In a market brimming with opportunity, distressed assets and disciplined leadership are key to unlocking wealth. Join host Mike Zlotnik for a powerful conversation with Trey Taylor, managing director of Trinity Family Office and author of A CEO Only Does Three Things, recorded in May 2025. From steering through the post-COVID multifamily market to seizing steep discounts—acquiring a 612-unit complex at $48,000/door, down from $126,000—Trey reveals how his family office thrives by buying distressed properties and deploying capital strategically. Despite challenges like soaring interest rates and tenant-friendly regulations, Trey’s team mitigates risk through strong partnerships and prudent underwriting. He also shares insights from his book’s core principles—people, culture, numbers—now expanded with a Spanish edition and upcoming monographs on meetings, strategic planning, and financial literacy for CEOs.
Whether you’re an investor targeting discounted real estate or a leader sharpening your business, Trey’s strategies provide a blueprint for success.
HIGHLIGHTS OF THE EPISODE
00:00 – Welcome to the BigMikeFund Podcast
00:18 – Introduction: Family office investing and leadership
00:29 – Guest introduction: Trey Taylor’s journey
00:55 – Family office update: Navigating post-COVID markets
03:18 – Distressed multifamily: Buying at $48,000/door
06:46 – Execution risks: Tenant-friendly regulations
08:30 – Deal structure: Avoiding foreclosure, raising capital
12:07 – Market timing: Buying at steep discounts
14:20 – Private debt vs. equity: Balancing risk and return
17:16 – Contrarian investing: Fundamentals over optimism
21:30 – Reconstruction cost: Buying below replacement value
23:47 – Book updates: Spanish edition, new monographs
27:57 – CEO leadership: People, culture, numbers
30:20 – Connecting with Trey: Website, LinkedIn, newsletter
32:27 – Political economy: Tax policies and deal-making
37:27 – Market challenges: Debt cliffs and interest rates
39:43 – Key takeaways: Distressed assets and leadership
If you found this episode substantial and want to dig deeper into real estate, or maybe you want to discover better investment opportunities, be sure to check out www.tempofunding.com.
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Website: www.tempofunding.com
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnJkdVoOsUy85ydkmot9iVA
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X: https://twitter.com/management_tf
CONNECT WITH THE GUEST
Website: trey-taylor.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/treytaylor/
Newsletter: https://plantyourflag.substack.com/
Full Transcript:
Mike Zlotnik: He is with a family office called Threadneedle, if I’m saying it correctly. And, he’s an author of a great book called “A CEO Does Only Three Things.” Welcome, Trey.
Trey Taylor: Hey Mike. Good to see you again.
Mike Zlotnik: Yeah, good to see you too. Thanks for coming back on the podcast. And this is the first episode we’re doing Riverside Studio.
Trey Taylor: Oh, good. I feel honored. Hopefully, I don’t mess it up.
Mike Zlotnik: It’s very exciting to use a new platform and great to have you.
So what’s been new? What’s new in your world? It sounds like you are more involved with the family office today than before.
Trey Taylor: Yeah, absolutely. So, we started the office in 2019 and have completed the first five years of distribution and investment. Now we have, a lot of those chips placed. We’re starting to see some returns coming in.
It’s been a weird five years, of course. So we started it, just as COVID was coming in, we didn’t know if that was gonna wipe everything out. The portfolio has held up remarkably well. We made a lot of good investments in multifamily, redeployed, those investments back into multifamily. And now those are sort of in the doldrums, you know, not really moving, up or down.
And then, you know, we finally took a lot of, positions over in the public markets, which we had not avoided, but not really allocated towards in a long time. And so now we’re. We are seeing very good returns, obviously, on those vets. And yeah, just kind of managing everything from the top down, you know, with various contractors, various partners in each of those, verticals and yeah, so that’s how I’m spending most of my time these days.
Mike Zlotnik: I’m actually amazed you have a multifamily investments that are doing well. A lot of people who have written checks in 21, 22. I’ve had challenges. Now, if you’ve written checks beyond that, 23, 24 probably got into well discounted deals, but a lot of people did what you did, invested in 19, doubled their money, you know, by 21, 22, and then reinvested.
And here comes the challenge. These investments are somewhat struggling. Yeah, and that’s where
Trey Taylor: we are for sure. We had an incredible 19 and 20, you know, 126% return on that, portfolio. Said, gosh, this will probably go on forever. And so deployed all of that 126% return right back into, you know, a host of really good assets.
And I don’t know that I wouldn’t, I don’t even know that I would rethink that investment strategy knowing what I knew then, because it was just not possible that we would see interest rates go from three to. Seven and a half. You know, it wasn’t logical to assume that, and then of course it did. And so most of those syndicator led type of investments, you know, used a lot of the value add funds in order to pay down and to keep up the debt service and those kinds of things.
And so we have six investments in that portfolio. Now, you know, they’re not. Doing great. At least we’re not losing them. I know some people are, we’re not losing them. And as a matter of fact, I am in the early, early stages of sort of putting together a distressed property buyout fund and, and we’ll walk in and, you know, guarantee the notes and put some additional value add in because I think there’s a lot of fatigue from people who says, just get me out and I’m okay.
So we’re looking at those kinds of things in multifamily now.
Mike Zlotnik: Well, we, what you’re observing is absolutely a great time to buy. So it’s a difficult time to sell. If you have to sell today, you’re taking a haircut, if not a big haircut, then a small haircut and fact that you have to burn your liquidity to keep the lights on in these deals is of course a little bit concerning.
But then, yeah, what else do you do? Have you had to deal with capital calls or any other additional capital needs? So.
Trey Taylor: The primary. I have two syndicators that I primarily work with, and one of them had written into the documents that there were no mandatory capital calls, which was a really good selling point until you need capital I.
So everything that they are raising on top of, if they have already in the portfolio, goes into a special pref. So we’ve been okay to put additional funds into those investments with the hope that the pref, you know, an eight to 10% pref depending on the property. We’ll mature and we’ll. If we can live through this sort of rollercoaster for the next couple of three years and potentially get back into a selling environment, I think the LPs will take most of the benefit from having done that with these pref deals.
So we’re seeing that for sure. We also, a partner and I just bought a new complex, to your point earlier, that this is the time to be buying and, and, you know, 612 units and we paid $48,000 a door for it. We have offers at 106 in hand right now. You can’t do that every day of the week. There are lots of people who have had the fatigue, who can’t stomach the idea of the capital call or who can’t raise the capital call, and you know, the options for them are closing.
I don’t wanna seem predatory in that environment, but to come in and provide a real solution that says you can walk away without getting hurt is a good service and something that I think we can make good return on for the family.
Mike Zlotnik: Yeah, that, that makes a ton of sense in this environment today. It’s the right time.
To write checks to buy massive discounted assets. I was just at a conference and the discounts of the pika so large, almost mind Bogle. What’s been your experience? I basically seen used example of 48,000 a door. What did you trade at? At the peak?
Trey Taylor: The people that we were buying that from paid 126,000 a door for that.
At the peak, and the challenge was, of course it was a 3.3% Fannie Mae loan or a Freddie Macone, Fannie or Freddie. And you know, it is, it’s workforce housing. So this is not something that maybe you and I would love to be living in, but it’s 11 minutes from the Atlanta airport. It’s a place where baggage handlers, you know, when they get sort of get hired on the first time and they don’t get good hours to work, they have to be there at sort of three in the morning.
You know, it’s a great place for them to, to be able to sort of start a career. The rents are relatively stable ’cause it’s not like they can go down too much more from the p from where they were. So we think that that is good. My partner is in the property management and asset management space and so he gets called frequently to say, Hey, can you fix this problem for us?
You know, he. Eventually approached me as the capital solution and said, Hey, we could fix these things if we own them, but they can’t hire me to pay me the right number to go in and fix the project for it. There’s an impasse there. There’s something that doesn’t work. There has to be an infusion of capital and so on.
This one, we just walked in and signed on the note. We took the. The existing owners off the note and they signed over all of the equity and they walked away, but they didn’t have to go through foreclosure. They didn’t have to, A couple of them would probably have to have, you know, bankruptcy and that sort of thing.
And we were able to acquire it for, you know, probably 50, 60 cents on the dollar. How were you able to do it without short sale on a bank? So the bank was involved the entire time. The bank, all the bank wanted was for somebody to guarantee that the project would be finished. So we had to raise an additional, two and a half million to put into the project, and they wanted to make sure that the note was gonna be paid.
Mike Zlotnik: Well, my question is, it’s just a math, right? The bank typically financed 70% of the, purchase price. So you bank finance of a previous owner, 70, 75%. If you go below that number, the bank is gotta take a haircut. It was a
Trey Taylor: 65%, loan to value on purchase. And the bank actually offered us some accommodation to say if you wanted to take 5% and put this on the backend and that sort of thing.
But the key is rent roll is 77% rented. There’s 20% of the units
Mike Zlotnik: distressed asset. It’s, it’s
Trey Taylor: not, it’s Senate distressed asset. That’s right. And the value add didn’t make it all the way to the end. So we had to complete the value add. We can lease up, you know, we can get to the high eighties on lease up through the summer, we think into the fall.
And the cash flow in the property today is paying the note. It won’t pay anything else, but it was paying the note. So it’s a situation that we could come in and raise a very small amount of money. Take over the note, unfortunately. Those G PLPs that had done the project initially, they walked with nothing on that.
That’s not always the goal for us. But on that one, they were quite happy to do so because the GP specifically was in danger of losing a much more profitable project, and so he was willing to sort of cut his losses on this one so that he could save the other same lender on both of those.
Mike Zlotnik: Yeah. You would you describe as a classic scenario of seeing this left and right.
Yeah, think is to buy today at a pretty significant discount. So here you are saying you’re peaking over the node. That’s 65%. So you effectively getting 35% off the peak of the market when the the deal was purchased, correct? Yeah. We see this, it was a similar deal. We closed in Q1 where we paid 79,000 a door while the asset used to be 125,000 a door.
If you’re on your map, it’s right around 35% discount and yeah. These numbers are huge and you know, on top of all this is obviously execution risk. That’s right. As long as you could confidently execute. And Atlanta is not an easy market to manage. There are obviously rent regulations. It’s one of those markets where you hear landlords complaining that’s difficult to evict.
I don’t know if this property is at an area where I’m in New York City, so I can’t get the more friendly air. That is, jurisdiction, but there are many other jurisdictions that are sufficiently tenant friendly, making it somewhat difficult for landlords and deal with problem tenants.
Trey Taylor: I think in terms of the law, Georgia is considered a landlord friendly state in terms of
Mike Zlotnik: Georgia.
Is Georgia, this is Atlanta, you said. This
Trey Taylor: is, in terms of the two counties where I’ve had the most experience with the investing, it has very much come down to the commitment of the local magistrate to enforce what the law actually says. And they haven’t been willing to do that because they’re very tenant, focused.
So I have, one of my sideways projects is in this county, next to this county. And, we’ve had that scenario going on for. A couple of years now where the evictions are severely delayed and that sort of thing. So you’re exactly right on that. There’s an execution risk. You know, can you, once you bring the right team in, once the team is properly funded, you still have another hurdle to go through, which is the, the compliance process to, to turn the.
The entire unit into something that somebody would want to live in with good neighbors and good amenities and all of that, so that you’re exactly right. There’s execution risk involved. Now for me on this project that I just mentioned, the smaller of the two projects, I have a great partner. I. For that.
So he is an asset manager in the business more than 40 years. He’s a property manager in the business more than 30 years. So he’s the right partner for that. He found this deal because they called him and said, we need work out on this and shared with you on the other project. I don’t have that. And so that a lot bigger challenge for us.
Mike Zlotnik: Well, at least today, you’re getting the assets at the right price. Yes. A few years ago. People paid what the market was and the market was high, and all these battles made it even more difficult, and that’s why they’re losing these assets and walking away. And you wind up stepping in at the at the right.
The right price per se. So yeah,
Trey Taylor: and it’s been really difficult also to maintain, you know, the deep pockets of capital. It’s been really hard to say, well, you know, gosh, that money is just sitting in the bank and we’re earning 4.75%, and maybe if it was deployed, we would earn better, but we keep waiting on the dip in order to buy the dip.
It has taken a lot longer to materialize than I thought it would.
Mike Zlotnik: Yeah, I mean, we can discuss at the, the bottom of the market. Near the bottom. The bottom line is we heavily off the peak, whether it’s exact bottom, maybe there will be some more corrections. It’s really deal by deal, local market. It’s a close enough discount where now you’re buying with a lot more.
Let’s call it much stronger and healthier risk reward ratio versus a few years ago to rent. Yeah. It’s, it’s kind of like you said, you cash can sit in the bank and earn 4% or it can get deployed. It’s the opportunity cost, it’s the opportunity, it’s at risk of missing out on a great opportunity and a lot of folks have been getting ready for these type of deals.
I’m glad to hear that. Got one of those. I mean, we are seeing same thing. It, it’s a, it’s not a volume of these deals. It’s kind of like a precision surgery you’re getting. Deal here or there, and that deal is the ideal. It’s not going to be just go buy everything you see. It’s just more of buying a great deal with the right partner and then have a confidence to execute as long as you can do that.
And essentially in this case, you didn’t have to line up a lot of capital. That’s right. And capital raising has been challenging and what you said previously, recovery capital or rescue recovery capital in the form of new pref or new mezzanine debt. We, we’ve done that too. That’s, that’s another way to play the market.
You could get into existing deals with a new profit equity and you push all other people back and say, listen, if you want the capital, let they come in. But these are the terms of the new money. It’s gonna be ahead of all previous money and it’s gonna have strings attached, per se. That’s how it functions.
You’re not trying to be a vulture. You’re trying to basically invest. As a prudent investor and Yeah. I have to, the real is turned on my money, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly right. Somebody’s else’s problem is another person’s opportunity. It’s kind of a, a strange way to think about it, but this is how it happens when there’s blood in the street.
Be greedy, right? Greedy. Not in a bad manner, but a manner that if you have the capital and you have the courage to act. Yeah. I
Trey Taylor: think capital finds, its best return. Right? And so if the return is in multifamily right now because of the distress space, and you’re looking at. 18 or 22 or this one project pencils out at about 36%.
You know, the capital will find its way to that a lot easier. If it isn’t there, then it’ll find something, something completely different, which is also okay. We’re doing a good bit of, private debt, mezzanine financing debt. Right now as well, asset based lending and you know, those numbers are coming out between 15 and 18% and with very good borrowers.
I mean, we’re not underwriting anyone who isn’t a good borrower that just isn’t, in the cards for that. That’s not risk-based capital for us. If I put that into multifamily can make the same amount of money a lot longer time period than probably I choose to do the debt. So the money will always find a place that it’s supposed to be.
I
Mike Zlotnik: think. Yeah, interesting how you put it as you go up the risk scale, how to put it. You start with the incredibly safe investment, US treasuries, maybe bank money at 4%, and then you go in the primary debt. Let’s call it in the, you know, 10 to 12% range, maybe 14% range. Keep going up into some level of secondary debt, mezzanine debt with a proper underwriting.
You can get into high teens, even even low twenties, ton of those deals at 20%. And then you start going into equity and you start looking into, let’s call it. Very high teams and above. If you can wind up into, you know, mid twenties, even higher in the thirties, in today’s world, underwriting obviously is very different.
So it’s more conservative. You have to be more careful. The fact that you’re coming up with 30% potential return on these deals, that’s wonderful. Almost. You don’t need these high numbers, you just need to feel that it’s right. A deep buy you. So there’s a margin of safety. ’cause today for most investors, it’s not the upside, it’s the risk mitigation.
Yeah, don’t lose your money. ’cause I already lost a lot.
Trey Taylor: Don’t lose anything because I’ve lost a, don’t lose anything because inflation is insane and it’s eating away at the fringes. Anyway, there’s a good bit of that mentality as well. And you know, I’m a third generation investor in our family office. You know, my task is, is not to go rebuild.
The family and fortune. My task is not to lose what has been given to me. And you know, to do that, you have to make moves when the returns are high and you have to really stay on the sidelines when it doesn’t justify the risk, which is the way that I was feeling in most of 23, was that I just didn’t feel like there was a lot of good places for us to put our money.
We were doing private debt, we were doing certain things, we were buying 10 and 12% coupons and those kinds of things, but it just never felt. Felt really good. And then with the uncertainty around the presidential election, you know, that resolved to some extent. And then, you know, we were very thrilled to deploy a lot of money into the public market knowing that the tariff situation was probably going to be resolved and that it was an uncertainty issue that was causing public market discounts.
And so, you know, those plans, knock on wood so far have have played out correctly. But I’m telling you, it was really hard to sit on a lot of cash for the last. Basically three years.
Mike Zlotnik: Well, yeah, if you wanna learn. Lord for Warren Buffer, right? Yeah, that’s right. When you have so much cash, it’s actually easy to sit on it because you’re not driven to deploy.
But yeah, I mean the food and investors typically sit on their hands most of the time and they act only few times. And when they act, they act. They really take. Yep. Well, I’m glad you’re actually feeling more opportunistic about equity in, we’re recording this late May 25, and I’ll tell you, I feel the same way.
I feel it’s actually a great opportunity if you can find these deals to buy into these, especially high quality assets. So, yeah, I mean, it’s great to hear. And then private debt has been the play of the, of the last couple of years in absence of equity investments or fear of, of being too early to the market.
So. It’s taken time for the market to settle in for the distress, to put pressure on owners, on the banks to be more cooperative.
Trey Taylor: Yeah, and I think the banks are the ones that are doing most of the kicking, you know, down the road right now. I had a conversation with a banker last week and he, he said, look, very candidly, if we do a recap on this project, I’m not gonna get a Christmas bonus.
Like my end of the year bonus is not gonna come through. But if I simply do a workout right now with the existing borrower. And give them, you know, enough rate relief and then tack the balance onto the back end of the loan. I still get paid my bonus. It’s a six or $700,000 bonus at the end of the year.
That’s crazy. So it’s crazy. He knew that it was wrong, the incentives are wrong. He knew that. But he said, what am I gonna do? I can’t change the entire system. And you know, my kids want to go to Vail for Christmas. And you know, I mean, he had his own motivations, and I agree with him. It’s not up to him to fix everything.
That kind of deal, we weren’t able to position inside of that deal.
Mike Zlotnik: I understand, and I hear you. And the whole banking system is riddled with the incorrect incentives and the fact that the stock market, the public markets are doing well. I guess on the, on the equity side, not the bond. Side, the yields are obviously up.
I’ll add this comment and nothing more, like I don’t have a crystal ball. I don’t know where it’s gonna go. We have volatility with tariffs and then it come down and the markets calm down and it feels like they’re back to sort of, it’s happy march. But what concerns me most is that it’s been this happy march.
Since I guess the dip of the COVID and the recovery, and maybe it’s still maintaining momentum, but there’s a reversion to the mean. The, if you look at the fundamental of all these investments, I, I am personally very concerned about PEs of the s and p 500, right? If you look at these 30 p plus pe, we are sort of approaching the stratosphere territory and what’s really.
Fascinating is people are still writing objectives, almost like optimism. When the markets are happy and optimistic. People continue to buy regardless of the fundamentals. That’s, I’m listening the book right now, not reading, listening. I, I do that. Howard Marx, market cycles. Yeah. Understanding market cycles, and this is exactly what he talks about.
It’s the. Broad optimism and investors not looking at the fundamentals of these investments, and they are disregarding the risk. Risk is a possibility of a loss, but when investors disregarding risk, they’re disregarding the possibility of a loss they’re buying because it has done well in the past, almost perception of risk changes when things that are are good.
Risk in reality is higher. Investors perceiving it as lower and on. On the other side, the perception of risk in multifamily today is high. When it’s in reality, it’s low, right? Because it’s actually trading at a steep discount to reconstruction cost. You could buy at the right price for existing cash flows and future cash flows, and you could buy it with a great price based on a fundamental reasons, not necessarily based on the fact that it’s done well.
It’s almost. Contrarian thinking is the way to go, but most investors don’t do it and they seem to be happy with the crypto and seem to be happy with the stock market. And because the price is up, the risk is up. This is as basic as it goes.
Trey Taylor: Well, if we were to go and buy this site and try to replicate this workforce, housing 620 units, whatever it is, we bought it at $43 a square foot.
We would not be able to rebuild that for less than 250 a square foot, and I think we insured it at 2 54 a square foot in replacement cost.
Mike Zlotnik: Yeah, the reconstruction cost. You bought it at a massive discount of reconstruction cost. Now you have to discount for the agent condition. Yes. That the point is exactly.
I agree with you, which you just said. I don’t see great deals in new construction today because it still costs you to build, but you get a great deal in existing. This is a very clear example. Of how you can get at the phenomenal deal at a well, well, well below reconstruction cost, and people still need to live somewhere.
Trey Taylor: Yeah, we only have one investment, which is, ground up and it is in, a market which has historically been underbuilt and not kept, pace with the desire of people moving into that market, which is Asheville, North Carolina. And so we have a new investment that we made in February. To be an LP on that project to go vertical there.
And you know, I think that the turnkey happens October the 15th and they’re already 26% leased up, pre-leased. And so, but that, you know, that’s not something we would look to do very often, especially when I can take that same money and go buy at a. You know, a one sixth, the price of, of new construction type deal.
But in that situation, I hopefully merit it. Anne, I wanna have a little bit of, of new product quality to offset some of the discounted quality that I have in the portfolio as well.
Mike Zlotnik: Yeah, it’s a diversification point. That’s right. Another reason that makes a lot of sense. Let’s go back and shift back to the book.
I just wanna. Sort of here. There’s anything new that happens. The book is kind of stuck in my head. I’ve learned a lot from the book. Yeah, I appreciate it. Yeah. Real basic, simple things. I can just tell you, a CEO does only three things. It’s people, culture numbers, right? Every day I sort of go to work and I think about it, and it’s all about people that I have.
The culture and the numbers and, have any new sort of ideas, developments, the book is great, so obviously let folks ensue the book. Yeah, I appreciate that. Yes. Right. A new addition. It’s so solid that you almost don’t need to reinvent the wheel because it’s so good.
Trey Taylor: I appreciate that so much. so a couple of thoughts there.
One, we just published a Spanish version of the book because the publisher noticed a lot of, traffic for the book coming out of Latin America, and we thought, why not write it in a, a language, you know, a native language for people there. We also recognize that a tremendous portion of new entrepreneurial businesses are started by Hispanics.
In America and, you know, did they ever intend to be a CEO? Probably not, because most of us are sort of accidental CEOs. We always intended to do something else, but then we ended up owning or running a business or something of that nature. So that, the Spanish version of the book just published, two weeks ago and doing very well Amazon.
And there’s an audio, version on Audible as well for that. So quite happy I didn’t read the book ’cause I don’t speak Spanish. But, I’m quite happy that that has happened. And then we have a series of three monographs that’ll be published starting in November, so November, June and November of next year.
And these are all of the transcripts and the recordings of the coaching that I have done over the past four years with executives inside of, of this idea. We. Loaded it all into AI and said, you know, where were the insights for CEO and what were the real things that they were taking from this so that I could produce a book that if somebody couldn’t come in and be coached by me, they could at least read a monograph, a very thin 180 to 220 page book.
I’d like thin books like that. They’re easy to digest and if you get the, if you get the point out there. So we had three of those. One of them, which was a bit of a surprise to me, was a CEO’s guide to meetings. So one of the things that we spend a lot of time on in coaching is making sure that every minute that you spend pays the dividend in multiple ways.
And one of the ways that we do that is to eliminate most of the meetings that we take as CEOs because, you know, they are informational, they are performative, but they are not results oriented. They are not the highest and best use of my time at that moment. And so when I do get into a meeting, I wanna make sure that that meeting.
Has a purpose, has an agenda, you know, all of the things that rule of thumb that we know to do well. And so we have that book coming out. We have another book, a CEO’s Guide to, strategic Planning. This is something that, very often CEOs will hire out to people, but I don’t think that CEOs do enough strategic planning.
Again, if you’re only doing three things, you’re supposed to do culture, people, and numbers. Where do those three things fit? They need to fit inside a strategic plan. I have a very specific way, that I like that done. I plan for one year at a time, not these three and five and seven year plans that, you know, they never come to fruition because so many things change anyway.
And then the third one is a CEO’s guide to, to financial matters, basically. Because what I have found is that most CEOs. You know, they’re not really trained classically for coming in and running a business on the financial side and a sales side and all of those kinds of things. And most of us feel a little embarrassed that we don’t have a full blown financial education.
You know, I have had many clients say, what do you mean when you say p and l? Exactly what does that mean to me? Now, does that mean that they’re not a good business person? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. But to be able to educate themselves a little bit on that, to be able to understand that, oh, well, maybe I should do this in this manner and not this manner because of the way that it advances my end goal.
Then, you know, we wanna give them some coaching on some financial literacy matters more than anything else. So those are the next, three books there. And then I am beginning to contemplate just going through the book and doing a second edition where I come in and say, you know, maybe the example of the CEO of Google, who isn’t the CEO of Google anymore?
Maybe those kinds of examples could be cleaned up. I don’t think that the core offering of the book, which is the culture people in numbers would change at all. But, I think we could just spruce the book up for a new sort of generation of, of readers. The book’s been out about five years now. We’re just shy of a hundred thousand copies and, and I think it could be spruced up a bit, as far as that goes.
So we probably will work on that the middle of next year.
Mike Zlotnik: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. I’m just curious, from the readership, a CEO of what company sizes I, I can imagine the book is really written for not necessarily the biggest company, it’s more of a smaller company. Yes. It’s a much bigger audience, number one.
Number two is the, the audience that needs help. Big time executives, they have. Kind advanced corporate programs to continue to grow their leadership teams, small organizations. CEO is, is expected to be a leader, just to be clear. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Leader, the manager in essence, and they’re also a leader and people is all about leadership, right?
Culture is all about leadership. Numbers is the managerial trait. Like you said. What is p and l? Well, if, if A CEO that can’t understand p and l, then he doesn’t know the numbers. Just it’s an important element of the numbers. That’s very
Trey Taylor: true. And, and I think if we’re honest, most of us run businesses where, we feel like we’re successful if there’s something left over at the end of the month.
But we’re not running them from a financial statement standpoint. Now, interesting to me, I wrote the book for, you know, small to medium sized businesses. Those are the businesses that I have worked in, those in businesses that I understand. I was invited to what’s called Secret Mastermind, which is 50 Fortune 500 CFOs and CEOs to come into the room.
They all read the book before you come in, and then they pepper you with questions, and I’m very nervous about that. Because I didn’t think that the book’s message would hold water for them the same way that it would hold water for the small to medium sized businesses. They took a poll at the end of the first day of that I was only invited for the first day.
Then they go through and do two more days. At the end of the first day, 49 of the 50 said that the presentation and the material in the book was relevant to their daily life as a CEO or A CFO. So I was very surprised by that.
Mike Zlotnik: Well, it proves that the concepts are so fundamental. You could apply it to Fortune 500 company CEOs the same way you can apply it to a small company.
It doesn’t change. Maybe it scales. Maybe they work on a different scale, but the concepts are, super sell it. Yeah. I appreciate the update. it’s so wonderful to hear you’re making progress on multiple fronts. Obviously the bulk, the book and the, the coaching and the consulting in the area spreading the, the wisdom is a great way to influence and impact.
A lot of people, and also you are a practitioner, right? You are managing family office, you’re writing checks, which is just as important. And so very happy to hear that. What’s the best way to folks to reach out to you if they wanted to speak to you about the book, the coaching, the consulting, or, look at one of the deals.
Trey Taylor: I appreciate you asking that. so my website is trey taylor.com. Got contact information, a little form you can fill out, those kinds of things. people find me on LinkedIn a lot and so it’s Trey, Trey Taylor, jd. ’cause I’m a lawyer by trading, so you can find me on LinkedIn there. I also have a newsletter.
I don’t know that we talked about that when I was with you the last time, but it’s Plant your Flag. Plant your flag live and it’s just sort of, I don’t, I don’t wanna say random, but it’s just sort of a thought piece, you know, every time I have something to say. So I wrote a little piece yesterday about the recruiting problem, and how that interfaces with the unemployment, you know, issues in the marketplace today.
It’s just, if you want to hear my take on various business issues, we do that. I do a quarterly update on, you know, the places I’ve gone and the deals that I’ve looked at and the books that I’ve read and that kind of thing. But then interspersed with that is a lot of, you know, mostly political economy, not politics, political economy, and, and how things, sort of affect people who are in the deal making business.
Mike Zlotnik: So what is political economy? Just to, to be very clear. Well, we know. Things get very dangerous when you start talking about politics, depending. Yeah. And
Trey Taylor: it’s, and it’s not politics specifically, so you’ll never open the newsletter and find that, you know, Republicans, bad Democrats good, or vice versa.
It’s not, that’s not the point. The point is when those folks get together and they start making decisions. Those decisions affect the economy, and you have to know that as a complete continuous system. And so I talk a lot about, you know, I’ll, I’ll be dissecting the new tax, plan when it comes out and saying like, this is what we had hoped for and this is what materialized and those kinds of things.
We had, you know, we had a, a quite a bit of movement inside of the, Accelerated depreciation and those kinds of things. And what does that mean when you’re doing deals, when you’re deploying capital and those kinds of things. So that’s what I mean by political economy. I did some of my university at, Oxford and, and did a lot of study of political economy.
Mike Zlotnik: Gotcha. Yeah. It’s the impact of politics on the economy, and That’s right. You couldn’t come up with the anymore. Impactful politicians seem to, they find ways to screw things up in the economies. They, every time they do it, they cause inflation. By printing money they cause, well now we, we are dealing with the trade wars, which creates a lot of uncertainty, volatility and all that stuff.
And, you know, in theory, all the stuff sounds good in practice. The economy doesn’t like uncertainty. And I think depending on, on your point of view, we, we still want. Made in America, we love American made, but some of the things are difficult to see being made in America. I don’t think we can ever really do the, the production blue jeans or some of the.
You know how crazy it is. My wife is optometrist and, she tells me about the tariffs on the frames that they import from China, and it, it gets getting a little ridiculous and crazy that these these frames that go from China to Canada back to the United States. Yeah. Wind up with the Chinese. Tariffs and all kinds of crazy stuff.
And the bottom line for small businesses, this is very, very difficult to be able to stay in business, to be able to deliver goods and services in the products and services to the consumer. Yeah, at a reasonable cost. When you implement tariffs fast and furious, it’s kind of a. Talking about, you know, shocks to the system.
We’ll see where we wind up from here, but, and I’ll add one more comment. Yeah. With the new tax bill, bringing back a hundred percent bonus depreciation should help real estate quite a bit. I mean, it’s one of the big tailwinds. That’s right. So,
Trey Taylor: so it’s interesting, I have a friend that, is in the Commerce Department and he was on the sort of study committee to give feedback for, you know, proposals for the tax, the tax bill, and which we’ve only seen part of, you know, the big, beautiful bill is only a little bit taxed.
There will be a more pronounced tax bill, hopefully later in the year. And what we, what he was told was that the White House was very specific to say we want a tax system that promotes transactions. We want people doing business. They will figure out how to make money. They will figure out how they pay their taxes.
They will figure all of that out. But we have to take our, our boots off the neck of the American deal maker, and we want people doing transactions. We want them buying airplanes. We want them, buying and selling real estate. We want them transacting in every way that they can because every time they transact, hopefully value is created.
Taxation can come off of that. That’s the way that the things have to work, and we just haven’t had that mentality in this country in a little while.
Mike Zlotnik: Yeah, I appreciate the wisdom. Certainly concur. We definitely have seen very slow transaction volume in real estate and to pick that up, but one of the important things that I don’t know how it’s gonna get addressed, we actually need a level of lower interest rates.
The interest rates is such a. Critical component of dri. It’s a critical driver of transactions. Critical driver of the cost of capital, right? And to solve that issue, we need to find a way to basically give the markets incentives to trade, to lower the interest rates I’ve ever seen struggles, and I don’t know where, where we go from here with all the politics aside, where we both need to provide pro-growth tax policies at the same time.
Keep the deficits under control. And we are certainly not of control. I don’t know where we go from here, but it’s, it’s kind of like a denture zone. I think that’s the
Trey Taylor: distressing nature of it all. I feel like maybe with political consensus we could come together on so many things, but the reduction of spending is not one of them.
And until we fix that, the rest of it is window dressing. You know, if we don’t refinance. The, the debt that we have right now that’s held at such a, a high interest rate, which is great for sort of mom and pop investors to be able to have a, a t belt that pays, you know, four and a half, five point half percent, 6%.
We almost touched 6% in the last, treasury auction a couple of weeks ago. And, if we’re not able to do that, then the country itself. Cannot serve as its own debt. That’s a bad thing for us. That’s a bad thing for people who do, capital allocations. It’s a bad thing for the country as a whole. It’s a bad thing for the world as well.
And so I think that absolutely has to be addressed, and the spending nature of that has got to be fixed. It doesn’t matter if you just refinance the debt, if you just go back and add another trillion or two, or three or $4 trillion to the balance, you know the payment stays the same and you’re carrying a larger load.
Which is very much what we have seen, as we started the discussion today in the multifamily space, right? So when those rates adjust upwards, that’s when the crisis, kicks in and equity is wiped out.
Mike Zlotnik: That’s exactly a concern today. How do you refinance the debt, the maturity cliff? Right. obviously all the paper that was born on floating rate debt is been, you know, causing a lot of grief and it’s been a lot of loans.
Originated five years ago, and then as they mature, you gotta roll the paper. And it’s not just real estate, it’s corporate debt. That’s right. Obviously government debts, municipal debts. The debt in the system is what’s created sort of the, the wellbeing in the country and refinancing of the debt is a serious concerted, I don’t know where we go from here, but the level of interest rate today.
It’s not just the level, it’s the shock where we were, it’s a zero. That’s right. Five and a half push in very short amount of time and higher for longer. Sooner or later it’s gonna break things I don’t know. We’ll see.
Trey Taylor: And the problem is right, is that there just isn’t a buyer. I don’t know if you saw the article that I saw when I was at lunch today that the, the big office tower in Portland, Oregon, I think it’s called like the Pink Lady or something like that.
’cause it’s made outta sort of Pink stone that sold for $70 million, which was one fifth the price that was paid for it four years ago. And the only good thing is that there was a buyer out there willing to buy that and use it in such a way. You know, that’s a catechism. If all of the commercial real estate is all of a sudden worth 20% of what it was four years ago, that’s a big deal.
Mike Zlotnik: That’s the worst of the worst. That’s the one that’s right. Got that’s been beaten up so about, I mean, at the end of the day, it’s a reset for the new buyers. Who could buy at this price. It’s a reset. But all that debt on the books, when you have a little bit of a haircut, the system is built for to protect the banks.
So when you have in 70/30 or 75/25 loan, when you, when the value drop by 25%, banks is still okay, close to the average. But if you drop 80% fifth of a price, then yeah, I mean.
Trey Taylor: And somebody probably got their bonus to do that deal upfront and a different guy got the bonus to do their workout and do it on the other side like we were talking about these misplaced incentives. So, anyway, funny, funny story there.
Mike Zlotnik: It was awesome to have you. We can keep going and going. A lot of things to discuss. Appreciate your wisdom. It’s so good to have you back on the podcast. Let folks reach out. Thank you for sharing your wisdom. Appreciate you and, until the next time.
Trey Taylor: Yeah, thanks for having me, Mike. Always enjoy these conversations. Thank you.
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