Please Lance, tell me about your vision.
You know my vision is one where the architects finally start taking back the master builder
role.
When architects the original definition was master builder and in previous times to modern
industrial society that we live in right now, architects actually did it all.
They were the drawings, they did the engineering, they did the building and they had a lot more
respect and I think we had better architecture.
So that is my vision and I've been doing that by being both of those things, an architect,
a builder and a real estate developer which is a rarity as an architect.
A lot of architects just want to sit in a cushy office, draw beautiful buildings, good
for them.
I used to be one of them but as a guy who started out being a builder first way back
when in North Dakota where I grew up, I couldn't help but sort of fuse all three together.
Wow.
So I'm curious, you used to be an architect.
Whenever you took that step into becoming all of the pieces of the building, where did
that come from?
How did you start that?
Yeah, well I tell you what, sort of harkening back again to North Dakota here is so I'm
41 years old today and my journey started when I was 13.
I grew up lower middle class, poor to the point where like we got one pair of shoes
per year.
My mom and dad's relationship with money was one of anxiety and not sort of embracing the
fact that you got to make money.
You got to make money if you want to live comfortably and remove yourself from that
anxiety.
So I tried farming with my dad one summer in Northwest North Dakota.
I grew up in a cattle ranch and a farm and he and I didn't get along at that time.
I just didn't particularly like the work and I go, hey, this isn't for me and he goes,
well you got to do something and I wanted school clothes and all the other stuff and
I said sure I'm going to call your best friend Bruce up and his best friend was a general
contractor and I said hey I will do, you got any work I'll do whatever it takes and he
says yeah you could be my gopher and I go great, what is that and he goes when you go
for this you go for that, when you're done going for things you get up on the roof and
learn how to roof.
We did 80 roofs that summer.
It was brutal work.
It was hard.
It was sweaty.
It was hot but I just loved every single minute of it and about halfway through the summer
Bruce told me a piece of, he gave me a piece of, he just asked a question actually and
it was sort of changed my life towards the trajectory of being a serial entrepreneur
and it was, he goes, how much money, he goes I'm paying you $7.25 an hour.
How much do you think I'm paying, how much do you think I'm charging the clients for
every hour you work and I go $7.25 an hour and he laughed and I had no idea why he laughed
but then he explained how service based business works that you, if you're paying your clients
and your employees $10 an hour you're usually charging them out two or three times that
amount.
He explained why with profits, cost of business, all the other good stuff that maybe just like
a young person doesn't really know until somebody finally tells him and then I saw Bruce's relationship
with money and he had no anxiety about it.
He was not rich and he was not this and he's still not and he's not this guy who has all
these possessions or anything but he just didn't have a, he didn't walk around all day
with this burden of money hanging over his head because he didn't have it.
One of my favorite rappers of all time, Kanye West, one of his songs he says, having money
isn't everything not having it is.
So all of that just sort of formulated and like oh I'm going to be a builder.
Like Bruce, I actually started out being a builder first and I went to tech school for
two years to become a general contractor and I got about, I almost, in our senior year
I won't, as we were finishing I got to looking at these blueprints.
We built a house for a capstone and I was looking at them and I went, man like why did
the architects draw it that way?
And then I started thinking oh yeah the architecture and the drawings are going to come before
the building obviously.
How interesting would it be?
I was like I love school.
I figured out for the first time in my life I love school.
I figured out how to monetize going to school with all the different kinds of scholarships
and stuff like that and I was, and I had no children.
I had nothing, I was like what if I went to school 70 miles north to be an architect too?
How interesting would it be if I got the architecture clients first and then I convinced them that
I should build their buildings too?
And I didn't even start thinking about real estate development until I got into architecture
school.
But that was sort of the next step on my journey.
Got to architecture school, same sort of thing, loved it, graduated at the top of my class
and I was like okay.
And then the ultimate kind of final leap should be real estate development like if I can make
enough money as an architect and then I can buy a piece of land, I know how to build it,
I can make money three times, four or five if you count like holding on to the real estate
developments and stuff like that.
And the ultimate thing that it's allowed us to do at our architecture firm, F9 Productions,
is when we wear all of those hats we have so much more control over the quality of the
project, the spaces, the design, the materials, we create better architecture.
And that's my ultimate vision for other architects is to hear about our story on our show inside
the firm podcast or this interview today with you Peyton and be inspired to start taking
on more responsibility and take back that master builder role.
Wow, so much going into that from beginning from drawing from idea all the way to finishing
it and then being the realtor side of it and selling it off to I don't even know my dad
does realtor but I don't my dad's a realtor but I don't know anything about it.
I let him handle it.
But I'm sure there's a lot going into this that you've got a whole train that just once
you're at the beginning you just take them through every step and you're monetizing each
section of it.
That's incredible.
I'm curious.
Yeah, thank you.
Yeah, I mean curious what your why is.
What got you started in this?
Was it the money aspect of not having to not wanting to worry or was it the passion of
learning?
Like what was your why?
What's your drive behind your day to day now?
Yeah, now.
Yeah, right.
So I've overcome the anxiety of not having money.
Right.
Which is I mean, you know, because like I I'm comfortable in my income.
I'm comfortable in my income.
I don't worry about it.
I don't worry about the little stuff.
This morning I just bought like I'm going up to see my girlfriend in Minnesota and I
bought these two like little fishing poles to go up there with her and I'm like didn't
even think about it.
Just bought it.
You know, I'm going to go send her like this beautiful gift later this afternoon for her
birthday stuff like that, you know, going out to eat.
And I've talked to a lot of a lot of other entrepreneurs who get to this point too, where
it's like Dave Ramsey talks about this with people, you know, where he talks about like
you should pay off your house first before anything because you like something will happen
in your in your brain when you don't have that anxiety of a mortgage anymore.
Something will happen to you in your in your sort of soul.
And it's true.
All of a sudden then once that's out of the way, you know, it kind of proved to me that
like money is not an end.
It's not an end goal at the end of it.
Like we're still in.
And now with the rise of like A.I. and automation, I've been thinking too a lot about like, well,
people still want purpose.
There's still an innate purpose that God gave us on on on this on this earth and that that's
what drives us.
So now it's for me, it is putting myself and keeping myself in this position to be able
to come on shows like this, like pull myself away from the work to spread the good word
about about the vision that we're trying to accomplish ourselves and then push it outward
in society.
And I just think we would have better a better built environment overall.
So there's always that driving factor for sure.
But I love every little aspect, too, about what I do.
I love being the salesman.
I love actually still designing and drawing with my staff.
I love mentoring my staff and bringing them up and coddling them and helping facilitate
their their careers in a positive way as architects, as we have carpenters, we have superintendents
that work for us.
I teach at CU Boulder and try to bring that sort of messaging back and forth between the
college universities as well.
And then and then I have a nonprofit, Longmont Community Gardens, where we just we just want
a USDA federal grant for eighty six thousand dollars and we're going to double the amount
of urban farming that we offer in the city I operate in.
So I just have a lot of passion for doing positive things for for myself and then everybody
everybody else who is within my umbrella or my peripheries.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is going to get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show.
And thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your vision and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.