Terrence Burner is the CEO and co-founder of Menace, where he turns business owners into CEOs and helps them create massive predictable revenue by implementing game-changing practices 🔥
Terrence Burner is the CEO and co-founder of Menace, where he turns business owners into CEOs and helps them create massive predictable revenue by implementing game-changing practices 🔥
All right, everyone. Welcome to the real estate game changer show. I'm your host, Mike McKay based in the Jacksonville, Florida market. And each and every week we do this show with people who are changing the game of real estate all over the country. For anyone in the Jacksonville market or thinking about getting into it, feel free to reach out to us if you need any help or connections in the market. We still are a very active buyer in Jacksonville, especially of mobile homes on land. So wholesalers, if you have any of those, feel free to send us those our way. We love flipping those. So let's kick it off this week. Our guest is Terrence. Terrence. Welcome to the show.
Terrence:Hey man, happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
Mike:Absolutely. So for the people who don't know you, can you share with us kind of how you got into the real estate business and how that's brought you to where you are today?
Terrence:Yeah, for sure. I got started. So my background was I was a financial advisor for a long time. So I was really fortunate that my first mentor, when I got into that business, He ran things how he wanted to. And what I mean is like typically with financial advisors, whomever they work for, like they're pretty much told the strategies and products they can offer. And they're kind of pushed to offer those things. Well, my mentor he just wanted to do things a little bit different. And one of those things was having people take a portion of their retirement and allocate it into real estate. And so instead of buying like a REIT, which would be like buying shares. Of a real estate fund. We actually started teaching seminars on how people could own physical real estate. And that just took off. And we started working with a company that helped us with that. And they would go find the houses. The contractors that would fix them up. They would get them essentially turnkey ready. And then we would sell them to our clients. And, they were doing five, 600 of those pretty consistently every single year. And then I got into some really high net worth clients and I started looking at their portfolios and I saw, man, these guys, they don't have 401ks or IRAs. Like that's not what they're doing with their money. These rich guys are doing something different. And so I learned from them. I started seeing these guys that were worth 50 million, 200 million, and they owned, auto malls and big apartment complexes. And so I just started asking questions and they did it because they were smart. They didn't want to send all the money that they'd spent all this time making to the government. And so they would put them in assets where they could depreciate and obviously have all the tax advantages. And so it was at that point, I was like, man, I'm done with this traditional financial advisor thing. And we started doing real estate. I mean, the thing about it is for the most part, you know why it's not performing or why it is performing. I could just wrap my head around it. got a house and it's fixed up and somebody's living in it and I'm not making money, it's because they're not paying me rent. So at least I know. The problem, or I got a house that's fixed up I don't have any money coming in because it's vacant so I can solve that problem And so I always could look at that and say man, I know You can't control most things in investments but I could put some stuff out there and figure out how to put a tenant in a property. So it's like I think people when they own real estate they forget that there are all these other problems with all these other investment methods like you could own stock and Apple, Tesla, whatever, and it can go up and down and you have no idea why. And you have zero control. And so I liked the whole real estate thing because I could at least put my finger on the problem and then go to work on it. So. We started just doing a bunch of deals in the Midwest and got to where we were doing, between two to 300 deals out there. And that was that. So I don't do deals out in the Midwest anymore. It kind of is morphed into a real estate fund where we build big multifamily projects and stuff. But that's how I fell into it and kept falling, I guess you would say.
Mike:Gotcha. And we were talking offline a little bit, you said you've probably wholesaled about, I call it a thousand houses or more in, in kind of your real estate career.
Terrence:Yeah, it's hard to say how many, cause I had a unique situation where. Right as I was getting, I'd gotten into Indianapolis and there was this whole big fiasco that happened where there was this company that basically was scamming people out there. And so, they were selling these houses per, you know, as though they were renovated, but they never actually renovated them. And they were taking people's money and they were trying to catch up, but they never did. Anyways, it's kind of a Ponzi scheme type thing. And I got connected to Some people that own, five, 600 houses that had never been renovated and I worked to deal with them and they let me wholesale their entire portfolio. It was crazy how it all happened. Anyways that's really where probably half my deals came from, came on the back of a really bad situation. Like the guy's in prison right now, the whole deal, like it was as bad as you would think it was that bad. So we've done a thousand plus wholesale deals, probably flipped, I don't know, a couple hundred houses. Enough I've got my teeth kicked in on quite a few deals and made lots of money on plenty of other ones.
Mike:Sure. Do you guys still wholesale or are you fully kind of transitioned over to the fund development of multifamily at this
Terrence:We're pretty much at the end. I stopped wholesaling probably six, eight months ago, but people still float me their deals. Cause I've been out there for so long. Like I think I flipped four deals randomly to my list last month and made like an extra 40 grand, so other than when people. Bring weird stuff. I'm pretty much in shutting it down I've only done deals like that For people that I just have known for a long time and was trying to help them for a second But I'm pretty much done with all of that.
Mike:Yeah. So what made you decide to shut down that business and focus really on the multifamily?
Terrence:That's a great question I got a lot of flack for it too because I got that business where it was highly profitable Like adding AI and all the automation. Our profit margins just got crazy in that business. I mean we would do Four and a half million in revenue and net on that was 2 million, cause we just had so much automation in AI and what happened was, is I had a buddy who called me and said, Hey I need another three and a half million raised to do this deal. Long story short, I negotiated a piece of the general partnership on it and some cash. And I went and raised that money. In one sitting and I was factoring in everything I made about 120 grand in cash up front. And then what my piece was that I carried into the project, I was like, man, this was over a seven figure payday on something. And you just start to factor in, I'm like, man, my average wholesale deal is$22,000. I'd have to flip a gazillion little houses to make that same money. For me it just immediately flipped my mental switch where I was like, man, I need to get into these bigger deals and I haven't in cause my buddy, I did that with, he's done probably 300 million in development the last few years. And he saw how quickly I raised the money. So he's like, Hey, why don't you come partner with me permanently on this stuff? And so when you just look at your return on energy, your return on time, and I saw what it was, it was just a no brainer I was never going to scale that wholesale business to a thousand deals a year. It was never going to turn into a 20 million, 30 million a year business. Just wholesaling. I just knew that I didn't want to do that. And I don't know very many operations out there that are running that kind of wholesale business. But there's way more upside over here. We're doing a project right now. We're raising money for the projects, 50 million. So, it was just kind of a moment where I realized like there wasn't. Huge, Huge upside. There was a lot of money, but then, I was never going to turn it into really more than it already was. And so I just said, let's just get rid of it and go do this new thing in a new way where it, sir, better serves your talents. It's kind of an accident. You just start, you look at it, you're like return on energy, return on time, return on happiness, return on, your dreams, what you want, all that stuff. And the wholesale thing just for me, didn't make any sense anymore. So, I don't know if that answers your question in a roundabout thing, it was an accident. I didn't plan for it at all.
Mike:So you said something interesting before, and I know you're not really focused on that business anymore, but there are a lot of people listening to this show wholesale. So maybe they can take a piece of advice here. You mentioned that you were able to really get that business tremendously profitable. You said from what some automated systems and AI, can you talk about that a little bit more?
Terrence:Yeah. So we built some software. I didn't even know the whole wholesale world even existed. I showed up to a Can't Clothe the Air event in California and realized it was full of wholesalers and that the people that were on the stage, I was already doing more deals than them. But I didn't understand what that whole thing was. It's because everybody goes after the same buyers. They try and get the same discounts on properties. And so there's just massive amounts of competition around there. Well, because of my financial planning background, I went after the guy that was running a CPA practice. It was making$300,000 a year, wanted to invest in real estate, but didn't have confidence on how to find deals, vet deals, work with contractors, get property management in place. Do the planning and all of that and so we just created this whole operation around those kinds of people and Our buyers would pay top dollar for deals because they're more concerned about cash flow and the tax benefits. We weren't selling to flippers that were trying to get 60 percent of ARV and grind you down every last penny on your wholesale commission and just freaking wipe the floor with you. They don't care if you make any money. built a business where, somebody that came in, if they didn't make at least a quarter million dollars a year, we wouldn't work with them. And if they were going to come in and work with us, they had to get their LLC put together. We went through and had a CPA firm that would set them, their tax strategies up the right way. We would put a trust in place. We would basically handle all of the complicated stuff and they would pay us a fee for that. And then, it'd be between five and$15,000 in the end, it was 15 grand. Somebody would have to pay us. To basically look at our list because we would only push our deals to those people And so what that allowed me to do is like I could go to other wholesalers That had great deals and I was their buyer and I would just flip them To my buyers'cause I sourced these guys off YouTube ads.
Mike:You sourced your buyers off of YouTube
Terrence:yeah. So I sourced all my buyers off YouTube ads. I got really great at marketing. And I realized the big problem in the wholesale space wasn't just finding deals, it was finding deals that you could match to buyers. And I saw that everybody was out there trying to find the same deal, 50, 60, 70 cents on the dollar of arv and they were all going about it the same way. And so when I figured out a way to source my buyers, those guys became my marketers. And so I could still flip deals to my buyers for, on average 22, 000 a wholesale deal. And a lot of the wholesalers that I would end up flipping those deals from, I would train them on what information they would need to have ready to bring me a deal. And so they would bring me. They would already bring me the pictures. They would already bring me comps. They were bringing me the rent estimates They were bringing me everything and so we could underwrite a deal in like three and a half minutes Because we would teach them how to bring us deals And then because we were just focused on generating buyers all the time We already knew who the buyers were on the deals that we were looking for and so we would just match them up
Mike:Got it. So you guys weren't really doing any direct to seller.
Terrence:We were. I sourced a lot of my stuff off Facebook ads. I ran Facebook ads to get direct seller leads and that would funnel into my software that I'd created. It would automatically follow up with them, send them emails, texts, and when I did that in March of 2020. Like, I think I put the first version of that in place with the software we created and it probably saved me a quarter million dollars in salaries just by putting in some tight follow up because I didn't need those people to manually do all of that stuff anymore. That makes sense. So since then, we've like, we've got a software company that basically creates automated offers on the MLS for wholesalers. So they don't have to burn a bunch of money on marketing. It sends all the letters of intent out, does all the follow up, everything automatically. And that idea was created because of what I put in place of my wholesale business in 2020.
Mike:got it. Okay. And is there like an AI component to that as well?
Terrence:Yeah, definitely. And it's like fully conversational. They immediately reach out. It answers all the frequently asked questions, overcomes objections, qualifies them. And then we'll automatically book calls, we'll ask them for, pictures, data, we'll do some of the underwriting. And then at the point when it does all of that, then you attach your human component. Now your people are spending time on, something that actually has legs and can become a deal and generate revenue.
Mike:got it. So those would be the sellers coming through Facebook ads. They'd kind of go into this automated conversational funnel. And then once it's really like something that needs a salesperson. You bring in salesperson in at that point.
Terrence:So we run that from Facebook and then we'd run a different version of that for our buyers that we would source through YouTube ads. I spent probably, I don't know, a million bucks over the last couple of years, sourcing just my buyers through YouTube ads and because we created a model where they would essentially come in and pay us to look at our list cause we'd help them create the LLCs, the trust, do the tax planning. It made it so that we could advertise profitably. So I could build a buyer's list. Essentially being paid for by my buyers.
Mike:Right. Cause they would pay you the setup fee and then additional profits come as you sell them
Terrence:Yeah, so it took the bite off, But like if people that already have a decent wholesale operation. It was nice for us because we already knew the types of deals we were looking for because we had the buyers and so We weren't locking stuff up that we couldn't move.
Mike:Yeah. You said like those other pieces though that they needed help on right the construction the Property management, were you guys doing that as well like full turnkey or how'd you handle that?
Terrence:Yeah. So, before March of 2020, we were essentially full turnkey. We would buy the properties, renovate it, get it tenanted. And then somebody could come in and they could get leveraged by through a loan. The problem was is in March of 2020, what happened is I had two partners that I had bought out at that time. And I'd pushed a ton of our liquidity out because I had this big package of houses that were already with the lender, already had the appraisals done, already had close dates set. And then all of a sudden this thing happened, COVID and the lender said, yeah, we're not going to close on these. And we were like 10 days, 14 days out from closing. And I'm like, why these are dentists. They've got tons of cash, it's like, well, the government just told them they had to shut their business down right now. And so we don't feel comfortable. We're going to press pause and push these loans out. Well, I got caught in a pickle because I just bought out my partners and I think I was down to my last quarter million dollars. And when you're running a business that, you're$120,000 a month just in overhead, that goes very quick. Like you're on the brink of being gone, right? And so just some fear set in and I came home to my wife and I'm like, we're screwed. I just told you this was a great deal. We bought out our partners. Basically things are going to change for us. It's going to be amazing. And I told her that two weeks prior to that and now I'm coming back saying just kidding life sucks right now I know you see a lot of money in the bank account what you thinks a lot of money But it ain't gonna last very long. So she just said she's like we'll go to your office get on your whiteboard and figure it out. I was like, okay I gotta go after buyers that they're just cash only I can't run this model that's dependent on banks anymore So then we just started selling the houses pre renovated. We would do all the legwork up front, get contractors out, build the scopes of work and all of that. And they would buy the houses pre renovated. We would make less money, but we would make it faster. It would take us four to five months to make money when we would buy houses before. So this new model like we could find a deal and close on it and have cash in two weeks. And so basically just selling them pre renovated saved our butt and it became a much better model. So we essentially just said, Hey, here's the deal. Here's what we think it will cost in renovations. You can buy it. And then we would just wholesale it and then we would connect them with contractors and the contractors would fix the houses.
Mike:Yeah. And how involved in that process though, the construction, would you be besides to get any initial scopes of work?
Terrence:Yeah, we'd have a team that would go out, take pictures of the projects. We were pretty involved the downside to that was You take somebody that like that doesn't have a lot of real estate experience Like I remember this guy we had finished his house handed it off to property management They had it for like a month and some raccoons got in and just messed up the gutter boards crawled into the attic And he came back and thought that we should pay to have it fixed. And he was nasty. And, he's like, I'll get on the better business bureau if you don't pay for this. And we were showing him the pictures that it was done. His property management company had accepted the house. All the work was completed. We weren't going to fix it. And he was still upset. And to this day, he went on the better business bureau and still kind of trashed us, we rebuttaled it and it got taken down eventually, but. My point with that is, is the downside is you're working with people that don't live in real estate all day. And so you, there, there is some of that you have to deal with. It's not fun, But the people don't have realistic expectations.
Mike:How responsible for, were you guys for the construction, right? Like, even cause you pre sold it, but like, are you still responsible for getting it to the finish line?
Terrence:Yeah, we would make sure it happened. Our agreement was we were consultants. It was a consulting agreement with them and it said basically this is an estimate in any given time, material prices could rise, labor costs could increase. And so you have all of that in there, which is what exactly what happened. If you remember after COVID, material prices went up, labor prices went up, all of that stuff. So, yeah, we would help them cause they were buying deals where they didn't live. And sometimes people were happy, most of the time, 85 percent of the deals were fine. 15 percent of the time you had to do a little bit of a difficult situation. But that's real estate, you want everybody to like you? Sell ice cream. That's the business you should be in, real estate's messy. There are problems to solve and things to do. Then there's opportunity.
Mike:So, how did you guys build that large of a network of contractors to be able to handle like that many deals, like reliably?
Terrence:We just had been in the area for a long time. I built the first cruise just in the back of Ubers asking people who they knew. And then the thing is a small business makes small problems seem big. What I mean is when you're doing a house or two here and there, you can't keep great contractors busy. So they're gonna go out and take other jobs instead of just working for you. So when we got to where we could pull in these great crews and keep them busy all the time, then we had some consistency. And so when we got to where we were doing five, six, seven, 10, 12 deals a month. You're this hub now where great people want to come to you because they know that you have work that's not gonna make'em rich, but work that is gonna show up week in and week out. Right? We weren't the, you're not gonna, we're not the little old lady you're gonna gouge, putting in tile in their in shower. Like we're not those people. But what I found would happen in winter months, especially in Indy, is. It would slow down and so you'd have a lot of these great guys that would work for other crews. They would go on unemployment for two to four months every single winter. So, yeah, they may be making 35 an hour when things are good, but when you factor in they're on unemployment for two to four months, they're not really making 35 an hour anymore, they're making whatever 20 something an hour. And so we just by staying in business and realizing some of those things, you could go to those guys and say, Hey! Boom, here's an opportunity to feed your family all year long and to make more overall year around. Yes, you're going to make less in that eight month window, nine month window that you're used to making more for, but you're also not making any money for two to four months. So like you just hang around and you kind of get known for paying your guys and paying them on time and good people come to you and you have crappy people that show up to. That burn you, that steal money, that say they're doing stuff they're not doing, blah, all the stuff every real estate investor.
Mike:Yeah. It sounds like that you guys did not handle the property management at that point. You would hand it off to a third party.
Terrence:Oh no, I made that
Mike:Oh, okay.
Terrence:You want to talk about the worst business on planet to be in? Man, I would keep my worst enemy from opening a property management company. That's a thankless job. That business sucks. Yeah, we hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of doors that we managed. terrible. We sold that business off and got It was horrible. The very nature of property management is you're not dealing with happy people. Like, if you're hearing from people, it's because there's a problem. There's no sunshine and rainbows anywhere in property It's it takes the guts out of you. That's, it's a horrible
Mike:yeah. No one ever calls a property manager to tell him good job.
Terrence:Yeah, no, they're like, oh, thank you. Nothing's wrong with my house. They're not submitting work orders saying just wanted to let you know today My house is in perfect working order and i'm super happy with everything. not not what happens Yeah, terrible terrible business.
Mike:Yeah. Let's talk about that sourcing of buyers. I think that's pretty interesting. So you ran these YouTube ads and I mean, usually the people who buy I guess you're not really turnkey, but you're similar audience. I'm guessing, right. There's no, not full time real estate investors like your normal wholesaler selling to are you like targeting based on income or something on YouTube to make sure you get people who fit your criteria? I don't even know if you can do that. I just, how are you going about finding them?
Terrence:Yeah, I mean, they're just they're on YouTube. They're on Facebook. And so the biggest thing is your message number one thing that attracts Detract somebody from you is your messaging. So like, we would have messaging to say Hey, are you making a quarter million dollars a year? You're pretty successful You've seen all these people on real estate, you know There's a lot of money and a lot of tax advantages, but you don't have the time to find the deals Mess around with contractors, deal with tenants, but you want to own real estate. And so then we would just walk them through what that process looked like. So we came up with a method that we use called the profit squared method, which was passive real estate optimized for income and time. And so then we would just really, all I looked at was I said, what are all of the things that are keeping these kinds of people from investing? And we just went to work and figured out how to solve those problems. And so we didn't sound like anybody else in the space. In the end we weren't turnkey to where you were paying top dollar anymore. You were still getting a deal. So we weren't full turnkey, but you still weren't having to deal with a lot of the headaches. But that's also why I wanted to get into the fund model is because I realized there's so much money out there for those kinds of people, but there's a reason that they're putting their money in REITs and mutual funds. It's because they don't have time to deal with anything. Cause even what though we would do everything, they would still have to communicate with their property manager. So if there was a tenant turn, they still would have to approve over 200 worth of work. And so now you're still intruding back into their life. And you've got a client that's a dentist that owns five offices. Makes a couple million bucks a year. He doesn't want to get bothered over 500 bucks, right. And so it was obnoxious because we couldn't just step in and do all of that because we weren't technically partners. We didn't own the property anymore. And so there was kind of a little bit of an alignment issue where after they bought the property, we weren't fully aligned anymore. And so with the fund model, it was like, man, we could go buy the same kind of deals. But now we're partners and we're aligned the same way. We just split the profits with our investors, 50, 50. They get paid a 6 percent return and then we split the profits. And so if the deal is not a good deal, we're not making anything. So guess what we don't do. We make sure we don't do those kinds of deals. And we get all of the financing. We handle all the insurance. If there's issues, we handle it all. And so I just, I liked that better because it got rid of some of the headaches that I could see we were dealing with that just were obnoxious, that we're never going to go away. Because it's real estate crap happens, stuff's going to happen. And if you don't own the property, you can't just step in and do it without getting approval from somebody that actually owns the property. And they're annoyed that they have to give you approval to deal with a 400 problem.
Mike:Yeah. For sure.
Terrence:So there's just some of that.
Mike:Yeah. And we were talking offline a little bit, you were down in Jacksonville for a while doing quite a few deals down here. You want to talk about your experience in the Jacksonville market?
Terrence:Yeah. I mean, I did all my stuff in the ghetto. Cause the guy who I had all those properties, those 600, 700 deals up in Indy. He had a portfolio of about 300 that he had in Jacksonville. And so basically that's why I ended up in Jacksonville was to liquidate his portfolio. So, I kind of partnered with him and said, Hey. I know this other guy that was supposed to be doing this wasn't, we are, let me come in and do it. And it was nice because I, it's like I tied down 300 properties all at one time. And so I didn't need to go out and look for deals anywhere. Like I had my deals locked up. So it was just market for buyers make sure the rehabs got done and then just keep going,
Mike:same model, like, find the buyer first to buy it as is, and then same kind of.
Terrence:We sold some of those where the guy because he was because he didn't buy him, right? So we had like I would say hey if we let's put 20 grand into it put some paint flooring get the electrical You know basically put make the house nice And we would make him whole by doing that. And then we would still make money selling it more at a retail price to an end buyer and they could get financing on it. So there was upside for them too. Right now they could come in with 15, 000 down and own a property. So we did a bunch of that.
Mike:yeah. What year was this that you were down in Jacksonville area?
Terrence:Probably 20, I don't know, 2019, maybe. So we did, I don't know, probably 300 deals down there all in the ghetto. Just, I mean, he had people stealing from them. They were collecting rents and cash and the cash was never getting reported. I mean, when I went down there, I fired everybody from the operation. Once I figured out what was going on. And then we just put systems in place. It was a lot, it was a lot of freaking work.
Mike:Did he buy those in like a package deal originally or he acquired them one off?
Terrence:just depends, like he would buy, maybe 10 at a time or four at a time. Well, what was happening was, is he had a couple realtors that would sell him a package of 10 and they would put this bum house that needed to be just knocked over as a part of the package. And because they were supposed to be verifying everything, they would slip in a bunch of these just knucklehead deals on him just to make money on him. And I'm the one that had to find all of that out. Like he thought he bought houses that had been bulldozed. He thought he bought houses that like they were condemned by the city already. I mean. This guy just totally got raked over the coals.
Mike:geez.
Terrence:Yeah.
Mike:So now you've transitioned pretty much fully or almost fully to, is it development in multifamily or do you look at existing products too?
Terrence:Yeah, I mean we'll look at anything all the stuff that we're doing Like the project we're doing right now Is like 60 units. They're big they're ski condos, you know up in northern, Utah
Mike:Okay.
Terrence:But yeah, there's more money if you can get the dirt right create the paper lots Sometimes we'll sell the paper lots to a builder, but there's the meat is going vertical. It's always, there's also, that's where a lot of the risk is, but that's where a lot of upside is. So that's primarily what we look at doing
Mike:And how are you sourcing these deals?
Terrence:From my buddy. When you've done 300 million over four years and then people know you can perform. Like that's the thing I would tell people in real estate is. Like you want to have a never ending flow of deals and opportunities show people that you can perform you know, you get known as the guy that can go raise money, find money, do deals, make stuff happen. People will bring you stuff. You'll get opportunities that you'll see before other people. And that's just a time and, just a track record thing. Now, do you need that to be successful? No, you got to break in and find your way and grind and do all of that. But it does get easier in the terms of like deal flow and opportunities that come to you when you're known as somebody that people can count on. Doesn't mean that they don't, the flip side of that is sometimes it's like, well, it's not that you don't make mistakes either. Like. Real entrepreneurs know that's part of the deal is can you get aligned with people that are problem solvers that don't dwell on, just talking about problems, their solution oriented and that they want to do the same kinds of things that you do? Because When you align with the right people, man that's like the biggest cheat code, the only reason that I even got to get into the development side is because in March of 2020, I got really great at sourcing leads off the internet for real estate. And so my buddy who had done a bunch of development, he doesn't have those skills. And so now all of a sudden you're attractive to somebody that's already done, like he just built a 16, 000 square foot, fully custom home. I mean, I say that because, but he still only has the skills that he has, like nobody would take me seriously, in the development space, I've built 300 little homes in Indianapolis. That cost me 67, 000 a piece to build. Nobody's going to underwrite me for a 50 million project because I have no experience when it comes to that stuff. I've never ran a team. It doesn't matter. I've done a thousand little wholesale deals. The banks don't freaking care. I'm a liability to them. But, when you align and now, you can bring the skills that you have with the skills that somebody else has, now all of a sudden you're a bad man. You're dangerous. Like, he has the connections and the deal flow and the banking connections, and we have a team of 300 people on the development side. That's what he brings. But like I'm a marketer, a money raiser, my financial advisor background, like I'm not afraid to go ask people for money. I'm confident I can handle the systems, the processes, all the stuff that he has no idea how to do. And now all of a sudden you have a collaboration and a partnership that you can start talking about like, Hey, let's go do a billion dollars in deals over the next seven years. And it's like one plus one is no longer two. It's five because you get into the multiplication business when you pair certain skill sets together. So like people think you got to be good at everything in real estate. No. You got to think what are some of the most valuable skills that you can develop in real estate, become known for those things. And you'll start to bump into people that you'll see opportunities for yourself because you'll have skills that they don't have, and you'll all of a sudden start playing a bigger game because of it.
Mike:Yeah.
Terrence:I don't know if that makes any sense, but that's been true for me at least.
Mike:Yeah, no, that does make a lot of sense. So that's kind of how, so I guess like outside of doing a billion dollars in deals in the next seven years, I guess, what's your, like, what are your guys goals for like the next, call it two years in that business?
Terrence:Well, we just got a billion dollar target. That's it. And just because it's a number that I never could have fathomed growing up in a town of 2,000. Not because I've like attached money or anything to it. Like I've already made more money than I ever thought I was supposed to make growing up. Like when you build certain skills, even though you go through different periods of your life where your money can fluctuate, like your skillset to know that you can make a certain level of money that doesn't ever go away. Right. And so I can just tell you right now it's to do, get this 50 million project done and to raise 10 million bucks before the end of the year that's the immediate goal, that's.
Mike:Yeah. And you mentioned earlier return on time, return on energy, you want to elaborate like a little more, like I think about return on energy a lot, but I think that's commonly overlooked by a lot of people who are entrepreneurs. So you want to give your viewpoint of how you look at that?
Terrence:Yeah. The thing is I built businesses that I wish my mentors would have shared with me would have been to begin with the end in mind. So Stephen Covey, who wrote the seven habits for highly effective people, he's got one of his principles in there is begin with the end in mind. And I've read those books. I guess I just never paid attention to really what that meant. It would have saved me so much time, energy and heartache because you find yourself building businesses and making more money, but you're really not building them around the life that you want to have. They don't serve you in the way that you want. If I would have looked back at my wholesaling business, and this is kind of difficult because of that business, I gained a lot of skills that are even giving me other opportunities. So you can't really say I wouldn't have done it because then you wouldn't be the same person. I wouldn't have done it as long though. I wouldn't have done it as long. I would have looked and said, I think now, like I'm 80 years old, taking my last breath. What will life be about then? What kind of businesses will I've created? What will I have been happy doing? Where will I have been happy that I put my energy, my time, my resources. Like, did I just do something just to fill a gap and make some money? Sometimes you've got to do that. Don't get me wrong. Like sometimes you've got to do that, but understanding, like if I'm going to put some energy into this, is it going to produce the outcome that I would want, not just one that I'm like, well, cool, like that's better than I thought it was going to be. But like the outcome that I really want, that's like beyond my wildest dreams. And aligns with my life and my family and my kids and all that stuff. So I don't like the construction side. I don't like that side of the business. And in our fund, like my partner, that's where he loves to live. That's where he thrives. He's got the team of 300 that he manages over there. Like, I like this. I like the marketing. I like the sales. I like the talking. I like that's where I'm happy. And so I created businesses where I had to live. Every single role forever. And instead of realizing like you can just build a business and you can choose eventually what you want to do. You don't always have to do what you're doing.
Mike:Yeah. So talking about beginning with the end in mind, some people sometimes say, Oh, I don't know what the end that I want is. Right. And, that's a common response. Any advice to people for how they can go about figuring out what they really do want so that they can build something with the right end in mind.
Terrence:Yeah. Don't get stressed out about it. Like your version of that is going to change all the time. And so there's two sides of that is one people that are just always thinking, thinking, thinking, and they never do. And what happens is when you overdo and underthink, things start to shape themselves because of your experiences. Whereas, if you just overthink and underdo, you never have enough data where you can even begin to fathom what that looks like. Like you just sit back, everything's just what you think. It's what you think could happen. It's what you think it would look like. But when you go do it, then you actually know. And so now you have data from your actions that now can reshape your thinking. And it can transform the new outlook that you want for yourself. So I think like, don't be stressed out about it. Just go do go overdo the doers of the world are the ones that change the world. It's not the thinkers. It's not the freaking, guys that sit around, like there's that famous statue where the guy's just sitting. I guarantee you there's another statue where he finally gets off his butt and he goes and does what he was thinking about, so, don't get stressed out about it. It should change all the time based on your experiences and the new version of yourself that you're always recreating. You just start to see things differently. Next year, you and I hope we're not having the same conversations. We're thinking different. We're talking differently. We've built new skills that now help us realize that we can do different things that we thought were off limits. Before and so, that's the advice like don't worry so much do more worry less. Take a risk bet on yourself make some mistakes do it wrong. It's all good.
Mike:Yeah. And you built up like a fairly successful wholesale operation and there are like people who listen to the show who like that is their focus and that's what they've decided they want to do. Do you have maybe a piece of guidance that you would give them kind of looking back about that business? I mean, I know you ultimately decided to get out of it, but if they have decided that's their thing.
Terrence:Yeah, I mean the wholesale is great because I mean, where else are you gonna go and you know knock down 40 50 100 200? Grand a month, you know do it doing that Yeah, I mean, depending on where you're at, like, if you're in the very beginning, invest quickly back into the business, if you don't want to stay where you're at, invest in skills, invest in relationships, invest to get around mentors, you want to make sure that you never get stuck where you're at, get around people that are doing it bigger than you, I decided to tear down my wholesale business. Because I went to a boardroom mastermind, we can't close the air. And I got to get up and present my business. And by the second time around doing that, I realized like, this is not the business I want anymore. And those are thoughts I never had until I was around people that helped me see things differently. So wherever you're at in the business, maybe you're at the very beginning of wholesaling, you're in the middle, you're at the end. It doesn't matter. Like my advice would be getting around people that are doing it bigger and badder than you only will help you see what's possible. And we'll help shape, if you want to continue building it the way that you are, if you want to do something else or, just be open, sometimes it can just validate that you're happy where you are. You can just be like, man, I'm making 50 grand a month. I have some freedom of time, energy. Can make commitments where I want. It's a great life. There's nothing wrong with that.
Mike:For sure. Well, we're we're getting close to the end here and there's always two questions I like to ask at the end. First is a little fun, which is what's the craziest or most uncomfortable situation that you have ever experienced in a real estate deal
Terrence:Uncomfortable.
Mike:or craziest?
Terrence:When we started the property management company and I was building the team, I would go out and meet with tenants. Well, there was like an underground tenant network where it got around that I was this, this white guy from Arizona. And I started showing up to some of these houses and women would show up with just robes on and nothing else, and that was really freaking awkward. I'm just this little Mormon Christian boy from Arizona. And that was just a weird situation to be in. Yeah, it's super uncomfortable. And the contractors will laugh at me, cause it was. I remember one day we went and visited like eight houses and like five of them is the same thing, you know You show up to the first one You're like whatever she's in a robe the second one the third one the fourth one You realize that all they have on is their robe. So that was really awkward that's when I realized like man the world sometimes is out to get you in different ways. So, that was uncomfortable I also I sold having to all those houses I sold for that guy, finding out that he had bought homes that had been bulldozed. His partner had sold out from under him that realtors were scamming him. That was really hard. I mean, cause you have this six foot six guy who's 350 pounds crying in your arms because people have literally taken him for a couple million dollars doing those kinds of things to him. And he was one of the most giving awesome human beings I'd ever met. And to see that so many people. Took advantage of him was really hard. And to see that his situation created a lot of opportunity for me was really hard for me to wrestle with at first. And then my wife's like, look, you're the one guy that he can actually count on. It won't be like everyone else. So if you don't do this for him, and he gets connected with another guy, he may just do what these other guys have done to him. And so, that was really crazy. But probably between those couple of things. Some of the craziest things.
Mike:Sure. For sure. And second question is for the people who are kind of new or listening to the show, if you go back in time, when you were getting out of financial advising, getting into the real estate business full time and, looking for your first deal, knowing what you know now, what would you tell yourself?
Terrence:Knowing what I know now, I would have went and solved my buyer problem first. I was like everyone else. I thought I needed the deals and then to go find the buyers. Everyone always says if you got a good deal then you can find buyers Okay, cool. But when you're starting out, you don't know how to go find the buyers even if you got a good deal It's a whole lot harder Then if I already know exactly what somebody's looking for and I go find it then I know I got some immediate cash And that would have saved me a lot of problems in the beginning because we did lock up some deals that we didn't have buyers for. They were still good deals. We just couldn't find the people all the time that they were good deals for. So I would have focused on finding the right kind of buyers sooner. What about you? What would you tell yourself if you could go back?
Mike:I would tell myself start training more on sales earlier.
Terrence:Great. That's a great one.
Mike:Cause I think that. I mean, I did do it fairly early, but if I think I had focused more on it, even like six months earlier, I think I just would have had even more traction. And I, not that I hadn't trained on sales before that. I mean, I used to be a real estate agent. I did sales training then, but I was certainly rusty by the point that I got in. And if I had shook some of that rust off a little faster I think the first house in Jacksonville that I had an appointment at, and I remember in. I just royally screwed it up. And I think today that would have been the easiest deal ever to write. The lady needed to sell. She wanted me to buy it. I just screwed it up. So, yeah. Focusing on sales.
Terrence:I love that. I think the challenge too, I think about a lot is like, just because I think I'm good at it doesn't mean I can't get better. And just because I'm good at it. Doesn't mean I'm still not going to forget parts of the process that I know that I should or shouldn't be doing, just listening to you, kind of, I was like, man, cause I still spend a lot of time on that, but sometimes, at least for me, I'm like, Oh I'm good. I got it. You never got it all the way. Like no one would ever look at me and be like, he's the best sales guy that I've ever met in my entire life. But I can appreciate that. That was a good answer.
Mike:Thanks, man. If people want to reach out to you after the show, whether they have questions, maybe they're interested in, investing in your fund or they have deals, how could they go about doing that?
Terrence:Connect on Instagram at beamenace, or you can go to you want to learn about the software and stuff we've got, you can go to automated MLS secrets. com.
Mike:Awesome, man. Well, thanks for being on the show. This is great.
Terrence:Yeah, bro. Appreciate it. It was fun.