Building a Brand That Lasts: Expert Marketing Strategies

We were on AI just slightly before AI got cool. We brought in expensive talent that understands language to get out ahead of it. We make decisions with much greater accuracy today than we ever have, and we're going to make it with better accuracy tomorrow because there's new technology available to us tomorrow and new knowledge available to us tomorrow.

Welcome to Deal Table. I'm Ryan Harper.

I'm Lane Carrick.

And on this episode, we talked to Charlie Kalisi.

Charlie's a Renaissance man. He has run a large digital advertising marketing firm. He is a franchisee, owns oil and gas wells. He runs a family office. Fascinating discussion on lots of topics.

Yeah, we talked about several things from owning and operating a business, hiring the right talent, working with your family, and how AI is impacting his business.

We hope you'll enjoy this episode. Charlie Khaleesi, welcome.

Thank you, sir. Great to be here.

To the Pig Room at Old Parkland.

It's pretty cool, isn't it?

A very unique space. And on a cold, blustery day in Dallas, welcome to the warmth of the Pig Room.

It's good to be here, sir. Thank you.

Delighted to have you. We want to have a conversation about your activities in marketing.

Yes, sir.

You've had a long and distinguished career there. We want to learn about that as business people who operate businesses and consult with business owners to understand the tools and techniques that you're employing these days, what you see in that landscape. We had a previous guest this morning, Kevin LaVelle of Mizzen and Main.

Oh, I love them.

Absolutely. And so I'm the oldest guy in the room, obviously. So my perception, I sort of have almost the Mad Men perception, right, of of advertising. One of the things he was talking about is he has a new company, Harbor, and they have a sleep aid product, a piece of technology for monitoring your child. And their marketing is through media influencers, women on Instagram and other social media, TikTok, talking about the benefits to them being able to get a good night's sleep because of this technology. You know, so no, you know, I'm of the generation where you buy radio spots and you, you know, you put an ad in a magazine. Does that exist anymore?

It does. I mean, there's still a lot of that, you know, more than you would imagine. But the, you know, influencers in particular, they play a really important role in today's marketing strategy. So it's funny that you, you go there because I'm One of my kids is a social media influencer in the fishing world and sponsored by Under Armour. I mean, Shimano, the whole thing. So, it's a thing. It's a thing for sure. And you have to imagine when he called and told me what he was going to do for a living, how that conversation went. But anyway, bless his heart, he's been wildly successful. Here's the thing our research says. A lot of times it doesn't even take a, you know, well-known social media influencer. I know you, you used it. And so therefore that says to me that I can trust it because, you know, I know Lane and, you know, Lane endorses it. So it's a really important part of the ecosystem today. Yeah. Radio, TV, all those things still play an important role at the top of the funnel to make people aware. But social media really plays an important role in the mix today.

You said something right there that in a previous conversation I've had with Charlie that I was like, oh yeah, I should be doing that, which is research and understanding data and analytics and all that. Because there's so many things that I do from marketing that's like gut— like my gut says do this, my gut says this. And what I've had to learn as a business operator is your gut could be right, but data is more likely to be right. So has there ever been a moment in your career where you've had to, like, hey, choose your gut over data or data over gut, or what was that internal conversation like?

That's a good question. You'd be surprised how often I'm wrong. There was a time, I think, years ago when data was not as easily available as it is today. But I can't possibly imagine making a decision without data, any decision. When you think about from your investment standpoint, you don't make those decisions without looking at the data and what it's telling you. And certainly marketing has gotten to a place today. You opened up with some conversation about Mad Men, and I kind of caught the tail end of that back in the '80s. And it was cool, man. I mean, we went to happy hour and, you know, long lunches where you, you know, drank cocktails. It was awesome. Yeah, it's gone. Yeah. You know, while I'm sure some of that still goes on today, our business has just changed tremendously from that standpoint. So to your question, I think we make decisions with much greater accuracy today than we ever have. And we're going to make it with better accuracy tomorrow. Because I'm sure we'll talk about this with AI coming on, literally by the time this podcast is over, what we talked about could very well be obsolete because there's new technology available to us tomorrow and new knowledge available to us tomorrow. So I believe that AI will change the marketing business to a greater extent than the computer did. So if you think about how profound that change was, AI will do it and it's gonna do it in a matter of years, not decades.

Wow.

Can you give us some insight into how you think that will play out?

Well, from a marketing standpoint, I think it plays out well for everybody. I'm not one of these that fear AI. I embrace it. And my advice to anyone listening is you better embrace it because you don't have a choice. I think it's better for everybody. I think it's better— most importantly, let's talk about for the end consumer. It's going to be better for them because they're not wasting time finding what they're most likely to buy or what it is that they're really looking for. It'll be served to them in a way in which It's just going to be a better experience, I think, overall for the customer. And I think for marketers, it's going to allow us to become more and more efficient every single day and more on point with what it takes to appeal to an end consumer. So I think it's going to be better for everybody.

Is it going to reduce your staffing needs?

It's a great question. We get that all the time. Yeah.

Probably from your employees.

Well, we get it from the employees and reporting anyone who reports to a board or even if you own your own company and you've got a small board of partners. It's always a question that I think everybody's answering today. Here's my take on it. I think that some jobs will transition into different jobs. So, I'm not really expecting it at least near term. When I say near term, With AI as fast as it's going, next 3 to 5 years. I think that what you're going to see is different talent. So I might, I very well might not need someone. Let's just say it'd be, well, I'll give you, I'll give you if I can, I'll give you a real life example. You've heard a lot about SEO and search engine optimization so that we make websites more efficient for Google and ultimately for the end consumer to search. What they're looking for. A big part of that is content writing and SEO. There's a technical aspect of it in optimizing the technical aspects of the website, but there's also content. And there's an insatiable appetite for content on SEO. And, you know, one of the things that we're seeing today is, it would have taken me, who knows, could have taken us 5 hours to write one piece of copy. Or 3 hours to write one piece of copy. Now we're writing copy, you know, you might get 20 pieces in 3 hours. Yeah. So this— the same person is there, it's just their productivity is infinitely better. Yeah. Another great example is on the legal side of things. Lawyers generally want to approve this copy because it's their brand, their company that, you know, is we're speaking on behalf. And we just developed a little platform, a little program that we can load 400, 1,000 pieces of copy, and the attorneys are interested in very specific type of language, and they can query for that language, and there it is available to them. So instead of a person taking, I don't know, 50 hours to review all of that copy, they can now review that copy in 2 hours. So I think it's just going to I, I really— I, I'm not convinced yet that, you know, all of these jobs are going to go away. I think they're just going to transition into different positions, um, and become more efficient and become more efficient, more productive for the client.

Anecdotally though, from a creative agency to, you know, creative agency to a creative agency, it does seem like firms are either going out of business or being, or being acquired. Now I don't know if that's due to AI or if that's due to just the market or just to do of, hey, I'm done being a business owner. Have you seen that at all? And again, I did say anecdotally, so I don't know if there's any research as far as firms going out of business or just being acquired by bigger ones. Have you seen any of that?

Not in my world. You know, we're, we're dealing more with, you know, our clients are large companies that are being acquired by private equity or even firms like ours, which is fairly substantial and whether or not if you decide to exit or continue on. I'm not that connected to a lot of the small firms, so I don't—.

So to that end, what motivated you to acquire Imaginity?

That was a great question. And I think it's why people often do acquire. So our vision for what we were trying to do is We want to essentially manage the customer journey for a client from beginning all the way to the end. And so we had— you asked about direct mail and radio and TV and all those kinds of things and a big media planning function and buying function. And then you pass that lead on to a third party and the web form doesn't work, or the page is not optimized for the keyword that we use to drive them there. So, what we wanted to do was control that conversion down to any device, a tablet, a computer, iPhone, what have you. And so, that's, for that reason, we went out and we acquired, we acquired one of the best, largest development shops in the city and integrated it into our shop. Provided us essentially that ability to fulfill on our vision. And it was a key function that we didn't have internally. So it was a great bolt-on to what we were doing.

Was that your first acquisition?

It was not. It was our largest at the time. Okay. All right.

So you had done acquisitions before and you saw that as a way to jumpstart and as opposed to building it internally.

Yeah.

Did it work out well?

It did. It worked out great. Generally, we look at acquisitions as, is it accretive to what we're doing? So, I'm either going to pick up an additional functionality that I don't have today, or I can bring some efficiency that I already have today and be able to weave them into what I'm doing and be successful doing so.

When I ran a wealth management firm out of Memphis, Tennessee, Memphis is sort of a small market and we grew to the point that we felt like we'd probably taken as much market share away from our good competitors as we could. And so we started growing through acquisitions and other communities to sort of expand the brand. There are challenges with that, but it worked out well for us as well.

Yeah. So when you decided to— walk me through that process, because I can understand, like, hey, I want a thing, I'm going to pull out my credit card, go buy the thing. But obviously with the scale of Ingenuity, is it just, hey, let me bring in my family office and take it over? Or are you pooling, uh, are you doing a cap raise to acquire it? Is it a pool of investors or is it, you know, just a like a single family office type situation?

It depends. For us, it depends on what the acquisition is. So on our core business, we, you know, we just, we acquire it. In the case of other businesses that we're in, say the single-family rental business, we might, you know, that's a place where we might take in outside capital as part of, you know, acquiring another package or what have you. So it just depends, depends on, depends on what we're doing.

What, what helps you, uh, determine that route?

Look, mostly, I think a couple, for us anyway, not unlike the acquisition side of things, we're often looking for talent that we don't have. In our family office, we're relatively small by the scale that you operate at. But there's a lot of, there's some experiences that we don't have. You know, when we got into oil and gas, we've been long on oil and gas for a long time. Right. But at the time that we started, we didn't know a lot about oil and gas. So it made sense to bring people in that, you know, that's not— that's not a place where you walk into the boardroom and, you know, you've got cred. Right. You, you know, it's just that industry doesn't work that way. So we've always looked at it, you know, again, like a talent acquisition. And brought people on to participate in a way that could add to the talents that we already had at the table.

As far as lessons learned from, you know, bringing on these various people, experts, whatnot, has it helped shine lights into where you're personally lacking? And does it help, help you grow yourself? Or are you like, okay, that guy over there has got that covered, I don't have to worry about it?

Yeah, I think really the latter. And I think, you know, as A lot of what we've talked about here is about entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs growing their business. There was a— and it stuck with me forever— there was a Clint Eastwood movie where I think it was Dirty Harry. I think it was a Dirty Harry movie. And he looked at the guy and he looks at camera and he says, a man has to know his limitations.

Great line.

Yeah. And that really stuck with me. Um, a man has to know his limitations. And I think it's frankly one of the biggest challenges that entrepreneurs have is that they do not understand their limitations and they can't be honest with themselves. They think they can do it all. And I'm just a big believer in understanding your limitations, and I do know mine. It took me a minute. I think part of it is, you know, you bang your head against the wall, you know, as a young entrepreneur anyway. But I think, I think if anything, I would say, Ryan, that you've got to know your limitations and surround yourself with people that can really, you know, take you to the next level. And I've watched, I've watched entrepreneurs, especially today. And, you know, we're going to talk a lot about technology. Today, it used to be you wanted to get a general ledger together. It was a pretty easy thing to do back in the day. I mean, look, the line items on a general ledger aren't that much different today than they were then, but inside of a Salesforce operating system or a NetSuite operating system, it's a different animal. You know, I just, I've watched a lot of guys try to go do things that they don't know how to do and burn a lot of time and money doing it.

You know what, I don't know if you've read the book E-Myth by Michael Gerber. It's about entrepreneurs that start businesses and they're idea people, and then they think that they need to control every aspect of the business, and it's very, very limiting on the business's ability to grow. I see that a lot in the lower middle market businesses I work with. Where, you know, the business doesn't have much value because so much of it is tied directly to the owner-operator. And I think that's probably one of the most important evolutionary points in owning and operating a business is recognizing I need help over here, or even if I'm good at it, if I'm not directly responsible for every major activity in the business, my business has value separate and apart from me that could be recognized.

I think that's spot on. And so many of us as entrepreneurs, all of our self-worth is kind of wrapped up in that entity, or a lot of our self-worth is wrapped up in that entity. And by gosh, I can do it better than anybody else. Well, no, you can't. You just can't. And it's a hard thing to reckon with, I think, for a lot of entrepreneurs.

It is. And the thing that made them entrepreneurs is that confidence, right? Right? That self-confidence that they have. And so it's hard sometimes to just step back and say, I'm good at this, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not so good at that.

Do you think it's the confidence, or do you think it's just the resilience to keep going? Because there's, there's times where, like, maybe I'm not the most confident in the room, but by God, I'm not going to quit.

Yeah, you know, well, I, I think that when you're an entrepreneur, when you go through your first entrepreneurial sort of spasm, if you will, that there's that lesson you learn at some point early on where you recognize I'm not all that. And that's a tough moment. And those, you know, and that's why the failure rate for new businesses is, I don't know, I mean, what's the number, 95%, 98% within a few years. So most small businesses fail.

And the thing is, is the first 6 months.

Oh yeah, you know, I think you ask a really good question. So my experience is that so many entrepreneurs start the business on a shoestring. I mean, most of us did, right? Our company started with me in an upstairs bedroom. So, the idea of shelling out $25,000 to, as a small entrepreneur, to hire on a company to launch your Salesforce instance, or $50,000 or $100,000 or $200,000. I mean, it could get expensive. It just seems overwhelming. You can't catch your breath, right? And so you talk yourself into the fact that you can do it. And, you know, arguably it's just you can't, or it's really hard to be successful. You're gonna go through iterations on down the road that, you know, ultimately cost you time and money.

One thing that's funny about that, the relative nature of of— is $500 a lot? Is it $5,000 a lot? Is $50,000 a lot? Is $500,000? $5 million? $5 billion? It— even though if you just move the comma, it's the same conversation no matter where you are in business. It's just, it's just, you know, where's the comma? Because like everybody we— I've ever talked to about this subject of the struggles of entrepreneurship, it's always the same. And it's the only thing that's different is the perception of how people see you from the outside in. And, you know, talking about Kevin, it's just like, you know, here's this guy that's foreseeably has everything put together. Same thing with you. Pretty much everybody we've ever talked to is like that. But when you peel back the layers, you're like, oh, so I'm not alone. I, I— well, all the struggles that we have is just a universal trait of this, uh, building a business on your own type situation.

Yeah, he talked about having to go to the bank and sign a personal guarantee. Yeah, and have his wife sign a personal guarantee. And, you know, I work with some business owners who have created successful businesses and their money came from the Small Business Administration. You have to put a personal guarantee. Most of these people have pledged their equity in their house, right, as collateral for a loan. So the downside of failure, which the probability is very high that you're going to fail, and the consequence of failing is terrible, right? You're talking about having to start over financially. So I applaud those entrepreneurs that are able to have that entrepreneurial spasm, go out there, create a business, and as you said, survive and just, you know, live to fight another day. We talked earlier today about Shoe Dog and about Phil, you know, about Nike, and how they were just on the verge of failure the entire, almost their entire life.

Elon Musk.

Right.

And that, that's just part of the, part of the entrepreneurial journey.

So speaking of failure, where have you failed? Or rather, you don't have to be specific. What are the lessons that you've— what are the best lessons you've gotten out of failure?

Wow, that's a, that's a big question.

Assuming you've ever failed.

No, look, I mean, I think we fail every day. I mean, if you're not failing, you're not trying hard enough. I'm not the first one to say that. Look, I fail every day. The good news is that I tend to be one of those people that, you know, I, I don't— I try not to make the same mistake twice. But, you know, look, we fail. We fail on talent. You know, a lot. Talent's hard to find. I think, you know, one of the questions that was asked earlier is, you know, what are some of the keys to success? And it's talent and finding good talent. And talent's hard to find, especially when you balance talent with trust, because those are kind of two things that have to go hand in hand there. So It's a tough question to answer. I think that we've been— we've overestimated our ability to break into new markets. I talked to you earlier about oil and gas was one of them. That's a tough place to break into. I think we ultimately found that while we still— I think we still have some production, it's easier to buy for us. It's easier and more productive to buy Energy Transfer or Exxon and not mess with it. So I think we've overestimated ourselves sometimes. But probably, Ryan, where I think we failed, where I've seen failure, and especially in this world that we're talking about, about mergers and acquisitions and that kind of thing, and that has to do with culture. You go into these things with, hey, we're going to build a new company. We're going to merge together and we're going to be better. And we're going to merge our cultures. No, you're not. My experience anyway is no, you're not. A culture wins. And I think that especially if you're considering being acquired or you're going out to acquire someone is to be real clear about, what that understanding is about the culture and expectations and those kinds of things. Because I think it certainly makes mergers and acquisitions in my mind harder because you're going to have turnover if those cultures don't blend or it's not clear about what our culture is going to be going forward. You're going to get down the road and you're going to have turnover and those kinds of things that are going to stub your toe. So I think culture is a really big, you know, it would be a big one that I would put up there about, you know, where have I stubbed my toe, where have I made my mistake, is not being clear going in as to what the expectations are regarding culture.

So speaking of culture, when you have a financial stake or ownership of multiple assets, companies, industries, Do you have a holding culture, or do you, do you have to like split your brain like, hey, when I'm in this room, I have this culture that I have to abide by, this one's this culture, this— or is it all kind of an umbrella, all need to be kind of universally dovetailed to each other?

Yeah, I think for us— so I'm sure it's different for different families and different companies— for us, they tend to be the same. You know, we have similar expectations, similar behaviors, similar reporting cadences, those kinds of things. We find them to be, you know, pretty similar because we establish them that way going in. This is going to be what the expectation is. And, you know, again, I think we've made some mistakes where we've talked ourselves into, hey, that person can mold to our conform to our expectations, and we've been wrong about that.

Yeah, speaking of talent, because there was a former employee of ours that we let go, and then we're like, but they did a really good job on this thing, and we're thinking about bringing them back on, but they were resistant to employing the same kind of new structures that we've implemented in the company. And they're like, well, I don't want to do that. And we didn't hire them. And it was just mainly because it's like, I understand that you do a good product and we, we love this aspect of you, but if you're not going to conform to the new direction that we're trying to, to take the company for in terms of efficiency, productivity, and accountability, I can't have you on the team. And, and it's one of those lessons that I've had to learn personally because before I've just been like, you know what, okay, it's I know you work good. I know you— I want you. So let's just, you know, let's just, you know, sweep that under the rug and we'll do that thing. Yes. And that was a lesson that I had to learn.

Yeah, it really damages the perception the other employees have of the firm. Fortunately, when I ran Sovereign Wealth Management, I had a young lady that had worked with me from day one. And when we grew large enough where I wasn't directly managing all the employees, when there was a problem, she would come and knock on the door. I guess, don't you understand what's going on down here, do you understand this person basically isn't carrying their weight and it's bothering everybody else in the office? So, the consequence of having somebody that doesn't pull their weight in part of the culture can really be toxic to the rest of the firm.

I think that's a lesson that all entrepreneurs, business owners that have a team have to learn is there's no such thing as grandfathering in when it comes to talent. Yeah. Like you either have to grow and evolve with the company itself or the company doesn't get to grow and evolve.

In mergers particularly, and I, you know, as an instructor at SMU, I have seminars on mergers and acquisitions. And one of my case studies is on the merger of Chrysler and Daimler-Benz Mercedes, which seems like a very unlikely pair. But back in the day when this occurred, Chrysler was the most profitable car company in the world. And they wanted to compete in Europe against General Motors and Ford, which they weren't. At the time, and they thought partnering with Mercedes would allow that. Mercedes wanted to have a lower-cost option to take to market. And it was a merger. Mergers are theoretically mergers of equals, whereas an acquisition is just that. There's an acquirer, and the acquirer's culture prevails, right? But in this case, it was supposed to— everybody was supposed to play nice with each other. Well, it didn't work, and in fact, After the merger, Daimler's team basically prevailed. They came to Chicago and sort of took over the C-suite and they took sort of Lee Iacocca's Midwestern culture. One of the first things they did was tear out the fire alarms, the smoke detectors from the building because they liked to drink and smoke cigars during the day at the office, which really didn't fit the profile of this Midwestern US firm. Ultimately, Daimler ended up disposing of Chrysler, which had been the most profitable car company in the world. They paid someone to take them off their hands. So it was a multi-billion-dollar destruction of value over a relatively short period of time, which absolutely was just a mismatch of culture and one culture becoming dominant where it didn't fit.

I think that's a huge lesson there. Obviously it's a case study that you teach, but because everybody talks about— I mean, you can watch a thousand different podcasts about culture, so important. You read a book, culture, culture, culture, and it's like, well, what does that mean if you're, if you're a solopreneur, or if you're just starting a company, or you have a team of 5, 10, 20, 100 people? Like, that right there is the downside of having an established culture that dominates, is a huge value And then you have this toxic virus or whatever you want to— whatever anecdote you want to call it, right? And it's just that the culture that's not in alignment with success, it completely destroys one of the most valuable assets in the world.

Look, this is a real hot button for me right now, and I'm sure, you know, you deal with this a lot in your business. I think especially with money having been cheap The multiples that private equity has paid for a lot of these companies that they purchased don't work on the spreadsheet that they pro forma these acquisitions on. And so now the operating companies are in a position to never meet the expectation. And I, I shouldn't use the word never. I don't like to use the word never, but it makes it very difficult to meet the expectation of their owner, right? And for operators, you know, all we want to do is make our owners happy, right? Whether if you're the sole proprietor or you report to a board or whatever, you know, you're in business, you spent your whole career making the owners happy, right? And that is a really tough position that I think we're in right now in this business cycle because they likely overpaid or paid top dollar. And the economy is down. And they very well may not ever make that pro forma work. And so culturally, that breeds a lot of toxicity inside of these organizations that performed for generations. Very well. So, it's a big— I think it's a big thing that's going on in business today where you have owners that never have really operated before. I'll give you an example. I'm going to change the names for— how's that saying go?

Protect the innocent.

We're going to change the name to protect the innocent, but I was working on a client one time, and this was a very long time ago when money wasn't cheap, and they bought a company that had a store-door delivery model. And the thesis was that it would be accretive because they would just put their product on the truck and the truck would deliver to the store. But nobody stopped to look to see that there was no more real estate left on the truck. Something had to come off to put that on. So it ultimately was not accretive. You ultimately had to buy more trucks. The whole thesis was flawed. So that just breeds a lot of toxicity inside of the operating companies. And I think it's a big challenge in business today.

It's interesting because at lunch we were actually talking about, you know, with Trump coming back into office— and don't worry, we're not going to get political— but, you know, and then just the last couple years of, of the downturn of the economy. And, and Andy brought up about the reason that it's— there's so much non-money out there floating for, for, uh, raises at the moment is because, because of COVID because election— who knows the because. But so many in the cycle where you would normally be able to exit and have money and then reinvest into the economy, that wasn't there. So now we have a hiccup in the cycle. So all that to be said, where do you see business going, especially now adding this conversation of culture into the mix where you have the, the everything you just talked about with the, with the culture aspect of it? Where do you see 2025 from a raise, from a business, from economy? Look, I'm not to put you on the spot.

I'm sure everybody's business is different. I think raises are going to be tough. And I mean, you asked specifically about '25. I think they're going to be tough. I think when you— what I think is interesting about your comment there is when you look back during COVID And the great resignation and all of that that went on cost us a lot of money. It costs businesses a lot of money to, in many cases, keep average talent. So, where I see things going in 2025, and I would argue we're probably looking at 2026 at this point. I think it's still going to be tough. But where I see the opportunity is to pay the ones, you've got your, what is it, the 80/20 rule? You've got the 80/20 rule or the 70/30 rule or whatever it is in your organization. That 30% of the people that are killing it, make it worth their while to continue killing it. And I think that where we got ourselves coming out of that Great Resignation is the fact that you just have a lot of just average people poking along, eating up a lot of salary. And I think that that's a challenge for us today. We're living with that hangover from COVID and so forth.

That's an interesting insight just because I'm about 70%, 80% of the way of Ray Dalio's principles. I don't know if you've ever gone through that book. And part of that was promote the killer. He doesn't use the word killers, but promote the really good ones and cut out, like you said, the bad ones, the average ones. So just that insight about how COVID made you keep the averages. I've never heard that said before, and I think that's a powerful comment.

Yeah, it's funny. I call them savages. We've got— and listen, I think with data in your hand and AI now just being able to provide us even more information in a shorter period of time, you have 25, 27-year-old talent that is killer. I mean, these are, these are, I call them savages. They are savage with the information that they have at their hand. And listen, at the end of the day, it's work hard. You know, we've all heard it 100 times. What's the key to success? Work hard. These kids that work hard today stand out. And now I have, I got to tell you, I have a really good handful of under 30, let's call it under 30-year-old executives that can sit in this boardroom as intimidating as this room could be and drop the mic on this table because they work hard, they're smart, and they take that information that's available to them and put it to work every single day. It's phenomenal. So that gives me, back to your question about where do I see, I have a lot of enthusiasm for 25. I have a lot of enthusiasm for tomorrow, because I see it every day. I see it every day in our business.

The thing about talent is, is, uh, somebody that's in Lane's network, Cody Sanchez, I saw a video of hers where she was getting— she was talking about some of the insights she got when she was early in her career. And the advice that she got was, listen, two things: be the first to the office, be the last out of the office. That's the only thing you need to be successful. And I was thinking about it, I was like, I mean, it's so true because especially in 2025 now, it was so many younger generation where it's like that work-life balance and they just want to like do the 38, 42 hours and then go back to whatever they're doing. Like, I don't know if I could ever even think like that or even attempt to do that. So to me, when I hear be first, be last, I don't know if that's a— I, I think that's the best way you're gonna have savages is, is— and obviously you want them to work, they're not just sleeping on the job.

I think you got to add— look, here's, here's my thing, and I'm, you know, I'm just— I deal— we deal with it every day in our business. I think as long as that's your ex— listen, I'm all— I'm, I'm behind it 100%. If, if being home on time at 5 o'clock and not being the last one out the door is what you value, I respect that. And I'm here to help you meet your objectives. But you cannot have the same objective of then making $250,000 a year or $500,000 or what have you, right? So, look, I would take— I don't think it's always first and last because we have life. And I think especially in our firm, we have a lot of young women of childbearing age. So, it's awesome because I kind of feel like a grandpa on steroids at my place, watching all of these young families grow. So, it's not always first in and last out. It's work hard. And I would add, be curious. Because if you're curious, you're always learning. And again, back to technology and information, it's readily available to you. Either inside of your firm or you can go find it. And it's not as hard because I certainly am not the smartest guy in the room, certainly here for sure. But I can work hard and I can go find the information that is going to make me an expert at the subject that we're going to talk about. So, I'm excited about '25. I'm excited about '26. I think you got a lot of young talent with a lot of information. Information at their fingertips, and it's going to be great.

So, specific to your industry, marketing, advertising, I know you have a lot of different business interests and we can touch on that as well, but when I think of marketing and advertising, I think about creative. And when I think about creative, it kind of cuts against what I see, where I see my skill set. So, I'm very focused on systems and processes. I want to understand what am I delivering to my client. And what does that process look like from the time they walk in the door? How do we take care of that client? What's our deliverable? How do we create that outcome? And I want to have best practices all the way through that. And I want when somebody walks in the door that's a new hire to have a book that lays out, this is exactly how we run the railroad here. This is how we get this outcome. When I think about your business, I think about it as, as not adhering to that, as being something that can't be put in a box, can't be structured in that way because it boils down to people's creativity to create a marketing campaign or an advertising campaign. Am I wrong?

It used to be that way. Yeah. Right? And it's a really great question that you're going to because I tend to be a lot like you. And I, and, you know, as our company scaled, today we do literally millions of transactions. A year. You cannot do millions of transactions a year without processes and all the things that you just talked about. They're critical. And so, as our company grew, and albeit there will be people watching this podcast that will smile at me saying this because don't think I didn't fight it because it didn't come natural to me. All those processes and those things didn't come natural to me, and it is not what I valued at that time. But I have learned, I would argue that today, processes, data, information, all of that, if you're going to scale a business, is essential. It's absolutely essential. Otherwise, you know that saying of changing, what is it, the engines while the plane's in air? You know, that's ultimately what you're going to end up doing. Our business has really gotten to a place where there is still a tremendous amount of creativity. It's just not only in the form of what does that television ad look like or that print ad look like. There's creativity in the form of how I'm going to look at this information, how I'm going to ask the question of the consumer regarding how they feel or reacted with a potential product. There's creativity in everything that we do today. And it just is— to me, it's made the business so much more— there's so much more dimension to the marketing business today than there was, I think, when I first started. I tell this joke all the time that my top largest expenses were labor, insurance, health insurance, and my bill at Aisle Art where we bought markers and paper. Probably my largest vendor today is Amazon. And I don't mean Amazon, I'm buying packages, it's Amazon taking up cloud space. So the business has changed tremendously. There's creativity everywhere. And I'll add one other thing that's just really cool. We'll run an ad, literally, I was in a meeting today, I ran that ad last week. This week, how's that ad doing? Not so great. Next. Change it out. So, what used to take 6 months, 3 months, I don't know, somebody walking into a room, a boardroom and saying, I don't like it. You know absolutely factually how that ad is performing today. And we didn't have that when we first got started.

That was one of my challenges with advertising is being this sort of in-a-box guy. I wanted to say, I spend this amount of money and I get this return on it. And in the old days, it was very difficult to measure that. You know, how do you measure the outcome of a radio spot? Unless somebody comes in and says, I came in because I heard you on the radio. Is it easier these days for a client to see the measurements?

For most media, it is. I mean, it's, it's a clear number. We have a saying at our shop, know better, do better. So the more transparent your agency is with you in terms of how something is performing, the better off everybody's going to be. I say this all the time. I have never once been fired by a client for walking in and saying, I'm wrong, or we're wrong, or this is wrong. Let's change it. And today you can do that cycle within weeks, right? Hey, this isn't working. Let's change it. And that's the position that we're in today as marketers is you're dealing with highly, highly factual, very statistically reliable information in a matter of a week or two. I mean, it's phenomenal.

Yeah, that is different than what I experienced. I want to talk a little bit about your other activities and at what point in your career in running your advertising business did you start investing in oil wells and franchises and all these other things? And how do you, one, how did that happen? And second, how do you allocate your time now? You have a son who's in the business.

Yeah, my son's in the, actually I have a son in my agency business. I have one of my sons that runs a Homevestors franchise in Florida. I mean, I do a lot of business with my daughter. So, you know, a lot of— I've heard a lot of families say don't do business with family. That just hasn't rung true for us.

You're an Italian family.

Yeah, it works out well. Now listen, don't kid yourself, my son will fire me.

Yeah.

You know, I mean, let's not Now, we tend to— it runs like— it is a big company and it runs like a big company with operating agreements and all that kind of thing. And listen, I think that's important in any business. You know this from your experience. Buy-sell agreements, operating agreements, all that kind of thing. And I don't care if you're family or what, you operate by— Maybe more.

So if you're family.

You operate by an agreement. But we've been— listen, not that— to Ryan's question earlier, it's not that we haven't had our failures, but generally we've been pretty successful. We're good operators. And I think that what we've found is that once you learn how to operate at scale, you can take a lot of other businesses and And you can operate them at scale. I mean, the disciplines are similar. I mean, I will tell you, I think going out and drilling oil wells was not a good idea. You know, it was just not a good idea.

Right. But because it was outside— it was.

It was just area of expertise. It's outside of— it was way outside of our area of expertise. And, you know, again, I would argue we have become very good operators at scale. To drill 3 oil wells in Oklahoma is not scale. But anyway, I don't mean to get off track on that. But I think that the how we got into it was we tended to be somewhat disciplined with our investments. And how we were going to deploy cash, those kinds of things. So for us, even though at the time we were really pretty small, we had investment policy on what we were going to invest in, how we were going to invest in, what our asset allocations were going to be. So we tended to be very disciplined about those things. And then as we grew, I don't know that the investment policy changed tremendously or the asset allocations changed tremendously as a percentage. The numbers just got bigger, right? So, you know, did you adopt the.

Investment policy concept.

For us? You know, it's been several years ago. You know, I think that once we got to You know, I think Ryan mentioned it earlier, you know, it's kind of as an entrepreneur, you're, you know, there's so much time just kind of eating hand to mouth. And I think that, you know, once we got past that and we were into, you know, very predictable streams of revenue, then it became obvious to us that we needed to to find that discipline. And I really credit my middle son, Taylor, for a lot of that. He tends to be the more disciplined of certainly the two of us and arguably of all the kids. He may be the most disciplined of all of them.

I very rarely saw families when I ran Sovereign Wealth Management. I made a living talking to families who had created significant wealth but didn't have a plan, didn't have an investment policy. Very few and far between that did. And my question was, you know, you ran your business with a plan and goals and metrics and measured, and you're not doing that now that your wealth is liquid. You know, why not? Why wouldn't you have the structure and discipline of a plan? So a big believer in the investment policy and certainly helps around the edges when there's things are too good or things are terribly bad because we tend to want to make emotional decisions around that to sell at the bottom and buy at the top. And so, I applaud you for— and your son for helping guide you to that place.

Yeah. Listen, I think when I think about your business and look, I think a lot of people get all hung up in did the stock go up, did the stock go down? I don't know. I tend to subscribe a little bit to the Warren Buffett theory. You buy good companies and just think long about what you're doing. At this point, I'm investing for great-grandchildren at this point. But it's probably the thing that I admire most about what you guys do. It's bringing those families that discipline. I'm an advertising guy. Listen, and you know, arguably by today's standards, I grew up poor. I didn't have insight into the types of things that you bring to a boardroom. And I think that that type of counsel changed the course of our family's life. And I mean that in a very strong way. The team that we worked with changed the course of our family's life. Just as you said, structure, huge difference, and then all the other disciplines that we talked about. And then the only other comment that I would add is, and I learned this recently in the last couple of years, bring the kids along, bring the wife along. One of the things that I learned, and I see this as a challenge for so many people that, you know, Bob died unexpectedly and they're trying to unwind this hot mess. And, you know, every year we fly all the kids in, the wife, we go someplace, we have a very, very formal board meeting of this is what we did, this is how we perform this year. Everybody's brought along because I don't want my kids. And I don't think most entrepreneurs want their kids fighting over this stuff. Make a plan. I think your advice, you know, it's beyond financial advice. It really is. I think it's just so important to the core and the survivability of families. And I'm sure you've seen it where, you know, kids are fighting over— I've seen people fight over $80,000, not to mention fight over, you know, $100 million, right?

So yeah, I had a divorce attorney one time tell me he earned $100,000 in fees, uh, helping a couple fight over patio furniture. Yeah, so people, money, people, uh, you know, it's crazy. It does get crazy.

Real estate deal years ago where there was like 14 heirs on, on the heirship of affidavit for a single-family house where the contract was like $25,000. And, and they were, they were fighting. Yeah. And you're like— and again, it goes back to the relative conversation. Everything's relative. Um, I want to go back to— you're talking about wanting to invest in things at scale and how oil and gas for you wasn't an opportunity for, for at scale. What do you mean by at scale? For what does that mean to you?

I think that goes back to your earlier question. It could be $500 or $5,000 or $5 million or $500 $100 million. It depends on your position. It's interesting because somebody said something about an investment. I don't know, this has been years ago, but they said, "It's not going to change your life." And at some point, it has to be a really, really big investment to change your life, right? And that's probably not realistic on a one-shot deal. It happens, but we'll see how the SpaceX investment goes, right? It's unlikely. So I think that at the end of the day, that answer comes down to just kind of where you are in the cycle. And, and it's going to change, right? Um, so I don't know if I answered your question or not.

That's all right. I do have another question though, because you were talking about how you got to a point where you did get counsel on, on how to better your family business and, and put those structures and policies. What was the catalyst to bring in that.

Outside counsel? Well, it's back. It's been almost 10 years now. So it's actually been exactly 10 years. I think it got back to, Ryan, the earlier comment I made about understanding your limitations. We were now dealing with investments beyond really our capability. And I think we knew our limitations. And so we sought out, we sought out counsel to, you know, to come in and help us. I think luck played a little bit, you know, into it. And I am a believer in luck and what you do with luck. We met some people at the right time at the right place, and they grew with us. So, but at the end of the day, we knew our limitations. And we were not prepared. When you get into all these things and you build a plan and, you know, you start looking at, you know, what you, what your goals are for 20 years from now. You know, you're not looking at whether or not if the market's up or down this year. You're looking at 20 years from now, or what happens when my granddaughter's 50. You know, those numbers aren't crazy. You don't have to do a 20% return. You can do an 8%, you can do a 7%, you can do a 5%. It becomes much more predictable. It becomes predictable. And you're taking, depending upon where you start, 10x is an easy number when you start looking out at a long time horizon like that. So, for us, it just got to be— it was a little over our head at the time. And so, we sought outside counsel. We knew what our limitations were.

So you bring up luck. Um, there's a conversation that a friend of mine— we have all the time, and it's about how there's certain skills and traits that people have, and some people are naturally lucky. Do you believe in that, that people— some people are just more lucky than others? And do you think that luck could actually be a skill itself? Or is that such a random, off-the-wall.

Question we can just skip it? No, look, I'm glad you asked it because I listen to a lot of— I've listened to a lot of books, as I'm sure all of you guys do. And some guys believe in luck and some guys don't believe in luck. And I believe in luck. I believe in being at the right place at the right time. Here's the key about luck. It's what you do with luck. Everybody has luck. It's whether or not if you do anything with it. And I think that one of the— an additional reason of why we've been successful is what we've done with luck. We had the opportunity, we took advantage of it, we invested in it, we doubled down on it. It's walking away from luck or smiling at luck and not doing anything about it that I don't know if you want to call that unlucky or not, but we've done a lot with the luck that we've, that we've seen.

And so there's been some recent research on that, you know, rational scientific research on the concept of luck. And I probably won't present it in the best, most articulate way, but essentially what the author said was if you perceive yourself as having good luck, you will take advantage of opportunities when they come your way. If you see yourself as possessing bad luck, you're going to run away from opportunities when they present themselves. So, it becomes self-fulfilling.

I think that's brilliant. That's much more eloquent than I think the way that I put it. But yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. I think a lot of people— another thing I'll add about luck, and I think that I call them crumbs. And all of you guys just in this meeting today, man, there's a couple crumbs on the floor that I've learned about today. And people step on crumbs, they walk past crumbs. I pick every single one of those crumbs up. Pick up the crumb. Somebody drops a crumb, pick it up because there's learning in that crumb and do something. Does that luck? I don't know. Is a crumb luck? But if somebody drops that crumb and if there's a way that that crumb maybe applies to my business and I can think about my business differently, it could make a profound difference in, you know, the outcome of our business.

So it's a mindset. You're seeking knowledge. Yeah. I'm reminded of Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes. I doubt they've probably been invoked in a conversation with either of you recently, but Harold was a great R&B performer back in the '60s and '70s. I can say that at my age. And he had a song called Bad Luck, and And the chorus was, if it weren't for bad luck, I'd have.

No luck at all.

There you go. Harold probably found bad luck, you know, because that's what he looked for. Yeah. But I do believe that there are people that seem to live under a blessed star, but I think it's their decision-making and their attitude towards, towards life.

It's really beautiful.

That's beautifully said. So.

What'S next? Oh, gosh, everything's next, it seems like, right? New Year, always full of hope and that kind of thing. Look, I think for our business, what's next is profound now. I hate to go back to the whole AI thing, but it's really real. And I lived through— so when I started in this business, we hand-typed. Actually, there was a typing pool on the second floor of the company that I worked for. And they would crank out your memos. And we would put them in a FedEx envelope and send them to the client, or we would fax them. And so, if you think about, I don't know what that was, let's just call it 1981 to today, we're going to see, and you know, not to mention an email or, you know, what have you, and how far we've come. We're going to see that kind of change in the next 5 years. I mean, it's just, it's going to be exponential in terms of the change that I think we're going to see. Certainly from a marketing standpoint, I think as, you know, just as regular consumers, it is going to be profound. And I think it's going to affect, you know, the marketing business, financial services business, medicine. I can't wait to see. So, you know, what's next? Nothing but hope on the horizon. It's going to be fantastic.

And I think with that is, is what's your ability to pivot? Because one of the things that I'm— even with our business here is recognizing AI, recognizing that there is a race to the bottom on certain level of service. So I'm not— I've chosen not to race the bottom but instead race the top, whereas like, hey, let's cater explicitly to more of an executive profile of people where they expect high-quality cameras, multi-camera aspect versus like, hey, let me just do a cell phone and get AI to do it, you know? Because like, I don't necessarily— I don't know how you build a business on a service that costs $50 to $100 an hour and have multiple people. So, and I bring that up only because it's like, that's what we're doing at Harbor Belmont is, you know, pivoting up because of things like people pivoting down. Um, and maybe it's not even pivoting down, but just utilizing AI and utilizing cheap labor and And because there is a barrier to entry on, on the type of service that we're doing, like right here is like, we've got cameras, we've got lighting, we've got professional audio. You can't do that with a cell phone. You can do something comparable, but it's not going to look as good as this. It's not going to sound as good as this. So I bring that all to say, not just to plug my company, but just to like, hey, you have to be able to pivot with whatever the market is showing you. And like you said earlier, sometimes you're wrong, sometimes you're right. What are you doing at Imagineery to pivot?

Yeah, well, I mean, look, we already pivoted. So we were— I'm going to tell you a quick story. We were on AI just slightly before AI got cool. Okay. We brought in a significant talent. I mean, so back to your point earlier about whether if it's $500 or $5,000 or $500,000, expensive talent that understands language and AI and, you know, all those kinds of things to get out ahead of it. So for us, it's already pivoted. Now I'll tell you a funny story. So we, uh, JLL, the, um, the commercial real estate management company is a large client of ours. And we developed an AI influencer called Cindy. And you owe it to yourself to go look her up. We— my wife, my wife's not day and, you know, not line involved in the business at all. But, you know, she knows Ryan and she knows Evan and, you know, these guys, you know, these folks at my office. She knows who the Keith Savage players are that we talked about, right? And next thing you know, so we launched Cindy and my wife says, who's this Cindy? Sees the video, who's this Cindy? And I said, honey, Cindy's not real. So, you know, I tell you all that because, you know, I don't know what, this was last year, you know, we're developed, we've already developed influencers as just one small aspect. And it was so real. Cindy was so real that we had to pull it back so that we weren't out there presenting this as this is a real human being. In our data work, it's phenomenal. So we've got predictive models on who's more likely to buy something than not buy something. And what's important about this is not the predictive model. Predictive models are not new. Predictive models in a month is new. So it's not that this is something that's never been done before, and at least in this particular— Cindy was, I think, something that hadn't been done before. But on these models, it's just the fact that we're able to do something that would have taken a computer a year to do. That I'm doing in now 6 weeks or what have you. So I think it's really profound in terms of the change that we're going to see and kind of the what's next and how do you pivot, right? So I would think in your business, because I've already seen an AI version of this, I think you're right. It's not going to the cameras and the cameramen and those types of things aren't necessarily going to change. But I think there's probably some applications like we were talking about earlier on my SEO where you can do 5 edits in the time that you used to do 1 edit, allowing you to scale your business more. Same talent, right? The same excellent talent, but now you're able to do 5 shows in the time that you're able to do 1 show, right? And I've already seen some of that technology because we're using it to develop reports. So it behaves a little bit like a podcast where there's different announcers and that kind of thing, and they're delivering a report and it's all automated. So it's pretty cool. It's— I expect what's next, I expect my business will change more in the next 5 years than it changed in the last 40 years. For me, it'll change more in the next 5 years than it 40 years.

And there'll be great winners and losers as the world changes, and some will adapt and some will not adapt. I guess for me, at 66 years of age, we're approaching what's called the silver tsunami, where half the businesses in the US are owned by people 55 years of age or older. So if demographics hold, there are going to be a lot of them seeking an exit for their business. Some of them won't make it to the exit because their business won't be saleable. They won't pivot, they won't make it. Some will create significant wealth. It's going to be really interesting to.

Watch and see how this unfolds. Yeah, I think that's a really good point. I've really been blessed to have been surrounded by a lot of young, curious people. And so I can't count the number.

Of pivots over time, right?

Right. Yeah. But I think that that's a really good call. That's a big market that I would imagine is opening.

Yeah.

I was attracted to the M&A space because I did some consulting work in it and realized that 8 out of 10 small to medium business owners who try to sell their business aren't successful. Which is just staggering to me, right? Because it's the repository for most of their wealth. If 8 out of 10 people that owned a house couldn't sell it in the marketplace, it would be catastrophic, right? It would shut down the economy. But here are these people that had built these businesses over time and they're not able to extract value. Now, a lot of that has to do with decisions they've made and a lack of information of understanding what they need to do to make their business saleable. But I'd like to change that math. That's my mission for whatever time I have left in business is to try.

To change that math. Look, as a 60— I'm 65. So, as a 65-year-old, I'm right there with you. I've had the good fortune of being able to build companies to last as opposed to necessarily sell. But I think that with this technology revolution that's happening right now,— it might be a real reason, a motivating reason for a lot of entrepreneurs our age to sell their company. Because you can't make that pivot without a monster innovation, a monster contribution of capital to the organization, both in terms.

Of money and talent. And time. So if you've got a 2- to 3-year time window to exit and you're faced with the capital commitment, the time commitment, and the resources.

Yeah, it's a— yeah, maybe we live in interesting times. We do. And I— listen, I'm excited. Again, I, I repeat this because it's more about— it's more than the money. What you do, right, I think is more than the money. Yeah, it really is. It, for me, it's at a really deep emotional level for, you know, these families and their businesses and their livelihoods and And, you know, bringing, putting that, you know, that icing on the cake or that bow on the box for them, I think is, you know, certainly must be very rewarding for you.

Yeah, when I was in the wealth management business and multifamily office, I would ask my team sometimes, you know, what do we do for our clients? And they'd go, oh, we make investments, or we do this, and they would talk about the specific actions. And I'd say, we are problem solvers, right? Problem solvers. We try to take those things off of people's plate that makes them unhappy and stresses them out so they can enjoy their wealth and enjoy their time with family. And so much of my time when I evolved within the business to just being a relationship manager for our largest clients, very little of it came down to making investment recommendations. A lot of it was just sort of blocking and tackling for the family dynamics, which when there's meaningful wealth involved It gets complicated. I applaud you for having the family meetings. I tried to do that with some of my family clients, and some were very resistant to it. Part of it was patriarch, matriarch didn't want to provide the transparency to the next generation. They didn't want their children to know, you know, and which they're going to find out, right? You want them to find out when you passed away from the lawyer, who's reading a document, or would you rather have an interactive, you know, experience with them to say, these are our resources, let's come up with goals as a family and how we're going to deal with this?

Do you think that's a pride thing?

I think it's a control thing. I think it's a fear thing. It may be a generational thing.

Because I know my father, like, and again, we're not— my family is just blue car. Dad still works. But I had to hear through my mother— she's like, don't tell your dad this, which I'm telling the internet, whatever, he won't watch this— he was scammed out of $50,000 through like a one of those email phishing things. Yeah. And it's like, but you know, here you have a— my dad who's been the strong patriarch of the family, what, last all my life at least, and he's so embarrassed that he doesn't— it's not a topic of conversation, right? Where all I want to tell him is like, Dad, it's not you, it's, it's just the world we live in. Everybody gets scammed, and it's just you have to be careful now even more in the digital world. It's not something to be embarrassed about.

It's be angry, yes, but embarrassed, no. I, I gotta listen. I, I did a lot of studying on this subject because I didn't know Again, I didn't know what to do. So, I went to several family office conferences and I'm going to tell you what made up my mind is that I watched fourth generation, what is it, Gen 4? So, I think they're referred to as— I watched Gen 4 who had absolutely no idea what great-grandpa did for a living, you know, not really have any clue what in the world they were doing or, you know, it was just, it was a hot mess. And I believe that so many kids are not ready for the transfer of wealth that's about to happen in this country. They are unprepared. Completely unprepared. And if you study this and you go back to all of the big leaders at the turn of the century that built America and those families that have money today and those families that don't have money today, I think all boils down to what was the structure? What was the investment policy way back then? Arguably these guys were worth billions and billions in today's dollars. But it was a big lesson for me to go and to some of these conferences and see it. And so as a result for us, we set it up to where, you know, we're there to help the future generations along. But in theory, the The money should last, should compound forever because all of it will not be distributed. Now, listen, that's our personal preference, but it hit me that these kids are not ready to inherit this money if you don't bring them along. Imagine you just wake up, Dad died, and now, you know, what am I supposed to do? And so our family meetings I don't want there to be any, you know, any, you know, misgivings. I don't want any fights going on. Everybody always knew this was the deal. And here's the other thing, I believe that our kids can plan their future based on, you know, what we have now agreed that they would inherit on what timeline. They can make decisions in their life on what they want to do. So, it's been a game changer for our family. And again, I really applaud, you know, I applaud the kind of things that firms like yours do, and it makes a big difference, I think, in families' lives.

I think also on that subject, I think it probably helps the family be more of a we versus my daddy this, my daddy that. And for context, I was at, last fall, I was at a lecture at SMU, and it was a family office lecture. There was like 3 or 4 panelists, and they're all family office guys. And one of them, who was the youngest, like, I had zero respect for— and hopefully he doesn't see this, uh— but, but the reason I didn't have respect for is like, that's cool that your family is worth a book of money, but you kept saying, my daddy this, my dad this, my dad this, my dad this. Versus the other panelists that were like, we this, we that. We— and again, it's the same conversation, but it, it just something triggered something differently in me where it's like when it's a we, I feel like, yes, I can inherently feel like generationally somewhere in your family you were given somewhat of a silver spoon, but at least you're working for it. But when you just flat out say my dad this, my dad that, I just hear silver spoon, silver spoon. And maybe it's just, you know, my own personal bias or jealousy, but— Could.

Be a lack of self-confidence on his part. Yeah, potentially. That he doesn't have the confidence to.

Express anything about himself.

Right, but it was just funny. I understand why it came off that way.

Yeah, because there was people that were also there kind of making the same kind of observation.

I've seen a lot of dynamics in family wealth and some families like yours handle it very well and there's clarity and there's open dialogue within the family and others are much more guarded. Maybe patriarch, matriarch uses it as a tool to control family members as opposed to empower them. So, I've seen it all and I've seen some families that have multiple generations of successful, happy, well-adjusted children and some that are just a mess. To use your term, which my daughters use, hot mess. And so I don't know if there's any one way to do it right, but if I were to choose one, it would be Charlie's, which is to say, look, we've got a family plan. These are our resources. This is how the railroad's running right now. This is what we're doing. We're going to make decisions. This is how decisions are going to be made, who's empowered to make them. This is what you can what to expect, therefore you can start thinking and planning. I had some families that would use incentive trusts. So it would be, I don't want you to just to inherit money, but I tell you what, I had a family that said, I'll pay you $2 for every dollar of W-2 income you have, right? So I'll match your W-2 income 2 times. So I don't want you to quit working, but I think that's probably an extreme measure of control beyond the grave.

But you see a lot of that as well. I think, look, again, this is one of the things I picked up along the way. It's just a thought. When we think about our business, we're bringing our teams along. As leaders, our job is to bring the team along to conquer the mountain that we're climbing. As the patriarch, if you will, of the family, all we're doing is just bringing them along. Yeah, right. Let's not— let's tell them where we're going, paint the picture. It's all on paper. And bring them along with us because, look, and, and again, I, I don't know one panelist from another, but there's a great opportunity for these future generations to carry the ball. So The model is, you know, we're modeled at low side 4%, high side 8% return, right? That's how we built our model. Whether it's right or wrong, I don't know. That's our model. There's an opportunity by future generations to, you know, do they get a chance at a 20%? Do they get a chance at a, you know, at a bigger, you know, a bigger multiple? Because they're able to take the investment, and, you know, do something with it. So I think you bring them along, and, uh, and, and they have the opportunity in those future generations to carry the ball and, you know, ultimately continue.

To benefit the family.

Yeah.

So one of my favorite questions to ask people as we're wrapping up is, like, what, what impactful books do you recommend to help grow, build, scale, exit anything related to your business, like what.

Is the most impactful books that you would recommend? I probably knock out a book at least a month, right? So, and I tend to listen and walk. As a Man Thinketh, I got to tell you, I've listened to it 50 times. And the reason— and listen, there's all kinds of books that I think are terrific, but that one book, and literally it's this big. Right. But, you know, it's all about.

Your headspace.

And, um, and, you know, if you can wake up every day and you, you know, back till, you know, we were using— we were talking about luck, and if you think you're lucky, listen, if you think you're lucky, you're lucky.

Yeah.

Um, I, I think that that one book probably had, you know, one of the biggest impacts, you know, in my life. There's another book, and I, again, I wouldn't probably put it at the top, very top of my list, but it's one that I think is worth mentioning, and it's called The Coddling of the American Mind. And I bring that up because of the conversation we've had here about future generations. And basically, you know what, and I'm seeing this with my grandchildren today, this book talks about I believe that the year was 1991. So, it was the first generation that really grew up with a smartphone. And they talk a lot about just kind of how that changed because we free played. We were gone. We played in the creek all day. And be home at 6:00. And Those were the rules, right? And that's not the world today, right? And I'm seeing this with my grandchildren. My son has a place in the Bahamas, and when they're in the Bahamas, kids are gone. They're out there playing. And so I bring that book up too, because I think it's important, especially for people with young families and how you really give these kids the freedom to grow and to explore into those types of things that they may not have today. So those are a couple that come to the top.

Of my mind. Yeah, I love As a Man Thinketh, and I too bring it out periodically and have it on my shelf for regular review. The data on the impact of cell phones and social media on this generation, your grandchildren, is compelling, and it's shortening their attention spans. And, you know, they're not reaching their full potential, and I bet they're different children in the Bahamas, not to pick on your grandchildren, just anybody that has access to that tool. So I read a book recently on how to break up with your phone, and I have to say right now I'm flunking the course on how to break up with my phone. I did take off every app that could send notifications to me. So I'm no longer getting cricket scores at 2 in the afternoon from ESPN, right? And I don't have Facebook and Instagram or any of the social media. So I've removed a lot of the easy temptations to just be distracted throughout the day. But the ability to concentrate and focus, I think, is something that we're depriving this generation of. And I don't know what the long-term effects of it are. But I know I'm a better person when I can remove myself from that and be in the moment with the.

People that I care about. Sorry to do this, but to bring it back around to advertising and social media and influencers and that kind of thing. So the kids love YouTube. I don't know what it is, but like they just get— so there's this Vlad and somebody, Vladimir, Vlad and somebody, it's pretty popular. Anyway, so the kids have been watching this over the years, so you know, I look over their shoulder. So I've seen how the show progresses, and I thought this was pretty funny. So yesterday, kids were over, and you know, they're watching some YouTube, and now there's a plug for Taco Bell, there's a plug for Sonic, there was a plug for, you know, the new, oh, I didn't know they had breakfast. I'm like, seriously, come on.

So yeah, that, that's a whole other 2 hours of conversation, because all you have to do is like look at MrBeast, some mid-20s guy having a multi-billion dollar business all off the back of YouTube. Yeah, it's crazy. But that's, that's next conversation.

Thank you so much for, for coming in today.

Appreciate it.

Been a treat for us.

Thank Thank you for sharing. Hopefully, uh, I'm gonna— can I get.

Your, uh, actually, yeah, well, we'll connect.

And I'll make sure we connect. We should— we— you and I should know each other.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And, uh, look forward for the audience to see this because, like, you know, all of our conversations have been real estate focused, so this is more business focused.

So I really enjoyed it. Thanks, bud. Yeah, always good to be together.