The Exchanges

Q Did that grit carry over? Were there other things that carried over into, into your next careers?

A Yeah. The, for me, the stuff that I just had in me that were refined through skateboarding, it was, I will go through a wall to get there. You know, something like failure that started becoming very natural for me. So that wasn't part of the equation any longer. Um, the skills that I learned from skateboarding that I then applied afterward was number one, Skateboarders look at the world very differently. And then two, because of how our world, the skate world is structured, we can't do a trick that's already been done at a certain spot. So, you know, for a, let's say Tiger Woods, right? If he's playing Augusta and hole one has been birdied, you can no longer birdie hole one. It's off the map. It's off the table. And that's how skateboarding is. So it makes us go to a spot and try to find a way to do a trick that's never been done before. And that actually changed the way I looked at life and business. What does everybody else see? And then what are they missing? And skateboarding taught me to focus on the thing they're missing. That's a very good thing to have in business. You have to be careful with it because being early on business actually can create a different type of challenge. And then I would say the second part was skateboarding breeds genius marketers because there's nothing really different about the product we're selling. Right? If you look at a actual skateboard, …

AI assessment note: “The skills that I learned from skateboarding that I then applied afterward was”

Q Yeah, no, yeah, right. So explain to me, um, you know, sometimes listeners will hear private equity and they'll think Wall Street or they'll think like the, you know, Apollo or some of the, you know, some of these massive private equity, uh, companies. So it just break it down for me. What, what, what's private equity mean? Where do you, where do you, where are you in that?

A Yeah, that's a really good one. So private equity traditionally Means that you are going to pool capital together and that capital is not going to come from the private markets. So it's not going to come from the stock market. And then usually traditional private equity invests in business, right? So what, for the listener, you're going to hear this one because it's trending everywhere. Private equity right now is doing a roll up strategy. That's the hottest strategy. And they go out and they buy service based businesses. They buy financial businesses. They buy marketing agencies. They package them up together. They try to find some efficiencies, right? They're cutting down expenses or increasing revenue. That's ultimately going to increase their EBITDA, then they're going to offload it. That's traditional private equity. In real estate, really what it means is that you're bringing investors together to go out and buy real estate. And you're doing that on the private side, not the public side. So for my business, we go out and find limited partners. So that's investors that want to own real estate. They want the benefits of real estate, appreciation, cashflow, depreciation loss, but they don't want to be active. They don't want to find the assets. They don't want to manage it. They don't want the phone call at night. And we Basically bring the two parties together and then when…

AI assessment note: “In real estate, really what it means is that you're bringing investors together”

Q Sure. Um, I, I, I had done a syndication, you know, um, and I, I view the difference between syndication and private equity is basically syndication is just a smaller version of it as opposed to Uh, private equity would be like a real estate fund. Is that?

A Yeah, you can, that's a totally fine way to look at it. Like if you're looking at my actual business, there's projects that we do as a syndication. So a syndication just means that you're creating an offering for a singular project. And then a fund means you're going to create an offering for multiple projects. That's really the only difference. There's some, uh, there's some more complexity into it, but That's the biggest difference. Private equity really is just a flow of your capital. Where's your capital coming from? And you can almost look at it as crowdfunding. You're crowdfunding one project, or you're crowdfunding multiple, and then there's different sizes, right? I would probably be viewed as a boutique company, and then you have the monsters. You have the big players.

AI assessment note: “that's a totally fine way to look at it”

Q I love it. I love it. What, um, what do you tell people who, uh, are getting in the game now? Um, you know, maybe they have a little bit of money, uh, maybe they have 50 grand, um, what's a, what's a good way to get started?

A Okay, so, this is what worked very well for me. I started with where I wanted to go. The end, the end game in mind. And when I first did this exercise, I was 23 years old and I was a skater, so factor that in. I wanted to make, at that point, a 180,000 dollars a year passively. Because I was like, that's a good life, I can have kids, I'm good. And so, I reversed it and went, what's a conservative yield I can get off that? And that could sustain during downturns. I picked five percent. Okay, I need about three million dollars invested. And then I just started putting money in those assets that would get me to that three million. In the beginning, the calculation is this. You need to grow your wealth. So even though we're talking about passive income coming in, if you pick passive income over growth, it's going to be a smaller return. So in the beginning, I was focused on growing the wealth, which was going to be, how do I double my money every three, four, five years? And then once it's at the number I need it to be, I'll switch over to income. That was my blueprint. And then once I knew where I wanted to go, I was like, okay, can I get, Nine and a half percent in the market. Cool. Money's gonna go there. Can I get 15% on this real estate deal? Money's gonna go there. And then as I became more sophisticated, it became a game of taking risk off the table while still maximizing up…

AI assessment note: “In the beginning, the calculation is this. You need to grow your wealth.”

Q they'll make a bunch of money. And I understand skate skating, you didn't make a bunch of money, but it was great money at the time. And they really, you know, sort of blow it all at the end. And it doesn't come out well for them in the end. How are you able to sidestep that mistake? And what's your advice for people, for people that are facing that?

A Yeah. I sidestepped it because my parents panicked when I told them I wasn't going to go to college and I was going to try to be a skater. And the thing that my parents pushed on me really heavily was go get help. Just go get somebody in your life that will help you do this financially. And that mixed with a fear, fear can be powerful, right? You can definitely use fear to get you forward. It can also You know, hold you back at the same rate. For me, I was so scared of what my life was going to look like after skateboarding that that fear created action to stick to the plan that somebody, you know, built the blueprint for me when I was young. And so what I was doing was wasn't making an astronomical amount of money, but I was living off almost nothing. I took the Dave Ramsey approach. I just reverse engineered it. And instead of living off nothing to pay off my debt, I was living off nothing to invest as much as I could. And that was very, very powerful for me. Now, talking specifically to athletes, here's what happens with athletes. Number one, pro athletes don't like thinking about the end. And when they have to think about the end, it's typically when they're on their way up or potentially at their peak. What usually happens as, as the wheels start falling off and your career ends, then you go into, okay, I got to figure this out. And unfortunately you just left yourself wit…

AI assessment note: “I sidestepped it because my parents panicked... go get help. Just go get somebody”

Q I love it. You had a, uh, you had a great, uh, experience, great exit with, uh, with St. Archer, which is the brewing company. Tell me, tell me how you, how you got into that, and how did that wind up great, and what did you learn from it?

A Okay, so I ended up being a part of building a very successful business that had a phenomenal outcome. We ended up selling the business, and That was in big part due to my father-in-law, because I was dating his daughter at the time, and I wanted to marry her. So, I asked if he would have lunch with me, and I was gonna ask his blessing to, you know, marry his daughter. And when I asked him, I was not prepared for the reaction I was gonna get, which was an onslaught of questions. Great, what are you gonna do after skateboarding? Uh, I don't know, maybe start a business. Okay, what type of business? Uh, I don't know. What makes you think you'd even be good at business? Uh, I don't know. Just hit me, hit me, hit me. To the point where I was like, is he gonna say no?

AI assessment note: “That was in big part due to my father-in-law, because I was dating his daughter”