Chris Powers: Starting A Real Estate Empire at 17, Focus, Podcast Flywheels
This week’s podcast guest is Chris Powers, founder of Fort Capital, a real estate firm in Fort Worth, Texas. Chris started Fort Capital as a hungry 17-year-old who just showed up at college, bought his first house with no money down in 2004. By the time he left college, he had 12 houses. Fast forward to 2021, just this year, along with investors, they purchased $500 million of industrial real estate in Texas. Throughout the episode, we discuss Chris’s journey in real estate, investing, recruiting, and podcasting.
Chris talks about his need to be able to recruit and the importance of having a mission. We also discuss how flywheels can propel us forward, and for Chris, his flywheel is based on his podcast, Twitter, real estate business, and investors that create a virtuous cycle of growth.
We end the episode talking about Chris’ motivation at this point in his career. Chris says he’s no longer in it for the money but rather to see what it is possible to accomplish during the one life he has.
Favorite Quotes:
“You cannot find a great company on this planet that didn't start with being really good at one thing for long periods of time and just doing the same thing over and over every day but just trying to make incremental improvements, and that's compounding.” - Chris Powers
“What feels like a small improvement every day over ten years is an enormous growth, but you never get that if you are changing asset types every day, you're never compounding.” - Chris Powers
“Most people on earth don't like change. They don't like not having clarity. They don't like the idea of waking up not knowing… people would rather be unhappy and secure than happy and unsecured.” - Chris Powers
“You cannot build a great organization that continues scaling correctly when there's no kind of north star. So that's one thing that focus gives you.” - Chris Powers
“I have always thought that the value of long-term coworkers, like shared coworker relationships, is deeply unappreciated. It is something that like Silicon Valley tends to not appreciate as much because there's a lot of kind of short-term turnover, but you can really get a lot done when you’ve got the same people working next to each other on the same projects for 20 years because of that trust and communication and everything that comes with that.” - Eric Jorgenson
“Money isn't the one thing that's driving people. People are driven by wanting to feel accountable for something and wanting to work with great people and feel stimulated and have a purpose.” - Chris Powers
“Paying people is really important. And I will tell you as a business owner, there is nothing more satisfying than seeing people have these moments along the way where the financial part of it materially changes their life.” - Chris Powers
“The more content I put out online, there's just more chances for people to discover who we are. And that's a lot more fun to me than flying around the country cold calling on people to invest with us.” - Chris Powers
“Having kids has made me realize a big priority is to spend time with them.” - Chris Powers
“People on Twitter always write like how much, those questions, how much is enough to you? And the answer to that question is how big of an impact do you want to have?” - Chris Powers
“It's a game. For people that really love the game or love the action, it's a game at some point. You're not doing it to pay for things. You're not doing it to meet people. You're doing it to see what can I get done in this short, finite time I'm here, back to where we started. You only live once.” - Chris Powers
“To be a great entrepreneur and to be a leader is to be humble and have a lot of humility because ultimately, what you need to build something great, you need great people around you that are willing to follow you.” - Chris Powers
“Despite what people say or what you might hear, everybody has a sense when they're being told the truth or when they're not, or when somebody's motivations are pure, when they're not.” - Chris Powers
“A leader that is humble, that has a healthy dose of humility, will have a much better chance of going the distance because people would rather follow somebody like that than somebody that is all for one and not one for all.” - Chris Powers
Learn more about Chris Powers:
Additional episodes if you enjoyed:
Nick Huber: How to Build Leverage, Buy Businesses, and Go Viral on Twitter
Mitchell Baldridge: Defeating Taxes, Crypto Taxes, and Financial Planning
Podcast Transcript:
Eric Jorgenson: Hello again, my friends and welcome to Jorgenson Soundbox, a sandbox of sounds. This show is a parade of friends and mentors and people I just really want to learn from and share with you. And this episode in particular is one that's been on my mind for a long time, and I hope that comes through. The last episode we talked about a wide range of alternative assets with Phil Huber. And today we're going to go deep on the career of a master of one specific alternative asset, which is real estate. Chris Powers, no relation to Austin Powers, is the founder of Fort Capital, a real estate firm in Fort Worth, Texas. Chris is a humble, kind guy, so I'm just going to flex for him for a second here to make sure it is clear how amazing his story is. And then I'll let him tell it in his own words. This company started when Chris was a hungry 17-year-old, just showed up at college, freshmen, bought his first house with no money down in 2004. By the time he left college, he had 12 houses. Fast forward to 2021, just this year, along with investors, they purchased $500 million of industrial real estate in Texas. Chris still owns 80% of the business, totally removed himself from the day-to-day operations, as he says, he's learning to be an owner, and he did this in 17 years. He's only 34 years old. We talk about all this. We talk about Chris's story, the fire that got him in the game at 17 years old, we talk about the single decision to focus, how it transformed his business, the book that inspired the change, a lot of that growth happened just in the last five or six years, and we really talk about the inflection points that led there. And last, we kind of get into some of the fundamental principles that drive success in business. I think a lot of what Chris talks about is super generalizable and everyone can learn something from. Chris is a true badass, a builder, a kind guy, a mentor, a leader, a very smart operator. His podcast, The FORT, is full of his expertise in real estate and operations. If you like this episode, go check that out. Almost every question you can imagine having is answered somewhere in his podcast. He goes deep in these solo casts about his real estate expertise. He has people from all over the industry come in and talk about their experience. It's a really amazing podcast. I've learned a lot from it personally. So, if you like this, go check that out. And please enjoy this conversation arriving at your ears in 3, 2, 1.
Chris Powers, thank you for coming on this podcast.
Chris Powers: Eric, I'm so excited about doing this podcast with you, my man.
Eric Jorgenson: I appreciate you saying that. There's a hundred percent chance that I'm more excited. And I actually think that I might be too prepared for this. And I'm wondering if that's a thing that you can relate to as a podcast host yourself?
Chris Powers: I can relate. And I would say that I think what I've learned is you get really prepared and you start there, and then actually over time, I think you're going to be able to do less of it because so much of it will be stored inside. But I have spent many days preparing long and hard for some of these episodes.
Eric Jorgenson: I bet. Yeah, I think like I try to- it's the old like make a plan and then let it go astray. If you have planned hard enough, the plan itself no longer matters. I have like, I don't know, nine pages of notes, so we have nine hours of podcast. And so, I'll try to move this along. But I want to start with a question that I think is a good- it's a good revealer of somebody, and I want to know who your heroes are.
Chris Powers: That's a great question. I've been fortunate to meet a ton of people, and I don't want to use the obvious one, but my dad is one of those people. And one of the reasons I think he is a hero of mine, and this is kind of weird because when he was alive, I might- one, I was a lot younger and I definitely held him in such high regard, but now that I don't, I haven't had him in my life for ten years, I actually have a greater sense of why I now have him as a hero. Not to say if he was still here today, I wouldn't feel the same way. But my attraction to my father has actually grown as I've matured in life, and probably, I joke, all the things that I maybe- when you don't like your parents when you're young and naive, everything I didn't like my dad for early on is now what I have the utmost respect for. So that is one. In business, and I don't want to use the like super catchy names, but Sam Zell has been a hero to me in the real estate world. I just think he's a fascinating mind. The current strategy that we're executing on in industrial, a lot of that thesis came from a lot of reading of Sam Zell. Which he didn't develop property, he just bought existing buildings. And at the highest level, his thesis was all you need to focus on when you're buying an existing piece of real estate is what is my cost at purchase and what is my cost to lease it up or create the value that I need to create? When you're developing and things take four or five years, and you're dealing with all these kinds of things that you're not in control of, the re's a lot more. So, he's one. And then who we were just talking about before we started, I think if YouTube, most watched YouTube videos was a benchmark for who might be a hero, are the guys at Berkshire. They're just fascinating to me. And I get a lot of pleasure out of them. And that's business. And then I would say my modern day hero right now, and then I'll stop, is probably Pete Chambers, who's a local guy. I've had him on the podcast, and I've talked a lot about him. He has spent an enormous amount of time with me, preparing me for adulthood, preparing me for what a successful life in business could mean and how you could have a great life with that or how you could have a very successful business life and a very terrible life in general. And so, he is somebody that immediately comes to mind when I think of someone I'm talking to almost every day and sharing a lot with – a local gentleman named Pete Chambers.
Eric Jorgenson: Okay. Yeah, I think, is there a lot of parallels between Sam Zell and Munger or Munger and Buffet? Like the way you described him seems kind of like early value investor mindset in the real estate world.
Chris Powers: A hundred percent. I mean, I would say Sam Zell is very much like the Warren Buffet of real estate, other than it's not a forever hold, never sell type of thing, but it's a lot of very logical, almost take a simple idea and take it seriously is Sam Zell to a T. Nothing he's teaching is hard to understand, but at times, it can feel so simple that you feel like there's a catch.
Eric Jorgenson: Interesting, okay. There'll be a lot of like first grade related- or first grader level questions related to real estate because I'm such an outsider and you're such a pro, but that is like what kind of makes it fun. So, let's start early with your story, and your dad's a great segue to that because I know one of your most popular tweets of all time is about your dad and the career change that he made that was like a huge kind of context for you growing up and really seems like an early domino for a lot of the rest of your life.
Chris Powers: It was. Isn’t that crazy? That tweet got 260,000 likes or something like that. It went viral. And I literally had been at breakfast that morning- There's some tweets you put all this time into, or you think about a lot, and it gets like no likes. I had just gotten out of breakfast talking about my dad and just fired it off while I was in the car. And the next three days were one of my wildest times on the internet, and it went viral on Reddit and everything else. But yeah, so I was born in El Paso, Texas. And the tweet really was referencing what was the first kind of moment in my life that seemed kind of big and that I can really remember and was a life pivoting moment. My dad, excuse me, was a lawyer for 13 years, excuse me, Harvard educated, undergrad, Harvard educated law, and was a partner at a law firm. And he came home when he was 37 years old, and this is maybe why it's something I'm talking about a lot more as I'm almost 37 in a couple of years. And now that I'm putting myself in his shoes, I just can't even imagine the decision that he made. He came home and he told my mom I want to become a doctor. And so, there's multiple things at play there. One, a supportive wife. You're living a great life. Things are kind of coasting, partner at a law firm, and then boom, I'm going to go back to UTEP, University of Texas, El Paso, get my prerequisites, and then we're going to move the family to Lubbock and start medical school. And I had another kind of tweet that kind of got a lot of attention, and this was on the idea that I think it takes a long time to become a doctor. And it's been the same way for a long time. It takes eight to ten years, minimum – four years medical school, four years residency, and then if you specialize. And it just seems to me like that could be streamlined. That's not where I'm going. But we lived the next ten years of our lives totally going through this becoming a doctor phase, which is four years of not making any money, and then another four to six of really $30 to $35,000 a year. And so, I'm not- my goal isn't to paint a picture of I grew up like in poverty, but I did grow up with this weird thing where we had kind of been here, if you're on the financial spectrum, then we made a decision to go to here, but we made the decision to go to here so that we could get back here, but be doing something like we were forever passionate about because we only live once. And that was like my dad's biggest thing. And so, the two lessons I've really drawn from that are, one, we really do only live one life. That's not to say everybody should go quit their career right now and just start something new. Everybody needs to figure out where they're at. But when you have two kids, a wife, and you're really comfortable, it's just very hard to make that move. And the second is if you had just made that decision based on a financial basis, we would've never made that- adding into it that money is only going to make you so happy. And so, there was a lot I kind of drew on that set a foundation for, I think, as we talk about my life progressing and what I'm doing today, those values are so deep in me I don't think I'll ever be able to shake them and nor do I want to.
Eric Jorgenson: What age were you when this was kind of going down?
Chris Powers: I was seven when he came home- or I was probably six when he came home and said it, seven when we started, and I was a sophomore in high school when he was finally named a doctor.
Eric Jorgenson: So super formative. Yeah, that's like your whole childhood really.
Chris Powers: My whole childhood. And a lot of the seeds that were planted came from we didn't have a lot, so had to work for everything. That's probably what- I think we'll talk about it today. I have woken up every day since I can remember feeling behind. People are like behind what? And I'm like I don't know, I just feel like as soon as my eyes open up every day, it is like I just got to go do something. I become very complacent. I become irritated – not irritated in a negative way, but like I got to kind of do something. And I remember my mom, and on one end, again, the lesson of being a supportive spouse; for him to have achieved that for ten years, somebody had to support him. But for her to even allow that decision to be made or support it is huge. And you think of yourself or myself, if my wife came to me right now and said, hey, I want to go become a doctor right now, and we're going to have to move, and here's the deal. And you put yourself in those shoes, it's tough. But she would often at times, remind me that, when times were tough or we were frustrated, she would just always kind of say like if you go into the world of business and you can kind of become an entrepreneur and control your destiny, you won't have to worry about some of these financial issues that we're dealing with as a family. And that was at a very early age. And so, those two kind of combined have really set this like tone in my being that I'm always just kind of going.
Eric Jorgenson: Interesting. Where did that knowledge come from for her? Was she or someone in her family entrepreneurial?
Chris Powers: Her dad was an entrepreneur. And I think, again, you’ve got to- I'm putting myself in her shoes. You're 37, you're 13 years into a law partnership. This was also, just for this timeframe, this decision was made in the early nineties to start this, and we remember the stock run-up that happened in the late nineties. So, as we're taking on student debt and kind of heading back this way, all the law partners’ stock accounts were going- I can remember vividly not just my mom but even my dad saying like it might have been the perfect- it might've been the most unperfect time to leave if you were purely looking at like just leaving your money in the stock market. Because my dad pulled it all out to pay for medical school. And my mom jokes sometimes that as soon as he got paying off all his law degree loans, he started his medical loans. He just kind of always kind of did this. And so, I'll wrap that up by just saying I think the lessons to her were this weird, unique perspective that they kind of forced themselves to be poor for a while. It was a decision. It was not a- And I think when times were tough- or the other part I'll say about being a doctor, you're not making any money, you're working ruthlessly long hours during medical school and residency, you're gone on call all the time, you're always tired, you only get ten days off a year. And so, it's this perfect storm of like can't be home, can't make any money, but you need the support system at home. And so, I think when my mom would have her moments, which God knows, I would have probably a lot more of them, she would just kind of- her way of maybe communicating that was if you're an entrepreneur, you don't have to put yourself in this position. And so, I really built off that.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. She kind of channeled that for you. I mean, the old Josh Wolf, lik1e chips on shoulders put chips in pockets. And I mean, the fact that I don't imagine you felt like part of that decision when you were six years old, it’s just kind of the context that your life took on. And then, I mean, you're lucky that you were presented with the solution to the challenge that you felt the world, I think.
Chris Powers: I tell people all the time, I think when we were going through it, when you're in the storm, it's tough. Again, it's kind of like what I was saying about my dad, it's very often the things that are most impactful are something you're reflecting on ten years after they've happened. But that period of my life is still so ingrained in me for better or for worse.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. And you see like a very different- you said before you were like a little bit of a rebellious, naive teen. Was your displeasure tangible in the house?
Chris Powers: Yeah, to be honest, I think I was- I meant well, but when things weren't going how I wanted them to go, I tended to maybe rebel. And some of that's like the entrepreneur, like if things aren't how you want them, like go create your own path. So, it's not that I was like disrespectful to people, but I just kind of wanted to do what I wanted to do. And when you're in high school, like an example would be, hey, you're in for the night, and I would always sneak out and go to Mexico with my friends. And they're like, no, but we-
Eric Jorgenson: That's such a crazy Texas thing to do. I grew up in Detroit; we would go to Canada, which is like way more tame then going to Tijuana and seeing what’s going on.
Chris Powers: I could leave my parents' backyard, get picked up, drive, walk over the border, and be in a bar in Mexico probably within 20 to 25 minutes of walking out of my house. That's how close it is in El Paso.
Eric Jorgenson: I was not prepared for that.
Chris Powers: And it starts early unfortunately, but I got to experience a lot kind of at a young age. That was El Paso back then.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, you grow up quick in the Mexican bars as a high school kid.
Chris Powers: The first time I went over, I don't know if I've said this publicly, I think the first time I went over was probably when I was 13 years old. Because all of our friends had older brothers that were seniors in high school, and it was cool to like do that. And so yeah, I just kind of marched to the beat of my own drum. And I'll tell a funny story of why I think some of my rebellion has actually changed my life. When you're a sophomore in high school, where we're from, you get to go to Europe for 40 days during the summer. And you kind of start learning about this trip in sixth grade, so for years, it's like the thing and it's guys and girls going to Europe, 40 days, teachers are chaperoning, but it's like the trip. Well, I had gotten into just kind of a series of just being a stupid teenager. And my dad finally said you're not going to Europe. And he meant it, like there was no- I had already screwed up enough that like there was no one more chance. And so, I just told him, I said, well, great, if all of my friends are going to be in Europe all summer and I'm going to be here, I'm actually going to go take summer school, and I'm graduating high school a year early. So, I actually graduated high school in three years, got to TCU early. When people hear that story, they're always like, oh, you must be so smart, congrats on graduating in three years. And in the back of my head, I'm thinking that is like the last reason why I graduated in three years. But that was, again, kind of how I felt at the time. I was just kind of rebellious in different ways.
Eric Jorgenson: That's awesome. I feel like there's a lot of- everybody has the story where they like take that last headwind and put it at their back and like yeah, it just goes from negative one to positive two all in one move. And I think, I mean, the other remarkable thing about your career, I'm going to call it, is that it started at 17. Like you showed up at college and bought your first house at age 17, and knowing how the story ends, we can say functionally started your career in real estate at 17, which is so badass. And also, extremely Warren Buffet. Like there's a Warren Buffet theme to this. There's like start early and length of career and simple ideas, and that is another great example of it.
Chris Powers: Yeah. Well, I appreciate that. Yeah, I went to school at a private university, and I did not have a lot when I got there, but a lot of the students that I was interacting with did, and so I started as much out of like a need to have money to hang out and do trivial things like freshmen college kids do. Whereas maybe Warren was like already into compounding and like knew every stock picker. I can't take that credit. But I did have the hustle and the drive. And again, it was that like feeling behind. As soon as I got to TCU and like mentally was like, oh shit, I'm not going to be able to keep up with a lot of these people, they're all wanting to go to Cancun for spring break and I'm not going to be able to do that unless I can make more than whatever the library's going to pay me to work hourly to like put books up. And sure enough, real estate was an opportunity in ’04, and I’m happy to chat more about that. But I got in to solve a problem. And then it was just like fuel for my fire. 17 years later, here we are, and things have changed quite a bit.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Let's start to kind of bullet point through some of these because you went through, you bought the first house for no money down, which is a thing that happened back then, and then pulled out 30 grand six months later and must've just felt like you discovered, I don’t know-
Chris Powers: I thought it was profit.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Refi is non-profit for the-
Chris Powers: It's more debt.
Eric Jorgenson: Was it clear to you then- I mean, you also, I should say, went on to add like a ton more units while you were still in college. Like were you working basically full-time as a real estate entrepreneur while you were in school? Is that a reasonable characterization?
Chris Powers: It kind of morphed there by junior, senior year. So again, entrepreneurship is all about the opportunities that are given to you at a certain time. You couldn't have built Uber unless Google was built and then Google maps had been built. So, things can only happen in certain time horizons. But for me, taking it back to just like a real estate thing, you're right, ’04, ’05, this was three or four years leading up to the great financial crisis. That crisis proved to be led by bad real estate practices. And I was probably fell into that camp. I was getting loans of 3% down, 6% cash back at closing with no credit and no money. They called them Liar loans. They called them Stated Document loans. The stated portion literally being, Eric, I'm stating to you that I have ambitions to make a hundred thousand dollars this year, and, Eric, I'm stating to you that I'm going to do it through flipping houses. And then you would say, well, show me proof that you've done that, and I would say, well, I don't have to because these are stated loans. And that was the time we lived in. And so yes, I was buying student housing next to TCU. I was leasing it. I lived in a room for free, I leased it out to three friends, and then six months later, you could go back in and do a cash out refi, which I would do. And so, I ended my freshman year with what you said, like $30-35,000 of cash in the bank. Again, I was so naive at the time, I really thought I had made $30 or 35,000, forgetting that on the liability part of my balance sheet, I just now had a loan for 140 instead of a hundred. And that parlayed; I ended up buying lots of units throughout college. I started a property management business that managed not only my homes but tons of student housing around TCU. I started a leasing business. I mean, I think it's crazy for a lot of your listeners, but you probably remember this, we are like in that last generation where we were kind of boomer-ish but kind of not – people were still driving around a month before they needed to move in, calling a for rent sign in the yard and moving in. I was literally the first person at TCU to put everybody's homes on a webpage so that students could browse them all in one spot. Now people lease a year in advance and they're on Zillow or wherever they are, but that was kind of how it all started. And yeah, by the time I graduated, I had a business.
Eric Jorgenson: Was it clear to you when you graduated, by the time you graduated, you’re like, oh, real estate is my career, this is what I'm doing with my life?
Chris Powers: No, it's actually really funny you ask that. So, I graduated- so I started college when it was probably the best time ever to get a loan. And I graduated at the end of ’08 when it was probably the worst time in our lifetime that we can really remember. But it's funny because all throughout college, honestly, there was so little planning for this. I thought I would go work at like Goldman Sachs or one of the big investment banks on Wall Street. In ’06, ’07, the cool job was like investment banker. Now it's tech and everything else. So, I just kind of had that mind, and then it kind of started dawning on me as I was getting near that like how would I even go take a job given what I had built. And then by the time the economy crashed, there were no jobs. So it was kind of like this is what we're going to do. And the truth is that's what I would have done anyway because I couldn't have left it. But I was really not left with any other choice. And so, then I really said, okay, I'm going to commit, here we go.
Eric Jorgenson: And what did it look like to commit?
Chris Powers: What committing looked like was, it was a little lonely in the early days. So, taking a step back, I had just gotten a line of credit before I graduated and that was tied to equity in my homes. And this is before the crash. I was going to use that to buy more homes around TCU, but I would just be able to buy them quicker because I had a line of credit, and it was almost perfect timing because then the crash allowed me to go buy foreclosures. I mean, people forget this, but 12 years ago when the economy crashed, every single property listed on the internet seemed like a foreclosure. Things that had been selling for 130, 140 grand I was buying for 25 to 30,000 a year later. So again, I really felt like I started my career at the bottom. Obviously, I had been in college where it was going up, but I didn't feel it that hard at the bottom, one, because I was at TCU, which was an insulated Texas university, and you have parents that are guaranteeing leases. So, I didn't feel it from that end, but I just remember everything was in foreclosure. It was crazy. And so, what kind of getting started and kind of committing, to your point, was I think your first question was, was it full-time in college? And the answer is yes, but it wasn't mentally full-time like this is it. It almost was like a hobby. But if I go back and I look at all the time I spent and the hours and I had employees and I knew accounting and I had a loan and I had a business. I just didn't think of it that way. I thought of it as a college hobby that's going to make me money and I'll be successful in whatever I do. The commit was like, okay, this is what I'm doing, now let's get even better at everything, and if I'm going to do something and commit, like we're going to the moon. And I poured every bit I had in it.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. I mean, it's probably worth like recontextualizing that because in 2008, when everything went from $130,000 to $20,000, it felt like the world was ending. And having the confidence as a 21-year-old recent grad to deploy debt against what you already owned into those assets, like in retrospect, it's a no-brainer because it's ten years later and everything is back, but it looked like the world was ending, and I can't imagine the stones that it took to [inaudible 30:17] in business. Was it easy for you?
Chris Powers: It was total naivety. It's not that there wasn't some stones to it. But it's kind of one of those things that like if you knew everything you know now, you might not have done half the stuff in your life that you've done. It was a lot of naivety. I often think about how important that was. And I'm not saying there wasn't an element of risk to it. Don't get me wrong. I understand that the world was shaken up, but I didn't go into it with all these battle wounds. I think the people that really were having a tough time pulling the trigger, it's part of because the nice office building they had bought a year ago was 50% down, and so they were battling kind of two things. I didn't have to battle this like historic massive loss of equity. But I will say the one moment I remember the most in the whole downturn, as crazy as it sounds, my Investments 2 teacher came in to class the day that Lehman filed for bankruptcy and the market fell off a cliff. And a grown man in his sixties just sobbing in front of the whole class, like crying, talking about all the things he could have bought yesterday that he will no longer ever be able to buy today, when I think of that whole time, that was the first day I remember going we're not in Kansas anymore, watching this guy cry in front of a class of a hundred students. And that was kind of the moment for me where I said, okay, or I thought, okay, we're in a different world. But I would love to give myself credit that I was really smart about it. But some of it was naivety, some of it was I had to keep making money, like I had to do stuff, or I had to go get a job, which at that point, I didn't really want to do. And so, yeah, there was a fair amount of risk taking, a fair amount of naivety, and I'll give myself some credit for being smart enough to continue pulling the trigger.
Eric Jorgenson: I'll give you a little more credit too, which is that you were in possession of some earned secrets. Like if you hadn't spent the last four years learning and building all of the systems that you had around like this local geography and how to buy houses and the property management business and leasing, the naivety or confidence or certainly the line of credit, whatever you want to call it, might not have been there for you to take advantage of what turned out to be I'm assuming like an incredible start your career and kind of a launchpad for everything that came next or at least a tipping point.
Chris Powers: It was. No, you're a hundred percent right. And Buffett talks often about if you love something and you're good at it and it keeps getting cheaper, you should be wanting to buy more of it. Actually, the risk goes down. Again, I'm not saying I was even thinking this at 21, but I do remember at times thinking I can buy this house for 30 grand that was selling for 140 last year. I still am not giving myself the credit to say that I fully understood what all that meant. But at the time, I will say like it was very rational to me like why would I not want to do this? And the only like thing I could think was like if the world is never going to go up again, then I might be making a bad decision. But again, if you go look at any chart on real estate, I just Google real estate prices, it's like it's been growing for thousands of years, it's got to come back at some point. So, they were very kind of immature – not immature – but very kind of basic ways of thinking about it. But I do remember thoughts of this would be silly if I didn't buy some of these things.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. I mean, I think this story kind of shows why you have what most people, if they're lucky, get in their fifties and their thirties because you started really putting your own skin in the game and making moves and have functionally been an entrepreneur since 17 and maybe before that, and it's really incredible. Andrew Finn in another of our conversations said like your career as an entrepreneur hasn’t started until you feel the repercussions of your own decisions, and you're actually like making decisions with your own consequences. Like don't mistake 20 years of employment as 20 years of preparation for entrepreneurship because it's different. I think this is a really sort of interesting thing. So, I really like to kind of build career stories through looking at really big inflection points. But this is where like my research brain loses the thread of clear inflection points. So, I have a little bit of a sense of like the epic Fort Capital as it is today, but I sort of lose the story between like 21 year old Chris and like the next big inflection point. So maybe like help us kind of see some of those stones along the way.
Chris Powers: So, I started buying foreclosures. And so, to me, Fort Capital seems like this thing that started when I was 17. The legal paper trail would say there's been some name changes along the way. We started as Powers Acquisitions then Powers and Company then Powers and Curtis, and then Fort Capital. But I've always just been working on the same thing, and I've had a few partners come and go. I think you're right. And actually, somebody has mentioned that to me before, there's kind of this gap that I don't talk about as much, not because I'm not proud of it, it's just, to me, it just kind of is boring to be honest.
Eric Jorgenson: I think everybody's got those messy, the messy middle years, the cocoon.
Chris Powers: So, I met a- I was flipping homes. Part of why it was messy is this period I was doing- at this point it was like, okay, I'd proven myself. I'd actually had some money, I'd made relative at the time some money. I was single. I had plenty of time. And now I had raised money from people, and I really kind of started having some real confidence. And so, I was doing lots of different types of deals. And so, I would say from 2000- let's see, I graduated in ‘08. So, 2010 to probably 2015 is kind of that gap that doesn't get talked about as much. And I was a custom home builder. I was building spec homes. I had a small team of about five people. I was buying land. I was VC investing. I mean, I was kind of doing everything. But the key things that mattered is I was always able to raise money because people trusted me, and I had a track record of making successful deals happen. But I had not really found something to build a company on. I was focused heavily in student housing. And so, I don't talk about it as much because it almost felt like at the time, I had taken what was like a company doing kind of one thing, which was student housing and kind of homes, and then I kind of like let it all turn into like this deal shop where I was just doing deals. And then I realized, it took about four or five years, and I did well, but the infrastructure of my company was like super weak, I would say. In 2014, it was all dependent on me. It was all predicated on me. I never knew what I was going to wake up thinking about the next day. Again, I felt kind of successful. I had lots of deals going on. I was always busy. But I quickly started seeing like I wasn't compounding really in a way and not creating leverage in any one thing that was going to allow me to recruit better, hire better, raise larger sums of capital. Like it started dawning on me that all these things that were important to build a big company and one that I wouldn't have to work in every day, there were just decisions I had to make. And so that five years was- that five-year gap in between, again, was still running a business. I had five or six employees, but I was doing a lot of things. So, if you were to say, hey, what were you then, I would've said I was a real estate investor. But if you were to say were you a developer, were you a home builder, or student housing? I just was a local Fort Worth all the above. Fort Worth was my kind of background and any deal I could get done in Fort Worth because I knew it so well. I was the Fort Worth hometown real estate investor Chris Powers. But I have like always, like I said, I have big ambitions. And at that point, I had maybe talked to enough people, read enough, kind of smartened up to go I really need to start pouring all my energy into one thing and get back to being really, really good at one thing. And a lot of people kind of knock on this book, especially on Twitter, but I couldn't disagree more with anybody that knocks on it, Good to Great by Jim Collins is an incredible book. It changed the way I looked at the business world. It is part of what I changed. I think a lot of the people that don't like it haven't put a lot of the practices into play, but he basically just says like you cannot find a great company on this planet that didn't start with being really good at one thing for long periods of time and just doing the same thing over and over every day but just trying to make incremental improvements, and that's compounding. Like what feels like a small improvement every day over ten years is an enormous growth, but you never get that if you are changing asset types every day, you're never compounding. And so, I started reading that book. And I was surrounded by people, and I built a great network of people, and it just was so obvious to me by about 2014 that I was never going to get where I needed to go unless I brought it all back in and started focusing really deeply on one thing. I'll stop there for a second.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, that's a really- that's actually, I have a whole like kind of section about the idea of focus because that seems- everything I've read and heard you listened to before or listened to you talk about before, that moment of deciding to focus really like streamlined the whole company. It gave you a lot of clarity on the path forward that has defined sort of, I don't know how you classify this path, but like 2015 to basically where we are today. So, why don't we do that kind of chapter? Like what happened when you picked a direction and the fog cleared? Or did the fog not clear until- did it stay foggy until the decision of what- there's two decisions in there. One is we need a direction and two is what the hell is it? Like what was that process like? And then you've got to steer this whole ship around to how do I build this organization around this direction? And that's its own sort of set of changes that has to take place. So, what was that kind of chapter?
Chris Powers: I love talking about this because I think it's applicable to everybody.
Eric Jorgenson: This is the thing that I'm like probably the worst at right now in my own like self-assessment of my life. So, I think like this is the medicine I need to take. So yeah, lay it on me.
Chris Powers: And to be clear, my natural instincts are to be terrible at this, too. It's why I do things like a podcast and things. It's an outlet for me to not go break other things in order for me to have some fulfillment. It's weird because most people on earth, and this is just human nature, most people on earth don't like change. They don't like not having clarity. They don't like the idea of waking up not knowing- they would rather- I think it's like people would rather be unhappy and secure then happy and unsecure, if that makes sense.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, predictably unhappy.
Chris Powers: Yes, but the crazy part is entrepreneurs by nature are the complete opposite. They love change. They love variety. They love big ideas. They love moonshots. And so, what you have is this person that could naturally go all over the place leading a company and the majority of folks willing to work for them being the total opposite going like we just want to know our lane and we'll do really good work, but we don't want to be surprised. So, what became apparent to me – and this is not like this is some novel idea, it becomes apparent to every successful company at some point, or they're never going to go the distance I think – when you're recruiting, people want to- like really talented folks that have a tenured career in something, they want to know what they're joining. And if you can't really even tell them what they're joining, that's a problem. I'm not saying you can't recruit, but you can't recruit at scale and you cannot- people want to know what are we doing, how are we doing it, and how am I getting paid for it? And when your answer at the time is we are kind of a deal shop, and well, we're doing all these different kinds of deals. They're all structured differently, I can't tell you in a year if we'll still be interested in student housing, so you might go spend a year really learning student housing and then great, you've got those skills, but now we're going to go get into like office buildings, that doesn't work for people. Again, it goes back to compounding. It does work for some people, but you cannot build a great organization that continues scaling correctly when there's no kind of north star. So that's one thing that focus gives you. Two, capital, this conversation kept coming up over and over. So, I said one of the things I was good at early on is raising money, and still, that's a strength of mine. But what happened was these small kind of friends and family deals we were doing around town, and I'll categorize those as capital raises less than $2 million per deal, you can kind of pass the hat around enough, and if you've been around, you can get that done. But when you start trying to raise like $5 to10 million for a deal, everything changes. And typically, you're starting to meet more professional investors, and over and over, I kept hearing hey, you're great, you have a good track record, we think you're going to be successful, but if I'm going to give you 5 million, I need to know for this let's call it student housing deal, I want to know that you're going to wake up every day dreaming about student housing. I don't want to give you 5 million for a student housing deal, and tomorrow you've woken up and you're thinking about land. And that kind of started coming up. So, the two things that were really dawning on me was to build a great company, you need great people and you need to build a recruiting machine. I think our mutual friend Brent Beshore has been outspoken about this lately, just about how great companies are essentially just recruiting machines. They can recruit the best people, they can do it when they need to do it, and there's never this gap. So, if I was going to do that, I had to recruit. And if I wanted to raise the capital to grow a bigger company, focus was going to matter. In each of those situations, it was kind of about focus. And then it was just kind of like the idea of really learning at that point what compounding was, going back to that employee example, if you're going to spend a year on student housing and you're kind of going to get this momentum, okay, I've kind of figured out how to pick a market and how tenants work and how to build the units, and then all of a sudden, at the end of the year, you sell that project and you're like you're moving to office, buddy. For me, the entrepreneur, it can feel great because we're just doing lots of stuff, but for my team, it's like this game of stop and go. As soon as they're getting good at anything, you stop it and then move them into the next thing. So, I'll start there by saying that was why needing to focus became a priority. And then if we want to chat a little more on that, we can, and then we can talk about what we decided to focus on. And then we can talk about the results of those decisions, which have been I would just say very good.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. I'll spoiler alert slightly because I think I've listened to you on the Owned and Operated podcast, which is an awesome podcast, and you guys spent a ton of time on sort of the specific thesis around the focus on class B industrial in Texas, which is like where you ended up focusing. But for the non real estate industry folks, let's go to the results of that focus. I mean, it sounds like both on the talent side and on the fundraising investor side, people knew certainly much more what to do with you, I'm sure brokers that you were working with and just like phone calls in the industry, you started to get more kind of what you were looking for and the more that flywheel took off. But let's get to that kind of like what happens once you start really focusing and how quickly that can happen. You've built a huge company in the last five years.
Chris Powers: Yes, we did. And what you just said, that keyword flywheel, I think about that word every single day, whether it's in business, even with, Eric, what you're doing with the podcast and your almanacs and your content, like everything is reinforcing everything and it's going to make whatever you're trying to do within those feel easier. For me, I think of every flywheel as – I'm going to give a spoiler alert, but I think the press release goes out tomorrow – Fort Capital will do half a billion dollars this year. And for me personally, I felt like I was working a hundred times harder to buy a million dollars in a year than I did this year to buy 500 million. So, we can talk about why that might be. When you are focused on something, and you were talking about the brokers, and there's no better spot to be in life – let's say, our friends up in Omaha call it like a web of deserved trust – then when you've worked with the same broker for 10 years, and I can just pick up the phone and say, hey, Steven, whatever we need to do. And it's like, okay, done. As opposed to the new guy in the industry or the new gal that's in the industry for a week, she's going to call Steven with some ask, and I mean, it ain't going to happen that way. It could take years before Steven finally gives that person the thumbs up. But so I remember being young going why does this old fart down the street get all the deals and I'm the one working hard and he's like not doing anything? Well, because he's put 40 years into doing those things to where, in theory, it should only be him having to pick up a phone. So, we could use that analogy for a lot of things. The investors that we know, we have 760 now, 400 of those have invested with us multiple times, a hundred of those, probably 50 times. So, I don't have to reconvince that person that's been in 50 deals with me why they should do the 51st. In fact, if I'm having to do that, something's really wrong with the business. The people that have invested with us the longest, we joke all the time, they do not even look at the deal. They trust us. They've been in every deal because they're probably in 30 of our deals right now, they're receiving distributions every month, their bank account is full of Fort Capital. That didn't happen overnight, but it's made it much easier. So, it's why when the next guy joins the industry and he's like why is it taking me ten weeks to raise all this money and Fort's doing it in 10 hours or whatever, that's just the by-product of like a lot of focus, these deep relationships that have been created with tons of trust. And there's just some things in life that just time has to take its toll on. You can't build that trust with somebody in a week. No matter if you went to somebody and said I love you, I'll do anything for you, Eric, you’re my favorite person in the world, there's nobody I like more, you'd be like that is all awesome, but I would have to prove that to you for years before finally you were like- it was just understood.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. It is a relationship sample size. Yeah, I think that's totally reasonable. And when someone wants to get married on the first date, that doesn't always work out.
Chris Powers: And then you talk about like internally with a team, even if Eric and I went and started a company today and we went and hired the most talented people in the world for the positions that we needed to fill, even though all the talent is in the arena, it would still take us a couple of years to build a systematic process. Everybody kind of has that gut feel of how everybody's going to work. You can talk to each other in the common areas. I mean, all these things happen in harmony, but you've got to give it time to kind of bake. It's just like cooking a brisket. Like it just takes a long time, but damn, the finished product is good.
Eric Jorgenson: When a Texan talks to a man from Kansas City, you get a brisket barbecue metaphor. Yeah, no, I think that's so true. Like I have always thought that the value of long term coworkers, like shared coworker relationships is like deeply unappreciated. It is something that like Silicon Valley tends to not appreciate as much because there's a lot of kind of short-term turnover, but you can really get a lot done when you’ve got the same people working on the same- next to each other on the same projects for 20 years because of that trust and communication and everything that comes with that.
Chris Powers: And when they're all working on the same kind of idea and thesis, it's not that things don't change- like not change the thesis, but as you grow, there's just different challenges. So, you're always solving something new, but when the north star is constant, these people just get into a cadence very quickly. Again, going back to that idea of student housing, office, here, there, they can never fully get into a rhythm because there's a lot of stop and go. And then as a leader to a company, it's so important, like if you're going to war, the general is telling his soldiers this is the mission that we are trying to accomplish, when you're in a business, if you cannot tell the people that work for you like what the hell you're trying to accomplish. And in real estate, what can often happen, and I would say this is what it was de facto, I didn't mean it to be this, was for like that 2010 to 2015, the mission was to make Chris Powers more money. There was no like mission to go be great at industrial or be great in Texas. It was like, no, do that deal. Why would you do that deal? Because it makes money. That's where I also realized really quickly really talented people, they want to make good money, but they're not necessarily going to sign up for a life of a mission dedicated to just making somebody else's wallet fat. And I didn't set out to do that. It's not like I told people in the office this is what you are here for. I would have said you are here to change the city of Fort Worth, but that wasn’t really the genuine what was happening. And so, once I realized also, oh man, great people want to work at place, and that can't be the mission, again, that's another reason to focus on something.
Eric Jorgenson: Somewhat ironically, it seems, I think I heard somewhere, I don't remember if this was public or private, that like you're actually on a mission to make all of your employees as wealthy as you possibly can. And that that has just like switched entirely and that you have these very kind of thoughtfully constructed, super generous incentive packages for I think all team members.
Chris Powers: Yeah. So, you back to what you were saying even about like the tech industry, where everybody's just kind of, I wouldn't say- and we're not painting a broad brush of everybody, but everybody's just like using everybody to get to somewhere, and there's not a lot of long-term thought put into anything. And for some people, they do really well, but there's a lot of people that try and chase this dream and bounce from startup to startup hoping to hit that thing. Well, in our industry, it's a little bit different. And so, yes, I think kind of to what you said is what I tell people all the time, and now we have like six, seven years of proving this out, you will always probably be able to find somebody that'll pay you more in any one year cash, short term cash comp, but you will not find many people that are willing to let you in on the backside, the long-term wealth creating side. And what happens is when you start offering that, and there's now been 13, 14 people in our company that have seen the fruit of that long-term mindedness, and now they're preaching to the rest of the company, especially the younger people, this stuff is real, it's tangible, but you have to wait. And I know our younger generation folks think that waiting five years for something is like a lifetime, whereas the other spectrum, you used to have people that would go work for Coca-Cola for 50 years just to get that pension at the end or whatever it was. And so, yeah, money isn't the one thing that's driving people. People are driven by wanting to feel accountable for something and wanting to work with great people and feel stimulated and have a purpose. But I will tell you paying people really well and not just a bunch of cash up front that they can go below but showing them this kind of wealth that can be created on the backend, it creates really loyal people that are very accountable and that get really comfortable and turn their starry eyes off of looking at every company. I've never had a recruiter approach me because I've never been recruitable before. And this is crazy, Eric, I've been in business a long time, I've never had a recruiter approach me. And nobody in my company is naturally going to come tell me, hey, a recruiter called me today. So, for years, nobody was telling me this stuff. And so, like two years ago, I was talking to some people, and I was like have any of y'all ever been called by a recruiter? And like the entire table is like we get an email a day from a recruiter. That was a light bulb moment for me. In the world we live in today, every single employee in this planet, if they're worth a damn, is getting emailed incessantly by recruiters. And what are you going to do for them so that they stop even looking at those emails? So, that's a long way. But yes, paying people is really important. And I will tell you as a business owner, there is nothing more satisfying than seeing people have these moments along the way where the financial part of it materially changes their life.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I think those were such- some of my favorite kind of entrepreneurs that I've become friends with over the years keep like meticulous count of the number of employees they made millionaires, and that's like the thing they are most proud of. And I think that is a wonderful way to live. So, that's a very good kind of synopsis of the team side of things. I'm actually also curious about you kind of dangled some bait in front of me on the investor side. So, I know you have almost 800 investors actively in deals, and probably a list of potentials that surpasses that on your email list that reads the newsletters or the quarterly letters and things like that. What are those investors like? Are those individual kind of retail investors? Is that all institutions that you work with? What is the role that Fort plays in people's portfolios? Because real estate has a very, I don't know, it's a lot different, especially these sort of syndicated deals are a lot different than like, I don’t know, I open my brokerage account and like buy a REIT or buy some stock. So, like what do people come to you for on the investor side of this sort of marketplace that you facilitate?
Chris Powers: So, for everybody listening, there was no grand plan here. This is just how we got to where we are. So, again, prior to going to a great university, private university with a lot of my friends that had dough, I started raising true friends and family money really early on. And 17 years later, I wouldn't even say 17, I'd probably didn't raise money until 13 years ago, but 13 years later, it's evolved because I keep meeting people. And so, I'll start, one thing I'm proud of, of those 760, I've never solicited somebody to invest with us. So, we've never sent out like a letter to Eric that says, hey, we're Fort Capital, if you ever want to invest with us, we'd love to hear from you. Everything has been a warm introduction or some type of inbound from something we're doing. And so, the answer to your question is I have folks that can write a $50,000 check all the way to somebody that could write a $50 million check. So, the depth and the range of who sits in that 760- maybe your audience will like this a little more. We're closing five deals this month, a total of 150 million in value, which means we raised about 45 million in the last 60 days. I have an $18 million raise down in Houston that I believe has like 78 investors. I would say our largest check is a million and our smallest check is a hundred grand, and there's a range in there of how the rest is filled out. We have a $16 million raise that we did. We actually took- on that deal, we took one investor for 13 million and we raised the other three from 10 or 15 people. And then we have a lot of $5 and $6 million raises that might have 30 or 40 investors. And I think the word retail, when people are listening to it here, often think, oh, these are the people putting a thousand dollars into a deal, I think retail is changing quite a bit. I call it- everything in the world is kind of democratizing in real time. We're living through this everybody has access to everything. Things that the guy on Main Street could never get is like readily accessible. I think we're in this gap over the next few years where people are starting to- it's almost like a trust thing. It's like if the Main Street guy is getting in this thing, is it really that good? And I think what we're proving out is the institutions are losing all the leverage they had by being able to write these enormous checks and dictate the terms, and society is still trying to wrap their mind around why the Main Street guy is being allowed into this deal. And a lot of it is because a lot of the people that have the wealth on Main Street to put in these deals haven't for so long that what you realize is they still have this like chip on their shoulder, like is this really happening? Are we really getting access to this stuff? That is happening at record speeds. And when you look in real estate specifically, the largest fundraiser in the world right now is Blackstone's B REIT, which is their retail REIT that they've created. They're raising $3 billion a month right now, all from doctors, lawyers, everybody. So, the answer to your question is I believe we've always been asked to be a fund, we've said no, we want to do deal by deal so that we can dictate the terms of each deal. We're not hamstrung to these terms for 10 years in a fund. We don't have to sell when the fund docks tell us to sell. So, we have strayed away from being a fund, and we've strayed away from institutions because they kind of like to create relationships, in my opinion, where you feel like you're working for them. It's almost like you're lucky that you have got our money. And I'm not saying- we're privileged and lucky that we get our investors’ money, I mean, that's always the case, but not to the degree that they cut your fees down, they tell you how to operate, they tell you how to do all these things. If you're going to invest with somebody, I believe you should invest and let them kind of do what they do best, not invest- unless the investor's bringing a set of terms. So long way of saying syndicated deals. I think this democratization of capital, especially in real estate with crowdfunding and everything, is accelerating at rapid rates. And as we sit here today, I'd rather see our company get to 5,000 investors then wake up one day and say we don't need 760 anymore, let's just go find one investor and just stick with them. And there's technology and tons of software out there that make having 760 investors unbelievably easy to manage and administrate.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. I mean, I'm not familiar with the real estate industry, but I see that happening, like AngelList is doing that in the world of startups. So, it's way cheaper and easier from a legal and like financial overhead perspective to have a lot more investors in a deal. So, what did those, and this is like one of those first grade real estate questions. So, if a doctor shows up and like writes you a million dollar check for one of these syndicated deals, how do they recoup on that? Is that paid out in like they get a share of rents of those properties over a long period of time because they own a percentage of the equity of that property?
Chris Powers: So, I'll answer the question and I'll preface it also with, just for listeners to understand, when you sign up with us, we have an investor relation team. We're doing full background checks on everybody. Everybody has to be accredited to invest with us. And what I would tell you the most fascinating thing I've learned, and I'm not going to mention some names, but you know some of these people on the internet. If I say this one, you actually probably will like immediately go to it, but there's friends of mine, one of them out in LA, and at first blush, if you're just looking at a Twitter profile, you might not know who you're dealing with here. And then it turns out they've sold for 50, 100 million dollars to Facebook, Twitter, whatever. And they're living out in LA, they're 28 years old. And so, if you just kind of judged a book by its cover, you might've said this probably isn't going to be a fit, and then you talk to them and you're blown away. Some of our largest investors that we've met off Twitter have like 30 followers, no profile picture. They just lurk. And if there's anything I've learned, one, we need a good process for vetting people, but two, it's the people that I expect to show up that I'm like disappointed by, and it's the ones that show up that I'm like this is going to be a waste of time that I'm just mind blown. And again, that world is evolving. Your question on how they're getting paid back – Eric, you gave me a million dollars. Dr. Jorgenson, you give me a million dollars. You said it was a doctor.
Eric Jorgenson: I did; I’m not a doctor.
Chris Powers: There's all different types of structures. So I don't necessarily have to talk about how we can structure that investment because we can talk about lots of different ones. But to your question, yes, you would be paid back a couple of ways. From the rents and cashflow that are generated by owning the property, you would get your pro-rata piece. So, if a million dollars bought you 30% of the partnership, you get 30% of that. And then if we create value, you often hear the refinance which basically allows us to pull equity out, so quick math for anybody, if we buy something for 10 million and we put 3 million down, that means we have 3 million in equity, $7 million loan. If that deal is now worth let's say 15 million and we go refinance on the same leverage ratio, which is 30/70, I'm now going to get a loan for, I don't know, 11 million bucks. That's going to allow me to pay back some of my original down payment to investors. Did I explain that correctly?
Eric Jorgenson: I think so, but you're the expert.
Chris Powers: When you create more, you can basically, one of the beautiful things about real estate is you can take a larger loan to pay back your initial equity, and it's not a taxable event. It's a non-taxable event. So that's another way I'd get you your money back. And then the third of course, is if we ever sold for a profit, you would get your percentage of the profits.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, it's very interesting. For somebody who's spent most of my time thinking about equity and building businesses, real estate just like breaks my brain sometimes with how the deals work. And I've learned a lot from listening to you and Nick talk about like what is and isn't a taxable event. You can be way more comfortable using more leverage and like smaller amounts beget much bigger deals. And it's a very interesting kind of process. And then the structures of like people sort of mixing the strengths of real estate with the strengths of a media business or something like that because you and Nick both like run basically an online media business and real estate business, and these things kind of like support each other really well as a source of cash and a source of-
Chris Powers: It’s a flywheel.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, they just feed each other.
Chris Powers: They do. And you kind of throw Twitter in, but I would say the same for you with your content business, your book writing business. But for me, if you had three parts of the flywheel, my podcast and Twitter, my real estate business, and investors, every single podcast I put out, I meet new people, new people go check out my real estate company. If they're interested, they reach out and they become an investor and they start telling other people. And then that kind of virtuous cycle kind of keeps continuing. So again, we signed up 400 investors in the last 18 months. And again, there's no- It's all part of this kind of flywheel. People keep discovering us. And the more content I put out online, there's just more chances for people to discover who we are. And that's a lot more fun to me than flying around the country cold calling on people to invest with us.
Eric Jorgenson: The podcast is super fun.
Chris Powers: I love it.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Did you set out with any intention or expectation of like what it would mean to your core business?
Chris Powers: No. I think in my first teaser episode, I literally said I don't know if I'm only going to do ten of these. I just feel like I'm in a really fortunate situation in life that I'm always having cool conversations with people that I'm always regurgitating to others. So I'm going to record ten, and if nobody listens to them, and this is something you're going to have as well that's a blessing for your family for generations to come, not just your kids, but ten generations from now will be able to listen to their great, great grandfather Eric talk about what he was interested in when he was 30. Your audio files will travel for hundreds of years. So I said in there, I just said if nobody listens, my family might be interested in what dumb Chris Powers at 31, I guess when I started, was interested in. If I end up doing this for 20 more years, just podcasting- I always think about that now; it's as much about in the moment as I'm creating this library of stuff that for hundreds of years in my family will be available for people to listen to.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, that's incredible leverage. I mean, creating audio not just for parallel listening but well into the future. And I can't wait to upload all these to some AI generator and like create a digital troll version of myself to like haunt my family forever. Like my Twitter account is going to live endlessly.
Chris Powers: You're like Tupac.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. I want my hologram to exist and hang out with all you guys forever. I hope our posthumous Twitter accounts are friends with each other.
Chris Powers: They will be. I mean, I'm sure they'll continue. I'm literally thinking about prescheduling tweets a hundred years out.
Eric Jorgenson: Oh yeah. Why not?
Chris Powers: That's funny.
Eric Jorgenson: That digression is a good segue to my curiosity about the divergence of like the focus of Fort Capital as a business and the focus of like Chris Powers as a guy. Like are you in your life- Was the focus epiphany to really focus the business or to really focus your life, or did one actually like sort of free up the rest of your time to like indulge your broad set of curiosities in the rest of your life?
Chris Powers: So, it's such a good question. And there's a lot of things I've learned today that I didn't realize would happen in the moment. So, one, I am naturally- the irony of this is I am probably naturally the least focused person you'll ever meet. My mind naturally wants to do a hundred things. And so, you're sitting here going, well, then who's this guy to talk about focus? So, I’ll regress a little bit. If you want to accomplish a lot- so, when people talk about Elon Musk and they're like how does he run these six huge companies, and where does he have time in the day? His focus is really on building great companies that can have leaders and stay super focused on one thing, but he's not doing all the stuff in any of these. So, for me, I realized, not that I want to be Elon Musk, but I do want to be able to do other things in my life. But in order to actually do a lot of other things in my life, I'm going to have to learn what the power of focus actually means. And by understanding now how great a decision it was to refocus for it and focus, I've now transitioned out of CEO. I have a CEO that runs that day to day. Of course, I'm involved, but I'm not involved in the day to day. And that is all because of focus. The second part is I guess it reenforces this, whatever I get involved in, I realize is going to flounder and be more of a distraction if I don't put enough attention and energy upfront and focus into it or have somebody working on that to keep the focus. But if everything in my life is always, hey, come join Chris Powers and we don't know what we're going to do the next day, it's just like quicksand. And so, the long answer to that is I understand the power of focus now. And I would tell you younger Chris might've started ten more businesses since I transitioned out of CEO, which was about a year ago, but now every decision I make in my life, I literally filter it through is this just a fun to have thing that I'm excited about and in a month it's just going to like willow away, or is this something that can go the distance? And if it's going to go the distance, I then have to look in the mirror and go and that means you're going to focus on it for a few years, which for me is not natural. So, for me to do it, I have to have a lot of conviction. And so, most of the things I'm now working on in life I kind of put through this test of how long do I stay focused on it early on because I am like the king of ten good ideas a day and wake up with no good ideas anymore. And so, I'm really conscious of what sticks and that kind of goes back to the focus lesson.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, that's interesting. The other thing that I hear in there that I'm curious if you agree with is it also has to be big enough and self-sustaining enough to warrant someone other than you spending their full-time attention on it in order to make it sustainable. Like if you know you are not going to do this for the rest of your life, you got to know that it'll support a manager or a CEO on its own.
Chris Powers: The reason is, is because I know naturally, I'll burn out on it eventually. And so, if it can't be that, then I'm going to be the killer of it. And I don't want to go waste three or four years building something that I'm going to kill because I have an ADD issue. It's so true. When I hear about, and you kind of mentioned like your ability to stay focused, but I would say when I think of writing a book for years and years, that is a level of focus that I can appreciate probably more than a lot of people. Now you might sit there and go yeah, but I was doing all this stuff, it was hard to maintain on it, but just the fact that you stuck with it for three or four years. And we were talking about this right before we started, you're about to go do book number two or book number three. Every single one will feel easier and easier to get done. The time will get cut in half. And if anybody asks you, well, why could that be, it is because I've stayed focused long enough to know what I need to do.
Eric Jorgenson: And that's how it felt to you guys iterating through deals over and over again, just building that system, and set to kind of do more and more faster and faster at Fort Capital?
Chris Powers: A hundred percent. I mean, the most easy example I can give, and I won't go on a soapbox on this, is if you and I go out tomorrow and we both look at the same building, we’ll both stand in front of it. Nobody's going to give us anything. We just get to look at it. And let's just say it's in Fort Worth. I'll have a logical conclusion in a couple of minutes in my head. You're going to have to go back to the office. You might spend days trying to get to that conclusion, calling brokers, researching the internet. I'm not any smarter than you, I just have 15 years of looking at that, like I have 15 years of knowledge in my head. It would be like if I tried to come write an Almanack right now, I would be paralyzed to begin with. It would take me years. And your second one's going to feel- it's kind of done in half the time and feel like half the effort.
Eric Jorgenson: So, I've got a few more things to pull your string on here. But I think you've set me up for something that I'm certainly curious about is, what are you doing day to day now? So, you're chairman of Fort Capital. You've handed over the CEO reins. You're actively repressing the ten ideas that you get every day and putting them through this filter, you're podcasting your face off. And I know you have like kind of a few other sort of side projects. I'm curious to see kind of like what your pie chart of daily life looks like right now.
Chris Powers: So, you can't see it right now, but I'm sitting in an office, and I guess we're not going to have video, but I'm sitting in an office that is now when you walk in the front door of this office, it says Powers Capital on the wall. So, when I kind of-
Eric Jorgenson: I always thought that was a miss. You’ve got an awesome name to be in an eponymous capital formation. So, I'm glad you're finally using that.
Chris Powers: I’m doing it. It didn't take me long to come up with that name. I was actually really surprised it was available, but it was. So, the podcast is this- when people ask me are you trying to make a lot of money off of your podcast, I think what they're really asking me is are you going to sell lots of ads and like generate lots of revenue, like tangible revenue. And yeah, I might sell an ad or two, but the way I look at the podcast is like this top of funnel for the rest of my life. And the cool part of it is it's not work. I'm getting to talk with cool ass people every day. And just like what you're probably doing right now, I selfishly just ask them what I want to know. And it turns out there's a lot of other people in the world that want to know what I want to know, not because I am some smart guy, it’s because we all kind of want to know the same stuff. We want to unlock these doors. So, I have this top of funnel for my life. It scratches an itch that I get to meet with really interesting people. I get smarter. Great. That is why I do the podcast. And oh, by the way, I might not go sell hundreds of ads on there and be able to show you a PNL, but I can promise you there's revenue showing up in other businesses and things I'm involved with. How much, I don't know, but my guess is over the next 50 years, I'll look back at my life and go that podcast generated a lot of value. I've met you, I've met so many people because of it. So, podcast, that's how I think of it. Fort, I still own north of 80% of the business. In that role, I'm starting to become more like a Brent Beshore or a Warren Buffet of sorts. I have a meeting there Monday morning. The CEO and I have been partners eight years, amazing friend of mine, I talk to him all the time. But I'm truly learning- I'm a year in; I feel I gave myself two years, I'm learning how to be an owner. So, if you're going to let somebody be CEO, they are CEO. And Warren has talked about this a lot that it takes one time of you- I was CEO forever, I was founder. The new CEO is going to make a decision that I don't agree with. Warren's been very vocal that one time of me coming over the top and exerting some power because I own more of the company could destroy the relationship indefinitely, or it could take years to repair to where- You want the CEO to not be second guessing their decisions or thinking fuck, excuse me, if this decision isn't good enough, I'm going to hear from Chris. So that's one example of learning to become an owner. Again, I have lots of ideas. It's easier for me to look at Fort at any point in time when I'm not in the day-to-day action and go we should do this. But it's smart to understand- it's easy for me to have that idea because I'm not there day to day, realizing all the projects they're working on.
Eric Jorgenson: You are not burdened by the details.
Chris Powers: Correct. So that's one area of my life. I'm an owner, and then I have two VC funds. They're small – $5 million funds. I have invested in over 40 venture deals. Those are going to start rolling up to Powers Capital. Powers Capital will start to become I tell people like a family office style business, but we'll keep raising capital from others and investing in probably alternatives. But back to the conversation we just had, I'm not getting into anything that if I'm going to start investing in crypto and web 3 and a lot of that, you might see somebody at Powers Capital that's really, really good at that because it's not going to be me. I don't have- I'm going to learn enough to be dangerous, but never enough to do it full-time, all day, and build all the relationships I would need to build to be successful in there.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I'm glad you said that because I was going to come back to like you dropped VC low key in your kind of like 2010 to 2015 chapter, and I made a note to come back to it and be like, whoa, you did real estate, real estate, real estate, real estate, venture capital, real estate, real estate. So, what is that? Is that just like, I don't know, I got friends who send me these deals? Is it like I have unique insight into, these are specifically like a venture fund focused or a real estate focused software investments that you make? Like where does the venture piece come in?
Chris Powers: So if you go Fort-Ventures, which is fort-ventures.com, you'll see our portfolio, to anybody listening. So, I have a buddy- I tell people all the time, I know I told you earlier that if I hadn't stayed in real estate, I would've gone into investment banking, and I kind of lied. I actually really wanted to- investment banking was actually probably what I would've done, but I really wanted to go into tech. But ’08 in Texas, like nobody was getting into tech. So, it was a desire of mine that I probably wouldn't have fulfilled because everybody in my life would have thought I was crazy. Long story short, that's a way of saying tech has actually always been one of my biggest passions. Fort Capital, I think Twitter is starting to learn, is a very tech enabled real estate company. More than most, a hundred percent, I'd put it on anything. I had a really good friend go out to Silicon Valley, go through Y Combinator, ended up selling his company to Airbnb. But he, while he was in Y Combinator, would always send me deals – hey, you want to angel invest in this? And what I realized really quickly was they go by really quick, even in 2014 and ’15, they were. But he had an amazing tier one network. I mean, Andreessen Horowitz was his leading VC. So, he was just seeing things before anybody was. And for anybody that's listening that is thinking about getting in venture, and I'm an outsider, I don't do it every day, it's all about who you know. At the earliest stages, you can be the smartest guy in the room that knows the idea's good, but if you don't- the rounds are only a couple million bucks. If you're not in the room to actually put money in the deal, it doesn't really matter. He was how I was able to get into the room. And so, I would say 20%, half of our companies are probably YC backed companies that we will invest in. He's a YC Fellow, so he has early action onto which companies are doing well. I would say a fifth of them are PropTech businesses. My real estate holding PropTech is starting to grow larger. I just joined On Deck with Chris Marino. Beyond Deck is owned by Erik Torenberg I think, I'll be in their real estate group. And then I'm just in like random deals that I candidly probably don't know a ton about, but the five LPs that brought me the deal are smart as shit. And I'm like, look, if you're doing it, I'm in. Like I can't disagree with you. You're my due diligence.
Eric Jorgenson: It's amazing how much of venture works that way.
Chris Powers: I would tell you my best investment right now, I know what they do. It's very simple what they do. But I am purely in it because of who was in it. I've had no desire to- I would've never seen these people. It's a company called Bolt.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, it's a weird, I mean, you hear it in the conversation. People are like this is the- it's like the main signal almost. It's like, oh, you should invest in this company. And before they even tell you what the fuck the company does, they will tell you Naval and Chris Powers and like Ben Horowitz invested, and you're like, oh, okay, I'm in, say no more.
Chris Powers: And people used to ask me like, well, how much due diligence you do? It’s is like how much do I need to do if Andreessen's in the deal, they're definitely doing- I know that the founders aren't like criminals. Like if Andreessen is thumbs up, like there's a whole layer of due diligence I just don't need to do, unless I just have some ego that I'm going to find something that they can't.
Eric Jorgenson: And there is not a ton. Like the only due diligence to do at the pre-seed level is very social. Like there's no- You're not going to go inventory their warehouse.
Chris Powers: I took December off of Twitter. I started on Thanksgiving, and I have not tweeted in, oh, it's been two weeks, it feels like two years.
Eric Jorgenson: Are you twitching?
Chris Powers: Yeah, a little bit. But you'll like this, the book I'm reading right now is called Token Economy, and it almost looks like a textbook on web 3 and it is giving me base layer knowledge. I bet you I've listened to 50 hours of web 3 podcasts in the last two weeks. I'm spending as much time as I can really trying to learn what web 3 means and is. And then if, again, going back to what we said, if a decision was to even try and do something there, the first thing I'm thinking is who's the person, not how far can I take it? And so, I would wrap up what am I doing – Powers Capital, I have my own money, Fort Capital's feeding me money. But we've learned how to raise money for real estate. And I get asked all the time, well, can you raise money to get us into other things, maybe more passive, and as the podcast grows and as the network grows, I'll just have access to things that a lot of people won't, and often you can get access to things because you can write a larger check. So, if I can bring that to the table, I would say five years from now, I think Powers Capital, it will function like a family office in the sense that I don't want to grow this big company, but it’ll also function like private equity in that I'm going to raise outside people's money and invest in kind of different businesses.
Eric Jorgenson: And I hope it's not a weird question, and I have my own like version of this and my own answer to it, but I'm curious as to like what is the- like to what end with that sense? Like because this is all a really fun way to kind of like learn and vet and meet people and get it all together because you have some- like you have built a very successful company, but you're not selling it and retiring and beaching, you're probably working just as hard as you always have on Powers Capital instead of Fort Capital and sort of getting a reset around your curiosity. I mean, I just think there's like a-
Chris Powers: It's the million dollar question, Eric. It's a blessing and a curse. And I honestly mean this because I now have two daughters, I've got a five-year-old and a two-year-old. And I was the guy that used to work until nine o'clock every night not because- for no other reason then I loved it. Like I wasn't- there was nobody watching. I mean, it was just I loved it. And what I told you, I think it was the first thing I told you when we started this, I’ve woken up every day feeling behind. And it has changed. Financially, I'm in a position that I'm able to take a little more of a deep breath now because of some of what's happened in business. Having kids has made me realize a big priority is to spend time with them. If I'm being totally honest, and some people might listen to this and say, man, that sounds kind of cold, but I think going back to how people are wired, I think there's people, call it dads, that could spend eight hours a day with their kids and take them to the park and read books and just like never give; I'm more great with my kids in doses. Give me shorter time spurts where I can give them all my attention. And so, I will never be the dad that I think could be a stay-at-home dad. That would never be me. But I have to make my kids a priority. And I want to make a big dent on the world. And I just feel like with the tech, with everything we're experiencing right now, there's a long way to go. But to answer your question, when is enough enough, or to what end, I ask myself that every day, and I have no idea because at this point, I can say enough to say it's not about the money at this point. It's about everything else. The money's great, but I don't have desires- like it's not because I need to pay for something that I can't already get.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. I think it's, I mean, the way we're wired is so hard to overcome. And the worlds that we build and the egos that we build for ourselves when we're teenagers, like I remember- and I didn't even understand, I didn't encounter the opposite of this worldview for a very long time, but like I remember, my dad was a small business owner and I was reading biographies of Richard Branson and Ted Turner and being like, wow, these guys became billionaires by serving like thousands and hundreds of thousands of people and helping them, and like that money is a symbol of how many people they helped and how many people chose to interact with them. And I was writing journal entries like I want to be a billionaire because it means I will have helped this many people. And like, it will be obvious the impact that I made when like I have that label.
Chris Powers: Yeah, you just nailed it. People on Twitter always write like how much, those questions, how much is enough to you? And the answer to that question is how big of an impact do you- like it's not fully that, but it's how big of an impact do you want to have?
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, like there's no- yeah, if you turn it into impact, which is like how I see an earned net worth, let's set aside like scammers and massive inheritance, but like an earned net worth I think is a reasonable representation of like impact had, and it's hard to ever say like, oh, I've had enough impact, like I'm just going to stop. I'm going to stop using the skills that I've created and the friendships and relationships that I've made. Like why would you stop?
Chris Powers: Yeah, it's an eternal question. I don't know if I'll ever fully be able to answer it. All I would say is I get more perspective on how I want to spend time and it doesn't all end up in the office anymore. But I get antsy after I've been sitting still for five minutes. I need to pick up a book. I’m very just wired.
Eric Jorgenson: So, you haven't slowed down. You've taken deep breaths now, you're working just as hard. Did anything- Like there's passages from the Almanack of Naval that keep like popping into my head as you're talking, and now I can see why we jive on this, but I wonder if that changed your thinking about any of these thing? Because he talks about this like hedonic treadmill and this sort of- Naval also is certainly financially successful by any remotely reasonable expectation but like still working, still investing, still starting companies in the same way. I wonder if that sat with you at all.
Chris Powers: It did. And we set goals as a company, and I set like things I want to get done, but I get asked all the time like what are your goals? And my answer is obviously sometimes maybe not what they're listening to or not what they're wanting to hear is I don't have goals because I just know that I'm going to like do it. Like I just know I'm going to keep moving the ball forward, not because I'm some brainiac, but because I literally have so much momentum from when I get out of bed in my soul that I'm just going to keep getting stuff done. All that to be said, maybe the way I'm answering your question and how Naval thinks of it is because I started early at 17, I'm only 34 years old. So, I'm not speaking like I've lived this long, long life. But in a lot of respects, I feel like I've been through more in 17 years then a lot of people go through in a 50 year career. And I have gone through these mental stages or mental goals of where I thought I would be much quicker than- I've gotten there much quicker than I had set out. And here's what I would tell to the people listening, and I think a lot of people in life can relate to this, every time I get to once I get there, then this – it doesn't happen that way. You get there and you're- it's not empty, but it's also not I'm going to take a break, like I'm done. I think the only way to answer your question to what end is if I literally made a deal with myself that said if I get here, I'm going to stop, like I am going to physically change my life in this way. Because when you're saying it tongue in cheek, like if I get here, I'll work less. And then you get there and you're like why would I actually work less? Because I told myself that two years-
Eric Jorgenson: Hang on a second, I've accumulated all this leverage, and now each incremental piece of work accomplishes more than I ever have before.
Chris Powers: Correct. It's a game. For people that really love the game or love the action, it's a game at some point. You're not doing it to pay for things. You're not doing it to meet people. You're doing it to see what can I get done in this short, finite time I'm here, back to where we started. You only live once.
Eric Jorgenson: So, something I wrote down actually when you first mentioned that, and it is like Brent Beshore talks about like early entrepreneurship as a knife fight. He's like you wake up, you grab the knife off the bedside table, and like you run into the knife fight, and like that's entrepreneurship for like the first decade for pretty much everybody. And some people never leave that. And like you contrasted with you're like feeling behind, you have this sort of background that's like propelling you and you're working your face off and you're accomplishing all these things. Like, are you working- is your state of mind now as you're working more like peaceful, more joyful? Like if somebody's working, sitting in an office with you today feel a different presence than like the Chris of ten years ago?
Chris Powers: Oh my gosh. If anybody that worked with me ten years ago is was listening, I'm sorry. No, I’m kidding. Yes, I can say that. I think we all mature. A lot of it is showing people grace and like having patience. Again, when you're so driven, and naturally, again, I'm going back to kind of personality types, but there's people that can just naturally see around corners. I would put myself in that category. I spend my entire almost waking life thinking about the future. I'm never really- people ask me about like a year ago, I cannot tell you what happened a year ago very well. But then you have those friends that can tell you about a movie they watched five years ago, where they were sitting. I'm always looking forward. And so, to the question that you were saying, I was hard to work with early in the day because I knew in my head where we needed to be as a company and what it looked like and how it would feel. And every day that we didn't match up to that, I just wasn't very patient. And I think, again, going back to focus, it's taught me the things that I really want to see play out, and you just got to be patient for those things. I give people, I think, a lot more grace and empathy than I ever have. Again, it's not near perfect. But I would say that the short answer to that question is, yeah, I'm a lot probably more laid back than I used to be. I have moments where I can go from zero to a hundred, but I kind of know why I'm doing it now. Whereas the knife fight early on, you're just trying to survive and every moment you're just, your emotions are kind of-
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, run on adrenaline for years at a time. We're through my nine pages, believe it or not. There's definitely so much stuff to kind of come back and like I have a lot of open ends to tie up, but this is not a nine-hour podcast.
Chris Powers: We'll do part two.
Eric Jorgenson: We can do part two. Yeah, I would love that. So, by way of closing question, I think there's a little bit of a, I don't know, it's a tough question, but I think you're up for it, which is what is the most foundational principle that you can offer broadly to all entrepreneurs, like something that is true for almost everyone pursuing whatever they're pursuing that's something you've learned in your career thus far?
Chris Powers: Oh man, that's a great question. There's just a couple. Yeah, there's something that comes to mind. This is kind of in hindsight, and especially in the world we live in today, I think to be a great entrepreneur and to be a leader is to be humble and have a lot of humility because ultimately, what you need to build something great, you need great people around you that are willing to follow you. And I think that people's bullshit detector, their ability to detect somebody that's not being genuine with them is very good. Despite what people say or what you might hear, everybody has a sense when they're being told the truth or when they're not, or when somebody's motivations are pure, when they're not. And in a world now that is so transparent, and there's lots of stuff that you hear, I think about this a lot, and this is maybe the answer I'll give today, a leader that is humble, that has a healthy dose of humility, will have a much better chance of going the distance because people would rather follow somebody like that than somebody that is all for one and not one for all. And it matters a lot. So, I would say that is one thing that everybody could have in common, and I don't think it will ever serve you poorly in life, in business, or in entrepreneurship.
Eric Jorgenson: I think that's an amazing bow on a beautiful package. So, thank you so much, Chris, for doing this and taking the time and being such an open book about what is I think truly an amazing story. And I wish I had heard it at 17, but this is the next best thing. And there's a lot to unpack and learn and apply from here. And I look forward to it.
Chris Powers: Yeah, man. I'm so glad that we've gotten to know each other. And I really appreciate the opportunity to be on, and your thoughtfulness. You haven't done as many episodes of me, but I literally spent half of today taking notes. This was an incredible episode. And you asked me a lot of questions that made me think really deep. So, cheers to you, man, and I look forward to hanging soon.
Eric Jorgenson: Thanks for listening. I encourage you to follow Chris on Twitter at Fort Worth Chris. Ask him any follow up questions you're left with after the interview. I'm sure you have some, I had plenty myself. If you liked this episode, you will certainly love my episodes with Nick Huber and Mitchell Baldrige, both of whom are friends with Chris in real life. And Codie Sanchez has a similar story. She has been on Chris's podcast and mine. And she has a lot of similar themes and advice as well. The next episodes on Jorgenson Soundbox are going to be real different. I'm going to interview people from Squid DAO, this ETH based treasury organization in web 3. I'm going to do a solo cast about a bunch of mental models for web 3. And then I'm going to do a second interview with Zach Marshall six months into his startup, three months after our first one, our quarterly check-in on his marketplace for private security. But before I go, I will leave you with this thought: If you went and narrowed your focus like Chris did so much that it hurt to see opportunity cost all around you, what would you focus on? Take a few quiet moments for yourself, breathe deep, and be well.