Episode 103 - Resilient Leadership in a World of Constant Disruption with David Ridely
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David Ridley knows a thing or two about real estate investing. Not only did he found and lead Invesco Real Estate for 27 years, but he also helped grow it into one of the largest and most diversified real estate investment firms in the world. And while the numbers are staggering, what is most impressive about David was his steadfast leadership. Learn more about building a resilient team in a world of constant disruption, what it takes to be salt and light in a big company, and what hope we have for the future.
All opinions expressed on this podcast, including the team and guests, are solely their opinions. Host and guests may maintain positions in the companies and securities discussed. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as specific investment advice for any individual or organization.
Episode Transcript
Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it.
John Coleman: Welcome to the Faith Driven Investor podcast. I'm John Coleman here with my partner, Luke Roush, and today we have the privilege of welcoming David Ridley to the show. Hi, David.
David Ridley: Hello there, John.
John Coleman: Well, I have to tell you, I'm really excited about this one. So I've known David for around a decade now. David was the founder and CEO of Invesco Real Estate, which grew to be a more than $60 billion real estate platform. Global everywhere in the world spanned tons of different products, and he also was just a great advocate for clients at the firm and someone that I considered a close friend and mentor. And so it's really a privilege to have him on today. And we're excited to learn how to build a $60 billion real estate platform. David, that should be a pretty easy task for you in the next 30 minutes or so. Is that right?
David Ridley: All right.
John Coleman: Well, talk to us a little bit about how you got started. We'd love to hear more about your life story as we dove in and just how you got into real estate investing.
David Ridley: You know, John, that's good question. Because when I graduated with my finance degree from the University of Texas, nineteen seventy five, I had no idea what I wanted to do. But the one thing I did know I didn't want to do is real estate. I wanted to be in stocks and bonds and all those really neat things. And somehow, the Lord has a sense of humor and shoehorned me right in the real estate. So it was kind of by accident. But if you don't mind, I'll just give you a little background on myself. I was born in San Antonio and my dad had been a B-17 pilot in the war and everything was new, you know, and he was the first out of eight that had ever gone to college. So we ended up getting transferred around a bit, and it was destiny that we'd moved back to Dallas because my mom died when I was nine and dad wanted to get us back or there was family. So it was just me and dad and my sister moved away to go to college. She might as well. That's why I ended up down there, I think. And being with my dad all that time, he was pretty hardened guy. You know, he did. There wasn't a lot of child-bearing books back then. I don't believe he was a believer when he died as well. I hope he was, but he would tell me over and over. We'd be driving down the road and he'd see someone digging a ditch or working on a telephone pole. And he would say, Son, do you want to do that when you grow up? And he would just start beating into me. I was going to college. And so that was my beginning. So there's one thing I knew I was going to do if nothing else in life, I was going to one day pass away, but I was going to pass away with college degree. So that's how I happened, and I went down to UT and got out and came back and was fortunate enough to get into a management training program of a small life insurance company. And I went through this all the different departments, and they liked me enough in the real estate group that they hired me there. And so I started off on our biggest deal I think I ever did was like eight hundred thousand dollars on a warehouse and that it was a good start.
John Coleman: It was faith always important to you, David, or when did that become a part of your life?
David Ridley: You know, growing up without a mother and dad was never at home? OK, so that was good for me. I thought that was fantastic, but I was without any real great leadership and there was this woman down the block who had three of the most beautiful sisters you've ever seen, who I really thought were cute and a son that I played in my little football teams with an elementary school right through high school with Danny. And that woman was a godly woman and she prayed for me constantly. And so sophomore year comes around, I was getting in more trouble. Junior year was no better and I finally thought I've had it. Friend of mine asked me to read the Bible. I opened it up and it made sense. For the first time in my life, I understood the value of Christ's sacrifice. And I prayed that night in bed between my junior and senior year that he would come into my life, and it was a remarkable change for me, and I jumped out of bed and drove over to her house the next morning to let her know. And she was a godly woman, and someone I think about constantly changed me forever.
John Coleman: That's fantastic, David. And as you navigated, you mentioned you didn't really want to get into real estate. You want to get into anything but real estate. So how did you end up in real estate?
David Ridley: Well, there was a program where you rotated throughout the company, and one of those was a real estate area and there was an Aggie in there and that Aggie decided he wanted to go back to College Station and open some ice cream stores. So I had written a really nice note. My dad had taught me to to do back in the low tech days, telling them how much I enjoyed it and that department. I'd done that earlier. So when he quit, they invited me down.
Speaker 3: And David, you know, maybe just for purposes of just listeners who were trying to get a sense of scope and scale, maybe share a bit about that. In terms of what your work in Invesco became, but maybe also speak to kind of why you went about that work and creation of jobs and sort of other things, it was a clear motivating factor for you.
David Ridley: What happened was that was my start in my career was south of life. I was fortunate enough to be hired by a large insurance company called Metropolitan Life, and they had their top person in the investment area, come to Dallas and made a little speech to us and told us where the world was trending. And it was towards managing other people's money. OK? He said. The trillions of dollars that are out there, the investable dollars are located in pension funds, endowments, foundations, sovereign wealth funds, et cetera, et cetera. Well, that planted a seed in me that I wanted to be part of that. And so as fate would have it, this company, I was making a little bit of a reputation for myself and Dallas, and this company that had been around a long time in Dallas invited me over to start that kind of group. So I started it from scratch. It was me and a secretary. No clients, no money under management. They had a relationship with Texas teachers. They were impressed enough to give us a chance to be one of the firms that would do that for them. And that's how it started. You know, they were OK with my qualifications. We got a contract signed and we had a nondiscretionary relationship with one of the toughest staffs I've ever had. And that's how the thing got started. But it was tough. There were 10 years with only one client in. The worst thing about it was we had no idea how to get another one. Okay. And and so that's how I got started. It was a very humbling experience, to say the least, competing against all the big boys, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley. Some of these firms, you don't know, but Reif and some other ones back then. So I don't know where you want me to go from there, but I'll tell you it was a it was a rough start.
John Coleman: Well, talk to us a little bit about that journey, David, because I've heard this story before and just how you came to Invesco, your interactions with Charlie. And then, you know, as I remember, there was a pivotal point in the history of the business where you decided that you couldn't do it on your own and I'd love to hear you just tell that story as well.
David Ridley: Yeah. So I remember sitting on the kitchen counter trying to decide if I was going to make this move and start this firm. And Candy's 80 year old grandmother was sitting there in the kitchen and she goes, David, in 30 years, it will take a bit of difference. So that was she really started this, I guess. So I jumped off the counter and drove my little purple opal down to downtown Dallas and joined the firm. And I had been into it for about two years. And when sort of this pivotal moment came, I'd been asked to come down to Houston by maybe one of their leading brokers. And I went down there and I looked at warehouses all day long in with her staff, and we were looking for investment opportunities all the time. And that night, at dinner, after dinner, I was trying to bond with these folks. So they bring me product and not others. The leader in that group, this powerful broker, kind of took his spoon and dinged the glass and he he sort of stopped the meeting and I thought he was going to say something nice. But he looked at us and looked specifically at me. And he says, David, what makes you think you have any chance to build this firm? Look, you're competing against. And he started naming firms. And I was a bit in shock. And I remember chills run down my spine because I realized he was really right. I didn't have much of a chance. If I'd really studied it harder, done a little more due diligence, I probably would have never tried it. And honestly, I don't even remember the rest of that dinner. I just remember getting back to the hotel room and opening the door. I walked back to it. It was near the Galleria and there was this little wooden desk in the corner and I sat at that desk and I just wanted to cry about me and to ruin my career. I had a leadership position where I was. Maybe I can get my job back, but that's not going to happen. So I took a pad of paper and I wrote down and I filled up every line with my weaknesses. Why this was impossible. I wasn't smart enough. I didn't know how to sell myself, you know, just on and on, and I took that sheet of paper and I put it on the floor and I got down on my hands and knees and put my forehead on it. I remember that, and I just prayed Lord, first, would you just take me out of this job and move me? But if you don't want to move me, then you be CEO and I'll be doorman or whatever else you want me to do here. But I'm done. And that went on for a while, and I stood up from that floor and I've never had this feeling in my life, just like someone took a thousand pounds and lifted it off, my back flew back to Dallas the next morning, creativity returned and just optimism. I had no fear of failure. I wanted to do well for all these senior people at this company, but I literally had no fear of failure any more. It wasn't mine to lose. And that changed everything in the way God showed up was. He started introducing me to these people, John, that you know, that three of me retired with me and we went all the way together. And you know, finding people is almost impossible. The right people. And I couldn't do it. Up to that point. So he tangibly showed up with these folks that we were able to team up with and do some great things. So I would say that we're in the middle of writing a book and there's three pillars in that book and in the first one has to do with being securely centered, and I will tell you that securely centered me for the next thirty two years. So it was a pivotal moment for me, John.
Luke Roush: When you talk about being securely centered, maybe just speak a little bit to what that looks like in the context of thirty two years at a big company like Invesco. What does it look like to be securely centered and kind of salt and light where you're planted?
David Ridley: You know, tangibly, you can see it because. You don't have the warning signs would be anxiety, insecurity, you know, comparing yourself to others. All those things. And when I speak to college students, I call those the big sins in business for a believer. And even when I'm speaking secularly, so all those went away, I immediately hired two people. One of them, I paid twice as much as me. And the other was David Farmer. Johnny, you remember I paid him like a quarter more than me, and it was about finding the right talent that could produce the right results for these clients and for our people that we were going to work for and have worked with us. And so that's what it looked like. And to be secure in myself, you know? Yeah. And that helped move us into building a culture that was somewhat maybe unparalleled in our sector.
John Coleman: Yeah, talk about that a little bit more, David, because I've heard you talk about just the importance of your partners, the people, the culture that you built in. I've also even seen you tell this story, this story about that hotel room and really handing things over to God and in the workplace that you were really authentic about the way in which that transformed you. I'd love to hear how you started to build that culture, how you found those people and how your partnership evolved in a way that was so powerful.
David Ridley: You know, it was all experiential. John, I didn't have any textbooks that talked about this. So. So first of all, let me say, I'm probably the least likely CEO you'll ever meet. OK. My favorite verse talks about where Paul asked for his thorn to be removed or whatever that was, and God said, No, my grace is made strong in your weakness, and I've always known that I've always kept that promise close to my heart. So I didn't go into this thinking I was the smartest guy in the room by any stretch of the imagination. So once I was centered, it was easy for me to realize that I needed to gather the best athletes around me, but also we needed to build great teams. We had to have great. We call it extreme team engagement. You know, as God has created us to do life with others, we call that other ring. And so I knew that was going to be key to us being able to win and have a healthy business. And so, you know, I happened to read, in fact, I'd left Invesco when I read this. I wish I'd known it when I was there, but it was St. Augustine in the fourth century, had a quote. It said humility is the foundation of all the other virtues. Hence the soul for that virtue does not exist. There can be no others except in mere appearance. And so when we would go out to build these teams, we would look for true humility. It was easy to find talent. It was hard to find humility in someone who could fit in. So we'd look for humility. We'd look for a team orientation as opposed to a star system. Then we try to find folks with a fire in their belly so that, you know, they get things done. And like you, John, you always walk around fast and get things done, and that's what we needed. So from being centered, I was able to go find those kind of people who I thought were better than I was and I was able to empower them. That's the biggest gift you can give. Anyone is empowerment. I learned that from a billionaire real estate guy in Dallas. I'm sure he's a Christian, but he would get his key leaders in the room and he would ask them questions that I knew he knew the answers to. So I started doing that. I would let them be the experts. I just became the bandleader, the coordinator. And that enabled some folks to really grow and thrive. And we ended up with some great team play there, which resulted in a great culture which becomes your character in the marketplace. People know you for that. In the business case, for it is you end up with high stability. We never lost a partner. We never lost a client. Knock on wood, high stability of people and clients. That's hard to replicate. You know when you're competing.
Luke Roush: So David, as you kind of went from building the team kind of world class, humble individuals that had both fire in the belly, but also a servant's mentality? And it wasn't about them. It was about the mission that you guys were on together. Maybe just talk a little bit about moving from building the team to building the portfolio of investments, a lot of capital to work over time and then maybe just extend off of kind of what that look like BAM to the market today and what's changed, maybe since you were running that group at Invesco?
David Ridley: Well, that's a great question. Basically, one of the pivotal moments was a trip I made to Atlanta. We had just orchestrated a sale of our firm to Invesco. This was 1990. I flew over to Atlanta as a Saturday morning. I remembered and opened my book up the show. Charlie Brady, the founder of Invesco, What we were going to do to be successful. And it was this strategic multifamily investment program in the South. You know, it was all this. And we're sitting there, his myself and a fellow named David Farmer, and he reached over right in the middle of my pitch. He just closed the book and I kind of looked at him with, Oh my god. That can't be a good sign in any culture. And he says, David, listen to me. He goes, This is all great. I've been very impressed with your diligence in how you run your business. And, you know, he went on about things that he likes. But he said, You do understand if you can't win, none of this makes any difference. None of this matters. And I began to realize at that moment my life, he's right. We have to learn to win. So once you build great teams, it's about having a healthy environment. We just talked about that. If you're not winning as part of those factors, if one of them in winning, then you're done. So that taught us the importance of this elite client engagement that we had to get really great at which we did. And I've got to tell you the way that happened. We were armed with great people. We developed something called the war room. We have the culture to do it. When we found out who our competitors were, we'd go in that war room and we would literally we had a structure where we knew more about those competitors, maybe, than they knew about themselves. And we juxtapose those strengths and weaknesses against our own. We would figure out ways to be more competitive. Part of having a great firm is the ability to have great meetings, and we had great meetings. We had rules of the room. You had to check your ego at the door. There was no rank in the room. If you're at the table, we had an obligation to disagree. You know when you needed to, then when you left the room, your friends and those are the rules, and we had the most robust group meetings around winning. And they worked. And so we started. Once we got this together, it was all about having a value proposition that made sense, etc. Just absolutely amazing preparation. And once we got all that together, we just started winning clients. It was amazing. We went from one client to the first one was state of Nevada and went on and went to Los Angeles County, then Colorado. I remember almost crying on the phone. I had to hide my tears from the guy there in Colorado because I never thought we'd get a second client, much less a third one. So, yeah, that's how we started winning. And it was around having a healthy environment where people could be empowered and grow. And it's just a more holistic approach, and it's not a secret anymore. McKinsey has studied this thousands of companies, and they determine firms that focus on their culture, meaning their health in factors that cause great cultures are four times more successful than firms that focus more on their acquisition or their ability to execute and operate. They're just more important if they're focusing on those things equally with those operational executional things. So we just happen to really get that.
John Coleman: David, that was one of the more fascinating things about the culture that you built. I remember and I've told the story elsewhere. You know, when you'd walk into your offices in Dallas right behind the reception desk, there was a big painting that had firefighters and teachers and police officers on it because those were your clients. Those were the beneficiaries of these public funds that were investing with y'all. And there was a real sense in your group at Invesco Real Estate that the clients really mattered and that that's why you were there and that's the purpose of what you were doing. It wasn't just winning with clients, it was winning for clients and making sure that you were guardians of the capital that they were entrusting you with. Where did that come from for you and how did you instill that in everybody at the company?
David Ridley: You know everything. And you know this, everything comes down from leadership. So as a leader, it's all going to reflect you. And that was a little bit of it, to be honest, was my natural personality. But what really honed this was having one non-discretionary client for 10 years that shaped us, man. There were many, many of our competitors that had commingled funds. They had hundreds of clients. They did not understand the servant's heart that it took to satisfy one high demanding client for 10 years. So the only way to quickly exit our firm would be to not get that in. If you didn't have that characteristic about you, you would win yourself out really quickly. So that came down to this humble heart that we had with these clients, and we just couldn't be wrong. You know, in the way we executed that. So we did have a servant heart and they got to know that they felt it and we developed accountability. So we called it the Invesco Report card. So it was all about building trust. It wasn't about investing money, it was having trust built and then it was about investing money in high levels of accountability. And one thing that really helped us to continue winning back to that topic was we developed the postmortem process so that when we lost, we don't get in that room within five. Days in, find out why we lost and no fingers could be pointed because we're all very potential to lay down a stinker here and there, which I'm probably doing right now, John. But what was definitely very disciplined in the culture of clients or everything just sort of permeated that picture you talk about. We talked about that all the time in quarterly meetings that we would have and I would be speaking. We'd refer to that picture. And I'd ask everybody in the room, if you're involved in sales and client engagement, raise your hand and everybody in the room had to raise their hand before we could go on with the meeting. Because, you know, the smart investment, people don't want to be known as marketing people or client necessarily client people, and they had to be in our culture.
John Coleman: I have seen David stop many a meeting until every executive raise their hand for the who's in sales question, so absolutely authentic. Any good stories about what that look like? David, I remember one that you told me about the Boy Scouts coming to Dallas, for example, but any great examples of how that looked in action?
David Ridley: Oh gosh, you know? Yeah, that Boy Scout one, I went around. I actually did a survey of all of our Dallas team anyway, and we have like 20 Eagle Scouts. I had no idea. I never made it past the Cub Scouts, so I was so happy to use that statistic. But it was the one of the toughest presentations we've ever had. And they were tough. They loved to ask the toughest questions in this time. They asked my colleague, who's now our CEO and Invesco, the address of a property that we invested in his city and we didn't know that address. We knew the basic block it was on. I remember leaving that thing and pounding my steering wheel. I was so mad that we blew it. You know, we didn't make it, and there were always that tough, but we won the account, Praise Lord, and we ended up having them as a client. They were very tough and we would have to remind ourselves it doesn't matter how tough they are, we're here to serve them. And we would just break our back to do it. And you know, that's the way it was. Clients never wrong, although sometimes they have to be steered around investment ideas that they were never wrong. You know,
Luke Roush: maybe just taking a moment to look out the front windshield of where you think the market is going. David Witter, just a couple of pieces of counsel that you would give to aspiring investors who were looking at current uncertainty in the market in the next 10 years. Just a couple of pieces of counsel that you would offer from your own experience.
David Ridley: Well, what I would say is I know I've lived in my business life. I've lived through seven recessions. Every everyone had a black swan event to it. None of them. Did anybody guess you can never forecast what that black swan is going to be the best ones? The GFC, you know, we suffered through the Great Recession in some way, and it's been almost 11 years since we've had one. So I know it's coming. The Black Swan is out there and it's probably happening right now with this new war we're engaged in. And every one of them is scary. But in my humble opinion, they all pass. And you have to look at it that way. You can't change the gravitational things that you're doing. And like everything, these three pillars we're talking about, you have to stay consistent with those disciplines that you have. So anyway, it's important to recognize they're going to happen and how you're prepared for them in our business. There's lots of things that have changed, and I'm maybe not the expert anymore since I've been gone almost seven years. But but we all know what's happened to office buildings. Obviously, a black swan was COVID, and that was a big hit when that hit us. Office buildings are not nearly occupied like they were Amazon and others came along and changed. Retailing that's left us primarily with industrial and multifamily is the darlings of the investment space these days that's taken our camp rights, which are the first. That's how you measure returns at your first year's return in real estate. It's taken out to historic lows in my earlier career. In fact, a friend of mine even wrote a paper. The answer is nine. OK, you bought real estate on a nine. And I remember seeing somebody took an eight and seven return on something, and I thought they were crazy. They were not correlated to treasuries. It was incredible. So now you've got the most expensive apartments in industrial properties you've ever seen out there. So people are having to lean into different things to satisfy clients. And some of those things are like medical office buildings look better than they've ever looked self-storage even residential mortgages or being, you know, all this, but through various conduits. The problem with those was bite size. But now invest goes into joint venture of some kind that they're able to buy the bigger tranches of that loans now making lots of loans. It's not your traditional money center bank anymore, your insurance company, there's a lot of loans that our guys are making a private rate they formed to get to the retail markets. So all that's new since I left. So every year, you know, it's change and they laugh at me now they say, you couldn't even work over here anymore, Dave. You wouldn't know what's going on. And I say, you're probably right. You're always having to change and be flexible.
Luke Roush: Well, the funny thing is that on the one hand, some of the facts and circumstances change. But part of what I take away from your commentary is that the most important thing? Rings around team, why you do what you do, how you care for clients. Those are more timeless principles than they are. Timely facts and circumstances are timely that core things are usually timeless.
David Ridley: I call them gravitational there things that have never changed in my career. I remember getting in before the Sun came up and talking about how we're going to win clients and who we were going to be. And I remember making decisions that are still good decisions today, but one was we were not going to focus on any one property type. We were going to be the four main food groups which I won't bore you with. We were not going to be a southwestern exposure. We were going to be national and that turned into global. We were not going to be one risk level. We were going to be up the scale from poor real estate to value added to opportunistic. And we didn't want any clients having more than like five or 10 percent of our business, and we got that done eventually. When I started, we had one client who 100 percent so all those things are good business disciplines, but we got there, in my opinion, more predictably because of the disciplines around the three pillars. It's building that kind of culture, and it's the soft stuff that some people don't understand that keeps them in marginalizes them towards not being able to be a really great, larger competitor.
John Coleman: And David, I know you've been up to some really interesting stuff lately, you've been kind of retired, I guess, although you've transitioned to some other things before we do that. You know, there are a lot of folks listening to this podcast who like you exist in larger, diverse organizations with all different types of people, and you led a large, diverse organization where people of different faiths or no faith at all. What advice would you have to those in those organizations about living their faith authentically in those types of diverse environments that aren't necessarily faith based or faith driven?
David Ridley: You know, that's a great question. I was convinced, you know, I mentioned that godly woman. Her name is Nelda Hassall. You know, when I first found the Lord in was saying I had my four spiritual laws book and I went to airports, I went all over the place in witnessing, and that's not wrong. You know, that was a very rewarding thing. But as a CEO in a multi-faith company and so forth, you obviously can't do that. So what Nelda had told me even back then, she says, you need to pray that God will bring people into your life that he wants you talking to. You need to just relax and pray that the Lord will open those doors. And so I've always had that feeling that that's what I needed to do, and God has been good about doing that. So we didn't go out to find just Christians. We went out to find the best talent we could in the lower stamp. As they interview people, they could see they're really talented. Our job in the upper management was to figure out who they were, really personally, who their culture was and how were they humble as we talked about it and all those things? And it didn't matter if they're Christians. We ended up with a lot of Christians. But my feeling was it was to be salt light. And people knew who we were in our hearts. We wouldn't hide it, but we didn't put it on our sleeve and try to push it. There was a woman out in California, I was told the other day by our new CEO. He said she almost didn't join us because she thought we were a Christian organization. And I thought, Well, that's funny because we've never advertised ourselves as being a Christian organization, but people can see your values and who you are, and maybe sometimes it seeps through. But our job is to our people, first in our clients, then the stockholders benefit in our obligation is to have great people in that we can get great clients with who will then benefit our stockholders. And I was fortunate to lead one of my bosses to Christ, once you know, I mean, it does happen, but it's not something that was on the front end.
John Coleman: And David, you've kind of taken a lot of the lessons you learned building a company over the course of a few decades, and you're now talking to others about those. And I hear you even have a book coming together. Do you mind talking about kind of what's happened after Invesco Real Estate and what you're up to today?
David Ridley: Well, we traveled. We had a lot of fun. We went to. I've never been to Italy, believe it or not, we even had an office there and I'd never been there. But we just had a ball and one day candy and I looked at each other and we said, we're so done with traveling. You know, I and 10 million miles on just American, you know, during my business life. So we settled down and my prayer was, I'm not going to go look for presentations, but I'm going to be open to do it. So Lord appeal, please open the right doors. And he did that through a couple of organizations. I started speaking the college students and I love doing that. I love. For twenty five years or more, I've been mentoring young business people. Now it's college students and young business people, and that's where I really find satisfaction now. Have I consulted? Yeah, I'm affiliated with, I should say. I guess I collaborate with Dr. Chip Roper, a brilliant man out of New York who is called out of the pastor who's business in 20 years as a pastor, then called back to New York City from Philadelphia to minister to Christian executives. And we met each other, and together we're putting a book together. It's called resilient leadership. At this point, who knows what it will be called building winning teams in the face of constant disruption. I kind of like to think about it is leading without regrets. I kind of like that title because what I wanted to do, I'd always watch Southwest Airlines and Herb Kelleher, and I would see how he led without regrets. I don't know that he was a Christian, but he really loved his people. And I can tell you when you retire, your legacy that you leave behind is about 100 times more important to you than you know it is or will be now. And so you want to leave behind people who knew that you love them and really feel great about the way you treated them and where there later. And so that's what drives me and I want to write. I spoke with Chip, not necessarily for me, John, as I said earlier to you, it's really, I think, going to give him legs as he builds his consulting business, which I participate some of those consulting assignments, but he's got more to play for here than I do. So, hey, John, I think you'll recognize my bio. You clean that up, buddy.
John Coleman: David was good at living the right life, and I was good at editing.
David Ridley: Yeah, I sent John my bio, and I think after he got up off the floor laughing, he rewrote it. I'm still using it over here.
Luke Roush: David, I think maybe the reverse that you were looking for earlier was, is it Second Corinthians 12 nine? Yeah, he said to me, my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. Therefore, I will boost all the more gladly about my weaknesses so that Christ Power may rest on me. And just as you shared some about your career and just the humility that you do that with, it's clear and where you find power from. So I'm grateful for you taking some time, and I'll turn it over to John to wrap this up.
John Coleman: Yes, Sir David will have to ask one question as we close out and then any parting thoughts from you. And that's just what is God been teaching you recently? And how has he been speaking to you?
David Ridley: You know, re impressing upon me the importance of habits that you need to stay with, and that means meeting with a coach before the game. And that's getting up every day and spending my first 30 minutes with Christ and how importance obedience is in the fruits of obedience. To walk in life with a spirit filled mine takes obedience. It takes being obedient to God and listening to the Holy Spirit and staying with those disciplines. And so I've really had to work. You know, it was easier when I was working, frankly, to have those routines than now. So he's been teaching me a lot about that and about being available, you know, and not stopping the mentoring and being available for consulting when someone calls on me, etc. So it's a great life to be able to have time to actually do that and not have to punch a clock. You know that the powerful
John Coleman: that's powerful, David. That's awesome. And look, we are really grateful to have been able to talk to you today. I know I personally am really grateful for the example you set in the real estate industry and at the firm I used to work at and just the friendship that we've had over the years. And I know that this will be a great benefit to all those out there who are thinking about starting their own firms, folks like my partner who went through their own decade long process of building businesses just like you. So thank you for taking the time to spend with us today.
David Ridley: Yeah, it's been a pleasure. I'm highly flattered. You reach out to me.
Luke Roush: No brainer. Grateful for you, David. Blessings to you and appreciate your time.