Supply Chain Saga
Supply Chain Saga
#3 - Jordan Brown
Welcome to this episode, where I have the pleasure of sitting down with Jordan Brown, a member of the fourth generation of the Brown family - the founders of NFI Industries. Together, we delve into the fascinating and storied 90-year history of NFI Industries, and explore the exciting opportunities that lie ahead in the ever-evolving world of supply chain.
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Mark Taylor:
Welcome to another episode of Supply Chain Saga. I'm your host, Mark Taylor, and joining me today is Jordan Brown. Jordan is the oldest fourth generation member of the Brown family who founded NFI Industries over 90 years ago. Jordan has worked in all aspects of the business and is known for his innovative and forward-thinking perspective. Get ready to learn about the fascinating history of NFI and gain insight into where Jordan sees the industry heading. Let's begin. First of all, thank you very much for being here. Enjoy our conversations anyway, but being able to pick your brain about all about logistics is exciting. Why don't you just introduce yourself, give me your background, how'd you get into logistics?
Jordan Brown:
Okay, so my name is Jordan Brown and I've arguably been in supply chain logistics my entire life. I come from a family business that coincidentally, we just celebrated our 90th anniversary this past week. Started by my great-grandfather, his name was Israel Brown. My foray into the logistics supply chain space, after college we have a rule within the family that if you want to come work for the business, then you have to go work for somebody else first for a couple years. I was the Guinea pig, I was the first one. I'm the oldest of the next generation, so I went and I decided that a natural kind of progression into the supply chain logistics space would be industrial real estate because that is also a component to our business, which kind of differentiates us from our competitors in a way. Maybe we can get into that a little later, but I worked for Cushman & Wakefield for about three years after I came out school in Dallas, where I'm from originally. It's where the business is based.
NFI Industries is based in now Camden, New Jersey. It started in Vineland, moved over to Camden. I'm sorry, moved over to Cherry Hill, and then eventually now we are in Camden. So after the three years that I worked for Cushman & Wakefield, we had just acquired a company in Texas. It was called Hunsaker. Their biggest customer was Neiman Marcus, and at the time, we didn't have any formal integration plan to integrate companies that were acquired. I think at that time, now I'm talking 2006 maybe I'm at. Yeah, I'd say 2006, 2007. We were probably a couple hundred million company at that time, nowhere close to where we are today, but we didn't have an acquisition strategy. We didn't know how to integrate companies into the NFI culture, which is kind of our secret sauce.
So I had already left Cushman. I didn't have a direct path of where I wanted to go. So my dad said, "Why don't you come and just don't be an official employee of NFI, but just come help out with this transition of bringing this new company in?" And there's one of the components of this acquisition was a truck leasing company. I don't know how much you know about truck leasing, but it was probably the worst job I've ever had. Easily the worst job I ever had because you're going and you're knocking on doors trying to lease trucks to different types of... And you're up against Penske and Ryder every single place that you go. That's how Penske and Ryder got started was through truck leasing. Well, I think that's how they got started. But at the time at least, that was their biggest money maker, biggest division.
So I did that for about six months and I just couldn't take it anymore, and I said, "Listen, dad. I want to come into the business. I don't want to start this way." I go, "Let's find a good entrance for me into the company." So that's when I officially became a member of NFI and started in the sales division working with an individual for our company who had been in the industry for, man, at least 40 years at that time, or now he's probably been in for 40 years. Back then he was 30-plus, 30-plus year veteran of the industry. And going around and meeting with customers and shaking hands and looking them in the eye. He's old school versus today you have all the technology and the internet and the Zoom and all that, but back then it was a lot of... I say back then. Man, now I feel super old when I say stuff like that. And it still means a lot to get in front of somebody and shake their hand and look them in the eye. It does make a huge difference.
So that was a good kind of entrance into the business. So from that point, I wanted some operational experience or I wanted to understand the distribution business. I had no experience with that, just besides working with commercial real estate on the industrial and just knowing the buildings. I didn't know the operational part that well. So the president of the distribution group at the time, to his credit, said, "Listen, we're really growing out in Southern California. I want to send you out to Southern California. I don't want you to be in New Jersey or anywhere that will make you feel like your last name is Brown," and that was one of the best decisions that anyone made for me. He definitely had my best interest at heart.
So he sent me out to California and I started unloading trailers at our HanesBrand facility in Perris, California, and did that for probably the first three to four months that I was there. Probably one of the most fun periods of time I've had since I worked in distribution to this day. Nobody knew what my last name was, nobody knew who I was related to or anything like that. It was just pure work. It was learning. You got to learn from the bottom up, and so even though I did progress fairly quickly through the operational hierarchy, if you want to call it, it was mandated that I start at unloading trucks.
Mark Taylor:
Did you get it when he said, "I don't want you to go somewhere-"
Jordan Brown:
No.
Mark Taylor:
At the time, did it come off as a slight or an insult at the time, or was it just...
Jordan Brown:
If he would've said, "I'm sending you to Green Bay, Wisconsin, or some..." And I'm sorry Packer fans and I'm sorry Green Bay. I don't mean anything by that. But I mean, some obscure type of market, I'm sure that I would've had an issue, maybe more of an issue with it. I'm not sure. Chances are I would've had some sort of issue with it, but because it was Southern California, there was no issue. There was no issue. So I didn't ask any questions and I trusted at the time that he had my best interest at heart. So it worked out pretty well.
I stayed in Southern California in the distribution space for about a year, and after that year, there was an up-and-coming industry that today is a pretty major industry, or at least turning into one, and that's the renewable energy and solar specifically, and being based in New Jersey, there were... For whatever reason, New Jersey, who has the reputation of being more of a dirty state as it comes from energy and some other things, decided for one reason or another they were going to be the leaders in renewable energy in the US for state incentives. There were some federal incentives that were out, but the only way you could pencil out these deals was through state incentives as well, and New Jersey by far had the most aggressive incentives that they were offering.
So I had a partner at the time who I knew from college that was not already involved in the business, he was outside, but him and I put a business plan together and presented it to my uncles and my dad, and at that point they said, "Hey, present this to the executive team. Let's see what kind of feedback we get, and then we'll determine what we want to do from there." So we presented to them, and within 48 hours or so, they said, "Hey, let's give this a shot, but Jordan, you're going to have to move to New Jersey and run it if you want us to invest in this and to kind of create this division off of NFI."
Mark Taylor:
So let's pause for a sec. So you went 2006 in Texas?
Jordan Brown:
I graduated 2003. So 2004, 2005, 2006 in Texas.
Mark Taylor:
And then that was the integration and then also the knocking on doors part that was just...
Jordan Brown:
Yeah, yeah. Not to say I don't like to knock on doors. I mean, that's what industrial real estate is too is brokerage is knocking on doors. That's not what it was, but yes.
Mark Taylor:
Okay. So 2006, 2007, you're out in Southern California, and you do that for about a year?
Jordan Brown:
I do it for a year only because... No, that was more 2007, 2008, and I only do it for a year because once this idea came up and it penciled out on paper, it was, "Okay, we have enough confidence to invest in this, but only if you move out and run it right." And here I am, what am I, 27 at the time, or something like 26, 27?
Mark Taylor:
Anywhere. Time's irrelevant.
Jordan Brown:
Yeah, right. So I decided, I said, "Hey, let's give it a shot." So I moved out to Jersey in 2009, and that was my first introduction into creating renewable energy and creating a separate business entity that had the same parent company as all the other divisions, but it was a separate entity from that.
Mark Taylor:
SO it's effectively intrapreneurship where it's like you're within a company, but it's like this is a startup.
Jordan Brown:
Yes, it's within a company. It was a bubble that was within the company, but it was vertically integrated to what we already did, and what we ended up doing was financing and managing the construction of solar facilities on top of our warehouses that we already owned or that we had existing leases in, and then sold that energy that we produced from the solar on the roofs to ourselves in the facility to save on power, energy.
Mark Taylor:
And how did that go? You moved back to you to New Jersey, and what was that like?
Jordan Brown:
So it was a big change of pace from California, yet luckily I'd only been out here for a year at that time, so I hadn't fallen too much in love with California yet, didn't know enough about it to fall in love with it, but I had gone to school up in the northeast about an hour away from where the headquarters for the company was, or was at that time. So that transition wasn't too difficult, and the fact that I had family that worked in the business with me and then also lived in just in that general area helped out a lot. And I had the existing friend network because I had gone to college up there, so it was a lot easier of a transition than it could have been.
Mark Taylor:
Sure. So how was the transition from you going from unloading trailers and being really in the distribution side of the business to now being completely different role, still within NFI, but I mean now it's like it's a completely different skillset that you're having to tap into to do the renewables.
Jordan Brown:
It was bittersweet just because of the fact that I knew how big of a piece the distribution was for our business, and I wanted to learn about as much as I could in that space, but this was just too big of an opportunity, or maybe not too big of one, but too enticing of an opportunity to go out and try to do something on your own and build up. It wasn't a no-brainer, but it was something that was very attractive to me.
Now, the problem was that with not most things in my life, but with a lot of things in my life, I end up thinking too far ahead, and we were probably way too early on the solar because now we're talking 2009, 2010 is when we started this, and at the time, just as reference, the cost per watt to build solar was around, I would say, six to $7 a watt, which just to give you a comparison today, you're well under a dollar. So it was so new at that time that you didn't have the economies of scale, you didn't have the market to really benefit from being one of those first movers into the space, and it was completely dependent on government incentives.
Mark Taylor:
And then that's my next question was were the incentives enough to offset that, or was it just you started doing it, and you started getting some success with the incentives, and then they took them away? What was the-
Jordan Brown:
No, so it's a good question. So the incentives were enough, otherwise we wouldn't have got into the business to begin with. One thing about my family is they're very calculated. If the numbers prove out something, they'll do it. If the numbers don't prove out something, they're not going to do it. They're not going to just take flyers here and there sometimes, I guess, based on gut feel, but not when the numbers, there's nothing there to support it. And the question... I'm sorry, the question was?
Mark Taylor:
So were the incentives enough?
Jordan Brown:
Oh, right. So the incentives were enough, but they were too good. They were too good enough, if you want to say. So my partner and I at the time, there was a cap on this program, and there was no really good way to determine how much solar was built out there already, or that was under construction to know about the supply and demand of these incentives and that aspect of it. So we thought that it was a good idea to hire some kids out of college. New Jersey's a big state, but it's not a huge state. So I think we hired four or five kids that didn't really know what they wanted to do, but wanted to collect a paycheck kind of deal, and broke the state up into five grids and had them drive the state and into the areas we knew that there were major developments going on, and try to get as much information as we possibly could.
It's 2011 at this time, 2012, somewhere in that range, and you take for granted that was 10 years ago at this point and how much data collection has changed in those years, especially in a new industry where no one really knew anything about it. So we calculated that you needed about a billion dollars' worth of investment into just the New Jersey market in order to really affect what they call the SRECs or the incentives that make this thing pencil out. And we thought we were safe given the billion dollar number. We just did not see that coming into the market so quickly. We decided to take more risk on the stock market than we did selling forward, just like you would in the other commodity or so, and what we didn't anticipate was the Chinese money coming into the US, and even at that though, we didn't see a billion dollars coming in, and they just blew through it way more than a billion dollars.
I mean, it was like once they figured out what we had already figured out, it was like a gold rush to get to New Jersey and start building solar, mainly because of the tax incentives that came with it, but that was the beginning of the end for me just because it got to the point where, okay, it doesn't look like we're going to kill it on this solar thing, and we have these core businesses that are sitting there that I don't know much about. And now I'm 30 years old or I'm 31 years old at this time, and I'm saying to myself, "Okay, you didn't fail, but you didn't hit a home run, so the smart thing to do would be to go back and learn the core businesses so that you know enough to be dangerous to help lead this company in the future."
Mark Taylor:
Yeah. I still think about it though. I mean, whether it's within a company, whether it's going out and starting something outside of a company, going and raising capital and everything like that, just the tools required and the way you have to learn to think when you're doing something that's new is invaluable, whether that's what you continue to do with yourself or not. So I think although it wasn't a hit out of the park, I would imagine that the way you honed some skills during that time has probably been very, very valuable in ways that you don't even fully appreciate.
Jordan Brown:
Absolutely. Absolutely. And like I said, not to say it was a failure necessarily, but people need to fail. People need to struggle in order to see that other side of the coin and to have that additional layer of motivation to succeed, and reflecting and looking back at it, I think that that was the first piece of that for me.
Mark Taylor:
So now it's 2010, 2011?
Jordan Brown:
No, it's 2010, 2011, and let's see, I go into operations, go back into operations, but stay in the northeast, stay in that Jersey, Philadelphia area. I'm living in Philly. It's tough being a Cowboy fan living in Philadelphia, being born and raised in Dallas, but I figured out a way to do that for the years that was there.
Mark Taylor:
That was when they had McNabb, I believe.
Jordan Brown:
It was McNabb. It was the era when the Cowboys were just horrendous. I think we went through 10 quarterbacks in five years until we got to Romo, and of course the Eagles were steadfast with Donovan and they'd been going to NFC championship games, and it was tough being a Cowboy fan in Philly around that time. It's still tough being a Cowboy fan, but that's besides the point. Yeah, I'd say 2011, 2012 or somewhere in that range now, I decide I want to go back into distribution and really learn that business. Our headquarters at the time was located in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, South Jersey, and I started working for a gentleman who had been with our company for 20-plus years at the time, and we have a saying at NFI called Bleed Blue, and he bled blue and was a great mentor in that aspect, really in all aspects of distribution. So I worked under him, he put me in charge of this account called PET360, which was an online food delivery company, and I just kind of had to figure it out.
But what I recognized right away was how much I enjoyed the pace and you being in distribution know as well that pace is just... I mean, you have to keep up and no two days are the same. You come in and we're essentially firefighters, you're just putting out fires all day. It's all organized chaos, although you try to make it as least chaotic as you possibly can. But it was fun because it was my first kind of opportunity to manage people. Since it was an e-com business, it was very fast and I got to interact with the customer, and so I went from supervisor to operations manager to GM and then ultimately to director where I was in charge of a couple different facilities in the northeast. I think I had four maybe at that time that I was responsible for. And then we started to do business with a little company that you may have heard of called Amazon, and we had one location with them and they were ready to sign up for the second location, which was going to be in Perris, California.
Our management team or our leadership team could have gone out about it a couple different ways, but at the time I was single, I don't have kids, I had the freedom to go wherever I wanted to and I remembered Southern California and how great it was, and so I raised my hand and I said, "Send me to Southern California. I'll open up the Amazon operation." So moved out to Temecula because at the time I figured that was the best closest location to Perris. That lasted about six months before I realized that I had zero social life out in Temecula, California. So opened up the Amazon operation, it was about a eight, 900,000 square foot facility, learned a ton, and then at some point went... Once that had kind of got to the point where I said, "Okay, I understand distribution now. What's next?"
And what was next was a newly formed group, I think this is right, I think this was my next step, a newly formed group called the account management team, which most of our competitors had at that the time, but we were starting to really grow. So it was kind of a good in interim step or just next step in helping build a group, even though I was very adamant that I did not want to run this group because I knew I was not going to be there for the long-term, but I wanted to experience what we were creating, wanted to be a contact for our major customers, and so I had about four or five of our top 20 customers that I was responsible for at that time, and that's what I did up until recently.
Mark Taylor:
So kind of leads into one of the things I was curious about. At what point, because of course Amazon started in the '90s and they opened up their third-party seller program, I think it was around 2006, and so people started utilizing their network, their logistics arm as... I mean, I like to refer to it as Amazon effectively crowdsourced all of their inventory because I mean, you never couldn't hire enough people, you couldn't deploy enough capital to know that somebody wants a Betty Boo sewing thimble, but there's somebody out there who says, "You know what? I think I've got this sewing thimble market," and they go and they figure out where to get them from and everything like that. So it's people that made Amazon the everything store. So at what point, and I guess it sounds it was around 2012, 2013, did you guys really start to understand the scope and start to get an inside view of how they were growing, and when did it really become apparent to you that, "Wow. This is going to be a massive deal."?
Jordan Brown:
Not until, I would say, two to three years before I moved out to California. So I would say that that was 2014-ish. I'd say 2013, 20 14. We had two sites with them at that time, and at one of them we failed. It was new business to us, and we made a strategic decision to shut down one of the two sites to just fully concentrate on one of them and just do it the best that we could to understand everything that we could and then go back to them and say, "Hey, look what we've done at this site. Now we understand and we get the business, give us some more sites."
So that was around 2014. So that was when I first was like, "Man, this Amazon group is going to be the next..." It already was the next big thing, but it was just going to rocket ship. But I can remember when I was working in the commercial real estate, right when I was leaving around 2007, I would say 2007 is when the first million square foot lease deal in Dallas had occurred with Amazon. So that was the first time I'd really heard about Amazon was at that time, but didn't get to really live it until I'd say 2014-ish or so.
Mark Taylor:
Right, and because of what you just described, your perspective on it may have been elsewhere, but you were in the industry leading up to, I mean, that 2006, 2007 period when everything was just gang busters, and then I think it was sometime September around 2008 when Bush was on the way out, signs into $700 million toxic asset relief program, and then all of a sudden everything starts hitting the skids, and I mean, you've got a unique perspective having come from that commercial real estate side. So what was it like, I guess, living through to the degree that... I mean, I also understand you were doing the solar thing and so you might not have been as focused, but what was the life like in warehousing in that 2008 directly until about 2011, 2012 when things started to really kind of rebound?
Jordan Brown:
Yeah, it was tough. I mean, the housing recession was right there, and if anyone tells you that they planned what they did, they're lying to you because you have to have some luck. You have to have some luck. There's no way that your plan is going to go exactly as you vision envisioned it when you first put it down on paper, right? And it just so happened that around that time we had a customer that you may have heard of called Trader Joe's, and we were one of their transportation providers and they had a big falling out with their largest transportation provider at that time, and since we already knew the business, and one thing that is recession-proof is food. Now, it might cost a lot more, but it's still recession-proof from a demand standpoint, excuse me. So we were just by luck able to sneak in and get a ton more business from Trader Joe's that then offset anything that was hurting on the distribution side because of the slowdown in the economy.
So I would say that you can make the argument that Trader Joe's saved us at that point. We're fortunate that I don't have another story to tell you here of how hard it was during that time. Now, part of is by design. You don't want all your eggs in one basket, you want to be diversified. I think that my grandfather did a great job in having that vision very early on, and I think that saved us, I think, at that point in time. We've been saved multiple times throughout our 90 years, but that was definitely a turning point for us for sure.
Mark Taylor:
Yeah. So what are the similarities? I mean, we've just come through this period where it's the pandemic hit. I call it the horse eye roll. If you've ever been around horses where it's like they're kind of trying to look back at what they're... Everybody's in that what's going on phase. And for us, logistics just threw gasoline on the fire and then kept on dousing it with gas for the last two-ish years. And then I think we're starting to see things get a little bit more competitive out there, especially we start looking at the East Coast and the whole port situation out there is funny because Long Beach and LA was all backed up and so everybody's like, "Ah, send it to the East Coast," and everybody's like, "Ah, the tsunami of containers coming to the East Coast are like nothing we've ever seen." And then Savannah now is, last time I checked a few weeks ago, is 45 containers back. They're rerouting them back to California.
It's kind of unfortunate that the East Coast flubbed the way they seemingly have, but without going down a rabbit hole too much and get back to the actual question, what are the similarities in that kind of 2008 and then in the come out to now we're kind of looking at the inverse where it's like it was the crazy up, and then now we're looking at a potential down?
Jordan Brown:
So I don't know if I was close enough to it in '08 to really understand like I am today where we stand and what our strategic path is, I guess, through the challenges that we're encountering, but I can say that in 2008, I think we had a lot less control than what we have now, and whether that be because of the ownership of the assets that we have. My grandfather always used to say, he had a bunch of different forms of this saying. I'm going to use he, but it could be he/she/they, whatever. He who has the labor wins the game. He who has the assets wins the game. He who has the space, the real estate wins the game. So I think that we're much better well positioned this time than we were in 2008 from a strategic standpoint. I don't know if I could really speak well to that just because I wasn't involved in the day-to-day strategy, high-level conversations that I am now.
Mark Taylor:
So kind of echoing your grandfather's perspective, is this a grandfather or great-grandfather?
Jordan Brown:
Grandfather.
Mark Taylor:
Okay, so your grandfather's perspective is I look at my balance sheet like, "What do we have?" It's like, well, when we originally had to actually post a deposit, I had to take out debt to do it, and then that paid off and then we paid it off. So we've got that in the bank, and then it's like you've got your racks, and so the racks are completely free and clear, and so you've got that, and then you've got this lease on this building for X number of years, and then that's a guarantee. So it's like it's kind of lining up those things to make sure that, okay, what do you really have, what's the worth, and what's your capacity to offer?
Jordan Brown:
He was a visionary. Can I go a little bit into the history? So I am the oldest of the fourth generation. We call ourselves G4. So original, right? G4. G1, if you'll want to call it, was my great-grandfather. He started with one coal truck back in 1932. That was really what really ingrained the respect of hard work into him was those early days. He's told stories. He's no longer with us. He passed in January of '20... Nope, January '21. January of '21. But he would tell us that his motivation, and I believe it to this day, was his fear of being poor because he remembers what it was like to sit down and have one can of beans for the five people in his family or everyone in his family and then not have to eat and not able to eat for...
So my grandfather's brother, tragically died in a accident at a fueling station where someone had lit a cigarette and just there was an explosion of some sort, and he died in a fire. And I think that my great-grandfather took it very... Both his parents, both my great-grandmother and my grandfather, I think, took it very hard as anyone I'm sure would, and it really jeopardized at that time the business going anywhere because it was my great-grandfather's... So my grandfather said, You know what? I'm going to pick up this ball. I'm going to run with it," and he really is the one that has set the foundation to where we are today. You know what a swan is? So he's our swan, right? My great-grandfather may have started it, but it's my grandfather who's the swan. He's the one that produced, enabled our family to have opportunity to grow and to have opportunity for generations to come. Now what we decide to do with that opportunity is a totally different conversation.
So now to go back a little bit, he saw that trucking has always been NFI's bread and butter. It's been near and dear to all of our hearts in the Brown family for generations. So that's how it started, as a trucking company. He quickly saw where all the trucks were going, they're going to warehouses, and so he said, "Well, you know what? I think I want to own those too, so that now the people that are in there are paying me rent and I can operate." And so then that's just kind of how it started is building off of that core business of trucking into the warehousing, and that's what really differentiates us from our competitors to this day is our real estate component and the fact that we own our real estate, and if we own it in a market, then great, and if we need to go lease, then we'll go lease as well. But it was that vertical integration that he saw early on that really started the trajectory to where we are today.
Mark Taylor:
So love that story. It's very similar to my grandfather. Same thing. Poor growing up in South Carolina, had to be signed off by his mother to join the Marine Corps at 16. They allowed that back then. And even when my grandmother and him were raising my mother and uncle, it was the same thing. One ham hock lasted the entire week, and it was leftovers and this and that. But they did some things that I still think about from a perspective. I mean, it's hard because you and I have so much opportunity to do whatever we want whenever we want. I mean, not whatever, but a lot of things. And I remember that for my grandparents, there was always a family vacation once a year to a lake in Arkansas, Bull Shoals Lake. Beautiful place. And then he would take the kids to the park every Sunday and their treat was getting a box of Crackerjacks once a week. And so you think about that's where we are today, and that's where generationally you came from. It's very interesting.
Jordan Brown:
So it's funny that you used that example of the vacation once a year because a lot of people... We're not supposed to be here. NFI is not supposed to be here today in the fourth generation statistically, right? I mean, I took a class in college called The Economy of Family Business, and that wasn't by accident, I made sure that I got into that class, and it said from first generation to second generation, it's maybe a 45, 50% survival rate of the company surviving. From second generation to third generation, it goes down to 7%, 8%, somewhere in that range, and then from third generation to fourth generation, it's like less than a percent, maybe less than 2%, somewhere in that range. So statistically, we shouldn't even be here right now, and I forgot where I was going with that. What was the original-
Mark Taylor:
Just my grandparents, the one vacation a year.
Jordan Brown:
So I give a tremendous amount of credit to my grandparents for making sure that every single year since I was in sixth grade, sixth or seventh grade, that the whole family went on vacation together once a year over Christmas and/or New Year's. And we never missed a year. And even though my father was in Texas, and that's where I grew up, and then my uncles and my grandfather were in the northeast, and so we didn't get to spend a lot of time with our cousins except for those trips every year, and even though there's the saying that my uncles and my dad to use that cousins aren't brothers. Cousins aren't brothers, your relationship dynamic is different between the two, they really cut down that... They fostered that relationship between the cousins of that fourth generation, my generation, at a very young age, which I think definitely contributes to our success today because we feel, I think, more like brothers and sisters than we do as cousins and brothers. And then my dad and my uncles have a great relationship with each other. It's worked out.
But that vacation every year, and it's funny that you mentioned your family. It's the same, I give them so much credit for... I didn't understand it at the time. I mean, hey, I'm very fortunate I get to go on vacation every single year over Christmas and New Year's, and yes, we recognize that we were fortunate and sure, they were fun, but we started to understand as a unit the importance of them after a while because family and business are very hard to commingle, and whether things were good at the time or things were bad at the time as kids, we never knew the difference. He was my grandfather, my dad was my dad, my uncles from my uncles. So they either did a really good job of hiding it or they just got along. Who knows? Who knows?
Mark Taylor:
It is interesting, the parallels, and then you also see I think the importance, and I think it was our family seemingly lost a little bit of... My grandmother was kind of the glue of her four sisters and then they had a bunch of cousins and kids. So I mean, our family reunions when we were very young were over Thanksgiving and there'd be 60 people there, and then the people that were actually putting that together really dwindled, and I haven't taken up the torch, and my brother certainly hasn't taken up the torch. So I mean, it's kind of sad when you reflect on it and well, I mean, it feels like there's like a... I don't want to say a degradation, but you feel the family unit kind of go by the wayside, and it's like you don't place the importance on it. So I won't put you on the spot, but hopefully you guys are still-
Jordan Brown:
We had great models and somebody has to take the lead. At the end of the day, that's what it comes down to. And we're not a family where everyone's looking to somebody else to take the lead and we're not a family where when somebody takes the lead, someone else is jealous of that person. We understand that we do things that's best for the family and best for the business because the family is the business and the business is the family.
Mark Taylor:
Yeah, that's an outstanding viewpoint, a fact that sounds like everybody's able to do it in harmony, and that's nice.
Jordan Brown:
Knock on wood, yes. Yeah. I mean, we still have many, many, many years to go, and the past has not come without its troubles and without its conflict, but it's how you navigate your way through them that really, I think, speaks volumes of who you are as a company and how you're able to survive.
Mark Taylor:
Absolutely. So switching gears a little bit, kind of a little bit more into the present. So if you're looking into your crystal ball, and you-
Jordan Brown:
It's a little cloudy right now. It's a little cloudy right now.
Mark Taylor:
Very cloudy. I think one of the things I definitely want to talk about with you is Amazon, and I mean, this is a direct threat to my business and my customer set. Actually, I want to clarify. I don't think that it's like I'm not going to curl up into a ball and go cry myself to sleep and tell everybody that, "Hey, I'm sorry, guys." That's not what you do as an entrepreneur. It's a threat to my business in its current state, and so I'm serving the horizon and saying, "Okay, how do I need to switch customers? Do I need to switch customers? Can I offer something that is of value and of enough value to continue to maintain the space and to maintain our customer set and everything like that?" So I'm thinking a lot about that, but I think you have probably some insights into the Amazon warehousing and distribution announcement because I mean, you guys are a 3pl as well. What's your perspective so far?
Jordan Brown:
So my perspective is that Amazon is just like everybody else where they're trying to figure out what's going on. They don't have all the answers, but I think from a 3pl standpoint, and we've talked about this a lot internally, is Amazon a competitor, is Amazon a customer? First of all, Amazon is a customer. Let me just go ahead and throw that out there. First and foremost, they're a customer of ours. What's the risk moving forward of how many eggs do we want to put in that basket? I see the fact that they don't have the answers as an advantage for us and only a value add in the grand scheme of things because that pendulum of a company that big swings very widely, and we saw it during the pandemic. As the pandemic starts, ramp up, ramp up, ramp up, ramp up, ramp up, ramp up. We need to take down as much square footage as we possibly can, we need to get ahold as much transportation as we possibly can. Everyone's ordering online, their stock had never been better. The value in society had never been better.
It was something that we needed at that time, and then inflation hits and to the pendulum starts to swing the other way. And that's what we're seeing now. That's what we've been seeing, I think, for the past month or two with them and all the announcements that have sure come out, but what I see there is opportunity. I see that they are always going to need 3pls for the reasons that we're talking about right now because 3pls have the flexibility of ramping up and ramping down quickly. They're typically on the leases of the real estate, they're the ones that go out and get the labor. It's not Amazon that goes out and gets that.
So I think that there's always going to be a role for 3pls within Amazon, the threat to that may be automation someday, and even at that, I'm sure there's going to be 3pls that specialize in automation that can cater to Amazon and their business, but I see it as opportunity for 3pls moving forward. Now, there's only so much opportunity that'll be out there, but the ones that establish those relationships with them now I think are the ones that they will be loyal to down the road because I don't know if there's a lot of room for new companies to really present themselves these days in the logistics space.
Mark Taylor:
Yeah, and in that last couple of sentences, when you referred to they, you are speaking of Amazon and people that have identified relationships with them?
Jordan Brown:
Yes.
Mark Taylor:
So I find, and this is just speaking very candidly, the way we serve, I got into this knowing that most 3pls, you're not going to speak to somebody. I mean, you'll talk with them of course, but you're not going to seriously entertain somebody who's got two pallets or somebody who's got 20 pallets, and so that was kind of my niche. And when we started, I said, "Hey, we've got this seasonal product. I would really prefer not to send a SKU in that's on test that might not be great during the holiday season and eat up a bunch of storage when storage rates are almost a little bit over 3x what they normally are cubic foot during Q4, and then be left with 10,000 units of something that didn't really move during the holiday season, and so then you sit on it, you sit on it, and you either have to eject it or whatever." So I saw this opportunity for smaller third-party vendors.
Jordan Brown:
You found the niche.
Mark Taylor:
I did, and in 2017, 20 18, when I got started in 2018, I felt like it was a good thing, and I mean, it continues to be a good thing, and many of our clients who I love and adore, they've grown from one container every couple of months to now having couple high hundreds to a couple thousand pallet positions type thing. That's great. Very excited about that and their growth. But now, so I look down the horizon and they say, "Okay," and my perspective is because they overbuilt a network so much and because they have these commitments, they have to fill the space, or somebody has to come in and take all that real estate off their hands, which there are only about two or three players that could even think about doing that. So you have this kind of, "Okay, well what do we do?" And so the value add to the third-party seller, of course is I think it's called the Amazon Upstream as well that's basically, I believe it's a competitor to freight forwarders.
So it's like that starts everything in China, and then they handle the logistics here, and then now they'll handle the drayage into wherever all this excess space is, and then they put you on a program where it's like, okay, so this is going to be where there won't be the long-term storage fees, there won't be the holiday surge fees or anything like that, and as soon as a carton is needed, we're going to go ahead and send that carton on. You don't even have to create the order, we're just going to automatically move your inventory out to the correct fulfillment centers, and it's great because we're going to have one truck show up and we're going to know that it can fit this many cartons of all these different things that need to be there, we label it, and everything goes. So it's a very nice streamlined.
Jordan Brown:
Maybe you're skipping one or two steps that you typically would take within the absolutely supply chain, right?
Mark Taylor:
Yeah, speed. And once again, it's cloudy crystal ball right now, my impression is that their algorithms, as good as they're getting still don't understand that human thing. It's like, "Okay. Well, this person sells things for St. Patrick's Day." We better send in everything that we can. So that's one of the things that can potentially get bought. I believe their algorithms look at it from the perspective of saying, "Well, I mean they've only had five sales a month for the last six months, so we only need to send in 20 items," and then as the demand goes up, are they going to be able to get in the items fast enough? So it's like...
Jordan Brown:
Well, the algorithm, I think, is being really screwed up now by the fact that ports are all backed up. I mean, how do you account for that? By the time your container gets around to actually being unloaded. Let's say it's St. Patty's day, right? Was that the example you just gave? Let's say it St. Patty's Day stuff, right? By the time your container's actually through the queue and unloaded, St. Patty's is over. It's over. So it reminds me of the losing team in the Super Bowl or in one of the championships where all the shirts are made for both teams, and then you got to figure out what to do with all of them, right? You got to figure out what to do with all the rest of them. So I think there's nothing they can do to plan for everything, but you got to think.
When Walmart was the 60,000 pound gorilla for the longest time, no one's ever going to be bigger than Walmart, Walmart's the biggest, and then here comes Amazon, and now it's, "Oh, Amazon's the big gorilla. No one's ever going to be..." Someday there'll be something bigger than Amazon. Not on the horizon anytime soon, but it'll come someday, and I think that they're the smartest that they can be for today, and just like any other AI or... They're a data company at the end of the day. They thrive on data collection just like Facebook and Google and all the other ones, and they just have done a really good job of, up to this point at least, getting the brand out there of hey, if you want something quick, it's Amazon.
Mark Taylor:
Absolutely. And going back to what I said earlier about people come out and they'll say, "Oh. Well, this new thing, this new threat," and I'm saying, "Oh. Well, I mean I guess should I ball up and tell everybody that we're closing shop." Of course not. But you see, here's the thing. I mean, you also have all these other competitors out here. Target's not closing up shop. I mean, they're trying to figure out something. Walmart still.
Jordan Brown:
I think Amazon is successful because of companies like Walmart and Target and those type of companies out there who Amazon took a look at and said, "Oh, you guys have a pretty good model. We're going to tweak it here or tweak it there a little bit and then we're going to build this network," and now what you see happening is Target and Walmart and those companies looking at what Amazon's doing and go, "Oh, okay. That's a pretty good idea. Let's go ahead and now take that and tweak that and make it a little better," and so I think it's healthy competition in a way, but that's how... I think it was my uncle who used to say, "You never want to be the first one in."
You never want to be the first one in because if you're the first one in, that's like the... It's the front line of any war, or any... I mean, I don't want to go in the war, but I mean any army is that you take the brunt of most of the issues and the problems because they haven't been vetted out yet, and you figure it out for everybody else. Someone else comes in, and sees the opportunity and seizes on the opportunity, and that's how bigger, better companies are made.
Mark Taylor:
I had at a professor that taught entrepreneurship that kind of talked about this perspective, this idea where the company that is the one who invents it or is the new thing, like Friendster and MySpace are no more, but Facebook's killing it. So it's that second mover or that third mover that really sees where the first guys aren't exactly getting it, and then what if we tweaked it here and then they go and they get it. So the real estate situation is very interesting to me because there are a couple things. Firstly, you've mentioned that it is one of your competitive advantages that you own a lot of your real estate, at least. I find when these companies like in funds are looking at an acquisition target, they either want the real estate or they want the operation. Rarely both. I wonder why do you think that is?
Jordan Brown:
They either want the operation or they want the real estate. I think it probably has to do with, once again, us being vertically integrated. I think it just makes sense for us to... No one else is in the business, that I know of at least right now, of real estate and being a 3pl. So you're either a real estate investor or you're an operator, and everyone has thought about it in those two separate silos for so long that you typically only get real estate investors that come in for the real estate or you get companies that expertise is operational and being as efficient as they possibly can, and so they come in and all they want to focus on is the operational component.
We just looked at it as why don't we want to pay ourselves? And I know at the end of the day, everyone would love to be able to do that, but I don't know what the secret sauce specifically has been over the years, but there's been enough capital there to be able to almost make a separate company out of the real estate part of it and it gives us so much more flexibility when we go out and try to win our deals.
Mark Taylor:
So when I started 2018, excuse me, my first sublease was a 55 cents gross. Then I was up in the 70s about not even a year later, and we went from there to, I think, this building when I first got in the sublease was I think around 80, 84, and then now we're signed in at just under a dollar. So I mean 95 cents.
Jordan Brown:
If you're just under a dollar, you're still in a good spot. You're still in a very good spot.
Mark Taylor:
Yeah, and so it's like you look at what you've got now and I mean it's a $1.40 to 80 depending. I mean, it's a big spread. And I always speak typically in gross numbers, not triple net just because I want to know what I'm actually paying. So I think you're going to have a lot of operators who resigned in the last year at really bad rat. I mean, at a very high rates, just assuming the train's going to keep rolling, we just have to keep increasing prices, and I kind of think that what may happen is we're going to see a lot of space start to open up because operators came in and now they might have to be looking at cutting prices, they might have to be looking at... I don't know.
Jordan Brown:
I think you're right, but I don't think it's going to be as impactful maybe as you may think because one thing that pandemic has taught retailers in this country is that they don't want to be caught with their pants down. Can I say that on here?
Mark Taylor:
Oh, you can say what you want.
Jordan Brown:
Okay. All right. So they don't want to be caught in the same situation they were caught in when the pandemic started, which led to the inflation. I mean, essentially that's how we got to where we are right today, and what you're starting to see is when companies would typically have things coming in from China or India, or wherever they're coming in, and it would flow through the warehouse. You wanted it flow flowing through the DC as quickly as it possibly could. You wanted it to turn, turn, turn, turn, turn. Now what you're seeing is a lot more, instead of just in time... That was just in time. Let's get it in there just in time so it doesn't sit that long and then it's out in the order and we can replenish that slot.
Now it's just in case, right? Now, it's okay we don't mind. I'm a retailer, I don't mind paying for a product just to sit and not move because at least I know that product is there, and if there happens to be another worldwide event and my product is made in China, I don't have to wait for that whole situation to work itself out before I'm able to start to sell my product again. So I think you're also going to see a lot more coming into the Continental, into North America, Mexico, Canada. More so Mexico, I think, probably than Canada. You're going to see those border hubs like Laredo, I think you're going to see those shoot up, but everything that comes through there, they still has to go somewhere. Still has to go somewhere.
So I don't think these industrial rates are going anywhere anytime soon, but to your point, that doesn't mean that the tenants that are in there are going to be able to self-support those rates. So eventually there's going to have to probably be a consolidation of retailers, not necessarily a consolidation of... Because it's either the real estate's got to give and it's got to come down, which I just don't see that happening on the industrial side at least, or on the other side, you need retailers that are able to afford to pay these rates and let products sit and can benefit from that, and the smaller retailers, they don't have that luxury.
Mark Taylor:
I agree with that. If you are going to go in and start investing in the actual real estate piece, if you were starting from scratch, how would you go about it and where would you go about it? Because I mean, right now mean just the acreage, just the land itself in California is a thing-
Jordan Brown:
Are we talking industrial?
Mark Taylor:
Yeah.
Jordan Brown:
So it's not just the land anymore. Now it's the image, it's the dirtiness of industrial.
Mark Taylor:
Especially with everything that's going on, they're putting moratoriums on building.
Jordan Brown:
Oh. I mean, it's getting the entitlements to build in each of the individual town and jurisdictions, and that's the challenge is you want to talk about supply and demand. How much more supply is going to get out there, right? Demand's only going to go up, but how much more supply of industrial space is... And from being both an owner of real estate and an occupier of real estate, it's like catch 22. It's great on one end when you put your real estate hat on because those rates are going to continue to climb and you're going to be able to really take advantage of that, but from a tenant standpoint how sustainable is that? It's not.
Mark Taylor:
It's not, which is also why you see Phoenix and Nevada and Vegas kind of just blowing up.
Jordan Brown:
Absolutely. I mean, the vacancy rate in Southern California right now is I think a half percent, or maybe it's less than a half percent, or somewhere in that range, which is just unheard of. It's unheard of. So there's no more supply out here, you have a ton of demand. So until that changes, especially in this market, you're not going to see any movement with the rates.
Mark Taylor:
Yeah. Well, it'll be interesting. I mean, because you've got so many buildings out here that are 10, 30, 40, 50,000 square foot buildings with not real big clear heights or anything like that, not ideal buildings, and I wonder if we're going to start seeing those that have already been zoned, if people are just going to say, "Well, actually, can we just take this and build a better warehouse where this is?"
Jordan Brown:
So I'm sure you'll see that at some point. I mean, there's always a ton of ways to skin the cat, and that's one of way to take a look at it, but I also think that you'll see at the end of the day, what do townships, as they call them up in the northeast or counties, what do they need? They need rentals. You need the tax dollars that come from these big facilities and the job creation, and at some point, they're going to have to figure out a different way to make it work, and whether that's being in a California and then having the environment first and foremost at the forefront of their vision for this state and constructing some sort of program around that, or if they get to a point where they need to lax on some of that, which I don't see happening in California. Something's got to give at some point, but that point's not anytime soon.
Mark Taylor:
You're right. Going back to the idea of California and everything and the rental rates just getting to a point where it's like you're just not going to be able... I mean, your typical operator, the rates are going to go so high that it's just like, "Well, look for another 600 bucks. I can give you better rates out in Phoenix or whatever." That supply and demand on gas and everything like that mean, or diesel in that case, it's all got to balance.
Jordan Brown:
It's all got to balance. And then the other thing that's got to balance is the labor. I mean, the optimal location to go next from Southern California, it would be like Barstow, Victorville, those kind of places, but unless it's fully automated, how you going to get labor out there?
Mark Taylor:
So going into the automation thing, it's interesting because there's this thing right now where you've got all the boomers. I mean, not all the boomers, but a lot of the boomers are exiting, legitimately exiting the workforce, and then what's replacing it is a much, much smaller generation. So there's a labor mismatch. A labor demand mismatch, I should say. You would assume that all industries should be moving toward some kind of automation, you're seeing more automated checkout stations at grocery stores, you've got things like that, and then on the Amazon side, I mean, it's interesting to see that their buildings are now going five stories tall and they're flowing them down from the top down. What we're noticing right now is, I mean like we are in a recession, but we're also losing workforce with the boomers retiring out, legitimately going out of the workforce. Gen Z is not replacing it at the rate that people are leaving.
So you would assume that at some point, almost every industry has to come up with some form of automation, even if it's just more human augmentation that allows you to run with fewer people in the store than you normally would. So Sprouts is a great example. If you go to any of them now they've got four or five self-checkouts, and maybe that accounts for two headcount that they now don't have to worry about paying. So it's like as you continue up, you pair down. And then there's this other thing out here where it's like Amazon's now starting to get hit with all these unionization votes and things like that, and it seems like one of the ways that they're combating that is via automation, and so I saw that even NFI, you guys are now you signed into with Boston Dynamics and you're doing the Stretch, the suction container, which those things can operate at 800 cartons an hour, I think, is what-
Jordan Brown:
They're piloting some of that, yeah.
Mark Taylor:
Yeah, and so those are all the places nobody, if they can help it, wants to unload a container. It is dumb. I mean, I've done it. You've done it. Nobody wants that job, but there are plenty of people right now that that's how they're paying their rent, that's how they're-
Jordan Brown:
Sure.
Mark Taylor:
So as we move forward, it's almost like automation doesn't even seem like a bad thing so much as it seems like it's absolutely just necessary.
Jordan Brown:
It's a necessity. It's going to come. I mean, it's already here, but it's going to come to a much larger degree as we move forward. You have to get involved in it if you want to survive in this space, but I also think that... And we're not at an inflection point, I don't know if we're even close to the inflection point yet, where the cost of labor versus the cost of automation makes it worth it. I mean, we're not close there yet. We'll be there someday, but for at least the short-term, you have to figure out a way to get those bodies through the door, treat them like they are human beings and not like they are just people on the floor that are unloading because they are human beings, and you're only as good as your people, and we recognize that, and the second that we stop recognizing that, then at that point we're not living by our values anymore and we're just looking to make a dollar instead of building a business and sustaining a business. And the only way to build and sustain is with your people.
Mark Taylor:
Right. That makes a lot of sense.
Jordan Brown:
And whoever figures out how to sustain the people part of it will win at the end of the day because they'll still be cheaper than the automation. They may not be as quick necessarily, but they will be cheaper.
Mark Taylor:
Yeah, they will be. And I just thought about from the perspective of one of the things that makes the automation cost prohibitive is a lease because you get the lease, your payback is, in a perfect world, typically two to three years, and-
Jordan Brown:
Who pays for it too? Who's going to pay for the automation? Is it going to be the customer, is it going to be the us as a 3pl? And then if it's us as a 3pl, does that mean you're sticking with us for 15 years or however long it's going to take to make it worth it? So there'll be that inflection point at some point, but we're not there yet.
Mark Taylor:
The interesting thing I'm finding in the automation game is... Because I agree with you. It's like if you're going to be in this business long-term, you have to figure it out, and so it's looking at what's the way to go, what's the right way? And my gut, and I think we've talked about this in the past, is more the modular kind of storage type thing with the AutoStore systems and stuff that I think you showed me the one that you guys run for Puma, but that does a lot of things. So let's say we fast-forward three years and your square foot here is 250 all in, and then it's like, "Well, you can't charge enough on a 50,000 square foot building and on just storage. Storage can't even really be a component for you unless you figure out a way to condense what normal racking structure would take in a third of it, and so now you stuff so much more in here, and then you get your pickers, they're not actually having to walk, they're brought to them.
We've looked at several of the systems, 6 River Systems, I think they were bought by Shopify. So they've got the Chuck, the automation thing where it's like they'll go and they'll just stop in front of where it needs to pick, and if a picker's just strolling through the warehouse, "Okay. Well, I need to pick that, right? So I'll scan it," and it goes to the next place, and then it takes it back. I see the benefit of those, but I don't think they look at the holistic perspective from not only do you have to deploy those, you also have to still have the people who are trained on them, and it does not help you maximize the cube. It just doesn't.
Jordan Brown:
But it may help you turn quicker. It might help you turn quicker, but you're only going to be able to maximize the cube. Amazon's figured it out, right? You go up. You go up. Much harder to go out than it is to go up. Now, the automation that's incorporated with that, I don't know anything about that at this time, but I'm sure that they have a good feel for it, and they will continue to lead the industry in innovation and figuring out the best way to cut costs, and I'm sure that most 3pls will probably follow.
Mark Taylor:
Yeah, I think that's right. So just a couple more questions. Biggest opportunities you see in the industry right now for anyone?
Jordan Brown:
I see two, it's labor and it's sustainability, especially being out in California. California tends to be the leader in sustainability initiatives. Anything that you see gets passed in California are typically adopted by states going east, and at the end of the day, we're a dirty industry. I mean, let's call a spade a spade. You got the trucks, and we're investing a lot into clean energy, and I think that you have to in this industry to be able to survive moving forward, but I think the sustainability piece is going to be very, very important moving forward, and as we've already touched on, I don't see the labor situation getting any better anytime soon.
Mark Taylor:
Yeah, I think that's fair. So with those two being the biggest opportunities, how do you... So let's say a warehouse starts doing all the sustainability things they possibly can, how do you get on the radar so you as a company actually are rewarded for that, and your efforts are kind of seen?
Jordan Brown:
Got to stay on top of it. You have to be educated in governmental incentives, what's on the docket coming up, what's already been implemented, and you got to work with the government in... I mean, as much as it may hurt to do it, or it may not be something you really want to do, you got to be on the same pages or you have to at least appease the government because they have the best intentions for all of us. Isn't that what they do? But from that sustainability piece, it's staying on top of at the forefront of everything that's out there. Once again, like we talked about before, you don't want to be that first one in maybe necessarily, but getting in on the front with some of these clean energy or clean engine type for our transportation company, or with Boston Dynamics and some of this other on the automation side.
I told you about solar, right? It's like it's Back to the Future. I was just way too early with solar. If I would've started it probably five, six years later than I may still be in New Jersey right now looking at rooftops, but look at California now. The trucks will be powered by the solar that's on top of the warehouse that is producing the energy that you're feeding into the truck and into the warehouse, and you want to be net-zero at some point, and you're going to have to be net-zero at some point. So that sustainability piece is very important, and then we touched on the labor.
Mark Taylor:
Are you guys investing for your own trucking fleet? I assume you still have. Are you signed up for some of the Tesla semis and stuff like that?
Jordan Brown:
We have been involved in this. We're very forward-thinking. We have to be. And I give my dad and my uncles a bunch of credit for investing early in sustainability-type initiatives. We are first in line when some of these truck manufacturers want to do pilots with different companies. We want to learn as much as we possibly can about all this so that we are best prepared for the future of sustainability in our space.
Mark Taylor:
Yeah, that's very cool. All right, last question. I mean, you know what I'm doing and you know kind of a fair amount about the story.
Jordan Brown:
What are you doing? What are you doing?
Mark Taylor:
Just this. The this.
Jordan Brown:
The podcast or what you got going on?
Mark Taylor:
No, the warehouse. Yeah, the 3pl.
Jordan Brown:
The niche that you've established here.
Mark Taylor:
Yeah, the niche. Put yourself in my position, what would you do? And let me set the stage. So we've got this warehouse right here. I mean, as you can see, it's very nice, very calm right now. We've got great customers. Capacity is not an issue, we're pretty full here. We've got up to 250,000 out, potentially more, in North Carolina right now, not far from Greensboro, and we're looking at a couple programs there. And I mean, look, between the two of these operations, I would like to get cash flows up to, let's say, on a monthly basis in one to 150k a month, and so let's assume that we get there and then it's like we're virtually debt-free at this point. What do you do with that? What's your next play?
Jordan Brown:
I hope this answers your question. If it doesn't, let me know, and I'll dig in maybe a little deeper, but if I'm you, I stay patient right now at least because unless you have a ton of capital that you're able to risk on certain initiatives to help you grow, things are changing so fast right now, and if you start put all your eggs or a lot of your eggs into a certain basket to grow, that could be obsolete within a couple months. There's really no stability right now in our industry. There's never a lot of stability, it's ever-changing. It's that chaos that we talked about at the beginning, but I think now more than ever, if you don't have a ton of capital, making big bets is obviously very, very risky and could knock you out.
So I would say be patient, figure out how to master your niche, and then there's two ways to grow. You either partner with somebody or you go out and you raise your own capital and try to go that route, and I would say just network. Keep your ear to the ground and know that you have something here that is unique and capitalize on the uniqueness and what differentiates you from everybody else, what's your special sauce.
Mark Taylor:
Yep. Well, I appreciate the perspective and very much appreciate you being here.
Jordan Brown:
You know what, this was a lot of fun. The almost two-hour drive in traffic, it was definitely worth it. It was definitely worth it. I know that you're kind of embarking here on the next endeavor in your career. I mean, still sticking with this, but maybe a little bit of a scenery change, so I wish you luck with that and just stay with it.
Mark Taylor:
I appreciate that. And just to be clear, I mean, I'm going to be back here quite a bit. I'm probably still going to see you about at least as much as I do now.
Jordan Brown:
Listen, we're all in this industry. We're all control freaks, so we all got to be as close as we possibly can to the action to some degree.
Mark Taylor:
All right. Well, with that, thank you again. Look, I had fun doing this.
Jordan Brown:
Mark, this was great. I had a great time. This was a lot of fun.
Mark Taylor:
All right. Thank you so much.
Jordan Brown:
All right. Yeah, thank you.
