Royal Oak Conversations – Dan Goldstein

Welcome to the fifth episode of Royal Oak Conversations. This discussion features Dan Goldstein, Founder, Chairman of the Board of Directors & Chief Executive Officer of Royal Oak.

We're also excited to share that Royal Oak Conversations is now available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon Music. Please click to subscribe to the show in your favorite podcast player.

Transcript

Royal Oak Conversations is produced by Royal Oak Realty Trust for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation to buy any security. Investing in non-traded REITs involves risk, including potential loss of principal. Please consult your financial or tax advisor before investing.

Now onto the show.

Mark Allen (Host): Hello, my name is Mark Allen, President, Chief Development Officer for Royal Oak Realty Trust. Thank you for joining us in our Royal Oak Conversations podcast. We're thrilled to have our founder, the OG of our firm, our Chairman and CEO, Dan Goldstein, with us today. Without further ado, thank you for being here, Dan.

Dan Goldstein (Guest): Thanks for having me, Mark. I'm looking forward to it.

Mark: Some of our listeners know our story well and others may not at all. I think it's helpful in any of these discussions to learn a little bit about you as a person, your background, and how you got to the world of real estate where you find yourself today.

Dan: All right. Well, I'm born and raised in Rochester, New York. I went off to college at the University of Michigan, originally thinking I might study law, but pivoted quickly into an interest in accounting and finance. My father was a CPA. He had a regional firm here located in Rochester, New York. And I made a decision to go back and join that practice after college.

So in 1993, I came back to Rochester, began practicing as an accountant. Got my CPA relatively quickly and grew to be a partner in that firm. Really enjoyed public accounting, but mostly enjoyed the interactions with the clients and developing relationships; had some great real estate clients. It was exciting doing work for them. They were doing extremely well and I didn't find it to be an overly complicated industry.

Around 2002-2003, I got an opportunity to meet Larry Glazer. I had known him a little bit. I was very close friends with one of his sons. And Larry was looking to fill a role at Buckingham Properties, which was the largest commercial real estate firm headquartered in Rochester, New York. Larry had a co-founding partner - Harold Samloff. Herold was retiring, and they asked if I'd consider coming in to be their Chief Financial Officer. So on a handshake and a leap of faith in 2004, I left public accounting, became the CFO at Buckingham Properties.

Buckingham was a really dynamic and interesting firm. It was growing like crazy, really focused on adaptive reuse of existing buildings and redevelopment, but it didn't focus in any particular asset class, so we did a lot of interesting projects. We predominantly focused on industrial buildings over time, taking large single-tenant facilities and repopulating them for multi-tenant, redeveloping them for multi-tenant. And in those years, I learned a lot about the financing and the organizational structure of putting those transactions together, but began to cut my teeth in understanding how to take those buildings apart and how to plan for, ultimately, a large single-tenant facility to become multi-tenanted.

So that was the real basis for my real estate education. I was with Larry for 10 years, and then together we had an idea. I think it was more my idea, but he really respected it and was looking forward to participating in it, which was the creation of a Real Estate Investment Trust. In 2012-2013, I put a business plan together for what is today Royal Oak Realty Trust, put it in front of my partner, Larry Glazer. He was extremely supportive of it, and we launched it at the end of 2013 and really more formally in 2014 in the spring.

And sadly, in the fall of 2014, Larry passed away. It was a real loss to our community here in Rochester and, of course, to me personally and to all his family and everyone that knew him in our community. But at that time, I decided to focus entirely on running the REIT, and I separated from the old firm and wished his sons well. They took the legacy business and continued that on and have been quite successful. And I took the REIT and, as you know, brought in some key partners along the way to help us develop an all-star team.

Mark: It's fascinating when I was at the bank, you'll remember your team came into my office and our team and presented the vision of what this REIT's all about. And to have a recording of that presentation would be pretty fun to listen back on, but I think what's most impressive about that memory is the thesis hasn't changed - the clear, consistent income of our strategy hasn't changed. And how would you characterize the accounting background in what we do at Royal Oak or what are those traits that you've brought into the real state universe pre- and post-Royal Oak?

Dan: Yeah, well, you hit one of the nails right on the head: how to have a clear and consistent cash flow. I've always felt and I know you and I have aligned on it as have many of our investors that if you're investing in something to gain income, you want to have a strong degree of confidence that that income is going to be there for you. It's going to be there on time, and the amount is going to be what you targeted it to be. So how do you create a clear and consistent cash flow?

I decided to focus on single-tenant, absolute net-leased real estate where the tenants are responsible for all the costs of operating and maintaining the physical plant. As the landlord, we collect that rent and we can predict with a great level of accuracy when that rent is coming in, what that amount is going to be. We have some fees that we pay to our management team and debt that we service, but it runs really, really well. It's efficient and most importantly, we're able to show investors that this is how you're going to get the dividend that we're targeting. And then, of course, having been a CPA and having been someone that obsesses about wanting to minimize exposure to income taxes as much as legitimately possible, we are able to create a security that has a significant amount of tax efficiencies to it. So let's get folks that income, let's get it on time, let's target and get to them what we say we're going to get to them. And then let's reduce it from taxability as much as possible. And that's exciting to people. That was derived from a CPA view of dumb it down, keep it simple, and let people keep as much of their cash flow as possible.

Mark: And you've explained this in the past, the pre-Royal Oak investing days with Buckingham had an industrial lens, yet the projects had varying degrees of risk and reward. And to maintain the industrial focus at Royal Oak, you went to that stabilized cash flow thesis. Maybe for the listener, walk through the "why industrial" and how that's been a key part of a lot of your real estate career, both pre and post Royal Oak.

Dan: Yeah, you and I both know industrial is a broad category. And within the industrial space, we focus on tenants that are doing important things, things that are critical to the success of their company. We call it mission-critical real estate. We have users in our buildings that need to be in those buildings. So not all industrial real estate behaves like that. You could argue warehousing and logistics has some of that characteristic, but manufacturing really does.

When you have a company within a space and they've got significant, bolted-down equipment, they're perhaps having multiple shifts a day, six, seven days a week. It's a major material disruption to their business to pick up and relocate. And they typically don't want to do that. So that's something that I definitely learned through Larry and at Buckingham Properties. We had tenants that had been with us for generations, literally. Multiple renditions of ownership that had passed through a company, but the company remained in that space. The labor pool was important to them. They had their system down.

So that's what we've tried to replicate here at Royal Oak, as you know, and I think it's been very successful. Our tenants enjoy the buildings they're in, and we hope for very little disruption when it comes time for renewals.

Mark: So we just crossed a big milestone this year: a billion dollar portfolio capitalization - onto our next billion. But if you go back to when you created this entity, this business, what would you say has surprised you most as you sit here today and reflect on our company?

Dan: I think one of the things that surprises me most, we created an income fund and a substantial amount of our investors prefer to reinvest their dividend. And that's flattering to all of us, that they have that level of confidence and that they want to continue to invest more, but I didn't expect it.

If you went back and saw the business plan, and as our management team knows, we assume that everybody's going to take their dividend and we put our budgets together and our cash flow projections together as though that's going to happen. It's a very nice tailwind for us to have such level of reinvestment. That's not something that I anticipated.

One of the things we did anticipate that has held true and that I think is really critical is the quality of the real estate. When you have a good building, there's a lot that you can do with that building. And if you don't overpay for that building, that is an investment that can yield positive results for a really long time. But again, you had asked some of the things that were surprising. I think we always knew tertiary markets would be a challenge in single-tenant building. So that's something we kind of kept one eye on throughout, not wanting to get too far remote, too tertiary with our investments. But there haven't been that many huge surprises. There really haven't been.

Mark: What's been exciting, and this isn't just the recent years, but you wanted initially to have a few segments of our country that were covered by the Northeast for obvious reasons, the Southeast for their own economic reasons, the Midwest for massive industrial activity around the Great Lakes. And we made that decision for a number of reasons to go west of the Mississippi. Talk a little bit about your geographic footprint and how we think about maybe specifically market selection. It's robust and diversifying by the day.

Dan: Well, there has to be a meaningful level of activity that supports industrial economics. So we need markets that have vitality and that have the attributes that a manufacturing firm is looking for. So they need access to labor. They need to have proximity to throughfares and highway systems, and we want them to be growing, not shrinking.

And so when you think about top 75 MSAs, they're typically going to be in play for us. But knowing our portfolio as well as I do, we're not too far beyond the top 50 MSAs. We'll see a few in there. Western New York has a couple of them in Buffalo and Rochester. And we're not going to be down in Miami and in New York City, but we've been able to get some traction in Chicago and Phoenix. And those are strong, Top 10 markets. Chicago is not a growing market from an industrial footprint, but it has such a substantial amount of inventory. And it's not shrinking that it still hits almost all of our requirements.

Mark: The sale-leaseback strategy that's the driver for a lot of our volume, I think has been even more utilized by business operators. So with our background and our focus on the deals we've acquired, let's say 50,000 to 200,000 square feet, would you characterize the acquisitions climate today as any different than it was a decade ago? And if yes, how would you characterize where we find ourselves with deal volume?

Dan: Yeah, it's been tumultuous. It's really been inconsistent. And one of the best things about our firm is that we never feel like we have money that has to be deployed. Our capital is invested. Our stockholders are happy with the results that we're achieving. It's good to grow. It adds diversification of the portfolio, to the investor base. It reduces rank concentrations. Growth is good, but it isn't mandatory.

So the market has had a bunch of different impacts. You've had a pandemic. You've had rising interest rates. You've had really quick level of tariffs that were brought on at Liberation Day. All of these things cause pauses. And typically for different reasons, all of those had different reasons to it. One of the things we've gotten really good at is working with private equity firms. In the early years, we were intimidated by it. We knew how sophisticated those firms were and aggressive that they could be. And they weren't the entrepreneurial-owned businesses that we were accustomed to, that I was accustomed to in my previous tenure at Buckingham. And so we were a little bit wary of those sponsors.

But over time, we prefer them. I mean, today it's a very straightforward, transparent set of goals that they're working with. Private equity are purchasing EBITDA. They're trying to grow that EBITDA. And then they're trying to trade out of that in a positive way to create value and have a nice exit.

When EBITDA for the target company they're looking to buy becomes uncertain, they can't transact. It causes a pause. Obviously, pandemic is a classic example as we all know today of that. Not knowing if you're gonna be able to be in your building where your materials are gonna be sourced that caused a major pause.

But ultimately it got ungummed and that flow picked back up and transactions started to happen. Same things been happening with rising interest rates. Same things been happening with uncertainty and growth in tariffs. M&A starts to slow down. The supply side of the buildings that we're looking to acquire starts to slow down. What we haven't seen is a permanent situation.

We've seen temporary pauses and we've been able to stay active in the market, continue to work on our broker relationships, continue to compete on transactions. And so if you looked at our growth profile it's been slower than we would have expected but that's a good thing. I mean, we're able to be as patient as we choose to be and be very selective in our investments. So if the flow is slower and the quality's not there in 2025 we didn't close the transaction until June 30th. Went full six months. We saw a lot of opportunities we bid on a few but the math wasn't penciling out. The quality wasn't there and we just decided we're gonna be very, very particular as we always are and we'll wait. And then we got rewarded in the second half of the year we did about $100 million. So it gums up and then it releases.

Mark: It's taken me 10 years plus, kiddingly, but to understand real estate isn't linear. Fundraising isn't linear, acquisitions aren't linear. I would say one of the surprises that I've had is how committed our capital's been from our investors, the loyalty, the reinvestment of dividends, adding to positions and those times when we've been acquiring a lot or times when we're not acquiring a lot we don't seem to get investors who are pushing us to do one or the other. But to your point last year was soft in the first half this year we've closed six deals with five to come which is exciting. You have to be ready when that opportunity rises.

I know you're proud of the team you've built and we've built at Cambridge Street, our manager. Talk a bit about how you view hiring and people, retention, development, et cetera.

Dan: I was gonna say one of my most proud achievements and I hesitated because it's really our achievement and I really dislike the word "my." Everything that I've always wanted to accomplish within Royal Oak, within Cambridge Street is to acknowledge that it isn't about any one person. Our stockholders own our company; it's not my company. It's our company. I'm a large investor in it alongside our other common stockholders but as I've gotten older and had a lot of experiences whether it's just personally, socially, professionally you start to appreciate being around good people and I think you start to appreciate being around good leaders and when I say good, I mean quality human beings life is really too short and what we do isn't, we're not saving lives out there, right? We're investing money prudently and we're doing it in a really transparent way.

People that we choose to be around are what is gonna allow us to feel good about our day to day, coming into the office having that camaraderie. So as you know, we hire good quality human beings. That's the first test. If someone's not a good quality human being we have no interest in being around them. And they need to be smart. I feel what we do, I mean we've got some very key roles that require a seasoned set of skills and genuine expertise but for a lot of people in our firm if they had a good strong finance background or a good strong real estate background they could find a role with us and they could learn something new as long as they were committed and smart. So being around good quality human beings that are smart is really the key to our success and it's the key to my personal happiness.

Mark: Well said. We spent time a number of years ago putting kind of a mission/vision/values for Cambridge Street. You know, I know we live them: teamwork, partnership, family first/family oriented, transparency, and stewardship. And I wanna talk about stewardship a little bit because again when you created this vehicle you were taking in outside capital. We've been successful, collectively raised $550 million of equity, 1200 investors, a lot of hard-earned money given to us to deploy and manage. Walk me through your philosophy on that stewardship and what we're doing at Royal Oak.

Dan: Well I alluded to it just a little while ago in the phrasing of it's not my it's our, our stockholders own the company. We work for them. It's a really clear delineation. We have a contract. We have a set of responsibilities. I take that, I know you do too very, very seriously. Not only do I have my money in, I have my family's money in, I have friends' money in and certainly a substantial, super majority of people that I've met and have met them through referrals of people that I have a strong relationship with a professional relationship with built on trust and built on a lot of life experiences. So, you know, we have to take stewardship at the highest level that we can and acknowledge that number one, we're investing other people's money. They have a right to know everything that's going on. Now we don't wanna, you know, provide the mundane details. That's not gonna be helpful. In fact, we'll lose the message if we over communicate, if we provide too much minutia. But to the extent there's something going on that should be of interest, whether it's a proud achievement or something that's at risk, we want our clients to know that. They have investment decisions to make.

It's my belief that if we tell people everything they need to know to make a good investment decision, then our investors and our prospects are sophisticated enough to make that decision. And then we've done our job.

The second part of what we need to do is do what we say we were gonna do. It's a simple proposition. Here's what I'm gonna do with your money. That's it. And then we have to go out and do it. And if something changes, we have to communicate that something's changed to let people absorb that and make further decisions based on that.

Mark: You know, I listen to a lot of podcasts on fundraising and private vehicles and strategies. And there's a lot of talk about differentiation because we know there's competition in our space. Similar themes, similar asset classes, similar risk-return profiles. I personally am biased, but the differentiation in terms of access to our management team, access to our board or our other stakeholders, inclusive of banks and tenants is something that not every product or alternative investment can give an advisor or give an investor. And I know you're spending a lot of time on the road. You were just in Cincinnati. And these are firms that don't necessarily know us from a Rochester-based connection perspective. But talk about, I wanna say the excitement or the encouragement you get when you tell our story and realize we have something special going on.

Dan: I do get excited about it. I am really proud of it. I know you are as well. And I like telling our story. I like looking people on the eye and saying, my cell phone number is on our website. And that's the way it's supposed to be. If you need me, I'm always accessible to you. I did pick that up from Larry. I mean, I think I've always been that kind of approachable person myself, but the memory I have of Larry Glazer is his cell phone in one hand and his hard line in another hand. And having no personal assistant work for him and leaving his cell phone number on his hard line voicemail and just being accessible 24 hours a day. And I always wondered, wow, why would you want that? Because he was just so present and so busy with so many different things. And he said, well, how else am I gonna get things done? How am I gonna tell people what's going on if I can't talk to them? I don't wanna put people between us. And so that was a great lesson for me.

And I think, I've tried to lead with that and I know the rest of our team feels the same way. People have a lot of choices for who they're gonna do business with and how they're gonna invest their money. And if you think that you're above being in direct communication with those people, they shouldn't want to invest with you. I wouldn't want to invest with somebody where I couldn't speak with them. It's one thing when you're investing in Microsoft and those are public companies and that's part of a stock portfolio. But in a private vehicle, you should have access to management when you need to.

Mark: You brought up Larry and I know he was important in your career. Talk about maybe some other individuals, mentors that have helped you in your personal and professional life.

Dan: Well, absolutely. My father, who I went to work for, I think anyone that knew him in the community knew that he was a real pillar of our community and had a high level of integrity and was just a wonderfully good, patient person. You know, all those lessons that you learned from your folks when you, if you have good folks, you roll your eyes, most of us when we're younger. And you've heard me say it so many times. It takes a lifetime to build up your credibility in only a moment to lose it. I think about that every day.

Tomorrow I'll be having lunch with our summer interns and I'll be preaching about that. You know, at some point you stop being a young person, a kid and it's real life and then those things have consequences. The way that you engage with someone when you're 18 or 25 or 35, they remember that. Whether it was good or whether it wasn't good, they're gonna remember that 10 years later when they have an opportunity to do business with you. If you were dishonest in a poker game at some point, someone's gonna remember that.

It's just not that hard to form a bad opinion about a person based on their character and then it's really hard to shake that. So you have to do the right thing. You have to do the right thing when you don't think anyone's paying attention. You have to make those decisions and they're the hardest ones to do and you think you could get away with something but you know it's the wrong thing to do, don't do it and then you feel much better about it.

So I think we run our business that way. I try to run my life that way. It makes me happy and I think it's the right way to behave.

Mark: We had an offsite as you know yesterday with the Investor Relations team and a number of other members of our team participated in the agenda - yourself included - but we did have a lunch with a large family office investor in RIA and then a past participant in our space but they know our business extremely well. And one of the leading questions was "give us the strengths of Royal Oak and also the weaknesses" and what was interesting was the strengths kind of consistently were around trust, credibility, discipline, doing the right thing and then some of the weaknesses were the conservative nature of our company.

And look, you and I talk about this to investors like our job isn't to deliver a home run for their portfolios. It's to deliver durable income, principal preservation and back to what you said about a reputation and we've done what we said we do and we're working our tails off to maintain the performance but what you'll tell the interns tomorrow resonates in anyone's career.

Dan: That conservatism is important and you can't be tempted into becoming inappropriately aggressive with what we do and you know that we have some investors some of our larger investors that sat down with us and said "I'm putting a large amount of money with you because this is my safe money. This is I'm gonna drive my income. I've got a lot more money and I'm gonna use that for some exciting personal things and maybe some venture activities, but this nest egg is really important to me and I'm putting it with you guys so that I can get my income every month and my tax shelter, you know, alongside of it." And those are the things that I continuously remind myself of.

You know, in real estate you have all these opportunities. We see so many opportunities every single week and we pass on what, 950 out of 1,000 and go after 50 of them maybe in a year and maybe get 20 or 15 in a given year, in a good year. So we have to be really disciplined. And as an entrepreneurial-focused person, and somebody who came from a value-add type of background it requires discipline, you know. But then you can go all the way back to my accounting days where I used to sit and counsel my clients that you're doing really well. I don't think you need to take that risk, you know. You need to not lose a substantial amount of money a lot more than you need to make a substantial amount of money, I would tell them. And so just stick to your knitting.

Mark: It's a leading question because I know where your answer is gonna go but on that same vein: You know, there are other real estate players not just in our town but elsewhere that kind of come to us with their own ideas of how they're growing a business and we leave those meetings and you spot it minute one of like what risks are there that you've seen and not wanted to relive or ever wanna engage in how would you frame the risks of real estate?

Dan: Well, hope is not a strategy, right? And so we're very strategic and some people are gambling and often it pays off and sometimes it doesn't. You know, with those folks if they have the ability to withstand a loss that's their business, right? And if they're willing to take that risk they can maybe get a really, really significant financial reward. Hopefully they understand that, you know, they're taking a risk and then at some point it's a little bit more than a risk it's gambling, but who are we to say that they should or shouldn't do it? You notice in most of those meetings unless they ask my opinion I just wish them good luck.

Sometimes though we'll look at somebody and they're all over the place and we'll say, "what are you trying to do?" And they'll be a little taken aback by that and it'll be like: "no, no. I mean really, like if you think 10 years out what do you want all of this activity to look like? Is it gonna be one portfolio? Are you just gonna be in and out and create a lot of chaos?" And so I find that to be fascinating and interesting, and sometimes personally I'll invest in something that may be a little bit more aggressive. But it's not the way to run an income fund that's wrapped in real estate and a single-tenant, net-lease environment with high net worth investors that are looking for a clear, consistent cash flow, and it's so easy to spot what we're doing right and how others just wouldn't be able to function that way.

Mark: Using the term governor but in line with governance we have our own governance to keep us or facilitate our mission or acquisition criteria but you've assembled and over time the board is critical to the REIT. You talk about our company and our shareholders. Maybe explain or talk about the philosophy around governance and how we have implemented it at our firm.

Dan: You know and maybe going back to one of your original questions what's something that's really surprised me? I think the pedigree of our board at an early stage of our enterprise when we were very small and we were able to attract some amazing, Hall of Fame caliber - and I say that genuinely - there are many of them in the Rochester business Hall of Fame - that was a bit of a surprise to me and huge compliment to all of us.

But that governance is critically important and all of them are meaningful stockholders they've introduced us to people in their network and their family. But they represent our stockholders, and they're deliberately selected for a variety of skills and experiences that allow the full spectrum of our stockholders to be represented. So having those folks on our board makes us better. And, you know, sometimes it's a careful what you wish for thing in life when you put really strong people in a position to govern you, you better be ready to listen, right? And it's not a rubber stamp board. It's exactly the opposite. They challenge us; they have good questions; they have good ideas, and it's a real credit to our whole management team that we go into those meetings excited to engage. It's really positive. We get some great feedback, and it makes us certainly better, but I think it also just helps us be a little bit more focused on what's in the minds of our stockholders and so that we can continue to run the business in the best interest of our investors.

Mark: Certainly agree with you there and as our listeners may have listened to or heard we had Tom Bonadio on earlier. We're gonna look to have as many if not all of our board members out in the future to continue to give a lens and to affirm that other strategies may not.

Two more questions. One would be, maybe, you mentioned your own words of wisdom earlier: but anything else? Your kids have now graduated - both from Syracuse, one at Columbia Business School, now in real estate. What's something you want to tell the young professional out there starting out in any career, but maybe notably business/real estate?

Dan: Yeah, don't get pigeonholed. You know, time moves very quickly. 10 years can happen: your salary's gone up and you find that you're dissatisfied with what you're doing and the thought of starting over is daunting. So early on I think you wanna have some diversity and exposure. And if you put that in the real estate context: real estate's such a massively large industry - not just from the number of asset classes, but all the things that you can do from being from sales and leasing to development to just being part of an accounting and finance team to raising capital…It's just a massive industry.

I do think if I were young and interested in real estate I would suggest get busy, get going just get aligned with somebody that's a good mentor and a place that'll give you some flexibility. Learn all the roles even if it's not part of your day-to-day. Sit in on meetings, go and look at real estate opportunities, underwrite them even if you're not planning on buying them. Think about how you might go about an opportunity and how you might secure capital. Ask lots of questions.

I think most people in real estate - certainly those that have had an entrepreneurial career - really enjoy speaking with people that are younger and trying to build a career. And I think those young people would do real well to reach out and just ask. I mean, it's amazing how many good people in our community would be happy to sit down and spend an hour. It may lead to an internship, it may lead to a job, it may lead to who knows what. But that's what I would do. I think it's "you gotta get going."

Mark: Get busy, I like it. Do a lot. That's well said. We'll close with your outlook. I know excitement, where we find ourselves. Our book has arguably never been as valuable. Our tenants are paying our rent. We're growing in a nice clip. What's next for our company? How do you look out in the future?

Dan: It's a great question. I'm really happy with where we are. We have an amazing management team. We have an amazing set of employees. We have an amazing board and really an amazing group of stockholders. I know that was a lot of amazings, but all of those are aligned. Add in our bankers, the aggregators, the folks that are out introducing us to their clients. So I think we need to keep doing what we're doing and not take it for granted any level of success that we've had. A billion dollar market cap is nice. We're still a small business, at least in our minds. And our obligation is to have a really first-class portfolio that is operating the way that we intend it to operate, that is staying full, that the leases and the details around our investments aren't so complicated that if anybody ever wanted to come in and make a big investment or try to acquire us that they couldn't understand it and figure it out.

Now, I don't have any reason to believe that we would look to sell our company - it's not on the market - but if somebody wanted to come and have that level of interest, our stockholders have the right for that process to take place. We'd have to entertain it and again our obligation is to make sure that it's attractive. That it's attractive of if we ever wanted to take it public, if we ever wanted to sell it, if we wanted to have a co-invest…All these things - if you don't prepare in the off season for them there's no way for them to happen. So the easiest thing to do is have a good balance sheet, have a good portfolio, have a strong relationship with your bankers, and continue to do one good deal after the next. Provide liquidity to the investors that want to get out, and come in every day excited about growing the business.

Now, I think that gives us our best chance for success. The people that know me - you being one of them - our partners will often tease me I should have the word options tattooed across my forehead, but that really is how I operate. I want to have as many options available to us at all times. If you reduce that to just one or two and they don't go well then you're in trouble. If you fail to think about what you need to do to prepare yourself for success later down the road you can't just snap your fingers and have those things happen. It takes years and years of preparation and that preparation is just building out a really good company in all facets of it. So when you do that you have a lot of options.

The market's going to continue to change, the needs of our stockholders will change, and we'll be able to satisfy all of that if we're doing the things that we're doing. So I feel really good about where we're headed, where we are. I think we can continue to grow and add value.

Mark: Couldn't agree more I think the team is rowing fast in the right direction, all cohesive. The momentum's positive. It is amazing, it's exciting, and this has been fun.

Dan: It has been fun.

Mark: As Dan mentioned, we are accessible. This is a different form of transparency. We want folks to understand our company, learn, hopefully get to know us better. We're always available. But thank you for doing this, Dan, and we look forward to having our next conversations thereafter.

Dan: Thanks Mark. Thanks for hosting.