Investor Cheat Code Podcast with Mike Simmons

My guest today is Amanda Cruise. After growing increasingly wary of the stock market, she pivoted to commercial real estate investing. Her first strategy was in single-family homes, then mobile homes, and now she is focused on the mobile home park asset class. She also works with passive investors looking to diversify income out of traditional IRAs and into alternative real estate investments to create a stable cash flow without the uncertainty of the stock market.

We begin the episode with Amanda sharing her background, what she did before and how she ended up in real estate. She shares that she was brought up in a traditional manner as far as jobs, work, and money are involved. After college where she majored as a data analyst, she couldn’t get a job. Amanda eventually started working her way up the corporate ladder at a large credit card company. She was a hard worker, and the harder she worked, the richer she made other people that she hadn’t even met. She knew there was something more, and she started looking for an alternative to take care of her own time, and that thing was real estate.

We then talk about Amanda’s interest and transition from single-family homes to mobile homes and later mobile home parks. They wanted to do something different, go faster, and mobile homes were the answer. They looked for individual mobile homes from people who really needed to sell and purchased them just like any other real estate property. They did seller financing, which helped get people in a home they wouldn’t otherwise be able to get into because it is hard to get financing for pre-owned mobile homes. They were getting great returns, and they realized they wanted to do more affordable housing, and that was when they decided to start owning mobile home parks. 

Next, we talk about Amanda’s criteria for finding mobile homes for sale. Amanda shares that if you’re really interested in single mobile homes, she recommends you drive to the parks looking for sales signs and ask people if they know anybody looking to sell. For them, they prefer the mobile homes to be in parks and have three bedrooms to make them easier to resell in today's market.

We then talk about how Amanda came to know that mobile homes were going to be a profitable venture. Amanda shares that they spent months educating themselves by listening to podcasts and reading books on mobile homes parks. According to her, mobile homes have better returns, and you can buy a mobile home park for a better cap rate than you can buy an apartment. Commercial real estate is valued based on the net operating income it brings in, and in mobile homes, this means more income. For the same amount of net income, you can buy a mobile home for less money than you would spend for an apartment complex. There are also many mom-and-pop sellers in mobile homes, which is not what you find when buying an apartment complex. Additionally, being able to get the deals straight from the people who created the parks themselves is really appealing.

Lastly, we talk about what to expect if you are looking for a business that will lead you to financial freedom in mobile home parks. Amanda shares that if you are looking for a good cash flow, you’re likely to go to multiple areas or states. They live in the central part of the state, and all their investments are three hours away from their home. There aren’t as many parks as there are single-family houses, so it takes a little more work and time to find one within your price range and location. Amanda and her husband's ultimate goal is 300 mobile home parks to get to their ideal target income.   

Make sure you don’t miss another amazing episode of the Just Start Real Estate Podcast with Amanda Cruise and get valuable information on how to invest in mobile homes and mobile home parks in a profitable way!

Notable Quotes:

“Mobile homes have a title, not deeds and they are easy to transfer, there’s no closing with mobile homes, you just get it notarized and sign for it just like buying a car.”

“You can buy a mobile home park for a better cap rate than you can buy an apartment complex.”

“Like everything else, in mobile homes parks going straight to the seller will give you the best deal.”

“In mobile houses, buyers' expectations are much more manageable.”

“There aren’t as many parks as there are single-family houses, so it takes a little more work and time to find one within your price range and location.”

“When buying a mobile home park, the most important thing is due diligence on the infrastructure.”

Links:

Voyage Investing

JSS Financial

Amanda on LinkedIn

Amanda on Instagram

Amanda on YouTube 

Mike's Email

Just Start Real Estate

JSRE on Facebook

Mike on Facebook

Mike on Instagram

Mike on LinkedIn

Mike on Twitter

Level Jumping: How I Grew My Business to Over $1 Million in Profits in 12 Months

Welcome to this version of the Just Start Real Estate Podcast! I am excited to bring you another replay of my Facebook Live Question and Answer sessions. I just started doing these live forums in April and they are going so well and I am getting such great feedback and questions, I thought I would share them here on the podcast. Especially for those people that are unable to join us live, this will provide an opportunity to hear the awesome questions I am fielding about business, taking risks, real estate, and so much more! Some of the questions have been very real estate specific, but others have been general business questions, like asking about overcoming fear in order to get started and how to successfully scale. I have also received more personal questions like how I decided real estate investing was right for me and the steps I took to get my business off the ground.

This presentation is the live Q&A that I did the week of April 27th and each Thursday we will offer you another chance to take advantage of listening to the answers to our guests’ fabulous and compelling questions! Don’t miss this new episode of the Just Start Real Estate Podcast!

Notable Quotes:

“I started out getting my leads from the MLS. But remember, it was 2008.”

“Going on the MLS and buying foreclosures was really easy.”

“When I couldn’t find deals anymore on the MLS, I went to direct mail and it worked great.”

“Direct mail helped me blow up into a seven figure business.”

“My best source of leads now is Google AdWords, pay-per-click.”

“The great thing about a pay-per-click lead is that it is someone that is looking for you.”

“Make an offer on it. Hoarder homes are fantastic investments where you can make a ton of money.”

“The great thing about a hoarder home is that the clean out is really not a big deal.”

“I would only consider giving a contractor a 30% downpayment to get started if I had a ton of experience and background with them.”

“Nobody needs 30% to get started.”

“If materials need to be bought to get started on a job, have the contractor make a list at Home Depot and call and pay for it yourself.”

“I was never a fan of motivational videos and affirmations until the last couple of years.”

Links:

7 Figure Investor

Eric Thomas YouTube Channel

7 Figure Flipping

Return on Investments

Just Start Real Estate

JSRE on Facebook

Mike on Facebook

Mike on Instagram

Mike on LinkedIn

Mike on Twitter

Level Jumping: How I Grew My Business to Over $1 Million in Profits in 12 Months

Incredible Wealth Strategies Using Opportunity Zones with Ashley Tison

Ashley Tison

Interviewed 3/22/2022 

My guest today is Ashley Tison. Ashley Tison is an attorney, founder of Opportunity Zone Professionals (OZPro), and strategy guru for OZPros. OZPros.com is a consulting firm that helps real estate investors, business owners, and other high net worth investors own qualified opportunity fund and qualified opportunity zone investments. They have invested in a number of products on their website to educate people on the complexities around Opportunity Zone strategy legislation so that they can implement it successfully.  You can purchase the educational product and do it on your own or sign up for their Oz workgroups, a virtual working center where people interact with others and exclusive resources to learn about these exciting investment types. 

We begin the episode with Ashley sharing his background story and why he chose his current profession. Ashley grew up in Indiana, played basketball, and ultimately ended up studying international business. After college, the job market wasn’t great, so he decided to go to law school to be an attorney. He practiced with big firms for five years and later got into in-house commercial real estate with a developer. When the commercial real estate market crashed, he went back to practice law and built up a mergers and acquisitions firm to help people buy and sell businesses. However, he sold the firm in 2017 because he got sick of seeing business owners who had built up big empires give almost 30% of it to the government. This led him to tax succession and mitigation planning, and along the way, he stumbled into opportunity zones. He loved it, and in 2018, he created a website, and within 2 weeks, he had 150 inbound inquiries and $75,000,000 worth of capital. 

We then talk about how Ashley was able to build a successful business from a website without marketing. Ashley and his team were doing it as a test, and they didn't have videos on their first website, but they had done a little bit of a keyword search. The opportunity zone program aligned perfectly with his background, and he had to help people figure out how to do it and implement it themselves. To achieve his goal, he repurposed a software program that they had built for his law firm that allowed them to do a main street-level business transaction for a fixed fee. They launched it to work in the opportunity zone space and partnered up to become the legal zoom for this space. According to Ashley, for the legal zoom capability, you must have a fair knowledge of how to do the forms, which is a little bit complicated. So they ended up putting in robust products to teach people and walk them through on their website, which has been rewarding. 

Next, we talk about what an opportunity zone is and the benefits that come with it. Ashley shares that Congress established opportunity funds and zone in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 to allow governors to designate up to 25% of their low-income census tracts all across the United States. When you invest in an opportunity fund, the first benefit you get is that you get to defer taxes until December 31st, 2026. There used to be a second benefit, which was a step up on the base after investing for either seven years or five years prior to the December 31st, 2026 deadline, but it expired in 2021. The third benefit is a permanent exclusion of capital gains tax via a step-up in base to fair market value. According to Ashley, for someone planning to build generational wealth, this is significant because it not only eliminates capital gains taxes but also eliminates depreciation recapture. So as a real estate investor, you can take any capital gains and invest them in a qualified opportunity fund and hold it for 10 years, and whatever you gain is going to come out tax-free.

We then discuss how you can take advantage of opportunity zones in real estate. Ashley shares that you can do it on any of your properties that happen to be in an opportunity zone. However, there are some requirements. You must have a substantial improvement of the asset which means you’ve to double the value of the building. So, if you buy a piece of property for $200,000 and the building itself is worth 50% of that, then you have to put another $100,000 into improving it. What you spend for improvement depends on the breakdown of what the building is worth versus the land. The opportunity zone tax act wants to make sure that people are not land banking on the opportunity zone. They want real investments. The good thing about it is that you don’t have to ask for permission from anybody, and there is no governing body that comes to check up on you. However, according to Ashley, when you don’t ask for permission, you must be prepared to provide a good audit trail to qualify. 

Lastly, we talk about how you can find out if your property is in an opportunity zone. Ashley recommends that you do this at opportunity.com/map by plugging  in your address. If you’re in an opportunity zone, it will pop up as blue. According to Ashley, to start your equity, you must have capital gains (you cannot use regular cash) and it has to go into a fund within 180 days. He recommends that you create a separate structure called Qualified Opportunity Zone Business (QOZB).

Make sure you don’t miss another amazing episode of the Just Start Real Estate Podcast with Ashley Tison and get valuable information on how you can build incredible wealth by investing in opportunity zones!

Notable Quotes:

“With a little bit of tax planning, intentionality, and foresight we can always reduce our tax bills when selling properties.”

“A qualified opportunity zone fund is a powerful tool for any investor who wants to build generational wealth.”

“When investing in opportunity zones, it doesn’t matter what the appraisal value ends up being. It matters what the building was worth at the time of purchase.”

“The good thing about opportunity zone investment is that there’s no governing body that comes to check your property, but you must have a really good audit trail to qualify for tax benefits.”

“Having a little barrier to entry is a smart way to do business.”

Links:

OZPros

OZPros on Facebook

OZPros on LinkedIn

OZPros on Youtube

Ashley on LinkedIn

Just Start Real Estate

7 Figure Investor

JSRE on Facebook

Mike on Facebook

Mike on Instagram

Mike on LinkedIn

Mike on Twitter

Level Jumping: How I Grew My Business to Over $1 Million in Profits in 12 Months

Welcome to this version of the Just Start Real Estate Podcast! I am excited to bring you another replay of my Facebook Live Question and Answer sessions. I just started doing these live forums in April and they are going so well and I am getting such great feedback and questions, I thought I would share them here on the podcast. Especially for those people that are unable to join us live, this will provide an opportunity to hear the awesome questions I am fielding about business, taking risks, real estate, and so much more! Some of the questions have been very real estate specific, but others have been general business questions, like asking about overcoming fear in order to get started and how to successfully scale. I have also received more personal questions like how I decided real estate investing was right for me and the steps I took to get my business off the ground.

This presentation is the live Q&A that I did the week of April 20th and each Thursday we will offer you another chance to take advantage of listening to the answers to our guests’ fabulous and compelling questions! Don’t miss this new episode of the Just Start Real Estate Podcast!

Notable Quotes:

“Entrepreneurial loneliness is one of the biggest pitfalls of being an entrepreneur.”

“The absolute best remedy for entrepreneurial loneliness is joining a mastermind.”

“You have to surround yourself with people who are in the same relative situation as yourself.”

“The mistake people often make, and it can cost them a ton of money, when they are lonely is to partner with someone.”

“You feel like you have someone in the trenches with you - until it goes wrong.”

“Don’t feel like your acquisition manager needs to have real estate experience. They don’t.”

“MAO stands for Maximum Allowable Offer.”

“Mortgages and promissory notes are two documents that you must have when you have lenders involved in purchasing a property.”

“You should be buying properties inside of an entity, an LLC.”

Links:

7 Figure Investor

7 Figure Flipping

Return on Investments

Just Start Real Estate

JSRE on Facebook

Mike on Facebook

Mike on Instagram

Mike on LinkedIn

Mike on Twitter

Level Jumping: How I Grew My Business to Over $1 Million in Profits in 12 Months

We begin the episode with Brian sharing his background story and how he ended up in real estate. He shares that he was conditioned early on in life to go to school, get a good job, save money, buy a house and hopefully retire at 75 years old. He was in sales for about 25 years and was interacting with business owners with a net worth that was ten times higher than his, which helped him in his real estate career. According to Brian, in sales, you can only make more money if you’re trading more time or moving up the corporate ladder, and this made him so nervous. This motivated him to stop the analysis paralysis and pursue his dream of real estate investing.   

We then talk about Brian's model and end game with seller financing. He shares that there are two models he likes to use. First, you can have control of properties without ownership and create multiple exit strategies. Second, you can take the deeds with seller financing. Brain's preferred strategy that pays him the most money is finding buyers who cannot qualify for a bank loan and leasing the house to them until they qualify for a loan to cash out. Brian is a long-term thinker, and this works for him. However, you can also leverage other existing strategies such as short-term and long-term rentals. He also shares that he finds his properties primarily by looking for sellers who are actively trying to sell their house, through expired listings, for sale by owners, or rent by owners. This is all inexpensive public information.  

Next, we discuss how Brian gets houses seller-financed and how he protects the transaction. Brian shares that before he sells a house, he likes the buyers to prove themselves using a lease option for a couple of years. After buying properties from a seller, Brian takes over their loan payment, and the house gets deeded to him. The loan stays in place until the end buyer gets their loan to cash out of the house. This can take 5 years, 10 years, or whatever the agreement is, but the longer you go, the better for you as an investor. To make the deal profitable, Brian sells the houses for more than the original loan payment. According to him, if you do this correctly, you will not be a landlord. The buyers are responsible for the utility, repairs, and maintenance because they act as owners of the house, which makes it more rewarding. 

We then talk about how Brian frames the conversation to find suitable candidates for sellers' financing. According to Brian, it takes a while to get there. In the beginning, he was petrified simply because he didn’t know what to say, but he had to learn it. The fear of phones can be traumatizing but treating a seller like a neighbor who has a sale sign on their house makes the conversation easy and natural. For Brian, this helps him in understanding their situation, and there are four things that he desires to hear from a seller before they know if they are a candidate for seller financing or not: why they are selling their house, why they took their house off the market, the condition of the house, and whether they need to cash the house out to move on to the next thing. 

Lastly, we talk about Brian's portfolio, plan, and how big he wants to get. Brain shares that he plans to get as many houses as possible on long-term financing contracts for deeds to have the cash flow coming in and never have to worry about cashing out. For Brian, the ideal number is 100, and he has a long-term plan to get there within five years. Deed contracts take time because not every seller is a candidate, but it’s a powerful investment channel if you do them right. Brian's goal is to get into more long-term financing, and he needs 10 to 15 such deals a year to achieve his goal of 100 before moving into other asset classes like multifamily.    

Make sure you don’t miss another amazing episode of the Just Start Real Estate Podcast with Brian O'Neill and get valuable information on how to create long-term wealth through seller financing projects!

Notable Quotes:

“Fear of the phone can be traumatizing, but treating a seller like a neighbor who has a sale sign on their house makes the conversation easy and natural.”

• Brian O'Neill

“When there is a lot of fear and uncertainty in the market  is when you need to double down.”

• Brian O'Neill 

“The market doesn’t have bad or good feelings. The way you react and position your business has everything to do with your success.”

• Mike Simmons 

“Deed contracts take time because not every seller is a candidate, but they are powerful investment channels if you do them right.”

• Brian O'Neill 

“Sometimes there is a lot of emotional attachment in a house, and you’ve to let the seller go through that process, no matter how excited you are about the deal.”

• Brian O'Neill 

Links:

BKW Property Solutions 

Brian on LinkedIn

BKW on Instagram 

BKW on Facebook

7 Figure Investor

Just Start Real Estate

JSRE on Facebook

Mike on Facebook

Mike on Instagram

Mike on LinkedIn

Mike on Twitter

Level Jumping: How I Grew My Business to Over $1 Million in Profits in 12 Months

Welcome to this version of the Just Start Real Estate Podcast! I am excited to bring you another replay of my Facebook Live Question and Answer sessions. I just started doing these live forums in April and they are going so well and I am getting such great feedback and questions, I thought I would share them here on the podcast. Especially for those people that are unable to join us live, this will provide an opportunity to hear the awesome questions I am fielding about business, taking risks, real estate, and so much more! Some of the questions have been very real estate specific, but others have been general business questions, like asking about overcoming fear in order to get started and how to successfully scale. I have also received more personal questions like how I decided real estate investing was right for me and the steps I took to get my business off the ground.

This presentation is the live Q&A that I did the week of April 13th and each Thursday we will offer you another chance to take advantage of listening to the answers to our guests’ fabulous and compelling questions! Don’t miss this new episode of the Just Start Real Estate Podcast!

Notable Quotes:

“For a house flipper, you want there to be 250,000+ households in your market.”

“Do you hunt where there are 10 deer or 1000 deer?”

“When you are looking for markets, you need to straddle the line between small enough that it is not overly competitive but still big enough that it has plenty of deals and buyers.”

“If I were looking to break into a new market right now, it would be a secondary market.”

“Do not print out your marketing letters and send them yourself.”

“How do you build your business so that you are not doing activities that you could literally pay someone $5 an hour to do?”

“I recommend postcards for marketing.”

“By doing that, you are making a living by undercutting another investor. I don’t love it.”

“The worst thing about being a contractor is getting sucked into doing the work yourself.”

“Your time as the investor and business owner is much better spent raising money and finding deals.”

“You should not just use a property management company someone told you about. You should interview them just as you would with filling a position in your company.”

“This is not charity. This is business.”

Links:

7 Figure Investor

Evergreen Printing & Mailing

7 Figure Flipping

Return on Investments

Just Start Real Estate

JSRE on Facebook

Mike on Facebook

Mike on Instagram

Mike on LinkedIn

Mike on Twitter

Level Jumping: How I Grew My Business to Over $1 Million in Profits in 12 Months

My guest today is Matt Pridemore. Matt is skilled in negotiation, operations management, coaching, retail, sales, and franchise building. Matt has a furniture business, and he was awarded 2021 Top 40 Under Forty Furniture Executive by Home Furniture Business. He purchased his first retail furniture store in 2016 from his parents and currently owns and operates 13 stores across Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. Recently, Matt started the Franchise Builder podcast, and he is writing a book to help people understand how to go into business using franchises.

We begin the episode with Matt sharing his background story. Matt shares that his parents had one store for 35 years. They did a phenomenal job with it, but they worked all day long inside the store, which discouraged Matt from pursuing it. He was in a professional baseball career, but he got injured in 2009 and had to resign. After going back home, he started to double his parent's business using the skills that he had learned in his career. Matt worked for them for five years, moving from a store manager to a regional manager and later buying his first store (his parent's store) in 2016. A few months later, he started scaling, he bought a second store, and within six months, he had his third location. Today, Matt has created a system of adding a new store every four to five months, and now he’s in his 13th store in the southeast. 

We then talk about practices that Matt uses that works well in hiring. He attributes his success to his regional manager role because when he was a store manager, he only had one location, and he did things his way. He was the smartest guy in the room every day and always on the front line. As a regional manager, he worked with store managers as part of his team, and he couldn’t be in every store every time. So in listening to them, Matt realized that they had so many great ideas, and hearing them out ensured they were on the same page at all times. According to Matt, this gave rise to culture, and he had to make sure everybody who came on his team understood that culture was going to be a big driver. Culture beats strategy, and in building a thriving culture, communication is key. So, if you’re a leader, you’re in charge of the people in your team, and you have to create a two-way communication to ensure you’re moving in the same direction.    

Next, we talk about How Matt does his interviews. Matt shares that he often involves his high-level employees, including his store managers. He has three people who know him very well, and he leads his company with them, and they have a hand in every interview. Store managers are also part of the program, especially when hiring people to work in warehouse delivery, sales, or customer service at the store level. According to Matt, involving his employees in interviews and allowing them to duplicate what they do, ask questions, and share their ideas is a big part of scaling. He also believes that consistent training is key to building a successful team, and they have training systems in place to ensure they stay on top of this. 

Lastly, we talk about Matt’s end goal for his business. Matt shares that when he first got into the business, the end goal was to sell the stores off to people who had added value to his company. However, his goals started evolving and changing as he realized that most of his employees didn’t want to be business owners. Most of them want to be part of the leadership team rather than buying a franchise store. Now, his focus is to keep scaling, training, and growing his business to build a culture of success. To Matt, business, in general, is infinite, and his end goal now is to give value back to the people who are adding value to his company.    

Make sure you don’t miss another amazing episode of the Just Start Real Estate Podcast with Matt Pridemore and get valuable information on how to grow and scale your business to the next level!

Notable Quotes:

“Make sure everybody in your team understands your vision, beliefs, values, and the way you do things early on when hiring.”

• Matt Pridemore

“Building, scaling, profitability, and success are closely tied to the people that you hire.”

• Mike Simmons

“Culture eats strategy. Make sure you are on the same page with the people you are working with at all times.“

• Matt Pridemore

“If you don’t have a support system for continuous improvement and training in place, you are setting your company for a slow decline.”

• Mike Simmons

“Training is not something you did, it is something you constantly do.”

• Matt Pridemore

Links:

Franchise Builder Podcast

Matt on LinkedIn

Matt on Facebook 

Just Start Real Estate

7 Figure Investor

JSRE on Facebook

Mike on Facebook

Mike on Instagram

Mike on LinkedIn

Mike on Twitter

Level Jumping: How I Grew My Business to Over $1 Million in Profits in 12 Months

This presentation is the live Q&A that I did the week of April 6th and each Thursday we will offer you another chance to take advantage of listening to the answers to our guests’ fabulous and compelling questions! Don’t miss this new episode of the Just Start Real Estate Podcast!

Notable Quotes:

“Banks look at your credit and the investment you are trying to make. They don’t usually beat you up for lack of experience.”

“I will loan you that money all day long because my investment is very secure.”

“You need to look for hard money lenders.”

“The answer is painfully obvious… it is an emphatic, scream from the mountaintops, yes!”

“If you are averaging more than a 12% return on another investment vehicle, maybe you should stick with that.”

“In the spirit of telling it like it is, 500 postcards a month is not enough.”

“The bottom line is that postcards do work.”

“Day one when a tenant is late on rent, send them a seven-day eviction notice.”

“You can stop the proceedings anytime you want, but until you get that notice into their hands, the clock hasn’t started.”

Links:

7 Figure Investor

7 Figure Flipping

Return on Investments

Just Start Real Estate

JSRE on Facebook

Mike on Facebook

Mike on Instagram

Mike on LinkedIn

Mike on Twitter

Level Jumping: How I Grew My Business to Over $1 Million in Profits in 12 Months

My guest today is Clay Hepler. Clay is the Chief Wealth Strategist and CEO of the Creative Capitalist, a multifamily investor, serial entrepreneur, podcast host, and cash flow specialist. He empowers entrepreneurs, executives, and real estate investors to create, protect and multiply their cash flow and maintain it no matter what happens in the market to get to financial freedom and abundance faster. 

We begin the episode with Clay sharing his background story and how he ended up in the real estate. He shares that his goal in college was to be an ambassador, but he dropped out of college after working at the US Embassy in Buenos Aires, which turned out to be a nightmare. Clay was very active, and being in an office was not what he dreamed of. It was so bureaucratic and the work was all mundane administrative work. His journey shifted from analytical and clerical work to marketing and sales in their family business. However, along the way, Clay met a successful real estate investor and developer in Washington, DC who started mentoring him in real estate. He taught him about insurance, taxes, and how to get equity in real estate. When he finally got into real estate, he leveraged his sales skill sets, and now he owns a wealth consulting company that works with entrepreneurs and real estate investors.    

We then talk about how Clay managed to scale their family business from two to forty-two countries and why he shifted to real estate.  He shares that he was living with his parents and working full time in the business, but he wanted to go out and do his own thing. Clay wanted to choose a path for himself, and he was on a mission to start something that not only made him successful but also brought the fulfillment he wanted. This led to the creation of Creative Capitalist, a firm that designs life insurance policies to help investors and business owners keep more of their cash flow by eliminating cash flow leaks, providing them with liquidity to grow, scale their business, and capitalize on opportunities for enormous growth. According to Clay, life insurance policies have enormous advantages.

Next, we talk about Clay’s plan for his business. Clay shares that the end game is to create a fractional family office. A family office is a structure that enables very wealthy people to access accounts of attorney advisers who work for them to ensure every dollar that enters their personal economy is used in the most efficient and effective way. Clay and his team are rolling out a fractional family office based on a subscription model where clients get access to hand-picked attorney advisers' accounts. The goal is to pull some of the greatest minds of attorney advisers together to help their clients get to financial freedom in abundance by preserving and increasing their wealth over their whole lives. 

We then talk about the best strategies for scaling your real estate business. Clay shares that the most important thing in scaling your business is having the right people in the game. You can have all the tactics, strategies, and systems with KPIs, but without a team that aligns with your goals, you’re not likely to be in the game for long. According to Clay, most successful investors thrive because of their teams' effort.

Lastly, we talk about the things that Clay has found to be helpful in hiring the right people. Clay shares that he has not hired a lot because he looks for strategic partners rather than actual hires when scaling his business. There are many ways of partnering with other businesses, but Clay prefers giving a percentage of the profit rather than actually paying someone and training them. This has helped them to get people who have more aligned interests. In a flipping business, the same principle applies. You can partner with someone who can be an aggregator of distressed assets, such as an attorney or a CPA. For Clay, he has always scaled his businesses using exterior partnerships, and it has been very rewarding,

Make sure you don’t miss another amazing episode of the Just Start Real Estate Podcast with Clay Hepler and get valuable information on how to optimize your cash flow, build more equity, and scale your business!

Notable Quotes:

“In real estate, you must have equity to become wealthy.”

• Clay Hepler  

“Most wealthy people put 15-20% of their liquid savings in life insurance packages because of tax and collateral advantages.”

• Clay Hepler 

“The way to scale your business is not by yourself - you need to have the right people in the game.”

• Clay Hepler  

“Letting other people do the skill set and giving them a piece of the pie can be very rewarding.”

• Clay Hepler 

“Most successful investors thrive because of team effort. You need a team that is aligned in the right seats to be successful.”

• Clay Hepler 

Links:

Creative Capital

Clay on Facebook 

Clay on LinkedIn

7 Figure Investor

Just Start Real Estate

JSRE on Facebook

Mike on Facebook

Mike on Instagram

Mike on LinkedIn

Mike on Twitter

Level Jumping: How I Grew My Business to Over $1 Million in Profits in 12 Months

This presentation is the live Q&A that I did the week of March 30th and each Thursday we will offer you another chance to take advantage of listening to the answers to our guests’ fabulous and compelling questions! Don’t miss this new episode of the Just Start Real Estate Podcast!

Notable Quotes:

“We have a leads manager that is really more of a data manager.”

“We send emails and text messages and also do automated and manual calls to potential clients if we don’t get the contract the first time around.”

“Maybe let a VA use a CRM that you like and figure it out for themselves.”

“You don’t have to have everything in place to start bringing people in to help.”

“The quickest way to not do things is to think all your ducks need to be in a row before you can take a step forward.”

“Bring help in and figure it out on the fly.”

“A lot of hard money lenders will write checks to the contractor directly.”

“If you are flipping or wholesaling a property, you are looking basically for the same things on a property tour.”

“When you go through these properties, you expect they are going to need cosmetic updates, but you need to take a hard look at all the big-ticket items.”

“If you have a buyer pressuring you before you have a chance to get other offers, it is because they know their offer isn’t good enough to get accepted with competition.”

Links:

7 Figure Investor

7 Figure Flipping

Return on Investments

Just Start Real Estate

JSRE on Facebook

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Level Jumping: How I Grew My Business to Over $1 Million in Profits in 12 Months