The Exchanges

Q I call them like low people businesses, you know, vending machines, laundromats, car washes, RV parks, all of them have like a version of the business that could be low people. Then they have a very high people version of it. You own a bunch of RV parks and got into it. How did you get into that business? Break down the economics of it. What's most interesting about it?

A Yeah. So, and I've done both ends of that. Um, small RV parks with no employees and large RV parks with a lot of employees. So I was buying single family homes back in college. Um, and then I moved to Texas and I met some guys that were, they owned hundreds of single family homes, but they had just been introduced to mobile home and RV parks. And they basically said, Chris, you've got to look at this. Instead of having 12 homes across a Metroplex in two hours, you can have 12 homes All on the same two acres. And each one of them is more profitable than those. And it costs like a third as much as all of the single family homes. So you have the efficiencies of them being all right there. Uh, it's the lowest form of affordable housing. So it's recession resistant and they're easier to manage and you don't have to maintain the unit. The tenant owns the unit. So you just own the land. So I'm like, why do people even buy single family homes? Like, I don't understand. Is this like the world's best kept secret? And so we partnered up and we started buying these small RV and mobile home parks across Texas and Oklahoma, 10 to 70 pad sites, no amenities, mostly long-term tenants, um, and where the tenants own either the RV or the mobile home, and we just maintain the infrastructure. Um, and we did that for two and a half, three years.

AI assessment note: “we partnered up and we started buying these small RV and mobile home parks”

Q So you once started a crypto project with John McAfee, who was easily, I think the most Accentric, paranoid, and wild entrepreneur, maybe of all times. He founded, like, founded and sold McAfee antivirus software, investigated for murder in Belize, and later returned to the U.S. where he ran for president, not once, but twice. I think there's a whole Netflix documentary about him. Is that right?

A That's correct, yeah. So, it was like seven years ago, uh, eight, I don't know, but crypto was going crazy, and I was getting involved because I'm, you know, always distracted. And I kind of found this math equation that helped me predict the price of cryptocurrencies. And it was very simple. Here's the whole secret. Okay. I would, I found a way to measure how much hype, uh, cryptocurrency had, how many people were talking about on Twitter, Reddit, Facebook. And I put that into a number from one to a hundred. And then I use public websites to find out the market cap. Of the cryptocurrency, how much it was worth. And then I just divided the two numbers. So if there was a cryptocurrency that was very big, very popular, but people weren't really talking about it. My algorithm division told me it was going to go down in value at some point. Or if everyone was talking about something and it was had a small market cap, then it would go up in value. So I started investing my own money in this. It was working. And I felt like I had just discovered like Newtonian physics or something, right? I was like, this is huge. I'm going to be so rich. This is amazing. Um, but I, this was like years before I ever started publishing content. I had no following, no audience, no rich friends, nothing. And so I thought, who's the biggest name in crypto? John McAvee. He had like a million Twitter follo…

AI assessment note: “That's correct, yeah. So, it was like seven years ago”

Q Wild. And so do you think a lot of your entrepreneurial chops come from? Doing hard things like that really young?

A Oh, a hundred percent. Um, I was like, in high school, you know, I, I, I had a single mom. She was a wait, a waitress, and I had bad grades. I was not motivated. I was not driven. I was not valedictorian, three point O GPA, stupid stuff on the weekends. But after knocking doors in Eastern Europe in a foreign language for two years, and I added up how many times I got rejected loosely because we would knock on doors all day. Every day. Um, and so if you add that up, like x doors per day, it's like 24,000 times. Rejected to my face, ok? This isn't like a mean email. Like, I don't want what you're selling me. When you do that for two years and you come home, I can, I just remember sitting in my room after coming home thinking like, I can freaking do anything. Like, and I will. Like, this is America. I can do whatever I want. Because I met a lot of really smart, kind, talented people over there that had no opportunity. They could not get ahead if they wanted to. And I was like, I can do whatever I want here compared to Hungary, and so I've just been trying to do that ever since.

AI assessment note: “Oh, a hundred percent.”

Q this guy. How did the guy, like, show that he was competent enough to be your operator? So if, like, somebody young is watching this, and they're like, man, I want to go pitch Chris or Cody or whatever rich person I know on a business to start, um, what do I have to present in order for you to say, I'm going to give you 50% of this company?

A Yeah, I kind of regret What I'm about to say, but, um, it's, but it's the truth. So I've noticed a direct correlation. You probably have to between the people that have just gone all out to get my attention and then their performance after I hire them or partner with them. Right. Whereas some reach out kind of half-heartedly and it's like, sometimes I've hired them in the past and it was just, they kind of did a half-hearted job, but the people that are like, just blowing me up everywhere. Like, I will, I will do this. I will do this. Like, I promise I'll be your hardest worker. I don't know anything. I'm humble, but I'm willing to do all the work. That was James. He had never had a home service business. He had like flipped iPhones on Facebook marketplace, but he was just hungry. And so I like to look for humility, um, gratitude. Someone who's like, I am just so grateful for this opportunity and some sort of an entrepreneurial gene, right? Cause I don't want to make them entrepreneurial. They have to have that. If they have those three things, Then it's almost a hundred percent certain they'll be successful.

AI assessment note: “I like to look for humility, um, gratitude... and some sort of an entrepreneurial gene”

Q like, let's give people some tactics really quickly. We've already talked about some ways to find businesses. Um, but if you were going to like have somebody leave here, you've given them three businesses like you like, you've given them three businesses you don't. If they right now are listening and they want to go find their next business to start, uh, where would you look? What do you do?

A Where do you start? So I think that you, you have to put yourself in one of two buckets. Am I someone that already knows I love entrepreneurship? I've made my first dollar for myself. I've tasted it. I love it. Or am I someone that loves the idea of entrepreneurship? Um, I like how it sounds. I don't want to work. Who wants to work for someone, right? Some of those people end up trying it and they don't like it, right? So step one is figure out what bucket you're in, right? Uh, and then answer that question for yourself. Like, go gather things around your house that are just sitting around, sell them on Facebook Marketplace, see how it feels. Is the, is the hassle of going back and forth with someone or meeting someone to sell a 50 dollar dresser? Is it not worth it for you? Or does it seem not worth it until you make that 50 dollars and you're like, oh, that feels good. I did that myself. Right? So start there, I would say.

AI assessment note: “go gather things around your house that are just sitting around, sell them on Facebook”

Q And how much cash did you have to start it with?

A I had cash to start it with, but I like, I grew up poor, right? And so I always like to say constraints equal creativity. And I've never been VC funded. I've tried to raise money. It's a lot harder than people think. And so I've, I've been forced to be creative, right? And that's never left me now to this day. Like I can afford to do certain things, but I'm so cheap and or willing to be creative that I don't have to. So with the tree trimming business, I had a truck. I found a young, hungry entrepreneur that had just graduated from college. And I knew how to start it because I had helped a friend do it as a favor a couple of years prior. And so we, we really, we didn't own a chainsaw. We still don't own a chainsaw. We just found subcontractors and subbed it all out to them.

AI assessment note: “I had cash to start it with, but I like, I grew up poor”