Brian Luebben: The Real Estate Master with No Real Estate?!

I'm a real estate magnate with zero real estate now, and we're helping people buy thousands of units, and I own no real estate. So, internet guru, am I a scam or do we have it figured out? Stay tuned and 5-star rating and a review, baby.

Hello and welcome back to Multifamily Strategy. Today with a friend, special guest. I've got to be on his podcast a few times, first time over here with me. Everyone, welcome Brian to the channel. Brian, Good to see you, man.

Yo, yo, what's up?

Hey, Brian was just beating me up because I'm horrible at scheduling. I apologize. I'm— I appreciate you showing up nonetheless. Dude, this guy is doing so much right now. I just saw a bunch of videos of your event in Mexico. He's blown up on social media. Like, I think you've probably tripled since I met you, and that was like less than a year ago. Really fun to share some of the things this guy's doing. So Brian, good to see you, man.

Dude, good to be here, man. This is gonna be an awesome interview. We got a bunch of new stuff to talk about. So I do a lot of podcasts as a guest and myself. I run a podcast, the Action Academy. So I think it'd probably be beneficial for your audience for me to do a super, super quick backstory so they are caught up to speed about where you and I are today. And then we can start at me selling the real estate and then get into what we just did over this last weekend because we just hit our millionth dollar, $1,037,000 for Action Academy. On Sunday, February 19th. Yeah, 13, 13 months and 18 days into the business. So we just went zero to $1 million in revenue with nothing from absolute scratch. That was before the following, before anything. We created all the following, everything from scratch, zero in 13 months, 18 days. And we just did it step by step.

Dude, that's amazing. By the way, everyone listening, everyone listening, this is a story of an investor. Last time we spoke, this guy sold all of his real estate. This guy's a real estate player. He understands the game. I'm super excited to share this. So, if everyone's waiting for what the hook is, here's an investor who doesn't own anything. How's he changing it? Why'd he do it? Let's hear the backstory, Brian.

Dude, yeah, I'm a real estate magnate with zero real estate now. And we're helping people buy thousands of units and I own no real estate. So internet guru, am I a scam or do we have it figured out? Stay tuned and 5-star rating and a review, baby. Okay, cool. So here's what I did. Long story short, how this all started was I started as a 6-figure corporate guy. So I was working a corporate sales job. I was making a quarter million dollars a year, yada, yada, yada. Super fun. Made it to the mountaintop, realized it was the wrong mountain I was climbing. There's a lot of podcasts that talk about all this stuff and in my content at Brian Lubin, you'll see many, many, many videos of me talking about this. So I was buying a couple houses a year, and I realized, wait a second, I make $20,000 a month. This cash flow, even though I was doing the co-living strategy, is printing me $4,000 a month. That's a $16,000 difference. I need to simply do larger strategies. But there was only a problem: I didn't know how to do that. I didn't know how to raise capital. I didn't have any confidence in doing that. And also I had zero community, like I didn't have anybody. So basically I spent 4 years doing real estate meetups once a month, 2 to 3 coffee chats a week. I ended up breaking into like this millionaire mastermind that they invited me to, and I started doing that for 2 years and showing up and adding value. And long story short, I ended up building my own business on top of the real estate that allowed me to leave that job in March of 2022. Then I did the next logical best thing. I went and traveled full-time around the world for 8 months. Continuing to build the business, documenting my journey, all that stuff step by step on my daily podcast. I've interviewed over 500 multimillionaire entrepreneurs across 37 time zones, no, 37 countries and 7 time zones. And during that process, I built the newest company, which was Action Academy Community, which is our mastermind that launched January 1st, 2023. That's the company that just hit the million dollars. And then long story short, yeah, now that's where we are today. I wrote a book, From Passive to Passionate: How to Quit Your Job, Grow Your Wealth, and Turn Your Passions into Profits. And now here we are today. We're doing over like about $100,000 to $150,000 a month through the company and just, you know, working on what's next. So I'll pause there. Where do we want to start?

Yeah, absolutely. So you had How many rentals did you get to getting you that $4,000 a month?

Oh, 4.

Okay. So you had 4 rentals, each one's cash flowing about $1,000 a month. Obviously, you build other companies that are making $1 million. The real estate seems a little bit less exciting.

I hate real estate, honestly.

Why is that? Why is that?

This is—

I've talked to a few people on the channel. This is— this has been a common theme with entrepreneurs. What is it about real estate? That's not as fun as business.

Yeah. So real estate. So real estate is awesome. Real estate is an awesome asset class. I hate running it as a business. And this is coming from a guy that like literally Action Academy, our business model is like, and even my podcast, I interview real estate investors every single day. Like I've had to say no to so many opportunities and like even with you, you know, where it's just like Every single person on my podcast is doing multifamily, self-storage, mobile home parks, triple net lease, industrial, commercial, retail, buying small businesses, car washes, laundromats, the whole nine yards, right? Yeah. And so for me, it's like it's all an inevitable game to get to the game of business. So you can become a millionaire and you will become a millionaire through investing in real estate. Like, it's kind of inevitable if you just stick it out long enough.. But to get to the 8-figure to 9-figure level, I don't want to ever, ever be a billionaire. That's not in my cards whatsoever. But to get to the 8 to 9-figure level, $10 million plus to $100 million plus, it's a game of business. So you need to be buying businesses, you need to be rolling up equity, you need to be building enterprise value. And it's just way more effing fun, dude. There's so many different levers. Somebody can look at a house and look at a rehab house like a crack den. Yep. And they see like art. It's like a freaking opera. Yeah. Singing off to them. Like, they're like, I know what this rehab is going to be. I know what, what paint I'm going to use. I know what LVP I'm putting down. This is fun for me. For me, that is business. I love business. I hate real estate. But real estate is an amazing vehicle to get you where you want to go. And it's the best vehicle along with businesses to help you leave a six-figure job is buying multifamily. And you're coming to speak to my community tonight. So that's where I began my journey, was buying the real estate. And now it's just like I have to say no to people that want me to partner with them on their large real estate deals. And I say no to a lot of people, you know, want me to build multifamily empires with them, self-storage empires with them, all these different things. And now I'm well-versed in all of them, but I'm keeping my one thing, my one thing. So to punctuate this entire tangent, right? Yep. Your yes muscle takes you to 7 figures. Your no muscle takes you to 8 figures plus.

Ooh, I like that. I like that a lot. And this is something that I think more people should know about real estate. Real estate, the reason that I love real estate is it is a fantastic base to get started off of. It is a great wealth builder. It is a fantastic wealth builder. And you want to own— awful for cash flow. Even, even as a business owner, like you get to a point where you want the write-offs, you— there's So many advantages to being in real estate, even when you make it a business. It's not sexy. It's not that complicated. You will at some point get bored in real estate if you're buying real estate. I love it. I have fun with it. It is so simple and repeatable. That's why we were able to scale to a couple hundred units in like— took me like 2.5 years to get over 200 units.

Christian, can I say something on that real quick? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the reason it's boring and I made an emotional flowchart. Off of this, right? So there's so many people that are listening to this, and I'll post this on my podcast too, and they'll relate too. And we can maybe post videos on this, but there's so many people that are so stressed out and emotional and terrified. And we've been there, right? Like, we've been there, brother. We've been there, sister. Like, we get it because it's— you're— it's scary because you're like, how do I do this thing? Like, I don't know how to do it. Here's the cool thing. You do not need to make a model here. You do not need to make a new model. We're not in the business of making models. We're in the business of taking models. All right. So I made an emotional flowchart that says, should I be emotional or stressed about this? And then you go down and it says, is it real estate related? And then you go down and it says yes. And it says, okay, has somebody done this before? And you say yes. Then it says, cool. Take their model. And then if it says no, somebody has not done this before, it says, cool, choose a different business plan, go back, and then repeat something that somebody has done before. So the good news is if you buy real estate, thousands of people have done it before you. Like the way that you buy a multifamily property is the way that you buy a multifamily property is the way that you buy a multifamily property. Same with self-storage, commercial, a cap rate's a cap rate, you know?

And, and there's a million strategies that work. And the great thing is all of them work. You find the strategy to find the deals that works for you, and it's worked for other people. That's, that's the basis of everything that we teach, like the simplicity of it. The reason it works is because it's so simple. Find the people who've done what it is you want to do and then ask them how they did it.

And then do it.

And then, then do it. I mean, that's, that's the business. There's only so many ways you can phrase it, right? It's like everyone's done this in real estate. Now, this is where it gets interesting in business. And it took me on my, on my first company that really took off, like a multifamily strategy. I think it was about month 13 where that became a million-dollar business. So that's, I mean, that's exciting that you just hit that 13th month, million dollar. It's, that's a fantastic pace. That is a huge growing community. I have to share this too. I've been to a few events, like when I'm at BiggerPocketsCon or I'm anywhere, people come up to me. I was on your podcast once and you podcast like every single day. And there'd be like, oh, oh, I remember you from Action Academy. I know Brian. I'm part of this community. Like, one of them was like, dude, I just— I met Brian a few years ago. I just bought 75 self-storage units. But like, dude, you've been going for not that long. And I travel the country speaking about real estate and people come up to me and just like, yeah, this one guy bought 4 units and then I listened to him and I bought 75. Like, the fact that people are buying more real estate than you bought with the principles that you teach is just freaking awesome.

Yeah, dude. And look, there's two different ways to go about that, right? So the first way that you can go about it, and I fell victim to it in the beginning, which was, you know, well, how do I teach on that? I don't have 100 units. How do I help other people buy 100 units? You know, like, I don't want to be a scam. I don't want to be a guru. I was just like, dude, no. Like, what we're optimizing for is cash flow. Cash flow, baby. And if anyone knows cash flow, it's me. I don't know that many people that have $100,000 almost free net cash flow coming in. You're like, that's, that's gross. But we have probably like a 60 to 70% net margins. That's $60,000, $70,000 like net coming in that we built from scratch. So I know the game of cash flow. And so what I, and what we do in Action Academy especially, is it's actually a benefit that I'm not the one that teaches everything, right? So it's like, it's actually, if it was me and any, and even in your business model to a degree, it's like if it's reliant on your knowledge, you're bottlenecking, like there's a limit there. But for me, I was just like, dude, I have like my backyard that I play in now is like got every single person that is the best person in that field. And I was like, and they all want to do this thing. And they want to have mentees and these mentees want to have mentors. And I'm friends with both of them. Let's pair them together and let's create the system and the model and the play box sandbox for them to play in and make freaking magic happen. So dude, we have an entire coaching staff where I'm like, all right, you want to learn self-storage? This guy just did an $18 million self-storage deal. He's who teaches self-storage. You want to do multifamily? This is the guy that does multifamily. Am I on a call tonight teaching about multifamily? No, you are. Right. So, and it's like, and you benefit from that because now you get the benefit of having people come work for you, have people do your stuff, have people be LPs in your deals, have people bring you deals, like armies of people. And then also at the flip end of it, like when you go all the way to the end, like it all just comes all the way back around. So It's keeping your one thing, your one thing. And that's why I'm like, dude, this is what fires me up every single day. It's my passion and income.

You said something that I think is really important. Don't be your own bottleneck. This goes for everything in business.

Yeah. If I was, if I was teaching people how to buy multifamily, that is a scam. I haven't like, yeah, I haven't bought a 100-unit. How can I teach you how to buy a 100-unit?

But you can actually, and well, and that's what I love about like your, your actual branding too. You, you call it Action Academy. What are you good at? You travel the world, you write books, you buy some real estate. You like to do a lot of a lot, right? You're a serial entrepreneur. So, what makes sense for you to teach? You can teach how do people take action. You have an idea, you implement it, and boom, you have a million-dollar company. You can talk about that. And so, you do what you're best at, but there's a few—

Systems, processes, and frameworks. Yep.

And there's a few marks of a good company. But if you're working on a business idea, I don't care if it's real estate, I don't care if it's a group, if it's a restaurant, whatever it is, businesses are only as good as they are scalable. And if they're simple, they're repeatable. If they're repeatable, they're scalable. And your entire analysis of your business is essentially, uh, how big can we grow the top of our funnel and how do we eliminate bottlenecks? Like that's, that's how you scale any business. It's a super simple game.

Yeah.

You hit it on the head. Most people though are their own bottleneck. They either try to be something they're not. Which I think you're super realistic about. You're like, these are the things that I'm not an expert in. I'm just gonna line people with experts. For those who don't know Brian, by the way, he's astronomically more social than me. If I was trying to connect a bunch of people and that was my market, dude, that would, that would be me being a scam. That would be me being like, hey, yeah, I know everyone. I'm super sorry. Like, I like hanging out with my wife at my house. Like that, that's what I like doing. I like teaching multifamily cuz we built a business around multifamily and we bought a bunch of it. But you figure out what you are best in the world at. And then you scale that. Now, usually I ask this as the last question, but I'm gonna ask you this early because it ties right in. What is it that Brian Lubin is the best in the world at? And it also could be your team, you or your team. What is the one thing that you guys are uniquely the best at and how has that helped you grow your business?

We are the best in the world at the gentle combination of handholding and ass kicking for six-figure high performers to actually leave those jobs. Dude, like that is what we're best at.

Well-rehearsed. Sometimes people are like, um, let me think about that.

I just came up with that.

Dude, that's really good.

I literally just came up with that. Write that down. Write that down. Yeah. But that's what we do. Yeah. That's what we do. Look, it's, it's a combination because to punctuate what you just said, you know, what we're really, really good at is solving the specific problem. So people focus too much on the vehicle and not enough on the problem itself. So the vehicle doesn't really matter. In Action Academy, we do self-storage, multifamily. We do the whole gambit. 50% of them are buying businesses. 50% of them are buying real estate, commercial real estate. So it's like we've got both. So the problem isn't, you know, necessarily like, how do you do it? The problem is like, there's a couple things that they're lacking. They're lacking clarity. They're lacking community. They're lacking confidence. They're lacking capital. That's what they're lacking. Because I interviewed 100 people. I did 100 free coaching calls to be able to build the business, like the core infrastructure of the business. And I solved all those problems for people. So in community, you're lacking— like, if you get the community part right, everything else falls into place. So when you're— for— let me slow down a second. For a person that's listening that has some single-family properties, there's only a handful of people that you're missing that will unlock the potential for doing larger commercial deals for you. And that's going to be an operating partner, an operating mentor that has a balance sheet, where you're actually going to be able to utilize their balance sheet to do the deal, and capital partners. You need people with capital, you need people with knowledge, and people that have operating experience and boots on the ground. So it's like, if you can just get all those people, you can either— I tell people, you can do this yourself in 4.5 years or 5 years or 6 years. Just go network. You can learn it for free on YouTube, or we can just give it to you on a silver platter in Like 2 to 4 months in Action Academy. So you're entering like the deep end of the pool where it's like, okay, holy shit. Like I've always been interested in self-storage. Now it's like I've got every single person that's like a huge operator in self-storage. Like half the group owns self-storage. Like I've got capital partners for self-storage. I've got operating partners for self-storage. And now I've got a step-by-step playbook and roadmap. Like, dude, I could tell you the core key actions for everybody to take. And I will like build up a massive real estate portfolio again, which we can get into in a second because I sold all my real estate. So I have enough cash sitting in the back for me to operate this business from a place of, I don't know a nice way to say it, but like a place of F you, right? So it's just like, because if I have $300,000, $400,000 of cash in the bank from selling my single family, I can just run this business and I'm not stressed about having, like, selling people. You know what I mean? So it's just like, I run my business where I'm like, okay, if you're not a fit, you're out. If you're not doing anything, you're out. Here's your money back. Bye. And we can afford the best talent, the best people, the best coaches, the best everything in the group, within the group, because I am not stressed about making payroll. That's why I sold the properties. And now 10 years from now, I may look like an idiot right now, But 10 years from now, when all of a sudden I build up all of this relationship capital and all this career capital and all this community capital, and then I do decide that I want to start buying real estate again, I'm the motherfucker that's going to pop up in one year and all of a sudden I got $20 million portfolio.

That's me. So what real estate is Brian buying next? When you, when you restart the real estate, you've retooled your company. We've talked a little bit about synergies doing what you're best at, what is the type of real estate that you want to be buying? Is it self-storage? Is it multifamily? What does it look like?

Oh dude, we are going to buy, so in our new company we have been, we just did Costa Rica and Cabo for our last two international events and we had these beautiful mega mansions that we stayed in, in Tamarindo, Costa Rica, overlooking the water. And over in Cabo, it was one of them was $8 million, $8.2 million. The other one was, $13.9 million for the properties. And they were just the most gorgeous 27, like 20-bedroom houses. I want to buy those properties. I want to buy those properties, like luxury real estate in Latin America, as well as boutique hotels and event centers. Like, that is what we're going to be buying, like through Action Academy, like for Action Academy, by Action Academy. So we won't do any outside raises. I'll probably be able to put down about $1 million of personal capital as well as maybe raising a couple million from investors within Action Academy only. And then we will go buy the properties. So we'll have Action Academy Mexico, Action Academy Tulum, Action Academy Brazil, and we'll have our different event centers all around there so that whenever we throw events, we're staying at our house that we own with our own in-person staff. Like, so that's, that's what we're doing. And then now it's just a combination of just finding the correct partners to do that type of transaction with, which, you know, if there's one thing I'm really good at finding, it's people.

Well, this, this, this episode is about you, but I am going to share one story because this is something my team learned doing hospitality. So we have the Robin Hood Village Resort event space, event center, 20 cabins on the water, foothills of the mountains, $4.5 million seller financed. Operation. Cody and I own it together. We do a ton of speaking events. I was like, all the synergies are supposed to be there for our team though. I'm not like an event hosting company. We run 4 events a year out of it. The rest of the time I'm a multifamily operator. And if I was to go down to what am, what am I the best in the world at? Value-add, entry-level multifamily, providing a nicer space than every neighboring property. At a slightly lower price per month than every neighboring property and doing it profitably again and again and again. And I do that with replaceable parts and with standardized models of like the floors are always these floors. The paint is always this paint. The countertops are always these ones. I can buy in bulk. I can actually really help homelessness in accounting and accounting, like actually help people and make money doing it. That is what we're the best at. For us, getting into hospitality was stupid.

It's an awful idea. I would have told you that that is the biggest distraction for you.

And it is a huge distraction. What I like about it for you is multifamily would be a distraction for you. It would be—

I would hate it.

It would be something like, oh yeah, I'm renovating properties.

I'm out here.

I could be just speaking and connecting people. You already travel. Like, for those of you, if you're one of the like 3 people left on the planet who haven't already followed Brian on Instagram, @BrianLubin, like you can watch him travel all over the world. You can see the videos and pictures from you guys on the boat out in, uh, out in— that was the— that was Cabo, right? Yeah, out in Cabo. You guys are having a blast. Events make sense. Like, anyone could look at that from the outside and say, this is a business that this guy should be in. There's synergies. It's going to be fun. You're going to stay mentally engaged. I think it makes a lot of sense. And this is coming from a guy who absolutely hates running hospitality.

Yeah, I love every single bit of it, dude. Like, the funnest part of my business is whenever we go down and we're hosting these events, and it's like, the coolest thing is I'm not running any of it. I'm managing the team that's creating it. So there's a book called Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara, and I freaking love it. I love creating these experiences for people. It lights me up. Even when I'm traveling on my own, my favorite thing to do, um, I'm literally hiring a new executive assistant. I have an entire team. Operations team that runs my life. But the thing I love doing, even when I was traveling before, is I love going through pages and pages and pages of Airbnbs and hotels to find the best suite, the best hotel, the best view, the best service. And like, that is just— I love it. I'm obsessed with it. So whenever I travel around the world, people get really interested because wherever I'm staying is going to be the best place. And that's where I spend all my money. Like, if I'm going to Singapore, I'm staying in the best suite at Marina Bay Sands. I'm going to the best penthouse in Columbia just because that is what dollar for dollar brings me the most joy in life. So for me, providing that experience to other people is the most fun and fulfilling thing. So whenever we throw these events and I have an operation team of 5 or 6 for each event, you know, we just sold out one. We just did $300,000 of revenue on a Sunday morning. Which validates the business idea pretty, pretty well, if I do say so myself. You know, it's just like throwing these events is the most fun thing, dude. And seeing them walk into these houses and having that look on their face and that wow factor and then like hosting these events is insane. So on the flip side, you know, that's why this works because for you doing value-add multifamily is the best thing. That is your one thing. And I would kill myself. So for me, I'm like, give me a freaking mansion overlooking the freaking water in Brazil where I can host like events for entrepreneurs and they can come down and have their speaking engagements. I'm gonna make it the best thing they've ever done in the world and make a bunch of money.

And that's how the game played. By the way, on that event, you, you said you had just launched your event, sold out in like a day. How— we talked about this before. How many minutes did it take you to just absolutely sell out that event?

Yeah, 16 minutes, 37 seconds.

See, I think you're gonna do fine in hospitality. I feel like you're gonna do well.

But we validated it, right? Yeah. So, you know, and this is just like, if this podcast is one thing, it's the Radical Honesty Podcast, right? Because, you know, I'm not really painting myself that great, huh? But, uh, no, dude, the first couple of events we lost money, um, intentionally. Same thing with our business. So it's like you start and you just make it like super affordable. You say, come on, try this out, tell me how to fix it. Then you fix it, you make it better, and then you charge more, and then you make it better, and then you charge more, and then you make it better, and then you charge more. Then you start hitting like cruising altitude. So we did that with the first business. We did that with this business. So first event, we, $2,000 all-inclusive Costa Rica. We lost our ass, but we knew it was gonna, it's okay. Like we knew that we just wanted to get like, can we do this? Is this, there's their demand. And this is private events only within our community. Second event was Cabo. We doubled the price. I threw $100,000 on a credit card. I was like, all right, I'm booking all this out before we even market the thing. Then we put it up and we increased the price 50%. We're like, uh, uh, people gonna do this? You know? And, uh, people did it.. And then we doubled the amount, we doubled the headcount. We had like 54 people for this one. And then best experience that they've had in their entire life. So much so that 50% of them already paid in full for the next event. And so we upped the price again. So now it's $4,000 and now $4,000 ahead. We just sold out 87 spots and we're predicting to get up between like 100 to 120, 130 spots for that.

Wow. And it's gonna end up being another heck of an event cuz you have more experience, you have more teams, you have—

Yeah. You just get— And now we have margin.

Yeah, I remember, uh, funny enough, it was, uh, Grant Cardone was mentioning it, but like his first 10X Growth Con was a total flop and he lost a heck of a lot of money. And I think his second one is where he's like, on number 2, it just was way bigger. And now it's this, like, I think he spent $11 million on the last one where it's like, you just watch these events scale. And some of those, I mean, just if you're good at hosting and you're good at doing the event thing. You can bring these things to ridiculous levels. So, dude, super excited about that. Okay, we have two things left. I want to talk about your book, and we're going to talk about that last because I, I'm very excited about that. There's a question we ask every time though, and this ties into that expense. When you are learning how to host events, run your own business, buy your own real estate, we pay something that's called the stupid tax. We talk about this every time on the channel, but it is the highest learning fee that you have paid being an entrepreneur. For Cody and I, it was raising capital incorrectly at double the cost we needed to on our first deal. We still made $1 million. We would've made an extra $300,000 had we just tweaked one little clause. For you, what was the highest stupid tax you paid and what did you learn from it?

I'll give two super relatable ones. So the first one is that I let a single— just to bring it back to relatability a little bit. Yeah. I let a single mother that didn't qualify for a lease rent one of my properties, rent one of the rooms. And so that was a 4-month, like $30,000, $40,000 eviction process plus $12,000 in damages. And yeah, and that was kind of the straw that broke the camel's back where, you know, then I went back to Atlanta to run the rehab of that property and then I was Well, I had mentors of mine saying, dude, like, this is like peanuts compared to what you're doing with your other business. Like, this is a distraction. Like, and then of course, the next conversation is, okay, well, how do we tap into like a HELOC or a cash-out refi? And then we just decided overall, just running the calculations on the ROI, the ROE, return on equity, and most importantly, the return on effort. Yep. The return on energy. We were like, let's just offload these things and just get, get a payday. So we use a bunch of tax-deferred vehicles to get that too. But so we did that. And so that was my biggest stupid tax for that one. And she was a nightmare the entire time she was in that property. In business, I didn't know, I didn't understand how to run cash flow for the first 6 months of my company. So in the first quarter, you know, we made like $28,000 our first month, I think, for Action Academy, and the second month was was like, you know, like $25,000. So I mean, it starts small when you bootstrap it. But first thing I did was I was like, I'm going to hire a Facebook ads guy. I'm going to hire an agency immediately. Ended up paying them $20,000 because I was like, okay, I've got $20,000 in my bank account. I can spend $20,000 on Facebook ads, which will of course make me $100,000, right? No, that $20,000 did not lead to anything for me, you know? And so that was like, Both of them were just like smaller mistakes, but I made many bigger mistakes along the way. But those are just two small, like, ouch kind of mistakes where you're like, okay, cool, I'll learn something here. And I tell people this, I'm a very, very confident person just because I take so much action and I'm in the weeds so much that it's like I've got trench-level knowledge in a lot of different asset classes now. Um, but it's very easy to remain humble. Like, confidence can become cockiness. It's very easy to remain humble when you're in the correct rooms. So you just said, you know, you've made a million-dollar mistake. The rooms I'm in, like, there's a guy that had this quote and I love it and I tell it to everybody. He goes, I've made mistakes that are larger than your net worth. And I'm just like, Oh, he's like, I've made singular mistakes that are larger than most people's net worth. Like, I was talking to the CEO of Keller Williams. He's like, I made a $10 million hiring mistake. Oh. And I was— he was like, $10 million is what that cost us. And so I was just like, yeah, dude, like, there's levels to this. Like, there are people, you know, my buddy, He had his executive assistant embezzling money.

Mm-hmm.

So he thought he was cash flowing $50,000 a month on his multifamily portfolio. He was losing $50,000 a month. She was cooking the books. Oh, that's terrible. So that cost— and then all the banks ended up pulling his lines of credit. So that executive assistant that was embezzling money from him ended up costing him about $7 million. Yeah. So, yeah, so it's easy to remain humble, you know, and we'll go through stuff like that. I mean, it's inevitable. You have problems. People, houses burn down. I've had houses flood 5 different ways. Trees through roof. Problems are, you cannot escape problems. You cannot out-earn problems. The only thing you can change is your relationship with them. And I just interviewed Dan Martell on my podcast and he called problems puzzles. Yep. I really liked that.

That's— and granted, this was during COVID so I had like this way too long, nasty looking beard and it was kind of a, you know, it was before I was ever a public figure. So I had a crappy camera and crappy mic, but I was on the BiggerPockets episode 605. That was my first time on BiggerPockets. That episode, that's all we talked about was you need to find problems. Like as an entrepreneur, you are paid to solve problems. And if they're legitimate problems, like the heart of the problem, Typically the bigger the payoff, because other people aren't willing to do it. So when I find something, I'm like, oh, this is super difficult. That's usually a type of business that I get excited to get in. Cause I'm like, when I solve this, everyone is going to have to work their ass off if they want to catch me. Like, if it's really hard to get in, it's going to be really hard to compete. That is the type of stuff I want. I think the technical term for it is economic moat. But how hard is it to compete with me when I break through on this business?

I love that.

Find a bigger problem, solve it, get paid. That is what you do as an entrepreneur. That's why I love entrepreneurialism. Entrepreneurialism. Entrepreneurship. Yeah, entrepreneurship. There we go. It's still morning over here. We're on different time zones.

Okay.

Biggest stupid tax. It costs you tens of thousands of dollars. You have friends it's cost tens of millions of dollars. It's all levels of scale. The message here is when you are starting, It is more expensive while you're learning. You're going to make mistakes. They're going to cost money. That's okay. Yeah, it's okay. If you're like, oh, I wanted to go to college and get a master's degree and do whatever, you're probably going to spend a lot more than that on one mistake. If you're scaling your business, you're going to— it's going to— you're going to make your 6, 7, 8 million or figure mistake. It will happen. Let's talk about things going right, though. I've seen this thing all over the place. You're doing a fantastic job, by the way. On, on the way that you market. Like, I'm seriously, if you got, if you guys want to learn how to like grow social media, create a personality online, follow Brian on Instagram, just do it. So it, it has, you have a, you have a really interesting flow. Every video by you feels like a video by you consistently. Yeah.

Cause it is, I don't have a team. It's just me.

And they feel similar. You have, you're just a super encouraging channel. I'm seeing this book pop up everywhere and it's just, tell us about the book. Show us. Do you have the book with you? I love the COVID of this thing.

Bam.

Look at that.

From Passive to Passionate. To Passionate. Yeah. We spent $3,000 on the COVID That's money well spent. We had, yeah, we had 127 designers competing for it and I raised the bounty from, it's normally like $500. I raised, I 6xed it. I said, I want the best design. And it's so easy, like, it's so, not easy, it's so interesting where it's like the simpler the design, like the better. Yes. You're like, how do you convey this really complex? And so for people listening, it's this picture of like this Cole Haan dress shoe and then it's this picture of this like money print flip-flop and it's from passive to passion. It just like, you're like, I kind of understand what this book's about immediately. Um, so you're talking about problems and the problem that we solve, and I'm the best in the world at solving this very, very hyper-specific problem, which is you're making six figures and you want to leave your job in the next 2 to 3 years and you need to fix that cash flow problem and you don't know how to do that yet. We are the people that specifically help you with that problem. Like, there's so many different nuances in, like, I've spent probably 5,000 hours thinking about how to solve this problem because I solved it myself. And now we've just worked and worked and worked to solve it for other people. And that's the book. So I've had really cool people endorse the book like Mike Michalowicz, author of Profit First, Brandon Turner. I just was on his podcast for it. Amy Porterfield, Jay Papasan, John Lee Dumas, like a bunch of really, really cool entrepreneurs. And the book is step by step, literally how to quit your job, grow your wealth, turn your passions into profits. So it walks you through the first half of the book, reads like a psychology book, and then the back half of the book is just pure tactics and strategy. How to go through a seller finance negotiation, how to raise capital, what's the difference between a debt raise and an equity raise? You know, what are the different types of syndications? How do you buy a business? What does that conversation look like talking to a seller? You know, how do you buy multifamily, self-storage, you know, flips, single family? How do you start your own side hustle? How do you build the profit models for your own side hustle? That's the back half. First half is like, okay, how do we overcome those 4 C's, right? Which is what we build in the business. 4 C's are literally like the confidence, capital, clarity, and community. So how do we remedy those for you first and get your head right so that you're able to digest the rest of the book? So the cool thing about the book is the book is literally our onboarding for Action Academy. It's our literal 50-hour, onboarding that we do. It takes 30 days to complete, and we charged $1,500 for it before. So I just made the book, like, I wrote the book on the onboarding in order how we had the modules because we had 300 people go through it and say like, this changed my freaking life. And so I was like, okay, cool, that's validating. Now let's build the book. So then I built the book, um, took me 1,137 hours. And then I broke it down chapter by chapter and we went through 19 rounds of editing and every single person that is the master of whatever asset class I speak on, I take the chapter and I send it to them. I send it to an 8-figure entrepreneur. They had to be 8-figure level and also they had to, I sent it to a purely beginner that was in that asset class and I said, okay, If you don't know anything about seller finance, does this chapter answer everything for you? And then also, Gabe, you've done $80 million of seller finance deals. Is there anything I'm missing in this chapter? Okay, cool. Buying businesses. Hey, you want to buy a business? Does this chapter answer every question that you have? Hey, Walker Deibel, who literally wrote Buy Then Build, like, you know, Buy Not Build, like you wrote the book on this. Like, is there anything I'm missing?

He goes, no, dude, you crushed it.

There we go. So like, that is the book. Yeah. So that's the book, From Passive to Passionate, man. It's available on Amazon. There we go. So Amazon only. So if you guys want that 2-day free shipping, shout out Jeff Bezos and capitalism.

Go check it out. Everyone buy it. Check him out on Instagram @brianlubin. Brian, where else do we find you? You got a podcast. You got all sorts of stuff going on. Where, where are the best places is to find you?

Dude, Action Academy podcast. We give everything away for free in the business. Like, like your call that we do tonight, I'm going to record it and we'll post it on the podcast. We do give everything away for free and we sell the implementation. So it's like them asking you the questions, them getting to know you, you getting to know them along with the other 300 members in there. Like half the group is between 5 and 50 rentals. The other half the group is $5, $10, $20 million net worth. So it's like we've got a really cool band of misfit toys over there. Everybody's willing, Dylan makes over $300,000 a year. We're crushing it. So the podcast is the gateway drug and it will get you addicted in the community.

So that's us.

Okay.

We'll close on this. Everyone on the fence, and I don't care what this is for. This could be for Action Academy. It could be Multifamily Strategy. It could be whatever it is that you want to do. Find the people who've done what you want to do and network with them. Easy enough. Information from all of us. This is everyone online. Information is free. Application is everything. Gather the information, figure out what strategy you want to follow to your financial freedom and your entrepreneurial goals. And when you're ready to take the next step, take action. Go join the people who are doing the thing and just go do the thing. It's going to cut so much time out and it's going to save you a boatload of stupid tax. And stupid tax costs a lot. Everyone, thank you for watching. We'll see you on the next episode here on Multifamily Strategy.