Podcasts about kevin there

Book Your Free Revenue First Podcast Strategy here!Get Your Free Dial Session here!Want Your Reps Hitting Quota in 2022? Get Your Wingman Free Trial HERE!HIGHLIGHTSA discussion about current events An obsession with creating a new pipeline Cold-calling is an extreme sport It takes all kinds of people to be successful in sales The list is the strategyWhen cold-texting is acceptableNobody does their best work when they hate their jobA personalized video for reach outs will do wondersQUOTESKevin: "What am I obsessed with? Three things: technology, process, and people. You blend the three of them, outbound suddenly becomes a formulaic machine just like the Model T. You crank it up, you get it going, and once it's running you can drive anywhere you want. But you got to blend the three the right way."Kevin: "There's so many really technical products out there and really technical buyers that it's not really about the gift of the gab. It's a much more consultative and technical sale, and that takes a lot of documentation, a lot of explanation, a lot of demo stuff."Kevin: "There's more opportunity out there than ever before for salespeople, for SDRs, for AEs, for anyone who's like in SaaS sales. Now is the time to get an awesome job, an awesome offer. Every company is hiring, venture capital is flowing like water."Kevin: "What are salespeople for? You're hiring a salesperson to fuss around the CRM, and build lists all day and write emails that never get opened? That's now why you hire salespeople. Salespeople are in the job because they like talking to people, they like solving people for people, and they want to communicate with people. Nothing about sales, even if you're an inbound rep, nothing about sales is just sitting, alone in your desk."Learn more about Kevin in the links below:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/khopp/Website: https://www.hoppconsultinggroup.com/Podcast: https://pod.link/1601548363Learn more about Collin in the link below: LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/collin-saleshustle/Also, you can join our community by checking out @salescast.community. If you're a sales professional looking to take your career to greater heights, please visit us at https://salescast.co/ and set a call with Collin and Chris.

In this week's show, Phil talks to Kevin Harris, who has been in the IT field for over 20 years, holding positions that range from Systems Analyst to Chief Information Officer. He is now a higher education administration official, continuing to make system improvements to support student success and learning. As a faculty member he has delivered instruction in several disciplines including business, cybersecurity, computer science, and computer networking, with particular interest in information security and computer forensics. Kevin joins Phil to talk about how exposure to new opportunities can help to shape our attitudes. He also discusses the value to be found in sharing our own career stories, and how this can inspire others.   KEY TAKEAWAYS:   TOP CAREER TIP Make sure you're always stepping out of your comfort zone. By pushing yourself into spaces outside of your comfort zone, you develop new sensibilities and attitudes.   WORST CAREER MOMENT During a junior role, Kevin and his team assumed that all the work they had done was enough, but upon the rollout of the project, it transpired that things were not as prepared as they may have liked. This taught Kevin the value of understanding each organisation's political structure.   CAREER HIGHLIGHT Kevin was given the chance to return to his college and work on prestigious projects. Working on the other side of learning was quite a thrill.   THE FUTURE OF CAREERS IN I.T IT has become a more inclusive place to work, and a sector that allows for many more opportunities for growth, as well as more diversity in terms of raising up minorities.   THE REVEAL What first attracted you to a career in I.T.? – The challenge of finding solutions to problems. What's the best career advice you received? – As long as you understand the consequences, you can do anything you want to do. What's the worst career advice you received? – Don't seek roles above you and stay where you are until something comes up. What would you do if you started your career now? – Kevin would be more intentional about finding an internship. What are your current career objectives? Focusing on more ways to introduce tech to more diverse communities. What's your number one non-technical skill? – Being able to take something highly technical and communicating it to a wider audience. How do you keep your own career energized? – Kevin is always asking questions, as well as reading and listening. What do you do away from technology? – Kevin regularly “unplugs” by going fishing and getting back to nature.   FINAL CAREER TIP Share your story. No matter where you're at in your career, sharing your story so far can act as a beacon to others who may be at the beginning of their own journey.   BEST MOMENTS (5:51) – Kevin - “Exposure changes attitudes” (12:20) – Kevin - “There's a lot of underrepresented populations in the tech field that we need to focus on, but I think the momentum is there” (13:55) – Kevin – “You can do anything you want to do but you must understand the consequences to it” (17:13) – Kevin – “Anyone who's interested in tech can find their place and a really rewarding career”   ABOUT THE HOST – PHIL BURGESS Phil Burgess is an independent IT consultant who has spent the last 20 years helping organizations to design, develop, and implement software solutions.  Phil has always had an interest in helping others to develop and advance their careers.  And in 2017 Phil started the I.T. Career Energizer podcast to try to help as many people as possible to learn from the career advice and experiences of those that have been, and still are, on that same career journey.   CONTACT THE HOST – PHIL BURGESS Phil can be contacted through the following Social Media platforms: Twitter: https://twitter.com/_PhilBurgess LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/philburgess Instagram: https://instagram.com/_philburgess Website: https://itcareerenergizer.com/contact Phil is also reachable by email at phil@itcareerenergizer.com and via the podcast's website, https://itcareerenergizer.com Join the I.T. Career Energizer Community on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/groups/ITCareerEnergizer   ABOUT THE GUEST – KEVIN HARRIS Kevin Harris has been in the IT field for over 20 years, holding positions that range from Systems Analyst to Chief Information Officer. He is now a higher education administration official, continuing to make system improvements to support student success and learning. As a faculty member he has delivered instruction in several disciplines including business, cybersecurity, computer science, and computer networking, with particular interest in information security and computer forensics.   CONTACT THE GUEST – KEVIN HARRIS Twitter: https://twitter.com/kevinharristech LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harris-kevin/

Jason talks to Kevin Levitt; he is the Director of Industry and Business Development for Financial Services for Nvidia. The company is one of the driving forces behind the technology powering artificial intelligence today.Episode Highlights:00.38: Nvidia is a company that was started about 30 years ago almost, and they have really pioneered the use of graphics processing units. 08.12: What Jason has seen in academic studies is more accurate FICO scores in terms of calculating the probability of default.09.58 Jason asks, “What is the natural type of function for artificial intelligence disturbing the market today like what is the commonality around the things is replacing?10.20: Kevin says in the example of Siri virtual assistant or chatbot. In the context of financial services that are helping us to transfer a balance or to understand what our balance is, or pay a bill, it goes from there to assist the call center agent where we have a more complex problem. With the call center and the agent, the AI is actually complimenting human assistants with information.18.30: Large banks are trying to figure out how to build an enterprise AI capability, AI infrastructure to support the migration from a handful of AI-enabled applications up to 100s.22.10: Jason inquires, “What is the kind of cool use cases you see being drummed up and coming forward going in the future?” 26.30: Kevin talks about the four primary players in terms of big retail, big tech, fintech and big banks, are going to be the primary competitors and if one of them is using AI to deliver a virtual assistant or chatbot and the other one is still using some form of rules-based kind of chat experience, AI one is going to win.28.40 Jason: The technology companies choosing to come out and this is going to make everybody sharper, and everybody really focused on their value proposition and really try to eliminate friction.35.32: NVIDIA is all about innovation and stretching, kind of the boundaries of where people thought. Computing power could go and certainly where artificial intelligence could be of benefit. 3 Key Points:For the past 15 plus years, Kevin has been at the intersection of data technology and financial services.The technology can enable a better customer experience across many dimensions when artificial intelligence and deep learning models that leverage natural language processing are utilized.There are lots of opportunities to continually improve how AI is leveraged within any industry, including within the context of financial services.Tweetable Quotes:“You can think of artificial intelligence, or AI is kind of the Super umbrella if you will, and underneath that falls a category of artificial intelligence which is machine learning.” – Kevin“It is not about job loss it is about job improvement, which is freeing us to do the higher-order capabilities.” – Kevin“There are some of the smartest people in the world that are working on financial services, and they see the power and the opportunity associated with AI.” - KevinResources Mentioned:Facebook – Jason Pereira's FacebookLinkedIn – Jason Pereira's LinkedInWoodgate.com – Sponsor See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Kevin Hourigan is President and CEO of Bayshore Solutions, a digital agency that started in 1996 as a branch of a managed services provider – a 3-member team building and maintaining client networks. Two years later? Thirty employees.  Decades ago, one of the Kevin's engineers developed a company website and asked 100 of the company's clients if they would be interested in a 3-page website for $500. Client responses were either “What's a website?” or “We'll never need one of those.” One client agreed to give it a try. That $500 website cost $5,000 to build, but two years later, in 1998, clients came begging for websites, which were now more profitably priced at $7,500 and up. The company failed in its attempt to go public in the late 90s and survived the dot com crash in the early 2000s. Its base of paying clients plummeted 90%. In response, the company slashed its staff from 225 to 12 in a year. Larger agencies, the ones Kevin considered as his mentors, the ones that went public . . . failed. Bayshore Solutions is one of only 2% of the digital agencies that survived the dot com collapse. When Kevin realized that what he had left of the company would never again be “an aspiring dot-commer on the verge of going public, spending money like it's going out of style with clients spending money with us like it's going out of style,” he knew it was time to rebrand. He wanted the new name to be “agnostic,” that is, not tied to any transient technology. Bayshore Web Development could become obsolete. Baysore Solutions, on the other hand, would not be tied to any here today, gone tomorrow technology. For almost 25 years, BayShore Solutions has helped clients create advertising campaigns that drive qualified traffic. It designs and develops powerful stakeholder-targeted websites with the right marketing mix to help its clients succeed. The agency markets itself as a digital expert, applying strategies horizontally across a variety of verticals, transferring experience from one vertical to another completely unrelated (and non-competing) vertical. Every solution is unique, with a balance of the “bleeding edge of new and the tested, tried, and true.” Around 90% of implementation strategies are things Bayshore KNOWS will work. The 5 to 15% that is experimental will vary depending on the phase of an industry's business cycle.  After Kevin had excellent experience working with a CEO coach, he decided to let his leadership team hire an executive team coach. The result? Tighter vision and a better definition of core values (working together, winning together, and solving problems together), with the team all learning together, rather than receiving the information from “an informed Kevin. He says, “Having a team coach, we're hearing the same thing at the same time.” In response to the impact of Covid-19, Kevin explains that his company has reduced unnecessary expenses and increased its marketing budget by 50%. He says the company's strategy is to market and sell its way through the crisis, rather than trying to cut its way through. The results so far? Leads are up, traffic is up, and sales have met December's forecasts. He plans to continue operating this way and says the agency's next 90-day plan is to remove unnecessary operational expenses and reinvest that money in sales and marketing efforts.  Kevin can be found on his agency's website at: BayshoreSolutions.com or by email at: kevin@bayshoresolutions.com Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by Kevin Hourigan, President and CEO of Bayshore Solutions based in Tampa, Florida. Welcome to the podcast, Kevin. KEVIN: Hey, good morning, Rob. Nice to be here. ROB: Fantastic to have you here. Why don't you start off by telling us about Bayshore Solutions and where you are excellent?  KEVIN: Appreciate that, Rob. Bayshore Solutions, we're a company that's about to celebrate our 25th year of providing services to our clients. I think what makes that special – we started this company in January of 1996, when America Online or AOL or however you might know of them was still on Version 1, and many people were still just getting introduced to the internet. As a digital agency, we've probably been around more than probably the top one percentile of the industry's experts. For almost 25 years, we've been helping our clients design and develop the correct website that's going to speak to their primary stakeholders as well as creating the advertising campaign that's going to drive qualified traffic and help our customers grow through a combination of the right website to the right audience with the right marketing mix. Enjoyed 25 years and still having fun at it. ROB: That's remarkable. Congratulations on those 25 years. If we rewind to 1996, what do websites look like, and what do your scopes of work look like at that time? KEVIN: It's too funny. I love telling the story, Rob. In January 1996 when we went to market, this was a new division of a company that I had. Back then, we would be what you might call a managed services provider or your outsourced IT department. But essentially, my company at the time really helped companies manage their computer networks – which, back then, there was no cloud; they were all in some kind of closet in the corner of a company's office space. We managed their servers, their desktop computers and things of that nature. One of our engineers was getting into web design and built our company's website and wanted to see if we could do the same for a couple of our clients. I told him I don't have any blockers to it. I wasn't super excited about the idea, but he was knocking on our clients' doors, and he was offering them a three-page website for $500. Of the first 100 people that he asked that were existing clients, they had two responses: “What is a website?” or “We'll never need one of those.” Finally, finally, one of them said yes. We built them a three-page website. Really, all it was, was a digital version of a trifold brochure that they had, but I think we spent $5,000 building this $500 website. But sooner or later, all that came back. About a year or two later, all of those companies that said, “What is a website?” or “we'll never need one of those” were banging on our door and saying, “Hey, listen, that website thing you talked about a year or two ago – I think we need one of those.” But the good news is they weren't $500 anymore; they were $7,500. I think we were such an early adopter to this that we were truly to educate a market on a need they were going to have, and they weren't ready yet. But when they were ready, they came back to us, and I think that's part of our viability. We're fortunate; we're one of only 2% of the agencies who survived the dot-com bubble burst. I think it was those early seeds we planted in building a good client base that helped us survive the dot-come bubble. We were a company that went from three employees when we got started to two years later having 30 employees to a year after that having 225 and blowing up huge in the dot-com bubble. But when the bubble burst, we went from 225 employees down to about 12 in a matter of a year period of time. If it wasn't for that early foundation of clients that we had found, I don't think we would have survived. There's an old saying, “What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.” Certainly, we learned a lot of experiences from that. But very thankful for that original client base that we had. ROB: In that timeframe, a lot of web companies went tremendously, tremendously upmarket. I don't think people realize how little you would get sometimes for a million-dollar website in that era. KEVIN: Yes. ROB: Kind of the iXLs and the Razorfishes of the world. Did you ever swim up to that scope and scale of website, or did your MSP roots also keep you grounded in – KEVIN: As I tell the story, we started out in '96 with $500 websites. In 1998, the average value got to be $7,500. In 2000 that went to $216,500. You just see how that was growing. iXL and Razorfish were what I would call my mentor companies. I'm very fortunate that I've had some great personal mentors in my career, but I had some corporate mentors. I looked at iXL and Razorfish as those two companies. I don't know if these are the right words, but I think we got cocky a little bit. We put billboards right above the headquarters of iXL of our company's brand. [laughs] So companies or employees going in there knew who we were, and we used that as one of our marketing tactics. Then, fortunately, I got a chance to actually go through the offices of Razorfish on a couple different occasions as our company was about to go public in the journey, and the bankers that were going to take us public also took Razorfish public. So, we got a chance to go see how Razorfish operated and things of that nature. But I think one of the blessings we ended up receiving was just that we didn't go public. iXL didn't survive; Razorfish changed ownership numerous times, bought and sold for losses during the journey. Because we didn't go public, I got to own the decisions that we had to make to navigate that journey. While it was no fun to deal with the downside of the dot-com bubble bursting, I do think it was a savior that we were able to make the changes necessary and nimble enough to be able to survive, where some of those mentors that I looked up to didn't have the same outcome. ROB: It's interesting. I think everybody in that time was a little bit cocky. You mentioned you had the billboard by iXL, and Milchem today puts billboards near their competitors just to spite them a little bit, although they are a cash machine. But iXL I believe also had a movie theater on their roof, so I think everyone was a little bit cocky. KEVIN: For sure. Cocky or stupid or a combination of each. Unfortunately, I think a victim of the times – everyone thought those were the right things to do. At that time, I joke like everyone in 1999 or 2000 was changing the name of their company to something “dot com.” I remember seeing State Farm change their name to “StateFarm.com.” Sears changed their name from Sears to “Sears.com.” Everyone thought if they didn't do that, they weren't going to survive, but fear was motivating their decision, and often good decisions aren't the outcome of fear. I think the dot-com bubble exploded for numerous different reasons, but one of them is everyone was chasing after something they didn't understand, and everyone got caught up in that momentum. The good news is that wasn't the right momentum, and correction needed to take place, and it did and everyone got better and stronger as a result of it.  ROB: For sure. Amazing that you were even able to survive. How do you navigate that sort of path from 200+ employees to around 12? Obviously, there's the financial aspect of it, but there's also the psychological aspect, the identity of the company and your role shifting so quickly. How did you navigate that healthily and keep the business rolling as well? KEVIN: Of course, downsizing is never fun for anybody at all, but the reality is that the companies who paid me $500 for a website or later $7,500 stayed with me. The companies who were paying $216,500, it wasn't their money. They had investors, and when the dot-com bubble burst, those investors weren't funding those projects anymore. 90% of my clients could no longer pay their bills anymore, so I had to send a cease and desist letter to all my clients that if they couldn't meet their current financial obligations to our company, we had to sever services. 30 days later, I lost 90% of my client base. But who did I still have left? The people who paid me that $7,500, who had realistic expectations of what their investment was going to make for their business and how it was going to help them grow. The ones who had unrealistic expectations were someone who raised zillions and millions of dollars with this fantastic idea and spending money like it was going out of style – and then it went out of style, and there was no money to be had. I think in the journey of going down, some of my coworkers were cognizant enough to know that what we thought we all were working towards, the opportunity had gone. Others weren't quite there yet, and I think there was a hope that it would go back to the way it was. Unfortunately, some self-selected themselves to go somewhere else, and unfortunately we had more than one round of layoffs that helped some of that reduction as well. At the end of the journey, Rob, to your point, I ended up rebranding our company because the company that we were wasn't the company that we were going to become. I didn't want that brand of who we were – an aspiring dot-commer on the verges of going public, spending money like it's going out of style with clients spending money with us like it's going out of style – that went away, and I think I had to rebrand my company and find people how accepted the fact that it was never going to be what we thought it was, where we are going to have stock options and be worth a lot of money. I had to find a core team who realized that wasn't on the table anymore. I had to change the company's brand because I didn't want us hanging onto a lost hope that wasn't going to be a new reality. ROB: Wow, that's quite a shift, but it's tremendous to think about getting the right team on board for that shift. You mentioned you've been in business almost 25 years. KEVIN: Correct. ROB: One thing you see with agencies that stay in business for a while is sometimes they get mired in the previous generation of the marketing that was hot. There are still web design development agencies. There are still SEO and pay-per-click agencies. But the bar keeps on moving. The target keeps on moving. How have you navigated which lines of service and which technologies, which tools, which marketing channels to bring into the mix and which ones to hold at arm's length?  KEVIN: That's a great question. When I rebranded the company, we came up with the brand Bayshore Solutions. Why'd you come up with Bayshore Solutions? The reality is very similar to the question you just asked. I named our company Bayshore Solutions, one, because our office was adjacent to Bayshore Boulevard in Tampa, Florida, so that's where the “Bayshore” came from. [laughs] But the “solutions” piece was I didn't want our company's name to be associated with any service that I didn't know would survive the outcome of the dot-com bubble burst. At the time, it could've been Bayshore Web Design. It could've been Bayshore Web Development. It could've been Bayshore SEO. It could've been any of those. But I didn't want to tattoo the name of our company and associate it to a service that may not be what the new norm was going to become. So, very agnostically, I used the word “solutions.” That gave us an opportunity to not be positioning our brand name with a particular area of the industry that you didn't know would still be surviving. Then on an ongoing basis, under Bayshore Solutions, the services that we provide – I've always said that at the end of the day, the value that we bring to our clients is a level of expertise over and above what they have. Our tagline is “Digital expertise to grow your business.” It's my job and our company's job to continue to find a balance between the bleeding edge of new and the tested, tried, and true. It's finding a solution that isn't too risky to be on the bleeding edge but isn't that lack of scalable to be leveraging the tested, tried, and true, and always be bringing a solution to our clients that balances a little bit of both, minimizes their bleeding edge risk, but maximizes their ability to have their investment have some scalability. It's always having that next level of expertise that our clients value and can appreciate, and the services around what we can do for them are going to help them move their needle towards growth. ROB: Is there a percent range of budget you recommend, often, towards more experimental channels? Less proven, in your words? KEVIN: It's a great question. I think while every client would love to hear every dollar that they spend absolutely is intended for strict ROI, the opportunity to find the right mix is putting a percentage in the media budget and services to some experimental type things. I think while every solution is unique and different, some are in the 10% range. Give or take 5 points is probably the right answer. So 5% to 15%. Often that variance can be where particular industries are in their particular cycle. Almost every vertical market has cycles. Some are in an upcycle, some are in a downcycle. Where you spend your exploratory dollars on an upcycle is probably a bigger percentage, and on a downcycle it's probably a smaller percentage. But it's finding that right mix, whether it's opportunity to grow in each particular vertical market that we're providing services for, and educating our clients that part of the opportunity to find their secret sauce is finding a budget that we can use for some exploratory services. The other neat thing that we do, Rob, is we market ourselves as digital experts horizontally across numerous verticals. When I talk to our clients every month and I ask about what's the value we bring back to them, what I hear them say is they have a choice of picking an agency with vertical market expertise or one who's more of a generalist across many vertical markets, and they appreciate picking Bayshore Solutions, who has this horizontal approach to many different verticals, because we're bringing ideas to their vertical that, if they had a vertical-focus-only agency, that agency wouldn't have that awareness from. And as we're able to share that expertise that we're learning in other verticals, it's not coming at a competitive risk that we learned it on one company that may be competing against another company; it's coming from experiences outside from another industry. So as we have that exploratory budget for each of our clients, a lot of the learning lessons don't come at the cost of their budget, but it comes from the learning lessons of other verticals and what seems to be working that can be applicable to that particular industry. ROB: I hear a through line, a sense of balance across what you're talking about. You talk about there's a balance in the channels of not too, too experimental and not too staid and old. There's a balance in your client base. There's a balance in choosing solutions as being forward-thinking but also flexible. Even in the Bayshore part, people who have been to Tampa and know Tampa know that there are parts of Bayshore Boulevard that are tremendously lovely and picturesque and evocative to someone who is from there and may or may not be able to afford to live on Bayshore Boulevard, but it seems flexible also. You mentioned that you also have an office in Denver. So, the name itself even can be about a place but is also not about a place, is also more general. When you have two offices, how are you thinking about that balance of local clients, regional clients, or location agnostic clients? What's the reasoning on the second office? KEVIN: That's a great question. The real purpose of the second office, Rob, was just an opportunity to expand our talent pool. Tampa's been amazing to us, but we wanted a complementary talent pool to be able to find digital experts in. Secondarily, we want to be able to serve our clients as easily as possible, and our clients are nationwide. So, we wanted a second office for that talent pool opportunity, but also to be able to serve our clients in their same time zone or one time zone away. As we expanded to a second office 8 years ago, we looked at either Mountain Time or Pacific Time, and that would give s the ability to serve same time zone or one time zone away. We looked at 13 communities and ended up picking Denver, Colorado, and couldn't be happier that that's where we ended up picking. I had no idea Denver would go gangbuster great and we'd be this community that's just been thriving like crazy, but I'm so fortunate that we did. It's funny, talking about Bayshore Solutions – I thought I was so crafty in coming up with this agnostic name. While it wasn't very attractive or – I hate to use the word “sexy” – it was very agnostic at the time, but certainly “Bayshore” in an application in Denver doesn't necessarily fit. I remember opening up the office out there, I'm like, man, I wonder if someone's going to question, “Why Bayshore Solutions? What's ‘Bayshore' mean?” out in Denver. It was probably about 3 years into being in Denver that we were having a kickoff meeting for a pretty significant size company, and the CEO of that business wanted to attend the first hour of that kickoff meeting. He said he was going to exit and leave it up to the rest of his team; he wanted to take me outside for just a moment and say a couple words. He goes, “I've got to ask you. Bayshore Solutions – are you guys from here?” I was like, finally someone asked that question. I knew it was going to come. [laughs] And it happened to be a company that was probably about $800 million in revenue that the CEO asked me for that. I'm sure if it was Denver, it should be “Snowcap Solutions” or something along those lines. What's really interesting about our journey is that very intentionally, we're headquartered not only to be able to serve our clients in the same time zone or one time zone away, but secondarily, Colorado and Florida are two of the top eight states that have the most digital talent within them. The advantage to Denver and to Florida is we don't have the cost burdens of a few of the others, but certainly California, Illinois, and New York. So very strategically, we are in two of the top eight most digital-rich talent states, but without the cost burdens, and secondarily, able to serve clients in the same time zone or one time zone away. That isn't accidental. That's very intentional, and I think it's been a benefit to our company and our customers as a result of some of that very intentional decision-making.  ROB: It also seems aligned from a city culture – I have not lived in Denver per se, but both places are places where there are reasons to get outside. Those reasons are different, but both places have very many reasons to have a life outside of work that isn't just going to your house and hiding in the air conditioning, as if you'd gone to Phoenix or something. KEVIN: Right, exactly. No doubt about it. Culturally, we were a fit. In our dot-com rise, we did go from one office in Tampa – we had six offices total. Two of them were in California and one of them was in Chicago. I think we gelled well culturally with our Chicago coworkers. California was always different. We did research in four cities in California when we were doing our expansion, and when we got down to the final datapoints of what we were seeking from a data perspective, the list of 13 communities we looked at got narrowed down to just two. It was Denver, Colorado or Orange County, California. Then I had to make a decision, and I used this terrible logic to make my decision, but it was twofold. One was about 20 years ago, I made a commitment to myself I would never fly on a redeye the rest of my life. I only cheated on myself one time, and it was coming back from Orange County, California, and the only return one-way flight to Tampa from Orange County is a redeye. So, for that reason, it had a scar. Secondarily, I recalled having two offices in California, one in San Francisco and one in Los Angeles, and culturally, while they did a great job performing, there was always a cultural riff between our California coworkers and the remaining part of our company. For those two reasons, I picked Denver, Colorado, and again, I think I'm very fortunate that that's what the final decision was. I couldn't be happier about our progress in the Denver community. ROB: That's fantastic. Kevin, you mentioned that you made it not only through the dot-com bust, but the financial crisis. I'm sure come around March, or maybe sooner or maybe slightly later depending on how you look at things, in 2020, there was probably a little bit of a sense of, “Oh, here we go again” with the pandemic and the knock-on effects from that. Was there anything you did when you started seeing things shut down – how did you react and prepare, and how are you thinking about the situation now? KEVIN: There isn't a “COVID for Dummies” book published yet, so we're all flying this with our own experiences as a navigating tool. I think everybody's approached this in different ways. My company has taken a stance that when times get tough, we've reduced a lot of not necessary expenses, but we've actually increased our marketing budget by 50%. We're aggressive in trying to market and sell our way through this versus cut our way through this. We're having some upward trends. Our leads are up, our traffic is up, sales met expectations from our December forecast. We've had a couple months where we actually met those forecasts where I don't think, if we didn't go more aggressive from a marketing perspective, we'd have any ability to do so. Our company has tried to market our way through this, and that's continued to be what I think we're going to see ourselves do for the remainder of 2020. When people say, “Hey, what are we going to do in…?”, I'm not stating or committing to anything I can't own. Right now, I feel like I can own 30 days, 60 days, maybe 90 days, but I'm not comfortable that I know I can really own anything much further out than that. So, we are communicating frequently with our team on what our next 90-day plan is and removing any unnecessary operational expenses and reinvesting that into sales and marketing. We haven't had to lay off any people. We're trying to keep our great team together, and the way to do so isn't by cutting; it's by being aggressive and going to find business a little bit more intentional, a little bit more aggressive. There's companies out there that need help, and we're out there seeking those companies. That's how we're positioning ourselves in this pandemic. ROB: I think not even cautiously optimistic, but just optimistically – not even cautious. There's just an intentionality to it that I think is really worth looking at and listening to. It's not panicked. It's looking at opportunity without being opportunistic. I think that's a really good stance to consider. When you look back at the overall journey, it sounds like you've navigated a lot and learned a lot through that path, and we've talked through some of the changes, but overall if you look back and you could do some things over, what are some lessons you've learned along the way that you would maybe do differently if you were starting this 25-year-old company today in 2020? KEVIN: That's a great question. I used to have a CEO coach, and he asked me this loaded question one time. He said, “Hey Kevin, do you know how you get experience?” And I knew it was a loaded question. I knew his answer was going to be the only answer. I'm guessing, and he's like, “No, that's not it. That's not it.” I was like, “Coach Chris, tell me, how do you gain experience?” He said, “You gain experience by making mistakes and learning from them.” As I look back, I certainly didn't make every right decision, but I've gained a lot of experience. I think some of the things I might do differently – one is when we started our company in the dot-com era, we had a very, very focused culture that we were driving towards, but it was caught up into the dot-com era, which wasn't real. Then when that dot-com bubble exploded, that culture had expectations that weren't necessarily real. I think part of it would just be making sure that our culture is partially organically created and we have likeminded people that fit our core values, but also intentionally corporate-driven and that it's meeting the expectations of our customers, our coworkers, and our company altogether. So, I think maybe an added focus on an intentional organic culture as opposed to an intentional focus or an organic focus. It's a combination of both of those. Over the last few years, I think our company has really worked on a great balance of an intentional organic culture and really spending more time identifying the core values of Bayshore Solutions and finding people to work with us who meet those core values and use those as real true guiding posts. The result of that is the amount of internal friction within our organization is significantly less than it has ever been before. The cohesiveness of the team – they have fun together and meet all of our goals and objectives. I think in the past, we either had fun and didn't meet our goals and objectives, or we highly met our goals and objectives but sacrificed fun. Today I think I've learned that there is a fine way to balance both out and meet goals and objectives with a team that you appreciate working with every day, and everyone's having fun in the journey. ROB: You mentioned core values. Are those something you're able to share with us? I think it can often be helpful for others to hear each other's core values. KEVIN: Absolutely. First up, we work together, we win together, we solve problems together. Those are probably the three core values that we live by. We have a few others, but certainly we work together, and it's not just as a company. We work together with our clients on one digital team. We form a digital team with our clients and our coworkers on it. We work together, we win together, we solve problems together. We come to work with a positive winning attitude every day, problem-solving. We own our own accountability; we don't point fingers at others. That's really worked well, finding people who have that likeminded approach to who they want to work with and how they want to work – not only from a coworker perspective, but we see clients that meet those values also. Clients who don't necessarily share those same values become clients who maybe you don't have the same relationship with. So, it's not only who we work with, but who we work for, finding likeminded customers and coworkers. In that journey, we've enjoyed that journey much better from a customer and a coworker perspective. ROB: You mentioned a coach that you used to work with. Sometimes it's interesting to hear people's processes on working with a coach. Do you still work with a coach? How have you met that need for a voice outside of yourself? KEVIN: I don't have a personal CEO coach anymore, but our company has hired a coach, and in my journey of having a coach, it was great. It helped me see the blind spots that I couldn't see. So, the coach was very beneficial. But almost 2 years ago, I elected to switch from having a personal CEO coach to my leadership team having an executive coach. We all picked a coach together, and we started following Gino Wickman's Traction program called the Entrepreneurial Operating System. It goes by the acronym EOS. We found an implementer to be all of our team's coach – not just Kevin having a coach. The journey using Traction's EOS has been amazing for I think our entire leadership team and our entire company. It's given us a tighter vision, a better definition of what those core values are that we just were talking about. But instead of me learning on my own and trying to bring those lessons in to my leadership team, we're learning that all together as one cohesive team. When we hired our implementer, we made it a team hire, not “Kevin found one and brought him to the table.” It's our coach, not Kevin's coach. There's an old saying, “If you want people to be part of the plan, make them part of the planning process.” Having a team coach, we're hearing the same thing at the same time. Following Gino Wickman's Traction Entrepreneurial Operating System, this is stuff we're learning together. We're all part of the planning process. So being part of the plan comes much more easily and understandably to the whole team versus me creating this on my own and bringing it to them. It's just been far more understanding and aware and excitable as we've gone from “Kevin's CEO coach” to a team coach. ROB: That's a great lesson in bringing a lot of the pressure, even, off of yourself, bringing your team into the decision. I think we all need to think about and learn from that a little bit more. I was reminded yesterday when somebody on my team solved a problem better than I ever would have, but I felt like I needed to solve it at first. KEVIN: No doubt. Quite frankly, it's just finding the right people in the right roles. It's helped us complement each other. I don't have to have all the answers, and I think prior, I had to have all the answers. Today we have a very strong, strong leadership team here. We all know what we do well and the areas of the business that others do better. We're comfortable being very vulnerable and exposing where our strengths and our weaknesses are and dividing and conquering, and working together as one cohesive team. It's been highly effective. I used to joke, before we were following this Entrepreneurial Operating System, which goes by the acronym EOS, prior to all of us following the EOS, I joke we were following the KOS. People are like, “What's the KOS?” I'm like, “That's the Kevin operating system.” No one's written a book yet about the Kevin operating system, but there's tens of thousands of companies following this EOS. For sure it's been great guideposts to help us continue to find the right people to help us accomplish the things that our company seeks to do. ROB: Super-duper solid. Love it, Kevin. When people want to find you and find Bayshore Solutions, where should they go look you up? KEVIN: BayshoreSolutions.com, find us there. Love to hear from everybody. I'd like to have some ongoing dialogue. I'm easy to reach; it's just kevin@bayshoresolutions.com. Rob, I enjoyed the opportunity to share some of the Bayshore Solutions story with you today. ROB: This was great. It sounds like an excellent journey, and it's still rolling, so congratulations. KEVIN: Thank you. ROB: Be well, Kevin. Thank you. KEVIN: Thank you. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

When deciding to turn your side-hustle into a legitimate business, there are so many unknown variables that can sometimes drive you away from accomplishing it. Today, WTR welcomes Luke Peters, an expert in building wealth and a successful entrepreneur. In this podcast, we will discuss how side-hustling brings about a large amount of freedom and how to transform your side-hustle into a legitimate business with value. Luke Peters Website https://www.instagram.com/newairusa/ (https://www.instagram.com/newairusa/) Website #2 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-page-1-podcast/id1478811133 (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-page-1-podcast/id1478811133) Website #3 https://www.newair.com/ (https://www.newair.com/) LinkedIn URL https://www.linkedin.com/in/luke--peters/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/luke--peters/) Facebook URL https://www.facebook.com/newairusa (https://www.facebook.com/newairusa) Instagram https://www.instagram.com/newairusa/ (https://www.instagram.com/newairusa/) NOTES: [00:28] Kevin: Today, we're joined by Luke Peters. What we're going to be talking about today is thinking of your side hustle/business as an asset [02:22] For some people that side hustle becomes, like Luke here, legitimate business in their way of life [02:32] Can you talk a little bit more about where you came from and what inspired you to get to where you are today? [02:40] Luke: My parents had always worked hard and always taught us to work hard (I got a good work ethic from my parents) [03:10] An inspiration is that once you have a business, you kind of realize that you have more stability in a sense (you're in charge of the risk versus being an employee) [03:22] And I enjoy the freedom, I'm not someone who likes to follow a lot of rules [03:48] Everyone can be in business, you don't have to be just one type of individual [04:14] Hiring good people is the best thing now. The sooner your business is making enough money to hire good people, good people are going to drive your business [04:27] Kevin: Do you find that in today's world it's a little easier to outsource tasks (ex: Fiverr) [04:55] Luke: For sure, in today's day and age you can do that, but you have to weigh both sides of it. You don't want to outsource things that are not making us money in the beginning [05:15] You hire locally for the high-level talent (where experience makes a difference) and you outsource the tedious things you don't need to do locally [05:30] Kevin: There's also the flipside to this and that is when you're starting out your side hustle, you're doing all those tasks and a lot of people say it's good that you do them in the beginning in order to learn it first. When you understand it better, you can outsource it better [06:27] Let's talk a little bit more about why would our listeners want to change their mindset of thinking about what they're doing as a side hustle into a legitimate business? [06:40] Luke: Let's first back up and look at employment. The days of people staying with the company their whole working lives is past us now and it is a very competitive world [08:01] When you work for someone else, first of all you need to be motivated (flexibility to make their own decisions) [09:23] Is there free time and are we spending it wisely? And if not, that's the time people can spend on their side hustle [09:36] Kevin: You mentioned spending time with your family. Once you change your mindset of taking your side hustle into a legitimate business, can this (entrepreneurship) benefit your family? [09:46] Luke: I think so because when you think about it, yes, it does take you away from family time, but you can still be very active in your family's lives all while doing this side hustle [10:18] Really disciplined time spent (a couple hours a day) is enough time to start a side hustle [11:46] I think it's really...

Have you ever wanted to become better at managing your day-to-day money in order to help prepare you for success? Maybe you have a large amount of debt and don’t know how to figure out a better way to manage your money. It all starts with a mindset shift. Today, WTR welcomes Linda Hannon, the founder of Real Family Finance, which provides online classes to teach women how to manage their money. In today’s podcast, we will be discussing 5 key points to thinking differently about managing your money. This episode will ultimately help you with making a plan to manage your money and build more wealth. Ingenious tactics to accumulate wealth, for people who see things differently. Linda Hannon Linda is the founder of Real Family Finance, online classes to teach women how to manage money. Website https://realfamilyfinance.com/ (https://realfamilyfinance.com/) LinkedIn URL https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindahannon/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindahannon/) Facebook URL https://www.facebook.com/RealFamilyFinance (https://www.facebook.com/RealFamilyFinance) YouTube URL https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCK-aKdi0Jn-5EKDyfKmI7Mw (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCK-aKdi0Jn-5EKDyfKmI7Mw) NOTES: [00:27] Kevin: Today we're joined by Linda Hannon, the founder of Real Family Finance which is online classes to teach women how to manage money. If you wouldn't mind sharing a little bit about where you came from and what inspired you to get to where you are today. [01:02] Linda: I was in the corporate world for over 30 years[01:10] I used to specialize in companies that were in distress (crisis management) [01:36] Like a lot of people, in my early 20s I felt like I had not been taught how money works, and even though I did it for a living, I did not get my personal finances under control [04:30] I went on a mission on how my personal finances worked, and I had an advantage due to the accounting background, but it was hard[04:44] Took classes but the classes only covered a piece of something, not the whole thing [05:02] In accounting, they didn't teach how to manage your personal finances or how to budget. They would teach you how to count money that came in, but they wouldn't teach you how to proactively plan [05:42] It took me years and a lot of mistakes along the way before I figured it out, but I eventually came up with something that worked for me[05:56] I was at a networking event and a woman asked me: Do you do for people what you do for businesses? [06:28] I started teaching live classes and took off from there [06:32] I was amazed to realize that no one knows how money works, there are no resources [06:38] Kevin: There really isn't. It's one of the reasons for this WTR podcast and that there needs to be more coaches out there[06:44] To help you understand what the tactics are on how you manage your money [07:14] Linda: I think we both talk about the same thing and that is that you can't think in pieces, you need to have a fundamental base to work from and then there's a place to drop the pieces into[07:25] If you don't have that fundamental base and a fundamental plan, then nothing is going to work or it's going to be very painful [07:36] Kevin: Hope is a great thing to have, but it's not a plan [07:42] Linda: As we both know, one of the big factors for money is time [08:08] Kevin: So, today we're talking about thinking about managing your money and the 5 key points to thinking differently so that you can help prepare for that success [08:35] Linda: The 5 pieces that I talk about as my baseline are:[08:54] Budgeting (people need this all the time)[09:09] Understanding how much money is coming into your life and figuring out where it's going, and then having both happen with purpose [09:21] You have some control over how much money comes into our lives [09:35] People have more control over their spending than they think...

James: Hi, listeners and audience, this is James Kandasamy from Achieve Wealth True Valued Real Estate Investing Podcast. Last week, we had Rich Fishman(?) with 8,000 units. Almost half of which he owns by himself and he had bought over 20 years across five to six different states. And he gave us an outstanding overview of what happened during the crash of 2008. Was it true that everybody needs a roof above their heads? And that's what a lot of gurus are telling us in multifamily or is it true that multifamily has the lowest default rate? You will definitely need to listen to that podcast. Because he went through the whole downturn with all his multifamily(s) and came back up after the cycle and he gave a lot of awesome perspectives. Today, we have Kevin Bob. Hey Kevin, do you want to introduce yourself? Kevin: Hey James, I'm excited to be here. Yeah, I'll give you the quick overview for sure. So, I have been investing full time in real estate going for on 20 years now and I got started like a lot of folks did with single-family investments. It was just what my mentor was doing. It's what he was good at and what he taught me and so I didn't reinvent the wheel. I did exactly what he told me to do and that evolved into multifamily investments and other types of commercial real estate. That led me up to the crash of 2008. That's a very challenging time. It kind of was reborn in 2011, 2012 and was introduced then to mobile home parks. Which is what we focus on today. So, for the past seven years now, we've been solely focused on mobile home communities. We own parks in thirteen different places throughout the US and that's our niche of choice as of now. James: Awesome. Awesome. I mean, Kevin is being very humble. So, just to give you guys some background when I was in my W2 job, one of the first podcasts that I listened to was Kevin's podcast. I mean, the podcast is called Real Estate Investing for Cash Flow With Kevin Bob and it's an awesome podcast. It focuses a lot on commercial real estate and I really learned a lot when I was in W2 and I was listening to it in the car. Are you still doing the podcast, Kevin? Kevin: I am. Absolutely. I do two podcasts. So, I do the Real Estate Investing for Cash Flow Podcast and then about three and a half years ago I thought it was a good idea to start a second podcast as if I wasn't busy enough already. And I started the Mobile Home Park Investing Podcast, which is specific to that topic. James: Got it. Got it. Kevin: James, I remember the first day we met. Not to interrupt you but I always joke with you every time I see you because I got a weird memory. I forget a lot of things but I remember the odd things and I do those free Friday calls. I've been doing it for like five years now. And I remember that's how you and I originally met. It was during one of those 30-minute calls on a Friday and I don't recall why I remember this part of our call but I had been making lunch with my Bluetooth in while we were talking about a multifamily deal that you were taking down in San Antonio, Texas. James: Yeah, it was my second deal. I was buying 174 and have you found it on our yellow letter marketing campaign. It is very interesting because when you had your podcast, you announced it that you're giving thirty minutes of your time and I was like, ‘Wow, that's awesome. I'm going to talk to a celebrity.’ Right now, I do offer like fifteen minutes of my time for whoever wants to talk to me. You just have to send me an email at jamesatachieveinvestmentgroup.com. We're not big celebrities.  We're just normal people. Kevin: I get as much value from those calls as the person on the other side. That's how I like to think and you just never know who you're going to meet on the other end of the phone, right? I mean, that's how I that's how you and I met. You just never know and so I think that you have to keep that normalcy in your life and I enjoy those calls. I’ve met a lot of great people on the way. James: Surprisingly, I still remember the day you called me and the moment you called me. I'm not sure why but that was like probably five, six years ago. And I don't remember my other calls. Kevin:  Yeah, yeah. I have been on for five years. Yeah. James: Yeah, that's awesome. Awesome. So, I mean, I want to dive deeper into mobile home parks. I can see you have like a 150 million real estate transaction. Is it all mobile home park? How many parks do you own right now? And can you give those kinds of details? Kevin: No, we don't have. Our current portfolios are not 150 million. That's just that's like my transaction for the principal. You know, investments over the years. James: Thanks for being honest, Kevin. Because a lot of people misuse those big numbers to do their marketing and then we find out they don't have anything. They're probably on a passive investor and that's really awesome that you're being very upfront with that. Kevin: Yeah, I’m the majority principal in the parks we own as far as on the GP side and things like that. So, we'll get that clarity out there as well. James: Awesome. Kevin: We're not really sellers. So, to answer your questions about what we own today. We've been teetering around like the 2,000 mark. We go above it. We go below. We have a park that going to be closed in a week and a half. We sold a park earlier this year and then we're going be selling one in probably February next year. That's in contract currently. We got one that we're closing on in 45 days, which is 215 lots and so we keep teetering around this 1900-2000 mark. We've really been evolving our portfolio by selling off some of the smaller properties and by selling off some of the properties that we don't really have an interest in scaling in a particular marketplace or maybe it's just one that just doesn't fit our model moving forward. I don't know how else to answer it other than that. So, that's where we're at today. We're really long-term cash flow investors, though. That really is our business model. It just as far as the selling side of things I like to take advantage of an opportunity when it arises. That's one thing I did not do before 2008. I never would sell anything and it came back to bite me at that point. So, I am not a seller. However, I will sell when the timings right the price is right. James: Yeah. Yeah. Let's talk about that experience. Because I heard about that in your podcast and so you are doing single-family homes before 2008 and you were doing very well. Kevin: And multifamily but mostly single-family was our focus. That was our business model. It's what we were very competent at. We had acquired a few hundred multifamily doors over the years almost by accident. We didn't really put much effort into it because deals would just come our way like small multifamily stuff. Thirty-six units forty-eight-unit type properties that we just kind of threw into our rental pool. However, the biggest part of our model and the thing that took the most time and energy was a single-family. You know, buying the single-family rental properties and managing a portfolio across multiple different counties was just very inefficient. And it's unfortunate because I think we just got very complacent with our model. You know, we were we felt we were really good at it and we never took the time to be honest with ourselves about how inefficient that was and that we should have just taken our efforts and converted them over to multifamily at that given moment. I think that we would have fared through the downturn a lot better. The single-family properties… it wasn't really the single family that sunk us during the downturn. It was a whole mixture of ingredients. You know, Florida was ground zero for the crash. A lot of our properties, not only did they lose within a year but they also were upside down. Our leverage point on the front side was originally somewhere in between the 65% to 68% range. So, we were very low leverage. Most of them were upside down underwater within a year. Another big thing in Florida that really was a major impact on us was there were a lot of speculative single-family builds happening back then. I don't know if you remember back in that heyday. I guess you could say that was back when a new build property in like Vegas or Phoenix or Southwest Florida would literally flip three times before it was ever even occupied. Before it was ever finished. It was crazy. There was like thousands of new home builds happening in Southwest Florida for a population that wasn't really coming in. So, the big nail in the coffin for us back then was a lot of these builders that had these properties who weren't selling and they started renting them out. And so now, they started pulling the populations away from our rental properties and they offered better incentives. Because what they had was a new product. So, we had an occupancy issue. We were under wonder water value and like it's just a perfect storm and it was ugly. It wasn't fun at all. And the banks at that point weren’t willing to work with us. This was like a year within entering into this downturn. The banks didn't have loss mitigation departments. They weren't prepared for this and so we struggled with a majority of our lenders to even do work out deals or loan modifications. James: Yeah, I read some books about how the lenders can be nasty during the downturn but now they're super nice. Kevin: I think they got a lot more flexible. Because they had to. In the first year of the downturn, no one knew how bad it was really going to get. It was like ‘Are we at the bottom? Are we at the bottom?’ I feel like that question was asked for many years before it's like, ‘wow, it's 2011 and it's still messed up like things are still fairly bad.’ You know, I think it took the bank's a while to realize that and they even put the infrastructure in place to manage all these defaults. It was a disaster for the banks as well. I mean, they had more defaults than… they had to build entire departments within their companies to manage this onslaught of default. So yeah, it was a challenging time for everybody. James: Do you think you could have done better if you had a lot of non-recourse loans? Kevin: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, as far as my personal assets being attacked and things of that nature absolutely. And I think there is also a lot more flexibility with the non-recourse lenders to work with a borrower because they have quite a bit of leverage. You know, another thing that hurt us pretty badly on our part was a lot of our apartment properties and a lot of the commercial loans and a lot of times we would package up like eight to ten or twelve single-family properties and put a commercial loan on and it takes money out. That was kind of our model. A lot of that debt was shorter-term recourse debt. It was five years,you know, either resets or five-year balloons, twenty-year [inaudible10:23]. What happens we didn’t default on multifamily. However, after all the credits were going bad on the single-family stuff and we started having issues there. We couldn't get new loans when the time came due for them a couple of years later. We couldn't get any debt in place. We had to sell things for basically fire sale prices and give them away. We basically either gave it back to the bank or did some minor workouts, did short sales or had to sell at fire-sale prices. It is what it is. I learned a lot from that period and things move on and I've learned a lot from it. And I think I'm a stronger investor and a better investor nowadays because of it. James: Absolutely. Absolutely. So, you brought up three or four cities that are very, very high growth right now.  We’re at the late stage of this cycle. Which is similar to 2008 before that. They are Phoenix, Las Vegas and Florida, right. So, do you think we're in the same stage right now because they are one of the highest growth rental rates for multifamily? I would say I'm not sure how much you would be able to compare multifamily at that time.    Kevin: I think the reasons behind the crash back then are a little different. I mean, back then the lenders were so loosey-goosey. Because anyone could get a loan and I mean anyone. Even a waiter who just started the job yesterday. Who had no provable income could get a loan on a property. You know that that's one thing that hasn't gone back to the way it used to be, lending restrictions are still very tight. So, I don't think that we have that fear. I'm not an economist and by no means am I an expert here but I don't think our fear should be related to anything that was similar to back in the 2007, 2008 crisis and what caused that. So, I'm not sure what it could be. I know that there's a huge demand for multifamily. There’s a pent-up demand for supply still in a lot of these markets based on population growth. I think that the bigger risk lies and like A class stuff or like some new developments as far as like, you know, the game of musical chairs. It’s about who's ultimately left holding the bag. I think that what you do as far as like BNC grade apartment complexes are very similar to our business and that as long as you provide a clean, safe and high-quality product at affordable prices. There's always going to be a demand for it no matter what happens. I'm a firm believer in that and that's played out time and time and time again and that you were making mention of the last guest you had on. I'm going to give listen to the show but what was his take? You know, what did he tell you was the ultimate outcome of his multifamily holdings through that downturn? James: Yeah, it was very hard for him during that downturn. I mean, He has to cut down a lot of it and if I remember correctly the default rate was pretty high. It was like almost 8% where a lot of people did lose their property to the banks. Kevin: I wonder if that was because they were over leveraged but I'm not talking about him though. I was talking about the operators. See that's it leading up to that recession and the last time people were overpaying for apartment complexes and if you recall one of the big the big hot trends were buying an apartment and doing a condo conversion. So, you saw people buying apartment complexes for valuations that had no relative nature to the actual NOI that was in place. It was all based on a pro forma exiting out as individual condos and a lot of those condo things failed miserably. Anyway, how did the guy you interviewed fare? James: I think he was not talking about condo conversion. He was just talking… Kevin: I mean as far as multifamily investments. How did he fare? How did his investment go? James: He did say that it was pretty bad for him and for a lot his friends and who were buying at that time. Kevin: Specific markets or…? James: Across the country and he has been down twenty years right now. I mean, he has like a thousand units right now. The key thing is I mean everybody says ‘everybody needs a roof over their head.’  But he's a says that people become creative on how to get a roof above that they’re head. They double up. They live in their basement. So, it's not like everybody's going… Kevin: Yeah. Well, I think another thing that changes is  the quality of your prospect changes as well. You know, people lose their jobs. People miss payments on their credit cards.  They get bad credit. They get into this revolving cycle or downward spiral. And so, although everyone does need a roof over your head, the quality of that prospect might change. It might actually deteriorate over time but what you can really get to fill that unit which a lower quality resident typically is going to equate in a higher turnover, rate higher expense and maintenance costs associated with running that property. So, I think that there are other factors that are derivative of a downturn  even though everyone does really need a roof over their head. James: Do you think the optimism that you had or the entire market had before 2008 crash like in 2006…  I'm sure everybody was optimistic. Nobody knew about the subprime mortgage. Because nobody really knew in detail, right? Do you think that the optimism that people had during those few years before the crash is the same as now? Kevin: There's some Deja vu that I've had and I think maybe a lot of that has to do with even just watching like social media feeds and things of that nature. A lot of the kudos and congrats are given to folks just because they like buy a property and that’s only a part of it. James: They just started running. They haven’t done the marathon yet. Kevin:  It not what it looks like today but it’s can you execute the plan accordingly? What does it look like three years from now? Because you bought something doesn't mean that you've won yet. It's easy enough to get on the front side. So, that's a different form of that optimism. James: Social media has increased the FOMO syndrome. Kevin: Yeah, that's it. Success seems to be equated on social media to actually just doing a deal. Whatever it means to get the deal done: overpaying for it, over raising investor capital, putting capital your investors capital risk. I mean buying bad markets and I think that was a very similar sentiment that was shared by a lot of people back prior to the crash. ‘If we don't buy now, there's like anything left. We’re going to get priced out of every market and then will never own real estate. Let's buy whatever we can. Let's get that 95% loan.’ So again, the lending standards have not gone back to what they were then. Which was a big cause of that crash. But I do think that there's some Deja vu that I've had.  You know, the FOMO thing… the fear that you’re missing out, that's real. We've seen things be much more competitive over the past year. We bought nine properties last year and we wound up buying two this year. So, we did get side-tracked a little bit this year with building a property management company. And we that's another discussion but even then, I don't think we would have bought more than maybe three or four properties. If that was our sole focus but we're very conservative. I think we had seven or eight deals in contracts that we ended up killing… for various reasons.  There just a lot of hairy things out there and you can make money with hairy deals but you got to really know what you're getting a deal go to. James: Yeah, exactly. I mean, that the experience of going through the crash will make you’re really a conservative person, right? Because people have never gone through it [inaudible17:59] including me. I didn't go through it. So, I didn't know how painful it was, right?  But I do read a lot of publications and try to feel the fear at that time. I mean, you can be too much of an optimist. I'm not so engaged in the height of optimism right now. So, you did single family and you went through this 2008 crash and suddenly you started doing mobile home park. Why that mobile home park asset class and why not go back to the single-family apartments? Kevin: Well, it's a great question. So, I answer the second part of that question first about why not go back to like single family properties. You know, I finally had an internal point of reflection probably like two years after the crash started. There were a couple years where it was pretty challenging to even think about what was happening in my life. So, there were a couple years, I don't like to say that I put my head in the sand and buried it. But somewhere around, 2010 to 2011 I would go through like a reflection point in my life where I tried to look back and just really be honest myself like, ‘what I should have done differently.’ What I ultimately felt went wrong and I came to a quick realization and I kind of knew it back then.  You know, you're comfortable and complacent you know we should have made the switch. Our model is very inefficient with the single-family properties. You know, running multiple maintenance crews and management crews amongst many different counties. You know, having a home here, a home over there, home over there, hundred something that way. It was incredibly inefficient and it was very hard to scale. You know like just going out and trying to buy one by one by one and buying a hundred and twenty, a hundred and fifty, two hundred single family properties is a lot of work. That’s two hundred individual closings. That takes a lot of effort to make that happen. And you'll being honest with myself, I knew that those same efforts could have been multiplied like 10 x but by actually putting that effort into multifamily and that multifamily is much more efficient to operate. It could truly provide that cash flow and help me get back on top much faster than trying to go back into the single-family space. I didn't have an interest in the single-family. It was what I was taught at a young age and I rolled with it and I did really well with it. And then now, I felt more grown-up and it was time to make a big change in my life and I knew multifamily is going be it. And so I went on this exploration journey, knowing that it was going to be multifamily. What I wanted to do, James, I wanted to go back and talk to everyone. I went on a six-month binge of interviewing and talking to everyone I could, locally and on the phone, who have either been in the multifamily and made it through the crash and you'll just get a sense from them how things have changed today?  How the landscape has changed? I always spoke to those who just got their start. You know, what's their perceived notion of the next couple of years? What the lending environment look like? Where are they finding opportunities? Where was the risk? I just wanted to get an update because I basically stepped away for years from real estate. And things had changed over those three or four years, right? And during this period, I was introduced to a guy named Randy through a mutual friend. And Randy had mobile home parks here in Florida. He owned three of them. He had been a banker for thirty years and I like meeting new people. So, I said ‘let's grab lunch. You’re local to me. So, let's grab lunch.’ And we did. I didn't go there with the intent of like, ‘I want to learn about mobile home parks.’ I just wanted to meet someone new who had been quite successful in their life. And that after like a two-hour lunch with Randy I walked away, saying ‘I'm going to buy a mobile home park.’ I need to either prove or disprove all these great things that Randy had to say about this niche and this asset class. And that's what I did. It took me about 12 months.  I bought a park up in Atlanta. We still own it today. It was a small part of a highly distressed Park and I bought that one and then I bought a second one and I bought a third one. I just spent a couple of years of my own money proving the concept. And then ultimately once we proved the concept and went full cycle on a few things. I went out and actually built a business out of it.  Where we started hiring multiple team members and investors into the game and that's where we're at today. James: What were the top three ‘aha’ moments from that discussion with Randy in that one-hour lunch that you had with him? Kevin: Yeah, and this isn't to compare multifamily to mobile home parks. I mean, but this is what he told me. This is how his conversation went with me. He was like ‘You know, the bottom line being C class apartment complex is great. Everyone needs to roof over their head.’ Just like we talked about. Affordable housing is in high demand and that demand… James: And what year was this? Kevin: This is in 2011. James:  2011 which is supposed to be one of the lowest and best times to buy. I guess, right? Kevin: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely and so he went on to say that one of the big challenges with multifamily that he found in his career, and he wasn't a multifamily guy but from a theoretical standpoint was the turnover and you're turning 50 to 60% of your tenant base every 12 to 18 months. In mobile home parks, he's like, ‘95% of our residents owner their homes and it costs a lot of money for them to move their homes.’ So typically what happens, Kevin, is if they want to sell that home or they want to go somewhere else move. They don't move their homes. They just put their home up for sale and they move and go buy a home somewhere else. And basically, you never lose that lot rent. That lot rent continues to come in day after day and you don't have that down period like you might have an apartment and you don't have to that make-ready costs like you might have an apartment. So, that was one of the big ones. Another big one that really piqued my interest was the just really the barrier to entry and that there's really no new supply coming in the marketplace. You know, municipalities don't like our asset class. It's got a bad stigma attached to it. And so, no new parks being built and so if you find a good quality park in a great market, you don't have to worry about competition coming down the road. It’s not going to happen. It's just not a chance of it happening. James: It's not like a straightaway somebody can just come and build something in front of you. Kevin: Right. Right. Exactly. So, that was a big one. I liked that and then another big thing that he sold me on was just the management side of things. You know when the residents own their own homes you're not maintaining the roof, you’re not maintaining their plumbing, you're not maintaining their electrical. You’re not maintaining anything whatsoever that happens to their unit. They just like a homeowner, they call that vendor. They call the HVC company. They call the roofer. They call the plumber to fix it. You're not in charge of that. Our only requirement is to maintain the infrastructure. So, the roads, the water and sewer lines leading to the houses and the electrical infrastructure and that's pretty much it. And so I was like, ‘Wow, that's interesting.’ So, like low turnover, fairly lower management responsibility and very rarely is there ever a point in time where you have a down unit or a lot that's not paying you rent. So, the fourth, you asked me for three but the fourth big thing that really sold me on it was He's like Kevin there's a lot of first- and second-generation park owners still out there. Either they built these parks or their father built these parks and now they're aging out. All of these parks were built in the 50s and 60s and 70s and these owners are getting very old. You know, like five years ago the statistics were that 85% of Park owners only owned one Park. And so, to me that means they're a mom and pop, right? They're not a big professional or institutional operator. And so, his point that he made was that these individuals have been working these parks not like you or  I, where we run them like a professional company,  but with their bare hands. They are working these things from day to day. And they're either getting old or their health is becoming an issue. They're getting tired and they're aging out of these things at a very fast rate. And so, there's the opportunity to get in and run it like a professional. You know, get markets up to the market rate in the area and run it more efficiently and do a better job of collections and whatever they might be doing wrong there. So, that was a big thing that piqued my interest as well is working through that ‘mom and pop’ generation and finding opportunities that had a lot of meat left on the bone. Those were the big ones he threw at me and many others as well. But those are some of the big ones that just really sold me. I was like, ‘I’ve got to learn more about this.’ James: Yeah, that's awesome. When I learned about mobile home park, I went for like some three-day class and I really learned it. I love it. I mean, it's a really good asset class and I didn't want to do it because I believe in focus. I mean sometimes as entrepreneurs, we are like, ‘Oh, mobile. Oh, that's so cool. The self-storage let's go do this.’ Kevin: Shiny objects. James: And I realized that to be really good at something you have to have focus. So, that's the one thing I wrote in my book, right? Whenever a passive investor chooses your sponsor make sure that your sponsors focusing maximum to asset class. There are so many details in this asset class but with this market being hard a jack of all trades can’t really make money. Kevin: True. James: Some of their mobile home parks are a bit small, right? I mean, it used to be like 3 million for like a hundred parks or something like that. So, we were like all in doing like large deals and we thought, ‘Okay, we're just going to stick with apartments and stay focus and make sure we get good at it.’ So, that's important, I think. And so, at a very high level can you explain how the cash flow is generated in a mobile home park? Kevin: Yeah, absolutely. It's pretty straightforward. You know, we own the entire community and in a perfect world, this is how we’d like to own the community, where we own zero of the home. So, let's just give an example: we have 149 space mobile home park in Buffalo, New York. In that community, we own zero of the homes that are in there. There are 140 of those lots that are occupied with residents. Who again, they own their roof above their head and they pay us on average $428 a month in lot rent. They also pay their water and sewer; you bill it back for the trash usage. So basically, our job in that community is to maintain the roads and make road improvements as necessary. We cut the common areas of the grass. We trim trees throughout the community. Just making sure that the community or the subdivision is up kept and their responsibility is to pay us for the renting of the lot that they're homes are sitting on. That's it. We make money in that manner. That is the sole source of our revenue. Now I’d say, ‘In a perfect world, we don't own the homes.’ Unfortunate, we're not in a perfect world, James, are we? So, we have our portfolio of approximately two thousand lots that we own and it changes every day. In somewhere between two hundred and fifty and two hundred and seventy of the mobile homes and some parks we own zero homes and in other parks around twenty. It just really depends on how that older owner who we bought it from was operating it. And so, our goal with those homes that we own is to get out of the ownership as fast as possible. And so, what that means to us is that we'll go in and we'll do a very nice builder-grade renovation on them. We’ll sure make everything is operating as it should and make them look good and ultimately try to sell them at a breakeven or we'll even lose money on the homes if we can find a cash buyer, who will come in and purchase. Who we know once they own it outright that they will be a very sticky resident and they'll end up staying there for a very, very long time. And so, our goal is really good to get it back to the lot rental model. Because at that point our management and our maintenance responsibilities are incredibly minimal. James: Yeah, let me try to summarize this for the audience. It’s like a parking lot for a car, right? But it’s Just a car that doesn't have a wheel to move. Kevin: We’re the home parking lot specialists. James: You make a lot of money, right? Because I just own the land, right. The earth is one of the best business on earth. Kevin: Yeah, that's a good way to put it. We are definitely a parking lot.  Except the homes are very expensive to move… I don't want to say that's a great thing about our resident base because that's not the best way to put it. But typically we cater to workforce housing. That's what we have. You know, so good hard-working blue-collar folks. And the average single-wide cost about 5-6000 to move and reset in another the community and a double-wide 10-12,000 and the average folks who live in our communities do the average do not have that type of money lying around to move their home but some of them. And so normally, like I said what happens is that they sell it. Just like you would sell a stick-built home. They put it up for sale and someone else buys it and that person comes in and takes over the lot rent responsibility. So, it's a beautiful thing. James: Yeah, it's a beautiful thing. So, just in terms of the lot itself are there any other issues with the city? Or do you just own the whole lot? Kevin: Issues with the city meaning…? James: So basically, you own the entire park. So, that whole thing is an SL real estate, right. Kevin: That's correct. James: The city doesn't own any of the things inside. Kevin: Sometimes, every park is a little different. We have a few communities where the main road going through it is owned by the town or the city and we own the park. So, they maintain that one road. We have other communities where the water company direct build the water and sewer lines. So, when that park was built the local municipality handled the water and sewer and they literally put the lines and they own them. And we're not responsible for water leaks or anything like that. In most communities, we own the lines but there are some communities that are just anomalies. They are kind of stand alones, where we don't have to maintain them. Every park is different but normally, we own everything. For the most part, we own everything in the park and we have to maintain it. James: So, do you get a lot of depreciation because you just own the land? Compared to like multifamily? Kevin: You do. You do. You know, we did a bunch of cost ex studies last year and we were actually pretty shocked. In fact, Tom Wheelwright from Rich Dad Advisors… I didn't know that he's good friends with the person who does our cost ex studies. He personally reached out to me because he had never looked at a study from a mobile home park before and she shared one of ours with him. And he's like, ‘You got to come to my show. I'm actually baffled at the amount of depreciation that you guys able to gain.’ So, the infrastructure… So, all the improvements in the land. Most of the value of that property because we're not buying the homes. Most of the value is in the improvements of the properties. Because a lot of our property that we're buying it’s not like a path of progress. I mean, the dirt itself isn't worth the money. It's the infrastructure that's there that is really worth the money. And so I don't want to just off the cuff share with you some of the cost ex studies but it's a fifteen-year depreciation schedule.  And I think we've been able to, on a couple of our deals, depreciate it like upwards of 60% of the actual purchase price within the first year. So pretty significant. James: [inaudible34:57] the bonus depreciation. Kevin: With the bonus depreciation. James:  Got it. Got it. So, is it fifteen years or is it similar to like twenty or fifteen? So, mobile home parks[inaudible], okay. That's something that I didn't know. That's very interesting, Okay. That's really good and what about what is the primary value at the mobile home park? Kevin: Yeah, there are a couple big ones. I kind of classify them as like low hanging fruit, middle hanging fruit and then the high hanging fruit. Which is hard to get to. The low hanging fruit for us are simple operational changes. You know, the heavy payroll. We will go in and…  they’ve basically got their family members and their cousins and their brothers on payroll and we'll go in and chop it down to what it really needs to be. That's very low hanging fruit for us. Some other low hanging fruit for us are just your rent increases. There have been many communities that we have purchased that literally have not had a rent increase in fifteen years or twenty years that’s a long, long time. And so that's very low hanging fruit. Medium hanging fruit to us would be controlling the water and water sewer and other utility expenses. So, a lot of these parks when they were built back in, back in the day, water and sewer weren’t expensive utilities. They just weren't. It was included and was factored into the lot rent. You know, the infrastructure was new back then. So, there weren't leaks or wasn't waste or anything like that. Over time the infrastructure gets older and leaks that happen. People tend to abuse water. Water and sewer are expensive in most parts of the country. And that's normally a very large line on the PNL expense statement. And so, we'll go and we'll basically buy individual water sub-meters. They’re pretty advanced meters that are digital and have remote reads. And then we will install them to a lot and will essentially start building the residents back for their own usage. Proportionately speaking we will do the reads each and every month build them back. So, number one: we'll save anywhere from 20% to 40% of usage because people now get responsible very quickly when have to pay for it. And then they'll all those savings basically good to our bottom line. So, it costs us a little bit of money but typically in a normal-sized Park, we will recoup that entire investment of the water meters within like 12-14 months. It's pretty quick. And then the high hanging fruit of the value-add side is infilling of new homes on to vacant lots and so a lot of communities that we own they might have some vacant lots of them. Some more than others. So, I'll give an example: we buy a mobile home parks 100 lots in size. It's got eighty that are occupied with trailers that are paying. The other twenty they were fully developed when the park was built. They've got infrastructure there. However, they do not have a mobile home sitting on them. We've got dealers license in every state that we own a park in and so we can buy wholesale from the retailers and the manufacturers. And we’ll go buy brand new home inventory and we'll bring it in and will basically create a retail program and find buyers for those homes to infill those lots. So, we'll buy the homes. We’ll bring them in. So, I say that's high hanging fruit because it's very capital intensive. It costs money to purchase a home and that money is tied up until you sell that home. So, there are different programs out there that help you to facilitate that but it's still very capital intensive. And there are a lot of logistics involved with moving homes in and setting them up and things like that. So, those are the big ones of how we add value to communities. James: Got it. Got it and I believe the mobile home park homeowners compared to multifamily which are renters, right? So, it’s a completely different mindset when it comes to pride of ownership. Kevin: That's it. That's it. That's why we try to convert them to a homeowner as fast as possible. I mean, you still have your homeowners who you have to kind of kick in the butt every once in a while, to keep your house in order, to keep the yard in order. We’re pretty strict with our screening processes and for the most part, the homeowners within our communities have pride of ownership and take care of their units quite well. James: Got it. Got it. Got it. So, let's go back to the property management side of it. Because I remember when I was listening to your podcast about five years ago, you were always saying or the apartment guys had it easy. Because they have their own property management. They are more professional. Finally, after five years you are going to be moving your property management company under yourself.  You going to self-manage, right?   James: Yeah. So, you guys do have it easy. All you have to do is pay it and just hand it off. Buy it and... Yeah, joking. I know there's more to it than that. So, up until a little over a year ago, we managed all our own assets in house. And unfortunately, the property management side of any business there's a certain size to where you can actually break even and we were nowhere near that size. And so, it was a losing endeavor for us. And so, sometime in the middle of last year we were introduced to a property management firm…. we’d never considered property management in the mobile home park space. Only because we were always told that the options of the companies that were out there were poor, very poor. And I was told so by many different people, many different veterans of the industry and so we never really explored it. And so, we always manage it ourselves but last year we were in contract to buy a property up in Michigan. It was in receivership and the bank had engaged this management company, a national management company, a property management company that were mobile home park experts in the business forty years. They were engaged to actually manage the day to day of this thing while it was in receivership. We were buying a note on this thing and we got introduced to this property management company. We got to see them in the real world. James: [barking] My dog has been like a... Alright, Kevin. So, one thing that I got to know since a long time ago is apartments have an easy way of getting into third party property management and buying it and giving it to third party property management. More recently, you have been trying to get your own property management company or maybe you already done it. So, can you explain why that is? Kevin: Yeah. Yeah. So, in our space it is not the norm to hand off to a third-party management company. I think we're like the redheaded stepchild or the anomaly of the real estate industry. Because pretty much every other asset class multifamily, office, retail, all of them have multinational property management companies and lots to choose from, right. They can choose from many different people in the space, best in class things of that nature. I had always been told in the mobile home park space by many industry veterans that it just doesn't exist here that there are only a handful of property management companies and most of them aren't very good. So basically, in the initial years of us owning parks, we managed it ourselves. However, in order to build an appropriate property management company that's profitable, you have to have a certain scale and we were never there two years ago. We just weren't large enough. And so, it was kind of a losing endeavour for us. We're okay with it. But it was prohibiting our ability to grow at the scale that we wanted to. We were good at finding great opportunities and we were good at raising capital. The roadblock was actually the operations of all these different parks were buying.   And so just by happenstance, we were buying a note on a distressed property up in Michigan and it was in receivership. And during that transaction, we got introduced to the management company that was running the show and it was this large group. They've been in this space for 40 years. They are the largest fee manager in our business and they've had a footprint nationwide. And I saw them first-hand and it seemed like they were doing a great job within the first couple of months of us being introduced to them and of them managing this asset that was not yet ours. And so, I flew up and met their team and flew my team up to meet their team. I got to see their operations. I got to learn about them and everything seemed great. I mean, I was impressed. Again, they had a lot of experience… way more experienced than us in this business. They knew everyone in the industry. They knew all the intricacies of the business. They had different departments to manage those things whereas we were basically were trying to wear a million different hats. And it seemed like a perfect match made in heaven. And so, after another month or two of kind of testing them out on this asset. We were buying this and we said ‘You know, let's hand them the majority of our properties and let's see how they do.’ And we kind of did it like two different chunks. And long story short, they're great guys. However, no one's going to ever manage your property like you would. No one's ever going to care as much as you do. And so within four or five months, we started seeing some pretty readily available signs that things were not going as planned. The promises weren't coming true. You know, decisions that should have taken three minutes to make were taking three months to make. Everything was moving like a snail's pace and nothing was getting done and we were actually regressing and it was frustrating. However, what happened during these first six months of us being with them is that we literally acquired like another nine properties. So, we doubled in size. So, unfortunately, it wasn't as easy as us making a decision saying, ‘Hey, we're going to give you our thirty-day notice and we're going to take it back in house.’ Because we surely did not have the infrastructure now to actually manage our assets because we literally doubled in size in a short period of time. And so over the last six months, we've been kind of behind the scenes building out a legitimate property management company with systems and processes and in hiring new team members. We didn't want to bring it back in and fumble. We want to make sure that we brought it back in, we basically built our own best in class operation that we could do it better than anyone else. Whether it be for ourselves or current assets or new assets that we were buying. If we woke up one day and we ended up going crazy. We thought that we wanted to do a third-party management for other people that we would be best in class. I don't think that's going to happen. But that's what we've done over the last five or six months and that's actually side-tracked some of our acquisitions we've only bought two properties this year. We probably could have bought a lot more but anyway I guess long story short, James, is I'm somewhat envious of you guys in the multifamily space. Because there's a bar that set with property management companies and if one company is doing poorly you’ve got other options to go to and typically they kind of keep each other in line a lot of times. And I know that they’re still never going to treat your property like you would yourself personally. However, You've got options and things that might not be working with one company you know that you could probably actually go and get served correctly at another company. We just didn't have that option. We just didn’t have that option. This was the once and done. There were other companies out there but these are the best in class and I'm like, ‘If these are the best in class, we got to build our own. Because there are other options for us.’ That's what we did. We brought it back and so that just happened on November 1st. That’s when we actually truly brought everything that had migrated back in was November 1st. So as of the time of this recording, it was like six weeks ago. James:  Got it. Got it. So yeah, it's a different ballgame, right?  of course, it's going to slow down in terms of acquisitions because now you're also managing the property management. But I think overall, in the long run, it’s much better for you. Right? Kevin: Absolutely, at the end of the day the amazing strides that we've made just in the construction side of our business and the marketing side of our business as far as like sales are concerned…like we've done more in the past two months then was completed in the past year. I'm not even joking. It's been absolutely amazing. So, I'm excited. I’m like, ‘Hey if I'm going to screw up, I want it to be my fault. I don't want it to be someone else's fault that our properties aren't performing.’ I'm okay taking accountability if they're not performing if it's me that's running the ship or driving the ship, right? But if it's another company and they're doing a poor job and we can't control it. I've got issues with that. So, that's kind of where we're at. James:  And I also think that when the market turns people with their own vertical integration will have a lot more leverage in terms of control, right? I mean a lot of property management companies are doing a mediocre job right now but they escape because the markets are super strong right now. Kevin: That's right. The market props everything up. James:  When the market turns then we will know how good they are. Because now we have to be answerable to our investors and we have to go to third party. So, one other thing that I want to touch on about the way you do business a lot of times you raise money and not deal by deal but you use fund model. Can you explain what's a ‘fund model’? And why is that beneficial? Kevin: Yeah, to keep it somewhat simple… I mean, it's really not much different than your deal-specific syndications other than the fact that we've got multiple properties that we're putting underneath that fund umbrella versus just one individual property. So, an investor is going to get their investment diversified amongst multiple properties and possibly multiple different markets rather than just one. So, simply put that really is the only true difference between probably how our business operates and how your business operates. The reason that we decided to go that route happened about three years ago…We were going into the end of the year and we had just founded Sunrise Capital Investors. As like a formal company, rather than just me and buying parks on my own. And we had a pretty stout pipeline and a lot of deals kind of fell apart. And we were like, ‘Oh, we only have two deals now. They're going to either going to close January or February next year. This is due to individual deal-specific raises.’ That's fine. And then all sudden like within like two weeks somehow all these other deals came back to life and we all of a sudden had five deals that absolutely looked like they're going to close. We had like four to five money that went hard and anyway we're like, ‘Okay, well now we have five and they're all going to end up dropping like in the same like week or two. Logistically speaking, it'd be an absolute nightmare to try to do five deals specific syndications. Because of the paperwork and logistics behind it and then the legal costs associated with it and that just didn’t make any sense.’ They're going to close right at the same time.  I think there's more of a benefit for our investors to give them diversification amongst all five of these versus just one. You know, one individually. And so we didn't know what the feedback was going to be and we put it out there and it was well-received. So, it was great for us. It gave us a little bit more flexibility on the buying side. Gave them risk diversification amongst multiple different assets and markets and so it's been a win. So, we did really well with that. That was kind of our test fund and you're last, actually about eighteen months ago, we launched our second Fund. Which is a little bit larger fund twenty-million-dollar fund and it did the same thing. So you know, we're a little different, though.  A lot of funds… a lot of institutional funds will go out and they'll get really aggressive. They'll raise all the money. Let's say it's 100-million-dollar fund to go out and raise I'll spend all their time and energy raising 100 million dollars. And once they've got the commitments for, let's say, maybe 75% or maybe more than that. Then they'll actually start going to buy it. You know, once that money's there and the costs of capital is very high. We didn't want the money sitting around idle. And so, we just continued our building our pipeline and we would only bring money in tranches. So, we'd only bring enough in during that fundraising that we actually knew we're going to need or the next like two months to close deals. So, although it was an eighteen-month buying period over the last fund, we would raise it in tranches. Which meant our investor capitalism is sitting around idle, not collecting a return. We weren't occurring pref on money on millions of dollars that were sitting being around idle. And it just held us accountable and it held everyone accountable which I like. Our interests were very much aligned with one another. James:  So, you basically do capital calls whenever you need the money.  Kevin: That’s it. That's it. James:  These are good capital calls, not the other bad capital calls.  Kevin: Right. Exactly. Like the verbal soft commitments are there. And some of them might not come through but the majority of them do.  You know, I think about 5% drop out of folks. James:  So, you basically make a verbal commitment. And when you have a deal, you say now let's make it hard. Kevin: Yeah, absolutely and each one of these two funds that we started, we actually already had deals and contract going into them. So, it wasn't like we were raising a blind pool like, ‘Oh, here's what we're going to do. We're going to raise this much money, and then we're going to buy.’ It's like we got X amount of properties in contract right now. So, while there might be more properties in this fund, you can physically see and see the performers in each one of these. These are going to be properties that are in this fund. So, there's something tangible there. That's another thing so different about us and how we do these funds. We don't go into it blind. Where we're just raising money and then we're going to go do what we say we're going to do. We're actually doing it simultaneously but we've got deals coming in. We've got deals in contract money hard--- James: ‘Semi blind’ I would call it. Kevin: Call it ‘semi-blind.’ That's a perfect way to put it. It sounds like a rock band. James:  Right, right. Right. Alright, Kevin, can you give some advice to people who are trying to start up in this business in real estate or even in mobile home park? Kevin: Yeah. Yeah. Trying to get started up I'd say go try to mute a little bit of social media because everyone's on social media now, but I’d try to mute a little bit of that and go find the one individual girl or gal who is actually doing what you want to do. They can prove to you that they're doing what you want to do.  They're an actual GP. They're not they don't have five thousand units of very minimal shares as an LP and they're touting that. I know that's happening a lot out there. So, you know try to mute all that crap because I know it gives people anxiety. You know, like social media gives people anxiety because they see how everyone else is doing deals and ‘I’m like stuck here I can't get going.’ Just try to mute it out. Silence it and go find the James. Find guys like me.  We're very good with our time. We’re not going to just give everything away for free per se. We only have like so much time today but like find an authentic individual like us,  I don’t want to tout ourselves here, who will actually like give you some real advice that can give you some proper guidance or at least give you some nuggets get on your way and let all that other noise go. Because I think that that that that bottlenecks people a lot. That fear of missing out man. That anxiety creates just this internal turmoil of like, ‘I'm missing out’ and then like you get nothing done right. You’re like, ‘I'm going all these conferences and I'm reading all these books. I'm doing all these things.’ And you feel like a… James:  And you pay big money to some gurus out there. Kevin: Yeah and I think that a lot of folks’ mistake that with like productivity of …attending things like that. It's great. I do it all the time. You do it obviously. We're part of a mastermind together. But like you've actually got to like at some point get granular and you actually have to take some risk and take that leap. It's easier to do when you know someone like you or someone like me or there are other people like us. That one person who you can just kind of lean on and get some general advice from and get the real picture from as well. You know, what's real and what's not.  James:  Absolutely, absolutely. Kevin, why do you do what you do? Kevin: Why I do what I do? I really enjoy it as far as investing in real estate, I really enjoy it. I mean, I love the people I work with. I love our team here. I really enjoy being active and so everyone likes different parts of the deal like as far as what I do I'm not an Excel junkie. Not like my other partner he'll sit in from an Excel platform and run the model many different ways over like five hours. I want to shoot myself when I think of that. I'd rather be out in the field, I like executing on the plan. I like taking something from what it is today and actually seeing the end result of our hard work and effort over a period of six to twelve to eighteen, twenty-four months. And I also like seeing the smiles on the faces of residents. When we take something that's been blighted and actually make improvements to it. Especially folks who have lived there for many years. That's pretty rewarding to be seeing that kind of stuff. Especially, you get the one residence like, ‘God, I’ve been in for twenty years and this place over the last ten years was just scary and I didn't want my family to come over. Now, I have dreamt of the day that it will be the back to its former glory.’ And I like that kind of stuff. So, I like the lifestyle that that real estate provides, right? I get to spend a lot of time with my wife and my kids and friends and family and things like that. James:  Absolutely and was there any proud moment towards your real estate career that you can never forget? That will stay with you.  Is there one proud moment that you were like I’m so proud of myself. Kevin: Yeah, actually there is one. It was the very first mobile home park that we bought. If you got time, I'll tell the story. It's probably two- or three-minutes story but anyway, I'll try to keep it short. We were buying a very, very distressed park in Atlanta, Georgia. It was in a good little town but it was in the southern part of Atlanta. Which was got hit really hard with the recession and was slower to recover because there were a lot of the new developments that were out that way.  Anyway, we're buying this park that had been receivership for two years. It was fairly poor condition. Lots of squatters, all kinds of bad stuff happening there. The chief of police and the mayor's office were right across the street like a catty-corner. They had to drive past this place every day and we got it tied up and it was a small enough town and corporate town that we actually got a meeting with the mayor and this entire city council including the chief and everyone. And we went in there with his grand plan of how we're going to literally spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to clean this place up and to improve it and make it a proud part of their community.  And we gave this big sales pitch to the mayor's like this really tall guy with a bald head and the handlebar mustache. He is a really mean looking guy and this was in Georgia. He had like a rifle on the wall and a fox. He was a  very intimidating guy but he let us talk. Everyone's kind of looking like shaking their heads. I thought we were like getting their acceptance and he let us talk for fifteen minutes and then he looked at us and he said, ‘If you guys buy that park, you're wasting your money.  Get out of my town. I've been trying to shut that thing down for years now and I'm not going to stop until it's completely closed down. So get the hell out of here. Take your money somewhere else.’ So, we walked out of that room and we and I looked at my partner I said, ‘What do you think we should do?’ Because we weren't getting financing, we were paying all cash for this thing, too. Because it wasn't financialable. So, it was like basically all the money we had at that point. We bought it anyway. ‘So, let's buy it. I mean what are they going to do? Listen, let's just show them what we're going to do. I mean, how are they going to truly stop us, right? Let's do what We're going to do. We know we're going to clean the place up. He doesn't believe us but let's prove them wrong.’ We did that cleaned it up. We became really good friends with code enforcement officer that's kind of that was our like our foot in. We got her gift cards and made her like us and it was a very very open with our communication to her. So, if there was ever an issue, we addressed it right away.  Anyway, twelve months later I got a call from Mayor Bobby Carter's that his name and we got a call from him and I answered I didn’t know it him and he said, ‘This is a Mr. Bobby Carter.’ He has a southern accent. He said, ‘I just want to take a moment to apologize. I want to apologize for the way I treated you guys. I want to apologize for thinking that you wouldn't be able to execute on the beautiful plan that you have done over here.’ It was a long apology and he's like, ‘I just want to take a moment today. I've been meaning to call you over the last six months as I've seen progress being made but it's a year later and this place is great and actually, one of my staff members lives there.’ James:  He was holding it off until he had to tell you. Kevin: That was pretty cool. He literally wrote me a letter then he wrote a letter of recommendation to another Mayor who we were having an issue within another state in another town. Basically, saying like, ‘I thought mobile home parks were the problem. I thought this and the other and that's not the case. And these guys proved me wrong.’ And that's pretty cool. I'm pretty proud of that one. James:  Yeah. It's a big change especially with one of your first ones.  Kevin: He was the very first one. James:  You must have been really scared. I like how come the is not behind your back. Kevin: Well, we could lose that money either. I didn't have much at that point. In 2012, I was pretty broke back then. So, I had to make the money work. James:  That must be the fuel that launched your rocket and your motivation I guess. Kevin: Yeah, that's it. James:   So, why don't you tell our audience how to get a hold of you and your company? Kevin: Yeah, the best place to reach me personally is my website, Kevin Bob. You can find me on LinkedIn and Facebook as well. As far as our company if you want to learn what we're doing in the mobile home park space, you go to sunrisecapitalinvestors.com and get signed up there as well. We don't have an offering open today but get signed up. We have a secure portal and get updates from us when you know we have deals coming about and things of that nature. But other than I'm not too hard to track down. So, it’s pretty easy to find me on iTunes. I've got a couple of podcasts as we've mentioned earlier. You can find me in many different places. And now you can also find me on Jame’s show. James:  Yeah. So, thanks for coming. It was an awesome podcast. It was a lot of value that you gave us and I'm happy to have you on my show. Kevin: Thank you. Thanks for having me, James. And it's been a pleasure knowing you. I appreciate all you do with the podcast. I know how much work it is to put these things out. So, thank you for taking the time to get back to everyone. So much appreciated.  

When looking to expand your business, having smart marketing strategies can help lead you and your business to an increase in your overall customer pool and ultimately your revenue. WTR welcomes Jeff Pulvino, co-founder and CEO of Boost Media Group, a full-service digital marketing agency. In today’s episode, we will discuss the steps you could make in order to further advertise your company and how you can maintain growth in your company with advertisements and upkeep of what it is that you’re trying to specifically accomplish with your company. Ingenious tactics to accumulate wealth, for people who see things differently. Jeff Pulvino Website: https://boostmediagroup.com (https://boostmediagroup.com) Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/boostmediagroup/ (https://www.facebook.com/boostmediagroup/) LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/boost-media-group/ (https://www.linkedin.com/company/boost-media-group/) Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/boostmediagroup/ (https://www.instagram.com/boostmediagroup/) Twitter: https://twitter.com/boostmediagrp (https://twitter.com/boostmediagrp) NOTES [00:27] Kevin: Today, we’re joined by guest Jeff Pulvino. We’re going to talk about an important topic for all entrepreneurs and that has to do with marketing and digital media and how those tie together [00:51] Jeff’s been an entrepreneur for over 15 years and he’s the co-founder and CEO of Boost Media Group, which is a full service digital marketing agency [01:04] Why don’t you tell our listeners a little bit about where you came from and what inspired you to get to where you are today? [01:34] Jeff: I ended up getting hired on at a BC funded company and had hundreds and thousands of stock options, but it never really amounted to anything (the company never went public), but I learned a lot [01:49] That venture gave me the entrepreneurial taste because we were truly building a business from scratch [02:43] We decided to start a marketing company and that’s how we got started with Boost Media Group [03:19] Kevin: There’s a lot of people out there starting new businesses. The facts are about 20% of them fail in the first year. Then you have about 50% of those who fail in the first 5 years [03:46] Jeff: Being an entrepreneur is being embraced by the US and the world and it’s a growing trend [04:04] In America, we have something like 28 million small businesses and 22 million are solo entrepreneurs who are running the business all on their own [04:18] There’s this huge learning curve and stress to be successful and I think that’s where a lot of new small business owners run into pitfalls [04:54] In marketing today, there’s so much to know, learn, absorb, and execute on and it literally changes daily [05:02] As an agency owner, it’s a struggle for me to keep up on my own expertise much less than a business owner trying to do everything (nearly impossible) [05:21] Kevin: Marketing plays a major role in pretty much every entrepreneur’s business, but you were saying earlier that most of the businesses out there don’t have a solid marketing plan in writing [06:07] Jeff: A lot of people have something in their head that they thought about (an idea) [06:14] It’s so different when you put it in writing and you commit to it [06:19] Putting your plan in writing so that it makes financial sense for your business [06:25] Almost 10 out of 10 of the businesses that I talk to don’t have any type of marketing plan in writing [06:33] Kevin: But, as we stated, a lot of those entrepreneurs are trying to wear a lot of hats and they might not be marketers per say (dabbling in it) [06:54] Jeff: With the learning curve and staying on top of everything, you have to constantly be studying and reading. What I find is that most business owners at some point have tried some sort of digital marketing (whether it be on their own or with...

This episode’s guest is Kevin Wheeler, Founder, and Chairman of the Future of Talent Institute. Kevin is a futurist and a true thought leader whose personal brand brings to the party a practical but future-forward blend of wisdom.Kevin brings a really strong foundation in understanding the role talent will play in shaping the future business landscape. It is through the lens of a hybrid futurist- realist that Kevin discusses his views on how assessment fits into the big picture. In this episode, Kevin shares his views on the state of recruiting and talent assessments 10 years from now.According to Kevin, there is a utopian view that AI will take over the need for human intervention in hiring. His view does not align with this. Rather Kevin feels that 10 years the view will not be radically different than it is today. Instead we will see a more evolutionary change that will be subtle and consist of augmentation as opposed to redefinition.Kevin feels that 10 years from now there is no way we will not be able to push a button and deliver the perfect candidate. Instead, using systems to quickly settle on a shorter list of candidates that are better qualified is more realistic. In fact, the entire hiring experience will be streamlined to be simpler and easier- with administrative tasks being handled by the machines freeing up humans to do what they do best.I asked Kevin, “How his clients feel about the AI based TA tools available today? Are they afraid or excited?” Kevin’s reports that his clients are confused, skeptical and scared. They do not know if the technology that is being advertised is for real. They also fear that tech tech may take their jobs someday. Most recruiters don’t trust the black box of AI. They need better education about what the tech is really doing.When it comes to the practicality of advanced tech’s role in the hiring workflow, Kevin’s clients generally show that we have a long way to go. This is because, despite the hype, the reality is that even though there are some cool tools out there, they still have to exist within a big-picture process and workflow. Typically getting new tools to play well with existing legacy systems is an exercise in frustration. Putting an exciting tool into a process that is not its equal can create a log jam that keeps the value of the new tech from being realized.According to Kevin- There are 3 key areas where AI is going to lead change over the next 10 yearsSourcing- Finding candidates will be much easier via the assistance of AI. We already see this trend, but in the next 10 years, the sourcing function will become both more automated and more accurate.Assessments- Humans are complex and assessments don't tell the whole story. We are a long way from being assessed by AI alone. Insights can be delivered via AI and the most basic level can be automated, but blindly expecting AI to radically change assessments in 10 years is foolish. The biggest change will be the increased use of work samples that are augmented by AI.Chatbots- Chatbots and assistants in the here and now are not really too capable, in 10 years we will have very capable assistants to help us. This will mean that applying for a job will be a much better experience for candidates. We all want a good human experience. By removing the admin layer AI can help stuff will free up TA to provide the human experience candidates want.Yes, we will still have assessments in 2028, they will be easier to use and will provide a smoother, more realistic experience for candidates and TA. But beware the danger of over-relying on AI to come rescue us. Kevin is confident that we won’t be getting a magic button to deliver the perfect employee anytime soon.Kevin leaves us with the ideal strategy for the next 10 years (and beyond)- “Question everything!”Kevin Wheeler is the Kevin started FOTI out of his passionate belief that organizations need a more powerful and thoughtful architecture for talent than they have at present. After a 25 year career in corporate America serving as the Senior Vice President for Staffing and Workforce Development at the Charles Schwab Corporation, the Vice President of Human Resources for Alphatec Electronics, Inc. in Thailand, and in a variety of human resources roles at National Semiconductor Corporation, Kevin has firsthand knowledge of the need for better strategies and approaches to finding, developing and retaining people. Kevin is a globally known speaker, author, teacher and consultant in human capital acquisition and development, as well as in corporate education. He is the author of numerous articles on human resource development, career development, recruiting, and on establishing corporate universities. He is a frequent speaker at conferences. He writes a weekly Internet column on recruiting and staffing, which can be found at www.ere.net, and he and Eileen have written a book on corporate universities, The Corporate University Workbook: Launching the 21st Century Learning Organization. He has served as adjunct faculty at San Jose State University, the University of San Francisco and on the business faculty at San Francisco State University.Learn more about Kevin's work at https://futureoftalent.org or email Kevin at kwheeler(at)futureoftalent.org

Today we have Dallas based agent and real estate investor Ian Flannigan. From an investment real estate agent to Ian has been in the real estate industry for over 15 years and has come a long way gaining a diverse background around investment property sales and distressed properties and has become an expert at it travelling around the country speaking on creative financing and topics.  Ian talks to us about what attracted him to EXP and his transition coming out of a franchise system and joining EXP. He touches on the things that led him to decide to move all of his businesses including his investment business his brokerage business etc. over to EXP Realty  He brings a business owners perspective not just a listing and selling agents perspective.  Learn More about eXp Realty - Click here to watch a quick 7 Minute Intro Video. Remember our disclaimer: The materials and content discussed within this podcast are the opinions of Kevin Cottrell and/or the guests interviewed.  This information is intended as general information only for listeners of the podcast. Listeners should conduct their own due diligence and research before making any business decisions. This podcast is produced completely independently of eXp Realty and is not endorsed, funded or otherwise supported by eXp Realty directly or indirectly.     In this episode. The Investor & Business Owner's Perspective  Creating Cashflow and building assets Benefits the Cloud provides Equity and revenue share Being the exponential earner Getting awarded EXP shares and becoming an EXP icon The compound effect on my revenue share & referrals  Predicting your income   Want to Learn More about eXp Realty? If you are interested in learning more about eXp, reach out to the person who introduced you to eXp or contact Ian to inquire or ask questions. Contact Ian: Text at  214 213 1737  Links: www.EXPCloud.com   Take away "you borrow capital you'll leverage it against a property and then you receive that cash flow. The reality is not too many people ever get to that point" Ian Flannigan   Podcast Transcription Kevin: Welcome back to another episode of In The Cloud the EXP realty explain podcast I am host Kevin Cottrell. Joining me today is Dallas based agent and real estate investor Ian Flannigan Ian is going to tell us about his transition coming out of a franchise system and then working for a transaction based brokerage to decide to move all of his businesses including his investment business his brokerage business etc. over to EXP Realty and why he did that. He brings a business owners perspective not just a listing and selling agents perspective. Ian and I are going to talk about things ranging from equity revenue share and the other things that attracted him to EXP realty. Please stay tuned for my interview with Ian Flannigan. Welcome to the show Ian. Ian: Hey how's it going. Kevin: It's going awesome. I'm looking forward to our conversation now for any of the listeners the podcast that may not be familiar with you once you take a minute and give your background and history as far as real estate. Ian: I've been in real estate for almost about 15 years and I was a young hairdresser in my past life. We all have that story right? So you know I read that book Rich Dad Poor Dad and made me realize that I was you know spinning my wheels as a self-employed business owner. I didn't own a business I owned a job and just like you know we have friends that are attorneys you know real estate agents. Well you know all that stuff that they had these commission businesses and stuff like that so I knew that I had to make a change so I started studying real estate and I started flying around the country go into seminars was like a lot of people I didn't come into the business through the licensing side I came through the investing side which I really cherish that information because I have a very intimate knowledge of how the legal process works with pre foreclosures. We know probate houses people losing their houses the tax liens. I mean I've bought fire damaged houses all kinds of very interesting distressed property situations. I've become an expert at it and I've traveled around the country speaking on creative financing and topics like that because I ran a big seller financed real estate model for quite a long time and like I said I wasn't licensed I leveraged to brokerage's one in Oklahoma City one here in Dallas and we used all of our marketing and we ran all of our leads through them. I learned the business on both sides so when I was drafting my own contracts two years before I ever got a license so you know the market changed and I felt like I left a lot of money on the table so I started. I realized that like look I'm going to get go ahead and get my license because I'm processing so many deals through my investment company. So I might as well do it so you know I got my licence I hung out with Keller. Keller was a great company at the time, for me it wasn't a good fit. When I moved my licence over to a 100 % shop and it was a much better fit for my needs at the time but I had a big exit out of my investment company and everything that I had built over the last nine years kind of came to an end and I knew that I needed to buy and sell houses I knew I needed to list and sell houses but I also knew that I had to build more cashflow and I needed to build more assets because I just made an exit out of a company and it was a very interesting time in my life because I went through a legal divorce. You know I went in business with these wealthy individuals that were coming out of it luckily everything the dust settles all right. I came out OK but you know I knew that I had to build something again and when I saw the model with the EXP I was like oh my gosh this is interesting because there have been nothing like it that I've ever seen. So that's how I got to be. Kevin: Great! So you have a diverse background especially around investment property sales and distressed properties. When you looked at EXP you mentioned like myself I was a team leader at Keller Williams for a long time great company but the EXP is.. You know especially and I want to chat about this for a minute. It's a different model. When you talked about Rich Dad Poor Dad in thinking like a business owner that I think the industry has seen so there's a lot of noise and information out there that is confusing for real estate agents. In other words I want you to take a few minutes and talk a little bit about how you process this as a investor slash business owner because for real estate agents listen to this a lot of them have a commissioned sales job and they need some help understanding how to think like a business owner. Ian: You know that that couldn't have been the more perfect way to explain that because you know being an investor we have to think about OK how are we going to get money out in the market. This is how our thought processes we have X amount of capital we can leverage capital and we're going to put that money out into the market either short term or long term and then we're going to get a return on it's going to be a four month timeline a six month timeline. So that's what we're doing when we're buying and selling houses right we're thinking of it as a business it's not on the other side of the track where when you're listing agent it's a different experience because you don't own the house you're not responsible for the repairs utilities all that other stuff it's just a different ball game but it's a great way for someone to be able to get into the market and that's what almost drives me crazy about getting a real estate licence. Was I did that in a couple of weeks it took me almost a year to get a licence to cut hair in the state of Texas as it was mindblowing how different it was but my point is you know getting into real estate is the barrier to entry isn't that you know it's not very difficult. So there's a lot of people coming in and they don't really think of it like a business. They don't know that they have to put themselves out into the marketplace and sell themselves as a business owner so they get stuck in just that hamster wheel of the commission side of the business still thinking of it from an investment standpoint is like like oh my gosh this company... Forget the name forget all of it just look at your balance sheet and what are you doing on your balance sheet. Right you've got income expense asset liability what are you doing to create income in your business that you only have a commission type of business you only have one source. So this is the way that I see it because I built a seller financed model by leveraging capital we would raise millions of dollars actually. We didn't raise millions of dollars until after we placed it because one of our limited partners was our lender. So we had in-house lines of credit and I was buying you know five to 10 houses a month that I was selling them on owner financing and carrying back a note and we were archiving basically building a big huge spreadsheet of notes right. So once my mind opened to that like I knew that there were so many different ways to make money in real estate but once you find one model that you can't replicate and duplicate... And that's what exactly what I was doing with seller financing I was buying a house. I was renovating that house and that I was selling it and carrying back a note. And the more notes that I could create the more money I could borrow because we had we were building. A balance sheet of. Assets. Yes we had debt on it but. Our cash flow was compounding. Our interest was compounding. So having that experience with selling houses in volume like that and then carrying back notes like a bank that's what expanded my mind into understanding how to create massive amounts of cash flow and that's traditionally how you do it you borrow capital you'll leverage it against a property and then you receive that cash flow. The reality is not too many people ever get to that point even when they've been in real estate 15 20 years especially if they're coming from the licensing side of the world unless they have some mentors and coaches that were great that helped them put money back in you know build assets outside of their license that would be great. But most people never experience that. So when I saw EXP I really understood like oh my gosh like I got it immediately. Not only could I you know sell houses I could get you know software and technology to plug into to sell more houses because the training in EXP is you know second to none which people don't realize is the support and the training in the cloud is 100 times more effective more efficient. I mean the words just go on and on and on that describe how well you know it is and how easy it is to plug into the cloud. It's... The support and training is you can access it from anywhere in the world any time. There are no restrictions on getting in your car driving down to the road like that is gone that is over we plug into the cloud. So. That's one of the biggest takeaways of you know. Jumping into that is the time right we're all trying to... Maximize our time. So you know not driving down to offices. I had a huge office on the eighth floor overlooking. Downtown Dallas and I hated it because I had to get my car. I had to drive down to the office. Much more efficient with the home based office than I'd take my laptops and I got my Wi-Fi. So when I travel. I'm connected so. That I was the one thing is offloading that big expense of an office so that's the biggest thing that the cloud provides. And you know. To grow business you've got to reduce your expenses and grow your cash flows. And grow your transactional cash flow too. Kevin: So let me ask you a question regarding the business small as a business guy. You know so when you're traditionally a commission based business you know like you said that's one stream of income. When you look at the two big plays that EXP let's talk about the one being equity and the other being revenue share. The market really doesn't get this from the standpoint of the way startups work in Silicon Valley that's where I come from. You know so they look at it. I'm a real estate agent. I'm at XYZ brokerage I'm at independent it could be a big franchise. I go through my business I sell own a bunch of houses every year and either take listings and so on will get buyers at the end of the year or if I run my business well like you said I make a little bit of money. Ian: Yeah. Kevin: Now meanwhile there are people like Sherry Elliott who you know because she's in your marketplace that come on the podcast and go Hey by the way I'm buying a EXP stock for 20 % below on the commission plan. I've also been awarded it as an Icon for several years. You know I look at my account and I've got seven hundred thousand dollars in equity and if you'll look around a big franchise market center or office I would challenge you and you know this because you're in the marketplace. This is where the market doesn't get it right. There are not people running around with 150000 like I met an agent here in Austin or 700000 like Sherry Elliott where this is just occurring on automatic investment because the average agent just at the end of there like oh how many units did I sell. Ian: Exactly. That's you know the biggest part of about the business model is. Having that that potential to be what we call the exponential earner right. How you can scale a business. And adding stock and equity to your balance sheet. You know it's like sitting down with a financial planner and saying hey we're going to take a little bit of your cash we're going to put it here again take a little bit more your cash. We're going to put it here and then over time we're going to let this grow. And that's what people don't understand is. EXP offer's.... It's almost like a 401k for real estate agents. So as they're closing transactions moving forward paying into the brokerage we're actually getting a return on the money we're paying in. Right. Especially with the stock program that we have you know there's actually you know there's six different ways to get stock. One is to buy over the counter. Another is when you close your first transaction with the EXP you'll get awarded I believe it's 50 shares right now that could be off because the numbers are changing so fast I can't keep track of them but you'll get awarded shares of stock when you close your first transaction and then when you cap once you sell you know two point six six or about three million depending on what commission structure you're on 2.5 or 3 % whenever you cap you'll get more shares of stock I believe around 100 shares right now and then here's the cool part is if you sell 20 houses after your cap which a lot of team leaders do and a lot of brokers do they do a lot of volume or if you're a commercial and you sell about half a million then you can qualify to become an Icon. And then there's a panel that vote you and once you get qualified. You can receive your entire cap backing company stock which is sixteen thousand dollars just awarded back to you in company stock and that is pretty darn amazing. Because think about that. All the other franchise models that are out there there are great companies. You know. Nothing has changed in real estate in the last hundred years. Now the Internet has finally caught up with the brick and mortar real estate model. And no longer are agents being you know paying every dime in you know into their brokerages and not seeing a return on it. So it's a completely different mindset from this day forward of technology and growth and all that it's just changing the game in you know the billion dollars in expenses that all the big companies have. What do you think they're going to be in five and 10 years. I mean the internet has completely changed everything. But but that's why it's so important to build a future. And we haven't even talked about the revenue share. I mean you know as you're closing transactions you can be accumulating stock just through production. So every transaction you close your laying stock you have to think about that is building assets on a balance sheet. So back the very first thing we first started talking about where is why is what attracted me was understanding that I could build and compound more and more line items of assets on my balance sheet like in a spreadsheet. When you see cash flow coming at you in a spreadsheet and you see a total at the bottom and that total gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger by adding more line items of assets to your balance sheet. When I saw the revenue share model my mind was blown. And I've been in the company two years in what I've seen happen in the last two years. I mean I just stopped telling people the numbers because they're so big it just It's not relevant to them right. How does anyone relate to the kid that won the 450 million dollar Powerball in Florida. Like how is that relevant to me right. That's a massive amount of cash. It's like you know it's just one of those things. What do you think about that. Kevin: It's exactly what people miss. I talked to somebody last weekend. She's in Southern California and I'm glad you brought up the Icon program because as I started to ask her questions I could see that because she comes from a big franchise system that she was confused by the noise and information and other words they're trying to basically make it not clear that you're getting an equity award if you qualify for the Icon program of 16000 and that that's highly highly difficult to actually obtain that. Well as you mentioned either based on GCI or 20 transactions above capping. Ian: That's right. Kevin: There are very clear terms on how you qualify for this. So in her case she's got a big presence right. So I asked her some questions and just to clarify for our listeners in her case I said well how many referral fees on top of capping right she does about four or five million dollars a year. So she easily qualifies based on capping and she's in a high priced market in Southern California. I said well how many referrals did you do. She said I did I think somewhere around eight or nine referral fees that I got paid back to me last year. I said do you do any leases you're in a pretty high price market you've got to have people that are looking to lease houses and she goes I did it at least 10 of those on top of my real estate transactions. I said well just the referral fees and the leases are 18 transactions. How many did you do above. Approximately three million in volume. She goes well I have like another six transactions on top of that based on her pricing. I'm like OK well in our model you would be an Icon. Ian: That's right. Kevin: She's like I have no idea. I'm like yeah that's exactly how this program works. And assuming that you want to participate you're going to get all of your money back after you basically qualify based on transactions and you know the other structure and then for anybody listening to this you can certainly reach out we'll have some more information about the Icon program in this and other episodes. But don't let the marketplace confuse you. This is a real program. We can refer you to plenty of icons within EXP to talk to them about qualifying. Some of them have qualified for more than one year. In other words this isn't some promo special like you'd have at the car dealer where they're doing it once right. We have icons that have been here for more than two years that have qualified. Every year their hair. So the whole purpose of this podcast and I'm glad you brought this up is to have people understand because as a business owner at most brokerages there is no way to qualify to get your company dollar back. Right they just don't offer programs like that specially around equity which is an appreciating asset in most entities like this. So you absolutely are in a position to create value. I mentioned two numbers and now I want to tie this down. There is a agent I met at one of the meet greets right one of the EXP explained meetings and when this came up about Sherry Elliott in the conversation she said well I don't have a big mega team right. I'm a Capper. I do business and I've been investing in EXP stock through the program that Ian talked about where you can divert 5 % of your commissions. She said I have a hundred and fifty five thousand dollars in less than two years in my equity account. I would challenge any listener here if you're in a franchise or even an independent brokerage. Go look at your equity account and go ahead and send me a message if you have a hundred and fifty five thousand of your company's stock in there. And I think you and I know the answer is not unless you're buying at the market and you happen to work for a company that's traded right there's companies like Real Ajee or Remax or others out there that you could buy stock but you're not buying it for 20 % below market. Ian: Now you've got to buy it at today's value which it's been going down. Kevin: Let's transition a little bit to revenue share I'm going to give you my perspective and then I want to hear yours as a real estate investor so Gene-Frederic and I come out of the team a role or the regional owner role if you will at a big franchise system Keller Williams in particular but they all work the same way right. So one of the big things that were trying to basically make sure that agents understand is in a franchise system and if you are lucky enough to be around Keller Williams in the early days and this would be in the 90s right Gene-Frederic and Susan joined in the early 90s. They along with others had the opportunity to invest and buy regions right Gene-Frederic in particular with a couple of partners own Northern California Hawaii. Ian: I actually hung my license at DPR and live right down the street from where they used to live in Plano Texas. Kevin: That's awesome. And so for anybody looking at this the way regional owners are paid in franchise system and I'll speak specifically for Keller Williams is the royalties are taken off the top and they are paid half to the regional owners and have to the regional operating company in Austin. Right. So half and half. So one of the interesting variants of information out there in the marketplace is taking money off the top. It's not sustainable. Well if Remax does it if Keller does it. If all of the real Ajee franchises do this and if they have a regional operating partners or owners they're all paid this way then I challenge anybody that has been told that to go back and ask the person that told you this is this not how our franchise system the regional owners get paid. And the answer I'll just give you the answer is yes. So don't let anybody tell you that paying money off the top out of the revenue stream is not sustainable. This is exactly what EXP is doing. They don't have regional owners. From the standpoint of anybody buying in and owning Northern California Hawaii like Gene and Susan did with their partners. You are paid as a regional owner any EXP so to speak and I'm using that term broadly and loosely but it's the same concept off the top. Based on agents that are attracted to the company they become like your regional owner group. So with that as a precursor so people understand the concept here. This is not any different than what the franchise are doing. Ian what's your perspective on this as a business opportunity. Ian: So the way I see it and then you can correct me if I'm wrong that you know this is a big referral type of based payment right. Everyone understands. Getting a referral you mentioned the referral a moment ago. I have someone in California. I have a lead in California. I'm in Texas. I contacted agent say hey I have a great lead for you. They're jumping up and down because it's a five million dollar acquisition. So they think I've hung the moon. And I come and I go back to that same age and I say Hey. Here's the business model. That I'm operating around the entire country if you're interested in it and you're attracted to it and you like it. I could sponsor you into this model and then I could show you how to expand that. Across the entire United States as well. So now I sponsor that age in California. Now every time they close the transaction I'm going to get paid a referral fee. How cool is that. Right. And then every time they attract somebody. Into the company underneath them they could be in Seattle they could be and. They could be in. WASHINGTON They could be in Florida. They could be down in Alabama taxes Arizona. Every time those agents close transactions not only is that agent that I sponsored in California are going to make a referral now I'm going to make a referral fee off of another 20 agents. And wow the crazy thing about this model is every single person is on the same plan and they all want to expand their business so now I get organic compound and kind of like compound interest. So I'm getting a compound effect on my revenue share because now I've gone from two agents to 4 agents to eight agents to 12 to 24. I've expanded my revenue share business into 14 states and Canada and I just hit 84 agents and almost 30 of them hit my team in the last 60 days. So I'm now getting the organic compound effect of the duplication of what makes this lucrative revenue sharing model so amazing. Kevin: I've interviewed several independent brokers because their business owners right? They get blown away with is all of a sudden like Mitch Ryback and Florida they wake up and they're in 32 states in two provinces in Canada and they're adding more people per month than they had in their brokerage when they converted to EXP. Now you started from scratch right. You didn't convert a brokerage but for any agent listening here it doesn't matter if you're a single solo or and an agent that operates by themselves. You're a team and you're the rainmaker. You have an opportunity just to have when people ask you and I'm sure this happens right. And they like Tell me about the EXP. Why are you with EXP. You know somebody is going to listen to this podcast or other episodes and get it right. You're going to be able to have people have an understanding of the reality of EXP and to tie this down. From the standpoint of my comment earlier in the down markets right there is a several franchise systems including a very large one that operates on profit share. The regional owners and I'll speak to Gene-Frederic and his partners in Northern California. We're making a enormous amount of money in that 0 8 0 9 downturn. Most of the market centers we're not profitable for obvious reasons right. People's production were down however... because it's paid off the top the regional owners were making money like they were printing money and they felt guilty frankly about it. If you ever hear Gene interviewed about it he talks about the fact that they felt fairly guilty about the fact that if you're out there and you're thinking that it's all about profit share that's your reality check. We are going to go through another business cycle correction and you're going to see that when something is paid off the bottom at a profit. There's nothing wrong with that. It works. I'm invested removed partner. I was at Kellems for more than three years so to speak. And so I'm vested. I get paid profit share every month. So does Gene-Frederic. So do plenty of people. Now the difference is we're now comparing revenue share the profit share and it's a completely different model revenue share. Just to make it really easy is paid off the top like original owner. Like. I described earlier. Ian: And it's 100 % transparent. Kevin: It's very predictable. In other words.. Ian: You know exactly how much it is you can calculate it on your own. Kevin: And you can build a business around it in other words you've got to look at it like Ian talked about if you've got 80 people you've got 100 people if you've got like Pat Hays you have 800 people. You can predict very accurately. But here's what I expect at a minimum I'm going to make. And usually the numbers end up higher than what people are estimating. So let me ask you this before we wrap up today if somebody is listening to this and they want to do some due diligence obviously they can listen to this or any of the other episodes they can click on the link and watch that seven minute intro video that's in the show notes. What would you advise them to do as far as due diligence to really understand what the EXP is about. Ian: I would just refer you to some Web sites like you can really learn about the company. Number one is we're a publicly traded company right. That's one of the big game changers about this and why Glenn Sanford created this because he wanted everyone that was contributing to the growth of the company to be an owner and to be rewarded with it. So EXP world Holdings Inc. Is the site that you can do your due diligence and you can see our balance sheet. You can see everything about the company we're very very transparent. That's number one and that's the myth that everybody that's listening maybe for the first time or have heard something negative from someone else about the company like just forget all that. Do your due diligence were a publicly traded company EXPworldholdings.com The next thing that I would say is maybe we could take him over to the cloud side so they can see the training schedule they can see the agent handbook at EXPCloud.com. That's what I like to refer people to you know if you scroll down on that site you can see the agent handbook and you can read this and you can see exactly what the financial model is. And you can read through it. There it is it's right there in PDF form you can download it you can read it all the contact information for everybody in the company not everybody as far as the agent count goes. But now it's got Vicki in there it's got Jason Guessing in there. It's got you know Glenn its got their e-mail addresses in there. Everybody in this company is 100 % transparent. That's the great thing that I love about it so EXPCloud.com that you can see the agent handbook there. Kevin: Excellent.. which are the two suggestions I would give. I also would like to state this and I know that we're going to get your contact information before we wrap up. And when you're introduced to EXP the person that introduces you to EXP can get you in touch with Ian or anybody else or any of the people you interviewed on this podcast ask for references if that's what you need as far as your due diligence. There may be somebody that's from the same franchise you are with that you can chat with maybe you've never met them maybe you admire them and you respect them completely. That is the culture. As owners of this business that's also not apparent from the outside. In other words he and I'm sure you've had this happen we're all of a sudden you have somebody that needs to chat with somebody that's in another part of the country you reach out and say Hey John this person is from the same franchise that you were with. They want to talk with you. The answer I found 100 % is yes sent them my way and I'll be happy. Yeah. And it's not that clear from the outside. And so now with that even if somebody listens to this and they want to chat with you a little bit more directly what's the best way to reach you. Ian: I mean best way to reach me is by text at 214 2131 737 and I'm in the Dallas market. This is my backyard and I've had a lot of fun. I still do tons of fix and flips I actually have some pretty huge renovations that I document put on Facebook and LinkedIn and stuff like that and I invite people to come out and check them out when I'm done. Kevin: Fantastic. Appreciate you coming on the show. Ian: Thanks buddy. Thank you.

Daniel Beer Interview Joining us today is Daniel Beer. Daniel is the CEO of Daniel Beer Home Selling Team in San Diego California and has been in real estate since 2005. In 2017 his highly leveraged team was the top producing team in Southern California. Daniel shares his story about his business with us, talks about his decision to move his already successful business to EXP Realty and explains why he believes EXP is the most important opportunity that has ever existed in the Real Estate industry.  Learn More about eXp Realty - Click here to watch a quick 7 Minute Intro Video. Remember our disclaimer: The materials and content discussed within this podcast are the opinions of Kevin Cottrell and/or the guests interviewed.  This information is intended as general information only for listeners of the podcast. Listeners should conduct their own due diligence and research before making any business decisions. This podcast is produced completely independently of eXp Realty and is not endorsed, funded or otherwise supported by eXp Realty directly or indirectly.     In this episode Why EXP is the most important opportunity in Real Estate  How easy it is to move to EXP Many mega agents are making the move to EXP Creating revenue and passive income through EXP EXP is currently the fastest growing company in Real Estate The benefits of moving to EXP in these early stages EXP is like buying in to a business without paying for it Want to Learn More about eXp Realty? If you are interested in learning more about eXp, reach out to the person who introduced you to eXp or contact Sean to inquire or ask questions. Contact Daniel via his website www.fastforwardwebinar.com   Noterworthy "It's killing the traditional model and this is the highest value proposition available today to people selling houses." "Me being at EXP has nothing to do with wanting to move away from Keller Williams vs it actually just has to do with me wanting to move towards something that I see as being a phenomenal opportunity"  Daniel Beer   PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION KEVIN: Welcome to the show Daniel. DANIEL: Thanks Man. It's good to be here. KEVIN: Looking forward to the conversation.. The market and the industry are a buzz when you made the move recently but before we jump into all that why don't you give a little bit for those that maybe are listening to this that don't know you personally and know what you do as far as your real estate practice a little bit of your background. DANIEL: Sure. So having been real estate full time since 2005 and this past year 2017, my team was the number one producing team for all of Keller Williams and the Southern California region IGCI. And number two buy units. So we closed 222 houses for 164 million dollars in sales volume. We have what I call a highly leveraged fully built out team everything from operations, listing management, transaction management through company listing, showing agents inside sales and of course our sales agents or sales executives. It's been an incredible journey. And I went through the same Genesis that I think a lot of agents go through. I like most other stumbled into the industry. In 2005 I was 23 years old and my dad was about to sell a house and of course I got licensed because it's unfortunately are too easy to get licensed. And I started selling homes basically just doing friends and family business and that was cool. Up until the market crash.. The market crash happens we all know how devastating that was. All the friends and family business goes away. And I'm left to either make a decision to leave the industry or learn how to build a true business that can predictably systematically create leads in income for my family. So fast forward there were a lot of learning that you know that I went through is some winds some fails and here we are today having a ton of fun and now at EXP man I can't even begin to tell you how energising this has all been. I haven't had as much fun in a long time. KEVIN: And that's great. I like Gene Frederick we're team leaders and in leadership at Keller Williams I was with Aaron Lancaster and Andy Allen in the early 2000s and they had a team and we ran and we were doing about 600 transactions a year and that was the genesis for the whole MREA and so we thought we were having a lot of fun back then but it's nothing like this. So tell me about the process. Obviously well before you decided to move you started to hear about the EXP and you start seeing agents moving. What was the genesis for you making the decision to take a major big business like yours and make a change. DANIEL: Yeah it was an interesting journey. And so for me my personal story goes back to being in Gary Keller's mastermind of killer Williams so I have to say by the way it was a wonderful company. I was very very happy there and me being he has nothing to do with wanting to move away from kW vs it actually just has to do with me wanting to move towards something that I see as being a phenomenal opportunity. So anyway I was at Keller Williams. I was part of Gary Keller's mastermind. And you go back over a year ago. All of a sudden in our group we had a Facebook group. We suddenly started having people asking you know and making comments asking questions about EXP. And you know questions like "EXP just did this in my market" or "what are you guys doing about EXP saying this" or taking this person or "oh my god you hear we lost that one". And I found that to be really interesting because first of all I don't know who the EXP was. I had never heard of it. And of course at the time it was like a 2000 person company. And so I started to asking myself this is where do you think it's curious that the most elite group in the biggest company in the world or at least in North America is talking about some 2000 person company. But I have never heard of. So that's over a year ago and you know going back to say mid 2016. And the interesting thing about that too is that.. that group never talked about Berkshire Hathaway and they never talked about Remax they never talked about Coldwell Banker. They never talked about anybody. Yet they were talking about some little 2000 person company. So that's kind of interesting right. That was my first introduction to it all. I have another group that's a very very high powered mastermind. Everyone's number one or two in their market. There's about 35 or so people in it and that group all of a sudden three of them went to EXP. I'm talking about big heavy hitters. And so I learned the model and Kevin I think this might resonate with you. You know there's an evolution in this whole thing just when you hear about it, there is when you learn the model. So you go back over about a year ago. I understood the model okay call their stock. There's revenue share. There's the fact that you keep selling houses right? We're not being asked to become essential oil sales or anything we're just simply selling houses as stock revenue share. Cool. I got it. That was a year ago. But then there's when you finally kind of see the entire picture come together Kevin and you see the real power of the opportunity to step into the fastest growing brokerage in the country in the very beginning of the first inning. And when you see real productive agents start moving into the business. For me that was Curtis Johnson. Johnson was another guy that I was friends with he's a guy I followed actually been stocking years back before we knew each other. I was trying to learn from him. Now all of a sudden he goes yes. There's just that moment when you say wait a second what is going on. Too many incredible smart strategic business people that I respect are making the same move to the same group that Gary Keller's private mastermind's talking about. That's interesting. And so... you know I'll take a pause here Kevin in case anything to throw in there but when you start seeing that and then start seeing how truly financially incentivize the people at EXP are to help each other and essentially make it true the thing that we all tend to say in all brokerages that we are all for each other we want to share. We want to do this. Not in my market right or not too much. Not my true secret stuff. Well I started finally seeing a model that really incentivize people to open up completely and help one another because everybody financially benefits and the power of that and being able to go from one bucket of income to three right? just simply selling houses getting checks. It's also owning your brokerage and having passive revenue became so compelling that I made the move and I have been having a ton of fun since. KEVIN: Couple of interesting tidbits that you'll know who I'm talking about I'm not going to mention by name because I've got a good friend and he's in St. Louis and he's got a mega mega team like yours Daniel. I mean he was my mastermind in St. Louis when he was just getting started and I had my team and we were the number three team in the market. So I was talking to him about EXP and he said I get it. I know the model. Don't worry about it. Let me tell you this I've been accumulating stock and EXPI for over thirty four months. I've got thirty or forty thousand shares. I can't tell you the number of people. And he's with an NRT company. So guys like that are buying stock and the EXPI. There's a mortgage lender in central Texas. I think he's got close to 50000 shares. The industry is betting that this is the new model. And so some of the stuff that you know I just wanna throw in here because this predates your entry into KW and I agree with you it's a great company for people like Gene Frederick and I and others. We were there in 1999 when Keller Williams was a small little company and I'm going to tie down why you said it's kind of interesting to you to give you some perspective. Gary Keller and the team and the regional directors are all getting ready to launch a ton of market centers. They've got somewhere around 50 700 agents in 1999 and they have to go through the process of fining agents finding investors they have to go the 14 to 18 month process that other people have talked with me about on other episodes mentioned this. It's a slow process right. I could have met you in San Diego. Got you all excited about a market center and then 18 months later we'll be all through the process and opened. So now Brent Gove and I always give the story because it's most enlightening when you listen to his interview you'll hear him say this. He was in San Antonio for the EXP meeting met with Glenn met with Gene met with the team brought some people that were his best Devil's Advocates said poke holes in this model. Tell me why I shouldn't do this. Ten days later he is up and operating as the EXP and basically being powered by the brokerage. So the reason that people like you are seeing these antidotal people dropping in and out and it gets mentioned 12 times at fam reunion is this is Netflix versus Blockbuster. If you're sitting in the private room with Gary Keller's insiders not the people in the company but the guy that he's paid millions of dollars in consulting fees to they're going to tell him this is Netflix vs. blockbuster. You have all this bricks and mortar. You have all these franchise locations. It's a great company but so is Blockbuster and they couldn't pivot they didn't pivot. DANIEL: It becomes very difficult when you wrap up in hundreds and hundreds of franchise agreements. KEVIN: Absolutely. The interesting part about that I wanted to tie that down is there were fifty seven fifty eight hundred agents now eight years later they were at 78000 agents right. They executed extremely well. There were a bunch of us in leadership and I ran some market centers in South Florida. Gene was regional director as well as a team leader and phenomenal model lots of execution. The thing is and this is where Gary and the others realize this if it takes some 14 18 months to open a markets and with 100 agents EXP adding agents at 250 plus per week and you don't need a slide ruler to do the calculus to figure out if we're disproportionately high on producers like you or in the parlance of the franchise system cappers or better they can figure out what the picture looks like in 3 years when the company has 100000 agents. And I want to do two more data points you may not even know this in a one week period somewhere around Baltimore one of the market centers number one through five at one market center in one week they all basically said we're going EXP. So that is how you end up with a small little company being mentioned 12 times at fam reunion. The momentum is crazy. DANIEL: It is an incredible thing and here's how you know I truly believe this will be the first 200000 person company in North America. And the reason why and that it will also get there much faster than what is currently the biggest company is simply because let's imagine that you're an agent somewhere in remote Montana. Okay. And you want to be at Keller Williams and let's rewind right years back is I don't know where the market centers are but let's imagine it's the year 2000. And you want to be a Keller Williams And you're in remote Montana. Well they had to award the franchise fine the space build up the space they need to get X amount of what they called capping agents to be able to finally launch. And then eventually you can join that. That's a long process. If an investor chooses to build a market center in your area. You know that's that could be a one or two year process there. And again if they choose to build a market center in your area well you could be on a remote mountain top somewhere in Vermont right now without an agent within 500 miles of you and you could be speed this afternoon. And that is why this company without the restrictions of brick and mortar and traditional franchising territories and regions. When you remove all that you allow scale to happen at an exponential rate versus what companies not just in real estate but in any industry can traditionally experience. And so when you take all that in when you hear a guy like me that know I've had the privilege of being connected to some of the most incredible producers in the country I have a unique point in that I know what those conversations are. I know there's market centers being quickly unwinded so that people can move to EXP I know that headline making names across the country across every major city are all in motion right now. Right now is an opportunity that I saw to essentially step into Keller Williams in 1990 and in the very beginning the first inning. It it's been around for nine years by the way. But I would still say this is the first inning of a productive agents that will quickly and exponentially grow the awareness and the conversation which is already the loudest conversation in our industry is only being magnified each time one of these large producers in a different region nor a different city moves to EXP and the real aha is that if you can do that and you can have world class uplined support from big influential names and people and you're the first productive agent or among the first if you're in this first wave the first inning of agents that are really selling house it's moving into it. Yes. Well everyone wants to know about it. The conversations will naturally flow to you. What I saw Kevin is an opportunity to essentially own my region. It's like buying a Williams region without ever having to pay for it. And that opportunity was when I could not even I had not pass up. And this happened just like that right?. This is the loudest conversation in our industry. KEVIN: Absolutely. I mean I want to come back to what you just said because for people we've been talking a lot about wins it doesn't matter if you're at Remax or even if you're independent. The analogy of the fact that you can build a business where it's the equivalent of owning a region something that was out of reach for anybody in the franchise systems is the reality. And so if you're Daniel Beer and you're a major producer in your market and you have a couple of choices for additional income this is where I see the next phase of this momentum and rapid growth. You could go expansion right go into multiple markets and there's a lot of the franchise focus on that and certainly we're starting to see a lot of talk about this loud conversation from people looking at the EXP from an expansion standpoint and there's a lot of momentum there but it's that revenue share regional ownership if you will in the building a business around that that we have enough demonstrable examples whether you listen to the episode by Pat Hayes look into the Gene Frederick ston or even Sherry Elliott and Dallas. It's incredible now and I think the market with this loud conversation can no longer go. Well yeah. You know what they don't have anybody that has any real success because now regardless of how you've been introduced to this episode or any of the other episodes and as my guest ask whomever introduced you to EXP to go get you success stories. It doesn't matter if you want to talk to Daniel you want to talk to me Gene Frederick Pat Hays. We're all agent shareholders we're all here to help you. And again I want to get your perspective on this. Isn't that the craziest part of this culture that's not apparent from the outside. Anybody will help anybody because we're all age owners we're all either going to benefit through share or through our ACLI because the stronger the company can become the more our stock is worth in the most simple terms. Like I said the math finally makes sense. It's the first time it's been able to put the numbers and the altruistic or altruistic aspirations finally in alignment with the numbers and the math. It's a beautiful thing. And here's something I was listening to as I might say to myself OK that's helpful and great. So the 160 million dollars of real estate in the last 12 months. Sure. What about me. What I have seen over and over and already has set for us here locally in San Diego just within our first literally the beginning stages of us being at the company is if you're 5 million or 10 million or producer if you're an agent that's been operating with integrity showing up as a professional in your marketplace you are vastly underestimating your influence whether it be at a branch level or a zip code level a neighborhood. A town or county or city or state your region your underestimating your influence and keep something in mind. Again you're stepping into the loudest conversation only is being magnified by every big iconic agent keeps coming into the company which seems to now be happening on a weekly basis. So I'm stepping into the middle of that and your boots on the ground doing deals. Talking to agents talking to a hundred plus agents on a yearly basis. No one's asking you to go become a recruiter. In fact make sure you keep selling houses. Do what you do sell houses. All you needed really did was alter 10 percent of your awareness 10 percent of your script when speaking to an age. Something as simple as closing a deal out with somebody and just simply calling them hey is great doing that. You know what let's do another one soon. Let me know. Let me know if you listening coming up. You know I had the same conversation you're already having. And then just adding. And by the way you mentioned earlier during our transaction you know you'd asked me about EXP. We're actually having an event or there's this wedding or going on or blah blah blah. What I'm trying to say is that someone like me someone like Kevin and a lot of other folks across the country there's a lot of opportunities to it regardless of sponsorship there's a lot of people like us that have already created the system. Or you could just alter 10 percent of your awareness and introduce people into the system so that you can continue to do what you do and sell houses. You're going to go from what I call one bucket to three real estate sales but can we just sell a house and get a check. Transition to now having ownership. Because you actually get ownership simply for doing their jobs and having passive revenue here locally. Kevin like it points out an agent great agent just you know your bread and butter productive long time respected agent. She's not a YouTube star she's not on stage. She's just doing what she does in her local market place for some time. And she has five hundred ish dollars of profit sharing the last 12 months that her previous company her revenue share based on which she's already introduced. It's unnatural attraction and conversations coming to her is already on track for seven thousand dollars this year. And I think that's incredible. I think that's the most incredible thing because it makes seven thousand dollars in passive revenue in San Diego. You need to invest about a hundred and twenty thousand dollars cash to do it in real estate on a rental. So that's power. KEVIN: There are tons of examples and you're going to see them on these podcasts episodes. I mean I always love to tell the story of Sherri Elliott. It's one of the other episodes she was age at number 14 in Dallas and they have over a hundred there now. So when you look at the growth of the company the other thing I want to point with that comment is even if Daniel's point you're in a market where there aren't 800 agents. Here's the deal if you're in a market like San Diego it's coming. Right. Less than two years ago Dallas had 14 agents they have 800. Austin's over 315. I'm just picking a couple of markets. Daniel have every confidence that you'll be at a huge number in the southern California San Diego market and it will be but here's the point nobody in real estate does a good job of saving like you can with an opportunity like EXP. I want to talk about her two numbers that she talks about publicly. One is the equity she's been hurt less than two years she participates and in the GCI program where she dedicates 5% right? And if you're at a franchise and you pay that royalty. Think of it as the same thing off the top she has. And when she told Gene this recently, even hundred thousand dollars in her stock account in EXP stock and less than two years. So I challenge anybody listen to this. If you're an independent you're in the franchise model and where you are you're never going to see something like that. We were telling the story and one of the lunch and learn actually explain meetings and one of the three agents from Austin was in there and she said well I don't know nearly as much business as Sherry does and this is your point. I probably do a tenth of what she does in production she said. Isn't it interesting that my stock portfolio in less than two years of the EXP stock is 155000. I've never seen that much money in a investment account my life. Those are why Daniel's point of you don't have to be 150 million dollar producer with a big team. You could be a capper in that parlance. DANIEL: Well the story I told news about someone that's been in the company for three weeks its simply for this reason. And really this is the thing that people have to take with them. If you go and see who's making six figures profit share. Keller Williams which again a wonderful company that I love respected. Gary Keller will forever be one of my biggest influences if he goes to you. Who's collecting six fingers of profit share at Keller Williams what you're going to find is that it's not the superstar agents it's not the guys on YouTube on stage and being created around panels and it's not the celebrity agents that you whose names you know today it's actually the people whose names you don't know who were simply there early period. Now that doesn't mean they just showed up and didn't do it thing. And he EXP isn't that either. You can't just show up and not participate. It's not a get rich quick and just you just sign here you a million. No that's not what it is. But the people collecting six figures of profit share at KW And that's profit share revenue sharing exponentially more powerful only to talk about why in a moment. And a key reason why as we go deeper into it the number one reason why is top line revenue can't be manipulated. People collecting six figures of a profit share in this. You have to allow them to land. It's not a celebrity agent. It's not the people you saw on stage at the last conference convention etc. It's people that were there early. In my view is 1995 all over again being given the chance to enter. What's about to be the fastest growing company in the history of North American brokerage and I might be wrong right. I mean I've done an incredible job of being right more often than not in terms of my vision of where to take my business which is how we've got here. But I've also been wrong but was a guy like Curtis Johnson also rock the guy like Jay Kinder was a guy like Frank go wrong and Gene Frederick are all of these producers Kyle Wessell 200 million dollar producer was he also wrong are we all seeing the same thing and are we all wrong. Well I'm excited to find out. Here's the thing. The odds of all those people being very low and if we are we'll just go back to selling houses because that's what we're doing is we're selling houses. And so you obviously can hear the enthusiasm and buy my voice around what's going on here. It's just been on fun I keep coming back to that. You know what I'm talking about Kevin like me the amount of energy that you feel around all this. It's something I hadn't felt until... KEVIN: Absolutely I would agree with that completely. Before we drop off today if somebody is listen to this and they want to reach out to you and talk more about it what's the best way to reach you. DANIEL: Well two things you could do. One is my name is Daniel Beer. So just like the drink I'm easy to find. Go get me. Call me e-mail me it was jump on a call. The others go to fastforwardwebinar.com spell out the whole model. We spell out exactly why we've done what we've done not just my self on the way but some other mega producers that have made to jump as well. Independent brokerage's you know I'm giving you the KW because that's my history but independent brokerages are seeing that this becomes a platform where they still get to operate their brand. They're what they wanted to build their brokerage associates operated they just can get rid of this stuff it's not so unlike the broker stuff repurpose that time to building your passive revenue it and not have to take your eye off the ball at all as it relates to real estate sales. So you want more detail around it it is fastforwardwebinar.com and yeah it takes a whole webinars. The reason why is it's a completely different model. It's a model that I hadn't seen in my entire career. And it's just different. And when we've been looking for what's going to disrupt our marketplace. You know Kevin we always thought it was going to be someone that would create a button that would allow a buyer to purchase a home. That's actually not where the disruptions coming in disruptions coming in the brokerage space and how the agent is demanding value from their brokerage on a level that had never been previously demanded before it and that's happening more and more. It's killing the traditional model and this is the highest value proposition available today to people selling houses. KEVIN: Absolutely I agree with you. Thank you so much for coming on the show. DANIEL: You've got it!

Kelly Coughlin talks to Kevin Chiappetta, CFA, Financial Institution Management Associates Corporation about bank portfolio stress testing tools that are being utilized to help banks get prepared for the new FASB rule and CECL   Kelly Coughlin is CEO of BankBosun, a management consulting firm helping bank C-Level Officers navigate risk and discover reward. He is the host of the syndicated audio podcast, BankBosun.com. Kelly brings over 25 years of experience with companies like PWC, Lloyds Bank, and Merrill Lynch. On the podcast Kelly interviews key executives in the banking ecosystem to provide bank C-Suite officers, risk management, technology, and investment ideas and solutions to help them navigate risks and discover rewards. And now your host, Kelly Coughlin. Kelly: Kevin, I came across FIMAC I think, at a conference in Wichita, where I met your CEO, Greg Donner. I think Greg made a presentation there that I thought was really interesting. Let’s just start out with a little bit of just brief background, Kevin, of who you are. Then we can do a deeper dive into what FIMAC does, and what you see going on in the market today. Kevin: I appreciate the opportunity. Living in the Milwaukee area, my wife and I are the parents of two recently grown children. We’ve got one out of college, living overseas. We’ve got one who’s in college not too far from you, up in the St. Paul area. Kelly: You came over from your executive director from a company called Balance Sheet Solutions. Kevin: That’s correct. Kelly: You guys are in the space of helping banks manage their balance sheet … Both their assets and liabilities. Correct? Kevin: That is correct. We actually are two different approaches on that. We consider ourselves a technology company. We do provide the tools to do that. There are a number of them in the market place available at different price points. Different models which accomplish the tasks with slightly different variations, but we also are the consulting side of it. We use those tools to help the financial institution understand the risk that’s inherit in that, and use that risk information to make different decisions. We also want to be able to lend the expertise that we’ve been able to accumulate over the years. Both from bank CFO positions and other consulting firms to help them understand that information. Help them build that information better. Having the technology is fantastic. It’s helpful, but understanding how to use that technology is really where we’re kind of moving forward with our firm, helping those institutions understand what all goes into using technology to make better decisions. Kelly: The first point of entry is technology. Give them some tools. They start to use it, and they think that it probably triggers more questions than answers, so they need help implementing it. You’ve got a consulting area that helps the bank from that point. Kevin: Precisely. Kelly: What are some of the different business models out there to help the bank with their ALM? Kevin: The most basic approach that we’ve seen is the technology side. Here’s our model. Here’s what it cost to run it. We can help you move data in and out. Here are the results. We provide that series of results in a report, and you’re off on your own. There is some benefit to that. Obviously, it tends to be more of a low-cost entry. For those who are well-versed in that type of thing, it might be advantageous. We can see all the way up to the full consulting as we’ve described it before. We know that there are a number of competitors in the market space that provide that as well. We see some of this provided by firms who offer other product lines. Perhaps a broker dealer could offer something like that under a different feed-based arrangement, so we see a number of different ways to pay for that service. Whether you’re paying through a soft-dollar transaction type of thing that doesn’t show up on the income statement, or more on the straight feed base. There are probably three or four different ways, I think, that we see financial institutions using this information. Where is it coming from? Who’s running it? When we start to compare the models themselves, we get into what type of random number generator is being used to create rate paths and some of the more geeky stuff that comes along with the rate models. We can start to split hairs as to one model comparison to the next. I think the business side of it really breaks down into a model-only on the left-hand side, and on the right-hand side, the full-in consulting. Either you are or you’re not a full service on the consulting side. You’re just merely providing the service that brings the data in and pushes the reports out. Kelly: You certainly have plenty of brokers that are trying to jam municipals and securities into the asset side. Right? That’s one component that is somewhat of a unique approach that you guys have. Kevin: Without a doubt. We’ve run across some of those models. I don’t want to be overly disparaging. It really cuts back to something. We want to make sure as an organization that we separate duties. We do that in a lot of different areas. Those who are responsible for money coming in versus money coming out. To the big duties, we try to make sure that we split the risk-taking and risk-measuring. When you start to combine those two duties you open up the opportunity for one to kind of crowd out the other. When you have advice that’s given on an overall risk-management standpoint for somebody who’s being compensated for selling you risk, it doesn’t take long to see that the opportunity to create more risk than you wanted to was there. I’m sure there are very good people doing that modeling, but when it comes down to it at the end of the day. Whether I eat or not is dependent on you buying risk and adding it to your balance sheet. The opportunity to create an environment that looks like you can absorb more risk is clearly there. Personally, I just don’t think that you’ve done enough effort to separate those two duties to make sure that conflict of interest is removed if you’re getting the information on your risk-management and acting on that from the same place. It creates too much room to create errors either willfully or otherwise. Kelly: In other words, if you’re going to accept the business model where brokers drive the decisions, then you better have done your preparation and homework beforehand so that you know exactly what you need. Don’t let them decide which assets sit inside the bank’s portfolio at the inherit conflict. Is that a fair statement? Kevin: Yeah. I think that’s a spot-on statement. Clearly, to create these risk reports it requires a certain amount of judgement to go into some of the assumptions. I don’t want to get overly technical but if you look at the liability side, it requires a certain amount of assumption. You need to understand the impact of that assumption has on the result. If my main motivation is to sell risk asset, I can make an organization look more or less risky depending on what is necessary. The opportunities exist for that to happen. Any time the opportunity for that conflict of interest opens itself up, it has risk managers and organizations who are responsible for managing that risk. I think it’s imperative that we try to close off those opportunities. Whether or not you believe they’re there. The opportunity for it to be there and anybody with a suspecting eye is going to be drawn right to that, taking that opportunity for that risk-management problem off the table. It just goes a long way in proper governing. Kelly: All right. Another approach, that I’ve seen in the marketing out there, might be to outsource it completely to another investment management firm where they will take on the entire function. They’ll take care of finding and executing the trade. Presumably, not with their own broker, I would imagine, but in theory they could. They could be a broker dealer, they could be an investment adviser, and run the trade. Do you see much of that going on? Kevin: Yeah. We do see some of that. Some of my background comes from that particular business model, whether with or without the dealer side. It’s not too dissimilar from the role I described earlier on our consulting side, where we spend a great deal of time getting to know the organization and working along with them. In essence, being an outsourced CFO, or finance division if you will, we create that role and play that role within the organization. Along the lines with that business line, however, it’s imperative that you don’t simply take it off their table and say, “Go focus on lending,” or “File your table reports and everything will be fine.” It’s imperative that you become part of the organization, provide the information, the education, and help them understand what’s going on with that decision-making process. It might seem easy, say, in February now to come up with the reports from the year end, then tell them where they are and what they can do, but along about April, May when they need to answer for an exam a process , “ Where did those numbers come from? How did you make that decision process?” I can’t think of something that would go worse in that exam process than not being able to answer a question because you just don’t know what’s going on behind the numbers that created that decision. However, we approach that. If you don’t include management in the decision-making process, I think later on there’s going to be some difficult conversations you’re going to be having. Kelly: Why don’t we talk about what’s going on with this new FASB ruling, the current expected credit loss that is coming out here? I believe it’s going to come out this year. Correct? What are you guys doing? What should banks be doing? What are your thoughts around that issue? It seems to be a fairly big one. Kevin: It clearly is. It’s kind of been hovering out there for a while now. This sort of looming storm coming our way. As we look and see the discussion of the proposal, I think the proposal become more finite this year, so we get a lot better feel for how it comes out. It’s a slight shifting from the current allowance calculation where our allowances sort of reflect previous history on loan credit performance. It gets more into a projection. From our standpoint it really works very well with the mathematics that we’ve been doing in the forecasting for interest rate risk. It may be an eyebrow-curler but I think there some really definite, clear parallel there. We’re expected to put a present value on the projected losses for a particular loan, loan portfolio, or loan type. However we want to look at that. That really kind of goes along with the same type of mathematics we run now for expected cash flow. From our standpoint, this is more of a pivoting of how we’re going to create that projection of loan losses from a look-back historically to a forward-looking calculation. The technology that we have isn’t going to require us to make any major changes in the mathematics of it. We’re just applying it a slightly different focus. To be projecting a current value of a future cash flow, that’s kind of what our whole business is about. While it is somewhat scary, because we still don’t know exactly what it is, and it’s going to change to focus of what we’re doing. We feel very strongly that we have the tools, and the expertise in place to help management get their arms around this forecasting process. Then, sort of tweak the way put the input into a loan-stressing calculation or a forward-looking calculation. It’s so similar to what we’re doing now that we’re trying to take a sort-of … Let’s relax, focus on it, and apply that same thought process into the loan loss process. We think we’re going to be able to come up with a solution that’s going to be fairly well understood, fairly well put into place, and maybe less stress than we we’re thinking at the beginning, simply, because of the unknown. Kelly: You guys aren’t currently doing that now for loan portfolios. You’re doing it for assets. You’re doing it for investments. Correct? Kevin: Yeah. Absolutely. We’re applying that same concept to losses. What is the value of that loss? Is it the currently value of those future losses? The same discounting process that we’re going to go through. We’re just using that into a different piece of the balance sheet than we’ve had in the past. We’ll do a study so we can build an assumption built on some sort of a historic look-back as to how the depositors behave. We’ll help them understand the pre-payment speed. All the different assumptions that have to go into that technology in order to understand the behavior of the cash flows under different rate environment. We help them with that point. I mentioned earlier that I think one of the biggest assists we’ve had right now is just bringing people up to speed into what it is we’re doing. The board can handle those responsibilities that have been squarely put into their lap, but they just don’t have the day-to-day expertise to deal with making sure that they can deal with what’s going on. When they see what comes out of that technology, they get a better feel for what went into it and what it’s telling them once they see the results. Kelly: Okay. You guys are well-positioned, I’m thinking or at least from what I’m hearing, for this CECL ruling. Correct? Kevin: Yeah. We’re very confident that we have the tools in place now to tackle CECL. There’s still a lot of detail that needs to be brought out and put into place, but we understand the mathematics of it very well. That’s the business we’ve been in for decades. Just merely applying that concept here isn’t overly frightening. Again, there are detail that need to be brought out. There are certain things that we need to make sure we’re comfortable with so that we’re applying it properly to comply with the CECL guidelines. Without a doubt, we’re very confident that we have the knowledge, expertise, and the tools in place to tackle this once we get around what all the specifics are. Consciously optimistic is the right way, I think, to put that. Kelly: Okay. That’s great. Do you have any take-aways that you’d like to go away with? Kevin: Sure. Let’s start with CECL because that’s what we we’re most recently discussing, and again, it’s going to bare a repeating. We have the knowledge and the expertise in place already as banks, and institutions. We’ve been working with these concepts. We’re now applying it to a different area of the balance sheet and the balance sheet reporting. I think it’s important to know what the guidelines are, but by the same respect we want to make sure that we don’t get overly concerned with the concept of moving from a backward-looking to a forward-looking projection of losses. It’s merely applying the concepts we know into a different area. The biggest concern that we have on CECL is more making sure we understand the guidelines behind the assumption building process and get that done. We want to make sure that we don’t step into a panic state because it’s something new. From an interest rate standpoint, one of the things that we’re trying very, very hard is to get people to conceptualize as they get into the balance sheet management process. Not merely the interest rate reporting process. What do we mean by that? As I’ve mentioned before, we have the technology side of our business. We do a great job of getting the information, and reporting that information. What we do with that information becomes the big next step. From the consulting side, what we’re trying to get organizations to understand is more the movement up the scale towards this modern portfolio theory. We want to look at the balance sheet as an entire entity rather than component, as most things are done now. For instance, organizations that run an investment portfolio with a certain set of guidelines, because we don’t want risk here. We take risk elsewhere. That isn’t necessarily beneficial to the overall organization, or to the balance sheet. We want to look at how a decision is made in a loan portfolio. It has an impact on the balance sheet. We want to understand that. A decision made in the investment portfolio has an impact on the balance sheet, and we want to understand what that is. Understanding how things interact with each other when we’re going through the risk management process is one of our biggest challenges. Trying to evolve organizations out of the component style management into a more holistic balance sheet style management. In order to do that, you really need how the balance sheets react to each other. In order to do that, you need to be able to break down interest rate risk reports that we’ve provided. In order to get to position, we have to take three steps backwards. We need to make sure the policies are written correctly, that the management understands what we’re doing, that the process of doing testing, stress testing, movement rates, and seeing how different decision’s reactions appear on the balance sheet. All of those things become critical in order to look at the balance sheet management as opposed to component management. When we start using this information to make management decisions as to merely reporting what our risk profile is, that is a huge step forward in getting everybody aligned. We’ve got Board alignment through line management alignment. Everybody understands what we’re trying to accomplish. Everybody understands how things impact, and we know that before those decisions are made. We just feel that’s a much better approach. One that if we embrace the holistic approach, the decision making process becomes more a matter at looking at the menu and picking which we want to have as opposed to hoping that things work out our way. Kelly: Great. Very helpful. Do you have a favorite quote? Kevin: There’s one from a business standpoint that I was told a long, long time ago. I try to remind people of the same thing. When you find yourself in a hole, the best exit strategy is to stop digging. You see how people try to manage their way out of that hole. It sounds kind of basic. Maybe a little too folksy, but it makes a whole lot of sense. Whatever put you in that spot, you need to stop doing it first. That’s our first strategy. Stop doing what put you in that world of hurt, and start trying to come up with ways to get out of it. Kelly: That’s great. We want to thank you for listening to the syndicated audio program, BankBosun.com The audio content is produced by Kelly Coughlin, Chief Executive Officer of BankBosun, LLC; and syndicated by Seth Greene, Market Domination LLC, with the help of Kevin Boyle. Video content is produced by The Guildmaster Studio, Keenan Bobson Boyle. The voice introduction is me, Karim Kronfli. The program is hosted by Kelly Coughlin. If you like this program, please tell us. If you don’t, please tell us how we can improve it. Now, some disclaimers. Kelly is licensed with the Minnesota State Board of Accountancy as a Certified Public Accountant. Kelly provides bank owned life insurance portfolio and nonqualified benefit services to banks across the United States. The views expressed here are solely those of Kelly Coughlin and his guests in their private capacity and do not in any other way represent the views of any other agent, principal, employer, employee, vendor or supplier of Kelly Coughlin.