“Your mom and I looked at office space today,” Caryn said. “We got to talking, and I told her what one of my business professors said. He always encouraged us to increase the bottom line with multiple streams of income. How he explained it was to consider your core business and see where there were opportunities to offer other goods or services that complement it.
“Let’s consider your mom’s business, real estate,” Caryn said and wrote it in the center of a sheet of paper. “In a real estate transaction, there are many services you need to make the transaction work. The first are the initial inspections. The two main ones are the home inspection and the termite or wood-destroying organism inspection.”
She wrote those two on the side.
“Then there’s the mortgage, survey, appraisal, and title company.”
Caryn also wrote those down.
“Each one of these is a potential income stream. There are also opportunities before the sale happens. Your mom pointed out that curb appeal is crucial, so we could add lawn service and repairs as two more lines of business. The home may also need to be decluttered, painted, and staged. Then there’s the marketing that involves video, photos, websites, social media, and print.”
She also wrote down all these.
“Within real estate, there are specialties. The skills to be a good buyer’s agent are not necessarily the same as those for a listing agent, and their needs are different. For example, the listing agent is concerned with staging; the buyer’s agent, not so much. And there is yet a different skill set required for working with investors and commercial clients, each of which has their own needs. Finally, there are rentals. Those are a completely different animal with unique opportunities.
“A realtor is expected to know a little about all of these, but no one could master them all. I can’t see us getting involved in all these. In fact, some would be a serious conflict of interest, like having our appraiser do work for your mortgage company.”
“Caryn’s right. We might go to jail for that one,” Mom said.
“No, I’m not interested in jail time,” I said. “I also am a little leery that we could do all this.”
“I don’t think that’s the point,” Uncle John said. “Caryn has just pointed out how over time you could grow your business. It’s sort of like what we did when we merged the hay farm with my cattle.”
“Yes. John is exactly right,” Caryn said. “I wanted to talk to you about this because if you plan to grow your business to include other services and specialties, we need to consider different office space. For example, we found a nice large home on Main Street that’s next to the downtown area. The downstairs would be perfect for the real estate company, and I could have my office on the second floor. But if we elect to add more agents to handle different parts of the business, or a title company, we’d need more space. Your mom found a strip mall that would be perfect for growing into,” Caryn said.
“We could rent out the extra space to other businesses until we needed it,” Mom said.
“Like a massage studio,” Angie subtly suggested.
It then became clear why Greg and Angie were here. This suddenly all seemed to overwhelm me. I recognized that I needed to invest my money, but wouldn’t it be easier to just put it into a mutual fund and ignore it?
Then I had a horrible thought. There were stories about how friends and family took advantage of young people who came into money. I sure the heck hoped that wasn’t the case here. Two seconds later, I knew that even if I did lose all my money to this, I’d be okay with it, since it was family. All I had to do was look at the farm to see how that was working out. If I could help my mom and Greg achieve their dreams, I would. I turned to Caryn and smiled.
“So, you have a plan, right?” I asked.
“I do, but it requires you to initially spend some money. Plus, I want to hire two people to help me pull all this off.”
Caryn then laid out her plan. She hadn’t been sitting around while I was on set, making my movie. Caryn also tied her proposal in with the charities. She wanted to collaborate with the Mennonites for the farm work, with which my grandmother agreed 100%. Caryn was a little mysterious about the two hires because she wanted to interview them first and see if they were interested or not. I was sure one of them was Kendal.
Finally, we came the big issue: how much was this going to cost me? The initial outlay wasn’t insignificant, but she backed it up with income projections. Everyone seemed to agree she had a solid plan. I asked her to give me some time to think about it. The problem was that everyone in the room had a vested interest in this happening. I also worried that I would be tying up an awful lot of my signing bonus to get this off the ground.
I kicked everyone out of the office except Caryn and asked my dad to join us. Then I had Caryn go through it all again for him. He’d managed the park district and was now in charge of the local country club. Dad asked some insightful questions, including a few Caryn admitted that she hadn’t thought of. What it highlighted for me was this was her first shot at overseeing a business startup. I knew she wouldn’t get it all right, but she was eager to learn and seemed confident.
When she finished, I asked her to help me out with a little surprise for Jim’s signing day. I was quick to ask her to delegate it to one of her minions-to-be before she had a chance to huff about it. Then I asked her to let my dad and me talk for a bit.
“What do you think?” I asked after she left.
“You’re halfway in already, with the purchase of the farm and telling your mom you’d partner with her. I wish Caryn were more experienced, but she’s sharp. If it were me, I’d do it.”
“Can you help her?” I asked.
“Of course I will. I’ll make sure she doesn’t mess up too bad.”
That’s what I loved about my dad. He would look out for me and still have a sense of humor.
“You saw the cash-flow numbers. There’s a lot of money going out with the new farm, and all the setup that will be needed to get Mom’s business started. I’ve also been spending money while I was in LA, recruiting trips, and the like. I’m worried it won’t pay off in the end,” I admitted.
“Your mom and I suggest that you curb your personal spending. I’ve seen your bank statements, and what you spent on your recruiting trips and learning to skydive weren’t insignificant.”
“But we made all the money back from the skydiving lessons,” I explained.
Shooting the ad for the wingboard for Range Sports had more than paid for those lessons. Especially with the hazard pay that was added on after I almost killed myself when the board decided to spin out of control and I was tossed off it.
“And I guess I wanted to reward the guys on the recruiting trips,” I continued.
“David, look at me,” my dad ordered and waited until we made eye contact. “You can’t be buying friendship. I’m sure your friends appreciated you putting them up in a high-class hotel when you made your trip to Georgia. But I would bet they would’ve had just as much fun at a Holiday Inn Express that they paid for. You need to be careful in setting their expectations of your friendship.”
He was right, of course. My goal wasn’t to make the guys reliant on me for what I could buy them. Wolf, Tracy, and Lily were perfect examples. Wolf earned extra money by doing tasks that I either didn’t want to do or didn’t have the time for. Tracy and Lily had volunteered to help me with recruiting and social media with no compensation. I finally had forced Lily to accept a small amount, and recently, Frank, my publicist, had hired her. When I tried to pay Tracy, she’d told me her dad made enough off me and not to bother.
Of my other friends, Brook and Halle had money of their own. I was aware that Brook had spent more on our playdates than I had. Halle’s mom had taken me in when I was in LA, so I didn’t regret buying her things like a custom surfboard. Zoe was very thrifty and never asked for anything.