Christian Osgood built multiple seven-figure businesses in three years by starting with multifamily real estate acquisitions, then vertically integrating his property management from a cost center into a profitable service. He created a course and in-house marketing division to support his core business, and avoids side ventures that don't feed back into the main operation.
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Not only have I bought hundreds of multifamily rentals starting with no money, I've started several businesses. We've built a multi-million dollar network in a little under 3 years. Now, are we titans in the industry? Absolutely not. But anyone can copy this. We're going to talk about general strategy, how many income streams should you have, when is it time to start a business versus outsource to a third-party vendor, how do you actually build a business empire in just a few years. We're gonna cover all of that in this video today. Welcome back to the channel. My name is Christian Osgood. If you don't know me, I've bought hundreds of multifamily rentals. I've started several companies including an online course, a sales and marketing company, a property management company, resort business, wedding event business. We have started so many different businesses and I want to dispel some of the myths here for you. I'm going to start with this. You'll see a lot of stuff online about, well, entrepreneurs and rich people have a ton of income streams. They typically do after they become rich. Focus on the main thing. Every time I have been distracted, I have lost money. You want to focus on your core business first and out of your core business, any other business that you may need to start will evolve. Let me give you a very practical example, two businesses that obviously go hand in hand. I own a bunch of rentals. I have an acquisitions business where I go and I buy and hold multifamily properties. Buy them with or without money. We talk all about that on this channel. If you want to learn how to do that, literally watch like 80% of my videos on how we structure, fund, find these deals. But that is its own business. That is my core business. Out of that, when you buy and hold properties, you need to hire Property management. We got to a point where we were self-managing enough of our units where I wanted more employees. However, at the time I only had about 80 rental properties. I did not have enough doors under management, enough revenue in that company to support the staff that I wanted for that company. So how do you expand? Well, we got good at property management. We were running at a slight loss. We brought on other clients, third parties, so that we had more units to support. We could get more employees in. Not only did we do a better job servicing our clients and create a very profitable property management company. What we ended up doing was stabilizing the employees that we needed to help me run and stabilize my multifamily business. I got utility from both companies. They both reinforce each other. I am my own largest client, but my other clients enable me to have a larger staff, which helps me run my properties and their properties better. That's vertical integration. If you're trying to get into real estate and you started with the property management company, that makes absolutely no sense to me. If you do not have utility where you're building your own portfolio, you're just doing a crappy service job. Property management is low margin. However, if it directly supports your business and you can control it and you can make additional money doing it, employ more people, increase your value to your clients and to your own portfolio, that is perfect vertical integration. Those are two companies that intertwine with each other. Now, in addition to this, I actually have a course called Multifamily Strategy Course. Mentorship group. It is my largest passion project in my life. I love getting to work with other people, watch all the success around the country of people repeating our simple strategy. I truly believe we have the simplest strategy. If you're trying to buy real estate with or without money, this is the simplest way to play the game. I have no marketing expenses. I get to meet a lot of fun people. It is a great way to do real estate. I love talking about it. I love teaching it. However, it is ludicrously expensive to push that out. So to actually get traction for this, how do you cut costs and what do you do? Well, I figured out how to sell this course very, very well and we built this amazing community. So we have consistently having people come in and they're buying real estate and they're partnering up. And so we have deals found, funded, negotiated all on that call. That is the type of stuff that I like to see where people are weekly getting engaged and people are buying real estate. How do you help promote that? You need to market more. When I started marketing, I found that I was better than every marketer that I'd hired. Also, we were outclosing. Anytime I try to hire a company to help me bring more people in, I would always outperform them. What I did is I took all my systems and my processes, and we started another company, which is a sales and marketing division that helps me grow property management, that helps me grow my course and my mentorship. And for other people in real estate who do not directly compete, we went ahead and brought on more clients there, and we started taking the systems that I learned and mastered and rolling them out to other people, which again brings in more income, which helps me pay for the marketing spend, which helps grow the company, which then gets reinvested back into real estate, which then helps feed my PM company. If you see what I did here, this isn't about creating more income streams. It's about monetizing the things that you are the best at for services that you can outperform others in. Everything directly feeds the other thing. There is an outlier here though. I have a resort, the Robin Hood Village Resort. It is a wedding venue. It is a corporate retreat place. We host concerts there. It is an actual like It is a boutique hotel. It does not help my multifamily. It does not do anything for my course or my property management business. It does nothing for anything other than it independently makes money. That takes away my time and some of my employees' time and my stress levels and my— it takes a bunch away from the core business. Having multiple streams of income, even when everything's profitable, is not the goal. You develop multiple streams of income when you intertwine your businesses. I need a sales and marketing team. Can I outsource it? Do I have to bring it in-house? These are questions you should be asking as an entrepreneur throughout the process. There's only 3 answers to this, by the way. Either yes, I absolutely can bring this in-house right now. No, I do not want to do this job. Like for me, I don't want to own a maintenance company. I— could I make money on it? Sure. Could it integrate directly into property management? Absolutely. Do I want to do it? Not interested. That one's a no. Or am I not there yet today? And there are plenty of ideas that I have. Like at some point, it would be nice to bring my bookkeeping in-house. In-house and to offer that to my clients. I think that is the vision of my company is that I do need to start at some point. I am more focused on growing the Texas property management arm, Apex Asset Management. I'm trying to grow that. I'm going to focus my energy there. And when we're a little bit larger, I will build out my bookkeeping core. And with the bookkeeping that I do for myself, when it is perfected, which is getting really close to, we'll go ahead and start rolling out those services to other clients. We will add value to them. Also allowed me to bring in more staff to better serve my multiple businesses. When you have great bookkeepers and lots of LLCs, I have about 30 of them, it makes this game a lot easier to play. So name of the game is vertical integration, is expanding off of what you have that is working instead of focusing on, hey, I need more revenue, I need more revenue, we need to start another business, the next company is going to make this. Build things on top of each other that stack together, that feed each other, and what you end up with is multiple corporations all making more money because the other one exists. Do not go off on side quests or other ventures like I did with our resort. It is a good business. It does make money. It is not my main field. It distracts from every other company. It does not vertically integrate. That needs to be off the table. If you want to be a successful investor, focus on the things that are working for you. Double, triple, quadruple down on them. I promise you, you will not regret it. Hope this was helpful for you entrepreneurs. I hope this was helpful. This made a ton of difference for me. I hope it does for you. If you like tips like these or you want to learn more about the business, the real estate, follow this channel, Multifamily Strategy. If you want to learn more in depth or you want to get coached directly by me, check out multifamilystrategy.com for more information. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you on the next episode.
