Rock Earle:
Interview by Brett Eisele – Summer 2014
I first met Rock Earle some years ago at a gathering a REALTOR® was hosting and remember thinking “this guy is an eccentric”. Little did I know that we would travel the world and become friends and business partners. That aside, it fell upon me to conduct the interview with Rock for the business issue of this magazine. I must admit he fought me the entire way because Rock doesn’t like to talk about himself. If you have ever met the man you know he is extremely intelligent and is an idea generator. Sometimes to a fault…please read on.
– Brett Eisele, August 2014
GC LIVING: You were born and raised in Southern California?
Rock Earle: Yes, primarily Escondido where I attended primary and secondary school.
GC LIVING: What were your hobbies as a child? What gadgets did you like to play with?
Rock Earle: I remember I was given an erector set for Christmas which held my imagination for hours at a time, and I would go out in a field behind our house and build forts and other stuff like WW1-style Army tanks from scraps of lumber. There were no Legos in those days.
GC LIVING: Knowing you, I would imagine you would design things other than what was in the directions supplied with the erector set?
Rock Earle: Oh yes, my mind would just take off!
GC LIVING: What do you remember about your schooling in Escondido?
Rock Earle: I vaguely remember going to a Christian preschool in the morning and then having lunch from Tupperware in Grape Day Park before I went to public school afterwards.
GC LIVING: Interesting memory. After preschool when you entered 1st grade, did it interest you or was it boring?
Rock Earle: A little bit of both. The new stuff was interesting and then it got boring really fast.
GC LIVING: What were you interested in?
Rock Earle: I was interested in reading about all kinds of other places and times.
GC LIVING: Did any of your teachers pick up on your aptitude for reading?
Rock Earle: Yes, in fact in 3rd grade, I was a reading tutor for 2nd graders.
GC LIVING: Reading took you to places you always wanted to go?
Rock Earle: Yes. One of my favorite books at the time was about a young boy in the Mongol era who had a favorite hawk, a hunting hawk or falcon. He was one of the Golden Horde in that time and I read it, reread it and reread it. The teacher actually gave me some grief over that. She wanted me to read a new book.
GC LIVING: When did you, as boy, start realizing you had an aptitude beyond the erector set, beyond the building of forts, that you had an aptitude for certain subjects that set you aside from others? Were you ever told you were advanced?
Rock Earle: Little bit of both. My report cards began coming back with A, A, A, A, A. Problems are: “He gets his work done and then bugs the other kids”. I never understood why the other kids were still doing their work. Eventually in 4th grade the administrators wanted to skip me a grade, but they decided against it for some reason.
GC LIVING: In those days, did they have curriculum enrichment?
Rock Earle: The school offered what was called “More Able Learner”, which I thought was interesting because even then I understood that “MAL” was the Latin root for bad. But yes, I was in the “More Able Learner” program and I still got done early and bugged the other kids.
GC LIVING: When did you start physically growing and were you taller than everybody?
Rock Earle: Oh yes! Junior high and high school especially. I grew six inches my freshman year in high school.
GC LIVING: Speaking of which, what interested you in high school?
Rock Earle: Math, particularly calculus
GC LIVING: Junior year?
Rock Earle: Yes, they had some rudimentary pre-calc types of things junior year, but then I graduated before my senior year. My Levi’s would tend to have holes in the knees which I proudly displayed and one day the vice principal called me into his office and told me there would be no more of that. Oddly enough shortly thereafter, one of the counselors called me into his office and said, “You know, if you did it right, you could be out of here at the end of your junior year.” What he meant was taking some college courses at the local community college at night and as a result I did and I was gone. I never had a senior year.
GC LIVING: And so it begins. Where did you go from there?
Rock Earle: I attended junior colleges for a while, without a clue as to what direction to go in. It seems strange to say now, but as a kid I was always an active investor, along with my Dad, in real estate limited partnerships. Back in the day, there were various programs that would take investments a small as $1,000 per Unit, so I would kick in $100 along with my Dad’s $900. We invested in budget motels, land all over California, the odd income property, and even a vineyard. One of our most attractive investments – we thought – was a large undeveloped tract of land in Santa Cruz, which our group had visualized as a luxury oceanfront resort and conference center.
GC LIVING: What did you learn from those experiences?
Rock Earle: I was developing mentors in the business and financial world. One of the reps for the syndicator we invested with most heavily was a very successful financial planner in San Diego, and one of my best mentors. He told me if I wanted to help people invest like he did, I would need to find out where their money was, and the best way to do that was to prepare their tax returns.
GC LIVING: Did you follow that advice?
Rock Earle: Yup. I took H&R Block’s course at nights and on weekends, and in 1975 I was the nights and weekends guy, doing tax returns by hand with an adding machine and a pencil. I did 365 returns that year.
GC LIVING: Well, you do have a penchant for numbers.
Rock Earle: Right, and I thought maybe that would be the right career for me, and the next step in taxation was to become an Enrolled Agent – a special designation to enable non-attorneys or -CPAs to practice in Tax Court. So I took a night course again, this time at UCSD, taught by an IRS agent whose name I will never forget: Max Poppleheimer! That course culminated in a 1½ day test, which I passed, and which brings us to the point of this whole digression.
After receiving notification that I had passed, I applied for my “Treasury Card” (or T-card as it is commonly known) only to be notified in April 1976 by the IRS that the regulations state the minimum age requirement was 21 (I was 18) but suggesting that I apply for a waiver. On June 7, 1976, the General Counsel of the Treasury informed me my waiver request had been approved! I was 19 at that time, and I thought that was pretty cool!
My direction was still unclear, though, and I moved to San Diego, bouncing around between several more institutions of higher learning studying an odd mix of business and science before ending up at UCSD. How I got in there I’ll never know because I did not take the SAT’s, but I guess my college career to that date made a little sense because I wrote my entrance essay on my desire to become a great scientist/businessman, like Hewlett or Packard or Wang or Land. And believe it or not, I was pursuing a double-major of computer engineering and physics. Go figure.
GC LIVING: But your brain helped pay for your college, didn’t it?
Rock Earle: It did. I got a job as a computer operator for Hewlett Packard on the third shift. I would show up at 11 at night and run the old IBM360 until 7 in the morning and then go to school.
GC LIVING: And how old were you? 19?
Rock Earle: Yes, maybe 20 by then.
GC LIVING: What would you do the other eight hours?
Rock Earle: I got my real estate license, started selling real estate and I was also learning to fly.
GC LIVING: All of this before 20 years of age?
Rock Earle: Yes.
GC LIVING: Tell me about when you were flying one day coming back from …
Rock Earle: Memories from that time are dim now but I think it was supposed to be a cross country solo and I believe it was after departing Hemet, California that at some point in time during the trip I had no idea where I was or what I was doing. I had been thinking about everything else going on in my life. I looked out the window and had no idea where I was, where I’d just landed and where I was headed. It took me awhile to figure that out and I eventually landed back at Montgomery field in San Diego and walked away from flying. There was just too much going on in my life.
GC LIVING: Were you doing well in real estate in California?
Rock Earle: No, not at all. I was doing too many other things at the same time when I started in residential. I began “farming” for listings in an area called Bay Park, walking and knocking on doors and doing open houses, but my heart wasn’t really in it.
GC LIVING: In College, how far did you advance?
Rock Earle: I had completed three and a half years which meant upper division science courses at UCSD – advanced math, physics, courses like that. I looked at it as I had at least three years to go because all of my credits were not in the same discipline – most of my early college classes were business-related.
GC LIVING: Did you come up with a model of the unified theory?
Rock Earle: Almost, but not quite. [laughs]
GC LIVING: I’m curious why after you went on with life you chose real estate over science which you loved?
Rock Earle: That’s an interesting question and the reality of the situation is that after I arrived at UCSD I soon found myself with 3 ½ years invested already and another three or so to go, and I looked at my chances. If you’re in science, you’re either going to be an engineer or you’re going to teach. I had no interest in academia and if you’re an engineer that means you’re on a team. And all I wanted to be was Albert Einstein. I just wanted to sit around and have an idea and win a Nobel Prize and call it a day. At some point I realized neither of those was going work, so I started losing interest. I didn’t want to be an engineer, I didn’t want to teach. And then the real problem was I had never learned to study; to do any homework or anything.
GC LIVING: Because to that point everything taught to you came naturally?
Rock Earle: Yes and then one day I was sitting half awake at some upper division algebra class and I can still remember to this day this crazy Hungarian teacher with white frizzy hair. It was kind of like Einstein was up there doing stuff on the board. I couldn’t understand him and the stuff on the board meant nothing intuitively to me.
GC LIVING: That must have been a rude awakening.
Rock Earle: Yes. I listened to that class for a couple of weeks and I realized, well, I guess I’m done with college. [laughs]
GC LIVING: So that’s when a decision was made?
Rock Earle: Yes, I realized that my real estate business could proceed as a sole practice and I could do my own thing by myself and not have to interact with other humans as co-workers.
GC LIVING: Did you just pack up and leave?
Rock Earle: I did. I left school. I left Hewlett Packard and I drove to Phoenix because I’d always liked the desert. In high school while my buddies were surfing, I was always in the desert camping or doing whatever. Also, my sister had moved to Phoenix because her fiancé at the time lived there and I had met a guy in the real estate company I was working with who wanted to go to Phoenix and buy properties and invest so that’s exactly what we did.
GC LIVING: Did you have an Arizona State real estate license when you came over?
Rock Earle: No.
GC LIVING: So you just came over and went to work? You obviously had to take the state exam.
Rock Earle: Yes.
GC LIVING: Who did you work for?
Rock Earle: I hung my license with Auerbach Real Estate located on 32nd Street just South of Campbell.
GC LIVING: Did you go right back into residential?
Rock Earle: No, my partner was experienced in the land business, and we went right out and bought a bunch of land that we thought looked good.
GC LIVING: Where was that?
Rock Earle: We bought a piece at Cave Creek Road, north of Cactus, and an apartment zoned piece in East Mesa. This being in 1978.
GC LIVING: That property was way out in the middle of nowhere!
Rock Earle: Yes, exactly and we were funded by an investor and sold the properties almost immediately at a nice profit! We thought we were just the smartest guys on the planet.
GC LIVING: After you put the required 2 years in, you obviously went and obtained your broker’s license.
Rock Earle: Yes in 1981, which means I’ve now been a broker for 34 years. I formed Newport Properties, and even then I had other companies, other partners. We had the Gibraltar Group, clever right? “Rock of Gibraltar”…? We were developing four-plex lots and condos; condo-convertible four-plexes and lots. We had a Canadian partner in the development, and we hooked up with a couple guys who were doing arid crop commercialization research and development. We were buying, actually the agricultural arm, was buying farms in Casa Grande that we would then plant in jojoba. And to do that, we needed some real estate expertise. We had hired a custom farmer, Tom Gaddis, and his wife Nan had her license, so we opened a branch office here in Casa Grande that I was the broker of, she was the manager, and I would come down here every couple weeks and look over the files, and I ended up liking it so much that I moved here.
GC LIVING: What year was that?
Rock Earle: I moved down in 1996, actually to the Maricopa area, near the air park that we developed and then I moved out to Tierra Grande area in 1997, and then to Casa Grande proper in 2007.
GC LIVING: The air park which is now known as…
Rock Earle: Ak-Chin Regional. I’ve always done well with what we’ll call “old infrastructure”. Water lines, power, and asphalt that someone else paid for, like someone else’s dog and someone else’s boat and someone else’s cabin-someone else’s infrastructure that they’d forgotten about, you can buy for a discount and get the land for free. There’s a whole section that Cecil Crouch had farmed …
GC LIVING: Saddleback Farms?
Rock Earle: Yes, Saddleback Farms. And in-between the residential subdivisions, he’d left a big area that was split into 40 acre parcels, and they were zoned heavy industrial, and there were 2 major waterlines for the company; the water company at the time was Mohawk Water Company, and it had the right zoning and everything else needed so I started investing, and selling land there to some guys, investors, and little by little the investors turned more into users, because everything was there that you needed to escape Phoenix as an industrial user.
One of those guys was a pilot, he was a metal building guy, and he wanted a yard to store his steel, and to build a little shop, and he also had the idea to develop the air park, and that’s how what is now Ak-Chin Regional Airport started in 1991.
GC LIVING: How did you decide which direction the runway was to run and all that business and paperwork with the federal government, how, how did all that evolve?
Rock Earle: He did all that. I didn’t have anything to do with it. He just said, “well let’s do it this way, can I buy this piece?”
GC LIVING: The next thing you know you own an airport.
Rock Earle: Yes, until the Ak-Chin group eventually purchased it, I think in 2005.
GC LIVING: The beginning of the golden years! When did things really start to get good for you?
Rock Earle: Back in the years when we were developing it, the mid-nineties, nothing was easy but in 1997 things began to really get better for me. All the land I’d been investing in for ten, fifteen years was starting to become valuable, people had discovered Casa Grande and the whole area as a legitimate investment venue. You could just feel that activity was picking up. Many of my partners and investors were guys in Phoenix, builders who had gotten sick of building, but understood the value of infrastructure in the ground. So we started scouring the area for roads and sewer and power and dirt that’s really ugly and nasty and cheap.
.GC LIVING: Around 1999 or 2000 you found a project in the Eloy area with an industrial zoning use that had that infrastructure.
Rock Earle: Yes, we bought the original Eloy industrial park. It had rail to it and all the utilities. There were utilities, but they were tired pipelines, there were tired roads and tired everything. I believe we paid about $4,000 an acre for … I don’t remember how many acres. We started putting money into the infrastructure by extending the rail, we extended the roads and we extended the sewer. We ended up selling some parcels to some big industrial users, brought some good jobs in there and it turned out to be a really great thing for everybody.
GC LIVING: And then one day a real estate broker from Phoenix comes in and talks to you.
Rock Earle: Well, it’s a little more complicated than that. All of our holdings at that time, say the early 2000’s, were becoming quite valuable, and I had partners in everything I was doing, imagine that: me, a mediator of sorts! We had sold a couple pieces and made a bunch of money and in retrospect, I think we all started bickering, and I think it’s because we all thought we were the one responsible for the success, like “I’m smarter than you, I’m the one who made this work, not you”, and we were just sick of each other. Finally we got so angry with each other we said “we’re just going to sell it”. And that was a controversial decision at the time, because things were right on the way up and we thought we had the best piece of land in the universe … and we ended up doing exactly that. We sold it for what we thought was just a fire sale giveaway price.
GC LIVING: Do you still feel that you gave it away at a fire sale price?
Rock Earle: Oh no, no. All that bickering was the best thing that could ever have happened, because of what happened next: the Great Recession – who knew the end was so near?
GC LIVING: It turned out to be a very wise move on your part, but now you’ve reached the pinnacle. Where do you go from there? What did you do?
Rock Earle: Well see, that’s a good point too. At the time, everything was priceless. $2,000 per acre dirt was selling for $20,000 to $40,000 per acre and I couldn’t get my head around that so I sold everything. I just thought “these prices are crazy, it’s fine, I have enough”. I sold everything and I just left. And actually, the crazy prices continued for a year or 2 after I was gone and I would hear about some deal. I would be in Barcelona and some deal would happen, and I’d think “I really screwed up by leaving”. Frankly, it was the best thing that could have happened. I wasn’t tempted to be in any deals any more, I wasn’t tempted to buy or double down, and I never did any tax deferred exchanges, which would have forced me to re-invest. I was in Europe with all my cows safely in the barn, so to speak, when things crashed.
GC LIVING: Did you stay in Casa Grande?
Rock Earle: I did.
GC LIVING: How old were you?
Rock Earle: 48.
GC LIVING: 48 years old, you’ve retired and now you begin to do something that you’ve always wanted to do since reading that book about the Mongol boy and the hawk when you were a child: travel the world.
Rock Earle: Yes, I’d actually started traveling a little bit in the early 2000’s, you know the Europe thing, the first trip to London, it’s wonderful, and I wanted more of that.
GC LIVING: In the early days you were traveling coach back and forth to London.
Rock Earle: Oh yes! Back in those days I had a million different strategies for getting the exit row because it was the only way to get legroom in coach, the first 13 times across the Atlantic we were in coach – seriously! For a guy my size, which is 6 foot 5 that was excruciatingly painful, it was utter hell.
GC LIVING: You were mostly in Europe then?
Rock Earle: All Europe in those days, England and Continental Europe and you know the prototypical grand American tour where you do 13 countries in 8 days, just rented cars and drove around.
GC LIVING: And how long did this last?
Rock Earle: I would say that phase of travel really started in ‘98 or ‘99 and lasted until about ‘05 or ’06.
GC LIVING: Did you tire of it?
Rock Earle: I was tired of coach and the cheap motels, but I was not tired of traveling, I wanted more and at that point I had bought into the ADA Travel agency with Hope Wallace, who you interviewed last issue, and so all kinds of new things opened up, I started going to the travel conventions and started seeing new ways to do things and had the resources to do things a little differently, a little more comfortably. For a couple of years I did everything I wanted to do; I had no more business, I had shut down the office and was not doing anything actively. I made plans to go everywhere I wanted to go. I was gone half the year for a couple of years in a row and I just got tired. I did a lot of solo traveling, because no one wanted to travel as much as I did. I wore out, came home and did nothing for awhile…
GC LIVING: When I first met you, you walked into the old Mahoney Group Real Estate department and during the course of discussion with someone, somewhere you heard they were going to close the real estate division down?
Rock Earle: Yes, this was right on the brink of the crash and I think the Mahoney people felt insurance was more stable than real estate and in turn made the decision. I’ve grown to have a healthy respect for bad times because all chance and opportunity shows up and this was the first, “recession” shall we say that I was ready for. I got killed in the previous two or three recessions in my career and this time I was sitting around, completely liquid, nothing to do all day, tired of traveling. When it turned out Mahoney’s real estate division was potentially available, I thought, how interesting that was because I always wanted to be Mahoney, I wanted a real estate operation that had an insurance arm and was a pillar of the community and sponsored every event and everyone knew they were the go-to people for solidity and permanence and scale. When I was offered that opportunity I thought, “Eh, the recession will be over in a couple of years. No big deal.” So I bought the best building in town, built it just the way the real estate people said they wanted it, and lo and behold, one day twelve people walked out of the Mahoney office and into mine and ROX Real Estate was born.
GC LIVING: It was successful from the beginning, it was as successful as it could be during the recession, but then there was another opportunity that opened up for an insurance company.
Rock Earle: Well yes it was, the real estate was as successful as it could be and we held our own in a really challenging environment. I want people to know here that we opened our doors in the second week of September 2008. In the third week of September I was floating around the Galapagos Islands doing my traveling, snorkeling expedition thing and that’s the week that Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. We get back to the boat every afternoon and we’re with a bunch of East Coasters, so all the New Yorkers, the stock market people would be in there watching the TV, watching the latest DOW closing down 900 points, then next day down 800 points and it was like people were cutting their throats on the boat, after a day of snorkeling with seals, so that’s the environment that we opened ROX Real Estate in.
So we operated it for a year or two and actually along with that I made a bunch of what I considered really nice land purchases at post-crash prices, most of which we still own today. We’ll just say the recession went a little longer than I thought it would. Anyway the next step of it was to look around for some kind of insurance arm, and as it happened the company that I had dealt with for years, Stu Rasmussen’s old Casa Grande Insurance, had sold to Mike Johnson; Mike had sold it to a couple of fellows from Phoenix who were commercial brokers, and they were looking for a new local partner. They didn’t want to come to Casa Grande anymore so one thing led to another and we found ourselves with Casa Grande Insurance under the ROX umbrella.
GC LIVING: Now you have insurance, and you have real estate which are two businesses you wanted, but also a large portion of your life involves travel and another opportunity presented itself?
Rock Earle: That’s an interesting story too. I mentioned earlier I was a small minority partner in Hope’s business ADA Travel for years, and we had always thought that on the day she was ready to retire it would be a perfect thing to incorporate into ROX as ROX Travel. There was some conversation and it turned out she wasn’t ready to retire. So, we pulled in a couple of other travel industry veterans and formed a new ROX Travel. Now we have the three different businesses under the same umbrella that I always dreamed about.
GC LIVING: Was that the old Desert Travel?
Rock Earle: Right. Peggy Eck had worked for Jim and Joann Kroll who owned Desert Travel. In fact that story is in our last issue as well.
GC LIVING: I remember we were talking in your office one day and you had this idea.
Rock Earle: I wish this were a video interview and you could see the smiles in this room right now. Yes, I had this idea of how do you grow companies? Well, sales agencies you grow with leads, how do you grow leads, well there’s a variety of ways, there’s vertical, there’s horizontal, but really it’s about marketing and marketing’s about scale and a variety of other things. And what I thought we should do is find a way to set ourselves apart with marketing and that idea certainly went to the idea of a quality print publication that no one else had.
GC LIVING: But nobody in the company was for it?
Rock Earle: Except for you and me and of course Bea Lueck shortly thereafter. Everybody thought it was a waste of time and money and had their own ideas about how promotional money should be spent. I thought it would be a substantial investment of time and money for several years, but I thought it would continually improve and as it integrated the companies into the mainstream, it was a natural adjunct.
GC LIVING: How big was the first issue?
Rock Earle: I think it was 44 pages.
GC LIVING: And now we’re over 100 pages?
Rock Earle: Yes. We had hired a consultant who knew the magazine industry, and we were led to an over-sized very high-quality publication, which I think really was the way to enter the market. It didn’t fit in any racks, it was hard to mail, but we got people’s attention.
GC LIVING: And the whole idea behind marketing is to gain a franchise in the minds of people, and I would venture to say there are not too many people who have not been exposed to the word “ROX”.
Rock Earle: It’s funny how in the American culture, I mean, “ROX” came about because it’s, my name is R-O-C-K; in the possessive, with an apostrophe and the S, that sounds like R-O-X, but in the American culture it’s absolutely common place to say, “Soccer rocks.” OK, maybe not soccer, maybe “Football Rocks”. I mean it’s a serendipitous set of circumstances for the whole marketing idea.
GC LIVING: You have evolved. Many ideas evolving by trial and error where some things worked, some didn’t. Are you happy where you’re at now?
Rock Earle: Yeah, very happy. I don’t like to sit around and talk about things very much, I’ve always been willing to just write a check to get something to happen so that’s what we do. I think the whole group of companies is characterized by having a good idea or two, pick one, and then just do it! Then measure the outcome after that. So after having opened in the absolute worst week in the US and global financial world since the depression, here we are six years on and I’m quite pleased with everything.
GC LIVING: Where are you going from here?
Rock Earle: That’s a very good question! One of the moves we missed during this discussion was our merger with Coldwell Banker Excel Realty and Century 21 All-Stars Realty.
GC LIVING: That’s right! Now you have insurance, you have travel, and you have real estate. All is running smoothly until you were approached with the opportunity to merge ROX Real Estate with not one, but two nationally recognized real estate franchises. I emphasize that they came to you!
Rock Earle: Yeah, that was an interesting time. We obviously had just done the insurance merger, and we had the magazines, and one of the important aspects of the real estate business was our property management. There was a firm in Phoenix, a Century 21 franchisee that had taken on the local C21 franchise here and we had had merger discussions earlier, but it didn’t happen for a variety of reasons. Then one day, in the door walked a three way merger idea which would involve Connie Rush’s Coldwell Banker Excel and the Century 21 office here in Casa Grande and ROX Real Estate; all to end up under the Coldwell Banker flag. That’s exactly what we did which more than doubled the volumes, more than doubled the size, and we ended up all being housed together at Connie Rush’s office on Trekell. It hasn’t been without its wrinkles, but I think in the long run we’re extremely happy with where it is now. A national name brand brokerage with the type of marketing we do? I don’t see how you can beat it.
GC LIVING: Along with the property management.
Rock Earle: Along with the property management, that’s a very important part of the business.
GC LIVING: Which is done well. Do you feel you’re at your pinnacle?
Rock Earle: Close. Back in ’08 or ’09, I wrote what we in the company called the manifesto – it was basically an idea to expand on three business concepts: real estate, insurance, and travel, under one roof with expansion to other geographical islands in the state, like Yuma, Sierra Vista or Prescott and cover them in each place with a print publication that markets them. I think at this point in time we’re having a lot of fun with the magazines.
GC LIVING: Are you going to stay as hands-on as you are now?
Rock Earle: It’s been proven to me that I am not an operator. [laughs] In fact, the key people in the enterprise now listen for ideas and then they listen for the next stuff after an idea, and they cut me off right before that, so I think I’ll just stay the ideas guy, and stay pretty scarce and let the capable people do what they do.
GC LIVING: Well you are an idea person, and you’re very good on computers, coming up with visuals of how that idea looks, which is very important.
Rock Earle: It’s all part of the big plan. You need the vision, and you need the execution also. One of the neat things about having an enterprise of this scale is we are definitely moving into having our own in-house web programmers, and graphics people, and having that capability just is really wonderful, and effective.
GC LIVING: What’s the next adventure for Rock? More travel?
Rock Earle: Back in the day I was writing a weekly travelogue that I would pump out to 3-400 subscribers, and some people thought that was fun. It was always a lot of work and it never translated into a real business, it was always just a mission. I think something like that might be up for me in the future.
My personal circumstances have changed. I’m a married man now, with a young wife, very young twin boys and all the complexities of school and domestic life, and yet-
GC LIVING: And yet you’re in the yard planting trees?
Rock Earle: I’m planting trees, I’m laying bricks in the backyard and I’m planning travel. I have some major international trips coming up, I have ways to handle all of that and integrate it into life. I think I may start writing travel related pieces again, but also integrating that into our businesses somehow. Stay tuned to see how that works out.
Learn more about Rock Earle’s ROX companies:
ROX Group • Coldwell Banker ROX Realty • ROX Insurance • ROX Travel • ROX Media Group
