Todd Pultz: How Quick Decisions Build Wealth Fast! | DSH #1502

Summary

Digital Social Hour – Episode Overview

Guest: Todd Polt
Host: Sean Kelly
Episode Title: Todd Pultz: How Quick Decisions Build Wealth Fast! | DSH #1502
Date: August 20, 2025

Main Theme / Purpose

This episode of Digital Social Hour explores the unconventional journey of Todd Polt, who rose from humble beginnings and a career as a police officer to become a real estate mogul and advocate for mental health causes. The conversation delves into his no-nonsense approach to building wealth, the realities behind real estate entrepreneurship, and his commitment to social impact. Throughout the episode, Todd offers candid insights on quick decision-making, the pitfalls of instant gratification culture, challenges of affordable housing, and the overlooked struggles within the mental health system.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Early Background: Failures and Resilience

• Todd’s Origins: Raised in a trailer court in Riverside, Ohio with no financial literacy. Became a police officer, believing a $37,000 salary meant he'd “made it.”

  • “Working for somebody, getting a check every single week, I thought that was the way to live life ‘cause that’s what society teaches us.” — Todd [03:19]

• First Steps in Real Estate: No mentor in real estate, only a general business mentor. Started with nothing—first house foreclosed, car repossessed.

  • Bought his first property, which burned down two days later with no insurance.
    • “We bought a six unit building ... two days after we bought it, somebody threw a Molotov cocktail through the unit that [someone] was killed in ... I was too dumb to have insurance.” — Todd [01:32]
    • Keeps paying taxes as a “reminder not to be a dumb ass.” [02:10]

• Motivation: Failure was not an option.

  • “I was either at the point where I had to admit to my wife ... that I failed, or I had to figure out a way to go all in.” — Todd [02:31]

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The Grind Behind Success

• Online Perception vs. Reality:

  • People judge successful entrepreneurs without seeing the sacrifices involved.
  • Important to recognize the long nights, financial stress, and emotional toll of entrepreneurship.
  • “They don’t know the grind that you put in ... Nights at 2, 3 in the morning where I woke up petrified I was gonna have to tell my wife ... that I was failing in real estate.” — Todd [05:26]

• Entrepreneurship Myths:

  • Social media and TV paint an unrealistic picture of easy wealth and glamorous lifestyles.
  • “All the gurus out there ... are selling a dream, they’re selling a pipe dream.” — Todd [21:49]
  • Honest about showing the “raw side of real estate” rather than just the highlights.

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Society, Instant Gratification & Decision Making

• Shifting Culture:

  • Discussion on society’s obsession with drama, instant gratification, and reality TV.
  • Binge-watching culture (Netflix, social media) enables distractions and short-term thinking.
  • “People care more about [reality TV] than making money.” — Host [08:32]

• Difference-Maker: Decisive Action

  • Core argument: Wealthy people make quick, decisive decisions and live with the consequences.
  • “They make decisive, quick decisions, and they live with the consequences ... When you look at people that are stuck in middle class ... they ponder things.” — Todd [10:03]
  • Personal anecdote: Contrasts his decision style with his wife’s tendency to overthink.

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Leadership and Company Culture

• Todd’s Management Philosophy:
  • Prioritizes honesty, loyalty, and empowering employees.
    • “If you want a boss gonna pat you on the ass, tell you a great job ... I’m not the guy. If you want someone who will have your back, be loyal, tell you the truth ... I’m the right guy.” — Todd [12:43]
  • Immediate, active leadership style. Employer-employee transparency as antidote to workplace paranoia.
  • Employees rarely leave; those that do are simply not the right fit.
  • “All the people that work in my offices, they just stay with me forever, because I treat them right.” — Todd [13:53]

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Policing, Crime, and Urban Development

• Reflections on Modern Policing:

  • Paranoia and stress were constant in police work; social scrutiny is worse today.
  • “I wouldn't want to be a police officer in today's age ... Social media was not a big thing ... Now, every[one] has a video camera.” — Todd [16:03]

• Crime and Community Investment:

  • Crime and lack of government support make turning around troubled neighborhoods a challenge.
  • Personal involvement in evicting squatters and combating crime when law enforcement is ineffective.
    • “I gather my buddies up ... We go out and knock on the doors of the dope dealers and we run them off ourselves.” — Todd [20:40]

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Real Estate Realities & Strategy

• Landlord & Investor Insights:

  • Busts myths perpetuated by “Section 8 gurus” and get-rich-quick courses online.
  • Wealth in real estate is a long-term game: Flipping funds long-term holdings, which build generational wealth.
  • “You might see me driving a Lambo ... but ... I’m going to show you the real piece, the frustrations, the things that are going to go wrong in properties.” — Todd [22:00]

• Market Caution & Overleveraging:

  • Lessons from the 2008 recession—never leverage more than 75% LTV; Midwest markets less volatile than coastal regions.
  • “As long as we're not over-leveraged ... the worst decline in the housing market in our country's history would never allow me to be over averaged.” — Todd [31:40]

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Evictions, Squatters, and Policy

• Squatter/Eviction Realities:
  • Deals with squatter situations daily; Ohio is still landlord-friendly (evictions in 30–45 days).
  • Contrasts to California, New York, Washington, where laws heavily favor tenants or squatters.
  • Pushback from social media critics who misunderstand local law.
  • “If somebody breaks into our unit and they're living in there and we catch them, we're dragging them out because they still broke in. They're not a squatter ... welcome to Ohio.” — Todd [27:13]

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Mental Health Advocacy

• Personal and Family Commitment:

  • Todd and his wife run group homes and a service provider agency for people with developmental disabilities and severe mental health needs.
  • Started by purchasing properties then acquiring a care company and scaling it up.
  • “Mental health does not receive the care that they need ... They're like the forgotten people.” — Todd [43:38]
  • Funding is inadequate; the most vulnerable require the most resources but get the least.
  • Personal involvement is hands-on, late nights, confronting crises with little government support.
  • “We’ve had mental health clients ... threaten staff, hurt themselves, and you can’t get a caseworker ... that’s kind of what we deal with.” — Todd [44:16]

• Men’s Mental Health:

  • Both Todd and Sean share personal losses and struggles.
  • Importance of vulnerability for men; offering support and building networks of honest conversation.
  • “Sometimes we just gotta talk about it, man, and get it out. ... If you called me at three in the morning, man, like, I’m down — let’s talk.” — Todd [45:01]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Wealth and Motivation:

  “The only people that say [money doesn’t buy happiness] are people that have never had money ... you can’t go to a store and take happiness off a shelf, but at the end of the day you can buy everything else in life.” — Todd [04:22]

• Decisiveness as Success:

  “Wealthy people make quick decisions, and they live with the consequences. That’s the biggest difference between people that are successful and those that are not.” — Todd [10:03]

• Real Estate Reality Check:

  “Flipping was always a vehicle to fund my landlord addiction ... the long term holds, that’s where the real wealth comes in at. But that’s 15, 20 years down the road. It’s a slow grind, man. It’s a slow burn.” — Todd [22:49]

• On Leadership:

  “I need that freedom as a leader and as a CEO. I need the freedom to be honest with my thoughts and my words at the time they’re happening. ... If something happens, let’s deal with it now.” — Todd [12:43]

• Society and Distraction:

  “At this point, you’ve got to be aware of it and kind of control your urges. ... The difference between people that are successful ... is they focus on and prioritize where they need to be.” — Host/Todd [09:47, 10:03]

• On Mental Health Service:

  “Mental health does not receive the care that they need ... they are the most challenging ... it makes your heart hurt a little bit; I wish we could do more.” — Todd [43:38]

• Support for Other Men:

  “The feeling embarrassed, like, you know, screw the ‘I’m a tough guy’ type ... Sometimes we just gotta talk about it, man, and get it out.” — Todd [45:01]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

| Time | Segment / Topic | |----------|-------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 00:00 | Todd on leadership, employee loyalty, and empowerment | | 01:32 | The fire, lack of insurance, and lessons in real estate risk | | 03:19 | Upbringing, first perceptions of financial independence | | 05:26 | The emotional toll and sacrifices behind entrepreneurial “success” | | 10:03 | The pivotal importance of decisive decision-making | | 12:43 | Todd’s management style: honesty, loyalty, and “active leadership” | | 14:46 | Workplace paranoia and stress from policing, differences from entrepreneurship | | 16:03 | State of policing today, social/camera scrutiny, and public perception | | 18:05 | Real estate in high-crime, low-income areas — practical risks and solutions | | 21:49 | Critique of online “gurus” and myth-busting real estate education | | 22:49 | Real estate as a “slow burn”—the importance of patience, long-term strategy | | 27:13 | Eviction process, squatter issues: Midwest vs. coastal U.S. | | 31:40 | Avoiding over-leverage; market lessons from 2008 and today | | 35:31 | Vegas market volatility, politics, and value fluctuations | | 37:04 | Mental health group homes: business entry, social mission | | 43:38 | Funding issues, first-hand stories of mental health system failures | | 45:01 | Men’s mental health; breaking the “tough guy” stigma |

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Conclusion & Where to Find Todd Polt

Todd’s social handles (all platforms): @ToddPolt.Official

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Summary Notes

• The episode offers a rare, raw perspective on the real costs, long game, and unfiltered realities of real estate, leadership, and giving back—and doesn’t shy away from hard truths about society, policy, or personal struggles.
• Particularly valuable for aspiring entrepreneurs, real estate investors, and those interested in authentic leadership and social impact.
• Todd’s willingness to discuss not just the upside but the pain and complexity of his journey, including his advocacy for mental health, makes this one of DSH’s most substantive and grounded episodes.

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Transcript

[Todd Polt]

All the people that work in my offices, they just stay with me forever, you know, because I treat them right. I believe in treating people fairly and treating people right and giving them the respect and giving them the power and feeling empowered to make decisions without, you know, having to worry about, am I going to get in trouble. Does he like me? Does he not like me? I promise my employees, they know how I feel about them every second of the day.

[Podcast Host]

Okay, guys. From Dayton, Ohio. First guest from there, former police officer, now real estate expert. Thanks for coming on, Todd.

[Todd Polt]

Man, glad to be here, dude.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, I'm excited. You got a lot of properties, so there's some stuff people can learn from you.

[Todd Polt]

Yeah, we got a couple.

[Podcast Host]

Was it immediate success when you got into real estate? Did you have a mentor?

[Todd Polt]

Ah, man, you know, I didn't have a mentor in real estate, but I had a business mentor. So I was fortunate in that way. But I jumped into a zero financial literacy, no background. Actually, probably a couple months after my first house was foreclosed on and my, my car was repossessed. I didn't have shit, man. Like, I didn't, you know, it was, it was rough, but that was about the only thing I understood. Like, I knew I couldn't be a doctor, I knew couldn't be an engineer, but I figured if I bought a house for a buck and I sold it for 10, maybe I'd make somewhere in between. So, yeah, it was all right. It was immediate success, but it was a little bit of both. First one was a killer, and then the second deal, two days after we bought it, it burned down. We didn't have any insurance, so we lost, right? So we, we win, we lose. And, you know, then you got to figure out what you do from there. Like, let's just keep rocking forward.

[Podcast Host]

Starting Cali that you burned on now.

[Todd Polt]

It was in Dayton, Ohio. Like, that's, that's where all of our properties are at.

[Podcast Host]

Holy crap.

[Todd Polt]

Yeah, somebody.

[Podcast Host]

House fire.

[Todd Polt]

No, it was like. So we, we bought this and this was a different market, so the C class, right? So, like, it's a more challenging neighborhood. And that's where we bought at because that's all we could afford. And we, we bought a six unit building that, that a dope dealer had been killed in one of the units while he's fixing it up. And so we got a good deal, man. It was like 21,000 for six units. And we're going to stick like 50k into it. And then two days after we bought it, somebody threw multi cocktail through the unit that he was. That he was killed in. So I'm assuming it was family. They didn't want to see the building anymore or whatever. And at that point, I didn't know shit, so I was too dumb to have insurance on it. So, you know, I still pay taxes on that property, like, 15, 16 years later. Damn. It's just piece of grass in the hood. 1700 bucks a year. But it's my reminder not to be a dumb ass and have, you know, not take insurance on our properties anymore.

[Podcast Host]

And that was your first intro to real estate? That's.

[Todd Polt]

That was my second property. Yeah. The first one was great. You know, I bought and sold that one, like, four times while I had it, but that was the second one, so. Wow.

[Podcast Host]

And that didn't steer you away from pursuing it further?

[Todd Polt]

I had nothing to fall back on, man. You know, like. Like, yeah, I had the law enforcement. I had some other things that I could do, but, you know, I wanted to change my lifestyle. I wanted to be able to provide a different type of life for my family. And I was either at the point where I had to admit to my wife, who let me use, like, my last 10,000 on the first property. I either had to admit to her that, hey, I failed, or I had to figure out a way to go all in and really make something of it, you know? So the latter was a decision that I. That I knew I had to make. Right. Like, I ha. Failure. Like, you're an athlete. You play ball.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Todd Polt]

I don't know if you're any good.

[Podcast Host]

I'm decent.

[Todd Polt]

How tall are you? Six.

[Podcast Host]

Six.

[Todd Polt]

I can take you, But. And you're right, you have a competitive nature, like you don't want to fail, like you want to win. And I was an athlete all through school, and, like, the. The worst thing that, in my mind that I could do was have to admit failure. So I had to find a way to make it right, man. And that's what I did.

[Podcast Host]

I love that. Yeah, I'd imagine. Police officer. The money wasn't crazy.

[Todd Polt]

It wasn't crazy, but, you know, I grew up in a trailer court, right? So, like, I grew up poor. I. I started the projects and then the trailer courts of Riverside, Ohio. You know, no financial literacy, nothing whatsoever, right? So when I got on the police department, it was like, man, I made it, you know, Like, I think I was making, like, $37,000 a year. And. And that was great. I had, like. I thought, this is the life. I went out, bought a new truck. Like every police Officer does. But it's because I didn't understand what else was out there. I never had anybody in my younger life teach me what else was out there. I didn't know what was possible. You know, I thought working for somebody, getting a check every single week, I thought that was the way to live life because that's what society teaches us. That's what my parents had taught me. Very few things they taught me, but, you know, my dad worked three jobs growing up, so I thought that's what you had to do. I didn't know that there was a different type of lifestyle, that there was wealth. I didn't even know how many pizza places were out there growing up, you know, because we didn't. We weren't fortunate enough to be able to experience those things.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, yeah, I was. I grew up middle class, so for me it was like making six figures a year was crazy. Yeah, that was unreal. Like you could save up and become a millionaire that way. And then you realize there's much bigger goals as you, like, get into entrepreneurship.

[Todd Polt]

Well, you get, you know, you, you see little things, right? Like people you hang out with or like your first time you go out of state or like, you know, being that you're in Vegas, right? So first time I came to Vegas, I'm like, oh, shit. Like there's a whole nother life out here, right, or anything that you do. And I think the, the more that you get that, the more that you experience that, the more that you want it, right? Especially if you grew up without it. Um, and you know, a lot of people say, look, money doesn't buy happiness. And you know, all that shit. Like you heard I said, the only people that say that are people that have never had money, right? Because can you go to a store and take happiness off shelf? Fuck no, you can't, right? But at the end of the day, you can buy everything else in life. And all of those things, whatever it is, are the things that are going to allow you to be happier in life if you use them the right way. So for me, that's what it was. I don't care about stuff myself. I don't care about the small things myself. I don't need fancy cars, although I like them. If my family can live a different type of lifestyle, then money is the key, you know, and you got to make more of it. Because when you have a little bit of it, you want more. When you have more, you, you, you want a lot more.

[Podcast Host]

Absolutely. It's. It's never ending, right?

[Todd Polt]

No, it's not, it's, it's always a grind, it's always a hustle.

[Podcast Host]

You gotta find where, how much you're willing to sacrifice.

[Todd Polt]

I think too, yeah, that's what it is, right? Like it's so easy for people, especially online, right? Like I have a decent following online and people beat you up all the time, right? Like oh, golden spoon boy or you know, like greedy landlord, like blah, blah, blah. And I still have feelings, man, like, you know what I'm saying? Like, so it does, it does hurt your feelings sometimes when you see people say those things about you because they don't know the grind that you put in. They don't know the sacrifices, they don't know the long nights, they don't know the, you know, the nights at 2, 3 in the morning where I woke up in the middle of night just petrified that I was going to have to tell my wife, my family that I was failing in real estate. Like, I didn't know how I was going to pay the bills, I didn't know how I was going to pay the next mortgage because there's a lot of sacrifice that goes into it and some people don't get to see that. And most people online in today's age, they don't see what really went into to making what that person online now has. Yeah, and that's, you know, it's frustrating sometimes but you know, that's what you do 100%.

[Podcast Host]

That's why I have so much respect for successful entrepreneurs, because I know what it took to get there. It wasn't easy.

[Todd Polt]

No, not everybody's like that. But I would say the one thing that most people in common, even the big influencers out there right now, the one thing that most of us have in common is we all have a story. And I imagine even you, if we were to dive into your story, you have some type of story, right? And most entrepreneurs have a grind, a period in their life where they went through pain and hardship and sacrifices to get them where they're at today. And you know, you have what, 60 seconds a minute, 30 on reels, maybe some long form on YouTube. That's not enough time to really share your entire story with everybody that's out there. So all they see is what you are now. They don't see all of this.

[Podcast Host]

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[Todd Polt]

And if you do put it out there, most people don't want to watch it.

[Podcast Host]

They don't care.

[Todd Polt]

They don't care. They want the drama, they want the controversy. They want to see the. Like, when I put out a video of me going into an apartment and kicking a squatter out or a crackhead out. Like, they love that shit. They tear it up, right? But I could put a. I could put a whole hour video out and say, look, here is step by step how I created my millions. Here's how I created my wealth. Like, I can teach you right now, free of charge, how to be a millionaire. Yeah, Nobody watches the shit.

[Podcast Host]

Like, so ironic because I have on billionaires on the show and they get the least views out of all my guests.

[Todd Polt]

It's so true though, right?

[Podcast Host]

Not crazy.

[Todd Polt]

Yeah. I see even on my smaller podcast, same thing, you know, I have somebody on there. It's like, man, this dude is like, if I can just get an hour with them. I'm like, man, they've taught me so much in this hour. Like, I can really get stuff from them, but nobody wants to watch their shows, you know.

[Podcast Host]

Crazy.

[Todd Polt]

Yeah. And the minute I have somebody come on there that says something just crazy or outlandish or, you know, it was on a reality TV show, it's like, oh, my God, this is the best episode, best podcast I've ever seen. I'm like, what? Like, you know, it's just crazy. But it's the world we live in.

[Podcast Host]

That just shows you the state of our society where like this whole week I've been hearing about that dating show. Forget Love island or something.

[Todd Polt]

Yeah, yeah.

[Podcast Host]

And people care more about that than making money.

[Todd Polt]

It for sure.

[Podcast Host]

Like, this whole week, I can't go anywhere without someone talking about it.

[Todd Polt]

No, but like, when was it? When do you think that our world changed, Right? Like, I remember the first reality show that I watched. I mean, I started with mtv. Actually, Vegas was one of the first ones I watched with mtv, and they were at the Palms. But I remember from that time on, it seemed like every year just reality TV grew and grew and grew. You had the Bachelor, Bachelorette, and people, like, get consumed in their lives, like, Their whole day is built around the whole, like, I'm off at 5. I'm not sure if I'm gonna have time to stop and get dinner because Bachelor comes on at six or whatever it is. There's so many people out there that get consumed with that instead of being consumed with making their life the way that they want their life.

[Podcast Host]

I think it happened. I saw an interview about this, actually, when Netflix came out, because they pretty much invented binge watching. So back in the day, you couldn't really binge watch because there was commercials and stuff. You couldn't fast forward. So I saw the. Walter White. I forget his real name. He was talking about this. But when Breaking Bad came out, people would watch the whole thing in a. In a day, the whole season.

[Todd Polt]

So you think Netflix is the. Is what change it?

[Podcast Host]

I think they contributed plus social media, plus the instant gratification apps. You know, a combination. I don't think it's one thing.

[Todd Polt]

Yeah. Now do you think that was all, like, just fueled by. By Covid when everybody was stuck in.

[Podcast Host]

That definitely amplified it.

[Todd Polt]

I mean, at least TikTok was right.

[Podcast Host]

Like, yeah, TikTok, yeah, yeah. Who knows? But at this point, you got to be aware of it and kind of control your urges. I feel like.

[Todd Polt]

Yeah, for sure.

[Podcast Host]

On you at this point. I don't like when people make excuses. Like, we all have the same distractions, you and I, but we just choose to focus on what we focus.

[Todd Polt]

Well, that's the difference, right? Like, that's the difference between people that are successful and create the life they want and. And others that don't. They just don't focus on prioritize where they. Where they need to be. You know, that's the only difference. And I think that's one of the things, you know, I tell people all the time. Like, they say, well, how do you do what you do? Like, how do you create the wealth? Like, how do you create the money? Like, how do you make what you make? And there's one stark difference between people, and you see them all the time. People that are wealthy or millionaires, billionaires, they all have one thing in common. They make decisive, quick decisions, and they live with the consequences, right? Whether they're right or whether they're wrong. And when you look at people that are stuck in middle class or you look at people that for some reason, nothing goes their way, it's always the people that are afraid to make decisions or they ponder things. I said, my wife, wonderful lady. I love her. She's hot, right? I Definitely married up. But at the end of the day, we will talk about something that she has on her mind for three or four days, you know what I'm saying? And at the end of the day, it frustrates the shit out of me. The other day I woke up and she was like, hey, I got this text message that I'm gonna send to this employee. What do you think about it? And I'm like, we just talked about this last night. And I love her to death, but that's the type of personality that she has, right? Like, she. She thinks about things. She thinks too deep into things. And when you ask me something, I'm like, I just say no. Just say yes. Just say this. Like, just do this. I don't want to talk about it again. Like, once I make the decision, I'm done. And we'll figure, you know, something happens for him, we'll figure it out. But just make quick, decisive actions. And that's the biggest difference between people that are successful and those that are not. In my mind.

[Podcast Host]

No, I love that. That's phenomenal advice. But, yeah, I feel like all the top CEOs or whatever, they make decisions quick and then deal with the consequences, like, later, Right?

[Todd Polt]

Yeah, that's it. You can always clean it up, right? Like, you're never going to make a decision that is going to be too detrimental to your company or your business or your life that you can't recover from. And if you're confident in the fact that you can pretty much fix anything that you get yourself into, then you can make those decisions, you know, and if you surround yourself with an, you know, incredible people and people that are loyal and, and those that you trust to make decisions, and you give enough rope to make decisions, you gotta be the same way with them. You have to allow them to make decisions within your company, within your organizations. Give them the rope to do that, knowing that you've taught them well enough, you've trained them well enough that they're not going to make any decision that's going to be too crazy for you. Not always the case, right? Like, some employees do some crazy stuff, but I think we have to live like that as CEOs. We have to live like that as business leaders. And we have to allow our people, our high ups, our executives, we have to give them the rope and give them the freedom to make those decisions for us in our companies, too.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. When it comes to leading employees, are you pretty hands on? What's your style, man?

[Todd Polt]

I'm a little bit different I'm. I would say I'm super easy to work with. My employees are all kind of the same, right? When I bring them in, I tell them the same thing, no matter what role they are. If you want a boss going to pat you on the ass, tell you a great job, if you want me to buy you gifts and extra little things and. And do all that for you, like, I'm not the guy. If you want somebody that will have your back, that will be loyal to you, that's going to tell you the truth every single day. Somebody that when you fuck up, I'm gonna tell you, and I might bark at you. Five minutes later, I forgot about that conversation and we're moving on. Then I'm the right guy for you, right? Like, I believe in honesty. I believe in being an active leader with our people. I don't wait three days and bring somebody in and then discipline them. It's like, if something happens, like, let's deal with it now, right? Like, active leadership is the way to be. And some people appreciate that and some don't, right? Like, some. Some employees will crumble if you yell at them or if you, you know, go off on them for a couple minutes. But I tell everybody that works with me, I need that freedom as a leader and as a CEO. I need the freedom to be honest with my thoughts and my words at the time that they're happening. And as long as the people that work with me can do that, we'll have a great relationship because they know that I love them. Even if I go off for three minutes in an office, they know I love them. They know I got their back. They know I'm going to be just as loyal to them as they're going to be to me. And most of the people that have been with me forever, man, and the ones that have left, it just wasn't the right fit for them. But I've had very few employees leave me since I've been in real estate. Like, my longest construction guy's been with me. He's been with me for 14 years, the day that I started. He's been with me since then almost 15 years. All the people that work in my offices, they just stay with me forever because I treat them right. I believe in treating people fairly and treating people right and giving them the respect and giving them the power and feeling empowered to make decisions without, you know, having to worry about, am I going to get in trouble? Does he like me? Does he not like me? I promise my employees, they know how I Feel about him every second of the day, whether it's good or bad.

[Podcast Host]

That's good, though. I value honesty too.

[Todd Polt]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Because I started creating scenarios in my head if I don't know what's going on.

[Todd Polt]

Well, our world is built on paranoia, right? Like, everybody's paranoid. I married back to the police department. When you would walk in for roll call and the chief or captain's doors were shut, that's all you did. You're like, oh, shit, who's in trouble? Right?

[Podcast Host]

Like, I hope you guys are enjoying the show. Please don't forget to like and subscribe. It helps the show a lot with the algorithm. Thank you.

[Todd Polt]

Who got the complaint? Who you know, who they investigating. You were always paranoid, like you never knew what was gonna happen. And it was like just a constant, like, turmoil of, of drama in my mind, wondering if the arrest I made the night before or, you know, the fight that you got into or the pursuit that you got into, am I in trouble for that now or what was it like? It was always paranoia, like, and that drove me nuts about the police department. And that's why it was easy for me to walk away from full time police work when I did.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Todd Polt]

Once I found real estate, because I just. Once you get out of it and you realize how different the world can be and how different the world can be when you're an entrepreneur and you're running your own stuff, there's just such a relief that you feel like, come across your body. I can't describe it. Right? Yeah, it's like, man, like I thought, you know, being a full time police officer, retiring from that was gonna be my life. But then when I got out with my own businesses, I'm like, oh my God, like, life is so much easier.

[Podcast Host]

You know, that's such a crazy statement because we want our police officer to be level headed. And in fact, I had no idea you guys were dealing with paranoia. Like, that's. You can't operate like that, you know.

[Todd Polt]

Well, that's all of them. And, and I'm not. I've been out of police work for a while now. Right. Since 2016 was the last time that I, you know, that I put a duty belt on. I wouldn't want to be a police officer in today's age. You know, when I was out, out of the police academy, when we first got in, we were just getting cameras in the cruisers. We didn't have all the body cameras. Social media was not a big thing. I mean, we're talking 2000, 2001 people still liked police officers. Criminals still feared police officers at that time, right? Like they still thought, well I better not screw up, I might get my ass kicked a little bit. In today's age, man, our police officers have such a hard job. Everybody has a video camera. Everybody can clip a 30 second clip from something and make it look like something that it wasn't. You can't get the full context of what's going on. Videos are great, but they don't show everything that a police officer is dealing with. The things that they don't show is they don't feel or they don't show what's going through like that police officer's mind at the moment, right? And, and that could be completely different. You know, like you might see a cop wrestling with a dude. Well, you don't know. In that video, if you see that guy that has his hand on his gun that's trying to yank it from his holster, the video might not show that. And you might not see that that officer in his mind is thinking, all right, I'm not gonna make it home tonight unless I do something drastic and has to take a serious aggressive, know, posture in that situation. So there's lots of things that you can't see. And our, our cops day have such a hard job and like they're money. More Monday morning quarterback on absolutely everything. Yeah, I wouldn't want to do it.

[Podcast Host]

I wouldn't either.

[Todd Polt]

It's a tough job.

[Podcast Host]

Hats off to them because as soon as they pull someone over, they know they're being recorded now on the iPhone.

[Todd Polt]

And look at the disrespect that they get, right? Like when I got out of the academy, nobody was throwing water on us or throwing eggs at us or you know, screaming at us or kicking our cruisers. Because I'll tell you what, at that time, if they did, we were going to get out of cruiser and we're going to, we're going to beat their ass. Like that's how it was. And people still feared that a little bit and criminals still feared that a little bit. Criminals, they have no fear, man. They don't care. Like they, they, they know they're protected by something. You know, whether it be cameras or a society that, that wants police officer to fail, it's just a different world today. And I'm, I'm glad I got out when I did. And I would probably last a month if I was still in police work at this point, you know, before I was fired. That's just the truth of it.

[Podcast Host]

Plus there's more Crime now than ever, I feel like too.

[Todd Polt]

Oh, for sure. You know, especially in, especially in states like California and in New York and places that have, that have taken a very soft stance against criminals and allowed them the freedom to, you know, do stuff that would never ever went on, you know, like it's just, I mean seeing a mob shut down a highway. Yeah, she didn't have 2,000. Like, did you have some riots? Sure you had riots, like, but those were like one offs. Now it's like, you know, like, hey, we're mad that egg prices are up. We're going to shut down the freeway. And governments are okay with this shit. And they wonder why things are happening. They wonder why businesses are closing down. They wonder why businesses can't stay in a, in a great place of their town, right? Or even in, you know, areas that might be considered like food deserts, right? And we deal with this in real estate too, where you have like food desert areas where certain neighborhoods are more challenged or impoverished and they don't have a grocery store or they don't have somewhere they can go to get, you know, their essential items that they have and they have to travel outside of that. So somebody comes in and they try to do this, they try to develop some real estate and develop that in those neighborhoods and then what do you do? You have crime, you have looters, you have people breaking windows, you have people spray painting, you have people just doing crazy shit. And eventually that real estate sits there and ends up boarded up. Right? And people don't understand that. And I don't understand why our government is so okay with this in some areas, right? But then on the other hand, they cry about board up buildings, they cry about no developers wanting to come in. And then what that does, that creates a sense in those communities that, that maybe there's racism or that there is, you know, a different treatment of those communities. And the truth is it's, it's not, it's not from like people standpoint, it's by the situation that has been created where nobody feels comfortable developing that real estate or nobody feels comfortable doing business in that area because the local government's not taking their back and stopping crime and doing the things that they need to do. It's, it's really a sad situation. And most of my career has been buying properties and developing properties in the most challenging parts of our city, right? Like that's where I feel comfortable at. I want to buy a whole street of boarded up houses and turned around and not turned around for gentrification. But we do affordable housing. We want to bring them back online. We work with, for first entry programs, we're bringing people out of prison. We work with developmental disabilities and mental health group homes. Like, we want to help the most vulnerable parts of our society. And that's where our real passion lies. But there's certainly a challenge that comes along with being in those communities. Right. You can't just leave your construction tools on site, you know, like they're going to be gone. You know, you can't. I mean, every day, if you were to go to my social media, you can find video after video after video of me ripping a squatter out of our apartments or somebody that broke in or just some type of crazy scenario, Right. Like just last week we did kind of like our little, we called a little drug spree in one of our apartment complexes that we bought that we're trying to clean up. But right now it has a bunch of little trap houses and stuff like that. So we can't rely on our local law enforcement to take care of that. So what do we do? I gather my buddies up, I gather my construction crews up. We go out and knock on the doors of the dope dealers and we run them off ourselves. But most people are afraid to do that and they should be right. But based on my background, we're okay with that. And that's how we have to handle situations. And that's the only way that we can get properties and communities to turn around that we're investing in. Because local law enforcement, local government, they're certainly not on our side. They're on the side of squatters. And you see this every day. How many videos do you see? Especially in California where. Yeah, well, squatter moved in. They said it's their house now, so the person that bought it can't move in.

[Podcast Host]

It's every day 30 days, right?

[Todd Polt]

Even longer. Yeah. I mean, in Seattle, Washington is probably the worst place. But there's all kinds of controversial topics like that. And they wonder why things are going the way that they are in our society in certain parts of our country. You know, to me, the answers are simple.

[Podcast Host]

I love that you showcase the, the negatives too, because a lot of, there's these Section 8 gurus, kids in their 20s and 30s teaching this and they never show any downsides of Section 8 housing.

[Todd Polt]

Yeah, well, you know, that's, I mean, it's always been one of my frustrations with online. I think I, I, you know, I probably mentioned that to you. Is all the gurus out there all the educational people that are out there, they're selling a dream, they're selling a pipe dream. And it's easy to sell that to people online, right? Like if you have a, you know, you have a single mom that's struggling to pay her bills every single week. You have a construction worker dad or he's working two or three jobs and he can't just get ahead, but he's scrolling at 1am or 2am and he finds a guy that says, are you tired of not being able to pay your bills? Like you know, $199. And I got the course to teach you financial freedom. Most people are going to like take a second look at that and it's easy to get people to pay those, but they're not putting people in the right direction. And you're right, that's. Maybe my social media doesn't grow as fast as what it could if I was doing all that stuff. But what I love about my social media is that I give the raw side of real estate. I give the real side of real estate. Yeah, you might see me driving a Lambo, you might see me dropping some stacks at a blackjack table. But at the end of the day, I'm going to show you the real piece, right? I'm going to show you the frustrations, I'm going to show you where we struggle at and the things that are, you know, going to go wrong in properties because shit happens and you don't make money instantly in real estate. You know, I, I always consider like this, right? Like back in high school, maybe you weren't like this, but, and as a young adult you have, you have one night stands, then you have the woman that you marry, right? Real estate is the same way. You can flip some real estate and you can get a quick one night stand where you make good cash or you can buy long term hold properties. And those are more of the marriage, right? But you don't get rich off those. You don't make hardly any money off those for a long time, right? And so you start paying down your, your debt. But the flips and the wholesales, that's what kind of keeps funding your addiction to create those long term holds. And the long term holds, multifamily apartments, single family homes, whatever you are going to hold long term, that's where the real wealth comes in at. But that's 15, 20 years down the road. You know, it's a, it's a slow grind, man. It's a slow burn.

[Podcast Host]

That's a long game. Yeah, most People, I feel like, aren't willing to take that, that game.

[Todd Polt]

Why is that though? Like, most people want instant gratification, right?

[Podcast Host]

My generation, yeah. I don't know if the older, I feel like my parents are more save up and build up to that, but I feel like my generation is just. Yeah, they want it quick.

[Todd Polt]

Yeah, they want now. And that's why the, that's why the quick hits on social media are so beneficial to them, right? Like they want to see like right now they don't watch a five minute video or ten minute video. They will in a certain scenario, but they want to see that instant. Like, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, 100%. And that's why everybody on their social media clips that want that quick engagement, what do they start off with? Like, if you're going to see a video that's about a police chase, they start the video with the car wrecking for like what, the first 15 seconds, 10 seconds, 3 seconds, whatever it is. And then they go into the actual video that takes you another minute to really get to the vehicle wrecking. But they always start off. And I think that's mainly because your generation, you want to see it like right now, the hook, it's everything. That's it.

[Podcast Host]

If you're not interested in the first two, three seconds, you're scrolling.

[Todd Polt]

Yeah, but you figure that out. Like, that's why your podcast with the clips.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's important. So you can use it for good, I guess too.

[Todd Polt]

You can?

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, for sure. How many squatters are you dealing with, man? Is it that bad out there?

[Todd Polt]

We can deal with them every day.

[Podcast Host]

Every day?

[Todd Polt]

Yeah, every day. You know, like it's, it's crazy in inner cities. Right. And that's where most of my properties are, out of the inner cities is what people don't see is they don't see the truth of the governments in our society. Right. If you watch a city council meeting of an inner city, what do they talk about? The homeless population, the addicts, and how much help they want to give them. And they try to make everybody believe that that's really what they're into. The truth is there's not help out there for all of them. The way that they would portray it. Right. If it wasn't for the private entities that are out there, that are, that are helping people with addiction and helping people with homelessness, it would never get solved because our governments just can't do it. So the fact that when you're an inner city, that there's not all this funding that's out there to help these people. And I don't think there should be, I'm not saying that. But there's so many people that are out there that are homeless, that are addicted to drugs. It's impossible, man. Like if, you know, for us, if we got a property under construction, I mean we have to alarm it up, we have to check on it every single day. If you're evicting somebody, you know, and that's the other piece that comes along with helping the vulnerable population, right? So if we're helping like on the reentry program and we bring people in or we're trying to get people back on their feet or some of the homeless programs that need housing for, you know, abused moms, when we help those people, we also know what comes along with it is that 50% of them aren't going to work out. We're going to have to evict them. And then when you start evicting somebody that's in that scenario, what happens? All their friends start coming over, all their dope friends start coming over and eventually you have basically a trap house or they just move out and these people overtake your unit while you're trying to get this thing evicted. So it becomes a challenge that you have to try to work around and work, work through without violating people's rights. And that's the challenge, right? I mean, I would love to just go in and grab people by their neck, rip em out and call it a day. And maybe that happens sometimes, but you have to be careful, right? And then the people that live around those people now, they're affected, right? So now they're affected by the dope dealers that come around and everybody else. And you have, you know, this sweet old grandma that's lived there for 15 years and she doesn't feel safe walking out her door anymore. So what she do, she starts moving out. So now you end up with boarded up buildings. I mean that's kind of the perpetual cycle that happens.

[Podcast Host]

How long does an eviction process take once you serve them the notice?

[Todd Polt]

Yeah. So we're fortunate though, like in Ohio we're still, in most parts of Ohio, we're still landlord friendly. So if somebody doesn't pay their rent, we give them a three day notice.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, three days.

[Todd Polt]

Three day notice. Well, but then at the end of that three days, then we can file the eviction. And then from there it's about two to three weeks that we get a court date and then after that we win the court date maybe 10 days so about a month, 30 to 45 days at most. Which is, which is great, comparatively speaking, you know, from different parts around our country.

[Podcast Host]

I feel like Cali, I hear the worst stories out of Cali.

[Todd Polt]

Cali's the worst. Washington state's the worst. New York is horrible.

[Podcast Host]

I noticed a pattern there. Politically was, well, you know, that's what happens.

[Todd Polt]

Right. But when you talk about Florida, Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, like basically the Midwest, right. If you're in a landlord friendly area, it's not hard, you know. And what's crazy on social media is when you have so many people that follow you from around the country. The amount of people that get on my media when I'm dealing with a squatter and they just beat me up. Oh, you're violating the rights. You can't do that. That's against the law. I'm like, welcome to Ohio. Like, we don't have, we don't have squatter rights like they do across the country. You know, Are there certain things that you can't do? Sure there are. But if somebody breaks into our unit and they're living in there and we catch them, we're dragging them out because they still broke into our unit. They're not a squatter. They don't have any rights. Like they broke into the unit. And that's why I tell everybody but you. You know, people are roadside lawyers all the time, right? Oh, you gotta like give them a free place to live. Like they deserve to be there.

[Podcast Host]

That blows my mind that people think that way.

[Todd Polt]

I tell them the same thing all the time. I'll shoot my dm like, because I like to troll people sometimes. They're negative. I'd be like, hey, just shoot me your address real quick. Like I got a whole group, I'll fly them out. Like you got a couple places at your house. Like, we'll move them right in. Like we're good with that.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, you put hard earned money into that property and they just want you to house people.

[Todd Polt]

That's it. That's how most people are though.

[Podcast Host]

Blows my mind, man. So how many properties you got? I know you've bought over a thousand units in your career so far, right?

[Todd Polt]

Yeah, we have. I mean, we have over a thousand units that were, that are still in our portfolio right now. That equates to, you know, 250, 260 properties. Yes, we do a lot of multifamily stuff. We also manage to for our state investors. So we, we have a couple thousand units that we manage for other investors. So large portfolio, large you know, management arm, which, you know, we see everything, man. Like we have the A class, nice luxury properties, you know, all the way down the slumlord property that we're trying to turn around for somebody. So it's, it's kind of cool, man. And like for younger real estate agents or younger real estate investors that really want to learn, like, my office in Dayton, Ohio is like the most phenomenal training ground that you can imagine because they get to see virtually everything. You know, like, it gets, it gets wild, man. It gets crazy. I could do a whole reality show.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Todd Polt]

And at some point we probably will.

[Podcast Host]

That's a good idea.

[Todd Polt]

But yeah, like, you remember the, remember that lizard toe or whatever it was? It was a towing company, used to tow all kinds of cars. They'd have all kinds of fights in their office and they had the camera. No, I never saw that one. I was, well, you're too young for that probably. Well, anyway, that's what I want to do. Like if we just put a camera above our window the first of the month when everybody comes in to pay the rent. Yeah, it's a show, man.

[Podcast Host]

I bet.

[Todd Polt]

I used to love circus.

[Podcast Host]

I used to love those fix and flip shows. But I feel like they make it look easy.

[Todd Polt]

They do. And they give you the wrong numbers, you know, And I've. I'm friends with quite a few people that have had those shows, those reality shows. Is the, is the basic concept of it right? Sure it is. Are the numbers right? Fuck no, they're not. Right. Like you're not, you're not making million dollar on flip. You know, most of the time now if you buy something in Malibu or, you know, something crazy in New York, could you make a million bucks? Sure you could. But when we talk about wealth and I'm teaching young investors how to really make money, we're Talking about making 20 to 40,000 on Flip in the Midwest, you know, and then how do you take that money? How do you take that 20 and 40,000 bucks and turn that into a long term hold? Right. And for me, flipping was always a vehicle to fund my landlord addiction. And that's what I did. I didn't take money. I didn't go out and blow it at a club or a bar or, you know, you know, make it rain somewhere. I would take the money we made from flips and I would use that to buy whatever I could using hard money in conjunction with what I made off the flip to buy another whole property. And little by little, you start stacking properties and eventually you look back and you're like, shit. And I got a lot of properties.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Todd Polt]

You know, but you got to do it the right way and that's what we do. But yeah, it's just the numbers on TV are crazy. But that's again, that's what people want to see, right? Like they want to see the crazy stuff or they want to see the guy that bought the storage shed and, or storage locker that was under, you know, foreclosure, and they found like a million dollar gold artifact. That shit doesn't happen, you know, like maybe like once in a blue moon, but it just doesn't happen. But that's what people want to see on tv. That's what they want to see on social media.

[Podcast Host]

You ever get over leveraged when the, when the interest rates went up, did you get over leveraged then?

[Todd Polt]

No, I didn't. And, but here's the thing. I think we learned a lot from 2007, 2008, 2009. You know, I wasn't in real estate then, but I've done a ton of research on that time frame and when we had our in, matter of fact, I just had a gal on my podcast that did seven years in prison for real estate fraud and mortgage fraud during 2008, 2009. And back then it was a different ball game, right? So when the housing bubble kind of burst, that's what people are doing. There were shady banks that were out there that were giving 90 loans, but then they were like, oh, well, here's another 20% loan that we can get from another bank and people are getting leveraged 100, 110%. So then when the, when the market shifted, that's when everything blew up. Now banks are so much more strenuous that it's hard to do that. Not that you can't get into something slow or shady, but now banks are, they're very picky about it, right? So our rule is this. I never want to be leveraged more than 75% in any property. And what you have to do is you have to understand what your market is, right? California is different than New York. New York is different than Florida. Florida is different. Ohio, and in the Midwest, it's a different market, right? So when you guys are see some of social media or politics or the news that talks about some type of crazy thing that's going on in our housing market, we don't feel it the same way in the Midwest, right? So when you have a high peak in California or you have a very low, low, low Valley, somewhere like the Midwest still kind of stays somewhere in the middle, right? Like it just kind of rides in the middle so we're not going to feel it the most. So in our area in the Midwest, as long as we're not over leveraged and by over leverage for us, for me it's 70, 75%. The worst decline in the housing market in our country's history would never allow me to be over averaged. And I think as long as you can pick your numbers and stay true to your numbers and everything that you do, then you'll always be okay. The problem is people that are greedy and they want to go and get, they'll find a lender that's new out there, right? That's an unconventional lender that says, oh, we can write 90% loans or 95% loans, that's great. And it feels good. And people that don't have money or don't have a creative mind to get deals done other than taking those high equity loans, they're going to get themselves in trouble at some point. And we have a lot of people like that right now that are in trouble because a couple years ago our housing market was nuts, right? And we had investors specifically in the Midwest. I'll give you an example. In Dayton, Ohio, you know, I was buying quads, like four unit apartment buildings for 20,000 bucks when I first started.

[Podcast Host]

Geez.

[Todd Polt]

Now you can't do that anymore, but you can still buy them for under a hundred grand. But what happened was our market, all these quads in the Dayton, Ohio area, all jumped up to 250 to 300 grand. Whoa. But the rents didn't support that. But investors that were just jumping in the game, like, oh, I want to be part of the games, they were overpaying for all these properties and now what they've realized is the rents don't support it. I'm losing money every single month and they're trying to sell off these properties and the values are kind of going back down. And all of us old guys over there were like, whatever, man, we're good. We bought all of ours for 20, 50k, you know, and things are good. But if you over leverage, you're going to get yourself in a jam, you know, in places like Vegas, very easily you can get yourself over leveraged because your guys's housing market, if it crashed, it's going to drop, like it's going to, it's going to tank and you could get yourself in a lot of trouble. So I would say if I'm in Vegas, I'm probably like, 60, 65% of my equity, and that's the most I would do on a property to make sure that I feel comfortable with it.

[Podcast Host]

They say Vegas is a market signal because we. We get hit first. First or something during recessions.

[Todd Polt]

Yeah. And Vegas is like an earthquake. Did you know, like earthquakes, they. They move out, right? Like, they get lighter the further that they get out. And when you look at that, I think Vegas is kind of there with, you know, Austin and places like that. In Texas, you guys are always going to feel it first, and everybody else is going to feel it, but it's going to get a little bit less hard to deal with the further that you get out. And fortunately, I'm far enough away from Vegas that, you know, going to affect me.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, we've been in a standstill in Vegas. Like, there's not much movement here for a while because I think. Because of the interest rates, too. Yeah, 8%. Pretty high.

[Todd Polt]

Yeah. Interest rates are starting to come down a little bit. But. But, but, you know, look, Trump and. And Jerome Powell, like, they're fighting right now, right? Like. Like he's our Fed who. Who won't drop rates, which. It's the time to drop rates. Is. Is refusing to do that. And I think what's crazy about Vegas. Tell me if you saw this. I was out here with my wife by six months ago, and every time I get out here, I get this little bug. I'm like, I want to buy something. Right? Like, I love it, man. Like, I love the clubs. I love the tables. I love blackjack. I like Spanish 21. Like. Like, I love Vegas. So I always want to buy something when we come out and I start looking at real estate. And what was crazy to me is when we're out here, and that was what, like, six months ago? So. Right. It was right before Trump got inaugurated. But at that time, the Trump Hotel down here, when you looked at condos there, it was like, everything was for sale on that entire building. Wow. For, like, super, super cheap. And it was because nobody wanted to buy it. Nobody wanted to be associated with it. And I talked to a couple agents at that time. I was like, why is everything so cheap in there? And of course, they gave me bullshit answers because they wanted to sell them, but it was amazing how cheap it was. So the fact that if you don't stay close to politics when you're investing, whether that's real estate, whether that's just stock market, whether that's crypto, if you don't Stay close to politics, man. You get yourselves in a jam, you know, because politics affect our market everywhere. Wow. You know, and a lot of people don't pay attention to it.

[Podcast Host]

I had no idea that happened in Vegas. Well, that makes sense, though, because if he lost, people would have been pissed, right?

[Todd Polt]

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Now you look at those same ones, and they've went up $100,000 in value or $200,000 in value. It's just, wow, six months.

[Podcast Host]

That's pretty crazy.

[Todd Polt]

Well, but now I'm pissed.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. Because you could have bought a few of those.

[Todd Polt]

I should have bought a couple of them cheap, you know?

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. That's nuts.

[Todd Polt]

You know, what do you do?

[Podcast Host]

I want to end off with mental health. I know you and your wife are big on that, right? You have your own. Do you have a charity or a company around that?

[Todd Polt]

Yeah, it's not sure we're for profit, but my wife's the CEO of our developmental disability. You know, we're an agency, service providers. We provide services to developmental disabilities. And she also runs our mental health group homes. And it started long before that. Ever since I got into real estate and I was buying in challenging areas, I found that people couldn't get housed that had mental health issues. So one of the things I did early on in 2012 was became one of the largest landlords for mental health subsidies. And there was a group locally called Eastway, and that's all they did, was house people. And the crazy thing about mental health is that most people don't understand how it works. Not that they don't understand how mental health affects people, but like housing, mental health. Right. Because you have. Every state might be different, but in our area, you have people that can live on their own that are diagnosed with some type of mental health disorder. And then you have people that are required to live in a group home setting. Right. But then what you have is you have people that are in between where maybe that county agency doesn't have any money left, so they don't have any more money to put towards a group home for somebody. And they're trying to push and force people that should be living in a group home setting to live on their own. Right. And they have these government payments called RSS payments. So that's what goes into a group home is RSS payments. But if that funding is lacking, they're trying to push more people to live on their own. And what I found was it was there was a lot of landlords that wouldn't work with them, and some Good reasons why landlords wouldn't work with them because it can be a challenge. So we just made it our mission, man. Like, I became the largest landlord for mental health and then my wife and I ended up. She's an ICU nurse. She was ICU nurse forever. Like, phenomenal. Never thought about running her own company. Never wanted to. She didn't want to be a supervisor of the hospital, right? Like, she just wanted to do her job, man. She's a worker and she's good at it. And I went to buy a 10 unit apartment building and the dude was selling it super cheap, like 150k for 10 years, worth like 400k at the time. 450 somewhere around there. Like, this is a great deal. Like it must be falling down, you know. But then I get there and the in the building is beautiful, it's nice. And I didn't even negotiate with him. It was such a good price. I didn't negotiate with him. He was a nice guy. And as we started talking, he said, well, I need about 60 days to close on the property. I said, well, why do you need 60 days? Like, I'm ready to close now, right? Most people want to sell quick. He's like, well, I got to move everybody out. I got to move all my clients out. I said, well, hold on, what do you mean you got to move all your clients out? Like, I don't want a vacant building. And he said, well, these are my clients. We provide services to them. And I said, what type of services do you provide? He's like, well, we provide mental health services and services for the developmental disability clients, you know, that need help cooking and cleaning and all that good stuff. And I said, well, why don't we just buy your company instead of just the building, right? Like, we'll do it. And I didn't know what I was getting into. Like, I know that when you see opportunity, you always just take opportunity to become the expert later. And that's what I did in this moment. But very quickly we got in the conversation, I realized that part of his properties were mental health group homes. And the other part was people that were living that were receiving services to help them because they had some type of disability that they were diagnosed prior to the age of 22 with. And a couple months after that, we, we ended up buying this company. It was a crazy deal. I got the best price in the world. Like, if I told you the numbers, it'd be sick. And I will tell you the numbers, you can say it's sick. But you know, at the time we bought, we bought four properties from him. A 10 year apartment building and three houses. His company, without rents or anything like that, the company that was providing services, they were doing about $850,000 a year. And we kind of packaged this all up and we bought it for 350k.

[Podcast Host]

Holy.

[Todd Polt]

We convinced him to own her finances and put $10,000 down at 3% interest over three years. And then I came home and I told my wife she needed to quit a nursing job because she had run this company that I knew nothing about, right? She's like, now you're fucking crazy. I ain't doing that. And I think when she, when she visited one of the homes and started meeting some of the people, she fell in love with some of them, right? Because we have, we have people that have a disability that still drive themselves to work every day, but they need help in another area. We have people that are hands on care 24 hours a day, right? Or maybe they have a colostomy bag or maybe they're in a wheelchair. So we have such a crazy range of people. But what you do is you find out that like you just fall in love with a man. Like they all have something crazy about them. Like maybe, maybe they like playing basketball every single day. Which I have one guy that you would absolutely, his name's Chris Hooper. You would fall in love with him, right? Like he plays Special Olympics basketball and things like that. Like, you just fall in love with them. And, and I think that's what my wife did. And she ended up dropping down, you know, part time basically at the hospital, and she became CEO and she's been kicking ass on that side of it. But what we've, what we've learned is that mental health, as much as we hear society talk about it and our government talk about it, they are like the forgotten people. And this is probably the best example I can give you on funding. When you talk about somebody that has a disability and they have a state waiver that provides services to them, those people get basically like a daily rate, let's call it like a homemaker personal care rate. Okay? So you might have somebody that if we're providing services to them, Medicaid might pay US$150, all the way up to like $900 per day for that person with a disability. When you look at somebody with mental health disorder that has to live in one of our group homes, the government will pay us $1,600 a month. Okay, now that number sounds good off the bat. But you have to have 24 hour staff, you have to provide them three meals a day, you have to provide them transportation, you have to provide all their furniture, you have to pay their utilities. You don't make anything off that. Right? So it's almost, it's not all about money, but you have to be able to survive as a company, right? So it's almost impossible to take mental health on because the money is not out there. And they are the most challenging, right? Like they are more challenging than somebody that just needs help getting up in the morning and washing their clothes or something like that. So it's really a fucked up scenario, man, honestly, with mental health. Because the funding's not out there, the resources are out there, are not, not great. I mean we've had mental health clients in our group homes that, you know, they come up and they, they walk away from the home one night and they're out and they're, you know, going to kill themselves or they're threatening staff and trying to get a hold of their caseworker at night or on the weekend is impossible. You know, my wife's been up many nights, midnight, two, three in the morning, driving out to pick somebody up that ended up at a hotel down the road or something that ran away from the group home. Not able to get a caseworker on the phone, not able to get any assistance. And you know, we had one several months ago that was threatening staff, was going to assault them, was going to hurt themselves and three or four times in the week we had to call the ambulance, take him to hospital and literally within six or eight hours, the hospital staff says now they're just kidding, you know, I'm saying like they're not really a danger to themselves.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Todd Polt]

And some of those scenarios, we, we had one, you know, that we three times in the same week we tried to get them admitted to the hospital and they just kick him out and then they came back and assaulted our staff, you know, and, or they, or they hurt themselves and eventually like, oh yeah, well maybe they do have a problem. Well, no, dumbass, that's why we said in the hospital three times. Right. But mental health does not receive the care that they need. It's, it's just, it's a such a up scenario, man. It really is. And it makes your, makes your heart hurt a little bit, you know, like I wish we could do more of it. The problem is there's just not the funding out there. And yeah, and while you're, we do well and we, we Do a lot of charity. They can't all be charity, right? Like, we still have to pay bills, you know.

[Podcast Host]

I'm sure they'd rather put all those people on antidepressants and just forget about them, you know.

[Todd Polt]

Well, that's, that's a mantra of a lot of our, you know, a lot of our society, right? It's like, let's just medicate everybody and, and call it a day. But what happens when, what happens when they don't take their medication or when your staff member hands them the pill and they stick it in their cheek, act like they took it until the staff walks away, then they spit it out, and then a week later they're having outbursts or they're damaging property or they're damaging staff members or threatening to kill themselves and nobody knows why. And you can't get a behavioral caseworker in or get somebody at a hospital to really dive in and figure out, hey, their levels are all jacked up. It's. It's a nasty cycle, man. But that's, that's kind of what we deal with, you know.

[Podcast Host]

That's messed up. Well, thanks for doing that, man. I lost two family members to mental health.

[Todd Polt]

So, yeah, it's a real thing.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Todd Polt]

And it's real with guys like us too, man, even. For sure.

[Podcast Host]

I almost lost myself to it. Yeah. Shit's no joke, man.

[Todd Polt]

Well, look, guys are, guys are different, right? Like, we're, we're taught by society to grow up and be tough and be strong and, you know, keep our feelings bottled up. And one of the biggest challenges for us sometimes is just to talk to another guy and to have somebody to release things to. And I've been there myself, you know, Like, I've been in some of the lowest points in my life with nobody to talk to and, you know, trying to figure out where I was going to go and what I was going to do. And I finally got to a point now, man, in my life where I'm like, man, the feeling embarrassed, like, you know, screw the I'm a tough guy type, man. Sometimes we just gotta talk about, man, and get it out. And I'm fortunate that I have some, you know, incredible men in my life that, that we can have those serious conversations and we can talk about it. And, you know, even interactions like this where we just met this week, like, if you called me at three in the morning, man, like, I'm down, like, let's talk. Like, let's figure it out. Because I've lost friends to mental health and you know and, and family members the same as you have. And it's, it's real and people don't give it the, they don't give it the, the credit of severity that, that they really need to give us sometimes.

[Podcast Host]

I don't think. Absolutely. God, it's been awesome, man. Where can people find you, learn from you and message you and all that?

[Todd Polt]

Yeah, all my social media is the same, man. Todd Polt. Polts. Official TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube. That's it, man. Easiest place to give me. Perfect.

[Podcast Host]

We'll link below. Thanks. See you next time.