#95: Michael Girdley - The One man Venture Studio

You know, I think back to my favorite professor in college, and, uh, he was the one the other professors hated, but I realized he was, he was a genius. He's a computer science professor, and he would never answer any of our questions. Like, we'd be like, hey, how do you do this? Like, how do I show the contents of a directory on a computer? And he'd be like, I don't know, have you looked at the manual? Like, everything was, I don't know, have you looked in the manual? But the advice that he was teaching us was that, you know, you first have to develop the ability to be self-reliant and go try to solve stuff without being dependent on somebody else, and that's the way to get ahead. And so he didn't exactly ever say it, but he beat it into us that that sort of life approach and that, that first principles idea there is core to being a successful human being.

Hello everyone, my name is Chris Powers, and I want to thank you for joining me on the Fort Podcast This show is an open-ended discussion and journey covering real estate, business, entrepreneurship, and investing. I would love to hear from you by tweeting me @FortWorthChris on Twitter. Hey guys, it's Chris. Thank you so much for joining me today on The Fort. I have Michael Girdley with me today from San Antonio, Texas. Michael's the chairman and co-founder of Dura Software. And he owns several businesses like Alamo Fireworks, Toro Coffee. He owns a venture fund called Geekdom. He owns a coding academy called CodeUp. And today we talk a lot about what he called the 3 phases of his career and where he's at now in his 3rd phase. We talk about how he learned that he's really good at getting things started, but is really also focused on when to get out of a business and let other people run it. We talk about his family business, the firework business, and how he left Silicon Valley to come run it and how he operates it today as an owner with another CEO in place. We talk about CodeUp and what they're doing with Dura Software. We talk a lot about business structure. We talk about what Silicon Valley looked like in the late '90s during the dot-com bust. We hear a little bit about what's going on in San Antonio and how quickly it's growing. and then one of our mutual connections, Culture Index, how we help identify and create great teams through Culture Index. So this episode was a lot of fun. Enjoy. Michael, welcome to the show.

Great, thanks for having me.

I really appreciate you joining me today. Let's just start off with a little bit about who Michael is and kind of your story growing up and what led you to what you're doing today.

Yeah, well, great. Yeah, I'm really in the third phase of my career. The first phase was growing up here in San Antonio, always being a computer kid. Left San Antonio like many other people in the, in the early '90s. I wanted to go see the big world. I went to school back East, got a computer science degree, got really heavy into tech. Like, that was where I wanted to be. And, you know, after graduation there, moved out to the Bay Area, and that was really phase one. I worked for other people at that point and spent 6, 7 years rising up the ranks at different tech companies, worked in cryptography, enterprise software, all this different kind of stuff, got exposed to that. And then around that time, met the woman who would become my current wife, and, uh, an only wife, hopefully. That's the plan. And she and I decided we wanted to move out of the Bay Area. And at the time, my father wanted to retire from running our family business, so he offered me the opportunity to come in and learn that. And that started the second phase of my career, which was being CEO of a retail and wholesale fireworks company here in Texas. And I did that for about a decade and then realized that I wanted to live in a more creative space professionally. And that leads me to the stuff I do now, which is, you know, first phase was working for other people, second phase was working for myself, and now I work on businesses and try to avoid working in them if I can.

What is cryptography?

Cryptography is the basic science and methodologies around how you send codes, coded information, and protect it. So Like every time you go visit a website, there are technologies underneath that that are based on cryptography that allow, you know, codes and all that kind of stuff for your credit card information and whatever to pass safely and securely to another site, or for two people's iMessages not to get seen by people in transit. So old school, it's a fancy word for codes.

Yeah, I like it. It's a fancy word. You grew up, you know, now if in the generation we're living in now and somebody's a computer kid, it's really probably more normal than not, but I would imagine when you were growing up, being a computer kid was probably less the norm. How did you get into computers? Was there something that, you know, made you fascinated in them, or was it your dad or family, or how'd you get into it?

Yeah, well, I think as a young person, I definitely was a precocious kid. Some of that was because I didn't go to classical kindergarten and pre-K, so I spent a lot of time with adults when I was very young. So for me, you know, being that kind of kid and living in the suburbs, computers just sense much more than people did. Like, they just always felt easy. They were very logical. You know, I can remember as being a young kid, I was really enamored with Spock, you know, from Star Trek's view on life, like, you know, rationality, logic, like, that's awesome. And Bones, you know, the doctor, he looked like a crazy person. I was like, who can live like that? You know, that doesn't sound like fun at all. So, you know, my parents were entrepreneurs and doing well, and I remember they bought me an Apple IIe computer when I was 8 years old. That's 1983. And yeah, then I spent a lot of time on that and then was fortunate enough to go to a privileged high school here in San Antonio that had years of computer science beyond what even many of the universities had in their programs. So I took 4 years of programming and passed out of the first 2 years of college computer science just because what I was able to do in, in high school. So I liked them. They were much more fun than people at the time.

That's awesome.

I love it.

What year did you go out to the Bay Area?

So let's see, so I graduated from college in '97. There was a 9-month kind of boring stop in the middle skiing for an entire season in Colorado, which was great. And so I would've been there, you know, just early '98.

So you kind of got there before the big kind of dot-com bust. What was Silicon Valley, San Francisco like one, just arriving there in '98? I mean, I think it's a lot more talked about today than maybe it was back then, but what was it like when you got there, and what was it like going through that period of massive bust?

It was crazy. You know, I told a story on Twitter the other day about right at the peak, the company I was working for called BEA Systems, which is now part of Oracle. They ran a referral program because recruiting was so tough. They ran a referral program that was basically close to $20,000 per referral in today's dollars. At the time, it was $12,000 and in '99, $2,000. So like, things were nuts. It was just the beginning of kind of those, you know, perfect storms that come every once in a while in the tech industry. And yeah, I can remember the Pets.com parties and not getting invited to that and realizing, okay, I'm not as cool as I think I am and all that kind of stuff happening. But the other thing that was really different is Back then, most of us, if we wanted to live in San Francisco and you wanted a tech job, you had to basically drive down to San Mateo, Redwood City, or whatever. So one of the jobs I had had me commuting 3 hours a day round trip from San Francisco to San Jose. That's also, it turns out, really unhealthy to do that. But so at that time, San Francisco really wasn't as much of a center of gravity for tech as it is now. Like, Soma's a totally different place. You know, I lived there and it was rough.

Yeah.

And it's still rough, but like, it was really rough. I saw some stuff that As a kid from suburban San Antonio, I was like, "Oh boy, that is not what I expected to see this week." Yup.

So when the crash happened, did people see it coming or was it like the lights were on and all of a sudden the lights were off and it happened that quick?

I think some people saw it coming. In retrospect, I felt like I had a lot of privilege because I was that 26, 27-year-old kid who had been promoted really beyond his years. I got promoted several times and was a director level at a big corporation. And I was managing people that were like 45 years old who were making more money than me. It was super weird. So I can only imagine how they feel, felt being a 46-year-old guy now where this kid's like sitting there talking to you. But I got to go to meetings that were pretty fun. And I remember going into one of the meetings and one of the other senior executives who was a C-level person, you know, he just comes in and casually announces while we're getting ready to have a meeting, you know, oh, like I sold all my stock today. 'Cause our stock at the time had gone from $4 a share when I first started to like $132 or something, split unadjusted. And he's like, "Yep, I sold everything." And it turned out he was pretty smart because the top was like 4 weeks away. So I think it was just like most things, you know, people, some people see it and the majority don't. I know there were stories of developers that I worked with One of them exercised all of his shares and then the stock crashed, went from back from $130 to $12 or whatever. Well, there's this thing called AMT, alternative minimum tax. So he'd had to sell his house in order to pay all this income tax on money he never collected.

Oh my gosh.

It was rough. So the C-levels got it. Some of the junior folks, not so much, not so much.

And I'm assuming I know the answer, but On the ride from $4 to $132, was the business growing? Was revenue growing? Was there income, or was it purely just like everything else, everything was just running because of the promise of what tech would be, or did— was there fundamentals in the business that helped drive the stock there?

Yeah, the product I worked on, I was product manager for it, which for my personality type is a great type of role, right? Product managers go talk to a bunch of people and then they develop insights and then they go try to sell those insights to other, other folks. So I assume we'll talk about MyCultureIndex, like, that is a perfect role for MyCultureIndex. And so based on that, that I was the product manager for that. And so we had a real enterprise product, like, we were basically selling the stuff that was middleware that would enable websites, which until then were pretty static, to be highly scalable and dynamic and customized and personalized. All the stuff we take for granted now, but like being able to log into a website back then and have personalized content for you, like, that was cutting-edge technology. So we were selling all of that. You know, when I first started working on that, that product, we were doing— we were part of a startup that had been bought by BEA. We were doing $3 or $4 million a quarter. By the time I left, that had turned into a $75, $80 million run rate. So, you know, we were seeing massive growth, and it's still a pretty viable business. I mean, Oracle is still selling that product, and I assume ridiculously high maintenance contracts and all that kind of stuff. And I think they're on— when I left, we were on version 5. I think they're on version 17 or something now.

That's crazy. And, and were most of those businesses venture funded before they went public, or was everybody having to go public because there wasn't a lot of venture capital to handle all these tech businesses that were coming out of the ground?

Uh, I mean, it feels a lot like today, like just the natural market pressures were causing supply to be created. I mean, people were just hungry for the vision of the internet at the time and would throw money at Pets.com or Amazon and all this kind of stuff. I mean, I don't know if I'm ducking your question or not, but it was just a, it was just a mania, just like right now feels like a mania.

Yep. And then you leave San Francisco and go do something that's not as tech. You go run your family business, which was a firework business, which in Texas is a big, big deal. Talk to me just about maybe the culture shock or the maybe difference of being in high-flying, fast-moving Silicon Valley and then moving to Texas to run a firework business? How big was the business? What'd you do with it? Tell me the whole thing.

Yeah. Well, business was about 20 full-time people when I joined, a little shy of 100 locations. So, for those of you listening, in Texas, we have only two types of ways you can sell backyard fireworks. So, there's different types of fireworks and the kind we are the ones that you do yourself. So, sparklers, Rummy candles, little firecrackers, cakes that you stuff up in the air, stuff that consumers can do. So yeah, that was about the size when I joined. We were in an office that we had been in for, geez, 25 years or so on the east side of San Antonio in a building that had been built, I think, in the '60s and looked every part of it. It was definitely one of those kind of ones where you go in and, you know, at the time there was no computerization of anything to speak of. Well, there were some, like we ran the whole business off of a TRS-80. I don't know if you're familiar with that type of computer is, but it was even old in 1999. It was a green screen all-in-one computer that RadioShack sold. So not only is this computer type not even sold anymore, and at the time RadioShack was getting ready to go out of business. The company that sold it was going out of business. So we didn't even have internet, email, nothing. It was all phones and faxes when I showed up. And it was definitely a culture shock. I came from an email-driven, high-tech environment. To one, you know, which is selling explosives on the side of the road. Yeah, it's really different.

So your dad called you and basically just said, I'm, you know, I want to retire and I'd love it if you'd run the business. And was that kind of how that all came to be?

Yeah, exactly right. Yeah, so got into entrepreneurship the old-fashioned way, like my family talked me into it. Yeah, I think it's what I'm born— it's what I'm born to do. So yeah, so my dad My dad has a very, very successful style but is the opposite of me. So he is— well, we'll get into Culture Index, but he's basically a half architect, half Trailblazer. So he's this really, really cool, wants-to-win type person, very competitive, and also detail-oriented. Like, it's just, it's super cool. Whereas, you know, my personality is I'm somewhat competitive, but I'm also not detail-oriented in the least, right? I'm, I'm totally the opposite. So, you know, that created a, a very interesting cultural kind of conflict, and dads and sons in business transitions often have those. And kudos to my dad. It's all on him that it worked in terms of us maintaining family harmony and all that stuff that we've managed to do through that process. And he's retired and super happy right now. I'm so happy for him.

Robert Leonard So did you work with him when you first— was there a transition where y'all worked together? How long did y'all work together, I guess, when you started?

Well, we still work together now. You know, he's a huge supporter of ours, and he owns a number of the locations that we operate out of, so we're, we're very grateful to him. But yeah, he was day-to-day in the business for a couple years, and at that point, you know, he had been wanting to kind of slow down a bit. And then over time, it took about 3, 3 to 4 years before he finally stepped off. And, you know, we've taken over the business from him, so he doesn't have any equity in it anymore, and He's fully retired. So it took about that period of time.

Do you still own the business?

Yep. Yep. So, you know, as part of this transition to the third phase of my career, I realized that, you know, to be in a creative space, I was going to have to find the right people to operate and run things, especially, you know, where I'm not strong. And so we have professional CEO and professional team that run the business at this point.

Did you already have most of that team in place when you were leaving, or was that kind of your last, you know, hurrah on the job, was putting that whole team in place so that you could kind of parachute out?

Well, our first step— the first CEO was actually my brother, who's the other co-owner of the business, and then he's not that fired up to be the CEO. So then there was another— so there was an intermediate step in there, and the new CEO has assembled a team that really works for him. So He has brought a level of detail orientation and excellence to the business that I think is beyond, beyond the Girdley level. Let me put it that way. So the team has turned over quite a bit, and that really fits kind of the leadership and the mode of operation that we have right now.

How long did it take you to find that CEO, and how many people did you talk to before landing on him? And did you hire a headhunter, or how did that come to be?

No, I did it all myself. So I'm very big on not recreating the wheel when I don't have to. So I'm a huge Topgrading person. I think we've talked about that before online. So I use that plus the Culture Index tool, which is a personality assessment tool. I use those like crazy in hiring processes. Topgrading, which is awesome, there's, you know, you don't have to pay anything for it. You can get a book, the book on it on Amazon for I think $11. Book's terrible, system's great. But it's a very expensive process to run because it changes everything in terms of how you think about hiring and what you have to invest to find really good people. But if you're committed to find really good people, it's an amazing system. So, so I ran that. We actually went through 2 batches of candidates. It took me about 5 months to run, to find the right person.

And I don't want to ask something too personal, but there's, you know, we're now living in a world where the baby boomer generation is going to start retiring. There's going to be. Thousands and thousands of small businesses change hands. And I'm always just fascinated by, you know, you and your brother own the business. How do you set up a compensation incentive system for people to be motivated even if they're not the owners? Like, how have you set it up there? And we don't have to get into the exact numbers, but is there a methodology you follow?

For sure. Well, the, the first realization I've had in life around this stuff is that where I think you and I are both entrepreneurs and a bit more coin-operated than other people. That's not the way other people operate. And I know that's— and then maybe that's obvious to people, but it's just like, oh, not everybody's coin-operated, but still people want to be paid fairly. And I think secondarily, Graham Weston, who's a huge proponent of San Antonio and one of the founders of Rackspace, he basically has a saying, and I might butcher this in paraphrasing it, but he's like, People want to be a valued member of a winning team on an inspiring mission, right? And so, you know, I think what I'm trying to get to as a point is that money is important and people want to be paid fairly, but retention is really about how you go above and beyond money to create an environment where somebody feels— if they want to be part of the family, or if somebody wants to feel like they're changing the world, how do you create an opportunity for them? And then that all ties back to how do you get the right person as well. So to answer your question, yeah, the money's important, but it's maybe half of it or 40% of it. The rest of it is how do you craft the right scenario for them and the respect for them and the care for them and the appreciation for them as a person to really make them want to stay there long-term and feel inspired by it.

Robert Leonard And as the owner, I'm assuming that you've given all delegation to the CEO to run his business. How does he communicate with you or how often are you involved Is it like a board meeting or are you totally out of the picture now?

Yeah, day to day, the company's better off without me all up in their business. So we've crafted a, you know, a designed interaction model and split of responsibility. So we also run EOS, which I think you and I've talked about also on Twitter, and we're hardcore about it. So there is an accountability chart and I'm on it, right? And it shows what I'm accountable for. And EOS is a huge part of why I feel like I can do what I do. So there's an interaction model, there's a cadence of meetings, there is a level of detail that I get and level of detail that I don't get. And then the hardest part really is for me, especially having spent time running the business, not to get in there and CEO, right? Like I have— it's the biggest challenge is not any of that other stuff. It's like, if you're going to be a semi-active owner who cares about the business, how are you going to do your part, right? And not step into your old job and start bossing people around, making decisions. And that is a continual challenge. That is always very hard, but that's the biggest challenge.

If you don't mind me asking, just as a semi-active owner, is there something that you would mind sharing? Like, what are you accountable for then if you're not working on the day-to-day? What type of accountability do you hold?

Yeah, so I get called in for big problems than typical board stuff in terms of that. So if something needs to get elevated to be a hard thing, like we have an IDS that we're doing this afternoon, that's an EOS term for how you solve problems. Like, we're doing that around the a pretty challenging issue that the company has. So I'll get called in for that stuff. And then with everything, the, you know, if you're going to be a semi-passive owner, like having been stolen from before in my career, like you got to watch the nickels and watch the way, watch where the money's going. That's what I do with all the businesses. And I hate accounting, but I end up every month going through looking at all the bank statements, looking at where the money's going, understanding who the, who the things, you know, where the cash is going. Like you got to watch that stuff if, if you're not going to be in there day to day.

For sure. All right. I won't keep asking on the, the firework business. My last question on it, though, and I listened to this in a podcast the other day that I think Andrew Wilkinson was on, but do you have some type of control from the standpoint of like if something costs more than X or you're signing a contract with a vendor for more than X, that has to be approved? Like, do you have a threshold that anything over that you need to be told about?

We have not put a fixed threshold in there. We just have an understanding with the CEO for that business that we talk about it. For another business, the limit's $25 grand.

Yeah.

And so we just kind of design that every time. You know, this particular business deals with pretty big numbers sometimes, so we just end up talking about them at the, you know, at the cadence of stuff that we have. It's probably a good idea. We should probably do that. But right now we're not spending money on anything that, you know, I feel like is— I want to take back the money, right? It all feels like we're— we haven't had that problem yet, so we haven't made a rule for it.

And one last question. I've just never talked about the firework business. Can you sell year-round, or do you just expect a major spike around 4th of July and maybe like Memorial Day or something? Or are you— do you have a business that's year-round, or is it just very lumpy?

It's incredibly lumpy. Yeah, most of the sales happen 4 days out of the year. When I started to work in other businesses where people pay you sometimes before you deliver the service or right after, like, it felt like business on easy mode. Yeah, yeah, because in the fireworks business, like, literally you sell a whole bunch of stuff, uh, on the 4th of July, and then you sit around and you wait for 6 months and try to fix all the mistakes you just made.

What are the big dates? Just 4th of July?

One of the dates— so we can sell for 12 days before each holiday, basically. So you get 2 weeks twice a year, but nobody sells anything till the last few days. It's all, you know, it's all preliminaries. You're just getting ready.

So you kind of sit around for 360 days a year, like, hoping to God that those 4 or 5 days are going to be awesome. Is there like a leading indicator or data that y'all follow that gives you, you know, some type of comfort that this is going to be a good year?

There's some things that you can predict around, you know, is the weather okay? New Year's Eve is our other big holiday. New Year's Eve, the weather can affect stuff. If it snows on New Year's Eve in San Antonio, that kind of sucks. 'Cause people don't want to go outside, you know, what's happening with COVID or anything like that, that can affect stuff. Days of the week are important. All that stuff kind of matters, but it's hard, right? Like the business is fundamentally hard because in normal business, at worst, you have quarter by quarter feedback cycles, or maybe even week by week or month by month. This is almost year by year that you have to wait 13 months to put in place anything that you've learned because July is different as a season from New Year's, different Merchandise mix, different people buying, different everything. So like, there's a reason why young people aren't getting into this business. It is really hard. It's a hard business to do.

This is fascinating. I've never talked about that. I mean, like, what do people do the other 11 months of the year? Is it— do you staff up around 4th of July and then it's a lean staff throughout the year? Like, what do you do for the other 350 days?

So the rest of the year has become just as busy as the in-season part. Hey, but so we're doing stuff like merchandising, pricing, strategy, taking vacations, doing audits, financial planning, team building, building systems, dealing with all the stuff that you have to do to be ready. So it's not a hair on fire situation for the season. And that business has become, I think, very much more professionally run in that way over the past few years, right? We treat the off season just as seriously as we treat the on season. and that's really a cultural shift that we've made that I think is really, really good. We needed to do it.

I love it. All right. So that was the second phase of your career. And then you moved into the third phase of your career. And when we first met on Twitter, you— I said, what do you do? And you said, I'm a one-man venture studio.

And now I am. Yeah.

What does that mean?

Yeah, I started some other companies in the middle there. I was CEO of two at one time. So we started a coding school called CodeUp that's doing really well as well.

So Is that in San Antonio or is that all over?

We're in Dallas and then Houston, and then we're close to announcing a fourth city pretty soon here. So yeah. So board, board role with that. And there's a professional CEO in place. He's doing a great job. Yeah. Started that, started a venture fund also. I'm still involved with that on a day-to-day basis as well. But yeah, I mean, so it's, I don't know, I got away a little bit from the venture studio stuff because it sounds so hokey, but I couldn't describe a better way of what I do. Like, I think I'm really good working on businesses from inception to about the time they buy a CRM, right? There's that phase where it's like, okay, like, we can track all of our customers on a spreadsheet. Like, I'm really good in that kind of indeterminate space and, and having the intuition and kind of energy to push through and creatively figure that stuff out. And then I think the thing I've learned is that operationally, there are people that are going to be better at it than I am. And that's where I've gotten and made a lot of focus on how do I envision stuff, get it off the ground, put some skin in the game, and then partner with the right people to take and run with those things. So partnering is like a core of what I do, like on everything. I have other people with skin in the game on all the stuff that I do. So if my tombstone will say, plays, plays well, plays nice with others, like, so that's true. Like, that's, that's one of the things that I try to leverage when I do this stuff. So So now I spend a lot of time supporting the companies that I've started or built, and then being there at the earliest stages to try to build these little things that will hopefully come into— turn into big things someday.

Is every business different, or is there a typical time length when— to the way you put it— when you start needing a CRM? Is that usually in like a year, a couple months, 2 years? Depends.

It's usually 12 to 24 months. I mean, the evolution I'm making now, I think you've seen, I talk about it on Twitter, you know, the experiment we're doing and the venture we're starting is a drive-through coffee kiosk chain. And, you know, this is the first one that I've started with partners where I won't ever work in the business from day one. Everything else, I've taken a role in the business, either been full-time or part-time to like work in it, to build it. And this is one where I wanted to learn, how do I scale that? because scale myself, because I can only hire myself once. How do I start businesses that are compounders without me having to take the thing that I have one bullet to shoot, which is I can only hire myself once? So that's an experiment that we're doing there, and I'm learning a lot about that process.

So let's just dive in on that just a little bit. Did you have the idea for this, or did somebody bring you the idea?

It was my idea.

Okay. So you have the idea, I want to start a kiosk chain of coffee company or coffee companies, do you like, you have that idea and then your next step is I'm just going to go find the right people to actually build it?

Yeah. So in this case, exactly. Like I had enough data by kind of seeing it. Like I like being a business nerd, so I'm always out like on vacation. I'll be like, hey, look at that t-shirt business. Those guys look like they're killing it. Or reading about, that's why I like Twitter. Like I love reading about crazy niches of things that people have learned. So, you know, going out on vacation and driving around, like I would see these kiosks that are all really kind of overbuilt in the West Coast, but they're moving towards flyover America now. So some of the big chains are like Dutch Brothers, Human Bean, all of those folks, but they've never really come to Texas. There's a handful of mom and pops, but they're not serious here yet. So I, you know, I saw that and read about it. And then, you know, I was in Bentonville last year and I saw a chain there that was just like killing it. Like I spent like 2 hours watching their store and it was like, man, Is anybody not gonna stop here and buy coffee today? And I knew that coffee was a good thing. So yeah, so just having a prepared mind was really how, you know, I was like, man, I just can't let this idea go. It just kept gnawing at me, and that's usually what it takes for me to eventually work on something. I have ideas all the time, but it just takes 2 months of me just being like, okay, I'm just doing it. It's like Cameron from Ferris Bueller's Day Off. It'll keep calling me, keeps calling me. That's the experience I have.

Okay, so, so you, you're convicted, like you're going to move forward, and then did you already have some people in mind, or do you have to again go through using Culture Index and things to find the people that you're gonna build this with?

Yeah, well, I think at our age— and I don't know how old you are, but I'm 45— like, I think you start to build a mental Rolodex of people that you're like, I want to work with that person someday. And there was a person who used to be in my Vistage peer group. So I'm in a CEO peer group that I go to every month, and it's basically CEO therapy. We talk about our feelings and stuff. So, uh, highly recommend it. I'm being diminutive about it, but it's actually, it's really good. It's been transformative for me. So he left because his company didn't want him to do it anymore and wouldn't pay for it. So that's fine. But I always kept it in mind that I wanted to work with him. Like, I really like him. He's a big hook D persuader, not to go full CI on you, but he's like a persuader that gets stuff done. He's like great. So culture, where these are culture indexers, I, I'm bringing this up because you're a CI guy too. So anyway, so I always knew it. And he also has a big background in construction and entrepreneurship in Fast. So yeah, I just, I called him up and I said, hey, we should do this, what do you think? And that was basically it. And we had a couple meetings about it and put together an MOU about how we would work on it together, who puts in what money, who does what. Then we started looking for a location.

So can you just describe just a little bit about— you said it's the first company that you've started that you never actually worked in the business. So what were your roles in getting this off the ground if you weren't going to be working on it day to day?

Yeah, so, you know, being consultative in terms of strategy and making some early decisions about the stuff, doing some things project-wise to help get things set up in terms of, you know, we needed a lease and all that kind of stuff, being there for team meetings early on. But we decided to hire a general manager early, so we threw money at the problem. So 5 months before opening, we hired a general manager that comes from the food service world, and that he would be the person really to bring this first location to fruition. So, you know, my partner and I would and his name's Tom, would work together on getting the construction stuff done with the help of the general manager. And then based on that, we would have the GM in place to do what he's doing today, which is like training baristas. So I'm not out there training baristas, and I have no interest in training baristas, but I'll drink the coffee.

Yeah. Is that business only in San Antonio?

Yep. So right now we're only in San Antonio. Goal is to keep growing, get really big.

How many locations do you have?

One, this first one, yeah, hopefully we'll start making money. So yeah, we're not wanting to go invest more money until it proves that it's working. So worst case, we're out the money to do one location. Best case, it does well and we move on to the— to doing location 2 and location 3 and, you know, building the snowball after that.

And so by kiosk, that just means it's really only a drive-through or a walk-up? There's no place to sit inside and Enjoy the coffee there.

Exactly. Yeah. So this is not a sit-down, come-in place. They're kind of like, I'm trying to think of a good example that's here in Texas a lot, but they're 300-square-foot little portable or modular buildings put on a slab. Usually have double drive-throughs. Goal is to get people in and out in less than a minute. This is a business that is called Toro Coffee. This is a business that targets downmarket from where Starbucks and those sorts of guys live, right? So you get more value, you get more speed. You get less kind of pretentiousness. I don't know a better way to describe it. There's also more sugary drinks, more kind of generic level type cruise ship style drinks. Let me put it that way.

Yep. And how many people staff a one 300 square foot kiosk? One or two people or more?

Full staff will be 13 for each, and typically 3 or 4 will be working for each busy period. So, you know, this is a young person's job. We're pretty intentional about the way we want to compete as a business. So speed, quality of product, and then customer service and friendliness. So we're very intentional about the types of folks we're hiring. Not to go full Culture Index again, but these are high B, high D people. So they're really, really good people, people that, you know, we want them to be developing relationships with the people that are coming and generate repeat business from all that kind of stuff.

And you just said that after one store kind of proves itself and is profitable, that's when you'll start pouring gas. Is it a business that if you get the results that you want, that you kind of go raise private equity around to scale quick, or do you just keep kind of self-funding it one after the other? Like, how do you think about that?

Yeah. So this is a capital-hungry business, so it won't surprise me if we go raise money. It's funny, since I started talking about it on Twitter, people are like, can I invest in your thing? And I was like, you know, I had some other things that were just really good investments, but nobody wanted to invest in those. But it's, it's funny that people— it's like investing in restaurants, everybody wants to do it. So anyway, I did have a lot of people reach out and It's been pretty fun. We're not there to talk about it, but probably at some point, there'll be some sort of growth round that happens to accelerate the growth because this is a land grab situation. It's just going to happen here in Texas. Who's going to own the market? Is it going to be us? Is it going to be Dutch Brothers? Is it going to be somebody else? And I think we have an opportunity to do that.

Robert Leonard Well, you said you also own the other business, CodeUp. Is CodeUp basically just a coding school?

Yep. Yeah. So Coding School, they do coding, data science, um, working on some other programs as well. So yeah, it's a just-in-time accelerated learning program. So basically train people for jobs. And then we're pretty unique because we give people back all of their money if they don't get a job. So it's, you put up the money to pay for the program. If you don't get a job and do all that you're supposed to, we give you back all your money. And that really is a big differentiator for us versus more conventional education programs.

Yep. So similar to kind of like a Lambda School.

Yeah, Lambda for sure is there. Lambda's got a ton of buzz around it. We are fundamentally opposed to the ideas of ISAs, so we don't do them. We help people get loans and then we give them back their money if they don't get a job, which we think is much better. You know, our problem with ISAs is that they— there's not appropriately aligned motivations, right? Like if you're a school and people are showing up on ISAs, you're motivated actually to churn people out who you don't think are very promising. And we just didn't want to build a company that is motivated to give up on students and therefore have a big churn rate. So that, and then we do stuff in person, which is just much more efficient and higher quality than doing stuff online permanently.

I think it's interesting that if you get a job, I think universities, I think are going to have to figure out a new model because they have no true skin in the game. If somebody goes and pays them a quarter million bucks and they don't get a job, How do you define not getting a job? Is it like a period of time after they've graduated, or, you know, how do you make sure somebody's doing all the things they need to do and, you know, exhausted every effort to truly say they didn't get a job, or is it kind of on the honor system?

Early on, it was on the honor system, and that turns out when you have honor system, people will— some people will not be honorable. So we had to evolve it to basically be a set of very specific criteria of things that you have to do. So for example, if you go to a coding school and you stop coding the day after you you leave, like, it's very difficult for us to get you a job, right, 4 months later, right? If you walk into the employer and you're like, "Yeah, I coded for 4 months and then I quit for 4 months," they're not gonna— we can't help you. So, you know, we've had to set a time limit on it. So it's typically 6 months. We've had to set a list of things that you need to accomplish post-graduation to stay involved. For example, if you don't answer the phone when we call you and say, "Hey, we have this interview that we've set up for you," Or you refuse to go, or if you get an offer and you don't take it, like all those things kind of disqualify you, right? But it's just designed to take care of the people that are doing it the right way. And then the people that don't do it with the most kind of honorable approach, they don't deserve a refund. No offense to them. And that's all in the contract we signed with them. Like, I'm not— I don't want it to sound shady because it's actually all written down and it's exactly like, okay, you want your money back? Like, this is the way it works. And we do give people money back. Like, it happens. It's 2 or 3% on average, we end up failing them. But, you know, we see that as a failure of us that we don't get them a job. And so that was either a failure of we shouldn't have brought you in, you know, we didn't teach you the right way, you know, or we didn't, we didn't help you afterwards. And so we do, we do end up doing that. And that's just a cost of doing business the right way. We think like it's, we're totally fine with it. It's part of the model.

Are there tons of different courses they take or is there like a typical amount of time spent? Is it like you go for a year and you take all these courses and you graduate, or is there— they can kind of pick their curriculum?

Yeah, so we're backwards from the way typical educational institutions do. So it all starts with what are the, what are the jobs that are available and how do we make you a viable, ready candidate for those. So we start really with the web developer one and then also the data scientist or data analyst one, and we work our way backwards from those to give you the skills to be ready to go take those to do those in-demand jobs. So that happens in a very fixed but intense curriculum that happens a little over 5.5 months of all-day, every-day immersive learning accelerated around how do we give you the skills to go precisely to those jobs. So there's no Chinese menu, so to speak, of what you get to learn. Like, this is all about how do we help you change your life, be the Yoda for you to do that by giving you the skills to get there.

And how long is the program and what does it cost?

5— I don't want to quote you the wrong number, but it's 5 and a half months. We just lengthened it a bit under COVID, and last I checked is $25,000 for the 5 and a half months.

Awesome.

With some scholarships we have, we just announced an African-American specific scholarship, which we're pretty excited about. So really cool. Yeah, we try to help people get in and then get loans. And then what's been really cool is now that we're established and a trustworthy partner both for the employers and local community, like there's a lot of grants that like the the county and the local workforce commission are giving to our students. So a lot of people are getting big chunks of it paid for, which is pretty cool.

That's awesome. And if you're in the 5.5-month program, is it a full-time job, or are people doing it while also working?

Yeah, our opinion is part-time doesn't work. Frankly, a big part of why accelerated learning programs work is because employers see that you've made a commitment and you've done something really hard to get there. So that's a big selector there, but you know, there are people that offer part-time. I think those people are in the education business and full-time is what you do if you're in the businesses which we're in, which is how do we help you change your life for the better? And part-time doesn't get you there.

And I'm just not up to speed on some of this stuff, but when, you know, you read a lot about on Twitter and just anywhere now, this whole no-code movement, is there always going to be a need for code and there's a word and a need for no-code, or do we continue to gravitate towards this world where everything's been coded and now people are just building things with no-code? Or I don't even know if I'm asking the right question.

Yeah, yeah, no, it's cool. We do have no-code. You use it every day, like Microsoft Excel. Like, people use it all the time. Like, it's been part of our life, but we don't even really think about it as a situation of, you know, what's going on in day-to-day business. And, and I think it's I think it's totally the case that a lot of simplistic things are going to continue to be put into code through the no-code kind of tools. Like, they're great, right? And so that's part of it. Even still, you know, our opinion is, is that the hardcore stuff that happens in the enterprise, the hardcore stuff that is happening that requires more than just what you can do in a no-code tool, like, we're decades away from that, like, disappearing. So no-code is going to be huge, but it's going to be— I think about it more like, how did Microsoft Excel transform your business? It's going to feel more like that. That, then, you know, oh, like, is there an AI running your business? Like, that's not going to happen anytime soon. That's, that's how I tend to think about it.

Yep. Okay, can we talk a little bit about Dura Software? Oh yeah, so what is awesome? Yeah, what's Dura to you?

Yeah, so I'm board chairman there, co-founder. I spend time there a lot these days, um, so it's the actual one of the businesses that I actually have a role inside of, so I wear two hats there, so I work in the business and then work on the business as chairman. So Dura is a software company that's building a really big software company in a unique way. So akin to what Constellation Software does, we're doing that for basically the type of software that they don't want to buy, which is they do vertical market software, we do horizontal market software with vertical market that walks in the door, but we focus on different niches of the universe of software that they do. And we've gotten really good at buying, optimizing, and holding forever small software companies. So we've done that 5 times now, with the 6th and 7th one getting acquired sometime in the next couple months.

That's awesome. And do y'all— is it a fund, or do y'all just raise money on a deal-by-deal basis?

We are an operating company, so we are a C-Corp. So C-Corps have huge tax advantages vis-à-vis other stuff, so they also fit our model compared to what a fund does. So funds buy and flip stuff typically. That's not our model. Like, we actually are able to buy things at a pretty reasonable multiple because sellers know we're going to take care of their people and their business after they're gone, right? Because they know we're going to keep it forever. Whereas you sell it to a fund or you sell it to a big strategic, you don't know what's going to happen to your business. Like, good chance it gets flipped or, you know, burn the candle at both ends, take all the cash out of it. All that kind of stuff can happen. But With our model, we wanted to be able to create the type of environment that would take care of the legacy of these sellers, and it helps us buy stuff and get the right stuff in our company.

And so you buy the business, and then you let that owner, or you replace the owner with a new CEO, and they just run it on their own, kind of like a Berkshire model?

Yep. So we think about ourselves— so Berkshire is like a pure holdco, right? So they don't have anything centralized. They are entrepreneurial and then they push all the business decisions down to the edge, right? Where we live is the next notch over. So what has typically been called an accumulator. So because we're buying a very narrow kind of band of companies, when you look at what you're spending in those companies, there are two types of investments, right? You have non-strategic costs and strategic costs. So non-strategic costs are things that aren't going to help you be any better in the marketplace, things like HR facilities vendor management, all that kind of stuff. So we centralize all of that and, and we get economies of scale around that. And then what we do at the edge is we push all the stuff that is strategic cost— so sales, marketing, product development— like, all of that lives underneath the CEO's purview, and they get to make the right decisions there to meet their numbers each quarter, each year.

That's so cool. One last question on that. It's probably the dumbest question of the podcast, but describe to me the difference between the vertical roll-up that Constellation does versus the horizontal product that y'all focus on? What's the difference?

Yeah, great. So vertical market software is stuff like software for libraries, software for a specific individual industry, and software for healthcare. Those are all vertical market pieces of software. So Constellation and like every other search fund out there, they've, they've all decided vertical market software is great. What, what we do is we do horizontal but niche software. So we'll buy things that are a TAM of $20 million, total addressable market of $20 million, and we'll try to find the number one or number two player in that and then run that business really well. And in horizontal use cases, it turns out that there are very unique kind of use cases that you don't have to worry about Facebook, Google, Microsoft coming in and trying to eat your lunch someday, right? So for example, The very first business that we bought was an MDM solution focused on very large deployments of basically kiosks and digital signage, like 20,000, 25,000, 30,000 device deployments. Like, that is not a niche that you have to worry about the other MDM players, mobile device management players, coming in and, and trying to kick you out, right? Because it's just a tiny market, very few people need it, but the people that need it, they really need it.

So just to kind of wrap up on all your different ventures, is there a— are you designing your third phase of your career to where you could keep adding more in, or are you going to reach a point where it's like, this is what I'm going to focus on and I can no longer do it? Are you trying to build it to where you could get involved in as many things as you wanted without sacrificing, you know, focus on everything you're already involved in?

That second one. Yeah, working, working on one thing. Like, I've been CEO 3 times now. Like, I don't want to do it anymore. Like, somebody else can be in the hot seat. You know, I want— the challenge now is how do I scale entrepreneurship, right? How do I do that on a parallel basis? Because, you know, I want to live in that creative space, and that's, that's a fun challenge.

All right, a couple more. Let's just talk a bit about Culture Index. You've, you've mentioned it several times already. That's where we first really got to talking, was on Culture Index. What is it to you, and, and how has it impacted your career?

It's been huge. I mean, I think the leaving to enter into this phase, third phase of my career, like I realized going to Vistage, which is my CEO peer group, and all this different stuff, like there were so many ways that people had figured out and good ways to solve problems, to run businesses. And it was just stupid for me to either operate without a system or to go not adopt one of the ones that was really good. So Culture Index is one that, because I'm a contrarian and I don't like people telling me what to do, I was initially resistant to. I was like, ah, that stuff doesn't work. It's hokey, like Myers-Briggs. And the more I dug into it and the more I saw what it could do in terms of hiring and also interacting with people where they want to be interacted with, like, it was super powerful. And what it is, Culture Index is a personality assessment tool. There's no right or wrong answers, but people shake out in it to really help you understand where they're coming from, what they're going to be good at, what their traits, natural traits, are going to be, and then how you as a manager or a peer or an underling can meet them where they are. So I'm pretty nerdy about it at this point. Like, you've heard me just like drop high B and high D and stuff like those are all Culture Index things. Like, but it's so powerful. Like, you know, I do one-on-ones with CEOs and it's like, it gives you, if they've gone through the training also and how in terms of how to think about the graphs, it gives you so much power in just terms of how to quantify how people are thinking about stuff. Like there's this one. Natural thing, for example, where high D people, they are very kind of inductive thinkers, right? They have a lot of influence on how they think based on what other people think. Well, that also has a downside, right? They're a really good people, but B, it turns out they're sometimes slow to make really hard decisions that are going to hurt other people's feelings. And then that toolkit, like if you and the people you're working with all think about things the same way, it gives you like an amazing toolkit to go and and like take teams that are maybe running on an 8 out of 10 and turbocharge them to run out of the 10 out of 10 just by making some little tweaks here and there, all based around that, that shared language.

So if you take like Dura Software, for example, and, and you talked about centralizing, I would consider this a strategic cost actually. But do you require the companies that you buy to adopt Culture Index, or that's up to them?

Yep, everybody runs the same playbook. So all these kind of business systems I talked about, EOS for strategy and planning, TopGrading for hiring, NPS for customer satisfaction, Q12 for employee happiness. All this on my website, gridley.com. You can download it if you want. They all— everybody uses it. And the, the pitch to them is, okay, you have to use a system. This is the system we're all going to use. We're happy to change it if you want to use a different one. You just have to tell us why the system you want to use is better than the one we have, and we'll change it for everybody. Like, if you have something better than EOS, like tell me why, we'll change it for everybody. And yeah, that gives us a standardized way of interacting with each of the companies. Like we know what their, their one-page strategic plan is in terms of the VTO. Like all that stuff comes standardized. So we have an interaction model that works.

And on it, and just on that topic real quick with EOS, do you use an implementator for each company? Do you hire a consultant or have you found success just doing it naturally inside the organization?

I've never used an implementer. Okay.

Yeah, never. It's like a 50/50 split on that question. Some people swear by it and some people have never used it and been wildly successful with it.

You know, I think there's a combination of like, A, I'm cheap, you know, and if you have a tiny $2 million a year company, you can't spend $50,000 on an implementer. Um, and then two, like, I've talked to some of the implementers and like they've grown their implementer community a lot, and there's some that are really good. They're really good ones. Like, you can't hire them right now because they're overburdened. And then I've sat in on some of the sessions with some of the new implementers, and it's like, I know more about this than this person does. And lastly, I think that when these kind of systems come from management, like, that forces you to really create buy-in, because so many of these folks adopt these systems, whether they're EOS or top grading or whatever, but the management's not really bought in. If the management has to roll it out, like, they're either going to quit or they're going to roll it out. Like, those are the few options for them. And so you get assured buy-in that way. And I just think that's better. Like, if you want to outsource this, tell me what else you're working on that is so much more important than you running your business better. Like, tell me what else you should be doing. Is it having more lunches? You could have more lunches, but no, no, why don't you work on making your business better?

I know, all those types of things. Like, I don't have time to do that. It's like, you do not have time to do that because you don't do this. That will give you your time back.

I think if I could go back and find me 25 years ago, I would just hold me down and just say, "You're going to do everything. Here's all these systems. You need to use these. Trust me." I love it. Stupid me probably wouldn't have listened, but anyway.

Michael Girdley Sr. holding down Girdley Jr. I've never had somebody from San Antonio. Obviously, I'm up in Fort Worth and we look at real estate in San Antonio all the time. I'm pretty familiar, but what's your 2-minute pitch for what's going on in San Antonio and why it's continued to be really successful over the last 20 years?

Yeah. Well, I think San Antonio has been really smart about how it thinks about development and growth in terms of the community. And it's super, super funnier because I've seen new people move here from other places and they'll come to me and they'll be like, "Girdley, things are so weird here. I just went to a meeting." And I was like, "Yeah?" And he's like, This is the exact story. He's like, yeah, like it was like 50 people and everybody was just so passionate about making the city better. Like, what's wrong with this place? Like, he's like, where he came from in Utah, like, wasn't that way. Nobody cared. They were just there to consume what had been built by the previous generation. So, you know, I think we've got the ingredients here to be a city that's going to continue to grow and evolve and be one of the winning cities amongst the 3 other ones in Texas, which are guaranteed winners, I think, between Austin and Houston and here. So, you know, what's cool here on top of that is, besides the culture, is This is a place where if you want to be somebody who's a big fish in a little pond and you want to be able to work on stuff of a magnitude that can really matter for the community, and you want to be somebody who is part of building the community and not just consuming it, like, that is where it's awesome. Like, that's— this is a great place to do that because, you know, anything smaller than this, like, I think you run into a place that's not going to be on the upswing. But if you want to be a person that's a community builder, that's going you can have a real impact, like, this is a great place to do it.

I love it. How has the, the growth of Austin impacted San Antonio? Often we hear, often a big case for San Antonio is its kind of synergy with Austin. Do you see that a lot?

Austin is awesome. I mean, if, if I wasn't born here and didn't live here, like, there's a good chance I would have ended up in Austin. My sister lives there and it's great. So, you know, I, I could live in any of the four big cities in Texas. Like, they're all great. Um, Houston feels like a version of San Antonio. They're all great. You know, Austin's San Antonio benefits when Austin does. I think we're all really happy for what's going on there. They've made some really great decisions, right? Fighting to have the kind of culture that they do, fighting to be a place where you feel like there's an openness and a progressiveness of stuff like that, that attracts a lot of people. And so we're starting to see people migrate back and forth like they always have. If you look internally in Texas, the numbers last time I checked were basically the net migration between the cities is pretty neutral. So, you know, I— we're seeing people move from here to there and there to here. Like, all that's perfectly healthy, and it's just a matter of time until this feels like Dallas-Fort Worth, and Austin will probably be Dallas, and we'll probably be Fort Worth, which is totally fine. Fort Worth is great.

Yep. Now, San Antonio is awesome. All right, do you have a morning routine or something that you do in the morning? If COVID gave me my first morning routine that I've had my whole life, so I've been curious what other people do in the morning.

I am an early riser. So I get up in the morning. This morning I got up at 5. I have coffee and I tweet stuff until about 5:30. And then I answer email. And then I go to the gym. And I typically go to a CrossFit gym. So I go 4 or 5 times a week. So I'm the old guy at the CrossFit gym. And then me and my buddy, who we're accountability partners, he and I, And our other friends, we go get a coffee afterwards. So we reward ourselves afterwards. And then I go to work.

I love it. What's the best advice you've ever received?

Man, so much. I only wish I'd listened to it. I think back to my favorite professor in college. And he was the one the other professors hated, but I realized he was a genius. He's a computer science professor. And he would never answer any of our questions. We'd be like, "Hey, how do you do this? How do I show the contents of a directory on a computer?" And he'd be like, "I don't know. Have you looked at the manual?" Everything was, "I don't know. Have you looked at the manual?" But the advice that he was teaching us was that you first have to develop the ability to be self-reliant and go try to solve stuff without being dependent on somebody else, and that's the way to get ahead. He didn't exactly ever say it, but he beat it into us that that sort of life approach and that first principles idea there is core to being a successful human being.

I love it. All right. Two more questions. If you had a billboard on a major highway, the busiest highway in San Antonio, and you could put anything on that billboard, what would you put on it?

This is unoriginal, but it's raise prices.

It is unoriginal. Oh, I thought you meant my question. That too is unoriginal.

No, no, the question's great. I've, you know, preparing for this, I was like, well, do I come up with something original? I just tell you what it really is, but it really is raise prices. And that's a very deep, you know, it's a Mark Andreessen quote, but it's exactly right. Like, I think back to when we started CodeUp and we started CodeUp and it was really cheap. Like it was really, really cheap. We were giving people 3 months of intense learning, you know, 1 instructor for every 6 students. Like it was a great, we gave them a great deal and it was $6,000 for 3 months. And it just wasn't working. It totally wasn't working. And the reason it wasn't working was we were creating an intellectual disconnect with people. They didn't understand how something could be a Cadillac or a Range Rover, and it would be priced like a beat-up 20-year-old motorcycle. And the business actually took off when we raised prices. We raised prices. We doubled them. I said, we just can't do this anymore, guys. We got to charge people what this is worth. It's got to be a fair price. And we doubled the prices, and demand went up. Up. And the reason, the reason was, is because suddenly our story made sense. It's like, oh, this is— we're giving you a Cadillac here, guys. Like, and people wanted to pay for it. And, and so I think that translates into so many things that, you know, just like you're, you're managing your funds or, you know, your real estate portfolio or any of the business I'm involved in, like, you got to charge your fair worth, and that will help you be the best you can, right? And you just— too many people charge too little because they just think about it all the wrong way. And make such a huge difference.

Oh man, I love that. Especially in real estate, the common thing is that new sponsors or new GPs try and charge no fees and, you know, very little promote, and they wake up 5 years later and they can barely cover their operating business, and their promotes are helping cover their operating business. And I'm like, you gotta charge what you're worth to be successful. And you see it over and over.

I've made the same mistake and I even made it as an adult, like in my late 30s. Like we raised our first fund. We didn't charge a management fee for Ethan Fund. I want to go back and punch me in the face. Like, stupid. Like, what were you thinking? Like, and I thought it would, you know, we thought it would make it easier to raise the fund. It was great, but it turned out like that's not sustainable, right? Charity is not sustainable. You gotta, you gotta charge people for what you're worth and that'll help you deliver a premium service and, and do things the right way. Goes back to that ISA thing we were talking about. If you worry about how your value alignment happens, where everybody's incentivized for the same thing to happen, that's where magic happens.

For sure.

All right.

How can people find you or reach you?

Yeah. So personal website, girdley.com. Twitter is @girdley. So I've been tweeting a lot. So that's one of my 14 new hobbies during COVID I have nothing to sell. So that's the one thing I feel weird about being a prolific Twitterer is like, oh man, I really selling courses or raising funds or whatever. And it's like, well, I'm doing nothing. So I'm just here to talk. But yeah, I'd love to interact with people and continue the serendipity that I found by being on social media and doing that kind of stuff. So yeah, @Girdley on Twitter or girdley.com.

Michael, thank you so much for taking some time this morning to sit down with me. This was an awesome conversation.

Yeah, great job, man. Thank you.

All right, we'll see you. Hey everyone, it's Chris here again. Thank you so much for joining me on this journey. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, leave a 5-star rating, or write a quick review. Thanks again, and I'll see you on the next episode. Chris Powers is the founder and CEO of Fort Capital LP. All opinions from Chris and guests of The Fort Podcast are solely their own and do reflect the opinions of Fort Capital LP. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for real estate or investment decisions. The Fort with Chris Powers is produced by Straight Up Podcasts.