Steve Van Buskirk - From Dirt to 6,600 Lots: Building a City From the Ground Up

I showed up my first day of work and he'd hand me this, you know, huge roll of blueprints and said, here, figure out how to get this thing built. like that big 180,000 square foot power center called up and said, we're not going to pay rent. The thing that's really rewarding about what we do with development. is that we take these ideas of this bare piece of ground and we turn it into a building that somebody lives in, has an office in, or they're selling dresses out of, or they're manufacturing fire trucks out of.

It's actually getting used. I'm here at a secrets resort in Mexico, courtesy of MacArthur Company and their customer incentive programs. If you guys are in roofing, siding, sheet metal, insulation, mechanical work, and you're not buying your materials from MacArthur, check them out and make sure you ask about the customer incentive trip so you can start earning points for a trip like this. hey there and welcome to From the Ground Up Show, the show where we encourage and inspire the next generation of free thinking leaders by telling the stories of those that have been there, done that, and are still getting it done.

building a life that they love with their hearts, their hands, and their hustle. I'm your host, Erick Loden. If you guys are listening on podcast, make sure you catch us on YouTube for the full video version. And we are on all major social media platforms at From the Ground Up Show.

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com for all your from the ground up show merchandise. today I am super excited and honored to have Steve Van Buskirk joining us. Steve is the owner and CEO of Van Buskirk companies in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Van Buskirk has developed slash established 40 neighborhoods, 120 commercial developments, and they have sold 6,600 lots.

They have built 1,125 apartments Steve and his company have quite literally built Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Steve has an incredible amount of experience in land development, construction, and property management. So Steve, thanks for joining us today. Yeah, thank you for having me.

It'll be fun. I'm looking forward to it. Yeah, I'm excited to glean a little bit of your experience and learn a little bit more about your business. So we like to start off every show just getting to know you a little bit.

So could you tell us a little bit about your life growing up? Yeah, absolutely. I will. The one thing I want to talk to your listeners about is that it's a family business.

So I've got partners and we'll get into that more. So I got the intro there. My brother is my co-CEO or we're co-CEOs and my brother and sister in the business and we're second generation, but we'll get into that as we go forward. So it's a group effort.

So all that stuff that you listed off is way too exhausting for one person to do by themselves. It's definitely a team effort, but yeah. So you're asking about growing up. Yeah, I grew up in, I was born in Dubuque, Iowa.

My dad was an engineer at John Deere. He wanted to get back closer to Hitchcock, South Dakota, which is closely here on South Dakota in the middle of the state. And that's where my mom and dad grew up is in here on Hitchcock. And they are tired of living out in other parts of the countries.

They moved back and we're always happy that they uh It didn't go quite as far back as Huron. They stopped in Sioux Falls along the way because Sioux Falls is just an amazing economic community and opportunity for people in the construction development business. My parents came back in 71. So I was just out in Iowa for just a minute.

I moved back in 71 and I was born and raised in Sioux Falls and grew up as a town grew up. So it really did win a weird We moved back in 71. Sioux Falls started kind of the decades, you know, in 70 or 70,000, 80, 80,000, know, 90, 90,000 is kind of how the population of Sioux Falls tracks. So it really saw that community grow up from a town that really, from my perspective as a young person, didn't have a whole lot going on.

was, you one of those places where you wanted to grow up and go out and see greener things in a bigger city when you're all done. But it's been a fun part to be part of that growth and watch it grow up as I was there. you said this was a family business. I'm assuming it was your dad that started the business.

Yep. Yep. My mom and dad uh wanted to start the business. Their idea was to start a manufacturing business.

He's a mechanical engineer from South Dakota State University. But he wanted to start a manufacturing business, so he came back and started a truss plant, which is roof trusses and floor trusses that most people are familiar with. So he started that, and then he figured out he could sell more trusses if he's building houses, and he figured out he could build more houses if he was doing land development. So one thing One thing led to another, far as their growth pattern through those early years.

But that was the beginning. So the company actually started in Brandon. And then Sioux Falls came on as a, they bought a subdivision in Sioux Falls. So they ended up moving the business in Sioux Falls.

It's 20 minutes, 15 minutes away from each other, but just be a little bit closer to it. yeah, that was the start of it. just, two people with a, crazy dream to do something. man, yeah, that sounds like a wild adventure.

And you said you were born in Iowa, so you were alive when they started the company? Yeah, yeah, not aware, but alive. So my older brother's memory, the guy I'm a CEO with, now he remembers coming because he would have been seven or eight when it all started. So they came over and he remembers helping my dad paint the house, which that's always debatable how good a seven or eight year old was doing, but they bought a house in the middle of Sioux Falls and came over to get it prepped for the rest of us to move back to.

South Dakota. Yeah, okay. All right. And do you remember that move at all?

How old were you at that time? Uh, no, really, I really don't. you know, I was only a one, so, you know, a little too young. do remember our site.

I do remember our first house that we lived, lived on because, the best part about it was in the middle of Sioux falls and kitty corner across the street. There's a, like a convenience store in, you know, I knew it as the candy store. you know, kitty corner across the street and grew up from a candy store. So it really doesn't get much better than that.

So we're, we're in that house for a long time. So. Yeah, so to reminisce on my childhood a little bit, we're in that house for quite a while. We have some good memories of that, but then we moved to the west side of Sioux Falls, which is Kingswood area.

It was really where my dad, he got started in that neighborhood probably like the late 70s. We'd primarily developed residential housing, gosh, through like probably... early 2000s. So we're developing land on the west side of Sioux Falls for 30 years.

when I grew out there, I was one of the first houses, the new houses on that whole side of town. my memories as a kid were running around construction job sites and taking the wood and stacking it up and nailing it together to build forts and crawling through storm sewer pipes and biking around and generally causing too much trouble. on the, you know, out in that neighborhood. But that was, you know, kind of the back in the seventies and eighties where kids were, you you'd send them out the door and tell them what time dinner was and they better, you better show up for dinner.

That was the cardinal rule around our house. But other than that, you know, stay out there and try not to get in too much trouble. So, a lot of good memories of growing up and got good friends that, you know, to this day they're in Sioux Falls and business in Sioux Falls. We have a lot of good relationships growing up there.

So it's fun. It's it's it's fun to be still in that same town that you you you know, spent so many years in there 50 years I guess in Sioux Falls now so really know a lot of people and you it's fun to do things together, know with the people that live there and you know, we've grown up to be Business leaders and you know advocates for the community in our own right now. So it's it's fun. It's a good place and Sioux Falls is really Great place.

That's awesome. Yeah, that sounds like a great way to grow up. It's not a lot dissimilar from the way I grew up. So growing up in Sioux Falls, your dad had already started the business and it sounds like he kicked it off and really kicked it into gear early.

When did you decide that you were going to go into the family business? Uh, you know, kind of a strange path of that. we grew up, know, because it's, uh, we like to joke amongst our family that we're, you know, we're a bunch of farm kids that happen to work in the construction business. You know, so we're, we're always, always working in it.

You know, those early years in the seventies and eighties, I suspect there wasn't many that didn't have one of the Van Buster kids in their cleaning houses and mowing lawns. You know, trying to keep things in order. I remember growing up with my mom, she'd pick us up from school. We'd go to the carpet store to pick what color carpet was going in the house, and the tile store, and the countertop store, and the paint store.

That was some of the after-school activities. We'd just be dragging around, running around on carpet piles, having fun while my mom's trying to concentrate on the... figure out how to make the house look good so somebody would buy the thing. So I grew up with it.

I tell that part of the story. grew up with it. Really had no intention of coming back into the business. I just kind had my fill of construction business and all that, but I wouldn't wait to...

went away to college and ended up graduating in 1992, in that time was just a, I went to the University of Minnesota, was where I was going to college. So right as I was graduating out of business school, you know, there's a pretty major recession going on at that point. And it seemed like half of Minneapolis was getting laid off. know, the big companies like, you know, Honeywell and 3M and all those, mean, putting thousands of people out on the street with no jobs.

everybody from college was going out and getting whatever job they could find, something to pay the bills, some sort of service job or labor job or anything. So for the new college grads, that 92 timeframe is really, really hard to find a job. So trying to figure out what to do, and I've had enough of that, working with my hands growing up. So I really wasn't too excited to do that.

I was ready to do something professional. So talking to my dad, said, well, you know, I'm going to retire soon. I'm going to retire soon. This turns into an inside family joke.

I'm going to retire soon. if you ever want to come back here and work in the business, now's the time. Come on back and then you can have a job. That's my best option at the time.

So I decided to go back and start in on the business. the joke is, is that my dad is still, well, he was in the office today. He's 85 years old, you know, so, you know, he hasn't quite figured out how to retire yet. So he doesn't do the day-to-day operations, but he has long since, he has not come close to retirement because he just, loves hanging out with the family and he loves what we do.

And, and it's, fun to have them there, but yeah, he, he did not retire. So he kind of, he kind of suckered me in on that one just a little bit, I think, but you know, that's the way it worked. But so. you're gonna retire soon in quotes there.

exactly. Soon. Yeah, 35 years later, you're still doing it. yeah, so anyway, so I came back in 92, you know, really did not, you know, like a true construction background.

It didn't have it. And I got when I came back, my dad had eyeballed a piece of land and he wanted to 40 unit apartment buildings on it. And he's, you know, so I showed up my first day of work and he'd hand me this, you know, huge roll of blueprints and said, here, figure out how to get this thing built. I really, I had to figure out how to get it built.

Obviously he's there for a resource and all the contacts and all the history there, but really left it to me, kind of the secret swim of training methodology is what was employed. So I went to work as a project manager, a superintendent. you know, working on banking side of it, know, everything that needed to happen to get that apartment, you know, that apartment project completed. You know, I really did the whole thing from, you know, soup to nuts.

you know, so I'm out there at a 21 year old, you know, no training in construction really. I mean, I've been an observer and around it and, you know, you know, understood a lot, you know, so not like I'd never walked on our job site before, but to actually tell. people, you this is what we need to do next for scheduling or show them how to do it. You know, I was, I was doing a lot of reading at night trying to figure out how get all this stuff done.

Internet didn't exist right back then. So that really wasn't part of the resources available. But so anyway, so, you know, jumped in and started building apartments and that's where those thousand apartments came from. So, you know, that was the beginning of it.

So, you know, got that project done and got it up and built and, and then we went. went on to build probably for another five, six years, we kind of went on an apartment building spree, you know, some of that, that side of the business built up. So that's really where I really got my construction experience, you know, because I was there, you know, 12 hours a day or whatever it takes, you know, figure it all out and manage all those projects. So that was kind of a nice...

baseline of knowledge for me, know, to carry me forward, you know, through the rest of my career as we got into other types of construction, commercial construction or whatnot. You know, really got to understand it at that point. So did that for the early years with the apartments, you know, basically up to probably about 98, 99. And then I met My wife, I moved in with my wife back in Minnesota and she was living in Minnesota again.

So I took a year off from my career and went back up to University of Minnesota, the Carlson School of Management up there. I got my MBA in finance. I graduated in 98, I guess I graduated in 98. And ended up getting married in 99 and drug my wife back to Sioux Falls kicking and screaming because she was not happy about it.

I guess I gave her a good enough sales job. could, she decided to come. But, uh, so about that time, you know, the, you know, the late nineties, early two thousands, uh, you know, housing was just taking off, you know, cause we're, know, if you think back, we're leading up to the 2005, 2006, you know, bubble and housing meltdown, you know, so all that was taking off in Sioux falls and Sioux falls continues to grow about three and a half, 4 % growth rate year over year. So there's, know, you know, you know, that, you know, we're, kind of expect, you know, four to 5,000 people a year to show up in town.

you know, business, you know, the community is great for people in our business. are always so many showing up, you know, within reason to buy a, buy a house or rent an apartment. But so those early 2000 years, housing was taken off. So we really set aside the multifamily part of the business.

started focusing on the land development, the single family housing to really keep up with that effort there. So really had some, you know, crazy busy years in the single family housing development side. you know, so that, that really kept me busy in there. And then that time we were never, we weren't building houses back then in that, in that period.

So that, you know, that's kind of, those are kind of those early years and I should interject there about four or five years after I got started. My older brother, Mike, who uh we share the CEO duties with right now, he came back in there and picked up the property management business because about 93 or 94, somewhere in there, we had some people managing our apartments for us and they just really weren't doing that great of a job. I had a slow winter in there right before my brother came back.

So over the course of the winter, I figured out how to manage all the apartments or, you know, wrote a, a, or thought I figured it out. But, you know, tried to, tried to, I started in on it and wrote an operations book. And, you know, so that, that one summer we took over our apartment management. then my brother kind of came loose from his career, his early career.

And he came back and started in on the property management side of the business. So he joined, I would say it was probably 96 or seven. I think is probably when he came back to the company. When I started in 92, was my dad and a secretary.

That was it. He had a partner that was building houses on the land that he owned. It was pretty small. We're up to about 65 employees now.

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shop/fromthegroundupshow Again, that was athletefresh.shop/fromthegroundupshow Yeah. So, your older brother, he, he did not come back to the family business as quickly as you did. had another career before that.

Yeah, he was a mechanical engineer out of SDSU as well, followed my dad's footsteps, but he went to Colorado and he's working in a manufacturing facility out there. So he actually got a lot of really good training, which, we can, he could use and all these, you know, bring these skills back in as a family business is wonderful. So he did a lot of management training, you know, just in time uh inventory. was, it was.

kind of a new thing back then. So he was part of a management group that was running around trying to teach their suppliers how to supply the semiconductor company that he was working for. So he had a lot of really good opportunities to learn those management techniques. So he was doing that until he got tired of it.

And then he went out and started working on his own, following the entrepreneurial track of the family. He found himself in a little bit of a lull there and we needed help and the timing was right. So he came back for a summer visit and by the end of it we talked him into coming back to Sioux Falls and run the property management business. That's where he started, but all the roles have changed since then.

Yeah. Yeah. So it sounds like growing up, you decided to go to college without a mind to necessarily come back to the family business and then eventually return to get your MBA. Do you still feel like that was a wise track to take or have you seen things shift when you're advising your own kids?

Would you encourage them to take a similar track? ah Well, that's a timely subject for us because I'm second generation, my siblings are second generation and we got the young kids coming out of college now, so that third generation is out there. My siblings and I all felt very strongly that our kids, our nieces and nephews go out and do your thing. you know, go out and explore the world and explore your careers.

And, you know, if you have a inclination to come back, you know, and it makes sense somewhere in the fabric of the organization, you know, then that could be a possibility. But we really encourage them to go out and do their own thing. And, you know, the results of that are still outstanding. But we've got, you know, we've got a civil engineer, which, you know, he's, you know, got the skill set to do it.

But we've got nurses, we've got a graphic art, we've got a microbiologist, we've got one in medical school and one in mechanical engineering and a couple of young ones in there. So, don't really see anybody but the civil engineer, which he's on a happy track with his company, so I think he's satisfied for the most part. So, I don't know. I don't know how that'll work, but what we've concentrated on...

within our organization, because we always knew, because always, all of us had kids late, and that we're going to be pretty old by the time these kids would want to come in, that we really need to have a really strong group of professional managers. And that's really what we're working on. That's strategic focus right at the moment is getting that next group of people in that. We've got some good young leaders, we've got some really experienced leaders in there as well.

So we've got this really great mix of professional management coming in that can manage the business and all the real estate portfolio that we've put together all these years. So that's how we're going continue to manage the business going forward and we'll see how the kids all make their decision. that we did that, know, there's, you know, there's, you know, family businesses are tricky, you know, and there's a lot of failures out there. And we've been so lucky with, you know, my parents as the type of founder that they are where they're not, you know, not micromanagers, not hovering over you and saying, well, this is the way I've done it for the last, you know, 25 years, and this is, you know, how you need to do it.

They've been really good about starting with that first roll of blueprints, go figure it out for yourself and make it happen. So they really gave us a chance to go out there and to succeed or fail and do different things. And we're into areas of the development that my parents were never thought about and weren't interested in and had very little excitement about it during their time. Ha ha.

making those strategic decisions. My siblings and I are so closely aligned because we're out sweeping those houses and painting houses and mowing lawns together. We grew up in it. We understand what it takes.

We can take long-term views. We're really fortunate to have that. This next generation, as this third generation comes in, we really want to have them We've already started to have meetings so they understand the business better. We're laying some of that groundwork, even the matter if they end up being owners of the company and someone else is running it or they happen to find themselves inside of it.

But we've always thought amongst my siblings is that if these kids are interested, we want them to go out and learn something and then bring that back. It'll make us stronger. Just like my brother working in a semiconductor industry, figuring out how to do just in time delivery of material coming in, they gave him two years of training on how to manage that. And then he was out there training people how to do that.

So he brought all that back to the company. And I took that break and got a master's degree and bring that stuff back to the company to really you know, find those next steps, you know, to make us, you know, a better organization. So, so I said, we've, know, with the kids, we've always, always wanted them to say, you know, coach them to like, go do your thing. Cause if you want to be a nurse, you know, we don't need nurses, you know, that's not what we do.

You know, so if you want to be a nurse, go be a nurse, you know, that's, know, that's, if that's your happy spot, you know, go do it, you know, so we don't want, you know, we want them to come back for the right reasons cause they want to come back. rather than fill an obligation, you know, which that happens in a lot of family businesses that there gets to be an obligation that you got to come back and take care of it. So it's always, you know, it's tricky to balance those out, but that's the path we've picked.

Yeah. Yeah. That sounds like a great way to go. And as a second generation like yourself, I can appreciate that stance.

That was kind of how my parents approach things. So you mentioned that you guys are branching into things that maybe your parents never imagined. And you guys just kind of have your hands in everything. Can you help us understand that development process a little bit?

You said you started as a trust building company. and then kind of moved into a construction company and a development company more to support the trust building. How has that growth continued? What have been the different steps as you've taken on different avenues of business?

Yeah, it, you know, how we've morphed over time is, really, because Sioux Falls is a small town. I mean, it's getting bigger, but it's a small town. you know, what we've tried to do is we've always tried to diversify ourselves. You know, the apartments, you know, when I started came back in building apartments, historically, know, apartments are doing well financially and housing's not, or housing's doing well financially and apartments are not.

So that was... That was the first iteration of trying to balance it out so your income, you're not a feast or famine income so that you can hopefully steady out your income. we did that and built out that asset class and built the apartments are generally pretty nice steady piece of business so that could hold us over when we hit things like 2006. I mean, that was terrible.

time in my career. But so that you can push through those, even those, that was a really dark depression at that time, or recession, whatever. so trying to balance a portfolio out. So that's really where we started.

So kind of going the early 90s, started building apartments, we got housing going on, then housing took off. And then we got really busy and and doing land development because when I say housing, we weren't building houses at that time. So we got really busy building uh and land development, a lot of lots and opening up new subdivisions because part of when my brother and I came back and joined my dad, just gave us more people to do more stuff. So we went out there and really started expanding.

So when that housing boom was happening in those early 2000s. We're really in a good spot reputationally wise within the community and how we had our business set up to really push into that market and expand our land development on the residential side during that time. So that was going good through the early 2000s and then somewhere about 2003-ish, 2004. This is something my brother and I did.

This is the area my parents really weren't that interested in and started getting into the commercial development because we found this piece of ground that we really liked. so we got pretty excited about it and we said, hey, we want to tackle this. my dad's like, I really don't want anything to do with that. And so he challenged us a lot as far as wanting to move forward with it and making sure that We had our thoughts in order and our plans in order that we could actually pull off something.

It was a major undertaking. It was probably a 15-acre commercial development right off the interstate, but it had been sitting there for years. Every developer in town had been driving past it just like we've been driving past it. It doesn't make sense.

It's too complicated. Whatever reason they passed, we're the ones that are kind of our flag on the ground saying, hey, think we can figure this thing out and make some money at it. you know, those are the moments when development's pretty scary, you know, because that's really when you're, you know, you're trying to, you know, you're putting all your time and energy and resources into making something like this happen. But it's 15 acres and I got to say it was probably, you know, 150, 200,000 square feet.

forget how big of a, you how many buildings we ended up putting in there. But so we... We really got excited about this idea and really kind of created a whole new branch of our organization and getting the commercial development going. That project turned out really well.

Our timing was good. We ended up with a completely amazing opening with a restaurant that was beyond successful. Five times the expectations of the restaurant opened. operators, know, expectations when they opened it.

So that momentum really helped, you know, kick off the rest of development where we did a mixed use, know, multi-story mixed use building, you know, high end shops, you know, more pedestrian open type development where we really tried to take some of the stuff that we saw out of the Sioux Falls market, brought it into Sioux Falls where Sioux Falls is basically building, you know, things that are indoor malls or just strip centers where you pull up, run in the front door because it's 20 below zero and run back out, get yourself a, we created an environment where it was pedestrian friendly.

People could shop, go door to door and shop and really make it a nice built environment. And so a lifestyle center, that was the buzzword at the time. We still do use those terms now, but it was truly the first lifestyle center in Sioux Falls. And it worked and it worked really well.

that was kind of the... that next generation, kind of the early 2000s of what our company was. And that really set the stage for us to do follow on. We did the office park.

That was very similar nature to that. And we started doing our office and commercial build outs all around town. It was really kind of cemented our reputation as a commercial developer. And with all that, With all that activity that you know that got the notice, know of you know additional Partners that we have or clients that we have that have these very nice pieces of property You know around the Sioux Falls community that aren't fully They're not performing financial like they should because they're just you know farm fields or gravel pits or you know Those types of things so they you know, we've got people coming to us now saying hey, how do we how do we take this?

You know this you know, expired gravel pit or this farm field and turn into something that's income producing. You know, so we either partner with them or we'll work for them as a feed developer. We'll do, we'll figure it all out for them and we can help them activate that, you know, that resource that they've got for their family and then figure out how to build some long-term income for them. But all that commerce, that commercial development kind of early 2000s, that super successful corner that we put together.

that really paved the way for us working for another family in town, the Friesen family. They came to us and said, you know, hey, you guys did this beautiful corner over there. Why don't you come help us with this other project, you know, they were calling late, well, it's called Lake Lorraine, still called Lake Lorraine today, but that's, you know, it's hundred acre, you know, development. around an old gravel pit that they've been mining out for 40 years.

So they had this beautiful lake that was all fed by the aquifer. So nice, clean water. And around Sioux Falls, is no water, you know, so if you got a, if you got a lake, it's really kind of something special, but they wanted to put a, you know, put a walking path, a one mile walking path around it. give that whole lake and that walking path, the walking path, the park around the lake, back to the community, back to the city of Sioux Falls, because Sioux Falls has been good to that family and they wanted to give something back.

So that was kind of their idea and they said, we need to help developing this out and you've done a good job with these other projects so you can come help us. So we turned that into, one of the first things is 180,000 square foot you know, National Retail Power Center, know, Hobby Lobby, Home Goods, DSW, you know, that typical lineup of retailers. So that was kind of our landmark piece. we also, in that development, we wanted office, you know, so we got a 65, 70,000 square foot, you know, office building to come out there.

We got some neighborhood services where we put in some, you know, some restaurants and some eye doctors, some chiropractors and a vet clinic. sushi place. Then we ended up with, gosh, there must be 150 rooms in there, but we had Ryan companies on Minneapolis buy a piece of land and they built just an absolutely beautiful, you know, a senior living facility, you know, as another anchor piece. And uh then we had an uh apartment developer to really build a, you know, a very urbanized, something you'd see in downtown.

Sioux Falls, we've come out to our lake is on the west side of Sioux Falls and build this really nice apartment building with a lot of amenities. So all that's kind of our core out there that we've managed to build and fill up, you know, probably about 90 % of this lake over the last 10 years. We got caught in COVID in there, so that put us back a little bit, but we got a hotel out there. And then Sam Clickman, that's how he introduced us.

That's why I'm sitting here today. But, you know, he joined out there. We built him a building. sitting right on the lake and big lost meteries right there on the lake.

It looks just like his other store out west and it's just absolutely beautiful and looks like it's doing quite well for him. But that's small world, right? So that's why I'm here, our mutual connection with Sam. Yeah.

Awesome. Well, you mentioned in that story, a few difficult steps, kind of venturing into different avenues of business, different sectors, the 2006, 2008 time period. What has been the most difficult thing you've faced in running your business? Well, know, it's always, uh know, people is the biggest thing, you know, that's the most important thing.

know, you know, running a small business because we've always kept our, kept it too small for too long, you know, to a fault, you know, because we've you know, we've um been on You know, and family, you know, having grown up in entrepreneurs. mean, before 2005, my parents lived through 25 % interest rates in late seventies. know, so, you know, they had a huge run through the seventies and then the seventies and the early eighties, it was a disaster, you know. So it was, you know, my dad's generation calls that the builder depression is, and because there's, you know, hardly anything going on back in those years.

So. There's been these major cycles, it really all depends. The people has probably been the biggest thing, because we've always been too tight organizationally, not adding too many people in the organization. So we've always run very thin.

finding those people that are that... that work with us, that's always been our challenge. so it's, we've, historically has been our biggest challenge, but in the last couple of years, we've really made major strides in trying to round out the company, fill all the departments in the company. We hired a marketing director, we hired an HR director, and we hired a COO.

to come in. Those are all new roles, but we were probably five years behind when we should have hired them and brought those people in. So that's always been the challenge of trying to keep that in balance because you have these big, huge projects, you need a lot of people, and then it's a small market and things slow down so that you're not so busy for a while. So we've always been hesitant to staff things up more than we should.

more than we should but I we might have finally learned our lesson. ah Well, and that's kind of the entrepreneur's curse is you think you can do it all yourself right up until you can't. uh and a big part of our story too is my younger brother came back in about 15 years ago and he was running our commercial construction. And then up until about three years ago too.

he stepped out and decided to pursue a different path a couple years ago. So we lost a leg of our, the three-legged stool with the brothers in there. So we lost the leg of the stool. that's been a crimp, back to the people part of it, but backfilling him with a director of operations and getting a COO in there and getting the right personnel has kind of fulfilled all that stuff.

The strategic drive to get a professional management group in place, we're there. We're just getting everyone working really well as a group now. So it's fun to watch. fun to be a part of.

Good. Well, that kind of leads me into my next question. know you guys do, you do development, property management, building apartments, building commercial properties, single family homes. You kind of have your fingers in everything.

Which sector of your business is most rewarding and which sector is the most profitable? Well, whatever's working well is really rewarding. So, the stuff that's not working so well, that's not rewarding. That's where you end up spending a lot of extra time.

I think the part that we love, and I think this is universal, not just me or my family, my brothers, my sister, the people that work there, I think it's just universal. The thing that's really rewarding about what we do with development. is that we take these ideas of this bare piece of ground and we turn it into a building that somebody lives in, has an office in, or they're selling dresses out of, or they're manufacturing fire trucks out of. It's actually getting used.

After those projects are done, you can go back 10, 15, 20 years later, it's like... I did that, you know, like I had a piece of that, you know, had a hand in getting that there and people are coming and going and enjoying it. So that's all the rewarding stuff, know, because it's really fun to be in that process. It comes out in so many different ways.

We have a lot of opportunities to work with fellow entrepreneurs, you know. a new law firm or a dentist or an eye doctor or someone that wants to open a daycare. They come to you and like, I'm going to quit my job and I got all this money saved up and I'm going to do my own thing and I'm super nervous, but I've been planning on this and now I've got to figure out how to get a facility put together and I've got a super tight budget and everyone's always got a super tight budget.

You know, but you know, really working with those people where it's just like, Hey, it's going to be okay. You know, it's just like, you know, we're going to figure it out because we've been, we've been done this so many times, you know, cause you know, our, our job as a developer builder, our job is to help, you know, help the project get done in whatever form that makes sense for the client. Yeah. So it's, it's a lot of, it's a lot of fun to work with the entrepreneurs to help them, you know, get to a spot where they can go to work and, know, sell the widgets that they're selling out of the front door.

that's really fun. So I really enjoy that. But it's also difficult. It's all just difficult because everyone's got different experiences and different expectations.

So it just takes a lot of time and energy to get that right. As far as, the, you see what's the most profitable, you know, a lot of the service stuff that we do, you the commercial construction, you know, property management, you know, home building, you know, now we do build houses now, you all that stuff is, you know, very tight margins, know, all those activities, you know, so it's not, you know, it's not an easy business, you know, so, you know, going back to what's your...

because challenges the people. If we didn't have good people helping us keep those businesses running at a high level, delivering quality on time, on budget, happy customers, it be really difficult to make money in those areas. So they're all real tight margin businesses, but they make sense to us because we look at it holistically because we're really trying to build it out where we can take care of know, a customer, wherever their needs might be. We might rent somebody an apartment and they're moving to town to go run Walmart, you know, and that's happened.

So they're going to be the new assistant manager of Walmart. what do they need next? They're going to live in an apartment for six months until they can figure out where they want to build a house. So then we do a good job renting an apartment and servicing them in the apartment, making that a good experience.

And we tell them, hey, we build houses too. it's like, hopefully we get a call. And it's like, you guys did a great job over here. It's a group that's not related to our home building group, but then our home building group has a good relationship already built up and then they'll do a good job building a house for them.

then that person hopefully tells their friend that we did a good job and they know that we do brokerage work and that friend's... looking for a new office space, hire one of our brokers to go help them rent a new office. So it's very, we like this idea that we could really take care of any real estate services that our clients might need. So that really makes us unique in the Sioux Falls market that we can handle all of it on the consumer side, but also on the business side, do anything that they would.

need and build that customer for the long term is what we're really trying to strive for. man, you can rent him an apartment and sell them a lot and build them a house and then build their business and do pretty much anything they need. Yeah, yeah, and I think, you know, that's just, you know, that's, that's what makes it hard, you know, the business because then you got to be good at all those different, all those different things, you know, because we're, you know, we're because there's just home building companies, there's just property management companies, there's just brokerage companies.

Yeah, so it's, it's hard to run, you know, so we're running several different companies under one umbrella. but for the diversification of income, so you're healthy over the long term, so we have a good place for people to work. And another thing we love to do in our organization is that if we really want to create a place where people can stay for the long term, as we know them and build trust with each other, where we can get young leaders in and... they might start in one area of our company and if another opportunity opens up in another area of the company that if their careers maybe hit a lid for whatever reason in one part of the company that they can look at another spot and say, I want to go help over there and work in that area so we keep that good person as they progress through their career.

that's one of things that we're trying to do to make a better working environment as people. spend a lot of time together in our work environment so we can make it as good as we can. Yeah, that's awesome. And, I think that's, a lot of bull goal.

know that was one of the big motivations for me and growing my business was I had people working under me that wanted an upward track and, wanted to go to the next thing and I didn't have something to hand them. So we have to grow and get bigger to create more opportunities. So, great. You've now been in this business for quite some time.

You've seen a lot of ups and downs and been in a lot of different businesses essentially. At what point in your career were you most afraid and what was the threat that you were afraid of? 2006 was a big one. That was pretty intense.

I we were pretty heavily weighted towards housing at that time. And, you know, because we had stopped building apartments there for quite a while. know, so that was, you know, we had times, you know, well, the year before, I'd say like 2005, I think we sold 197 single family lots. And in 2007, we sold 17.

Yeah, so that's about, you know, zero. In that business, doesn't, you know, that's not enough to pay the light bill, so to speak. You know, so that was, you know, that was pretty nerve wracking. You know, hadn't seen a banker in our office for five, six, seven years.

And when that hit in 2006, 2007, there came out every month, like, what's going on? Because back that time, the federal regulators were pulling every single housing and land development loan that they had in the entire country and reviewing those with high scrutiny. And so the banks would come out to us like, what's going on? And what's the activity?

we're like, there's not much activity out here. We're just flat. No one was buying anything. So that was pretty scary time.

That was nerve-racking because you never know how long that stuff is going to last. Family history, my dad went through that as big of a disaster in the late 70s. He said was worse, it really was, because nobody could even afford to buy anything back then. He said nobody wants to anything right now, but the interest rates are cheap enough that people still could do it, but everything can kind of shut down.

So that was uh a wild time. had three developers go bankrupt in Sioux Falls, major developers go bankrupt in Sioux Falls at that time. So it was real. It hit Sioux Falls as hard as the rest of the country.

I think what saved our community is that we had some good long-term developers, community-minded people that just felt like we could. You know, I don't, no one got together and decided this, but in retrospect, think it was just a mouthful of this is like our mindset, just kind of that, you know, we just need to ride this out and, you know, not dump a bunch of inventory and crash all the prices and create a bunch of equity losses, which would have rattled the market more. You know, everyone kind of, everyone kind of, you know, grip the steering wheel a little tighter and rode it out is really what happened.

yeah, that was, that was pretty, that was pretty intense. And then, you know, the other one was COVID for sure. I mean, that was wild. mean, we have hundreds of leases with national retailers, local retailers, local offices, whatever.

So COVID hit and the nationals calling up like that big 180,000 square foot power center called up and said, we're not going to pay rent. you're done. like, well, you got to pay rent and your real estate taxes are due twice a year in South Dakota. they're not paying rent and real estate taxes are coming.

that's a gigantic bill. So that's a pretty big cashflow crunch that you're staring at because we got loans. you get that phone call, like, well, the bank wants to get paid. power company wants to get paid.

The county wants to get paid. Real estate to act as, know, how's this going to work out? know, so, you know, so that was a while, which that would turned out that everyone did the same thing is, you know, the banks froze their payments for a while, you know, for, you know, 60, 90 days, you know, because they knew all of this was going all the way around the country. So they didn't want everything to melt down, you because all the rent payers quit paying, you know, and then, you know, so then we were caught in the middle.

So the bank, you know, stopped, you know, froze the payments. But then what they did is we reworked our loans with the banks, you know, you know, redid everything, lengthened everything out and it worked out with the banks. Then we had to rewrite, you know, I don't know if it's right or not, but we say we rewrote every lease that we had that summer, you know, so it was just a massive, massive effort. Our property management department was absolutely amazing, you know, to get through that because it's It's just a mind boggling amount of work.

I mean, you may talk to the local restaurant owners and dress shops and coffee shops and you're talking to these people. mean, they've got payroll. You think about it in their perspective, they're trying to figure out how to make payroll and they're trying to figure out how to make rent and pay insurance and everything else that they've got. they're all, a lot of them are solo.

Sole proprietors, you know, so they get home mortgages to pay and no jobs, you know, this is their job So they're on a cash crunch. I mean, they're absolutely freaking out would be the best way to describe it You know, so the whole the whole system is like completely in disarray, so Those are the two big ones. So hopefully we don't have that again, but you know, they they seem to you know You think about it, know 70s 2000s and you know 2020 every 20 30 years you get a pretty pretty nasty one.

So, czar is gonna, it's gonna happen again. Hopefully we got a good decade or so ahead of us, so... Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I don't want it.

yeah, just, you know, so the key is that, you know, got to be prepared for it. In 2005 and six, we, by 2007, I think we're starting to say this about 2007, because we're into it pretty good. And we always thought we had, we were joking, we thought we always had a contingency plan, but we didn't realize that we had a disaster plan, because we're conservative enough that we just survived a disaster. But we're always playing our cards tight because it's easy to get eaten up in the development construction world very quickly with cash flow.

So you got to, it's like farming, it's a big equity game. man, yeah, for sure. Was there a lesson that you've learned that you wish you would have learned earlier? Uh, well, um, those old guys are right more often than they're wrong because they've been through it before.

So they always like, this is what's going to happen. And, know, as a young, as a young guy, like, yeah, okay. I hear you. But, uh, and then you get, you get through it and like, dang it, they were right again.

So yeah, you know, find, find, find some advisors, you know, some people that have been through it before, you know, maybe not even the same. industry, but find some advisors that have been through it before because they've seen it. I remember I was super involved in the Home Builders Association in Sioux Falls and on the national level starting back to the 90s. as we're coming up to, we're into 2003, 2004, guys that are my age but new to the industry.

didn't have the They didn't have a dad sitting in an office keeping your head on straight. then they didn't have your dad's friends that you go hunting with and hang out with. You can have these casual conversations with the guys that have been through the 70s and 80s and what it took to get them through. So I remember talking to guys that are pretty close to my same age and were hang out and home builders and everything's great, right?

It's 2005. You know, there's people are lining up to buy, you whatever you build, someone's going to buy it, you know, so it's just bad easy. You know, at that timeframe, and I'm like, you got it, you know, get ready, you know, just make sure you're, make sure you're putting money away and, know, you know, keeping your debt low, you know, cause you can see them buying new trucks every six months and stuff, you know, think, you know, obvious things that they're spending money on.

We all were. And it's just like, you got it, you know, keep your, keep your head down. Cause this thing could shift. I remember some of those guys didn't believe it at all.

We're contemporaries, I'm passing on the wisdom I'm hearing to them. some of those guys, they're gone. By the time that's all over, they don't have a business anymore. But some of them, that they keep it, play their cards a little tighter, they survived that.

If you survive those things, that's the good news. When you survive those things, there's usually a lot of opportunity afterwards. Because if you're stable enough and you get through that, operationally, financially, there's a lot of opportunity because people are so, the rest of your competition's a bit hamstrung because they got hurt a little bit more, so it takes them a while to get going. But when things start turning around, If you're in good shape coming out of a recession like that, that gives you a lot of chance to really fire.

I guess one thing I say is you can start running if you're not in a hole first. If you're in a hole, you've got to get yourself out of the hole to start running. If you're standing around just waiting for something to happen, you can start running a lot faster than the guy is trying to get out of the hole. That's good way to put it.

Yeah. Yeah, so it's always felt like even those are the big ones and there's been absolute little dips here and there along the way too. But yeah, so it pays to be conservative. Yeah, good lessons there.

Is there something like an opinion that you once held strongly that you've changed your mind about throughout your career? Boy, no, I think not really. It just seems like it's got to work hard. I never felt like I'm going to change the thought process.

When I started out, I didn't know what I was doing, building those apartments until I told you that story. You know, that when I got that roll of paper and said, go build these apartments, I didn't know what I was doing. Yeah. So what I figured out is that the people, you know, when I went and talked to the plumber, the electrician or the framer or the concrete guy that has been doing this for 25 years.

And I went up to them and said, help me understand what's, know, you know, what I'm looking at here, you know, and, you know, what should we be making a decision on? You know, not what should I be making a decision on? What should we be making a decision on? And they'll help you.

They'll help you get through that and they'll give you all their information, all their experience and help you make a good decision so the project turns out well. But you just need to be confident in yourself enough to listen to them and humble enough to listen to them and really find out what they're trying to tell you and what they're saying to you. So I think... that shaped me.

So getting back to your questions, something that I have this really hard opinion on something that I had to change over the course of time? My answer is no, because I figured out that the world keeps changing, and there's all sorts of things that I don't know that I need to know. But I just need to go ask the people that know those things to help us make the best decision possible. I don't really have these hardcore beliefs that this is the way it should be because stuff all changes.

Everything changes and moves along so you just got to be curious and ask people the right questions. I just keep moving with the times, I guess, is what I feel like more than having a stuck opinion on something. Gotcha. Yeah, there's some wisdom in that.

No, there's some wisdom in that of, you know, you observe and see what's going on and then make a decision rather than coming in with an opinion to begin with. So, yeah. and ask people, learn from the people. If you could go back to 1992 coming out of college with the option to pursue a career elsewhere or come back to the family business, would you choose to do it all over again?

Not 92, no. That's part of where my personal opinion applies to the next generation is like, go out and do your thing first. Because I came back and it felt like I settled for a long time. that I didn't really want to be back here.

I wanted to be doing something else. I don't know what that was, but I didn't want to be back in Sioux Falls at that time and working as hard as... I was, I found myself at that time. So I wish I would have had a chance for a long time to go out and, and, you know, find my way and see if there's something, you know, something else that was out there.

So yeah, I wouldn't have come back, you know, if things would have been different, I wouldn't have come back. I mean, it was, was, you know, long-term, it's right. It's clearly the right decision. but it was, yeah, I think go out and explore and, you know, take your time to figure out what, you know, where you want to be long term, because it's a long life.

You can change your career multiple times. So go out and learn some stuff and bring it back. yeah, would hold off, I guess, if I was going to advise myself back in 92. Go wait tables for a while until you found a job, I guess.

Okay. All right. And what has been your biggest win as a leader? What are you most proud of?

Oh, I think one thing that I'm pretty proud of, within Home Builders, we cooked up a street of dreams concept. Because I was always on the education committee, we're trying to figure out how to raise fundraise money for scholarships, because keep people in the trades, get people in the trades and interested in the trades. So Home Builders are always active in like Tools for Schools is one of their programs where they, the industrial arts programs have been completely, you know, line-itemed out in our area.

know, so the home builders go out and buy table saws and drills and, you know, get it to the high schools, you know, so they can, you know, the kids can learn how to use that stuff to, you know, get them into the trades. Because if we don't have builders out there, electricians and plumbers out there, you're not going to live anywhere. So, HomeBuild has always been super involved. it was a lot of finance.

We always did fundraisers, but we ended up working together and kind of an integral part of that was getting like a we always have a parade of homes every year where there's 20 houses that you can go visit and go view and that's kind of - it's a nice marketing event and it's a good chance for people to connect with new housing, great chance to connect with new housing. But we did a Street of Dreams where we did cul-de-sac where we did five houses built at the same time open at the same time and we had them open for you know three four weeks and we'd charge an entrance fee because we knew people love to go to that stuff and we saw that in other markets so they'd pay interest in an entrance fee to get in there so that ran for three years was such a heavy lift such you know so many volunteer hours but it was it really gratifying to be a part of that just to see how much money we raised thousands I forgot how much it was now but it was a It was a big deal to really set up that endowment.

So that was fun. I mean, doing things like that as a leader has been fun along the way. Okay. I see in, at least in my area here in Wyoming, there's been a shift back towards the trades and uh our local high school is doing a great job of funding their, the woods department, their construction classes, that kind of things.

Do you guys see a swing back that direction or are you still fighting an uphill battle there? You know, it's, I'm a little removed from that now, but like three, four years ago, one of our school districts, we've got five school districts in town. One of our school districts partnered with the Home Builders Association and the Home Builders, like that street and finish project I was telling you and all the other fundraising provided the money built like a indoor or built a building that the kids in the Harrisburg school district can go build a house in.

So the school district stepped up to it, home builders stepped up to it paid for the building and the tools, but then the school district is running the program for the long term. So it's building back up. We've had a lot of, so I think the answer to the question is yes, there's been a lot of momentum back towards the trades. In Sioux Falls in South Dakota, we've had really good leadership on the state.

the state side, they do this Build Dakota Scholarship. it's pretty, a lot of kids could get scholarships into the trade schools, like get the two years totally paid for if they agree to work for a couple years after. So we got a lot of that going on. It's robust now, it's been going on for a good 10 years and the tech schools are expanding.

We actually opened up a community college, so you can get an associate's degree. maybe not so much trade schoolish, it gives you a technical degree that you can use to get that first good job, and then if you want to go finish college online somewhere, you could go do that later on if you choose to keep moving forward. So there's been a lot of shit, but there's been a lot of momentum in our community. Home Builders, the Chamber of Commerce, the Sioux Falls Development Foundation, trying to build out and expand those programs, really trying to get people engage with the jobs, because it's like 50 % of the kids don't make it through college.

They enter college. I was shocked when I first saw those. I think it's over 50%. So we've got to give our kids a better path rather than send them to college that they don't make it through.

Get them into a trade that's meaningful, and there's plenty of work. We've got super low employment. We always have 2 to 3 % unemployment. I think one was like 1.

7 here, not that many months ago. mean, so Sioux Falls is, you know, it's growing so fast that unemployment is always way below everybody else in the region. So yeah, so it's nice to see some of that stuff coming back. I mean, there's a lot of people paying attention to it, putting energy and dollars behind it, know, create those opportunities.

Yeah. Yeah, I've been excited about it in our area and man, I think that the opportunity available in the trades for the next generation is just going to be incredible for those that are willing to take it. Yeah, agreed. has any of that shifted your opinion about education and what advice would you have for someone pursuing a career that's maybe in high school now?

Do you feel like college is as important as it was or extremely important or? Are there more opportunities in the trades? What educational advice would you have for a high school student looking forward to their future? Get it, keep going, know, get, you know, whatever, whatever makes sense to you.

I mean, if, you know, if college, you know, college makes sense to you, go do it or, you know, community college or trade school, you know, just take that next step, you know, whatever, whatever, whatever works, you know, so if, I mean, if you, if you go to, if you go to a trade school and finish that program and go get a job and then where you start working your way through college, if you choose to do that, you know, down the road, those opportunities are always there, but just keep building up, you know, it.

So whatever the right avenue is for you is just find it and do it. Education can never be taken away. When you learn how to learn, you get curious and you can figure out more things and expand your career. I think just find a way to move forward.

you know, some, you know, beyond high school, you know, we got a, you know, high school career or a high school education, you know, isn't really enough, you know, I think to, you know, find those good jobs out there, you know, to having a technical school or a social history from, you know, a community college or, you know, a bachelor's degree. mean, you need those things to really prove yourself out. I think it's important, but it's... Every answer is not for every person.

But just go get one of them. Move yourself ahead. So this is my uh favorite question that I ask of every guest. Are you a person of a particular faith tradition?

And if so, how has that shaped your leadership? Yeah, we're just joking about that the other day. So I was raised Catholic and I married my wife's Lutheran. So I got married in a Lutheran church and one of our friends is their daughter's converting from Lutheran to Catholicism this weekend actually and we're talking about all the stuff that he had to do.

My wife said, I said, you didn't have to do that to be a Lutheran. And I said, well, I don't know if I am a Lutheran because No one ever asked me to send my Catholic card back in. I don't know if I'm a Catholic or a Lutheran, you know, it's, it's, you know, we, you know, always been around it. You know, we took our kids all the way through confirmation in our local church, because we wanted them to be aware of what, you know, what's going on, you know, in that, you know, inside those big buildings and, you know, why people get so much.

out of it. We thought it was important to expose our kids and the values are great. We're not active members per se. My wife is more than I am.

Try to live by the values that are common throughout is what we're about. It's good. A lot of good people spend a lot of time there for sure. Good.

So your dad started the business. You've been involved for over 30 years. You've been running it for quite a while now. guys have grown it to incorporate a lot of different aspects and different sectors.

What is next? Where do you go from here? Uh, you know, the, the fun, I mean, we keep, I mean, it's always fresh, you know, so we're, we're working on, I spent most of my week working on a new development, you know, on, um, you know, and another one of our communities surrounding Sioux Falls this week. And so I spent half my week working on that and it's, you know, it's the scene, you know, things that you got to get done, but you know, we're coming up with a new twist on it to make it exciting, to make it a better place to, you know, to, uh, to live, you know, for, the people in that community have a better place to live and give them a reason to sell their house and go build a new one.

That's really what housing's about. we're, you know, in last week I spent a whole bunch of time working on a new office park that we're working on in the south end of Sioux Falls. So, the work is very variable from week to week and different things seem different. attention at different moments.

you know, it's, that's what's, you know, I'm not quite sure what's next. We'll keep finding more of these, more of these projects, but that's, you know, that's, it's, it's fun, you know, to work through those and try to figure out a better way to, you know, you know, present, you know, the, you know, make the product new and exciting and people want to engage with it and buy it or rent it or, you know, build on it, whatever the case. that's Yeah, we'll just keep finding finding those things.

So that's that's that's the exciting part. You know, on the project side, you know, the business side of it, you know, really, I'm really am truly excited with the staff that we've got within our organization. And, and, you know, we've got this great team now, and we're really showing up and able to do a lot of things that we need to do and want to do. And it's gonna be fun to watch them grow and take the company to maybe places we weren't expecting by giving them some room and some latitude to be the leaders that they are.

So there's a couple of exciting things going on. There's always the daily development, but the long-term strategy of getting some great people in place. That'll be fun. That'll be gratifying.

Okay. Is there a particular part of your business that you really get excited about and you kind of hang onto and like doing yourself? it the, you know, finding the new development or building homes or the commercial or customer interaction or is there a particular part of your business that you really enjoy? Yeah, I mean, the development side of it, I mean, that's the really tricky part.

Like the land development, I always call it the entitlement work and trying to get a cornfield to be build ready or have some sort of structure on there that's usable. the part that's going to be the hard part to let go because You have to have a lot of knowledge about a lot of different things. Because we view as a developer, as filling the gaps between the real estate broker who understands the market, between the architect who understands how to build things, between the civil engineer who understands how to put land together, between the banks and how to finance it.

There's all these really good professionals around, but the developer's job is to all those cracks, you know, to get a project move forward, you got to be able, someone's got to be in, in the middle of it, just saying, yeah, we can do that, you know, civil engineer. But if we do that, when I go down to city hall and talk to the city's engineers or the city's planning department, they were going to say no, you know, because they got a whole set of rules that we need to abide by.

know, so, you know, so being, you know, having that, you know, that that knowledge of all those different areas, not being an expert in all of them, but having gone through so many projects that you know where to find the answer, you know who's got the answer, you know which direction not to run down because it's going to end in a dead end, so you can avoid those pitfalls. So that's the tricky part because it's so multi-dimensional. So that's hard for us to envision on how to replicate that.

But all the individual pieces, we've got good people either employed or working for us that can fill in all those roles so they can get that to go. So anyway, that's the tricky part, but it's also the fun part. It's also the frustrating part. So you get it all when you're doing it.

But that's the place that will be the last spot that will exit. As far as my brother and I, our family, the actual development work, because that's tricky. Yeah. Okay.

people out there that can do it. We just need to keep training our people up to do that over the long term. But we'll hang in there for a long time. Sounds good.

Is there somebody that you'd like to see on the show? Somebody you know that has a really interesting background and interesting business, works in an interesting industry that you'd like to learn more about? yeah. actually got a, I got a young man that is from Sioux Falls.

He has been in China since 2019. He went there as part of the state department exchange program in high school. And that was a senior in college. Our kids grew up with them.

You know, our families know each other. he went to China, went to that program, loved it. So he ended up going to NYU Beijing. So he's starting a whole company over there.

And I'm not quite sure what he does, but he has an office in Shanghai. has partners. He has employees. He's just lighting the world on fire over there.

I do know a little bit what he's doing. But what he's trying to do is get consumer products from this area of the country because he understands this area of the country or anywhere in the United States. this area of the country and try to get them, you know, help us sell stuff in China, you know, is what he's working on as I understand it. So ah if that were interesting, I could introduce you to a person like that.

So he's a dynamic guy. Yeah, that would be fantastic. I might send you an email after we're done here, see if you can introduce us I'm always interested in an interesting story or an interesting background. So if you don't mind connecting us offline, I'll probably reach out and have you do that.

Okay, my last question here to either uh fuel or settle the debate. If you have a job to do and have to use a cordless tool, which brand do you prefer? I saw that on your list. was going to you asked it a slightly different way.

So I was going to answer the Apple iPhone because that is the tool that I use most of the time. So but yeah, I beyond that, Ryobi, I use I use the Ryobi because it's all interchangeable. I can keep swapping out those things and it's a of it's a it's a yard guide stuff. So not the professional grade stuff, but.

It works good. The batteries seem to last a long time and get good power out of them. So can't argue with that. They do and they have a great warranty.

think when I was a kid, I had a set of Ryobi stuff and that was great stuff. Yeah, well, you have to keep your eyes open. My wife had just read me an article that in the School of Mines out in Rapid City, these guys just developed a battery out of biomass. So they're using corn, like a corn derivative, they're created.

It works, but they've created a battery out of it. So maybe that'll be the new one that'll win someday. But you never know. man, yeah, that would be impressive.

Awesome. Well, Steve, thank you so much for joining us. You bring a wealth of knowledge and an incredible amount of experience in a number of different industries. I just appreciate your time and your wisdom and thank you so much for lending it to us.

Yeah, yeah. Well, thanks for having me. thank all of you guys for joining us again here on From the Ground Up Show. Again, check out our new merchandise store, shop.

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