How to go from a Real Estate Rookie to Multi Millionaire in One Year

Hello YouTube, it's Christian and Cody. I am wearing my Cody Fink shirt. Don't let that confuse you if this is your first time on the channel. We just love this t-shirt, so we drop a link below. Today we are going to be talking about how we got to where we are today with the build year that we had together. Usually on Fridays what we do is we share something that is very easy to share, grows our audience. It's a very simple topic. We're not doing that today, so if you can do us a favor to get this video off the ground share it with a friend. If everyone shares with one friend, this should do okay. But I think this content is really, really valuable. So instead of being clickbaity, we're just gonna tell a story today, and I think this is gonna be really, really valuable.

Now, the backstory behind Build Year: I met Christian about a year and a half ago. We partnered a year ago as of this month, and since then we've accomplished all the goals we set out to do. We wanted to retire his wife, we wanted to get to 100 units, and really the 100-unit goal was a 2-year goal, and we did it in 10 months. We prioritized hitting our goals above and beyond everything else. We sacrificed everything that we could, and we set out to accomplish some goals, and we hit every single one of them. A lot of people want to do this over a long period of time versus being gazelle intense, as Dave Ramsey would say, and really knock it out right away. And you can do this in less than a year.

Absolutely, 100%. It is doable. It takes a lot of sacrifice. There's weddings, birthdays, family events. Like, there's a lot of stuff I've missed this year, this one year, because we prioritize building the business above everything. Now, where I think a lot of people get bogged down is they try to build the whole business before getting any income. And so build year, just to define it, is build the top-line revenue that we need to scale the company where we want to go. Now, you have to have bottom-line revenue. You can't just go cash flow negative and only focus on that.

It doesn't work.

Yeah, but buying cash flowing assets until you have enough top-line revenue, then focusing on, okay, where are the holes in the armor? How do we adjust for tax strategy? I'm gonna just— I can guarantee we're not going to be optimized for the perfect tax strategy because we focused on buying, acquiring, and growing our teams this year. Next year we can fine-tune it, cut some expenses, and build a smoother engine.

But, and we're going to pay more taxes because of that. We didn't build the whole ship at once, but we built to fix the problems we wanted to fix, which was a real estate problem. Christian had 2 duplexes. Mm-hmm. That was it. Today he's got 95 rentals. He built that. We're going to pay more taxes because we didn't focus on all the little pieces. However, that's the right problem to have. When we first started partnering, we were collectively worth less than $1 million. We were each around $440,000. He was a little bit more than me because he had a house.

And by like $10,000, we're basically the same net worth.

Yeah. And Over the last 12 months, we've accumulated close to $5 million worth of equity.

I became a millionaire at 30, and then I became a multimillionaire at 30. And we want to share a little bit about what that journey looked like.

Yeah.

Let's start with you. You started a couple of years before I did in real estate at 19. That feels like a natural starting point.

Right. So 19 years old, I wasn't focused on equity growth. I wasn't necessarily just focused on building all the cash flow. I was focused on, okay, how do I get into a deal? After the 22 units had fallen apart for a client of someone else in the office, I was like, well, I want to go do this. And so that ended up getting me into a 12-plex. And I realized quickly that it's a lot easier to cash flow a 12-plex 100% leveraged than it is to do a duplex. And that instigated that idea. It started the concept of, oh, I need to scale to get enough cash flow and then I can hammer all the debt later. And when Christian and I started partnering, he had 2 duplexes. He wanted to get to 30 units by 30. He was like, well, It's a little easier if I buy a 38-unit than if I buy 15 duplexes. Yeah. And he crushed his goal. The point of that is when we sat down and really decided what we wanted to accomplish, we omitted all the extra stuff and we just bought. Like, we kept on buying and buying and buying and leveraging up. And in the beginning, a lot of people don't want to leverage up super far. They're like, well, what if I lose it? What if you lose it? If you get to 10 units and your goal is 20 because you can't get enough cash flow off of 10, Why would you focus just on protecting the 10 when it doesn't get you what you actually want? So our goal is let's get to 100. We crushed that, and now we're going into protection mode. We go into stabilization year. But it really came down to we have to get enough top-line income in order to build the life we want to build and then protect it instead of trying to protect what little stuff we built. He could protect his 2 duplexes, but that doesn't get him what he wants. And most people out there are trying to build a temporary business that doesn't actually get them what they want. They start with wholesaling because they think it's going to get them some cash, and it doesn't actually get you what you want in the end because you don't want cash, you want cash flow. And you can't get that through wholesaling unless you build the business up. But then again, it's dependent on being able to do that forever, which isn't realistic.

Now, laying out the path that we had— and your journey will be different— the reason I want to share this is because Cody and I had totally different approaches. Cody has never really had a W-2 job. He part-time coached gymnastics in high school, and that's about it. So Cody started with just buying real estate. I did the corporate route. I graduated college, went into a 7-year career in sales. So two completely different paths. We started together. He's 8 years younger than me, but at roughly the same net worth. And we took a net worth that was illiquid in real estate. It's not like we had cash.

Yeah, we never have cash.

Took that from about $450,000 to multi-millions in a few years. And the exact pathing, like he said, he bought a 12-plex, he bought another 12-plex, he bought a 6-plex. He did that with one partner, that partner ended up being a dud, and then Cody negotiated his way to ownership of the 30 units. I left the 9-to-5 right as COVID started. Bought the duplex, bought the next duplex, got out of big corporate jobs. A lot of people will say that, oh, of course you guys did really well, you timed the market perfectly, you guys got super lucky. Don't time the market, but that wasn't accidental, at least not for me. When COVID hit, they just started printing money, and we made the decision, if there's a time to be hedged in real estate, it's right now, which is part of why we went as aggressively as we did.

Yeah, and you talk about time in the market everyone else was saying not to buy. We were literally going against the grain as in many ways as possible. Everyone was saying don't buy. We buy on our principles, and if you adopt great principles, well, your outcomes usually go a little bit better. Absolutely. But really, the, the message we want to share today is stop focusing on all the little pieces until you get enough big pieces on the board where it's significant. Significance matters. And if you're building a little duplex, you know, you build your little dinghy if we're on the boat references. You can build a dinghy, that's great, but if you're trying to build a superyacht, the dinghy is not really ever going to build into a superyacht. So you need to build the vehicle that gets you to the destination. If everything went right, are you building the business you want to build? And most people can't say yes if they're being truthful with themselves.

Yeah. And once we bought the 38, that's— we talk about that one the most. Uh, that's the one where Cody and I first partner, by the way. From there, we didn't just stop because 38 is where I think a lot of people be like, oh my gosh, okay, I have some duplexes, I got a 38-plex, Cody has 2 12s, a 6, 38. Most people go like, okay, this is the point where we stop. Because we set the goal we did, we kept moving until we hit the goal. And I just want to share that is exactly what you do. Within a few— within weeks of closing in 38, we closed on a 7-plex, we closed on a 6-plex. I bought into one of Cody's 12s, which helped us renovate that building along with one other partner and expand that portfolio.

We bought some triplexes, and now we're finishing up build year on a resort. Seller finance, by the way. Mm-hmm.

It's completely doable no matter where your background is. If you've done a corporate job, if you've been in real estate before, you've never been in real estate, what you need to find is the right team. For me, Cody was the right person in that market because Cody had already managed 30 units. Doing a 38, I would not do that by myself. There's just no way. I don't know what I don't know. Cody's managed 30 fairly similar units. The 38 was a little rougher than most of his stuff.

All of it. All of it.

But the 38 was a project with 2 people we were comfortable doing. I had a little bit of experience in renovation. I had some idea of what we were doing there. Cody had an idea of how to manage that. Did we get blindsided by stuff? Absolutely. We didn't know everything that we really should know to do that, but we did have the dedication to, hey, we're going to make this work no matter what.

Now back to your situation. If you're building this, once you hit your original goal, don't just move the target again and go for a new goal. Stabilize what you built. We got to 100 units, I got 105, and now we're finishing out with a resort to celebrate. And we're going to do that seller finance to keep on theme, keep building the brand. And then we're stabilizing. We're going to spend a whole year stabilizing. Will we keep buying deals? Oh yes. Are we going to go as aggressive? No, not at all. We're not going to target deals. If deals pop up, we will buy them. But now it's time to stabilize because once you build it, there's no reason to lose it. If your original goal was big enough to where it can hit all of your significant reasons of being on planet Earth and you can donate and you can take care of your family, phenomenal. Don't risk that just to go get a bigger number to flex on because there are a lot of people, I mean a lot, lot.

If you look at real estate gurus or people who do almost everyone's channel has some story of, wow, I started this when I was young and then I lost it all. I don't want to have a Dave Ramsey story of, hey, I overleveraged, I just kept going and going, and then turns out my 3-month balloon killed me. That's not a strategy that is repeatable. Build what you're trying to build and then make sure that you don't lose it before moving forward. People get addicted to growth, they get addicted to money, which is stupid, but it happens to a lot of people. That's a pitfall that we've made the decision we're not gonna fall into. We did what we want to do, It's a piece of paper, guys.

I mean, it— that is all this is. So don't risk the safety net that you've built within real estate just to get a bigger net like that. You don't need to catch more fish at that point. You can play the game to play the game, which is why we're doing this. We want to keep playing the game at the highest level. Christian loves board games. I love card games. We want to be the best in the space. We're not there yet. We're working our way up one day at a time, but Don't risk what you've built just to be further ahead because you don't have to rush this. We did this all in a year. That's why we call it the build year. Now we've got another 50 years. Unless one of us gets hit by a bus, we can keep playing this game for a while. So spend all your time in the first 10 to 12 months, build what you want to build. Yes, you can do it. No, you don't need to be able to get bank loans. You can do this private. And once you build that, stabilize your existence so you don't risk it. And then grow again. That's the main message we want to share today.

Yeah, the practical application of this is I just imagine blocks of— here's my first goal. You build that block and then you stabilize that block so that it can support weight. I'm gonna use that as a stair. So I want to build something that's solid enough that I can stand on to get to my next goal. So instead of setting a next goal, I'm gonna build it, I'm gonna stabilize it, I'm gonna support it, I'm gonna engineer it, I'm gonna optimize it, and then I'm gonna use that as a stair step to the next goal that I set. If you have a stair that is just not stabilized, if you forget to nail it together, and you try to leverage that into your next step, your staircase will fall apart. That's an image that an early, early mentor gave me, and I absolutely love it. Solidify your stair step before you stand on it. If it's solid enough to hold weight, excellent. Now you set new goals, you move forward, and that'll be what Cody and I do next year, and we'll share here whatever our next target is.

And there's a lot of people out there that say, oh, just earn more money, you can throw your money at your problems. You can do that until you can't. It's hard to rebuild 10 steps down. So if you just keep building and building and building, yeah, you can get a lot of money. But if you screw up something because you didn't really solidify your foundation, it doesn't matter. Houses fall over. There's a big housing project in Issaquah that completely sank into the ground and it sunk the buildings around it. Yeah. I mean, it completely wrecked the whole area. It was tens of millions of dollars, if not hundreds.

I would assume hundreds. It's a huge development.

Yeah. So if you skip steps, because you didn't solidify your base, you're going to lose what you built. It doesn't matter how big it is. It can be hundreds of millions. They obviously did that in Issaquah, but you don't want to do that because if you can build something that can self-sustain and hit all your goals, it's not worth sacrificing that just to say, oh, I got 100 more units.

Yeah. So that's how we've operated. That's how we're going to build it and never lose it. If you found this helpful, again, please share it because this is not our most clickbaity video.

It will not SEO.

No, it will not. So I'm relying on you, the 27% watched this far through the video. I'm relying on you to help get this out here, so thank you so much, guys, for watching. We'll see you again on Monday.