In this solo YouTube talk, Christian Osgood recounts his real‑estate investing journey and distills the mindset and tactics he used to scale his portfolio from a handful of units to over 55 units in a short period. He explains how setting a bold, time‑bound goal (30 units by age 30) forced him to pursue a large‑scale acquisition—a 38‑unit building—rather than slowly accumulating duplexes. He emphasizes the importance of committing to stretch goals, taking decisive action over perfect preparation, and embracing new, larger operational problems (bookkeeping, tax filing, property‑management capacity) as indicators of growth. Christian also describes forming a mentorship group and a property‑management company with his partner Cody, and he urges viewers to adopt a “get‑it‑done” mentality, continuously set higher targets, and engage with his upcoming Whiteboard Wednesday Q&A series.
Chapters
Hey YouTube, it's Christian, and today I'm going to talk about scaling. If you haven't followed my story yet throughout this channel, feel free to go back and see bits and pieces of it. But the long and short of it is I started with 2 units purchased conventionally, and in my first year of really investing, bought another 2 a little less conventionally using hard money. I spent my own money repairing that unit, and then I was completely out of capital. I had no more to invest with. I'd worked for 7 years, I was about to turn 30 years old, and I had 4 units in a house. While this is an excellent starting point, it's not where I wanted to be. I had set a goal when I was younger of I want 30 units by the age of 30. Granted, unit count is arbitrary and is probably not the goal that you should set, but it is a goal that I had set. And once you set a goal, you need to be committed to finishing it. You want to make it all the way through and achieve what you set out to do. So what did I do? I networked with Cody. We found a 38-unit building and we closed that deal. Now, if you want to get to 30 units, the fast way is to go buy 30 or more units, which is exactly what we did. And that's a lesson that I want to pass to you. The easiest way to get to your goal is to just go out and achieve your goal. Don't add steps. For me, buying duplexes, I would have had to do that 15 times to get to my 30th unit. Probably not going to happen in a 1-year stint. I was 29 and I had to get to 30 units by 30 because I committed to doing that. That brings me to my next point: committing to your goal. You need to set a goal to really scale to anything. You need to know where you're headed. If you want to climb a mountain, you need to have a, a trail mapped to the top. You need to know exactly where you're going and where your destination is before you can plot out the steps to get there. So for me, I had to sit down and say, okay, I have limited time. What are we going to do and how are we going to get there? Now, once I hit my goal, we hit it before I was 30. I had a 38-plex. Now I expanded that goal and I pushed myself. We got another 7-plex and we got a 6-plex before the end of the year. Brought myself to 55 units when my original goal was 30. That's where you want to be. People talk about setting baby steps and hitting your little goals one at a time for wins. I completely disagree. Set an unreasonable goal and then go knock it out of the park. That is exciting, and that is something worth scaling to. You can't do it if your reason behind it isn't big enough. So know where you're headed. More importantly, know why you're heading there. I know exactly what I want to achieve in life. I know how I want to reach people, with a way out of the 9 to 5. I really want to retire my wife in the next year. And these are all things that are motivating me towards the success that we're seeing in our business. Now, all at the same time, Cody and I started our mentorship group and property management. We actually had property management fail on us for our original properties and had a choice of, well, do we work with someone else or do we start our own? So in a very short period of time, Cody and I had bought a multitude of units together. We'd started a property management company. We'd started a consulting group. All at the end of a year going into tax season when neither of us are bookkeepers. Next point is you have an option of getting things done or getting them perfect. And you want to aim as close to perfection as possible. You want the best product at the best time. You want the best bookkeeping, the best team. However, if you don't buy the real estate, you don't have those problems. If you don't get started, you never get to those issues. There's a certain point where getting it done is more important than getting it perfect. You're going to work towards perfection as you go, and that is always your target, but don't let that hinder you from getting started. A lot of people get stuck in analysis paralysis because they don't have their team, they don't have their account, they don't have the CPA, the property manager. You have all these pieces that everyone online is telling you. There's only one piece that you need if you want to get into the real estate investing game. You need a deal. Just start there. Find the deal. If you have a goal of 30 units and what you found is a duplex, buy the darn duplex. Just do it. It's gonna make you so much more confident and so much more ready to go find that next 28 units. If it takes you a few more transactions, that's fine. The easiest way to 30 units is to buy a 30-unit building. The hardest way to get there is to never buy anything at all. Then it's impossible. Find a deal in front of you, get in the game, take steps towards your goal, and you're going to make it. Now, something that Cody and I are going through right now In regards to getting it done or getting it perfect, Cody's not a bookkeeper, neither am I. I took a couple accounting classes in college. Cody dropped out of college very early. We don't know everything we're doing about that. However, we didn't have a 38-unit building, so we went out and bought that first. We found the deal, we negotiated, we closed. We did it in December, which means taxes are due pretty soon and we have to figure out how to file. We bought a lot of other stuff and started a lot of other companies. Now there's a ton of accounting and we have no idea how to do it. However, we got it done. So we spent most of the day in the accounting office. We're learning. It's hard. Yes, it's painful. Yes, it's arduous, but it's the right problem to have because it's a problem we didn't have before. You need to get the right set of problems, and the right set of problems is new problems. If you are struggling in 2022 this year with the same problems you had in 2021, and those problems look like the problems you had in 2020, you're still at the job you hate, you still don't have any real estate, you still haven't bought your dream car that you wanted to buy, whatever your goal was, you need to go out and achieve that goal and then get a new set of problems. I don't know bookkeeping. I also didn't have a 38-unit building. Now I have a 38-unit building. Well, now bookkeeping is my problem, and we're going to bust through that, and we're going to clear 100 units here in the next few months. When we have over 100 units, my property management team is not big enough to handle that. So now I have a problem of how do we scale and how do we grow. Pretty soon we're going to look at how do we scale to new markets. Point being, you need new sets of problems. That is your benchmark for how you are moving forward and progressing toward your goal. Are the problems you have today the same problems you had last year? Go out and get yourself a new set of problems. Tell myself that every time I get stuck, and again every time things are hard. This problem's hard, I've never dealt with this. Good. Get through it and get on to the next problem. You'll thank yourself, I absolutely promise. That's a lot of the pain of scaling, is developing new problems. Your problems get bigger, but you grow to them. Set your goal high enough so it's something that you are going to just feel amazing when you crush, and that you're pushed— you have to stretch to reach that goal. Have high goals, smash them out of the park, and do that again, and do it again, do it again. You'll start scaling faster than anyone else around you, and it's going to feel amazing. If you want more tips on how to scale, if you want to look back and see more of our story of how we got from where we started to where we are, we've documented all of it on YouTube from the beginning and will continue to do so. On Wednesday, I need 5 questions for us to cover. Last Wednesday we were out of town and we didn't get a lot of questions, so this week if you guys have any questions— how we did it, next steps, questions on property management, on legal, whatever it is— 5 questions, post them in the comments. We're going to answer next Wednesday on our Whiteboard Wednesday series. Till then, like, subscribe, and follow, and we will see you all soon.
