Tim Gurule: What I Learned

Dan Austin: [0:00] Hey there, welcome back to another episode of the Collecting Keys Friday Focus. Today you have me, Dan Austin, as your host. If you're new here, these are the episodes where we take a deep dive into a specific topic, or talk about something that's top of mind for Mike or I in our business. We also use this to do some business case studies, or deals case studies with some of our scale team members, scale group members. And today, I'm gonna use this to do a what I learned episode from our most recent guest, Tim Gurule, his episode was 175, which dropped just this past Monday, so go and check that out if you haven't listened to it. We got a lot of great feedback on Tim as a guest, and I'll be honest, he's just a super talented speaker, and really just a great storyteller, and I think that it was just great to get all the feedback from folks, and so I just wanted to do a recap of what I learned, and see what you all thought too. So, me up on Instagram at InvestorManDan, if you have some other thoughts on what you learned, I would love it, and I'll pass this on to Tim, if you haven't already reached out to him, let him know. He's he's been getting some good outreach from you all, so I appreciate that too. So keep sharing the love with him, and and encourage him. He also has a podcast called the Dynamis Podcast, go look it up on iTunes, and check him out, he does some great interviews with some awesome individuals, and entrepreneurs out there.

Dan Austin: [1:16] While you're on iTunes, go and give us a five star review, and give us a review as well, a written review, and say how much you love our episodes, and I promise you, if you do that, screenshot it, DM me at InvestorMandan on Instagram, or just anywhere you do social media, and I will send you a free t shirt. We're still doing that, just let me know what size you need, and we'll send you a Collective Keys podcast shirt, give you some free swag. If anything, it's a great workout shirt, it's tight fitting, you know, around the right spots, and it's super comfortable. So if you don't have a t shirt and you want it, give us a rating and review. So, okay, let's dive into this episode, I'm just gonna go, you know, kinda talk about some of my high level learnings, and just observations. And really the first observation I came up with was, not just when Tim talked about, but from getting some feedback from other people, and that is the common culture that you build with groups of people. Tim and I were in the military together, we were our special operations unit together, we deployed to Iraq, we deployed to Afghanistan, we were going after high value targets, and things of that nature, so we were always in some pretty precarious situations, More than anything those situations did for us was they built us bond and brotherhood, and just this kind of ideology in how we make decisions, and how we live our life. There's a lot of other folks out there that have dangerous jobs, first responders, maybe our alignment out there, working on high voltage power lines, anything that really has that, where you're working around a group of people with the knowledge that's underwritten there, that you could die at any moment. And what I think that does, is it just creates a bond, and it's a similar bond to entrepreneurs, right? So when I walk in a room and I see other Army Ranger guys, and special operators, we kinda have this unwritten, I guess, contract of how we can engage with each other, and then if you're an entrepreneur, it's the same way.

Dan Austin: [3:00] That's why I join entrepreneur groups, GoBundance, other masterminds, where when I walk into the room, there's already a baseline of camaraderie there, because we get it. If you're listening to this podcast, you're getting into real estate investing, it's the same thing, right? So the goal there is to like be around groups, where you can build camaraderie, and have instant baseline, like brotherhood, sisterhood, group. That's what Mike and I have been trying to do with our scale community, we really are loving getting to see that happen with the people that are in there, it's a tight knit community, trying to help each other grow. The next thing that I really loved about Tim's story was the adversity that he faced throughout his life. I mean he talks about, you know, growing up in a loving family, but they didn't have a lot of money, he lived in cars, he lived in storage units, you know. He's had, what I'm projecting a little bit here, but maybe some shame around that, didn't want to share that story, but in reality that's what made him who he is, and now he's able to share that, and then if you follow his story through, you know, being in the military, facing adversity there, getting out, going to college, and doing all these steps, because he thought he had a job with the FBI, only to find out that the government had some bullshit going on, when it was time for them to hire him, and he didn't have a job, because he finished college, and he did what he said he would do. They told him, No, we're not hiring right now, because of some other governmental issues. So he had to pivot, right? And he went and became a firefighter, another tough job, and he did a really good job doing the firefighting things, until COVID happened.

Dan Austin: [4:24] And he talked about how he had to make a decision, because he wasn't willing to get vaccinated, to leave the fire department, really just lose his income, right, and have to figure it out from that point on. And all these steps of the way with this adversity, what he was doing was he was learning how to fight when his back was against the wall. And a lot of times, as entrepreneurs, when we're doing that, it's not easy, right? That's why we need a group of people that we can talk to, that have faced that, and that can encourage us, because it's so easy just to quit when your back's against the wall. But as Tim shows like, and talks about, it's like so much better if you're able to march forward, and move forward. And I'll be honest, community makes that easier, but if I had to sum all that up in one little sentence, it'd be like, you're going to face adversity in life, you're going to face adversity as an entrepreneur, in real estate, as a business owner, and what you do and how you react at that point is what will make you successful or not successful. The last thing on that note, like on the adversity and pivoting I wanna talk about is just opportunity recognition. Like this is another thing that Tim really was able to recognize throughout his career was, when he was making those pivots, recognizing a new opportunity and seeing situations as an opportunity, although it probably didn't feel like that in the moment, the way he reacted was obviously very opportunistic, and that's shown through his real estate investments, he has quite a bit of a, him and I talk about mishmash of a portfolio, and I really do believe niching down and really becoming an expert in one asset class is great, but the way he's done it, and has kind of a few things out there, like he truly can recognize opportunity, he's taking that down.

Dan Austin: [5:57] And with that, towards the end of his episode, he's talking about something he's doing now, which is private money lending. And you know, he basically has all these deals coming across his desk as a loan officer, as a lender, that he can't fund because they don't meet his company's lending standards. So, he has to look at those and say, man, this is a great opportunity for somebody, but then he also knows all these other people who have some extra money that need to invest, and they don't know how to underwrite deals, they don't know where to put the money, because they don't have the same contacts he has. So what he's essentially doing is pairing the people with the deals, and the people with the money, and he's helping raise that capital for them, and if that's not opportunity recognition, I don't know what is. And Mike and I talk about this all the time in the business, that opportunity recognition is what separates the, you know, one to two deals per month, and the five plus deals per month people, is how you can recognize those opportunities. And if you hear a lot of the people we interview on the show, you'll hear things like, yeah, I just was doing deals that other people weren't willing to do, because they didn't see the value in that. And that is time and time again something I hear from highly successful people. But on that same note, what Tim is talking about when it's like the opportunity recognition, is I wanna observe on this, is the stacking of revenue sources and revenue streams, right? He left the fire department, had no money coming in, other than a small rental portfolio, so he had to quickly scale up his loan business, and that's what he did. So he had his rental properties and his loan business, he's got some short term rentals, and some long term rentals, and a mix of other assets in there that are kind of having a diversity of income streams, and then he has this private money income stream that he's spinning up and starting, and that right there is another valuable opportunity.

Dan Austin: [7:37] And when you think about this, if you wanna start a side hustle, you're working your W2 job, that's awesome, I would agree with that, you're adding an income stream and you're diversifying it away from your company who may control your income, or do control your income. But then as you become an entrepreneur too, sometimes it's hard to do that overnight and become successful and gamble 100% on all your eggs in one basket, right? So, as you build out your business, think about different opportunities, and different profit centers adjacent to your business. I don't think you should go out and buy a bunch of different random things, and call that a diversity of income, because that is just stretching you thin, but if you can stack, especially in real estate, super easy, because there's a lot of adjacent business lines, if you can stack those, you are building massive income over a period of time. And you know, Mike and I were counting just in one of our businesses, we have six profit centers, and we were just kind of talking like, there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to pull tens of thousands of dollars in personal profits from each of those every single month, right? And so, the reason we talked about that is like, okay, we're trying to forecast and plan kind of our revenue, and where we're going to reinvest certain profits into what. And the cool thing is, is once you recognize your profit centers in your business, you can really focus on certain areas that you wanna grow. You know, for us, we have a private loanee lending business, and we recognize, we've recognized it for a couple years, there's so much profitability in that, but we just haven't had the time to grow it, because that's not where the best use of our time is. But we still have it, and we are prepared to launch that, and continue to grow that, and scale that. We also have our scale community, where we're bringing in investors, and we also have our partnership program as a Province Center, where we're finding deals for people all over the country, and just really choosing where we wanna focus, based on where the highest ROI is for our time.

Dan Austin: [9:19] That's the key when you're adding different income streams into your business. But, I'll just finish you with that, like I really found that that was a valuable insight, and I thought it would be valuable for those of you that are out there struggling as solopreneurs, and Tim was right there with you, he's still right there with you in some cases, right? He talks about that like he's just growing and he's trying to find the different ways to scale each of those profit centers for himself, and you know, if you're out there trying to convert a side hustle into something full time, it's definitely possible for you. But okay, I will leave you there with that, this was our first What I Learned episode from one of our guests. Hope you liked it, if you did, hit me up on Instagram, investormandan or mikeinvest is where you'll get Mike at, maybe we'll do more of these, I definitely will certainly be doing a few more episodes with a few of my military friends that are our business operators now, that I think will be really valuable episodes for our audience to really learn and understand from these guys who are doing stuff at such a high level, and just so awesome to see those things. But yeah, other than that, I hope you enjoyed this episode. Go to collectedkeys.com and check out our instant investor program, where we literally have an off the shelf program that you can just buy, end to end videos on how to start your wholesale real estate business, or if you're already an operator, and you're trying to take it from one to two deals a month, you're trying to get to that next level in your business, and figure this out, go check out our scale community at collectingkeys.com/scale. Just have a phone call, schedule a call with Mike or I on there, you can just do it directly, and we'll see if you're a good fit. So, alright, other than that, have a great weekend.