Building A Team That Performs With Megan Gluth – RFP 69 Transcript
Gordon Lamphere (00:06): Hi, I’m Gordon Lamphere, and welcome to The Real Finds Podcast, where we have real conversations with key entrepreneurs, activists, and researchers who are shaping the real estate industry and, as a result, our world. On today’s podcast, we’ll be speaking with Megan Gluth. Megan is the owner and CEO of Catalynt Solutions, Inc. and is a voice in the manufacturing industry for pragmatic leadership, human-centered capitalism, and supply chain resilience. On the podcast, we take a deep dive into Megan’s path from below the poverty line to CEO. We look at the power of American capitalism and the uncertain state of American manufacturing and its supply chains. Most of all, we dive into what business leaders need to do to future-proof their businesses. If you’re interested in the onshoring movement and manufacturing leadership, today’s podcast is well worth a listen. Megan, thanks for hopping on the podcast today.
Megan Gluth (01:10): Hey, thanks for having me, Gordon.
From Small-Town Iowa to CEO
Gordon Lamphere (01:12): So what got you into the world of corporate life? Iowa is always near and dear to my heart, as my mother is in Iowa.
Megan Gluth (01:23): I actually started as a lawyer before that. I was just a small-town Iowa kid who didn’t really know, frankly, what I wanted to be. I grew up below the poverty line, though, and I knew that I didn’t want to do that, right? It’s funny, because a lot of people set goals in their lives based on passion or things like that, and I don’t know if I ever knew what that was. I liked a lot of things. I liked learning. I liked building things. I liked creating things. I liked being part of a team. I liked a lot of things that didn’t necessarily translate into standard career conversations. But I also knew that I wanted to be self-driven, a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. And so I made my way in the world.
That’s a super long story, maybe for this podcast, maybe not, but ultimately I went to law school and became an attorney. I started at a firm where we were advising family offices and closely held businesses and doing advanced estate planning for higher net worth individuals. I got to see behind the curtain of a lot of how businesses are created, what drives people, and what it takes to create, maintain, grow, and scale businesses that, while they may be closely held, certainly didn’t end up being small.
I came to this company that I now own originally as its first general counsel. That’s how I got started here. I fell in love with the business and loved what we were doing. I quickly got promoted to president and then CEO of the company. Then, after some time, my predecessor was at a stage of his career where he was getting ready to retire and sell, and I was coming up, and I said to him, “If I can figure out how to finance this, can I buy this business from you?” And that’s exactly what happened. It’s a crazy story and a crazy journey, but that’s how I ended up here.
How Businesses Are Created
Gordon Lamphere (03:20): So how are businesses created? You mentioned that, and I know a lot of our listeners are in the real estate world, but many of them are business owners as well. How does that process play out?
Megan Gluth (03:34): I think the real estate world and the business world are inherently the same thing, because all businesses are started by somebody saying, “I want to make something bigger than what is here,” right? Maybe it’s an idea, maybe it’s somebody’s vision, maybe it’s somebody’s solution to a problem, maybe it’s simply a skill they’d like to market and monetize, or it could be as simple as a duplex on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. There are all sorts of things where a person looks at them and says, what’s here in front of me could be something bigger. It becomes its own thing, its own idea, and its own enterprise. I think that’s how a business is ultimately created from an ideological standpoint. Obviously as an attorney, I could tell you all the nuances of how that actually happens. But at its core, business, particularly business in America, is the seed of someone’s entrepreneurial spirit, looking at something that doesn’t exist and wanting to create something that does, with their mark on it.
Running a Business in Uncertain Times
Gordon Lamphere (04:40): Putting our mark on this conversation, one of the things everyone’s talking about in the business world, and I’ve got clients, particularly on the industrial side, who are all worried about it, is where we’re going with global supply chains. From what I understand, your business is very tied into global supply chains. How are you seeing the complexities of global trade play out, and how are you addressing that?
Megan Gluth (05:07): I have to be honest and say that I’m addressing it with a one-day-at-a-time philosophy, because I think that’s all any of us can really do right now. This is not a knock on the administration or any policymakers at all. That’s not what I do. But it is a fact that right now we’re trying to run a business in an environment that lacks steady, durable, long-term guidance on what we should be doing. So we’re all turning on the news and saying, “Okay, what is it today?” And we don’t really know. That presents an interesting challenge for supply chain and for business in general.
My business is not only supply chain, and in particular global supply chain. We procure raw materials from all over the world that are used by companies in America to make things. Some of my customers make infant formula, some make paint, some make downhole oil drilling fluids, some make soft drinks. All of those things made here in the United States have ingredients that go into their creation. Part of my business is procuring those from all over the world, bringing them to the United States, and supplying them in the quantities needed to these customers’ manufacturing sites. The other part of my business is actually manufacturing. I have a plant in Chicago where we make those very things under other people’s labels. It’s called contract manufacturing, for anybody who’s not familiar.
So I see the supply chain in a dual way: from the perspective of a user, an American company seeking to make things in the US, and from the perspective of a supplier seeking to gather things from a global supply chain and put them back out into the supply chain. We are all operating right now in a season of really dramatic uncertainty. We’ve been told there would be tariffs, then the tariffs stopped. We’ve been told there are conversations going on, and then we’re told they’re not going well and they’re going to break apart. The stock market is not the economy, but for us it is a barometer of what’s happening in the minds of American business people. What you see in that erratic, “what’s really happening” behavior is, I think, governed by two things. One, we can’t forecast. Things are uncertain, and we don’t know what’s coming next. And two,
Megan Gluth (07:34): we still have in us a fundamental belief that what we do is valuable and good, and there’s a future and potential goodness coming for us here. We want to continue that entrepreneurial spirit, to grow our businesses, and to do what the president and the administration are asking us to do, which is invest in our country and grow. But we’re hampered by the fact that we don’t have clear policy guidance, so we can’t forecast. And not to get too technical, but we’re also living in a high interest rate environment, which makes it unattractive to make large capital investments in the very things we’re supposed to be incentivized to do. So it’s a very, very tricky environment in which to run a business. That’s why I say it’s sort of one week at a time.
Interest Rates, Inflation, and Investment
Gordon Lamphere (08:23): Can you talk a little bit more about how interest rates have affected you? We see it every day on the commercial real estate side, but I think it’s also a huge factor for businesses, and I don’t think the real estate community talks enough about it.
Megan Gluth (08:45): When the real estate community talks about it, everybody thinks they’re just talking about mortgage interest rates. That’s true, there’s certainly an element of that, and I don’t mean to belittle it. The retort is always, “Well, you guys got used to super low interest rates, and they’re never coming back. When I bought my house in the ’80s, it was 16%.”
Gordon Lamphere (08:50): Exactly. Exactly.
Megan Gluth (09:13): I get the joke. But the truth of the matter is, to make things affordable for American families, an affordable mortgage rate is important if you want to incentivize homeownership, particularly in this inflation environment. And this inflation environment is further impacted by the fact that when we’re bringing in goods from all over the world, or when American companies see their competition from outside the country coming in more expensive, the price of things goes up, right? So mortgage rates do become incidentally relevant.
From a business investment perspective, let’s talk about it in its most basic form: borrowing money to do capital improvements, to build a new plant. This is what we’re supposed to be doing, right? Building more things in America. If the interest rate on that money is high, and I’m already concerned about how long it will take to get a return on the investment I’m supposed to be making, and I’m living in a very uncertain environment in terms of forecasting revenue or profit, and now you’re telling me that interest rates are maybe not going down and possibly going up, my incentive to make that investment is not high.
I understand the argument that we raised interest rates to decrease some of that runaway spending. But you have to understand that the spending has to occur in order to make the things in the United States that you want made. If it doesn’t, you’re just placing tariffs on goods coming in from outside the United States, which makes everything expensive. I hope I’m being clear. You have this inflation and interest rate, chicken-and-egg story, and you never really get ahead of the problem.
What Policymakers Should Do
Gordon Lamphere (11:05): So how do businesses end up getting ahead of the problem? I know you’ve done a lot on the lobbying side. What are some of the steps policymakers can look at to move forward, beyond just creating a game board that’s not constantly moving? I think that’s probably number one, and I think we’ve covered it, and anybody listening with any business sense will agree with us. But what else can we do to move industrial business forward?
Megan Gluth (11:44): Sure. I’m going to speak in really pragmatic ways, and then no one will listen, right? But the answers are actually simpler than we make them. The first thing we need to do from a policy perspective, and I say this when I’m in DC, is that whatever side of the fence you’re on, whether you’re wearing a blue jersey or a red jersey or no jersey at all, you have to stop being extreme. You have to stop being at the polar ends of the spectrum. Because the truth of the matter is, like most things in life, very few things are black and white. Most things are gray.
It is true that many American families cannot afford life right now, and things are getting more expensive. The answer to that is not simply, and again, this is sort of a canned thing, that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer and there’s corporate greed and all of that. Yes, that sort of exists. It’s always going to exist. But I think most Americans, frankly, don’t understand the difference between gross profit and net profit, or even revenue and profit. I think some basic economics lessons would be helpful before we roll that corporate greed energy out into the world.
You cannot use policy to force increased wages. You may want to, and there may be policy reasons to do that. But if you force somebody who owns a fast food restaurant to pay someone twenty-five or thirty dollars an hour, the price of a gallon of milk will go up. These are fundamental economic principles. In many cases we’re using a cure that is causing the sickness. Now, I’m not saying we shouldn’t raise wages. What I am saying is, if you tell me as a business owner that I now have to pay everybody more, I’m going to raise my prices to cover that. I just am. That is what’s going to happen, and inflation is going to go up. So perhaps the policy consideration is: what is an acceptable amount of inflation? What are we willing to deal with? Because I don’t know if we can say everybody is now forced to a basic minimum wage
Megan Gluth (14:02): at this level, but we’re only going to allow 2% or 3% inflation. I’m not sure that makes good sense. When we calculated and set our targets for what inflation should be, were we doing that in an environment where we were using the government to tell business owners what they must pay employees? We removed the free market economy from that equation, from the labor market. What happened to an employee picking where to work based on how much money they could make, whether they could do better? Some of those things left. So you have to say, okay, fine, if this is what we choose to do as a country, then we have to set policy and reconfigure what’s acceptable to us in terms of inflation rates.
The second thing I think we have to do is understand that there’s never going to be a situation where a business like mine absorbs all of those rising inflationary costs and doesn’t seek to raise prices. It’s not going to happen. I’m not running a nonprofit, Gordon. I need to make money. My gross profit is how I pay my employees. My net profit is how I make the additional investments that, on the other side of the policy fence, I’m being asked and incentivized to make.
So to really solve this, we have to go back to the drawing board and ask whether some of the tropes we’re throwing out into the public space are true. Is it true that we should be paying people a $25 an hour minimum in the state of California and really only expecting a 3% inflation rate? Is that possible? Is our math good? And if we agree that 3% maybe isn’t realistic, and the new normal is a little bit higher, could we then say that, to incentivize continued growth and the return of some of that net profit I was talking about, continued investment, continued capital expenditure, continued capital growth, we need an interest rate environment that isn’t always driving toward a 3% inflation rate? These are complicated conversations. They’re boring, they’re not sexy for the news, and there’s not a good sound bite.
Megan Gluth (16:18): But that’s one basic thing that needs to be done. We need to go back and revisit our assumptions, and revisit what we’re telling the American people they can expect based on some of these policy objectives.
Human-Centered Capitalism
Gordon Lamphere (16:32): Yeah, I think that’s a very tough, dry, and important conversation that we have to have. Generally in the real estate world, we have conversations when people’s rent comes up, be it yearly or at a five-year or ten-year term, and we’ll say something like, “We’re going to see three or four percent annual increases,” and people go, “How is that possible?” And we’re like, “It’s inflation.” We’re not even trying to make more money. We’re just trying to maintain the status quo, and asking anybody to take a hit is just not fair. But at the same time, we have to have that honest conversation that we should never be living in an environment with zero inflation, because then there’s zero growth.
Megan Gluth: Right. That’s right.
Gordon Lamphere: So we have to find that balance. In terms of finding balance, one of the other things I’ve seen in a lot of your content is that you talk a lot about embracing human-centered capitalism. How do you define that, and how can we get to a more inclusive work culture?
Megan Gluth (17:46): Sure. The first thing I tell people when I talk about human-centered capitalism, and it’s the way I define my approach to the world, is that the capitalism piece is important. I am an unapologetic capitalist. I run a for-profit corporation, and we should stop being ashamed of that. We entered a time recently where we were talking about making money like it was a bad thing. We had a CEO out in the Seattle area, where I live, who said that at his company everybody, including the CEO, was going to make the same amount of money. I’m not going to name that company, but we now look back and see that it doesn’t work, because what you remove is the spirit of people who want to build and create and pursue the things that drive them. When you take away their incentives, when you take away the pellets from the mouse in the maze, the mouse isn’t going to run in the maze anymore. Somebody will come back and say humans aren’t mice. I get that. But we are an incentive-driven species. We are.
So I’m an unapologetic capitalist, and I think the first part of that, as a business owner no matter how small your business is, or even just as a human with your own self-worth, is that you get to claim and own the fact that you want to make money. You want to be somebody who builds something and increases your own wealth and the wealth of your company. There’s nothing wrong with that.
The second portion is recognizing the very real truth that if you’re truly a builder and you truly want to create, you want more satisfaction than money can provide. You have to create an environment, even for yourself, that feels good. And when I say good, I mean the kind of environment where you’re proud that everybody who works with you, including yourself, is treated like a human being worthy of dignity, respect, and their own self-autonomy. When people feel that way, and they know you’re genuine about it, because I am and a lot of people like me are, they want to stay and be a part of that, because they feel valued, they feel respected, and, back to the capitalism piece, they feel rewarded. So I’m looking at the people who work for me, and I’m taking very
Megan Gluth (20:08): pragmatic steps. In my business, for example, I’m not interested in your resume when you apply for a job here. I really don’t care where you went to school. If you went to Harvard, that’s great. I’m sure you’re going to tell me about it every day you’re here, and that probably means you won’t fit in here, because we’re not doing that here. No knock on my Harvard friends. But I’m not super interested in that. When I finally meet somebody, I ask questions. How old were you when you got your first job? What was it? Did you ever have a paper route? Did you mow lawns for money when you were a kid? What excites you? What drives you?
When I know the answers to those things, I know whether that employee has the skills I can’t teach. I can teach anybody how to sell chemicals or how to work in finance or any of that. But the skills I can’t teach are drive, ambition, loyalty, honesty, and integrity. I’ll know who they are by the answers to those questions. I’ll also know whether they’re going to be happy here and whether they’re the kind of person who wants to roll up their sleeves, kick in with a team, and achieve something great. People who want to do great things love working with other people who want to do great things.
At our company, well over fifty percent of the people who work here have been here 10 years or more. They like being part of this team, and they’re treated well. They’re not paid more than my competition pays. In fact, I live in Seattle. You could probably leave here, go to a major corporation, and get stock options. It’s not like that. But I create a culture where the fact that you’re somebody who works hard and wants to do well matters. You get to take bigger bites of the apple and be a part of something. I have people here doing that who’ve never been to college, and it’s irrelevant to me.
Rewarding the People Who Add Value
Gordon Lamphere (21:55): We had a guest on last year who talked about this. One of the biggest issues I have with the idea of equal pay across the board is that you end up hurting the folks who are trying the hardest and adding the most value.
Megan Gluth: Yes.
Gordon Lamphere: And those are the folks you want to reward. That doesn’t mean your lower-level property manager or your janitor doesn’t deserve more money. Pay them, and pay the person who’s not working as hard or not doing as good a job less. If we try to create companies around the idea that everyone’s equal, you end up with a ton of slackers, and all the hard workers carry the weight for everyone else. That could be the person who’s low on the totem pole or someone high on the totem pole. But unless we find some way of rewarding and incentivizing those who are adding value, it’s a real dystopia. So, trying to avoid potential dystopias, how do you go about empowering people in your business who are adding value? I know that’s something everyone wants to do, and I think you’ve done it very well. What are a couple of tidbits of advice that an executive listening to this podcast can apply?
Megan Gluth (23:28): I think leaving the model where everything has to be equal and everything has to be matrixed out is the best thing you can do. I tie a lot of performance and pay to incentives, across all levels. I always tell people that the people who work for me are typically, back to my earlier statement, the ones who had paper routes and mowed lawns, and who describe college group project time as their worst nightmare, right? Because they were the ones who ended up doing a lot of the work.
I create a lot of opportunities for those people to share ideas and experiment with them. A lot of times an incentive can be as simple as, “At this place, I’m able to run out an idea I have, and I’m not fired if I screw it up.” A lot of people want an environment where they can experiment, stretch, and grow, and you would be well served to give people like that the opportunity, because that’s what they want. If they know they can do it with you, they’ll stay. They’ll often stay to be allowed to lead a project and design its path more than they care about the money they get for it.
But I also tie pay to performance and results. I want everybody to understand that an idea that makes money makes them more money. An effort that makes more money makes them more money. Rather than everybody on salary just getting their standard cost-of-living adjustment percentage, which is not a high percentage, Gordon. If they want to make more money, I give them ways to make more money that are tied to their effort, and people like that.
The other thing sounds old and tired, but recognizing people’s performance achievements publicly is huge. Everybody wants to be praised in public, whether they’ll say it or not, and sometimes that’s worth more than money. I always, always use the principle: I praise very publicly, and I correct very privately.
Megan Gluth (25:37): I never talk in a group about a mistake that was made unless it serves the whole group as a lesson and more than one person in that group was part of the mistake. I’m very, very careful to safeguard people’s dignity. That works better than cash in so many circumstances. Little things like that give people an opportunity to be seen and recognized.
I will also reward people who experimented with something and failed. “Hey, Gordon had a great idea. We ran it out, and we ran it out hard. It didn’t work, but I love his persistence and tenacity. I want you to know that he worked 20 extra hours a month on this project for six months. He is a hustler, and I want you to recognize Gordon as a hustler at our company.” Things like that cost me no money. Every executive listening to your podcast needs to recognize that the most valuable thing in your possession right now is your words. What you say and who you say it to matters, everything. If you are very diligent about the way you use your words about your employees and to your employees, you will get a return on that investment you can’t possibly imagine.
That, and tie pay to performance, every single time. Write it in your handbook. You don’t have to worry later about getting sued, and maybe you do, but defend it. Sorry, you can bleep that out.
Gordon Lamphere (27:01): You can curse on this podcast. It’s all right.
Megan Gluth (27:03): Defend it. I’m tired of people saying, “Everybody in this position gets this.” Put it in your handbook: we pay based on merit here. If you do well, you’re going to get paid more, and these are the metrics we’re going to measure that by. They can be whatever metrics you create. Apply them consistently to everyone, and stand by that. When you do, you attract the kind of people who want to work in that environment. I will tell you this: A players want to play with A players. C players do not want to play with A players, because they feel like they have to work more than they want to. And A players will leave your company if you make them play with a bunch of C players.
Finding Your A Players
Gordon Lamphere (27:45): I think that’s tremendous advice. How do you go about identifying who the A players and the C players are? On our team, we’ve been pairing people up across a variety of sections to boost high-performing teams and put them on great projects. How do you go about the process of identifying who your A and C players are?
Megan Gluth (28:14): It starts at your interview. Ask questions that are offbeat. Just because somebody graduated top of their class does not mean they’re an A player. The days of using metrics that can come to you on two sheets of paper are over. They are. You’ve got to get at the things you can’t teach, and nobody can tell you about those. If they write on their resume, “I’m a hardworking individual,” you’d better see that. And if you don’t see it, it’s not real.
Spend time with people in the interview process. Ask them questions that are not illegal. Don’t ask them if they’re married, you know what I mean? I am a lawyer. I understand. Everybody asks, “Can you ask that?” And I figure as long as I’m consistent across all people, no one can say I singled them out. I do want to know: Where’d you come from? What do you do on the weekends? What motivates you? What time do you get up in the morning? I have questions I ask people that tell me exactly who they are. Somebody tells me they have a hard time making it out of bed before noon, and I’m like, okay, cool, how late do you stay up? There are people who say, “I do my most amazing work between 11 PM and 2 AM.” I’m not that person, but okay, I’m willing to hear that. I look for things like that.
Like I said, I’m not interested in all the things I can teach. I’m asking questions in the interview to know whether you hustle. I’m very interested in whether somebody had a job while they were a college student. I know this sounds terrible, but when somebody says, “I didn’t work in high school or college because my dad didn’t want me to have any stress,” I know your dad had the best intentions, but as an employer, that’s something I’m going to dig into a little bit. Maybe your dad didn’t set you up to be a person who knows how to multitask, prioritize your time, and keep grinding.
Then, once they’re here, and this is another unpopular thought: you have to hire very slowly, and you have to fire very quickly. You cannot imagine the negative impact of keeping somebody who’s on the C squad with your A squad for too long. That’s all I’m going to say about that. I get that it’s fraught with legal challenges. Again, I apply these rules evenly and consistently, and I think everybody knows my stance. I’m a deeply caring person, but the thing I care most about is the good of the order, the good of the whole.
Megan Gluth (30:36): I have people coming to work here every day, working really, really hard, sealing envelopes and mailing out invoices or doing things like that. They’re making their kid’s next braces payment. If you are costing us money and not contributing to everything going well, then you’ve got to leave, not just for me, but for them. That’s the view I have to hold. Nobody but the executive at the top can hold that, and you can’t let it down.
Gordon Lamphere (31:01): I couldn’t agree more. You’re failing your team more than you’re failing the executive or the bottom line, because the people holding up the person who’s not doing their fair share are the team members around them. That could be someone very low level on the team doing forty percent more work every single day, stressed to the hilt, to hold up the work of an individual, or even a lower-level executive, who’s not doing their fair share.
The Final Four
Gordon Lamphere: One of the ways we like to do our share of work is to get into the Final Four. It’s one last wrap-up to understand a little bit more about you and how you see the world, and how we can go forward and maybe address some of those issues in our own careers and our own worldview. Our first question, and we love this one: ten years from now, what do you think is going to change the most about industrial business in general?
Megan Gluth (32:08): I think ten years from now, we can’t underestimate the presence and power of technology. I’ll go further and say that if I were looking at how to prepare myself as an employee, and as an employer, I would be looking to create an environment where people who understand how to work with tech feel incentivized to come work at my company. By tech, I mean they make machines now, and have for a while, that screw the lids on jars. They make machines that put boxes together. People who know how to service and run those machines, I want to be a creative employer for them.
But there are also things we must not overlook. Ten years from now, you’re still going to need a good plumber, no matter what. So we have to hold that in balance: revolutionizing ourselves, moving forward, and adopting state-of-the-art technology where we can, but not forgetting that, by my estimation, people still want a human being to show up and unclog their toilet when it’s time. And when they have a problem with a product they receive from me, even if a robot put it in a box, I want them to reach a human being when they call. You have to do a little bit of both.
Gordon Lamphere (33:28): There’s never a person so desperate as someone who’s found out their toilet is clogged. One of the things we’re desperate for in life, often when we’re starting out, is guidance, because we have no idea of the path forward. We always like to ask how you might have changed something going back, or what advice you’d give your young self. Could you give a little bit of advice to your young self at maybe eighteen, starting off in life?
Megan Gluth (34:08): I think I would have told myself to know that not every voice gets the same weight at the table. Not everybody gets to speak into your inner circle and your inner sanctum, and it’s okay to be discerning about those people. I would also tell my younger self that the best advice you’ll ever get in life is from people who have no skin in the game and no stake in the outcome. Early on, I took banking advice from any banker who would talk to me. Now I look back and go, they had an angle, right? But I didn’t know any better. And no disrespect to bankers, because now a bunch of them are my friends. But never, never underestimate the value of advice from somebody who doesn’t have any skin in your game. It’s probably pretty good advice.
Gordon Lamphere (34:59): One of the ways you can get advice from somebody who doesn’t have a whole lot of skin in your game is through books. Is there a book you would recommend to our listeners?
Megan Gluth (35:11): I read a lot, and what I read a lot of is biographies and autobiographies. I really love The Snowball, about Warren Buffett. He didn’t write it, and I’m failing on the name of the person who did. I also liked Stephen Schwarzman’s book. I like The Ride of a Lifetime by Bob Iger. I was a history major in college, so I read all of the presidential biographies and autobiographies.
I think you’ll learn more from people who just tell what happened than from people who tell you how to do something. My experience with people telling you how to do something is that they usually haven’t done it, or haven’t done it the way you need to, and they’re not as quick to say, “These are all the mistakes I made.” If you read a truly good biography or autobiography, you’ll see that no one’s path to success was without a ton of hiccups, and a lot of those hiccups were of their own making. People who can be really honest about “this is how I screwed it up, and this is how I came out of it” will teach you more than you can learn anywhere else.
Gordon Lamphere (36:16): One of the ways we like to learn, maybe not more than anywhere else, but at least a decent amount, is that we designed this podcast around reaching out to interesting people in business, real estate, and logistics to learn a little more about our world. And we find that some of the best recommendations always come from individuals who are in the arena. So I’m curious, who’s the next person we should have on the podcast?
Megan Gluth (36:45): Oh my gosh.
Gordon Lamphere (36:47): And we won’t let you get out of this question.
Megan Gluth (36:49): This is going to sound crazy, but I want to say the next person who should be on this podcast is somebody like a tattoo artist. That’s the thing that interests me the most right now, and maybe it’s the podcast I’d like to listen to. In fact, I kind of want to interview my own tattoo artist. Here’s why. This is a creative person who wants to make art, is making permanent art on a human body, and monetizes that. How cool is that? What a cool business model. They’re typically very right-brained, in the sense that they’re very creative, and they’re putting their hands to something that has to generate revenue. I think that would be a fascinating podcast guest, because the truth of the matter is they’re making a decent living. You know?
Gordon Lamphere (37:41): I think it would be. We’ve been going back and forth with one of the largest graffiti artists in the Miami area about how they’ve created culturally unique neighborhoods, and we just haven’t been able to arrange it for a variety of reasons. I’m not sure they want to talk publicly on the podcast. But I think artists and those who create culture, be it on someone’s body or on buildings, serve really unique roles in our society, and they drive a lot of value that we don’t always put down to an easy number. In terms of that, you don’t have to give out your phone number, but we do want to let someone reach out to you in the future if they’re interested in learning more. What’s the best way to get in contact with you?
Megan Gluth (38:38): My website. It’s MeganGluth.com, so just my name dot com. I always leave this disclaimer: do not send me a LinkedIn message. That inbox is bad. I can barely handle my actual email, right? People message me there, and I feel terrible, because six months later I’m like, “Hey, thanks for your kind words.” But here’s the thing. I really do want to interact with people and engage. I just can’t do it there. So come to my website. There’s a place to hit “contact me.” I actually get those, and I have a team of people who help me field them. It’s a much better way to get hold of me.
Gordon Lamphere (39:13): Again, thank you so much for hopping on the podcast, and we’ll have to have you on in the future.
Megan Gluth (39:17): Thanks so much, Gordon.
Gordon Lamphere: Thanks again to Megan. We appreciate her insights. If you enjoyed the podcast, please give us a like, a five-star rating, and a review. Your comments, interactions, and subscriptions truly matter and help us continue to bring on quality guests. You can find us on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. I’m Gordon Lamphere with The Real Finds Podcast. Thank you for listening.
Van Vlissingen and Co. has been the Midwest’s oldest commercial real estate brokerage, development, and management firm since 1879, and today is independently ranked the #1 commercial real estate agency in Chicagoland, home to the #1 independently ranked agent, Gordon Lamphere, and the region’s #1 ranked commercial property management team. If you own, manage, or invest in energy-adjacent, mixed-use, or transit-oriented property across Lake County, the North Shore, the Northwest and O’Hare corridors, DuPage and the I-88 corridor, Will County, or southern Wisconsin’s Pleasant Prairie, Kenosha, and Racine markets, contact Van Vlissingen and Co. at 📞 847-634-2300 or 🌐 vvco.com. For a market-wide view of where these dynamics sit today, see our State of the Chicagoland Commercial Real Estate Market for Q3 2026.