Be the Solution with Maria Quattrone
Maria Quattrone, a leader in real estate with over 21 years of experience, is the driving force behind RE/MAX @ HOME - Maria Quattrone & Associates in Philadelphia. Her passion goes beyond selling homes; she’s dedicated to helping others succeed. Through her 'Rise in Real Estate' training program and the "Be the Solution" podcast, Maria shares her expertise, inspiring professionals and entrepreneurs to excel. With over 3,400 properties sold, Maria's success is evident, but her true mission is to empower others, build strong brands, and foster meaningful connections.
Be the Solution with Maria Quattrone
Transforming Luck into Success: Crafting Your Mastery in Real Estate and Business Relationships
What if you could turn what seems like luck into a calculated success strategy? Join me, Maria Quattrone, as I sit down with Ryan Spak to uncover the hidden art of mastering your craft in building, construction, and business relationships. We unravel the secrets behind how years of honing our expertise allowed us to seize opportunities that others might simply call lucky breaks. Alongside tales of our own experiences, we draw inspiration from the Philadelphia Eagles, demonstrating how small, strategic adjustments can lead to monumental successes. Plus, hear the incredible journey of a friend who, after 25 years of dedication, finally received a Grammy nomination.
In a landscape where real estate often conjures images of cutthroat competition, we illuminate a different approach. Ryan and I share an inspiring story of rescuing distressed properties by weaving together partnerships, state funding, and strategic collaborations. These efforts not only saved buildings but also preserved a nonprofit's stake, all while maintaining affordability. Through personal anecdotes and insights from a wise business coach, we emphasize the strength of integrity, transparency, and strong relationships in transforming challenges into opportunities and reshaping the perceptions of real estate developers.
As we explore the excitement and trials of expanding beyond Philadelphia, Ryan opens up about his dream of watching his company thrive outside its local roots. We discuss the importance of having the right processes, systems, and people in place to achieve this ambitious goal. Balancing multiple projects and maintaining high standards in customer service is a challenge we both know well, and we share our strategies for managing these growing pains. Amidst the busyness, simple pleasures like savoring hot chocolate keep us grounded, and we reflect on the gratitude and perspective essential for personal and professional growth.
Connect with Maria Quattrone:
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TikTok: mariaquattronerealestate
Website: MQrealesate.com
Office number: 215- 607-3535
Morning. This is the Be the Solution podcast, with my guest today, ryan Spack, and I am your host, maria Cuatrone, and I am excited to talk to Ryan today. All things about building and construction and relationships, and one of the things I was thinking about this morning is mastering your craft. About this morning is mastering your craft. Mastering your craft doing the same things over and over and over. You create the perfect scenario by mastering your craft and because you master your craft when the right opportunity presents itself, you're prepared. That is a.
Speaker 2:that is a truth. I think to any business, I think to anyone's success in life. That is a truth. We have a development that we actually just finished and when we were the winners of purchasing that particular property, a lot of my colleagues congratulated us as being lucky.
Speaker 2:And the reality is that it was not luck. We knew the land, we knew the property, we knew the site, we knew the zoning, we understood the base marketplace, we understood the multiple exit strategies that were possible. There was no need to run a pro forma, there was no need to debate whether we should move forward with this particular property or not. It went on the market at three o'clock and by five o'clock we had an offer that the owner couldn't refuse and by Monday we had an under agreement and within six months we had it purchased. And today there's two buildings that sit on that site with close to 60 units, both mixed-use, commercial. It's an inclusionary housing development with deed-restricted, affordable housing inside the apartment complex gym, dog park, green roofs. And you know, my colleagues thought we were lucky and it had nothing to do with luck. It had to do with the fact that we had done that type of project on that type of land before and knew the sub market really really well.
Speaker 1:That's exactly right. So we can put it to, let's say, the Eagles winning the Super Bowl. There was no luck involved. No, it was the drills and the practice and the mastery that happens when nobody else is looking.
Speaker 2:And they saw. You know if you you know I don't not going to pretend like I understand the complete mindset of Howie Roseman and his team and the coaching staff, but you know they had gotten close and they saw what didn't work. And so, because they knew the base model of what they wanted to accomplish, they were able to make tweaks real easy and what seemed like luck or what seemed like opportunities that no one else really had, they put themselves in a position to be able to have those opportunities because they were so close before and they were able to look at themselves and say, well, that didn't work. This is what worked. Let's change this piece in the machine and make this adjustment. And they did that to multiple parts of their team and had a significantly better team this year than they've had in the past better team this year than they've had in the past Significantly better.
Speaker 1:We call it tiny hinges swing big doors. And when you look at that in your business we look at that in our business, ryan of selling a massive amount of listings in high volume, it's based on the tweaks, the tiny hinges that swing being doors, the things we do that are behind the scenes that nobody knows about, and not because they don't know about. It's because it's not shiny and it's not sexy and you got to get your hands dirty and a lot of I would call it blood, sweat and tears over decades of work.
Speaker 2:What's the? I have a friend of mine in the music business who was just nominated for his first Grammy this year, and what seems like an overnight success has been 25 years in the making.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so here he is sitting in the Grammys waiting to see if he wins an award, and simultaneously, another song that he produced was hitting number four in the world marketplace for downloads. So here is, like, all the success. It seems like it is happening overnight, but it is this compound of knowing what he does well, tweaking what wasn't working, tweaking what wasn't working and continuing to just pound this idea of his goal, along with these tweaks, for 25 years. For him, that's how long it took.
Speaker 1:That's how long it takes. It really does take quite some time. People would say I used to hear this 10,000 hours. I think it takes more than 10,000 hours.
Speaker 2:Well, I think it takes more than 10,000 hours to get to a level of success that you are comfortable with, but to know your craft, to get to that baseline that we were just talking about. Yeah, I think it takes that long to try and figure out your baseline. Look for the baseline.
Speaker 1:That's right, the baseline, but not the mastery, correct?
Speaker 2:If you look at the trajectory of our company, the first six or seven years, we did the same thing that most small investors and developers do the triplexes and the quads and the single family one-offs, and we had bought a commercial mixed use building on 52nd Street relatively early in the lifespan of our company.
Speaker 2:But it wasn't until like six or seven years into this that, all of a sudden, the mindset shifted, the mission shifted. The type of developments that we currently do became the idea of what we wanted to be working on, where we wanted to put our time, our energy, our capital. And you know, I look back on the first six or seven years as the 10,000 hours that was the baseline. If those hadn't happened, no way we get to the stuff that we're working on today. And so you know, the first real partnership that we did with a nonprofit organization that was real estate driven, it took three years to negotiate. The one that we are about to like, sign on the dotted line for has taken six months. And so you know, you look at those scenarios and you go well, why did it take six months? Well, because the first one took three years.
Speaker 1:You knew what they wanted, you know what they didn't, you know what they didn't want.
Speaker 2:We also had an idea of how to approach the subject Right. We understood where their fears were their mindset. Yeah, we understood their mindset. That doesn't happen without the first 10,000 hours, it just doesn't, don't you find it, you mentor?
Speaker 1:you know you have a group West Philly. I've been to it. I was just thinking about that. I haven't been to it in a while. I'm going to make an effort to come out next month.
Speaker 2:But you get a lot of.
Speaker 1:You get a lot. And I remember the one I went to. Actually I thought it was really great the way it unfolded, but you get a lot of new people it, but you get a lot of new people. How do you express to the new people really what it takes?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so yeah, I've been really, really, really lucky to be welcomed into the Jumpstart community my daughter, charlotte, who I affectionately call Charlie. She is nine years old and I know how long I've been a part of Jumpstart because when I spoke at Jumpstart for the first time three days before she was born. So my, my, my anniversary with Jumpstart as a program and my and my daughter's birthday are very, very much aligned. Jumpstart is an amazing program the idea that someone with experience in real estate can help those in a community understand how to do development so that they can own a part of their community and benefit from the improvements that are happening in that neighborhood. The idea behind Jumpstart having a loan program that supports those folks is the key to the success of that program, because someone who doesn't look like me, who doesn't have the relationships that I have, usually doesn't have access to capital, and so when you take the mentorship and the learning and you combine it with capital access, all of a sudden you have an opportunity for a whole group of people to get into an economic game that most times they don't have the opportunity to do and that really intrigued the hell out of me. And it really intrigued me for the idea that gentrification doesn't necessarily need to be bad or looked at as bad if the community owns the benefits of the gentrification. And so a couple of years ago, after COVID, I was given the opportunity to take over the Jumpstart West Philly program, and we have big plans for that. It hasn't been everything that I wanted it to be, but what I started to realize was the amount of mentors that I had from the Jumpstart Germantown program and the amount of people in the West Philly program and the amount of just general folks who call me for advice. I realized there was too many of them and that they were asking a lot of the same questions and that we needed to start putting them in the same room together so they can meet each other. They could create their own community in and of themselves.
Speaker 2:And I start out with the idea of what is? What is it that you want from your investment goals in real estate? Investment goals in real estate? Trying to just pay for your cell phone bill on a monthly basis? Or are you trying to work for nine months and to do a turnover of a flip property and walk away with $25,000 in profit because you want to buy yourself a new car. Where is your goal? And then, what is the time that you have? You have family, you have your job. You have other obligations in your life. If you can combine the amount of time you can invest in real estate with the capital, with the idea of what you want from any profitability that you get, you can start to figure out where you want to start in this business.
Speaker 2:And then just come to Jumpstart and allow the program to help support you in that goal and find a mentor that understands what those goals are and how to get from point A to point B, and I have loved every minute of being a part of that program for all of those reasons.
Speaker 1:It's helped, supported a lot of people.
Speaker 2:My favorite story is this woman in her 60s, retired Philadelphia school teacher, lives on a tiny little street off of Girard Avenue and in the 80s she was gifted a side yard lot from the city of Philadelphia for a dollar and she owned her home and what was happening around her was all of these three-story quad apartment buildings was happening on her block, and so she thought about selling the parcel of land. And then she heard about it instead of it remaining a side yard, and today there is a fully functioning triplex with three two bedroom apartments in it that she owns, all on her own, no investors. I helped land her financing right it's her credit and her work, but I helped guide the situation. And now you have this woman who has this massive asset next to her home.
Speaker 1:It's amazing.
Speaker 2:Awesome, it's absolutely awesome.
Speaker 1:Beautiful story, you know, because this is probably her. Well, I'm sure, as a school teacher she gets a pension, which is great, but this is, that's a generation of wealth, yep.
Speaker 2:She's able to build.
Speaker 1:That's why the first step is we want to get people into home ownership.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And getting people into home ownership is a really important part of what we do as brokers. But I want to talk about right now, Ryan. What do developers do deals? I talked to so many people that are in the industry and so many people still are sitting on the sidelines. I know that you aren't, and you found a way.
Speaker 2:We're also not really buying a whole lot of properties, so a lot of our projects that we have in the pipeline are partnerships, and so those type of partnerships are with assets that are incredibly distressed or assets that the institution or owner just can't unlock.
Speaker 1:So you found a way to still do business by being the solution in your space.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:By partnering with others, by helping, assisting and guiding situations that are in bad shape for a variety of reasons, I could imagine, yeah, and still do business today.
Speaker 2:I'll give you a really good example of one that we already accomplished. It was negotiated from 2018 to 2020. It was the first one that we ever really did like this, and that was. A nonprofit owned 18 buildings in Strawberry Mansion. They had bought it in 2012 for a dollar and all the debt, and if you looked at the capital stack once this nonprofit was done with this transfer, they had a million dollars of private capital with $750,000 of state funding and then almost $4 million of public debt. It was three of this capital stack in terms of the debt on this property. The problem was, on a good day, the whole thing was worth 3 million, so they were massively underwater massively. What made it worse was, of the 47 apartments in the 18 buildings, one building had collapsed. There goes three apartments and of the other 44 units, only eight of them were occupied. It was a literal.
Speaker 1:Bloodbath.
Speaker 2:It was a bloodbath, yeah, and all the while, these were deed-restricted, affordable housing units where the deed restriction was about to roll off. It was about to end, and so the affordability in a neighborhood that was being highly gentrified, that the, which doesn't exist anymore, and we were able to negotiate with the state funders and with the redevelopment authority who held the remaining public debt, and we were able to save all 17 buildings. The 18th building that had collapsed we sold to a developer who rebuilt it as a triplex market rate. Triplex the other 17 buildings. We extended the deed restriction 25 years for affordability and came into this whole thing knowing that this was going to be a 20-year play, that we were going to save it, salvage it, put 10-year money on this thing and that at the end of nine or 10 years we're going to refinance this and redo all of the properties with the proceeds. We didn't over-leverage the debt. We did it just enough to get it to salvage what was there, and the nonprofit still owns 19% of the whole development.
Speaker 1:So they were able to stay in the deal. Everybody wins Everybody wins.
Speaker 2:And so we you know, is it perfect Hell? No, absolutely not, not even close.
Speaker 1:And was it easy? No, it's not easy.
Speaker 2:No, and if you if anybody listening to this.
Speaker 1:This is the easy stuff.
Speaker 2:If you speak to my general counsel, jen Tittenfoss, over at Royer Cooper, she will tell you that her first reaction, when I told her we were doing this deal and how we were going to structure it, she told me, I was out of my damn mind. And now here we are. We're in negotiations for our sixth or seventh version of something like this.
Speaker 1:Rinse and repeat yeah, rinse and repeat.
Speaker 2:Now. They don't look the same and they all have very different problems, but the concept is the same, right? That baseline is still the same. Right, you have a, an asset has unrecognized value. You have an institution, nonprofit, government agency or owner who doesn't know how to tap into that value and we as a partner and we as a partner recognize that they have to understand the process and understand and trust that we are their partner and that we're there for the right reasons. And then make sure that. And then we have to make sure that we show them the math and that their value and their asset is actually recognized and we don't try and screw them out of a single dollar of what the value of that asset is. And if we can get past that threshold, the rest of this is a simple real estate deal.
Speaker 1:It goes back to what we started talking about earlier, before we got on Relationships.
Speaker 2:Building relationships. It's all relationships, yep, it's building relationships.
Speaker 1:It's all relationships.
Speaker 2:A hundred percent.
Speaker 1:Building relationships, doing the right thing, so being the solution, being an integrity, even when nobody else is looking, because we know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I have a business coach, emily Golden, who I absolutely adore. I don't think in my life I'd be where I am right now if it wasn't for her I absolutely adore. I don't think in my life I'd be where I am right now if it wasn't for her, and her entire premise with me for the last several years has been that quote of being in integrity. Where is your line? And you need to walk it straight, and it is something that is always floating around in the back of my mind. And so, when these real estate deals are happening and you're sitting across from a board of directors who is scared half out of their mind and reads the inquire on a daily basis that real estate developers are fiends and the enemy Right, because that's the, that's the that's the temperature in the room.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's the temperature in the room. Yeah, that's the temperature.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, when the initial impression that they have of you when you walk in the door your entire space initially is to overcome that challenge. And I recognize that right out of the gate, that right out of the gate, we have to beat that whole entire notion down and that if we can learn that we are there for the right reasons which is, hey, we are a for profit developer, we're here to make money, but we can also do communal good then there's a deal to be made and then the rest of it just turns into a real estate deal. Right? What's the capital stack? What's your return? What's your debt service coverage ratio? Can you finance this thing return? What's your debt service coverage ratio? Can you finance this thing? Can you make the property its highest and best? And, if you can't, into a functional place and have a much longer term vision for it? And putting that puzzle together is the best part of my job.
Speaker 1:Well, that's the part of it right, Like what inspires you individually? What inspires you? What inspires you individually?
Speaker 2:What inspires you? Give me the most challenging thing that someone has told me I can't do. That will get me up in the morning and I yeah, that's the part. There's a reason that my company has never gotten into. Let's build 70 townhomes that all look the same Like.
Speaker 2:I can never see my company being that type of developer and I and my colleagues who do that, and I get it, but I would lose complete sanity. I'd be so damn bored. Give me the complicated project. Right Right now we're working on a building in Reading, Pennsylvania. It's 40,000 square feet. It was built in the thirties. It has apartments. It turned into dorms in the sixties. It got gutted in the late nineties and turned into 125 bed dormitory.
Speaker 1:Give me, we're turning it back into the apartments that it was in the thirties give me.
Speaker 2:We're trying to get back into the apartments that it was in the 30s. Give me the complicated deal right. Give me the one where the elevator is from 1931, right, and we want to save it.
Speaker 1:I love it.
Speaker 2:Right, give me the parking lot that has 12 spaces and we need to squeeze 21 spaces out of it so that we can meet the zoning requirement. Right, give me the complicated deal where the building was owned by Albright College and Albright College was having financial issues and you're negotiating with a board of directors who just fired the president of the college. Give me the complication. That to me. I want the story and that drives me in this thing. The more complicated, the more fun that it is for me.
Speaker 1:Well, I think there's a special talent that comes with that and when you are looking at that puzzle like it's an exciting puzzle to solve. Yeah, Although you know, probably lose a few hairs along the way.
Speaker 2:I don't know, you got pretty good hair there, though I'm doing okay.
Speaker 1:I got some grays going. There's grays.
Speaker 2:My daughter told me that I'm old. Oh boy, she doesn't know what old is. I get it.
Speaker 1:So you know, we had a conversation with some people asking what keeps you up at night?
Speaker 2:If you would have asked me this question three years ago. It was losing key staff members at the same time that the development project that we were working on budget went from a total of 7.7 million to 9.8 million pretty much overnight.
Speaker 1:Because of the change in costs and rate.
Speaker 2:Yep change in costs. The rate didn't really impact us as much. I have believed for a very long time that the interest rate environment was going to change, or it actually did. If you would have asked me in 2020, after COVID happened, what I thought was going to take place, I would have told you that interest rates would be exactly where they are Like. When we were underwriting deals three years ago, we were looking at perm rates that six and six and a half percent on our performance. I anticipated what's happening for a multitude of reasons why.
Speaker 1:So it's interesting. You anticipated it, but 85% of others thought that the gravy train would continue to go on forever. Or is that just delusional?
Speaker 2:No, I think that it's sentimental more than it is anything else History has a tendency to repeat itself but it never looks the same.
Speaker 2:That is true, and so you know, if you look at real estate cycles going all the way back to the 1800s unless there's some cataclysmic event like a world war, what usually ends up taking place is a real estate cycle. Is what? 18 and three quarters years, something along those lines, three quarters years, something along those lines. Might be 18 and a half, might be 19, but it's really around the same. And if you look back, if you look back the real estate in the 80s and real estate base crash we had in the 2008, 2009 era, they were about 18 and a half years apart from each other. And so if you do the generics math, the generic math on this 2007, you knew there was a problem in the real estate industry. If you go back and you read articles, you knew there were problems 2006, actually 2006,.
Speaker 2:you probably knew.
Speaker 1:I did. I'm boots on the ground right. I inventory stacking and stacking and stacking. And I keep it out to everybody Stop, stop, adjust the price now, adjust the price now, cutting one off at a time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I say all of that to say I don't think you know. No one can actually determine exactly when an state-based financial crisis happens, but I think it is coming. I think we know it's coming. If you watch the CMBS market, you can tell it's coming. If you watch the articles that you get every morning from Philly Biz Now, you can tell it's coming. Just read between the lines, you can tell it's coming. Just read between the lines, you can tell it's going to happen.
Speaker 2:But if you went back to 2019, when things were so good the minute COVID crashed the economy and the government started flooding the economy with capital, the only thing that can happen when you flood an economy with cheap money is inflation. It's the only thing that could happen. It's economics 101, and so when that happens, to drive down inflation, the fed's going to increase interest rates and, with my thought process that there was going to be a real estate based crash in 2020 through 2021, we refinanced every project that we had, every building we had, even though, even if it didn't need to be refinanced, we refinanced in the 10 year money. Even if the interest rate was higher at 10 years than it would have been at five years, we did it into 10 year money Smart, and so you know when. So you asked me about staying up at night. If you asked me two or three years ago, it would have been that. It would have been hey, I'm short staffed and a hole that I need to figure out.
Speaker 2:Lucky for me, we control both the development process and the construction process, and so it's not like we have to drag a third party GC into the mix to make changes quickly. That made us very nimble. Party GC into the mix to make changes quickly. That made us very nimble. We were able to drive a $1.8 million hole down to $236,000. Took a lot of pain and energy, but that's what kept me up. If you ask me what keeps me up right now, it's two things. From a business standpoint, one would be expectations. Right, what are other people's expectations, other partners' expectations, my expectations and?
Speaker 2:the other thing is the idea that if every project we have in the pipeline happens over the next two or three years, my company doubles in size. What does that look like? How does that feel? What are my employees doing? How do they respond to me? How do I communicate? That is something that I have not figured out just yet.
Speaker 1:That's interesting, interesting thing to think about. What does it look like, how does it feel? Because life is about the way we feel. We're chasing a feeling, always we're chasing this feeling, this feeling we had somewhere some time ago yeah and we want it back. We're to find that feeling back yeah, so you know what.
Speaker 2:What does it look like right now? We, you know, I think I have the benefit of a really, really, really good team. But you know, one of the things that I've asked my construction and development project manager on who's relatively new to my team is you have autonomy to figure out the systems of communication for you to quarterback the construction manager in the field and how you communicate with me. I don't care what the system looks like. I want you to think about what you're going to do when there's two other people underneath you and how they're going to communicate with you. What's that system look like over the next six months? And let's try something. And so yesterday you know he's three months into the job Yesterday he showed me something that he's trying, an application that he's, you know, put out there, and he built this system within the application and he showed it to me for like five minutes and I went great, let's test it, let's see if it works, cause I don't know what this looks like. I've never been here before, and so you know, this is all new to me, and that is I don't. I don't mind new, but the idea of failing when we're so close to this that I've wanted us to be for the last couple of years. That idea keeps me up at night, and so what's it all look like? How do they communicate with each other? How do I make sure that the I's are getting dotted, the T's are getting crossed, that we don't lose our relationship, so that the product is no different?
Speaker 2:We've been in business 15 years as a property manager. You go on Yelp we have a 4.8 star review. You go on Facebook, it's five stars. You go on Google, I think it's four and a half stars. I don't know a lot of property managers that have that high of rating. Being in business for as long as we've been in, that's a lot of people that have lived under our roof, a lot of people we've had the opportunity to piss off, and so you know, if we grow in size, does our customer service experience change? Does it get better? What's it look like? And so, yeah, that's definitely something that like when the world is quiet. That's what I'm thinking about. Good stuff, I think so. Well, we're gonna find out.
Speaker 1:A lot of two. I think you're running so fast sometimes that like where you've run into you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I mean it does.
Speaker 2:It does help that a good amount of our projects are not set, Not like we've got all the equity or we have all the financing set up, but there's a, there's a play, right, like I know there's a project in Wilmington, delaware, right, I know we're about to file zoning permits on a project in Redding.
Speaker 2:I know there's two more coming in Redding. I know that there's one in West Philly that we're looking at and there's two others that we're in like preliminary negotiations on, and so, like I can see the landscape to some degree, right. And so, from that perspective, if I decided to stop, if all of those landed and I decided to stop finding new stuff to do, we've got enough work for the next two and a half, three years if we can finance it and find the equity for it and keep moving. And so then the question is what's the other systems to make all that work? And if my company continues to develop and build for itself and do the it and keep moving? And so then the question is, what's the other systems to make all that work? And if my company?
Speaker 1:continues to develop and build for itself and do the property management we're running three companies pretty much all at the same time.
Speaker 1:Exciting times ahead, ryan, it's not boring. No, lots of moving parts, lots of challenges, lots of headaches. You know I said I say this all the time in real estate. To agents and people I said well, change your vocabulary. You don't have to do anything, you get to do it. So you get to do this. And then, and um, that's a mindset shift about getting versus having and being grateful because you be digging ditches out in the rain and the cold and doing some other BS stuff.
Speaker 2:I had a janitorial business before I had this. I remember what that was like when my employees didn't show up and you know I was. I was cleaning hair salons at three o'clock in the morning, right, like I remember what that was like. I was cleaning hair salons at three o'clock in the morning, right, like I remember what that was like and so, yeah, I I do not. As painful as this business can be, as frustrating, as aggravating as this, 15 years in, I still want to be in this business.
Speaker 1:So that's what it's all about.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Keep on being the solution.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So, before we wrap up today, ryan, I have two questions for you. Number one Sure. What's your guilty pleasure?
Speaker 2:Guilty pleasure. I'm going to say my simple guilty pleasure is hot chocolate, especially from Franklin Fountain. I will go out of my way for a Franklin Fountain hot chocolate. I will go out of my way for a Franklin Fountain hot chocolate. But I think my lifelong guilty pleasure is 80s movie memorabilia.
Speaker 1:Oh.
Speaker 2:Which has now translated into life-size versions of that memorabilia. Oh so I am a big 80s TV show, 80s movie person and I love the cars and the vehicles from those movies and TV shows. Like the Dukes of Hazzard. Like the Dukes of Hazzard. So one of those TV shows is the A-Team, and the A-Team has their van that is so iconic with the red stripe up the side. But this vehicle in that show was a white 84 Corvette.
Speaker 1:Nice.
Speaker 2:I've been blessed with the ability to buy one of those.
Speaker 1:Oh wow, that's fun.
Speaker 2:My obsession with movie memorabilia has gone from little models in my office to real life models.
Speaker 1:That's cool.
Speaker 2:I love that. That's a guilty pleasure.
Speaker 1:That's a great guilty pleasure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a lot of fun.
Speaker 1:Okay, so this personal question for you.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 1:What are you nobody else, no kids, no wife, no you most excited about for your personal future?
Speaker 2:Personal. Five years ago I was in a really nasty bike accident that broke a whole lot of my body. That I was very private about and I am, although I'm still in pain from that on a daily basis. I am on the other side of that and what I'm capable of physically is kind of awesome today, looking back on what transpired, and so personally, I'm excited about that prospect. I'm in better physical shape today at 44, than I was when I was 32 years old.
Speaker 1:Wow, I didn't know that.
Speaker 2:On the professional side, I'm excited for my company to start doing things outside of Philadelphia.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:I know, but not because I don't like what's happening in Philly. It's been a dream of mine to be able to say my company's large enough and strong enough that we can do something outside of our neighborhood, and that to me is it's like an award on a wall having the ability to be able to pull that off and do it successfully.
Speaker 1:And have the right processes and systems and people.
Speaker 2:And I'm and I that. So, yeah, there's a lot to look forward to in that regard.
Speaker 1:That's awesome.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Wow, this has been a really fantastic conversation. Ryan, thanks for coming on the Be the Solution podcast and I wish you the best in all your future endeavors and good luck with the doubling of your company. Thank you, I know what will happen, because you're determined. You're a determined human.
Speaker 2:Thank you Appreciate that. Thank you very, very much. I appreciated being here and the invitation put a massive smile on my face, so thank you.
Speaker 1:My pleasure, thank you.
Speaker 2:Awesome.