S10E05: Ten years on the Inc 5000, with Don Wenner (CEO, DLP Capital)

Richard Medcalf
Hi Don, and welcome to the show.

Don Wenner
Hey, thank you so much for having me today.

Richard Medcalf
I'm really interested, interesting guy, you, you've created incredible business, DLP Capital over the over the last few years, it's so much so that it's now in the Financial Times list of fastest growing companies in the US and you've also been on the Inc 5000 list. So you've made a great business and yeah, as I was reading about you, I see the impact is something that's really core to who you are. This is called The Impact Multiplier Podcast. So let's why don't we just start by talking about impact? Like what is what does impact mean to you?

Don Wenner
Yeah, it's a great, great question, I'm glad we get to get to start there. So, I think of, you know, my opportunity and being the CEO of my organization, as is an opportunity to make an impact and, and other words to make a make a difference on. We think about it on specific crisis or challenges that we face and we have decided on kind of four specific areas that we think our organization, our platform, our knowledge and relationships and skills and abilities are directly aligned, to make a difference and to make an impact on and the first an obvious one, for what we do is we impact the affordable workforce housing crisis. So we've self mandated all of our investment funds, all of our investing that we invest in housing, in improving, managing and building creating new housing that is, and will remain affordable for the local workforce and we're not doing that as a nonprofit. We also do a lot from nonprofits and what we're doing it for profit, and, and so we've been it's much people say, Well, isn't that in conflict and make money and make a difference and people often think of it that way and it doesn't have to be you can do both at the same time. It's much harder to do both at the same time but it can be done, we're, you know, we generated, you know, 45% returns last year, but all of our housing is affordable, and will be affordable for local workforce and so that's the big area we focus on. We focus on jobs, we focus on happiness, and we focus on the leg legacy wealth crisis, we call it.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah, why don't we jump into that? It's It's fascinating, right? Because there's you talked about this dilemma, or tension, perhaps, tension and you started to get into the mission about what you do. So I think we can come back to that I really want to explore this this shift between Can you be a for profit, and also really make a big impact? I mean, I think you can, but it'd be great to kind of get into that. Why do we have to zoom out one second, I took it straight into the conversation. Just tell us to set the scene what what is DLP? You know, what are you doing? Obviously, it's in housing, you've talked about investments just kind of give us like the one minute you know, the elevator pitch, like, what's the kind of core of the business? I know you've set it up about 17 years ago, so looked.

Don Wenner
Yeah, so DLP Capital and DLP stands for Dream Live Prosper. As you said, I set up in 2006 and we're a real estate investment management company. So we manage private investment funds for investors, and we invest that money into predominantly workforce housing we do so as a lender, we lend money to real estate sponsors, developer operators, we joint venture partner with other developers and operators, and then we directly develop and operate housing. So by housing, I mean, mainly multifamily properties, but also a new kind of asset class that we've been investing in since before it wasn't really a thing is, you know, build for rent, single family communities, you know, as well. So we're investing in housing communities, as a lender as a partner as a sponsor and, and developer and then we do all the vertically integrated, you know, business lines that are needed to execute on that that investment strategy.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah, fantastic and I know it's a it's been it's been obviously a really great success. You diversified into these different product lines, you know, your your fast growing company, you've got a few 100 people, I think on the staff if I if I saw correctly built from nothing, I guess so this is a great story. Let's get back to this question now of okay. So within that context, the impact daily people need housing, it's important for them to have affordable housing that fit to be available to be well maintained all the all these parts and so when people say, can you really do both? How do you how do you answer them? How do you answer them about having a heart for impact? Because I see that very clearly. I look to your profile research, so you have a heart for impact and successful business. So how do you balance the two?

Don Wenner
As I said, you know, briefly a moment ago, you know, it's, it's harder for sure to do both but it can certainly be done, it starts with what is the fundamental strategy of the business so, so kind of give you the tangible strategy of what we do. So first, it starts with we have to choose to invest in housing communities, in areas where we cannot afford if we're building new communities where we can afford to build new communities, where the rents will be affordable. Right. So that's, that's sounds simple but that's a that's not possible in every market in the country today, unfortunately. So first, it comes down to choosing the right locations where we can financially afford to build new housing or acquire housing where the rents in that area the or in other words, the incomes in that area, support our rent. So that's the first thing we focus on doing and the next thing we fill you in for us affordable workforce housing is kind of our our main theme, how we define that as is our rents have to be less than 30% of the area median income, and across our portfolio are about 18%, which means that most of the people who live there can afford our rents. So how we do it, so a lot of people who run similar strategies to us or invest in I should say, similar asset classes, they may buy a property where rents today or say $1,000 a month, and they come in and their business plan is to renovate the apartments and put new granite counters in and all new floors and new kitchens and, and put 3040 $50,000 into each apartment and raise those rents from 1000 to $1,500. There's that's that's a very common strategy. It's also very common to focus on every single year, every single day or month, to try to get the maximum rents you can out of each property so, so constant, making sure you're charging the highest rents possible and that may mean that you have more turnover and people leave more regularly, but you justify it because you get higher rents. So that's the most common kind of value, add multifamily strategy, get the highest rents, you can and renovate the apartments to get, again, the highest rents you can get and that's not what we do. So our business model is we want to come in and have safe, clean, affordable apartments and invest in things that will save money over time. So we get rid of carpet typically and put hard surface floors and we put new efficient lighting in place we put, you know, efficient plumbing fixtures, we certainly freshly painted keep the unit clean, but we address you know HVAC units and things that are needed to keep maintenance costs lower but we don't go in and try to renovate and raise rents to the maximum then what we focused on doing is keeping our residents in our properties. So we do mostly two year leases instead of one year. We do two year renewals, we want our residents to stay in our properties for eight 910 years, versus the industry average of 16 to 18 months and by getting people to stay longer. we lower our turnover costs, we lower our maintenance costs, we might not always get the maximum rent, but we keep people in our properties which lowers costs, and does good not only do good in that we're providing safe affordable housing that people can afford but there's a lot of other challenges that come out of people moving constantly. As an example if for people who have school aged children, if they move every year or so which is very common and they're constantly changing their kids school every time their kids have to restart a new school. it restarts the insets them backwards from a learning standpoint and a lot of the working class areas around the country. It's a major problem and and so many kids today graduate third grade without the ability to read and I heard a great saying recently that from kindergarten to third grade. You learn to read from third grade on you read to learn and if you don't end third grade with the real ability to learn so many things in life Uh, your your chance of success in life goes down dramatically, you're changing schools constantly, that ability to stay at pace and gain basic skills like like reading decreased dramatically, you know, so many other community and and factors that happen when you're constantly moving, and you're not building deep friendships and relationships and community. So it's a different approach a different business model. So what we invest in how we think about keeping our residents in the property, how we think about our business model, that still can generate really great returns, we think by getting our people to stay in our units longer, we actually could generate better returns than maximizing rents every year as an example.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah, that's brilliant description, thank you so much, Don, this, this point about making strategic choices that actually support the consistent that actually makes sense financially, but they actually support an outcome goal that actually makes sense. I think this is a brilliant example, right? You're gonna have people coming in and out of apartments, on a regular basis, and a turnover and other costs and disruption for them and for you, that goes along with that and empty buildings and all the rest of it the maintenance and reselling the space, or you can change it around, not just change one thing, but a whole number of things, long term operating costs, the price levels, etc. and create a whole different, stable outcome that actually generates something that you might believe in more. So yeah, I think that's a beautiful example. Thank you for sharing that. Yeah and I think that what I often say to people who are thinking about this is the purpose or is it? Your the economics, for me that finances finances to fuel that like to say, I mean, you, it's, there's, there's only a destination? Sure, that is bigger than just the fuel, right? I mean, your company needs to fund finance to pay its people and have offices to work in and all the rest of it at some point, I think it's more than about the money, right and it is about the impact that you're creating and I think he's a great example of how you can have both and if you don't have the financial engine, you can't create the impact anyway, right? It's very hard, you haven't got the resources? What a couple of things that you did done to help the company scale because obviously, I mean, I'm a suspect, even the strategic choice is a key point. I mean, it's a very clear strategy that you come up with, you've got your percentage numbers, you know, you know, your figures, you know, it's 18%, or whatever it was of the, of the median income, we those are very clear. So I suspect their instance, strategic choices that you made, and then there might be some internal organizational choices, but I guess there's many real estate companies out there. What's what's the what's been the magic in yours?

Don Wenner
Thank you. Yeah, great, great question and, you know, scaling a business is, is a topic I'm quite passionate about and, you know, as you mentioned, you know, bet on a number of fast growing lists. The one I'm most proud of is, is 10 years in a row on the Inc 5000 list, which, this past year, we were the fourth fastest growing company in America, that's made that list, you know, five or more times where on 10 years in a row, we've grown between 306 100%, any three year period, you pick for 17, straight years, we've grown by over 50%, every single year for 17 straight years. So, you know, business scaling is a discipline that we've, we've built and in fact, I actually wrote a book called building an elite organization, the blueprint of scaling, a high growth, high profit business, you know, year and a half or so ago now nd it's a book on how we scale our business and so we've built an entire we call operating system to scale a high growth entrepreneurial business, we call that operating system, the elite execution system and fundamentally the the core of the operating system is discipline, first and foremost. So discipline, thought discipline to action and discipline people we call it the, the 20 mile march is our secret weapon, which is a term we took from, from Jim Collins, which happily can describe what that means and then the second really important part and the hard part, right, the terrible and great quote that I've heard said many times is, business would be so easy if it wasn't for the people, right? And so understanding the key behind any business, it's a group of people and so our ability to to attract and hire and develop and retain the very best people and at the center of that is leadership. You know, has been the things that have allowed us to grow really fast. So having a secret weapon we call it the 20 mile march, a disciplined way of going out and setting goals and achieving them and doing the things that generate results and having the very best, you know, people for our culture in our organization, have been how we've been able to grow and sustain that growth. You know, year after year after year.

Richard Medcalf
A lot of people talk about leadership and having, you know, key in their company, how does that show up in your business? What? How do you see leadership and what does that mean and what do you want needs to be in place for you?

Don Wenner
So our mantra DLP is leaders made here and so first and foremost, our focus is on developing leadership within the organization. We define the job of a leader at DLP is to show the way through the forest and be able to, you know, generate results. Through influence, it's a short version of our description and so we spent a lot of time teaching, on leadership training, doing workshops, creating stretch project opportunities, giving exposure opportunities for people to see and be a part of, of opportunities. We meet as a leadership team every single Monday and have some level of leadership training and message involved in that we're reading right now book called The Eight Paradoxes of Great Leadership, we just read finished rereading the best book ever written on leadership, in my opinion, The Five Levels of Leadership by John Maxwell, which I think does the best job of any book of defining what leadership is and how it really works and I think most people, especially CEOs, especially business leaders, think they're level five leaders. They think they're world class, incredible leaders, when most people rarely ever consistently achieve level three leadership, which is being able to lead through production be able to consistently generate results with and through a team, most people are not able to consistently do that and so that's an area we spent a lot of time focused on, we built this training curriculum, we call the 24 practices of highly effective and productive leaders, and their different skills and abilities that need to be developed to be able to be a consistent leader who generates results and so we put a tremendous amount of intentional focus around the development of leadership around the evaluation of our leadership abilities and, and in turn, you know, the growth of leaders, we think that the biggest job the biggest challenge and focus of leadership is to develop other leaders and that's what we challenge each of our our leaders to do each and every day.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah, I love the way that you describe it. Actually, Don, it's so clear that you've been thinking about this in a very structured way, you've got key principles, and that you've embedded those in the organization to the degree that you know, you don't just have your weekly leadership meeting, but you whatever, but you also make sure that there is some leadership content in that meeting, rather than just focus on the tasks. Most teams I've worked with, frankly, you know, a lot of them are just like, Okay, what's business challenge? They get right into what they're doing and they're not thinking about who they're being or how they're being, as they do it and so I can really pick that up and your thoughtfulness in how you do that. Don't tell me about the was talking about the 20 mile march, what's, what's that about?

Don Wenner
So 20 mile march is comes from my opinion, Jim Collins, Best Book, Great by Choice. I love all of his books but, you know, his most famous book is called Good to Great, where he studies you know, these great companies in their parallel companies, Great by Choice in that book that was really a four year research project for Jim Collins and Morton Hanson to determine if you wanted to run a great company, you know, what do you need to do and what do all you know, great companies have in common? And long story short, after this four year research project, the thing that all great companies had in common, and great companies being companies who maintain their greatness over 30 years over decades, was the 20 mile mark and the term 20 mile march comes from the story of two expedition crews, who set out to go to the South Pole. Nobody's ever been to the South Pole before. So two similarly skilled leaders and teams with similar resources, both set out to go to the South Pole and the end result was one group got their first 31 days earlier and the other group who got their 31 days later, they actually all died on their way back. So two parallel differences and when they studied what, what did one group do differently than the other, the difference was the 20 ma marks and the The Expedition crew who got there first, they would march 20 miles every single day. So if the weather was negative 20, and wind in their face, they would force themselves to go 20 miles. When the when it was 60 degrees and sunny and wind at their back, they would modulate their effort to not go more than 20 miles. So every day, they knew what they had to do was to go 20 Miles didn't matter what was going on around them didn't matter what the conditions were around them, the crew who died, they would go 40 miles on good days and bad days, they would stay in their tent and wait. Right? So they let what they did each day be completely controlled by what goes on around them and the the business parallel to that is, is that we need to figure out what are the things that we do that generate our results? How do we drive productivity as an organization? How do we protect our productivity individually, and make sure we're doing those activities, no matter what's going on around us? No matter if we're in a global pandemic, no matter if we're in a recession, no matter what's, what's the outside conditions are making sure we control those activities each and every day and sometimes it's not even just the external conditions. It's just the world when within our lives and within our businesses, making sure we still are doing the things every day when I explained this story, and I play a little video for all new team members every month, and we do a welcome to DLP meeting and I asked people, what's the business parallel to the story, somebody always says, it's like the tortoise and the hare, you know, slow and steady wins the race and the steady that consistency part is 100%. The accurate, the slow part is not. So I always tell people, this is called the 20 mile mark. You know, for any of us who wear a Fitbit or an Apple watch or track our steps, activities, you know, most of us don't go 20 miles a day, right? I average 20 plus 1000 steps a day, that's, you know, seven to 10 miles depending on what I'm doing, right? 20 Miles is a massive amount of activity, right and it's about building the discipline that we do a massive amount of product productive activity every single day, not just the beginning of the year and at the end of the year, not just the beginning of the month, not just in the summer, not just you know, but every single day and when you can get every person in organization doing a massive amount of productive activity every single day. It's amazing what you can accomplish and that's how you grow, you know, 60 plus percent a year every year, is by putting this kind of discipline in place that everybody marches forward, you know, every single thing.

Richard Medcalf
Don, I'm really curious, what's your 20 mile march? What do you need to get done every day?

Don Wenner
So for every person organization, it's a little different, what we define it as...

Richard Medcalf
I'm gonna do about you as a leader, right? Like, you're the CEO, is gonna be different from you from like, a sales person or whatever it is, I get that, right, you're not making sales calls or whatever, you know, 20 sales calls or whatever you got to do, but how do you internalize that for yourself as as the organizational leader?

Don Wenner
So we internalize, and I'll answer my specific in a second is, is the 8020 principle, right? So we've all heard, you know, the Pareto is 8020 principle, right? That, you know, 20% of our time produces 80% of our results, right? 20% of the world's population controls 80% of the world's wealth. 20% of the world's roads have it, you know, it applies to everything, but applies to our time as well. So we go through this exercise with every person in the organization, what is our 20%? Or what is the 20% of things you do that generate 80% of your results, and a lot of people struggle to accept that. Alright, so if I work 50 hours a week, that means 10 hours a week, produces 80% of my results, right? And then we teach the 64 four rule, which is if you take the 2080 20 principle to your 20%, that means 4% of your time produces 64% the result? So two hours a week is producing, you know, two thirds results that seems hard to believe but how powerful would it be if you get everybody in organization understand what are the is the 20%, or the 4% of things they do that produce the results? Right salespeople? It's obvious right there. The easiest example it's prospecting, being on sales appointments, right? Those are the things they do that produce the result but what is busy sales, people stop doing prospecting going on sales appointments, right? And most organizations. So we figure that out in organization, everybody in the company has a clear set of expectations for their job, the clear outputs they're responsible for and a clear set of responsibilities and they know what they are, they've know what success is for their job. So we define that upfront. So for me, you know, I know the things that today point of my, in our growth that I do that generate the biggest results. You know, one is interviews. So one of the biggest allocation of my time is hiring, top talent organization. So interviewing potential leaders and then number two, we're doing what we call alignment meetings with my top leaders. Those are two of the most important things I do every week, spending one on one time with my top leaders, my direct reports and working to recruit and bring on new leaders Another really important focus of my time is meeting with prospective. We call them elite members or sponsor operators who we're going to build a relationship with and we're going to help them scale their business and be their primary capital provider and partner with them, and so forth. So being with our existing elite members, partners and prospective elite member partners, spending time with, with, with those high, really great sponsor CEOs that we can pour into and help them scale their business and turn scale our business. So those are a couple of the activities that that I know are part of my 20% that if I make sure I do each and every week, no matter what whirlwind going around me by all the other things I have to do, you know, we'll make sure that, you know, we're achieving our results. I'm doing my job as CEO.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah, that's fantastic. It reminds me it's actually interesting. This is the first conversation where I get to say, by the time this podcast episode is released, my book will be out.

Don Wenner
Awesome.

Richard Medcalf
And my books on Making Time for Strategy and because it's such a big issue that most people get stuck in the low level operational tasks, the 80%, or not on the 20% and so I have a whole area around high value activities, right? What are those high value activities for me their content, connecting and coaching, right? If I do those three things, create new content, new ideas, new programs, connect with high level leaders, and serve them, coach them create value for them, advise them, those are things that I am a genius zone and world class and I the more I do that, the more value I create in the business, the more I get distracted with finance and expenses, and admin and everything else. I'm I'm out of my zone and I think it's really important for people to get clear on what those you know what there's 20%, or those 4% activities are, what this high value activities are and once you once you see them, and I think you know, yours are really clear as well, you're interviewing, aligning, and managing your elite members and it's really clear, I want you to call that scorecard you can look at your day and say I was I was like contributing at my highest level today.

Don Wenner
Exactly, and you know, one of the my favorite quotes, my leadership team is tired of me saying this, I've been saying it for last, you know, year and a half, and I go to quote, but many have the will to win, few have the will to prepare to win and I think you know, most people are really, really busy and wandering around really hard and you know, Tim Ferriss, I don't think he's the original quote of this, but says, you know, busyness is, is a form of laziness, right and many people are running around doing lots of things not exactly knowing why and what the purpose behind it, it is and the prepared to win that most people won't do is the stopping thinking, intentionally deciding what I want to accomplish and how I'm going to spend my time and, you know, I teach on this on this idea of what I call the five keys to success, significance and happiness and they are intentionality is first and foremost. I'm incredibly intentional with every minute of every day, making sure each thing I'm doing is aligned with with a bigger goal. Number two is purpose three is goals. Four is grit, and five is growth mindset and, but it starts with intentionally knowing what to do, and we build this tool we call the elite compass, and we have the business tool and then we have a tool we call the personal compass that every person in my organization uses I use to guide our individual lives, then we which we'll call the family compass to and and it's a tool to get very clear about what we want to accomplish and why and spending time each year we just Friday spent a whole day with my top leaders working on the kind of the first detailed draft of our compass for next year and that attentional time and deciding where we want to go and why and how it fits in and what we're not going to do. Right. Warren Buffett says, you know, the difference between millionaires and billionaires is billionaires say no more often right? Is being able to say no to lots of opportunities to focus on what's you know, most intentionally aligned with what I want to accomplish and I can create the biggest scale and leverage to my time and resources is something few people slow down enough to do because they're so busy. You know, doing you know each day.

Richard Medcalf
I have absolutely it's why I have I might have been you might have been to see this is on video for those who are listening but I have a little snail here. Blurry to remind me on my death to slow down to speed up right? It's not to slow down to slow down but it is that when we bring ourselves down, get rid of the tunnel vision and say what's the real where do I really need to put my energy is a game changer. You and your own most people were running so fast. I call it the Infinity trap. We're just dealing with all the infinity of stuff hitting us time and time again and we feel we've been productive because we're trying to plow through our lists, and we're knocking things off. Yep. But are we changing the world? Probably leveling up? Probably not. So that I'm really enjoying this conversation, I'm just aware of time. The good news is that we've already dealt with a couple of my quickfire questions, because you've recommended a ton of books, you've already given us a couple of your key quotes that you've used, you know, with your team on occasion. So in many ways, we're kind of ahead of the game here and what advice would you give your 20 year old self?

Don Wenner
That I will give to my 20 year old self?

Richard Medcalf
Yeah, feel to get back in time.

Don Wenner
Even though I feel we've done this reasonably? Well, I'd say higher faster. So is what I would have told myself at 20.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah. Why was that? Why would that have been a game changer?

Don Wenner
I think every time I've hired the right people in our organization, you within 30 days, 60 days, and we're saying, how did we survive, you know, before this person, right, where you can't imagine life or business without that, that key leader and so often, you know, if we would have made that decision, we would have brought that leader aboard a year earlier, two years earlier, you know, we would make an even bigger impact, we would have grown even faster, I would have been freed up more to be focusing on my high value opportunities

Richard Medcalf
Fantastic. So Don, one of the things that I get about you is you know, you're actually pretty soft, spoken. Reflective and you've got like a really sense in you that depth of you know, you're playing a big game, right, you making things happen, you're really focused on impact and not every leader is not ready to play that game. So I love this question I love particularly plants for you, which is many of our best guests on the show come from referrals. So I'm wondering who inspires you? Who's an impactful CEO? who perhaps you've apprenticed with, or you've we've seen in your customers or your partners? Yeah, who's your friends, you know, who's somebody who inspires you? Who gets you to play a bigger game? You know, who might be another great guest for our future episode?

Don Wenner
I'll go with two people. One, I'll go with Lloyd Rebe. Lloyd is the founder of halftime Institute, a nonprofit organization focused on helping people go from success to significance often second half of life but not always. I've gone through the program and is running a really cool organization now called ardent where they match up incredible CEOs and business leaders with young social entrepreneurs. To help them scale. Lloyd is the most intentional person I know he's one of the members of my personal board to highly recommend Lloyd and then second is a person who Lloyd put me in touch with is David Weekley. David Weekley is the founder and CEO of David Weekley Homes, Top 10 home builder in America, privately owned but David's a person who clearly knows what he wants to accomplish in this world, he gives about a third of all of his wealth and his income. Last year, I believe he gave $34 million and he doesn't just write checks, he gets very involved and make sure all of his giving is scalable and sustainable and just incredible individuals built an outstanding business.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah, fantastic. I love the examples because as I said, I knew you're gonna have some great names, because I see that you're up to impact and it's not you. There's plenty of people who can build a really high growth business. Yeah, and they want to fit their stock at the end of it and walk away and they're good. Yeah, fine but I said obviously, I'm sure you're happy, happy to create the financial wealth that I'm sure you've created but I get the sense that it's not just about that, right and it is about the impact and so the people you mentioned there is that shift right to significance to changing the world to making a dent that makes the place of the world a better place and so I just I love that about this conversation. It lights me up. It's why I do what I do, right and I realized that at some point in my career, I don't want to just help AT and T or whoever it might be increased the EBIT down margin by naught point. 2%. Nothing wrong with that. What I really want to do is help leaders change the world because they're in such a great place to do it. Great to hear that from you. So done, no matter what we've achieved, there's always a next level to get to. So where's the next level for your business?

Don Wenner
So our BHAG or Big, Hairy, Audacious, Goal over the last few years has been to achieve fortune 500 status through positively impacting 10 million lives and we're not actually planning to go public but to be at the size of a fortune 500 company has been our BHAG. We're kind of in talks right now going through our strategic planning, we may tweak that BHAG to becoming the world's most productive company, which leads to us building a $1 billion foundation. So, so we're really focused on making sure everything we do for profit for our business is making an impact but then also the, the, the wealth and profits that we're generating off of the good we're doing from organization are being poured back into nonprofit opportunity to social opportunities where we can, you know, make a tremendous, tremendous difference and so I've recently kind of set a personal goal, I want to build my foundation, I set up to a billion dollars and, and for the purpose of, you know, make the biggest sustainable difference post my lifetime. So there's some of the things that I'm focused on. On right now and the short answer to a lot of that is right now I need to scale our impact and working on the most effective ways to do that.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah, beautiful. What about you personally? What needs to shift inside you? What do you need to do differently or be differently in order to multiply your own impact? Because we always have a next level. What's yours?

Don Wenner
Yeah, I think I think my next my next step is is a step that I've been, you know, working my way up for a while here is, is developing and empowering leaders to pull myself out of more and more things that aren't the highest value and use of my, my time. So I'm give both blast and I don't like to use the word curse, but the alternative of blast in the respect that I you know, I'm the visionary door organization, and I have my head in the clouds, and I can see the big picture very clearly but I also keep my feet and I'm in my hands in the dirt and sometimes I do that. Too long that it holds back the hiring and development, empowerment of leaders to pull me out of more which would allow me to free me up to to make a bigger, a bigger impact and leverage, you know, that my, my, you know, God given gifts and blessings more more effectively. So investing in doing that, and empowering leaders in our organization, is the big challenge I'm working on right now.

Richard Medcalf
Beautiful. So Don, if people want to find out more about you, about the business, how do they best do that?

Don Wenner
Absolutely. So they can, so I run a podcast, similar name Impact with Don Weiner, which you can check out on any place you go to your podcast, you can go to our website, dlpcapital.com, you're welcome to email me as well at don@dlpcapital.com as well.

Richard Medcalf
All those details. We'll put them in the show notes. Don, it's been a pleasure speaking with you. I love your sense of ambition, our vision of impact of service and I think you've shared some really thoughtful ideas there around. Yeah, what it takes to grow this business business sustainably over these years and I think it comes down to that thoughtfulness around around leadership around what those high value activities are around all the things that we talked about. So thank you for sharing some of your nuggets with us today. It's been a lot of fun.

Don Wenner
Awesome. Thank you for having me so much.