Where did that come from?
How'd you start that?
Yeah.
Well, I tell you what, sort of hearkening back again to North Dakota here is, uh,
so I'm 41 years old, uh, today.
And my, my journey started when I was 13.
I grew up, uh, lower middle-class, uh, poor to the point where like we got one
pair of shoes per year money.
My mom and dad's relationship with money was one of anxiety and, and not sort of
embracing the fact that you w you got to make money, you got to make money if you
want to live comfortably and, and remove yourself from that anxiety.
Uh, 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 I go 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, do you have 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're, 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.
Uh, 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
it, he just asked a question actually.
And it was sort of changed my life, um, towards the trajectory of being a serial
entrepreneur.
And it was, he goes, how much money?
He goes, I'm paying you $7 and 25 cents an hour.
How much do you think I'm paying?
Um, 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, you know, how it's service-based business works that you, you
know, if you, if you're paying your, your employees $10 an hour, you're usually
charging them out two or three times that amount.
He explained why with the profits, uh, it costs a 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, 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
goes, has all these possessions or anything, but he just didn't have a, he didn't walk
around all day with, with his burden of, of money hanging over his head because he
didn't have it.
Um, one of my favorite rappers of all time, Kanye West, he, he, you know, one of his
songs, he says, having money is and 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 once I went to tech school, uh, for two years to become a general contractor.
And I got up, I got about, I almost, you know, in our senior capstone year, I won't,
as we were finishing, I got to looking at these blueprints.
We, we, 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 am, 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, I didn't, what if I went to school and I didn't have any money?
I was like, I didn't, what if I went to school 70 miles north to be an architect too?
How interesting would it be if I, if I'd 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's, that was sort of the next step on my journey.
Got to architecture school, same sort of thing.
Loved it.
Graduated the top of my class.
And I was like, okay.
I like, and then the ultimate just kind of final leap should be real estate
development, like if I can make enough money as an architect and, and then, and,
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 onto 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.