Noob School - Episode 70: Hunting for the Next Sale with Hunter Garrett

Episode Date: May 29, 2023

On this episode of Noob School, John reunites with an old friend - Hunter Garrett of NAI Global, discussing his experiences in the world of industrial real estate, and giving great advice to help you take that next big step in your sales career. Tune in to learn more from this certified sales all-star. I'm going to be sharing my secrets on all my social channels, but if you want them all at your fingertips, start with my book, Sales for Noobs: https://amzn.to/3tiaxsL Subscribe to our newsletter today: https://bit.ly/3Ned5kL #noobschool #salestraining #sales #training #entrepreneur #salestips #salesadvice

New School. All right, welcome back to Noob School. Today I've got my good friend and former neighbor, Hunter Garrett, here. Hunter is a partner at N.A.I. Earl Furman, one of the best commercial real estate companies in the Southeast. And he focuses mostly in the upstate on industrial development. Is that correct? That's correct. And you've only been doing it for 30 years now, right?

Right around 30 years, a long time. Well, did I say right what you're doing? Does that make sense? It is. I mean, we do a lot of things and a lot of things fit into that bucket from site selection to the actual development. There's a lot of brokerage pieces in that equation. But that would be a fair assessment. Right.

So you consider yourself in sales. I do. But you have to have a lot of knowledge to go with it to do what you do, right? Well, like I say, there's a lot of pieces and a lot of different people involved in the deals. And at the end of the day, what we are doing is buying and selling sites. Buying and selling the idea overarching to investors, two limited partners, general partners, people that are bringing equity to the table, the lenders. you've got to be able to have an idea, be able to quantify that idea through analytics

and your financial fundamentals and then be able to execute. So there's a lot of sales that go on there. Yeah. I just feel like, you know, you have to be a good salesperson to start with, but over time and all the educational things you've done, you have to learn so much to be able to actually do the job. The job is actually to, you're talking to some company or some representative of a company in Germany or something and they're trying to pick a site within 50 miles of the BMW plant

or something like that and you're having to figure that out for them, right? Right. They give you the broad strokes and then you've got to execute the fine ones and kind of dial in to where and what meets their criteria. Yeah, okay. So not that long ago, you know, we were. both in school at the Citadel, you're a little bit behind me. How did you decide, first of all, what you major in down there?

That was business administration. Business major. How did you decide to go to work for Earl Furman back then? You know, I was not one of the types that knew exactly what I wanted to do. I knew I didn't want to do engineering. At first I thought I wanted to go to law school and quickly found out that's not what I wanted to do. got into business, took a real estate class, and being at the Citadel, which is not the, it's fairly stressful for four years. I didn't want that stress for right away, going, jumping right

into a job. So my first job out of school, I was a ski instructor in Breckenridge, Colorado. So I went out west and did that thing for a year and found out that I didn't like living with six guys and being broke every day. eating dinner at happy hour. And so I came back and met Chuck Stone here in Greenville. And Chuck did real estate appraisals. So I went to work with Chuck. It was a salary or commission-based, no salary. So I had my first dose of that.

And I really learned the ins and out of the real estate industry how to basically value. real estate from you know the income approach if you will capitalizing you know what income was coming in on the buildings and from a cost you know what did it cost to build the different product and then you know things are going to sell and there's a range of how they sell and so you there's a lot that goes into valuing the real estate but it was always on the the back end of the deal as opposed to the front end of the deal and I'm

I'm a very social person and feel like I need to network. So I was talking to several different people and ended up going to work with what was then Grubben Ellis, Steve Navarro, doing development work for St. Francis Hospital. I got my first taste of true development. So hold on a second. Development work, meaning you're helping them expand the footprint of the hospital? Sure, that was back in, I want to say. say 96, 97, St. Francis Hospital was buying up practices. It's been an evolving thing.

So we were looking in different, say, Travels for Us, Simpsonville of the world, to do different offices for different practices that they were buying. The doctors typically owned their real estate, and when they were putting these groups together, they had to have new offices for the groups. and they had a concept where they would do two or three different disciplines in one building. So we were going in and finding the sites that were suitable for these groups and large enough that they could accommodate the three users. And then we went out and hired the architects and the contractors and basically turnkey did the development for St. Francis. They had a group that would own it and we basically just did that.

the fee development for them. Got it. Okay. And so was that when you made the jump to Earl Furman? Well, I did that for a couple of years and then got into just pure brokerage. My family has been in the development business since the 1950s. They did gross rankered centers and in a lot of retail. Didn't know what kind of brokerage. I was chasing the fees at the time, I mean, whatever I could work on. And that was back when our industry would let you do multiple different product types. And I bounced around for a couple of years and then went to work with Earl and partnered with Randall Bentley.

And that was all Randall did was industrial brokerage development. That was in 2000. Okay. So Earl started the company in 83, right? He did. 83. You started in 2000, and you say you partner with somebody. Explain to me how, or explain to us how that works in real estate when you partner with somebody.

Sure. I mean, years ago, people in our industry were your independent contractors. So everybody would basically have their own book of business, and there was not a lot of collaboration. And in some markets are still very similar to that, but our industry has evolved. more and more into the teaming aspect where that was how I cut my teeth. I mean, had Steve, Chuck Stone, Randall, they were my mentors and kind of taught me the business. And that's kind of how we've grown our company is there were four partners at the time. My biggest partners now were all working under those different groups.

And we've tried to grow our company organically by bringing in younger people and teaching them the business. So a younger person would come in. and work with you as a partner, and y'all would work deals together? You know, my business partner, John Stanton and I work together. We sit in the same office and look at each other every day, and we've got skill sets that are completely opposite, but very complimentary. So we're more equals than junior, senior, but we've had juniors that have worked for us over the years. They would get a smaller percentage?

True. Okay. What are the skills, what are your skill sets with your partner? Like what are yours and what are his? I like to go out and catch the fish and then bring it back to the dock and let him clean it and cook it. Got it. He is more of a detail-oriented person and I'm more big picture. Relationships, I may have different relationships than he does.

But they've always been very complimentary. So I was trying to understand this when I was talking to some other of your partners last week. But, you know, I guess if you're operating on your own versus a team of three people that are similar to you that are partnered, they've got an advantage. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right.

Yeah. Interesting. And work different levels of the spectrum. Yeah. From big pictures to – you take the industrial market. I mean, if you've got a guy that's chasing the 500,000 square foot deals, and you've got one that's chasing the 100 square foot – thousand square foot. foot deals and then you got somebody that's hitting everything below that. Yeah. So, I mean, just a bigger spectrum of what you can cover.

Okay. Well, and so you've been with Earl Furman since 2000. That's a pretty good run. It's 22 years. It's a long time. That's pretty good. And Greenville, I assume, is a great place to be in your business right now. People moving here. You know, I guess right when I was getting out of the Citadel is right when BMW announced. And, you know, we were a dying textile market and quickly became an automotive market. And it's been great ever since. That 85 quarter from Charlotte to Atlanta has been really good. Our port system in South Carolina has been great. Our business climate in the southeast is really good.

And our political climate is good. Yeah. So it's been, it is a great place to live. living geographically you're right in between the mountains and the beach. Don't tell anyone. No, yeah, I certainly am thankful we're here. When I travel, I mean, I feel like I have to temper myself from always talking about Greenville, you know, because, you know, there are other places that are pretty good too.

Right. But so many of the places I go to, I'm like, man, I wouldn't want to live here. We're fortunate. Yeah. Yeah. So let's talk about for the noob schoolers out there, if they were getting into sales, what would you say the best way to learn sales is? You know, I mean, like we mentioned a while ago, I mean, what we've been successful with is having the mentor approach.

Okay. Having somebody that you can talk to, you can learn from, you listen to, you watch, do things and try to emulate what you feel like their strengths and weaknesses are. Okay. I know you guys at Datastream had a different approach where you had inside, outside sales, and you had sales trainers. And being a, I guess the barrier of entry for our industry is that we're all performance-based.

We're all commission-based. And you really don't have a safety net, if you will, as far as a salary. Yeah. When we're bringing somebody in, we do provide something in that realm, but it's just not it's not something you can touch and say, hey, I'm going to be making X number of dollars in two years. It's all, how good are you, how quick can you learn? And you can climb the ladders quickly or slowly as you want to.

Yeah. But if you get in on a good team, you get in with some people that kind of adopt you and teach you, that's a good way to do it. It's a really good way to do it. I like that. I like that. So for the Noob Schoolers, they have that chance. That's a good, a very good way. Find a mentor to help you one way or another.

You know, in sales and in other fields, you know, it's a really good idea, I think, to get a coach to help you figure out how to do whatever it is you want to do, whether it's selling or, you know, getting like a personal trainer, getting in shape or whatever, you know, I highly recommend people find coaches to help them, even if it's for an out. hour a week, you know, if you could, like if someone brand new in your business could pay you for an hour a week to answer questions. And we do provide our young brokers with sales training, and whether it was you doing our training for all of our brokers across the Southeast to groups that do that.

And the company will pick up the bigger portion of that so that you can do that. And they do it weekly. I mean, a lot of our young guys are doing cold call. I mean, and that's a hard thing to do. Rejection is one of my least favorite things. I don't know anyone who likes it. But, you know, teaching somebody that skill set is powerful. Are they calling, like, for listings mainly?

Well, they're calling for a lot of different reasons. But say, we've got a property that we're marketing for lease or for sale. they're calling prospective tenants or buyers for that type property. And whether it be an industrial building or a retail space, you've got to call a list that you have to work. And it's monotonous work. Some people are really good at it. That's not one of my strong suits. But it does need training.

Right. So let's talk about training a little bit more. How much product training do you get or training on real estate in general do you give people? That comes back to your teaming aspect. Say if I've got a younger person on my team and I'm putting together a marketing profile, if you will, say an industrial building. The biggest things to know are size where you stand, your ceiling heights, How high can somebody stack? Power requirements, lighting requirements, outside parking for trailer storage.

So each product type has their different key factors that make it attractive for how much do you have to discount it based on certain aspects. But just doing the menial tasks, go out there and you've got a list of fill out these forms, it just teaches you kind of what everybody's looking for in the market. So roughly how many like repeat buyer long-term customers to someone like you have that you work with over year after year? You know, I think everybody in our industry is different as to the client that they chase. You know, I've been in a long time.

My philosophy is like, I like to work with people that I like. And I like to have some skin in the game. A lot of the stuff that I do I'm personally involved in. How would that work? Like someone's asking you to find a site for them. How would you be involved in that? Or how does that work? Sometimes it doesn't work out that well.

But say a lot of the stuff that we do is investment real estate. We find a building. We lease it out to a tenant. We hold it for cash flow or we turn around and sell up for a profit. So if I find a building that I think is attractive and I would like to invest in it, I'll go out and find my additional investors. We'll put whatever lipstick we need to on the building. We'll find a tenant and we hold it. But we are, you know, you can do it a lot of different ways, whether you're a pair of pursue investor and you put in your money and I put in my money and we both share in the same returns or you get into a more institutional level.

and you have general partners and limited partners and the returns are a little bit different. But everybody's got their threshold of where they're comfortable. And if you hit certain marks, you're rewarded. And, you know, it's just, it is nice to be able to tell somebody this is something that I would, I would spend my grandmother's money on. Yeah. So how do you go from being like you just met a new, possible investor or somebody who wants to build something?

How do you go from that initial conversation where you're, they're just this and you're just a sales rep to being a trusted partner? You listen. You ask a lot of questions. You find out what their needs are, what their wants are, what their long-term goals are. And then you try to facilitate those. And if it works out, it works out. I always am skeptical of the hardcore sales pitch on the front end. I'm not selling me.

I'm just trying to figure out what they need and be able to facilitate that. And if our interest align, I mean, we could potentially do something. It's so interesting you say that because, you know, we only have successful people on this podcast that are trying to give their knowledge to the noob schoolers. They almost always say that. They almost always say that that's what they do, is they say, I'm trying to find out what the other person wants and then give it to them if it makes sense.

There's no pushiness, there's no trickiness. Earl Furman was one of the best at that. He could sit at his office on the phone, and he wouldn't say a lot. You listen in, and you're like, what does he do? And then he could steer the conversation any way he wanted. It was brilliant. But, I mean, he asked questions, and he listened.

Yeah. Now, you always have had a, since I've known you, a great positive attitude, do you have any tips or tricks of things that you try to, on purpose, get in your brain and things that you, on purpose, avoid to stay positive? You know, I love to feel good about myself, and whether that's, you know, having a good relationship with my wife and my kids or working out every day or feeling good about myself really helps the positive attitudes you have a you have a fight with with my wife first thing in the morning you're not going to have the most positive day I don't mean that in a bad way

but you know and I like to stay healthy spiritually I like to be in a good place and it goes back to working with people that you like working with I love going to work every day day because I've got the best clients in the world and I like talking to them. I hate delivering bad news, but I love talking to my guys. But at the end of the day or the beginning of the day, if you wake up feeling good about yourself, you're going to have a great day. That's a good start. So, you know, that's chapter two of my book, Hunter, is the second thing I tell people,

salespeople, is take care of yourself. You get yourself right, you be in shape, you have your mind right. then you can try to be a salesperson. But you can't have lost yourself and think I'm going to teach you some trick to be a good salesperson. I need all these self-help books. I mean, you've got to feel good about you. So you've got to be in a good spot. That's a great.

That's a great. That's a great one. Now, since you've been there so long, I usually ask some interviewing questions. Do you interview many of the young people that come on board? So we've grown. When I first came to work with Earl, there were. probably eight of us in the office. Eight.

Wow. And there were four partners at the time. And as things have evolved, took more of an active role, becoming a partner and having to interview people. And it was probably not the best interview process, if you will. But the three partners, two of my partners myself would sit down and interview people. And it was a learning process. process and we learned to hire an HR person and let them do that.

But it was interesting the turn-ons and turn-offs of the different people that would come in and the different, you know, my thought process through the interview or my partners, it was always a little bit different. Yeah. So what are some of the things that people did well to maybe get a job with you and some of the things that they shouldn't have done? You know, I think one of the biggest things that young people can do is kind of know what you want to do. You go into an interview and, you know, I think I'd kind of like to do this because your lifestyle. I mean, I want to do that. Let's back up. What do you want to do at the end of the day?

And then, you know, they need to know what I do. If they're coming to interview with us, they've got to know a little bit about the company. But I like to ask them, you know, what questions do you have about us and what we do and how we got here? And I mean, if they're inquisitive, you know, I tell you one of the biggest turnoffs is, is Citadel background, you know, our parents, you know, look like you're a professional person. Yeah. Come into the interview that you're prepared, you know, you're clean, you shaving, you've got nice clothes on or whatever the atmosphere may be, know, know your audience. And be respectful and be inquisitive about you, the business. Interesting.

Those are good points. Y'all, I tell you this, I did get to meet your team or most of your team, and certainly your process has developed a common culture. You know, they all seem like good people and get along and, you know. It's a great office. And culture is the one thing that we stress internally. and how do you replicate it from office to office? And that's one of the hardest things we've had to deal with.

But we're a very collaborative group. We probably do 90% of our business walking down the hall and talking to different partners, brokers in the office. I love it when our young brokers run in our office. And they're enthusiastic about a deal that they're working on. We need to do this. I'm like, why do we need to do this? Tell me where the pop is in that deal.

What's the sizzle? Where do I need to focus and how can I help you do it? I love it. But we try and do more and more business with each other. That's great. I love that idea. And so what do you think the next 10 years is going to be like for your particular business? Wow.

You know, the trends that we've mentioned just geographically, we've been fortunate in that a lot of people are moving into our area and specifically into the upstate of South Carolina, the lower part of South Carolina. You know, I'd hate to get to micro, but just the industrial market has been great. The multifamily market has been great, and that's always cyclical. You know, retail is something that's always going to be there. There's always going to be a need for your restaurants and your retail. And then your office space, everybody in the Northeast is looking at office space as a redevelopment play for residential.

Just hearing your last guest talk about them having 700 employees and now 100 of those coming to the office as opposed to seven. There's a huge excess. So you've got to find a different use for that. So I think we're in a good spot in the world. BMW's not going anywhere. They just made a big announcement in Woodruff for the EV vehicles. You've got two or three battery plants that are going to locate in the lower part of the state that are going to be supporting that. It's a good climate, but I don't think it's going to slow down here any time.

Okay. And the interest rates are going to keep going up? Interest rates are going to be a bump in the road. but I think that when I first got into the business I mean interest rates were 7, 8% and we were valuing properties accordingly

returns I guess the yields and returns that people were willing to accept when rates were at 2% are going to be vastly different than when they're at 6 and we're going to have a there's going to be a curve there, learn curve as to where to read price things so that your yield on cost is similar, but I don't think it's unhealthy.

Yeah. Just talking to a lot of the lenders that we talk to on a day-to-day basis, feel like that they'll stabilize this year and hopefully come back a little bit in the near future. Well, always ask people about head trash. You know, I love to talk about the subject because I've had so much, I think we all have had head trash in our life where there's something that we believe because maybe we saw it, you know, in advertising as a kid or maybe our mom told us or something. Like an example would be my mom used to always say, no, don't talk about money.

It's rude to talk about money. Right. Right. So you have that growing up and then you get into business. If you don't talk about money, you starve, right? Right. You have to learn to talk about money. In fact, it's one of the first things you eventually should talk about it, you know,

because to find out are we on the same page or not. So anyway, that was some of my head trash. Do you have any head trash? Complacency is my head trash. Okay. You get into a comfortable spot, and you think that's a good place to be. We as a company, I think, got fairly complacent years ago, and we brought in a consultant, reorganized our company,

and kind of set what we thought was a pretty high threshold. You know, rise in tide raises all ships. Yeah. We said if we can get all of our brokers to a certain level, will be really healthy as a company. And at the time, we were like, that's going to be a tough task to get everybody to that level. And fast forward, six, seven years,

and you look at where all the guys stack up, they're there. That's awesome. So we've got to move that bar again. Yeah, that's awesome. That's great. That's a good one. That's a good one. There's always room going.

A lot of times that's the CEO's job or the leader's job, whether you're leading your household or your team or whatever. it's just to keep saying, okay, now we're going here, now we're going here, because it's so easy to get complacent. It is, and our business is very competitive. Within our partnership, it's always competitive. You know, John Good and Peter Cushel and I always had a bet, you know, who's going to have the best production that year? And it's always, you hate to come out on the short end of that stick because there was money involved, but it was you do have to have to reevaluate and set that bar and figure it out.

Do you have a favorite book? You know, I've got my favorite books that I love to read for business and I've got my, just don't have to think about it books. But I mean, one of my favorite books is the richest man in Babylon. Okay. Most of what we do is investment real estate. And it's a book about, it's a book of parables that a scribe. basically was, for lack of a better word, interviewing the richest man in Babylon.

And what were the tidbits that he was using to not only create wealth, but keep it, invest it and let it grow. And I made my kids read it. It's just a short read, and it's not a hard read, but it's very pertinent in day-to-day, but it's a great book. Good. Well, we do talk about, you know, like if we were. are noobes just getting started again, you know, the quicker you can understand how money works and how you can start investing and having money, start to pay you money, and, you know, all that kind of stuff.

It would be good to read that book early. It was very good. Start to figure it out. You got to start with the end in sight and plan for that. And how about a favorite movie? You know, Top Guns always been my favorite movie. I love it. It was great to see the sequel come out.

this year. Did you like it? I did. I did too. It's entertaining. Still like the first one better. I do too. But, uh, okay, how about a favorite word? If I had to have a favorite word, be positivity. I love it. You got to be positive. Positive attitude goes a long way. Yeah. And everything that you do. It does. Relationships and in the light. Yeah. Positivity and showing up. Showing up. Well, is there anything you'd like to promote? You know, just South Carolina.

As we do different developments across the state, it's nice to have, you know, one of a governor that's pro-business, a wonderful port and interstate system. Interstate system's hopefully going to get a little revitalization. But it's a great place to be. and I would love to see a little slowdown in the influx of people coming into our world, but if I do that, I'm cutting my own throat.

Come on, come on. Well, I can't thank you enough for being here. It's amazing what you've accomplished, all the different deals you've done and all you're doing for South Carolina and what you shared with Noob School today. So thank you very much. I appreciate it. I appreciate it. Thank you.

Okay. We'll just keep it rolling. You want to start over? Can you quick question for you. How's Point Set Highway? Is that a good place to invest these days? You know, Point Set Highway is an odd dynamic that the city and the county are two different. The city line goes just past where the new Spinks is.

Yeah. They're on Point Set Highway. The balance is county. And it's just, it's a hodgepodge of different. Now, I think the biggest positive is that the Hartness family owns a huge chunk of that. On the left-hand side as you're going out towards Travelers Rest, and they're going to have a vested interest in what goes there. David Carter, that owns a graphic cow in town, is very entrepreneurial.

He started a little... Butcher, block in butcher is the name of his. I saw that. And it's a great spot, but he's doing takeout meat cuts. He's got beers and wines and appetizers and different things. Blocking barley, I'm sorry. Someone showed me a little thing on the, right past Spinks, maybe another couple hundred yards on the left. It's like nestled in between two crappy used car places, but it's got a,

nice building in the front. It's a plumbing supply place or something. And in the back, it's got a little warehouse. It didn't seem that expensive to me. It was like, you know, $4.80 or something. In the Opportunity Zone. The Opportunity Zone is great. What I was thinking was that I would just lease out the front building

because it's a pretty good spot. I'd make the warehouse into, like, I'd put some storage back there and maybe a little office. And you just put all my business stuff back. there and make it in the opportunity zone. It's a good spot. Yeah. It's in the path of progress.

At some point in time, Travelers rest and that Cherrydale is going to grow back into downtown. If I get close, I might send it to you and let you eyeball it. Just tell them, because I don't even know what the price per square foot should be. I don't know if it's cheap or not. How would I know? All right. So he's going to ask me some questions.

We call this little, we call this turn the tables. So go right ahead, Hunter. What questions do you have for me, sir? I mean, I'd love to know what the best questions my guys asked you last week during our training session. Did they ask you any good questions? Well, I'm trying to remember they did not ask a lot of questions. You know, the things I was talking about, I was, I mean, first of all, I kept having to remind myself, these people out here are making a pile of money, right?

Ten of them make a million dollars a year. That's what good told me. So, I mean, you know, they're doing well. So when I ask them, who here's thought about doing a podcast? And they all just like, you know, nobody was it, you know. And then I suggested somebody learn Chinese. So they get all the Chinese business coming to town. That did not get a big, don't want to clap for that one, you know.

I said, who hears you uses Twitter? It was like one guy. And I said, I used Twitter. I found two guys. that are in the southeast doing real estate, they're looking for things to buy. Storage facilities and there's something else, strip malls or something, strip malls.

And one guy raised his hand, he said, I know those guys, I've talked to them. They were on it. That's good. So I was thinking, you know, a lot of these ideas could be very helpful, but very few people had tried them. What did you look for back in your data stream days

when you were hiring the best of the best, coming out of the Citadel and Wilford. How did you find the Michael Paces and the Ben McElhannies of the world that have gone on to be successful in other industries? We put together, and I had help. I had a coach or a consultant help me with it. We put together, first of all, I had maybe 15 salespeople when I hired him to help me. And he said, let's test everyone and let's do metrics on everyone. of those 15 people, and let's see if there's any commonality between them, including what they sell per month.

What is their average per month for the last 12 months? So everyone has an average per month. And so we quickly found out that the people at the top of the grid, they went to Clemson, Wofford, Citadel Furman. They're all kind of from around here. They were athletes to some degree. I mean, if they weren't D1 athletes, they were like good high school athletes. and they were just athletic people. They were involved in their fraternity.

They weren't just in the fraternity. They were like, you know, president fraternity, those kind of people. Usually, they eventually knew someone who already worked at the company. So they kind of had to pass the good person test. Oh, yeah, Hunter, we know him is a good guy. He should come to work here. So we put these grids together. And so I would only interview people that went to one of those four schools

that was from the area because I didn't want to hire someone from Salt Lake City who went to Wofford who was going to work for me for a year and then move home. So around here, people, plus that help with the culture. And then once you found

a couple of Lorbox and Paces, they pretty much would put you on to the next, the McElhaney's and the whoever. So once you get your core established, they can take you to the next group of people. It becomes quite easy.

We've had great success with very similar. Yeah. But it is interesting that the athletes, they're driven. Yeah. They're very driven. They want to play. Self-motivated. Yeah.

The guys that are going to do the work behind the scenes that are going to be successful. Right, right. I got another question. He just killed me. Sure. How much money do you make playing the saxophone on the street? Let's see. Hourly.

Um, probably 30 bucks an hour. Pretty good. It's not bad, really. Yeah. I've saved every bit of it. I've got a suitcase, just full of greasy ones. It's just, they're like trophies. They like trophies.

They just pull it out and look at it. Look at all that money. I love it. So, yeah, it was a nice moment because, you know, you probably heard me playing when we were neighbors. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. At the possum. Yeah, that's true.

That's true. So, but to get good enough where I could go out there and play. and people wouldn't complain was a good starting point. But now that they actually put money in there, you know, I've gotten, I'm moving up the ladder. Well, I've enjoyed hearing you play, and I got your CD. Good, thank you. It's good.

Thank you. Very good. Anything else? I think that's all I got. Well, gentlemen, we've done it again.