Dakota Malone: Community Solar Authority

Welcome to the Legends of Land show, my friends. We have Dakota Malone, who is a co founder of Community Solar Authority. And I think this is a really interesting way for land investors to look at possibly making some other money off their land. So let's hop right into it, Dakota. What is the Community Solar Authority and how does that turn into money for land investors?

Yes, let's get right into it. First of all, Brandon, thank you so much for having me. My name is Dakota. I co founded a company called Community Solar Authority. And just for context as to how all of this came to be, my company consults for some of the largest solar developers in the country. There is a trillion dollar clean energy going on, economy going on in the United States right now. And essentially we are helping streamline that access to those available solar incentives. And so in order for solar farms to get built, they need to go on parcels of land. And so to answer your question right away is there's a huge opportunity for people with parcels of land or raw land between 30 and 100 plus acres to essentially look at it as an exit strategy when it comes to monetizing their piece of land. And so I know that the land investing community is a big world. There's a bunch of different opportunities to do it. And in the context of solar leasing, that is one example of an exit strategy where a potential landowner could make anywhere from what we say, anywhere from 875 to 1,000 bucks an acre per year. The next 20 to 25 years is passive income. And those numbers are not diluted, but I like to keep them conservative. I'm all about under promising and over delivering. If I can tell people and set the expectation at a thousand bucks per acre on 30 acres of land and then I come back with 1500, they're jumping with joy for what we were able to kind of bring back to the table. And so that's the opportunity at stake here, is that there are many solar farms that need to be built. There's only obviously so much raw land. And so if you happen to have a qualifying parcel, which I'm happy to kind of get into, there's a massive opportunity to generate income from that raw land.

That's fantastic. So yeah, I'd love to get into what the qualifying is. Like, what would a land investor be looking for to fit your model?

Yeah, and my co founder, or one of them rather, is actually coming from the land investing world. And so he brought on a lot of this knowledge because it's not our first, I'll call it our flagship business. But what we actually do is consult with large consumers of electricity and we help them participate in this legislation with this commercial solar, specifically these solar farms that are being built. But after a few years of developing these relationships with developers, we realized that there was a massive opportunity on the land side. And because we had a co founder that was already involved in the space and kind of understood, we were able to really monetize that vertical in our business. And so typically what we look for, Brandon, is a minimum of 30 acres. There are many different types of commercial solar programs and incentives at a municipal, local, regional, state and federal level. It's kind of zooming out from that. Typically what we look for is about 30 acres that will allow us to build inside the community solar program, which is state level legislation. And that will allow us to build inside small utility programs which if you pay an electric bill, you have an electric utility. That utility has to generate. They don't have to, but they take typically generate a portion of their generation from clean energy sources. And so those 30 acres is essentially what lets us build anywhere from a 1 to 5 megawatt solar project and really puts that solar farm into what's called interconnection and feeding the energy grid. And so typically we're looking for 30 acres. We're looking for access to what's called a substation, which is essentially where everything interconnects with the power lines. You can drive by them in residential sections, you can drive by them in rural sections. The substations are basically the big pieces, equipment on the side of the road that connect all the poles together. Those substations actually need to be pretty close. And so we're looking for 30 acres, really anywhere as close to a mile away from a substation as possible. If it's any further than that, your lease opportunity doesn't go away, it just may go down in terms of your lease payment. Because once you have to start trenching and wiring and grounding cables beyond that 1 mile, it can actually get pretty expensive. So 30 acres close to a substation. And there also needs to be what's called phase three power lines. Now these are the big power lines that basically have three tiers to them. And that's essentially what lets you know that you can connect a solar farm to it. Many of these substations are old, Brandon. They haven't been updated. The utilities try to make the solar developers update them. So it's really like a game of cat and mouse of who's going to upgrade the utilities infrastructure. And so as long as there's phase three power lines, which are becoming more and more common and there's capacity to build, that parcel would be a good site. Now, the good news here, is anybody listening to this? As long as you can do the basics of, hey, I have more than 30 acres and I think it's close to a substation, we'll actually invite you to submit your land to us. We'll take care of the entire process. Turnkey. We also outline it in some resources, we'll throw in the show notes. But really the 30 acres is where we like to start, and then we do all the work required. We kind of know what we're looking for. We don't charge people to do it. And again, it's just part of our mission and making this go as smooth as possible to help put more solar farms into the ground, if that makes sense.

Yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned a couple things there. The interesting part of this, I think for investors would be like, how do you locate these prime pieces of land? So if we're looking at a mile from a substation, phase three power lines, and you want to get into some big, big sets of data and locate these, how do you, how do you do that?

Yeah, and, you know, I'll mention that I was just on Mark's podcast over at the Land Geek. I know that you featured him and he did a whole strategy session with your audience on how he thinks through land investing. And I'll tell you, you know, we run the same exact strategy, but for solar farms. And so to answer your question, you know, we do the digging. And so our internal GIS team will look at utility maps and basically where the lines run on a satellite. And so they'll locate the substation, they'll find the parcels that work. We'll basically reverse engineer those ideal parcels that are good fits, and then we'll do the same exact direct mail campaign, very similar to how most people do land investing, which is sending letters, sending multiple offers. And again, that's where we had the advantage, Brandon, is that point of our co founders is very much used to doing this. He was a land investor himself. And so when we moved the conversation from, hey, we want to buy your land and then flip it into seller financing, it was like, hey, you can keep your land. We'll turn it into a solar asset, and you can start to generate solar income on a potential piece of property that was maybe generational to your family or otherwise you can essentially live off of as a primary source of income passively. And so that's typically the strategy. Those softwares can become expensive, a couple thousand bucks a month when you start to pay for it. Which is again why as a baseline we always like to start with, hey, if you have this in your portfolio of land, if you have 30 to 100 plus acres, that can be as high as thousands. We had a family trust pass us over 800 acres of land that we turned into qualified parcels for solar farms. This opportunity scales, but we always like to start with those that already have it in their portfolio. You can absolutely go and run this strategy for yourself. It's just going to require a few tools which again we can link the software that we use in the show notes that would be useful, but that is a little bit more of a labor intensive process. And a lot of times these solar farms are, well, often like every time, these solar farms are not guaranteed just because you have a good parcel. From a software perspective, once we do the engineering and the site walk and the interconnection studies, that parcel may not end up working out. And so that's why we don't typically encourage people to go out and hunt this stuff down until they've actually maybe done or seen a deal where they were already holding onto it. We did all the work for them and could kind of walk them through the process.

Yeah, interesting. So what are some of the main disqualifiers? Let's say someone's got a place that's mile from a substation, they can see the three, the phase three power lines. Then you, and it's flat, you go out there. What are some of the kind of big red flags or things that disqualify the land?

Yeah. So typically it just comes down to substation upgrades and capacity. So again you could have the phase three lines, you can have the substation upgraded, but when we look at the hosting capacity, which is essentially how much more solar can you install on these lines before you have to upgrade it? Again, those capacity lines may be filled with other solar farms in the area. And so other solar farms are a great indicator as to whether or not a parcel is good. But it may also be the exact reason why it disqualifies a parcel because that capacity is already full. Now that's kind of a one off scenario. Another one off would be typically zoning issues. So if it's zoned residential, we've had problems there. If it's located in a floodplain or zoned as marshlands, that could be a problem there. And then other than that we're doing a potential Install on a paper mill, one of the largest in the country, in upstate New York. And it's right outside of the Salmon river, which is an environmentally protected area. They get 100 plus thousand salmon fishermen every year. So very at a local level, they're very protective, as they should be, of their kind of environmental resources. And so we may run into issues building a solar farm so close to a property like the Salmon river, for example. And so other times it may be like they go and do an environmental study, an interconnection study, or any of these milestones that they're trying to hit. When it comes to going from signing a lease saying, hey, we'll do this, but we need to do these studies which typically takes 12 to 18 months. And then from that, that's where the problems will kind of arise and pop up. But that's also why landowners make these milestone payments. So they get paid, you know, anywhere from 5 to 10 grand is what we typically see during this 12 to 18 month process. And maybe 10 to 20 grand in order to do those studies over the course of the two years. I always tell people that leasing solar is a very much a long term play, Brandon. So this isn't like something you're going to find out tomorrow and then be able to execute the next day. And so again, it doesn't always work for land investors who are trying to sell or finance and really build up their streams of income. This is really more for again, those kind of one offs in the portfolio that may make sense for a solar farm. You're willing to kind of take the bet on it, course you get paid for it. And then of course if it does get approved, you kind of get this windfall that you can sit on for the next 20 to 25 years.

I see. Yeah. So it's a pretty unique property. So you're saying it's hard to go out and necessarily target them, but keep your eyes open for that to pop up as you kind of are going through the whole. The whole land system.

Exactly. Yeah. And this has really been our strategy, obviously. I've been on a couple of podcasts that we've shared. Mutual connection, Swift. I'm on podcast circuit right now. I'm trying to do 50 plus this year. And really what we're seeing is just a couple weeks ago we released a podcast. Someone had reached out to me. They were originally from Illinois, about 100 acres. They were farming out, I think 20 of it and had 80 that was available. They moved out of state, so they're an out of state owner leasing a portion of their land. And we've put it under LOI within a week and a half after looking at it as an initial findings, because it checked all of the boxes, it was 30 to 100 acres, it was close to a substation. I actually believe it had one right on the property. They were open to leasing it. And so all of these make for great fits. And so again, maybe someone out there is listening and we're really trying to jump into other people's audiences and pull the people that have those good fit parcels into our ecosystem. And then as we kind of develop this strategy and keep people updated, they can kind of follow along and then start to take place in it. Because the reality is this is going to go on for a while. The US Development of solar is looking like more. More like a hockey stick. It's increasing 600% year over year growth based in certain markets. The incentives aren't necessarily going anywhere with the IRA coming through the federal legislation. And so there is a massive opportunity to get in on this wave. I think we're really just seeing the beginning of it. And so maybe only a few people can be involved in the very beginning, Brandon. But those are going to be the case studies that really sets the tone for what's available in the future. And as we see the nationwide adoption of the clean energy economy, do you.

See those criteria loosening a little bit? Specifically the one mile from the substation, that type of thing getting more broad as time expands or what do you think?

Yeah, and the cool news is when I say that we're working with the largest and the most significant solar developers in the world, we're coming in and working with teams that essentially have an endless appetite. And this is all they invest in in terms of financially. And so many times we'll work with other solar developers who they'll find a parcel, they'll put it under contract, but then they can't afford the $2 million upgrade. And that gets very expensive for small businesses that are solar developers. But for a global solar developer or some of the most significant in the country, backed by the biggest banks in the world, they'll pay $2 million to upgrade a substation. And so what we're finding, Brandon, is that where otherwise some people from podcasts say, hey, I had a solar developer told me that they were going to come give me this. It ended up not working out. I'm wondering if you can help me. We'll run that back through our system and oftentimes it was just a Cost perspective. And it just so happens that the people in the financial teams that we're working with, they're willing to pay a couple million bucks to upgrade a substation or increase that additional wire. But again, it's just kind of setting the expectations, like, hey, it may not be $1,500 an acre if they've got to put $3 million into the substation. And so the kind of economies and the way the project pencils will obviously determine the lease rate, but certainly I think that it's not necessarily getting more loose, to answer your question, but the opportunity to really bypass that and solve those problems is exactly why we started this land business, to kind of help streamline that and solve those issues.

Yeah, you talked about a little bit about the total addressable market. Let's call it. Is it Blue Ocean? You feel like, how much opportunity is there and. And how many of these properties are available? Are we talking there's within a mile of a substation with the three power lines. Is there 10,000 of these properties available or is there a million of them? What's that number look like?

Yeah, so I definitely think it's. I wouldn't call it Red Ocean by any means. And I think a better way to answer that question is that there are millions of available parcels that would make great fits for solar. But back to our last question is most of the time the biggest problem for the clean energy transition right now, Brandon, is the utilities and the interconnection required to make that happen. So, for example, there are hundreds of megawatts, which is kind of how we measure solar in kilowatts dc, which turns to megawatt hours. There are hundreds of megawatts of potential solar projects that are submitted and into the interconnection queue. So, meaning they've got the land, they're saying, hey, we want to build this project. Here's everything that you need. We're turning it into the utility. But then the utility is basically caught in a queue that just jams up the entire process. It's like a log jam for solar projects that want to go online but can't because of all of the interconnection problems. That is the number one challenge that we're facing in terms of scaling the clean energy economy is solving this one particular issue. And again, the opportunity, once that gets solved, is going to just open up the floodgates and I'll give a shout out to my local utility back in upstate New York, National Grid. These guys are handling all sorts of commercial solar and solar Farm legislation. From an interconnection level, they're really leading the space. And so they're coming up with a lot of creative strategies to basically redo their queue, get everything unstuck and unjammed, and then really start to streamline that process. I use that word a lot because it's actually one of the most important things. Efficiency is actually a core value of our organization. When you think about being able to, again, keeping it at the perspective of a land investor, if I have a parcel of land and I want to turn that into passive income, I want to be able to do that in the most efficient way possible, which is directly. And land investors working with us have the opportunity to interface directly with some of the largest, again, most financially backed solar developers in the world who have an interest in making it work. And that partnership partnered with these utilities, starting to figure out these interconnection studies. Again, I think it's very much already a blue ocean. I'm trying to find the right metaphor. But essentially, I think as we start to get more creative in solving these interconnection issues, Brandon, I think we're going to see the rise of commercial solar and these solar farms and solar leasing in general really start to stretch across east to west coast.

Yeah. And so could you talk a little bit more about that bottleneck with utility company Q. Is that physical or is that legal? Like the interconnection issues, Is that like bureaucratic or something?

Both.

Okay, okay.

Yeah, yeah. And solar can obviously be viewed as a very political thing. I like the space that we play in because it's very much bipartisan. When you think about community solar, which is the idea of developing a solar farm, you get fair clean energy practices all the way through the value chain, meaning the landowner is getting compensated fantastically, they're able to generate passive income. And then you obviously have solar farm that other people within the community can join. It helps clean the energy grid. Multiple people get the benefit and then obviously the landowner is happy because they have an income producing asset on their property. But when it comes to the interconnection jams that I had kind of talked about, it's very much physical. And so again, that goes back to the substations needing to be upgrade, the queue needing to be cleared out, which you can think of as like a digital wait list. There's all of these projects in the queue. But, you know, New York State, for example, may only allocate. I don't know, this is just a random number, but 400 megawatts of solar is what they're going to approve in 2024. And so if there's 1,000 megawatts submitted for projects, then only 400 are going to get approved. And that's where kind of the logjam starts. And so again, a lot of these leading utilities are starting to figure out, okay, how do we solve for this? It's not like a nice to have. It's a must. In order for us to transition into clean energy, into cleaning our energy grids, into decarbonization, this is a must. And the same way people talk about solar, I'll use another example. It's how are we going to recycle all these solar farms as technology advances and as we continue to work on these hard challenges, which is safe to say that this is tough to figure out. And it's a challenge because you're getting everyone involved from a physical level, but also from the legal level. Like you said, that's a hard problem to solve. But my point is that it's a must and it's slowly happening over time and again. As it does, that opportunity is going to become bigger and bigger for land investors.

Yeah, I love that. The not only solar push in the right direction, but the secondary benefit of going around upgrading these substations. Yeah. What a killer market you're in. I love it. This is, it's really interesting. So when you talk about that queue, how do they sort through the queue? Is this by. They're analyzing the best deal, this is going to be the most effective deal? Or is it like, get in line, your number 37 will get to you when you're there?

It's more like the latter. Yeah, exactly. So the solar developers are doing all of the work. They'll know if the project pencils, if it's something that they want to put into their assets or even potentially sell. That's also a common strategy. They'll put it into the queue, but that queue is very much just like a wait list like you had mentioned, where your project gets submitted, if it gets approved. Great. Some states, like Illinois will do like a lottery system and it will be awarded to different projects or the projects will be awarded to different solar developers. New Mexico also does a lottery system like that as well. So it's different on a state level, but primarily it's really more of that wait list that you had kind of mentioned.

And so that is kind of from a business standpoint is a little bit of the bottleneck. And if or when that opens up a little bit, then there is a Lot of development that can come in and happen, it sounds like. Is that the right take?

Yeah. And the other way to think about it is again, these studies are going to take 12 to 18 months to do anyway. And so if they look good, we'll get them submitted. And then as that goes on, hopefully over the next one to two years, we're starting to pick up the speed in which we can solve these problems of interconnection. And again, sometimes it's not a problem at all. I don't want to lean on it and say, oh, it's the doom and gloom, because that's not always the case. Again, just like this hundred acres we just put under contract in Illinois, it's very likely that's going to turn into an income producing asset for that person. And it took us two weeks to sign the LOI and we turned it into our developers and we're talking about co developing it now. So again, not so much doom and gloom. It's just good to know, good to be aware. And I also just think it's good to report on and really share the challenges that we face in the commercial solar world.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and there's, there's a, two angles that my mind is like, goes both ways. There's like this, this wonderful thing where, okay, you're already flipping land, you get 40 acres that's near a substation and then all of a sudden you kind of hit a little mini jackpot. Awesome. This is going to be passive income that is just ongoing. That, that's the one angle. And then the other angle that I can't help but continue to wrap my head around is the entrepreneurial angle is, okay, I have a call center. I call 15,000 people for each of my clients. I call between 15 and 30,000 people a month. And I crank through data and I pull in warm leads for vacant land. And I just keep going back to applying that to this business. If you can't through, if you can sort through all the property, if you're already flipping land anyway, then what does it look like if you go and pull all the data in the country that is within a mile of a substation with the, with this type of thing, say you have 200,000 records and you just start cranking through them and then you're just flipping that land, you can flip that land anyway. So continue to have cash flow.

Yep.

But you also have this opportunity of maybe one in a hundred fits this model. And so that's why I'm asking the questions about the the bottleneck of the bigger picture. Because as that, like you said, as that gets solved, are there people that are positioning themselves in a spot where they already have a system cranking to be, to, to be positioned for if or ever that problem gets solved? Maybe, maybe it stays slow. But yeah, yeah. What's your thoughts on that?

I love it. And if that's your thought and if you have that similar arrangement and entrepreneurial pursuit, I invite you to hit me up and let's partner because we're going to. We already do this at a national level but we grew our entire business model, Brandon, through these strategic types of partnerships. Again, we're really just getting started into the co development and land investing side of things. But on the actual flagship side of our product where we're doing these corporate style community solar rollouts, we're working with multibillion dollar companies through our strategic partnerships. And so again we'll run it the same exact way. On our land investing side, we'll grow it the same exact way we grew our first vertical. Which is, hey, if that's you, if you have the ability to comb through these parcels, get the right data, we can obviously give you all of the inside information through our strategic partnership. It's we'll bring the insights, you bring the land and then we'll do some sort of rev share model where we'll do all the work to get the parcel turned into passive income. You bring us the qualified parcels and that's going to be a damn good partnership that I always tell people, anybody we work with, we're long term players. I have zero interest in doing like one off deals and short term deals and short term money and short term relationships. Just not interested in it. I think that when I think about partnerships specifically which I co founded csa, one of my main objectives and responsibilities in the company is forming partnerships. So this is what I do, this is what I think this is, this is really how I lay it out. We have no interest in selling our company. We're not going anywhere over the next few decades because I can see the nationwide adoption of this. I know how big this is going to get and so I encourage people to jump on, message me, let's talk about a partnership. And I don't see it as making the pie smaller and splitting it. I see in partnership we could just make the pie bigger and each be able to take a share that's fair and meaningful and significant in terms of what we're actually doing to make those projects work. So if that's you, I'M exactly the same thought process as far as being an entrepreneur and really thinking that way. And that's exactly how I want to grow my land business. I encourage people to reach out and happy to talk through setting something like that up.

That's awesome. And I think that land investors naturally have a entrepreneurial bent because they're out there. They're out there doing deals. I mean, that's the whole game is doing deals, building repeatable automated systems.

Yes.

And so I think that a lot of the listeners think along those lines. Which is. Which sounds like you do too. I mean, you were a door to door salesman for a lot of years before you got into this. Tell a little bit about your entrepreneurial journey or kind of how you landed here.

Yeah. So sustainability has been a huge part of my life. I am thriving after five heart surgeries, severe scoliosis. I made a post on LinkedIn today about it. Just my healing journey in general. And so sustainability for me started very much as a human pursuit really to stay alive. I've been dead multiple times. And So I was 17 and basically coming out of my open heart surgery. I had realized that life was meaningful. Every day mattered. I wanted to see the world and I wanted to make a big impact. And so very much the dial on my life changed. And so I got my associate's degree. I handed my parents my two year degree. I said, please leave me alone, let me go figure out I'm going to be a businessman. And I knew school wasn't for me. And I had a close friend actually who was doing door to door sales in the energy space. And he was always posting about how much money he was making. And I was like, dude, like I will because I was making maybe 300 bucks a week being like a server at a kids ice cream restaurant called Friendly's at the time. So I was like scooping ice cream. I was probably 18 years old, I guess 19. And I was like, dude, I will do whatever you want me to do if I can make as much money as you. And he was making like 1000 bucks a week at the time. And he said, you're not going to like it, but. And so the very first week we go on a road trip, we go and knock some of the most dangerous parts of Albany, New York, do a door to door sales. And that's really how I got my start. It was like the third day, Brandon, I was freezing cold. I had zero deals. It was in the middle of winter. I was in a gas station. I can remember I had My hands over the coffee, just trying to warm up my hands, it was so cold. And I get a call from my dad and he's like a plant manager at. He runs the cash line for Novelis, which is a large aluminum recycling company in upstate New York. Where I'm from is where they have a plant. And he called me and he was like, hey, Dakota, like I got you a job. You could, you can stop doing door to door sales. You can come home. And I could have taken that path. And again, it was day three. I had zero sales experience, no sales, no reason to believe I would ever be good at door to door sales. And I just remember telling my dad, like, hey, I think I'm just going to knock doors. Instead. He's like, what the is wrong with you? Like, you're crazy. And really that was the deciding moment that I was just all in on self employment, which led into entrepreneurship. 2016, I became the number one salesperson in the company, which was a Fortune 500 company in the entire world. So it turns out I got really good at door to door sales. And then 2017 kind of turned into remote work. Saw the writing on the walls with where renewables was going. So I've been in the energy space for over a decade, but really the last five and a half years kind of pivoted, got online and started serving a niche community, which I also think is super important, which for us is large consumers of electricity and now landowners who are seeking to monetize their land. So that's a very brief timeline of my entrepreneurial journey.

Yeah, tell me about that mindset shift. Almost dying is, I think that has like a permanent change of how you view the world. What are the main things that. That. What did you learn from that?

Yeah, so I was raised Catholic, but definitely not religious, but very spiritual, especially after experiences like that. And for me, I was left with a lot of physical trauma again. Like, I actually made this post on LinkedIn today, so it's really fresh. The third heart surgery I had I was wide awake for. And there were multiple times you got to break all your ribs in order to have open heart surgery. They went in through my back to do adjustments when I was a child. And so I was left with a lot of physical trauma. But essentially the big moment where my life was flooded and my dial was changed was I was in the pediatric ICU for my open heart surgery because I was under 18 at the time. It was a week after I graduated high school. I was wrapped up like a mummy. Just got done with my open heart and I couldn't move my body. But kitty corner to me there was a little boy who also just had an open heart surgery. And this is graphic. So I'll try to keep the goriness to a minimum. But essentially, in order to leave the hospital after open heart, you have to drain all the excess blood out of your chest. And the only way you can do that is by walking. You have tubes set up and as you walk, it drains into a bucket. And so you could leave when you filled it up with X amount into the bucket. And here I was feeling sorry for myself, feeling miserable. I was a kid at that point. I was self conscious. I was in a lot of pain and just not feeling good about myself. But then here was this small kid, six, seven years old tops, walking down the hallway by himself with this little bucket. And in that moment, I felt like he was more of a man than I could have ever been. And I watched him climb back on his hospital bed by himself, no nurses, no family, no doctors, and actually watched him like physically cry and just release his emotions. And watching that while wrapped up just kiddie corner, like that exact moment was when the whole dial of my life just turned. I was flooded with compassion. I had all of these new realizations. It wasn't close to dying, it was dead multiple times. I didn't necessarily see any white light or do anything like that. But for me, my entire life changed based off of that. And really over the last 10 and a half, 10 to 10 to 12 years now has been my healing journey and I call it my medicine path. And so for me, I've done everything from psilocybin healing days. I went to Columbia a year and a half ago and did an ayahuasca initiation and the jungles of the Amazon to go through another death rebirth process. I've done cold, hot therapy, all sorts of stuff as far as healing modalities to be able to learn to integrate and heal from my past. But ultimately that was, like I said, a journey of sustainability. And I'm a big practitioner of the forces in ability pillars, which is human, social, business and environmental. And so when it comes to solar, environmental sustainability makes sense. I love talking about business sustainability. I hope that you can see my passion for being an entrepreneur and that's a huge part social sustainability. We work with affordable housing communities and disadvantaged communities to be able to benefit from the clean energy economy. And then again, right back to human sustainability is super important to me on a very personal level. And I always like to talk about and teach people how, how they can really deploy these sustainability principles. Healing, letting go of the past, integrating into an initiated adult. All of these things are super important if we ever have a chance at actually preserving a sustainable future, because it starts with humanity. And I always tell people, look, if you want to change the world, there's a lot of people that want to do that. You actually have to start by changing yourself and really going inside yourself and looking at all the shadows and the dark stuff that you don't want to. Because inside those shadows is our greatest treasures. And oftentimes it's just looking at what we're afraid of and really being able to transcend it.

So how did you come up with the sustainability aspect of like it, how it's all encompass, encompassing is interesting to me. Did that start where, I mean, you're. Did that start with sustainability for yourself or did you start get into all these other things and then realized, oh, this, I'm involved in sustainability in all these areas. Did you start there or did you realize you had ended up there?

No, it was definitely my journey. I don't remember when it started to click for me, but you know, I've been, I keep referencing my LinkedIn, which I encourage everybody to connect with me at. I've been creating on LinkedIn for maybe a year and a half now. And on top of building CSA and being entrepreneurial, I've always wanted to kind of establish a personal brand as well. Just knowing that I want to do a lot in my lifetime and when I think about what I want to be known for, what I want to talk about, it just kind of hit me one day. I was like, oh my God, like all of this, everything, the way that I live my life is distilled by and from bedrocking the principles of sustainability through my personal life, which led into my work, which led into social, which jumped into environmental. And really, that's really what I kind of teach, preach and practice now. It very much started, like I said, from my own journey and then really kind of opened up into these bigger opportunities to kind of tackle it. From the four sustainability pillars, other people call it the three Ps, which is people, prosperity and planet. We're all saying the same exact thing. Human, social, business and environmental. Again, back to what changed and what practices and the way I see the world, I believe in universal law. And one of those, for example, is as above, so below. And I really think that everything that goes on in our external world, which to me is just, and this may seem esoteric, and kind of crazy for land investors, But I believe everything outside in our external world is really just an extension of our greater body. And I believe that our unconscious mind projects our external world through our unconscious. And so everything that we see outside of ourselves is actually what's going on inside of ourselves. And that's really why it's important to bedrock that sustainability into it so that you can really start to look at that stuff. And again, for me, my big mission is to inspire other people and help preserve the next evolution of humanity, because I just believe that's what we were here to do. And again, that's just because of what I've experienced in my own lifetime.

And when you talked about turning up the dial for yourself, was that a realizing you had the capacity for more work or more passionate work, or was that like breaking the kind of mental constructs that are so easy for us to get into? Did it make you think bigger or make you work harder? Like, what turning up the dial mean?

I love that question. Well, I think it's both. And you can even look at turning up the dial. Another healing modality that I did and really got into was hypnosis. And so shout out to my hypnosis mentor, Kit Brooks. He really walked me through what it looked like to use timeline therapy and essentially heal my trauma. And we used nlp, which is neuro linguistic programming. Kips, a master PRAC of nlp. And so he really opened up the world, which is into mental models and the power of our language. And even when you think of the words that we use, which is super important and also a massive. When you talk about shifting mental frameworks, you're really talking about the language that we use. Because human beings, especially in from the hypnosis perspective, we have control over three things and only three things in this life. And that's what we focus on. The meaning that we put behind it and the language that we use and our beliefs. And so when you can start to first of all heal, when you start to heal from the past and let go of all of the baggage, you just make more room for more potential and more stronger, more embodied human being. And so as I was able to let go of my baggage, and again, everybody has their own version, but this is why it's important, is because empowered people is what moves and evolves the world. And so when you have room in your body, in your psyche, in your greater body, when you have room for empowerment because you got rid of all of the trauma, now you can make a real impact in the world, and you start to fill that in with what's most important. And again, from a human needs perspective, of course, most people live their life based on having security and feeling significant. But to me, the largest growth factors, and this is straight from Tony Robbins, who I'm also a student underneath, is growth and contribution. And so to me, growing and contributing are the two human needs of the spirit that fulfill everything else in my life. And so that's really the kind of the first part of it. But then the second part is just using nlp. So when you think of, okay, I'm having some anxiety. And we would say, what would it look like if you could turn the noise down? What would it look like if you could turn the dial up of your excitement? We're using language to invoke a state in our body because that's what moves our physiology. What you focus on the language you use and the beliefs you have determine the emotion that you feel in any given moment. And to answer your question, this takes practice, and this took years for me to learn. But reformatting your brain, we call it. There's a really fun hypnosis podcast I listen to called Brain Software. That's how I look at it, is our brain is an archaic software that is pre programmed with a bunch of evolutionary and survival dispositions that no longer serve us, especially for entrepreneurs and people that want to generate and grow into a more empowered mindset. And you simply need to reformat your brain. You need to change the software. And so you can actually change those programs with nlp, with hypnosis, with that language, and you can literally walk yourself into enhanced empowerment, feeling better, stronger focus. And it really starts with moving those three dials. So focus, language and beliefs. And really, I reverse engineered it into what I wanted to feel. And so again, like, on a daily basis, I want to feel empowered. I want to be able to inspire other people. I want to be able to do work at a massive level. And I want to be able to get stuff done, feel creative joy. And so for me, it's okay. What do I have to focus on to feel good? What do I have to actually believe is possible in order for me to be empowered? And what is some of the language that I have to say to myself in order to do that? But again, for me, it started because I had a lot of trauma from heart surgery. I realized that the language that I was using was keeping me stuck and trapped and holding onto that trauma. And so as I worked through hypnosis and NLP and timeline Therapy. I then learned the power of language, which then allowed me to apply to sales, which is how I got really good at sales, and then obviously leading that into entrepreneurship. And now I'm a language machine, where I am very conscious of the language that I use and I try to be as articulate as possible, but really it stemmed from my own personal journey. So I hope that answered your question. I know that was a long one.

Yeah, I love that. I love that answer. And I like thinking about language that way as well. It's almost like we're. It's almost like we could think of it as if we're coders and our inputs are the words that come out of our mouth and we're defining the reality around us by.

Yes.

How we articulate our thoughts, how we think about them. And then. And that is what creates the universe for us, basically.

Yes.

The world that we live in and. Yeah. Affects people around us.

That's exactly right. And my mentor calls it the spoon in the waterfall. And the idea is that we are bombarded with. So because if you boil life down, we're vibration and light energy, and there are so many vibrations, which is external stimuli coming into our sensory senses. But we can only take on so much sensory overload. Right. There's only so many bits of information we can process at a time. And so my mentor compares it to. There's a waterfall of information around us at any given time. But the way that our brain works, which is where our focus goes, energy flows. And so as that waterfall is coming down, some people. And this is why two people can live in the same exact situation. Twins that were born to alcoholics or abusers, one grows up poor and miserable, the other becomes empowered and makes it in life, quote, unquote, makes it in life. The only difference is that where that spoon was at any given time. So again, it's a waterfall of information. But our focus really shows where and what bits of information we want to take in.

And.

And so again, that's exactly why if you simply change what you're focused on, you'll naturally change the language that you have around it. And then when you can change the beliefs, which is always good. A good way to start first is look at the beliefs that are limiting you. What do you believe about yourself that just isn't true? And this takes contemplation and reflection and journaling. This is what we call inner work, which is what I think human sustainability is all about, is you have to look at your programming and say, like, what did my parents Teach me about money, for example, or what did I learn about business growing up? And you'll find that we have all of these limiting beliefs. For me it was, I grew up in between two cornfields in the middle of nowhere. My public education was not that stellar. And when I went to college, I was uneducated that I thought I only had two choices of degrees. I thought I could either be a police officer or a nurse. My sister was a nurse and I didn't want to copy her. And I definitely didn't want to be a police officer. And so I was like, I'm just going to go do door to door sales instead. And so I had to like work through all of those limiting beliefs of like, I wasn't good enough, I wasn't significant. Abandonment was a really big issue for me because I got ripped out of my mom's arms as soon as I was born for an emergency heart surgery. But again, it starts with looking at your own stuff. All of the stuff that you don't want to look at, maybe the things that you just assume to be true. But upon further investigation, you can start to let go. And as you let go of those beliefs, you start to change your focus, you start to change your language and all of a sudden you're in a totally different spot in that waterfall and your spoon's now getting a totally different piece of information and all of a sudden your life is different now. And that's how it works, at least from my perspective.

And talk about that transition from door to door sales into where you are now with that mindset, with the you were doing door to door sales. Sounds like it was in the energy space, but now you're here, what's all that time in between look like?

Yeah, I've got a fun story. So I was obsessed at the time with Tim Ferriss. Still love the guy. But I was reading the four Hour Work Week and at the time I was obsessed with the idea of what he calls mini retirements, which is, hey, instead of waiting till you're 65 to retire, why don't you try these small periods, 30 to 90, sometimes six months of getting away, going on retirement and seeing if you can essentially make it happen. And for me especially being dead multiple times, I didn't plan on waiting till I was 65 to see the world. And so 2017, I got a call from my best friend. I probably had, I don't know, 60 to 80k saved up and just door to door sales because I just saved my money. I've always had that investor's mindset, and maybe not always, but at that point I did. And my best friend called me. He was a K9 officer in Italy. It was where he was stationed. And we were talking one day, he's like, why don't you just quit door to door and come move to Italy? And I was kind of reading the book at the time, and I was like, say no more. And literally, I think that week I quit, got a plane ticket, used my three credit card points from the bonus miles to get a free round trip ticket to Italy. And I went and lived in Europe for a few months. I saw 12 countries that year, basically using his. He had a nice little villa in a small mountain town in Italy. Just the most serene, beautiful place you could imagine. I traveled 18 hours on bus rides to Barcelona, and we took trips to all sorts of different countries, which was amazing. But for me, Brandon, that time was all about, okay, I have this sum of money. How am I going to invest it? But then more importantly, how am I going to learn remote work? Because for me, I recognized my biggest bottleneck was myself. I could only make money if myself or my immediate team was out knocking doors every single day. And as I was getting into entrepreneurship and sustainability principles and building lean business models, I just knew that I had to figure it out. And so I started going from door to door sales in the energy space to starting to work remote. I actually invested in bitcoin back in 2017 when it was like $3,500 sheer luck. My buddy called me up, he's like, hey, there's this thing called bitcoin. You should buy it. I was like, cool, I've got all this money saved up. And so I made a big investment into crypto at that point. And so I felt really comfortable kind of doing that. And then really from there, it was all about just learning these principles of entrepreneurship, studying personal development. At the time, Tim Ferriss, Tony Robbins, Gary Vaynerchuk was really starting to come onto the scene. Andy, Priscilla, now people like Alex Hermosi. I don't try to reinvent the wheel. I model, which is what I learned from Tony Robbins. You can model success. What are people doing when you can model that and you can create predictable results? And really that was kind of the transition for me. Brandon was direct sales into more of an investment position. And then from there, I was just committed to making remote work work for me. And I eventually went back, did door to door sales for a little bit. When I got back to the US kind of rebuilt that nest egg. And then when I was ready, just made the transition to online, started working with large consumers of electricity, and same exact thing. We were running an energy brokerage, so really nothing was different. It's just we had access to anyone in the country in a deregulated market. And then I just simply made the jump into the clean energy space, working with Solar developers, consulting, etc. And five and a half years later, here we. Here we are today.

What a fantastic full circle story right there. That's cool. I love it. I mean, that kind of brings us back to a little bit of solar stuff. It feels odd, like transitioning back into. I'm back into solar after. Yeah. But I'm interested in the people's journeys. I'm interested in how people become entrepreneurs. What the mindset are, is. And so it makes sense to me. And I think that a lot of land flippers, like I was saying earlier, have this type of. This type of bent to them. So I think it'll make. I think it'll make sense to a lot of these guys.

And I'm obviously super passionate about it. So I super appreciate you letting me go off on a little.

So.

But I do hope it's relevant for people. And again, a changed mindset is all the difference in the world. Right. If there's one thing that you can do to actually step into a more empowered human being, it's going back through and changing how you think about life and really the meaning that you put behind the experiences happening to you. And so something as little as just changing from life is happening to me to life is happening for me. And you start to figure out all of the ways, even the hardships, even the challenges, even the obstacles, when you can start to figure out why that's happening for you. Again, you're taking a totally different perspective on life, which will bring you to a totally different environment and new personal reality.

I'm curious. I might start asking people on the podcast, but it seems like a lot of entrepreneurs may have some sort of culminating event, some sort of thing that gave them a little bump in that direction for you. It was pretty drastic. I think that there's a lot of times that people get this bump and then they realize, oh, the world. I don't have to operate within this very structured thing that everyone's kind of doing. Yes, something knocks them out of it. A lot of times it could be something like some real physical trauma, it might be some real heavy emotional trauma, but all of a sudden that, that framework breaks, and then I think you see a lot of entrepreneurs come out of that. I think that the. There's a lot of greatness on the other side of hardship. And your story is a good example of that. Really good example of that. I kind of feel like I don't even want to go back into solar. I think we crushed it. I think we talked a lot about that. Do you have anything that we glossed over or you think that people kind of. That you'd like to get back into that you usually talk about with the solar thing, or you think we, we got the message out there for people?

No, the only thing I would add, Brandon, is just a couple resources. So again, the first thing I'd say is connect with me on LinkedIn. It's LinkedIn.com in Dakotam alone. You can also go to lease.communitysolarauthority.com if you have 30 plus acres of land in any given state and you'd like us to look at that for solar leasing. So again, that's lease.communitysolarauthority.com and otherwise we'll link the landowner's guide to solar leasing in the show notes so everybody can look at that, get a good understanding of how the process works and what it looks like. And if you feel compelled to reach out and work with us, we would love to be able to deliver that in a turnkey way. It's not going to cost you a single dollar. And we will increase your odds of turning your raw land into passive income.

Beautiful. On that note, my friends, thank you for coming to the Legends of Land show today. And Dakota, it's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you and I'm sure we'll cross paths again.

Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.