🎙️ Episode 32: Find Your Next Gear with Jonathan Landau

What happens when you put a master communicator and salesman together with a dreamer in the world of real estate? Layer on to that a man with deep Jewish beliefs, you get one interesting story. The story is next level this week on Jewish grit. Welcome to Jewish grit. I am super lucky to have an amazing guest on Jewish grit this week. Welcome Jonathan Landau, real estate developer and just a really great guy. So, Jonathan, take us into your professional journey for a moment. I know a lot about it. Um, you're young and you're trying to figure out your life. You try to hustle. Take us into your first hustle. Uh, before I was in the professional career, uh, when I was, uh, a dropout from Yeshiva, probably around 17 or 18 years old, um, the first, uh, I wouldn't even call it a business idea that I had was, um, the internet was just evolving. Uh, this is, you know, call it early '90s. And, um, you were now able to get information uh, either, uh, via mailing, phone sources, or things like that cuz it wasn't yet a worldwide web, uh, where you can get information about occurrences that took place in your neighborhood or around your neighborhood. And the concept was to find out where there were fires that had fatalities, uh, and sell, uh, to the neighboring, uh, homeowners fire extinguishers because at that point time people really didn't have fire extinguishers in their home or at least in the uh, world that we lived in people didn't. So we would get these clipping agencies that would give us news indications of where fires occurred. We would use some tracking data to find out who the neighbors were. We'd send them mailers and the the statistics were if one out of every 50 people responded, you could make a lot of money. Um unfortunately the data that we were getting wasn't necessarily as accurate as we thought it would be and the hit rate was a lot less than what we expected and after a while it became clear that this needed more of a definitive data source and program to make it successful. Probably within a year or two that was readily available in the marketplace but at that point point it wasn't. That was my first endeavor into business. Um I'm cutting you off for a second. What did you learn from that? Not every great idea is a success. Has that served you well? Um I'd like to say that I'm a glutton for punishment. Uh but yes, I think you've got to think through your the the likelihood of success on every endeavor. Um I think you still need to be inspired by your great ideas as as I think we'll get to later on in the conversation. Part of inspiration is taking the effort to the maximum extent uh that you can and believing that you have capabilities to succeed. Uh but definitely I would say uh double checking yourself, triple checking yourself is is good practice. So that doesn't work. At some point you decide that you're going to law school, correct? Right. I I actually before I got married my parents said you can't get married until you have a livelihood. I worked in a warehouse. Uh in that for about a year before I went to law school. Um, I was only 19 years old at that point in time. Uh, I probably got paid, uh, less money than, uh, what a, uh, uh, Minimum wage. the lowest minimum wage, uh, was. They they paid me less than that. But, it was a job. Uh, and then I, uh, went to law school the following, uh, August. Um, and I clerked at a law firm while I was in law school. I got paid even less working for the law firm, but it was great experience, uh, and that started my professional career. Now, let's fast forward a bunch of years later. You're not a practicing attorney anymore. What happened? Uh, I would say that at, uh, about after practicing for five or six years, and I worked really hard. Um, I had great great success, um, at in the practice of law, and I enjoyed it. Um, uh, it became apparent to me that instead of actually representing other people and helping them succeed in business, it would make more sense to do it with myself. And so, um, you know, I think opportunities present themselves in ways that you can usually not script. And at that point in time, I was, uh, working on a project, uh, that generated a significant amount of capital for one of my clients, uh, and the opportunity came about for me to be able to get involved in starting a new business, uh, with a development platform, which I had absolutely no experience with, and a real estate, uh, operating company platform, which I also had very little experience with. And I thought, "Hey, if you don't, uh, step it up and take advantage of opportunity, you're never going to succeed beyond, uh, what, uh, the average person, uh, can accomplish. And so, it's worth taking a little risk every now and then and getting out of your comfort zone." And, um, I think that, you know, there's a tension not just in it for average people in life, but also religious tension as to, you know, how far should you push things? How much of your own sort of, let's call it, grit, okay, do you want to put into play? And and how far outside of reasonable expectations you should pursue things to try to succeed. And I would say probably hadn't a thought through some of the implications of my beliefs at that point in time, but it was it was definitely inbred in me to the point where I believe you you talk about, you know, successful Jewish business people. And there's all kinds of, you know, you could say stereotypes out there about why Jewish people are successful and and Jewish people control everything. But the truth is that if you really believe in God the way I was raised and the way you were raised, then you believe that the natural limitations that we have as human beings are somewhat enhanced by your belief in God. And so, it's very, I would say, apropos that we're coming up on the Passover holiday now. And one of the recitations that we say on the Passover holiday at the Seder is we say, "If God would have taken us out of Egypt and he wouldn't have given us the Torah, it would have been enough." And everybody asks the question, "Would it have been enough?" And we have all Like without Torah. We have all kinds of answers that we accept like, "Oh, it would have been enough for us to say thank you." Okay. You know, for that we have to recite this and we have this sort of tradition. And I think that the answer is very simple. It's not that it would have been enough in the context that we understand. It would have been enough in the context of the following. Jews are standing in front of a raging water body of water that they cannot cross and behind them is a army that wants to murder annihilate him. And nature at that point in time doesn't say that they have a chance of survival. They're dead. They're dead before they get in the water not in the water. And yet God does something special. He splits the sea and he's and he actually creates a miracle that nature wasn't able to comprehend. And you could say, "Okay, we were lucky. God had our back." Or you could say this is a lesson for us to learn how to conduct ourselves. We don't just have natural limitations. When we have God, we have another gear. When we have God, we have faith that we can achieve more than we can with our own natural capabilities. The whole concept in our religion of don't say that you are this great warrior and you did it on your own. As they say, "Kochi vi otsam yadi, my strength usali achayala za makes me this great warrior." Absolutely not. We are not allowed to believe that. Why? Because if we do, we're diminishing our capabilities. We're saying we're limited to our own natural capabilities. But, if we have this another gear that we can go into which is belief that God saved us and because he saved us, we see that he's there in a way that we can rely on. Now we have a greater gear. We have another place to go and that's why I think whether it's consciously subconsciously thought out or not, the Jewish people and the Jewish religion have succeeded because we rely on God. Thanks for sharing. Pleasure. I'm going to push back a little bit. Go ahead. So you start this real estate career and you do have a lot of success. I guess you had that extra gear Right. built a lot of things very successfully. Can you bring us into a moment in the next 10 or 15 years of your career where you really needed grit cuz maybe it didn't follow the narrative or the script that you thought it would. I mean, I think if you're asking for a moment, it probably wasn't in the next 15 years. It probably took 17 years. But, there before we get to that, there are plenty of times in any professional's career where you you make an investment, you bet on something, and it doesn't work out. And, you know, the human reaction to that is to feel dejected. The human reaction to that is to sort of succumb to failure. And, I would say that, you know, you're about to close a loan, a hundred million-dollar loan, a billion-dollar loan. You're about to acquire a property, and then something goes wrong. An investor falls out at the last minute. Um you know, the the lender says they want terms that you didn't anticipate. A tenant's supposed to sign a lease, they don't sign a lease. These are all kinds of things that are not in your control that happen every day in everybody's life. Or, sometimes, not every day, but at meaningful times in your life. So, what do you do? >> And I think having the awareness that it's not just you. If you just are limited to your own capabilities, you're screwed. Dead in the water. But, if you realize that the only way you got here in the first instance was with the help of God. You have, again, that gear to go into, and that is optimism. That is taking your own initiative and trying to make a success out of a failure. And, many times when you look back in retrospect, you can see that that failure is what actually gave you an opportunity for much greater success that you didn't even envision before. That's super meaningful. So, now I'm going to drill down a little bit. Um can you take If you're comfortable, can you take us into a scenario, a moment, uh an episode in your life where that happened. And, I'm curious like, okay, so this happens, now what do I do? I pivot, I I I providentially Talk to us about that. Well, I mean I think I can go back as recent as um say uh 5 months ago. Uh we were we were closing a loan for a half a billion-dollar ground-up development uh that uh my company was uh the developer on. Uh for the first 17 years of my career, I worked with partners uh and did a lot of big deals. Billion-dollar deals, but um but there was there was somebody else next to me. And here I am now undertaking to do a very large half-a-billion-dollar development on my own. We have uh probably one of the number one banks that lends in the development world that's giving us a 300-plus million-dollar loan. There's lots of um I will call it complicated factors uh that are underlying the transaction including getting air rights and and um you know uh making deals with neighboring properties and and having equity investors that had special deals and all kinds of different transactions that had to align for us to be able to execute. And at the last minute, our lender pulled out. Um Did it have to do with the political climate of New York or I think I think it was a contributing factor. Uh the climate meaning obviously the socialist mayor uh coming in was was not something that uh banks felt comfortable with. Um it also had to do with the fact that the uh the housing department had made certain determinations in anticipation of the mayor coming in that were detrimental to our project and that added some significant cost to the project. There were various factors involved. Ultimately, it wasn't meant to be and the lender pulled out. And They pulled out on a Friday. Pause for a second. You get that phone call. Right. I had $26 million hard money up at that point in time that is at risk. And uh that's >> What do you feel? Like is your entire gut turned inside out? Like is it adrenaline? What happens at that moment? >> you At that moment I was I was obviously dejected. >> It's dropped. Um but I was not willing It was shut It was right before Shabbos actually and to me Shabbos is one of those days where business has to be 100% outside of your mind and you have to enjoy this special moment of your family and your friends and the time to sort of shut off from the rest of the world. And I knew that there wasn't anything I was going to do in the next 24 hours. So I was like, "Okay, just going to enjoy Shabbos and we're going to deal with this on Saturday night or Sunday." That's huge. >> And you were able to compartmentalize that successfully. Yeah. That's great. The bottom line is that, you know, within a day or two sometimes the help comes from from other people outside of you. We have another brother who's a debt broker and he went to, you know, to a few people that were backups in the original um I guess you could say marketing of the uh financing of the project and we had somebody that was really eager and within three or four days we ended up with a replacement lender um and uh you know, it was it was a different deal um than the deal that I had envisioned closing because it required multiple uh financing uh stages and it required me getting some of the other partners involved, but ultimately it worked out and probably worked out better than what what what the original loan would have looked like. So, you know, you just got to keep on chugging. Wow, that's beautiful. That's a really nice ending. I mean, it's not over yet, but God willing it should just go from strength to strength. I think one of your greatest qualities, besides your amazing heart that you have and ask anyone who's met you that is, you're a great communicator. And you're a good salesman. And that's what you need to build any type of deal that you're working through. What's What's What's that skill? What's that gift? You sit down at a meeting. These are new investors. You're trying to pitch a new project. What do you have to do to bring them into your corner? In today's world, I would say that's a particularly important question to be able to at least consider and answer in some way or another. So, the first thing you need to do is live your projects. You need to You need to feel them. You need to have a conviction in them. You have to understand passion, energy. You have to understand why they're great. And if you do and you don't overthink the process, then you can convey that to other people. Um and I think, you know, I've I've delivered speeches in front of large audiences before. I'm I'm always unscripted. And the reason for that is it's much better, in my opinion, to share your experience with with other people. And not everybody vibes with you. You're not going to appeal to everybody all the time. But when you're sharing the way you experience something with somebody, then it it's easy for them for that energy to be received. And I would say it's uh to a certain extent a um an infusion of vision. And if you can if you can share that vision by sharing your excitement, by sharing your energy, by showing why it makes sense to somebody, then you're not really selling them. You're just giving them a vision for them to buy into. And I think uh that is probably uh something that uh comes reasonably natural to me. Uh and that's because I'm all in on everything I do. Couldn't agree more. You know, you have such a generous heart and you love giving. It really gives you a high. Um and that's a big part of of who you are and your wife is and obviously I'm going to ask you a question. Now that you support many institutions, you give a lot of charity, like how do you decide? There's an There's an unending stream of opportunities for philanthropy. What are the things that pull you in? I'm assuming it's like an investment to you. How do you invest? Well, um from a philanthropic perspective, I am uh not necessarily mainstream. So, I think you know, people who are in individuals who are who are in dire straits versus institutions who are in dire straits appeal more to me. Um The human part of it. I think it's also because they have less access uh to assistance. I think it's because it's it's then it's more of a personal connection. So, that's that's something that that appeals to me. Um I think if you if you think about the charities, the Jewish charities, logically speaking, it it's an inhibitor because there's a lot of charities that are probably not great investments. And if you do that and you think about it in that way, you will probably not give to some people who are great investments. And so, you have to try to shut off logic a little bit and just really rely more on emotion. And that would be my approach to charity. You know, most of the people who watch this or listen to this are young professionals or college students living in a little bit of a crazy world. They're probably experiencing anti-Semitism in the workplace, on the college campus. And listen, I don't think either of us ever dreamed growing up as a child that we'd be living in a chapter of history in the modern world that we're in right now. As somebody who is super exposed to so many people, for so many different walks of life, like how does that make you feel? I mean, is there a dormant anti-Semitism that maybe some of the people you work with have that you didn't know was there? Yes. Um let's just say Jewish people can't expect the world to love us if we don't love each other. And unfortunately, we don't love each other enough. So, it's a difficult thing to live with, especially we have a grandmother that went through the Holocaust who talked to us about it all the time growing up. Um and we I remember I remember thinking as a as a young child like, I think I may have even asked my grandmother at one point, like "Why don't you guys just shoot them?" You know? Obviously not understanding the implications of what that would take as a three-year-old asking that to my grandmother, but the this the problem is that just like we're seeing today, we thought anti-Semitism was somewhat shelved uh after the Holocaust. And it wasn't, it was just suppressed. It's been there. It is there. And it's a very difficult thing to deal with. But, the best way we can deal with it is by trying to live our life properly and and loving each other to helping each other. And also doing what's right in the world and not not make not not desecrating uh God by the way that we act. And um you know, people who hate are going to hate us. Doesn't matter what we do. But, we have to put blinders on, do the right thing, and try to uh you know, not make bad decisions. And unfortunately, I would say liberal Judaism makes bad decisions. And you know, you you go back in time and you grew up as a kid hearing that, you know, Jews voted for Hitler the first time around. And you say, "How could that possibly be?" But, now we live in a time where we see people voting for anti-Semites here in our country. We see college campuses just rampant with anti-Semitism. And you have to say to yourself, "Okay, we need to bind together and we need to take a position and we need to try to make much better decisions." You have a microphone in front of you and it's an opportunity to share a message with our student and young professional population around the entire globe literally. These are people who are starting their lives considering the type of families they want to build, the lives they want to lead. As somebody who has significant life experience both professionally and personally, what would you want to share with them? I would say being able to live an Orthodox Jewish life and celebrating Shabbos with your family, with your kids, with your loved ones, with your friends is the most special experience you could ever have in this world. Being able to shut off your phone for 24 hours and reinvigorate your life with your loved ones is a gift from God. And having holidays together with your family and friends and enjoying your life, and I'm not saying enjoy your life in a synagogue. I'm saying enjoy your life with all of the accoutrements that are available to you, with all the luxuries that are available to you, but with your friends and family, that is a special way to live and it's a way that is integrated in our religion. And it's something that I think everybody who is starting, everybody who's already uh on the way to uh mapping out their life should should consider. And I also would say something that's probably unconventional, which is you know, you can't be an an exceptional father, you can't be an exceptional husband, you can't be an exceptional businessman life life if you're not happy. And your happiness your happiness in your business life, your happiness in your personal life is paramount. Don't forget yourself. Don't forget your spouse. Don't forget the relationship that you need to have with each other in order to be great parents, in order to be successful in your business. Don't forget the experiences that you need to have to be somebody that other people can benefit from. And that's something that unfortunately we get so focused on whether it's our business or our families or our or our religion, we sometimes forget about the fact that we need to be healthy and happy. And And if you focus a little bit on that, give yourself the luxury of treating yourself both mentally and physically and relationship-wise, you will have a much better life. This was a true pleasure. I think the whole podcast is worth it just for me to have this conversation with you. Absolutely. >> Keep Keep taking care of yourself, your family, keep being happy, keep keeping Shabbos, and I keep making a difference in the world around you. Thank you for listening to Jewish Grit, an Olami Mentorship podcast. At Olami Mentorship, we believe that everyone needs a mentor. What better way is there to tap into your personal and professional potential than with a Jewish mentor at your side? Learn more at olami.org/mentorship. Don't forget to keep listening on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.