Discover the inspiring journey of Patrick Antrim, the visionary founder of nectarflow.com, as he transitions from the high-stakes world of professional sports to the multifamily real estate industry. Patrick's early influences in real estate come from his grandmother, but his unexpected career with the New York Yankees provides him with invaluable lessons on excellence, branding, and teamwork, often referred to as the "Yankee way." Through nostalgic recollections, Patrick reveals how the discipline and community spirit of baseball have shaped his leadership philosophy, which he now applies to revolutionizing the real estate industry.
At just 24 years old, Patrick took a bold leap from the baseball diamond to the boardroom. Guided by mentorship from the Hon. George Argyros, the former owner of the Seattle Mariners, Patrick learned to navigate the complexities of the multifamily real estate market. His story underscores the significance of finding the right mentors, creating fail-safe environments, and pushing the limits of what’s possible. Patrick's high-performance expectations and insights into motivating and managing teams provide a unique perspective on the parallels between sports and business.
As we explore the future of work and the transformative potential of AI, Patrick introduces nectarflow™, an AI-driven initiative designed to tackle industry challenges head-on. Through engaging discussions on unlearning outdated methods, fostering innovation, and building community, Patrick emphasizes the importance of rapid failure as a tool for growth. Wrapping up the episode, we delve into the challenges of integrating siloed technologies and the innovative solutions nectarflow™ offers to streamline business processes. Join us for a compelling episode packed with insights on leadership, innovation, and the journey from sports to business.
About the Multifamily Innovation® Council:
The Multifamily Innovation® Council is the executive level membership organization that makes a difference in your bottom line, drives a better experience for your employees, and allows you an experience that keeps demand strong for your company. The council is uniquely positioned to focus on the intersection of Leadership, Technology, AI, and Innovation.
The Multifamily Innovation® Council is for Multifamily Business leaders who want to unlock value inside their organization so they can create better experiences and drive profitability inside their company.
To learn more or to join, visit https://multifamilyinnovation.com/council.
For more information and to engage with leaders shaping the future of multifamily innovation, visit https://multifamilyinnovation.com/.
Connect:
Multifamily Innovation® Council: https://multifamilyinnovation.com/council/
Multifamily Innovation® & AI Summit: https://multifamilyinnovation.com/
Patrick Antrim: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickantrim/
Welcome back to the Multifamily Leadership Podcast. I am here today with the founder of Nectar Flow, patrick Antrim. We are so happy to have you here again today. And I'm really excited today because when I started at Multifamily Leadership, you started to tell me your story and I was like, wow, I didn't know this. I didn't know you were a part of this and this and this. And so there were so many parts of your story that were compelling to me that I felt we needed to share it. So one happy to have you here.
Speaker 3:Yeah Well, thank you for putting this on, because I probably would tell that story differently every time.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 3:You know, depending on what prompts it, I guess.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, you guys have been on a really amazing journey, you and Carrie, and I just think let's start from the very beginning and how you got into multifamily and then kind of where the journey went from there.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I mean way, way back, my grandmother was like the top selling real estate agent and she had all these keys. Literally I think the name of the real estate company was key real estate or something like that like it was literally a key, yeah. And I just remember she had all these keys and I thought she was so cool because she had all these keys to all these properties and apparently she was like a top go-getter. I mean she was dressed like she was going to I don't know, just the most, she was just a killer.
Speaker 3:I guess right. And that was early in my life Like I'm talking, four or five years old, I'm noticing these things. So my family you know family had aspects of real estate but I never really explored it as a career, never thought I'd be down this path of real estate. But it was when I trained early in life as a professional athlete. I played three or four seasons with the New York Yankees, you just tossed that out there like it's nothing.
Speaker 3:Well, that's a whole other conversation, because the Yankees have a culture called the Yankee way, and part of that is that's why they don't have their names on the back of their jerseys. It's they're like well, we're the Yankees. Fans should know like who we are, and so outside of the game where the uniform is on.
Speaker 3:It's almost like you're not allowed to wear any Yankee clothing. You know regular life, you carry yourself as a Yankee, as a complete person. But in doing that I mean you figure you go to college for four years. I mean I did that for four years. You're essentially traveling, you're away from home nine, 10 months of the year and I learned that it was very routine and for me. I started to see I retired at 24. So when I saw and I'm reading books on bus rides, Okay, this was a long time ago, right, I retired in 1998.
Speaker 3:Wow. So on bus rides I'm reading, like John Grissom, books, fascinated with law, I'm literally buying, like ATM machines, finding places to make money with ATM machines, like, what do you do? And I was probably an entrepreneur and I didn't know it yet, but it's sort of like Groundhog Day, it's four o'clock stretch, six o'clock pregame, game time seven. I mean, you play a game and it's the same game.
Speaker 3:The only thing that never got old was listening to, you know, the national anthem every day and seeing some performer come out and perform and seeing just community come together, and I get the chills because I miss the fresh cut of grass and the fact that America loves baseball. Baseball is essentially the greatest simulation of life and your perspective of how to learn, how to make yourself better, how to be coachable, how to coach others. But I sat there in those games and I just watched all of this happen around me and I journaled every day playing. I knew Reggie Jackson told me this, cleet Boyer told me this the Steinbrenner slipped me $100 at the you know here and whatever it is. And it's little stories like that, like I remember in college, I, you know you don't have a lot of money, right. You're like where's the pizza, like how are we going to eat? And you're at the end of the game, you're raking your own field, you're cleaning up everything, and then you're running and it's just like an exhausting thing and you're preparing to then get picked by like the Yankees, right. And so when I got to the Yankees, the moment I put on my jersey and those pinstripes, I mean it was like putting on the most amazing Italian suit. I mean it's fitted the way like it's crazy. And you see your. You know your locker. It's got your name on it.
Speaker 3:All these emotional things go into like since five years old I've been working towards a school and I actually got there. I didn't know I was going to get there then and all that stuff there. I didn't know I was going to get there then and all that stuff. But in observing all these things I noticed that this organization was building a brand and they were building a brand off of people winning and they built a brand off of finding and paying for the best talent. So you look at some of the parallels that come into the things that I lead in business comes from a lot of what I trained early in life and experience with even the Yankees. But what you soon realize is not everybody attacks life that way. For example, back to my story with college you're kind of scrambling, you're hitting dirty baseballs you can't even see at five o'clock at practice.
Speaker 3:And when I got to the Yankees I was in spring training at the Tampa Complex and we call it complex. I know it's an apartment complex but it's a complex and I just see this bucket of balls. And we just signed Dwight Gooden to like a multi-year, amazing high contract and he was warming up and they were using these balls that were. To me they looked like pearls, they were perfect and beautiful. But Steinbrenner gets on the field, walks on, you know, he's got his turtleneck and the whole thing just as it plays out in Seinfeld all that stuff, it's true. And he just looks at these baseballs and almost throws a fit Like, get these out of here, we need to, and a new set comes in. And I was just blown away because he basically was saying these are scuffed. And I just paid X amount of dollars for Dwight Gooden. I don't want him getting a blister. Wow.
Speaker 3:And so, as a leader, it's very tough to work for somebody like that. But it's also exciting to see that they're going to pay the most. They're also going to expect the most Right and also they're going to give whatever. They're going to get the best equipment, the best technology, the best trainers, the best doctors, whatever to say. Look, I'm going to expect that employee to when they become the Yankee. They walk in that field. They got to arrive at the highest level, but the owner is also putting it all in, not cutting corners, and that played out into like what hotels we stayed at and all that stuff.
Speaker 3:So I journaled all these things I mean, I tell you that story because I wrote it down and things Reggie Jackson told me are these just legendary teams? But what's fascinating about that was rookies. You're signing at 21 years old and you get there and they have players in there that were 70, 80 years old roaming around the complex. So they do a great job of bringing sort of. The rookies respect those that have gone before them with great legacy and great honor, because they've won championships and they've done things that they probably grew up witnessing on TV and stuff. But the old timers we'll call them also respected the rookies. So you're talking about in work the generational differences In baseball. There's no better experience than that. Absolutely.
Speaker 3:And I just really thought that was really well done. Yeah, Because I think even today in real estate there's a lot that we can learn from our sort of founders that saw an oak tree and a vision of land and had a vision for a city and took the risk and fought for that and got the resources. It's an entrepreneurial story and I think people walk into lease ups today and forget that. They just forget the fabric of what made this happen.
Speaker 3:And so I think the Yankees gave me that appreciation to. You know, if you look at all the people that are trying to get that job, you don't get it by applying. You get it by winning where you are, if that's in college or another team. And then if you want to be on sort of a bigger and better team or another team like, they will choose you based off of how you perform in another environment. Yeah, so I think that was a lot of my early start to that. I then realized, with the redundancy, the routine of this, the journaling and me saying like I want to own this team, I don't want to play on it. You know what I mean. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And so for me that vision. I don't know where that came from. I think it came from that I just hadn't found me. Yet I haven't figured out who I was. I haven't figured out who I was, but when I retired, I actually retired in 97 and then went home with no plan, no idea. Yeah. And no support. Wow.
Speaker 3:I mean you think about everybody in my life. This was when, like you're in the newspapers and there's no social media and there's no mobile phones, really. So everybody family, friends, everybody that's ever seen my journey thought I was absolutely crazy to walk away from this Now. The Yankees wouldn't trade me or release me, so I signed a seven-year deal. So I was still under contract, which meant I can't play for anybody else, and they were like we're not going to release you, you can run, you can switch, hit, you can do all these things. So we think that there's still value for this. I essentially retired means also quit. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Right To me. I wanted something better. I was witnessing on road trips, long road trips, isolated from family. A lot of them I couldn't even speak English with a lot of my players, because number one an international I didn't, and that with a lot of my players because number one I had international, and that was actually an exciting part. But I started to witness other players that were older than me I'm talking about even 30 years old, I'm 24. And I'm like, do I want this? Because they were missing their kids' birthdays. Now I was from California, and so I missed all the summers. I missed a lot of the things that I valued at the time, and so I sort of just said, well, who else has done things in sports? And then did remarkable things after it, and I looked at guys like Vince Ferragamo, Tim DeCense, these sort of families that were familiar to our hometown and they'd done some great things off the field, and so I called my sports agent. I said, listen, I want to do something, maybe in real estate or in this aspect.
Speaker 3:Vince Ferragamo is an old football player. That Legacy did this and he connected me with a gentleman by the name of George Ardress which used to own the Seattle Mariners baseball team and I became his apprentice. He became the US ambassador so many great things that he had accomplished in his career. But owning a baseball team was the transition and the soft landing into. Okay, this is much bigger than baseball and I thought like making a million and a half let's say a million and a half dollars as an athlete and you know that's not a bad annual salary if you had that as a position player. So when you're giving up opportunity there and then you go take a job, I got $24,000 a year is what I got paid to be the apprentice to give up everything in baseball, to not know what was going to happen, and I essentially became almost like a personal aid assistant. I drove him to meetings, we went everywhere and I did it for 24, I didn't even do it for the money I was scraping. I did so many things that were like, what am I doing and what did I give up?
Speaker 3:But there was this process of the Yankee way, and the reason why I don't talk a lot about this is because they have this thing and it's not just the Yankees, it's more became a fabric of how I show up in the world, which is in baseball, let your glove do the talking, let your results do the talking, and I've always tried to do that. But now in business, that's not enough. You have to share, you have to experience, you have to take people, you have to pull back the curtain, you have to let people see what's behind the making of what's happening, and so that's been sort of my unpack. I still haven't unpacked that and I have an advisor, former head of talent capability at Microsoft, who is working with me on the weekly to to being this apprentice for this 700th richest person in the world.
Speaker 3:Amazing best friends with Richard Nixon, like chairman of Republican Party finance, you know, finance George Bush campaigns, both families, both senior, and, you know, and I'm in meetings where John at the Architect to Peace Awards, sitting next to William, simon, henry Kissinger, the you know the I think it was a commissioner of baseball. So now I'm with the commissioner of baseball, you know, and all my other buddies are back in, you know taking ground balls and he's just like what?
Speaker 3:No, not at all, and so anyway. So that's kind of how I that formulates a lot of how I see the business and see what's possible. Because what I realized and fast forward everything that I did and I do that in the fast forwarding piece is everything that I did in real estate bringing and building management companies, even lease-ups, developments all the stuff comes from their ability to find the right people, which is scouting and baseball, getting them to work effectively together. In many ways that's the minor leagues fail-safe environments, pushing them to the limits, simulations of situations, preparing them for something bigger and better Right, and so collecting the right people. Fail-safe environments, pushing them to the limits, simulations of situations, preparing them for something bigger and better right, and so collecting the right people, getting them to work effectively together so then they can show up for the customer and if you do that, you get yield for the investor.
Speaker 3:And a lot of I didn't realize I was that's kind of been my style and a lot of I didn't realize I was that's kind of been my style. That's pushed away a lot of people because I mean, I expect people to play a big game and that's part of my problem is that I think everybody else wants this high performance life. Yeah, yeah, so that's been a lesson to learn over time. But yeah, so that's how I got into multifamily. The owner of the Mariners, who I became an apprentice for, or former owner. He owned apartments and I was 15 seconds away from never being in this industry. Wow.
Speaker 3:I walked in there, I did this five-step recruiting process at this time and I'm looking around at the wall and I see these apartment buildings and and uh, I'm like they weren't really that. Some of them weren't really that nice. I was like I don't want to do this.
Speaker 3:Like this isn't what I have in mind right you know little, did I know like those apartment buildings created all these other things that he did? I mean, a simple Google search on George Ardress would be. It's just like how does one human being do this? Wow, and I almost I, literally, I think I got up out of my seat and Jill this lovely regional manager, I guess, opened the door and was like hi, you know, come on in. I'm like, oh, you know, yeah, and I went through the process and the rest is history. Yeah, and here I am in multifamily still.
Speaker 1:It's pretty incredible and it all makes a lot of sense to like I didn't you know.
Speaker 1:I came in pretty I had no idea who you were. I had heard of multifamily leadership, I've heard of best places and multifamily, all of these pieces of your business, but, um, but I think the story is that it makes so much sense the way that you're doing it, and for me it was such a thought through, plan and strategy that you have. I was almost taken aback to your point, but I think it's you have the sense that everybody it's not that everybody doesn't want that. I would say it's not that everybody doesn't want to know how to be successful, like, like who you've been in a room with, or it's it's that they don't know how or they don't think they have access to that, and so I think I think that would be the biggest piece, that's, I don't want to say missing, but but that's different is to think that you know the masses, you know someone like me. You know it's not that I wouldn't come in and want that for myself, it's just I wouldn't even know where to begin.
Speaker 3:You know it's interesting and since we've been talking so much about baseball in college and leading up to it every, every level, from little league on, there's a lot of instruction. How to do this and mechanics, right, yeah, but do you know why? Even in political campaigns? Do you know why people want to grow up to become teachers, firefighters, policemen, baseball players, basketball players, football players.
Speaker 1:Do I know why? Yeah, do you know why? It's a trick question.
Speaker 3:Well, it's not really a trick.
Speaker 1:To educate, to teach, to mentor.
Speaker 3:So what happens is at the early stages in life, four or five years old, all the way up. That's what children see. They're in the classroom with the teacher, they're watching them work. Yeah, when I tell you build in public is because I want people to see us work yeah and that's how you solve the I can do that industry. Yeah, right, because I was. I saw the photo.
Speaker 3:I'm like I don't want anything to do with this yeah it's the greatest industry on the on earth, right, because people but they see movies, teachers, you know. Even in political campaigns, you know they romanticize these roles as important as they are. It's just a quick accelerator to value in communities. And you know, when you look at organizations, people aren't growing up wanting to do real estate, they're not growing up wanting to operate apartment portfolios and these types of things because they don't see that work. They don't, they don't have a vision for it.
Speaker 3:But when I was in little league and all that stuff, I had a vision of like I would emulate batting stances from certain players and because we saw them on TV, we could watch them work. So I would emulate their moves, their steps, their mechanics. And so you're in this instructional phase all the way up to college. But the most profound moment that I recognize, when I signed that contract and I'm flying from Cape Cod because that's where I came out of the Cape Cod League, flying into Tampa the moment I stepped in there on that field, I realized a policy that the Yankees had which was don't instruct for 30 days. I thought that was interesting because to me when I was flying in, I'm like man, I'm going to get the best instruction. I'm going to get all this. I'm going to get better, and they're like we're not telling you anything.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Right, like we're not going to mess up with the system because you did something to get noticed, to get here Like a coach isn't going to mess that up, like overcoach it, right. And when you said like people need to know how, I mean the thing that was the shift is that it became the unlearning.
Speaker 3:I realized most of the instruction, if not all of it, was wrong when, I got to the Yankees and I learned from some Dominicans that were playing baseball with literally a paper plate in their country, and I learned it without even speaking English, and so I'm learning these things that took what I thought was a lot of things that needed to happen to like very simple things that needed what I thought was a lot of things that needed to happen to like very simple things that needed to happen.
Speaker 3:And so, if this plays out in business in so many ways, we overthink things, we try and emulate others and through this process, what I benefited the most from was my own trust in my own outcomes and not copying somebody else and trying to make it my own or trying to be like somebody else else.
Speaker 3:And so the quicker we can fail which is what we learned in baseball the quicker we can make it better. So when I mentioned to you that not everybody else signs up for that process, I'm coaching, I'm seeing an employee with like a five-year vision and I'm like, oh my gosh, they're going to change the world in this way. Five years later they may not even know it, and I'm putting them in stressors situations and I'm like orchestrating, like how can we fail so fast in all these different fascinating ways that they then build confidence for themselves, that they learn that they can do it, that they don't need another logo to say they did it from this other logo. They don't need another leader, they don't need an article, they don't need a video, they don't need anything but their own truths. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And that is powerful Very powerful. It's also frustrating.
Speaker 1:It's all the things.
Speaker 3:It is.
Speaker 1:There's been a lot of unlearning and it's not in a bad way. It does make you question. You know, I think I asked you a lot up front. I was you know why do you cap your events at 250? That seems like a missed opportunity. Why is our council only you know this amazing executive level? You know why don't we let you know? It's, it's just the way that you've structured and and when I think about the story you just told, you built a community, the multifamily innovation council, a community of people who have been in the industry a very long time, come from very diverse groups of assets, types of assets, styles of companies, and then there are some people that are more fresh, that are needing to be mentored, and you've kind of built that already in multifamily. And then you think about the applications. You're saying you, you know, I think you're implementing a lot of the elements you're already talking about, which is really interesting to me to see where it all comes from. Now it makes sense.
Speaker 3:Yeah, sometimes it's. We try and have a plan and I can tell you most of this hasn't been planned.
Speaker 3:It's just been paying attention and making those adjustments just like in anything else, if you're a singer and songwriter, you launch. I mean, do they dance to this? There's a Taylor Swift clip where she's like she's got the whole crowd and they're doing this. I can't remember the song lyric or whatever. Carrie sent me the link and she's like isn't this just give you the chills? And I said yes, I don't have my phone with me here, but I said also, you know what Taylor did? She gave them a call to action and she says let me see your hands. And then she did this. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So, like she didn't just do this, right, she's like do this and do it and do it like this, yeah, right. And so the brain works in a certain way that it's designed to protect us in some outcomes. And so when we can set the intention to what we're really trying to accomplish, um, we can do some really interesting things. And you know, sports psychology is, it puts us into situations where the outcomes are impossible sometimes. And when you do something that's impossible and you get progress, that is like fire to the human soul, knowing like you're going to walk into the next situation and have an edge. Or have I got this, you know? And so all of this kind of circles back to you know, just being okay with the process and figuring out, most people will think it's about something else.
Speaker 3:You mentioned the 250 attendees. I guess if we went to 500, we could create that same experience. But the product is not the attendee. The product is not how much money we can make from the event. We lose money on these things, right, just by the way that we structure the experience. But the product is when somebody attends something like that, they leave with something that makes their business better. Right, because what else are you going to do? Are you going to try and collect everybody Like how do you network with 10,000 people? Right, you can't.
Speaker 1:You leave with a stress ball.
Speaker 3:That's true.
Speaker 1:That's you know.
Speaker 3:That's true, but so I think that's the. I think it's having the courage to know, like, what you're doing, that's different, yeah, and being able to say well, most people are going to ask for this over here and you can make a lot of money with this over here, but what truly people need is this. So you just have to have marketing stamina to sustain it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think it's just such a different mindset than what we're used to. We're used to thinking the masses is what you want, all the people and all the money and all the trade shows and all that. You know, the things that we are marking as indicators for success from observing you. Maybe that's not it. Maybe that you know and you have done a lot of research on some of the brightest minds in the world.
Speaker 1:You know, you're observing and you're taking the elements of these people that you find to hold true and you're applying them into your business. And. I think if more people thought that way and kind of broke, broke out of the norms of what we know to be true, which it only can serve us for so long, and you say this a lot.
Speaker 1:You say people are. You know it's working in the sense that people are cashing checks, you know, um, but I think we're going to hit a point and we already are getting there where we're realizing that the change needs to happen. And I think that, you know, is a nice segue into the fact that now it might feel like this AI tech side of the company that you're building now, nectar Flow I don't want to say it felt like it comes out of nowhere, but it could, if you don't see that all of this has been to warm up to now solve the problems that you've identified, and to me it's like wow, now this makes so much sense that the natural next progression is to launch a product that now solves all of the problems that you've observed over however many years.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely. And when you observe and you can research and you can involve people that would use something like that, then you get the priority right, you get the need right, you get the feedback loop and you want to build things that are useful. And contrary to that, I mean you you have like nobody asked for the iPhone either. Right, like nobody asked for certain things. So you need to kind of take people with you where you, where you see going, because they're not involved in certain conversations because they're so focused on their own applications. But, yeah, I think it's ultimately the way that I see innovation is not technology, it's not AI, it's making the business better.
Speaker 3:In some cases, that could just be like take that one hour meeting and make it 15 minutes, and I just immediately walked into your organization and created profitability. Like, how many employees are in one hour meetings? Across 200 employees? What are you paying them per hour? And even on a phone call with us as a demo for Nectar Flow, I mean you come out of that meeting. You haven't become a customer and you're like you know that's a good point. Why do we do that? Well, the meeting is set, you know, if you can't get it done in 15 minutes, get it.
Speaker 1:If you can't get it done in 15 minutes, like is it even worth it, right, well, and you even walk away with actionable right outcomes not usually right yeah.
Speaker 3:so I think I think it's, you know, just figuring out that other people are not smarter than you, that you a lot of people think they can't do it, and one of the things that I've always done is I've pulled off most everything I've set out to do. Yeah. And some of these things have been difficult and it's just. It makes you feel again like unstoppable. Yeah.
Speaker 3:But you have to have the marketing stamina to know like there's going to be. I mean, I went a lot of years, sometimes before, even when I retired from the Yankees there was a long time where people are like oh, I get it now. Yeah, you know.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I mean, that's where the personal courage needs to happen. A lot of challenge today is that people are dependent on their income through an employer, and so they they don't. They don't unleash their true self. Right, okay, because if you look at Elon Musk when he talks about first principles, he talks about when somebody smart says something to you, it could impact things, because we believe that Smart people said it must be true. It's not necessarily the case. Right.
Speaker 3:Right. And so when we can use like first principles thinking or like a scientific method to truly understand decision making, then you can do bold things and you know that innovation will always win, just like it did in automotive, just like it did in the hotel industry. Even with smart players, Biggest industry dominators missed it all. So to me, when industry incumbents and large organizations say things, it's not really that impressive. To me it's really what does each individual employee have activated to truly impact that customer experience?
Speaker 1:Right, and I think that's really smart, because on a recent Innovation Council meeting, somebody said we've been talking about the hierarchy and the org chart a lot, and somebody said something along the lines of well, what if everybody did every job on site?
Speaker 1:Or everybody knew how to process payroll, everyone knew how to do sales, everybody knew how to do a resident, you know, deal with a resident complaint, and when to escalate, and all of those things.
Speaker 1:So that concept is what, when I'm thinking of the future and what we've been working on with AI and automations and things like that, is that I, as an individual, now need to be looking at myself and say how do I gain this robust skill set so that, as processes become more efficient and I'm able to do what I would normally do in a 40-hour work week in one day day?
Speaker 1:What else can I, where can I provide value now to be able to keep a job you know, not to just keep a job, but, you know, thrive in a world where automation is going to be the norm, and so I think that is where employers are almost doing an injustice to their people by pigeonholing them into this one set of responsibilities that they have to accomplish in this one day. Well, they're kind of like, you know, they're kind of like expose me to more to your point, give me a mentor to teach me how to do every single part, play on every single part of the team. Right, you didn't only know how to pitch, or to you know whatever it was, so that I can step in and I have the skillset I need as as processes change, as companies reorganize and things like this. Right, yeah, I think it's important.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think the the challenge with all this is and this is we're all going through this experience together and if anybody has told anybody that they know what's going to happen, that's not true. Yeah, nobody knows. Yeah. Nobody knew the internet. You know what that would unlock, you know. So I think people are going to need to figure out themselves. This is going to be the best thing for humanity. Yeah, absolutely the most amazing thing for humanity and empowering.
Speaker 3:There is going to be massive uncertainty, tremendous amount of shifts from how they identify with who they are and what they hold like a lot of. I talk to property managers sometimes and, uh, it's what they hold. I talk to property managers sometimes and it's like they hold themselves so proud with their checklists and the this and the that and I'm like that's not impressive to me. That's not impressive. So it's going to be when those things get done better, faster and from a global marketplace, it's what they do next. Like what else? Right, so that's what I was told Like.
Speaker 3:So if everything I've had to do to build this company and do the things and know AI and talk to developers and do all these things, but my next phase is building a team. That would completely like walk off a cliff for me. How do you build that culture? How do you build people that can challenge the status quo? How do you build people that want to do something different and make a difference and become filthy rich along the way? How do you do that? That's different than doing the thing. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So people right now have been doing the thing for so long in front of a monitor, in front of a computer, on a platform that they're used to. So when all of that gets reinvented and it becomes new and better, it will be better.
Speaker 3:What else do you do? Yeah, and that's where it's like well, what do you like to do, like, what makes you? You Like what music, what travel, like, whatever that is. And it's hard to think about that in multifamily because we're so high task, high relationship and you think, well, that would be distracting, whatever. But man, if your employees came to work not because they had to, but because they wanted to, yeah, that's a very different thing, okay.
Speaker 3:That's a very different thing, mm-hmm, okay, it's a very different thing and there's just a lot of shifts that are going to happen as this unfolds. But you think about the residents, the greatest movement for humans possible, because the things that they're going to figure out not just multifamily is like wait, I got significance out of my job. Yeah, I got significance out of I was capable at this report. I got significance because, whatever it is, I showed them where the dishwasher was, you know, yeah, and I was a closer, whatever that is. And so if you strip all that away from work, where do they find their personal power and their personal value and the reality? It's just been hidden for so long. Right.
Speaker 3:With all this boring stuff. Yeah, yeah. You know and, um, you know, I I think it's, it's really remarkable. So, if I'm an employee, you want to get on the other side of this, you want to go along with this, you want to figure it out, you want to use it for your own benefit so you can bring this, you know, bring momentum and profit to your organization. Uh, but just recognize it's, it's just, it's a transition.
Speaker 1:It's going to be yeah, yeah, I mean even, like I said, I've been here for a couple of weeks at this point, but having to even look at, like I said, I resonate probably now with the greater audience who's listening to this of like, just wow, I really need to be thinking. You know I'm in marketing, so I don't want to say a low hanging fruit, but a lot of tasks in marketing are being automated as we speak and copywriting, graphic design I mean every single element.
Speaker 3:And.
Speaker 1:I had already noticed this, mind you, before AI started rolling out. It started especially after COVID. It really started to become necessary, as a marketer, to be everything. I couldn't just be a video editor and a producer, you know, I had to be. I had to know Adobe inside and out. I had to know, you know, and it was. It became more and more expected to be a full you know, full service marketer as an individual, and these unique, one-off skills weren't enough. It wasn't going to cut it. So that happened, even without AI, right? So I think we all need to be thinking about the progression of ourselves. You know, and to your point, I think, the mentor mentality of having somebody who's highly elevated, that you're looking at and almost I don't want to say copy pasting what they're doing, but you're observing and you're pulling the elements, like you've done, of what they're doing. That's working, that's what we all need to be doing today.
Speaker 3:When I mentioned humanity, the greatest gift from this is because I mean, I do stuff. People copy some things that I do out of the strategies that we deploy, which is great. I love that. That just means that it's an early indication that these things prove to have momentum and they prove to convert to value. But you don't want to get concerned about that, right. Everything is art, right, and it's only art when it's seen by the world. It's not art if it's held back, right, and so, as people play out these situations, the differentiator is that person, that humanity, that person. So you're the different. Like there are things that you would do that would be in marketing that you're doing, that could be automated or, like you mentioned, or AI or all these things, but it's getting in the way of you. So you would set goals, set direction and measure results. The technology can be supportive to help you accomplish that, but the true differentiator in all of this is you, or it could be your property or your company. So that's the magic is where, again, we have to find out who we are as a company, who we are as a leader, who we are as a human, because that is what's going to be the differentiator between this and that.
Speaker 3:When it comes down to if everybody can do it, it's not interesting. So the speed of this is just far faster than what we experienced with the internet. So I think people aren't really prepared for that. A lot of people are, but that's where it gets back to. Our industry is a people industry and you know it's unknown about how these models shake out for what people expect, but I can tell you that you're watching it in music, you're watching like how people TV, you're watching it and how people consume content. But at the end of the day, people see the world through their eyes or they hear the world through their ears.
Speaker 3:And I think, at the end of the day, if you're building a team, you have to be able to, you have to be able to bring people together and give them that vision through that Right. And then same thing with with video. With video, if it's an iPhone or if it's a production, like we have, or if it's a webcam, whatever that is, that's the lens, as I mentioned, that we see in pictures and images, and so AI is being able to generate these things on their own Right, but they can't generate you as an individual right, right. So all that stuff will sort of it'll just be. I don't know if you've ever listened to your favorite song too much, it becomes less valuable. Yeah, you just kind of.
Speaker 3:We have songs that we just won't play. Yeah. Because we appreciate the value of the song. We're like we really want this to be a special song, so we're not going to play it a lot, yeah, and so that's what's special is people, there's only one of you. Mm-hmm, okay, and AI what's? Special is people. There's only one of you, okay, and ai can generate all these other things, but that's where, again, if you lean into us, that's where you make the edge.
Speaker 1:They make the difference right, right and and to really just kind of tie this all together, because we've we've gone through your journey, how it got you to where you are today, we've kind of trickled in the Nectar Flow piece, and so for me to physically kind of tie this all together. So Nectar Flow is a product that allows you to look at workflows within your business, create workflows within your business and understand how each of your applications talk to one another through a scenario where you are able to also infuse elements of custom created AI solutions agents. So talk to us a little bit about the product and how that solves some of these issues.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I think you look at a business. What is a business? Well, there's a collection of people with different organizations. You mentioned the org chart, so humans, the reason why that org chart exists and for 200 years that's the most transformative technology is the org chart. And that org chart is how we organize people, how we organize priorities and structure flow of information. But humans can only take on so much capacity. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And that's why we have these boxes right and those boxes go up to the other box and it basically is decision flow. With AI and automation we can go across all of that Right Without limitations. Right. Which means if you start looking at every department in your operation payroll, human resources, acquisitions, due diligence, recruiting, maybe training, marketing, sales maintenance, investor relations, fundraising, capital raising, banking there are endless opportunities in the organization where an executive today can find efficiency and value and operate more profitable. Right the math has to work.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 3:And so what that means is the reason why they don't do all those things is because they've been focused on debt and equity to get to the ability to raise rent and sell it to someone else, which is fast and that's good. But you kind of create either more regulation for the industry or you create. You know you got to put the money somewhere. So what happens is CEOs have not built their organizations for 20 years with technology. They've bought technology along the way, and they bought technology along the way for a single problem, and now they've bought technology along the way and they bought technology along the way for a single problem, and now they've stacked all these things up and they don't know how to bring them all together, and some of these things don't even share data and they don't talk to each other. But the technology we have with Nectar Flow makes all of that possible. We can connect any application to any application with an API. We can do anything that they want. Organizations that would need to hire somebody to figure all this out invest the resources and due diligence, orchestrate it, and then even that there's risk, because what if that employee left? What would happen, right? So what we've done is we've created essentially like a managed services innovation arm that can bring any AI technology automation into the business, depending on the problem it wants to solve. And so companies, instead of buying technology that was built for everybody to buy, they can connect to those technologies but also have the ability to bring technology and AI to solve a microservice problem within the business that's unique to that business.
Speaker 3:You know, for example, yesterday I shared a video with our team around. You know, somebody mentioned that they wanted to be able to review a contract. Right, and these contracts were expiring and they don't want it to roll into another agreement. And so great. We brought in data automation and our AI to read that contract, pull out the information that we needed and structure that in JSON, which is basically so the computer can see it, so we can move it into fields that look kind of like an Excel sheet or Google sheet. And so now that CEO has the ability, or business leader has the ability, to plan, knowing that the date of this is expiring on this date, and to trigger an action that says, hey, a month before the notice period, make sure we handle this and either review this contract, decide if we want to renew it or send a notice like we're out and that could save that company $300,000, $400,000, millions of dollars just from that one workflow.
Speaker 3:Now that workflow, nobody's going to build a product around that that's going to be venture-backed and innovate around that. It means that companies need to be able to do their own things with technology without depending on other products and services that are being created Now. You need to work with other people that have done mission-critical things, like your accounting systems and stuff like that, or point solutions, or if you've got a favorite CRM, you want to be able to connect to those things. But make that product more valuable when you can take it other places, like word or favorite, I don't know everybody. Somebody moves in and wouldn't it be nice to send? I have an api to 1-800 flowers or something yeah and it sends a flower or something.
Speaker 1:Just one flower, right yeah, just one one flower to you congratulations on your new home, yeah exactly so.
Speaker 3:There's so many things that we don't even know is possible yet, because they don't have the data and they don't have the tool to bring it together and they don't have the ability to connect it to other interesting things. That's what Nectar Flow does, yeah, and so to me, I think this is like a massive leverage opportunity to see this in your business and to do something other people can't do. Right, right, and that's what leverage opportunity to see this in your business and to do something other people can't do. Right, right, that's what makes for great business right, I love it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's kind of hard to explain without, actually, you know, taking someone through and actually showing it to them. So my kind of call to action here would be if you want a demo, book it through NectarFlowcom, because I have seen people's eyes light up as they experience this and watch you automate something for them, and my eyes have lit up the same way, and so I think that's really amazing to just get into a room and see it and experience and feel it and understand the possibilities.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean we take the complexity out of it so it's easy for you. But I think that's a good thing to do Our marketing and how we go about this we want it to. If people just go through our marketing and they even jump on a demo call with us going through that process, life should get better for you. And so that's when you know you have something useful is when the pursuit of educating people about the product and solution if they get better in your marketing, they may imagine like, wow, if I was a customer, what would be possible. Well, you have this entire team to assist you in what's modern today.
Speaker 1:Well, and I told you and I'll probably leave it here, but, like what I told you is I, I looked at it and I came in with base knowledge, probably the general knowledge of AI and automation, and I, yeah, okay, these products are implementing it, et cetera.
Speaker 1:I think if I were to teach a course today on AI, I would just pull up the software that you've created and I would say here's, here's how it works. This is an automation, this is a workflow, and here's how you can pull in elements of AI, not just the ones that you know, the big ones that everybody's created, but you can actually talk to those large language models and you can train them to do specific things for you, as if they were a person doing a specific task. And I think that just made it all make sense to me. And I told you this you've made AI less scary because you can see it. You can see it in a workflow, exactly where it lives in my process. I'm still right here doing this, I'm still right here doing this, but I've automated this 70% and I think it makes it more palpable, it makes it less scary and it makes it more understandable.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you mentioned you can see it. That's very powerful, also to the programmers. When you're relying on AI, that was built for everyone, number one it's all happening programmatically, so it's behind the scenes. You don't know what's happening and you don't know what what's happening for you like our environment is. It's like your company environment, your departments right, your users, your teams and everything's happening in your secure environment. Versus like we're using ai, but it's, it's coming to us, but we don't know where the other stuff's going.
Speaker 1:It's coming to us. Yeah, that's what. You know where the other stuff's going. Well, it's coming to us. Yeah, that's what you're saying. Right Versus. I am owning it Right, I am deciding Right. I have the control.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, it's important. The stuff we're doing is sort of like I mentioned before in other shows is the crawl, walk, run. It's like what's going to make the biggest impact financially if we solved it today. Simply let's start there and then if we then have a profitable relationship with a customer now it's just like what else can we do? It's not an expense situation. This is a profitable relationship, just like when you you know, when you build an apartment community, you have that driveway right. It gives customers access to your thing, your property. There's value in that, but the real value is that you get the customer where they end up needing to be and that's, I think, making their business better, solving their talent problems. You know hedging all the challenges around. You know just the cost to build insurance costs it's just hard to operate an apartment building today and you know people need a platform to make it more efficient.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you and I can talk for hours, but you've talked even about how, at the end of the day, this benefits the resident, because and which is what we all want to do, right, and so when you're not, when you're finding other ways to save money or to, you know, be more efficient, then the only answer is not to raise the rent. There's other answers as to how to be more profitable. Yeah, and so that's. There's other answers as to how to be more profitable. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And so that's I love. So rent increases are really good for healthy markets. It's good because people appreciate. When they pay for things, you know they value it right. What they don't value is when they're priced out of the market. Right, because what ends up happening is it's not that the current owner shouldn't be raising rents or it should be. That's up to them and their investment objectives. Healthy rent increases are good for markets, as I mentioned. What I want people to think about, though, is think about, like what Elon Musk is doing in the automotive industry. Everyone else is trying to sell more cars 15 million units a year, whatever that is and for higher prices, and they're fighting over.
Speaker 3:Just think about the TV commercials. Every commercial has action, details and motion, right. So the Ford truck, you know out there and it's got. You know the tailgate drops and kids jump out with their surfboards. Or it's towing a boat. Just next time you listen or watch a TV commercial, there's some emotional component there. And then there's the shifting of attention. It keeps you engaged. But then there's the financing at the end. No money down, 3% interest, whatever their terms are. There's the financing at the end. You're like no money down, three percent interest, whatever their terms are. That's the logical buyer. They want that, but they need the facts to justify the decision. In the apartment industry, so much money and energy is trying to or, I'm sorry, the automotive industry, so much energy is trying to sell these cars to people, is trying to sell these cars to people, and Elon is coming at it with an entirely different approach. He's thinking how do I make the vehicle more valuable to the customer? Heck, he's letting them drive themselves, right?
Speaker 3:So now all of a sudden, maybe eating that cheeseburger is a little more safer, the coffee or whatever that is, and so he's increasing the value of the car and he's trying to get it to the customer for less. Now, this is the richest one of the richest people in the world, trying to make the customer pay less. And Jeff Bezos, same thing. He appreciates that. Hey, customers in in five, ten years are probably going to want to have lower costs of things and they're going to want to get it quick and they're going to want to get it fast, without hassle, right? So these are two of the wealthiest people. Like that's what multifamily is about creating wealth.
Speaker 3:But shouldn't we listen to the two wealthiest people that are trying to make life better for the customer? Yeah, and and in many cases I don't believe our owners and managers don't want to make life better for the customer, but they're taking purchasing power away from the customer by only raising rents. Now, rents are good for healthy markets, rent growth but we have to think about all the waste in the business. As leaders, we should get rid of that. We should get rid of the high construction costs. We should solve real problems so that the investor and the property owner still gets the same return because they're taking the risk. They're taking more risk today today for less return. It's not fair that an investor, a property owner, an LP, a general partner, a sponsor puts out all this risk and then can't get the customer to pay for it because there's fraud, there's collection issues or there's regulation limiting what they can do. That's a problem, but we can't control that because that's what got us here. That got us here because all we did was buy a property, put some money into it and raise the rent, and now we've created our own problem. So how we solve our own problem is through innovation, just like elon did.
Speaker 3:The automotive industry said this won't work. Electric vehicles because it costs $600 for a battery. Elon said let's solve that, and he did. There are people today that says this won't work for an apartment development because they're looking at, as an analogy, $600, but they're looking at things and cost without innovating and taking control of the supply chain, taking control of their business and making things happen. Because ultimately a property owner will protect capital and grow capital if we can keep our residents in apartments and we can continue to grow our income not always just the rent. And so it's.
Speaker 3:It's a challenge and, uh, the markets always win. Yeah Right, we don't want regulation. That's never good for business. But guess what? Back to the story about the firemen and the teachers and all that stuff. What is happening in our industry? The story is not out about how much all of this costs and how supply is restricted and all these things, and it's just unfair, because they're building communities, building roads, doing so many great things, yeah, and it just takes innovation to make to pull these things off. And we've just been we off, we've just been lazy.
Speaker 3:Buy a property, raise a rent what worked, flip it. Yeah, yeah. Well, now we can't do that anymore, so we got to go look at what Elon did, and he figured it out. Yeah, I love it.
Speaker 1:Well, we could probably talk for a whole day to two days if we wanted to, but I think that's a really good place to leave it for now and I think it really got some wheels turning on some of the innovation and changes that need to happen in our industry. And again, if you want a demo, go to NectarFlowcom and book a demo with us. And thanks for being here, Patrick. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 3:I'm yeah, thanks for doing this. I just I think people you know we built the platform so we can get others excited about it and behind building a modern way for markets to bring innovation to companies so that we can do healthy things.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. It's a great product and I'm very excited for people to see it. Awesome. Thanks.