Welcome everyone to episode 24 of Offshoot. My guest today is Jason Luker, a Principal and Founder of Cardinal Group which is a vertically integrated institutional asset manager and developer focused on student housing. From a 2006 start at zero, Jason and his three partners have absolutely crushed. They have 2,000 employees, 100,000 beds, and $2B of gross asset value under management. With a P.O. Box as an office and just the four founders, to this scale in 15 years is incredible. This is a unicorn in real estate operating companies.
Jason’s really open here and provides ton of dimension around the challenges of growing the company, institutional capital, entrepreneurship, and strategy.
This one’s a bit like hopping in the back of an F-14 with an ace pilot only to have him explain the instruments, the different maneuvers, and some of his past flights. Jason’s career and life are really on a roll and I think you’ll enjoy the unique perspective he offers.
Listen in as we cover topics that include:
Why listening to your dad’s advice for a career path isn’t always a bad idea.
How capital markets are starting to thaw, and the fact that real estate is beginning to trade more freely now.
How having kids changed his view of the world and his business.
How Jason started with almost nothing yet successfully pitched an equity group to support them on a $30MM acquisition and how conviction that they would be successful or die trying influenced that capital raise.
How Cardinal Group is organized and how they think about the sharing of internal resources and profitability within each of their operating companies.
Why being the employer of choice has been a coup for Cardinal Group, and why they invest heavily in operational improvements and HR with a focus on recruitment, training and retention.
How they think about culture, providing the opportunity to grow into any role within the organization as a competitive advantage.
The nature of their capital inflows from internal funds to programmatic LP vehicles and how they are structured.
How the pull back in office investing is pushing capital allocators into alternatives within the real estate sector like student housing, data centers, B2R, and outdoor storage.
How they get called, weekly, by groups wanting to acquire their platform.
How large allocators of LP capital think about, or prefer, investing in sector-specific platforms vs. investing in co-mingled, closed ended funds. As well as how those investors would like to put GP capital into those platforms to own part of the sponsorship.
How gaining scale brings more, better, and cheaper capital to the table.
How Cardinal looks to be the tip of the spear in terms of consolidating the fragmented student housing industry.
The fact that this entire enterprise was self-funded, and not from deep pockets.
How they manage the partnership with 3 principal’s votes, any one of which can veto and create a no.
How brining in an executive team really freed up the founders to grow the company even more, and how that was hard to do.
The fact that hiring is a crap shoot.
How culture was at the foundation of Cardinal Group’s formation; they spent a lot of time thinking about what the place would be, long before they grew.
The sacrifices that Jason made in his 20s and 30s to get here.
The fact that they’ve never lost money.
How having confidence that you’ll figure it out is essential. Know that you don’t know, but that you do know people who have the answer.
Transcript
[00:49] Kevin Choquette: Welcome everyone to part two of my conversation with Jason Luker from Cardinal Group. If you haven’t already heard part one, please go back and give it a listen. We go deep on all manner of institutional capital markets as well as house tenacity, culture and a sharp executive team took Cardinal Group from zero to $2 billion of assets under management with 2,000 employees.
[01:20] Look, you’ve shared a ton on the business. It’s awesome. Thank you.
[01:24] Personal side, let’s switch over a little bit.
[01:29] This is like very broad, reaching question, but there are a lot of things I suspect you could have done with your life. And you did explain, you know, I asked my dad, like, hey, what are all your rich friends doing?
[01:42] It was either insurance or real estate, but even so, now you’re 15 years into it. I think you probably could have decided you didn’t like it or maybe gone and done something else.
[01:56] So like, on a personal level, why do you continue to trade commercial real estate? Like, what are you hoping to get out of this adventure and is there some part of it that feeds you outside of the monetary part?
[02:11] Jason Luker: Yeah, definitely, definitely. I, I like quickly fell in love with real estate because I, I had always like, I’d always had like a very commercial mindset and I always been an entrepreneur and started, you know, a dozen businesses from the time I was 10 years old or so.
[02:30] Real estate to me just had that perfect kind of mix of analytical and tactile.
[02:37] And I would say housing in particular, like, you couldn’t pay me to buy industrial real estate. I just have zero interest in that. But I’ve always been, you know, I’ve been like obsessed with this old house since I was little and just that the way people live and the environments they live and how they choose to live and where they choose to live, you know, all of the, you know, dynamics behind, you know, housing in general has been fascinating to me.
[03:03] Like, absolutely love that we get to provide housing for people and, you know, they’re living out their lives and all the daily dramas in an asset that we manage is actually like fascinating.
[03:14] And then I’d say on the, on the kind of technical side, real estate finance is amazing. Like everyone, everyone dress, dresses it up in fancy language in terms of art, but like it’s 8th grade algebra at.
[03:26] Right, at most. Right. So you don’t have to be that, you don’t have to be that smart. But it’s really still interesting to do.
[03:32] Um, and you know, there’s just endless, endless ways to put deals together. I mean this is something you excel at. It’s like there’s nothing more interesting than just taking this huge knotted up deal with all of these weird, you know, contingencies and hairballs associated with it and figuring out like an elegant path to, to getting it done.
[03:52] Like that’s just deeply satisfying to do. That never gets old.
[03:56] And then, you know, as the business has grown, you add on the people side of it that becomes like, really, you know, a lot of my relationships and social network is now like tied up with the business and like, so I love the fact that I have an excuse.
[04:18] I mean I’m, you know, a middle aged dude who gets to talk to his two best friends for like an hour or two every day. Like that’s a pretty unusual situation for most page.
[04:30] Kevin Choquette: Yeah.
[04:30] Jason Luker: So like to have that built in excuse to, you know, call Eric and Alex and shoot the, and you know, we’ll talk deals and the business and personal and like that’s a pretty remarkable thing that I don’t take for granted.
[04:43] So it’s hard to step away from something like that.
[04:48] Kevin Choquette: Yeah, that’s fantastic. And just a ice comment on the 8th grade algebra sort of aspect of real estate finance, I agree with you and I think a lot of it in terms of the lingo is kind of career management.
[05:09] Right. This is complicated and you don’t know what I’m talking about. So I’m going to keep using this. I mean every industry has its lingo and until you get through the lingo, you actually don’t really know what people are talking about.
[05:19] But the part that I also like, you’ve said it in that you can kind of go, okay, this is a hairy deal and how am I going to navigate it?
[05:27] What’s also amazing is that there’s no real regulatory guidelines onto what’s allowed. If somebody can say, hey, you put up all the money, I’ll take 20% on the return of capital and the profits and somebody wants to sign up for that, they can do it.
[05:47] If somebody’s, you know, literally anything that you can articulate, if you can Find a buyer on the other side, it’s game on. And that part’s really fun. It’s just. Yeah, there’s not a lot of spaces where you can be that, like unfettered by the.
[06:02] The construct.
[06:03] Jason Luker: Yeah. You know, whenever. Whenever I’m in a negotiation and people say, well, that’s market, or this isn’t market, my reaction is always exactly that. As market is whatever two willing people will do.
[06:14] So that’s exactly right. I don’t really care what you think. The market. How bad do you want this deal or how bad do I need it?
[06:21] Kevin Choquette: Yeah. Here’s my ask. Do you want to make a bid?
[06:24] Jason Luker: Exactly. Exactly.
[06:26] Kevin Choquette: So, look, honestly, the way you talk about the company, it seems you’re being very conscientious about how you relate to the employees and the culture. And in a lot of ways, that actually sounds like a give back.
[06:36] But I wonder if there’s anything that Cardinal does or that you do on the personal side just to give back to the community or. Or, you know, how that might show up in your life.
[06:48] Jason Luker: Yeah, most of that stuff does run through the business too. Yeah.
[06:52] And like, that’s been certainly a big push for us. So we have Cardinal Cares, which is our kind of charitable giving arm within the organization, and we certainly do a lot around Colorado, and the three of us do.
[07:06] Personally, I generally don’t talk about that kind of stuff. I’m kind of prefer to be in the background with it, but it’s certainly been an important thing. I think, you know, we on the personal side.
[07:20] Being mentors in the business has been probably the most satisfying thing I’ve done. You know, giving away money is fine, but like, actually mentoring is because I had some awesome mentors that were immensely helpful to me.
[07:34] And this business is a mentoring business. You have to just kind of learn it at the seat of the people who’ve done it before and learn all the terms of art.
[07:43] And so I think that side of the business has been probably the most satisfying piece.
[07:50] Kevin Choquette: Well, that’s a good segue. So mentors for you, like who. Who do you point to that’s kind of helped you along the way? Whether they’re mentors or just role models and people that you kind of looked up to.
[08:00] I just wonder what key relationships might have set you on this trajectory or giving you the perspective to understand, you know, like, while what you’re talking about isn’t rocket science, the symphony that you’ve been playing for 15 years and all of the different instruments and the way you guys are doing this honestly is like, you’ve got a really good grasp.
[08:21] I mean, you guys are the 1% of the 1%. So somebody’s, I’m suspecting, kind of helped you out along the way.
[08:29] Jason Luker: Yeah, I’ve been very lucky for sure. My, my first mentor in the business was actually Peter hall, who is my first mentor boss and he was the head of Center City Development Corporation for a long time.
[08:41] And he was just an old school real estate exec and like, and just kind of an old school business guy.
[08:47] And so that was really fun. That was like my first like real professional experience of like learning from someone who was like at the top of the game and just seeing how he carried himself, how he made decisions, how he thought through those things.
[09:01] And he was very, very generous with me with his time. Like, you know, brought me into meetings I had no business being in. Like, you know, let me sit in on phone calls, let me do things for him that would have been, you know, that were just totally outside of my scope that were just like so instructive and made me feel like I was in the mix, you know, like I was actually like learning and getting exposure to things.
[09:26] He was huge.
[09:28] Nate. Nate Mater, our mutual friend at London Group was awesome. And he taught me so much about how to look at real estate.
[09:38] He taught me, he was kind of sort of like how to analyze real estate generally, like certainly a lot of specific tactics. But I think Nate is one of the smartest guys I’ve ever worked with and he was a ton of fun.
[09:50] I used to make fun of him because he was about my age or so when I worked for him.
[09:56] Kevin Choquette: Totally.
[09:56] Jason Luker: I used to make fun of him because he would go home at 5:30 every day. I was like, dude, don’t you want to put in 100 hour weeks and like push this and like.
[10:04] But he was looking at sustainability across his entire career, which I’ve adopted since then.
[10:10] I’m like, maybe this guy’s on to something. It’s like if you want to keep doing this for a long time, like 100 hour weeks are not the ticket to longevity, that’s for sure.
[10:19] But he was amazingly helpful. And then I, I’ve. More recently in the last like 10 years or so, Mike Carp and Stu Shift up here who are at divcore, have been like really, really instrumental in how we think about kind of platform because they built an amazing.
[10:38] Divco west and divcore have built like an unbelievable debt office platform and they invested with us a little bit in their GP and they Were really helpful in raising our first fund.
[10:49] And they kind of gave me, I think, a lot more insight into how the game is played at that level. You know, I was, I think, stuck thinking a little bit small ball for.
[10:59] Kevin Choquette: A while when on the deal, by deal basis, get the promote, do the next deal.
[11:04] Jason Luker: Exactly, exactly. And they kind of, I think, opened my eyes a little bit. It’s like, hey, the scale is what matters and here’s how it’s done, here’s how you approach this.
[11:13] And they really also taught me how to, like, I think they taught me about kind of institutional, like capital markets. Like, I had a much more of a chauffeur’s like, theoretical understanding of it.
[11:24] And they were incredibly successful raising money. You know, I think they’ve got 20 some billion under management right now.
[11:33] So it was definitely an education and they were super helpful. And they’re also like old school New York real estate dudes who are just tough as nails. And I just like that, like, it was just f fun being around them, you know what I mean?
[11:44] Kevin Choquette: What about the personal side? Any challenges you’ve had to come through just to, just to get here. And I’m thinking of things like I’m gonna just make them up just to get you in the, where my head’s at.
[11:56] Like any physical handicap or mental challenges or health scares or relationship things. Anything that has been a significant impediment outside of the professional challenges that you’ve been articulating.
[12:10] Jason Luker: Yeah, you know, certainly I have had that in spades, for sure. Um, you know, I worked myself to death in my 20s and 30s and like, suffered a lot for that.
[12:22] Suffered. You know, we, we had this kind of saying. So I, I, I played baseball in college and there was this idea that you had a social life, you had academic success and you had athletic success, and you got to pick two of those.
[12:38] And that actually translated when I started the business as well. And like social life, you can have business success or you can be healthy.
[12:48] And I let the health side slip, which was unusual for me because I was always, I’ve always been very active, but I let it slip for sure. I mean, I even stopped surfing, which was, you know, been an obsession for my life.
[13:02] I stopped for like five years, which was crazy. But, you know, I felt like I needed to give absolutely everything to this business. I’ve got a whole lot, you know, and that cost me a lot.
[13:12] And then, you know, socially and like, I did not have a normal 20s.
[13:17] You know, I just, I didn’t have that experience.
[13:21] So Certainly that. But like on the, in the grand scheme of things, man, I was born on third base. I’ve got no illusions about that. You know, my parents aren’t wealthy, but they made enough money to send me to private schools that were really well attended.
[13:35] You know, I’ve, I’ve been schooled in the best institutions. I’ve always lived in a safe place. You know, when I started the business, if it fell like my parents were going to bail me out, but I could sleep at their house, you know, there was no, like, failure.
[13:50] Failure would have been embarrassing. It wouldn’t have been devastating.
[13:54] So like, you know, that gave me a tremendous amount of freedom to take risks.
[14:00] So, yeah, so I certainly sacrificed a lot. But, you know, I, I think I got off pretty easy where we are compared to most people that have to sacrifice that.
[14:10] And I certainly have rather done it for myself than working at Blackstone for 10 years, you know.
[14:14] Kevin Choquette: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.
[14:17] You just mentioned the idea of failing.
[14:22] Have you had any, you know, I realize this is like a contradictory term, but any favorite failures, any, any particular zingers that, that taught you something that you needed to learn?
[14:36] I mean, this notion of like, experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you expected.
[14:41] Jason Luker: Oh man. Yeah. Where do I even start on that?
[14:45] I can’t even begin to explain the amount of stuff I up over the years.
[14:49] The problem with me is I’m not smart enough to not do it again, you know, **** it, I already did this once too.
[14:55] Yeah, I keep unfortunately learning the same lesson twice, which is not, not super helpful. You know, we’ve actually been fortunate and I, I, I, you know, credit this to just where the markets are, but we’ve never lost money on a deal.
[15:10] Kevin Choquette: I think our, wow, that’s fantastic.
[15:12] Jason Luker: Our lowest returning deal was like an 8 IRR over four years or something like that.
[15:19] And most of our failures, frankly, have just been in, like, have just been in building the business, hiring the wrong people, putting the, you know, people who weren’t ready for roles over important parts of the business.
[15:33] Like most of our failures have been sort of around the choppiness of, you know, startup, you know, organization and things like that.
[15:43] You know, where we’ve lost some, we lost some like key clients early on because we screwed up something or other that was totally predictable, that we should have known. None of it turned out to be fatal, certainly.
[15:56] But man, we’ve made a lot of mistakes along the way, but like, I don’t know, I’ve always had the sort of mindset that’s like, well, what are you going to do?
[16:04] Like, you going to curl up in a ball and die? Or, like, go fix it? You know, like, almost anything can be unwound, you know, if you’re willing to work hard enough.
[16:13] Kevin Choquette: Well, there’s another part. If you go back to the comment about, you know, the 15 duplexes, and I know I’m taking some editorial liberty there, and talking to the guy about the, the $30 million acquisition, that entire idea of, like, fake until you make it, it’s not, it’s not the faking it of, like, your own commitment and tenacity, but it’s the faking it of, like, trusting that your, your credentials are secondary to who you are.
[16:39] And same same thing here, right? Like, you make a mistake, you dust yourself off. You, you just keep going. You’re like, okay, let’s hope I don’t have to do it again.
[16:48] Jason Luker: Totally. Yeah. I, I, my partners and I have always kind of had the mindset that we’ll sort of figure it out, you know, like, yeah, there’s a certain arrogance involved in that, certainly, but, like, I don’t know, I, I, I feel like we’ll figure it out.
[17:03] There’s, you know, I certainly don’t know everything, but I know people who do know everything. I could probably get the answer for you, you know.
[17:12] Kevin Choquette: Yeah. And that arrogance is, is really just healthy confidence. It’s not, I don’t think you’re saying, like, I know everything. I think I’m just saying I trust that I can work through the process and get there.
[17:25] Jason Luker: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
[17:28] Kevin Choquette: So let’s talk about just success. Right? Like, you go back, I love this, like, 2002 Toyota pickup idea to where you guys are now and early. You’re just, you’re just really hoping that, you know, you’re the visual as you’re on the desert island.
[17:45] You’re putting little messages in the glass bottle. You’re sending them out, a bunch of them every day, and you’re waiting for somebody to send a message back. And eventually you get a message back.
[17:54] You’re like, whoa, these guys actually want to do something. And at this point, I have to imagine, like, the shore is just littered with bottles of messages that are people trying to get through to do whatever they want your time to be consumed with.
[18:10] And, you know, that’s kind of one aspect of being successful is our time gets crowded and there’s a lot of things competing for our attention. It goes back to this discussion of, like, working in the business versus on the Business and all of that.
[18:24] I just wonder how you manage that challenge and the change from the early days to now.
[18:31] Jason Luker: Yeah, it’s, it’s a great question because it’s kind of a. It’s very difficult. Like, as the business grows and it becomes more successful, the phone starts to ring for a lot of opportunities that are tangential to your core business and the ability to have the discipline to exploit your market advantages and your kind of structural advantages that you have and keep your focus there and not get distracted while at the same time, which sounds contradictory, being sort of open enough to understand that you do need to grow and change in order to like, maintain those market advantages.
[19:19] And a lot of that growth and change can entail doing things you might not be totally suited to do.
[19:25] So I think we have a very good sense of what our circle of competency is like and understand how to sort of stay in our lane. While, like, early on we were very entrepreneurial and would do almost anything that sounded interesting.
[19:41] And now I think we’re a lot more protective of our time and our treasure.
[19:46] To say, like, if we’re going to go into X, Y or Z, it’s gotta be like, I have to have a clear path. We always ask that question, like, what needs to happen for this to be successful?
[19:57] And like, you know, give me some probabilistic thinking on these outcomes here.
[20:02] Say, like, if, if this bank shot needs to hit off the garage and then off the hood of the car and then the top of the backboard.
[20:11] You know what I mean? Like, I want free throws. I want straight up free throws.
[20:15] Kevin Choquette: Backboard, just right off the backboard.
[20:18] Jason Luker: So like, that, that is actually very difficult. I’ve seen this a lot with friends as well as one guy in particular I know, who’s been like, amazingly successful. But, you know, the phone just rings and then you look up three years later and you’re like, how did I get into all these weird businesses and lines and stuff?
[20:37] It’s like, well, it all just sounded interesting at time, you know, but keeping your eye on your core business, like LeBron always says, like, first things first. Like, people hire me to sell their products because I’m good at basketball.
[20:50] If I’m no longer good at basketball, I don’t get any of this other. So like, I need, I need good at basketball first and foremost, you know.
[20:59] Kevin Choquette: And it’s a paradox, right? It’s, I don’t, I don’t even think it’s contradictory. It’s. It’s the one thing of like, hey, this is where my core competence is. I’m going to stay here.
[21:07] And at the same time, you just brought something up that seems kind of crazy, but it actually caught my attention and I don’t want to be so myopic that I don’t even entertain the fact that that could be a multiplier for my business.
[21:20] Jason Luker: Totally, totally.
[21:24] Kevin Choquette: Routines, like daily routines. Right. And I don’t know how you shape up on all of this. You mentioned SERP and you know, it sounds like you maybe picked up the fitness thing after giving it a rest for a bit.
[21:36] But what, what might you do on the regular to try to get your head right before you step on the court of, of your business?
[21:42] Jason Luker: Yeah, that’s funny. I, I, I exercise every single day now.
[21:46] Kevin Choquette: Nice.
[21:47] Jason Luker: That’s, I’m, I’m back. But I’m, I’m like, you know, that’s like classic middle aged dude who wants to live forever type anxiety. Right.
[21:55] So like, you know, I stay active. So I, I got back in the water probably seven or eight years ago, which has been nice. I live up here in the Bay Area, so it’s, you know, it’s kind of a year round outdoor paradise.
[22:07] But no, I definitely, I definitely stay fit a lot. But I’ve got two young kids at home right now and so my perspective has changed a lot and the balance of my day is a lot different.
[22:20] So I can’t burn it down at work like I used to, you know, one, just the raw hours away, I don’t, that’s like an unacceptable trade off for me. And then two, the, like, I don’t want to come home drained either.
[22:37] Kevin Choquette: Yeah.
[22:38] Jason Luker: You know, like, that’s not acceptable to me either. So, you know, I live a lot more balanced life like, you know, early on, like cost me a lot relationship wise, the way I, I approach work.
[22:51] And I’ve got a whole lot more balance in my life. I’m still not cool and I’m certainly not laid back, but I’m better than I used to be, that’s for sure.
[23:02] Kevin Choquette: What about the end of the day? You got anything that gives you relief? Where do you kick up your feet and just kind of go, all right, that was a good day?
[23:09] Jason Luker: You know, honestly, I do absolutely, like, I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I, I, I, I read books. That’s functionally what I do to like relax.
[23:21] And I watch, I watch a lot of like engineering on like YouTube, like complex engineering projects. Yeah, they’re fascinating to me, like, you know, building some enormous bridge in Japan or Something like that is like endlessly fascinating, all the technical detail.
[23:38] So, yeah, I waste a lot of time doing that at night after the kids are asleep.
[23:43] Kevin Choquette: That sounds nice, actually.
[23:45] Jason Luker: Yeah, it’s pretty cool.
[23:46] Kevin Choquette: I got two more for you. But you know, you’ve kind of, I’m guessing by the magnitude of the venture that you’ve created that this question I hope has like some, some resonance.
[24:00] And it’s around like the utility of money.
[24:04] We, you know, if you kind of go Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, right, it’s food and then it’s shelter. And then I think at the top we’ve got self actualization, but money plays a part in that somehow.
[24:18] And at some point you might get to a point where the, the money doesn’t have the same preciousness that it did when you start the journey because there might be a little bit of extra.
[24:35] And I just wonder how you think about the utility of money. Like, what is it once you’ve got enough? Like, I know that’s kind of a super esoteric question and you could feel free to punt on it, but if you’ve got thoughts, I’d love to hear him.
[24:48] Jason Luker: No, I, I certainly do. I mean, when, you know, my first job, I think I made like $32,000. Yeah, which this was not 1970 either. Like, that was, that wasn’t back when I, when I was at that job too.
[25:03] It’s like I, you know, it was like sharing a bedroom with friends. And so like, there was certainly a long period there or like, I was certainly motivated by that.
[25:15] And then you have the first couple waves of success and like, it feels amazing for like six weeks and then you go back to just being you.
[25:26] And so like, if that happens enough that you’re sort of like, okay, I’ve sort of reached the end of like, I, I’m not like, from a consumption standpoint. Like, look, I, I understand in the grander scheme of things, like, I live a ridiculous lifestyle, but it’s actually a pretty, like, we don’t consume a whole lot.
[25:47] Like, that’s not really my thing.
[25:51] But I will say, you know, the difference between, you know, 50 and $150,000 a year is life changing.
[26:00] The difference between 150 and 15 is really not anything, you know, and so like, and then certainly 15 to 15 is like, who cares at that point?
[26:11] So like, you know, I dipped my toe and all that stuff early on when we first started having success and it was a ton of fun and I was just kind of like, ah, tried it not interested and go back to my normal life.
[26:20] Like, you know, if I didn’t have to do anything all day, I would probably look at real estate deals and, you know, surf a few times a week and hang out with my family.
[26:29] So, like, I’m kind of doing what I would do if I won the lottery anyway, so why would I, you know, stop it? So.
[26:37] But yeah, you know, especially early on when you’re starting out in your career like that drive to make enough and secure resources to be able to support yourself first and then hopefully other people is like pretty hard.
[26:50] But like, I don’t know, my wife, my wife’s a do gooder and we’re going to die with zero. So nice. You know, we’re going to. Yeah, that money’s just gone.
[26:59] You know, that’s gone when I’m gone.
[27:01] Kevin Choquette: I like it.
[27:03] But there’s another thing you’re saying, which is your work has become an expression of self. And it sounds. Anyway, again, I don’t want to be putting words into your mouth.
[27:15] It sounds like it is intrinsically rewarding. You enjoy manifesting and creating with your, your friends and like having executed strategies and built something that, you know, has some real gravity to it.
[27:34] Jason Luker: Totally. It’s very satisfying. It is very satisfying. The work is really fun and the people are really fun and like, yeah, it’s very satisfying to build something kind of big and long term like this.
[27:47] Kevin Choquette: So think of your $32,000 a year self or think of yourself, I don’t know, say seven years ago or think of yourself three years ago. I know you understand full and well that the entrepreneur’s ride is days of glory and then just days of hell and everything in between.
[28:06] And you know, you just kind of go like, okay, this is a day. I’m not going to make any decisions that are important today.
[28:13] This is an amazing day. I’m similarly not going to make any really important decisions today, but ideas you might want to share to any of the entrepreneurs anywhere in their life cycle in terms of, you know, maybe things you wish you could have learned earlier or words of encouragement, like anything that comes up for you in terms of, you know, helping them, helping guys out, guys and gals on their journey.
[28:38] Jason Luker: Yeah, I’d say, you know, early on one of my superpowers was that I was sort of unembarrassable. If that’s a word I would try and ask anything. My partner, Eric Frank is like, he’s like that 10x like he just doesn’t care.
[28:55] Like, I won’t be Embarrassed by asking a stupid question or like, you know, trying to get in over my head and like, that kind of talent. Because like, there’s nothing more awkward than being 24 years old and asking people for loads of money to do things.
[29:11] Like, that’s a very difficult conversation for people to have. Like, you’re either overly arrogant and they’re like, this 24 year old doesn’t know what the hell they’re doing. There’s no chance I’m giving them money.
[29:20] Or you’re overly deferential and, you know, you lack sort of the confidence to. To do it. So, like being sort of unembarrassable and willing to go for it, I think is probably like you.
[29:33] You can’t. You just can’t get started without that.
[29:36] And then the lesson that I continue to learn every day is survival is victory.
[29:42] Like, just keep going and making the next best decision is like, is it like you can’t map everything out? Like, my five year plan from five years ago did not have me doing what I’m doing today, like in the business, but we just kept making the next right decision, you know, and like, the more you keep the music going, the more inevitable it becomes.
[30:10] So a lot. It’s so. There are so many chances to just bail out early and I’m really glad we kept it going.
[30:17] And I don’t know what it looks like over the next 10, 15, 20 years, but like, you know, who the hell knows? But like, the idea that we’ll just keep going and keep compounding is probably the secret sauce.
[30:30] Kevin Choquette: Yeah. Awesome.
[30:33] So the website and everything anybody could ever want to find for you guys is Cardinal Group. Google it, you guys can’t miss it.
[30:44] For all the listeners who’ve come this far, thank you for taking the time. My production guys tell me to remind you to go and put up a review if you enjoyed it.
[30:51] And Jason, thank you very much for sharing your time with me and all the listeners. Any closing is yours. And again, thank you very much.
[31:02] Jason Luker: Yeah, it’s been a ton of fun, man. I appreciate it and I’m glad you reached out and I’ve really enjoyed our friendship and it’s cool to see it come full circle with this.
[31:11] Kevin Choquette: Yeah. Yes, it is. I agree. All right, thanks, Jason.
[31:16] Jason Luker: Thank you.
