The Deal Maker’s Will: Walker Thrash on Vision-Driven Negotiation and Collaborative Problem Solving

I do really believe 100% from every part of me that everyone has the capacity to be able to do the things that they want and not to be held back by the mental baggage that's in our head that we want to push through.

Welcome to the do the Thing podcast. In each episode, we get down and personal with people who go after the things they want to make all their wildest dreams come true. Join us as we unveil and dissect a formula for what it takes to do the thing. Here is your host, Stacy Lauren.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the do the Thing podcast. This is your host, Stacy Lauren. Well, you guys, this is one of those moments that I love. It's just getting to meet new people that are doing absolutely extraordinary things, and it's so funny. I'm in a group called Podcasters paradise, part of John Lee Dumas Network, and he had mentioned this amazing human that is doing amazing things and just recently launched a book. And that's when I wanted to reach out and really learn more about what he was doing. How did this book come to be? His book is called the Deal Maker's Will, and it's already hitting the streets in the world of negotiations and helping people see things in a different way. And so I'm so excited to learn about him. We just got to talk briefly before the interview, and I just like when you get to meet people that are, like, wanting to put something out in the world and they have this deep message, and you're able to really, like, tap into that and see what gets birthed, that's what's so exciting for me, and that's what I love about doing this podcast and being in this world with you guys. So I am so excited to welcome Walker to the show. Hello, Walker.

Hey, Stacy. Happy to be here. This will be fun.

I am so excited. I just feel like just from just already talking to you, like, being able to dive deep, deeper is, like, really exciting to me.

Why not? We'll. We'll peel back the layers on this.

All right. We have to start with just your story, so can you just give us some background? Who are you? What do you do, and all the fun stuff.

Sure. My name's Walker Thrash, and I'm in South Boulder, Colorado, but for years lived in the Southeast. So we have developed. I'm a real estate developer at heart. We've developed hospitality, hotel, restaurant, residential, some municipal projects throughout, I would say, the Southeast Texas, and then into Colorado. And really, in the last decade, I would say most of our focus has been in the state of Colorado, but kind of beneath that, our projects, what makes our company, I'd say, a little unique is most of our developments are public, private projects. So there's typically a city, or sometimes the city in the state or master development arm that we are partnering with on all these projects that are somewhat multifaceted, and we are typically brought in to solve some problem in the development, to bring some project to fruition that they're struggling to deal with.

I was just writing down solving a problem in the development because in my mind, I'm like, how do you actually tell that like that quickly and be able to see what the problem is and be able to identify it?

Well, we don't. It's not a quick process. So oftentimes I would say, well, my favorite phone call is, hey, Walker, this is what we want to do, but this is the very specific problem of why it's not penciling out or why this doesn't work. Rarely do we get that phone call oftentimes like, hey, here's an idea. Can we sit down at the table and see if this is of interest to put together a public private partnership and bring this project to fruition? Or sometimes we're answering a generic request for proposal from a city that's cast out citywide or statewide. But almost immediately, our goal is kind of that creative problem solver is just to start asking the questions and trying to understand, okay, really, what are the pinch points here?

So you're really the do the thing of development because you're taking the idea and you're bringing it out into the world.

I'd love to have that brain.

That's amazing. And it's such a good skill set, right? To be able to listen and ask the right questions and then be able to see what's there that you could help bring to life through creative problem solving.

And a lot of that's learned, too. It's not, I wouldn't say it's somewhat not a natural process to come in and say, hey, the first step really is to not impart all of our ideas and whatever we've learned, but more kind of ask those general questions. But I do find in the meetings, especially, the more dynamic the project, the more people that are in the room, the more there needs to be kind of a slowdown. Let's talk about what the vision is. And I say this all the time. The worst thing we can do is start at a granular sense. Dollars and cents, what money needs to change hands. Like all of those things that are Very important to the overall project, but not necessarily important to the objectives for the group that sit at the table. And I think that's, that's more what great thing are we going to do together, right? What is the lofty objective that we're sitting down to talk about? And now what's keeping us, what are hurdles that are keeping us from being able to develop it and start to tackle those things one by one.

So you're tapping them into the vision of what they want to do and then also figuring out what the things that are going to hold them back. So then you're able to really kind of see what's there.

And even drilling down on that, there's a certain sense of, I mean, you talk about community a lot, right? So there is a bit of community. The projects we're working on typically take minimum of three years. So these are long standing relationships that we're building that there's always the first impression and first meetings. But we know we're going to be with this group of humans for quite some time. There is a thought process that if you're sitting at the table, you have some value to bring, right? Otherwise Stacy, you wouldn't have been invited to that meeting. There is some reason that you're sitting there. There's some value perceived in either you or your company to bring to the equation. But if you really step back from it and think about what are we all trying to accomplish, there is a bit of community around. Everyone has the same lofty, singular objective. Once you tease that out, it's developing this mid rise municipal building. Whatever the widget is, ultimately the team is around the idea of trying to make that happen. And the most successful deals that we've put together, negotiations we've had, we've built the trusts both ways and they've been the most open discussions. The more guarded those conversations are, typically the tougher those deals are to put together. So it's so important. Early is not trying to like rush through all these conversations, but to kind of decompress that conversation and say, hey, what are we trying to do? What are our hurdles? And let's not talk about how we're going to tackle all this right now. Let's just kind of understand what we're dealing with. And what's funny is the more questions you get to ask in those early meetings, sometimes I feel like we're cheating. The ideas come from the other people in the room. A lot of these answers are there already. No one's contemplated them yet. So there's A little bit of that steering the conversation. That's part of our job.

I love this because I'm shaking my head for those of you listening that did not see the wild. The wild head nod at the moment. But yeah. One of my favorite challenges that I run, it's called find your voice. And it has a question a day that I ask participants and then they respond in the group. And this is the one that I like, license to communities and organizations all over the world because it creates that container of, like, safety and trust and what you just said, which is like, it's like, not only is it helping you answer the question so that you're able to like, hear your kind of like thoughts come out of your head and be more self aware, but now all of a sudden you see this, like, group hive almost, right? This incubator of everyone else, and that's where you're learning from. It's like you're learning from yourself, answering it. But there's so many people that have so many things that are just like wealth of knowledge, right, that you're. You're getting to see too.

It's good that you said learning from yourself. I think that's an interesting topic because if you kind of boil this down to like the everybody, right? We're talking about very specific real estate deals and there's no one size fits all for this is how you do every negotiation on earth, right? But there are some rules that I think are somewhat universal, and one of them is preparing for the meeting, as stupid as that sounds and as rudimentary as that conversation is. But we're all. I mean, I'm sure you've got a calendar of events today, calls meetings, whatever that is, and you have filled your day as most of the people that are listening to this podcast. And we're going from one meeting to the next. And so often when you walk into a meeting and everyone's busy, everyone's unprepared, we get through the very first rounds of introductions and it's like, okay, well, what next? And some of the discovery is before you're talking to the rest of the room. And this does go across. Doesn't matter if you're buying a house, figuring out where you're going to dinner, or trying to build a project, what do you need from the meeting? What would you love to get out of that meeting? And what doesn't matter to you? And having that list, understanding that as you walk into the meeting helps you ask those same questions of others and really start to, like, let the playing field level out as to, okay, what are we trading here of value? And again, not dollars and cents. I'm a big proponent of when it comes down to money. Figure out what objective criterion you're using as a group, what metric that you're going to bounce this off of. Let's have fair numbers and let's not make that this a haggling exercise. That's a secondary effort. And that comes after understanding needs, want, subjective goals. And it's funny, if you don't understand your own, it's really hard to understand others. And we pretend like we're not self interested. I actually think we should celebrate the fact everyone is self interested at some level. What we're trying to do is deliver other people's interest at the meeting. And understanding that has really been pivotal in doing more and more public private projects is understanding that, hey, there's nothing negative in the conversation about the fact that people are trying to survive, they are trying to feed their family, they are at some level self interested and if you look in the mirror, some level, so are you. And, and that's just, that's a good baseline to start to understand humanity. And it does play into negotiating strategies. Because if you do understand that, then trying to deliver other people's interest is really just part of a basic strategy. It's not this complicated event. It's like, what do I need? What do they need? What things don't matter to both of us. And if we can find all this stuff in the middle, we can actually make this deal more valuable for everyone at the table.

Wow. Because what you're saying is first you're tapping into like what you are like what you believe in. Right. And so nobody wants a yes man. I mean they think people, sometimes they think they want one. But like in order to like really create really activated groups and be able to have this creative brainstorming and be able to bring ideas to life, we need those different diverse opinions and perspectives. And we also need an ability to be able to have those conversations so that we could see all sides. And that's where you're able to solve, I mean, not just the problems for a project, but we could actually solve the world's problems. Right. When we can kind of use that, that sort of philosophy.

Absolutely. And being if we, if we now start to say, okay, let's some actionable things like for what we're talking about, being prepared for the meeting is such a critically important step. If it's a deal that's going to be at all dynamic if it's not just widgets and how many pennies are we paying for this per item? But if it's a more complex deal, being prepared is important for the simple reason that like I said so often, the room is somewhat unprepared that if you put like in a real world scenario, let's just say you walk into a meeting with a budget in hand, you've done just that little bit of due diligence, you understand? Okay, here's a, Here's a sense of a total rough order of magnitude the budget for the project that didn't take very long to do. But watch how many questions you get just because you're the bearer of some information in the meeting. And the more questions you get, the more questions you get to ask of others. And your time becomes more valuable in the meeting simply because you walked in with some level of preparedness. And that seems so. And everyone listening will say, well, obviously, right. Ask yourself how often you walk into that meeting actually prepared. And the more important it is, the more you should really drill down on that. And we've definitely. I'm bad about that. I can walk into a meeting with just, I'm coming from one thing to the next like, oh, what are we doing? Those are the least productive meetings we have.

So for preparing for meetings. And I love this because I think sometimes it's like the prep work that you could do before you do something is actually what then creates the. It like gets you to be able to do the thing essentially. And so you mentioned asking yourself what do you need from the meeting? What matters to you? What doesn't matter to you? Is there anything else that you think would help people when they're preparing for things like this?

It's a clarity exercise. A lot of negotiation is just trying to bring clarity to the conversation. And when you do that, it's a more collaborative effort. But I'd say the same is true if you can self reflect. It is a benefit to then assume, okay, what things might be important to the others that are going to be in this meeting, what things may not be important to them that are important to me. And when you start to draw those lines between your interest and theirs, I will say there's a danger to that, which is you don't want to have this all pre baked and assume what everybody's thinking. That's a double edged sword. But at least having the thought in if I know I'm walking into a city and the city manager within their 30 year vision guideline, that's already been published. They're telling me what they want to be able to do. I should take that to heart and understand, okay, that's probably an objective and I need to at least think through that. But once you enter the meeting and you understand those two pieces, that's where you ask the questions to make sure that these assumptions are accurate. And it's, I'll give you about a story that is literally ongoing right now. This comes to mind, talking about that because it's hard to just get this right into the real world. So this is not a public private, it's part of a public private project that we're working on. But we're just trying to buy a piece of land. Seems pretty simple, right? How much are you paying for this? And it's some acreage that's been assembled. It's in an urban setting. It's not an inexpensive piece of dirt. So you, you think through, okay, what's the seller want in this engagement? And of course there's some level they want the dollars that they want for the project. But in our very first meeting, just asking some of these basic questions and not trying to, to pretend like I understand all of the seller's objectives before we start being open minded enough, it came to light that his biggest interest is he's got, he's getting up in age, he's got a few children that he wants to leave some inheritance to. And this is part of the legacy of that. His biggest objective is not money. His biggest objective is finding a willing partner and buyer that's actually able to execute the transaction. That's number one. I could not have guessed at that. Right. Coming into the very first meeting. But that's that internal clarity exercise, asking those questions and then externally assuming what things may be of importance in being prepared for the meeting, but asking those kind of open ended questions. In the meeting, we arrived at some interest I had no idea of. And they have been important for moving the project along. It actually led us together very openly put together a little bit different strategy about how we might would take that land out and get them the maximum benefit for the seller.

I love this conversation because like I think it's so easy to live in autopilot with life. Right. And that the things that we do and like we like you mentioned like going meeting to meeting or fire to fire or like okay, the robotic things that can happen during the day. Right. And what you're doing is you're interrupting that pattern by becoming more clear yourself and then also creating that, I mean like community. But you're basically, you're making these events, these meetings into this, like, community effort. Because now you're hearing all the ideas, you're hearing all the, the struggles, you're hearing everything inside of a container of safety. It sounds like, where you're able to really bring these things to life from the, the core values and the core principles of, like, who we are and what we want as humans without just coming up with this, like, very surface level thing. Oh, we want to do this project and this is how it's going to happen. And so for those of you listening, this is the thing, right. It's like, how do we actually tap deeper into these things that are. No, not surface level. We're really tapping into the deepest parts of, like, what we want in the world by being able to follow this strategy and this process.

Sure. And taking a genuine interest in the other people in the room is part of the deal. If, and I say this all the time, if it is just tricks and gambits, things fall apart. If you're not in the room with people that you want to be in the room with, that you're trying to work through a conversation and a deal. Maybe you've got the wrong people in the room. But back to, for instance, that story, we can get to that point because this, this is a mistake I've made a million times. I want to get a lot of information from the other party, but I'm not willing to give up information on my end. Or we're playing poker, that's a bad place to arrive. So one thing in that specific conversation, what I've tried to do over time and what our team tries to do is really, we're trying to divulge our objectives. The more open we can be in that conversation, the more we can get ideas from the other party. So like I said, the best deals we put together are when we can get to a level of trust where people believe there's a fair and equitable deal that's, that's going to come out of this arrangement in some way. But we're, we're exchanging information so that we can tease out where's the value we're missing in this deal. That's. That is a question that probably comes up in every, at least every major project we're working on. Where are we missing value in this deal between the two parties? And you can arrive at that sitting before the very first meeting, but you can help to arrive at that while in the meeting, divulging some of your Objectives and saying, hey, this is what I'd love to see happen. Like, after we've talked about the vision, this is what I'd love to see happen. What's important to us is X, Y and Z. How do we get there? It's amazing. Once you kind of just open up a dialogue, how much easier does conversations go? And years ago, I was awful at that. I want to. People want to. I think it's part of our human nature. We want to come in and impart all of the things we know to everyone in the meeting. And I mean, you can do that at your own detriment all you want. No one's there for that. We're trying to figure out what are we all missing here? And how do we bring. How do we shed some new light on the value of this project that we don't understand. And again, that's coming at this specifically from that creative problem solving, the types of projects that we work on. But why don't we, like, shift completely out of that? Because I'm sure 90% of your listeners are not real estate developers trying to figure out how to do public private projects. If you want to take it to there's teasing out ideas and just stop me wherever you want, Stacy, but I can talk about this forever. But let's just say, even between you and I, there's the idea of, I believe no one owns ideas. They're just out there in the ether. Most of them aren't original ideas anyway. It's just something you've learned along the way. If you have an idea, or let's just say this at first person. If I have an idea, it could be a good idea if I'm willing to share that idea with you and let you make the idea better. And I'm not trying to just own all of these ideas and positive things that we're doing in the meeting. Those ideas can go from good to great in a way. Like this basic level. If I want to eat Italian tonight, okay, let's just play an anecdote. I'm hungry. I want to go to Italian. Like, hey, Stacy, I want to eat Italian tonight. I'm in 50 50. I'm gonna be successful in that conversation. You may say, hey, great. Or I could approach it and say, stacy, what's your favorite Italian place in town? All of a sudden, there's part of this idea that you're already injecting yourself in, whatever the name of that restaurant is. How about we go there tonight? Neither one of us have that idea anymore, right? It seems so, so silly now. We're co creating basic level. We're kids playing around here. Your success rate, and you can magnify that up to more important ideas and discussions, but your success rate in bringing other people into the idea. How would you look at this differently?

Yeah.

Is such an important twist that I would say we have really leaned into in the last 10 or 15 years in these larger projects, and that's been where we found a lot of success is if we're talking about that, all of a sudden you're telling me about restaurants I've never heard of. You might know the chef. This experience gets totally different. And it's because we're opened up to sharing that idea and you bringing your, your pieces and parts to it. That's where I really do believe everyone can come up with good ideas. But great ideas in a negotiation are owned by the team.

Yeah, because you're co creating it together. I love this because, like, this is what my whole thing is like. I get so exhausted when you hear like all these meetings, all these things where it's just like everyone's talking and talking and talking and lecturing and barking orders. Right. And you're just really, you're. What you're really showcasing is the power of bringing people together and hearing their ideas, hearing their perspectives, and being able to create a structured environment where that happens. Okay, I have to ask you advice. Are you okay? Can I ask your advice?

Let's do it.

Okay. So I'm launching this thing, it's called the Billion Dollar Impact Project, where I'm raising a billion dollars for charity and impact projects using a lot of different funding models. One is a charity auction that I'm doing both virtually and in person. Anyway, I'm launching it in January. It's going to be in San Diego. And one of the things I'm actually working on today, which is coincidentally or not coincidentally, is I'm having like all these speakers come in that are going to be teaching things on leaders and how you're a better leader and like all these different kind of things. Because the model is basically using these leadership development programs. And then instead of like normal money for nonprofits comes from personal spending, like they're buying vacations or buying all this stuff. This model is using like leadership development programs and experiences. And that's where the funding comes from, from business. So it's like a different kind of way. And so I was like, oh, man, wouldn't it be cool if I could like, almost like then do breakout sessions, which is what we're kind of talking about. Right. And like. And somebody actually just gave me advice right before you, which is really interesting that all this is happening today where it's like, oh, you can get the CEO with the nonprofit and like be able to like create the container of conversations in there. And I'm like, how do I like then create this way of like how do we actually like solve this? You're the CEO. You have every ability to fund this nonprofit by buying these leadership programs, leadership development programs. And then there's like a money split anyway. It's a whole thing. I don't. This might be too much. Maybe we'll have to talk about after. But just curious if anything comes up.

Yeah, for you that's perfect because that's your domain. I know nothing about any of that. What comes to mind just off the cuff, I love this is there are always these questions that I do think kind of go across all the different spectrum of. I mean there's a certain amount of that is deal making. Whether it's a nonprofit, it doesn't matter where the money's flowing, there's a deal happening in there. But two really powerful questions I think for that especially like I said, people are self interested and let's just go a step further. If they're CEOs or they're at high levels of rank, they also have egos, as does everyone listening to this podcast. But people love to impart wisdom and they love to bring their part to the idea. And if I, I like the idea of bringing them together in small groups. And I know obviously you're a big fan of that. But the question of what am I missing here and I need your help. How would you like this is our problem. How would you solve this? How do we cross this chasm? And just listening to what the CEO, how they might would problem solve that. I promise you there's five or six ideas that they have that are genius that you and I can't think of sitting here because we're not in the CEO seat. Yeah, that's the beauty of having a talented team around the table. People with different ideas and some like diverse backgrounds that solve problems in different ways. The CEO probably has the answer. Yeah, they're waiting to tell someone.

So when, when you get to the. What am I missing here? How do you get to that question? What are you sharing before that?

Very similar. I think the tee up you just gave me is context, like any context around the deal. This is what I'm trying to do. We can make this almost like a high level flowchart. This is what I'm trying to do. This is the problem I'm having. What am I missing? And I mean, if you ask somebody, that's like giving somebody a high five. I mean, I actually want your opinion on this and acknowledging that they, they may know more about this subject than you do. People love that conversation. And you may have to, you may have to break out a journal. It may take a while to get out of the meeting. There may be oversharing happening there. But I think it is that simple. This is what I'm, this is what I'm trying to do. This is where I'm getting caught. Like this is the hurdle that's tripping me up. What am I missing here?

Wow. I feel like I'm going to be listening to this episode like 25 times. So thank you. I'm so excited. Okay, so I got to hear the journey now because you're like real estate developer and you're now an author. Best selling author. This book is Flying off the hotcakes or Flying off the hotcakes or hotcakes flying off whatever.

Fly one off.

It's hotcakes. It's sold out even. Right. By the time you listen, it'll be restocked. So buy the book. But any main tell on those?

Yeah, this, I, I mentioned this before. I'm not a consultant. There's nothing I do that's by the hour. We're a real. I love real estate development. My company loves design. There's a whole nother conversation we'd have on that. But really a design development team that does these public private projects. So obviously there's deal making, negotiation that's happening constantly throughout those projects. I wanted to take a different bent. I love nonfiction. I've read a ton of it. I say this all the time. My kids make fun of me because I read like every self help book they will print, I will read it. But I wanted to write a novel that's a business novel, but steeped in the actual some fundamental rules of negotiation and deal making. And honestly, Stacy, I was just looking for an outlet. I mean, I have no hobbies other than my, my family and my children. It's just work. So I was looking for something else to think about. And what's interesting, you said before we got on this podcast, you're, when you did your TED Talk, that part of the nice thing about the TED Talk is it made you drill down the idea to its most simplistic form and get it into whatever that was, 10 or 15 minutes. I think the same is true about writing a book. What are the most important rules to me personally and to my company for deal making and negotiating? That was kind of the interesting because I tweaked and changed some of those rules along the way in the few years it took to write it in between working on real estate deals. So that was enlightening for me. I feel like I ended up with this selfish thing. I still go back and reference the seven rules that are in the book because if you spend the time to distill it down to that, for me they are the most important. And just to be clear, it's not a conversation about tricks and tactics. It really is more simplify the approach. Maybe this is a different lens to look at deal making and negotiation through, but in the form of a story.

You know what I love about that? It kind of goes back to what I was saying with the barking the orders and the teaching. Right. And it's when things are so explicitly teaching, sometimes our brains, it's hard for us to comprehend all the stuff that we're learning. Right. But when it's in the way of a story and it's fiction now we're like. We're almost like learning by accident.

Yeah.

Cause what's in an episode.

Nice story.

Yeah.

I think. And. And I'm that way. I mean, I'm an ADHD poster child when it comes to like attention and what grabs my attention and not. It's tough for me to digest bullet points in kind of raw academic information. And so some of my favorite books have been either very anecdotal or truly novels that I've read that had kind of a bend to business. But for me, it somewhat makes concepts that were two dimensional a little more three dimensional when they're told through a character you can relate to. And that kind of puts it more in the real world context. Look, I gave it my best effort to really try to tell a character driven story about business and some very fundamental principles and rules. But I'll say this doesn't really give anything away. Here's the baseline. It's a young bank vice president who wants to be an or becomes an entrepreneur. Because that feels like the sexy thing to do. Right. That's the next step. He's languishing in the very first meeting where an elder gentleman who's really become somewhat of a mentor explains what happened in the room. He was there. He saw the deal go down. But to have this person explain it to him in a Way he had never contemplated it before and all the real different moves that actually transpired. He knows this isn't a chance meeting and he may be a target, but he's willing to somewhat set that aside just for the benefit of learning how to put these deals together. That's the tee up for the story. But I think that's what makes it somewhat relatable because I've had mentors along the way, some of them that really took me under their wing and some people in business that taught me a lesson the hard way. They were my mentors and didn't try to be. I figured out after that deal, I'm never doing this again.

That's so funny.

Yeah, she just taught me a lesson. Right? But for that tee up, I think it helps when you put it in the context of a story and there is some emotion behind it that everyone has had that thought. Anyone that's gone into a business venture has had that thought. Are there other people around this that just simply know more than I do and that are doing this at a level playing at a level higher than I'm playing at right now?

Yeah. Oh, my gosh. Where's your favorite place for people to get the book? Cause I know there's different ways that you could get it.

I think simply, just for ease of use, you gotta be a fan of Amazon, click it and you'll have it. That's what we were talking about. It just went out of stock, but I would imagine by the time someone listens to it, I would hope they'd be back. But yeah, I hope that listeners, some listeners would buy the book and just enjoy the read, but pick up a couple of nuggets along the way. And I would hope if you're. If you're interested, if there's some deal or negotiation that you feel like is in your near future, I would think you could resonate with this. This book and the characters.

It's amazing. And what do you think in your mind when they're done reading it that you're like, oh, I wish. I hope they do this after they read the book.

I hope that they have. It's a good question. I hope that a reader that finishes the book and there are seven very. I mean, they're obvious rules that are. That are feathered throughout the book. You won't miss them, but they latch onto one or two. You don't have to have a whole knapsack full of stuff. And that gives them the confidence to feel like they can walk into whatever that negotiation or deal that is in their future and arrive at the answers in the meetings and in real time rather than feeling like they need to have it all figured out beforehand. If there's anything that someone gets from the book, I hope it's that because I think that's such a critical part of being able to put dynamic deals together.

How did you get the book out? You mentioned it's a different form of expression and being able to like dial in deeper to the message of what you were doing and then deciding to go the fiction route. But how did it actually, like pour out of you?

Well, early mornings, so coffee. It was somewhat therapeutic to start the day over the course of. And I really started it. You can get back to Covid and if you want to dial into that. That was a dark time for us in real estate development. I don't want to parallel. There were some terrible things that happened to Covid families, sickness, illness and death. So within scale. In a real estate development world, though, it's somewhat shut down. We had hotels that you weren't allowed to have occupancy in. So we spent some time for a couple of years figuring out are we going to be in business in three or four years. That's just the reality. And anyone in real estate development, I promise that thought crossed their mind. So it was nice departure for me to sit down and say, okay, look. And we were dueling deals during COVID which was wild. No one knew what it would be worth. But I guess at some point you can't stop. We were so committed to some of these projects that we were going to bring them to fruition either way. And I think that was the genesis of it was, hey, what. What are the most important things that we're doing working on these projects from a thought level perspective? So what are those rules if we can distill them? But as far as getting it out onto the page, it was every morning taking an hour or so, getting up early and really enjoying that process. I will say I had. I had more fun writing, way more fun writing than rewriting, I imagine. Assure you I undervalued the rewrite effort after engaging the publisher.

I love how these things, like that's what my podcast was for me. I had gone through this dark time after I exited my business and was like lost and like, what do I do now? And whoever am I? And all the things. And I actually started to write a book and then I like couldn't remember any of my stuff. So a friend told me to start a podcast and it was like, literally. It was like literally my form of expression. It wasn't even on video. It's funny, when I first interviewed. We got introduced by John Lee Dumas. I first interviewed him. It was video off because I wasn't even comfortable, like, showing my face. So it was like a whole, like, finding my voice part. But yeah, it's so great when we find these creative expressions and outlets that we're able to use with our voice. Right. Because that's really what this was. It was like almost like a rebirth of what you actually believe in. And I do. Like you mentioned humanity earlier. I think that's what you're doing with this book is you're bringing us back to humanity, being able to teach us these principles that help us tap into each other's kind of message. Right?

Yeah. And I think I would stop short of saying I can just bring wisdom to the world. I have some experience in development. We have really enjoyed and have developed a lot of projects. But I'd say this is almost more just an exploration of deal making and negotiation from a handful of different angles. And like you said, I do believe people need some outlet. I can't think about real estate development 24 hours a day. That's probably the healthiest part, is waking up at three in the morning, which happens the older I get, the more that's happening. But that you're either contemplating the structure of financing on a project or maybe how would this character actually think about that? And did I do that the wrong way? The creativity of it was, I think, somewhat relaxing for me. So that was. That was fun. Now it's out there. So you can read it and tell me if you hate it. But if you don't, I would hope it's because it really is. These are characters, I feel like, that we all know.

Yeah. And it's called the Deal Maker's Will. And you can buy it on Amazon and. Okay, I would love. Before we go, I'd love you to share, what is your biggest piece of advice for people on doing the thing?

Loaded question, but biggest advice is. Okay. And this is gonna seem very obvious, but I promise there's more to it than this. Be active, right? Get out there and actually start, fail. Be iterative. There are myriad people sitting in a room somewhere right now crafting out a business plan they're never gonna touch. Go out there, do something. Like I said, fail iterate. I've definitely done it. And a lot of the people that have been around that are more successful than I am, they're on their fifth venture at this point. But you're not going to catch them stagnated. Doesn't matter. The market cycles, whatever. They're just in their blood. They're active. I think that's the most important thing people can do is get out there and do fail. Figure it out, do it again, and at some point you're going to find yourself on the top of something. So there's, there's my advice.

I love it. And is there anywhere people can follow along with you on your journey and kind of see what you're up to?

So I'm becoming more active on LinkedIn. Social media is not my bailiwick, but in LinkedIn and community there for sure. And then at our website, vertical co.com vertical spelled with a K. Our projects are ongoing and it's funny how often we get phone calls or emails just from people that are perusing projects that we're working on with great ideas. So feel free to email us directly there and I promise you someone will reach out.

I love it. Thank you so much for coming on. This has been like, I cannot sit still right now. I'm so excited about this conversation. So I really appreciate you taking the time and sharing your story and everything that you're doing.

Yeah, I love it. Simple and open. These are the conversations we should be having. Right?

Thank you for joining and do the Thing. Don't wait for opportunity. Create it. And hey guys, have you checked out my Facebook group yet? Go to do the thing collaboration.com thanks.

For listening to the do the Thing podcast. We hope you enjoyed the show. But even more, we hope you'll be inspired to do the Thing. Do you have a burning question on Doing the Thing that you'd like answered? How about an inspiring do the Thing story of your own that you'd like to share? We'd love to hear all about it. Just leave us a voice message at do the Thing callcast Co or email us@helloothethingpodcast.com.