Justin Ishbia

Like, for example, we made mistakes in the past where we did not renew a lease at a portfolio of a company at an important location and the landlord extracted a pound of flesh out of us after the fact.

What we did after the fact is now all of our businesses are required to have what we call lease query.

I don't care if the system was called lease query.

And all of our leases have all the data points in the system to make sure we never had that mistake happen again.

So there's prompting.

And so I think the biggest way to improve the organization, I think it's hiring more and more talented people.

getting tighter and tighter on processes, making it incredibly clear and reducing the likelihood of making the same mistake twice.

I say all the time at Shore Capital, very rarely is there a problem with first impression.

When you have 35,000 team members and you have hundreds of locations and you have everyday things that are appearing, the same mistake can happen twice.

How do we reduce the risk of that?

And that's through knowledge sharing, but doing it in an efficient way.

I wish there was more time, I would say, to work with sellers.

I've not let a deal on short capital in seven or eight years now.

I miss some of that relationship with building with sellers.

Those early days of short capital, the board members I personally recruited, I was one of four partners and I was lead partner on a lot of those early deals.

As the firm gets bigger, my job is to run short capital and give people resources they need and remove obstacles for the system and the whole organization.

But you kind of miss the newer boards that created a lot of great people, some really talented people.

I just don't know them the same way as the early boards.

It's almost like your high school buddies.

You know them better than your work buddies.