Blake Hansen Of Alturas: Five Things You Need To Be A Highly Effective Leader During Turbulent Times
An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Business leaders must be personally financially stable (or they put undue stress on their business during difficult times).
As part of our series about the “Five Things You Need To Be A Highly Effective Leader During Turbulent Times”, we had the pleasure of interviewing Blake Hansen.
Blake Hansen has been an active entrepreneur since he was a young boy, making his first stock market investment at 12 years old. Today, he runs Alturas, a holding company that owns a diversified group of operating businesses in real estate, construction, software, and more. On the real estate side, they own about 3 million square feet of real estate.
Thank you so much for your time! I know that you are a very busy person. Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
My story starts back when my dad got me into the stock market as a kid. I started thinking about business and business ownership. I came across some extra money when my mom died and I started investing more during the dot com boom.
On the other side of the bust, when I lost all my money (plus some) because of some risky investments and trades that I had done, I had to figure out if there really was a way to make money long-term, even with the market cycles. Because it seemed to me like you can make money when the market was going up and then you would lose it all in the market went down. So I started studying to see if there were people that had long-term outperformed the markets.
Naturally, I came across Warren Buffet who had some principles that felt natural to me. He also had a system using operating partners, and there’s a whole lot to this story, but that in a nutshell is how I started down the path and started creating a vision like Warren Buffet did in Omaha, Nebraska.
I thought, “Why couldn’t I do it in Boise, Idaho in my own little way?” And I wanted to create this diversified portfolio of operating businesses as he had. I found my first application in his philosophies in real estate. And then I eventually started applying the same principles across different industries and different businesses.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘takeaways’ you learned from that?
Oh my gosh, we made so many mistakes.
We make mistakes all the time. You have to laugh about it.
But the fact that we’ve made so many mistakes and we don’t dwell on the mistake. We learned from it and move on. I think that’s what you probably could learn from this conversation is we make mistakes every day. We do stupid things all the time. We say, sorry. We get better. And we learn from it and try not to do it again. You know what I mean? That’s it. That’s what it comes down to. So what we have learned is how to build a culture of innovation and continual improvement by embracing our mistakes, giving room for our people to make mistakes.
How does that start? It’s the culture that starts from the top. I make mistakes. I acknowledge my mistakes. I call everything “experiments”. I give people room to play in this idea of doing experimentation. So everything we’re doing is an experiment. We don’t have final answers on anything. And if we do, we have to be open to changing it tomorrow. We may come up with the best solution today and we may find a better one tomorrow and we have to be open to that. So I don’t even know that we call it mistakes. It’s just the process. It’s this evolutionary process. It’s this iterative process of running businesses.
We’re business operators. And when you operate a business that means you’re a people builder. I say, if build businesses, you build people. It means you’re dealing with people, which means you’re dealing with what that brings.
So many people are like, “I don’t want employees. I don’t want to deal with employees. I don’t want to deal with all that headache.”
And I think, “Well, that’s unfortunate.”
That’s like saying you don’t want to have kids because they’re a pain. That just takes away your learning. That takes away from your growth and development. So I say, “Yeah, bring on the employees and what that means because all of that’s learning.”
I want to learn how to do that. I want our people to get better at managing people and working through challenges and figuring out how to rectify situations when they botch it. That’s great. That’s what life’s all about.
The day you wake up and you say, “I figured it out and I have nothing else to do.” That’s a crappy day. That’s a horrible day in your existence.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?
Thousands of people. It will make me cry if I start thinking about it because people have been so good to me along the way.
In my biggest moments of potential failure, people have come through to help me out in ways that I want to be able to do for other people. My business partners and the struggles of building these businesses together. We couldn’t do it without each other.
My dad was my very first business partner. Couldn’t have ever done it without him. Although early on he was critical, I still needed him and was able to reciprocate and make his investment in me worthy of the investment.
I’ve had a lot of coaches and mentors, other entrepreneurs who have been there to help me through some of the challenges that I’ve faced.
I’ve gotten very lucky that people took a liking to me and were willing to be there and support me and help me. I can’t even tell you how many people have been there along the way. All of our employees who are dedicated to the cause.
I’ve tried to live my life in a way of being a giver where I was constantly giving to other people. I want to have the notion of having hundreds, if not thousands, of people in my life that would take a bullet for me. That notion where I’ve tried to give so much authentic giving, sincerely give in meaningful ways to other people and reciprocate the way that other people have done that for me, so that I could create this loyalty around me.
I found that successful entrepreneurs want to give and they’ve learned so much and some of them don’t have the platform to keep building. And they’ve been a great resource for me. I like to say, you need to take advice from people that have solved the problems that you’re facing or that you will face and not take advice from people that have no idea.
I’ve always just tried to align myself to the people that have been on this similar entrepreneurial path and make sure that I’m getting good advice from them. Instead of getting advice from people that have never been down that path or been on that journey.
Extensive research suggests that “purpose-driven businesses” are more successful in many areas. When your company started, what was its vision, what was its purpose?
I always had a vision to create this platform of diversified operating companies, working together, synergistically. It started there and it was about this partnership model. I knew I couldn’t do that alone. So I was always fixated on how I could surround myself with people that have expertise in these different businesses. I was lucky to learn that early on.
It was about attracting talent and finding talent.
It’s interesting because the business I started originally was with my childhood best friend. And we had a different vision. He didn’t want to build a business with a whole bunch of people. And out of the gate, we had a split, because my vision was to create multiple businesses with thousands of employees.
I wanted to have employees. I wanted to have talent. I wanted to create the infrastructure to go out and do fun things and to do great things. And he looked at that and thought, “Oh my gosh, that sounds like a lot of work. I don’t want to do it.”
And I think the purpose has always just been around people. It’s the theme of my life.
Thank you for all that. Let’s now turn to the main focus of our discussion. Can you share with our readers a story from your own experience about how you lead your team during uncertain or difficult times?
Being a good leader is about understanding people. When COVID hit, I took time, personally, to connect with every single one of our employees. I wanted to know what their fears were and their concerns. I wanted to help them find some peace and comfort in where they were.
As a leader, you’re the one that can find pathways through difficult things, or at least you have the confidence that together you can find a pathway through hard things.
A major aspect of it is confidence. I’ve put guardrails in my life to help me when I start veering off the track of confidence by saying, “Oh no, I have to get back to confidence.” I call it getting back to confidence. I teach my teams how to get back to confidence. You’ve gotta be aware of when you’re starting to veer off in turbulent times or in challenging times where it’s like, “Hey, why is our confidence being eroded here?” We have to acknowledge that we’re losing confidence.
Because in confidence, you make good decisions. One of the ways that you can see if you have confidence, is that you’re willing to take risks. Not unnecessary risks, like jumping off the cliff and trying to go too big, too fast. But one of the things that happen in an economic downturn is people stop taking chances. They stop doing the small experiments that are crucial to an innovation culture. They stop finding new ways of doing things because they lose their confidence to try to do that stuff.
You have to recognize when you’re in a moment, where you’ve got to re-instill this confidence to push through things. Again, you don’t have to go and grow during a turbulent time, but as it turns out, I’ve made my biggest leaps when conventional wisdom says, “Now you should be hunkering down and latch the hatches. And here we go, we got to hold on.”
I’ve made my biggest moves when that’s what the conventional wisdom says, but you’re out there acting in confidence, moving forward, taking market share, finding new and innovative partnerships. Finding ways to move things for when other people are unwilling to take even small risks.
Did you ever consider giving up? Where did you get the motivation to continue through your challenges? What sustains your drive?
I’m unemployable. There’s no quit in me. If I lost it all, I’d go build it back up. I have no other options. There are no other options. There has never been a thought of giving up. There have been hard moments, but there’s only one path and that’s forward.
What else am I going to do? I have a wife and six kids. I’ve got hundreds of employees. Add their spouses and kids to the mix. And I’ve got thousands of people that I have to win for. I don’t take that burden lightly. I fill the burden and I want to do good for them, and I want to sustain these things for them.
There’s no way I’m quitting. I’m not betting the farm anywhere, I don’t have to do that anymore. I can play in the sandbox that I’ve created. And continue to build these companies. I’ll never give up.
What would you say is the most critical role of a leader during challenging times?
To find the confidence in yourself, in the team, and in the organization to keep pushing on. You have to continue to just take that next step.
When the future seems so uncertain, what is the best way to boost morale? What can a leader do to inspire, motivate, and engage their team?
I think there’s a balance between being overly optimistic and overly pessimistic. I think that you have to play that balance. I think you have to confront the actual challenges for what they are. You lose a lot of credibility when you can’t see a challenge from what it is. But if you can’t see a challenge for what it is, then people start thinking, “Oh, he’s a clueless leader, or she’s a clueless leader. They don’t get it.”
You have to call a spade, a spade. You have to lay out the facts. You’ve got to acknowledge where you are, what the challenges are. And you have to do that in a very open and honest and transparent way. That’s the basis of it. The starting point is to see it for what it is.
And then the other side of it is, to see a path forward, but not in the specifics that you might think. So laying a path forward that has too many specifics that are also hard to believe and unrealistic, you can lose credibility. So you’ve got to figure out that balance of bringing confidence and enthusiasm and a vision to the future, but also acknowledging what it’s going to take to get there. And the fact that you don’t have all the answers of how it’s going to happen, but that you’re confident in the team and their ability to work together, to solve problems, to get out of it. That’s how I look at pushing through hard times.
I think it’s important that you acknowledge the hard things that you’ve done historically, to build confidence in how you can get through these ones. The fact that you’ve already built up resiliency because you’ve done hard things, and you’ve always been keen on doing experimentation and trying things and working through failure. When that’s just a part of the culture, then the new challenges aren’t seen in a different light. It’s seen in the exact same light, things for what they are and you can take it in stride.
It’s like the kid that never had to face hardship or challenge. And then all of a sudden it’s, “I don’t know what to do.”
One of the best ways to deal with challenging things is to have contemplated those challenges in advance. If you’re not contemplating where things might go and what you might do. For example, when COVID hit, my teams have already gone through the sensitivity analysis of what might happen if we have a recession. The recession hits and you say, “Okay, bring out the tools that we’ve already used.”
It’s par for the course. We’re already there and no one lost their mind. We didn’t freak out. We said, “Hey, we’ve already planned for this. We’re ready.”
We haven’t planned for this exactly. No one knew a pandemic was going to come, but we had already thought about it. So going there with a team, using your creative juices in advance of a challenge to think about it and stress test. You’ve got to be able to do that as a management team. You have to be able to lead your people down that and really think objectively about what might happen, what could happen, where landmines are, and how you might have to do hard things under some circumstances.
When you can, in your mind, go there and talk about the hard things that you might have to do. I may have to lay you off and I might have to lay half of your team off and I may have to cut this or that. When you talk about that out loud, when you’re in the moment and when you’re actually dealing with it, you probably don’t even have to go there because you’ve talked about some of those extreme things that you might have to do. You find every way to not do that. You’ve gone to those worst-case scenarios and then you back up into the future and into where you are in the present and say, “Okay, now how do we avoid having to go through those really hard things?”
What is the best way to communicate difficult news to one’s team and customers?
Open and honest, straight transparency. What other way is there? The best way is in person, being straight up, telling ’em the truth, acknowledging the realities of it. Again, calling it for what it is and not talking around it and not calling it something else.
How can a leader make plans when the future is so unpredictable?
It’s not really unpredictable. There are cycles to things. There’s a natural ebb and flow. There are natural cycles. You can learn from the past to predict the future.
In fact, the best way to predict the future is to look at the past. So look at the past, put it together, always be projecting, always be thinking about the future.
It goes to what we were just talking about.
Is there a “number one principle” that can help guide a company through the ups and downs of turbulent times?
I think the guiding principle for me and our companies is that change is constant. We’re either changing because there’s a better way or we’re changing because of market conditions. And so we’ve created an innovation culture, that’s always seeking new and better ways of doing things. And that culture allows us to deal with the challenges wherever they might come from.
So yes, it may feel unpredictable, but the future is unpredictable, naturally.
Markets change, consumer preferences change, your competition changes, technology changes, it’s constantly evolving. So we live in an unpredictable world, but that doesn’t matter. That’s what we’re navigating every day. You have to make that a natural part of the evolution of your businesses and your people, to deal with constant change.
Being a good leader requires you to deal with that in advance of it being this unpredictable catastrophic change. It doesn’t have to be catastrophic. It can be an incremental, constantly evolving iterative type of change that sets you up for success in an unpredictable future.
You want to always be adapting and changing and be flexible to create that type of resiliency that your people need and your organization needs.
Can you share 3 or 4 of the most common mistakes you have seen other businesses make during difficult times? What should one keep in mind to avoid that?
- Giving up too quickly
- Holding on to false assumptions
- Making unilateral decisions
- Taking the burden upon themselves instead of getting help from the team
Giving up too quickly. Usually success follows failure to some degree. My biggest moments of growth came after struggle and what appeared to be imminent doom. When you push through the challenges you emerge more confident to approach the future. You realize that you just need to hold on for a little bit longer to find success. Don’t expect quick results. Success comes if you can persevere.
Holding on to false assumptions. Sometimes you believe things that were true in the past that are no longer true today. Other times you think there’s a paradigm shift and that the world has fundamentally changed, when in fact, it’s the same story playing out again.
Making unilateral decisions instead of using the collective from the team. So, failing on the collaboration. In the moments where it’s hard, people stop being transparent, which prevents their team members from making the right decisions and having the right context. You want to be even more transparent so that people can have the right context to make decisions and help navigate.
A lot of times people take the burden of the challenge on themselves alone and they don’t use the team to solve the problem. I see that all the time. It’s like, “Oh, this is my problem.” No, it’s not, this is their problem. Because if you don’t make the right decision, they don’t have a job anymore.
You’ve got to solve company problems using all the company resources, not just you as the one sole decision-maker. You’re not the unilateral decision-maker that has all the context. You have to share within the team. You’ve got to share across the departments and make decisions together.
Generating new business, increasing your profits, or at least maintaining your financial stability can be challenging during good times, even more so during turbulent times. Can you share some of the strategies you use to keep forging ahead and not lose growth traction during a difficult economy?
We consider ourselves contrarian. What that means is when things are really great, like they are right now, I start losing sleep. I lose a lot of sleep right now because every single one of my friends that owns a business had a banner year in 2021, their best year ever. And talking to them, 2022 is going to be even better than 2021.
When that happens in the magnitude that it’s happened in the last year, that makes me very concerned.
How do we forge ahead and not lose traction in a difficult economy? We are always talking about the fact that we make our biggest moves during difficult economies. We talk about the fact that we’re going to have to be creative, to utilize our resources, to find new opportunities. We have to be even more innovative when times are tough. That we have to use our competitive advantage of being hard workers that are willing to do hard things.
That’s when it comes to bear. When times are tough, it’s hard because it’s hard. And if you didn’t develop that institutional resiliency and build people in a way that they could be resilient in the tough times, then you never can take those big moves, the contrarian moves.
While everyone else is reeling, you’ve got to be stable and confident. Getting back to confidence, you have to know what gives you confidence. You need to protect that in a downturn. And in turbulent times you’ve got to be ready for it and have already got cash in the coffers and emotional resiliency built-in and all these things. You’ve got to have thought about that in advance. And when you do and you make that, again, just the natural way of doing business, then you’re ready for it. You’ve got the right mindsets and mentalities. You’ve got the right systems and processes to adapt and change.
Creating rigid systems that are inflexible, that’s how you lose. Creating people that are inflexible, that’s how you lose.
Here is the primary question of our discussion. Based on your experience and success, what are the five most important things a business leader should do to lead effectively during uncertain and turbulent times? Please share a story or an example for each.
1. Build resiliency in advance of uncertain times.
2. Ensure your team/leaders can identify and solve problems as they come.
3. Always operate your businesses with elements of contrived scarcity (operate under constraint).
4. Business leaders must be personally financially stable (or they put undue stress on their business during difficult times).
5. (Contrarian mindset) Understand the opportunities during the downtimes (as opposed to being defensive and guarded).
I think you have to build resiliency in advance of this uncertain time. Again, you have to have that infrastructure in place. You have to institute the mindsets, mentalities, and infrastructure to be there.
The team has to already be making the decisions. Effective leaders have already empowered their people to be able to be the frontline defense on seeing the change as it comes in, identifying the change, dealing with the changes, they’re the ones that see it. In certain businesses, you already have to have things in place where the team is solving the problems. And the team is identifying and solving problems. You have to be the type of leader that’s already given freedom and autonomy to your people.
I also think it’s imperative that you always operate your businesses with some elements of contrived scarcity. Maybe the way better way of saying it is under constraints. I think you need to teach your people how to operate under constraints. So I think effectively managing people and resources and businesses with constraints allows you to be prepared during uncertain and turbulent times.
Business leaders have to be personally, financially stable. Business leaders who are not stable financially put undue pressure on their businesses in order to maintain their lifestyles during turbulent times. These leaders lose their own stability and it trickles into their businesses. That’s the same thing with management teams. I require my business partners to have a certain level of personal financial independence so they don’t become a burden on the company and can be the exact opposite. They can be a stabilizing influence on the business and on the people. You cannot underestimate the power of your personal financial stability on a business.
In my world, it’s a mindset of being a contrarian, having the history of knowing that we’ve taken market share. We’ve started core businesses during downturns. When you have the mindset that a downturn is the greatest opportunity, instead of the mindset that this is something that we’re going to have to just hold on to and figure out how to get through it. It changes the way that you can be proactive and opportunistic versus being defensive and guarded. I think that totally changes the way that you can effectively lead your people. Because your people want to follow, they want to be pushed. They want to find ways to apply themselves.
And in the moment of uncertainty or in turbulent times, most businesses take away their team’s ability to be innovative and to find new opportunities, so their talent departs. That can be avoided long before the turbulent times arise.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
Theodore Roosevelt “Man in the Arena”
- ”It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
Ray Dalio “Struggling Well”
- “In my early years, I looked up to extraordinarily successful people, thinking that they were successful because they were extraordinary.
After I got to know such people personally, I realized that all of them — me, everyone — make mistakes, struggle with their weaknesses, and don’t feel that they are particularly special or great.
They are no happier than the rest of us, and they struggle just as much or more than average folks. Even after they surpass their wildest dreams, they still experience more struggle than glory. This has certainly been true for me. While I surpassed my wildest dreams decades ago, I am still struggling today. In time, I realized that the satisfaction of success doesn’t come from achieving your goals, but from struggling well.
To understand what I mean, imagine your greatest goal, whatever it is making a ton of money, winning an Academy Award, running a great organization, being great at a sport. Now imagine instantaneously achieving it. You’d be happy at first, but not for long. You would soon find yourself needing something else to struggle for. Just look at people who attain their dreams early — the child star, the lottery winner, the professional athlete who peaks early. They typically don’t end up happy unless they get excited about something else bigger and better to struggle for.
Since life brings both ups and downs, struggling well doesn’t just make your ups better; it makes your downs less bad. I’m still struggling and I will until I die because even if I try to avoid the struggles, they will find me.”
Thomas Watson “Formula for Success”
- “Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really: Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t at all. You can be discouraged by failure or you can learn from it, so go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because remember, that’s where you will find success.”
How can our readers further follow your work?
Anyone can learn more about me and my businesses as well as subscribe to my newsletter here.
Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health!
Blake Hansen Of Alturas: Five Things You Need To Be A Highly Effective Leader During Turbulent… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
