The WAY to WOW Shows
The 60/40 Recipe for Success
July 27, 2022
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[0:10] good afternoon and welcome to the way to wow show my guest today is a very very long-standing friend of mine uh steve bram and before i introduce steve i do want to take a minute to remind you about last week's show so my guest last week was greg ward who had a very interesting authority tell of having started out on the wicked stage as those of us who were broadway aficionados sometimes refer to it he was an actor and eventually he was hired by

[0:46] the new york police department to help them train their officers to better deal with citizens especially the kind of diverse citizenry that the city of new york has and he was tremendously successful doing that and he went on to found the uh center for respectful leadership uh which is what he pursues to this day so for those of you uh who may be in the acting world and are trying to figure out am i ever going to be able to do anything with this i i can't encourage you highly enough to watch last week's

[1:22] show just go to our youtube channel uh the way to wow show and uh take a look at it if you have any thoughts or comments uh you um greg's uh contact information is there as is mine we'd be happy to hear from you today uh it's just it's it's a real real treat to have steve bram on the show um and and also his uh lovely bride is is joining us i see i actually knew julie before i knew steve we taught sunday school together um longer ago than any of us are going to want to admit

[1:57] that is true it is right a good old university synagogue so um and uh i i julie i don't know if steve showed you this but uh i think i know a month or two ago uh i sent him a copy of the school newspaper that announced your engagement to steve so see even then we were diligent diligent reporters of of the important things that were going on so amazing amazing that's great yeah it's it's uh you know it's it's it's great to uh to be with long-standing friends

[2:32] so uh just a real brief biography on you steve um and anyone who is in the real estate business in los angeles knows steve brown he uh is one of the co-founders and he's the principal at george smith partners incorporated which is uh correct me if i'm wrong the biggest uh real estate financer finance finance arranger on the west coast is is that well no we were we were and are the largest independently owned

[3:08] commercial mortgage brokerage company on the west coast so so you're right so there are a couple of large i want to call them chains that have offices in new york have offices in texas and chicago and other places but in la we are the largest independently owned mortgage brokerage company mortgage brokerage being that we broker or arrange complex commercial financing transactions for what we're doing and our biggest years were four billion dollars a year most years we do two and

[3:43] a half to three and a half billion a year of loans we arrange and about a couple hundred transactions a year as i as i record from you exactly and and you know i will speak as having been involved in in the real estate business here in l.a for most of my professional life at least my civilian professional life um george smith is known for the kind of attention to the individual needs of the people that they work with and that's really i think what has made

[4:18] the difference in in that business um and and also um so back in the days before i joined the navy um even though steve was uh you know heading up this this huge company he would always take the time to come and speak to the students i was teaching at ucla extension who were for the most part brand new to the real estate business uh and and didn't of course didn't know a whole lot um and he came and shared his time to taking it away from his family because the classes were in the evening so julie

[4:53] you have to i always felt a little bit guilty about that but uh presumably you you understood um and and to you know for for steve to give of his time to people who were new to the business it was really a wonderful thing for them to be able to talk to someone who was both so successful and so knowledgeable and and just sit down with them and and have a conversation and really help them launch their careers in in a very powerful way so so steve thank you very very much for for coming on the show well you're welcome it's glad to be here and

[5:29] maybe out in your podcast listening group your audience are some people that are thinking to get into the real estate business or the finance business and some things that we talked about today can shed some light to help them figure out their path in life and figure out if it's something they like and and that's my goal and that's my goal in doing this and speaking in classes at ucla and usc and other schools as well well that's terrific so you know i want to i want to start as far back in your um thinking about a professional life as

[6:04] you're willing to go some of our guests will even talk about kind of what they were thinking they might do when they were a kid um and then we sort of traced their story up from there um you know i didn't know you when you were a child or a teenager um we were already kind of young men when we met um but would you care to share some thoughts from you know i would say that if somebody's trying to think of what kind of career they're good at what kind of business they should go into and if the business that i'm in is a

[6:40] business that's good for them there are some there are some skill sets that one should think about that one needs to succeed in the business that we're in um you know one is that you have to be good at sales and sales means being able to emit trust being able to get people comfortable that you know what you're doing and they should be comfortable to entrust in the business we're in oftentimes they're entrusting one of their most important assets to us at the time where everything's done except the financing and everything can

[7:15] go wrong example might be if someone's going to build a project and they've been working on it for four or five years to buy the land get it zoned and entitled designed and now they need that construction loan that mezzanine financing that equity and they're thinking they've got four five six months to get it done and gee if you screw up then they're screwed or if they're buying an asset they put a half a million dollars in escrow and they've got three months to close and they're trusting you to get it done and we tend to say to them one of the things that we pitch is you can sleep at night

[7:52] because we don't and the idea being that when a customer gives us an exclusive to represent them they've now handed over control of this very important part of their business process to us and we're not sleeping at night because we're uptight that we have to get it done and it's an awesome responsibility in their business what we're doing obviously in the world it's just another deal but in their business world it's a big deal for them and they've handed it over to us and we've said trust us we'll get

[8:27] back to you when we've got questions or an answer but let me go back to your question about you know is this a business what's this business about this business is about sales we call it technical sales when you sit down with someone you're not trying to sell them a used car you're not trying to convince them that you're the best just because you're the best you're trying to convince them that you're the best because you understand the technical aspects of the finance business which is a very complex business underwriting real estate is complex

[9:03] knowing lenders and their programs is complex and knowing what a customer wants and what fits them is complex so so that's technical sales i'd say and that's really what our business is about having a very deep bench of skill set um you know when did i think i wanted to do this uh um you know as a kid i was always good at math you've got to be good at math

[9:38] to do this business you've got to be good at numbers real estate is the core of what we do so you have to understand real estate and like it i'd say that my dad was in the real estate development business and so i was around that as a kid my grandad was in the real estate development business i was around that as a kid um and i'll say that when i was younger i thought i wanted to be in the operations business i wanted to be

[10:13] someone who operated hotels wanted to be somebody who operated different things because it was fun and there's nothing wrong with doing something that's fun and doing something that you enjoy but over time in high school college and high school i determined and i think i took the lessons from my dad who was in the development business in the brokerage business that if you can find a career where you're not paid for your time you're paid for your expertise

[10:49] and that could mean being in the real estate business where you own something where once you put the deal together it cash flows and gee you can sit on the beach and the cash comes in that's a good business to be in or you're in the brokerage business where if you're where if you're smart you put people together you structure a deal that the other guy couldn't do and you get a fee that's certainly on an hourly basis far in excess of what you could get working on an hourly basis or on some sort of base pay so at some point you decide that you

[11:24] want to take the risk you're not going to get paid for your time you're going to get paid for your smarts and how you can put deals together whether it be brokerage or development or ownership and i kind of developed that not when i was 12 years old but when i was 18 19 20 years old so um you went to college i mean when when you were figuring out your course of study at college how did you fit that around um you know wanting to be in real estate

[12:01] so i will real estate development programs and such those are relatives so i'm going to first apply what i had just said to you to my personal experience when i was in high school and junior high school i was very involved in school activities i was president of my graduating class in high school with 900 kids in the class i ran the food stands consent i ran all the food con sessions at the high school where i went for three years

[12:37] and i said gee operating food and beverage businesses is kind of fun and i like it i'm good at that so i ultimately decided to go to hotel school and i graduated went to cornell hotel school i did i did clermont mckenna college at the time called claremont men's college for two years and got a pretty deep uh background in finance and business for two years uh politics as well but then i transferred to cornell hotel school for my last two years and got a business

[13:13] background and running hotels thinking i'm going to want to run and operate hotels and then i worked in the hotel business for a few years and quickly learned that it's a hard business to be in the hours are long the pay is low and the upside is not great and i said kind of a little bit on the side i said well i like being around the hotel business it's fun but instead of being able to get a free hotel room because i work there i'd like to get a free hotel room

[13:48] because i own the hotels so i said i'm not going to be in hotel operations anymore i'm thinking i want to own hotels instead so i kind of got into the finance business went to went to wharton for business school it's a finance school and when i went in there i was thinking i was going to just improve my business finance background so that i could own hotels and during my business school background i i took classes in

[14:24] real estate finance because my dad had been into that business and learned more and more about real estate finance rather than the business of owning hotels and um when i grad she waited i ended up getting a job in real estate consulting and then just buy a fluke ended up in the mortgage banking finance business which i've been at the same firm for 38 years so um let's let's take that that first step after wharton you said you worked as an as a

[14:59] consultant what was that like and how did that benefit your your career that you eventually ended up in so you know some people plan and some people plan and god laughs [Laughter] i think you try to make a plan i met with a 16 year old high school student yesterday who's trying to figure out his life career at age 16. he wants to go to this school he wants to do this he wants to do that he's trying to plan every step along the way

[15:35] good for him i was trying to give him advice and he was listening and taking notes 16 year old high school kid when i was 16 i wasn't trying to plan my life at that point in time so i think sometimes you just look around for upper trinities and see where they land maybe you maybe you tried a plan um specifically with me back in the year i'm 66 so it was 40 42 43 years ago wharton graduating from

[16:12] wharton they had people that would come and recruit at this recruit at the school and nobody would recruit for the west coast and i wanted to come back to the west coast i was from here i wanted to return so there was no recruitment opportunities through the school so a friend of mine actually a friend of yours too rob stone remember him so rob stone introduced me to a professor he knew from ucla the professor had a consulting business on the side and i figured it was a job real estate finance consulting numbers

[16:49] uh and i took the job and it was a great job you know i would relate that a bit to when new people come into our firm to work and we obviously have had hundreds of new underwriters and analysts over 38 years that have come to the company and i tell them for the first three or four years you're going to be chained to your desk you're going to underwrite deals and you're going to get a graduate degree in finance by sitting in the cubes in our office and reviewing deals and underwriting

[17:25] and learning the business and i had that opportunity as a consultant out of business school to just do deals underwrite numbers i was not in charge i wasn't the boss i just reviewed stuff and that was the opportunity i got when i graduated business school and i really insist that our new under under writers in the firm do the same thing they just listen and learn and i tell people that once they're working at a good firm they make their own opportunities

[18:00] by offering to do extra work reading everything they can in the office and if you work at the right firm you should be able to to grow your knowledge base by taking advantage of everything that firm has don't just stay in your own hole there so you were talk about you know you said it was um i guess kind of a fluke that you ended up um at with george smith you know what created the opportunity for the fluke so i'm happy to share that

[18:36] story it's kind of fun so i was working at this firm consulting firm i've been there about a year a year and a half learn learning a lot the senior owners of the firm were very very smart i learned a lot from them i'm still in touch with them now you know 40 years after and i was taking a class at ucla extension in advanced tax planning for real estate again trying to expand what i knew my knowledge and just

[19:12] taking every opportunity i can to learn and there were a couple of there were a couple of guys in the class and they heard me talking because i asked a lot of questions i guess they thought they were smart questions and uh during the break third or fourth week they said you know we're looking for someone to work at our firm would you like to come work at our mortgage banking firm and i said i love the job i've got i'm not interested in mortgage banking i've never heard of that what is that but i'm not interested and so they left

[19:47] me alone the next week at the break they bugged they bugged me again the third week the fourth week finally i said okay already i'll go talk to the president of your firm and see what it's all about so so the fluke was i was in the class i was in the right place at the right time i had spent many years up to that point in time getting educated such that uh someone would say that was luck that i got that job my answer is no there's no such thing as luck luck is when opportunity

[20:23] meets preparation so the opportunity was i was in a target-rich environment a class where a lot of business people were and uh prepper preparation meant i mean darn i had an mba from wharton in finance i'd worked at a finance consulting company and i'd also uh been in business in lower end management roles in business in the hotel field so the luck was that you know i got the job in a heartbeat

[20:58] yeah it seems to me there was one other thing that that you were doing and and this is something i've noticed as as a lifelong teacher is when you were in a learning environment in this case a classroom you were actively engaged with what was going on in the classroom as opposed to some students who will you know kind of sit in the back and just they'll listen or they'll take notes or whatever but you were asking questions trying to you know really pull out of the the teacher everything that that person had you know to teach you

[21:33] i'll i'll i'll add something to that so yes when i'm in a class i always sit in the front two rolls front two rows and as far as i'm concerned the teacher and me and some might say i ask too many questions and i talk too much and i do but i want to take the best advantage i can out of that but i'm going to relate that now to when i teach a class and i teach classes like i said at ucla and usc all the time i walk into the class i'm i don't teach the full class i come in as a guest lecturer but i walk into the class and there are always some people in the back

[22:08] and some people in the front and and i first thing i do as a guest lecturer is i say guys you know what i can't hear you in the back row i can't see you i want everybody to move into the front three rows and they wonder who is this teacher and he's making us move our seat but i do that and then i was teaching a class at you at ucla a day class and the class had about 400 in the class and you know the front the front of the class is filled with about two-thirds and in the back two rows there were you know 20 or 30

[22:44] people in the class starts and they've got their laptops open they don't need to be open and i said can you please close your laptops and listen and they said they didn't want they said they didn't want to or something and i said you're here to learn from me if you're not interested to hear the class you can leave and about 10 of them got up and left and i was a little bit surprised the instructor was very embarrassed but you know those kids in the back row are just wasting their time and wasting their lives if they weren't interested in the class they shouldn't

[23:20] have been there they're going there just to buy their time you know they're going to buy their life away like they buy their time away and uh i didn't care it's their loss yeah yeah i you know too they're in a way kind of stealing from the other students because the teacher still has to grade their papers and all this other stuff and if they weren't there the teacher would have more time to spend on the students who were genuinely interested well what's more so for me is it just gives a poll of disinterest in a class and i want everybody in the class to be interested in paying attention in those classes as well obviously not a class of 400 but a class of 30 or 40 or

[23:57] 50 i will call on the people who look like they're confused lost or disinterested i will ask a question then i'll point to somebody who looks like they're asleep and ask them a question if they're not woken up you know they're embarrassed whatever the case might be but that's the way i teach my classes and somehow the teachers still continue to call me to come back so i guess that i guess it works well having seen you in action i can tell you that my students always loved to hear what you had to say and they were eager to

[24:32] you know drink in your knowledge i mean that's you know i seriously i you know um i i had many many many compliments um about about your having been at the classes that i taught you're very kind so the the the i assume the person you um interviewed with the president of the company was that the legendary george smith it was not at the time we at the time we were owned by grubb and ellis company and at the time we had five off five off fishes as well and uh

[25:08] i interviewed with the president of our company who actually uh worked came from grub but but i did meet george briefly but it's kind of in kind of interesting and i'll share after i after i worked at the company for about four months working for some guys there those guys told me they were going to leave the firm and go work for a company called bear stearns who is well that's no longer

[25:44] round and they wanted me to come work with them and i said great fine why not let me go interview let me go learn the company georgetown partners grub and ella's tourism partners didn't mean much to me only the guys i worked for were the guys that meant anything to me at the time and the george smith heard that my bosses and i were going to leave and he invited me out to lunch or something george did and that was a big deal because i didn't know george the guy whose name was on the door who spoke at all these events so he invited little

[26:19] old me out and said i want you to come work for me i don't want you to leave and go work for bear stearns and work for these guys and that was potentially a difficult choice because i owed my allegiance to the guys who brought me in hired me and working for bear stearns a big new york investment bank was a big deal and julie my wife and i talked about it we met george smith's wife uh and talked about what was a very

[26:55] major uh fork in the road for my career and decided rightfully so to stay georgetown partners their work george offered me a job to be an under under rioter for him at the time and so i stayed at the firm i did not go over to bear stearns with the other guys and uh i became quite quite close to george i underwrote some of his deals all of his deals worked with his clients uh so eight or ten years i went from

[27:30] being just one of his team to being his number two on his team with him and it's the importance of picking the right right mentor thank goodness i made that choice it had a huge impact in my career so from what i'm gathering this is part of your story i've i've never heard before so i mean it doesn't sound like up until that time you know you even realized you were on george's radar why do you think he knew who he were and and and reached

[28:07] out to you in the way he did i mean to you know to use the yiddish word no offense but you know i i would have thought myself the same thing we're kind of i'm kind of like a picture at this point right i'm just a little guy here learning the ropes and yet the the number one guy is is saying you know don't go why why do you think that was the case i think that's a good question i really don't know i can't ask george because he's passed on but um you know it goes to you know you go to a job you do your job right you ask a lot of questions you raise your hand you offer to participate and help out you know it

[28:44] goes with the remark the comment i make to guys who say they want to work for a certain firm a company they say my dream is to work for cert for this company that's where i i see myself and i say well get a job base it's a job i want i can't get at the company i say does it make any difference get any job you can at that company any job just get in the door and once you work there you know go talk to the higher up guys and say i'm working for mr x but i'd like to learn from you can i read some of the things you do can i

[29:19] attend some of the appointments you do some of the meetings can i can i just learn more about the company and show yourself in the company and when an opportunity avails itself hopefully they'll select you and i suppose in retrospect that's what happened to me i took a job with a couple of guys that weren't that great i didn't really know it at the time i didn't really know i wanted to work for george at the time but it ended up that just being there on the inside and doing my job well being smart diligently gave me an opportunity that when he looked around he said i'd rather he worked for us and

[29:54] worked for me than leave the firm yeah you know um during the years i spent in the navy there was there was a kind of tongue-in-cheek joke that navy stood for never again volunteer yourself and you know i would get these young sailors um who were you know not at all pleased with their uh professional progression and one of the things i would say them is you know have you bought into this philosophy i said because if if you want to advance your career in the navy you're going to have to step up not wait

[30:29] for people to ask you but but volunteers say what can i do where can i go where i can learn more is there a training i can do et cetera et cetera et cetera um and and it you know a lot of people think that the military is very different than the civilian world but in in some ways they're very very similar and i i would say that this is a way where they are very similar the self-starters um really have kind of a leg up in terms of moving their careers to the next you know to the ever next level if you will that's what life is all about i think and there

[31:04] are many people that are happy doing what they do and their role and there's nothing wrong with that and there are those who want to really be aggressive in what they do in their life and i'm going to steal your navy acronym because uh because you know sometimes you tell a guy he comes in and he says look i've been working for you for three years and i'm in the same place i was three years and um i'm going to say to them well you're not in the navy he's going to say what are you talking about i'm going to say you know what it stands for because if you're acting like you're in the navy you're going to keep your same

[31:40] position for a long time yeah very good i like i like that i'm going to make use of that for sure please do please do no need to no it's i didn't make it up so no i'm sure it's been for sure a long time so um at some point um george smith i guess sort of separated from um uh grub and ellis and and you were instrumental in that whole that whole um somewhat but not quite but i'll tell you

[32:16] that story briefly because it's fun so you know when you work for a big firm big company grub and ellis was a big company sometimes you're a very small piece of a big company and when things happen to the company the smaller pieces have are impacted in ways that don't make sense in our case here in 1994 there was a slowdown in the real estate world recession somewhat as we're seeing now grubb and ellis at that time was a fairly big company with maybe 30 offices across the

[32:53] whole country and business slowed and revenue slowed and they were trying to consolidate offices and businesses and slow down the cash loss they had and they said we're going to close down our freestanding mortgage brokerage division which was us we're going to close down the five offices we've got and we're offering that all of the grub and george smith grubinellis brokers will now work in the

[33:29] 30 separate offices that grubbin grub has grub and ella's house and george said that doesn't make sense because the magic of what we do is that we share information everybody was really in the main office there were two or three people in the other offices but we had 35 to 50 people in the main office at the time and uh and and we said you know we really need to have everybody in one office essentially to be successful and they said well we're going to shut down

[34:07] the office in george george cut a deal where they said well if you'll take over the lease george we'll sell you for a buck the company because as far as they're concerned you know what's a brokerage company worth nothing because it's only the broker is staying at the firm generating income so so george said we want to stay together we'll pick up the lease so i we i re remember that we took over the lease we took over the copy machine

[34:42] lease the furniture we got for free and he signed some documents the next day we owned the place we said my gosh how are we going to pay the overhead well it ended up that we had two or three loans that were going to close in the next few weeks that grubbin ellis you know didn't really think about didn't care about and so within a month after we closed we made a bunch of fees on deals and we put that in a reserve account and that gave us six months of overhead to cover everything and that's how we ended up buying ourselves from grub and

[35:17] ellis but the other part that i want to share is that george at the time was the guy his name was on the door he was the icon but george said this is a teamwork kind of a business and he picked the five strongest most active brokers in the firm i was one of the five and he said we're all going to own this firm to gather and so he gave all of us one share and he took two shares of the company so for the guy that really was the name on the

[35:53] door for him to take only twice as much as what all of the other younger guys had really speaks a lot towards the kind of guy george was and the fact that to have a successful business you need to share the wealth around we didn't have much wealth at the time but you need to share what you have around and and i've used that over my career as running the firm you know george ran the firm at the start but because i was so close to my administrative helped guide us with policies procedures

[36:29] for letting new brokers in for how we paid brokers commissions all that stuff i set that stuff up ran it by george after a while george said steve whatever you whatever you once find and you know for five or ten years i did it behind the scenes and then soon thereafter i started doing it you know george was not interested in really running the firm so i did and i served as president of the company for about 20 years or so but i but i go back to what george did which was share the uh ownership of the firm

[37:05] so as we grew the firm we made a point as well to make a very clear path for younger very successful brokers to buy into the firm to be part owners of the firm and that allowed us to really grow the firm successfully over the over the years so uh you know and and i i remember i met george uh i don't know i think a few times you know over the years and and one thing

[37:40] that always struck me about him is his openness and really his humility i mean like i said a minute ago he was legendary in many ways and yet you would never know you know he never he never got a big head about it and i i'm curious to to have your thoughts about not just his generosity and and therefore the value of generosity in a business but what are what are some of the other um uh traits that that that you've uh found over the years or or that you've learned

[38:15] from your mentors george maybe other people that you feel are are central to you know being successful in the business world well on the point that you raised there kevin i'll share that uh brokers which is what many of us on this call are our job is to put deals together in the background our deal is to match people up nobody cares what we think we might share briefly what we think about how to deal with something

[38:51] but the most successful meetings we have is when we have the two principles together we set them up we give them a path and we let them talk if we sit down at a business meeting and we hardly say a thing we've done our job well the meeting's been good if i have to talk a lot and me in a meeting then it has not gone well um we're brokers we're not principles in a deal and nobody cares what we think unless they ask us or unless we're just

[39:26] trying to guide them the way we want them to go you know market it or sell it sometimes our spot sometimes our sponsors will look at us to sell the deal for them to pitch the deal for them because they know we've got a lot more experience at that kind of sales salesmanship than they do um but besides that no one really cares what we what we think and i think george to the point that you spoke of kevin george knew that his clients were first and we always want our clients to be first we want our clients to feel good

[40:02] our clients have a lot at risk and everything's about making sure they're happy and george unders george understood that what we did it was very rare that george got mad at a customer told me he was doing something wrong just wasn't the way things worked how so look there's there's a lot of a lot of people especially you know kind of our age they talk about um you know the how um i want to make sure i use a an accurate

[40:38] word um unflexible um how um how much young people today think very highly of themselves um how they seem to you know lack the ability to look at life in a larger context i'm i'm curious to know your thoughts on that number one and number two for for those of us who you know want to groom the kind of ability that that you and george had what what can we do in order to become you know more client focused

[41:14] um more willing to you know be in the background so i think the first question is how do older mentors me you work with younger mentees and people coming up in the firms and i think that um if you don't listen to younger successful people your firm will fail i think it's just as i just as i said that we encourage

[41:50] younger brokers to become part owners in our firm and recently our firm has merged with a tech firm and the reason is because some of our younger brokers you know 38 year old 40 42 year old not so young but younger brokers have said the world's changing and the older guys in their 60s don't get it and i admit the older guys in their 60s say we've been do we've been doing it the same way for a long time and it's worked fine and that's what we're going to keep doing well if we keep doing it that way

[42:27] the younger people in their 30s and 40s are going to leave because they're saying there's a new way that things are being done and they're not wrong and so i think it's important for the old guys in the firm to listen to the younger partners in their firm listen to what they have to say because they often know what they're talking about know what they're doing and us older guys can learn a lot from them um it's difficult for the old guys and frankly if the old guys don't

[43:05] listen to the young guys pretty soon they find the young guys have left and when the old guys get older there's no firm left um now with that being said many of the young guys don't have the hum don't have the humility to understand that it takes a while to get successful to learn the ropes you know they listen to social media and they see people who make a big splash and are successful they're on

[43:42] tick-tock they're on this and they're making a quick buck and that doesn't work at least it doesn't work in the finance and the real estate world in the social world social media work world i can't speak to that apparently it does work for a while but you really have to pay your dues in other businesses which include real estate and finance which is what i know about so so i think you know younger people with an ego that's too big

[44:18] might have a hard time younger people that really want to learn the ropes but have good ideas are going to find they're going to have a lot of success in what they do um and i've like i said i've i've done that in the sense that on the one hand i insisted that we open up our firm to younger partners i had vocated for us to merge with a tech related type of firm that had younger

[44:53] partners in it and in my own personal development world i've got partnerships with many sponsors who have smart ideas and are younger i've got partnerships with server with people in their 20s 30s you know 40s you know they're very very smart younger people out there and if you listen to what they're saying and you and you watch them closely as an older experienced guy i think one can quickly

[45:29] learn and listen and determine that a younger guy there are very very smart younger people out there obviously of course and being an older guy with uh financial means and experience teaming up with younger guys that have ideas and expertise can be very successful for both sides so when we're we've got just a few minutes left so um what does the future hold is there a point

[46:04] you know for example is there a point at which you know us older guys should you know step aside i was reading an article on the wall street journal i think i think it was the wall street journal um and i don't remember what industry was but it was they were basically saying you know the old people have to step aside they got to make room for the you know for the new blood and let us you know kind of spread our wings i know that's i would argue that that is potentially the case in academia where you know our generation i mean i think you know we're gonna we're gonna carry it out in boxes you know um and and academia needs to change you

[46:39] know just like every other part of our society so what what your thoughts about that well my thought is that if a good relationship can get built between younger people and older people are cooperative trusting relationship then the older people that want to continue to work until they choose not to should have a role i think that in some businesses that's hard to do because in some businesses there are only a certain number of call it job

[47:14] slots in academia there are only so many tenured professor or even associate professorship roles in accounting firms and law firms oftentimes they say they can't make room for the new guys unless the old guys leave and unless they sell their shares partnerships and in those places at some point in time the older guys may have to leave even before they choose to choose to leave in some businesses the older guys may not have a choice in the sense that to stay

[47:50] to stay capable of doing a job you've got to stay up to date on things and you have to work full-time and at some point in time the older guys may say you know what i don't want to work 10 hours a day every day i don't want to stay up to date and everything it's just too hard i'm ready to exit where in some businesses the expertise of the gray-haired guys like you and i you're the gray-haired i'm the no-hair guy that we have that we're able to work less hours and still have a very productive relationship with younger guys but i think that happens when the old

[48:26] when the older guys respect and listen to what the younger guys have to say knowing that they often are right and look at things differently from the way we look at them that doesn't happen with all old guys many old guys think they know what they have right away and the younger guys don't know what they're talking about and that's a recipe for failure yeah i i i will observe i it's it seems to me that and maybe this was something you learned from your father um but to you know to have a mentor like

[49:02] like george um george always struck me as being absolutely respectful to people no matter what the stage of their career they were in and to learn under someone like that um i think one is is schooled in the idea that that is something you do throughout your whole life and so now when when you're at you know at the point that we are in life it's probably easier for you you know to do that because that's how you were treated it is i think that people should always look for mentors mentors are not going to find

[49:38] you you have to find them and um again speaking to the crowd out there the audience and and also people like to talk about themselves and what they do so if you call up a guy you've got your finger on and you say you know what i'm not asking for a job i'm asking for a half hour an hour of your time to get some advice from you most everybody's going to find time and and and if you want to benefit from that wealth of knowledge of people out there you've got to actively reach out for it

[50:13] a mentor is not going to call up a young guy and say hey you look like a smart guy come in and talk to me let me tell you about what you should do to improve your career doesn't happen that way um so so the opportu the opportunities are out there you've got to take advantage of them we live in a wonderful world where opportunities abound so i can't let you go without shifting gears on you a little bit and and by the way certainly feel free to decline to answer this um you not only have had a long successful

[50:48] career you've had a long successful marriage what do you think has been the key to that uh my wife's on the line honey do you want to add to that do you want to say anything i don't i want to hear you answer it i didn't mean to put you on the spot but no no no no i don't mind i think that you've got to treat your partner as an equal in everything you do

[51:23] you have to always tell the truth can never ever lie as in business in home in home life if you lie once and you get caught that bond of trust is broken for life or for a long time depending on what the situ way situations you've got to treat your partner with respect you've got to include them in major life decisions you make along the way you've got to understand that you've got

[51:59] to give more than you get and i heard someone say a successful marriage requires that you plan to give 60 and get 40 back and if both of you do that it leads to a good marriage yeah i think you've got to understand and it takes a long and by the way many of these things i'm saying my wife's on the line i have not been good at this so i learn over the years i'm not going to claim that i've always had these thoughts um you have to know that you can't change your partner the way they are is the way that they are and you just have to learn

[52:35] to accept them and uh uh um uh don't worry about the small things only worry about the big things just ignore the small things and you can't change them and uh i've got a wonderful marriage with a wonderful wife who i've known we've been married for 38 years and i knew her for 10 years before then so we've known each other a long time about ten years seven years eight years so um those are some hints that i'd share julie would you add anything to that

[53:12] um i add to that um yeah mary a saint well that's not me so does that mean you married the wrong person no i'm thinking of it from your perspective oh okay kevin knew kevin knew what i meant i knew what you meant indeed oh thank you thank you well unfortunately the time is up um i i have to tell you i i am so glad to be able to spend this time

[53:49] with you stephen and you too julie um you know you guys are just i mean you were just the the idyllic couple and i'm sure you know look every marriage has its things but you know from the outside um you know you you you look and you say you know this is really a team that has worked together and really made a difference not only in their own lives in the lives of your children but in the lives of so many other people in the in the community in which you live and and really in the world so um it's it's it's a huge treat for me to be able to have

[54:25] both of you here today and i want to thank you very very much and kevin the work that you do in these podcasts to share information and help people get ins get insights which hopefully benefit them you're doing a mitzvah and the things that you do as well and i wish you much success in everything that you do thank you steve it just remains for me to remind you all that uh my dear friend marie you are still my bell darling thank you all for watching steve julie thank you for being here today hopefully we'll talk soon

[55:00] you all have a great rest of the afternoon kevin thanks