Meet the Team : Tanner Dean

Meet Tanner Dean! He currently serves our customers as one of our awesome Housing Consultants, and has been with Braustin Homes since May of 2021. Tanner has been part of our team for just over seven months now, and we are so excited to share his experience thus far!

The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity purposes.

Tell us about yourself.

I’m Tanner and I am a Housing Consultant at Braustin Homes. I help our “Custys” find a mobile home that fits them perfectly.

I’m originally from Yakima, Washington.

That’s the central part of Washington, Yakima’s right in the middle. It’s a desert, so it is dry and sunny most of the time and beautiful weather. Yakima’s in a valley, so you have hills on the outside.

I actually lived right at the base of the hill so I would just walk to the top of the hill, sit up there for 20 minutes and be like, “Alright, cool. I’m in a better mood now. Let’s go back to the real world.”

What did you do before joining Braustin?

I was in the gym business for about 15 years.

I went to school to be a police officer, but I got out, and I applied at a gym and started applying to different policing agencies as well. The gym hired me, and I moved up fairly quickly to a training director.

I managed trainers for about 12 or 13 years.

Actually, I do still do it here in the office. I have the TRX training bands set up and I have started writing up workouts on the window as well to get everybody working out.

It makes you feel better and perform better even just in general life and in your job as well.

That’s probably the extent that I do of it now, but fitness is always going to be a part of my life.

It’s fun. I like helping people. I like to make a difference in people’s lives, and that is why I wanted to be a police officer. I discovered when I was a trainer that I was changing people’s lives there as well.

What made you want to join the team at Braustin?

It was the way they worded how the job was going to be done.

Rather than just being “a salesman,” it was like, “help families find a home.”

It was something so simple that got me to go to the website, and once I went to the website and started looking at the stories, the two brothers, Jason and Alberto, and how they were talking about the business, I thought more about it and thought maybe this is something I could do.

Being in this position has been very rewarding.

Buying a house is a really big deal and something you only do once or twice in a lifetime, so I could get a lot of enjoyment out of that.

Being a new company, I see a lot of room for growth, and I believe in a lot of the same core values, which is great. You don’t always get that with every company you work for, so I see myself learning the ins and outs of this, being just as good at it as Mauricio and maybe even Jason and Alberto.

Doing whatever I have to do to continue the growth of the company and obviously growing within my role as well.

What do you enjoy outside of work?

I like exploration and I like solitude.

Usually when you go into the mountains, as you’re walking, you’ve got all day and you can look around like, “Oh, what’s over there?”

One of my favorite hikes was Jade Lake.

You guys need to look that up.

It is the most beautiful lake, but it is a rough hike.

16 ½ miles, and 6,500 feet of elevation gain from beautiful lakes to a beautiful river to a beautiful waterfall to a beautiful mountain and even a beautiful glacier.

It’s so many different changes in scenery, and all of them are equally amazing.

Once you get there, your mind’s blown.

There’s something about it.

I think we as humans and the way we live now are so disconnected from the way that we were intended to be. So many distractions, advertisements, cars, people.

You are just constantly distracted.

When you take someone who is meant to be in nature and they go out there and experience it for the first time, it is mind blowing. I have never had anyone go out there and be like, “that was a waste of time.” They are just like, “man, that was an incredible experience.”

Even kids. I will take my kids and their friends on little hikes. It just blows their mind.

What’s it like to hike in Washington?

In Washington, usually there’s a bunch of connections so you could you come to a center point, and you could either go to the right, you could go straight, you could go to the left, you can go back to the left.

There are so many options.

You really have to be well planned and you can use a map, but that is pretty tough too. When you get into the hiking community and you start paying attention to it, there are a lot of people that die (as terrible as it is) out on hikes.

It’s simple mistakes, even some very experienced hikers make mistakes and find themselves in some real trouble.

My kids, and I always say, if you don’t almost die when you are on a hike, it was not a real hike.

It wasn’t even worth it.

It’s difficult in the moment, but afterwards they are the most fun to look back on.

Every time I spend time with my kids, we reminisce, “Oh, remember when we did the 11-mile hike.”

Tell us more about this memorable moment.

The 11-mile hike was the first time we ever ran out of water.

That was rough.

Running out of water’s a scary thing, and we ended up having to drink some pretty nasty water.

I had to make some decisions, which is also what I love about hiking too.

We had like half of a bottle left of water, I had my son who at the time was nine and my daughter was four, and we were 11 miles deep with no water.

Eleven miles in the woods, which meant it would take about five more hours to get out of there.

It was pretty hot, and we were thirsty, so I made the decision, “hey, Justice, we’re going to save this water for your sister.” I said to my daughter, “Debbie, don’t drink until you have to. We’re going to save this as long as possible.”

We knew we had crossed the stream on the way up because we, on the way up, we joked about it, “man, that’d be crazy if you had to drink this water.”

I reminded Justice, “remember that stream down there, son? We’re going to be drinking that, okay?”

It was a scary situation.

Walking down the hiking trail, I was thinking, “man, I don’t want to be in the news tomorrow. This is STUPID!”

That would be a terrible reason to be in the news.

You seem adventurous, what are your thoughts on space travel?

Space?

It really depends on how long it is going to take to get there.

If we can design a way that is a 30-minute round trip, sure. I’ll go check it. That’s no problem.

But if it is going to take a year to get there and back, probably not going to be up my alley.