you because there's a pretty great blueprint for how to fail. You can succeed in so
many, so many different ways. There's money around every single corner. You just need
to know where to look and how to look more so. But there's a very easy way to
guarantee your failure, not having proper security in your transactions, not vetting
your partners well enough, getting into a deal even if it's the best deal with a
shitty partner, it's just not going to end up well, you're not going to be taken
care of. And there are plenty of other mistakes you can make just not doing enough
research, not doing your, for example, UCC searches. It's very easy to find
information. It's very easy to move forward without information that you can find
easily and should have found easily if you were if you were paying a little bit
more attention. Now separately to that we are you know a multi -family office. I
don't come from this world I come from by education I come from the world of
politics and by trade I come from the world of real estate that's how I started
out as a as a realtor and there's a lot of different there's a lot of odd overlap
between those two that you know I often find that a lot of people in this space
in business in general kind of ignore the political side of things but I mean and
I'm not gonna even ask for a show of hands because I can guarantee you every
single person in this room was affected by all this nonsense ping -ponging that went
back and forth about the Corporate Transparency Act. In some way shape or perform
every single person in this room was affected. And it's, it's a nightmare to try
and bounce back and forth. But, you know, those are the kinds of huge things that,
you know, you may, you may ignore because they're political and it's not your world,
but it very much affects you. Or we can talk about, like I had mentioned yesterday,
President Trump's plan to bring back 100 % bonus depreciation, that's going to be an
incredible political shift that directly impacts specific parts of the real estate
market.
credit especially, because a lot of my families are in that position of G1 to G2,
they're looking to exit their businesses and their portfolios require a little bit
more high -grade fixed income rather than appreciation -focused investments,
although their kids are exactly the opposite. They need a little bit more
appreciation to understand how difficult it can be to create wealth and add value.
It's easy to find a deal that looks great on paper, but then there's,
you know, one or two small things. Maybe the partner is a little bit sketchy or
maybe you can't understand the full story, but it looks great on paper and you want
to go into it anyway. I would say the biggest piece of advice, and I really don't
have all that much, but the biggest piece of advice that I can share is to not be
afraid to say no.
We're constantly tempted by people who are not as serious about their business as we
would like to be and are not as knowledgeable about their business as we may
potentially be. In my opinion, why would you ever give your money to somebody who
doesn't know what they're doing as well as you do because you should just be doing
it at that point. Apart from that, I really do enjoy Jeff Bezos' concept of the
two -way door versus the one -way door. The way he puts it, about 70 % of the
decisions you make are two -way doors to where if you go through it, you can
backtrack. It may be a little bit of a pain and it may cost you some money, but
it's not something that's going to be destabilizing to your business if you backtrack
that decision. And he says about 30 % of those decisions are one -way doors where
you really can't go back. In my opinion, that's a lot more like 90 % to 10%.
There's so much creativity that you can find in odd places that can really save you
from a bad situation if you recognize that you yourself are in a bad situation and
you can, there are ways around it. - Right, right, and I think in the family office
space right now there's a big conversation surrounding the wealth transfer that's
coming from generation to generation, and I think that's where you find a lot of
those opportunities and relating to that cause and effect and silver wave that we're
going to start to see from Gen 1 to Gen 2 or Gen 2 to Gen 3 where their
interests change up.