Episode 258 - Brian Gubernick on Scaling 700+ Real Estate Deals, Mastering Short Sales, and Growing Teams Across Phoenix and Beyond — The Co-Living Show

What's going on everybody? You are listening to Investify. My name is Craig Kerlop, AKA the FI Guy, and we've got honestly one of the best episodes I think we've done here with Mr. Brian Gubernick. Brian Gubernick is one of the executives at Place, kind of Ben Kinney's right-hand man and really helping grow and develop the company. But we are not talking too much about Place. We mention it, We talked about place in the last, I think, episode 2 weeks ago with Ramon. Today we're talking about kind of his journey through being a real estate investor, a real estate agent, and kind of like the beats and the battles and the bruises that he's gone through over the last 20 years being in real estate, starting in 2004 or 2001 actually doing flips, and then in '04 started actually doing deals for other people. Started getting into the short, short sale foreclosure game, which is something that might be coming up here soon. So if you are a real estate agent listening to this, you may want to start familiarizing yourself a little bit with short sales and foreclosures because you might see them come through. And then of course, once he kind of built up a team, how to lever out of that team and how to partner with people so that you can scale. Ultimately, what I've gotten out of this episode and what I think you will too, is that people are the key to scaling. And if you can partner with people and get the right people in the right places, that is really the best way to scale. 'Cause there's only so much time in the day. So you gotta either partner with people with time. If you've got capital, partner with people with capital. If you've got time, and that's how you go to get things a lot faster. So we're going through kind of that whole process with Brian here today, and it's a fantastic episode. Before we get into the episode with Brian, I've gotta let y'all know that the FI team is hiring. We want investor-friendly agents or agents that just love— people that just love real estate that want to help other people buy and sell homes. You gotta be ready to hustle. You gotta be ready to put in the work. But on the other end of that can be a life-changing amount of, of income and a life-changing amount of wealth. If you're interested at all in partnering with us and kind of starting and being in business together, go to thefiteam.com, fill out a form on the work with us page, and we'll get in touch with you fairly quickly. With that being said, let's bring on Mr. Brian Gubernick. Brian Gubernick, welcome to the show, my friend. How you doing today, man?

I appreciate it, man. I'm doing great. Thank you so much for having me. Hopefully I can deliver for you, but I appreciate you having me. It's an honor.

I have no doubt that you're going to deliver tenfold. Exciting update, guys. The FI team is now powered by Place. In addition to having so much more to offer our clients, We're now able to grow our team in all 50 states. If you're an investor-friendly agent seeking a top 1% real estate team to join, reach out. I'd love to talk about how we can partner to accelerate your career. Reach out at thefyteam.com/apply. So why don't we kick it off? Like any good story starts is in the beginning. Where did it all start? How old were you? What year was it? When did you start to get into real estate?

Dude, we only have an hour, right? Like, I mean, we're not going to go that long. I, uh, Gosh, I gotta really think, how am I gonna summarize this? Well, I'm in, for what it's worth, I'm in Scottsdale, Arizona. Pretty much grew up out here and I went to college to become an accountant. That wasn't necessarily the mission, but once I got into the business school, it was like, there's somebody I looked up to and he said, you ought to go into accounting. And I looked at accounting and it was like a competitive major. Like whoever got the best grades got the best job. And I was like, that's for me. So I went down that path and it all worked as it should. And I went to what was at the time a Big Five firm. Now, now there's fewer. I'll spare you the details on that, but Deloitte and Touche is who I went to. It's now Deloitte. And I spent the first couple of years out of school as an accountant and hated every second of it. Hated every second. I love the numbers. I love the P&L. I love the balance sheet. I still use all of that stuff today. So believe it or not, I would go back and go the same path. But no one ever told me, at least at that time, you are not a behavioral fit for this sort of role. In other words, I was not wired to be an accountant working in a cube, climbing up the corporate ladder. And so fast forward a bit. Whenever, you know, in Phoenix where I live, in Scottsdale, when you don't know what you want to do with your life, what we do out here, we go get our real estate license. And so on the side, I got a real estate license. And when you get your real estate license in Arizona and you don't know what you want to do, you become a real estate investor. That's what we do. Now, this was 2000. I'm getting up there in years now, but this was 2004 when I decided, all right, real estate's the path for me. I finished school in '01, spent a few years, and eventually went 100% into real estate. And at that time where the real estate market was at, You were buying properties and I was flipping 'em, but I wasn't particularly skilled. I didn't understand the data. Frankly, it was just the right time, right place. And I would buy a home and next thing you know, 6 months later it was worth X% more and I'd sell it and I made money. And that worked well until it didn't. Craig, I don't know if you've spent time around, if you were thinking about real estate at that time, but—

Well, in '01, I was in 4th grade and my grandma had picked me up from 9/11 and that's like my only memory of 2001. That, and I think the Diamondbacks beating the Yankees, because I grew up in Boston, so I like any team that beats the Yankees. So maybe we share that, uh, that fun that year.

That did happen. I appreciate you letting me know you're in 4th grade. Now I feel even older. But yeah, I was buying properties and selling them, and I said it worked until it didn't, because even though you didn't work in real estate at that time, 2006 and '07 and '08 2009 hit, and I'm sure many in your audience were familiar with what occurred during that economic and housing market downturn.

I want to talk a little bit about kind of like those first deals that you did and just maybe just take us back to like that time of what did a deal look like for you back in 2001 and how did you analyze it? Or was it just like anything worked, throw a dart at the MLS?

And it really, at that time, I mean, I'm not even kidding around, like we had such rapid appreciation in '04, '05, '06 that it was like most anything I bought, you know, I borrowed some money at the very start, like, you know, borrowed money from a bank as well as pulled some money from friends and family. And I had a, I had a run where I'd buy something and then I'd sell it and I'd make, you know, 10, 20, whatever it was. And I was a house flipper. I think there's a really important point to make, and I don't want to go too hard on the investment component just yet, but we called ourselves investors at that time. We were not investors. We were buying. I was buying properties and selling them rather quickly. That was job income. You know, as I grew up and became more experienced, I realized you are not an investor when you're flipping properties. From my perspective, you are just trading your time for money, which is exactly what we do when we have a job. And so my job, which I'm not anti, by the way, but my job was find properties that looked undervalued and sell for more money, do a little bit of rehab. I was not particularly skilled. I wasn't learning from others. The market timing played well for me. And so when it came to like underwriting the deal, it was like pulling comps and how does this one compare you know, relative to those around it. Oh, it looks like there's some margin if I just put in countertops and carpet. And I was doing a lot of that labor myself, which was a great experience. Like I'd go in there and I'd rip out carpet. I'd go in and I'm not particularly handy. I didn't grow up that way, but I learned a lot. And then eventually I built to a place where I could hire third party as I sourced more opportunities.

So we got kind of like '04, to '07, you're flipping houses, you're finding under-market deals, you've got your license, so I'm guessing you're at least listing them yourself and probably getting a discount on the buy side. Did you leverage that?

It was the only reason I had my license at that time. It was not to be a retail sales agent. It was to simply manage my own deals and save money in ways that I could save it.

And what were you making on like the average flip?

My objective was to make $10,000 to $20,000 a flip.

Okay.

And so as a 20, call it 5-year-old, 6-year-old who would do, call it, I mean, it wasn't a ton of deals, but call it a dozen deals, a couple hundred thousand dollars in job income at that time. By my metrics, I was, I was doing all right. But it's really important though, as this, as we kind of shift into the next phase of my career, I keep alluding to the fact that I was not particularly skilled. Didn't understand the math and what truly drove value and frankly what drove the economy because it felt like one day every property was worth significantly less than what it was on the day prior. And that clearly was not true. There was a, there was a, there was time that had to happen. There was things that had to happen. I just was naive and uneducated. Probably one of the first big mistakes I made in my life was, and I've made many, but it was just lack of knowledge. And I didn't realize how it was just a moment in time and a fair amount of luck that led to early success. It wasn't, it wasn't my knowledge. And, and I learned the hard way, which is again, probably one of the first failures, but it was also the greatest learning lesson I've ever had.

100%. And, and so I guess you know, as, as someone that kind of grew up in a sim— like, different time but similar, like, market was really good, really frothy, it's pretty much impossible to fail. What were some of the, the holes that you saw in your business when the market was good that you then had to patch up when, you know, the market started to go down?

Well, to be clear, I had to more than patch up. I had to more or less shift my entire business world to survive. Again, I, I wasn't underwriting I, I will tell you, like, to summarize it, there's lots of little things I could point to, but I was trading or making moves based on optimism versus how I invest more today, which is always underwriting worst-case scenario and developing contingency plans. Like, if this happens, then that. If this happens, then that. I wasn't— I was singularly focused in that I'm going to buy this, I'm going to sell it at a profit, I'm going to move to the next. So I would tell you that hubris and optimism is what ended up, you know, really doing me in. The market did change and I ended up with, Craig, 7 or 8 properties that I thought I'd be selling rather quickly that were now on my books in my name. And they were all upside down, meaning that the value might have been a little bit more than the loan, but after like, sales costs, time on market, all of that, I was upside down in that the debt was more than the home's value.

How did you get there and what did you do?

On this one property, 10401 South 49th Street, the one that changed my life. And I called the bank at the time, which was a bank called First Horizon. The second on it was First Tennessee. And I called them and I said, hey guys, I can't pay your loan in full. And they said, okay, what do you want us to do about it? I said, I, I don't know, but I've got a bunch of these and I don't have the money to pay them all. You could have the house back. And this was like a legitimate conversation with like a random person there. And it was, you know, fast forward a bit. What I was really asking to do, which is actually something that nobody's talked about in quite some time but is now resurfacing in today's environment, I was discussing a short sale, selling a property for less than what the bank is owed in the bank for giving or agreeing to accept less on that loan, forgiving maybe the balance. And so I had this property and I argued with them for what felt like an eternity, but it was like 48 hours. And I got a letter from them that said we would take X, and X happened to be like $30,000 less than the mortgage. I didn't disclose it to anybody. I didn't tell the title company. I didn't intentionally do that. Just no one had ever heard of it. I had a payoff letter. And I went and sold that property and I learned after the fact that that's called the real estate short sale. It's kind of funny, but I started Googling, or actually at the time, Craig, don't laugh at me. It was probably like Yahooing because I don't think it was Google.

Asking Jeeves.

I was asking Jeeves. That's right. What is this short sale thing? And everything it pulled was short selling stocks on Wall Street. And I found one guy who wrote a book on the real estate short sale, and I called him And I tracked him down. I called him and the guy was ecstatic. I don't think anybody had ever read his book except maybe his mom. And by the way, I wrote a book that only my mom read, so I can relate. And I talked to him for hours about the real estate short sale. He had a strategy to go knock on people's doors, you know, buy their property for like— he had a whole investment strategy. I actually was learning more about it because as, as big of a knucklehead as I was at that time, I also recognized that in Phoenix, which was a hotbed for this activity, We were first. We were very fortunate to be the first market that really collapsed. I'm like, yeah, I think other people might need help with this. And yeah, I learned about the short sale and I short sold a handful of my other properties. Honestly, I had a couple I didn't get done and they went to foreclosure. My credit was destroyed. It was the first major, major failure I'd ever had in my life. I was calling— it's funny when I think about it now, I was calling a bankruptcy attorney and I think that's funny because I did. I had a condo and a Labrador at the time. That was like my only obligations. But, you know, you don't know. You're young. You haven't experienced anything. I thought my life was over. I was like embarrassed to tell my parents and my— I was hiding it all. And fast forward a bit, I thought that real estate short sale thing could be something. And I got into retail sales like a traditional agent sort of role. And I'm like, gosh, maybe I could help some people. That's how I launched my real estate sales career. Yeah, thousands of short sales on behalf of others later, I happen to have a really big real estate team in 7 different states, and it was all based on the real estate short sale, believe it or not.

I kind of want to unpack the short sale a little bit because I feel like it is coming around. And honestly, I've never— I've full honesty, I've never done one, right? I mean, I've only been in this business for the last 5 years, really 5, 6 years of like helping other people be innate, like helping other people transact. And so the, the basis of a short sale is that the house is worth less than the debt on the property. The bank forgives a certain amount of that basically because they don't want to deal with it. They just want the house off the books. They're not in the real estate business. How does it work when you're a real estate agent helping somebody else in this? Because the seller's got no money to give a real estate agent. So how do you get paid?

Yeah, great question. So I'll tell you, like, the way my business model evolved, for what it's worth, is I began putting it out there that I've been through this. You may be experiencing it as well. I can help you. And that evolved eventually to— I mean, I'm moving through this kind of quickly, but at some point I had the budget to market these services and I started running radio ads that drove to a calculator where you'd input your address much like you would on a lot of websites today. This was— it's funny, but it was kind of innovative then. And it would tell you, you put in your address and you put in your home mortgage amount and it would tell you how far upside down you were. And the website, the URL was howshortami.com. And that was the, that was the radio ad. That was the call to action. And I would have dozens of people every day input their address into this site and see how far upside down they were. And then I would call them and I'd say, hey, here's your options. You could either come to the table with money, or if you have financial distress like so many did, we can go to your bank and negotiate or attempt to negotiate them for them to take less. And so what would happen is you would— let's say, let's just say for sake of example here, you owed $200,000 on your property, but it's worth $150,000. I would market your property for sale at $150,000, but it would be a contingent contingent upon bank approval sale. And so I would get this offer in and I would submit it to, let's call it the time it was like Countrywide. They were the big one who eventually was— became B of A. Eventually became B of A later, later, later down the road. But Countrywide, I'd go to them and say, I have an offer and here's a package of information that displays that this homeowner is in financial distress. Pay stubs, you know, financial statement, bank statements, all sorts of information that they would request. And my job as the real estate agent became negotiating, arguing, debating, showing, you know, different valuation and all sorts of things, making a case basically to get the bank to take less. The bank would include in, in taking less, they would approve all of the costs of sale as well. So people didn't pay me out of pocket their commission. The bank approved my commission, and oftentimes I had to fight for that as well, because what's a bank trying to do? Banks trying to maximize their return. So who's the first? What's the first expense they would cut or attempt to cut was mine. Now, property values dipped pretty aggressively at that time. I mean, we had, we had homes in Phoenix. I mean, I think our, our average price point for a moment in time was like $130,000, $140,000. So you could do the math. I didn't have a lot of room to negotiate on commission, but there were times where there was a deal or 2 or 10 where I just ended up doing the thing for free just to get it done. Because why would the seller want to do it? They want to avoid foreclosure. And so you've got to negotiate the terms of the sale. You got to negotiate what, what, what the bank is going to get in terms of their net, but you also have to negotiate the outcome. Like, are you going to accept this and allow the homeowner to avoid foreclosure and all of that. So it was a pretty, pretty detailed process and I ended up doing it thousands upon thousands of times, not just for my own clients and my own listings, but I built a pretty large real estate team that began acting as a third-party negotiator for agents all across the nation. And so from really, call it 2007 all the way through 2013, that was 100%. The focus of all I did was acting as a negotiator or an agent for those that were having different distress. Now, I had to move my model outside of Phoenix because in 2011 or so, the market in Phoenix really started to rebound. And as that market started to rebound, my business model began to go a little bit stale. In other words, there wasn't a ton of opportunity in Phoenix like there once was. So I ended up going to other states that were behind Phoenix and Vegas and Florida and some of these areas that were hit hardest at first. So I ended up in the state of Washington and the state of Oregon and some in California and Michigan and Nevada. I was bouncing around trying to extend the life of the model, and that took me all the way through about 2014, Craig, before I did my first what we would call normal sale, before I did my first traditional sale, which is mind-blowing. I had done thousands of transactions before I actually worked with somebody who had equity in their home because my area of expertise, what I was specializing in was, was the real estate short sale. Now, in terms of, you know, when I think back on that time and I'm going to put my investor hat on and for those agents and non-agents listening, I think this is a really important point. Yet another mistake I had made. I was, I was acting as a retail salesperson for everybody. I was getting paid a commission. But I was, I was not thinking like an investor at all. So what that means to me is I was again only getting paid on retail. I was only getting paid on retail. I wasn't buying any properties. I wasn't investing in any properties. Craig, I wasn't— I didn't have the hat on, the investor hat on at that time. So I made a big mistake, man. I really did. If I could go back in time, I should have been buying everything or attempting to buy everything that I was negotiating on. That because I had, I had insider information.

Real quick question, Brian. When you were doing all those short sales and you started to expand in different states, do different states have different rules when it comes to short sales, or is it all kind of the same?

Yeah, really good question. Every state has some different approach in terms of like how they facilitate foreclosure. Like Arizona is a deed of trust state, so they would issue a couple of different notices. Then you had to go to a trustee sale. Whereas other states are judicial. You go through the courts. Typically, the deed of trust states are a heck of a lot easier in terms of the process, being able to stop the foreclosure, what the bank has to invest to facilitate. It's a lot cheaper to facilitate on the bank's behalf foreclosure in a deed of trust versus judicial. But equally, if not more important, there's different deficiency laws in each state, meaning how they treat that remaining or outstanding debt varies. So in Arizona, there was pretty firm— and Washington was this way as well— there was pretty like clear and structured deficiency laws, meaning that the bank had very little recourse. So it would behoove them to work with me and negotiate a deal. But in other states like Michigan and Nevada, there are deficiency laws, meaning the bank could recover post-sale. So I had to negotiate a settlement they were harder deals to typically do. So yeah, every state has its own nuances and, and, and different things you've got to navigate and understand. You needed to understand that stuff inside and out if you were going to effectively negotiate with a bank.

Right. Yeah. And where does someone go like today if they wanted to learn about short sales and go through with that?

I would tell you today, I don't know if there's a lot of classes just yet. I do expect some things to ramp up in the coming months or years, because I don't think there's going to be a run on short sale or foreclosure, contrary to what maybe some say right now. I think there's a couple of pockets around the country. San Antonio, for example, is one where we're seeing more spring up. But honestly, right now I'm probably hitting ChatGPT first and then I'm going, I'm going from there. If it's me and I'm brand new, I'm probably going chat and then I'm probably trying to connect with those that have had firsthand in-the-trench experience and trying to understand from their experiences, like interview them, partner with them, learn from them in some capacity. So I think that's where the real opportunity lies.

Getting back to kind of like the story side of things. So '07 to '14, you're doing all these short sales. If you had to guess a number between how many short sales you did in those 7 years, how many did you get and how did that change your financial, like, situation going from bankrupt?

Yeah. Great question. As I was mentioning, we were running our own listings and those listings also created some buyer opportunities. But I also was negotiating as a third party for many across the nation. We touched probably 6,000 short sale files in the course of like a 7-year run. It was a lot. And yeah, no question, it changed my financial situation tremendously. It's important though, like another thing that happened, which seems negative when you think about it at first, but proved to be awesome for me, like fantastic for me.

My—

when I went through my own stuff, the short sales, the foreclosure, my credit was banged up, which means I had to use cash for everything for a long period of time. Again, another thing that in the moment you're like, oh man, this is rough. It completely reshaped the way I thought about money and my, my approach. Like my, I didn't have a credit card for about a decade, even to run my business. And I was, I almost was like reluctant to even get one. And, and I'd have to look at like the Amex I have. I bet you I'm like a customer since 2018. Like, it's not like I have some longstanding relationship. I didn't have the opportunity to, so I had to buy everything in cash. Or I didn't buy it at all. So I mean, you could either afford it or you can't. But yes, you know, I, I was able to create some liquid cash, you know, and I was able to start doing things again, but doing them certainly, I wouldn't call it more conservatively, but I began doing it in a much more educated, calculated manner.

Do you think if you could have gotten a loan in those years, '07 to '14, that you would have bought some of these things that you foreclosed, or was that not even on your Oh no, no.

I mean, it's one of the bigger mistakes I made not buying, you know, in the real estate game, Craig, and maybe you've heard this before. I always get a kick out of it. If I was in the stock market game, if I was in the Wall Street game and I had information about a company that was going like I knew this company was going to go up in value and I heard about it before anybody else and I acted on that knowledge. That would be called insider trading. I'd go to jail or I'd be deeply fined. In the real estate game, if you have that same sort of knowledge, you know what happens to you, Craig?

You get really wealthy.

You get really— you get high-fived on stage and you're a well-known investor that's super wealthy. In other words, I had the inside track on so many properties and did nothing about it. And it's because I was so focused on like the next retail deal, the next commission. And I wasn't thinking about wealth creation at that stage of the game. I was trying to dig out of a hole. So in answer to your question, I couldn't have gotten a loan, but I could assure you I could have found individuals with money because I had the deals. For all those listening right now that are all hung up on where do I find the money, the money is like, the money is genuinely easy to find. The deal's what's hard to find. If I took 100 short sales that I knew were being sold for, you know, under market and I brought them to somebody with money, like some of my peers who are much smarter than me, I definitely did. I'd own 10x the number of homes I own today, and I own a couple today. Like, that was a big— that was a big miss for me.

There's a guy named David Osborne. Do you know him? I did. Yeah. Yeah. That's how he made— I really like and admire David because He made a lot of his money in foreclosures and short sales in that time, and he just bought a ton of houses. And like what a lot of investors do is they make them and they sell them, or they try to get all fancy and 1031 exchange. He just held them. Just so boring. He, I think he still has a lot of them today. And he's, I know he's worth, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars.

So David's got a few bucks. I think he owns thousands upon thousands of units. And no, no, no. I learned later in life, the quickest way to go broke or the quickest way to not accumulate wealth is to sell things that appreciate. And so today my strategy is shaped on that experience in that, no, I don't sell anything unless I'm trying to, you know, unless I feel like the equity tied up in it is being underutilized. But no, I'm a buy and hold indefinitely.

I'm the same way, which makes it hard to be a real estate agent sometimes, especially because we focus a lot with investors, is that I usually encourage people to not sell their house and instead just buy another one if they can. But I guess that That's neither here nor there. When did you actually get in and buy your first true investment property?

I mean, after I got— after I got my butt kicked, I think probably when I was stable again, it might have been around 2012. Like, I bought some, but again, I was only dealing with my own cash. So I want to say like 2011, 2012, 2013, I picked up something here, picked up something there. Just not at the rate I would have. So I wasn't gun-shy. Well, let me rephrase that. I probably was more gun-shy or conservative because I just saw what was supposed to never happen. I actually saw it happen. Like, you've probably heard about Lehman Brothers crashing and all the— I saw it. I lived it. Like, there's movies that have been made about this stuff. I was that. And so I experienced it all. But it was probably 11, 12, 13. I started picking up one here one there, all with the mentality of long-term rental. It was no, I was out of the flip game.

And did you just buy these with cash and throw a renter in there, or did you, did you renovate them and know, because you had some experience with flipping, like, did that bug come back to you at all when at least to renovate them?

No, I have no bug to flip. Like, I genuinely, like, can I go into a property and recognize how to force appreciation? When I say forced appreciation, for those that may not know what I'm talking about, what can I do to enhance the value of this property? Like, does it make sense? Now, again, I have a rental mindset, so going in there and putting in the nicest floors does not make sense. But going in there in many cases and ripping out carpet and putting down some sort of hard flooring, laminate flooring, whatever it may be, I would do things of that nature. I would change the countertops, but I'm not trying to put top of line. I'm just— I need durability. And so I would do things like that, but I'd also do little things that, that, Craig, I don't know if many people think about. I would do goofy things like I'd go to Home Depot and I'd buy storage sheds, you know, like the $300, $400, $500 storage sheds people throw in their backyard to store their stuff. And I would drop it at a rental property that I owned and I'd say, Mr. and Mrs. Tenant, you're welcome to use the storage. For $30 a month. And I know many would be like, it's only $30 a month. Well, in 12 months I paid for the cost of that silly storage unit and it's been gravy for a decade since. So like little things like that, I constantly think, how do I increase cash flow? And again, I play the long-term hold game. I've, I've probably flipped a couple properties over the years because maybe I partnered with somebody or just made absolute sense to do it. But 95% is, is I think about how am I, is this something I want to hold indefinitely?

Right. And I love that mentality. There was a property that I just, I bought it. I bought it subject to, got a great rate on it. And I wanted to do a, I want to do a rent to own on it. And I put it on the MLS, advertised as rent to own, all these things, hoping somebody in a little bit of trouble would be able to help them get into a home that they wouldn't otherwise be able to get into. Turns out I got an offer like in a down market that was like $30,000 or $20,000 or $30,000 more than what I had listed for. And I listed it kind of high and I was just like, sometimes, sometimes you get offers you can't refuse. And, you know, a quick dime sometimes is better than a long dollar.

I don't disagree with that at all. There are some times where it's like you just run out the math. To me, it's all a math equation. I mean, it really is. Even if someone's going to pay me a premium, I've got to ask myself, okay, let's assume I accept that premium. How am I going to redeploy these dollars and get an even greater return? And so like the math just has to make sense. I think for novice investors, we, because I've been there, we, we don't place enough emphasis on the actual calculus and we rely too much on like, our feeling or our gut or subjective measures. I think investment could be, you know, for the most part could be all objective for sure. And that's usually around the math, around the data.

Yeah, 100%. So you started kind of buying things in 2012, 2014, your business shifts a little bit. So let's go to 2014 and tell me how the business shifts where short sales are less and less popular. How did you pivot yet again?

Yeah, it's interesting because you always hear about people talking about a market shift. And when a market shifts as a real estate professional, as a real estate team, whatever it may be, you've got to adjust your business plan. Well, most people were super excited about 2013-14 because the market had truly started rebounding like we were out of it. For me, that, that was my shift because I had to change from this distressed model. I was doing all the short sales, but I also started doing a lot of REO, like bank-owned properties. And things like that because of my relationships with the banks at that point, I had to learn how to facilitate traditional equity in my property type sales. It's a different customer service experience. It's a different skillset. And at that point, I was out of the transactions. I was running the company. I wasn't— so I had to really pivot. And so we did get into more of that equity, right? That traditional property. And and I ran that and obviously still run it through today given where, where the market's at. But I had to pivot quite a bit. Now at that same point, 2014, '15, as we started to kind of evolve, now I'm in the game like I got licensed early on, but I didn't start selling until February of '07. Now I'm in the game, call it 8 years, and that's when I started kind of diving into these other real estate opportunities from a business standpoint. When I got in the brokerage game and eventually got into like the title insurance game and the mortgage game. And I then started really ramping up all the coaching and training mastermind business that, that I still do today.

Gotcha. So, so you didn't actually go back into production. You were just kind of teaching your team how to handle sales that were just typical, normal equity sales.

To the best of my ability. But I'm going to be very clear, and it might be funny to some, some people, maybe even some of you, you know, you know me. I was never a great agent. I wasn't like— I loved the real estate business. I loved the operations. I loved the short sale negotiation. That stuff was a blast for me. But in the traditional real estate agent world, that wasn't— I didn't thrive in that. And so not only did I not go back into it, when the market changed, I had to find people partners or people I could bring into my business who actually were truly knowledgeable around an area of the business, the traditional business that I was not. I had gotten to that. That was probably in the point in my career, Craig, where we all have ego as we grow up in this business and we all kind of go through these phases. I had probably reached the, the phase of, okay, I'm not the guy to do everything. Like I'm aware of the fact I have awareness around the fact that I'm great at some things and I'm not great at others. I had to bring other people in.

How did you bring other people in? Like, did you, did you give them equity? Did you pay them a salary? Like what were the caliber people?

Interesting question. So no, it was almost all override slash salary, like creative ways to compensate without jeopardizing the team's P&L. I had to give up knowing that I believed in where we were going to go, so I would invest profit back into the people. Like people say, take your profit and plow it back into your business. I was doing that, but specifically in terms of plowing back into the business, I was putting it back into acquiring more talent, more people. And so, you know, I still had all these different locations around the country. So I started having leaders rise up. And at some point, you know, I was less in the trenches and I was just working on the business and coaching the leaders who were then turning around and working with the agents and all of that other, all the other components. And so I'd be also though, I mean, I truly became a student of how to hire, how to partner. You know, I worked relationships like I thought about getting in partnership or hiring people nonstop. Like a lot of agents think about the next deal. My next deal was like, who's the next person to align with. I focused a lot on that. It's cliché to say, like, I know lots of people say that, that genuinely was my life talking with people about potential opportunities for us.

Yeah. You know, Brian, I didn't realize, I didn't realize that about you, that you kind of started off in the short sale and like you weren't a good typical real estate agent. Like, I feel like I am where you were in this part of your journey right now in that you want an investment property. Like, I can legitimately say, I can confidently say that there's not a better investor-friendly realtor in in Denver than our team. However, when it comes to selling regular homes, which we're trying to get into, that was a big reason why we partnered with Place. Dude, I've never sold a home in my life. Someone's actual legitimate like home, home. I've just now had the revelation that you seem to have is like, how do you, is finding the right person to plug in and yeah, that's something that I'm trying to figure out and struggle with now. So I'm curious as to like, how'd you find your first guy?

Oh, that's a good question. It does sort of go back to Craig. Like, you know, we talk about like this reticular activator system. Like you talk about how nobody has a blue car, blue cars on your mind. Now you go drive today and guess what you're going to see? Everybody's going to have a blue car. Like you think I never see them. The second it's in your mind, it's all you see. I think it started there with me when I started thinking, and by the way, I do this, it's still what I do today. I am nonstop. Looking for people everywhere I go. My wife will tell you, I'm like super annoying. I'm not the most social, like, relationship-based guy, but if I know of somebody who's got a pedigree or a resume or experience in something, you will see me engage just to learn more. Now, I'm not always thinking like I want to hire or partner with this person, but like, I lean heavily into relationships. I cultivate relationships from a business perspective to see where they go. So see where they're going to go. So number one, I would tell you that I'm thinking about it nonstop, and I started thinking about it nonstop then. Number two, once you— like, like, for the first person I'm thinking around right now, I had to make sure that my world was big enough such that he could come in and run a massive world within that world. Does that make sense? Like, there had to be enough going on to where I wasn't like a short-term partnership. He said, you know what, I can grow this, this, this, this, and this within this ecosystem or world that Brian's created. And I think that's true for anybody you bring in your world. Forget about big hires. If you're bringing real estate sales agents into your world, people will leave you, will leave your organization when they perceive that opportunity ceases to exist. If I go back to this the boring accounting story I told at the beginning, I actually could still be at Deloitte if I had believed the opportunity was massive and I wouldn't want to walk from that. But instead they said, year 1, junior accountant, year 2, senior accountant, year 3, opportunity to become junior manager. Like, there was this hierarchy of this that wasn't appealing to me. And so not only did I have to constantly be thinking about people, I had to be thinking about like what I was building, what I was creating, and is it attractive? Right? Like the truth of the matter is, Craig, you and I— forget about place for a moment— you and I could be in business together if you had something so big that I said, you know what, I could build something awesome within Craig's world. I could have a partner. I could have somebody who's along this lonely journey that we're all on as entrepreneurs, or vice versa. But we just have to make sure that, that it truly is, you know, not a short-sighted opportunity. It's a decade, two decades, whatever it may be. It's one thing I love about, you know, since we mentioned Place, right? Like Chris and Ben, who founded— who are the founders of Place, recognize I met those two guys. We've been in the real estate trenches together since, since 2007, 2008. I met them both around 2010 in a mastermind. And here I am now, 15 years later. And I'm playing within their ecosystem. Why? Well, because before I even got here, they were on the track to be a billion-dollar, and now way greater than that, type of company. I could kind of build a lot of stuff and, and hit a lot of markers for my family and me within a world that big, right?

Yeah, that's exciting, man. And I mean, we just had an episode, uh, with, uh, with Ramón uh, Casas, uh, who I'm sure you know, uh, he's in Arizona too. So, and, uh, to talk all about place and all that kind of stuff. So, um, if you guys, if you guys want to know more about place and what it's all about, the episode with Ramon is fantastic. Um, when, when you are like thinking about partnering with somebody, what are some red flags, green flags that you might look for?

Well, it's very, it's going to be very specific to what we're aiming to accomplish. I will tell you about a partnership experience that I had that might sort of answer, at least in answer that question in a, in a roundabout way. There was an individual that I was looking to get into business with. We had talked about it for years and he was doing some really big things. I think I was accomplishing or building a couple things and I wanted to bring him into my world. And we shared a mentor and we told our mentor that, hey, we're thinking about partnering. And our mentor said, Great. Come out to see me and do me a favor. Both of you need to bring your net worth statement. Bring your balance sheet. I said, okay, that's a weird request, but sure. So we fly out to Austin and we go to his office and he goes, you guys bring those net worth statements? You bring those balance sheets? We said, yeah. He goes, cool. Exchange. Brian, you take his and give yours over. And I'm going to give you both a half hour to study what one another has. And it was one of the most uncomfortable exercises I've ever done in my life. People don't openly share that sort of thing. And then we hand it back to him and he goes, okay, well, you know, what did you learn? And then he ultimately said, now you're both completely naked. You've been undressed. In other words, the ego is now aside. Like a lot of partnerships, they start like people trying to protect what's theirs and, and, you know, it's just human nature. And he said, let's remove all of that. Okay, cool. Now we can have a real conversation about you partnering. Which, that was a fascinating move to me. Then as we worked through things, what we realized was in any partnership, no two partners will ever be contributing to the partnership at the same level at the same moment. Craig, you and I are in partnership. Let's say you and I, like some days I'm going to be doing more than you, my performance, maybe the hours I'm working, maybe my contribution. And then there's days or weeks or months when you're going to do more than me. And what happens in most partnerships? Well, when that sort of thing happens, because we're human, resentment starts to brew. So how do we eliminate that? Like, how do we already know what's going to happen? So what do we do proactively to eliminate that? And what we would— what we did to make sure that it worked was we just started outlining when I outperform you, here's what's going to happen towards me. And when you outperform me, when I say outperform, maybe you've got metrics and one guy's hitting the metrics and one isn't. Well, when the one guy's always hitting his metrics, he should get disproportionately rewarded. Like most partnerships all end up doing like a 50/50 deal. Okay. But I should get a bonus when I outperform you. And by the way, you should get unfairly rewarded when you outperform me. And that was a big thing. And I would say the very last thing around partnerships that I've learned over the years, they usually fall apart because of number one, what I just said, like misunderstood expectations without proper setup. But number two, it's almost always a communication issue. Our communication isn't frequent or it's not clear, or we don't have an agenda. And so it, for any partnership deal I do these days, we're super clear on how we're going to communicate. We are incredibly clear on what our expectations are from one another, and we are especially clear on how We're going to behave when one of us is outperforming the other.

Yeah, I love that. That, that is actually, it's a tremendous help to anybody looking to partner. And honestly, both of those things I think are super common mistakes is that you think you get to know somebody, maybe you've been in business with them for a while, maybe you have a bunch of conversations, maybe you see them every month at the Real Estate RIA or whatever. But until you see their net worth, because you honestly, you want to work with someone that is probably plus or minus 10% of your net worth, like around there. Otherwise you're going to be, you're not going to be operating at the same wavelength. Like a $10,000 or a $50,000 investment might be this person's entire net worth when it might be a drop in the bucket to you. Right. And so I think like making sure we know, we think same dollars.

I think that that's a really fair statement. I would say though that there will be times where people partner in some capacity, but there might be a greater delta than what you just described. I don't know if this is the right recipe. I'm just telling you what's been right for me. I'll give you an example. I own a property management company. I love that business, and I spend, no joke, 5 minutes a week on it. I funded that operation, right? All of the money that, that went into the startup of that company and funded it for the year plus it was in the red came out of my pocket. Now, my partner, though, if I'm spending 5 minutes, my partner is the one spending all of the time on it. So in that particular partnership, it was my capital but her time. So when I think around any business deal for that matter, I think there's really 3, 3 variables or 3 things that you can control and you have to decide which of these or in what combination will I use them? It's your time. It's your capital, and then it's your, your reputation slash influence. So going back to the property management example, I put my money in, I use my influence to— because realtors are our number one source of, of opportunity or business for that property management company. So I'm using my network, but it's all her time. I would not be in that partnership if it required my time. I don't have enough of it. In other things. Maybe it's both of our capital. Maybe I truly love the business. I'm passionate about it. And you know what? I'll put in the work, but I need you to leverage. I'll give you another example I'm working on right now. I'm working on a tax services company that we haven't rolled out yet, but we're going to equally put in capital because it's not capital intensive. But my job is going to be to leverage all the relationships I have around the nation. And his job is to make sure we do the job and deliver great tax returns and tax advice. Again, time, capital, and influence. And you get the— you get to use those. Now, if you're listening and you're young, like young in your career, guess what? You probably don't have a lot of capital and you probably don't have much influence right now. So your only variable to play with is time. And that's what you get, what you get to deal with until you generate a stronger reputation and you generate capital. Then later in your career, you may have a lot less time. Like if you looked at my calendar right now, I don't have a lot of time, but I am fortunate in that I have a few more dollars and I have at least generated, I think, a half-decent reputation. So I'm sorry to beat that up, but I think about those variables all the time in partnerships.

No, I think that's phenomenal. And you're like levering up, right? When you can learn to manage people and you've got a great people thing, you can create almost any business you want because all you got to do is find the right person with the right skill and make sure that y'all mesh. Because we're kind of coming towards the end here, just to kind of recap the story a little bit of, you know, you know, started off flipping, got into short sales, then started realizing that you weren't the person to do the typical real estate team, but you didn't want to throw away everything you just built over the last 7 years. So you found a partner that seemed to have unlocked this, like, holy crap, it doesn't have to be me. In your brain, and now you've got a bunch of different businesses with partners where you're kind of like, I don't wanna call it the Geppetto, but we'll call it the Geppetto of a lot of these different businesses. And you're spending the times in the ones that truly drive you, which I'm guessing are the coaching and managing the leaders. Is that a good summary?

I mean, I have a day job, right? I, I, I spent, you know, we talked about Place a couple times. I mean, I spend an awful lot of my time on Place building aiming to build enterprise value. That is my time. The coaching and training, it is a good chunk of my time, but everything else, and, you know, I've got different streams of income. Much of that is just my capital at work or reputation. You do earn the right to do that. You know, I think that since we're winding down, I think one thing that, that was an interesting kind of aha for me. When Ray Dalio wrote the book or came out with the book Principles on— what's it? Principles on Life and Work or whatever it's called. Principles. He says in that book a lot of great things, but one thing he said that really, really resonated with me, he said, and I'm going to butcher this, this is how I remember it. He said something to the effect of the first portion of your career, you spend time proving to yourself that you can do it. The next phase of your career, which is hopefully short-lived, is showing others, proving to others that you did it. And then the last third or the last portion of your career, which is the most rewarding portion, is to show others how to do what it is you did. And so when I think through my career and kind of summarize this conversation today, I got my butt just whipped and everything I thought, all the confidence I had. And, you know, you know, I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs. I'm going to be an entrepreneur. I had to question all of that after losing everything. And I spent 7 years just proving to myself that maybe that I am capable. And then, hey, I'm going to be, I'll be honest with you. Like there was probably a moment when my team started getting big and I started having more success. A microphone was put in my hand more often and it felt good to show others what we did. You know, I like to think I didn't live in that zone too long, but I absolutely did. Enjoy that. But to get to the point, at some phase, the ego subsides. You start thinking about partnership. And what is partnership? In a lot of cases, showing others how to do what it is you did, bringing more people in my world, leading, influencing, showing others how to do what it is. And then today, Craig, as you know, like most of my, you know, the two things I mentioned as my day job, it's predominantly to talk to others about how to do what it is we've done. And it's, it's, I'm definitely in, in the most rewarding phase of my career thus far.

Absolutely. I absolutely, I love, I love the trajectory and it just seems like you're kind of like levering up in terms of like your time, dollar per hour stuff and all that.

Okay.

I, I could literally talk to you for another 3 hours, but I want to just ask 2 more questions. The first one being in the partnerships that you had or have, um, I guess one, have you ever— this, this is a two-part question— have you ever had to unwind a partnership because it wasn't what you thought it was? And if not, how would you go about doing that if you did?

There's one that immediately comes to mind for me. Somebody that I thought I had fully vetted and thought I had really known and did everything that I described earlier and still proved after like 6 months into the business that I totally misread her. And by the way, she probably misread me too. Like, I'm not putting the onus 100% on her. I probably might— I'm going to guess maybe there— I didn't show up exactly how she thought I would either. And I remember thinking through this, like, this is someone I've known a long time. This is someone that's really well known in the industry. Like, how am I going to navigate this? Because I can tell you, like, the marker is when you start having that resentment. Like, that's a killer. It starts just subtly, and if you don't address it, it starts to show up frequently, and then all of a sudden you don't want to talk to that person. They zap your energy. I think the writing was on the wall, and I knew I had to get out of that. And I was, I was, I'm a big whiteboard guy. Like, I'm always thinking about, and I'm like mapping out, like, how would I handle this? Which I say, this is before ChatGPT where you just say, hey, give me a script for this. And I realized one day as I was mapping things out, what am I doing here? Like, just go be honest and transparent and direct. Like, you will not regret being direct in the long term. Sometimes we don't want to be direct because we're worried about feelings and emotion and all of that. But I'll tell you what's worse. When you're indirect and you prolong things and you kick— you're like, you're too— you're not— you're not transparent. It never works out. It never works out. Like, all of us have been in that experience where like, I'm going to sugarcoat this. I don't want to, I want to wait. I want to, it never works out. So my rule from that point forward was just attack it, use the right language, but be transparent, be direct, say what's on your mind and it's going to hurt in the moment, but it will serve you down the road. And so in this particular partnership I'm thinking about, when I called her and I said, you are not honoring what, what it is we wrote out. And she may have disagreed with that. And I said, you may disagree, but this is not going to play out favorably for us. I think we're better off ending this sooner than later. I'm going to buy you out. And her response was, nah, I'm buying you out, which she ended up doing. And we did not like each other for a little while. Today I can call her and we're friends and we talk about everything. Not everything, but we still talk. I think that if I would have been soft around that, I wouldn't have attacked it head on. It wouldn't have shaken out well. And even still today, I bet you we would not be in the same room together. But because we had that hard conversation, Craig, I think it, I think it served us in the long term. So if you're looking to break up, be honest, be direct, address it immediately, because resentment is such a killer. Like it just, it gives you like, you lose sleep, you get stressed, you you make decisions you shouldn't be making. It's just not worth it. Life's too short. Business, our business life is way too short.

It sounds just like a, a relationship with your wife or whatever, your, your, your life partner. And it's that, that relate, that, uh, correlation is made a lot. And, uh, it, you know, it's, I think it's, it's fantastic. Okay, Brian, one last question before we head into the final part of the show. We've, we've mentioned Place in case you guys have not listened to a couple weeks ago, the episode with Ramon. Give us the 3-minute, like, what is Place?

Why?

Why are we excited about it? Why are you excited about it? Why have you dedicated most of your time out of all the businesses to this one?

I don't even think I need 3 minutes. I think at the end of the day, what do we really do at Place? What we do, I've been saying, and what I believe is we take a lot of good real estate teams, teams that are doing good things, and we make them great. We make them great. And how do we make them great? We supercharge all the things that they're doing really well, and we introduce models and systems and technology and support around those areas of opportunity. Place is a tech company, and we function in partnership with real estate teams. But our job as Place, as your partner, our end of the bargain is to deliver on technology, marketing, accounting, legal, you know, you name it. We either own it or developing it and/or deliver it to you as the real estate team. And what does this then allow the real estate team to do? Craig, it allows the real estate team to go out and do what it is they signed up for to begin with, which was work with clients, have fun, sell some real estate, and then let my partner, who is stronger with respect to the operation side, given the tools, resources, and, and budget and all of that. Let them do their thing. In other words, it allows us each to operate in our area of expertise. And so again, as Place, we're aiming to partner with some really, really good real estate teams, make them great. You know, in doing that, you know, assembling broker agnostic, all of these amazing teams while at the same time developing our tech stack, our mortgage, our title and all these other ancillaries, we end up becoming a rather sizable company that, you know, 4 or 5 years ago took its, took its first funding round from Goldman Sachs and were valued at a billion dollars. And that was when we were quite a bit smaller than we are today. So, so Craig, I think we're, we're, we're on the path to something really big. What are we really aiming to achieve, not just through partnership with agents? We really believe that we could be the one-stop shop We could be the one place for all consumers to do real estate. Anything they need in their homes will be routed or connected to Place in some sort of way. And lastly, we believe the agent differently than all the other people in this space, the tech companies out there that you're all too familiar with that generate leads and all of that. We believe the conduit to making all of this happen is the real estate agent. And why is that? Because no matter how much tech is going on out there and how much noise is in the world, we believe that the relationship is still going to prevail. And so our partner is the real estate agent who is then connected to the consumer, and we could deliver on this promise that we have.

I love it. We're so excited to see and kind of be part of the journey of Place and just kind of see how it all comes together. And I firmly think that this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a lot of the partners within Place and a lot of the investors with Place too. So I sure hope Goldman has itself a field day here in a few years.

They're certainly betting on it. And I'll tell you, without getting too far into the details, they're pretty darn excited.

Yeah. Amazing. All right, Brian, we've gone a little over, but as promised, we got to get into the final part of the show, which we lovingly call the final, the final four. Super high tech. Brian, give me the book that you're reading right now.

Oh man, I just reread, literally finished it last night, The Science of Scaling, Dr. Benjamin Hardy. Freaking love this book. I love this book. I am so excited about it. And then this morning before I was running, I did download, and I can't vouch for it yet. But I gotta see what all the hype is about Hormozi's new book.

Okay. The $100 Million Models.

Yep. I have, I mean, I literally just downloaded it. I haven't even pushed play. That's gonna be the next one I listen to. Science of Scaling is the last one I physically read and finished it for the second time last night.

Okay. This is the second time I've heard that book in like the last 2 or 3 weeks, and I just listened to a podcast on the Science of Scaling. So I think this is a sign from God that I'm gonna go buy That book.

Go read that book. And, and side note, without saying too much, Craig, there is reason at place. There might be a few things I'm working on that would, you're gonna wanna read it here in the next month or so before that. So I can't say too much, but we may have some special guests coming in.

Yeah. Okay. That's exciting. Number 2, what's the best piece of advice you've ever received?

The best bit of advice, and I'm gonna have to paraphrase this so as to not turn it into a long story. I think about it all the time. I met an individual, I know an individual who's a billionaire who once said, I'm not smarter than, you know, you guys. I'm not a harder worker than a lot of you guys. I'm not as creative. And he kind of went through this list. He said, you know what's different between me and the rest of you? He said, I just think a heck of a lot bigger than you. You're all thinking about how to become the biggest realtor in your city. The biggest investor in your town, maybe the biggest, you know, mortgage company in your state. I was thinking about becoming the biggest XYZ in the world. And I know that sounds like, oh, that's funny advice. The idea here was what I learned was kind of Elon Musk-esque. Love him or hate him, doesn't matter for sake of what I'm going to say. The dude wakes up every morning thinking about how he's going to colonize Mars. Can you imagine waking up and thinking that big? I would say in terms of advice, for me, sometimes I gotta take a step back and say, am I thinking too small here? Am I thinking about how to sell 100 widgets? Maybe I should be asking the question, what would it look like to sell 2,000 widgets? And then you go and build models and systems to get there, fail miserably, and you're still well ahead of where you ever would've been.

I love that. I love it. What is your why, Brian?

I have stories for everything. I don't wanna tell another story.

Stories. What is it? Stories sell. There's, there's a saying out there about stories are a good thing. So share a story.

I went through this challenge in my life where one particular time I was given a mic in front of 8,000 people and I was asked that exact question. And I said, well, obviously it's my family, my wife, my daughters. And I got off the stage and I felt like a total fraud because yeah, I love my wife and my family. Obviously I love my kids, but that wasn't why I was waking up grinding, going to bed late grinding. I mean, they were a component of it, but they weren't the total thing, total package. And I, and I'll fast forward. I kind of went through this whole discovery process, even went so far. You'll find I'm kind of a crazy person. I even went so far to track down Simon Sinek, who wrote Start With Why before the book was huge. Actually, before it was even released, I found him. And was able to kind of work through a couple things. And I realized that for me, at the end of the day, it was really to make an impact through leading and driving outcomes, driving solutions, being a player in that. I know some are like maybe rolling their eyes right now, but what I realized is if I'm truly effective as a leader, as someone who's influencing and making an impact, if I'm generating opportunities and I'm having an influence on those things, not a bystander, but I'm driving and I'm involved. When I go and do that and I win and we win, the trickle down is that my wife and my girls and everything I've ever dreamed of is taken care of. So in other words, they're incredibly important to me. They are my life. But taking care of all of that is a byproduct of me executing on what I just described.

I love that. I love it. I love it. It's like the, the lead versus lag indicator, right? Them being happy.

Well said. Yeah, it's a great way to put it.

Yeah. All right, Brian, second to last question. Uh, what's your strategy if a goose just started to follow you home?

God, my immediate reaction, my first thing in my head was I'm gonna turn around and confront that goose.

You're gonna confront the goose? I am, man. This is a brave man.

I've seen the videos, but I've also, like, I hunt. I don't hunt goose, like, I, I'm not, I'm not hunting the geese, but my immediate reaction when you ask that question is, okay, it's an animal in the wild and you never try to outrun. You got to get big and stand position. Like, I start thinking about bears and things like that. So my immediate— I don't know if this is the right strategy. I might have to look this one up to see what you're supposed to do, but I actually think I'd turn around and like try to square up. Man, those things are nasty. I've seen them crush some people. I'm not going to be that guy.

Dude, Goose, they don't look scary from a distance, but if you get in their way or in their path or anywhere near their kids, be careful.

I have a story for another day. I have been charged a time or two by a variety of things, and my default is going to be do my best to stand my ground. I got to look it up now. You got me thinking. I got to look up what's the greatest defense or how do you react to a charging goose? I got to find that one out.

If there's one piece of advice to maybe not take from Ryan in this episode, it's that last one.

Oh, so you don't, you're telling me you don't do that?

I don't know. I, my thought is like, I hope you're packing and just shoot the dang thing. But, uh, maybe that's cheating.

Is it run? Are you supposed to run? I don't know.

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know if I could outrun a goose. Maybe. I don't know. I don't know.

Yeah.

I don't know. I don't have an answer. So that's why I gave it to you. All right, Brian, where, where can people find out more about you if they wanna follow your story, your journey, all that kind of stuff? Is there, A good place.

Oh, I appreciate the question. There's a couple things real quick. Number one, I'm, I'm not on social a ton, but you could definitely find me on Instagram at @bgubernick, G-U-B-E-R-N-I-C-K. Every Monday through Friday, I have an 8 to 12 minute podcast episode. That podcast is called No Days Off, which doesn't mean work nonstop. It means every single day is an opportunity for us to get a little bit better at something. Be it our health, our wealth, our business, our leadership, whatever it may be. So 10 minutes a day every morning, you can find me there. And then lastly, Craig, I was really fortunate to do a TED Talk not too long ago that just crossed over the 50,000 views metric in the past kind of month and a half it's been up. So if you go to like TEDx or YouTube and look up Ryan Gubernick, that TED Talk on time, How spending time with, with, on those things is most important. Not time management, but on time in general. It's, it should show up there.

Awesome. Brian, thanks so much again for coming on, sharing everything, sharing your journey, sharing your, uh, your wisdom on partnerships and all of that. It's been an absolute pleasure and, uh, we'll look forward to seeing you around.

I appreciate it, man. You're doing a great thing here. I, I appreciate all you do for our industry and, and spreading the word around. Around sales and, and around investment. It's just very cool. Thank you for having me.

Awesome. Thanks, Brian. And that was Brian Gubernick. Man, I really like this episode. I feel like he hit me right in the place where I am right now in that I feel like we're, you know, I mean, honestly, like I feel like we've built a pretty good business, have made decent money doing a lot of stuff where I'm kind of at the forefront of things. And I don't really love that, to be honest. Um, I'm really looking for and inspired to find different partners to help run and help operate different parts of the business. And not just anybody, but people that can do a better job than me at a lot of these things. And making sure that, you know, you don't move into partnerships too slow. You know how to kind of back out of it if you need to. All just fantastic tips from Brian in this episode. And so just, I mean, I, I was jazzed by the end of this and, you know, I, I really wish we could have had him for another couple hours because I would've been drilling down pretty deep. So luckily I'm in partnership with him with Place, so I can definitely see him around and ask him questions. But yeah, just a fantastic episode. If you did, if you agree with me and you like the episode and you like the show, please, please, please leave us a rating and review on Apple, on Spotify, wherever that is. It just helps us so tremendously. Just to bolster the amount of the, the quality of the guests to keep the show going, all that good stuff. So thanks so much, guys, and we'll, we'll talk soon. See ya. Hey, you made it all the way to the end. Thanks so much for listening in, guys. My mission with each episode is to inspire all of you to take action on your real estate investing goal, whether you're looking to grow your current portfolio or ready to take the jump into your first deal. Each guest we've had on the show was at one point in the same exact place you are. Some right in the same exact spot right now. No matter where you are in your journey, reach out at thefyteam.com or DM me on Instagram @thefyguy. I'd love to help you take the next step.