766 - Tiny Homes Big Profits: Tom interviews Lance Cayko - Screw The Commute

766 – Tiny Homes Big Profits: Tom interviews Lance Cayko

Lance Cayko is here, and I think that's not a stage name. He can tell us about that. But he is an award winning architect. And he got knocked down and he got back up with some guerrilla marketing techniques he's going to tell you about.

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Screw The Commute Podcast Show Notes Episode 766

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[01:47] Tom's introduction to Lance Cayko

[02:54] Tiny homes and architecture

[11:09] Rough times and gorilla techniques

[18:05] Using Amazon

[22:06] Sponsor message

[24:28] Giving back

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Episode 766 – Lance Cayko
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 766 of Screw the Commute podcast. And yes, I know many of you have called me a psycho, but I decided to have a real psycho on. Lance Cayko is here, and I think that's not a stage name. He can tell us about that. But he is an award winning architect. And he got knocked down and he got back up with some guerrilla marketing techniques he's going to tell you about. And he's a podcast host and we'll bring him on in a minute. Now make sure you check out my TikTok thing at tiktok.com/@digitalmultimillionaire and also pick up a copy of our automation book. You will thank me for it because we actually figured it out one time. We estimated it's just one of the techniques in this book has saved me 8 million keystrokes and that's saved me carpal tunnel and, you know, allows. I want you to spend in time with your customers and prospects and not fighting with your computer all day long. So get your free copy of that at screwthecommute.com/automatefree and let's see, we've got lots of back episodes training episodes that screwthecommute.com/training, probably 400 training episodes there That's on all kinds of topics since I've been doing this 29.5 years since the commercial internet started. So I've been around a little bit. So check them out.

[00:01:48] All right, Let's bring on the main event. Lance Cayko is a dynamic architect, builder and podcaster, and he's the co-founder of F9 Productions. That's not few productions. It's F9 Productions. He specializes in residential and commercial projects. Now, he's got expertise in architecture and construction, and he's earned recognition and actively contributes to his community through lecturing, leading a non profit and co-hosting the the podcast Inside the Firm. Lance, are you ready to screw the commute?

[00:02:24] Let's do it. All right. Good to have you, man. Nice to meet you.

[00:02:27] Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for the introduction. Thanks for leaning into Psycho. Maybe I should start telling people that's my stage name. I love.

[00:02:34] That. Well, I mean, I meet a lot of psychos, but never any real ones, you know? Yeah. So, so glad to have you on here. And I've got the other podcast you're doing is Monday Morning Coffee podcast too, so that's pretty ambitious. Two separate podcasts that are doing real well. And and I, I think I first heard about you a long time ago. I was thinking back now, but I didn't recognize the pronunciation was psycho about some tiny homes and you're an architect but Tiny Homes was a big trend a while back. Tell them about your experience with that.

[00:03:14] Yeah, we jumped on the tiny home train right away. And I think right when it was starting to even before there was such things as like Twitter, Twitter hashtags and Twitter trending. But I'm trying to make that metaphor work in terms of it was still something that, you know, at the very beginning of the stages of that whole movement taking off. It was a reaction like a lot of things are in the United States, you know, for for better or for worse, it seems like we we overcorrect when we go too far one way and then we go too far the other way and that sort of thing. So it was a correction from an a reaction from what happened after the Great Recession with the meltdown in the housing industry, with all of the overlending and the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and everything like that. So, you know, it's not too long ago, I think everybody will remember that, you know, millennials just keep getting pounded with this as soon as as soon as we just get these big recessions that come in, it's like, man, are we ever going to own a home? So a lot of millennials at that point who were just getting out of school like myself and ready to start thinking about buying their first starter home starter condo starter thing like that rug got pulled out from underneath us all in terms of the Great Recession and like in the architecture community and construction industry, about 50% of the people got laid off.

[00:04:31] So it was even more tragic than the tech sector. And so what people started doing is they started looking at the opposite is like, do we actually need to be buying, you know, these these even just a starter home all the way up to like a McMansion. And so it was a social thing, really at the at the it was a reaction of like the opposite of like what is the smallest we could get down to and try to not have a mortgage. So maybe we could avoid some of these pitfalls. So our specific story with the Tiny House starts with when Alex and I first started the firm in 2010. That's one of our that's.

[00:05:06] Al Gore, I might add. Besides the psycho, we got a psycho and Al Gore on the show today.

[00:05:12] Yes, sir. Yep, Exactly. So my my business partner, Al Gore and I were coming back from Boulder one day and we were celebrating. It was a very, you know, kind of small celebration for what we could afford at that time. I think we went and got burgers or something like that at our favorite joint. But we got this duplex project that we were going to design very, very first, like substantial project for us. And and we called our friend Blake up. Blake was living up in South Dakota at the time and he said, and we said, Hey, Blake, uh, how's everything going? You know, how are you doing? And he's like, I hate my job. And I go, Well, how much money do you got? And or we said, he he's like, I hate my job. And I was like, Well, you love photography. Like, why don't you just quit? Like, how much money do you got? You got enough money to just kind of travel for a while? And he's like, Yeah, I've got like, you know, 20,000 or $30,000 or something in the bank like that. He's a single guy, no responsibilities beside himself sort of thing. And we were like, Oh, man, you should just why don't you just You ever heard of those tiny houses? They seem to be like, starting to get popular. What if you just what if you designed one and built one and then you just traveled all over the United States with it? That'd be cool.

[00:06:13] And we laughed about it. Whatever. Alex and I are the type of people that often act on not often, but on certain points. We think it's okay to act on impulse, and this is one of those points. So we got home after we hung up with Blake and I bought the domain name Blake Blake's tiny house.com and I set it up and and then I emailed him in the morning and copied Alex on the email, and I said, Hey, guess you're doing it. And, and he Blake Blake agreed and kind of went with along with us for a while and, and we worked with another colleague of ours, Sarah Schultz, for about six, five, six months. And finally, Blake, we, we sort of called Blake's bluff. He sort of called his own bluff. We ended up doing all of these really cool iterations of a tiny house. And since we're architects looking at like, what? What, you know, the common man was doing with the tiny house part at that point, we like to try to, like, break the box, so to speak. You know, metaphorically break the box. The thing the biggest thing we noticed about the tiny house is way back then, which they were really sort of in their infant stage of people even talking about them. So it was a pretty new movement was that they just kind of looked like cabins on wheels and we were like, Man, that's kind that's, you know, I'm not sure that's doing justice for what they're really trying to do in the sense of, you know, they're pulling these things around often to the woods next to creeks, like out outdoors, like.

[00:07:38] And on top of that, you know, you're sort of confined to this space. What if we made ours so that it was a foldable, collapsible, transforming, tiny house? So it was dynamic, right? And what would it calm? And then at the same time, with the nature part of it, it was like all they're doing is building like glorified RVs is what we thought. Like, why can't we have just a ton more, a ton of more glass involved with this? So, you know, you really feel that blend, you know, that seamless sort of like, am I inside and my outside sort of feeling. So when you go look at our house, our the first tiny house that we designed to build on F9 productions.com if you just. And we're on a HGTV episode as well. Season one, Episode 13 of Tiny House, Big Living. Ours is a dynamic, folding, tiny house. It's got a folding deck and an awning that end up covering up and protecting this giant glass wall that we have. And then it's fully sustainable, too. So it collects its own rainwater, which you can use for for flushing the toilet. And then it's got solar panels on top. So it's sort of an all in one. And what was amazing about it is the the I think the most amazing part from a marketing standpoint was we got so much organic traffic on that website without barely knowing how to even build a website at that time, just using like a free service like weebly.

[00:08:55] We were getting the growth of exponential. The growth was like exponential and how much traffic we can get to that website to the point where then, then that's how like HGTV got Ahold of us, got Ahold of us, NBC, everybody was scrambling to beat the other networks out to try to put these shows out about people designing and building tiny houses. And there was just you even go look back at the historical Google searches at that time, like they started to skyrocket. So we really sort of luckily through our, you know, intuition and then our impulse jumped on that, jumped on that sort of bandwagon right away and got recognized for it. We ended up winning an international architecture award for that tiny house, which was kind of unfound at that point. You know, it was a very first of its kind sort of thing. Hgtv found us. We filmed with them the whole time. We and this is when, again, at the very beginning of the firm, we had we had no advertising dollars. Like it just it just couldn't happen at that point. But because so, you know, we didn't get an appearance fee with HGTV or anything like that. Um, and we just kind of put the time in and they watched us design and build it.

[00:10:00] But that press was priceless for us because then we were on TV every two weeks, and then we wanted to the International Architecture Award for it, and it ended up landing us another set of tiny houses to build. But this time we repaid the whole time. And for a pretty handsome design and construction fee, Subaru ended up finding us and they wanted to build two more of those. So we ended up At first I was reluctant to do it, and because the first one was so hard, I mean, we're literally inventing a tiny, a different kind of tiny house that nobody had ever seen because it was so foldable and collapsible and all of those kind of neat things and told my business partner, you know, he was enthusiastic about building the next two. And I said, Well, I don't know. And the first two were really hard to build. And he said, What if I tell them this number? And he did. And they they didn't even balk at it. So we ended up building those two. We've built a couple since then, and that was kind of a big part of us cutting our teeth on figuring how to do unique projects with the very little money, if no money that we've had, and really try to make the marketing happen exponentially and sort of organically and just riding the wave of, you know, Internet and social media and those sorts of things.

[00:11:09] That I'm glad you didn't charge them by the square foot because you wouldn't have made too much. Wow. What a great, great story. So, so one of the things and it actually that joke just means something to people don't always charge for the the hours or the square foot or whatever charge for the result. And and like I said, you probably lost money because they they didn't even blink an eye. You know, you could probably doubled the fee and they would have done it. These big corporations have enormous amounts of money, enormous. They can't even imagine. And I'm glad they gave some to you. Now, you had some rough times, right? And then you used some guerilla techniques to get out of them. And we're all about bootstrapping around here. So tell us about that.

[00:12:01] Yeah. Mean. Our firm started in the Great Recession, Right? So, like, we got laid off from two very high profile firms. One mine was like a regionally high profile one. Alex was was working in New York before he got laid off at one of the one of the most high profile firms in the city. And so then when he came out to Colorado in 2009, 2010, for those first 3 or 4 years, it was it was basically, you know, barely living paycheck to paycheck. We you know, there's no real growth or anything like that. You know, we were we were totally bootstrapped.

[00:12:35] Was this before or after the tiny house, though?

[00:12:38] This would have been. This would have been before the tiny house. Yep. Yep. Exactly. Well, before sorry, before we actually built it. But it was during when we were designing it. So the. So the press is still lining up here, you know, for that sort of thing. So since we saw the organic growth that we got from that website, that first tiny house website, then the next. So we you know, we we successfully identified that trend, right? And and it was through, you know, sort of an organic way by talking to Blake. But then also just seeing a headline here and there and just kind of having that sort of pulse on it as a designer and in the field and everything. The next big one was in 2012. So everybody so still remembers like, you know, we'd been hearing all about this since forever since I remember, you know, my first memories of like anything like this was like the Mayans are saying in 2012, the world's going to end. You know, it was all this doomsday stuff. And so we were Alex and I, Al Gore and I were driving with our girlfriends the summer that that summer of 2012. And we were headed down to the Grand Canyon. And if anybody's been in the Southwest or, you know, that kind of west, when there's a big thunderstorm and stuff and you're driving through that barren landscape, it it exudes apocalypse.

[00:13:55] I mean, you just can't get away from it, right? Like it looks like what it would look like if there was a nuclear winter and that sort of thing. Right? So we were just in this sort of ethereal zeitgeist like mindset about about the apocalypse. And our goal after we did the Tiny House, you know, even the design work was like we we made it a we made it sort of an unwritten rule that we would do one fun project that could potentially get us a ton of free press every single year. And so this year, then at that 2020, in 2012, it just all seemed to click is like, why don't we do doomsday dwellings If everybody if if the word apocalypse is going to get Googled, you know, a bunch this year and the Google trends are going to go up, what if we did a series of homes just theoretical design like ones, right? That doesn't cost us anything but our time. And we had a lot of time at that time. We had the hardware from, you know, the computers and the design skills and all that, but we had no money.

[00:14:50] And so that's all we could really bring to the table to try to get press or people to notice us and look what we're doing and, you know, pay attention to our work and maybe hire us and stuff like that. So we came up with four different houses and the website still exists today. It's called Doomsday dwellings.com. We came up with one that would protect you against floods, another one that would protect you against a nuclear winter, another one that would protect you against wildfires and another one that would do earthquakes. And what was really what ended up being probably the best part about it was, you know, they actually got picked up all over a couple different international magazines, picked them up, CNN picked it up. But the best one for us was a magazine called Modern in Denver. And I'm actually as I'm sitting here, you know, recording with you, Tom, I'm looking at the modern and that that magazine that we got in into in in in 2012 and we got we ended up landing a seven page spread. Wow. And to put the to put the I know I'm glad you said like that is a wow because and if anybody doesn't know this magazine like that is like sometimes it's up to like at that back in the day I remember asking like what would this cost? And they said that would have been $7,500 a spread, um, to just to get full of, you know, seven pages basically.

[00:16:05] So $7,500 each page. There's no way we could have paid for that kind of marketing back in the day. But we had a compelling, interesting, unique story. And a lot of these editors that I found whenever we get this kind of press, if you can just sort of spoon feed it to them and you're polished with what you present, it literally makes our job easy. And they're they're more than happy. If you have a compelling enough story or design or idea to put it out there on your behalf because you're actually making their job easier. So so that's one of my favorite guerrilla marketing stories. And like I said, we there's no way we could afford that kind of press. And then once we got in that magazine, it sort of it gave us it solidified us as in terms of people who are noticed in the area. And we landed a couple really nice custom family, single family, custom homes to design after.

[00:16:54] Yeah, basically you you structured a free publicity campaign and and implemented it and plus those people that do the story you know they're going to have you and their database and when anything comes up architecture wise so you know, you get ongoing promotion out of it. Now, did anybody ever commission the actual homes?

[00:17:18] No, I wish they would have. You know, I would thought I was really.

[00:17:23] Sell the plans. Recently, I.

[00:17:24] Just bought a plans to build an Adirondack chair. The lady sold 3000.

[00:17:30] I'm still I'm still very confident that at some point in the future, I have I feel like I'm 40 years old today. Most architects honestly do their best practice and work in the last ten years of their life. So I've got another 40 years.

[00:17:43] You know, to.

[00:17:44] Hang on for that. It's going to happen. It's going to get built.

[00:17:47] No, you got to accelerate it.

[00:17:49] You just get with AOC and the world's coming to an end tomorrow and you get her buy the house and paint it green.

[00:17:57] So we'll have Greta get we'll have Greta Thunberg get arrested again on our behalf.

[00:18:02] And if we don't build these. Yeah.

[00:18:04] Now so you had you did something with Amazon too to as a guerrilla marketing technique. What was that.

[00:18:10] Yeah. Yeah. So the next evolution of what we did after that was and this is again is we're just our strategy has been trying to find things that are going to trend or are sort of on the on just right at the beginning of trending. So if everybody if everybody recalls back in 2017, Amazon was looking to develop their second headquarters somewhere and they were identifying a city and there was all these cities were some cities were completely fawning over them, you know, giant tax breaks and all this other stuff. And so my my business partner had the idea of what if we just what if we did a study of and we just did a test fit? What would Amazon HQ look like if they put it in Denver and we built the tallest skyscraper in North America, right in Denver and it was Amazon's headquarters. So we. Hee hee hee hee. Scrambled to design this skyscraper. And again, if you go to if you go to our website, you just type in, you know, and you look down at the ideas section of our website and our portfolio, you can still we still have the Amazon HQ concept up there. And so, so he executed we split the task of getting this out to the media in half. In other words, Al's job was he was going to dedicate two days in the firm to design everything and get the concepts out and get the renderings done. And then it was my job as somebody who was deep into social media at that point with some political activism and stuff like that. Like, I knew how to make things go viral and I knew how to get get attention.

[00:19:45] And I also had like, I think the advertising ability, right, where you can boost you could boost the posts and stuff like that back when they let you do that really well. And so we conquered and divided the problem in that way. He did all the renderings, all the all the Photoshop stuff. And then I went after that and then marketed it online and we ended up getting, um, in a couple local newspapers because of it. But then actually interviewed by Fox 31 and Denver seven, they came up to our office with the media van and everything like that and interviewed us and then showed the skyscraper on there. And so we got all we got all this, this amazing press. And then we at that point, we were also even using like this email tracking software. And we could see if people, whoever who opened our email we sent we sent the package to Jeff Bezos and his team and we were able to actually see like that. They shared it around corporate for about a week. We never got a call from Jeff or anything like that, but we couldn't have paid for that kind of press even in 2017, which would have been six years ago. Right, Right. That sort of thing. And what it resulted in is from one of the newspaper write ups, we landed on the front page because, you know, it was kind of like mind blowing to people. I mean, they really thought we were so good at sort of.

[00:21:08] Tricking in.

[00:21:10] A way, the public that they actually thought this was going to happen, you know? And so when we made the cover of one of the newspapers in town, they a local developer, real estate developer ended up giving us a call and we ended up designing their townhome project. I think it ended up being like a 14 townhome, 14 unit townhome project. And 66 years ago for us, that was a that was a pretty big deal. So it ended up working in, in our favor in terms of, you know, the return came later.

[00:21:38] Yeah, yeah. It's a beautiful guerrilla techniques, that's for sure. And it kind of reminds me you're not old enough. But the War of the Worlds was on radio and people were panicking because they thought it was real. So. So probably people were moving to Denver to work for Amazon.

[00:21:55] Yep. Yep.

[00:21:56] Well, they were actually really angry because.

[00:21:58] Like.

[00:21:58] All the am I am, I'm old enough to have listened to enough podcasts for the reference that story though.

[00:22:04] So I'm with you there.

[00:22:05] So, so we got to take a brief sponsor break. When we come back, we're going to take a deep dive into the fishing world because this guy is into it, folks. About 20 about 25 years ago or so, it kind of turned the Internet marketing guru world on its head. And the guys at my level and girls were charging 100 grand up front for small business people to to teach them what they knew. And I knew a lot of these people they'd be hiding out somewhere in Mexico. If you gave them 100 grand up front, you'd never see them again. So I said, You know, that's too risky. I'm a big, small business advocate. And and I said, I'm going to charge just an entry fee and then I'm going to tie my success to your success. So for me to get my 50 or 100,000, you have to net 200,000. And people really love this and 1800 students later, it's the longest running, most successful, most unique internet and digital marketing mentor program ever. And I triple dog dare anybody to put theirs up against mine. And they won't do it because they're too embarrassed. But you get an immersion weekend and the great Internet Marketing Retreat Center here in Virginia Beach, it's all one on one. We don't do any group coaching because we want success from you on what you're doing and speed. So without sacrificing quality. So my staff and myself will work with you one on one remotely and here at the retreat center.

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[00:24:28] Okay let's get back to the main event. We're here with Mister Lance Cayko award winning architect and and he's doing some great things once. What I really love about people like this is that they they just don't keep sucking second, second all the money for themselves and do nothing for the world. So besides fishing, which I want him to talk to you about, I want him to tell tell us about some of the ways he's his firm is giving back. So, Lance, tell us about it.

[00:25:02] Yeah. Yeah. Well, number one, I think, you know, I was on a I was on a, doing a different interview earlier today and, and think this, this kind of still rings true here is that I live a life of a with the mindset of abundance right. So a lot of other architects design professionals engineers, even contractors are very they keep things very close to their to their chest. Right.

[00:25:24] Because with a machine gun.

[00:25:26] Nest, everything you know.

[00:25:27] Yeah. Think they worry about and I get I, I have empathy. I totally understand why they would worry about it. They worry if they. Tell their employees, teach them, rather, if they teach their employees too much about how much the business operates, that they'll just go up and start their own business. And, you know, I'm not of that mindset. Sure, that might happen, but I don't believe I actually think entrepreneurs are so special in terms of the people that are willing to just go out there and take that kind of risk. It's not as it's not as abundant as I think most people think. Think, think. Entrepreneurs are in the minority, I would say more than anything. So that's the the primary way that with Alex Al Gore and give back is that we we are pretty much minus. Nobody knows how much everybody makes at our companies. That's probably the only thing we hold back. But the employees know how the contracts work, how they're set up, what we're looking at for fees, and then the inner workings. You know, we've even made an internal sales meeting or sorry, an internal sales course for our one of our senior employees who's now going to manage a Denver office that we just opened this last month, our original headquarters up here in Longmont, Colorado. So the one of the biggest ways we give back is just internally. And then there's other ways we do externally, right? So Alex and I have developed a couple of courses for other architects who are looking to be more efficient like us and get to that 30% profit, which is not typical, by the way.

[00:26:59] Most architects and designers are looking and even contractors are looking somewhere between the margin of ten and 20% profit. We do about 30% every year, and we do that through a course that we develop. It's called it's a Revit rocketship.com. It teaches anybody Tom you can take the course if you if you really wanted to. And we could teach you Revit our design software in three days and make that happen then then there's the podcast inside the firm podcast that we have. You know that's do we have a couple sponsors? So we are compensating for our time in that way. But for the most part it's a labor of love. We once we got to year 7 in 2017 after being there, you know, starting in 2010, we kind of had a little epiphany and it was, you know, most businesses fail within the first seven years. Here we are in our seventh year. Seems like we're kind of out of the clear And with the kind of growth that we're looking like we're going to keep going with in this this press and stuff that we keep making. It would be a positive thing if we told our journey about how we did that kind of brass and bare and raw and really not holding back.

[00:28:02] So that's when we started the the podcast and, you know, the pilot episode and one that's been going the most is the Friday show. It's literally called Inside the Firm. And we tell our story on a lot of these marketing stories that I'm talking that I've told you in your audience today. Tom are on that podcast, and there's a ton of other information there too. That is 100% applicable, not just to architects, not just to designers, any kind of small business owner. We just really give you everybody an inside look in that way for that. And then the last one of the last big things is we do we sponsor a community garden. Some of our employees end up taking over the plot and they do a bunch of design work there. They grow their own food. And then at the end of the day, I'm also a philanthropist, so I have a I run Longmont Community Gardens. And it's a it's a community garden where we have about 40, 40 plots, various sizes that we rent out to each year. We sort of have this public private, symbiotic relationship with the city where they give us the water for free, which is insane. I still think it's like this crazy blessing, and then we lease the land from them and pay for it with the plot rentals and everything like that.

[00:29:12] Beautiful. Beautiful.

[00:29:13] But where's the fishing going on?

[00:29:16] Ha ha ha.

[00:29:17] The fishing is whenever I can get away. 100%. Yeah. You know, in, um, from 2017 to early 2020, right before the pandemic hit. That's when we decided to put on a couple more hats. So up until 2017, we were strictly architects. And then after we built that second round of tiny houses with Subaru, we had enough profit from that. Al and I bought a third of an acre up here in Longmont, Colorado, and we'd always had the dream of wearing all three hats, meaning architect, builder, real estate developer. More risk, more reward. We get paid three times instead of one. We have more control. We're going to be able to expand after that in terms of just what we can offer to the public. You know, like a general contracting service or maybe we even do more real estate development.

[00:30:08] Wait a minute.

[00:30:08] That sounds like a pretty big development. A third acre, you could put 42 tiny houses on it, right?

[00:30:14] You could put 42.

[00:30:15] Tiny.

[00:30:15] Houses on it.

[00:30:16] 100%. Yeah. We ended up putting nine condos on it.

[00:30:21] Tiny ish.

[00:30:23] Super modern looking, though, and super cool for sure. A lot, lot of those tiny house lessons we pulled over into that This project out. But the reason why I'm telling you about the you and the audience about this is like that was one of the hardest three years of my life from every standpoint. We spent the first year in 2017 just getting through the city and all of their bureaucratic nonsense. Then we spent the next year in 2018 trying to get the whole thing financed. Then we spent then I spent 2019 in the mud and the dirt and and at one point working 80 days in a row to get this first one built, done, sold and out alive. I mean, when you do a development like that for the first time, if you don't come from money like I do, um, you are just scrapping every single inch, every single way, just trying to get that first one done. And just like everybody says who is successful, it seems you get the first one done. The next one is easier. Et cetera. Et cetera. Right. Well, we finished it. We got it done. Covid hit, Everything was locked down. And it was kind of a perfect storm for me. And what ended up happening is I experienced burnout, kind of like I never had before.

[00:31:35] I mean, as somebody who is just a really a go getter, even from the age of like 13 up until 40 now, you know, all those years of just like working, working, working, working, working every waking minute, sort of thinking, trying super hard, all of these sorts of things. And I found myself just like going, Wow, Mike. I just don't feel like working right now. Like I'm really experiencing some burnout here. And at the same time, like, none of my kids want to hang out. I have four children. They were like all hitting their tween and teen years. And, you know, it's like anybody who have kids and listening like, you know, what happens? They just they get their own lives because obviously they're becoming young adults. They don't want to hang out anymore. They don't want you to take them anywhere. They want to. They want to go sit in their room and listen to music with their friends or whatever. And so and so I found myself sitting here going, Wow, everything's locked down. I'm kind of in a burnout stage. I, I forgot why I even moved to Colorado in 2008. And it wasn't just for the architecture job. It was, I want to live in the mountains so I can hunt and fish trout as much as possible.

[00:32:41] And so once I remembered that and I got back into it, I just became completely addicted again. And it was every Wednesday I started, I would take off the whole day and go hiking and fishing all by myself Saturday, same thing, hiking and fishing all by myself. Sunday the same thing, hiking, fishing by myself. I started going on these big long trips, rekindling my relationship with my brother, and I was doing it so much that I ended up becoming the regional editor for the Fish explorer.com and which put me in charge of like monitoring all the lakes Rivers, Creeks in Rocky Mountain National Park, Indian Peaks Wilderness. James Peak Wilderness. Um, and then I became a fish angler ambassador and then launched a YouTube channel called Fishing with Lance and a newsbreak channel called Fishing with Lance, where both were earned revenue. And it kind of was a full circle thing for me because like my mom, you know, tells a story all the time. Yeah. When Lance was in second grade, all he wanted to ever be was a professional fisherman. And and so the first cent I made actually framed for her with a photo of myself on my channel and gave it to her for Mother's Day in 2021.

[00:33:49] Wow.

[00:33:51] That's a cool story. Oh, this is what we love about entrepreneurship. You could go do things. There's nobody stopping you. You can make your own breaks and just love it. So thanks so much for coming on, Lance. Tell tell people how they get Ahold of you.

[00:34:08] Yeah. Best way to get a hold of me is link in with me. Go to LinkedIn.com, type in Lance. Last name, Cayko. It's really pronounced like that and will never be offended if you if you pronounce my name like that. If you're looking for good business content again go to inside the firm podcast.com you can find us on then you can find us on YouTube, iTunes, all those other places. If you're looking to keep up with anything architecture wise, go to F9productions.com.

[00:34:40] F9productions.com. Awesome. Well, thanks so much for coming on, man. It's been great.

[00:34:46] Yeah, thanks for having me.

[00:34:47] Tom. Okey dokey.

[00:34:48] Folks, We will catch you all on the next episode. See you later.