes, and PoetrYY provides a platform to manage the money and provide financial education (including tax implications on money earned) that will serve athletes now and into the future.
“I haven’t heard of any banks collaborating with college athletes in this way,” Dallas said. “I feel like PoetrYY being one of the first could be big; it might be the pinnacle of the entire bank. It’s expanding, and as it does, the company will expand, and that’s just really good to see.”
Chasing a Legacy in Multiple Ways
This is the most important time of year for Dallas and Alabama’s team. Early-season struggles called the team’s ceiling into question, but after nine straight wins, the Crimson Tide (10-1, 7-0 in the SEC) are within striking distance of the College Football Playoff. Alabama is set to travel to Auburn on Saturday (2:30 p.m. CT on CBS) and to Atlanta for the SEC championship game against No. 1 Georgia on Dec. 2.
Dallas is one of the leaders of the team, and his emergence as one of college football’s top linebackers — with 42 tackles, seven sacks, and 10.5 tackles for loss — is one of the reasons for the Crimson Tide’s success.
“The team’s kind of peaking at the right time,” Dallas said. “We’ve established our identity as a team, and a lot of things are coming together. It’s just been growing every week on both sides of the ball.”
Dallas wants to cement his legacy by helping lead Alabama to another national championship, which has evaded his recruiting class. And he hopes whoever he’s aligned with within the business will leave an impact on his community in South Florida. Whether it’s B Generous’ initiative to promote nonprofit funding to uplift communities or PoetrYY’s multi-pronged goal, there’s a common thread of service, which is a high priority to Turner.
On Tuesday, he hosted the inaugural Dallas Turner Thanksgiving meal and turkey distribution drive in his native Miami Gardens. His family, on his behalf, was on hand to donate 200 turkeys and 100 meals to the community.
“Honestly, I just want to make an impact on the whole community where I’m from,” Dallas said. “Just to inspire the youth and be a figure of, ‘If I can do it, you can too.’ I was that one kid who looked at other people and wanted to be like them. You never know who’s gonna be the next one, so it’s good to inspire everybody.”
Turner’s list of goals is lengthy. He wants to be the best player he can be, and a few bucket list items include a signature shoe deal and a featured spot in a prominent fashion week in a premier location. That’s an area that he notes wasn’t possible growing up but is within reach now as athletes are taking more ownership of their business futures.
The foundation of who he is will remain the same, which allowed for his success during his Alabama career and can be a blueprint for the next generation.
“Doing what I do on the field, of course,” Dallas said. “Coming into work every day ready to grind and give it my all, be coachable, talk to people, and just be an overall good guy on and off the field. It’s paying off.”