An Airforce Officer Perspective To A Successful Entrepreneur

Hey, it's Mark Podolski, the land geek with your favorite niche real estate website, www.thelandgeek.com. and today's guest is really going to be pretty interesting. Lots of things going on, a fellow pilot for Scott Todd to discuss. I hope they just don't talk about planes the entire time is my hope. But maybe they will, who knows? But before we talk to our guests, I'd be remiss if I didn't properly introduce my co host, Scott Todd from Scott Todd.net landmodo.com Learn anything about anything. Investorninjas.com Scott Todd how are you?

Mark?

I'm great.

How are you?

Pulse is still normal. Respiration is fine. I'm excited to talk to Axel Meyerhofer. He is, after a successful career in the Air Force, an executive role for software company. He founded a consulting company mere 15 years ago. The Great Recession around 2009 introduced him to real estate and the many things that it seemed to allow for him. And he's now been creating passive income in real estate. He teaches people about passive income and real estate. He's like our guy, but he does it with a little bit of a different take, a different spin. Axel Meyer Hofer, welcome to the podcast. How are you?

Great, thank you, Mark. And hi Scott. Great to be here.

So, Axel, let's just rewind the tape a bit and tell us how you got started.

Well, I basically got started because I had been trying to be a stock investor and I picked a great time right around the year 2000 where everybody said stocks can never fall again. And I drank that Kool Aid just to come to realize that the dot com bust that some people might still recall kind of defeated that claim that they could never fall again. And they fell so quickly that I couldn't even get the gains out of the market. So I started thinking, okay, there must be something different, and started to research and look into it and found real estate and was very surprised to see all the additional benefits besides, you know, you're buying a property and hoping that it increases in value.

No? Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So let's talk about real estate. What got you into real estate?

Well, the main thing was I called it at the time, only amongst friends, it wasn't really public or anything like that. I called it the Hansel and Greater Strategy. The reason for that was that as an Air Force officer and anybody who has been in the military in an officer level, you know that you get moved around pretty much every 18 to 36 months. And that was our reality Too, in my career, in those 22 years, I got moved around 11 times. So at some point, like I mentioned, when I became aware that real estate would be a really good area to invest in, most of the time when we got to a place, it was kind of prudent to decide between renting and buying, that buying would probably be the right thing to do. And then actually the question comes, okay, after about two or three years, what do you do? And the Hansel and Gradle strategy basically points out that we kept these houses and rented them out and then got moved to the next station and bought another place. And we had naturally, at the time, the benefits of the VA service because you get favorable financing and all those kind of things. I don't think we may have necessarily been able to do it the same way if we weren't in the military. But what it meant is basically every place that we had been, we left the breadcrumb of a house behind. And so that's kind of like how the quote unquote portfolio started. And it wasn't a very, like, sophisticated or educated strategy at the time. It was just, okay. Every so often it just seemed to be more sense to keep the house and have the income generated and have somebody else pay off the mortgage we moved on than any of the other choices we would have had. Because in two years, typically, I mean, at least in most places we have been in. And you have to keep in mind military bases are not necessarily in locations where you have a huge amount of appreciation. Right. So when you look at and say, okay, two years, three years ago we bought this place, would we really make any kind of significant gain if we sold it? The answer was almost always no. Right. So that was kind of like what informed that strategy originally. And like I said, only after doing it for a while, and people said, so what are you actually doing in this real estate? I thought about, okay, I'm a German guy, what could I come up with for my name? And that's where the handle and grader came from.

Interesting, interesting. Tell us about the ideal wealth grower system.

Well, the ideal wealth grower is basically, in the one hand, a name that is kind of occurred out of the things that we have done in the last 15 years. But it is also a combination of abbreviations because if you take the term idea, it basically represents the different aspects, what I call the left brain side of real estate. So the I stands for income, the D stands for depreciation, the E stands for equity, the A stands for appreciation, and the L stands for leverage, right? So yes, it's the word ideal, but it also includes the majority of those most, what I would call most important metrics type aspects of real estate investing. The wealth is kind of the goal in the middle. And then the grower is also an abbreviation for anybody who is a little bit into skill development or mindset development and things like that. There is actually a concept by a guy called John Whitmore that he developed and wrote a book about it called Performance Coaching. That is the grow model of coaching. It's very famous in business coaching cycles. And I analyzed it, I studied it, my PhD is about it, and I came to the conclusion that it misses two pieces. So in a nutshell, without boring you and your audience too much, the G stands for what goal do I set? The R stands for what's my current reality, how is my life right now? The O stands for kind of like two O's, but it's only really one. The one is what are my opportunities, but also what are my obstacles? Right? And then the W stands for what actions will I take? Now, if you only do that, which is typically what happens when you have the first type of interaction with somebody new who's interested to get coaching or mentoring or advice, that's all good because you say, here's what I want to do, here's what I have. Here are the obstacles and opportunities, and this is what I'm going to do. Now that we talked about it, but then when you really think about it, nobody just does that once and then you're done. So what you really do is to say, okay, so now that I have committed to take the action, for example, to write down all the details of my expenses for the month, which would be a prudent thing that we suggest in Idea wise Grower, when we meet again, let's say a week or two later, and I say, okay, Mark or Scott, how did it go? The question that I'm asking there is the E in grower. That is, what was your experience, why you were actually taking these actions that you committed to? And then what were the results of these actions and experiences? And the other question that comes from that is to say, okay, besides stating the results, do these results in some way influence your goal? Right, because first we said, here's a goal that I want to accomplish. Let's say, okay, I want to get a passive income in eight to 10 years so I don't need to work anymore, or I want to become an influencer in a particular topic or whatever your Goal is. And I differentiate the goals, by the way, in something that Jim Collins came out with. He calls it the B hack, the big hairy, audacious goal. Something really ambitious at the very high end. But then you have all these sub goals underneath. And especially when you go through the cycle of the grower system, you find out I do something and now I know more, or I have this particular experience and that makes me maybe adjust one of my sub goals or maybe even change it. And oftentimes what I find when we actually do these sessions with our clients is that they crank up a little bit on the goal. Right? When they said, okay, I thought the maximum I could ever get TO would be $5,000 of passive income, right. A month. And then they go and do some research and couple months later, after we have gone through that cycle a few times, they come to the realization, no, I could actually do more and adjust it up. Right? So ideal wealth grower, to answer your question, is the what I call left brain side. The idea like I went through, the wealth is the goal in the middle, and the grower is the method to change your perspective, your mindset, and your approach to how do you actually apply what's on the left side to make it actually happen and become wealthy.

I love it. Scott, Todd, what are your thoughts?

So, you know, obviously you're working. When you're working with somebody, you're working not only on the, on helping them to build wealth, but really I think something that's more important, if I understand correctly, which is to change their mindset, right? Like to build that wealth mindset. And so, you know, I'm just kind of curious, you know, like, what do you think that the biggest obstacle to helping people change their wealth mindset is? Like, what, what is it? Because we get our own way a lot of times, right? So like, how do you take somebody who's here and literally move them out somewhere else?

Well, there's a couple of different things that I've experienced along that question. Basically, the first thing is a lot of people, as soon as you talk about real estate investing, somehow I don't know if it's the media or some external influencers seem to think that you can only be a real estate investor when you already kind of in a way rich or have huge amounts of money available to you, you. So that's one of the hurdles to overcome to say real estate investing in almost any kind. I mean, we are applying a specific strategy that I call the out of state turnkey strategy that we recommend to our clients. But in general, the first hurdle from a mindset perspective is to say, get over this limiting belief that only other people, only rich people, only people with massive income can do it. You can do it too, if you apply strategic and disciplined approach. So that's the first part of the mindset. Then the other part that I think it has to do that more and more people, and I'm working with an age group between 30 and like late 40s, at least that's my target audience that I would like to serve is to get them away from looking at real estate investing purely from the property itself and how much can it increase in value and so forth. But go more in your mindset to say who would actually be able to serve the fundamental need for shelter, and the fundamental need for shelter that we all have can either be served by private public investors or by the government. Right. So what you really do when you become a real estate investor, whether you join us and apply our strategy, but you get your mindset around that is to say, I provide a service to the public for those people who want a nice property, good quality at a fair price, and that service, so they have shelter and they can focus for themselves and their family to do their job or do their work or whatever they're passionate about. And to get away from just looking at it as a money making thing, as a profit making thing, as a tax advantage thing. Yes, all those things exist. That's what I meant by the left side with the idea. But the more important mindset that I would like to infuse to the people that we work with is to say you provide a fundamental service that everybody has a need for and that changes the whole ball game. That goes to purpose. Right. What purpose? Why are we doing it? Is to help people who want to live in a single family home or in a duplex in a nice renovated property for a fair price.

Yeah, I think purpose is so important. We talk a lot about that. The Simon Sinek book, you know, start with why is a really great book if you know this is sort of a new concept for you. So, Axel, my question would be, what's the worst advice you see or hear given in your area of expertise?

Well, there's a couple of things that I really don't like a whole lot is, for example, anything that has to do with speculation in the context of real estate investing.

Right.

Let's speculate which market will explode next. Let's speculate where Amazon is going to put the next warehouse. Let's look at how much can the value of a property improve over a certain period of time? Or when we talk about leverage, right. Everything is basically thrown in the same bucket where people say, okay, you're either on the one side where you're not supposed to have any kind of debt and you pay everything cash, or you're on the other side where you over leveraged. And the sophistication, I believe there is sophistication in all of these different kinds of things that need to be looked at. And that's why I, for example, say you need to. And by the way, I wanted to mention real quick because mindset, as we were just discussing, is so important to us. We actually give people they don't need to pay us anything. We give them a mindset manual that I wrote so that they can actually work on mindset and watch our videos to see what we mean by getting clear on mindset. But what I really don't like is these extremes, right? You either over leverage or you're supposed to pay in cash. You're either speculating on a massive increase in value or real estate investing is not even worth considering. These extremes. This is kind of a little bit like we seem to be going in society to always try to look for the black and white, left and right, up and down. Everything is like binary choice. And I believe especially in real estate is such a broad field. Yes, we have narrowed it down to a particular approach, to a particular strategy that we recommend and we have good reason for it. But I'm the last person who would say, okay, if you feel you want to rather do multifamily apartment. Yeah, that's not my strategy. But I know folks I would call friends I can directly to. If you want to do something in syndication or with Reeds, I know folks I can directly to. And I don't do this in a disappointed way. But there are so many people out there, even like bigger picture, say, if you're not in the stock market in this super rally that we've had for the last 12 years, even with COVID then you're dumb or you're not the right person. For me, there is so much, there are so many layers. That's. For me, the worst thing is that people try to turn everything into a binary choice. And I really hope that we can, you know, get away from that.

Yeah, yeah. Scott Todd, does that, does that resonate with you?

Yeah, I think that a lot of times, I think, you know, Mark, I think a lot of times, and we see this with our own coaching students as we see, like, a lot of times people think it's one way or the other. Right. Like, it's got to be this way or that way. And the reality is that you got to look at the situation and make decisions, but it doesn't always have to be all or none. Right. Like, that's a big deal, that all or none piece. And I think that the approach, no matter what you're doing, we talked about this before. No matter what you're doing, doing nothing is not an option. You got to do something and just keep your feet moving.

Yeah. And if I may comment on that, Scott, there's also a tendency that people make basically decisions based on these kind of pieces of information. So I oftentimes deal with people who approach me who take advantage of that complimentary strategy session that we are offering on the website. And when I talk to them, they say, well, I read about it. I saw some videos or blog articles or whatever, and I'm interested, but I think it's not for me. And when I say, why not? They say, well, I live in New York or I live in Seattle or I live in San Francisco, and the properties here are so expensive, there's no way. I can barely pay for my place. There's no way that I could invest in something. Right. And where I'm saying, well, this is part of our strategy to say, yeah, but what about other places where it's way more affordable and where you can get all the services that you need to have a successful investment without having to be there? Right. So this. This goes into that binary selection as well, even within real estate, where people say, I believe that the only way I can ever invest in real estate is within like an hour's worth of driving range around my. My current location, which is, in my view, absolutely not true.

Yeah, yeah. You know, I. I totally agree with what you're saying. I want to go back to mindset, because, you know, Scott and I talk about this all the time, especially with our coaching clients, because we really feel like in coaching, it's like 10% how to, and it's 90% kind of getting out of your own way. Right. You know, being comfortable with being uncomfortable and growing in this way. So how do you help people get out of their comfort zone, start working on this big, hairy, audacious goal that they have and, you know, get out of their own way and just execute?

Well, one of the things that I find is there that were two things that kind of directly combined with each other. The one kind of more as a Result is habits. And the other thing is some selfishness. And that may sound weird, but what I mean by that is I, for example, help and try to convince people that they should look at themselves and their accomplishment first, all the way to the point to say pay yourself first. You may have heard this from other people or read about it. There is this philosophy to say, say, and I'm actually a subscriber to that, take the first 10% of everything that comes in and put it into your accumulation account and then do all the rest. And a lot of people initially struggle a little bit with it, but they have gotten so used to managing their money so that it just barely ends up to be enough at the end of the month. If I say I take 10% away at the beginning and you have 90% to manage, you just manage that. What the habit part then actually does is as you see your accumulation account, which is the money that you're ultimately going to use to make the investments. And a lot of people, especially, like I said, West Coast, east coast, or anywhere coastal, think it needs to be hundreds of thousands of dollars, when in reality, for a single family home in the Midwest, at $100,000 range, you really only need about $20,000 to do your first investment. So it's not a huge massive number of months or years away with two people doing the 10% pay yourself first approach that I recommend, you can be there anywhere between nine and 12 months to buy your first house. And if you don't have a huge amount of real estate in investing experience, and even with when you work with us and qualification and all that stuff, it's not that unusual that it takes six to eight months anyway. So while you're doing that accumulation, you're getting yourself ready to actually make that purchase. But the point is, what's interesting, what I've seen over and over and over, first people say I can't do it. And then they kind of getting forced a little bit by the coach and mentor to do it anyway, because I keep them accountable. Have you done it? Show me that you've done it, where is it in the account? And stuff like that. But after three, four, five months, two things happen. Number one, it becomes a habit. And number two, there is this really strong energy and emotion to say, wow, look, the numbers are increasing. I can actually do it. And people are actually asking me, should I maybe do 15%, should I maybe do 70? And I start then actually switching to say, well, first I had to convince you to do 10, and now you want to do more, which is on the one hand great, but you can also overdo it, right? So steady as she goes is kind of oftentimes the right philosophy, but that's really one of the big things is how interesting it is that first you need to be convinced to do something and as soon as you see the results to be positive, that habit kind of makes you almost crave to see the results even faster than they would otherwise occur. So that goes then also for those people who say, maybe I should start another gig or so forth on the side to create more income. And it's always a question, okay, so should I then put all the money from that into this accumulation account or only part of it? And that is ultimately a decision that people have. And if you spin this a little bit more forward and say, okay, what do I do with the passive income? That amount is also accelerating your accumulation account. So when people ask me, okay, how does this work to go from one investment maybe in nine to 12 months when we first start, to a real portfolio, is that when passive income comes in money that you didn't have before, it accelerates your accumulation and therefore means the second house may take nine months, the third house may take six months, and then you might be able to buy one or two every year. Right? So that in and of itself is basically a success path that can really be invigorating, energizing and make people passionate about it. And then they really hooked. I mean, it's, you know, if you've ever been in this, in this floor to build your portfolio and you have realized that you don't have to have hundreds of thousands of dollars besides the fact that you're also spreading the risk, right? I always say you have a choice in San Francisco or in San Diego, where I live, to have $500,000 house and you need to rent it for $5,000 to meet the 1% rule, or you buy five $100,000 houses, how likely is it that somebody is going to pay you 900, $950,000 rent for a nice three bedroom, two bath house? That's very likely when you have five for the same amount of money. If one for a little while is vacant for whatever reason, you still have the other four. If your house on the coast is empty, you screw. Right? So there are many, many other things that come into play. But this initial part is get your mindset around, you can do it. Here's a formula, how you can do it. And be aware that the number that you're trying to reach, that first, $20,000 and is not that hard to reach, especially if you're not just by yourself, but you have a spouse or a wife or something like that. Right. So. And as soon as you see it coming, like the numbers on the bank statement, people try all kinds of ways to get to that 20,000 faster.

Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, your mentorship, this podcast has been phenomenal. But now we're at that point in the podcast where we're going to put you on the spot one more time and ask you for your tip of the week. A website, a resource, a book, something else actionable for the art of passive income listeners to go improve their businesses, improve their lives. What do you got?

Well, my tip of the week is the book from John so Foric called the Wealthy Gardener. I think it's a really seminal book. It gave me a huge amount of input and anybody who is looking about how can I get my mindset and my approach and my thinking about wealth and money and life in the right direction? I would say John did a phenomenal job to write that book.

Okay, great. What was your biggest takeaway from the Wealthy Gardener?

The biggest takeaway is that steady discipline is actually the path to success.

Steady discipline is the path to success.

The steady part of, you know, doing the same thing over and over. Even if everybody says you're a fool or who are you? Or why do you think you can do it? And discipline in the sense of really having a structure, you can do 20 different things over and over and over without a structure and never get anywhere. But if you establish a certain structure, which in our case we try to help people to establish, which shortens the time for success for them. Right. That's mentoring for me is I take my experience and make it available to other people so they don't have to make the same mistakes we made or I made. Right. But then when you have that structure to just be disciplined and keep applying it, like I said, you know, you put your 10% away every time a penny or a DOL or $100 comes in. And that discipline combined with the structure of why you're doing it will make you successful even if everybody else says, mark, why would you ever be in real estate? Invest. And I can tell you, and you probably had that same experience. There are plenty of people out there who can't tell you what to do, but they tell you for sure what you're doing is wrong.

No, I love it. You know, it reminds me of if you've ever saw the movie Shawshank. Redemption. And the main character is chipping away. Chipping away to get to his freedom. And it takes, I don't know, 17 years, but he does it with this little rock hammer. Hopefully that wasn't a spoiler. Who hasn't seen Shawshank Redemption?

I haven't really?

No, I'm just kidding.

All right. See?

All right, it's not a spoiler. Alright, so before we get to Scott Todd's tip of the week, I just want to, you know, give a little shout out to our, our hosts are, you know, people sponsoring our podcast today, which is of course flight school. Learn how the next 16 weeks can literally transform your life. Start building that passive income machine. But go up the mountain of land investing quickly, safely, efficiently with Scott Todd as your sherpa, someone who's done it thousands of times. And next thing you know, your passive income exceeds your fixed expenses with no renters, no rehabs, no renovations, no rodents. How do you learn more? Go tolandgeek.com training get on a free consultation call thelandgeek.com training okay, Scott Todd, what's your tip of the week Mark?

Check out this book right here. It's called you next five moves.

Okay.

Okay, next five moves. Master the art of business strategy. And I don't know, I found it to be pretty cool so far. I'm still going through it but the author is basically has a YouTube channel for entrepreneurs and you know, basically he walks you through the the ability to gain clarity, strategy, build strategy, think about your business for from growth and to gather the skills that you need in order to implement and execute and bring it all together. And I think what it comes back down to is a lot about what we talked about on today's call too, which is most importantly, consistency.

Right.

Like you can do anything when you do it consistently. I think that's where a lot of people get in trouble is they're not consistent. Even though we tell them mailing and marketing every day. What's every day? He meant every other day, right?

All right, I love it. I've got couple books to read now. Wealthy gardener and your next five moves. You know, it's funny, this guy's like got the biggest YouTube channel for entrepreneurs. I've never heard of him. Patrick Bet David, have you heard of this guy before?

No.

Shows you how much we're on YouTube.

Listen, you know what, you can say whatever you want on the Internet.

That's right.

We got the biggest channel for land investors right here.

We do, we do have the biggest channel for land investors. And you know, these are guys good tips, right? But one of them is really going to make you wealthy. And my tip of the week is going to do that. Go to idealwealthgrower.com idealwealthgrower.com There's a ton of information there. Start building your wealth. Start changing your mindset. It's all there. It's all there. So please do that. I want to thank the listeners, remind them the only way, the only way we're going to get a quality of guests like an actual Meyerhofer to come on this podcast. If you use three little favors, you got to subscribe, you got to rate, you got to review the podcast, send a screenshot of that review to support thelandgeek.com we're going to send you the $97 wholetailing course, how to double your money, 30 days or less for free. So please do that. Dr. Axel Meyerhofer, are we good?

Absolutely. And thank you so much for having me, Mark and Scott.

Thank you, Scott. Todd, are we good?

We're good, Mark.

All right, let's do this. One, two, three. Let freedom ring. Not bad.

Oh, we've never had anybody laugh at us now.

Just kidding.

It was, I think it was a very like.

Yeah, Scott, there was laugh with you, not at you.

Yeah, I felt that.

I'm just laughing.

All right, thanks, everybody.

Thank you.