- You are listening to WHOA podcast
coming to you from Gainesville, Florida.
Good morning everybody
and welcome to another episode
of the WHOA GNV podcast,
the podcast bringing you businesses and individuals
that make you go WHOA.
Today on the show we have Mitch Glaeser,
CEO of the Emory Group of Companies.
Since he was 18 years old,
he has started 12 companies
and is one of Gainesville's greatest serial entrepreneurs.
What's up man?
Thank you for being here. - Good morning.
Good to be here.
- You were so excited.
He was messaging me last night.
What did you do?
You messaged me last night
and let me find the text real quick.
I should've had this pulled out.
- Are you sure it was me who did it?
- Yeah 'cause it was 9:53PM.
I was already asleep let me mind you.
- Now I thought these texts were between us only.
- Well most of them but this one says,
"Not feeling good,"
then he goes, "Feeling awesome."
- Well, in all candor,
I let a couple minutes go by 'cause I thought you'd be like
oh shoot, we're not gonna have this dude on today.
What do I do, what do I do?
Everybody's on their way.
- Well the good thing is I was already asleep,
I was already asleep.
- So you got up at 4:42 this morning?
- Well yeah and I hearted his comment at 4:42 this morning.
So I'm on the Alex Willis Newell Fox plan,
I'm trying to do this wake up at 4:30 in the morning
and so far it's been,
it's only been day two, day two but so far--
- Day two and it made it to 4:42, not 4:30.
- Right, it's more like 4:45 by the time I actually get up
but I'm trying to get it going,
trying to do that thing.
A lot of people say you have a lot of productive time
in the mornings before the family gets up
and before you've got to get the kids ready for school
and that kind of stuff.
Are you a morning person?
- Yes, pretty much. - Okay, like when
do you start your day?
- 9:30, 10.
- Okay but when do you wake up?
- 9:25.
- So he's not a morning person.
- No, I am very much a morning person in all sincerity.
I get up naturally early in the morning,
probably almost always a little bit before sunrise.
Getting up in the morning
and your attitude in the morning
is completely 100% in your control.
And so I've always gotten up really easy,
roll out, go,
ready to take on whatever the day ends up being.
But I would be known to most of my family and friends
as a morning person, yes.
But I stay up late too so--
- I'm just trying to get my mind right for the day.
I'm like doing it
so those guys got me on doing the meditation thing,
trying to get the head clear, get focused for the day,
get my little prayer time in and just me
before the family wakes up
and so far, like I said, it's only day two
but so far it's going okay.
But dude, how are you feeling man?
I know you were sick last week,
we missed you.
- I'm doing alright.
I missed you guys too.
- I had to interview romance novel authors by myself.
I was nervous,
I was a little nervous about it
but it went really well.
But you just got back from Thailand.
- Yeah, I was in Thailand. - He was leaving us,
dangling this carrot the entire time through the holidays
and wasn't gonna tell us what was going on
but you were there for how long?
- Almost three weeks.
- Three weeks?
And you went to golf right?
- Yeah, I'm kind of putting into motion,
resurrecting my golf career.
So feeling healthier than I have in five, six years
and gonna go attack it.
So kind of 2019 when we were talking in the fall,
it's like what are you looking for
and I was kind of piecing together Best of Gainesville
and different things.
I've been trying to set a lot of stuff up
to help myself maybe reboot the golf career.
So I'm gonna go after it this year.
I got some Asian development tour status
which is like the second tier tour in Asia
which is like the web.com here.
So I'll be going back over there a little bit
probably first to Malaysia here in a couple months.
- That's cool, man. - We're gonna see
what happens.
- Was that your first time over there?
- Yeah, first time in Asia.
- It was pretty cool?
- It was amazing.
Lot of, it really is the scooter capital of the world.
- Right?
There's so many.
- Traeson, my little brother and I
actually rented some scooters.
We took 'em about an hour north
to this place in Kanchanaburi
and did some waterfalls and all sorts of cool stuff.
But we rented scooters for like 12 bucks for the day
for 24 hours
and they went about 75 miles per hour
and it was my little brother's first time on a scooter,
almost put that thing down a couple times.
- I'm sure.
- But it was a ton of fun, beautiful country
and I can't wait to go back.
- So when do you go back?
Or when you say you go in--
- I'm trying to figure that out now.
- Okay.
- I've got to see what I'm exempted too and you know--
- Good for you, man.
Your story was awesome.
I was watching your Instagram stories.
So you have the Best of Gainesville Instagram account
but you also have your personal Ty Rucarean account.
- Yeah I've been trying to follow you
and work on some personal branding.
- And that's where you were showing
a lot of this stuff and it was super cool.
- Yeah I've got about 20 golf companies
that I've been kind of working with
to do some promos
and some different kind of influencer type stuff.
So I'm trying to do it both from my golf academy side
and my personal side
and use all the stuff I've learned
from Best of Gainesville and just in general
with marketing stuff
to kind of do a little bit more personal stuff
than I ever have.
It's a little uncomfortable
but podcast helps.
- Yeah, you got to get outside of that box, right,
you got to push your comfort zone.
I think you've always got to do that
as an entrepreneur right?
- Totally.
Well it sounds like he's doing awesome.
- Yeah, he's definitely doing awesome.
- Just adding more stuff to the plate.
- Well it's a new year,
new year, new growth, new opportunities,
you got to do that, right?
New Scooters 4 Less graced the cover
of Power Sports Business Magazine yesterday
which was pretty cool.
- Yeah super cool.
- So that's like for us,
in the industry it's a really well known magazine.
So to be the cover story was pretty cool.
- (mumbles) was featured.
Yeah, super cool. - Yeah,
the unique things that we do were featured
so that was pretty cool.
But Mitch man, thanks again for being here.
- [Mitch] Sure.
- You guys this is somebody who I consistently go to
whose just been super open and has spent,
I don't know if you're transparent with everybody
but you're very transparent with me
and have helped me with a lot of the things going on
in my companies.
I definitely consider you a mentor.
I know that we don't meet all the time
but you're always there when I need you
and I've always really appreciated that.
So I'm just really excited for this interview.
I know you've seen some of our podcasts.
We always like to start with the origin story,
kind of take it way back
and then just let the conversation go from there
'cause I know I can get into
a plethora of different topics with you.
So for a lot of Gainesville
and a lot of the world that doesn't know,
just give us that origin story,
how have you gotten to this point today?
- Right.
So I think, a lot of times,
at least my story as you kind of paraphrased it
is really about the people who are around me
and you talked about the mentorship that I've had for you.
There's a lot of mentoring opportunities
here in Gainesville,
there's a great community wrapped around
offering insights to young entrepreneurs.
And more than about me,
I think it's the folks who really kind of helped shape me.
So when I talk about the genesis of some of the things
and the reason I'm here today,
it probably really hearkens back even to my grandparents.
Both on my father's side and my mother's side,
my mother's father, who I was actually named after,
which is where Emory comes from, Mitchell Emory,
was a school board member,
he was post commander for the American legion,
he was a poultry farmer
but he was a CPA actually by education.
And he was an entrepreneur himself.
And that's where the Emory Group of Companies
who I'm the CEO for actually began.
So that's the genesis of that.
My mother was raised in Sapphire Hills, Florida.
- And when was that, what year was that?
- He came to Florida in 1923.
But he died when my mother was eight
and so the influence is very strong on her
from just an impact of knowing who he was
and how involved in the community
and how philanthropic and also civic minded he was,
kind of carried forward.
But on my grandmother, you have to think about,
she was raising five girls by herself on a farm.
Pretty remarkable.
When we think of women today
I often think about my grandmother
who raised five girls by herself.
What a very strong and impactful lady she was
to have that kind of impact on those lives.
My father, just kind of fast forward,
his parents were actually German immigrants
and worked in basically what you would know as sweat labor,
poor conditions,
actually was somewhat the genesis for unions
because they didn't have a lot of the
air conditioning, heating, those kinds of things
and they were lunch box workers.
They packed a lunch every day,
they clocked in, stood in the lines
at the factories and so forth.
And so that impact also was profound on my father
and kind of set his path.
And so they were very, very, very poor
and they would come home and drink alcohol.
(laughing)
- Thank you for clarifying,
just wanted to make sure.
- Pure and simple, it's a fact
and it's nothing to be proud of
but they were alcoholics, smoked a lot,
packs of cigarettes a day.
They ended up dying at a fairly younger age.
And there's a lot of stories that surface out of that.
But my father was raised in an extremely poor conditions
in Patterson, New Jersey.
And so he joined the Air Force when he was 17 years old.
And so he found his way.
And it was during the Korean War.
It was considered a conflict
but now it's considered a war.
So he served eight years in the Air Force
and actually ended up getting stationed
out at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa.
And so that's when my parents actually met.
And so after serving eight years,
my father decided to go to college.
Well, guess what?
Like a lot of the stories you hear,
lot of people come to Gainesville,
they go to college here,
they fall in love with the town and they stay
and that's really how I ended up in Gainesville.
- Me too. - So in 1955,
my folks came here,
they got married.
And just to kind of put it in perspective
in terms of my upbringing,
in 1955, they moved into a 28 foot long mobile home,
eight feet wide and 28 feet long
and actually started their family there
and was going to college and so forth.
So what's incredible about this story
is 36 months later,
from the time they were married to 36 months later
they were a family of five.
So in three years time, they had three kids
and had gotten to a longer mobile home,
I don't know about wider but certainly longer.
So unfortunately my father had to drop out of college.
You can imagine the condition
that that really provided,
not very smart when you think about it.
My father was flipping burgers at night.
Because of his Air Force duty,
he actually got a job as a police officer
at the University of Florida
but just couldn't make ends meet
and so he actually got his real estate license.
If you want me to tell a really cool story,
I'm actually about halfway into a book called The Sexy Rut
and I'll talk about the sexy rut here in a minute.
My father,
the only possession he had
from his family were two things,
from his upbringing, were two things.
One was a train set that he had gotten at five years old
that still is in my office, he gave it to me
when I took over Glaeser Realty
and so it's sitting there front and center pretty prominent.
It's just an old HO train set,
six cars with a big transformer and just cool
but it's the only possession he has.
The other one was
when his mother was born
my grandmother,
her parents didn't have any money
and they set aside a silver dollar
of the year that she was born.
Now a dollar was quite a bit of money back then actually.
They set aside and that was a gift to her
for her baptism.
And when my father went through first communion,
we were raised Catholic,
and when he went first communion, they had nothing,
they had nothing.
What were they gonna give him, a cigarette,
a bottle of whisky?
Seriously, they were that poor and that broke.
So they decided,
they gave my father the silver dollar
of my grandmother's birth year.
And my dad kept that silver dollar in his pocket as a child
and all through high school
and all through the military.
And when he got a call
and his father had died a few years earlier,
he got a call that my grandmother was dying
and she was in Patterson, New Jersey
and he ought to come see her.
So he was in the Air Force and they let him go home
and he was down at MacDill.
Now my father didn't own a car
and they didn't have scooters.
He hitchhiked from Tampa, Florida
all the way to Patterson, New Jersey
with that dollar with him
and honest to God, the last thing he was able to do with her
is they put that dollar between their hands
and just prayed.
And so he had to come back home,
and on his way home, which took days
'cause he was hitchhiking, she died.
And the dollar became a very powerful representation
of that bond between them.
And so kind of fast forward just a little bit,
my father was struggling,
my parents, excuse me, were struggling so bad
with three children,
now I had not been born yet.
And so they were struggling
and the struggle went like this,
it was pretty simple,
they would get down to the end of the week
and my father was flipping burgers
as I like to say
at a place called King Burger,
not Burger King but King Burger on 16th Avenue,
I think it was located actually,
near where Burger King is actually near Main Street.
They would get down to the end of the week
and they would have no money for food
and he would take that silver dollar
down to a store, corner store,
and he had a deal
with the person who worked the cash register
and he said, I would like for you to set this dollar aside
and when I get paid, I'm gonna come get the dollar.
And I'm not making this up,
they would literally get peanut butter
and a loaf of bread to feed the family
because that's how things were.
And this went on for some time
and the takeaway is real simple.
Look, we are creatures of habit.
We all talked about this morning,
our habits about getting up and those kinds of things
and how we change gears
and how we become who we are,
how we have influence
and how we affect other people around us,
the realities of change
come with really hard tough decisions
and sometimes those decisions
actually to have the effect that they need to have
sometimes don't make logical sense.
So they were in this routine
and they were like, how do you get out of the routine
of going down to the corner store every week
before you get your paycheck every week
and cash that dollar in?
How do you break that?
And my father knew the answer.
Being of Christian faith and the belief,
he took the silver dollar
to Saint Patrick's on 16th Avenue
walked into the church
and dropped the silver dollar into the poor box
never, ever to be retrieved again and broke the cycle.
What's interesting is he did that on the way to work
and the owner of the King Burger
actually came in and knew that my father
had gotten his real estate license and said,
"Ralph, you got anything special for sale?
"I have some money to invest."
And made his first sale on that same day,
put the deal together.
And it was Magnesia Springs of all things,
a local spring here in the area.
And from there my father's real estate career started.
But that kind of sets the tone for who I am.
People say, what made you do the things you?
So I
was born later, five years later, my mom had me
and then couldn't have any children.
It was over for her.
And literally for medical reasons
could not have any more children.
But they then went into foster care.
And so I'm one of 81 kids.
My parents are foster parents.
And so my parents took in 76 foster kids
over about a 30 year period
and I had one adopted sister named Teresa.
And what's interesting
is of the four children born to my mother
and my adopted sister, we're all entrepreneurs.
We write our own checks every single,
if we get paid, we're the last to get paid,
but it's fascinating how a family
actually generated five children
that are all 100% self employed, five kids.
I've never heard of that before.
So we're very entrepreneurial
and that entrepreneurial spirit
started when we were very, very young,
predominantly because we had no money.
We got a nickel per year old we were per week.
So when you were five years old,
you got a quarter for your allowance.
And when you were 10, you got 50 cents
and it went up a nickel every year
and I never forget, oh my gosh, my birthday is coming up,
I get another nickel per week.
So when it came to wanting something,
I could tell you so many stories
and so many things were going through my head
but we wanted to go on a vacation,
you know what we did?
My parents didn't pay for a vacation.
I didn't go on a plane until I was
I might've been,
I did not go on a plane,
I think I might've been 25 years old, it's crazy.
No, no, that's not,
I'm trying to think if anything before that
but no, I was quite an adult.
So we took vacations in the proverbial station wagons.
We loaded all the kids in,
thing would almost be dragging to the ground
with stuff on top.
And so we'd pick a city.
And it wasn't, it was like Atlanta
or we'd go down to the keys.
But my mom would put a jar on the,
we had a big, long dining room table
and she'd put a jar over there and she says,
"Well, here's how much money we need to raise
"if you want to go on."
And we would go door to door in the neighborhoods.
You need an odd job, I'll sweep, I'll clean your windows,
I'll mow your lawn, I'll do whatever, whatever it takes
and you'd go and you'd put money in that jar
and when we hit that amount of money,
we were on a road trip.
We would go and hang off the back,
collect bottles on the side of the road,
things like that
because people used to litter
and throw the bottles out when they were done with them
and whatever, couple cents,
depending on the type of bottle and everything.
So we were knocking on doors very young
and one of the stories
that has been published quite a few times
is the red wagon story.
And that's where I was about five or six,
I think it was six years old
and I went and knocked on a door.
Now you'd be snatched almost
but yes, I knocked on doors at six years old
and this lady needed some elephant ears
removed from her backyard and she says,
I'll pay you a dollar a piece
for five of 'em or something,
it was like hitting the gold mine, you know
and I put 'em in a red wagon and she says,
what are you gonna do with 'em?
'Cause usually you just throw 'em away
or throw 'em in a garden,
you just kill 'em
'cause they grow and grow and grow,
she wanted 'em kind of culled back.
I went door to door selling 'em
and they were just like, how ingenious.
It was pretty funny.
And so it was anything
to create an opportunity.
I collected coins,
I still have a huge coin collection
and I would sit out,
we had a house out on 39th Avenue.
I'd get a folding table,
buy a couple cardboard white sheets
down at the drugstore
and put coin sale on there
and people would pull off and they'd say,
I was born in whatever year
and they'd buy a coin and off they'd go.
And when I bought a coin
I just doubled the price on it
and they would just pay it.
And it got to a point where,
like on a weekend, a good weekend, Saturday or whatever,
I could make some pretty good money.
And people would buy and sell and they'd say,
hey, I've got some to sell and whatnot.
So it was always about creating an opportunity.
So that's kind of the start.
It really does hark back to my parents
and kind of my family doing that.
I remember my brother Greg
actually won a motorcycle
for the walkathon for March of Dimes
'cause we raised the most money
and we would go out and just get pledges.
I remember when I was in middle school,
we would sell tickets for car washes
before anybody else did it.
No one sold tickets for a car wash.
So you'd sell the ticket to a car wash,
they probably wouldn't even show up before the car wash.
And I'd sell the most out of the whole school
and things like that.
So there's a lot of sales background and so forth.
- That's cool, man.
What a crazy story.
Do you think even your coin collecting
had anything to do
with that story? - The silver dollar.
Ummm...
- I don't know, I always like to analyze things like that.
I'm like maybe if you didn't even realize it
but subliminally or something.
- Well what really happened during my period of growing up
coins actually changed.
They went from a wheat sheaf backing
to a different stamping of the coin.
And what happened is those were rotating out of circulation.
As they rotated out of circulation,
the penny became worth two pennies.
So we would go up to the bank on the corner
and I'd buy $100 worth of pennies.
And even my father and I,
we just loved watching TV
and we would take a roll of 50 pennies out of a roll,
we'd unroll it, flip 'em all over
and go, go, go, go, go through
and call out the wheat sheafs.
And then we would put the pennies back
and we'd rotate this $100 of pennies all the time.
The bank loved us.
I even had a good friend
whose father was a bank president,
let us in the vault
and actually would go through
and we didn't have enough,
I didn't have enough money, my parents I mean,
we didn't have enough money to buy the silver
'cause you could find silver in there too.
'Cause at that time,
some people would still have full silver coins,
older silver.
And that was really good money
'cause the silver was worth more
than just the penny.
And so we would go in the vault
and we would go through all these coins, these bags,
they were just bags of coins
and he trusted us impeccably.
And we'd take a bag of coins
and untie the bag
'cause they were in these white bags
and we'd tip 'em out
we'd just run through
and you'd look at the side of 'em,
not the date but the actual side.
And you could tell if it had any copper in it
or if it had just pure silver.
And we'd pull those out and we'd say,
Mr. Shriber, we have so many dollars in silver
and we would trade it back and put it in there.
That was crazy. - That's awesome.
- You have to appreciate.
So just again to follow the progression of
the struggle.
I hate to use the word poor
but the real definitive struggle.
So when we all graduated from high school,
number one, right or wrong
and don't take this the wrong way
anybody watching whatever
but we didn't get a graduation party for our high school.
That was not a big deal.
You want a graduation party,
you graduate from college
because that was the inspiration
my parents wanted us to have.
But, they said, when you graduate,
we will give you $1,000.
I did not receive that $1,000 for a couple years.
They couldn't afford it.
They just couldn't.
It was a struggle for me
'cause I could use 1,000 bucks really, really bad
at the time.
I was riding a motorcycle,
I actually had a Camaro,
the transmission went out, that I bought,
gas, insurance, car, the whole thing, by working.
One of the downsides
is I was not able to participate
in after school sports very much.
I had played baseball and little league
and was a pretty darn good tennis,
Greg and I are both
very, very good tennis players at the time
but I had to go home and go to work.
I worked at a gas station,
I worked packing bell peppers,
I worked at a gas station.
I had jobs, jobs, jobs.
But no, it was a real struggle
but there was a lot of life lessons
learned out of it all.
The coin thing was more I think of a timing thing
more than a silver dollar story to be candid.
But it was really making something out of an opportunity.
- So tell me, college life,
you came to UF?
- [Mitch] Nope.
- Okay so...
- I went to Santa Fe.
- Okay, you went to Santa Fe.
But so you did come to Gainesville, when was that?
- No, my parents were here since '55.
- Okay.
- So no, they're the ones that stayed
and I was raised here.
- [Collin] So you're homegrown?
- Oh yeah, Steven Foster, I went to Duvall,
I went to Duvall, I went to Steven Foster,
I went to Fort Clark,
the first year it was open, yeah,
Gainesville High School grad, 1842.
- Been here all this time. - 1842.
I'm just kidding.
- Went to Santa Fe,
were you working in your dad's real estate company?
When did that start?
Was that while you were in school
or was that right after?
- So I got my real estate license, 18 years old.
So here's what's really funny.
I was taking my real estate course at 17
'cause I wanted to go into real estate really bad.
And I just loved it.
- Just because of your dad's influence or?
- In large part.
I think there was,
so what I was able to do
was meld the real estate world with entrepreneurship
and here's how it worked.
So ironically,
my father and I got along really, really well.
I was wanting to get into real estate
and he was not wanting me
to take the reigns of Glaeser Realty
because he had this
feeling, this implied feeling
that all of the other siblings,
now all the, candidly, all the foster children
were treated equally as natural born children by my parents.
You would never know,
you would never know
other than some of them were Asian
and black and Hispanic and whatnot.
You would never know that they weren't my parent's children,
okay by look.
So let's just say all the Caucasian children,
you would never know.
Now some of them, you could say,
oh that's little Jonie's son
'cause it looks like him or whatever
but you see what I'm saying,
we were treated equally.
And my father just did not want any of the siblings,
my siblings,
to feel like I got something that they,
if I did really well,
they were gonna be resentful towards me
and he didn't want that for my future.
So I got my real estate license,
I was in school when I was 17,
I was gonna have my adult rights instituted
but the Iran hostage situation was going on
and they were bringing up the draft,
this is Jimmy Carter was president and so forth
and I was like, mmm, I think I better stay
under 18 for as long as I can.
And just because I wasn't 18,
it's not that I would've done anything
to circumvent the draft at all.
In fact, when I was 18,
on my birthday I went down and signed up actually.
But it was shortly after that,
after my 18th birthday, I got my real estate license
and then I went to work for my father's company.
And it went fine and so forth
but it was about a year and a half later,
so I went and got my broker's license
which is crazy
because to have your broker's license
for as long as I have
and as young as I am is almost unheard of.
To be able to get it at,
I was either 19 or 20 years old,
I don't know the exact date I got it
but anyways I started my own company
and it was Mitchy, Glaeser and Associates
and that's where MEGAbook came from,
MEGA, m-e-g-a, Mitch E. Glaeser and Associates.
And that's a whole nother things as well
So anyways, I did that.
So I had my own company,
my father had his own company,
we did our own thing.
But the entrepreneurship,
what happened was,
I saw opportunities in real estate to lease from myself.
So I started really one of the first day spas in Gainesville
and had 13 employees there,
but I owned the building
and I was able to justify the income
off the business side
to justify the real estate side,
that's what I love.
I was president of the company,
we started Contemporary Care.
It's the first,
I built,
my company built the first adult congregate living facility,
the first ACLF,
now they're called ALFs.
So now you have The Village
and you have all these different retirement communities.
They did not exist when I had graduated from high school.
They were all converted homes.
So Bailey House and all these different houses
had been converted to house elderly individuals.
But I built the very first ACLF
in Alachua County's history ever
from ground up.
So there's a lot of firsts if you will.
I didn't bring the list,
it's so funny,
if you asked me to name the 12 companies I started,
I could hardly remember 'em.
I'd really have to go through the sequence to be candid.
The biggest one that I owned and did really well with
and did it in 30 months was MEGABook.
So I worked for New York Times Company for eight years
in their new products division
and I ultimately became their general manager
for that division and product line that they had
and they were pretty,
actually, I worked for the first,
the original Google.
Do you know what the original Google is?
- No, do I?
- It's called the phone book.
- Well yeah, I know what a phone book is.
- Yeah so that's the original Google.
- They still get dropped off on my front porch
every once in awhile
and they go directly to the recycling bin.
- Yeah but that's where I really made
a lot of opportunities came my way.
So New York Times
went into the independent phone book business
and they printed phone books
and they're the ones who invented,
or not invented but created opportunities for markets.
So the old phone book was,
it was a name and a phone number
and then when the competition,
and that was under a monopoly system.
Well then when you could buy that data from them,
when they were forced to sell that data to you,
then you put in addresses and zip codes
and community pages and maps and things to do
and places to go
and restaurant menus
and we did these mini books,
have you ever seen the mini books?
- [Collin] Mmhmm.
- When cell phones became real popular saying,
we don't want a full size book in your car,
do a little mini book
and people loved it
'cause they could put it in their little side glove boxes
and so forth.
So it was the independent phone directories
that brought creativity
and really brought the concept
of bringing more information and data to the consumer.
And they did it for half the rate
of what the Baby Bells at the time,
they've been aggregated back now as AT&T.
They were AT&T, went to Baby Bells,
then back to AT&T.
But they were the ones that brought,
and we would come up with all kinds of ideas.
We'd give you a special phone number
so you could track and see that Betty Jones called you
on this date at this time
and you talked to her for seven minutes.
And then we'd just,
you'd do a charge per call and say,
well you don't want to advertise with me,
how much is a customer worth?
And they go, well what do you mean customer worth?
And I say well I'm only gonna charge you
if I make your phone ring.
And you're like what?
Okay that's cool.
So we put a special phone number in there,
and you never knew it 'cause it just dovetailed in
but you get this report and you'd say,
wow, I did sell a scooter to so and so
and that was worth X
and I only paid 10 cents for this phone call.
If you could add all those 10 cents up
and that would be your bill.
So there were all kinds of ideas
we were coming out with.
But I started MEGABook
which MEGA was Mitch E. Glaeser and Associates.
You're the third person that knows this
and now fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth,
and then if anybody watches this podcast,
they'll be the ninth, 10th and 11th, yeah exactly.
But MEGA meaning big as well.
So it kind of had this
yeah you should just run with the acronym, MEGABook,
it's gonna be this big book
filled with all kinds of information.
And then we did a blimp at the O'Connell Center.
That was a funny story.
I saw a blimp in another arena somewhere
and I was like, I want to do a blimp
in the O'Connell Center at basketball games.
And they were like, no, no, no, no, no.
I said, I'll pay you.
And they're like, okay, we'll beta test it
at the women's basketball game.
So we bought this huge blimp--
- And flew it around in there.
- Flew it around there,
put this little,
you know the spiral thing at a vending machine,
you push the button
and remember it used to unspiral one of the candies
or bags of chips or whatever?
So we put this spiral thing
and we hung coupons on it,
free pizza or we actually did lottery tickets,
they you can't do lottery tickets,
kids are getting 'em.
Anyways, what happened was
that the women's basketball game
doesn't have as many attendees.
So we would go around,
the blimp would go
and it would drop a coupon
and they'd go around to another area
and drop a coupon.
Well people were tripping over each other--
- [Collin] Trying to get 'em.
- Trying to get 'em.
And they were like whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
So they let it happen at the men's basketball games
but the place was so full
people couldn't travel over the bleachers and--
- I've caught a couple of those coupons.
- Oh have you? - I used to sit
10th row behind the basket closest to the Gators.
I was the best.
- I mean it's cool 'cause you had everybody's attention.
- I still talk about it when we go to games now.
It's like where is the blimp?
That was awesome.
- That's a good idea. - Yeah.
So that goes into marketing.
I'm guerrilla, I'm all about guerrilla marketing,
coming up with different ideas--
- So did just evolution kill that business
with social media and that kind of thing?
Or did you sell it or what happened?
- So a funny story,
we were the fastest growing publishing
phone book company in the country
which means we were fastest in the world
and we were just crushing it.
What had happened before that.
So I worked for New York Times for eight years.
And I'd risen into management pretty quickly
but I hold a sales record at the New York Times company.
It probably still stands to this day,
I don't know, it probably will,
just because the way
the dynamics of newspaper and whatever--
- Google it.
Don't phone book it, but Google it.
- That's fine,
there's been plenty of stories written about it.
So anyways,
so when they sold,
I tried to buy,
it was called Sourcebook from the New York Times
they ended up selling to a company on Transwestern.
Well I knew I didn't want to work for Transwestern.
And so
I got a call,
I had turned in my resignation,
funny thing is, I went down,
I bought a brand spanking new convertible car, Corvette,
I drove it back to Gainesville,
I drove it to the front of that building
and I walked in and turned in my resignation.
Now I would not recommend you do this
but I knew it would inspire me.
I was making crazy amounts of money candidly.
I'll come back to that story,
I walked in and turned in my resignation
and that was on a Friday
and on Sunday my phone rings
and a lady, her name's Jackie Punky of all things
and anyway she said, I heard you had resigned.
She said, I want you to,
we're starting this new motivational division
in sales training out of my company
and it was up in Michigan.
And I was like, Jackie, two things,
let me just share with you.
Smartest thing I ever said in my entire life.
Number one is I'm not moving to Michigan.
And number two is I told her she could not afford me.
And she said, oh you have no idea.
And candidly I made 3,150 bucks a day.
Yeah, every day I was on stage.
They put me on stage 36 weeks a year.
It was crazy.
And so immediately hit the ground running
and did that for three years.
Well here's the beauty of it.
The work I did all over the world,
Romania, Europe, Canada was about half of my work,
all through the states of course, had a blast, it was great,
did it for three years, which is a lot,
and then I was out of the country on 9/11
which is a whole nother story
but the realities are
I came back and started MEGABook
but what I was armed with
were the best practices
of a lot of the best publishing companies in the world.
And so I would come to your company as an example,
if I was working in your industry
and I was able to see other models of what you do
or what other owners would do,
I could say, you know,
I don't know, college town,
let's go start in, I don't know,
I don't know your business well enough
to pick it apart and say,
these are really his best practices.
Your marketing efforts, your team building,
your compensation plan,
your visibility in the community, your involvement,
your civic organizations, whatever they are.
And so MEGA Book was really
about putting a puzzle together.
And so it wasn't anything that,
I guess in a way I was fortunate enough
to have the right people and the right ideas
to pull it together,
call it pieces of the puzzle
but I was taking that one's marketing ideas
and I was taking that one's distribution ideas
and this one's pricing ideas and this one's billing ideas
and I was putting it all together.
And we actually,
our very first year
we were outpacing the Sourcebook
which I had done for eight years,
we're really an 11 year old product.
An 11 year old product,
I sold more in my first year
than they did in 11 years of building the business
because we had brought that model here.
And really 30 months later,
two and a half years I sold out
for millions and millions of dollars,
I mean lots of yeah, yeah, we'll leave it at that.
- That's only a couple years later?
- Two and a half, 30 months later for over 15.
- Dang.
Can I have some of it?
(laughing)
- Unfortunately it's all gone, it's all gone.
- Doesn't hurt to ask.
I'm trying to get over this fear of rejection
so just throw shit out there. - Talk about fear of rejection
I lost over three million dollars
in Saint Louis in my phone book operation up there.
So it's not all,
you kind of have to,
just like our lives,
you have to add it all up,
draw the line, that and that
because you're gonna have opportunities in the world
and you're gonna have some failures
and there's a lot,
the proverbial there's a lot more to learn
over a failure than over a win.
- Is the real estate the thing now?
Do you have your hands--
- [Mitch] Right now?
- 'Cause I know you've got Tech City going on.
I want to spend a few minutes on that.
We're already at like 50 minutes.
I mean we could go on all day, I know we could.
So I want to get into that but--
- I just want an invitation back.
- Yeah, yeah, no for sure.
I think that's what's gonna be so great about this.
We've already talked about how cool it's gonna be
to have people come back
and see where they're at.
- I'm gonna see if your check cashes or not.
- [Collin] Yeah, let's see that first.
- Yeah, yeah I want to see that.
- So is real estate the thing
or you got your hands in other stuff?
- So my passion,
there's again the old cliche
is you never work a day in your life
if you follow and do what you love to do.
- [Collin] 100%.
- It really is true.
So September 17th, a year ago,
so a year and a half, I retired, I'm done, right?
What's that mean?
I always ask, they go, Mitch,
you're working harder than you've ever worked.
I say, I don't know if I'd call it work.
I don't set an alarm clock. - You're just playing.
- Yeah, I'm playing.
But I'm having a blast doing it
and it really shows.
People are really, really engaged to jump on board
and do things with me
because they see that it's just,
you talked about transparency,
it's like, hey it's all transparent.
If you want to be a part of it,
great, jump on, if not, whatever.
I have my podcast as well we do once a month
called Startup Talks so that's,
I love doing that because
it goes back to entrepreneurship.
I get to bring and showcase common denominators
amongst entrepreneurs.
And you were on there
and so you saw the group.
It's great.
So people learn little tidbits along the way.
And those golden nuggets add up to be very valuable.
I do love real estate.
I like that creation element of things.
Also still I like creating ideas and things and so forth.
So I guess through the vein of real estate,
it's a comfort zone.
I know it well, I can do it in my sleep, kind of thing
and that's what Tech City really is somewhat about.
But we're creating a mentorship program up there
that's gonna be almost unparalleled
to anything in the reach or even in the state.
And then we're creating this really cool vibe up there.
It's morphed into these--
- Well for people who don't know,
give us a very general--
- The real opportunity was this,
that there was a void in our community
for companies to have another choice
in the myriad of real estate decisions.
If I could take one second
and kind of express the state of real estate
the way I see it.
A lot of people do not really comprehend what
the retail side, the commercial side, the office side,
the malls, the shopping centers and all of that,
what they really are.
There's been a lot of disruption, if you will,
to food delivery systems,
you see prepackaged meals going on
and there was this whole movement, this concept
that the malls are dead,
that real estate is dead
and it's not and let me tell you why.
Not until you get to virtual reality
which is possible, which is coming,
maybe decades down the way, who knows,
if you're gonna be able to put a headset on
and climb a mountain as if you're there,
like really feel like you're climbing,
maybe even exercise to the extent on a machine,
USA Today had a survey on their front page
that said 66% of millennials
think they will have
I don't think they used the word intimate
in the same way you would think intimate
but a real bonding relationship with a robot,
with an artificial intelligent thing.
66% think they will have a relationship
with a thing of the future.
Until we get there,
now I don't know what life really becomes then
if you really put the headset on and go to Thailand
versus really going to Thailand.
So I don't know what values we're gonna place
as humans on that, I don't know,
but follow me for a second.
When you go to Outback Restaurant,
what are you going to?
Just a word
or what's your definition of Outback, what is it?
What is Outback?
- It's a restaurant.
- Right.
99.99% of people say it's a restaurant.
It's a food distribution center is what it is.
When you go to Walmart, what is Walmart?
It's a distribution center.
So when you think about the concept of distribution centers,
when you think of Amazon
was gonna put everybody out of business,
it's gonna put all the malls out of business,
what did they do?
They bought what?
What was their big recent purchase?
Whole Foods.
Why did they buy Whole Foods?
Because it's a distribution center.
And so I'm trying to reshape people's concepts
of what real estate really is.
And until you get to maybe an architect
putting lines on a piece of paper,
everything's a distribution center.
New Scooters 4 Less is a?
- Distribution center.
- It sure is.
The bottom line is it's a distribution center.
So I think that's the genesis if you will for Tech City,
to understand how that interplays with each other.
On the decision side,
there are some really dynamic and cool things
going on in Gainesville truthfully.
We can beat 'em up,
I can come up with a dozen things
Gainesville's doing wrong,
I can come up with 10 times that many things
that they're doing right.
I was just somewhere
and they were talking about
how Gainesville had done it right
with it's beauty and it's character and so forth.
So there's a lot of good things going on.
But there's some things that,
take Fracture as an example,
they're producing
I think over half a million fractures a year,
probably 1,300 a day.
You're talking about semis worth of product coming in
and semis of product going out to the world.
- Dude that crew is hustling during the holidays.
That's like a 24/7 operation.
- Oh they have to be 'cause they're such a small space.
But they were looking at their options candidly
and they love Gainesville.
But where in Gainesville are you gonna find
30,000 single story with a roll up door
for a semi to park his truck there
so they can just pull up to it?
They load it, they do their thing
and they have the opportunity to grow.
So Tech City is,
I thought interviewing,
and we've dealt a lot with the millennial class.
One is millennials hate to be called millennials
by the way.
And so for those in that younger strata,
we'll call it that,
and I thought that I knew this class
but the reality is when you know one you know one.
So we had some concepts brought together
and then we sat down with them and they're like,
no, we don't want that,
we want to live real lives.
We want to have a dog,
we want to have a grill on the back porch
and those kinds of things.
We want to have walking trails
and we want to have activity and so forth.
So Rich Blazer,
whose my business partner and I--
- Which is the coolest thing
that you're name is Mitch Glaeser
and his name is Rich Blazer.
I just think that's fantastic.
- Only in Gainesville.
So we put this idea together
to really maximize the efficiencies of these buildings.
I call 'em the Model T of commercial development.
We have taken all of the mechanical electrical plumbing
and put it through these chases.
So that's where it all drops down.
We've maximized the roofs then for no penetration
so we can do solar.
We've done promenades.
We have these pedestrian corridors.
We have a clubhouse, swimming pool, tennis and basketball
and volleyball courts.
We have community gardens,
we do have walking trails.
I like to say the coolest thing going on
is that I like to say art development is 7,282 acres.
We're developing 82 of it
and 7,200 acres we're gonna keep in natural preserve.
It's called the San Felasco Hammock
with over 30 miles of bike paths.
There were over 600 people
at the San Felasco Hammock over the weekend,
600 riding their bikes.
So the millennial class if you will
that we're trying to tap into are threefold.
One, minimalists.
Number two is their sustainability
and number three is health through activity.
And that's a real quick definition of what we're doing.
So we're offering all of that.
Our committee will be sustainable.
We're gonna have,
our first phase has one megawatt of power.
It's gonna power the whole place,
the whole place, housing and everything.
We have some really cool concepts going on in there.
I'm actually,
Rob Edmonds and I are actually traveling to Pennsylvania
in a couple weeks.
We're gonna go buy two PCC trolley cars,
we're gutting the inside
and we're gonna have those as sitting areas
inside a coffee shop/sandwich shop up front,
really cool, restored 1950s style.
And so it's under development now,
it'll be done in April, our first phase.
We're currently in negotiations with two companies,
one's a pharmaceutical company
for a sizable number of square feet.
And then another's an engineering company as well so--
- And these are companies that are already in Gainesville?
- Both of 'em are, yes and they're expanding.
- Let's talk about that
because I feel like there's some concern
about the fact that this is in Alachua.
A lot of people know with our podcast,
they're all like, we're all about retaining talent
in Gainesville,
attracting people to Gainesville
and I've had a lot of people like
hey what do you think about this Tech City
and the thing of it being out in Alachua
and what does it look like?
And it sounds like a lot of people don't know
a lot about the nature aspect to it
and a lot of the cool benefits
that are gonna come with it
that you can't do in downtown Gainesville or somewhere else.
And I know there's been a lot of concerns
over rent prices in particular areas of Gainesville.
There's companies like,
here we are talking about Fracture,
this company's growing like crazy.
The last thing I want
is for a company like that to leave.
So if it means going out to Alachua
because they need that space,
then I'm all about it.
So I'm like pro what you're doing
but I know that there's a lot of people
that are concerned about it,
at least from that perspective.
So maybe you could talk a little bit on that.
- Sure.
So couple things.
One is people know Alachua
by driving I-75 or 441 and that's it.
Number two, Sharp Spring's not even in Gainesville.
They're in the county, just as an example
so I don't know about the uproar of that.
Number three, there's more traffic in front of Tech City
than there is in front of the single building.
There's more traffic,
there's more people in front of Tech City entrance
than in front of the entrance of the Segal Building
which everybody knows the Segal Building.
So there's some myths out there.
The other cool thing is this is all on the trail line
that goes from the Innovation Hub biking, a bike trail,
goes all the way up by here.
Now it's currently,
when GRU stops taking coal for the GRU Plant,
I would envision that that's gonna convert
to a rail to trail
which Alachua County just did for High Springs to Newberry.
That just happened or is happening I should say.
So this is going to link.
So you can get on a bicycle
from Tech City and come all the way to Innovation Hub.
It's like nine miles.
- [Collin] That's cool.
- Yeah.
Tech City's only two miles from the city of Gainesville,
just from the city limits.
From 43rd Street, it's three and a half miles up 441.
There are a lot of myths about Alachua.
I've started saying,
people say, well where's Tech City,
where's the San Felasco Tech City?
I said, well it's in the San Felasco, it's a city,
it's San Felasco Tech City,
trying to get away from saying that it's in Alachua.
But that's a sales pitch for those who don't understand,
okay, so for those who are beating up this concept,
go to Greenville, South Carolina.
Greenville, they're getting an award a week.
They're one of the most robust, kick butt,
fun, great, downtown vibe things
going on in the entire world,
not the country, in the world.
Go see what they have done.
Look at Samsung that's 15 miles out that way
or BMW that's 20 miles out that way.
They even,
I think Clemson is 20 miles away from Greenville
and that's their downtown.
Their college for Greenville is 20 miles away.
And so I think it's just a very naive thing
that's going on in terms of saying
Alachua versus Gainesville.
It's still Gainesville.
And I can tell you it's gonna help Gainesville a lot.
- That's why I was excited to have you on here
and talk a little bit about that
because I knew some of the perspectives out there
and the one thing that I know about you and Rich both
are that you are super invested
into the entrepreneurial community here.
Like I said, you've been a personal mentor to me
and I know that Rich has been to several entrepreneurs here,
the guy's so giving of his time.
So I appreciate you guys immensely for that.
But I definitely wanted
to bring up the opportunity
to talk a little bit about it
because that perspective has definitely,
even been thrown at me a few times.
I don't know if you've got it
but a lot of people are just kind of like ah, what--
- It's pretty funny, I'll tell you this,
I'll tell you straight from this studio,
I'll race you,
I can get to Tech City
quicker than you can get to Celebration Point.
- Yeah, I would agree. - Yeah.
- Alright, so case closed, alright.
Another fact that's really important
when you talk about Rich
influence and impact on this community
and really what we are for and what we love and love to do.
Couple things.
One is Rich Blazer's company,
312 employees at last count,
does over half a billion in revenue a year.
How many customers do you think he has in Alachua County?
- [Collin] Zero.
- Zero and he's here.
So trust me,
I know you're not beating me up,
I know you're speaking to your audience.
The reality is we believe in this community
a lot more than some who talk about it.
We are investing in companies here,
we're investing in startups, that's a fact.
I'm not sure,
I'm not gonna name names
but some people who might say those kinds of things
what are they doing?
I'm doing a podcast called Startup Talks
and focus on the,
look, two other things.
One is the number one biotech incubator in Alachua County,
I'm just kidding in the state of Florida,
no, I'm just kidding, in the United States,
no I'm just kidding.
The number one incubator,
the biotech incubator in the entire world, okay,
I'm talking about the globe,
I'm talking about China,
I'm talking about any country,
I'm talking about, name 'em, the entire world
from one side to the other
and every point in between,
north, south, east and west,
the number one biotech incubator in the world,
the only incubator to ever be named twice
number one in the world
is in Alachua, Florida,
not in Gainesville.
But it's in Gainesville, for crying out loud.
- [Collin] Right.
- Are they really beating that up?
Is that a horrible thing?
And I will tell you what's happening before our own eyes.
This corridor, 441,
is becoming a tech river.
And you're seeing companies like Zack Tech is on 441
if you think about it, 34th Street.
When you think about all the biotech,
when you think of RTI, when you think of Brammer,
when you think of all the others
that are all along this corridor,
you go all the way south to the health complex of Shands
with tens of thousands of employees,
tens of thousands,
that is doing also the most incredible work on the planet
and anchored by the Sid Martin Biotech Incubator
and all the way south to the Shands Complex
and they're building more hospitals
and more discipline and more research going on.
They're getting a billion dollars,
900 and some odd,
but a billion dollars in the next 12 months
will flow into our community
for research at that south complex.
Think about that. - That's impact.
- Yeah.
And so anyways, we're thrilled to be a part of it.
Candidly, if real estate was,
if you could find me 82,
if you could find me 7,300 acres in downtown Gainesville,
we just kicked off,
by the way before I let you go,
and I don't know how much more time we have
but we just kicked off the coolest thing.
We're doing a pedestrian flyover over 441
because we're looking at additional properties
but we also have the connectivity
to the San Felasco Hammock there
which is really gonna be cool.
But one of the things we talked about
was a tower element.
And the tower element originally
was gonna look somewhat like a fire tower
just a rector set,
put some offices off the edges of it,
some hangout areas and collaboration rooms
and it would be for climbing the steps at the stadium.
You could have it for activity.
We're gonna have platforms at 50, 100, 150 feet.
It's gonna be cool,
you could have your lunch up there,
we could meet,
we could do whatever.
And so it was gonna,
you would reserve these rooms.
And so we had people come to us
and say, look, I'm looking to start a coffee shop,
I want to go in to the first floor of this tower.
So we started morphing our chains.
We have a brewery,
we'd like to be there.
So people are wanting to be a part of this, right?
Well the whole thing morphed now
that Rich and I, putting our money where our mouth is,
our own hard earned money,
we have just launched with the University of Florida,
a contest.
And they are designing the flyover
and the world's tallest indoor rock climbing gym
that we're looking at putting up there.
So we will attract people to this region
and when they come here,
they're gonna go to the Hippodrome
and they're gonna go to Dragon Fly.
They're gonna go to these places.
And that's the missing part that people don't understand.
This ecosystem is way too,
has way too much movement
for it to be just situated in a couple block area.
There's too many cool things going on in our region
not to capitalize on those opportunities.
- It's gonna be super cool
to see this thing come to fruition.
And I look at you and Rich
as influencers like big time within this community
and I know that Ty and I,
we look at ourselves as hopefully being
that next coming up right behind you being right there.
And also having that kind of impact
because you guys have had such a powerful impact.
Real quick--
- This was supposed to be a lot more fun
and a lot more jokes and stuff.
You said there would be a lot of laughter.
- I think you're,
well I always have a lot of laughter.
Well you're such a good storyteller.
- [Mitch] Appreciate it.
- Where can people find access to that contest?
- So it's with the University of, I'm sorry,
that's a great question.
So Martin Gold is a professor
at the University of Florida School of Architecture.
So it's their teams.
It's already formulated.
So as I understand it,
they're getting a engineer,
someone out of construction
and then an architect
and those teams are going after it.
And there's six or seven teams.
And then there's a first, second and third prize
and so forth.
So it's a school project for them.
So they'll take their whole semester to evolve this--
- I'll get his information afterwards
so I can reach out
and maybe do some Best of Gainesville promotion
'cause that's some crowd sourced ideas is always fun.
- [Mitch] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah very cool, yeah.
- Hey real quick.
So we got talking
and we never came back to this
so I want to spend just a couple minutes on it
but you said something at the very beginning of the podcast
about sexy rut.
I just wrote sexy rut down.
I'm like, what is this?
- So what happened was
I would get in front,
look, so Jackie was very crafty in her hiring of me.
She said, you're in, we'll do it, here's what we do.
I guarantee you this and so forth.
You'll make this or more
based on numbers in the participants.
So it was that number or higher
and I said it, I probably shouldn't have
but it was a lot of money.
So they put all the material together
and they would ship it out.
They would actually get all the scheduling put together
and I would just kind of go do my thing.
And these motivationals are day long.
Some of them were one day
but it wasn't like a Tony Robbins one hour
ra, ra, whatever.
These were very interactive, very content-filled.
And so I had to write a lot of material
and so forth as well.
So one of the funny,
I'll tell you how this kind of all evolved
and I'll make it as short as I can
but she had me go up to Grand Rapids, Michigan
and we all went out for dinner.
So the whole company
or as many of the employees that could go or whatever,
we all went out to dinner.
And so we had a great time
and just chatted about things
and just general life stuff
and had no idea really
what actually was going on.
So the next day I go and I show up and they go,
well you're hired.
And I'm like,
well, I thought you already offered me the job.
And she goes, no, that's what I told you
but what we do is we get all the other employees to buy in.
And we want them to approve
who they're going to be working with.
And I was like, holy crap.
I had no idea that I was actually being interviewed.
And so it was an interview
without me knowing that I was being interviewed.
Very fascinating concept, by the way.
Although if it went really bad,
I'm not sure--
- You'd be like, oh I thought I had the job.
No I'm sorry, you completely misunderstood.
I can totally--
- Yeah, we'll give you one gig a year.
So anyways she says,
okay, we've got this, it's up in London,
it's in London, Ontario,
not London, United Kingdom.
So anyways, she said, you're gonna go across the border,
you don't have a work,
I can say this stuff now 'cause I don't go up there
but you don't have a work permit
but don't worry about it,
you're just gonna go snow skiing or whatever,
you're going to see a friend.
And so I go up there
and anyways, I go to the Elmhurst Inn,
I'll never forget, it was snowing outside,
it was just crazy.
It was beautiful,
there was all these windows around
and you see up on this hill like a barn.
And all you're waiting for is two things.
You're waiting for the deer to jump by
and then the bullet to fly.
It was like what's going on here?
It was picturesque but you're like
kind of out there on this beautiful setting, incredible.
And I remember I was in front of this big group of people
and they're all kicked back like this.
They're just like...
So they've all been forced to go there
because they're not producing for their company.
They've been sent there to be motivated.
And so I'm like,
God, what am I doing here?
I'm like, who am I to be doing this?
And it was first time I'd ever done this gig
and content and so forth
and they're all just kind of kicked back,
you could just, the body language was as ugly as it gets.
And so I don't know why
but I went around the room,
we got some introductions
and figured out what people wanted to learn
and just kind of really get their buy in.
It was one thing I'd always done, real good questioning.
And so anyways,
and so we had kind of come to me
and I said, well, I'm from Gainesville, Florida
and here's a little bit of my history
and I said, look,
and I don't even know why I said it
and I don't even know why it was funny.
It's probably not funny now but I said,
look, we're from, we're just in bred, corn fed
and hand spanked.
And they just thought that was hilarious.
And so I knew through humor
and through storytelling and so forth
that I'd get greater buy-in.
That was the line I used.
And then I realized the further slurpy south I got,
the more the head turns
and really getting sucked into this thing.
So I'd use that South Carolina almost accident.
I wasn't from Florida anymore,
I kept moving up to the mid part of the state.
So before you know it, it was a three day gig.
The last day, all the owners of the companies were there
like you've got to come see this guy and dadada
and from there, I never missed a beat,
never somewhere to go to.
So that was really, really cool.
But what happened was I got so good
at beta testing certain things,
I would take the sign,
and especially if there was an owner there
or a manager in the room
and it almost felt like bringing one in here today.
So you've seen it done before.
It's like Bob.
So you take a piece of board or whatever
and you hold it up and everybody goes, Bob.
And then you go Bob, Bob, Bob or whatever.
And it just gets 'em loosened up and they're awake,
it's just an icebreaker kind of thing.
And so I would,
that was kind of the testing into
let's do some fun stuff, you know?
And so we would do things like that
or I would do things like that
and then I would say, okay.
So when I saw the body language go negative,
I would always say,
well how many of you are here today,
how many of you are in a rut?
Anybody in a rut?
And they would be forced to put their hands up
because nobody's not in a rut
that's in my seminar.
If they were there,
they would either be teaching it
or they need to be taught it.
So they would all I'm in a rut, I'm in a rut.
So what I did was coin this phrase called The Sexy Rut.
So I would take them through
and I won't do it here
but a really cool day,
like a day that you have.
And it's like wouldn't you want to emulate that every day?
Wouldn't you want that to be your rut?
Wouldn't you want to be so far down in that rut
that you couldn't get out of it?
That's a cool day.
I want another day like that.
And so I coined the phrase the sexy rut.
And it's a twist on being in a rut
to being in a sexy rut,
being sexy just means it has a flavor of
wow that's got to be a good rut to be in.
- It's got whoa flavor, baby.
- Yeah, got whoa flavor.
- So that's it and--
- I'm glad we addressed that
because otherwise you would've dropped the word sexy rut
at the beginning of the podcast
and everybody would've been like what was that?
We never touched base on that.
- So I've got a book that's about half written.
I've got a deal
and it was funny 'cause I was talking to my brother Mark,
he's like, you got to finish that thing.
So it's really got a lot of good storylines in it
but it's about making decisions
that you can take a path
and create a successful path for yourself.
And that's really what life is about
is making those choices.
You know what things really need to have happen.
You had that conversation with yourself all the time.
There's two of you, right.
There's the inside and the person talking to you.
And that comes from Mickey Singer,
I don't know if you've read his book.
But it's a good read.
I think that one is called untethered soul.
And it talks about the inner self
and the conversations you have.
Like whose really in control, you or you?
What do you mean? - Me.
- Yeah but you know what I'm talking about--
- I just got that book
yesterday. - Oh did you really?
- Seriously?
- Yeah. - That's ironic.
- Yeah, you'll enjoy it
because it talks about that how you beat yourself up
and who's winning.
It really has a profound pause in your life
to think about wait a minute,
I'm sitting here middle of the night
tossing and turning, having conversation with myself.
That does not need to happen.
When you talked about waking up at 4:30 in the morning
and getting that clutter out of your way,
when you talked about that spiritual connection,
your pray time, your meditation,
maybe yoga, maybe whatever,
it doesn't have to be long
but you need to have that cleansing of time that says
okay here's what I'm doing today.
- Well yeah and I'll be honest about the meditation thing,
I don't judge anybody else for that kind of stuff
but I've always been the guy who's seen it
and just kind of laughed it off
like okay, that's cool, do your thing.
That's always kind of been my attitude about it.
And then I took a trip with a couple friends
and they were like, oh no, you're gonna do this.
And so I did it
and I was like, oh damn, I feel better.
I was like I feel really good.
And so I kept doing it
and I'm like oh my gosh, this really works.
And then I actually found from the spiritual sense
I actually found that I was more focused in my prayer after.
I would meditate first, really clear my head
and then just focus on my prayer time
and I was like man, this is really, really good.
And so now I'm getting hooked
and trying to incorporate it into my daily routine.
- I'm pretty sure Untethered Soul,
when Oprah Winfrey read that book,
he's written two number one Times bestsellers
and that's one of them.
I'm pretty sure it was that one when she read it
she called Mickey Singer up,
"Hey Mickey, this is Oprah Winfrey."
He's like huh, really?
And Mickey Singer is a rock star himself.
You should have him in here actually.
He created a billion dollar local company,
medical manager
so doctors all around-- - You have that connection
for us?
- I probably can, yeah.
- No fear of rejection this guy.
I'm just gonna ask questions all day.
- No, no, no, I really believe
we could probably get him in here.
- Do it up, man, it's on you.
The whole WHOA GNV Podcast fan base
is going to be disappointed if you don't deliver that.
- Yeah.
But she says, "I want you to know what I'm gonna do next."
And he's like, "What's that?"
She goes, "I'm gonna read it again."
It's a good book.
It's a very provocative,
it's a very provocative concept
about this conversation that you have with yourself
all the time.
We all do
and there's a way to manage that
and he talks about it
and it really does help you become laser focused
on really who you want to be.
- Cool.
We're gonna have to wrap up in a second
but I want you to get last question in.
You got anything?
- No.
I guess my last question would be
is Tech City looking for any businesses in particular
to join them in any kinds of industries
that you don't have yet?
- Yeah, so everything's on the table.
I do know that the food component
is a big missing link out there.
The promenade itself
is such an impressive structure.
It can hold food trucks and activities and so forth.
There's pitch areas, there's a myriad of things.
But there's certainly a lot of food opportunities
for those who are in the business,
either from the food truck side
or actually having a stand up facility
that we can have out there.
Much like many things that are,
take Celebration as a good example actually.
It takes awhile for it really to get,
I wouldn't call it traction
but some synergy.
So there's more food choices coming
and now they have spa and they have this.
So there's a lot of morphing that goes on
and it doesn't happen overnight.
So our success overnight is this,
speed of delivery,
think about this.
We closed on the property in September,
we started construction in October.
We're gonna be open in April.
These are just 75,000 square feet of structure.
This is huge.
So speed of delivery is one of our key components.
Also simplistically, Fracture's rent is half
of what it would've been anywhere else in Alachua County.
So that's another thing we're bringing
is our investment is to incentivize these companies
to land there, be successful,
give them structures
that for a long time have a lot of runway.
There's a lot of flexibility with Tech City.
The coolest thing?
We can take a building, put Fracture in it,
we can put housing in it.
We can put daycare in it.
There's a lot of things.
That's another opportunity.
So a lot of the employees were looking to live out there,
stay out there, work out there, that kind of thing
are asking about daycare.
And so if anybody has a daycare
that they would like to expand out there,
we'd love to work with 'em.
We can provide very affordable space.
- Ty and I are now starting a tech daycare center.
- [Mitch] There you go.
- We'll bring Duncan in on it also.
- Yeah, there you go.
Kids code and stuff,
aw man, it'd be awesome.
- But much like the,
we're negotiating with a couple different folks
on the rock climbing gym.
I think that's gonna be a gamechanger in the sense
that that's gonna bring people from Atlanta,
there'll be people from Miami coming up for the weekend
and participating.
It has different activity portions to it
including workout and yoga and physical fitness
and also it's gonna qualify also for Speed Wall
which is the Olympic event, 60 feet of rock climbing.
And so it would also be a training facility
for those who are in speed wall as well.
- [Collin] Next podcast event,
me verse Ty up the wall.
- There you go, yeah.
So we're really excited about that coming to fruition
and we're excited to see the design teams
come up with some really fun and unique designs
upwards of 200 feet.
- I cannot wait to see it.
If anybody wants to connect with you,
what's the best way for them to do so?
Do you have website or something?
- Who would, I don't want to connect with anyone,
no, no, no, no. - Don't connect with Mitch.
- Okay so it's real easy.
It's mitch@glaeseronline.com is my email
and Glaeser is g-l-a-e-s-e-ronline.com,
mitch@glaeseronline.com
and candidly, I'll give out my phone number.
My cell number 352-538-0072,
anyone can have it,
I'm accessible all the time.
As you opened up with, I'm very transparent,
I love helping people.
We're doing solar trees by the way
out at Tech City as well.
Lex Dould is a rock star,
a local entrepreneur,
you go by his place,
he's making phenomenal woodworking pieces.
He has bicycles that he's built these frames
that are all over the world.
He's doing the solar trees.
So we're doing a bunch of solar trees.
They're 22, 23 feet tall
and they have these big 36 inch panels on 'em like pedals
and there's a dozen per tree.
Alachua,
I'm 99% sure that code of Gainesville doesn't allow them,
it's a long story,
they're more infatuated with a live tree or whatever
but I think we need to find ways
to incorporate and celebrate solar
and Alachua's completely all about it.
So there's some things that need to happen in Gainesville.
Can you imagine going through
some of the newer developments,
call it Celebration or even Butler, whatever,
if you saw 30 or 50 of these solar trees around,
I mean it would be cool as hell,
it'd be really cool
and it's all about sustainability.
- I can't wait to see yours man.
It's gonna be neat.
We'll have to,
maybe we can get Rich,
maybe you can help us get Rich on the podcast
after it's all built out
and we can talk about it.
I think it'd be cool to like
having this one and then seeing, interviewing him
or maybe we can have both you guys come in or something
and just talking about it
once it's actually going. - His speaker fee
is twice as much as mine. - Yeah I'm sure.
I'm sure.
So well hey man, thanks again so much for being here.
- I love it
yeah it's a great time. - I appreciate you so much,
I appreciate you always investing into me and this community
and I'm excited to see what 2019 holds for ya.
- Me too.
I still want to know what you look like without the hat on.
- Okay.
I feel like people have seen this.
But it's just short hair, man,
it's just short hair. - I wasn't sure
if you were bald.
- I mean I'm probably not--
- He swoops it down though if he's doing it.
- Those almost look like implants.
You have such a perfect-- - Did my hair.
- He did?
- Yeah.
He's like no dude,
you've got to go back like this.
But it's a mess right now
'cause I wake up and I throw a hat on.
- You're sure they're not implants?
- What? - Your hair,
it looks perfect up there.
- No, oh my God.
- I've enjoyed it guys,
thoroughly enjoyed it.
- Thanks for ending it on that note,
thank you very much.
So Gainesville world, we appreciate you so much.
This is the WHOA GNV Podcast,
the podcast bringing you businesses and individuals
that make you go WHOA.
We will see you later.
♪ Gainesville rock city ♪
♪ Gainesville rock city ♪
♪ Gainesville rock city ♪
(upbeat music)
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