John Gafford: How to Build Radical Accountability, Escape the Drift and Scale in Business

In this episode we sit down with speaker, author, entrepreneur, and real estate powerhouse John Gafford. Brad and John dive deep into John’s book, "Escaping the Drift," which serves as a practical, no-nonsense instruction manual for taking radical accountability, building self-awareness, and developing a bulletproof business strategy.

From his days on NBC’s The Apprentice to building the largest luxury boutique real estate brokerage in Las Vegas, John shares the hilarious failures and hardened frameworks that shaped his path in business and life. Whether you want to master vertical business integration, understand the current shifts in the housing market, or find out why customer-facing AI is facing a massive consumer backlash, this episode is packed with real, actionable wisdom.

About John Gafford:

John Gafford is an author, speaker, serial entrepreneur, and a dominant force in the luxury real estate market. Known for his raw, direct communication style and practical approach to business, John has built a career defined by massive scaling, radical accountability, and a refusal to coast on past successes.

He translated these decades of business wisdom and multi-million dollar missteps into his hit book, "Escaping the Drift", a user's manual centered on breaking free from complacency, practicing radical honesty, and taking absolute control of your trajectory before you crash into an obstacle. Beyond his large-scale real estate operations, John remains deeply committed to mentoring the next generation of professionals through his rapidly growing weekly newsletter, Wednesday Wake Up.

John Gafford Online: thejohngafford.com

John Gafford on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thejohngafford

Grab a copy of 'Escaping the Drift': https://thejohngafford.com/getthebook

John Gafford’s Newsletter: https://thejohngafford.com/request-membership

Transcript

Brad Banyas (00:08)
All right, everybody. Welcome back live from the McBastard studio in Foco, USA. I'm Brad Banyas. I'll be your host today on the SALTY MF GOAT podcast. And we're really excited to have John Gafford on today. Speaker  author, entrepreneur has a new book out that we're going to talk a little bit about. He's in the real estate business. He's been pretty good at that venture, but he's an interesting guy and a, and he's a real guy. And we are just happy to have John on the show.

John Gafford (00:35)
Yeah, man, glad to be here. Happy to be here.

Brad Banyas (00:37)
Yeah, absolutely, man. It's, know, when I was reading your background and all the things you've you've done in your life, and you know, your kind of approach to life and you know, being accountable and gritting it out. And I was just I was just excited to hear more about you and get into some get into some deep stuff.

John Gafford (00:54)
Well, you know, it's funny, man. didn't have any great financial success in my life till a little bit later. was 32. I was a late bloomer, especially in today's age of internet success. I was a late bloomer. And a lot of that was just because I had a lot of cool jobs, right? I did a lot of cool stuff. And you and I were kind of talking about some of those cool jobs before we got on the air. And hopefully talk a little bit more about them because they're very much Atlanta-based.

Yeah, I didn't find any real success in life until I really made some serious changes within where I am. And kind of the reason I wrote the book is because I love when entrepreneurs do have had good success come back and they say, I wouldn't change anything about my journey. The struggle, the strife, they made me who I am and it forged in iron and all that. To that I say, bullshit. I say, if I could go back in time,

and smack myself, go to my 22 year old self and smack myself in the head with a user's manual, which is this, which is what I wrote and say, just do all this now, instead of screwing off for 10 years, maybe I like to think where would I, how much further ahead of the game would I be? And so, for me, I wanted to write the book as a user's manual to my dipshit 22 year old self. That's what it is.

And it is very practical information. It will save you. And I'm very candid about a lot of my misadventure through the book, because hopefully my misadventure will hopefully save some folks from making the same mistakes.

Brad Banyas (02:31)
Yeah, absolutely. But you know, it's, you know, you say that like, and people ask me, you know, I've been an entrepreneur since, you know, early twenties. And, ⁓ you know, I wouldn't do any other way only because I didn't know any other way. You know, my dad told me that I wasn't employable and I better figure out something I can do or I was going to be in deep shit. Right. I mean, I said, he told me, so I always started from a very young age, like, shit, I got to figure this shit out. Right. You know, and, ⁓

I think that, I think as you get older, like, you know, I'm probably older than you, but the wisdom of that and what you're doing with Drift and your book, I always encourage people, hey, like read these things and truly read them, right? Don't just read it for entertainment. Like feel what this guy was going through, feel what he was doing. And just like you said, it'll save you 10 years of your life, so.

John Gafford (03:26)
It's so funny you just said that, because I literally told my kids a week ago, I said, you know, hey, listen, you know, you get some good traits from your mom and you get some good traits from your dad. And I don't know if this is a good trait or a bad trait that you've inherited from me, but you're, I am chronically unemployable and you will be as well. And the problem with that is I'm not saying you won't have a job and have a boss because everybody does at one point in their life.

but you were going to be a miserable employee because you will always think in your heart of hearts that you can do it better, faster, smarter than whoever is telling you what to do. So I said, as you are an employee, the best thing you can do is take really good notes. And I had told my kids last night, cause my son has a job and they just made a change kind of in how his role is compensated. And I got to tread lightly here cause the guy that gave me jobs in front of mine, but.

somewhere in middle management in this company is in, they made a change to the way that all of these people that work there are compensated. And I said, okay, what are you thinking? goes, well, we're not gonna make as much money. And I said, okay, what do you think is gonna be the byproduct of that? And he's like, well, people are gonna quit. And I said, okay, so when they were thinking about this, do you think they were thinking about it just from a monetary standpoint or were they thinking about the long-term ramifications

on their business of having to hire people, of the stress of being short, of now having to retrain new staff and all of those things that come with those decisions down the road. And he goes, probably not. They probably just looked at the numbers and said, we want to make more money, so let's just do this. And I said, yeah, that's probably, I said, I'm assuming my buddy doesn't know about this because he owns the business. But I said, I'm assuming that somewhere in middle management, somebody just made a quick decision that's going to have some ramifications. So let that be a lesson to you in the future

of what not to do when you're operating from a place of the decision maker. so, yeah, so if you're gonna be in that situation, at least get something out of it.

Brad Banyas (05:25)
Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, absolutely. And you and you know, you've been around long enough and you know, you're the psychology of business, you know, you talk a little bit about that, but you know, businesses are reacted, right? Based on what the market does, or what they say. And you know, it's going on right now with all the AI shit, right? You're laying everybody off and they're starting to realize that the compute power costs more than the damn employees did. Right. And then someone's like, shit, maybe we should have waited. I always tell them, get like, don't panic, wait stuff out. Think about it. Let stuff settle.

and then and then make a good decision. And that's really hard for people to do in life because you might have a little bit of pain between that weight, right, versus just reacting. So.

John Gafford (06:11)
Well, I think what you're seeing with companies that are laying people off heavily through the use of AI is most of the jobs that are being eliminated are unfortunately in a lot of those companies, they're most consumer facing positions. Those are the positions that deal with the consumer the most. And I know I love it when I call, when you get that automated voice and you know it's AI, just like, I mean, you just start saying, speak to a representative, speak to a representative. You just want to talk to real person, right? And so,

I think these companies are already starting to feel some of that backlash of, our customers are going other places where there is that human touch. And you're starting to see large companies like, I think it was Chase. I saw a commercial the other day that I thought was really good. That Chase is now marketing, Hey, we have these, we're opening more of these coffee shop type stores where you can come in and talk to a person. Like they're going the other way that, and that's how quick the backlash on that was.

Brad Banyas (06:46)
Absolutely.

Absolutely.

John Gafford (07:03)
So yes, do I think AI is gonna still be a very important part of our business future going forward? Yes, but I think that rush to implement it, you're right, man. ⁓ There's some boardrooms right now where they're like, maybe we shouldn't have done this so quickly.

Brad Banyas (07:04)
Yeah.

Yeah,

there's some pain coming fellas. Those tokens are going to cost a lot of money. But you know, we see that you, you know, we were talking a little bit before and I know that you were kind of in the restaurant bar music business in your younger younger days. And you know, everyone now the new world is IRL in real life. Like that's a friggin acronym now. And I'm like, you know, people, what the hell are you talking about? Like live music's coming. It's not coming back. Everybody was, you know, tightened up and, you know,

John Gafford (07:19)
Yeah.

Brad Banyas (07:45)
living in their house for five years and that was just, we can go outside again and actually communicate with people and have a real relationship and have a beer and look someone in the eye. It's not, it never left. It was forced that you couldn't do that at one time, but we won't get into that, but anyways.

John Gafford (08:00)
Well, one of the things we're starting to see a real surge of here in Las Vegas is clubs that are opening, ⁓ via private clubs or just like Bruno Mars has a club here called Pinky ring where you are not allowed to have a cell phone out. Like you cannot have it out and obviously here in Vegas, probably to protect some people that doing maybe something they shouldn't be doing in there. I don't know. But the byproduct of that is, is you actually spend time talking to the people you're with or the people that are next to you.

Brad Banyas (08:13)
Yeah, that's awesome.

Hahaha!

John Gafford (08:29)
rather than staring at Instagram trying to like see how many likes you just got on a post you just posted in this club, right? I think, no, what, no, I mean, well, they're just people, people are starved for real kind of connection. And I think that's the live event business, the live music business, all of that stuff, which is very near and dear to my heart. ⁓ Yeah, I think that stuff's having a a major comeback. I think it's gonna be huge.

Brad Banyas (08:37)
Yeah, nobody gives a shit

Absolutely.

Yeah, that's

good. The US needs some of that. They were, you know, I was a big ACDC fan as a kid and still am and they're, they're doing their last tour, right? You know, and, you know, um, they were in Argentina and they were showing the crowds and literally, you know, I how many people are in that stadium. It looked, it looked like 80, it was a lot, 80,000 or whatever. And they're just jumping up and down, going insane. And literally the singer now, I forget who the singer now for ACDC is, but he literally, you heard him go.

Holy shit. Like it was the whole, like he literally stopped him. So I was like, holy shit. It was rocking. And then he showed the U S and everyone's got their, you know, phones up doing this shit. And I'm like, I want to be, I want to be in Argentina. That concert is going insane. But anyways, off the music side, I, you know, escape the drift. ⁓ you know, let's go through some of that. Let's go through some of that. Cause you go through your life, you go through some of the things that, you know, you went through.

John Gafford (09:26)
Yeah.

Brad Banyas (09:52)
Let's get into some good points on people of, you you talked about being complacent, right? Once you've had success, not moving, being complacent. There's obviously some people you get into that drift and many times in your life, you're just in one role or in one job and you're just kind of floating through. And then sometimes you've hit, you had some very good success, but you kind of same thing. You kind of lose direction and you're not pushing yourself. You want to, you know, get into some of that?

John Gafford (10:22)
Well, you know, it's funny a good friend of mine urban urban McManus who's an awesome dude If you don't know who he is look him up He's great and Irwin was on my podcast at one point and we were talking about the book and and he said something I wish I could say I came up with this I'll tell you where it really came from in a minute But this is what Irwin took from it and Irwin also he goes man escaping the drift I love it he goes because the biggest problem With people that are drifting through life is you're still moving So you're still feel

Like there's momentum, you still feel like there's, there's motion and you don't realize you're out of control until you hit something. And I thought, man, how true was that? Like you get this decent job. You feel like everything is going okay. Your boss seems to like you. You get maybe that, that, that 3 % increase every year. You take your week's vacation with the wife, whatever it is. And all of a one day you come in and they say you've been laid off by AI or whatever it is.

And you're like, all of sudden, like, I was never really in control of my life. My life is completely at the whims and control of others. And there's so many of us that are existing like that, not just in our professional life, but in our personal life, in our personal fitness and everything that we do, we're just kind of going along with the motion and the currents, right? Now, that's the deep meaning, and it means a lot about what it is. Now, where the book title actually came from is,

Brad Banyas (11:30)
Yeah.

John Gafford (11:49)
I was on a reality show many, many moons ago. Um, and yes, I realized that talking about something you did 20 years ago was very similar to talking about how many touchdowns you scored in high school, which for me was zero. was zero big fat zero, nothing on the note, no touchdowns. So yes, but 20 years ago I appeared on NBC's the apprentice with the 45th and 47th president of the United States who is, you know, a lot of people don't know, don't know this, but Donald Trump is actually in a very small club.

Brad Banyas (12:01)
you

And...

John Gafford (12:18)
with the AM room service manager at the Ramada Inn in Tallahassee, Florida, Jeff, and the president as the only people to ever officially fire me. So yeah, they're a small club. I think they meet once a year just to celebrate. I'm not sure, but yeah, that's ⁓ the only times I've ever actually officially been fired in my life for those two times. ⁓ But the process of being on that show, Mark Burnett was executive producer and watching him

who was an incredible story. If you've never looked up his story, do that. He went from selling T-shirts on the Venice Pier to being the most powerful man in television inside of about six years. I mean, it was a meteoric rise for him, but watching him do his thing and run his business was really amazing. And one day we were on set and we were getting a task in front of Trump International Tower in New York. And it was one of those days when stuff was just going wrong and like the boom cranes were working and people run around and you could tell the, you know, the

production staff was freaking out because Mark wasn't exactly the easy guy to work for, guess. Just, I don't know that, I'm just guessing. And ⁓ one of the other castmates that was on the show with us, Christian Kirschner, yelled across the way. She goes, ⁓ treading water today, aren't you Mark? And he just stopped and shot her a death stare. And he's like, I never tread water. I swim because you drift with long with the currents. And I was like, ooh, God, write that down. ⁓

And it was one of those moments where you start thinking, yeah, this dude is successful because he never treads water. He never drifts. He's always swimming. And you start to take stock of your life. And you say, where are the places where I'm really swimming? Where are the places where I'm just taking it as it comes? And the book starts out, you know, my book is written very much like it, like it is an instruction manual. It's very much a practical guide. It's not just hyperbole. It's not,

metaphor. mean, there's lot of stories in there, but it is very much practical information that you can execute into your life today and whatever faster you're trying to improve. But it all kind of starts with the same place, which is radical honesty. If you most people for whatever reason, have this really hard time with taking accountability for what they did to lead to their current situation. Everybody wants to say,

⁓ woe is me. I'm here because of X or this happened and that happened. Yeah. You can't control what happens externally. You've got to be willing to look in the mirror and take an internal audit. And anytime anything goes wrong with me or my businesses or anything that happens, my very first instinct is to say, what did, what did we do to lead to this? What decisions, what lack of controls, what, you know, where did we go?

Even if it's something, you know, even if I walk outside and it's pouring, right? I didn't do anything to make the rain. I'm not that good, but I could have made, I could have checked the weather report. I could have made sure I had an umbrella. I didn't need to get caught in it. You know, so having that sense of radical honesty is where everything starts. And I think also there's a line to that. You've got to be very pragmatic in the way you look at that and very honest with yourself because you don't want to turn into self-loathing.

Brad Banyas (15:08)
Right.

Right.

Right.

John Gafford (15:38)
You know,

we all know people that we all know the ears of the world that walk around with a black cloud over their head. Oh, well, another day happened to me again. You know, there it is. All my, no, dude, you don't want to be that guy either. So, you know, I give you some steps to really kind of take a look at where you are. Cause that's where everything starts.

Brad Banyas (15:56)
Yeah. That's great, man. I mean, I think it's good advice and sound advice. You know, I think, uh, I don't think life's as complicated as everybody makes it. And, you know, the hard part is to, uh, you know, what I call like a listen to your inner core, right? Or your inner spirit, like it's intuition. Like I saw somewhere where, you know, you, you, you were talking about how a couple business deals had gone bad, right? And, you know, it looked good on paper, but you, did your wife check, right? So kudos to her.

where she may be a better person reader than you sometimes from what I hear. I'm not saying that, John, I'm not saying she is.

John Gafford (16:30)
No, no, no, no, you can't say that. You absolutely can't

say it because I have lost. look, I find that, I find if you look at somebody and all you see is the victories probably getting bullshitted, right? I'll tell you straight, I have lost seven figures, north of seven figures exactly twice on business deals. And both of those times, my wife said, do not do this. Not because of the deal, not because of anything else, 100 % based on

the people. And so after the second time, I was like, I promise I will not make any big moves outside of what we do. And I had and I take her everywhere with me now, like literally, I will go to I'm a member of several, like, high, high level mastermind groups, and I take her with me. And she doesn't go to the sessions and do that stuff. She'll go do whatever she's, she'll go see whatever city we're in and go screw around. But if I meet somebody that has something I might want to take a look at, I'm like, Hey, man, before I can even look at your deck or look at your numbers.

my wife's got to get a look at you and they're like, what are you talking about? I'm like, I just got to meet me at the bar. I got to call my wife and she just got, I mean, it's like, I'm like, not like the evil eye thing where she puts her hand and gets that, but, you know, she'll just get a feel for him and she's like, yeah, that's a good person or that's not a good person. And, and yeah, I mean, I'm happy to say I haven't lost seven figures again since we've been doing that. Yeah.

Brad Banyas (17:42)
Yeah.

Well, kudos to her, man. She's

a good half. I just thought that was funny. I was just reading through some of your stuff and I thought that's great. Because I think, you know, I've been married. We just took my wife, it's 35 anniversary. Honey, good job. Stayed with me for that long, but very similar. Because I'm one that one of my partners said, hey man, you pick up every lost dog on the street, dude. And, you know, I've always been like that underdog champion, right? You want to give people a chance and get them.

John Gafford (18:01)
Congratulations, congratulations.

Brad Banyas (18:17)
get give them that that opportunity to be what they potentially could be. But, you know, sometimes, yeah, it's painful. It's painful to it's painful to lose money. It's what's really painful. I think if you started a business venture, what you know, and you realize it, it's just a dog and and you have you have to bury it, man. I mean, and I've I'm guilty. I've had a few of those and it's hurtful after you've put, you know, millions of dollars into something. You're like, you know, this this

John Gafford (18:35)
Man.

Brad Banyas (18:47)
It's a dog. mean, we got to put him to sleep. It's painful.

John Gafford (18:51)
Brother, I love when you go to somebody's office and they've got all these awards and accolades all over their office with plaques and trophies and stuff and letters from the, you know, the Senator when they opened their business and all that, whatever. My office is like a serial killer's trophy room to failure. That's what my office is. Like I take my failures and I take my biggest missteps and I put them in on pedestals in my office to remind myself to never do this shit again.

For example, I have $100,000 bottle of vitamins in my office and I, $100,000 bottle of vitamins and it sits on a little pedestal that is bottom lit that I bought. I I bottom lit this thing like Raiders of the Lost Ark, right? When it's like, it's lit from the bottom. And just cause I want people to walk in my office and say, what's with the vitamins that are lit up? And I like to tell the story. So when I had left the bar business in Atlanta in...

I got out of the bar business and restaurant business when I was 27. And my buddy had told me, know, everybody told me you should be in sales. I got to get out of the restaurant business. It was killing me be honest with you. I was 27, I had bleeding ulcers, smoking cigarettes, drinking too much Maker's Mark. It was bad. And so I got a job, learned how to sell at Tron Colley Nissan in Atlanta, Georgia in Decatur. I worked there for about six months. That's where I learned how to sell, was selling cars. Cause that's a buddy of mine told me it would be good. And it was.

Brad Banyas (20:10)
Yeah, that's still around.

John Gafford (20:18)
But coming out of the back of that, knew I was going to like, wasn't, I went there to learn to sell. And my sister said we should start this multi-level marketing company because she was the C C O O I guess, or CFO or C O O O of some people that had one of the biggest AMWA businesses on earth. And she said, we can start her. Yeah. She's like, we can start our own multi-level marketing company. We're going to do this and you know, come down and we're going to do We're going to do nutritional supplements. It's going to be great. And we, we, so we just went head first into it.

Brad Banyas (20:34)
⁓ shit.

John Gafford (20:47)
filled a warehouse up with nutritional supplements, right? A whole warehouse of them. And we did all this before we ever asked anybody if they wanted to buy any nutritional supplements, which was the fucking mistake. So of course, here's a spoiler alert, nobody did. We never got this thing off the ground. We had all this inventory that kind of just wound up going bad, except for kind of what we gave away. We threw most of it just in the trash. And I kept that one bottle to remind me that don't ever

go down the road of development, product development, product acquisition, brick and mortar launch, any of that stuff until you know there's a market for your product. That product market fit portion of building a business is so important. And that's a step that so many people skip when they start a business. And that's why they have to take their $2 million dog out and hit it with a shovel. That's why, and they love it. They can't.

Brad Banyas (21:39)
Yeah, yeah. Wait. Yeah.

John Gafford (21:42)
They still can't believe that nobody, they still

cannot believe that nobody wanted this thing.

Brad Banyas (21:47)
Rub it in, John. Way to rub it in. to... I would have rubbed it in.

John Gafford (21:49)
I, hey man, we've all been there. We've all

been there. And I have kickstarted businesses, just, know, hey, let's put up website for you, the dev on the product and we'll just put it out there. This niche product that I really believed was gonna work. And I think it's a great product and nobody cared. And you're like, luckily it was more of a tester than a full blown launch. So you don't get really hurt, but I've got products that I still can't believe people didn't I still just can't believe it.

Brad Banyas (22:16)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, that's true. And sometimes it's timing, man. A lot of shit's timing. You know, you have the best idea and it's not ready. And then, you know, 20 years later, you see some asshole becomes a billionaire. Like, holy shit, I was doing that 20 years ago. You know, it's just timing. It's just, it is what it is.

John Gafford (22:18)
That's life, you know? That's life.

Yep. You know what I think?

You know, I think the biggest differences is not necessarily timing though. I'm going to say the differences from people that I have seen some people through my life that had an idea. And then later I saw that real idea. And I just remember at some point I'd be sitting around a table or a bar or wherever we were. And this person was explaining their idea to me and I was like, well, I don't really get it. And then they're like, well, no, no, let me explain it again. And this, and this, and they explain, explain it until finally I would kind of understand it.

And then I would see somebody else launch it 10 years later. And then in like eight words on the commercial, I knew exactly what it was. Right. It's, the ability to articulate to the marketplace, what you do in its simplest form. Then in a lot of cases makes a product win over one that can't. The more you got to explain it.

Brad Banyas (23:13)
Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Yeah. Yeah. That, that, yeah.

It's, it's, you know, I feel for people like starting, you know, businesses now we've had our other company almost 30 years, you know, there wasn't as much competition, you know, the internet and everything that's going on now is this open competition to a world market. So there was as much competition, ⁓ but just the attention span of, of people is like, you know, it's a goldfish. I mean, I think the human has a lower attention spans than a goldfish, which is eight seconds.

You better get that message over real quick or you know that that person's gone and like, shit, there's a butterfly and hell I'm like that too. If a butterfly comes in the studio, John, I may walk away, but you know, that's how it's how it goes, brother. So.

John Gafford (24:04)
Yeah, attention

is definitely the new currency and it's getting more expensive every day. There's no question there. And I find it's, know, especially in my industry now, you know, real estate, it's like, you know, it gets a little more ridiculous every day. What people, seems that are in my industry will do for attention on the internet. ⁓ We, so a little bit about the company we have now. So, so after the,

Brad Banyas (24:12)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

John Gafford (24:33)
Yeah, I was, I was in the tech industry too prior when I was on the apprentice. And then once that was done, I had exited that tech firm and, Kendra Todd, who wouldn't my season, the apprentice was like, come get a real estate license, so real estate with me. It'll be fun. She lied, but that's what, know, whatever Kendra's one of my best friends. But so I got a real estate license and went to work for Kendra and we were doing kind of the traveling road show. This is an five, six or six when the boom was still kind of going right before the crash. And we were doing the traveling road show, selling condos and

Came out to Vegas, met a girl who we will have been married 19 years ⁓ in two weeks. So yeah, I'm right there with her. So that worked out. Yeah. And then moving to Vegas for her and just kind of gotten the residential real estate game here and built a team very quickly. And then within a year and a half, I bought a Keller Williams franchise here in Vegas. ⁓ No offense to anybody that loves that brand, but that was the worst decision ever made. What a business model.

Brad Banyas (25:11)
Awesome.

John Gafford (25:31)
When you make money, get to split 50 % of it with the people that work there. When you lose money, you get to write a check. It was a terrible business model. And through the course of that, we started, I sold out of that after about again, a year and a half of doing that. And then we started what has now become in Vegas. We own the largest luxury boutique real estate brokerage in Vegas. We have 585 agents that work for us. We do about 4,000 homes a year. So one out of about every,

17 homes in Vegas gets sold by us. Last year we sold more homes over a million dollars than any other firm. And we're a completely vertically integrated company. we own the mortgage, we own Tidal and Escrow, own everything that potentially, touches the transaction we own. And yeah, that's been a great business. But one of the things with us to get back out of ties in to social media, what we're talking about was we have really strict social media things here.

Brad Banyas (26:03)
That's all.

John Gafford (26:29)
And it seems to be a race to the bottom, especially in real estate marketing, online, Instagram. It's restart. seems to be in some cases and I get killed for this. If you listen to me, somebody's going to be mad about it, but you know, there seems to be this blurring line of only fans, girl and real estate person. And that line is a line that we don't blur. Like if you, if you want to, if you want to act provocatively online, that's great, but that does not go with our brand.

And we don't allow you to do that. That's not something.

Brad Banyas (27:02)
Well, I think that's great. And you talked about the vertical integration and why that's so important versus having one revenue stream. So you just proved kind of what you're doing in your business. you know, you can own the whole relationship is that obviously money wise, you're making money across those different areas. But is that what like, what made you say, Hey, I've got to go to this vertical integration. I've got to have the escrow I've got like, so what, other than there's money reasons why, but

John Gafford (27:32)
Well, okay. I wish I could say that it was some genius stroke of genius, but it was not. It was, was sitting in my office one day and there was a, I don't want to call the company out, but there's a, there's a national lender. All right. There's a very well-known mortgage company that had created this company. We'll just call it X company. So I don't want to out anybody. And the purpose of X company was to go out and build joint venture partnership title companies with large brokerages like ourselves.

Brad Banyas (27:32)
You want to experience.

Yeah.

John Gafford (28:02)
as a way to create a relationship with mortgage company X, which was this behemoth kind of like a little, we're going to wedge our way in here and say, Hey, we're already partners with this. Do you mind if we start marketing to your people as well? Right. And so they came in and they said, Hey, we're going to spin you up a title company. You're going to make all this money. You just got to work with us and you know, we're going to take care of everything. That's going to be great. So call my partner. And I said, Hey man, we're going to make some money. This is going to be great. They're going to handle everything. They're going do the whole thing.

Brad Banyas (28:15)
Yeah.

John Gafford (28:31)
And so that we got it open and it was nothing but problems and we were banging our head kind of against the wall and we were kind of doing everything. And, here's the thing, even though it was this headache, it was still making a really good clip of money, like enough to deal with the headaches. And then one day I got a spreadsheet that was accidentally sent to us that was not meant for us. And it was a list of all of this company's joint venture partnership title companies across the country on a spreadsheet with a real simple P and L on every company.

Brad Banyas (28:45)
Yeah.

John Gafford (29:01)
on a spreadsheet. The only one that was making money was us. So I was like, these dudes don't know how to operate their way out of a break, you know, of paper bag. So we called them and said, we're buying you out. We're taking this over and we did. And that was eight years ago. And then since then we've actually kind of flipped that model on its ear because now we go out and open joint venture title companies for large brokerages and operate for them because we understand how to do it. And

Brad Banyas (29:29)
Right.

John Gafford (29:29)
that model, but having that is not just necessarily about profitability for the business. It's about the best pathway for your client and client satisfaction. Because when you work in a business like real estate, it's kind of like, think of it like being a contractor, right? If you were a contractor, you go into the lady's house and you shake their hand and say, we're gonna build you a new, we're gonna build you a new ADU outside for grandma. We're gonna build you a new.

Brad Banyas (29:56)
Right.

John Gafford (29:57)
But then you go out and find the framers, you go out and find the concrete people, you go out and if they do a crappy job, you know, they don't, this person doesn't know that's your, that's your guy. They think they work for you, even though it's another company. So it's kind of the same way when you're handing your clients off in any space, you're running the risk of that satisfaction, not being where it needs to be. So when we're working with our mortgage people and our title company, it gives us great control over the consumer experience.

Brad Banyas (29:58)
Thank you.

It's on you.

Yeah.

Yeah,

absolutely.

John Gafford (30:28)
not just being a benefit to them financially, because in most cases it is, because I'm not paying 8,000 vice presidents and everything else. So we can be a little bit more nimble with our pricing, but also the overall experience is better because we can control it.

Brad Banyas (30:35)
Yeah.

Yeah, no, it makes sense. I know you were talking about that getting out of these kind of single revenue type things and getting deeper and I appreciate that explanation because I think it matters. I mean, the more you can control the customer around the customer experience in any business, the better off you're going to be.

John Gafford (31:01)
What I can, I talk about in the book too. It's one of the things I talk about is how to build these vertical integrated businesses. We use, I call it the Tony Soprano corollary is what I call it. I mean, for lack of a better phrase, cause what I will do is I will look for a revenue venue, a place where our customers are spending money. And I will say, okay, and I'll find who's the best vendor for this one service. Call it solar, right?

Brad Banyas (31:12)
Ha

John Gafford (31:28)
And then I'll go and say, okay, we're gonna pump all of our business the best we can. We're gonna market to you guys, but you've got to perform at this level as far as customer service and everything else that goes with our brand. You gotta be in lockstep with our core values as far as customer service and how we treat our customers. Okay, cool. So we find a great place that does a great job. We start sending them all the business. And then after about three months, it's like, how much of our business is your total business?

you guys probably make up man. We're killing it. Probably 25%. Okay, cool. Keep pumping it. Keep pumping it. Keep pumping it. How much of our business is your business? And as soon as that conversation tips to where our business is north of 50 % of their total business, well, now we're going to be partners because now I've proved the car. I proved the concept. I'm not going to wind up with a bottle of vitamins underlit on my desk. I know this is going to work. I can make an investment in that business to scale it larger. If there needs to be money,

Brad Banyas (32:13)
Yeah.

Ha ha ha!

Yeah.

John Gafford (32:25)
And now there's value in the partnership for the person who's having it. And anybody that hears that says like, that's terrible. You move in and take over somebody's that have their business. Yeah. Nobody we've ever done that with has ever complained because we end up tripling the business in the long run. So we can get that, that operator much further than they ever would have gotten on their own, even with the reduced equity in the business. So it just works.

Brad Banyas (32:49)
Yeah, absolutely. Well,

I love the nobody eats unless someone sells something. You know, I mean, that's that's the reality of it. mean, you know, I think one of my kids is funny. One of my kids was here with do I said, Hey, you don't want to learn how to sell go sell cars and he did. And he's this is not as easy as I think it is. I'm like, yeah, but you're there every day. You're communicating people. It's a great experience. And he went on to do something else. But just that experience people sales gets a bad

John Gafford (32:55)
Amen.

Brad Banyas (33:19)
bad kind of a knock these days. But the reality of it still, it still is today. If you don't have a strong sales channel or strong people communicate or can articulate, you know, it's not magic. It's not magic. Someone has to go out and sell the dream. So I think that's great. I think that's from a partner perspective, that makes a lot of sense. And plus if someone started bringing north of 25 to 30 40 % of your business, you kind of be a fool not to say,

Yeah. Well, obviously you know what you're doing. So yeah, come on board, right?

John Gafford (33:49)
Yeah, well,

they also know that if they say no, we'll go find another partner. Because now we've proved that concept, we can flip that stream somewhere else. But again, it's beneficial for everybody in the long run. And there's been deals we've done like that where, hey, man, we couldn't push the business. We couldn't do it. For whatever reason, just couldn't drive traffic there. So it wasn't like we went out and said, let's start up a business doing this. And then we couldn't make it work.

Brad Banyas (33:55)
Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

John Gafford (34:17)
You know, there's certain

Brad Banyas (34:17)
Yeah.

John Gafford (34:18)
trades that I would never want to be in ⁓ with it around the real estate transaction. Like I would never want to be in the moving space. my gosh. No, no, no, no, no. I mean,

Brad Banyas (34:27)
Yeah. Yeah. I,

I, my, my, in high school, my buddy's brother and Bulldog movers. If you, know, you've been here, so Bulldog movers and it was a really good moving company time. So from the time I was old enough to, you know, furniture, that's what, that's what we did from 13 to 18. And now, you know, now everyone still, someone calls me and goes, Oh yeah, you want to help me move my house? But absolutely not.

Absolutely, absolutely not. We were moving Elton John out of his penthouse and Buckhead and the guy, yeah, you remember that? Yeah. was Park Avenue or whatever it is, but the guy literally on his top floor had like a kitchen at the very top and he had this huge wooden, you know, cutting board that probably there's no telling how much the thing weighed. And they paired me with this guy.

John Gafford (34:50)
No.

I don't

Brad Banyas (35:17)
I was always a pretty big guy. A pair of me this guy looks like he weighed 135 pounds. And I said, guys, why are you pairing me with this guy? Like, what are you talking about? Like, that is the strongest guy we got. You're going to be happy that he's with you when you do that. But we carried that thing down a layer of stairs before we could get it to the elevator. And I told myself, I said, there's one thing I don't want to be when I grow up and it's in the movie industry. So.

John Gafford (35:41)
Yeah, no,

no, no. have probably five different movers that we send people to, but that is such a hard, because something always gets broken, always. I don't care how good you are, something's gonna get broken. I don't care.

Brad Banyas (35:51)
⁓

Absolutely. It's, you know, carry some good liability insurance if you're, if you're going to get into that business, you know? Yeah. So what, so what, other things like would you give advice? Like, I know you talk a lot about, you know, checking your ego, you know, and, and, know, you seem like a pretty humble guy. You've kind of gone through some things and have a lot of different experiences, which I think helps. It's so many funny, like,

John Gafford (35:58)
Yeah, no kidding. That's the smartest thing to do.

Brad Banyas (36:20)
people that were in the bar business. So when I first got out of college, I was a bartender, right? And I was in that business and it's such a people business. It's such a great thing if you get a chance to do that in a young age, I encourage you to do it because there's some good times associated with that. But my wife nixed it when she found out I was bartending for some extra money at the Marriott near the airport and stuff on weekends. And she found out that the old broads were leaving the keys to the room. She's like, you're done.

John Gafford (36:47)
Yeah, you're out.

Brad Banyas (36:47)
I'm like, yeah,

but I can, I can use a 1500. You know, you're done. So.

John Gafford (36:52)
man, dude, the stuff that used to happen in, you know, cause like we talked about from when on, you know, I spent, I spent my early twenties working for Hooters of America in management with them and got into upper management with them. And, and that was at the time. mean,

I mean, it was as crazy as you can imagine. It was like working at a fraternity house. was that crazy. I'll never forget, you know, when I first started there, and this is in 1994, whatever it was, the director of human resources, Paul Schaeffer, because we had to go to Atlanta and Marietta to the corporate headquarters for Hooters University, whatever it was. And Paul Schaeffer, who was the director of human resources, walks out and he goes, hey,

Brad Banyas (37:15)
Yeah.

John Gafford (37:40)
So let's just make this easier on me. He goes, there's two kinds of guys that come to work for this company in management. He goes, there's guys that have just been really good with girls their whole life and just girls think they're funny and giggle and laugh and never had a problem getting a date. And you know, a lot of those guys, you're going to wind up being, if you're really that dude, you're going to wind up being a vice president. And he goes, and then there's guys that unfortunately think they're that guy, but they're not that guy.

I'm gonna fire you for sexual harassment. So if we could just go ahead and weed out who you are right now, it'd make my life a lot easier. And over the years, that was so true with that business. was so incredibly true. after that, coming back to Atlanta to run Cobalt Lounge, which is made famous by Ray Lewis ⁓ in Super Bowl 2000, hey dad, I'm in it. ⁓

Brad Banyas (38:12)
You

Yeah.

What a sleep is that?

John Gafford (38:30)
Hey dad,

I finally made it on Sports Center for all the wrong reasons. There you go. ⁓ Finally made it. ⁓ Yeah. I always, I always said anybody that says no press is bad press. Never tried to run Cobalt Lounge in 2000 after Superbowl. ⁓ That was as bad as it got. But you know, that club in itself and just the stories and the people and the stuff that we would see in there was just, it was pretty crazy. It was wild.

Brad Banyas (38:46)
Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah,

yeah, it's it's worth doing it if you're a young person, you know, we're gonna bar restaurant for, you know, for whatever. Yeah, not not for a long time, but but do it and and get get that feeling and that ⁓ that personal touch of people because it's a high high stress. You know, you got to deal with people all the time pissed off people. It's it's it's good for you. It's good for your ego. It'll humble you.

John Gafford (39:00)
It was wild.

Agreed.

But

it's funny you say that because we're talking about, because my son just graduated from high school, actually just graduated yesterday. Incredibly smart kid, valedictorian, 35 ACT. He's going to SMU in the fall in Dallas. And we're sending him there because, know, a lot of people, especially entrepreneurs have this weird relationship with education right now. Personally, I kind of feel it's, most of them didn't get a lot of education. So it's a great time to say it's worthless.

Brad Banyas (39:35)
That's awesome.

John Gafford (39:48)
I do not, like I didn't finish college. I went to college, but I did not graduate, but I do not feel, I don't feel negative about the experience. think, I feel like college is a great place to learn how to be an adult. I figure like it's a great place to learn how to think. But I also feel like where you go is going to determine how you think. you know, intelligence has been commoditized in a way that we can still quite fully don't understand with the advent of AI. I mean, there's nothing my son,

Brad Banyas (40:06)
Yeah.

John Gafford (40:16)
can ever do that's gonna be smarter than what I already have in my phone, right? It's just not gonna happen. However, the network is invaluable and understanding the value of that network, which is why we ultimately chose SMU. have, for wealth concentration in families for kids that go to college, SMU is the top 1 % of all universities in United States. There's so much incredible wealth and power there.

And now with, you know, Goldman Sachs office is bigger in Dallas now than it is in New York and the whole y'all street thing that's happening there. There's a lot of high dollar stuff there, but all of that is useless. If my son is, doesn't understand how to network and talk to people like, and for his, most of his, of his high school career, he worked for me here at the company here doing social media stuff, working on the podcast and was up and he's in an office with a bunch of adults.

Brad Banyas (41:01)
Yeah. Yeah.

John Gafford (41:13)
So I said, so as I said, you know, I saw this coming and you know, he's a smart kid, but he's not necessarily a super outgoing guy. So I said, how we gotta put him in environment where he's gonna start talking to people. And so where do we send him? My buddy owns a bunch of bars. We send him there to work there for the summer. So now he's in a place where he's forced to talk to people and around people all day long. And that is much like the car lot is the gift of

Brad Banyas (41:32)
Yeah. Yeah.

John Gafford (41:42)
education and sales, hospitality is the gift and

Brad Banyas (41:47)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we were just, we were on someone else's podcast yesterday and they were asking, you know, what, what would I tell younger people to, really be good at, right? You know, and at one point it's go be an engineer, right? Or go be a finance guy and go be, you know, whatever it is. And I said, the num, the number one thing that everyone should work on is their communication skills.

John Gafford (41:48)
So I agree completely.

Brad Banyas (42:12)
their ability to articulate their ideas or, you know, talk to someone, be in a broad environment with a bunch of different types of people. doesn't matter if you're, you know, a billionaire or the guy who's a garbage guy. It really doesn't matter. The ability to communicate and relate to people will always be in high demand. And most, not in all cases, but most people that succeed in life to some level are very good communicators. And so the only way you learn to be a good communicator

is talking to people or being around people. I'll never forget. I, you know, I, when I was a young guy, um, they sent me to Puerto Rico to do some presentation because the, the VP of sales didn't want to go. I mean, I'm a 23 year old kid. I'd never been out of the country. Right. It sends me is like, Brad, you, you, you go run it. You, can do it. And I get there and John, you'll laugh. it wasn't like a little small like meeting. There were 500, 600 people in an auditorium.

John Gafford (42:58)
I'm in.

Brad Banyas (43:12)
And so, you know, first of all, I've never had any public speaking training or anything in the five companies that presented before me all spoke in Spanish. And so I'm sitting here. I'm like, holy shit, man. Like what like, so I get up and of course, I, you know, I'm a kid. I'd never been, never been anywhere outside, you know, whatever a couple of states. And I'm like, the only thing I could get out, I'm sitting like, uh, no habla espanol. I mean,

That's all I said. I'm like, I don't know shit. And everyone just cried laughing and they're like, it's okay, Brad, you can speak English. We speak English. was like, Oh, thank God. Cause that was it. Like I'm done. You know, so nothing like being thrown into the world. got back and I told my boss, I was like, Hey man, what the hell, dude? There are 600 people there. Like I'm cool about throwing me into the water, but like there were waves and sharks and they didn't even speak English. So it was a good.

John Gafford (43:49)
Yeah.

my God.

my gosh,

Brad Banyas (44:09)
Good time, Good time. Crazy stuff.

John Gafford (44:10)
dude, that's great. That's so funny. you know, I tell my kids all the time, like, if you can develop one skill, like the soft skills are gonna be way more valuable than the hard skills, because the hard skills, again, you'll have help for that. But I said, since all of your friends live their lives with their face down in their phone, the ability to look across the table and connect at a visceral, human, deep level with another human being, that skill set is gonna be in short order.

by the time you're 25, 30 years old. And you will eat people for lunch if you have.

Brad Banyas (44:41)
Absolutely.

Absolutely. And it is true. mean, people prefer to do business with people they like. I'm not saying in all cases where it's a price oriented, a lot of price pressure where someone's looking for the lowest deal, but in most cases, you know, I want to do business with people I like. I want to do people that have interests with me. A guy that likes his wife, a guy that likes his kids, a guy that's doing these things. Like it's okay. That's, that's naturally who you want to, you know, be around because they're similar to you.

I think that's just under underestimated. People think, well, you necessarily have the best product or best service. That's not true because everybody has service problems. Everybody's products has issues. It's how you work through them, how you deal with them, how you address them, how you be accountable as you were talking about earlier. Hey man, we totally screwed the pooch on that. You're right. We're owning it. And owning your mistakes or failures, I think, is another skill that I would tell people. Own it. Get over it. Be gen...

Be sincere and genuine about, know, don't just wash it off. But if you're sincere and genuine and you do a good job in that crisis management that you're talking about, the cobalt bar that you're at, the crisis management part is important in life too, how you react to that stuff. So.

John Gafford (45:58)
One of my favorite

compliments I've ever personally received about myself is many, many years ago, one of my bosses said, just called me a bleeder. He said, so I love you Gafferger bleeder. And what, what he, I said, what does that mean? He goes, you just take it right up. You just take it right on the chin. You just, when you screw up, you just stick your chin out and say, smack me as hard as you can. And that's it. No, there's no, there's no shuffling. There's no finger pointing. There's no, it's just like, yep, that's what happened. Give it to me. Just give it to me.

Brad Banyas (46:09)
Hahaha!

John Gafford (46:27)
He's like, so I love you, dude. You're a bleeder. And so I always, I've told my kids just be a bleeder, man, because it's better off to just take your medicine upfront. They'll respect you more for it. But if you screwed up, you if you screw something up, you can't just say, screwed up and throw your hands up. You've got to say, I screwed this up. This is why this happened. This is what I'm putting in place to make sure it never happens again.

Brad Banyas (46:27)
I love it.

Absolutely. I when we were Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, and also if you've done something wrong and you know it's wrong, it's different if someone's riding your ass for riding your I don't like people. like managers like that. I like people like that just ride people's ass to ride their ass to be a control freak. But I'll never forget when we first started first our tech company and it was a rough time because I was 2000. That's when the market crashed.

John Gafford (46:51)
Now all of a sudden it's like, how can he be mad at that? You're like, ah, shit.

Brad Banyas (47:14)
You know, you weren't raising any money. weren't doing it. It was just like, you know, we got to just hold on, get this, get the, get the string and hold on. And one of our investors called and he goes, how's it going? I said, well, you know, we're, we're down, we're, we're bleeding and, we'll, we'll live to fight another day. So we'll get up next week and come at it. And he's laughed, but, ⁓ I forget the, was a famous quote around that, but I'm bleeding, I'm dying, but I'll get up to fight you tomorrow. So it's true. This is what life is, man.

John Gafford (47:42)
Yeah.

Well, and you look at like what's happening in the real estate investment space, which I'm also do a lot of stuff there as well. But right now there's a lot of people that are getting murdered in these syndicated multifamily deals that they did three, you know, three to four years ago, because part of the performance on those deals when they raised the capital to purchase these assets was that rates were going to come down and rates have not come down. And all of sudden

these banks are calling their notes to they can't refinance into them. All the gap money is getting smashed. And I know people that are like calling me like, I just found out that I'm, going to get smoked on the still. I'm like, they should have been telling you that for 18 months. Like, listen, we're in trouble here, but we're having this because if you are somebody that raises capital for deals or asked them to go in on deals with you, like

Brad Banyas (48:15)
Yeah.

Yeah.

John Gafford (48:35)
Deals are gonna go bad. It's just kind of the nature of the beast, especially if you're doing any type of investment. Occasionally, things are not gonna go the way you want it. That's why it's called investing. There's risk involved to it, right? And again, part of my book is about how to evaluate risk. But if you're not telling people, if you're not advising them along the way when the risk is getting worse, you can't just drop people on the end. And I see a lot of that happening right now, where people are really surprised their investments are not.

Brad Banyas (48:36)
Thank

Yeah.

Well, you know, it's kind of like, you know, any time I always say to go and getting out as outside investors, like we had angel investors early on, we've kind of cashflow most of our businesses because I just never liked that. Cause they only, even the, the angel guys that we had early on, you know, we had 14 pages of risk. Right. And in the contract there's 14. And I would say, did you read, you know, the 14 pages before you're, yeah. And I, and they would say, why would you say that? I was like, well, because, you know,

John Gafford (49:25)
Yeah. And initial the bottom of every page.

Brad Banyas (49:33)
These are risky things. know, technology can be obsolete in it. Now it can be obsolete a day later because of AI. Like, did you read the risk? And I, like I said, going back to communicate to people, think that is, do you know David Seymour? Do you remember David Seymour? No. He was on Flipping Boston. He's been doing a lot. I should connect you guys. Super nice guy. but he, was on the show and we, got into, deep into inflation and what's going on with, you know,

John Gafford (49:49)
I don't, uh-uh, I don't.

Brad Banyas (50:02)
you know, basically the Fed and whatever, you know, that stuff, a lot of people don't pay attention to it, but it affects you when you're getting into these kind of real estate type investments.

John Gafford (50:12)
Well,

even in residential, we live and die by the interest rate. ⁓ One of the things that's been very unique here, and again, anybody that pontificates about the residential real estate market at a national level or even a state level, is they're an amateur. mean, real estate markets are so localized to what they do with the exception of the massive crash of 2006. ⁓ But in most cases, what happens here

doesn't matter what happens in Tampa. The two things are unrelated. And we've been blessed here in Nevada with the migration. You know, the California tax policy has helped us dramatically. Washington just passed the 10 % state income tax. Come on down. My phone is ringing like crazy. And, and, and any more like, you know, I don't go out and do a lot of the practical work that a real estate agent does anymore. That's not what I do. However, I do have

I do have a handful of clients that I will work with if I, if they are at that level. And like two weeks ago, I was out shopping for $20 million houses with a guy from, Washington that will literally pay for that house in cash in one year of tax savings by leaving Washington. That's wild. So, so as long as yeah, as long as that kind of stuff still happens and we maintain what, you know,

Brad Banyas (51:30)
Wow. Wow, that's insane.

John Gafford (51:40)
If Nevada maintains our tax thoughts on people, I think we'll be good here and it will be fine. But again, housing, like six point, know, six and a half is not a bad rate. It's not a horrible rate where the rates are today. But when you had the massive run up in housing that we had over the last several years, including when you look at, know, when the single family home became a commodity, according to Blackstone, that caused a lot of a of a problem, especially here in Vegas. When we have pockets of Vegas,

Like North Las Vegas, estimate it is 51 % of the houses up there are owned by investors. That's a city. And 51 % of the housing stock is owned by investors. That's wild. So.

Brad Banyas (52:23)
Yeah, I wanted to

ask, was gonna, I wanted to go ahead. I'm sorry. I was going to ask you, I want to ask you about BlackRock and what you think about, you know, what they're doing just as a whole, you know, being in that business and being an entrepreneur and really on your own. mean, what, what are your, what are your thoughts on that?

John Gafford (52:26)
No, keep going.

Well, it's, it's for me, it's a little bit of, for me, it's a little bit of a double edged sword because I did help black. helped Blackstone, uh, through invitation homes. helped Goldman Sachs. I helped all of those guys build their portfolios quickly in 2013 to about 2016. I helped them by hundreds and hundreds of homes here in Las Vegas. Um, you know, but then at that moment in time, we were trying to absorb sitting housing stock.

Right? So it was a good thing to get to stuff moving. And the problem that I think none of us saw when we were doing it for them back then was when, when wall street buys a house, you might as well burn it down because I'm not saying go burn down houses down. So I'm saying, but it's, it's, it's probably there's a good chance it's never coming back on the open market for a, you know, a normal homeowner to purchase. It's going to get traded in a block of properties amongst reeds and amongst everything else. It's become a commodity.

Brad Banyas (53:24)
Hahaha.

Yeah.

John Gafford (53:38)
And when that happens, now you go from having housing stock surplus to having housing stock shortage in certain markets, especially, you know, a lot of people look at Las Vegas and they see, you know, all the land and see the desert in every direction. When you're flying in there, like, look at all this land. This is crazy. All of that land for the most part has been slated for conservation. Las Vegas is an Island. We're just surrounded by sand instead of surrounded by water. So we have really heavy geographical limitations about

where we can build, how far out we can build. There's no urban sprawl here. That's just gonna go to the horizon. That's not gonna happen. So when you have a market like that, you only have so much land, you only have so much available land, and now you start taking chunks of the housing stock out, and you have this massive housing, you have this massive population migration coming here. Because if you look at, and again, our market is so special in what's happened here. Name one other city in the United States that got

Every single major sports franchise inside a period of call it 12 years This one any day they're gonna announce. I don't know what's gonna happen It's gonna be interesting to see we had some news today that I think was interesting for sports fans out there Especially if you're in Houston, this might be bad news Tillman Fertitta his bid to buy Caesars went through today Tillman Fertitta also owns the Houston Rockets Vegas currently does not have a basketball team

Brad Banyas (54:52)
Yeah.

wow.

Hahaha!

John Gafford (55:06)
The NBA has

said they want to come here. They want to have a team here. They look at the success of other teams, go Knights go, going back to Stanley Cup final for the third time in 10 years. I don't know why people think that's hard. It just seems to be really easy for us. Yes, I'm aware. Everybody hates the Knights. I'm aware of it. We, we, we, so we, we bathe in your tears. If you're a hockey fan, listen to this. Yes, we, we, we shower in your, your anger and your tears. We love being the evil empire of hockey. We love it. ⁓

Brad Banyas (55:14)
Yeah, that's awesome.

John Gafford (55:34)
But you've got that and then Foley who owns the Knights just put it in a bid to buy a team as well. So it's going to be really interesting to see. I think it's going to be one of those two groups that'll either be telling them moving the Rockets here if you can, or it's going to be Foley will get another team, which really I kind of hope it's Foley because they've done such a good job with the Knights. And really, I, I don't think Vegas needs another basketball arena. I don't think they do. I think they need to make improvements to T-Mobile and let the Knights and the basketball team play in the same place. That's what I think. So, but it's just yet.

Brad Banyas (55:55)
Yeah.

Yeah, that's great. Yeah.

John Gafford (56:03)
Yeah,

that's crazy stuff. just, it just continues to grow. It's nuts.

Brad Banyas (56:06)
Yeah, so what you're saying, hey, if you're young, aggressive, and you want to get into the real estate business, you need to call john Gafford and get in there and and help with that.

John Gafford (56:16)
Yeah,

we are, and I'll tell you this, we are actually in the middle of, we're gonna do a full West Coast expansion. We're as big as we can be in Vegas. We're as big as we can be. And our goal now over the last year is, what we've kind of learned is, and not that we're looking to get out of the business right now, but we've kind of realized we've built an unsellable business, which if you're a business owner, that's the worst thing you can do. And the reason I say that is we're too big.

Brad Banyas (56:38)
Yeah.

John Gafford (56:43)
to be sold to another like real estate brand, because they could never write the check that we would take to walk away. But we're not big enough to get sold to private equity. So in meeting with our advisors and our &A people, we understand the size that we need to be and how big we need to be to attract ⁓ a private equity buyer. And we intend to get there in five years. We intend to get to 3,000 agents over probably 12 markets total on just the West Coast or just the West side of the United States.

⁓ with our vertical integrated model into different cities and get that done in five years and then have a business that if we choose to at that time we can exit.

Brad Banyas (57:23)
Yeah. Well, that's great. Well, I mean, I'm confident, you know what you're doing. and I mean, you, ⁓ you know, your life experiences kind of get you where you're at and, ⁓ it's, it's, it's been awesome. Really talking to you, man. You're, you're just, you're, you're a regular guy and I, I appreciate that. I love your, I love your directness to it. The world needs more direct people. You're very open and telling us, telling the world kind of what you're doing. So I think you're going to do it. So

John Gafford (57:47)
Well, you you learn pretty quickly when you teach as much as I do that you can walk in front of a room of 100 people and literally say, here's the exact roadmap for how to do exactly what I'm doing. And of the 100, five will have the gumption to try and one might have the gumption to finish. So be the one, be that, rip me off, be that one person, steal all of this from me. I'm rooting for you. I want you to be that one person. I want you to...

Brad Banyas (58:07)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. We're to Vegas. We're moving to Vegas.

John Gafford (58:17)
Anybody listen to this, I want you to be that one person. I want you to be the one person. I want you, I'm rooting for you.

Brad Banyas (58:17)
We're taking the fast studio to Vegas. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, it's, it's, um, I hate saying this. Everyone says all the time, but you know, you know, every, everyone wants to be, you know, they don't want to be part of the process, but they want to be part of the goods of what happens from the process. Right.

the results they want to be part of it, but no one wants to go through that pain. It's not pain where I say, you know, it is what it is, whether you're working for someone or yourself. It's just life. mean, shit happens, right? But at the end of the day, it's people's, you know, appetite for risk. Most people don't, don't have that appetite. They're not willing to put in four or five years or whatever it takes to do that. And it's just they it's

It's perceived risk in my mind, because just like you gave the example before, where you could go into this job and you've got a great salary and you're getting a 3 % every year and everything's gravy and someone walks in and terminates you, and you didn't do anything wrong, but you had no really control, no input of how to avoid that. That's the lesson for everyone out there, kids, young people.

John Gafford (59:18)
Mm.

And that's the book, man, that's the book.

Brad Banyas (59:29)
Put the book up again. Let's let's give it one more. Where they can they find this? I saw it on Amazon.

John Gafford (59:33)
Anywhere, yeah, Amazon, you

go to Barnes and Noble and buy it. ⁓ It's, if you wanna pick a bar copy there. If you wanna pick up the audio book, which seems to what a lot of people have done, which is great. I was number one on Amazon ⁓ for education for like a month under audio books. So I like that. ⁓ Yeah, but you know, give it a read. know, I put a lot into this and my goal is to make as much impact as I can with people, especially young people. Cause again, if I could go back and...

smack my 22 year old self in the head with it, I would.

Brad Banyas (1:00:04)
Yeah, well, you know what? ⁓ Those dumb, that dumb shit that I did, I don't think I'd take some of that back, because there's at least some good, the good news is you may not make any money out of it, but you're gonna have a hell of a story around a fire pit of what you did and why you did it. And someone's like, God, that was really stupid. And it was, there were a lot of stupid shit we all did,

John Gafford (1:00:25)
It's the of the day, isn't that the point?

Brad Banyas (1:00:27)
Absolutely.

I mean, you gotta have some good stories. you're squeaky clean, man, nobody wants to hear that bullshit, right? There's got to be something in your closet. Hey, did you drive through your parents' house? You know, did you get arrested? Those are the stories that build legends. So I'm not encouraging young people to drive through their parents' house, but you ever want to know how to get out of that or, or, you know, come back to your parents and have a decent relationship after you've done $50,000 damage their house. Call me. I'll let you know. Maybe I'll put it in a book.

John Gafford (1:00:55)
And I'm not even making this up. There is a story in this book about me causing probably $50,000 worth of damage to my parents' There is also a story in the book about me getting caught with girls after hours in my car by two very angry redneck fathers in the book. So both of those stories are already in this book.

Brad Banyas (1:01:13)
So hey, so John, this was divine intervention. It was meant to be. So I literally drove, I was not in a good state, but my parents lived down this hill and I literally drove down over the front porch into the house, onto the stairs, caved onto me. My dad, can still, I'm looking at the bottom of the steps in the house of my car. I'm looking up the steps. I can see my dad running, slide by.

John Gafford (1:01:17)
Why?

Brad Banyas (1:01:41)
He's got half his face shaved. He's in skivvies and he's just dropping the F bomb over and over. And so at that time, he's like, he's like, what the F what the F with that he comes down the steps, he back it out. And so at that time, I was at the University of Tennessee, and he goes, come sundown on Sunday, I want your ass on a Greyhound bus back to Knoxville, and I don't want to see till Christmas. And so that was like June. And when I came back, he had had it was great, a new brick, it looked amazing. And I walked out like,

I was like, Dad, your how you're just shut up. Don't don't even don't don't talk to me. Don't mention it. Whatever. So anyways.

John Gafford (1:02:17)
Oh God. Yeah. My, my, my story real quick about damaging the house was when I was 13, when I was 13, uh, me and my friend, Corey were at a home alone, of course, cause we're kids of the eighties and that's what she did. And, we're, playing a game of match flick inside my house. If you don't know what that is. So we take a big box of kitchen matches, then you flip them and then they light in the air. Right. So there was a knock at the front door and I grew up in a very small town in North Florida where I'm sure you've gotten gas before called Lake city, Florida. That's right.

Brad Banyas (1:02:21)
Hahaha

yeah.

yeah, absolutely.

John Gafford (1:02:47)
That's where I grew up in that place is where I grew up, right?

Brad Banyas (1:02:47)
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

John Gafford (1:02:49)
And so we're doing this and there was a knock at the door and we these two big oak doors that were kind of the latch would get stuck. And I was trying to open the door and it was these two, we'll call them juvenile delinquents that were at a high school car wash with my sister. And they were coming to our house to get another hose or a bucket or something. And I'm trying to open the door and I'm trying to get, I'm like, yeah, hang on a second. I can't get the door open. I can't.

Corey taps me on the shoulder, I turn around and my family room's on fire. Like, on fire. So I'm like, my God, the house on fire, come around back. So these two juvenile delinquents run around back and they do put the fire out to their credit, but like the drapes are burned, the couch is burned, the carpet's burned, ceiling's burned, burned, right? I'm 13, I'm freaking out, I'm like, my God, my God, my God, my God, what am I gonna do? So these two dudes are like, okay, here's what we're gonna do. You two idiots disappear and come back in like two hours. All right.

Brad Banyas (1:03:19)
said.

John Gafford (1:03:42)
So we disappear, we go heading off into the woods, goofing around, whatever, like, oh, I what's going on. And I was having a blah, blah, blah. We come back two hours later and like, there's five cops there right now. And there's the two juvenile delinquents over there talking. And our TV are like 1975 crappy TV, 20s crappy TV. And our 1970 Hi-Fi stereo is sitting outside the back of the house. Cause what these two idiots did is they told the cops that they came

to the house to grab some stuff for the car wash. And they caught two dudes running out of the back of the house after they were trying to rob it. And they had set the house on fire and they ran the dudes off and then put the fire out. So now they're heroes. Like I'm 13. This is insurance fraud. I'm 13. My mom is standing there. I'm like, ah, what's going on? Right? And yeah, this is me at 13, right? And

Brad Banyas (1:04:35)
Yeah.

John Gafford (1:04:39)
Sure enough, insurance bought my mom like all new stuff. Everything got taken care of, which it would have anyway, even if I had said I'd done this. And I got away with that until my sister's wedding, probably 20, 20 some odd years later when we're sitting there and we know we're bringing up all the stuff we did as kids. And my sister Mandy goes, well, they said, hey, mom, commit insurance fraud. My mom's like, what? I'm sorry, what happened? Yeah. So yeah, that's the.

Brad Banyas (1:05:05)
my God. And she, yeah,

your mom felt bad about it. She was probably going to go to report it.

John Gafford (1:05:09)
She was,

no, yeah, oh yeah, she was pissed. like, well, so immediately I started reminding the statute of limitations for such a thing as probably up. yeah, it was like, yeah, yeah. That was, that was Lake City, Florida at 13. There you go.

Brad Banyas (1:05:16)
You

Dude, that's awesome. It's those life experiences. That's a great story. Well, so if someone for, if you can, on the book, we've got that from your real estate company, where can people find what you're doing and how to get to you?

John Gafford (1:05:37)
Yeah, you can find me at TheJohnGafford anywhere. So TheJohnGafford on Instagram, all the handles across the way. can go to thejongafford.com and it has links to all of my stuff. Probably the coolest thing that I'm doing right now that I really like is I've got, that people has really grown a lot, like a lot. I wrote the book now almost, you know, two and a half years ago. It takes a long time to get stuff published and get it out. And I kind of, and I kind of felt like I had this, I missed writing a little bit.

Brad Banyas (1:05:57)
Yeah, absolutely.

John Gafford (1:06:04)
So I started doing a weekly newsletter that comes out every Wednesday called Wednesday Wake Up. And it's just a story that I saw this week and it's a good lesson. that has grown like wildfire with subscribers on it. So people love that. So if you're somebody that likes getting a real quick, you know, pick me up in the middle of your week with some cool stuff, check out Wake Up Wednesday. You can do that also at my website, thejohngaffer.com. Love it, buy the book, that's