Highlights from our interview with Chris Powers, founder & CEO of Fort Capital:

Lone Star Standard: How does somebody become successful in your business, real estate?

Powers: Real estate is a game of what is your all in cost and what is your cost to lease. And, so, what that means is if I am going to buy a building from you, I would know the day I closed what my cost of the building was. And, then, let’s just say it was a vacant building and I had to get it leased up, I’d have to project how much it is going to cost to lease it. How much interest am I going to have to pay while it sits vacant. How much am I going to have to pay for marketing? How much am I going to have to pay for leasing commissions? How much am I going to have to pay for tenant build out? And that’s my all in cost. So, I just have to weigh what’s my own cost, what’s my cost to lease and that’s going to produce some type of return. Now that’s it. If it was easy to pull off, more people would do it. Not over-leveraging properties and staying relatively conservative is important. Being in Texas and other markets where there is a lot of population growth and demand, make those markets great to play in. There is also less regulation by the government. You kind of see what happens in a lot of these coastal states, where government regulation has gotten overbearing and you have rent control and it’s impossible to get permitting and everything is just way more difficult. Texas and Florida, specifically, and some of the other Sunbelt states that we’re in are just less regulated. It’s a lot easier to be an entrepreneur in those states.

Lone Star Standard: You have talked to a lot of successful entrepreneurs. What is a common theme among them?

Powers: I think it’s their default optimism. I think in the world today, if you pick up the media or you pick up a newspaper or read an article, it’s mainly just negative stuff all day. We don’t celebrate optimism the way we used to. America has been built on optimism. And I think if you talk to any great entrepreneur, they are optimistic. And it’s not blind optimism. It’s not that they're not thinking about risks and thinking about the playing field, but their default is to be optimistic and not to be kind of a pessimist. So, that’s probably one, that they have an incredible amount of durability and grit. And, so they can just deal like an entrepreneur. You read the headlines often making entrepreneurs sound very glamorous. But if you actually talk to an entrepreneur, it’s a lot. It’s a million little boring things that you do for that one big headline that you might get one day or the one cool thing that you do. It’s being able to wake up and do boring things consistently over time and kind of stay in the game. And, so, they’re just always in the game and they’re resilient.

Lone Star Standard: How is Texas positioned economically for the future?

Powers: I think we live in, arguably, one of the best economies, if not the best economy in the world. We have pretty much everything you could want. We have rail, we have a great port, we have border trade with Mexico. So just from goods in and out, manufacturing and jobs, we have a lot there. We have a relatively low cost of living, although that’s gone up more the last decade as more people have moved in. We have people moving in from all over the country and not just individuals. Fortune 500 is moving into Austin and D.F.W and Houston. Houston has one of the best medical systems in the world. We have NASA and SpaceX and a lot of what’s going on in space, which has become a much bigger deal over the last decade. We have a great flourishing oil and gas industry, the Permian Basin, arguably the most prolific oil and gas producer in the country. We have great access to power, a deregulated market, as you think about what’s going to happen with A.I. and crypto and the need for all this energy. And so we have that here. We have an amazing culture, where, again, not a political statement, but we just have a low regulated state. Texans love Texas. And so you have people that are very passionate about their state. They still have a lot of old time values like just being polite and helping out your neighbor and not taking life terribly seriously. And, so you kind of take all that into consideration, it creates a perfect environment, especially for commerce and business. And so long-term, I couldn’t be more bullish. I don’t know what will happen over the next couple of years or in short periods of time, but it’s setting up really well.

Lone Star Standard: Tell us about the man who tried to extort your company through an online fraud scheme?

Powers: We are working with law enforcement, in what we believe is an extortion case. And so, what I will say is we are dealing with a career criminal, a gentlement that we know who he is with 100% certainty, that lives up in Boulder, Colorado, named Jacob Kostecki. And he has been on X or Twitter for years creating multiple scams that he’s been accused of and has court cases against him that have judgments that he has lost. He’s just a career criminal. This is what he does for sport. He came back online and basically started an account that defamed myself and many others and started saying we are going bankrupt, saying we are frauds. I went through a list of things that couldn’t be more untrue, that we bought airplanes with investor dollars and that we forged documents. The list goes on. He’s a professional. He created a lot of fear in the market. He has kind of become the ‘hey, if you have a tip on somebody, email me’ guy. That account got very large. It got up to 22,000 followers. And so you can imagine when he’s out tweeting, some of those tweets would go viral and be seen. Basically, his whole play was, ‘pay me to go away.’ Pay me a lot of money or I will destroy your family, I will destroy your reputation, your business. I will go after everything I can until I’m paid to go away. And to the extent that I can share, what I can share is we’re working closely with the FBI. There is another party, it’s public so I can say it, that has filed a civil lawsuit on defamation. We’re undecided if we’re going to do that at this point but we are cooperating with law enforcement and have every intention of pursuing this to the fullest.

This interview transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Listen to the full discussion here: https://texas-talks.simplecast.com/episodes/ep-36-chris-powers