From Fields to Fundraising: The Entrepreneurial Evolution of Luke Miner and YouCaring

John Hutchings:

Welcome back to the Forward Drinking Podcast. I am your host, John Hutchings. Today's guest brings to us a technological breakthrough, while having no background in tech. What started out as fulfilling a need for locals to raise money for causes gave way to what we know today as crowdfunding. What started in the Redding area, quickly spread across the globe in a matter of months. As has been said often in Silicon Valley startups, focus on the experience, not on making money and you'll be successful. This advice seems to have rung true in the story. So grab a libation, this was one you surely won't want to miss. Luke, welcome to the show.

Luke Miner:

Hey, it's great to be here, John.

John Hutchings:

Glad to have you, brother. So what are we drinking today?

Luke Miner:

We are drinking Hillrock single malt American whiskey.

John Hutchings:

All right, so I'm pretty stoked on this because I've never had it and...

Luke Miner:

I think I've only ever had the pleasure one time.

John Hutchings:

The bottle...

Luke Miner:

Look at that. See, that's how I did that with my mouth.

John Hutchings:

The bottle is beautiful.

Luke Miner:

It is.

John Hutchings:

So, let's get into it here. See if we can-

Luke Miner:

Let's do it.

John Hutchings:

... Get this poured up and-

Luke Miner:

Thank you.

John Hutchings:

Alrighty, cheers.

Luke Miner:

Cheers. Silky smooth.

John Hutchings:

It's almost got a little bit of peated malt to it, delicious. Alrighty. Well, Luke, tell us about where you grew up.

Luke Miner:

Thanks, John. We bounce around a little bit. My dad was a pastor of a few small community churches. I was born in Illinois, moved to Oregon. We bounced around a little bit between Oregon and Washington, and then settled where my parents both grew up and my grandparents lived in kind of Central Oregon, Willamette Valley, farming community. My parents are farmers, my grandparents were their whole life, so I was born in a farm community.

John Hutchings:

Nice.

Luke Miner:

Raised in a farm community.

John Hutchings:

And was there any point in time during that upbringing that you thought Little Luke, the farmer, wants to grow up and be an entrepreneur?

Luke Miner:

I definitely did not have those words, no. My grandma is one of the closest people to me, even still. They're still alive, both my grandparents on that side are still alive and just precious, precious people. My grandma raised strawberries for 30 or 40 years, grew strawberries, and she was the strawberry lady in Lebanon. Actually, funny fact about Lebanon, there's a strawberry festival that goes through town. It usually would go through town beginning of June, which my birthday is June 4th, so oftentimes it would land on my birthday, and they had little town Lebanon, 15,000, 20,000 people has the largest strawberry shortcake in the entire world.

John Hutchings:

Wow.

Luke Miner:

And my grandma was known as a strawberry lady, so she is a little bit of a legend even in that community, but I was definitely inspired by my grandma. When I grew up, first, I think I wanted to be an archeologist, and then I switched to wanting to be a pastor like my dad was basically.

John Hutchings:

A lot of us grow up, we look at what mom and dad do, especially my dad was a teacher, and that seemed like a gravitational thing for me was to look into going into teaching just because that's what dad did, and it really took until I got into my high school years before I started to feel like, well, what do I really want to do?

Luke Miner:

Totally.

John Hutchings:

Is that what I want to do? But absolutely, so from growing up in the Pacific Northwest, for the most part, how did you end up in Redding?

Luke Miner:

I came to Redding... I originally went to the Bethel School of Ministry, again, trying to follow after my dad's footsteps and be a pastor. It was there that I kind of first started a lot of the lessons from my grandma and the way she ran her farm, and she taught me how to count money and to treat customers. My favorite game growing up was Monopoly, and that taught me probably more than almost anything else about money and four greenhouses, one red hotel. You keep doubling down and the more money you put in, the more money you can get out was a crucial lesson for me, but the Bethel School was where I ended up meeting a lot of other entrepreneurs, a lot of successful businessmen, particularly some people in real estate, and started to rub shoulders with people of varying levels of business acumen, wealth, and that really opened my eyes up a lot.

John Hutchings:

So was it while you were at the school here for ministry, was that when you launched your first entrepreneurial experience or how did that happen?

Luke Miner:

My very first one and a little bit of an embarrassment to tell the truth was a Christmas tree business. I think it was in 2009, so economy was in the tanks, things had just crashed. A buddy and I were applying all over the place to get jobs and we couldn't get anything. I remember applying to the Olive Garden, and I think I did work at Big 5 for like three weeks in the holiday season, but they didn't.... It was just a total train wreck, trying to find a student job with restricted hours. So me and a buddy were like, "Hey, let's start something." Christmas trees were selling down here for 80 to $100 a pop, and we realized we were searching Craigslist and we could buy them in Oregon for like seven to $15. My buddy's dad had a big flatbed trailer, so we went home over Thanksgiving break, we'd rented a little lot, actually two lots down in Redding.

We went over up to visit our families over Thanksgiving break and came back with about 200 Christmas trees, set them up. We had no idea what we were doing. We didn't know how to set them up. They actually build frames so you can lean them up instead of just being on the ground. Everything was new and we hadn't thought through any of it. Ironically though, what really turned the table, that was a very stressful period of time certainly. I think we ended up actually losing... I did the calculation. We lost like 15 or 20 cents an hour, so we were working for less than pennies, negative pennies on that first entrepreneur experience, but I read a book called Rich Dad Poor Dad, while we were starting that business and that was the thing that really kind of changed my mindset from like, "Oh, this is total crap, this sucks," to, "I'll work for myself. It doesn't seem that bad."

I'm working hard, I'm working long, but I actually have some freedom and flexibility, and that really reinterpreted the way I saw that experience. Funny story, years later, I went to a... And we'll get into what happened years later, but I went to a conference in Mexico and they had a surprise guest speaker. I had no idea who it was. I show up and it turns out to be Robert Kiyosaki, the author of Rich Dad Poor Dad, a total hero of mine, and I got introduced by a mutual friend to him, and I got to spend about an hour just hanging out with him and his wife, talking life, kind of getting nuggets, and so it was this kind of surreal, full circle experience for me. So, that's how I got into business.

John Hutchings:

The Christmas tree business. Who'd have thought that it could be so complex?

Luke Miner:

Oh my gosh.

John Hutchings:

Just trying to sell and flip Christmas trees.

Luke Miner:

Well, when you don't think through any aspects of how it's actually going to work, how are you going to take money? How are you going to give change to people? Do we need to start charging sales tax? There's like a bunch of infrastructure that we just didn't think through.

John Hutchings:

What's good about it, and what I love, and this is kind of me, I'm more of the ready, fire, aim type person.

Luke Miner:

Oh yeah.

John Hutchings:

And what's great about it is that action creates things, and so what's cool about that is that got you guys into looking at it and going, "All right, we're stoked to start a business."

Luke Miner:

Totally.

John Hutchings:

Was it the Christmas tree business that then launched you into your next endeavor that was successful?

Luke Miner:

Definitely. Actually, right about the time I had done the Christmas tree business, I was becoming friends with a guy named Brock Ketcher who had been in real estate back in Minnesota. He had sold a fair amount of his real estate, and especially that was not a great time to be in real estate in 2009, 2010, but I really got close to him, and the drive was, I was asking him every day, every time we'd hang out, I'd ask him some question about real estate or business or something, and we became pretty close on those topics. We went on a couple trips together via the ministry school, and then eventually he was like, "Hey, let's start a business," and he had the idea, the business was called youcaring.com, and we were basically helping people raise money online for various causes, mission trips, adoptions, nonprofits, even pet fundraisers where it turned out to be a big thing on there. So, that was the first business that actually worked.

John Hutchings:

Nice, so you and Brock, you meet up and you decide... Now Brock, was he involved in the Christmas tree business or was that separate?

Luke Miner:

He was not, he was just a friend and he would stop by and encourage me and pat me on the back and be like, "You're going to make it through," but he was not involved.

John Hutchings:

I got you. So, can you walk us through what you guys did to get YouCaring started? As I'm understanding this, so people can understand the brevity of this, you guys created GoFundMe before it was GoFundMe.

Luke Miner:

Kind of, I think the word crowdfunding was the category... Or the category crowdfunding was the category we were in. GoFundMe I believe was started maybe a year or so before we started, but crowdfunding wasn't a thing.

John Hutchings:

I got you.

Luke Miner:

It wasn't yet called crowdfunding. It was just raising money online, but how we got started, so about a year and a half after the Christmas tree business, I was back looking for a job again, that would tell you how good I would be as an employee. Before I started my own business, I was constantly looking for a job, trying to find something to just pay the bills, but my buddy Brock asked me if I wanted to help him start that business. I didn't have any money at the time. I did, I was able to get a sales job and at least make a living that I worked at for a couple years.

But he put up the first, I think it was 14 or $15,000 was the original budget to get the site started, or we had to build a website and do a little marketing plan, 14 or $15,000. Now granted, we were in a great community to launch a business like this because if you know anything about this school, there's about 1,000 or 2,000 people that travel here from around the world, around the planet, and they're constantly trying to raise money for either a mission trip or tuition or something. So we had in our own backyard, a couple thousand people who would not only use the platform, but share it with their friends and family all over the planet to raise money from them, and then those people would then share it and share it and share it. So, it took us about six months. We hired a development company out of India.

Neither my partner and I were technical in any form or fashion, and still neither of us are, but we hired a development company. We were up from, I think the working window was midnight to 4:00 to work with them. While they were building the site, they would have questions. I was working my day job, and then I'd go to sleep and then get up at midnight and meet with them for a while and then go back to sleep and then go to the day job, but it took about six months, I think, and we launched the site sometime early October of 2011, got it off the ground. I remember the very first donation that came through, somebody made a $50 donation from New Zealand to somebody in Anderson, and they gave a $2.50 tip.

John Hutchings:

Wow.

Luke Miner:

Shocking, but I didn't go into that yet. Interesting thing about the business model, this was drastically different than GoFundMe at the time. They would take a percentage of donations, three, four, 5%, I think it was 5% was what they were doing at the time. We just asked people to give us a tip. If they thought the service was valuable, if they appreciated what we were doing. We said, "Could you give us a tip and that'll help fund operations and help fund what we were doing?" And totally surprised at the generosity of people.

John Hutchings:

Absolutely. Well, what's incredible about that, and why I find this story so intriguing is that you guys didn't launch a business that was based around, hey, this is something we're going to do to get rich. You guys launched a business based around fulfilling a need.

Luke Miner:

100%.

John Hutchings:

That's cool about that, so you guys essentially set out with philanthropy in your hearts, and then it was philanthropy on top of philanthropy and that people were giving to you guys in the form of a tip in order to keep the business going, which totally turned out to be wildly successful. What's awesome about that is if you were to ask me as an investor-

Luke Miner:

Oh no, nobody would've invested in that.

John Hutchings:

Nobody would've invested in that, and you guys did it on your own by going out and saying, "Hey, we're not here to do this, so that we can get rich. We're doing this so that we can try to figure out how to help people fund causes."

Luke Miner:

Totally.

John Hutchings:

I think that's pretty awesome. Another thing that I wanted to touch on that I thought was pretty cool is that we hear all the time with people that are looking to start businesses that a lot of folks say, "Hey, I don't have any money. So there's really no way to get started with that." So from what I'm gathering from what you were saying is that your guys' partnership was formed out of one, bringing capital, and then obviously you being able to come in and work with some sweat equity, putting your back into it to get this going so you guys could form this partnership and able to get YouCaring off the ground.

Luke Miner:

Totally, like I said, my partner brought the initial cash. After I had worked and saved about a year later, I did have to bring about 15,000 and he brought about 45,000, and that was loosely based on our equity percentages in the company in later to fund the next website development, but we didn't raise any money and I'll give credit to Brock. He really was the mastermind, and in a lot of ways, I might have been a workhorse in that he could throw any task my way and I could do it, but he was all hours of the night and day, he was slaving away, so really a fantastic partner and partnership. But no, we didn't have a lot to start. We didn't have a much money to start, and I worked my day job for 18 to 24 months while we were starting this site because I remember asking him just a few months into it, "Hey, when do we think this is going to make money? Are we going to be profitable soon?"

And he was like, "You're not going to get paid for years," and it was the best thing he could have told me because I was like, "I can't depend on this little baby to actually pay me or to give anything back to me." I'm pouring everything into it, time, money, expertise, whatever, and if I demand money out of this company at this stage, it might kill it, or it'll stifle growth. So, we put every dollar back in for a long time, a year... Well, and maybe that's not really a long time, but it felt like a long time at the time, and I kept my day job, which was how I stayed alive. So I was again, working those regular nine to five hours, and then nights and weekends I was doing the business.

John Hutchings:

Well, I think when you're in the fray, it's always a long time, regardless of whether it was a year-

Luke Miner:

A great point, totally. I've just heard a lot longer stories on people being in that step where every dollar goes back in, but it feels like a long time no matter how long.

John Hutchings:

Well, that's part of why you're on the show, and the main reason, Luke, is that you guys accomplished something very incredible, and again, it's all in the perspective of the person who's perceiving it, but you guys accomplished something very incredible in a short period of time. Now granted, when you're in the fray, the suck is real.

Luke Miner:

Oh man.

John Hutchings:

So tell us, you guys got it off the ground, now it's alive, you had your first donation come in from New Zealand. Tell us about the first six months to the first year of this company. This was an amazingly rapid growth.

Luke Miner:

It was, no doubt, and every month kept catching us by the seat of our pants, it feels like. We had the website developed, spent the first six months with that website, but probably like two, three, four months in when it actually started working, and it was growing, I'll have a stat on that in a minute, but when it was working, it was growing, just bugs started... Software bugs, not bugs-bugs, but software bugs started coming out of the woodwork, and we quickly realized that it was a perfect beta test or alpha test or whatever it would be called to get this released and get it functioning, but this website could not handle any major volume. Once we got to hundreds of... Tens was okay, hundreds was meh, thousands of fundraisers was like total max out, the sites breaking down, we've got to build something else.

So, that's when we both brought money back in at that time and reinvested in a site. From there, I think it was January 2012 to January 2014. I remember pulling the stats, the growth stats, and this was top line dollars donated to causes. I remember pulling those in averaging amount over that time, and the company grew 22% a month.

John Hutchings:

Wow.

Luke Miner:

So, essentially that works out to have doubling about every three months, but 22% a month for those two years, just a fantastic, fanatic growth pace. Again, every month would catch us kind of lying on our back or by the seat of our pants, just like, "What do we do? This is nuts." We ended up by about two or three years in when the partnership started to change a little bit, we'll get into that in a minute, I'm sure, but we had raised a half a billion dollars for various causes.

John Hutchings:

That's incredible.

Luke Miner:

100% funded on the generosity of people.

John Hutchings:

And you guys throughout the entirety of this business, you ran off tips the entire time, you never switched to a percentage.

Luke Miner:

100%.

John Hutchings:

That's amazing.

Luke Miner:

We never did advertising. I think they may have done it since then, but worked with the payment processors to get a little piece of the pie from the payment processing or have them tack on extra fees or something on the donations. We didn't do any of that. We probably did leave quite a bit of money on the table, but we were doing what we-

John Hutchings:

You did it for all the right reasons.

Luke Miner:

Correct, we wanted to help people, and any obstacle to that just felt like it wasn't true to the mission.

John Hutchings:

Absolutely. This is awesome, I'm so wound up, I've already pounded my bourbon. We're going to go ahead and take a short commercial break here. I'm going to top us off with some fresh ice cubes and some more of this Hillrock bourbon.

Luke Miner:

I love it.

John Hutchings:

Stick around.

Speaker 4:

Inspired by the unspoiled nature of the Fall River Valley, our craft beer community is always open to adventure. It's the spirit of innovation and exploration to move us forward. We push through tough times, step beyond our boundaries, and expand our horizons at every opportunity. Our beers have scaled mountains, floated downstream, been fireside, and a part of all the little moments that make up a life well-lived, from small beginnings to big ideas. It's our passion for craft beer and the community that we've created that keep the heart of Fall River, well, brewing. Whether it's the crack of a can, the rush of a tap, or the clink of a glass, these are the sounds that pull us forward toward connection, connecting to nature, connecting with friends, and connecting the memories you make with Fall River beers. Fall River Brewing Company is proud to sponsor the Forward Drinking podcast. We hope these stories motivate you to think creatively, take risk, and put a plan into motion. Fall River Brewing Company, Redding, California. Please enjoy responsibly.

John Hutchings:

All right, we're back from the break, and we got some fresh topped off bourbons here. So Luke, last we were talking about, you're on this meteoric growth and from a guy that's been in my business for 10 years, and what I find so amazing about what you guys have done is that it's been a grind for us to constantly feed the beast with the capital that's required to keep something growing at a-

Luke Miner:

It's such a grind.

John Hutchings:

... At a rate. Now, can you walk us through... You're talking 22% month over month, not year over year, month over month growth, was it just a constant feeding the beast operation, or were you guys able to retain some earnings and take something out of that?

Luke Miner:

The nice thing about tech is that the incremental cost of a customer is very low, so every new fundraiser that was hosted on our side, or every new person that gave us a donation, there was not necessarily an incremental cost to that. Now, we did have these major... Similar to a traditional business like a brewery, we did have these major points where we would put in a gigantic amount of money, and that went from 15,000 on a website to 60, 70,000 on a website to then 300,000 on a website. We were able to do most of it, especially in the later years out of cash flow, but the beginning stages, we certainly didn't get to take all the cash out. And like I mentioned, I kept my job for several years after starting it, even after the business started to actually make money, actually send us checks.

So, it did take a lot of cash. The thing it took for me more than cash though, was my time, and that's a really interesting thing because we certainly could have bought our time back, but my business partner certainly, and I didn't know any better necessarily, but the proprietary information to our business was very low. There wasn't a ton of... I guess eventually we built some brand recognition and it's a brand loyalty, but we really had this model that was working very well, and we didn't want to let anybody else know. So, we were quite nervous about inviting somebody else on the team. In fact, for the first two years, it was me, my partner, and then his wife. We eventually did hire one other person, just one other person to handle this, and we had millions of dollars coming through the site from a donation volume every month at that time.

But we were nervous about adding people. My job was customer service, so I actually did from that probably January 2012 to January 2014, I only took three days actually off where I didn't take a phone call or look at my computer. The only reason those were off or else I wouldn't have even got those is I wanted to get backpacking. So, I went out into the woods and just had no technology around me whatsoever, no service even. That was the only reason, and three days off in two years, that's a slog and definitely not why I got into the business in the first place.

John Hutchings:

Absolutely. Well, I think there's something to be said about when things go well, I think a lot of people don't understand the price that everybody pays for things to go well, right?

Luke Miner:

No doubt.

John Hutchings:

And it's a big price to be paid, and you can't put a price value on your time. It's just amazing though, and God, I can't believe what you guys got done in the amount of time that you got it done, but during all this, there had to be a sweet spot where it was like, if you can recall a certain time where you thought, "Holy, Luke, we did it." Is there a time where you thought, holy crap, we actually freaking did it, I feel like we've really developed something here?

Luke Miner:

I think that the answer is no, there was not one time. There were many of those times in reality, and the first one was that very first donation where somebody gave $50 to some random person in Anderson, and they gave us a $2.50 tip. We didn't know if anyone would tip us, to launching the second version of the site. I remember about a year in, my parents had no idea what was... They knew I was working on this thing, they knew I had a day job, so I was provided for, but they had no idea I was making any money from this company. They thought, "Maybe he's making a few hundred bucks or just giving his time in possibly future equity," but I remember when I told them about a year in that I was making five or $6,000, putting all that into savings, but five or $6,000 a month on the company, and they were just blown away.

That was a lot of money for them. We were definitely a pretty poor family, my dad being a pastor, we lived on shoestring budgets and peanut butter and jellies, and oftentimes we would stay alive through the generosity of the people in the congregation or gifts that people would give us.So, we were very, very blessed and very fortunate for that, but to them, that was a lot of money, and then to me, therefore, that was a ton of money, especially for a second gig to, like I mentioned, 22% growth a month was just astonishing. To back that up, when we first started talking to other people in the industry, they were shocked at the growth. So, there was many of those aha moments for sure, where just, holy shit. What are we doing here?

John Hutchings:

That's awesome.

Luke Miner:

We have no idea what we're doing.

John Hutchings:

I love it.

Luke Miner:

But it keeps going.

John Hutchings:

So during this whole meteoric rise with YouCaring, walk us through then how it was that you guys ended up exiting the company. You've got this thing that's just growing at a massive rate, it's wildly successful. What caused you guys to decide to part ways with it?

Luke Miner:

So my partner and I, Brock, had different directions that we would've gone with the company. I was probably more interested, and possibly this was foolishly at the time, but more interested in building a little bit more typical company where we would start to have employees instead of us, the partners and wives doing everything and giving everything to the company where we would bring other people in, and that was to give me back a little bit of my life. Having worked every day for two years besides three days, I was like, "This isn't actually the reason. If we remember back to the Christmas trees and the Rich Dad Poor Dad, having the freedom and flexibility to certainly work really hard, but own my own time and schedule and the way I wanted to do it, was a big driver for me in getting into the first place into entrepreneurship and starting businesses.

And so, to lose that in this company and this startup was to me kind of a little bit of a tragedy. I certainly loved the success, but at the same time, being married to it and have to show up every day and attend it was hard. So, I would've wanted, if we had stayed with it, to build a team and been able to give our partners back a little bit of lifestyle. My partner had no interest in that, and he was the majority owner, certainly very savvy businessman and nervous about letting anybody else know the trade secrets are under the hood. So, that was our big divergence as partners and in a way caused us to... It would've ended up there naturally or inevitably, but in a way, it caused us to go out and find a broker and put the business up for sale privately without real advertising, but to put this business up for sale.

John Hutchings:

Talking about that grind, money is only as valuable as what it is to you and what you can do with it. If you're working around the clock and you have no life, what's the point?

Luke Miner:

And I didn't necessarily work around... This is clarification, I didn't work 16 hours a day, but I worked from... I'd probably work an hour or two in the morning, an hour or two in the middle of the day, an hour or two at night before I go to bed, or maybe six, eight, 10 hours through the course of the day, but it was constant. It was a 100% have to be paying attention all the time, and to not be able to shut off my phone and not look at email for a couple, that was a travesty.

John Hutchings:

So you guys, you went out and decided to hire a broker. Nobody came knocking at the door, was this just a decision to go ahead and let's put this thing for sale and see what we can get for it?

Luke Miner:

I think we had had a couple people just reach out of interest, and I'll give all the credit to my business partner on this. He knew much better than to entertain casual offers from people who just knock on the door, actually going to a broker. Despite there being some expense to that, actually going to the broker and getting some professional help to professionalize the business, tell us what we needed to change and adjust in the business to make it most advantageous to a buyer, to de-risk it to a buyer, to eliminate risk and eliminate friction in the deal was a gigantic win.

We we found a guy named Zane Tarence in Alabama, who had a very robust team, I think at that time 20 or 30 people, analysts, and analyzing our business and then helping to put together a package for different buyers. It was sent out to 140 some different corporations, including Visa, MasterCard.

John Hutchings:

Wow.

Luke Miner:

The Bill Clinton Foundation took a look at it for a little while because of the charitable component.

John Hutchings:

Sure.

Luke Miner:

There were many, many different private equity groups and many, many different groups that kind of took a look at it at the time, which is exciting and weird and nerve wracking all the same time.

John Hutchings:

So, how did the process go? Can you walk us through that as far as just the whole, you guys put a proforma out there and people start bidding on the business, or how did that work out?

Luke Miner:

Actually, there's relatively sophisticated at that level. Every buyer got a little bit of a different packet. The credit card processing companies would get a volume of top line donations. So, they knew how much credit card processing they could possibly capture. They were interested in the top line dollar donated. Most other people weren't as interested in that as they were in the revenue or weren't...

Some other facet, nonprofits, or the Gates Foundation was probably interested in the charitable component more so. So, Everybody got a little bit of a nuanced packet, but they all got a packet, and there was a 30, 40, 50 page business performer packet telling the story of the business. That broker went up and set up many meetings. Finally, when it got to... I think it was down to half a dozen different interested parties, we might get to meet them, talk to them, tell more of the in-depth story, but even at that point, the trade secrets of exactly what percentage of people ended up donating back to fund the operations of the site was concealed almost until closing because we wanted to make sure that before we gave that away, we knew that somebody was actually going to purchase.

John Hutchings:

Absolutely, so the date comes. You ink the deal, you select your guys' purchaser. I think about Fall River Brewing, my wife and I started this company, and I think much like you and I talked about before when we were discussing this episode, I have two children, but this was our firstborn child, this business that we created together, and there's a lot of emotional aspects that go into that. Can you walk us through what it was like to finally be like we're going to eat this thing, we're going to let this thing go?

Luke Miner:

Well, fortunately or unfortunately, I was not married at the time. I've since married and I have an amazing wife, Meredith and three boys, Jack, Kit, and Carter. We just had another boy about 10 weeks ago, but the feeling was certainly amazing to... On the closing day or a couple days after the closing day when they actually wire money, the feeling was amazing, and that life has changed dramatically. I don't have to show up anymore, nobody needs me. I don't have to watch my email every day. I certainly have this pot of money in my bank account that I didn't have before, that's kind of crazy, but there was also a big fear of, what do I do now?

Who is Luke Miner? What is the purpose for life? For so long, I was 100% focused on building this business every day, all day, from morning to night with little breaks in between, but from morning tonight, what does this business need? And all of a sudden that just appears? That's a big shock to the system, giant shock to the system, so it was good and bad. It was good, and created some identity crisis.

John Hutchings:

I got you. What type of firm was it that ended up being the one that you selected?

Luke Miner:

We sold to a private equity company out of the Bay Area. They worked it, built it for a couple years. My partner stayed on the board in kind of from a steering standpoint, but they worked it for two, three years, and then it ended up selling to GoFundMe, our main and most direct to competitor. We were about one quarter to one third the size. From a total volume of payments standpoint, we're about one third to one quarter of the size. They actually ended up integrating and then taking our model. I think there was a little bit of a race to the bottom component where they were charging this 5% fee, but we were free and we could market that we were free even though we accepted donations, so they ended up absorbing us. Now youcaring.com is a landing page for GoFundMe, and they switched from their model to ours actually, after the acquisition.

John Hutchings:

Wow.

Luke Miner:

It tells you how good it might've been.

John Hutchings:

Absolutely. Well, it says what you guys were doing was right.

Luke Miner:

Totally.

John Hutchings:

And that's awesome, so congrats to you guys on that, that's super cool. So, we're going to pivot here a little bit. We're going to get into the teaching portion of the show, which is, like I said before, my dad was a teacher, so I naturally-

Luke Miner:

You have to.

John Hutchings:

We've got to do it. Now we're in with Fall River Brewing, myself, my wife, our team, we've been into this for 10 years, and of course, from time to time we have folks that talk to us about exit strategies, whether it be attorneys, what are things looking like? You set up your trust, they always ask you, "What's your exit strategy? What's going to happen here?" And I've been warned by so many people about how the exit can be really tumultuous, and then what's great about what you guys did is you grew a great company, you exited really, really well.

Can you walk us through what you guys did and what you would share with other folks to make sure that when they reach that point, which all businesses are going to reach it one way or another, I think it's one thing that people really right, commonly misplace as they think-

Luke Miner:

It's a great point.

John Hutchings:

It doesn't matter that we have to think about, well, what's going to happen when we're not going to do this anymore? At some point in time that's going to happen. Can you walk us through what you would say as the Luke Skywalker version of how to exit properly and how you guys did it so well? Because I've heard of horror stories of people losing their companies on exiting.

Luke Miner:

It is it a little bit of a shell shock, wild thing. I would say from a tax standpoint, just pay your taxes. Don't try to do anything crazy because you'll sleep better at night. From a reinvestment or what do you do with this gob of money and this time, I would just encouraged people to slow down and take time. I went and reinvested. I did a handful of things. I invested in some startup companies, I bought a little FedEx business up in Washington, that was a total train wreck, one of the most stressful experiences of my life. I barely got out of that with the money that I put into it in the first place, and then I did real estate. Real estate was the thing that really stuck with me, and I've since gone to build a boutique real estate development company with a partner, Eric Hiatt.

We look at value add properties, always trying to find something that's underutilized and bring the highest and best out of it. We're predominantly in Redding, California, but looking to expand. So there is that, but if you can slow down a little bit and it takes time for your system to re-acclimate, readjust to the new reality of what you are in, and it's really, really easy to put dollars into a new project, especially if it's not your own, and it's really, really hard to get them back, very hard. I've got one investment that may come back, I think I'll break even after 10 years of it being basically sitting where it is, no interest or anything. I'm basically going to get back exactly what I put in.

John Hutchings:

Sure.

Luke Miner:

There were times since then that I desperately needed that money to build my actual business, the real estate development company. So if you can slow down... The third thing that I think is highly important is what you really have done is you've bought back your time. Whereas I had to every day, all day kind of pay attention to the business, I now was able to take time off and shut off my phone or shut off my email. I got married to a beautiful girl and had three boys, and what I found that I did really in that phase of life that I'm so grateful for is I bought back my time. Now I do work, I work from typically 8:00 to noon. We're recording in the afternoon because we're drinking bourbon, but I would usually be at home hanging out with family or going on a bike ride with my five-year-old or something like that, but actually the highest and best thing I think you do is you buy back your time and then you can spend it however you want.

I choose to spend it with my family and there's some crazy stats out there. For instance, one of them that I read recently was that by the time your kids are five, you've spent half the time with them that you will spend over the course of your or their life because it's so highly concentrated. They need you for everything, you're with them all the time. After that, they go to school, then they go to high school, then they go to college, they're hanging out with friends. They don't want to hang out with you. You hope that you get them back for Christmas, but that's how I'm spending my time these days.

John Hutchings:

Awesome, that one hits home for me because for me, when my wife and I set out to start our business, we both ask ourselves, "What do we want out of it? Why are we doing this? There has to be a why," and we fell on the same thing that you did is we want to buy our time back. We want to be able to spend it with family, with our kids as much as possible, and that statistic is a sobering statistic of the zero to five [inaudible 00:42:55]-

Luke Miner:

Oh man, it wrecks me every time I think about it. It totally wrecks me.

John Hutchings:

I've got a daughter that's turning four on Saturday and I'm like, "Oh no, I've got one more year before the quantity-"

Luke Miner:

I've spent half of the time with her that I'm going to.

John Hutchings:

Absolutely, and man, that really hits home, but I also want to point out and just say thank you for starting the real estate development company you guys are doing. Shout out to you guys on that. What's the name of that company?

Luke Miner:

We are Downtown Collection. We're actually going through a little bit of a rebranding, so that's possibly likely to change, but Downtown Collection, and a big part of the why of why we do what we're doing predominantly in Redding, California, we are looking to expand communities now, but was I married a local girl. I was not local obviously for my story, but I married a local girl. I've got three boys here. My in-laws are all here, my friends are here, my real estate is here, so I'm going to stay, but I got these three boys that are going to go away to college and have a great life.

But how can I lure them to come back to Redding? What can I do to lure them to come back to Redding? And the answer that I inevitably came to was I've got to make Redding a place that I would want to stay in that they would kind of want to come back to. I know they're going to leave, but if I can get them to come back, raise a family, make it a killer place to raise a family... It already is a killer place to raise a family, but a vibey spot, fun spot out, great outdoor community, that's the primo. So anything I can do, particularly from the real estate development side to enable that is a huge win for us.

John Hutchings:

Absolutely, and you guys are doing it, and that was the point I want to make is that, you go out and you do something successful, you make a lot of money, it would be easy to just say, "Oh, I'll just sit on that and I'll hang out and I'll do whatever," but you guys are actually risking it by putting it back into our community to make it better. That's something that I don't think a lot of folks recognize or realize. It's not like it's a guarantee. There's risk involved in it. You guys are doing that and we appreciate that.

Luke Miner:

Totally.

John Hutchings:

So, thank you very much. Luke, I cannot thank you enough for being here today and pretty good little bottle of bourbon we got this [inaudible 00:45:15]-

Luke Miner:

Great bottle of... That was probably the best single malt that I've had in a while.

John Hutchings:

Beautiful, and congratulations on all your success and Luke 2.0 with the future, and we'll be keeping tabs on you and rooting for you and for all the other folks that joined us today, thank you very much for being here. If you haven't already, please like, follow, share the Forward Drinking Podcast, leave some comments on our social media, let us know how we're doing and until the next time, cheers.