Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: The good news is on work ethic.
Assuming you're not necessarily born with all of it, just that dna that you wake up every day and you just have to go accomplish something, it doesn't mean it's like all or nothing. You can still in today's world where they're trying to make work, minimize it more and more and more. It gives you even more opportunity to go outshine everybody because more people are trying to figure out how to work less. It's just been happening forever, but it seems like more recently people want to work from home. They don't want to go to the office. They want Fridays off. They like thirsty Thursdays. They like all this stuff. They're looking for every edge to get out. I think today presents an opportunity that if you do have work ethic, you have a huge advantage to maybe compensate for other weaknesses you might have.
[00:00:59] Speaker B: My next guest is the quintessential entrepreneur. A bootstrapper yet kind and generous, understanding, constantly learning, easily approached, a mentor, a mentored, and somebody that we're going to learn a ton from today. If you're a budding entrepreneur or want to start something on your own, you'd better be watching this. This guy started with a $90,000 home when he was in college, flipped it and flipped it and flipped it and flipped it, and now oversees over $2 billion in commercial real estate assets. There's a lot to be learned here, but moreover, this guy is a sweet, dear friend, and I can't wait to introduce him to you. Here he is. Welcome to the tcast. Mr. Chris Powers. I'd really like to kind of play on your entrepreneurial success because we have tons of people that are entrepreneurs or aspire to be entrepreneurs. Tons of people really aspire to do it, but don't appreciate how hard it is.
But yet, those people also could experience more success if they heard from someone like you who has just bootstrapped their way through just going out, failing, learning what works and everything else. And then I like to talk everything from where you started on, through culture and all that kind of stuff. Include the podcast.
I'll ask you, what was your most important lesson that you brought growing up that inspired you to even decide to be an entrepreneur? Did you even go to school to be an entrepreneur when you went to TCU?
[00:02:35] Speaker A: No, I didn't go to school to be an entrepreneur.
That's a really good think. I don't know if it was a lesson, but I often tell people it was like a chip on my shoulder that started building early in my life. And it really just.
The simplest way I can think about it was, when I was growing up, my dad was an attorney.
And when I was seven, or I was, like, six, he came home and said he was a partner at a law firm, that he wanted to become a doctor.
And so for anybody that is listening to this, that doesn't know what it takes to be a doctor, you literally go to a year of get prerequisites at the university so you can go to medical school. So that's one year of no pay. Then you go to medical school for four years. So now you're at five years of no pay, and then you go to residency for four or five more years, and you're making, like, $30,000 a year. So over, like, a ten year period, my dad made, like, a whopping 100 and 3140 grand across ten years total.
And so I think what was interesting was, like, I grew up kind of middle class, and then there was this dip in my life where we didn't really make anything. And this isn't the question you asked, but it was some of the best years of my life. We could maybe talk about that. Why? I was young, so I was playing sports, but I was just very aware early on, like, we had something, and then we didn't have something.
I saw my parents, they had a great marriage, but their struggles sometimes tended to be like my mom would. This was like going on in the. She was just like, we basically made the decision to have no money.
It was like a decision which not everybody has that decision, but we did.
[00:04:36] Speaker B: Decision in terms of, she was going to do what she's going to do, and he's going to do what he's going to do, and therefore, we're going to try to make it on what we.
[00:04:44] Speaker A: For sure.
She taught tennis.
Okay, that he had savings. But in moments of weakness, I would often hear like, you have to make money.
If you don't want to struggle, you have to make money. Money helps solve basic needs. And so even I always thought of it as, like, freedom, kind of security, kind of safety. And so a lot of it was like this muscle of, I had to learn how to make money to basically build some type of foundation for my life, which we can talk about how I think about that today. That motivated me for a while, not so much anymore.
[00:05:32] Speaker B: Were you somewhat motivated to or inspired to not be like that in some form or fashion? Maybe we take good things and bad things from our folks, but was that part of the inspiration is, look, I don't want to live this way if I have a choice. That was something you took forward.
[00:05:49] Speaker A: That was it. And really what it was was its simplest form was we didn't have money to buy anything. So if I wanted something, I had to go earn it. And so I had to wash cars, I had to mow lawns, I had to sell golf clubs on eBay. I probably did some more trivial things, but I made money to do things to get something. And so that was just always my, like, I just never thought any differently. And then I got to TCU, and TCU is a super wealthy. Like, there's a lot of wealth walking around that school. And I was just blown away. And so I really just said, okay, I have to keep that momentum on. I got to make some good money to be able to do things I want to do in college. And so a lot of it was like, entrepreneur, because I wanted to make money to have the freedom to make decisions I wanted to make. It didn't start as this, like, I had a dream or I had a vision or a mission to start this one company. And real estate kind of is what happened at the time. Now, those things have changed over time. But if I was like, what's the earliest instincts I can remember was like, how do you make money?
[00:07:02] Speaker B: And so how did you learn how to do what you want to do? Because what you say is somewhat profound. Somebody listening would be like, okay, well, that sounds interesting. So how the hell do you turn that into something that blows up when you literally are coming out? You're a college student, so it's not like you have tons of experience. You don't have tons of cash. You don't have access to tons of cash. If your folks aren't fluid, then you're looking at borrowing externally. So what is it that drove you to do something? And what was that one thing that kind of put you in a position where you're actually moving forward?
[00:07:39] Speaker A: I kind of have this theory, and this is easier to say, as I've gotten later, that the world does a really good job of making people that don't have experience feel like things are really hard to achieve.
And some things are like, if you want to go be a rocket physicist, that is kind of hard to achieve. But there's a whole lot of people out there that have made money that if you actually look at the work that they've done, it's not like super complicated, I. E.
You could watch somebody do it, you could read about it, you could get the hang of it. Pretty quickly. And so the second thing I would say that I think I've always, and I'll unpack that in a second.
I've always had a skill for, I don't even know if you call it a skill. It's always made sense to me that if somebody's already done what I want to do, either make them a mentor, study them, read about them, just like they've already done. There's so many people that have already walked the walk that you're trying to walk, whether it's to make money or be something.
And so for me, it was realizing that, I think, again, from an early age, I've always maybe had the confidence that things aren't as hard as I think they were made out to be. So somebody would say, like, how did you buy a house when you were 18 years old? Well, if you really break that down, it's like the first thing that scares most people is they look around and they're like, well, no other 18 year old has really done this. So I think they just categorize it in their head as, this must be really hard. And for a lot of people, it stops right there.
[00:09:15] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:09:16] Speaker A: They don't even make it past that point.
But if you really, then you read a book. Okay, what's real estate about? You buy a property, you have to rent it for more than your expenses are. I'm simplifying it for the sake of the podcast. What's a good location look like? How would I find a tenant? What are the major expenses? Are they easy to predict? What makes a good property? What makes a bad? I'm not saying by the time I bought my first property, I was an expert, but I had done enough research to go like, this isn't rocket science, it's really not that hard. And then if I said, well, why do most 18 year olds not buy? It's like, one, most don't have money. Okay. That's a barrier I'm going to have to overcome.
Two, is it legal? Yeah, it was legal to do it, so I figured that out. Three, would lenders allow me to do it if I met all their criteria? Yes. So the really biggest barrier to entry was like, do I have the confidence to do it and can I find the money to do it? Right? That was really it. Now you could say, yeah, but you still didn't know what you were doing. But I'm taking you through 18 year old Chris.
[00:10:18] Speaker B: Right.
And those are super key for sure, whether it be 18 year old you or if you were going to start over and do something else. For sure you have the experience behind you. A lot of new entrepreneurs are at that threshold, for sure. Just think I'm just inundated with all this information. It's frustrating. Or I don't have access to capital.
[00:10:39] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:10:40] Speaker B: And a lot of people also just misunderstand the whole capital idea anyway. They think they're supposed to be able to borrow money that pays themselves while they work on this project, too, as opposed to understanding that it's going to take eaten off the dirt floor for a while, for sure, and all that kind of stuff, too.
[00:10:57] Speaker A: And I think that's what gets lost in a lot of this. It's easy to look at somebody that's making a lot of money or has a successful business today. But every business started with zero. Amazon started with zero.
Apple started in a garage. Like your business probably started with you, probably wearing your security gear. And it was like just you day one, and I'm going to go out and protect this person, and now you've got security agents everywhere. For me, we started with nothing. And then we started with $110,000 home. Like, we started with something, but it was just me. It looked really messy. It was a bank account. I didn't even know how to file a tax return. There were 100 things I really didn't know how to do.
But that's the other part. Most things aren't that hard to figure out along the way. Maybe that's me. But do you think it's resources, though?
[00:11:52] Speaker B: Because some people feel like they don't have resources either to reach out to, if they don't have parents, for instance, mentor them or whatever, is that something? That's a perfect spot to say.
[00:12:04] Speaker A: My life has been blessed up and down by incredible figures in my life that helped me out along the way. I'm not a self made guy.
I have had people at all levels, but I would tell you, I know people that also have those. You still have to be willing to take the step forward. Now, to your point, I think when you go back to the barriers is, yeah, I think there are people that are in situations, whether you said, whether they have mentors or parents that love them or financial resources or whatever it may be, it makes that risk tolerance or that. Could I actually do this seem much harder? There's more stacked against them.
[00:12:51] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:12:53] Speaker A: So, no, I can't speak from that side of it. But I can imagine it's not any harder for me to imagine buying a house and what it would take to run a house than anybody else, anybody could figure that out no matter where you come from. But I think there are new layers that get entered in that make it seem like even though I understand how to buy a house and operate it, the barriers to actually do it increase. For some people, I think is where.
[00:13:21] Speaker B: You'Re getting some of it. Maybe personality type too. Which leads me to one of the other things is how much, and not just in that first house purchase, which obviously you've expanded house to house to house and now in a commercial and et cetera. But how much do you think work ethic has to do with the numbers of entrepreneurial failures that happen these days? Or do you think it's an equal number of failures that happened in the past? And do you think a lot of it's work ethic? Because what you're describing is just jump in. And I've experienced some of that too. If you jump out of the plane without learning how to operate the parachute, you there will better figure out how to operate the parachute. But it's almost easier for me if I know I'm already flying to do it, as opposed to taking the time to figure out how to do it and then plan when I'm going to do it, because something will eventually just delay the process and whatever. You have too many things to think about. But if you're flying already, you got to figure it out. And sometimes you end up doing better that way. But you also have to have a work ethic. I think that is quite underappreciated. And I think knowing you, you have quite the work ethic. How much do you think that applies?
[00:14:31] Speaker A: I think it applies greatly.
I think we've gotten a little bit soft on this topic.
You see, people start talking about work life balance, like right out of the gate.
Look, if you look at our ancestors going back to when we were like cavemen, imagine how much work it took to be a caveman, actually.
You had to kill your food. You had to dig a hole and take a dump in it and cover that. Everything we take for granted. Just getting through a day, you had to go down to the river to get your water. You had to fend off animals trying to eat you all day. You had to deal with the elements. Like when it rained, you were like, I can't imagine how much work not it was to work a job just to work at your life exist. Yeah. When you actually look at humans today, technology has made it to where we can leverage technology to get more stuff done.
We are doing far less work as a species today than we have done in human history.
Now it's like, okay, now we're not going to work five days a week, we're going to work four, and we're not going to work nine to five. We're going to work ten to four. It's this race to see how little we can work.
But then what I would tell you is, what do Kobe Bryant, Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, Tom Brady, what do they all have in common? What do their coaches all say they had in common? First in, last out studied, the most thought about it, the most put in the work. It doesn't mean, like, everybody has to want to be Tiger woods, but there's never a tiger woods that is also associated with.
And he just showed up a couple hours a day and he just had it. It just doesn't happen. It's the same in business. Like everybody in business and entrepreneurship that I know.
You might see them at a successful point in their life where they're working less, but if you could rewind back to the early days, there was a grit. And then I think what underlines all of that is, at least for me, but I've met a lot of folks that are entrepreneur types.
They don't have to be told to do it. It's like an innate part of their dna. It's just how they wake up each day.
[00:16:57] Speaker B: I would agree with that, too. It is a personality type. It doesn't mean everybody could do it.
[00:17:03] Speaker A: Correct.
[00:17:03] Speaker B: I think that's why it's a misperceived endeavor for a lot of people.
[00:17:07] Speaker A: So what I think when you talk about work ethic and people failing, I think that has a part to do it. But I think some people start businesses that candidly just shouldn't start businesses.
That's not a knock on them. If everybody was wired to be an entrepreneur, this world would have blown up like a long time ago. Right?
[00:17:27] Speaker B: Who's going to do the expo?
[00:17:28] Speaker A: For sure.
[00:17:29] Speaker B: Ground level, whatever. You have to have workers at all these.
[00:17:32] Speaker A: You go back prehistoric times, you had hunters, you had people that built the village, you had people that made the food, you had people that helped the sick, you had people that. Everybody's got a job on this planet. We tend to glamorize the entrepreneurs, but entrepreneurs couldn't also do it without everybody else. Right? You know what I mean?
[00:17:53] Speaker B: And there are missing cogs in what an entrepreneur does, which is why it's necessary to know how to build and formulate the business and develop the culture and then plug in the right pieces, for sure. It doesn't make them any better than the pieces. It makes them a part of the whole.
[00:18:09] Speaker A: The good news is on work ethic, assuming you're not necessarily born with all of it, just that dna that you wake up every day and you just have to go accomplish something, it doesn't mean it's like all or nothing. You can still in today's world where they're trying to make work, minimize it more and more and more. It gives you even more opportunity to go outshine everybody because more people are trying to figure out how to work less and it's just been happening forever. But it seems like more recently, people want to work from home. They don't want to go to the office. They want Fridays off, they like thirsty Thursdays, they like all this stuff. They're looking for every edge to get out. I think today presents an opportunity that if you do have work ethic, you have a huge advantage to maybe compensate for other weaknesses you might have.
[00:18:58] Speaker B: That's a good point.
And you had mentioned something when you were talking too, about in the beginning when you have the fire, and I know you've been through some phases and stuff too, and I've had discussions about this. How do you mitigate anyone that starts any business? I don't know anybody that thinks differently than this. But when you first are really launching, even if you started by happenstance like you did, at some point you said, wow, this could really be something. And you took it into a direction and had to really pour into it to build it where it is now. And it doesn't mean you work less now, but those first several years were living and breathing and taking calls late at night, on weekends, and everything else. And not that that still doesn't happen, but it happens with a different level of enthusiasm after a certain point.
[00:19:52] Speaker A: I.
[00:19:53] Speaker B: Think it's perfectly natural.
But in order to keep it from being unfair to the business, how do you mitigate that, knowing that everyone actually goes through that? How have you in particular kind of mitigated that when you started feeling like, not that I don't love what I do, but I'm less excited about it than I was when I started. So what does that look like?
[00:20:15] Speaker A: I think the first thing is, it took me a long time to realize this, but things I really didn't like doing, that I was willing to do at the beginning, at all costs to make something work.
One thing you learn over time is there's things that you don't like doing that actually other people love doing.
So you might not like accounting. But there are people on this planet that love accounting. You might not love construction in my business, there are people on this earth that were born to build things, and they love doing it. So I think one thing all entrepreneurs that make a long career are good at is they're really good at one, delegating, but two, like, empowering other people. So part of that, usually when you get to a point where you're frustrated or you're worn out or you feel like you're doing a lot of things you shouldn't be doing, the first thing you should do is step back and be like, okay, what is my situation? What am I working on right now? That there's a matrix, I'm going to kind of get it wrong. But it's on the Internet. It's like, what do I like doing? And I'm good at? What do I like doing but I'm not good at? What am I not good at but I like doing, and what am I not good at that I don't like doing? And you can kind of split up your tasks, and you can clearly see really quick what should be delegated off your plate. And it doesn't mean it happens tomorrow. But you think, man, as long as I keep doing this set of criteria, that takes me forever. I'm not good at it. I don't like doing it. It's just like, drains my battery every day. The real goal of the entrepreneur, the business builder, is like, how do I find a person to compliment me, to take on those roles so that your energy gets filled back up to go do the things that you like doing? And that's why I keep using the Amazon, because I think everybody can wrap their mind around it. But you look at the early days of Amazon and you see those pictures of Jeff Bezos on knee pads on the factory floor, like, stuffing books and boxes. And then you see him 20 years later, and he's got 500,000 employees, and he totally changed. What did he really do over time? Well, obviously, he had a product people loved, we can assume that. But he just kept delegating power over time. Like, his job kept changing and he kept leveling up.
[00:22:33] Speaker B: Elon talks a lot about that, too.
Have you read any of his book?
[00:22:38] Speaker A: I just got his biography. I've watched every probably interview on him, though. But he's the master of mean. The dude's running five of the biggest companies in the world.
[00:22:47] Speaker B: He's quite the micromanager to a fault. But he's smart enough to be a micromanager for sure. But I think that's his biggest battle, too, is delegating and being comfortable with somebody else doing it and running him with it. But he is also the grassroots guy. Like, we need to scrub this floor clean. Then he's down there doing so. He's. There's another good example.
[00:23:10] Speaker A: If you take two businesses that both sell like, a similar product, like, let's just say hamburgers. Everybody loves hamburgers.
My friend Brent has a quote. Small businesses don't stay small on purpose, usually. Why a small business stays small for a long time is it's got a leadership problem. Not necessarily. Now, again, I'm assuming, like, a product that's already proven that it can be a huge company. Like, you have McDonald's or Burger King. You can turn one burger shop into a hundred.
[00:23:40] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:23:41] Speaker A: It's generally at the leadership, they weren't able to figure out how to delegate power and kind of move on to the next level. Maybe they didn't have a desire to do it. Some people might say, I just wanted to own one shop my whole life, and, great, all the power to you. But if you started two people on the start line and they both said, like, we want to build a big company, and one did it and one didn't, what you usually find is you had a leader that couldn't delegate power and couldn't kind of get out of their own way along the way.
[00:24:10] Speaker B: Along with delegation and work ethic comes risk, which is also one of the more underappreciated aspects, because people think, this is so easy. I could go start a company, and you have one of your guys leave and want to start a company with your clients, which is not how you start a company.
For instance, I'm not putting a scenario in your mind, but what are some of the most significant risks that you've taken that have either paid off or failed and put you at a razor's edge, or either one?
[00:24:46] Speaker A: Okay, I'm going to answer your question, but I'm going to say something before risk is in the eye of the beholder. So if you were to tell me right now you got to go start a private security company tomorrow, I'd be like, man, that's really risky. But if I told you to go do that, you'd be like, okay, I can do that. What's the difference? You know a lot about it. I don't. Risk is very often just a lack of knowledge, and we call it risk. Some people would say, oh, cryptos or bitcoin is super risky. But then there's some people you talk to about, they're like, this is the safest asset in the world. What's the difference between the two? One generally has a lot deeper knowledge about something than the other. So I just wanted to preface that with how I think about risk in general. Risk is usually just a lack of information or a lack of confidence because you don't have the information.
[00:25:37] Speaker B: So in this case, what if it was capital in this case, and in particular your case, where you're not just responsible for yourself succeeding anymore, you're not the guy with one house building into two to three and everything else. Now you have a squad of people who are feeding their families and relying on you to make the right decisions. And perhaps, I don't know if you did this, but you reallocate a bunch of your funds into something else in order to make the next big expansion and put somebody in charge of it. But that would be a risk because financially it's putting a burden on what you've already established. Or, and maybe it is something that you feel was a risk, because I think a lot of people just feel like, I think most people don't realize that the risk is that you could go to zero very quickly.
And being in charge of other people's livelihoods makes that quite risky, in my opinion. And I know you hold other people's livelihoods in your hand based on the decisions you make every day.
[00:26:42] Speaker A: I think one of the best things you have when you're much smaller is a bigger tolerance to take risk.
There's less resources that could go wrong. But to your point, like, if you have a company that's got 50 employees, it's not that you can't take risk. I think all businesses have to take a healthy dose of risk, but there's more to lose as you grow. Right? And so I think that just one, that risk tolerance changes over time.
I think if you're starting something initially and you are going to go take a big amount of capital and put it into something, you have one of two choices, in my opinion. Maybe I'm coming up with this kind of on the spot, but it's, what comes to me is if you're investing in yourself or your own business, you have to be all in on it. You see a lot of people that are willing to risk a lot, and they're kind of working a job and they're kind of doing this on the side.
If I was to coach somebody, I would say if you're taking a big financial risk, you're going all in you should also be all in. If you're putting all your money in, you should be all in. Or the second would be, if I was going to go say, I have this money and I'm going to invest it in a private security company, I can call Johnny and be like, hey. And Johnny said, I'm going to start one and say, johnny, have you ever done this before? He's like, no, but I'll figure it out. Or I could go to Tegan and say, tegan, what about you? He's like, I've been doing this for 20 years. I was in the police force. I was blah, blah. If you're not going to control it, you want to ask every question you can to make sure the person you're giving it to has the most knowledge possible. And what you see really often when people go to zero is either they weren't really putting in the effort.
I'm assuming they didn't just have a bad idea. Like, if you're going to Alaska and trying to sell ice to Eskimos, like, sorry, but you kind of deserve to lose.
[00:28:44] Speaker B: There's a lot of those ideas.
[00:28:46] Speaker A: So we can talk about how to come up with a good idea, but I'm assuming we at least got past. Like, you have a general chance of.
[00:28:52] Speaker B: Making it, and I'm kind of wanting to know yours in particular. You took a leap where you thought, man, I don't know. I remember Elon going like, wow, if this one thing doesn't work, then I'm bankrupt.
[00:29:03] Speaker A: I will tell you, I've had many zeros investing in other people. And it always boiled down to this.
The person that was starting the business didn't already have a track record in that business, and they were using my money to kind of figure out their way in an industry that they didn't already know. We won't say the name, but we share a business in common that we both know well. In town, that didn't work out, great idea. Had worked in other places. Big businesses had been built in that industry. This one didn't work.
[00:29:33] Speaker B: Run properly, too.
[00:29:34] Speaker A: Smart guy that came from a smart. The whole deal, but he hadn't done that thing.
And the others have been where maybe somebody. I just trusted somebody, and I didn't really do the due diligence myself. Here's the biggest risks we've taken in real estate. We were talking about it on the way in here.
There was a period of my career where we were buying land in the city that was serving one purpose, call it single family homes. That we wanted to convert the use to build big apartment complexes.
The risk was we were buying it without what's called entitlements. Entitlements are what allow you to do things on a piece of land. So if it's entitled for single family, you can build single family home. If you get the entitlement changed on that land, that's how you could build multifamily.
[00:30:27] Speaker B: Well, if it never gets approved for a new zoning, then.
[00:30:30] Speaker A: Correct.
[00:30:31] Speaker B: Right.
[00:30:32] Speaker A: And the delta between getting here to getting here is not just calling the city and saying you want it. It's neighborhood meetings, gathering opinions, making sure there's feasibility studies. There's a laundry list of things, and it usually takes 18 months. You can have city council members get reelected or new ones come in that don't want to have to have that ruin their election. I mean, it gets down into the politics.
You could have somebody that's lived in the neighborhood for 90 years and is sad that they're going to miss their view of downtown, and that kills a whole $50 million project. I mean, you actually see this all the time. So the biggest risks we would take, and we were willing to take them, because if you got it, that's how you could actually make financial gain of significance, was you had to buy it without the entitlements, betting that you could get it done right. And there were actually times where we didn't get the entitlements we wanted, and it cost us time.
We could have made this, but we were basically able to get out, break even. But we had put two or three years of our time and energy.
That's like a risk. I could say that we knew what our risks were going in. Now, here's the other part. If you're going to play this in business, what's called risk reward.
So we knew the risks of the cards were almost stacked against us, but for every dollar we were putting in, we thought we would get back like $7, right? Alternatively, if I go put my money in a treasury bill, for every dollar I put in, at the end of the year, I'm going to get a dollar five back. Well, you're like, well, why would you do that? It's like, well, because it's guaranteed. Yeah.
[00:32:12] Speaker B: And you're going to live to be 1000, so be rich eventually.
[00:32:15] Speaker A: So as the risks, as the risk.
[00:32:20] Speaker B: Just a side note.
[00:32:21] Speaker A: It's a side note. This is a side note podcast. But my point is, it's not that you're going to do things without risk, but you also want to make sure. Am I getting paid for these risks? If they work out. And that is why business owners, that's why if you are a true believer in capitalism, every big business was at one point a nothing that took a ton of risk to get there. And they took risks along the way to get where they are. And so risks change over time.
Whether you're risking your money or other people's money. There's all different types of risks, but there is nobody, unless you were just born on third base and were born into it, there's nobody that started and just had this free pass to go make a successful.
[00:33:08] Speaker B: Yeah, it sounds like it aligns with the same type of personality that you had when you started your journey too, right?
[00:33:15] Speaker A: Here's the other thing.
Naivety is actually a superpower to some degree. You talk to a lot of people later in life and you always hear the old adage, if I knew what it took to make the sausage, I wouldn't have made the sausage. Or what's the meme I put up. Sometimes we don't do this because it's easy. We do this because we thought it would be easy.
Most people, when you're starting a business, I actually didn't know how hard it would be to build the business if you actually had told me up front, this is all the pain you're going to endure over the next twelve years and sleepless nights and high blood pressure and whatever humans actually probably aren't like, yeah, give me that. Very few.
[00:33:59] Speaker B: But it's a risk reward again, because you'd also have to say, but the reward is this is where you'll end up.
[00:34:06] Speaker A: Correct.
So some of the best times of your life is when you actually don't know what all the risks are. That's not me saying like, just roll the dice and good luck. But I think that's why you see young people that don't have all the battle scars yet are willing to endure some things and take on risks that others aren't.
[00:34:26] Speaker B: That's interesting because I almost even used that exact term when you were talking about the 18 year old you. Yeah, and I need money, but I don't really know all this, but I'm going to learn these three things and whatever, and then I can move on. Part of that is your naivety for sure. And that worked to your benefit for sure.
[00:34:44] Speaker A: And the good news also is if you're competing against somebody that's already successful, maybe they've already made some money, they're a little more secure, they might not have the risk tolerance anymore to keep going at that pace, like you have an advantage on them to some degree that you're going to be willing to take an additional risk that they're not going to be willing to take anymore.
[00:35:06] Speaker B: Yeah. So what would you give advice wise to a new budding entrepreneur? Since we even gleaned a little bit into the AI age, not to mention the economy instability we're looking at and unpredictability. At the very least, I think we'll be okay eventually. But you're looking at somebody now, regardless of the age, that's interested in starting something creative or business entrepreneurial. What would you give them advice wise?
[00:35:39] Speaker A: I think on one end, the first thing I'd say is you're living in the greatest generation to reduce what you perceive as risk because knowledge is everywhere. You don't have to go to the library and get a book off the shelf to figure something out now. So you have a huge advantage that most people in all of history, up until about the last 20 years of time, you had to go down to a library and rent a book for two days and try and recram as much as you could. There was not the Internet. So what I would say, number one is if you wanted to go start, I'm going to keep going back to private security company, but I would read everything I could. I'd listen to podcasts of people that talked about building a private security business, maybe private security officers that are in the industry, what they like, don't like about it. I'd learn everything I could about the industry. And to be honest with you, I think you can get a pretty clear understanding from a business perspective of how a business works in a relatively short period of time. I would then go call the tegans of the world and I would say, hey, and they might not all talk to you.
Tegan definitely would. If there are more tegans, they would. But if you're going to call ten people that have built private security companies and three of them are willing to meet with you, most people that are successful that I've met, have a good heart and will share with you, and I would ask them questions. What was the biggest risk you took when starting your business? What would you do again, if you could start all over, and that's just free information, but it's the most valuable information.
So I would just try and keep derisking without actually having spent a dollar yet.
And then whether you know how to do it or work with somebody, try and build a one or two year budget or plan going, this is at base case, if things go moderately well, this is what it might look like. And here is what would not have to go well for me to lose everything.
And so again, I'm making this up on the fly.
[00:37:44] Speaker B: I know, and that's a broad question, too, to be fair, in those two years are key, because usually within those first two to three years, you're going to go belly up.
[00:37:55] Speaker A: Like in the restaurant business. Most restaurants fail in their first year.
[00:37:58] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:37:58] Speaker A: Now, I'm not saying restaurants are a little riskier, but my point is, if you only have a finite amount of money and you know you're not raising any more of it, nobody's going to bail you out. You usually should have a two year, you should have 24 months to figure out if you can get there. Now, a lot of businesses, we've also gotten in this world now where everybody thinks they got to raise a ton of money. And there's a ton of businesses that started with a roofer, that started with a guy in a hammer that started patching roofs and then hired a contractor to work with them. Then they started doing.
But they were making money day one, right? It's like they're mowing lawns. Like they were making money day one. You can start really small, be the security guard right out the gate to where you're just making money day one. And as soon as you get that job where you now need you and another person, you're never really risking the whole house, right? You want to go invent something and go put a bunch of money into something that's an invention that you hope you might sell down the road. That's risky. The only way I would do that, though, is if, okay, if this invention takes off, I could make 100 times my money.
[00:39:05] Speaker B: Risk reward.
[00:39:05] Speaker A: Correct.
[00:39:06] Speaker B: The risk reward, more time than money. And if we can get to a certain point, the money will be worth all the time.
[00:39:11] Speaker A: But you see it all the time now on YouTube. You see these young entrepreneurs that will go buy like a power washer from home Depot for like $500, and then they'll go stick signs all over the streets, hey, I power wash for $50 an hour or whatever, and they pay that thing off in like a week. They're just kind of profitable from day one, right? They have very little capital out, and it's all upside.
[00:39:32] Speaker B: So you turn almost like a side hustle into a legitimate business, and then you get to a crossroad, too, where you have to make the decision, do we want to turn this into a big endeavor.
[00:39:43] Speaker A: Correct.
[00:39:43] Speaker B: Or do we want to keep this a small thing where it's me and my two brothers?
Because that's a giant crossroad to be at, too.
[00:39:50] Speaker A: Correct.
[00:39:51] Speaker B: Did you ever get there where you had to decide, all right, I want to blow this thing up and taking it in a different direction. At what point did you decide? What point did you decide that?
[00:40:01] Speaker A: I think the most obvious one was 2015, 2016, when we decided to go from being a developer around fort Worth to a buyer of industrial real estate. I mean, totally different business model.
[00:40:15] Speaker B: That wasn't risky.
[00:40:17] Speaker A: I will say it was risky a little bit, but I will tell you, the one thing we knew going into it was we had eight years of experience knowing what we didn't want to do. We spent, like I told you, a year of looking at the market, reading everything we could on industrial, talking to industrial brokers. We hired a person that was the number one industrial broker in Fort Worth to come work for our team. So we derisked it more and more before we kind of really pressed go. But, yeah, it was risky.
It was. Not to say it was going to work bulletproof.
[00:40:51] Speaker B: I mean, you're leveraging what you've succeeded at for sure, and built up to take it to another level and do something completely different.
[00:40:58] Speaker A: But we did not just wake up one day and say, we're getting into industrial.
[00:41:01] Speaker B: Of course.
[00:41:01] Speaker A: We said we looked at five different asset classes. We said, this one makes sense. We started talking to people. We went to a conference, and then we hired the number one person that we thought knew industrial and said, come work for us, and we built a team around them.
[00:41:15] Speaker B: Love it.
So you had mentioned also you do YouTube and stuff like that. Do you still read books and stuff, or is that way too old school?
[00:41:24] Speaker A: I read a ton of books.
[00:41:25] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:41:26] Speaker A: But I love YouTube.
[00:41:27] Speaker B: What do you like to read, and what do you like to watch on YouTube? What kind of stuff do you put in your mind?
[00:41:34] Speaker A: I read a lot of nonfiction. I'm not a big fiction reader.
I don't mean to sound like a total nerd, but I read a lot of Warren Buffett type books. I read biographies.
Most of things change, but people like, if you go throughout human history, we pretty much act the same way. Just like, the surroundings are a bit different, but you see a stock market crash or you see, like, we speculate on crypto. It's like, well, in the 1920s, we were speculating on tulips. I mean, tulips became, like, the most expensive thing in the country for, like, a brief period. Humans are very emotional.
[00:42:15] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:42:16] Speaker A: So I'll read a lot of history.
I'll read a lot of nonfiction biographies. I read a lot of stuff on companies. So usually, going into the weekend, I will print out four or five articles I saw from the week, and I'll print them out and I'll put them in a folder and I'll just kind of devour them throughout the weekend.
I don't really have, like, a set schedule. It's just kind of what's ever interesting to me at the moment. I listen to a ton of podcasts. I think podcasts is the best way to learn and communicate in the world today.
[00:42:50] Speaker B: Well, I think it's an amazing way to do it, too. There's still a lot of people that really don't listen to any.
[00:42:56] Speaker A: I think we're so early still.
[00:42:58] Speaker B: Really?
[00:42:58] Speaker A: Yeah. If you look at how many people actually listen to podcasts, it's still very few.
[00:43:04] Speaker B: So let's talk about your podcast. And I know you didn't do a deep dive enough into your business either, but talk about the podcast and how you decided to do that and then what your purpose is.
[00:43:19] Speaker A: Well, I think it goes back to maybe who I am and just how I was wired is I've always been a ferocious learner. And again, I don't have to wake up each day and my wife has to be like, okay, go learn. Today I wake up and I'm immediately like. My instinct is like, how do I get more not seeking again?
There's positives to that, but I could tell you all the plenty of negatives to that. I'm not very present sometimes I don't sometimes smell the roses.
[00:43:48] Speaker B: Just make conscious efforts to do that, I assume for balance, for sure.
[00:43:52] Speaker A: And then there's some people you meet on this planet. It's like, are you ever going to stop smelling the roses?
I know. Get up, budy.
[00:43:58] Speaker B: Yeah, we're all weird. That's okay. That's okay.
[00:44:00] Speaker A: We're all different.
Quit smelling those roses. No.
[00:44:08] Speaker B: Wrote the two day work week book for sure.
[00:44:12] Speaker A: My tea.
[00:44:14] Speaker B: No.
[00:44:16] Speaker A: So I was ferocious learner, and I felt like at the time, the reason I started it was because I would go to lunch with you and I would have this amazing conversation, and then I would go tell everybody about it. And so when I first started the first episode, I said, I think I'm going to do ten of these. I'm just going to record conversations that I have because I think people would be interested. I felt like I had a really good network, but it was for me, it was like, I just really enjoyed doing it.
But I also knew I saw the early signs that podcasting was going to be enormous.
It's as transparent and genuine of a conversation as you could have. When you think about watching the news, whatever your opinion on it is, I won't make that today. But you don't watch the news and then go, man, that's like how people talk to each other in real life, right?
[00:45:10] Speaker B: You're being spoken to.
[00:45:11] Speaker A: You're being spoken to. It's a show.
It's entertainment, to be honest with you. And I'm not saying podcasts can't be, but this is just a conversation. I think the way people digest it is they can build trust around it because they're not being spoken to. They're just like sitting in on a conversation, right? You don't have to be able to watch it, so you can listen to it anywhere. You can listen to it on your commute, while you're working out, while you're walking. If it's video, you kind of have to be paused and watching or a book or anything like that. And so it's the most mobile, on demand way to learn anything. And the friction and the cost to actually start one is relatively low, so you can have a lot of people putting it out. It's like, nobody can afford to create a news station. You need like millions of dollars and towers and big media centers.
[00:46:06] Speaker B: And like Johnny said, we had a radio talk show host in here, and I was asking about radio stage. He's like, man, 28 years old, where I don't listen to the radio. I know.
[00:46:18] Speaker A: Is that really a thing?
[00:46:20] Speaker B: Man, I feel even twice as old. When you said that, I was like, wow. It never occurred to me, but it made me appreciate this medium, too, because that is. But there are a lot of podcasts, and we discussed one before we came in here, too, that they can be contrived and they can be developed for entertainment purposes only. But I think there are plenty of these, right? I think kind of, Rogan has kind of spearheaded that movement toward trying to get organic conversations in. And what types of things have you learned along the way? Because how many hundred?
[00:46:57] Speaker A: I've done 300 and 2320 shows.
I have learned one. I've just learned. I've gotten to talk to 320 people, so I've learned two as a host. What I've learned is if you'll ask a question and then do a good job of just shutting up, people will tell you a lot.
And I think one muscle that's really hard. Podcasts that I can't stand listening to is when the host is constantly talking over and you see it all the time.
It's actually hard to stay quiet, especially if you're engaged. But it's usually like that extra second of not saying anything, that the goods keep coming out, too.
I'm enjoying this conversation so much because most people don't get asked about their life very often. And I think people genuinely like talking about not themselves, but just kind of telling their story. They don't get to do it very often. So giving people an opportunity, you'll find out crazy things and people will tell you a lot. I mean, those are probably two of the more little nuanced things that I think anybody, whether you have a podcast or not, could take away from this, especially if you're starting a business. Yeah.
[00:48:22] Speaker B: And I think you have tons to offer. And the fact that you have a show, and I've been on your show, and you've now been here, I think there's so much to learn from other people who have been somewhere where other people aspire to go, for sure. But I think even your 18 year old self would have lent an epiphany to somebody out there. Any story has got little nuggets in it, for sure.
[00:48:48] Speaker A: And I think everybody, I sometimes say you're one good question away from changing your whole life.
And so sometimes asking the best next question is the most life changing thing.
And so even if you go back to the risk we took, we were like, why are we still developing if we don't like it?
That might seem like, oh, that's an easy question to ask, but some people actually never ask the question. They just say, well, we're developing, so we're going to keep doing it. I'm using like an internal question, but when you're talking to a lender or you're talking to an investor, and you say, somebody that's really good at sales is usually good at asking lots of questions, if you say, oh, we're not going to put money in your deal, why not? Then they start kind of going on and on about, why not? Well, have you thought about this? Blah, blah, blah. The next question could totally change the reality of any situation. And I don't know if I did a really great job of explaining it, but you talk to really great hosts, or really people that I think are influential. They're not characterized by the answers they give. They're always characterized by the questions they ask.
[00:50:07] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, you're leading them in a direction, at least for sure. But other people like you, you're an easy interview too. There are some people that have a hard time sitting in front of lights and cameras and actually being relaxed enough to have a normal conversation. And I'm sure I don't know how your first podcasts were, but, and I can speak for myself too, and I'm not even saying I'm a pro yet, but after a certain amount of time, you feel relaxed. You can kind of groove into these things a little bit easier versus before. But where are you taking your podcast now? Are you turning it into a business business? Or is it still. I mean, it's still not a side project for you anymore as ambitiously as you're tackling it, right?
[00:50:49] Speaker A: No, I mean, Johnny and I talk about this pretty. It's, it's grown for the effort we've put into it to date. I would say we've knocked the COVID off the ball. I think the way I think about it going forward is we're hitting between YouTube and audio, almost 40,000 unique people a month. I think podcasting is one of the best business models in the world because it's very low overhead, it's very low cost to do for me to go get the next few hundred thousand listeners doesn't mean I have to go hire 30 people.
[00:51:27] Speaker B: True.
[00:51:28] Speaker A: It's like better than software. You actually don't have to scale the team up very much.
You don't even necessarily have to go do a ton more episodes. You just have to market a little better. And then you have to have the a team that can get the right guests on and the content right.
But where are we going to take it? I think we will professionalize it in 2024, even more than we have from the guests that we have on the way. We deliver episodes to our audiences across all channels.
Having somebody that works on ads full time, or at least that's part of their job to sell. But really the big thing is, the best thing about having Fort Capital or another business is I can shine this podcast light on my business. And that drives recruiting, it drives capital raising, it drives deal flow.
So when people say like, how much is your podcast worth? I'm like, I'm not saying it's priceless, but it's not just the ad dollars, it's all the other things.
[00:52:37] Speaker B: It's the eyeballs in general.
[00:52:39] Speaker A: Correct.
[00:52:39] Speaker B: Finding out who you are and what you do and then finding more about what you do.
[00:52:43] Speaker A: Correct. So I look at it as like this piece of work that I'll continue to work on the rest of my life. I can't envision a world where I'm not doing it. Maybe I go to doing a few episodes a month, but to not ever do it again, I could not fathom not being able to do it.
[00:52:59] Speaker B: I think it's brilliant. And I'm impressed with your consistency because that was also something that is really challenging. And I know how much time you put into your business also. So that has to be a really consciously set.
[00:53:13] Speaker A: I dipped. There's been years where I've come in and told Johnny, like, I'm not sure if I can keep going. But you know why? Those years, if it's even interesting, is I got away from what I enjoyed doing, and I tried making episodes that I thought other people would like rather than what I liked. So I wasn't myself.
I was trying to do so many episodes that I was having guests on that really didn't fit the show that I probably shouldn't have been having on. Okay, no, fine.
[00:53:42] Speaker B: I get it.
[00:53:44] Speaker A: No, look, it's not even that. I think every episode we've done, we've learned from. But it got to a point where it was like I was trying to game the system. And I think the only way to build great art or media or anything is it has to be authentic. You have to really believe in it. You cannot fake a good podcast, at least for multiple episodes, because most people, I'm sure, that listen to your podcast when they see you, they're like, oh, we feel like we're always talking to you. I haven't seen them in years. Well, we listen to you every week. Yeah, you can fake an episode, maybe, but to do 320, you know who I am.
[00:54:22] Speaker B: There's a careful balance, though, too, because when you have 40,000 people that listen to your podcast every month, then you also have an obligation to make sure you're aligning with the diversity of audiences that come in. Right.
[00:54:37] Speaker A: For sure.
[00:54:38] Speaker B: So I can understand that toil also, because I want to do things that I feel like are absolutely authentic. I'm willing to. I mean, you're just talking to different people. Sometimes just the person that you interview might steer you in a direction you had no earthly idea, and you can still keep it in the lane. But how much of that do you think you still do? Or have you just come back and said, look, I'm going to hire these other people to take these periphery jobs away and delegate like you did your business, and then you do what you do.
[00:55:08] Speaker A: In a perfect world, when we get this. All I'm doing is showing up to the mic and interviewing people.
[00:55:14] Speaker C: That's it.
[00:55:15] Speaker A: Now, what am I willing to do to get there? And, like, johnny and I will be working on this.
The creative side, like getting marketing looking right, getting YouTube thumbnails looking right, getting the right quotes, going out that you're publishing, getting the right hooks, going through the episode, and getting rid of any minutes where it was kind of just a boring part of the conversation.
Making the show the best way possible might eventually get into making, like, trailers for the episodes. But again, I can go look at what the biggest podcasts do, at least understand it, and at least build a framework where I could go into my team, be like, hey, this is what they're doing. Now, granted, they've got five people or ten people working on it. This is what it costs. Do we want to do that? What's the risk if we go do that?
So that's exactly how I'll look at it. I think this is the first year. After five years, though, it's dawned on me.
I would really feel sick to my stomach if I never felt like I gave it a ten out of ten effort, and I don't think I've done that yet.
[00:56:21] Speaker B: Well, you've come this far, and I think it's brilliant to think that there are ways that you can accommodate your audience's wants and needs by leveraging the way the ads go out and the shorts go out and the thumbnails and the whatever, and you still be able to do your authentic interviews with the people that you really feel comfortable with.
[00:56:43] Speaker A: For sure.
[00:56:44] Speaker B: That's a brilliant way to approach it.
[00:56:45] Speaker A: And as far as preparation and research, there's some episodes where you do very little, because, look, if you and I went and sat in here, we could chat for 3 hours and make it a podcast episode. If I'm trying to get a specific thing out, you can over research some of these things where you're thinking too much about the conversation.
That's what I love. I mean, Rogan is like the goat. I don't know if I want to do three or four hour podcasts one day, but you just watch him. He's got no notes, and he just carries on conversation for three or 4 hours.
[00:57:20] Speaker B: After several thousand, that's kind of how.
[00:57:22] Speaker A: It works for sure. But he's smart. You got to know stuff. To talk to Elon for 3 hours, you have to kind of know something.
[00:57:30] Speaker B: Yeah, well, he's become smarter, too. He's an intelligent guy, but he's become smarter after interviewing, what are they at?
2100? Yes to 2000 plus episodes. And he's got some really entertaining and insightful and enlightening type folks on there that teach him something new every time for sure that you get to leverage to the next one. I mean, it's a fantastic way. I also agree with you. I feel like I grow every time I bring somebody here because it just teaches me something. Even if I just have a couple of little nuggets that for sure that it gives me, I feel like I'm enlightened.
[00:58:06] Speaker A: Life is so, it humbles you also.
I think that's part of just wisdom. You just grow up every year, you realize how little you actually know. But yeah, I had somebody on today, I had somebody on yesterday. Every time I leave, almost every time I leave and I'm like, man, I learned so much more. And often it's an audience of want as long as I'm satisfied.
That's like my barometer.
[00:58:33] Speaker B: Yeah, well, we'll definitely link the podcast there so that people here can go there and scope it out and learn from all different kinds of other folks too, per your leading conversations, which I think are fantastic.
[00:58:46] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:58:50] Speaker B: What would you want your, this is going to sound hokey if I say what's your legacy? But when you leave the industry, even not necessarily leave this earth, how do you want to be remembered? I mean, you've got a large company that you control, that you're still involved with, you're growing the podcast, you have other invest companies you're invested in.
With all that going on, when it really cuts down to the nuts and bolts, what do you want people to say in a few sentences? Oh, Chris Powers, he's the guy that.
[00:59:27] Speaker A: What I think he's the guy that was generous with his time, with his money, with his resources.
I don't think I would have always given that answer, but if you were to ask my kids, what I wanted to say is he was generous, he was always around. I look at that as like he was always there.
[00:59:52] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:59:54] Speaker A: You see a lot of people that they just hoard all their financial resources and they never use them for good and time. Yeah, and time, I will say the time is the hardest part. You get involved in a lot. It's hard to be generous with your time because you can also lose it all by being too generous with your time because you're not right now. I've got three young kids. I say no to almost everything that I used to say yes to.
But in the back of my mind I'm like, oh, I want to say yes so bad.
But I think the answer is, when it's all said and done, is he was a generous guy.
[01:00:32] Speaker B: That's a fantastic answer. And it'd be an interesting thing. You'll have to report to me on this, too, because I've been with. I have one kid, and when he was growing up, we made okay money. It was fine. It was nothing to speak of. And telling him no when you really don't have the money is easy. Yeah, very easy. And then once you start hitting a level of success and they know you have the money and you say no because I said no, or it's too much or whatever, it changes the level of difficulty for you to do it because you have to give a more explanative answer. You've got to really say there's a reason why no. And it's because you have to be limited. And you're not going to understand this context until you're ten years older. But it does present a challenge. And I think that's how our society, in generation after generation, has become softer and softer and softer. And I participated. You want to do things for your kids where you had missing pieces and spaces and everything else. And like you said, in your circumstances, you had to work for everything you had because you had to, not because your parents said, well, you have to work. If you want to start going on a dates, you got to go get a job and whatever, and you just come on. Come on, mom.
[01:01:53] Speaker A: I know.
[01:01:54] Speaker B: Well, if you make $20 to go on a date, I'll spot you another c note. So you take her to a nice place.
This is a different game. It is looking at it two different ways.
[01:02:03] Speaker C: Right?
[01:02:04] Speaker A: I think it's hard.
It's. My biggest fear in life is raising entitled.
I think the best advice I've gotten is for a while, I was like, trying to create fake reality.
And the reality is kids are really smart. They understand what's going on, especially as they get older. So you got a parent from how to teach them how to live life with what they do have, not pretend to create a life of what they don't have.
[01:02:37] Speaker B: That's a good way to start.
[01:02:38] Speaker A: So starting there, going back to generous money is the root of all evil. It's not money is the root of all evil. It's the love of money that's the root of all evil. And I think you've seen a lot of amazing people that are generous with their money. And so being able to instill that in kids. Well, the only really way to instill it in kids is to be a generous person. Yeah, you see, all the time people are like, you should donate to this. And it's like, well, do you? It's like, no, everybody always wants to donate everybody else's money. You see it in politics, you see it in everything. Everybody has an idea for what everybody should do with their money, but I think you got to lead forward with that and you've got to show what it's like. And I think, like you said, the world's gotten softer and softer and softer.
It's the nature of all successful empires throughout history.
The next generation is a little bit.
[01:03:41] Speaker B: Softer, which eventually leads to a fall, but let's not go there for sure necessarily. So this leads to my last thing. I swear I won't keep you all day because you have been generous with your time today, too. But when and how do you determine when it's enough? Because when you started your business, maybe you didn't have grandiose goals of earning XYZ. You get to a certain point where maybe we talked that crossroads where you say, I actually want to blow this up. I don't just want to have my own self doing this and this and have a house manager or whatever. I want to grow this. I want to have employees that help me out and we blow up and we move properties all over the US.
You could take a company an under 10 million, you could take a ten to 50 million, you could take a 50 million to 250,000,000, and there's always somebody doing something more.
And yet if you backed up to a certain point in your life and said, how much would be enough before you had it all, you might give an answer that I think a lot of people just constantly push for so much more because they never had a threshold. When do you think, and how do you think you'll manage that? Or do you already know when enough is enough in terms of earnings and profitability and stuff like that? Not necessarily in learning or being active.
[01:04:59] Speaker A: The answer is, I don't have a fully flushed out plan. I think my wife and I actually talked about this the other night.
It's what you said. If you actually look at humans, most people, you give them more, they're going to do more with it. There's very few people that are just wired to keep getting a lot and not change anything else.
And humans are also about bigger and better. So it's like very rarely, unless they lose all their money or resources, do they regress. So they might buy a nice car. The next car they get is probably not going to be less nice than the one they got. Most people buy a big house. If they're going to buy another house, it's usually a bigger one. Unless maybe they're down. So if it's jewelry, if you have a diamond that's this big, the next one you buy is probably going to be big. It's just like the law of human nature.
So I think the thing that we're working through right now as a family, and I don't think it's like you said it, and it's like, that's it for the next fit. We're going to be on this planet a long time. Circumstances are going to change. But my wife and I have done a pretty good job of saying at this point, everything we make beyond this point, we recognize we definitely don't need and is not going to add a dime of happiness to our life. It'll actually probably add more complication.
[01:06:21] Speaker B: Okay.
[01:06:21] Speaker A: And that's where I think you start seeing the lopsidedness of generosity, where maybe you're giving 1020 percent away and then all of a sudden you see people that are giving way more ways because they've hit like their threshold. I know a family in this town that gives 90% of their income away.
Now, they live really well, but they said we're going to spend the first few million bucks to have a membership. Maybe we'll fly right, blah, blah, blah. But everything above a few million bucks a year, we're giving away.
And they've stuck to it. And I think that is like creating where's your ceiling? Is the best way to start. Most people actually don't think about it that way.
[01:07:02] Speaker B: In my experience, most people don't think about it at all.
[01:07:05] Speaker A: Correct. And look, if you're fortunate enough to even have that thought.
But if you are, that's how we're thinking about it. Where do we know is enough? And I think the other part is like, man, this country has been so prosperous last 20 or 30 years.
Again, you go see all these social media influencer, these like 20 year old kids driving Rolls Royces.
I'm not even that old, but when I was growing up, there was like one guy that had a Rollsroyce and he was in Dallas and his name was like Jones. Like that was it.
[01:07:39] Speaker B: But that's the only one you could see.
[01:07:41] Speaker A: That's the only one you could see.
[01:07:42] Speaker B: You didn't have access to be able to see people across the US everywhere either.
[01:07:46] Speaker A: I just think the proof is so in the pudding that there is nobody where buying lots more stuff is going to make their life.
You know, you see people that have houses everywhere and cars and planes, they wake up every day, like, fighting problems because something's broken or somebody broke in here or we lost this.
So I don't have a great answer for you other than we have kind of mapped out to some degree of vague, like, this is where we stop and we'll reevaluate at that point. But we've also agreed, like, there is nothing we could buy beyond that point that would enhance our lives at all. Now, if that were to change, we'd be willing to change. But it really goes down to the filter is like, is this making our life better or is this just like a nice to have in the moment?
[01:08:36] Speaker B: And you're addressing it by recognizing, and I've had billionaire clients and it's unenviable to me. I don't want a billion dollars.
[01:08:47] Speaker A: I don't want it. It's a problem.
[01:08:49] Speaker B: It's a massive problem. And most people aren't just privy to how torturous it can be. And there is a number that's cool and it may be a different number for everybody, whether that's an annual income or whatever. But I'm impressed, but not surprised at all that you've had that discussion, because I think it's an important aspect for somebody, especially on a rocket ship that could continuously, you could be 80 years old and just nonstop chasing the bird because it's the cash.
[01:09:23] Speaker A: Well, I think the one thing that somebody told me that sticks with me a lot is money. At the end of the day, once you have is a magnifier of your heart.
The more you have, the more it magnifies your heart.
And so you can't really hide from it. You do see people that give all their money away. You see people that buy 50 houses and 50 planes and 50 boats and they can never stop. What is that actually telling you about the person?
There's people that give their money to education. They care about education. There's ones that give to cancer. But it is magnifying something going on in your heart. There's nobody that is like a humble, down to earth person that's also buying a house in every city in the country. It just doesn't happen.
[01:10:11] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm not even thinking it's in a judgmental way. I just think you can get caught in that cycle because, again, you're an ambitious personality, and I know you and you've just described it throughout this conversation, how you are just the guy that's going to wake up and pull up his boots and start kicking somebody else's ass to get to here. And unless you set parameters on what is reasonable, especially with your family, right, then you just get caught up in it. It's not that you're all of a sudden, like, the worst guy, but you've just never honed in on that perspective. I think you've always seemed like you've been down to earth. You're very approachable, easy to talk to, you have great advice. Even when we're just sitting at a lunch. I can ask you whatever, and I cherish a friendship for that. And I really am honored to be able to sit down and chat with you.
[01:11:05] Speaker A: It's an honor. Yeah.
[01:11:07] Speaker B: So I agree with your approaches and everything, and I learn a crap ton of stuff from you every time, same thing. This is no exception.
[01:11:17] Speaker A: I love you.
[01:11:18] Speaker B: So thank you so much for being here, man.
[01:11:20] Speaker A: Thank you for having me.
From one podcaster to another, this is a kick ass studio.
[01:11:26] Speaker B: Well, thank you for letting me use your studio, too, because people have seen your studio in some of my shows, too, which I think is fabulous.
[01:11:34] Speaker A: I love it. It's part of the journey.
[01:11:37] Speaker B: Well, bring some dudes, bring some entrepreneurs in here, some real estate guys in here.
[01:11:40] Speaker A: I might actually do one in here. Come on, Johnny.
[01:11:44] Speaker B: Johnny knows how to set it up. I mean, it's basically ready to go.
Yeah.
I really do appreciate you, brother. Thank you so much for your time, man.
[01:11:52] Speaker A: Thank you.
[01:11:53] Speaker C: What's it gate? What you gonna do? What you gonna do? Successor rather than second grade rules a confident faith to make you do make you do what they want when they won't be the fool a diplomatic face is the one to see you through don't let those figures take you off your game adjust a lot of them lose sit here in the front seat, baby ain't that sweet take a little honey from the money be but don't pay the fool a political magical potion a missing piece at the end of the game a slow roll see the truth of soul motion I never found a 63 like between the right line if you gonna call me back if look at all.
