0:06 good afternoon and welcome to the wave wow show people making money i'm your host kevin bemel and this is wednesday so i have my guest here ricky gonzalez and i'll introduce ricky in just a moment first i want to tell you just a little bit about my guest from last week dr mark broker i think i've been saying his name wrong since i've known him i thought it was brooker but i think it's broker anyway mark is a retired navy captain he was a pharmacist in the navy uh the first and i think the only pharmacist who ever ran an entire naval
0:43 hospital and after he retired uh mark pursued his absolute passion which is leadership and uh he has become a successful speaker and writer on the field and um if you uh check out that episode on our youtube channel uh the way to wow show um you'll find a link to his books and you'll find contact information for mark and um if you have any kind of questions or stories about leadership um mark absolutely loves to gather
1:18 um stories and so uh i i encourage you to be in touch with him and and and and also check out the uh the episode i think you will find a lot of great insight not only into leadership but in how you can build a career as a speaker and a writer and and i can tell you that mark is just loving life outside of the navy as much as in it um which isn't always the case for uh service members so uh today um i have another uh service member it just so happens we're doing that back to
1:53 back and uh my guest is ricky gonzalez a new newer friend of mine uh i think ricky and i have known each other for uh not quite a year now ricky is see you you never are a former marine that doesn't once you are in the marine corps you are a marine for life so just a little you know piece of knowledge to pass along you ricky is a marine although he's out of the marine corps now and has been in civilian life for quite a number of years he's uh made a terrific transition doing a lot of very very interesting things and you can see he's he's quite a bit younger than uh mark and some of the
2:29 other guests i've had and i think it's it's interesting to look at the career development and professional success that that all kinds of people have to to see how how everyone's pursuing their own path but then has lessons that we can all use as we as we pursue our own so ricky thank you so much for coming on the way to wow show welcome yeah yeah thanks a lot uh kevin you know it's funny uh i appreciate the introduction uh so you know sir fidel is sitting my marines out there um you know it's funny that you you say that you've known me for a year because i think
3:04 in practically we have known each other for about a year just in our conversations about business um but really our relationship goes back a little farther back then i don't know if you remember but um i think in like early 2020 maybe late 2019 you actually filled out a lead for where i work um as an accounting executive now for software um investment management and uh i just kind of followed up with you uh found you on linkedin and kind of connects you that way and we had some pretty early conversations back when you were involved in the uh private equity real estate space
3:39 oh okay did actually yeah did did we actually connect with john rubino uh maybe uh you know that name sounds really familiar but yeah i think john actually uses your platform maybe that's all we've really okay so we've known each other actually longer than that okay that's great see this is this is why it's good to have you know friends who are younger than you because their minds retain information better so um and uh you know i i have to say you know you're you're you know being out in the forest uh just just looks lovely although i assume that that's a you know a green screen
4:14 background right you're not actually uh sitting in amongst the trees there today yep you'd be right uh i took this photo actually a buddy of mine took this photo while we were backpacking out in utah i always think of utah as being a desert so uh that's that's actually really beautiful yeah me too uh you know i'm from or maybe you don't know this but i'm from north texas dallas uh fort worth area and you know when i imagine the west i just think of pretty much the desert for the most part like you but yeah utah uh the dixie national forest uh looks just like this um you know it's
4:49 got birch trees there's a doe in the background over there so oh yeah i started over your shoulder yeah wildlife uh beautiful country so you know i want to start kind of early in in in your life really and um you were you know a a kid um i don't know maybe you know pre-teen or or teenager what ideas if any did you have about what you wanted to do you know when you grew up right i i know
5:24 for me i had all kinds of ideas when i was growing up i'm i'm curious to know what if any of uh thoughts you had about that when you were you know significantly younger than you are now oh yeah for sure i mean um i think my business career probably started uh when i was you know probably six years old my my parents maybe don't know this but they had a chain of car lot dealerships in the dallas fort worth area uh through the 90s and up until most of the early 2000s when they kind of sold out and invested in some other things but uh yeah no my role uh i think going back to that time starting accounts receivable i just remember uh kind of
5:59 entering some of the customers you know hey i've seen you in a while i'm like i've seen you last week rick so i spent a lot of time under my parents desk when i was a child and um you know was always admired kind of their efforts in business and uh yeah i mean that's some of my earliest exposures that i can remember i was a door-to-door salesman selling chocolates that was pretty popular uh in the late 90s if you if you remember world famous chocolates i think it is or yeah whatever the box that sams would sell oh okay yeah yeah the schools would sell for for a dollar um you know so that's i guess when my outside sales experience started but
6:35 yeah it was early back uh you know when i was a pre-teen really i mean i i was trying to figure out how to grow my family's agriculture business in mexico um you know i i would take kind of any idea and run with it and it's just always kind of been a passion for me business and then a big deal for me early on was the marine corps the the advertising kind of took root uh pretty much as far as i can remember i remember the kind of slaying the dragon commercials and actually there's a popular advertising video for that time of the guy climbing a mountain i think in uh in utah but he's like a diamond or a diamond in
7:11 the rough getting cut with like the sword yeah so anyway those were kind of my two things i want to be a businessman like my parents and um yeah i want to be a marine so luckily for me i got to do both uh so far so you know as a kid i mean look a lot of kids just don't have the focus and the self-discipline to you know go sell door-to-door for example where do you think that drive came from uh yeah i mean i had to credit my parents i mean they they kind of are always advocates of just making your own
7:46 money and um you know being proactive about what you do for business um and in life so uh yeah they was kind of they encouraged me i mean i think they're incentives or something in school as well like at the book fair or something like that but yeah i know it was always fascinating to me and i didn't i never really had trouble kind of approaching a net new prospect i guess in that way so so very early on in your life you got used to the whole sort of sales process of talk to 100 people find 10 prospects make one sale right yeah i mean i guess what helped at
8:21 that time is you know i had you know just a cute little kid fat little kid walking around selling chocolate so it was kind of hard to say no to these days yeah good and um i mean was there any things specifically that your parents said to you that that you remember to this day um kind of an axiom or something i'll give you an example my mother this is many many years ago when i was first starting in business told me something that my paternal grandfather used to say all the time he used to say it's easier to make the
8:56 second million than it is to make the first million so i'm going to start on the second one first i thought that was so so sounds like you know my grandfather that i did get i didn't know him for um a short time when i was a kid i you know it's so pithy um and and speaks to you know what it takes to be successful sometimes anything like that that you recall yeah i mean i think both my parents kind of echo the sentiment that you always throw your hat in the ring i mean it was a common expression around my household and i saw it my parents time after time i mean after they sold their business around 2007 so
9:32 i think contextually here 2007 recession's coming we didn't know at the time uh they invested in a full service like gas station chain in south arkansas where we lived for about three years so the timing was not ideal um and happening after that was you know business kind of declined and they ended up having to sell that business as well um but you know so i saw them at high points in the early 2000s um and then i saw them at lower points whenever we had to sell uh that business but i think what was interesting is that they did always try
10:07 um to do uh what they wanted to do and throw their hat in the ring i saw my mom open uh a restaurant at one point take another stab at some more car dealerships um not as much success in those years but i think what's kind of left an impression on me is that yeah you should always attempt and you know there's value and just the process and i've seen that and the latest feature you know in the better dinner lab uh you know i pitched to the texas business hall of fame you know i didn't get selected to the final round uh which is a little bit of a bummer but i'm taking it in stride because i know that i can do better for that idea and uh you know i'm just
10:42 kind of excited to see what kind of lies ahead so let's let's let's talk a little bit about you know being in the marine corps so um you know people i i think have a somewhat idealized picture of of what it's like to be a marine and be in the marine corps that they get from both the the recruiting advertisements but also from you know movies that they see um so what was it really like to be in the marine corps first of all tell us what you did if you don't mind in the marine corps then what was it really like to be in the marine corps
11:17 yes so i uh i joined when i was 20 years old actually on my 20th birthday is when i swore into the depth um i failed out of my second semester at college and was just kind of ready to do something else i i really was kind of feeling a calling um to uh finally go abroad and you know it kind of adventure at the time um i was carrying my cousin's dog tags he was fighting in afghanistan uh with the army and you know i young able-bodied person i was like there is no reason i shouldn't be there uh with my cousin josh so um yeah i really kind of took it to
11:52 heart at the time and in 2013 um you know i swore in i did the depth and then yeah shipped off um my experience in the marine corps um i was a radio operator by trade um when i first entered i went to the second battalion marines fox battery um and i was a field radio operator for the battery so basically what that amounted to is just doing a lot of field ops and uh you know setting up and displacing uh gun position so i got to do a little uh gun buntery um you know if you will and uh put some lanyards on on some artillery and uh when the opportunity
12:29 came to get on the 26 mew in 2015 came along i was the only person who raised my hand um i kind of forced my my friend to to raise his and uh that's when we got moved to what's called liaison uh if you're familiar with that is that's the forward observer side so oh okay yeah the gun line and then you have somebody on the on the kind of the receiving side um calling for fire basically and i took a bunch of courses uh through the uh mci's like marine corps institute courses so i was the only person equipped for the job and uh they actually released me and let me go so at that point um i attached to six which
13:04 is uh second battalion six marines it's an infantry battalion and uh yeah we deployed in 2015-16 after that uh c deployment so we left from norfolk did the transatlantic mandarinc fifth and sixth fleet areas spent some time in oman doing some ports half of us went to iraq the other half stayed back and then yeah at the end of that was about a seven a month half deployment and uh yeah one year left my contract it came back was communications chief went through fazemo which is fun for anybody that that knows what that is it's a third-party
13:42 private company uh audit of equipment records things like that so those were the longest days of my career honestly um so anyway yeah pretty pretty straightforward career got the one deployment in and uh you know exited in august of 2017. um oh good so go ahead i'm sorry oh i was just gonna say you asked about uh you know kind of like how i viewed it or what was it really liked yeah yeah um you know you say it it's easy for people to idealize it it's it's the same for me it was easy for my s for me to idealize it while i was in um i was really proud to be maureen um you know since i've gotten out i still
14:18 hold him in high regard i i had an incredible experience and it's kind of equipped me for life some of my senior leaders have helped me get into business school apply to college and just initially and have kind of helped me every step of the way so i've i've been exclusively a beneficiary um of the network and the training and uh um indoctrination of the marine corps so yeah i have nothing but positive things to say okay yeah i i will say of of all the service branches the marine corps absolutely i mean by a huge margin does the best
14:53 job in helping marines transition to civilian life whether it's through the marines for life program or or the various other things that they have it's it's it's very very robust so talk about what it's like to when you were the you know with with the mew and you were a liaison or where you were with 2-6 and you're a liaison you're calling for fire so what is that really like because it it it it's got to be something more than you know lob one over there right i mean right because you're making sure that your own forces aren't getting hit with
15:28 ordnance and such right so so it seems to me there's a lot of it's like being a plane captain on an aircraft carrier you know bbc 18 19 year old young people are deciding whether a you know 80 million dollar aircraft leaves the deck or not it's it's a huge responsibility um so talk about that if you would yeah i mean a thousand percent i mean i think artillery more than any other job and especially um marines and service members um that are working in liaison specifically uh have just incredible insight into what's going on the battlefield i mean what's going on in the background obviously i focus on setting up
16:03 communications so i'm throwing up oes um you know i'm tuning in radios i'm getting radio checks and stuff up um radio watch things like that but i mean everyone on the team kind of plays a role and some of that involves deconflicting uh the airspace monitoring where different units are on the map and it takes an incredible amount of coordination with the other units to be able to kind of pull that off because you're right it's a it's a little more than hey shoot over there you know but i think like you'll be surprised we had an incident in oman and this
16:39 wasn't like anyone's fault uh to do a deconfliction of airspace or anything like that but um operator error for 81's um in the weapons company that we were shooting for us so a mortar tube um one of the guys didn't duck his head down and uh when we were calling for fire on the hill he had uh a mortar bounce off his helmet and it recognized and like exploded like 15 yards in front of the gun line so everyone's you know go crazy because at this point we were like on the border of kuwait uh in oman and at the time there was revolution so we were just like uh you know what what
17:14 are we gonna do turns out you know and i think a couple people ate a little bit of shrapnel but you know at the end of the day i think they just pulled it out and everybody was fine but uh yeah definitely a scary moment and i'm glad we can laugh about it now you know that sounds like something out of a movie right it's like like a jerry lewis movie or something like it's a guy gets hit in the head with a mortar and uh you know it got in the tube and he didn't duck his head so it kind of don't stop him what what um less and you mentioned the teamwork
17:49 involved you know the deconflicting the airspace all these different issues that come into being involved with you know making sure artillery is is effective as well as you know safe i guess we could say so what kind of lessons have you did you draw from that that you're using today in your civilian career yeah i mean yeah i mean i guess the biggest thing is that just everyone plays their part um you know it's kind of hard to replicate this in the civilian sector because it's just never going to be the same uh
18:25 you know i trusted those people who are now my lifelong friends you know with my life and um you know i couldn't necessarily say the same thing about the people i work with though i won't buy company don't get me wrong but yeah i mean i think just relying on your team um you know i one of my my actually my uh solution engineer partner the guy who uh works with me on closing deals is on this call he said that he would count some time and that's donish um yeah you know i i think just like trusting your team once you kind of find and all fill your roles you know just trusting each other to execute and i
19:00 think that's something that my company does really well now and i guess that'll be my biggest takeaway for teamwork so you know something you mentioned a minute ago about the mortar it tell me tell me what you think about this i mean um and hopefully you know the mistakes we make in the civilian world aren't as potentially disastrous as you know a guy for getting to dunk in a mortar dropping you know fifteen hours but it seems like you know mistakes are gonna happen and you can you know ch chew out the guy who made the mistake and spend your time doing that or you
19:36 can spend the time making sure okay is everybody okay all right what do we got to do so this doesn't happen again now let's move forward and it seems to me that from my experience with the marine corps and and please correct me if i'm wrong the marine corps really especially when you're in the combat situation that you are they're not going to take the time to point fingers and all that they're going to still stay focused on the mission they're going to deal with the mishap and then and continue moving forward seems to me that that's a you know a lesson that we can pull into the business world as well i'll be even when it's you know
20:12 where it's not you know so existential in terms of you know ordinance falling in the wrong place right yeah no i i'd agree i mean that there's really no sense in crying over spilt milk i mean you know i i could kind of think of a couple situations at work where um you know maybe i i fell short and uh something else fell short and it really is no value and kind of i guess reiterating on that um past the point of just giving the feedback and let's do better in the future yeah yeah so um you're in the marine you did you did one tour in the marine corps i guess about four years was it yeah i just did the standard four years
20:47 active duty four years irr super combo yeah and um what what drove your decision to to leave active duty that was a hard one uh you know honestly at the time i i was pretty i was still infatuated after four years in the marine corps i just was a newly promoted sergeant you know i i been in my role um so yeah i had aspirations to continue my career at the time i actually put in a package to serve with hmx um that's the marine corps unit that serves marine one the helicopter that it helps with
21:24 and they have like a rotation of units so obviously they need radial guys to make sure that comms are up with the aircraft and uh yeah anyway so i put my package in for that at the time i was actually married um my uh now ex-wife wasn't a huge fan of the way that i volunteered for the first deployment so she actually prevented me from uh doing a second one and uh yeah i mean we just made the best decision for us at the time uh but there definitely wasn't going to be another four years and i guess besides all that like i had aspirations outside of the marine corps too you know it was
21:59 kind of a goal of mine uh to go to college i was a first generation high school graduate uh neither my parents graduated high school and then you know obviously college followed and all that good stuff so i kind of had a lot of my plate at the time and you know i guess in hindsight it was the best for me so you you left the marine corps were you going to college while you were in the marine corps or is that something you did afterwards or yeah yeah so um my last year while i was um at camp lejeune uh just being calm chief and doing facebook good stuff i actually took advantage of uh taking online classes uh knocked out
22:34 a fair amount of them i think like maybe like six classes or something like that and that really helped me get out um with my bachelor's degree at utd um university of texas dallas pretty uh pretty quickly so which is great and i'm glad that i did that and i'm grateful that i had the proper guidance at the time because that is allowing for me to not only have paid for the bachelor degree in completion in under two years but also pay for my uh uh my mba over at baylor so i'm okay it worked out just perfectly that i run out of benefits like my first month in my last semester next year and
23:11 luckily the gi bill will stretch to the end of the semester that you start so yeah perfect so were you able you know one of the benefits i used when i was in the navy is you have something called tuition assistance i actually got a second master's degree using that so was it was that what you were able to use while you were still on active duty yeah so yeah tuition assistance um and i was able to take just like online classes at my local community college uh i think it's not dallas college um okay i don't even know if it yeah it's like an actual four-year institution now but uh yeah anyway took advantage of tuition assistance and
23:46 you know it's a little um i think that tuition assistance could use a lot more kind of um advertising and promoting in in the service because i don't know a single other marine that was using taking advantage of the program and it's completely free yeah i mean and it is i don't ever hear recruiters talking about it either interestingly enough um i mean i get it if you're brand new to the to the military taking college classes in your first year or something probably isn't a good idea but once you're sort of set in military life and you you understand your jobs then it's
24:21 it's absolutely worth worth taking advantage of because you can go although i think you can go all the way through a phd on tuition assistance if you've if you've earned the prior degrees or whatever so it's a robust program you can one-up your degree um as i would i think it so if you come in junior enlisted you can get a bachelor's degree if you're an officer and you have a bachelor you can get a master's or like you get a second master's or something like that yeah that's incredible yeah yeah so you you're out of the marine corps now um you you you went i think you went back to dallas what what what drill drove your decision
24:56 about where you went after you um left the marine corps yeah good question so um from dallas texas for the most part um went back there to go to college utd um when the pandemic started my job went remote like most i think most of us in business and that opened up some opportunities to be a little more creative about where i lived um the time at the time i was living with my brother and uh yeah he joined the army so he's on the first calpari he's actually at ntc the national training center to prep them to deploy to eastern europe so he's going to poland sometime in the fall
25:34 but we were living together he was leaving so i decided i wasn't going to rent anymore so i had been shopping for hopefully a duplex was kind of the idea since i work with real estate and a lot of my clients that have got their start in real estate started by house hacking so that was my goal but i couldn't do that in dallas in a way that made sense just because of the way that prices were sort of stacked up um had a quad flex under contract in hot springs arkansas where i have a lot of family and yeah that one kind of fell through because of the uh valuation because it was just kind of a unique kind of weird property it used to
26:09 be a brothel it's like a converted four unit um they made broth there yeah yeah it was like a it's a kind of a weird unit for for like short-term vacation rentals and they're just a good way to value it out so i couldn't get the the underwriting to make sense and then yeah uh fallback plan was uh my best friend lives from the marine corps lived up in milwaukee wisconsin which is where i am now uh live with him shortly before finding a uh a nice duplex here in uh bayview so
26:47 been enjoying living in milwaukee for about uh a little over a year and a half oh okay and and so at the same time you're going to you were going to college you got a job with the the real estate company the real estate it was a it's a technology company it's as i understand right yeah absolutely so yeah they recruited me at the time i was working kind of an internship job for like uh i.t staffing company it wasn't i could tell early on it because it wasn't for me uh recruiter from appfolio reached out and kind of gave me the job
27:22 while i was still finishing up college and i started out by doing a couple years in business development which is how i met you and then which is just a lot of outreach and then yeah i made the transition into being on the kind of the closing side of it uh accounting executive job and working the relationships to uh fruition to a partnership so that's what i'm doing now so um talk if you would about um you know appfolio and and what they do and and you know more of the details about what what your job entailed and how you how
27:57 you looked at you know developing in that job yeah i mean uh there's a lot to be said about that i talk about this all day but uh i think appfolio just to give a quick background um the idea behind the company back in 2006 was that they would create great all-in-one software for different business verticals and so um at the time they from what i understand they they explored a lot of different businesses and they they wheeled it down to two there was auto shop management and there was property management so they went with the property management which is obvious or maybe not so obvious to people who are familiar
28:33 with appfolio but you know they're huge in that space i think they have over 20 000 customers or something like that on that side of the house and those are people with over 50 units under management owner operators third-party property managers corporate property management companies and appfolio for a long time was best known for property management software took him public in 2015 where i kind of came into the picture early on is in january 2019 they moved me into a new vertical investment management um so you know how we kind of got there was out of that customer base you know 18 19
29:09 20 000 whatever the kind of numbers say about 20 of them we're doing private equity real estate type activities um that's real estate syndication funds uh private reits jv's or any kind of number of uh creative deal by deal situation and um yeah what they found out is they were rigging the property management software and back in ways to handle uh investment management so imagine like dating they were giving their investors like an investor like a property management tenant portal or something like that and handling communication that way so
29:45 we found out there's a huge need in the space and this has been in the works for about six years but around the time i started in january january 2019 we started looking um outside of the company towards net new clients and yeah it's just kind of blown up in the last uh three and a half years you know we've become the largest provider of this type of software for real estate investment management i think something like over a thousand uh act sponsors use the platform today and uh yeah they're growing like crazy the customer clients are doing great i think their equity under management grew like 80 year-over-year
30:20 from this past june to the june before so yeah i mean uh there's a lot more to come too um it doesn't stop so i mean i'm just as far as a corporate career goes i couldn't be happier uh to be here it's been an education in business i mean i've shared this with you before but i'll say it again here you know i get to talk to people who are any one of them could be a potential person for this podcast because they're business people oftentimes looking to grow their startups in a lot of cases they're leaving their company to start their own
30:56 private equity real estate company and yeah it's hard not to listen to these people and not be motivated to maybe do your own thing someday i mean it is it is impressive that you guys um took on i mean as i re back when i was still in the property well i still had a property management company yardy was you know the 10 000 time you know elephant in the room and they they absolutely controlled that market so that so that you guys have um you know rested a significant percentage of the market away from them shows that the quality of the product must must really be there and that's
31:31 that's that's very impressive yeah no absolutely i mean the company prides itself on uh i think first and foremost just hiring the right people great people make a great company uh it's one of our core values and then i guess one of the other kind of important ones is just simpler is better so i mean you know when we put those things together compare it with the listening to customers is in our dna uh kind of core value the end result is something really exciting because we're not we don't work with every kind of business we work with our prospects kind of business and you know we deep dive into those industries listen to customers feedback because we
32:06 know that it's going to make our product more attractive and reiterating on that time and time again releases every single week if not twice a week that's it's by these methods that we create software that you know has revolutionized the industry you know the thought that went through my head as you were saying listening to your clients is um you know one of the adages that use i used to hear all the time when i was with the marine corps um in my first my first um tour of duty was with marine corps um he was talking about the strategic corporal it was the guy you know who was
32:41 really at the the the very you know lowest level of leadership but you know he's turning around to talk and talking to the marines who are out there actually doing the fighting and and to have his input going up the chain of command was critical for more senior leadership to really know what was going on on the battlefield and what what adjustments need to be made in order to meet the mission so it is interesting that the core value of appfolio is is something that ties to
33:16 your time in the marine corps oh no absolutely i mean so you know now that you're even saying that the framework of the marine corps rifle squad is the same thing as a good tech company's agile development framework you know small unit leadership is a huge thing so just the idea that there's decentralized command allow people their lateral limits to operate and to make the best decisions under a commander's intent all those concepts are rooted in effective organic organizational leadership and operations so yeah it's
33:52 it's the same thing and it it's funny that you even mention that because like i don't i don't draw apparel i mean i don't differentiate uh between those two things because it's just all about how can we put decision making at the lowest levels so that boots on the ground uh you know can to make those crucial agile decision making so yeah love that yeah yeah for sure so at some point you decided to then get an mba what what drove that decision yeah so good question i mean i kind of i think it's something i always wanted to do i mean what what i was sitting on was 14 months of gi bill a post on 11 gi
34:27 bill just having that in my back pocket was kind of a security blanket you know if that makes sense you know i know that this doesn't work out i can always do something else you know or you know if i really wanted to go off the rails i could you know go to scotland you know university of aberdeen and you know do a masters of management there so i was just sitting on this and um you know i had that kind of flexibility in my life but you know i think diving into my career um and i kind of looking at the path ahead i mean i'm 29 now i'll be 30 next year around the time of graduation i was just thinking like
35:02 an mba makes sense uh you know i this is an opportunity uh through the baylor mba program to transform my career and that's kind of what i intended to do i want i'm not going to let that graduation point be a flash in the pan like i've seen happen to some of my friends where they get it pat on the back keep doing the same i'm really looking to to seize that moment and either do something else in my career that involves a little more responsibility something that's a little more catered towards my skill set or you know entrepreneur entrepreneurship like uh you know we spend a lot of time to talk about before
35:37 so let's let's talk about that now talk um give us an idea of the the scope of your entrepreneurial thinking what you know what are what are some of the uh ideas that you've considered and what's what is the the driving force between any uh behind i'm sorry any particular um idea that you have yeah yeah absolutely um so i mean i think that the best way to characterize it would you for me would just be um i'm business agnostic you know i don't i'm not necessarily passionate about any one
36:12 opportunity within business i think i have a bias towards government intersections with business uh just because my familiarity my background with the government defense um and then obviously i work in tech too so you know any opportunities to take advantage of technology to create an efficiency is a winner so having said that you know if you ask anybody that knows me i'm constantly kind of talking about ideas riffing on ideas i have you know a lot of friends from my undergrad and and elsewhere that i uh that are on the engineering side that i'll kind of just bounce ideas off of and you know
36:47 there's probably a lot that we could talk about in terms of just idea splatter but um you know i guess the real truth of it is you know i'm still kind of searching um you know we talked about uh the dinner lab concept uh and what what is the word you use that because i love that i think that it described it perfectly like the cottage manufacturing oh yeah love that you know i think any opportunity to disrupt a market by democratizing um where the products are coming from such as the dinner lab industry and allowing um in that example allowing kind of dental technicians to work from home like everybody else versus just a giant
37:23 lab i think that that's a winner you know one thing that i've been thinking about recently has been connecting va disability oriented benefits at the state level because so for example i just applied for my wisconsin disabled veteran parks fest right pretty straightforward system but i had to in order to do it i had to contact the va get a letter i had to make an appointment with the milwaukee county veteran service officer get him to sign a form certify it and then mail that in to
37:59 madison uh the state capitol before i can come back and you know in 2022 i just don't understand how that's even still possible so you know what i mean and i created an efficiency inadvertently just by making picking up the phone like can i email this to you what if i just get that and you know i did that myself and it was really easy and i ended up getting it right but i just don't understand how there's not a connection there so yeah if i could if there was a way and anybody that you know has a way of connecting va rating system to states so that we can
38:36 create a portal for veterans to access the benefits that states are offering in a very simple way i think that that's a quick win you know things like things like that um you know i'm fascinated with i think trucking uh has been a big one because i have family that that kind of owner operates uh trucks and you know connecting to contract bidding and somehow um connecting into an owner operator network that's a lean business you know i think anything like that i have a bias towards just capital light
39:12 and how can we work smarter here um without blowing the top off our capital expenditures up front yeah what you said about um this whole sort of paper chase on on doing you're getting your veteran permit so here in in california to get your veteran designation on your driver's license which then allows you you know having it gives you basically a veteran's id so you have to go down to this one office in person with the fulfill the forms out right and then you're going to take that form to the dmv right it's it's like you would think
39:47 that in this day and age you know there are these companies out there um that they will verify for a private business that in fact someone is a veteran and you go online and you put in your information and they and they they must be have they must have a tap into the va or something somewhere um and uh because i don't even think you have to you i don't think you have to submit your dd214 even um that yeah i'm fascinated about that i'm passing that business model i mean but
40:22 they're they're an example of a private company that has tied in with federal uh benefits i don't know that it's the va because not every veteran is in the va right right so like but they're the same thing could be done with state governments an me for state governments yeah what yeah what if there was a connection between federal va benefits or you know the dod's records and states so that you know there's not this paper chase like that's a good way of saying it you know to get things done and i think the other thing is there's a lot of benefits that are left on the table live veterans just because they're
40:58 unaware and even if they are aware they're unwilling um you know to take time out of their their work day to go make an appointment with the vso i'll pay my eight dollars to get into the park thanks actually you know now that i think about it the fact that i had that veterans thing on my driver's license when my took my daughter to yosemite last month i was able to show it and we got in for free and it saved us i think you're right eight dollars or whatever the parking fee was right exactly so there you go um i'm not sure on an
41:33 hourly basis it was still worth it but you know you know what i i think that it's a service i mean it could even be non-profit you know i don't care what i'm interested in is like how can we make life better and i think maybe that's the futurist in me um and that's just one example so any ideas like that i'm game i'm here to entertain them and see if we can make them better yeah yeah well we'll we'll have to talk offline because i have a couple of people um to connect you up with uh especially on the trucking one of my uh navy colleagues started a trucking
42:08 business so i'll hook you up with ernest i think you you two would uh enjoy speaking so what is about 15 minutes uh before the end of the show so what is what does the future really hold for you where do you see yourself going what is you know what is the next step on your way to wow as we say here on the show yeah i mean that's that's the story still being written you know i i if i had the ideas already down i think i'd already be doing it um yeah in terms of my my corporate career i'm looking to kind of grow it here at the company i'm at i think for the most part
42:44 been beneficial to me in in terms of it being a business education the entire way possibly some operations roles maybe some products management type roles in terms of business you know that could be next year that could be in five years um but i think what's important is that it's the right idea to kind of pursue and um you know that could be anything i was um i sail i'm a local yacht club here south shore yacht club and uh my captain that i'm um gonna be a hand on this year for the racing season you know he's a retired engineer and he's building uh yacht
43:19 racing software so you know this is a manual thing people do today they you know gotta watch and uh every uh boat club in the country you know is doing it this way they just write it down the different sections of boats well he's he's already building out software to to help make that easier you know and so i just share that to say um you know i'm unsure uh about what exactly it'll be but uh it might be all the above you know so i mean that's that's fast i would have thought with the with all the electronics and such on ships that there
43:55 wasn't her boats there wasn't anything you know new to doing that in that arena but obviously there is what yeah what if uh captains of boats could use their phone as a gps tracker so that race committees could electronically record their results for quicker scoring of races i don't know it's it's it's yeah it's just it's wild there's so much more to be done um in in all of these uh in all of these areas yeah everywhere everywhere you look um
44:30 so that's kind of the whole thing oh i talked to him about that so so your your uh your colleague here denise is saying that was my idea by the way to be fair donis was trying to sell him a gps tracker i said that it should be their phone oh okay donna she wanna you wanna chime in here and uh and uh uh you know make sure that that ricky is telling the street story yeah we'll go with the fact that it was a joint idea
45:07 so so what question have you always wanted to ask um ricky that that you you haven't yet or what question can you ask that will help us better understand uh ricky's professional development i think i stumped him no so a little quick background on me i've been around for a few months here at appfolio and working with ricky uh you know for about four months or three months approximately and he and i hit it off right away i think both of our um both of our interests in business and
45:44 investing and in the real estate realm we connected right away and one of the things that stood out to me about ricky was the fact how much he's learned and done in such little time um you know after um he mentioned after he came out of the service pretty recently um not only had he moved up in the role in the corporate world but you know starting finishing up school and then starting business school right away it's not easy to do i've uh i tried to do that coming up in my career as well so
46:19 one of the things i'm very excited about continuing our career in our friendship um is being able to spitball ideas such as both gps's back and forth right and uh um for somebody like myself who's an investor and entrepreneur um early on in his career as well um is the i the ability to be able to talk about ideas without having to um just being able to spit ball ideas is so important and i think that's where most ideas and businesses are born as i'm
46:55 sure you can attest to that is uh something that's a very rare thing in humans these days so that's something that i am learning and growing as well and i think ricky and his career will be pretty successful because of that as well so so here's a question i'll throw it out to both of you because you you're both you know it sounds like you're both around the same age and um you know as we look at trends in business startups and entrepreneurship the the rates are much much lower for um you know younger people
47:32 younger i might say young people i mean people under under 30 um then they have historically been why do you think that's the case and and what do you mean again for both of you and what needs to happen in order to get those rates coming back up again i got some ideas on that i mean i think today versus you know probably my parents generation the business world's just a lot more competitive you know my mom uh you know started a successful chain of car lots 1990 with my father who immigrated here
48:07 from u.s and barely spoke english and she didn't even graduate high school and they were successful so that's not to discount you know what they achieved but i think that the world internet information has just made it incredibly incred uh competitive so to the point where you have to have business experience for the most part um you know if you're going to be uh successful in this world because you're right the internet and you go online right now and find a millionaire million ideas everybody's got one um but you know creating an idea that creates real value uh in a market you know that's that's a challenge and so
48:42 it's gonna take ideation and reiteration on ideas uh before you land on something that i think investors kind of resonate with because i that's the other thing for people under 30 um you know barring you just coming into an incredible bucket of wealth you know like you don't maybe don't have the money to bankroll your own idea um you know just initially at least and so that's why capital light's important and uh yeah anyway that's why i think contributes to why that average age because i think i read the same article you did maybe on linkedin a few months a few months ago um you know that i guess that'd be kind
49:18 of my thoughts on that that topic for me i think fear has a lot to do with it and there are a couple different reasons fear and then i'm not necessarily sure our education system incentivize uh younger individuals that you know might have some ideas um a quick example i have a similar background is ricky i'm first generation american and my parents you know they came in came up and uh also had businesses travel agencies things of that nature and although they had businesses i was always
49:53 taught to you know follow the rules stay you go to school and and you're going to go to school you're going to study this and you're going to have a good job there was nothing else kind of besides that and it took me quite a while to kind of break out of that norm of okay you know that's just what everybody does we get we go to school we get a good job low paying job we work our way up and then a couple years down the line maybe go to grad school once you know exactly what you want to do and then go up climb up the ladder too i think in this day and age in the digital age as we've seen in the past couple years with our economy has
50:28 just boomed um you don't necessarily need that you find a niche you find a problem find a way to solve it and go from there so i think for me that's something that resonates quite a bit because i got a late start in my career because of it because i was trying to follow so many rules and follow a certain agenda if you will and uh i think it could help a lot of younger kids these days if things like that were talked about in school yeah i i agree you know it is interesting my daughter um
51:05 she'll be 15 this summer and when we talk about what she wants to do for the future um college really isn't part of the equation she really wants to start some kind of business or you know some kind of venture on her own that that's really what seems to spark the deepest interest for her and um you know i i'm glad to see that because like like you danish um you know when i was a teenager was like you're going to go to college you're going to get a degree you're going to be a professional right and then i got out of school um at
51:40 a time when the economy was terrible and you know i couldn't get a job in my you know in the profession that i had a degree within which is very fortunate by the way because i was a horrible architectural designer so um but i think that um i agree you know kids in school need to hear more about what the life of being in business is all about and how exciting it can be and i think too i was having this conversation with someone i met last week who's who's a wealth manager
52:15 and um and i i said to him you know what you do is is is really noble and he's like no it's not he says i just i just moved money around and i said yeah but without you moving money around business doesn't happen i mean the the the the capital that he is able to invest on behalf of his clients is the lifeblood of you know the ventures that create our economy and without you know people willing to do that you know those of us who want to start businesses and and grow we don't we don't really have a chance so i think
52:50 hopefully more more people will will kind of see the those those uh you know those aspects of it so absolutely and one last thing i wanted to uh buck off that as well like the things we're doing right now and you're doing you know talking to younger individuals i think that's kind of how it starts is getting people involved in these conversations so i just wanted to say that uh things like these are monumental for growth thank you yeah yeah agree absolutely agree well danish thanks so much for joining in the conversation ricky um we're
53:26 almost out a time here so um any sort of you know saved rounds that you uh you want to kind of lob out here before we have to sign off yeah no no save rounds over here you know i think we're winchester uh you know on ideas for now okay yeah man i i just appreciate you know the opportunity to come on the show uh going into this format it's my first podcast you know i wasn't kind of sure uh what to expect but uh you know as always you know you haven't let me down in terms of a rich conversation and you know looking forward to our continued conversations about business and ideas and
54:02 um yeah see what we can make happen well we definitely i'll definitely want to have you back on the show at some point to see you know how things have developed for you and what you're up to next so thanks very very much for uh for joining me today um before we sign off i want to mention my guest for nest next week it's best-selling and award-winning author suzanne woods fisher i became familiar with suzanne's work through a book called amish values for your family and i that may sound i don't know a little bit hokey it is a wonderful wonderful book
54:40 suzanne is a really amazing writer and she has wrote many many many books her most her second most recent book is called season of wind it's a novel and her most recent book which just came out i think i want to see this month is called sweet life and uh suzanne has gotten involved with one of my dear dear loves ice cream and uh you know premium ice cream that's you know not not the kind of stuff you buy for you know five dollars for a huge two gallon tub in the store this is this is high quality stuff so um it's i think
55:16 it's going to be a fascinating conversation um suzanne has a tremendous amount of insight not just into the business of writing but just into the kind of things that um that people seem to want to know about and i i think that kind of um dovetails to what dinish and and and ricky were saying is we've got to be on the lookout for what people need what will make their lives better and and then deliver it to them in an effective way and and so ricky is working on that and i think you
55:52 will find uh next week on the show that suzanne is is doing the same thing so thank you very much for joining us today ricky again thanks for coming on looking forward to continuing the conversations offline and um we will all we will be back oh um i do want to mention uh tomorrow my colleague leia siegel her show the way to wow bounce back her guest is mike skripnik mike was actually on the first season of my show a couple of years ago and he has a new book coming out um he's been
56:28 immersed in a project called an unlimited worth dealing with primarily men who have dealt with child traumatic issues and gone on to tremendous professional success so i think you will find there's a lot to learn from from mike talking to leia in terms of overcoming the setbacks we face in life and bouncing back so that's tomorrow at uh 1 p.m pacific 4 p.m eastern time please join us for that and uh as always again thank you ricky and sign
57:03 off by reminding you all reminding her marie darling you are still my bell you all have a great rest of the day and hopefully we'll see you tomorrow and next week thank you bye