Gary Pinkerton welcomes graffiti expert Timothy Kephart to the show. He shares how he was introduced to graffiti and the difference between gang graffiti and tagging graffiti. Timothy also gives his #1 piece of advice for entrepreneurs, starting your own business, and shares insight into what it takes to persevere in a successful business.
Announcer 0:04
Welcome to the heroic investing show. As first responders we risk our lives every day our financial security is under attack. Our pensions are in a state of emergency. A single on duty incident can alter or erase our earning potential instantly and forever. We are the heroes of society. We are self reliant and we need to take care of our own financial future. The heroic investing show is our toolkit of business and investing tactics on our mission to financial freedom.
Gary Pinkerton 0:39
Hello, and welcome to Episode 116 of the heroic investing show, Episode 116. On this show, we focus on the unique challenges faced by members of the armed services, and first responders. But we also focus on those that are common to all investors, like how to secure your asset, how to get best investment returns, how to partner with individuals on the ground teams for rental properties in states that are distant from where you currently live. How do you find a team that will work in your best interest, and a team that will help you secure an asset that you have spent a lot of time, effort and money in putting on the ground? So we help our listeners put in place dependable safe investments? You know, often we talk about real estate, it’s not the only option, a paradigm life with Patrick Donahoe, I talk to clients about all kinds of alternative investments, but specifically thinking about rental properties. Certainly the focus that Jason Hartman talks about with his audience, and so and co hosting with Jason, I’m obviously a very big believer in real estate and my wife and I own, you know, a tremendous amount now for us compared to what we looked like to you know, a decade ago. But it doesn’t have to be just rental properties. But in this specific episode, and certainly on this podcast, we focus on what I believe is the strongest of the alternative and passive investments real estate. On this episode, it came pretty close to being a 10th episode off topic, conversation when we were finished. I’m talking to In this episode, graffiti expert, Timothy Kephart. So you might wonder why in the world, and certainly graffiti is typically done on real estate, you know, it’s done on somebody’s property. But what does that have to do with us in running rental properties? Well, I found it to be a fascinating discussion. And in the end, I believe that it really is in direct alignment. It’s not a 10th episode off topic. It’s in direct alignment with what we’re talking about here. And specifically, what Timothy talks about, that I found this to be fascinating, was really three things that make this important for you. He talked about how to start, you know how to create a startup business, and he gave some great advice there about how you, you stumble into it. And you have to slog through a lot of work becoming an expert in your field. He also talks about, you know, how to protect our assets. And so, I mean, yes, they can put graffiti on your rental real estate property and reduce its value, you can also end up with some gang activity in you know, in your neighborhood. And knowing that this service is out there, you know, will enable you to use his service or services like it to help the authorities to get rid of the activity, so they don’t go put the graffiti on your property. But more importantly, so there’s not a shooting at your property. And you’re many of you out there may say, Well, I’m not gonna have a property in that situation, sometimes the neighborhood changes, and it comes to find you. I mean, you don’t want to purchase your property. In a bad neighborhood, you just have to be holding it when the neighborhood turns bad. And I’ve seen things like that, in one of the cities, St. Louis, where I own properties, you know, the neighborhoods kind of wave and wander back and forth. And you always have to pay close attention to which direction is your neighborhood going? Well, you can help it nudge it in the right direction, knowing that these capabilities that these techniques and that these resources exist, you know, he just gave us a fascinating look into the criminal mind of gangs and why they do graffiti to start with. And I think that that’s just a really interesting aspect of this whole thing. But listen, I have to tell you, the audio quality on this one is perhaps the most challenging one to overcome, that I’ve ever done with one of my podcasts so far, you know, unlike Jason, who’s, you know, recording his often in a helicopter in the Grand Canyon. I stick pretty typically to my sound studio here in my office. And so one side of the acoustics is generally pretty good. But what happened on this one, and is too long of a story to worry about and talk about but a general you know, I use an audio recorder that triggers off of the phone system that I’m using here on my computer with the incoming call. The individual that I called for the podcast, and the recorder was offline, and I saw that it had crashed very early in the conversation. But actually, before we started doing what we were going to record as the podcast, and as we were starting it up, I quickly launched my webinar recorder, and the one that I use for my meetings that paradigm life. And so what I caught was his voice coming out of the speakers, and recording through my microphone. So if I’d known for sure that this podcast recorder wasn’t working, I would have stopped everything, of course, and and started it again. But I thought there was a 50% chance that was running, and it was not. So I spent a long time because I thought this was such a good episode. Such a unique episode, I didn’t think we could recreate it very well. So I spent some time with some video and audio recording editing software, to get it back into something that you can at least understand what we’re saying. So as I point out, there’s some challenges. And actually, when we go into this one, I’ll remind you at the very end that we kind of just launch right into Timothy talking, there’s not a real introduction there on that one. So, as I said, it’s it’s really an interesting thing, what Timothy has done here. So first, let’s talk about his company. His company is called graffiti tracker, just the two words graffiti tracker, and you can look him up at I think it’s graffiti tracker dotnet. You know, the nice description on the website about this, and he does a much better job. And our interview, is that graffiti tracker provides clients with GPS enabled digital cameras to use to photograph incidents of graffiti. And the photos are uploaded to his secure web based system and analyzed within 24 hours of submission. So the train analysts and the software itself, read the graffiti and input the intelligence into the system. And they can identify whether the graffiti is gang related, and can alert law enforcement to potential threats. It’s analyzed nearly 2 million images at the date of my reading here. So pretty interesting, very interesting thing, and he essentially created this entire industry. I know most of us think that NSA is out there with cameras, you know from space, analyzing everything, and immediately being able to interpret what they’re seeing. I really don’t think it’s quite that good. If it was there would be no graffiti out there, there would be no acts of violence, right? We’d be able to stop them all with real time situations. You know, I forgot that the term but it’s right at the tip of my tongue, but you all will probably remember it. But when you’re you know, when they’re trying to prove that you’re not a robot, often they’ll have you determine which images have street signs on them, which ones have storefronts, when what that’s actually doing is it’s helping improve the algorithms of you know, the automatics software, which is taking images and interpreting them right. So we’re helping clarify or confirm whether they’re getting the images correct or not. So kind of interesting, but it goes to prove that Skynet has not taken over yet as it as it did in Terminator. Right. So this gentleman software, though, with human intervention, has the ability to really link things together. It’s like a fingerprint that a gang has and so why do they do that? Why do they, you know, put it out there and admits there brag about their activities on walls that they’ve killed someone you know, or that they’ve, you know, damaged something or taken over something your their criminal activity in a mural on the side of Islam? It is, well, why would you do that? Well, it’s interesting into the psychology of gangs and criminals. And that’s something that Timothy gets into a bit in our discussion here. You know, he kindly shirts a lot of great advice for us on how to run businesses, how to protect your real estate, and how to avoid trouble with some nefarious individuals. So again, I just want to have one last reminder, as we transition into the actual podcast interview, that there is no separate introduction, it was just a result of what I had to work with. But we’re gonna launch right in here. And the question that leads up to what you hear Timothy talking about, was me asking him, how did he get into such a unique industry? And actually, the industry didn’t exist? So the question I should have asked was, how did you know that you should create this industry and have such a successful company? Everybody’s company looks successful afterwards? And Tim talks about that as well. That, yeah, it looks easy now. So again, he’s responding to my question of how did you end up in this industry and getting started here at all, and he takes us back to when he was first going to college. Please enjoy this interview. And Timothy, answering that specific question. Here we are with Timothy Kephart.
Timothy Kephart 10:00
I got accepted to Cal State Long Beach. And I didn’t know anything about graffiti. And graffiti to me was I knew nothing about it. So I moved to California in 1999. And they started going to college there, and I do my Masters there. And it was a job posting in the criminal justice hallway for the same crime analyst. Part time, 20 hours a week, $20 an hour. That’s perfect for grad students. So I went and applied, and I got the job. And then I go in on the first day of the job, and I said, Great, welcome before. And here’s the grant that we got to better understand graffiti. So good luck. And I said, What, there was no mention of this at all. But what had happened was they had applied for the city and applied for the city of Carson had applied for a school based Partnership Grant. And the idea was to understand this graffiti problem that the city was experiencing, and if there was a better way to address the problem, but nobody ever told me that he interviewed for. And I didn’t know anything about graffiti at all. But you know, I was young and tenacious. And so I was just hungry for something. And so I went across the street, because the city of Carson contracts their police services with the LA County Sheriff’s Department. So I went across the street to the sheriff’s station, the Carson sheriff’s station and ended up talking to a gang detective. And they said, Look, I, you know, we’re gonna start taking pictures of all this graffiti. I don’t know anything about this stuff. Can you help me out? And I was very, very fortunate. The guy was really super cool. And he said, Yeah, you know, I’m really busy, but I’ll see what I can do. And it’s one of those things where when people tell you, yeah, they’re busy, they’re probably really going to help you out as opposed to the ones say, Oh, yeah, no problem. Absolutely. And then you never hear from him again. He and I just basically sat down and started going over the different pictures. And he explained to me what I was looking at what I was reading. And so once he sort of unlocked the language for me, and I could read it. That’s when I started to do the research on it. And I realized there was all this hidden communication that was there in plain sight. That because technology at the time, because of course, this was back in 2000. And we were taking pictures with the Sony Maverick and what you put the third in the three and a half inch desk inside the camera was a real old
Gary Pinkerton 12:12
Yeah, yeah.
Timothy Kephart 12:14
And so we would go and get those in, when I was looking at it, I realized that because they had not been really photographing this, they were losing all this intelligence value is the crux of a master’s thesis was I looked at 1000s of images of graffiti. And what I realized was that, within this language benefit by tapping into this language, because they could find out who the most active taggers were in a specific geographic area over a specific time period, you could also find out who they associated with, because only a certain number of Tigers would associate with other ones. And so you sort of got this nexus of relationship superfine that was there. And then on the game side, I propose there was five ways in which games are communicating with gravity. And that if you capture that, and tap into that information, you could use it for to prove motive for murder and murder investigations or other criminal investigations, you could see which gang members associated with one another because even though in the police records, they may have a gang as having saved 400 or 300 members, active members, there was only like three or four or five that would associate the other with their graffiti, where they would put their names together up on the wall with the graffiti. And so when you started to see that relationship make sense, do you actually realize that these gang members even within the game, there was small groups that would hang out together. So if one person was involved in some sort of criminal activity, and they hit accomplices, you could turn to the graffiti to see who else was involved in that. So there was just all this tremendous amount of intelligence there. That partly because of lack of knowledge on law enforcement for over the years, and also a big part of it was a lack of technology. This sort of just been ignored for the longest time.
Gary Pinkerton 14:02
So now you’ve got technology that will kind of match different artwork with the individual you can see influence from others. Almost like, like we do with writing nowadays as well, I guess, right?
Timothy Kephart 14:13
Yeah. It really comes down to the monitor. And, for example, in the title of graffiti, the whole motivation for it is fame and notoriety, right, john doe is going to take on a nickname. And that monitor that he adopts is going to be that he’s gonna want to market that advertise as much as possible. So by tracking it, that actually becomes his, his motivation becomes his ability, because every single time he puts up in your feed, what we found and this later research that I had conducted is that they were doing refeeding and small geographic locations. So you might have for example, a sleeve Snoopy would be at moniker, Snoopy would would only put up with graffiti and within say like a five or six block radius most most of the fee will be contained to that small I have a few outliers here and there. But the idea that he was going to go all over Southern California, and he had a few outliers that would do that. But for the most part, they pretty much stayed within a small location that was centered around their house, where they worked and where they went to school. That made it a lot easier to go after those individuals. Because now not only do you know who’s doing the most damage, you can see the geographically what small area they are associated in as far as where they’re doing their damage. And then you could go into the schools, and the teachers and the principals and stuff. They knew who this kid was because the kid was writing the book bag and stuff, but they weren’t talking with the local law force, because they simply didn’t know that there was a reason to. And so what was happening. And what we found that a lot of seeds we started working with and doing this is that by tracking it, they were able to not only focus in on those that are doing the most damage, but they could also be able to show when it comes to the court, hey, this person did 150 or 200 pieces of graffiti, and it costs us 5000 $10,000, we want to get that money recovered. And it made it much more stronger argument to the courts to show this person had cost us this kind of money. Whereas prior to that what was happening was that they basically would like sit on the wall and stay out. And they might catch one kid, and they would arrest him and they’d send it to the courts with just one count of vandalism, HELOC, which really didn’t take any industry taken serious, because why would one counter vandalism, it’s not as big of a deal versus if you send the case that’s got, say 150 pounds of vandalism
Gary Pinkerton 16:35
Makes sense. And and so what we’ve been talking about so far is just the cost of destroying private or public property with putting, you know, the art on and having to revitalize that. But there’s a bigger side of this that you mentioned about what the gangs and being able to use it as their fingerprint to track individuals and to kind of tie pieces together. And I know that you know, an introduction, I’m sure I covered a little bit about master’s degree in criminal justice, but but the fact that you’re, you know, a court certified expert, and have been testifying in homicide trials and other major trials like that. So there’s a much bigger aspect than simply the monetary impact of doing the art, right?
Timothy Kephart 17:14
Yeah, because with those kind of cases, lead to a couple of cases and I’ve worked on in the last couple of years over with the homicide angle, is you’re able to actually look at the graffiti and see, okay, this person, on this day said they were going to kill a rival gang member. And sure enough, they have killed that person. So, or at least that’s what the charges are. So the graffiti supports that charge by showing them these dates here. This is when they sent these threatening messages. And I jokingly say this, but graffiti is one of the very few crimes, if not the only crime, where they actually sign their name.
Gary Pinkerton 17:49
Yeah.
Timothy Kephart 17:51
They sort of package it really nice, really. There’s not too many crimes out there, where they actually sign their name as clearly as that. So yeah, in terms of other aspects, the one aspect of courses is the vandalism side. But then the other aspect is on the gang side, you can start to see what new gang members are coming up, you know, you really sort of get a nice roadmap in terms of gang activity, through the graffiti, you’re able to see what’s really going on not only membership wise, but other criminal enterprises might be involved in which gangs are really out of nowhere, they’re spiking their final threats to one another, you know, gangs may have a rivalry. But if all of a sudden out of nowhere, you’re seeing 20 or 30 threats over the course of a two day period that you hadn’t seen before. That’s information that law enforcement can benefit from, because now they can adjust their resources accordingly, in hopes of preventing a kind of a shooting that may have occurred as a result of some sort of strike that’s going on.
Gary Pinkerton 18:46
Interesting. So you’ve brought to light and I’m sure this is happening in other cities across the country, other law enforcement organizations, you know, one of the things I’ll pause it and comment that, you know, our listeners are predominantly real estate investors or individuals interested in that. So there’s a little bit of a tie in here for real estate, like, you know, getting some graffiti and on your properties, and you know, what resources are out there to help you. But we’ve also got, of course, a lot of first responders and police officers, firefighters that are in trying to protect property and individuals from the gangs or, or from just the damage of the property. So certainly, we really appreciate this and it’s nice every once in a while to get something that’s just kind of not in right field, but a little bit different than just how to best financier for property. So thanks to me again, I want to make sure I stuck that in there one more time for joining us. You know, one of the things though, is that as this becomes more, you know, popular or more understood about what kind of technology we have, you know, I’m sure when a criminal is writing in their you know, their memoirs are their their journal or something keeping notes of planning their event, if they start to believe that maybe this stuff is going to be found and held against them that they’ll stop doing it. I mean, are you seeing the same kind of changes occurring with graffiti?
Timothy Kephart 20:01
in terms of that they know it’s being attractive. You know, there may be some that want to do that. But as crazy as it is, and it’s one of those circumstances where even though they know that there’s a chance they’re going to get caught, they still are motivated with the fame and notoriety aspect. So I’m never going to get caught, you know, not to put this in the same perspective of what has happened recently in Texas, but the kind of went into a FedEx location where there’s cameras everywhere. I don’t know if it was Hoover’s or what it was. But for some reason, he thought he could just mail bombs in the store, like FedEx, where there’s cameras everywhere. It’s still what it did it and obviously, that was his undoing. It sounds like that was the reason why he was called. So you know, I’m saying like, even though there’s a high likelihood that they’re tracking this graffiti, and I’m going to get caught, it’s like, I’m going to take my tunes just because they’re never going to catch me you sort of believe your own your own mythology, if you will, in your head that you’re never going to get caught. And so their desire for the fame and notoriety ultimately becomes their undoing, because the more they put the graffiti out, the easier it is to find out who they are.
Gary Pinkerton 21:06
Okay, good points. It led me to another question and on the graffiti itself, to the individuals. So you talked about a monitor? Do you find like in more of the homicide cases, or the more violent cases? Are they warning? Or you know, when they say they’re gonna go kill someone, for example? Is that a warning? Is it like you said hubris you think where they’re just saying, you know what, I’m going to tell you, I’m going to do it, and there’s nothing you can do about it anyway. What do you see that is?
Timothy Kephart 21:31
I, you know, I think it’s a combination, I think in one aspect, that is a warning. And that’s the difference in motivation between the game and ruffini versus tagging, to get your feet either motivated for fear and intimidation. So the whole concept of gang graffiti has a different comes from a different place in terms of motivation, as opposed to the title. So I think it’s, it is kind of a warning, I think it’s sort of a flexing of the muscles, if you will, but do it through through graffiti, and I don’t think it’s something where they really feel like it’s gonna be, something’s gonna come back on them, or they may just be so angry, they don’t care. I mean, there’s always that aspect that exists as well. It’s also such a cultural thing, in that gang culture, to put the graffiti up. When I propose tracking graffiti in the first place, what I, the thing that stood out to me most was that all of this information was out there, technology had now jumped ahead and forward enough to where especially now, 18 years later, we can capture with a cell phone instantaneously. So the abatement process never slows down at all that’s continually painted over, which is good. But now you’re capturing this information, and you’re just unlocking all of this information you’ve never had access to before. And when you look at that you can actually even utilize that you’re feeding in a lot more different ways than just saying, okay, it’s for somebody, it’s just a bunch of young punks that are putting up graffiti, it’s, well, no, there’s, there’s actually a lot of intelligence there, that now law enforcement can tap into. So when it comes to the game side of it, you can even see that, okay, these are the threads that are coming out. And a lot of the games will have like this is just human behavior, if you will, there’s a sort of a normal level of noise. And then also you’ll see like a burst of loud noises or spikes. And that’s what we’re sort of looking for on the game side, in terms of trying to be proactive to prevent violence from occurring. Is there some sort of immediate spike that we didn’t see before? Is that an indicator that there’s going to be a problem this weekend or the next couple of weeks? Is there going to be a problem? So it’s trying to instead of be so reactionary, to Okay, shootings occurred, and we send out the police, okay, now we send out again, unit, and they investigate instead of that, it’s like, okay, we think of shooting massacre this week, based off of this tremendous spike here that we’ve seen in the violent threats and that sort of stuff. So that’s, that’s kind of the hope is to get ahead of the curve. And to prevent that, and then, you know, like to tie it back into we’re talking about real estate, investing in housing is one of the things and this just drives me absolutely insane when I see this is that a lot of times, smaller communities, or even actually, probably bigger cities, they sort of just look at your fees, like it’s the cost of doing business as a city. It when I see that, I look at that I’m thinking, Okay, you spending over a million dollars a year to just paint over something that you don’t have to have, you’re driving down the cost of home value. There’s so many ancillary things that are occurring to property values and communities as well, that is sort of like it’s ignored. That. Yes, it’s a it’s a lower level crime. Of course, it’s nothing to the level of what homicide is, but I don’t think they realize that it actually signals to a lot of people. I don’t think I want to live in this neighborhood. Yeah. Yeah. My wife and I just bought a house and when we were looking to buy a house out here in Vegas, I mean, she’s born and raised here. So it’s a little different with her but for me, that was one of the things I was absolutely looking at is is the graffiti up around the area, because if there’s a lot of graffiti, I’m not Hi, there, you get away
Gary Pinkerton 25:01
Great point. That goes directly to relevance for all the real estate investors out there, not just those of us that are in law enforcement that are followers, I purchased some properties in St. Louis. And in Memphis and some other towns that do have those areas of town, most big cities have that. And of course, as a real estate investor, you want to be near a Metropolitan Statistical Area, because that’s where the jobs are. But you don’t want to have your property in a in a neighborhood that’s either going downhill or already in that area. So I’ve certainly done the same thing you talked about about a primary residence and your wife’s response, I look at the same thing as my investment property, right? Because I mean, that’s your family’s wealth that you’re tying up in this building, put it in the wrong neighborhood, you can be in big trouble. And so I remember, I take a look at the same stock, you know, does the city have complacency about it? You know, is this graffiti been up here forever? Is new graffiti coming? Like you say, you know, what is the kind of trend in that specific area and men a couple of blocks, like you mentioned, with where people do their graffiti, a couple of blocks makes a huge difference in a major city as far as violence and safety of your asset.
Timothy Kephart 26:05
Yeah. You know, out here in the southwest, I grew up in Philadelphia, it’s a very different world in terms of how they construct properties and property lights, you know, we grew up with everybody had some kind of a fence of some sort, but they were fences, they were usually the traditional white picket fence, or wood fence or something like that. Whereas out here in the southwest, it’s like walls, walls everywhere, which happened to be fantastic canvases for somebody that was looking around and looking for houses and looking at what neighborhoods and stuff. The thing I also looked at was not only whether there was graffiti, but I also wanted to see, is there a square box, that’s a different shade of the regular color wall, you know, where somebody has come over painted over the graffiti, and they didn’t exactly match it to the best of the best color? Yeah, this glaring box square box there. So that’s kind of the thing that I always look for, in any kind of neighborhood, because that’s, to me, that tells me that can tell me a lot about the neighborhood, you can tell me when I see the graffiti, I can see Is it is it gang graffiti is attacking graffiti, I can make that distinction. And that’s something I can know, really quickly looking at it. And I can look at the graffiti myself. And I can say, Okay, this is one moniker I’ve seen a few times here in this neighborhood. So it’s probably just one kid, as opposed to some places. You know, it’s so heavily covered my data, it looks like Paris, you know, it’s just there’s graffiti everywhere. I just, you know, what do they, I don’t want to look like that. I don’t want to live with that. But I’ll tell you, that’s one of the things you want to see me really spin out and go crazy, is when I hear this argument about its bark, and I just don’t want to have my head explode, because people are spending hundreds of 1000s of dollars for a piece of property for a place for them to raise their families to be safe in and somebody else has the audacity to come along and destroy their property. And then somebody else has the audacity on top of that and say, oh, but it’s hard. You should respect it. But you kidding me? I just spent $300,000 on the house. But for me, it’s hard.
Gary Pinkerton 28:06
Yeah, exactly. So I think your comment there about, you know, I don’t want to live in a city or a location where, where all they do is paint over it. Right. So they’re treating the symptom, they’re not treating the real cause. So the cost is coming back. And it’s probably a lot of it’s probably a lack of understanding, right? They don’t know that companies like what you do have the ability to help them fix it. And I wanted to transition to that, because every one of my listeners is interested in being an entrepreneur or already is one, they want to get back some free time for themselves, they, they want to be able to improve the situation of their families. And because, you know, they started off as people who have devoted themselves to a life of service, or at least a period of time, they’re interested in helping the world by, you know, adding value. So all those things, you know, lead to Gosh, entrepreneurs, yeah, and so and you obviously have successfully gone down that path. First talk a little bit about your company, and then maybe any lessons you have for those who are budding entrepreneurs out there.
Timothy Kephart 29:02
Well, I mean, I started the company formerly in 2006. In 2001, I finished my master’s degree. And that’s what I’d written my thesis. And it’s been probably a good five years to refine what I had done in terms of what I discovered with graffiti to really turn it into a product that could be a solution for government agencies. And so that was, I would say, that kind of ties into the the advice, my biggest advice is just keep firing away. You know, just keep at it. Because I jokingly say this and I cannot believe that I look back on the company. And over the last 12 years, I cannot believe I’ve not run this company in a bankruptcy. I looked at all the mistakes that I’ve made. And maybe we do this as parents to really, you know, how’s my kid going to college, I can’t believe that they’re not hooked on drugs or something like that, because I’ve you know, like, it’s just, you look at all the mistakes that you’ve made. And, you know, for me, at least in my world, there’s no one more critical of those of me that And then myself. And so I just, I think that when it comes to why this has been successful, yes, it’s it’s a very nice product, and it’s very beneficial product. And this is so, so cliche, but I’ll use a different word, not succeeding was just simply not an option. It didn’t even cross my mind, I just kept pushing and pushing and pushing. And you know, God, I mean, we’re talking about a product that was brand new, nobody had done anything like this. And really nobody still to this day does anything like this. So when I first started out, I was not only not only did I have this new product, but I was trying to convince the government agencies and law enforcement agencies to look at a problem that historically had been either ignored or not viewed as any, any way beneficial for law enforcement. So there was a tremendous uphill climb there, to not only educate potential customers and clients about benefits of tracking graffiti, but also had to show them that you could track the graffiti and that there was value in doing that. And that there’s there’s benefits. And here are all the different benefits that you get from that. So it was, you know, there’s a significant uphill climb to do that. And it still is because, you know, in the southwest of the United States, and in big cities, like, for example, we work with the city of Denver, and the City of Phoenix, and in larger cities like that, they understand that the problem exists, and they understand they’re spending millions of dollars to try and fix this problem. But in smaller cities, as we go further east, it’s such a new concept to them, that there’s actually intelligence information, ie graffiti, that can benefit they’re not only preventing investigations, but can also benefit other investigations, as well as this relates to criminal activity.
Gary Pinkerton 31:41
And that’s really interesting, and some some very good help there you just gave to. As I said, other budding entrepreneurs, the idea of having to Well, first of all, never giving up, right? I mean, Jim Rohn, has a great quote, where he says, you know, the successful, the person who succeeds is not that much different than the person who doesn’t succeed, they just get up one more time than the other guy did. You know, I mean, it just takes that continued effort, certainly something that everyone in this community understands and is probably really good at achieving. And so that, you know, there’s some things about being a service member, you know, and I include as, as all my listeners know, I include everyone who does any kind of service police officers, firefighters, and the actual military in that group. But people who provide service are generally rule followers, you know, and we’re not the ones to step out and do something absolutely crazy. I find myself an entrepreneur at heart. And I know there’s a lot of people in my communities that are that way. And we feel like we’re really kind of not a good fit for where we are in the military, because of that reason, because we just we want to do our own thing, run our own company, do it our way. And that’s not always a good fit for, for people in uniform
Timothy Kephart 32:52
In response to that, though, you know, when I started in grad school, I knew nothing about graffiti, it was tributed 1999. When I took my first class, I didn’t know anything about graffiti. I didn’t know anything about it. And so even though I was completely ignorant to that world, it was just I guess, the tenacity and the desire and the excitement and all that stuff sort of came together. They just kept pushing through a push through. And, you know, here we are 19 years, 18 years later, it’s still still going strong and still successful. And I’m quite proud of that. So, yeah. Exposure to something doesn’t necessarily mean that you can’t succeed it, that’s for sure.
Gary Pinkerton 33:30
Right. Right. Yeah, I appreciate that. Certainly, it was interesting, you’re talking about, I mean, you You not only persisted, which was a key to success, but you also completely created a market, I mean, led you to create a solution. There wasn’t even a market for it right here. There was no one who you had to go convince people, like you said that, that it makes financial sense. And it’s in their best interest to even pursue that route.
Timothy Kephart 33:52
Yeah. And that was left 11 years, I’m thinking of some of the meetings that I have been in, in the beginning, they sort of had this blind look on their face, like why we can we can track it, we need and so you have to sort of, it’s tough in my circumstance, because, you know, as you said, I’m a court certified expert, I’ve testified on many of cases related to graffiti. So I know it, and I kind of look at finding God, everything has to know if there’s not, you know, I’m not extraordinary that I you know what I mean? Right? It’s shocking to me, and I have to, I have to really coach myself to take a step back and understand that my audience that I’m talking to, may very well have no idea that graffiti has all this intelligence that even though I’ve been doing it for, you know, at that time, it was like seven or eight years, and I’m very familiar with it, they are not familiar with it. So be patient and explain that to them, as opposed to assuming that they already know it. That was a big challenge, because it still is a challenge with with agencies, like I said, especially as we as we go further east and talk to agencies, explaining to them that there’s actually is intelligence there. I mean, you’re talking about it. You said about before, but law enforcement, especially is very traditional rule following. So thinking outside the box and seeing something a little differently, you have to have an open mind. And I will say to all the cities that we work with their credit, they have kept an open mind. And that’s why they’ve had the successes, and they’ve recovered the 1000s of 1000s of dollars in restitution, they’ve seen their graffiti cut in half, because they were willing to to keep an open mind and look at something and say, Okay, well, so for a small investment like this, we can actually dramatically cut the amount of money we’re spending on on graffiti abatement. And that’s the thing that scare me about a big city or any kind of city is that if I live in the city that spending, say, a million over a million dollars a year on graffiti abatement, and that’s all they’re doing about the problem, my grave would be in my community where I would live. Is that Yeah, okay, they’re coming out and repeating and repeating. And that’s great. But what happens when the budgets get tight, and then they stop painting over as much graffiti because they can’t afford to, because the budgets are deficit spending or something like that. Now you can really destroy my property value. And I’m going to really have a problem with that point. If I want to sell my house, or that’s something I don’t think people really truly understand how significant that can destroy the property value, do you go into a community, and you have four or $500,000 homes, and then all of a sudden, there’s graffiti in the area, those are not going to be four or $500,000 homes anymore? Because the kind of person that’s going to spend that kind of money is not going to be willing to spend that kind of money if they see that.
Gary Pinkerton 36:32
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. In that vein of kind of creating the market, and well actually back up a little bit further. I’ll make this my last question. This is really fascinating stuff. So you mentioned that you hadn’t really thought about graffiti hadn’t didn’t know anything about graffiti, when you started working on your master’s program, or when you were in college there? How did you find me clearly, one of your qualities of success is that it was a good fit. It’s something that you’re really interested in, which gives you the staying power to be successful at it. And I mean, it comes out clearly in our conversation here that you just are super excited about this concept and what what your company can do what the product and the technique can do. How did you find it? You know, a lot of people, I’ve worked with a coach who helped me get on my path, which I think is a great path. It was very helpful. But I mean, did you do that? Or what what indications Did you come across that led you to believe this was a good path?
Timothy Kephart 37:21
The first sort of lightbulb moment, if you will, was when I started to track back in, in the graduate program. When I was doing the research. I remember, I printed out something like five 600 pictures of graffiti. And I started going through it. In fact, I can tell you exactly why I was in this places even still around. But it was in Long Beach, California. And it was it was overnight. And it was this Catholic diner, like on the waterfront kind of thing. I was sitting there, and I was going through each picture. And I looked at it and I said, Wait a second here. And I started looking at him again. And I started to realize that there was all these messages that it was just one of those weird things, and I can’t describe it. And then it just sort of popped out to me that there was something here. And of course, it’s not like at that moment, I said, great. I’m going to form graffiti track. And here we go. It took a while. But But the first step was that I realized that there was a tremendous amount of information that was being captured when the each incident was being photographed. So that was the first step. And then from there, it just, it really took a constant tenacity to refine and we find more and make it better and make it and simplify it and get it to where it could be packaged in such a way that a city could understand it. That wasn’t going to be insanely expensive to do. And it was something that they could understand. And most importantly, and this is probably the biggest thing, and I think your audience will appreciate this. At the time that I converted from research to actual practical application. I was working, I came back to the city of Carson as a graffiti consultant. So I was working paired up with the local Sheriff’s Department. And I was working with the deputies there. And they were doing the investigations. And I was sort of the support behind that and giving them the information. And I essentially created a system that made my life easier. So when I was going out in the field with the deputies, and we were rolling in the neighborhoods and talking to various kids and that sort of stuff. I came up with a system and that was what their fee tracker became it became a system that made my life easier. I will always say this no matter what, build something for yourself. And you’re you’re just sort of banking on it that everybody else would find benefited as well. And that’s that’s what I did. I built graffiti tracker was actually truly built for me when I was working in the field with the deputies and it made my life easier. And it just happened to also be something that makes other agencies lives easier. Other investigators lives easier.
Gary Pinkerton 39:50
That’s amazing. That’s a really great advice and I can as you were talking about that I can think of dozens of examples of where people did the same thing you know, and they did something they went through a life experience or probably have a job. And then they put it in a book. And a lot of people bought it because they found value and then they use the person as a mentor or whatever. That’s a great, great example.
Timothy Kephart 40:10
You know, like, you don’t want to, I don’t even know if this is historically accurate. But the old saying was the car was that Henry Ford, supposedly it said, he asked people what they wanted, they said a faster horse. I don’t necessarily think you do something for what other people want you do something that that you yourself would want. And then you’re sort of hoping that you’re not so you need that ability to so you need just for yourself that nobody else will find any value. Difference in that.
Gary Pinkerton 40:32
Yeah, good point. So what have I not asked as we come to come to the end here?
Timothy Kephart 40:38
How awesome of an individual’s new daughter like new nine month old daughter upgrade? She was staying up all night crying and things like that, that are important in the world?
Gary Pinkerton 40:51
How about how do we contact you? And how do we see more about your company?
Timothy Kephart 40:55
Oh yeah. graffititracker.com is a website or you can contact me directly, Timothy, tracker, that one featured on that but@jaeger.com was
Gary Pinkerton 41:06
Nice. Yeah, and I went there before the show. It’s really interesting site. I love your your stats that are running at the bottom, you know real time on the effort and what it is done to help out the challenges of graffiti, Timothy that 45 minutes flew by. So I truly appreciate you joining us and I’ll give you an opportunity for the last word. How about that.
Timothy Kephart 41:27
Last word is just be kind to everybody. Legit.
Gary Pinkerton 41:32
Oh my gosh. Nice. Very nice. How can we top that? Timothy, thanks so much for joining us, my friend.
Jason Hartman 41:42
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