Two Peas in a Podcast

Episode 91 - Jay Soave (MedCraft Investment Partners, Medical Real Estate Deals, and Interest Rate Consequences)

Jay Soave is the Managing Partner & Chief Investment Officer of MedCraft Investment Partners, a firm specializing in medical office acquisitions and development. Since joining the MedCraft team, Jay & his partner Michael have bought & developed over $300,000,000 in assets throughout the United States since 2021. Jay has extensive legal background and is a specialist in tax law, both of which give him a leg-up on structuring and completing high-value deals.

To connect with Jay please reach out directly at:

https://www.medcraftip.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaysoave/

Duration:: 40m
Broadcast on:: 31 Aug 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

Mr. J. Swave, one of the things that I've always admired you about you outside of the absolute superstar that you are on the business front is just how good of a man you are, how good of a father you are and how good of a family man you are, all while having this high profile job and being super plugged in and just being on top of all your stuff. I am so thankful, first and foremost, for having an opportunity to share some time with you because I can only imagine that time is really hard to come by. So thank you for sharing it with me and our audience. Well, thank you for inviting me, Igor. You're a good person. We met at the CrossFit gym, great motivator, straight shooter, which I love. And I'm always happy to do something and talk with someone who's a good person. And that's you. So my pleasure is mine. I appreciate that. And the conversation is going to be great. I will let you introduce yourself. Tell us what you do, Jay. Okay. My name is Jay. I am a former attorney and I am a partner in a medical office private equity fund. We do build the suit developments for health systems and physician groups and acquire existing assets as well. We've been the company's been around for 25 years. I joined about five years ago with the idea of raising capital for them, which we have done. I've acquired and financed about $300 million of assets so far and on the verge of starting to kick that off again as interest rates normalize. I love that. Now, you mentioned a lot of very, very technical things. Talk to us about the actual work that you do and the typical deals that you help structure. Medical office buildings that we're talking about is the stuff that you see all around town. It's like at Northwestern in Chicago is a Northwestern building on the corner. There might be an urgent care might be where your primary care doctor is your orthopedic surgeon is, you know, that is the new wave of medical office. They don't want you in the hospital. There's high infection rates and they're big hard to navigate open 24 hours. And what they're trying to do is put these in a more clinical setting. They're set up almost like conveyor belts. So they're very efficient. And what they're all these health systems are doing, not Muslim or not for profit is they're fighting for you. So they're trying to get you into their system so that if you go to your primary care doctor and say, Oh, I spray my wrist. Well, hey, our orthopedic guy is right across the street or right across the hallway. And so you go there. So they want you in their system and they're fighting for market share. So they want to put all these buildings in the neighborhoods in the cities so that, you know, it's very easy convenient for you to enter into your system and then something really bad happens or you have a baby or something they drive you to their hospital. You know, they, they want you going to their facilities. So we have been doing that for 25 years. We have a lot of great health system relationships throughout the United States. We've built in 35 states, millions square feet, 10 million square feet of development. And so we're, we're out there hunting for opportunities on a day to day basis. What am I doing? I'm going out and try and find deals. So that means pick up the phone. Call calling people, talking to relationships, hunting for opportunities, visiting people visiting properties. And then kind of a before I was in this role, I was raising capital for projects. And so you're always talking to capital. You're always talking to money. So we have tons and tons of conversations with. Private equity funds and the big banks down to family offices in our eyes. So my day is split between that. The last two years have been. Slow because of the interest rate environment. I would say that real estate has been in a recession for two years. But thankfully we closed our first asset and I think in 18 months, two weeks ago we have another one closing maybe next week. And one other one under L O I and maybe another one soon. So we're back, baby. I love that. I love that because it's such a positive story. Wherever the market went, wherever the environment financially was, maybe wasn't the perfect environment, but it feels like now we're coming back to more of a normal trajectory of where the economy is headed. Hopefully. Yeah. Talk to me because just like a typical American and just like a typical person. I have no idea who sits on the other side of these transactions. So who are the people who actually are looking to partner with you guys to make sure that these deals get done. So there are two groups basically so health systems and physician groups and we'll talk about the capital separately. The tenants are health systems and physician groups and so one of the biggest owners of real estate in the United States, a medical real state or the health systems themselves. And then a lot of doctors own their own buildings too. So they, you know, they, they're very smart. And I think they know everything and they think they know real estate. They do their own deals but, you know, it's kind of like, if I go break my arm, do I want to go to the new resident doctor or the guys been doing 35 years. We think it should be us. So we're always looking and talking to them about, Hey, let's, you know, partner on a new development opportunity. Let us help to program it so that you got the right uses in it. Let's make it more as efficient as possible for use. You can take on more space and you need and pay more than you need to. And so those are our target tenants. Yep. On the capital side, you'll say in general, I think this is probably something that's less known. Very few developers. So you see these multifamily buildings going up. You see new office buildings going up. The person who's developing it rarely has their own money. They might have 5% 10%, which is kind of the typical JV investment. They're always raising money from a third party or group of third parties or a fund, like a buddy works at Heinz. Heinz is a very well known national developer. They, they work with JV partners all the time. So they're talking to capital on a constant basis. And that can be any number of people, it could be a private equity fund, like a Blackstone or a Carlisle group. It can be a bank, like JP Morgan, or Morgan Stanley, it can be an insurance company, like PJM, it could be pensions funds and it could be family offices. So it could be any one of those or it could be a mix of those. And there's a market out there and people say, Hey, if I got this profile of deal and I want to have this kind of return. And so you got to, you know, fit the box together to make it work. And, you know, development is one, but, you know, there's various risk profiles up and down about where, you know, various people play. So part of my job is okay talking to these capital groups all the time and having conversation with them like, Hey, they want this type of deal and these conditions that this dollar amount, you know, there's, there's someone anywhere up and down that stack. So some of them have a my minimum equity check size is $100 million. You know, usually using debt, like 60%. So $100 million equity check means that you have to have a $250 million deal, which is a big one, especially for medical. That's the way the world works in really any development deal or acquisition deal or whatever there's outside money being used. Yeah, I love that because you are just the specialist in real estate and you have a lot of visibility into things that common people do not generally see. How did you get in real estate. And like what was the path towards building this foundation of knowing how real estate operates and how deals are done. That's a great question. So, um, we're going too much but I was an attorney for 15 years. First, I worked at some big law firms in Chicago. And I found out pretty quickly I didn't want to do that. I don't think that's atypical. I mean, those places are meat grinders, you know, and you do. You do some exciting stuff so you'll do big public MNA deals you'll do these big takeovers you do a whole bunch of things that are fun and cool but you know the amount of time that you put in is soul crushing and then if you're not doing a big deal you might be doing which is small deals but you know what does that mean I'm looking at a 120 page debt document and going through it and reading it and across this word I don't put this word in. I think you do that like 10 times in a month. You know, it's kind of soul crushing you may not talk to someone close your door and look at 15 of these things. So I always definitely wanted to do something else. 2008 2009. I was working on a law firm met a girl. And so decided that I was going to move to where she was in New York. And I said, listen, I'll go, but I'm done with this law firm thing. I'll only move there if I find a job at a hedge fund or five and every fun. So I wanted this is 2008 2009 not the most robust of economic times and found a job a tissue inspire to aspire or is it 75 billion dollars of a UM developer and owner of primarily office building for now they do life science industrial lots of other stuff. So I went there as a, I know it was a time like a director of transactional tax and so my job, I'm going somewhere promise was to work on the tax consequences of various deals. As we talked about most of the people that tissue inspire work with were foreign pension funds or pension funds if they're structured the right way. Don't pay taxes on us income. You have to do it the right way. And it's a very sensitive topic because you know it's kind of very binary it's like zero 50%. So my job is to make sure we're 50%. So my job is also not only so I had to make that that make it work from a structuring perspective, but I can't change the deal, you know, I'm a tax guy, you know, if so, my job was, here's the deal, figure it out. And then we spend many, many hours with, or some young KPMG attorneys, going through these various issues I mean the, the tax code is enormous. You know, binders are probably, you know, of all the codes and the regulations are probably 10 to 15 feet long. It's like, not enough, because, you know, everyone's like, Oh, I can do this, I can do this, I can do this, and it gets great really fast. So I spent my time doing that point being, I had to learn real estate under rating. I had to learn all the different aspects of it. And I was very fortunate. I worked with some of the smartest people I've ever worked with. A plus organization, and just because we were kind of like this pivot point so part of my job was structuring but then also conveying to our tax reporting group, and our accountants, what we did. So, you know, it's kind of like an in between so I had to learn accounting. Sometimes deals would come in and we didn't know about them until it was like the last second. So to prevent that my, my boss, Victor Cuchanello, great man, very smart, said, Hey, we need to be sitting in on the investor relations people to understand what they're working on so we kind of get a preview before it came down the pipeline. So got to sit in and talk about here the deals here's all the investors were talking to so kind of got into that. It just so happened as a time that I was came in they went away from the fund business and went more into the direct investment business so I worked on every JV they did for seven years give or take. They wanted pretty in depth after tax models. So in conjunction with a very smart underwriter from our business side, we put together tax models that bolted on to the financial model so we could understand the after tax or any tax issues. So I learned financial underwriting, I learned, you know, JV points economic points, I learned, you know, who the investors are how they like to be structured work with as a management work dispositions. I did work that restructuring and so I got to see kind of everything because of the time I came in. And then, at the same time, early in that me and my buddy, one of my partners now Michael Bennett, we started buying properties in Kalamazoo, right outside Western, you know, from Michigan University, it was a place that was very active and leading up to the financial crisis where people were flipping flipping flipping flipping and then the music stopped, the banks took everything back, I wish I was smarter, but we were for experience I guess is the right question point where we were buying houses at $25,000, $30,000, and, and they were just there to be picked up. We could own half the town that I've been living more experience. Oh, did that loved it grew to love real estate. But for me, I always wanted to do something more I wanted to be more entrepreneur Detroit boys so you know we're all hustlers out there. So it was just kind of a little bit of happenstance frankly that I got into it. I happen to have a number of friends of mine who are in real estate to and me and my friend Michael had been talking about it for years and took a long time but here we are. I love that story so much because first and foremost it speaks to what it is that you take away from an amazing job. And in an awesome job, a lot of the time you have an opportunity to do a lot more things than you were expecting. And you just have this learning opportunity to be an awesome entrepreneur after you leave. Now you're a tax guy and you're an expert in this field. Talk to me about some of the main reasons why people invest in real estate and why it's such a powerful tool for people to use. Well, it's a it's a great investment opportunity from my perspective, it doesn't have the high upside of private equity, they can get in 20s and big things and you get a three times return on your money in a real estate deal that's a pretty good deal. I've heard of several mega mega mega return deals but that's that's not typical. It's steady at a check in the mail check in the mail check in the mail which is great. The other advantages are it's you get to depreciate it which means that in my building, you can depreat like a multifamily building you can depreciate it for I think 28 years so you basically say okay I paid $10 million I could take forever I could take let's say third, you know, 30%. I could take divide that number by 30 every year for the course of it you can also do things to accelerate that number so you'll get cash, which is great, but you won't pay tax equal to the amount of cash that you get so it's kind of a shelter of income thing. So there's a lot of damages over time which allows you to take debt out debt finance proceeds out about paying taxes on it too. So if you hold these for a long period of time you can, you know, okay it's going going going it's appreciated put on a bigger loan, take out money, washrooms repeat. So great that way there's also one of the few places remaining we'll see that say that way but you could do 1031 exchanges which means that I can sell it. In the state I don't pay tax on whatever gain I had, and you could do that forever and people do that forever so you kind of can basically kick the can down the road, the name of the game and tax is pay tax tomorrow not today. And so the longer you kick that that bucket down the road the more ahead you are. So very tax efficient and it's a steady Eddie cash flow return much higher than bonds. Yes, because 1031 exchanges is exactly what I wanted to talk to you about because you're the expert you've done a lot of deals where people shelter gains long term and find the opportunity and the ability to not pay capital gain taxes. When time is due and structure deals the right way to make sure that these gains are sheltered indefinitely talk to me about like the things that people don't really understand about 1031s and why a lot of the best pension funds a lot of the best private equity funds have such a high importance that they put on 1031 exchanges. Yeah, pension funds as much through taxes but it's, it's a, it's a cost. If I can, if I make $100 after paying off my debt, do I want to then take 20 and give it to uncle Sam or do I want to take 100 put into something to make more money. It's pretty, pretty easy and straightforward. And it's a little bit more than capital gains because that depreciation I talked about that can shelter your income is recaptured at a little bit higher rate. So it's more than the capital gains rate. Not purely ordinary income so capital gains but it's a little bit higher so whenever you can pay later pay today this is simple time value money concept. You do it all day long love that so much because there is just not enough understanding in the general market for why people do these deals knowing that hey, the returns aren't so sexy to be jumping off the page, but they are so attractive long term for these various reasons. Based on what you see who are the typical investors that you would love to be working with and who are the key clients who you could be helping long term. Yeah, I think from a, from a client perspective, I mean we love talking to health systems we love talking to doctors primarily not primarily exclusively but OB, ortho cardiology, ENT, urology, we can help them with their real estate needs we can, hey, I want to sell this thing. We could talk to you you want to still co invest with us, we'll talk to you it was very flexible like that, and we are going for still working on. There's a 1031 stuff there's a lot of rules it's very technical, you know, if you still you buy you still might have to manage it. So there's there's work that goes into it. But basically it's a vehicle that allows you to take advantage of 1031 exchanges, we'll find the deals, we get paid fees, you get a return, and then if you want to sell it. You know, if we sell in your five seven 10 whatever it is, you can do it again. You know it's kind of just a passive way to get access to deal flow. Rather than you having to go find it you having to go manage it you having to do all the tax return stuff blah blah blah. So it's a, you're treating return for efficiency, and depending on what you do in your day to day life. So it would be very attractive to you because, you know, there's real estate there's things happen all the time. So, you know, that is another way and plus if you have like I just sold my building, and yet like what happens is like you could see like a business owner, and they have a industrial building that and their wealth is besides their business might be tied up in that real estate might be in a great location. And so you can have these businesses that have pretty pretty big appreciation in the in their real estate assets who might want to diversify that. They may take the tax it and the longer you own it, you know your bigger tax you're going to pay down the road. Yeah, that's that. And when you do what some of these vehicles called DST, Delaware statutory trust me enough to get to that. But you can say okay well I just saw my building all invest in this medical building this multifamily building is industrial so you can split it up and diversify to. On the capital side we talked to 1031 investors but, and then family offices and we got pretty much all the big banks and big private equity funds cover so Jay one of the things that I've always appreciated so much about you is your high moral ethics and everything that you touch feels like a long term partnership where you are doing great work and at the same time, your biggest concern is about building this long term relationship. Talk to me about some of the things that separate mad craft investment partners from other competitors in the field and what you guys are doing that's making you better. I think certainly our loan tenure in the space is an advantage we've done a lot of great work all the projects we've done around time around budget. It's important, but it's a relationship based business. What I mean by that is, when you're putting these deals together. So putting it together a deal 18 months ago, two years ago, and then all the interest rate changes you have a conversation with your tenant and be like hey this. These parameters don't work anymore we're going to have to change what how much the rent is going to be. And then vice versa they come back down and they want to be hey listen I know that the financing environment got better. You're working a collaborative in relationship. One of the biggest reasons made craft wanted to get into the space was these relationships take a long time to develop and what would happen. Like every other developer they take outside money and typically what would happen is that the outside money would buy us out when we're done and then they would manage it and what would happen is that something would go wrong. They don't have to be a big thing and not getting done it's not getting the attention it needs and then, you know the CEO is calling you and be like hey dude what's going on here. And they're like oh yes and they you know they did it and we're not there anymore. And so you know what can happen is that these people can sour your relationship. So we didn't want that, you know our focus is I'm being the best relationship people that you can be in the business, because you know my opinion. I was raised your word is everything you want to do everything you can with honor you know we don't try to take that max profit on this deal just because we can, because you might have someone who doesn't know what they're doing or whatever it might be because the thing you want is to put them in a financially awkward position three or four years and then they come back to you and like dude, what happened. You know that's not great for long term business and I think having high integrity having high character, you know resonates people could talk about it. If you want to do it. And we've spent a long time building up our reputation or brand and I think once you start operating in that type of environment you just can sell yourself pretty fast. So today, having raised money and work with a number of various different sponsor types. It's shady. It happens all the time and that was the biggest adjustments I have when it went into that world just like how often people just try to screw you over. And I think it's just a terrible place to be. And I think this is one of the special things about you is you truly understand and appreciate the value of good relationships. Make the art of making a deal and getting a deal done, especially such a high value deal. Much easier and why you guys are able to craft the perfect deal for both sides. Yeah, I would say that you're part of our special sauce medical office is kind of a small alternative asset class. The big ones are multifamily industrial retail and office. And this is kind of a smaller one. So, well, the buildings are all over the United States. There's a lot of real estate there. You know that it's pretty small as far as the community that there is. And so everyone knows who everyone else is everyone you go to these conferences and we're friends with a number of our competitors. And we're going to do like a annual principles meeting. So we go out with the competitors who we like, you'll hang out. But like, again, that's a relationships right where people like each other. You know, they might be like, Hey, we got to sell this. Hey, you want to sell that. Hey, do you want to sell this? And so you have a good reputation. You treat people the right way. Or for other opportunities. And so, and same thing where you're going through these deals and you cut somebody a deal or you work together with them, but they remember that they appreciate it. And so, it's just all about creating that gravitas. I don't know if that's the right word relationship where you're willing to work with people. You know, it's not going to be like, well, your contract says this so screw you kind of thing. I just don't think that takes you very far. And maybe if you get to a certain size you don't care anymore, but, you know, the way that that I like to operate the way that we operate. You know, maybe I don't think they'll ever change. I think it's just very important. We kind of have a no jerks policy at our company. That's a nice word I'll use no asshole policy because, you know, everyone in reflection of our company. And so, I don't want, you know, someone might be the smartest person in the world. They're very good at what they do, but like if they treat people the wrong way, and you know there are jerks and aren't good people like life's too short, you know, we're, we're a card we do things hard but we like to have fun. We like to have all these good relationships where people think that we're someone that you want to do fun stuff with, always try to do something innovative at our conferences to set us apart. But if you don't have that across your organization, I just think that it could create problems. Yeah. And let me ask you this difficult question. How do you find that perfect middle ground between being competitive and still understanding that these guys are the people you're competing against, and at the same time having this collaborative environment where you understand that you're also in the same business long term, you need to be doing deals together, and there's benefit to making more friends than enemies. That part's not that hard. I think so we've got we've got a bunch of groups that we are very close with, but like, there's deals that are marketed by brokers and we're all competing for them. We're going to do our thing you're going to do your thing. And look, you know, a lot of people in, is this just generally and certainly our business that they want to win. So if they outbid me or they try to, they do something very rarely is it some kind of under hated thing you want. And so that's, that's not hard when you start to do things unprofessionally you start to very loose with your word and your honor, but you start to get a reputation. People in our industry and every industry that have terrible reputations. Some people just work with them because they do. We just choose not to. Yeah. And I love that message because as often as it gets said, it's not often enough. Hey, you can be in the same field. You can be in competition with each other. And the other day you can still want what's best for everyone knowing that, hey, I might not make a full on killing on every single deal, but what matters more is we just do good business continuously with good people. You know, we're, we're, we hope to be bigger and I think we're, we'll get there, but, you know, there's somebody like I was much bigger, but they want to win. We want to win. It's okay. Everyone. That's, that's business. And, you know, you can use that excuse for everything. But I don't have an expectation that they're going to not try to win deals to, that would be naive. I think that's a fair statement. So let me ask you this because a lot of people don't fully understand the scope of this. What is the impact of interest rates on real estate deals. It's pretty certainly I think it's pretty easy on the home ownership side where you could get interest rates at 3% now it's was 8. It's a nice house affordability, a big issue. But depending on my business, in particular, like office industrial and medical or all kind of similar. There's a couple variables that you have you have, assuming a stabilized building. But rent, you got interest rate, you got price and most of our leases, typically, I mean, it's all over this but you know say it's 7, 8 years, whatever it is. Rent doesn't change. Nothing to do about it. Interest rates, they are what they are. And so the only thing that can change is the price. And so as interest rates go up. The price I can pay to hit a certain return goes down. And so everything started about 2 years ago just started to freeze up because sellers didn't want to sell at that price. There were people who were getting really greedy and felt a lot of money on the table. I don't know if we'll see interest rates that low again I think they're going to come down but I don't think they're going to be that low again. So it creates a whole bunch of other issues where from the lender side, lenders like to see a certain coverage, you know you have to have a certain amount of income relative to the interest expense. What interest rates are 3% you pass those tests no problem. When your debt becomes due or as you're going through before the loan becomes due you start to violate those covenants. And that means you have to refinance. And so because this move was so drastic, what you're seeing in all these rumblings about apartment buildings and office buildings is that now I need to refinance. Well, an office building we know all the struggles that that's had. Well, you're not going to get the same low proceeds. Now you know you had a $50 million loan well guess what they're not only going to give you a 40. So you have two choices you can either come out of pocket and pay down the debt. People don't like to do that, or you got to sell. Oh, you know work office space has been struggling because of occupancy. Nobody wants to own it. So like what's this thing worth. Nobody knows and it's certainly not going to be a pretty price, even with great buildings and great locations and great tenants. People don't want it. It's toxic. Some people are going to make a killing buying selectively buying at the right times. Maybe that's now maybe that's in two years but you know it's for the bull. And one of the things that I've learned a lot of the big investors out there just follow people. Yeah. You know they've got different names and caches and whatever but they do the same things. They invest in the same markets. There's no necessarily secret sauce that they have. And so if everyone's paid this on this say it's like for my industry like medical office did great during COVID. Very resilient, no issues underlying real estate doing great still other than the pricing issues that we've seen. But it's not one of those traditional things. And so people are moving to it slowly. No one wants to, you know, number of people have so I'm not saying nobody but you know the bigger universe of investors. It's slowly gaining momentum but I'll do it by one invest in the top 20 markets. I want to do it but I only want to invest in the southeast. All these kind of like arbitrary restrictions because they don't understand it yet. And so I think it just people are just following what works for them. And so there's this this issue of well no one's buying office now we're not buying office so interest rates have had a pretty dramatic impact on where things are the markets were getting pretty frothy leading up to the interest rate hike. You're getting outsized valuations on things that are sometimes just absolutely crazy where their industrial was so hot because of COVID and scarcity. And everyone going to this supply chain last last lesson line type business. People were paying fully least pricing with a vacant building that just like crazy stuff. And so now two years later, three years later. Maybe the rents aren't there, you know the rents were flying through the roof to and leading up to that as well in Austin and Charlotte and Nashville. Now Austin struggling they got too much supply, you know it kind of like people start flocking somewhere and they're like build build build build build build build and then they supply explodes and now. All this others a lot of it. So now the rents go down and guess what your returns went down and guess what now you're building isn't a valuable as much and now you have to do this other stuff so it all plays. Together and my belief, you know real estate is like a first in first out, we went into the we went into a session first. We're going to be the first ones out if we end up being in one later this year which I believe we're. Yeah, and I think this is the next leap and the next iteration of the same question because I feel like a lot of people fail to make this connection. Talk to me about the status of the economy as a whole and things that you see based on deal flow because I think there is a massive correlation. And that correlation can be made to first interest rates do this, this happens to deal flow deal flow is a direct reflection to what's going to happen in the economy. Yeah, I mean, real estate is a huge piece of the US economy, I don't know 15 20% China, it's a gigantic percentage and they've got, you know, they invested in it more than the stock market so it's a huge issue over there. Velocity slows down and think about the knock on effect that that has it's not just me as a property owner it's all the contractors that we build the building. So all the, all the people who are construction companies, they've got a problem. If you think about all the fact people or whatever and like you know when the new houses are being turned over being sold frequently. They're slower because there's not as much sales going on. So they're slower, all the people who got into home brokers during COVID like they're really slow. So it just starts to permeate through and that's just on the real estate side I think on the business side, same issue was like free borrowing for so long. And now costs have gone up interest rates have gone up and you just seen these massive layoffs that are happening throughout the, throughout the economy. And some extent it's being disguised. A lot of the new job growth has gone to part time jobs, lower wage jobs. And so like if you looked at like the numbers it's like, oh well it's like. Yeah, but when you kind of like open the hood up it's like well IBM's laying off this and Facebook's league office and they're laying off this and like those higher paying or white college jobs are just being cut. So from a net net basis it looks, maybe it's okay. You have massive government spending that is covering that up as well. And then I think they're political opinion, gamesmanship going on with those numbers there was just an 800 and 18,000, 1000 adjustment down in the estimated jobs growth. So what that meant was we were having we're showing 220,000 jobs a month in creation and instead it was like 120. And from my economic standpoint that's one's good, one's not good. So I think there's a little bit of hiding the ball that's taking place. Yeah. The finance people know that I think the general populace might not. Yeah. And I feel like this is just a common theme, especially heading into an election year because it's easier to mask up for the short term, knowing that, hey, the results are probably going to be long term and they're not as impactful to my agenda. Jay, final question, the thing if I win. Exactly. Jay, final question I'm going to hit you with today is this one. As a businessman, as a person who is super super busy, talk to me about the value of your family being the top priority in your life, because the common pattern that I see across all successful people is, they understand that in order to make time for the things that are the most important. They have to be efficient, effective, and really good at what it is that they do in the office to make sure that they live a balanced and good life all around. It's hard. I have three kids seven, five, and three. It's a young man's game. And, you know, for me, it's, it's effort. You got to put effort into it. And it's like the days are long and the years are short kind of thing. And my daughter just started second grade. It just flew right by. It's very cliché, but it's very accurate. And so, you know, just trying to find ways to be involved while I can, you know, at this point, I can help coach basketball. I can help couch flag football. Like, that's going to be gone in two years for her, because, you know, they're going to have real coaches. And so, it's just effort. And I think, you know, what, what you change exchange is try to have a social life outside of just a social life with Chicago friends, college friends, whatever has neighborhood friends. I think that's important. I think it's important for your relationship with your wife. I think it's important for your kids to see that. Like, listen, you don't, you know, you can do stuff with other people. And, you know, you don't have to just be doing something with this one person all the time. But, you know, what loses out is that, you know, that social thing that you maybe have like a big piece of your life when you're a single, that's what goes. And so, I just have to be as efficient as I came with my time. Listen, like, Saturday's football season different. Well, I'm watching that football game. I don't care. But, you know, it's just like, I just don't have the same. And I don't want the same freedom I have before, you know, it's, I want to spend time with my kids. I want them to grow into people. I want them to grow up the right way. I want them to appreciate me and their life. So, you got to make sacrifices. And the sacrifices are social life. Yeah. And what a good sacrifice to make. Jay, you are an inspirational human being. You are so good at what you do. You're a great father. You're a great husband. And I'm just so, so happy that we had the time together to share you with our audience and let everyone know just how amazing you are. We appreciate you. I appreciate the man. I always love speaking to you. You're just awesome, awesome human being. And, you know, happy to do this again in the future. If you want to talk about non-business stuff, I got, I'm going to talk about Jiu Jitsu and surfing and my lack of profitability and all that kind of good stuff. God, I love you. I love you. You're a great human being. And thank you so much again for sharing your time with us. You're welcome. Thanks for having me.