Okay, well, basically my background is that a registered architect? I had my own business for 24 years. I had an office in Massachusetts and I had an office in Florida. I couldn't stand the winters in Massachusetts anymore. So is spending more and more time in Florida. And when I was in Florida, I started volunteering for Habitat for Humanity in Sarasota County, and I got hooked that very first day that I was on the job site, I would like to say, started off in the trenches because that's what I did. I dug trenches for foundations, and I couldn't wait to go back the next week just to become, you know, part of that team and volunteering. There was a lot of things that are going on because I love the construction end of it. I love the physical part of it doing that, but also meeting all the people, the volunteers and meeting the homeowners that were buying these homes. There's some interesting stories and how they got to this particular point and habitat, just in case someone doesn't know one of their programs is to try to build safe, affordable homes for lower income families. They really can't go to a bank and get a mortgage. So there are so many interesting stories and people that I ran into well, as I was going through, that particular affiliate was doing about 18 to 20 homes a year, and they had what they call the orange shirt crew leaders. And I thought that was the coolest dudes I had ever met, and I wanted to be part of it. Eventually, I was asked to join because of my construction experience, and we handled all the different tasks. The building from there. I was invited to be construction committee, and I was asked to be go as a liaison to the board of directors. And I didn't realize how much of a conflict there waas between the construction group and the board of directors of this particular nonprofit, and it was brutal going to these meetings. I got verbally beat up all the time, but I learned some very valuable lessons on how to run, Ah, habitat of Philly of what to do, what not to do, what kind of board members with the best board members to bring on so you know, kind of keeping that in mind? Um, it's after about 24 years. The financial meltdown that everybody thinks about is around 09 and 2010. It actually started a No. 16 07 in the area that I was in. And I had some developers that I was working for in my architectural firm that filed for bankruptcy, opened up the next day and went from there. So that was my third financial meltdown, so to speak. And I was burnt out because I really enjoyed the sabotage, this nonprofit work. They had a position of a chief operating officer. I applied for it. I got it and kind of went from there. But that affiliate was in a lot of trouble because the executive director had taken out lines of credit without board approval. $1,000,000 actually, And so there was a lot of issues, and the board wanted me to try to correct issues that I couldn't correct because they had an executive director there. After about four months, I decided this was not a good fit for me mentally physically, but I wanted to stay with a Habitat affiliate. So Habitat International has jobs listings. I looked on one. I found three of them. I applied for one, called me back and, um basically they had 50 people had applied for the job. They got it down to 10. They did a phone interview. Then they got it down to three. I was one of the three, and when I went for an interview there, somebody told May that probably the best thing to do is write out a business plan on your 1st 100 days. And that's exactly what I did. I brought 25 copies with me. I had no idea how many people would, but I had 25 copies I got there. I was assigned a board member who showed me around town. I had dinner breakfast with people, but I asked what was the issue? Why do you getting rid of the old executive director on bringing in a new? He just kind of smiled and said, If you get the job, you'll find out it's a trouble company. So keeping that in mind when I so it was a four hour interview and for your students out there, this is a good thing to keep in mind. Specially do all your research, understand the business that you're going and the job that you're going. But I realize because of my almost a dozen years of experience with the habitat, I knew more than what this committee did. And I don't mean that to be arrogant, just it is what it is. So I made a decision that I was going to that I already had the job and this was a strategic planning group and we were gonna talk about how to turn this company around. So I brought out my 100 days pamphlet. I gave it to everybody and I took over control of that meeting and I just discussed highway. We're gonna go through the next 100 days, three months to kind of get on track. Everybody liked it. And the next week I was offered the job. So about a month later, I came to Smith County here in East Texas, and I started when I was told that this was a troubled company. Nobody really heading idea how bad it waas, You know, I thought I left the frying pan. I didn't really because when I got here, it was it was in really rough shape. There was six directors the first year. I had to fire five of them and start rebuilding the organization. Um, they had moved into a new building. You don't move into a building without an occupancy permit, and that's exactly what they did. So I got there. There was no heat phone system, didn't work, and also what's this thing? So I basically had to rebuild the infrastructure of the company, but one of the most important things that I had to do, you know, I used to say that I came here to build houses, I had to rebuild bridges, and one of the things that didn't happen is that nobody introduced me to everybody, anybody in town, except for the one person I didn't fire. So my wife and I went to every single after our function that we could go to, and that's where we built relationships. And those relationships over the last 12 years have helped us grow the organization into what we are today. We're one of the more successful habitat affiliates in Texas and in the United States for some of our programs and what we do so building relationships, how do exactly did we do that? Not only did we go to these after our functions, we tried to find the photographer at each one of these things and got our pictures taken. So was in all the different magazines, the monthly magazines that came out after about a year and 1/2 of renting, we bought a home and we started having cookouts and just inviting all these people that we had met it thes after our functions. So it became a so you'd need a meta function and then all of a sudden, you just turn this off. Sorry, they became your friends, and that's what opened up a lot of doors to enable me to start buying land, start building houses, building new programs and moving everything forward. So, um, those with the type of things that I had to do to rebuild the organization to where we are today. I'm very proud of where we are today. We've got good people on board, highly educated experience, people that know what they're doing. And we, for our particular affiliate were four different companies where retail company we have the habitat restore the business model for that is profit on sales support operations. We have construction, which we have four programs. We build new houses, we do critical repairs. We do deconstruction. We do a problem called Rush with kindness and because we hold a lot of the mortgages. Right now, we have 66 active mortgages. We are legally a bank, and we have to apply by all the rules and regulations of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and just kind of go from there. The at the fourth company is what I call the management firm in my area. Our budget we just got approved was 3.3 million. So that's almost $9000 a day that we have to raise. And, you know, just the accounting end of it alone is just, you know, there's a lot of work that goes into keeping that those wheels running and moving forward. So I think I've kind of touched on things that

the first few weeks, I mentioned that I ended up after the first year firing five of the six directors. But when I first got there, um, and started meeting some of the staff, first of all here, where they were not very friendly. For one thing, our construction manager, I couldn't even find most of the time I couldn't get answers for simple questions of basic business questions and how to make things run. Now one of the things is they had a server, which was an old computer. That was not. It wasn't keeping anything the way it's posted. So one of the first things I did was to go out and get a server. I had to find a new I T person, and this all happened within a few weeks that I needed. I know that I needed to do something. And the we've got set up for about a couple of weeks. This fellow calm and he said, Jack, you got a problem and I said Dry. Only one problem. I said We got a lot of problems. Here he goes. Now you have a major problem, I said. I'm coming down. So one of the things that I didn't really understand, I think I did, But I didn't remember is that when you have a server, every single website for every single computer is logged, lie down. And so what was happening to the staff that I had There they were on spent majority of their time on shopping websites, dating websites, X rated dating websites and pornography. So I had to deal with that right away. One of the biggest defenders was that construction supervisor that I could never find. I printed everything out. I called him in and I fired him right there on the spot, and he tried to convince me that I didn't understand what was going on. There's no way you could do that. But here's the interesting dilemma. So we have people donating money to us when I let somebody go. Do I tell him that he's because he's spending all his time on pornography because they've been donating money to us? So basically, he did have some health issues. So I wrote out his resignation letter and said that you know, I John Smith had to resign because of health reasons. I had him sign it and go. And so from there I just started letting people go on cause and trying to get the right people in and took me a little bit of time. A couple of times, I had to, you know, bring somebody on. It wasn't the right fit and move forward. But in doing that, so not only was it the infrastructure of the company, but it was the perception of who we were and one of those after our functions the woman that became the future mayor and has become a good friend of my wife's and I She grabbed my hand and she said she wished me the best of luck because our affiliate had lost its credibility in time. So we had to work on, you know, different fears, stairs of influence here to figure out how we were going to move forward. And so we're We were able to do that by working hard

basically each department, the the way I kind of run the business is that I try not to micromanage anything. I bring in people. We and we really try to understand what the job description and what that particular department job actually is. You know whether it's running the restore or of its development, where we have to be out in the public and raising millions of dollars every year in the grant writing, or especially in the financial, and because each one of our programs and each one of our grants that we have can't we can't co mingle money. So there's a lot of we we do business with at least six different banks and friends with every single president. We actually have had him at our homes, and so each one is different, and so we have to kind of oversee it, and they all kind of interlock to with the way they have to operate on a daily best basis. So it's important for me to make sure everybody's working together as a team, understanding what their job descriptions are. We have a staff meeting once a week on excuse me every other week, and we talk about what we've done, What are problems are how we can help each other get involved. I also try to cross train everybody because we only were only about a 15 person organization. So this vacation time, the sick time, that's what I think. We can't stop. You know when you're building multiple homes a year and a critical repair program is the biggest program we do about 150 critical repairs every year. So all that stuff has to keep going. So we try to crush train everything, everybody so we can fit in and make sure nothing stops when someone goes on vacation or get sick.