Jason Reid on Compounding Advantages by Focusing Local – EP.294

(00:00:00) – Intro
(00:01:10) – From masonry to remodeling manager
(00:07:01) – What intrigued you about fencing
(00:08:36) – Building DreamCon management company
(00:10:22) – Memorable projects and learning automation
(00:11:53) – Simple changes driving big improvements
(00:13:46) – Promoting hidden talent from within
(00:15:50) – Learning curve: contract pitfalls
(00:21:07) – Embracing obstacles and staying focused
(00:23:20) – Keeping balance through big goals
(00:27:51) – Becoming a pilot after decades
(00:34:22) – Current goals and art foundation vision
(00:38:53) – Education reform and other causes

[Jason Reid] (0:00 – 0:37)

If you have your goals really identified, you have to take an honest look at your own ethics in terms of what do you spend your time with. And you know, that is an enormous exercise because most people spend 80% of their time outside of work doing things that don’t have anything at all to do with their goals. So I really took an honest look at that and broke that habit severely.

And that, you know, just enabled me to really focus on what I was really wanting to do. And then to a large degree, I accomplished it.

[Alex Bridgeman] (0:39 – 1:08)

Jason, thank you for coming on the podcast. Think Like an Owner has been this college project of mine that eight years later is all focused on how ambitious small business owners are growing their companies. And a lot of them have focused on garage doors recently, but I’ve also, we were just talking about kind of home building and building suppliers before this.

I’d love to hear about like, how’d you get into all of the building and contractor oriented businesses in Oregon? Like where, where did that come from?

[Jason Reid] (1:10 – 6:57)

Well, it started pretty early on. I, I worked when I was in my, you know, 19, 20 years old for a masonry company and learned how to rebuild chimneys and that sort of thing pretty quickly. And decided to start my own little business doing that.

So I did that for a couple of years. And even though I did good work, I wasn’t a very good business owner at the time. So, you know, it didn’t, didn’t last through kind of a harder time in the winter where it’s slower.

So after that, I worked for a remodeling company for many years and that’s where I kind of gained most of my technical skill. I rose pretty rapidly in that, that business to be the, the project manager and then the general manager of the company. And did all aspects of mid to higher end remodels on residential homes primarily.

But after doing that for a couple of decades, I worked there for 24 years, I just got to a point where, well, he was going to phase out his business. He was retiring. So I started my own little one, but I was pretty dissatisfied with like what I accomplished in life.

Decided to do some real soul searching at that time. I was in my mid forties and just felt like I had a lot more gas in me, but I didn’t know which way to go really. Because what I’d been doing, even though I was arguably successful in what I was doing, it was just so small compared to what I felt like I could do.

So I took a couple of weeks off and went to Hawaii with my son just to try to get out of the environment and clear my head and really kind of free my thoughts to think about what I really wanted to accomplish and really define that. And I really want, I really enjoy doing large scale kind of projects, a lot of action, a lot of activity. I can tolerate a lot of confusion and put order into it.

So, and I wanted to make a lot of money. You know, I may sound greedy, but you know, there’s a lot of charitable causes that I support. And the only way to really support them with any kind of degree of magnitude is to make some bucks.

So I decided, okay, well, I really like construction, so that’s good. I’m doing something that I really love and I’m passionate about. I’m just not doing it the right scale.

So how do I grow quickly, like really quickly? Because remodeling is a tougher business in the construction area, requires a lot of skill and a broad range of things. And it’s highly dependent on like very, very proficient project managers to be able to grow to any scale at all.

So I didn’t think that that was the right one to really scale. So I started looking at other construction businesses and I learned from one mentor I picked up on this guy named Dan Pena that a good way to grow is through acquisition and just acquiring companies. And how to go about that, because I had no clue.

I had, you know, my idea of like buying a business would be go to a bank and beg for a loan. And it’s a lot different actually how you go about getting lending for doing large transactions like that when you’re buying companies. So I learned a lot about how to do that, how to go about it and went all in on it in the fall of 2019, mortgaged my house or refinanced it to get some down payment money down and bought a little commercial fencing company in Portland, Zockert Fence.

And so I was running it, running my remodeling company, going between the two and was just flat out putting the pedal to the metal on the commercial fencing. I found that it was an interesting niche. You know, these fencing companies to a large degree are people that started out with a pickup truck and they grow to a certain extent because they’re comfortable with, and then they keep it there.

They don’t go any further because it’s out of their comfort zone. So this was a perfect example of that. It was a great little company, very small, only had about 12 staff, but they were doing a couple, you know, one and a half, $2 million a year in revenue.

And, you know, I was, well, how do you get your work? You know, and, you know, you just get it off the government website, things get out for bid. I’m like, well, why aren’t you bidding all these things?

Well, I just pick the things I want to do. I’m like, oh, okay, that’s interesting. So I gave the order, okay, we’re going to bid everything that we possibly can as long as we can deliver it.

And even if we can’t deliver it, bring it to me and we’ll see if we can figure it out. And so that company, we went from the one and a half or so million revenue it was doing to nearly 10 million that first year. And I was just having a blast.

And that’s when I knew like, okay, I’d really tapped in to the right kind of line of where I can really get things going. So I ran that really hard for the first year. And then I bought two other businesses the next year, another fencing company in another area of Oregon, down Coos Bay, and then kept repeating that.

And at the end of, you know, four or five years, I’d grown it to, I think about 280 staff across 12 different companies I’d acquired. So it was a heck of a lot of fun.

[Alex Bridgeman] (7:01 – 7:13)

What intrigued you about fencing originally? There’s a former podcast guest, Sam Rosati, he has a fencing business that he’s actually in Tampa. So I need to introduce you to him.

But what intrigued you about fencing?

[Jason Reid] (7:14 – 7:57)

Well, at first, what intrigued me is like, it was in like a, an area of construction that I thought, okay, this is kind of a simple area. I can really get my head around fences. No problem.

Even though I’ve never done a commercial, you know, I never done chain link fence. I’d never done, you know, ornamental iron fence or any of that. I figured, okay, I can figure this stuff out really quickly.

And that’s what I did. So it was, it was in the area of where I lived. It was a great price for the company.

And it was a product that I could really get my wits around. And then once I saw like how much potential there was in it, that’s like where I really got pretty excited about it.

[Alex Bridgeman] (7:58 – 8:06)

And so of the 280 folks on your team, how many is just the fencing businesses?

[Jason Reid] (8:07 – 8:35)

Well, let’s see, I’m not sure what’s out right now. Cause I haven’t been involved with them directly for the last year or so. And of course I did sell off a big chunk of, of what I’ve, what I had acquired, but there was four commercial fencing companies that we had one, no, excuse me, five.

And probably just those probably made up about 120, 150 of the staff.

[Alex Bridgeman] (8:36 – 8:42)

Yeah. That’s pretty impressive. So what’s DreamCon?

Can you explain that more?

[Jason Reid] (8:43 – 10:21)

Yeah. Well, after I got about four businesses under my belt, I knew I needed to create a real management team and I’d already gotten somebody to be a direct assistant and executive assistant for me. That was really great in helping me organize things.

But I figured, okay, well, ultimately I’d love to, you know, roll these companies together, do a rollup with them. And I thought, okay, I’m going to develop a company to both manage them and to, to build this rollup. And that never, the rollup never really came to fruition just because of the nature of trying to refinance and restructure SBA loans is just too complicated.

But the management company of DreamCon was established with myself, you know, a really good CFO and, you know, COO and a couple other people. And they would put in standard bookkeeping in each of the companies, put in all the financial records to make sure they’re like, you know, just straight and correct because those are, those can get really out of whack if you’re not on top of it. And we’d also develop programs that we could implement across the companies to improve them.

So we would go in once in a while to each company, you know, be there, work at it directly on site for a while. And then we pull back. And also we work within that company to hire the more higher end executive people, the managers and the senior project managers and that sort of thing to really get them established.

[Alex Bridgeman] (10:22 – 10:35)

Are there any projects that stand out to you as maybe the most interesting to you or had the most surprising benefit or you just learned the most from? Are there any projects that stand out?

[Jason Reid] (10:36 – 11:52)

Yeah, there’s a few. There’s one we did for Google out in the Dalles. They’re built a data center out there and they’re expanding their, what’s the name of the Google AI project that they were Gemini.

That’s right. So it was their Gemini project and it was a big expansion of that. So there’s this multi-billion dollar, you know, data center being built right there on the Dalles where electricity is cheap.

And we put a perimeter fence around it that was, you know, it was a one F almost $2 million project. So that was an interesting one because we had a lot of automated gates and crash rated RAM systems and, you know, wedge barriers that raise out of the ground that we installed and all kinds of, you know, automation, which was somewhat new to us at the time. Get into that field.

Often we had subcontracted out a lot of the automation until we realized how simple it was and that we could learn it in a couple of weeks, as long as you’re intelligent and willing to really buckle down and study it. So that was, I think, a real memorable one. It was a big, large-scale project and it’s a lot of fun to do.

[Alex Bridgeman] (11:53 – 12:07)

What about like internal projects that you worked on in the companies? Like to, you said you would kind of pop into the business for a little while and, you know, come back and implement certain things. What about some of those?

What stood out to you in those?

[Jason Reid] (12:09 – 13:44)

Well, I think the biggest thing with that is, is it’s not large changes that are really needed, usually, to make a big improvement. And most of the changes I would find out about just by walking through the company and talking to the employees and seeing how they’re doing and asking them, you know, what they like, what they don’t like, how they think they could really change things. I mean, the company down in Coos Bay, it was, it does primarily residential fencing, probably 60, 70% of it is residential.

And it was a giant, you know, revelation to just implement a Google calendar to keep track of the jobs instead of having a paper copy. And so the old owners never wanted to, because he was old school and didn’t want to, you know, embrace any kind of new technology, even though Google calendars are not exactly new. So it’s just that little change there increased the productivity by a pretty good factor.

And a lot of the other things is just in being in really good communication with all the people, you know, you find out a lot about the company. And you also find out a lot about the potential of the people. And I found that to a large degree, your best talent is just not being utilized.

And it’s right there in the company working already. And just by giving them the opportunity to take on a new role, a bigger role, you know, it brings in a whole new level of excitement to the whole area.

[Alex Bridgeman] (13:46 – 14:01)

Who are some examples of people on your team who had all this talent that they just, they weren’t in the right spot to use it, or it wasn’t asked of them to use it or something, but who are some people that come to mind?

[Jason Reid] (14:01 – 15:49)

Yeah, there’s one that stands out down in Coos Bay. He worked at the fencing company, worked there for, I don’t know, eight or nine years already. And he was an estimator, and he’d worked in the field.

He’d done installations, and he’d done their automated gates and everything. He was pretty skilled, technically, all these things. And, you know, he, I found out, you know, he just, he really wanted to do a lot more.

He’d done all these different areas, and he’d excelled at them and done really well. But he was being paid pretty moderately in. So I went, okay, you’re going to be the manager.

I’m going to let you run this company. So I installed him as that. And, of course, we have good oversight in the financials to keep track of that, to make sure nothing goes awry.

But he did fantastic. And he did so well that when I bought another company, I asked him to find himself a replacement and train him up to his standards, because I wanted him to run the next company. And he did that as well.

So that’s one example. Another one was just a young kid who was actually friends of my son when they were in high school. And he started working with me part-time just one summer, and then he really liked doing fencing.

So I’m like, great, go and learn all about it. And, you know, within six months, he was able to do large-scale estimates. He was project managing projects by himself, over supervising these guys that are, you know, twice, three times his age.

And that was a lot of fun. And he’s actually still there in the fencing company running it. He’s helped grow it to a large degree in the last couple of years.

[Alex Bridgeman] (15:50 – 16:10)

That’s fantastic. Those are cool stories. What was your biggest learning curve in going from, you know, being a general manager with the remodeling business to, all right, you own the business now.

It’s yours to manage and ensure that it’s going well. Like, what were some learning curves that stood out to you?

[Jason Reid] (16:11 – 19:13)

Probably the biggest learning curve is negotiating and navigating the large contracts that you get involved with, with these big general contractors. Because you’re doing a lot of jobs in a commercial fencing company each month, but you’re getting contracts that are, you know, 40 pages long, full kinds of fine print. You know, who has time to read all those?

Well, you should definitely read them. Because that’s what I think my learning curve was, you know, making mistakes and getting messed over or screwed over, or you can put it even more crudely if you like, by a few of the contractors. Because there’s by and large, you know, 80% of everybody out there is doing great, honest work.

But you get these ones that they put in the contract language, different things that they can do and bind you to if you, for whatever reason. For example, there’s one that, it was a pretty large project that we hadn’t signed the contract yet because I wasn’t sure about the job. And it was by the prior owner that had estimated it.

I wanted to look at it to make sure it was accurate. Because if it messed up on the estimating, it would have a big financial problem. So it’ll look good.

But we had to rework the contract and had a funny feeling about the guy. And he was rushing me to sign this contract. And in the language of the contract was items that he could fire me for cause with no pay at any time during the job, if he found I wasn’t performing, which was so vaguely described, you couldn’t even tell what it meant.

It’s like, he didn’t like me that day, so he fires me and I’m out $200,000. Well, so I kicked that back and redid it, but I wasn’t careful enough because he did still have in there some clauses about arbitration expenses and things. And on this particular project, he kept delaying paying me and then fired me towards the end of the project because we weren’t performing.

And right after he had given me a giant change order for a little item of the job that he was going to do to help me out to get the job done quickly. And it was like five times the cost of what it should have been. So anyway, I spent a lot of money trying to figure out with lawyers that I can’t really do anything about this.

I could fight them, but it’s up to the whims of the arbitration, how it would go. And by the time I got through, the lawyer fees would be greater than any money I could possibly recoup, even if I got the entire contract amount. So that was a big slap in the face to learn that.

But it was an important lesson because it hasn’t happened again. Sure, we have occasionally, rarely trouble with the contractor, but we’re on top of it now.

[Alex Bridgeman] (19:15 – 19:34)

Yeah. And you said, you know, 80% of contractors do good, honest work. But I mean, having, you know, one in five contractors in any particular job be dishonest or pull something on you, definitely could throw the whole project off and off track and cause a lot of pain.

[Jason Reid] (19:35 – 20:33)

Absolutely. Yeah. And it was especially painful for this one because I did some research on the guy.

I had him investigated privately because I just want to know what I was dealing with. You know, I was willing to put some money at it to really, you know, expose the light on this guy. And, you know, I did find out that he had a history of doing this.

He would hire a contractor, you know, a smaller guy, smaller company, string him out and not pay him, and then fire him towards the end of the project, and then get him into arbitration, which is too expensive for them to handle. And then they would settle for a small, small, small amount if they got anything. So he did that.

I had, I think, 15 different cases documented where he had done that, that exact thing. So I made sure it was known that this is what this person does, did not work with them.

[Alex Bridgeman] (20:34 – 20:35)

Is he still doing it now?

[Jason Reid] (20:36 – 20:49)

I don’t know if he’s still doing that kind of shenanigans. You know, eventually that does catch up with you where it does get around. So I don’t know if he’s even operating anymore.

I haven’t looked him up recently. Hopefully not.

[Alex Bridgeman] (20:50 – 21:00)

It’s pretty evil, especially for small contractors where it’s, they may be on the edge of, you know, on every job trying to make it work and take care of families.

[Jason Reid] (21:00 – 21:06)

Yes, it’s very evil. You know, it’s pointedly destructive, you know, for their own benefit.

[Alex Bridgeman] (21:07 – 21:21)

Yeah, that’s pretty cut and dry. For other learning curves in running businesses for the first time, what else did you spend a lot of time sharpening as a skill as you began running more businesses?

[Jason Reid] (21:22 – 23:18)

Well, I think the biggest thing is, you know, to go into it knowing that there’s going to be something that’s going to be a big surprise and to just accept that as a matter of business. Because if you’re going to grow fast, there’s going to be a lot of things you’re going to bump into and have trouble with. So you just have to embrace that because otherwise it’ll become such an impossible barrier that you may give up.

You know, so one of the things that I did is I really kept my eye on the mountain of where I wanted to go with the business, what my goals were, the bigger goals, and kept that purpose and that goal and that intention really live within all the staff as best I could. And that helped me overcome some of those obstacles. Like the first obstacle I had with the first business I bought is I ran out of money.

I was told that the invoicing of the company, they get paid usually within 30 days and it turned out to not be the truth at all. It was 60 to 90 and sometimes 120 days before they get paid on these projects. So here I am three weeks in thinking I was going to get some invoices to get paid and I’m running out of money and I had to use credit cards for payroll to pay things until I got the money flowing in.

So that was one of them. But being able to really keep your eye on your goal and keep that alive and keep your spirit high about that is the key to overcoming those things. Because I could have just been infuriated and frustrated and whined about it to everybody but it wouldn’t have done anything except just make it more of a problem.

So I just went okay well we’re gonna get the money in but I’ll just have to do this for now.

[Alex Bridgeman] (23:20 – 23:39)

Yeah you seem pretty steady Eddie and even keeled despite any of these projects you know could send anyone into a roller coaster of emotions day-to-day. What have you learned about you know keeping balance and consistent not letting the highs or lows get you down or up too much?

[Jason Reid] (23:40 – 26:55)

Well I think the key thing is there’s a little bit of humility in looking at these different things where you have to take an approach of all these different problems you’re running into even though they may be in the moment. You know these huge enormous problems you know 20 years from now it’s going to be a blip in the wind you know and 100 years from now no one’s even going to remember or even think about it. It’s just a little tiny blip in the real scheme of things.

That was the key thing so knowing that and then thinking and you know envisioning very large goals that are perhaps not even realistic or just really setting those goals and creating the kind of the feeling of accomplishment of having accomplished those. I was doing that daily all the time just reaffirming you know these different goals I had to keep that drive and that passion because one of the things I learned from actually from Dan Penny I’m Mr. Penny I think I’ll come up sometime. Most people give up on their goals because they just don’t believe in themselves very much or they’re not really passionate about it they just give up and the key to overcoming that is to one find out what is it you really want to do like really for real like you could just love it you could just do that and you can and then to take that idea and expand it to a much larger scale because you’re never going to accomplish any more than what you can envision yourself. So if you’re going to accomplish a lot well you probably need to envision 10 times the amount of that to even get to that the initial target.

It takes a lot bigger goal to even get partway there. I mean take Elon Musk he wants to go to Mars and colonize the planet so that’s a pretty big goal pretty impossible pretty ridiculous but it’s you know what it’s actually approaching now and he’s accomplished all this other stuff that is all kind of led in that direction. So the other thing I learned is that if you have your your goals really identified you have to take an honest look at your own ethics in terms of what do you spend your time with.

So I did this as an exercise like every time I was spending time doing something you know I would make kind of a mental note like okay how much time did I spend doing this and what did it have to do with my goals and you know that is a enormous exercise because most people spend 80% of their time outside of work doing things that don’t have anything at all to do with their goals. They’re doing whatever they’re doing TV they’re going to the pub they’re hanging out with their friends who also have no goals and they’re not doing anything. So I really took an honest look at that and broke that habit severely and that you know just enabled me to really focus on what I was really wanting to do and then to a large degree I accomplished it.

[Alex Bridgeman] (26:57 – 27:03)

So how did you set your own goals and maybe what were some of those goals?

[Jason Reid] (27:04 – 27:49)

Well I wanted to have enormously profitable conglomerate of companies taking on large-scale projects and expanding at a rapid rate. That’s one of them. I wanted to become a professional pilot and owner of aircraft which I did that as well.

I wanted to create a successful family that was happy and thriving and I’ve done that. It’s the funny thing is like when you really focus on your goals and that’s all you’re putting your attention on these things even though you don’t know how to do it sometimes you find a way because that’s all you’re putting your energy into is to just keep pushing at it and surprise now you find that there’s a way to do it.

[Alex Bridgeman] (27:51 – 28:16)

Will you tell me more about the pilot thing? I’m a huge aviation geek. I even have this is my favorite gift from our wedding.

These friends of ours in Seattle her dad was a Alaska pilot and got me this Alaska Airlines model. It’s the most memorable gift from our wedding that I have on my desk. So I’m a huge aviation geek.

You said a commercial pilot?

[Jason Reid] (28:17 – 29:57)

No not a commercial pilot but when I was 12 years old I lived in a little town called Council Idaho. If you look it up it might come up on the map it’s like 900 people but it has a little tiny airport there and when I was of that age I took an interest in airplanes and I you know walked down to the airport and I you know walked into the little office with these old pilots here and tried to talk them into giving me pilot lessons and they kind of laughed it off and put me on this old style simulator to toy around with and I didn’t really know what to do but I really had a real interest. I really wanted to fly you know I won this lottery ticket or raffle ticket rather I was selling them on the 4th of July these raffle tickets for a plane ride.

Me and my friend were selling these and whoever sold the winning ticket would also be able to go on the flight and so I got to fly in the smaller aircraft over the mountain ranges of Central Idaho and that was it. I was like okay I want to do this this is just there’s so much joy in this and over the years that dropped away as a goal it got kind of beat down and there’s no one to blame except myself but there’s a lot of you get a lot of opinions about different things like becoming a pilot it’s like oh it’s expensive oh what are you going to do are you going to fly you know for a job and all these different things it’s like it’s these counter intentions to actually just fly in a plane. So I was doing a fencing project actually at the Aurora airport

[Alex Bridgeman] (29:57 – 30:23)

and that’s 10 minutes from where I am now and I grew up in Canby so Aurora was a very yeah that’s right a Columbia helicopter out there a couple flight lessons as a kid Vans aircraft is there there’s a good good family friend who worked at Vans for a long time so there’s there’s a lot going on at Aurora it’s a busy town they got a terminal or a control tower recently too which has been an upgrade.

[Jason Reid] (30:24 – 30:51)

Yeah absolutely yeah it’s a great little airport so I was doing this fencing project and I remembered that that goal I had to become a pilot and I was like why did I not ever do this and I had no good reason it was all just other people’s opinions which I just kind of took on as like a reason to not do it or something so I enrolled in lessons the next day and became a pilot out of that airport actually.

[Alex Bridgeman] (30:52 – 30:59)

Nice good good I’ll ask for your recommendation on trainers or flight schools.

[Jason Reid] (30:59 – 31:23)

Oh yeah yeah there’s well I don’t know she’s still doing much teaching but the instructor I had was a Mindy Fisher and she’s now a commercial pilot for Alaska Airlines I think it’s either Alaska or Horizon I don’t remember exactly but she’s a fantastic instructor yeah so that was uh that was great and I was able to incorporate flying with a lot of my work sometimes flying to the different areas.

[Alex Bridgeman] (31:24 – 31:28)

I mean Portland to Coos Bay is a that’s a hell of a drive but a pretty easy flight.

[Jason Reid] (31:29 – 31:36)

It is yeah 45 minutes you know from Aurora it’s no problem at all versus three and a half hours of driving.

[Alex Bridgeman] (31:37 – 31:51)

No problem at all or you know council you know I was looking it up on Google Maps pretty close to McCall you know that’s a that’s a nine or ten hour drive from Portland or uh you know 60 minutes in the air.

[Jason Reid] (31:51 – 32:32)

Yeah one Saturday I took off in the morning and flew to I think it’s uh Eastman I remember right oh it’s a little town forget the name it’s in far eastern Washington right next to Idaho and I picked up my dad and then I flew down to council met with my brother we had lunch and hung out for a while. Is that Lewiston? It’s near there it’s it’s not Lewiston it’s a small town the name will come to me but anyway it was it was great because I gave his my brother’s you know daughter and son a ride in the airplane and had lunch and hung out with him for all the afternoon and then flew my dad back home and flew back home myself all in the same day.

[Alex Bridgeman] (32:32 – 33:23)

Yeah that’s I mean this is a great region for I tell anyone who will listen but it’s a great region for if you own a you know a little 172 and you just want to fly point to point like going Bend to Boise is a five and a half hour drive or a 40 minute flight and there’s just you there’s that type of journey all over the pacific northwest going to eastern Washington or going to the coast or going like southern Oregon like it’s it’s a great little region for private flying where roads often take a long time or might be closed or you know there’s something going on so absolutely perfect region for it and most of the flights you know you’re probably not going to fly more than two hours at a time because you can get pretty much anywhere you need to go in that time.

Lewiston? Saves a ton of time

[Jason Reid] (33:24 – 33:49)

absolutely and it’s so beautiful too especially in those cool mornings where the air is really clear you know you get up to altitude and you can see all the way to the olympic mountains in Canada and all the way down to Mount Shasta and all the way over to the Seven Devil Mountain range in Idaho and you can see the coastline you know all you know and all the mountain main mountains through Oregon and Washington are popping up it’s as clear as day.

[Alex Bridgeman] (33:50 – 33:54)

What do you like to fly? Do you own a plane or just rent one when you do?

[Jason Reid] (33:54 – 34:07)

Yeah I’m a partial owner of a Beechcraft Debonair. Excellent excellent. Yeah and it’s just great it’s a you know low wing aircraft with rechargeable gear and yeah it’s been a lot of fun.

[Alex Bridgeman] (34:08 – 34:13)

Yeah those are those are pretty fast too you’re not the you know you’re not a slowpoke getting anywhere.

[Jason Reid] (34:14 – 34:21)

Yeah you’re cruising around 150 miles an hour so good 20% faster than 172.

[Alex Bridgeman] (34:22 – 34:48)

Yeah and certainly faster than the 150. I did a little a few flights in those are those have a hard time getting to 150. Yeah not gonna not gonna happen.

What are your goals now? What are you excited how do you set your own goals for you know today onward? A lot of these have been accomplished the pilot one very exciting but what what’s on your you know set of goals today?

[Jason Reid] (34:49 – 36:26)

Well it’s something I’m actually working on while I’m in Florida. Part of the little project I have is just to do kind of what I did in Hawaii just kind of read group rethink and examine what it is I want to accomplish now because you know I think it’s pretty critical that anybody to accomplish anything you really latch on to something that you really want to do because if it’s something you really love and you’re really passionate about then the obstacles to get in the way are going to be not much of obstacles anymore. You’re going to be very willing to persevere and do what it takes to get through them or around them or over underneath them whatever you need to get past them. So I’m spending some time to do that.

I haven’t decided yet. I still have different charitable causes I want to put more into and it’s going to require more funding to do that. I really like to fund one of my goals was to to develop an art foundation that helps fund art projects that embody like the nobility and purpose of the human spirit because I think art that’s you know especially larger scale projects that can be very inspiring to people you know gets them out of their their head makes them think and dream bigger because that’s what artists do all the time they’re visionaries of some future idea or some just aesthetic creation. So I think that’s that’s something I’d like to to actually finish.

You know I haven’t done that yet but it’s going to take some money to to put some seed money in it and hopefully get donors to help invest into it to to fund art projects.

[Alex Bridgeman] (36:27 – 36:32)

Is there anyone who shares a similar ambition in Portland you’ve met to this point?

[Jason Reid] (36:32 – 37:13)

Yeah there’s I did team up with Zale Schoenberg who’s the founder of Picathon which is a music festival that’s been going on for the last 25 years out in Happy Valley each year and it’s a collaborative effort where they develop like whole like kind of artistic communities and they showcase a lot of lesser known artists you know and on multiple stages and things so that’s something I’ve done it’s not quite in line with what I had in mind for my art foundation but it’s certainly you know somebody that I I helped out I put a lot of work into helping build out parts of Picathon.

[Alex Bridgeman] (37:15 – 38:53)

Nice there’s probably a crossover between home development or home building and art there’s a a couple example communities like this but there was one in Chapel Hill where Michelle and I lived for about two years and the the builder bought this pretty large acreage piece of land and built an entire community that was designed to be very walkable that had all the key services a family would need on a daily basis there’s a school there was a preschool and a daycare there was a grocery store bank coffee shops a couple restaurants all kind of centered around this courtyard that had like these large grass fields where you could go play and run and then the homes would be like tightly packed not packed but tightly centered around this courtyard so you could walk very easily from your house to any of these things on a daily basis and it was supposed to be a way of removing cars and making it more feel a little bit more open and easy to spend time walking around very popular community and there is some art in designing like the right layouts and walkways and you know where does certain landscaping go like there’s big and small decisions in building something like that so if you want examples there’s one that you probably enjoy reading about yeah oh that’s fantastic it’s fantastic what other causes do you spend a lot of time thinking about well one that i haven’t

[Jason Reid] (38:53 – 43:24)

gotten into into doing anything about yet but i’m interested in is doing something to reform the education system you know i’m a kind of a product of it i’m a high school dropout but i was not done i just i wasn’t learning anything you know there’s there’s kind of a big problem with education in america and that’s you’re being taught a bunch of stuff but you’re not being taught how to do you know how to use what you’re learning there’s a large disconnect and you know you go into any classroom and the only ones that really are successful is just dependent completely on how good the teacher is at getting the students involved and like interested in what they’re doing and and that’s a big failure i think because uh i think and i think it’s an administrative failure or programming failure because it’s not hard to educate people so they actually use the information i remember even my son going through grade school they’re teaching math in like this weird convoluted way i was like i couldn’t even make sense of it like why would you even think this way it’s so complicated you know when it’s not complicated if you just do it like this way i learned it’s just like what is going on like i think it’s like it’s being purposefully forced in there’s these programs to install methods of teaching and it’s just completely untested just somebody dreamt it up thought it was going to do good or maybe they thought it was going to do bad and they just rammed it down everybody’s throats because they’re you know they’re that kind of an individual and it’s not that complicated there’s not a single problem in this world that there isn’t already existing solutions to that are highly effective even drug rehabilitation and other things like wow we just get in proper drug rehabilitation i’d be a game changer because most drug facilities any rehab center you know 30 days and insurance kicks in out it’s usually not enough time to really do the job and their success rate is only a few percent you know it’s very low but there is programs that are highly successful you know 80 plus like the narconan program there’s one of them like that’s highly successful but it takes a couple months so there’s these different different methods of handling things that if you just find out where they’re doing it well who’s doing the best and do that that’s all you have to do you have to reinvent the wheel or try some new weird thing you know take what’s working the best and then improve upon that if possible that’s what you do and that’s why i applied to business as well i try to find the very best people i could and improve upon that and get everybody the chance to improve and as long as everybody has the same purpose they’re going in the same direction they’re either like on board with i’m doing or they’re going in that direction then you’re on my team if you’re not well it’s kind of like well why are you here you know why do you do something you don’t want to do you know to make money to make a paycheck that’s not a good enough reason do something you enjoy doing at least yes yeah i agree i agree so there’s there’s a lot of different things that and that’s one of the things i’m trying to think about how to do that how to maybe get more connected with the different officials in government and i started to do that a little bit in oregon you know i had a couple talks with the you know one of the congressmen there but you know i think these people they need help in government there’s too many wrong solutions being implemented or they’re just being implemented because it’s a way to funnel money into different things but it doesn’t require like an enormous amount of resources to to make a big improvement if it’s the right solution it’s kind of like you have a well on the car you don’t fix the tires and you know rebuild the engine you just add some oil and go on down the road that’s all it takes it’s like you gotta have the correct identification of what the problem is and then solve that you know that’s it absolutely jason thank you so much for

[Alex Bridgeman] (43:24 – 43:33)

coming on the podcast this has been a ton of fun and i appreciate you sharing your time i’m excited to see you again when you come back to portland as well it’ll be good to good to meet you and

[Jason Reid] (43:33 – 43:36)

spend some more time together yeah absolutely good talking with you

[Alex Bridgeman] (43:41 – 43:56)

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