88. David Stanley – Full Sail Capital

David Stanley:

Active management, and we'd always tell these people, "Hey, we've got the smartest people in the world." We did. We had some of the smartest people in the world where we came from. They're going to sit in this back office and all these CFAs are going to gather around the table and they're going to figure out the four or five best names we should have in every sector. Over the long haul, we're going to outperform the market and it's going to be great.

Aaron Ackerman:

From HoganTaylor, I'm Aaron Ackerman, and this is How That Happened, a business and innovation success podcast. On each episode of the show, we sit down with business and community leaders behind thriving organizations to learn how business and innovation success actually happens. Thank you for joining another episode of How that Happened. I'm excited about my guest today. My friend, David Stanley, is joining me today. David, thanks so much.

David Stanley:

Great to be here, brother.

Aaron Ackerman:

Yeah, so just a little bit about, David graduated with a business and finance degree from the University of North Texas, also graduated from the Graduate Trust School at Northwestern University. He's a certified trust and financial advisor and holds a Series 65 securities license. We're going to talk a lot today about Full Sail Capital. David and his two founding partners started Full Sail a little over five years ago. Is that right?

David Stanley:

Yes, sir.

Aaron Ackerman:

And have grown the assets under management from essentially zero on day one to $1.6 billion.

David Stanley:

1.6.

Aaron Ackerman:

Close to that. Awesome. David is also a devoted husband and a proud dad and grandfather. I know from firsthand experience, he's a pretty accomplished fisherman and hunter as well, which is where we got to spend some time together. David, thanks so much for joining.

David Stanley:

I'm glad to be here, brother. Yeah, we met in the mountains of Chama, New Mexico.

Aaron Ackerman:

That's right.

David Stanley:

Yeah, that was a blast.

Aaron Ackerman:

You can attest, I'm a terrible fisherman. I'm a bad shooter, but I'm a good spotter.

David Stanley:

Literally, you were the bird dog that day. We were supposed to have this accomplished guide and he's going, "Ah, I don't see anything out there." You go, "No, there's eight of them right there." We took two more steps and there they were.

Aaron Ackerman:

Yeah, they were.

David Stanley:

Thank God you were there.

Aaron Ackerman:

Yeah, that was fun. Well, I'm excited about our conversation today, and I want to just let you tell the Full Sail story. How did you get to a point where you were going out on your own five years ago? Just tell the journey that led you to where we are now.

David Stanley:

So, I think the people that saw us, there were five of us that rolled out of a trust company, local one. We are doing fantastic, by the way. I headed up the local office of that and my partner Zach Reynolds, partner Scott Cravins. Scott Cravins headed up real estate. Zach was our local CIO, Chief Investment Officer, and he's a CFA. He kept coming into my office every day with just these annoying white papers he would leave on my desk. He would go, "Dude, you need to read this, you need to read this." It was basically the argument against active management versus an evidence-based passive management system. That's what we employ here. I was a big active management guy. I believed in it, man. So, I was arguing with him and everything he brought me would always boil down to basic math. I couldn't argue with that.

So, it was so funny when we first started, there were people in town going, "Boy, I hope Zach knows what he is doing, following David." I was like, "What are you talking about? I'm following this guy. He's the guy that started it all. It's not me." So, at 53, to do that, it was terrifying. Earlier in my life, I'd had a time where I tried my own business and didn't work, which started hedge fund and it didn't work. Like you, I'm sure, Aaron, every great thing I've ever done in my life, it's been because my wife has told me," I believe you could do it."

I sure did. Man, I looked around at this team that was around me and I thought, "Man, if you're going to do it, this is the time to do it." You launched and you sit there because we could not call out. By law, we could not call out and we didn't. You're just going, "Lord-"

Aaron Ackerman:

So, you're just sitting there-

David Stanley:

I'm just waiting for the phone to ring.

Aaron Ackerman:

... waiting for the phone to ring.

David Stanley:

Thankfully enough, it rang a lot. Yeah, it rang a lot. So, we're real thankful.

Aaron Ackerman:

So let me just dig in a little bit on the active management versus non-active management. So, part of this or maybe most of this switch where you guys started Full Sail Capital was a philosophy driven mission for you, right?

David Stanley:

Completely.

Aaron Ackerman:

So just for our listeners, what is active management versus what Full Sail does?

David Stanley:

So active management, and we'd always tell these people, "Hey, we've got the smartest people in the world." We did. We had some of the smartest people in the world where we came from. They're going to sit in this back office and all these CFAs are going to gather around the table and they're going to figure out the four or five best names we should have in every sector. Over the long haul, we're going to outperform the market and it's going to be great. You're going to feel great for paying us fees for doing that. That's what all active managers say and it's not bad. It's a philosophy.

A lot of companies, a lot of managers out there employ that. The evidence shows us though, if you look at the last three or four market cycles, 15 years even, 90% of active managers underperform their underlying indices. So, think of it this way, when the market's up 17% and you're only up 15, you're probably not upset. Hey, I'm up 15. You don't realize that if you trail by 2% over a 10-year period, that is real destruction and what should have been the ultimate of value of your assets over that time.

Aaron Ackerman:

So just painting with a broad brush when you look at active management that underperforms, is a lot of that due to just racking up higher transaction costs as opposed to making bad stock decisions or investment decisions?

David Stanley:

I think it can be both, bro. Definitely, most active managers charge a lot more and they have transactional fees, underlying commissions. But more so, it's just, "Wow, information moves so much faster now than it did." When I first started, I believed you could do this. You could find a liquidity hole in a company. A guy like you could tear through a financial statement and find that too. Now, I mean, if I'm going to sit down and tell you, "Wow, my greatest use to a client is deciding which is better, Coke or Pepsi," that to me is a futile world. There's nothing behind that that adds value in my opinion, because any information that comes out of these companies within two seconds, the market is trading on it. The information moves so much faster now, I believe. It's not just now.

We started really digging in and getting academic about it, which if you know me, I'd rather talk to people than read, but my partners are cerebral. Our skillsets are amazing how they fold into each other and they started coming back going, "Hey, Dave, last 100 years, 4% of the stocks in the stock market are responsible for 100% of the game. We don't think we're smart enough to pick those every year. You know what? We don't think anyone is." So we started just laying this thesis out. It's not for everyone, but I will tell our clients have benefited from them. We told them three things we thought we could do for them, lower their fees, lower the risk because we have no individual stock risk, and increase the returns. We look back over the past five years. Every one of those situations, we've done that.

Aaron Ackerman:

Yeah. Yeah. That's fascinating, that stat. I've also seen along the same lines, I don't know what is there in how many trading days in a year, 250 or something like that, 240 days wash each other out. All the gains happen on 5 or 10 trading days typically.

David Stanley:

You look at it even in a crazier scale. Go over a 20-year period. If you're out of the market, five of the best days, you'll knock-

Aaron Ackerman:

You're flat.

David Stanley:

Yeah, or you'll knock half the game. So, let's say we looked back last 20 years at the beginning of this year and I'll give you some numbers that are rough numbers, but off the top of my head. But the average return from mid-90s forward through the end of last year was like 8.5% a year in the market, right? That's going through some pretty tough markets, 2008, 2009, and so forth. You look at it. You're out of the market the 10 best days. You go down to 4%. You're out of the market the best 20 days. You're down to two.

Really, you're out of the market 50 days in that 20-year period, 20+ year period. You're negative. So, we don't think anybody's smart enough to choose when you get in and out. So, we don't do that. We're very diligent on setting asset allocations. When we have one, we stick to it. We believe discipline trumps conviction and our clients have benefited from it.

Aaron Ackerman:

So you said something just in there about how your skills really complement each other. Talk about what is it like if I'm a client of Full Sail, I'm not David's client, I'm Full Sail's client. That may be different than how some other shops operate.

David Stanley:

Yeah, I think that's really, I call it all the time, our special sauce is that you may have a primary contact here, but you're going to get the whole team. We call it Team Full Sail. We have CPAs here that, but we don't do people's taxes, but they work with their accountants and can really identify some issues that they need to go to their accountant with. We have attorneys here. We don't do people's legal work, but we can sure help them navigate a legal situation pretty amazing.

We've got real estate experts. We have trust experts. So, there's not a whole lot our clients can ever ask of us that one of our teammates can't come and engage with them and bring their skillset into that room and help a client with that situation. I think it's really neat, because in most shops, they're trying to protect their book from the guy next door or the gal next door.

Aaron Ackerman:

It's not the building next door. It's the office next door.

David Stanley:

Yes, the office next door. I'm afraid to go to lunch because of one of my clients calls in. We've seen that happen in the warehouse world. So, it's just we're different, but again, we're not for everyone. We don't think we are and we don't try to be. We said no to more clients in this past five years that have tried to come work with us than I ever dreamed I was in my whole career. I think all people think they're interviewing us, but we're actually interviewing them too, because we don't want people to be unhappy.

We don't want them to expect something from us that we're not going to provide. So, a lot of times, we'll say, "Gosh, thank you so much for coming in. We don't think we're a good fit for you. Hey, if you want us to help you, try to find that fit, we would love to do that. But if not, we wish you nothing but prosperity. Go kill it wherever you want to go, but it's just not us."

Aaron Ackerman:

Yeah. So, in the early days, did you always say no to a lot of people?

David Stanley:

Yes.

Aaron Ackerman:

I mean, that's got to be hard. When you got 1.6 billion under management, that's one thing. But when you're counting your clients on your two hands, saying no is a different situation.

David Stanley:

Well, I'll tell you what happened at the very beginning that let me know we were going to make it. We were probably three months into Full Sail and our largest client that decided to come with us spent $80 million. Three months into it, he called me, he goes, "You know what? I love you, but I just think I need a bigger firm. I'm going to go to a firm out of New York, but I love you guys." We love him. So, we were like, "Hey, if we're not a fit..." So a third of our assets at that time walked out the door. I remember coming back to the office and I was telling my two partners what happened. They just went, "Man, are you okay?" They were worried more about me than they were about us losing assets.

They just looked at me and go, "We're going to be fine. We have a very great story to tell, and those who fit into that story are going to come." So, we're at peace with that. I was like, "Wow, this is going to be good. This is going to be really good." Now, fast forward March of 2020, that same client that left came back with 150. So, we're pretty thankful.

Aaron Ackerman:

Yeah. Man, there's got to be a lot of lessons there about the relationship, like being gracious, not burning bridges.

David Stanley:

Yeah. Anybody's ever left where I worked or anything, I always just hug them and wish them well, because when you try to force a round into a square hole, you know as well as I do, just trouble comes and bad feelings. I wish people well and hope they do it. Fortunately, we haven't had very many clients ever leave us, but when we did, we hugged them and helped as much as we can. It's been shocking how many that have left come back. So, I think you learned that lesson not only with clients, but with the people you work with. Because it's hard when this key person's leaving to go to a competitor. I always just hug them and say, "Man, I hope you do great. Hope you do great."

Aaron Ackerman:

I think that's special. That may be something you can get better at, but some people may just have that in them to be that way. I think it's hard. I mean, it's hard. I can tell you as I've matured and grown in my career, I've had people leave and I take it personal. You're dead to me.

David Stanley:

Yeah, I know. I'm not saying those thoughts don't occur behind the scenes. We're human, right? I'm certain if somebody violated something of a standard we had that they wouldn't get that from us, then they would get something different. But man, at the end of the day, what I know is that let's say that person leaves. They're not supposed to be in here anymore, and they're leaving room for the person who this place is their destiny.

Aaron Ackerman:

That's brilliant.

David Stanley:

So, it's like, "Hey, you're going to your destiny. Guess what? Now you've made room for the person that's supposed to be here." This is what's cool. Every time we've had that happen, we've only had it happen twice in our young. Every time we've had that happen, we've upgraded dramatically and dramatically. I'm sure the people who left did great too.

Aaron Ackerman:

Yeah. I love that. I don't think I appreciated it at the time, but in retrospect, early in my career, I left a place that I was very happy at that I was going to what I thought was a better opportunity. It wasn't. I know my boss knew that, but we had a good relationship. This was 15 years ago, right, or more. He was the most gracious person and took my call. Anytime I called him, we go to lunch.

David Stanley:

So cool.

Aaron Ackerman:

I think about that and how I've felt or reacted when I had people leave and I'm like, "I don't think this is the best thing for them." It's not I'm just mad because you're leaving me. It's like you need to go somewhere where you're going to be able to grow, have a better opportunity. If I think they're not, it's hard to be supportive and it's something that came home to me later. I was like, "Oh, my goodness. What a beautiful guy he is that we preserved a relationship." He never told me I was making a mistake. They tried to keep me, but he was so gracious. I contrast that with how I've been at times and that's inspirational, but I love that concept that you're opening up a spot for someone who's meant to be here.

David Stanley:

You know what's so cool about that is that I actually this past week ran into the president of the state of the bank that brought me to Oklahoma. He just hugged me. I hadn't seen him forever. He hugged me and my partners were like, "Wow, that guy..." Because he did not take it personally when I left. He totally got it. He said, "Man, Dave, we got to get together for lunch. I haven't seen you forever. I'd love to catch up." We had a relationship, a real one. That's when you find out if you really had a real relationship with somebody is when there is a breakup or was it coming after-

Aaron Ackerman:

It's transactional.

David Stanley:

Yeah. If they're coming after you and you've done nothing wrong, it's transactional.

Aaron Ackerman:

Yeah. Well, you mentioned that scenario where the guy left and you were like, "That's how I knew we were going to make it." We have this theory that nearly every business has near death moments. You talked about your hedge fund. Was there a moment or a day or a week where you thought, "Oh, man, what have I done? I don't know if this is going to work"?

David Stanley:

It was probably the week that we were receiving a lot of legal documents from our previous employer. That was when I was like, "Oh, my God. This is great. So, glad I did this. This is great. This is great. Now we can go home and be worried." No, really, we expected that. We all hugged and made up, and they're great people. They do great work. I think it's hard for people to realize when you have a different idea and you want to go do something, it doesn't have to mean where you left, what they were doing wasn't good. It means you want to do something different and time proves out whether who was right. So, at the end of the day, it just has to be. I think there was those early days when we couldn't do anything.

First two weeks we were open, we couldn't do anything. We were just scrambling trying to get furniture. You had people calling. If you remember, February of 2018, the market was going down too. So, you had people calling going, "Hey, we don't have anyone to talk to." We were like, "We can't talk to you, but we'll love to talk to you someday." Every time we have an account review with a client that came, the first six months we're open, they were signing their paperwork from a folding chair on a borrowed conference room table that looked like something you'd have in your backyard.

It's easy to come now. You come into our offices. Hey, 1.6, you see our track record and you see our team. The ones that came the first six months just came because they believed in us and were trusting us with everything. I mean, all your clients have your heart, but these people have our hearts. I mean, because they took a risk.

Aaron Ackerman:

Yeah, no, that's right. It's like anybody who is good to my wife or my kids, they could rob a bank. I don't care what they do. They're on my good list. They can get off of them.

David Stanley:

That's true.

Aaron Ackerman:

So true. So, those early clients, they're on a list written in permanent ink, huh?

David Stanley:

Yes.

Aaron Ackerman:

Okay. So, I know in your career, you had a very successful career before you started Full Sail. You'd grown assets. You had that track record. What do you attribute going from 0 to 1.6 billion so quickly? I mean, I did some research. That's a really fast trajectory. Not every firm grows that quickly. So, is there a philosophy, a trait? What is it that allowed you and your team to grow so rapidly?

David Stanley:

So, we've had time to, as a group, think back on this, and each of us have our own philosophy. What's so funny, the head of Fidelity Investments, their RIA division, when we were in Boston a couple years ago, he goes, "I want to meet with you guys." We thought we couldn't understand why this guy would want to meet with us. He comes in, he goes, "We look at every RIA in the country and we're not seeing anyone grow organically at the trajectory you guys have done it so quickly. You're doing it in Oklahoma City." That irritated me, the last part. I was like, "Have you never been to the city? It's way better than Boston, anyway. We got a lot of rich people there too, buddy."

Anyway, a lot of people have won and been successful there too. He wanted a five-point plan of how we did it. We all just laughed. It was like if I were to say one thing that we did, we were very intentional about the team we put together, not only in our partnership group. Partnerships don't make it usually, and it's usually because everyone in the partnership's the same. They have the same skillset. They have the same philosophies. The three of us, Zach Reynolds, Scott Cravins, and myself, we could not be more different. We are wildly different. With that comes conflict. I got to tell you, we've had some serious conflict different times.

We find that every time we go through a period like that, we come out with a decision that was just brilliant, because no one mindset crafted it and no one philosophy pushed it. It was all three of us molded it in, threw some compromise into a place, where just we look back and we go, "Wow, that was a really good decision." I'll tell you this is my personal opinion. I've seen a lot of people work really hard and nothing happens. We've all worked really hard, and I mean really hard as a team.

A lot has happened. I just say at times, I just go back and I go, "God, thank you for your favor. Thank you for your favor. There's no empirical evidence I can put my finger on at times when we're sitting across competing with some of the biggest money managers, and not even here, but regionally and nationally, when people just look at you across the table and go, 'You know what? I don't know why, but I just trust you.'" I got to tell you, it's humbling and you just go, "God, thank you."

Aaron Ackerman:

Yeah. That's amazing. I love the concept about the conflict. You guys all had a deep enough relationship and had created a safe space where people felt comfortable having conflict. The outcome of that was you got the best ideas. If there's one alpha and everyone has to agree or go away, you are not going to get the best results, right?

David Stanley:

So true. Yeah.

Aaron Ackerman:

It's like a family. Mom and dad or dad and kids will yell at each other and then you hug and you go on and you're better, right?

David Stanley:

Yes. I'll say, I don't know that we knew it was a safe place then. We won't have conflict. We just had it. Yeah, because we're very strong opinions, but boy, all those things have made us trust each other even more. I mean the three of us, we love each other. There's no doubt about it. People think of that as cliche, but it's really not. At the end of the day, even though there's significant conflict at times, especially when we're making a big decision, there's no distrust I can say between us. I don't see that with a lot of partners. There's always an element or two where one partner thinks the other one's trying to gain something to their benefit.

At the end of the day, it always boils down to a really wise thing Pete Patel always told us, a great mentor of ours too. In every decision you make, you have to look at the why or what's in it for the people you're working for. If as long as there's a why or what's in it for them and making sure you're serving people, all the rest that you're trying to have happen here will take care of itself. We truly believe that.

Aaron Ackerman:

Yeah, that's great. Okay. I want to talk a little bit about just current events. So, this is my perspective. You can tell me where I'm wrong or give your observation, but this market we're currently in is different maybe than any market ever, but certainly, in the last 30, 40 years. So, we've got inflation at a 40-year high, something close to that. Interest rates haven't been this high in 20 years at least. We've got global geopolitical unrest that hasn't been like this way maybe since the '60s in some regards, if you go back to Cuban crisis with whatever. Some new first time market pressures, ESG, cryptocurrency, these are all things that weren't even in our vocabulary 5 or 10 years ago or 20 years ago.

So, as an advisor, do you have to modify your approach or do you have an approach that weathers all the storms? Maybe just talk a little bit about the current market and how Full Sail is approaching that, if it's different than how you approached 10 years ago and 20 years ago.

David Stanley:

It's a great question. It's a big question. Every generation has their series of giants they've got to overcome, and this is just another one. We had 2008, 2009. We had COVID. We're still struggling through some of that. Now we're having to deal with the unintended consequences of our government dumping what's the equivalent of the GDP of California, Texas, and Florida into our economy all at once or at least over a very short period of time. You're right, but I don't think a lot of people talked about when interest rates were almost zero. That was just as unusual period of time, but they liked it. Oh, no, happy days are here again, because everything's low interest rate. The saver got crushed. The saver got crushed.

So, when we look at things, yes, when we make adjustments, we make them at the margin. We don't make wholesale adjustments because we believe capital markets work over time and we're not managing for a quarter. We're not managing for a year even. We're managing so that our clients when they want to, can own their own time. You ever hear everybody say, "Retirement is really not that for us. It's owning your time, deciding what you want to do with it." Before that, we even started down this road. So, Zach, we were seeing some of this coming, especially when we do financial planning for clients and you sit and when they were literally making nothing from bonds. Bonds became a volatility hedge where you got a little bit of income.

We introduced alternatives to our client. The three legs of the stool for our alternative pieces, private equity, private credit, private real estate. We've done that and our clients have benefited greatly from it. I would say that's how we tilted into where we're at now. We're never going to completely go away from the public markets. If you look at an investment portfolio like a pot of stew, your meat and potatoes are always going to be the public markets, but the seasoning you add is going to be your alternatives. It's going to be the things you do at the margin that have a little more risk to them, but over a long period of time have proven to be very rewarding. We were doing it to make up for the delta.

We were seeing that we needed to make up for the return of bonds, because when we were doing financial planning, the equity portion was having to carry the whole load. So, now, yes, going forward, you go for the next 10 years, we think equity returns will be lower, but we also now see bonds going forward, helping much more in a person's financial planet with all of their assets. With the adding of the alternatives, we feel very good about where we're at. We don't know what the markets are going to do. That's the one thing we tell our clients all the time.

We sell to our competitors. It's so fun just watching. They just are so certain. When they're lucky enough to be right, man, it just draws people to them until people realize there's a persistency of being right that's a problem when you go with anybody because no one can game or gauge fear or greed. There's just no way to do it.

Aaron Ackerman:

Yeah. Well, and most of the people who are right on these predictions that nobody can see coming, they predict a recession. It's like, "I've predicted 20 of the last two recessions or whatever."

David Stanley:

Oh, yeah. Anyway, the one that I remember the most was Meredith Whitney when she came out and said, "Every municipal bond's going to, basically, to break because of these balance sheets. Every municipality, they're going to break." It was totally wrong, but she was doing all this out of 2008, 2009, a lot of fear, but she sounded good at CNBC. She was on every afternoon. Now, I'm certain, all the money she made there, she's on an island somewhere and didn't have to work, but you only have to be right once when you make an outrageous prediction.

Aaron Ackerman:

Yup. Well, we're wrap up here in a minute. Anything else, David, about Full Sail or about you that we didn't talk about that you think is important?

David Stanley:

Gosh, no, I mean, we're just grateful. Well, at the end of the day, we pull into our parking lot here in Midtown and I just get out and it feels surreal at times. I'll just stand in the parking lot and look around. I'm amazed. I'm in the period of my career I'm not going to be here forever. I got another decade where I'm going to do what I do and then see if Scott and Zach want me to take the garbage out or run errands for them or do anything like that. I don't want to go to the house, but I'm always going to be really excited and proud about what happened here and feel just in my own way with all that, it happened to a guy like me.

Aaron Ackerman:

Yeah. That's awesome. Well, congratulations. I know that it felt like a risk and it was a risk, but pretty amazing what you guys have accomplished in a short period of time. So, congrats.

David Stanley:

Hey, thank you, brother.

Aaron Ackerman:

So what's the best way for somebody to learn more about Full Sail? We'll put this in the show notes, but fullsailcapital.com is the website.

David Stanley:

Run to our website. Yes. If you have any questions about what you see there, all of our contact information is there. We'd love to talk to you. Sure.

Aaron Ackerman:

Awesome. We love it. Well, I appreciate the time and the transparency. So, we end each episode with five questions we ask the same questions to every guest. So, if you're ready.

David Stanley:

I'm ready.

Aaron Ackerman:

What's the first way you ever made money?

David Stanley:

Oh, man. So, my dad, I look back and he was a good man, but he felt cruel at this time. He didn't think I understood the value of money, which I didn't. He goes, "I got you a job for the summer at Rose Gravel that's living in Carlsbad, New Mexico." Mr. Rose is a wonderful man, but they put gravel on roads. He put all the tar down and then you pour the gravel on top and create a road. My job was when the trailers came back in with all this asphalt stuck to them, they go, "Son, you just take this pole that's hooked onto what looked like to be a giant SOS pad dumping in this diesel fuel, and you scrub that asphalt off these trailers."

Well, I learned then muscle tone wasn't a real thing for me back then. The first trailer I did, I felt like I'd run three marathons and the guys in the shop weren't exactly saints with their criticism of the verbal cues they gave me for not doing a good job.

Aaron Ackerman:

So, you got immediate feedback.

David Stanley:

Oh, my God.

Aaron Ackerman:

They didn't wait for the quarterly performance review.

David Stanley:

Yeah. I made the mistake of having a pair of jeans on that day that had a rip in the front of them. I got home and I found out how really tedious it is to get tar off of bare skin. So, yeah, it was a summer of crime, but I came out of it. I came out it with a real appreciation of that I wanted to go to college.

Aaron Ackerman:

Hit the books.

David Stanley:

Exactly.

Aaron Ackerman:

Yeah. What would you be doing if you were doing something different? If you weren't Full Sail, you weren't a wealth advisor, what would you be doing?

David Stanley:

Well, my first love, I'll tell you, was theater. I know that's ridiculous. When you look at me, a guy can't sing or dance, but I loved the theater. In fact, I came from a very, very, very talented athletic family. My dad played football for Clemson. I got two cousins that have done it. I got another cousin, [inaudible 00:38:34]. He played in late '50s. Everyone in our family plays football and were athletic. I was like the most unathletic kid in the world. I look back now, my dad could have probably devastated me, but he didn't look disappointed when I would try to catch the football and it would hit me in the head instead of going in my hands and all that stuff. So, he told me, "You either got to go into band or you got to go into something else."

I found theater and did one act competitions all over the country. We did really did really well and had a chance to get a theater scholarship in college. That's when my dad threw the brakes on. He puts his arm around me. He goes, "How are you going to support a family working in the theater?" He gave me this long one. You can't dance, you can't sing, and everybody you're going to compete with can. Okay. Every once in a while, you make somebody laugh. He goes, "Sorry, that's not going to work." I believed him. Then I went and got a degree in finance. So, yeah, I would be in the theater.

Aaron Ackerman:

Awesome, man. You never know what you're going to learn on these podcasts. What would you like to go back and tell your 20-year-old self?

David Stanley:

Wow. I wasn't a kid with a lot of confidence at all. I probably would want to go back to my 20-year-old self and just tell him, "You can do it. You can do it." I had to wait for a lot of people to come in my life to tell me that. I wish I would've believed it myself initially. Yeah.

Aaron Ackerman:

That's awesome. Well, and thank God that you had people that did tell you that. Do you have a heart when you see somebody that you think maybe is lacking confidence and you can be someone that speaks life to them?

David Stanley:

It's funny you say that. I have a lot of people tell me that when I engage with most people, they hear me try to encourage people mostly when I talk with them and point out what I see in them, that I see that they're exceptional or great. I think it's just because I would've loved to had a bunch of people do that for me.

Aaron Ackerman:

Yeah. That's awesome. All right. What's the title of your book going to be?

David Stanley:

The title of my book?

Aaron Ackerman:

Story of David Stanley.

David Stanley:

Yeah. Wow. I guess it would be great things can come out of average people. I think that's what I want probably say about my life, especially if you trust that you were created for something beyond yourself.

Aaron Ackerman:

That's awesome. I hope that's true. Yeah. So, I'm banking on that being true.

David Stanley:

No, man, you're way above average, bro.

Aaron Ackerman:

My wife and I always say, "God can make great kids with average parents. Let's hope that's true."

David Stanley:

Oh, man, you're living your best life right now, brother.

Aaron Ackerman:

All right. Last one. What's the best advice you've ever received?

David Stanley:

The best advice I've really ever received is it came out of a scripture. Someone finally sat me down and they said, "Humility and the fear of the Lord lead to honor riches and a long life." That's a Proverb. Then they just looked at me and said, "Read one of these every day. There's 31 of them. Read them every day. It'll give you wisdom." It truly did that for me.

Aaron Ackerman:

Yeah. That's awesome. Well, David, thank you. I appreciate your just transparency and willing to talk about Full Sail-

David Stanley:

Thank you, bro.

Aaron Ackerman:

... and your journey. Congrats on everything, man. I love you, brother.

David Stanley:

Love you too, man. Very good.

Aaron Ackerman:

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