Legendary NYC Broker Bob Knakal Combines AI Power with Reborn Entrepreneurial Spirit

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This episode is with Bob Knakal, a New York City powerhouse real estate broker. He's done over $20 billion with a b in sales. He started a company years ago, brokerage with his partner and a one assistant, I believe, out of a suitcase, and decades later sold it for $100 million.

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The first ten years of that, Bob was personally running in the red as far as personal finances. His net worth was little to nothing if not in the negative. And man, he has overcome so much. He recently was let go, surprisingly, by a company that he was with for six years, JLL, and has now been kind of reborn into the entrepreneurial world. And he's clearly very passionate about entrepreneurship.

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He's launching his own brokerage. He's going to be incorporating the decades of experience and relationships he's built, as well as all the data that he's gathered over the years and combining that with the power of AI, and I have no doubt he's going to be continue to be extremely successful. This guy is referred to as the king of commercial real estate in New York. Is just, it's a fantastic interview. We talk a lot about inflection points.

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We talk a lot about the lessons he's learned through the ups and downs of entrepreneurship. We get into some commercial real estate, and I just love the he's got a humble, fun, yet still hungry approach to this. And I just thoroughly enjoyed this, this interview, and I know you're gonna love it. Welcome to the from adversity to From Adversity to Abundance Podcast podcast. Are you an entrepreneur or aspiring entrepreneur?

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00:02:57
Welcome, everybody, to another episode of the from adversity to From Adversity to Abundance Podcast podcast. I am your host, Jamie Bateman, and I'm thrilled today to have with us Bob Knakal. Bob, how are you doing today? I'm doing great, Jamie. So great to be with you.

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Thanks for joining me and our audience. You're joining us from the NACL map room, which I think we'll touch on. Actually, before we jump in, can you speak to the map room? What is it and what is that all about? Sure.

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The Nacl map room is a room in an undisclosed location in midtown Manhattan that has a map that is 24ft long, 10ft wide, and a bunch of other maps which you can see on the wall, which basically has information about the development market in New York. A lot of what I do, I'm a real estate broker, I sell a lot of land here. So we created visual tools to show everything that is planned for construction, everything that's under construction, everything recently completed, recent sales within that marketplace. So we have the whole pipeline of buildings that are being built in Manhattan south of 96th street and comparable sales on what has sold over time. One of the tools we're coming out with shortly is the NACA Land Index, which is going to look at 2417 development site sales that have taken place in Manhattan south of 96th street, going all the way back to 1984.

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And we segregated the buckets into residential rental, residential condo, hotel, office and a miscellaneous bucket. So it's basically first in Maine for anybody that wants to know anything about the land market in Manhattan. Love it. That's fantastic. So Bob, before we jump back into your backstory, because I know you've done a lot, there's no way we're going to cover your entire backstory.

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But before we jump back for the listener, who are you? What are one or two of your highlights of your career and what are you up to today? Sure. Sure. Well, I'm Bob Knakal.

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I am the chairman and CEO of a new company I started last week called BKREA and I've been a real estate investment sales broker in New York City for 40 years. For 26 of those years I had my own company. My first four years in the business, I was with the company that is now CBRE, left there in 1988 with my partner, Paul Massey. We started our business, Massey Nakal Realty Services, with just the two of us and a secretary, grew that business to have 250 people in four offices by the end of 2014 and sold the business to cushion and Wakefield for $100 million. And I've been brokering ever since and just departed old company a couple of months ago and back on the entrepreneurial spirit, starting my own firm and couldn't be more excited about it.

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Well, I'd say for anyone who's at all interested in real estate or New York City or brokering, real estate or entrepreneurship, I'm not sure why you would hit pause or stop at this point. So this is going to be fun. Bob, lets jump back. You mentioned the first business you started. What did that look like?

00:06:32
Why did you start the business? Well, we started the business mainly because at CB, there was a system that was supposed to be implemented. That system meant that if brokers working in one neighborhood came up with something in someone else's neighborhood, they were required to bring them in. There were a bunch of people with a lot of experience at that time and went to the boss and said, hey, this deal happens to be in Bob and Paul's territory. We don't want to bring them in, though.

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And the boss didn't have them bring us in. So the rules didn't apply equally. And it's one of the big lessons that we learned at Massey Nakal. We had a set of guidelines, rules and principles. They applied to everybody, whether you were at the company for years and years and years, or it was your first day on the job.

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And those rules also applied to Paul and I, just as they applied to everybody else. And you have to have that. So that was something that was a little disquieting to have to deal with. And we were young. I was 26, Paul was 28.

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We thought we could take over the world and decided to branch out on our own. We actually wanted to do it a couple of years before we did in 1986. We wanted to start the company, and we were in 86, we were the top salespeople in CB's office out of about 60 brokers, which is only our third year in the business. But we were fortunate enough to have a little bit of success. Went down to chemical bank and said, hey, we need $500,000 to start a business.

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Where do we sign? And they kind of laughed at us and said, no, guys, that's not how it works. Start your business, come in with a three year track record, show us what you can do, maybe we'll give you a couple of bucks. So we spent the next two years saving money from every commission that we made, and by November of 88, had saved up enough to start the business. So we we left.

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And Massey Nakel was born on November 15 of 88, just the two of us. And a secretary in 800 sqft was 18 month sublet. And we went from there. Robert. Yeah, so speak to the person who's 26, and maybe they have some sales experience or experience in an industry that they're passionate about, or how do you know?

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And we get it. There's no one size fits all answer, right? Every situation's different. But how does somebody know when it's time to jump out on their own and start a business? I think it's really Jamie just a feeling that you have.

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We just, whether you call it blind ambition, vaulting ambition, just really wanted to have something where we were getting out of it exactly what we were putting into it. And the interesting thing is, I think real estate brokerage is a very pure form of meritocracy. You get out of it what you put into it. We both knew we were going to work really hard. And I think one of the benefits of our partnership and something that I think is really important for all partnerships, whether you have very correlated skill sets or very different skill sets, I think the work ethic has to be there.

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The same work ethic. Um, I've seen a lot of partnerships come and go, uh, over the years. I was partners with Paul for 20 years and I bet. Or 30 years. I'm sorry.

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Um, if you added up all the hours that we each worked during those 30 years, I will bet you there's less than a ten hour difference. And I think that that was something that really helped our partnership. And, you know, when, when you're, you're giving it everything you have, going all in, every day, working till you drop, you want to know that your partner is doing the same. And that was a big thing that really helped our firm. But I think we just knew.

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We said, hey, we can do this. We have a good idea. We believed in ourselves, and we just wanted to go make it happen. And it was a lot of challenging times, particularly at the beginning. We started the company in November of 88.

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By late 89, we were in the depths of the SNL crisis. You ran the business on credit cards for many years. I remember vividly, we got to a point where our burn rate was $15,000 a month. We had $15,000 in the bank, and we're like, what the heck do we do? We have no deals under contract.

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Do we pay 5000 a month for three months? Keep the lights on, keep the phones on? Do we pay everything next month and then hope something good happens? And it occurred to us we both had really good credit. So we went to every bank in New York and got a $2,000 card at this bank and a $3,000 card at that bank.

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And before you knew it, we had about $60,000 in total credit card lines. And so that's four months of carry for the business. So we ran the business on credit cards for years. Wow. And would you, would you recommend that?

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Well, in retrospect, yes. Interestingly, it's like we had nothing to lose. We didn't have families. We didn't have to. Didn't have big personal overhead.

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And again, we really believed in ourselves. So would you go all in? Would you personally guarantee everything under the sun? You know what we did, we did. We just really believed that it was going to be successful, believed in ourselves, and, you know, got to the point where we had the $60,000 of credit lines maxed out, had no money, went to one of our clients and said, hey, we need a $75,000 loan.

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We've done some deals with you. You seem to like us. Could you lend us the money? And this was a guy who was probably worth hundreds of millions of dollars back in the early nineties. And he said, you know what, guys?

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I'll give you the 75,000, but I want half the stock of your business. So this is like an early iteration of shark tank, right? We weren't expecting that at all. Totally depressed, walked back to the office with our chins on our chest, and Paul had a stepfather in law that owned a mortgage brokerage business in New Jersey. So we set up a meeting with him, went out to meet with him and said, hey, we need 75 grand.

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We'll give you 25% of the stock in the business. And Jack Holler was his name. He said, you know what, guys? I'm going to give you the 75 grand. I don't want the stock.

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Someday you're going to be really upset that you gave me the stock because you're going to be very successful. We were total luck. You know, I always say you have to have luck on your side, and I think the harder you work, the luckier you get. But, you know, we named our salesperson of the year award after Jack and gave it out for 24 years. So it was a great, great saving grace.

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But tough times as an entrepreneur, tough times. And I often tell the story that while the company, we got out of debt by about 1993, we really didn't start making profits until 1998. And personally, I lived on credit cards. I had overtime. I thought credit cards are the greatest thing in the world.

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I had about $180,000 in credit cards. My net worth fluctuated between zero and -180 for ten years from 1988 to 1998. So I'd be zero, -30 -80 -110 close a deal. Oh, a -60 -90 -120 close another deal. Get up to -30 close another deal.

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I'm at zero. I was like, yeah, I'm worth nothing great, but I have no debt. And that was life for ten years. During those ten year period, did you consider, you know, just going to work for somebody else or, no, you were full steam. Never thought about it once.

00:15:09
Never thought about it once. We felt like, oh, success is right around the corner. Right around the corner. Ten years right around the corner. But, yeah, it's a challenge.

00:15:21
Being an entrepreneur is absolutely a challenge. We almost went bankrupt in the early nineties, during the recession. In the early two thousands, we were lucky. Volume slowed down a little bit, but value didn't drop. And so our business moved along fairly well during that recession.

00:15:42
In fact, a big inflection point. I think it's important to talk about inflection points, but we also almost went bankrupt in 2009. We had a $50 million offer in 2007. For a variety of reasons, that deal didn't happen. If we had to sell in 2009, we would have been lucky to get 2 million for our AP and our used furniture.

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But then we built it back, and we're very fortunate. In 2014, the market was the best market ever, and we actually didn't make a decision to sell in 2014. In 2014, we made that decision in zero seven. When our $50 million deal didn't work out, it was apparent to us that we were going to be on five year contracts with whoever bought us. And so we said, okay, we're not selling now.

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Market's starting to go into the tank a little bit. But Paul was turning 55 in 2015. So he said, you know what? A buyer is going to think that these contracts have more value if we're in our fifties than if we're in our nineties. So in 2014, if the market doesn't stink, let's go to the market, sell the company, then.

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Just interesting that in 2014, 5534 buildings sold in New York City. That was an all time record by more than 10%. That still stands. So it was absolutely the perfect time to have sold. But through no great wisdom on our part, it was more a function of.

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Of age and a decision that was made many years earlier. Well, I mean, certainly, I mean, I agree with you that luck is. Is involved for sure. I mean, in any success story. But like you said, you've got to set yourself up to be in those.

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Those situations where the luck arrives. And you did. One thing I just, you know, kind of noticed was, okay, when you went, uh, to try to acquire the initial $75,000 loan, you learned what might be interested to that lender, and then you learned how to structure the actual loan that you got. And then, similarly, you learned when you got the $50 million offer, what would be interesting and appealing to the buyer of the business. So it's not like you weren't learning along the way.

00:18:04
And it seems to me like you were testing things, trying things, and seeing what works and what doesn't work. And then obviously, the market conditions help, help as well. But you were definitely a big factor in all of that. You and your partner constantly, constantly trying to learn. And one of the big regrets I have is that early on, we didn't seek out counsel from people who had a lot more experience than we did.

00:18:33
Yeah, speak to that. What would you have done differently? We did everything by trial and error and consequently made hundreds and hundreds of mistakes. Every mistake you probably could make running a business we made, we didn't make a lot of them twice, but learned lessons the hard way. So, you know, I wish that in retrospect, we had formed an advisory board, which we actually did later on, probably in zero seven or zero eight, we formed an advisory board of senior people, knew sales businesses, that knew running businesses, knew the brokerage business, and they were tremendously helpful to us in terms of guiding policy, strategy, tactics.

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And I wish we had done that much sooner because it would have saved ourselves a lot of time and a lot of heartache making all the mistakes that we made. Got it. So the advisory board, I'm curious about that. How did you, what were their different roles? How did you decide who was going to do what on the board itself?

00:19:41
Well, we just, we had six or seven people who, you know, again, very senior people with a lot of experience. They were friends of ours, even competitors. We had two competitors, Steve Siegel, who was the chairman of global brokerage at CBRE, and John Fowler, who was one of the name partners at HFF, were on the advisory board, gave us invaluable insight into things. Fowler was the guy who convinced us to get into the debt side of the business, which we did in 2012. We were selling a lot of, we were selling four or $5 billion worth of real estate a year, but were making no money on financing.

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So John was like, hey, you guys got to get into the finance business. And 2012, our first year in finance, we did 300,000,002nd year, 800,000,003rd year, a billion three that would have been, had we not sold the business, that would have continued to be a great business for us. So for the person unfamiliar, what does that mean exactly? Youre originating loans along the way, what does the debt side look like? Yeah, most mostly we were building sales brokers, so we'd only work.

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And I think this is important, too, is figuring out what your approach is going to be and how you're going to differentiate yourself from everybody else. So we just sold buildings, just represented sellers, only worked on exclusive listings, only worked in New York, in our geographic territories, and we were selling all these buildings to folks, but not asking the next question, hey, how are you going to finance this? So we assembled a team of mortgage brokers and they'd work with the buyers of the buildings we were selling. And often we did what was called stapling the financing onto the transaction. And that turned out to be a great business strategy for us.

00:21:38
Got it. And this is strictly. I know there's a big, big dollar amounts. This is strictly commercial properties and commercial loans, is that right? Correct.

00:21:48
Got it. And I think I read somewhere you've done over 20 some billion dollars in sales over the years. Is that last week I closed deal 2331 and it's about $22 billion of sales volume. That's incredible. Might have to change.

00:22:10
I have one question that I ask everyone. I might have to add a zero to that one when we get there.

00:22:17
So through all the. I know this, you know, this is decades of entrepreneurial experience, and, well, I guess before we get there, what. Why did you end up going to work for someone else? Why did you kind of take off your entrepreneurial hat at that point? Yeah, you know, that's an interesting question.

00:22:35
Well, first, when we sold to Cushion and Wakefield, we had to go work at Cushman because that was contingency of the deal, was the five year contract, which actually, there was an event that occurred about a year and a half into that, where the company brought in another team of investment sales folks. That was a breach of our agreement. So we were able to shorten our agreements from five years to three and a half years, got a few more bucks out of it, and got some other support and some other things. But when our contracts were up, at the time, Paul had left the firm and was running for mayor of New. York.

00:23:18
I decided to leave. I brought 53 people with me. We were thinking, hey, this is mid 2018.

00:23:28
Mark has been on a pretty decent run. Not going to stay like this forever. Let's go to a big shop that could keep paying the bills in the event something negative happened in the market. And so brought 53 people with me to JLL. And then about a year, less than a year into being there, the JLL purchased HFF, which also was a breach of my contract.

00:24:02
But we were able to. I was able to stay there. And, you know, just recently left, I was terminated on January. On February 14, Valentine's Day, I got a good Valentine's Day present. I got my walking papers.

00:24:19
But why did I go there? I think it was a realization that the brokerage business is a tough business if you really want to grow it to scale. At MK again, 250 people, we almost went bankrupt three times. Very fortunate with the way our exit worked there. I didn't want to take that chance again.

00:24:47
But this time around, I think the day after my departure from JLL, the entrepreneurial spirit started to get reawakened. Yeah. Couldn't be more excited. I certainly don't want to create a business that's 250 people again, particularly with technology today. And we're focused on AI.

00:25:12
I think that a handful of people can do what it used to take 100 to do. So we're really excited about where we're going in this new iteration of the business. But it feels great to, to be back in the trenches and everything is much more vivid, let's say, as you are doing everything. Yeah, absolutely. A little more real and intense, maybe so.

00:25:42
I know that my father still is a residential real estate agent, has been for decades. So I'm familiar with some of the sort of ups and downs of there were years where we were living large and then other years were very lean. So I recognize that being a real estate broker, whether commercial or residential, doesn't come necessarily with that sort of flat line security compared to maybe some other industries. But what would you say? It's just kind of maybe a little bit ironic that you tried to go the safe route and then that didn't end up being so safe after all.

00:26:23
What would you say to maybe somebody who's working a full time job and they want to start a business? Is there more risk being an entrepreneur or is there more risk working for someone else? Well, I will say this, Jamie, and I think I've said this a million times, that there are pros and cons to everything. There are pros and cons to working for yourself and working for someone else. There are pros and cons to small companies, mid sized companies and big companies.

00:26:55
The secret is to, is to take as best advantage as you can about the pros in those environments and try to keep your head down and stay away from the cons to the extent you can. That being said, I think a lot of it is, you know, what, what really motivates you and what excites you and what are you passionate about? I think, you know, I never had a job where I looked at the clock and looked at the clock and it was 230 in the afternoon. You were wishing it was 05:00. And I have, I have friends who have jobs like that, and I can't imagine what that life would be like.

00:27:36
I mean, I feel so blessed. I got into this business completely by accident, by walking into a Coldwell banker office as a college kid, thinking it was a bank.

00:27:47
They were the only ones hiring college kids for the summer. Took it, loved it. I love this business more than anything. It's my job, it's my hobby. I have a wife and a 15 year old daughter and try to spend as much time as possible with them.

00:28:01
But if they were to go out of town on a girls weekend, I'd be selling buildings all weekend. I absolutely love this. And I think that when you find something that you truly enjoy and you're passionate about, you can't wait to get up in the morning. You feel a little disappointed the day is over. When the day is over, clearly everything has its ups and downs, and the.

00:28:25
Times still work on that point. And then I want to get to really your reawakening in the entrepreneurial world here. And what's driving you on the point of following your passion versus following, you know, maybe what the market is telling you to or what you're, you're good at. So you kind of, again, I know there's no one size fits all, but some people say, follow your passion and you'll end up never working a day in your life. Other people say, no, get good at something that the market will, will pay you for, and then you're going to enjoy doing that.

00:29:01
Um, any take on that for the younger entrepreneur? You know, I just think it's important that people try to follow their passion. I mentor a lot of young folks and tell them, look, expose yourself to as much as you possibly can, learn as much as you can, read as much as you can, what excites you, what interests you, what is going to make you, make you go for it. And I think that could you get addicted to making a lot of money doing something you don't like? Maybe, but I don't think you'd have the stick to it I've ness or the desire to keep doing it if it was just simply you were doing it for the money.

00:29:46
Got it. I think in the business world particularly, I think if you get to the top of any aspect of business, you're going to do very, very well financially. So it's not a question of, of that. I think it's to rise to the very top. One of those ingredients is hard work.

00:30:05
And I think if you don't really have passion for what you're doing, you don't really love what you're doing. It's hard to work hard enough, really get to the top. And, you know, like I said, you get to the top of any aspect of the business world, you're going to do very, very well. Financially. Sure makes a lot of sense.

00:30:23
All right, so what, what is driving you today, Bob? You said that just this sort of re energized version of yourself has awakened, if those are my words. But what's driving you today since February 14? What's your passion right now? Yeah.

00:30:40
Well, number one again, my love for the business. I have a great bunch of clients who have really been extraordinarily supportive, encouraging, and just the love of the business. As I said, I've sold over 2300 buildings. I'm a huge baseball guy. So in baseball, getting 3000 hits is a big milestone.

00:31:05
I'd love to get 3000 sales. But there's also, there's something that is really cool about knowing, hey, it's all on you. It's all on you. If I do well, it's on me, and if I do poorly, it's on me. And that's a big motivator.

00:31:22
And so, you know, fortunately, you know, it is, I am running a startup business, but have a 40 year track record behind me. So I've been doing the same exact thing for 40 years. Just have a different business card now. And, you know, I very much miss my buddies at oldcolor. Um, but, uh, life goes on.

00:31:48
You make the most of it. And I'm building a new team that I'm very excited about. And, uh, I think we're going to do some really terrific things. Well, I can tell just from, uh, you know, I followed you. I follow you on Twitter, or x, as we're calling it now, I guess.

00:32:02
Um, and just from the reaction in the last, uh, couple of months from people, you clearly have a fantastic reputation. And, um, I know that the real estate industry is all about relationships, and you can't be this successful for this long of a time period and not treat people well. Speak to that element of real estate brokerage, the relationship side. How important is that? Jim?

00:32:31
Yeah, Jamie, it's everything I tell folks that the real estate business is not really the real estate business. It's the information business and the relationship business. And so much of your level of success in this business comes down to how you treat people. And do you keep your word. And we've always put the client's interests first.

00:32:57
I get grief sometimes from folks who are ignorant and don't understand that market presence is an important component of serving your client. If I'm on television or in the paper or I'm giving a speech somewhere, it's not to boost my ego, it's to increase the probability that I'm going to get in front of some information that's going to benefit one of my clients. And at the end of the day, it's all about your client. Somebody happened to see me on CNBC and calls up and says, hey, I want to buy a building, and that person will pay 10% more than anybody else. I've just done a great service for my client, and that's the whole reason that you do that kind of thing.

00:33:48
But the relationships are so important.

00:33:54
And I tell everybody, if you're in this business as a broker and you want to make sure you're constantly doing the right thing, just pretend that your client is your mom or your dad, if they own the building, what advice would you give them? And it's hard to make mistakes when you think of it that way. Sure, I love that. That's really good. Speak to how your new business and you mentioned AI.

00:34:23
I do have some follow up questions after this, but what's the, how is your approach going to be different than every other brokerage that's out there? Well, yeah, again, I don't know everything that everybody else is doing, so I assume that folks are exploring this and wanting to use it. And I think that the interesting thing about AI is the extraordinary power that it has. And so I think there are two main functionalities that AI will have relative to real estate brokerage. One is in the prospecting for new business part of the business and the execution of business, and the other is on the data interpretation basis and understanding data better.

00:35:15
On that front, I think that while the potential is massive, the unfortunate reality is that most data sets in the real estate industry are terrible. And if you put terrible data into the best algorithmic models that you possibly could come up with, it's going to produce poor results. Garbage in equals garbage out, right? Yep. We've really focused on the integrity of our data sets.

00:35:45
You know, I've been a statistics guy my whole career, so we've used the same exact methodology to calculate our data, going all the way back to 1984. So we have 40 years of data that's been collected the same way, analyzed the same way, and that's really important because it's not the absolute. Numbers themselves have very little meaning. If I told you that in 2019, there was $26 billion of investment sales in Manhattan, that number, you don't know what to make of that, right? But if you know that at the peak of the market in 2015, there was 57.4 billion, and in 2020, it dropped to 14 billion, all of a sudden you're starting to kind of get a sense of how that number is.

00:36:39
And so it's the relationship between the numbers that matters more so than the numbers themselves. But if you haven't calculated data the same way, you lose that relationship between the fluctuation in numbers. Every data person looks at buildings a little differently. What do you include? How do you calculate it?

00:37:05
Do you use rentable footage? Grow square footage? What do you do with vacancy? Do you make projections for vacancy or not? What are your, what are your vacancy rates that you're using?

00:37:18
And if you're not doing this consistently, then the data is very, very staticky. So we're taking models, we're building great algorithmic models to analyze the data, and the data will have as much integrity as any data set possibly could have. Makes total sense. The data integrity and then, and also the relation, the human side and your experience and your reputation, those are elements that are hard to just show up with, even if you're now incorporating AI into your business. But the AI side, it's just incredible.

00:37:59
I mean, I was just at a mastermind event in Dallas, and I spoke with. There was a presentation on AI and what's going on in the investment space with AI and the speaker. The presenter had to redo his presentation multiple times because AI has changed so much in the last. I mean, he didn't have to re present, but he had to re prepare multiple versions of his presentation because it's just changing so rapidly. It's just incredible.

00:38:32
Yeah. Jamie, when I explain this to folks, I say, when I started in 1984, I sat at my desk. I had no computer, no fax machine, and no cell phone. We carried rolls of quarters around to go to the corner and make a call from a payphone. The extent to which things have changed over the last 40 years, I think, will pale in comparison to what's going to happen over the next five, because just exactly what you said.

00:39:01
We look at an AI product and say, wow, this is really cool. We could do this with it. We could do that with it. And two months later, it's like, oh, that thing's, you know, that's obsolete, antiquated already. This new is so much better and can do so much.

00:39:18
The rate of change is remarkable. And I'm trying to stay as on top of it as I possibly can, but it is very, very rapidly changing world. It sounds like from I did was doing a little research in preparation for this. And it sounds like you've brought in some, some talent on that front as part of your team. Can you speak to that briefly?

00:39:39
Yeah, sure. My coo, Seth Samowitz is an AI guy. He started companies, started AI companies. He understands the business. And we started working together, trying to adopt some of what he has incorporated or what he's developed over time into what we were doing day to day, looking at all of our systems, looking at all of the techniques that we use and figure out how to do them better, more efficiently, more effectively through AI and through working together.

00:40:10
I'm like, oh, my God, this is going to change the world. I said to him, Seth, you got to come work with me. You got to come work with me. I don't want you doing this for anybody else. Come on, let's go.

00:40:20
Let's make this happen. And it's really been remarkable. There's so many cool things. I mean, if we do another podcast session two years from now, we're going to be talking about stuff we couldn't even imagine today. And it's really a remarkable thing.

00:40:36
Well, as we start to wrap up here, Bob, thats a great segue. I was going to ask you, what does your team look like right now and what do you think it will look like in twelve months from now? Yeah, well, I have some great folks with me. Ryan Candel is my transaction associate who is senior vice president here and runs my transactions. I have Taylor Bello, whos my director of communications.

00:41:05
My executive assistant Denise came along. We have mo regulato as my social media manager. Dwayne Buress is my research partner. We have Ed Winslow, who is in charge of Pr and SEO. And we have several brokers, about two dozen brokers we're in active negotiation with talking about what the opportunities are here.

00:41:32
That being said, I really think I want to keep the business to around 15 to 20 professionals max. Don't want to have the big 250 person shop again. I don't think it's needed today, but couldn't be more enthusiastic about where we're headed. Love it. All right.

00:41:53
Are you ready for some rapid fire questions, Bob? Sure. All right. This one does trip people up sometimes. What do people misunderstand about you?

00:42:03
I think what I had said already, that all of my market presence. And I do a ton of market presence stuff. I make calls, I do emails, do text, do hard mail. Still a lot of hard mail, which I think is great. Underrated.

00:42:16
I engage with the press regularly. I court the press. I like to be quoted in the press. You want to do television, all of that kind of market presence stuff. But it's all because it's in my client's best interest.

00:42:30
And people don't understand that. They think it's all about me and my ego couldn't be more completely wrong. It's all about the client. Ask any of my clients that I've gotten record pricing for if they want me to be out doing all these activities or sitting in my basement. Love it.

00:42:48
That's great. We've talked about some of the ups and downs over the last 40 years that you've had professionally and how you were in particular carrying a lot of personal debt. Maybe in that vein, what was one of your biggest failures and what did you learn from that? I think probably one of the biggest failures I'm trying to correct now is the slow adoption of technology. I remember when email first came out, I remember I had a client say, hey, do you guys have email?

00:43:16
I'm like, email? What's that? You're going to look at your computer? And I never even went on computers, even when people had computers on the desk. So very, very slow adoption of technology, but that I'm trying to get in front of that today.

00:43:31
Got it. If you could go back and give your 18 year old self some advice, what would that be? Be an expert. Read as much as you can. Get the advice of people who have been there and done that, apropos of what we discussed earlier, and just realize that there are three things that separate the brokers who do the very best from the rest of the pack, and that is expertise in a very narrowly defined segment of the market.

00:44:04
Passion for the business, which will get you through the tough times and live to enjoy the good times. And then discipline, being very, very disciplined. I love the quote from Abe Lincoln, who said that discipline is choosing between what you want now and what you want most. A lot of what we do in brokerage is not glamorous, but you have to do it over and over and over again. You need discipline to do that.

00:44:31
Love that. Besides Abe Lincoln, if you could go, if you could have coffee with any historical figure, whom would you choose? Oh, gosh, that's such a great question. I think one of the people, and there are a lot of them, but I would love to sit down and have a beer and a hot dog with Babe Ruth. That would be so cool just to hear his stories and go behind the scenes.

00:44:56
And also one of the guys I would love to hang with is a guy named Edwin Perona. People probably don't know who that is. He owned the club El Morocco here in New York, and we sold that building in the 1990s. And on the wall of the club were all these old photographs of all the people that had been in the club. Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett and Joe DiMaggio, Marilyn Monroe and Bing Crosby, Humphrey Bogart, all these stars of their day.

00:45:31
And I'm sure that he would have. We got to know his son. But the Edward Perona senior, I'd love to talk to him about some of his experiences in the club El Morocco. And it was hopping during the fifties and sixties. Love that.

00:45:47
Great answer. This is the one. I had to add a zero, too. If you were given $100 million tomorrow, what would you do with it? I probably would.

00:45:59
Well, let's see, what would I do with it? I would probably invest a chunk of it in my business.

00:46:10
You know, I don't really know. I don't really know other than that. Other than wanting to grow the business and keep developing cutting edge marketing materials and probably plan a few more vacations with my wife and daughter. Love that. Couldn't ask you the 10,000,001 because you might not notice what is.

00:46:36
Back to your business for a moment. What's a challenge that you're facing right now? Well, challenge we're facing now is figuring out how much space we need. You know, I'm talking to brokers who we're talking about having them join us. Some of them have teams of three or four, some have teams of ten.

00:46:56
So how much space are we going to need? But that's a relatively good problem to have, so we'll figure that out. Fantastic. What is one book or two that you could recommend for my listener? I love the series, written by Doctor Benjamin Hardy and Dan Sullivan.

00:47:15
Most recently ten x is easier than two x. They also wrote the gap and the Gain and who not. How. All three of those are spectacular. I love Jim Collins.

00:47:27
Good to great. Fantastic book. Dale Carnegie stuff is all great. The Harvey McKay stuff is great. Keith Farazzi, never eat alone.

00:47:37
Bill Urey, the Harvard professor, the power of a positive. No. Bob Cialdini, the head of the psych department at From Adversity to From Adversity to Abundance Podcast Podcast, probably the leading authority in the country on persuasion, has a great series of books on persuasion. And these are the things that I think help people in life. If you're dealing with people, people skills, knowing, human behavior, psychology, you know, why people do what they do.

00:48:02
These things are so important. They should be taught in college. So much of what we learn in college is not accretive towards helping us in our lives. But those topics would help just about anybody. And so I think that, you know, I have a reading list if folks want to reach out to me.

00:48:20
My email address is bk@bkrea.com and happy to share the reading list with you, but a lot of great books there to really learn a lot from. Sounds like it. That may have been the most thorough answer we've had on that question. So that was really good. What is one question that I have not asked you that you wish I had?

00:48:44
Oh, gosh, I don't know. Maybe we referenced earlier just the inflection points in the business and I think that was kind of interesting. We worked on a geographic territory basis, and when we had all the territories in Manhattan filled, how are we going to grow? So we said we could either get into different business lines or go out to the outer boroughs and sell buildings there. At the time, the outer boroughs were not cool, certainly not as cool as they are today.

00:49:20
We decided to not get into other business lines to keep selling buildings, but just opened the Queen's office, then opened in Brooklyn, opened the division that handled the Bronx. And then years later, we had all of this sales territories in New York City filled. So again, same decision. Do we get into different business lines or do we go to Philadelphia or Boston or Chicago? And at that time, we made a different decision.

00:49:48
We decided to get into other business lines, the aforementioned mortgage brokerage business. We got into the retail brokerage business and different decisions at different points in time based on different sets of dynamics at those times. Love that. Maybe if we can get you back for episode two, maybe we'll focus on inflection points. That seems like a really powerful.

00:50:14
Yeah, another big one. Right after 911, you know, 911 happened in New York, shocked the city. A lot of folks were downsizing, letting people go. We had from 1988 to 2001, we grew from three to 21 two years. We decided to go out after 911, hire a director of HR, hire all these great people that were out of work, and we were 150 people two years later.

00:50:44
And that totally could have sunk us if the market didn't come back. But the market came roaring back and we had boots on the ground at the time and really took advantage of that. And then we went from selling two or three times the number of buildings as the number two firm to selling four times the number of buildings as the number two firm. And that was a counterintuitive, risky move. But we really believed in the city.

00:51:08
We believed it would come back strong. We believed in New Yorker, put our money where our mouth was, and it turned out to be one of the best things we ever did. That's fantastic. Second to last question. When you sold your business for $100 million, how did that change your life, your personal life?

00:51:26
Well, it. It allowed me to take care of my family in a way that, you know, my. My wife and daughter will never have to worry about anything, uh, moving forward. And, um, you know, allowed me to take a deep breath and, um, you know, not have to be as concerned about some things. Um, but that definitely was a life changing thing.

00:51:51
I miss Massey nackel. But, um, it was such a positively life changing thing for me. I don't regret for a second having sold the business. Well, yeah, it sounds like your decade of. Of negative to zero net worth finally, plus more decades after that certainly paid off.

00:52:14
People might look at, oh, he's an overnight success. Yeah. After three decades. Right? But awesome.

00:52:21
Bob Knakal, where can our listeners find you? Online. Yeah, online, you definitely email me at bk@bkria.com. I'm on all, excuse me, all the social media platforms. So put Bob Knakal in there.

00:52:37
I don't know exactly what my handles are on each of them, but my name is in there. So whether it's Twitter or X or LinkedIn or Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, I think I'm on all of them. So you can find me. And I do respond to DM's. So happy to share the reading list with folks.

00:53:01
And also, I put together a packet of lessons learned in those 26 years and 46 days of running maths. Nacl, I'm happy to share that with folks as well. That's fantastic. That's great. Well, you are easy to find online.

00:53:16
I can verify that. Thank you, Bob. This has been really good. Love to have you back. This is your wealth of knowledge.

00:53:25
And I'm excited for the future for you. And, yeah, thank you so much for. For spending your time with us. Thanks, Jamie. Really, it was great to be with you.

00:53:34
And to all those budding entrepreneurs out there is go for it. We live. Once you get one chance, make the most of it. Love it. And to piggyback on that, thank you all for spending your most valuable resource with us.

00:53:49
And that is your time. Thanks, everyone. Take care. Thank you. For spending your most valuable resource with us.

00:53:56
Your time. If you like the show, please share it with your friends and fellow podcast listeners. One entrepreneur at a time. We can change the world. See you next time.