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Uncharted Entrepreneurship - hosted by Brent Peterson out of the Minnesota chapter of Entrepreneurs’ Organization – brings you daring stories straight from the trailblazing entrepreneurs who are unmapping business frontiers across every industry. Settle in around our virtual campfire as Brent sits down to pick the brains of startup pioneers, visionary founders, and intrepid CEOs whose origin stories - marked by unexpected twists, lessons, and stumbles along unpaved paths - will inspire your own trek in launching a boundary-pushing venture. Trading war stories, strategies, and even warnings, these audacious guests invite fellow founders and future leaders into their confidential circles in a uniquely transparent, wise, and motivational way. So join us off the beaten business trails to light your entrepreneurial fire!
Brent (00:02.868)
Welcome to this episode today, I have Chris Volk. Chris, why don't you go ahead, introduce yourself, tell us your day-to-day role, and maybe one of your passions in life.
Christopher Volk (00:12.542)
Sure, Brent. It's good to be here and thanks for inviting me. And my name is Chris Volk. I have taken three companies public on the New York Stock Exchange and two of them I conceived and founded. All three were engaged in the financial services business. And in our case, what we would do is we'd go to thousands of middle market companies and we would convince them that having a landlord was better than having a banker when it came to how to finance their real estate. So at the end of the day, we financed thousands of
real estate locations all over the United States ranging from fast food restaurants to veterinary clinics to all kinds of other types of properties.
Brent (00:54.884)
And passion, any passions in life, besides haggis that we just talked about? Ha ha ha.
Christopher Volk (00:58.194)
Well, my work career has been mostly in Arizona. And so my passion this time of the year is getting cooler. So today I'm in Scotland, which is great. So I can have a vest on and I can be in 60 degree weather. And so I enjoy travel and, you know, I think a lot of life is about experiences. And so I'm very big into trying to experience as much as I can.
Brent (01:27.36)
Yeah, I would imagine Scotland's a little bit like being in San Francisco.
Christopher Volk (01:32.578)
Well, from a weather perspective, it can be like that. I mean, the landscape is beautiful and I just have felt a kind of an attachment to this place for a long time. So my golf is really mediocre, although I'm enthusiastic, but there's a lot to do here.
Brent (01:50.42)
Yeah, that's awesome. So tell us a little bit about your background, how you got into it, and how you managed to get, let alone once, but three times to starting companies and making them go public.
Brent (03:09.916)
I lost you Chris, if you're there.
Christopher Volk (04:03.617)
I'm gonna guess that was me.
Brent (04:06.964)
Yeah, your internet's pretty slow, but that's all right. We can, I put it on low data mode now for both of us, so let's, why don't we start over? I lost you at, I think you're doing, I lost you right away, so I don't know much you said. But.
Christopher Volk (04:29.663)
Yes, let's start me anywhere you want to. We can do it all over again for all I care. I'm good.
Brent (04:34.856)
Great, all right. Yeah, so actually I got the question out, so let me start with the question again and we'll go from there. Chris, that's great, thank you. So I think a lot of people are struggling to get their company even started, but you started and made the companies public. Tell us how you did that and how you did it three times.
Christopher Volk (05:04.191)
sure.
The first company that I did this with, I was working there, we had raised capital from lots of different sources to acquire the real estate that we acquired. I decided that a good thing to do would be to combine all this stuff and just list it on the New York Stock Exchange. When you're doing this, you're trying to think about who would buy this. Whenever you want to list a public company or a company public or whenever you want to raise money to start a company, you're always thinking about...
who's going to put up the money for doing this and what kind of returns they expect. They all have other choices of what they do with the money. So I had spent a lot of time understanding business models, putting together company projections, and came to the conclusion that we could actually attract a lot of investors to be able to do this. So we put together a game plan, merged a lot of assets together, took a couple years to get it done.
And in 1994, we listed our first company on the New York Stock Exchange. And it sat there for three, well, seven years total. And we sold to GE Capital after that. And investors did well. We outperformed all the benchmarks. We made, I think, a 12 and a half, 12-2 rate of return for investors. And not long after that, I did it again. And eventually I would do it a third time. So I'm kind of proof positive that non-competes matter, that you could take a really good idea and do it multiple times.
And I became really facile with the idea of how important business models are to create successful companies. And having done three of them, they weren't all exactly the same. We made business model tweaks to all of them to make them better and better. And eventually what I decided to do was to write a book on it and then talk about how business wealth is created. And I think that's a really important and topical conversation. And I'm just interested in having...
Christopher Volk (07:03.827)
as many people experience what I experienced and to be able to start businesses and to be able to create wealth both for themselves and for the people.
Brent (07:13.776)
So do you see a big differentiation between private equity and doing a public company? Is there a difference in there in how you look at things?
Christopher Volk (07:29.279)
Well, private equity investors are going to typically demand higher rates of return. And so when we started our last, my most recent public company, we started that in 2011, took it public in 2014. And when we were private for three and a half years, our investment capital came from private equity sources. And their returns are going to look a little bit richer than what a public company investor would be willing to have.
Christopher Volk (07:58.275)
private equity invested in the company that I created was to have the chance to be able to take the company public where investors would expect a lower rate of return. And if you can do that, then basically your private equity guys can do really well. In our case, the private equity guys ended up making a 26% compound rate of return, which if you're doing real estate lease type stuff, that's a big number and it's actually a pretty big number anyhow.
for our public company investors, we were able to generate something like a 12 for the public company investors, which is also good.
Brent (08:37.112)
So your book is called The Value Equation. Do you, and I know that it kind of lays out some of your ideas and some of the framework that you're using, do you follow this in all the things you're doing already? Or that you've done, I should say?
Christopher Volk (08:52.203)
The answer is yeah. I mean, the value equation represented a set of tools that I created kind of around 1999. And they were helpful to me and all three public companies, but they just became increasingly helpful to me. And what you're trying to do with the value equation is dumb down business, basically to take business and get it to as few variables as you can get it. And in this case, I determined that you can create a decent business model with six variables.
variables. And so if you're like starting with a blank spreadsheet, you could just do it with six variables. And so I would focus on those six variables in terms of how I ran the business and eventually would disclose to shareholders, public shareholders, how I was doing this. And with our last company, the approach that I had attracted really a who's who list of shareholders, including Berkshire Hathaway, which became
our largest shareholder. And I think one of the things that they liked about it was that Berkshire Hathaway is very much about how you can create wealth, how businesses can create wealth, which is simply put, making them worth more than they cost to create. And while that sounds pretty basic for you or me, the fact is most businesses in the world don't ever rise to that level. It's kind of a rare business. It ends up being worth more than it costs to create.
And if you can do this as a public company, then you can just create wealth from thin air. And that, if you're looking at how the richest people on the Forbes 400 list got there, it's that simple. I mean, they created wealth from thin air by creating just outstanding business models. And so I wanted to articulate how that would be done. And I did so with the companies that we created.
Brent (10:45.532)
Are those six variables constant or they different in every business?
Christopher Volk (10:49.091)
They're the same in every business, they're universal. And they revolve around companies' operating efficiencies, which you're trying to maximize operating efficiencies, and they revolve around minimizing the investment needed to create the business. So you're taking an asset efficiency and you're trying to make it as small as you can. And then you have your sort of debt equity breaks, your capital stack. And the capital stack you're trying to optimize.
So it's sort of maximize, minimize, optimize. And it's pretty simple. And you've got six variables. And pretty much it's two variables each.
Brent (11:32.064)
So do you want to give us a little hint on some of those variables?
Christopher Volk (11:38.231)
Well, okay, I mean, you know, going through, one of the things about business is that it involves math, you know, so, but the good news is that the math can be middle school math. I mean, it's just basic math and anybody who's an entrepreneur kind of gets it and they know what their business cost.
Brent (11:55.936)
because I lost you again.
Christopher Volk (11:59.493)
Um.
Christopher Volk (12:03.523)
Alright.
Christopher Volk (12:16.019)
You there? Can you hear me?
Brent (12:19.831)
I hear you. Yep.
Brent (12:28.116)
Can you hear me?
Christopher Volk (12:52.614)
You there?
Christopher Volk (12:56.847)
You there? Okay, all right, so let's try again.
Brent (12:57.46)
Yep, I'm here.
Brent (13:02.072)
Yeah, I'll ask it differently. We'll start over on that next question. So Chris, some of these variables you're talking about, if we compare it to Apple, and I think people would say that's the most valuable company out there, how would that fit in with the Apple model?
Christopher Volk (13:24.487)
Sure, well Apple has one of the best business models going. And it starts with a sales to investment ratio. So basically they're keeping their business investment pretty low. If you buy an Apple product, you might notice it's designed in California, but it's made somewhere else. So they outsource a lot of manufacture. And by doing that, they can keep their investment low.
And so the relationship of their sales, their investment is super high. And they also have a really attractive profit margin which will be the next piece of it. So their operating profit margin before they pay for any debt cost and stuff is pretty high. And so those three costs are sort of like the big three. And by the way, in the case of Apple, they hardly use any debt. I mean, they've got some debt that they have but they really have more cash than they got debt.
So Apple's almost effectively able to run debt free. And it shouldn't be like a surprise to any of your listeners that Apple has a decent business model because it's worth $3 trillion in change and it's the most valuable company in the world. What might interest your investors is this. I mean, Apple's equity, so the amount that the stockholders paid for it at cost, and that includes stock that's issued, but it also includes money the company has rolled
over the years into operations. So they haven't paid out that much in dividends. So they've just kept your money and like rolled it back into the business. And so today, Apple's worth kind of around 10 times more than it costs to create from an equity perspective. So that's their kind of multiple they've created. And meanwhile, the company that I created most recently was worth about one and a half, you know, 1.4 times. And so there's a massive difference. I mean, Apple's...
first of all, just a bigger company and it's a global company. You know, whereas the real estate investment trust that I was leading was focused on the national market, so smaller markets, smaller business. But being worth 1.5 times the equity created $3 billion out of thin air in terms of wealth creation. And that's where, you know, both investors and employees, business leaders, CEOs like myself can really make...
Christopher Volk (15:49.859)
uh... significant amount of personal money and create a personal amount personal wealth uh... and uh... so you don't have to have the perfection that something like apples got you can have far less and create and that work that'll put you well inside of the one percent
Brent (16:08.016)
If we talk about another company, let's take Twitter for example. Yep, can you hear me?
Christopher Volk (16:12.678)
You there?
Brent (16:17.728)
Chris?
Christopher Volk (16:20.123)
Branch it there.
Brent (16:20.168)
Hello? I'm here. Hello?
Hi Chris.
Christopher Volk (16:44.438)
Brent, I'm back. I couldn't hear you at all. So I'm assuming you didn't hear me.
Brent (16:48.316)
No, I got you all the way to the end. It was good, thank you. All right, let's, yeah, that was great, thank you. So, yeah, let's go to the, we can go to the next question. I can ask you with, well, sort of offline, but I was gonna ask you about Twitter and comparing that to Apple. I don't know if you wanna talk about that.
Christopher Volk (16:54.646)
Was that a good answer?
Christopher Volk (17:14.85)
I don't know that I can talk about it because I haven't ripped apart Twitter's financials. I have ripped apart Apple's financials and they're really good. I haven't done Twitter. Twitter is a company that hasn't even got an operating profit at this point. It's had a hard time trying to figure out its business model.
Brent (17:33.696)
Do you think that Twitter, the reason that Elon Musk did what he did to make it go private, was more just for his own personal, because he is so wealthy, he doesn't necessarily have to make money at it? Or is there a, do you think there's some kind of a, something behind it that he feels as though it's gonna make money someday?
Christopher Volk (17:59.906)
We're offline, I take it. Okay. Yeah, I think that when he took a private... I'm not sure if he's got a game plan or not in terms of how Twitter ultimately makes money. I mean, it's a frequently used social media platform, but...
I'm looking at threads today being introduced by Meta. That may have more traction because it's integrated with Instagram. And Instagram has been pretty potent. Trying to figure out how to get advertising revenue and how to bring a revenue stream into Twitter has been a problem from the outset. So I'm not sure what drew Elon into it. I would guess that Elon to some degree was...
ultimately forced himself to buy it because he put in an offer to buy it and he was going to be sued to execute that purchase contract. And so he closed on his deal, but it's not without a lot of risk.
Brent (19:15.296)
All right, well, let's move on. We'll move on to the next question. All right, so I know a lot of people are interested in the RETs, the real estate investment, as a way of sort of not having to get their own building, but also participate in the real estate market. Do you feel as though as an investor that reduces them risks from a smaller investor and even larger investors can reduce risk that way?
Christopher Volk (19:17.406)
Yeah.
Christopher Volk (19:45.17)
I think if you're an investor and you're looking to diversify into real estate ownership, you're really wise to think about owning a real estate investment trust and to own perhaps a lot of public real estate investment trusts and even to own REIT ETFs, exchange traded funds and REIT stocks.
The reason is because the public companies have such great disclosure and they have really efficient management organizational structures and they're transparent and they pay out good dividends and you don't have to really manage a piece of real estate. One of the things I get concerned with people owning real estate is that the average person who owns income producing real estate.
has very, very large percentages of their personal net worth in that. And so they're not really that diversified. And with real estate investment trusts within the public market, you can do that. You can be extremely diversified into real estate investment trusts. And I've run three of them over 35 years, and our average return has been well into double digits for investors. That's pretty awesome. And of that amount of return...
probably 40% of it's coming just from cash, just dividends being paid out every single quarter. And so investors benefit from the cash as well as the appreciation. From a total rate of return perspective, it's been tremendous. And so I would encourage investors to think about.
Brent (21:26.188)
I'm in Entrepreneurs Organization, which is a group of entrepreneurs across the world that we, and I think the minimum threshold is a million dollars in sales. But before that, there's solopreneurs and all kinds of different types of people who want to get into business. Everybody has this dream of making a billion dollars or a million dollars. What is your take on how...
the average entrepreneur or the average person who thinks you're an entrepreneur is gonna succeed in what they're trying to do. Like what are the odds in that?
Christopher Volk (22:00.574)
Right, so the odds are decent. So there are, in the United States, about 12% of people are millionaires. I think the number should be higher. So I wrote a book to help people get there. Of the millionaires that are out there, two thirds of them own businesses, where they either started businesses or they are engaged in businesses where they own some of the stock. So two thirds of millionaires do that.
And the reason you find that is because if you're not engaged in business where you're owning a piece of the pie, being a W-2 employee is just not enough. You can't save enough money to become a millionaire unless you're a really super high net worth earner. It's very difficult to do it. But if you own part of a business, even if the business doesn't rise to where I'd like it to be, which is worth more than what it costs to create, even if it doesn't do that,
you may still be able to build up equity in the business over time. And so now you have two ways of saving money, both sitting aside money in your 401k or your IRA or whatnot, and you have value being built up in the business, which is why it's easier mathematically for entrepreneurs and for business people to become millionaires than it is for somebody just having a W-2 paycheck. I think that the chances that...
If somebody gets to be above a million bucks, which is 12% of the people, to let's say get to 11 million bucks, which gets you a net worth inside of the 1%. That's where the 1% is, 11 million bucks. I think that that's totally doable. I think that more people should be worth $11 million. I think that there is a chance for that to happen, and I would like to see that happen more frequently. If you want to get to the upper one-tenth of 1%, now you're talking about 50 million bucks.
And I think most people don't even think about this because they're assuming when they think about what's great wealth, they're thinking, well, you've got to have 100 million bucks so you've got to have some dollar amount. And when I educate kids in classes, especially if they go to really fancy schools, they think that they've got to be able to have a 50 or 100 million dollar nest egg to be considered wealthy, but that's not true at all. It's way inside of that. And now today they're about...
Christopher Volk (24:25.646)
billionaires give or take in the United States of America. And as odd as this might sound, it's just easier to be a billionaire than a pro golfer. If you were ranked 1,000 on the PGA Tour, you wouldn't be able to make a living at it. So the real unicorns, if you want to say who's the real unicorn, it's a PGA Pro Tour golfer or somebody who's playing at Wimbledon today. So it's easier to be a billionaire than that.
But my goal is a lot more modest. My goal is to get people to be worth more than a million bucks. And I'd like to see people get up to be worth more than 5 million bucks. And if you can follow some business model fundamentals, you can get there.
Brent (25:05.66)
And do you feel as though, so in your book, do you think that you can help the average person who may not have the will or the desire to be an entrepreneur but would like to be an investor, gives them some of those tools to make those right choices?
Christopher Volk (25:21.258)
Yeah, because even if you're, let's say you're looking for a job, who are you going to work for? You've got certain job options. If you can understand something about the business models of the companies that you're working for, the companies that have the best business models are going to just make people rich, you know, and those models are going to be able to have more options for employees in terms of if you're working for a company like that.
your career path is going to have just a lot more interest in terms of what can happen with your career. So I think that understanding business fundamentals, even if you're not an entrepreneur, even if you're working for a company, or let's say you're just investing in businesses, I mean just to understand the fundamentals behind how these businesses are so successful. I mean it's not just luck. I mean it's...
It's really very much engages the fundamental business model and it's highly designed. I mean, people sit around and I've created three public companies and I've sat around and changed the business model of our companies in order to be able to create higher rates of return and to be able to make those companies worth more than the prior companies. And so I know that it could be done and I know what happens when people work to design.
strong companies and I think that whether you're an employee or an investor you will benefit by understanding these basic fundamentals.
Brent (26:55.472)
I'm a big fan of the Rockefeller habits and the book Traction and Scaling Up. Do you feel as though whomever is starting a business, they should have some sort of an operating system or some kind of a framework that they should always look to go at, even at the very beginning when you're at the smallest stage?
Christopher Volk (27:16.246)
I do. I think that when you think about businesses, they all exist to solve customer problems. So you're providing a solution for a customer. And the solution for a customer is your first job. I mean, the customer is always job one. And then right behind that is the investor who's going to help make that company reality, the people that are going to put up the capital to make that company happen.
And so investors are number two. And between those two, the customer and the investor, now if you have a great business model, you can help all your other stakeholders. You can help the communities, you can help your employees, you can help lots of people. But the first two are what you've got to deal with. And so as you're putting together a business, you're solving the problem for the customer, and then you're dreaming up how you want to structure the business. And I think it's really important to.
try to have a structure from the day you start and the day you open up your doors, because that's going to have a lot to say about what kind of value you're going to create for your shareholder. And if you can create some value for shareholders, then you can really help your employees and you can help all your other stakeholders.
Brent (28:32.348)
I heard a statistic that most new business, new people who start a new business don't think about the exit and they don't think about even selling their business and therefore they often don't even think about how should I raise some capital. They're just sort of bootstrapping it. How do you see changing that mindset in a new entrepreneur that...
And I should also add, do you think it is a good thing to go into it thinking, hey, at some point I wanna sell this, at some point I may or may not wanna try to get investment? Talk us through a little bit of that mindset and how you see that playing out for a new business owner.
Christopher Volk (29:13.766)
Right. So I think that as a business creator, I've created companies with the idea of making them desirable to own both by myself and by other people. But I've not thought about exit strategies from the onset. I think that if people think about exit strategies too early, it's...
it never really works out that well. My history has not worked out that well. People should be focusing on the customer and the shareholder and making a desirable business. And the exit strategy will take care of itself if there ever needs to be an exit strategy. And in our case of building companies, one of the problems in me building a company is that
Our sales to investment ratio wasn't ever anywhere near as good as Apple's. So if Apple's at two to one, which is kind of where they are, ours was at 0.08 to one, which is basically 8%, which is the average rent rate that we were getting on real estate. And so, you know, we're thinking about this and realizing we need a lot of I, we need a lot of investment because we're not as efficient as Apple. And
And because we're not as efficient, we need to raise a ton of money. I mean, none of us had enough capital to be able to put this company together. And so again, it's, you're putting together your business model. You want to minimize the investment as much as you can. Well, if you're a real estate investment trust, I got news for you. You can't minimize the investment that much because you're buying a lot of real estate and, and over my career, I've bought about $20 billion for the real estate. And so I had to raise a lot of equity. Um, and.
uh... and knew that from the outset so i was going to private equity firms i've uh... raised money in other ways as well uh... in the three companies we started we raised our startup capital from three different sources uh... so you're always looking at where your sources are and the good news for investors today and the good news for entrepreneurs today is that there are something like ten thousand uh... private equity firms and people looking for really good uh... business ideas
Christopher Volk (31:32.938)
with good leadership teams. And so if you're an entrepreneur and you want to get people to fund your investment, there is a deep ocean of companies that would be willing to do that. So long as you have a good idea, good business model, good team of people to be able to execute it.
Brent (31:53.284)
I know that business models are how any company works well and efficiently. And just kind of going back to the EOS model, the Entrepreneurs' Operating System and Traction and all those other things that people can look to, do you think that when somebody goes into that, should they depend on it or should some of that be engineered and molded by...
what you're doing and how you're going forward.
Christopher Volk (32:24.586)
Well, I think that...
Christopher Volk (32:29.046)
I think that you want to set ground rules day one in terms of how you're engineering the business model and then every year you put people together in a room and you tweak the model and you change it from time to time. When people talk about re-engineering companies, for example, to me that's just another way of saying my company's not making enough money. We're not making enough return.
we need to really change the six variables. We need to work with our six variables. And so you're constantly focusing on the six variables. And then by the way, the variables are simplification. So you're taking a complicated business, you're reducing it to six variables, but inside of those variables, there are a lot of other components to each of those six variables. And you may have people that are delving into those components to be able to tweak individual ones to make those variables.
just better and to maximize your operating efficiency, minimize your investments, optimize your capital stack. All that stuff is just important and it's the fundamentals that will kind of get you to where you need to be going and will make your business attractive to other investors and will create wealth for you and your employees that are doing this.
Brent (33:55.084)
So what you're saying is that these things don't just happen, they have to be engineered by the team.
Christopher Volk (34:00.31)
They do. Businesses don't just mystically happen. You know, when we had, I'll give you some examples. With our first company, we sold it to GE in 2001. At the time, we had 250 employees and we were managing, I think our company value on the New York Stock Exchange was kind of a little bit over a billion dollars at the time, say a billion one. I flash forward to the, if you go.
Fast forward into 2021 when I left the company to my successor. We had almost $10 billion in assets and we had employees of basically 150 people, actually probably 120 people. So we were able to do the exact same thing with a lot less because we figured out how to outsource a lot of functions and to run the company a lot leaner and meaner. So there were a lot of changes that we made.
our business model to make it better. And so it was highly engineered.
Brent (35:09.781)
The world of AI is changing everything. Do you think that AI is going to give us more efficiencies in these and maybe even reduce the headcount for people and companies? I suppose it depends on what kind of company, but let's even talk about real estate. Is there efficiencies that can be made through artificial intelligence in the real estate market?
Christopher Volk (35:30.11)
Well, I think AI is going to definitely affect knowledge workers a lot. So, and it's going to displace some knowledge workers. And when I think about real estate investment trusts or finance companies, I can envision much more document automation when you're buying real estate. I can, I can picture document automation on the real estate front. I think that artificial intelligence will have a
chance to make things a lot more efficient to be able to execute over time and to take that headcount from 120 employees and drop it further and to take some of the people that we would outsource to, whether it was surveyors or law firms, and drop their headcounts as well. So I think that artificial intelligence is going to be really impactful, certainly in the businesses that I'm familiar with.
Brent (36:31.904)
Where do you think, I know this is gonna be a hard one, but where do you think the commercial real estate market is going in the next five, 10 years?
Christopher Volk (36:41.618)
Well, commercial real estate market is a very broad marketplace. So if you're looking at real estate investment trusts, for example, it includes everything from cell towers to industrial properties to chicken stores of the kind that my companies would own. I think that a number of these real estate types are going to have and are having issues whether it's enclosed shopping malls in the wake of...
competition from online retailers to office buildings who are suffering from the lack of tenants as a result of people working from home. I think that there will be absolute changes. I think that driverless cars, should they ever happen, is going to impact real estate and will impact a lot of other parts of our daily life. But on the other hand, real estate is stuff that you...
needs from day to day. And I tend to like it on a broad category. I like multifamily housing. I like single family residential housing. I mean, I like the net lease real estate stuff that we would do. In a higher interest rate environment that we're certainly in today, as Warren Buffett would say, interest rates tend to act like gravity on the stock market. You haven't really seen that so much yet, but I think that is a…
definitely a truism and something that we should watch out for. And in the case of real estate returns in the last year, the real estate returns have definitely been depressed as a result of the higher interest rates that are out there. But I think that over the long term, if I'm looking at real estate over the long term, if you're trying to generate, you know, if you're an investor and you're trying to find some nice investment that's going to pay you a good dividend and get you to a...
sort of a nine or ten percent rate of return on an annual basis. I think that real estate is very capable of doing that for the indefinite future.
Brent (38:48.18)
Do you see, last question about real estate, sorry. Do you see that a lot of the companies that were downtowns, like in the city center, now are spreading out to the suburbs? And I guess a lot of that is driven by warehouses. You see warehouses going up everywhere, but you hear and see that the downtown city centers are very vacant because from COVID, people weren't going into the office.
Christopher Volk (39:16.57)
Right, I mean one of the ironies has been that a few years ago suburban office was viewed to be a very risky asset class and today I think people are looking at suburban office and thinking not so bad because it's closer to where people live and people might want to occupy suburban locations that are within better proximity to where they are. So I'm a person who grew up in Manhattan. And so I can...
I can sympathize with some of the issues that are happening where people don't want to take that long commute and come into the office and if they can work a couple days from home or they can work in a suburban office location, that's going to be much more suitable to a better lifestyle. And so many people in so many big cities have just extremely long commutes. And if you can shorten some of that and give them back some of their time, how much better is life?
that you can live, in terms of living in these locations, being able to have the extra time. So I think that there are a lot of changes that are happening in the real estate markets and hence the business models, hopefully we're gonna go back to business models, that underlie fundamental real estate investments just like they underlie everything else.
Brent (40:36.908)
Chris, if you had any, if you had a bit of wisdom or advice to give an entrepreneur who is, you know, this year in 2023 still who wants to start a business, what would be the first thing you say that they should do?
Christopher Volk (40:51.266)
Well, the first thing that they should do is be convinced that they have a problem that's worth solving for a customer. And the second thing they should do behind that is to put together a team of really great people that have complementary skill sets that can be able to address that problem. And then the third thing right behind that they should do is begin work immediately on crafting a business model.
wanted to give a shameless plug I would say that they go out and buy a copy of the value equation and I get a head start.
Brent (41:28.96)
That's awesome. So you took the words out of my mouth. We do a shameless plug at the end of every podcast. I'll let you do an extended shameless plug about your book. So tell us a little bit about your book.
Christopher Volk (41:40.266)
Yeah, so the value equation is maybe the only book that's written on how businesses create wealth and which would seem odd since it's so important. The richest people in history have all made their money in business and how that happens is a function of how the business models work. And so I made it my hobby to understand this stuff. And over the years...
I've written a lot of articles and ultimately wrote the book which came out last year while he published it and it's available on Amazon and anywhere else that you'd like to buy books and it'll take business creation and simplify it as much as you can. There'll be a little bit of math but it's all middle school math so it's nothing too fancy and involves just six variables and so you're taking business, dumbing it down and saying here's what it takes to make a...
good net worth for yourself and for your employees and this is how businesses create wealth and you can do it.
Brent (42:46.888)
That's awesome. Chris Volk calling in from Scotland today. Thank you so much for taking some time. I'm hoping you get in on the greens in lovely Scotland and I hope you're staying warm and you have the advantage of having a ton of sunlight right now. Probably not as much sunlight as you would have in Phoenix, but you have more daytime potential of sunlight.
Christopher Volk (43:06.978)
You have daytime potential. The sun doesn't really go down here until about 10 o'clock at night. So it's light much of the day. And thank you so much. I'm enjoying the time here and it's a beautiful part of the world. And if you're up for a visit to a great country, this is a great place to come.
Christopher Volk (43:28.258)
Okay, thank you so much. I enjoyed it.
Brent (43:28.884)
Christopher Wolk, thank you so much.