Early Investing, Early Profit With Dan Butler

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Welcome to the Next Level Income show where it's our goal to take your income, investments and life to the next level. I'm your host Chris Larson. You can get your free copy of our book@nextlevelincome.com book today's show is sponsored by Money Insights and their investment Optimizer strategy. In my book, I share how I use this strategy to invest my money in two places at one time. This strategy has been used by the wealthy for generations for estate planning, minimizing taxes, preserving wealth, and increasing stability for their investments. Money Insights can help you develop a plan to build an emergency fund because pay for college, fund a business plan for retirement, and optimize your investments. Find more information by checking out NextLevelIncome.com and clicking on the banking link. On today's show we have Dan Butler. Dan Butler is a co founder of 6am Core Collective, the parent company to Crestcore Realty, Corelin Financial, Crestcore Property Management, Core Build, City Light commercial services, and coreassist. He spent the first 20 years of his career in plant management and operations with Fortune 500 manufacturing companies, then left the corporate world in 2014 to be in real estate full time. Today he owns over 900 units. Personally, he's been an active real estate investor since 2001, focusing on buying and managing single family homes, duplexes and multifamily apartment buildings. He co founded CentreSquare Realty in 2012 and currently manages more than 3,000 properties in Tennessee for over 700 local, national and international investors. Dan, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much. I'm glad to be here. Excited.

Yeah man, it's great to talk to you again. Talking a little football here before the show.

That's right.

Yeah. I'm hoping that. I hope so too because I'd love to bring my boys to watch Virginia Tech play Clemson.

Yeah, that'd be awesome.

Yeah man. So for our listeners that haven't met you before, maybe you could share a little bit more with the audience about how you ended up in the role you are today and more than 3,000 doors man.

Share your story oh man. Goodness. Yeah. I mean it really goes back to high school. I had a mentor in high school that I helped do grunt work, helped to the yards of rental properties he owned and that his father in law owned and he just taught me about wealth creation and just really listened intently and just so going into college I just had that in the back of my mind that at some point I was going to do real estate. Didn't Know what that was going to look like, did engineering and then had a lawn care service as well. And so out of that, created some cash to buy my first house right when I graduated, which then parlayed into line lines of credit. So then I moved to Memphis in 1998 and was determined to buy my first rental. And I think, I think the book was nothing down in the 90s. I think it was Robert Allen.

Robert Allen. I had a. Yep.

Yeah. So I mean, I think he's got the 2000s now and all that stuff. Like I was in the 90s at that point reading that one and that just, you know, before the BRRRR strategy became the BRRRR strategy, it became popular acronym through BiggerPockets. That's the strategy that I kind of figured out that I wanted to do. And so I just, I had a manufacturing gig I was in, you know, as we talked about engineering and operations, plant. Plant management and just started buying real estate on the side. And the whole goal was to have choices. You know, I think I didn't really know what that meant. You know, like in my mind it's like, all right, when I hit 55, which sounded earlier than 65, I could either quit and just be a landlord or I could accelerate my, you know, my income or, you know, speed up the retirement and all that kind of stuff. So I just, I just wanted choices. And I didn't know this was going to lead into what it did because I parlayed two careers for about 14 years, which was brutal. And, you know, a lot of, lot of testimony coming back, you know, around now these days of just the journey that I went through to do all that. But yeah, just blessed that, you know, created that and then that created a property management company. We wanted to manage for others to create fee income so that we could manage our own, you know, like we wanted to be managed. Then we just started the whole vertical operation, vertical integration kind of thought process. What else can we add to help feed the businesses? And I'm happy to go through all those, but I mean, each business is linked some way somehow where we're normally the largest client. You know, like you talked about the, you know, so we have 900 units out of 3,000. We're the largest client of the property management company. You see what I'm saying? So they're all. That's how. That's all. Or the maintenance company. Largest client at the property management company. So it just kind of plays off that. And that's how the business got started and built yeah.

Excellent. Well, yeah, so tell us a little bit more about why you went into engineering because we have a lot of similarities. For those that are familiar with the show or have read our book, they know that I have an engineering background. You have an engineering background? Real estate. Real estate. You know, I listen to your story and it sounds like you're like a, a real life rich dad, poor dad story, you know, where you're thinking about that. But tell us a little bit about, you know, why you went into engineering and what was the inspiration. You know, you talked about, you know, family friend or mentor that talked about wealth creation and the thought process behind that.

Sure. So, you know, through high, through, you know, middle school and high school, I loved math, enjoyed math, was good at math, hated English, you know, just like that side of the brain and the artistic side, you know, like just. I didn't have that artistic side, I just had math and, and come to find out, my dad tells me like last year I was like, why didn't you tell me this before? But he said, you know, since I was 9 years old, I'd be doing math, you know, numbers and stuff on church bulletins, you know, back when I was nine years old, so. Or calculating how much I was going to make by cutting yards or, you know, just all that kind of stuff. My mind's always been spinning that way. So anyway, my mentor actually was a mechanical engineer. And so between what I had with math and what I saw, how he thought that analytical, that, troubleshooting, that problem solving, that mindset, that's, that's what I was really after. As soon as I got into engineering, I realized I did not want to be that design engineer. You know, that wasn't who I was. You know, like I wanted, I wanted the ability to think different and problem solve and, you know, and then I realized I have a love of coaching people and so I kind of married that. That's how I end up at operations when I did, because I saw those two combined, I could, I could do, use my engineering thought process while coaching people in a manufacturing environment. And that's how that, that kind of played out.

So, yeah, so you talked about, you know, running those two parallel careers for 14 years. Talk about, you know, you said, you kind of shook your head when you said that. What were some of the challenges? But what else, what else did you bring from your operations career? Because I know, you know, a lot of the stuff, you know, kind of very similar, 15 years in the med device space and learn a lot, learn a lot along the way and think, okay, how can I apply this here? I often talk about working with surgeons and just what I learned. Maybe you can share with the audience, you know, operations. To me it sounds like a great fit for, you know, what we do in the real estate and the multifamily space.

Yeah, so great, great question. I mean, I think back then I was blessed to get Six Sigma training, what they call lean Kaizen training where you like not getting rid of non value addict added activities workflow. You know, we had ISO, ISO certification which is like, you know, your standard operating procedures on steroids basically. And so yeah, I carried all that into creating these businesses and having that mindset of just efficiency processes, you know, coaching people, that kind of thing. What I didn't realize, you know, the pitfall of all that is that, you know, in corporate you got a lot of peripheral stuff like they've been around a long time, so got a lot of support system. So when you're starting on your own, you don't realize how much you're relying on others and how important that hiring piece is creating your business. And that that's probably where we, if I had to say one big mistake where I didn't use my skills set from before of vetting people, you know, and training people on the front end, I just was, oh, you do property management, Come on in. You know, like that kind of does that make sense because you're just blowing and going and entrepreneur and starting up and you're just trying to plug holes and you know, just keep things afloat. And so that would probably be my biggest piece that I would say it was a struggle very early on.

Yeah, no, I think you bring up a good point. If you look at the skill sets that are most desirable these days, I mean you can, you know, we can hire, we can outsource, we can bring in from overseas different technical capabilities, but the ability to lead, to find talent and to train talent and ultimately find the best fit, I think that's really, you know, what provides the robustness of and durability of a company over time. So I think that's a great lesson for anybody as you looking at the commercial side operations, Six Sigma when you're operating from a lean perspective. I was on a webinar earlier today and talking about the lower the cap rate, the more the value creation. Dan, share a little bit about your transition from the single family space to the commercial space and where you focus today as far as the real estate market and why that is.

Well, you know, I think I'VE always, I started out early on with like the smaller multifamily, you know, that did not require on site management. And you know, I like that space because, you know, I call it under 50 units just for simplicity. You know, you don't have to have an outside manager. Your cost, you know, to over the overhead on that is a lot lower. And you don't have the hedge funds of private equity really chasing after that. That's just too small of a fish for them. So you can find those, you know, for lack of better words, a mom and pop landlord that may have owned it for 30 years, that's, you know, now ready to retire and all that kind of stuff. And so out of that would become, you know, potential for owner finance or partial owner finance. Because, you know, one of the key things that my business partner, one of our, you know, we were willing to give up personal guarantees early on. Like some people hold that, that piece like they don't want to do personal guarantees. I'm like, I mean it's either gonna work or it's not. That's just my personality. And. But we wanted no money down. That's always been our mantra. So yeah, every multi family we bought, we bought with no money down. And every house we bought. Yeah. So it's always been no money down one way, some way, somehow, you know, so that's, that's, that's how I got into it and that's how I continue to buy to this day.

Wow, that's, I mean that's impressive because. Yeah, you know, reading the same books by Robert Allen I had, I'm trying to remember there was a silver one he had. I can't remember if that was no money down for the 2000s or his multiple streams of income. And you know, I think all the ones that influenced me and that's, you know, a lot of the early properties I bought, I leveraged off of other ones and took out credit card loans and different stuff. And when, you know, when I was buying in the early 2000s, you can probably relate. They're like, just sign here like, that's right. That's it. That's it. You're giving me a loan. That's terrific. I'm like, well any, you know, and fortunately I had good income and we could do stuff. Was there a point though, Dan, where you, you made a jump like 700 units. That's a lot of units. I mean, did you go from like 2 to 4 to 8 to 16 or was there, was there a jump where, where that curve Went, yeah, know from linear to curvilinear.

So that's an awesome question. I would say I started out, you know, and this is one of my. I would say a weak strength and a weakness all rolled in one. I like to go big or go home. And so I started out with a 19 unit multifamily when I was 27 years old. Had a 1616 unit when I was 28. I still didn't know what I was doing. You know what I mean? I still, I was underinsured, no renters, insurance, had a fire. That's all whole nother story, but I think but one. The other piece was, I learned early on was the big banks. You're just a number. It's kind of like being at Clemson when I was going to. Like when you're in chemistry class and you're like 300 people there that your professor will never. I mean. Yeah, yeah. Who. Who is this guy? He's a number one, you know, number two or whatever. So that's why I felt with the banks when they were saying, all right, we just sent underwriting to Birmingham, Alabama. And just a yes or no. So I learned to deal with the local banks. And so I just, I created a system where I had like five of them going at one time. And they all gave me, say, $250,000 officers guidance line, which is basically, I could buy one house for 250 or five at 50. They didn't really care, but they proved me to spend 250. Does that make sense?

Oh, yeah.

So I had that across five banks. But. So by the time I came back that next year, I'd already spent the million that these five had given me, and now I want another million. So fast forward from 01 to say, 08 when the crash happened. So, Well, I mean, part of that equation, I'd say as well, is that, you know, I was. I was seeing people getting taught about getting houses buying cheap, fix them up, appraising them high, and taking money out. You remember that strategy?

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Which is over leveraging. So I just. That's where you took a key piece of the engineering piece. Was like, I'd extrapolate that out. I'm like, this makes no sense. What if the tenant moves out for two months? It just started becoming a negative cash flow. I could see the math not working for the long term.

So you were buying on cash flow. You weren't buying on appreciation like everybody else in the mid 2000s. That was nuts, man.

Always cash flow, always cash flow. So the piece that I was getting to was that because that relation to local banks when 2008, 9 and 10 hit, they were calling us left and right to take, take houses that they were taking back. And so I would get 10 houses here, five here. You know, we had one instance where we got a hundred houses in one fell swoop.

Awesome.

You know, so in that 08 to 10 where people, a lot of people were losing their property, we actually ramped up about 300 units in that three year span. It was, it was crazy. Just, you know. But part of that too though is you had to take the good with the bad. You know, you get 10 houses that were, you know, or 10 houses, eight of them were awesome and two of them were dogs. And so, you know, you learned it was a little, you know, a little too long of a lesson. But you learn later on you should never kept those dogs. You should have just got rid of them. But anyway, to answer your question, that was the, the crash was actually our accelerant which is opposite what most people you probably hear is when they were just trying to hold on, we were actually pedal to the metal and take it all.

I think that's an awesome lesson and it's something that I talk about in my book. Kind of going through that period, we didn't lose anything. We didn't lose any of our properties. We were cash flow positive. We stopped buying in 05, I think it was. So we had three, four years of lag time and ample reserves, but it still sucked. Sitting on properties that you saw go down in value even though they were still cash flowing. But we didn't have, we were, we were still making investments, but we didn't have as much capital as I would have liked to have to really, really jump in. And that's something I think I talk about real estate cycles and it's going to happen again, right? Like we're going to get over leveraged. It's not, probably not going to look exactly that way. But I think that's a great lesson if you're listening, to make sure you're not over leveraged when it looks crazy out there. Prepare. Because what does Buffett say when there's blood in the streets by.

That's right.

Yeah, man. You followed that.

Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful. So there you go.

Well said. So what are your Dan, what are your rules that you follow when you're looking at properties now?

You know, I'm a little more picky than I used to be as Far as the areas, you know, I was buying a ton. Just, you know, pretty much if the numbers look like they made sense on paper, I would buy. But as you get older and wiser and kind of been through, you know, a few cycles, you realize certain areas are better than others. So you really hone in on that. I think, you know, my whole rule of thumb has always been I want no money down. And then if it'll cash flow positive, you know, even a dollar on a 15 year note, and that's with reserve for maintenance, insurance, taxes, all that stuff, to me that's a good deal. You know, that's my barometer, you know, like, I think that's where I.

So say that one more time. So no money down.

Yep.

Cash flow positive on a 15 year note.

Yep. That's my, that's, that's. So that's a small buy box, right? I mean, like, yeah, you gotta find a good deal to make that work because.

Yeah.

Especially right now, I mean, most people are selling and I'm sure over where you are, like, you have to put 25% down on a 30 year note to cash flow.

Yeah. And it's. Yeah. I work with a handful of, you know, young, young investors that are getting started. And I just talked to say young in terms of investing, not age. And I was talking to one the other day and walking through a deal and I brought up the 1% rule. I said, hey, if you see a deal, just run this on the back of the napkin. And he's like, no way. I said, well, there you go. I said, but feel free to say I'm happy to walk you through it. But we're getting to that point again where the numbers aren't really making a lot of sense in a lot of different markets. You gotta, you have to either be really picky or you have to be looking at different stuff.

Well, and to your point, just FYI, like my engineer, you know, I know you like that, that you're looking for those angles of that of how I apply that. I figured out before that 1% rule came across that 1.5 was my rule.

1.5.

1.5. That would make it better in your note work. So that's my buy box. It's got to be a 1.5 or better.

Yeah. Outstanding. Well, you got to kiss a lot of frogs when you're looking at those numbers. But I think, here's the other thing I noticed, Dan. So most of your properties are in what I would call kind of like the heartland of the country. And I think a lot of people romanticize like, oh, it'd be great to buy a property in this cool area. But I think we see better deals from a cash flow perspective in what I would call the heartland of the country. Can you share kind of your perspective on that and experience with that versus, versus, you know, buying in like San Francisco where you know, you're paying a million dollars for a row house, you know.

And I came from Greenville, South Carolina, which, you know, is, you know, the 1% rule is very prevalent over there. So. And I have some buddies, so I keep up with kind of the market. I had no idea. I was blessed to come into Memphis, Tennessee with the top five price to income ratio. You know, the rent to price ratio was one of the top five in the nation. And what does that mean? That just means that the deal is, you know, you're going to be able to get a 8, 9, 10% cap rate here in Memphis, whereas you can't get that in New York City where they're fighting to get 1%, 2%.

You know, like crazy amazing, right?

And it's amazing what that makes people do too because you know, 95% of our clients are California. And you're like, man, these guys buy houses left and right from California, whereas in Memphis, sight unseen, never been here, never driven a street. And it's like, it just blows my mind because I'm like, I wouldn't, I couldn't do it. I just, I don't have that. I got to go and see it and understand why. Yeah, I mean I might would invest over there, but I've got to like drive every street. I'm going to meet with all kinds of agents and I'm going to really dig in and you know, but I mean you got business professionals out there that got, you know, extra income and it's so much more, less risky to put it over here even if they lose it all, you know, because the real estate so much cheaper over here.

So. Yeah, no, it's, I worked for Medtronic for 10 years which is, which is located there, the spine division in Memphis. And Memphis has a lot of great industrial factors, you know, employment factors that make it a real positive. And again, I think that, you know, I know people that are investing their buying turnkey rentals in different areas of the country like Memphis, because it works where it doesn't work and certainly doesn't work here in Asheville, North Carolina right now.

No, you bring up a good point. I think where for your listeners to understand like a Memphis, you know, we are 55% rentals, whereas the national average is like, say, 36. Yeah, 35, 36, something like that. So you take that 20% delta on 300,000 parcels in Memphis, that's 60,000 units on a comparable city. Does that make sense?

It makes perfect sense. Yeah.

So that's a ton of inventory, a ton of stuff that can be consumed by investors to create cash flow and income.

Yeah. One of the things we talk about, consistently talk about in the book, when you pick a strategy, it doesn't have to, like, we were talking about the burst strategy. Buy, renovate or buy, rehab, refinance, rent it out. And it's like, okay, that works. Multifamily strategies work. Different strategies work. Pick a strategy, then pick an area of the country that works for you. And I think if you're a listener and you have geographic mobility, you say, hey, this is what I want to do. If you can move to an area of the country, that's a lower cost of living, it has characteristics of the investing strategy that you are interested in moving to. You know, Dan just brought up, I think, a phenomenal golden nugget right there. So, hey, shifting gears a little bit, Dan, I know in addition to being an engineer, you're an athlete, you're a runner. And I love the saying, you know, have a hobby that keeps you healthy, one that makes you smarter, and one that makes you money. Talk about, you know, being a runner and maybe you can get into the 6am core collective and how that came to be.

Yeah, that's a great question. I think so. You know, I've always been an athlete in sense of just always worked out some way somehow, whether it be racquetball in college or lifting weights, you know, so I carried that all the way through to, you know, moving to Memphis. And, you know, I met my business partner, he's a neighbor, actually. And our wives knew each other in high school. And we both said we wanted to try to run. And so we started running back in. We literally in 2004. And so in 2004, we just said, let's start running. We tried 5pm we tried 8pm which not good because then you can't go to sleep. Tried 5am that's way too early.

Yep.

We settled on 6am which seemed to work for both of us. We both get in bed in time. And, you know, the beauty of that was just the personal accountability, you know, I mean, literally, snow, rain, doesn't matter. Like, he's going to be outside my door and vice Versa and out of that became business strategies and just I taught him what I was doing. And then also we realized because he's a CPA, CFA, accounting, background with real estate technology, and realized that one plus one was three for us to be partners. But that's how the 6:00am Core collective kind of came together. Was like that. 6:00am Means a ton to us. Mean you're 16 years in, right, of just five, four days a week, five miles, you know, a day. That's a ton of mileage, you know, like so an hour.

Oh, I know, yeah. I got a, I got a great group of cycles I ride with at 5:30 in the morning and that's, that's a hair early. I think I would, I would like 6 too. But 5:30 works for us. We probably ride just a little bit longer too than you run, so you probably end up getting home at the same time. But it really is amazing what you, you know, the bond you form, you know, when you spend that many hours, you know, kind of the, there's, I think there's something special when you're enduring, you know, a heart. You know, whether it's physical hardship through athletics or anything else, you know, there's a real bond that forms and you know, if you haven't been through it. I know Dan's shaking his head up and down here and I say, you know exactly what I'm talking about. So talk about, you know, we mentioned several, several your companies here, Dan, as we got started, what's the latest company, what's current focus? And you know, how did that idea come to be?

Oh man. Our latest company has been a company called CoreAssist.

Okay.

And that's our virtual staffing company basically. And so several years ago we had, we were trying to figure out, you know, property management has very slim margins, you know.

Yeah.

My brother, when I got into it, he goes, yeah, I looked at that and it's got one of the smallest margins of most industries. Didn't know if you know that.

Like groceries.

Yeah, that's right. So there's not much money there. So. But it's a very labor intensive business. And so about four or five years ago we started using a third party and actually out of India where we'd scan invoices, you know, on the, on the scan machine. And the next morning they're all input into our property management software and we're just cutting the check to the vendor. We're like, okay, this works good. But we didn't know the people, we didn't know the the who was behind doing the work, which is a service. Then we were in a mastermind in Dallas, Texas, that we were going to three times a year and met a guy in Dallas managing 300 properties with 12 people in Bangladesh, India.

Wow.

And I'm like. And he had no employees here in Dallas. I'm like, what? That doesn't. Just didn't make sense. So I'm peppering him with questions. And I came back and told my business partner about it. He didn't believe me. No, it's not impossible. And he's actually from Dallas, my business partner. So he met up with him in Thanksgiving. And I remember he called me, I think it was Thanksgiving Day, and said, you won't believe this. The guy has no offices. Like, it was just him sitting in a room. And there's nobody there. It's just him. And it's literally the people. Yeah, yeah. I remember he said, we're all eating ice cream and gelato and this guy's eating cake. Meaning just totally different process.

Yeah.

So anyway, in that same mastermind, a guy was there that provided that service to give you employees from the Philippines. And we did that. And our team's like, man, we could do this ourselves because we're using so many of them. So we just started doing ourselves. And then that led to people saying, hey, hey, how are you doing that? Can you give me one? You know, can you find me, Source me somebody? And so we just got really good at sourcing virtual employees because you're talking about something that's thousands, thousands of miles away. It's like, how do you sort through resumes and personalities and all that stuff? Because you can't physically get in a room and have an interview. It's all virtual. We have probably a little over 100 virtual employees right now, and half of them work for us, and then half of them, we outsource to other, you know, other companies.

Yeah. So. So how do you. Like, how do you. How do you structure that process so it's repeatable? You know, a hundred, you know, dozens of employees like that. Do you have somebody in the Philippines that's helping you out with that? Or, you know, do you. Do you have. Are you going back to the engineer? I'm very systems oriented. Have you put a system in place to make that happen and more predictable, or how have you done that?

Yeah, so we just replicated what we had for the States for hiring, and we hired somebody that's in the Philippines that puts the ads out. You know, they take. We do use a Thing called Culture Index. I don't know if you're familiar with Culture Index. I've heard of it, yeah, it's a behavior based survey. And so if you're looking for, you know, it helps us sift through. Like if you're looking for somebody that can cold call, that loves to be on the phone, has empathy, you know, all that kind of stuff, that's gonna be one personality profile that you're gonna get versus very detail oriented, likes repetition. That's probably somebody that you want to put in billing. Does that make sense? So depending on what our need is or what our client is, we know what profile of a person. So we'll get 200 resumes. And we are, we're only talking to like 10 people. We're not talking to 200. We're taking the 10 that. Because you have to take the survey before we'll, we'll talk to you. Yeah, that's kind of our pre filter, if you will. And that's if you ask our clients internally and externally, what's the biggest success for courses that's been the biggest piece is just our sourcing and because they, they've tried it, they've gone to online jobs, ph and places or upwork or places like that and they just had not had a success. You know, they just, the person didn't work out and all that stuff. And it just, it just boils down to recruiting is what it boils down to.

Yeah, that's phenomenal. And I mean, anybody listening, you know, when it comes down to, you know, how can you, how can you systematize things, how you can you improve it? You know, it's whether you're in property management or whether you're looking at, you know, like you said, it's, it's impressive. You've applied a lot of the same principles and done that. One thing that really resonated with me, you know, if you go to our website, we talk about putting investors first. Dan, I saw that pop up, you know, in yours, I mean you, I confused this earlier. I said over 700 properties, which you do, or units. It's actually over 900, but over 700 investors. So please share with the audience. I mean, we try our hardest to delight every one of our investors and just provide the highest level of communication. And whether it comes to returns or communication or information education, what are some of the things you've learned in working with investors and some of the principles.

That you apply, I think, to your first piece? I think our whole goal is for our residents and our employees and our clients to thrive, you know, to be fulfilled and phenomenal. So if you put that first in a, you know, global perspective or, you know, however you want to say it, like money is last. It just changes your perspective on how you run your business, how you treat your employees or your clients. You know, if you're treating your clients as a commodity, you know, one of our key terms is long term partnerships versus short term transactions. You know, like, and being in property management, we could charge anything and everything that we'd want because we're controlling the money, you know, and, but every one of us has the mindset that we want that person to be with us three years from now, five years from now. They want them to organically tell their friends about us, you know, or go in bigger pockets and mention us or whatever. So if we try to make that short term dollar, that's just not gonna work. So we, you know, it and how do I say this? It's just not worth it, you know, from a life's too short. That's kind of our mantra. Like if an owner really feels really upset about $100 charge, I'm not going to spend hours defending that $100 charge. I'm going to probably credit that and just move on and just, you know, chalk it up for how do we get better on our process to communicate or make it cheaper, whatever. What can we learn from that experience versus fighting for that almighty dollar? Does that make sense? Like.

Oh, it makes wonderful sense. Yeah, it really does.

That's probably the biggest piece. But then you asked me what, what did we learn? I think communication, transparency, you can't over communicate enough. I think that's, that's, that's the piece in this business because you're talking about a ton of, a ton of money that people are their life savings, their 401k, their self directed IRA, whatever it is they're using to invest, it's their money. They worked somewhere to pour that money in, funnel it through their life. Yeah, their life. That's right. So that's why, that's why it's such a, you know, a big deal as far as, you know, trying to make sure that you stay transparent, have integrity, you know, and try just, I mean, just do the right thing, you know, like that's, that's, that's, that's what our mantra for the, for the employees, just do the right thing. So I love it.

Yeah. I had, when I first started in the medical sales industry, I had one of my mentor, my senior rep that I worked with. He said, chris, if you take care of the patient, the money will take care of itself. And it was like somebody, it was so obvious, but it was like something hit me upside the head and I'll never forget that. And so I love that philosophy, Dan. I think it's fantastic. You know, one, we're coming up towards the end of our time here and one question we always ask our guests is if you go back in time to your 25 year old son and give you a piece of advice, what would it be?

Wow. You know, you catch me in an interesting time of just reflection in the last several months with this Covid. You know, I think I would say the two things that come to mind is I would have started earlier. You know, I think the earlier the better. So that's why I always tell people, like, they always want to wait for the right time or, you know what I mean? Like, or the market's too hot or whatever. Like, you can still find deals you just might have to sift through bunch of hay to get to that needle, you know, like. Yeah, but it's the 10X. I love Grant Cardone. I love the 10X mantra. Like, just do it 10X and figure it out. The other pieces I would just say is just put things in perspective, you know, like, especially as entrepreneurs that are out there and people that are building things, you know, I would say balancing family and work and just bucketing it a little bit more, you know, that's one thing I probably would say that was a key learning for me coming out of this Covid. When you slow down, you really realize what's important, you know, and just, you know, I think. And it's hard because as an entrepreneur, a business owner, you're trying to build and you're just going fast and you're just doing all these crazy things to make it happen. But don't neglect, you know, what's really important. Does that make sense? So it's probably.

Oh my goodness. Yeah. So much sense right now.

Yeah. I just think, yeah, in light of everything that's going on, I think you just gotta look back and say, what's the most important thing, you know, like your family, you know, your relationships, your kids. And just make sure, you know, put that laptop down and you know, or put that phone on silent for a couple hours, whatever that takes. That'd just be, you know, I'm just coming from the heart today just to share that because I think that's something I've really learned through this Covid experience.

Well, Dan, you shared a lot of great lessons today with the audience. And you know, for somebody like you that's had so much experience, you know, I've loved having you on the show. You know, I like our backgrounds. But if people want to learn more about, you know, whether it's CoreAssist or your investments or, you know, even your property management company, what's the best way to get a hold of you?

I mean, my simple. Email dan at the number6amcc.com dan@sixamcc.com or just my cell, 901-289-7888. That's the only number I have and don't mind handing it out if I help somebody. I surely try my best.

Awesome, man. Well, we will make sure that's in the show notes. We'll have all this in here. Dan, again, thank you so much. I'm so grateful that we've been put in touch and getting to have you on the show and look forward to sharing all your wisdom with our audience.

I appreciate it. Thanks for having me on.

Absolutely.