Episode 10
Pounding the Pavement with Amy Kelly
Let's go. Let's go back to… we met in Asheville, and I just saw you in Miami. We met at ILC and I mean, after I met you, I remember listening to another podcast that you were on where it was like an interview. And now you're a…What are you, a developer, a hotelier? What's your title now?
Amy Kelly (01:15)
Yeah. Yeah, I'm a developer, but I'm actually still a lawyer. I still have to, every year, do my continuing legal education to keep my law degree. And I think for better or worse, like once you actually become a lawyer, you're always a lawyer. It means like I won't ride roller coasters or you know, I'm always paying attention to ice on the ground, you know, things like that. So I'll never not be a lawyer, but yeah, I'm a commercial real estate developer. We have three hotels and we build high rise apartments. We're based in Atlanta. Technically I tell people I live in my car, ⁓ which is, it looks like it, if you're in my car, you can tell I live in there. A lot of us are nomadic and I am one of those people. So I really live between Atlanta and Asheville, but we develop in Seattle, Phoenix, Asheville, Salt Lake City. So we're kind of all over the place. But yeah, we build apartments and hotels. You know, when you control real estate or space and then businesses, you are, you know, a designer. You're a brander. You are an employer. You are also a politician. You're a community builder. There are a lot of kind of responsibilities of a developer, you know?
Doug Logan (02:33)
So you started by building a career and then exiting, and now you're an entrepreneur. So now you're a founder.
Amy Kelly (02:39)
Yeah, which I highly recommend. I talk to students all the time at my alma mater, which is the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. And, ⁓ I always tell them, I'm like, learn on other people's dimes, like go in, like grind it out, like, do what you're told. You learn a lot doing that, and there's something to be said for just hard work. So how did you become a developer property owner?
Doug Logan (03:02)
Yeah, I didn't do that. That would have been nice. I did the opposite. I was a stubborn, typical millennial and graduated high school, went to art school for a day and was like, I'm going to start my agency and have been doing that ever since.
Amy Kelly (03:04)
Okay. There's an intelligence in that by the way, like you kind of talk about it like apologetically. I like no that there you just did that a lot smarter than everyone else who spent a hundred grand on something but learning on other people's dime I think can be helpful.
Doug Logan (03:27)
Yeah. I was young, I was starting the agency in the basement of my parents' house, right? So there was this sense of really having that imposter syndrome and really trying to come over that. But then years into it, and it probably took six, seven, eight, maybe 10 years into it, till we got some real brands behind us.
Amy Kelly (03:45)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Doug Logan (04:02)
And the peak is clearly Ferrari. I mean, like it doesn't really get any bigger. I mean, it does. There's other brands, but everyone knows who Ferrari is. And when we got to that point and kind of reached that mountain, realized that like it was great to work with a brand like Ferrari, but the work wasn't meaningful and we didn't love the work. I think what it really came down to for us was that the work didn't really matter. Like they were Ferrari before us and they were Ferrari after us. And like, yes, we helped them uncover some things in digital. We really helped them launch into digital in the first place and we helped them measure some things and we helped them add a couple of names to the wait list. But the wait list was already two years long. So what do we do? just add, we made the wait list a little bit longer and that was it, right? It wasn't like where we're at now, which is working with other founders and helping them actually grow their business. That to me is rewarding because there's a direct relation to the goals and what they're trying to accomplish and their livelihood and their family and their employees. You know what I mean? It's that balance of people and profit and not just profit.
Amy Kelly (05:27)
100%. Mm-hmm Totally. Yeah, so like for our company, you know, like I said, we develop hotels and apartments. You know our 80 % of our portfolio is easily these big projects or high rises with hundreds of apartment units and like we have a 225 room hotel in Salt Lake City. They're awesome. The other part of our business, is a 70 key, just like off the wall hotel in Asheville, a 20 key off the wall hotel in Asheville. We own two artists studio businesses. But, and then we have a restaurant downtown in Asheville. You know, those are very different animals. So like the big multifamily projects, there's like a formula for it. It will do well because they're located in markets like Seattle, where there's just jobs everywhere. You know, they're gonna do well and they have their own characteristics, but they're gonna be fine. At the Radical, our hotel in Asheville at 70 Rooms, you know, there's many, many, many employees. They all have gifts and talents and, and if someone told me tomorrow that all I had to do was like foster that in Asheville, I would… I would find that rewarding every day of my life or the rest of my life. Like, so I totally hear what you're saying. It's like, it may not make me that much money, but that's like a good day. And truly the reason I left the practice of law was because I wanted to have a good day. But you know what I'm saying? Having like a safe client like you're saying, you know, that's a great thing to have it pays the bills and all that kind of stuff But it's like teeing you up for the next thing when you get to do the thing you're really passionate about It's like well, I just want to be passionate today. I feel lucky that I get to do both But if you told me tomorrow all I could do was like what I consider to be kind of the hard stuff I mean, I would be fine to do that is very rewarding.
Doug Logan (07:19)
So what are you working on right now that's exciting you?
Amy Kelly (07:22)
So in terms of being in what we call pre-development on a project, we are working on a project called Zelda Salon. It's a 35 room hotel in downtown Asheville and it's under our license with the estate of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. And so it's another hotel honoring them like our other project, Zelda Dearest. It's more art deco, more French. So each of our hotels take kind of a piece of their life and, you know, explore that piece. This one is more on their time in France. Beyond that, you know, I just kind of run all these operating assets, right?
Doug Logan (07:57)
Next time I'm in Asheville, I'm going to stay at Zelda Dearest. I'll have been at both of your hotels then.
Amy Kelly (08:05)
Awesome.
Doug Logan (08:06)
You phrased it that, you know, being a developer, you do a lot of things. I like to call it a lot of hats. I've had this, I say this a lot and I, you know, having founded my agency and starting off wearing a lot of different hats, my new goal in life is to try to give away a hat a year, right?
Amy Kelly (08:10)
Mm-hmm. Hmm. ⁓ that's cool. That's a good thought.
Doug Logan (08:28)
Just eventually not have any hats left. I mean, it sounds weird, but like that's sort of the idea is as an entrepreneur, get to that point where, you know, really you give all the hats away and you're still, you're still going to have a hat to wear. You just get to pick which one, you know, on that given day that you want to wear. And sometimes the hat’s just thrown at you, like in your case, when there's a hurricane, it's not a hat you want to wear.
Amy Kelly (08:48)
Mm-hmm My hurricane hat.
Doug Logan (08:53)
But sometimes you have to wear that hat. so I'm just curious, and you don't have to use the hat metaphor, but like with all the different things that you're doing, what's your approach to that? And is there, is there one or two of those things that you really love doing? Are you working towards getting to that place where, I mean, maybe, maybe you just want to be the bartender at one of your properties. I don't know. Like what's, what's the goal?
Amy Kelly (09:18)
I've said before that I just want to work at The Radical. I just want to work in the lobby at the radical and talk to people and help them find things because I get a lot of enjoyment out of creating art sales in The Rad. So, when people are like, should I go? What kind of like what artists should I meet? Love to do that. So that's that I'm like the greeter at Walmart, but the greeter at The Radical, you know. So, that's my dream job. But no, I think Elon Musk, you know before he was so controversial, had quote that said he said something like as the owner of a business you're always just solving problems like once something hums you don't touch it anymore like once it's working you don't really look at it anymore so all you do is put fires out and I think I'll always be doing that that's just we're not we're an eight-person development firm that delivered eight projects in six years and so we don't have like the strictest structure. So a lot of times I'm just pitching in like where it makes the most sense. In addition, I think just my personal preference is to sometimes pound the pavement because what we do a lot of times, you know, I joke that I'm a finance bro. Cause in reality that's kind of the hardest part of what I do. Like it's the part that not everyone can do. You I just put all the financial pieces together and it's kind of creative how you structure things but that stuff takes forever. I think we started working on the radical in 2019 it delivered in 2023 and it's like hit a hurricane now it's safe. And so sometimes I just want to pound the pavement. Like I just want to like go around the neighborhood and pass out flyers. You know, it's not my highest and best use, but It's just satisfying. because doing these things with these huge arcs of time it just takes a long time to be really set. like when you're done with something like that. It's very satisfying. It's like holy cow. How did we do that? But ⁓ and so but in the meantime like that's a long time to wait for any satisfaction, you know, so having those times where you pound the pavement. like I have a farm I don't know if you knew that. But I have a vegetable farm in in North Carolina that actually is not producing anything right now, but it was and like sometimes I just want to take baskets of produce and go to the restaurants in Asheville and just hand out produce. Hey give us a call if you need these amazing organic vegetables, you know, just pass them out because it's just like a some, some interaction, some human connection. That's not me like sitting around with Excel spreadsheets and talking about capital, you know?
Doug Logan (11:57)
It's, I mean, one of the things that I've been really focused on lately is this idea of like, scaling yourself and what that looks like. If we don't rise to our goals, we fall to our processes. And so trying to just build more consistency into the things that really matter is really important. I mean, you and I talking like this is part of that process. Like just getting this coordinated so that it works for your schedule, my schedule, and we get on here and talk and…That takes a process, that takes an army of people, a small army of people to get that done. It's rewarding. Never eat lunch alone, I think, is another concept that's really great. Just you never know where a conversation is gonna lead. And it's just important to be out there. mean, if you're not out there. You, you're never going to meet anybody. So you don't know where that's going to go.Amy Kelly (12:49)
Yeah, 100%. Yeah, absolutely. As a lawyer, you you track your time in billable hours, know, point, point one, point two, like that's how you track your time. And so there could be wasted time. But you'd be like, gosh, I lost that time. I couldn't bill it. Now I have to go make it up. You know, that's like a weird paradigm to have. It took me like a mental shift to be like, none of this is wasted time. Everything I do is valuable.
Doug Logan (13:15)
We're junkies. We're problem junkies. I guess it's like, we're just, you know, that's our, that's our heroin, I guess, to use a terrible metaphor.
Amy Kelly (13:22)
Yeah. Well, I would say it's like Shark Tank even like, you know, just in the seat that I sit in. Sometimes people will ask me for a meeting at the Radical Lobby. They make perfume or something. I'm like, okay, so I'll meet with them and they're like, what do you think of our packaging? What do you think of all this stuff? And I've, I'm just, I don't shark tank it. It is really rewarding for me, to do that actually. So again, I learned something about branding or a thought process or something. And then of course they're beautiful products, which I would be happy to have in our merch area at the hotel or whatever. So, so yes, I am the same way. I, I don't have a lot of conversations where we're just, chit chatting is usually like what problem are we solving you know whether it's a personal thing or you know a business thing whatever but yeah you're probably right it's probably... I'm the problem, it's me.
Doug Logan (14:13)
That's my line.
