A (3:16)
Enjoy. Everybody's favorite person, Brandon. Turn, Check, check. Hey, everybody. Yeah. Keep it going. Come on, come on. Just kidding, just kidding. All right, sit down, sit down. Wow, this is cool. I haven't seen the stage yet, like, from this angle. This is great. Hi. Wow. This is absolutely incredible. Thank you guys for being here. Thanks for being part of, like, my vision. Like, I was just talking to, like, the team in the back and I was like, it's wild when you just have, like, an idea, like years ago and then you, like, stand on stage and see it. So this could not be possible without you. So thank you very much. This is awesome. How many were here last year for the REI Summit? A Year ago. All right, so some of you. So if you remember, last year, we actually had. I think it was on a Saturday, Sunday. And so Sunday morning, we actually had a church service, which was kind of fun. I actually played music with my wife. We led worship. And then we had Cam Cathcart doing a sermon, I guess you'd call it. It was awesome. Right? Anybody there for that? That was fun. All right, well, this week, this year, we're not on a Sunday, so we didn't do church. But I'm taking you guys to church this morning because I'm going to talk a little bit about an actual story from the Bible. But don't worry, this is not a. This is not a religious conversation. I just love this metaphor. So I'm going to tell a story today. Let me see if these slides work the way that I want them to. There we go. Okay. All right. So we're going to go way back. Way back. Thousands and thousands of years ago. I mean, and by the way, if you're not personal of faith, that's totally fine. I'm just telling you a story. It doesn't matter if this is real, doesn't matter if this is made up. It's just I'm using this as context. And if you are a, you know, Bible believing, you know, Christian or other faith that believes in the Old Testament, I also realize this is not what the passage is about. I'm just using this as a metaphor. So please don't give me a Bible lashing later. Be like, that's not what that's about. I just love this metaphor. All right, so here we go. Is that cool? Are we all good? Nobody's angry with me. Okay, good. So I love this story. We're gonna talk about. Let's go way back, there was a guy named, like, Abraham. He was like the very first person in the Jewish religion or the Jewish culture after Abraham. He had a son like Isaac. And then Isaac had a guy named Jacob. Jacob had 12 sons. You've heard that story, right? Anybody seen the musical of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat? Anybody ever been in that musical? I have there. We got a few. Yeah, that's right. All right, so there's like the 12. You know, the 12. You should watch the movie. Right. By the way, like, Donny Osmond is phenomenal. He's great. So the people, they're living in kind of this, like, beautiful area on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. And the Jewish, I guess, tribe just starts getting bigger and bigger when you have 12 kids that just gets, well, 12 sons and then some daughters. It just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. Pretty soon there's a hole, a decent amount of them. I think there was like actually like 70 when they're in that area and they actually go down, at some point they go down to Egypt because they're out of food. So they're, they're super happy. In the 70 people that are there, roughly, they run out of food and have to go down to Egypt to find some because of this famine. Now the metaphor I want to talk about today is this idea of, I call it braving the wilderness, this exodus, because I'm like pulling in a biblical name, the exodus from slavery to freedom. And so what we're paralleling here today is this idea of the walk of an entrepreneur. From what we'll call slavery to a 9 to 5, to your bad habits, to the life that you once lived into a life of freedom, whether that's financial freedom or freedom in any other way. So we're talking about this, this journey. And the reason I think this is helpful for a room like this is you guys saw the hands raised a little bit ago and people standing there are complete people, people who are brand new here, like they're just looking for their first deal. And then there are people here who've got 30 years experience. So how do I talk and try to like help people on that whole spectrum of the journey? We have people who are already in the promised land, they're already in there hanging out. And we got people who are just, you know, stuck making bricks in Egypt. And we're like, how do I help the whole thing? And I think the way I do it is by telling the whole story, the whole arc of what I see entrepreneurs have to go through. And so that's what we're doing today. So to begin with this idea, if I go back a slide, at some point when we're young, usually before we leave our parents house, we are happy, safe really in freedom. Most of us start life in freedom. I believe that we're born into that where we just generally have freedom. Like our parents take care of things for us. We don't worry about bills, we don't worry about all the drama. We don't worry. This is. Life is fairly fun and free. Anybody have any like 2am Nights at Taco Bell? Like when you're like in high school? Like, it's just, you could do that kind of stuff, right? Because you're free. And so what we're really trying to do as entrepreneurs and as real estate investors is just get back to that state that we were at when we were kids. We just want to be back in that freedom where we can just do what we want, when we want, how we want, when we want, with whoever we want. Right. So how do we get there? Well, the first thing, why do we sell ourselves into slavery? Why do we go and grow up? Well, because we have a famine. We have to. We can't pay the bills without it. And so we're told the best way to be able to survive is to go down to Egypt and go sell yourself into slavery. And I'm not even saying it's a bad thing. We all have to. You have, you have to be able to make money. When famine hits, you gotta be able to make money. And that's what happened to the Israelites. They go down there and they're living and they're, they're fine at first, but over the years, over a 400 year period I think it was, they get enslaved. And nobody chooses to get enslaved. Right? We don't choose and say, hey, I'm gonna go and, you know, work for the next 60 years of my life at this job I don't like, just because that sounds fun. We do it because we have to, and we take a job and then we take another job. But what do we all do? Maybe not all, but most of us do, is we buy a little bit and we get that job and we buy a little bit nicer house and a little bit of a nicer car and we upgrade our life. Do you remember, like, when you were like, I'll say my story and see if it resonates with you. When I was 21, I set that goal of I'm gonna use real estate to retire someday. And I said, if I can just get $3,000 a month, I would be the richest person I know and I would retire and be done forever. Like that was what I wanted. Today I spend $3,000 a month on coffee. Not quite, but it's pretty bad. And so we increase our expenses and we buy nicer stuff and we get the second car and at some point we maybe get married and then we have more money, so we spend even more. We buy an even bigger house and a better house and nicer clothes and better vacations. And then maybe you have a kid and maybe one of the spouses stays home. And all of a sudden now it's real tight and now we cannot leave. We can't train that, we can't change our lifestyle anymore. We can't just go back to the Taco Bell at 2am like, parents aren't going to take care of us. So we are just stuck. Anybody ever been there before? Just stuck, like in that spot. I've been there. I'm just like, this sucks. Like, I have to work. I can't just not work. I have to. And maybe it doesn't feel quite like making bricks in slavery, but it doesn't feel fun. I can't just leave. I can't just. If I want to go spend the day with my kid, I can't just go. I got a boss. I have somebody else telling me what to do. So we want to be able to get out of that. So the, the, the Israelites also wanted to get out of that. So for hundreds of years they were stuck in there, multiplying more and more of them till there's millions of them just hanging out there, working hard, trying to make these bricks, trying to build all this cool stuff for the Egyptians. They're building somebody else's empire. How many of you have spent some time building somebody else's empire? How many of you are doing it right now? Again, it's fine. You can do that. Like, it's fine. But how many of you want to spend the rest of your life building somebody else's empire? Me neither. And so we need to find a way out of that. How do we get out of Egypt and into the promised land? Well, what happened in this story is a man is born. And you probably heard the story, you remember the old Charleston Heston movie where this baby's born. He ends up getting put in the palace and basically gets raised as an Egyptian. His name is Moses. You've all heard Moses. So Moses is actually a Hebrew. He's actually an Israelite, and he's raised as a prince of Egypt. Anybody seen that movie Prince of Egypt? It's a great one. So he's raised in the palace and one day he realizes, like, that he's actually a Hebrew. And he sees the plight, like, the problem. He's made aware, like, oh, oh, now I see, like, I've been living in the Matrix and now I see what things really are. And that's kind of the start, right, of freedom is to recognize, oh, this is not right. This is not what things are supposed to be like. Do you remember that moment for you. How many of you guys remember that moment where you're like, oh, this is not what it's supposed to be? How many was reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad? Yeah, Rich dad, poor dad did it for a lot of us. Like, you read it and you're like, oh man, Like I've been in the Matrix and all of a sudden I see something else. That's what happened to Moses. He's like, oh no. Like, this is not right. So he's like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm going to help, I'm going to get out. I'm going to get my people out. I'm going to get us, our people and we're going to go find freedom. So when we do that, when we encounter that, like, I'll tell you my story. The first thing I did is I think I read Four Hour Work Week. Right? Right. You know, I started doing some real estate, but then I read Four Work Week and I'm like, I'm going to build an online business. So I started building some random, like wooden sunglasses business and some others just random stuff. And on this quest, maybe you've done something like go join, I don't know, Amway. I don't want to throw it on Amway. I'm sure it's fine. But you know, you find something, maybe it's a multi level marketing thing. Maybe it's some get rich quick scheme. Maybe you saw some video online and you got suckered in. And we make maybe some mistakes on that first venture out into freedom. Anybody do that? Make a mistake on your venture into financial freedom? Yeah, maybe you bought a house that you thought were gonna, is gonna do really, really good. You got excited, you bought this house and you lost money on it. I've been there. It sucks. We make mistakes. Moses did the exact same thing. So Moses over here, he says, you know, I'm going to help my people. So he goes out there and he just like murders a dude. Anybody do that? No. Okay, so Moses makes a mistake, he goes out there and murders it. Maybe he maybe murders a strong word, but he sees him beating up one of his Hebrew brothers and he's like, stop it. Boom. And he apparently didn't know his, how hard his punch was. And he kills the guy and he's like, oh, I gotta hide this thing. He's gonna bury him in the sand. And of course somebody sees him. It's hard to hide that stuff. Right? So hopefully your mistake was not as bad as the mistake that Moses made. But he still made a mistake. He got screwed up. And what happens when we screw up on the journey to freedom? Is that it? It wounds us. And it says, maybe this isn't true. Like Maybe I'm not worthy of this. Maybe I don't deserve freedom. Maybe I'm not gonna, like. It's just not gonna work out. I'm gonna give up. The fear sets in, right? Because you tried it. Like, you had the belief, you saw that you were in the Matrix, you wanted to pull yourself out, and so you tried it and it failed. And maybe people around you were also saying, see, see, I told you that. You know, Uncle Jerry, he lost money in real estate, too, and so did you. Like, it's a bad idea. Go back to work. That's what most people do. That's what Moses did. He goes back to work. Now, he couldn't keep working there, so he actually flees. He runs away. And he runs like hundreds of miles away out in the wilderness, and he goes and becomes a shepherd out there. He's just going to ignore it. He's going to buckle down and just ignore it and ignore the people, his people, who are hurting and are dying and are enslaved. And he says, I'm just going to ignore this. I'm just going to forget that it ever happened, that I ever knew about it. I'm going to go live a life out here. And he lives from a long time out there. And again, that happens to us as entrepreneurs, as real estate investors. We. We get burned, we get hurt, and then we run, we flee, and we hide. Because that shame of failure, it hurts anybody ever failed before. It sucks. You know, one of the reasons I wanted to tell this story today and talk about this is I think, especially for. Let's do a quick show of hands. Who's new here to real estate? Like, you're pretty new. You've done a deal to none. It's helpful to know what's coming. If you just think it's going to be just great and it's easy, I could sell you on how amazing real estate is, and it's going to be amazing and financial freedom. And then when you encounter those times where you lose money on a deal or where you go after a deal for months and you're about to close and you're at the finish line, and then the governor signs a law that destroys the tax strategy you were going to do, and you lose millions of dollars, which happened to us this year, it sucks. And then you're just. If you don't expect that, you're going to be devastated. David Green, who's here this week, David Green once said to me, or said to the podcast, when we were on Bigger Pockets together, he said, all happiness and Unhappiness is based on expectations. And I love that line. I was like, like, if you expected something to happen and then it happened, usually not too, you know, pissed off about it. You're like, oh, yeah, I knew that was gonna happen. If you didn't expect it, then, yeah, that's a big deal. Our. Our happiness and unhappiness is based on expectations. So I'm just trying to lay out the. The whole journey from getting started all the way to the promised land so we can expect. You're going to have failure, you're going to have shame, like, oh, that didn't work out, and you're going to want to hide, you're going to want to give up. Just encourage you not to. So Moses gave up, and then you know the story, right? He sees this bush that's on fire, and he's like, oh, that's probably not a good idea. But, you know, whatever. It'll burn itself out or it'll burn the whole hillside, whatever. But it doesn't do either. It just sits there. It just burns and burns and burns. So he goes over to it and, you know, you know, take off your shoes. You're on holy ground, that whole thing. But what happens is, like, God calls him back and said, hey, I want you to remember who you are. I want you to remember who I am. This is not what I had meant for you. And maybe somebody in this room right now is in that spot. You're just like, I'm so burned out right now. I'm so ashamed of the mistakes that I've made or the difficulty. It's way harder than Brandon said it was going to be. Now it's just really hard. And I hope I can call that out right now and say, no, that's not like, that fear, that scaredness, that timidity, that is not who you are. That's not who you were made to be. And so we can come back. And what. What God says to him is, hey, my people, your people are crying out to me right now, and I need you to go help them. And I think that's such a powerful question to ask is who's depending on you right now to get them out? You know, when you're living in that fear and you're living in that maybe shame, and you're just like, oh, this is so hard and so difficult to remember who in your life is depending on you? And maybe they're not even born yet, maybe you're single, maybe you don't have family, whatever, but there's somebody depending on you that says, like, I need them to keep fighting for me. You guys know who that is in your life? Raise your hand if you got somebody that's depending on you. Yeah, keep. Keeps you motivated. Right? Like, I've got to figure this out. So Moses is, all right, I'm back. I'm gonna do this thing. So he goes back, he goes back to Pharaoh and he's like, all right, here's the deal, dude. I need you to let my people go. We're gonna go and we're gonna get out of here. And of course, Pharaoh's like, no. And that's gonna happen to you as well. When you tell people, hey, I'm going into real estate, most people are not like, hey, that's a great idea. I told my dad, I was like, I'm not going to law school anymore. I'm just gonna. I'm gonna go to buy rental property and then build up a portfolio and retirement. And he's like, terrible idea. What are you gonna do if tenants don't pay rent, Brandon? And I was like, I don't know. He's like, do you have. Do you have money to cover just months of rent when you have to evict them? And I was like, no. He's like, well, I think you better just go to law school. And I'm like, yeah, you're right. And I remember that day, like, just being all dejected. Like, he said, you know, no. The universe said no. God said no. Right? Pharaoh said no. And I typed into Google what to do when tenants don't pay rent. Because I was like, somebody's got to have this figured out. First thing that pops up is a little website. A tiny, little, ugly little website. Just a forum, just some Q and A stuff called Bigger Pockets. Anybody been there? Yeah. And I click on it and it's just, yeah, ugly little site. And there's an article from somebody or like a forum thing that just says what to do when tenants don't pay rent. And they just wrote a whole list of things that they do when the tenant doesn't pay rent. You know, issue the three day notice, do the thing. And I was like, oh, like, there's an answer to this. And so the encouragement I have for you is anytime the world starts telling you, like, no, that's not going to work. It doesn't work that way. That's not a good idea. Just remember that there are people out there, and especially in real estate, there are millions of people who have solved that problem already. It's One thing I love about real estate more than any other business is that it's just so well traveled, so many of us has done it. There's no problem you're going to encounter that somebody else hasn't already encountered. And when we're in a digital world like we're at today, you can find those people, but those people are in this very room right now. And so just remember as you're going through it, like the world will tell you no. People will tell you no. Sellers will tell you no. You'll get rejected over and over and over. But that's just their opinion. In fact, my mentor, the guy who like, mentored me and I worked for him and helped manage his properties and he taught me how to do real estate and all this stuff. He was amazing mentor. When I told him I was going to buy my first mobile home park, he's like, terrible idea, Brandon, don't do it. And I was like, why? He's like, mobile home parks are the worst investment you can do. They're terrible. They're awful. They're going to take all your time. They don't make any money. You really, I. I really caution you, don't do it. I was like, oh, same thing. So I go in Google what to do when you want to buy a mobile home park. No, I didn't, but I was like, at that point, I'm a little arrogant. So I'm just like, I'm gonna do it anyway. So I did it anyway. And that first deal I bought with Ryan Murdoch, I don't know, Ryan's probably in here somewhere, but with Ryan Murdoch, and it was awesome. I mean, it didn't cash flow as much as I wanted it to, but we made a ton of money at the end and it started a trajectory where now we have, I don't know, 60 some mobile home parks across the country. They're the best investment that I have right now. They're the thing that's working better than anything else, which is what I thought they would do. And I'm not saying you need to do mobile home parks, but I always believe that in a downtime, in a hard economy, when people are tightening their budgets, that was, that would probably do pretty well. That was the argument. That theory has proved completely true. It's doing great. So even mentors, even people that you follow online will tell you something, will maybe tell you no, that something's a bad idea. I'm just encouraging you to not take what people say. Even me, even if it's me. Don't take it at face value. Like, go investigate. Do your own research. Find out. Is that really the truth? So as we're pursuing financial freedom and as Moses is trying to, you know, get his people out, he go tries again and again and again. And he asks Pharaoh over and over, and every time, Pharaoh says, no, screw you. And so then God sends all these plagues, you know, like the frogs and the gnats and the blood. The river turns to blood. All this stuff happens over and over and over, and he continually gets, no, no, no, no, no. And at some point, I'm sure Moses was probably like, oh, I'm done. Like, this is just. This does not work the way that they said it would. You know, this is not what Brandon promised. Like, the real estate doesn't work, right? That's like. I'm sure he felt dejected, but he just kept trying and trying different things, like, go, like, really pushing it. And guess what? Eventually it got so bad for Pharaoh. If you guys know the story that he finally let him go, there's this little story in there where God basically tells the people. He's like, hey, if you're a Hebrew, I want you to go and take a lamb, like a little baby lamb, and kill it, and then take the blood and put it on top of your door, like, on the side of your door, on top of your door. It's a little weird, little graphic, but they would do that. And then he's like, tonight, I'm going to go through. Or the angel of death is going to go through and kill all the firstborn sons in the entire land. They're all. They're all gone. But if I see that blood over the door, I'm going to pass over it. Which is where. This is a history lesson. This is where the idea of the Passover comes from, right? Because angel of death passed over their house. And so the Israelites still, to this day celebrate Passover. It's still. It's still a holiday that they're celebrating and remembering this moment. So that's what they do. They go out there. I don't have a great metaphor there or anything like that. There is a good metaphor there. The idea of, like, the lamb's blood on the door so the death passed over it, like, thousands of years later. That's literally the story of Jesus. So if you're a Christian, you know this, like, that's literally like the story of Jesus. That's why they call him the Lamb of God. You've heard that name, Lamb of God isn't there a rock band called Lamb of God? I think that was the idea was like, hey, Jesus is the lamb that gets sacrificed so that the angel of death passes over. So God likes metaphors, too. So I'm not the only one. David Green's not the only one. We like these metaphors. They're fun. So finally, Pharaoh says, okay, you can go and in your life at some point on this entrepreneurial journey, you're going to get out, you're gonna finally quit your job, and you're gonna feel so good. It's gonna be like, I did it. Like, I jumped in. You know, I tried things, I tried things, I tried things. And finally I left my job. How many of you have left your job so far? Like, you're. You're out doesn't necessarily mean you're financially free, but you least left your job maybe to go flip houses or wholesale or whatever, but you're out of your job. And that feels really good. Except for this. That's the first feeling. It's like, oh, I did it. Oh, it's amazing. I remember that. I remember, like, I worked at a bank. I was like, 27. I worked at a bank. I was making it again. I got up to that $3,000 number, which I wanted. So, you know, I was the richest person I knew. So I quit my job. I sat on a couch and I watched Law and Order for, like six months. Like, just every day, it was Law and Order reruns. It was like, you know that. That sound, it's the best theme song ever. So I. Every day was like Law and Order. And. And after a little while, I realized, well, you know, that that kind of sucks. And I started getting scared. Like, $3,000 a month actually isn't that much money because I'm going to eventually want to have kids, and eventually I want to travel some more. And that's expensive. I mean, it would take a long time to save up for a vacation when I'm just making what I'm spending. And so then I got nervous, just like the Israelites did when they encountered the sea. They. They're leaving Egypt and, like, we're going to get out of here. And they run right into this. I think it was the Red Sea or the Reed Sea. Depends on who you listen to. They run into the. The. This giant body of water and they're stuck. Like, they can't go this way, they can't go that way. They're trapped by mountains, trapped by seas. And they're there and they're like, well, what do we do now? I mean, I'm supposed to get out of here, right? I was. I was told. God told me to. To leave. God told us to leave. And we're on this journey, and now we're stuck. And then they look behind them and they see this big cloud of dust, and they're like, oh, that's weird. What is that? And they realize it's dust getting kicked up from horses. There's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of chariots and horses coming. Because Egypt was, like, pissed. Like, all their little. All their sons just died. And they're like, why do we let these people go? Like, let's go get them back. So they're coming to get them back, coming to kill a bunch of them and take them back into slavery. And the Israelites are just freaked out. They're just freaked out. They're like, we are trapped. We are stuck. There's nowhere to go. And again in our life, on our journey, we are going to have those moments where you're like, I'm done. Like, I'm at a. I'm at a dead end here. There's only one solution here, and that is to surrender and go back to work. Anybody done that? I did that a couple times. It's like, I can't do this. And maybe there is a logical reason to do so. Maybe you should go back and get. Get some income coming in. But what if there was another way? Like, what if you just hadn't thought the way through? You hadn't built the right systems, you didn't meet the right people, but there is a way through. And again, real estate is such a phenomenal investment because it's been done so many times. So the way through can often be found. So what Moses does, or God tells Moses, he's like, hey, go step in the water. Moses has faith and says, okay, I'm gonna do it. He steps in the water, and it turns to dry land. He's like, oh, this is cool. He steps a little bit further and water just kind of recedes. And he's like, all right, that's cool. And then if you watch the movies, right, he takes a step and he's like, boom. Like Gandalf style. Like, you shall not pass. And the water goes. So this path opens up right through the sea, and he takes all the Hebrew slaves, and he just goes through the sea and they escape. And that, again, that metaphor is as you're encountering that dead end, that moment where you're like, I'm just stuck. And this applies to whether you're been doing real estate for 30 years, 20 years, 10 years, 5 years is your first year. There's going to be a moment where God is going to ask you, I believe he's going to ask you to step in the water and just step into faith and say, like, no, I can. Like, there is a way. I'm going to try it. But most of us tend to just get scared. And that fear tells us, no, go back. So I'm encouraging you go through the water. So they do. They go through the water. They go on dry ground. They go all the way through it. It's super cool, I'm sure. And then they get to the other side, and then Moses, like, gets out of the water, and the water just comes crashing around, kills all the Egyptians in the water, and they're free. They're finally officially financially free, or at least they're out of slavery again. We leave our jobs, we get through the difficulty, the fear of leaving our jobs, we get through that. That stage. But at that point, everything's good. They're happy forever, and the end of the story. Thanks, all. Have a good. I'm just kidding. No, if you know the story, that's not the end of the story. Right now they're. Now they're on the other side, and they're super excited. They're like, yeah, we did it. We made it through. Hallelujah. However, we don't have any water. There's not a lot of water out here. There's not a lot of food out here. This sucks. This is a lot harder than you said. This is difficult. And they start complaining to Moses. They're like, hey, you didn't do that. And what do they say? Actually, they say to him, like, we just want to go back. We just want to go back. Let's just go back. Which is funny. That's on the entrepreneurial journey. Like, that'll happen again and again, where you're like, I just want security. I just want the security. I just want the security. And we will trade the freedom that we have acquired up to that point for the security. And we want to go back just like they did. And they argue and they complain. They're mean, and they're. They're just having a rough time. And so Moses goes up on the mountain at some point here, and you've heard the story. He gets the Ten Commandments. He's like, this is how we're going to live. Like, these are the rules. Like, these are the fundamentals that we're Going to follow and we're going to be really good about it. And it's the things that you know, right? Don't kill people, you know, don't take your neighbor's wife or cow or whatever. Don't, don't steal stuff, you know, don't lie, like, be good to your parents, take care of them. It's like just the fundamentals. And he's like, if we just follow the fundamentals, just stick with this stuff. Like don't worship other gods. We just left Egypt. They have a lot of gods. They're just, just follow the one God, do the stuff you're supposed to do, follow the fundamentals and we're going to get through this, this desert period, this wilderness. That's where they are, the wilderness. And the Hebrew people, all the slaves are now freed. Slaves are like, no. And they immediately like, right away they just start like worshiping a cow, like this golden calf. And they just start causing all this like, just problems. And because they're not following the fundamentals, they end up just getting stuck there in the desert. Now here's a funny thing. I saw this meme a few years ago and it was a, it was a picture of like Google Maps. I should have put it on the screen, but you can do it later. And it was showing like Egypt to Israel. And it was Google Maps showing the walking time. Do you know how long it takes to get to walk from Egypt to Israel? It's like three days. It's three days if you're just walking continually. Maybe six days if you're taking breaks, having a break. The Israelites wandered for 40 years in the desert on a three day trip. Why? Let me give you a couple reasons. Number one, they forgot the fundamentals over and over and over. There's certain just rules that they should live by. And they put them on a big stone tablet and they just forgot them or they ignored them, or they just were like, screw that. I'm going to do what I want to do. I'm going to just. This looks fun over here. Let's go do this thing. And there are fundamentals in real estate, in business and entrepreneurship, there's just fundamentals. Whether it's watch your cash, just watch it. Because if you don't have cash, you're going to lose. Like it's hard to lose when you have a lot of cash. And we know that, right? We know fixed rate debt is really, really good. It's really hard to lose when you have fixed rate debt and you have good operations. But we Forget that. That's why 2008 happens. That's why 2023 happens in multifamily. And then we forget the fundamentals, and it hurts us. And because of that, we end up just wandering for a whole lot longer than we need to. The second reason they got stuck out there in the desert, besides just ignoring the rules and the fundamentals, is that they get close. Like, they actually walk through, and they get almost to the promised land where they're trying to get to, and they let's go. Let's go set out some spies to go look at the land and see what it's like. And so the spies go out, and they check in and out. There's like. I think there's 12 of them that go out, and they all come back. And out of the 12, 10 of them are like, that place is scary. Like, there are giants in that land. There are giants. There are. I mean, big people, big strong people, huge cities. We don't want to go in. We're scared. And a couple of them are like, no, we should really do this. This is great. And a couple of them. One guy named Caleb, he's like, this is great. Another guy named Joshua, he's like, let's go in. But everybody else is like, no. And so the people decide collectively, we're not going. We're not going there. Now, what's the metaphor here that I want to get to? You're in real estate. You're in financial freedom. Maybe you even got to that point where you can quit your job. You got that freedom. But the idea of scaling is scary. The idea of, like, you're working right now. Let's say you're working a real estate business. You're flipping them houses, maybe doing a little bit of rentals. You got some stuff going. You got, like a kind of a level one financial freedom, and you're like, you know what? I'm just. I'm just good here. I'm just good here because the idea of hiring people. Oh, that sounds scary. The idea of buying, you know, if you're. Let's say you're buying 10 houses a year, the idea of buying a hundred means that you have to work 10 times more. Now, we might not say that, but if it takes you. If it takes you 10 hours a week to buy a house a month, it would take you 100 hours a week to buy 10 houses a month. That's the logic that our caveman brain tends to want to do is. We just feel. It's a feeling that if I go bigger if I try to take full abundance in my life and big wealth, big impact, big change. I'm gonna have to fight some battles that don't sound fun. You know what? I'm already free. I'm fine. I'm fine right here. I'm fine in the wilderness, I'm fine in the desert. It's okay. I mean, I got food, I got water. I'm fine. And you know what? I'm not saying that you can't be fine there. I'm not saying you can't have a good life where you just have just enough that $3,000 a month and you can sit down and say, hey, I can pay my bills and be fine. Because maybe you find another way to spend your time and another way to grow. And that's line. But I would question, is it a logical choice that's keeping you from scaling, from getting to the next level? Or is it the same fear that those 10 spies had that says, I don't want to fight those battles out there, that's too scary. And instead I'm going to wrap that fear around the idea of contentness. I'm just content here. I'm happy here. It's fine. Maybe that is and maybe it's not. But it's a question we all have to ask ourselves as let, like, if we want to actually scale, then why don't we scale? And I remember being on stage. I told the story last year, but I'll tell you again. I was on stage at an event just like this, about the same size room. It was the best ever conference in. It was probably seven years ago. And I'm on stage and I'm speaking. And at the time I had 30 rental units. Again, just enough to pay the bills. I was getting some book royalties. Thank you. Anybody buy my books out there? Thank you, thank you. I get like a 12 cents every book, so coffee's on me. So I'm like, it was, you know, it was cool, but I had 30 units and I look out there and I was in a room of like syndicators and commercial investors and multimillionaires. And there was a lot of them. And I had this realization. I'm like, I'm the smallest guy in this room. Like, I'm on stage teaching and I have fewer rental properties than almost everybody in this room. And I haven't taken a real risk in years. I'm just living in the wilderness. It's fine. It's fun. I like being on the BiggerPockets podcast. I was just doing a podcast. That was cool. Writing books every so often, that was cool. But then I saw my potential. I came face to face with my potential because I was looking out in the audience and I saw my potential and I was like, oh, the reason I'm not there is because I'm afraid. Because I was afraid to fight those battles and I didn't, I didn't want to. And so I just stayed comfortable. See, we stay comfortable in our jobs, and that's one thing, and I'm speaking to some of you is we're, we may be comfortable in our jobs and that's a dangerous spot to be because you get trapped and you just believe that slavery is actually security. And we believe that security then is going to make us happy. But that also. So I'm speaking again to probably half of you or maybe a third of you who are newer here. But to those of you who are already financially free, or at least you're full time in real estate, that same danger exists of being comfortable. Oh yeah, I just buy, you know, I just flip three houses a year, four houses a year, and I make just enough to get by. It's fine. You guys have heard the story of like the fisherman down in, like, in like South America somewhere. It's like from the four hour work week where there's like this story of this fisherman or this American businessman. He's on, he's on vacation down there and he sees a fisherman out there hauling his fish in and his boat in at like 11 in the morning. He was like, hey, buddy. Hey buddy. Like, it's 11 o', clock, you're done for the day. And the guy's like, oh, yeah, you know, I got enough for the day. I got enough. I'm, I'm happy. He's like, what are you gonna do now? He's like, oh, I'm gonna go probably just like take a little nap and then go take my wife, you know, out to a nice afternoon siesta or, you know, take a little siesta wife out to a nice dinner, have like a long dinner with my friends. We're gonna really enjoy the evening, probably dance away for a while and then go to sleep really full and content and happy. And the businessman's like, nah, I'm, I'm Harvard trained. Let me tell you what you should do. You should go out there and go out again for the afternoon and go get twice as much fish, maybe three times as much fish. You stay late and you work really, really hard and you can get, you can get three times more money. That's gonna allow you to hire two, three, four more people. You bring them in, they're gonna allow you to get five times more fish. You're gonna then build your own distribution center in the area so you can sell direct to. To Americans. Then you're going to build this network that gets you up there. You're Gonna probably have 100 to 200 people by that point. And then you're going to probably have to move to New York City where you're going to run your empire from there. And the guy's like, well, then one. He's like, well, then you IPO out, you sell, you make millions, millions of dollars. And the guy's like, oh, then what? He goes, well, then you're going to retire down here on the beach and you're going to fish until 11, and you're going to go to, you know, take a siesta, go to lunch with your wife, and then go dance with your buddies until. Until you go to bed fat and happy. And so I like. The story is powerful, right? I remember when I first read it, I was like, yeah, that's so good. Like, so it is a good story. But I heard a counterpoint to that a few years ago. Somebody's like, yeah, that was great. Except for the hurricane came. Yeah, the hurricane came later that year, and the fish dried up a little bit. There weren't enough. And his boat got a little bit damaged in the hurricane, and he didn't have the money to fix it because he only worked just enough to make the money for that night's dancing. And so then he lost his boat. He couldn't make the payment, Couldn't afford the boat anymore. Couldn't afford the fish. Then he's fishing from the shore, can only catch a few fish. And things just got worse and worse for the fisherman until he lost everything and lived in poverty for the rest of his life. So that's the other side of that story is we believe again that contentness and security is going to be fine. And again, I'm not saying the answer is go build an empire and move to New York City and IPO and make millions of dollars. That's not the answer either. I just want to challenge you with the idea of scaling and growth that it is. It is not greed and arrogance that says, I'm going to go bigger. It's potential. It says, like, I'm going to climb this mountain for no other reason that there's a mountain there to climb. Why do we climb Mountains. Why do people do that? I don't know. It's weird. But, like, we do it because it's there. There's a mountain there. Why do people do triathlons and all the things? Because it's there because of the challenge. So I'm on stage at that event and I'm like, I don't deserve to be here. I'm only here because I'm like the hot girl that can get people to show up. And I'm like, I don't like that. Like, I don't want to be the hot girl that has no abilities and just gets people to show up. Like, I want to be like, the person on stage that deserves to be there, can actually teach these people something. So I left there and I made a decision. I said, you know what? I am going to change my life. They say I'm going to scale. I'm going to ramp up and I'm going to scale. And I wrote that vivid vision that you've probably heard me talk about. It was a 3,000 word newspaper article written that I. In the future. It was like, Open Door Capital is an investment firm unlike any you've ever seen. And it said we had a thousand units and said we had. What was it? It was $50 million of real estate. And across the top it said the $50 million surfers. Because it was all about like, we have lifestyle and we have a ton of real estate. And I got off the plane, I went and sat down with Ryan Murdoch. Ryan, are you in the room at all? I want to shut you out if you're there. He is in the back. Changed my life. I'm sitting with. I sit down, Ryan Murdoch. I'm like, hey, check out what I wrote on the plane. He reads it and the first thing he said is, oh, dude, I want to be a part of that. I was like, really? Like, all right, let's go. So Ryan and I started it. We brought in Brian Murray. Later, we brought in Walker Meadows, who's probably here somewhere. And we built Opendoor Capital. And we scaled that thing and we fought a ridiculous number of battles. Just like when finally, 40 years in, all the old people who were all angry and grumpy and scared died off. Finally they decide, okay, we are going to go in. We're going to go. We're going to go fight those battles. And they go in and they start fighting them. You know, the Joshua fought the battle of Jericho. Yeah. So they fight. Yeah, I know Sunday school kids in here. So they fight. They fight these battles. And they start to win, and they start to actually dominate and step into the life that they were meant to live. They stepped into the abundance that was possible, not the scarcity, because they were willing to brave those battles. And then they did. Now, I'm not saying things were perfect for them. They won. You could say they got the land, they got where they wanted to, and they. They had a tremendous success in taking over the land. However, in that process of abundance, there's a tremendous danger. There's a huge danger in that when you're living in abundance, you have a lot of money. There's a tendency to get lazy. There's a tendency to forget the fundamentals. There's a tendency to just, I'll do it tomorrow. Yeah, you know, I'll put it off until later. There's a tendency to live in more fear. There's a tendency to go back to the person that maybe you once were or to get into some things that you should not get into at all. And so they're not. I mean, abundance is great. Living in abundance, living with a big company, maybe, or a big business, it's great. It's not. There's a lot of fun things, but there's also a danger there of being rich. I think, like the Bible warns. Almost every religious text warns about wealth as much as almost anything else. Like, I think the Bible talks more about wealth than it talks about hell. There's a real danger to it. It's fun. It's fun to build money, right? We get money and build a business and have all this stuff. But there's also a real danger to it, which is why at the better life tribe, I'm so obsessed with the idea of building wealth without losing your soul. I don't want to just teach you how to build wealth and to build a big business and scale. I want to teach you how to do that without losing your soul. Amen. Because we don't want to be people who just have a lot of money and then our kids end up being dirt bags or our spouse leaves us or we leave our spouse because we're bored or we get into heavy drinking or drugs or whatever, because we're bored, because we're living in this abundance. So we want to be able to walk into the promised land and actually keep the abundance that we have. And we do that by getting together in person, by getting the right people around you. Right? You are the average of the five people you associate with the most. And we get around those people. So I want to close with this to give you guys just a little bit of a teaser of what's coming in the future with the Better Life Tribe. How many of you are actually tribe members? Official Better Life Tribe members. All right, a bunch of you are. So this is for you guys about what's coming in the coming year. We're actually making a pretty big pivot. The pivot is not necessarily what we're doing. It's more of the focus of what we're trying to help you do. And if you're not a tribe member, this is my. I don't want to call it sales pitch. There's no run to the back of the room. There's nothing like that. But I will say this. I've been convinced lately that what the tribe needs to be more of is people who are across the sea. They're generally across the sea. Maybe they're still flirting with Egypt a little bit, but they've already got some things going. Like, and that's what most of the tribe is. Most of you guys already have some real estate. You're already there. But I want to help people get into the promised land to actually get there. I had a friend growing up, you know, over the last, whatever, 20 years ago, that his parents were in real estate for, like, 40 years. They were like, it's funny, it's the same number that the Israelites were there 40 years buying rental properties, self managing, fixing their own plumbing, doing all the work, dealing with all the problems. And after 40 years of that, while also working a job because they wanted to get freedom. So they started buying rentals. After 40 years, they went bankrupt, they lost all their properties, and they got divorced all in the same year. And they were like, in their 70s, late 70s, early 80s. It's like, dang, what a waste of 40 years. It didn't get them anywhere because they never learned how to scale correctly. They never learned how to build. Right? So that's what we're gonna. We're gonna shift something at the tribe and that every single week. I think it's on Thursday afternoons. Maybe it's Thursday evenings. I'm going to just start teaching, like an hour, hour and a half. But I'm not going to teach you how to buy duplex. If you want to know, like, FHA loans. Duplex, the tactical new stuff. That's what First Deal is about. Go check out the guys at the First Deal booth later. That's what we teach there. I'm also on a call every single week for First Deal. And I handhold people to get Their first deal. That's not what the tribe is. You guys don't need that. What you guys need besides fha, you don't need the FHA loan like information or figure out what a duplex is. What you need to figure out is how do you attract and an a talent like a player, like just high level player like a Walker Meadows who I have on my team. How did I get Walker? I want to talk about the internship that I launched. The gauntlet that we used to be able to test people through to find the right guy and then how to elevate them, how to incentivize them properly and then how to train them and manage them correctly. That's something that you don't get from almost any real estate like education program. They're going to teach you the how to do these little things. I want to teach you be like how to do business. My buddy Rob Lee. Is Rob Lee in the room? He might be here somewhere. Oh, there he is over there. He said something to me once a while ago. He just said something along the lines of, you know, some people buy real estate and invest in real estate and some people build businesses that buy real estate and invest in real estate. And I was like, whoa, that's so true. Right. My friend's parents bought real estate and where did it get them a job on top of their other job for 40 years. So what I'm going to be pivoting over the next year is then I even have, I literally have the next 52 weeks planned out on lessons and everything from like how to build, how to incentivize your team, how to hire people, how to motivate people, incentive plans, how to build a pipeline of deals, how to hire an acquisition manager, how to buy back your time better. Like all the business principles. So we're shifting the tribe a little bit is I want to be the tribe that creates business owners that invest in real estate. Does that make sense? So that way you can take those skills that I have learned and failed and messed up on and like all the battles that I have fought to get to 14,000 units over the past, whatever, five, six, seven years we've been doing open door capital. I've made so many mistakes in scaling, so many mistakes. But it has been the most epic, fun, exciting seven years of my life because there was a massive mountain and we chose to climb it for no other reason that than there was a mountain to climb. I want you to do that without losing your health, without ignoring your kids, without ignoring your spouse. Without working late nights. And how do we do that? Business principles. So we're revamping reios. We're rebuilding all of that stuff and we're going to say we're going to help people build businesses that invest in real estate. And the cool thing is you can even take the principles that we're teaching over the next year and apply it to any business. My goal would be that if real estate you just decided to stop doing doing it and you decided instead, hey, I'm going to go open an ice cream shop. You'd have a massively successful ice cream shop because it's the business principles that are going to get you through the promised land, into that abundance and keep you there for good. So that's what we're doing. So if you are not a tribe member, I would love to have you in at some point. So come talk to us at the booth over there. If you are new to real estate and you want to get there as well, come join first deal. We're going to get you your first deal and then we'll get you into the tribe and we're going to dominate there with your life. And I am pumped about the next year. You guys. Pumped? All right. So that's all I got for you guys today. Let's keep striving towards greatness. Don't let fear get in the way of your growth and abundance and don't forget the fundamentals. That's why we're here today.
