Ex-Grant Cardone Employee Uncovers how Money is Really Made in Multifamily- Gabe Bowling Podcast

In my opinion, this guy is like Cardone plus plus. It's like a Cardone who actually knows what he's doing.

The marketing phrase is GB over GC.

There we go, there we go. I don't necessarily disagree with that. By not disagreeing, I mean yes, heck yes, man. Welcome to another episode of the Owner Meeting Podcast. I'm Christian Osgood, your channel host, joined today by a friend, Gabe Bowling. I actually met him in his deal room in his program pitching a deal. I like this guy a lot. He started out, he's one of the Grant Cardone boys. He started out working for, for Uncle G. If you guys know a little of the history of multifamily strategy, Grant's messed up some deals for some of my mentees before. We have some mixed feelings about that man. Love his books, love his methods. Uh, I have some questions about the real estate. Today we're gonna be talking about deal structure with Gabe. We're gonna be talking about what he's learned since syndicating different actual opportunities and different deal structures, incentives behind them. This guy is super smart. If there is one episode to listen to on The Owner Meeting, on like how one would tactically structure a deal and continue to make money, and we're talking actual cash flow, Gabe is your guy. Gabe, welcome to the channel, man.

Well, thank you for— thank you for talking me up so much. Thank you for having me as well. I really do appreciate it.

We'll give a little backstory here. You worked for Grant for how many years?

So backstory in a very quick period of time. Middle-class family, grew up. My father's a Green Beret in the Special Forces, military guy, very accomplished. Leader up in DC. Mom's best stay-at-home mom in the entire world, best friend to date. Uh, grew up in a middle-class household. Go to school, get good grades, go to college, get a degree, you know, get a job, and then die. Uh, that wasn't really for me. I was not like the big fan of school. I've always been like, I want to be different, I don't want to be normal, I want to stand out. I played baseball, football my entire life. I was like, you know, the running back that everybody would be like, give Gabe the football, let's go. So I've always, I've always had that thing like, okay, I want to stand out.

Um, can I just say Bowling is a great last name for running back?

Yeah, yeah, no, it was, it was fun. I was like, you know, I'm 5'8", 5'9" today. I was the, the white guy that was not fast. If you just were in my way, you were gonna get trucked and ran over. Uh, it was fun. But so I didn't really have like a mentor growing up. I didn't have entrepreneurship in my family. I didn't come from money, but I didn't come from like poverty. I didn't like I just went to school, I went through the motions, and then life got very real for me at college. I went to University of West Florida. It's in Pensacola for half a semester. I almost failed out and it was just not for me. It was my first real taste of freedom. I questioned going to classes and everything because the people that I was learning from was not like who I wanted to be from. So it didn't really match up for me. I went to, I went to Google very quickly and I knew that if I wanted to get out of like the whole college thing that I would have to create my own life. And like make money and not go like down the pathway that my dad wanted me to go down. So at the same time, I met my now wife, then girlfriend. We've been together now almost 7 years. She was on the other side of the middle class, waking up at like 5 a.m. every morning at Panera Bread and like actually working. She knows what work ethic is.

That's what I loved about my wife, by the way. That was as soon as I learned she was full-time student, full-time working. I'm like, yep, yep.

Yeah, yeah. So there became a point, it's like I was waking up at 10, just going to the gym and like going through the motions, you know, the normal middle class thing. And then she's like waking up at 6 and we were sleeping together. She'd kiss me goodbye. I'm like, all right, I'm going back to sleep. Enough of that was like, all right, some, some, something's got to change. Uh, I go to Google, I type in what can I make the most money in without having a college degree? Sales, automotive, insurance, and real estate. I was like, pretty much the options. My mom was a realtor back in the day. I was like, screw it. I'm going to go down the real estate. At this point, I just wanted to try stuff. I didn't really know what, like, I was going to get attached to. I failed my real estate license 3 times. I passed on the 4th, which, by the way, you can, you can fail it 3 times and still be okay. I thought money was going to come in. It didn't. I was introduced to the world of sales and marketing. Like, you have to produce to make money. That was fun. Um, and then I didn't get any jobs at any residential brokerages. I called like KW, all of the ones at the time. I was 19 or 20, no experience, never done anything in real estate, no sales experience, never picked up a phone. I was like, what do I have? I was living with my parents. And for everybody that has the opportunity to live with your parents and work for free, go do it. Like right this second, go work for free for somebody that you can get experience from. Because it doesn't matter if you get a paycheck anyways, you're still going to be broke. It doesn't matter.

Work for skills, not money.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. So I ended up landing a job and it was like the very, very, very base floor at Marcus Millichap. That was my first exposure to commercial real estate. I worked at Marcus for a year for completely for free. I didn't sell anything. I didn't make a single dime. But I— and I thought I knew what cap rate was like. I saw other people make 500 grand or $1 million on, on a single deal. I'm like, holy cow, you can actually change your life and make a whole bunch of money in this business and you don't need a college degree. Sign me up. I'll do whatever you like. You want me to go pick up the trash? I'll go pick up the trash. You want me to call the people and get the comps? Tell me what to say. I'll make the call. It was just the, the hunger and willingness to do whatever it took to get the experience that I knew I could leverage later on in life. That was like my big first win working at MarketMailChimp. Now, working for free only works for so long because, you know, you kind of need money to live. And at the time, my wife and I, or my girlfriend, now wife, we wanted to like grow up and create our own life and move out and like have our own apartment and like have freedom. So she sent me a job posting from Cardone Capital because at the time I unfollowed Grant. I thought he was super annoying. And like salesy. And now I'm the person that's on Instagram, like going all over the place saying, click my— click the link. It's funny, but I got the post and it was like $60 grand a year going to work for a billionaire that was doing a bunch of stuff in apartments. I was like, all right, this seems like a really good opportunity. We should take it. We go down to Miami, interview, and next week we move down to Miami. And I'm like, okay, that's the next little big piece of momentum for, for us. Or the opportunity, I guess you could say, that we needed. We worked for free. We leveraged that experience. It was just enough because Grant doesn't hire the smartest people. He hires people that are super hungry, have a little bit of experience, but hasn't formed their own opinion about like real estate and what a great deal is. So I fit the bill. 12 to 14 hour days every single day on the phone every single day. The first year I developed the skill set of communication, which people call sales, but it's not sales when you're raising a lot of money from very wealthy people. It's actually just effective communication with them and solving for problems. Um, I got really good on the phones. I raised $20 or $30 million my first year, uh, $40 million my second year, and another, I think, $40 or $50, uh, year 3. So over— it was a— it was $100 million from retail investors over a 3-year period. I went through 19 institutional transactions. The smallest one was $50 million, the largest one was $750 million. So like, all I knew at that point was I stumbled upon— I started at Marcus just like to change my life, and then I stumbled upon the job working at Grant's, which is like the real world is private equity real estate. Like, I have become obsessed with private equity and like the big guys like Steve Schwarzman and Blackstone and Barry Stern, like, and all the giants. Those are the people that I study today very, very, very closely. That was my introduction to it, and we were there for 3 years. Uh, I got the deal bug. I started asking questions. I was like, wow, you know, we're making good money. '21, '22, '23, and '24, uh, we didn't make less than $200 grand, uh, just hunger, production, commissions, bonuses for raising a bunch of money, uh, there. So it's great opportunities. I got paid to learn my MBA in life, business, real estate, marketing, sales, all of it. So it was a fantastic opportunity. And then we left. We quit February 1st of 2022. I'll never forget that day. That's when we took the leap. We went from $200 grand a year of income to zero, which was like a really big step for me. I was 20. My wife and I was 24. The month before we quit, we said, screw it, if we're going to do this thing, we're going to jump all the way in. My wife and I went and eloped. Down in Key West, just me and her, and we got married. And we're like, let's go, let's take this big jump. And that was kind of like the start to entrepreneurship. But that is my story.

What a, what a, what a commitment. Like, okay, let's go from employed making good money to, uh, let's go to zero money. Let's also get married today. And away we go. I didn't elope, but I had a similar moment with my wife where I remember I was working for the CoStar Group. Very, very, very similar backstory, right? I'm working for for Andy Florence, who's a billionaire, owns GoStar Group, working with them, nailing the sales. I was 4 years into that sales career and I just had this realization. For me, it was, it was right during COVID That was the time where I'm like, oh, I actually took the first time in my career, and I think everyone needs to do this, took the time to actually think about what I wanted to be doing instead of just like, I go to work, I get a job. I was like, All of my clients make way more money than me and they're on the owning side. Why don't I just do that? Like, I had this realization, like, there's nothing special about any of my clients other than they're highly motivated people who own real estate. I'm a highly motivated salesperson who doesn't own real estate. Let's flip that around. I had that same conversation with my wife. I'm like, I'm thinking about getting HELOC on the house. Do we want to quit my job and just risk everything that we've built? And she's like, well, there's only one thing I know. We know how to buy a house, so if we lose the house, we can buy another house. Sure, let's go all in on real estate. And that's what we did. But having that moment where, one, you thought about what you wanted to do, you created a reasonable path to do it, and then you had a jumping off point where you were like, okay, at this point I have built the skills that one would need to succeed in what I want to do. You took the risk and you got your partner on board. Like, those are, those are the things that you need to do, especially for you, uh, You married people.

Yeah.

So get your spouse on board.

The logical reason behind it. And you mentioned something developing the skill set that is— I will— nobody can ever take a skill set from you. Anything. Money. You can take, you know, a lot of things. You can take everything, but you can't take what's, what's up here in your brain. That's a skill set. So it was like a 3-month decision for me and my wife. A lot of walks around this little park outdoors, like worst case, best case. It's like a deal. We look at a deal, we look at a lot of deals. What's the upside? What's the risk? And how do we mitigate take the risk. And we're like, all right, well, you're one of the top guys here. You're a real estate guy. You've raised over $100 million. You can put that on your resume. And you work for a billionaire for 3 years. Like, worst case scenario, we quit and we go out and we fuck up and fail, and we go and get another job, like, making $150,000 or $200,000. Like, all right, great. That's the worst case scenario. Best case scenario, we couldn't— I literally could not fathom what we were doing today, and it's only been 3 years. So it's like, that was how we made the decision. And we knew that we wanted to do something bigger. Like, we didn't want to settle for what we were going to get over a 5 to 10 year period there. The quality of life is a really big metric you should look at. And so we just said, fuck it, and we did it.

And when you're stacking these skills, by the way, the unique stack of skills is really what gives you the value in the workplace and in the entrepreneurial space. People who have very few, very specific skills, typically have very simple, very low-paid jobs. It's the combination of skills that you acquire over time where it's like, man, someone who can persuade other people, who can communicate, who also has a reasonable math background and understanding of what makes a deal— you add some, a little sprinkle of some legal understanding to that, and all of a sudden you have someone who can do a deal, understand a deal, create an opportunity to communicate to others, raise capital. If you only have one or two skills, you can't do that. If you stack a few basic skills on top of each other though, suddenly you can get into these multimillion, you know, tens, hundreds of millions of dollars of opportunity only by stacking the right set of skills. Question for you, Gabe. I had a moment in my life where I think it's the number one skill that has helped me uniquely be me. I had a conversation with Mike Rowe and he's like, hey, the superpower I have is I can talk about anything for 8 minutes because I had to do this on QVC. I'm like, son of a bitch, that is the best. That is the coolest skill ever. I'm gonna learn that. And that was right when I was starting YouTube, which funny enough, at 8 minutes is where, like, at the time, their algorithm for ad revenue was like 8 minutes or greater was the video. I'm like, all I need to do is be able to competently open my mouth and make— and just know for a fact that words will come out. That skill has helped me on so many deals, so many transactions where it's like The ability to just competently say words that make sense and communicate confidence to others has been amazing for me. In your career, working for Cardone, working for Marcus and Millichap, making that decision to leave your job, what is a skill that you have that you think has been the number one skill that has uniquely made you able to have success in your business?

Listening to the other person on the side of the table, the side of the phone, the side of the deal. Listening. As most people are selfish, they only care about themselves. And as a byproduct, it doesn't work. Like, so many missed opportunities happen because of it. If you forget about yourself for a second and you're like, it doesn't matter if you're going into a new business, you're going into a deal, you're going into just anything between point A and point B, there can be a clear line of communication. And if you're trying to get a deal done and the only thing you care about is an acquisition fee, or the Instagram post that you're going to be able to post after you close it or whatever it is, if it's self-interest, like it, yeah, deals will get done. But I think what makes me somewhat good— I don't love saying I'm like fantastic at it yet because we've done— we've barely done anything.

Fantastic in this.

I'll say it's just— it's just— it's just being able to understand the problem that the other person has because they decided to sell for a reason or they decided to reach out to you for a reason. Nobody accidentally does anything in real estate. I mean, sometimes you do. It's like, I'm on Instagram, I'm just clicking on an ad. Like, okay, that's possible. But you booked the call with me to specifically talk about a deal that I'm under contract on right this second. Why in the world did you take the time to book this call? Well, you know, I just got an inheritance. My grandfather passed away, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, if you just take the time to listen to that person, and solve their problem, as a byproduct of you being a great problem solver, you will benefit greatly. Now, how you benefit, like, financially greatly is solve bigger problems. That's all you're doing. So I'd say listening and being able to solve different people's problems.

Where did that click for you? Like, if someone wanted to build that skill, how did you become a truly great listener?

Uh, grants. 50,000 phone calls, opportunities. The only way, like, if you only talk to 10 people your entire life, you only have 10 data points on what life could be like. Imagine talking to, like, get uncomfortable and go out to events and meet people that are doing different things. Like, I've met some incredible people that are regular everyday human beings. And if you just take the minute, like, the, a refinery business for like mineral rights that is based out of Minnesota. It's like, the most random thing in the entire world, but the guy does $75 million a year top line and keeps 30% of it. Like, I want to listen to that guy and understand how he thinks about building his company. Um, and you get different data points. So I'd say talking to people and getting uncomfortable, you have more data points to think about what— because everybody has a perspective. Like, you think a good deal is a good deal in your head because you've had you know, 7 or 10 years. I don't know, how long have you been in real estate now? For— since— because I know you were at CoStar, you were seeing it, you're being a part of it. What was the— how long have you had like real estate data points coming in of like, this is a good deal, oh, that's a bad deal, probably shouldn't do what that owner did? That was a good thing for you at CoStar, you saw what worked and what didn't work.

CoStar is very helpful. I, I had a few main data points. In 2025, bought my first rental property. It was just a single family. I— it was a classic BiggerPockets house hack, 2-bed, 2-bath condo. I lived in it, had a roommate in it. That was my first exposure to rental income.

So $800 a month rent check, a good deal then is probably not the exact same good deal to what it is today. And though not at all, I'm guessing what's changed is just more data and more experience that's come in over the years that you've been at. Exactly.

You, you do, and this is true of anything, right? You do it enough times consistently enough, you build the skill, you build the muscle, and it becomes very, very, very, very simple. It becomes second nature. Just like any sport anyone's played, just like any— I actually think of real estate more similarly to math. I've found that real estate, while there is nuance to it, a lot of your data points are pretty objective. There is correct and incorrect ways to structure and think about things. There's a creative aspect for sure, but a lot of it is pretty empirically black and white, a good deal of it. And so as you learn it, you can look at a deal and you can see it very quickly only if you've seen it 100 times. And for, or 1,000 times, or however many deals you looked at. Yeah, I did a condo. I learned that I didn't— one thing I learned, that $800 of rent doesn't mean jack. We need to scale. Like, uh, to me originally, I was like, we can make another $800 every month, this is freaking awesome. And then you start going through, like, what are my actual goals? And you're like, boy, we need to let— we need to get, like, hundreds of these to actually make a dent. Uh, learn that early. Yeah, I bought a— the next deal I bought was in 2020. I bought a duplex, then bought another duplex, then I went to 38-plex, and we scaled down.

I want to understand, like, for just listening to that, you go from 1 to 2 to 2 to 38. Something happened between that, the between the 2 and the 38 where it's like you got new information or maybe you got new people or something happened where you would go from 2 to 38.

There's 2 things that happen and this is applicable for everyone. There's actually a great piece. This is, this is what happens when a podcaster talks to another podcaster. Gabe knows how to— Gabe knows how to listen.

I run these calls every single week, twice a week. I'm good at getting extracted data and the important stuff.

This, this is a, this is a good point. And then I have a couple of questions for you. This is your podcast today. I'm interviewing you, but I went— so I left my job at CoStar making $250,000 a year consistently. I left and worked for one of our clients for $50,000. So I did not do what you did. I didn't go from $200,000 to zero.

And from— I had my wife. Let me correct myself. I had my wife. She was working $40,000, $50,000. $50 grand. So we had something.

Okay. Okay. I downshifted to $50K a year to work for a guy who ended up being the worst business operator I've ever met in my life. Zero business ethics, but a brilliant mind for creative finance, for deal structure. He could buy anything. Unfortunately, he could also convince other people to give him money for anything. And then the ethics came into play. You can learn a lot about how not to do business. Mentors are valuable on both sides, good and bad. I— my eyes were opened. I started with Dave Ramsey's. I was not a Kiyosaki guy. No one ever showed me that book until I started business. I'm behind everyone else in the world on that. Yeah, I was told save up, work hard, take the money, invest in real estate. I believed in that model, but I thought that I had to earn it. So I got to 2 duplexes and my house because I worked my butt off and I did it with my own money. I watched what you can do acquiring. He acquired like 20 condos, $0 out of pocket. He built or bought this beautiful office building, seller finance, $0 out of pocket. He bought another office building for like 3 times more than he should have bought it for because he's an idiot. But I watched all these things come together and I was like, oh my gosh, if you hold this stuff for 40 years, like if I can buy these things now and now I get all the time value of money, if I can just make them cash flow, I'm rich. I had that realization. And the other thing that happened is this was during the pandemic. It was the only time in my adult life where I was able to actually slow down and spend time thinking. And since then, I've— I work crazy hours all the time. I love working just like you. We're both— we're both high-grind people. Yeah, I schedule in my workday. Part of my day is quietly thinking about the business and having actual time to sit down with a cup of coffee or sometimes even just straight up stand in the shower. You have some great thoughts when you're naked, but you get, get time to process. Where are we headed? Why are we going there? What happens when we get there? I learned that skill later in life than I think a lot of people should. And that is a big message I have for people. You do not spend enough time quietly thinking. You will. It is amazing what you can accomplish in 3, 4, 5 years. Speaking of what you can accomplish in 3 years, Gabe, you have done so since, since you've stacked the skills. Yep. Eminem, Cardone, starting your own business. You've acquired a lot of rentals. Yep. You've taught a lot of people how to buy rentals. You're in this community all the time, which is what I think makes you so sharp. Is that you do it and you teach it, which is extremely powerful.

Hard to find these days. It's surprising. It's crazy. I don't know why, but—

Oh yeah, we're going to go into that. You've, you've worked for someone who is by some considered one of the greatest coaches, by others considered an online guru.

I'm—

we're going to get into that. But first. Yeah. So you came from a heavy syndication model. If you came out of the Cardone Capital, they're big on syndication. They're big on acquisition fees. I have a question for you. Not a right or wrong answer here. Syndication. Perfectly fantastic, legitimate way to buy real estate. It is not the model that I use the most. Acquisition fees and disposition fees and management fee, all the fees. I've had a hesitation about syndication. I always like to hear from people who are really good operators. Yep. I feel that in any great business, the objectives should line up with the goals. And what I've seen often in syndications, and I've seen good syndicators and bad syndicators, there is a temptation to be able to buy the most expensive deal possible to stack the fees up front. There's low incentive to be a fantastic operator because you only have to be good enough to get the disposition fee successfully. I see this as a misalignment between the general partner, the GP, and your capital partners, the limited partners, the LPs. Yep. Have you seen this consistently, and, and how would one Am I missing something in the incentive process for a syndicator?

So it depends who you're— there's a— there's the little leagues and there's the big leagues, and then there's the middle ground. The big leagues is the Blackstone, is the KKR, is the Starwood Capital with 50,000 units and 100,000 units. These are the big leagues. And that's where I can't— like, Grant's in the big leagues now because of the audience that he's built. And, uh, everybody wants to be there. It's like the kid that's watching in the bleachers. Oh my goodness, I want to play under the lights. Um, everybody wants to be there. There is also a lot of education online about syndications and how structures work and acquisition fees and carried interest and how much carried interest one could actually retain, meaning ownership, real net ownership of the entire deal. Because in these deals, you're giving 70 to 80% of the equity away to the LP. So there's only so much to go around for the GPs. Yes, I see a lot of bad actors. I see a lot of people that they don't have any other source of income, so they are heavily incentivized to go on to Cushman Wakefield or CBRE or CREXi and just find a deal and then put a packet together and call it a fantastic deal. All you got to do is just mess with the exit cap rate just a little bit and you can get to a 15 or an 18 IRR pretty, pretty damn easily.

Just a little massaging of the numbers, getting the data and make it say— make it tell you the story you want to tell.

Yeah. So there's a lot of people that are great story crafters that play in that middle ground between like the big dogs where the— like, this is really like— this is Ivy League, Wharton, Yale, Stanford, like the, the trust fund kid that grows up in it. Like they're literally growing up to be a fund manager. Like there's an entire world that exists. I have found out about it. That is the big leagues. That's, that's okay. They should, they go to school for 4 years and then to another 2 or 3 years getting their MBA and then they start as an analyst making $150,000 for a big firm. Then they are there for like 5 to 10 years before they go out and start their own thing. And then we have like the other end of the spectrum, which is I'm going to pay $20,000. I'm going to go to this thing and I'm going to get sold a big idea that I'm going to be able to syndicate a $90 million deal with never have done like doing a deal ever before, and we'll be able to charge a 5% acquisition fee, which is outrageous, uh, and we're going to be able to retire my entire family on one single deal. All you have to do is swipe your card and sign up. That shit I hate. And that's, that's kind of like I'm the rebel of a lot of the big multifamily people that we compete against that pitch the syndications.

I love that. So you've done grad at biz, uh, syndication. You've also done other deal structures. Yes. Uh, how far have you gone into these, like, just general portfolio for the— I probably should in the intro, but where are you at today as far as in syndication? We call it assets under management, but what does the portfolio look like? And I think more importantly, how much equity do you usually retain, like, on the GP side in these deals? Because that—

people don't talk about that enough. Yeah, fantastic question. So today we have ownership in 337 units across Florida. And Missouri. My first deal was a 55-unit deal called Palms at Daytona. The address is 913 Catherine Ave in Daytona Beach, Florida. We paid $8.2 million for it. We closed it in June of 2022, bought it at the worst time possible. Fortunately, we financed— I know, fortunately, anybody who says anything different, like they're just out of the market, like it's stupid to try to paint that story. Fortunately, we weren't stupid with our financing and we fixed a 10-year fixed loan at 3.87%, full-term interest only. And we're paying— I just sent out district 35 $25,000 of distributions today. Uh, we pay every single month, so that deal is performing well. We've hit $400 across the board on the rents from takeover. We've owned it for 2.5 years, and that's paying 6.5%. My second deal was a Missouri portfolio, seller financed. It actually came from a member inside the community, so his name is Bryant. He's flipped 2,000 homes. He flips a couple hundred, a couple hundred homes every single year. Got fantastic deal flow from The two owners that owned it is 84 years old, 85 years old, owned it from 1969, original owners. And they got old and they wanted to pass it on, but not all at one time. So that was a $7.75 million transaction. $6 million was a seller carry at 5% interest only for 5 years, I believe. $50,000 a unit, rents are $1,000 today. And we owned it for a year. And then my third deal was 102 units. This is like the first recession deal. The seller-financed one was in '23. Nothing traded on market in '23. In fact, a lot of deals fell apart because of insurance. '24 comes around, we did a deal called the Levi. It's brand new 2023 product, 102 units, and we bought it from the merchant developer who was— I don't want to say too much, but they had a lot of distress on their short-term construction loan and they needed to sell it very quickly. They leased 102 units in 90 days from start to finish and offered a significant amount of concessions. It was too small for the institutions because it's institutional product, but it wasn't— it was only 102 units. They want 250 plus. There was very few players that could actually get that deal done. Fortunately, we were one of them, and I'll go through who we are. And then my last deal we just did, we closed that in September, September 6th of this year. It was a small 28-unit townhome deal in Ocala, Florida. Another one that came from the, the Deal Room community. So we train people really good. I'm heavily incentivized to actually partner with people that bring fantastic deals because I can raise a lot of money. That's my superpower. It was 28 units. We bought it from him. He modified his loan. He was in default. He had to sell it to us. We stole it. We bought it at almost a 7 cap with— we paid $140 a unit. Rents were $1,350. We have 2 apps pending right this second for $1,600. We've owned it for 60 days and we've completed the entire exterior business plan within that time. Uh, so yeah, I like to go deep whenever I talk about deals because a lot of people say I, I own 1,000 units or I have 1,000 units of assets under management, but they don't know the addresses. They can't pull a rent roll. They can't pull anything. They don't have really any like hands in the actual pie. They're like a glorified LP, I like to call them. But yeah, that's the— that's where we're at today. So those are all the deals that we've done. $50 million. If we wanted to like round up and say interest rates just went down, we probably could. But $50 million is the acquisition.

And that's a fantastic portfolio. A lot of people— and you're not just coming into these deals and you're like, oh yeah, no, I own like 1% of the deal. I've seen some syndications where it's like they own a fraction of a fraction of a fraction.

Yeah. So to answer your question for it, we do every other deal that we've done other than the last one was an 80/20. 80% of the profits goes to LPs, 20% comes back to the GPs. I did my first deal with my first and third, the big one with a guy named Ken Gee, founder of KRI Partners. He's on the wind— I guess you could say he's on the wind up and also the wind down at the same time because he's been in the business for 25 years. Gone full cycle on 14 deals. Like, he's the old white guy that's been in the business for a very long period of time that all the brokers know. And if you mention Ken, it's like, all right, this guy's real. So I met him through working at Grant, uh, Grant's office. At the time for my first deal, he had a fund that already had money raised on it, and he was closing a big deal, and he only had a couple million dollars left over to invest. And it was either roll it into the next deal or find another one. So I found one that fit the size. He doesn't normally look at anything less than 100 units. 55 units, there's $400 of upside. There's, you know, everybody has like a Gary. He had a Gary that helped him get into the business. And I had Ken to help me get in the business. And then I've helped people also get in the business. That's pretty much how real estate works.

Yep. I had a Gary that helped me get into the business.

Yeah, everybody has— it's like an apprentice business. That's what I found. It's like the electrician that goes and they get paired, the newbie with the person that's been in the business for 30 years.

Well, unless you're Elon Musk,— us trying to go to Mars. Everyone's like, anything you want to do realistically, someone's already done. It's much more efficient to learn from that person and you make less mistakes. I talk about the stupid tax all the time on this podcast. Like when you're the, the most expensive it will ever be is when you have the least skills and the least knowledge. So when you're starting, it just costs more to do everything. Your contractors cost more, your transactions cost more, you pay more in legal cuz you just don't know what you don't know yet. Yep, you can bypass a ton of that expense by just getting around the people who are doing what you want to do.

So of the 20, going back to it, of the 20, we did our splits based on the equity raised. Not— we're going to operate this thing together. I found it. He was the reason that we were able to close it, was signing on the debt. It wasn't seller financed. I'm a really big fan of seller finance deals today. Um, he satisfied liquidity and net worth, and then I found the deal. I ended up raising a million bucks at 24 with no track record. Uh, that was hard. It was like 120 nos to land on 13 yeses. Um, his fund backstopped the, the equity, so it didn't matter whether I raised $1 million or $2 million. He was good with whatever I raised, and then we did the split on it. So we own 6 of the 20, or we own 25% of the 20 as a, as a GP, and then my wife and I personally invested $50,000. So we're an LP in the deal, is $50,000. And then for the GP side, we own a quarter of it. His fund invested three-quarters of it, $3 million, and then I raised $1 million. So total on an $8 million transaction, it was 6% total between GP and LP. The acquisition fee was maybe $40,000, asset management fees or a couple grand every single month. And then the dirty little secret on why people jump into syndications is because we invested $50,000. We raised $1 million. That's 5% of the total equity that the sponsor invested. Our $50 grand should come back to $50 total, all in all, between the LP, you know, $50 coming back $80, uh, and then the GP fees on top of that. So you can grow your money so much faster as a GP. That's why people do it. That's why they jump into the business. Um, but you have to be able to do it at scale. Nobody makes— nobody retires on one deal. In syndication. That's the biggest lie and the farthest thing away from the truth that's being sold in the marketplace today.

It's— syndication has some— something like you have to be pretty darn good, or at least have a really deep understanding of what it is you're doing, because you are creating a security and people are investing in it.

Like, well, you're signing up for the highest responsibility any human could sign up for, which is managing money that's not your own. And most people suck at managing their own money. It's like people think it's like a hobby. I'm going to try this thing out. And then they raise money for a deal and then they're like, ah, this thing didn't really pay that well. It's like, oh, you got to manage it. Like, you, you, you are the investor relations person for all the money that you just raised. Uh, you can't just go quit and like go do something else. So it's like, if you're going to jump into it, which is why like we point everybody down, go do 5 or 10 units, like start small, do it with one person. The probability of closing it so much higher. Just get in the game. Like, you don't— the— all the deals we've— the acquisition fees across the entire portfolio is like $225,000 over the last 2 years. It's been 20, I think, 28 or 29 months, uh, from first acquisition to today. A couple hundred grand of acquisition fees. The asset management fees are $100,000 a year. That pays the asset manager that I'm hiring right this second. Like, there's very little money that actually comes from it from the short term. Now, if it's like now, if that's your goal to get to a couple hundred and that's it, you could get there. But there's a much easier and more, much more probable pathway to get there through doing smaller deals or seller finance. You don't have to go the syndication route. If you're going to go down the syndication route, you should be like, you know, the Steve Schwarzman, like you should be obsessed with creating a big, massive scale company.

Like that's what we're focused on. And that is what syndication is. Syndication, because you have, you have more reporting, you have a lot of investor relationship, you're creating a business. If you want to, this is my opinion. But if you want to run this as like as a solopreneur or as a small team, if you want to have a small business where you can have financial freedom, you probably don't need to have thousands of units under management.

There's—

we call it right-sizing. But you figure out, okay, how much cash flow am I really trying to generate? Yeah. What margin and how many doors? And now what would I actually need to build as a business to hit the freedom that I'm looking for? Like, for me, it was originally $15,000 a month. I'm like, I'm in the clear. I can afford to build my house, sustain the mortgage. My wife doesn't have to go to work, I can have kids. That was the, that was the number for me. Now we've surpassed that by a lot, but that was the target, and that's what we built the business for originally. When we made the decision to expand beyond it, yep, I needed more people and more business, and there's more responsibility, and that's how you scale. But yeah, you can do this. You know, syndication is a business with a lot of responsibility, and if you've seen advertising online from people saying like, oh, you can learn how to do this too, that What I found most typically is people who specifically are running courses on syndication and telling the average day person, like the average everyday person, hey, part-time you can buy a 200-unit building. They're usually trying— they usually have a failing portfolio or they're bleeding cash flow somewhere and they're like, hey, I can sell this knowledge to help like protect my life.

I know a lot more about— I— so in business you track who you compete against oftentimes unbelievably closely. I'm a competitive son of a bitch. I not only track what people are doing on their whole marketing and stuff, but I track their trades. And you learn so much. I've— it's ridiculous. Pay whatever money you have to pay for the data. You can track trades all the way back from the original time that the building was built. And it's like, okay, let's, let's see how people have actually made. And timing is super important. But a lot of these people have shitty terribly performing deals that insurance has absolutely killed them on. Interest costs killed them on, uh, hurricanes. I know somebody very, very, very well known, very— they just made a post about the, you know, the Trump thing, uh, reassigning everybody. Oh yeah, yeah. And I'm like, dude, this is the farthest— like, I don't know if people actually knew how your portfolio is performing and the stuff that you run into, uh, it probably wouldn't even make that, uh, that post. So Yeah, there's a lot of that stuff that happens. And to get the $10,000 to $20,000 a month, you can do it doing 5 to 10 units with one JV partner and that's it for 5 years. Like if you just commit to doing one thing for 5 years, you can change your life. It might happen quicker, but like most people want it now and that's why they get sold into the 200 units. One deal can change your life. All it takes is $20,000.

And gosh, I got— I got to say, 5 to 10 years is not that long when you're staring down the barrel of 9 to 5 into eternity to, you know, the standard thing that I think most entrepreneurs are trying to break away from. I mean, that's the number one thing. Be like, I want to be able to escape the 9 to 5 and own my time. Yeah, it doesn't cost that much money. It doesn't take that much time. But the things that are going to kill you, as anyone— it's almost always, almost always the person standing in front of the yacht, the car, the super house, the, hey, look at all my cool stuff. I got a $600 watch. I, I'm still, I'm still trying to wrap my head around spending more than $100 on a watch. I'm like, that is about as far as I can fathom. Uh, real, like, everyday millionaire next door people, which I think is what most people actually, like, actually are aspiring to, don't look like an online guru. And financial freedom doesn't look like that. Building a big business and getting competitive That's fun, but I don't think that's what most people who take these, like, hey, get rich quick real estate things— I don't think that's really what they're trying to build. People say, I want to get $100 million, and you look at their goals, they're like, I want to travel more. I'm like, cool, you need another $100,000 a year to travel indefinitely anywhere you want to go and spend money like crazy. Like, you don't need that much money. Yeah, it's wild. I don't know.

Yeah.

And then of course, guys like us, if I want someone to join my community, you want someone to join the deal room, we have to compete with like, you know, Lamborghinis on Instagram. I'm like, yeah, I will never get the click through. My life, the coolest thing is having a kid and having my wife not have to work. Like, yeah. Knowing that my family is provided for, even if I stop.

Nobody, nobody even cares about it. Like, that's what people should see and should be like, man. I wonder what it'd be like to like Monday or Tuesday at 1 PM or 2 PM just say, you know what, let's just go on a walk. I love going on walks on specifically around times that I know people are not going to be there because it's like we busted our asses for this. Let's go take advantage of it. That's what people should see, but they don't because the algorithm doesn't, you know, reward people like that.

It's an interesting thing.

No.

And then of course I'll shoot a video while, you know, it'll be midday. I'm like, you know what, I'm gonna make steak and eggs right now. I'll be barbecuing in my backyard. And the comment section is all like, you're cooking your steak at the wrong temperature. I'm like, God, I'm like, this is what we're concerned about right now. We're talking financial freedom, guys. This is something that anyone can get to emulate. And now granted, I have taken that comment and I have learned how to cook steak better. So for, for, you know, whatever, user 5900 with 2 subscribers, thank you for the feedback. Also, watch the content from people who are actually doing the thing that you want to do. I've had a chance to be in your deal room before. I actually pitched a deal there, a hilarious story, but we had it fully funded. The guy who was going to fund it, turns out, one week before the deal comes together, he ends up going to prison for like a long period of time for financial crimes. I— this is the only time I didn't raise the money myself. I brought in a partner who was going to raise the money for us, and the guy that he lined up just told— I mean, Total fluke. No one knew it until they knew it. Like, boom, he's in prison for decades, hundreds of millions of dollars of financial crime. So we're a week out from a deal. I jump in the deal room. There's all sorts of great people there. Ended up funding the deal from someone within my own network. But it was this awesome community of like people are presenting real deals. There's opportunities there. There's fantastic conversations. Memory serves, you guys actually had a pretty healthy number of people on that particular call.

Yeah.

How, how did the Deal Room come about? Because you're an operator, you're running your business, you're having your own success. Yeah, I know you've done stuff within the community, but what inspired that and why is it, you know, why is it even there?

Yeah. So, you know, when I worked at Grant's office, they would always invite these big named players in and like put them on the TVs. And then you would see— I was on the important side of the office, which is like the real estate side. So you got the man side. Yeah, you get to see them walk in. You see like billionaires shake hands and stuff and it's like, man, I want to be a player. I don't know what we're going to do. I don't know what we're going to create, but I just want to be a mover, a shaker. So like, if we're going to do something, it's going to be a magnificent scale and a magnificent impact. Impact is more important important for me than money because money is typically the byproduct of impact.

Um, you, you're in the right environment to learn that.

So I left, and initially, uh, I did consulting. I'll never do consulting again. Um, I used my network, people that wanted to model what Grant was doing and raising a bunch of money online, and basically use me as their like mini acquisitions person because I was you know, as a deal person. Um, I had 13 people pay me $2,500 a month or $20,000 up front. That was like a— I had no idea what I was worth, so I was like, fuck it, let's just put $20,000, and people paid it. Um, which was so interesting. It's some prices so made up, it's crazy. Um, I was working like till 2 AM every single night trying to service these people. I was their entire acquisitions department with one person in our office. At our home, but we, we needed to make money. So I knew that wasn't really sustainable. That lasted from February to November, uh, of 2022. And November came around and I said, I want to do something of scale, and I can't do it one rich person at a time that needs me to be their workhorse. So we need to build up, we need to build something of size and a community. Community fit the bill. I said, screw it. I've never ran a community before, but I wanted to do everything different. So I looked at what Grant's was. It's like you pay $25,000, you swipe your card, and then you join a call on Wednesday with like 600 other people and like deals get pitched. But there's no, there's no directional pathway for somebody to go down from step A to B to C to D all the way to Z to like fully understand multifamily deals and understand the pathways that are available. Again, I'm a syndicator by heart because I know a thing or two about a funnel and I know where we're going over the next 5 to 10 years. It's not the most probable pathway for most people to go down. So I learned, I just listened. I said, let's sell the deal room for $2,500 whenever it first came out. That's what I was just like, all right, people pay me $25,000 a year. Let's cut it by 10 and let's add so much more value than what people would charge and get in groups like grants and stuff. So we started, we got 50 people in and we were like, all right, well, let's start with one call a week and then create a course. And it's like, let's train these people. And then we found out that people really need help, meaning like somebody to talk to on their underwriting because courses don't work. Courses work, but they don't come with somebody to answer questions and like make sure you actually understand it.

Information is one thing.

Application is everything. Thing. Yeah, it's useless until it's used. That's my thing. It's like, so for us, the, the act of moving from the education bucket— so we've— to answer the question, we listened for the first 2 years. We did. We had nothing. I didn't sell individual courses. I didn't sell anything. It was a free course that I gave out to 50,000 people, and we charged $2,500, uh, then $5,000, then $7,500. We're at $8,000 now, probably going to $10,000. But let me say that. We've added in new tiers. So we have a free community and we have a low-ticket $97 a month community because people— like, we just meet, nice to meet you, hey, do you want to join our thing for $8 grand? Like, who are you? I didn't know marketing, no content or anything. I just wanted to help. I just wanted to help people do deals. And so we kind of built it the wrong way. Like, if I could go back, we definitely would have rebuilt it. Um, I wanted to listen to people to actually understand. It goes back to the, the the thing that I said about that's important, like my superpower. Let me listen to like what works. Let's get deals done because I'm not going to go wide and, you know, pound my chest that we're really good at educating people until we've actually done it. It's like, for my conviction level to be at the conviction level I need to operate at, we need to do what it is that we're saying that we can help other people do. So up to that point, I was only syndicating deals, big deals, raising capital. Uh, we've closed on $125 million collectively between 184 people active inside the deal room over the last 2 years. And that's tracked, get like addresses are here, here's the structure, here's the carried interest, here's everything. A lot of them were smaller 10s, 16s, 24s, 32s. I'm like, interesting, wait a second. From a probability side, people will enter and then they'll learn the business and then they'll, they'll go out to the marketplace to try to take action and find deals and to find their buy box and submit offers. Everybody's finding so much more success in the small to midsize multifamily deal with one other partner, and it's a much more probable way of closing deals. Like, shit, interesting. So we've kind of built everything around that. We have an education bucket that we take people through. It's a general 60 to 90-day onboarding process or meeting. We do a one-on-one onboarding call. We set a goal. Hey, what's your goal over the next 5 years? And then 12 months, and then next 30, 60, 90 days. We do check-ins every 30, 60, 90, and then we taper off to 6 months and 12 months. And we have a tracking activity sheet. Like, I have it pinpointed. If it doesn't work, it's because you didn't show up. And I can, like, I can very confidently say that because everything is tracked. How many offers did we submit? If you submit 10 offers, we should land 1 deal. Okay, great. Great, where are we at? You haven't submitted an offer? Interesting, why not? Well, I'm getting stuck on underwriting. Interesting, where at? On the basic pen to paper or the advanced? Okay, great, go spend time. We have an underwriter on our, on our team, underwrites probably 10 to 15 deals a week, every week, for people on the inside, uh, that they go through, they underwrite the deals, and then they submit it to Matt. Matt looks at it line by line. Hey, looks good, let's get it passed on and let's get it pitched to the Wednesday call that you were That's our process to train people. And I'm like, if you compare that to any person that charges $20,000 or $25,000, like, what is the actual onboarding process and user experience? And are you helping them develop a skill set? Because a skill set can't be taken away from you. So if they get confident enough, they know what a great deal is. I don't care if it takes you 6 months, 12 months, 2 years, 3, like, I don't care as long as you get into the game. It will change your life because we don't— you don't— how many times have you ever heard, I got into real estate, I did one deal, and then I stopped buying deals? The only time that's ever happened is if like the first deal was a shitty one that you shouldn't have done because you were misinformed and like you shouldn't have done it. But anybody that does find any success in their first deal, they never stop. So the point is getting into the game so you can last, because if you don't get in, it's like, okay, we've been trying to do this for 2 years now. Self-doubt starts to kick in. It's like, is this really for me? And then you quit. That's why people don't do the syndication stuff. They try for 3 to 6 months, doesn't work out, they quit. And I'm like, man, that's so sad because I know the impact that it can have to the everyday person.

And to your earlier point, this is why standalone courses typically do not work. Is it? I have So I, of everyone in my, in my group, Multifamily Strategy. Yeah, we've had like every month one person. I think I do like one sale of the course by itself and it's just someone online. Like, I didn't want to do the mentorship, but like, I— you can buy it. No one, no one buys the course by itself. Every, like, every single person is in the mentorship. I have had one instance where someone called me and they said, hey, I just bought your course online. I saw a video, I bought it. I've never reached out to you. 'Just so you know, I've bought 3 deals. It was fantastic.' Like, holy crap, you're the only one. Uh, no one does just— basically no one does just information and then goes out on their own and succeeds and then doesn't make mistakes. When you have accountability, and then you did 2 things: you add accountability and you add community. You go, 'Hey, I'm giving you the information because you need information to act on. Then I'm making sure and helping you act on that information.' And then I'm putting you in a group of other people who are also doing the thing. And there's something in the human brain where you can conceptually understand something, but when you're around other people doing it, it becomes culturally normative for you to do the same thing. You're like, wait a second, this guy— like one of my, my earliest students, Caleb Hall, he's 19 years old. You know him, you know Caleb. Yeah. He was 19. He had $300. He bought a 10-plex, an 8-plex, a 10-plex. To your point, not that hard to take one partner and go, go buy stuff. He does 3 deals. There is no human less qualified to buy real estate than a college dropout with $300 who have never had a job. Yeah, you can't be around that and be like, boy, I just can't make it happen. Like, people, you get around these people and it's like that in the deal room. You're around these people who are succeeding, who are doing the thing, and you realize These people aren't better than me. They're just doing something maybe slightly different that I'm not. And then you start seeing success on any successful mentorship, any successful course, any successful community. You have those foundations of— it's like 10 to 20% information, 10 to 20% like guided coaching, and the rest of it is all doing community and doing.

Yeah, failing forward. So we have people that are 5 years ahead. We have people that own hundreds of units by themselves completely outright. We have syndicators. Then we have like the main 50% of people, which is, you know, W-2 employee making $100,000. They want to transition into real estate full-time, get their time back. Uh, we have LPs. So we target LPs that just simply want to invest in deals. They just want more deal flow. So we've, we've not only selected like the, the new person that wants to learn multifamily at the beginning, and still today it's flippers that have done deals and not brand new flippers, but people that have done a couple and they're like making $50 grand and it's like, fuck, we got to go find the next deal. They know how to run a construction project like very well. They just don't understand NOI and cap rate. That's like the most simple thing to learn. But those are like the perfect people that we try to pull from doing 10 flips a year to doing one 18-unit deal right there. Like, I think that is a perfect transition. But being around people that have— like, there's a guy named Scott Nalbach, he's in Ohio. He started with a duplex and then went to a 12— 1031 the entire time. 7-year compound effect from a duplex. He refinanced 105 units that he owns outright last week, pulled out $1.6 million, and just closed on a 166-unit, 100%, no investors, by himself. Yeah. Now he's at like a couple— that's a pretty sexy deal by himself. So 2 to like 300 in a 7-year period, and we have somebody that's entering here, that person has a much better perspective of how long it might take to get to something of that size because you're connecting with them today.

I think that's always important. That's a fan. By the way, this is what this podcast is designed to do. It's called The Owner Meeting because I built my entire career off meeting the people who've done the things that I want to do. And I— the best I can figure it I finally own my time now. So if you're here listening to the podcast, you don't— you feel like you don't have time to do the owner meetings. First of all, you're wrong. You do have the time, but you can listen to a few of them here and I'll run them for you. Gabe's a guy who we like to learn a lot from. I found one of the most— I mentioned this like way earlier, but with mentors, like, you have good mentors, you also learn the best lessons from people who've done something the wrong way. Yeah. Highest expense. We call this the stupid tax, but it's like when you're, when you're new, you do things and then you're like, oh, I'm not doing that again. Can be monetary. It could be something like it could be a relationship that got lost. It could be personal or monetary. What's the most expensive lesson that you have learned that you can share on this podcast so that someone listening can avoid that one thing?

Yeah, I don't— so fortunately I don't have many lessons of like I lost money. I don't— knock on wood, I've never lost money on a deal.

Super— I, I— me neither, though I've misstructured them where I should have made like an extra quarter million and I didn't.

That's where I was going. It's missed opportunities more than it is mistakes, because I've like— starting out, if you have really good people around you, you're like, fortunately you can learn through their mistakes and not make the same fuck-ups That's a good thing. Missed opportunities because you're not aware of it. So like for me, there's been so many deals that have hit my inbox and is like perfect opportunity, perfect timing. I just didn't have the equity ready or I didn't have the capability of taking another deal on. The deal we just closed in September, there was another one that popped up midway that I've been tracking for 2 years. It's gone under contract back 3 different times with people. Uh, there's easily— it's a seller finance deal where the guy, like, I could do it 100% by myself and then raise the outside capital. So there's a fucking score there, uh, well over $1 million. And I just— I can't take advantage of it because I don't have the right team, I don't have the right system, I don't have the capability to go out and do that deal. Um, a lot of missed opportunities with deals. I'd say that's my biggest learning expense.

Is there one that stands out? If you're like, man, I wish I didn't miss this one?

I messed up a broker relationship, uh, when I left Grant's office. I came, I came with a little bit too much of an ego working at Grant's office.

Um, I can't imagine where that came from. Oh, Grant.

Yeah, 100%. So having delusional confidence is like a good thing, and being naive to, to the business is— it serves you well. But then like later on in life, you realize how kind of stupid it was to do whatever you did back then. Um, I messed up a relationship that I've since repaired, but I've probably missed another 300 units between, uh, the time that I messed the relationship with. Because I just— I said that I could raise a bunch of money, I really couldn't. I played this character of like, I'm the man, I can close on anything, and I never actually closed the deal. So it put a sour taste in his mouth. He never sent me any more deals. I know the people that bought them and they're kick-ass deals. So a lot of it comes back to I've missed multiple millions of dollars on deals that I really, really, really wanted to own. And then I could probably pull stuff out of missed opportunities in the deal room side of it, not having places to place investors like like for, for me, we had the deal room, the education side of it the entire time. Uh, we have hundreds of people that come into our ecosystem every day, and we've only raised $7 million. If we actually have the system set up the same way that Grant does— like, I'm hiring an IR person, uh, in Q4, and we're setting up a similar funnel for it— we could have easily raised another $20 or $25 million. So it's like, that's what keeps me up at night, thinking of like, if we actually integrate these two and create a vehicle where people can learn, they can network, they can invest in deals if they want to be LPs, and create this big ecosystem, it will allow us to go out and accomplish our, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars of goals, uh, at the same time.

That's what has been lacking over the last two years. That stuff— that is what you hear from someone who actually spends the time thinking about their business, actively thinking That is everybody.

Yeah, everybody has a visionary in them. Like, I am the— I have been deemed— I've been pulled out of the business over the last 6 months. I've been deemed the visionary, um, of the company. But everybody has a visionary in themselves of what you actually want your life to look like. Like, you should tap into it. And to your point, most of the time it's like early in the morning before anybody else is up, complete quiet, no distractions, or at the gym for me. I go, I listen to this guy named Harry Mack. He's a freestyle rapper, uh, freestyle rapper. And I don't know what it is, but like, I just, I get into this groove because he's creating stuff off the top of his head. Again, he's mastered a skill set, uh, and it's really awesome to watch. I recommend doing it if you like anything cool. Um, and I don't know what it is, but like, whenever I listen to him, I'm at the gym, I'm just in my groove. I'm like, yeah, we're gonna do some really big shit in life, and this is where we want the company. Other times I wake up every morning at 5, we work from 5 to 7, and that time right there, we get so much done. That is a life hack for us. We've done that over the last 2 months and we've probably gotten more done in the last 2 months than we did in the last 2 years just because of the productivity that comes from it.

I hear that from so many people. And the funny thing is I'm wired the opposite. I do my best, most creative work, my best ideas I get from like midnight to 2, but I have a, I have a wonky schedule. I hate morning meetings. I don't like, I don't like mornings. I wake up at like 9:30. My wife is the same, but I work like, it was fun. So, so I'm partnered with, with Caleb now. Years later, I partner with him on other projects. Yeah. So he wakes up at 5. And so when I wake up, my inbox is full of stuff for Caleb. Like, I knocked out this, this, this, this, this, this, and this. Then at night I'm teeing up or finishing off all these projects. So then I give him all these updates. Yeah, that's a good, that's a good, that's a good, uh, there's like 3 hours a day one of us is like, none of us are on the rest of the, the rest of the hours. He's working all morning, I'm working all night. It's been a really fun partnership.

But that's how you structure a partnership. I was just going to say complement each other's downsides and upsides.

And I have found that whether, whether it's the front end of the day or the back end of the day, it's the people who spend that extra time on their business when the other people aren't working working. It could be morning or night, and morning seems to be overwhelmingly the most common model where people find success. I recognize that I'm a weirdo, I snowboard goofy, whatever, uh, you know, it's like I might do it the other way. But if you could take that time where you are working and other people are not, while other people are watching a family movie, that is when I am taking my creative energy and I'm pouring it into the next project. I'm pouring into the next YouTube video. I'm making, you know, I'm taking that call or structuring that one deal late at night when no one else is working. Or you do it in the morning at the gym, whatever it is that works for you. It's finding that rhythm where you have the unique time to have the quiet to work on your business. And these are the people almost without variation, all successful entrepreneurs take this time at some point. So I, I love that you do that. That's something I just want people to hear on this episode in particular. It's like, learn the skills, take time to think. Build the business that you guys want to build. We're out of time. I'm gonna have Gabe back on the channel here.

We can talk deals forever.

Oh well, we can, we can do— the only time I do a 3-hour podcast is if you're at my house. If you, if you come over, if you're, if you're in Dallas at any point, we can, we can chop it up for 3 hours. We'll do a long one. But dude, awesome having you on. If people want to get a hold of you, if they want to be a part of your community, The Deal Room, how do they best contact you and your your team?

Uh, I paid $1,500. I— so fun fact, I sold Instagrams and Xbox gamertags before I ever started business. And, uh, people can follow me on Instagram @multifamily because I kept some good connections there. And, uh, go to thedealroomcommunity.com. That's, that's where you can find all the fun stuff on The Deal Room. We have a free tier you can join for free. The pro tier is $97 a month, or if you want to jump into the deep end, just reach out to We'll make sure it's actually a good fit and we won't kill you to get money.

Perfect. Well, everyone, skip the free one, jump right into the paid one because why not? I can vouch for the deal room. I have personally been in it. It is an awesome room of great people and Gabe's done a good job constructing this business. I don't personally endorse people on this channel basically ever, but I had a fantastic time in my hour or so in that deal room. So, uh, highly, I really do highly recommend Gabe as an actual operator, absolutely doing the right things in the field. Awesome having you on. Links are in the show notes, or if you're watching on YouTube, they're in the description below. If you've got all the way through the darn hour, I mean seriously like and subscribe cuz I don't know why you wouldn't. Uh, I will interview owners of whatever business you want, but we're gonna get you connected with owners who of great freaking takeaways like Gabe. If you want more of this, follow the channel. We'll see you all on the next episode.