Bill Douglas: Own your data or somebody else will.

Bill Douglas spent his career applying industrial manufacturing playbooks to industries that hadn’t caught up yet. Eleven years ago he decided commercial real estate was exactly that kind of industry, and built OpticWise to close the gap. Today he’s CEO of a data and digital infrastructure company that positions itself as an operating partner to ownership, working alongside property managers, asset managers and IT teams rather than replacing any of them. The business is more than 20 years old, self-funded, and has never taken outside capital. Bill has led multiple companies onto the Inc. 5000 list and is co-author of the best-selling Peak Property Performance, published by Fast Company Press in 2025.

What makes Bill different is that he’s found a category almost nobody is watching: the triangle between the property manager, the asset manager and the IT manager, where a building’s networks, sensors and data end up belonging to nobody. Most buildings OpticWise audits are running more than ten separate networks when two would do, installed in a panic in the final 90 days before the building opens, undocumented and unmanaged until something breaks. His core conviction is that data is an asset, not an expense, and that owners who don’t control it are quietly handing leverage, and money, to the vendors who do.

What makes this compelling is how much is actually sitting on the table. OpticWise won’t take on a retrofit unless they can find at least $300 per door per year of NOI without meaningful capex; on new construction the floor is $600, and anything past $1,000 is a home run. Run that through a hundred-unit property and it’s real value most owners never knew was there. Underneath the framework is someone who’s applied the same discipline to himself, managing multiple sclerosis for over 20 years, coming back from a ski accident that broke 13 bones to find his business had grown 25% in a single quarter without him, and turning a hundred-day positivity challenge into a permanent operating principle. He’s landed on a line he’s kept on his wall for two decades, the one he returns to on his hardest days: life is a gift, meant to be pursued, shared and savored.

Transcript

[00:00] Bill Douglas: And when a doctor told me 15 years ago when I was laying there paralyzed on a table, we’re going to retrofit your house so you can use your wheelchair.

[00:07] And I’ve been skiing with you since.

[00:09] So the noise in your head is what you want to believe.

[00:14] Like I think you’re capable of anything.

[00:25] Announcer: Welcome to Offshoot, the Fident Capital podcast with host Kevin Choquette.

[00:30] Offshoot is a curiosity driven conversation that features a wide range of real estate and business professionals.

[00:36] In each episode, we unpack the knowledge, vantage point and domain expertise of our guests.

[00:42] Then we move beyond the facts and figures and dive into the personal habits and mindset which allow them to be high performers in their respective field.

[00:51] This podcast’s objective is simple supporting entrepreneurs,

[00:55] fostering relationships, and uncovering meaningful conversations that positively impact business.

[01:07] Kevin Choquette: Welcome to episode 38 of Offshoot. My guest today is Bill Douglas, CEO of Opticwise,

[01:13] a data and digital infrastructure company focused on commercial real estate.

[01:17] Bill helps owners and operators stop treating their digital systems like scattered gadgets to instead manage them like mission critical infrastructure.

[01:28] He’s a patent holder, has led multiple companies into the Inc. 5000 list,

[01:32] and is co author of Peak Property Performance,

[01:35] published by Fast company in 2025.

[01:38] I’ve known Bill for about 15 years. The first time he explained Opticwise and what it does it was about Internet service.

[01:46] My interpretation? Don’t use ***. Use these guys. You’ll make more money.

[01:50] But time passed. His business evolved, and I’ve slowly realized this is something much bigger.

[01:56] What Bill’s really doing is shining a light on a massive blind spot in commercial real estate. The networks, sensors and data that run your building are essentially nobody’s job.

[02:06] Your property manager doesn’t cover it, your IT person isn’t doing it, and the asset manager doesn’t even know what’s in the closet with all the blinking lights.

[02:17] Meanwhile, your vendors quietly own your data and your digital infrastructure,

[02:22] and there’s a ton of what Bill calls money leaking through the floor.

[02:27] What makes the conversation so timely is the current state of the market.

[02:31] Cap rate compression is gone,

[02:33] lower interest rates gone.

[02:36] Rent escalation mostly capped.

[02:39] You’ve got higher concessions, you’ve got higher vacancy.

[02:42] So where do you find value?

[02:44] Everyone’s focused on operations.

[02:47] Bill makes a really compelling case that operational technology, his phrase,

[02:52] is that overlooked triangle between your asset manager, your property manager, and your IT people.

[03:00] It’s the frontier for NOI optimization.

[03:03] He puts real numbers on it at least 300 per door per year of NOI on a retrofit,

[03:10] 600 to 1000 of NOI on a new build and that’s on top of Capex reduction on the front end.

[03:18] We also get into the personal side and Bill brings some of the same intensity there. He’s battled multiple sclerosis for over 20 years, survived a catastrophic ski accident, and come out of the other side with a framework around body business.

[03:29] And being that, I think a lot of you will connect with Listen in as we cover topics that include why most commercial buildings have 10 or more separate networks when they only need two, and how that’s costing owners hundreds of thousands of dollars in unnecessary Capex and opex how opticwise functions as an operating partner for ownership,

[03:51] analyzing, controlling and managing digital infrastructure on a recurring basis so managers, asset managers and IT teams don’t have to why this entire domain has been overlooked. It’s not heavily scrutinized by municipalities, utilities or inspectors,

[04:09] so it just lives in the periphery until something breaks.

[04:13] How digital strategy at the design development stage of a new project can reduce building costs and even recover enough space for additional rentable units or rentable square feet.

[04:25] Why data is an asset and how property owners are currently giving it away to vendors without realizing its value at operations and exit.

[04:34] How tenants want secure private Internet access and will treat you as a highly differentiated offering if you can provide it.

[04:43] The fact that none of this technology is new AI and large language models have simply made machine learning and predictive analytics more accessible and easier to communicate with.

[04:53] How Bill builds his global workforce by hiring a culture first and second on energy, tapping into the digital nomad and expat communities for quality talent.

[05:04] Bill’s framework of body business and being and why he blocks half a day off twice a week to step outside the operational demands of his business.

[05:13] How Bill thinks about money as temporarily in his position,

[05:17] a resource to circulate, not hoard and why he pays a hundred dollar fee every time he touches anything work related during his 17 day vacation and finally, why the voice in your head is just that, a voice.

[05:31] Now. A hundred day positivity challenge helped Bill learn to hear it without believing it.

[05:36] There’s a lot in here. I really hope you enjoyed the podcast,

[05:44] Bill. Good morning.

[05:46] Bill Douglas: Morning Kevin. We’ve been trying to do this a long time. I’m glad we’re finally doing it.

[05:50] Kevin Choquette: You know, life gets way too busy. But thank you for taking the time. I appreciate it.

[05:55] Bill Douglas: Yeah, it’s an honor to be here.

[05:57] Kevin Choquette: I love your show opticwise. Look, you told me about Optic Wise a number of years ago.

[06:04] At the time it was,

[06:07] you know, don’t do Google Fiber,

[06:10] don’t do *** Internet.

[06:12] As a landlord, owner do optic wise, it’s better for a whole array of reasons. I’m not going to explain it for the listener. Why don’t you just tell,

[06:22] you know, what is, what is optic wise? What are you guys up to?

[06:25] Um, yeah, let’s start there.

[06:28] Bill Douglas: Yeah. I never said don’t do it. I said don’t give away control to them. I said you should do all of that connectivity because your tenants want it, but you should own it.

[06:37] That was our whole position from the beginning.

[06:39] And since that,

[06:40] that was seven, eight, nine years ago.

[06:43] I mean, I’ve known you for 15, so half of that is with Optiquise. Right. And basically we, I’d like to say we focus on the triangle in the middle. So your property manager is running the building.

[06:56] The asset manager is running the investment, and IT manager is running the office computers and the security and identity management and all that stuff.

[07:04] Your building’s operational nervous system. You know, the networks, the cameras, the access controls, the H Vac,

[07:10] H vac,

[07:11] the tenant Internet.

[07:13] Whether it’s wired or wireless doesn’t matter.

[07:15] That’s actually nobody’s job. I mean, somebody’s responsible for it, but nobody’s doing it. And that gap,

[07:21] well, there’s a bunch of money leaking out of there. And your vendors end up quietly owning your data and your digital infrastructure.

[07:28] So not only do we see leaks on the build, we see leaks on the operation, and it all ends up in NOI or value on exit, you know, capital maturation process.

[07:39] So nobody, nobody owns this. And it’s a liability, it’s sale.

[07:43] Even if you’re not going to talk about sale, it’s significant loss of noi.

[07:48] Kevin Choquette: Every time we talk, it goes from like zero to a hundred really quickly. And I think what we’re going to unpack here is so important.

[07:58] Let’s, let’s go on record. It’s June 5, 2026, right? Cap Rate compression is gone. Lower interest rates is gone. Rent escalation,

[08:09] mostly gone.

[08:11] Concessions currently are up.

[08:14] Vacancy is up.

[08:16] You know, we spend a lot of time in multifamily, but what I just said applies to most commercial real estate sectors.

[08:23] And so operations is like really critical. People are starting to go, right? I, I get rich in real estate the old fashioned way, which is slow. I own things with pragmatic leverage.

[08:35] I’m laser focused on operations improving noi.

[08:40] So everything you guys do I think is super important. My commitment to you, to me,

[08:46] to the listener,

[08:48] let’s go slow. Like if we go just what I’ve been calling fiber, but let’s just call it Internet and start there. I think that’s a good entry point into what you guys do.

[08:59] You started there and then it expanded where now, you know, you’re making that abstraction between the asset manager at the, the OPCO that owns all the prop cos, the property manager who’s a consultant often, although they could be vertically integrated, who’s managing his sort of boots on the ground at the asset.

[09:18] And then you got it. People that kind of play in, in all sorts of interesting spots,

[09:24] but like a really good entry point because at least in my circles,

[09:28] uh, Internet is, is an understood place of monetization, right?

[09:34] Google will come to a developer or an owner and say, hey, look, give us the whole property,

[09:40] we’ll throw you a rebate of, let’s just stipulate 25amonth. Um,

[09:45] I think if we start with Internet then we can go into the other things. But like,

[09:50] why does this matter? Like why, why should a property manager.

[09:55] Property owner, excuse me, it’s probably not a property manager who’s coming forward with this.

[10:00] You know, who cares? Like, I just own,

[10:04] I own an apartment building, I get leases,

[10:07] I pay my bills. At the bottom is noi, I pay my mortgage. What’s left over is for me, why, why do I care?

[10:14] And let’s just start here again. Why do I care about Internet?

[10:18] Bill Douglas: Well,

[10:19] Internet runs on a network and often those companies that you let come sell Internet services to your tenant,

[10:27] quote, unquote, give you the backbone, but it’s not yours. Read the document. You, number one, don’t own it, even though they gave it to you and you installed it. But number two, you can’t use it.

[10:39] So in the advent of trying to make a building more operationally efficient,

[10:43] operators need to collect and analyze data.

[10:46] Well, here’s one huge network and a lot of information traveling over it that if you give it away to an isp,

[10:54] granted you’re getting some money for it, but not as much as if you did it yourself. But if you give it away,

[11:00] it’s an asset you don’t own. And you’re, you don’t have control of the data, you don’t know where it’s going.

[11:05] So why not flip the paradigm? Own and control what that is running off of. We call it digital infrastructure, but for the sake of keeping it easy, let’s just say that network.

[11:15] Because this strategy applies to any vendor, not just Internet. It can apply to your pms, your BMS your access controls, your,

[11:22] you know, H VAC systems, your lighting controls, anything that you need to operate your building, the same strategy applies.

[11:29] So why would you give it away just because it was easy? Well, that never stopped you in the past. You never thought getting that deal done or getting that zoning change in front of,

[11:40] you know, that zoning board would stop you. Why? That wasn’t easy. But you did it anyway, right?

[11:48] Closing it wasn’t easy. How come you do anything that was easy? Right?

[11:51] Kevin Choquette: Is. Is it.

[11:53] And I’m going to sort of speak for the developer. I know these guys.

[11:56] Is it a part of my business?

[11:58] Like, do. Do I care? Is this part of my value creation? Like, under the sun? Of all the things a developer must manage,

[12:08] there’s a long list.

[12:10] Is this a part of it? Like, I don’t know, like, here, I’ll be the developer, bro. Like, I’m just gonna call ***. They’re gonna turn on the Internet. I’m done with it.

[12:18] Okay.

[12:19] Bill Douglas: Okay. You’re looking at. Is this all right? I’m gonna say you’re only a developer, not only, but you’re solely a developer.

[12:26] Kevin is a developer. For this conversation for the next few minutes,

[12:30] you’re saying, it doesn’t matter to me because this is Internet for tenants. After I hand the building over and it’s done being built and I’ve been paid,

[12:38] I want to back up further and say, wait a second.

[12:41] This is extremely expensive for you in the build process.

[12:47] This network I just mentioned for Internet is just one network. How many networks are in the building?

[12:53] Like, you design?

[12:55] You pay an architect and you pay an engineering firm to design and, you know,

[13:00] detail, design and build your building,

[13:03] but you often ignore digital, and you often ignore technology.

[13:07] So why would you put in three or four or five plumbing systems?

[13:11] Like, you wouldn’t, right? You’d say, no, we have one. We have one water in, we have one water out.

[13:15] You know, clean water in, gray, black water out.

[13:18] Why do you put in multiple plumbing systems for technology?

[13:22] Like, we like? Here’s perfect example. We have a. A client with a 400, 000 square foot property.

[13:29] We did the digital infrastructure. We designed everything for connectivity. Well,

[13:33] their GC wasn’t in on the plan, and they decided that they needed a different network because they didn’t understand what was already there.

[13:41] And they wanted to sell some access controls. They put in an entirely different network for the access controls.

[13:48] $300,000 was wasted to put in another network. That’s just one more network. It turns out most buildings we audit have more than 10 networks,

[13:59] why you only need two. Fire and safety is always by itself.

[14:03] And then there’s another network that you could put everything else on.

[14:07] So you can drastically reduce your build costs, Mr. Builder, Mrs. Builder.

[14:13] By looking at digital strategy first and then you can reduce your capex and then once you have the digital infrastructure right, you can reduce the number of closets. Like very commonly when we look at an apartment complex new build,

[14:26] we can eliminate enough space to create two or three more apartments. Like so for every hundred, we can typically find one.

[14:34] So if you’re building a 300 unit complex, we can find you three more apartments.

[14:38] You’re saying how do I do that? Well, you don’t need two or three closets on every floor. But that is what used to be the standard 10 years ago when there was telephone wiring everywhere.

[14:47] You don’t need that if you design it from the start. You can run all of your operating technology,

[14:52] including that tenants Internet by the way, on one hardened backbone.

[14:57] Make that backbone very resilient. Runs when the power’s out. Resilient. I’m talking about bulletproof data center type stuff at less money than you’re spending now. This is a capex reduction play.

[15:10] So Mr. Builder, this absolutely applies to you.

[15:14] Kevin Choquette: So how, how is it that the industry sort of got to the place where there’s all of these physical spaces that are accommodating the myriad of network providers?

[15:27] And why, why was it the case that it sort of evolved? So I would have my building access,

[15:35] my what you’re saying fires separate access. I’d have my climate control. I don’t, I’m not really on the construction science side enough to know all the building systems. I mean obviously there’s mechanical, electrical, plumbing.

[15:50] I think those are slightly different.

[15:53] But like how did, how did it get to this? Like why are there so many vendors running? We’ve all seen those closets, right? Why are there so many vendors running so many wires?

[16:01] And when the new vendor comes in,

[16:03] they just abandon the old stuff because they don’t want to have any liability for whatever somebody else’s work was and they just run more wires. Like what’s,

[16:12] what’s happened to make it that way and what’s changing now? Is this like a function of just diffusion of innovation? Like why is it, why is this happening?

[16:20] Bill Douglas: Well, the simple explanation I’ve always come to is water and power and sewer are controlled by local organizations and inspected.

[16:31] Low voltage often is not required for that.

[16:35] So it’s ignored in the design process. It’s largely ignored in the construction bid.

[16:40] And then 45 to 90 days before a building goes live, the property manager shows up and says, holy cow, we need this, we need this, we need this.

[16:48] And they’re on a deadline to get this building live. The,

[16:51] the contractor’s on a deadline to finish building it,

[16:54] and the property manager’s on a deadline to make sure it’s open and the ramping is as fast as possible.

[16:59] So they throw a litany of money at it in the last 90 days.

[17:04] And all of those networks that go in are undesigned, unmonitored, unmanaged, undocumented. So they’ll run for three to five to seven years until something breaks and then nobody knows why anything stopped working.

[17:16] The poor property managers,

[17:18] you know, their job is to keep people in the apartments or keep people in the office buildings, keep them happy and collect their rent. They’re not set up to design, implement, and manage technology, but it takes technology to, to run a building,

[17:32] to run it efficiently, shall we say. So I think that the status quo, the old way was the contractor’s doing things to what the inspector said so they don’t get a red tag and get delayed.

[17:41] Right. This is largely ignored.

[17:44] Architects. Now,

[17:45] our favorite architects are designing digital. Just like they design structural. They’re designing digital or asking for digital help,

[17:53] just like they would design signage and glass and facades. And you know, the H Vac contractor that’s moving the air around is designing it with a system in mind, like, where’s my connectivity?

[18:07] Do I need my own network? Or do you have one in the building?

[18:10] So it is shifting. So there are two things that shift. That one is capex, like, how much is it going to cost me to build this first?

[18:18] And to all the builders out there, it costs you less to do it this way.

[18:22] Don’t think about what the tenant’s going to pay. Don’t make it just a tenant thing.

[18:25] You can reduce the build and the installation costs. That reduces it to your customer and improves your margin. Both.

[18:32] The customer becomes very happy.

[18:35] Then you hand them something that’s professionally designed and that somebody else is going to run. Just like their water system, just like their sewer system, just like their fire system, just like their elevators.

[18:46] Right. There’s code for all that and there’s design specifications.

[18:50] I’m just asking you to include digital strategy, digital infrastructure in the design process.

[18:56] You will be handsomely rewarded financially.

[19:00] Kevin Choquette: That’s pretty good. Like I said, this goes quick. So where does.

[19:05] If.

[19:06] If it was the case that I could have just called Up ***. I could have even told the property manager, hey, we need Internet, get somebody in here.

[19:15] And instead I go, okay, no, let’s not do that. I’m still at the wrong end of this because I didn’t start with someone like Optic wise in mind at inception, right?

[19:26] When I’m going through like schematic design and moving into design development,

[19:30] building out CDs and all of that. But where, where does one go? Like, okay, cool, I’m gonna, I’m going to call up Optiquise. Like, we kind of got right into it.

[19:40] What do you guys do? Like, how do I relate to you as a vendor and make me not the.

[19:46] I’m no longer Kevin the developer, but I’ll be Kevin the guy who just bought 350 unit complex in Houston. So how do we, how do we call up Optic wise?

[19:56] And, and what is, you know, like, what’s your role? Like what.

[20:00] Why would I call you guys? Let’s do it that way.

[20:03] Bill Douglas: Because you want to get control and ownership of your data and your digital.

[20:08] Like, I’m not going to go techie on you. It’s an asset, right? Do you want to manage that asset or do you want to run it as an expense,

[20:15] treat it like an investment, expect an ROI from it.

[20:19] So if, if you called us, I don’t care if it’s a new building or an existing building, we would sit down first and say,

[20:25] what systems do you know of?

[20:27] Are they there?

[20:28] How are they connected? Like, the retrofit is going to be a different strategy than a new build, but it’s going to be the same question.

[20:34] What systems? Mr. Builder, Mrs. Builder, do you need to operate this building? Like,

[20:39] you’re going to know about the elevators, you’re going to know about the fire system,

[20:42] you know, you’re going to know about access controls because you’re going to wire those and then I’m going to say, who’s your property manager? Let’s talk to them. What other systems do you need?

[20:50] Like there’s property management system is an obvious one.

[20:53] Is there a system running the pool? Like, how are you controlling the common area utilities? Because those are.

[20:59] That is a big area, we call it the big three plays is utilities, insurance and occupancy. If you can improve those, then you significantly impact the noi. But that is on an operational standpoint, not on a build standpoint.

[21:11] And you asked me to talk to the builders so we would immediately go through everything you need to operate the building. That’s the OT part, operational technology.

[21:20] Just because it has lights blinking in that closet and those yellow and gray and blue wires plugged into it. Doesn’t mean it’s not valuable. It means historically it’s been ignored.

[21:31] That’s why those are dirty, dusty closets that nobody wants.

[21:34] But I’m going to paint the other picture. Imagine if that was a clean closet that was managed and vendors didn’t do any wiring vertically in your building.

[21:43] They were only allowed to go to the nearest closet and plugged into a specified port.

[21:48] Then all those vendors would not be selling you networks. You’re going to reduce your costs. They’re not going to be selling you network management fees. You’re going to reduce your operating costs.

[21:57] So build cost reduction, operating cost reduction. They’re not going to be charging you for Internet because you’ve already wired the building with Internet for all your employees, for all your tenants and for all your systems.

[22:07] So you immediately see a massive reduction in operating expenses. So if we went into a retrofit facility,

[22:15] we would do,

[22:16] we call it a review. In the book it’s called an audit, but we would do a review and figure out what’s worth it. Some systems aren’t worth converting, some systems aren’t worth connecting to some networks.

[22:27] Maybe it’s not worth it to replace them, wait till they fail. They’re not critical anyway.

[22:33] Sprinkler system, for instance. Maybe it’s not worth it, you just wait to it. But some have an immediate impact on noi and that’s a financial decision.

[22:41] Instead of treating technology like, oh man, it’s a pain in the neck and I gotta do should be how can I use technology to, number one, build this building better and cheaper and more efficiently, and number two, operate it more efficiently and more profitably?

[22:55] That’s the real question. So think about technology as a tool and think about the digital and the data as an asset. You’re giving away your data.

[23:05] Like I was on a panel at the blueprint conference two years ago and somebody handed me a mic and said, what frustrates you most about this industry?

[23:15] And I said, besides how slow it is to adopt technology? And the room laughed.

[23:20] I said, I want a show of hands in this audience. How many people think Amazon would ever let another company come, put a network in their building and mine data out of it that Amazon did not own?

[23:32] And nobody raised their hand. I’d say, do you think Toyota would do that in a manufacturing facility?

[23:37] Nobody raised their hand. And I said, how many people in this room are doing that now? And maybe 5% of the people raised their hand. And then I started to go through certain systems and then I said, basically, how many people don’t know the answer to that question?

[23:49] Everybody’s hand went up.

[23:51] It’s because it’s just ignored,

[23:54] it’s pushed off. When I said at the beginning, it’s nobody owns this.

[23:59] That ot in the middle of this triangle, that big circle in the middle of the triangle. That’s the operating technology platform.

[24:05] It impacts new build costs, which is CapEx, and it drastically impacts OpEx.

[24:10] And you can generate more income by it. If you own the delivery platform that delivers the Internet. Back to your original question.

[24:17] You will make anywhere from two to eight times more than if you let the ISP do it and you own the network and you can protect your tenant from privacy concerns and security concerns that will fill up your building.

[24:32] Kevin Choquette: So there’s a lot of value.

[24:37] Let me see how to say this. Like,

[24:40] I can grab onto a few different things you said there that are valuable because I think lowest common denominator is probably noi.

[24:50] Let’s start there.

[24:52] If, if we’re just talking Internet, right? And we’ve had this conversation, thanks to you,

[24:57] enough times with our developer clients that the, as my South African friend would say, the penny has dropped, right?

[25:04] And they’re like, and they’re like, oh, wow. Actually that’s like a, that’s like a real channel of, of monetization.

[25:12] It definitely money left on the table. But let’s make it real because I think it’s. This message could get lost if it’s just like, I don’t know, man, that’s really complex and I’ve got enough on my plate.

[25:25] I don’t necessarily need to deal with,

[25:28] you know, operating technology, this kind of concept and all this digital stuff. Like, it’s hard enough to build assets, but I can tell you everybody’s struggling to make a pro forma work.

[25:40] And I have a sense of the numbers. But I’m going to put the question to you like, what’s in it? What’s in it for. Let’s start with the, the Internet and then talk about some of the other services and, and make it real.

[25:51] Because if we stay in the multifamily paradigm, we could do it in any of the commercial sectors.

[25:56] My experience has been it’s not a nothing,

[26:00] it’s worth doing the work.

[26:03] Bill Douglas: Well, let’s stick to the multifamily because you know it and your audience knows it. It’s just a different denominator if we’re in commercial, that’s all. If we’re in office or hospitality.

[26:14] Yeah, hospitality is going to be per bed and like it’s the same numbers if you think about it this way. So in a retrofit environment, if we can’t find you $300 per door without much capex like literally leaking through the floor,

[26:32] then we don’t engage and it doesn’t cost you.

[26:34] Kevin Choquette: That’s 300 NOI per year. Per year.

[26:40] Bill Douglas: That’s in a retrofit environment on a new build, if we don’t make you 600, we’re disappointed. A home run is more than a thousand.

[26:47] Kevin Choquette: Yeah.

[26:48] Bill Douglas: A door per year. So you do that at exit and that’s huge. But even on operations where are you going to find that? And the 300?

[26:57] Kevin Choquette: Hang on, let’s just go the other direction. So 100 unit complex, 300 a year, five and a half cap. It’s $545,000 in value.

[27:08] Bill Douglas: That sounds about right to me. I mean I do love math but I’m just having a, I’m not having a numbers mindset. So yeah, like it was easier when it was 5 cap, put it that way.

[27:19] You just multiply by 20. Right?

[27:20] Kevin Choquette: That’s right.

[27:22] Bill Douglas: But look at the $300 in the meantime, that’s another $30,000 of income a year.

[27:27] That is from like, that is from basically utilities and insurance play and some other things. Low hanging fruit. If we can find you revenue from connectivity which your tenants pay for whether it’s wired or wireless.

[27:40] Don’t think about it,

[27:42] think about is fiber.

[27:43] Kevin Choquette: You’re saying I can get the 30k of either savings or income just off of managing the insurance providers. This isn’t even a revenue stream.

[27:52] Bill Douglas: I’m talking about in a retrofit environment. The first thing we do is focus on opex. So we go after that $300 right away if we can find you revenue. It’s additive some instances and I’m going to point specifically at say garden style appointments with open breezeways that are not very dense are not worth it.

[28:12] To do a wi fi instance, you might only want to do wired.

[28:16] Well wired is still going to earn you $300 net per year.

[28:21] So that this is a very conservative number.

[28:23] Add to that the utilities and the insurance reductions and then you’re way over the 300. But even if you couldn’t do any connectivity because I don’t know, maybe you have a bulk agreement and you don’t want to buy it out or maybe you have a, you know you’re going to wait two years until it phases out or there’s a litany of other questions.

[28:40] But if it’s a new build,

[28:42] it’s a clean slate.

[28:44] We don’t ever see less than $600 a door. And a home run for us is over a thousand.

[28:49] That’s on top of reduced capex.

[28:51] So the retrofit market is obviously 95% or more of the market, but we do both.

[28:59] Kevin Choquette: How are you guys?

[28:59] Bill Douglas: You get into a dense market, like a dense, you know,

[29:02] like say 15 stories,

[29:05] like 300 unit kind of building,

[29:07] then the 300 gets even easier because you have a lot more common area operations to optimize on and a lot of networks that you’re paying for that you don’t know and a lot of systems that you’re paying for that you don’t need.

[29:20] There has been consolidations across the market in proptech and in operations.

[29:26] And these vendors are happy to take your money twice, even though they’re owned by the same company.

[29:31] Like they’re happy to take your money for an Internet charge that you already have.

[29:36] Like, though that’s the kind of thing, like we focus on everything, not just revenue generation.

[29:43] Digital and data opex.

[29:46] Kevin Choquette: How are you guys able to impact insurance? How does that show up? Like, insurance is a growing cost.

[29:55] I think there’s been a little bit of relief. But where does this operational technology kind of management idea have an impact on insurance?

[30:03] Bill Douglas: Every time we have helped a client present their case to an underwriter and their case is, here’s our data warehouse, our data lake, here’s our operations history,

[30:15] here’s our SOPs for should there be a leak, for should there be a fire,

[30:20] Every time they go present it from a data position,

[30:25] they see a reduction anywhere from 3 to 10% of what they were about to get.

[30:30] Sometimes we see a 5% reduction of where they are. I can’t promise this, I’m not an insurance broker.

[30:36] But if you go sit down with your underwriter and you say, look, we can tell if there’s a leak before it goes down two floors.

[30:44] We can tell if there’s this, we can tell if the door’s open. This is what we’re doing for here.

[30:48] Like all of the things that an insurance would think is a liability.

[30:52] Like we have cameras running on our own network, we’re not paying for the awful CCTV quote, unquote. Like, talk about a cost reduction. Get rid of that junk.

[31:03] Like if you present everything that an underwriter thinks is a risk, if you present that back with here’s how we’re tracking it and here’s our sop.

[31:12] Your insurance costs go down. I’m not saying that’s easy. It’s very tedious.

[31:17] But if you own the data, you can do that.

[31:20] If your data is spread out among 12 to 15 vendors and you don’t have it, you can’t make the case.

[31:28] Kevin Choquette: Let’s use that segue. And I’ll use my very trivial example. In my home, I’ve been getting just absurd electric bills for a while. Like, you could pay for a pretty decent BMW with my electric bills.

[31:44] Partly. You know, welcome to California. I don’t know.

[31:47] I think San Diego’s 54 cents a kilowatt hour. So. Rest of the country?

[31:51] Bill Douglas: Is it really?

[31:51] Kevin Choquette: It is. Yeah.

[31:52] Bill Douglas: Holy smokes.

[31:53] Kevin Choquette: Yeah. Yeah. It’s the highest in the country.

[31:56] I had no idea it makes solar more lucrative. But I put. I can’t even remember the hardware, like Emporia or something like this. It was these clips that go around the wires for Every.

[32:12] Bill Douglas: Yeah. There’s CT’s current transformers.

[32:14] Kevin Choquette: Yeah, there you go in the control box. And I candidly forgot about it.

[32:20] And then I downloaded the last year of data in a CSV file and threw it into Claude. And I was like, hey, like,

[32:30] what’s up? Right?

[32:33] Let’s talk about data. I mean,

[32:35] newsflash. Like,

[32:37] I found the problem,

[32:40] which turns out to be heat tape. The heat tape on one of the circuits was never shutting off. But I think it’s a residential expression of what you’re talking about.

[32:52] Let’s talk about the data and what you guys do. Once you’ve got optics or visibility into all the systems, like, how do you store it?

[33:02] How do you manipulate it? What processes do you run on it?

[33:06] Or is that something that you do? Or is it just like, hey, now the data’s here. You do with it what you want.

[33:13] Bill Douglas: I’ll start with the last question first. We do either one. We have some clients that want us to maintain the, you know, the systems and the connectivity and the data, and they do their own thing.

[33:23] And then we have even more that say,

[33:26] just give me what I want. And what we do there is we apply the coordination and control phases instead of just the, you know, connect and collect.

[33:35] So there’s. There’s five Cs, and it’s all in the book, but this is how we actually operate. So we wrote the book around how we operate. So you can.

[33:45] You can do this yourself. You don’t have to hire us to do it.

[33:48] I just. I love talking about this because I’ve seen such impact, but you can build a property brain that has all this data and then operates autonomously if it sees one system doing something.

[34:00] And that system may be able to control only itself, but if it sees something, it can give a red flag to another system if you can take that signal and talk to that system through your own property brain.

[34:12] Like the heat tape, for instance. Right.

[34:14] Why do the lights stay on all night? Because the cleaner was there at midnight.

[34:19] They don’t have to. They just. They see somebody and maybe they don’t turn off for two hours or whatever the setting is, but you know the cleaner’s coming.

[34:25] Like you have other ways of telling that somebody’s in the room, Nobody’s in the room, turn the light off. It’s. It’s between 11pm and 6am so you see massive savings there.

[34:36] Right. That’s just an opex. And you go into catastrophic failure. It’s all about sensors,

[34:43] systems, and data.

[34:45] So where are your sensors that are generating data? Where are your systems that are either generating or processing data? And who owns the data?

[34:53] I’m trying to shift the mindset in your mind, Kevin, and your audience’s mindset to own your data. In the book, we actually said, own your **** data because I was passionate when I was speaking about it.

[35:06] But you’re giving it away. And it is an operational gold mine when you go to sell the building,

[35:12] to have that as an operating history reduces the buyer’s risk. And then the buyer should ask for it, too. The buyer should make digital infrastructure review and data review part of their diligence.

[35:23] In our opinion, you should know what you’re buying. Don’t assume because the building’s profitable that every piece of it is. Right? Like you need to know what you don’t know.

[35:33] So it’s about the systems and the sensors. So you put in sensors, you put in those current transformers,

[35:40] and then when you finally looked at the data, you realized, oh, there it is.

[35:43] By turning that off, flipping a switch.

[35:45] I can do that.

[35:47] We had a digital infrastructure review. A client paid us to look at a building.

[35:51] We found a lighting control system that was purchased seven years ago when the building went live, never turned on.

[35:57] Spent a day programming it, turned it on. Saved them almost $70,000 the next year in empowerment for a system they already owned.

[36:07] Kevin Choquette: Hey, do you guys want to turn this on?

[36:09] Bill Douglas: Yeah. Hey, what’s that? I don’t know. It’s just in that closet with all the blinking lights. We know what it is. Who has the login? What login? I don’t even know what it is.

[36:18] So it’s the question of who owns this,

[36:21] who controls this? Right. Whose network is it, whose system is it? And after it’s installed, Mr. Vendor, that you’re selling these stuff, who supports it?

[36:29] Yeah.

[36:30] Who owns and controls the data flowing from it?

[36:33] Imagine if you paid somebody to come put those current transformers in your house and the data was in their system and you had to pay them another layer to do anything with it or even to see it.

[36:45] We do see old school vendors now holding the data hostage, charging clients for their own data. I think it’s absurd.

[36:52] Like I get very offended by it because that data is the property of the property. Like it’s owned by the property that’s generating. It’s not owned by the vendor who’s collecting it, in my opinion.

[37:04] Kevin Choquette: Well, but that’s not, I mean,

[37:09] how many of the consumers?

[37:11] Let’s see, there’s two ways to think about this.

[37:14] Consumer as in the general public, the way that the zeitgeist has replaced citizen with consumer.

[37:22] How many citizens are aware of just how little privacy there is?

[37:29] Bill Douglas: Oh, right. Not many. Right?

[37:32] Kevin Choquette: Yeah.

[37:33] Bill Douglas: I mean, but if you could, on your apartment complex, if you could say we,

[37:36] any tenant walks in the door, we have multiple Internet providers,

[37:41] they’re all servicing you anywhere on this property. So it’s redundant, it’s never going to go down.

[37:45] But we give you ultimate privacy. Not only is your information not being sold, it is not being collected.

[37:52] You get some very technically astute tenants because word of mouth travels fast and they want to be in that building.

[37:58] Kevin Choquette: Hmm.

[37:59] Bill Douglas: Yeah. So another thing we see successful in apartments, Kevin, is gamifying shared expenses. Like,

[38:05] you know how water is usually paid for by the facility because water can always be leaned back to the property. Right. And rather than making it something like the power that can be sold by unit,

[38:14] if you put sub metering in and show somebody on their bill every month how much they’re using versus the average in the building. Just gamify it, not punish them, not do anything more than make them aware.

[38:25] You see water usage go down and that is directly coming to your bottom line because your tenants don’t want to use more water. And they realize, wait a second, I’m above the average.

[38:36] Maybe I could use less. Maybe I won’t let the faucet run. Well, I’m not using that sink.

[38:42] Kevin Choquette: Right.

[38:42] Bill Douglas: I’m in the other side of the sink, you know, cutting some stuff. I’m not gonna let the water run. All of a sudden it becomes theirs because they have some accountability or Gamifying it.

[38:51] Kevin Choquette: So the, the old mantra is, you know, if, if the service or product is free, you’re the product. Right. It’s more really the service. The service is free, you’re the product.

[39:00] I try to tell my wife all this time as it pertains to social media, but are you able to sell this data?

[39:07] Like if you have 3, 5, 30 assets and you’ve done the work,

[39:13] is there a marketplace for property level data that’s clean and well organized, or has that not yet developed?

[39:22] Bill Douglas: We do not sell data. Like data is our client’s data. So we do not sell it. We’re not a data broker.

[39:27] Kevin Choquette: Not you guys.

[39:28] Bill Douglas: I mean, your client,

[39:30] they can participate if they want in some studies that we do see in the commercial world.

[39:37] Not lead, but Energy Star,

[39:39] they might pay you to participate in some of their things. And it is not personally identified information. It is relative to your property and you have to sign off on it.

[39:47] Be very careful about those contracts. If somebody comes along and says, we’ll pay you for things, especially in an apartment because it might breach somebody’s privacy.

[39:55] So I’m not advocating that you do sell it. I’m advocating you use it to operate more efficiently and recognize all of that revenue while protecting your tenants. I think that tenant privacy.

[40:07] I have sons, you know,

[40:10] my 31 year old owns a house now, but my 28 year old is renting and I know,

[40:15] and he’s very aware of privacy and Internet neutrality and all that stuff that tenants actually want it. So if you use this as another differentiator, not just because Internet everywhere, but as a differentiator is you’re not the product, you are secure,

[40:30] then they flock to it, they love it.

[40:34] So I. If you want to sell your operational data,

[40:37] sure, but don’t ever think about selling a tenant’s data. We get asked all the time, can you what a geo fence? Can you sell them things? And I. We do not.

[40:47] We do not do it. I’m not saying you can’t, but we will not participate in it. I think that’s an invasion of privacy.

[40:52] If you want to take Your portfolio of 30 or 300 or 3,000 properties and monetize that some other way because it’s your systems, then you have the ability to. Because you have the data.

[41:05] That’s a decision you can make on your own. I’m asking you not to breach the tenant’s privacy.

[41:10] Kevin Choquette: Mm.

[41:12] Um,

[41:15] it sounds like this is really helpful. I’m actually starting to get what you guys do. I mean, again, you and I Started with like, you know, Internet and that was simple.

[41:24] And obviously you’ve expanded your thinking and kind of the value proposition of optic wise as you guys have gone down the path. But in my words, I don’t know if they align with yours.

[41:35] It sounds like you are kind of the property manager of this domain you’re calling operational technology, which is the networks, the sensors and the data.

[41:49] Bill Douglas: We are data and digital infrastructure. Like we want to be your operating partner. Like we support property managers, we support asset managers, we support IT managers,

[41:59] we don’t replace any of them. But remember I started out by saying nobody’s doing it now like where Kevin, you live in CRE Capital. Where do you see owners get hurt at either refi or sale on the operational and the digital side?

[42:11] Like what surfaces surprise you in due diligence?

[42:15] Kevin Choquette: The most obvious thing that we see, and this is kind of crazy,

[42:20] is that the owner isn’t really managing the property manager. So there’s even just month by month and I’m sure this is not the case for best in class operators but like even month by month variation on a specific line item, it doesn’t get flagged.

[42:38] Like why was it. I’m just going to make up numbers. Why was it $1400 a month for the last 16 months and then it was 37 and then it went back down to 14.

[42:47] Like what was that? And it,

[42:50] you know, like it just means like there’s volatility in the noi and so then when you go to sell you, you end up or refinance, you end up having to audit all of that information just.

[43:01] And the only place you can see it, at least from our perspective is in a QuickBooks file. And then you’re you know, calling the property manager, you’re calling people and being like hey, what was.

[43:10] Oh, that was the one time I did it.

[43:13] I see a ton of, of of leakage just on like really locking that stuff down.

[43:20] Like hey, what is that? No, we’re. No fix that. Don’t let it happen again.

[43:26] The, the PMs look, that’s a hard job. Property management is a freaking hard job. I mean it’s,

[43:33] it’s hand to hand combat with,

[43:35] with all the tenants and all the things that are always happening. They’re always short on time. They. I think they’re always a little under resourced.

[43:43] I don’t see that being managed proactively and it’s, it seems like a necessity that the asset manager owner is managing the proper property manager. So where I see it is just it’s it’s too noisy, there’s too much noise in opex.

[44:00] Why is there that much volatility? Like, can’t we just sort of hit the budget every month? And if there’s a budget variance, what is it? Why did it happen?

[44:08] Bill Douglas: Well, if you had a data lake, you could look at why that happened. You could look at the sources, not just the results.

[44:16] And our favorite instance is property managers love us because number one, we’re helping them make the decisions about what systems and et cetera, et cetera. But number two, more importantly is we do all the support calls.

[44:29] They don’t have to take them. If a tenant has an issue,

[44:32] if they have an issue with connectivity around the property, a system is offline, anything like that, they call one number, they text it, they email it, whatever, that’s where the support is.

[44:42] They’re not trying to figure out, ooh, who’s this and what Internet and what’s this and where’s that and what system?

[44:48] It’s mapped, it’s monitored, it’s managed.

[44:52] Kevin Choquette: Sorry, when I went, when I was talking about property management of operational technology,

[44:56] who’s your competition? Like, this is,

[44:59] this is why I wanted to get you on. From my perspective, this is a new space, right?

[45:03] Bill Douglas: This is like competition is honestly from. It is the status quo. Like all of the vendors, all of the 12 different vendors you have don’t want you to have an OT platform.

[45:15] They want to keep their little myopic view of your world to themselves because they’re maximizing it revenue and profit wise.

[45:24] They don’t want you to aggregate your physical networks because they would lose money.

[45:30] They don’t want to divulge the data because then you’re going to be able to take inputs from other systems and make theirs work better. Maybe they don’t need to be there in five years or maybe you’re going to develop your own system to do what they’re paying you for.

[45:43] Now we see all three of those cases work.

[45:46] Of course we have competitors, but we love to operate on the enablement platform in that is you can operate your digital infrastructure or you can have a partner do it with you, or you can ignore it, right?

[45:59] But operate with foresight, have a strategy like, you don’t need to just keep running blind and ignoring this until something fails.

[46:07] There’s a lot of money leaking through the floor.

[46:10] Grab it, right?

[46:11] There’s,

[46:13] I don’t need to list the competitors. They’re there. We’re not the only ones doing it.

[46:17] A lot of this comes from the Industrial space. And by this I mean the technology.

[46:23] You know, me, I’ve spent my career applying technology that works in other industries. Like they taught us at MIT, right? R& D we used to call it,

[46:33] to industries that are lagging. That is why I moved to this one 11 years ago, because I knew managed services in manufacturing and I knew that commercial real estate wasn’t there yet.

[46:43] So we took systems and technology and processes and we wrote them around commercial real estate specifically. Like we operate in multifamily and office and hospitality. Right. All of which have mixed use.

[46:55] But there are companies doing that for each one of the verticals in commercial real estate, applying very same technology,

[47:02] very same strategies. So, no, we’re not the only ones. Yes, it is new relative to like, it’s less than a decade old for commercial real estate. But this technology, like machine learning,

[47:12] predictive analytics, they’ve been around for decades, 20, 25 years.

[47:16] AI is just the easy way to talk to the machine now. That’s why it got so sexy in the past two years. And everybody has ChatGPT on their phone and they’re talking to it.

[47:25] That is natural language processing, just a way to communicate with the machine.

[47:29] Where our clients are very advanced is they’re allowing machine learning to go look at all of their data and find those correlations. They would find out why there was that variance from 3200 from, you know, to 3200 from 1400.

[47:43] They could find that what caused it? Was that anomalistic or was that.

[47:48] Does that correlate to every July?

[47:50] Is there, is there some other thing that is going to overflow into other systems or other budget categories? And nail me there. What are the gotchas I don’t know about?

[48:00] That’s the application of AI, true AI, because there’s three legs of the AI stool. But if you don’t own and control your data,

[48:06] you genuinely can’t use it to your betterment. You can keep paying your vendors to say you’re doing AI,

[48:12] but you’re actually not doing it.

[48:14] Like, I’m not here to say do AI, I’m here to say get control of your data.

[48:18] The world is your oyster.

[48:20] Kevin Choquette: If you do so under the backdrop of, hey, there’s at least 300 bucks of NOI per unit that we’re going to find for you.

[48:28] Um, let’s go the other side. How do. How does someone engage with opticwise? And what is your business model? Is it a subscription, is it a. A retainer plus service if somebody calls, you know, the, the Optic Wise customer service for an Internet issue or an issue with the,

[48:48] the lighting system or whatever it is.

[48:51] Like how, how do you guys monetize the relationship with your clients?

[48:55] Bill Douglas: Well, we do recurring services that would be two layers. The layer one is going to be the manage the physical networks and connect to all these systems and collect the data.

[49:06] Layer two is actually doing the analyzation and the control phase. You don’t have to do layer two by any means.

[49:12] Some people only want to do layer two. Like they just want it to come in there.

[49:16] And we do projects, we do advisory services, we, we do consulting, we do design on projects that they don’t want. Like we have a very large Fortune 100 company that engages us to do design.

[49:28] And they’re all their buildings are single tenant like and we operate in the multi tenant world but they want the design philosophy we do. Like we talk about the building of things, strategy and design, your security infrastructure and connectivity in a building and things like that.

[49:44] So we can engage most clients on any size, any level of services,

[49:51] depends on what they want. This is not something you go to the website and click a box and sign up recurring services. There’s a conversation,

[49:58] there’s a review process. Some people pay us just to look at all their contracts and say where’s my data? How do I get it right? Some people say come look at the whole thing.

[50:06] I want to know what I own and I don’t own relative to everything network or everything digital in this building. Where’s the data? I don’t have it.

[50:14] And then it turns into an engagement or not an engagement long term,

[50:18] depending on what the result is. Some people will say I gotta fix this before I sell it.

[50:22] Kevin Choquette: That’s and, and the 300amonth.

[50:24] I’m just trying to make it all real for the guys who I know are running math in their head as they’re driving down the highway.

[50:31] Yeah, I’m gonna pay Optic Wise. Obviously you guys are creating value. You know, let’s pay consideration where consideration is due.

[50:39] I’m still,

[50:40] this is still accretive. I’m not seeing all of my operating savings being diverted to Optic Wise.

[50:49] Bill Douglas: No, no, we,

[50:50] we’re either on a revenue share or a fixed rate per door.

[50:54] So the more we find for you, the more you get some.

[50:58] Sometimes clients will say we really, if you hit it out of the park, we’ll give you this much.

[51:03] But the standard is a straight rate and you get all the, all the vig, all the upside. You start with,

[51:12] we’re going to manage this for you, right? We’re going to relieve your property manager,

[51:16] your IT manager and your asset manager from this headache and then all the money we find is yours. That’s the standard engagement.

[51:25] Like we’re not here to, like we do have some engagements that are revenue share like the old,

[51:31] let me, let me enter audit your property tax and I’ll take 25% of it.

[51:36] We do that on some portfolios, but really they end up engaging long term because they want to maintain that going forward. They want to look at the data once a month or once a week or once a quarter, not just every three years when they do an audit.

[51:49] So think about it as a way to engage somebody that is going to, it might look at it as an expense in month one or two, but it pays for itself by month six.

[51:58] Done, done. Out of there. And then I think you, then you have a go to like you have a design partner. If, if your property manager says, hey, I want to do smart locks,

[52:06] you should get a couple of smart locks from every vendor you’re looking at and send them to your digital partner and say, test these against my network.

[52:13] Tell me, break it. Tell me how it integrates, tell me what it works. You know, here’s the bids. Help me evaluate these. Do I need a network? Do I need hubs?

[52:21] Do I need repeaters? Like how is this gonna communicate? How does this impact my tenant?

[52:26] Nobody does that. They just say, oh this is cool, let’s buy smart locks.

[52:30] Smart locks work,

[52:32] but how about how they impact your tenant? And what about the other options? And why did you buy a whole nother network? You already have one,

[52:40] you didn’t need that.

[52:41] You could have reduced the expense by a hundred thousand dollars by simply not checking the second line there.

[52:47] Didn’t need it.

[52:48] Kevin Choquette: Could have used my own network.

[52:50] Bill Douglas: Yeah, you should use your own network.

[52:52] Uh huh, yeah. And then you ask the question, where’s my data?

[52:56] Who owns and controls the data flowing through the system that I’m paying you for, Mr. Vendor?

[53:01] Kevin Choquette: Well, we do, because it’s our network. Exactly.

[53:05] Bill Douglas: But it’s my device or you’re renting it, so it’s our data. Well, okay, okay, well what about the bigs, right? The huge property managers that come along and say we got you,

[53:17] okay, they got you. I’m not knocking the bigs, but how about asking them why are you recommending this vendor?

[53:23] Let me ask you some hard questions.

[53:25] Do you own a piece of this? Does your venture capital ARM invest in it?

[53:29] Are you going to benefit from this, Mr. Or Mrs. Broker, if I sign this deal, are you getting any money?

[53:34] Kevin Choquette: Are you selling it to me at the gross price with a little bit of a discount netted back to you?

[53:39] Bill Douglas: Yeah. Ask all those questions.

[53:41] Kevin Choquette: Oh, you get a little rebate on all these sales.

[53:43] Bill Douglas: Yeah,

[53:44] they’re not bad people, but just hold them accountable and be honest. Like, hey, great, if you, if you actually own part of it,

[53:51] maybe I’ll buy from it still. But I’m going to look a little

[53:53] Kevin Choquette: harder at your competition before we go to like the personal side. Cause I want to get into that.

[53:59] There’s this phrase that has been coming up a lot more for me and I don’t know what it is. I’m probably not the only person.

[54:06] A data lake, I get like data warehouse, database. What is a data lake?

[54:12] Bill Douglas: Data lake is a bunch of databases, bunch of data warehouses. So a data lake can, a database can be structured or unstructured. Like it just can be haphazard stuff. A data lake can be any type of data anywhere.

[54:24] Like it is your.

[54:26] It’s everything of everything. And it doesn’t have to be structured. Like I don’t have to put Kevin’s name in the first name field. I can just put Kevin in a data lake.

[54:35] Right. And you dump it all in there and then machine learning starts to sort it out.

[54:40] Okay, so a data lake,

[54:42] you can take analog and turn it into certain kinds of data. Or if you go to that vendor, the Fortune 100 vendor you’ve had for 20 years and say, give me my data, it’s going to be in a 10 year old structure.

[54:52] A data lake doesn’t care.

[54:54] Put it in there, then we can start to deal with it. We might suck it all up into different. I’m getting way in the weeds. But a data lake is all of everything.

[55:03] You have data. I’m just trying to greatly simplify it. Don’t be intimidated by this. The,

[55:08] the topic it is above a data warehouse.

[55:14] Kevin Choquette: Obviously we go personal, but let’s, let’s talk about your team.

[55:17] What’s it like over there? How are you finding the right people? I actually don’t know how big you are. I imagine quite a bit bigger than when we were last hanging out,

[55:25] going skiing.

[55:26] But what’s the team look like? How are you finding the right people, keeping them on board? How do you think about staying light or scaling what’s that side of the business looking like?

[55:36] Bill Douglas: The team here is awesome because our culture is all around operational excellence. Like it’s not a sales culture. It’s about always be learning Find a better way. Like we celebrate the wins, we don’t just whiz past them.

[55:48] But I put in a culture of accountability. Like I want you to act like an owner. There’s no renters allowed here. Like our clients own commercial real estate. So we have fun with it.

[55:58] No renters allowed.

[56:00] The people we hire, every once in a while you just get a bad hire, right? If they’re a renter and they’re trying to take and they’re not treating the company like it’s theirs, then they just opt out after time because they don’t fit.

[56:10] So how do I find the right people? I hire internationally.

[56:13] I’m not going to lie about it. Not for price, but for quality. Like we, we don’t care where people are. In the pandemic. I,

[56:21] I mean I had shut our corporate office down,

[56:24] minimized it I should say, not totally shut down.

[56:27] And 90,

[56:28] no in 2018. So when the pandemic came, we were already running largely virtual, but my last three companies were.

[56:35] And we have employees all over the world. Like we have British speaking customer service agents handling calls in Albania. Right. We have,

[56:45] I have a workforce in Latin America,

[56:48] I have a lot of engineers spread out across the country here in the United States.

[56:53] So the beauty of that is getting to clients sites is a lot easier than it used to be.

[56:59] I’m not the one making it. Whoever’s closest is there.

[57:03] We have a partner network for all of the, oh, this broke, we gotta get something replaced in the middle of the night so that nobody’s down kind of thing.

[57:09] We don’t actually do that. But our like we will hire somebody and take care of it because we’re accountable.

[57:15] But the answer to your question is I hire first on culture,

[57:18] second on energy and I don’t care where they are physically, I don’t. We do really well with American citizens living abroad,

[57:26] you know, digital nomads or living in expat communities.

[57:31] We found a niche there. It’s really nice.

[57:34] It’s fun. It’s fun.

[57:35] We try to stay in the same time zone. Of course the customer service people have to be 24 by 7, so that really doesn’t matter.

[57:43] Kevin Choquette: Well, that actually could help, right? Having them on a different clock.

[57:46] Bill Douglas: It does, it does. And their British speaking is kind of fun because we’re an international company, but we service owners around the world, but we service properties in the 48 states.

[57:57] I don’t want to expand our,

[57:59] our like network management footprint outside the United States at least for a couple more years.

[58:05] But the owners are all over the world. So when I travel around the world, I’m meeting with owners all the time. There’s, there’s a lot of capital in, in Europe.

[58:14] There’s a lot of capital in the Pacific Rim. There’s a lot of capital and,

[58:18] and South America that is invested in real estate. Well, you know, better than anybody, you raise it, so.

[58:24] Kevin Choquette: Yeah, that’s interesting. I didn’t know you guys were working outside of the US though.

[58:28] Bill Douglas: Yes, and those Fortune 100 clients I talk about that pay us advisory services to do design and consulting.

[58:37] Their facilities are all over the world too.

[58:40] But if we’re going to operate, like,

[58:42] be responsible for keeping something up, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, we’re trying to focus that on the 48 states. We have clients across the country. I mean,

[58:50] you saw us do one in San Diego. What was that, five years ago? And like, we, we’ve got some all over the east coast, you know, north and south and everywhere in between.

[59:00] Kevin Choquette: Do you see the architectural side or the, the design build side? Starting to tune into this. I, I think you alluded to it a little bit. I’m, I’m backtracking a bit.

[59:08] But like, this seems.

[59:09] Bill Douglas: It’s limited.

[59:11] Kevin Choquette: It’s limited.

[59:11] Bill Douglas: Yeah, it’s limited because they’re,

[59:13] they’re the creative side. They don’t want to talk about technology. There are a few firms out there that are digital forward,

[59:20] or AI based, as they’ll call it. But even then,

[59:24] they are trying to avoid specifying too much. Like, when it gets to the mechanical and electrical, design is usually where we see the most resistance because they just want to drag what works over.

[59:37] And a lot of that times, what works is not being used, so the owner is paying for it even though it’ll never be used.

[59:44] So the earlier we can get involved in a design, the more money we can save. Not just by what’s put in, but what is not put in.

[59:51] Kevin Choquette: What is not put in, Exactly. Yeah.

[59:53] All right, let’s switch to personal side. I know we had the opportunity to do some classwork together,

[01:00:02] and so I’ve got some of the background. But you’ve kind of been rolling around resiliency for a bit. Like, how’s that landing for you these days?

[01:00:15] Where’s that show up in your journey and,

[01:00:18] you know, where you’re currently at?

[01:00:21] Bill Douglas: Well, I fell in love with fitness,

[01:00:23] I don’t know, 17, 18 years ago again when I got a divorce. And I was basically at a low point in my life emotionally,

[01:00:32] but I had also been Struggling with multiple sclerosis for 10 years at that point. So at all, at the same time, I decided to stop that medicine and get fit.

[01:00:41] So I weighed 171 pounds the day I filed for divorce.

[01:00:45] I’m six foot four, by the way, to put this in context.

[01:00:49] And I decided to start taking care of myself. First I was running a business, then we were doing quite well.

[01:00:55] But I just realized that fitness to me is the fountain of youth. So my friends started to call me Resilience Guy because a year after I started that fitness trend, I was in a horrific ski accident.

[01:01:07] But you know, I in when I was 26, I got bit by a coral snake in Florida. Maybe realized I didn’t want my corporate job, became a real full time entrepreneur.

[01:01:17] Not just piddling on the side, but like writing the checks,

[01:01:20] you know, putting your neck on the line kind of entrepreneur, as you, as you and I well know from our MIT days,

[01:01:27] right? And then had that ski accident and got humbled again. I was taking life for granted. I was not looking at the stuff I had, I was looking at the stuff I wanted.

[01:01:37] So it shifted my viewpoint to be more about gratitude. And my friend started to call me Resilience Guy. So I branded that resilienceguy.com and I’m in the process of redoing it because so many of my friends,

[01:01:49] I’m 61 years old now. So many of my friends are like, what’s the trick? How do you stay in shape?

[01:01:54] And the bottom line answer is there is no trick. I live like this morning I had a great workout because I knew I was going to have a couple of podcasts today.

[01:02:01] And I’m on my head, clear and look forward to it. And I think fitness is the core of why my business is healthy.

[01:02:08] Fitness is the core of why my marriage and my relationships with my sons and my friends are healthy. Why fitness is at the core of it. So food can be a poison or it can be a fuel.

[01:02:19] Like I told you Yesterday, how many 61 year olds do you know that weigh 225 pounds at 9% body fat and can bench 3 15?

[01:02:27] I’m not saying you want to do that or have to, but most of the people that ask for help, and I right now, I’m not charging for this at all.

[01:02:35] This is, I do it out of passion.

[01:02:37] Most of the people that ask me for help have a lot of money and are disconnected at home or have let their body go.

[01:02:45] So while I have coached business in the past and I’m quite Good at it.

[01:02:49] I’m really enjoying on the personal side, helping people find more balance, shall we say? I don’t say balance between work and life, but I focus on body,

[01:03:02] business and being so a lot of times the people that ask for help from me are doing great in business, whether that’s an entrepreneur or it’s a corporate job, it doesn’t matter.

[01:03:10] They got the money down. Put it that way.

[01:03:12] Their being is off or their body is off or both. And I’ve been there like, I’m just an average Joe that’s gotten my butt whooped. And I’ve learned a lot.

[01:03:21] So I’m trying to share what I’ve learned. I don’t tell anybody how to do it. I just share with what I did.

[01:03:26] Like a doctor told me 20 years ago, you’re not gonna walk in 10 years.

[01:03:31] And when a doctor told me 15 years ago when I was laying there paralyzed on a table, we’re gonna retrofit your house so you can use your wheelchair.

[01:03:39] I know, and I’ve been skiing with you since.

[01:03:41] So don’t. The noise in your head is what you want to believe.

[01:03:46] Like, I think you’re capable of anything. So I’m an optimist. I love spreading that. I like to surround myself with people that do and it does flow over into the company’s culture.

[01:03:56] But I don’t see any difference between Bill at work and Bill and personal.

[01:04:01] Like, I’m just Bill all the time.

[01:04:04] And I’m not naively.

[01:04:06] Like, I’m not naive about my optimism.

[01:04:09] I know the damage that Ms. Has done. It’s already there.

[01:04:12] It’s not active in my body and I’m grateful for that. But the damage that’s done is done. I just choose not to dwell in it or think about it because that’s a negative thought.

[01:04:21] I choose to think positive.

[01:04:23] Kevin Choquette: I love it.

[01:04:26] There’s a couple things that come up for me.

[01:04:28] One,

[01:04:31] I’m wondering if we’re sort of in an epidemic as a.

[01:04:38] Maybe this is a forever human condition.

[01:04:40] Maybe it’s acute.

[01:04:45] It feels like people are over committed and overstimulated.

[01:04:49] Like,

[01:04:50] oh my freaking God. The amount of things that maybe this is just me. Some of you, some of you guys are zenned out. God bless you. The amount of stuff that I think I can get done in a day versus what’s actually possible and the amount of information that comes my way and the things that I think I’m going to do about them,

[01:05:14] all of that, like,

[01:05:15] there’s a certain quality of like,

[01:05:17] freaking Overload and insanity that just shows up with like,

[01:05:21] hey, did you read? Did you read? Did you read? Did you read? Did you hear? Did you read? Did you hear? And then, oh, hang on, I gotta go do this, this, this, this, this.

[01:05:29] And then, boom, days gone. It’s. I don’t, I don’t know that I’m human being, I’m human doing.

[01:05:35] Bill Douglas: I couldn’t agree more. That is largely what happens. And I know you can apply AI tools to it, but I would encourage you to apply your brain first. You can find the tools later.

[01:05:46] But just because somebody chooses to email me doesn’t mean I have to respond.

[01:05:52] Like, I’m not trying to be rude, but I never asked you for this, so why am I obligated to respond?

[01:05:58] Like, my time and my energy are very limited and I’m no more special than any other person in this world. I’m not.

[01:06:05] But once I could shift it to where I simply cannot answer every email, like, especially the solicitors. God bless you. I know you’re out trying to sell as we are too, but I have prospects and customers that I will pay attention to.

[01:06:20] So if I don’t know you and you email me, I’m probably not going to answer. It’s just that simple. That was one of the things. Like, I’m going to start clawing time back.

[01:06:27] I block out half a day at a time both ends of the week just for catch up and cleanup and strategy. Like, put it on my calendar. Done.

[01:06:37] Like, I need that four hours. Leave me alone,

[01:06:40] turn my phone off,

[01:06:41] put my head down and make sure that everything else in my life and my business is aligned.

[01:06:46] And I will admit, sometimes during that four hours, I’ll go for a hike with Julie.

[01:06:50] You know, some of the four hours, I’ll kick off early and drive to the mountains on Friday afternoon instead of Saturday, you know, and I am working on Saturday. In my head I’m doing stuff, but when my face is not staring at a screen, my brain is operating much better.

[01:07:05] But you can,

[01:07:07] you can apply AI to all of those things to streamline it, but you have to make the commitment first. When I did that,

[01:07:13] I got a lot more breathing room.

[01:07:15] Kevin Choquette: I’ve got a really great coach right now and he sent me a little email thing this morning and it was,

[01:07:24] he was reflecting on his boxing coach who told him that winners,

[01:07:30] maybe champions,

[01:07:31] take a day off.

[01:07:34] And I wonder how many people are just white knuckling the steering wheel, like a little or a lot too hard versus, like,

[01:07:46] you know what,

[01:07:47] been driving pretty Hard going to go break bread with my friends.

[01:07:51] Bill Douglas: Yeah.

[01:07:52] Kevin Choquette: Just take a breather.

[01:07:54] Think the sun, wind,

[01:07:56] recognize. I’m not going to be here that long.

[01:07:59] The things that matter aren’t going to be coming with me,

[01:08:03] you know, Or I should say maybe will come with me. The things that don’t matter are going to get left behind. That’s probably a better way to say that we’re not taking any money or any of our accomplishments with us.

[01:08:13] I don’t know. You have any thoughts on that? I feel like that’s a part of the thing. People just can’t like, step back and. And recharge.

[01:08:21] Bill Douglas: Two thoughts.

[01:08:23] I was interviewed almost 20 years ago and I. I have it hanging on my wall because it came out of my mouth.

[01:08:29] Life is a gift. It’s meant to be pursued, shared and savored.

[01:08:33] Like, not worked.

[01:08:35] The not worked. I’ve added since. But I said that in the interview. And then when I saw it printed, I was like,

[01:08:40] wow, okay, I’m going to focus on that on my rough days.

[01:08:44] On my rough days.

[01:08:44] Kevin Choquette: And then it’s meant to be pursued something and savored.

[01:08:48] Bill Douglas: Pursued, shared and savored.

[01:08:50] Kevin Choquette: Yeah.

[01:08:51] Bill Douglas: One of my personal core values, not business, but personal, is pursue the use,

[01:08:55] the unique shared experience.

[01:08:57] I would personally rather do something than have something.

[01:09:01] And I’m constantly seeking things to do with other people I know, like trust and love. Right. I want to have a unique experience with them. Like when you and I went skiing in Vail, it was awesome.

[01:09:12] That wasn’t just the skiing. We went found that dude playing the guitar set outside. It was a sunny day. Like, we still laugh about it, right?

[01:09:18] Kevin Choquette: Yeah.

[01:09:19] Bill Douglas: Skied in Tahoe, I think, once, and had the same kind of experience. Still see that picture roll by. I can’t believe you didn’t wear a helmet that day. I’m still giving a **** about it because I almost died on the side of a mountain because I had a helmet on.

[01:09:30] I lived. And you’re skiing without a helmet on. So I was giving you ****.

[01:09:35] So there something that my wife Julie is. She’s brilliant and very chill and everything works out as it’s supposed to.

[01:09:44] Her saying for this year is, you’re just not that important.

[01:09:48] And let me put it in context. She doesn’t mean you don’t matter.

[01:09:51] She means if you took the weekend off, the world’s not gonna stop. If you took a week off, the business is not gonna stop.

[01:09:58] Right.

[01:09:59] If you miss your kid’s game, they’re gonna know it.

[01:10:02] You’re important to them,

[01:10:03] you’re not that important to the rest of the world. This whole facade we’ve built around, I must do this.

[01:10:09] I am a human doing not a human being is because we believe we’re a lot more important than we are. So Julie keeps reminding me, dude, you’re just not that important.

[01:10:20] Not to the world.

[01:10:21] Like, the world is not going to stop if Bill takes the day off. If Bill takes the week off, like a week from tomorrow, I’m going to Europe and I’m taking 17 days off.

[01:10:31] It’s like. And I have told my staff if,

[01:10:34] if you reach out to me, I’ll be disappointed. But if I answer an email,

[01:10:38] if I look at Slack, it’s a hundred dollars every time I do. It goes into, there you go. Hell yeah, it goes into the kitty.

[01:10:44] Kevin Choquette: I love that.

[01:10:45] Bill Douglas: I used to say it was a rule. Now I hold myself accountable.

[01:10:48] So I’m going to take the app off my phone. Otherwise it’ll be very expensive and the business will be just fine.

[01:10:56] Kevin Choquette: It might be better because you come back with clarity, with separation, with a different vantage point and you actually got to fly at 50,000ft and think about it and then come back.

[01:11:07] Bill Douglas: In a funny story, after the ski wreck, I had to take three months off work to recover and several surgeries and therapy and all that stuff. Go from paralyzed and 13 broken bones.

[01:11:18] It’s not easy to go back to work.

[01:11:20] I went back to work like 13 and a half weeks later and the business in one quarter had grown 25% and that’s. I’m talking about 8 million to 10 million in revenue.

[01:11:32] It wasn’t like it grew 20 grand in one quarter. It grew more than twice what we had the year before.

[01:11:38] How’s that for a lesson? I was in the way.

[01:11:42] It was my fault. It wasn’t the business fault. I had an awesome cfo coo. Salima was awesome and she nicely said,

[01:11:50] this is working. I think you should just come in on Fridays for the foosball tournaments and then spend the rest of the week with customers.

[01:11:56] Because that’s what I love to do, is sit with customers, have relationships, solve problems.

[01:12:01] And it was a real eye opening experience. I hope the audience doesn’t have to almost die to learn that, but step out of the way and watch what you’ve built grow even more.

[01:12:12] I was choking it.

[01:12:13] So I’m taking 17 days off and I. And if I look at anything work, I have to send $100 into the kitty every single time. Not just once every time.

[01:12:23] So am I going to look at it ever. No,

[01:12:26] it’s just a pride thing. Now, even if it was a dollar, it would have the same effect on me. But I told the staff, I told the team. I’m. I’m out.

[01:12:33] I’m gone.

[01:12:34] Employees, customers, everybody knows it. And I want them to do the same thing. When they go on vacation, I’m going to cover for them because I want that treatment. When I go on vacation,

[01:12:43] I say the same thing, just not that important.

[01:12:46] Kevin Choquette: Go away. Go away. Just go.

[01:12:49] Bill Douglas: If somebody messages me from vacation, I lambast them. I said, put your phone down or I’m going to call your husband. Put your phone down or I’m going to call your wife.

[01:12:58] I have their number.

[01:13:03] Kevin Choquette: I. I’m going to.

[01:13:05] You’ll. You’ll catch this. But it’s tangential.

[01:13:10] Like, Maslow’s, right. We need food, we need shelter. At some point, money,

[01:13:15] yeah, money is enough to take care of primary needs.

[01:13:21] Now, there’s season. There’s seasons for that.

[01:13:24] There’s times when you’re seeing in the highs, and there’s other times when you’re straight just getting your butt whooped.

[01:13:30] Especially for the guys that you know are putting on the line. It’s not always. It’s not always sunny.

[01:13:38] But beyond basic needs,

[01:13:39] what.

[01:13:40] How does money land for you? How do you think of money,

[01:13:43] like, as a resource?

[01:13:47] Bill Douglas: That is a question I rarely get asked, so thank you.

[01:13:50] I think of money as purely that it’s a resource. It’s not mine. I just have it now. Like, I have been broke in my life, and I’ve had a lot of money in my life, and I have been joyously happy in my life, and I have been miserable and depressed in my life,

[01:14:05] and I will tell you that they don’t. The ups and downs on my personal life don’t correlate to where my money was at the time.

[01:14:12] I let a lot of money create problems for me,

[01:14:15] and I let no money free me. I’m not saying that no money is where you should be. I’m just saying it’s a resource. When I have it, I love to share it.

[01:14:23] Money’s not meant, in my opinion, to sit.

[01:14:26] It only works when it circulates.

[01:14:28] Obviously. I have pillow money and I have investments for when I don’t work anymore.

[01:14:33] All right? Pillow money for when the stuff hits the fan. You gotta have that safety net. But I look at it as a resource that I happen to have right now.

[01:14:40] And if I want to share it with you, please let me. Don’t argue with Me about, I want to buy you lunch.

[01:14:46] Right?

[01:14:48] Don’t like or like. A friend’s house burned down last year, and I said,

[01:14:52] can. Can we help you? When we made a significant investment helping them, because the insurance,

[01:14:57] you know, at a loss. Insurance never makes it up. So we did a GoFundMe and I seeded it.

[01:15:03] It felt really good because they were just at a low spot. I’m sure some other time it’ll come back tenfold.

[01:15:08] I don’t look at it as mine. I look at it as an enabler to do better things in this world,

[01:15:14] and that’s what I try to do with it. I don’t own many things. I’m very simplistic. I used to have the big house and I used to have the cars, and it brought me no joy.

[01:15:23] So return on joy to me is like that. It’s a formula my EO form made up.

[01:15:30] But what’s your joy factor and what’s your expense? The expense could be monetary or emotional.

[01:15:35] And somebody’d say, my house. And we’d say, all right. How much joy have you had for that?

[01:15:41] Half a million? Million, $2 million house, whatever the case is.

[01:15:45] Oh, that’s all right. That starts to be expensive. Well, Scott says these, and he reaches down, he pulls out his flip flops and flips it on the desk and said, that’s the highest return on joy I own.

[01:15:56] I walked the beaches in Bali with that. I met my wife in those everywhere, and they’re 20 bucks.

[01:16:05] And he said, that’s my highest ROJ return on joy. So look at it from your emotional investment, too. Not just money investment. So I don’t look at money as mine.

[01:16:16] I know this sounds weird, but do I like having it? Yes, because there’s been times when I have it. But I don’t need to take every dollar out of this business.

[01:16:23] I love reinvesting it. Like, how many more people could we hire? How many more customers could we help?

[01:16:28] If we keep it in the business, pay the taxes on it and keep it going? It’s a C corp, and we have to pay taxes for every dollar we retain.

[01:16:34] But to have that going forward, if we didn’t think like that when the AI wave came along, we wouldn’t have been able to do what we’re doing now, put it that way, because that didn’t come for free.

[01:16:45] All the investments we’ve made,

[01:16:47] the business is profitable. It’s been there for more than 20 years,

[01:16:51] you know, and we’re not venture capital funded.

[01:16:54] So we are in a very Strong position that way because we treat money as another asset, not an emotional attachment. No bragging around it,

[01:17:03] is it just

[01:17:05] Kevin Choquette: what I want to say, Founder owned, kind of principal shareholders. No external capital.

[01:17:10] Bill Douglas: There’s very few external capital.

[01:17:12] Friends and family. And our advisory board,

[01:17:15] some really very successful people on our advisory board, they own a little bit, but it’s largely held by the founders and the, the operators that are driving the business.

[01:17:24] Kevin Choquette: Yeah, that just drives alignment. Getting your advisors to have a little piece.

[01:17:28] Bill Douglas: Yeah, I always do that. And I said my business, it’s not my business. It is not. It is our business. So that was a misnomer, like I didn’t start it. And it’s, it’s not mine.

[01:17:39] They’re.

[01:17:40] There’s a very small number of people that own it and we treat it like ours. It’s a family.

[01:17:44] Kevin Choquette: You’re portraying a reasonable, if not a high level of enlightenment. So I’m going to throw another one at you.

[01:17:53] Social media, like just writ large. What, what’s your view of.

[01:17:58] Yeah, let’s leave it wide open. What’s your view of social media?

[01:18:02] Bill Douglas: The less of it I do, the happier I am.

[01:18:04] Kevin Choquette: Yeah, there you go. There’s the correlation. Not more money equals happy. Less social media equals more happiness.

[01:18:10] Bill Douglas: Yeah, I could go the data because we have kids and we’re all worried about that, you know, the controls and all that stuff. But how I feel about myself,

[01:18:19] I dictate by how I feel about myself, not how I think other people think about me.

[01:18:24] So social media just flips that around and puts your happiness in somebody else’s hands by the euphoria of a like or a comment.

[01:18:32] I’m very active on LinkedIn, but that’s because it’s real conversations. I’m not bragging about anything.

[01:18:37] And social media, a lot of it’s bragging, a lot of it’s fake. I have a friend who owns an exotic car dealership and he said he sold it, it was in Vegas, it was doing really well.

[01:18:45] He said over half of the people that rent the cars from us for the day are social media. And he air quotes influencers.

[01:18:52] So they’ll rent the Lamborghini one day and they’ll rent the, I don’t know, the McLaren the next day, and they’ll make a year’s worth of content and a rented home and it’s just not real.

[01:19:01] And these, these poor other people think that they have to be like that. And because they’re not and they’re younger than or older than that person, they’re A failure.

[01:19:09] The, the correlation is never positive.

[01:19:13] Do I use social media to keep track of my college friends and you know, some people like that, sure. But I’m not a poster and I certainly don’t scroll.

[01:19:22] Kevin Choquette: Yeah, I’m bouncing around on it, but I know you’re good for it. Political process. Watch from afar or engage. What’s your, what’s your view on that whole thing?

[01:19:35] Bill Douglas: I watch.

[01:19:36] I will engage if somebody wants to have a conversation. But I’m not going to go hold a sign and protest and scream and be angry. I, yeah,

[01:19:44] you’re entitled to your opinion if you want to talk about what that is and why. I,

[01:19:48] My mind has been changed by people that have engaged and wanted to have a real conversation and I love it. I’m not out to change anybody’s mind, but if they want to talk about why, like I,

[01:19:59] I, I’m not gonna be the one on the corner that wants you to honk because you agree with them. I’m not that person.

[01:20:04] I’m not judging them, but that’s just not me. I’m also not the person that stands up at the party and tells the joke that everybody laughs at.

[01:20:10] I’m not, I’ll be the guy in the corner, like moving around. I’ll talk to everybody in the room. I just won’t do it in front of the room.

[01:20:17] Kevin Choquette: Yeah, I, that seems a little hard to believe. I can’t imagine you don’t have a couple good one liners in there.

[01:20:24] Bill Douglas: Well, it’s because we were in a close group. You know, there was six or eight of us and then class was what, 55, 60 people, so that was different.

[01:20:33] Kevin Choquette: So daily routines. You already sort of talked about fitness as like your true north. And you know,

[01:20:40] what was it?

[01:20:41] The body.

[01:20:42] I’ve got it written down here somewhere. Body, business and being.

[01:20:46] But what do you have by way of daily or weekly routines that help you sharpen the saw and kind of keep you on the path? Maybe it’s easy for you to stay on the path, but I see a lot of people have kind of ways of keeping themselves tuned up.

[01:21:04] Bill Douglas: I get at least seven and a half hours sleep a night.

[01:21:07] I’m an early riser. I like to, before I go to the gym in the morning, I’ve had a breakfast and I’ve done a little bit of work. So my brain is clear.

[01:21:17] I’m gonna lift weights at least five times a week.

[01:21:20] I’m gonna go for a walk at least five times a week. I’m gonna. And in that lift I’M gonna row first or ride a bike or run a half mile.

[01:21:29] Like,

[01:21:30] last weekend, I did a Murph for the first time in my life. I’m not anxious to ever do another one.

[01:21:34] Kevin Choquette: What’s a Murph? I don’t even know what that is.

[01:21:36] Bill Douglas: You run a mile and then you have to do a hundred pull ups, 200 pushups, and 300 air squats, and then run another mile.

[01:21:43] Kevin Choquette: Oh, gosh.

[01:21:44] Bill Douglas: And time it. So it was. I’m. I don’t like running, but I did it. It was horrible.

[01:21:50] Kevin Choquette: A hundred pull ups, 200. 200 pushups.

[01:21:54] Bill Douglas: Yeah. And then.

[01:21:56] Kevin Choquette: And then 300 squats.

[01:21:57] Bill Douglas: Yeah.

[01:21:58] Kevin Choquette: I don’t know. Yeah, there’s a lot of people who couldn’t even do that with a mile

[01:22:02] Bill Douglas: on either side, so.

[01:22:04] Kevin Choquette: Yeah.

[01:22:04] Bill Douglas: Well, Julie got into CrossFit after her cancer, like, breast cancer and all that. So her comeback was to go join CrossFit. She’s always been a runner and now she’s into all that stuff.

[01:22:14] So she threw down the challenge. I couldn’t say no.

[01:22:19] She’s strong and, like, she was strong back when she was still bald from the chemo. But, like, we challenge each other there. So I. I think the structure sets me free relative to my routines.

[01:22:30] And I put the routines around my food. I very ritualistic about what I eat during the week. It’s just the same stuff every day. I’ll vary dinner, but it’s the same stuff every day.

[01:22:39] So I know my macros, I can control my energy level.

[01:22:43] Uh, look, I know my basal metabolic rate, so I know how much work I need to do every day. So because I know what I’m eating, I. I’m either in a weight gain mode or a weight loss mode because I like to play with it.

[01:22:54] I’ll, you know, during the winter, I’ll get five pounds heavier with muscle, and then I’ll get cut before we go to the beach, et cetera, et cetera.

[01:23:01] So the rituals around fitness I enjoy because it’s just me. The only time my brain is clear is when I’m either playing the guitar, which I’m not good at, but I can’t think when my two hands are doing different things.

[01:23:14] Right. I can’t think about anything else.

[01:23:16] And when I’m working out, when I’m lifting weights, if I’m doing cardio, my brain is open, but if I’m lifting weights, I’m counting and focusing,

[01:23:23] and it’s just like meditation to me. So it’s freeing. It’s stress relieving and it’s freeing. And I come back invigorated and I sleep well.

[01:23:31] So that’s the ritual. And I put work and visitations, and I try to see friends at least twice a week.

[01:23:40] You know,

[01:23:41] I try to see my sons at least once a week.

[01:23:44] Kevin Choquette: It seems to me like you’ve got a real.

[01:23:48] Like you’re very proximate to the things that allow you to decompress. Is that something that you came to naturally,

[01:24:00] or did you have to do the work to find the place and the space to be there?

[01:24:07] Bill Douglas: School of hard knots. It taught me. Yeah, I.

[01:24:10] I could not have dreamt this up if I tried. This was a reaction to getting my *** kicked and wanting to get better.

[01:24:18] Both. So it’s what works for me. I’m not telling your audience they have to do it, but be open to the challenge. Be open to the hard thing and let yourself actually like it.

[01:24:28] You might actually like it. I don’t like running, but some people do.

[01:24:32] I like rowing for my cardio. Some people hate rowing. Like,

[01:24:35] same thing in business. Why are you doing something you hate? You know, delegated or hired out?

[01:24:41] Do what you love. You’ll create more, value the same thing in your relationship. Right. You know that you have a healthy marriage.

[01:24:48] You know that I’m just preaching to the choir, but I was open to learning, documented it, and just continually tried to get better.

[01:24:55] Kevin Choquette: I honestly feel like there’s a component of humility and vulnerability that is the access to being able to keep moving forward. And when I forget that,

[01:25:16] then ego shows up. Needing to be right shows up. And I put all kinds of **** in front of me and the people that I love. That is everything except what’s needed.

[01:25:30] Bill Douglas: That’s interesting. All kinds of **** stuff.

[01:25:34] Kevin Choquette: Yeah, it just, like, it’s.

[01:25:36] Bill Douglas: You project your stress on them is what you’re saying.

[01:25:38] Kevin Choquette: Yeah. I mean, this is a conversation about you, but I feel like we forget our frailties, we forget our humanness.

[01:25:50] We. We.

[01:25:51] We push it away so that we can project strength or whatever.

[01:25:58] It’s the. It’s the Brene Brown thing when she talks about vulnerability. And people who are available to whatever is here have, like, a much more authentic connection.

[01:26:09] And it’s just a better way. It’s not for me. It’s not intuitive at all. I have to remind myself all the time, like, hey, dude, get out of your head.

[01:26:17] Like, you’re. But you’re. You’re telling me that you know how to do it. I go do cardio. I play the guitar. I do the things that take me out of my head, because I.

[01:26:27] I don’t want to spend all my time in that place.

[01:26:31] Bill Douglas: I really don’t.

[01:26:33] And, like, just hosting a podcast and being on podcasts has taught me. For instance, in the past two years, I focused on doing that more.

[01:26:41] It has taught me to be a better listener.

[01:26:45] You and I talked yesterday, and I was driving down the road. When we were talking, I interrupted you three times because I was so excited.

[01:26:49] Kevin Choquette: I was trying to get on another phone call.

[01:26:53] Bill Douglas: And this conversation is.

[01:26:55] Let him finish. Like, actually listen to what Kevin’s saying.

[01:26:59] Cause he’s sharing what he’s thinking, but he’s going to ask something, too. So I’m not trying to predict what I’m going to say next. I’m actually trying to keep my head clear so I can focus on listening.

[01:27:09] And it taught me a lot as a parent when I was trying to coach my kids instead of listen. Right.

[01:27:16] But podcasting you,

[01:27:18] you’re not going to be good at it, as, you know, if all you do is talk.

[01:27:21] Like, Rogan is really good at just asking a great question and then listening. Yeah, But I. When I started doing that, and my last relationship, it was Julie and I had been together seven and a half years.

[01:27:32] We didn’t get married until last year, but,

[01:27:34] wow, the relationship got really, really good when I learned to do that and learned to do that when I was,

[01:27:41] what, 54 or 55? Like, I wasn’t a young thing again. I had to get my *** kicked a few times. Had some relationships fail.

[01:27:49] My. My marriage failed. I got divorced.

[01:27:52] That was a long time ago. But,

[01:27:53] you know, I had to accept failure and learn from it. So part of that was listening. I became a better parent when I listened. I’m a much better manager when I listened because they already solved it.

[01:28:03] I don’t have to cut them off and tell them what the solution is. They just want permission or an idea or a budget. They know how to do it.

[01:28:10] Kevin Choquette: They get. Man, I dig it.

[01:28:13] Where do you see yourself giving back? I mean, you already mentioned it, like, you’ve got the GoFundMe, helped a buddy out who’s in a tight spot. Sounds like, you know, you’re.

[01:28:23] You’re generous when the. When the flow is coming and. And you’re gonna tell people, shut up. Stop arguing with me. I’m buying dinner.

[01:28:32] Bill Douglas: Yeah.

[01:28:32] Kevin Choquette: Where. Where else might you see that in the future or now? Just kind of curious about that.

[01:28:37] Bill Douglas: I’m generous with the money I do earn.

[01:28:41] I ritualistic about it, not just at the holidays.

[01:28:45] So I like to find people less fortunate than me. We’re all just the same people, less fortunate and find a way to give it to them.

[01:28:53] I’d rather reduce their expenses than hand them the money because that way the money they earn they can spend any way they want. I don’t want control over their life.

[01:28:59] And if I could do it anonymously, it’s even more fun.

[01:29:03] As far as giving back, I think that’s the passion project around resilience guy.

[01:29:07] I’m redoing it all now so it’s more self catered, self service.

[01:29:12] But I think that when I’m done working, whenever that is,

[01:29:17] that’s all I’ll do is coach younger people on body business and being.

[01:29:22] I’ll coach old dudes on bodi of course, but the business and the being is a young person’s game.

[01:29:28] One of my other personal core values is positively impact others.

[01:29:33] So I love asking people, how can I help you?

[01:29:36] Because I wouldn’t be here today if I didn’t get a lot of help from many people and most of the time I didn’t ask for it. They asked me, how can I help you?

[01:29:44] And then I’d be like, oh,

[01:29:46] okay, I’m really looking for this. I didn’t have the confidence.

[01:29:51] I guess confidence is the right word to even say, yeah, I need this, can you help me with it? And now I will. I’m like, okay. My forum taught me that,

[01:29:58] my relationship taught me that.

[01:30:00] I asked my sons every time we hang up or every time we’re together,

[01:30:03] can I help you with anything? No, I’m good, I’m good. But every once in a while they’ll say,

[01:30:07] yeah,

[01:30:09] sweet, that’s a good day.

[01:30:11] If I can make somebody. When I was coming out of the depths of my depression post divorce, I challenged myself to a hundred days of positivity.

[01:30:19] Kevin Choquette: Oh, wow.

[01:30:21] Bill Douglas: Like if I couldn’t think it, I couldn’t say it. I couldn’t do it if it wasn’t positive. The hardest thing was the thinking.

[01:30:27] And then after about 20 days,

[01:30:29] I made myself spread that to somebody else. I had to make a stranger laugh or smile every day. It was a self challenge.

[01:30:37] My sons accused me of flirting with the grocery store clerk, for instance.

[01:30:41] Kevin Choquette: Well, what’s wrong with that?

[01:30:42] Bill Douglas: Well, they thought I was hitting on her, right?

[01:30:44] And I was just trying to make her laugh because I didn’t know her and it was part of the game. So they got in on it. They got in on it and then they would start to be lighter with people like, and you’re.

[01:30:53] One of the rules,

[01:30:55] as I developed my own rules, is I couldn’t make fun of myself after a certain amount of time to make them laugh. I just had to find something,

[01:31:02] make them smile, compliment them, like,

[01:31:05] not talk about the weather, for instance. But I couldn’t say, oh, I suck, and make somebody else laugh. It’s not that kind of laughter.

[01:31:11] It had to be positive.

[01:31:12] Kevin Choquette: You can’t be self deprecating. How did you find,

[01:31:18] Like, I hear you say, hey, I had to be positive for a hundred days and I couldn’t think negative thoughts. How did you find the vantage point to see a negative thought and arrest it and be like, oh, hang on.

[01:31:31] Not that that doesn’t seem easy.

[01:31:34] Bill Douglas: It wasn’t easy. I had a very good counselor. And it was more of recognizing that that’s the shadow talking. That is the imposter syndrome in your mind. You know the old cartoons, you had the good guy on the right,

[01:31:47] the angel on the shadow was either black or red on the other side.

[01:31:51] So recognizing it’s just a voice in your head and it’s very normal and it’s not true was a huge step.

[01:31:58] And then you could acknowledge it. Like, wait a second, I’m. It’s not fear of speaking in public. It’s me thinking I’m not worthy of being up front.

[01:32:07] It’s okay to be afraid to speak in public, but to think you’re not worthy to be there when you were invited to be there is absurdity. Like, why that’s not even true.

[01:32:14] Why would that be there?

[01:32:16] And same thing in a job interview or a sales call or a date. You know, when I was in the dating world, like,

[01:32:23] why would you think she doesn’t want to be on this date?

[01:32:26] You asked her out and she said yes. Like, why would you like it? It doesn’t make any sense. But your brain says these things, and if you listen to them, it’s very dangerous.

[01:32:34] So I got better over that a hundred days about acknowledging it. I always heard it, but I didn’t have to listen.

[01:32:42] I didn’t have to believe it, put it that way.

[01:32:45] Kevin Choquette: So it’s just kind of, oh, there you are again. Yeah, moving on.

[01:32:48] Bill Douglas: Yeah, shut up. I’m not accepting that.

[01:32:51] I would literally say to it sometimes, shut up.

[01:32:55] If nobody’s around, I will talk to it. Like, you’re not welcome here. I don’t want you today.

[01:33:00] Kevin Choquette: Please go away.

[01:33:01] Bill Douglas: Yeah. And it does. Or when I lay down to bed, I have a meditation I say at night, and I release all negativity from today and welcome calm into my being.

[01:33:10] And that was a big help.

[01:33:12] So that my subconscious, when I was sleeping, wouldn’t go there.

[01:33:15] Kevin Choquette: Hmm.

[01:33:16] Bill Douglas: That was a. I didn’t. It’s not original. It’s not. It’s not a Bill ism, but I adapted it and I got a lot of value out of it. Like, there’s not many new thoughts in this world, Kevin.

[01:33:26] We’re all regurgitating and recirculating them.

[01:33:28] Kevin Choquette: Oh, a hundred percent.

[01:33:29] Bill Douglas: I don’t claim to be a brilliant. I claim to be a brilliant sufferer from the school of hard knocks. And I like learning.

[01:33:38] Kevin Choquette: Yeah.

[01:33:39] I was fortunate to spend a couple of days out at Esalen, like some very new agey woo kind of retreat place in Big Sur on the California coast. It’s a spectacular spot.

[01:33:50] Bill Douglas: Yeah.

[01:33:51] Kevin Choquette: They have a bookstore. And this would be like the epitome of a curated bookstore. Right? There’s. There’s maybe a hundred titles to your point. Like,

[01:34:02] it’s all been said,

[01:34:03] it’s all been done, it’s all been written about.

[01:34:06] Like, we just need to slow down,

[01:34:08] get sick, get signal.

[01:34:10] Bill Douglas: Right. Well, you said you hired a coach, right? A coach is not telling you anything you haven’t heard before, but the coach is holding you accountable. The coach is listening, helping you translate some of the noise.

[01:34:20] You talked about the noise earlier.

[01:34:22] Kevin Choquette: That’s it. Yeah.

[01:34:22] Bill Douglas: Well,

[01:34:23] I hire coaches. I mean, I love fitness. And I still hire a different coach every other year just to learn. I have.

[01:34:29] I have coaches in business. I have. I’ve had all kinds of coaches over my life and counselors.

[01:34:34] So we’re all helping each other.

[01:34:36] Like, like that’s. That’s all I. I have to be vulnerable enough to say I don’t know and accept that that’s not defeat, that’s not failure. That just means I don’t know.

[01:34:46] And then I want to know.

[01:34:48] Like I.

[01:34:49] To recognize that I don’t know is one step. And then I. I have a. I’m a problem aware. Right. And then if I can move to solution awareness, that’s the next step.

[01:34:59] I want to make this better.

[01:35:03] Kevin Choquette: You have put a lot on the table. I’m going to give you one more. Softball intrapreneurs, entrepreneurs early in the career,

[01:35:13] you know, in the darkest, before the dawn moment.

[01:35:17] Maybe they’ve just had an exit.

[01:35:19] You know, it’s. It’s the full life cycle.

[01:35:23] Any. Anything you want to share with just your sort of entrepreneurial brothers out there, if you will,

[01:35:31] and then we can wrap. But thank you, Bill. I appreciate your time.

[01:35:36] Bill Douglas: Oh, it’s been a pleasure to be here. And it’s gone really fast.

[01:35:40] To all the entrepreneurs out there,

[01:35:42] I wish I knew when I was 25.

[01:35:45] Number one, to pay myself first and number two, to take time off you working. You know, when you’re in college, you realize that studying past 1am is worthless. You’re just going to be so tired tomorrow,

[01:35:59] you stay up all night. Like the all nighters doesn’t do you any good. So to stop at 11 o’ clock and get seven hours sleep for your 8am exam is going to be better than studying all night.

[01:36:09] The same thing is true in your business. You can’t solve every problem.

[01:36:13] Pick the ones that matter, pick the three. They’re going to move the business forward.

[01:36:16] And if you work more than 50 hours a week, something’s wrong.

[01:36:19] Like you are the biggest asset in the business. If you ask me to speak directly to the entrepreneurs, I can speak to corporate people too.

[01:36:26] If you work for a firm that wants you more than 50 hours a week, something’s wrong with the firm.

[01:36:31] You are,

[01:36:32] you are worth more than that. Life is a gift. You need to savor it. And if you’re working 70, 80, 90 hours a week,

[01:36:39] that’s not a rite of passage, that’s not a bragging point. That is something seriously wrong.

[01:36:45] So value yourself more than that. Take time off. Give yourself time to breathe, smile and have some fun. Like why are you working?

[01:36:53] All right, yeah, you’re working to earn some money so you can go do fun stuff. Well, go do some fun stuff or go buy some fun stuff. Whatever’s valuable to you, right?

[01:37:01] Or go do nothing.

[01:37:03] I have some friends that value doing nothing and they have a racing simulator and they’d rather sit there and that’s cool like that. To them, that’s joy. Go do it.

[01:37:11] Just don’t work all the time. Like you’re. There’s a certain point of diminishing returns and you’re worth more than that.

[01:37:17] Kevin Choquette: Right on, man.

[01:37:19] So optic wise, you guys Google it, you’ll get into all of their stuff, you’ll be able to connect with Bill and his team.

[01:37:26] If it’s a fit for you, I encourage you to do so.

[01:37:30] And I have to say, you know, we live in this digital world.

[01:37:33] I don’t know all the things you can do, but I know subscribing and writing reviews matter for this little passion project of mine. So anything you can do there. Also appreciated.

[01:37:43] Bill Douglas: I’ll go spread that too. But for your audience, the peak property performance is the book the Fast Company published for us last year.

[01:37:50] And the website has the podcast on it and all kinds of free resources. So if you’re in commercial real estate,

[01:37:56] use that as a resource. We’re trying to change the industry relative to how they think about data and digital, so.

[01:38:03] Kevin Choquette: Right on, Bill.

[01:38:04] Bill Douglas: Yeah.

[01:38:04] Kevin Choquette: Hey, thanks. Thanks so much.

[01:38:05] Bill Douglas: It’s been a pleasure and a joy, Kevin. Thank you.