Brandon Steven
speaker
104 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Brandon Steven’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Sometimes that's even better. For sure. Because you do get to go home at night and have a different – the meal tastes better sometimes. Your sleep – you do get a better night's sleep, I would say, for sure.
I'm guessing you're going to come back to the tirade, though.
Yeah.
I did not do a very good job of investing in this bar. So I would definitely tell everybody, everything I did in Gravitas, you should not do.
Like I would say, actually, everything that I did, you should do the exact opposite. I started out with a great plan. I was going to make it small. My budget, I'm embarrassed to tell you guys this, but I'm going to tell you. My budget for the first 12,000 square feet was $13 million. And I spent two months value engineering, with my team two months to get it from $13 million to $11.4 million.
And I'm like, I did it. I was really proud of myself. I signed the contract. Let's go. $11.4 million. Now, it's ironic that we went from $13 to $11.4, not $11. Let's not round off to $11. And we're at $37 million is what I spent. And guess what? I'm still going.
But I'm so happy that I got it to $11.4 by spending two months to value engineer.
So back to your question. This was a horrible investment idea. And then when I got it down to 11, I was going to get 20 partners, friends of mine, and say, hey, this is going to be a passion project for all of us. We're going to build this great thing, and we're going to use it for ourselves. And then as it got bigger and it got bigger, the number got to 23 million. I was for sure.
23 million, I'm done. I went ahead and talked to some of my buddies about it. I said, here's what we're going to do. And I said, we're close. And I'll get the information to you when we get closer. And the number got so big that I just said I can never bring somebody else in as a partner in this deal. And so I own 100% of it, unfortunately. Well, I say I, my brother and I are partners.
We own 100% of that. Interesting enough, Rodney, my partner, my brother, I kept on telling him for the last, you know, 16, 18 months. You need to come to LA to see what you're doing. He's like, I'm busy. You got that part. I'm like, you need to come to LA to see what we're doing. And as the numbers got bigger, he came last week.
A month 36, he came by. He had dinner.
He loved the food.
So I know a lot of people. You know a lot of people. We have a lot of friends. We're very passionate with our friends. One thing I'll tell you is when you're in the position that we're in, everybody comes to you with their new idea to invest in. If it's not once a week anymore, it used to be once a week. People would come to me and say, hey, I want you to invest in this.
And now it's not as often because people know very clearly that I do not invest in other people's business. I know that you're very good at that. I am not. I've done it a lot in the past, and I'll tell you I'm zero for whatever. That's not true. Maybe I'm one for whatever. I've decided, Rodney and I have decided we're going to invest in us. So we're going to invest in projects we do.
I have no problem spending an infinite amount of money borrowing it or in my own capital of a car dealership or a health club because I know for certain that I will win. That's not arrogant. It's because we have solid processes. We have an incredible team that's been with us, number four employees. They've been with us since the 90s.
So we have confidence in our team for our two core businesses, health clubs and car dealerships. We know for sure that I can go buy a car dealership that's broken and fix it. That's not arrogant. Trust me, it's really not arrogant because it's a prudent process. And it's the team that we've built, the teams we've built.
We know for sure that we can go into market for health clubs and we're going to do very well. Health clubs are a little different because it takes us years to curate the market. But we're good. We're really good at buying the real estate and then putting the best health clubs in the best places.
Real estate is interesting because we're in the car business and the health club business, but we own all of our facilities. Oh, wow. So we're really real estate developers, but not really. Like the McDonald's model. Yeah, but for car dealerships and health clubs. Interesting enough that Gravitas is the only thing in the world that I don't own.
I'm leasing this space, which is very frustrating that I spent all that money on leased space.
I should have bought it in 2021 when it was worth a lot less after I spend all this money.
Showing 41–60 of 104 · page 3 of 6
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