KBA was the pioneer of commercial lease auditing in 1985 and remains the signature firm in the industry. It has represented thousands of companies in almost every leasing market within the
US, helping them to eliminate overcharges in their commercial leases. Visual Lease is the #1 lease optimization software provider that helps organizations become compliant with FASB, IFRS, and GASB lease accounting standards, while simultaneously improving the financial, legal, and operational performance of their leases.
- CEO Story: After graduating from Law School, Marc became an expert in commerce
- Business Service: Representing clients for lease negotiations, loo
- IAL lease negotiations. Seeing the need to look at the loopholes of the leasing contracts, he founded the auditing lease company and later on made the lease contract more visible and accessible, building the virtual lease application which has helped companies save tons of money and headaches on their obligations while on the lease. king at lease contracts, leasing market. Virtual lease software.
- Secret Sauce: Great product with years of experience and research, and easy to use. Hiring people that are within the cultural fit of the company.
- CEO Hack: Always finding ways to improve, to the next level.
- CEO Nugget: Be patient. Make good decisions rationally, calmly, and professionally.
- CEO Defined: Being the inspiration in the organization. Drive performance and create emerging qualities and benefits.
Website: visuallease.com
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marc-betesh-6b78883/
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Transcription
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00:22 – Intro
Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.
00:52 – Gresham Harkless
Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Marc Batesh of KBA Lease Services and Visual Lease. Marc, super excited to have you on the show.
01:04 – Atty. Marc Betesh
A pleasure to be here.
01:05 – Gresham Harkless
Yeah, it's a pleasure all ours. And you're doing so many phenomenal things. So before we jump into the interview, I want to read a little bit more about Marc so you can hear about some of those awesome things. Marc is the founder and CEO of KBA Lease Services, the leading lease auditing firm, and Visual Lease, the number one lease optimization software provider. After receiving his BA From Temple University and his JD From Georgetown University, Marc practiced law in New York City, where he negotiated commercial leases. As an attorney, Marc became widely recognized as an expert on commercial lease negotiations, lease interpretation, and expense reimbursement clauses.
KBA was a pioneer of commercial lease auditing in 1985, and it remains a signature firm in the industry. It has represented thousands of companies in almost every leasing market within the United States, helping them to eliminate overcharges in their commercial leases. Individual Lease is the number one lease optimization software provider that helps organizations become compliant with FASB, IFRS, and GASB lease accounting standards while simultaneously improving the financial, legal, and operational performance of their leases. Marc, super excited to have you on the show. From one Hoya to another, I want to say Hoya Saxa, first and foremost.
02:19 – Atty. Marc Betesh
Yeah, I saw that. That's great.
02:21 – Gresham Harkless
Yeah, absolutely. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?
[restrict paid=”true”]
02:24 – Atty. Marc Betesh
No, that's too much.
02:26 – Gresham Harkless
All right, perfect. Let's make it happen then. So to kind of kick everything off, I know I touched on a little bit, but I want to rewind the clock, and hear a little bit more about how you got started with what I call your CEO story.
02:35 – Atty. Marc Betesh
How I got started. Well, I guess the. I was always an entrepreneur at heart. I've done. If I ever told you about all the crazy things I did, you wouldn't believe it. However, after graduating from law school, I was practicing law in New York and negotiating commercial leases. I was a litigator for a while. I did a bunch of different things, but at one point, I'll never forget getting the assignment and going out to New Jersey. I had to negotiate a commercial lease for an insurance company that was moving into an office building in New Jersey. So got in my car, drove to New Jersey, and sat down in a conference room with another, with the landlord's attorney, with the landlord there, and with a few other people.
And we're sitting there and we're hammering out the lease. And commercial leases are fairly complex. There's a lot of. A lot of moving parts. I mean, some of those commercial leases can be hundreds of pages long. So we're going through and dealing with all of the expense obligations. Who pays for this and who pays for that, and under what circumstances do you have to split it? And like, we're going through a whole bunch of things. And at one point, the landlord, not the attorney, the landlord looks at me, I guess, trying to get me to back down on some of my things, and he said, Marc, he said, you're doing a great job, but I've got to tell you, no one's going to ever read this lease. It's going to. It's going to get signed.
We're going to sit here, we're going to finish this up, it's going to get signed, the tenant's going to move into the building, and the lease is going to go in a drawer, and no one's going to even know where it is. It's going to get signed, it's going to get put in a drawer. It'll never see the light of day. And quite frankly, the things we're arguing over, if we bill your client $50,000 and it should only be $30,000, do you think they're going to know? Not that we would ever do that, but they won't know. They don't even know what the lease says. They don't know what it means. They don't know how to check. They don't know any of these things. I'm sitting there thinking, geez, that's like. That's crazy. This is not.
This is not inexpensive stuff. This is. This has to be watched carefully. And, you know, I didn't back down, of course. But it got me thinking. And about a year later, I ended up leaving my law firm and joining that real estate company. And we formed a new division, a new company within that company to do this novel idea called. We called it lease auditing. It's now a common phrase, but we invented the phrase. And we said we're going to go out and represent companies and see if we can help them to check and make sure their leases are being followed. And we. And we started out, I think one of our first major clients was at AND T. And we did a lot of work for them. We actually saved them a lot of money.
And as we were saving the money, we were looking and saying, but the lease says they're not supposed to pay for this. Why are they paying for it? And, like, back to what the guy said. They don't know where the leases are. And if you think about it, a lease over years becomes fairly complex. It gets amended, it gets adjusted. And, you know, after. After. You know, after 10 years, you could have 15 documents in there. So it's very hard for people unless you're the person that negotiated it. It's very hard to really know what it says and what it means. So we saved a lot of money, and after about 10 years, like, nothing was changing, like, we were correcting leases, but people were still overpaying the same way.
And by the way, Gresh, they're still doing it today. But we were correcting the leases, and we said, this is stupid. Why don't we invent a system? Why don't we come up with a software platform that makes the leases visible to them? So we went from doing the lease auditing, which. And then we still do that business, that's KBA Lease Services, and we built a database system called Visual Lease. We wanted to make the leases visible. We wanted to make them transparent so that if somebody has a problem with the roof is leaking, you can find out who has to fix it in five seconds, rather than have to wade through 15 documents to try and figure out the roof is leaking, the computers are getting wet, everybody's in a rush, and you're over there trying to find lease documents to just know who. This is silly.
And it's not like these are $500 transactions. These are expensive. You have to have that information. We built that platform. We built it in 85, 86. We launched it, we put it out into the marketplace, we sold it to a bunch of companies, and over the years, it just gained more and more traction about let's see, about five, six years ago, the accounting boards, the boards that control the rules and standards that accountants have to follow, decided to change the way leases are going to be tracked on financial statements. And so we already were tracking all the leases. We already have all the leases and all the rents.
Like, we interface, our system interfaces with all the accounting systems and ERP systems, but when they change the rules around leases for account accounting, we already had most of that in place. We just extended it a little bit more and now capture that. Now we're, you know, we are who we are now. We're one of the leading providers of that service. We have now over 1000 customers and handle hundreds and hundreds of thousands of leases.
08:17 – Gresham Harkless
Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. I know you touched on exactly how each of the businesses works, so I wanted to see if there's anything you wanted to mention in addition to that too and hear a little bit more about what I like to call your secret sauce, which could be for yourself, the business, or a combination of both, but what you feel kind of sets you apart and makes you unique.
08:34 – Atty. Marc Betesh
And we try to isolate what our special sauce is. In addition, look, I think our product is unbelievably great. And it's, and it's a reflection of many, many, many years of thinking. And you know, it's, you know, it's, it's. I think it's terrific. It just has so much in it and it's so easy to use. But besides that, the people that we hire are, are all reflective of a certain kind of personality, that warmth and friendliness and poise and professionalism. And you just try to dig in on that stuff. You try to understand who you are and make sure that the people that you bring into your organization have a similar cultural fit.
Because that's really what it's about. It's about people going above and beyond. It's about people going home at night. Now, you know, you start out at home, but now you never leave home. But people going home at night and thinking about work, not because you're forcing them to, but because they're into it, because they like it because they're getting fulfilled, they're enjoying what they do and they feel good about it and they have an idea at 10 o'clock at night and they want to implement it, that's what you want. You want people that enjoy their work. And that's kind of how we approach, approach everything that we do.
10:06 – Gresham Harkless
Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have. But what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?
10:18 – Atty. Marc Betesh
I don't know. I'm a tinkerer, so I'm always looking to find ways to improve everything I touch. I drive my wife crazy. I drive everyone else in my business crazy, but I'm always trying to get to the next level. It could be you can spend a thousand hours on it. There's always a way to make it even better. And I'm always looking, always looking to improve everything I touch, just kind of the way I am. And I think it helps to drive all of us.
10:46 – Gresham Harkless
Yeah, I absolutely love that. I think I'm a fellow tinkerer as well, too. So would you consider that to be what I like to call a CEO nugget, which is a little bit more word of wisdom or a piece of advice? I like to say it might be something you would tell your younger business self if you were to hop into a time machine or potentially your favorite client.
11:02 – Atty. Marc Betesh
Be patient. Make good decisions. You know, we can't control the world. We can't control everything we touch. The best that any of us can do is make the best decisions rationally, calmly, and professionally. When they. When. When you have to make them. You'll never be right 100% of the time, but you sure improve your odds. Right. And the goal is to get your odds as good as you can get them. You're never going to get them 100% but make good, rational, straightforward decisions and you'll do all right.
11:38 – Gresham Harkless
Absolutely. And I've always felt that about business and entrepreneurship. I think sometimes when you look at entrepreneurship, you think of somebody that's going skydiving and jumping off the cliff and doing all those things. But, yeah, often it's minimizing your risk. And I love what you said about not necessarily being right 100% of the time but increasing your likelihood of being right 100% of the time. So I love, that because it just makes sure that you kind of stack the deck as much as possible so that you can succeed.
12:04 – Atty. Marc Betesh
Yeah. Eliminate your, you know, I mean, people that. I watch these guys on TikTok and on Instagram. You ever see the guys with. I don't know what they're called, but they fly with those flysuits.
12:17 – Gresham Harkless
Oh, yeah. Yes.
12:18 – Atty. Marc Betesh
Right. Like, they look. They're crazy, you know, or people that skydive, they're crazy. But you know what? It's all calculated risk they're not crazy people. They just know and they are controlling each aspect of what they do and they're eliminating the risk. People would say you're crazy for driving a car. Back in the day when people first had cars, other people would say they were crazy. They're getting in that iron horse and they're crazy. That's a risk. You're going to get killed. Now we all drive cars. Right. It's a matter of managing your risk and managing what you're doing. And it all seems from afar, very frightening. But when you get down close to it, it's just regular stuff.
13:08 – Gresham Harkless
Absolutely. I imagine that happened a lot with you in the business. Once you start to hear a lot of times, the more that you research, you test out, you experiment, you start to realize that the leap that you're taking, so to speak, isn't really a leap at all because you've done the homework and due diligence to know that this, this is the where everything's going. This is the future, this is the next step. So why not take this step?
13:32 – Atty. Marc Betesh
Yeah, business people, most of them aren't crazy. They're pretty rational.
13:35 – Gresham Harkless
Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of times they could be, quote-unquote, to some degree risk-averse. They just did so much homework and research.
13:41 – Atty. Marc Betesh
They're so risk-averse much more than anybody. And you look at them and you say these people are crazy. They're not. They're more risk-averse than you are.
13:51- Gresham Harkless
They just did more homework and due diligence.
13:53 – Atty. Marc Betesh
That's right.
13:54 – Gresham Harkless
They're second in the deck.
13:55 – Atty. Marc Betesh
You got it.
13:56 – Gresham Harkless
So. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. I wanted to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping that different quote-unquote CEOs on this show. So Marc, what does being a CEO mean to you?
14:07 – Atty. Marc Betesh
It means to me, I mean, everyone's different. It means being the, being the inspiration of the organization. Being able to drive performance however you drive it, everyone drives it differently. But drive performance and really create emergent qualities and benefits. Being able to take 2 and 2 and turn it into 5 or 6 or 7. That's really what it's about. It's finding ways to build given what you have.
14:43 – Gresham Harkless
I love that, especially when you said that two and two, you know, turning into five because I think when you talk about the inspiration, driving performance, the making sure to do all those different aspects, that's when you start to take the 2 and 2 and make it into 5 or 10 or 15 because you are starting to use those drivers, I guess, for lack of a better term, to turn what may seem like something that's impossible into the possible plausible and actual things that we see on an everyday basis.
15:10 – Atty. Marc Betesh
Yeah, you're right.
15:12 – Gresham Harkless
Well, Marc, truly appreciate that definition and of course, I appreciate your time even more. So what I want to do now is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know and of course, how best people can get on view. Find out about all the awesome things you and Kim are working on.
15:27 – Atty. Marc Betesh
If people want to reach me, find me on our website, the visual lease, with two Ls, visuallease.com, and happy to answer any questions. And they can reach out to me on LinkedIn as well.
15:40 – Gresham Harkless
Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. And of course, to make it even easier for everybody that's listening and watching, you can click the links in the show notes just so that you can find out about Marc and all the awesome things that he's working on and he's building. But truly appreciate you for taking some time out and of course, you know, sharing some of your wisdom, your knowledge, and some of those, you know, experiences that you've had. So thank you so much again and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of that.
16:02 – Atty. Marc Betesh
You too, Gresh. Thank you. Pleasure.
16:04 – Outro
Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.
00:22 - Intro
Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.
00:52 - Gresham Harkless
Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Marc Batesh of KBA Lease Services and Visual Lease. Marc, super excited to have you on the show.
01:04 - Atty. Marc Betesh
A pleasure to be here.
01:05 - Gresham Harkless
Yeah, it's a pleasure all ours. And you're doing so many phenomenal things. So before we jump into the interview, I want to read a little bit more about Marc so you can hear about some of those awesome things. Marc is the founder and CEO of KBA Lease Services, the leading lease auditing firm, and Visual Lease, the number one lease optimization software provider. After receiving his BA From Temple University and his JD From Georgetown University, Marc practiced law in New York City, where he negotiated commercial leases. As an attorney, Marc became widely recognized as an expert on commercial lease negotiations, lease interpretation, and expense reimbursement clauses.
KBA was a pioneer of commercial lease auditing in 1985, and it remains a signature firm in the industry. It has represented thousands of companies in almost every leasing market within the United States, helping them to eliminate overcharges in their commercial leases. Individual Lease is the number one lease optimization software provider that helps organizations become compliant with FASB, IFRS, and GASB lease accounting standards while simultaneously improving the financial, legal, and operational performance of their leases. Marc, super excited to have you on the show. From one Hoya to another, I want to say Hoya Saxa, first and foremost.
02:19 - Atty. Marc Betesh
Yeah, I saw that. That's great.
02:21 - Gresham Harkless
Yeah, absolutely. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?
02:24 - Atty. Marc Betesh
No, that's too much.
02:26 - Gresham Harkless
All right, perfect. Let's make it happen then. So to kind of kick everything off, I know I touched on a little bit, but I want to rewind the clock, and hear a little bit more about how you got started with what I call your CEO story.
02:35 - Atty. Marc Betesh
How I got started. Well, I guess the. I was always an entrepreneur at heart. I've done. If I ever told you about all the crazy things I did, you wouldn't believe it. However, after graduating from law school, I was practicing law in New York and negotiating commercial leases. I was a litigator for a while. I did a bunch of different things, but at one point, I'll never forget getting the assignment and going out to New Jersey. I had to negotiate a commercial lease for an insurance company that was moving into an office building in New Jersey. So got in my car, drove to New Jersey, and sat down in a conference room with another, with the landlord's attorney, with the landlord there, and with a few other people.
And we're sitting there and we're hammering out the lease. And commercial leases are fairly complex. There's a lot of. A lot of moving parts. I mean, some of those commercial leases can be hundreds of pages long. So we're going through and dealing with all of the expense obligations. Who pays for this and who pays for that, and under what circumstances do you have to split it? And like, we're going through a whole bunch of things. And at one point, the landlord, not the attorney, the landlord looks at me, I guess, trying to get me to back down on some of my things, and he said, Marc, he said, you're doing a great job, but I've got to tell you, no one's going to ever read this lease. It's going to. It's going to get signed.
We're going to sit here, we're going to finish this up, it's going to get signed, the tenant's going to move into the building, and the lease is going to go in a drawer, and no one's going to even know where it is. It's going to get signed, it's going to get put in a drawer. It'll never see the light of day. And quite frankly, the things we're arguing over, if we bill your client $50,000 and it should only be $30,000, do you think they're going to know? Not that we would ever do that, but they won't know. They don't even know what the lease says. They don't know what it means. They don't know how to check. They don't know any of these things. I'm sitting there thinking, geez, that's like. That's crazy. This is not.
This is not inexpensive stuff. This is. This has to be watched carefully. And, you know, I didn't back down, of course. But it got me thinking. And about a year later, I ended up leaving my law firm and joining that real estate company. And we formed a new division, a new company within that company to do this novel idea called. We called it lease auditing. It's now a common phrase, but we invented the phrase. And we said we're going to go out and represent companies and see if we can help them to check and make sure their leases are being followed. And we. And we started out, I think one of our first major clients was at AND T. And we did a lot of work for them. We actually saved them a lot of money.
And as we were saving the money, we were looking and saying, but the lease says they're not supposed to pay for this. Why are they paying for it? And, like, back to what the guy said. They don't know where the leases are. And if you think about it, a lease over years becomes fairly complex. It gets amended, it gets adjusted. And, you know, after. After. You know, after 10 years, you could have 15 documents in there. So it's very hard for people unless you're the person that negotiated it. It's very hard to really know what it says and what it means. So we saved a lot of money, and after about 10 years, like, nothing was changing, like, we were correcting leases, but people were still overpaying the same way.
And by the way, Gresh, they're still doing it today. But we were correcting the leases, and we said, this is stupid. Why don't we invent a system? Why don't we come up with a software platform that makes the leases visible to them? So we went from doing the lease auditing, which. And then we still do that business, that's KBA Lease Services, and we built a database system called Visual Lease. We wanted to make the leases visible. We wanted to make them transparent so that if somebody has a problem with the roof is leaking, you can find out who has to fix it in five seconds, rather than have to wade through 15 documents to try and figure out the roof is leaking, the computers are getting wet, everybody's in a rush, and you're over there trying to find lease documents to just know who. This is silly.
And it's not like these are $500 transactions. These are expensive. You have to have that information. We built that platform. We built it in 85, 86. We launched it, we put it out into the marketplace, we sold it to a bunch of companies, and over the years, it just gained more and more traction about let's see, about five, six years ago, the accounting boards, the boards that control the rules and standards that accountants have to follow, decided to change the way leases are going to be tracked on financial statements. And so we already were tracking all the leases. We already have all the leases and all the rents.
Like, we interface, our system interfaces with all the accounting systems and ERP systems, but when they change the rules around leases for account accounting, we already had most of that in place. We just extended it a little bit more and now capture that. Now we're, you know, we are who we are now. We're one of the leading providers of that service. We have now over 1000 customers and handle hundreds and hundreds of thousands of leases.
08:17 - Gresham Harkless
Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. I know you touched on exactly how each of the businesses works, so I wanted to see if there's anything you wanted to mention in addition to that too and hear a little bit more about what I like to call your secret sauce, which could be for yourself, the business, or a combination of both, but what you feel kind of sets you apart and makes you unique.
08:34 - Atty. Marc Betesh
And we try to isolate what our special sauce is. In addition, look, I think our product is unbelievably great. And it's, and it's a reflection of many, many, many years of thinking. And you know, it's, you know, it's, it's. I think it's terrific. It just has so much in it and it's so easy to use. But besides that, the people that we hire are, are all reflective of a certain kind of personality, that warmth and friendliness and poise and professionalism. And you just try to dig in on that stuff. You try to understand who you are and make sure that the people that you bring into your organization have a similar cultural fit.
Because that's really what it's about. It's about people going above and beyond. It's about people going home at night. Now, you know, you start out at home, but now you never leave home. But people going home at night and thinking about work, not because you're forcing them to, but because they're into it, because they like it because they're getting fulfilled, they're enjoying what they do and they feel good about it and they have an idea at 10 o'clock at night and they want to implement it, that's what you want. You want people that enjoy their work. And that's kind of how we approach, approach everything that we do.
10:06 - Gresham Harkless
Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have. But what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?
10:18 - Atty. Marc Betesh
I don't know. I'm a tinkerer, so I'm always looking to find ways to improve everything I touch. I drive my wife crazy. I drive everyone else in my business crazy, but I'm always trying to get to the next level. It could be you can spend a thousand hours on it. There's always a way to make it even better. And I'm always looking, always looking to improve everything I touch, just kind of the way I am. And I think it helps to drive all of us.
10:46 - Gresham Harkless
Yeah, I absolutely love that. I think I'm a fellow tinkerer as well, too. So would you consider that to be what I like to call a CEO nugget, which is a little bit more word of wisdom or a piece of advice? I like to say it might be something you would tell your younger business self if you were to hop into a time machine or potentially your favorite client.
11:02 - Atty. Marc Betesh
Be patient. Make good decisions. You know, we can't control the world. We can't control everything we touch. The best that any of us can do is make the best decisions rationally, calmly, and professionally. When they. When. When you have to make them. You'll never be right 100% of the time, but you sure improve your odds. Right. And the goal is to get your odds as good as you can get them. You're never going to get them 100% but make good, rational, straightforward decisions and you'll do all right.
11:38 - Gresham Harkless
Absolutely. And I've always felt that about business and entrepreneurship. I think sometimes when you look at entrepreneurship, you think of somebody that's going skydiving and jumping off the cliff and doing all those things. But, yeah, often it's minimizing your risk. And I love what you said about not necessarily being right 100% of the time but increasing your likelihood of being right 100% of the time. So I love, that because it just makes sure that you kind of stack the deck as much as possible so that you can succeed.
12:04 - Atty. Marc Betesh
Yeah. Eliminate your, you know, I mean, people that. I watch these guys on TikTok and on Instagram. You ever see the guys with. I don't know what they're called, but they fly with those flysuits.
12:17 - Gresham Harkless
Oh, yeah. Yes.
12:18 - Atty. Marc Betesh
Right. Like, they look. They're crazy, you know, or people that skydive, they're crazy. But you know what? It's all calculated risk they're not crazy people. They just know and they are controlling each aspect of what they do and they're eliminating the risk. People would say you're crazy for driving a car. Back in the day when people first had cars, other people would say they were crazy. They're getting in that iron horse and they're crazy. That's a risk. You're going to get killed. Now we all drive cars. Right. It's a matter of managing your risk and managing what you're doing. And it all seems from afar, very frightening. But when you get down close to it, it's just regular stuff.
13:08 - Gresham Harkless
Absolutely. I imagine that happened a lot with you in the business. Once you start to hear a lot of times, the more that you research, you test out, you experiment, you start to realize that the leap that you're taking, so to speak, isn't really a leap at all because you've done the homework and due diligence to know that this, this is the where everything's going. This is the future, this is the next step. So why not take this step?
13:32 - Atty. Marc Betesh
Yeah, business people, most of them aren't crazy. They're pretty rational.
13:35 - Gresham Harkless
Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of times they could be, quote-unquote, to some degree risk-averse. They just did so much homework and research.
13:41 - Atty. Marc Betesh
They're so risk-averse much more than anybody. And you look at them and you say these people are crazy. They're not. They're more risk-averse than you are.
13:51- Gresham Harkless
They just did more homework and due diligence.
13:53 - Atty. Marc Betesh
That's right.
13:54 - Gresham Harkless
They're second in the deck.
13:55 - Atty. Marc Betesh
You got it.
13:56 - Gresham Harkless
So. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. I wanted to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping that different quote-unquote CEOs on this show. So Marc, what does being a CEO mean to you?
14:07 - Atty. Marc Betesh
It means to me, I mean, everyone's different. It means being the, being the inspiration of the organization. Being able to drive performance however you drive it, everyone drives it differently. But drive performance and really create emergent qualities and benefits. Being able to take 2 and 2 and turn it into 5 or 6 or 7. That's really what it's about. It's finding ways to build given what you have.
14:43 - Gresham Harkless
I love that, especially when you said that two and two, you know, turning into five because I think when you talk about the inspiration, driving performance, the making sure to do all those different aspects, that's when you start to take the 2 and 2 and make it into 5 or 10 or 15 because you are starting to use those drivers, I guess, for lack of a better term, to turn what may seem like something that's impossible into the possible plausible and actual things that we see on an everyday basis.
15:10 - Atty. Marc Betesh
Yeah, you're right.
15:12 - Gresham Harkless
Well, Marc, truly appreciate that definition and of course, I appreciate your time even more. So what I want to do now is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know and of course, how best people can get on view. Find out about all the awesome things you and Kim are working on.
15:27 - Atty. Marc Betesh
If people want to reach me, find me on our website, the visual lease, with two Ls, visuallease.com, and happy to answer any questions. And they can reach out to me on LinkedIn as well.
15:40 - Gresham Harkless
Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. And of course, to make it even easier for everybody that's listening and watching, you can click the links in the show notes just so that you can find out about Marc and all the awesome things that he's working on and he's building. But truly appreciate you for taking some time out and of course, you know, sharing some of your wisdom, your knowledge, and some of those, you know, experiences that you've had. So thank you so much again and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of that.
16:02 - Atty. Marc Betesh
You too, Gresh. Thank you. Pleasure.
16:04 - Outro
Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.
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