Real Estate Investing Rules You MUST Know

If you're going to do real estate and you are an active investor, no matter what they tell you, it is going to take time. There's no such thing as completely passive mailbox money. As an active investor, here's the thing that I really want everyone to listen to, especially the newer investors. On paper, it makes total sense for you to buy at the bottoms. It makes total sense for you to be greedy when others are fearful. What they don't tell you is how difficult it is to actually do it. Because. Because you are going absolutely against the grain. What you're going to see is everyone in your friend group, your family, the media, they will all be telling you you're crazy. And you're going to have to go against that.

Guys, welcome my good friend, Mikey Taylor. Dude, what's going on, man?

What's going on? It's great to see you again, bro.

It's so good to see you. You know, you guys have been growing like crazy over Communion Capital, man. That's. That's amazing, dude.

You know it. Thank you. It feels good. You know, the first few years of any business is brutal. You feel like you're pushing everything uphill and then you have these moments where it gets a little bit easier.

Yeah.

And so, yeah, we're experiencing that, but, you know, it'll just be a matter of time till we have to push it up the next big hill.

Yeah. A good friend of mine says that everything starts. What does he say?

It's like it starts to nurture, then it goes to suffer, and then it goes to performance or something along. Along those. Along those lines. And that's been my experience too. So, you know, it's. I've recently exited a business I built over 25 years. Move upward my entire life, moved the. My entire world to Utah because I love this area. And next thing you know, I'm starting. And ironically, next year when I get a certain portion of capital coming in, I'm going to be looking heavily at commercial real estate. When I say commercial, it could be multifamily, could be live event centers. What I have in Raleigh, and I thought today would be really cool because you're an expert in this field. Obviously you went through the business exit yourself after being a. A very successful professional skateboarder, sold a beer company, the whole deal, got in investing yourself. So I was hoping maybe we could like, do like a master class for those who are in my season or looking to be in my season and figure out, okay, what do I. I got capital. Come in. What do I do with it. So maybe start us off by telling us why you chose commercial real estate.

To really kind of being. Be an anchor of your portfolio.

So it's a really good question. For me, the first business I did was in the beer industry. And I did it with two friends. We had no business experience. The amount of risk that we were taking was great. And we brought on investors. Now it worked out, we sold our business. Everyone made a lot of money, but it was one of those kind of big return, but also came with big risk type of investment profiles. And it's not to say you shouldn't be investing in those things, but after I sold, I had a lot of people from my past life, which was the pro athlete, pro skateboarder career. And I was more looking at them. I was trying to figure out how I could help athletes plan for their future when their careers ended. And in doing so, you know, you maybe want to put some small amount towards the high risk, but you want the majority of your portfolio in investments that are going to be there and that can weather a storm.

Yeah.

And so when I started basically coming up with the idea of the next business I was going to start, I was looking at the assets that I was investing in that were always there for me. And at that time it was storage units and apartment buildings.

Yeah.

And so I just picked those two assets because I had a great experience with them and I felt comfortable bringing that to other athletes. And then as we started basically growing the business, I started seeing a lot of correlation with athletes and then normal or maybe more conventional careers. Right. You have your sales guys or sales girls. They have a very similar pain point, which is my year starts over every new year and I can't step off the gas or my whole lifestyle goes away. Yeah. And then even all the way to entrepreneurs where, you know, we get in the grind of. Or. Or I would say we run the risk of becoming a slave to our business. Yeah. And we're all trying to find some type of option and then ultimate freedom to where we get to choose what we want to do instead of having to do, you know, the things or responsibilities in front of us. So that's kind of where I landed on it.

Yeah. No, and look, I. And I love those two segments. I've heard, I've heard great things about apartment buildings. You know, one of the things I think people find confusing, there is an approach to become a bit of an early adopter in investing commercial real estate. And, you know, I'm happy to recommend your firm to, to the audience, because I know how you operate as a human being. I know you're big into the family. Obviously you were led by a core mentor we talked about on the first time you're on the show. And you know, I, I just, I just find a lot of value there. But more importantly, I find that, you know, I know that there are other thought leaders out there that are, you know, trying to get people to kind of in, into their commercial investment pool. Cardone comes to mind. You know, I'm curious to know, at what point does it make sense for someone to start their investment journey? At what, at what point of, do they have enough liquidity to even get started in this, in this field? And what do you think sets your firm apart from, you know, a lot of the other thought leaders that are, that are also investing in commercial real estate nowadays?

Yeah, good question. So there's a couple hurdles. This is the, I would say one of the cons when it comes to real estate. And then more specifically, the private offering private equity side of real estate is the accredited investor qualification. So to invest into a firm like mine or many of the private real estate offerings, you're going to see, you need to be an accredited investor, which means if you're an individual, you make over $200,000 a year. If you're married, it needs to be $300,000 a year or you have a net worth of north of a million dollars, excluding your primary residence. So you already have a pretty big hurdle to get past. That's the first part. Now to answer the second question on how much money do you need until real estate starts making sense? Most investments like mine, the minimum investments going to land somewhere between 25 to $100,000. So you got to get somewhere between there to even qualify for the minimum investment. Yeah, but even if you have a hundred thousand dollars liquid, it doesn't always make sense to put the whole thing in real estate. What you want to do as an individual is go, okay, one, what happens if things go wrong in my life? What if an unexpected issue happens? You're going to want some capital or cash set aside to float you through those. Honestly, uncomfortable scenarios.

Sure.

Once you have that built out and now you're kind of addressing some of your short term goals and long term goals. On the long term goal side, if you have a hundred thousand dollars, that's probably when real estate starts becoming an option or a viable option. Now what makes my firm different than the rest? Oh, there's probably a few of them. I would say most firms that we're competing with are they're built for institutional investors. So what you're going to see is it makes, it's the same amount of work to basically bring on an investor for $100,000 as it is to bring on an investor at a million or 10 million. Same amount of work. So what you start seeing is firms basically get created and then they start spending their energy on the big check writers because it gets them to scale quicker. For our firm, we made a decision early on that we are building this firm for us. This is a. We are stronger together. It is built for what we call the retail investor so we can all put our capital together and then contend with the big institutional funds. So we, the $100,000 check. That, that is the, the, the majority of the people that come in with us. And then I would say, you know, the second thing, our team is very unique. You know, one, I was a skateboarder, then I, you know, built and sold a craft brewery. That's not the normal storyline for somebody who builds an equity firm. The normal storyline is I went to school, I got my MBA at usc, I spun up a private equity firm. That was my path. I'm also a city council member and then my partners all come from the financial world, CFAs, CFPs. So we actually have a very unique outlook where I tend to see things differently. I'm definitely more.

Contrarian. I'm a contrarian thinker and then I'm surrounded by people that do have more of an institutional outlook. So we were able to blend both worlds, but build it for our avatar, which is it's us.

I love it. I like. Well, I think the other thing that set you guys apart too is outside of just the skill set. It's the, it's the humble, principle driven.

Mindset that you guys use. 1 and 2. Another thing that I like is it's kind of a common sense approach when you guys, you guys pay attention, you know, you're not, you know, we, we. You know, I've seen this a lot and obviously in the worlds that we're in now, we see a lot of P and E firms.

That I see, you know, they, they get an acquisition and it could be multifamily, it could be something else. They get really overconfident. They start letting, letting loose on the principles. The next thing, you know, the asset that you thought was going to bringing a return is, is doing bare minimum to holding steady, you know, So I love the fact that you guys do that. I also think there's an interesting correlation. I was hoping we could talk about this a little bit. You know, it's one thing to have liquidity. And you see, like, here's an example. Someone wins the lottery, right? You win the lottery, you get a bunch of liquidity all at one time after you're paying all your, your state and federal fees and all that stuff. So you got liquidity, and you're like, okay, I'm gonna go buy all the fun stuff I never owned before. Right. Well, but you and I both know that's, that's not the best use of, of liquidity. But let's say, okay, now I got liquidity. Even if they have liquidity, they technically pass the accredited investor test on paper, but they don't actually have the skill set to know some of the important matters that you would find in real estate. For example, cap rate. And I want to break some of these terms down, and I was curious to know how you guys go about maybe kind of schooling some of your investors as they're coming on board to make sure they understand these terms, what they mean, why you guys are looking at the deals, you're looking at why you choose to invest in the deals. You look at investing in that kind of thing.

Yeah. So we spend a lot of time on educational content is to answer your question. So, you know, we'll. We have videos in our library that go all the way from. If you're an investor and looking to invest in real estate for the first time, here's a list of all the questions you need to ask and what some of those questions mean as you brought up cap rate, etc, and, you know, from there, even the investors that end up coming in with us, there's a big push on our company that is very educational. So it offers the, I would say, ability for any of our investors to one, know what's going on, and two, if they ever want to get to a point where they're doing it on their, you know, by themselves. We feel like this is a great opportunity for you to get money to work.

Yeah.

Have experience as an LP and gain some of the educational information that you would gather as a gp.

Yeah.

And so that's just part of our, I would say, value add proposition. Yeah. You know, because unfortunately, this is the experience for most LPs, right. The GP comes in with all the information and no money. The LP provides the money, and at the end the LP has no money, but has all the information, Right?

Yeah.

And we're trying to flip that. We want the LP to make money and we want them to learn something along the way. Yeah.

Just for the sake of clarity, because, just for the audience, because again, I want, I've made most of, I was, I was actually thinking about this outside of my exit. Most of my wealth has come from real estate.

Right.

And different. And you know, commercial buildings, light industrial, you know, looking at doing multi family in the future. You know, terms like GP and lp, like just for the audience sake, tell them, give them an idea what those, what those terms mean.

Okay. So it's part of the partnership structure. So you have a general partner and a limited partner. Now when we talk about passive investing or you making money, you don't have to do the work. LP is how that's created. And basically what that means is you're investing with an operator or a group that is finding the assets, underwriting them, securing the financing, managing or managing the manager. They're doing the work and you are making a return because your money is invested in the project. So that's an LP or a limited partner. When you come into a partnership like that.

And look, there's, there's different ways to structure it, but if you're going to do real estate and you are an active investor, no matter what they tell you, it is going to take time. There's no such thing as completely passive mailbox money. As an active investor, the closest thing.

Is having a debt free, debt free property. It's about the closest you can get to it.

You can get close, you just can't get all the way there.

Yeah, right. Oh my goodness. Well, let me ask you this, all right? Because again, this is, you know, someone with your experience in this. And I, and I've, I've been watching you work the business now for several years, you know, since we first got to know each other a few years ago. And I love what you guys have done. What do you think most investors, early stage investors are getting wrong about this, this field? And what do you, what do you hope that we can help them get right?

Okay. I would say there's two major things that we see kind of newer investors get wrong. The first one, they only focus on return and they do not focus on risk. I would say that's the biggest. So they look at, let's say, three different real estate projects and they typically pick the one with the largest return, but they don't necessarily have the knowledge yet to understand how that group is getting to that return and the added amount of risk to get you there. Right. So I would say that's the first One, you have to include risk into the return profile because at the end of the day we're trying to figure out what the return that actually makes it in our pocket is. A paper return means nothing. Right. And then I would say the second one, you know, newer investors focus on quick money. It's okay, if I invest in this deal, what do I get in my pocket right away? And I actually think that's not how to look at investments. Investments are meant to be wealth builders. They're not meant to be active income. And so sometimes we like the idea of money actually coming into our pocket because we feel it. But if we're really talking about growing our wealth, that's done on the back end. That's not the stuff we feel. And so you just need to balance that out. And I would say the final one is ask yourself what the money's for. Right. If you're our age, I don't need a return today. I would actually rather delay my return so I have the opportunity to double it in a quicker time hold. And then I want to do that over and over and over. And so, you know, ask yourself, what is my goal here? What's the money for? And if it's long term, don't worry about what you're making, you know, the first quarter in cash flow, it's just not that that's not the outlook for a long term investment.

Yeah, I think that's, that's brilliant advice because I to your point, I think people a lot of times, especially early stage, you get into looking for the dollars back but you're not looking at the compounding.

Right.

And investing as a whole, doesn't matter what you're investing in. It's, it's a long game. Right. You're, you might put money in, in year one and you might honestly not even take some capital off the table to like year 10.

Yeah.

If you're playing smart because you're going to weather some economic headwinds or tailwinds for that matter, and then you got all these different types of things that you're going to focus on. Which brings me to the next point. So we're obviously in a, from all of my real estate investor friends, especially in the commercial real estate, especially in the office space category, dealing with, dealing with a lot of challenges right now, sincerely or seems to be mostly tied to the cost of capital and to the, for the audience, say cost capital, meaning interest rates that people get debt from to bar to buy these properties or a portion of these properties. What types of Things are you guys doing differently to try to, you know, work your way through some of those challenges?

Okay, so those challenges, there, there's. Depending on the stage in the project that you had in the works, it could be a very painful moment for you or it can be actually a buying opportunity. So for real estate developers, right. Or somebody doing a value add, let's say opportunity, so they bought, let's call it an apartment building, they wanted to do a renovation, you're typically putting on bridge debt or construction debt. This is short term financing because the property doesn't qualify for the permanent financing.

Because it doesn't exist yet.

It doesn't exist yet. So you're getting, let's say a bridge debt for years. Three. Three years. And you're making assumptions in the future on where interest rates are going to be, where cap rates are going to be, etc.

Yeah.

Well, if you started a project in 2020 and you were expecting interest rates to be at 5% and the bank to lend you, you know, X amount of dollars, those numbers aren't here now. Now interest rates are higher and banks are lending you less, which means a lot of operators having to come up with the capital to qualify for the deal. And in a situation where your property is distressed, it is very difficult to get capital. And so I would say for some investors, this is a painful moment for them. Yeah, for us, we are in a buying kind of window right now. We are looking at either operators that I just, you know, spelled out that are distressed, that we're able to get a project for a discount. We're looking for people that wanted to sell last year, weren't able to, and are now willing to sell it at a discount so that we can buy it at a, at a better price. Yeah. Now on the financing, the financing is still more difficult. So what that means for us, we're having to put way more money down today than we had to three years ago.

Yeah.

So an equity check for us is now about 45% of the cost of the project. So on a 40 million dollar project where we used to have to put down $9 million, $8 million, now we're putting down closer to 20. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I think that's important to know because it's also, I think it also goes to show that.

They always say that and this. I'm, I'm a hockey guy, so. Hockey analogy, right. Skate's where the puck's going.

Yeah.

Right. And the best people that I know in the business, like you, like you and your firm, for example, Are great at this, are great at looking at data and anticipating that data and getting a good baseline on kind of where we think the puck is going. All right, I'm curious to know from your perspective. We're obviously, we're heading into an election cycle which always gets crazy.

They pump fear like crazy into the marketplace, which sucks. Yeah, you know, there's, there's, you know, there's gonna be people that say, okay, well things are in their, in their term, great. Now it's going to get worse if someone gets elected or vice versa.

What do you think the interest rate market looks like with the fact that inflation keeps hovering around 3%? Do you feel like we're going to be in a whole, whole pattern with the Fed for a while? Do you feel like they're going to loosen up and start going backwards maybe mid next year, kind of. What, what is your, I mean a lot of this is very subjective in gut, of course, but I'm curious what you see on the tea leaves.

Okay. So considering we don't get slammed into a big, big recession, considering that I think we're in a holding pattern for a few years, I, I, I don't think it's going to ease up significantly for a while.

Yeah.

And then once it does ease up, I think it's going to go back to probably 2018, 2019 rates. I personally don't think we're going to see these 2 or 3%, you know, 30 year fixed rates again. I think that was once in a lifetime. Now look, can we get in a scenario where the economy just freaking bottoms out and we have to drop rates because of that? Yes, that's a possibility. Of course. I just think that's a lower probability. I think probably the, the highest probable outcome is we see the rates stay where they're at for a few years and then somewhere in that we see these very small decreases. But I don't think it's going to be significant.

Yeah, I think we're probably looking at a quarter point when they start going backwards a little bit. And I agree with you, I think we're 5 or 6%. It's probably going to be baseline.

That's what I think.

Once we get, once we get to a health, what I would refer to as more of an evenly kill healthy economy.

That's what I, I, that's where I think it lands also.

Yeah, so that's, that's good to know when it comes to the overall investing structure. And you know, we're, we're talking about the early stage Investor. For the sake of the show, we're trying to get in the line of sight on risk.

Let's talk about risk a little bit deeper, if that's okay. Yep. What are five tips that you think are really instrumental in reducing your risk when you're looking at jumping into the investment pool?

Okay, so if we're talking real estate, actually, this one will, will cross over to any asset class. Diversification helps reduce risk. It, it, it always does. And then anytime you can invest in investments that are uncorrelated, that is significantly going to reduce your risk. So, you know, that used to be stocks and bonds. You know, you invest in both because when stocks are good, bonds are bad, and vice versa. Unfortunately, we're living in a time where the last two recessions, it was like stocks, bonds, and public REITs all dropped together. So I think you need to go into the private kind of investment world to get a little bit more uncorrelated investments. But diversification is going to help. If you're investing in real estate, I think some of the things that you want to look at to protect yourself or give you, you know, downsizing, the, the risk is one. What happens if things go wrong? This is a really important one. Right. A lot of times operators are going to sell you this very rosy picture of. We've been doing this over and over and over, and this is what you're going to make. Some of the stuff you want to ask yourself is what happens if cap rates move? What happens if interest rates move? What happens if the project is delayed? What happens if cost goes up? Right. And then when you're starting to rent it out, what happens if it takes longer to rent out or if there's a rent reduction that we have to give so that we can rent it up to a higher occupancy? And when you're looking at those what ifs, you want the operator or if you're an active investor, you want to run the modeling to see if this scenario happens, how does that impact my return? And then what we do as a firm, we look at if basically all hell breaks loose, what happens if we are in doomsday scenario 2008 all over again, what happens to this investment? And we like to see a scenario where we're still making money. Might not be a lot, but we still want to be somewhere positive for us to move forward on a deal.

Yeah, profitable is always better than losing money, for sure.

Well, yeah, especially, look, you go back to 2008, like, you know, it was a dream to make money during that year, everybody was basically taking Ls, you know, and so to be in a scenario where you might make 5% on a deal when everyone else is losing money, that's not a bad day. Now that's a big haircut from 20% if everything went right. But I like trying to see an outcome where it looks like there's somewhat of a floor. That's a better day for me.

Yeah. Well, not only that, if you can get to a place where you're in a worst case scenario that your return is exceeding the cost of inflation, you know, by decent, by decent percentage or a margin, then you're normally in a pretty decent shape. Which kind of, that 2008 just made me think of something really fast.

So in 2008, my first mentor, Steve Meyer, you and I talked about him last time on the show. Just quick refresher. He invested in me with, with knowledge, you know, knowledge, I guess I should probably say it right, but, you know, invested me with knowledge and taught me a lot. But when he did that, he always gave me this, this principle. He said the bear is always trying to bite the bull and the bull is always chasing the bear. Yeah, right. So he was trying to get me to understand that in world economies, local economies, everything is seasonal. Right. You know, it might, you might go on a run for 10 years. Like, I think we're just kind of coming out of, with, with a dip. You might go into like in 2008, several years where, where everybody's digging out. And one of the things he told me it was to, is essentially what he was saying in my younger, younger age, because we weren't talking in investment language at the time, was to always try to have some capital on hand. Because he taught me the principle of fear when the world is quote, unquote, falling apart, recession's happening, 2008's happening, global banks are doing this, or banks like he just says, you need to be the person that can think and not feel in those seasons, like you need to think responsibly and to have capital on the sidelines. Because one of the things that I know, one of the things that he did in the late 9 or mid-90s, when the mid-90s was a big challenge economically, he actually had capital sitting on the sidelines and he waited till basically the fire sale began and went out and bought all kinds of things and he tripled his net worth. All right, Right. So he's. So from a principal sake, I'm curious to know when, from your perspective, does it make Sense to settle capital versus when does it make sense to invest capital?

Yeah, really, really, really good question. So look, I, I have attempted to always have a war chest of capital on hand. You know, if we are timing the market. Yeah. It always makes sense to buy at the bottoms. Now it's very difficult to time where the actual bottom is. And so for me it's, I've been able to somewhat get there by a buy sell discipline or a buy sell strategy. So when I'm investing in a certain asset class, I allocate a certain percentage that's going there. And when things appreciate, that brings my allocation up beyond my threshold and that's my trigger to sell. And then vice versa, when markets drop out, that brings my allocation below and that's my trigger to buy. That's helped me basically be less emotional when it comes to investing. But here's the thing that I really want everyone to listen to, especially the newer investors. On paper, it makes total sense for you to buy at the bottoms. It makes total sense for you to be greedy. When others are fearful, what they don't tell you is how difficult it is to actually do it.

Yeah.

Because you are going absolutely against the grain. What you're going to see is everyone in your friend group, your family, the media, they will all be telling you you're crazy.

Yeah.

Right. And you're going to have to go against that. And so for those of us, and I understand it because it's human nature, we find comfort in doing the things that the person next to us is doing. It takes very thick skin and an ability to hold your emotion back for you to act when others aren't.

Yeah.

And so it's learned that discipline will be created when you do it. But the first time it is not easy. 2008 was not easy for me to do it. After 2008, I'll be doing this for the rest of my life. It just is hard in the beginning.

Well, I think it goes back to a term that I use all the time, which is principles govern promises. Right. So if you have strategic principles in place, they make your decisions basically before you have to make them right. You know, you talked about thresholds and you know, Steve was telling me all the time, he says kind of operate in the gray rather than trying to time the bottom or try on the top, you know, get within a threshold of the bottom and then get with a threshold at the top. You buy and sell. And, and I think that's kind of what you've just described there because I, I do Feel like.

When it comes to money, people handle money with more emotion than logic.

Okay.

I know for a fact after going through my own financial crap that I made a bunch of emotional decisions, got me a lot of trouble, and then had to dig my way out and start all over again. So now I typically have a threshold, a little Warchester cash like you're talking about. I got a little thing sitting to the side and if, if my, my cash position gets low enough, then I stop or I slow down or I get out there and hustle for, you know, for some extra income, maybe I'm doing some more speaking events or, you know, whatever, whatever the case may be, to kind of bring that level back to, to baseline. Because again, this is a season. Right. So it doesn't matter. And honestly, this is go. This is for any business. All businesses go through seasons and investment classes are no different.

Right.

I'm curious to know. So there's been a. Obviously there's a lot going on with AI nowadays, a tremendous amount going on with AI. Have you guys been able to see a resource where AI makes sense for you guys to deploy in your business or are you still kind of waiting to see how technology plays out?

We're using it on a lot of our communications, so, you know, investor updates, transcripts, all the way to leads. So when leads come in, we have AI software that's creating messages to communicate to them along the process of whether it's getting on a call with us, getting information, et cetera. So we're using it more on the marketing side. We have not found a tool yet that we are bringing into like the actual operations of the business. I think we'll get to the point where you're using AI to model your deals. We're still using a human to do that.

Yeah.

But on the marketing side or the communication side, just the little bit that we're using has been massive. It's, it's. This will be a game changer. Absolutely.

Yeah. I think that's why I'm always so curious about when I, when I get to talk to successful entrepreneurs and investors and business owners and whatnot. It's always interesting to see who's using it and how they're using it currently, what their anticipation factor is, what they think, the disruption factor. And we all know it's going to be a pretty massive disruption long term, how people are going to be kind of positioning. You know, I've got, I've got folks that are, that are very AI. They want everything to be done by AI. It Seems like the vast majority want, want a collaborative approach to human AI together to make, you know, in theory, wiser decisions, model deals, you know, even have even time buys and sells for at some point. But I know we're a little ways away from there because the AI obviously has to learn the behavior of the thought pattern of the investor. Right. So, yeah, I was just curious how that, how that does that. That's always makes me excited.

Yeah, it's, I mean, it's cool. Like, but, but we're, we're definitely more collaborative with it. Like I, I use it to, to speed up time. It's more to build a framework really. But you know, we still have to be involved right now. We, we don't have any platform that's just running without us.

Yeah, no, I love that. All right, so you started a show. You're, you're now on YouTube. You're climbing, climbing the ranks subscriber wise. Everybody's learning more. I, it's. You're uber successful. You. I know you're a wonderful dad and a great husband. I know you spend a lot of time with your family. I know you now serve on the city council. Like, dude, do you, do you not have enough things to do? I mean, like, what, what, what made you want to do it?

Yeah, I know. No, I'm at, I love that, I.

Love that deep thought.

I'm at. I, I have enough to do now. I am at, I am at max capacity. Everything that I'm asked right now is, no, I can't do anything else.

You know, the, the, the decision to do a podcast and, and focus more on YouTube, I, I think was more a business decision, like how could we extend, you know, or create another offering that, that is, you know, gives more long form content, which I think is just a, a better delivery when it comes to trust build 100 and also learning. So I just wanted that to be a part of the business. The podcast. I, I don't know the thing about the podcast, I wanted actually a little bit more flexibility to go beyond real estate.

Yeah.

Because in my life there's a lot of like, different factors. It's like I'm a dad and husband. That's, you know, that's a very, very hard thing. And you're sitting at the same. Yes. Right. I'm a business owner. I'm on city council. I used to be a pro skateboarder. I was in the beer industry. Like, there's a lot to talk about here. So I just wanted to be able to incorporate some of those Other things.

Yeah.

And then the city council thing was actually more a conversation I was having with my wife, who felt like our community was missing things for our age demographic and she wanted to look at another place to live. And I was like, I didn't want to. I love where I live. And so I just basically threw it out there. Like, you know, what if we're a part of the solution? Instead of us just looking for a grass is greener scenario, what if we help create the things we're missing? And so I didn't really realize what I meant when I said that, or I didn't realize the amount of time I was going to go into that, but I wanted to find something that. One, I felt like my skill set could add value to my community. And two, I have a business. Like, I can't go all in on the new thing. My business is not at the point yet where it totally runs without me. And so I just felt like city council was actually that perfect blend to. It's in my wheelhouse.

Yeah.

It's a. More of a. Call it a side hustle. I'm a policymaker, not an implementer.

Yeah.

And so I went for it.

Yeah.

No idea what that meant. Had to run my first campaign. It was a lot of learning. It was fun and hard and challenging, but so far, I'm glad I did it.

Yeah. No, dude, I love that. Well, so I'll hit both of those. So I love the fact that you're trying to use the show to. To get outside of just investing. You know, there's. There's content I saw that's related to, you know, social media versus actually having real content. You have a lot of great thought leaders on. In their genre, in their space, which I think show. Which I think goes to show one of your superpowers as a human being, which is the ability to build amazing relationships. And one of the things that I personally struggle with just being transparent with you in the audience is, you know, now that I've had an exit and I've got. There's a. There's a game plan in place for that exit to. To double or compound.

Everyone. Other. Everyone in the woodwork has come out and wanting me to. To do this, that or the other thing. And, you know, and everybody. To your. To your point earlier, every. It all sounds good. You know, send me your deck. Send me your pitch deck, you know, whatever. You know, I like the operating business space. You know, I know Tony's really big into this new private equity firm. He's put Together, no surprise. You know. You know, I like, I like real estate because that's, that's what I understand more of. You know, how are. How do you decide.

When to get involved in a deal versus to kind of like walk away from a deal or just pass.

And that's a bit of a selfish question because you're further ahead than I am with you.

No, it's good. Honestly. The. For anyone who's sold a business before, you're gonna know this. For anyone that hasn't yet, here's some things that just pay attention to. It's really cool. It's really exciting. It adds a new type of challenge. Though it doesn't make everything easy. It just is different, I guess is the best way to say it in the beginning. You're probably gonna invest in some stuff that you shouldn't like. That's the truth. You know what I'm saying? Like, you just have more money and you're like, I have. I have the ability to stay away.

From the worm farm, you know?

Yeah. And so look, I did it too. I invested in some stuff that I shouldn't have. It was just. I was looking at way more dollars to participate in and was trying to stretch it out into more investments. I had to learn basically what I wanted to invest in and what the purpose of that investment ultimately could become. Now, what works for me doesn't mean it's going to work for you, but this is what I found. I like investing in things that, one, I'm interested in, and two, I have the ability to help drive that value up. And so I've spent 20 years building this vehicle of having an ability to highlight items or services or products. And so, of course, if I'm investing in something, I want to be able to plug that into my system, because why not? Yeah, and so I, I'm looking for stuff like that.

But at the. At the same time, I'm looking for some diversification as well. So for me, I understand real estate and I enjoy building business. So the majority of my time, energy and money is going into that. Now when we get into, like, tech, I'm not a tech dude. I want some allocation to tech, though, so I'm looking for those operators. It's a similar strategy when you're basically doing your due diligence on an operator regardless of the asset they're in. Yeah. So I'm asking a lot of the same questions an investor would ask me. I really like the, the financial space. So, you know, I look for opportunities to blend the two with fintech.

Yeah.

You know, but it's more than anything, it's picking what you want to invest in, having the allocation and not going over it. That was a big one. Like I had to get to a point where I had enough invested in tech startups. And so anytime somebody reached out, I had to say right away, no, don't send me a deck. I am not investing right now. My money is allocated. I'm not going to string you along. I'm just not in an investment time right now. Once something changes, I'm hitting you up. Nice.

The tech, the tech slot is difficult for me because either you find a unicorn or you find a snail. Yeah, it's very. I have, I haven't seen an evenly balanced tech deal at least come across my desk where.

I don't know, it just feels like it's going to have even kill growth. And what I see in the tech space, a lot of like either rocket ship growth or pitfall, you know, decline. Yeah, you know.

Yeah, I hear you on that. If, look, if we're going like through like my actual asset allocation, you know, it's heavily private real estate, private equity, private credit. On the tech side, it's smaller than those allocations.

Sure.

But I don't typically invest in individual. I'm looking for funds where they're playing the let's call it 10 investment model where you're going to get snails. The majority are going to be snails. You need like the two to three to hit. Yeah. And then I enjoy entrepreneurs so I do make investments in like early round startups. Yeah, they're high risk though. It's a, it's a smaller percentage of my allocation.

Hey, look it, that goes back to the earlier. But the earlier point, that's like how much time are you willing to invest in the entrepreneur? I've. Because I find, and I, this is me to a nutshell when I was building businesses in general or like I'm like, I haven't stopped building business, you know what I mean? I was making mistakes because I didn't know what I didn't know and had. I had someone alongside of me, right. To educate me. Hey, watch out. Hey, that's actually, that's actually a ditch. Watch out for that, you know, or hey, that's actually a really good opportunity, you know, or hey, dude, your leadership, we got to work on your leadership, man. You're, you're killing these teams. You know, I think that that's a, that's a special skill set. And to your point earlier, when I invest in business owners. That's what I'm looking to do is I'm going to come come alongside of you as one part mentor and then one part know investor, which I think has turned out to be a pretty good strategy overall.

That's good. That's really good.

You know, we got just a couple minutes left, and first of all, thank you for the master class on investing. I. I find that there's more people looking for ways to deploy capital.

Especially as they're, you know, there's. There's a lot of movement right now in M and a. A lot of movement.

Yeah.

And my. One of my investment bankers called me recently and he was like, he goes, do you realize they're paying multiples of 12 for roofing companies? I'm like, what? Yeah, I'm like, that's normally like, reserved for tech space. I'm like, holy cow. You know, and, you know, that's probably. There's probably a small window that that's going to be. Be happening, but there's a lot of folks in that space.

Right.

I sell that to say thank you for the, for the masterclass.

Yeah, of course.

I really want to have folks continue to get to know you and more about what you're doing, especially as they're looking to deploy capital as opposed to maybe another entity or firm or thought leader that may be a bit more risky. I'd rather them be with somebody's common sense, humble at heart, and ready to get going. I'm curious to know what our kind of a final question for you, because I love. I love your mind so much.

What is. What is something you've been dying to talk about either to your audience or audiences in general that have you. That you've yet to really kind of bring to surface?

Oh, that's good.

I don't know. I would say the. I more talk about the things that are currently happening in my life. Right. We're doing real estate deals, so you're gonna get a lot of real estate from me. But I'm a dad and a husband and I have young kids. I have four of them ranging from 11 to one. And so, I mean, honestly, a lot of the. The challenge and struggle that we're really going through is, you know, how do you have a healthy relationship with your wife or your husband while you're trying to raise kids? Right. And so I don't know. Yeah, it would probably be probably around that, like, you know, I'm a father, so I would probably, you know, the things that I'm thinking about That I don't talk about how do I be a good dad, a good husband, and a good example as a business owner to my kids, knowing that I am the example that they're seeing for my girls on what a husband's gonna look like and for my son, what a man's gonna look like. Right.

That's right.

And, dude, there's a lot of pressure on that because they see all my weaknesses as well, and they pay more.

Attention to what we do than what we say.

We don't pay any attention to what we say. Right. Things are caught, not taught.

Yeah.

And so, yeah, probably around that man, like, how do you maintain a healthy relationship with your wife and not have the entire focus become on the kids?

Yeah.

You know, we do a lot of, you know, whether it's marriage counseling or marriage retreats or in a marriage group, we spend a lot of time on that. So I'm constantly learning. But that is hard, man. Being married and being a dad is hard.

Yeah, it really is. And then. And then trying to make an active movement in the. In the public, obviously is difficult. You know, this. One of the things I was just thinking of, too, is, you know, something my oldest son told me he just graduated from Campbell. Literally last week. I flew back from North Carolina to go watch him graduate. And probably a year or so ago, he sat me down. We were having dinner at a Mexican restaurant. You know, I went to go have hang out with him at the college or whatever. We're sitting down at the dinner, having rest at the restaurant. My audience has heard this, so it won't be anything new to them, but maybe it's something that resonates with your audience. He told me that the one thing.

I needed to work on is your son saying this.

This is my son saying this. Adult son, 20, basically 20 years old at the time.

He said, there's one thing. He says, you were a great dad. You're a fantastic husband, but there's one thing you could work on, just one thing. It would be something like this. And I was like, okay, well, now I'm all ears. And I'm going to be honest with you. It changed my life. Like, ever since this moment, it changed me. He said, if you could learn to be more present when you're present.

Yep.

Get all the entrepreneur curse right there. The game, whatever the. Whatever that thing is. And, you know, I pretty quickly reinstituted what we call them. Date night. I guess you call them date nights, boy hangouts or whatever you want to call them. But the one on one Time, attention. I've really focused really hard that, like, okay, at this time of day, I'm off the clock. You can even. You can call my phone. You can be one of my ideal clients. And I'm off the clock, you know, because to your point, they're watching.

Right.

And I want to be a good man. I want to be a good husband, be a good father. I want to be. I want to be great at those things, you know, because I find that. That. And I mean, I was a person of faith. I find that that stuff means more in heaven than how much money I made.

That's right.

You know what I'm saying? So anyway.

That's right. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. I. I think that. Look, that's. That's. I. I would probably say my number one struggle is why I think it's for entrepreneurs. It's hard. Right? Yeah. I'm with you. We do the, like, you know, I date my daughters, I take my daughters to, you know, we do breakfast on Saturdays or, yeah, my son go golf with him. But yeah, one on one time and put the phone down. That ends up resulting in a. The highest return out of anything we talked about today. It's always. It's always quality time and presence.

Quality over quantity, ironically.

Yeah, 100%.

Yeah, a thousand percent. Well, dude, I love you to death, man. I can't. Thank you for coming back on the show and schooling us again today. Where can everybody find out more about what you're working on, the best way to connect with you. I know you're all over social media. Obviously you're on YouTube, got a growing show, all the good stuff. Where would you like everybody to go find you?

Yeah. So regardless of the platform you're on, just search my name, Mikey Taylor. And you should be able to find me if you listen to podcasts. Our podcast is Life with Mikey. You find it on any of the PL podcast platforms or on YouTube. And then our company is Commune Capital. So same thing. Search Commune Capital on any of the platforms or our website is communecapital.com.

I love it, dude. Thank you so much. And I apologize that my Southern twang messes up Commune Capital.

You're all good. Thank you, brother. It was great to see you.

Awesome, man. Take it easy, buddy. See you. I hope you liked that video. And if you did, make sure you check out this next video right here.

Email still has more daily active users.

Than any single social media platform. 4.65 billion people are doing stuff with email every single day.

Why?

Because it's one of the oldest communication.

Technologies on the Internet.