How To Become a Multifamily Syndicator and Establish an Authority Platform – Dan Handford

This transcript was generated automatically with Otter, there may be some grammatical errors.

Sean  0:09

This is the everything real estate investing show with Sean Penn. We interview local real estate investors and professionals to go over tips, tricks, and investing strategies to help you learn about the business and to enable you to achieve your financial goals. And now, welcome to the show. Hey, everyone, and welcome to another episode of The everything real estate investing show with Sean Penn. Today we have Dan Hanford. That is a commercial multifamily syndicators and host of the online conference, multifamily investor nation summit. And this episode down with her story of how he got into multifamily investments, and how he was able to establish a massive presence in the community in a relatively short time frame. If you enjoy this episode, subscribe to the show and leave a review. We release episodes every Wednesday, Sunday released the show notes on our site, everything, Rei com. So thank you so much for coming on the show today. Go ahead and introduce yourself and let everyone know who you are and how you got into real estate investing.

Dan  1:06

It’s a long story. But I’m Dan Hanford, founder of the multifamily investor nation, as well as a group called passive investing calm. And I my main purpose of getting into real estate really was from the tax side of things. So I had, I have five medical clinics that I have here in South Carolina that I own, and I and I say I’ve run them, but I have a good CEO and position that met primarily runs the organization. And I kind of play the Warren Buffett role in them right now. And so I managed the CEO, and he manages the other 50 employees and the entity. And I also have another company where we have a company called shop anatomical.com we sell all kinds of skeletons and skulls and brains and hearts and plastic anatomical model models to colleges, universities and professional offices around the world. And that’s a seven figure business that I’ve had for about 12 years now. And it is passive as well. And so when I started to make some money, I started to have to write these large checks to the government. And I was tired of doing that. And so real estate was that ticket for me to help to reduce my tax liability. And so once I started to look into side, the real estate, multifamily large multifamily real estate is really where I wanted to put my money and my time and energy and effort to help to help my other professional friends that you know, are also in that same position, but they don’t have the flexibility to be able to exit their business and, and and do something full time. So the syndication, the multifamily syndication space is really where I where I landed.

Sean  2:33

Yeah, your story was so interesting. I met you at the conference in San Diego a couple weeks ago. And I remember you telling me this exact same story. And I was just so impressed. Because you’re actually relatively new to the real estate investing space, right? Most of your success was because of your other businesses.

Dan  2:48

I really started this thing about about a year and a half ago, and a year and a half ago was really when I stepped out of my business. And I I say I retired at 35, you if you will sat there for about a week, week and a half and just was bored, you know. And then I went to lunch with a banker out of Greenville, South Carolina, which is where I’m originally from actually live now in Columbia, South Carolina. And she mentioned to me and reminded me of my my passion, my love for real estate. And I was like, that’s great, because that also helped my tax problem too, right. So it was kind of a win win situation. But I had, I had already stepped out of something that I’d already taken to a really large level. And so I didn’t want to go into something else that was going to be at a smaller level, I wanted to continue to grow and continue to go big, and also be able to help some other people that are in that same position like I am. And so I decided to go straight into this multifamily space and scale it. And we did a little over 130 million of acquisitions last year, in 2018. And this year, we’re on par to do another hundred hundred and a quarter

Sean  3:47

see just started. And you’re already over 100 million dollars in assets.

Dan  3:50

Yes.

Sean  3:54

That’s very impressive. Well, let’s talk about how you got started with that.

Dan  3:57

Well, I was gonna say, so I was gonna dive into that, because I I couldn’t have done this on my own. And I feel like, you know, the biggest thing that I did that helped me was number one, finding a mentor that I could reach out to on a regular basis that had already done what I was wanting to do and was already there. And so I also wanted to get access to them and not access to say maybe one of their coaches or their students I want I don’t mind paying a little extra to get access to that person. So I can have their personal cell phone number, I can call them whenever I need to. And I can have my personal coaching and one on one calls with that person and not somebody else that they had coached. And so I sought out for that person. And I wanted to make sure that they were already where they where I wanted to be. And so I’m on I’m on a road right now to get a billion dollars of assets under management. And that person right now is almost there. So but they they are already on that path, they’ve already gone down to the different, you know, you know, issues that along the way, because we’re at a point right now, or we’re like, if we’re going to grow in the next four years to a billion under management, we have to start closing more than 100 hundred and 25 a year 100 hundred 45 million a year. And so to be able to ask somebody, that’s your mentor, hey, how did you get to be able to start closing two and $300 million a year and assets, you know, cuz we got to continue to get to that level as we continue to grow. And it’s great to go to have somebody and a mentor to go to do that. But for those people who might be listening and going well, I don’t really know if I want to grow that big of that fast. And you want to kind of start small, I would say the same thing, though, where however you want to get started, you need to figure out where you want to be and hire a mentor that can help you get to that point. And so you need to find somebody, if you want to start off in the 30 4050 units and grow to, you know, 1000 units over the next five years, go find a mentor that has already done that or is already on there, on the way to that process, and is almost there that can help you reduce your learning curve and allow you to get there faster.

Sean  5:57

So a year and a half ago, you had lunch with your friend from 1980 that you want to do real estate, or your very next steps after that.

Dan  6:04

The very next weekend, I was at an attic at a conference for multifamily investing. And so I immediately I already been reading books about it. So I’d already you know had a lot of knowledge. And so I jumped on an airplane went to into the very first event I could get myself into. And then right after that event, I realized that that wasn’t the right mentor for me that because it was also a coach that was trying to put that on, I knew that wasn’t the right fit, because they were kind of playing in this kind of the smaller mom and pop space. That’s not where I wanted to play. And so I continue to search out and find that my mentor found my mentor hired him right away. And then twice a week I had phone calls with my mentor. And even now I try to get on the phone call with him at least once a week, depending on this, our schedules and stuff like that, but I try to get on there once a week with him. So I can make sure that I stay focused, I stay on track. And throughout the week, I’ll write down questions that I have that I want to make sure I break up. So because a lot of times you get on those calls, and like I don’t remember what those questions were. And so I’m very purposeful and being able to write those questions down down so that when we have phone calls that can be answered and be very, very, very, very focused phone calls as well. Do I give a shout out to your mentor? Sure. Joe fearless. So Joe fearless is is my mentor. And you know, you can obviously you know, look him up or whatever. But he also was wrote wrote a book and last in the last six months or so called the best ever apartment syndication book. So if you’re interested in that large apartment space, you know, he’s a great mentor for that.

Sean  7:24

Yeah, actually just had him on my show, we can go I saw that. Yeah, we released it. That’s awesome. So it’s crazy being able to talk to him, because he’s at such a high level. So I mean, obviously, it’s not very common for people to reach out to someone at that high level, when you’re just starting fresh, what were your techniques to actually reach out to him to have him work with you in the first place?

Dan  7:43

Sure. Well, he’s he is very selective on who he who I who he actually works with. And, you know, like, unlike a lot of other mentors, he only accepts two people a month into his program. And it’s because he doesn’t have a lot of time to just focus on 100 students, right. And I know that he does live up to that a month, because, you know, he has a closed Facebook group where all of his members members go to, and we don’t see it growing 100 a month, right, we only see one, two, maybe three a month that are going in there. So he’s only doing two a month that he accepts, into the program. And so he is very selective. And so what he is his criteria is is he wants to see someone who has had some form of success in their background, in order for him to work with them, because he wants to work with people that he knows will take it to the next level. And so one of the things that attracted him to me, even though, you know, I was interviewing him at the same time was, he knew that I had had some success with my closing the clinics and the businesses and various things like that. And so that was definitely something that helped me have a little bit of a leg up in the application process for him to be able to say, yes, he wanted to work with me.

Sean  8:45

Yeah, it’s amazing. What were the some of the key techniques that he taught you that you probably didn’t know beforehand?

Dan  8:53

I don’t know if it was something I didn’t know beforehand, but I didn’t know how vital it was. But I would say the biggest thing for me was is this is crazy, some form of an authority platform that like like you’re doing with this podcast that allows you to be you know, elevated and stature and in a position in your particular industry or in this market that allows people to point to you and think that you are that you’re not thing, but they kind of know that you are that authority person. Right. So I mean, me and you and I met for the first time, you know, back in this event in San Diego. And I think you had thought that I’ve been doing it for many, many years, because of how how I’ve built my authority platform and how many assets I have under management and the and the kind of reach that I have right now. And it’s because of that authority platform. So a lot of times when people you know, reach out to me, they are just like either shocked that I’m only been doing this thing for 18 months, and we build a scale as fast as we can. Now a lot of that has to do with my own net worth and liquidity and being able to take down a lot of the lot of the debt that we’re doing right now. Because we don’t have to go outside the group to either find that loan, guarantor, that balance sheet to be able to acquire these assets. So we do all that in house. So that is definitely has been a benefit. But one thing that he always pressed upon me was is is you’ve got to build your authority platform. That’s what he did. You know, if you if you follow him at all, you know, he has this large, you know, platform, you know, he has a he even has a podcast called the best ever real estate investing advice ever podcast. And, you know, he gets 250,000 downloads on that thing. And he’s just, he’s just massive out there. And it’s a daily podcast. And so I originally started a podcast called the tough decisions for entrepreneurs podcast. And then later on down the road, I decided to start the multifamily investor nation. And then from there built out the passive investing com brand to allow us to be able to have it have a brand around our our multifamily syndication space so that as we continue to grow, it would continue to build up as a brand. And also we can provide some free education for our multifamily investor friends, to be able to learn from us, but then also elevators and authority position so that we have projects that they can invest in and lead with that’d be willing to invest in it as well, because they’ve already provided we’ve already provided so much value to them through the education.

Sean  11:10

me see you are the trusted figure in the community. You know what you’re talking about direct? Yeah, like I read the same book, the best ever apartment syndication book ever. And I told you this while my podcast with him that, hey, you’re the inspiration for this podcast, because you said hi. Seven authority platform. So help my podcast. I have my blog, I have my meetup groups that have, you know, twice a month, but you took it to the next level. Now you have this crazy conference and FIN. We have over 70 speakers. And it’s online too. So tell me about NFIN.

Dan  11:40

Yeah, so my I’m on my entrepreneur podcast. So I started the the multifamily investor nation in the fall of 2018. And when I started it, it was primarily just to leverage the media platform to be able to expand my reach. And so now right now, we have little over 6000 members and 50 different meetup groups across the country, and co organizers throughout and each one of those markets. And my purpose of that was also to build up the multifamily investor nation. And I was not planning on doing any type of in person events like like a live long, large conference or anything like that. And I had never even considered doing a virtual or online conference. Until I had on my entrepreneur podcast, I interviewed a gentleman by the name of Scott Carson, he has a podcast called we close notes. So he’s a note buying person. And he talked to me about how he had a bad experience in a live event and lost a lot of money with it. And he said it from that point forward, he’d never do another live event like in person. But then that’s when he started going down the virtual route. And when he did his first virtual event, he got several hundred people to come to this virtual event actually pay a couple hundred dollars for each one of those tickets to come to it. And he didn’t have to pay for the speakers. He didn’t have to travel, he didn’t have to worry about a lot of the expenses. And he was able to use that money to market to kind of fill it in with more with more attendees. And I was like that is brilliant. And so I actually invited him on for a second podcast where I dove even deeper if like an hour, I told him I said this would be a selfish podcast, right, dive deep into what you’re doing. And I’m going to duplicate it, and I’m going to do it for the multifamily investor nation. And I had two months to promote the last the last event that we did in January 2019. It took me two months to promote it. And we had 586 attendees with a ticket price of 299. And we had over 70 speakers, I mean, 60 speakers at that event. And it was phenomenal, had a lot of great, great, great marketing behind it and helped kind of push me out there. And all the speakers were promoting the event. And it really was a very cohesive and coordinated event that was done virtually it was all online. And now we’re doing another one in June of this of 2019. And we’re already doing really, really well with that one as well. And so my goal with it is to every act twice a year and about to put this event on to be able to provide more content and value to the multifamily investing in community.

Sean  14:01

So I saw the event for the multifamily investor nation back in January. So I thought, Okay, well, this is another guy in the space, you know, like bad some rock and, you know, Joe fail this. And I had no idea was virtual, until I actually looked into it more, I said, Oh, my goodness is virtual and somehow managing to get a lot of people that I know, personally to speak at this event. And that’s how they met again. So I wondering what was it already been a year ready, progression to be to a year?

Dan  14:25

Yeah, we’re really excited about it. I originally, I wasn’t planning on putting these on. And, and a lot of people are like, man, he’s just making a ton of money off of these things. And I’m not I’m not I my goal is not to make money with these events. So I take all the money all but about maybe I think last the last event we did in January, I might have made five grand off of it. Okay, we clicked it over six figures of that event. So this event, same thing will clicked over six figures, I’m probably going to make about five grand on it. And the reason why is because I take all the money that we’re making off of it, and I put it back into the marketing. So I can market it to fill more people into the funnel so that it will help the business years. And it helps me to build a build our passive investor list, but also for people who attend the event, they also get access to the name and contact name and email of everybody else who attended. So they can actually reach out to them afterwards and network afterwards that you wouldn’t normally get in a live event. So it helps them fill their funnel with more passive investors, but also with other partners that they might want to partner with on a future opportunity or for a future project that they’re putting together.

Sean  15:25

So don’t mind me asking how do you set this up?

Dan  15:28

It’s it’s a longer conversation. But it kind of in a nutshell, we we have three different rooms. So I’m virtual rooms. And so a lot of people will ask, Well, if there’s 70 speakers, and it’s over three days, what do you give them like 10 minutes each just to speak. And that’s not that’s not as not the case. So each speaker gets 75 minutes. But we do also have panel topics. So there’s six panels. So we’ll have anywhere between three to seven speakers at each one of those panels. And so that’s how we’re able to fill up so many of the speaker spots. But each speaker that has a main session have 75 minutes, they usually go for 30 to 45 minutes on their on their on their content that they’re providing on their on their topic, and then they’ll have a live q&a afterwards. So none of them are recorded. It’s all live, there’s live q amp A at the end. But there’s three rooms going on at the same time. And so here in my office here in Columbia, South Carolina, will have three different rooms set up inside of here, which will be for our moderators. And so it’ll be myself that are the two managing partners with our passive investing.com group, who will actually be the moderators for each one of the rooms. And basically being able to introduce the next speaker and teen at the q&a. At the end, just making sure all the technology is working very well. So we definitely have to make sure you have good internet connections and backup internet in case it goes out and making sure that all the technology is working. But we’re definitely from the marketing perspective is really the play around that which takes a lot more of the time and energy and effort away from us is really trying to do things like this to help to kind of promote the event and things like that.

Sean  16:55

So are your speakers are talking from home? Right? They’re not

Dan  16:58

at your offices in South Carolina. That’s correct. So we had one in January, we had people tuning in from from the Bahamas, from Germany, from Israel, from Canada, from Australia, from all over the world. So most of them, of course, are here in the United States, we had him from internationally as well, that’s what’s the power of a virtual event. As you can get know, you can get all these quality speakers into one event packed into a three day time period, where you wouldn’t be able to do that in a live event, because you’re not going to get this many speakers to be able to coordinate their schedules to have to all fly to one location and spend 30 minutes with you in a session. Now they’re going to get a full 75 minutes, and they don’t have to leave the comfort of their own home or office.

Sean  17:37

So what’s the motivation for the speakers to come talk at your event,

Dan  17:40

the motivation for the speakers is being able to be able to put them in an authority platform in front of all the speakers in front of all the attendees. But what it also allows them to do is they also get advertisements because of their our speaker inside of our manual that we send out to all the attendees. And they also get to have access to that that name and email address, oh, the attendees following the event, because I know even some of the speakers from the last event, they had passive investor that joined their list, because we were able to elevate them in that authority platform, that authority position. And they were also able to email them. And I’ll email though their their people that attended the event last time to add them to their passive investor list.

Sean  18:19

That’s a good point. Like when speakers come on this podcast, there’s a good chance that someone of my listeners would actually contact the woman speakers later on to like do business with them in the future?

Dan  18:29

Absolutely. I mean, one of the number one ways that our group gets passive investors is doing these right here doing podcast interviews, and I even have met in the past three weeks, like three local people in Columbia, South Carolina, that have now invested in some of our projects to the tune of almost a million dollars, because I found they found me and heard about us on a podcast.

Sean  18:51

And what are the costs of setting something like this up?

Dan  18:53

Well, there’s a couple of things. So obviously, the marketing is the number one cost. So we’re spending most of the money that we make off of it on re re igniting the marketing even more and put putting more gasoline on the fire, if you will, from the marketing perspective, to get more attendees, which is why you see us everywhere, or all over Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, bigger pockets, we’re on banner ads on YouTube, we’re everywhere. And it’s because we have the funds to be able to market towards it. But as far as the technology, we’re using a we’re using the zoom platform for technology wise, they have a webinar platform that can have over 1000 webinar attendees at once. And so we’re leveraging that platform. And we’re having three rooms, virtual rooms in that platform. And so for the cost perspective, that that usually runs about $500 a month, but we only have to activate it during the month we use it. So we won’t even activate it’s like a week before the event. And then after the event we just downgraded to a normal plan.

Sean  19:48

Yeah, that’s really smart. Like, if you were to host a live event, you probably spend that whole six figures on just the venue. Oh, absolutely. You’d be paying $150 a gallon just for coffee. That’s absolutely correct. So let’s talk about your first project. So you got excited with real estate, you found your fearless, you somehow persuaded him to be your mentor, you joined his program,

Dan  20:12

then what happened. So for the first couple of projects that we did, we co co sponsored or partnered with other operators to help them with those projects first, to kind of build our credibility and get our feet wet. And then the very first project that our group put together on our own, no other person as the operator was 130 unit property was an $8.9 million acquisition with another $2 million dollars, say, and and renovation. So it’s about a 13 $14,000 adore renovation project. And that was taking a C class property to a B class property. And that one was actually given to us, I wouldn’t say given that when we actually came back to us after we had lost the deal originally. So we had put an offer on this one and got all the way down to best and final and an increased our bid and 8.9 million, and also put $100,000 on the line as as as an additional kind of motivator for the seller to give us the deal to to pay for that earnest money deposit. So it’s $100,000 will put up that went hard day one on if they accepted our offer. And we got outbid by another group that built it up by over $300,000 more than what we had. And they were putting $200,000 hard day one. And so we just passed on the deal was really upsetting because it was actually in a market that I grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, I love that market. I know the market like the back of my hand. And I was really upset that we lost that deal. But I had to make sure that we didn’t just try to get the deal out of off of emotion, we also have to use logic as well. And so we did pass on that deal. And then, oddly enough, four weeks later, the broker calls me up and says that deal is back online, because the original buyer could not get it done and never negotiated the PSA to get to the terms proper. And so no money ever exchanged. And so if you wanted at your original offer, would you accept it? And I said, Yes, absolutely. I’m not even thinking right. So I’m just saying yes, I will take it at the other offer, we want it. And so immediately after that phone call, this is why mentors are important. And direct access is important. I immediately after that phone call called Joe Pharaoh’s up, and it was the most, I always, I always say it’s the most expensive phone call I ever, ever paid for. Because everything that I paid for was was was for that phone call right there. Because I told him into the air beginning I wanted his direct cell phone number, so I’d have that access. And so I picked up the phone called him it was a minute and 47 second phone call, because he’s a very direct person, and so am I, which is why we work well together. And so I picked up the phone called and I told the whole situation. He knew about the offer and everything I said, I’m thinking, you know, they’re coming back to us, should we lower the offer price, or maybe reduce our hard money day one? or What should we do? And he gave you some really good advice. He said, Dan, he goes, if the numbers make sense sense at your last offer, just take it at that last offer, make that brokers life easier, because they’ll pay you back and dividends in the future when they send you more deals. And they talk to you about how easy you are to work with with other sellers. And I was like No problem, Joe, it makes total sense and hang up with them. And the call was done in a minute and 47 seconds. And that was perfect advice. And so we I called back the broker, again, just confirmed everything send over the updated Li got it accepted, closed 60 days later on December 14 of 2018. And that was our very first project that we did on our own. And it has been doing phenomenally well since we acquired it. We obviously have had a few little hiccups from renovations and things like that, because of the holidays and things like that. But it’s been a great asset for us. And all of our investors are that are in it are getting the returns with low though they’re looking for it that we’ve projected, which is really cool. And it kind of you know, stepping forward a little bit on that asset about two months ago, had an investor come down to my office here in Columbia, South Carolina. It’s lower than they located in Charlotte. And they sat down in my conference room and they said that we were talking about the different deals and stuff like that. And they said, You guys got that deal. You know, that project. And again, Greenville. And I was like yeah, that was us. And he’s like, man, he goes, You guys got a phenomenal deal. He goes, we were $20,000 less on our offer. And you guys got the deal. And I looked back at that. And I was like, you know, I am so glad we did not try to reduce our offer price or reduce our hard money. Because right now we wouldn’t have gotten that deal. Because there was somebody else right behind us. That’s that was the one they for $20,000. Less, and $20,000 is is nothing but you know, with those types of large deals, when it starts to talk about return projections and stuff. But if we would have lowered the the offer price, I guarantee you we probably would have gone down by probably 50 to 100 grand, and they would have gotten the deal would have been a totally different conversation. But we stuck with it. We stuck with what our mentor said, got the deal. Got it closed. And now we’re on the other end of it. And that was our first deal.

Sean  25:05

Congratulations, since amazing story. Now, after that, have you acquired some more properties since then?

Dan  25:11

Yes, we have. So we’ve acquired we’re now this this year. That was our first one we closed we closed another 123 already this year. We have one more we’re closing on in July, on July 3, and we have another one. We’re closed on July 22. And we’re working on two other deals one in Raleigh and one in Charlotte right now. Well, you guys no joke, man, you guys are going hard. We’re going man we’re going. But I would say also that we wouldn’t be able to do this if we didn’t have a good group and a good team behind us. So it’s not just me running these things. It’s it’s I have two other really good strong partners that manage the construction piece and the acquisitions piece. And then also somebody else that manages the the finance piece who does all of our financial analyzing and due diligence, and his his background is as a financial analyst for a top, you know, multifamily multifamily, but multi International, or multi billion dollar internationalizing consulting firms. So his background is all in financial and analyzing. And so, you know, he’s very good at what he does. Brandon, as Danny Brandon is really good at what he does. And I’m really good at what I do, which is Investor Relations and Marketing and an overall business operations.

Sean  26:14

Yeah, that’s pretty good. You always have to have a team that like supports you from all different. Absolutely. Yeah. So when you guys were first starting out, I guess you’re helping out other people, you’re co sponsoring, what was your role in that?

Dan  26:26

It was primarily from a capital raise standpoint. So we’re joining their teams making sure we’re fly out of the properties, vetting the property, vetting the team, and and bringing our investors in on it. And what that does for somebody in the very beginning is number one, and it helps build your credibility and your track record. Because in the beginning, I never close a deal. And so I go to investors and try to say, hey, I want you to, you know, wire me 100 grand to be able to invest in a property that I’m putting together. And they’re like, well, how many deals have you put together? And I’m like, zero, right? They knew me from the medical space, but not this space. And so being able to raise for other groups allow me to leverage their experience and their credibility until I had enough of a track record with them. And then when I put my own deal together, they already see me as that multifamily expert and multifamily person now. So we’re we’re raising money for that first deal, it’s pretty easy that first deal we did, we raised those money that that money in four days. So we actually the equity raised on it was 2.5 million. And we did that in four days.

Sean  27:19

So if you’re just starting out, you have no experience in multifamily. Assuming you don’t have the same background as you do. What does someone do to try to raise $2 million for someone else’s project.

Dan  27:29

So I have a lot of different ideas on and think along that because even though you don’t might not have the track record in it, it’s all about meeting people networking, and getting referrals and actually putting a face to other people that are either in that high net worth or accredited status. And so one of the things that you should do is, is try to go to these local Ria clubs and meetups that are around real estate to find those people. But you also have to start thinking about how to put yourself in a position where you are the only person in the room looking for that kind of money. Because when you go to these Ria groups, these meetups, guess what everybody else is looking for that same person, right? We’re all looking for that person in the room. And so when that when that high net worth individual comes in the room, guess what happens is like a fat rat on a Cheeto, right? So everybody’s pouncing on that person trying to get them to invest, or at least, you know, build that relationship. And so what I try to do, I always recommend other people to do is get inside of a room, or you’re the only one per looking for it. And so go to go to executive clubs, go to Golf and Country clubs, go and do some meetings on your own locally, that it’s just you as the expert teaching, or you as the expert talking about these types of assets. And so that’s the number one thing I would suggest. But another strategy that I would give to your listeners too, is if if you’re out there, and you’re going on podcasts like this, these are great podcast to go on and helps build your authority helps build your brand. But also think about going on non real estate podcasts. Because if you go on real estate podcasts, I mean, you know, you’ve already had multiple people on here that are looking for passive investors. And so yeah, I’m on a probably get a few passive investors from being on this podcast and, and your audience hearing and listening to me. But if I go on another podcast that’s more like, say business or entrepreneurship related, I’ll get even more, because it’s the first time they probably ever heard about it, and they’re gonna be more interested in it, I’ll have a larger reach, because I’m the only one I’m the only guest talking about it. And so I try to also get on to other types of podcasts and other types of events that I’m not that I’m the only one talking about it. You know, even before you know, about two hours before this recording, I was being interviewed on another radio show. And so even doing podcast is great. But also doing radio shows is also important.

Sean  29:37

That’s actually a really good advice. I never heard that one before. Because I asked a lot of people Hey, what is your case of keys to success, were some tips you have for newbies. And they all said the first thing you said, which was go to meetup groups, find a mentor that jazz with you, someone you want to be in five years advantage of them and learn from them. So that’s good. But in terms of expanding our reach, you’re the first person said, it’s good to go to meetup groups, but not necessarily real estate meetup groups go out to other groups who don’t know about real estate investing, when you say something that’s new. I like what you’re saying. Whereas there’s actually like 15, people doing the exact same thing, and you’re doing? Absolutely,

Dan  30:14

you got in this space, you have to build a think outside the box, and, you know, play smarter, not harder. And so obviously, I like podcast, because I can spend, you know, 3045 minutes, you know, sitting on a podcast versus having to go fly to fly to another state and go to an event and stuff like that, I still do that I still go to events, you know, I’m now in a position where I’m being invited to speak at various events. So I’m speaking at one event in July, I have two of them that have already scheduled for an August and three in September and one in October. And so I’m gonna be flying quite a bit. But I’m actually now being able to speak at some of these events, but trying to put yourself in events, that you’re not the only one. And so I don’t always just speak it at multifamily real estate events, either I try to go to other business events and speak at those two, and I might I might not be specifically speaking on multifamily. So there’s one event where I’m teaching, you know, marketing to about two or 300 physicians about how to how they can market their their clinics better. And in the middle of it, I might have a picture of a slide on my PowerPoint of a multifamily apartment complex. And I’ll go Oh, yeah, and I wanted to talk to you about what I’m doing about multifamily. You know, oh, by the way, type thing and spend, you know, three or four minutes talking about the, the little, you know, elevator pitch on it, and telling them, hey, if you have questions about it, you know, email me or, you know, find me afterwards. And I’ll usually pick up you know, a dozen, you know, passive investors from from that kind of a speaking gig as well.

Sean  31:35

I think that’s the key word there, you’re really good at marketing. So what makes you different from all the other I say real estate investors who just think about buying the deal operating it, Barney thing on the marketing side, like you’re the only one I know of who started within a year and a half timeframe that’s already hosting their own conferences.

Dan  31:53

I would say from a marketing perspective, it’s it’s all about really trying to hone in who you’re trying to reach, and just taking action. Because a lot of times we sit back, and I’m guilty of this too. So even though you see me everywhere, I think I should have done it six months earlier, right? But we always sometimes will take will take too much time to think about something and try to put all the different pieces together first, before we get it in place. And so one of the things that you need to understand whether it be marketing or anything, and just take action, you know, I’m a big believer in what I call relentless implementation, you know, really trying to get yourself to the level of being able to, you know, have an idea and implement it and don’t don’t look back, just continue to implement, and continue to correct and continue to fix. And I am guilty of that fire ready aim mentality. But I will say it might annoy my team when I my team when I do that. But it is definitely allowed me to build a scale and grow as fast as I have. And it also helps us to reverse engineer the systems and procedures and processes to put those in place. So that when we actually move forward and continue to grow, we can have those in place. But we’re not just sitting there thinking about putting them in place, or putting them into place, as we are actually implementing,

Sean  33:07

I think fire ready aim is better than just aim, aim aim, which is what a lot of people do, especially when they’re not familiar with something they feel like not confident, like imagine if you’re new, and you decided to set up this huge conference event. And if it didn’t work out, you know, like,

Dan  33:21

well, and they will be scared for that. And then the one thing that I did there was is the moment that I wanted to do that event, I set the date. And I sent an email out and started to promote it. So I had already committed the date. And I already sent it out to all my entire list. And so they already knew about it. So there was no looking back, there was no turning away, there was no I’m going to think about it, it’s I set the date, I’m going to do it on a matter of fact, now I have to do it because everybody else knows about it. And I don’t want to look bad, so it’s going to happen. And so then it was from there was just reaching out to all the speakers that I had been building relationships with, and invited them to speak. And and I had maybe a handful of them that weren’t able to do it because of various travel or things that aren’t even doing this stuff like that. But it was it was it was it was amazing to see how everybody came together the attendees and the speakers of that first event.

Sean  34:08

Yeah, that’s amazing. Yeah, you’re a pretty unique individual, right? Because you actually do take massive action when you need to. And it’s not really real estate related, because you were already doing all these things before real estate. Do you want talk about I guess your life and like what was the main inflection point that made you into a different person, rather than someone who just works a typical nine to five job,

Dan  34:28

I would say that, that, you know, ever ever since I was I was I was born I’ve kind of been an entrepreneur because, you know, you my mom tells me that, you know, when I was born, you know, the doctor, you know, smack my behind. And I turned around before he smacked it and said and wanted to negotiate which which cheeky was going to slap, right? One of those types of things. But you know, I’ve always kind of had that that drive within me. And you know, I have always wanted to be an entrepreneur and I’ve kind of always been an entrepreneur, I have started businesses, you know, when I was younger, you know, you know, going door to door selling cookies and, and candy and doing pressure washing in and doing selling Cutco knives and, you know, cutting grass and anything I could do to be able to kind of have that, that ability to build a you know, work and earn money without having to be tied down to an hourly job. That’s what I wanted to do. And I still had over the years, I had a couple of jobs, I worked at chick fil a for a few years. And actually I for about nine months, excuse me, and then realized that I didn’t want to be making $5 and 10 cents an hour back then when I was working. And I’ve been working there for nine months, and they gave me a 10 cent raise. And I was like okay, well, I’m going to be finding something different. And then, you know, I love to fly there about once a week with my family. She’s where we go, before we go to our Wednesday night church service will usually go to go to a chick fil a and next to the church and have dinner there. And but I’ve always had that drive in me. And I will say this, though, that I was not really able to scale where I wanted to, until I learned a couple of things. First off, I had to learn that I needed to I was not even though I’m the type of person where I feel like I can do everything better than everybody else. That’s just kind of the flaw that I have inside of me. And and I still haven’t today. So I still feel like I can do everything better. But I had to come to the realization and have the mindset that I can’t do everything. If I want to grow and I want to scale, I need to be able to surround myself with a good solid people and a good team that can support me and build me up and allowed me to allow that and have them do things that I don’t necessarily have to do on a day to day basis and on a regular basis. So that I can continue to be that visionary and be able to continue to scale and come up with ideas on how to make the make the practice and make that make our businesses grow and make them bigger and better and and have that that stronger scalability of our businesses. And so learning that art of delegation is really what allowed us to scale. But then the second thing I would say that allowed us to scale is putting in certain metrics in each business has different metrics, have been able to put certain metrics in place. So we can manage the success fast, because we’re measuring that success as well on different KPIs, those key performance indicators in our business. And so we’re constantly looking at those KPIs in our businesses on a weekly basis. And in all and also on an on a daily basis. So we can make sure we’re hitting the goals that targets are looking for. Because if you can’t measure something, it’s very hard to measure it. And so we had to put very specific systems in place to make sure that we could measure the various KPIs so that we can manage them properly as well. So being able to delegate but also build a measure your success, so you can manage it properly as well.

Sean  37:36

Do you ever had a full time day job? Or have you always been doing businesses on your own?

Dan  37:40

Yeah, so when I was going through, so my background is actually in chiropractic. So before I got into chiropractic before, I actually, of course, had to get my degrees, right. And so when I was working in my undergraduate degree actually worked for Nat my wife’s uncle. At the time, she wasn’t my wife, but my wife’s uncle. And that’s how I met my wife. I was working for him and work for him for four and a half years and, you know, made made probably 10 bucks an hour doing that for four and a half years. But it was learning the steps of writing that kind of a clinic as well. And so that was probably my longest running nine to five job, if you will, was working for him. I did that for four years, while I was working on my undergrad. So I have a undergrad in biology from the University of South Carolina. And then I moved to Atlanta, Georgia and graduated from life University there, they have a College of Chiropractic and and then in 2011, started my first practice, if you use it for a few years into your into it figured out was at the same time trading time for dollars, because I can only adjust so many patients and out in an hour. And I didn’t want to do that anymore. And so I started bringing on the other other clinicians brought on the medical team, and then eventually grew it from doing the one clinic to five clinics, and then was able to step away and really focus on the multifamily stuff full time, once I grew those clinics to a point where I could have them as a passive investment.

Sean  38:57

Nice. What are some of your tips you have for I guess new investors or people who are younger, who want to be in your position sometime in the future, I would

Dan  39:06

say, go find an operator that is doing big things and go learn underneath them. You know, I’m actually I was on a phone call this past Tuesday with somebody, it’s that very same position. He called me up and he said, I just graduated from college, I really love the multifamily space, I’d love to do anything that you could give me to do and multifamily. And I got my wheels turning. And I was like, you know, I could pay this gentleman, a nice salary that would allow him to learn that stuff along the way. And eventually he could get his own wings and go do it on his own. And we could we could help him and support him in that way. And so there’s always going to be other people out there different operators are going to need help and assistance, and being able to go to them and say, hey, these are my qualities, these are my skill sets, I want to provide value to you. And and I don’t mind taking a pay cut to be able to do that, because I know the value of the knowledge that that a group like us can bring to them. And so we’re always looking for that kind of talent. And we’re always interested in and interviewing somebody for that position. But that would be something that I would definitely suggest that you if you’re new in the space, and you’re really passionate for it, and you’re not working right now and you’re not, you know, you don’t know what you want to be able to learn to do it in the future. And you don’t have the net worth and liquidity to be able to, you know, take down the asset yourself. That’s what you should do first is go find an operator, join their team, take a pay cut to learn the ropes, because that’s where you’re really, really be able to take your game to the next level, especially when you start to take down these deals yourself. You’ll have years of experience in it. And that helps you to leverage finding investors, but also finding deals and having the brokers present your deals as well.

Sean  40:41

Yeah, I think Robert Kiyosaki says you should always work for free, because, you know, then you learn more. By the way, what are some of the things that you know, as a big operator you are struggling with that you would appreciate? outside help from?

Dan  40:54

Sure, I would say there’s two main areas so are all three I guess, and it kind of is from a for three partners perspective. So we’re always in need of someone to help us from an investor relations standpoint to be able to help you know me managing our investors and and and talking with our investors and teaching them up for me and you know, getting that schedule filled and stuff like that I have an assistant right now, that helps me with that. And she does phenomenally well. But she also gets overwhelmed because she’s taking care of all the ppm, the disclosure documents and the bank stuff and working with the attorney to make sure we got all the documents in place for closing. And, and so we’re getting a little bit to point where we’re spiders, we’re getting ready to need to hire on some more people right now. So we have a team of about six people now that are that are part of our group, and in addition to our three partners that helped to support us, but the second role I would say is, is acquisitions. And so we’re always needing people to be able to go out to the properties to or the properties, you know, see if it’s a good asset, do market research, do comp analysis, all the data driven stuff. And then the third one would be from an asset management perspective. You know, we’re now growing to a point where we’re needing we’re looking for that person to go to help us from an asset management perspective. Alright, so we need somebody to jump on a property management call every single week to make sure that we’re hitting the goals and the targets that we’re looking for, and report back to the partners and and do those kind of various legwork things that you know, we can do, and we’re doing right now. But as we grow and scale, those are going to be some pain points that we had to fill.

Sean  42:16

It’s smart that you’re trying to outsource these tasks, because I think a lot of people who are new, try to all these tasks by themselves,

Dan  42:22

which means you can’t scale very, very challenging to scale and try to do all that yourself. Because even right now like so right now, my current position, I kind of told you a little about this in the green room. But you know, we’re in a position today, where we have the multifamily investor nations summit coming up and coming up next week, right, we have two deals that we’re closing on right now that will be closing on and on July 3, and July 22. So we’re in the middle of raising funds for that and getting all the money and and talking with investors. And we’re also finding our next deal and vetting the next deal and underwriting the next deal. And you know, so there’s a lot of things that are going on right now. And it can get to the point where it’s overwhelming. And we’re we’re fine as other as three partners in this in this passive investing calm group, to take less home, because we can have more flexibility with our time, we would rather have more time to spend with the things that we want to do instead of having to make this be another job. And so we’re fine to be able to, you know, leverage other people and do what I said earlier, delegate delegate certain tasks that we don’t necessarily have to do on a regular basis. And also put some KPIs in place to make sure we’re measuring things properly, too. Yeah. Awesome.

Sean  43:27

So thanks a lot. For all your tips and advice today, how can people get in contact with you?

Dan  43:31

Well, there’s two ways you can do that. So number one, you can go to passive investing calm. If you’re interested in partnering alongside us on one of our future opportunities, you can do that. I’ll personally jump on a phone call with you after my assistant calls you and schedule an appointment with me. We’d love to be able to kind of hear some of your investment goals and see if it would be a good fit. And then number two, if you’re interested in learning more about multifamily investing, you can go to multifamily investor nation.com and find out more information about our multifamily group, join our Facebook group, our YouTube channel. And if you’re interested in the next multifamily investor nations summit, you can go to just MFIN summit.com thank you so much for having me looking forward to hearing and hearing your success as you continue to grow as well. Excellent. All right. Okay.

Sean  44:13

Here’s some of the key takeaways from this episode. Find a mentor. That’s where you want to be an add massive data person, show that you had success in the past so that you’re not wasting your time. Create an authority platform. Dan created the online summit because no one was doing it. And there were no large costs. If you want to branch out, you need to differentiate yourself. Go to non real estate meetups and speak on non real estate podcast. People will think that you’re unique, and will be more likely to work with you in the future. I hope y’all learned a lot. You can find the show notes on our site. Everything, Rei com. Thanks and have a great day. This was another episode of The everything real estate investing show. Sean, did you enjoy the show leave us a five star rating will take less than a second and they’ll help a lot. You can contact me at sean penn realty at go.com. That’s svanpanraotyigo.com Thanks. Have a great day.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai