Elliott Bisnow (03:27):

It was a very in-your-face thing to say. He said it with a good sense to humor, but I think the takeaway was for me, it’s such a crowded world in whatever you do. It’s such a busy world. It’s so hard to get people’s attention. And it’s similar to the quote doing something, “Well, it’s just that’s not good enough.” Right? And I think with our events, like putting on good events, putting on events that are people like, I mean the main problem is people will come and say, “I had a good time and they won’t then tell all their friends about it.” And if you want to have a product that’s successful, it needs to have virality, right?

Elliott Bisnow (04:02):

They need to come back and say, “Robert, you need to stop what you’re doing. You need to buy this book. You have to watch this new show on Netflix. You have to go to this event.” And I think coming out of that conversation, I realized whatever business we’re in, and we were in the event business, our events need to be, they need to put the boundaries. They need to be over the top. They need to be inspiring. First and foremost, they need to be different than any other events.

Robert Leonard (04:27):

How did that lead to the cruise ship?

Elliott Bisnow (04:29):

So we’d been putting on events that started from 19 people to 60 to 120 and we were always trying to make the events creative, innovative. We would design cool experience in the hotel lobbies. We have great dinners we put on or exciting musical acts that we would book. We’d have great speakers. But at the end of the day, we were still putting something on in a hotel, in a city. I think we had seen some kind of mini-music festivals at sea, like one of your favorite bands on a cruise ship and we had this idea what if we took over a cruise ship, we did all the menus in the food. Instead of the typical, cheesy music that you might find on a big ship.

Elliott Bisnow (05:10):

We programmed all the soundtracks. Imagine we reprogrammed all the contents, so it was the speakers that we booked, the DJs, the bands that we booked, and then we filled the ship with the Summit community. The Summit community is entrepreneurial group of people, people who are enterprising, starting businesses, nonprofits. So we thought that is surreal. Whether some people don’t want to come doesn’t matter, but this is boundary pushing. Doing a traditional business event on a ship, we had never heard of anyone doing that and I think we’ve often thought the most important thing is just being different. So we’ve reflected back, keep it surreal. Okay. A ship in the middle of the ocean for a business conference that feels surreal.

Robert Leonard (05:55):

And it wasn’t just a small bet. You didn’t just take 10, $20,000 that you guys had in the business account and put it as a down payment on this cruise ship, you had to really bet everything and put over a million dollars into that down payment to secure the cruise ship. How did you think about making such a big bet on something that you weren’t sure if it was going to work?

Elliott Bisnow (06:12):

I mean, the events business can be a really challenging business. If you look at farming, for example. A farmer, it’s really unfortunate because they have to spend all the money getting their fields ready, buying seeds, hiring workers, to tend to the fields. This all starts in the winter and then the spring. And they only sell their produce in the summertime. So they have to front all the costs. And events are the same. You have to have this whole team planning out the events. You have to book out venues and make deposits often a year ahead of time.

Elliott Bisnow (06:42):

You’re booking speakers because you can’t sell tickets without seeing the lineup and seeing the programming. Similar to that farming analogy, building an event, you have to front all this money ahead of time. And it’s really difficult. It’s the opposite of some businesses that collect the money upfront, like you pay them a fee upfront, and then they send you the product after, or the 12-month subscription after through your Netflix subscription. You pay them upfront, they have upfront costs. But for the most part, events are challenging business model.

Elliott Bisnow (07:13):

It’s one thing to do it at a hotel and you can have attrition clauses where if you can’t sell all the… You could book… You got a fewer rooms than you could add more hotels later. You can get out of your hotel contracts. But with a cruise ship, it was just cut in stone. It was a year ahead of time. You owed this much money. And the deposit was like a million dollars. There was no easy way to do it. It’s not like we could book one small hotel. If we sell the first hundred tickets, we could book another hotel if we sell the next 200 tickets. We could book another hotel.

Elliott Bisnow (07:41):

It’s just if you want to book a cruise ship, we had to basically predict forward how many people were going to come. And we had to put all this money down. So what would happen is that our company, after we do a successful event, we would have money in the bank to then continue paying the salaries of our team and to bank roll the next event. We basically had to take all the company savings and push the chips on the table to make the down payment, to book this cruise ship. So it was a million bucks. It was all the company’s money. It was all the Summit co-founders money. We put all the chips in the table and we booked this cruise ship.

Robert Leonard (08:15):

What was the outcome?

Elliott Bisnow (08:16):

Well, as soon as we started telling people about it, it was pretty universally loved from the start. People really, really loved the idea of Summit at sea. I think any event that you do is going to preclude certain people from coming. If it’s too far away, if it’s too much of a party vibe, if it’s too much of a boring business vibe at a conference center, certain people won’t go. If it’s in Las Vegas, certain people really want to go and certain people will never go.

Elliott Bisnow (08:44):

So I think depending on what event you do, there’s just certain people, they have young children and maybe they could pop out to a city for a couple days for an event, but they can’t go off the grid for three days with no phone contact. So it’s kind of each event, self-selects a group of people who are going to kind of be the target demographic of the people who are going to really love this.

Elliott Bisnow (09:04):

And I think within that target demographic, we were basically met by almost everyone with, “Wow. That is a really audacious big idea.” I mean, it definitely got a lot of attention. It garnered a lot of press. It garnered a lot of people talking about it. Even the people who didn’t want to go, they said like, “I’m not going, but that is wild.” You guys should go. I think what it did was it cut through all the noise and people definitely started talking about it. And then almost like layers of a cake, we then realized, “Well, we need to book great musicians. We need to a great speaker.”

Elliott Bisnow (09:36):

So when you layer on great speakers, great musicians, suddenly you’re going to a ship in the middle of the ocean with this great content and this great music. And then the event, it ended up being a big success. But putting an event on at sea is off the charts, complicated and very challenging.

Robert Leonard (09:54):

You were pushing the boundaries with business conferences, business meetups, basically. And what you were doing was kind of never really been done before. If correct, it was around like 2011 to 2013, sometime in that timeframe, if you fast forward about five years, there was another festival, but it wasn’t business related. It was just a music festival that was trying to push the boundaries as well, and that was the Fyre Festival.

Robert Leonard (10:16):

Obviously, it had a very different outcome than what you guys did. I’m curious as an event producer and one that has kind of pushed the boundaries yourself, what do you think of the fiasco that was the Fyre Festival and how that all unraveled?

Elliott Bisnow (10:28):

Well, when I did the first Summit event and I took this major risk that we have talked about for many years, my major risk I took, was bringing 19 people to a rented house in Utah, near the Alta Ski resort. So the worst thing that could have happened would be that the people would just, I guess, say like, “I hadn’t paid for the house.” They would’ve just gone to a hotel and then gone skiing. There was no bad outcome.

Elliott Bisnow (10:58):

Next event was 60 people in Mexico. It’s like, I guess I could have been in a worst case scenario, if I completely flubbed everything up, I could have stranded 20 people in Utah or 60 people at a beach resort in Mexico, and then they would’ve gotten their own accommodations. Maybe I would’ve lost tens of thousand of dollars, I think.

Elliott Bisnow (11:15):

By the time, we’d been producing events for a decade, we were doing 1,500 person events. And by the way, in cities, in Los Angeles or on a cruise ship even as audacious as it sounds with infrastructure, with bathrooms, showers, kitchens, bedrooms, stages, electricity. The Fyre Festival, so when you put this in context, I mean, by the time we did Summit at sea, we had dozens of people on the team. I mean, the Fyre Festival and I think their first event was 10,000 people on an island with no infrastructure and no power, and no toilets, and no showers, and no bedrooms. It was their first event.

Elliott Bisnow (11:57):

Our first event, I spent half a year planning for 19 people, and then half a year for 60 people, and then half a year for 120 people, and then half a year for 250 people. And even after six years, we never made it past a few thousand. And here they were on event number one going… Again, I don’t know the exact numbers, whether it’s 5,000 or 10,000, some number, many times what we’ve still ever done with no infrastructure, right?

Elliott Bisnow (12:24):

It’s not like they tried to pull it off in Los Angeles or in Miami or in Las Vegas. And there was no infrastructure. It was just on this island. I understand, there’s no power. They had to truck in generators. There’s no water. I think it’s not even in the same league of complexity. It’d be like me organizing a pickup basketball game with 10 people. I don’t know. And you trying to start the next NBA. We’re both doing events, but it was so off the rails what they tried to do that I… It’s shocking that anyone who’s ever done events, wouldn’t say from the start, “There’s a 0% chance that you can do this.”

Robert Leonard (13:02):

In your book, Make No Small Plans, we have a few takeaways that I want to chat about today, and it kind of goes to what we were just talking about. And the first one is that no idea should go unspoken. Talk to us about some of the ideas that you’ve had that others might have thought were crazy just like maybe the Fyre Festival or even doing the cruise ship, but taught you that your ideas should still always be spoken, even if they are crazy.

Elliott Bisnow (13:26):

Well, if you have a safe environment with very collaborative people, which is the first step, then that environment embraces lots of ideas and creates an open forum around them. So we’ve all been around people where anytime you tell them an idea, they ridicule you and they push you down. So when you’re in that open collaborative environment, ideas are really, really valuable and really good ideas are hard to come by. I mean, execution is even more important, but to create an environment where people can just put out their ideas, most ideas for my experience at companies don’t just come from the founders or the CEO who go off to their room and read a book or bring a piece of paper and come out two days later with some big idea.

Elliott Bisnow (14:10):

I think big ideas tend to rise through the companies. If you literally look at all the best companies how did… I don’t know. From how did Gmail get invented to… You just look at all the different products and services at our favorite companies, they tend to rise through the ranks and these companies foster this culture where anyone on the team can bring ideas. And then everyone’s very, very receptive to the culture of ideas being brought forward.

Elliott Bisnow (14:36):

It’s so easy to shut down an idea, right? At any time, if it’s not a good idea, you can just say, “We’ll pass. We’re not going to do that.” So we’ve certainly fostered that for a long time, and we’ve always encouraged our friends, our team members, “Please bring us ideas.” It could be ideas for the next event, ideas for speakers. As out of the box as they could be. Speakers that might infuriate some of the attendees, speakers that don’t normally speak at events, ideas for music, ideas for… It could be like our events, for example, ended up being mini-music content and arts festivals. And at one point I think someone told us, “You should just program your event for 72 straight hours. Even if nobody comes to the 5:00 AM session, just do it.”

Elliott Bisnow (15:17):

So we would get a lot of out-there ideas like that. “Here’s these wild foods you could serve. Here’s how that has absolutely served us.” I don’t really see any downside to having a culture of just encouraging people to bring creative ideas to the table.

Robert Leonard (15:33):

As part of your sales pitch for you and your dad’s commercial real estate media company, you used a sales approach that was probably a little bit kind of out there. I think that other people might not have used or traditional sales people wouldn’t used. And you would joke with your prospects that your global office was at 1601 Pennsylvania Ave which is directly across from the White House. How did you use creative sales tactics like this in that business? And then also businesses you’ve built since then.

Elliott Bisnow (15:59):

This one time I went to one of my early pitch meetings wearing a suit and tie because when I left college after a couple years… So I really thought when I was 21, I have to fit in or I’m not going to be accepted. So I went to this meeting with this suit and tie to try to sell someone, some ads. We got to the meeting and there’s this guy had been in the business for a long time. He must have been 50 years old, 60 years old.

Elliott Bisnow (16:22):

When we sat down at this table, it was at The Palm restaurant. He was like, “Take off your jacket.” “Okay.” I took off my blazer. He was like, “Take off your tie.” “Okay.” He’s like, “Unbutton the top button.” I’m like, “Okay.” He’s like, “And the next one.” I’m like, “Okay.” He’s like, “Roll up both your sleeves.” Like, “Okay.” He’s like, “Be yourself. Let’s have a beer and some cheesy fries and let’s just get to know each other. And then at the very end you can just tell me whatever you want to sell me, and I’ll just say no, or I’ll tell you here’s the little tweaks we’ll do to it. Let’s just not small talk and BS each other. You seem great. You’re an entrepreneur. You’re building this cool startup with your dad, Bisnow. So let’s just be friends. And then at the end you can just do your pitch in five or 10 minutes.”

Elliott Bisnow (17:07):

We had this unbelievable meeting for an hour. He’s like, “All right, what do you want to sell me?” I’m like, “I want to do this package.” He’s like, “How about we do it like this and this?” So I’m like, “Well, how about this?” He’s like, “All right. Yeah.” With that tweak, I’m like done, shake hands, do this deal. And I think I left that meeting realizing the most important thing is just being yourself, like really, really being yourself with people, not trying to pretend I was someone else.

Elliott Bisnow (17:30):

So for how I did it, I stopped wearing suits and ties. I stopped pretending I was 30 years old. People used to say like, “Oh, where’d you go to college?” And I would literally say, “Oh, I went to the University of Wisconsin in Madison.” And after this meeting, I would say, “I went to University of Wisconsin and Madison, but after two years I decided to leave college. I can’t believe that I’m a dropout. But it was because I had this entrepreneurial bug in me and I love college, and I got so much out of it, but it was my… I went to college to get a career and now I was building my own career. So I left early to build my dream.”

Elliott Bisnow (18:01):

I just told them the truth instead of pretending… I was never lying, but I would pretend… I would never want them to know I dropped out. And as soon as I started being authentic, people really started bonding with me. And I think I would also do things that would catch attention. So we had to get some office space and there was this really crappy coworking space next to the White House. And the address was literally 1601 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Elliott Bisnow (18:26):

You know what? The space wasn’t that bad. It was like a Regis office space, but the interior space was really bad. But I don’t know. I just thought it would be so funny here I am, this college dropout and I could literally tell people on the phone, “Yeah, I’m working next to the White House.” I don’t know. It was just, I think, part of my personality that came out over the years was I’ve always enjoyed being eccentric. I’ve enjoyed being myself.

Elliott Bisnow (18:48):

So there was this element of eccentricity. I cut a deal once, Robert, with… I was selling ads to different transportation companies and there’s this limo company that wanted to buy ads and they couldn’t afford our budget. So I just traded them ads for limo hours. So I would literally end up taking this limo to all my sales meetings. I had this office, it’s interior office at 1601 Pennsylvania Avenue. I was wearing a T-shirt and tennis shoes to all the meetings.

Elliott Bisnow (19:15):

I think when I look back, I think what actually really resonated was I was at the forefront of this new entrepreneurial generation, where today anyone can be an entrepreneur, right? Just anything you want to build, there’s a platform to build it on. Right? Whatever you want to start. And back then, this is in 2008, 2009, there just weren’t a lot of entrepreneurs.

Elliott Bisnow (19:37):

So for me as I was trying to break into this industry, rather than pretend I was older and already successful, I just told people, “I’m not successful. I left college to try to build my dream. By the way, see that limo out the window? That’s mine. Not because I paid for it, because I trade some ads for it. And yeah, I needed an office and so I thought I’ll be in the heart of the action. I’ll take an interior desk next to the White House.” And I think people just, they really resonated with the entrepreneurial spirit.

Elliott Bisnow (20:08):

I ended up just building really good friendships with all the people I was prospecting or trying to sell to. And by saying, “I really took this guy’s advice from there on out. I stopped trying to sell to people.” I would even say to them, it’s like, “Look, you know I’m calling because I think our platform is great for you to advertise in. But also I just love meeting people. So I’d love to hear your story. I’d love to get to know you. You can take 10 minutes and hear what I have to pitch. If you don’t want it just say no and I’ll move on. But we can still be friends and we can connect.” So I learned a lot from that one first meeting.

Robert Leonard (20:41):

Have you kept up with that kind of unconventional approach to this day throughout all your businesses?

Elliott Bisnow (20:46):

Yes. I’m off the rails.

Robert Leonard (20:49):

One of the other things I guess some people would consider is maybe not off the rails, but crazy, similar to the kind of the cruise ship pioneering that you did is that you purchased a mountain and one of America’s largest ski resorts. How did the idea for buying such a massive piece of real estate come about and how did you actually make that happen?

Elliott Bisnow (21:08):

Let me back up. When I say off the rails, I mean there’s a balance between operating in an incredibly professional and structured manner. And then also within that, being yourself and being your best self, right? You can be a very successful business person. And I don’t know, like the CEO of Goldman Sachs, David Solomon is a DJ at night. Literally, I just read an article about him. I mean, that doesn’t mean he’s any less professional by even 1% when it comes to work.

Elliott Bisnow (21:36):

I mean, I had a fifth grade teacher who said, “There’s a time for work and a time for play.” I don’t know why it had always stuck with me? So I’d like to think I’m like that where in the work hours, I think I operate at extremely high level of when it comes to process discipline structure. But then I also understand that you can have a fun working environment. You can have fun after hours. It’s okay to not always be checking your phone. It’s okay to enjoy the weekend.

Elliott Bisnow (22:02):

So what happened with Powder Mountain? There’s really great precedent for how towns or neighborhoods, or communities get built. If you look back over the last few hundred years, just in America, you can look at all these neighborhoods that we’ve all been to whether it’s Soho or the meat packing district, whether it’s neighborhoods across Washington, DC. It could be Portland. It could be Austin, Texas. It could be all the neighborhoods around Miami, Florida. It could be Venice Beach. I mean there’s unlimited examples.

Elliott Bisnow (22:30):

And all of these neighborhoods underwent really dynamic transitions because either a person or a small group of people led the development of those areas. And you can literally just look up any area and you can read all about the people who led the development of that area. And there’s great precedent for ski towns. What happened? How do these towns get built? What’s the history behind Tahoe or Jackson Hole or Aspen or Vail?

Elliott Bisnow (22:57):

By chance, in 2011, I met an attendee of a Summit event, a venture capitalist who… Like we just went out for a coffee. So I met him over a coffee and he told me about Powder Mountain Ski Resort, and that it was for sale. And he told me, “I think we have a chance to try and buy this ski resort.” He was the one who told me about the historical precedence of how people and groups have led the development of really interesting towns and places.

Elliott Bisnow (23:26):

His pitch was pretty simple for the last half decade, Summit, which the company I had started was putting on events. We were gathering people. And his pitch was he was a financier. He had some development experience. He would help finance the acquisition. He would help lead the development and we would help build community because you really can’t build place without community. So in 2011, started basically this what’s now more than 10-year journey of trying at first to buy Powder Mountain Ski Resort, put together a really thoughtful plan for how to preserve the amazing valley that it’s in, how to preserve the classic character and history of the ski resort, how to do like a tactful, interesting creative, modern development with small homes and kind of a heritage modern architectural aesthetic and really try to reimagine the American mountain town.

Elliott Bisnow (24:19):

So again, in 2011 began this journey that started with trying to buy it all the way up to… We bought it in Powder Mountain in 2013. And then the last eight plus years managing or stewarding Powder Mountain, if you will, which is a ski resort with four restaurants, about nine various chair lifts or lifts, 250-ish team members who work at the ski resort throughout the year for Powder Mountain restaurants, 30 miles of mountain biking trails. So it’s a really magical place, and I spent about the last 10 plus years working on it.

Robert Leonard (24:52):

Did your experience with your commercial real estate media company help at all with buying a mountain or did you rely on the VC guy for the financial and real estate experience and you were really just part of the community building?

Elliott Bisnow (25:04):

One of the funny things that happened is one of my I Summit co-founders out of college, he had worked at a land brokerage firm, but the recession hit of 2008. So he worked commission only job in real estate brokerage trying to move big land parcels. And he spent a couple years just doing that without any success because we were in the heart of this terrible recession. When we actually heard about Powder Mountain a few years later and we need to figure out how to actually acquire 10,000 acres in a ski resort, he actually knew exactly what the path was to follow and he knew who to engage.

Elliott Bisnow (25:40):

But then I think at a high level, no, my background did not help. I mean, I had some contacts from the estate days, but ultimately we were very entrepreneurial. And so between Greg who had told me about the mountain and my other partners, we were just constantly studying. We were bringing people out. We were reaching out to other communities or resorts or resort developers that we’d read about or heard about. We were asking for intros. So most of it was us aggressively learning everything.

Robert Leonard (26:12):

Just the way my brain works is I love to research businesses, see how they work. If I go to a restaurant, I wonder what their margins are or if I go to anything really, I always like to see how things work. And so I got into snowboarding a couple years ago and I was just curious a little bit more about… And I’m a real estate investor myself. So I was curious kind of how ski resort and mountains work from a real estate and business perspective.

Robert Leonard (26:31):

So I looked into it a little bit and I saw that some of our local towns, the ski resort operators leased the land from the government rather than actually owning the land. So were you guys doing that similar model? Were you leasing the land and then running the business of the ski resort or did you buy the mountain itself and the business?

Elliott Bisnow (26:50):

We bought all privately owned land, which is extremely rare and you’re right that almost all the ski resorts in America are… I don’t know if almost all, some big percentage are the resort leasing the land from the US Forest Service. In fact, at one point I think until a couple years ago, the US Forest Service had not approved any new ski resorts for development in 20 years.

Elliott Bisnow (27:11):

The ski resort industry is really interesting. There’s about 400 resorts in the United States and they ranged from little mom and pops with a couple of small chair lifts to big Disney World S resorts like Vail that have 35,000 people a day. Just massive revenues in EBIDA. And most of the ski industry today like so many other industries, the ski industry is basically owned by three companies. Just in the same way, eight food companies own almost all the food brands, right? Or there’s just a hand full of airlines, right? Or a handful of cell phone companies, right? It’s all been consolidated.

Elliott Bisnow (27:49):

Ski resorts, this happened over the last few decades and it really accelerated the last decade, but first was the small mom and pops being bought by local private equity firms. And then those private equity firms being bought. But basically if you want to ski at a resort now, for the most part, you’re going to be skiing under one of three companies like, “Oh, you’re from Los Angeles. You want to go to Mammoth? Oh, you want to go to park city resort? Oh, you want to go to Vail? Oh, you want to go to Tahoe? Oh, you want to go to East Coast resorts?”

Elliott Bisnow (28:20):

So all these resorts are owned by either Vail Resorts, which is public or Aspen Skiing Company and the private equity firm KSL, and one other group. And then there’s these competing ski passes like all you can eat for skiing where basically you get this season pass that gives you access to all these resorts, basically, right? Like an Epic Pass or an Ikon Pass.

Elliott Bisnow (28:41):

Interestingly, these groups are pretty much, as I understand it, they’re not really in the real estate business. They sell a lot of these season passes like a billion dollars worth. There’s some massive number. And then they’re totally vertically integrated. They own the ski school, and the shops, and the restaurants, and the retail. And then whether it’s about snow, you’re on one part of the country or in one state, it doesn’t matter because the other side has a good snow year. And then they also have just really impressive, pretty mind-blowing summer programming and now mountain biking.

Elliott Bisnow (29:11):

The whole skier industry is really been consolidated for example, in Utah where Powder Mountain is the only one of eight resorts in Utah that’s not on one of the big passes. So in Utah you have Alta, Snowbird, Solitude, Deer Valley, the canyons, which is now Park City, Powder Mountain and Snow Basin. And we’re the only one that’s “independent”.

Robert Leonard (29:35):

Does it hurt you to not be part of that pass?

Elliott Bisnow (29:38):

Well, it depends what your goals are because by being part of those passes, you’re going to get a lot more skiers and a lot more traffic. So interestingly our business models, the opposite. We’re one of the only resorts in the country that has a cap on the total number of season passes and total number of lift tickets that will sell a day. And certainly the lowest cap, right?

Elliott Bisnow (30:01):

We’ll only sell couple thousand season passes a year and I think it’s 2000. I think it’s 1,500 or 2,000 lift tickets a day. So we actually cap it like a deer valley has a cap, but I think it’s like six or 8,000 lift tickets a day and they’re 4,000 acres. We’re 10,000 acres with 2,000 tickets. So we’re like 10 times less crowded than something like deer valley that’s considered uncrowded.

Elliott Bisnow (30:27):

And then our business model like our resort is profitable, but our business is focused on real estate. I think it would not be good for the real estate business to pack your ski resort, but also it’s not what we want to do. We all live in Eden, Utah and we love it there. We love this empty ski mountain. We’ve won the most affordable ski resort in the country a bunch of times the last 10 years. I think we just have a different business model which has led us to be able to have an uncrowded ski resort.

Robert Leonard (31:00):

When you mentioned these kind of caps, I thought for sure that you were going to be more expensive than some of the other ones. I mean, supply and demand, right? If you have a less supply, but you have a lot of demand, I would’ve figured that would’ve pushed you up in prices and not allowed you to be affordable. But I know exactly what you’re talking about from the busyness. I went to Vail and Breckenridge last year and it was just absolutely insane. The lines were crazy. You could barely go down the mountain. There were so many people around you.

Robert Leonard (31:23):

And then even in the Northeast on the east coast where I live, some of the mountains around here are just incredibly busy. I mean, like you said, a lot of them are owned by Vail, which is a publicly-traded company. So they need to do what’s right, quote-unquote, in the eyes of shareholders and increase shareholder value. So they’re not going to put caps on things like you guys do.

Elliott Bisnow (31:42):

Yeah. I mean, we have this small ownership group and our goal is to have the best experience. We’re just not obsessively focused on the bottom line. Our number one focus is on having the best ski resort and the best experience for the community. And then I think just again having an empty ski resort makes it a lot more attractive for folks to buy real estate. And then even with our real estate, we’ve capped the largest homes you can build are 5,500 square feet. A lot of these places, they don’t even allow homes under 8,000 square feet.

Elliott Bisnow (32:12):

Plenty of our homes like my house on Powder Mountains, 1,600 square feet. So a lot of the house are 2,000, 2,500 square feet. So I just think we’re just going for a different, more boutique product and experience.

Robert Leonard (32:25):

And when you talk about these houses, are these houses that are being built on the mountain themselves or are they in the city that’s at the base?

Elliott Bisnow (32:32):

Powder Mountain is unique and that it has what’s called an inverted topography, which exists a little bit in some of the upper Alpine mountain towns in Europe. You can actually drive to the top of Powder Mountain and Powder Mountain is actually flat at the top. There’s literally thousands of flat open acres at the top of Powder Mountain. It’s pretty mind-blowing because you get up there and you see all the other mountains are all peaks and then Powder Mountain, we of course have peaks, but there’s just huge thousand acre flat areas.

Elliott Bisnow (33:02):

So our project is actually all at about 8,700 square feet, all of the homes and there’s ski in, ski out from the top. Again, there’s some examples most of the Deer Valley Village is up and then red clouds even more up. So there’s, I think, Red Mountain and Aspen. I mean, there are places where there’s developments like Telluride has both the village at the bottom and at the development at the top of the mountain.

Elliott Bisnow (33:26):

So our projects at the top where you can have these views for whatever it is, 100 miles and just at the top, you can literally drive up park at the top and the houses are all on these cascading plateaus. Our village is designed in a horse shoe shape and then we have these really strict architectural guidelines. So there’s no fake French chateaus or 10,000 square foot mansions. It’s all kind of this heritage modernism with local found materials.

Elliott Bisnow (33:52):

Basically, where we try to keep the houses close to each other when it comes to side by side, sometimes above and below each other, but then they’ll have these beautiful views. And it’s like this concept of you want to be in the mountains. You don’t want to be in the middle of nowhere. You want to feel like you’re in nature and you can look far out and ski in, ski out or quickly get to the slopes, but you also want to have a neighbor you can walk to in 20 seconds.

Elliott Bisnow (34:17):

Just we’ve studied tons of towns, visited towns and we really had a very specific vision if we were going to reimagine the American mountain town or community what would it look like?

Robert Leonard (34:29):

I just pulled up some pictures of that top area while we’re talking. And it’s pretty fascinating. I recommend anybody that’s listening, that’s interested, Google Powder Mountain top and just look at some of the pictures. It’s pretty interesting. How does that work from a business perspective? Are you selling lots of land to these people and then they’re essentially doing the construction themselves, obviously within your guidelines or you the developer? How does that work?

Elliott Bisnow (34:53):

It works like any other resort development. So you essentially have a number of options. Right? The easiest one to do for a variety of reasons is selling home sites. And there is some subset of people who’ve always wanted to design their dream home. Right?

Elliott Bisnow (35:10):

I mean, for a lot of people, they definitely don’t want to do that. And they just want to buy a finished product just like you would in a city. But there is some subset of people who really want to buy their own finished home. Then I’d say this three high level three options. That’s the first option. The second option would be either the company or with a third party, you can do a joint venture and you can develop spec homes.

Elliott Bisnow (35:32):

So you can actually prefund the homes, start building them in either while they’re under construction or after they’re finished, you can sell those finished homes. And then the third option is kind of a hybrid of that where you sell a home site, but you funded architectural designs that are engineered and are ready to go and are approved. And you sell a home site with architectural plans. We have a neighborhood called Horizon Run and that neighborhood when you buy a lot, it comes with one of three options of the home that you want to build on the lot.

Elliott Bisnow (36:07):

So in that option, it’s kind of a middle, right? You don’t have to spend a year designing and getting approved the plans, you buy a lot and you can pretty quickly break ground. I think most have those three options, and the dream is definitely to be where a project is just selling finished houses, but it’s quite complicated and expensive to be financing spec homes.

Robert Leonard (36:32):

From a, I guess, legal perspective or zoning and permissions like that, who does that it fall on?

Elliott Bisnow (36:39):

You mean at our company, who does it fall on?

Robert Leonard (36:41):

No, like in the sense like if you… In the city that I live in, if I wanted to build a structure, I have to go to the town and I have to get all these permits and all the zoning laws and all that. So I’m curious, does it go to you guys as the company or is there government organization has to deal with some of the zoning and things like that?

Elliott Bisnow (36:58):

It’s just the exact same as buying a home site anywhere else. So, I mean, at the beginning, when we bought Powder Mountain, it fell on us, the developers, right? We had to get the project entitled, how much you can build. We had to get it zoned what you can build. We had to put in roads, water, sewer, power. We pulled fiber optic internet, right? So five and a half miles of roads. We had to build wells. And once all those things were complete and the project was zoned and then titled, then we are allowed to sell real estate.

Elliott Bisnow (37:28):

Until that’s done, you can’t actually sell real estate. Now, if you buy a home site on Powder Mountain, it’s the same as buying a home site, any other place. Yeah, you can just buy a home site from Powder Mountain and then you take title and then you go through the exact process as you would anywhere else. You hire an architect and a builder. They help you collectively to design the plans to engineer them, and then you submit them to your local county for approval.

Robert Leonard (37:57):

Do you allow Airbnbs?

Elliott Bisnow (37:59):

We do allow Airbnbs. I mean, one of our beliefs is that the best way to build a community or keep people in and out is by building a place that allows people to self select into that place. Right? So what that means is I think with our small homes, our uncrowded skiing, kind of the vision for the community, it’s a place where you’re excited to meet your neighbors. It’s very focused on families. I think there’s not nightclubs at the top of the mountain. I think the people who would rent Airbnbs are hopefully most of the time, they’re self-selecting into wanting to go to Powder Mountain versus wanting to rent an Airbnb in Las Vegas or in Aspen or Vail.

Elliott Bisnow (38:39):

I think Powder Mountain, it’s kind a little bit of an adventuresome ski resort. I think that Airbnb is a really good way for new people to come visit the mountain. I think because we’re so differentiated, people are self-selecting that I think a really great pull to have on the mountain.

Robert Leonard (38:56):

What happens if you decide you want to sell? Are you basically selling all of the land that is not occupied or owned by these private individuals?

Elliott Bisnow (39:05):

Yeah. Something like that. Yes, the ski resort. I mean, real estate is a lot more complicated than a business because in a business is like one business and there’s one cap table. And I think in real estate, again, it’s like any project, you might have a few hundred houses, you might have hotels, you might have sites that have been sold to other developers and they’re going to put something up.

Elliott Bisnow (39:26):

You may have some sites that used as collateral to a lender. In our case, when we bought Powder Mountain, even though it’s 10,000 acres, the previous owner, they’d sold probably 50 sites over the years. Again, I don’t know, there’s 30, 40-ish houses on Powder Mountain before we arrive. There’s some kind of boutique hotels that were there. So you end up as the owner, you have all these different parcels and various holdings.

Elliott Bisnow (39:52):

So I guess you could like any project could just sell everything that they own. But it’s not quite as simple as you have a company and you just sell your company.

Robert Leonard (40:01):

Similar to the guy that you talked to that changed your viewpoint when he told you to be surreal, not real. And then also the guy that told you to roll up your sleeves and just kind of be yourself, when you talked to Kobe Bryant, he changed your viewpoint on pressure and explained how it isn’t real. How did this change your life and perspective on stress and pressure?

Elliott Bisnow (40:21):

I do a lot of interviews at the Summit events. I really love interviewing people, and I did an interview with Kobe Bryant. I was asking him a whole slew of questions. So I asked him just about what his experience with pressure was like when he is down as three games to two or down in certain games. I guess like in anyone else, I had my own view on pressure. My view is always pressure creates diamonds. Use the pressure to… If there’s pressure, you know it matters. So really step into it.

Elliott Bisnow (40:50):

He just had a totally different view, which was that, like you said, pressure is just a figment of your imagination based on your ego is kind of how I took it and that you’ve essentially created your own pressure because something is so meaningful to you. For a whole slew of reasons. You don’t want to let people down. You want to get a bigger contract. You want to be viewed a certain way in people’s eyes.

Elliott Bisnow (41:14):

I just thought that was a unique perspective on pressure that it’s all at the end of the day. The pressure is not real. It’s your ego that has created it.

Robert Leonard (41:23):

A kind of similar concept that has really kind of surprised me and opened my eyes a bit. I don’t know if you’ve read this book, Elliott, but it’s the Almanac of Naval. And basically in that book, he talks about a similar concept on how in a kind of… Not in a necessarily bad way, but basically nothing you do really ultimately matters in terms of stress and pressure, because in maybe one, two generations, people will remember you, but once you get past three, four, five, six generations, nobody is going to remember you anyway.

Robert Leonard (41:51):

So even if you make a mistake, it doesn’t really end up mattering in the long run. So when I read that, it was really eyeopening, I guess, experience or concept that I had never considered, but it sounds similar to what Kobe kind of believed.

Robert Leonard (42:03):

Warren Buffett has two famous quotes about reputation. One says, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it”. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently. And the other says, “Lose money for the firm, and I will be understanding. Lose a shred of reputation for the firm and I will be ruthless.” I think it’s safe to say that Buffett thinks reputation is important, and I know you do too, since you have an idea in your book that says, “Reputations are earned by the drop and lost by the bucket.” Why do you think reputation is so important? What role has reputation played in your business?

Elliott Bisnow (42:39):

Well, I agree with everything that you just said. I think that building a great career, a great business takes time, like a lot of time, right? I mean, not just five years, 10 years, 20 years. So the only way to do that is through long-term partnerships be it that include the people you work with or the people that you raise money from, your customers, and there is no more valuable asset than your reputation. We’ve certainly given our best effort to build our own reputations around the values that matter to us and those values, reputation doesn’t just have to be, “Oh, so-and-so is a lot of integrity.” It could be, “So-and-so gets straight answers. So-and-so is generous when they part ways with people. So-and-so, they’re great listeners and they take customer feedback right.”

Elliott Bisnow (43:27):

So I think we’ve thought a lot about what it means to have a reputation and we’ve really tried, and certainly I’ve personally tried very hard to be consistent with all my values. So people know who I am and they know what I stand for and how I operate

Robert Leonard (43:44):

Your book also talks about this concept of becoming a favor economy millionaire. This isn’t something I had ever heard before. So break down what this means and then explain how we can do it.

Elliott Bisnow (43:55):

There’s lots of good reading about what it means to be wealthy, right? And I think so many people at the beginning of their career, they just want to make a certain amount of money. Right? I want to make $100,000. I want to make a million dollars. I want to make $10 million. Whatever that number is. But really the most important question that should be asked irrespective of money is how do I want to live? Right? And it can be, what are my values that I want to live by. But it’s also, how do I practically want to live? What place do I want to live in? How do I want to eat? Do I want to have friends over a few nights a week? Do I want to go out for meals? Do I want to go on a trip once a year?

Elliott Bisnow (44:32):

I think as you start to establish to how you want to live, what you realize is that not all the things you want to do, you need to pay for. Just because you want to go to an exotic place, doesn’t mean you have to pay for an expensive trip just because you want to have a private chef cook a meal for your family doesn’t mean you have to pay for it. Just because you want to go on a boat in the lake, in the town you live, doesn’t mean you have to buy a boat.

Elliott Bisnow (44:53):

And I think all this comes back to this concept of becoming a favorite economy million millionaire where everyone has something to give, right? You may think, “Oh, I have this friend and he’s a chef in a restaurant.” You never thought much of it. But by you giving to them and them giving to you, you can radically improve living experience right? In the same way people listening to this might be real estate investors. And their friends might have to spend tens of thousand dollars to get that same real estate advice.

Elliott Bisnow (45:20):

They have a gift to give. So I think just living that kind of giving economy where we always say the most selfish thing you can do is give unselfishly. So this certainly is not going around and trying to take from all your friends, their best asset or skill. It’s not about taking their vacation house or jacking their boats on the weekends. But I think it’s about just building relationships with people where everybody’s giving.

Elliott Bisnow (45:44):

So rather than everybody having to spend, everyone can begin to shift to a culture of giving. And you can live this kind of like favor economy, millionaire lifestyle, if you will.

Robert Leonard (45:55):

And going back to the early days of your career, you essentially did that with the limo company, right? I mean, you had an asset that they wanted and they couldn’t have necessarily pay for it. So you traded. You had these favors or gifts that you could go between one.

Elliott Bisnow (46:06):

Exactly.

Robert Leonard (46:08):

We do things similar on the podcast. People will reach out and sometimes I’ll get a copy of their book and they’ll come on the show or they’ll have a service or a product. And we’ll kind of exchange, they’ll come on the show and we’ll get access to that product or service. I mean, I love that concept and idea myself personally.

Elliott Bisnow (46:23):

Yeah. Thank you. Us too. I mean, you can really look around and just see all the examples of how you can give and how your friends can give. You take your friend out on your little fish and boat for the weekend and maybe they’re helping tutor your kid in math the next week. Right? So I think it’s just about all the gifts that we each have, but often we could share them a lot more.

Robert Leonard (46:46):

From my research, it seems that you’ve had a business partner in pretty much all of your businesses that you’ve had. At least your substantial businesses. But not everyone thinks partnerships are the way to go in business or real estate. What has been your experience with partnerships both the ups and downs. Why do you think partnerships are important in business?

Elliott Bisnow (47:04):

Well, I think in order to have a business partner, you need to have a certain type of personality. So it’s not necessarily right for everybody, but I would like to think that for almost everybody, it’s ideal to have a business partner. I mean, my favorite part of doing business has for the most part been my business partners. Right? I mean, I think they’re important for a lot of reasons, but the quick reasons are business partners bring skill sets, you don’t have. And you don’t really just want to hire skillsets you don’t have, because then these things that you don’t really know, people are working for you and you really want peers to have skillsets that you don’t have.

Elliott Bisnow (47:38):

So whether those business partners or those who are board members, I think bringing that diverse set of skills extremely important. Having a business partner really means a peer, right? It’s someone that you can’t fire. You always want the right mechanisms in place if a partnership needs to end. But ultimately, it’s someone who can look you in the eye and they can say, “Robert, I wanted to tell you this thing about X, Y, and Z, or I wanted to give you feedback here. Why don’t we do this differently?”

Elliott Bisnow (48:05):

And the final thing is it’s just way more fun. Have great business partners who you build your dream with and who can help you build your dream. I don’t think I’d ever want to build a business personally without business partners.

Robert Leonard (48:19):

Throughout this episode we’ve talked about some of my favorite takeaways or concepts from your book. What is the biggest thing that you want people to take away from your book after reading it?

Elliott Bisnow (48:29):

Well, the reason we wrote the book was we just wanted to tell people how we built what we did, because two of the four of the Summit co-founders including myself, didn’t have college degrees. We were not exactly great students or potential business successes, and we figured out over the last decade how to build really great businesses and how to build community. We really just wanted to share how we did it and we’ve never done that before.

Elliott Bisnow (48:57):

So that was the main reason. We just had all these interesting tidbits and takeaways and creative ideas for each of the steps in our journey, and we for a long time really just wanted to share as much of that as possible.

Robert Leonard (49:09):

Other than just picking up your book, where is the best place for anybody that’s listening to this episode that’s interested in connecting with you?

Elliott Bisnow (49:17):

They can just reach out on Instagram or at Summit, S-U-M-M-I-T or if they want to connect directly to me, they can just write it on the summit.co website and all the emails. All the messages for me just get forwarded to me, so that’s probably the easiest thing.

Robert Leonard (49:33):

Awesome. I’ll put a link to your book and all the different resources we’ve talked about throughout the episode and different ways to connect with you in the show notes below for anybody that’s interested in checking them out. Elliott, thanks so much for joining me. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Elliott Bisnow (49:45):

Cool. Thank you, Robert.

Robert Leonard (49:47):

All right, guys. That’s all I had for this week’s episode of Real Estate Investing. I’ll see you again next week.

Outro (49:53):

Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to subscribe to We Study Billionaires by The Investor’s Podcast Network. Every Wednesday, we teach you about Bitcoin and every Saturday, We Study Billionaires and the financial markets. To access our show notes, transcripts, or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decision, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by The Investor’s Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.