Noob School - Episode 77: Promoting the Southeast with John Good

Episode Date: June 14, 2023

John Good of NAI Global joins John on today's episode of Noob School, looking back through their sales careers and giving excellent advice along the way. Join them, take in their stories, and to hear a little about what makes Greenville South Carolina such a special place. Check out what Noob School has to offer here: https://www.schoolfornoobs.com/ 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

All right, welcome back to the Noobcast. Today I've got a good friend named John Good. John is the CEO and president of N.A.I. Earl Furman, headquartered right here in Greenville. They're one of the largest commercial real estate firms in the southeast, and they have at least 120 or so reps. that go out and make it happen every day. So, John, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for having me, John.

Yeah, man. So why don't we start by, I know you've been with Earl Furman for a long time. Just tell us a little bit about the company, the history of the company, and kind of where you are today. Sure, happy to. Sure. So the company's really a combination of three or four main companies that were all founded at different times.

The original company, Earl Furman, was founded in 86 by Earl Furman here in town. And then the NIA Columbia office was founded about 52 years ago. Wow. It was part of Eden's and Avant, which ended up separating, and Edens went one way, and the brokerage company went the other. And then in North Carolina, it was Piedmont Triad, NIAPont Triad, which is about 50 years old as well. Okay. So all those companies, we wrote Earl Furman,

rolled those companies up into one company over a period of the last 15 years to create this, you know, very large commercial real estate brokerage and management company across the Carolinas. Okay. And what's the advantage to having three companies like that rolled up versus just having Greenville? So the advantage for our shareholders, we have 35 shareholders, and the advantage for the shareholders and the brokers and by way of the brokers and the property managers is really the the clients. So we have access to deals across all the Carolinas. So prior to us joining, we would

have a broker in the Columbia market that might be an expert in the industrial space, but they've never sold an apartment deal in their life. And there was no one in Columbia that did apartments. But the Greenville office has an apartment team. So that relationship that the person had in the in the Columbia office is transformed when they bring in an expert for multifamily. And now they get to help their client that trust them and our experts that sell apartments get another deal that they get to sell. So really it's a win-win across those offices. And we can track 50 transactions a year across the offices where you know,

you as a salesperson may have the relationship but not the expertise for a specific deal. Yeah. That's one of the other offices has that. Interesting. I know from working with, we're talking to and working with some of your salespeople over the years, that you're really big on working in teams. People have partners at least two, maybe three? Yeah, so we've had large teams and small teams and still have some individuals.

Earl, probably in the late 80s, early 90s, started bringing people in as teammates. He was really the first person in the upstate anyway doing this. And it's really been refined over those decades to now. It's interesting that we actually have a number of our competitors that when they talk to somebody that say they want to get in the business, they actually send them to us and say, these people know how to bring in young people and put them on a team. But in any professional service firm, real estate maybe is slow to adopt. Late adopters, not earlier adopters. And so if you think about the other professional service firms, law firms, accounting firms, engineering firms, they all did a much better job bringing in associates and building leverage off of the experience of your 25-year career, but too busy to do some of the grunt work. And so we've really perfected that.

So we have some, again, large teams, small teams, teams that have been together for 25 years. teams that may be together for two or three years and then split and join another team. But it's been really productive way to expand the business. And again, expand the capacity for the clients, which is the ultimate goal. Right. So instead of like if I work for you, just working by myself, I would team up with, let's say, another person or maybe two other people that had one with apartments, one with warehousing and one with office space. We all had our expertise, and as we brought clients to the table, we could help them? No, most of those teams are more permanent teams, so it would be all multifamily.

So you might be on the apartment team, and you may be due, and your role may just be underwriting the deal, putting together financials. So teams are all one specialty. They're generally one specialty. And then on an individual transaction, two of those teams may come together with an expertise. Okay. You know, so generally speaking, the teams are all focused on the same thing. Okay. Over the last five or six years, if you've been in any of our markets in the southeast,

the residential markets with the population growth that we've seen in the southeast, have been very busy. So we have some teams that our newest teams are just doing land development. Exactly. Zoning, entitling properties to do neighborhoods and new apartments. Well, the team thing, brings me to something that we just touched on earlier. I know when you and I, you know, both from Greenville, both went to local high schools and played sports,

and you were the captain of the jailman soccer team in 93. Now you're telling everybody how old I am. Well, I don't know. Maybe you were slow. I don't know. They all think I'm older than I really am, so they're going to figure out what happened to my hair. Well, anyway, you were the captain of the team. And first of all, was it a good team?

We were pretty good. Riverside and East Side generally had our number back in those years. We were not always in the same conference. So that was nice sometimes. But yeah, we were okay. Well, I guess my point was that I see over and over again, not always, but very often, you know, good athletes, high school or college, particularly people that had some leadership on the team,

they do well in sales and ultimately in business. And I think it's because, you know, we're too old to play soccer or basketball anymore, but we can keep competing at something, trying to break last year's record or be number one on the board or, you know, whatever it is. You know, I think we are always looking for athletes, high school and college athletes. And it's interesting when you find, and you can tell very quickly when you find an athlete that wants to excel more than his teammates, but still wants the team to win, versus an athlete who just wants to excel more than his teammates and doesn't care about the team. Right. And it's really the reason we've been successful is we have hyper competition within our organization, but we're all still. working together all the time and we don't have anybody that's out just for themselves.

Right. You can't let any of those people in. No. Well, they get in every now then. You've got to have the courage to throw them out. Which, you know, when we have looked at mergers with other companies and when they haven't had the courage to make those decisions, we know that we're not going to be a cultural fit to get together.

Right. So you went from man. to Furman. I did. I was the last of a long line of Furman people. And my father told me that you don't have to go to Furman after two older brothers and four cousins

and two aunts and two uncles and two parents. And I said, so I'll be the one that everybody thought couldn't get in. So you had to go. I had to go. Yeah. So great experience. you know, Furman was a, you know, an educational challenge coming out of a public high school that, you know, you didn't really do a lot.

Yeah. It didn't take me a lot in high school to make okay grades. Right. And, you know, they made you work. And it was fantastic. Yeah. But, you know, you earned everything you were going to get at Furman. Yeah, I bet.

I tried to take a summer school class there one time, and it didn't go so well. So down hard. So political science major? So I didn't even know what political science was when I got there. I went in as a business management major and thought the professors in that department were boring. And I had a professor that in political science, I took his class and I absolutely loved his class and loved debating. and love the energy and changed my major right after that class. You know, everybody at Furman, their purpose is to send people to grad school.

It's like 80% of the kids going to grad school from Furman. And, you know, I was not going to go be a lawyer, but all my classmates, you know, ended up going to law school, but it was a wonderful experience and really enjoyed, you know, understanding, you know, how decisions affect people. Which is, you know, again, I try to, I try to stay away from it because I'll get engulfed in politics. So it's easier for your sanity to avoid it. And just, you know, go vote and ignore the TV the rest of the year.

Yeah, you're not going to change it watching television. No. Yeah, but it is interesting. We both majored in the same thing, and got just enough of that to have at least appreciation for what's going on. I'm sure you had some good professors there. A. Phenomenal professor. So Don ASE was my first professor, the reason I changed my major.

And he was, you know, people can tell I'm from here when they hear me speak. and Don's from North Andover, Massachusetts, so he just enjoyed hearing me talk or making fun of the way I talked. Yeah, yeah. So he and Glenn Halvindubauer, you know, some, yeah, so Brett and Ellison, I mean, we had some phenomenal polysyche professors at Furman doing my time there. So was there a real estate track that you could have gone down at Furman? Not at Furman. So my intent was always to be in the real estate business, but I was going to go, I want to go do something different and get rich because you need a lot of money to be in the real estate business. Right.

So I just want to be an investor. I just wanted to sit on a beach and have someone send me a rent check and not do anything. Be retired by the time I was 30, was the plan. And so that led me to my first career, which was. It was a little interesting pathway to get there, but my MBA. So I bought a franchise of a restaurant in a small town because my father had developed grocery stores in small towns. The plan was I would put these in all of his grocery stores, hire someone else to run them, and then be sitting on the beach the whole time I was 30. Investing in real estate.

Investing in real estate. So it's easy. What was the franchise? It's called Papa's Pizza to Go. Not to be confused with Papa Johns. It was actually older than Papa Johns. It was found in a little small town in Georgia and kind of run out of Atlanta. It has since sold.

There maybe were 35 of them left. My old restaurant is still there in North Georgia. I gave you a lot of credit for trying, man. Well, it was successful. So I met someone who had four. We borrowed all the money. So we're about $250,000 when I was 22 years old. You know, with his credit, me running it.

And two years into it, we were about to pay it off. So I was going to be 24 years old making a lot of money. And I was like, then I'll be stuck. Yeah. And, you know, working 80 to 100 hours a week was not really the way I wanted to spend the next 50 years of my life. So I sold out to my partner. Just went ahead and went straight into the real estate business, realizing that maybe it was going to be. a little harder than just sitting on the beach collecting a check.

Yeah. I love that, though. I didn't know that about you. I did, of course, did some research, but I didn't see that. It doesn't pop up on LinkedIn. But, you know, we, we, you know, I'm asked to recommend things to new business people, new salespeople. And, you know, very often I give them, you know, my pat answer is what the guy did, Reed Hoffman, who started LinkedIn. So, you know, he was out in California, and so he kind of knew the pattern of how people

developed things that became rich out there. So he, you know, he got a couple of jobs in his 20s where he learned how to be a project manager, then learn sales, then learn marketing, then learn finance, and all of a sudden he's about 30, and he's like, okay, now I've got to come up with my idea because now I know how to do it. And, of course, it was the online resume, LinkedIn, and he crushed it. So to be prepared is smart. other way to do it is just to jump in like you did. I did the same thing. My didn't work as well as

your did, but I started to understand what it was like to put something out there and try to make it work and get hit in the face and all that kind of stuff. So interesting. Yeah, so I got to, you know, got to borrow the money, got to hire and fire everybody, got to do all the marketing, all the inventory and ordering and, you know, the training and, you know, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, was a great experience and one that, you know, it was proof to me, you know, that understand that after two years I didn't want to work that hard again, but it was proof to me that in this country you could really be successful if you're willing to work hard. Yeah.

You know, because that job didn't take anything other than hard work. Right. Yeah. And I made the mistakes on the people, you know, with the staff. Yeah. But they turned over so quickly. You had new staff, so you could be a new person. Right.

In another month, they're all going to be gone. You're going to have new people. That's right. That's right. So you had that experience. I mean, again, probably the only person slaying pizza right out of Furman, too. Oh, there's no doubt about that. No, no doing that.

Yeah. They're all going to law school. You're doing what? Yeah. Yeah. So did you know Earl Furman? So Earl. and I were fraternity brothers with 28 years in between us.

Okay. And so he sat behind us at the Furman football games. Okay. And I knew him from him sitting behind us because he had two kids that were a little bit older than me and two kids a little bit younger than me. Yeah. And the younger ones generally like spilled their drinks on us, you know, during the games. Yeah.

So you knew him through Furman and through SAE. But it's a good reason to join him. eternity and to go to the football games. That's right. Be social. Yep, no doubt. Yeah. Interesting.

Well, I know he left the firming company to start his own company. And that would have been 86? 86. And then you joined. In January 2000. 2000. And then 11 years later, after being outstanding broker, you took over. I was an okay broker.

Okay. I was better than a lot, but I wasn't the best. You must have been pretty good. I was, again, good at organizing things, not just my own deal. And what were your area of specialty? So I was an industrial broker and did a little bit of investment. You know, with my dad's background, I did a little bit of land development. Okay.

And a little bit of investment, but mainly industrial. So I was calling on warehouse and manufacturers and manufacturers all day long. trying to fill up big buildings and get people to develop more big buildings. And then in 2011, you got the opportunity to run the show. And I guess Earl wanted to go back and maybe not run the show anymore. So those that were around in 2009 in the real estate business kind of remember what happened. So the end of aid, it fell apart. Yeah.

A little bit about what's happening now. different but the same in that the banks just dried up. And it's back to, you know, we need regulation. But the federal government went to every bank all at the same time and said, your liquidity ratios aren't right. You need to improve them by 10%. And so every bank made the same decision at once, and they took 10% of the liquidity out of the market,

and then all the deals were upside down, and it just collapsed everything. And so we didn't have anything to do. There weren't any deals to be done in nine. So we were sitting around and said, huh, the company's, you know, 25 years old, maybe we should update our strategic plan. That's how it took us, you know, to tend. Well, now we were just trying to stay afloat. By 10, we hired a gentleman, consultant, come in and help us do a new 25-year plan.

Through that process, Earl admitted that he hated being in charge. You know, he liked doing deals and solving problems for class. clients, you know, not making sure the copiers were working. And, you know, the lease wasn't about to, I mean, you know, you'd think it's like the cobbler shoes, you know, lease is coming up or whatever. And so out of that led a plan because I'd had no interest in running. I was like, I'm not going to take my mentor's job, number one, even if he says he doesn't want to do it. And there were several of us in my generation that were certainly capable of. kind of taking the reins.

Yeah. But once all of them said no, we refused to do it. Here you go. I was like, okay, fine. Yeah. Well, you've had it. Gosh, it's been 12 years now? 11 years.

11 years. 12, maybe, yeah, coming up on 12. Well, what do you have planned for like for the next 10 years? What would you like to see the company become? So, you know, one, I told them there was certainly no way. You know, Earl ran it for about 25. I was like, you know, I certainly don't want to run any longer than that. And in our business, it is very difficult to find someone on the managerial side, the operation side,

because frankly, doing the deals is much more fun. You know, so, you know, it's like trying to find a managing partner or a law firm. The person that's going to be good at taking care of all the lawyers is not necessarily going to be the best lawyer. but you need them to be a great lawyer to understand all the lawyers. So it's complicated. But for us, it's truly where's the growth going to happen? And all of our shared resources, say, the Southeast is going to continue to be the winner in the economy for another decade. And then what we've been doing for the last decade is when we put our people,

in a place to excel their clients excel and if our people are excelling and their clients are excelling then we will always win and so every year we pick one or two new things we try to do that add capacity for us to add value to those clients and we'll keep winning yeah and do you have a headcount target for your sales guys but no real head count target other than then again, if there's a place that we don't have capacity to provide you good service in our target market, which is just the Carolinas, we don't necessarily see ourselves expanding to an Atlanta. You know, the N.I structure is a licensee structure.

So there are other N.A.I. offices around. And where they're good N.A.I. offices, that's good for us because they send business to us and we work just like we own them as well. where they're small offices and they don't have a lot of capacity, it's not good for us. So if there's a smaller market that's kind of within our area that we can take over or they can join us and we can add more capacity, then we will do it. But we're not going to go out and, yeah,

we're not going to go out and borrow money and do all that. We're going to wait for that opportunity to come to us. So there's not enough money in it. I mean, our structure is truly, the reason we've been winning is because our structure is leaving the value in the salespeople's hands. The company is really just sharing a tiny little piece that then's owned by the 35 largest producers in the company. So it's really just a mutual shared services platform. That's great.

And so just not too long ago, two years, a year and a half, money was so plentiful and so cheap. and of course that changed in an instant and now it's very expensive and hard to get which means your customer is having a harder time doing deals right and so what kind of things are you doing to allow the deal flow to continue? Yeah so you know when banks complain for a decade about how low rates were

and then they doubled the rates and then they don't want to loan the money out And it's a double whammy for them because they're losing their deposits, which is back to their liquidity ratios. They can't loan anything and they lose deposits, so they have to pay more on their deposits. But then they're still scared to loan the money. It's really been an interesting time to watch it. So lots of things that can occur, and we're seeing a multitude of things. The first is we're seeing a tremendous amount of additional equity going into deals.

So we are seeing deals that would have been an 80% loan, 20% equity, that very quickly back October became a 60% debt and 40% equity. Those are even pushing to 50-50 now. A lot of that has to do with the debt coverage ratio, which is more not a financial show, but the coverage ratio in there with rates as high as they are unless you put more equity into the deals. So we're seeing a lot more equity in the deals. But because the deal volume is slowed down, there's a lot more equity out there. A lot of the more local family office type investors is what we would talk about, have a tremendous amount of additional equity because the deal volume where they would normally invest that money has really dried up. So we have shifted from selling to the institutional owners to the family office owners.

and using that equity to close more deals. Because they have cash. They have cash. And then the sellers that need to sell, you know, to keep their opportunities open, you know, we're now seeing a reasonable amount of owner financing. Of course, much more difficult unless people own things outright. Right. But we're seeing a pretty significant increase in owner finance deals,

which is very interesting. And it's really, it's fun for us to see, And again, this just goes back to, you know, buy, you know, a little bit of, you know, antagonistic view that I have and that, you know, people push markets up and down to make money off of it. You know, it's just the reality of what it is. And so when markets go up and down, there's a lot of money to be made. It's not necessarily always by Main Street. But you have a time right now where major institutional owners are dumping assets. They're exiting office space rapidly because they're like, oh, people aren't going to come back to work.

And that's the case. They are not wrong in a lot of markets. But in a lot of our markets, smaller markets that don't have a lot of office space, don't have a lot of national owners. The owners are local engineers and attorneys and attorneys. and insurance agents and things like that, those folks see the value of being together. You know, the cost center space, different story. But if you're trying to build something together

and you're trying to do it just through a computer screen, we don't think it's very effective. And so in a lot of our markets, we're seeing office buildings being walked away from institutional people. And so local investors, they have the money, can come in, pick those things up, retentate those. And eventually the institutional people,

because again, they've got to spend their money somewhere. So three years, they'll be right back. And they'll say, oh, we made a mistake, and they'll buy stuff back. And there's money to be made. So there is certainly great opportunity happening in the market that's tough. Wonderful. That's good news. I know you guys will figure it all out, too, all the angles.

I love that. There's no, you know, there's nothing that a creative mind can't solve. Right. And that's the best thing about our business is there are million ways to do every single transaction. And a lot of them will get you to the same result. Right. Yeah. There's not just one way either, right?

Yeah. Cool. Give us some advice. You've seen a lot of salespeople, you know, young salespeople, people coming out of school. What are some of the attributes of the ones who do real well in your business? I think that last comment, my last comment is kind of our goal. when we find somebody is to maintain in our brain, which is really hard for leaders to do,

that you're not going to sell the way I could sell something. Because I've got to use my strengths, and you've got to use your strengths. If I try to do something the way you're going to do it or vice versa, we're bound to fail. It's very difficult to teach that innate personality and transcribe that. So our goal is to try to find.

find people and help them figure out what they're best at. It may be that they're a real low pressure, uh, facts based salesperson versus an emotional salesperson. Uh, and so you can be successful a multitude of ways. So, so we're looking for someone who's willing to learn their best way. Um, and then the things we're looking for, it's, it's, when you take away the fear, then it's really easy for a salesperson to succeed. And if you can't take away their fear, if they're just afraid, they're never going to get there. You've got to have the confidence that what you're doing is not really trying to sell something. Earl would say you've never going to sell anybody anything. You never convince anybody to do something that they don't want to do.

you're just trying to make sure you're explaining to them where the market is and giving them all the options so they get to make a decision on their own. And I think that really was his hallmark of how he got to be to the level of success that he's had. That's a good way to put it. And people that are new to sales or looking at sales from the outside, they still think that we're selling people's stuff. Right. and we're clever or we're pushy or whatever. And it's really, it's trying to, if we can just talk to enough people that will tell us what their problems are, what their opportunities look like,

and we'll just see if we can help them. Right. That's it. And it's easy enough to say when, if they're honest, you can say, there's not a solution for what you want. Yeah. And, you know, we have lots of times that we tell people that, that, you know, for what you want, the price that you're willing to pay,

there's not a solution for you. I'm sorry. And I had one yesterday that said, hey, would you still do this deal? It's like, it's the weekend, man. Why are you bothering me? I mean, that was six months ago. But they didn't believe when we talked to them six months ago

that there was only one solution for them in this market. It was to build a new building. They're expensive, and this is what it's going to cost. And they spent six months, and they rode all around and wasted hours But again, they had to get to where they understood and they were educated about the market to where they came back to say, okay, this is a solution now. Have you helped people develop any of these little pockets around Greenville that are like the place on the river that Parker did, Drew Parker did, and there's Hampton Station. Have you helped with those?

So we've done a lot of, you know, it's interesting. Earl, those people, there would be a lot of people that would be a lot of people that see. this at no Earl, there'd be a lot of them that don't. Those that know him know that he's probably the most humble person on the planet. And his four kids, he never talked about what he did. He never talked about the deals he did. And we were all together one night several years ago and we were talking about something new that was happening near Earl's house. And I just started talking about that deal and other deals. And they were just kind of blown away about the fingerprints that their father had

on the community in transactions. So, yeah, we've done lots of the deals. We represented the city and probably 80% of the acquisitions for Unity Park over the last decade. That came out great, by the way. Yeah, I mean, I was at the Commons today. I mean, it's phenomenal to go somewhere on a Monday

that you can barely get a parking space you know, at lunchtime, you know, just wouldn't ever thought that Greenville could have this many people here and join, you know, what the community has put together for them. So, so we worked on the commons, you know, Earl representing the city right now to sell City Hall to be redeveloped and a much better use of space and then move the city, a block over into a new facility that works better for them. Now, that's the one I read about, of course, you know better than I do, but It's the one right next to the bohemian, right? Yes.

So the city's under contract to buy half of that building and move city hall into that building. I think, because I live down there, and I just think that would be remarkably good. Right. Because that's going to be so pretty. They'll fix it up so nice right there. It's going to be beautiful. They'll actually preserve the land in between the building and the river, so there's actually another building pad out there.

And so it'll all stay green grass if the city can finalize their deal, which is also one of them. city council's main goals of having Greenville look beautiful as well as be functional. And then we've had tremendous influence. We have a lot of industrial brokers, so we have tremendous influence over the new businesses that have come to town. You know, every now and then, the Citadel generates a nice graduate. You know, we've got a couple of those.

You know, it's rare. We have a city manager as a Citadel graduate now. I understand. It's rare. But we've been involved in a lot of the industrial parks and a lot of the industrial development. That's bringing jobs and new people into the community. Augusta Grove on 25. We've got another group looking to move into a building that one of our investment groups just completed.

That'll be another round of new jobs. We've worked on pieces of those deals. And so it's fun to, you know, that was brand new when I started 20 plus years. years ago. It was just the woods and we were riding around with Vardry, Ramseur, who was running Dawson Center. This was Dawson Center's expansion to continue recruiting companies there. And you've got to be a real old person to remember Vardry. And all that the business community has brought, you know, which has led to the ability for the community to afford to do what it's done downtown. Yeah. Be the place that has a

attracted to everybody here. So I only live down there. I don't do business like you do with the city, but I'll give you my opinion on why it's so darn good. And again, I get to travel to other cities around the southeast, you know, Charleston, Louisville, Columbia, you know, wherever. I'm not even going to count Atlanta in the southeast anymore. And the big difference is our place is very clean and safe.

Mm-hmm. And the other places aren't. Right. Charleston is dirty and not safe. Right. So who would, I mean, I'm not that scared being a big guy. I'm not really that nervous about walking down King Street. But if I was not, if I was a woman walking down Main Street, I mean, there's thugs down there.

They let them do it. Right. Yeah, and I think it's interesting to see, you know, the comparison of the big city. And I think it has so much to do with the vast majority of people move into the Southeast and moving to South Carolina. I tell people, again, I grew up here, and I tell people all the time, from kindergarten to 12th grade, I went back, and I could name five friends that moved here that weren't originally from here.

And I can ask any one of my three kids, and they can name five kids that moved here this month. New people. Yeah. Of new people coming here. And it's this, it's this, you know, ignoring the safety of cities and things in other markets that I think has been a big part of it. You know, because there's still plenty of great big cities that are fantastic.

I was in Boston a couple weeks ago. It's still fantastic. They're pieces of Philly. They're still fantastic. But Washington, D.C. has been ruined in the last five years as far as just it's dirty and you don't feel safe. And you don't want to be, you know, you wouldn't want to your wife and your kids. to walk around at night. Yeah.

So it's really a shame that it has happened. Yeah. And that people ignore it as a cause for why, you know, I mean, San Francisco, you know, was a phenomenal place to go. It was the best. Yeah. 15 years ago, even 10 years ago. Yeah.

We had some of our most favorite vacations. My wife and I did. Mm-hmm. And we never took our kids there. They were still too little to enjoy it then when we used to go. And now they'd be like, why did you bring us here? It's terrible. Right.

Well, I agree. So my top two things for Greenville are the safety and the cleanliness. And then, you know, people point to the main street and the waterfall. I'm like, I love all that. But there's plenty of other places to have a great main street in a feature. Right. But you have to have the other two to have people flocking here. Right.

It's unreal. Can you describe for the sake of the salespeople who want to do big deals? Can you describe one of your biggest deals ever, how you did it? Again, the biggest deals generally end up being, they take a real long time. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, we had a big deal last year in Columbia that Tom and Tom Bo Milliken, Tom, Tom's been in the business, maybe 55 years. Wow. And it was a large land deal for the county to bring in economic development opportunities.

And that deal, Tom, started on 20 years before. Wow. And, you know, so it just takes a long time. Yeah. I sold the land for Fleur, you know, a long time ago that, you know, everybody there got mad at me, which sometimes happens. But, you know, Fleur was tired of owning the walking trail. So they had 26 acres next to the campus that had a walking trail on it.

That's now an apartment complex. Okay. That took five years to do that for Fleur, just zoning and all the other kinds of things. And who would be mad at you about that? The employees at Fleur, they lost their walking trail. Well, they should talk to the CEO floor. Right. Right.

So they lost their track. But a lot of, again, a lot of our transactions, you know, we were involved in putting together the site where Project One is that Bob Hughes ended up finishing, which you did a fantastic job. Yes, beautiful. You know, but if you remember, I mean, that block, you know, was the former Woolworth and a couple other, you know, really underutilized vacant buildings. and one or two open. And you remember the bridge, there used to be a building over the square that was empty.

Yeah. That wasn't hooked to anything. We're like, who owns this thing? I never knew what that thing was for. Yeah, it was crazy. Yeah.

You know, there was title questions, literally to who actually owned it because it was in an air right space. So over the city's property. But so we started assembling that in 2002 or 03. And, didn't finish until through the 8-9 downturn,

which again led to Bob coming in, and we put together the first couple tenants in Tower 1, along with Bob, who brought Clemson as the anchor. So that was a fun deal. We had a client that we represented that opened the first business on Pendleton Street, which is now Main Street. They changed the name.

It used to be Pendleton Street at the Army Navy store, which is now gone. Yeah. And they changed that to Main Street and carried that all the way up to the current Pendleton Street. Okay. That was in probably 2000, 2001. But when we opened the spa at the West End, she was the first new business to open on that stretch of Main Street in 30 years. Yeah. When Knox was there for the ribbon cutting, next door to that, there were two liquor stores.

two doors apart on Pendleton Street to give you an idea. And again, the baseball stadium wasn't there. I mean, it was, you know, so the changes that we have been able to be a part of and get on the leading edge of those kinds of things. It's really been fun to watch, you know, the connection of Main Street to Augusta Road. I mean, Gus Road always went there. Yeah. But there was this zone of no development.

It's getting closer. You know, picked in piece by piece by piece as that connected through. It's really been exciting. The exciting things that, you know, I was on the Housing Authority Board that Nancy Whitworth asked me to be on. And so obviously, I credit Nancy with as much as anything for the city. So I was happy to do it. And that was near and dear to my heart. But 10 years is a long time to be involved.

But we rebuilt the entire housing stock. of the housing authority during that 10-year period and expanded the units along with the new units where Scott Towers used to be. Well, it's interesting, you know, for the sake of the listeners, you know, all the big deals take a while. Do anything significant takes a while.

And if it looks like it's going to be a really fast big deal, there's probably something wrong with it. But, you know, I read the book on the Tommy White book, which I'm sure you read. Oh yeah. And all of his projects had 20 and 30 year time horizons on them. Right. And they seemed to all hit like right toward the end of his life. Right. It was just like one thing after another was hitting and they were like, wow. And he's like, I've been working on this for 30 years, you know? Overnight success. Yeah. So I'll tell you a story.

Do you remember when the river, when the river area got developed, like when the river place building went up? What year was that? Roughly. Probably 5, 6. 05.06. So talking about a big deal. My dad, when he moved to Greenville in 1972, went to work for Tommy White and Buck Mickle. And his first job as a young MBA was to figure out who owned all that land on the other side of the river, where river places.

And nobody knew anything. And he had to go just piece by piece. and there was a big board in Tommy's office where they were putting it together, who owned what? And eventually it took like, I think, 10 years. Just to figure out who to talk to. Oh, yeah.

And then it took another while before they got them to sell. It's, I was, you know, so our Greensboro and Burlington, North Carolina offices, you know, when you go to these other markets, you know, Greenville has held up as a shining example of success so many places in the southeast. And it's fun. to find those people and talk to them about you know they asked well what'd you do what'd you do like

like I did it all myself you know just made a decision and they're overnight success and I have to remind them especially in Greensboro uh about you know the bridge you know so the Liberty Bridge that nobody talks about yeah is you know there was this massive petition to stop it yeah you know all the business owners on that end of Main Street signed a petition, said we don't want this to happen because we were going to have to drive an extra block around when they tore out the Camperdown Bridge. I mean, it was like 2,500 signatures. And the city council at the time and the city manager at the time had the courage to do it. And they weren't worried about getting reelected. They were worried about a 25-year plan rather than a two-to-three-year plan.

Right. I mean, and the articles in the paper, I mean, you can go back and pull up the articles and the op-eds and editorials about we're going to spend millions of dollars on a park. Yeah. You know, how crazy would that be, rather than all these other problems with roads that we have. We're going to tear down a bridge. We need new bridges. It was really interesting.

And I think it's the answer to, if you can have a 25-year view. versus a three-year view, you can really do special things, but you still have to be able to make a tough decision when other people are afraid to make tough decisions. And wouldn't you say that's one of Knox White's real attributes is the longer-term view on things? Knox wants to do something, and he says, this is going to be my legacy.

And as soon as he does it, he finds another one. And he's like, this is going to be my legacy, and he finds another one, which is amazing, because he's left multiple legacies already. It's been amazing. Because, you know, he pours the passion into each one that's difficult. I mean, Unity Park, you know, 70% of counsel didn't want to have anything to do with it. And they were still buying stuff over there.

Yeah, yeah. So. Well, he's been a big part of it, man. It's been awesome. Do you have any, any, any, um, any, other lessons learned or advice for young sales reps? So I think advice is certainly understanding and it's advice in life. You know, the tough decision, the easy decision is always the short-term decision.

You know, if I'm going to get skinny, you know, immediately know that I can't eat something I want. You know, I've got to make the tough decision. If I won't be successful, I may have to give something up. and work a little harder. Yeah. So I think the tough decision is generally the right decision. Right. In this world, and we like to take it easy.

Yeah. So. That's a good one. And then in terms of favorites, give us your favorite book. I got a bunch of, so my parents both started out as teachers. And so my, the deal in our house, was you could stay up as late as you want as long as you're reading in your room. So I've got a lot of favorites.

I love Rich Dad, Poor Dad. It's a great book. There's a Schwartzman book, Stephen Swartzman's book. It's not the one he wrote what it takes. It's a biography on him, not an autobiography that I'll tell you, because It's been a while since I've read it, but King of Capital. Great book that talks about how he kind of built what he was, what he's turned into black stone. And how about your favorite word?

Perseverance. Perseverance. That's a good one. That's easy for sales. That's a good one, yeah. I would also say, you know, you've got perseverance, but it's all, the same area because some people will try this perseverance and then that perseverance and that doesn't do it 20 years plus of perseverance and you're going to be successful right um my one more story about my daddy when i was in my early 20s i was living in california and i said hey dad give me some advice i want to be

successful you know what should i do and he sends me a letter and he listed out all the guys he knew successful, built businesses and stuff. And the odd thing, he put the dates of how long they worked at it. And they were all about 20 years. He said at 20 years, you know you know what you're doing, you've built your network, you know you've compounded your business, and you can keep going after that, but all of them about 20, they're pretty good at what they did. So it's good to persevere, but know what you want to be in.

That's a good one. And then in terms of promotion, is there anything you want to promote today to the millions, millions of internet viewers? That's easy. Tell me. Oh, it's the southeast. The southeast. Yeah. I mean, there was an article this morning that California is going to do away with diesel trucks.

Right now, the majority of the products that come into this country from overseas come into California. And it's really what the Southeast has really been doing since 2018. And we forgot about it, but in 2018, they expanded the Panama Canal. So it can handle a super tanker. And that product has been moving to the Southeast. So it's going to continue to improve. Southeast is going to continue to grow. Successful businesses are going to come here for workforce.

Workforce is the number one thing people have been looking for pre-pandemic. and that's going to continue. It's harder and harder and harder to find people that are interested in working and interested in working hard and want to be creative. And so we think the Southeast is poised to win. So we're promoting the Southeast.

Well, I'm with you. I'm with you on that. Well, thank you for taking time out to come see us today. We really appreciate it. And all the noobs appreciate that you would share some of what you've learned. Excellent. So thank you.

It's been a pleasure. Yes, sir. Thank you. All right.