Revealing The Top 7 Ways Vertical Integration Can Help Businesses

Vertical integration is when you have control over nearly all of the elements of your business or you are attempting to do so. Vertical integration is incredibly important because we were going through trauma, outsourcing to other people. And I say trauma as a very, very serious word, like the pain and frustration that you go through because you don't have control over something that is so critical to your success and to the investor. Experience is traumatizing. And, you know, there was just some, you know, real PA involved in those scenarios. And so one by one, we were just like, we have to bring this in house. We cannot allow this to happen. This is not the way we're building a business. This is not who we are. This is not the product that we represent. And just bit by bit, we're just like, bring it in, bring it in. I don't care. I know we're going too fast, but we have to do this for us, our reputation and our investor experience.

Welcome to the Freedom Show. You got Flip and Danny here. We're live in the studio. Live, live, live, live. I haven't done that in forever, but welcome to another exciting episode of our podcast, the Freedom Show.

Yeah. So Flip and I wanted to come to you today and talk to you about vertical integration. I know that we do a lot of banter, usually at the very beginning, but, like, I want to dive into this topic because it's so incredibly important, and it's something that we did on accident, but it's proven to be that it will be the reason for our gigantic, amazing, champion style success and why we attract so many investors to work with us and why we are achieving all the things that we're achieving.

Right. So before you start, though, I want to say something that you don't even know I'm going to say is I remember when we started the company in our house in Westchester, and you showed me a video.

Yeah.

Of the guy in Florida. I don't need to say his name. But anyway, he ran a company that's very similar to what we're running now. And he took a video, and he walked up and down the hallways, and he walked into each office and showed. Introduced everybody that was in each office.

Yeah.

And when he went into the property management company, he introduced the people that were running the property management company. And when he left and he walked back in the hallway, he looked right at the camera, says, he says, always make sure that you own your property management company, because no one will take better care of your property properties than you. And I'm like, wow, that's so amazing. And just like, wow, this guy is so awesome. He's got all these companies all under one roof, man. Oh, if we can only get there someday. Little did I know, less than six years later.

Yeah, I love that. So this is something not a lot of people talk about. And the reason they don't talk about it is because it's very difficult to do. It takes years. And to, like, we've done it in six, and that was crazy, insane. Like, most people would not be able to do it in six. Thank our team. The reason that we've been able to do it is because of the team and the people that we've got. We always say people are our greatest asset. We aren't here because of Flip and I. We are here because of the team that we have brought into the company and the care that they have for what we're doing, the vision, and how we are helping other investors. So vertical integration is when you have control over nearly all of the elements of your business or you are attempting to do so. So, Flipp, you want to share when we started the company and. And you don't have to share why we did it. Just share, like, the order of the companies as we built them and what. Each one. Each one does.

Yeah. So we started out with the turnkey company. Yeah. Because that was the. The meat and potatoes. And we immediately went into renovation, and you said not to say why we did.

Right.

So we immediately went into renovation, and then after renovation, we were sort of forced to. Into property management. We were heading that direction. We just were moved there faster than we had anticipated. And then. Then acquisitions.

Yep.

And. Well, I think. I think that's the main parts of this. That. That as far as. I mean, we also have brokerage, which came as well as the property management company. Yep. And then I think that's it. Yeah.

Yeah. The fund and syndication.

Well, the fund and syndication, that's not.

Really a part of the vertical integration, but it is just our last company. Yeah. So you nailed it. So as Flip went through that, I could see, if you're watching on YouTube, I could see the gears turning in his head, like he was remembering the stories and the trauma that we were going through.

Yeah. That was hard to sift through so.

Quickly and why we built each of those companies. So this is exactly the point. Vertical integration is incredibly important because we were going through trauma, outsourcing to other people. And I say trauma as a very, very serious word, like the pain and frustration that you go through because you don't have Control over something that so critical to your success and to the investor experience is traumatizing. And, you know, there was just some real pain involved in those scenarios. And so, one by one, we were just like, we have to bring this in house. We cannot allow this to happen. This is not the way we're building a business. This is not who we are. This is not the product that we represent. And just bit by bit, we're just like, bring it in, bring it in. I don't care. I know we're going too fast, but we have to do this for us. Our reputation and our investor experience. And so, one by one, and we just kept on hiring the right people to come in and lead each company. So it wasn't all on Flip and I. I mean, Flip and I were juggling a lot, but we did have people in each company that we could lean on so that we would sit down and we would collaborate. And we say, here, this is the vision. This is what we want to build. Let's. Let's talk. Let's figure out how we need to do it. What's the game plan? And as we bring this into realization, let's talk about the challenges that we're facing and solve them together. And so, literally, it was Flip and I and each team member, as we brought every single one, it would be constant. Here's our challenge for today, and here's how we're going to solve it. Here's our challenge for the next day. And every single day, there's challenges. When you get to. When you're building a business, you have to understand that the wins are sometimes hard to feel because you're faced with challenges over and over and over and over. And if you don't have the vertical Ingr integration piece, then you're faced with a challenge that you can't solve. You've got no control over it.

Yeah, that's right. Well, well put.

Yeah. So that's why it's so, so important. So before this podcast, we wrote down seven things that we felt was just right off the top of our head, because this pain is real and it lives in us of what we've gone through and what we've created. And we want to share those seven things with you. And there's also three things at the end that kind of results in those seven things all coming together. So we're going to go ahead and hit on you. Want to start?

Yeah. So. Well, I mean, I sort of touched on it before. You know, what that one guy said is, you know, always make sure that you're in charge, that you own the property management company, because no one will take better care of your properties than you will. And that's, number one, loss of control.

Yes. Yeah. So not having that control was going to cause Flip and I to fail at building what we were dreaming about, what we wanted to build. And at the very beginning, I don't even know that we had this dream. The dream kind of grew bit by bit, but it was partly because of, oh, we had to bring that in. All right, so if we're bringing that in, probably down the road, we're going to bring this in because we can see how control is helping us. And it just happened naturally. But that loss of control would have meant failure to us. And at the very end, we're going to bring that full, full circle, because the other people that were affecting our business were going to lead us to number two, which was they're causing us a loss of money. And they're not only causing us a loss of money, but they're causing our investors a loss of money. So we were affected in the loss of money was the contractors and the rehab. So we would go in and we'd get the bid. We put the. Put the contractors under contract. We'd have the scope of work, and they were so horrible, they'd have to do things over. They would miss something and go, oh, we need a change order. Oh, you know, this happened. They wouldn't show up. The timeline went longer than it was necessary. Materials and things were being stolen from the property. So the renovation piece was hurting us in terms of money. So number two, loss of money. The property management piece was hurting our investors in terms of loss of money because there was property mismanagement, there was financial mismanagement. We would look at numbers and be like, oh, no. And we would have to go to bat for our clients on behalf of them just because we're like, this is ridiculous. This is not right. You know, and we knew it like, we're in the business so that we knew how to read the financial statements. We knew what was wrong, we knew what needed to be fixed. So we just went to bat for the investors. And that was really, really, really crazy. And it got so bad. We were actually. We made complaints to the board, the realtor board. We actually sought out an attorney. We started having some meetings about what are we going to do. We ultimately sent out an email to all of our clients when. When we got to this point and said, hey, this is what we're doing, and this is why this is not to throw anybody under the bus or point fingers or assign blame. That's not what we're here for. We're not here to trash other companies. What we're here is to take control. And f. And so we brought everything in house. And fortunately we had. Chris was part of our team at that point in time, and so he was ready to take in all of that business. And then not too much longer. We actually acquired another property management company because what some people don't realize about property management, it's not a money making business. And you're serving two masters. You're serving the owner and you're serving the resident. So it's very hard to keep both of them happy all the time. So it's a very, very tough business to take. And so because it's not a moneymaker, it involves a lot of people and a lot of help to be able to do it well. And so your overhead ends up being far greater than your revenue when you only have like less than 100 doors, you know, even 200 doors, I think you're probably close to breaking even between that, you know, 200 to 300, depending on what you're charging and what other fees that you have. And we didn't believe in fees. You know, we didn't want to like nickel and dime our investors. We just wanted to be a better property management company than all the other ones that we tried outsourcing to. We ended up acquiring another property management company so that we could get our doors up to a point where it made us profitable so that we could hire more people and just do a better job. And that was its own adventure of bringing on another property management company. And those people, it was all a big, big learning experience. But for the sake of this podcast, we just want to say number two is loss of money. And it wasn't just us, it was also our investors.

Right.

So as two of the point, importance of vertical integration. So number three, flip lack of flexibility. Yeah, so lack of flexibility is really. How many have we been talking to a investor? And they're like, okay, well, you know, this happened, or this is what I need, or I need help with this. And we are able to do something unique because we have all companies, right, right in house, under one roof. Whereas, let's just say somebody bought 10 properties at once and they said, hey, I would really like a break on my property management fee because I bought something in bulk. Oh, we can't go to our property manager and expect them to do that. But we have everything in house, and we can expect our to say, yes, I would be happy to do that because we both have the same vision of a great customer experience for our investor.

I don't think they have a choice. No, I'm just kidding.

They do. They push back on me every now and then, and sometimes I let them win because they're right. Right. You have to be in a position and you have to be a leader that's willing to let people push back and go, oh, yep, yep, yep. You made a really good point there.

So good point.

I'm gonna back off. But, yeah, we still have that flexibility. The opportunity to sit down with team members and talk about things and have all of our interests pointed to the investor and the company. And so whatever decision we make, if it's a win for the investor and a win for the company, we get to do it and we get to do it easily as opposed to bringing somebody else in. So that's the flexibility piece. So vertical integration number four is you have cost savings. And so what I mean by this is we've got all of these companies. So guess what? With our overhead, you should see our overhead tracker. It's hilarious. We have an overhead tracker, and it's got companies and tabs on the overhead tracker, and every single company is a different tab. And then we have a summary tab at the very, very front. And we've got people who work across all the entire family of companies. So that's the advantage, is you get to hire one person that can help, maybe 1, 2, 3, 4, maybe all six. It doesn't matter. And so you have one salary that gets split among the companies that that person is working for. So there's lots of different ways that you can do this, but we won't go into all of them. The key here is that we control over being able to hire more people because we have more places to put them and save money. Because, for example, our main freedom marketing company that's marketing our turnkey product doesn't have to carry the weight of a salary if that salary can be shared by three other companies.

Right.

So when I talk about our overhead tracker, like, if you look at all of our employees and team members, then you're going to see, like, Tiffany's our transaction coordinator. And so it'd be Tiffany, and she works 60% in this company. And then on the next tab is a different company. And Tiffany, she works, you know, 30% in this company. And then another tab, she works 10% in this company. So we, we look at that. And we're able to take Tiffany's, you know, salary and allow every single company to share 60, 30, 10 of her salary. So it's. It's just carried, you know, throughout those companies. So the cost savings are huge. We have other opportunities, like, because we have property management and we have renovations, we've got opportunities to buy materials and bulk, and we have the opportunity to store a warehouse with the materials that we use to renovate the property. So the property management company can very easily replace things because we have everything in storage and in the warehouse. So keeping those property standards in line all are have to do with cost savings. So that was number four. Flip. What's number five?

Well, before we go on, I think Tiffany's going to start to get a complex because we're always using. Always using her as an example.

We know she's always listening to the podcast.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's also more than 60 other team members, but Tiffany just happens to be the one that's. She's always top of mind. I wonder why. All right.

I do talk to her a lot.

Yeah. Number five is accountability across all companies.

Yeah. So this is a big one. I'm trying to think of a funny story. Chris. I talk about Chris a lot, too. I talk about the people I talk about are the people that I interact with so much. Right. Well, good thing Chris and Steve are going to be the ones that we tell the story about here. So Steve, when he was moving up into. In the company, he was first our punch list guy, and then he moved into the renovations manager. At the time, Chris was managing ipm. So think of. Think of it this way. So renovations is taking care of a property and doing all the renovations, and they're passing it off to the property management company. Property management company then has to put a resident in that property. Well, Chris or somebody on his team is walking a property and going, oh, yeah, no, no, this is not done. There's things. There's issues here and then there's that. Oh, but we're one family of companies. I know. I don't want to call somebody out. What do I do? How do I handle this? And we have gotten to the point where we just don't care. And literally, there's like this, you know, nope, it's not ready. Push it back. And then Bulldog ends up getting it back. They have to go back out. They have to fix whatever happens. And then there was one time where it was the opposite. Bulldog had handed off the project. It was good property management. They didn't have time to get somebody out there. And in between the time that they got somebody out there and the time it was handed off was enough time that something happened to the property. And so I can't remember exactly what happened to the property. It might have been a storm or something like that, but something happened. And so when they went to push back to our renovations company, the renovations, kind of like, you ain't pushing it back. You guys signed off, you said this was done, you passed your quality check. We are out. And so guess what? Ipm, or property Management company, was now held accountable to what happened to that property to get it fixed so we could get the resident in there. So that accountability across companies is fantastic, because can you imagine us going to an outside property management company and try to hold them accountable?

Oh, yeah.

Oh, man, what a pain in the butt. And we probably.

I think we did try that with five different companies.

We did. We'd be eating all the costs 100% of the time. Right. But now it's a shared responsibility, and each company has to stand on their own as far as profitability and what they're doing, what their expectations are. So they know, oh, crud, you know, I screwed up, and that's now going to cost our company. And that, you know, when we look at our P and L, we go, hey, what's going on on over here? IPM or a bdr, what are you guys doing? And they start evaluating the challenges that they had that last quarter and start fixing them so that accountability across companies is pretty huge. All right, so did you do that one?

I did that one.

Okay.

I do the odd numbers.

Okay. All right. Number six. That's funny.

Isn't it, though?

Okay, Number six is efficiency. So an example of efficiency is what we always say, right? You can run down the hall.

Yeah, exactly. You run down the hall and say, hey, property management company, or hey, acquisitions team, or hey, renovations team. You know, everyone's right under one roof.

Yes.

And it's just so nice to have it that way.

It is also our systems, Right. Like Podio is one example. Almost every single company uses podium. And so our ability to communicate within the team. Also Google the Google suite. We have Google Chat, and Google Meets. Our ability to communicate across all companies is huge because everybody can. You don't have to call up the property manager to go, what's going on this property? What have you done? You can go. Just tap into the system and just go, oh, okay, I see. Or you can run down the hall and just ask them if you can't tap into the system. Same with Bulldog. You can access the spreadsheet that says, here's where we're at on the renovation. Here's how long we anticipate it's going to be so that the sales teams knows what's coming down the pipeline. So when they're talking to investors and they go, oh, you know, I'm just looking at this sheet. It looks like in the next, like two weeks we're going to have this or this. We'll have people calling and saying, hey, I really want a multifamily property. So do you have one? And the team can just look and check it out. So that efficiency across the board of communication and ability to serve our investors because we can just jump in, into the systems and be able to see mostly everything. And what we can't see, we can run down the hall and find out what it is or jump on a very quick, you know, video chat with whoever it is. Because everybody prioritizes the family of companies. They're not like, I work for property management and I'm not going to make time for you, Mr. Renovation Company. Right. They know that, that we're one umbrella, we're one team. And everybody prioritizes the team as a whole because that's what serves our investors, that's what serves our company and the success that we're going.

Well, even the meeting we had yesterday, in that meeting yesterday, we had a member of ffc. Sorry. Yes. Right.

Yeah. So it's Freedom Family Investments, but the fund and syndicate side part of the fund.

Its indications you had the CEO, the CRO, the vice president of client or investor relations.

Client.

What's his title now?

Yeah, yeah. Chris, we're going to kill you because your title is so long. I think it's vice president of customer relations and asset management.

Yeah, that. Yeah. So he was there. We also had one of the heads of the Bulldog, which is the renovations company. We also had an integral part of ip, which is our property manager that was in one meeting.

And the financials, the fund, fund financial accountant. He was in there.

Oh, yeah, yeah. And he was there, too. And they're all part of the team.

Yeah, you know, but all in different companies, but all in one meeting. Because in that meeting we needed different pieces of the puzzle. How hard is it to get your attorney and your tax guy together right into one meeting?

They're, they're like, they're like two sides of the magnet. You can't push them together. Sorry. For those of you that just listening and you can't see me. I'm trying to put my hands together. Yeah, yeah.

So. So, yeah. So that's a perfect example of, you know, how difficult it is to work with an outside company and get them all in one place, where all we have to do is set meetings on a calendar and everybody. Again, priority number one is the family of companies, not your company. So we all jump into whatever meetings that we need to be in. We make that a priority for the company as a whole, for our investors as a whole. And then number seven is you.

Yeah. And it all comes down to teamwork. It's the teamwork, the vision, and I like the word the coherence. You know, it's making sure. Well, because you can have a team. Team, but if the team doesn't work together, it's not really a team, just a whole lot of individuals.

Yeah. And learning lessons. Like, remember back in the day where it did seem like we were fighting against each other a little bit.

Oh, yeah. Back in the day when I rode my horse to work. Yeah. No, but then we've. We've built the team and it's taken. It's. I mean, today's team compared to when we first started, it's. It's much different. It's much more coherent, I guess, since you use that word. You know, it's. It's. We're much more of a team than a lot of individual players.

Yes. Yeah. And that's been the nature of the team itself very many times. Somebody in the team will say, hey, can we do this as an exercise? And it's meant for the entire family.

Right.

I think there was an exercise where we put. What do we want to stop doing? Start. Keep stopping. Start.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yes. So we made a list of what things we want to keep across the family of companies. What we like that's happening. What things do we not like and we want to stop doing? And then what things? What ideas do we have that we want to start doing? And so everybody, you know, had their list and built it out. And then ultimately we looked to see how many times something came up, and those would be, you know, key factors that we would go, oh, whole lot of people are saying to stop this, so let's circle that and ditch it. And, you know, quite a few peoples had recommended to do something, and a lot of people said, you know, keep. And so doing exercises like that for the family of companies that teamwork our parties, even amongst the US Team and the virtual team. And the virtual team is not just in The Philippines, but they're, you know, across the US I think we've got, gosh, Georgia. We've got, I think North Carolina coming on, Missouri coming on. We just have people, we're in Florida, but our offices in Ohio.

Indiana.

Yeah, Indiana. That's right. Georgia. There's two people in Georgia. So. So, yeah. So just, you know, that teamwork, you know, even virtually, like, we've just done a really, really good job of making sure that everybody communicates really well no matter where you are in the world. And that that vision, we're getting better and better at the vision. I think that's something that CEOs have a hard time doing, is making sure that the vision isn't just stuck in their head. Right, right. That the team actually knows where they're headed. And then there's. There's a book called Vivid Vision. So for those of you who are, are business own, an aspiration to become a business owner, read Vivid Vision. It's a really great way to put your brain on paper of what you see over the next three years. And when you talk about vision, it's really hard to, to set a vision 10 years down the road. You know, so many things change in a few years. Even five years is tough, but three years, not so much. It is, you can, you can get realistic about three years. Is it going to be perfect? Is it actually going to come true? No. But it will give you a guiding light. Right? You say here, this is the direction that we're going. And then as you go down that maybe the next six months, something happens, you go, we're just going to tilt it, you know, a little bit this way. But the point is just to have that lighthouse saying, this is where I'm going. So I think that piece of the vertical integration is really, really powerful because you're only as strong as the weakest member of your team. So it's just really important that you're working together and that you build this really strong foundation. I recently recorded that 2012 part video series.

Right.

Is probably going to get released soon, either via YouTube, email or app, or a combination of all of the above.

So stay tuned.

Yeah. So that 12 part video series was really meant to be short video segments that kind of said, hey, like, for those of you who don't know us, or those of you who do know us but don't understand what we've built here, let us show you what this vertical integration looks like. Let us show you the foundation that we've built that is so freaking strong. Just try and topple us over. You can't, because we're so, so super strong. And we've just built this foundation that we are able to control all the pieces to the puzzle, and not every single piece, but most of the pieces, I would say the most critical pieces. And why this is important is because these seven things that we just went over is ultimately the reason you succeed or the reason you fail.

Yep.

Right. So at the very beginning, we said we could have failed because of the people that we had outsourced things to. If we would had kept it in their hands, we would not have made it this far. We had to bring it in house.

Just the first two loan.

Yes.

Renovations and property management.

That's right. And that goes to risk mitigation. When you're building anything, when you're investing in anything, you always want to mitigate your risks. When I'm on the phone with investors, I tell people why we do volume. Why? Because it was a risk mitigation piece for us. It was. I know in real estate, things are going to happen and it's going to suck. We're going to peel back a wall and go crap, and it's going to add 5,000 to our, you know, our rehab budget or 10,000 or whatever it is. We've had septic, you know, issues. We've had plumbing issues. We're just finishing up two plumbing issues at two of our apartments that were unknown, and we had to get the city involved in permits, and it was just insane. That's gonna happen. That's real estate, folks. So if you want to be an active investor and deal with that crap, join us. It's crazy. It's a wild ride. If you want to be a passive investor and, you know, let that not.

Deal with all that, deal with all.

That stuff, that's actually who we serve. That's what we love. We love the passive investors because we're willing to go through those things because we've gone through them enough. It's normal to us. We know we're waking up. We know we're getting exposed to the challenges, and we know that our job in our business is to be problem solvers. All we're going to do is get up every single morning and solve a problem and solve another problem, solve another problem. And that's how we keep on growing, is making sure that the companies are in a good place, our investors are in a good place. So that's how you mitigate risk, is because we did volume, we said, we know it's going to happen, you know, and crap's going to hit the fan. See, look at me holding my tongue. And so when it does, who cares? Because we do volume. So if 8 out of 10 deals are good and 2 out of 10 deals are bad, it does not matter. So it doesn't phase us. We don't get incredibly emotional. It used to get really emotional when things went bad, but now I'm just like, you know, whatever it's part of, it's part of the game, you know, you just know and understand that it's going to come. You wait for it to come, you address it, you fix it, you move on. So risk mitigation, vertical integration is a big piece to risk mitigation. You're listening to the Freedom show with Liv and Danny. It's just us today. We don't have a guest. We're talking about vertical integration. But don't leave yet because we are going to take a quick commercial break and we'll be right, right back.

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All right. Welcome back. We're so excited to be talking about vertical integration today. It's been a really hot topic in our minds of something that we wanted to bring to the table and start talking about more so that people got educated on why it's so important to be working with a company like ours and why this builds such a strong foundation for us to be able to continue to grow and continue to add on more companies. That allows us to serve, serve us as a company and serve our investors as well. It also allows for simpler communication and transparency. So we always say that we're transparent and authentic. That's just first and foremost part of our core values. It's who we are. It's what we believe in. It's our character. And in order to have that transparency, you need to have vertical integration. You have to have all those companies because it's really hard for us to look in somebody else's system. System or look and see what somebody else is doing if it's not in house. But in house we could get to dive into everything and we get to really see what happened what went wrong? How do we fix it? And that allows communication between us and our investors to be so streamlined because we can say we know exactly what happened now, we know how to fix it, and now we're going to fix it. Here's the solution, and this is the result. So those things are incredibly important. So the reason that we thought vertical integration was so important to talk about today is because. Because over the last year, as the market has shifted, we have seen, number one, projects fail. Whether it was fix and flip investors or hard money lenders having defaults on loans from fix and flip investors, or multifamily syndicators struggling with their deal because they underwrote it and they thought it was good, but they got a bridge loan, or they thought it was good, but they didn't anticipate the inflation environment, they didn't anticipate the rising material costs, they didn't anticipate the rising interest rates. And there's a lot of things failing. And I'm not here to point fingers and say that those are bad investors because you simply don't have a crystal ball. Right. But the better investors, the people that you want to be aligned with and working with, are the ones that are taking control of as many pieces of the puzzle as possible. So that when things like that happen, it's not that hard to fix. There's so many levers that you get to pull. You have all the pieces in house that you're able to get through challenges. So we still have challenges, but we are able to get through them because of our volume, because of our vertical integration. And we have partners, in fact, on a building in Mississippi, and they have, I think, over 2,400, probably up to 3,000 units now multifamily. And they said we were outsourcing to other property management companies, and every single one was failing to our underwriting standards. And so we had to bring it all in house. And this is during her pregnancy even. And so she was like, what a wild ride. But at least I didn't have to think about the fact that I was pregnant and what am I going to do? There's a child coming. They were just silver lining. Yeah, they were working on hiring and then building that whole entire property management team in house. Vertical integration. That's. They. They said after. And this is after 3,000 units. They went, we have to do this. This is critical to our success. We have to bring it in. We have to have control. Um, and we have another friend. He's in our mastermind, that the reason that he is succeeding. He attributes it to the fact that they brought property management in house, they're bringing renovations in house. Um, so this is so critical that we thought, hey, we're going to be the people that are going to start shouting vertical integration from the rooftops and start talking about it, Talking about the risk involved if you're not vertically integrated, talking about the advantages of being vertically integrated so that you can get more educated. Um, if you're an active investor, you can start thinking about how are you going to. Going to control and mitigate these risks. If you're a passive investor, you can start going, oh, you know, I don't want to work with somebody that doesn't have control over all the pieces of the puzzle. I want to make sure that I'm working with somebody that I trust that has a track record and does have everything in house and can solve problems faster and can identify what's going wrong and be able to fix it at their control and desire as opposed to relying on somebody else. So it's just a powerful, powerful topic, and I really thought it was important to share today. So flip.

Yeah.

Yes. Before we end this episode.

Okay.

I want you to think of something fun.

Okay.

Remember, I bring the content, you bring the fun.

Oh, I have to say this out loud.

Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. All right, I gotcha. What is it? Well, this episode's gonna air right before Christmas, so what do you want for Christmas?

Oh, crud.

See, this is fun. I knew this would be fun. I think it's fun for me.

I'm not really good at the whole Christmas thing. I like to give, but I don't. I'm so bless that I have everything that I possibly could want. I think what I always end up asking for is I go on, like, Amazon or something or an audible, and I start listing all the books that I could potentially read. And I say, okay, here's like, 10 books that you can choose one.

Choose one.

Because I have so many books and I'm still catching up on them. But, yeah, all I want for Christmas is my two front teeth. I don't got nothing, and all I.

Can do is all, I want a hippopotamus for Christmas. Sorry, no, I just want some Rudy's breakfast tacos. That's all. That's so much to ask for.

Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's gonna be fun. We're gonna be in Phoenix and Texas.

Yeah.

Spending Christmas. So, yeah. All right. Very cool. Okay. So that was pretty fun. Thank you for doing that. Oh, wait, let me throw it right back at you. What do you want for Christmas?

Rudy's breakfast tacos. I already said.

Oh, all right.

Come on.

I thought you were gonna say something about a car. No, I always expect you to watch. Want a car or sunglasses or shoes?

I didn't know that was in all my choices. So let's. Can you ask me that again?

No, no, no, no, no, no. We're done. So we're super happy to have you guys here. Thank you for joining us for this episode. We are super excited about the next episode coming up. We enjoy bringing our network to you and talking to these guests. Man, we've had some really powerful episodes, so stay tuned. Join us next Wednesday. And until then, happy investing. Bye, everybody.

Bye. 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 or loss.