Ep 320 - Flip & Dani's Story Pt 3 Cont - Beginning Their Real Estate Journey to Building 5 Companies

Hey, everybody. Flip and Danny here, founders of the Freedom Real Estate Group family of companies. And welcome to another episode of our.

Podcast, which is called Freedom through Passive Income.

That's right. And actually this is not another episode. This is.

Well, it is another episode, but it's the other half of our previous episode. Because it took so long for us to get through the story, we decided to split it in two. Somebody was a chatty cat, so tune in and enjoy. And then we moved to Arizona because my mom went into the icu and so I thought, I don't know how long she's gonna be with us. And so I wanted to be with her. So we moved to Arizona and spent only a year there. Probably a year and a half. Year and a half, yep. And the reason that we only spent a year and a half was another story you can hear on a different podcast. But we had to move because of who we were renting from at the time. Because we rented. We didn't know how long we were going to stay in Arizona and we were renting from at the time, needed their house back. And this happened to us twice. Again, different podcast. But so we at that point in time was working with somebody in Ohio. We had partnered with them to sell turnkey real estate. And so we're like, we have to move anyways. We're either moving to another house in Arizona or we're moving to Ohio because we actually have a pretty good thing going with this partner and really like that strategy. And so we ultimately decided to move to Ohio and that was 2015. And that's when we really kind of dove into turnkey real estate. And from there we fell in love with turnkey real estate. It's really one of those investing models that helps you build wealth, but somebody's doing it for you. Because there's so many people in the world, high net worth individuals who are doctors, lawyers, just entrepreneurs. There's just name so many different careers where they have a passion for what they are doing, but they also understand the power of wealth. Building wealth through real estate, but they don't have the time to do it. Right. Using a resource like us to be able to do that and buy the properties and have it completely handled for them was something that appealed to us. And to do that not only for ourselves, but for other people. And that's where it really kind of started. Hey, we want to be on this journey ourselves, but we actually want to help other people on the journey too. Because more than us want to achieve this dream. Right? Right. And Hit this goal. So that's when we started. In 2017, we actually created Freedom Real Estate Group. Right.

Yep.

And then I'm gonna let you walk through and feel free to hand it off at any point in time, or you can tell the whole story, but walk through Freedom Real Estate Group's creation and how it turned into five companies.

Yeah. So I didn't know if that was this episode or next episode. So. Yeah. So we started with Freedom Real estate group in 2017, and it was just Annie and I, you know, we were plugging it out. We just worked out of our house. It was no big deal. And the reason why is because it just. Houses just kept coming to us. We were trying different things, but we couldn't get out of real estate because real estate KE coming back to us. We're like, I think it's trying to tell us.

Yep.

And so, you know, so we went, you know, we did I don't know how many deals in 2017. And that was when we're like, we need number one. We need somebody else working with us. We need. We need to hire an employee. We need to. We need to find an office. And so then we got Betty. Betty is our. Was our first employee and worked out.

Of our dining room.

Yep. And. And then a month later, we got our first office. And it was the three of us in a 5,000 square foot office.

That's right.

You could have played football in that thing and not touched anyone. But it was, you know, so that was. That was. And then it sort of just, you know, just went from there. Snowballed. Yeah, it snowballed big time. You know, and then we were working with all these crews that were. Well, we won't talk about what these crews were, so we need a different episode. That is a different episode too. But we needed to hire. We needed our own real estate or our own renovations company. And so we had, you know, a Bulldog. Bulldogs. And so we're like, we need to call it Bulldog Renovations. And so Bulldog Renovations came out. One of the few non patriotic titles or names of the companies, you know, and then after that, we went through, I don't know, like 45 different property management companies. Also another podcast. And so we needed our own property management company. And so. But to have that, we needed our own broker, you know, so that. Here comes Independence Property Management. Independence Real Estate Group or Independent. Yeah, Realty group, you know, and it was just. It was one thing after another. Everything was done on purpose because. Not because we wanted to do it, but because we needed to do was.

All built out of necessity.

Yes.

I think that's really the important part of the story is if you're a turnkey operator and you're doing things in service to other high net worth individuals, then there's many pieces of the puzzle. The renovation was our first pain point where contractors weren't doing what they were supposed to be doing. They were taking pictures of completed work. It was like a corner of the wall that's painted and the rest isn't right. And if you ever run a renovation or hired contractors, I hope you don't know this story, but you probably do. 99% of people who hire contractors understand the pain of them not showing up, of them wanting to be paid up front only to not do the work. There are so many lessons that we learned. Fortunately, we knew some of them out of the gate. We never paid people first because you just quite frankly, can't trust people until you've experienced some time with them. And so out of necessity, we had to build Bulldog Renovations so that we could control everything in house and control the product that we were putting out. And then property management. We did try five. We tried outsourcing.

It was only five. I thought it was five.

Five different companies and it was terrible. And I'm not telling you that we're perfect because I always tell people we are human like anybody else and we're building five businesses at the same time. Essentially over the course, you'll see how fast, in one of the episodes we actually say, it's 2017, we just did this. It's 2018, we just did this. We just had a down a wall in our office because we have so many team members that we grew like way so fast. But all of those things were a requirement and necessity for us to do a good job at the very first one that we built. Right. And we're not in this to do a poor job for us or for the people that we serve. And so we just went after it and we took the approach of we're going to figure it out and if we fail, we're going to fix it. And we told our clients all the time and still do to this day, hey, we're not perfect. If we do something wrong, give us a call, let us know. We now have five companies under one roof and we can run down the hallway and knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, and fix the problem. Right. And so the fifth company actually was acquisitions, because you were in charge of our acquisitions. So I'll let you go into that.

Yeah. So I was the acquisitions department. And majority of the deals that we got, like 99.999% of the deals we got were from wholesalers. And so I had quite a network of wholesalers and I was always following up with them and getting deals in that made the. That kept the business. And then all of a sudden all the wholesalers didn't have deals and the well dried up and we're like, oh, we can't. This can't happen. We need to be in control of this. And thus the fifth company, Cash for Ohio Houses, came about and we created an acquisitions company to constantly bring in leads because we can't rely on other people for our company to survive.

Yes, that's right. And now we're even on tv.

Yeah.

Isn't that cool?

Yeah, that's very cool.

And starting other cool things. So anyways, very, very excited about the path of where it came. But those five companies were really the core of what we wanted to build and what we wanted to be able to sustain. And again, it wasn't a perfect road and a lot of mistakes happen. It was a roller coaster. They always see that graph of an entrepreneur and how they're like, your road to success is not a straight line, it's just a big hill. But you learn a lot. And that's what makes you more intelligent in terms of what you should be doing, how you should be handling projects, how you need to be leading your team, what decisions you should make, what market are you in. All of those things are learned by doing right. You don't learn them by reading a book. You actually have to dig in, make a whole lot of mistakes, lose a whole lot of money to go, oh, okay, well, now I know how to do this. And that's kind of the road that we went on. And you know, these family of companies that we call them Freedom family of companies, was built really with the start of Turnkey, where we fell in love and then as a result, had the other five companies. But I don't think we would do it any other way because having that vertically integrated fir you to control all the pieces of the puzzle. And again, not perfect. There's going to be a day where I'm going to go, we're close, but we're still not there. But there's always hurdles in real estate. One of the things we've always said is in real estate, the great thing is that you never stop learning. There's always a new situation, a new regulation, a new something hurdle that you're going to have to or just something where you go, whoa, that broke in the house. And what is that exactly? Because that's never happened before. So it's really just incredible. The team, I'm grateful for the team that we've been able to put together and the people who are now in place to run those five companies. Because our next and last episode is really going to talk about where we are right now and how that happened and what our future looks like on this particular journey. Because I think this was the destination we were meant to get to and we're really excited about it.

Yeah, super excited about it.

Yeah.

Well, we hope you enjoyed this episode. Make sure you're heading on over to our website, freedomcapitalinvestments.com to join the investor club. We've got a lot of things going on before the end of the year, so make sure you're in the investor club. But we like to end all of our episodes with Invest Smart, Live Happy. Bye, everybody. Nothing on this show should be considered specific personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, financial or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions and information on the show are not guaranteed. All investment strategies have the potential for profit and loss.

Sam.