Those are three great questions at one end. Let's say yes to all of them. It's how you can get someone to pay you for what you're good at and and what you enjoy. The those that's the best of all worlds. Right? You got all combined. Yeah. And and I would I would recommend trying to achieve that. If if you can't achieve three, maybe you can achieve two of those. Mhmm. And still, you know, have real success in business. Business, you know, you you've been in business a while. I I've been in business a while. At the end of the day for me, it means getting up every day with a passion, wanting wanting to do it. What can we get done today? Not wasting a day. Time is our enemy. It's it's really you know, you wake up one day and you go, where did those three years go? Where where this amount of go? And and so, you know, my partners are all like that too in real estate. And so, you know, we push each other and it and it's fun. And I'm in this in these ventures that I'm in today, I never did work with the people I grew up with. This is a chance for me to work with my old friends, which is just because we've been friends all these years. We've never been business partners. And so this is one of the great experiences in life for me.

Sure. That's really good. So, I guess yeah. So so taking at least two of those three, if you can, and maybe three of those three would be ideal. But I I think that in many cases, that ends up being pretty rare. But I think you need at least one or two of those, obviously, to keep going. Right? So in your back to your story, so you did the the sports agency for fifteen years, and that was, pretty successful. Talk about you said you made a decision to to leave that. How did that come about?

You know, I I realized one day I was I was getting a little stale because I was doing the same thing over and over again without really a pathway to, you know, a new challenge, I'll call it. I I didn't really know what the the next thing should be. And and Mhmm. Company I was in didn't really need me to grow because they just needed someone to run this division, if you will. And and I felt like I was being held back a little bit, not by them, but but by the role that was needed. And so I just said, look. I gotta I'm gonna explore something else. So, you know, it was a it was I've always had good departures when I've when I've left places. I think that's an old point to make here. Yeah. Build a nugget for maybe your listeners at the end of the day. You know, there's no reason to walk away in a in a negative way. Mhmm. Experience that you've had wherever you are, I'm sure has has been, you know, positive for you in some way. And so you you take that. You you you you you wrap it up, and you and you and I'm still good friends with the people that hired me at Octagon. I mean, the guy who's still running Octagon is a good friend of mine. So he's another twenty something years. So, I I I think, you know, I so I walked away, and what I did was I took some time. I didn't have the pressure. My wife was working. My I didn't have the pressure to immediately find a job. And so I took a month, two months, and and I looked around. And and I realized, you know, there was another opportunity out there, which which I grabbed. And it was to be the president of a sports ticketing company, and and and that was that was a really good experience as well. That's one of the ones that didn't end with the financial success even though we had pieces to sell out at at multiples of what we had in it. It was a really great experience. I I I was tasked with making deals with all of my sports contacts, the NBA, the NFL, Major League Baseball, the NCAA, all the bowl games. I mean so, basically, that I was in a good place. I could do I could use my contacts and my and my skills and and was able to do my job pretty well. Unfortunately, that company, did we had an exit we had an offer to exit. We were we were offered, I think, a two x or three x multiple by CBS and chose not to sell, not not my choice. And the CEO ended up, you know, making, I think, poor decisions, and and we ended up, the company went belly up at some point. And so I went from making several million dollars to losing several hundred thousand dollars of actually money in the bet money in the deal. And so, you you know, that's that's adversity. Right? If you ever are gonna have adversity, you're losing hard earned money that you put at work. Yeah. You're you're losing four years of your time that you put at work. Right. Relationships you put at work. But you know what? It's okay. I I I learned a lot. I came out of it, and I haven't made those mistakes again. So I

Got it. Yeah. So and just to be clear, the several million would have been what you would have been paid at at that potential exit. Right?

Would have been somewhere between two and three million dollars, and I had four thousand in it, and it would have been a nice return.

Yeah. Absolutely. And so you did that for four years. And then before we get to rev in more detail, what was the third, career that you had?

We ran this out, and we became effectively, you know, one of two companies that were high profile, fire drill, save save the save the difficult project leasing companies. We'd go in within ninety days, we'd turn the whole thing around. If it was at seventy eight percent occupied, we would turn it around to ninety three percent occupied in a few months. And, you you know, that we were good at it, and we were very good at it. And we developed a lot of skills and knowledge by doing it. We took those skills and that knowledge, and we built tools to give to the marketplace because we realized that, you know, although we had we and I think the highest employee number we had was, like, seventy nine or eighty people. We we weren't gonna grow into this thousand person team that was gonna go run around the country fixing things.

Mhmm.

But we said to ourselves, well, how do we get people to fix themselves? Let's let's get the equipment to fix themselves. And we we wrote we we wrote, some AI algorithms, and and we do some, some assessments with, you know, people going out and doing tours and also telephone calls and Internet contacts. And we we built this what we call the leasing score, rev leasing score.

Okay.

So we assess over a two week period of properties ability to, perform and and obtain leases. And so, we've been doing this for about two years now, and we've got a bunch of clients that use our assessment, and we have a bunch of clients that use our training. So we've on the other side, so once we, you know, it's logical that if you tell someone, hey. You have a few problems or deficiencies in these

Yeah. We're gonna give them a solution too.

Help us. Right? Right. Right. And, well, we say you can help yourselves. We'll we'll kind of, you know, govern over it, but you're gonna learn, you know, from our courses and our testing and get better. And so course of, you know, anywhere from a ten week to, you know, twenty week period, these people can can train up and be retested. And and, you know, it it's effective and it affects the bottom line. And, ultimately, if you're affecting the income stream, you're affecting the the valuation. Right.

Right. Exactly. And we we I mean, we definitely have a lot of commercial real estate guests on the show. I'm more of a residential real estate investor, but, but yeah. So the the occupancy and the the, I mean, that all ties into NOI and then the value of the property. Right? So it's a pretty not just a number on a piece of paper. It's a pretty important factor in determining how well this the multifamily project is doing.

I would say it's the factor. Right? Yeah.

Yeah.

Asking you know, if you think about it this way, Jamie, the the the people responsible for all revenues that mean, it's not it's like maybe there's parking fees and pet fees and maybe a couple of points, but ninety seven, ninety eight, ninety nine percent of all revenues have to be generated out of that office. Mhmm. And Right. That property can afford to do to promote itself, you know, in addition to in addition to, you know, realizing returns for their investors. Mhmm. You know, you know, you if you're if you're producing better, let's say you're two, three, four points better in a submarket than your competition. Mhmm. You can some of that performance, you know, revenue to stay far ahead. There's there's no reason you can't, you know, advertise more and, you know, add add more, benefits to your property. Right? Add more amenities. I mean Mhmm. All kinds of things that can be done to keep yourself far ahead. So it's not just getting caught up, but staying ahead. You know, those revenues can be used to create a margin between you and your competition.

Sure. Which is increasingly important in today's environment. So as a as a, again, as a residential real estate investor, I've got some rental properties. And, you know, one one of the things I noticed over the years about property management and property managers, first off, that term can be a little misleading, because it really includes both property management and tenant management, and that in in includes leasing. So, you know, I know that that was a big part of what you what you did was decoupling leasing from property management. So and and from my experience in the residential space, you've got either essentially, you have property managers who either have a a kind of more of a realtor background, an agent background, or an actual, like, construction or, you know, handyman or property management background, and they're pretty different. But they come to the same place and and become a property manager, but then they obviously have strengths and weaknesses. So but they've really there are two majorly different, you know, functions there. How did you determine to focus on leasing and and not so much the property management itself?

Yeah. That's you know, I'm glad you bring that up because as as as we just a little bit talked about, it's such a critical function. The leasing function is so undervalued in in the multifamily industry today. Mhmm. Mhmm. Literally, if you asked a property manager to give me your twenty five most important tasks you're doing every day, I would bet you on some of those lists, it wouldn't exist. Okay? That's sad, but it's true. And on on a lot of those lists, it might be below the the top half. Mhmm. If you ask me as a property owner and and and I'm I'm not a manager, but if I were the manager and you asked me, leasing would be, if not at the top, very close to the top. Mhmm. Because it pays for everything. And and if you're not converting on on your opportunities, on your prospects, the guy down the street is. And that's really bad for your property. Sure. Yeah.

You

got these concessions, which is really prevalent in the industry right now. Mhmm. Yeah. There isn't give it away. Okay? The the answer is to get better at what you're doing, not to give it away, not to increase your advertising, not to use locators to bring you clients. You know, just do a better job when you you get the opportunity. When you it's like at bats. If you can bat three fifty instead of batting two seventy, you're you're a hall of famer.

Right. Right. Yeah.

Literally, just when you get up to bat, hit get more hits. That's what this is. Yeah.

You don't need more at bats if you have more quality at bats.