← Action Academy | Millionaire Mentorship For Your Life & Business
Action Academy | Millionaire Mentorship For Your Life & Business
He Quit His $150k Engineering Job (and JUST Became A Millionaire) Through Self Storage Investing
00:41:00
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- [00:03]
A
All right. All right, Mr. Brandon Hicks. Tell me the story of the significance of Zermatt, Switzerland, and describe what the heck Zermatt, Switzerland is for somebody that's listening and they're like, that sounds fancy. That sounds foreign. That sounds out of my tax bracket. What is Zermatt, and what's the significance behind it?
- [00:25]
B
Yeah, well, so my wife went there. Me and my wife went there about six years ago, seven years ago in 2018, for the. Just wanted to ski. We had heard about the Matterhorn and this beautiful, like, iconic mountain. Actually, I think it's what's on the Tabarone candy there, the chocolates there. And we went there, and, man, it was. I just remember it was super expensive, but absolutely beautiful. And we loved that. We. We went. And when I had joined Action Academy, you had suggested right after I wholesaled my storage deal, and we made almost a quarter million dollars on the wholesale. I had just left my job. You said, you got to go celebrate. And. And of course, I'm thinking I should save all that money and put it away, because now, all of a sudden, I have no income, and I need to be really conservative. And you're like, no, dude, you got to go celebrate. So we booked our trip a couple months after we left, and we ended up staying at a much nicer hotel. And I remember sitting on the hotel in the morning and thinking, wow, this place is. This is so much nicer than the place we stayed at before, because back in 2018, this was, like, W2 Brandon super, like, penny pinching, not wanting to spend any money on anything. And we decided to splurge a little bit. And so the hotel was so much nicer, the food was so much nicer, and there were so many things about that trip that we did a little bit differently, which is, like, we went and got food at the places that we wanted to get to that we did not do the last time. The last time I was like, well, maybe next time. Maybe one day I'll do that. But this time I had, like, a completely different mindset. But the interesting thing about that was that we ended up meeting someone in Zermatt who just. My wife followed her on Instagram. She just happened to be there at the same time, and her husband had no one to ski with, and we had been there before. So we took him around and showed him all of the mountains and everything, and basically was his tour guide, and they were staying in this even nicer hotel. And I was thinking, like, why. Why am I not. Why didn't I could Afford that. It's only an extra couple hundred dollars a night. Why did I not do that? Like, why was there something. What is it about, like, my money mindset or my philosophy around this? Like, they're not multimillionaires. They're not making significantly more money than me. Why am I not staying there? And so I distinctively remember, like, journaling on the balcony one morning, like. Like, I love this place, but, like, there's something that's keeping me back and holding me back. Like. Like I have, like this, like, thermometer or temperature or something that's like, telling me that I'm a $200 a night hotel person or a. A night hotel person. And I have no idea where that's even come from or where that even came from. And so I remember journaling on that and saying, I like the place that I'm at, but next time I come back here, I'm going to get everything that I wanted. Have a gym, a sauna, the cold plunge, and the view of the Matterhorn. And so this year, the beginning of the year, I set my goal. I had an income goal to hit $20,000 a month, which for years I had not been hitting my goal. I'm like, well, what's wrong with me? I'm going through all this emotional, like, I set a goal and I didn't hit it. And I set a goal and I didn't hit it. Am I not taking action? Or like, what's the deal? And I decided. Cause I was so close to hitting my old goal. I was like, I'm going to double it, and I'm going to hit that this year. And in the first month, I hit my previous goal. And then in multiple consecutive months this year, I've hit the new goal. I said, all right, I'm booking this trip and we're going to do exactly what I want and I'm going to splurge, which I have never done before. And so that's the Significance of Zurich A. 7. Seven Years in the making. But to get to here. But that's the. That's the story.
- [03:51]
A
So tell. Tell them about the new hotel. What's the hotel called? Like, describe the. The new room. Like, I hope that you got a suite. Like, what. What room did you guys get now? And. And for people listening, there's a point behind all of this, because this is an investing podcast, right? We talk about buying businesses and a Brandon's Case Self Storage, which we'll talk about here shortly, how he acquired his portfolio, scaled it aggressively, over the last couple of years and then also share what worked for him and also different pieces of advice that he wishes he could have gone back and changed and. But the significance of this isn't what assets you buy, but what do the assets yield, what is the cash flow yield, what is the equity yield? So tell me about the new hotel, because this is what we love to talk about. This is my favorite conversation on this podcast about the new hotel. The new bucket list.
- [04:40]
B
Yeah. So the thing about the Zermatt and the Matterhorn is it's like this really like iconic, like, very sharp looking peak that just kind of like sits over and sits over the town and it's just the most beautiful, like, thing. Whenever I'm walking around town, I'm always just like looking up. It's almost like, it's just like hovering over the town. It's super cool. And I always wanted to have a hotel room where I could see that from my room so I could wake up, look outside, go out on the balcony. And again, I just would never allow myself to spend the extra, in the grand scheme of things, an extra $200 to get the Matterhorn view versus, like the city view. And so this time, you know, it's, and this is going to be pretty cool because I was sitting on my balcony at the old, old, the previous hotel, looking at the one that our friends were at and saying, why should I? Why am I not there? And the room that I now have is on the corner with a Matterhorn view, looking back at the room that I stayed in the last time. And so, yeah, we, we upgraded to the grand junior suite. I was like, you know what, for years I've been, I've been saying that I'm going, I want this, but I would never allow myself to do it. I actually have it as on my phone screen. I've had it on my phone screen for a year. So I've had like the exact view and, and said, you know what, I'm gonna, we're gonna go big, we're gonna do it. So it's got the gym, it's got the sauna, it's got sauna with the view of the Matterhorn. They've got like outdoor heated pool with a view. Like there's a view of the Matterhorn no matter where you go for this hotel. And I was like, that's where I want to be. It's got everything that I've ever wanted in a hotel. And we're going back, back to there.
- [06:10]
A
That's fricking Sick man. And then now you're celebrating an income goal, but you also celebrated another massive milestone. What was the other massive milestone you guys hit?
- [06:19]
B
Yeah, so we just crossed millionaire status through a lot of it. Through self storage skyrocketed this year with adding a cup. We bought over $5 million of self storage and we added almost a million dollars of value at one location already. And by this time next year, it'll probably be about a million and a half dollars of value add with rental increases, tenant protection, a triple net lease. So great home run deal. And we're looking at hopefully doing a full cash out refi next year. But we've added a significant AM and I was, did redid my PFS and I was like, holy smokes. Like it's like a double or a triple over last year.
- [06:57]
A
Yeah, dude, it's, it's really crazy because if we convince people to do two things on this podcast, hopefully it'd be number one to believe in themselves and hang out with people that are closest to their dreams, not just closest to them. And so that'd be number one. Number two would be to get them out of residential real estate and get them into commercial real estate or businesses because the value generators and the wealth generators and the cash flow generators are so much more insane. And so can you describe to somebody that's listening to this that perhaps is an engineer like you were before you were a high, you know, a senior level engineer. You were managing other engineers. If somebody's at that point right now with multiple rental properties or Airbnbs, why should they perhaps consider shifting to commercial real estate and maybe in particular self storage? But let's start with commercial real estate in general.
- [07:52]
B
Yeah, so it's really how the value of the property is calculated. So it's revenue minus the expenses is your net operating income and it's divided by a cap rate. A lot of times that cap rate is in the, for the properties, we're looking at 7 or 8% range. So any NOI increase that you can do but divided by a 7% or 8% number has a very large impact. You know, a 12 or 13 or 14x impact. And specifically for self storage, you know, when a tenant is paying $50 a month for rent, and then if we raise the rates to even $60, that is, what is that? It's a 20% rental increase. Doesn't seem like that much. You know, you're only. The customer is now only having to pay an extra $10 from where they were before. But if I can do a 20% raise across the board for 100 and some odd tenants. That is where all of a sudden we're raising hundreds of thousands of dollars of value. And so, for example, the property we bought earlier in the year was 100% full and the rates were 35% behind market. So we decided to take half the customers and do a test to see because this was actually pretty aggressive for us. We did a test and we raised the rates 33%. And so I think that added about 1500 to $1800 a month of cash flow multiplied by 12 for 12 months. So I think it's, you know, it ends up being something like, oh, what is it, 20 to $30,000 of extra cash flow a year. But on a valuation it's roughly 200 to $250,000 of value increase just from sending out 80 emails. I mean, put it in perspective, it's probably like three, four hours of work to research all the market comps, see where everybody's at, look at all the customers, where they're at today. And then we're also looking at unit by unit and trying to figure out like how can I maximize the amount of cash flow increase here? Because some customers, small units, they are more likely to move out. Large units, they're less likely to move out because it's more of a pain. So we're like weighing all of those odds. Couple hours, pull an email together, send it out. We had some customers move out, but in the end it was like a net 1500-1800 dollar cash flow per month increase. And it's roughly a quarter million dollars value add just from that.
- [10:12]
A
Yeah, I think acquisition is a cool game to play, but asset management is an even cooler game. And in my case right now it's business management. Because right now I'll share three different strategies. One in private equity that we're utilizing in business, and then I'll share one in multifamily and one in boutique hotels so that people can get like a full range of what we're talking about when it comes to equity arbitrage or forced equity, forced appreciation. So the first thing that we are doing right now is what's called the bolt on and roll up strategy. And private equity. So we're buying kitchen hood cleaning companies, we bought one. And I think the profit was maybe just for easy math, $500,000. Now $500,000 profit will trade at maybe 3 to 5x multiple of profit. So you're getting that for about 1.5 million dollar valuation. Right. But the more Profit that you have in a small business, the higher the multiple goes, that will it will sell for. So the goal is to increase the profit or EBITDA as much as possible. And we do that through buying other small businesses. So we went and bought a competitor in the same Kansas City study market seller, finance them, bolted them on to our current existing operation and our profit went from again, I don't have the numbers in front of me for, but let's say it went from 500 to you know, 900 or to a million. Now right now we're looking at acquiring another kitchen hood cleaning company vertically integrate them within our company and then that will maybe take our profit up to 1.5 million. So 1.5 million. The multiples that I could trade at are like 7 to 9x and so or like 5 to 7x. So it's the difference of going from a $1.5 million valuation to like a 9 million dollar valuation within a couple of years. So that's the roll up strategy in private equity. Then when it comes to multifamily, a strategy that I really like from Logan Rankin, shout out to Logan is he'll have an apartment complex that he buys for 100 units. We'll say just to make again simple math and let's say that everybody's paying, you know, $50 for Wi Fi and so he goes and negotiates a bulk deal with or let's say 100 bucks for the WI fi. And then so he goes and does a bulk deal with the WI fi provider and he's able to give it to them for you know, 70 bucks. But he pays 70 bucks but they pay even less. So he gets like A$20 Delta and the customer pays even less than they would pay on their own because of economies of scale. So he bundles that into the rent and then he gets like $20 clip per month per unit. And so all of a sudden like again that's another, you know, $2,000 clip per month, $24,000 per year of value add just from negotiating a WI fi contract. And then the third one is from Rich Summers and his boutique hotels is he'll have a boutique hotel he'll buy for 30 keys or some odd and then he'll have one, an on site manager and they live in what's called the manager's suite. So he'll take the manager out of the business automated, do self check in and then put the manager suite online as an additional unit and increase the the profit again like another 30, $40,000 to the year just by having that extra room online. So those are three different kind of methods for exactly what you're talking about, which is value creation. Instead of just sitting around waiting for your rental property to hopefully appreciate through interest rates and through your neighbors not getting divorced and fire selling the property. So that's what's so much fun about this. To go back a little bit, you know, because you, you scaled like crazy here in Action Academy and I think that you wanted, you said before that you wish you would have scaled a little bit more, but talk to us a little really quickly. I think we you joined like 2022. I think you were one of the original members. So between 2022 and 2025, what were your storage numbers? Like what was your portfolio numbers?
- [14:06]
B
Yeah, so when I joined in 2022, I had that wholesale deal, home run home, wholesale deal for me at the time I had just hired a virtual assistant. We built an off market list and I was just trying to add value to a coach. And so we ended up deciding we got that under contract. It was the first loi I had ever sent and I was going to close on that and operate it. But there was just a lot about that deal that I like. A lot of capex, a lot of construction that was well over my head as a newbie. And so I decided to it off and wholesale it. So when I had left my job, I mean I had partnered in a few deals as a JV, but real small, like a percent here, 2 or 3% there. So I was involved in two deals and you know, that was probably about $5 million of storage. But I wasn't self managing, I wasn't, I really didn't know what I know today. So I left thinking I'm going to take over the world and I'm going to buy a bunch of storage. Interest rates rose. This was now 2023 and I didn't get anything accepted probably for year, a year after I had wholesaled that deal. So I went from like, you know, my biggest income year. I think I might have made like 370 that year between like my W2 and the wholesale deal and all the other things that had come in. And the next year I made two grand. So I went from 370 to 370 to two.
- [15:23]
A
That's not gonna pay for Zermatt, dude.
- [15:26]
B
No, no, it's not dude.
- [15:28]
A
Entrepreneurship. Wow, I didn't even know that one.
- [15:31]
B
Yeah, not something that you want to, it's not something you want to really want to tell everybody. It's like I made two grand last year, you know, it even the deals that I had invested in because of the uncertainty and the market stopped distributing. I was like, dang, dude, I can't make a buck. Like to save my, like I can't make anything this year. And then finally towards the end of that year, I got a couple of accepted offers and we closed on the two of them. The first two when we were down in Cabo together for one of the Action Academy events. And so it took me, it was about 18 months or so between the wholesale and then finally closing on my first two. And then like that was a world of difference. Cause we decided to self manage. First time answering the phones. The first customer call I ever took, we were sitting in Villa Savina, you know, and like I got a call and I didn't even know what to say. I was. Because I hadn't even prepared, you know, like I've never answered a customer call before. And so there was just a lot of lessons learned last year between, you know, managing, answering the phones, paying the bills, like asset management, dealing with auctions. So many different, you know, so many different things that you just. Where would you ever learn that, you know? And so I did, I learned that all kind of by, by scratch. And then we ended up doing one more deal. We wholesale to Hunter in Action Academy towards the end of last year. And then this year we, we essentially, what was it, we tripled, I think we bought about 5.2. So we did more than double the acquisitions this year than we did last year. And now we have about 9 million of assets under management. I think it's 600 units and 100,000 square feet that we're directly managing. And then I still have the other couple that I've partnered in, well like early on in my investing journey. But we self manage about a hundred thousand square feet now.
- [17:11]
A
And now you find your business partner also through Action Academy.
- [17:14]
B
Rob.
- [17:15]
A
So talk about how you guys partnered up. I think you talked about it briefly in the, in the previous podcast. Just hit on that really quickly about the importance of partnership and finding someone complimentary to you.
- [17:25]
B
Yeah, so we, we ended up meeting in the first Action Academy event. So in Costa Rica. He wasn't even thinking about self storage at the time. So he, he wasn't looking necessarily to meet with me from a business partnership perspective. And that was right around the time I had those two deals under contract, so I was starting to work on those. He was doing his own thing, but we had some similar interests and fishing and A few other things. And we stayed in touch. We ended up at the Nashville event. You were there too. And he and I ended up going to the gym together. And then we just started keeping in touch. And then about six or eight months later, things shifted directions for him. And he said, you know what, I think I want to get into self storage. And he just started sending me, was like, how can I add value? And he started sending me a bunch of deals. And I had, I had people do that, say that before, where they like say, hey, I'm going to send you deals, let me help out. And they send one a week or one every two weeks. And like he was sending me so many, I couldn't keep up with, like he was sending me two or three a day. And I was like, dude, like, I felt, I started feeling bad, like I was the one with all the experience and like running deals. And I started to feel bad that I wasn't keeping up with him. And so we decided to just keep on looking for deals together. And then we ended up. The first one we did together was the one we wholesaled the Hunter inside of Action Academy. And then this year we ended up doing the two together. And the biggest thing for, for, for me was like you mentioned earlier, like, I'm highly analytical. I was an engineer. I always resisted cold calling owners and building, resist building relationships. But he does that for fun. Like he likes it. And so the first deal we did this year definitely would not have done it without him because it was a six month period of building a relationship with the owner. It was on the list I had built four years ago. That property was on the off market list. So it had sat there for four years and we decided to start calling again now that I had the right resources and he had the, the desire and the will to like actually build these relationships. And the seller was like, yeah, I don't want to sell for. Well, he was an owner at the time, didn't want to sell for five years. He didn't want to do seller financing and he wanted a much higher price. And then just like you hear like things shift. They decided they wanted to move and price came down, seller financing was on the table and he was like, let's sell right now. And that's how we ended up getting it. But it was six months of Rob building a relationship, staying on top of like actually continuing to check in. And then six months later, we ended up with what is by far our best property. It's only three years old, it was full. We've got a ton of value add opportunity. There's still more value add we can do. And it is by far our best deal. And it all is from the relationship that was built.
- [20:15]
A
It's funny as you're talking because all I'm thinking about is there's never a point where you're going to be ready to do the big deal ever. There's never going to be a point. And I think that applies to all levels. So I think it applies to the person with two Airbnbs looking to do a 20 key boutique hotel. It applies to the person that has got a 20 key boutique hotel, they're looking to do a 200 key hotel. It applies to storage, it applies to multifamily. It applies to action Academy. Like us going from $2,000 a year to 5,000 to, you know, 10,000. And it's just like there's never a point really that I found and we're going through it right now in business and in life and investing, which investing is just business to its highest extreme. Like when you actually extrapolate investing out to its core, it becomes business. So it's funny because there's never a time where you say, oh, like this is so good, I'm just gonna like 10x the price and then everyone's just gonna be fine with it. It's you, 10x the price and then you start to figure things out and then you adjust to that new price. You say, okay, cool, let me figure out what's needed now, what needs to change, what needs to be fixed. And then the same thing with investing is you're like, okay, cool, with this new price and with this new amount, there's different things involved, different lenders, different processes, different timelines, different skill sets. And so can you talk a little bit about your experience with that for to hopefully help somebody that's listening to this and they're just gritting their teeth trying to get ready to do that first relatively air quote, big deal for them. And maybe that's just a storage facility. What can you tell them to hopefully help them overcome that resistance and just dive in?
- [22:09]
B
Well, I think the thing that has helped me along the way, like that first wholesale deal, and it's funny, you do the one deal or you do a couple days, you feel like you've got experience and then you run into another issue and it's stressful. And so I can share some stories from each of the deals that we've done along the way. So the first one was the first loi. I'd ever sent. First accepted offer. And then I was like, well, what do I do now? Like, the first offer I sent, I didn't even have the loi. I had to go to my coach and say, I think I want to make an offer on this. Can I borrow your loi? And then I sat on it for two weeks because I was, like, overanalyzing what. What offer to make. And I. And. And then I. Then I started feeling like I probably lost this deal. I took so long. And then I sent it to the guy and he accepted it in five minutes. Like, he pulled over on the side of the road and accepted it. And I was like, okay, cool, now what do I do? And they're like, well, now you got to go interview three attorneys. Okay. So I went and interviewed three attorneys and then just started going down the process. And the way I felt comfortable or confident to do that deal was by aligning with a coach who could help me and guide me. And I ended up trading him equity in exchange for mentorship. That worked out real well for them because they ended up making, I don't know, 20 grand or something like that for, like, you know, 20 hours of coaching. That was. But that was extremely stressful. I think I might have touched on this the last time, but we were going under contract the same month that we were getting married, Shelby and I were getting married. So we got all our wedding bills going out. And then, you know, I like it like a clown. I, like, check my email while I'm on the beach in St. Lucia and I got my first attorney bill and it was eight grand. And we hadn't even. We hadn't even gone through the whole process yet. I was like, oh, my God, what did I get myself into? And now I'm stressed out and I'm worried, like, got all these bills coming out. Like, now I'm eight grand out of here and I'm not even halfway through the process. Like, what am I thinking? And then, you know, it got. It became very stressful. I ended up, you know, with tens of thousands of dollars at risk by the time that deal closed. But then I ended up with a six figure reward. And so, like, in the end, I was taking quite a bit of risk in that deal. And I don't even know if I would do that deal again, although it was a. It was a great outcome. But I probably would have said, like, oh, no, there's going to be so much capex. Everything I know today, I might not have. I probably wouldn't pass on the deal. But it ended up, which is interesting, it still ended up being a great, great return. But then, you know, the next two deals I did, one was about one and a half million, the next one was like 700,000. Both went fairly smooth on the capital raising side. Like, I reached out to a couple people, raised the money, and they went smooth. Now I'm thinking, like, now I know what I'm doing. Like, I've got this thing figured out, right? And then I get to this year and we buy our biggest deal, which was over 2 million, which is about as much as the two combined from last year. That one went really smooth. I'm like, oh, I, like I've got this down. And then we get to our biggest one, the end of this year, which was over 3. And then we had a big investor back out, financial advisor, he was going to be like 80% of the raise. We raised over one and a half million this year. And this, he was going to bring in the majority of the money. And his financial advisor, right before our EMD went hard, said, you know what, I'm, you know, I don't think this is a good idea. Didn't look at the deal, didn't look at the numbers, didn't even know where it was, but just said because he didn't want to, probably didn't want to lose the business, his book of business basically got in the way. And we had our money going hard, probably $50,000 going hard. In two days. We had to make a decision, are we going to raise the most amount of money we've ever raised in the next two weeks? Like by far the most amount of money, or are we going to walk away from the deal and lose all. Like, we believe in this deal, it's a good deal, but like, we have a lot of money that's at risk right now. Should we, should we move forward? And we said, we are going to move forward and we're going to get it done. And we got it done. It was the by far the most stressful time. Like I was on, I can't tell you how many cap, like investor calls then, then there was a thought that we weren't going to even be able to do the expansion that we intended. We didn't think to have that planning meeting with the town because we had never done that before. And then the town was like, well, you can't just go back, build another building here. We're like, what? It was already there before. And like, well, you can't just go do that. You got to go check with fire and this and this. And we're like, oh, this is a week before we're supposed to close. I'm like, oh, my God. Like, oh, my God. We. We might have just lost, like, 50 grand and a great deal. Like. And sure enough, it worked. It all worked out. But it was, I mean, several sleepless nights, like, worried, waking up in the middle of the night worried that we might not get this done. And we got it done, and it's turned out great so far and things are going smooth, but, like, every step of the way is something different. And I'm starting now to have the confidence that we're just going to figure. We will figure it out. We will push through. We might not know every step of the way, but we can lean into our network, lean into Action Academy, lean into others who have done it, and then we can overcome because we're not running into anything that's any different than anyone else has ever run into. This is, like, stuff that plenty of people deal with on a daily basis. We just need to know who they are and talk to them.
- [27:21]
A
Dude, if I could say one macro skill that I'm actively working, I think it's something that all of us are going to actively work on for the rest of our lives. But as soon as you begin actively working on this skill, then everything else becomes significantly better. And that's just the skill of having a brand new problem that you haven't experienced before, staring at it in the face saying, this sucks, and I'm gonna figure it out. I'm not gonna stress about it. I'm gonna figure it out. And that's why, you know, people are, you know, kind of poo pooing on all these CEOs of these major companies, you know, but when they get a problem across their desk, it's a massive problem. So an example of this is, I remember I was in Europe this last summer and. And now my fire alarm's going off. But, hey, that's a problem that I'm not gonna stress about because the fire alarm's gonna stop. Now. Let's ask you if I have my attention. All right, I'm gonna leave this in the podcast. This is effing hilarious. Hopefully the podcast doesn't pick up the. Doesn't pick up the thing exactly as I'm talking about problems. But I was in Europe, and when I was in Europe, Verizon, my cell phone provider, stopped issuing international coverage. And it was insane because all of a sudden my phone doesn't work at all. All of a sudden, everybody's international phones don't work at all. And it was crazy. Can you hear this in the background or no?
- [28:54]
B
I can hear it.
- [28:56]
A
Great. This is hilarious.
- [28:59]
B
You know, one thing as you were saying that, one thing that I started to think of and what helped me through this was I've shared this phrase with you, but, like, what story are we going to tell at the end of this?
- [29:14]
A
And we're going to tell the story that there wasn't actually a fire and they were just doing a test on the alarm.
- [29:20]
B
We'll find out if this episode airs. This. This really resonated with me. I did that ultramarathon with Calvin out in. In the mountains last year, and the night before, we were just watching some ultramarathon videos and this lady running 250 miles and. And she said one of the things for her that. That she runs through her head. Like, what's popular inside the running community is mantras or things just to, like, because you're out there for a very long time. Like, I've. I've done multiple marathons and several ultras, and I've. This was the longest one I've ever done. It was almost 18 hours. And that was some. That was by far the hardest thing I had ever done. Funny, I moved a customer in at mile 23, out in the section where they said all those. All the rattlesnakes are. You had to be looking out for rattlesnakes. I got a phone call because I still hadn't hired out my. This position yet. And I helped the customer move in. But I know I shared this before, but at mile. I think it was mile 23, like, right before. It's the last checkpoint. I'm sitting. I'm sitting at the station, and I got 30 minutes to leave before they don't let me move, like, go forward. It was like, that was the cutoff. And I looked at the guy to my left and I said, see at the finish line? And he said, hopefully. And immediately I was like, this dude's out. I know he's out. And so I left and went up the road and come back. And then you have to make this decision to take the right up the mountain or you continue down the road into town, and then you take an Uber back to the start. And that was a very tough decision because I knew I was going right back where I had come from, straight back up the mountain. And I had no idea if I would finish before it got dark. I was all by myself. There's no cell signal. And I was like, if I go up here, I don't know what's going to happen on the other side? And it was. I'm not. I'm from Massachusetts. Not acclimated to the. To the, like, 10,000, 11,000, 12,000ft. Like, I don't even know how I would have trained for that. And so everyone actually was like, wait, you're the dude from Massachusetts. What are you doing here? I was like, oh, I'm just with my Budd. He wanted support. So I went out there. And that was the thing that I kept telling myself was, what's the story that I'm going to tell? Like, am I going to tell the story about how it got really hard and I turned around and walked back down the mountain, or am I going to tell the story about how I pushed through and could only go 20 steps at a time and had to keep catching my breath? And then watched the sunset over Great Salt Lake. And then we got down. Then the race director had to hike three miles up to give us headlamps because I ended up catching up with two other guys. We all ran out of water. We had to take the snow from the mountain and pack our packs with it so that we had drinking water. And then we got down to the tree line and it was pitch black. And the only way we got through it was because the dude had to hike up for an hour against headlamps. And I was the last. I have the. I have, like, the longest recorded time at that race. No one has taken longer to finish that race. Every. Everyone else had quit. So, like, although, like, I would have liked to finish a little quicker and, like, have a true, like, official time, I actually have, like, the longest unofficial time, which I'm pretty damn proud of, because I pushed through. And the thing that stood out to me the most was, like, what's the story I'm going to tell? And so when this happened with so long winded, you know, I like to take tangents, but, like, back to that deal, when the investor backed out, I said to Rob, I was like, well, this is going to be a much better story to tell about how we had $800,000 from one investor I had left. I was with you at Tony Robbins. I left Tony Robbins. Did the investor call out in the hallway? And it was like. And he had said, yes, like, how much do you need? And he was like, I'll give you up to 800. I was like, wow, I don't think it's supposed to be this easy. And then sure enough, like, you know, the advisor got in the way and we were like, we can't rely on this because we only have two and a half weeks left. He backed out and we had to make that decision of are we going to let our money go hard? And then we let it go hard and we pushed through, had a bunch of investor calls and we raised the money. And it's, in the end it was much more rewarding for that like, than it to just be super easy. And I learned a lot more having gone through that than the other ones where it was like, wow, that was actually pretty easy. We reached out to three people and we raised a half million dollars. Like, I hope they're all like this. I didn't learn nearly as much in that one as I did in this one.
- [33:41]
A
Yeah, exactly. Dude, that was a freaking crazy story. And, and I'll kind of punctuate this podcast and close it out with the quote that we're all doing on the Action Academy core team. Because for people listening, Brandon's operations director of Action Academy, it's if you have the path, if you have a choice between two paths, choose the path with the most short term pain because almost always that is the correct path and your brain is going to optimize for self preservation and immediate protection over long term benefit. And so that was that fork in the road between you going from, you know, the mountain to going into town and getting an Uber back. Like I've thousand percent been there so many times, I'm there. Reese there recently, was there last week. And you know, just doing the thing that hurts the most in the short term is almost always the best case. So I freaking, I freaking love that.
- [34:37]
B
Yeah. Another one is like, don't make long term decisions based off of like short term pain. So like in that race, like, you know, it's granted it's only a couple more hours, but that in the grand scheme of things that's a very short period of time to endure through the pain and everything else. So I could have made a long term decision, which is like years later I'd be thinking about how I quit on that, quit on that race and gave up and like, what would the confidence hit be? Because now like I'm very confident I can go, go out and do a long race or I can put myself through something hard because I, I mean I did it. That was by far the hardest thing I've ever done. That was one of the other things that she had said was don't make, don't Use, don't make long, have a, make a decision. With short term pain, I would have a long term impact. Because then if you're thinking about it for years, like, I give up, I quit. And the same, same deal would have been like with the, with the property, be like, hey, like I really don't want to risk that extra money and put it at risk. Like, why don't we just find a, find the next one, you know? And so it'd be like a short term pain, a two week pain. But then now we own an asset that we have expansion opportunity. We moved a customer in just this month at 88% over previous rates. 88% and I underwrote to 10%. So we have a good chunk of customers who we are, they are well under market. And even that 88% increase in rent is still not even close to where the market's at. And so like, so like we could not own this asset and have. That would have been a very long term decision or long term impact by saying, ah, I don't want to risk the money right now. It's tough in the moment for sure. But I'm glad we didn't make, I'm glad we made the decision that we made.
- [36:26]
A
1. One closing story on that is I was just in Fairmont, like in Banff, and we were at this Mastermind retreat and it was cold, Cold, man, It was just like multiple layers cold. And so during the day at like the peak of the day, it would get to maybe, you know, 33, 34 degrees. And there was snow everywhere. And there was this giant lake, it's Lake Louise, out in Fairmont, for any of my Canadians that listen. And I saw this one dude, this one Asian dude just go, raw dog, jump into the lake and just fully submerge himself, do a cold plunge. And I thought to myself, I need to do that this week. I need to do that while I'm here. Which is funny because I've cold plunged before. And the worst part was they even have a spa there where I did the hot and cold experience. So I went in the sauna and I did the cold plunge in the spa. So I know that I, I could do a cold plunge. I've done it before. But something in my brain was just telling me it was like, dude, no, this one's going to be so much worse. You can't go do that. That one's going to be so much worse than any cold plunge. You're doing like maybe 50 degrees. This one's like 36 degrees. I got a freaking temperature check on it from the hotel, 36 degrees. And I was almost about to not do it. And then finally it was the last day I was going to check out and I look out and I said like, f this, I walked upstairs, I had my suitcase in my hand, I changed, I put on my bathrobe, I walked out to the lake, I freaking jumped in. And it wasn't that bad. It was the, the cold plunge in the sauna in the spa was actually significantly colder than that one out there because the sun warmed it up a little bit. But 36 degrees felt like so refreshing at that point. And I just remember thinking, I was like, if I don't do this, that I'm going to break the chain in my brain that allows me to be confident. Because if I don't do this, then I'll know. Like nobody else will know, but I will know that I didn't do the hard thing. And so that's a small example. But man, if people want to find out more about you, they want to invest with you, they want to run an ultra marathon with you, where do they go?
- [38:34]
B
Instagram would be the best place at realb Hicks. You can find me there. Send me a dm.
- [38:39]
A
Yeah, and that's H I C K S. We'll have that in the show. Description and closing advice to anybody that's on the fence about joining Action Academy. They're listening to this and they're wondering, hey, should I book that call? Should I go to actionacademy.com should I check it out? Any advice?
- [38:54]
B
Yeah, I would say for me, joining a community is the reason why that I'm still doing this today. When I burned out in my job five years ago, I got into a habit of. I had never read books, never listened to podcasts. And then I started and I was reading all the books that I could, listening to all the podcasts, and then I found that I just kept on doing it and I wasn't taking action. And for me, I'm pretty risk adverse analysis paralysis, you know that Brian. And I thought, there's no way that I'm actually going to buy something that's millions of dollars on my own. I need to, I need to do something different. And so for me, that difference was joining a community. And then once you get around that community, it's like now, you know, it's like weird to not buy multimillion dollar properties, right? Like, this becomes like you bought, you.
- [39:41]
A
Bought a $200,000 or $500,000 thing. Like not 5 million. What are you doing?
- [39:46]
B
Right? And the same goes for, like, being around you with travel. Like, you travel a lot. Like, I. I remember wanting to travel, you know, just three weeks out of the year. Last year, we were away from 160 days. This year is 120 days. I never even thought that I'd be away for three to five months, you know, at a time. Not at a time, but, like, throughout the year. And, like, the joke now with our families, like, oh, where are you now? Oh, you're going somewhere else again. You know, it's like, well, that's become normal because I'm, like, hanging around you, and it's like, well, my friends do that, so, like, it'd be weird if I didn't do it.
- [40:18]
A
I called you with a week's notice and said, hey, fly to Croatia. Like, I've got a spot for you guys in the boat. Yeah, we went around. We went around Croatia. We went island hopping in Croatia for a week.
- [40:28]
B
I remember that. You're like, hey, did you book your flight? Like, they're gonna go way. It's seven days away. I was like, yeah, I know. We're doing it today. Yeah. Never. Never thought I would do that.
- [40:36]
A
Yeah. So if you guys want to go island hopping, run ultramarathons, climb mountains, do big deals. Actionacademy.com you guys know where to go. And always we are having the biggest Black Friday special. If you're listening to this, in the month of November, you guys do not want to miss out. Sit tight. It's coming here soon. Book your call. Talk soon, guys. Brandon, thank you so much for coming on. Let's get back to work, brother.
- [40:59]
B
Thanks, Brian.