← School of Hard Knocks Podcast
School of Hard Knocks Podcast
Brent Franklin | Broke at 26, Sued, And Became a Multi-Millionaire. How To Turn Rock Bottom Into Power And Empires
01:51:47
Brant is a ninth-grade dropout who went from sleeping in a garage and mowing lawns for $23 an hour to risking it all on oil wells, losing millions, getting sued, and still refusing to quit. That same obsession and grit turned his failures into fuel, a...
Loading summary
Transcript134 lines
- [00:00]
James
What is the most amount of money you made in a year?
- [00:03]
Brent Franklin
Tens of millions, bro. A lot of people are going to hate us for this podcast because we're going to explain exactly how oil and gas has always been done. Anything that somebody wants to learn about today, somebody has been there, they have done that and they have wrote about it.
- [00:15]
Josh
You went from the highest you've ever been. You're 26 years old, you're a multi millionaire and you make the investment, you're waiting for the return and it just never comes when you're at that lowest point. Did you ever think about quitting?
- [00:26]
Brent Franklin
Man, as much as I want to sit here and just tell you, needless.
- [00:29]
James
To say I'm hearing is that we need to start buying some oil wells with you, brother.
- [00:33]
Brent Franklin
Are you credited?
- [00:36]
Jack
I like how you break it down for like the average person and get them excited to get into the oil and gas space.
- [00:41]
Brent Franklin
There's nobody really doing what we're doing. Nobody knows who we are. They don't know we got a great rig. They don't know we got great crews. We got a market, bro. If you want to make millions, go to sales. If you want to be wealthy and make billions, be a good in one.
- [00:53]
James
Sentence, your last message to the younger generation.
- [00:56]
Brent Franklin
Let me take a sip of water on this one.
- [01:02]
James
What's going on, everyone? And welcome back to the School of Hard Knocks podcast. I'm James and I'm here with Jack and Josh and we have a crazy episode on the way. There's one industry that's minted more billionaires quietly than any other industry in today's world, including real estate, tech, crypto, and that is the oil and gas business. So we flew out to Houston, Texas to meet with the oil mogul himself, somebody who's been drilling oil throughout the entire nation for the last decade, making tens, hundreds of millions of dollars in the oil and gas business. We're out here with Brent Franklin. Brent, it's great to be here with you today.
- [01:38]
Brent Franklin
Absolutely, man. Thank you so much.
- [01:40]
James
So I was out on your oil rigs earlier. Earlier or your drilling rigs earlier, as you corrected me. And I was talking about how, you know, look, oil and gas is a billion dollar industry. And you corrected me and said it's.
- [01:51]
Brent Franklin
A trillion dollar industry.
- [01:52]
James
It's a trillion dollar industry. And most people have no idea how money's even made in this business, how to get into this. So we're going to be breaking all that down today so that way they can learn how to get their piece of the pie. In this industry. Before we do that, I want to start off by asking, how in the world did you end up in this trillion dollar industry? What was that turning point? Getting into the oil and gas business and taking it to where you've taken it to today.
- [02:15]
Brent Franklin
Yeah, I appreciate that. So I always told people, hey, man, I don't really know how I got here, but in reality, I know exactly how I got here. I busted my ass and I went down rabbit holes of opportunities, as any entrepreneur would do. You know, it started out, you know, early on. I left school, you know, finished ninth grade. Somehow, you know, worked every job, got every job I ever applied for. You know, I worked at Buffalo Wild Wings. I worked at Wings and more. I loved working at Olive Garden because I just love the interaction with people. And for me, it was just like, go in there and crush it. It was never about money, but I was always looking for opportunities. And I always felt like I scaled really quickly at what I was doing. I ended up getting into the Navy. Somehow they gave me a badge and made me a master at arms. After getting out of the Navy, you know, it was a quick journey. I was living in my friends, literally my friend's garage, and I got in a lot of trouble because I cut a hole in the side of their house and put a window unit in there because it was hot, because they didn't have anywhere else for us to stay. And I got a call one day and my friend's like, hey, man, I got your job out in West Texas on a drilling rig. You're going to be a Derek Can. And I was like, who the hell's Derek? You know, he's like, and obviously we know what a Derek is, right? It's the big. The big tower on side of a drilling rig. But I never really, you know, had the mindset of where I was going to go. You know, everybody has dreams as, you know, young entrepreneurs. Like, what's your idea? Hey, man, I want to get rich. You know, I want to be a millionaire. And, you know, I think that a lot of people, they focus on that, and money is the most important aspect of their life. And when they don't have it, and then once you get it, you start recognizing other pieces of your life. So it kind of just transitioned from, you know, young high school dropout to, you know, chasing my tail and trying to just figure out where I belong. And nothing ever felt like, hey, I want to do this forever. So whenever I got that job in oil and gas and I went out to West Texas I mean, I had never seen a rig, I was getting yelled at all the time. Obviously you saw how it is. We treat our, you know, employees and partners with a little bit more respect than they treated me. But you know, it was a huge learning curve for me and I was like, man, as soon as I got that oil field check, you know, it's dirty hands, clean money. I mean, we still got, you know, terrible hands. And I'm the business owner. You got some dirty hands today too. As soon as I, you know, got out there to the rig and started recognizing how I was doing. I think that so many people start out in a new career and they really don't know what they're doing when they get there. They're kind of just doing what they're told and you're not really thinking forward because you're not educated. Right. It's like if I, you know, jumped into social media marketing and I didn't know anything about it, I really wouldn't know where to start. The oil business was the same way. So I started out as a roughneck in Carlsbad, New Mexico working on a super single rig. And as soon as I got that check.
- [04:54]
James
How much money were you making?
- [04:56]
Brent Franklin
Man, I was making $23 an hour and we were getting a well bonus of like 3 to 500 bucks, you know, so this is, you know, 2011 error. It, it seemed like great, you know, because I had done little side jobs where I'm making 100, 150 a day. And I said, you know, I'm giving up 12 hours and walking out with you know, like almost 500 bucks. You know, between the bonuses and the wells. And I was, I was sold. I was like, I don't give a how hard this is. I'm gonna do whatever it takes. I'm gonna be oil filled trash forever. So that, that lasted for about six months and I got burned out, ended up getting a fight with my driller, literally fist fight, walked off location that just got treated real bad. You know, that real old school oil field, you know, people yelling, cussing, calling you names. That real negative environment that, you know, I don't think a lot of people see, they, maybe they have that stereotype of view on it. But you know, I realized, I said, you know what, there's gotta be something better. Not to mention, man, you know, a younger guy in good shape, much better shape than I was today and man, it took a toll on my body. I mean, you're working 12, 14, 16 hour days and the hot sun and you're just busting your ass seven days a week. Seven days and then another seven days. I mean, the body just literally can't take that type of beating. It takes a special breed to be a rough neck in oil and gas. And I don't think that a lot of people, you know, even think about that whenever they go to, you know, the gas pump. Right. We talked about today, like, hey, how'd you make your money today in oil and gas? How'd you get rich? Well, you know, you've pumped gas, right? Yeah. That's a product that has a journey just like we do. And we're just at the very early stage of that journey.
- [06:30]
James
But it's not just pumping gas, though. And we were talking about why oil is such, like, a valuable commodity and an asset for people to have. Can you explain that real quick to people, just to kind of put it in perspective for them as to why this is such a big industry in today's world?
- [06:44]
Brent Franklin
Yeah, so that's a great question. So why oil and gas is such a big, you know, commodity and such a big play in today's world is because oil, we look at things so much differently than what they actually are due to social media and due to the way that, you know, the world has made people perceive things. You see people laying in the streets right now, you know, with yellow hair and fingernail polishing. Stop oil and stopping traffic. Like, I don't think that existed back when oil, you know, was discovered. Oil and gas is an absolute privilege. It's a man. It's an absolute mandatory commodity that will be needed for the end of time. Everything you see every single day in this world, whether it be your car, your gas, the paint and your clothes, the. The makeup that women wear, the plastics, these cameras, these mic, everything that's out here comes from a byproduct of oil and gas. I don't think that people know that. If there was a little sticker that said made from oil, Made from oil, Made from oil. I mean, there'd be stickers everywhere. But people just don't know that. They just know the big bad wolf side of it. And that's what people are trying to push that agenda. And I really don't understand why other than to hurt what we have going on in our country. But oil and gas is a commodity that it's been around. You know, its discovery and its uses have been absolutely incredible. And the world is abundant with oil and gas. The extraction is what people are trying to perfect. We know where the oil and Gas is today. It's not like the Beverly Hillbilly days where we go out there and, you know, hey, this looks like a good spot. We have great technology today. And I think that if people spent more time learning about the industry, which I'm so glad that people could tune in, and I'm so glad that, you know, our generation, the younger generation, is so intrigued by it. I think that, you know, this is going to be a huge educational piece that will help people. I'm sure that you've seen the. The series Landman that came out. Everybody started seeing that. They're calling me. They're like, oh, my God, bro, like you're a landman. I was just like, hold on a second. You know, like, we do operate like that. I think that where we're at today with the oil and gas industry is there's massive opportunities. We've got to adjust the way that our youth and the younger generation looks at it. Every single person that I talk to that's selling us an oil field, they say the same thing, hey, look, you know, I'm 80 years old. I've done this my whole life. My family has everything they can imagine. My son's a sports player. You know, we have a ton of real estate. These kids are set for life. That's true generational wealth. When your kids don't have to worry about going out and actually learning how to make a living, it's not necessarily good. But somebody planted seeds to those trees, and those guys are going to have shade, you know, for the rest of their life. And oil is a true commodity and a true opportunity for you to do that. But it's a dying industry. People today are lazy. They. They want to get out there. No do you know, all due respect, not everybody's gonna be a super famous TikTok influencer, but they want to be. Everybody's looking for that easy way to go in there. The cryptos they're looking for how to wholesale a piece of real estate. We're looking to get rich quick, but we're willing to bust our ass and do the sales right. That's how I got into, you know, to really having the money to invest was being able to, you know, find a distressed asset, real estate, get it under contract and flip it to a buyer without having to pay for it. And I said, this is crazy. And in reality, I just figured out, like, all you have to do to make money in today's industry is solve problems. And the oil and gas industry is loaded with problems. We have problems that people just can't even think because it's been done the same way for so long.
- [10:29]
Josh
Yeah, I absolutely love what you said. Everyone just wants to make $1,000 from their iPhone. And I want you to take us back. You're making more money than you've ever made. You're working harder than you've ever worked on the oil rig. But you're like, this isn't sustainable. I can't do this for the rest of my life. So what were those next steps that ultimately led to what you're doing today?
- [10:47]
Brent Franklin
You know, I think there comes a point in time in your life where you not. You're not sure of what you want to do next. You're just. You have to have that reasoning with yourself to quit doing the things that you hate. And as much as I love the idea of what I was doing, I hated the people that I was around and, you know, bad people. And a good opportunity can create a bad opportunity for you. So I just wanted to get away from the negativity. I've never liked being around negative people. So I came home, I was dating this girl, and I moved into my friend's apartment. You know, I had saved up a little bit of cash. She was a trust fund baby. So she was making, you know, 10, 12 grand a month, which I thought was, you know, the lifelong dream. I said, then why couldn't I had that luck, you know? But I got back and I said, you know what, Let me just do something that provides hard work. And so I'd already. I'd always been a worker. So I said, you know what? I'm gonna start a landscape business. Like, I. I can go mow a yard for 35 to 50 bucks. And if I mow, you know, five or six of these in a day, you know, I can make a couple hundred dollars a day, like, and I'm already used to hard work and being out the sun, you know, mowing grass ain't, you know. So I decided to start a landscape company not knowing anything about landscaping. And I was trying to, like, knock on doors. I would go look at grass, I'd knock on the door, nobody'd answer. I'd knock on the door and. And, you know, I'd have this 70 year old man come to the door and say, you know, hey, what do you want? You know, I was like, hey, listen, sir, you know, I noticed that you had a broken sprinkler head. I noticed that you got molten in your yard. You know, I'd like to give you a Worry for your lawn year round. You know, I mow it for 99 bucks. I include two cuts, I bag my grass. I'm thinking, like, how can I give this guy so much value that he can't say no? And he's like, well, you know, Javier's, you know, he's, he's doing it for, for $20. And Javier did a badass job. You know, I mean, it was like, it looked perfect. And I started thinking, I said, okay, what's going to be my competitive advantage to get in the door with these things and how can I tell more people about it? So I just hopped on YouTube and I said, you know, how can I get it out? And I started learning about, you know, every door direct mail. And I said, what if I put an offer out there, you know, that they grabbed people's attention, that made them call me and I started getting more clients and I just sold them. And so the turning point of that actual conversation was whenever I talked to the guy, I, I threw that out there. I said, hey, man, you know, I was in the Navy, you know, I was a police officer. You know, I just got out of the oil field. You know, give me an opportunity, I'll even mow it for free right now, you know, and if you don't like it, you go with anybody else. There's a cost for convenience. I'm willing to do things and I'm going to give you a better looking yard. And he was like, oh, you were in the Navy? And I said, yeah. And I started realizing, I said, okay, that, that, that is a little bit of leverage, you know, that people do support, you know, prior military veterans and ems. Some of them do. And so that was my first step of leverage. It says, hey, you know, maybe I'll just pull that Navy card and, you know, I can, I can dive in. So I started recognizing competitive advantages and it's like the self education that came along, the way to got. They got me to where I'm at today is just, it's just nuggets that everybody needs to know, you know. So I got into landscaping. And then landscaping turned into I can clean your gutters. And then turned into while your gutters broken. And then they're like, can you fix it? I'm like, dude, I could fix a gutter. YouTube University. Yeah, bro, I fucked up some gutters. I went up there and, you know, I started trying to screw in with sheetrock screws. And basically I was just trying to do all the work.
- [14:06]
Josh
You know what I love about this though, is I think when people get started in entrepreneurship, they think it's this grandiose thing that, like, you just end up on, you know, step zoo. But the reality is, the first couple of years, you're just eating shit. Year after year, project after project, you're literally just eating. And what you're describing right now is like, look, I had to realize that, like, look, I'm not gonna have clients unless I learn how to sell. These people aren't gonna buy unless I.
- [14:29]
Brent Franklin
Have a great offer.
- [14:30]
Josh
And it's all these small little nuggets along the way that have ultimately allowed you to become the person that you are today, right? So you're starting to learn all these things and what happened next.
- [14:39]
Brent Franklin
So, you know, people say, like, hey, fake it till you make it. Like, I don't believe in that. I believe in, like, make it till you. Till you make it. Like, just do whatever it takes. One of the biggest nuggets that I can give to anybody that's going to go down the entrepreneurial journey, right, is number one, is not everybody's meant to be an entrepreneur. If you have a good paying job and you're happy with what you do, like, it's okay to have a job. Like, not everybody's cut out to, like, do what it takes to get here. That's why they call it a 1 percenter. You're in a room with 100 people, 99 people don't get what it takes, right? And today it's even less than that. I think that there's truly less than 1 percenters. But the entrepreneur journey is it's not necessarily all, you know about eating in the beginning. Some people have really quick success in what they were doing, and the faster they find that they might not have been through market cycles, they not might not have been the, you know, the experience. They might have just had a good experience early on. And you see all these, you know, motivational memes that say, oh, you know, quick success, you know, creates ego. It doesn't necessarily create ego with everybody, but a lot of people are not ready for the challenges that are going to be forthcoming. You've seen the memes, hey, entrepreneurship's jumping off a mountain and building a plane on the way down. That's not necessarily true. What I can tell you is anything that somebody wants to learn about today, somebody has been there, they have done that, and they have wrote about it. And every successful person that's out there tells you. What do they tell you? Read books. Read books. I read a book a day And I'm like, I'm not reading no damn book. I'm a good picture looker at her, you know, like, I'll watch a little bit of YouTube, but with my mindspan is like, I'm not reading a book. And it was my biggest mistake. Once I started getting into books and listening to, you know, the audibles, and I started realizing like, holy shit. Like, that's exactly what I'm going through. Somebody's been there, they've done that, and they told the story about it. And if you're willing to educate yourself before making that initial jump into anything that you're doing, man, you can save yourself a lot of time and you can save yourself a lot of money and you can usually get to where you want to be a lot quicker. So that was really the turning point.
- [16:44]
Jack
What are some of those book recommendations? Real quick, before we dive back into the story, what are some book recommendations for? Everybody watching that they got, that they got to tap into.
- [16:51]
Brent Franklin
So people that are not business guys like me, I didn't go to college and I didn't learn what the system teaches you about business. My problem is, is I was hiring friends, I was trying to hire people. And I always invested in people who had that good and that motivation. And it often ended up being the wrong person, good person, wrong person. And so the first book that I read that really changed my life was called who, not how. And it explains how everybody is somebody, they're a who. But the only way you can tell who people are is by what they're able to do and the results that they're able to get me. I was just trying to find people that I could have access to. And the problem was is I never wrote down what I needed. And the best way to find people is to write down exactly what you need and figure out if you can find who can do it and get you the result without you telling them how. In addition to that, it's about finding people who have good culture that are gonna show up and then also running that little personality test with them. You see a good mentor and friend of mine that I ended up paying down the road. I had met at an event. He was, I was like, hey, you know Tom, Tom Berry. I was like, hey, how can I hire the right people? And I said, I'll give you open checkbook to spend time with you. Let me just talk to you and have you poke holes because you've built a multi hundred million dollar company. He's like, come in here. I laid out my Business, he started giving me books, right. Another one was rocket fuel, right? It explains whether you are a visionary or you're an integrator. It explains your characteristics and who's able to do what. But that meeting with Tom, he taught me about hiring. And I think that this is something that everybody struggles with, is hiring good talent. You're never going to make a better investment outside of your marketing than investing in good talent acquisition today. And people aren't willing to do that. An A team player can outperform 30B team players and people. All you do is just give them a little bit more incentive and. And give them some upside. But the main thing that I learned on the hiring process from the who, not how, was whether they're a dominant person. Okay. And what he did is he pulled up a little chart and it said whether they were dominant, they were influential, they had the education, right? And they were organized. And he said, brent, on a scale of 1 to 10, how dominant are you? And I was like, I ain't dominant. He's like, you're 10. I was like, okay, all right. So I'm that guy that's like, hard charger, like, let's rock and roll. I like to be in charge. He said, how influential are you? I said, I'm a 10. You know? He's like, all right, you're 10. How organized are you? I'm like, what's that? You know, like, you know, so like, my organization's always been terrible, and you get a lot of good entrepreneurs that are visionaries and we're high energy. We want to be in control. Our idea is the best, but in reality, we don't know everything. And we're typically disorganized. It comes with the adhd. And then the last thing was influence, dominant, influential, organization and education. How much do you know? And taking the who, not how, and putting this together, it really was able. Dominant people can't work with dominant people. You get that clash. And that happens with sales guys. And most your sales guys are not super organized. So whenever I found my COO Rhelia, this was the turning point in my business. When was that? I found somebody who was super organized, was influential, was extremely smart in everything that I wasn't and was non dominant. We went together like two peas in a pod. And all of the fires got put out by their self. So that was a huge portion of it.
- [20:29]
Jack
It reminds me in the book Good to Great by Jim Collins, he talks about, you gotta have the right people on the bus, but not just the right People on the bus. You have to have the right people in the right seats.
- [20:38]
Brent Franklin
That's exactly right.
- [20:39]
Jack
I wanna go back. How did you go from mowing lawns and doing lawn care to a multi millionaire in the oil business? What brought you back into that oil business?
- [20:48]
Brent Franklin
Yeah, so that's a great question. So how I went from just mowing grass to getting into the oil business was it started out landscaping, then I started getting into construction. And then once I got into construction, I ran into an investor that was flipping houses and wholesaling. And I saw this guy's card, you know, had the we buy ugly houses ugg on it, homevestors. And I was like, oh my God, this guy's buying houses, cash. You know, he must be a billionaire. And so I approached him one day and I said, you know, I was out changing a water heater and I approached him and he was basically like, you know, I buy these houses, I flip them, I wholesale them. And I said, well, do you have a contractor? And I became his contractor. I found a way to bring value to that guy without having much value. I just said, hey, do you have somebody that you can call 247 that can come fix your house? I'll go change a water heater at 3 o' clock in the morning. I just want the work. And he's like, well, no, you know, I said, listen, I can do everything and I can. And I thought I could. So I dumped, I jumped in and I made a friend. And I think that, that that's a huge, you know, important piece of business. So I got in with this guy flipping houses and I started riding along and I went with him on an appointment. He's like, I'm going to bring my contractor. Well, I start going around and I start looking at things. And he said, well, give me a bid. And I said, well, what do you think it's going to cost? He's like, well, you know, I'm thinking like 20 or 30 grand is like a lot for me, right? And he's like, well, my, my program here says that this is a $80,000 remodel. I said, oh, no. I said, this is like 70, you know, like, I was like, wow, $80,000, you know, for this work that I've been doing for free. And so I made a friend. And whenever he was negotiating that property, I sat down with the, with, you know, with him and the seller, and they were like, oh, we did this. And I just started to point out problems. They're like, hey, let's fix this. Little piece of house. I'm like, well, you can't do that, because when you take the siding off, then you got to fix it, then change the wood, then you got to paint it. And I started learning, like, I was able to use negotiations to lower the value of properties, which was bringing him more benefit than me even doing the work. And so he started taking me along with every trip. And he said, hey, how about I give you $500 to ride along with me? And he's like, and we'll just play good cop, bad cop. He said, you'll be the contractor. He's like, we'll just sit down. He's like, and you could just tell him what you found, and I'll give you the numbers off this. So we started getting into this real estate game. And I'm like, holy shit. These people are selling a $200,000 house for 60 grand that needs 20 grand worth of work, and it's worth 200 grand, you know, like. And I started seeing, and I was like, man, if I was only a millionaire, I could buy this piece of real estate. And I watched him go in and get the property under contract, and I watched him pick up the phone, and I watched him sell that property, sell the contract without paying for it. It's real estate wholesaling. And I said, holy shit. He didn't. He didn't do anything, you know, like. And I was intrigued, and so I just, like, locked on like a hawk. It's kind of like, you want to go fishing, right? I don't have the boat. I don't have, you know, rod and reels. But if I carry your gas and clean your boat and carry your fish for you, you find a way to bring people value that are doing something not, hey, man, can I pick your brain? If you find a way to bring people value in any business without, like, them even thinking about it, this is how you get in with people.
- [23:53]
Jack
And it's not just, hey, how can I provide value to you? I don't know. I don't know what skills you can do.
- [23:58]
Brent Franklin
You just start doing it. You make your life easier.
- [24:01]
James
Yeah.
- [24:01]
Brent Franklin
You just.
- [24:02]
Jack
You find what I'm missing in my business. You find what I'm missing in my life, and you figure out how to bring that to me. And it's like, oh, man, this made my life better. This made my business better. I need to pay you for that because I need this to keep going.
- [24:15]
James
Or it's in their mindset that, hey, when you have an ask, I'm going to have by no means have an issue to kind of go out there and help you out. And they're always going to remember that. People are always going to remember if you make their lives easier.
- [24:26]
Brent Franklin
Yeah, they do. So here's. Here's something I'll tell you. Life lessons and business lessons will always cost you one or two things. It's either going to cost you time or it's going to cost you money, but it's always going to cost you what you value the least. And people who are high net worth that are successful, they're always looking for ways to buy their time back, the true successful ones, because you're going to realize there's no harder worker in the world than a dollar. And if you learn how to leverage money as a tool and not what your perceived value of it is, you're going to go a lot further, a lot faster. People that have never had money don't know how to get money. And once they got money, they don't know what to do with it. And once they have an abundance of it, it's not even really about making money. It's more just about capital, perseverance. And so some of the things we're going to get into today, I'll talk to you about that. But whenever I was able to start bringing this guy value, I was able to kind of learn as I go. And so once I saw that, I started looking for properties and I started learning how to evaluate them. I was looking at how he was looking at the mls, I was looking at how he was looking at the comps, I was looking at who he was calling. And he was sitting there and he would call his buddy and I would listen to the phone conversation, and he's like, oh, I don't like that area. You're out in the middle of nowhere. And I started thinking forwardly. I said, al, you're finding properties and making offers on them, and then you're trying to find a buyer. Why don't you find your buyer first and figure out what they want and then put your marketing there. Why don't you find out what the guy's looking for and then we'll go find the asset there. And we started doing that and it started booming. Well, I started looking for properties, too. And I locked up this address. It was 7 Holly Lane in Huntsville, Texas. You can look it up. I remember it to this day. I remember at least 45% of the addresses that we flipped. I found this property. I ended up talking to this seller, older woman, wanted to get out of it. And we ended up, I ended up telling Al, I said, hey, come get the contract. I already got it filled out for you, just sign it. And he signed the contract. But my remodeling wasn't the greatest. So he was like, hey. He's like, I'm just going to wholesale this property. And I'm like, no, like I, you know, like, give me the remodel, like I want to remodel it. And he's like, if you want to remodel it so bad, he said, well, why don't you just do it yourself? And I said, I don't have, you know, $100,000 exactly. Shut up. So I said, okay. So what I did is I said, can I reach out to some of the people that you're selling to? He says, yeah. So I ended up learning about hard money companies that will lend you money asset based with no credit, no tax returns, and they'll just put a first lien position and they'll give you the money to buy a house and they'll give you the money to remodel the house, but they lend based on a certain amount of the after repair value. And so I called up Jet Lending in Houston, Texas and I met this guy named Eddie Gantt who is a homevestor franchise as well. And I sent the deal in and they said, we can get this done for you. We can fund you 100% of the property 0 at closing and we can give you some of the remodel money up front. And because of how cheap I bought the property and I actually ended up paying my mentor $20,000 assignment fee to buy the house from him, which I ended up turning around and flipping. And so this was the real turning point in my business that got me making money and I was so excited about it. I talked to the seller and I had such good rapport because relationships are everything. You know, there's a lot of money in deals, but you're never going to make more money than investing in the right people and doing what you say. So for the relationship side of it, I had made a friend with this. We don't go and try to make a deal. You always try to make a friend. And so whenever I made friends with this lady and I told her, I said, hey, I'm going to close on the house, I'm going to give you a deposit. I said, can I go ahead and start the construction on this? And she's like, well, don't you want to close on it? I said, listen, you have Nothing to lose. If I start the construction on this and I don't close on the house, you get free construction. I was so excited to do this remodel because I had already planned out, like making all my money on it. And so whenever I jumped in with her, she agreed to it. My friend at the title company helped me put a little second lien on the property and I closed. And I couldn't believe that I had just bought my first piece of real estate with no money, only a deal. And so I turned around and whenever I closed on the property two days later, I called for the final inspection on the remodel. And it was a, it was a full, like rehab. So I got there and the, the lender that kind of took a chance on me, like, you know, that I said, hey. I said, you know, I'm ready for my final draw. And they're like, what? You know, so they showed up and they saw this house completely remodeled. Granite countertops, new floors, everything. And they were like, you know, what, what the hell, you know, this is, this is, this is massive. Like, how the hell did you remodel this house in two days and make it look badass? Ended up flipping the house for 152,000 bucks. We ended up selling the property and I made a huge spread on that. I said, okay, you know, I'm going to go into the real estate business. So ever since then, I put out signs and I marketed and I just started looking for people I would market for construction. I said, hey, if you want to get top dollar for your real estate, you know, I'm a investor friendly remodeling contractor, give me a call, you know, and I'll give you a great deal on the remodel. So that was my way to get them to call. Kind of like guerrilla marketing. But whenever I got there, you know, I'd give them the bid of market value or a little bit below market value. And I say, hey, instead of just putting all this money in here, making a little bit, why don't I just buy your property cash? And so the construction teed me up for the real estate and I started getting under contract. And then I had already made all these friends, and now word was spreading like wildfire at, you know, the hard money company that, hey, this guy is a two day remodeling contractor. He's buying badass deals. And so that's where my reputation kind of started. And you know, I ran that really hard all the way up in about till 2016. And I was just burnt out. No systems, no processes, getting my ass handed to me. I'll remodel after remodel, just figuring it out. And, you know, I had about almost $2 million in the bank, you know, at 26 years old. And I'm like, I'm a millionaire, but I'm exhausted. Burnout is a real thing. And so these people that think that they're going to go forever and just have no systems and just bust their ass, bust their ass, bust their ass, trade time for money. I've got, you know, big news for you. Like, your energy runs out, you know. And so I had a huge tax bill that came in, and I was like, you know what? I'm just going to start lending my money out and just using my money, because I've already understand how money works. I started lending my money out, and I loaned my money to this guy down in McAllen, Texas, and I was trying to get him a loan because in the state of Texas, you can broker money, like as a hard money lender without having a license. You don't have to be an rmlo. So what I realized was, is I could just sell money and make a couple points on it. And then I started using my own money. Well, I looked at this guy's bank statements. He had like 3 million one month, negative $56 the next, you know, 500,000 next. And I said, what's this guy do? Sell drugs, you know, like. Like, how do you have. Like, how do you have $3 million? And then negative $56 the next day. And so I asked him, and I said, man, what. What do you do for a living? You know, he didn't have no fancy car. He got that down. But I said, hey, man, I said, what do you. What do you do for a living? Well, I just take this fucking oil well right here, and it's got an oil zone up at the shallower depth. And I just put a plug and I shoot on. I sell to these. I'm like, oh, like oil, man, you know, just. Just running wild. But I saw the checks, and I was intrigued. He said, look at this well right here, man. And I saw that statement, and it said $86,000. He said, I paid 100 grand for it. I put 100 grand in it. And he was making $86,000 a month in cash flow. I saw that statement with my eyes, and I said, I don't know anywhere I can get a rental property for $200,000, make $86,000. I was sold. I said, listen, anytime you get A deal. Call me like I got some money. And he did. He called me up and he said, hey, you know, I got this. Well, I sold it for 1.2 million to this company. They don't know how to manage it. You know, we can buy it back. They want half a million dollars. I said, what's wrong with it? He said, it just has some dirty gas, some natural gas. It just needs to be cleaned. It needs 56,000. They made their money back. They're tired of messing with it. This is an area of interest. He said, buy it right now. He said, 500 grands of steel. Well, that little salespreneur popped out. And I was like, you care if I give him a call? You know, same thing as real estate, right? If something's for sale, everything's negotiable. Why the hell is it for sale? If something's so good, why is it for sale, right? I asked myself that. And real investors ask yourself that. If something is so good, why is somebody selling it? Think about that, right? So that's the first question you should ask as an investor. If it's so good, why the hell is it on my desk? And so called that company? And I said, you know, I said, hey, how's it going? I said, you know, my name is Brent Franklin. I said, you know, I'm an investor. I was over here looking at your. Your gas well. I said, you know, can you send me the statements on it? And there were the statements. 56,000, 86,000, 64,000. What do you think went off my head? Bing, a light bulb. I'm like, Holy shit. For 500 grand, this is going to be great. And this was like my first step in the oil and gas investing. And I looked at it and I was like, okay, keep calm. When you got a big fish on the line, don't force it in, right? You know, like, you want to stay calm and collective. And so my personality, obviously high energy. I was like, all right. I said, well, why are you selling it? Well, you know, it's been a great well, you know, it's just not our area of interest, blah, blah. And I said, okay. I said, but you want to get rid of it? Yeah, we're going to get rid of it. I said, how much are you asking for? It said 500. I said, all right, I appreciate your time. I'm not interested. Well, you know, I talked to. I talked to Mike and he said you were going to buy. I said, yeah. I said, I'm. I'm just not interested, right Now, I said, you know, I've looked at several of these. I said, I see some things I'm unsure of. And he said, and I could hear in his voice, like he thought I was a burden hand. And the person that can walk away from a deal even. Even when you need. I did this in real estate so many times. The person that can walk away from a deal really controls the situation. There was times I was in real estate deals, bro. I was sitting down with a seller, and I was like, yeah. I was like, this just isn't going to work out. And I knew I was going to make 30 or 40 grand, and I had fucking negative $800 in my wood Forest account, and I had to have that deal. But walking away, it's that fomo, that fear of missing out. You take something away, guess what? People are going to want you to do it a hundred times more. And if you can do that sharp as attack and do it confidently. This is where so many young entrepreneurs mess up. They beg for the buy. You don't beg to buy. You. You just take it away and you see where the deal stands. So I said, you know, I said, yeah, I'm just not interested in this right now, you know? And he's like, oh, okay. And I said. I said, you need to sell it. He's like, well, we don't need to, but we're going to. I said, I tell you what, man. I said, I've looked at this. I said, you don't have to accept it. I said, by all means, somebody's willing to pay more. I said, but I can give you $162,084.84 for this right now. That was my highest offer, and I can close tomorrow. Well, okay. And I hung up the phone. I just pulled that number out of my ass. And I don't believe in ever making those. Those numbers. Like, Hey, 150,155. I always pull some crazy number out of my ass because I'm like, I put the pencil to this, and this is absolutely every penny I can give you. You know, and this is a. This is a little. A little nugget. So write this down, because I don't want to see your offer. 150. I want to see that 149, 52.
- [35:42]
Josh
You want the sense of the dollar.
- [35:43]
Brent Franklin
Yeah. Hey, listen, we put the pencil to the pen. You know, we put the pen to the pad, and this is every penny we give you.
- [35:49]
Jack
There must be a reason why it never came out to this.
- [35:52]
Brent Franklin
Yeah. So. So you know, and that. Because it gets people thinking. It's like, you know, when you go to the store, you don't see something. You see 499, 450. You don't see 423, 30. You know, like, it just. It's just something that I've always done, you know, on anything. And it just, like, for me, if I saw something and it had every detail, I'm like, damn, somebody, somebody calculated this stuff, you know? So I made that offer and I called back the guy and I didn't know a. About oil wells. You know, I worked on them, but I didn't know. And I said, well, what's the process? He said, well, we make a purchase, sell agreement. And I said, okay. And then they're going to give you a deed to the. To the minerals that you're. You're buying, called the working interest. And then you're going to get the title to a well, which in the state of Texas is called a P4.
- [36:34]
James
What city was this? Was this El Campo or was this.
- [36:35]
Brent Franklin
No. So this was in Frear. This is Duvall County, South Texas.
- [36:38]
James
Do you still have it today?
- [36:40]
Brent Franklin
I do. And I will tell you the nightmare behind it, which also is how we got here today. So I lost almost $2 million on that well, and we actually still own it today, and I'll tell you why. And it's. It's. It's crazy, you know, we'll probably end up going to work together on it together just so we can finish this podcast and show people, like, how much money's in oil and gas. So I was like, okay, what's the process? Right, I understood real estate, get it under contract, open title, verify who owns it, make sure there's no liens or encumbrances, and then close. Send your money title company. So I'm asked him, I'm like, all right, you know, like, what do we need to do? We just bought an oil well, or how you call it? You know, like, it's like, okay, well, oil and gas, you make a purchase, sell agreement. You know, basically the seller says, hey, can't guarantee anything on this. Once it's yours, it's your problem. And you take all the debts, liens, everything with it. And what's crazy about oil and gas wells is there is no title insurance on them. Whereas real estate, if you go and somebody sells you a property and the title's bad, you can file a title claim and get your money back. Potentially. Oil and gas has no title insurance. So it's the wild West. So it's like if something got messed up or the lease that you're buying is expired, like, you're, you know, so. Excuse my language, buddy. You are. So I said, okay. I said, what do we need to do? He's like, let's put together a purchase, sell agreement. We'll take the title. And I think that a lot of people don't know when you buy an oil well, you can actually buy the well. The well can be deemed almost worthless unless you get a lease to it. You see, in oil and gas, there's somebody that owns the land that it's on. That's your surface owner, okay? They own the property. And you typically get the rights to go on that property through a surface lease. Everything below the land is called the mineral rights. And this is where you can have one owner or you can have fractional owners where people own a portion or a divided or undivided interest below the ground. So you might have one owner or you might have a thousand owners. And you got to get those people to agree to a set of terms for you to extract their oil and gas off their property. So if you have an oil and gas well, but you don't have an oil and gas lease, all you have is a liability. So he's like, you want to make sure that the lease is valid, that the terms are good, and you want to make sure that the title is clear and there's no liens or encumbrances, just like a house. So we looked at that stuff, we used a transactional attorney, and I said, okay. So I said, where do I send my money? They said, wire it to the seller. So I wired my money over to the seller, and we bought the well and we bought the leases. And mysteriously, whenever I bought this oil and gas well and I saw those statements, I was waiting for my damn check, right? I was like, okay, where's my $86,000? But the first month goes by and I didn't get nothing. And the second month goes by and I didn't get nothing. He said, hey, we need to do some work to this and get it going. So I start feeding him hundreds of thousands of dollars to fix this up. Because I'm like, even if I'm in a million dollars, who gives a shit? You know? So.
- [39:39]
James
So did the business just, like, dry up or, like, why were you guys. Why was there no more cash flow from it? Were there not any more customers?
- [39:44]
Brent Franklin
So the well was producing, and this guy became what's called the operator of record. Your operator is kind of like your property manager. Your operator is the person that has a bond with the state, especially in Texas. It's a P5 bond. They register with the railroad commission and they hold the liability and responsibility of managing the well to make sure that, you know that it's compliant. And so this man was the operator. He took over operations of the well. The operator gets the revenue from the gatherer. So all the money started going to him. And me being a. Basically an active partner, I own the lease, but I didn't manage the well. So the oil and gas comes out of the ground. It goes to an oil tank, if it's oil and it gets sold, and then that check goes to the operator. And your natural gas, if they have a market, it goes to a pipeline and it gets sold and that money goes to operator. So the gross proceeds come to your operator, your property manager, and then he pays the mineral owner, hopefully, if he does his job, he pays the severance tax. And then he deducts any expenses, like utilities, just like you would in a rental property. He deducts any maintenance cost, utilities, chemicals. And then every single owner that has that lease gets their fractional share of the profit. And if the well is cash flow positive, you get a check. If the well is cash flow negative, you write a check. And this is why it's super. You need to be educated on oil and gas before becoming a working interest owner.
- [41:13]
James
Can you clarify? Right. So since you owned at this point in time, you bought this first, it was an oil well, correct?
- [41:19]
Brent Franklin
Yes, it was a gas well. It made a little bit of oil, but it was gas.
- [41:22]
James
But that grants you the minimal rights or like, how does that.
- [41:25]
Brent Franklin
It gives you the rights to extract. So you can be a mineral owner, which means you actually own below the surface. They lease those rights out that whenever they give that oil and gas lease, you can own a fraction of that lease. It's kind of like we all decide to buy a house together, but it is a lease. That lease is a piece of deeded real estate. It is fee simple, meaning it's real property. It's registered at the county, and everybody can take a fraction of it. You can have 5%, he can have 10%, I can have 40%. I took over the majority of that lease. And that's what people are buying. Whenever you see companies that are doing oil and gas investments, they say, own a piece of the booming oil and gas industry, you know, own a piece of deeded real estate. What they're telling you is Is you're going to basically become a fractionalized tenant in common and you're going to pay your share of the drilling and expenses and you're going to get your share of the profit. But you also are liable for your share of the liabilities. And if you got a bad project, it's going to hand you your ass on a silver platter.
- [42:25]
James
So is it more valuable to own the land or the operations?
- [42:28]
Brent Franklin
Well, let's think about it. Okay, you've got a piece of land, right? Surface and you're not doing anything with it. You don't build and somebody approaches you and says hey, I want to put a convenience store on your piece of property and you lease it to them. What is your risk?
- [42:43]
James
There's no risk.
- [42:45]
Brent Franklin
Okay, give me some money. If you're going to do it right, let's take a bonus. Same thing with oil and gas minerals. They take that lease bonus, that's what gets them to sign the contract. What if I go out there and I build the sheet shittiest gas station that you've ever seen and it's all janky and it falls apart and I tie it up, what happens to you?
- [43:02]
James
You're not going to make any money off that tenant.
- [43:04]
Brent Franklin
Yeah, but you don't lose any money, you don't have any risk, right? And if they don't follow the terms, they're one, three or five year term, guess what happens? The lease expires. Them and everything that gets left behind, you either have them clean up or you get converted to personal property and you get a keep. So when that lease expires. So in oil and gas, whenever you go and you get that oil and gas lease, that preliminary lease from your, from your mineral owners, you've got a set of terms and conditions you have to follow. Maybe you have a bonus you need to pay. Maybe if the wells get shut in, you have a royalty that you need to pay. And oftentimes if you go and put an oil well on a property and that lease expires or gets terminated because just like an apartment complex don't pay your rent, get kicked the out, right? So same thing with oil and gas. You breach that lease, your lease gets terminated. Hey man, come pick up your oil well. Let's go out there and pick up that gas well today. Load that thing up in a U haul. How are you going to get rid of that? You can't. But guess what, somebody is on record and they have to plug that well. Remember you've got a P5, you've got a property manager. There's compliance with the state that that well has to be plugged once it quits producing. So what do you think happens when all these leases lapse and those oil wells are out there? They're just sitting there. Those are free for the taking. You reach out to those mineral owners doesn't mean that the well was bad. They might have borrowed too much money on it. They might have went bankrupt. They might have spent too much money on it. An oil and gas well will tear your ass up quicker than anything else out there. It's like getting in a pond full of gators and, you know, strapping chicken to your neck, you know, swim, you know, I mean, it's literally that bad.
- [44:33]
James
So let's get back to this. The first well. When did you start to turn that into, like, a profitable, profitable business?
- [44:39]
Brent Franklin
Yeah, so I bought into that well, and the operator was essentially stealing the money. And just. And he was just charging a bunch of fees to me where I wasn't getting any cash flow. And I was seeing the statements, and I was waiting. He's like, oh, we're reinvesting, we're reinvesting. Fed me a bunch of like most people do. And I was so hooked on just seeing the statement. I was like, okay, whatever. Well, we ended up going and doing some work on the well. He's like, hey, if we just clean out this pipe, you know, it'll fix it. And it ended up messing up the well. And it was like, oh, I guarantee it won't. I'm actually suing that guy right now. I don't know if anybody ever googled it or not, but I'm suing him for about four and a half million dollars. He was actually my mentor. Like, he was like, a shitty person that taught me a lot about oil and gas and how to do it, but also ended up burning me. And we ended up going back, and we're coming to a settlement agreement on it right now. But it's like, you can do business with people who burn you. You just have to know how to play the game better than them. And so it's like I ended up losing. And, you know, the sad part was, is I had some very good friends of mine that came in and they bought into the well. Okay. These are people that I built relationships with in real estate. And what was so intriguing about them coming into oil and gas was that the money that we were putting into the well could be deducted against active income. So people that are flipping houses, they're getting capital Gain taxes, right? They have earned income. People that have a W2, they have earned income, taxable income, and oil and gas. When you own a direct working interest, it can't be classified as a passive investment. I think it's 465 of the IRS code that says that it can't be classified if you're actively participating. And so when we figured out, so.
- [46:19]
James
That'S why a lot of rich people invest in oil and gas.
- [46:21]
Brent Franklin
That's why they do the direct participation. But what a lot of them don't know is there are entity structures that allow people to invest in oil and gas where they can still get active deductions without having to be in control. If I went out there today and said, hey man, take 25% of this well, sign here, you're liable for everything, it might look like a good idea if you're looking at that cash flow, but the second you get a bill called a jib, a joint interest billing statement, and you made five grand one month, six grand the next, now you've got, you know, your brother in here and you know he's ready to rock and roll. Everybody starts getting excited when it's good. But when shit hits the fan, that's whenever people that don't understand what they're getting into come running. And you're the bad guy no matter what the situation is because that's your relationship. They didn't invest in the well because the well, they invested because they like what you sold them. Also, you need to make sure that you know what you're putting your name on, you know, you understand in depth, because I didn't. And so we started getting our ass handed to us on this well and starting pouring in money. And I started selling off my properties and paying the bills for my friends, my rental properties I busted my ass for. I started selling them off and paying these jibs and we never got the well back.
- [47:33]
James
Did you accept at this point that you're all in on oil and gas like you're going to, you're going to make it work?
- [47:38]
Brent Franklin
I didn't, I didn't. It took a breaking point to do that. Real estate was cranking along. I was great at wholesaling, but I saw the money that could be made and I love the cash flow. So I immediately called that guy and I said, hey man, you broke this well. I can't let my partners have zero. What can you trade me? I have more money. Give me something that's already done, that's non problematic, right? Show me something that Has a year of not breaking, right? Show me a way to get return of investment. And having a way to get return of investment is one of the most important pieces of anything. When I talk to somebody, the first thing I want to know is how the hell am I getting my money back, right? Is this backed by an asset? Is it tangible? Is there a lien? What is my leverage and am I over leveraging? And so he started basically giving me these other projects, and I just started going down the rabbit hole and panic mode because I'm like, this is broken. I'm super deep into it. My friends are in it. Oh, what do you have? And I started giving him money for other wells and started. And guess what? He was supposed to break me off other portions of those wells. And he just. He just decided not to said, fuck it, you know, And I was like, now I'm depressed. I've depleted all of my cash. I have my friend's money and my investors money into this well. I'm selling off my rental properties, and in a scramble, I'm fighting with this guy who's then turning around and trying to go to my investors and try to raise money from them. I mean, the world is caving in on me right now. And I just went from super successful multimillionaire, 26 years old, to out of cash. Everybody pissed off, liabilities coming in, lawsuits coming in, you know, companies not getting paid, and everybody looking at me and saying, you're the bad guy.
- [49:15]
Josh
So you went from the highest you've ever been. You know, you're 26 years old, you're a multimillionaire, and you see this pipe dream of like, look, there's so much opportunity in this traditional business of the oil and gas industry. And you make the investment, you're waiting for the return, and it just never comes. You've not only burned your own cash, you've burned your friends cash. When you're at that lowest point. Did you ever think about quitting?
- [49:42]
Brent Franklin
Man, as much as I want to sit here and just tell you, no, I don't think that quit was the word. I think that I was losing faith. I was giving up. And, you know, it really took a lot for me because, man, I had such a strong reputation, I had such a good. And I had all the wrong friends around me. You know, I'm out buying shit. You know, I'm wearing the Louis Vuitton Rolex, boy, you know, I had those fake friends that are, you know, friends with a lifestyle around me. And when everything hit the fan, you know, kind of everybody just kind of, you know, turned to crickets. And there were times that I was like, I don't know what I'm going to do. You know, whenever you owe somebody a million dollars, you know, like, and you don't have any way to make it back, the market's not doing what it's doing, and you're not going to 20, 30 grand your way back to it. And people have busted their ass their entire life for it, you know, and, you know, they just made that investment in you. You. Regardless how anybody feels like it, you up mentally. I mean, it really does. It put me in. It put me in a. In a mindset because I'm. You can see, I'm high energy. I'm always seeing, you know, I never see the glass as, like, half full or half empty. I've always been like, dude, the glass is refillable, you know, like, it can be refilled. You just have to be willing to do it. Not me. I'm somebody that you can bank on. Like, you know, have I made mistakes? A million percent. Do I know everything? I don't. But I find the person that does. And I'm not afraid to move. And that's what it takes to be an entrepreneur. You have to be willing to fucking do things that other people are not willing to do. And the only thing that's going to matter at the end of the day is results. If you're working hard all the time, busting your ass, and things just aren't happening. I always say there's one or two reasons. Number one, it's not what God has in your plan, you know, And a lot of people, they try to go out here and preach that, you know, that they're Christian or, you know, they're perceived. And not everybody is. You know, I don't get into the religion game, but if you don't believe in God, just know that there's something greater out there than you and I that created all of this and gave us these opportunities. And, you know, energy is real. Energy is transparent. And so something that was big for me was when I was at that lowest point, what do most people do? They turn to drinking, they turn to partying. Not me, man. I was like, how the do I get out of this? Excuse, my friend. But, you know, like, that's how it was. I mean, this is the real stuff, you know, you don't. I don't sugarcoat it. Outside house. How the am I going to get these people their money back? It was never about how am I going to make more money? It was, I'm traveling, I'm doing good things, I'm making money off my real estate. How do I make this money back? So I just went down every rabbit hole I could possibly think of, and I called the oil company that originally sold me the well. I said, do you have any more oil wells? I said, I can't go to this unreliable source. Do you have any more oil and gas wells that got production? Do you need any cash? Yeah, I do, because my partners had more capital and I had a little bit more money left. And I said, what would it take to buy some of these? I said, and I'll do a deal with you. You guarantee me my money back, which there's no guarantees and investments. But I made them do this. I said, you guarantee me my Money back in 24 months, I keep the upside, I get you liquid. And they're like, no, no, we can't do that. So what I ended up doing is I just started reaching out to oil companies that were good businesses that had offices that weren't operating out of their truck, drink, you know, drinking a Pepsi and smoking a cigarette every day. Like, I reached out to real companies, and I started making lowball offers on their assets that were operated by good companies. I didn't have to manage them. This was the turning point. This how I got out of it. So I started buying and selling and buying and selling and buying just like you would a house. You flip your way back to success. And I flipped the shit out of these oil and gas wells. I bought them, I sold them, I bought them, I sold them. And to the point that I was learning so much about it, I ended up saying, you know, I ended up buying an oil and gas lease that had some locations, you know, from that company. And the guy's like, we're going to drill this. All you got to do is go drill this. And he basically gave me a road map and a plan. And I looked at it, and I'd never drilled a well for myself. I'd been on a rig, but I still didn't know what the hell I was doing. This was the huge turning point for us, is I took a map that had this stuff called 3D seismic. It's like a radar, you know, a sonar for. For gas. And I looked at these locations, and I ended up buying that oil and gas lease. And, dude, I just picked up the phone and I called a drilling rig and I called a dozer, and I negotiated everybody down as low as Possible. And I went out there and I started drawing. It's on my YouTube channel or my old YouTube channel. I didn't know what the hell I was doing, but I had a good idea. I knew the concept. I'd been on a rig, I'd seen it, and I just started reaching out to people for help. And everybody in the world who could get a check out of me, all of a sudden, they want to be my friend, you know, so they wanted to come help us. So I started punching oil and gas wells in Lavaca county. And, man, thank you, Lord, I hit on every single one of them, which is huge.
- [54:33]
James
So this is what I have to ask you, though, because this is the fascinating thing to me about this. A lot of people, they get into oil and gas, and maybe they're wanting to be the promoter. They wanted to be the guy that puts the deals together. Maybe they just want to go buy a well or two and just be the guy that does the drilling and goes and sells it off. You own every aspect of the production, every vertical. We were at your sites earlier. You own the drilling rigs, you own the oil wells, you own the natural gas plants, you own where the water's, you know, everything's made and the oils actually produce every aspect of it. When did you realize that instead of just being the guy that is just leasing a couple wells here and there, bringing a bunch of other people in, that you're like, no, no, I want to own all aspects, every vertical of this production.
- [55:16]
Brent Franklin
Bro, that is a phenomenal question. And let me tell you something, the language again, every single aspect of this business that I have is because I took an ass beating and learned that I needed it, okay? When people have leverage over you, they tie your hands. And it doesn't matter how good of a person you are, how good of a deal is, if you've got a good property that's being mismanaged by a bad. By a bad manager, you can have a bad deal, or you can have a property that's not so good being properly managed by a company. It can create a good deal. So every step of the way before I got the drilling rigs was literally, I need this because I don't want people to control me. Want you to think about this analogy for a second, because I think that people understand real estate a lot easier than oil and gas, right? You understand the concept. You want to build a house, what do you do?
- [56:05]
James
You buy the land, you buy the.
- [56:07]
Brent Franklin
How about a little research, right? You do a little market research, you Find out what has good comps. Then what do you do? You go and you figure out where you want to build. You put a set of plans together and then what do you put together after you get those plans? What do you get? What's that piece of paper called? It's a budget. Right. In oil and gas you have budgets on wells. Let's say that we have a neighborhood where houses are $300,000 and you have a builder that comes to you and says, hey, you can build these houses for 175 grand. Here's the budget, here's the material, here's the builder. It's a no brainer, just put up the money. No brainer, Right. Well, imagine you start building those houses for 175 grand and all of the sudden the house value goes from 300,000 to 800,000 and there's a bunch of empty lots around you. What do you think happens with those contractors? What happens to contractors when they're out in storms right now and they're doing roofing for $300 a square and all of a sudden hurricane comes through and everybody wants high demand. What happens?
- [57:03]
James
The price they want to goes up, charge way more.
- [57:05]
Brent Franklin
Why? Supply, demand and availability. Right. Same thing in oil and gas. You ever heard of oil and gas? Boom, right? All we were making money during the boom. It's oil and gas boom, people will pay anything.
- [57:15]
James
What creates a boom in oil and gas for people that don't realize?
- [57:18]
Brent Franklin
Is it commodity price? Commodity price, the demand of. We know where the oil's at, we know what it costs to put a well in there. If you only had a limited amount of resources. Let's say you had a swimming pool that had 12,000 gallons in it and it cost you and water was selling for $2 a gallon. Okay, you got 24,000 gallons, $24,000 in there, right. It cost you $3,000 to put a spout in that pool, right. If it cost you $3,000, put a spout in that pool and there's only so much water in that pool, you know where it's at? How many spouts are you going to put in that pool? And it can, it can pour out a couple gallons a day. Well, if the price is low and you're getting $2 a gallon, you're only going to put a couple spouts because you don't really care. You know, you got a bunch, you're going to kind of let it trickle and it's going to give you some income. But what happens whenever that water overnight goes to $45 a gallon. You're gonna stick all the spouts and your spout, what happens? It went from 3,000, 6,000, but who gives a shit? It doubled. But your money that you can make quadrupled. Same thing with oil and gas reservoirs. These operators, they know where their oils at, they know where the reserves are at. They've got enough data, they've got enough test wells to know that. So when the oil boom happens, they go drill shit and start extracting it because it's a depleting resource. Same thing with that pool. You're not going to go in there and try to dump it out at the bottom of the market. You're going to hold it as long as you can have a little bit of cash flow to pay those over overhead expenses and keep your lease. Right. Same thing with the oil field. These operators know where their oil and gas reserves are and they're not going to just deplete them at the low market. Well, what's low? 50, 60, $70. Oil is considered, you know, median of the market. But the bigger oil Companies need like 60, $65 oil in order to break even, even because of their cost of drilling. We'll get into that another time. So what we do is, is we make sure that, you know, the fields that we have, we are only letting them trickle. And that's the reason we talked about natural gas. We like natural gas because we can adjust the pressure, we can adjust the flow rate right at the wellhead. So you turn a valve open.
- [59:21]
James
I want to be clear to everybody though, because we were talking about this earlier and I was asking you, you know, there's all these different aspects of oil to get into. You own a lot of the verticals. And I was like, hey, what's the best part of oil? You said, no, no, no. Natural gas.
- [59:32]
Brent Franklin
Natural gas, yeah.
- [59:34]
James
It's because. No. And because nobody talks about it.
- [59:36]
Brent Franklin
Yeah. So I like natural gas because it's less problematic to me. I know where to find it, I know how to extract it, I know where there's an abundance of it. It's easy to look for on well logs, which are like little surveys. After you drill a well, they bring a truck out called a wire line and they take a survey and it tells you, like, the neutron density. And they run these tools that basically show you what type of formations you have, whether it's sand, shell, rock. It tells you, like how porous the permeability of the wells, which, you know, how easily oil and gas can flow through the Porosity. Basically, we can get a little survey of the earth and I'll show you that in a little bit on, you know, where it's at. And I like natural gas because you can go and find wells that have natural gas left behind. Somebody goes and drills down to a target depth for a specific zone, and that zone might be 10,000ft, but they might have drilled through four or five gas zones to get it. And on that log you're able to see those zones. Well, those zones might not be appealing to Exxon or Chevron. It's not big enough for them. Whereas they'll just give you that well. And we can go in there and make a gas well really inexpensive without having to spend two or three million dollars drilling the well. And I was like, holy shit. This is like people giving you a free oil well or gas well. I like gas because I understand it, it's in high demand. The usage of liquefied natural gas is always going to be around. It's the cleanest burning fossil fuel. It's a tax deductible investment. There's tax incentives on it. And we use natural gas for so much stuff. And the world needs it. Look at all your AI. Do you believe in AI? You think these data centers, what do they run off of? I know you want to say natural gas, they run off electricity, right?
- [61:15]
James
But nuclear is a big thing that's going to go into that, right?
- [61:17]
Brent Franklin
Maybe you're going to go run it off your solar farm, your windmill, you know, all that stuff that uses a shit little. What are you going to run it off of? Right, Natural gas. Have you ever heard of like the bitcoin mining?
- [61:29]
James
Yes.
- [61:29]
Josh
You know, bitcoin, the bitcoin farms and everything.
- [61:31]
Brent Franklin
What do you think the biggest problem is with bitcoin miners?
- [61:33]
Josh
It's expensive, all the electricity that it costs.
- [61:36]
Brent Franklin
Electricity, right? So where's the electricity come from? People are plugging into the outlet, right? So what we did was we are taking that gas, which we've already found. Not all natural gas has a market. So we've kind of did creative finance for natural gas. Not all natural gas has a market. And so what we're doing is we're finding wells that have natural gas, but they don't have a pipeline. Imagine that you go build a farm in the middle of somewhere and you got crops, right? You got tomatoes and you got corn, and your corn goes on a conveyor belt and it goes to the market, right? A truck comes and picks it up, but your tomatoes have to get sent through A tube, for whatever reason. Same thing with natural gas. Your natural gas has to have a pipeline to travel to. So if I drill a well right here and I don't have a highway to get my gas to market, that gas is deemed useless. And all of these wells, which. The ones we went out to today, all these wells across Texas, they have so much natural gas in them, but there's nothing they can do with them. So we're taking that natural gas. We're hooking up a caterpillar generator. We're using a very, very small amount of gas to run a generator. And what does a generator create? You don't know what a generator creates? Electricity. A generator creates electricity. You know, you put a generator on your house. That's what it creates. And guess how much it cost us? We're taking gas that's essentially low cost or free, and running it in a generator that we own. What's our cost of electricity? Peanuts. And then we run our bitcoin miners, and we use Starlink or we use mobile Internet, and we start generating cash from running the miners. Well, if you talk about the data centers and you talk about the big companies that are running these. These miners. One sec. I'm gonna go down this. This is gonna get you a lot of action. All right, so these bitcoin miners run off of electricity that we're creating from our natural gas generators. And what's really unique about it is it created a secondary market for income. Now, regardless if you believe in the crypto hype or not, this is just the way that we get the source. We can convert that bitcoin into fiat at the end of the year, which we launched a fund for. And so the reason I'm bullish on natural gas is because I have two buyers for it. Some of them, I have pipelines, which is what we initially target. But I can make more money than the market can pay me from a pipeline. You see, natural gas is about 270 to $3, depending on who buys it. There's a transport cost. Like you got to pay the pipelines to use their pipes. The midstream company we talked about. But if I can create electricity and I'm mining bitcoin, and I'm making a certain amount of bitcoin every single day in my cracking wallet. If you break down the numbers, I'm getting almost $6 for my natural gas compared to $2 less transport. I'm making 300% more profit off running it off my bitcoin miners than this.
- [64:30]
Josh
Okay, so one thing that I'm curious about is you said that you love natural gas because you know it. But if you go back to when you were, you had lost everything when you just got started within the oil and gas industry, I feel like most people would go back to what made them all the money. Like, I'm just curious, why did you actually go back into the oil and gas business instead of just going back to your roots of what made you your millions in the first place?
- [64:52]
Brent Franklin
Yeah, so I was literally doing real estate and I started lending the guy money for real estate. I started lending this guy money for real estate and it just so happened he was in natural gas. It was kind of like, you know, it just popped up. And I saw opportunity. What does any entrepreneur or venture capitalist do, especially you know, one that's always going down rabbit holes of curiosity, is I saw an opportunity to put money into something and to generate a return, which is what investing is. And so I, I started investing. I, I didn't really have a plan to go to oil. I like the fact of what due diligence I did do. I could deduct it. Right. So I got the tax write offs against my money that I was making and then I, I thought I was getting cash flow.
- [65:33]
James
But from, from, from the investor standpoint, what is the range of returns like for people that don't know? Right. Because you know, the average, you know, S and P. Right. Could do up to 17% or you know, what 5 to 7, you know, real estate's, you know, 7 to 11% and like a good cash on cash returns. What, what are, what's like a reasonable, you know, expected return rate in oil and gas?
- [65:53]
Brent Franklin
Yeah. So something that, I think that is a huge misconception about oil and gas returns is how much you can actually make. Right. When somebody sees an abnormal return, which I think that a really good return on any stable investment is between 10 and 16%. After 16, I don't think people get any more excited of 18 or 20 after 16. And I think that anything higher than that that's projected most investors that don't understand oil and gas or how it works, cause bullshit. So oil and gas can produce returns depending on where you invest, depending on in ways that you've never seen. And so let me give you an example. Let's say that we have an area where 3D seismic has been identified and we've located an oil and gas pocket. It's never been tapped. It's been down there millions of years and it's packed. Let's Say that it cost us a million dollars to go in there and put a well in the ground, right? We go out there and we drill that well and we put it in the ground. It's realistic that that well can make home hundreds of barrels of oil a day, especially if it's never been touched. Okay? And it can make a lot of natural gas. If you just did some super, super simple math, right, let's use a low oil price, $50 a barrel. If we make 100 barrels a day at $50 a barrel, that's $5,000 gross revenue for a day, right? Let's say that we have a really good lease and we give our mineral owner 20%. That leaves us $4,000 left over. And let's say our expenses are 1,000 a day, right? That is $3,000 a day. Times that by 30, that's $90,000 net cash flow for the month. Where can you buy a million dollar house, deduct the investment and make $90,000 in cash flow and something that could potentially last for 20 or 30 years. Granted, these are depleting resources and what a well initially comes on at usually doesn't last forever, but a lot of them do. And depending on how you pull that well or choke that well back, all the returns are going to vary. It doesn't matter. There is no set. Hey, it can make this or it can make that. You have to look at some of the data. And if you're not an oil and gas expert, you have to have somebody that is everything that's on the Internet for real estate today is on what mls. You can look at the comps, days on market, what it rented for, rent rolls, whatever. You know, there's data that you can get. Oil and gas wells are no different. You want to look at what formation you have, the potential of the size of the reservoir. Instead of an appraisal on a house, you get what's called a reserve report on there that somebody goes in and tells you they believe you can extract 20% of 100,000 barrels. They give you what they believe you can recover. And so there's no real way to tell you what you're going to get or not get in an oil and gas well. What you have to do is you have to look at data. And you not being an oil and gas expert, no offense, somebody needs to be on your side. Do you want the person that's an industry expert that's selling you an asset and promising you the world and all these benefits to give you the information or do you want somebody that's putting their money in side by side, that has their ass and their reputation on the line and their capital that's going in, that has the industry experts, experts that are looking out for our investments?
- [69:07]
James
It's the number one thing when you're looking to go into a deal. You want to ask that person raising the money, how much you put into the deal, man.
- [69:13]
Brent Franklin
And what you're going to get from these promoters is they're not because they're all worried about just making it. A lot of people are going to hate us for this podcast because we're going to explain exactly how oil and gas has always been done and the reason it doesn't traditionally work and why so many investors have a bad taste in their mouth. But if you talk to our partners, they'll tell you, would you rather try it on yourself? Would you rather try it on your own or would you rather do it with somebody? Think about this. If we're going to go skydiving today and you've never been, are you going to go just get in the plane and jump out of the plane on your own? No, you're going to want somebody strapped to your back. But what if somebody's getting paid for you to jump out of that plane and get to the ground? Right? They're going to tell you, man, just pull the cord, watch this video, you'll be all right. Nobody ever gets hurt. You know, they lived, whatever. I want somebody strapped to my back, at least until I get the hang of it. Then I might go try it on my own. But oil and gas is no different. We co invest with our partners and we have industry experts that have been in there. Everybody's bringing something to the table. And our business model is an economies of scale. It's a we win, you win situation. The biggest risk you take in oil and gas is losing your capital and most importantly, never getting return of investment. And this is where people that are non industry players don't understand. They see that first big check and they get that dopamine. I mean, imagine you gave me a hundred grand and I wire you back 23 or $24,000. The first month you're going to say, holy shit, guys, we are never doing the podcast again. Screw social media. We're cash flowing. We're oil filled trash. Oil filled cash. Call everybody, call them right now, and we got to deduct it. And then the next month it's 21,000. You're like, hey, it's a little bit lower. No big Deal. And then all of a sudden, the next month, it goes to 27,000, y'. All. There it is, there it is. Big money. And then also the next month, it's like you owe a thousand bucks. You're like the, hey, Brent, is everything okay? Like, what's going on? This is the part that people don't understand. It's not a rental property. You don't got a set amount of rent. You're producing a commodity out of the ground. That commodity has to get sold. You have market volatility. How much does it cost? What if something breaks? What if you make oil and gas, make the product, and then it costs too much money because you needed a repair, you got a rental property, and you need a roof. So, I mean, we could go down, you know, a lot of these rabbit holes.
- [71:21]
Jack
But, you know, Brett, I like how you break it down for, like, the average person and get them excited to get into the oil and gas space. And it was like we were saying earlier, when you think of McDonald's, they're not in the hamburger business. They're in the real estate business. And you even said yourself, I'm not necessarily in the oil and gas business. I'm in the sales and marketing business. Break that down. How have you been able to, from a sales and marketing perspective? What's some of the game of how you've been able to take what you've done and bring it to the public and being able to explain this is how you can get in on this industry?
- [71:50]
Brent Franklin
Sure. So I don't know if I'd word it that I'm exactly in the sales and marketing business. What I'm in is I'm in the problem solving business and the connectors business. Right. I connect people who have capital to opportunities that they can't understand. And what I've done is I've simplified the process for people to be able to. To invest. And so what I've really learned is the old school way of oil and gas is broken. You've got people that been in oil fields that can't make their project investable. They don't know how to market to people. They don't know how, you know, to get people to invest in it. They don't know how to bridge that gap. And whenever I realized that I was the one that could do that, I know the investment side. I know what it's like to raise capital. I know securities laws. I know what forms and proper things need to be filed. And I know who's a good investor and who's not a good investor. I can tell the personality. Just because somebody has money doesn't mean they're a good investor, you know, so you have to thoroughly vet, you have to make sure you stay compliant with all the filings. Whereas your typical oil and gas guy, they don't give a shit where they get money from. So whenever I started and I dived in and I really realized that I could explain this in a way where I'm not selling it, but I'm actually wanting to buy it, and I could create win win scenarios for everybody involved. This is where our business started getting legs. People love the idea of oil and gas. I mean, how exciting was it today? I saw you out there on the rig. I mean, look like if this stuff doesn't work out, I got a spot for you. You probably don't make it long, but you know, it. You know, poor things, all wore out. You know, he's had a hell of a day. So people yelling, cussing, you know, it.
- [73:24]
James
It'S a good time.
- [73:25]
Brent Franklin
Hey, it makes you respect putting gas in the car, huh?
- [73:27]
James
100%.
- [73:27]
Brent Franklin
Hey, you see him in a Tesla? Stop following. No, I'm kidding, I'm kidding. So we are in the connecting business. We look for people that are of a certain net worth that we know can handle this type of project. And we don't just do oil, by the way, we did this in real estate. People that are putting their money in things, what I tell you, they want to know how they're getting return of investment. They want to know what are the potential returns. The smart ones want to know what's my risk. And if I talk to anybody, I tell them, hey, the biggest risk is you lose all your fucking money. I mean, that's. What other risk do you have than that? And that's the risk in anything. All investments carry risk. And what our goal is is not to mitigate risk, it's to mitigate loss. We don't want people to lose. From the time that somebody writes you a check for an investment to the time that you get them a return, I mean, you're on the clock. Once that money leaves their account, it better be performing better than what they're doing. And you better have clear, concise, accurate information. And this is what oil companies don't understand. Oil companies are typically not investors. They're just people that have an idea and they know how to extract it. So when we were able to come in and say, let's use pain points to get people interested because they're already interested and then the Landman series came out and people like, oh my God, I love oil. We said, what if we came in here, we solved the problem of traditional oil and gas investing. We created a model where these people aren't their own oil company, they're partnering with our company. We let them select what they go into because everybody has a different risk tolerance. Not one size shoe fits all. And so when you let people select what assets they want to go into and you simplify it, where the terms, the returns, the timelines and expectations are properly set, you leave people in control where they're getting to select but not manage. This is what really was the turning point of our investment model. And our partners love it. People can't invest in things they don't understand, simplify it and break it down. Well, what about all these old school oil and gas guys, these geologists? Let me tell you something, engineers, they're overly protective of anything that they touch. They build a bridge. Why? Because if they're wrong, somebody gets hurt, their career's over with. And oil and gas, it's either going to work or it's not. We're doing as much due diligence as possible, but we're not going to get hung up on some 90 year old person that's out there that's been doing this their entire career that had a bad experience. We're going to take true data, we're going to go to fields that are proven and we're going to do things that are not necessarily simple but are proven and we're going to follow the plan. And a lot of times we're just continuing development plans that were already put together. The oil's been identified, we know the people that have been out there, the, the land owners, the mineral owners, everybody is loving what we're doing and we're solving problems. Why do the oil companies love us? Well, we're bringing them capital and instead of them having to go get 75 investors and burning their self out trying to communicate with all these people, they just get one investor. So we show up with our company, we're their 1 investor, we're bringing them the money, we're bringing them the rigs, we're bringing them the crews, we have the systems, we have the software and we have the network. And they don't have to worry about trying to focus on explaining everything to us because we are hands on. And if we don't trust that oil company, but they got a good project, guess what? We move it to a third party operator where we can actually control who's managing it under our terms. So we're controlling everything. We're controlling who manages it, we're controlling how the purchase is done, we're controlling how much we paid, we're controlling what rigs go out there. And we're just making strategic decisions that overall win.
- [77:09]
James
Can you break that down? Because I think when I originally asked you about the vertical integration, we had got slightly.
- [77:15]
Brent Franklin
We were going adhd. We talked about.
- [77:17]
James
No, I love it though, because there's so much value packed in this. But can you. Can you talk about how right. The first play was you're an investor, then it was, okay, I'm going to kind of lease some of these wells and rigs. Can you just kind of break down to just step, just step by step, your kind of approach to owning, you know, all the vertical?
- [77:33]
Brent Franklin
Yeah. So remember I told you I bought that property with that picture of 3D seismic, and I went out there, I started drilling the wells, and the wells were successful. Well, the first well that I drilled, I got it on what's called a turnkey price. They gave me a price and they have to put the well into the ground. And as long as the well gets put into the ground, I owe them that money at the end. Well, what happened was, was natural gas went from $3 to $7. This happened. I'll show you the statements. And my cash flow in that Property went from 20 grand to 88 grand. It was like, that's how much commodity price can play a role in it. And when that happened, what do you think that that rig did? They jacked up the price, they doubled the price. All the prices of everything went up. Do you remember that Covid happened? Yeah. What happened? What happened during COVID The bit, the.
- [78:20]
James
Big C shot up like crazy.
- [78:22]
Brent Franklin
Cars went crazy. Everybody freaked out. Right. What do you think happened in the oil field?
- [78:27]
James
Who's controlling that? Is that the government? Is that like. Like, what is that dependent on, like.
- [78:31]
Brent Franklin
How big of a that was? Joe Biden? No, no. So, you know, we don't really know what's going on in the world. I mean, but.
- [78:39]
James
But it's safe to say that in this business, though, the overall global economy and US Government has a big role in determining, you know, the success of the oil industry.
- [78:48]
Brent Franklin
Oil went to negative 20 something dollars, negative 30 dollars. Could you imagine producing a product and having to pay to get rid of it? Like, the market crashed and people were freaking out. The price of pipe went up, the casing, the tubing things. People started stockpiling it's like, you know, the only thing that people were stockpiling more than toilet paper was freaking drilling casing. And they were jacking the prices up. And so everything was in short supply, short demand. So the price of everything went up. So those Wells that were 250 to $350,000 to drill turned into $700,000. Remember the conversation I told you about what would happen if you're in a neighborhood and houses went from 300 grand to 600 grand? Well, imagine that. They went from 300 grand to 600 grand, but it cost 800 grand to build the house. Would you still build them? Probably not. You're going to pay 800 grand to build a $600,000 house? That doesn't make sense, right? Well, imagine being in the middle of a neighborhood and having, you know, investors in that. What would you do? It's probably. I don't know. Right? Yeah. Well, that's what happened to us. We were in the middle of developing a field, and Covid hit. We were hitting on wells. Natural gas went up, so our cash flow went up, but so did the cost of everything. And that cost stayed high. And then that natural gas price came back and leveled out. So we went from 20 grand a month to $130,000 a month in cash flow. So I was just like, okay, let's just pay whatever. But what happens is those wells come on and they deplete. So we wrote it up, everybody got super excited, and then we wrote it down. And then it got to the point that that property started breaking even just a couple years later. And people freak out because they didn't understand. I ended up having to buy that property back from my partner. So it was a huge learning curve. So the point was that I said, I'm never going to have this shit happen again. So the guys that were out there drilling my wells, I asked them, I said, what do you guys make? Oh, you know, we make, you know, 12, $13 an hour. I said, you make $13 an hour out here? It's 103 degrees and the sun. How long you been with this company? Oh, you know, long time. I said, what if I went and bought one of these rigs? You know, like, I understand oil rig, you know, like, what if I went and bought one of these rigs and I'll find a good one and you guys can know. I said, what if we just partner together? And said, instead of trying to go out and drill for all these crazy customers, why don't we just drill gas Wells while the market is down and we can develop when the market's bad. Imagine being a builder back in 2008 and building stuff at low cost while everybody's freaking out. This is where real money is made is whenever the market is low, you buy. But most people are freaking out when the market is low and they sell. It's that emotional wave. Things are going up and people are getting excited. I don't want to miss this opportunity. And then it peaks and they're like, it's here. And then it dips down a little bit and they're like, oh, it's the temporary setback. And then it goes down a little bit more. I'm a long term investor. And then it tanks where they're starting to lose money. They're like, oh shit, you know, like. And then they get depressed. This is the market cycle every seven years. And there's emotional buyers and sellers. So for me, I got pissed off whenever I was drilling that my price went up. So I said, let me go buy this rig. Let me partner with the who, who can do what I need and get me the result. And so I found the guys and I said, hey, you guys take half the company, I'll go buy the rig. And we went out there, well, how am I going to get the money for a rig? Oil and gas equipment, buddy. You could depreciate it 100% against your active income. Another tax deductible investment 178k on the retired IRS code. And so I had my buddy that reached out, had a huge tax bill. One of my best friends, Nick Perry, he can attest to this, you know, don't know if you heard him, but he's on there. And he had this huge tax bill. And I said, hey bro, I said, why don't you buy this drilling rig for me, you know, and I'll give you a little royalty on it. So he bought that rig, he wrote it off. He went from having like a 5 or $600,000 tax bill to actually getting a return. He was just like, man, that's great, you know, and he had money sitting there. So he bought that first rig with us. We called it Sharkey. And that was the start. And we went in there, we refurbished it and we, we started waiting, but we ran below market value. And we were trying to get jobs, trying to get jobs. And we got a job here, got a job there. It was really slow. And I told my sales guys, I said, you guys have got to market. Nobody knows who we are. They don't know we got a great rig. They don't know we got great crews. You got to market. We started marketing, we started getting jobs.
- [82:56]
James
You were saying that sales makes millions.
- [82:58]
Brent Franklin
But bro, if you want to make millions, go to sales. If you want to be wealthy and make billions, be a good marketer. Marketing is everything. There's no budget for marketing. And you just have to make sure that your product is strong enough to justify not only the return on your marketing, but it's strong enough. If you sell a $99 course, it doesn't make sense to market $100,000 a right. But if you sell something that's 50 or 80 or 100 grand and you're only selling one or two a month and you could take three to five grand per closed deal and get it and you can sell 10 times more. What's your actual cash on cash return? Are you running KPIs? Are you tracking it? People aren't doing this these days. You know what they're willing to do? Bring me somebody and I'll give you a kickback. That's what all the lazy bastards out here are doing today that don't understand it. Bring me somebody, I'll toss your referral fee. Why the hell would you pay a referral? Be go direct to seller, man. Get seen by these people. Make them see your product, make them see your service, whatever the hell it is. I don't care if you sell Tupperware lids. Find somebody who's got, you know, Tupperware, you know, you gotta go. I tell people all the time, man, you gotta. It's just like fishing. You don't go out there and throw a worm in the middle of lake. You find the lure. That is for the proper fish. You find out what they bite and you use that lure and it might cost you a little bit more. But think about it. It's gonna cost you breaking off all the wrong shit. You can do marketing and it not work. Oh well, Brent, I ran a Facebook ad. Now sponsored nad. Nah, I didn't get anything. It's cuz you know what the fuck you're doing. You got to find who can get you the results. Ads do work. All marketing works, you know. So I think that people that aren't marketing are missing out on a ton.
- [84:35]
James
So I gotta ask you this because you know, oil and gas is definitely a boom bust business business. And we just interviewed a gentleman in Dallas the other day, Steve Hooten.
- [84:43]
Brent Franklin
Who? I saw that.
- [84:44]
James
You saw that one. Where in 2015, he went off to The Delaware Basin, you know, made 40 million bucks, you know, selling a bunch of oil minerals. What would be your advice to somebody, they've got some cash to the side to really go identify the right opportunities in this business. You mentioned, you showed us the technology in your office earlier, how it's tracking all the numbers. It's fascinating, right? Even I still can't completely, you know, understand it because it's not like the most clear business because there's so many different components. But your advice to somebody got, they got cash ready and maybe they want to go in for more of like they want to own the operation side of things, like to identify the right opportunities, the right places to go in and to potentially buy some, some rigs and wells, whatever it may be, to start striking some, the black gold, as they call it.
- [85:28]
Brent Franklin
All right, so this is, this is a great question. And so I'm going to touch base on a couple of key points that I think is going to be the absolute, absolute most gold of this podcast. Okay, so that guy, what he does, or what I believe he does, is he goes and actually buys the minerals below the property. And those mineral rights that are down there have oil and gas companies. If you own the minerals, you can lease out that where somebody's going and taking all of their risk, they're paying for all of the drilling and you're basically getting a risk free cash flow if they hit. So if you know where there's a bunch of oil and gas and you can buy those minerals prior to them drilling, once they put that well in there, you've got cash flow, your minerals skyrocket in value and it's almost, it's almost risk free for the mineral owner other than just waiting for somebody to pop off. What I do that's a little bit different is I'm on the extraction side. We do do minerals, but we do the extraction side. And the main reason for it is not just because of the major upside. You don't get the tax benefits that you get from buying minerals that you do for drilling. Whenever you buy that real estate, those minerals, or you buy a lease that's existing, you get to depreciate that over seven years. Okay. Whenever you actually go out and you're drilling the well, you have what's called IDCs and TDCs. And you might have seen this, you know, on the Internet, people say 100% IDC. People don't know what, what that means. An IDC is any of the cost that's incurred whenever drilling a well, whenever you're drilling, it's anything that you can't pick up of a tangible value and resell. So if I did five jumping jacks, would that be an IDC or a tdc? Can you pick up my jumping jack and sell it? Why? Because it's something that's been done. It's a service, right? Same thing for labor. Things that are Non recoverable, your TDCs are your tangible drilling cost. These are your pipes, your casings, your wellheads. Things that have a salvageable value that can be sold. And when a well gets drilled, depending on where it's at, 70 to 80% of the costs that go into a new well are intangible. You can't pick them up and resell it, especially if the well doesn't work out. Whereas the other 10, 20, 30% is tangible. Those are depreciated. And I'm sure you're familiar with the big beautiful bill and every said bonus depreciation is back, right? Well, bonus depreciation is what gives you the deduction on your tdc. So it was getting phased out where people could only take a small portion of that deduction on the tangible assets and depreciate it. But now it's 100%. So investors that are actually going in and drilling on the oil and gas side are getting to write off up to 100% of everything that they put in there. Now if there's a promote or a lease cost that's in there, that still gets depreciated. And by the way, I'm not a CPA or tax advice, but I know this industry and you know, you can get with Carlton Dennis on it, he is a tax expert, he can tell you all about this. But people don't know what's available to them. So my advice is if you're looking for tax benefits, you're going to want to go with companies that can drill wells. And by the way, I see a lot of companies that do sell working interest. There's a lot of great companies that are out there. You know, we're not out there, you know, trying to bash everybody. In oil and gas, we support the industry, we want everybody to drill. But there are a lot of out there that are structuring deals where people are never going to get the return of investment. You see these guys that are going out there, they're saying, hey, look at me, I'm buying this oil well in the back right here and it's stable cash flow. But what you're not seeing is, is those oil wells break consistently you need workover rigs, the lease, operating expenses. All they're seeing is that they can go in there, mark up the asset, make a huge rip off of it, and the investors don't make any profit until they get return of investment. And not to mention all those purchases are only depreciated. So you're not getting the tax benefits. If you look at oil and gas from an actual investment standpoint of investment, not just your cash on cash, which is the return of how much money you're getting. If you actually look at the IRR and the return of investment through all of the benefits, you take 100 grand, you put it into a well, let's say you get to write it off, right? Let's say you're a high income earner because you have to be accredited, you're saving 33 to 37%. That's 33 to $37,000 in tax savings right there. You would agree dollar save, dollar earn well. Let's say that you go and you drill a well and that well is going to take two years to pay out because you went conventional, you didn't go any of these big Wells. Well, that two year payout is based off that $100,000. What would it take in order for you to get to your payout? About 4,000 bucks a month. Right. That'd give you 48,000 a year times two. Right? Okay, so let's assume that you get a well that's on a two year payout, you're getting 100% of your money back. Technically, with the deduction, if you wanted to look at dollar for dollar of benefit to zero return of investment, you'd have 33 to 37,000 ROI from deduction. Then you make another, I don't know, 40 grand for the year. Dude, that's like a 70% like technical return on there. You're getting your money back quickly, whereas these other people are not giving that to you. Most people are using lower projected numbers. Hey, 8%, 10%, 12%, what happens when the well runs out three or four years later? You're giving them that 8 or 12%. How the hell do you get return of investment when there's no more production? And, but people are more likely to invest when they see that because the numbers are realistic. People that are going into oil and gas wells, if they're going into a drilling project, they should get their money back in about 24 months. Realistically. And conventional wells are, in my opinion, are going to have more ROI than unconventional wells. Your simple vertical wells versus the shell wells that hit 100% of the time because as well as come on like a freight train, they deplete down very quickly. And you might get your money back in two years, but it takes you 10 years to get two times your money. Whereas ours might take three or four years to get the money back. But you got a well that can go 20 or 30 years. Once you get return of investment, you truly have an asset that can provide cash flow in perpetuity for your family. And what's really unique about high income earners is most people right now that have big money, they're either in one of two phases. They're either in the phase where they're aggressively using their money to make money. And they've got a risk tolerance. They understand buying a house, fixing up a house and selling it for profit. They're capitalist. The people that want passive income are people that should be preserving their wealth. Passive investments suck. That's the truth of it all. The passive investment, slow, boring, long term appreciating real estate. They suck and they suck for a reason. It's supposed to be safe. Real estate is not safe. There's no such thing as a safe investment. In my eyes. Markets will always be going up and down. Well, they ain't making no more land. You know what they actually are. Go to fucking Dubai. They're making islands over there, right? They are making land. So this is 20, 25, right? This is a different market than anybody's ever seen. And if you're not with it, then you're going to get left behind. My vertical integration came from. We're going to control it. We're going to actively market to sellers. We're going to buy under leveraged properties that have value adds. We're going to go out there, we're going to structure win win scenarios for our partners. We're going to rush to get them return of investment. Now if I save you a shitload of money on taxes and I get you return of investment and you have an asset in perpetuity, I probably deserve something for my hard work. Would you agree?
- [92:52]
Josh
I would agree.
- [92:53]
Brent Franklin
Okay, so if I give you 90% or 100% of the cash flow until you get return on investment, you're not mad if I go take 20 or 30% on the back end and then when we sell that asset, you still get 70%, right? This is why people are investing with us. This is the model that's needed.
- [93:07]
Josh
So I'm curious, Brent, a big part of your success was vertical integration. You know, you're looking at all the ways that people are making money off of your business. They're jacking up prices and you're like, okay, how can I also own a part of that business and control that business? And so for other people who are growing their company and they're also seeing those similar problems where, you know, I have a construction business, but you know, the interior design man, I'm getting ripped off on that every time I'm doing a new business build. When someone is looking to vertically integrate, should they look to partner with someone who's maybe hungry and is already in the industry or should they look to just maybe buy an existing business?
- [93:44]
Brent Franklin
Man, that is such a great question. Let me tell you something, just like I stated, you know, before in the beginning, good talent acquisition. When people invest in oil and gas with us, they're not investing in oil and gas, they're investing in me. They're coming in because they believe in you. Whenever you want vertical integration in your company, anybody can go out and buy an old rust bucket drilling rig, okay? You're investing in the team. You have to find operators, operators. Not just oil and gas operators, operators and businesses. You got to find people that you can trust, that are hungry, that are willing to work and that can do forward thinking. So if you're going to vertically integrate, the best thing to do is find a business that you like, find a way, find who is going to run that business for you and just make sure it's an economies of scale. People don't want to not have a sky's the limit opportunity. You have to make it where it's incentivizing for them to be able to make more as you do better. I always say it's better to have, you know, 50% of a watermelon than 100% of a grape. Especially in partners. If you find people and rocket fuel, the book is going to help you with this. If you're the integrator or the capital guy and they're the visionary, you got to get those two personalities together and come up with a plan. You got to plan the work and work the plan. And once you do this, this is going to really be the game changer. And by the way, you don't always want to vertically integrate. There are aspects of the oil and gas industry that I'm never going to own just because the liability that comes with them and the profitability is not there. One of them is fracking. You might have heard that term. A lot of people don't know What?
- [95:24]
James
Fracking is offshore drilling, right?
- [95:26]
Brent Franklin
No, bro. See, this is the misconceptions everybody. They don't know what the fracking is. And I will explain it to you. It is so easy, okay? Whenever you drill a well, you're going through different layers of formation, okay? You've got sand, dirt, rock, shell. Okay? If I go out onto the road right now and I dump water onto the, onto the cement, what's going to happen with that water eventually, right? Or it's going to end up seeping in because cement is porous, right? Rocks are porous. What happens if I go to the beach and I dump water on the beach? Same thing, really. How long is it going to take? It's going to go down to the, it's going to go quick, right? Because it has permeability and it has porosity, okay? The, the size of the pores it can flow through. So what happens is, is there is large deposits of oil and gas that is trapped and type limestones and tight shale formations and it's in there. And so what we do is we can't get the oil to flow to the well bore very freely because it's real tight. So fracking is the process of taking high horsepower pumps on surface, injecting it down the well at a fast rate and using the water to go through the natural fractures of the earth. And it breaks open the earth and what it does is it kind of lifts open the earth with that fluid and after they open it up with the water, they chase it with sand and they pack it full of sand. And what happens is, is that water, oil and gas can flow through those fractures and flow through that sand a lot more freely, getting it to the wellbore, giving you increased production rates and giving you a larger area for depletion. So these big wells that they're doing these huge fracs on, they're going into these huge blankets of shell and they're drilling in and they're drilling over and they're, they're perforating and they're fracking all these stages and they're depleting a shitload of oil really, really quickly. And then whenever it's gone, it's gone. So that is fracking. It's no different than if we were to take a bag and hook a shop vac up to it and set a piece of plywood on top. If I started filling that bag up with water, what would happen? I'd lift up on that plywood, right? And if I take that one water off, what would happen I would sit back down. But if I fill it up with water and sand and I take the water off, I'd prop up. That is what fracking is. It's where we use sand at high rates to frack and to prop open the earth to allow water, oil and gas to float our wellbore more freely. That's fracking. And the people don't like it because sometimes behind that piece of pipe where you drill, there's cement behind there and sometimes that frack will come around and it will come up that cement and it'll go and get in people's fresh water. That's why they're up there in North Dakota like hey, check out my water faucet, it's on fire. Well, first of all, there's natural gas all over. There's you know, 800 BTU gas at shallow zones, so they might have drilled through that. But also if people over frack zones, what will happen is, is they'll go into that shell and they might frack into a zone where that water travels and it goes up into fresh water and it goes up into other reservoirs and you can just things up. And this is why people don't like it because people don't always do it properly. And any oil and gas guy, dude, comment below because you know exactly what the I'm talking about. This is exactly what fracking is and it's dumbed down. You're going to get your, your 100 year old engineer that says now there's so much more to that. But anybody that you can understand what I'm talking about.
- [98:41]
James
But you know, needless to say I'm hearing this, that we need to start buying some oil wells with you brother.
- [98:47]
Brent Franklin
Are you accredited? Listen man, you don't need to go buy an oil well but you know there are opportunities for you to co invest and there's a lot of opportunities for people to co invest. You know one thing that I, I really wanted to touch base on right now that you know, we can wrap this up. I know we probably went over on time a little bit, but hell, if you're, if you're this far along in it, you know, this is not about just investments, okay? Oil and gas is not for everyone. You do have to have a risk tolerance for it. You have to really figure out who you're going to partner with. There are great oil and gas companies out there, there are great promoter companies out there. There are people that do perform and people that are happy. You know, we don't have a perfect Track record. We haven't hit on every well that we hit, you know, but we have a very good track record of making people money, getting them the return of investment. And at the end of the day, what I tell you, you're investing in people. If somebody doesn't pay us, our team's on the phone. If something goes wrong with the well, we're out there getting it fixed right now. This is super, super important right now. The oil field service companies, the people that do the work, the drilling contractors, the workover companies, they are struggling to get capital. You can't just walk into Chase bank or Wells Fargo and say, hey, I want to go buy a drilling rig and get a loan like you could, you know, post 2008. Right now there are people where insurance cost and inflation is a real deal. The oil and gas service industry and anybody that's in it from this right now will tell you I hope you make a real out of this. The oil and gas service companies right now are dying off because of lack of capital. They can't go to the bank, they can't get traditional financing. The companies that do finance charge them so much money. You go buy a $5 million rig and they give you a five year note on it at 18%. You can't afford a two or three hundred thousand dollars a month note. There's business to make crazy returns, but they want their money back because the volatility. So what we did was we created an equipment fund where we're buying it all cash, we're deducting it against our income and we're giving our partners a fixed return plus a profit split. And we are dry leasing these pieces of equipment out to good people. So you talked about vertical integration. We found great companies that been in business for a long time, they're debt free, they just have shitty equipment. We're providing them the equipment at low cost for fixed returns. And we own the equipment, so we have the vault and it's got equity in it. So we're not just buying $10 million brand new rigs, we're using our fix and flip model. We're creating equity and value. And we have a company called Rise Energy Group that's getting ready to launch where we're going to sell off some of our common stock to people. And instead of somebody going and investing in oil well or investing in an oil rig, they can actually purchase units directly into our company and they can get the combination of every single service company that we're getting to wrap up. We have so many of these older guys and older baby boomers that are ready to get out of the industry and they don't have an exit strategy. One of the biggest pieces about oil and gas service companies is everybody has a dream of getting bought out. They all want to go and sell to the majors. The majors right now are working with other majors and their costs are so high that it's becoming non economical for their wells. So there's nobody really doing what we're doing. We're going after good equipment with debt free companies. We're getting them to sell or finance us their business. We're giving them some stock so they have upside because they want to leave their family something and we're getting to take over all their contracts. So whenever I tell you that rise is literally going to control the smaller EMP side of Texas. Everybody in the oil and gas industry knows that we're coming and they're about to see it unfold heavily, especially at the end of this year.
- [102:24]
James
I love it. My man. We like to end these off with two quick questions in one sentence. Your last message to the younger generation.
- [102:32]
Brent Franklin
I'm gonna take a sip of water on this one because it'll be, it'll be powerful. So my last message to the younger generation and I hope that they literally just take this and run with it. You come across social media all the time and you see people that you like and you follow and those are essentially your heroes, right? They see people. You're somebody's hero, bro. Somebody. Like when I met you today, I got chills. I was like, man, look at this cat, you know, like here I'm about to work his ass off. So one of the things that I think is people aren't always who they perceive to be on social media, okay? The world is so full of negative negativity right now. And it's real easy for somebody to discourage you and talk you out of going after what you believe in. Okay? Don't give up. You're going to see every single one of the successful people out there tell you the good stories. Hey man, I got the Rollie, I got the car. Money comes. Do the right thing. You don't have to lie. If you want to make money, search for problems and provide the solution from them and invest in the right people. If you're in that bad relationship, you got that bad girlfriend, that bad boyfriend, you know, you're, you're around people that are draining your energy, you got to just rip the band aid off and you got to get okay being alone. Go For a walk. There was so much time that I wasn't okay being alone by myself on the entrepreneurial journey. It is a lonely fucking ride. Be prepared to be tough. And if you're not cut out for it, recognize that early on when you make mistakes, rip the band aid off. The faster that you can stop something that's not working, the better off you are. Things aren't going to always work out. Trial and error, trial and error, trial and error. And if you want to know the truth, a smart man will learn from his mistakes. A brilliant man is going to learn from another man's mistakes. Anything that you want to learn, go find out who did it, find out how they did it, and just do it the same way. Add your twist, and always be ahead of the game. Do not be afraid to take risk. Do not fall in love with money. Learn how to take that money and plant it. It's just like planting a tree. You go out and you plant 10 seeds. It didn't grow. It didn't look like the packet. Everybody told you where to plant it. One grew and it made a little bit of fruit. Your investments and your money are the same. Plant money, put it everywhere. High risk, high reward. You know, people always tell you, hey, you know, you, you, you preserve money by taking small risk with large amounts of money. You've just got to plant that. If you don't have $10 million in the bank, you don't have anything to lose other than your time. So, you know, if you're starting from zero and you've lost hope and you're not sure on where to begin, you've had, you know, bad things happen, your job's not going right. Just know that sometimes those setbacks is God preparing you to go exactly where he wants you? And even a tragedy can sometimes be a blessing. Whenever I lost that money in oil and gas, dude, my whole goal when I started my business was to make $150,000 a year. I'm making more than that a week right now at, you know, 35 years old.
- [105:40]
James
What is the most amount of money you made in a year?
- [105:44]
Brent Franklin
Tens of millions, bro. And, and we're this year we're on track. I mean, we're, we're, we're pushing nine figures years, so we're doing a lot. But I don't, I don't count how much I make. Anybody can gross money. I count how much I keep. And you know, a lot of people, they chase getting rich, right? What does rich mean to you? To me, rich means an abundance of money or possessions. What you're really chasing is you're chasing wealth. Wealth is an abundance of everything. It's abundance of money, love, peace, health, possessions, things that people don't think about. There's so many people that are going to go through their entire life chasing money and they're not even going to have an abundance of it. They're going to do things, they're going to beat people out of things, they're going to lie, they're going to be manipulative, they're not going to really do it the right way and they're not going to give a shit because they got a Rolex and they got a Ferrari. Get away from buying the, you don't need it. Until your cash flow can buy the things that you want, you don't need that. And all you're going to do is attract all the wrong people. You know, I used to wear, you know, all that stuff. I still like my watch and stuff. But dude, this is Target, you know, this is my friend's business. I stuck with him. You know, I got my embroidery on my 30 shirt. I don't give a about that. People that are impressed by materialistic things, you know, they're going to fall off eventually. You know, find people that support you. Find people that believe in you. Because at the end of the day, the best investment you're ever going to make is self. And I can't preach that enough. So I hope that you find the courage to get out there and build that business, you know, and do not be afraid to take risks, you know, calculate it. Don't believe what everybody's going to tell you. People are going to feed you a bunch of bullshit. Nobody's coming to save you. You've heard that a million times. That's the truth. The only person that's going to look out for you is you and God. And remember, God is the only person that can judge you because he's been the only person there with you since day one.
- [107:26]
Jack
Yes, sir. Well, at 35, you've had quite the journey going from driller to lawn care to construction to real estate, and now in the natural gas business. But when it's all said and done, how do you want to be remembered.
- [107:41]
Brent Franklin
Man? Whenever I sell this company and I exit, which, you know, I could retire right now, I'm going to do what fulfills me. And you know, I believe that money empowers you to be more of what you already were if you were, you know, a douche. Whenever you didn't have Any money, you're gonna be a douche. When you get a lot of money, it's gonna make you a bigger one. Me, I've always been a giver. That's my love language. So, you know, I spent a lot of time in other countries, and I really feel my most fulfilling, you know, points in my life whenever I'm giving back and I'm helping people, not just giving them money, but actually giving them skill sets to be able to provide and changing the trajectory of their future. So I want to be remembered as the guy that helped everybody who wanted it, not the people that, you know, just want to take advantage of it. I want people to sit down and, you know, you're always going to have haters regardless, just because there's just negative people. But, you know, I want to teach people to fish. I want to show people how to make money that they're not stuck. I just want to be remembered as that guy where people. I don't even need them to say anything. I just want to be like, Brent, that motherfucker. You know, that's. That. That's kind of how I think I'm going to go out.
- [108:47]
James
I love it. Well, guys, that's a wrap on this episode today. Be sure to like and subscribe for amazing content. That was a straight masterclass right there. And every week we're going around the world to bring you guys, the biggest business owners in the world. Brent, what's your Instagram? So everybody can tap in with you?
- [108:59]
Brent Franklin
Yeah. If you want to follow along, I post, you know, a lot of stuff. You know, not just oil and gas, but just, you know, life lessons. And I'm going to be. I'm going to be pursuing it a lot harder. You know, my Instagram is @RealMillion Dollar Closer. And it was funny how I got that name because I was broke as when I read it, I said, you know, I'll be a millionaire one day. And, you know, I kind of just manifested it. So I put that on there. And if you go, I actually have my entire journey on there. I know people delete their stuff, things that they're not proud of. I mean, you can go back, see me passed out on the couch drinking a beer a couple years ago before I got an oil field. You can see my landscape journey. I. I think that your social media is, you know, it's your business card, but most importantly, it's your story. So I want people to see, like, hey, this guy didn't. Didn't really come from it. And it's not for bragging. I just hope it gives somebody motivation that no matter what your circumstances are, they don't define what you can do tomorrow in your future.
- [109:47]
James
I love it. So we're gonna put the link down there for Brent's Instagram as well as to his company for you guys to check it out as well as we're also gonna put the link down to the number one entrepreneur community in the entire world, the school of mentors. With over 5,000 members and every single week, we give you guys direct access to the multimillionaires and billionaires that we interview on this channel where you ask your questions to them, they mentor you and give you the blueprint that they took to build multi million dollar businesses. So we can't wait to see you on the inside. With that being said, we'll see you in the next episode.
- [110:15]
Brent Franklin
I'm gonna leave it with one thing for you, okay? If you're sitting there online and you're following people, you know, fallen school of hard knocks, whoever your mentor is, One of the biggest mistakes that I made was not being in the right rooms. Whenever I started learning about real estate and, you know, seeing all these events going on and I looked down, it was 5,000, 10,000 a ticket. I had the money, I said, I'm not going to go pay $10,000 and I can outclose everybody in this room. That was one of the biggest mistakes I ever made. Whenever you see an opportunity to get in a room with like minded people, regardless of what it is, you don't pay money for the education. You pay money for the circle. If I'm sitting in a room, that's $10,000, I want to be sitting in the room with the same person that paid the same $10,000 out of their own pocket. You got to pay to play in today's market. And the faster you recognize that, the better off you are. So if you see these little courses or things like that, don't ever go in there and think that you're going to come out with 100% of all the knowledge and it's just going to be a done for you model, dude. It's going to cost you millions of dollars to get to where you want to be by the time it's said and done with. The idea is, do you want to pay it and get there quicker or do you want it to be through hard lessons and learning? So if you see a group that you can pay a hundred, whatever your budget is, the best thing you can do is save up invest in yourself, get in those groups and just network your ass off with the like minded people. Because one relationship is going to change your life just like it did mine. And hopefully like it does yours.
- [111:44]
James
You heard it from the man himself. With that being said, we'll see you in the next episode.
- [111:47]
Brent Franklin
Cheers.