How These Founders Built Wealth Through Sales & Real Estate | Moe Falah & Brad Sumrok 🌏EP128

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Money Mondays. This podcast is normally inside of an RV motor home, but we're in Miami, figured why not go to the Move Studio. They have three different locations here inside of this building, and I figured why not use this studio to bring in special guests. We're doing six episodes in one day, and this guest, Mr. Mo Fada, was deep into the solar game, going all over, I was watching him scale this business, and then he exited the company and decided to get into the insurance game. So I want to find out everything we can, but first we're gonna get a quick two minute bio so we can get straight to the money. Awesome, Dan, thank you so much for having me. Move Studio's great, great location. Thanks for hosting this today. Quick little bio. I've been in sales for quite some time, started selling since I was 15 years old. You know, the idea of working for like an hourly just never really made sense to me, but when I was really young, what always made sense to me was margin. Like the idea that like you could buy something for a dollar and sell it for three, and you can make two, how many times can you repeat that? And I realized that that's actually like how business works. It's just all based off of margin, right? So I got into sales 15 years old. Up until the point I was 23 is when I got into solar. I went door to door, learned how to do the whole entire solar game, recruited people, built it up to about 400 agents. We, about 400 agents. We opened six offices in three states, California, Texas, and Florida. In three years we sold just a touch under $150 million with a product, all door to door, no ads, nothing like that. Company got ranked by Inca Magazine as the 44th fastest growing privately held company in the nation, and in late 2022 sold the company. And retired at 27. Sounds boring. And then I got really bored. Yeah. All right, so you're 27 years old, you have this exit, you're like, okay, I'm gonna golf, I'm gonna go to a beach, I'm gonna travel a bit, and you realize, all right, I got the entrepreneurial bug again. Why decide to get into an insurance game when you have all these different options? Yeah, you know, like, I wanna take a look at something that could embody my skill sets. And I knew that as a sales leader who can drive vision, who can drive performance, production, and attract high quality individuals, that I should look into something where I can help create opportunity for more people. We created about a dozen millionaires in my previous company, and I wanted to be able to do something, like that's a great thing, right? Making money, working on the money, money Monday. The impact that we were able to make on people's lives once they were able to buy their first home, buy their first investment property, take care of their family, have their first kids, like you can't do any of that stuff unless you make money. So I realized that my ability to help other people make money was a gift. And so I wanted to find something where I could create a sales opportunity for people to succeed and grow. And after spending probably a little bit over a year trying to find out, okay, what is the thing that I wanna go into, I ended up running into this guy who was selling Medicare. And I was like, Medicare, what the hell is that? You know? And we dove deeper into it. It was probably about six months worth of investigation to determine like, this is the thing that I wanna do. And it's a tremendous opportunity. We're helping a lot of people. And yeah, that's kinda how it worked. So you dive in and typically when you start to get into a company, you gotta figure things out as you're growing. What happened where all of a sudden now you went from practicing, hiring some people, to whoa, we're scaling, and then you call me, like, whoa, we're really scaling, and then you're like, oh, by the way, we just got this humongous office, like walk us through that. Cause it's been pretty quick time frame. Yeah, so I think one of the most important things is making sure that you have the right people on your team. And we would not be able to do what we've done if I didn't have an incredible COO, incredible administrative team, our head of HR, like our sales leaders. If we didn't have great people, we wouldn't be able to have done what we did. But one of the benefits that I had was that I had reference points. I could look back at my previous organization and be like, okay, this was awful. I will never repeat that mistake again. This is what I need to look out for. Let's see. This is what I need to look out for. And so I was able to quickly distinguish, like, who is great and who isn't great. You know, we started just pushing and had full belief. We had a good mentor, you know him, Justin Brock. We had a good mentor that guided us on, like, hey, these are the things you should avoid in the space. This is what you should do. We got the right technologies in place. In our first 72 days, we acquired 10,000 customers. 10,000 customers in 72 days. Yeah, we started on January 6th with 12 agents. And we're a little bit over 200 agents now. But in our 72nd day, we had hit the 10,000 customer mark. And about a week and a half ago, we hit 20,000 customers. Wow. Yeah. What do you do now? How do you keep scaling that? You know, really, it's a matter of still hiring the right people. That's what I'm spending most of my time on right now, is finding great leadership talent and finding great executive talent. You know, the quality of your people is going to determine how big your business grows. And so not only making sure that we're, like, hiring the right people, but it's also making sure that we're weeding out the people who don't belong in the organization, which sometimes is an even harder thing to do. Is everyone working in one space, or are some people working remote, or how's that working? Yeah, we have an office space here right outside of Miami. We've got 17,000 square feet. We have part of the group that's working in office. But about 95% of our workflow is remote. Really? Yep. So talk us through, like, someone on the make money side, because we cover three core topics here. How to make money, how to invest money, how to give away to charity. On the make money side, how can someone work remote? What type of money is there to work with someone like your company? Yeah, you know, like, one of the cool things that we do, and the way that I really look at it is, like, if you take a look at most sales careers, you have, like, the top 10% of people who, like, absolutely crush it. You've got 70% of people who just get by, or, you know, paycheck to paycheck. Maybe they get to take a family vacation once a year. And the bottom 20% quit. Everything for sure. No matter what. You give them the greatest opportunity in the planning. It's like a summer platter, yeah. Yeah, and they'll just, you know, throw it all away. And I wanted more people to be able to get into, like, that 10% bucket. And the thing that we were able to design through how Medicare works with the residual income, every policy pays every single year. You get passive compounding wealth based off of the active efforts that you do. So, like, a lot of people want, you know, passive income, which is a very important thing. But we all know that active income is where you can make, you know, in terms of, like, a trade-off of effort. Active income is where you can make the most. So, the way that we design the program is that you can get passive compounding through active income efforts. Which is quite remarkable. I mean, to get the type of cash flow that one would get working in my company in one year, you'd have to invest between 1.2 to 1.5 million dollars in real estate. If you're talking about a 6% return on your investment, 6% net, or you can work inside my company for one year and you can generate that same type of residual income. So, the way that the opportunity works is, if somebody comes into our platform, the company covers all costs of leads. We do 100% inbound, so no outbound, no, you know, you get a list of 100 names and you just bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, yeah. Now, we wanted to take the marketing out of it and we wanted to be able to take the responsibility of the marketing and put salespeople into the position which, what they do best. Which is, you know, qualifying, finding out their needs, closing the customer. So, we took out a lot of the marketing, because a lot of the marketing is kind of just like, it's a dead time for a salesperson. We took on all the marketing element, somebody comes in, they hit available on their dialer system, and within 35 seconds, they're gonna have somebody calling them asking about what plans they can upgrade to, what they can switch to, and the cool thing is that Medicare doesn't cost the customer anything. So, when you're enrolling somebody into a plan, it's $0, they don't have to sign a contract, you don't need a credit check, you don't need to get banking information, you just gotta get a verbal confirmation from them that they wanna say yes. And so, somebody can come into the business and make $8,000 to $15,000 a month, but the cool thing is, it's like, you know, cause $8,000 to $15,000 a month doesn't really change, you know, it could change some people's lives. Yeah, but the great thing is that whatever you make in year one, you get that as your residual in year two. Oh, interesting. So, if you get $100,000 in year one, year two, if you do the same exact effort, same exact sales, the following year you'll get $200,000, cause you still get the recurring. The recruits from last year. You get the recurring from the year before. So, somebody works inside the business, you know, let's say they're at that $100,000 a year pace, and they never grow, they never expand, they never get into team building, and they just sell the same amount every single year. With drop off, you know, somebody working in the business for five years could be making $400,000 or more a year within five years of being in the business. Fascinating, even though they're only producing $100,000 the next year. That's right, cause it's compounding wealth. Okay. I want you to do something for me. Yeah, and capital is really cool, right? Yes, of course. So, I want you to look in that camera over there. Yeah. And 60 seconds, explain to someone that wants to come work at Better Life, why they should. If you want to come and work for Better Life, the reason why you'd want to come and work for Better Life is because we're not only here about making money, we're about helping you create a better life. So, it's getting the discipline in, getting the confusion out, helping you put order in your life, and then being able to create something where you can get out of the hamster wheel. And the hamster wheel is every single month trying to find out how are you going to go get that next paycheck, where inside of Better Life, we built a residual compounding model where for every single year's worth of efforts, you get to remake the money that you made in the first year, every single year following, and allowing it to compound. So, if you want to get off of the hamster wheel, the only true way to do that is through, the only true way to do that is through passive cash flow, where the money comes in whether you work or not. And that's what we help people do here at Better Life. So, you sold the solar company at quite an ideal time, especially just in the last few weeks, there's been some major, major, major, major, major announcements that are wrecking the industry. Can you talk us through what's going on in the solar space? Yeah, you know, the big, beautiful bill is pretty much sending a nuclear bomb to the solar industry. It's the taking away of the tax credits, and I believe that's probably one of the biggest reasons why Elon had left the administration to help with Doge. Yeah, they just basically nuked the energy incentives. So, even when we sold, right, we sold in October of 2022, within six months, if you take a look at any of the major publicly traded companies, they were all down 60 to 80% within six months after I sold. And the biggest companies, Sunpower, Sunpower, they did Apple, the solar for Apple, they did the solar for Microsoft. They went out of business within a year after I sold. So, these are like major, not just small mom and pops that are losing it. The companies that did Apple's solar, that, you know, the little circle inside of the South of San Francisco, what's it called? South San Francisco, that little city. Yeah. Silicon Valley? Silicon, somewhere around there. Yeah, so solar just got absolutely crushed. Wow, so what happens going forward? With solar? You know, the bill still has to pass Senate. If it passes Senate, there's probably gonna be a lot of people who need to pivot and get into something else. Will they be able to sell it at all? Or is it just not gonna be compelling to do financially? It's gonna be less compelling. You know, the 30%, you know, if you have a $50,000 system, you're talking $17,000 that the government gives you back to go solar. Now you're paying full price. Got it. Yeah. Which can definitely change the economics of why somebody would do it. And most solar isn't purchased outright, most solar is financed. Or it's done through like a leasing program, but in a leasing program, the government, the company who leases it to you, they get the tax credit. That's why they're able to keep the prices so low. But if the leasing company doesn't get tax credits, they're now installing it at full price. So even the cost of the lease will now increase for the consumer, unless somebody just like really cares about the environment and is willing to pay more for solar, which, you know, I think more people are concerned about their pocket and lowering their bills. But new builders are still gonna be using solar, right? New builders, in California it's mandated. Yeah. But the rest of the country isn't. But who's selling to those new builders? Is it guys that are not doing electricity? Electricians. Got it. Electricians, yeah. So the developers, they already have their contractors, they've got their electricians, yeah. So there might be a mass exodus from the solar space to come work for better life. Yeah, there's already been a little bit of a mass exodus. We've attracted a lot of people from the solar space. You know, we did people right at Simple Solar, and we had a good reputation, nobody ever, of course, you're always gonna get the haters. But nobody from our organization like ever could speak negatively about us. So we attracted a lot of people. We brought people in from my last company who were like, oh, you're starting something new, we wanna be with you again. Right. So yeah, definitely a big exodus over there, and better life is happy to take on great talent. There was a time, I spoke at one of your events, it was like a retreat up in the mountains somewhere. Why did you do that? Like why is it important, corporate culture wise, to take people, I mean, you literally took over a mountain. Yeah. Walk me through that. Yeah, you know, like, we wanna give people great experiences. You know, working for an organization isn't just like you come in, you clock in, you clock out. If you're not providing growth for your people, opportunities for them to win, opportunities for them to get engaged with the community, you know, ultimately you're just gonna be another job, where at, you know, my previous organization and this one, we really care about empowering the individual. You know, John Maxwell has laws of leadership, the five levels, or the five levels of leadership. And the fourth one is, second highest is people development. And people follow you because of what you've done for them. And so when you help other people develop and grow, and you know, we brought you, we brought Bobby Castro, we brought in a bunch of influencers from the solar space as well to come in and just pour value into them, people grew and people developed. And when they have that type of development in their own personal lives, like many companies aren't doing that. Very, very few companies are developing as much as, or investing as much into their people as we do. Okay, so on the make money side, someone starts working a better life, and they make a hundred grand, and they make 200 grand, they make 300 grand, and now it's time to finally do some of their first investments. When they have options for real estate, stock market, cryptocurrency, NFTs, I can find a deal with this person, Angel Invest in a restaurant in a sports bar and a clothing line, so many options to invest into, what would you say to someone to start and make their first couple hundred grand? You know, the first thing is that I say is like, you gotta get to a hundred K, my personal take is get to a hundred K saved. That's what I've been taught to do, because going from zero to a hundred K, you learn the skill of discipline. Because a lot of people, they'll get to maybe 20 K or 30 K, they feel that they've got enough or they're good, and then they spend it and they drop back down, and they just keep repeating the cycle. So I believe that first you gotta get to a hundred K. Once you can get to a hundred K saved, that's the point where you go out and deploy so that you can learn the skill of discipline. The worst thing that a person can do is that when they get to a hundred K, they just keep all the money. That's the worst thing to do. What I've been taught personally is that you dump it into illiquid assets. I dumped my first million cash that I got, I dumped the whole entire thing into real estate that I couldn't touch. And it scared the shit out of me, because I was like, I don't have anymore money. They're like, I gotta go work, I gotta go work. And it's that all in this of like, having your back against the wall, I believe allows you to push for more. Cause I was really scared when I had a million, and when I dropped down to zero, I was like, holy shit, I intentionally created chaos for myself, and I have to force myself to go, because there's a big difference between being broke and being poor. So being poor is having nothing, or having a bad mindset, or not having belief or conviction in yourself. But being broke is just like, how much cash you got in the bank account. So I've been taught, stay broke. Every time you get extra cash, dump it and get rid of it, so you have to keep the hustle going. So, I'm obsessed with that, yes. Yeah, you know, Bitcoin's incredible. Like, absolutely love Bitcoin. The thing is like, you just can't get scared when you don't have money and then go sell it, because that's what a lot of people do with, you know, even with stocks, anything that's liquid, people get scared, and they don't realize that even if they didn't tap into it, they can figure it out. Like anytime you've had your back against the wall, you've always figured it out. Same with everybody else on planet Earth, for the most part. Like, people have figured it out, but a lot of people, when they have that cash reserve, or the extra money that's liquid that they can pull, they sometimes feel like, oh, it's okay, I can just go ahead and pull from there, I'll be okay, rather than forcing the production out of themselves. Right. So you jumped into 17,000 square feet. Yeah. I call that, you know, I didn't invent this, but where the puck is going, right? You were just going to where the business is growing at the scale that you were at. You don't need 17,000 square feet today, you know you're gonna need 17,000 square feet at the way you're scaling. That's a big jump. How do you plan to fill up 17,000 square feet? Yeah, you know, we have a really good model inside of our business. You know, people get bonuses if they recruit great talent. Obviously, you know, we don't hire everybody. They go through a pretty extensive screening process to be able to work with the organization. But one of the big things is that when we got that office what that did is that casted vision for all of our people. And our first day I was like, guys, we have a lot of seats that we have to fill here. You know, we recruit a lot through social media. We were now building out a lot on the W2 side as well. So you heard of join.com? Yeah, so our friend, he just became the CRO of join.com, which is a pretty cool set up. So he got a set up with join.com. And you know, we're just gonna be blasting out across all channels trying to fill that place up with great talent. Referrals are always a great thing. Like anytime you know somebody, like if they wanna work for an organization that cares about them and their development and their success, like we always take referrals to be able to bring in great talent. Yeah, when you post on social media, I literally took a screenshot and was texting it out to different friends. Yeah, appreciate that. Because I didn't realize the remote part of it was so 95% it was remote. I was texting to people that are in Miami. But now I got a lot more people to text because I think it's a great opportunity for someone to be able to work from home. So when you say turn on available, does that mean they don't have to work exactly nine to five? They can. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, they don't have to work like exactly nine to five. You know, we, our team leaders, you know, we don't set people off to failure. When somebody comes into the organization, they're part of the group and they need to rise to the standards that we have as a company. So we, our team leaders take deep responsibility in ensuring people are successful. We also know if somebody sells 10 accounts a week, they're not gonna make enough money to live. And so that's just like, you know, and if you're 10, 10, 10 accounts a week, excuse me, 10 accounts a week, you're talking 10 hours of working a week. So it's not really much effort. So, so somebody can hit available whenever they want, but our team leaders do hold people up to a standard of ensuring that they get to a certain KPI to be part of our organization. You know, ultimately we, we want to have a culture of high performance. And in order to do that, we have to hold people accountable to hit KPI. Do you have any that are a part time, like a single mom? Right now, right now we don't know. We did and we found that they just, they couldn't get the, get through the learning curve fast enough. And the thing is we're paying for all of the leads. So if someone's taking two, three months to get through that learning curve, we as a company are just spending so much more money on them for them to learn, versus, you know, somebody shortens that learning curve by 50%, like our return on investment for the lead dollars is significant. Got it. Yeah. Okay. So you've invested into different deals. You've invested into real estate, different private equity companies, et cetera. For you personally, how do you decide? Like there's, you know, sometimes you just want to make 5%, 10%, 15% return. And sometimes you want to cross your fingers and have this big exit. As you're growing this business to hundreds and hundreds of employees, if not thousands of employees at some point and become hundreds of millions of dollars and God willing, billions of dollars, what do you see for yourself in the future for investing? For investing in the future? Yeah. You know, the real estate game is just like super safe. You know that that's always going to come. But I think like at this stage of my life, it's a little bit boring. And I think that I can take on more risk. So I really like, I really like investing into my own business. I found that to be like the best return on any capital that you have. I like doing the private equity deals. We did one recently that just like, when we got into where it just raises a seven and a half X increase in like what, a year and a half or something like that. That was cool to see. But I see myself going a little bit more philanthropical once I get to like hundreds of millions. And at that point in time, I see myself as being like a, going into venture capital. Yeah. Buying, buying businesses, investing in businesses beyond the boards of different businesses. I think I bring a unique skill set to companies in a different vantage point than most people see. And I know business. Like it's, that's my thing, right? Like the number one piece of advice I have is like, don't invest in something that you don't understand. If you don't understand it, like don't put money into it. Unless you have somebody that you can really trust. If you have somebody you can really trust, then go ahead and do it. But if you don't, if you don't fully understand it, don't do it. So you also consume a lot of knowledge from books, live events, masterminds, podcasts. Why is it important for you as an entrepreneur, as a business owner, to constantly be connecting in person and in your mind? Yeah. I mean, like you'd want to be able to deliver value to others, right? Like the thing is that you don't know everything and I don't know anything. And the more that I learned, the more I realized, holy shit, there's a lot more for me to learn. I want to be connected with great people so that I can absorb the right information, the right data. You know, I realized that at a pretty young age that where we're at in life and the way that we operate and the way that we act is strictly based off of the information that we have. And if we can replace bad information with good information, we can make better decisions. And those decisions ultimately lead us to getting to, you know, achieving a better life. So I consistently want to surround myself by people who are doing better than me. I'm always seeking counsel from people who are wiser than me, because if I want to be better, I should go listen to people who have done it before. And so one of the guiding principles that has helped me make the right decisions was this quote that said, never take advice from people that you wouldn't trade places with. You wouldn't trade places with them? Their advice really wouldn't be valid for you. So the interesting thing about on the mentor side is, let's say we both want to start a clothing line, but Mo hires Damon and John and gives him 10% equity in his business. And I don't hire anybody. If we both try to get to a million dollars, if we did that same race a hundred times, he's gonna win every single time because Damon and John has been there. He's done $4 billion in clothing sales. He's gonna get the right manufacturer, the right designer, the right sales team. He knows how to deal with the buyers, the shipping, the convention boost, the hiring, the firing, samples, tags, labels, what should we do? The cotton should it be 7% or 8%? Like he knows all the things because he's been doing it for 30 years, where I'm trying to Google what percentage of cotton in my sweatshirts? How much production, how much does this cost? Like I'm just trying to figure it out compared to Mo hiring an expert. So that's why I'm always recommending advisors, mentors, people joining your board, et cetera, is they are the fast forward button to not pay the dummy tax. So if I try to start a clothing brand, I'm gonna pay the dummy tax on every single part of the business. I'm gonna overpay for the convention booth. I'm gonna overpay for the staff. I'm gonna overpay for the manufacturing samples. I'm gonna overpay for the shipping costs. I didn't know I could use that shipping department. So do it for $4 a unit, set it $6 a unit. Everything I'm paying a dummy tax on that Mo is not gonna do it because he hired Damon John. All right, the last part of this topic is make money, invest money, give it away to charity. Why do you think it's important to have a charity component whether it's for your personal life or for your business? You know, there's a lot more to life than like you just making money. And I found that some of the biggest moments of joy that I've been able to have and I've been given to others is by giving it away. It's also kind of does something to, it does something to your mindset where, you know, there's this whole entire way that people are raised, especially here in the US and through our education system that like you should just hold, you know, if you get money, you need to hold on to it. And when you reverse that direction, you reverse that flow and when you get money and you say, hey, it's okay, I'm just gonna go ahead and give it away. I feel that that actually pushes a fire into you and puts you into the idea of abundance to be able to like go and achieve more. So like I'll tell you the story that happened to me. And this was the first time that I made like a, this was the first time that I ever made like a decent sized contribution. I had the wrong people in my company, some bad actors. I knew that they should have been gone, but it was really one person. I knew that he should have been gone, but I didn't have the leadership in me to fire him. It's actually really funny. I was at your event in San Diego. Remember when we were on that big boat? Yeah, we were on the big boat. I went to Tim Grover and I was like, I was telling him about this guy. I'm like, hey, I got this guy. Like we've known each other for 10 years, went to high school together. Like he's just like, he's not doing it. Like I, and he's like, and he just, you know, Tim Grover's a tough dude. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Tim Grover's a tough dude. And he came to, he's like, the problem is, he's like, you're thinking with this. And he like, tap me in the heart. And it hurts. He's like, you're thinking with this. He's like, you need to be thinking with this. And he's like, you know what to do. He's like, when you, he's like, when you go home, the right decision is that you get him out of your company. And went home, had the conversation to do that with him. Didn't have the courage to do it. Two weeks later, he ended up leaving, spreading a bunch of gossip and pulled half my company. Pulled like 50 people overnight, extracting them from the organization. Cause I didn't have the leadership in me at the time to do it. And that's a time, you know, when you was half your company, you're probably scared most of the time. You're like, what the hell am I gonna do, et cetera. The next day, an individual reached out to me and asked, and said that he was doing a charity trip in Peru, and he asked for me to contribute. And literally the next day, I wired him 50K. Whoa. And I was losing half your company. Right after losing half my company. I wired 50K because I just kind of wanted to give the middle finger to the universe that said like, despite this idea that I should be in scarcity, I know that I'm gonna be able to get through this and I'm gonna go and play in the world of abundance. And so I gave the middle finger to the universe and said, despite all this pressure, I'm gonna go against what you think I should do. And I'm gonna go and like just take control here. That move just like inspired me to go out, do more, provide more. I mean, we get to help a lot of people. So aside from just like the idea that like, it creates more abundance in your own ability to go and pursue, just help me. If all you're taking is for yourself, it's just very selfish. Like we're gonna die at some point. Like we're all gonna die and you're not gonna take anything with you. So give it to people who need it, who don't have the same opportunity that we have here. All right, so where can people follow you? Better life, if they wanna work with you, et cetera. Tell them everything. Yeah, so on YouTube it's atmofala on Instagram. It's atfole the leader. And if you wanna follow Better Life, it's at Team BLFG. But if you wanna hop into our opportunity calls, we run them twice a week. We show everything about the opportunity at join.teamblfg.com. We'll show you everything of what we do, how we do it and how you can get involved. All right guys, you're watching The Money Mondays. And as you know, we cover these three core topics because it's important to have these discussions with your friends, family, and followers. We grew up thinking it's rude to talk about money. I think that's insane. You have to talk about money, loans, debts, financing, investing, cash flow. Should I get a lease? Should I rent? Should I buy? So, if you're in a situation that you have to be able to talk about with people around you, so check us out online, like, comment, subscribe, and we'll see you guys next Monday on TheMoneyMondays.com. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to a special edition of The Money Mondays. Normally, this podcast takes place inside of an RV motorhome, but I'm in Miami trying to knock out six podcasts back to back to back, and there's a rainstorm outside. So, we took over the MOVE studio here in Miami. They have multiple locations, so I'm very grateful to be here in their space right now with a longtime friend who's in the real estate category. He's had masterminds, coaching, businesses, accumulated thousands of units in the retail space, and he's also been a part of the real estate team in the retail space, so what we're gonna do is cover three core topics, how to make money, how to invest money, how to give away to charity. So, without further ado, Mr. Brad Sumrock, give us a quick two-minute bio, and we'll get straight to the money. Hey, Dan, thanks, I'm excited to be here. Yeah, I never thought I'd be doing real estate and I don't know the business. Neither of my parents finished college, so it was impressed upon me to study hard, go to grades, go to school, get a job. I did all that after 14 years in corporate America. Never made it to the top, never even made it to the middle, and was fired once, laid off once, read Robert Kiyosaki's books in the year 2000, and I became a seeker of business and entrepreneurship, went to a real estate investing seminar, and eight months later bought my first investment property, 32 units, did another deal with my own money, found myself out of money. My third deal was 250 units, where I learned how to raise money from other people, and since then I've done over 11,000 units as a general partner all over the country. Then I got inspired by Tony Robbins, and I saw how he was impacting millions of people, so I started doing conferences and seminars and created the large investor community, and run a mentoring program and a mastermind, so that is the two-minute summary. Wow, okay, there's lots unpacked there. On the path to 11,000 units, when you first started, when did you decide to go from your own money to bringing in capital? Well, I decided out of necessity because I ran out of my own money. I had a mentor, which I think is critical for anybody that wants to achieve a lot of success faster, and my mentor wasn't syndicating deals with other people's money, he was using his own money. So that's what I did, I did 62 units, but all my money that I'd saved in 14 years of corporate America was gone. And then a broker brought me a 250 unit and it penciled out, and I wanted to do the deal, but I didn't have the money. But what I had, Dan, is I was going to networking events, I was going to meetups, I was going to other investor clubs, and people would tell me, like, hey, if you find a deal, I'll invest with you. So when I found the 250 unit deal and I didn't have any money, I put it to the test and I was able to raise $2 million and buy a $7 million deal with other people's money. And what I learned about it, it was easier, the lender's wanted the loan anymore, it was non-recourse financing, I was able to hire professional management and become a true business owner instead of an operator, where I would literally bought myself a job with my 32 units and my 30 unit, now I'm a business owner. So that's how I did it, it was kind of out of necessity, it wasn't like I wanted to do it, but I didn't want to stay small and I didn't want to give up the opportunity to buy that deal. So for the investor side, why is it better for them, interesting for them, easy for them, good for them, safe for them, like walk through why they make a decision to co-invest into this deal. So let's say their $2 million you're raising and they're gonna put in 100,000 of it. What's the typical thing for them, what are they looking for, the investor? Well, they're looking for a good return, they're looking for something safe, something relatively secure, there's always risk in any type of investment. But they're also looking to invest outside of Wall Street, they're looking to have a little bit more control over their investment, where they get to see the asset that they're investing in, they get to know the people that are running the deal and making the decisions. And in multifamily, they're looking for cash flow, they're looking for appreciation, they're looking for depreciation. So when you have something that puts money in your pocket every month, something that goes up in value and something that reduces your taxes, and then they don't have to do any of the work. So they're leveraging, like in my case, they're leveraging my experience, my contacts, my time, my Rolodex, my expertise in terms of like finding deals, analyzing deals, funding deals, managing deals, handling nuances, anything that goes wrong, like we handle it. So for them, it's pretty hands off. So if I'm in the investor and I'm listening out there and I wanna put in, just use a hundred kids example, what should I be looking for if someone's bringing me a real estate deal? Well, I look at two things, I look at you wanna vet the GP team, so you wanna vet the people, like what's their values, how do they run their business, how are they gonna handle adversity, what's their track record? And I also look at the numbers of the deal, what are their returns gonna be? What's the cash flow, what's the upside, what's the tax savings? And Dan, I'm sure you know this, like you've looked at thousands of investment opportunities, like every investment opportunity, every pitch deck is gonna look amazing, right? Like the sponsors have amazing experience. Everything's really pretty, yes. Everything is gonna look amazing. And so one of the things I'm passionate about teaching is like how do you really vet that, both on the people side and on the numbers side. And what's the ballpark return I should be looking for? I think investors could expect to double their money, say like in a five year period, not including the tax benefits. So you'd have a combination of cash flow and upside, and if the deal does as projected, it should pretty much double your money. When times go better than expected because of market forces, the deals generally do better and they could also do worse. And the tax benefits could be really, really big, but everyone's gonna have that a little different because of their own situation. So let's say on the other side of it, I am 29 years old, I live in Montana, and someone shows me a deal for 12 units, for example. Something crazy, just 12 units. And I wanna go raise $600,000, what do I do? Well, there's a couple steps. So this is what I got into teaching, and that's how I started, is I went to a seminar and I joined a mentorship program. And so my first deal was 32 doors, and I'm not sure I would have done that on my own. I probably wouldn't have done it or maybe I would have done it wrong. So I believe that anybody could go out and buy 12 units, especially if they wanna use their own money or even raise money from other people. So you wanna acquire certain skills. I think you wanna understand some of the basic fundamentals, like what is NOI? What is Cap rate? What's a T-12? Like what's a pro forma? How do you model a deal? And then you wanna be able to find deals. And then when you find them, you wanna be able to analyze them quickly and effectively. And then you wanna have a network of industry professionals. You're gonna need a real estate attorney, you're gonna need a lender, you're gonna need an insurance provider, maybe a management company, unless you're gonna self-manage it. And you need a network. Having a network of investors and being a part of a community really helps. I think at some point, you could create your own brand and your own community and have your own following. But as you know, that takes time and it takes money. So that's how I started as I joined the program and I leveraged somebody else's experience and Rolodex and Track Record and Community. And that's the best way I think people can get started. So you're saying I should go try to find like a mastermind or a group or networking in my city to start to build relationships and to build information. Sure, I mean, and there's a lot of free stuff. Like you could find free resources on YouTube and bigger pockets. You could find free meetups and get a lot of information. But at the end of the day, you pay one way or the other. You either pay with your time or you pay with your money. Very cool. So on the making money side, as you're accumulating more and more in the real estate game, how are you deciding whether you go to commercial buildings, Airbnb's, fixed and flips, multi-family. There's so many options for you as the real estate person, real estate mogul that you are. How do you decide what you're working on? Man, that's a great question. Like I really believe that you could be wildly successful on any of those things. And for me, it was like the first seminar I went to, I learned how to knock on doors, buy the pre foreclosure list and knock on doors and try to save people from their home being foreclosed. And after having the door slammed in my face like 49 out of 50 times, I was like, this isn't for me. So number one, it just didn't align with me like that business. So then the next seminar I went to, they taught single-family rentals. And the whole first day, it was like buy a single-family home, rehab it, rent it out and cash flow. And I remember going home that night thinking, I'm gonna buy 40 single-family homes in the next three years and quit my job. The next day they taught multi-family rentals. The same conference. Yeah, and multi-family was like, hey, instead of buying 40 single-family homes, imagine buying 40 units on one property. And I'm like, this seems simpler. And the guy teach and said, hey, look, if you have like 100,000 to invest, like skip the single family and buy as many doors as you can on one site. So that's what I did. And what I didn't do is I didn't go to 27 conferences and look at 27 different things. But honestly, I probably could have done the same with Airbnb, your self-storage or anything. But one of the things I learned early on, Dan, is that the riches are in the niches. And I heard somebody else say, if you wanna make specialized money, you need to be a specialist. So I just decided to be a specialist. And to this day, like I get pitched a lot of other asset classes, mobile home parks and different types of things. And the thing is, is I'm still a beginner in those asset classes. So I just stay in my lane and I keep growing and I keep scaling. And there's so many opportunities, like in this narrow niche, but there's unlimited opportunity. So you now have a wide array of states to invest in and choose to buy multifamily. It's like Dallas, Texas, Chicago, New York, Atlanta, California, if you wanna go. Like there's so many different options. How do you decide what state you're gonna buy multifamily in? So I have a recipe for that. And one of them is I prefer like landlord and business friendly environments, literally at the state level. And not California. And look, so, yeah. Here's the thing, like there are people that own apartment communities in California and they're making a lot of money. And so one of my beliefs is like all real estate is local. Like if you know the nuances, like in California, I have a, actually a student that lives there and he's buying deals in San Diego and adding additional dwelling units and he's crushing it. But like I don't live there. I don't know all the nuances. So if I'm starting with a clean sheet of paper, I'm gonna go to a red state at the governor level. So I'm gonna be looking in like Texas, Georgia, Tennessee, you know, Utah, Florida. Florida, yeah. Because even at the city level, they're more progressive and they're more likely to implement like rent controls and stuff like that. But at the state level, it's not gonna go through. In fact, some of these states actually have laws passed at preempt cities from implementing rent controls and stuff like that. So I like places where like if they consume your product and they don't pay for the product, they can't live on your property. It's just like a restaurant. Like California. Yeah, so that's not California. It's not New York. It's not Boston. Again, people that live there, they understand these nuances and they can make a lot of money. But so I look for red states. I look for population growth above the average, job growth above the average, affordability gap, which is like say a median priced home costs 420,000. And a median price department might be 1,800 a month. Well, that median price at home at 420,000, when you look at the principle of the interest, the tax and insurance, it might be 3,200 a month. And I target Dan like the working class and middle class families that makes 60 to 80,000 a year. Only 27% of them could get qualified to buy a mortgage. I mean, to get a mortgage for that $420,000 home. So they're more likely gonna be renters and they're less likely to be able to afford the payment of 3,200, 3,300 a month and they're gonna be more likely to rent an $1,800 a month apartment. So those are the things I look for. And coming down to like every year, I do like a top 10 market analysis. And they're past five years, it's all been pretty much the same with a few markets coming in and out. But it's Salt Lake City. It's Las Vegas, it's Phoenix, it's Dallas, it's Houston, it's Charlotte, it's Tampa, it's South Florida. And this is where the people were going. This is where the young adults are moving to. And this is where people are more likely gonna rent. So those are all still big name cities. So you're not going to like a rural city or like a secondary or third tiered town. I love this question. And that's, it's one of the nuances is all those cities I mentioned, if you're willing to understand and get to know some of the tertiary markets around there, you could do really well. And you'll have less competition. So like I have a deal in Amarillo, Texas. I lived in Dallas and Houston for like combined over 30 years. I had never been to Amarillo. Like why would you go there? It's not like I'm gonna say, hey honey, let's go on a weekend trip to Amarillo. Right, doesn't happen. But one of my mentees that was trying to get into the Dallas market and didn't have success decided to look in Amarillo. Now he's got like six deals there. And he's literally the third largest property owner in Amarillo, so we really know the market. And then he found deal number seven and I co-GP'd that deal with him. And it's one of the best performing deals in my portfolio. That's awesome. Yeah. So as people are growing, they're getting their first property, their second property, the third property. How should they be considering to scale? Should they focus on that niche like you like to do? Or should they be studying and researching if they wanted to go into storage units? If they want to go in Airbnb, or should they really pick a niche and just go that way? Well, it's hard for me to tell people what they should do. And you can do both. But I would just say if you start to get into other asset classes, just know that there's a lot of nuances that are different. And I've seen people that have jumped from multifamily to triple net, to storage, to development. And they didn't do as well because they didn't see the blind spots. They didn't fully see the differences in these businesses. So if you're gonna do that, you wanna make sure that maybe the first couple of deals and that transition, you're working with a really experienced team. I haven't done that. The way I've scaled is I've just done bigger deals and more deals. And then if you stay in your lane in multifamily, like some people would develop like their own vertically integrated company. They'll do the management in-house, the construction in-house, or the renovations in-house. What I do with all my investments is I co-invest with other really good operators. So like, I have no employees in my multifamily business. I have no construction people. Like I've trained thousands of people over the country and a lot of them are out there doing deals and they're building their own organizations. And now they've scaled up and I end up partnering with a lot of them. And I also partner with some of the biggest and best operators in the country. So that's how I do it. So when you first get a deal approach to you, is there like a certain checklist of things like, no way I'm doing this deal? Is there anything that stands out? And vice versa, are there any times like, oh, I really want this deal because of this? Yeah, I think it's important that you have what I call like your buy box, you know, and you just get really clear on what it is that you want. Like for me, I'm gonna buy, like if I'm gonna lead a deal, you know, I'm gonna buy in Dallas, I'm gonna buy in Houston, I'm gonna buy in Tampa because I know these markets, I lived in these markets and they all meet the criteria. I'm gonna buy 150 units and up. I'm not gonna buy something under 1960. I'm probably not gonna buy anything newer than 2010 because there's too much competition and too much new supply. So if a deal comes across my desk, that's 150 units and up, you know, that's between say, 1980 and 2010 in these markets, then I'm gonna start digging into it. If it's smaller, if it's in a different market, I'll probably send it to somebody else than I know and I'll say, hey, here's a deal that might fit your buy box, it doesn't fit my buy box. Some people stay away from properties that have, you know, flat roof. Some people get really like technical with like the piping and the roofing and stuff. For me, I've made money on all those types of deals, so it's not so important to me. So how do you know when it's time to sell, when it comes to multifamily? Like some people get emotionally attached or they just wanna keep it forever. So you buy a place for $8 million and now it's worth 12 or 13 or whatever the number is and time goes on. When you know it's like, you know what, now's an opportune time to sell. Yeah, that's a great question because some people do talk about like holding these deals forever. And by the way, if you do that, just know that like every five to seven years, you're gonna have to reinvest to continue to upgrade the property. Because all those upgrades you did in year one are starting to experience wear and tear after five to seven years. So I don't really get how people talk about owning properties forever and having infinite returns and it doesn't always work. It's a good concept in theory, but it doesn't always work that way. So because most of my deals are syndications with investors, what I find is people like to get in and out of deals within three to seven years. Some people wanna reinvest. Some people wanna use the profits to pay for their kids college or to pay off their home or to take a dream vacation. So within three to seven years, if I've completed and met or exceeded the projected returns, that's the time for me to exit. Interesting. Yeah. Also, you know, like every asset class, I mean, Jamie Dixon with Chase will say this and Ray Dahlio, every asset class, every the 15 to 20 years is gonna have a correction. So you may be going up and up and up and up and up. And for example, from 2012 to 2022, multifamily only went up. Then in 2023 and 2024, it went down. So there were people that just continued to hold. Now they wish they would have sold. And now they gotta wait for the next upturn. Interesting. Yeah. So on the mastermind side, why is it important for people to join if they wanna get into the real estate space? For example, why joining real estate masterminds? Well, because you're around other people that are playing a game and at your level or higher. You know, you hear the saying like you become like the five people you spend the most time with. So when you are a part of a mastermind, you expand your network, you know, you expand your contacts, you expand your knowledge, you get exposed to different things and you get to leverage other people's experiences, other people's problems, other people's network. And a lot of people like in my mastermind, they end up co-investing with each other. So you just have more deal flow and more opportunities. Very cool. Yeah. So people start to meet each other. They're starting to build up their own portfolio. And now it's time. They're ready for their first big deal. When they're reaching out to investors, when they're reaching out to people that they've met, how do they put it on a silver platter for someone to actually wanna invest into their business, into their real estate? Yeah, that's a whole topic of like how to, so what I hear you asking is how do people effectively like position their deals and pitch their deals and raise capital, right? Exactly. I think part of it is like, who's your ideal investor? Like for me, for so many years, I would say it was a retail investor. It was people that came to my seminars, watched my masterclasses, follow me on Instagram, and then go to my website. Maybe they've learned from me or took a course. These people are likely to invest like 50 to 100 to 150,000. So if I'm raising $10 million, I need 100 investors. A lot of investors. You know, other people and where I'm transitioning very recently is I'm getting in front of family offices, allocators, high net worth people. So, you know, there's a theory that like it's easier to get 10 people to give you a million dollar check than 100 people to give you 100,000. For me, it's been the opposite because of the nature of my business and the seminars and the masterminds. I once was able to raise $22 million in an hour webinar from like hundreds of people that I put out on a Zoom meeting. But now what I'm focused on is like how to get in front of and build relationships. And the more the family offices and the high net worth people, they care more about the relationship. They care more about like knowing you because they don't have a shortage of deals. You know, a lot of people teach like, oh, you're giving people one opportunity. Well, that might be at the retail investor level. As you know, like the family offices, the center millionaires and the families that manage hundreds of millions of dollars, they have a lot of deals. They have a lot of deal flow. They're getting pitched all the time. So what they're looking for is like connection. They're getting to know you. They're looking to know your values. Like who are you as a person? And I think they're gonna invest more into you than in any deal that you might position with them. Is there a goal in mind? We've done over 11,000 units now. Is there a number like, you know what? I'm gonna stop at this point. You know, that's a good question. Every now and then I think about like, why do I keep doing this? But I keep doing it because it works and I could do it somewhat passively. All my investments are something I do like with that I co-invest with other people now. So I don't have to do all the work myself. I'm not an operator at any of my deals. And so I think that's something I'll continue to do for the rest of my life, honestly, because it works. The event and mentoring and mastermind, I am an operator, like I'm very hands-on. I coordinate, I'm the main content creator. I'm the main coach, I'm the main mentor. I do a lot of the speaking. And that's just something that feels my soul. How long I'm gonna do that? I don't know, but probably for another decade or so, but I'm not sure I'll be doing that when I'm 80. Sure. You know. All right, let's talk about the charity side. Why do you think it's important for people inside of their households or with their businesses and offices, why do you think it's important to have some type of philanthropy part of their world? You know, the best way I would say that, Dan, is anybody in this country who already hit the lottery. Like, we're so blessed. And I didn't realize that. Like, I'll be authentic. Like, when I was an engineer and an MBA and I was making 120,000 a year, like, I was blessed, but I didn't feel it at the time. I felt like I was struggling to keep up with the Joneses and was just in a different phase of my life. So I wasn't one of these guys that were giving away 10 or 20% of my income. But when I started to come into, you know, seven figures, and I started to reduce my taxes, and I went five years without paying any federal tax, like I felt a calling that like, I could be doing something more. And so I got into charity and it became addictive, you know? And if you have actually not only contributed to a charity, but actually went to another country, and like, I used to donate tens of thousands of dollars to a charity that would provide wheelchairs for people in need. And then they invited me to go to Nicaragua in 2017, and it just changed my life. And so like, to me, like giving money changes the people that are the beneficiaries of that charity, but actually going on a trip actually changes my heart, like it just transformed me. So I got into it even more. And now one of the charities that I'm most passionate about is one of my best friends runs a charity called Child Liberation Foundation, where they are committed to eliminating trafficking of children. So like I have Paul Hutchinson speak at a lot of my events. We do fundraisers, I match dollar for dollar. And just in the last six months, we've contributed like with my community and the matching of my company, like almost a half a million dollars. Amazing. Yeah, and now I'm like, hey, I wanna go undercover. And he's like, no, no, no, no, no, you'll be killed. Like that's not something you wanna do. Yeah, I've had a lot of friends that have done it and it really does change them. Because of the things that they see, and when they go to Mexico and they have to be there for weeks at a time to be undercover, it's very intense and very dangerous, very much so. Okay, on the charity side as an individual, why do you think it's important people to take the time to actually go do it compared to just here's 10 grand or here's a thousand bucks? Well, as I mentioned, I think the money is impacting lives because they do need money. And I believe everyone in this country in the United States is blessed. Like I said, we hit the lottery. So whether you're making 10,000 a month or 100,000 a month, I would encourage everybody to start doing something like that. But actually going on a trip like that first trip, I went to Nicaragua where you see how a $200 wheelchair not only changed the recipient, but like their family, their caregivers. I mean, some of these people were adults and some of these children that are 11, 12 years old are being carried like a sack of potatoes that never had the gift of mobility. And when you see the emotional response where they're getting placed into a chair and they could actually move around, and like it brought tears to my eyes and it just touched my soul. And then it makes you wanna do more. And it also makes you realize how blessed you are. And for me, it just made me feel gratitude every day that like I have my arms and I have my legs and I have my mind and I have my eyes and it just changes you. And you go from like your hardest day could be somebody's best day. For sure. All right, so the last question is the one question I ask on every single episode and I've never gotten the same answer before. So let's say you go from 11,000 units to 20,000 to 50,000, 100,000 units over the course of time, so finally eventually it's time for Brad to pass away. What percentage of that billion dollars do you leave to children? Wow, with the children or the charity? Children. Children. You know, that's a really good question and I don't know the exact answer because I believe that children are our future and I know a percent of it, but I also have a heart for like old people and my dad's in a senior living facility and if I ever got into another asset class, I have to believe that we could run our senior facilities better. For sure. And so, and I don't have kids and I'm not currently married and that's a good question and I don't really have a clear answer. I could make something up, you know, that would sound really good, but I don't have it. Yeah. So where do people check you out on social media? Where can they learn about you? Your masterminds, your events, things that are going on in your world? Yeah. So I'm really proud of what is happening on my Instagram page. So I told you this personally, but six months ago I had 14,000 followers and now I have like almost 350,000. And so I spend way too much time on Instagram and I respond to my own DMs, but I'm really into it and how it's grown. So I would tell everybody to go to Instagram and my name is just Brad Sumrock, B-R-A-D-S-U-M-R-O-K, and it's got a blue check mark and I also found that there's like some copycat accounts, which is the highest form of flattery and they have punctuations and underscores. So I don't have any of that. So just B-R-A-D-S-U-M-R-O-K with the blue check mark and I'll respond to you personally. Very cool. All right guys, as you know, we covered these three core topics about how to make money, invest money, give it away to charity, because it's important for our society to do those things, understand them, and have discussions with your friends, family, and followers. We grew up thinking it's rude to talk about money. I think that's ridiculous. We have to have discussion about money because it's real life. Loans, taxes, accounting, should I rent, should I lease, should I buy? These are all things that are part of our daily life. So you have to be able to have these discussions eloquently with the people around you. So getting as much knowledge as you can by listening to podcasts like this and we're just reading the things that you hear on this podcast is a very useful tool for you ever and ever and ever with the people around you. So check us out online, share, like, comment, subscribe, all those things, it all helps us keep up with the rankings on the top 50 of the whole world right now. We're number 44 in the world right now. So that's because of you guys liking, commenting, subscribing, so I appreciate it. Visit us at themoneymondays.com and we'll see you guys next Monday.