Tai DeSa
WHAT CAN A FIRST-CLASS BUSINESS DEGREE AND MILITARY TRAINING DO FOR YOU?
MARIA GEFFERS
Talk about your background. Do you remember the moment you knew what you wanted to do in life?
TAI DESA
I’m the oldest of eleven children. My mother is from Vietnam, and met my father when he served in the Army there. I grew up in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. I attended Catholic school and graduated first in my class. My parents were really into academics and thanks to them I became a very competitive person.
During my senior year, when I talked about college with my guidance counselor, I told him I wanted to go to the number one business school in America. Not knowing what that was, he looked it up for me, and it was the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. He asked me if I wanted to consider that elite university for my master’s degree and go locally for my bachelor’s.
I told him I wanted to go right to Wharton, so I applied for early decision and was accepted. Needless to say, I had to work very hard there. In high school I could study for a test the night before and ace it. I could not do that at the Wharton School of Business. If I only studied the night before I would get Cs and maybe a lucky B. It was a struggle. I had to pay attention in class, which was new to me. I had to participate. I had to study weeks in advance and stop procrastinating. Wharton forced me to up my game.
TOM GEFFERS
What was the typical school year like there? Did you take regular courses and then courses related to business and economics? What was a typical week like in the Wharton School of Business?
TAI DESA
There were about 2,500 students in the class of 1997 at the University of Pennsylvania, of which 400 were members of the Wharton School of Business. We had a certain number of classes that had to be taken at Wharton, with Wharton professors, that were business oriented. They were classes about economics, finance, statistics, and entrepreneurship. We also took some liberal arts courses. Psychology was something I was always fascinated with, so I ended up minoring in it. My major was in entrepreneurial management.
TOM GEFFERS
After you graduated from college you decided to pursue a Naval officer candidate school. How did you find that school and what was your experience like?
TAI DESA
In the few months before graduating from the Wharton School, my classmates were talking about going to consulting firms either in New Jersey or on Wall Street. A few were talking about opening businesses. None of that felt right to me. I felt like I was wimp and I needed to learn leadership and toughen up. Two weeks before graduating from college I went into each of the Armed Services recruiting stations in in Stroudsburg and I said, "What have you got? I want to see the world. I want to learn leadership. I want to serve."
This was in the spring of 1997, and I had a sinking feeling the next war was around the corner because we were enjoying peace and prosperity under the Clinton administration. The stock market was racing to new highs, and the country was several years removed from the Persian Gulf war. I felt like I needed to serve, learn about leadership, and see the world. I liked the opportunities the Navy recruiters presented me, and I signed up.
MARIA GEFFERS
They must have loved getting you from Wharton. You must have been a prized possession there.
TAI DESA
At first, they didn't know, so they signed me up as an enlistee and not an officer. I didn't know any better. My father had enlisted in the Army. But the day I signed up to go to boot camp to receive a lot less pay than a college graduate would potentially get, especially a Wharton graduate, I learned I had made a mistake. I happened to see my best friend’s older sister, who had served as a Naval officer, and she told me to go back on Monday and tell them I wanted to be in the officer program. She told me not to take no for an answer.
So, I went back and said, "I was told about an officer program." They apologized to me and said, "That's a different person in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. You have to go see them." I did, and I signed up as an officer. At the officer candidate school, they had a lovely lady who was very proper. She would teach us how to be a gentleman or a lady. It was a lot harder than the movie An Officer and a Gentleman paints it to be. In the movie, Richard Gere has a lot of free time to court Debra Winger. In real life, we didn’t have time to go off base. We were marching around, doing pushups in the sand, and getting yelled at. We didn’t have time to leave the base and date.
I found officer candidate school to be even tougher than college, and a personal tragedy made it even harder for me. We had just completed the fourth week, which is the toughest week. It’s like hell week. It was Halloween night, and they let us go off the base, so I had a ton of pizza. It was great, until I got word that my best friend died that night in a terrible car crash. He’s the one whose sister had told me about the officer program. It was devastating for me. And I couldn’t even take a break without quitting. DOR is an actual term. It means drop on request. If you DOR, you quit. You can never get back into officer candidate school if you leave. So, I refused to quit.
TOM GEFFERS
How awful that must have been. What was the time commitment for that school and what did they require once you got out?
TAI DESA
I had to serve a minimum of eight years in the Navy, four of which must be active duty. If you’re relieved from active duty in the latter four to get a job, you have to be at the very least, on inactive reserves. When you’re an inactive reserve you’re not drilling or wearing a uniform, but in the event of a major war, you could be called up. I did active duty for six and a half years and inactive reserves for nine months. I missed the training, so I signed up as a drilling reservist and did that for nine months. Then I was honorably discharged in 2008.
MARIA GEFFERS
How did 9/11 affect you?
TAI DESA
I was forward deployed with an intelligence unit in Japan.
When 9/11 happened I woke up at 4:00 a.m. on September 12th in Japan, which is 13 hours ahead. I saw on Yahoo News that the attacks happened, and immediately went into our base, which was locked down. Prior to 9/11 the military seemed a bit more relaxed. People worked from around 8:00am to 4:00pm, and a lot of them would focus on how fast they ran their biannual 1.5 mile run and what they did to stay physically fit.
After 9/11, we were at war, and we were deployed. I ended up doing three combat deployments, and in 2003 President George W. Bush signed his executive order for the invasion of Iraq. I was involved in the first year of that. I had joined the military, in part, because I felt like a wimp. I learned great leadership under fantastic leaders and officers. I learned so much and developed a lot of self- confidence from that. I was put in a lot of situations that were extremely trying. I also learned the value of hard work. There were times I would work 24 hours straight with no sleep. It's what we had to do.
I toughened up. I see that whole experience from officer candidate school through 9/11 and the Iraq war as something that was profoundly great for me. I learned about teamwork, leadership and mental toughness. During my first tour in the Navy, I spent two years on the admiral’s staff as a junior intelligence officer on the USS Kitty Hawk, which was based out of Japan. We sailed around the Pacific, dealing with North Korea, China, and things like that. Then we sailed to the Persian Gulf to deal with Saddam Hussein and Operation Southern Watch, which was before the war in Iraq.
TOM GEFFERS
How did your education and leadership skills help you become a leader in the real estate business?
TAI DESA
I learned at The Wharton School and then in the Navy that everything rises and falls on leadership. You can just look at what the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are getting paid. There are ones that don't do a good job and they can get fired very quickly, and there are ones who do a great job and get paid hundreds of millions of dollars. When I first left the Navy in 2004 it was to become a full-time real estate investor. I became a real estate broker because I saw it as a way for me to find more real estate deals.
As it turned out, other real estate investors as well as people looking to buy or sell a home for themselves came to me saying, "Tai, you're really knowledgeable. Can you be my agent?" That’s when I realized I had a business opportunity there. I opened my own brokerage in Pennsylvania in 2008 and then joined Keller Williams in 2009 because of their great training opportunities. Keller Williams was named by Training Magazine the number one training company in the world across all industries. If you must choose between job opportunities and one is higher paying while the other offers the best training, always pick the one that offers the best training. When you are trained well, eventually you will earn more money than what the other position offered. Keller Williams offered world class training.
I became a real estate broker when the housing bubble burst. I hired some partners and we helped hundreds of people with hundreds of transactions, so they avoided foreclosure. We did have some that failed, which was tough. Then I had the opportunity to run a Keller Williams office in Lehigh County, and we took it to number one in the marketplace. I was the principal broker there and the CEO.
Then my wife, Amira, and I, chose to move to Knoxville, Tennessee in 2018, and created our own brokerage, called Harb DeSa Realty. We’ve also kept our Keller Williams business in Pennsylvania, so we run simultaneous real estate brokerage business in both states. And we're active real estate investors as well. We buy slight fixer-uppers, fix them up quickly, and then rent them out.
TOM GEFFERS
Lehigh Valley is one of the fastest economically growing areas in the country as is Tennessee. Everyone is moving down there for opportunity and tax reasons. How did you do that with a team in Pennsylvania? Were you in contact going back and forth?
TAI DESA
Keller Williams taught us so much, even how to build an expansion business, where you can be in another state and run a business. We have a showing assistant for Pennsylvania, so if we are not physically present there, which is most of the time, and we have buyers, we can have a showing assistant go and open the doors for us. Through Keller Williams I learned most of the value an agent provides is through negotiation and advocating for their clients. That can be done virtually. You don't have to be physically present to negotiate for a buyer or a seller. For example, we sold three houses we had never seen in Pennsylvania to three separate buyers we never met.
We provided tremendous value to them because we negotiated, advocated, and guided them through the process. Our showing assistant got them into the houses they wanted to see. Then we have a network of people we've built up, like home inspectors and mortgage professionals, who can help those clients.
MARIA GEFFERS
It takes skill, time, and relationships. You've taken your training from Wharton and your leadership, grit, and working under pressure from the military service, and then gleaned that into a successful real estate career. Is there one mistake or misstep you made in your journey, and how did you face it, move on, and build from it?
TAI DESA
I had massive business failures as a young real estate investor. I left the Navy and took my life savings of $125,000 and I jumped into buying properties. The first property I bought was in inner city Philadelphia, sight unseen, at an auction. I was foolish not to be represented by a realtor and it was a great learning experience for me. It was so bad that one of my tenants killed another tenant in the building five weeks after I bought it, and I had to testify at the murder trial.
Then I compounded my mistakes. I was confident, having been a Naval officer, having been tested, but I was new to real estate. People must be brave enough to be bad at something new, so I was terrible at real estate when I first started. I didn’t bet on myself enough. I tried to build up my confidence in an area where I was new and took on a lot of business partners. Having business partners isn’t a bad thing, my wife is now my business partner, and we make it happen. But I picked business partners to make up for my weaknesses, and I would have been better off consulting with a lawyer, finding a good mentor, or hiring a real estate coach.
With partners you’re really giving up a lot of profit and control of the business. I had partners who were writing $40,000 checks out of our joint account without consulting me, because they believed that they were doing what was best. We had different standards. I spent so much time fighting with partners, being pulled in different directions, while trying to grow the company in my image when they were trying to grow it in their image. I should have been the CEO of my own business with no partners, just advisors to guide me. I would have saved myself a lot of heartache and trouble.
I ended up squandering my entire $125,000 life savings in a short time, and then I took on massive debts in my own name and my company name. As the housing bubble burst and things got worse my partners and I diverged on how we wanted to run the business. I defaulted on all my debts, which were in the mid six figure range. I never declared bankruptcy, even though I could have. I never was foreclosed upon, even though it could have happened to some of my properties. I thought, “You got yourself into this mess, you can get yourself out.”
TOM GEFFERS
Is there anything else that you would like to share?
TAI DESA
For those who are going to college, stay in touch with your professors and classmates. Looking back, I did not tap into all the resources that were available to me at The Wharton School. I should have spent more time in college asking great questions and building deeper relationships because there were a lot of smart people in my classes and a lot of highly intelligent professors too. The most famous graduate of The Wharton's class of 1997, my classmate, is Elon Musk.
MARIA GEFFERS
That would be a good contact to have! Thank you for sharing such valuable insights about your career and leadership.
