Nora Seastrand interviews John M. Laviter, the founder of Northpoint Asset Management, Inc. about the core ingredient of discipline derived in his youth that drove his success as the founder and CEO who recently sold his company to a private-equity group for one of the highest EBITDAs in his industry.
SALT LAKE CITY, UT / ACCESSWIRE / October 16, 2024 / It was a cool and crisp morning waiting at the airport to interview John M. Laviter, 44, the founder and now retired chairman and CEO of Northpoint Asset Management, Inc. When he and his pilot arrived, we were escorted through a large gate into a restricted area and drove up to his private jet for our trip where I would come to learn about this curious, younger-than-usual retired entrepreneur. He jokes that he's "happily unemployed."
As we flew from Salt Lake City to his second home in Southern California, I asked what was his most important characteristic behind an 18-year run as founder, chairman and CEO of Northpoint Asset Management, Inc. He says "discipline."
John spoke of receiving unsolicited offers to buy his company last year, even though he wasn't planning to sell, he believed the timing was fortuitous out of concern for the future of the U.S. economy. John sold his majority stake in the company to LP First Capital, a private-equity group out of Austin, Texas, for one of the highest EBITDA multiples in the national single-family residential property management industry. According to LP First Capital, Northpoint is a top-10 national competitor. At the time he sold in December 2023, his company had hundreds of employees with 44 office locations in 23 U.S. states, $178 million in sales, and approximately $5 billion in real estate assets managed. I asked how it was going post transition and he said "I've learned a lot about who you can and can't trust." An interesting response and perhaps a good topic for another day.
To my question about the most important characteristic that drove success, John says discipline is crucial for young college students and aspiring career professionals, especially entrepreneurs. I asked him about his own discipline, and was surprised to hear that his parents growing up were "quite hands off." Instead, he said it came from 10-years of intense-competition focused training by his Sensei(s) in the martial art of Shotokan Karate.
Intrigued, I asked if he had any discipline before he started training in Karate. He explained "not at all," and that he came into Karate as, what he called himself "a snail," and "unsettled" from growing up in a divorced family, without form or the rigor of discipline. But his father got him into Karate when he was 7-years old. Soon, as he got into the repetition of kneeling down before each practice, reciting the words to the Sensei "character, sincerity, dedication, etiquette, self-control," in his Dojo in downtown Riverside, California, under Senseis Ray Dalke, Kevin Warner, and Hiroshi Allen, all high ranking black belts, he began to transform into what he is today. In looking into this, Mr. Ray Dalke has been known through the Riverside Sports Hall of Fame as the highest ranking American in the martial art of Shotokan Karate.
"These men were warriors," John said, "and they trained me to be the same with the key ingredient of discipline in my early formative years." John went on to explain that it's a critical time of development for children between the ages of about 8 to 16-years old. "During those years, I was under intense scrutiny practicing kata and kumite, and as Sensei Warner would repeatedly tell me ‘practice doesn't make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect' and thus I was taught to perfect each movement of my body, my breathing, even where my eyes were looking. To be totally precise. To focus my mind." John quoted one of his favorite quotes by what he called "the father of Shotokan karate," Japanese Master Ginchin Funakoshi (1868-1957), who said "the ultimate aim of the art of Karate lies not in victory or defeat, but in the perfection of the character of its participants." John certainly took this to heart.
John achieved his first-degree black belt when he was 13-years old in 1993 and went on to win first place with his kata "Unsu" in a Shotokan National Championship in 1995 held in Calgary, Canada, and then later in 1997, he took third place in kumite at a Shotokan National Championship held in Riverside, California.
"I attribute the same discipline learned during those formative 10-years to the focus that I applied in both college and career," he says. John graduated college with Academic Honors from Brigham Young University, a distinction only about 1% of the graduating class receives, and then went on to graduate from Harvard Business School and earn an MBA degree from the International School of Management in 2010. He founded Northpoint Asset Management, Inc. in 2006.
John feels that discipline is the required ingredient to become a master of anything. When he achieved third place in the Shotokan championships in 1997, he says there was a moment during the fight when he seemed to "lose any fear of the outcome and the crowd disappeared" in his peripheral vision. He described that his moves became "sharpened due to a keen concentration and focus derived not from that moment or even adrenaline, but from the years of intense training." His eyes widened as he described the proverbial "beating" he received in training.
I then realized 90-minutes had passed when we were circling the John Wayne airport and I had to buckle up. The sun started to shine through one of the side windows as the airplane rotated and both John and I turned our faces from the concentration of the bright rays, and he remarked "notice how focused the sun is when shown through a convex surface? That's exactly what my training in Shotokan did, it focused me through discipline, and I would just encourage parents to get their kids engaged during those impressionable years in any sport or challenging activity that forces them to focus and develop a serious mind, allowing discipline to become an infectious characteristic in all they do."
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SOURCE: Seastrand Publishing Co.