From $0 to $25 million in Real Estate In 18 months w/ Sam Primm

I feel like the most successful people I know in business show up every single day despite the results from yesterday. A lot of people show up tomorrow when they crush today. But if you've had several down days in a row, honestly, not a lot of people are going to show up that next day just because of pride, ego, vanity, whatever it is.

Welcome back to Multifamily Strategy. I'm Christian Osgood, your host. We are now on podcast finally. So you have us on YouTube and everywhere that you listen to real estate podcasts. Multifamily Strategy. We have a huge privilege today. We are joined by Sam Prim. You've seen him on every platform that you see anything on. He is everywhere for financial freedom and real estate. Absolute privilege to have him. Everyone, welcome Sam to the channel.

Excited to be here, man. You, you turned in, you turned into this, uh, you got this radio voice. I like it. Your voice was fine, but as soon as the mic's lit up, then you got this, you got this suave tone to you. I like it. I need to work on my radio voice.

Oh, there we go. I gotta get excited for the, uh, the podcast. You gotta get through the first 30 seconds, right? People gotta be excited. And, uh, I've been told the 30 seconds that, uh, that matter are the beginning. So we'll try to keep that energy through the entire podcast because this is an exciting episode. Sam, for the very few people who may not know you yet, tell us a little bit about you. Where are you based? What does your business look like today? Just give us the, the 30,000-foot view of Sam.

Yeah, so I'm based out of St. Louis. That's where my team and my office is. I have 3 main companies. I have a fix-and-flip company. We operate here in St. Louis. We buy 250 to 300 houses a year. It's a good-sized company, it's our largest company as far as employees go, team members go. It's a great company because it just provides so much quality up-to-date context for my content. I'm active every single day, our team's active every single day. We're seeing what works, what doesn't work, we're bobbing and weaving with the market. So we got a really, really ear-to-the-streets type of knowledge that we get from that company. Then I got my real estate rental company, Midwest Property Group. We own $47 million in real estate. We've been able to buy without using any of our own money. It's a good hook for a TikTok, but it's also a true statement. We've been doing that for about 9 years now. You know, I own about 150 single-family houses, 6 mid-to-small apartment complexes, a few self-storage facilities, and a hotel now, which was a fun hotel resort venture. And then my third company is my education and online brand. I have somehow amassed, as you allude to, about 3 million followers on social media. Ridiculous. Between TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook mainly. Getting into the X a little bit game, the LinkedIn game a little bit, have a podcast as well. But short form is definitely my— seems to be my jam and what I'm more talented at than anything else.

Well, there we go. If you're not one of the 3 million, we'll drop all the links here in the podcast notes. But yeah, Sam is effectively everywhere all at once, all the time. Short-form king and a fantastic message. So the volume you're doing, you said 250 to 350. You're, you're almost doing a transaction a day in your companies. You're basically just a part of the everyday life of Sam is sign for something.

Yeah, it seems to work out that way. So it kind of fluctuates. We did 312 houses in 2022 last year. The market contracted a little bit. Not a, not a lot of people know that in 2023 there was less transactions than 2008. Obviously, we didn't get the market price shift. The market looks completely different as far as the loan basis, the quality of loans, the types of loans, the equity, everything's different. But the transactions were down and we're a transaction-based business, obviously, to do almost one a day. So yeah, we— I think we did like 180 last year, but the last two months we've done 29 and 27. So we're back to that, you know, one-a-day-ish kind of pace. So the market's opening up a little bit. So yeah, it's always something flowing through that company for sure.

So at one a day for transactions or just about there. Where did you start? You probably didn't start doing a deal every single day. There's got to be an origin story here. What was, what was the first deal and what really got you into real estate in general?

So yeah, it's super, super boring and normal, but I read Rich Dad Poor Dad in 2011, 2012. My best friend at the time and current business partner gave it to me and I read it on my honeymoon and just kind of opened my mind to different possibilities besides lights going down that, you know, that W-2 conveyor belt that I was just, you know, graduated college in 2011, so it was just on. You know, there's nothing wrong with that, but that's just what I thought I was going to do. My dad was an engineer, he worked for Boeing for 40 years. My mom was a part-time teacher. So, like, literally, like, when I said boring, I meant like boring and normal Midwest middle class kind of thing. And then I read Rich Dad Poor Dad and thought, well, I've kind of always had an entrepreneurial spirit. I feel like I had a painting business in college, me and Lucas, who I just mentioned, we had a painting business in college where we painted houses and decks and fences and things. We, we try to become bookies for a while and, and run bets through our— through Excel. Um, so we always kind of tried the business thing during college, and then we both went off into the real world and decided, hey, let's try this real estate thing. So in 2014, we said, let's buy rental properties. Robert Kiyosaki says rental properties build wealth, let's buy rental property. So we didn't have enough money to put 20% down on a rental property, and that's the only way I thought you could buy rental properties was putting 20% down cash. So we bought a house with the private lender's money, uh, with the intent to flip it and take the profit and put that down. So our goal is one house a year for 10 years. So that meant we were going to have to buy two houses a year because one to come up with the cash and then put it down. So during that process, we learned about the BRRRR method, the refinance. We ended up keeping that one as a rental. And then the next 2 or 3 years, we're like, let's buy as many rentals as we can so that we can quit our jobs. And that's stupid because that's not really physically possible if you're trying to replace your income with $200, $300, $400 a month rental cash flow from rental properties. Because when you buy rentals using none of your own money, The give and take is you don't cash flow quite as much, but you can still cash flow. So after a few years of that, we figured out we need to buy flips and wholesales to build our active income up and to fill the pipeline for rentals. So we did that. We were up to 25, 30 a year, and then we partnered with a guy in St. Louis here that was doing a little bit more than that. We partnered up and made our businesses stronger. And since then we bought him out of his share and now it's just Luke and I again. But kind of a slow growth. It seems like a lot. I understand that. But when you're doing it for 9 years and the past, you know, 6 full-time, it doesn't feel as fast.

It is certainly a grind. I'm sitting on about year 4 of investing myself. And yeah, it— if you're working every second of the day, it goes pretty— like, in some ways it goes pretty quick, and then some ways it's like, wow, it feels like I've been doing this forever. It's certainly not get rich quick, and it's certainly no lack of work, especially with what you're doing, the amount of systems it takes to build that, the amount of time that you must have spent on the front end to get where you're at today, I mean, that has to be ridiculous.

Yeah, it was, it was a lot. And that's where I think having the right partner— I know you mentioned you have a business partner too, so having the right partner really makes the difference. It's one of those things where the right, uh, combination of 1 plus 1 can equal 100 or a million if you wanted to. It doesn't have to equal 2. You can kind of redo math, um, if you have the right partner that's kind of the yin to your yang. So Lucas is an engineer. Systems, processes, you know. And while he could probably do what I do, my genius zone is definitely branding. Back when I was in— like, I don't really do much with the flipping company anymore, but when I did, I was sales manager and marketing manager, right? Ran all that, ran the sales team, ran the marketing leads, raised money for deals, negotiated, you know, houses when I was doing that. But also I still negotiate our apartment complexes, our bigger deals. And then Luke is focused on the systems, the process, the operations, the financials. And at this point We're both kind of, um, have moved those 3 companies I mentioned earlier, each have a COO. So operations officer, the, uh, chief of operations that manages all of them. Everybody rolls up to them. And then Lucas and I are kind of the CEO visionary roles for the multiple companies. But, um, yeah, for a while there, all the systems and things in place were put together by Lucas and or put together 6 months too late, hobbled together. Cuz we, we just grew. I mean, we bought, we bought about $25 million worth of real estate, um, from 2020 to 2020, or 2021 to 2022. So when you do that in scale, it's just an absolute freaking nightmare getting caught up— systems, processes, financially, accounting, everything. So we, uh, we— Lucas did his best, but we also just grew too fast and figured it out after the fact.

Now you said one buzzword that we definitely have to hit on. You said you did a lot of this zero down, especially when you got started. Now you've built a pretty large portfolio. First deal was, uh, you know, you said that was essentially private capital, right? Is that how you funded the rest of the deals, or what zero-down structures have you utilized while building your portfolio?

Yeah, so the, the BRRRR method, for those that don't know— buy, rehab, rent, refinance, and scale, not repeat. I changed that, that the R in repeat to scale. That was—

I like that better.

One of my, one of my BiggerPockets episodes, been on there a few times, we talked about that earlier, was, um, was, uh, scale. Um, I, I changed repeat to scale and had an acronym around it. So that was, that was always, uh, that's a good way to look at it. But in general, um, we've mainly used money and bank money. So on our houses, we use private money to buy and fix it up, and then we get a loan from the bank, and then we pay off the private lender, and then we use the rent to pay the bank. So that, that's our process for 150 single-family rentals. Now, apartment complexes, we do the extended BRRRR, or we do the, you know, creative BRRRR, whatever you want to call it. But what we'll do, for simple math, let's say we're buying a million-dollar apartment complex. We'll get a $200,000 loan from a private lender in second position. We'll get an $800,000 loan from the bank. So we're into that thing at a $100,000 100% of cost, which can be risky if you didn't buy at a discount or there's no upside. Fortunately for us, we own 6 apartment complexes, about 140 doors. Each of them, for the most part, we've bought at a discount and there's been upside that we've been able to add quickly, whether through renovations or just through rent raises or rubs or things like that. So we've been able to essentially fund, fund everything using other people's money and making sure that we're doing it at scale because obviously obviously there's less risk at scale if, you know, one thing goes south. And then we're just, you know, making sure to add value quickly and buying the right assets at the right prices. So pretty much, you know, either quick BRRRRs or extended BRRRRs. And even our hotel renovation, our boutique hotel we just bought a year ago and just opened up about 2 weeks ago, we did the same thing with that. Private money, that one was private money for the, for the down payment, and then the bank did the construction and then the rest of it. So just, just using our relationships and using other people's money wisely and properly and responsibly. Has led to our growth because that's the best way to grow. Because it's even if you have a lot of money, you're going to run out eventually putting 20% down.

And for those who follow this channel, you know, we do a lot of seller financing here.

Okay.

Your structure isn't that much different, though. Seller financing is just a different type of private capital. It just happens to be the person who holds the equity in the actual real estate. What you're doing is effectively the exact same thing that I did to scale my portfolio. You found the deal, the opportunity, then you went out and you found the debt product that works for your deal. And occasionally for me, if I take on a larger property, I'll also bring on an equity partner, especially if it's more of a fix-up project. Like we're doing a hotel conversion right now to multifamily. I brought in an experienced operator on my first one on those. But I mean, it's the same basic deal, then debt, then equity. It's going to be different types of private capital that allow you to do these zero-down deals. Whether it's the seller or another private individual has the money, you just have to find a deal that supports that debt.

100%, right? The biggest thing is finding the deal and then, and then figuring it out from there. I noticed when we shifted to, hey, let's just find distressed discounted assets with upsides, whether it be a house, a hotel, a 32-unit apartment complex, a 42-pack of houses, all the things that we've done, you find the discounted property and then the money tends to come because smart money follows good deals because it's a great place to park your money for somebody on the debt or the equity side. And it's, you know, backed by real estate, which everybody, you know, pretty much believes in. And it's just it makes a lot of sense. It's a lot easier to find the money after you got the deal. But obviously you need to kind of time them at the same time or you're kind of screwed.

Very true. Now, you said you did boutique hotel. I bought my first boutique hotel about a year ago as well. And that was for me personally, I thought that was a huge mistake. I think that was my biggest stupid tax. Was changing asset class from what I was the best in the world at. I'm curious what your take is and if that's something that your team is enjoying running more than I am.

Yeah, so we've enjoyed that. So we have, you know, our property management, project management team. We got, you know, 6, 6, 7 people in that team and it was remote, which is kind of nice for us. Everything we do, our flips, our rentals, everything's in St. Louis or St. Louis metro. This one's our hotel. It's a small little hotel down in Branson, Missouri, I think 20 units. And we bought it and then a company down there, you know, managed the rehab. We did it virtually and then is also managing the, you know, the, the hotel unit styles for Airbnb. You know, there's 3 bedrooms, 2 bedrooms, 1 bedroom. So efficiency, there's a mixture of everything and there's a little clubhouse there. So it was fun for us. We screwed it up royally. I think we bought it for $850 grand. I think we budgeted like $600 grand in rehab. We ended up putting like $1.1, $1.2 million in it. So where we're in it for, you know, a little over $2 million. But, you know, the numbers still worked out because we got such a good deal. It's still, you know, penciling out to be worth a little over $3 million. It still should cash flow. So it was a little bit harder for us doing the virtual route. But, you know, I— we don't like self-storage. I'm in self-storage, but other than that, I like apartments. You know, when I say apartments, your audience knows some people think multifamily is a 2, 3, 4 unit, and it is, but that's really treated as a single family. So 5 or more when I say multifamily. So we like multifamily, love single family, and then this hotel kind of thing has been pretty fun. Don't really love self-storage. So there's where, there's where most of our mistakes and kind of what we're stepping into it is. So, but I can see what you're saying. Different asset classes are definitely managed differently.

Yeah, it's figuring out what you're good at. And then I have found the easiest way— you were talking about changing bird to birds, that scale piece. I have found that comes with doubling and tripling down on what your teams are the best at. People who try to branch out and do too many things tend to do a bunch of things decently as opposed to just accelerating in one or two things that they're excellent at. Now, in my head, self-storage should have a lot of synergies with multifamily and single-family. As you know, you're renting a unit instead of a— what did you not like about self-storage?

Well, we, we suck at managing it is the main thing. So self-storage is a— it's a different asset class. So obviously You don't have toilets and tenants to deal with for the most part on a daily basis, which is great. But we just honestly, we just, we can't be good at everything and we don't want to be good at everything. Similar to what you found out a little bit. We just, the ball got dropped. As you know, that was when we bought our self-storage in the midst of buying, like I said, $25 million in real estate. And there was 3 apartment complexes mixed in there, a 29, a 27, and a 19-unit. And then there was rehabs going on there and we, that That was right around the timeframe that we bought 312 houses and, and we were, you know, you know, growing and education was taking off and just it kind of got pushed to the wayside because the numbers are smaller and it's, you know, more stable. So we just didn't manage it. And then we turned around and we're at, you know, 73% occupancy in one building and, you know, 78% in the other. And we're, you know, losing a couple grand a month. So not the end of the world in the long run. But the value of multifamilies as well as self-storage is based on the income you produce. So if you're not producing income, not only are you missing on the income, you're missing missing out on the equity and value gain. And in order to do the BRRRRs on singles or multis or self-storage, you have to add value, you know what I mean? You have to create that equity and value over time to get your debt or equity partner out of the deal and just own it all yourself or only have one note on it. So that whole just process just kind of got left behind a little bit. And we're, you know, we did— we'll get into it in one of the mistakes I had we talked about earlier.. But we just, just made mistakes, didn't manage well, and just tried to do too much. And I feel like we did a good enough job on the other assets we bought, but that one we just kind of let go to the wayside. And it's not like a bear to manage, it just, it does need managing still. Yep.

That's, that's where I got caught on the hotels. It's too, at least for me, even Airbnb style, too different from what I'm used to doing. We like value-add, we like doing larger multifamily projects. I'm not huge, but, you know, 25 to 50 unit projects. None of those skills translate at all to hospitality, like zero translation at all. Take all of your specialists from one thing, put them on something else, and yeah, you get a similar result. It's just, it's not an optimized piece of real estate. And you make your money in real estate by optimizing the real estate and being excellent at doing that. If you could go back in time on the self-storage deal, is there something that you would have done differently, or would you have just avoided doing it altogether? Is that the best thing you can do on that project?

Honestly, probably would have avoided altogether because it's something we didn't even intentionally get into. I've noticed a lot with the, the people that I'm around that are way more successful than me, intentionality is huge. It's an asset class that we, we didn't intend to get into. So we bought a, a small 12-unit apartment complex in a suburb of St. Louis, and it came with 12 storage units on the back. We're like, oh, this is fun, it looks cool, brand new building, let's let's, let's, you know, we stumbled upon that. And then we got a self-storage facility sent our way about 3 months later that was dilapidated, needed work, and it came with a couple acres next to it empty and open. So we're like, hey, let's buy this and build self-storage. We're so freaking good at everything. So we not only got into an asset unintentionally, an asset class unintentionally, we doubled down on it before it was even proven that we knew how to manage it. So, um, just one of those things where I— cocky is probably an aggressive word because I don't feel like we're rocky, but we just got a little overconfident and just like everything was working. The market was hot, prices were high, the interest rates were low, everything was rocking and rolling. Money was coming in through all 3 businesses pumping at the same time. It's been the only time all 3 businesses have been pumping at the same time. So we're just— so we went at it and just, um, probably would have avoided it. I mean, we got it kind of turned around now. We put some extra money into it. I think we'll be able to, to sell it, um, you know, if interest rates ever do dip. But right now, when we were trying to get out of it, interest rates dipped and money cost went up, so prices go down on assets like that. So, I just probably would have avoided it to give a short answer to your question.

No, I think a good way to think about it is find those things that you want to do and that you could be the best at and focus on those. What I found is when you have the ability to buy anything with or without money, you then have to add the discipline to not go and buy everything. Because not everything's going to be the right deal for you. And I think everyone who learns the creative finance thing that I've seen has a deal like that. Everyone who buys no to low money down who I've had on the podcast has done that. That seems to be the natural business cycle. You take on one thing, you take on another thing, you expand, you go, huh, we went somewhere we didn't need to go because I wasn't limited by money, and we figured we could just knock out everything.

So consistent Yeah, you got to get your peepee slapped to learn a little bit.

All right, so when you're building business and you're focused on your strengths, what is the thing that you think Sam is the best in the world at, and how has that helped you build the business you have today?

So something that I feel like I am, I am, uh, gotten a pretty good knack for these days is, is growing, is growing the social media thing we talked about. There's a lot of people that flip a lot of houses There's a lot of people that own a lot of real estate. Very few people are able to grow the brand in 2.5, 3 years that I've been able to grow and grow the following. So there's a lot that's gone into it. I've spent 25, 30 hours a week on social media for the past 3 years growing this brand. But it's something that is pretty rare out there to see somebody that's got, you know, 2 million on TikTok, but also 600-something thousand on Instagram and also 100,000 on YouTube. YouTube and also, you know, a podcast and also 300 and whatever thousand on Facebook. Most people, like really high quality people, crush one, maybe two platforms, and we're doing a pretty good job on three or four platforms. And I think 50,000 on, or on Threads or whatever. So I mean, all platforms we seem to do pretty well because I am so involved in the process. Most people hired out from day one, which never works because there's no authenticity. People people can see that you're just reading basically from a teleprompter from somebody who's an agency that charges you $5,000 a month to produce it, and it just, it's not good. Or, you know, people grow a following organically, authentically, and then think they're too good to do the day-to-day tasks, and then they hire it out, and then they lose their, you know, their credibility with people. So I've been able to grow a pretty good audience, and, um, as well as, you know, have been able to grow a decent-sized rental portfolio as well as, you do a lot. So being able to kind of like be pretty good at multiple things, um, has been something that I've noticed is a little bit rare out there.

If someone is buying real estate and they enjoy the presentation, they actually enjoy creating content, and they're getting into this, what advice would you give someone who is trying to launch their social media or get started in storytelling online?

Yeah, the biggest things I would say, and it It's boring, but I'll add a little context to it. Again, it's just consistency and not cutting any corners, and I'll explain what that means. I've seen so many people that have 100,000 followers on Instagram and their biggest video's got 4,000 views. Like, it's obvious that you bought your followers. So I know it's— I get DMs probably 30 a day from people saying, hey, would you like a shout-out? Or, hey, would you like me to buy you real followers and real likes? And that's That stuff's not true. It doesn't work. It's never worked. The algorithms, um, are, are catch that very quickly and you, and you're gonna be even further behind. So the biggest thing would be just be okay with having 30, 40, 80, 120, 60, 2,040 views. Just be okay with limited results. And I think that's a great, great analogy for business. I, I feel like the most successful people I know in business show up every single day despite the results from yesterday. A lot of people show up tomorrow when they crush today, but if you, if you've had several down days in a row or you've had several videos in a row that have bombed, now honestly not a lot of people are going to show up that next day just because of pride, ego, vanity, whatever it is. So consistency and not cutting any corners. I can't tell somebody a style that works for them. Walking down the stairs with one shoe on and pointing on, on beat to music works for me, it's probably not going to work for you. I've tried a million different types of hooks and strategies and things that have worked and haven't worked. You're just gonna have to put it out there. It just quickly— what I did is I call it the— and I'm thinking about creating like a, like a company or corp or something around teaching people this. But you just post and you analyze and you post. That's what I did for a year and a half. I posted, I analyzed it and saw why it did good, why it did bad. Was it the topic? Was it the hook? Was it the song? And then I posted just constantly. Then after doing that for about 18 months, I have about 15 hubs, I call them. Like, I'm in $26 million worth of debt. That's a hub. I can produce that piece walking down the stairs. I can produce that piece talking. I can produce that piece pointing in the air. I can produce that piece on the vibe board. I can produce that hub with multiple spokes. So I have about 15 hubs and multiple spokes that I know will do well. And it took me, you know, 2 years to find all those, but those are videos that I know will hit. And I continue to experiment and try new different things to try to come up with more hubs and spokes, But so many people come up with one viral video and then they think they're going to create another one. No, if you came out with a viral video, reproduce that viral video. Freaking cut it and take a second off the back end and paste it again 2 months later, or just try to recreate that video with a different deliverable to gain that momentum and credibility. So many people think that everybody sees every video and they don't. So it's okay to kind of go back to the well. So there's a hodgepodge advice for you.

Oh, I appreciate that. Is there a point when you're doing this where you took off where it's like you, you were trying and trying, like I did. You have immediate success when you were starting social media or did it take a lot of time to develop those, you know, multiple hubs with multiple spokes where it's like, oh, there was a point 18 months in where all of a sudden I went from 50 to 200,000. How did, how did the actual growth trajectory look? Was it linear or was it exponential?

Uh, it was, it was, it's, so it's, It's a little bit of both. So, it's very, very cyclical. It's very, very— the algorithms, what they do, how they push you, they're all a little bit different but they're all pretty similar in that they're not going to consistently push you. They're going to sparingly push you. So, it's one of those things where you're not going to get— unless you're Alex Hormozy and are insanely articulate and smart and jacked and odd-looking honestly, you're not going to get that like hockey stick growth because very few people are that talented at articulation. Articulating and communicating? I'm sure as hell not. I talk too quick, I mumble, I slur a little bit. I just, I'm just, it's just not, not the best articulator. I mean, I'm getting better, but not like him. So unless you're that talented, which very few people are, you're going to have hockey sticks and then downs and the hockey sticks then down. So at first I wanted to grow a good YouTube channel, which YouTube is, is, I mean, it's a search engine. It's not social media. People kind of confuse the two, but YouTube, I want to grow a YouTube channel. I was really bad at it. I tried it for several months and didn't get much traction. So then I started to post on Instagram and TikTok to try to get people to follow me there and then send them over to YouTube was honestly the origination. And then I just found out that I'm much better. I don't have time to go down rabbit holes on short form content. I don't have time to, I can like, you know, articulate for at least 45 seconds and not go back to my mumble mode. So I, I got, I got a niche there and I, I've always been, it's honestly been, my short form's always been pretty good. I think my like 8th TikTok video got 100,000 views, which for me at the time My TikToks were getting 50 views before that and my, and my, you know, YouTube was getting 80 views. So that was insane. So I've always been pretty good at the short form thing. It does go in waves. I've got 70,000 followers in one month on Instagram and then I've also, you know, got zero followers in one month on Instagram, like consecutively. So it just super, super cyclical.

Do you think it's important for investors to tell their story on these platforms? Like if you're getting started, is it important to document your journey or to share the things in social media? Is that for everyone or is that just for specific people?

I think it's the only way to do it because, um, I know people that, uh, you know, like this— there's this, uh, there's this, uh, lady, Lily Invest. I don't know if you've heard of her. I remember she— I've been on her channel a little bit, she's been on mine. But I think she had like 150,000 on YouTube and had like 1 or 2 deals, or maybe not even got a deal, because she just talked through her journey of what she was doing or not doing or people can relate to somebody trying to negotiate with a wholesaler on their first deal and find the money and find the contractors and have a contractor, you know, screw them over because it's first-time work with them. That's way more relatable than me, hey, we bought our 30th house this month, you know, because I have a team and systems and processes that make it happen. So the relatability, the connectivity that comes with a beginner's journey, because most people on social media are beginners in real estate if not 99 point whatever percent of them. So I think that's the only way to do it, is to tell your story. And that's what kind of worked for me. My story moved quickly. I went from, I'm in $8 million worth of debt to $15 to $20 to whatever. I just grew that pretty quickly, but people followed along the journey, and that's where you get the most connectivity.

There we go. I think the takeaway there is tell your story from the beginning. Like, when you have no real estate, launch a video. I mean, even on my YouTube channel, you go back, originally my YouTube channel was actually started by my business partner Cody. But you can go, the first 4 videos are him at 19 years old saying, "Hey, I'm going to go buy real estate." And then fast forward, what, 5 years later? And all of a sudden, it's like, "Okay, yeah, we have hundreds of multifamily units and all these projects." You can go back to the beginning and it's more real. If your followers can look back and say, "Oh, you're not just this guy who's showing up with a—" You see all these gurus online with, "Hey, look at my yacht, my cars." Like if you go back to the game, it's like, hey, I'm broke and I have nothing and I'm gonna make it. I think that story is so much more relatable and more compelling. So if you're someone getting into the game, go ahead and call your shot online, say what you're gonna do and get all the videos where you're gonna suck at outta the way. Cuz you're not gonna be good at making videos unless you're Sam.

Oh, stop it. Yeah, no, but you, you're, you did hit it on point though that the secret sauce is authenticity. That's all, all I know how to be. Um, so I got lucky into a certain degree that social media shifted from bragging and being fake to people craving authenticity because it's so rare. So that— I didn't do that intentionally. I've always been that way. But I— because if I would have started social media maybe like 2015 or '16, that was the brag, the flash, the, the everything. I would have done as well, but it's, it's, it's pivoted to I want something real. I see all this fake shit. I see all this AI stuff. I see all this stuff that's not real that I know isn't real, or or it's not relatable. Like, I always kind of take shots, not shots, like Grant Cardone and 10X, because I'm doing an event in May, first in-person event in my office, and it's me and my team speaking. My property manager that manages 400 properties, my CEO of my flipping company that manages people. Like, we're talking not Magic Johnson, who made hundreds of millions of dollars outside of real estate, or Floyd Mayweather, who made a billion dollars boxing. That's cool. But that's not— nobody else in the audience is doing that. So there's no advice that Floyd Mayweather can give somebody that besides motivational advice, there's no tactical advice that he can give anybody because nobody can relate. But I, I, you know, went to college and grew up in the Midwest and made $17,000 my first year as a sales guy and $48,000 my next year. And like, I grew up and came from, you know, normal circumstances, and I know what that feels like. That's way more relatable. So anyways, just that, the, the, that just trying to tie them together of the authenticity, the realism, um, that, that is somewhat rare out there in events and on social media. It's just, I've got fortunate that it's leaned into that recently cuz that's kind of what the apps are about now.

Speaking of authenticity and takeaways that we can have, the stupid tax. Everyone's waiting for this question every, uh, every episode. When you're learning something new, it's not that you're dumb, you just don't know what you don't know yet. No one starts out in real estate or business doing everything right the first time. And those lessons come with a cost. I've had deals that I would have structured differently. I had assets I wouldn't buy, much like you. I've done things that I'm like, wow, had I done that differently, that would be the thing that saves me multiple six figures. Uh, what is that piece of advice or thing that you learned where you paid the highest stupid tax that others can learn from and avoid in the future?

Yeah, this goes kind of go back to the— I mean, there's a ton of them, but the one that pops in my mind, we talk a little bit about that self-storage. So we bought that self-storage facility, that little bit bigger one, and had a couple acres next to it. So we built a couple small self-storage facilities. We've never done that before. We never did the development, but let's build, you know, 2, you know, 15 by 60 long, you know, wide, you know, 60 long or whatever self-storage facilities. They're like putting together Legos. It's fine. So we hired a contractor to do it. We bought the materials. We got the insurance, we did everything, threw them up, and it worked great. And then we were going to do like an acre of outdoor boat and RV storage, and we did a little analysis thinking we were cool and, and, you know, getting ahead of the curve. And we noticed that there's not much indoor boat and RV storage, it's all outdoor, and it provides a premium to have an indoor, you know, 15 by 40 unit. So we're like, hey, let's build a 255-foot-long by 25-foot-high, which if you don't know, that's ginormous. That's a huge building for indoor boat and RV storage. Um, you know, we didn't have it in the budget, but let— we'll, we'll raise some more money for it, and then we're going to get way more money, and that, you know, we'll be able to sell for more because that income will be higher because blah blah blah. And, um, we did that, and then, uh, we, we built it kind of the wrong way. The contractor was in over his head, and then, you know, a storm came through and like kind of straight-line wind in the, in the, in the bay and blew out the back wall, huge wall. So that blew it out, right? Okay, that's unfortunate. So we kind of pieced it back together, and then it blew over again, and then we went to piece it together the third time. So it blew over 3 times is the gist of the story, 3 times. The last time it blew across the road, was very dangerous. Lucky it was a huge storm, nobody was outside, but this huge metal I-beam just mess everywhere. So we ended up saying, all right, we're calling it, we're calling it quits. We're going to, you know, call, call uncle and get— just get the insurance money for this. But I didn't get the insurance on this third building because we just built the first two. This was an afterthought. So we had no builder's risk insurance on this building. So we were $150 grand of material, probably $50 grand more in labor, plus the extra money we raised, plus the lost time, plus the everything, probably $300,000 or $400,000 mistake. Mistake because we got in too big and we didn't cross the T's and dot the I's because we were buying 312 houses and scaling other business. Just, it just completely slipped through the cracks. So it's just a bigger lesson than the money. Fortunately, there's still equity in the deal and it's all working out okay, but that was definitely a mistake of doing too much as well as the loss of focus, as well as you're not crossing all your T's and dotting all your I's.

Yeah, so lesson there is focus on what you're best at. Uh, thoughts on, uh, thoughts on development? Obviously the project didn't to plan. Is developing something that you see yourself doing more of in the future, or do you prefer the projects that you do existing where it's, you know, you buy an existing building and you make what is there better? Personally, I enjoy doing those projects. I like revisioning something that's already existing, but I'm curious on your take. I've done zero development myself.

Yeah, I think we'll get into development. I like the idea. We're— me and Lucas and probably some of your partners, we're in growth mode at this point. We just want to grow and scale and kind of the pie-in-the-sky type of vision of bringing an NBA team to St. Louis and, you know, happened to, you know, do very well and make connections and help make the community better and all these things. So, so be pretty tough to do that buying, you know, a house, a house a month or a house, a house a day or whatever. And, you know, you can always, you know, buy distressed assets and bigger deals. But I think, you know, like a build-to-rent community or something like that or like a, you know, a couple hundred unit, you know, apartment complex, I could see us doing that. Now we have to, you know, make sure of the right team. And I think we'll approach it a little bit better way this time. But yeah, Yeah, I think we'll get into the development space because we want to have a billion-dollar organization. So, I know we're going to have to kind of delve into some paths that are a little more scalable and a little more controllable.

I'm really curious about this. This will be the last path that we go down on this podcast, but doing about a transaction a day, how are you sourcing deals? What are you doing to bring in that amount? Of volume? Is it a, you know, is it a call center? Is it a whole bunch of outreach? Is it a relational strategy? What has worked for you in finding and sourcing deals?

So we have 6 full-time acquisition reps. That's their job all day, every day, is to go out and find deals through the leads we provide them, as well as find their own deals and their own leads. And that's kind of where the, the, the, the little, you know, turning point for us is We get 250-ish leads a month, 200, 250 leads a month. But also these guys are, if they buy one from our marketing, they are expected to go buy one on their own through us. But they're like networking with wholesalers. And we bought 60 houses last year from wholesalers and 40 houses from real estate agents. And we're, you know, sending letters into elder law attorneys and we're stopping by all the senior care facilities and we are, you know, connecting with contractors., and we are hosting, going to, you know, meetups and talking to people, and that their job is to be out and about every single day. So we provide them leads through, you know, direct mail and PPC. We got some TV ads out there, so a mixture of things, but it's kind of a combination of, hey, we're going to provide you leads, but you're expected to go, to go provide your own leads, which come at zero cost to us as a company. Um, you know, they get— they pay a little more on those, um, naturally, but still So it's just kind of a combination of 6 fully dedicated people with a sales manager, with a marketing manager. So just treat it like a, you know, like a legitimate company that it is and not try to have the sales manager be the rehab manager, be the marketing manager. Like, you know, everybody has one hat. We have 2 project managers to do the rehabs. We have, you know, obviously they have a ton of subs they work under, but just structure it out and treat it like a company and then spend money on ads. And drive the sales guys to go out and bring their own leads in. How many people do you employ in that org today?

That specific company's got 21. Not bad, dude. You've built a business, everyone. That is what scaling looks like. You come up with an idea, you add systems, you add layers. Usually, I'm guessing when you started, people had multiple hats and then as you— Oh, gosh. —got a little bit more mature, everyone kind of falls into their own silos. What did it look like starting that? I'm so curious. From the beginning, did everyone just have 15 hats on, or how did that start?

Yeah, everybody asked me like, what's your first hire? How did you scale? And it's like, it's literally everybody wearing multiple hats. Lucas doing, um, you know, the, uh, the operations. Lucas running the projects. Looking, doing the management. Me doing the sales. Me doing the, um, you know, managing the sales guys, the marketing. So it just got to the point where wherever, like we were pulling out our hair most, we, we hired somebody to take that off. And then they had 3 things. And when did we all were pulling out our hair? Because you can have a small group if you're buying a certain amount of houses, but if you're wanting to grow and scale like we are, you have to continue to hire. So basically, it just got to the point where when everybody was pulling their hair out to a certain degree, then we'd lessen the burden. And then everybody would get comfortable, we'd grow again and lessen the burden. So there was no systematic way to do it. It just was through need and through whoever was kind of greasy or what the squeaky wheel gets the grease as far as the team members we were building. There we go.

And if someone wants to learn from you and all these amazing things that you do, uh, where's the best place for them to go to learn? Because as we've already covered, you're everywhere. If someone's trying to learn, where would they go and how would they learn more from Sam?

Yeah, so if you want to connect with me, the best place to do that is Instagram. Um, just shoot me a message on there and I'll get back to you and then kind of point you in any direction you need. So same, Faster Freedom on Instagram. As far as like learning, the YouTube channel, the podcast. So we obviously is going to get into more stuff there. I got a book called Own Your Freedom and then fasterfreedom.com website. So kind of poke around, see what you see, see what you see and see what you like. And then if you want to connect with me, then Instagram is the best way to do that.

There you go. Reach out to him on Instagram. If you want to find anything else, Google the name Sam Prim. It will show up, I promise you. This guy knows how to market. Sam, thank you so much for joining the podcast. If you guys want more of this, please like and subscribe to the podcast, to the YouTube channel. Reach out to us if there's anyone that you want to see us interview, and we'll see you on the next episode.