How you know you've made it:

You get to stop doing business with assholes.

No asshole clients.

No asshole partners.

No asshole investors.

In the early days, when you're hungry, you have to do what you have to do.

Bend over backwards for customers.

Deal with disrespectful partners.

Take investments from folks who don't have the same vision as you do and bend the terms to their liking.

As you build enough experience and wealth this slowly shifts.

And you can start firing the bad customers.

Breaking up with the bad partners.

And buying out the bad investors.

This is different than F U money.

F U money is the next phase...

It happens a few million later when you become one of the assholes.

Tip:

Get F U money but don't become an asshole.

This transformation happens through leverage.

When we start, we have none. Others have it all.

You have no negotiation power because they have everything YOU need and YOU are a commodity.

As a real estate entrepreneur you need a certain mindset to win.

From sourcing deals to dealing with bankers to deploying capital...

There are certain attributes that make you BETTER at creating long term wealth.

A thread 👇👇👇

RE is all about generating what we call YIELD.

Yield is the return on our precious capital.

And it comes in two forms:

Cashflow - the cold hard cash it puts in your pocket.

&

Appreciation - the additional VALUE to a buyer or a banker above and beyond what you paid.

And before we start. A note on YIELD.

It's getting harder and harder to find.

Capital is plentiful and yield is scarce.

Folks are chasing deals with less and less of it and they are taking more risk to get the same amount of it.

The amount of yield you get from a real estate deal is all relative to the amount of risk you take.

A risky deal deserves more upside and thus more yield.

A safe deal deserves less upside and thus less yield.

The winners think about one thing only:

Risk-adjusted yield

Successful real estate folks have a long term mindset.

The folks who win in real estate don't buy-in to the "life is short" mantra.

They know that life is long. And they are fine to do work now and get paid later.

TIME is what makes these folks wealthy.

They get paid to WAIT.

Entrepreneurship culture in America is all messed up and it’s a shame.

TechCrunch. Product Hunt. Shark Tank.

It’s all about new ideas. Changing the world. Innovation. 0 to 1. Blue ocean. Venture capital and exits and scalability.

And ITS ALL A LIE.

You ask the average american who a real entrepreneur is they’ll say Jobs, Musk or Zuck.

We read their books and idolize them and hang on their every word.

So the brightest among us think they need a moat. A new idea. Something revolutionary.

Were setting them up for FAILURE.

I took an entrepreneurship course at Cornell in 2011. 24 kids with new ideas. Big plans. Pitch decks looking for series As.

I was #25 with a regular old-fashioned business.

When professors asked me what my differentiator was I didn’t have an answer.

I saw a company out there doing sweaty, non scalable work. They were terrible at it.

I started by trading my time for money. Bought a $1500 cargo van. Used the things I had in my life to make some profit.

I wasn’t trying to educate a customer base.

I wasn’t following my passion.

I didn’t need funding or a network.

I wasn’t competing against brilliant folks from Stanford.

I want trying to prove a concept.

I wasn’t emotionally attached to anything except adding value.

The hardest thing about entrepreneurship, real estate, or anything else worth doing:

You have to be able to look at incomplete information...

Or a complicated problem without a clear-cut solution...

And make a good decision on which way to proceed.

A thread 👇👇👇

There is nobody who can take you by the hand and lead you through a step by step guide to win.

Everybody's journey is different.

The 1,000 important decisions I made to win will look nothing like yours.

This is why success is so hard to teach..

Because there is one skill you need to have to win:

Resourcefulness.

The ability to find what you need and figure out solutions to problems that there are no correct answers to.

Life isn't a textbook.

You can't turn three pages back and look up the answer. You can't ask a teacher.

When you are an entrepreneur there is nobody out there who can help you answer problems except YOU.

And this is the opposite of what most people are used to doing.

High school and college teach you to comply and look up the answer and memorize. Google gives us answers to any question we have at our finger tips.

Except what to do when a problem in your business arises.

I've been serious about personal development for 10+ years.

But not just reading...

I've put the concepts to work - we sold our business for 7 figures and built a real estate portfolio worth $100 million +.

Here are a few of my top takeaways:

20% of your customers will produce 80% of your profit.

20% of your customers will also produce 80% of your headache.

The sooner you learn THESE AREN'T THE SAME CUSTOMERS the sooner you can grow, scale AND experience less stress.

99% of people network all wrong.

With their hand out.

Help me. Do this for me. Introduce me. Me me me me!

It’s not about you!

The way to network well:

Get good at something. Put in the work. Add value everywhere you go. Then watch your network explode.

The 4 quadrants of time management concept changed my life.

Urgent + important is where stressed out owners spend their time.

Not urgent + important is where you add long term value to your company and your life. Its also the easiest area to push to the back-burner and ignore.

3 keys to hiring and managing great employees:

#1 Raise your prices (so you can afford them)

#2 Simplify the job so average employees can thrive (and killer employees can crush it)

#3 Give them praise in public (it means just as much as money)

I'm not gonna lie.

My success is 95% attributable to running with the right people and being in the right place at the right time.

The lucky part for me:

It’s a flywheel and it’s all about momentum.

I’ve learned a lot from those folks. I’ve learned a lot about business and management and real estate.

My network is growing.

And I’ll continue to get even more opportunities and meet more people.

My advice:

Surround yourself with great people, add value to their lives so they keep you around, and focus on spotting opportunities.

Do the not fun, hard, sweaty work early so you can build up capital. Then work smart and keep the flywheel going.

And the thing you need to realize:

50% of people are negative, incompetent, mean and take more than they add.

Like crabs. They pull you back down into the bucket. Instead of lifting you up to help you win.

Cut the crabs (even the family crabs) out of your life.

The other 50% have an abundance mindset.

They don’t complain or blame.

They believe you winning is good for them. So they want you to win and will do things to help you win because they know it comes back around.

These are the folks you need to find, help and spend time with.

A hill I'll die on:

95% of entrepreneurs should forget about technology (a few big fish and a lot of sophisticated fishermen) and focus on small business (small fish everywhere and really crappy fishermen).

A THREAD:

Be like water.

Take the path of least resistance.

The goal of every entrepreneur should be:

#1. Gain financial freedom

and

#2. Maximize probability of achieving #1

Because when you have financial freedom your world opens up.

You can start doing what makes you happy.

And you can positively impact a lot more people with project #2, 3, 4 etc. You're in a position to try to change the world if you have financial freedom.

So why don't more folks think about opportunities with more weight added to #2?

The odds part. The risk. The probability.

The amount of small businesses in America that absolutely print money and still do business like it’s 1985 is astounding.