In The Thick of It

You hire A players and you lead them well.

I just think most of my job is

taking what the board says, going and delivering

a clear vision, and then letting people execute.

And when they have big issues, if they bring it

to me, it's an issue that they really need help

on, and I need to get it resolved.

Get the A players on and pour into them and lead them

well, and they'll go flourish. And then let them be free.

Welcome to In the Thick of It.

I'm your host, Scott Hollrah.

In today's episode, I talk with my friend and

former fighting Texas Aggie Yell leader, an entrepreneur who

grew up in Whitesboro, Texas before going on to

build a career in wealth management.

Jonathan started out at AT&T and

Goldman Sachs, but eventually left to launch

his own independent investment firm.

More recently, Jonathan co-founded BirdDog, an

online marketplace that connects landowners with hunters.

We'll hear about Jonathan's journey from

small town kid to successful entrepreneur.

The lessons he learned along the way, and how

he's bringing technology and innovation to the hunting industry.

Jonathan is all about living life to the fullest,

taking risks, and is constantly learning and growing.

So I think listeners will find his outlook

inspiring regardless of their background or industry.

Get ready for some high energy inspiration.

Well, today is a super fun one, bringing

in an old college budy, Jonathan Lusk.

Welcome to In the Thick of It.

Thanks for having me, man. Yeah.

So you grew up in small town Texas?

Whitesboro, that's right, yeah.

What was Jonathan Lusk in Whitesboro,

Texas like as a kid?

Oh, my goodness.

It was pretty crazy.

So Whitesboro is a small town of about

2500 people north of here, Dallas, about 70

miles, 10 miles south of Oklahoma.

Very poor family growing up.

My dad was a fisheries biologist, still is.

And so he stocked and managed

lakes and ponds with fish.

And so we grew up sainting ponds and working.

There were six of us.

You're one of six kids? I'm one of six.

So my mom left when I was in kindergarten

and then my dad got remarried, had my little

brother, and then I had two stepsiblings.

So there were six of us in the house growing up

and my dad made, I found out when I got my

first job out of college, I was making $55,000 a year.

And he's like, that's more than I make.

I was like, how much do you make?

He's like 30 grand a year.

It's like, you raise six of us on $30,000 a year.

He's like, yeah.

So we didn't really know.

Just because the community

doesn't really flourish there.

And it's more of like, how do you get

out of here and go do something else?

And there are a few people a year that

do get out and go to college, but most

of my friends growing up still lived there.

Got some fun stories.

My best friend, Daniel Pruitt, growing up, I

took my wife to go meet him, and

he was, you know, she's really beautiful.

And he's like, where are you from, plano?

She's like, no, I'm from Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Don't meet too many people

from Minneapolis in Whitesboro.

And he's like, tell me right now,

I got a serious question for you.

Ford or Chevy?

And she's like, I don't know. I said, just say Ford.

Just say Ford.

She was like, I like Ford. He's like, lusk. I like her.

I like her a lot.

I was like, I knew you would dp. I knew you. So.

Grew up there, graduated high school, and

then ended up going to a m.

My dad was the first person our

family and antiquity to go to college.

I was the second person to go to

college, and he went to a m.

So that's where I chose to go.

But I just wanted to go to college.

I wanted to get out of town, go to college.

But beyond that, I really didn't have any dreams or

aspirations of anything else because it's all that I knew.

Were you into sports? Yeah.

So it's a small three a school.

So in that context, you play everything. Basically.

You play football, basketball, baseball, run track.

As many people as you can get on the field, they do.

So that was really cool.

Playing the sports of my friends all growing up.

We had a pretty decent basketball team growing

up, and now they're actually decent at Football.

I played football for three years on varsity.

We won like five games.

It was so bad.

And now they make the playoffs every year.

I'm very proud of these guys. This is awesome.

But it was not like that when I was growing up.

But waiting for you to leave.

They were waiting for me to leave. Exactly.

Sounds like hard work was something that was

instilled in you from a young age.

Oh, I mean, from when I can remember, very young.

You're saning ponds, you're dragging a

sane to go pick fish up.

You're putting them on the back of a

truck in a tank, and you're delivering them.

And I just remember riding in the front

seat with my dad in one of those. Bucket or not? Bucket.

It was one of the long benches and the truck driving

all over the state with him to deliver these fish.

And it was just instilled.

You'd get up at this, not during the week, you'd

go to school, but weekends or during the summer, you're

up at four or 05:00 loading fish and delivering them.

And you got to meet interesting people.

Landowners and people who own companies and sold companies, lived

out the country, and you knew they were different from

you and you knew you worked for them.

But it was very interesting

meeting these types of people.

I was like, man, I want to do that.

How do you do that?

But, yeah, it was always work hard.

My dad always instilled us.

He's like, do you want to be a winner or a loser?

He asks us all the time, do you want to be a champion?

Here's what you have to do to be a winner.

And so he put this mentality in us.

I'm like, I don't want to lose. I want to win.

I want to be a champion or whatever it is.

So whatever he told me to do, I would do.

And it was one of those deals where

he said to him, he's like, the most

important attribute is, can you be coachable?

Can you be coachable?

If you can listen to people who are wise

and do what they tell you to do and

go execute on it, then you'll make it.

And if you don't, you won't.

And it was very simple for me.

And so I think about that a lot as

I try to grow and learn and gain knowledge.

Just try to be an open book and surround myself by

people that are better than me, smarter than me, and I

just listen to what they say and then go do it.

Talking about your dad's winning mentality, I

had a little Talladega Knights flashback.

If you're not first, you're last.

Is that kind of how it was, basically? Yeah.

I mean, it was like, hey, do you want to be a champion?

Do you want to be a winner or do you not?

It was very binary with him, and I was

like, I choose the winning, so whatever that means.

And it was hard work.

It was discipline, it was humility.

And it was those types of things that were instilled at

me at a young age that kind of grew from there.

Whenever I got to a m and met my

friends like you, you've never met a stranger.

You've got a lot of charisma.

Is everybody in your family as

outgoing and boisterous as you are?

We're all very similar.

My dad is like this.

My brother, my sister, my little brother, not so much.

But we're all, I mean, it's life of the

party, and when you're around for the holidays and

you're sitting around the dinner table or watching the

cowboys play or whatever, it gets lively and fun

and people are telling stories and it's a blast.

I love my family and very thankful,

but we're very similar in that.

The fun loving but also the work.

We're all very similar.

My sister is a nurse.

She manages a bunch of nurses here in Dallas.

And then my brother is a

residential real estate agent in Phoenix.

And there's just this work ethic and

drive and you don't make excuses.

There's nobody's like, no, woe is me, or I

can't do this or I can't do that.

Everybody's like, suck it up.

We have to get this done kind of thing.

And it's very consistent with those people.

Where are you in the birth order?

So I'm third of four, really.

So I've got a brother who's eight years older

than me, a sister who's two years older than

me, and then I've got a little brother who's

eight years younger than me, so I'm number three. Okay.

And did everybody leave Whitesboro?

Yeah, my brother left right after

high school, moved to California.

My sister ended up moving out of town as well.

And then me and then.

Yeah, so no one lives there anymore.

My dad sold his house about two years ago and

moved to Granbury when he was a little kid.

His parents had a place on the Brazas

river near Granbury, and that's where he grew

up and learned to love fish.

That's why he wanted to go to a. M.

And it's where he really drew a passion from there.

And so he's like, that's where I want to spend.

The last chapter is where I spent the first chapter.

So he bought a place out by Lake Granbury

and he lives out there on the brasses river

now, but no one lives in Whitesboro anymore. All right.

You mentioned earlier the goal growing up

was just get out of town.

And you went off to a. M.

What did you want to do?

I didn't know what I wanted to do when I

got was I was really nervous that I was going

to fail because I was know, small town kid.

I met all of these people who were just excellent.

I joined the corps cadets and so that was pretty

wild and full of discipline in which I needed it.

Whenever I was in high school, I was

a lifeguard at the Whitesboro public pool, and

this guy, Bob Jewell owned the local daycare.

And he's like, hey, lusk, who are you going a m.

You going to be in the core?

I was like, absolutely not.

And he's like, why not? I was. I just.

That sounds hard.

I was like, I don't want to do that.

He's like, okay, go home tonight and you're going

to put a t chart together of all the

positives and the negatives of the core.

I was like, okay.

So I wrote down the positives were that

I would stay in shape, that I would

make my grades because they make you study.

And I thought that the girls would like the uniform.

So that was like, what I based my decision on.

What was in the negative column.

Negative was like, can't sleep in, don't get to

hang out with the people that I want to.

It was just stuff that didn't matter

when I got down to it.

And the fact that he just challenged me to

think about it, I was like, okay, I'll go.

Do mean, I didn't know it.

I didn't know ROTC.

I didn't know what to expect.

I just thought, like, more discipline.

And, boy, were my eyes open when I got there.

But I don't know what I expected.

I didn't have great expectations other than getting out

of Whitesboro and trying to achieve something bigger.

When I think about life, I think a lot about legacy

and I think about my grandfather and then my dad and

how this guy got the ball down the field as far

as he could and then my dad did.

And then I'm getting as far as I could down the field

and then my kids will pick it up and take it.

And so I think a lot about that, but

I was just trying to get to a place

that I'd grown up going to football games.

And then I love the atmosphere and I love the

people, but I didn't know really what I wanted.

A lot of people didn't going in, and a lot

of people, even years afterward, didn't know what they wanted.

And I would actually put myself in that category.

Real quick, talk just a little bit about the core

cadets for people that may not know what that is.

Are you guys all in the army now or what?

So the core cadets is an ROTC program

as part of Texas A and M.

I'm making this number up, but

it's somewhere between 2000, 503,000 people.

So a small percentage of the university, but very

important for the image of the university, I would

say that 25% to 35% take military contracts.

It's a decision you make after

your sophomore year to do that.

I did not take a contract, but a lot of my friends did.

So it's very regimented during the day where

you have morning formation workout and then breakfast,

and you have classes during the day, and

then you come back and do more workout

learning and training and all those things.

Formation, go study, go to bed every day.

A lot of drill and ceremony, things like that.

And you bond some very significant relationships just

because of the trials that you go through.

And you think about the harder things

that you do with other people, the

closer those bonds typically come together.

And so that's what mean when I first started,

when they're recruiting you, I go, it's awesome.

Everything I remember my first day, my commanding

officer was a guy named Scott Monteer.

And I walked up and I just got

out of fish camp, which is basically.

It's a camp before you go to

a m to teach all the traditions.

And I got off the fish camp bus, and I

came into my dorm, and I was like, hey, Scott.

And they were like, shut up and get on the wall.

And I was like, oh, we're not in Kansas anymore.

And I was wearing, like, a hawaiian shirt and some

frayed shorts and some, like, doc Martin sandals or something,

and I was like, oh, and then they shaved my

head, and I got yelled at every day.

And I was like, man, I hate this.

I wanted to quit, like, six times, but that was

not in the playbook of how I grew up.

If you started something, you finished it.

And so made it through my freshman year

and was like, okay, I've got this.

And you don't even feel like you're part of

the university because all your friends are having fun

and doing all these things, and you're not.

You're just basically doing push ups.

And then you realize you are the image of

the university, and you're like, man, you don't realize

it until you do that first march in, and

you're like, this is pretty awesome.

This is pretty awesome.

When you say that, you are the image of the

university, certainly being in the core, totally get that.

But you actually had some other pretty prestigious things,

and you literally were the image of the university.

You were in parsons mounted Cav, you were a Ross

volunteer, and you were a fight in Texaggy Yale leader.

Well, one minor correction. I was in the cab.

I was not a Ross volunteer.

I didn't go out for the rvs.

I went out for Aggie men's club instead

of the rvs, which they did not like.

But I was like, hey, I love these guys.

I want to go do it.

I always felt that.

I just love the calf.

I'm from the country.

Like, I loved being out there.

And Parson mounted Calvary is a mounted unit that

is part of the corps cadets, and they march

in before the games, and all the horses are

on fiddlers green, which is off campus.

And it's a very hard unit.

It's a very hard unit.

It's basically twice as hard in terms

of discipline than your freshman year.

And so maybe 30 guys go out for

it, and 20 of them make it.

And so I looked at that going, I see those guys wearing

that yellow cord, and I want to be a part of that

group because those are some bad guys in a good way.

And I had a lot of respect for

them, so I went out for that.

And then end of my sophomore year,

I got elected for junior Yelleter and

then got reelected senior year leader.

And so it was a dream for me.

I mean, there was no legacy.

I didn't know anybody.

You go through a system in core block where you're

selected within the corps cadets, and then you run in

the general election against folks who are not in the

core that want to run a campaign.

And so to win, that was a life changing experience

for me, changed my whole life in terms of image

at the university, but also the relationships that I've been

able to develop the rest of my life.

It put me on a different trajectory.

I'm sure it's opened all kinds of doors.

I mean, the yell Eater network in and of itself

is a whole bunch of guys that have gone on

to do a lot of big, amazing things.

But the exposure that you got being a

yell eater just had to have compounded and

opened up all kinds of doors to you.

Well, I'm 42 years old, and people still

introduce me as a yellater for hung out.

Aggie, say this Jonathan, he was a yell leader.

I was like, yeah, 20 years, 20 years ago.

And our teams were terrible when I was there.

Let's not talk about those. So we beat ou.

We beat ou when they were number one.

When I was a junior, was Fran coaching? He was.

So my junior year leader year was coach Slocum's

last year, and my senior was Fran's first year.

So my junior year is when we beat Oklahoma,

which was like the highlight going to fish pond.

And I still remember that was.

It was a big deal, man.

Reggie McNeil yeah.

He was actually a student in a class that

I was a Ta for, you know, Dr. Welch.

Yeah, I was the Ta, and

Reggie McNeil was in that class.

And when he showed up the next week for

class, people were throwing oranges and all kinds of

stuff, but he was getting a standing ovation.

Yeah, exactly.

What did you study in college?

I was an ag major.

I was ag development.

I started out in business, and I remember my sophomore

year, I made, like, a 40 on an accounting test,

and I was like, maybe this isn't for me.

I went and talked to all these guys

who were, like, leaders in the core.

They're like, I'm ag development. Ag development.

I was like, well, that sounds good to me.

I grew up in the country.

I understand agriculture, and I loved it. I loved.

Then, you know, when I graduated, I went to

work for at t here in Dallas, and succession

planning was always like, what's ag development?

Because I was doing really good in the

business, but they know, what is this degree?

I was like, oh, man.

So I always felt self conscious about

my degree, which is very interesting.

And so it's really the reason I went and

got my MBA was self consciousness, because people were

like, man, you can't make it to where you

want to be if you don't do this.

And now the business I'm in, I'm like,

I'm so thankful I was an ag major.

It has all come full circle.

I totally get what you were saying a

minute ago about people who are telling you

couldn't rise above a certain level without that.

But looking back today, do you still buy that?

I don't buy it.

I don't buy it at all.

And, man, if I was a.

My wife was a finance major.

She's a doctor now.

She's like, premed, and finances are major, and

she might remember 2% of what she learned.

Same thing with me.

I was like, I bought this property out in the country,

and I'm like, and all I care about right now is,

like, growing grass, growing trees and flowers and stuff.

I'm like, I need to call the ag extension off.

I wish I would have paid more attention to these

classes, because this is what I actually care about deeply

now, and I don't really know what I'm doing.

And so I don't know that it matters

as much as the relationships that you develop.

I really think that, and I think just the

university as well, that you choose and that network

and the people who will help you along.

I mean, if you have a work ethic, if you're

humble, if you don't make excuses, and you do good

work, people will find a spot for you.

I mean, that's what I want. That's what I want to

hire businesses that I've started.

That's what I look for.

I look for that and those people not.

Are you technically proficient and such? And such.

I can teach you that, but I'm looking for a

specific type of person that I want to hire.

And it's that.

How far post college did you go get your MBA?

I got my MBA whenever I was 28.

So six years after I graduated undergrad, you'd gone

on from at and t at that point?

No, I was living in Dallas.

I was dating my college sweetheart cat, who played soccer at a

and m, and she was a freshman, I was a senior.

And so I lived here and I

would drive to college station every weekend.

And I remember I went and asked her dad's permission

to marry her and he told me no, and he

didn't want her to marry a southern boy.

And I wasn't a doctor or

a lawyer, so I wasn't successful.

I was smiling and dialing in a cubicle at, at and t.

So he's like, no, I don't think so.

And so he wanted us to date in the same city.

So she moved here with a family and

we dated in Dallas while she applied medical

school and then got in in Houston.

So we moved to Houston in 2008, and that's when

I applied and started going to business school at Rice.

But I was working during the day and

got my MBA at night at Rice.

And then from there I just started to see these people.

I was like, man, you've got a really nice

house and you have a really nice car. What do you do?

And these guys are like, I do finance.

I was like, what does that even mean you do finance?

Like, well, I do wealth management, or

I do sales and trading, or I

do investment banking and investment bankers.

Like, yeah, we stay up all night, do pitch decks.

I was like, man, that sounds, uh.

And then the wealth management guys develop

relationships and investing in the markets.

I was like, that's what I want to do.

So met a couple of guys did this, and

I met this guy, Shay Morrenz, who's like one

of the best human beings in the world.

He was a quarterback for Texas back in the early ninety

s, and he was the managing director at Goldman Sachs.

And I interviewed with him and he gave me a job.

And it was so funny because he was

like, hey, why should I hire you?

I was like, well, I look on the

floor and all I see is long horns.

I was like, you don't have any aggies, man.

And I was like, I know them all.

I was like, you should hire me

right now and let's go crush it.

And he's like, game on.

Let's do it, Lusk.

And so that's how I got my job at Goldman.

And that was out of, so I literally resigned,

gave my 30 day notice at, at and t

15 days later, I graduated from Rice.

And then six weeks later, I started Goldman in

New York, trading July the fifth of 2011.

I want to dig into Goldman, but first, for

people who are considering going and getting an MBA,

what advice would you give about that?

I would say go to a mean.

When I think about it's, you're basically going for

the relationships and the name on the wall because

it provides credibility to whoever you're talking to later.

Nobody cares how you finished in

your class, all of those things.

I wouldn't say that.

I was like, I left Rice and was like, man,

I've got all this more knowledge than I did, but

just, I was trying to get through it.

I was working married, trying to execute on that.

But when you say, hey, I went to

rice and I've worked at Goldman, you have

instant credibility with people, whatever you're doing.

So when I tell people, when they say, I want

to go get an MBA, I was like, just go

to prestigious school and make a lot of friends.

And if you can't, then don't do it.

Go work somewhere, get experience, get a great mentor.

And that's what I tell kids anyway.

It's like your first job doesn't necessarily matter what

you're doing, but it matters who you work for.

And go work for a great leader and do it for two

or three years and learn everything that you can, like that.

So Goldman Sachs, big, big name, very prestigious.

And you were doing wealth management there.

What did that mean?

At Goldman, you basically go get meetings with rich

people and bring in someone who actually knows what

they're talking about to talk to the people you

got the meeting with as a young person.

So it's a lot of networking and spending time around.

I've focused primarily on people who are selling companies because you

have this thing called a t list, which is a list

of names that each person has, and you can't call that

person if they're not on your t list.

So basically anybody you'd ever read

about is already covered by somebody.

And so I went to all my investment making

buddies that worked for these smaller shops that were,

hey, we're selling this company for $20 million or

$50 million or whatever, I'm like, hey, can you

connect me with those guys? So I spent a lot of time

in biddling and that's kind of how

built my business was developing those relationships.

And I go back to it.

Most of my clients were all blue collar guys who sold

these big oilfield service companies that I could just relate with

because they were like me from a small town, but they

had just hit it big and figured it out.

And so it was very different.

I really didn't spend much time in the city

going after folks, but that's how I built my

business and going to meeting with these people.

The goal was to get them

to move their investments to Goldman. Yeah.

And at the time, 2011, it was like a

few years after eight, Goldman had a bunch of

bad publicity and you're just trying to get meetings.

And I remember there was this guy who sold

this Olfield service company and Goldman is great to

tell your friends, I think it's cool.

But at the time it was very challenging to get clients.

I mean, people would call in because they

want to work with Goldman and those leads

would get distributed to different people.

But our job was to go get those meetings.

And I remember this guy and I brought him

in the office and he was like, all right.

He's like, goldsmith, you guys are investment bank.

What kind of investments do you have?

And I was like, oh, dude, I'm finally going to get

a client because he actually doesn't know who we are.

We are an investment bank.

But we were in the wealth management side of it and

so we were able to bring him on as a client.

My first clients, like $17 million.

I was like, high five.

And it was really cool.

But yeah, I spent a couple of years there and

went to work for a group called Avalon which spun

out of Goldman back in the, started their own shop.

And so I worked for those guys.

They're great guys.

I loved working for them.

And the culture was like probably what Goldman

was like when it, they were just great.

And I did that for a few years

and I was super successful at it.

And I was like, man, I can do this on my own.

I could either make you guys a lot of money

or I can go make money for my family.

They respected it.

I mean, it wasn't like I was a big dog.

I'm not trying to portray myself as that, but I was

like, I want to go do this on my own.

And I'm a terrible employee.

I'm terrible at working for people because I see the world a

certain way and I want to go do it a certain way.

I'd rather be told, hey, here's the result I want,

and then let me go do it the way that

I want, and then I'll deliver for you.

But it's not going to be your typical call.

100 people do this or that.

And so I was like, man, I never

thought that I wanted to be an entrepreneur.

I was just too much of a maverick not to be.

And so I ended up figuring out that there's

all these guys in wealth management that have their

own shops, and it's a very fragmented industry.

And so it's all based on a relationship.

Like, if one bank had the best

results, everybody would be with that bank.

And so nobody does.

It's basically marketing.

And so I was like, and there's this

industry that will help you from custodian to

compliance to products, all these things, they all

support you to go start your own deal.

It's like, can you go get clients or not?

That's the biggest question.

And so I was like, I'm going to go do I?

Kat had just finished her, no, she'd

finished medical school and was in residency,

and we didn't know Jackson was born.

He was six months old.

And I was like, you know what?

I made a decision before I was 35 that

I was going to go start my own company.

And so I was 34 when I left and

started the investment management business eight years ago.

Talk a little bit more, though, about how did you

compete against the big names like Goldman, Merrill, Schwab?

These are names. They're household names.

They're names that people trust.

Why are they going to trust a

guy without a big name behind them?

Yeah, no, it's a great question.

When I first left, I just didn't know.

I mean, I left going, I'm going to do this.

It's already been done.

It's not like I'm reinventing the wheel.

I know 20 people right now who've got their own shops,

who manage 100 million to 2 billion or whatever it is.

And I was like, man, if they can do it, I can do it.

It was a confidence. It was confidence.

I just saw how the business worked.

I saw how these other entrepreneurs worked.

And I just thought, I want to go do this.

If you can do it, I can do it.

And it's not rocket science.

It's literally like, go develop a relationship and this

is what they taught us at Goldman training.

There was this guy, I wish I could remember his name,

but he came in and he wasn't wearing a tie.

Even Lloyd Blankfine had a tie on.

But this guy, he had the

largest wealth management shop in Goldman.

He's from South Africa.

And he was like, okay, here's the deal. I got here.

I didn't know anybody.

I'm not from this country.

I got a credit card and business

cards, and I just started calling people.

He goes, if I can do it, you can do it.

And he used some pretty funny analogies

to explain what was going on.

And he was like, you see somebody lose a lot

of weight and you're like, well, what did you do?

I just changed my diet and I started exercising.

No, but what else did you do?

No, I just get up every morning at five

and I go work out, and I eat healthy.

And that's how I did it. And he was like, that's what

this job is, diet and exercise.

But can you do it?

Because most of you will hit the snooze button.

Can you get up and go do it?

And then at the end, he was like, and do me a favor.

Write me a bad review so they'll stop

asking me to come talk to you guys.

I don't like doing this.

And I was like, dude, standing ovation. Love this guy.

He's like, awesome.

But when I got on my own, I just did the same thing.

I looked for people selling companies, never

pitching people who already had wealth.

It's a waste of time.

And just found those folks that were selling companies.

The other thing that I noticed is that

entrepreneurs want to see other entrepreneurs succeed.

And so guys gave me business that they did not

have to do because I was taking a risk.

And I'm like, hey, I cut the assets at Schwab.

I do this, I'll do this.

On investing, you can't screw that up.

I can see it every day.

So I'm going to help you out by giving you

a couple of million bucks or whatever it is, because

I want to see you succeed because I like you.

And so it started out like that, and

then you just build a track record.

And I started doing private investments,

not just the public markets.

And so that draws a younger crowd, kind of the 35

to 45, because they're not looking for six to 8% return.

They're like, hey, I'd rather give up liquidity

and go invest in a private investment that

I can't not get my money back for

five or seven years, but higher expected returns.

So I started doing a lot of those, which is different,

and then I haven't shown a pitchbook in six years.

It's all referrals.

What I learned is, just take care of your clients.

I don't ever take a salesman.

I'm just like, when I meet with someone, with

somebody last night and it was a referral from

a client, they already know what to expect.

They know what I do, what I don't do,

and then it's like, okay, when do we start?

It's kind of the conversation.

Here's what I'm going to do.

It's like an hour, and then we go.

And so that's kind of how I've set up.

Also saw that there was relationship between the

wealth manager and the rich guy that gets

really upset with the wealth manager.

There's a codependent relationship.

The wealth manager takes it so the guy doesn't

pull the money, so he doesn't lose his fee.

And I was like, man, that's pretty jacked up.

I was like, why don't you just tell the guy the truth?

Well, he's going to pull his money.

And I was like, I'm never doing that.

I like to sleep at night, and so

talk straight, follow through, and if you set

those boundaries, the right people will come to

you and the wrong people will stay away.

Something you said before, you kind of dug deeper.

There was, you're a maverick.

You don't like doing things.

You don't like people telling you how

to do things a certain way.

And I probably said this before on the podcast, but

the only thing I like less than being told what

to do is being told how to do it.

Does that.

I tie it together because there's, like, this dichotomy in

me between being teachable and coachable, but also seeing a

way of doing things that I'm sure other people see

it, but it's like, I think this works over here

versus checking a lot of boxes so that you can

go report to your manager and they feel good.

So you have kind of these false

metrics that don't really matter at all.

And so I'm like, how do we get rid of all of that?

And it's hard to do.

In a large organization, it's very hard to do.

The second thing I'd say is, if you want to

create wealth, you need to own your own company.

You've got to own equity in something.

And that was my other conviction is like, if

I want to go do this, you can't complain.

You'd have guys that have been at these firms for

20 years, and they complain, why don't I have equity?

Why don't they do this? What are this?

I'm like, why don't you go do your own deal?

What's stopping you right now?

It's your monthly expenses. I get it.

But stop complaining.

Or just go do something different.

Go do something about it.

Because you don't want to be that guy who's 45 or

50 years old and trying to stick it to the man.

Like, go be the man.

You have the opportunity.

And this one entrepreneur told me when I

started the company, he was like, you're standing

over a cliff, and it's really scary.

And you look down there and you've got to jump.

And he's like, you look over, and then

finally you jump, and what you realize it

wasn't actually a cliff, it was a curb.

But most people won't jump.

And that's what I found is, like, people, you work

your tail off, you find a niche, you find customers.

You take care of those customers, they tell other

people, and the thing just goes bananas 1000%.

And I love that cliff curb analogy.

I think it's the fear that holds most people back.

And the fear is what you said.

It's making those monthly expenses, making

sure that they're covered and paid.

You talked about you'd set a goal for yourself that by

the age of 35, you wanted to start a business.

When did you make that decision?

Probably when I was 33, because I was talking

to this old guy who owned an EMP company,

exploration production company in Houston, and he said that

he started his company when he was 35.

And he just challenged me.

He was like, hey, by the time you're

35, that's when you need to do it.

And I've heard this great jack ma or

watches a video, I don't know if you've

seen it, where he's like, in your 20s,

you should be learning everything you possibly can.

You should be a student, like,

learning under a great mentor.

When you're in your 30s, go try something,

because your risk level is very low by

the time you're 40, in your 40s, you

should be doing something that you're passionate about.

By the time that you're 50, you should be,

like, pouring in and mentoring tons of people.

And when you're in 60s, you should be

spending all your time with your grandkids.

And I tell that a lot.

I tell the younger folks who work for me and

just go, hey, you're in your 20s right now.

I hope you go leave bird dog and go start

a company and I'll back you in your 30s.

But right now, learn everything.

You can develop as many relationships as you can

and just be an awesome employee and then go

start something when you're in your 30s, when the

risk is minimal and you can go do it.

And so that's kind of how I

think about it in those terms.

Mentorship is a topic that's come

up a ton with our guests.

You clearly had a lot of mentors that

spoke into your life along the way.

Were those mentor relationships?

Were they like formal relationships?

Know, Jonathan, we're going to sit down once

a week and we're going to talk about,

we're going to go through this program.

Or was it more about just somebody that was

present in your life that spoke when they saw

something that needed to be spoken about?

The way that I've gone about it is when

there's someone that I meet and respect and want

to learn from, I typically pursue them.

And again, I tell this to kids coming out of college.

I'm like, hey, whatever you want to do, go

find five people, people that you respect and email

them or call them and say you want to

take them out to coffee or lunch.

And I know you don't have any

money, but you're never going to pay.

They're going to pick it up.

Just the fact that you'll go take the initiative to

get in front of them, and if they like you,

then they'll spend more time with you or they'll help

you and connect you and all those things.

And so that's been my approach.

If there's been somebody that I respected

a lot, then I'll pursue them.

And if they like me, then they'll invite me, hey,

come to this dinner with me, or come do this.

And then I just ask a lot of questions

and just go through things that I'm struggling with,

that I'm thinking about, and a lot of how

do I make good decisions and things like that.

And so all of my mentor

relationships to this day are informal.

It's like, hey, can we go grab dinner on your schedule?

I know you're busy, but I'd love to

just talk to you for an hour.

And they typically always make themselves available.

And do you have people that you're now doing that for?

Oh, yeah.

I would say that the people that work for me

are the people that I talk to every day.

A couple of them are in their,

teach them everything I possibly can.

I would say the two groups of people that I've

mentored the most are my kids and my employees that

are in their, spend a lot of time with them.

And then I've got tons of kids from

a and m that call and want.

I mean, I talked to these guys who started a company

yesterday and we had an hour and 15 minutes conversation just

about life and business and how to think about things, how

to prioritize who to listen to, who not to listen to,

how to make decisions, things like that.

And so I mentor down and get mentored up as well.

You still have your investment business, right?

That's been going eight years now.

Eight years last week, yeah. Okay.

What gave you the confidence to make that move?

It was more like dissatisfaction.

You could go back to why did

I want to get out of Whitesboro?

Why did I want to get out of the corporate world?

Just not satisfied. I'm not there.

I was like, your boss comes by at 03:00 and you're

acting like you're busy and you were done at eleven.

And I wish I was like taking a nap or working

out because I'm tired and then getting back up at four

and going to meet somebody for coffee or drinks and dinner

and then going, that's what I want to do.

That goes back to my, like, this

is how I think it should work.

I think you should get up and work out

and go meet somebody for breakfast and do all

your calls and go to lunch and then go.

For me, I'm like, I need like an hour nap or

whatever because I'm going very fast and then I re energize

and get after it and then go meet more people.

But I find myself acting like I'm busy

when my boss walks by and sending him

reports that don't matter about things that don't

matter, that aren't really moving the needle.

And I was just like, man, there's got to be

a better use of time to actually just do the

job and spend time with people that I really love

and enjoy being around and building a business around that

I don't know how I'm going to do it.

There's no guaranteed success. It could fail.

And I could have to come back and ask for my

job and just live in a situation that I don't enjoy.

But the pain is too much for me

to stay and so I have to go.

And then when you start the company and then it's

successful and takes off, you're like, man, I made it.

And then I think a lot about, and even in

the bird dog venture, which I'll talk about in a

little bit, is you don't want to miss out on

the adventure, especially when you're like, this is a startup.

I hope my business works.

What if it doesn't?

Am I going to lose money? Lose investors money?

I mean, I didn't have any vectors in the

wealth management business, but what if it doesn't work?

Reputation. I'm all in.

All these things that you battle

against, you're like, I don't care.

I'm going all in.

I'm going after it all in.

And from the first business to now, I just think

about, do not miss that opportunity of facing fears, of

going through tough times and enjoying the moment, because you

hear about guys all the time that have big exits

and, like, man, I just missed the grind and how

hard it was and things like that.

When you came home one day and told your

wife Kat, that you wanted to go off and

start your own investment firm, what was her response?

Well, she knows that I pray about everything,

that I seek wisdom about all major decisions.

And I talked to her, and she knew, I mean,

she knew that I needed to go do it myself.

And she was in the middle of medical school and then

going into residency, so she was super focused on that.

And our expenses were very low.

I mean, we lived in an 800 square foot house in Houston

and had a couple of dogs and a bunch of student debt.

But I was like, I've got to go do this.

And she's like, okay.

And that's how she's always been when

I've talked to her about it.

And I'm like, I'm certain of this.

We have to go do this.

She's like, okay, go do it.

I'm here, and we're doing this together.

So she's always been solid.

She's solid.

All right, bird dog, what is it?

So bird dog is a

marketplace connecting landowners with hunters.

The genesis of this is that two

of our friends, Evan Loomis and Jason

Ballard, started a company called Icon Build.

It's a 3d printing company.

And they took some money off the table on a

recent fundraise, and Ballard bought a ranch in Teralingua down

in Big Bend, and I'm managing their money for them.

And Ballard's like, hey, Lusk.

It was like, after the Christmas party,

he's like, okay, here's the deal.

I need you to not just manage my money, but I

need you to do my taxes and manage my ranch.

And I was like, well, I don't do any of that because that's

a lot of work, and that does not sound fun to me.

He's like, well, just double my fee.

I was like, what did you say?

I was like, let me update my resume.

I'm in the ranch management business.

I was like, that's amazing. Let's do it.

And so I was trying to find, like, an

Airbnb for hunting to put his ranch on so

we could show some income in his llc.

That was basically what I was trying to do.

And I scoured the earth, and I could not

find a good solution, and I went back to

him and said, hey, there's no Airbnb for hunting.

You can't imagine.

There's no technology in this business.

And, like, 95% of the land in Texas is privately owned.

You have all of these ranches.

You only get to hunt if you're

invited or you own a ranch.

It's like, hey, Scott, you want to come hunting?

Well, it's like January the eigth, and

that doesn't work for me or whatever.

And here's a list of all the things you can't shoot.

You're like, okay, but my dad said we can shoot hogs.

Okay, that's fun. Yeah, it's great.

But what if you had a central place that you

could go to and choose what species you wanted to

hunt, what price, what geography, where you could go?

And I liken it to, like, if there are golfers out

there, imagine a world in which there were only private golf

courses and you only got to play if you're invited.

We're effectively creating a public tea time system for hunting

so I can choose where I want to go, what

date I want to go, how much I want to

spend, and then we're getting these guys into it who

are just falling in love with it.

And it's a lot of guys who didn't grow

up hunting, like me, I didn't grow up hunting.

I worked in the fish business, and my dad, he

traded fish for one hunt when I was 14.

And so I got to shoot $1.

And so I've got kids now, and I'm like, well, I

want them to grow up as this part of our family

tradition, but I don't even know what I'm doing.

And what I found is there's a lot of

guys like that that have got some capital to

spend, want to go hunt, maybe not know what

they're doing, want their kids to get into it.

So we do a lot of hunter's ed, where the kids are

in the front row, the dads are in the back row.

The dad's like, I know what I'm doing.

I'm like, no, you don't.

And neither do I, so it's cool.

And then we teach the kids and teach the

dads, and then you go shoot shotguns and rifles.

Hey, dad, you get up here and

load it, and then he starts shooting.

And then you open up the laptop

and you have a father son hunt.

And it's just been very successful.

And in the spirit of not growing up in it, I had

a view of what I wanted my experience to be like.

And I was like, I want to show up to a ranch.

I want to go sight rifles in, go hunt.

And then I want to have a great meal,

sit around the campfire, smoke cigars with all my

buddies and laugh and talk and go deep, and

then go hunt again, have great meals.

And I was like, man, I'd love for there

to be some country music aspect of this.

It'd be fun to have somebody playing.

The month after, Taylor Jackson and I started

this business by the, uh, and then ballard

backed us, so Taylor and I.

Taylor is in the construction business and

was like, hey, he's your co founder. He's my co founder.

Taylor's my co founder.

So he was in the construction business and

he was looking at it from a perspective

of, hey, I want to take all my

subcontractors hunting, but it's hard to find places.

And I was coming at it from a

stewardship perspective, from, I've got these wealth management

clients who've got ranches and they need to

sell more hunts to generate income.

So Ballard said, hey, Taylor's been talking about this.

You guys get to, I'm going to fund you.

And then the next month, I was hunting with Colt McCoy.

And Colt was like, hey, I love this idea.

I want to invest in the company.

And so he and I become really good buddies.

And so he is my second investor.

So we raised some capital and got in

our trucks and just started signing ranches up.

And basically you've got all of these ranches,

tens of thousands of them in Texas that

already have lodges, food guides and game.

They just need help on marketing.

It may be a website that's 20

years old and call for pricing.

It's very challenging for the hunter to decipher.

Why does this animal cost 3000?

This cost $2,500, the same animal.

What are the amenities? Things like that.

It's just like Airbnb or Vrbo, but for hunting.

And so I read Brian Chesky talk about how

he would go send a professional photographer in early

days of Airbnb and the photos sold.

So right when we started, we got a

professional photographer, photographed all the ranches, drone footage,

all the things, wrote descriptions, talked to the

biologist about what game could be harvested.

And then we put it on a website

and we built it on Shopify originally.

And our first year, we had 112

hunters come through in like four months.

And we just finished our first full

year, and it was around 200 hunters.

But everybody starts out shooting a dough or something

smaller, and everybody goes up for bigger animals.

So higher margin stuff, but it's been really cool.

Back to the country music.

I called Colton.

I was like, hey, man, I've got an idea.

We should get some country music singers

out here on the ranches and just

play private concerts and things like that.

I was like, well, who do you know?

He's like, I know everybody, man.

I was like, well, let's go.

And so he hooked me with Pat Green, and so I brought

on Pat as a partner, gave him equity in the business.

And so he's been great playing shows for us.

And then brought on Roger Krager, same way.

And then do a lot of

stuff with Josh Abbot, who's wonderful.

And then we've got a bunch of guys

who are in the Texas country music scene,

but not those big names, but phenomenal, phenomenal

musicians, singers, songwriters that will come.

And it's corporate groups who like, hey, I've got eight or

ten guys, and I want to go do this hunt.

Can we get a musician to play

on Saturday night or something like that?

Not Saturday, because all these guys

are busy on the weekends.

But if you did a deal Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,

Thursday, then they're going to come and do that.

So I'll tell you what, we're having a lot of fun.

It's a blast.

And it's not only fun, it's really cool to see

the lives get changed on these ranches when you can

get guys off their phone and onto the ranch and

to go hunt, especially the father son stuff where you're

creating a rite of passage for them that they otherwise

couldn't figure out how to do.

And they don't know how big of a

deal it's going to be until it happens.

And so the comments are not like

three star, it's like all five star.

And, hey, this was life changing.

Thank you so much for what you guys have done.

And so we see that there's a huge

purpose behind what we're doing building this company.

You talked about being a maverick

and wanting to kind of.

I'm paraphrasing, but break the rules, and, man,

it sounds like with this, you've done that.

I mean, there weren't a lot of rules

to begin with, but you've really pushed the

boundaries and taken it, created something out of

nothing that is truly, truly unique.

I listened to a podcast recently where the

founder of Calendly, I don't know if you're

familiar with Calendly, but it's a calendar system

that helps people book meetings with one another.

Him creating calendly came out of his frustration with

the fact that he needed to schedule meetings with

different people, and it was so hard.

There was nothing out there to help him do that.

Your thing was birthed out of necessity, right?

You had this need.

You had this frustration.

It amazes me how many problems there are

still out there that don't have a solution.

Do you think beyond bird dog and are there

other ventures that you're thinking about getting into?

Are there other problems in the marketplace that you

see that you want to go solve for?

Most of the problems that I see can be

solved within bird dog, so I didn't seek this

out, going, I'm looking for another company to start.

I mean, my life was really good, and now it's

really hard, like, working twelve to 15 hours days.

But when I look into this

industry, it was out of necessity.

I just couldn't believe there was

no technology in the hunting world.

I mean, you got websites that connect

outfitters with hunters, but there was no

real websites that connected landowners with hunters.

And I knew the landowner really well

from doing my wealth management business.

I mean, these were all the guys that I was talking to.

And so within that, I've noticed a lot of things,

like the companies that will know it'll be within bird

dog, but there are things like the animal live trade.

Like Texas is like Africa, basically, where you've got all

these species of animals that are bred and then sold

from ranch to ranch, and then people go hunt them.

And a lot of these species exist, are

not extinct because of hunters, and so they

breed all these animals, but there's no technology

within the buying and selling of the animals.

So, hey, we just sold 20 oryx hunts.

We need to reload.

Can you help me find Oryx?

And then you call a bunch of people, and

then you finally find some, and then you hope

that the guy's trustworthy to get it there, and

then you hope some of them don't die.

And you're like, man, this is super inefficient.

And so what I've noticed is, as we

talk to our customers on the landowner side,

they tell us all of their problems.

I mean, the other one, I would say is you

have a lot of landowners who own 20 to 100,

maybe 200 acres, and they live in the cities.

They live in Dallas, Houston, Austin, San Antonio.

And the pipe busts on their well, and they're

like, okay, what do you have to do?

You've got to call from Dallas, like, five different

plumbers until somebody can come get it fixed.

Or I need my fence fixed.

I need to build a pond, I need

a pole barn, put up whatever it, like.

The services out there are very fragmented.

And so at some point, not right now, but we'll know.

Think of, like, the angie's list for rural landowners.

So the reason that people do good work is if

they can do their job, and then there's accountability.

Like, you're publicly rated and reviewed.

I think about myself as an example.

We've got a little place in Washington county.

It's like 26 acres.

I go up my barn yesterday, and one

of my pipes is busted at the well.

And so I use that as a real example.

I'm like, and water is going everywhere.

And I turned all the valves off, and

I can't think of what to do.

And I call two different plumbers.

And thankfully, one guy was like,

hey, I can come out there.

We happen to just finish a job, but if not,

you'd be lucky to get somebody out there that day.

And he was like, hey, turn the

electricity off to the hit the breaker.

I was like, oh, great.

I didn't think about that.

So I turn off the water, stops.

Fine, he fixes it. But I live there.

Imagine if you don't live there or you have a

caretaker or something like that, then imagine, like, going into

a website, and we call it, like, a landowner portal

that we're building where the landowners can go in.

They can black out their dates

when they're at their ranches.

They can buy and sell animals when they need to reload.

And then you also say, hey, I need a plumber.

And guess what?

The top ten plumbers with all five star ratings in

the surrounding three counties come up and you message them,

and they pick up the job like an Uber driver

or whatever, and they're like, hey, I'll be over there.

Because whenever your pipe is busted,

you're not really negotiating on price.

You're like, hey, I just need

it fixed as soon as possible.

And so that's the next thing, I think.

There's no real service component, especially for those

ranches that are 20 to 100 acres who

don't have a dedicated ranch manager.

But you could put together a platform for

fractional ranch managers for people who mow and

trim your trees and clean your house.

And if you don't live there, have it prepared when

you and your family and friends want to go.

It's all fragmented.

These guys are on the phone 10 hours

at a time before they can find somebody

to come spray the weeds on their pond.

I see a lot of things that are ancillary to what

we're doing, is you start out with hunting, but then you

can become a SaaS company for that landowner to go, hey,

if you want to sell hunts on your ranch, you can.

If you don't, Bird dog offers this other

marketplace kind of business to business for you.

I think about that as a business leader,

business owner, you got lots of ideas.

How do you prioritize what you're going to do next?

How quickly my design, product, and engineers can

work, and how much capital I have.

I mean, I've got a lot of ideas,

but also have a board of directors.

And so we have quarterly meetings

and kind of go through.

Here's what we did.

Here's kind of the vision.

And Jason Ballard's on our board.

Probably the best board member you could ever want.

He's unbelievable.

We have this law firm for startups in Austin.

This guy's like, Ballard left our board

meeting, and the guy was like, hey,

you guys want some honest feedback?

After the meeting, he didn't say

a word the whole meeting.

He's just taking notes.

He's like, for a guy who sits on 20 or

30 that use a quarter, he's like, that's the best

I've ever seen of any company I've been involved in.

What made it so?

He said that Ballard was command and control.

He said most board members are like finance guys

who really don't think about operating, but they just

want to see the numbers and all that stuff.

And Ballard's whiteboarding going, okay, here's

what the organizational chart needs.

Here's where we're weak.

We need to go find a product person for the

hunter side, a product person for the landowner side.

You need three engineers for each of these.

If you're not willing to commit three,

you don't care about the product.

All right, we need to identify a

product person to report the CTO.

Okay, the next group is the sales team.

Here's how it's broken out. Okay?

Admin, this is our CFO, and he's going to handle

all documents for hiring, all financials, all those things.

Okay, we got it.

All right, Lusk, your job by the next board

meeting is to go interview 60 landowners and hunters.

You're going to get 15 new ranches on the website.

I want you to add fishing to the website.

And then I want to do a deal

code for anybody who signs up for.

Give them $250, and they give them another 100

for each friend they have that signs up. All right?

That's your to do list.

He goes, I'm just a board member.

You don't have to do anything, I'm telling you.

But this is my point of view.

So a board member who's actually

whiteboarding and strategizing with about.

I said, well, how did you learn that, Ballard?

I told him at dinner, I was like, man, yeah.

I wasn't impressed because this is how you always are.

Like, I just thought that's par for the course.

But this guy was very impressed.

He's like, I learned it from

a guy named Jason Portnoy, who's.

I think he was like, the first

CFO for Facebook or something like that.

He's the PayPal Mafia and just a stud.

And he's on Jason's board.

He's like, this is how Portnoy

does all our board meetings.

And so I've learned it from him. And I was.

That was, I'm so thankful for you, to have you.

And so how do I go back to your question about

how do you take all these ideas and really stay focused?

Is those board meetings are super helpful.

I need, like, three tasks to go get done.

Like, what can I go execute, and where does

that fit in with the vision for right now?

Because I tend to live in the future, and a

big area of opportunity for me is to be present

and to go, like, what do we get?

We got to go execute on this now.

And then we just do 30

day sprints before the next board.

30 days or, sorry, set 90 day sprints.

What are we going to do in the next 90 days?

We've got to get it done.

And all of our KPIs key performance indicators

are all driven towards those goals to achieve.

And then you go present the next board meeting.

It's like, okay, let's update the chart.

What do we need next?

And that's been super helpful to have that structure

with Taylor, my co founder on the board, and

Ballard, you've touched on this a couple different times,

and you've referenced Uber and Airbnb.

You are a two sided marketplace.

You've got to find the landowner and you've got to

find the hunter, which is harder of the two.

So I think if you were to come into this with

no relationships in the state of Texas or wherever that you're

starting it from, the landowner is the hardest part, because the

typical landowner is a guy who sold a big company or

owns a big company, bought this land.

It's recreational.

They all lose money.

If you have a huge cattle operation, you might

break even or make a little bit of money.

But I'd say 99% of them are in the red.

They're recreational, they're fun.

For family and friends.

They're typically in a trust.

There's five kids in the trust.

One kid likes to hunt, the rest don't care.

And everybody gets capital called for,

property taxes, feed bills, and insurance.

And so you may get a sibling

who's like, hey, we need $50,000.

That's not my ranch.

Well, yeah, you own 20% of it, so send the money.

And then they've got to generate income because

they're llcs, and so they're either cattle, hay,

hunting operations, whatever they're doing to generate revenue.

So through our relationships and really our investors and our

cap table, who are really tied in with this, and

just as we talk on podcasts and meet different people,

somebody's like, hey, my cousin's got a ranch.

My uncle's got a ranch.

Hey, these guys want to sell some hunts,

or they've already got a commercial operation.

We want to put our ranch on bird dog.

And so we've been very fortunate to get ranches.

We've got about 30 ranches in the last 15 months.

We're going to add another 35 this year because

we think that that capacity you could have, again,

a phantom metrics like, oh, we got 300 ranches.

It doesn't matter if you're not feeding

these people business and they're happy.

And I'd rather have 65 people love us than a handful of

them not like us, because it's not working out for us.

So we've been very fortunate on the ranch side.

The interesting thing about the hunter side is the

two groups that we really focus on are high

net worth individuals, because our experiences are premium.

You sell a premium product.

We sell getting to sit around the campfire and

drink bourbon and smoke cigars with Pat Green.

That's not an everyday kind of thing.

And when we put these opportunities

on facebook, we hear about it.

It's like, that's highway robbery.

I'd never pay for that.

I'm like, I know, man, I know.

We'll get there as you scale ranches,

and then you can show all these

ranches, like, who's paying what for what?

You have all the data on the back end to go,

hey, the average 150 inch whitetail is going for $4,500.

And so you can adjust your pricing accordingly, Mr.

Landowner.

Then they can take it down to

3500, and then it's supply and demand,

increased supply, and then prices come down.

But the other group outside of

those individuals are corporate groups.

And there are corporate groups that have

budgets that are 20,000 to half a

million dollars to take clients hunting in

the construction business, oil service companies, whatnot.

And they usually go to the same ranch.

And so we spent a lot of time

going, like, setting up booths at different events

for oilfield service companies, for exploration production companies,

or whatever it is at these events.

And then they're like, oh, man, we can go do this.

Like, hey, we're going with you guys this year.

And then you get that repeat business where they'll bring eight

or ten guys on a trip, and if you can get

50 of those a year, you break even in this business.

And so we've focused really heavily

on those groups of people.

I also think that we launched two years ago and

then last year, with the rate, interest rates where they're

at, this couldn't be like the harder year to ever

operate because everybody's like, all my budgets cut.

Instead of ten guys this year, I've got to bring three.

Like, bring them and we're going to knock

it out of the park for them.

And when it comes back, we'd love your business

and we'd love to this more like, no, definitely.

We'll be back.

It's just budgets are down.

I don't know that the hunters are the hardest

part, but they are whenever the economy is down.

But we still fought through it and had a

really good year and developed some really important relationships.

So I'd say the hunters this year

were harder to get than the ranches.

But at the same time, when hunters

aren't hunting, ranchers need more support.

So we were able to really level up all of our

ranches because everybody went from, if you had 50 guys two

years ago or three years ago, you might have had 30.

And so like, hey, we need help selling more hunts, which

has allowed us to get more ranches on the platform.

Is it safe to say with your first

business, your investment business, it was not a

capital intensive thing to get off the ground.

Yeah, it just took grit and you needed some

money to go buy coffee for people and tell

the story and maybe go print pitch decks.

You didn't have to raise money to start that one.

That was interesting because I partnered with a family

early on who gave me working capital, and then

I bought them out after a couple of years.

But the working capital was really just a hedge

against my fear because I was afraid of failing.

And so I was like, if I could

partner with this family, it'd be really good.

But never in a kind of raising a

safe or convertible note or a priced round.

I never raised know Ballard coached me up on all this.

He was like, you got to get a C Corp and

you got to do this, and you're going to go raise

money, and this is the law you're going to use.

And here's how it works.

And so in the venture capital world, and

we've raised a little bit of venture capital.

Roger Sealy here in Dallas is

one of my partners, Morrison Seeger. They're awesome.

And so they're our one venture capital partner.

We've got another special purpose vehicle group that

came in, and the rest are all individuals.

But it's definitely kind of a venture capital structure

of raising rounds of capital to grow the business,

to eventually grow a really big company.

Is it stressful having these investors and how

active are they in terms of what they

want to see the organization do?

What I thought about raising money from investors was, when

I first started was, am I going to get feedback?

Is it going to be talking to a ton of

people when I need to be operating the business?

The way I thought about it's very similar to

how I thought about my wealth management business.

I'm not working with any jerks.

I don't care how much money you

have, I'm not working with you.

And so you can't do that at first.

You got to take whatever you can when you're

in that business, but eventually you can do it

the way that you want to do it.

I thought the same thing about investors.

I was like, I only want to work with people

that I really like, that we have a high level

of trust and they can help us grow the business. Us.

So these investors are all guys who own

companies or running companies or own ranches, and

they are all accretive to our success.

Like, if I go to those guys right now, like, hey,

I need five more ranches, they're going to connect or, hey,

we need three more groups to go hunting with us. Okay.

Hey, I got this company that we

work over here, their construction company.

Introduce them to us and you just remind them,

and they can help you actually grow the business.

Versus, like, let's just say

it's a real estate company.

You give those guys money, you

really can't add any value.

You just hope to get some return from them

from what they know that what they're doing.

This is actually different where

these people can be involved.

So I've focused on people who can help

us grow the business, who know the industry.

And really it's just a business that

attracts those same type of people.

They either get it or don't.

I pitch this to probably 300 people, and

I've got, I bet you about 15 investors.

And then two of those are spvs that have

got ten to 15 in each of those.

And most people said no, but the people who

said yes were like, I totally get this.

This is a brilliant idea.

Like, why is no one doing this? I'm all in.

And so when I'm raising money, I don't push it hard, I just

tell the story, and if you want to do it, do it.

If you don't, no big deal.

But usually they'll say, talk

to these three other people.

And that's how I've gone about it.

I mean, I just live with open

hands, and the right people will come.

It's like, mentor of mine was like, he's like,

I imagine myself sitting in a chair every day,

and then I look around a room and there's

a door over there and I go open it.

And if it opens and I walk through

it and I explore what's in there.

And if it's locked, because when I was younger,

I'd kick it down because I wanted it so

bad and then it would never work out.

It's what I wanted so bad, but it's

not what it was supposed to happen.

And so I think about that in life

in general, whether it's investors or ranches or.

I mean, there's 100 decisions a day that you

can try to force, but if you don't, if

you explore but not force, then things typically work

out the way they were supposed to.

You've got two separate companies, at least.

Yeah, just two.

And a family man.

How do you balance your time?

It's very challenging with bird dog, and it's something that

I talk to my wife a lot about because there's

this aspect that you have to be on the road

and you have to be on these hunts.

You have to understand what the

landowner wants because they're all unique.

You got to understand what the hunters want

and then resolve problems while they're there.

So there's an element.

Year one, I went on 22 hunts.

Like, I had to be there, but I also felt

this guilt and shame of being away from my children

because, hey, when are you going to come home?

When are you going to do, when are

you going to hang out with us?

And there's all these country music

songs that you listen to.

Like, my dad wasn't there and whatever.

Oh, I don't want to be a country music song.

And so I thought about it a lot in year

one and just decided the folks that work for me

who don't have kids or aren't married, I'm like, hey,

you're going to go on all these hunts.

And I just have to trust that you can pull it

off and you can identify things that need to be resolved.

But when I think about the balancing, you have to

prioritize and you have to really take a look at

what your priorities are and then put those first.

And for me, it's like my walk with the Lord.

Number two, it's my wife as my children,

and then it's my friends and then business.

And so I'll write it out.

Where am I actually allocating my time?

And am I staying true to those first principal things?

Like, you have to.

And if I'm not, which no one does,

you just go, okay, it's time to recalibrate,

and I'm going to do it right now.

And then I'm going to go say it

out loud instead of keeping it in.

I'm going to go tell my wife.

I'm going to go tell my children.

I'm going to go tell my friends.

I'm going to go tell the colleagues.

And then that something about saying it

out loud got a lot of power.

And then you just get back up, like, right know.

I went on maybe two hunts this year, and so I've

spent a ton of time with my children, with my wife.

Very attuned to them, not just, like, know about them.

I know them.

I know them really well.

There's just joy in that.

And now I'm in a season this next

month where I'm on three different hunts.

I'm here in Dallas for Dallas Fari

club, and it's time to work.

And I told him, hey, this is what I've got to go do.

And here's the expectations.

But I'll be back.

But I just want to get to the end of

my life knowing that I kept those first principles first.

And I took care of my wife and my kids because

it goes back to my family, like a broken family.

And then getting the ball down the field is like, we've

been married for 15 years together for 23 kids, and it's

like, let's go for 50 or 60 or whatever we can.

And then I want to see these kids

grow up to be awesome human beings.

And it's just that bird dog and the wealth

management business are just a way to do that.

Doors that opened up, that they just opened up.

But it's not like I'm like, oh, man, I love

finance, and I'm passionate about hunting and all these things.

It's like the Lord's called me into it is

the best way I can tell you, Scott.

And I'm going to go deliver what hasn't

worked out like you expected it to.

Working with friends is really hard.

Working with friends is very challenging.

Or just working with people who, even if they're

not friends, let's just say it's a colleague.

They have different interests from

what your interests are.

And so let's say you have a supplier that I'm

making this up, but someone who sells shirts or something

like that, outdoor shirts, and they want to partner with

you, and you really like them a lot.

And you're like, man, I need shirts for this.

But it's a bad allocation of capital, or I'm not

going to do it, and you're going to be mad

at me because I really want to do it.

It'd be big for you and your

business, but I can't do it. Okay.

Conflicts of interest are very challenging,

and there's a lot of them.

The other one, be like, you meet these

people, and when you're building these companies, you

don't know exactly what you need.

I don't know anything about engineering,

and Taylor and I found it.

Neither one of us are engineers.

And so he's like, hey, man, take what I'm getting

paid, and let's go find an engineer, and I'm going

to be on the board, and let's go.

Showed a ton of humility on that.

But we didn't know that.

We didn't know that.

We just thought there was, like, some white label

thing you could buy off the shelf and do

this and just use relationships and things like that.

And then you have these different groups of people who

are like, hey, this is how much it costs.

This is what you should expect, and then

it's completely different from what you thought.

And then you have to fire them.

And you're like, man, I really like you

as an individual, but we can't keep you

because it's not right for the business.

And I've got investors.

If it was, like just me by myself, I'd be

like, okay, I'd be a little bit more compassionate.

But when you have other people's capital, it's a different

ballgame of going, and it makes you better because those

are the right decisions you ought to make.

Like, you're a fiduciary, just like

a fiduciary in this one business.

You're also fiduciary in this other one.

And you have to make decisions that

are in the interest of your investors.

That's something surprised me.

I can't remember the question.

Yes, but that's been hard.

That's very hard, because people

get their feelings hurt.

But at the end of the day, you know you're

doing the right thing and you can sleep at night.

How many people do you have on the bird dog team today?

We have got seven people on the bird dog team today.

All right.

Earlier in your career, when you were at at t

or when you were at Goldman, did you manage people?

My first job out of college was

managing a team at at and T.

I was in their leadership development program.

Well, management program, where they put you in

an area for twelve months, and right when

you under, like, the training wheels come off,

they move you to another spot.

So my first job out of

college was managing twelve network engineers.

And they were ladies who, they would make a

change out, like on a telephone pole or something.

They would call in and these

ladies would type in the change.

And it was a union environment

too, which was very interesting.

They were like, hey, the LDP program,

they called us little dumb people, and

they're like, host the leadership development program.

And I laughed it off.

And they're like, hey, you just sit back and don't try

to be a hero, and we'll make you look really good.

I was like, all right, let's do it.

And so I'm just like, bringing people coffee and, hey,

let's win a gift card to so and so.

I was just like, out there keeping everybody

happy, and they crushed it for me.

But I managed teams, and then I did that, and then I

managed a big sales team while I was getting my MBA.

It was actually the reason I could study all

the time, because at t had just bought singular

wireless and they were integrating it into at t

wireless, and there was no integration between businesses that

had at and t landlines and Internet and wireless.

So, like, hey, we want you to manage the

team that goes into all these businesses that have

wireline business and sell them cell phones.

And by the way, we're going to give you

15 of the best singular at and t wireless

salespeople to come over here and work for you.

And so we crushed it.

I mean, I literally have sales team

meetings in the morning, like, just putting

out fires for people, solving problems.

And I'd study during the day and

then go to school at night.

And thanks to those people, we all made diamond club.

We got to go to Vegas.

So it was like, your top salespeople.

I was like, oh, it was cool.

But thankfully, been managing teams for a long time.

Is it different managing when it's your business

than when you were at at t?

Does it feel different?

Do you manage them different? You know what?

I've thought a lot about leadership now that you're

older and have gained a lot of wisdom from

people that I've surrounded myself with is that you

actually have something to teach them.

The younger folks, you have something that you

can like, wisdom, you can part on them.

And the leadership is interesting.

The guys I was talking to yesterday started

this apparel company, and they're like, we only

manufactured in the USA, and we're giving 12%

of our profit away, our revenue, to nonprofits.

And we've talked to all these leaders, and they

told us what a bad idea it was, but

they had a lot of conviction around it.

And I was like, hey, man, don't listen to them.

You go do your deal, and if this makes

it big, stick to your guns and what you're

building, and just go build it, because you're fully

committed to it, and you're young and you're hungry,

and you don't know what's going to happen.

You could be the next big

whatever, but don't ever be discouraged.

And I think leadership now is a lot about those.

I just think about the things

that I've learned about decision making.

Like, talk about this a lot.

But Terry Looper is a mentor of mine, and

he has this process of how he makes decisions,

and he's wrote a book on it.

And the first is like, consult your

friend Jesus, is what he says first.

He's like, I was talking about bird dog.

Like, we're blowing and going. We're crushing.

He's like, hey, lord.

He goes, hey, lusk, have you talked to the Lord?

About this, I was like, no, he knows.

He's like, well, you might have a nervous breakdown like I

did when I was 37, but now he's got a $6

billion company that he owns by himself and he uses framework.

Consult your friend Jesus, he said,

number two, gather the facts.

Like, figure out what's true and what's false.

Number three, watch for circumstances.

Like, what do you see that

are trends that are important?

And number four is get neutral.

Don't try to manipulate the outcome, because a lot of

times we want to do what we want to do

instead of just waiting for the right thing.

It's kind of like what I was saying about

sitting down and waiting for that door to open.

And he's like, and if you use that framework,

you'll make the best decisions every single time.

And so even importing that wisdom on

these guys that has impacted my life.

If you can impact lives, I think

that's the biggest thing on mentorship.

The other thing is just hiring a players.

If you hire a players and you lead them

well, I just think most of my job is

taking what the board says, going and delivering a

clear vision, and then letting people execute.

And when they have big issues, if they bring it

to me, it's an issue that they really need help

on, and I need to get it resolved ASAP.

And so it's a big decision that takes time

to think through and make the right decision.

And so I really empower them.

I'm very impatient with B players and have no tolerance

for C players, but that's one of the biggest thing.

Get the a players on and pour into them and lead them

well, and they'll go flourish and then let them be free.

Don't try to control them.

They want to go start another

company, go let them do it.

If they want to go, call me and

say, hey, I'm leaving to go somewhere else. Great.

How can I be supportive of you? Live free.

The next person's going to come along and they're going to

crush it, and that guy's going to go crush it.

That girl is going to go crush it, and

you're going to be friends and you're going to

watch their success, and you're the one who planted

the seed in the first place.

Like, let it grow and flourish.

Don't get upset.

That's how I think about it.

When I was younger, I was just like,

what numbers do I need to hit? Who's the team?

How do we do it?

Please help me.

I'll do whatever I can.

It's very different now where I think a lot

about the mentorship and the wisdom and trying to

take what I'm learning and even delivering that wisdom.

It's one thing to learn something, it's

another thing to teach something that grows

you even deeper into what you believe.

It's like saying it out loud is important to kind of

ingrain it in your heart, your mind, and your soul.

How are you finding good people?

Hiring people is the hardest thing in the

world, and I've hired some a players and

I've hired some really bad folks.

And a lot of people say hire slow and fire fast.

And in the startup world, you have

to hire fast and fire fast.

So what I found is like, word

of mouth is the most important thing.

And then I take my time interviewing them

and then always get reviews on people.

Like before, I was like, you

know what, I don't have time.

They're going to crush it.

Let's go do it.

I learned this in engineering with these engineers

where we had a really bad experience.

And we've got these new folks that came on and

they're really good, but I really want to get the

old engineers out and the new ones in.

But I was like, no, we want two references for

the specific guys, not your company, but these guys.

And they got one.

They're like, hey, it's going to be another

ten days before or something like that that

we can get the other one. I was like, well, we're not

signing the contract until we enter.

Like, we think you're great, all the things, but

we have to know, I have to know somebody

who's worked with you to do that.

And then I'll typically give a

project before you get paid.

This is going to take you a

day, it could take you two weeks.

And I want to see how you do, and I

want to see how you are with the team.

I want to see your work ethic.

I want to see if you don't know

how to do something if you're asking questions.

And on the other end of that, we've got

an offer that we're ready to do, but we

got to make sure that we like you.

It's like date before you marry.

It's like, got to make sure that we

like you and you can do the job.

You're competent and you have the attitude,

the right attitude to do it, but

I think it's the hardest thing ever. I'm still learning.

I'm still learning, but that's how I'm thinking about very

specific situations because we've done a lot of hiring and

had to let some folks go as well.

I wholeheartedly agree that hiring is one

of the absolute hardest things to do.

And one of the challenging things is that you don't

really know if somebody's going to be a good fit

for 90 days, six months, maybe even longer.

And you can do all the reference checks, but

I find that people aren't going to give you

a reference that's not going to say good things.

So I wholeheartedly agree that it's one of

the hardest things, and there's only so much

you can do to mitigate on the front.

And I think, for me, anyway, I've had to

go with my gut a lot of times.

Yeah, same here.

And sometimes my gut's right and sometimes it's wrong, and then

it goes back to expectations, like, am I going to leave

this person in the business just because I feel bad about

it and I'm going to hurt their feelings, or am I

going to do what's right for the business?

And you have to do it.

I mean, you have a lot of responsibility and

you're kind and you're gracious about it, but you

go, hey, it just didn't work out.

And here are the reasons, and I love you,

but I'll help you any way that I can.

Oftentimes, you're not just doing the right thing

for the business, you're doing the right thing

for them, because if they're not flourishing, you

are preventing them from going and doing something

where they could be flourishing.

Yeah, that's a great point.

Looking back, is there anything that you would

do differently, knowing what you know today?

Yeah, I mean, this is very specific, but

I would get a deep technical understanding first,

like two years ago, because when you're not

technical, you want to change an industry.

I'll tell you, I don't have time to do

it, but go into the third party engineering world

and turn that thing on its head.

Because the gap between great engineers, it's

like, great engineers are terrible engineers.

It's like there's nothing in the middle, and

you've got all these companies that will outsource

their service and you don't know what you're

getting, and the model is really broken.

But I think that two years ago, this

is like, if you don't have enough capital

to have in house engineers, right.

This is if you have to have a third party group.

But I would have gotten more technically savvy.

Like, we don't have any fatal flaws.

We haven't made any issues with that, but I

wish I would have known a lot more early

on, like when we built the website on Shopify.

At first it was a great experience, but

then the functionality, quickly, we needed more functionality

that we had to go build ourself.

And so when we started doing that

about eight months ago, it was rough.

And then I just jumped in. I was like, hey, I'm going

to learn everything I possibly can.

I've got to hire a new guy who can

be a fractional CTo, get this stuff cleaned up.

I learned the difference between that engineering

and product are two different things.

And you have to have design, product,

and then front and back end engineers,

quality assurance, stuff like that.

And then within those roles, who's

going to play those roles?

That's something that is very specific to my situation,

but it's something that we got fixed very quickly.

But I wish we'd have done a better job six months ago.

We've covered a lot of ground.

Is there anything that you wanted to

get into that we haven't yet covered? No.

Man, this is awesome.

I'm so proud of you for doing this podcast

and featuring all these different folks on it.

I think it's super helpful, man, to learn.

And I think podcasts are, I listen to

music and podcasts and I learn every day.

I'm on the road, put like 40,000 miles

a year on my truck, like just traveling

and meeting with people and things like that.

And so podcasts are very important.

So it's nice to do what you're doing because

you get to, not only are you understanding what

people do, but why they do it.

And if you could understand how people think and

why they make decisions and why they do what

they do, it's very interesting because you can pick

up nuggets here and there that can make you

better that you may not get in other forums.

And so I'm thankful for you and proud of you

for doing this and appreciate you having me on.

Always be learning.

Always be learning.

Lusk, thanks for coming in, man.

Yeah, bro, thanks for having me.

That was Jonathan Lusk, CEO and co founder of Bird Dog.

To learn more, visit birddogit.com.

That's Bird Dog I-T dot com.

If you or a founder, you know, would like

to be a guest on In the Thick of It,

email us at intro@founderstory.us.