← The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner
The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner
How to Buy Big Things With Little Money⏐Ep. #273
00:28:32
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One of the questions I see most often in my messages is, Kris, I want to start a business, or I want to buy a business, but I don't have any money. And you know what I would say to that? Good. Because constraints equal creativity. And that's what this whole episode today is about. I'm going to call it how to buy Big things with little money, Whether that's a piece of real estate. Maybe you're buying a business. Maybe you're buying equipment or assets needed to start a business. Maybe you're trying to buy equity for a business that you work for. You want to buy a franchise. I don't care. This episode is where you will go to learn how to buy big things with little money. And I would know because, A, I grew up poor, B, I'm cheap, I don't wanna pay full price. And if I do a whole bunch of research and I come to the conclusion that this initiative that I'm looking at is not as risky as it looks from the outside, then I'm gonna be willing to take some risk to make sure that I get what I want. So if you're looking for an episode where you talk about, oh, have you heard of Kickstarter? Have you heard of seller financing? No. This isn't gonna be generic. This is gonna be creative. And it's going to be very tactical. And everything I'm about to tell you, I actually have experience with guys. I've been buying real estate for 17 years. I've been buying RV parks and mobile home parks for the last seven years. I bought an $800,000 business for $50,000 down. I invested in my best friend's business that was worth 2.2 million. He only put 10% down, and he financed almost all of that from friends and family. I have been in the weeds of buying big things with little money my entire career. So if you're looking for just a video where I just regurgitate things that chatgpt tells me, then go somewhere else. Before I get into these tactics, I want to tell a couple stories to illustrate where I'm coming from here. When I was 21 years old, I had just spent the summer reading books about entrepreneurship and real estate and I had moved to Alabama. I just got married and I was fired up to make something happen, to start a business, to buy real estate, whatever. Turns out 2008 was not a great time to buy real estate, especially if you are a broke college student with student loans waiting tables for 213 an hour plus tips. But sometimes ignorance is a superpower. And my wife and I started looking on Zillow. We found a house, this house right here. If you're watching 1805 21st Avenue East. And it was $90,000 and we bought it for three and a half percent down. We used grants from the government to pay for it, plus a little bit of savings from our serving job at a Thai restaurant. And we bought something big with little money. And then President Obama had a first time homebuyer tax credit, which basically Meant you got $8,000 cash after you bought your first home. And so about nine months later, we got a check in the mail for $8,000 and we put that towards a home about five minutes away. Our first rental home. We were still broke college students still making 213 an hour, but we owned two homes. We just kept talking to bankers until we found one that said yes. So we finally found a bank that said yes. But they said, chris, you're going to have to pay pmi. What is pmi? It's mortgage insurance. It's going to bring your payment from $535 to $700 a month. Now, as a broke college student, that extra 160 bucks a month was just a non starter. So I said, well, I don't, I don't want to pay that. How can I get around that? Well, you can't. You have to pay 20% down if you don't want to pay PMI. And I was just like, no, I read that I don't have to pay that. And they were like, all right, I don't think it's going to work, but let me see if there are other options. Guess what? Magically there were other options. I got to pay 3.5% down. I didn't have to pay PMI because they had to choose between that and losing my business entirely. And in the wake of the financial crash, I'm sure they were thrilled to even have this tiny $90,000 mortgage. That was one thing that I remembered from all those books that I read at Barnes and Noble. Many loans require you to have pmi, but almost all banks have other loan options that don't require that. They don't want to give you the option of those loan packages because it's not as profitable to them. But if they have to choose between losing your business and giving you a less profitable loan, they're going to give you the loan you want. I ended up owning that house for 11 years and renting it for nine of those 11. Fast forward about eight years and we were in the middle of building our dream house with a custom home builder, the one I'm sitting in right now. And I'll never forget, I was getting this office designed and they had already laid the foundation. I think the drywall was even up, and they were about to lay carpet. And I realized at the last minute that I wanted a floor plug right in the middle of the room because I knew my desk would be right here where I'm sitting today. And I wanted to plug my MacBook in in the floor. So I went to the builder and I said, hey, is it too late to add a floor plug? Cause, like, doesn't that need to go in the foundation or something? I don't know how it works. And he said to me, we can reverse, change, fix, add anything. At any stage in the build process, literally anything can be fixed or changed. The only question is, how much are you willing to pay? And for whatever reason, that line stuck with me. Everything is figureoutable. Everything. Whether it's buying a home on 213 an hour as a broke college student with no assets to your name, or adding a simple floor plug at the point your house is almost finished. Constraints equal creativity. Now, just one more analogy before I get into the tactics. Vexillology is the study of flags. Now, when a flag designer is designing a flag, they. They have to start designing it on an index card. They have to shrink it down all the way to an index card. Because if your flag doesn't work or if it doesn't look good when shrunk down to the size of an index card, then it's not going to look good as a flag. It has to make sense in one second. It has to look good while flapping in the wind. It has to be stitched and not printed. It has to be drawn by a child, and it has to be recognizable from far away. So we're not doing tiny details or gradients or, or clever explanations. It's gotta be simple. Shout out to my friend Bill for that analogy. So trying to buy something that's very expensive or invest in something when you have no money or almost no money is the index card. You can't rely on big down payments or perfect credit or standard financing terms. You're forced to ask better questions. What does the seller actually want? What part of this deal is flexible? What part is negotiable? What part isn't? Instead of adding cash, can I just remove some risk? And can I change the timeline instead of the price? Can I change the terms instead of the price. You've probably heard the phrase my price, your terms or your price, my terms. That's just a small part of what we're talking about here. And this is why I am so adamantly against raising money for your startup in 99% of cases. Because it removes the need to be creative. That's why venture funded startups statistically have no better chance of succeeding than, than bootstrap startups. Because once you get a few million bucks in the bank, you don't have to be creative. Let's hire a marketing guy. Oh, we need our profit and loss statement. Yeah, let's hire a cfo. All right, so let's start covering these tactics and I'm gonna save the very best for last. Number one, do it publicly. A while back I had an episode with my friend Isaac French and he built this property called Live Oak Lake just outside of Waco, Texas. It's I think seven beautiful cabins. They're Scandinavian style. He bought kits, he shipped them overseas, he dug out a pond. They this Property was like 5 to 10 acres and it had these mature oak trees on it. Long story short, two years after building it, he sold it for seven or eight million dollars. And his costs on all of it was like one and a half or two million. So one deal that took two to three years of his life provided him life changing money, enough money for him to retire, and he had very, very, very little money to put in. Guys, if you're liking this so far, please hit subscribe or follow or whatever. Share with a friend. It would really mean a lot. Now if you want to hear that story, I'll link to it below. But this tactic I'm telling you about is actually from one of his friends that wanted to do something similar. They wanted to build these beautiful short term rentals, but they didn't have any money. So what did they do? They started an Instagram account with zero followers and they just started documenting their process with their iPhones. No fancy editing, no fancy equipment, just talking to the camera, showing what they were doing. Hey, we're building a property, we want to document our journey. And this guy built an Instagram following of 130,000 people, just showing them what the process was like of dreaming, building, planning, trying to raise money for this short term rental property. By the time he was actually ready to launch, he had tons of people ready and willing to give him money to launch his project or to be his first customers at his project to go stay in his property. If you bring the world along with you through these free media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, whatever, then you can skip the line. The downside to this is it's public accountability. You might fail, you might feel embarrassed if it doesn't go well. Maybe the algorithm never picks up your videos and you feel like it was a waste of time. But this is an asymmetric bed. There's a lot more upside to posting free videos on the Internet, spending a little bit of time doing so than there is downside. Now, one of the most valuable things you can do is to start following a bunch of people that are doing this on Instagram. What are they doing, what are their hooks, what background music are they using, how often are they posting, what days are they posting, what type of asset are they building or buying? And what do the comments say? Right. Open up Instagram in your browser and copy all the comments, paste them in the chat GPT and say what are some trends or themes found in these comments that I can learn when making my short form videos that are in the same niche as this guy's? Maybe all the comments refer to the fact that he had to quit his job to do this. What? Well, if you're quitting your job to do this, then you should talk about that in your content a lot too because it clearly resonates with people. Maybe people in the comments are just talking about how cute their dog is in the background of the video. Maybe you need a dog in the background of your video. I'm serious. Getting a like on social media takes a millisecond, but getting a comment takes seconds, 5 to 50 plus seconds. Right? So that's a signal to Instagram, Facebook or whoever that you are keeping people on the platform longer than average. So we're not optimizing for likes, we're optimizing for shares because shares also keep people on the platform and for comments and for average view duration, AKA how long people spend watching your video as a proportion to how long your video is. But one thing that you can't skip here is you gotta shed your ego, you gotta shed your pride. You gotta remember that people aren't thinking about you. It doesn't matter. They're not judging you. And if they are, who cares? It doesn't matter. You'll never even know about it. And this doesn't just apply to short term rental properties or real estate. It's this applies to any business. If you're starting a business, if you're trying to buy a business, if you want to buy a franchise or sell your Business. Just document the journey. Try to make each video better than the last copy, the same formats that other people are doing in that niche. And given enough time, you will win. The second strategy is to be loose. Be flexible on the asset that you're trying to buy. If you say to yourself, I really, really want to own an RV park within an hour of me, that I can stay at, that I can have my friends come out, like that is my dream, that is my passion. But the problem is maybe you live in a more rural area. Maybe there are only four RV parks within an hour of you. And what is the statistical chance of you twisting the arm of one of those four sellers and forcing them, AKA convincing them to sell. It's not great. You're really constraining yourself here. And you can't remove the agency of another person. You can't force someone to sell their asset. So. So before you do a lot of these other steps, you've gotta be willing to be flexible either on the geography, the price point, the type of asset, the size of the asset, et cetera. I think as long as you fall in love with an asset class like self storage or single family or RV parks or pest control business, whatever, and you're willing to be flexible on the geography or the size of the investment within that asset class, you should be fine. But the most important thing you can do throughout this entire process is to find an owner that, that likes you, that is willing to get to know you, and preferably you should like them as well so it can be an authentic relationship. Here's another analogy for you. Let's say you really needed $1,000. You just had to have $1,000 for something important. You've got two options. Number one, your mom. Okay? Number two, a stranger. From which person are you most likely to get that money from? Of course your mom. She knows you. I hope she. She loves you. There's a relationship there. There's a history, whether she's wealthy or not. If you really needed that money, you could almost certainly get it from your mom, right? What about the stranger? Well, no, because who are you? But there's a spectrum, right? The stranger's on this end of the spectrum, your mom's on the other end. So if you really want to buy big things with little money and you want to get creative, then it's all about getting the stranger, in this case, maybe the seller of the asset from this end of the spectrum to that end, a little closer to where your mom sits. If you don't do that, then everything else I mention in this episode is going to be significantly harder. That's the whole secret. That's the crux of it all. You've got to be willing to build a relationship of trust. You don't need to be likable or extroverted or super engaging or energetic. Those things help for sure. But if you don't have those things, you just need to find that other weirdo in the world that is kind of like you, that identifies like you, that says to themselves as they see you and talk to you, man, man, that kid reminds me of me when I was that age. That's who you need to find. Offer him value. Tell him what you're learning about his asset class. Acknowledge that he probably knows way more than you do about the asset class. Don't shrink from that. Compliment him on his property, on his asset, whatever it is. Visit him in person multiple times. Follow up with him. Bring your spouse and kids. If that's the case, back to my analogy of the thousand dollars. If you spent some time with that stranger to them, who you are, what your story is, why you need the thousand dollars, pointed out, what you have in common, you could probably get him from a 1% chance of saying yes to a 10 to 20% chance of saying yes. That principle is still true whether it's $1,000 or a million dollars. Tactic number three. I want to talk about seller financing. You probably already know it exists, but I want to talk about different types of it and how to increase the likelihood of selling someone saying yes to it. Now, I will tell you straight up that your best shot of being able to buy something big with a little money is seller financing, preferably as close to 100% as possible. Yes, 100% seller financing is very possible. It depends on the asset class. If we're talking about a business, like a service business, that's going to be easier to get 100% seller financing for. But if we're talking about a piece of real estate, that's going to be a bit harder because there's more at stake than just goodwill. Now, there are some levers you can pull when seller financing real estate to increase the likelihood of them saying yes. Many of these you probably haven't heard of yet. But even so, if someone tells you 100% seller financing for real estate is super commonplace. Happens all the time, super easy. 20, 30, 40% of sellers say yes to it. They're lying. It's not true. Because at the end of the day, the majority of people, when they go to sell a piece of real estate, they just want their cash. They have to pay off their note and then they want cash for their checking account. Now before I get into the particulars of seller financing, let's talk about the alternatives. One, you can borrow from friends and family. Now, I'm not a big fan of this because A it means you need to have friends and family with money. B you need to be able to convince one or more of them. So I'm starting to run paid ads directly to my newsletter because right now it's where I'm seeing the most potential. Because here's the thing. Social platforms don't let you own anything. The algorithm changes and your reach disappears. Email is the only channel where you actually own anything. Your audience and Beehive is built for people who are ready to grow bigger than ever. It's got a built in ad network. Sponsors come to you directly through the platform. You approve, you get paid. You pay no platform fees on paid subscriptions. Whereas substack takes 10%. Beehive takes nothing. And now you can sell coaches and coaching directly to your list. You don't need to stitch five tools together. Beehive lets you do everything in one place and you pay 0 commission forever. Name another newsletter platform that can do all that. I've been on Beehive for over two years and it is without a doubt one of the biggest reasons my newsletter is growing like wildfire. So go move your email list over to Beehive now and get 30% off your first three months at beehive.com Chris that's B E-E-H-I-I V.com Chris and C, you're going to have to risk your reputation with them and you'll need to ask yourself if that's something you're willing to do. Oftentimes these situations can be asymmetric bets in the wrong direction. The downside of losing these valuable relationships and friendships is much, much greater than the potential upside of the asset that you're trying to buy. With seller financing, there's much less surface area for risk. So if I need 500 grand to buy something, then let's say I'm going to need 10 different friends and family members to give me 50 grand each. Well, in order to get that, I might need to talk to one to 300 of them. That's a lot of surface area for risk and for reputational loss. Whereas with seller financing, you're interacting with one person, one party, the seller, and you probably don't know them. And they can still be protected. We're not framing this like this is a zero sum game and maybe you win and they lose or vice versa. No, oftentimes when we go to ask a seller for seller financing, like, we, we shrink from it. We frame it in a way where it's like, listen, I know this is an ideal, but no, like, you've got to own it. You've got to frame it in a way that really highlights the positives for them, both the tangibles and the intangibles. Now, when having this awkward seller financing conversation with someone, one of the intangibles can be your story. Sell your story. The story of you riding around and your dad as a kid in his truck fixing up rental properties that could be more valuable to the seller than proof of funds or an extra $5,000 in down payment. That story could be worth thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. And so often we all have stories like these, but we don't think to use them. All right, let's talk about seller financing structures for a second. All right, you've got the balloon payment structure. With this structure, you're going to pay little to nothing down initially. You'll make small monthly payments for a few years, and then you'll have a large balloon payment due at the end of the term, whatever you guys decide upfront. And the idea with this struct to either refinance or sell the asset before then. For example, let's say you had experience in the landscaping business, and you approached the landscaping business owner about his business, and you knew that he's not running Facebook ads, because anyone can see that he's not running Google Ads. He's not on Angie's list, yada yada. He's not doing all these things. He's just relying on word of mouth. And you're fairly confident that you could buy this at two times annual profits. Let's say his annual profits are 100,000. So you can buy this business for $200,000. You can add all these marketing tactics, you can reduce some of his costs, increase his yearly profits from 100,000 to 200,000, and that you think you could also do a better job at marketing the business for sale. You want to flip the business. You don't want to hold it long term. You want to flip it two years later, and you're going to sell it for three times annual profits of $200,000, which would be 600,000, right? So you're buying it for 200, you're selling it for $600,000. But you have very little money down. Well, you put in 10 grand to him, you pay him $5,000 a month as his payment, the balloon payment. So that's 60,000 a year. That can come out of your profits. So that's not coming out of your pocket. You only have to have 5,000 to do this deal. And let's say the balloon payment is due in four years. Well, two years later, you've turned around revenue and you've sold it for $600,000. That balloon payment is never due because you pay off the rest of the note at closing when you go to sell the business. And the logic holds true with an RV park, mobile home park, self storage facility, multifamily duplex, fourplex, whatever. Now, the risk with this is, of course, what if you're not able to refinance or sell by the time the balloon payment's due? Well, it's due. And if you don't pay it, then they're going to get the asset back in most cases, unless you're extra savvy, and that's not worked into the contract, which is not likely, they're probably going to be in first lien position on the asset, which means they are the first person in line to get it back should you default on those payments. Okay, the next structure, interest only payments. That's it is what it sounds like. Instead of paying the interest and the principal, you're just paying interest for a set amount of time. Now this is great because if you're in a tighter cash flow business, you're not as constrained to make that payment, but it's not great because your interest keeps compounding and you're never cutting into that principle. So this works very similarly to the balloon payment that I just referenced because at a certain point that note is going to be due to. Now, the third structure I really like as part of seller financing is what's called graduated payments. That's when you start with small payments that increase over time. And these payments can start like ridiculously small. 500amonth for six months, then 700 for six months, then a thousand, then 1500, then 2000. Believe it or not, these graduated payments go a really, really long way at showing legitimacy and goodwill to the seller, AKA you're showing them from month one that you're not a scam. And I really mean this in the context of comparing this to a deal where you make no payments for the first six months. Right. He's going to have some heartburn about that because he probably doesn't know you all that well. And he's not going to know for six months if you're actually a good honest person yet, or at least if you're going to do to this business or real estate what you say you're going to do. You're going to add value, you're going to improve it. He won't know that for six months. So if you're having trouble with the trust part of a seller financing structure like this, then suggest graduated payments because they can almost have the same purpose, which is to save you money in your payments upfront. But it can go a really, really long way at buying some goodwill. Okay. The next structure is called a partial seller carryback. Now this is called a half a dozen different things. That's what I call it. And this is using the combination of traditional financing and seller financing. So here's an example. Let's say you found an apartment complex for a million dollars. You think it's worth 1.2 as, and you think you can get it to be worth 2 to 3 million after some value added improvements. So million dollar apartment complex, you've got 50 grand to put down, but the bank wants 200 grand, so you're 150 short. Well, a partial seller carryback would be for the seller to put 150 grand on the line and say, all right, I'm going to do, basically do a seller note for 150,000. You put in your 50, the bank puts in 800 and you buy this for 1 millimeter. Now, 1 big problem with this, one potential problem with this, is that the seller is almost certainly going to be in second lien position, as in they're second in line to get their money back. Should you default, the bank is almost always going to want to be first in line, which means the sellers kind of be left holding the bag. They're not going to have anything if you default. So it's definitely not impossible to get this structure. In fact, you're more likely to get this, in my opinion, than to get a 100% seller financing deal. But it's just harder because they're second in line. But my best friend did this with a business he bought. He bought a business for 2 million bucks and change. He used an SBA loan which is backed by the government for I think, 80% of it. The seller held 10% of the note and he only had to put in 10%, which was 200,000. Where'd he get that 200,000? Well, he had a bunch in savings. I invested Some myself and some other friends and family invested some. So that's something I haven't even talked about yet is using friends and family to fund the down payment and then using a traditional bank to fund the rest. All right, the next seller financing structure is called a shared appreciation mortgage. Now this is where the seller agrees to take a percentage of future profits instead of taking a higher sale price today. So if you're really good at selling your story, if you have some sort of industry experience or knowledge that you can lean on, but you don't have a lot of money in the bank, then you can say, listen, I really think this million dollar apartment complex you have, I can make it be worth 2 million. But I only have 50 grand to give you today. So how about this? Once I get rents to X, Y or Z, or once I get the value of the property to X, Y and Z, I will start sending you X percentage of the rents collected or something like that. Oftentimes you can use this structure kind of against them in a way, or you can use their information against them to get a better structure. Because oftentimes people will say, oh, dude, this thing, this park is so much better than it looks right now. Like, all you have to do is this. You just have to do this, you just have to do this. And then instead of it being worth 1 million, like I'm selling it for today, it's going to be worth 3 million million. Well, if you want to be a jerk, you can say, why don't you just do these things yourself? But if you want to get the deal, you could say, awesome, that's amazing. How about you give me better terms on the seller financing and then I cut you into those future profits. Right. So the next creative seller financing structure is a lease to own or a master lease agreement. I almost did this exact structure on a really large RV park I was looking at once in southern Louisiana. It was a $2 million park. And once it was fully performing and 90% occupied, it was worth about $23 million. But there was a huge amount of risk. It was a massive part. It was pretty rural, There was a lot of work to be done. We were going to have to buy trailers, move them in there, do seller financing. And so I negotiated this deal with the seller that said, hey, I really think I could get this to be worth 20 million. But it's a big risk and it's a big gamble. And they knew it. It had been listed for sale for like two years. And so we said, okay, day, the rents are $12,000 a month. That's what you're collecting today in rents, right? Correct. Cool. I'm going to lease this from you for two years at $7,000 a month, which is just going to come right out of the gross rents that you're collecting today. You're still going to own the park, the title is in your name. And no, I'm not going to give you 2 million today for it. But in two years, I'm going to give you 4 million for it or I'm going to walk away. Right? So worst case, six months later, I just don't do what I think I'm going to do. You will have made $7,000 a month for this over that same time frame, which right now, you're making nothing for it. It's just listed for sale. It's probably still going to be listed for sale month. So you'll have made $42,000 from me and I'm just going to come to you with my tail between my legs and say, sorry, I thought I could turn around, but I couldn't. It's yours. Give you the keys back. You still have what you had six months before, plus $42,000. No harm, no foul. That's worst case. Best case is in two years, or maybe even less two years from now, I buy this from you for 50% more. An extra million dollars. Three million. But I'm de risked because clearly my plan is working and I think it can be worth a lot more. So under this scenario, you're not even seller financing or buying anything. You're just leasing the entire property. It's a master lease agreement with the option to purchase at a predetermined price at a certain predetermined time in the future. This works with real estate businesses, anything. Okay. The next type of seller financing structure is simply zero down, aka 100% seller financing, with either a higher interest rate or a higher price. They want 5% interest and 10% down. You say, how about 8% interest and 0% down? Or you want 300 grand and 5% interest and 20% down. How about 400 grand, 7% interest and 2% down? ChatGPT is great at taking structures like these and spitting out a thousand different ways of crafting them. The next type of seller financing structure could be an asset swap or services in lieu of down payment, where you offer consulting or marketing agency services or something in lieu of a down payment. Or heaven forbid, you offer collateral. A vehicle, a house, a different piece of real estate. All of these are on the table. Another creative structure is a sub 2. In other words, subject to existing debt, the seller has a loan on the property. You take over the seller's payments. The debt stays in the seller's name, and you come out of pocket, little to nothing. This works great when the debt on the asset is low and the seller is just tired. Another thing you can do is a delayed down payment. Hey, this thing's 1 million bucks. You want 20% down? I don't have 200 grand. But how about I give you the down payment 12 to 24 months from now, and if it never comes, you take the property back? You're in first lien position anyway. With any of these structures that I'm talking about today. One of the most important things you can remember is to not get emotionally involved or invested in the asset class. That is where all the mistakes will happen. Don't put your blinders on. Don't act like this is the best deal. It's the only deal. It's either this deal or bust. You've got to be willing to walk from any deal at any time. It should only be math to you. That's all for today, folks. I hope you learned something. Go out there, buy big things with a little money. And here's your disclaimer. All of this stuff carries risk, right? Know what you're doing? Know what you're getting yourself into? Everything I've told you is the tip of the iceberg. It's all going to depend upon you and your situation, your risk tolerance, et cetera. Yada, yada. Not financial advice. Thanks for hanging out on the Kerner office.