Smart In, Smart Out

Shannon Robnett has been in the Treasure Valley since 1979, when the stretch from Mountain Home to Caldwell held about 100,000 people. It holds roughly 10x that today, and he has spent 35 years building into that growth.

He is the founder of Shannon Robnett Industries, a Boise development and syndication firm building Class A multifamily and industrial. In 2017 he partnered with a family office on an apartment complex in Meridian. The office dissolved when the project finished, cutting off the capital. He started raising from passive investors instead, and has syndicated roughly seventy-five million since. Today he has projects in Meridian, Nampa, Texas, Florida, and Washington, and recently broke ground on 84 more units in Meridian. His team of 14 runs property management and construction.

Over the last nine months he built something most companies several times his size have not. Roughly 60,000 company emails, ingested into a searchable database on Supabase, with Railway and n8n underneath. Out of all the Idaho business leaders I've interviewed for this series, nearly all of them described wanting a single source of truth. Shannon has one.

You partnered with a family office in 2017, built in Meridian, and then they dissolved. That ended your access to twenty million dollars at a time. How did you rebuild?

With a partner, I'd go find somebody that had a bunch of extra money, we'd partner on a deal, we both make money, we go find another deal. In 2017 I partnered with a family office and we built an apartment complex in Meridian. After that project finished, the family office dissolved itself. They all parted ways, they all left with their own money. They were no longer willing to give me twenty million in a whack.

So I started syndicating capital at that time, and since then we've syndicated about seventy-five million. We've got stuff in Texas, stuff in Florida, stuff in Washington. That's kind of how I got here. Thirty-five years of grinding. Now we primarily build for ourselves.

Micron's expansion is expected to add 4,000 jobs. You've watched this valley grow for forty-five years. What's your read?

It's hard to complain when every dollar you've ever made came from growth.

Micron essentially became a trillion dollar company. It became too big to fail. It's one of the top five companies in the nation and it isn't going anywhere. That facility is going to add around 4,000 jobs, and when you think about it, those 4,000 people need groceries, they need a place to eat, they need tires on their car. You're talking about creating a lot of ancillary jobs. Maybe 20,000.

The thing I think is important is, do we keep our quality of life. One of my investors is out of Montecito, California. He calls it the sunshine tax. He knows he's paying huge amounts of taxes and dealing with a lot of things, but his place to live is pretty nice. That's what we have to protect here. Good schools. Lower taxes. Property owners have rights. A safe environment.

You're running construction, investor relations, cash flow, and market analysis across four states with a team of 14. What breaks first?

Staying on top of everything. We've got construction to manage. We've got investor relations. We've got cash flow. We've got what everybody else is doing in the market to manage.

And with Micron there's a lot of job demand out there, so keeping good employees is tough.

Most people I talk to use AI to write emails. You built a database out of 60,000 of yours. What's in there?

All of those emails have information that needs to go into a database. Deals we've done, how they're performing, what we said then, what we're doing now. I used that to create a backbone on Supabase, with Railway and n8n and a few others underneath.

All of our emails are centralized so we can search conversations across everybody's inbox. I might start talking to someone and then investor relations takes over. Or we need to process what's coming out of the weekly report from property management.

The reason that matters is when somebody leaves and they've got all these emails they were interacting with people on, what was the tone? How do you pick up where they left off? How do you keep fostering that relationship? Losing people in the information management age is incredibly painful, because you often lose the relationships they had.

What did you mean by everyone being in information management?

Unless you're working the line at Micron building chips, you're in information management.

Everybody at my property is in information management. Somebody walks through the door, you manage their information, and if we manage it properly and what we have meets their expectations, they become a tenant. Once they're a tenant we still manage that information. Did they pay on time? Are they violating policy? Are they a good tenant? Do they have problems that need attention, and does maintenance know? All of that is just information management.

Where do you see people getting AI wrong?

A lot of people fail because they treat it like a glorified Google. They're not building infrastructure with it. They're relying on artificial intelligence to make them more intelligent, and it does not. It makes you faster. In my opinion that's really all it does.

I can find information now that would have taken hours of Google searching a year ago. I can build things I don't have the knowledge to build. I can program, and I don't have the knowledge to program. It has that knowledge. But if I don't understand the framework I need, it's dumb in, dumb out.

I spent six months running down the road and then three months backing up, going, okay, here's how we build the mainframe everybody can tap into. That's where all of this comes full circle. Building the infrastructure everybody has access to. That's the key.

Most AI pitches end in headcount reduction. Yours doesn't.

It's not going to replace people, because you still need the human factor that makes the decision. But it will make good people way more efficient. If I've spent three years getting you into the space where you understand my business, now I can make you three times more productive. And that productivity pays.

It's not a situation where I say, I'm going to make you do the work of three people and pay you for one. What it lets me do is properly integrate you into the company and put you in a position to make way more money, so I can retain you when somebody else comes along and says, we'd like you over here, we'll teach you all these new things. You'd take some of what I taught you, but you'd have to learn their culture and their system. Instead I get to say, I'm paying you 250 because you're doing the work of three people.

Shannon Robnett is the founder of Shannon Robnett Industries in Boise, Idaho.
Part of AIdaho Conversations, a series with Idaho business leaders on how they’re actually using technology and where it falls short.