Dave Marcinkowski WINS by Innovating in a Tech-Adverse Industry

Episode Summary

In this episode of Win What's Important Now, host Carrie Richardson interviews Dave Marcinkowski, founder of Madera Residential and nominee for the EY Entrepreneur of the Year award. Dave shares his entrepreneurial journey from his early days as a bookkeeper to leading multiple successful ventures in real estate, property technology (prop tech), and financial technology (fintech). The conversation delves into the challenges and innovations that have defined Madera Residential, as well as Dave's vision for the future of real estate and technology integration.

Episode Highlights

• Dave’s Background and Early Career: Transition from economics graduate to real estate entrepreneur.
• Founding Madera Residential: The initial challenges and successes, including the impact of Hurricane Ike and the 2008 financial crisis.
• Innovations in Property Technology: Development of Quext and its impact on the real estate industry.
• Fintech Solutions for Renters: Introduction of Rent Plus and other fintech initiatives aimed at improving renters’ financial health.
• Future of Real Estate and Technology: Scaling Madera Residential and expanding into new markets.
• Advice for Aspiring Entrepreneurs: Dave’s insights on persistence, innovation, and the importance of building a supportive team.

Guest Quotes

• "I think you know you're an entrepreneur when you're taking a risk, it doesn’t go well, and you have the passion and the heart to fight through it."
• "The real estate industry is way behind as it relates to technology. We're a 'this is how we've always done it' industry."
• "Living in a multifamily world is different and as an industry, we have to adapt to that."

Guest Information

Dave Marcinkowski is the founder of Madera Residential, a leading real estate investment company based in Lubbock, Texas. With over 32 years in the apartment industry, Dave has spearheaded numerous initiatives in property technology and financial technology, helping to modernize and improve the multifamily housing sector. Dave is a nominee for the prestigious EY Entrepreneur of the Year award.

Links and Resources Mentioned

• Madera Residential
• Quext
• EY Entrepreneur of the Year
• Rent Plus
• Amazon W

Carrie Richardson and Ian Richardson host the WIN Podcast - What's Important Now?

Serial entrepreneurs, life partners and business partners, they have successfully exited from multiple businesses (IT, call center, real estate, marketing) and they help other business owners create their own versions of success.

Ian is certified in Eagle Center For Leadership Making A Difference, Paterson StratOp, and LifePlan.

Carrie has helped create and execute successful outbound sales strategies for over 1200 technology-focused businesses including MSPs, manufacturers, distributors and SaaS firms.

Learn more at www.foxcrowgroup.com

Book time with either of them here: https://randr.consulting/connect

Be a guest on WIN! We host successful entrepreneurs who share advice with other entrepreneurs on how to build, grow or sell a business using examples from their own experience.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Carrie Richardson: Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to win what's important now. My name is Carrie Richardson. . And today we're asking that question to Dave Marcinkowski, who is the founder of Madera residential out of Lubbock, Texas.

[00:00:14] Carrie Richardson: Dave is also one of the nominees for the EY entrepreneur of the year. Congratulations, Dave. 

[00:00:20] Dave Marcinkowski: Thanks, Carrie. I appreciate that. Yeah, it's very humbling to get the opportunity to be considered for EY's Entrepreneur of the Year award. It's been a really cool process too.

[00:00:28] Dave Marcinkowski: It's been a lot of fun. 

[00:00:30] Carrie Richardson: Tell me a little bit about what caught the judge's eyes about Madera Residential. 

[00:00:36] Dave Marcinkowski: A friend of mine nominated nominated me all of a sudden out of left field.

[00:00:39] Dave Marcinkowski: And while I knew about EY's. Entrepreneur of the Year award just never really thought about actually going through the process. And so it's been really enlightening. I think what the judges are looking for are groups that have made an impact on people, not just been successful financially or as an organization, but really built something that has a real and [00:01:00] lasting impact on people, which it's cool to be considered for award like that.

[00:01:05] Carrie Richardson: Buildings have a pretty lasting impression on people in their communities. So let's get right into how you got started. We talked a little bit before the podcast began and you mentioned that you bought your first property in 2008, but that you started around 2004. So walk us through the journey from where you began to where you are today.

[00:01:25] Dave Marcinkowski: Real estate's a really interesting thing. Not a lot of people go to college to get into real estate. They'll get into finance or something and just backdoor into real estate. I didn't go to college to go to get into real estate. I have an economics degree with a concentration in accounting and needed a job out of college.

[00:01:39] Dave Marcinkowski: And I went to work for, a company called Ed Rosen Sons out of Detroit, a good size, family owned, apartment ownership and operator company. And I got in at the bottom level. I got in as a bookkeeper. And I spent three years there and learned a tremendous amount. You really have to learn on the job.

[00:01:57] Dave Marcinkowski: And I did and graduated up to where I [00:02:00] was essentially running the bookkeeping department, but I had bigger aspirations and was able to land a job as director of training for a medium sized apartment community or a company out of Chicago, spent a decade in Chicago with a great company called Marquette management and Again, learned a lot, started in training, really moved over into the operational side of things and have really been an operations junkie around apartments my whole career.

[00:02:23] Dave Marcinkowski: Met a girl from Lubbock, moved to Lubbock, got, met great partners down here. At first in 2004, what is now Madeira Residential, we were managing apartments for other people and doing well. We were successful. And we finally in 2008 said, you know what we're making money for a lot of other people.

[00:02:41] Dave Marcinkowski: Why don't we see if we can do it ourself? And so we were blessed to find a group of guys out here in West Texas that sponsored our first deal. In July of 2008, we bought a 392 unit apartment community in Baytown, Texas, probably the worst time and worst location in human [00:03:00] history to buy an apartment community.

[00:03:01] Dave Marcinkowski: We bought it at a great price. We bought it. We had a great business plan around it, but we didn't expect for Hurricane Ike to come pouring through Houston in September of 2008. Sustained a ton of damage as it relates to that. And then in October of 2008, the financial hurricane, the financial crisis hit and Baytown, which sits in the shipping channel of Houston was just devastated.

[00:03:21] Dave Marcinkowski: To say everything that could go wrong, went wrong would actually be an understatement. It was mind boggling. I practically lived in Baytown for two, two and a half years. And while those were at the time, the worst of times, They ended up being a really important chapter in my personal and business professional career really forced us as partners to have to Solve big hairy problems and have to work through real challenges.

[00:03:46] Dave Marcinkowski: We thought we were good. And maybe on some levels we were, but we weren't nearly good enough to be able to take on that storm. And we really, God's will, we worked our way through it. And the cool part of the story is five years later, we sold that deal. [00:04:00] We tripled our investors money.

[00:04:02] Dave Marcinkowski: And we were able to convince those same investors to invest in our second deal in April of 2010, which was a home run from the get go. And we were able to take all those learnings from our career and really parlay it to where, we've done about 140 apartment deals. In the last 15 years since we started. Today, we have about 12, 000 apartment units, mostly in the DFW and Houston markets all Texas.

[00:04:26] Dave Marcinkowski: That's just been our strategy. We know Texas really well. So we've targeted markets that we know. We're also building about another 4, 000 units, probably about a billion and a half dollars worth of real estate today. We have about 4 billion worth of real estate under management today.

[00:04:40] Dave Marcinkowski: Hard to believe in 15 years ago, like just doing that first deal. And to think that here we are today it's very amazing. It's, it is quite a blessing. 

[00:04:50] Carrie Richardson: Oh, it's an incredible story. My favorite stories are always the then this terrible thing happened. 

[00:04:55] Dave Marcinkowski: I think that kind of speaks to why we've done what we did.[00:05:00] People ask me, when did you know you were an entrepreneur? I think you know, you're an entrepreneur when you're coming up with something, you're taking a risk and it doesn't go well and you have the passion and the heart and the desire to fight through it.

[00:05:11] Dave Marcinkowski: Because I think that happens to everybody at some point in time in their career. And I think the real entrepreneurs are the ones who try to figure it out and not only figure it out once, but figure it out with a, with like, how do we apply that to what we do going forward? 

[00:05:25] Carrie Richardson: I think when you're not an entrepreneur, they call that scrambling.

[00:05:28] Carrie Richardson: And when you are an entrepreneur, they call it pivoting because it sounds a little more. We expected this might happen. So here's our plan B that I came up with on the way here in the car. 

[00:05:41] Dave Marcinkowski: Yeah, Carrie, I'll tell you it was scrambling. We did not have, there was, it was like we had to dive into plans E, F, G, and H at various times for that whole experience.

[00:05:48] Dave Marcinkowski: It forces you to really have to look at things through a lens that solves a problem. And you really get to identify opportunities then too, because it's man, I wish. We had a solution for this that existed that maybe didn't [00:06:00] exist. And that's what led us to our second company, which is this company called Quext, which is a prop tech company.

[00:06:05] Dave Marcinkowski: The real estate industry is way behind as it relates to technology. We're a, "this is how we've always done it" industry and so to get us off center from that and trying new things has been really challenging. And because of that, we're behind and so tried to work with a number of different groups on seeing the future of technology and embracing it and realizing that the industry just wasn't ready for it.

[00:06:29] Dave Marcinkowski: And so I was able to convince my partners to start this company Quext. And we started to just solve problems for Madera and Madera is this awesome sandbox. We get to go and create a cool solution, really make it right. Harden it on our properties and then take it out to the marketplace. We've now done that like 11 different times, 11 different products that are Quext related products today.

[00:06:50] Dave Marcinkowski: And they're cool. Like we invented a smart thermostat hub just for apartments. Everybody's talking about sensors and wanting to control things. You've got Google nest, you got smart [00:07:00] locks, you got smart lights, but we needed a platform that could really control all those specific to multifamily real estate.

[00:07:06] Dave Marcinkowski: Everything that was being built for the single family house. Challenges there is. You don't have people moving in and out of single family rentals like you do in apartments. And so you need a solution that can adapt to that. You need a solution that maybe the, you're going to have lots of different Wi Fi solutions that you have to tap into in a multifamily world.

[00:07:26] Dave Marcinkowski: So you need a solution that's going to be able to lay over the whole property versus a single family where you just put internet in your house and then you plug things in. And it needs to be easy. And that's one of our solutions.

[00:07:36] Carrie Richardson: So you had 12, 000 use cases to experiment on. Yeah. Yeah. So you took on property tech and I understand then you moved into FinTech. Tell us a little bit about the the evolution from real estate into now one of the hottest industries.

[00:07:53] Dave Marcinkowski: When we started buying apartments in 2008, we would call those workforce housing. Those were renters by necessity. All of our [00:08:00] customers were renters who really were not in a position to buy a house . They were renting because that was really the only option that they had.

[00:08:06] Dave Marcinkowski: And one of the things that we saw through that was our renters were paying us the majority of the time with money orders. And we're really curious, like, why would you do that? That's an expensive way of paying your rent. There's some risk involved there. And so we went and met with a number of focus groups of our residents to ask them that question.

[00:08:24] Dave Marcinkowski: What we learned was, they don't trust the banks. They think banks are for rich people. And then the other thing we heard was there was just this lack of financial understanding .

[00:08:32] Dave Marcinkowski: They really felt that paying with the money order was the safest form of payment because at the end of the day, they're going to have a perforated carbon copy of the money order that says, Look, I paid my rent . 

[00:08:43] Dave Marcinkowski: What if you could just have your money drafted out of your bank account? If would cost you essentially nothing to do that. You wouldn't have to take the time off to go do that. You wouldn't have to take the risk of carrying a lot of cash around. And people's light bulbs went off with people like yeah, I just haven't really thought about it that way.

[00:08:59] Dave Marcinkowski: And so we built[00:09:00] a FinTech solution a digital bank, essentially bank by phone. You can do everything on your phone with our bank app outside of writing a check. You can wire money, you can deposit money, you can do a number of different things there. And let's make it for renters where if they get approved to live in an apartment, they're automatically approved for this prepaid visa, FDIC insured bank account, we call it rent plus what we did is we layered in additional services.

[00:09:28] Dave Marcinkowski: People don't realize in the apartment industry, we don't report rent and utilities to your credit report very much. It's starting to become more of the norm. If you have the money drafted out of your bank account, we're going to report your rent and your utilities that you pay to your landlord on your credit report, we're going to help you improve your credit score while you're living in our properties.

[00:09:45] Dave Marcinkowski: The other thing we did, I think, which I think is cool, is our partner on this is Visa. We're using Visa Rewards to incentivize renters to do the right thing. Pay your rent on time, you earn Visa Rewards. You refer a friend, they'll move in the property, you receive Visa Rewards. We're [00:10:00] offering them an alternative that saves them money, makes their life more convenient and offers, enhances their lifestyle, their financial. I like to tell people, we help people level up financially living in one of our apartments. We're no longer just shelter and a place to live. We're actually

[00:10:13] Dave Marcinkowski: partnering with them and providing them solutions that really truly make their lives better. 

[00:10:19] Carrie Richardson: So is that part of Madera or is that a completely different company?

[00:10:23] Dave Marcinkowski: Three different companies. So we have Madera, which is the real estate side of things. We have Quext the holding company for Quext is called EDST, which stands for Everyone Deserves Smart Technology.

[00:10:33] Dave Marcinkowski: And we have 11 different solutions underneath that. And then we have this other holding company for the FinTechs called Espuela. Which is it's we actually own a bank as a part of a Espuela, and then we have the fintech, Rent Plus I told you about we have two additional fintechs, we have one that's called Viva First, which is a digital bank for the Latino community.

[00:10:54] Dave Marcinkowski: And then we have one called Fan Inc, which is a digital bank for student athletes with NIL deals. A hot topic in [00:11:00] today's environment, but we actually built, we basically took our same technology and ideas around our other two fintechs and said, what if we built a solution like this? For the student athlete, but we're going to do things like embed an NFT system inside of our digital bank, where a student athlete can create their own digital baseball cards for their fans.

[00:11:19] Dave Marcinkowski: And we've done a number of things like that specific to that niche to try to offer them a unique solution that in today's environment, I don't think exists. 

[00:11:28] Carrie Richardson: Who's the visionary behind all this? Do you just stay up late at night wondering what kind of interesting things you can create ?

[00:11:34] Dave Marcinkowski: We've hired an incredible team. It's all collaborative. No question about it. Quext and some of these newer technology ideas started from me, but they've been taken and built into something even beyond what I would have thought. I think a great example of that is our smart thermostat hub that we end up building.

[00:11:51] Dave Marcinkowski: I had this really cool idea of building a smart door. What if we put all this cool tech in the front door and we like, you had a package [00:12:00] hatch. The lock was already You built a thermostat inside of the door, but it was all in this one door. And we could just, we have we had all this, we have all these patents around doors, plugging in to an electrical outlet and all these different solutions.

[00:12:14] Dave Marcinkowski: And so I was. Really excited about the smart door. I thought that was like the greatest idea ever. And we actually convinced AT& T to help us build a smart door. And we went through the process of building it. And I got a call one day from the head engineer on the AT& T side. And he's Hey, we've got a couple of problems.

[00:12:30] Dave Marcinkowski: First, your door is going to weigh a couple hundred pounds. I'm not sure we can get a hinge big enough to hold your door. And it's going to cost, it's going to cost like five or 6, 000. You think people would pay five or 6, 000 for a front door and totally killed my idea and I was totally dejected, but what was beautiful about it was, is my team came together trying to make me feel a little bit better and they started to look at it from a different approach.

[00:12:52] Dave Marcinkowski: And from there came this idea of building a smart thermostat where we embedded the hub, the brains of the operation [00:13:00] inside of it. Thermostats are generally in an apartment community. They're centrally located. They have power coming to them already, so we don't have to go and overcome those two solutions.

[00:13:09] Dave Marcinkowski: People don't tend to jack with their thermostats. They don't want to do something that's going to make it where they can't turn up and down their heater or a C. And end up being a really novel thought. We've got a lot of I P around that. And then we layered into it a very unique technology.

[00:13:23] Dave Marcinkowski: We don't need Wi Fi or cellular or any kind of broadband like that for our technology. We use a technology called LoRa WAN, which stands for long range wide area network, which is essentially a radio frequency. Yeah. So one of the guys in our team was working for, before he came to work for us, a agriculture startup where they were planning sensors around a farm to track precipitation.

[00:13:45] Dave Marcinkowski: And he was using this radio frequency to collect, small packets of data. You can't send big data, but you can send small packets of data. Did it rain? How much rain? Just different things like that. And we built a LoRaWAN based [00:14:00] smart thermostats where we can stand up a single antenna on a leasing office and we can control all the smart devices in a very secure, even more secure way, I would argue, than Wi Fi or cellular at a very low cost.

[00:14:12] Dave Marcinkowski: LoRaWAN is essentially free. We, funny story there, we actually got laughed out of a couple meetings with some groups that were going to help build that with us. And we were really dejected and we were doing some soul searching going, okay, are we really sure those guys seem really smart.

[00:14:25] Dave Marcinkowski: They seem to know what they're talking about and they're telling us it's cute, but. No, thank you. What are we missing? And we stayed bound and determined. And then this this little company in Seattle called Amazon Web Services came out with a LoRa network for smart technology. And fortunately for us, we had some connections there.

[00:14:42] Dave Marcinkowski: And our thermostat hub has now been been featured at ReInvent with featured first in 2020. And then it's been brought up again in 2022 that's been a, that's been a kind of a, another cool story about our evolution. 

[00:14:55] Carrie Richardson: What's the process like going from idea to [00:15:00] execution?

[00:15:00] Carrie Richardson: I love hearing about how people structure their plans: 5, 000 

[00:15:06] Carrie Richardson: door notwithstanding. 

[00:15:08] Dave Marcinkowski: Yeah, 5, 000 door is notwithstanding. We've gotten better at that. That's an area that I would say, trial and error. Unfortunately, I think, you read books and everybody's got their own opinions.

[00:15:17] Dave Marcinkowski: I think when it comes to that, every idea is a fingerprint and it requires some different look at how you're going to do that. For us, I'd say it was, Run as fast as you can, get it to an MVP where you could go again. The beauty of Madera is, that's our sandbox where we could go put it on properties, get real people using things and then being patient.

[00:15:39] Dave Marcinkowski: With our smart thermostat hub, it was 2018 when we put that. First on an initial property, we really didn't start selling it to the outside market until last summer. And so we spent the time and the energy, the money to be able to make sure that it was right before we hit the market with it.

[00:15:57] Carrie Richardson: Are there milestones that people hit? Are you [00:16:00] thinking about profitability with new ideas or are you thinking about innovation with new ideas? 

[00:16:07] Dave Marcinkowski: It's a great question. Obviously you've got to focus on the profitability side. So you have to go through that exercise internally of whiteboarding out the business model around it and going, okay, yeah, is, are we really solving a problem that people need?

[00:16:20] Dave Marcinkowski: And are people willing to pay it? What do we think they're going to pay for it? And then you go and you talk to your peers. And fortunately, being in this industry, I have a lot of peers and I'm like, Hey, if we could do this, would you be willing to pay this? And once you get enough of kind of a comfort level around that, then you really run and you really try to put it out there.

[00:16:39] Dave Marcinkowski: Again, we're blessed because we have that sandbox. We get to play in, we don't have to go and find some partner who's a guinea pig. We are our own guinea pig. But especially in today's environment where technology is rapidly improving

[00:16:50] Dave Marcinkowski: you've got to stay, on the wave of that technology development. And so you've got to be future proofing your idea, or at least looking to where the technology is going and not an example of [00:17:00] that is we invented with a group called soul machines out of New Zealand, a digital leasing agent for apartments. 

[00:17:05] Dave Marcinkowski: So a synthetic person like I'm talking to you right now where you can actually see this synthetic person and they interact with you. We started doing this back in 2017 before the big AI boom, but we saw where technology was going. We knew AI was coming. It was just a matter of time.

[00:17:21] Dave Marcinkowski: And like our digital human, it's creepy, but really cool. Like they're watching you. So if you smile, they smile back. If you get angry, they get empathetic. They'll change the tone of their voice. They'll change their facial expressions. And it's really conversational. Then what is a year ago, November, chat GPT comes out.

[00:17:38] Dave Marcinkowski: All of a sudden there's this big gen AI boom. And now we're working through layering in with our friends at AWS a generative AI version of our digital human. And it's really amazing where this technology is going. I've given some demos to some friends recently and like their eyes are popping out of their head.

[00:17:56] Dave Marcinkowski: Oh my goodness. This is amazing. Sadly it'll displace people[00:18:00] cause you're going to offer a 24 seven solution. Multilingual solution. That you can keep enhancing that you don't have to keep training and whatnot, but I think the opportunity there is that I think it opens up for the you try to synthesize the predictable, which we can do with that.

[00:18:16] Dave Marcinkowski: But you want to humanize the exceptional. And so you really want to be able to now really hire people to be doing things. Customer service level or providing a level of service that you've always, we've always wanted to, but we couldn't because we didn't have the resources to be able to go do it.

[00:18:31] Dave Marcinkowski: Now we get to do that. Now we get to offer a whole different lifestyle to people living in apartments. 

[00:18:36] Carrie Richardson: And the way that I see it, there is only going to be apartments in the future, at least if you look at the development around East Lansing. I haven't seen a condo building go up here since I moved here.

[00:18:47] Carrie Richardson: I've seen a lot of rentals go up.

[00:18:48] Dave Marcinkowski: Yeah, sadly from, I'll put my Madera hat on, our biggest issue is affordable housing in this country and I think across the globe. I think there's some interesting technologies there that are in the beginning stages, whether that's 3D [00:19:00] printing prefab homes tiny homes and I have some friends that are really diving into that headfirst and doing some amazing things but you're right, in today's environment with high interest rates with inflation, homeownership is no longer the American dream.

[00:19:14] Dave Marcinkowski: I think, especially with the younger generation they don't want to be tied down into a home. They want to be able to be mobile, pick up. They like the idea of renting. And so you're going to see more and more, I think, apartments pop up. And it ebbs and flows, but in today's environment, for sure, we're living in a renter's world.

[00:19:30] Dave Marcinkowski: It's 

[00:19:31] Carrie Richardson: crazy when I think about being back in my 20s, the only thing I was dreaming of owning my first home, and now there are people who haven't even considered that as a viable option. 

[00:19:40] Dave Marcinkowski: Yeah, it's not even like on their radar, like they almost scoff at the question. Like, why would I do that?

[00:19:45] Dave Marcinkowski: What's the point of that? And I don't know. I think as an industry, as a society, we have to adapt to that. It is definitely different living in a multifamily dwelling than it is in a single family house. And especially post COVID, I think you're seeing a lot of amenities and things change around[00:20:00] the quiet pods to be able to do conduct business meetings are now an important from your home, because more of us are working from home.

[00:20:06] Dave Marcinkowski: I think that's been interesting too. One of the biggest challenges that I see in the apartment world is electronic vehicle chargers. We're having more and more people buy electric vehicles, but we don't have enough chargers in the world. And then you talk about an apartment community. An existing apartment community wasn't built for EV chargers.

[00:20:23] Dave Marcinkowski: New development. It's a big deal. We're putting them in, but the vast majority of apartments out there are not new development and they weren't built that way. Yeah. How do you do that? And the big cost is bringing electricity to a place where you can put an EV charger. And it's very expensive. It's disruptive.

[00:20:38] Dave Marcinkowski: You're having to dig trenches and do all these things. We don't have a good solution for that, but yet every day, more and more EVs are coming into the world. And it's okay, how as multifamily operators can we address this need? And then how can you build a business? Plan around that. We've kicked over a lot of stones.

[00:20:53] Dave Marcinkowski: We've looked at solar. We've looked at batteries. We've looked at a number of things. And unfortunately in today's environment, there, there isn't a good one that we've found.[00:21:00] I'm sure we will eventually get there, but I think the need is now, and I think the need is only growing daily. And I don't think we have any good answers to that.

[00:21:08] Carrie Richardson: One problem that someone else has to solve. Maybe we'll see them on the EY nominee list next year. 

[00:21:14] Dave Marcinkowski: There you go. There you go. Yeah. It's like package delivery. Like the hardest thing we have to deal with today. That's Also, real time is package delivery. Everybody's buying their stuff on Amazon.

[00:21:23] Dave Marcinkowski: Apartment communities weren't built for packages. We don't have the big room. We don't have storage. And there's a hundred different solutions out there in the marketplace. I'd argue none of them are perfect. None of them are even close to perfect. They're just band aids to a much bigger problem.

[00:21:36] Dave Marcinkowski: We're addressing them with new development. We're doing the things necessary to make it to where that's a much easier challenge to overcome. But again, the vast majority of apartments in this world are not new development. And it's like, how do you retrofit it? 

[00:21:49] Carrie Richardson: We need our 5, 000 doors, Dave.

[00:21:53] Dave Marcinkowski: I know, right? 

[00:21:53] Carrie Richardson: There's been a lot going on for Madera since 2008. What's [00:22:00] next? You've gone through real estate, you've gone through software. What's next? 

[00:22:03] Dave Marcinkowski: I think for us it's about scale.

[00:22:05] Dave Marcinkowski: Today we're we're not lacking ideas for new solutions, so I think you'll see. Quext in the FinTech, continue to add solutions to offer to the industry. But I think for us at scale, so Madera residential we like to call ourselves a tech enabled real estate company, and those words don't necessarily go together with people who grew up in this industry, I think I mentioned earlier in this podcast, we frown against technology.

[00:22:29] Dave Marcinkowski: We're very late adopters. So earlier this year we made a significant merger where some peers of ours, we already partnered with a group called Waymakkere out of Dallas merged in under Madera. And we are gearing up for what we think will be a good opportunity to grow our real estate portfolio.

[00:22:47] Dave Marcinkowski: Probably not for another year before we think things shake out after the election, but we think there'll be a lot of good buyer opportunities. And so Madera is targeting to move outside of Texas. We're going to try to grow pretty substantially into the Southeast United [00:23:00] States. At the same time, like with QEXT, we're really focused right now on success and growth there.

[00:23:05] Dave Marcinkowski: So I mentioned, earlier in this podcast, we really didn't start selling solutions until late last summer. So we're not even a year into our sales cycle. Prior to that, we were We're almost all Madera units was our was our market. Today we tripled that size and we're growing fairly rapidly as it relates to that with a number of our different solutions, some even more so than that.

[00:23:26] Dave Marcinkowski: We are a retail electric provider in the state of Texas. We sell electricity to our residents and offer them a convenient solution that business is really Grown pretty rapidly for us where we're trying to make sure we're positioned correct for it. But I think as we look to the next three to four years, the game is going to be for us to really grow our market share, take these ideas that we've proven, or we feel we've proven our value add opportunities for apartments and take them out to the industry as a whole.

[00:23:53] Dave Marcinkowski: And so that's our focus. On the banking side and the FinTech side, we have values. Our values at Madera and our three [00:24:00] companies. We're a Christ-centered company. We believe in community. We believe one plus one equals three. And we believe in this acronym, constant and never ending improvement.

[00:24:08] Dave Marcinkowski: C A N I . When you put those three things together, I think when you look at us and what we're doing, I think we really honor our values and our growth and our strategy. We're not deal junkies. We're not just doing, I just let's come up with something else. Let's come up with something else.

[00:24:21] We try our best not to get distracted when we come out with an idea or a product, there's a real business sense around it that brings value to Madera that we think brings value to the marketplace. 

[00:24:32] Carrie Richardson: So from a, Economics degree and a bookkeeping job to where you are today. What's your advice for aspiring entrepreneurs?

[00:24:43] Carrie Richardson: What's the most important thing you've learned in the last 20 years? 

[00:24:47] Dave Marcinkowski: Yeah. Know it's, this is 32 years in the apartment industry. Unbelievable. For. Me, I think, first and foremost I started probably at the bottom and was able to work my way up to where I'm now founder of multiple companies [00:25:00] and really chasing my dream and being able to do stuff.

[00:25:02] Dave Marcinkowski: I didn't go to college or even in my twenties, even think that gene was inside of me. It really took, the growth and the desire to want to constantly be a little bit better today than I was yesterday to get to a point where I Hey, maybe this entrepreneur thing is for me.

[00:25:17] Dave Marcinkowski: It was a probably a 20 year journey before I was there and really wanting to kind of test those waters. And then like we talked a little bit earlier you're gonna have setbacks. You're probably gonna have huge setbacks. You can do all the planning in the world and I'm not a, I'm not a huge fan of planning.

[00:25:31] Dave Marcinkowski: I like, straw men. I don't like going into gory detail because as soon as that plan's done, it's probably obsolete. Something's changed. But it's important to be directionally on the right track. I know directionally where I'm going and why. But when you hit those setbacks first and foremost, you can't just put more weight on your shoulders.

[00:25:50] Dave Marcinkowski: You've got to be able to inspire people to join you in this journey in some capacity because you're not gonna be able to do it alone. The people who think you can do it alone are the ones who are gonna burn [00:26:00] out, they're probably gonna fail. But if you can find the right people who see your vision, who can get on board with it, who who you can collaborate with, Man, the sky's the limit, and it can get so much even in the signs of the worst stress.

[00:26:12] Dave Marcinkowski: And trust me, we have plenty of stress where we're going. Just be sitting around a group of your peers who you trust, who trust you, who can bring a lot of different perspectives and come up with a solution that overcomes whatever challenge you're facing. The level of accomplishment you get from that and the joy you get from that is amazing.

[00:26:31] Carrie Richardson: I think we're going to stop it right there. Thank you so much for taking a couple of minutes to be with us today. Dave, really appreciate your time. 

[00:26:39] Dave Marcinkowski: I really appreciate the opportunity to share a little bit of my world with you and appreciate you having me on your podcast. 

[00:26:45] Carrie Richardson: Thank you very much.