Entrepreneurial Appetite
Entrepreneurial Appetite
Real Estate, Social Impact, and HBCUs: Empowerment and Profit with Tawan Davis
Unlock the transformative power of real estate with Tawan Davis, the CEO of the Steinbridge Group, and our guest host, Kendra Barnes, as they provide a masterclass in melding profitability with positive community impact. Their insightful exchange paints a vivid picture of the current landscape where affordable housing and investment in historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) converge. Kendra, with her invaluable experience and the release of her book "Acres," offers a unique perspective on personal finance, education, and the upliftment of Black communities through strategic entrepreneurship.
This episode traverses the strategic role of HBCUs in America's South, where their positioning offers ripe opportunities for real estate investments that promise to bolster both economic growth and educational resources. The dialogue unveils how partnerships, like the one with Robert Smith's Student Freedom Initiative, are crucial in tapping into the latent potential of these institutions. Through Tawan's narrative, we explore how the Steinbridge Group is flipping the script on traditional investment models by prioritizing both returns and societal advancement, ensuring that families have access to affordable housing without sacrificing investor confidence.
Finally, we navigate the intersection of enterprise, philanthropy, and ministry with Tawan at the helm, showcasing how one can foster community growth while addressing the challenges of gentrification. Kendra chimes in with practical advice for budding real estate investors, emphasizing the trifecta of time, knowledge, and money as key success components. As we wind down, we ponder on the enduring wisdom of the 'Seven Habits of Highly Effective People' and its application in building not just businesses, but legacies that resonate with efficiency, growth, and profound impact. Join us on this journey to uncover the strategies that mold highly effective leaders and change-makers in the world of real estate and beyond.
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Speaker 1:Once again, this is Langston Clark, the founder and organizer of Entrepreneurial Appetite, a series of events dedicated to building community, promoting intellectualism and supporting Black businesses. And today we have a very special conversation with Tawan Davis, founder and chief executive officer of the Steinbridge Group. And we have my podcasting. Kendra Barnes is my podcasting best friend because Kendra has been a guest host on this show two or three times, in addition to just being a guest on the show. And today is special because, as you'll notice, over my shoulders I have my hat from North Carolina A&T.
Speaker 1:And then the endowment letter that established the contract that me and two of my friends put together for the endowment we started there from A&T to PhD, and Kendra's book is next to the endowment letter that you see up there, and Kendra is the author of Acres, which chronicles the stories of I believe it's 25 black real estate entrepreneurs, and her book is attached to a scholarship that she started in North Carolina A&T as well, and so that matters because Tawan and his organization, the Steinbridge Group, has decided to do some serious real estate investment in historically Black colleges and universities, so I felt like it would be great to have this conversation with him and also include Kendra, who is a real estate entrepreneur. And before we get into the questions, tawan, thank you for joining us. Thank you for being here. If you could just begin by letting us know a little bit about your story, your autobiography and how you got to be who you are and doing what you're doing.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for having me. It's good to be with you. So let's see here. Team leader, I call it, and founder of the Steinrich Group. We are a real estate impact investment firm, so our focus is making impact through real estate investments. Real estate is the first group of that impact for us. Our goal is to expand it to other groups as well, including finance and technology and other areas where we believe that we can match investment with impact. Today we have about $1.5 billion of pipeline of developments around the country. We have roughly $500 billion of active developments in construction in four or five states over the next 12 months. I think that's one of the larger not the one, in the world state investment companies in the country.
Speaker 2:My theory, my working idea, is that you have a match impact with investment. That public sector, the government sector, has limitations on its ability to make investments in areas that close economic and opportunity gaps, and that the private capital and private markets have to come to bear and to influence those gaps and to close those gaps. And you can do that without sacrificing returns. This is not charity. In fact, this is not a nonprofit organization. We have to be very profitable and turn that profit over into reinvestment into the community. So that's our working thesis and so far. I founded the company in 2016, 17. And over the last several years we've grown to be a bit of a juggernaut in this particular space.
Speaker 1:Right and real quick. Can you just talk about what the impetus was for founding the Steinbridge Group and how that story came about?
Speaker 2:Sure, so, let's say, when I started the company we actually bought. We actually started as an office building company. So we purchased almost a billion dollars worth of office space, including the famed Watergate building in Washington DC the one that got an exit in there and so that's when I started. We started as an impact investment company. We started in the office space. Now, thank God, by the time COVID came down and office buildings began to lose 30% of their value, we already located out of the office space, so we actually had one office building in our portfolio today, and then, in about 2018, I began to really think about where we should go next.
Speaker 2:I was in my late 30s. I was thinking about how the rest of my career would look, and I looked at different sectors of real estate looked at retail, looked at hotels. Of course, we had office buildings already and what became clear is that the long-term need in American real estate isn't more malls and it isn't more office buildings, it's more housing. American real estate is more malls and it is more office buildings. It's more housing, and that if we got into the housing sector and took seriously the idea of providing additional housing for American working families in particular, the people who are in. There are rich people can afford whatever they can afford, and there are programs to encourage housing at the lower ends of the impact spectrum. It's the folks in the middle that carry the bulk of the American economy that get stuck with the lower housing options, and so my thesis was that if we can begin to provide housing opportunities for that group of people, it would have a meaningful impact long-term. It would also give us the opportunity to have a growing business over a long period of time, because there's a two-generation at least need for housing in the United States. And so that's how we got into the space.
Speaker 2:What began to then become clear to me is that it was an opportunity to match my career with my calling and what was unclear at first. Frankly, I kind of stumbled upon this. As things often do, Most stories are told in reverse, so everybody talks about well, I knew I had a tissue in that shirt, and I get there and you look back and you say, like the old ways to say how I got over it. And that's what happened to me. We started in the housing sector and it became clear that it was an opportunity to add impact to our investment thesis. So we focus on affordability, we focus on ownership, we focus on housing working families and we are able to partner with nonprofit organizations and help them to activate their underutilized real estate into economically productive uses. And that, frankly, if I think about it, I wrote my graduate school thesis on that idea, my business school thesis on that idea, and then, 25 years later, it becomes the exact business plan of the company I run today.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:As I mentioned early on, Kendra and I are both graduates of historically Black colleges and universities, and so I want you to talk to us a little bit about the Steinbridge's group investment in HBCUs. And specifically, it's interesting because before we got on, Kendra and I were talking about South by Southwest EDU, which is the education hand of South by Southwest, and two years ago there was a conversation with the president of an HBCU I can't remember which one, but there was a brother in the audience who was a little what's the word? Reluctant, scared, maybe, didn't have full confidence in his ability to support or invest in HBCUs because he didn't go to one, and the president of Black College that was up there was saying don't worry about that, We'll take all the help we can get from anybody who's willing to support what we do in our mission. So, as someone who didn't attend a historically Black college or university, what made you decide to do this type of investment in HBCUs? You know it's something. It's a very powerful question.
Speaker 2:It's interesting that I think it was Maya Angelou who said I am the gift that my grandparents gave, and so it's fascinating because I wanted to go to an HICU and put another board in. So it's actually the exact opposite of what happens to many folks Happened to me. I applied and wanted to go to Morehouse, but my family, raised by my single mother and she had two children At the peak of her earning potential at that time I think she was in the $20-something thousand dollars. We couldn't afford for me to go from the Pacific Northwest all the way to Atlanta to pay the full freight of Morehouse University, and so I ended up going to Georgetown, and Georgetown just had more financial resources to get me through, and by first year I went, I got some scholarships.
Speaker 2:By the middle of my second year I got something called the Baker Scholarship, and the Baker Scholarship had a couple colleges Georgetown, princeton and Harvard and that scholarship basically paid for the remainder of my academic career, from the middle of my sophomore year to all of my tuition through graduation, and I think by the time I think I had a few thousand dollars in loans for undergrad. Anyway, that had to do with meal plans and residency and all that, but the bulk of my academic career was paid for by that scholarship. But the reality is is that that is entirely, was entirely, a financial decision. Had the HBCUs that I would have liked to attend had more financial resources, there would have been opportunities for me and students like me to go there instead, and so it's so fascinating how, again, I'll be 45 this year and at the time I'm 17 years old, that was almost 30 years ago, and I made that decision on financial reasons, and life comes full circle and allows me the opportunity to impact other institutions and folks that are having similar experiences, that are making financial-based decisions.
Speaker 2:You take the historically Black colleges they have roughly 1%.
Speaker 2:If you put them all together, they have roughly 1% of the endowments of all the Ivy Leagues on average.
Speaker 2:They have 10 percent of the average endowment of the remainder of all colleges and universities in the United States, and when compared to comparable institutions, they receive roughly 30 percent less public funding on average.
Speaker 2:And so these and yet 75 percent of African-American PhDs, something like 80% of federal judges, more than 45% of African-American executives have matriculated through historically psychologists, and so these institutions are punching with above their weight on a schistering budget, and so I think that the opportunity to have an impact and partner with those institutions to advance their fundamental financial and economic situation was a meaningful opportunity that came based on the idea, based on what I call the latent asset theory, that we as a community of African American people often have resources, land, property that we haven't activated in our communities, and so the opportunity is to activate, to catalyze those underutilized resources into economically productive uses, and that includes churches, that includes nonprofits and lodges and fraternities and sororities. Many folks who have excess land have excess capital lying around that they haven't activated, and that's really what emerged capital lying around that they haven't activated, and that's really what emerged. And so the historically black college opportunity became clear in Bristol as a meaningful opportunity to impact institutions in that way.
Speaker 1:Can you talk about what that process looks like at an HBCU and how do you choose what historically Black colleges and universities to work with?
Speaker 2:Sure, depending on which numbers you believe who you believe is active and inactive. There's some up to 105 and 107 historically Black colleges in the United States Part of our thesis. These institutions are sitting in great real estate, sitting on great real estate. So in the Valley of Wilson, founded in the Reconstruction South after the 1860s, after the Civil War, 90% of historically black colleges are south of the Mason-Dixon line. The re-migration of Americans from north to the south in major areas in the southern United States and then around the major cities of the southern United States, like Nashville, tennessee, like Atlanta, georgia, like Dallas and Austin, texas, like North Carolina and the like, provides just a very strong, powerful investment opportunity for any black, white or otherwise. Think about it also this way If you think about the states in the United States that have the fastest job growth, the fastest job opportunity, they're all in the Southern United States North Carolina, georgia, texas, maryland and the like, none of them above the Mason-Dixon line. So just on the basis of it, the real estate opportunity is historic and what has happened is that the history of the United States and its economy, and particularly real estate economy, has come to our doorstep and that is happening for the first time in probably 80 years, right? Because, of course, if you think about the Great Migration and how people were involved by the whole story. So basically, the first time in 80 years, where we are is perceived by the rest of America to be profoundly valuable. It's the Harlem story. It's to be profoundly valuable. It's the Harlem story, it's the West Philadelphia story, it's the Dorchester Boston story, where our communities are suddenly of extreme value and that's where the historic black colleges are. So that's the first reality. It's not just a.
Speaker 2:As an investor, you have to make a return and you have to give the market back that return. And you do that by finding ideas to make outsized profit, outsized returns. And my goal as a leader, as an investor, is to partner that with the impact that I want to make. So I don't separate those two things. I'm not a charity leader. There are some. That is real work. There are people who are called that. My father pastored the same church for 30 years. That's not my calling. My calling is to identify opportunities to actually make a profit and use those profits to make an impact on communities, and so the HBCU opportunity is a big one.
Speaker 2:How we go about choosing partners is we partner with the Student Freedom Initiative. Student Freedom Initiative was founded by Robert Smith. Robert Smith is the founder of Vista Equities, a $100 billion venture capital firm. Smith is the largest, the wealthiest African American today, with a net worth of $9.1 billion. He just closed a $25 billion venture capital fund this year.
Speaker 2:A few years ago you may remember that Robert gave $40 million to Morehouse College to close out the loans and the student debt of the senior graduating class of that year and with that he founded what we call the Student Freedom Initiative, whose focus is to alleviate student debt, to assist at the student level financially, but also to strengthen historically Black colleges and institutions.
Speaker 2:It's kind of an emerging, but it has emerged as a juggernaut along with federal board institutions like the Marshall Fund and UNCL.
Speaker 2:It's kind of a third actor in the HBCU space these days, and so we partnered with that organization, student Financial Initiative because they understand the HBCU's relationships with its leaders and they help us to identify, to vet and to engage with the leaders of historically black colleges, both at the presidential and at the board of trust level.
Speaker 2:And there is a portal that we've opened. And again, vista Equity is a technology company, so there's a lot of technology involved in our approach. There's a portal that we've opened. All of the HBCUs have been invited to access that portal and in that portal they identify details of their financials, of their leadership structure, of their land holdings, and then we use that to go through and to narrow down which HBCUs make sense for this particular strategy and then we tier them ABC tiers based on the details that they provide and how ready they are and prepared they are to move forward with a large investment quite well prepared to give. And so that's the program that we sit down with SFI. Once they get through the SFI process, we then, as the investors, then underwrite the actual real estate investment and begin to allocate capital for that, based on the deals that make the most sense to them.
Speaker 1:So, tawan, I had the pleasure of listening to a number of different podcasts, youtube recordings of you tell your story and you being someone who chose to go into business as opposed to going into the pulpit, but when I hear you speak, even the cadence of your voice is like pastors of churches that I used to go to growing up.
Speaker 1:So I want to ask you this question because it's something that I've been thinking about for a while, or I want to pose this concept to you and get a response.
Speaker 1:It seems to me, based upon what you've said here and what you've said in other interviews, that you're at this interesting intersection of enterprise philanthropy even though you're still trying to make a profit but also in ministry, and so can you talk about what it's like to be someone who's overlapped in those spaces?
Speaker 1:Because, as a millennial, there's research that says that millennials, in terms of how we identify as philanthropists, we have the highest percentage of people who think of themselves as philanthropists and as folks coming from Black community. The research also says that, while people's in the United States, people's overall belief in God has gone down over the years, black folks are the group of people who believe in God the most, while, at the same time, we have folks like Kendra, who were able to successfully build a brand for themselves through social media and other networks and leave corporate America and be entrepreneurs for themselves, and it seems like you've been able to be at all three of those intersections of enterprise, philanthropy and ministry. So talk about what that means for you to be in that unique space Very interesting question, one that I haven't asked the word philanthropy.
Speaker 2:Now you'll have to help me. I'm a little bit of an academic, so I tend to have long form answers. I'm not a great of an academic, so I tend to have long form answers. I'm not a great, you know, sometimes I'm not the great podcaster because I don't do great soundtracks.
Speaker 2:Here goes the word philanthropy comes from the Greek phileo tropos, which means the love of your fellow man, love of your fellow man, and so I think that what I have been blessed to become is work that overlaps my love of my papers. It is ministry because, like my father, my grandfather before him, it reaches out and it helps people who might not have opportunities to have just the people in the arms, but the architects might not be able to get an assignment without us and the contractors and and the lawyers and the accountants. We have an economic multiplier because we get to make all of the decisions on hundreds of millions of dollars, on real estate opportunities across the United States. But it also is ministerial because people are being displaced, the gentrification movement in the United States, in and around our communities. Zip codes like mine 97212. In Portland, oregon, 97211.
Speaker 2:If you look, it's a small town that didn't have as many Black folks as other parts of town, but it's always counted. It's one of the most five. If you look at Washington Post and New York Times and other studies, it's one of the five that provides zip codes in all the United States. The community has been entirely displaced, and so I understand what that means. Has been entirely displaced, and so I understand what that means.
Speaker 2:And so helping people find place, find homes, be in the areas that they're familiar with, build a community that's a ministry, but it's also and there's the profit side of it, which also is you could think of that as the love of man as well. We create returns for the folks who invest with us. We create jobs for the people who work with and for us, and so, at all three areas I get to engage in, I think it's unique and I think it's very few people find they overlap their career and their calling in the way that I have the list to find is because all three ways I get to engage in the label I think it's great, but getting to engage in the love of my fellow man by helping them with homes and housing, by creating jobs and opportunities and in other different ways, and I think Kendra has some very specific questions about real estate, because she's a real estate entrepreneur and budding mobile and things like that.
Speaker 1:So, kendra, I'm going to let you go ahead and ask your questions.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So one of the things I love about real estate investing is there's so many ways to get in, right. Everyone doesn't have to invest the same way. There's so many ways to be successful in how you're investing. You're investing in a very large scale, right?
Speaker 3:One of my friends always says in order to invest in real estate, you have to have three things time, knowledge and money. But you personally don't have to have all three. You can team up with other people who have the other two If you have time but you don't have the knowledge or money. You can be a passive investor If you have knowledge but don't have the money and time. So there's kind of like a way to pull up a seat to the table, depending on where you're at and what you want to do and how much you want to get out of it. Much you want to get out of it.
Speaker 3:But what are your thoughts on how people can identify what kind of investor they should be? What if they say you know what? I want to build a company like Tawan's, or I want to invest alongside Tawan, or I want to be a landlord. So how did you come to the conclusion that this was your calling? I guess you got into that already, but how can someone identify if they should be pursuing the kind of investing you're doing, or like? How do you know if it's for you or not? I like your trifecta.
Speaker 2:I like your three to three legs on your suit time, money and knowledge. I like that. So let's start with that as a framing of the question. I would take that and make one modification to your friend's observation. I think you need two out of three. You need two out of three. You don't have to have all three, but you need to either have time and money you need to have time and knowledge or you need to have money and time. It's best to have two out of three. Why I love that? Because you have to solve. It's basic algebra. It's you understand. You get the best outcomes when you solve for one variable at a time and so when you are doing a math problem, the best way to figure out if A plus B equals C is to solve for one variable at a time. And similar here is. I would suggest that you get those two.
Speaker 2:So the challenge is that many people view real estate as a sidekick and it's not. It's a career and it's a business. I think that's the mistake that people make and it doesn't grow to their expectations. They get stuck, they lose money because it's actually not a sidekick, it's a full-time undertaking mentally, and the challenge of getting one house built is almost as hard as building a world prison In some. I mean it's that's one of the reasons why we went to larger scales. When I did start, I started by buying one house at a time in Philadelphia. I bought and we had 196 houses, oh, after the other, after the other, after the other. Now this is a meaningful doubt.
Speaker 2:When I started my career, I was at Goldman Sachs. I was an investment banker. I was in private equity at Prudential at the time the largest real estate investor in the private sector and then I worked for Michael Bloomberg's administration running real estate for New York City, and then I was president of a multi-building dollar real estate company. And then I went almost all the way down and went to Philadelphia and bought one house at a time to get myself started. But I had two things. I had zero dollars of my own, nothing to mention Nothing. But I had two things I had knowledge because of all the experience that I just described, and I had time because I left my job and I said it is going to work or it's not going to work. And so I gave myself time and I gave myself and I had enough knowledge, but I didn't have the money to go get that. So I think you have to have two out of three. And I think one of the mistakes that many people in the real estate space is they act like it's a side gig and they lose their shirts. So they're sitting in Brooklyn trying to buy houses in Savannah, georgia, and they lose their shirts because they can't watch it. They don't know if the screen door is put on or not, they don't know if the window is on, they don't know if the contractor showed up.
Speaker 2:I never lived in Philadelphia. I am not from Philadelphia. I had. When I arrived there, I had a relationship.
Speaker 2:New York was too expensive to start buying houses one at a time, and so I looked around the northeastern United States.
Speaker 2:I didn't want to go back to Oregon, I didn't want to go to California with my father, I didn't want to go back to Oregon where my mother was, and so I set up on Philadelphia and so I went to Philadelphia and stayed there for six months and I started buying one house and then I bought four and ten and we got 296 houses at the peak of our ownership, invested $40, $50 million in Philadelphia alone, one house at a time.
Speaker 2:And so that and I was able to raise money and raise some equity and get some debt and all that. But it was a full-time undertaking and it was stressful and it was hard and you have to sign on the dotted line for loans with your name on it. It's hard, it's not easy Pressure and so it's a great deal of pressure and we survived COVID and we survived a recent economic downturn. Despite those challenges, we've been able to have some success there and so I think that's a long, again a long answer to your question, but I think two out of three and you can't think of that as a side gig. You actually have to come in.
Speaker 3:Yeah, people really want this like fast money, just because of social media and all this information, and real estate is not that you know, so I'm glad you made that point. If you want fast, money.
Speaker 2:Play the markets, yeah, but you got to know what you're doing there. Matter of fact, let me be clear. There is no such thing as fast money. That is the biggest lie. There's no such thing as gas money, even if you think about it the couple of opportunities that we thought people were making fast money in Bitcoin and then the whole thing falls apart. The bottom falls out. Every history tells us that. Again, I studied economics and economic history, political economy. You go back to the great boom in the Netherlands, back in like the 1400s that predicted being a dot-com woman bust in the 1990s because the same activity there from 500 years ago was the same behavior that happened in what Alan Greenspan called irrational exuberance. It's the tendency for people to jump in psychologically on economic opportunities, drive the values up, go overboard and then cause a crash. So that's what happened in the green tulip craze of the 1400s. That's what happened in the dot-com boom and bust up in the 1990s. That's what happened in the real estate crisis of 2008. And that's what just happened with FTX and the Bitcoin folks. And so I think that people have to really accept the idea that there is no such thing as fast money.
Speaker 2:I have a nephew who is 23,. He'll be 24 this year and he and I have had this discussion and I'm going to say a lot of young people haven't been to one and they all think that you know, we'll be out there. And they get out there for a couple of years and they realize uncle was right, there's no such thing as specimen. You get out there if you want to go out there and see if you can make it quick. And you know, do that and. And then do all that and to a young man or young woman, they have all come back to me sweetly and respectfully and said do you love children? There is actually no such thing as specimen. So that's the reality, that's true.
Speaker 3:Even if you do come up on some fast money, right, it's not going to last, and that's the tricky part, making it sustainable and that's what's so good about real estate is it's a long game and so you have that consistent cash flow you can make and things like that. So I think I've also heard you say on interviews that you believe that real estate is the first mover of impact. Hopefully I'm quoting that correctly. What do you mean by that?
Speaker 2:First of all, you guys are a guest of your own. I'm sure you guys were very good students on the show. It's the first mover of economic activity. So, because of what I said earlier, it is such an economic multiplier. It ties in so many different economic opportunities. You've got your hard costs and your soft costs, which means on the hard cost side you've got your contractors and you've got your brick folks and you've got your concrete folks and you've got your little thingy teams and I mean that's to get the bricks out of the ground right, that's to get the building out of the ground, and that in itself you've employed. I mean to get one of our projects out of the ground. We employ hundreds of people and not only hundreds of people, scores of companies. So not only are there jobs there, there's profit there for other participants in the space. Then on the soft costs, you've got architects and lawyers and accountants Gosh. We've got consultants and we've got engineers and we've got civil engineers. We've got more lawyers, lawyers coming out the wazoo right, and so on the soft cost side we've got another 15, 20 firms that we're working with at a time to get that same building out of the ground.
Speaker 2:And so it's unique at Real Estate because it's not just trading one stock where you're really not. You can make a lot of money but you're not making anything and there's no in that stock trade. There's no economic multiplier. Now, there might be an economic multiplier in what that company does, right, but in that stock trade itself there is no economic multiplier. But when you get in the ground it's one of those things that actually creates all kinds of opportunity.
Speaker 2:Technology does the same. Technology is a great industry for young folks to go into because it is the way of the future and because it's a great economic multiplier. So many things come in through and come out of the technology space. Healthcare is another one. So many vectors in healthcare, and so it's one of those great spaces that is a first-linger again economic activity. And what we do know is I don't care how sophisticated our official intelligence becomes, everyone needs a house and they're going to need it for the foreseeable future. Now I don't know if we become like fiscally virtual I can't even conceptualize that but maybe that happens one day out. Maybe we actually don't need it, we just exist in the ether. But until that happens, everybody's going to need a place to stay. That's a great makes real estate a great first unit for economic opportunity.
Speaker 3:I love that. Absolutely brilliant Now that whole thing about us existing in the ether that is actually scary to me.
Speaker 1:That's a whole other conversation, but yeah, so I'll hand it back over to Langston for the last couple of questions. So I'm thinking about two things, and one is that Black folks and this goes back to the conversation about philanthropy and enterprise Black folks don't get what get like less than 2% of institutional philanthropy or something like this really low. I was surprised when I heard that stat. I didn't know it was as bad as the venture capital investment. I had no idea, because the way things get framed it's like we're, we always need philanthropy. So I felt like we were getting a lot of that money but we're not.
Speaker 1:And then so we have institutional philanthropy, but we also have institutional real estate, which one is what you're doing? And what I'm wondering is is that? So you have student freedom, initiative with this institutional philanthropy, but the average black person is not involved in those spaces at the large institutional level? Right? And so the question I have for you is how does someone like Kendra, who has a real estate portfolio, probably more than the average person, or someone like me who is trying to get a real estate portfolio, how do they support what you're doing at Steinbridge? Or how can we invest in HBCUs through Steinbridge or along with Steinbridge. In the same way, if I were going to SFI website, I could make a donation there, but you're running like a straight up business. So so what's the strategy for being part of the ecosystem? That's a a great question.
Speaker 2:And we're working. I have to tell you I don't have an immediate answer because our minimum investment right now is $2.5 million and not many of us have it, and people have tried to give me less and I won't take it, because dealing with an investor that has $10 isn't just as hard as dealing with an investor with $2.5 million, because when you have somebody else's money, they will call you. They will call you, they will call you.
Speaker 3:The investor with $10 is probably going to give you a harder time than the person.
Speaker 2:By the way, that is exactly right, because the percentage of their net worth that $100,000, that $500,000, that $1,000,000, that $100,000 as their percentage of their net worth is much more than the guy who gave me two and a half million. So that's one of the reasons I get calls. I got a call from the school. I got a quarter of a million dollars. I got half a million bucks. We actually do not take it, but we're trying to solve that. I don't know how to get it. We hired a guy who runs our capital office, jay Dunn. Jay comes out more than Stanley. He went to UVA and MIT, he worked for the largest office owners in New York City on Mark Abbott, and so he is now trying to help us think about how to broaden our capital markets participation and to create opportunities, for we thought about creating a REIT, we thought about creating a reach, we thought about creating some kind of structure that allows co-investment, we thought about doing crowdfunding. So I don't have an answer for you yet, but we are working on that and hopefully we'll come up with a solution in the near future. As far as taking funds from folks who would like to participate with us in the work that we're doing. It's a good question and it's a fair question and we'll work on it. But the answer also would be helpful is just conversations like this.
Speaker 2:It is a huge opportunity for me to be invited on here and to talk about what we're doing and to be able to share with folks and to be able to tell the story of our work at every level and um to talk with students about it, to talk with former students, with talk with hbcu alums.
Speaker 2:Also to talk with other market participants and you know bishops that have called me and said I'm the bishop of such and such and such and such and we got 140 churches in florida and we got land in Panhandle where you can take a look.
Speaker 2:So just having conversation with folks about our work and having the opportunity to communicate our vision. And also, I think once you know it sounds big and formidable and institutional what we're doing, but once folks hear me talk about it, it makes a lot of sense, it makes a lot of common sense and it's actually more acceptable than it seems. You know it's not, as it sounds, complicated, but it's just about putting one foot in front of the other and explaining that to folks and kind of how we got here and what our conviction is. It's a huge opportunity, so I think the more one can do that that's actually as much of a help to us as a $10 investment being able to tell our story. And so this conversation is worth more than if you had written me out a $1,000 check for an investment, because it's helpful for us to talk about what we're doing and to talk about how we're going to try to take impact on our clients.
Speaker 1:All right. So, tawan, we started as a dinner club. There was a brother here in San Antonio named Mark Aldy. He had a burger joint and was going out of business, and so we got a bunch of young Black professionals together and we had burgers at his burger joint one day five years ago with a local state representative. And then COVID happened. We evolved into a book club and so we were able to get Black authors and Black entrepreneurs in conversation with each other. And so, because we have Origins as a book club and I see that stack of books behind your shoulder my last question is always this what are some books that you are currently reading, or a book that you read in the past that has inspired your journey as an entrepreneur and maybe for you as someone who was at the intersection of enterprise, philanthropy and ministry?
Speaker 2:It's fascinating because I recommend the same books. And that would have to do with business, because, you see, life is mostly about life and often we ask ourselves the secondary question before we get the primary questions answered. And the secondary questions are what should I do for work? Where should I go to school, what should I study, what should I major in? Primary questions are who am I, what is the meaning of my life, why am I? What is my raison d'être, what is my calling, what is my reason for being? I think those primary questions inform and direct the answers to the secondary questions. But so many of us are so focused on the secondary questions and we don't get those primary questions answered until we go through a crisis or sometimes until we're middle-aged and oftentimes that is then there is not enough opportunity out of us to focus and reset based on those primary questions. So I encourage folks to focus first on those primary questions before we go to the second questions. And here are three folks that have all of those primary questions. And those primary questions are what am I? What is my goal? Why am I here? How do I engage?
Speaker 2:Goal number one is I'm trying to decide which word I want to use. Goal number one, I would say, is the power of now. Power of now I think I'm coaching Church of God and Christ can encastle five generations. A bishop might get mad about me recommending a Buddhist book, but there it goes, the Power of Now. Number two, how to Influence and Influence People, written in the 1930s. And the reason it's an important book is because it talks about how to engage with the world. Selflessly. It said not everything in the world is about you, and I think we forget that. And the third, and I think the one that I am probably most set to memory, is the seven habits of highly effective, and that informs how I direct my company on a day-to-day basis, how I engage in business, how I set goals, how I accomplish individual tasks and how you go about scaling any undertaking.
Speaker 1:Seven habits of violence. All right. So, juan, thank you for joining us today. We appreciate your time. Kendra, thank you for stepping in as the local real estate co-host here today, and once again, I appreciate you both.
Speaker 3:Thank you, bye-bye.
Speaker 1:Thank you for joining this edition of Entrepreneurial Appetite. If you liked the episode, you can support the show by becoming one of our founding 55 patrons, which gives you access to our live discussions and bonus materials, or you can subscribe to the show. Give us five stars and leave a comment.