114: The Business of Great Ideas, Real Estate, Charity, and an Eco-Friendly Cause with Mayer Dahan

Everyone has great ideas, but what matters is taking action! Mayer Dahan from Prime Five Homes and The Dream Builder's Project tells us how he's innovated in the real estate space to create luxury, eco-friendly homes while also championing a great cause in the Los Angeles County area. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYLatrb1n0c Display TranscriptRobert Plank: Today's guest is Mayer Dahan. Mayer has a vision for a sustainable, environmentally friendly residential market and has continued to make a positive impact in Los Angeles. Dahan has a bunch of cool projects, a bunch of cool companies. This thing called prime five homes, dream builders project, and prime five homes was recognized as one of the top 15 fastest growing private businesses in Los Angeles, and a recipient of the best of 2015 in west Hollywood aware. More recently, Mayer was acknowledged as a 40 under 40 residential builder to watch by professional builder magazine in 2016. Lots of cool subjects to talk about. Mayer, welcome to the show. Mayer Dahan: Awesome. Thank you for having me on, Robert. It's an honor. I'm excited. Robert Plank: Well, cool. It's an honor right back at you. What is it that you do and what makes you different and special? Mayer Dahan: I think that's probably the hardest question to answer for me. What I do is very difficult to be categorized as one thing or another. Through my experience of growing up in this century with all the difficulties and the new economy and recessions and what not, I've come to the understanding that each person must have many hats and must cover many responsibilities, so in essence, what I see in my own private development firm, where we come up with the most innovative, beautiful, sustainable, Eco-friendly, luxury homes we can come up with and try to raise the bar as best as possible to try to merge people who are looking for the finer things in life with the concepts and ideas that are relatable to taking care of our environment, to giving our children a better, healthier world, to not ruining the gift we're given. Subsequently, our company has a foundation that I founded four years ago, back in 2013, that ... our premise is a charity for charity. We use our profits from our houses to go out in the world, support charities, have children's events, feed the homeless events, back to school, galas for children's hospital, and we try to cover the gambit. We're trying to help the world economically, from a for profit side, and we're trying to help the world from a non-profit side, which may seem like it's a lot of things that are going on, but in my opinion, that's the most balanced and healthy approach that we can take to secure that we'll have success and purpose in our future. Robert Plank: I like all of that. The thing that I've been ... the pattern I've been seeing with a lot of business owners I've been talking to lately is that, like you said, you can't just do one thing, especially in this day and age. A lot of us have maybe a scattered attention span. Some of us have multiple businesses, and it seems like the people who have been doing really well are the ones where the businesses they have either interrelate, or one relates to the other, right? This way, you don't have to switch gears so much. You don't see people who maybe own a dry cleaning business and a truck driving business. It's like in your case, where you have your real estate business, but then also the non-profit. Is that right, one connects to the other? Mayer Dahan: Yeah, absolutely. There was this very consistent idea that I had many years ago where ... to explain it to you in simple terms, everybody has great ideas, but if you have a great idea, and you just pull it out of the sky, sometimes that standalone idea might not do so well. I think if you have a company,