People who are only book smart end up sucking at business. But if you don't consistently teach yourself you also make errors you never had to make, when you could've just read about somebody else's. Feynman said the reason he taught basic level material to students is that the fundamentals stay true. The advanced stuff keeps changing, a lot of it's esoteric and they weren't even sure about it. Studying the fundamentals gave him a better grasp of what was possible. Same in business. The fundamentals are kind of boring but they're there. The newer trendy books are almost always terrible.

I've said in the past that people who are only book smart usually end up sucking at business. This is a perfect example of that statement

No matter how crowded your market is, there's always a way to stand out. Look at Chick-fil-A: Late entry into fast food, maybe the most crowded market on earth for 50+ years, and they became one of the most profitable in it. Sandwich aint even that special (these are fighting words I know, ive been told lol). It's the marketing and the principles they're willing to stand on. People aren't buying chicken, they're buying the whole experience

Actually prefer typos and shorthand from my own team. Perfect grammar was never the most important thing & isn't what makes things worth reading. This aint school

God loves each of us, individually, excessively. Take 60 sec to ponder this truth and accept God’s gift of love. Then get back after it 👊

I used to put a lot more weight on IQ than I do now. Why? Very smart people, high IQ people, make really bad business decisions all the time. I think it's bc business has way more variables than anything you'd ever see on an IQ test. Somebody can score sky high intellectually and still struggle once you add uncertainty, timing, and all the interpersonal stuff that comes with real decisions. Judgment is its own kind of intelligence. Gets built through feedback loops. You decide, you see the result, you adjust, you get better. Sort of like sports, where some people have a natural touch but the great ones still train and adapt. Early on I was focused on IQ and EQ. I've added a third one I call BQ. Business quotient. How good your business judgment actually is.

More and more companies are realizing that remote is just a better way to do things (on average, of course some industries need in person). That’s why office defaults prob arent gonna bounce back the same way 08 did as this trend grows. Will be interesting to see exactly how it does play out

One of my biggest failures ended up saving the company 15 years later. I came out like a bull right at the top in '05 to '07, built aggressively, and the crash wiped out everything I'd made. But it taught me a ton. By 2022 I recognized the same behaviors again and sold $1.5B+ at nearly perfect timing, top 1% globally. That call came straight out of getting my head handed to me the first time

Low performers create drag on everyone around them, not just themselves. Gotta keep it moving and keep the waters from getting swampy in your business.

One factor in timing real estate that I don't think folks think about much: picture the entire universe of buyers and sellers and look at which side is crowded. When rates run up on people, owners sitting on floating rate debt get stuck. Say they signed at a third of where rates are now. They'd love to get out, and a lot of them can't, or won't at the prices being offered. Meanwhile the buyer pool thins way out bc everybody's reeling. Lots of desire to sell, not much desire to buy. That's the setup you want. You want it tilted your way, fewer people chasing the asset you're after and proportionately a lot more who'd like to hand it to somebody. Just simple supply and demand between the two sides of the table, and it tells you a lot about when to move.

Supply constraints are almost as important as location in RE and it doesn't get talked about nearly as much. If somebody can put up 100 stories of apartments near you, they can cause a supply deluge that drops rents like crazy and takes years to absorb. Office did this in the 90s. Overbuilt it, and I think it sat around 20% vacancy for something like 20 years. Nuts. Technology means we can build almost anywhere now, so the constraint is mostly political. Local city doesn't want new supply and won't permit it. Or it's geographic, water on one side, protected land on the other, nobody's ever building there. Get that in a place where demand keeps showing up and rent keeps climbing and the value keeps pulling away from stuff in unconstrained markets.

The hard truth founders face that not everyone talks about. This is for both your internal team, and for folks you hire. A bad judge of people isnt gonna build anything exceptional

Leaner teams are better than big ones. You'd think more people helping means more speed. But past a point it just breaks the relationships that make communication flow. The right number for the job is almost always fewer than you think

Waiting on the market to fix this for you is a losing bet. The affordability is def an issue, but you gotta just go build and make more

“We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed.” -2 Corinthians 4:8-9

This is why i stay high level before going deep on anything. Once you go into the weeds too early you get sunk cost fallacy, you start valuing the time you already spent more than you should and you dont walk away when you need to. Busy isnt the same as productive, its just busy. Priority has to come first or the effort doesnt matter, doesnt matter how fast youre moving if its in the wrong direction

If I can't do the math in my head I'm already skeptical it's a good deal. Not precisely in my head. Approximately. I'm not the best in the world at it but I'm good enough to get through most investment decisions that way. If the math doesn't math I don't even move to back of the envelope. If it roughly works, then paper. Then maybe a quick check on the phone. If it still holds up, then we go do the intensive underwriting. I run all those steps bc we're all prone to error and our own biases and sometimes I'm just wrong. People who do it the other way, detailed analysis first, make crazy bad errors. They never nailed the key assumptions to the wall and got caught up in peripheral stuff.

Has the thought of walking away from business crossed my mind? Sure, more times than I can count. What stops me is that it was never about me. People bet on me to steward this thing, and I'm in it to serve them, and ultimately God. If I were only doing it for myself, I'd have quit at the first real beating. Nobody takes those punches to the face for their own sake

Worrying what critics think is just performing for an audience, same thing as worrying about legacy. Ppl who care about that are living for applause they'll never even get to hear. Ive had people be flat out wrong about what I’m doing more times than I can count. Used to want to correct every one of them. Realized thats a losing game, the work either holds up or it doesnt, arguing about it in the comments doesnt change that

Maintenance people aren’t paid enough. I would know as I employ a lot. Saying that cuts against my own short-term interest as an owner/operator, but it’s squarely in my long-term interest to build something valuable and sustainable which means embracing hard truths and finding sustainable solutions. Proof is that these folks will bolt for a dollar more an hour elsewhere. That’s terrible for the employer (us) and definitely not good for the employee. The root cause I’ve concluded is many are not making enough and thus driven by desperation. The fix isn’t charity; it’s smart economics. We need to find a way to change the model so we can afford to pay good performers more so they stick around. The only realistic path is for the economic contribution of the maintenance professional to go up, and thus the owner can share in that upside via increased pay. Tech’ing up the workers, which is what Rex is doing, is the way. Paying workers more is straight out of Henry Ford’s playbook. In 1914, Ford faced insane turnover, 370% annually, because assembly-line work was grueling and pay mediocre. He doubled wages, and turnover plummeted while productivity and profits soared. Higher pay plus stability created loyalty and efficiency, not handouts. Paying more is the cheapest way to buy retention, reliability, and real growth in a world where losing a good maintenance tech costs way more than bumping their rate. Our companies are determined to find a way to do so.