Real Estate Underground

From Active Investor to Private Equity Fund Manager: Lon Welsh's Evolution

• Ed Mathews • Season 4 • Episode 169

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Ed Mathews:

If you are getting value we've had some amazing guests over the last several months and if you're getting value out of it, I would greatly appreciate if you could follow us and maybe share our show with a colleague that helps us grow. So with us today is Lon Welsh. He is the managing director of Ironton Capital and he works with real estate brokers as well. As I've just discovered a former strategy consultant. I'm not going to make him. We're not going to get into management consulting because that's one of the hats I used to wear, but we may get into technology just a little bit, because he knows more than I do. So, lon, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining us today. Thanks for having me. Yeah, truly my pleasure. So, for those folks who haven't discovered you on LinkedIn and the other places that you haunt, why don't you tell us a little bit about you and your firm and then we'll get into it?

Lon Welsh:

Yeah, just a quick nickel tour. I was in corporate finance for a couple of years, went back to business school. I worked as a strategy consultant for eight years at Deloitte and then Accenture. I've been investing for just about 25 years now, started when I was still a consultant. Left consulting in 2002 to go into real estate full-time. Sold real estate for a couple of years, decided to launch a brokerage called your Castle Real Estate in 2004. Grew that to be the largest independent in Colorado, with about 750 agents. Built a title company with a partner. Sold the brokers to a private equity fund about three and a half years ago. Title company to Compass three and a half years ago. And then I launched Ironton about three years ago. What I found is that I was an active investor, probably like an awful lot of your listeners, for a couple of decades. It was getting hard to find deals that make sense.

Ed Mathews:

So I've switched to passive investing and with the private equity fund I started, I can help other people be passive investors too. Yeah, congrats. And Ironton is a rapidly growing firm. Even in. It's interesting and one of the real. One of the things in preparing for our conversation today I really wanted to understand is where are you finding the deals? And obviously you're finding operators, not deals, but it's still a process, because we've switched to a similar strategy, mainly because we went to go trade up and sold off a bunch of assets with the intent of finding new, larger assets, and we were successful in some respects, but in others we were like, oh boy, it's day 30 in my 45 day, 1031 exchange and I don't have anything that I like picking up the phone and calling operators that I know and trust to see if I could deploy the capital with them. We were able to find deals, land those deals. It's really stressful.

Lon Welsh:

No doubt about that. There's three of us full time on investment committee that are just out trying to find things and then doing initial underwrites and then flying out to visit the properties and meet the sponsors and double check everything. Probably about a third of our investments are repeat of sponsors that we've worked with in the past, that we've had success with, and once you've been a successful investor for them, that's not a pain to work with. They usually have a friends and family list that they'll contact before they broadly disseminate a new investment opportunities and the very best ones they're totally filled just by us. Nobody else even sees them. So that's probably about a third. About a third is just random stuff that comes into the inbox and it's just like a lot of boiling to get to the good ones. On that, Back when I was a commercial broker selling multifamily, I had a designation called a CCIM, a Certified Commercial Investment Manager.

Lon Welsh:

So I'm not active anymore but I still have access to the CCIM database we started with. Every CCIM in Georgia that specializes in multifamily introduced ourselves hey, do you have an interesting transaction? Makes a ton of sense. But the lending requirements are different, where your buyer needs more of a down payment than they used to Do. You need a capital to partner on the equity stack. Explained what we did and then we called everybody in South Carolina. We called everybody in Florida we're working with everybody in North Carolina. We called everybody in Florida. We're working with everybody in North Carolina. It's just a lot of calls. I wish I had a slick answer, but it's just a lot of work.

Ed Mathews:

Yeah, it turns out this is actually a hard job, right, and people like you and me and our backgrounds dialing for dollars, as they used to call it. They may still call it that, but I haven't done that in a long time, but the fact is that there is nothing replaces a hard work and b a network of relationships, right?

Lon Welsh:

yeah, the network is actually my biggest driver in the real estate. There's really no substitute for it. If you can't be on the phone talking to people mostly all day long, it's tough for people living at this.

Ed Mathews:

You can't market your way to find deals. You can occasionally, but those deals are sometimes. They're okay. If you want real meaty deals that are going to perform like they would if you were running them, there's really only way to do that, and that's embracing the fact that this is a team sport. Okay, so let's talk about your buy box. You mentioned Georgia, south Carolina, north Carolina and Florida, I believe, and so that's a pretty large area, and so I'm curious about the types of properties you tend to target. Are you a value add player? Do you look more for luxury A and B class? What's your target?

Lon Welsh:

Good question. From a geographic standpoint, we've actually invested in about 15 different states. They're mostly the Sunbelt states. Our biggest criteria is we want to see a high degree of employment growth, because that tends to drive everything downstream. About half of our investments will usually be new construction and the other half will be value add. We don't do any buy and hold work.

Lon Welsh:

There's plenty of REITs that are outstanding and it's tough for us to compete with that. And then, from an asset mix standpoint, a typical fund will have about 30 different assets in it, usually with about 10 to 12 different sponsors. So usually about two-thirds of those will be multifamily and the rest will be industrial. Every once in a blue moon, self-storage not too often and there are some segments within hospitality that we like. So what we want to try to do is bring really good diversification across a number of different axes to our limited partner so that they can have a really broad portfolio, and the payoff for that is last fall there was two hurricanes within a couple of weeks that hit Tampa and we had an asset there and I was able to sleep pretty well at night knowing that 3% of our portfolio was in Tampa and it's going to be flooded when I woke up in the morning, but the other 97% would be just fine. And man, that's a whole lot less stressful. We are all prostituted in one spot.

Ed Mathews:

Yeah, sleepless nights, right, and you bring up a point that I ask most of the investors that I meet who operate in the Sunbelt. Let's talk about insurance briefly. Obviously, even our insurance up here in the Northeast and we haven't had a direct hit of a hurricane since I think I was a sophomore in high school Insurance companies are looking to diversify their own risk, and little guys up here in Connecticut, where I am, get a little bit of a surcharge From what I've heard in talking with your counterparts as well as several insurance brokers. Insurance has been a pretty rough road over the last two, three years.

Lon Welsh:

Oh, it's really been a headache. So the projects that we bought in, say, 2020 through the first part of 2022, when the rates were a little bit on the lower side and the insurance rates went up quite a bit, that's been a negative hit to cash flow that wasn't anticipated and a lot of times the contingencies weren't sufficient to offset that. So that's been a negative hit to projected returns. But what we've seen in the stuff that we've bought in 23, 24, and this year is that we're underwriting on a much higher base for the insurance premiums and we forecasted in higher rates of growth in the future.

Lon Welsh:

What I'm hearing from some people is that we might be getting close to the apex and maybe it'll stabilize and if that's the case, we've been too conservative in our underwriting. We've put too much reserve into future years, which is a great thing. Taxes, I think, would be another analog that would follow that same cost trajectory and, to a lesser extent, the underwriting that you're doing now. Not only the benefit of buying on a higher cap rate than you would have in the past, you've also got a much fatter OPEX stack. So there's a lot more room for error in the stuff I buy today than, say, four years ago.

Ed Mathews:

Sure, absolutely. And so I heard capital reserves. Is there anything else that you're doing to? No one has a crystal ball, but yesterday I was reading the wall street journal website around two o'clock two, 15, actually and I saw huh, fed, didn't.

Ed Mathews:

Fed kept rates soon. Yeah, they did a nice job with the soft landing, but I would love to see rates at least chip down. That said, rates are historically right down the middle in terms of the median of where they are over the last 50 years in that seven, seven and a half range. So I can't really complain a lot. I like 3%, 4%, we all do. It was nice, made me look a lot smarter. That's got to be a challenge with managing a private equity fund, because do you have multiple funds and one fund is targeting development and another fund is targeting more cashflow oriented assets, or like, how do you manage that, knowing that you take on a 200 unit development project and you're probably two years away from any cash flow, at least 18 months and possibly three years from some level of stability and break even and possibly profitability? And I'm curious, how do you manage that with your partners? Yeah, so for the limited partners, we really have three offerings.

Lon Welsh:

We have a short-term income fund that pays about 8% and it's got a high degree of liquidity. We've got a short-term income fund that pays about 8% and it's got a high degree of liquidity. We've got a medium-term income fund that pays around 11 to 13, depending on how much you invested with us. It's locked up for a year, 90 days notice, so not bad liquidity, but not as liquid as the short-term.

Lon Welsh:

And then we've got our long-term growth funds and our goal with the long-term fund is that there's no income, or as little income as I could possibly manage to, and it's all capital gains, and that's usually about a five-year horizon. I usually try to coach people that will try to get most of your equity back by the fourth year and most of the profits will be in year five and six. If they're selling an apartment complex and they want to be passive with us, we could put as much as we have to into the medium-term income to replicate the cashflow they were living on from owning this real estate property, and then the rest we can put in the long-term fund to replicate the long-term appreciation they had. But synthetically I can recreate just about any scenario a client needs just by balancing across the two.

Ed Mathews:

Oh, okay. So I have half a million bucks and we're going to allocate 150K into the long-term fund, 150k into the medium term and 200K because I've got kids in college and I'm going to need that money I got you. That makes a lot of sense. I'm curious about the short term. Is that more of a debt fund or yeah?

Lon Welsh:

it's a hard money fund, so probably have a lot of real estate investors that are familiar with hard money. Our business partner on that. It runs about a $270 million fund. It's around 300 loans. So we're just a tiny slice of every single one of those.

Ed Mathews:

Nice. One of the things that was particularly interesting to me when I'm meeting with people are like why are you loaning out money when you could be buying real estate? I said here's the thing In some cases not all, but in some cases I would like to be John Sutter of the fame where he was the first millionaire in the gold rush back in the mid-1800s, and the reason being is that he was selling the shovels and sticks. In our world, when real estate people are digging for gold, capital is that tool, or at least it's one of them, and so I would much rather facilitate yeah, and we're not getting the same returns, but they're six-month gigs, nine-month gigs, 12 months at the absolute outside, and we're able, like you were saying, to be able to provide liquidity, which is unique in the real estate world, where you deploy capital into some sort of real estate investment and you're probably a year plus, in some cases, multiple years away from having access to that capital again.

Lon Welsh:

Absolutely. One idea for your listeners to consider in our medium-term fund is underpinned by medical accounts receivable, and medical receivables are not impacted by interest rates wars in Ukraine, if we run a deficit or not, because people are getting car access no matter what and it's really valuable to have part of your portfolio. Be not correlated to the real estate markets or the drivers of the market, because I'm very heavy in real estate and when interest rates go up, that's not a favorable thing for me and when they come down, as you were alluding earlier, like we're all cheering. So try to get a couple different asset classes. Not all have your eggs in one basket. It's not a bad idea.

Ed Mathews:

So what other asset classes are you using to diversify your funds? You, so what other asset classes are you using to diversify your funds?

Lon Welsh:

You know that's really it. So the short-term fund is primarily the hard money loans, the medium-term fund is based on medical receivables and then the long-term fund is equity positions, not debt positions. Okay, a variety of either development projects or rehab projects.

Ed Mathews:

So I'm intrigued by the mid-term one then. So when you are investing in medical receivables, are you simply? Is it a factoring type of a play, or like how does that work with?

Lon Welsh:

Yeah. So our coach EP that we work with on this, it's actually a two component solution. For larger claims, the physician or the medical practice is going to want to do all the work themselves on the billing and paperwork administration side. But for small claims say $30,000, it's just not worth their time to do it. So what we do is we completely take over the claim. We give them about a third of the value of the claim. So it's factoring in the sense that we're giving them an advance against receivable but they don't have to pay us back. We're just taking the claim over and we're doing all the paperwork from here on out.

Lon Welsh:

The challenge is, if you're just selling money, which is what factoring is, then it's just a knife fight to see which bank can provide the best terms. We're providing a business solution, so then the terms don't need to be as attractive, because we're solving a different problem entirely and what we like to do is have a basket of about 100 of these medical claims from a physician's office or a clinic. We'll advance on about 95. We're only advancing a third of the value and they're all cross-collateralized. So we anticipate two or 3% will be fraudulent and then we've got 97 other claims in the basket we can go collect against. So it's as if you had a partner with a hundred paid off real estate investments that came to us as a bank. We did a 35% loan to value on 95 of the rental properties, but they're all cross-collateralized. If you didn't pay the mortgage on one, I could take any other property I wanted to get paid.

Ed Mathews:

Oh, it's pretty darn close Now. Are you so the entity that you are billing yourself? Is that the patient, or is that the insurance company? Or is that-?

Lon Welsh:

Insurance company. Okay, so usually it's going to be in a state where there may be it may be contested. Is it you with Geico or me with State Farm that's at fault for this accident? I don't know which of the two of us is going to pay for this medical claim yet, but meanwhile doctor needs to get paid and needs to move on to the next patient. They need cash flow. So we solve that and we solve the paperwork problem. So it's a really great niche. One of the guys on our investment committee. He started at Goldman Sachs and then he ran a $2 billion family office. Then he came to us and there was a relationship that he brought with him. They only work with institutions. So we've raised just under $30 million for these guys so far and we've got a $100 million allocation, so I'm very grateful to be doing this.

Ed Mathews:

Yeah, it's a fascinating play. It really is. One of the things that I'm always interested in is and let's see if we can get into our lightning round into the final five. I'm always fascinated by the fact that people that are successful like you, where the mortgages are paid, the college tuitions are taken care of, there's probably no car payments Every Monday morning you wake up and go to work. That tells me that there's something else driving you, and I call that purpose. I think a lot of people do so. I'm curious what is your purpose? What is that thing that gets you bounding out of bed on Monday morning and heading over to the office?

Lon Welsh:

I'll tell you a quick backstory. I've written 13 books, five of them on real estate investing in Colorado, and I've done a bunch of training classes over the last two decades for people on why should you invest in real estate. I'd have 20 people in a class and at the end one of them would say, yeah, I want to go buy an apartment building with you. And the other 19 would tell me I'm too busy. I'm an attorney or an architect, I'm taking my kids to soccer parties. I can't buy real estate, but I sure love the idea. So when I launched the passive investing company, I really had formulated a solution to 19 people instead of one person.

Lon Welsh:

No-transcript. Help them do that in a tax advantaged way Not as good as a 1031,. But the other use case is all these dentists, physicians, chiropractors, architects, attorneys that have got their entry-level high network. They're between one to five million. They know they need to have some exposure to real estate, but they don't want to have the burden of running an apartment building themselves. We're a way to give that part of their financial portfolio a sense of peace of mind that I'm diversified across a lot of assets, I've got professionals running it and I don't have to worry about it. My goal is to create a hundred million dollars of wealth for these people. We're well on the way to doing that. I'm in the dream, granting business. I'm like the genie in the bottle. You get to retire sooner, retire better, send your kid to a better school. We make that happen.

Ed Mathews:

It's amazing, and it's truly amazing what you can do. Similar story in that when my daughter, katie was born in 2008, I was going to invest in real estate. It actually took me almost three years to get the courage to pull the trigger and I bought a four family and over the course of the next 14, 15 years we fixed it up and made it beautiful and clean and safe and paid it off. And then, when she turned 17 and became a senior in high school, it turns out the child wanted to go to college and we leveraged that asset to basically pay for her college education.

Ed Mathews:

And yeah, it was wonderful and we even got her a car, but she had to wait for that to be a senior. Nevertheless, real estate a very useful tool to be able to plan for those life events, especially if you're figuring it out early on the fact that you are the genie in the bottle, granting more than it sounds like, more than three wishes that's a pretty cool place to be Honored to do this and one of the things that I'm always interested about. We're going to talk about books in a minute, but I want to talk about your books for a moment, because you reminded me you've written 13 books. One of them I'm familiar with is the Complete Guide to Pass diversified real estate investing, and so I wanted to.

Ed Mathews:

One of the great things about a book right, especially someone who has been there and done that like you is they're basically boiling a sizable slice of their life into 200 pages. Yeah, exactly, and I can sit and read or listen that's how I do it to the book and basically understand and hopefully digest and impulse some of the strategies and tactics that author has provided in the book to help me improve my business, and that's a really unique experience. Can you tell me a little bit about the experience of writing either that book or if there's another book that you'd like to talk about, that's fine, but the passive book jumped out at me so I figured I'd mention that one.

Lon Welsh:

That's a really good example. After talking to a lot of prospective investors, many of whom did eventually go on to invest with us the idea of passive investing and what is a private equity fund this was like a lot of really new information. How does this kind of fit into the overall financial plan of my family? So these were like a set of questions that kept coming up on a recurring basis. Rather than me giving an hour and a half discussion to each person, I thought I'm just going to write all these things down, because they're a set of common themes. That's actually where the majority of my votes came from is you would hit a vein of I want to invest in Colorado real estate. What are my options? All right, here's eight different options. Here's six skills that investors tend to have. Let's do a diagnostic when are you relatively strong and relatively weak? Based on that assessment, I can tell you that this class and this class are a good match. Here's why these other six you should not look at. Here's why.

Lon Welsh:

And then there's a chapter on each of the eight investment classes. Just read those two chapters that apply to you. It'll save you all this time and greatly increase your odds of success. And, as a real estate broker. I want you to be successful, so you come back and do 10 more. The wrong reason. You're not going to come back and neither one of us win that game. So this is the exact same thing. If your listeners would like a copy, it's just irontoncapitalcom forward, slash R E underground and you can download a free copy.

Ed Mathews:

Oh, that's awesome. Thank you. Of course, I know about a dozen people off the top of my head that are going to jump on that immediately. So that's great, that's great. So let's talk about other books. I'm always curious about how leaders like yourself sharpen the saw, so to speak. I'm curious about how you take in information, how do you do it and who are you paying attention to these days? Gosh, a lot of it is just general business 101.

Lon Welsh:

And it's everything from sales skills to people who have studied TED Talks to figure out which ones are more or less successful. What are the elements of a successful speaker that really captivates an audience? How to be more effective with interpersonal communications. There's always something you can get better at and half the time you realize like gosh. I heard this seven years ago in a different book, but I'd forgotten about it. I really need to re-implement this.

Ed Mathews:

So I try to eat a pretty broad and varied diet so I try to eat a pretty broad and varied diet, and so, when you think about some of the creators, authors and so on, what are some of the ones that have been particularly valuable to you over the last however much time?

Lon Welsh:

oh, gosh, you probably had this 55 times on your show but rich dad, poor dad. 25 years ago, when I first got started, that's crystallized for me more than anything else really what the opportunity was, because that's something that we didn't learn in the MBA program. Oddly enough, I think since then it looks like Captivate were really good at just thinking through how you communicate, how you're received, how to adjust your delivery to have the impact that you want to have. That was incredibly helpful. Anything you could do from a communication standpoint, I think, would be a very high return on investment.

Ed Mathews:

Absolutely Wonderful. So I'm also curious about the mentors you've had in your life, and I'm very specifically curious about the best advice you ever got and who gave it to you.

Lon Welsh:

When I started at Deloitte, there was this guy, john Baer, who was my first engagement manager, and something he told me that wasn't obvious to me at that moment in time is that he said whenever you're talking to a client, our job is to affect some sort of change in behavior to get a business outcome. If we don't do that, we're not in the entertainment business. So to do that, what you got to do is figure out what is it that's important to this person and what's the best way for them to receive information. So just to use stereotypes like, you've got an engineering type. They're going to want a lot of detail, a lot of supporting evidence. Show me the whole chain of logic you're going to have.

Lon Welsh:

Other people are going to be a little bit more like artists where you can show them the composite picture and they don't really care about how you got there.

Lon Welsh:

They see the vision. That's all they want, and there's a couple like steps in between on that sort of a scale identify what this person's style is and then adjust everything about your presentation format and the level of detail to that. And I was able to do it in a crude fashion almost immediately after he said it and it got better results from a persuasion standpoint immediately, and then just by iterating over the years, I hope I get better and better, and I think the way to do that is just to ask a lot of good questions of the other person about how do you like to make decisions, what is the deliverable you're hoping to get from this, and then asking a couple of whys behind that. If you want to grow your overall investment portfolio from $2 million to $3 million, that's good for me to know, but what would that enable for your family? If you pulled that off, the more granular you can get on the end goal that you back-solve, and then it's not abstract. There's a really meaningful why behind it.

Ed Mathews:

That's where you want to be. It's something I learned very early in my career as well. Understand where your customer or your client is in their journey, where they're trying to go, why they're trying to get there. And then your job understand where they're trying to get and help them get there right. Provide the alternatives and some of those alternatives are things that you can do with, they can do with you, and some of them are introductions to other people in the space it's they've got to go out on their own, but at least you've given them a path. In all three situations you've added value to where they're trying to go.

Ed Mathews:

Absolutely, karma is a real thing and integrity is a real thing. If you help enough people get down that path, eventually they will reciprocate and in some way, shape or form, it does come back. It has for me. Yeah, that's what keeps me in Cheerios and coffee. I'm also curious about the way that humans grow right, and so I. Fundamentally, in my 55 years on this earth, I think I've learned a lot more from the mistakes that I've made than the successes I've had, and so I'm curious about a decision that you've made than the successes I've had, and so I'm curious about a decision that you've made along the way, and one of them I'd like to talk, in particular about something that you decision you'd love to have back, and if you can talk about that kind of what, was it knowing that you're only as good as the information you have at the moment at the decision point, right? And so I'm curious about a mistake that you made, and if you were able to recover, how did you?

Lon Welsh:

recover. I'll give you three of them. So the first is the decision to sell the real estate brokerage which I built from scratch. I spent almost two decades running. In retrospect, I probably should have sold it four, five years earlier and launched the passive investing firm that much faster. I think I was reluctant to let go of something I knew so well and it was like I'm autopilot making a lot of cash and start something new was a little bit gosh. There's going to be a lot of work. I'm glad I did it, but I should have done it sooner. So I think the core letter to that is there's a lot of people who are stuck in a bad job and they stay at it because it's known or a bad relationship, and then when they finally end the relationship, where they get laid off and they move on to the next thing, it's a terrible transition time emotionally, but when they get to the new thing, they're like, oh my God, why did I wait so long to do this? And this is an example of that, I think.

Lon Welsh:

The second is shifting from being an active investor to a passive investor. I'm 57, so not too far from it. I don't need to prove to anybody I can slay the dragon dream. I've had an absolutely great project I don't need to prove it to myself or anybody else and I'd like to work just a little bit less. So I want to ski a little more, Letting go of something I'd done so well for so long to learn something entirely new, right Once I figured it out. I wouldn't have to work as much but get pretty similar returns. And everybody on this call is going to have to go through that transition too, because you're not going to want to be 80 years old running a renovation of up for me. I was in my early 50s, you might be in your 60s, but we all have to come to that moment eventually.

Lon Welsh:

And then, probably the most actionable one is in our first fund we only had eight investments. It wasn't enough diversification. So on those eight it was a typical distribution one complete disaster, one grand slam and a bunch of base hits, and it all ended up averaging out okay. So the big mistake on that one was we bought an office building that was a huge value add in the office park suburb called Sugar Land of Houston, like three, four months before COVID broke out, and we'd lost everything on that project. And it's just like why did I buy this thing? But there's nothing I could have done to do it? I said no one saw that coming. Yeah, exactly.

Lon Welsh:

But on the other hand, when we did a build to rent project that we should have been like in the low twenties on our returns, we ended up delivering a 54% to our limited partners and I'd like to tell you that I'm just really smart at picking out funds.

Lon Welsh:

But, to be honest, we just got lucky. We bought it at the exact right moment in time in the cycle, we sold it at exactly the right moment in time and we ran a fundamentally really good project on top of it, but the timing being perfect raised this from being like a 21 or a 22 to a 54. So when I talk to people who are considering passive investing and you're evaluating a sponsor and they trot out these really great success stories, you've got to take some time thinking about. Why don't you get in and get out of the project and think through how much of this was just luck of the timing cycle and how much of it was actually authentic, what they did operationally, Because there's they could be very significant factors and that those two stories, I think, bookend the experience.

Ed Mathews:

I agree. I thank you for sharing that the yeah. The fact is that the late 2019, 18, 19 and early 2020s, 2021, 22-ish made a lot of people look a lot smarter than they were. Exactly, Exactly, yeah. How do you define that?

Lon Welsh:

in your life I've been fortunate enough to do a lot of real estate products for a couple of decades and I've built and sold two companies. So what I really focus now on is I'm on the board of directors for three charities in Denver, trying to help them achieve their mission. The other part is just the group of limited partners that we serve as our investors, trying to help them achieve their financial goals, and hopefully I can help them get there a little faster with a little bit less brain damage, and if I can do that then I've been successful. Couldn't agree more.

Ed Mathews:

Brain damage. I've really enjoyed this conversation, Lon. Congratulations on a tremendous business you've built and congratulations on all your other successes as well. When not talking about real estate or medical billing, what do you like to do for fun so?

Lon Welsh:

things I've done for a while are skiing, tennis, golf skiing, or I'm actually starting a new gigantic Bob Mann hat and project project next, two or three years from now, we're learning how to paint.

Ed Mathews:

Oh, artistically paint. If you need a house painted, I'll do that. Different skills, so I'm a.

Lon Welsh:

I've gone through a fine arts certificate. I got a minor in art history during COVID just for something to do while we were all locked up. I've picked out like a hundred master canvases I want to copy from Degas or Cezanne or Titian and we're going to do that for the next year and a half and I'll see if I develop a style plan after that.

Ed Mathews:

You have to keep me up to date on that. Are you going to create a website or something share, or is this just for you and you're not going to make it public?

Lon Welsh:

going to make it public. I think the first phase of it for me is that I've traveled a lot. I've been to a bazillion museums multiple times, so the art history study helped me to get a much better appreciation. When I was in a gallery looking at a piece. But my hypothesis was that if I actually tried to copy some of these things and ended up spending eight hours looking at one canvas trying to recreate yourself the level of detail and engagement is a lot different than just standing in front of a painting in a museum for two minutes. It's analogous to I played piano and saxophone growing up. I can listen to jazz or classical music in a way that people who haven't played an instrument probably can't. So I'm trying to recreate that and so far I think it's working.

Ed Mathews:

Excellent, you bet. All right, lon. If someone wants to learn more about Ironton or anything else about you, what's the best way to get in touch?

Lon Welsh:

Two ways to do. It would be just Lon Welsh my name L-O-N-W-E-L-S-H at Ironton, i-r-o-n-t-o-n. Capitalcom. You can email me. You can go to our website and book a time slot or, honestly, just text me 303-619-0633 and set up the time for us to talk for 15 minutes. If you are an investor and you're not sure of your strategy, I am not that busy. I am happy to talk to you for 15 minutes and try to give you some advice and say here's three things I would try not to do and one thing that might work. You'll need to test it. Here's three things to find out if that's going to work for you or not. I had a lot of people do this for me when I was starting and it greatly accelerated my learning curve. I've been a lot more successful as a result and if I could spend 10, 15 minutes with some of your listeners, getting them that same benefit, I'd be honored to do that.

Ed Mathews:

Thank you very much. That's incredibly generous, absolutely so, lon. Thank you so much for your time today. It's a pleasure to meet you. I am very much looking forward to reading your book. Now that I know there are 13, I'm a voracious reader I may read all 13. You never know. Thank you for your time and it's really good to meet you.

Lon Welsh:

Thank you, thanks for having me.

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