Lance Cayko on Finding Success Through Life's Ups and Downs

In this episode of Behind the Scenes Stories of Busy Professionals, host Rob sits down with Lance Cayko, a multi-faceted entrepreneur who combines architecture, building, and real estate development. Lance opens up about his journey through personal transformation in 2024-2025, dubbing it his "Rebirth" year as he navigated divorce, new beginnings, and finding love again.

The conversation delves deep into Lance's philosophy on the law of polarity - his belief that every negative experience leads to an equal positive outcome. 

From his humble beginnings working on sugar beet farms in North Dakota to becoming a successful architect and developer, Lance shares how early mentorship and a contrarian spirit shaped his entrepreneurial path.

Lance offers valuable insights into the real estate industry, breaking down the relationships between architects, builders, and developers while explaining the risk-reward dynamics of each role. He also discusses his morning routines, maintaining multiple businesses, and his approach to turning setbacks into fuel for success.

A candid and inspiring conversation about resilience, entrepreneurship, and finding purpose through life's ups and downs.

Catch up with Lance at these links:
https://www.insidethefirmpodcast.com
https://f9productions.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lance-cayko-1227031a

Transcript

 Good morning. Good morning. Welcome. It's  📍 nice to meet you. This is the behind the scenes stories of busy professionals. My name is, you'll get a kick out of this Lance.  Fale Ulu, Robatsi, Nikolau, Mikaele, Pinholo, Taulau, Usofano. I nailed it this time. Yes. Yes. Way to be. You could call me Rob. And this episode is brought to you by High Performance  📍 Ads, but in mine is doing some great things running ads for private equity firms and hitch funds.

They recently raised $1.2 million in 51 days off of $30 in dollars in ad spend, so they've got it going. High performance ads. Check 'em out when you get a chance. If you're looking to raise money 

today. We have Lance Psycho. This dude is a serial entrepreneur Lance is an architect.  He's a builder. Which is so foreign to my brain up in Samoa. We have the huts, we have the small little houses and stuff, but then architecture is a whole different story. So I'm excited to learn from Lance today and to hear how he got started and just the intricacies of what that world is like.

It's so foreign. It's amazing. I hope my son will be architect because I know it's pretty profitable, but that means you have a really special mind. So appreciate you Lance. Thanks for joining us, man. 

Yeah, thanks for the amazing 

intro. I'm happy to be here. The question I want to start off with is It's a fun one, but then that should lead us to where we need to go. 

In the last 12 months of your life, the last 12 months of your life, if you were to turn that into a Netflix special,  yeah, what would that movie be like and what would you say the title would become?  

I would call it Rebirth.  And because I just finished going through a divorce and twice divorce our families my last wife and I were brought together by our children.

So she had two, but two biological children and I had two biological children. I'm the architect. We were literally the new. Level of Brady Bunch because that's how it worked with the Brady Bunch. We even designed built and you know Developed our own custom house to join the families and then eventually the kids hit puberty and tore us apart that's it was I Dated a bunch of a bunch of gals and you know got dipped my feet in the water there So to speak finally came out On the end of it finding, I think, finally my soulmate, the love of my life.

And that's why it's rebirth for me. I, my vision board for this year in 2025, like the number one thing is, hopefully get Jen says yes. When I asked her to marry me in a couple, in just a week from this recording, which is January 28th, 2025. And yeah, it's like new beginnings.

Cause I kinda was, it felt like I was in purgatory. For the last about 18 months, I could feel like my heart and my mind and my soul were just being, I still wasn't fully divorced in the sense of like I had to, we were still trying to sell the house or I was still trying to get bought out of the house that I shared with my.

And until that happened, I really just didn't feel like I was completely free. And that didn't even happen until about six, seven weeks ago. December 12th is when I was released. That feels like my freedom day. It was 12, 12, 24. And I'm like, I get a little  wacky, a little woo with.  Yeah. And I, I thought it was like that's some interesting alignment and usually odd or even numbers are not like what my favorite.

So it was very, they're just not they don't work well for me even as a designer. Like I just, I like the design and threes, fives, sevens, nines. There's a divinity to three, right? The Trinity there's, then there's like the number seven,  number nines divisible by three, all that kind of good stuff.

And then all of a sudden I had these even numbers lining up like that. And it was like. That was actually  proof for me that was the perfect way to end it was on those even digits 12 12 24 and In 2025, I'm you know, I'm really excited about jumping into a new odd year odd oddly numbered year  But I'm re energized and Focus laser focused on some big goals and a lot of them have to do with our own show our own podcast inside the firm Podcast getting that back on track getting our numbers and our listenership back up.

I was just so busy Like I said dating and teaching at two universities and you know catching up with some debt that I incurred from that divorce  That I was I had to I missed a lot of shows and I'm trying to really stay on top of it this year So we can get our numbers up same thing for my fishing show I have a YouTube channel called fishing with Lance where I'm a professional fisherman on the side and  Did he get those numbers back up to I had the full intention of hiring a full time cameraman last year.

And I was able to pay him a little bit, but now this year, finally, I am able to pay him each month. He's going to make, four videos and four shorts for me and keep up with me and all of that good stuff. So yeah that's how I would, I think there's a lot of depth. If somebody actually wanted to pick up the Netflix movie, there's some scandal.

But there's a lot of triumph and I think it'd be a very interesting story. 

Yeah, it sounds like a four part series. Yeah, there you go.  It's definitely a series. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. So I imagine that not only the occupation, but you know what you've built and I don't want to say it like part of your identity, but the architecture piece.

Of who you are was maybe the constant throughout everything from the ups and downs or was that part of the questioning process? Oh, I'm not sure about this either when you're going through it. 

I actually, it actually has to do with the law of polarity. That's for me, what grounds me and centers me when I, and I try to think of the law of polarity through the lens of Marcus Aurelius as meditations and being a modern day stoic. 

So about four or five years ago, I read the book meditations by Marcus Aurelius and I'd heard it. You would just, if you go, if you're in the bro podcasting circles, you just hear about this over and over again. It's like meditations. And prior to that, I had been into, morning routines.

It's always been a very. Big thing in my life to embrace the mornings  have something called like the golden hour That's what I call in. That's what I call it in the morning. You get those first hours before Anybody else gets up. It's a way to stay ahead of the head of the world It's a way to control your time and then honestly everybody else's time and that's for me like the path towards freedom.

 Word the reason I bring up the law of polarity though is if that Sure, through, through the profession of architecture and being a builder and being a real estate developer and actually being divorced prior to that and having my former wife the first one who was the biological mother of my children, like abandoned me and my kids for three years.

And then I was a single dad and all of that  becoming, a actually middle aged person. I'm 41 about to be 42 is when I getting through enough of life. And being able to look in the rear view mirror a little bit and reflect, I realized then doing podcasts like this, what was getting pulled out of me by some of the hosts was I was explaining the law of polarity and finally one podcast host had to, told me, I was, because, the framework would be, I would say, I would tell them a story and I would say every time it seems like something negative happens in my life, like there's this huge positive thing that happens in return, and vice versa too, if it's just all positive stuff.

It almost feels like the rug is going to get pulled out from you underneath you sometimes. And then a negative things happen. They go, Oh, you're describing the law of polarity. And I go, is that a real thing? Because I would even describe it in terms of physics. I was like, you can't have electricity.

If you don't have negative plus positive, you have to have both of those things for there to be a balance with electricity or otherwise it just goes awry. So my children were about a year ago, they were asked, we sat down for dinner and they were asking me, Hey dad, is like anything.

Anything scare you like it seems like nothing scares you and I go, cause I think I'm just a fearless entrepreneur goes out and fisherman outdoorsman does all these things. My daughter will ask me we'll go out in the wilderness, go hiking in the mountains. She'd be like, aren't you scared?

You're scared. You're going to get lost. And I'm like, no, I know the mountains by my, by heart type of thing. And I said the only time I ever get scared guys is when it's just all good stuff happening. And they're like, what?  And I go, yeah, I go because there's been so many  negative things that have happened in my life.

And then in hindsight, after I go through the negative cycle of that part, something super beautiful and positive happens every time on the other end of it. And I go, I actually get real excited when the bad stuff is happening, because I know that I'm going through a fire. I'm going through I'm going through a very difficult period and that eventually I'm going to come out on the other side and it's going to be this beautiful positive thing.

Like one of these quote that I like a lot is a man cannot remake himself without suffering. For he is both marble and the sculptor. That's, I just love that, of ah!  Going through the negative stuff think about a, think about how a diamond is made. Under intense heat and pressure, right? And then you come out, this piece of coal comes out on the diamond side of the thing.

But I, and to, but again, to relate it to what you were suggesting there, Rob, is Yes, if I hadn't been This entrepreneur of having all these experiences in business and then they also relate personally to architect, builder, professor real estate developer, all of those things and having negative things happen to me through clients or, projects and stuff like that and then all it seems like positive comes out in the end of it and that's for me proof of god.

It's proof of like providence proof of that i'm supposed to be on this And then I'm on the right track even if it seems like I'm on the negative track with all of that. 

Yeah, boy that's a really powerful resilience position. I imagine you maybe learned it or it was modeled to it.

There was an example you saw, or do you think it progressed slowly as you matured throughout all the years?  

It progressed slowly. Yeah. Yeah. It's real hard. And that's why I do these, I do interviews like this, Rob, is I just want to, I just want to, I want people to be able to, if they can relate to me  as a young person, and I'm a little bit older than them, and I can maybe save them from over worrying about things and just being a little bit more relaxed or just tell stories about, negative stuff that they could avoid.

In that kind of way and just learn from my lessons. My mom, one of her, there's some phrases I don't like that she says, but there's some phrases that I do and one of the ones is it is what it is. And I've, my girlfriend hates it because she's it's defeatist.

And I go, no, that's, it's the stoic approach to. Being in a negative situation is you go it is what it is now. What what is the next step? How do we move on from beyond here? And that's just been super helpful. It's I always try to see a positive light, even in the worst projects, the worst clients, the worst things that can happen to you.

And look for those, like those fingerprints again of God and divinity and that goodness is flowing still,  

I like the the fact that it's a law. The law of polarity, because  it's a definitive type of belief. When there's a bad, there has to be a good. But on the flip side, when there's a good, just be prepared because there will be a bad.

That, that's pretty powerful. Did, how did the serial entrepreneurial thing happen for you?  bunch of different things. 

Yeah. Great question. If you go, if anybody goes on LinkedIn and they look me up, I'm the only one L A N C E, last name, psycho, C A Y K O. They'll notice that my pot, my preferred pronouns are positive reactionary because that's what I am.

I took me a while. I would, make up other ones just to be a contrarian and all that. And finally I was like, you know what? I'm a positive reactionary. That's my whole thing. And again, it took me like 40 years to go. Name myself that  why I say I'm that is because I think I'm an entrepreneur about because I reacted to my mother and father who were not so I grew up in Northwest North Dakota  and in a very rural area in between a cattle ranch and a sugar beet farm  and. 

One of the things I noticed about my mother and father is they had this  anxiety about money. One of the phrases I didn't like that my mom always said is she says, Having money isn't everything and not having it is. And or She said, Having money isn't,  Having money isn't everything, but she never finished it, right?

And then 10 years ago, I was listening to Kanye West, one of my favorite rappers, and he finally finished that phrase for me, and it was, He finished it with saying having money isn't everything not having it is and I went oh That's yes for me. That's what it is. And it's not that i'm like this person who has all these possessions it's 2025 and I drive a 10 year old suburban with 240 000 miles on it i'm not how you're buying all flashy clothes and everything.

Like I dress pretty plainly black v neck  like jeans from like guests or something like that. And like tennis shoes from Nike. It's not about that. It's what, for me, what money does is it'll, it gives you more moves in the chessboard of life.  It gives you more freedom and it frees you ultimately from the anxiety of not having money.

Watching my dad, Work on the farm growing up. God bless him for that. Cause now like we retained it in the family, it's like generational wealth and we're going to take it over and stuff like that up in North Dakota. And my mom being the majority breadwinner, keeping insurance going, she worked as a dental assistant for 40 years,  like God bless her too, for having that.

But not, they were not risk takers. And I've just always been a natural contrarian and so that's why I think I, I moved in the direction I did in terms of being a serial entrepreneur and starting all these different companies, architecture company, building company, real estate development company, podcasting, going out and teaching at two universities and nonprofit community garden.

All that kind of good stuff is yeah. Is that's why I'm the reason I'm here in terms of being an entrepreneur. Yeah, I actually wanted to be a builder first. Okay. So when I. I tried farming with my dad when I was 13 irrigating sugar beets, which is, it's very hard annual labor. And it wasn't that I was adverse to the manual labor, it was just, I didn't like that kind of labor.

And I didn't like my dad and I didn't get along too well at the same time.  My best friend I was like, Chris I want to quit this job. Do you want it? And he goes, Oh yeah, I would love that. And I go, cool. So the next day I went and told my dad, I'm like, Hey,  it's going to be my last day.

Chris is happy to come tomorrow. It's all good. I'm going to call your best friend, Bruce. Who's a general contractor.  And see if he has any labor jobs for me. I would love to try doing building stuff. And so I called Bruce's best friend and he goes, yeah, sure. I've got a job for you. We're going to we're going to do.

We had a big contract. We're gonna do 80 roofs this summer. We're going to get up at 4 or 5 a. m. have the roof torn off by 10 a. m.  put it back together. By 3 or 4 p. m. and we're done for the day. I'll pay 7. 25, 7. 25 an hour. And you can be my gopher. And I go, cool, what's that? He's oh you're going to go for the things. 

Go for this, go for that. When you're done going for the things, then you can get up on the roof and you can lay shingles and, learn how to be a carpenter. I was the best day and go for it. He ever had it. And he saw some potential in me, I think as a young guy that he didn't see as maybe like the old haggard 

sort 

of guys that he had working for him.

So he pulled me aside about halfway through the summer and he taught me, he gave me some insight that kind of changed my life forever. And it was he says Hey, I'm paying you seven 25 an hour. How much do you think I'm paying? How much do you think I'm charging the client for each hour of your time?

And I go seven 25 an hour and he laughed and I was like, what's so funny? And he goes it's not. That's not how it works.  He was the first person to ever really explain how like a service based business works to me.  He's no, I'm charging. two, three, four times your hourly rate to the client. And I go, why?

And he goes I have overhead. I have a insurance. I got tools. I'd have to go get the work. There's downtime,  there's the risk. And then there's, whatever's leftover after that life, that's profit. That's my reward for taking that big risk.  And  I had I also noticed how he had the opposite.

Relationship with money that my mom and dad did 

there was 

no anxiety about it. It's not like it's not like Bruce had all these possessions or anything that wasn't that was not at all what it was about. It was he wasn't worried about it and he was freed from the anxiety of not having it.

And so I got like this. If anybody, if any of your listeners or you Rob have ever like this, I think you're I heard of Robert Kiyosaki. He wrote a book. It's called rich dad, poor dad. And I didn't read that book until maybe about a decade ago, but after I read it, I went,  Oh, I had the rich dad, poor dad experience.

Very interesting. I was like, Whoa, like what a blessing in disguise. And for me to not know that right away. So yeah that's what kind of led me to. I wanted to be a builder first. I went through, finished, finished high school, went for building construction technology for two years at Wahpeton, got to the, finally excel, finally excelled at school because I got to choose what I wanted to do,  got to the end of that program and I was like, I figured out how to monetize going to school.

I love going to school. I'm good at it for the first time.  And I, and it just clicked. I was looking at the blueprints and I was like if I became an architect,  I would get the clients first and then I could turn them into building clients. I was like.  It's a what a like sustainable kind of vertically integrated business.

I don't even know what that word was or that phrase was back in the back then, right?  And ran straight towards it. So applied to North Dakota State University, 70 miles north, got accepted to the architecture program, again, accelerated in college, graduated top of the class winning the best thesis.

And and during that time too, then I learned about like architect should become. Builders and developers, and that's what kind of made the whole trifecta work for me. So it had been a goal, since my early twenties to get there and be here. So  

would you say an architecture would need a lot of creative side, imaginative or more on the technical type of thought process?

It's a balance actually. So the way I like to describe architecture is that it's a, it's the balance between science and art.  And you really need to be about half and half to be the best, I think. And we haven't even started talking about business wise. I know you mentioned like that, maybe your son wants you like, Oh, I wish my son would be an architect.

Architects only make about five to 10 percent of a construction budget. Builders make 20 to 30%. So where you really want to be is you want to be, I think you want to be both like that, and a lot of architects will complain about it's very ubiquitous in our, my profession of. Why are the builders making money?

Why are the builders? The builders are taking on more risk. The builders are making it a reality It's a harder job like being in a cushy office drawing lines is much easier and I can say that because I wear all three hats and Ultimately if you want to make even if you really want to be wealthy Then you need to actually take them to the final leap and become a real estate developer Then your butt is ultimately like really on the line with you buying up land Taking out a huge massive loan spending all kinds of cash You And hoping a city will even approve the plans, and it could take two, three, four, five years if you're in California, New York, places like that.

That's ultimately where you want to be I think. There's this myth that Hollywood is played with architects making all this money, and it is a sexy profession don't get me wrong.  It made my, it makes, it made my dating life super easy. You just say you're an architect and yeah, and dressing all black and, have a nice smile and have a personality and you're off to the races.



Oh, cause that's interesting. So now, so the real estate developer has the most leverage per se and the earning. 

Yeah,  yep, it's just a relationship of risk versus reward I think.  Developers definitely has way more risks They should get more reward than they do Okay because they're like making the product and selling it and all that plus they're controlling the purse the money and they can beat The architect down they could beat the contractor down.

They're in charge  Minus the bank right and then and then the next person in line who has the most risk Versus reward is the builder and the last is architect. 

Yeah, so then what's the path to the real estate developer? Would you need to go learn the investment side and then also?

The technical side, which I need a builder. I needed to learn a little bit about that language. I need the architect and the construction. Would they need to learn all of those ahead of time? Or can you just find a mentor and that does real estate developer and learn from that person? 

Yeah. I like where you're headed with the mentor.

Yeah. A hundred percent. That's where I would go. Like in hindsight, it's 2020, right? Like where you're, you don't,  if you were to ask me this question prior to us, actually. Becoming real estate developers too and investors. I wouldn't have had a good answer But I think the answer is exactly that is if you can find a mentor if you can find somebody to work with who will who show you the ropes and is not too covetous with like information so it's one of the there's a gentleman I met with about a year ago I met him like maybe gosh almost a decade ago, I think at at a business conference and He moved from Michigan, moved down here and he became like the right hand man of one of the biggest real estate developers and investment holders in Boulder County.

And he worked with him for about a decade. And so when I finally went and had lunch with him after not seeing him for a long time, I go, Ben,  I go, hi, where are you headed next? And he goes, I just spent 10 years in like my own grad school mentoring under this person. He goes, I got paid the whole time.

He goes, it was, I learned so much. And he goes. I want to replicate what he does it, but in my own way. And this is a man who went to business school at like university of Michigan. This is not like he didn't, no architecture, no real estate development, no, no building knowledge and stuff like that.

But he was able to pick it up from the mentor in that kind of way. Cause there really isn't like a school for this sort of thing.  Yeah,  

man. So you're into all those.  What keeps you going? 

What keeps me going? I just have this innate. I think men are particularly blessed with unlimited energy. I think that's one of the things God gave us is if we really, if we take care of ourselves and treat ourselves well, like for me, my morning routine is tries to be very strict.

Wake up between 5, 5, 5 a. m. and 6 a. m. every day. Get up, take a big drink, a big glass of water, put the coffee on. Stretch. I pray the rosary every morning, or at least I try to. And then by the time I'm done with that, coffee's done and I'm on the computer and I start my two golden hours in the morning and get ahead of the world.

That's where I usually do my most creative work to business wise, architecture wise, any kind of not just drawing and stuff like that. So I just have a, and ultimately being entrepreneur.  I think is even more creative than being an architect. Like I, I really like to juice up  and venerate the entrepreneurs out there because I'm like,  people are, they're so creative.

You're making up a new company, right? Even if it's like a variation of a different company, you're making up like how to market. Every day is just so exciting and invigorating. I'm just never bored. With it, with whatever I do, like my girlfriend has asked me, she, she's hell bent on retiring at some point.

I'm like,  not me. Like, why would I especially I'm the boss. I get to do what I want generally, I can make my own hours. Next weekend I'm taking Friday off and Monday off and doing a annual birthday trip where we go up to Fort Peck, Montana and go ice fishing for lake trout.

Stuff like that is is what keeps me going. I just, I really feel blessed. Compared to most people. And I really try to acknowledge that a lot, especially with my son, who doesn't know what he wants to do. He's 20 and I go, man not everybody's like me and my business partner at where at 13, we knew what we wanted to do.

Like we were truly blessed with kind of a beeline path towards where we're headed. 

Yeah, and it sounds like the podcast is gonna start taking off again.  

Yeah, I hope so. Yeah, it's not like it fell off or anything like that. It's just, we didn't have the best numbers last year but it was because we were inconsistent.

And consistency is key with anything, right? Especially when you're doing,  it's even when starting a business or a career,  it's, there's a compounding interest effect of, am I just, can I stick with one thing for an extended period of time? And it's like the tortoise and the hare sort of story of you can be the hare and run as fast as you want, but who wins at the end of the day?

It's like the tortoise who's just slow, steady, consistent, that, that sort of thing.  

Yeah, that's good. Last question I have for you. What's out of all of your life experiences, the. The peaks, the valleys, what would be the biggest encouragement that you would give someone that's just getting started and deciding what they want to do for the future, whether they're young or old and, doing something new?

Yeah. What would be your encouragement to them?  

Oh, man. Again, look for that negative. When the worst thing happens to you in your career, it could probably maybe the next day is going to be the start to the next, to the most positive. In 2008, I graduated at the top of my architecture class, basically like in the top 10 of just architects graduating because of where our university ranked in the rankings.

And I, so I, big bushy eyed, like ready to take on the world and felt like I'd earned my place at this internship in Boulder only to be let down nine months, nine months later, crying, driving home to my wife and calling my grandmother and be like, I got laid off. It's like completely dejected.

I just had a newborn child. So we had two at that point  and. I want to just remind everybody about the Michael Jordan story. So if everybody, I'm a 90s kid and a huge basketball fan then if you grew up in the 90s because it was the golden era of the NBA. And if people don't remember, Michael Jordan got cut from his high school basketball team in between his his junior and senior year. 

Like he didn't make the starting squad. So just like me, I got cut.  I always I really resonated with Michael Jordan having a chip on his shoulder. 

Yeah. 

And then using that chip on your shoulder as fuel, and especially if you're a man and you have this mat, you have this energy about you. Take that negative and put it in your belly. 

Pretend like it's a piece of coal that is burning and it just drives you every single day and march.  And put one foot in front of the other and just keep looking forward.  

That's good. That's good. And remember that the law of polarity will always. Yeah, predict what's going to happen next and be able to own that.

So I appreciate it. Where do we send people to check you out? I think inside the firm. Yeah. Yeah. 

Yeah. Go to inside the firm podcast. com. You can check us out there. We're on YouTube. We're on all the terrestrial platforms, iTunes, Spotify, SoundCloud, all the other good stuff. If you want to keep up with everything I'm doing professionally, go to f9productions.

com. You can sign up to our newsletter and then LinkedIn. I already mentioned, I will link in with anybody. Just type in L A N C E, last name C A Y K O and I'll link in with you. 

F nine, right? Okay, man. I appreciate you guys. Check out inside the firm podcast. F nine productions and yeah, listen and share.

Appreciate you guys. Thanks.