Scaling Profit & Peace: How Samantha and Michael Guthrie Built a Lean ATM Empire While Keeping Their Marriage Strong

Summary

Problems to Profit Podcast
Episode: Scaling Profit & Peace: How Samantha and Michael Guthrie Built a Lean ATM Empire While Keeping Their Marriage Strong
Release Date: July 3, 2025
Host: Preston Brown
Guests: Samantha and Michael Guthrie

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Introduction

In this engaging episode of Problems to Profit, host Preston Brown welcomes his longtime friends and esteemed guests, Samantha and Michael Guthrie. As a successful married couple and business partners, the Guthries share their inspiring journey of building a lean yet highly profitable ATM empire without compromising their marriage. The episode delves into their origin story, business strategies, balancing personal and professional lives, and their robust investing philosophies.

Welcome and Guest Introduction [00:00 - 05:24]

Preston Brown opens the show with enthusiasm, introducing Samantha and Michael Guthrie as not only successful entrepreneurs but also as personal mentors and friends. He highlights their achievements, including exiting companies for tens of millions and managing a vast portfolio of apartments. Preston emphasizes the unique dynamic of being married business partners, setting the stage for an insightful conversation.

Notable Quote:

Preston Brown [02:52]: "They are phenomenal investors, they're phenomenal givers. They are great speakers, leaders and teachers."

Origin Story: From Setback to Success [09:31 - 15:10]

Samantha and Michael recount their humble beginnings, sharing a pivotal moment when they were simultaneously fired from a medical clinic due to wrongful accusations related to medical billing fraud. This abrupt job loss thrust them from a stable income to financial uncertainty, prompting them to pivot into the ATM industry.

Notable Quote:

Samantha Guthrie [10:28]: "We both got fired at the same time, going from $100,000 a year to zero overnight."

Determined to rebuild, they invested their remaining $2,000 into their first ATM machine, marking the inception of their entrepreneurial journey. This bold move laid the foundation for what would become a significant enterprise.

Building a Lean ATM Empire [15:10 - 26:05]

The Guthries detail their rapid expansion in the ATM business. Starting with one machine, they swiftly scaled to tens of thousands, leveraging efficiency and streamlined processes. By 1997, they had established Automated ATM Solutions Incorporated, later rebranded as Cypress Advantage, ranking as the fifth-largest ATM company in the United States with a minimal team.

Notable Quote:

Mike Guthrie [18:36]: "We were like the number five company in the United States with four employees."

Samantha handled processes, ensuring that every inefficiency was addressed and optimized, while Michael focused on sales and technical aspects. Their collaborative approach and relentless pursuit of efficiency allowed them to manage immense transaction volumes with a lean team.

Notable Quote:

Samantha Guthrie [20:45]: "Every day it was just, you're learning one more thing or one more little trick."

Business Philosophies and Strategies [26:05 - 47:05]

Preston and the guests discuss critical business strategies that contributed to their success. Key among these is the emphasis on efficiency, process optimization, and treating vendors as partners rather than mere service providers.

Notable Quote:

Samantha Guthrie [27:08]: "We looked at every vendor of ours as a partner in the company."

They highlight the importance of stepping back to assess and improve business processes continually. This proactive mindset enabled them to handle a vast number of transactions with minimal staff effectively.

Notable Quote:

Mike Guthrie [31:10]: "Identifying inefficiencies and addressing them was crucial for maintaining our lean operation."

Balancing Marriage and Business [47:05 - 49:35]

A significant portion of the episode focuses on how Samantha and Michael maintain a healthy marriage while being business partners. They share five essential hacks for couples navigating both personal and professional relationships:

1. Remind Each Other Why You Started [40:20]: Constantly revisit the original goals and lifestyle aspirations that motivated them to start the business together.
2. Spouse Always First [41:00]: Prioritize the relationship over business matters to ensure mutual support and understanding.
3. Paradox of Taking vs. Serving [42:10]: Focus on serving each other and the business rather than merely taking from it, fostering a culture of generosity and responsibility.
4. Define Roles and Responsibilities [44:21]: Clearly outline each partner’s duties to avoid overlap and ensure efficiency.
5. Set Boundaries Between Work and Personal Life [48:34]: Establish specific times to disconnect from work to nurture the personal relationship.

Notable Quote:

Samantha Guthrie [49:10]: "Never talk business in the bedroom."

Investing Philosophies and Strategies [50:45 - 83:03]

Transitioning from business operations to investing, the Guthries discuss their approach to building wealth through strategic investments. They emphasize:

• Tax Optimization: Utilizing real estate investments to take advantage of depreciation and tax deductions.
• Asset Allocation: Diversifying investments across apartments, debt funds, hard money lending, and triple-net properties to mitigate risks and ensure steady cash flow.
• Syndications: Engaging in real estate syndications by partnering with trustworthy sponsors who share their investment philosophy and have a proven track record.

Notable Quote:

Mike Guthrie [68:10]: "Investing in apartment buildings and getting K1s has allowed us to legally minimize our federal income tax."

They debunk the traditional advice of saving money for retirement, advocating instead for making their money work through smart investments. By strategically leveraging their assets, they have been able to generate substantial wealth while maintaining financial flexibility.

Notable Quote:

Samantha Guthrie [69:11]: "Having your money work for you, investing it, having your money go out and come back with friends."

Lessons and Recommendations [83:03 - 84:14]

As the episode concludes, Samantha and Michael provide actionable advice for listeners interested in real estate investing and business partnerships. They stress the importance of:

• Vetting Investment Partners: Ensuring potential partners have a solid track record, contribute equity, and are willing to take financial responsibility in case of setbacks.
• Building Trust: Cultivating genuine relationships based on mutual respect and shared goals.
• Continuous Learning: Staying informed and adapting to market changes to optimize investment strategies.

Notable Quote:

Mike Guthrie [80:22]: "It's just like getting married. You have to date first to know if you're compatible as investment partners."

Conclusion and Contact Information [83:03 - End]

Preston wraps up the episode by expressing gratitude for the Guthries’ transparency and invaluable insights. He encourages listeners to reach out to Samantha and Michael through their provided contact information for further engagement and learning.

Contact Details:

• Samantha Guthrie: Instagram: SamanthaGuthrie, Website: SamanthaGuthrie.net
• Michael Guthrie: Instagram: MikeGuthrieInvestor, Phone/Text: 509-270-6701

Notable Quote:

Preston Brown [83:03]: "You might have to watch this one two or three times and take notes, but there was a lot of gems there."

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Key Takeaways

1. Resilience and Adaptability: Turning setbacks into opportunities is crucial for entrepreneurial success.
2. Efficiency is King: Streamlining processes and optimizing operations can significantly enhance business profitability.
3. Balanced Partnerships: Maintaining clear boundaries and prioritizing relationships can sustain both personal and professional harmony.
4. Strategic Investing: Leveraging tax strategies and diversifying investments are essential for long-term wealth accumulation.
5. Authentic Leadership: Building genuine relationships based on authentic interactions fosters trust and business growth.

This episode offers a comprehensive look into the Guthries' journey, blending personal anecdotes with practical business and investment strategies. Their story serves as an inspiring blueprint for entrepreneurs aiming to build profitable businesses while nurturing strong personal relationships.

Transcript

[Preston Brown]

Are you tired of complicated business advice that rarely delivers any real results? I'm Preston Brown and I've built a nine figure portfolio by following simple business formulas that anyone can use. In my new book, you, First Million Made Easy, I reveal the exact system that I've used to generate hundreds of millions in revenue. And it's frankly a system that works in any industry, with any business and yes, in any market. The good news, it's not about hustle. It's not about running or working or struggling. And what it is about creating money instead of just earning it. Because earning money is slavery while creating is freedom. It's about stopping the cycle of managing by crisis and building a business that doesn't depend on you transforming your business from a high paying job to an asset that generates money even when you're not there. Whether you're a startup or an established company, this formula will transform your business into a profit driven machine that gives you the time and freedom to to focus on what truly matters. Grab your first Million Made Easy now and let's start the journey of financial freedom together. I look forward to being a part of your story. Welcome back to Problems to Profit. Guys, I'm smiling my ass off right now because it's not every day that you actually get to do a podcast with some of your best friends who have some of the best value that can be delivered. And I can't even start this show without good old Samantha here making me blush and telling jokes and embarrassing me and starting everything up. Guys like. And also, I don't know if you guys know this, but you're actually my first threesome podcast. So congratulations. Welcome. I mean, it's nice to burst that bubble.

[Mike Guthrie]

It's my first threesome also. I was looking forward to it.

[Preston Brown]

But guys, look, I'm super excited for you to get to know these people because not only are they fun, not only are they playful, not only are they loving, not only are they insane, but they are also wildly successful. They've exited companies for tens of millions of dollars. They are actually my business partner on a company and we have. What about. I think I have 3,000, 3,200 apartments. I think a couple thousand are with you guys, right? And so they're phenomenal investors, they're phenomenal givers. They are great speakers, leaders and teachers. And you know what, what's cool is they're like practically aunts and uncles to like my kids. They are, you know, encouragers and mentors to my spouse and I and they're total givers. So without further ado, like, I am so excited to bring my friends. Probably not even friends. That's a word. I apologize for saying that. My family, Mike and Samantha Guthrie, to problems, to profit, to give and serve you all today. Welcome to the show, guys.

[Samantha Guthrie]

Thank you, Preston. Thanks for having us. Real honor. I've been listening to your podcast, as I've mentioned, and I'm blown away by the content.

[Preston Brown]

Well, it is always our intention to blow people's minds. I got you back. She's blushing too. If you're not watching this on camera, I got Samantha back. You know what? It was one of my favorite statements by a speaker on stage that we all heard. And he was like, I don't know why they call African Americans colored people. He's like, it's those white people that change colors all the time. And Samantha, I think you just went three shades of red. That was really good. Like, you shifted colors really quick there. That was amazing.

[Samantha Guthrie]

It's a talent.

[Mike Guthrie]

It's a gift.

[Preston Brown]

So with this show, guys, one thing, like, our main thing is we want to bring the stories of true leaders and inspirations and success stories and failure stories. But to our audience, we want to allow our audience to see what people went through the full journey. Like, there's no straight line to success and how you went through the problems, challenges, stresses, and struggles of your life to become the profit you are today in your industry, your space, and to generate the profits that you're making now. Now, I mean, I kind of shared a little bit about the current part of your story. Where didn't you guys just close on, like, a beautiful multi million dollar home in a place that's not cheap to live? I think you're down here in Scottsdale, Arizona. Got the hell out of California.

[Mike Guthrie]

That is correct.

[Preston Brown]

Congratulations, by the way.

[Mike Guthrie]

Yeah. When I sent the listing to my daughter after she had had her grandson, she said, there's no way in hell Samantha's gonna let you buy that house. And I just like, watch me.

[Samantha Guthrie]

And then I watched him.

[Preston Brown]

You were like, there's no way in hell Samantha's gonna not let me buy the house. I'm pretty sure she bought the house.

[Mike Guthrie]

Clearly, she made all the money. I'm just another pretty face.

[Preston Brown]

Oh, my God. So they are also a dynamic duo, and they're a married couple that has survived business partnership, which is, I mean, when you're in partnership in business, I mean, there's a lot of stress, a lot of struggles. When you're in partnership in marriage, there's a stress, a lot of struggles. But when you're in marriage, partnership in both, I mean, it brings a totally different meaning to you.

[Samantha Guthrie]

Right, Right. We call that hallway sex. You're walking down the hallway past each other, and you're like, you. You know, the main thing is, like, trying to actually have a relationship, growing a business, all the stresses, all of that can really invade your personal space. You know, if you're upset at somebody at the office and then you walk into the kitchen, and that's where they are. You know, you haven't escaped it, so there's not really a break.

[Preston Brown]

Yeah, no, I mean, no kidding. But, I mean, you guys are a shining example of what it looks like to have a successful marriage and a successful business. And I want to get into that. But let's dive in a little bit to the end of the story. Can we go over some of the accolades? Like, I've seen you guys on stages. You guys are, like, in. I don't know if I want to call it that, but the ultra wealth category now, like, you guys are definitely top 1%, probably top 0.01%, but you've moved beyond just the business sector, and you're also leading in teaching now. Can we dive into some of that?

[Samantha Guthrie]

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I don't know that anyone knows the origin story either. We're going to that rock. It's very, very rocky. And so that, I think, to me, that makes the end, like, where we are today is all that more sweet because we could have never seen it coming. And it was really an evolution over time. Learning along the way, figuring out what works, really learning how to serve other people. That ended up, I think, getting us to where we are today, which is really what we continue to do by giving back or teaching or talking about the road.

[Preston Brown]

I love that.

[Mike Guthrie]

And so I'm getting ready to speak. We were both getting ready to speak on a fireside chat in Beverly Hills in about a week, and I seen the ad come out. Well, I didn't see the ad come out. A friend of mine took a picture of the ad texted to me, and it said, samantha and Michael Guthrie, ultra wealthy investor. That's why I dropped it with an exit. And I was like, wow, somebody knows something I don't. So I just thought I'd throw that out there because I found that out myself for the first time just recently.

[Preston Brown]

Hey, when other people are bragging about. I mean, look, you guys are very, very successful. But when other people are throwing the words ultra. That's why I dropped it as I Saw the same ad. I was like, I want to go.

[Mike Guthrie]

I was like, third party recognition is always better than my own.

[Preston Brown]

So I had a. I mean, I'm doing pretty well. I'm okay, too. But I went and spoke for a group, and they're like, preston Brown, billionaire. And I was like, do I correct him? Do I explain this? And you know what? Like, they were definitely wrong. I am not a billionaire. I mean, unless you're talking about the amount of times I had, like, imposter syndrome on the way, Like, I'm maybe a billionaire of, like, feeling stress on the way to multimillionaire, but, like, not a billionaire in dollars. But it was funny. I decided, you know, I'm not gonna correct em because then you're damaging your host. But when they're putting that kind of loud on you, obviously I was more successful than anybody in the room, and that was cool. Doesn't hurt. But I went out there with a level of humility, which is what I see you guys do all the time. And when you have that humility, people describe you even at a higher level than you may be.

[Mike Guthrie]

Absolutely. And it's always good to. When you approach walking out there on a stage, your number one job isn't to tell them who you are. It's to share with them what need. And that's the only reason I get on that stage, because I want to reach out to somebody, reach in their heart and go, this is what I have for you today. This isn't about me. This is about you. And if I can bring you value from being on your stage and share some nuggets that help you elevate your career, your business, your job, whatever it is you're doing. That's why we do it. We're not getting. I haven't been paid to be on a stage yet, but, you know, it pays dividends to see other people using what we bring to the stage to elevate their life.

[Preston Brown]

Well, I know for a fact you've gotten calls a year later, because I was one of them. And that's being paid, too.

[Mike Guthrie]

Absolutely.

[Preston Brown]

So let's dive in to Mike and Samantha Guthrie origin story. Where did we start? How did we get here? What were the problems that took you to profitability?

[Samantha Guthrie]

Gosh. Okay, I'm gonna have to back up just a few years here, like 30, because that's when we started. Yeah, we started our company by default, which is actually how I think a lot of entrepreneurs get into business is, you know, you're almost forced into it or an opportunity Sort of flings, by your way, and you're willing to grab onto it. But we actually both got fired at the same time. So we worked at a medical clinic. They were doing medical billing fraud. They found out we knew, and they basically refused to let us both in building. So we went from at the time, like $100,000 a year income to zero overnight and had to go, like, get temp jobs and try to claw our way back. We got a roommate who broke all our dishes while he was arguing with his girlfriend. It was pretty bleak. And it was in that. That the ATM industry really was becoming possible.

[Preston Brown]

I love this. Hold on, I gotta go back. I didn't even know that, like, I knew that you guys got fired, but you were working at a medical billing company. I mean, probably just a medical company. Medical company. Probably just trying to hold onto a job. I mean, and if you knew what was going on, and maybe it was a hard economy and you weren't really happy about everything that was going on there. You were trying to hold onto a job, and so maybe you knew a little much, but you just needed to feed your family and got thrown out.

[Samantha Guthrie]

Yeah, basically. And it feels, you know what. When it's not like, if it was work performance, fire me. If it's like I didn't do the right thing or I screwed somebody up, like, fire me, that's fine. But it was, like, not my fault. It had nothing to do with anything I did. In fact, we were both excelling at our jobs, but they needed us out for their own purposes. So it felt so wrong that it, like, it forced us into thinking, like, what other options do we have besides, like, a job?

[Preston Brown]

What was the fraud?

[Mike Guthrie]

Well, they were. So there was a workman's comp medical facility. I was doing the X ray at the facility. Samantha was doing the marketing, and they were committing medical billing for. They were handing out.

[Samantha Guthrie]

Generic.

[Mike Guthrie]

Generic medication and charging for brand names. And it would be a simple visit, and they'd charge for an extraordinary visit. So they were doubling and tripling what should have been billed to the actual endpatient. And so the silver lining on the end of it, at the very, very end, they paid for the down payment on our very first home, which was really nice.

[Preston Brown]

So you weren't involved in the accounting department. You weren't involved in the operations or ownership that had anything to do with this. You were just holding onto a. And they were basically. It sounds like they were defrauding insurance companies.

[Samantha Guthrie]

Correct?

[Mike Guthrie]

Correct. That's exactly. The state of California's workers Comp.

[Preston Brown]

Wow.

[Samantha Guthrie]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Mike Guthrie]

And the doctor in charge knew, and she shared everything with me and Samantha because we were the only ones in the building most of the time. So we knew too much, so they had to get us out.

[Preston Brown]

Oh, my gosh. That's. I love that level of transparency. Thank you. So. But I do have confusion on one thing. Just the economist in me has to ask a question. Are you telling me that the government of California, a rather left wing government, has an issue with fraud, waste, or abuse?

[Mike Guthrie]

Well, the government probably did not. But the doctor that owned the clinic, that knew we did, had a problem with us knowing.

[Preston Brown]

Oh, he wanted you out because he didn't want you to expose him.

[Mike Guthrie]

Correct.

[Preston Brown]

That's how you got the down payment.

[Mike Guthrie]

Correct.

[Preston Brown]

So I'm sure there was some litigation or something that makes the story fun.

[Mike Guthrie]

Absolutely.

[Samantha Guthrie]

It took, like a year and a half, almost two years to recover. So even though, like, there was, you know, they kind of paid us off to keep us quiet, it still took a long time to get that. So, like, immediately I got a job at a temp company typing, which I'm horrible at, so that wasn't very good.

[Preston Brown]

Oh, I'm so glad we went full circle on this. I'm so glad I dove deeper. I was literally sitting in the back of my head thinking I just let my friends on my podcast to tell everybody they committed fraud.

[Samantha Guthrie]

No.

[Preston Brown]

I'm so confused. I'm so glad we dove deeper. I was like, God, they're gonna be so mad when they see the comments in this.

[Samantha Guthrie]

I love it.

[Mike Guthrie]

That's awesome.

[Preston Brown]

I'm like, okay, well, we're going there. I'm so glad we asked more questions. So basically, you were thrown out because he didn't want you to dime him out.

[Samantha Guthrie]

Yeah.

[Mike Guthrie]

Correct. He didn't want us to whistle blow.

[Samantha Guthrie]

Yeah.

[Preston Brown]

Oh, my God.

[Samantha Guthrie]

Which is actually how we keep going.

[Preston Brown]

Back to this word blow. It's crazy. Like, I mean, there you go again, Samantha. That blush looks good on you. Sorry, guys. Look, sometimes we play a little bit too much. We're gonna get to that entrepreneur value again. Please continue. So you got the down payment on your first house?

[Samantha Guthrie]

Well, that was part. Yeah, that was. So we both were kind of doing, you know, kind of getting back into jobs that would provide for us. And the ATM industry just became. Was it deregulated? I don't know. You didn't have to be a bank to own an ATM machine. And someone had proposed that idea to us, and really, our first ATM machine we bought on a credit card and drained Our bank account of all $2,000 we had to our name, because, of course, we had just been fired and we had no money. And this was, you know, this is a few months going by, but we were living paycheck to paycheck, and one machine became four machines, became 10 machines, became 50 machines. And then we started wholesaling, and eventually we sold.

[Preston Brown]

I knew you started with one machine, but I didn't realize you bought a cash machine on debt.

[Samantha Guthrie]

Oh, yeah.

[Preston Brown]

That's fantastic. Like, what a beautiful story of arbitrage.

[Mike Guthrie]

Way to lever your way to riches, right?

[Preston Brown]

Oh, my God.

[Samantha Guthrie]

It's like $2,000 to a 10 figure exit. 10 figure exit.

[Preston Brown]

Excuse me, what year roughly?

[Mike Guthrie]

1997.

[Preston Brown]

1997. Bought the first ATM machine.

[Mike Guthrie]

Correct. And we bought it. And so here's the interesting thing. I had just gotten out of the military, and I was in the middle of getting divorced from my first wife, and I had no credit. I had no money. Samantha put the ATM on her credit card. So then she became the president of the company, I became an employee, and that's the way it went. For the next 28 and a half years, she was my boss.

[Samantha Guthrie]

Well, so we were boyfriend and girlfriend.

[Preston Brown]

When we started that remark like that. You know what? I think I work for Aaron. Yeah, I get it.

[Mike Guthrie]

It resonates.

[Preston Brown]

I totally get it. You always get the last word. It's yes, ma' am, right?

[Samantha Guthrie]

No, but we were boyfriend and girlfriend when the company started, and it was on my credit card. So I'm like, if. If we break up, I still own the debt. So obviously I need to own the company that might pay off the debt. And then, of course, we just never changed it.

[Mike Guthrie]

I've learned to be a much better negotiator since then. I at least closed the deal and married the lady. Right.

[Preston Brown]

I think you got a lot of the good ends of that negotiation.

[Mike Guthrie]

100%. I married up for sure.

[Preston Brown]

Like, dude, I see you and I see her. And there's one thing, and a lot of people are going to hear this and not see, but if you see Sam and you see Mike. One thing you know about Mike, Mike can sell. Boom. All right, that was a Mike drop.

[Samantha Guthrie]

And I'm the one with the sales and marketing background. It's just for our company. And this actually goes into your whole podcast. I ended up for our company. I did like accounting, legal compliance, hr. It. I called it the Soul Crusher problems.

[Mike Guthrie]

Those were the problems for the company.

[Preston Brown]

You know, what's.

[Samantha Guthrie]

He was the prophet, I was the problem.

[Preston Brown]

So I remember when we met.

[Samantha Guthrie]

Oh yeah.

[Preston Brown]

And like I met you guys and I think it was probably 2017, 2018 timeframe. I was right around the time I bought my home building company. And you all were one of my inspirations. I don't know if you know this in talking about efficiency, because Mike was telling me all about like, oh yeah, we have this ATM coming. I think you were like number seven in the United States. Like size wise, transaction volume, it's not a little company. Like there was hundreds of thousands or millions of transactions. I don't remember the numbers and I'm not trying to put a number on it. And then I was like asking about your industry, asking about your competitors. All your competitors had all these employees and I think you just had a few people, like kind of y' all. And wasn't there like another young lady that was involved? But it wasn't like a huge office and a group. And there was a level of efficiency within your system that no one could duplicate.

[Mike Guthrie]

And they still have it. The original name of our company was Automated ATM Solutions Incorporated, and then we became Cypress Advantage because there's so many other automateds in the industry. Companies that had the volume of transactions our size would have anywhere from 40 to 60 employees. When we exited, we had two and a half million transactions a month, which we were like the number five company in the United States with four employees, two of us that traveled three weeks out of every month. And then we had another full time assistant here in the United States and another full time one in the Philippines. And they basically ran the company for us. Efficiency.

[Preston Brown]

I mean, and the goal of every business is the same thing. It's efficiency.

[Mike Guthrie]

Absolutely. It's always the who, not how.

[Preston Brown]

Absolutely 100%. So kind of diving back into the story, like, I'd love to hear some of the, some the relationship pieces because, you guys, it wasn't an overnight journey of okay, we started with one, we moved to four, and then all of a sudden number five in America, which probably means like probably top 10, top 20 on Earth as well. So we're talking about a large scale company, an enormous amount of transaction happening. In the time we're doing this podcast, you'd have probably done tens of thousands of transactions on your ATMs around the world, correct?

[Samantha Guthrie]

Nationwide, yes.

[Mike Guthrie]

Nationwide, yes.

[Preston Brown]

Okay. Nationwide. Sorry, sorry, sorry. There I am. I'm growing you again.

[Samantha Guthrie]

Yeah.

[Mike Guthrie]

You do anywhere from 70, 60 to 75,000 transactions a day. Typically Fridays and Saturdays are a little bit higher, but that was the volume on a daily basis across this plethora of ATMs, lots of systems, lots of.

[Preston Brown]

Processes, lots of like, you know, probably checks and balances and safety nets and.

[Samantha Guthrie]

You'Re speaking my language.

[Mike Guthrie]

She solved all those problems.

[Samantha Guthrie]

Well, so Mike was really the sales and technical side of what we did, but I was really all the processes. And really what I did is anytime there was a total pain in the ass that we bumped into or something didn't go right, Mike would fix it immediately, like, here's the thing to fix the problem. And I'd be like, where do we get to the root of the problem? What was the root? How did that start? And what can we do to fix that? And so every day it was just, you're learning one more thing or one more little trick. And I will tell you, I really think this is the biggest difference is people will look at things and be like, that's not really going to save that much time, or that little thing's not that important in the big scheme of things. But when you put them all together over a long period of time, you get a company with four employees that matches a company with almost 100 employees. And that's the difference.

[Preston Brown]

Well, and I agree with this, and I learned some of this from you, like sitting there and chit chatting. Whether we were sitting in a Tony Robbins platinum partnership room, whether we were like sitting in a, a beach somewhere in the world, just traveling on our own, like going and hanging out, the families, like you would always talk about that because significant emotional events in life create significant emotional events. And what do we talk about? We talk about what we're remoting about, we talk about what we're doing. And when you're working as hard as you guys did for so many years, like, that's what you shared. But it brings to me like a little lesson that I think the audience needs to know. Because entrepreneurs understand that business is, you know, at a certain level, it's not a spectator sport, it's a team sport. You have to build a team. And I think one of the things that people don't realize that, Samantha, you especially are a master of, is you can never delegate anything you haven't done. And a lot of entrepreneurs do not know what their teams are doing. They're trusting someone else to hire, they're trusting someone else to train, they're trusting someone else to do it because they haven't stepped into their business. We talk a little bit about working in your business versus working on your business versus mastering your business versus being a business owner. I mean, there's all this out there. You gotta stop being an operator and start being an owner. And it's a crock. Okay? Like, it's not operator, owner. Like, that's. It's not a linear path where it's like, hey, you're here. Then billionaire. Like, no. Like, it's not a light switch. Like, you have to go like, operator, slave to it, operator. Then eventually you develop out after a decade or so, some mastery in it, and you get mastery. Then you actually go to kind of a teacher stage, and you become an educator. Then you can become an owner. And at the stage of owner, you can exit if you choose. Can we dive into some of. What does it take? Because I know that was an area of stress for you, especially towards the end, even though I think in the beginning you kind of liked it. What does it take to master the art of learning and figuring things out so that you can prevent that? What was that keyword that is so popular? Fraud, waste, and abuse within your company.

[Mike Guthrie]

Right. We were just on a podcast earlier today where this gentleman was talking about how somebody was working the accounting, and he was dating the cfo and she was coding things one way, and he was writing checks the other way, and the checks weren't coming in. He got embezzled for millions and millions of dollars. Cause he didn't have those checks and balances in place. And for us in the business. And I'm gonna let you step in here a second and take over. But we loved it when it became Thanksgiving or Christmas and New Year's and an employee wanted the time off. Cause then we got to go work the desk. I was just gonna say their desk. And we're like, it's taking them so much time to do X, Y, and Z projects. If you did it this way, this way, and this way, it cuts the time in half. And every. Every time you cut something in half, that's more efficiency, more productivity that person can actually do. So we're always like, absolutely, you can have some time off. Because now it's our opportunity to figure out how to be more efficient. Go ahead.

[Samantha Guthrie]

Yeah, like, if someone took the day off, I'd be like, yeah, no problem. And it's like, I would be. You know, I'm working their desk. Like, if something came in that needed handling, maybe I'd be at their desk handling. But I just, oh, okay, I'll do their work so they don't come back to a ton of work to do. But then I'd be like, oh, my gosh. We told Them to do it this way. It's so inefficient. Or. Because things would change over time. And what was great to do six months ago, there would be some technology shift or some other report you could get or some better way of doing something. And if you don't go back and look at the system that started it or that you were following and say, is that the best system today? Then you don't end up doing it the best way. And we would just kind of go like, oh, wow, that sucks. Maybe we could do it a different way. And then we'd talk to that person when they came back. Hey, what do you think if we do this or that? We had very collaborative people that we worked with. So the door was always open to hear the input from the person doing the job, because they're the ones on the front line who would know sort of their own pain points.

[Preston Brown]

I love what you just expressed because there's a lesson in that. And the lesson is, like, the problems that you would have. And if somebody wants some time off to go spend time with family, that's a benefit to them. But it becomes a problem for you because then you do have to go work that desk. But that problem became your gift, and that problem became your guide. And that problem helped you actually develop technology. People misunderstand the word of technology. People think technology has to do with some software, some program, and it can mean that. But you actually developed a technology of processes because all technology means is an innovation beyond that of competitors. And like, so you gotta think about the first humans that had the wheel. They had a technology. The first humans that had fire had a technology beyond that of their competitors. And thus their youngsters survived a little longer than others, and so they thrived more. So that's how we're here, right? You guys created a technology by you going in as an owner, operator, on our way to mastery and caring about the problems. I just. I love that.

[Samantha Guthrie]

Yeah. The other thing beyond, because that was really more in house, is we looked at every vendor of ours as a partner in the company. So there would be something. I remember this happening. We had a whole software system. It cost us thousands of dollars a year to update it. And it's all these transactions. Where does all the money go? Where's all the revenue being split to? It was like just. It's all this labor to get it done every year. And I looked at one of our vendors and I was like. They were like the. They made all the transactions happen and gave us the raw data. The raw data is what we had, a system to pick apart and decide who got what money. I went to that vendor and I was like, if you have all the data, I'm using your data to create these reports for myself. If you created that, no one would ever leave your company because no one in the industry was doing it. They created it, and boom, they got tons of clients from doing it that way. And then I didn't have to keep my own system in house. I could use the system that they created.

[Mike Guthrie]

And part of the system that they created was what was called a payout module. So as soon as you set up that one ATM one time, you never had to touch the setup again because the payout was set up, where the money was supposed to go was set up, and how we got paid was set up. So as you touch one ATM out of 8,000, where other companies, somebody sets up this, somebody sets up that, somebody sets up this, and they separate the duties of power. The duties. And it's so inefficient. Too many people are touching the file, and things don't always get done correctly.

[Preston Brown]

Yeah, there's another lesson there. I mean, that's actually really beautiful. I want to pull that back and not necessarily reframe that, but mention it again, because what you said, you're obviously going to care about your own company, but in this situation, you weren't just caring about your own company. You are actually caring about another company that you just had a relationship with. Now, your profitability may or may not immediately have changed by you helping them, but you helped for the sake of helping, not for the sake of more money. You added value to a partner company who really you were a service provider to. So they're gonna pay you regardless of whether you made that call or not. You weren't paid for that call. And immediately when you did that, you grew their business by nature, it grew your business. It may not have been your initial expectation to do that, but there's a law of reciprocity in caring. And what you cared about in yours, you shared. And then that translated to not only them keeping more staff, the staff having better lives because they had less turnover. The owner of that company probably dynamically, profitably increasing his wealth, but it also made you more profitable and democratized a system that might have shifted the industry a little bit.

[Samantha Guthrie]

Oh, yeah. Now it's an industry standard. There's no processor who won't have that.

[Preston Brown]

Now, which is where it's going, the goal of any business. I'm so glad you took Us there is to become a world changer. And that's not one of those sexy changes unless you explain it. Once somebody understands. Oh, wow. Behind the scenes, the entire world uses ATMs like this. Because this lady on this podcast that I met named Samantha, married to the ugly guy Mike, I mean, he's okay, but she's not as cute as her is. She created a system and actually cared about some other mother that would have paid her anyway not to Mike drop. Sorry, Mike, you keep falling. No.

[Mike Guthrie]

And it created a ton of efficiencies across the whole industry. And when you look at how it affected our ability to pay everybody electronically as opposed to writing checks, companies our size typically would write 3,4000 checks a month. We were writing less than 10 because we had some governmental agencies or some casinos that wanted physical checks delivered to them. So we had a few clients that needed physical checks. But 99.8% of our clientele all got an ACH and they got paid on the fifth day of the month versus the 23rd of the month.

[Samantha Guthrie]

When I started the company when it was very small, it would take me three days to close out the end of the month. By the time we ended, it took me 10 minutes and I had 8,000 machines instead of 50.

[Preston Brown]

I love this because it's gold, but I want to express the gold that you just mentioned. And this is not your unique to the industry you were in. Okay? What you're talking about is you guys cared about your efficiency, and probably initially you might have cared about it for the sake of your time or the sake of your margin or the sake of whatever. And eventually when you had time and you had margin, you started caring about it for the sake of your partners. But this was not like some unicorn crazy out of this world idea. And I'm not trying to if it was, please correct me, but it sounds like it was common sense that any good operator within the field, had they taken a time to work on and in their business, would have been able to isolate out and democratize. Is that correct?

[Mike Guthrie]

Absolutely. There's so many wonderful entrepreneurs in the industry, but they were the ones behind the wheel driving the car to fill the machine, to fix the machine, to do all their things. And the processor guy had a limited number of staff, so everybody was working in their business, nobody who's working on their business. And every time we had a chance to actually step back and take a peek over the hood, if you will, from 30,000ft up and go, what is it that takes up all of our time and how do we make it better not just for us, but for everybody?

[Preston Brown]

I'm not constructively criticizing your competition. I'm actually constructively criticizing most business owners. In fact, I'm probably constructively criticizing a lot of people watching this, because there's two entrepreneurs in this story. If we're looking at typecasting it right, there's the ones that work on and in, because you have to work in if you're gonna delegate before you do, and you have to work on if you're gonna innovate and prove correct. But en masse. Most people don't do that. Like, in the vast majority of industries. I mean, 21 of them. So I know that, like, I have 21 companies now, and it's really not that difficult to innovate. Like, let's just say there's a reason my podcast went to number four in two months. When my competitors are doing what? Like, they're hundreds or thousands and they're great. Like, there's a bunch of guys with good content. And I think we have really good content. In fact, we have the best content and we're the best looking and I'm the tallest and I have the biggest.

[Samantha Guthrie]

Muscles, and you'll make millions by listening to me.

[Preston Brown]

But, like, outside of my humility as well. But, you know, when we're looking at this, working on and in could be that little juice and squeeze. Like, even if it takes you an extra hour a day, even if you have to, like, spend a little extra time. Like if you had to spend an extra hour a day for one year in your business, working on and in, not just one, not just the other, but both, you might be able to create the innovations that add the technologies that put you ahead of those, at least in your industry around you, which would solve some problems that would generate you a ding, ding profit.

[Mike Guthrie]

Absolutely. Here's something interesting. We have a friend that we literally just met a couple weeks ago on Saturday at this golf tournament called Waste Management Open. And he was so in into us. He's like, you got to come over to my house this evening. We're having blah, blah, blah, blah. We had a dinner with our family office folks later that evening. So we went over and hung out with him. We learned a little bit more about what he did. And he had his software guy there. And here's the interesting thing. His software guy wrote a program. So when his phone rang for a service call, if somebody couldn't pick it up, they immediately got that. Customer got a text, said, we will be calling you back. Within the next 15 minutes, that software literally makes him an extra 2 to 3 million million with an M per week. He just had a minor exit, like, less than a 50% sell off $300 million.

[Preston Brown]

Oh, my gosh. How's it gonna eat?

[Mike Guthrie]

Well, I know when somebody. When I was standing there, when I was standing there watching him play the golf game, whatever, on the tube, and somebody. Golden tea, I think golden tea. And somebody comes from the kitchen with a plate of dinner for him. I'm like, oh.

[Samantha Guthrie]

With a monogrammed chef of shirt.

[Mike Guthrie]

And I was just like.

[Samantha Guthrie]

And the guy was totally down to earth, completely.

[Mike Guthrie]

Super nice guy right here in the Valley. Great entrepreneur. But he's figured out efficiencies to turn his problems, which were people not getting into the phone calls in time, into true, true profit.

[Preston Brown]

Yeah, absolutely. And it's. The thing is. And it's fun that we're talking about this, but it's not unique. I mean, it's special.

[Mike Guthrie]

The problems aren't unique. It's not unique. Yeah, for sure.

[Preston Brown]

And nearly everyone we interview has similar stories, which is part of the greatness. Like, I don't want to, like, bore you guys with some of the same stories, but even though it's a different story each time, there's common themes. And the common themes are where the gold is. Now, one thing I do want to touch on with you guys, because you guys have a very unique story. I want to dive into the marriage piece. Like, how can you be married to your partner without, like, owning a shovel? Maybe some lye, you know, digging a hole?

[Samantha Guthrie]

That's our joke. We're still alive.

[Preston Brown]

Yeah. Well, I mean, I talk about it. I worked with my wife, and, like, I don't think I could have continued. Like. And that's not a knock on her. It's probably a knock on. But it is hard to work with your spouse.

[Mike Guthrie]

Or is it a knock on the business?

[Preston Brown]

All of them. All of them.

[Mike Guthrie]

Because one stress can create other stresses that probably weren't there.

[Preston Brown]

I guarantee you. I mean, even though all of this is gold, I wasn't calling you guys boring. You guys are far from boring. Trust me, people are gonna be entertained by this show. But I was just saying the unique stories all come to a common theme. But you guys have something that is very uncommon that I'd love to jump into, if you don't mind. I mean. Cause we can go in so many layers with you guys. I know y' all so well. Like, we can go into investing. We can go into this. But I Don't know. A lot of entrepreneurs that are married to their business partner that actually end wealthy and in love. End in love with a healthy marriage.

[Mike Guthrie]

Well, it's way cheaper to keep her.

[Preston Brown]

Hello.

[Samantha Guthrie]

Thank you.

[Preston Brown]

It's a financial decision. I made a financial decision decision. You know what? I have a builder rep that works for my home building company.

[Samantha Guthrie]

All the single ears.

[Preston Brown]

Yeah, my builder rep. He comes in and I'm going to imitate him. His name's John. He's hilarious. He's always like, yeah, boss. Like, that is how he talks.

[Samantha Guthrie]

Really.

[Preston Brown]

And one day he makes this joke. He's like, yeah, boss. I don't. And I don't know if he was joking because he used to be a little crazy. I think he's actually settled down some, but. But he's like, yo, boss, I don't.

[Mike Guthrie]

Know why people get married.

[Preston Brown]

Whores are way cheaper. And I was like, geez, bro. Like, what are you talking about? And I'd not thought about it. I'd never pictured it like that. I'd never looked at it like that. But it was funny. Cause when my wife found her dream home.

[Samantha Guthrie]

Oh, yeah.

[Preston Brown]

I actually thought, you know, what they might be. Now, I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna like. But it brought me to a theory. Like, you know, not a theory. It's a fact for me, but it might be a theory for everybody, El. Like, they may be cheaper, but there's also a statement of value, too. Like, there's also worth it. I don't want my wife cheap. I want my wife expensive. I don't want her wearing cheap. I want her wearing expensive. If she wants that, I want it for her. If she wants to drive a nice car instead of a hooptie, please, God bless, go buy a nice car. If she wants to wear nicer jewelry, I want to be able to afford that. Like, if you're looking for. It's cheaper to keep her. It's not permanent. No business or marriage. But sorry, funny interlude, funny story.

[Samantha Guthrie]

I know. I like this. Go on, Mike.

[Preston Brown]

Continue with this financial decision making.

[Samantha Guthrie]

Well, look, I would like. Seriously, it was not always great, right? You have to work yourself into great. Same thing with the company.

[Preston Brown]

Hold on. He's getting shorter.

[Samantha Guthrie]

You have to put in the time. You have to figure out the kinks. You have to figure out what's not working. You have to adjust the same way you do in business. It's kind of like, you know, how you do life is how you do business. How you do business is how you do life. Like they overflow. You are who you are. If you're being authentic, you're the same in either capacity. So it's like, you're okay. What was the problem? What was the pain point? How can we fix it? Not that I'm gonna do like an SOP at home, but, you know.

[Preston Brown]

But you know what? I almost want to ask you for that. And it could be a little clickbaity, but can you give us, like, if you could, and I'd love to hear from each of you, like, or maybe play off each other, but like, three to five little hacks for. Because there's a lot of entrepreneurs out there that are married to their partner.

[Samantha Guthrie]

Yeah.

[Preston Brown]

And what you guys prove is it's possible. So, I mean, are there three to five hacks in a relationship? On how do I keep my spouse engaged as a spouse? We might have had a bad day. Like, it could have been a bad day in the business, but I need to keep them as my spouse or how do I keep engaged in the business if we had a bad day in the marriage? Give us three to five marriage Entrepreneur connection hacks.

[Samantha Guthrie]

One of the things that comes to my mind immediately is that the reason why most people start a company is to create a lifestyle that they want or a life that they want. And then the company kind of gets in the way and it has its own needs. And you kind of forget that. Oh, yeah, I did it because I want to pick up the kids at 3 o' clock in the afternoon. Or I started the company so we could get away every weekend, which is, you know, as an entrepreneur, nuance. Like, good luck getting away for the weekend. Right. So you forget those things and you really need to remind each other, why did we do this? And there were some business decisions we made, like, said no to certain things, even though they might have been financially rewarding, only because it wouldn't have ended up creating the life that we wanted.

[Preston Brown]

I love that. So, like, hack one, remind each other why we started this. Like, so the way it was supposed to be in the beginning needs to be like an agreement. It's almost like a vow. It's almost like a vow in your marriage that's actually really beautiful.

[Samantha Guthrie]

Don't forget your original outcome.

[Preston Brown]

Yeah, well, I mean, the original outcome of the vows in the marriage, the priest is giving you vows to have it to hold till death do us part. By the way, since you're going into business, frequently remind each other why you started this thing so you don't get off track. They should actually say that to married couples during.

[Samantha Guthrie]

During their vows.

[Mike Guthrie]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Preston Brown]

Like, give me.

[Mike Guthrie]

That's actually your business vows, right?

[Preston Brown]

They are.

[Samantha Guthrie]

Well, and. Cause, you know, well, you're always wanting to put the customer first. Like, that's a number one for any business. But you're like, when that steps on what you're trying to be as a couple or as a family or taking care of kids or having the weekend, you know, to go do something with the family, like, you have to find a balance. I didn't mean to cut you off, though.

[Preston Brown]

That's gold, though. I mean, I'm gonna throw that in this too, because spouse always first. Like, the priority is us. I love it.

[Mike Guthrie]

Absolutely. And I'm gonna go back to when I was an X ray and MRI tech. I was always there to serve the patient. And then we started our business. We were there to serve the client. The client being the ATM owner that we sold the machine to and the card holder that put their card in the machine. So if I'm showing up every day for those people, I have to show up in my relationship the exact same way. So if you show up to serve your client, you better show up in your marriage to serve your spouse. And too many people, even in their business, they're there to take money from the business, and they're there to take from their spouse. And when you start taking as opposed to serving, you'll get served papers.

[Samantha Guthrie]

Wow.

[Preston Brown]

So the paradox of taking and serving. Dude, I could meditate on a hot tub in that.

[Mike Guthrie]

Do you have any whiskey left? Remember the last time I was at the hot tub? Come on.

[Preston Brown]

Actually, we have a new bar at the house. If you fly into EP to be live on the podcast, we do it at my house. This is also an advertisement for future guests that are badasses that would like to be on the show. I will pour you Louis XIII or Macallan 30 or beautiful, like Yamakaze, like Japanese whiskeys. Like, I have now, I was told the second most expensive bar in El Paso, Texas. And it is a cool hack because anybody I want on the podcast, like, in El Paso, I'm like, oh, yeah, why don't you come over? And. I mean, it's not a hard sell, right? Yeah, yeah, it's pretty cool.

[Samantha Guthrie]

Another thing that we didn't do originally that really helped was roles and responsibilities. So what. What are my roles and responsibilities in the company and what are Mike's? So when we were started, you know, we both did anything. There wasn't no specific, you know, you do this part I do that part. And once we started defining like, these are my duties and this is, I mean, I even learned this from you, Preston, is that when you write down your roles and response, like you're the, the owner of the company needs a job description, right? So these are my duties. And if something comes up and it's not on my sheet, whose sheet is it on? And if it's not on somebody else's, then who do we need to come in to do the thing? It doesn't mean I do the thing just because, like I'm the president or the vp. Like, it doesn't mean, because something needs to be done, I'm the one to do it. Maybe that's not even my skill set. So knowing what my duties are allows me to first of all stay in my own lane. And it also means if I'm looking at his list, I can be like, oh, here's a thing that Mike does that's like, that's what he does. And then when the other things come up, you'd be like, okay, neither one of us really do that. Who can we get to help us? And we started outsourcing. That was a whole nother, whole nother thing on business was outsourcing.

[Preston Brown]

I gotta tell you, like, I'm loving this. We have foursome, aren't. And if there's more, I want them. Because I do think this is gold. Because I honestly think this is just, just it's truth. I'm going to go over them again, Remind each other often why we started. That's hack. One, to being married and a business partner within the family business. All right? Two, spouse, always put first. Three, understand the paradox of serving versus taking. You know, and I want to dive into that, because I called it that. But like, there's three types of people. There's givers, there's matchers, and there's takers. So when you have a giver, I'll often ask crowds like, what do you want to be? Do you want to be a giver? Do you want to be a matcher? Do you want to be a taker? And everyone invariably raises their hands, I want to be a giver. Let me tell you about givers, guys. Not the right choice. Even though I love givers, givers all serve, serve, serve, serve, serve. And invariably, unintentionally, they run into a what a taker. And you know what takers do? Consume, consume, consume, consume, consume. And then eventually the giver gets exhausted, gives everything they are, feels taken advantage of, like they've poured Their cup till it's empty. They've run out of steam. They're dying on the vine. They feel not enough, and they're going to take that home. And, you know, no one ever says takers, which I find interesting, because I'm a total taker. Okay? I'm a total taker. Lots of people are like, oh, it's very transactional to say, match her, but I'm gonna make a recommendation. You want to actually be a taker? You want to be a taker. Now there's taking versus serving. But the difference is an entrepreneur is somebody that understands control. If you take responsibility, okay, and you have accountability, then you're taking the control of your time. And you're making a point of knowing when to give, when to match, when to take. You need to be in charge of your outcome. So I don't want you to be an empty asshole taker. I want you to be a mature taker, because what that'll teach you how to do is be a server. So I hope I articulated that in a way that it makes sense. Absolutely. But, like, and that's something that we've gone on trips and we've talked about and we've debriefed on the beaches of the world together. But, like, it's good to unpack here because, let's be real, if you're always giving, that's not servant leadership. Leaders have one thing in common.

[Samantha Guthrie]

All of them.

[Preston Brown]

They're dangerous. The most dangerous part of the spear is the tip. It's that shiny point on the front. That's the part where no blood, no guts, no glory. And the leader has to be willing to take life to protect everybody standing behind him or her holding that spear. So you have to take responsibility. So, last one, roles and ding, ding, ding. Responsibilities. So that's the fourth one. Now I'm kind of like, segueing back. Like, are there more? Cause if there are, this is, like, what married couples need. And there may not be. Like, these are fairly broad, but that's gold. Is anything else popping up for you? That's your secret?

[Mike Guthrie]

Yeah, there's one more that's popping up for me, and I almost lost it there while we were doing the recap. You have to know when to quit your day. You have to shut your day off. And we're no longer talking about the business of business. We're talking about the business of our. Our relationship, the business of our house, the business of our love, our caring, our nurturing of each other. At some point, you have. And we Used to set. At one point we were like, four o' clock, okay. Then it became five o' clock, and then we got out of control. So then we had to reset the bar. But it's one of those things you need to remind yourself that we're in love and we're in business, but we're not in the business of love or the love of business. We're in the business of love. Excuse me, I said that backwards.

[Preston Brown]

I love it.

[Mike Guthrie]

I mean, even. I mean, I.

[Preston Brown]

Business it.

[Mike Guthrie]

Even perfectionists like myself get it wrong.

[Samantha Guthrie]

You know, it's boundaries. That's what it came, you know, like, finally we were like, okay, we're only going to work from 7am to 7pm and that was like a decline of hours that we wouldn't have normally worked at, you know, so we're like 7am to 7pm and then that's it. And then we were like, okay, what if we stop work at 4 o' clock in the afternoon twice a week or, you know, these weekends off or having the date night? Like, those things are important to, like, re. Invigorate it. Never talk business in the bedroom. That was.

[Mike Guthrie]

That's a big one.

[Samantha Guthrie]

That's a big one. Like, we had a corner, like, you know, in our house, in the living room, there were two chairs that, you know, that faced each other. And it was like, if you want to talk business, we had to go to the business corner.

[Preston Brown]

Go sit in the corner.

[Samantha Guthrie]

Yeah, we would go sit.

[Preston Brown]

I'm mad at you again. Go sit in the corner.

[Mike Guthrie]

Don't put baby in the corner.

[Samantha Guthrie]

That was a different chair. But I mean, you know, instead of like, like, leave business out of the bedroom. That is not what. The bedroom is not intended for.

[Preston Brown]

That. That's a, you know, that's a different kind of business. What's that song? It's business. It's business time.

[Samantha Guthrie]

I don't know that one.

[Preston Brown]

I haven't heard that one. We're gonna have to, for the podcast team, edit that song in. Okay. But it's a great song. So the five rules of maintaining a healthy marriage while being in business partnership together remind each other why we started. One, two, spouse always first. Three, the paradox of taking versus serving. Four, know your roles and responsibilities at work. And five, know when to switch business time off. That's gold. I love what you're giving us here because I. I do think it'll help, and I do think it'll serve, and I do think it'll add value and probably in far more of an impactful way than just talking about money. But money's cool shit too. Can we talk about money a little bit? Like, I wanna like, play with you guys a little bit. What are your interests here? You wanna talk money? You wanna talk investing? You wan. You want to talk where we want to go? What are some things that you want to like, debrief, download? I mean, you all are phenomenal investors, y' all. We talk about, like economic updates all the time off camera. Let's play a little on camera to give some feedback with whatever y' all.

[Mike Guthrie]

Think, I'm gonna throw one out there. When you do what you love to do and serve the right clientele, you don't have to worry about money. Money finds you. It just shows up. And that's because you're there in an authentic way. And authenticity being the most highest form of vibration that we can have between highest frequency, highest frequency between two humans. When you show up authentically, people feel you and they want to come alongside you and go on that ride with you. And that happens in investing, it happens in life, it happens in vacation, it happens in everything you want to do. Authenticity is the number one key to being successful in anything you do.

[Preston Brown]

Authenticity is like, it's one of those words that I've meditated on a lot because it's maybe one of the most powerful and profound words. And I like to think that it's made up of different things. One of the things that authenticity kind of graduates out of is vulnerability. Absolutely. Like, you have to be real enough to talk about your journey as you guys did your story, like where you came from. But then outside of vulnerability, which is about you, you have to be very intentional in caring enough about them when you're authentic to be a good listener. So it's like. And what I call it is kind of like community. Like you have to be community oriented and vulnerable. And those are things that, that I think today people are very, very scared of.

[Mike Guthrie]

Absolutely. And it's funny you bring it up in that exact way. I literally was on a coaching call for 45 minutes before we came here with this lady out of South America. And I'm the only coach out of like six she spoke to that actually listened to her and didn't try and sell her what I had to say. I asked her, can you tell me a little bit about you? And she just went on for literally 15 minutes. She goes, no one else has asked me about me. Nobody else is cared to listen. And nobody asked follow up questions based on what I said. And she goes, I Would love to come alongside anything you're willing to do, just because. And I just met her for the first time face to face today.

[Preston Brown]

And that's something you're naturally very gifted at because you were one of the first people actually, you know, And I can share this, and I don't mind sharing this, like, through my corporate, we'll call it corporate asshole Journey. Like, I mean, the folks that are watching this, a lot of them have seen my stuff. They know my story. They know I lost dad. They know I became. Or they know my dad got cheated. You know, I became corporate. I lost dad many years later and kind of fell out of corporate and cutthroat and all that. And it was no longer about money. It was like, oh, my God, how do I get around my family and my people? But.

[Samantha Guthrie]

But.

[Preston Brown]

It was a very lonely place. I didn't have for many, many years, friends. And you and Sam, especially you. Cause you were the loud one. Sam was easier to bond with. But you're definitely the marketer in the family. But you're a marketer that doesn't just talk. And I think a lot of marketers could learn from you. A lot of salespeople could learn from you, because you talk about how can you listen? And you guys were actually my first real friends as I came out of that, like, corporate crazy hell. And it was a magic that, you know, I was fairly successful and becoming much, much more successful in those years as, like, my business was scaling and all of that was happening. You guys were already successful. We kind of didn't really want anything from each other financially. There was nothing. Not anything to sell. Not that we never did anything. We did, but it was more of, like, a sideline conversation that created it when we did do stuff. But you had this natural gift. And maybe we could go into that. Maybe we can go into some of the sales pieces, if you're okay with it. Mike, on that authenticity. Because you're uniquely qualified in just the natural way you approach it. Like, where did you learn that? Where did that come from? Because you were the first person that was a badass like me that I could respect. I felt rapport. But you were also safe because you didn't want anything outside of me.

[Mike Guthrie]

I think that's where most people screw up. They show. Yes, everybody has something to sell, whether it's them. They want people to know who they are. They want something from you. If you already have everything you need, you just show up and be yourself and go. The only thing. And people I had, people that didn't want to come to our house in Spokane. It's too big. It's too this. We'll never have you over to our house. It's too small. We're not enough. And I'm like the only requirement, the single only requirement to be my friend or my wife's friend is to be nice to us. I don't give a about your money. I don't give a about anything else. I don't need it. I have enough. And I'm generous. I love to share. Let's get together and we'll share things and do whatever. But I don't need anything. And I think people always show up with a need or a want or I have to sell this or I have a quota to me. And they're never caring about what you need. They're caring about what they need from you. And until we know what you need, I have nothing to give you. So I have to ask you, who are you? What is it you're looking for? What's your vision? Who do you want to become? Who are you? And then I get to know you. And then we can become friends around that. And if anything else happens or blossoms from it, that's what's beautiful.

[Preston Brown]

Well, and you know, it's fun. And what you're saying is so true. But you've also, and I think been in a situation for many years where even before you didn't need to make the next sale. Even before you didn't. I mean, you've always kind of had that, at least as long as I've known you. Like, did you always have it or was there a point where you learned it? You've always had that just knack where, bro, you've made lots of sales since I've known you. You're one of the top apartment syndicators that I know. You pull more millions of dollars out of me and my friends just cause we love you and trust you and we've made money. But than anyone I know. And we do it all the people that invest with you because we trust you, because you listen. When did that become a. A thing for you? Cause there was probably a point when you were young where it wasn't. And everyone needs to know that. Everyone needs to know what it is in them. Cause you're absolutely right on the need. You're absolutely right on that. But give us a little story if you would. Or if you can. Maybe you don't even remember.

[Samantha Guthrie]

Can I jump in?

[Preston Brown]

Absolutely.

[Samantha Guthrie]

I think I remember. And I don't know how long ago this was. But when you're young and you don't have much and you've been fired for no reason, that whole, whole thing, and you're trying to this company and you're trying to make things happen. We were like always in sales or fully commission. You know, it's important to get the sale. But I remember you walked in my office one day and you were like, you know, I'm just gonna concentrate on serving. Like, it wasn't about closing the sale. It wasn't about that next client. It wasn't about getting the deal. Even though that's fun. Like, as an entrepreneur, entrepreneur in sales, like, it's fun to get the deal. You weren't negating that, but you were like, I'm just going to like, just sit in the other person's shoes and figure out what they need and see where I can help them. Do you remember you kind of just shifted one day and you were like.

[Preston Brown]

Do you remember that day, Mike? Like, what, What. What was the epiphany?

[Samantha Guthrie]

What was the aha.

[Mike Guthrie]

What was the.

[Preston Brown]

Like the sock in the gut or nuts that, like, shifted you where you were? Like, like, I'm done.

[Mike Guthrie]

Well, I used to. When we started in the ATM business, it was similar to when I was a kid, and I used to go knock doors and sell candles, raffle tickets, or whatever the school fundraiser was. And it was always about me and achieving and selling the most. And I think in the ATM space, I took that on the exact same way. And I wasn't being successful. I wasn't closing the deal. I started to go in and approach, go and see what they might need, see if there was a need for our services and start asking the guy behind the counter how I could help him. And if I could help him. If I could bring you an atm, I would buy it and put it in your store. Would that help you? And all of a sudden, we found a way to figure out how to actually communicate with people about what they need. And it was. I don't remember the exact day, what the exact thing was that triggered that, but when we started figuring out how to serve as opposed to being served, it was a game changer for our business. And it. I mean, even during COVID Well, that.

[Preston Brown]

That might have been it. Like, maybe that was it. But like, if you, if you started in kind of the same way that the kids do it, the kids have an advantage that they're like a little kid walks up to my door, he's cute. If a grown ass man walks up to my door. Not cute anymore. My. Sorry if you started that way in the ATM world as well. Like, I can only imagine the first couple dozen appointments where you're like, dude, this isn't working. Like, and people do need money.

[Mike Guthrie]

They weren't even appointments. I was knocking on their doors. It wasn't like they were expecting me. And then I finally figured out, 99 times out of 100, the guy behind the counter pushing the buttons was the owner. And it took probably six months to figure that out. But once I knew, I knew. I actually changed my appraisal on because I knew who was. Who the guy was. They're always like, oh, we'll get back to you. The owner will call you, da, da, da. And I come back, I'm talking to the owner. Or you sit in your car and you call in. You pull in the lot. A couple days later, you call, hey, is the owner in? Yeah, he's in today. I go, okay, I'm gonna swing over on the atm. Guy was there a couple days ago. He goes, oh, no, he's leaving in a couple minutes. I go, okay, hang up when I walk in, and he's the same guy. I finally figured them out. But then I started coming in a completely different way. How can I provide more value to you? Can I rent the 2 square feet of space from you? Can I help you build your business? Can I help you put cash in your customer's hands so it can end up in your till?

[Samantha Guthrie]

Sometimes we were solving business problems for people that had nothing to do with our business. So it wasn't about, like, oh, they need. They might have needed an atmosphere. You were certainly talking to them about that. But during that conversation, they might have mentioned something else. And we'd be like, oh, we know a guy who has a vendor who does something like that. Let me see if I can connect you.

[Preston Brown]

And it's natural. Wherever you learned it, whenever you learned it, exactly what you taught is true. If you want to develop that rapport, you have to have that authenticity. You have to be willing to listen to what they need, and you have to be vulnerable. You have to be human. There needs to be an ability to relate on a human level. And there was another lesson that you told. Most of the time, the guy at the front door was the owner. But you know what? Every time, the guy at the front door was the most important guy you were going to meet when you walked in.

[Mike Guthrie]

Absolutely.

[Preston Brown]

And so, you know, I've seen you, like, the way you've walked in and dealt with My staff, you know, the owner is not the staff. Because you've known me. Right. And you just treat them with a level of dignity that they all love you. And so we've had their jobs.

[Samantha Guthrie]

Yeah, they know what it's like to.

[Mike Guthrie]

But here's the deal.

[Preston Brown]

That's the lesson. I mean, that's what I think some of these people need to hear is like, a sale is a solution, but it's not just a solution for the salesman. It's a solution for the salesman, and it's a solution for the other party. But they're not going to buy from you in a market where they have a thousand opportunities. Unless they love you or like you or in rapport with you.

[Mike Guthrie]

Absolutely.

[Preston Brown]

Or you're a kid.

[Mike Guthrie]

Right. And we've been out to dinner with a number of vendors back in the day in the ATM space, they were trying to court us to do this and this. And we'd be at a nice restaurant, five, $700 bottle of wine come. And the host would be like, pour the wine, help us out, do this, do that to the waiter. And I'm just like, that's a human. In my mind, I'm thinking, that's a human. And if that's the way you treat them, if I become your client, is that the way you're gonna treat me? I treat everybody. Like, you never know who that person's going to be in a week, a month, a year, or 10 years from now. I could end up working for them, and I want them to remember I was kind, courteous, and accepting of who they are, where they are.

[Preston Brown]

Yeah.

[Mike Guthrie]

At the. At the expropriate time.

[Samantha Guthrie]

And it doesn't matter where you are on the tree of life, like, there's always someone with less. There's always someone with more. It's like, why not respect where everybody's at? They're all working their own angle. They're all using their talents to the best that they know how. It doesn't matter what job anyone's doing. I. I believe that most people are doing the best that they can. So honor everyone no matter where they're at. Now, if they're a jerk, it doesn't matter where they're at on the scale anyway. Like, they're a jerk, you know? But if someone's doing their best, then, like, honor them for their attempt at everything that they do and encourage that.

[Preston Brown]

I love it.

[Samantha Guthrie]

I was a diamond in the rough. I mean, you know, Right. So, like, I just had to polish.

[Preston Brown]

Her a little bit.

[Samantha Guthrie]

Just polish that.

[Preston Brown]

Wow. You know, what do they say in Spanish? Sasculero.

[Mike Guthrie]

I'm not even sure what that means. I thought it was como chingus.

[Preston Brown]

I don't know what that means, but.

[Samantha Guthrie]

Oh, my gosh. Right? We all started somewhere. We all started at nothing. Well, most of us.

[Mike Guthrie]

Well, we weren't like you, Preston. We didn't start at the top.

[Samantha Guthrie]

Yeah.

[Preston Brown]

Oh, wow.

[Samantha Guthrie]

Yeah, right?

[Preston Brown]

Yeah, I was at the top of that trailer park.

[Samantha Guthrie]

But look at it this way. How many entrepreneurs, the people that you've already had on your podcast, how many of them were like, self made, or they got there kind of by accident, or there was just a. A point where they felt compelled to do something and they started it.

[Preston Brown]

You didn't know that's how the story worked on this show. Like, everybody starts rich, stays rich, and rich. It's a really good story, guys. Make sure you watch that one. You'll come back for more.

[Samantha Guthrie]

Right?

[Preston Brown]

Like, you know what's not gonna be palatable? The lucky sperm club.

[Samantha Guthrie]

The lscs, you know, the hockey stick. Everyone thinks entrepreneurial journey is that straight up. I'm like, it's a play. That spaghetti.

[Preston Brown]

I opened a business and Rich, it's.

[Samantha Guthrie]

Like a crazy, you know, plate of spaghetti. And, you know, eventually, hopefully, you end up higher than where you started. But it's a crazy journey for people that really have a lot of gumption and want to stay in it because it's way easier to quit.

[Preston Brown]

I love it when people are like, oh, you got successful. You're lucky. And I'm like, oh. And then I'm like, let me look at that gray hair on my elbow again. Like, where'd that stress come from? I'm 42 and I have more gray hair than most 60 year olds. You call that luck?

[Mike Guthrie]

I don't have any hair on my arms. Yeah, I can't see my gray hair. It's up here.

[Preston Brown]

You know, Mike, like, I. I have. I. I quit shaving my arms, but it looks good. So, you know, I. I do want to go into another thing with you. Go for it. Get it.

[Mike Guthrie]

Let's go. Is anything off limits? Maybe not, no.

[Preston Brown]

I mean, are we still talking about shaving? But so.

[Mike Guthrie]

Well.

[Preston Brown]

So no. You know, one thing, you guys have done phenomenally well, and you've had ups and you've had downs, but we've known each other through each other's ups and downs. We've had ups and downs recently, but you guys consistently, regardless of stage of life or stage of business, have invested, whether it was investing in the business at Appropriate times and growing it. Or once the business was cash flowing. Well, like, you turned your business from just a cash flow machine into an asset. We can dive into that a little bit. But where I really want to take people is investing after the business has started cash flowing. Well, like, you know, don't act too early. Like, don't take money out of your business when you need it and go buy an extra property or buy an extra or whatever. But like, as you guys have dealt with new challenges that we don't have to go into here, and that could be a whole nother episode because that'll be a good one potentially to hit one day. But, like, you haven't stressed in the way that a lot of people stress with big challenges because of those investments. Can we dive into some of the philosophies on investing? Why investing? Because I love, like, and you know, I'll give a little pre frame for the episode I'm inviting you back for. But they had a con artist cheat him on a big exit, cost them millions of dollars, and this is something that would have ripped most people's lives apart. But they've invested so well that they've handled it with grace, they've handled it with dignity. Like, there hasn't been cussing, there hasn't been sputtering. I had a similar situation a few years ago, and I can't say that for myself. There was a lot of cussing, probably more sputtering, a good amount of scotch, and, you know, I got through it. But, like, you guys didn't go through, like, the same pain because of the way, you know, and, you know, in this, you're mentors of mine. And so I would like for you to express some of the investing philosophies thoughts and maybe talk about some of the things you are doing now as investors as we kind of close this out over the next 10:15. Are you guys okay with that?

[Samantha Guthrie]

Yeah, no, that's great. It started with us paying a lot in taxes. And what I've realized, I was even just talking to somebody last night who's an entrepreneur. You get so busy doing what you're doing, you're like, I'm just, what do I have to do today? What do I have to do? You're not thinking about taxes or saving money. And I was actually listening to a Daymond John podcast, and he was like, the really wealthy people don't try to find a new company and start a new thing. They figure out ways to save in taxes. And I was like, that's what I'm talking about I didn't want someone just to be checking boxes and doing my accounting. I wanted a tax strategist. So you marry that idea with real estate investing, which also can produce depreciation, which is a whole nother tax play. And I'll let Mike kind of take it from there. But it was like, keep driving for more ways of, like, what else can I do with the money? And, you know, we're of the era, really, that our parents taught, which is what they taught us, you know, go to school, get a job, buy a house, pay it off. That's like the great American dream.

[Preston Brown]

That's the Dave Ramsey special.

[Samantha Guthrie]

That's what we were all taught. And it's like, kind of. Because if your house, you don't know anything on it, you actually have dead money. Like, it could be working for you. In fact, that's a whole side story that we ended up closing our house for cash with some of the money that we got from our exit, and then immediately turned around and took out a mortgage and invested that money. And the investment's making us more than the interest that we're paying. And so every month, we're making money by owning our house. And I never would have put that together. And I'm like, I even know what I'm talking about. And, like, and now the interest is 100% deductible as it, as opposed to, like a mortgage. And because it's really an investment, we took the money and invested it. And I'm like, I'm getting paid to live in my million dollar, multimillion dollar house. And like, I never would have put that together. And it's like, my job now is, like, teaching people that. It's like, where is it for the middle market? Like, the poor people kind of not the people with less, are being taught, save your money, be careful, have a budget. And the people with way more are being taught, like, you know, buy a jet and, you know, do all these things, like what happens to the rest of us in the middle, that you're doing damn good, but you just don't know what to do with it. And instead, there's just no one teaching you those steps along the way until you get way high on the scale. Well, how did any of those people.

[Preston Brown]

Figure it out until now with problems to profit, where we are actually teaching you those things on this show? Sorry. I love it. That was the perfect monologue. Mike, Mike, take it from here. And I love what you're saying before Mike jumps, because everybody was kind of sold for the last 30, 40 years on kind of the Dave Ramsey special. They're like, oh, yeah, no, Pay off. Save your money. Pay off debt. Save your money. Pay off debt. And that doesn't make sense in an arbitrage economy where we removed gold from the dollar, where the dollar is actually losing value every year. So as a deflationary asset, that was not true back in the 1970s. It's like the world changed, but Dave Ramsey didn't. But he has a good show and he's very popular. And I like Dave Ramsey. I don't think he's a bad guy, But I just don't see the fundamental economic sense. It's not right for everybody.

[Samantha Guthrie]

It's not right for everybody. And there's a whole sector, a billionaire.

[Preston Brown]

Who'S like, so much cash, you don't need it.

[Samantha Guthrie]

There's also people it's good for. But, you know, really having your money work for you, investing it, having your money go out. We always say, send it out and have it come back with friends.

[Preston Brown]

Right?

[Samantha Guthrie]

So that's really the whole.

[Mike Guthrie]

So for us, I'm gonna back up just a little bit. She got way out over my skis for my liking. I just wanted to start it. But she just saw some really good thunder that we shared with people around our church table last night. We were with our pastors, and I explained what she just explained. And everybody's like, you're gonna have to come back and share that again. Because that just went right over it. And then the pastor Gary is like. Like, you're way smarter than I thought. And I go, well, thank you. I appreciate that. That's why you get checks from me and I don't get checks from you. But I didn't say it that way. But we had a good time last night. But in our business, as we started to make money, we both had four. We started a 401k and we both maxed them out every year, max company matching until it started to amass a massive amount of money. And that took 20 some odd years to get there. And that's when we knew we had enough money saved that we could live off of X number of dollars per year for the next 20 years. I'm 57. If I lived to be 77, God forbid, if I lived to be 77, I could have outlived the money that we had saved. So we started investing. We started at that point looking to sell the company. And we were like, okay, if we can sell it for this much money, we could make this much more impact. And Samantha came to me after an event. She's like, we're selling the company. And I go, as long as we get the right amount of money. She goes, whatever we get will be the right amount. But I'm gonna work my ass off to make sure it's the right amount. And we went to the broker guy and we said, we want this number. And he's like, never gonna happen. Way too high. Good luck. Good luck. Negotiations went back and forth, back and forth. We actually got a number north of where he thought. The number he thought we were going to get is what we got on our first payment. So we got more on our first. We got more than what he thought on our first payment, which was. Was great. We are still owed a good chunk of money, like five and a half million bucks. We have a judgment and we're just a little bit.

[Samantha Guthrie]

Right.

[Preston Brown]

Just a little bit of money.

[Samantha Guthrie]

I'm not saying it didn't hurt. Not saying that.

[Mike Guthrie]

It's a stinger. And we were supposed to get a portion of that $1.6 million this past May to close on our house. We didn't get it. We borrowed some money from a friend, family member, actually, her dad, and closed on the house, borrowed back against it, like she was saying. And you heard that part. So I'm not going to go into it, man.

[Preston Brown]

I'm going to do it in this episode. I love it.

[Mike Guthrie]

But what we've been doing over the last four years is investing in apartment buildings and getting K1s. I was taken off the ATM payroll so I could become what's called a real estate professional. That's a whole other podcast where all my K1 losses would offset Samantha's active.

[Samantha Guthrie]

Income from the ATM.

[Mike Guthrie]

So we didn't. We literally, legally did not pay federal income tax for the last four years in a row.

[Preston Brown]

And let's explain that K1 losses don't actually mean losses. Correct.

[Mike Guthrie]

It's just depreciation on a building.

[Preston Brown]

It's IRS tax code losses, not real cash flow or income loss.

[Samantha Guthrie]

Correct.

[Mike Guthrie]

It's not a true loss. It's a. A paper loss that may or may never come to fruition, and it probably won't.

[Preston Brown]

Well, and the way that these losses work, guys, is it's a function of depreciation and tax code, and it's a function of what's called accelerated depreciation, which may and almost certainly will be coming back in full this year. A few years ago, you could get 100% bonus depreciation. So you take what A building that's like say you have a $20 million apartment building, you could 100% depreciate a significant percentage of that building, like call it 12, $15 million of it. Right.

[Mike Guthrie]

You could well almost 37 to 40% of it. Because pretty much whatever your equity going in is, your depreciable coming out is approximately. Sometimes it's more, sometimes it's less, but it's in that same ballpark based on the equity you put in.

[Preston Brown]

But if you're putting 30% or 40% down on the project.

[Mike Guthrie]

Right.

[Preston Brown]

And then you're able to effectively depreciate the entire amount, you put down 100%. So if you made $3 million in your business for a round arbitrary number and you put 3 million down on a building.

[Mike Guthrie]

Yep.

[Preston Brown]

Then, and you got 100% bonus depreciation.

[Mike Guthrie]

Correct.

[Preston Brown]

Then your income goes down only tax wise by $3 million.

[Mike Guthrie]

Correct.

[Preston Brown]

And now with zero income, you pay zero taxes.

[Mike Guthrie]

That is correct.

[Preston Brown]

And I'm just working it through for the camera and the video because I want people to understand this and that is the tax code. And by the way, for all of my family and friends listening on this show, I want you to understand there is a fact. Do you know who writes the tax code? It is these amazing people called the donors. Okay. Politicians would not ever get money from transactional corporations, business people who would never give money to someone that wasn't going to give them something in return unless they were going to get something in return. Like I could go give money to a charity and rescue children from trafficking. Or I can go give money to some douchebag politician. At least I can feel good about giving money to rescue the child. Why do you think so many businesses and business people choose to give money to politicians? It's because they get something in return. Okay? They're not attracted to a bunch of 60, 70 and 80 year old assholes who tend to do dumb around the world, cause wars, inflation, government spending and stupidity. They're not attracted to someone that's like, hey, I want my little boy to change his gender and beat your daughter in a sport. Like they're not doing that. That's not the goal. Like that's not what people are investing in. What people are investing in is the politician turning around and saying let's put some in the tax code since you're rich, that'll make your income go away so that you don't have to pay taxes, rich guy, so that only your employees do. So if you're an employee watching this get into business and stop voting for whoever that idiot is that's doing that to you.

[Mike Guthrie]

So we've invested in a number of apartments over the last four or five years and we took a chunk of our money and we put it into some other cash flowing assets like, like debt funds and stuff of that nature. And we've been doing some hard money lending here locally for cash flow. So we, our apartments aren't necessarily cash flowing at this point, but they will soon. And our debt funds are actually paying us cash.

[Samantha Guthrie]

So we can actually buy triple net as well.

[Mike Guthrie]

And we bought some triple net.

[Samantha Guthrie]

This goes back to exactly what I was saying. Like who taught, nobody taught us that along the way. Like we ended up coming into money and going what can we do? And. And finding people who knew more about it than we did. But if I had known that 10 or 15 years ago, I would have been doing it starting then. It's like it kind of came to us later because that's when we got the education on it.

[Preston Brown]

Love it. And now you've actually done syndications. You're doing syndications, you do fundraising for deals. You guys are, what you're talking about right now is asset allocation. So you don't have one type asset because sometimes apartments are up, we've made cash flow, sometimes apartment are down. We're still making like minor losing a little bit, but it's less than what we've made in the past. And then when rates change, we'll make a lot more. Right. But like that's on multifamily. The triple net still doing fine. The hard money is still doing great. Like if you have multiple assets, one goes down, others are up. Can we talk a little bit about. And I want to close out in like two or three minutes just because I know I got to honor your time. I want to talk a little bit about syndications and like how can you find people that will help you invest in something that you don't understand? How can you find them and know to trust them? Because I trust you. I invest with you. And a lot of people might want to ask you guys questions as a result of this show. But even if they can't get to you because you guys are barely sought after, how do they find and ask someone the right questions to know that they're trustworthy?

[Mike Guthrie]

It's just like getting married. You have to have a little, you have to date first. You have to get to know people, they have to get to know you. And it's time, time in the seat, time in business. And look at what they've done with their past. Are they up, down, where are they on the economic cycle of their life? What have they done? Who's trusted them? Who's backed them? Do they have a track record of any sort? So you want to ask these sort of questions, and you want to know what their net worth and liqu. If something's going south, is that sponsor or that person raising money willing to take bullets for that asset to protect the greater good? You better be working with people that you know and trust that are going to do that for you so you don't have to come in later and bail it out.

[Preston Brown]

So I heard a lot of things there. I want to kind of break it down in some bullet points for the viewers. One, are they putting equity in the deal? Absolutely. Is it all your money or are they contributing too? So if they lose, if you lose, they lose too. Okay, so two, I heard you want to know them and their track record. Okay, so it's not just a flashy salesman or saleswoman. It's somebody that you're able to get close to, get proximity to. You have access to them. You know their track record. You've seen past deals. You can meet other investors. Like, there's testimonials you can reach. So there's some level of vetting there.

[Mike Guthrie]

Yes.

[Preston Brown]

Okay. God. There was a third one that I had in my head. What was the third one that you kind of mentioned there?

[Samantha Guthrie]

You want the sponsor, the person to take a bullet for the deal business.

[Preston Brown]

To take a bullet. Like, you have to know that. Thank you. If there is a deal that goes south, and we've had many deals go well, but we have had one or two go south. And I've never done a capital call with you guys. I've never had to crank in money.

[Samantha Guthrie]

I'm glad we're in this meeting. No, that's why we're here today, now.

[Mike Guthrie]

Good. Yes.

[Samantha Guthrie]

And look, real estate is cyclical, so sometimes you can get into stuff and you really just have to ride it out. Like. Like it always goes up, but it goes up over time. So if there's a dip in the market, which there really is right now because of interest rates, it's slow moving, but it's starting to come back. You have to wait it out, and you have to be with partners that are willing to do that, that are.

[Preston Brown]

Also financially capable of doing that and.

[Samantha Guthrie]

That have money in the deal.

[Mike Guthrie]

And if they haven't done these deals before, people. And it's sort of similar to your question you look at, we've had 28 and a half years of business experience in operating a very successful cash business. And our business ran through the Federal Reserve. Every single. Every transaction goes through the Federal Reserve. Everything was tracked, everything was monitored. So people actually trust us because they felt like we were more fiduciary responsible with other people's millions and millions of dollars on a monthly basis.

[Samantha Guthrie]

Well, and somebody's $40 was just as important to me as their, you know, $10,000.

[Preston Brown]

Guys, I love this. And there's so much here. Like, we have added value bomb after value. I mean, we have hit investing, We've hit marriage and business. We've heard your story. Like, I mean, you guys have shared so transparently. And just because I've known you for years, we've been on the beaches of the world together. Like, it's been fun. We've had jokes, we've had laughs. This is so beautiful. And I know people are gonna want to know more. They're gonna want to ask questions. Cause you guys, like, you're larger than life, but you're down to earth. Like, where can people get ahold of you? How can they reach out? How can they ask a question? How can they learn something new from you?

[Samantha Guthrie]

I'm on Instagram. SamanthaGuthrie. I am. And I'm also SamanthaGuthrie.net and then our.

[Mike Guthrie]

Real estate company is PacificCapitalLLC.com and you can reach me at Mike GuthrieInvestor. That's M I k E G U T H R I e investor on Instagram. And if you just want to text me, you can call me or text me on my cell phone at 509-270-6701. And I challenge you to do that because I've been on, like 100 podcasts. I always give out my cell phone. Nobody ever texts or calls. But I challenge you. If you're looking for more information, I'm here to help. I'm here to serve. Reach out.

[Preston Brown]

And we will put the Instagrams and the phone number in the show notes to give everyone access. Guys, thank you again for tuning in to Problems to profit. We have downloaded a ton of info. You might have to watch this one two or three times and take notes, but there was a lot of gems there. And what's beautiful is Mike, I think, might be our first person to actually give out his personal cell number on the show. So I hope you blow his ass up. I would love to see him have to change numbers. This is gonna be fun. Y' all have an amazing day on purpose. We will see you next time.

[Mike Guthrie]

Let's go.

[Samantha Guthrie]

Bye.