¶ The Ultimate Form of Entrepreneurialism
Greetings and salutations . Real Estate Undergrounders . It is Ed Mathews with the Real Estate Underground . Thank you so much for making this a part of your day . I'm really excited to have this conversation . I just found out that our guest , Mark Shuler , was the architect to the stars , and we may or may not get into that .
I'm a huge music fan , and particular grunge , and it turns out Mark , who lives in one of my favorite cities , Seattle , knows a bunch of the guys that I used to listen to . We're going to get into that , but first , mark , thank you so much for joining us . It's a pleasure to meet you and I'm really excited to have this conversation .
Thanks for having me All right . For those folks out there who don't know about SGRE investments or your architecture firm or anything else you do , why don't you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do ?
Sure , my name is Mark Shuler . I am a practicing architect for probably the last 40 years , always what I wanted to do with my life , and then , probably 12 , 15 years ago , I started pivoting into real estate investing . I got licensed in 1992 and then practiced traditionally for a lot of years , on my shingle out with two different firms .
In 2002 , I went to the University of Washington's business school and got a fan certification in commercial real estate development . I've been always fascinated by the industry . I have five family members who are commercial brokers . My kid brother is the foremost taxation authority for real estate in the country . Just a long career , always real estate related .
One way or another , I've designed and built probably close to 500 structures or remodels . At this point , I have a great understanding of the permitting process probably too much and a lot of battle scars to prove it too .
At this point , I'm about one third on real estate , one third on architecture , and I've got another business that we're launching right now indoor golf simulator business down in Phoenix . So I'm spending a lot of time on that , building that up .
Are you also an avid golfer , or are you in that just because it's a good business ?
Just a good entertainment play and a balance to the other business ventures I have going on . Real estate is you make all your wealth , but it's all equity based , not cashflow . So I needed something that was a little more cashflow based . So I decided after running the numbers I couldn't pass up on this .
So I'm curious about your transition from being an architect to being an investor . Can you walk us through that moment , that series of events that led you to decide that you should , instead of designing these houses and , ultimately , these commercial properties ? What brought you into this side of the business ?
Yeah , First of all , it's the family business . But more to the point , for me , I was doing a lot of projects for investors and developers and just looking over their shoulders and seeing the process they were going through and the mistakes they were making . Well , if they can do that , I can do that , and I'm just a rabid entrepreneur .
Do not have it in my DNA to work for a large enterprise . I wish I did sometimes , but I just have always found that the real estate is like the ultimate form of entrepreneurialism . I guess I'm a bit of a adrenaline junkie . So I like the risk and reward factor , but most importantly , I like the calculated risk . I just have the personality type for it .
Oh , you can't wing it On a hope and a prayer . You got to really build a game and get an A game going on to be able to do this successfully .
So you owned a little more than a thousand units , right North of 4,000 units oh , congratulations . And obviously you've been doing this for a while , and so I'm curious about when you look at the asset class out there . Multifamily is where you're most active . I'm curious about your perspective on the market .
It's interesting because your market and one of our markets in Boston , they tend to trend very similarly and I'm curious what you're seeing .
You know it's a very controlled market . The headlines coming out of New York City today are a candidate , a Democratic socialist , who wants to enact rent control citywide and also have state-funded grocery stores . I don't understand that component of it , but good luck . Execution is everything . I work in a similarly controlled market .
Seattle is historically a labor town . It is now a company town and there's a lot of people who rebel against that and our city council reflects that rebellion . So it's a very challenging environment to be an operator in , to the point where I've sold most everything up here .
We have one remaining asset that we're going to probably sell next year , and then I'm done . One remaining asset that we're going to probably sell next year , and then I'm done . I'm done investing in Seattle . You're going to see that play out in New York city . Right , watch it carefully for the next two weeks . Housing in particular is a free market phenomenon .
I have never seen government do it well . Now , anytime government gets involved , it gets screwed up and the flip side of it is there are slumlords out there . I get it , but I can tell you the profit margins in the real estate game and the housing market I play in they're thin .
I am not walking away with tens of millions of dollars and drinking Mai Tais on the beach , and all that's not how it works . It is an extremely challenging market right now . A lot of operators are losing their assets , so it's a high risk , potentially high reward game
¶ From Architect to Real Estate Investor
. The margins are super thin . Right , I know plenty of operators are not paying distribution .
And is that because of cost of capital ? Is that because they were cowboys and bought poorly ? What do you see , some ?
of them bought at the height of the market in 21 , 22 . And they are running on a runway on their loans . They are underwater . They didn't create enough NOI expansion to be able to refi the property and so they're looking at cash-in refis , not cash-out refis , and they're not even neutral . They're taking a risk .
Look , lenders , the leverage is lower than what it was when they took on the deal . I doubt it All the way around . There's nothing but risk in this line of work . No-transcript , and I think they're coming up here next . I hope they sue the shit out of Seattle because I'm just tired of this .
Yeah , it is a difficult enough business , but then to have government just like enact all this legislation and declare that making a profit on this is bad , it should not be allowed , that's crazy . There's no without reward . There's no risk . No one does any housing and it's not .
I was just having this conversation with Ben Carmona , who was on a previous show about 1031's Delaware Statutory Trust . One of the reasons that legislation exists in the tax code is because they were enabled . The government wanted people like you and me to provide good , clean housing that's well run . They're trying to incent our behavior .
I think probably part of it is a rebellion against a guy in the White House not to make this totally political , but I think part of it is just a lack of understanding understanding which you're exactly right how government got out of the business of housing years ago .
Because not only that , I flip over into the architecture side of things . The regulatory environment never stops , and so the drawing sets I produce now , compared to when I first started my career in the regulatory environment , is a thousand times more complicated than it was 20 , 30 , 40 years ago .
You want to see all this housing produced and yet you're just piling down the red . That's why we have a housing shortage in this country . You can drop the pin anywhere in this country , and there's a housing shortage .
I think 2008 wiped out a whole class of general contractors that just never came back , exactly Right , and so you've got a supply problem both both at the construction level as well as the material , for all project mentioned . That whole thing with that post-corona is still . The materials are still out of this world , expensive .
Yeah , and you're starting to see we're at the bottom of the cycle right now . Real estate moves in cycles and we've had a recalibration for the last three years and you're seeing a lot of product types that everybody was prognosticating was on its way to the graveyard Retail office . Both of them is all being absorbed right now .
One of the markets I play in a lot is Houston . Year over year , permit activity and housing delivery is down 72% , 24 to 20 . And you're going to start seeing vacancy rates go down and occupancy rates go up and it's going to really tighten up and that's going to happen nationwide .
So you compare that that's the marketplace phenomenon with this regulatory environment . How do you reconcile all this ? That's
¶ Market Challenges and Government Intervention
what's so challenging about real estate right there . I'm just describing it . That's what I spend a lot of time weaving through , trying to make my projects go forward .
Yeah , it's interesting . We play here predominantly in Connecticut . Like I said , we started to look at Boston and a couple other markets , but here in Connecticut , for instance , there was a report a couple of years ago maybe that Connecticut is like 30,000 units short of its 2030 affordable housing projections and that's universal right . There's less .
I saw over 4 million units short across the country , maybe more . One of the things that you mentioned and I wholeheartedly agree with is government's got to get out of the way . Forget parties . I don't care what you're talking about politically , I'm talking about just the regulatory environment . Here in Connecticut . We're in a development project right now .
It's taken us nine months just to get to planning and zoning . It's crazy .
I live in King County , Washington . A residential permit for a house in King County takes 16 months through the approval process . So think about how insane . Yeah , I talk to people who routinely interface with the government over there . Government is absolutely slow walking these permits because they don't want to see housing development beyond the growth management .
We have it around the Puget Sound and they are trying to focus all this development inside out in the rural areas , unincorporated areas of King County . They slow it down . Who can afford 16 months of carrying a piece of dirt ? Nobody . It bifurcates society . Only the wealthy can afford to do it . I have a house out there I'm designing right now .
It's 31,000 square feet . This is not affordable housing .
This is Bill Gates and friends .
People can afford to do it . It has the exact opposite effect of what the reporting policy goal is and it's just naivete on the part of policymakers . It just drives me nuts . I'm all about life safety in any building . This is the building code , the three-ring binder . My nose is in that all the time , trying to figure out the codes . And it's complicated .
The impact of the regulatory environment is a little bit out of control .
So let's talk about asset class and let's talk about regions that you like . From an asset class perspective , what are you hunting for these days ? What do you like or what have you tended to like over the last couple years ? I'm a housing guy .
I've been my whole career so I stick with housing . I do multi-family and large multi-family projects , so our minimum purchase is 250 units . We're doing the deep value add thing okay and so we're trying to create value where there was none before . And the nice thing about that they tend to be C-class deals . I like 80s product and newer .
We've purchased and renovated older product . You tend to find older wiring , older plumbing , electric panels that need to be replaced . They tend to be deeper lifts than you anticipate , 80s and newer . But then you don't even think about assets go through a major kind of maintenance cycle every 25 years or so the heat pumps wear out , pipes burst .
You got to kind of look and see when the last major rehab of the project was . But we do these deep value add plays . So we're spending . Our cost is 18000 a door on the lift . Anybody else it's 35 to 40,000 . And we're turning C-class assets into condo quality finishes . They look really nice and we're still catering to the C-class workforce crowd .
We're getting rent bumps of 100 to 150 a month . This is some of the nicest housing these folks have ever lived in . There's a little social mission there that we stick with . We've got a model and I don't look at retail . I don't know anything about it Office product , I don't want to go anywhere near it . That product is stable . People need housing .
We have a housing affordability problem in this country . Nobody can buy a house , so they got to rent . It's a good long-term bet . That's why we like it .
Yeah , I've read article and report after report on the fact that , particularly younger generations , we're becoming a renter nation , right and for 15 years . What other markets are you particularly paying attention to these days ?
We have a couple of deals up in Oklahoma city , okay , but at this point we've done a big lift on them and they're stabilized . Yeah , remember , I think we might have even refined those . We're just managing them and figure out what we're going to do next . We might hold those in house and buy out the investors .
I don't know , but houston is a ginormous market . Yeah , I don't need to go anywhere . Our , our business strategy is to , instead of going broad and wide , like a lot of operators , they tend to look at markets all over the country . I can't do that .
I know too much about the game and I don't want to have to figure out the personalities of multiple jurisdictions . The thing about Houston is it's like the 34th largest city in the country , second largest apartment market , and they built a lot of product back in the late seventies and eighties during that oil boom , and all of that needs to be renovated .
So we just stick to Houston and we've built a large organization , we've got over 200 people on the payroll and every time we take down a deal , we're day after closing , we're onsite , we're renovating . We just have a really developed business model at this point that worked for us . I don't need to go anywhere else honestly .
Yeah , I was going to ask you why .
¶ Deep Value-Add Strategy Explained
Your turnover or rehab is 18 per unit and the market is 35 plus , right ? So part of that is captive or employed your employee base , right ?
All of our everybody's on a W-2 and we control our labor . We also control our supply chain . Okay , yeah , so we have direct vendor relationships in India and China and the port of Houston is the largest port on the Gulf Coast . So you know , when we order doors we order a thousand of them at a time , right . And then we had a 20,000 square foot warehouse .
Just go grab the container , haul it there , warehouse manager catalogs it , drivers go down and get it when we need it . We're getting slab countertops for 50 bucks a slab . I just price slabs from my own house . It's 1500 bucks . So , and we're just cutting out like three layers of middlemen and our whole business model is premised on efficiency and operations .
So the more I drive the cost down , the greater the return for my investor . I know that we return four to five points more to the IRR than most other syndicates .
I imagine part of that is tenant retention as well . Right yeah , In this downtime in the marketplace .
We did two deals in Q4 of last year and those are the only deals we did all of last year . We've literally been on the sidelines for 18 months . Yeah , those both were distressed deals . That operator probably evaporated $40 million in investment equity . That was blood in the streets , but we got those assets at 2018 prices and , yeah , so we took them down .
One of them was a real nice B-plus class asset going west out of Houston . They call it the energy corridor . There's seven or eight Fortune 500s that their headquarters are based out there and there's lots of people who work there that need a place to live . It's just like amenity laden asset . Now that's a step up for us .
We're mainly in the workforce housing business , but we're sitting on sidelines right now , still just waiting for interest rates to come down , the bond markets to calm down and I think we're going to be labor problem there's a massive supply chain problem .
The fact is that , yes , the political cycle , presidential in particular , makes people a little bit nutty and that tends to affect the economy . Yet to be determined what the tariff policies and how they're going to affect what we're doing . Inflation seems to be getting under control .
The bottom line is that where rates are now historically , if you look at the last 50 plus years we're right down the middle right now .
Between the garden rails . Yeah , people , for the last 15 years we've had this free money floating around . People got that was by that , when you had a lot of people getting into the apartment game , not having ever lived through a more turbulent cycle , yeah , and interest rates that are two points higher than where they were , and it's more challenging .
That's the nature of the business . And , to your point , the political thing . I'm decidedly agnostic . Me too . I play with house money and I can't afford opinions and that's the way I think I have them . I just don't share them . That's for couch time with my wife .
The most challenging problem for any entrepreneur and business owner right now is you don't know what to do . Everybody's paralyzed , trying to make decisions for six , 12 , 18 months out . And so how do you do a deal now at a certain interest rate ?
And so how do you do a deal now at a certain interest rate , making a ton of assumptions about the structure of that deal and renovations and lease up , and all that when it is just utter chaos in the political environment out of DC right now . That's as political as I'm going to get in this conversation . It's challenging to conduct business .
It's completely dysfunctional on both sides , but we can talk about that . All I'm curious about it is impossible to predict 6 , 12 , 18 months out , but how are you approaching underwriting when you're looking at properties and what are your assumptions going into ? 26 , 27 , 28 ? That's a damn good question .
I read a lot of reports . It's not all doom and gloom . We're at the bottom of a cycle and so we're going to be heading up into an expansion cycle in markets , and who doesn't like that ? It's just a matter of how many black swan events and dead cat bounces can we go through before we get there ? That's the challenging part .
The first thing I do every morning when I get up , log in and check what the bond markets are doing . So I look at the five year , the 10 year , the two year and up to about three weeks ago , the five year was just stubbornly holding to just above 4% , and we've dropped 15 , 20 basis points on any given day since then .
So they're trending in the right direction , but everybody is on a knife edge , worrying about which way this is going
¶ Operational Excellence Drives Returns
, and our debt level is unsustainable and everything's so leveraged up that even at the government level right now . So to answer your question , one of the things in our underwriting that we are doing doing we're looking at lower leverage on all our deals because that's what's in the banding . You can't be so rosy in these predictions .
A lot of syndicators back three , four years ago . They didn't have a value-add strategy , they were just buying and hoping that the rising tide raised all ships . That is just gambling .
Yeah , I was telling people we were having this conversation a few weeks ago . I made that whole environment from 19 to 21 and probably even before 19, . But made geniuses out of everybody artificially .
But it's go time .
It's one of the work from each of the room , but now it's markets like this that separate the wheat from the chaff , right ? I'm interested in terms of leverage right .
We're going into deals and underwriting them at a minimum 65 , 35 debt to equity and I'm trying to get a low 50 just in anticipation of interest rates not moving , maybe even going up , but definitely not down . I'm curious what you're doing .
We actually underwrite on a continuum . Different lenders have different underwriting requirements and I think we're hovering around 60 on our deals Seems to be a good medium for us . You have to understand . We're expanding our NOI through our renovation and it tends to drive down the unlevered IRR . So that's why we're maniacal about getting the rentals done .
We target 5% of the units per month with a goal of after 20 months we're a hundred percent done with the renovation . We will have then really grown NOI and so our leverage goes way down . So we don't have to be so low on the front end going in because we're frequent suppliers .
So a lot of lenders know what our exercise is and we have a proven business model . So we can afford to be a little more risky on the front end . Sometimes we get up as high as 70 , but that's as high as you're seeing right now .
Yeah , and I would submit that's not that risky , that's more measured , especially if you know your rehab costs are half . Because of the team you have in place , you can move a whole heck of a lot faster than pretty much anybody else in that market . Yeah , we don't .
Third-party anything we don't license trades . All of our asset management is in-house . We have our own asset management company . We have a sponsorship deal , acquisition leg and then we have the management leg . All the construction and management is in-house . We're just trying to do everything we can to control the expense side of the logic there are variable costs .
You have no control over taxes and insurance by being the two biggest don't even get me going on insurance guys saw that coming . I had an interesting conversation with a commercial broker . We were interviewing him for this show , as a matter of fact , and he was talking about what was happening . This was by late 23 , early 24 .
And he was talking about what was happening . This was late 23 , early 24 . And he was talking about the hurricanes that had blown through Florida , what that had done to the insurance underwriting business .
And very in parallel to that , because I started to get interested we were sourcing our insurance for the following year and starting to see the rates climb , in some cases exponentially . Starting to see the rates climb in some cases exponentially , and so I started asking about that and it was eye-opening .
The insurance companies were viewing risk going into 24 and 25 . That's just another unknown .
I have a buddy who owns a deal in the Ninth Ward in New Orleans Tried to get me an investor . New Orleans is underwater , it's close . Never gonna so when he underwrote it and bought it , he was paying $850 a door for insurance . His insurance is somewhere between $2,500 and $3,000 . You never recover from them . No , and it's in the Ninth Ward .
That is the challenges of this business . What we did is we partners got on a plane and flew to England and meet with Lloyd's of London see if we could get blanket policy for our entire portfolio . We self-insure Right the way we keep our costs down .
Smart , spread the risk outside of the areas that are affected by major weather , right , yeah , one of the things you mentioned before we hit record , actually , is that you did a report , or we were discussing that you've written a report about the state of the market . Can you tell me a little bit more about that ?
Yeah , look , I don't want to come across as a total Debbie Downer here . This is just a business and any business is all about operation . The best real estate investors are good operators and they have their operations under control . At a macro level , there's actually a lot of good positives out there in the marketplace right now .
It's just that we can't gain any consistency as we come off the bottom . So I just really got interested in kind of overall , where we sit in the market , where we sit in the cycle , and tried to read the tea leaves of what we reasonably expect in the next 12 to 15 months . Interest rates have been trending down .
They're going in the right direction , despite kind of the political white noise coming out of Washington . The Fed's done a damn good job of containing inflation .
I did a podcast three or four years ago at the beginning of this inflationary cycle , and the comment I made it still sticks with me is once inflation gets baked into a market system , it is damn hard to squeeze it out , and during the pandemic the Fed and the government flooded the market with money and put the economy on a sugar buzz .
M1 is not a capital floating around the economy . They pumped $8 trillion in the economy and then the CDC decided to do an unconstitutional nationwide eviction moratorium yeah , I think that's , but since then has been buying back . A lot of that are evaporating and they don't actually buy it , but they've gotten the money supply back down to a reasonable level .
I think they still have some work to do on that , but it's more easy . Interest rates and inflation have fallen in tandem and we were on track by the end of this year to see the Fed achieve its goal of 2% inflation . This tariff war has thrown a huge monkey wrench into all that .
The recent reports I've been reading is there might be a little bump , but it's not blowing up . Let me put it that way . It seems like the economy is still clicking along . There has been some softening , but I don't think it's going to be catastrophic . Other reports I've read survey of economists .
You know 50% think we're going to make it through without going into a recession . There's a variety of opinions of the other 50% . But even in my architecture business I'm definitely seeing a bit of a slowdown in the economy . Yeah , where we go from here for the rest of the year , it just depends on supply chains .
Want to see what the shelves look like at the Home Depot in a month and how much plywood's available coming out of Canada .
I'd love to know board foot numbers .
We're definitely . I don't know if inflection point is the right phrase here , but we're definitely . It's either going to go one way or the other and it just unfortunately hinges on the whims of one person .
And buckle up Once I'm able to go retrieve that in my email . Thank you again for sharing it . We'll certainly make that report available in the show notes . We'll go from there , all right . We've been talking for quite a bit of time and normally we go about 25 , 35 minutes . We're already at the 40 minute marks , but I don't care , because this has been gold .
Maybe we'll break this up into a two part series . One of the things I'd like to do is go through our final five . Okay , and I think we've gotten a really good insight into how your brain works . But I'd like to dig a little deeper .
Somebody like you who has been very successful the mortgage is handled , the college education's handled , the car payments are handled , and yet you still get up on Monday morning and go to work , and that tends to be purpose .
¶ Market Cycles and Economic Outlook
And I'm curious when your eyes open on Monday ADHD and he's got anxiety and depression comorbidity and so I've mentored , raised him since he was like 13 . And he still has challenges in life . He's high end . He didn't go to college . He went to six high schools . I mentored him throughout all of that . I had to send him to a military high school .
He went from a 1.4 to a 3.8 . It's not that he's stupid , it's the executive functioning right , yeah , processing right , but he managed to pull it together . Go to trade school . He's a high-end Audi mechanic . Now they're going to park $100,000 vehicles and he loves it . He's learning about how to flip cars and so he flipped a couple of . Recently .
He's got a walking around money . He's feeling good about himself . So I get up just to be a role model and then I get informed like this and to impart my knowledge . It makes my life meaningful .
I tell people I'm not a grandparent yet . I have younger daughters . They're 22 and 17 . But I tell people all the time , being a parent , step-parent or parent , it's the best thing you'll ever do , Most important thing you'll ever do , for sure . I'm also curious about your growth and I want to ask you a couple of questions about that Mentorship .
You mentioned that in the previous question . I'm curious about the mentors that you've had along the way and what's the best advice you ever got and who gave it to you ?
one of the things I glommed down to earlier in my career was those rockefeller principles being a part of masterminds , finding coaches , just associating with people who are smarter than you or maybe more experienced than you . I've been able to do that . My whole career , just the nature of my career .
I'm not designing such a new housing , but the whole nature of my career is also one of mentorship . So as you come out of architecture school and you get your first job or two , you're working in an environment where you're being mentored by more senior architects . It became a mantra or model for me of how I wanted to migrate through my life .
I still do that to this day . I'm part of a mastermind . I just dropped 10 Gs on and it's the smartest thing I ever did in the last three years by far . I am constantly on a growth model . I do not know everything as an architect . I sit in front of this box all day . Who am I going to know ?
So you got to force yourself to get out there and force yourself to tuck your ego aside and just learn and grow . Once you stop growing , you die . I'm not ready to hang it up by any stretch of the imagination . I am still moving forward . You have to be very forward . When you look back , you're depressed .
When you look forward , you're totally neurotic , and so you've got to find a balance between being forwardly propelled but living in the moment , and that is a life work balance that I struggle with . Any busy professional is going to be that . That's the best advice I can give you .
And so I'm also interested in . I fundamentally believe that we learn more from the mistakes that we've made over the course of time . I'm talking professionally , right , but in this context I'm talking professionally . I'm curious about a mistake or a decision that you would love to have back . And what was it ? And how did you recover if you didn't ?
We reevaluate every deal we do . Hindsight's always 20-20 . And some of the deals we bought we've had to really roll up our sleeves and put some elbow grease into it . Hindsight probably wasn't something we should have bought . We'll get through it and we'll achieve our objectives , but it's been a lot of work . Operations is everything in multi-family .
If you don't have your operations down or if you try to sub that out to a third party , you're going to be disappointed . I think just every deal I've ever had . I have regrets , others more than some . But you dig down deeper and do diligence . You don't buy an impulse . You stay very data-driven and you do your research in the marketplace .
One other thing getting the right partner in life is everything I mean . You're married , you've got kids . I would not be where I am without my compassionate partner who puts up with me and keeps me grounded Wonderful .
Yeah , I find that , no matter how hard the day is , when you walk in the door into your home and you have somebody there that is truly supportive and a life partner and will help you figure out and help you process what just happened in the last eight , 10 hours , getting up the next morning is a lot easier .
It's funny , I tell my wife all the time we've been married 29 years now and every year when we celebrate our anniversary , I ask her what were you thinking ? Because , as a friend of mine says , in talking to his partner , it's his husband's .
They've been married , I don't know , 12 , 13 years maybe , and he said it's two or three of the happiest years of his partner's life . So you got to be it's always an interview for us guys
¶ Final Five: Purpose and Success
, we're just like stupid puppy dogs and someone- . Yeah , I'm a 14-year old wrapped in a 55 year old's body . At no time . I am no peach to live with , I can assure you . I'm curious about growth .
We talked about mistakes and how you approach that but I'm also interested in how you take in information , whether you're a reader or you go to conferences or your network or whatever and who do you pay attention to these days in terms of the way you gather information ?
So I follow a lot of folks on LinkedIn who and I try to use the same principles I was just telling you . I try to find guys who are smarter than me , who have better data sets than I do and who can impart that data to me . I've got like 20 people . I follow on LinkedIn religiously and I'm always reading their posts .
I get up every morning and the first thing I do every morning is I'm online absorbing as much data as I can . You have to be a data junkie .
You have to build a large macroeconomic model in your brain to be able to successfully execute in this business , because you've got to understand how actions promulgated by government today are going to look like six , 12 months down the road and what that's going to do to your business .
I have a mentor who's always talking about pattern recognition .
And you don't get up and read a newspaper one day and have it all . This is a success habit that you just have to embody and then all of a sudden , you become a data hound and you can't live without it . I don't know how many hours you have to do through repetition for it to become a habit .
It's what ? 21 days or something like that .
Just get into the habit . But if I can't figure it out , put post-it notes all over your office reminding you to do this Next thing . It'll be ingrained .
Even if you spend . I was talking with a softball coach about this this morning over breakfast . He was talking about working on a skill for 18 minutes a day . If you work on a skill for 18 minutes a day for one year , it's 100 hours .
Yeah , and you are ahead of 95 of the people that don't do it consistently so recently I started getting really curious about this concept called time block .
I use it and it's changed how I work . I know when I'm certain times of the day I can do certain tasks really efficiently . I know when I get up in the morning . I've got from eight to 11 . That is when I'm fresh , my brain is rested and I can make decisions three times faster from eight to 11 than I can from one and .
And then by 4 o'clock I'm toast and you go off and go relax with a light beer or something like that . And I'm an early bed guy . I go to bed at 9.30 every night and so I get to hang out with my partner for a few hours . Yeah , and you just need to adopt these habits . And what's really interesting about this ?
The last point I'll make on this is once you adopt the habits , it becomes much easier to adopt other habits because you're already in the mindset . You've already adopted the mindset to be open to that concept . You just get better and better , and really a lot of what we do is time management . So you just get better at these tasks .
All I think about is efficiency . How can I do things more efficiently ?
Good things will come from it and the last of the five questions . I'm curious how you define success in your life .
Funny thing is it's not monetary . At the end of the day , I can give a rip about that . It's not how I define success . Anybody does anything just to chase a buck . Good luck with that , but it's just not how I define it . Never actually been that motivated by money .
I need to pay the bills , I stress about it like anybody else , but chasing money for money's sake is just sort of lost on me . I'm an ideas guy . Success for me just looks like doing good work , being a good partner , being a good mentor to my stepson , being a good grandpa , I think , opening up , receding and closing down , maintaining .
Look at the end of your life , the only thing you got is reputations in your relationship . Nothing else matters . It's the journey of getting there that forces you to figure that out , because we're all knuckleheads as guys . That's how I think about it . Do I want to have a secure retirement ? Yeah , but guys like me never retire . Excellent .
All right , hey , mark , I've really enjoyed this . I thoroughly have , and so I'm curious . One last question about your business , and then we'll wrap this up . When you're not working , what do you like to do for fun ? How do you spend your time ?
Yeah , take care of your health . First thing I do on Thursday mornings I go work out with my trainer . Worked out with him today and I think about my health a lot , so that's one thing . I don't obsess about it , but I'm trying to make better choices . I'm almost a vegan . I have a BMI .
That's the same as when I was a freshman in high school you just got to take care of yourself . It's a marathon , and that actually is fun for me , believe it or not .
Also , relationships are really , as I've gotten older , I've learned to treasure those Like my kid brother and I were talking the other day and he's 62 and he's going to retire , worked hellacious hours his whole career , the managing partner of one of the largest CPA firms in the country .
So we're just having a brotherly conversation and so I look for meaning that's for me . I never for meaning that's for me . I never clubbed . I don't give a shit about that . I used to do a lot more outdoor activity , but managing businesses is very time consuming , so I don't have time . But I like to hang with my partner .
We like to go out and do things , and right now we're working on the house , so we're executing a minor kitchen remodel . She's got an art background , so we argue about that insensibly . You can't take any of it with you , so you might as well enjoy the ride .
I'm just always constantly trying to figure out ways to enjoy the ride more and become less of the jerk .
I would love to learn that .
Yeah .
Yeah . So , mark , like I said , I really enjoyed this conversation and getting to know you and talking in general , if people want to learn more about SGRE Investments or you , or want to get in touch , what's the best way to do that ?
Yeah , you can just surf over to my website , sgreinvestments . com . There's contact me link there . You can just send me an email . Or you can just send an email to investor at sgreinvestments plural com . I'm in front of this box all day long and you hit me up with an email and you'll probably get a response in three minutes .
Good to know . All right , Mark Shuler , thank you so much for your time today . You were very kind and generous with your time and I'm grateful and continued good fortune , and I would love to hear more about that golf project , so we'll maybe talk about that offline .