How to Survive Losing Your Biggest Client (And Come Out Stronger) | Dan French

A Podcast | Dan French

Pete Neubig: Welcome to the NARPM podcast. I'm your host, Pete Neubig, the voice of NARPM. And I have my Goomba with me here, Dan French, CEO of Northpoint Asset Management .And before that, eight plus years as CEO of ResProp, where he led a team of 450 plus managing 18,000 multifamily units. Dan, thanks so much for being here tonight, today.

Dan French: Pete, round two, bro. 12 round fight. So let's see who lasts.

Pete Neubig: Well, I wanted to get you back on because, you know, there was the big, the big shocker, I guess, of the summer was the whole Avenue One, you know, deciding to move all of their all of their units to Darwin. Can you talk a little bit about that? And just talk about like, how that impacted Northpoint, how it impacted you and what what positives came of it? And let's, let's, I would love to get that story.

Dan French: Yeah, Pete, always good to be with you, the voice of NARPM. Also, someone I work with here at Northpoint. So you've been great. And your team's great. So yeah.

Pete Neubig: By the way, I'm also not the voice of NARPM. I'm also the pizza connoisseur.

Dan French: Oh, yeah, you have to be. Yeah. Well, from the Bronx. I mean, it's only downhill from there. So yeah, most people don't get that. But um, yeah, our next interview, Pete, we're gonna do in the Bronx, New York in a pizza shop.

Pete Neubig: You're gonna do it at Louie's and Ernie's.

Dan French: Okay.

Pete Neubig: So kind of take me to that fateful day when you actually got the news. And you know, like, it's not even out yet. And you heard the news, like, kind of what happened? What went through your mind?

Dan French: Well, you know, first, what happened was Avenue One was transferring their doors to MCH. So MCH is called My Community Homes. And they're, you know, they both were a servicing partner to KKR, which is an ultra large, hyper scaled out, you know, real estate investment company with billions and billions of assets under management. So we already knew that there was a changeover from Avenue One to MCH as sort of the asset management layer standing between property management and capital. So that already kind of triggered some questions that we had in our minds, which was, you know, MCH was really consolidated into one property manager called Darwin. So that was already a bad omen, Pete, like in the beginning. I don't remember when that happened. I think it was the beginning of the summer, maybe even like May, let's call it April or May. So that changeover happened almost overnight. And that didn't make us feel great because, again, if the group has pushed all of its doors, 10,000 doors already into one property management firm, that doesn't bode well for the future. But we're competitors and we're like, you know what? Well, if this is going to happen, we want to really stand out and be the very best we can be and try to be, you know, climb up the leaderboard in terms of performance. And that was our mantra.

Pete Neubig: Now, is Darwin owned, operated? Do they have any relationship with KKR or MCH or anything like that?

Dan French: I don't know if it's a capital structure relationship they have. I can't speak to that. But clearly, they had a really good rapport with them and they were happy enough to consolidate even further. So 10,000 doors go from Avenue 1 to MCH. That next 10,000 doors and it wasn't just Northpoint that was impacted. And that is a really important part of the story for me is that it wasn't a performance firing. It was a consolidation. So we were in the same boat as Evernest Mine, Pure HRG, you know, and that's all public. So I can say that. But so, you know, the consolidation happened and then it's so one day, you know, you wake up, you're like, hey, can you get on? I received an email. Can you get on a phone call today? And I was like, OK, sure. And they gave us a very short notice, like a 30 day notice. So that is the that's the way it went down. And what I've been telling people there is like if you ride the back of the Tiger, you might wind up in its belly. So you got to you got to be careful. I do really want that that large institutional client, which I inherited. I did not close the Avenue 1 relationship was something when I came on a year ago was already pre-existing my my tenure. So it begs the question, do you want that scale? Right. It's very attractive to different groups like, hey, we can go scale with institutional players. But then if they change their mind, right, they can bring management in-house so they can consolidate. Then you really get stuck in your your whole P&L gets thrown sideways.

Pete Neubig: Yeah, because if you have if you get a really big client, I mean, a lot of times you have to staff up for that client. So 10,000 doors, I'm assuming it wasn't just, you know, a handful of remote team members, I'm assuming, you know, you have you have, you know, people in all like property managers, system property, you have you have people throughout the, you know, good people that you've that you brought on to service that client. And so when you lose a big client, a big part of your business, I can only assume there was some pretty tough decisions that had to be made.

Dan French: There definitely was. And so we had 1,500 of those 10,000 doors and the other were scattered across other three property managers. But for us, you know, we're still fairly small in the space. So we were at maybe 4,500 doors. Of which about 1,500 were with this Avenue One MCH. So that's a big impact, yeah, it's like 35 percent, whatever that is. And I'm really like, you know, I was telling you before, Pete, the behind the scenes info is what really people want. Right. Like so when I came on board at Northpoint, we had over 100 W2 employees and we had we had over, I think, 70 offshore people. And so we had already been trimming down the team because we kind of were declining in door count anyway. And some of that was pruning. Right. It's like it's prudent to go make sure you're serving the right type of owner and making sure you have owners that are paying their bills, doing the right thing, respecting us as a as a partner, you know, vendor partner. So some of that was like pruning and some of it was it's hard to grow being a pure SFR operator these days. Right. Because SFR has been in a crunch for two reasons. One, the macroeconomic climate, the interest rates have climbed and suppressed the investment activity. So the velocity of people buying homes as investment properties has been way down. Right. Secondly, you had this Trump thing where the Road to Housing Act sort of came from, you know, the clear blue sky. Like, you know, it was a proposal and then it became a real thing. And then Trump got behind it and it really suppressed the activity in the SFR space for that six month period where there was a lot of uncertainty. So we had already been paring down. So we were we were at 70 people and about 30 some odd offshore teammates. So we were we felt like we were a lean fighting machine. Right. We got right back to our fighting weight. We were down to the core team that was that was supposed to be there. So that's what was really super painful about it was going down another.

Pete Neubig: You kind of got rid of all of the low hanging fruit already before this happened. And now you had to get rid of like you had to make the.

Dan French: Yeah, let's just say the people that were bought in and really wanted to fight for this new championship style of culture and really wanted to do go the extra mile for for the team and for owners like we felt like we had that team. So, yes, those 20 people that got impacted and the offshore team that got impacted, that was that was even more painful because we felt like those people had already been through a lot. And for them to now go through a restructuring, it's really sad. There's no other way to put it, like, you know, getting a waking up and saying, hey, it's no fault of your own, but, you know, you're still getting the pink slip. That sucks. That's a bad day.

Pete Neubig: And you did everything we wanted to do for you. Embody or core values. You were in the right seat, the right place. But we just don't have. We just don't have the work anymore.

Dan French: Exactly. So we did our best to try to help folks. I paired up with with Evernest and we created this like sheet for a shared document.

Pete Neubig: I actually got it. I actually got a copy of the sheet. We reached out to some of the remote team members to see if we could assist them. So we were definitely, definitely trying to help those folks. So, all right. So you were pruning beforehand. So tell me, tell me like somebody's listened to this and their property manager, right? We all have those few clients that we just don't like or just every time they call, we get that agita, you know, that stomach ache when they call. Talk a little bit about like what why you guys were doing that. What was why was Northpoint pruning? Was it because you had bad clients? Was it like just was it just bad, you know, bad areas that you just decided you got to be in? Like talk a little bit about why the pruning was happening before you got you got the notification about you know, about losing those other 1500 doors.

Dan French: Yeah. So, we were running a perfect operation, Pete. No, I'm kidding. Like some of it was our fault, right? So I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna hide and churn. One thing I found out coming to SFR, and I just posted about this, but I've known now behind the scenes with talking with like really established people that it can be 20% churn, right? Everyone wants to flex like, oh, it's 10% churn, or it's 1% a month, 12%. Now, I think they're very even like excellent, excellent groups that I really respect, quietly kind of admit that, hey, it could be up to 20%. And then in some months, you beat that, right? So, but 20%.

Pete Neubig: I'm laughing, Dan, because every conference I've been to, that I've never heard anybody talk about, like they have 20% churn or more. Everybody's in single digit churn. I was the only one, I was, when I ran Empire, I was at 34% churn. So I was, you know, I definitely had some challenges. But yet the NARP, NARP puts out, you know, you know, the averages and the average is 20%. Yet, everybody I talked to is at 9% to 12%. How's the average 20% I'm talking to is 9%.

Dan French: Yeah, yeah, it's similar to how I view AI, you know, everyone's like, I'm 10x more productive. I'm like, whoa, dude, 10x, do you know how much 10x is? Do you have any understanding of that? So if the whole world was 10x more productive already, Pete, we'd be, you know, doing flying cars and just not doing it. We'd be kicking up our feet every day. But in reality, so going back to SFR, if you are churning 20% per year, right, and you're a 5,000 door company, that's a thousand doors just to remain in place. You're not growing at that point. You're simply replacing.

Pete Neubig: You can't outpace your churn.

Dan French: Yeah, so the question was like, well, what was some of that churn? Some of it was that we needed to do a better job. And a lot of it that we found out was owner responsiveness. And this comes up on surveys all the time. And you know this too, Pete, running your own shop and what you do with your remote team. But when people feel that there's no one that they can reach out to, they can't get a hold of their PM, their APM, that makes the alarm bell go off. The alarm bells go crazy and the smoke comes out of the ears. And then all it takes from there is like a vacancy that lasts too long and they're out. So what we did was around that, we created a thing called the Owner Concierge Desk, the OCD, and an owner, it's like a safety valve. So an owner always has a number and an email that they can reach out to. And this group is highly performant, like they're supposed to get back to that person within minutes and definitely within an hour. Two people, so there's redundancy there. And that's been a great success to try to show up well for owners. So one was that, yeah, we got churned a little bit. We're much better now than we were. But two was that there were some investors when they bought their deal, they weren't well capitalized. And effectively at that point, you're kind of a slumlord, right? If you're not taking care of your business and your property.

Pete Neubig: Which means you're going to get pulled into a lawsuit eventually at some point, right?

Dan French: Yeah. And eventually, we're the ones that show up with our brand. We're the resident facing brand and the vendor facing brand. And it really damages us in the marketplace. And so I really want to, one thing I said to the team was like, hey, number one on the business development intake flow, there has to be a quality control check. Before I got here, there wasn't quite one at all. It was just like, door's the door.

Pete Neubig: So you got a heartbeat?

Dan French: You got to sign a PMS. And like, did you guys even check the neighborhood and the quality of owner? And now we have all kinds of guardrails there, making sure we're servicing someone who really backs that.

Pete Neubig: How do you check to see if somebody actually has money, right? So we used to check at Empire. We would check to see if they make sure that they actually own the house, right? Which was the reason why we had to do that is because we got caught out there, right? Somebody said they had a house and we started managing it. And next thing you know, somebody's calling us, did they own the house? Anyway, that's another story for another day. But I never was able to figure out how to check to see if they actually had money. You can ask questions like, hey, if we had to do a make ready, they give you some indicators. But I never was able to say, hey, give me your credit score. Like, let me run a credit on you. Have you guys come up with a way to kind of give you an indicator that, yeah, these guys are capitalized pretty well?

Dan French: If we do in the SFR side, I'm not that aware of it. I think we've tried a couple of things. So we use like proxies, which would be, you know, what's the status of your house? What's the quality of it? Is it up to repair? Make sure there's no code violations. Make sure the neighborhood is fine and reputable and whatever. But in multi, it's a lot easier, right? Because almost always you have a lender involved. So you can look through and see are they tripping covenants with their with their lender relationship? Do they have a capex reserve? Is that in place? Do they have capex requirements that they have to do for the lender?

Pete Neubig: So do you grade your owners? And does Northpoint say, hey, kid, you know, like these are A, these are B, these are Cs and Ds. And did you use that grading system to actually prune some of your clients?

Dan French: No, I never got that scientific, but that's a good one. Maybe we should do that. It's a business right there, right? I don't know. It's like, you know.

Pete Neubig: So when you did prune, and of course, you had some churn. Let me ask you this, as a CEO, if you knew what was coming down the pipeline with the, you know, with Avenue 1, would you have kept some of those tougher clients knowing that, you know, the Avenue 1 deal was going to happen? Or would you say, you know what, we're good by not servicing these type of D clients?

Dan French: No, that's a good question. No, I don't. I would keep them separate, because I think there's a fallacy that people tell themselves about, like a door is, you know, the vanity metric of having more doors. Really, what happens is, first of all, there's no margin on some of these doors, because we also were closing people with really low rates to try and get them to incentivize them to sign the data line. The margin wasn't great. And then the mindshare, if you actually add up your team's time, which is, I call it like mindshare cost, or like the managerial servicing of it, it just takes up so much more of your time dealing with owners that are undercapitalized and really ornery, and they don't respect you as a vendor partner. So I don't think that was the wrong call at all. And in fact, I think, you know, now that Avenue 1 MCH is in the rearview mirror, that really lets us, it opens us up to figure out our new channels of growth, and really like hunker down and just like go through and crush it. Does that make sense? Like going up small, opening up BTR as a channel, we get all that team executive mindshare back to focus like, all right, how are we going to go serve owners well in those channels?

Pete Neubig: So every time I've let somebody go that I'm like, oh, man, this is going to be the hardest thing. And for poor performance or whatever, and I find somebody, I always find somebody better. Every time I lose a big client, I find that the operation ended up running much more efficient, or we took advantage of some things that we weren't thinking of doing, or we made some decisions. When you ended up getting that news with Avenue 1, now that's kind of behind us, what are some of the things that you learned from that experience? And how did you pivot? So you just kind of touched on that. So let's talk about, you know, as now, I mean, look, I would say, in your short run as CEO of Northpoint, this is probably the toughest part that you've been in at this point, right? This is when you earn those CEO bucks. So what have you guys have done? And how have you pivoted? And what does it look like in the future for Northpoint?

Dan French: Yeah, I mean, those are challenging times. And even though I've been through a lot of those, like restructurings and pivots, you know, they're all different. They're unique in their own way, right? So you have to face them head on. And they're always tough, because you have a lot of moving parts. And it weighs on even if you like, I like to say I have ice in my veins, because I've been through some things like, you know, you get your stripes on the on the on your chest, and then you're like, whatever.

Pete Neubig: You earn your stripes when things are bad. Not when exactly. Right? You'd like to deal with things.

Dan French: And I had the good fortune of getting my butt kicked early on in my career, like really, really kicked, like almost almost went bankrupt. I think we covered that last call, investing before the GFC. So to me, like that level of pain and, and, and misery can never be, you know, achieved into the future. Like that was such a moment for me that I was like, all right, this is the worst they could possibly get. So everything from here is, is surmountable. I can, I can surmount it. However, what my lessons here would be like, all right, poise, the keeping is poise. So if the team sees that you're freaked out, then they're going to freak out. Right? But if conversely, if the team feels like you have optimism and belief and you've actually, what I did personally was mentally try to flip this in my brain and say, this is a, this is a blessing. This is an unmitigated, absolute blessing. I'm happy it happened at this exact moment. Um, and really like turn that channel on in my head. And that way I can, I can make sure I convey that into our team's mindset and channel that positivity because otherwise it becomes a negative leverage. Like, um, you know, you just, you just spin on the bad news and you, you, you know, it becomes like this big boogeyman and you don't think you can get out of it. Um, so instead we really, we really kind of just embraced it. We're like, you know what, it's opportunity.

Pete Neubig: The team takes direction from the leader and leader is what was me or the, you know, the, the, the, the sky is falling. That's what everybody, but if the leader, no matter, even if, even if it is, you know, really bad. You, you, you have to be that cheerleader at that time and they will rally around, um, on, on the leader. So they, they kind of take the, the, you know, they kind of take their mindset from, from the leader.

Dan French: Yeah. General Colin Powell, I think said it best always rings in my head. It's, he said, optimism is a force multiplier. And when you have that, man, you, you know, you can be a group of 50 people. And if, if those 50 people are ultra engaged and bought in and have the belief and have the mission mindset, they can go up against teams of 150. Because they're that much more powerful. And that's, that's where, that's where we're at where our talent density is outstanding for, for a team of 50 people. You know, I've, I've been over teams of 450 people, so I know what scale looks like too. And, you know, to be part of such a special team that, that's small in many ways, but like the hitters that we have, it's just a matter of time. And, and that guy was telling you before, like, you kept all the all-stars. You, yeah, right.

Pete Neubig: You pruned the crop. You kept the, the, you know, the high performers. So, okay. So you learn poise, you learn how to stay optimistic. What, what other, what other things did you, uh, did you learn or what, what have you done? You know, to, uh, to bring Northpoint into Northpoint 2.0, so to speak.

Dan French: Yeah. So you, you also learn how much mindshare goes into certain of those clients and the PMA that we had, quite frankly, was, was not, wasn't one I signed. Right. I inherited that one too. It's a tough one, right? We're doing a lot of work, especially in the maintenance side without disclosing economics, but like a lot of work for very little, uh, remuneration. You know what I'm saying? Like the, the, so getting the mindshare back from our team to, to allow us to figure out like, what is our future? And then really going into that, those channels that, that luckily we had the green shoots already happening, like small multifamily. We, we have a pipeline of 4,000 doors just in small multi because we had started that in January. Well, really February. So some of the, it just takes time, right. To bake up. So we're, we're, we're in front of the brokers in Dallas, Houston, Austin, San Antonio, uh, Nashville, the Carolinas. We're in front of all of them and they're getting to know us. And then they're making ownership intros. Now it's only a matter of time, Pete, before we actually get the owners that transact on deals and select us because we know we have their trust. All they have to do is go, go transact and boom, we got it. And we're in that really awesome moment right now where we figure out we've gone to market so many times in small multifamily. The team does pitches every single day, every day we're doing a pitch, you know? So the market intel of what the ownership groups want and how to do an owner aligned incentive, like a fee based incentive structure that has no payroll costs. We've tested that now it's market tested. We know people love it. And now it's a matter of time before we win the deals.

Pete Neubig: I'm going to say that's a, that's an underserved market that, that small multifamily, typically because, you know, you can't get a manager on site. It's too small. Can't get a main sky on site. My, my understanding was from five to 50 units, those are the hardest to manage. So if you've come up with a way to manage those successfully, there are, there is a huge, you know, market out there for those type of owners. When I first got into it, I owned a 50 unit, a 32 unit and a hundred unit. And, you know, if I could have found a pretty, especially on a 32 unit, like I had like a manager, like I was managing it. I got it. I was working full time. I wasn't even in real estate at the time. If I could have found it, like somebody like Northpoint that can run this. And also when I was at Empire, if I would have ran into a small multifamily, that's not what I did. That's, that's not, I didn't, I didn't do that very well. And people would say, well, you didn't do SFR very well either, Pete, if you had 34%, but we, we had a pizza, we made a specific pizza. We just did pepperoni on anchovies, not us. I would have been, I would have been able to give you a lot of, a lot of, yeah, we'll do that.

Dan French: Yeah, heard. And it is hard. Actually, you're, you're one of the people I called for advice after this restructuring happened and I'll keep that private, but, you know, you gave some awesome advice and, and some of it was around, you know, what to do into the future. Is this worth it? Is that channel worth going into knowing it's very hard, but, but to me, hard usually equals opportunity. You know, it's, it's hard to create a remote staffing organization, right? It's very difficult. Most people don't even try it because it was hard, but then some people crack the code and they figure it out and then it works. And then people that, that follow later there, they stand on your shoulders because you kind of showed the way of how to do things. And that's what we're doing. We're really inventing a new national scale program. There are some people that do it fine in a regional level, but I'm really not aware that someone has done this, cracked the code to become a national scale platform that can handle small multifamily in different markets and do it well and consistently. And it's going to be us.

Pete Neubig: What's the old saying? Necessity is the mother of all invention. Right. And, and, you know, when you are, when you have some really big challenges in your business, whether that's losing your biggest client or, you know, some payment processor decides not to, you know, process your payments anymore. That's another story for another day. You have to become innovative. You have, you have to figure something else out. And what I love is you, you already had, cause we had talked about a year or so ago and you told me you were going to get into small multifamily. And I basically said, you're not Stan. Like that is the hardest thing. And the fact that you guys worked on it and figured out a great system and we're, and we're leveraging, you know, we're working on that. When this happened, you were able to kind of keep, you were able to really focus on it and leverage on it. And, you know, if, if, if I am a single family property management, you know, company and I get a referral for a, you know, or I get somebody that says, I have a small multifamily and I don't do that. Do you have a referral program out there? Folks that are listening to my listeners don't do multifamily or small multifamily.

Dan French: Yeah, definitely. We, we will sign up a referral partnership agreement where we'll pay you. I think it's one month, the first month of fees that go to you for, for that, if it closes. So yeah, that's pretty decent. Multifamilies. Yeah. It could be big. It could be, it could be pretty chunky. Um, and we'll do, you know, it's, it's a little bit, uh, in flux when you get to a hundred is 120. Really the cutoff, it just depends on the asset, but, but definitely the sweet spots like 10 to a hundred or 20 to a hundred really have this program where there's no payroll costs at the asset level. And it's really, um, it's all fee based. So to me, that's.

Pete Neubig: So it's almost running very similar to an SFR as far as fees are concerned. Once you get to like one 50 or whatever, and then you have, that's when you have the manager on site, the porter on site, the maintenance guy on site. Let me, let me ask you this too, Dan. So you, you, you kind of pivoted and really, I won't say pivoted, but you pushed more into that, into the small multifamily. Um, did you move into new, uh, or, uh, any kind of, um, new, new, um, new cities? Like, did you, did you move to any new, new, uh, new, new areas? Yeah. Like we're part of the, is that part of some of the things that you did as well? Once you, uh, once you had this issue.

Dan French: Yeah, we, we kind of selectively identified where we think we're best positioned to, to grow and operate well. Um, so we, yeah, we did, we're national. Um, so we have SFR homes from California to Florida and Ohio. Um, nothing really in the Northeast, but, um, yeah, we selectively identified, you know, what areas do we want, do we want to do small multifamily? Do we want to do BTR? And primarily that we came up with Texas is the far and away that the, the, the obvious one, because we're based in Austin. I have a lot of deep, um, you know, commercial real estate connections here, owners and brokers. And so does, um, some of our team, especially Steven Ray has been in the mix here for 20 years on the multifamily side. So, but the Carolinas are really powerful for us too. Especially Charlotte has been, um, an area of focus where we want to, we are growing there and we want to continue to grow. And we just so happen to have our whole accounting teams in Nashville. We have two business development people in Nashville. So we want to grow that, that area. Um, and I have a heart for Florida as well. So I want to get back and go there in the winter. Um, but yeah.

Pete Neubig: So you, uh, you did, did you, did you shut down any locations? Like any, like you were in this area and most of it was with Avenue One. So you're like, you know what, we're not gonna serve that area anymore. Or did you keep all your areas of service?

Dan French: We sold a couple of like states that we just happened to have. This is not related to Avenue One, but just FYI. There was a couple of states where we had maybe 20 doors, 15 doors, 25 doors. We just felt like it was time to not service that. And by the time you figure out the broker in charge and the compliance stuff, it's not, there's no money to do it.

Pete Neubig: So either A, you have to say, we're gonna go focus in growth and grow that area or that state or B, like, hey, let's sell it and move on and focus on these areas. Got it. You mentioned BTR. I know we're kind of up against it, but this is really interesting to me. So was BTR something that Northpoint was doing already or was that part of like because of the Trump thing and because of the interest rates and just not a lot of movement on SFR or did you guys pivoted to BTR?

Dan French: Yeah, no, we were already chasing a lot of BTR opportunities. Those are a little bit harder. They have a longer sales cycle. They're just harder to transact. They tend to be newer, higher asset pricing, right? Because a lot of them are $20 to $50 million or more. So you have to kind of really show up a bunch of times before you can possibly take over some of those deals. But we're really close on getting a bunch of those locked in like about the sign of PMA. But we do a version of BTR already in Charlotte area and we took it from 0% occupied to fully leased and stabilized this year and that worked out really well. So those are like attached townhome style communities and BTR means a lot of different things. It could be like cottages that are single family home detached. It could be a blend of like townhomes and cottages. It could be townhome style only. So we're pitching all those different types of things. And one thing that I've heard coming out of the Road to Housing Act, I've seen it written about but I've also experienced it on phone calls with owners is that people now are pivoting a lot of the capital. It's getting even more bullish on BTR development because it's seen as like more robust.

Pete Neubig: That seems to be the hot topic these days. All right, so I want you to put your feet in the shoes of an SFR operator, like a NARPM guy, right? So they're call it three to 500 doors. And they just lost their biggest client. If you were coaching them or you were consulting them, what would be some of the things that you would say to them when they, what are some things that they have to hear or that they have to actually have to do to survive losing their biggest client?

Dan French: Yeah, so if it's like a personal like one-on-one exec to exec coaching, it's all about mindset. It's really like, how are you processing it? And you'll be surprised at like the feelings you go through or the emotional like cycles. You're not even aware of it, but you're going through it. You know, and you have to be, you have to have some sort of outlets that you go to. Like for me, that's faith, family, fitness. Those are my obvious ones, keep me really balanced. So I just go into my same routines every day and know that optimism is so important. And then, you know, I have some mentors that I kind of like have to check in with. But another good thing that I did actually, which was really awesome, and call it the people you most respect in the industry or that are in your market or whatever, if you don't have these big industry connections, and just say, hey, what should I do? You know, what are you seeing out there? Like I did that to you, you know? And I did that to a bunch of people and I was like, hey, this is what I'm facing, what should I do next? And you'll be, you know, people love to be asked their advice. You know, because it shows, like, number one, you respect them. And number two, they're able to pass on some of their wisdom. And most people like to do that. So.

Pete Neubig: It's funny the way you answered it. It's really, really interesting. Mindset being open, ominous, and being optimistic and reaching out to other folks. And my mind went to, well, I have to, you know, let staff go and I have to pivot and I have to do, like, I'm thinking process. So that's just my mind goes to process oriented. And your mind went to kind of people oriented, which I find fascinating. And a lot of us that own these smaller firms have the mindset that I have, where a lot of us are integrators. So I would definitely listen to Dan's advice. If this happens to you, I love it. Keep being optimistic and reaching out to folks and saying, what would you do? And just being humble and then asking for advice. Dan, I thank you so much for doing this. I know, you know, this is, I know you do this as a favor to me. I really appreciate it. I love how busy it is.

Dan French: Hey, man. Round three better be at the pizza joint.

Pete Neubig: We're dealing with it, brother. Christmas time. Let's get there. Dan, if somebody wanted to reach out to you, what's the best way they can connect with you?

Dan French: Cell phone, 845-629-1808. Hit me on LinkedIn. Very easy to find there. Or Daniel French.

Pete Neubig: And it's Daniel French.

Dan French: Yeah.

Pete Neubig: It's Daniel French on LinkedIn. And if somebody actually had a lead, they wanted to send you.

Dan French: Oh.

Pete Neubig: What's the best way to do that?

Dan French: Hit me an email. That way I can try to go back and forth with a referral agreement with you too. Make it worth your time. DFrench@northpointam.com. Like asset management, northpointam.com.

Pete Neubig: Yeah. Northpointam.com. And if you want to be cool like Dan and have remote team members, then you should shoot me an email. pete@vpmsolutions.com. And I will be more than happy to help you with that. And if you are listening to this and you're not a NARPM member, shame on you. Go to NARPM, narpm.org. Or give them a call at 800-782-3452. Dan, thanks so much for being here.

Dan French: Thanks for having me, man. Appreciate you.