Episode 190: From Professional Snow Broader to His Own Show on Hgtv and 263 Real Estate Deals wit...

Welcome to this episode of the Million Dollar Mastermind. I'm Larry Weddell. And before we get started, if you want to know exactly how to win again and Again, go to wydellonwinning.comwebinar now to watch something I've put together for you. Now let's get going into this episode of Million Dollar Mastermind.

Today we've got some exciting information we're going to cover with a new good friend of mine, Chris Nagle. Hello, Chris.

Hello. I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me on the show.

You know, this is one of the exciting things for me. When I started the podcast, I had the idea I get a chance to have a reason to meet and get to know people like yourself that I knew were out there, but I didn't know yet because I knew in the economy there was, there was people that had this spirit, had this drive and had done amazing things and were already launched and moving up the ladder, and that is you. So, Chris, great to meet you, great to have you on. Tell people who you are now, where the things that you've been able to do that you're the most proud of, not from a bragging standpoint, but they'll know you do have credentials. I mean, you're not just a talker. You, you are a doer and you've got the achievements behind your name that did not come to your doorstep in a package from Amazon. You had to go out there and make it happen. So share some of those things with us.

Thanks, Larry. Yeah, none of them showed up on my doorstep like the Amazon packages do. I grew up in a very lower, lower middle class family out here in Buffalo, New York. And just like so many others that really, my mom didn't have much. So I was always taught to dream big and go out there and work hard and my big dreams. As a kid, I just, more than anything else, I wanted to be a professional snowboarder. Now, if you've ever been to Buffalo, New York, this isn't the Mecca for snowboarding. We do get a lot of snow, but we don't have mountains. So when I came up with this idea, it was everybody telling me that you can't do this, you got to move. But what I did is I did what everybody was unwilling to do and, and I practiced and I really never gave up on that dream. And lo and behold, I became a professional snowboarder. Also during this journey, at 16 years old, I decided that I didn't want to work for somebody. I had a terrible experience Working the first restaurant job I had. And the day that I quit, I literally quit trading hours for dollars. And I came home and I said, mom, can I open a clothing line in the basement? So I started my own clothing line called Fat Clothing Co. Phat. And that was at 16. Really, the sole focus of that clothing line was to create enough money so that I could fulfill my snowboarding journey. And I kept doing that for the next year. And when I was 17, I had kind of come upon my next big dream, and that was to open my own shop. Because I saw all these other shop owners, and they were living the dream, and I wanted that. So I went out, tried raising money, failed miserably. Had everybody said, no, you're crazy. Come. You know, my dad said, come work at the factory, and I said, no. But my mom did something crazy, and she put her house up on the line so that I could chase that dream. So, 17, almost 18, I had my first retail store opened up. So that's where the story kind of begins. And then from that point, I was living the dream. I became a pro snowboarder. I had my retail shops. I was living what I would have looked back and said was the perfect life. Until the first recession that I remember. This is my first recession. Early 2000s, just landed from going to a trade show in California. And then I saw on the news the planes hit the tower, and that was the first recession I'd ever hit. I didn't even know what it meant. But when my retail stores dropped 30%, it became very evident that that was a recession. And I was forced to go get a job. And guess where I landed? Right in the financial advisory world. I thought I was going to be delivering pizzas part time, but I got a resume called on from a company by the name of New York Life, and that's where I ended up. And it was supposed to be part time, and I ended up loving it. So from that was 2003 all the way up to 2008, I became one of the top financial advisors. I still maintained the snowboarding career. I still had my shops, but I was working on the businesses, not in them. Then that brings me to 2008. We all remember that inside.

Just so people know about New York life. You started in sales, I guess, but you quickly moved up into the other aspects of managing money and things like that. I mean, you didn't stall out in just the routine of sales. You moved up. As a result, you got a much bigger education about money. And I think what comes across is A comfort level about dealing with financial services, financial terms and people in that business that you couldn't get any other way.

You know, it's unique that you mentioned that because very quickly when I got in the business, obviously that company, you know, their big focus was life insurance. They wanted me to sell life insurance. And I was, I was that kid that watched Wall Street. I didn't want to sell life insurance. I wanted to be the financial advisor, the big Wall street guy. So I actually ended up on their investment advisory side, which is they've got an RIA called Eagle Strategies. So very shortly after I started and I had success, I went over to that side and I started working on investment management, fee based planning and things of that. And I literally was one of the top three reps and financial advisors, IARs, as we were called in that company, in that go. So 2008, I was making a ton of money. But in 2008 I decided that I wanted to kind of expand my horizons. And I bought a dilapidated building and I converted it into a strip mall right when the Great Recession hit.300 and some thousand dollars into a hard money loan. The Great Recession hits. I'm blindsided. And all of a sudden I almost went bankrupt. I literally everything that I thought it hit me like a Mack truck. I'll never forget the night I came home. I was devastated. I was like, I have one more month of payments I can make. And after that I literally am bankrupt. I've exhausted everything. And I said to the girlfriend who had just moved in the house, I said, sweetie, I need your help. I need your help paying the mortgage, I need your help paying the utilities. And by the way, my friend Pete's moving into that bedroom down the hall and my friend Jessica's moving to the bedroom upstairs. I can't make this stuff up. That's what it was. And I had a 50, 50 shot of her actually sticking around. I was like, all right, she's either gonna walk out the door and I'm never gonna see this beautiful girl again, or she's gonna stick around. Well, I'm happy to say that she stuck around. We're now married and we have a seven month old at home. But that was 2,000. Great.

Congratulations. That's fantastic. You got your first. You've duplicated yourself, huh?

I have, and she's a far better duplication than I ever was. She's incredible.

Congratulations. Great. And snowboarding. You know, one thing about the people say snowboarding. Are we talking X Games here? Are we talking the ramps and you know, they do that out at Aspen. I've got, you know, I'm half the time in Aspen. I'm heading out there Sunday. But I've stood. You don't know how crazy that is. I've been over at Buttermilk where they do the X Games after it's over and gone out on my skis and. And look down for those ramps. It's like they're about.

They're about 20ft off the deck. So when you're in the air, you're already 20ft before you take off. And then when you're in there, you're about. You say about 30, 35ft over the deck until the landing. And yes, I was. I was an. I rode in X Games. Not in Aspen, but when it was out on the East Coast, I rode in the X Games. Yeah. So all the jumps, the half pipes.

The hands, 35, 40ft in the air, twisting, tumbling, all of these kind of.

Just went off the jump.

Yeah, that's just a starting point. Getting 35, 40ft here. Now the party begins, you know.

Oh, my goodness. Before you left the jump, you're already spinning. I mean, that was the name of the game. You're right. But, yeah, those are some great times. And, you know, moving through the rest of the journey, you know. I entered real estate in 2009 because I needed something different to help support what I wasn't doing in the financial advisory world because of the recession. And Warren Buffett always says, buy low, sell high, and don't lose money. Well, I knew real estate was cheap, so I started buying real estate in 2009, and I got up to 36 units by 2014. I thought everything was better. And then I took my 37th deal to the bank, and the bank said, no, you don't fit in our little square box. I didn't know what the bank was going through a merger with a large commercial bank. And unfortunately, they. They didn't do that deal. They froze my lines of credit and they called one of my mortgages. I wasn't exactly back then, the A class mortgagee, if you will. During those hard times, I missed a couple mortgage payments. So in 14 or 2014, I had to sell all 36 units. Me and my fiance, Larissa, we had to sell our dream house. I went through another hard time. I lost it all again in 14. And this is really where everything changed. Now just to kind of unpack 2009-14, remember, I was still a professional snowboarder. I had sold my retail shops in 2010 after the recession. But at this point I had left New York Life and I had entered a small boutique ria. So I was strictly doing portfolio management, large institutional investing for clients and still running a small practice. I had 700 clients at New York Life and now I was down to about 160 total clients in this new RIA. So I was again expanding my cut. We'll call it Wall Street Knowledge, but more to the back end in market patterns and trading options and derivatives and doing different strategies. So that's kind of what I was doing during that time. And I'm not going to say that I loved it because to me it wasn't client facing as much as it was before. So I lost the things I loved about the financial services and financial advisory. But I took and learned things that I never could have learned and in a traditional financial advisory role during this period. And when 14, when I lost it all, I'll never forget, I mean, I had my steady income from the advisory, so I was doing okay there. But I went to a real estate seminar and up to this point I'd never really started seeking out knowledge. And at this seminar I met two guys, extremely successful real estate investors. One had a TV show, one was the bank. And I started hearing them talk about the way they were using money. And it was the complete opposite of everything I'd been taught as an advisor. They were doing things so different than what I'd been taught to do that I was intrigued and I also started questioning everything. So that's when I started diving in. And what I did is I went on a journey from about late 2014 straight up to this day. I went on a journey to really learn what the wealthy do with money that's different than everybody else. In other words, what multimillionaires and billionaires do. And I went to all the masterminds. I spent unbelievable hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars over this period of time, simply putting myself in environment with highly productive, successful multimillionaires and billionaires, people running giant companies. And I started seeing the patterns of what they did, how they managed money, how they moved money continuously, how they mitigated risk.

Hey, listen, there's a lot of information online, but there aren't a lot of people who have actually done something. In my case, I've actually built a successful business as accrued over 5 billion in assets under management and has done well even during trying times. Now, if you want to know exactly how I've done this, go to whiteellumwinning.com webinar now, I've compressed a decade of learning into five short weeks. Just for those of you who want to give yourself an incredible advantage and are tired of waiting and watching others move up.

Let me stop you for just a minute because certainly I'd like to make this point. What? First of all, you had, you know, you had to have an attack spirit, go for it, go for adventure, go for greatness to get you into snowboarding to begin with, you know, but you carry that passion, you know, so the great thing about it was you took turn. You know, people see them, their kids doing crazy things in sports and everything like that, but the deal is they're turning loose their passion. And once you learn how to do things because you really want to do it, and you wind up doing the extras and you see the rewards, you're learning lessons that you can apply the rest of your life, you don't even realize they're in there. But, you know, your approach to life is being formed. And all of us have an approach to life that drives us, and it shows up in our results. So the thing is, if people are listening to this and the results, everybody has the setbacks and everything. But how did you respond in the past to those things? Did you say, okay, I'm going to attack in a different direction, I got a hit in the face, and I'm going to back up, shake it off and clear my head, and then come back in and keep my hands up a little higher next time to maybe stop that punch and be able to punch, go back and say, I'm going to return the favor to the guy, see if I can get him. But do you regroup and come back with energy? That's what I've seen or heard from what you're saying right here. At every point, you got the things happen to you that happens to all of us in life on our way up the ladder. But you got to fight your way up the ladder. And what you did was you kept getting more and more knowledge, you kept getting bigger opportunities, but you kept getting setbacks, which we all do. But you continued to educate yourself, reposition yourself, and attack wherever you were. And what's happened is you have become highly skilled in multiple different areas. But the thing for people to learn is you can learn this thing if you'll stay on the attack. I mean, there's, you know, if you're getting beat, it's probably because you're doing something wrong or somebody knows more than you, or you let a blind side, you know, you didn't know you had to. Like you said, you didn't know what a reception was. Life will teach you that you know, and you didn't know. There's a lot of things we don't know about, but life will teach us. And there are employees, that there are people out there that are beasts and they are evil and they come in different forms. Most of them are very lovable. They look like your grandma. They bring you cookies. Those are the ones that embezzle the most money from you because you don't watch them, you know. And the people that are that can bring you down or to tell you wrong stuff or get you off track are usually the people you wouldn't expect. And life will teach you to keep your attention up, stay sober, stay alert, don't take things at face value. But most of us have got to be taught that, you know, but once we get the lesson, and if it doesn't hurt, you probably won't remember the lesson, you know, and so. Go ahead, Larry.

That's an interesting thing because, you know, looking back on my life, I've had a lot of failures. And you know, every single failure I had put me one step closer to the next success. But as many of your listeners will know, while I was in those failures, it didn't seem like that. It seemed doom and gloom. It seemed like it was all going to just crash and burn. And every one bad thing happens, it perpetuates another. And it's all your mindset. And people need to understand that what you dream and what you believe is actually what happens. So back then, in those times, I was in these hard times, these things were falling apart around me and I just perpetuated myself further and further down, which was an essential part of my learning. And the other thing too, that was interesting is the one thing I was never willing to do. And I think this comes from the snowboarding. I was never willing to quit. And a mentor of mine later told me that the only way to ever fail in life and anything is to quit. And that's the one thing I didn't do. I never quit. But during that journey, you know, one thing I didn't talk about is, you know, during that whole thing where it comes up to now, I did a lot of flips. You know, I got into real estate real heavily. I took the money from financial business and I invested in real estate. And, you know, to date, me and my wife have done 263 real estate flips. We've, you know, had a show on HGTV which was a huge congratulations. Yeah, that was fun. And during this whole journey, I love this quote by Will Rogers. And Will Rogers says this, and it sums up my life and probably many of your listeners. He says, the biggest problem in America is not what people don't know. The biggest problem in America is what people think they know. That just ain't so. Most of that early part of that journey that I just talked about, I thought I knew what I didn't know. I thought I knew how to do real estate. I thought I knew all there was to know about the financial world because I was this high level, high earner advisor. And then all of a sudden I got slapped around a little bit, as you call the Rocky. You get hit a few times, you hit the mat. And then all of a sudden I had to rethink everything. I had to get back up and say, okay, well, if I do that again, I'm going to get hit with that left hook. So I got to try something I'm not used to. And that's how I learned, but I just never quit.

Yeah, you're not going to learn these lessons unless you get in the game. You know, you're not going to learn how to be a boxer by reading a textbook or even watching a video. You got to get in there and be in three dimension, you know, in real time, see that punch come in. You don't really see the punch the same way watching it on a video or reading about it as when you're in the ring. And the other thing, and this is like college athletes, when they go to the pros, the speed of the game, you know, it's like John Wooden said, you know, at ucla, wrote, you know, all those books. He said it's great to have the fundamentals, but you gotta learn how to do the fundamentals at speed and at the pro level. This is why your experience, your education is so valuable. It gives you the foundation where you can do things quickly. You know, we got 24 hours in the day. You got to get things done. You got to make decisions, you got to react. You got to react and attack, you know, and you got to protect yourself. You got to assess where the danger zone is, reposition yourself and then move. You know, you can't just do one of those things. You got to like, badoom. And it's just like driving a car, you know, somebody slows down and, you know, hits the brakes in front of you, you got to react. And the thing is that what every step along the way was dramatic. You know, there was some kind of dramatic thing, but your response allowed you to make the dramatic jump forward. And I think this has been a lot of fun, very informative. And I want to get in and talk with you next time about what you. The things that still stick with you that jumped out the most about how people that are more successful, wealthier, what jumped out to you, that impacted you, that right off the top of the head, have become part of your operating principles. Not just like in this area, it's like something you do once a year, but on a daily basis. You know, just like breathing and eating, sleeping, breathing. These approaches, these reactions, these attacks, these concepts are just part of your operating system. And I really am curious to hear about those. So thanks so much, Chris. This has been great.

That was my pleasure.

If you enjoyed what you've heard and are dead serious about finding out for yourself exactly how this works in the real world, I've taken the most valuable business lessons I've learned over 40 years and put them into something for you to watch. Go to whiteellawinning.com webinar now in order to move up as fast as possible. I'm Larry Wydell, and I run the Million Dollar Mastermind. Go, go, go.