Designing Dreams: Lance Cayko's Architectural Journey

Rich Bennett Intro
Lance Cayko co-founded F9 Productions, evolving it from a humble two-person outfit to one of Northern Colorado's standout architecture and construction firms, boasting a 386% growth rate. Recognized with the Architizer A+ Award in 2016, Lance's over two-decade career is not just about business growth but also community involvement. He's turning a community garden into a non-profit and teaches at the University of Colorado Boulder. Beyond business, Lance co-hosts the top-tier podcast 'Inside the Firm' and enjoys family time, especially fishing adventures in Colorado and North Dakota. Join us to hear Lance's insights on starting a business from the ground up and podcasting success.

Rich Bennett 0:00
So first of all, let's welcome to the show me a great to have you on. 

Lance Cayko 0:04
Thanks for having me, Rick. 

Rich Bennett 0:06
Oh, my pleasure. And you know, you're out there in Colorado, so I got to ask right away, man, how's the weather out there? 

Lance Cayko 0:12
Weather's been awesome. Yeah, it's been a nice, cool summer I have wanted. I've been here since 2008, so, you know, 15 years is the first actual cool summer that we've had. We had a real winter, so. And all the natives, the coroner now is telling me this is how it's supposed to be. So I'm thoroughly enjoying it. 

Rich Bennett 0:33
So what's the high out there? 

Lance Cayko 0:35
Lately? It's only been like 85, but usually like in the last. Yeah. Yeah. So but like I said, the previous 14, 13 summers or whatever were 90 degrees plus and just nonstop and then like no rain for like three or four months. And now we get a nice rain shower probably almost every afternoon on the front range here and All right, cool. Down to 75 and we're sleeping with our windows open. It's just beautiful. 

Rich Bennett 0:59
Nice. Got to love that. Yeah. Now, you say you're not from Colorado originally. 

Lance Cayko 1:03
Originally from North Dakota, sir. 

Rich Bennett 1:05
Oh, really? Yeah. Okay. So what made you decide to move to Colorado first of all? 

Lance Cayko 1:10
Oh, great question. Yeah. So I graduated from North Dakota State University in 2008, and when I started applying for jobs that last semester when I was going to graduate, we were targeting three different areas. My, my former wife and I, we're looking in the Portland area. We were looking in Montana and we were looking and eventually Colorado. I had Summer. I grew up summering in the Rocky Mountain region in Idaho, in Montana. So like I and growing up in North Dakota, when we would go to vacation, I was we would leave the mountains and I'd go, Why don't we just live here and there? I could just. We love it so much. Like, why don't we just live here? So I landed the most interviews was out in Colorado, seven interviews and up in Aspen, Boulder, Denver and that sort of thing. My one person, my my wife, I at that time left when we left Fargo to go do the interviews over spring break, it was -70 below with the wind chill in Fargo, North Dakota. What and when we got to Colorado, in Lyons, Colorado, it was 70 above and this was in March. And I wow. We went and stayed with my aunt and uncle. And I said, Hey, how come nobody knows about this weather? And they're like, We want to keep it that way. 

So I was like, sold. And it was like, you know, the the low humidity, the mountains. I'm a huge outdoorsman, I'm a professional fisherman. And whenever I'm not building stuff or designing stuff, so that's what keeps me here, man. I just I just have my brother and one of my best friends out. Last weekend, I took him on a private guiding to a fishing tour up near the Continental Divide. We caught cutthroats at 12,200 above sea level, did a catch and cook on the shore. And it's that kind of stuff where I just that's my life. 

Rich Bennett 2:57
So you do all your fishing out there? 

Lance Cayko 2:59
I do most of it, yeah. I try to make one one trip out to the coast each week, usually Florida, because I have a couple of friends down there. I love Florida. It's nice and it's nice and free down there. And then I go to North Dakota a lot. I still go back to at least two or three times a year and do some fishing in North Dakota. Paddle fishing is a big thing up there right now in these big old behemoths. And then I go back in the winter to do some ice fishing to fill the freezer up with Walleyes. 

Rich Bennett 3:28
Now, do you guys have any snakehead fish out there in Colorado? Well, let me rephrase that. Have you fished for any? 

Lance Cayko 3:37
I have. So I did catch one in Florida three years ago in Lake Okeechobee. We did a bass fishing, guided a little guided thing and everything, and Carl went out there. So I am familiar with them. We don't have them in Colorado. Okay. Hopefully ever North Dakota. I think it's too cold, which is good. 

Rich Bennett 3:56
Yeah. Hopefully you'll never get them. Yeah. Now, did you eat when you caught? 

Lance Cayko 4:00
No, no. The guy. Oh, you know what the guy did is he goes, he goes, Here's you guys. You guys want to see what we do with these things? And I was like, Well, yeah, I mean, you're the guy here. Smacked it with a bat and threw it through back in the water. So, like, he killed it off he disposal? Yep. Yeah. He's like, we kill these things. I was like. 

Rich Bennett 4:15
Oh, there's these. You're starting to see some of the seafood market. Sell them around here. Really? Oh, one of the best fish I ever had. Really? Yes. It is awesome. If you ever get a chance, you go. You come to this again or whatever. And if you catch any, you have to eat it. These guys have these pontoon boats set up with the lights, and most of them go out in the evening or at night and they hit them off the boats. They both fish and. Oh man, yeah, it's, it's I. 

Lance Cayko 4:45
Will definitely try Rich. I'm a very adventurous ear, so I will 100% do that. 

Rich Bennett 4:50
Oh, you said you got it. You know, you don't know if you like it until you try it. 

Lance Cayko 4:54
The closest thing we have is there called eel Pilot up in North Dakota. And they they look very similar, but they, you know, they don't walk on land like these snakeheads, Right. Stuff like that and go back into the ponds. They call it poor man's lobster. And so I'm wondering if there's a correlation there because they're very long like lives like a eel, like fish. 

Rich Bennett 5:16
Yeah. 

Lance Cayko 5:16
Yeah. 

Rich Bennett 5:17
So interesting that now I'm getting hungry. All right, so let's let's get into the business, first of all, because I get a lot of entrepreneurs listen. And first of all, why did you decide to become an entrepreneur? 

Lance Cayko 5:30
You know, my analogy that I like to make with that is that I had the rich dad and the poor dad. So just like, just like and I didn't read that book until man, I think it was maybe late twenties or early thirties, but once I did, it finally clicked for me. I was like, oh, I had, I had I had that exact scenario. I had Rich Dad and then imported the poor. Dad was actually my dad who raised me. And God bless him because I'm actually glad that he wasn't in pursuit as an entrepreneur. Like he never had that gusto about him. Right. What he did is he stayed on the. So I grew up between a sugar beet farm and a cattle ranch in northwestern northwestern North Dakota. He maintained the sugar beet farm with his dad and did everything in his power. Basically, he sacrificed sort of his life and his best earning years to just keep the farm going, keep his mom fed, that sort of thing. But money was a huge problem. It was there was a lot of anxiety in the house around it. I remember one winter, way back in the day, I got my first computer from my aunt and I'm old enough to remember we had dial up modems. We had the AOL CDs, and I thought I would I that I have a modem, I have the Internet. I'm getting these AOL CDs like I'm going to I'm going to get the Internet right. So I plug it in and dialed long distance to Fargo, North Dakota, because I grew up in northwest North Dakota. And I thought I just thought it's the Internet, though, but it's not a phone call. So like, there's no way this could be long distance. And sure enough, they got a bill for it. Yeah, you got a bill for $1,000 later on. 

F1 S3 7:01
Whoa. 

Lance Cayko 7:02
And for them, it was huge, right? Like this. For them, that is a catastrophic problem. Oh, my God. Do we have to take out a personal loan to pay this? How do we handle this? It was it was that big of an issue back in the nineties, as would have been. And then I went to go work for his best friend, who was a general contractor. And Bruce and Bruce is not my dad, but he's my metaphoric coal rich dad. And Bruce never worried about money in that kind of way. And after I work for him for a summer in the middle of that summer, he said something very profound to me that just seems probably elementary to other people. But again, like I came from a very blue collar, working, working class family. My mom is very loyal to her job like she's been in for 40 years. She's a dent. She was a dental assistant. Now she manages the office but not entrepreneurial. Bruce's first entrepreneur ever encountered. So I was working for Bruce for that that first summer when I was 13. And what we were doing is roofing and we would tear off. We tear off and put it back on a roof every day, asphalt shingles. But halfway through the summer, Bruce pulled me aside and he said, he said, I'm paying you 725 an hour. What do you think I'm charging the clients I got 725 an hour, right? And he laughed and I was like a little embarrassed. And he goes, No, no, no. He goes, I charge clients like two, three, four times your labor, depending on the job anymore. You have to come in. I go, Oh, why do you do that? Well, I have to pay for. And he pointed around, you know, the tools, all the overhead, the insurance liability, getting the clients, the downtime, etc., and then whatever. After I'm done paying you and paying for those things, then I get something called profit, right? I try to be above 10% on what I do for that. And I go and then it clicked for me. And then I looked around at the crew and I was like, started doing the math. I'm like, Oh, well, that's why Bruce doesn't worry about money. Like he's he's multiplied himself. Yeah. So it really came from a place of I did not want to have me as an adult have carry that anxiety about money because like you're a slave to the anxiety at that point and I'm a, I'm a person all about freedom, personal freedom, financial freedom, spiritual freedom, every kind of freedom like that is a crux of what I or what I do in my fiber of my being. And I know that my life is most happy in that way, and I want my kids to go through that. So that's that's the primary reason why I think the catalyst for why I became an entrepreneur and that's what I wanted to be first and foremost was I was actually a builder, not an architect, right? So I kind of went back and forth. I went to builder school, then architecture school, and now I do all of it. Builder, architect, real estate developer, real estate investor, podcaster, professional fisherman. I try to make money every single day. I wake up. 

Rich Bennett 9:45
Not through all of that. Yeah, another of that at all. That's one of the things back in high school that was my dream to become an architect. I always wanted to do that. Then the Marine Corps found me. Yeah, so that didn't happen. So actually, what were the initial challenges you actually faced starting off nine productions, especially during the aftermath of the Great Recession? 

Lance Cayko 10:05
Yeah. 

Rich Bennett 10:06
And how did you overcome them? 

Lance Cayko 10:07
Oh, my gosh. Yeah. So many challenges. So many challenges. Well, you know, so my business partner and I his name is his name is Al Gore. He's he's a real Al Gore. 

Rich Bennett 10:17
Right. And not not the vice president. 

F1 S3 10:20
Yeah. 

Lance Cayko 10:21
He we both went out, we graduated top of our class, went our separate ways. He went out to New York City. I went to Boulder, Colorado. We both worked for this title that people, architects give ourselves is like Starchitect. I worked for these very famous, regionally famous architects. He worked for internationally award winning architect Starchitect, and we got laid off within a year of working for both of those folks. 

F1 S3 10:46
Hmm. 

Lance Cayko 10:47
A la A big part of it was the Great Recession. To be fair to those people and have any kind of empathy for them, 50% of architects, engineers, contractors, people in the building industry were laid off during the Great Recession. And now we're going through a tech recession right now. And you're seeing figures of like ten, 20% layoffs. Well, I'm here to tell you like it was worse and nobody had any mercy for us either. Like society was really anti us because they were saying because of jealousy. I mean, they were seeing how many people were making money hand over fist. It was all propped up by the Fed and loose lending and everything. So really their their anger was misdirected. But I digress. So when we got laid off, I had two children to defeat. At that point, a wife. I have four now. But then at that point, you know, I didn't want to go back to North Dakota. AL When he got laid off, he thought he'd go back for a master's degree. He did. He finished it. He thought, if I just want to get one more master's degree construction management, and by the time I get out, the recession will be over. Well, we don't know any better. I mean, we're just young 20 year old men. We have no idea. Like sometimes it's like five or six years. I mean, it's really and that one was so deep. So I used I fell back on all of my contracting experience, my handyman work when I did as it put up Craigslist ads. And I just I out competed all the other like handyman and contractor people. And I went after all these cash jobs, basically working for a lot of like just housewives in Boulder. Right. And for cash And I never had to take unemployment and stuff like that. And eventually those ads led to I landed a first custom house for four mice for me to design a clinic that I actually brought back to the firm that laid me off, ironically, and then a bunch of CAD work. But that was sort of nationwide for that. I had this base of work all on my own and I said, Hey. And Al graduated nice, And he was like, I got to get out of Mom and Dad's house. He had to go back to mom and dad. So it's. 

F1 S3 12:48
Like super. 

Lance Cayko 12:50
Super dejected. I mean, you know, Yeah, he was embarrassed, right? So and I said, well, he department right above me opened up. I go, I know we were going to do this like a decade after we graduated. It's like a year or two. I've got all this work left. If you got enough savings, let's just try it. Let's see it. We were on too, so we had to really navigate through what you can and cannot do design wise. And you can do a lot in Colorado. You can do house up to 13,000 square feet. You do small commercial projects. You there still. 

Rich Bennett 13:20
Is that being licensed. 

Lance Cayko 13:21
Without being without being licensed. Yep. Oh wow. And then. And then. And then our target was then we had to find a mentor who would be the prime on some of our contracts where we couldn't go after them as unlicensed people. And then we would get all of our like experience points and eventually get licensed, right? So that was one big challenge was just under just navigating the bureaucracy and the laws and trying to understand that. And the other big one was this kind of ties into the name F nine productions was we didn't have any built work. So like most, you know, you have to if whether you're a contractor or an architect or web designer, like you need to show people examples of, here's what I've done now. Trust me, trust me with your money and your business or whatever you're doing property to do a professional job. All we had were architectural renderings produced in the computer and the hotkey on the keyboard for that work that we would produce with the software was f nine. So I we had to get nine productions and. 

Rich Bennett 14:22
We had a funny feeling that's how that name came up. 

F1 S3 14:25
Yeah. 

Lance Cayko 14:25
So we convince people through that to hire us and we starved for the first three or four years. In 2013, the economy started to take off. We are, we are the garage story. But except from an apartment and Alex's dining room, we've grown the company from low six figures to high seven figures. We want we want a bunch of awards. We're one of the top firms in Colorado now. We have a staff of seven. We have two locations. And from there then we were on HGTV a couple of times building and designing these tiny houses, 

and then we spun off two other companies, a real estate development company. I'm sitting in the building right now that we built, designed, built and developed. Very proud of that. And then now we're also full fledged general contractor for that 14 productions. So that's that's a wow synopsis. And as quick as I could make it. 

Rich Bennett 15:16
Well, it correct me if I'm wrong, but I mean you growth wise is what, like 385% or something, right? Yes. So what do you attribute that growth to? 

Lance Cayko 15:27
It was when we took. So what he's what for your listeners we're Rich's referring to is we we're going a two year period we had that kind of growth of like almost a 400% growth in in the architecture business that we did. What it was was it ended up being that we just took on more responsibility and we got more reward. So most architects are just content with we want to just design and draw pretty buildings and that's the extent of what we'll do. Well, you're only taking out so much responsibility, showing going to get so much reward and a lot of that is like profit, right? Or just money capital. We ended up saying, you know, we want to be the architect, we want to be the real estate developer, and we want to be the builder. And it was and it was the big development project that we ended up getting off the ground, which is a lifelong dream for me to wear all three of those out. So that's really that is what I attribute to it. And then I would attribute even further, like last year we had in just the architecture firm, 30% profit. Typically, service based industries only do about 13%. Wow. But it's the same thing. We are just taking on more responsibility, higher risk, bigger reward. 

Rich Bennett 16:36
Now, you guys actually designing for people throughout the country? 

Lance Cayko 16:40
Yes. 

Rich Bennett 16:41
Yep. Okay. 

Lance Cayko 16:42
Yep. I mean, well, it depends. So like, people will contact us. Maybe we've done like a franchise. For example, we did the dog franchise down here, which is like a boutique pet store, and we do dog grooming and stuff. But then they were like, we want to expand and have a location in Tennessee. And we said, okay, no problem. So we had to get licensed in Tennessee and do that little more. Pretty simple actually process. And then we've been licensed in Idaho and North Dakota. Okay. Primarily we're contracted in Colorado, but if anybody is listing and they have property on Mars, I will I will design for you one more. 

Rich Bennett 17:20
You could go to L.A. fly. 

F1 S3 17:22
Yeah, right. 

Rich Bennett 17:24
Actually, speaking of which, well, not Ellen, but because your Web site, F Nine Productions is an awesome looking website. Thank you. And I noticed down there in the ideas. Can you tell us about the one for Amazon? 

Lance Cayko 17:38
Oh yeah thanks for asking about that. We one thing one little hack that we kind of figured out right away when we started f nine was trying to align a one fund project per year, which is a non-paid project. Like it's sort of like a passion project. A lot of people do this one one passion project a year. If we aligned it with the timing of big events that were happening in the media, we could generate our own press. And so yeah, and so the first example that we did with that was Fargo, North Dakota is notorious for flooding. They flood all the time and so Al with his thesis, his master's thesis in college, he designed this house that was up, up on stilts. And so we quickly turned that into something we called flood house. And we got on the cover of the Fargo paper. For that. We went the the images and the project kind of went viral over the Internet, starting with like art daily dot com. And so then every single year we would do one fun project that kind of was timely with again, the media. The next one was the the tiny houses that we did. The next one after that was the Doomsday Dwellings project that we did doomsday dwellings dot com because in every in 2012 everybody remembers like the world's worst. 

Rich Bennett 18:55
And the mining. 

Lance Cayko 18:56
Yeah. Yes. Was all over Google trends. Well then the next big one was if everybody remembers Amazon was shopping around to put their second headquarters in some city and cities were some cities were completely just clamoring over and like giving them insane tax break benefits and all that Denver was not Denver were sort of tepid in trying to reach out to them. 

Rich Bennett 19:18
Okay. 

Lance Cayko 19:19
So what we said is like, I bet the most shocking thing we could show is what would it look like if we put Amazon's headquarters smack dab in the middle of Denver? Like, what would that look like space wise? They're huge. The big one of the biggest companies in the world, right? So, like, they need a lot of warehouse space and office space and all that. So that's where that idea came from. So l l set aside two days and he came up with the design and the concepts for it. And then my job was as a social media guru, was to make it go viral and get the attention of local media and hopefully Jeff Bezos. So we we did that over the course of a week, and we did we didn't get a call from Jeff Bezos, but we did on our email tracking software like people on Amazon were ended up opening up the email. They saw this concept and everything. Obviously they chose, I think, DC or Maryland or something like that for the second headquarters, not Denver. But what it ended up resulting in was then Fox, 31 out of Denver and Denver, seven came up to the office, interviewed us about this concept. So we made those local news stations, which is awesome. We got some exposure from there. We made a couple. We sent out press releases to local papers. We got in a couple of local papers and a real estate developer ended up seeing the article and then they called us the next day and they said, Hey, I've got a piece of property and I know it looks like you guys, you big stuff. They really thought we were doing like this. And I was like, Well, well, it was almost like it was a it was our we were making up our own press. I explained it to them just like I did you now. And they said, Well, I've got a piece of property in Denver. I want to develop it with some townhomes. And we're looking for somebody young, creative, just like you guys are, and that I can work with that's local. And we ended up getting that project with them. So we're always like, and that's how it's kind of always worked for us with that kind of press. We just kind of try to make up things at time with things that are in, in the that are going to be in the media. 

Rich Bennett 21:21
That's a great marketing ploy. I mean, that's awesome. Thank you. And you mentioned something to press releases. 

Can you tell everybody? Because I believe they're still important, but how important they are because that's something I don't see a lot of businesses or entrepreneurs doing. 

Lance Cayko 21:41
Yeah, they're still super important. 

You know what? I've been we've evolved even further with the press. So the press releases absolutely 100% work like I did. The fundamental thing, I don't think I hope Gen Z, if there's any Gen Z listeners here, there's got to be some millennials because I'm even an older I'm an older millennials, like right on the edge of Gen X, right? I'm telling you that stuff, that traditional stuff works. Here's why works. It's so simple. If you are able to put together a simple one page press release with some images, like if you're a designer or anything, actually you're doing anything cool you're doing, you are making the editors jobs easy, That's what they. 

F1 S3 22:18
Want is. 

Lance Cayko 22:19
That's all they want. Like, Oh, you handed me an article. Yeah. Now I get to go home and go fishing or whatever, right? It's so simple. It's so simple that you get, like, you go to their website and just find their where you can send media inquiries or guest articles and stuff like that. Like just spend a morning one morning. If you're starting a business or you have a business right now and look up your local paper, all the papers in your county, maybe you do the counties adjacent, that's probably good enough for a start. Get a nice email list together, right? Go hire fiber if you need to. Or just just Google a press release template and start doing some press releases. I'm cool stuff that you're doing. You know, if you're a builder or architect like me, I'm breaking ground on a cool house or you just got hired to do something really neat, or you or even you just hired like a bunch of staff, just all you're doing is doing their job for them very easily. Yeah. 

Rich Bennett 23:17
I think a lot of people are missing the boat there. Yeah, it's. It's very important. You're getting the word out. What's it cost you? Nothing. Yeah, maybe a little bit of time. A little time? Yeah, that's it. And actually, with the architecture industry, how has your design philosophy evolved over the two decades that you've been in it? 

Lance Cayko 23:38
You know, it's procurement philosophy. I think first that comes for us. So when when we started out our business, you know, we I'm glad we started out talking about like how we did it and how difficult it was and especially like just getting the work. We were already climbing up. We were already climbing up a hill. Then we ended up having to climb off a mountain every day because we didn't have any built work. Plus, since there were so many laid off architects, then it was even harder to. There was very little work. A lot of architects that. That's right. The short and the short of it, right. We would take on anything. And I think now that we finally evolved, you know, basically 13 years later is now instead of winning over 50% of the enquiries contracts with the increase we're getting, we're comfortable only only winning about 25% or less. And a lot of it is price waiting out people through pricing. And so that we are narrowing down to like we're trying to get the highest quality clients. So with us doing that now and the most highest quality clients we can get at this point in our and our careers is then when we do get those very special clients. So an example of that is like on our website or you just, you just Google East Watch House, Colorado, that is probably our most famous and iconic single family house so far. And that client was super special. And like our our ideal client is somebody who has acreage, you know, bigger a bigger piece of property. So like we're not having to worry about being too close to the property and we're just a lot more free in what we can do. Yeah. And if the client, if that same client comes to us and they instead of showing us images of what they want or they already have a sketch or anything like that, if they're just saying like, Hey, treat us like a blank canvas, we're we're trusting you as artists. Then we get into a really ethereal and spiritual space with that client, and I make the pitch to them and I say, like, it's a sin if I don't go visit your site before we start designing it. So, you know, we come, we do. I make sure I I'm gleaning as much information is from them as I as I can. Tell me about your hates. Tell me about your positives. Tell me about your fears. Tell me if you've ever worked with another architect, tell me what your ultimate goal is with this house. Tell me about your lifestyle. And then you know we do that. How many bedrooms, how many baskets, that sort of thing really quantify, which we're trying to quantify quality, the quality things, the quality, lifestyle stuff. Plus obviously like this, the amount of space they need and everything. And then, you know, I try to do that and then I try to just sit on it or walk on it or hike on it in my head for up for for a good 72 hours at least. A lot of that time I'm in the mountains and I haven't drawn anything yet. Okay. And I'm letting all of that, all of that stuff just coalesce in my brain. And by the time Monday or Tuesday comes comes around, I'm ready to just sort of do like a flurry of sketches with what staff member with some concepts that I'm thinking about doing. And but all of that is informed from two different things, right? It's from all that client 

interview process that we're doing and then the site visit and we really try to understand exactly what the site, how the house and the site or the whatever building and site, how they want to have like a symbiotic relationship with with with the environment. I mean, we're not like hippy dippy green people, but there's we're all about efficiency for sure. Like, right, Like it's, it's, I think it's immoral to not be efficient with materials or like we're facing and like, capture the sun or get rid of the get rid of the sun if it's too hot and that sort of thing. That's, that's, that's where we're at right now in in that way. And then the biggest thing we layer on is like we have nine principles on our website and one of them is like, serve the client, serve the contract right, and serve the city. So we really try to be servants in in that way to people almost at a biblical level. You know, we're we're trying to kind of walk in those shoes. 

Rich Bennett 27:45
All right. So you've designed stuff all different sizes. And I would think that and correct me if I'm wrong, but it's two tiny houses, I would think that had to be one of the hardest things to design, because when you design something like where you're at now, you got more space. Yeah. To put stuff was the tiny house is more challenging. 

Lance Cayko 28:09
They were super, they were very unique. It was a very easy okay and you know, it wasn't so much the space actually, because I think that's our if you're a if you're a decent architect or a designer, interior doesn't matter. You are supposed to be a master of, of, of like designing space. That's where the qualities. Right. The actual hardest challenge was one that we made for ourselves. And that is they're foldable. They're like transforming tiny houses. So when we first when we did the, you know, we were looking at the tiny house movement and it was starting to trend right after the Great Recession, because what was happening is you had all these millennials and Gen X and going, Well, we're the the opposite reaction to the McMansions during that time. All the free money, all the easy money was all the debt was back to minimalism. And they were like, What can I can I live in a frickin tiny house? 200 square feet with no debt and beat the system? Well, the problem with the problem was what emerged right out of the gate with that was like they all kind of look like kitschy little cabins. Yeah, they just and I thought a lot of these people were pulling them into nature. And it reminded me of like, no offense to RV people or camper people because I'm an outdoorsman, as we talked about before we started recording here was So you're pulling this thing with like very little tiny portal windows out to the woods and like, you're in the woods. I get it. But you're not it's not like you're not blending the inside and the outside. 

Rich Bennett 29:44
Yeah. 

Lance Cayko 29:45
So that was one of the first things we recognized was like, what is the opposite of this? Well, nobody's doing super modern ones. No one's doing any ones with, like, a giant sheets of glass. And then how can we maximize this constricted space? Can we make walls foldable so that they extend the space outside? Right. So if you go so if you if you if you look up, we're on. And then we landed in an HGTV episode with that is called up. It's season one, episode 13 of Big House Time in Tiny Living. And if you just look up Alex and Lance's tiny, foldable house, it's exactly you'll understand why after watching the episode, exactly what it is is like we have this giant glass wall, which is the opposite of this sort of kitschy cabin part. And then we have a deck and an awning that fold up and protect the glass wall. When you're driving down the road, when you're done driving down the road and you're camped out, then that deck folds down, that protective wall falls down, becomes a deck, the awning folds up and it becomes a protection from the sun and the rain and those sorts of the elements and everything. So we extended we basically doubled the amount of space you have possible for that tiny house because we have those kind of mechanized things. So the challenge was getting the foldable ready to work and the engineering behind it. And nobody had really done that before. And we we set a trend. And then eventually, after that episode aired, Subaru called us to build two more that were like, I mean, I hate this phrase, but like they were on they were the original tiny house on steroids because then they okay who foldable decks to foldable awnings and then actually another deck on top where they were going to place rock bands and stuff like that to do it. So the challenge was like we I really think we were the only people on the planet at that time because we again took on more responsibility and risk being the builders as well for those insects instead of just the designers. That was a challenge. 

Rich Bennett 31:37
Wow. Something else that you did, which I love, and I see a lot of entrepreneurs doing this, but then again, I see some not doing it at all. You give back to the community big time. 

Lance Cayko 31:49
Yeah. 

Rich Bennett 31:51
Explain how how you came up with the community garden and what it actually entails. 

Lance Cayko 31:56
Yeah, a lot of a lot of what I do, if you haven't noticed, is like a come from a personal place. And then it goes, it goes outward for there. So if it's, if it's a personally successful thing that happens for me, I feel like it's selfish of me to not share that with the world. So when I moved here, so growing up on that farm, right, even though I didn't work with I only last with my dad for one week. Grandma always had a garden. Dad always had a garden. If you grow up between a cattle ranch and a farm in northwest North Dakota, like you're going to understand how to actually go kill, eat your own food. Right? Like it's very, very farm to table sort of thing. So when we moved to Colorado, the only thing I could afford right away was a as an architecture fledgling architectural intern who was then laid off and Lyla was a was in our apartment and it killed me that I couldn't grow my own food. So I just went on the Internet one morning and said and looked up a community garden. And sure enough, there was a new one that just popped up and probably about 5 minutes from the apartment. 

Rich Bennett 33:02
Really? 

Lance Cayko 33:02
Yeah. Which was thank God. Thank God it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because we were just kind of this was that community garden, this, this whole community garden movement. I mean, it really was sort of in tune with like the tiny house stuff, like back to localized, you know, situations for people. People really want to try to have more control over their lives and what they take in where they live, all that. So I signed up for a plot and I was just a simple gardener for the for the first year. And then the second year I co-led the garden with a with a gal. The original umbrella nonprofit was called Growing Gardens, and they were the ones that were like establishing these. They had the funds and all of that. I led the garden for about ten years and then fast forward to 2020, then growing Garden said, okay, we've grown them big enough like we have. We almost have too many community gardens. We can't handle them all over Boulder County. We'd like to give that back. Local control. Lance, would you be interested in that? And I said, Go. Are you getting at like, I could make my own nonprofit grow? Yeah, exactly. So I jumped at it because I've always wanted to be. I mean, I grew up with, like, winning. We would summer out in Idaho and I'd work out there. Peggy Rockefeller, David Rockefeller, that's one of the ranches I would work on. And I just I always heard about her philanthropy and I thought, that's what you do when you get successful. Like you give back, you give back and you become a philanthropist. You help other people because you don't forget about the lessons about, for example, there was a community garden that I was able to grow food for my family, right? That I want to expand that. So I so I created it at Longmont Community Gardens in 2020. It became my own nonprofit. And what's really great about that is now we have more revenue control. And since then we also have like our own website, which is much more visible to the public. Now we have this huge waiting list to even get into the garden like a several dozen people deep. And what that's allowed us to do is then now that we have this demand, there's a parcel just adjacent to us of the South that we're talking to the city with. They've preliminarily approved it. We can expand. We just have to raise the funds for it. So we'll double the site where our goal is to double the size of that garden, that original garden size, which has about 40 plots right now, right in the next couple of years. And then Longmont Christian Academy reached out to us to they have another piece of land and we're looking to expand there, too. So there's going to be a big push for grant money. If people go, people can go to the website right now. If you have a listener who is really all it takes 25 care to expand one of those gardens. So you get along like community gardens dot org. You can, you can donate the 25 K that'd be awesome. You'd make my day. 

Rich Bennett 35:35
What is it again? 

Lance Cayko 35:36
Longmont Community Gardens dot org. 

Rich Bennett 35:38
Okay. Yeah, we actually have one here. Somebody started a community garden and it's it's great because anybody can go up there grab if you want something fresh and so forth. It's awesome. Now do your employees also do lot of community work as well? 

Lance Cayko 35:57
Yeah So we've done we've done a couple like a in the in the town we operate in. There is a we ended up doing sort of this art installation with some folks and we utilized we just all donate our labor and time and design talents to that. We made this really cool Artwalk downtown. And then the other one they do is so they are two two of the members of our of our firm are active members in the community garden. We sponsor one of the plots for that. Okay? And they're able to get back to the roots with that. So whenever they volunteer opportunities pop up in that kind of way, we try to take advantage of it and utilize it. 

Rich Bennett 36:35
Do you find that helps with morale as well? 

Lance Cayko 36:37
Yeah, it gives them a good break from the from the day to day. I mean, people have this. I know, Rich, you said you wanted to be an architect when you were growing up. And I think one of the fallacies that everybody has, including myself, is that, oh, I'm going to become an architect, and then I get to draw pretty buildings all day. Guess what? 80% of your time is probably like dealing with the government. It's pretty, pretty crap. Pretty crappy. 

Rich Bennett 36:59
Right? 

Lance Cayko 36:59
Yeah. 

Rich Bennett 36:59
So to become a politician. Yeah, 

I'm glad I didn't do that. And actually correct me if I'm wrong, but you're also an instructor, right? Yep. 

Lance Cayko 37:10
Yep. Yeah, exactly. This will be. And this fall semester will be the most appointments I've ever had for that. So when the economy started to pick up in 2013, we we had to hire people and we reached out to CU Boulder. They have a architecture program there. And unfortunately their candidates at that time were just not turnkey, meaning they couldn't just bring them in and they knew the software we needed to just execute the project, right? Sure, they could design, but that's not really what I need. They'll get their design time in, but for sure, most of it is like, like I said, dealing with the government, literally just drawing stuff that we need them to draw. So we reach out to CU Boulder and we said, Hey, we want to hire, but your students really aren't there. And with all due respect, how can we help? And they go, Well, your email and call is very timely. We actually have a position open not in the Environmental design department, in the engineering architecture department, but we have a lot of crossover students from the MVD. Are you guys interested in teaching the software over there? And we said yes. So Alex, we initially co-taught that course engineering drawing in the piece of software for about seven years together. And then now Alex teaches it by himself. They moved me over to the Environmental Design Department. I teach the Adobe Creative Suite over there and then my alma mater called us last summer and said, Hey, we would love for you to teach a studio up in Fargo, North Dakota. It could be hybrid, you know, maybe you just fly in once a month, twice a month. I think we can handle a lot of it over Zoom and everything. So I'll be teaching at two universities this year University of Colorado, Boulder and North Dakota State. And the coolest thing I think that we do with both of those is I mean, first of all, we're giving we're practicing professionals coming into a non-practicing environment. We try to bring that, but we really try to make it our farm league for eventual employees. Our best students become our best Tas, our best teachers become our employees. And that's been really successful. 

Rich Bennett 39:06
Have you thought about maybe starting an apprenticeship program? 

Lance Cayko 39:09
I would love to do what Frank Lloyd Wright tried to do back in the day, and that's exactly what I tried to do with Taliesin West and Taliesin East. Maybe I feel like that's maybe a decade out sort of thing, but that would be that would be a life dream 100%. 

Rich Bennett 39:26
Yeah. I'm finally well out here. We're starting to see it. Our local community college started an apprenticeship program, I think, with H-Back, and if I'm not mistaken, automotive industry like mechanics 

and electricians. But because that's something that I in all honesty, I think that's something that's missing, is educating educating more people in the trades. Yeah, it's something that's not taught a lot. And actually what's probably the most valuable piece of advice you all for your students? 

Lance Cayko 40:01
Oh, that's a really good question. What is the most it's they should they should all go work one summer of construction at a minimum. Because and I say, look, even if you because some of the people that we like I teach for environmental design, they maybe they'll become like lighting designers or maybe because they can go to different tracks, maybe they'll become a landscape architect, maybe they'll be urban planner, you know, so they'll be like the people we're fighting against in the government all the time with our projects. But I said, even if you if so, even if you're not going to be an architect or a builder, like you're going to learn practical skills. Hopefully you own a house one day and maybe you'll learn how to you change the doorknob out. Like these are very tangible things that you need to have in life. Plus, I think there's something a big problem that I have with society right? And I'm a huge fan of like Adam Corolla, and he does this, too, is like 

everything is intangible right now. A lot of things isn't intangible. And people the people who are closest to reality and are the most what I what I call based are the people out there doing the work with their hands. And there's we're missing something as a as a society and a culture by by having that part removed from us and not being in the tangible thing like the guy handling a I trust the guy handling a skill saw and confronting danger every day more his judgment than somebody handling the laptop every day. 

Rich Bennett 41:34
Yeah. Oh, yeah, absolutely. You reached a milestone, Elise. I consider it a milestone in 2016 with the Archetype, her A-plus award. Can you share the story and inspiration behind the project that won the award? 

Lance Cayko 41:48
Yeah. So that's the first tiny house that we built this. 

Rich Bennett 41:51
I really. Yeah, That's. 

Lance Cayko 41:52
The first tiny house that we designed and built. And in 2013, Alex and I were coming back from Boulder one evening and we were celebrating. We went got burgers because we were celebrating because we got our first duplex project to design with a local developer. For us, that was a big deal. Yeah. So we are coming back home and we said, Let's call Blake and see what Blake's doing. Blake was our friend from college and he was still gainfully employed at the firm he was working for. He never got laid off, but he was very unhappy. He said if I called up Blake and said, Hey, hey, Blake, How you doing? You see, he's grumbling and complaining, all this stuff. And I go, Well, Blake, you know, like, I'm my kids are in the back seat. I have a lot of responsibility. I just can't stop doing stuff and I don't have any money. And I go, How much money do you got? You don't have any responsibility. It goes, I think he said like 25 K or something. And I go, Oh, well, why don't you why don't you quit your job and build a tiny house and travel around the United States and take photos? That's if that's what makes you happy. Like, happiness is much more important than just checking the boxes. And he didn't go for it, but we went for it. And so we got home that night. And because it's just what I'll do when we know there's a good idea, we jump on it. 

Rich Bennett 43:09
Oh, you have to. 

Lance Cayko 43:09
Yeah. And you could feel it as like when you're an artist or anybody knows, it's actually like, you know, a good building just innately right with the proportions and stuff. So we get home and we buy the domain name Blake Tiny house dot com and. We made a quick mock up ups and I emailed him in the morning and I said, Okay, we're doing that. Blake, let's to design this thing, let's just start designing it. So we worked with him and another colleague, Sarah Schultz, and we designed it over the course of a year. And what was amazing is that's where we hit that media timing. Again, we were for people who didn't really know how to build a website, do any SEO, The amount of organic traffic that we started getting on that website was insane. We would get all of these media inquiries from like CBS and HGTV and all these other places because they were just on the verge of like, Oh, this is going to be a thing, these tiny houses, right? Be a thing. We're going to capitalize that and with our headlines and like doing TV shows and reality TV was really taking off at that point, right? They want to see people like out there building stuff. It was really TV's time to like to Prime. So we we got through the design and you know metaphorical gun came to Blake said he's like, guys, I'm not really going to build this. And we're like, What? Like, come on, we design engineered the whole thing. So the project, the shelf for a little bit and then my business partner in 2014. So later on, you know, about a year later, him and his fiance at that time, they went down to the Denver Garden home and garden show and HGTV was there with a tiny house and they said, We're looking for people in Colorado because Colorado is somehow a hotspot for this. We're looking for people in Colorado specifically who are ready to build a tiny house. And my business partner said, Oh, that's us. And so he signed us up and he comes back to the office and he goes, Hey, we're going to be on HGTV. 

F1 S3 45:02
All this time. 

And I was like, All right. I okay. I was like, Well. 

Lance Cayko 45:09
I'm all in. 

Rich Bennett 45:10
Price. 

Lance Cayko 45:10
Yeah, I was like, I'm all in. But our where are we going to get 50 K? And so we took out we were one of the very few business loans we've taken out was you try to be just cash positive, cash flow, you know, no debt. We took out that loan. It paid off dividends. Obviously, I'm sitting I'm in the building I'm sitting in as a result of that risk 100%. And so we took out the loan. It was a scramble to build it. We did an episode with HGTV. And then again, like I was saying, it's it was the first of its kind. It caught the attention of everybody. We submitted it for to our credit architecture. And we we won our first International Architecture award for it. 

Rich Bennett 45:49
That's awesome. Thank you. Graduations. Now you're doing something that I keep telling business. I grant it's not for all businesses, but most businesses. You're doing something that I believe they should all do. What made you decide to start the podcast? Oh, the firm. 

Lance Cayko 46:10
Yeah. It was our own success. And I don't mean that from an egotistical way. I mean that from a again, sort of this back to if something was positive for me, I should, I should share that positivity to the world because it just the positive energy is, is good, but it's less sticky. And that's actually the problem with it. The negative energy is sticky and that's the problem with it, right? It just sticks around like, you know, it's like somebody comes in, your office has a bad mood, it just lingers around for all that. All that time. 

Rich Bennett 46:42
I always said negativity breeds negativity quicker than positivity breeds positivity. 

Lance Cayko 46:47
100%, 100%. So we started the podcast in 2017. And why I'm saying that specific that year is that would have marked seven years we were in business. And if your listeners have probably heard this a lot, I'm sure you have two year rich and that is most businesses fail. Then the first seven years we got to the year seven and we went, Oh my God, we haven't failed yet. Like it's still going like, this is actually happening right Every now, every year after this, then you decrease the probability of your business failing. And we said, Man, if you think about it, you know, we got the tiny house story now, the flood house story we have if we had eventually the Amazon story, we had just finished building the last two tiny houses. And so we had all of these amazing startup stories for people and we thought we should share our story with the world. Like, I want to document this in some kind of way. So that was the primary focus of starting the podcast and why we called it Inside. The Farmers are like, We're to bring you inside the farm. We're not. If you have a no approach, like I'm not your typical architect, years is out like we really are not these kind of stiff boulder kind of architects where they think they're better than everybody. They hold everything very close to their chest. They're very proprietary. We are people of abundance. Like my one of my favorite Bible quotes is Genesis 128. Be fruitful and multiply. And I that's how I live my life. Like I don't live a life of scarcity or like fear of scarcity, that there's none of resources or any of this stuff. It was like, if something good is going to happen because of this and like, obviously you look at the brought us to this conference. I'm having a great conversation with you today. Rich. 

Rich Bennett 48:24
Well, thank. 

Lance Cayko 48:25
You. Yeah, I just I just had somebody on our show an hour before this amazing conversation with that person, you know, more and more sharing. And so so that's the primary reason why we started the podcast. So the original show episode, weekly episode is the Friday show, and that's the True Inside the Firm podcast where and what we did is we went, we went back in time metaphor. Like literally we looked up old emails and everything and we talked about what it was like to start our firm. We talked about the steps we took. We talk about bad clients, good clients, lessons learned, tips for people so they can hopefully avoid some of those issues that we had and or capitalize on some of the positive things that we found out we were able to do with all the sort of made up media that I keep talking about. And then we and then about three years into it, about 2019, 2020, I was like, you know, there's only so much content Alex and I can produce. And we still do the Friday show. We still bring in and we still talk about trials, tribulations, all of that. One of our big focuses for like a whole year was just talking about our real estate development, like what it was like, what it's like to put on that extra hat, real estate developer builder. But I found myself wanting to talk to other people like yourself, other entrepreneurs, other business owners and from other fields and expand the podcast. So that encompassed more of that entrepreneurial spirit right? Because like in the last decade, one of the most negative things that I've seen happen is like people like AOC, these politicians getting in the place. Bernie, the rise of Bernie Sanders is like, look what you guys are preaching in terms of what you want has killed more people in the world than, yes, the big bad guy over in Germany. Technically it's pretty evil. And and then there's this giant despair that like millennials and Gen Z have, like we're never going to own a house. Remember this other stuff, like the world is stacked against us. And yes, the world is stacked against you 100% like you're everybody's dealt with. Some people are dealt five aces, some people are dealt a really crappy run in poker. Right, Right. But you still get to play the game. And so I'm here to bring in positive stories, not only for me and Albert people and talk about like, hey, the American dream is still alive. Like, it might be harder for you to do it, but it is still there. Like, please don't give up. If everybody could design and build their own house and have their own business and see the kind of taxes that they end up having to pay and and just gets blown literally blown up instantly by the government, the world would be a better place. We need more entrepreneurs, we need more business people. We need people who are out there actually getting it done. Less influencers. That's the whole idea behind the podcast. 

Rich Bennett 51:13
I love it. Yeah, I mean, that's one of the reasons I started mine was basically just to talk to different people and learn stuff because I learned something new every time. It never fails, never fails. So with the podcast, what did you find to be the biggest challenge. 

Lance Cayko 51:29
Consistent, which is the key to the whole thing? 

F1 S3 51:33
Like it's. 

Lance Cayko 51:35
Just coming. Yes, coming to the mic every Friday and making sure you do it. And by all means, people who are maybe their crossover listeners that come to your show and listen for my show is. Mm hmm. Well, aren't you miss last two Fridays? Yeah, yeah, yeah, we did. We did. But for the most part, we are very, very consistent. We try to put out our 52 episodes on the Friday show, 52 episodes of the Monday show. That's the hardest part. And, and just make it like and then looking at the numbers some month, like for some reason, May is our worst month every single year. 

Rich Bennett 52:08
Summertime is always slow Yeah. 

Lance Cayko 52:10
And then but then July comes around and we have the best month of the whole year. And I go, okay, it's worth it. 

Rich Bennett 52:16
In July. 

Lance Cayko 52:17
Yep, a July of all I know I couldn't believe it. So, so that's the biggest challenge. And for anybody listening, that sucks. I think there's another statistic I've heard is like most podcasts fail with 50 episodes or less, like they get up to 50 and then they kind of stop. 

Rich Bennett 52:32
Oh yeah. 

Lance Cayko 52:33
Yeah, it's some kind of number like that. But again, like that's if anybody wants I think everybody who owns a business should have a podcast. Yes, because you can tell your stories, you give you can have guests on, you can leverage the guests like I've had engineers on my show who we've recommended and now they recommend us. And it works. It just it's just a good it's just a great place to be. 

Rich Bennett 52:54
And I've had some business owners, they'll say, Well, Rich, nobody wants to hear about what we do. You know what? If you have customers, people want to hear about what you did. Yeah. And will everybody want to hear about it? No, but that's that's where you get your own niche, you know, That's where that's where it's important. And if people hear your story, but they have no problem going on another podcast to their story. Yeah, it's like, guys, come on, start a podcast. It's not that hard. But yeah, you're right. I think the numbers have to. I've talked about this a lot, so before COVID, I think it was not even a million podcast, active podcast out there. COVID hit, that number went sky high into the millions. I, I may be wrong. I wanted to say close to 7 million. I might be wrong on that. But now it's down to like a little over 3 million. Yes, I know your. 

Lance Cayko 53:48
Numbers are 100% spot on. Okay. 

Rich Bennett 53:50
Yeah. Okay. But yeah, I see it all the time, people, because I belong to a bunch of these groups, the podcasting groups, and a lot of people get frustrated because they keep looking at them. They download numbers and I tell people, ignore the download numbers. They don't equal listeners and vice versa, because if we do that, we do a beer bourbon barbecue once a month, and the guy who's put on a podcast is sit around and listen to it. Well, that's one download, but that's eight listeners. 

Lance Cayko 54:22
Oh, that's a good way of thinking about it. You know the other way? Yeah, the other way I've encouraged people to think about it is it's all I've told. This is my wife is I was like, 

so like our last month we had that, we had 20,000 downloads. And I go, Hmm, that's like, nice, imagine. But like I go, Think about it in this way. You could think about it in the opposite way, even if it's like, let's say 20 downloads, you're still in you're still in a room with 20 people. Mm. Like, as somebody who is also a public speaker, it's not easy to get in front of people or have People want like that is still tangible and like, like, okay, so any of your business owner in your front of those 20 people, fine. What if two of them are customers, right? I guess less. More or less more than you would have had without the podcast? 

Rich Bennett 55:05
Oh, yeah. Yeah. And people don't get that. It's I even had a company contact me when they wanted to become a sponsor and I talked to them and they're like, Well, why would I need to get my name out there in other parts of the country or even other countries? So do you have a website? You're like, Well, yeah. I said, Well, guess what? Your name's already out there. I said, The other thing I thought I said, Think about it. People will move from other countries or whatever to come here. Why not get your name out there, even quicker? A lot of people don't. They don't understand it. And this goes back to the marketing. So actually between between running a successful firm, the community service, you do the teaching, the podcasting, being a follower, how do you actually maintain a work life balance, especially with your love for and, and family? 

Lance Cayko 56:02
Yeah, I'm I'm so excited this weekend I'm taking my one of my best friends, Bill, and my daughter, out to this awesome we're going to go car camping. It's still very outdoorsy like, right? We just sleep in the bed of my suburban me and my daughter be nice and comfortable so far. Yeah. I make appointments for everything. I make appointments for myself. That is the critical part is and I'm just trying to train my son and my daughter and my daughter is picking up on it. She's like, my daughter is like my I tell her I can't say she's my favorite child. I say like, you're my favorite. 

F1 S3 56:37
So I have three boys and one girl. 

Lance Cayko 56:41
So but she listens. She actually listens to Dad. And that's super important for me because I feel like he like your dad kind of has his stuff together. 

F1 S3 56:49
Like, just please, please listen. 

Lance Cayko 56:52
But yeah, I make appointments for everything. I make appointments with for dates with my wife, silly stuff like appointments to go to church, appointments to go fishing, then all the obviously all the professional appointments and appointments to go with the garden. I just try to keep a very organized life. And now some people may listen to some people go like, Well, that seems a little anal. Like, you know, no discipline equals freedom. Like because I'm disciplined, then I have the freedom to fit other things in my life. Like I have I have the freedom to fit everything in and not be overwhelmed with it for sure. And then there's also the breaks, right? So like on an I my fault, I'm very disciplined and I try to train, which I train our staff to like, I don't want to see attacks. I want to see an email. I don't want to see a phone call after 5 p.m. each day. And I definitely don't want to them on the weekends. And then there's keeping control of clients. So like we've had plenty of clients where that like what can you meet in a weekend and go My rate is $1,000 an hour on the weekend I will meet for $1,000 and nobody's built in 13 years. I think somebody will, but like hate those kind of strategies and they laugh about it because it's sort of a joke. And then they go, okay, we'll meet on Monday. Like, Exactly, Yeah. Can we do it one day? 

Rich Bennett 58:05
I like that. I like the calendar part. And somebody I had on recently told me this because I've always talked about time management, how important time management is. But from what you just said, it sounds like you're doing what this other guest said. And it's not time management, it's priority management. 

Lance Cayko 58:27
Yeah, Yeah. Because like, I'll go home, like I go to North Dakota with my brother, like I said, for sure, twice a year I do Thanksgiving break and then two weeks over Christmas, it's just ice fishing, ice fishing, ice fishing, hanging out with friends. And my brother primarily, well, he works with some of my old friends. And one of the old friends said like two years ago or something. I was like, Man, it last comes home. And he never calls us to go fishing. And I think he was nervously saying it like, like where you kind of make the I got nothing to talk about. So I'm just going to say that. So we called him on it and we had group chat, me and Greg and my brother Lucas, and I said, Hey, man, here's six weeks notice. Come on out there. 

F1 S3 59:05
Oh, well. 

Lance Cayko 59:07
Been really busy. It's and I go, It's not your priority. Like, if it was your priority, you are not too busy, right? Clear. Right with that Rich. 

Rich Bennett 59:17
But my cousin's big into fishing and hunting. Actually, he's. I think he finally retired from it, but he was a guide. He would take, like, celebrities on all these fishing trips and everything. And I told us, like, name, like you never asked me to go with you. You've been back this way. I don't know how many times. So he finally he was coming back and ask me to go deep sea fish. One time I was like, Seriously, dude, the one time that I had a wedding, I had to DJ and I couldn't go. I never got an invite again. Yeah, Yeah. Mike Scott, I'm calling you out. Yeah, 

I'll never hear the end of that one. So what? Where do you actually see the future of if actually, if nine productions end the podcast and say like the next five years and then ten years. 

Lance Cayko 1:00:10
F9 that's this, that's an easy one for me. For F9, the podcast is a little different, but I'm happy to try to answer it. F9 So we just established a full fledged office in Denver about two months ago. Okay, Headquarters up in Longmont, Longmont officers serves Northern Colorado. The Denver officers Southern Colorado Divide and conquer is the idea. Right now we have a staff of seven between the offices. Ideally, we end up with a staff of seven in Longmont. Ideally, we end up with a staff of seven in Denver in the next five years. In the next ten years, then I want a third office on the western slopes in the mountains, an office of three, and where the seven number comes from. Honestly, as I've watched some of our best engineers grow their firms, and it seems when they get past seven, their quality of customer service goes down. And I, I never want that. And it really comes down to as simple as like they don't, they don't they can't they can't answer phones as quickly as possible. Seven seems the magic number where we're still picking up the phone call phone within we're turning calls, phone calls within an hour, 24 hours at the most, that sort of thing. That's what's coming from from the podcast. You know, we're in the top 1.5% in the world. We just looked up our downloads compared to everybody else. I would love to get in the top 1%. I would love to. We will try to get some bigger names on the on the show, like Robert Kiyosaki, for example, from Rich Dad, poor Dad, Pete and Peter Schiff, those kind of folks. And we have had some pretty big names. John McAfee was on the show before he died. That was pretty interesting, the software entrepreneur. So he's going. 

Rich Bennett 1:01:49
Wow, tell everybody the websites how they can get in touch with you guys. 

Lance Cayko 1:01:53
Sure thing. Inside the FIR podcast dot com, you can follow us you can find whatever listening app you're losing using you know, Spotify, iTunes or we're on YouTube as well. Check us out there started Episode zero. If you're seriously considering any kind of business, I'm here to tell you we lay it bare and even though we're primarily architects and builders, there's still just fundamental core values and things and ideas that we will give you from the show that will level you up. I'm telling you, it's like a decade's worth of information packed into those things. If you wanna follow us, if got to see what we're doing, architecture, building wise, development wise, go to F nine productions dot com. You can sign up on our newsletter there. We send out weekly our bi monthly newsletters and then follow me on LinkedIn link in with me. I will link in with anybody, go to LinkedIn Icon, type in L.A. and see last name. Psycho S.A. Wiktorowicz actually got it right by guessing. I got to let him know that Rich Rich deserves a huge props that the only other person who's ever got my last name right pronunciation wise because that's spelled C Akl is an Indian telemarketer. But Rich crushed it. 

Rich Bennett 1:02:58
Really? He said, I'm Wow. Well, you forget one other website, the non-profit Oh yeah. 

Lance Cayko 1:03:05
Long one Community gardens dot org. Check us out there. If you know anybody who's interested in like helping us out philanthropy wise, I would love that. Oh, and last and certainly but not least, I got a plug. Go to fishing with Lance on YouTube. Please subscribe to the channel. I take you on some high altitude Rocky Mountain adventures that you might not ever see anywhere else. 

Rich Bennett 1:03:24
Nice. You know, I'm. You're going to have to come on again because I would like to talk more about the fishing and hopefully, you know, you'll get out this way and try some snakehead. Heck yeah. You know, and and you know, just I know there's a lot more that we haven't covered, but one of the things I like to finish of this, you've been on several podcast and you've had several interviews, whether it be on TV, radio, newspapers, magazines. Is there anything that somebody that you wanted somebody to ask you but they never did? And if so, what would that have question been and what would your answer be? 

Lance Cayko 1:04:05
Do you have any regrets? 

Rich Bennett 1:04:07
Oh. 

Lance Cayko 1:04:08
Yeah. And I think so far I don't have any regrets because the way I look at life now, at 40 years old, it took me 40 years to get here to to have this mindset. And one of the books that got me there was Marcus Aurelius, his meditations and learning what stoicism really is. And for young men especially, I think this is a very important book that they should all pick up because we're supposed to be the stoic Stoics doesn't mean stoicism, doesn't mean you sit there and we don't talk. It means I am I am a man and my world is chaos. How do I operate in a positive way in that chaos? And look for if life is a chess game you always get, there's always moves. Even if you're a pawn, you get to that pawn at the end of it. You get all the way to the other side. And you, you, you become a king, right? Like that's how chess literally works. So what I look with a big thing is that every I told my children this about a month ago, I said, I go, what do you guys think happen when dad on that has something giant negative been happening in his life? Do you think you get sad or do you think he's glad or sad? Duh. I don't know. I get really excited down there. Like what? And they go, Guys, electricity does not exist unless there's a negative and a positive. Physics doesn't work unless there's equal and opposite reactions. So when something negative happens in my life, I know on the opposite end of this is going to be something huge and positive. And so that's what I look for in life. So that's why I don't have any regrets, because when the negative stuff happens, it's happening for a purpose. There's providence behind it and I know the positive is going to happen after that. 

Rich Bennett 1:05:45
I love that. All right. When's the book coming out? 

F1 S3 1:05:48
Yeah. 

Lance Cayko 1:05:48
I know. That's honestly one of the things I need to tackle. That's not a joke. 

Rich Bennett 1:05:53
I you know what? And I've been saying that I need to do the same thing. And I had a friend of mine that wrote a book about goals, and I actually started working on my book this or no last month. Yeah, but it's like what I write about. Nobody wants to hear my life story. Well, I've been doing this since 2015, so why not write about Pi? Yeah, but. But in a different way. Not the same thing that everybody else is talking about, so. Well, let's. I want to thank you so much. It's been a true honor and a pleasure. Yeah. I wish you continued success if you ever get out this way. Look me up, man. We'll go fishing. I'll give you a haul. And if I get out that way. Yes, sir. Same thing. You better. Hi. Take care. 

Lance Cayko 1:06:41
Thank you.