From Operator to Owner: Building a PM Business That Runs Without You | Mark Brower

A Podcast | Mark Brower

Pete Neubig: All right, everybody, welcome to the NARPM podcast. I know I say this every week, and every week it's true, we have another great show, but we have even a greater show today because I have Mark Brower, CEO of Mark Brower Properties, a residential property management company based in Mesa, Arizona, and he's also a landlord himself. So we're gonna talk a little bit about that as well because he's passionate about helping owners shift from landlord to wealth builder through long-term thinking, patient investing, and disciplined execution. Mark's also a speaker in the industry, and he's a great follow on social media. If you're not following him on LinkedIn, you are missing out because he's pretty, pretty a good follow on LinkedIn. Mark, welcome, buddy.

Mark Brower: Thank you, Pete. Such a gracious intro.

Pete Neubig: Well, you gave it to me, buddy. I just read it back to you.

Mark Brower: Oh. I was like, what are you reading?

Pete Neubig: So, all right. So right before we got on, Mark and I were in the green room and we were talking. I said, hey, shut down your Slack notifications. And he goes, Slack? I go, all right, am I an old man? Like no one uses Slack anymore?

Mark Brower: I use Slack, yeah.

Pete Neubig: And he's like, yeah, no, I just never get notifications. And I said, let's talk about that first. So Mark, you're running a PM firm, and I actually met your general manager at the last conference that I was at. I'm trying to remember, I think it was the PM conference, or PM systems conference.

Mark Brower: You met Richard, my director of ops.

Pete Neubig: Director of ops. So are you now running a PM firm where you are just the owner and you're not doing anything day to day? So talk a little bit about what your day to day looks like and what it used to look like before you had your team in place.

Mark Brower: Absolutely. Yes, I have moved more towards owner, less of an operator. I have one direct report. Well, probably two, but really one. My new COO, I hired a COO in November, and she is phenomenal. So far, total rockstar. And she's running all the one-on-ones. She's running weekly. I have a weekly all company meeting that I run every Tuesday morning at 9 a.m. That's 30 minutes. And then she has recently taken me out of all my other direct report meetings. And I'm gonna get sucked back into the front lines here soon because we've got some turnover in our BDM position. So I'm gonna be the BDM for maybe a month or two. And as we train and onboard someone new. But other than that, my schedule is completely my own. So my job right now is to support CJ, my COO, collaborate with her, stay aligned with her, remove her roadblocks and whatever she needs. She's bringing tremendous leadership and structure to operations. And I think we're advancing and improving faster than we ever have before. And I'm doing less than I ever have done before.

Pete Neubig: So let's talk about that transformation, both in as the company is growing, when you started putting people in place and secondarily, your mindset. I'm sure you had to grow internally or through a mindset to be able to take that next step, whether that's operator, CEO, and then now owner. So can you talk a little bit about a timeline or when you hit so many units or so much revenue, where you ended up building this team?

Mark Brower: Yeah, Pete, thanks for bringing this up. Thanks for making this a topic. I feel really passionate about this because I believe the journey of entrepreneurship is a pursuit of freedom. And Dan Sullivan talks about this. And he lists different types of freedom. There's time freedom, financial freedom, freedom of purpose and relationship freedom. So those are the four freedoms Dan Sullivan suggests that entrepreneurs are pursuing. And those resonate with me.

Pete Neubig: Okay, so time freedom and financial freedom, I get. So talk a little bit about the other two because I think most people get those two. So purpose freedom and relationship freedom.

Mark Brower: What's important to me is when I started the business, I was inspired by Robert Kiyosaki's Rich Dad, Poor Dad and some of his other books, which by the way, really quick sidebar. I met Sharon, I think it was Sharon Lecter, who's the co-author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad last year at MX Summit, which I think you were at, right? Remember she was there? And she said, this was cool. She said that that book started as the instruction manual for their board game, Cashflow. And then it was the thing that blew up, which I found fascinating. Robert Kiyosaki laid out this framework where people are in one of four buckets. They're either employee, self-employed, business owner or investor. And the investor was like, that's the top of the pyramid, the hierarchy. Everybody answers to the investor, investor answers to no one, why? Because they have capital and they're deploying capital, right? And I became enamored with this idea that I wouldn't have to be accountable to anybody. That's the truth. For some reason, maybe it had to do with my childhood. I just didn't wanna answer to anyone someday. And so this idea of, which there's a paradox there because I believe we all answer to God. And that's like core to who I am as a person, being accountable to him.

Pete Neubig: And some people would say you have to be, you're always accountable to your team and to your clients. But I think by having your CEO, that you're not anymore, right?

Mark Brower: Well, I think you're 100% right. And I think if a leader is accountable and dedicated first and primarily to ideas and purpose that are bigger than themselves, that matters tremendously. Because if you're just working for money, for instance, if you make that your God, that's your primary motivation. It's tempting to walk over people, take shortcuts and the low road. And that in the long run, I think is a losing strategy. That's not the game I want to play. And I think that the best leaders, at least the ones I respect the most, that seem to be in pursuit of freedom in an ethical, honest way, in a moral way, do, are accountable to their team because of what they stand for. They stand for principles like win-win. They stand for principles and they have accepted habits like putting first things first and begin with the end in mind. By the way, those three, for any Stephen Covey fans will sound familiar. Those are straight from the seven habits of highly effective people. But it's because of the dedication and the commitment to a higher purpose that tether us to that level of accountability. But in terms of somebody telling me what job to do and how to do it, I learned at a very young age that was absolutely intolerable to me.

Pete Neubig: We call that, you are unemployable, buddy.

Mark Brower: That's right. You nailed it. It should be no surprise to you that I was fired from every job I ever had before I started.

Pete Neubig: Makes a lot of sense. It does not. It's surprising, but I'm not surprised, I guess.

Mark Brower: So I got obsessed about this idea that, what was really fascinating to me, Pete, was that there's a difference between being self-employed and being a business owner.

Pete Neubig: 100%, yeah.

Mark Brower: And I'm not sure that's really clear to everyone. The two are conflated a lot. Like, oh, I own my own business. Well, I would respectfully submit that you own a job that you created. And for any of the listeners that have read the E-myth, you'll resonate with that journey that you have created sometimes a nightmare of a job for yourself. Yeah, go ahead.

Pete Neubig: I would say that's why in the E-myth, what is it? 80% of all businesses fail in the first five years and 80% more of the next five years. And mainly it's because the owner who owns a job gets burnt out.

Mark Brower: And it just- Pete, have you ever experienced burnout?

Pete Neubig: I have not.

Mark Brower: You have not.

Pete Neubig: You have mastered it. I felt burned out before, but when I see somebody who's really burned out, I don't think I've experienced that because it is pretty gnarly.

Mark Brower: I think that burnout is one of the most common tragedies in owning a property management company.

Pete Neubig: I can see that. Especially if you are self-employed, right? If you're running portfolio-based, you're- Oh, I just heard an alert.

Mark Brower: Was that from your computer, dude? No, dude. No. I have not heard that noise. You're such a liar.

Pete Neubig: You said you never get notified. I have not heard that noise in years. No, it is. I bet it's just like your computer that has like an update or something.

Mark Brower: It is not my computer. That was yours, bro. 100%. That was yours.

Pete Neubig: We can agree to disagree on this one, Brower. So let's talk a little bit about this. So when you started your property management firm, what year did you start?

Mark Brower: The first time I built a property management company was in partnership and we started in 2009. And that went for two years. And then I opened Mark Brower Properties in 2011.

Pete Neubig: Okay. When you decided to open Mark Brower Properties in 2011, did you have the vision of where you are today that you eventually wanted to be owner? Or did that come later on?

Mark Brower: Okay, you go ahead. 100%. I started this, I thought, I want a residual revenue business that's scalable because we solve simple problems at scale where I can build a team around me and have that leverage. So I was considering insurance or property management.

Pete Neubig: Okay. I'm gonna go back to your burnout thing. So you've seen, what's the most common in property management when people are burned out? What's the most common trait that you see?

Mark Brower: Fortunately, I have not had a lot of interactions with property managers that have gotten burned out, but I've heard stories and it's just my general impression it happens quite frequently. Because of the accidental property manager, the person that was a realtor, perhaps a few clients beg them to manage a few rentals on the side and suddenly it turns into 30 or 40 over a few years and they have no systems, they have no policies. They're just white knuckling through each new lease up and it's different every time. Totally unsustainable, unscalable. They undervalue their time and they end up getting burned out because they never put a system to it. I think that happens a lot. I think even at 150 or two, I remember when I was at 150 to 180 units and all I had done is hire low impact assistants and I didn't have good systems, good software. I thought I did. I thought I was way better than I was and I was working until two in the morning, like twice a week and still juggling taking my kids to school and picking them up from school and going to their stuff and I got to a point where I realized I was burning out and I couldn't afford a director of operations but I couldn't afford not to. There's the financial cost and the emotional energy cost and I think the emotional energy cost mounted became so high that it compelled me to hire someone I couldn't afford to hire because I was going for broke at that point. In other words, I didn't have the 70, 80,000 in my budget at that time, 10 years ago, which would be like 100,000 now to hire a leader in the company but I realized if I didn't do it, if I didn't throw that Hail Mary pass and try to like somehow make it all work, I was cooked. I'm not like you, Pete. I don't have an operations mind. I couldn't put the systems together myself.

Pete Neubig: Well, yeah, you're more on the sales side.

Mark Brower: I'm more of a sales promoter, yeah.

Pete Neubig: There's so much there to unpack. Okay, so one is I think you hit the nail on the head and I think the E-myth was the one who said it. If you don't have systems, you don't have a business, right? The second thing is if you are a property manager and you are running portfolio base and you're just kind of doing it yourself, completely 100%, you're gonna get burned out over time. Number three is I see a lot of business owners, they hire these property managers, they don't have good systems, they expect them to do everything. The business owner may not be getting burnt out but his team is and I've seen that firsthand. My team was getting burnt out until I was able to dive into my systems background and create systems and then hiring remote team members. Unlike you, I didn't have to go hire the $80,000 person to do the systems and blockage directive operations. I took on that role and CEO but I needed the people to do the work because we were growing so much and despite my property managers were just getting burnt out. And so I solved it a different way. By the way, my business coach, Doug Winnie says, if you can afford somebody 50% of their salary and they can do a job 80% as good as you, you go hire them.

Mark Brower: You're crazy not to. There's a fantastic book called Buy Back Your Time.

Pete Neubig: Yeah, by, what's his name? It'll come to me.

Mark Brower: And it gives a similar equation to what you just laid out. The right mindset for a business leader, and I love talking about mindset. I love talking about business leadership. To me, there's no higher leverage activity than developing our own business leadership. At the end of the day, Taylor Swift was right. It's me. Hi, I'm the problem, it's me. Sing the song, Pete. Sing it.

Pete Neubig: I don't even know who you're talking about. You talking about that lady that's a Chiefs fan? I don't have kids, brother. I'm not. I know that he doesn't know who Taylor Swift is.

Mark Brower: So here's what I started learning about myself at this point where I was getting burned out. And it was hard for me to admit. I think a lot of us are, a lot of entrepreneurs have the affliction that they're smart, okay? And they work really hard. And sometimes our strengths become our liabilities. Because when you know you're smart and you usually win and you can work really hard, sometimes that gets attached to our self-worth in a way where if we have to admit that we can't do something, it's an existential crisis. And that was the case for me. It was hard for me to eventually admit that I wasn't a systems and operations person. Because admitting that was a threat to my identity. And that's what I mean by the highest leverage activity is leadership development and mindset work. It's not the problem that's the problem. It's the way we're thinking about the problem that's the problem. And surrounding ourselves with smart people who think differently than us, who have sort of figured some of this stuff out and spending time with them and observing their model behavior shifts the way we think. So there's good books that we can read, there's seminars we can attend, but there's nothing more powerful. There's nothing more powerful than spending time in Keystone, Colorado at 12,000 feet with a bunch of smart people in a room for three days to shift the way I think and I see the world. And that has immeasurable impact. And so, and I said Keystone, Colorado because you and I were there, when was that? June, July?

Pete Neubig: It was June of last year, yeah.

Mark Brower: Ladies and gentlemen, Pete Neubig, fire walker from Keystone, Colorado.

Pete Neubig: Better than fire eater, right? Yeah, but that was at the, I was at Tony Klein's onyx retreat and I thought it was, you know, it was definitely, I don't know if I like to say life changing, but it definitely was impactful. It was definitely impactful.

Mark Brower: Hugely impactful, yeah, it's hugely impactful in ways that you don't consciously understand fully. So I joined entrepreneur organization accelerator group, you know, like eight, nine years ago, at around this point when I was getting burned out and I was getting really desperate, I took a big swing. I hired an operations person, I couldn't afford it. I was looking ahead at projected cash flows where I was gonna run out of money, but something beautiful happened. When I got back some of my energy and my time, just like you said, you know, I get hired somebody that could do at least 80% of what I could do, you know, and what happened, almost magically, I was able to increase the rate of our company growth, sell more homes with my freed up time and we were making more money and I had better leadership and less stress and better sleep.

Pete Neubig: And the team actually had better leadership or better management. I don't know about leadership, but better management. Most likely.

Mark Brower: Yeah, and then it took me 10 years, but now we're at that point again where we just made another quantum leap and we brought in a leader that is, you know how they say, hire people that are smarter than you?

Pete Neubig: Yep. That's easy for me to do, by the way.

Mark Brower: It's easy.

Pete Neubig: That's easy for me to do. I'm not a sharp tack. I'm a quick on knife.

Mark Brower: Well played. Hiring smart people is expensive, but here's the problem. And let's go back to this leadership mindset idea. Really effective leaders think about cost, not in terms of dollars leaving their bank account. They think of costs in terms of opportunity costs. What opportunities, what upside am I foregoing in not making this move? Just like when I was getting burned out and I couldn't afford not to bring on an operations director but I didn't think I had the money for it. Eventually I took that swing of faith and I said, I can't afford not to do this. Alex Hermosi once went to an event and he described the concluding speech by this coach at this event he was at. And the guy said, how much money would you spend right now to stop losing a million dollars a year? It's kind of a tricky question because your first reaction is like, well, what are you talking about? I'm not, I don't have a million dollars a year to lose.

Pete Neubig: I'm not losing a million dollars a year, correct.

Mark Brower: But you are losing a million dollars a year. Every single person listening to this conversation is losing over a million dollars a year because they haven't yet found the leadership team that can produce that for them. And even if you're making a million dollars a year, you could be making too many. So what are we so afraid of about investing in upside potential that could 10X itself, that could at least two, three X itself? It's opportunity. The biggest cost of our lives by far is opportunity cost.

Pete Neubig: So why do you think that is? Why do you think, is it just a price tag of those people you think? I'm sure that's a big part of it. Is it that I don't wanna hire somebody smarter than me because I might not look as good? Like I'm sure there's some ego involved in some of that, right.

Mark Brower: Oh, there's all of that, yeah. And guess what? You nailed it just a few minutes ago when you said, I don't remember the words you said, but you suggested that there's something about becoming the type of leader that other leaders would follow. I was in a room recently with a gentleman at a recent conference, and I was sharing about my COO hire. And he paused and he said, you know, Mark, your COO wouldn't work for me. I thought, what an honest, humble admission. And also the right perspective that us becoming a greater leader, a better version of ourselves, is the most important work we can do to enable that possibility of other leaders wanting to follow us. I used to get stuck in my head thinking, well, I just don't have the money to hire those people. So I'm stuck. It's not the case. It's not the case, Pete. There's unlimited money, by the way. Money is just a resource. Capital is just a resource among hundreds of different types of resources that a business needs. We don't lack money. We lack a compelling vision, the right leadership and structure to execute on that vision. If the other parts are in place, there's unlimited capital to make great ideas come to be, right?

Pete Neubig: I think you hit the nail on the head. You're not going to get high performers to work for you if you don't have a vision or if your vision is not very grandiose. People want to come work for, especially high-charging, high-performer folks. They wanna see growth. And if you say, hey, my vision is 300 units and you're at 287 units and you're like, I just wanna run just a 300-unit normal property management firm, you're not gonna get a director of operations that's going to wanna be a go-getter, in my mind.

Mark Brower: You'll get an employee that's coming to die. Here's my last stop in my career. I don't care about advancement.

Pete Neubig: Exactly. And I think also, a lot of people you talk to, they don't really have a vision, Mark. How many business owners do you talk to where you ask them their vision and they just kind of throw up on you because they don't really know. So they just kind of say word salad. They give you a Kamala Harris kind of answer to vision. Why do you think that is?

Mark Brower: I don't know, but you just dug on Kamala Harris. Are we gonna get canceled?

Pete Neubig: I don't know. Is she still around? I thought maybe she moved to Australia or something.

Mark Brower: Why do I think that is? I used to take for granted, we all have gifts and talents. Not everyone's a visionary. Not everyone's an operator. Some people have both. You have both, Pete. I admire that. I'm kind of jealous, actually. So I don't think I'd look at your question about why do some people not have a vision as like a deficit. There's no judgment there. But the point you're making that vision is essential is absolutely spot on.

Pete Neubig: And it doesn't have to be a BHAG, right? Like the big hairy audacious goals. I don't think it has to be a BHAG, but you have to have some type of vision for your organization so that people can get on board and kind of help you get there, no?

Mark Brower: Absolutely right. There's a really easy read, really compelling paradigm shifting book called Vivid Vision by Cameron Harreld.

Pete Neubig: Write that one down.

Mark Brower: And it's an easy read. It's a beautiful concept. And what Vivid Vision talks about is, it's really kind of a tragedy that most companies have these pithy three or four sentence vision statements or mission statements. These fall woefully short of painting a vivid, beautiful picture of the future state of a company. We throw out two or three sentences and we expect people to passionately exchange the best hours of their days and the best days of their lives. Are you kidding me? What? What if the vision was such a clear, beautiful, compelling future picture that not only was it inspiring, but then people could spontaneously enroll their gifts and talents in different pieces of it without being told they have to do that, right? Right? And so the Vivid Vision becomes like a beautiful detailed painting picture of the future state of the company. And Cameron says it should be done every three years. Peter Lohman does this. I did mine, my first one two and a half years ago. At the end of this year, we need to do a new Vivid Vision. Reviewing it frequently is important. It's a great exercise, super important.

Pete Neubig: So I used to have a vision with VPM about, I don't know, it was like changing the world, reducing costs for property managers, pulling people out of poverty. And it was nice and it was like, this is fun. But what I realized is like, it really didn't inspire. It's meant to, but it just didn't do it. And I gotta tell you, maybe it's the kind of people that I attract that come work for me, but now our vision is a number, right? It's like, we want X thousand people to have jobs across our platform. And then you say, well, Pete, that's like, it's just a number. That's not really exciting, but it's measurable. And people get excited about it because what I do behind that mark is, it's not just a number, because that number, the greater it is, all people see is, well, Pete's getting rich, right? Or Pete's making money. What I do, and I learned this from Matthew Whitaker. His vision was 25,000 doors by end of 2025, and he hit 23,000 doors. Like he came darn close to that vision. And so I'm like, you know what? I'm gonna take a page out of Whitaker's book. And I did that vision, but then what Matthew told me was like, hey, what I do is I tell the team why that number is important, how it affects not just the company, but them and every person on the team, right? There's growth, there's opportunity, there's bonuses, there's more money, there's helping more people. And he said that really had his team resonate and I tried it and by golly, it seemed to work for at least our culture.

Mark Brower: There's, I don't remember where I read this, the reason we need to keep growing our businesses rapidly isn't just to make more money for the founder. In fact, I'm sure you're quite comfortable with your lifestyle. All my needs are met, you know, like financially. I don't have some, I don't need to buy a private jet, I don't need to have a $10 million house, like I'm good, really. But one of the most compelling reasons to be growing quickly is to do meaningful work with meaningful people, with meaningful relationships. Ray Dalio, one of my favorite authors and speakers, founder of Bridgewater Capital, wrote the book Principles and he said, you know, he reached a point in his life where he was like, I just wanted to do stuff, I just wanted to work hard doing really fun stuff, making a difference with people I wanted to be around. That sounds great, right?

Pete Neubig: Doing cool things with people you love.

Mark Brower: That's right. But if you can't rapidly grow a company, you don't have the environment.

Pete Neubig: You're stuck in the rat race.

Mark Brower: You don't have the environment where A players want to come B. So that's the, in my opinion, that's the most compelling reason to be aggressively growing a business. Because you can attract the people that you want to be around and build stuff with.

Pete Neubig: You know, I don't know if I've read the, my business coach told me this, and this is probably in a bunch of books, but your business will only grow to the level of the owner or the level of the CEO, right? And so what you, you know, you have quoted about six or seven books that you've mentioned already. So obviously leaders are readers and they're a great reader and thought-provoking person. That's why I should follow them on LinkedIn. But what you're doing is you are becoming a better leader through these books, through your education, through your mentorships with other people and masterminds and with this EO and you're working hard at it. And so if you're listening to this and you are stuck in the doldrums and you are the day-to-day and you're starting to get burnt out, or your team is starting to get burnt out, or you don't have the team that you think that you should have. That's all a reflection on you. You have to become a better leader, a better, you know, a better CEO, a better manager of people. You have to be better at inspiring folks and you get the people you deserve. Right, Mark? When you hire people, you get the people you deserve.

Mark Brower: I don't know what that, I guess. What does that mean, Pete?

Pete Neubig: Well, to me, it means, you know, if I have a great company and I'm a great leader, I'm going to, I deserve great people and I'm going to get great people.

Mark Brower: Yeah.

Pete Neubig: If I am, if I'm running a poor business, I'm a poor leader or manager, I'm going to get people that are sub-performers.

Mark Brower: 100%.

Pete Neubig: So, and if you don't continue to grow, it's going to be hard to attract, we've talked about this, it's hard to attract that top-A, grade-A talent. The director of operations that you have today, six years ago, would you have been able to have that person?

Mark Brower: Well, I hired him 10 years ago. My COO that I just hired in December.

Pete Neubig: Yeah, the COO.

Mark Brower: Two years ago, she would not have worked for me. Not because I didn't have the money.

Pete Neubig: Right.

Mark Brower: But because I wasn't the person that she would have worked for.

Pete Neubig: Yeah.

Mark Brower: I think it's hard to overstate the point you're making, Pete. Like, I feel like, and it depends on your goals. Look, if you're content being an owner-operator and you can help, you can hire Black Sheep Global or, you know, whoever to build out your processes, you get some good virtual labor from VPM help, and then, you know, you plug everything in, and you're humming along at 150 units, and you got a lifestyle business, you don't mind taking owner calls 24-7, then that's great. But if you want to play, like, if you are intentionally wanting to play, you feel something inside of you calling out that I need to play a bigger game than this. I need to, for whatever reason, to fulfill my life purpose, or because I want to contribute, or it just is more thrilling to me, then you have to invest in your leadership journey. You have to. You have to read, and then you have to build. I haven't seen anyone do it any other way, so I'm just going to suggest that this is the path to consider. You have to build an intentional ecosystem around yourself that levels you up, and that includes, in my personal share, I have a business coach. I have a life coach. This is right now. I have a therapist. I am a member of entrepreneur organization. I go to a monthly entrepreneur's men's group, and then I go to, like, several conferences a year.

Pete Neubig: A month, buddy. I'm a vendor running the gambit I see at every conference, brother. The only person I see at every conference is not a vendor.

Mark Brower: So what does that do for me? I don't know, dude, but in the last two years, it put me in a position to have, like, a phenomenal leader want to join and take over operations for my company, and guess what? I'm convinced that's going to 10x. We're at 2.3 million. Like, that's our revenue right now. Within five years, we're going to be at 20 million. So I'm Babe Ruth. I'm calling my shot, and it's not because I'm going to force that to happen or because I'm smart enough to make that happen, but it's because I want it, and I'm becoming the person that can assemble the team to make that happen, and I hope this isn't just to feed my ego, like I'm worthy of love and belonging because I built a company that's large and it's performative self-worth. I'm really trying to do work on myself right now that I move from a fear, scarcity, locus of creation to an abundance, love, worthiness, locus of creation that I'm creating not to feed my ego, but I'm creating to honor the gifts and talents God gave me and how great he is. And I think if I can get myself there and stay there and build this team, we're going to do incredible things, and the best is yet to come. And that feels really exciting, not because of the money alone, but because the contribution and the value creation and the change and the impact we can have on the industry and what the work does to my team members and moving them along their transformative personal life journey. I mean, to me, that's what I'm working for now.

Pete Neubig: And the more abundance you get, the more people you can help. You can't tithe to your church if you have no money, right? And so as Mark Brower Properties becomes more successful, then you will be able to not just help more people just within the business, right? Hiring more people, having more renters, you know, residents, helping more investors. But now you can take that and you can help. You can start with a nonprofit or you can start something else even on the side or just donate more. And so you can help even more people as you grow your business and as you become more successful.

Mark Brower: We were talking about having an inspiring vision. And one of the things that happened when I went through that exercise and created that vivid vision in 2023, and I believe that this came from God, you know, kind of as like personal revelation to me. When I was just engaged in the exercise, I was just typing and typing and writing out, you know, a few pages of all the pictures and the images and like trying to build like a really clear picture of where we're headed. And one thing that came to me is really sort of galvanized our purpose. It's become our purpose. And the words came to me, we're good people, helping good people do more good. And so that became our company purpose, helping good people do more good. And there's so much in that. And that, in my opinion for us, is worth working for.

Pete Neubig: Yeah, well said. All right, Mark, we're up against it. I can probably talk to you for another two hours and still be captivated and have the... Likewise, Pete. Captivated. So let's put a pin in it there. And let's get you back on because I think this has been an incredible conversation. So thank you.

Mark Brower: Thanks, Pete. I'm honored to be here and I look forward to it. Absolutely.

Pete Neubig: Now, if somebody wanted to reach out to you or follow you, what's the best way to reach out to you?

Mark Brower: Best way is to text my cell at 602-228-9617. Or you can email me at mark@markrent.com.

Pete Neubig: And then to follow you on LinkedIn.

Mark Brower: Yeah, follow me on LinkedIn, for sure.

Pete Neubig: Follow B-R-O-W-E-R, Mark Brower.

Mark Brower: Yeah, that's it.

Pete Neubig: All right. Thanks, Mark. Thanks, everybody.

Mark Brower: Thanks, Pete. Been a pleasure.

Pete Neubig: Sorry. If you're not listening to this and you are not a NARPM member, shame on you. Go to narpm.org and sign up. That's right. And if you want to reach out to me, feel free to email me, pete@vpmsolutions.com. I'm looking for guests. Or if you have any questions about remote team members or just about NARPM, give me an email, pete@vpmsolutions.com. See you, everybody. See ya.