Welcome back to season 2 of My Mayor, the Catalyst series that helps you get to know the person behind the policy. We sat down with each candidate and asked them each the same five questions, with a few follow up questions sprinkled in. For Episode 4, we asked:

  • If you could spend a week shadowing anyone, who would it be? 
  • What’s something you’ve become less certain about as you’ve gotten older? 
  • Tell me about a time you had to choose between being liked and being respected. 
  • What’s a misconception about success that you no longer believe? 
  • What’s a compliment you’ve received that has stayed with you for years? 

Joe: We’re back for episode four of “My Mayor,” the last episode before the primaries, and joining me is candidate Batdorf. Kevin, good to see you again.

Kevin: Hey, how you doing?

Joe: Living the dream. Ready to jump into these new questions?

Kevin: I’ve been waiting my whole life for this time. All roads have led here in this moment.

Joe: All right. Number one: if you could spend a week shadowing anyone, who would it be?

Kevin: Well, I gave this a lot of thought. I’d like to shadow a president of the United States, but saying that now, with the current president, may not go over so well, because I’m assuming the listening audience would just assume that it’s this president. But it would be just kind of cool to see what a president does for a week in the everyday life. So I had to pivot, because that becomes too political. I’d really like to follow Mike Rowe, the “Dirty Jobs” guy.

Joe: Mm-hmm.

Kevin: I’d like to see what he does when he goes around talking about building the trades, and with his foundation, mikeroweWORKS. I want to see how he’s engaging with people to learn what it is that people are really looking for in education.

Joe: Interesting. I feel like that might be obtainable. Say, “Hey, I’ll make a little donation to the foundation. Let me hang out with you for a week.” He’d probably do it.

Kevin: Well, if I’m elected mayor, I won’t need to make a donation. I’m going to invite him to St. Pete for a project that I have to work on.

Joe: Oh, okay. I like it. I see.

Joe: What’s something you’ve become less certain about as you’ve gotten older?

Kevin: Well, you’re going to find that my answers have a theme today. College, I used to believe, was the best choice for pretty much everyone — you really need a higher education if you’re going to be successful. And I don’t believe that anymore. I don’t believe that college is for everyone. I believe there are people who don’t respond to traditional classroom learning settings. So college is no longer in my thoughts as the best option.

Joe: Yeah, it’s been interesting. I’ve been in several of those conversations recently, and I would agree that the landscape has changed. There’s so much self-education opportunity available, and you can get it done way denser and way more efficiently and way more cheaply, without the opportunity cost of all that time. The other piece of it is people always say, “Well, it’s the experience — going and living in a dorm and making bad decisions and things like that for a year or two.” But you can do that anywhere, right? You can do that anywhere. So it’s interesting to look at, especially as a parent, why there’s resistance to just saying, “Hey, college doesn’t work anymore.” And most of the people who say “You should still go” are almost like traditionalists, right? It’s just the nature of it. You don’t feel like it’s actually examining the SWOT analysis on college itself. It’s more just an emotional reaction — like you can’t not go to college because it’s such a status thing, or such a life-path thing that’s been accepted as a norm for decades. And it’s definitely changing.

Kevin: Well, and I agree with that, but some people should go to college and need that extra attention to develop what they want to do. I would never want a doctor to just come out of high school and say, “Hey, let me cut you open.” So there are some people that need training. Attorneys — I don’t think they need as much training in college as they do in the workplace. They’ll get more training in a courtroom than they would in the classroom.

Joe: Yeah.

Joe: All right. Tell me about a time you’ve had to choose between being liked and being respected.

Kevin: Well, that’s my life. When you get into sales, you want people to like you all the time, especially in real estate sales and the real estate business. When you go into someone’s living room and you’re talking to them about the most precious asset they have — they want to sell it, and they want to maximize their dollars, but the value isn’t there from what they’re seeking. So you have to be realistic. And it’s in those moments when I put being liked aside, and being real comes to the forefront. Most people respect that kind of honesty, especially if you follow through and get the job done. So that’s an everyday issue for me.

Joe: And do you find that you have to have that conversation? Do you tend to let them go to the aspirational side for a little while, and then adjust once they’re not having success? Or do you feel like coming out high and then having to adjust damages the story of that house’s for-sale-ness, and you really try to push to come out right from day one?

Kevin: Well, there’s a fine line there. You know what? I can be humble and say I have not always been right when suggesting a price for a property. But I’m willing to work with a customer to push the market — but not overprice a house. If you overprice it up front, because this is what they think they should get for it, and it doesn’t sell, it’s stigmatized. What’s wrong with the house? What happened? And that happens all too often. There’s too many young people getting into the real estate business that they just want to take a listing, so they’ll take it for whatever the seller wants to do with it. It doesn’t work that way. If you want to be successful — if you want your customer to be successful — you have to be honest.

Joe: What’s a misconception about success that you no longer believe?

Kevin: Well, this goes back to the college thing, right? Success requires a college education. Well, I’m here to show you: no, it doesn’t. I went to college. Turns out I kind of knew more than the professors that were teaching me. Why am I staying in this class when I can be out there hustling and making a living and turning an idea into a profit center? So that was a misconception about success that I had early on. I believe there’s a lot of successful people coming out of college, but I believe you can also have success in other ways.

Joe: Seems like the easiest path to success is just get into Stanford, drop out, do a startup, and then you’re guaranteed to win, right?

Kevin: Yeah. Right.

Joe: Then you’re going to get all the investment you could ever hope for. That’s the —

Kevin: — if you’re a Stanford dropout. I told you these had a common theme.

Joe: Yeah. All right, last one. What’s a compliment you received that has stayed with you for years?

Kevin: Well, this one’s going to take a little bit longer, so I hope you have a minute.

Joe: Let’s roll.

Kevin: I volunteer. I’ve done it for decades. About 25 years ago, I was president of the St. Petersburg Exchange Club, downtown St. Pete. They called it the Old Man’s Club, because we had members that were original high school students at St. Pete High — at the first St. Pete High. They were going to school in the late ’20s and early ’30s, and I’m like, “Man, these guys have stories.” But they elected me president, and my wife and I got to work and did some really good things. They had a program called the ACE Program — Accepting the Challenge of Excellence. We gave an award to high school students who, through adversity and life challenges, still were able to excel in high school. And by excel, B average. They didn’t have to get all A’s. They just had to show what was happening.

And we met this young lady — her name’s Sierra Simmons. She was living in a house that had no electricity, holes in the floors, no parents, just her. Siblings — I think she had a dozen siblings, and they were scattered everywhere. Several were in jail. I went to visit her at her house, and there was a drug deal right out in front. I’m like, “How are you living like this?” Yet she got up and took a cold shower every single day and went to school at St. Pete High. The counselors recognized her situation and helped what they could — they would donate money and whatnot. So we awarded her a $1,000 scholarship. The scholarship for this program could mean anything. And then we entered her into a national contest.

Turns out she came in second place in this contest, but only the winner was awarded a $10,000 check at the national convention in Dallas. I got a call two days before the convention saying that the winner could not make it — and you must be present to win. “Can you get Sierra there?” And I’ll never forget, I told them, “I’ll carry her on my back if I need to get her there. She’ll be there.” And the St. Pete Times wrote a story about it.

Now, I’m telling you this because it leads to the real story. When I was 16 years old, I used to shuck oysters at the Seafarer Restaurant. It was a horseshoe bar, and these old codgers would come in and sit there and heckle me all day long. And there was this one guy who was just extremely quiet. His name was Rusty — a Vietnam War vet. Turns out this guy was 100% disabled mentally. He was what they call unemployable. So I knew him. He heard that I started selling real estate, so he called me one day and said, “Kevin, I want to buy a house, but I don’t want to go into an office setting. I can’t do it. I can’t fill out paperwork.” I’m like, “Okay.” And he says, “I want to use my VA benefits.” I’m like, “How do we do that, Rusty? Because it’s paperwork. It’s in triplicate.”

I told you it was going to be a long story.

Joe: Yeah.

Kevin: So I was able to find a lender who would meet him outside of an office setting. He had already found a house. It was a Canadian tree farmer who came down here during the wintertime with his wife, and his wife had just passed away, so he wanted to sell the house and just move back to Canada. It was a one-bedroom house — I’ve never seen a one-bedroom house before. And it was off of Gandy Boulevard, on Snug Harbor Road. So, okay, I’ll meet you at the house, we’ll talk about it. The house was a disaster. For VA, you have to have a house that’s in good shape — meaning the roof has to be functional, it has to have a heating source. So I walked him through this whole process, and we got him to closing.

I don’t know how, because he was… let me describe him. Six foot four, 280 pounds, and he described himself as the master-at-arms for two motorcycle clubs in the state of Florida. He was a biker dude — a real tough guy. He had read the story about Sierra Simmons and came to my office one day. And when I see him, I expect the worst — he’s going to tell me somebody’s harassing him, and he’s about to do something that he’s going to need to hide from the police for a while, that type of thing. He comes into my office and sat down and said, “Kevin, I want to thank you for what you did for Sierra.” That compliment changed my life. Here’s this guy — I’m like, he’s a tough badass. He’s the kind of guy who made a promise to me after that closing: “If there’s anything the police can’t do and you need to have done, call me. I’ll get it.” I’m like, “Okay. Thanks for that.” But for him to sit down in my office and thank me for what I did and compliment my actions — which I didn’t do for the compliments, I did it for Sierra. She needed the help.

In both of those stories, there’s a lot more to them. Sierra — I helped her interview for a job at the public library, and she’s still an employee at the public library.

Joe: She got the $10,000?

Kevin: She got the $10,000. She won the national award.

Joe: Nice.

Kevin: Yeah. And we helped manage that $10,000 for her — to help her get an education, get housing, a car, clothes. We did everything that we could to help her succeed. And we did it because she deserved it, she needed it — not because I wanted accolades for it. I tell this story 25 years later. I don’t tell this story every day.

Joe: Right. That’s amazing.

Kevin: Yeah. And so that compliment, for something that I was doing to help someone else — and this big, tough guy comes in and says, “Good job, Kevin.”

Joe: Yeah.

Kevin: That’s who I am.

Joe: Yeah.

Kevin: So yeah, that changed me.

Joe: Wonderful. That’s nice. That’s great. You never know where the good things you do spread out to — in a sort of random pattern all over the universe.

Kevin: Completely random.

Joe: It’s cool that it came back to you. Very nice.

Joe: All right, so you’ve got a couple of weeks till the primaries. How are those going to shape up for you?

Kevin: Yeah, August 18th.

Joe: How are you feeling with the videos?

Kevin: I feel good. I feel good. The other candidates are bickering back and forth and throwing mud at each other, and I’m just sitting here telling my story.

Joe: Nice. I do appreciate your time, and appreciate the thought you put into the answers. It’s fantastic. Enjoy the next couple of weeks, and good luck in the primaries.

Kevin: Joe, thanks for doing this series. This is important work — letting everyone have a say. It’s kind of cool. Really appreciate you doing this.

Joe: Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks. It’s just good. People hear enough of the policy stuff, and there’s a lot more to people beyond the policy — so I thought that’d make a good tagline.

Kevin: Yeah. I like it.

Joe: Wonderful. All right. Kevin Batdorf, appreciate your time.

Kevin: All right, thanks. Take care.