Mark Spain (BBA ’93), Chairman and CEO of Mark Spain Real Estate | Terry Leadership Speaker Series

Thanks.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah. So I think the earlier in your journey that you can find that answer, the more rocket fuel you'll have behind your success. So, for myself, it took me a long time to really get really, really clear on my purpose. And when I did, my life and career changed. So my wife here is Whitney. She's also a Dawg. I used to say that my purpose was when her and I would talk and I'd say, hey, it's to put food on our table, to take care of our family. And frankly, she'd just call BS on me. She says, honey, you'd flip hammers, you'd deliver pizzas, you'd cut grass to provide for our family. And I come from a sports background. I was a competitive wrestler in high school, which really had an impact on me. And what I learned through a lot of conversations with my mentor and I'm a business coach, is I really just don't like to lose. And that doesn't. You know, and I used to always say, when I first really started discovering, I'd say, hey, I just like to win. And that doesn't necessarily sound so politically correct. So when you're in an environment, you just say, I just want to beat you, dude. I want to win, and I'm going to win with integrity. But if you get up at 5 in the morning, I'm going to get up at 4. You work till 11 at night, I'm going to work till midnight. And when I got real clear on who I was as a person, and I learned that that was my why and my purpose, my career. It was about 2012 that my career really, really, really took off. And so get clear on who you are. Get clear on it's your why, it's your purpose, it's nobody else's, and don't apologize for it. And if you don't know, ask people around you. Ask people around you, what do you think makes me tick? They know the people who are close to you and that are authentic. The authentic relationships you have with people, they know what you're about. I research. Why do I research? I'm a massive researcher. Why? Because I don't. I don't want anybody to beat me.

Absolutely.

So I come from a very entrepreneurial family where my parents had multiple businesses throughout the year. A lot of them related to construction or building houses or residential real estate. And so I was with ReMax for 15 years. And when you're at ReMax or Keller Williams or any type of big brokerage, you essentially are a business behind a business. You're using their infrastructure, but you're building your brand and your business. And so at about 2014, 2015, I'd always wanted to be an independent agent on my independent brand. But of course we had a little bit dark spot in our economy between 2008 and 2013. It just wasn't the right time. So when I left ReMax, joined Keller Williams, my time at Keller had an impact on me and really built me up to the place where, under my mentorship with Gary Keller, it was the next evolution of my chain of success or my evolution of my business cycle was to go independent. So I could have stayed at Keller and had my great income stream, a real safe income stream. And I can remember having a conversation with my wife, she said, honey, you can stay safe and stay in your comfort zone and you'll have a great income, we'll have a great life, and we'll retire very successfully. Or you can take this. This is your wife telling you they like security, right? For the record, women like security. Just remember that guys, women like security. They usually are not. They're not as risky or risk takers as we are. So she said, you can stay in this income stream and stay safe, or you can take this leap of faith and try what you've always wanted to try and never look back. You can always go back. My dad would say, hey, once you go, there's no plan B. So in 2016, I took that leap of faith. It was so much easier than I thought it was. I'd built my whole career to get to this place. I'm 47 now, so I was about 43, 44 years old. I'd worked for 20 years to get to this place in my career. And it went fast. I mean, it was just not. We did the project management piece. We understood exactly what we were getting into. It just wasn't as hard as I thought. It usually never is. My attorney used to say, you gotta black hole and a white hole. It's usually in the middle. It's usually never what you think it is.

I think. Well, I think it's, it's, it's. Yeah, it's an organic, it's organic, but it's really what you, all the steps you've taken over your life to build and the experience you have and the thousands of home closings that we've helped people, you know, buy and sell homes, it's just got us to that place. So that when we actually finally took the leap, it wasn't near as difficult as we thought because we did the work. Like one of our, one of our, you know, you picked up these today. One of our top 10 things is you got to do the work. And we did the work for 22 years.

Yeah, so that was a, I'm sure your parents, a lot of your parents, you know, experienced that. I mean, it was a very humbling time in our economy. You know, that, that recession. So that was the other that I can remember. It was the second major recession we had. So like we had the Gulf War crisis like in the early 90s. So I graduated from UGA at the tail end of that recession. So when I started my real estate career, it was in '93. And so in this particular recession, it was like a 50 year recession. Nobody realized how deep it was going to go. But what I had learned over my career even before that recession is if you pay attention, you see around corners and what's happening as I was going to appointments and every time I'd go to an appointment, somebody was in a hardship, somebody was upside down on their mortgage, which means that they owe more on the mortgage than they can pay off. And I was like, wow. But they had lost a job, they'd gotten cancer, they were getting divorced, there was a hardship and they needed to move, but they couldn't. So the world was like locked up. And you know, if you're going to be prideful and have an ego, you're like, ah, I'm not doing short sales. That's not me. I want the equity sellers and I want the people have money. Well, nobody had money then. The place was dark. And so I said, you know, to survive and not to lay off any of my team. What's the hardest part, folks, is building a team. You never want your team to fall apart because that's the hardest piece in business to put together is your team, your tribe. And so I said, I don't want to lay anybody off. I'm going to suck it up. So I went out and I became a short sales specialist. I took every single accreditation, every single class, and every single thing that I could get my hands on and become a short sales specialist. Which means you're basically short means you're helping people get out from underneath their loan when they owe more than they have. You know, the mortgage is 100,000, they owe 150. You're helping negotiate that gap with the lender. I partnered with an attorney. I brought two of their staff members onto into our office, and we just went out to help the world. We became an advocate of, like, helping people get outside of these hardships and outside of these loans. And consequently, we. Or as a result, our business thrived. You know, 80% of my business became short sales. I probably did more short sells than any real estate team in America. So you can take adversity and turn it into triumph if you pay attention and, you know, and you got to swallow your pride. I mean, we're not. It's not glamorous. There's nothing. There's not one thing glamorous about that job except you're helping people. In every single appointment we went to, I guarantee you, almost every 98%, there were tears shed. These are people crying at the appointments because, you know, men and women don't always communicate like they should. And the things that would come out at these table, you know, these conversations were just, you know, real life. And then we could come in as a as an advocate to say, hey, I know that you lost your job. I know your income went from 120,000 to 50. Let's lock arms, and I'll help you get to the finish. I'll help you get to that next chapter of your life, and we can help rebuild because, again, America was in a dark place. Most of my friends lost all their wealth.

That's right.

How much time you have?

Yeah. You know, in life and in business, you got to fail forward, and you got to take risk. And if you don't take risk. You'll never succeed. But you do have to take calculated risk. My biggest failures in business have been just bad hires. And I'll take 100% ownership at our company of the absolute worst hires we've ever made. And you fall in love with a person, you fall in love with their story. They paid somebody a lot of money to write this amazing resume. They gave you all the right references. And so when you get a bad hire, you can't let your emotions get in the way of the mission. So you got to go pluck that person out. And that's hard. That's painful. It affects your whole company. There's a wake of wreckage behind that person that you don't even know until that person's out of the company. So it's taught me how to really tighten up the filter. We run a very high performance sales and leadership team. It's a Navy SEAL force of people in our team. And so we have learned and continued to get better every single day at tightening up that filter so that we make sure that we only bring the elite in. We only bring the people who fit our level of excellence and who want to strive for excellence every day in our company. And we make mistakes. I mean, business and life is not perfect. There's a big difference between excellence and perfection. For the record, perfection doesn't exist. There's no such thing. You strive for it, but really, the word is excellence. And what excellence means is being your very, very best every day. And you know that we try to get better at every day, but I own it. And to look at your leadership team and to look at them and say, hey, I own the problem and I'm gonna fix it. Right.

Yeah, so from the outside looking in, it looks like we just, you know, growth is like this, but really it was like this, and then it went like this. So think of what a hockey stick looks like. So it's really more like this way. And so we've been in business for 22 years. And so like we talked about a little earlier about building that infrastructure and building that. That team around you, because it took 22 years to get the get the, to get the Navy Seal team around us, the elite force who helps us grow and to grow for growth's sake, is just unsustainable. I mean, it's just. You can't be reckless. So our growth is very strategic. It's very calculated. There's a lot of research and data that goes into it. But really what has helped propel our growth is A, I got really clear on who I was. I talked about that, like in 2012. I got really clear on how I was. I had a mentor that let me not be comfortable. I got very uncomfortable. I had a wife that pushed me out of my little comfort zone. And then I put great people around us, I put the Navy Seals around us that really understand excellence, who really want to go after it and who want to win.

That's a great question. If I could figure that out today and you could tell me the DNA in here, I'd pull every one of you out and I'd hire you. Unfortunately, there's no blood test that you can take to figure that out. I look for people who have a chip on their shoulder. I'm not looking for the Harvard MBA. I'm not looking for the person who had this perfect life. What I'm looking for is somebody who has something inside of them beyond just straight A's and a 4.0 average that makes them different than their neighbor. Somebody who gets up early, stays up late, works the Saturdays and Sundays. Whoever does whatever it takes to succeed, but really is about excellence, really. Who wants to be the very, very best, who is self managed. What I mean by self managed, that means that doing more than what you're told, doing more than what's expected of you, going that extra mile, putting in the extra hours, leading without a title. I mean, a lot of what I'm saying is really, if you just take and you do two or three of these things and master it that we gave you here, your life will change. The guy or girl who reads an extra book a month, I mean, those are the things that are different. The guy who, you know, whose parents told them they were never going to be anybody one day, and that chip on their shoulder that says, hey, I'm going to prove all you know. Or maybe somebody who's bullied in high school that says, I'm going to prove all those people wrong. You can't teach that grit. That's who we are. It could be sports. I mean, I am a prime example of that grinder who is all about winning and not losing. That, you know, if you ask the right questions in an interview, you'd find that out about me. You'd find out that I got up before high in high school and I ran before school to cut weight and be in shape for wrestling. After wrestling practice, I went to the gym to be just. It's just that it doesn't take this massive delta. It's just those little things. And so my challenge to everybody in this room is just aim to be just a little bit better than your neighbor and then the next month be a little bit better. A little bit better, a little bit better. I mean, this is a. Let's face it, UGA is competitive.

Yeah, and you hear it in the things that I say. I mean, one of our top values is it's a culture of excellence. And it means that every day you wake up and you try to be your very best and you put other people's needs before your own. So servant leadership, it's leading with a servant's heart. Again, we're in the commission business, meaning that we don't make a dollar until we sell something or somebody buys something. But it's not about the commissions. It's about putting other people's needs before your own. And if you do that, the commissions flow. It's having a fun and collaborative culture. And so what does that mean? Well, it means that we want to work hard, but we want to have fun and celebrate. But we also want to collaborate with our peers. We're not like segmented silos in our company. It's all one company with one single mission. It's having a learning based mindset, meaning that or continuous learning. We're always wanting to get better. As my dad taught me. You never make it, son. You're never going to get there. You got to keep working. So you're going to graduate with this awesome degree here. Guess what? It's not over then it's not over when you get the diploma, it's not over ever. You're always going to be learning the rest of your life. If you want to be the very best. And so it's the same type of values that we have in our company that I'd love you to adapt a few in your own mindset, especially the learning part, because learners are leaders, readers are leaders. Right. That sounds kind of like corny, but it's the facts. Right.

Yeah, I would say that they mirror our companies because we help create the values in our company. So we have a policy in our company. It's called no wimps. Guess what talks I have with my children at the dinner table. We don't do wimps. We don't do whining. When you sign up for sports at school, you don't sit on the sidelines because you're four and you're tired. You gotta go do the works. I mean, these are my little kids. And it's this. You know, we're about being learning based at our home and in our personal life. I mean, if you went to my nightstand, you'd probably find five or six books. You know, it's I'm a big reader. My wife's a big reader. That's just who we are as people. And I'm about excellence. If I play tennis, I want to be the best tennis player I can be. Because, remember, I don't like to lose, but I will lose, but I just don't like it. Whatever I do, I'm going to, I'm going to work really hard to be the very best or I'm not going to do it.

Yeah, so I think it's important for the people you hang around with. You know, if you hang around people that are always working to be better, it's going to bleed over into your life. So that my friends and my tribe are always looking to be the very best. And then from a learning based perspective, I mean, I'll go to seminars, I'll go to an Anthony Robbins seminar. Every single day. I'm reading all types of articles about my business. I mean, Alicia here, she's our VP of Marketing, and she'll tell you, I'll send her five, six, eight, ten articles a day if it's something of value that especially where I feel like a competitor is getting into our space, there's a lot of people that would like to disrupt the real estate industry and you got to pay attention. So we're always just studying it and embodying that learning base. But part of it's also researching it kind of goes hand in hand.

Yeah, so my dad is my hero. My dad's 72 and my dad really taught me the basics of business and life. And so I owe so much to my dad. I mean, I thought I grew up in this. I thought I grew up in a normal household, which in my mind I thought I was normal. I was big into sports. So my dad at 14 said, hey son, read how to Win Friends and Influence People. Great book, by the way, if you want to read a great book that will impact your rest of your life. How to Win in Friends and Influence People. Psychology of Winning by Dennis Whaley. He turned me on to like the Zig Zigglers, the Jim Rohns. I don't know if that resonates to any of you, but that's what my dad poured into me to basically impact me in sports, really, because if you fix your mind, you fix a lot of things. And so, and then later on in my career, when I joined Keller Williams, the person who's had the most impact on my business career was Gary Keller. And I was with Keller Williams for five years under a really close mentorship with Gary Keller. So when you hang around a billionaire type person, they really help you think a little different. And their thinking is a lot different than mine was. So mine was like a little close minded. And so this man taught me how to just think a lot bigger. He said, you're thinking too small. And so if you look at my career from 2012 to 2018 and our business grew 4 or 500% this year, probably be up like 700% in a six or seven year period. And again, it just the impact that that person had on me of just one person, of that loving coming from contribution pressure, that I could be a lot more than I was, that I'd gotten too comfortable in this little zone here. It was like getting an MBA in life, because he was just. We had. Basically, you had homework every time you met with him. And if you didn't read the book, you'd never be asked back. By the way, that's like a clue, too. If you. If somebody. If you're meeting with an older person or somebody who's mentoring you and they say, hey, you should read this book. By the way, the biggest clue I can give you is. And what people like me like is read the book. Send us an email when it's done. Hey, thanks so much for having me read this book. These are the six things I learned, because people like to help people, but we also like to help people that take what we're giving them and put it into work and put it into practice. Because. And so that's the way Gary was. And if you didn't do the homework, you weren't being asked back. And there was about 10 of us that he was like that with. And it just. You can look at my. If you mapped my career out, you could see that that relationship was very impactful. My dad helped me build the foundation, and then this man.

Yeah. So in leadership and in business, when you make it to the top, you have a responsibility to help those that, in your community that possibly helped you, just like this school helped me out. And so this part of me in my life is a blessing to be back here because this school had an impact on me. And so in our communities. About 2016, we created the Mark Spain Foundation as a mechanism and a vehicle to give back to the communities in which we operate. And we said, okay, we could be 65 things to 65 different organizations, or we could really. How you have the most impact on things is to go narrow. Go narrow and deep, because you'd rather be in one or two organizations making an impact versus a lot. So what we did is we said, hey, what's important to us? And so for me, it starts with families. That's the most important. Who has the biggest needs? Well, typically it's children. In our world, children have the biggest needs in our communities, because children, for the record, have no choice what environment they're born into. They have no decision in that process. They're just born into the environment that they have. And so for us, as we made a decision, we want to have the biggest impact on kids. And we want to give kids, which is our future of our world, the biggest opportunities to succeed. And so we have joined forces with the YMCA which is. The YMCA is a great organization that's a good filter for us and a good distribution channel. So they help us pick out the people that are in the biggest need. And so this year we will raise enough money to send I think 150 to 200 kids to summer camp. And so for those of you who ever went to a YMCA camp, you know what that feels like. Most people pay to go there, but there's like one in five people that don't, maybe a little more. And so everybody looks equal. We don't nobody knows who's on scholarship. And so for sending a kid into an environment that has that positive influence on their life, it makes a massive difference. So we have two events that we do each year. One is coming up on March 22nd. For the any I'll just throw this out here. If anybody is generous spend for the kids. org is the, is the website spinforthekids.org and that's we do a spin a thon on March 22nd where we actually ride bikes and do like a whole spin like spin class event with DJs and things for four hours to raise enough money to send these 150 plus kids to summer camp. And then the first week in May we shut down our company. This is called Big Y Day. We shut down our company for the entire day. We bring out about 120, 150 people from our company to basically open the camps up for the YMCA. Because the YMCA operates on donations. It's a not for profit type company and through some memberships. So we basically rebuild this entire camp that's been dormant since last September. That's just kind of cruddy. And we wake it up from the winter and get it prepared for the kids to go to camp. And so it's been an awesome thing for our company, it's been an awesome thing for just our communities that we operate in and it's just been a blessing.

Yeah. So for the company we want to continue to become that Southeastern dominant real estate player. For instance, in 2018 we helped almost 3,000 people in 2019, we will help almost 4,000 home buyers and sellers buy or sell a house. And so just to become that, you know, continue to dominate that Southeast and build greater brand penetration in the markets that we're in, as well as expanding to several other markets within the Southeast.

So most people don't know this about me. In 2012, there's a new. There was a new, you know, the Wall Street America was getting into the real estate space, specifically buying single family residential homes. And so I had a. We were already doing the distressed sale, so I had kind of a penetration in that market. And then there's this behemoth called Blackstone that came knocking on our door with a product called Imitation Homes. The new brand that they built back then, it wasn't even called Imitation Homes. And so they kind of tapped me on the shoulder and said, hey, you know, we'd be interested in you being our regional head. So I'm going, well, okay. Sounds kind of cool. And so I went to New York, did the power. You know, I hadn't interviewed for a job. I really never had a job. I always was an entrepreneur. So I went to New York, Park Avenue, high rise, Blackstone, big building, all these executives, and did the interview. So I interviewed with all these executives. So I moved around every 20 minutes to all these different people, and sure enough, I got the fricking job. I'm like, whoa. So I was the first hire in Atlanta for Imitation Homes, which, by the way, Imitation Homes own 70 to 80,000 homes across America. They're the largest single family homeowner in the world and one of the largest private equity firms in America. And so that period of my life, so I was the first hire, and I had to hire all these people and build this infrastructure. But, I mean, they were shipping me 20, 30 million dollars to Kinko's to basically buy homes on the auction block for them. So basically, when homes get foreclosed on, meaning that people couldn't pay their mortgage to get foreclosed on, we would have to go down to the auction and buy these houses for them, underwrite them, do the analytics, and buy them on their behalf. And I'm like, I could just remember in my mind, I mean, I'm driving home one night from picking up this money from Kinko. It was like, you know, $30 million and cashier's checks in my backseat. I'm like, if I get pulled over by the cops, I don't even know what I'm gonna tell them. And if I did tell them, they're not gonna believe me because nobody had ever heard of these companies. It was all brand new. So it was just. It was a crazy, awesome period in my life of just like, it will never happen again because those recessions are, you know, that's a 50 to 100 year recession. Those things don't happen very often. So it was just a. It was a cool experience. But, yeah, it's crazy.

I think I had a fuse out. My lights weren't working. I'm like, God, I'm going to get pulled over. What am I going to do?

Well, in the real estate industry as a whole, I want my thumbprint to have been on that industry. I want to know that at the end of my life or end of my career that some way I put a thumbprint on the industry, that I had a meaningful impact, just like these universities had a meaningful impact on me and has their thumbprint on me and will be for the rest of my life. I want to make sure that I do that in the real estate industry by being a great leader, by being very innovative, creating leading products. But also, and probably the most important part for me personally is I don't want somebody to. I won't. I can't tell you the exact number, but I want to have made an impact on a lot of people. You know, the biggest blessing in my life today is when I've met with somebody and two years later they're like, hey, I read that book you said, or, hey, I took that course you said, and, man, my whole life's different because of this. If in 50 years from now I can have that kind of meaningful impact on hundreds of people, then I'll know that I did the right thing. I'll know that I lived out a really purposeful life. So that's important to me because relationships are incredibly important to me. And that's one thing I'll challenge everybody in this room is you gotta have relationship capital. It's not all about a transaction. It's not all about money, although you have to make money to survive in life and business, but money is just a vehicle. At the end of the day, it's about relationships and it's about people. And I am in the people, business and the relationships you have in life and the relationships you build in life or what's going to have the most meaning when you get to the end of your life.

Do the work, man. Just really be willing to do whatever it takes to succeed. It's going to be really important that you're all going to walk out of this university with a very prestigious degree. It's a very notable degree from a very notable university. And it's going to make you feel good. And I want you to. I feel I have pride here, but what I don't want you to do is to go into a situation overconfident or go into life and business overconfident in your career is knowing that you're probably going to start out at the bottom. And that's okay, because if you find the most amazing CEOs in the world started at the bottom, come at life from a place of humbleness, from gratefulness, and be willing to do whatever it takes and never, ever, ever say, it's not my job.

Yeah, so real estate is still a people business, and so it's technology is a facilitator. And we embrace technology and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars every year on technology to facilitate information, to facilitate data, and to provide better value to our customers. There are. There is a school of thought by certain groups of people that think technology can disrupt us. In my opinion, real estate is a complete relationship business that is facilitated by technology. So technology is information. And you're starting to see this in cases like with Uber and the taxi drivers and like the profitability of Uber and the struggles. How many billions of dollars they lose is because it's still about people. And so I think it's important to understand that technology is important, but I don't think it ever replaces people in selling houses.

So I would say Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, Acres of Diamonds, Leaders Eat Last, the Psychology of Winning. And probably, from an entrepreneurial standpoint, one of the books that had the most impact on me was called the E Myth by Michael Gerber. There's a newer book out called the E Myth Revisited, and basically it's a book on systematizing your business. So when I was getting into the real estate world, my dad gave it to me back in the early 90s, and it basically just taught me how to create a repeatable business model. So there's somebody in Atlanta or Charlotte or Nashville or Stockbridge. It's the same. Everybody gets the same exact experience. It's called the E Myth, and the E is for entrepreneurial. Thank you.

Usually. Yeah. Depends on how good they hide, man. It's a great question. I think, you know, pretty quickly. I think that, you know, within the first month and you. If I made the hire, in my mind, I'm trying to justify some of the crazy behavior. You can usually see it in somebody's behavior. It's usually a pattern. It's like, why are you coming home on Wednesday from the region? Why? Why? Well, why are you doing this? Or you got to be off because your grandma's got surgery? What? It's those little weird things that start to come up and you go, hmm. When it doesn't make sense logically, you know, it's probably you got it. There's like 75,000 things underneath the surface you can't see. And sometimes you got to make a decision as a leader with only about 70% of the information. And I can tell you pretty much with a higher your. When you have about 60, 70% of information and you make the decision to pluck that person or help them find a new opportunity, you find out a lot. It's a lot worse than you thought. And I would just say, hey, as a leader, don't act in haste. Do your research, give people ample, you know, don't be callous. But on the same token, if you've got somebody bad, a bad hire can infect your whole company if you let it. And you'll find most businesses that are struggling have allowed people to stay in the company that never should have been there to begin with and they don't. They let their personal feelings get in the way of the mission. And you know, I don't mean that callously and that doesn't mean to put, don't care about people. What that means is if you've got somebody who's not the right fit, make the move. Don't be a wimp.

Yeah, so I think we always have that risk that things come back, you know, once things start getting easy again. And the biggest problem with that particular period was the, you know, it's, it really was all, it was financially driven, it was that we got careless with our, with the type of loans that we were given. And so like in the industry with like veterans like me, and we start to see kind of some crazy loans starting to pop up. Because what happens is when you have a lot of money sitting on the sidelines, that money's making, it's actually losing money sitting on the sidelines. And so they're trying to get it to work. And you're seeing that today where like crazy loans are starting to kind of creep up. So the lesson to be learned is just to not be too aggressive with our lending. I mean there's this fine line and there's no perfect answer, but it's really just making sure that we loan to the people who can pay their bills.

Well, you just, you recognize your boss, your wife is your boss or your husband? No. So in my world, like, for instance, like me and Whitney's relationship is very strong. And so I tell people in my company, it's safe to tell me anything you want to tell me, but whatever you tell me, I'm going to tell Whitney and I'm not. That's not some. I mean, I'm being as funny, but it's the truth. And it's. She's very smart and she's a great filter and she makes sure that I don't. My blind spot is I move very fast and I'm right most of the time, but not all the time. And so she helps me from stubbing my toe and she just gives me really good advice and she's just a really good filter, especially from a male to a female. So it's a great female filter for me. And so in the business side, we have the same type of culture. So like our leadership team, we don't go make hires without, for instance, you know, we've got an interview series tomorrow with a new, a new manager, and there's like four or five people sitting in on that interview because nobody, nobody wants to make a bad hire. And it's not that we're saying, hey, well, if we make it, it's on all. No, it's just more. We have five different people who have five different opinions and have five different brains and thought processes. So it's just making sure we make the right decisions or if we're buying some new media, it's like going, hey, what do you think? This is a new thing. This is what I'm thinking. What are your thoughts? Because everybody has different perspectives and at the end of the day, nobody succeeds alone. I mean, let's just be honest. There's not nobody succeeds alone. It's a teamwork makes the dream work. I mean, it's literally you got to have a tribe around you that helps you succeed. And they all have to. And this is like that bad hire thing. You don't want somebody on your leadership team that's all about themselves that make these harebrained decisions to make themselves look good. Like, for me, I don't need the I don't care about the credit. I just want to win. I don't care if it's a licious idea. It doesn't matter to me.

Yeah. So for me is when I. When I. College got really fun for me. I mean, I had too much fun as a freshman. There's no question. I got a lot. That spring semester, I got a lot of warnings from my dad. But it got really cool for me is when I got into my major. And it's like when I got into classes that were really. That I loved. And it's like, life is short, right? And so find, you know, find your dream, find your passion, and, like, sink your teeth into your passion. Put all your eggs in that one one basket. So I chose a major. So I was a management major. I thought I was going to be in the construction business and build houses. I chose management. And then back then we had a very small subset of, like, a very specialized management degree called, I think it was called Productivity and Quality Management. It was back when, like, Deming and Crosby were, like, the gurus of Japan. All this crazy stuff was going on in the Japanese economy. And there were like 25 people in my major. And so it became like this. That was like our little fraternity. And so I spent a ton of time with those people. We spent not a lot of time in the classroom. We were, like, at manufacturing plants all across Athens and Clarke county and Oconee County. And that was. That was what made my college experience like, wow, I'm not in a lecture hall in the journalism building. Wow, this is awesome.

Oh, man. Thank you. Oh, man. Thank you.

Thank you all for having me. I appreciate it.