What Can Car Sales Teach You About Private Equity?

Josh W: Welcome to the Deal podcast. I'm a fellow deal maker who accidentally became a media guy, and uh, what we do is we, we bring people as part of our core mission and strategy with FA Mergers, which this show is powered by, focused on mid-market m and a deals. So like, if you wanna sell a company, like, talk with Me, that's how we pay for this stuff, right?

But, you know, one of the core values that we have through this media program is, is meeting people. Sharing wisdom because that's how we all learned together. And then we absolutely love doing deals. So I got an opportunity to meet a new friend who has been a part of the automotive industry, has had some really big wins there, and has some great stories to share along the way.

So with that, I want invite my new friend Dan to the show. Dan, welcome to the podcast, 

Dan Daly: Josh. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. 

Josh W: I'm excited you're here to let, let's start with this. Where, where are you, where do you hail from? 

Dan Daly: I'm, well, I'm in Los Angeles now. I've been in Los Angeles last seven or eight years, but I'm an East Coast guy.

Grew up, uh, in the suburbs outside of New York City. Okay. 

Josh W: Copy that. So you moved from East Coast to West Coast. What, what music do you like better? East Coast music or West Coast. There's a lot of people who communicate about that. Oh, that's 

Dan Daly: a really good one. You know, I'm an East Coast guy. 

Josh W: Yeah. Cool, cool.

Yeah. All right. So Dan, what does your day look like? You know, what's, what's a day to day day for Dan look like? 

Dan Daly: I am an early bird. You know, I'm up at 4 45. My thought process is I like to wake up before the competition. You know, so I'll go for a run around the, uh, go for a run around the neighborhood. And I like running past everybody's house when all the lights are out.

Makes me feel like I have a little bit of a competitive advantage against the other guys that, you know, may be looking for the same deal that I am. Um. Swimming, cycling, I'm active, right? Sports, but for me it's, it's first thing in the day, 4 45, 5 o'clock by five 15 I'm on the road or in the pool, uh, doing something, getting that first hour of my day, um, dialed in the way I want it to be, right?

Because then your day tends to get out of control. So I have the philosophy of I pay myself first. It is like the IRS, right? They take their money out of your check because they know you're not going to pay them later, so they want to get paid first. Same thing. I pay myself first, so I'm up early in doing something physically related, active to just get me going.

Josh W: Yeah, copy that. Now your, before we get into the world of deal making and what have you done in the automotive world and what you're doing now in terms of international investing and building stuff. You're a competitor yourself. So like you, you compete, you're, you're in some, uh, big competitions. Why don't you kinda share some of the, uh, competitive stuff you've done in, uh, in, in your athletics?

Dan Daly: Yeah, I mean, going back, um, I'll go back about, uh, 15 years, you know, I was having a successful career. And I was eating bad food and hanging out too late and doing things that weren't healthy, right? Just going out for the steak and the potato and the fries. And I looked down on the scale one day and I'm like 220 pounds and I've been like, you know, 160 my whole life, like just fit, dialed in.

And I let it get outta control a little bit and I said, you know what? I gotta reel this back in. What am I gonna do? Do I wanna start jogging? Do I want to get on the, you know, the stationary bike? None of it appealed to me. And I remembered when I was young watching Wide World of Sports and they had this crazy race on once a year of these maniacs running through the lava fields in Hawaii.

And I said, what was that? And I get online, I'm researching. Ironman, it's called an Ironman. Here's what it is. It's 140 miles. You swim two and a half miles in the ocean. You bike 112 miles, and then after that you run a marathon. So I was like, oh, that sounds interesting. I signed up, entered into an Ironman right then and there.

Then I went out, hired a running coach, hired a cycling coach, and then I learned how to swim, and I did my first Iron Man 10 months later. So it went from 220 pounds to 160 pounds. Went from sitting on the couch to doing an Ironman in 10 months. So yes, I am competitive and I have a sense of urgency. 

Josh W: Yeah.

So you signed up for an Ironman at two 20, which for you that was large 'cause you're used to walking around at one 60. You said, I'm signing up for this now. I think a lot of people would take the approach as, oh, one day I'm gonna do an Ironman. They're gonna start running, maybe buy a book on whatever.

They might learn how to swim. You signed up and then you hired coaches. Walk us through the, the fundamental strategies that you had signing up for it. Hiring the people. So 

Dan Daly: for me, I need to put it on the calendar. It needs to be real, and it's not real. I signed something that says I am registered for this Ironman triathlon.

They're not cheap. They're like, you know, $2,000 for an entry fee. So the commitment was there financially and then personally, it was all about the ego, right? All right. I told myself that I did it. Now I have to do it. And I found a lot of that translated later into real estate, right? Talking about when do you get in the deal?

Do you get in the deal? When you find the perfect deal? Do you get in the deal when you have more than enough money? Do you get in the deal when you have the perfect environment? I didn't do that with the Ironman. I said, here's where I am. Here's where I wanna be, so I'm going to start and I'm going to start tomorrow.

And then with real estate, it was kind of the same, right? We've got a great portfolio of international properties now over in Europe, and I don't know anybody over there. I didn't have an accountant. I didn't have an attorney. Um, I didn't have a broker, I didn't have a property management company. So very, very similar parallels to separate instances.

But if you look at the person making the decision, it was kind of exactly the same format, strategy and execution is, what do I want to do? How am I going to do it? Start doing it. 

Josh W: And that's, that's so cool. All right, so now let's get into the world of deal making, right? What, talk to us about your professional career.

What, what did that look like? 

Dan Daly: I started in sales and I started as a car salesman. And if you want to talk about, um, the people that are the most nimble. On their feet about making deals. It's a car salesman, right? I mean, uh, it's not easy. It's very competitive. The customers, most of the time come in kind of cynically, right?

They, they, they're not really sure if they're gonna have a great experience because that business unfortunately doesn't have the best, um, reputation. So you were kind of already, you know, rolling the stone uphill a little bit. So you had to overcome. The objectives. You had to overcome their hesitations.

You had to overcome the boundaries of the relationship building with them. So, I mean, you talk about artful dealer makers, car salesman are some, they're pretty good deal makers. The good ones, 

Josh W: yeah. Yeah. What were some tips, you know, that's where you got your career start. What are what? What made you. A good salesperson.

So if like you and I are going to maybe buy a, an auto dealership or maybe a, a group of dealerships and we're looking at the salespeople and we're like, that's a good one, and we're not, maybe we're not even looking at their numbers yet, but we could just tell, how could you tell if someone's gonna be good in car sales?

Dan Daly: I mean, it starts from a feeling, right? They say people buy from people they like, and there's a ton of studies out there that any store. Restaurant, any place you walk into that you are intending to spend your money on, you can tell within the first 15 seconds if you want to spend your money there. So what made me really successful as I started managing and operating dealerships at a higher level was that I understood that within the first 15 seconds, our customers were going to decide if they were going to buy a car from our salespeople.

So I always have my customer hat on when I walk in. Do I feel warm and fuzzy? I like to walk in unannounced, so you know, I can catch people. Are you really, you know, are you at your best today or are you worse today? But you're still pretending to be your best? That's a great salesperson, right? It's really hard to do.

So, you know, as a sales guy, I learned early on two different ways to kind of build my skillset up through the years. They had this old fashioned sales board right from Hero to zero. And I went in there and I said to the boss, put me next to that guy. And he was at the bottom. And he said, no, no, no, you don't wanna sit next to him.

He's terrible. Nobody wants to sit next to him. And I watched everything he did for a month and I wrote it all down. And every customer was unreasonable. Every customer had bad credit. Every customer, you know, wanted the perfect scenario. Nothing was good enough for him. So I wrote down everything he did and I never did it.

And then I went and sat next to the Best Gut and every customer there was an opportunity and every customer he learned something from, and every customer he was able to help and build a bridge to. And he sold more than the other guy did 50 feet away selling the same exact product. 40 cars a month and four cars a month.

So I watched this guy and I took everything he did. I kind of made it my own and I learned that. It was me building my brand, the product, the car at the time, brought them into the showroom, into the dealership. It was my job to educate them and give them a great experience. So it was about the relationship, the product, and then the price.

And when you can add that much value, you can charge more money. And I used to tell customers, you know, God bless 'em, they'll grind you for a deal and they should, it's their money. But I would say I'm not, I'm not the cheapest. I will never be the cheapest. But here's why. There's value in me. You're going to get a flat tire on the side of the road on a Sunday afternoon when you're going to the barbecue for your 75th birthday.

Or your dad like, I'm going to come and pick you up. I'm going to get aaa. I'm going to be roadside assistance. And I did that as a vice president of a company, 500 employees, nine stores, giant operation. And I pick up the phone and call our customers that would give us a survey and say, Hey, like we got an 85.

How could we have done better? They're surprised by that, right? 80 five's pretty good. They would say, well, yeah, it's pretty good. But we wanna be great. We want our salespeople to be great. We want our service people to be great. We want our parts department people to be great. We want our front of staff people to be great.

Tell us what we can do to be even better. So put your customer hat on, walk around and you will find out who your players are and, and who makes up the bench. 

Josh W: Hmm. When you got your start, what kind of cars were you selling? 

Dan Daly: I was selling BMWs and in the beginning, you know, back then you sold used cars and you figured out, all right, is he good enough to sell used cars?

And then it was almost like a reward to go to the, the new cars. And it wasn't even the used cars, you know, it, there was an off lot. Blocks away from the dealership that had all the off-brand cars. So, you know, I got to practice there and all of a sudden, you know, they went from wholesaling 50 cars a month to wholesaling five cars a month because I was selling all the other ones to customers rather than wholesaling them.

And then graduated right through the ranks. They grabbed me, pulled me over to new cars and used cars, and shortly thereafter became a finance manager, sales manager. I just, you know, general manager went right up the, uh, the chain there because. I was a worker bee. I wanted to learn. I wanted an opportunity.

And people value that. Make yourself valuable and um, they'll give you an opportunity. 

Josh W: Is sales something that you can learn or is it something that you're either born with it or not? 

Dan Daly: I think you can learn it. I think the great salespeople have something that you cannot learn. So there are always going to be the people that make up the top 5% of a sales force, and they have something that cannot be taught.

It's intrinsic. They have something inside of them that makes them very approachable. They have a very good intention. They just want to help people. They want to educate them. They want to give them a great experience. There are those people that are kind of at the other end of the spectrum, right, that aren't naturally good at sales.

That you can take, that you can coach, that you can mentor, that you can make them better salespeople than they were. Are they ever going to be great? In my opinion, not if they don't have that, that kind of inner calling to be a bridge builder and a relationship builder and understand it on a really deep level.

You can learn sales, but you need something inside of you that's different to make you great at sales. Got 

Josh W: it. You were selling, you know, let's just say off brand off, you know, you guys go way down the road, right? Because we don't wanna associate brands, so like off-brand used. Brand new. So you're selling things that were gonna get wholesaled up to.

What were the higher end cars that you were selling on a day-to-day basis? Like when you, I mean, eventually 

Dan Daly: in my career as I moved up, I, Lamborghini, Aston Martin Bentley, Bugatti, rolls Royce. You know, I went from BMW, um, which I was with BMW stores for my majority of my career, and then switched over to the exotics late in my career about 10 years ago or so.

Josh W: Copy that. I'm gonna ask you in a few minutes about your favorite car. Right. Don't answer it yet. We will do a little bit of a cliffhanger. So you, you've had this wide range of selling cars on the wholesale side to, you know, maybe use to brand new to ultra luxury. Was there a story in there where, where maybe someone was maybe misjudged or maybe, you know, they looked like they were, you know, super successful and rich and they had no money, no credit, whatever.

Like have you ever mis or someone, or you've seen someone else misjudge a person and lose the sale? 

Dan Daly: I've seen it happen. I've been fortunate enough to have the discipline that I've never done it because I learned early in my career, don't ever, you know, judge the person that's in front of you or why they're asking for what they want.

Um, and um, we have talked about this previously, right? I had somebody walked into a really fancy showroom one day in, in dirty work, boots and jeans and a car, hard jacket, and everybody kind of pre sized him, didn't want to help him. Turned out he was somebody that was selling a very successful landscaping career, uh, company that he built a career out of over years.

And he wanted to treat himself and he was selling his business. And he came in that day and he told me, listen, we've got thousands of employees. We do, uh, hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in revenue, and we're selling our business, and I just want to come in and buy a three series. And, um, a lot of people on that sales floor, judged them in that time, stuck with me my whole career as I was selling myself.

And then mentoring and coaching people. Don't ever judge the person you're in front of and treat everybody as if your mom or your sister came in and you just want them to have a great experience. Say they had a great experience, get a good deal, and leave and say, that was a great experience that I had there at that store.

Josh W: Yeah, what a, what a interesting character, right? So they were working for 30 years, had thousands of employees, has, has been saving their whole life, had a, you know, working on a big exit. They've got money in the bank, they're doing successful. And he's like, my whole life I've been wanting to treat myself to A BMW.

And you're like, oh man, what kind of BMW are they gonna get? Right? For sure. I, I don't know much about BMWs. Gimme a range of like the highest NBMW to maybe entry series BMW. 

Dan Daly: Yeah, at the time, I mean the Big Dog was the Alpena version of the seven series, which was a very, very limited edition. They made like 500 of 'em.

Um, it was a European version that they brought here to the US market all the way down to the three series, right? So, yeah, I was guilty of that. Josh, he's telling me his story about how big his company was, even though he looked like, you know, average Joe. And I said, oh, this is great. This guy's gonna buy a seven series, or he's gonna buy a fleet of them from me for his employees to celebrate.

Right? And he, he bought a three series and I really, you know, that story has stuck with me my entire career because what's important to him? Shouldn't be important to me or judged by me. And yeah, he's got a lot of money, but it's not my job to tell him how he should spend it or judge him for how he spends it, because I was happy at the end of the day.

I had another sale on the board. And you know, the other salespeople, oh, you should have sold him a seven series. You know, you couldn't sell him a seven series. It, it just, it, it all went negative. And I, I never got a negative out of that. I, you know, I, I made a relationship. I earned a customer. I earned referrals from years from that gentleman because he was used to being pre-judged by other people.

And I walked up to him, shook his hand, looked him in the eye, and said, how can I help you today? I want you to have a great experience. 

Josh W: Man, what a good lesson. Sometimes we look at people as deal makers, right? We're, we're sizing it up. What kind of car did they drive? What kind of wallet? What kind of shoes?

What kind of belt are they wearing? You know, how are they dressed? How do they pose themselves? And a lot of times, you know, we see in the world of deal making posturing on one side, but also misjudging on the other. Some of the most wealthy people that I know are work boots, you know, like just got in off the cattle ranch or the oil rig or whatever.

They got grease all over them. They, so, man, that is such a good lesson for us deal makers. I'm so glad you shared that, Dan. That is super valuable. Now, here comes your, your favorite question. What is your favorite car that you either sold or that you bought when you had your exit event? 

Dan Daly: I'll tell you, I mean, favorite experience I ever had with a car, which has then made it my favorite car was the Bugatti Chiral.

So, um, about six or seven years ago, I was running a dealership in Silicon Valley and we had Lamborghini Bentley, rolls Royce, Aston Martin Bugatti was one of the brands, and I was lucky enough to host all of our depositors on the new Sharon in Lisbon, Portugal for two weeks. Spent two weeks driving around with that car with those people in a different culture and to see 80-year-old people standing on the sidewalk smiling and pointing at that car as it goes by the emotion that it evoked from people, right?

Just has stayed with me. It's imprint a memory on me, and it also is what planted the seed of me creating the international real estate portfolio because Lisbon, Portugal. Was the first city in Portugal that I got to visit. I started learning about Lisbon. I started learning about Porto, and it was on my radar for the last 8, 9, 10 years to start acquiring something over there.

I wasn't sure what it was. Was it going to be a business? Was it going to be a property? Was it going to be a vineyard? I didn't know, but I never lost sight of it. It, it was on my manifestation board for a long time. And now here we are getting ready to launch in Portugal, a $50 million. Golden Visa, hospitality, real estate, private equity fund.

Yeah. So I mean, that seed was planted because of that car and that environment. And that's a, that's a true story. So without that happening, I don't know. I'd be doing in the real estate world, what, what I'm doing today. Yeah, man. 

Josh W: The, the little tiny things in our lives, if we connect with people and build relationships, they could catapult you decades forward.

Um, yeah, so it's, it's the people we meet and the things that we do along the way. So that's why you should treat people with utmost respect. Um, you moved up the ranks from wholesale, you know, from the guy wade down the street doing wholesale all the way to leadership. What happened after you, you know, finance manager, what's, what's next after general manager and these different things?

Dan Daly: Yeah, so after general manager, um, I became kind of, it was my, my calling card to go into underperforming dealerships and make them profitable, right? Go into stores that maybe are not in the best location that people didn't give a fighting chance, um, with the same staff, with the same tools, and get them turned around.

Um, so about six years ago, I had a gentleman here in Los Angeles that's very well known in the sports entertainment industry, and very well known in the real estate side, and a mutual acquaintance put us in touch. I was supposed to meet with him for 20, 30 minutes or so. We wound up talking for two hours at our first meeting.

Hired me, made me the vice president of his new company 12 days later, and I was employee number one of a startup that he thought he wanted to build. Right? Kind of very similar to my own journey is, uh, you know, here's where I am. I wanna be an Ironman, let's just do it and we'll figure out how to do it. I was the CMO.

The CFO, the CPO, the CXO. It was a startup, Josh, like I was employee number one for a long time. And as we were building cars, uh, as we were buying dealerships, one day I went to him, I said, listen, we need some more people, or the wheels are gonna fall off here. I need some help. Yeah. And he was great. He said, listen, you, you map out what you need and why you need it, and who you need.

And six years later, we went from being employee number one and having a, the first small store was about five or six employees and 10, 12 cars in stock. Really small boutiquey store. That was not profitable. That store became number one retail store in the world, two out of the five or six years that we owned it.

Number one in the country, several years that we owned it. Same location, same staff, same cars, same brand, right? Taking an underperforming asset and turning it around, which is what I do in real estate, and we grew that to 500 employees, six, 700 million in revenue via the acquisition model, and going in and finding efficiencies, finding new margins, creating better world-class customer experience.

Which was really the, uh, the tipping point for us, right? Some of these stores were very, very profitable, but they had customer service scores 30 out of a hundred. I mean, you have to work really hard to make people that angry to give you a bad survey. And, um, we got that turned around. We had four stores.

Same brand in four big cities here in the SoCal region that went from very, very low underperforming scores to top dealerships in the entire United States. Forget about in the region or in the state, or in the West Coast? In the United States. For customer satisfaction in both sales and service scores of over 94 consecutive months in a row.

So you start making people really happy, glad they came into your store. You make it a destination that they look forward to coming to. There's a lot of added value there, and you have the right to charge for it, and it translates. A lot of dollars and cents in the bottom line that, you know, years earlier, the, the folks we had running the store were like, you know, we're profitable.

Like, yeah, customer service could be better, but look how much money we're making. Well. 12, 18 months later, look how much money we're making now. And the only thing that's changed is our customers are happier now than they were before. 

Josh W: What's the difference when it comes to selling, you know, a three series Beamer to, you know, Bugatti or one of these ultra luxury cars?

Like are there, are, is there a different strategy? Are there different tactics when doing the sale? Like, walk us through ultra high end, high ticket items. 

Dan Daly: The short answer is no, right there isn't. I treated a three series BMW customer 40, $50,000 purchase as if they were buying a $3 million Bugatti. And I'll tell you another very important lesson I learned.

I was, I was running a dealership in Greenwich, Connecticut for some years. And a couple of high school kids came in, really young kids, and they said, you know, can we get some brochures? We wanna sit in the cars, take some pictures. And I was like, no, no, no. Guys, these cars are really expensive. The brochures are expensive.

And somebody pulled me aside after they left and they said, listen, you don't understand whose kids they could be. I said, well, what do you mean? He said, well, what if you had done this? What if they came in and you said, sure, I'd be happy to take some pictures of you and your friends in the car. Just be careful.

Open up the door for 'em. Let 'em in before they leave. You give 'em a business card, you give 'em a brochure. You treat them as if they're the customer because you know what's going to happen on Saturday. Their dad is going to come back or their mom is going to come back and they're bringing their son or their daughter with them.

And what is the dad or mom holding in their hand the brochure. That was a game changer for me. So whether it was a 15-year-old kid within reason, right, that would come in, or somebody that was interested in a three series or a Bugatti, it didn't matter. I treated everybody the same across the board. I gave them a great experience.

I educated them. I made them feel comfortable, and then I charged them a lot of money for whatever I was selling, and it has always worked, period. 

Josh W: Very cool, man. All right, so we got you, you, you did this turnaround deal. You guys, in your last few years of, uh, in the car business, before moving to, you know, consultant and international investor, you guys did hundreds of millions in revenue, became one of the top, uh, shops in, in the world, you know, when, when you were, what, what did the transition look like because now you're a consultant at, in international investor.

What was the, the event that. Went from doing hundreds of millions of dollars to that. Was there a, an exit, a sale or what, what did that look like? 

Dan Daly: Yeah, it was an exit. So they started selling, you know, all of the big brand stores. Mm-hmm. It was great timing because the market's changed a lot since then with the tariffs.

And um, you know, I had an opportunity to possibly stay on, um, with that organization in a real estate, um, situation, right Where I could maybe lend some. Help experience on the real estate side rather than on the automotive side, because they're also big in real estate. And I just got to that point, Joshua, I said, you know, I've been working this hard my entire career for other people.

Um, I wanna work that hard for myself. And, and that's really what I did. I just, again. I bet on myself. Right. Worse comes to worse. I could always go back to doing what I've done. My skillset is there. Right. It's like a, it's like being a scratch golfer. You could take your clubs, go play on any course, and you're, you're probably gonna do all right.

Right. So I had the confidence in myself to try something new, and it has just taken off like my automotive career did. Right. I'm meeting brokers, I'm meeting attorneys, I'm meeting accountants in a foreign country based here in Los Angeles by building relationships, building trust. Educating myself and surrounding myself with great people.

It is, it is not a secret recipe, right? But you have to have the discipline to keep chipping away at it, because in the beginning, listen, it is not. When you're getting bad customer complaints about your properties from guests when they're in Portugal and you're also in Los Angeles, right. Um, and we went through a lot of those, right?

I didn't have the perfect accountant from day one. I didn't have the perfect attorney from day one or property management company. So the same trials and tribulations that you have here in the us. With finding great partners, it's no different than over there. The time zone makes it a little bit different.

Mm-hmm. The language barrier sometimes makes it a little bit different, um, but overall, it's basically exactly the same thing on a different playing field with a better price to entry. That's, that's my edge is now I've got a team over there that we've worked with for four years. Solid, hasn't changed any organization, right?

If you really want to build momentum and grow it, keep that core together, as long as you can surround yourself with great people, keep everybody involved and enthusiastic and you will do great things. So very, very similar, you know, strategy playbook for automotive that I did at real estate. 

Josh W: Man.

Fantastic. And you went from your first transaction, you read the book, rich Dad, poor Dad. Yeah. You bought the board game, which next time we, we connect, we should play the board game. I play it with my kids. It's a lot of fun. The, the cash quadrants or cashflow game. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is great for 

Dan Daly: kids. I mean, I, you know.

I grew up in a, in a great house, right? Very blue collar, very basic. My dad was a blue collar guy. We had a great house to grow up in. We went to great schools. But he wasn't a business guy. He wasn't a real estate guy, right? So I am not a third generation automotive dealer, third generation real estate guy, you know, which we hear a lot about in, in this business.

I did not even start acquiring real estate properties until I was in my late forties, right? With nobody around me. To say, here's how you do it. I needed to go out and find those people. And that was part of the challenge for me, you know? And, um, I've got a saying sometimes to myself, if, if it were easy, anybody can do it right?

I, I want something that's going to challenge me a little bit. I like those things where people go, well, well, how did you do that? I could never do that. They haven't even asked a question. They're already talking themself out of the game by saying, I could never do that. Well, that's great 'cause that's my advantage, right?

I don't want you to even think about doing it. So, you know, I, I'm never apprehensive about telling people what I do, how I did it, where I do it, because they're not going to do it anyway. Yeah, right. If they do, God bless 'em. But for the most part I'm sharing, I'm giving it to you. What you do with it is up to you, you know.

Josh W: For 

Dan Daly: sure, 

Josh W: Dan, we're, we're coming to an end at least of our first, uh, long form interview together. We've created a ton of content else, place elsewhere, but, uh, for people who wanna connect with you, we will put your contact information in the show notes. So like, we encourage people to reach out to you if they wanna know more about international investing in properties, if they wanna learn what you're doing in the world of consulting for, uh, kind of automotive turnarounds and, you know, buying and selling those kind of portfolios.

You know, there's probably a question. It could be business, it could be Ironman, it could be whatever you want. There's probably a question I should have asked you that I screwed up and did not ask you during this interview. What is that? One question's? And this will be the last, 

Dan Daly: oh, you're asking me, what's the question?

You should have asked me? Yeah. 

Josh W: Yeah. I probably dropped the ball here. Your life. 

Dan Daly: No, that's easy. What's next, right? 

Josh W: Yeah. What's next? Yeah, 

Dan Daly: I don't know. That's, you know, top of my head. What's next? Right? Because. We're talking about everything that got me to where I am here today, right? Yeah. So the idea now is we're launching this private equity fund that is based in Portugal, that is Golden Visa eligible.

So for people that don't know what that is, they're not familiar. You invest 500,000 euros into the fund and in five years you have permanent residency. In Portugal for yourself, your spouse, your entire family. That's access to education, healthcare, retirement, plan, everything. You are a permanent resident and it gives you access to the entire European Union, which is over 20 different countries.

So it is a golden ticket to a bridge abroad to lead a different lifestyle if you want that. So part of that fund is based on the golden visa. It's eligible for that. It's going to focus on hospitality real estate, so small boutique hotels. And lifestyle properties. So think 40 acre vineyards within State House.

Costa Rica Coffee Farm is another acquisition we're looking at making in Q1 of next year Saki Distillery in Japan in Kyoto. So lifestyle international properties along with the hotels that provide that ongoing cash flow. In Portugal, the hospitality. Industry in Portugal has been booming for the last five years.

Property values are up 12, 13, 15% year over year. So astronomical growth, and the idea is to build a $50 million portfolio of those properties and exit in three years to one of the small boutique hotel groups like in Aman or such. Something like that. They're not building bigger hotels now, the bigger groups, St.

Regis, four Seasons, Ritz Aman, they're building smaller boutique lifestyle, hospitality related branding now in their portfolio. So we're ahead of that curve, we think, to build a portfolio that would make it attractive for companies like that to come in and say, this is great. We'd love to add this to our, our portfolio and, and, um, go through a merger with them.

Josh W: Dan, it's a pleasure meeting you. I love the stories. I love like hearing your training on, on sales and strategy, building, advancing in careers, and, uh, going through this process now in the world of private equity and international real estate. Super exciting, uh, for the audience listening in, as always, reach out to our guests, say, thanks for being on the show, and if you are in the audience and you have a deal to talk about, or if you have a, a deal journey that you.

You would think would be interesting to share with the community. Head over to the deal podcast.com. Fill out a quick form and heck maybe get you on the show next till then. We'll talk to you all on the next episode. Cheers everyone.