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The Storage Investor Show
From High School to Storage Investor to DeepRent with Hunter Webb
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DeepRent.ai
DESCRIPTION
Can AI manage your self-storage investment like a self-driving car? Hunter Webb, the visionary behind DeepRent.AI, shares how his groundbreaking storage management software is transforming the property management landscape.
Through Hunter's story, you'll understand the importance of financial literacy and creative thinking in achieving long-term goals.
Hunter shares his journey as a young entrepreneur navigating the future of AI in storage, and the power of networking with fellow investors.
Whether you're a seasoned investor or a budding entrepreneur, this episode will help you understand the future of storage facility management using AI technology.
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Hey everybody, welcome to the Storage Investor Show. My guest today is Hunter Webb. He's the founder of DeepRentai. His family owns one storage facility. After buying that facility, they decided to pivot and focus on the software side of the business with DeepRentai, so I'm excited to talk about that. I'll have a link in the description for the website as well. But, hunter, welcome to the show. Thank you so much, chris. Yeah, man, so give us a little bit more about the background on that one facility and then why the pivot over to, uh, software.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so my story starts in high school with my dad coming to me. He's like I, one of my friends, told me that there's this part of real estate investing that it's like quite lucrative, like self-storage, and this is, you know, right before covid, andrative, like self-storage, and this is you know, right before COVID, and I'm like self-storage, like from Storage Wars, the TV show, and he's like, yeah, and after helping him do a little bit of research through LoopNet and you know, kind of finding an algorithm for how we want to approach buying a facility, we found maybe your classic facility in the market. It's an old retired couple. We found maybe your classic facility in the market it's an old retired couple. They had all the leashes on paper, all the payments collected through cash and checked, and they'd run it that way for like 10 years. And then we got it and the only way I could manage it and have time to do homework at night was using a software.
Speaker 2:And I realized that, especially with real estate software software, a lot of it is kind of like a car, is how I like to think about it.
Speaker 2:It's that to after you have the real estate property, you, you buy this car and you have to drive it yourself and you know you get the keys, that's your login and you kind of have to figure out how all the little instruments work.
Speaker 2:But what I realized is that a lot of people like that own properties. That's not their main job, you know they're doing other things, or maybe they just want to focus on buying more properties rather than the day to day management side. Especially with property managers costing, you know, $50,000 a year, it's out of reach of some people. With property managers costing, you know, $50,000 a year, it's out of reach of some people. So what we've done is we've envisioned a software that is a self-driving car. It'll just once you add in the settings of your property, you know the legal requirements, it'll drive your property for you and you can just check in each month to see the revenue that's being collected. But every kind of repetitive task, as well as some of the more complex tasks that have to do with coordinating with onsite personnel, is handled by the software.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Okay, so you were. You developed it in order to solve a problem, which was the fact that you were in school and didn't have time to keep like close tabs on this property, and that's a lot of people face. They had, where they work, a full-time job or whatever. I just had John Farling on literally before you.
Speaker 1:His episode may have already been out by now, but that's his story. He was working a nine to five. He found one and then a second facility, but wasn't able to quit his full-time job yet until he got to his third. So he had to kind of manage things as best he could, you know, after hours, on the weekends or whatever, and it gets pretty difficult to do that. So so that's why you created deep rentai. So what we won't get into, like how you found that first facility and all that kind of stuff, right? So I'm sure you know you made some phone calls or whatever, talked to a broker, whatever the thing was. You guys got it financed and closed and, um, did you put your own money into it or did you get some friends and family money? How did?
Speaker 2:you, it was owner finance. Actually negotiated an owner finance.
Speaker 1:Oh nice, okay. Well then, let's talk about that for a quick second. Then how did you, how did you guys structure that owner financing?
Speaker 2:yeah, you know, I gotta give a lot of credit to my dad.
Speaker 2:I, I think it's I had never really known about that.
Speaker 2:That was even a possibility and maybe some people out there don't but you know a lot of these people are can be quite motivated to sell and the prospect of having to sell to someone who may or may not actually secure the mortgage, uh, could can be daunting for some sellers who'd rather just like make the deal happen. Um, so what you can do is is, you know, I think the main thing that stalks people is just not asking. You know, ask, ask if, if they're okay with owner financing. If they don't know it kind of explain, you can explore it, especially if you have like a track record, like me and my dad do, of previous kind of real estate investments. And so we structured it just like a mortgage, like we got the interest rate set up equivalent to kind of what a bank would do, and I would just transfer the money to the owners each month, kind of slowly pay it off, and then, once we sold that property before we bought our next one, we just paid them out with a balloon payment.
Speaker 1:Okay, great, so was it 100% owner financing.
Speaker 2:Oh, sorry, that's a really good point. I think it was 10% down, okay got it so 10%.
Speaker 1:I think it was 10% down. Okay, got it so 10% down. And what was the amount down? $50k. So we bought it for $500. Oh, nice, Okay, $500,000. How many units? Roughly 70. Oh, that's great man. That's actually a pretty good deal. It was a killer deal. It was a pretty killer deal. I mean, bro, just high-level math, that's a really good deal. So where is that deal located?
Speaker 2:That was in Florida, that was in a little town called the Villages. I'm a property whose new owner actually uses our software.
Speaker 1:You're joking right? A little town called the Villages, the Villages, Florida.
Speaker 2:Lady Lake yeah, that's huge, oh really. The village is Florida Lady Lake yeah, that's huge, oh really. You know what I got? To be honest, I've only visited it once.
Speaker 1:There's all kinds of things being revealed in this episode. All right, that's hilarious. You're like a little town called.
Speaker 2:Atlanta. So okay, when I visited it felt kind of small town, Maybe we were on the outskirts. Yeah, I mean it is Kind of small town, Maybe we're on the outskirts.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean it is, but the village is a huge development down there, so okay, got it.
Speaker 2:I want to apologize to all the people living in the villages.
Speaker 1:That's hilarious. Okay, so you bought that deal. Okay, so now I want to know where do you live?
Speaker 2:Yeah, where do you live? I was doing high school in Portland Oregon.
Speaker 1:So you live across the country and you found a deal in Florida like the complete opposite side, both weather and in geography. Okay, so, uh, how did you find that deal? Just?
Speaker 2:day in, day out on loop net. You know it was just kind of the time you put in is a time to get out, um and and yeah, like we had a broker in Florida that we had who's named Carrie, and she's amazing. You know we're still in contact with her to hopefully find more deals in the future. But I realized that you know some people can be like, oh, I got a broker, that's fine. But know that like, if you actually put in the work to you know helping them, look that they can. You can kind of guide them like, hey, I found this property, it looks pretty good that they can. You can kind of guide them like, hey, I found this property, it looks pretty good.
Speaker 2:And my dad is like guilty pleasure is that anytime he has free time he loves Lufnet. He's just on there and kind of, well, this property looks good. Maybe not many people kind of get a kick out of their free time on Lufnet, but it worked out for us. He would send me properties. It's like playing Fortnite. Yeah, worked out for us. Yeah, he would send me properties like playing fortnight, yeah, yeah I was like tell your kids to get off fortnight.
Speaker 2:Get on lufa that and uh and and he found the funny man yeah, he sent it to me. I kind of had a spreadsheet with an algorithm we used to determine how, how good we thought it was, you know, such as like population growth, um, you know kind of the cap rate, all that stuff, and we're like, wow, this deal is like almost Um. So we went after it and we were lucky to close.
Speaker 1:Okay, that's hilarious, all right. So you found it on a loop net. Was it a broker deal, if you recall, or was it just the seller listening to himself? It was a broker deal, broker deal, okay. So we reached out to the broker, got it under contract, seller financing, got it closed. Guys and gals listening, trust me, you can find deals on LoopNet. I found two myself. Here's the third one, and there's plenty of other people. Loopnet is not where deals go to die, so that's the saying in commercial real estate.
Speaker 2:Or changing the narrative.
Speaker 1:It's not true. Yeah, it's not always true, so really good, okay. So that was an interesting conversation. I was not expecting that. So really good, man, the little town called the Villages I've never heard of it. Okay, so are you in school, like right now as of this recording? Is that where you are?
Speaker 2:No, I just graduated university, so we sold the facility.
Speaker 1:Congratulations. Okay, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 2:We sold the facility in my second year of college, okay okay, got it.
Speaker 1:And so now you're, um, you graduated and you're are you working on deep rent? Uh, right now, full-time. What's that? What does that look like? Okay, got it, so this is like your baby. So you sold the facility. Uh, put that aside to focus on deep rent. Okay, so why? I'm a vc? All right, so why is your? There are plenty of other software packages out there, right? Uh, management software, uh, including storable, which is like the big 800 pound gorilla in the room. Why is deep rent different? How is it different and why is it competitive with those guys?
Speaker 2:yeah, you know what we're hoping is to build something that's almost apples to oranges. You know where the the advantage that I have and maybe we'll get to the topic more of like kind of gen z in my generation my perspective, and then real estate too is that I was born with an iphone in my hands. You know I have such a deep finance. Uh, you know technical literacy. Uh, for understanding. You know all these new ai tools coming out, which is. You know all these new AI tools coming out, which is, you know, a buzzword. Everyone's throwing around AI, this AI, that. But you know, since middle school I've been playing around with coding and building these algorithms and now that large language models have come out, you know we have these artificial intelligences that can reason for themselves, which is huge.
Speaker 2:And if you kind of conceptualize what management is, you know I think anyone listening to this podcast knows you know real estate once you've put in the hours and you know it. It isn't rocket science. You know like we're not doing anything groundbreaking, we're just really efficient managers making sure that you know all the I's are dotted and T's are crossed and rent's collected each month, and if you have this artificial intelligence, like we've built that can actually manage, as a central part of the software, all the different pieces for you, then we're going to become a no-brainer as opposed to. You know the storables out there, the easy store solutions who, yeah, you can pay and they're going to allow you to collect right each month and look at your customers. But wouldn't you rather a self-driving car that, once you set it up, you don't even have to look at it?
Speaker 1:Okay. So if I were, if I'm listening to what you're saying, trying to summarize it, you're trying to build the Tesla right Of property management software. So, like you said, full self-driving. I get in the car, uh, I automate where I want to go, I tell it where I want to go and it kind of plots the course for me and tells me how to get there, shows me where it's going and if I need to make some adjustments along the way, I can grab the steering wheel and uh and do that. And so obviously I don't need to take a nap and you shouldn't take a nap on your self-driving experience.
Speaker 1:No, no, don't do that. But and you shouldn't take a nap when you're managing property either. So you got to keep an eye on some things. But what you're telling me, it sounds like okay. If I plug in, I have a hundred units.
Speaker 1:Let's just pretend I have a hundred units and they're all getting charged a hundred bucks a month for rent for 10 by tens. Just to keep it easy. The market as out there and the market for rent on a 10 by 10 comparable unit is 110. So I'm guessing, if I told the software my current NOI and if it knows my current NOI, my current whatever, and I tell it I want my goal to be whatever by the end of the 10% increase, by the end of the year, or match the market or whatever. It plots the course for me, tells me when it means when rent should be going up, and then it actually does those things, automatically Sends out the notices and all that stuff and I can keep it. I need to keep visual, I'm sorry, minimal eyes on the thing. It just does it. Is that what you're building?
Speaker 2:Yeah, as well as something that you can let it know kind of what onsite personnel you have maybe a landscaper and a handyman I think are kind of the minimum for any property and it can actually communicate with them. You know, hey, I just want to confirm that you're good for your usual date of X date to do the thing, and they'll respond to the AI and say, okay, we've made a confirmation. And then after the job they'll say, hey, can you confirm that this job was complete? So that shows up in the software too. It's okay, look, we confirmed that your handyman came in, cleaned out this unit and that your landscaper worked, as well as exactly what you said.
Speaker 2:We plot a course for the kind of revenue trajectory you want. But I think the important thing is that that course is a lot of nuance, just like driving a car right, what if there's a wreck in the middle of the highway? We're not going to just drive right through. That, it's impossible. So the AI is going to be hey, we've plotted this course, but it looks like based on market conditions. Right now maybe it's the winter, not many people are moving, it looks like we might have to wait to raise rents or we're not really confident that it'll have the impact that we want. And each year and years it collects more data about your facility. It's going to understand what's the seasonality, what works and hasn't worked and what can we do in the future just to continue to make it stronger. You know so. It's the equivalent of just you know an amazing property manager that's going to get better every year.
Speaker 1:That's interesting. Okay, you know, what's funny is I talked to a company kind of like the similar along the similar lines, like if you could do underwriting where and I know that financials are all over the place, every place is different how they run their, keep their books, so you'd have to do some inputs on your own right and kind of decipher the data. But once you have it all in the right buckets, you know some sort of automated underwriting which there's a company out there that's going to launch here shortly it might be already out by the time this podcast is out. Had the founder on of that but almost like an AI assistant within Excel, you know, to help you actually complete the underwriting process and make a decision on a deal or not. This sounds kind of like that. Is it's going to be your assistant manager in essence? That's what I'm gathering.
Speaker 2:I couldn't be off there but that's what I'm kind of gathering. It's the AI assistant manager.
Speaker 1:Okay, got it All right, so that makes sense, man. So, okay, if I'm an owner let's say I own that mom and pop and I own a hundred units and they're all 10 by 10, just to make it easy, what is the process look like? Let's say I'm interested in your software and guys by the way, this is not sponsored by DeepRent at all. Hunter just reached out to me and we had a great conversation and go from there. And I don't want to forget what you said about going back to Gen Z and their outlook on finance and real estate, et cetera. So let's get back to that here in a second. But if I'm an owner and I want to onboard, let's say I'm ready to go with DeepRider, I'm curious, or whatever. What does that process look like to onboard someone?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So what we're going to do is we have a team that initially is just human touchpoint. We say, hey, can we get the information on your unit sizes, your customers and their contacts, and then we'll handle all the getting all the information in there for you and actually, if you're even okay with it, we'll reach out to each customer personally and make sure they're good with their account. That's the you know very honestly, that's the main friction. It's just getting your tenants over so that they're set up and then the easy part is let's implement the settings of your facility.
Speaker 2:How long after a unit is delinquent do you auction? Do you want us to start setting up these things at auction websites? Who should the program contact for things handled on sites like locking units and how many days after a unit is late would you like the unit to be locked out? Of course, in compliance with your state laws, that's up to you to make sure that you set that up in the software. But once all that's set up it's hard to really think about anything really out of the ordinary you need to handle outside of maybe an hour or two per week for something, you know, really strange or a really unique request that needs the human touch.
Speaker 1:That's really good. Okay, so it sounds like you're right. The transferring of the tenant information is the most difficult part and oftentimes we have to get help from storable or whatever.
Speaker 2:They handle that entire process, because you could have 600 units, yes no-transcript graph showing you kind of what, what are the raises we estimate needs to be happen or occupancy growth to achieve that, uh, and then all the manager has to do is just wait for updates, you know, kind of course corrections, um, from the ai being.
Speaker 2:Hey, you know, it's it. It seems like we're having a really slow month. Uh, we recommend maybe we can add these extra things, maybe we'd spend a little bit more marketing or we we start a new promotion to kind of bolster it. But I think the key thing is that we're not selling a solution that is full self-driving yet, you know, because you shouldn't take a nap in it yet. But what we are selling a solution is that assistant property manager that's going to handle the majority of the tasks that burn your time, which compounds the more properties you have. Like you said, for 600 tenants, if you have to answer an email for each tenant, even one per month, that's brutal. That's so much time if you're trying to work that nine to five too, and we want to make sure that's all taken care of by automated processes that you can be really confident in.
Speaker 1:Okay, really good man, I appreciate that. So how let's talk real quick and pivot to the Gen Z conversation? So that was one of the things you mentioned earlier, ron like talk about that for a quick second and just the outlook on tech and real estate, et cetera.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I went home recently, two months back, to the little US tour visit, you know, the grandparents, the parents, and I'm sitting in a car with one of my really close friends from high school and he's talking to me. He's like I'm really, I'm really excited about, you know, working this job as a developer. I'm going to make, you know, 80k a year but, man, like, after I have to pay rent and taxes and and everything, you know it's going to be really hard to get a promotion to a place where I'm really happy and making the amount of money that I want to be really comfortable. He's my age. What I realized there is so many kids my age are one struggling to even find work. Sometimes, you know, if you read about the job market, I have so many friends fresh out of college, so smart, such great degrees, but just the job market is just not there for them. They just can't find anything.
Speaker 2:And what we're taught from a young age is this one track mindset of, like this rat race, where you find a career, you make as much money as you can to build this pile and then you retire and hope that that pile is large enough that you can survive on it and then you retire and hope that that pile is large enough that you can survive on it.
Speaker 2:And I'm sitting next to my friend and I go. Well, dude, even if you're worried about your rent, what about just buying? You know a little complex and you could rent out all the other apartments and you could just live in one for free. He's like what do you mean? I don't even, I wouldn't even be able to do that. You have to have a special license or something right? I'm like no man, you can buy it yourself and it doesn't matter how much it is or how much money it makes, as long as just the numbers add up. So at the end of the month you're covering your mortgage and it'd be probably around the same per month as you pay for renting, as long as you can just figure out a deposit. And I just saw the lights go out of the eyes, just like, oh my gosh, I can't believe there's this other way, like there's this option to really have money, as they say, money working for you, which?
Speaker 2:is just you know the fact that once you sleep, you can wake up and, you know, have more profit than you want to sleep with, which, I think blows people away and Gen Z a lot of. How did you figure that out?
Speaker 1:I mean, how did you figure?
Speaker 2:that out. I was 14 and my dad made me read Rich Dad, poor Dad and I'm like. And now?
Speaker 2:I know it's a joke, it's like it's a purple, but I think the and I'm like now I know it's a joke, it's like it's a purple, but I think the main point I want to make is that all these Gen Zers out here, you guys have this amazing marketing literacy already. Like we're on TikTok, you know most of the day, we know what ads are, we know how to make content, we know what drives engagement, just innately. It's like second nature to us. But I think the main thing that's lacking is understanding that there are other pathways to financial self-sufficiency, as opposed to just that degree just trying to grow your career by getting creative in real estate yeah, 100 man, that's that's.
Speaker 1:you said you read that at 14. So I may have my son read that. Uh, he's just turned 13. So maybe next year, just to have all of them read something to that effect. Um, that's great man, it's good information, I do think. Yeah, you guys know, like my kids too. Behind me, if you're watching on YouTube, if you're listening to the podcast, you can see this. Go to YouTube and check it out. But behind me are two screens, two monitors, because my kids we like to play. Literally. I'll play Fortnite with them.
Speaker 1:I grew up playing some video games. I don't play that much, but I'll play with them sometimes and they love it, and so I started a YouTube channel for them for gaming and all that. It's like what you said about kind of being born with an iPhone or an iPad in your hand. It's so true and it's something that we're not going to get away from. I know that there is a. You know we don't let them on tech all the time, of course, because it's not good. You know they read a lot. They do a lot of other things besides play games, but the point is the same, like this is. My generation was too, but this is even more right and the next generation will be even more of a tech generation.
Speaker 1:So the AI systems and all that is really interesting. I just started playing around with Perplexity not too long ago, like two, three weeks ago, and it's a great AI system, a little different than ChatGPT. I've been using that for a while, but Perplexity is great if you need to put an article together or something like that or cite all the sources. I don't know if you use it or not, but it's a fantastic AI. I'm curious to know what drives kind of the decision making. So you know it's like an assistant property manager, like what kind of helps it think through the process? How is it trained? Are you using and pulling information from some other AI systems, which is totally fine, like just how does it, how does it work and make some of those decisions and suggestions?
Speaker 2:Yeah, the main thing is that you have to reduce hallucinations. You know which is where right. Like you don't want your AI thinking, oh, we should raise the rents, like X crazy amount to that. It just executes on the system and you're like what is going on?
Speaker 1:Like yeah, I can't even tell how many units.
Speaker 2:We have Um, which is which is a lot of you know. It's it's a little bit of our secret sauce, so I can't the most all the details, but it's a lot of just that's okay. Yeah, it's a lot of recursively having it check itself. Um with the key. You know, I think very smart people be able to put this together.
Speaker 2:And there's some really good research over at cornell about multi agent systems, um, which is the fact that all large language models have the ability to ask themselves questions and answer questions. So you can have one large language model, look at the work of the other one and go, hey, does this look like it's correct? And if you do that enough and you have enough collaboration, then you get really, really accurate results. It's a little more expensive and time-consuming to set up the actual processes, but what it means is that, instead of just overwhelming one person, you kind of replicate the fact that no company just has one employee, right? It's hard to do everything at once and have all that information in your head, and it's the same for large language models. We can't expect one poor AI working by itself to be able to take this cascade of information and churn out the right decision.
Speaker 1:That's excellent, man. If I had a small facility, I would use it. I would give it a shot because I understand the AI, I understand chat GPT and I realize that perplexity pulls from chat GPT and so that makes some of it pulls from chat GPT. So that makes sense of what you're saying. I like that. I'm really really curious about it and how it functions and I would love to use it. So, uh, I'm gonna go find a small facility and then we'll use deep and we'll get on, get those kids on loop, that you're gonna find a great deal that's right, man.
Speaker 1:Before you play fortnight tonight, we need to get on loop net and filter some searches here, so I have good leads if you want V-Bucks, you better get those leads.
Speaker 1:Okay, they always bother me. Can I get some V-Bucks? If a new skin came out, I was like, no, you cannot. I know, yeah, can I get some cash on cash? Anyway, all right, let's wrap everything up here with the final four questions. Hunter, actually real quick, how old are you? Because you talked about your friends, your age how old are you? I'm 22. Nice man, so you're right in the beginning.
Speaker 2:So I can envision.
Speaker 1:I can envision where a thing where you know you're going to build this out and how long is it. Have you been building it out now?
Speaker 2:We've spent a year building this out and starting January will be the full release of the whole AI system.
Speaker 1:Oh sweet, okay. So, and then do you have I'm sorry I wasn't gonna get to the final four but a couple other quick questions here. So do you have a team employees or like, how does that? Like, are you venture funded right now? Like, how does it? How does it work? We're funded.
Speaker 2:we got a team and we even have, you know, some amazing customers that have helped test the software so far and give us, you know, feedback every day on features that they want to make their experience better.
Speaker 1:So yeah, we already got customers the process.
Speaker 2:The main thing is just to kind of hit the market, you know, get the ground running and grow this as fast as possible.
Speaker 1:Okay, really good. Are you going to be at some of the uh storage shows and all that? Or what's the, what's the plan? Yeah, look out for me at the storage conventions next year.
Speaker 2:Um, we plan to maybe maybe do some really interesting art exhibits outside of the entrance, you know, uh, maybe, poke fun a little bit at some of the competitors, at being outdated. So look at some. Look for some avant-garde stuff in Deep Red, you know what you got to.
Speaker 1:You have to differentiate yourself and you have to have. Justin Welsh talks about this, he's a prolific writer on LinkedIn and just building brand and all that stuff, and he talks about contrarian thoughts and ideas and also he doesn't use this word, but it's like divisive. I forgot what it's called Strong opinions. Strong opinions on something because nobody follows or people really want to follow someone who says, hey, this is good, but this other thing is good too. Exactly, you know, like that's kind of a middle of the road opinion and I like to do that because I see the pros and cons of both.
Speaker 1:But I realized I got to change my mindset. So, even for you guys I'm not trying to advise or anything like that, but I mean, if you got to, like, go after your competition, they're going to come after you too, but you kind of got to, you have to elbow your way in, otherwise nobody's going to care. Nobody will care, right, because we see tech come and go and, oh, this new lock just came out. Wow, you know, is it another Bluetooth system? No, it's a little bit different because, yeah, we use you know whatever to open the lock.
Speaker 1:Oh cool, can people break in? Sometimes, you know, like okay, you didn't tell us that part, you know. So, yeah, you know, you got to kind of like differentiate yourself and bring out your strong points, which is I try to do that. It's not my personality, so I can understand some people who have problems doing that. But I realized with the podcast there's 50,000 podcasts out there that you can listen to at any point in time, you know, and there's maybe 10 in storage, and so how do I differentiate myself? And that's something I'm trying to work through too. So, just to be open.
Speaker 1:But, dude, I would love to see it Like whatever you guys have have about the strong opinions you gotta, you gotta, yeah, you gotta do it. So, hey, okay. So talk to us real quick. What's a career highlight for you and, uh, what did you learn through that experience?
Speaker 2:yeah, career highlight uh is going to be selling that first facility. Um, you know, seeing that signature on the line, uh, we were able to sell it for double the price in two years. Uh, because it was like fully automated. Um, and I think what it really taught me is that it's a really respect the process. You know, sale. I was eager to sell because I'm like this is so cool, like we get to make profit, and it took longer than I initially thought because I was kind of naive, but after I learned to kind of like respect the process, you got to find the right seller or sorry, right buyer.
Speaker 1:Then you just get an amazing outcome and you get to see all your work kind of come to fruition. Excellent, man, that's a that's a really excellent point, actually really excellent point. What was a career low point for you and what did you learn through that experience?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the first month with that first facility, you know in my mom's basement making calls to these new customers who thought it was Craig calling them because I am now like asking for rent from me. I'm like, you know, I, we, my dad, we bought this facility. You know I'm going to be helping set you up on a software it's like. Well, call back in a week if you're still serious that's hilarious yeah, but it took.
Speaker 2:It took a little hard work, but I learned that if you really just like, keep at the grindstone, people, people start to respect it. They're like okay, this, this kid doesn't give it up. He started to send me mail, so I guess I got enough pay up.
Speaker 1:I guess he's real. The only thing that could be worse I could think of is if you had, like a Indian accent or something like that and like you were calling from you know not recall it from some unknown number. Uh, that would be even worse, Uh, okay.
Speaker 2:I will also man well that's I don't advise using, maybe like a Russian extension on your phone number. I don't think that's next year we're going to get really.
Speaker 1:Yes, you'll have to rent.
Speaker 2:Please send rent to Moscow. It's next week, that would be pretty rough. You'll never get your rent if you do that I don't think you're going to get your rent.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's awesome. Man Hunter, can you recommend a good business or investing resource for the listeners?
Speaker 2:I Hunter, can you recommend a good business or investing resource for the listeners? I'm going to go outside of the box here because I bet you've done so many episodes. I've listened to them. I really like them. I think everything that's been amazing has already been shared. What I would say is just talking to fellow owners and friends you have that own facilities, just like you do, with an open mind and just kind of seeing how they run their facilities, even if they're small, know like yours, because I bet you get so and I have gotten so many unique insights to how even guys you know aren't massively successful but just running the small ones. Um, now that I'm talking to so many that are using our software and how they do it, I've just been eye-opening like if I had to it all again, I'd have so many more tips and tricks to use.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, man. That's good. That's why I'm trying to put together some sort of group something. I'm trying to figure it all out. Right now we can talk about that offline, but I'm just trying to think through the next steps for me.
Speaker 1:But you're right, like I just had John Farling on talking from, he owns like 14 facilities all himself and that's fantastic and it doesn't matter. We were talking on the episode. It doesn't matter size and all that, so that doesn't matter. What matters is you know the living, the life that you want to live, and what does that look like for you? But the way that he runs them is interesting. It's. You learn a ton by me doing the podcast and hopefully the listener as well. Listening to different people, you get a little bit of that right when you're like, oh, this person does it this way or that person does it that way, and here's something I can implement, and so it's encouraging to be around some of those conversations, even if you're just kind of listening like on a podcast. So really good. Man. Hunter, how can people get in contact with you to learn more about deeprentai? I'm sure they can visit the website. No-transcript.