Do you ever look at big generational businesses and wonder how they made it? In this episode, Marco Santarelli is joined by someone who is more than qualified to answer that question. He invites on the show Mitzi Perdue, businesswoman, author, and master storyteller. Mitzi has not one but two business titans in her life. She is the daughter of Ernest Henderson, the founder of the Sheraton Hotel Chain, and the widow of Frank Perdue, the former President and CEO of Perdue Foods. With family members who have built generational businesses from scratch in the early 1920s and created and maintained strong value-based cultures, learning about what makes a business successful is just beyond any doubt. Here, Mitzi shares with us some of those lessons that she has learned first-hand, especially those that helped build the massive Sheraton Hotel Chain. She also addresses the current COVID-19 pandemic, giving out great insights to inspire those who are struggling not to lose heart. Whether you are in the real estate industry or not, this conversation will undeniably provide some great nuggets about success—what it means, what it entails, and how to maintain it.
Get your FREE copy of: The Ultimate Guide to Passive Real Estate Investing.
If you missed our last episode, be sure to listen to How To Build Tax-Free Wealth Using A Self-Directed IRA
Enjoy the show!
– – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Download your FREE copy of: The Ultimate Guide to Passive Real Estate Investing.
Get your FREE coffee mug by leaving us a Rating and Review on iTunes. Here’s how.
See our available Turnkey Cash-Flow Rental Properties.
Please give us a RATING & REVIEW (Thank you!)
SUBSCRIBE on iTunes | Stitcher | Podcast Feed
Lessons That Helped Build The Massive Sheraton Hotel Chain With Mitzi Perdue
What if you had someone in your life who was a titan of real estate? I have a very special guest. Something a little different than what I normally do on the show. My guest has had not one, but two titans in her life. The first is a real estate titan. You may have heard of the Sheraton Hotel chain. It’s a massive hotel chain. It was started by Ernest Henderson. Ernest is the father of my guest, Mitzi Perdue. As you may know, the Sheraton Hotel chain, Sheraton Hotels, and Resorts, is an international hotel chain. It’s owned by Marriott International. As of the end of 2018, Sheraton operated 441 hotels with 155,600-plus rooms globally. That’s not all. Mitzi was also married to a business titan as her husband.
That titan was Frank Perdue, who was the President and CEO of Perdue Foods, a major chicken, turkey and pork processing company in the United States. In 2016, their annual sales were a whopping $6.7 billion. The reason Mitzi is on the show is because in both cases, if you have family members generationally that put enormous effort into creating and maintaining strong value-based cultures and building businesses literally from scratch in the early 1920s, then I’m sure they have some lessons to share. I know Mitzi has had many lessons learned. With that, I felt that it would be great to learn what helped build these massive companies. We could maybe learn from some of those lessons in helping us as individual investors and us building our businesses and our real estate portfolios.
—
It’s my pleasure to welcome Mitzi Perdue. She is a businesswoman and author of the book, How to Make Your Family Business Last. Her family began in real estate 180 years ago with the founding of the Henderson Estate Company. Her father continued in real estate, founding the Sheraton Hotel chain in the 1930s. In continuing the family tradition of real estate investing, she invested in agricultural land in the 1970s. If you’ve tasted wine from Robert Mondavi, Kendall-Jackson, Gallo, Sutter Home, or Toasted Head, you may have sampled grapes grown in her California vineyards. Mitzi, welcome to the show.
What a pleasure to be here.
I’m honored to have you on here and you’re obviously friends with Mark Victor Hansen. How long have you known Mark?
It’s quite recent. We did author a book together, so I’ve gotten to know him reasonably well. The more I know him, the more I am in awe of him. He’s one class act.
It’s one golden nugget after another that comes out of his mouth.
In fact, I can tell you that when he’s writing, he’s unlike anybody I’ve ever known, and most of my career has included writing. I didn’t even know anybody who could have completely formed sentences, paragraphs, and thoughts. What an awesome mind. I’d love to know what his IQ is.
I’m sure it’s pretty high. I first met Mark back in late 2003 here in Orange County, California. It was at a real estate investing event that I went to that was put on by him and his partner at the time, Robert G. Allen, who’s one of the grandfathers of Nothing Down real estate investing. He comes from my hometown, my home province in Canada, and now he lives down in San Diego here. That’s what relaunched me back into real estate investing. I met Mark back then and I remember he was a very tall, big person. He reminded me of Tony Robbins. Mitzi, you have a very interesting family background and you’re very interesting too. I’ve looked at your books on Amazon and I need to buy them all because they’re pertinent to me right now. Can you tell us a little bit more about you and your background and where you’re at? I want to learn more about you.
I had an unusual circumstance in my life. I got to watch my father, who was the Cofounder of the Sheraton Hotel chain. He started it in the 1930s and we kept it in the family until his death in 1967. I got to watch who was, in the end, a real estate titan because the hotels were owned by the family. I got to watch him and ask him in real-time, “Why are you doing this? Why are you doing that?” In addition, he would always answer questions that I, as a little girl, would ask him of, “Why did you do this?” That’s half of my unusual circumstance. The other is I got to marry Frank Perdue and he’s not well-known on the West Coast, I’m going to assume.
Frank Perdue in the 1980s, 1990s, was known as the absolute iconic figure in advertising because he started out as a chicken farmer, 1 of 5,000 on the Eastern shore of Maryland. He grew to be somebody who went from employing nobody to employing 20,000 to sell in a good year in 100 different countries to become a household name, whether it’s in Tokyo or Moscow or Beijing. I got to watch two extraordinarily successful people. My degree is in Management. I have a Master’s in Public Administration and an undergraduate in Government. In the case of Frank Perdue, I had the background to ask him questions and then I could compare and contrast the success of my father with the success of Frank Perdue. It left me with a whole lot of ideas about what makes success.
You’ve been tied to two very big, well-known titan names. You’ve learned a lot from these people. Let’s start with your father. Your father founded the massive Sheraton Hotel chain back in the 1930s. This was during the height of the Great Depression, which a lot of people don’t stop to think about because it lasted from about 1922 to 1929. It was a time when people were running away from investments of all sorts. Credit was very tight and the banks weren’t lending. Banks were in trouble. Nobody wanted to invest in the stock market anymore and they didn’t want to invest in real estate. Your father ultimately owned 400 hotels and he employed over 20,000 people at the time of his death. What takeaways or lessons can we learn from his experience? You’re coming from this from a front-row seat firsthand.
I have loads that I’m eager to share that because they apply to now because it’s a time of uncertainty. We’re not sure when this is going to end. Even the travel industry, it’s up against something similar to what my father was up against when Sheraton began in 1933. You mentioned that people were running away from real estate, but within real estate, they were particularly running away from hotels. There weren’t conventions and people weren’t traveling. It was so what it is now and father was a contrarian. He bought one hotel and he made enough of a success of it that with the profits from that, he bought another and another until at the time of his death, 400. As a kid, it was clear as could be to me that father was a successful guy.
When we traveled, we were staying in presidential suites. Our country house had a ballroom that holds 200 people. As a little girl growing up, it was not invisible to me that my father had something. I’d ask him, “How did you do it?” I would love to share a particular story that is applicable to now. He told me that whenever he’d take over a hotel, the first thing he’d do on the day that he had taken possession, he’d invite all the employees to come into the hotel small room and there could be 400 people. There could be 800 people. Father would know, at least during the Great Depression, that he was addressing the demoralized group because every one of them was probably thinking, “I’m going to be fired.”
At the height of the Great Depression, it was 25% unemployment. If you lost your job, your chances of getting another were about close to zero. It probably meant the bread line. It might even mean hunger. He knew that every single person in his audience who’s looking up at him as he’s about to speak. The first words out of his mouth were, “I want every one of you to keep your job.” Imagine the relief that they must be feeling. He went on to say, “I want you to keep your job because nobody knows this hotel better than you do. Nobody in the world knows your job better than you do. I’m here to provide you with the resources and the support and the encouragement to show the world how good you are. You’re going to see in a matter of months, this is going to be the most successful hotel in the region. It’s going to be the most popular, the best served, the most financially secure. You’re a part of the team that’s going to do this.”
Imagine you’ve been at the depths of despair and suddenly you’ve got this vision that you’re going to be an inspiration to others, but that’s only part one of the stories. Part two, I want you to jump ahead 24 hours and these same employees, they get to witness something extraordinary. That is there are dozens and dozens of decorators, plumbers, electricians who were trooping into the hotel to refurbish it. They don’t go to the areas that the public would go to. They’re going to the employee dining rooms, the employee kitchens, lockers, showers, the rickety old elevators.
I asked my father, “Why did you spend money in areas that you’re not going to get your money back from the paying public? Why is your first money spent refurbishing the employee areas?” He said because he wanted to communicate in a very concrete way how important the employees were. This was a way of signaling to them how much he valued them and how important they were. That carries out something that he said all his life, that the success of Sheraton at every level came from the employees. That immediately to my mind brings up the question, how do you get the employees to go the extra mile, to have all that commitment that it would take to make the success that he had?
Now, we come to another part of the story and we’re approaching the end of the story, but I asked him, “Your first words were telling people that they could keep their jobs. Why didn’t you say do a good job or something? Why was it freely given you keep your job?” He said, “When you want to motivate people, there are three ways you can do it.” Three major ways, at least in his mind. He said, “The first two aren’t good and the third is superb. The first one, I could have stood up in front of those people and I could have said, ‘Shape up or you’re fired.’” Probably you’d get some compliance and they’d probably work harder. They don’t want to be fired. What this first approach is, he said, “Intimidation, people do it grudgingly. They do what they have to do and not one little bit more.” He could have tried the second flavor of persuasion and that is bribery.
He could have stood up there and told them, “You’ve done a good job. There’s a bonus in it for you. There’s a raise in that for you.” He was against bribery also because he said people work for the bribe rather than something bigger. On top of that, you keep having to raise the ante. “Once you’ve given them a raise, what have you done for me lately? You have to keep raising the ante.” He was against intimidation. He was against bribery. What’s left? What’s left, according to my darling father, was an inspiration. He said that the key to success is inspiring, don’t require. He said his goal was to give the people who worked with him a better vision of themselves.
They are not waiting tables or tending bar or carrying suitcases. They’re part of something that’s much bigger. They’re building the most successful hotel in the region. Something that will show everybody else in these tough times things can turn around. They’re part of a team. They’re part of a cause. That’s the inspiration that his approach to the leadership provided. It worked because he was famous for if you started working for him, you probably stayed working with him for life and you probably gave it your all to make it a success.
There are many good messages and nuggets and lessons in that. We could literally end this episode here.
Let me jump onto my late husband then. Frank Perdue started out as 1 of 5,000 farmers on the Eastern shore of Maryland. At the end of his days, like my father, he also employed 20,000 people. He also said that the entire key to the success of Perdue Farms and Perdue chicken and Perdue Grain was the people who worked with him. I got a real front-row view of one of the ways that he did this because, as far as I could tell, he spent enormous amounts of effort communicating to people how important they were to him. When we first married, and we’re back in 1988 now, we had come home from our honeymoon. Keep in mind that I grew up in the hospitality industry and you solve everything by hospitality.
I tell him, “Franklin, I think we should entertain every single person who works for Perdue Farms in our home.” There are 16,000 people at the time. He said, “That’s not possible.” I pretended that I didn’t process that he was telling me no. I said, “I think we should entertain them 100 at a time.” He’s saying, “No, that’s way too many.” I said, “Let’s start in six weeks. I think we could put it together in six weeks and we’ll start with the secretaries because they can tell everybody that our parties are fun and not scary.” We went round and round with me planning this thing and him saying no, but then gradually I could tell from his body language that he was now thinking, “Is my new wife set down from Mars?”
He began maybe taking the idea seriously until finally, he said, “I like it. We’ll do it.” He was hesitant. I know to do this because Frank was basically a shy man. We did it three times a month for almost seventeen years. The idea of having huge numbers of people in his home, it was way outside his comfort zone. When we started, it turned out to be a fantastic success. The reason that Frank changed his mind and was willing to do it was, it was one additional way of communicating to people that they’re important to him. At these parties, he used to pay attention to every single person that would have them in groups like the sanitation workers, the auditors, the truckers, everybody.
We did entertain way more than 10,000 people. At these parties, I would stand back in awe at the following picture. One hundred people in our living room, a great big, long buffet table, and Frank was one of the people waiting on his employees. He would serve them himself. Talk about servant leadership, but can you communicate more to somebody that they’re important if you invite them to your home and you wait on them? At the end of the evening, he’d do something that I thought was so respectful and creating so much employee engagement. Whether you’re an accountant or whoever were our guests that night, he would tell them what was going on in the company. The good, the bad, and the ugly.
He’d tell, “We lost the such and such contract, but we’ve got this new breed that’s coming on.” Whatever was going on at that moment, he would tell them as directly as if they were the board of directors. Imagine, you’re somebody, maybe you’re a secretary or an administrative assistant. You’ve got the most current information from the person who knows it most. At the end of the evening, he stands up in front of 100 people and he’d give some version of the following. “I know that the company wouldn’t be the success it is without you.” Here’s the big boss thanking them.
One of the clear messages from both of these stories is that you should treat people with respect and ask people, build their self-worth, build morale, show your respect and treat them like an equal, as a peer.
I thought Frank was a total egalitarian because I used to have the extraordinary privilege of going through some of the processing facilities or plants or grain mills with him. It was the neatest thing because I’d watch it. These are people who are on the line working with chickens and Frank would never have the attitude, “I’m the big boss.” He was asking how they were doing and are they being treated right. The number of names that he knew, I bet he knew the names of many thousands of the employees there. We call them associates. For the big boss to come through and he’s not walking there with his nose in the air. No, it was more, “We’re all part of the team and I’ve got my role and I value your role.” He was egalitarian. I can’t know this, but I’m going to go with it anyway. There are many companies where the big boss wouldn’t walk through the factory floor, talking with individuals and asking how they’re doing. We often would have lunch at the cafeteria. We sit down with people and talk. I loved it.
Let’s go back to your father for a moment here. He could have picked anything in terms of real estate investing back in the 1930s. Being a contrarian, maybe that’s the answer to my question, but why did he start with hotels? Was that the low hanging fruit or the greatest opportunity or what people were most scared of at the time?
My impression is, we, the Henderson Estate Company, had begun 120 years earlier. He had real estate in his blood and it certainly has done well for the family. His antenna we’re headed towards real estate, but I don’t think he ever expected to have a hotel company. I have another story about him that people might find encouraging. It’s on the subject of why did father pick hotels. This is contrarian to the nth degree because it wasn’t the hotels. Everybody was running away from them. Father had an interesting personality quirk. That is at age 26, he hadn’t found himself. He didn’t know what he wanted to do. He went to a career guidance counselor. He picked somebody out of the phonebook and he spent a whole day with tests. At the end of it, Johnson O’Connor, this guy from 1930 or something told him, “Mr. Henderson, you’re clearly a bright fellow, but you have the least human relations skills or people skills with any I’ve ever come across.”
It ended up being superb advice, but not for the reason that Johnson O’Connor intended. Johnson O’Connor’s recommendation to father was, “You would make a good scientist. You have a logical mind. You belong in a laboratory in your own cubicle where you don’t interact with anybody, but you can use your intelligence maybe to invent or solve scientific problems.” Father took this as a challenge because he reasoned, and we’ve even discussed this, that the most important ingredient for success is the ability to get along with the people. Here, it had been pointed out to him as cruel as anybody could ever do that he was deficient in this. To my mind, he spent the rest of his life trying to learn what makes people tick.
I know that he read books on it, he took courses on it. He even took the trouble to make friends, with psychologists and psychiatrists. There was a famous one, BF Skinner, who would be a house guest because my father cultivated him. There’s a guy named Eddie Bernays who seems to be the father of modern advertising. He’s also a guest in our house because this was a lifelong quest for my father. He took the Dale Carnegie course. He told me that every ten years had reread it because the information was so important that he wanted it sharply in his mind. If you re-read something over and over again, you got a deeper and deeper understanding of it. Father’s greatest weakness that he had the worst public human relations skills that Johnson O’Connor had ever seen became his greatest strength.
If you’re in the hospitality industry, you have got to have a deep understanding of what makes people tick. He became a public speaker and I’m going to guess that he interacted with more people than anybody but a national politician. I mentioned that he was a contrarian because part of the contrarian was that he went into the hospitality industry during the height of the Great Depression. The other part was he forced himself to transcend his greatest weakness. It became this greatest strength because nobody else that I know of at the time was able to motivate people the way he could. That’s because he studied it and learned it and it was important to him.
I always talk about personal development and educating yourself, never stop learning and being a student. That’s very important and this is a great example. It’s a great story of learning not just to develop and build yourself and become a better person, but understand other people. That’s where psychology and social psychology comes in because the better you can work with and communicate with other people, the further you will get in life. The more friends you will have and the more effective you become. It helps you in every aspect and dimension in life. That’s a great story, a great example of how you take that attitude and you take that knowledge and apply it positively in your business, your career, your life, etc. That was one of the things I wanted to ask you about. What attitude led to and helped him succeed in an industry that everyone else was failing? You answered it though.
He had a deeper understanding of human motivation than his competitors, but he also had some other things. He was a lifelong learner. One of his catchphrases was, “One good idea can change your life.” He used to put himself in the way of getting those good ideas. He would attend lectures. He’d had read books. He’s totally in self-development. We’re talking the mid-1960s at this point and computers were trickling into being used in business. They’d been in the laboratory or military before, but they’re edging into it. Here he is, 65 or 68, and he wanted to learn computers. He bought this thing that we had in our living room and he would learn programming, which I thought was cool that he didn’t stop learning.
By the way, Frank Perdue was exactly the same way. The research and the effort that Frank would put into self-development. In fact, the biggest key to Frank Perdue being a success was that at every stage from being a small-scale farmer to being a titan of industry, he had to learn new skills like delegation, or accounting, or dealing with numbers or dealing with politics or advertising. At every stage, there were things that he had to learn and he was able to see where he wanted to be and the steps it would take to get there. That almost always involved learning.
Success leaves clues. Clearly, this is a big clue and that is to continually educate yourself and learn the things that you’re weak at so you can better yourself, better your business, better your finances, better your family, and better everything else. That’s all good stuff. Let me shift it a little bit towards a couple of investment-related questions for you and for your father. Starting with your father, what would you say was the biggest challenge that he had as an investor? Focus specifically on that, if any.
To my knowledge, he put extraordinary effort into researching whatever it was that he was getting into, but he had a head start, which I recommend to anybody who wants a long career investing in real estate. This is part of the magic sauce that made Sheraton grow. He had a philosophy in a negotiation that he never wanted to be perceived as a shark. He had a pattern to always leave something on the table so that the person on the other side walked away happy. His view was, it wasn’t a good transaction unless both sides were happy. He was perfectly aware that in many cases he could drive a harder bargain, but he might make less money on a particular deal. This is so important for real estate. He would always get the best offers first. Let’s take hypothetically that a widow has inherited 3 or 4 hotels. She doesn’t know what to do with it. She’s getting on in years, she doesn’t want to manage it. She tells her lawyer, “Sell it.” He would have gone to my father first because father had a reputation of working extremely hard to make sure that both sides were happy. In any individual deal, he’s not getting the best deal, but because he gets the best offers and he gets the pick of whatever’s coming up, it puts him way ahead.
That’s what I would call a win-win negotiation.
It’s the reputation that he got that was beyond price. I love it. He was a good man.
Reputation speaks volumes. It’s important to have a good reputation because it takes years and years to build a positive, good reputation, but it can be tarnished or torn down in a very short period of time. I spend a lot of time working on my reputation, my company’s reputation, and preserving it, not just building. I call it reputation management. Sometimes it gets to the point where someone’s unhappy for reasons beyond your control and not your fault, and then you have to shift into this mode of damage control.
That’s painful because your reputation is you. It’s not literally you, but it’s awfully close.
This happens maybe once a year or once every two years. I don’t like it, but it happens to every business. You just have to deal with it. Reputation is so critically important, but your father obviously put a lot of value and weight on that. That speaks volumes. You’re obviously a passionate believer in real estate as an investment. You’ve done very well. You’re no longer here, but you’ve invested in agricultural land here in California where I am at. It was back in 1974. As far as I understand, the value that big investment in land increased 240 times in a 46-year period. Correct me if these numbers are wrong. Why did you choose to get into real estate and more specifically, why land? I can’t figure that one out.
I have a serious answer and a joking answer. Can I give the joking answer first?
Please do.
I grew up in Boston. Doesn’t every little girl in Boston dream of being a rice farmer? Maybe not. That’s the joking answer. Let’s get serious. I was living in California at the time. My father died when he was 70 years old. At this point, I’m 28. He died of a heart attack. What I’m about to describe, I don’t think it would happen now, which is that nobody expected him to die. I don’t think there was a lot of preparation because we thought he’d live another twenty years. It was very sudden. Suddenly, I come into a great, big, huge inheritance because we did sell the chain.
We sold Sheraton on his death. A polite term is a liquidity event. Here I am at 28 and more money at a younger age than I ever expected to have. One of the values that the Hendersons, and the Perdues also for that matter, have is we live below our means. The money that we have, our job is to hand it on in better shape than we got it to those who come afterward. It’s what we have now is borrowed from the future. It would have been possible for my siblings and me to buy yachts and racehorses, but we didn’t do it. Not one of them did that. We all, in one way or another, invested. In my case, I was living in Davis, California, which has one of the world’s outstanding agricultural colleges.
My inheritance, by the way, was in three parts. There was a trust from my mother, trust from my father, and then a third that I could do whatever I wanted with, including yachts and fur coats and resources and private jets or whatever. I didn’t do that. It occurred to me, I suppose, from having come from a family that had been in real estate since 1840, that my antennas go towards real estate. It was clear to me that they’re not making more land, but they are making more people. Agriculture, the logic seemed irrefutable to me that prime agricultural land would be a good investment, but I didn’t want to jump into it.
I wanted to prepare myself. I came into possession of the money in 1970. He died in 1967. I spent from 1970 to 1974 auditing classes, which I was allowed to do at the University of California at Davis. I’d study as if I was taking it for credit. I’d study like agricultural accounting, rural appraisal, agronomy, every possible thing that I could to prepare myself for investing in agricultural land. When it came time to pull the trigger on this thing and act on it, I’ve lost track, but I investigated 40 different pieces of land. Something would look absolutely wonderful, but I had a checklist of maybe 35 different things. Was the water supply secure? What were the neighbors like? What was the weed infestation like? Why were they selling?
I have a rule, by the way. I don’t know if it’s still true but it guided me, which is that if the property is good, it’s not going to change hands unless there’s some extraneous thing, like maybe a divorce or a death. I certainly wanted to know the history and production. Over and over again, I’d be so close to buying a property, and then I’d find some defect in it. Finally, in 1974, I did find a piece of land and it was ideal for me because it was prime agricultural land in the middle. It was between the Sacramento Airport and the City of Sacramento. It was surrounded by I-5, A-80, and I-80. In other words, there was a triangle of highways around it. The transportation was crazy good. It was flat and it was irrigated and it was between a major state capital airport.
It should have gone for an absolute fortune, but it had a defect in the title, which is there were 23 owners who are quarreling with each other and they had let the property become weed-infested. Nobody else was bidding against me because in the end it took almost a year to clear the title. I’ve lost track of the years, but I might be 33 at this point. I thought I can simply afford to wait it out. I got it at a crazy good price. I got what felt like the world’s best tenant farmer to farm it for me. It was like my father’s hotels. In his case, one hotel made enough money to get two. In my case, one farm made enough money to get more farms. I loved the whole business.
You weren’t out looking for cashflow. It sounds like you were looking for an investment to place your cash, somewhere to park your capital long-term that probably would appreciate, but you weren’t looking for monthly or annual cashflow from your real estate investment. This land, I don’t look at it as an investment per se, in the sense that it doesn’t generate income or cashflow.
Prime agricultural land, if you buy it right, it was a beautiful cashflow.
Were you producing from it?
I was producing enough to buy more land.
You did have cashflow?
I bought it at a crazy low price.
Ultimately, you were producing something on it.
I became a rice farmer. You can tell a rice farmer when you see one.
That’s interesting because most people don’t take the approach of getting into agricultural land and producing off the land to generate income, whether it be avocados, lemons, almonds, or whatever. That’s what you were doing. You were investing in real estate in another way. I like the fact that real estate is cashflow and that’s exactly what you did.
This is a top of the head guess, so I’m glad I’m not in court and have to say that this is absolutely true, but it’s close to true. The odds of whatever comes on the market right off being good are slim. It takes a lot of research to get good deals.
That’s true because everybody’s chasing the good deals. Nobody wants a bad deal. All the good deals are taken first. If they’re not taken, it’s usually the person who knows about it or has that as a listing, they’re going to send it to their friends and family and their networks.
There are a number of ways you can get taken in agricultural land. As I said, I investigated dozens of pieces of property before finding the right one. The one before the one I finally bought, it had absolutely everything you could possibly want. The best soil, fantastic crop records, and so forth. I went through it with a county extension person. It was probably 400 acres. It was in prunes. As we were walking along the edge of the property, the guy said, “Look at that construction on the opposite edge of the river. What’s that about?” He began doing some research and discovered that with the last flood, the river had changed its course slightly in such a way that every seven years, this almond orchard is going to be flooded. There’s a particularly noxious weed called Johnson weed that decreases productivity. He said, “This land might’ve had a perfect record for 50 years, but it’s going to change because of this change in the bend in the river and don’t touch it.” I’m heartbroken because it was a beautiful place. I wanted it, but I’m not going to buy something that’s going to be an endless headache every seven years.
Speaking of which, as an investor, what was your biggest challenge, and what was your takeaway from that? Everybody has challenges as an investor, especially in the beginning, but what would you say is your biggest challenge?
In the case of agricultural land, at least, here I have a pot of money from an inheritance. I’m in my late 20s, early 30s. I’m wet behind the ears. I don’t know what I’m doing. My challenge was to try to meet as many mentors and people would help me and then to take courses and read books and learn as much. At the end of it, in my imagination, I used to think I could’ve written a doctoral dissertation on land values. My biggest challenge was not knowing anything. If I want to get from here to there, here is, “I don’t know anything.” Here is, “I want to know enough so that I can responsibly invest.” I did take four years of a lot of effort of meeting people. I even got involved in women’s agricultural politics because I would attend their meetings and farm bureau and the rice growers’ association. It was total immersion. Learn it before I put down a single penny.
It seems like all roads come back to knowledge, educating yourself, and then building your experience off of that knowledge because of those two things combined lead to wisdom. You were like your father in that sense, you were out learning more about what you don’t know.
I was blessed with an extraordinary role model. I got to watch somebody who was conscientious and data-driven. To me, there are some people who study and study and then never act. There’s some people act and they haven’t prepared beforehand. I had a model of somebody who did both. I would love to say that I invented this myself but no, I was copying a good example.
Let’s tie things up here on your latest book, How to Be Up in Down Times. Talk about a timely title. It is not a big book. It’s a quick read. I started it and there are 40 tips. The way you broke it down, it’s 40 tips for the soul, mind, and body. Why did you write the book? If you don’t mind, maybe share a few tips that you think our audience would like.
For the question of why I wrote the book, the book had its beginnings in March of 2020. The lockdown was taking hold here in Maryland. In the end, I hardly stepped outside my apartment for many days. I’m feeling down and the people I talk with are feeling down and insecure and it’s a rough time. In fact, there are studies that say people in quarantine, if they don’t have the mental resources to handle quarantine, it can because post-traumatic stress disorder almost as if you had been through a horrible accident. In fact, I was reading a study saying a third of Americans are depressed right now and some are even having psychosis.
Being uprooted from your regular routines, the people that you normally interact with to keep you safe and sane, it’s a big deal. I thought something that you don’t know about me, but I’ll now reveal. For most of my life, in addition to real estate investing, I was a science writer. I wrote a column for Scripps Howard. It went to 420 newspapers. I also wrote for the Academy of Women’s Health and I wrote for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News. I have a science writer background, particularly on health. It occurred to me I know a lot of stuff that could be helpful to people during these rough times. It doesn’t have to be the quarantine, but anytime when things are rough. I mentioned it to Mark Victor Hansen and he agreed with me that people could use some inspiration right now.
He has a stepson, Preston Weekes. We agreed to each write about a third of it. I’ll share one of the tips that I have. I’m particularly big on attitude, at least in the book. That’s what I write about most of all. There’s something that Frank Perdue used to say and that is, “If you want to be happy, think what you can do for somebody else. If you want to be miserable, think what’s owed to you.” In the book, I wanted to illustrate that point with a story and it comes from Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of France. He’s one. The other is Mother Teresa. Napoleon Bonaparte, around the 1800s, he was the wealthiest, most powerful, the most famous man in the world. He had all the wealth, power, and fame that the world has to offer. On top of that, he had all the women. He had the best you would think that the world has to offer. He owned it.
Mother Teresa, in contrast, had a vow of humility and vow of poverty. The material possessions that she personally owned were three cotton saris and the sandals on her feet. It’s as big of a contrast as you could get between two people. Who’s happier? I read the biographies of the two. It happened the same week that I read these two biographies and it influenced the rest of my life. I’m eager to share it and that’s one of the parts of How to Be Up in Down Times. At the end of his life, Napoleon wrote. He was in exile in St. Helena.
Looking back in his life, he says, “I can’t, in my mind, think of five happy days.” Mother Teresa, at the end of her life, writes the following, “My life has been a feast of unending joy.” One of these people was a taker who thought that he could find happiness in wealth, power, fame, sex, all the goodies that the world has to offer. He was a taker. He was miserable for most of his life. Mother Teresa took nothing but gave everything. There’s a quotation from her that I admire so much. She said that her aspiration was to be a pencil in the hand of God. In other words, that her whole life was service and her life was a feast of unending joy. That’s the story that I tell in the book, but I also have another shorter tip.
I’ve talked with a lot of people who find that their brains aren’t as sharp during the pandemic. I even call it pandemic brain. It’s where maybe you can’t do math in your head as fast as you once could, or you’re not remembering names or dates. You’re not sharp and you’re worried and you’re thinking, “Alzheimer’s is beginning.” I can answer that in almost every case, you don’t need to worry. Science says that when you’re under stress, and a quarantine is a stress, that your body is flooded with cortisol and adrenaline and all these stress hormones which shut down your higher brain functions. It makes you ready for fight or flight. When you’re under stress, your higher mental functions, particularly memory, aren’t as good, but they’ll almost certainly come back when this stress stops.
During this pandemic, a lot of people out there are confused and/or worried. They need tips and guidance and advice like you’re giving. If they can put things into perspective and step back, take a breath and realize the reality and the scope of what we’re dealing with, then they put things into perspective. It puts a sense of normalcy back into their life, even if you’re cooped up and you’re going stir crazy at home. What I will say about your book, Mitzi, it’s relatively short. Each chapter is roughly two pages. The 40 tips make it roughly about a 100-page book, plus the foreword from Mark Victor Hansen.
It’s a great book. I don’t want this to sound like a sales pitch, but it should be. Download it and read it. It’s on Amazon, it’s wherever you want to find it. Let’s wrap it up with two things. One, I’m going to say I do like what Mark Victor Hansen said, and I took this out of your book. He said, “We will make it through this. As with every crisis or setback, we will be better off when it is all over.” I certainly believe that. With that, is there anything else that you’d like to share, and please share with our audience how they can find out more about you and/or get your books or whatever it may be?
The book is available on Amazon, How to Be Up in Down Times. I’d love it if you remember Mitzi Perdue, but if you don’t, remember Mark Victor Hansen, the Chicken Soup for The Soul guy, because you can get to the book through either of us. As for how to get hold of me, my website is MitziPerdue.com. If you want to contact me, there’s a contact page. I commit to answer any emails that people send to me. I love communication and I adore hearing from people and answering.
Mitzi, thank you so much for your time. This has been very entertaining and interesting. I look forward to speaking with you again and I look forward to finishing your book.
I would love nothing better than to be in contact again. Thank you.
We’ll talk again soon and thanks for your time.
Thank you.
—
Thanks for reading. It was an interesting interview and I had a nice chat with her before we started. A wealth of information and great stories that she has because of the families that she’s been involved with and her upbringing, especially having grown up watching her father build a massive empire with the Sheraton Hotel chain. Anyway, I hope you got something out of this episode. If you can take one nugget, one golden lesson or tip or piece of advice, or mental shift or attitude change that can help you in your life financially, spiritually, philosophically, whatever it may be, then you’re one step ahead. It was well worth the time reading about Mitzi. Thanks for reading. If you have any questions for me, submit them on the website and remember to subscribe. Remember to visit us on iTunes or whatever audio platform you listen to us. We will see you all on our next episode.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Download your FREE copy of: The Ultimate Guide to Passive Real Estate Investing.
Get your FREE coffee mug by leaving us a Rating and Review on iTunes. Here’s how.
See our available Turnkey Cash-Flow Rental Properties.
Please give us a RATING & REVIEW (Thank you!)