Building Bulletproof Real Estate Businesses: Diversification and Resilience with Shane Wilson

Josh St. Laurent: Welcome to the Wealth in Yourself Podcast, a show dedicated to helping you master the complex subject of money by simplifying it through stories and actionable advice. I'm Josh St. Laurent and this is Wealth in Yourself. Welcome to the Wealth in Yourself Podcast where we help people to design their ideal life and take control of their time and money. I'm your host Josh St. Laurent. Today we're joined by Shane Wilson. Shane Wilson is a seasoned entrepreneur and real estate expert with over 20 years of experience. Shane has flipped over 100 properties, built multiple successful businesses, including real estate teams, property management companies, and even a web design firm. Most recently, he launched his own insurance agency. Along the way, he's experienced both incredible success and tough setbacks, which have shaped his no-nonsense approach to business and life. Shane brings a wealth of knowledge, real stories, and a touch of humor to our conversation. Josh St. Laurent: Please join me in welcoming Shane Wilson to the show. Shane, welcome. Glad you're here. Shane Wilson: Thank you for having me. Josh St. Laurent: Yeah, we're snowing in Chattanooga, Tennessee today. You know, anytime it snows in the south, everything shuts down days before and the stores are just raw, devolved, dairy, all bread, eggs. It was actually on the front page of our local paper that the local Kruger was out of dairy, bread, and eggs. Shane Wilson: Oh my goodness. I feel like things are reversed. I'm out here in Tahoe and we're getting no snow whatsoever. So go figure. Josh St. Laurent: So maybe just kicking us off for anyone listening who isn't familiar with you. What do you want them to know about you and your work? Shane Wilson: As far as me and my work, I like to convey to people who are looking to get in a real estate investing, looking to get in a real estate that if you're just a simple individual, you can do this too because I have no magical powers. I just have a real endless persistence. Shane Wilson: So if you're persistent, you can succeed in this business. When I was younger, I just had a fascination with trying to keep improving myself. And then in college, I decided that real estate was going to be the path that I went on. And when I graduated college, that was my focus. I took a third shift job and started trying to do real estate during the day. And it took a few years, but eventually got going. So as far as being my work and my body, I just like talking to people and conveying that if you want to do this business, you can. It's not going to be an easy road. It's not quick riches. But I like seeing people being able to build their own life on their own terms and build it in their own design instead, just being a slave to a wage or an employee type mindset. I couldn't do that. I was never really built for that. So I always went with I'll work 80 hours on what I enjoy versus 40 hours for someone else. Josh St. Laurent: Yeah, I love that. I really align with that too. And I kind of touched upon it in the bio, but it seemed like when I was kind of reading through preparing for this session, it seemed like two steps forward, one step back, right? It wasn't just a smooth easy trajectory. Josh St. Laurent: Can you tell us about kind of the journey and maybe like some of the things you learned along the way? Shane Wilson: The journey of being an entrepreneur is very difficult. It's very much worth it. So I started, again, back in college, I went to the University of Georgia. They actually have a real estate program. It's one of the top 10 programs in the nation. But it doesn't teach you how to be an entrepreneur. They were teaching you to go work for a corporation, like go for a racetrack or a gas station and locate corporate properties for them. So that was the mindset there. And I took this entrepreneurship class. And we had this professor. He was just a tough hard-knows professor, very difficult class. But he made us read this book, which I'm sure you and every listener is familiar with Rich Dad Poor Dad. And it was that book which kickstarted me that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I wanted to do this. And when I graduated college, I didn't know what I was doing. I had no sales experience. Shane Wilson: I had no marketing experience. And that's one thing they don't tell you. When you enter real estate, it really is a sales and marketing job. The selling of property or buying a property as a real-state investor is just a vehicle you're using. You have to have sales and marketing to fine leads, clothes leads. And it took me a couple years of heavily educate myself. I went to all the local real estate groups. And back then we didn't have YouTube. So I went to courses. I spent thousands of dollars on courses learning from everyone I could. And what I found was taking the information from these courses and the planet to my personality and my personal life and tweaking it for me is how I was able to make it work. So I started really catching fire about 2006. Of course, the market was at a peak at that point. And then 2007, it did go down a little bit. And actually in June of 2007, you cannot sell a house. Some people, the past couple of years in real estate investing, been saying, it's a tough market. And in my mind, I'm like, you don't know what a tough market is. In June of 2007, in my market, you could not sell one single house no matter what the price was. But a couple of investors got together and we decided it would be a good time to go buy property because we knew there was going to be a dip. And Valleys had already came down pretty good. So we started buying that property. And in 2007, when I was 27 years old, I bought 27 houses. This was a massive mistake because the market continued down not for one year, not for two years, on down to about 2011, 2012, it probably flattened out, started coming back. So in that process, I went bankrupt. I lost everything. And my reason I did not succeed is simply because I was focused on one thing. I knew how to buy houses, flip houses, buy house, rent it out on our finance. That was it. That was my skill set. I didn't know how to pivot, adjust or do different things. A lack of knowledge, experience, and a bit of arrogance and youth and ego. Shane Wilson: So what I did when I came back in 2014, I got my real estate agent license because after having over a million dollars of debt go bad, you're a little bit scared to take on debt again, not to mention you're not very bankable after you just came out of a bankruptcy. So got a real estate license, started being an agent, developed one of the first real estate teams in that area. And again, it goes back to sales and marketing. Once I understood sales, I understood marketing, the skill set started to transfer. So when you hear about people running different businesses, when you break it down to the core skill sets, those are the two that you can convey to most any type of business. So being a real estate agent, you're in between on the deal of sell and the property and it sells and marketing. I put together a team and we did that for a while property management. I had a property management company in 2009. It was a bad partnership. I learned about partnerships, partnerships like a marriage. You choose your own partner. You get the boom chaos, right? So I started my own company again in 2020 because another epithetian is that real estate does not have a lot of cash flow. And I think that is probably the biggest reason a lot of real estate investors fail, a lot of real estate agents fail is there's no underlying cash flow. Shane Wilson: And if you're over leverage and the real income is not there to support you yet, you don't have enough equity built up over the years. Very precarious situation if things do go south. So the course of my journey is, you know, trying, making a mistake, backing up, what that do wrong. Let's go try something else and see what I'm learning, what I can keep growing from. And hopefully now that I'm 44, one thing that I'm really proud of is I did go all out my 20s. I took a huge amount of risk in my 20s and it didn't work out. But I made all those mistakes when I was younger now. And I feel very confident in my skill sets now and my ability to run a business and keep a business. And you give me any market right now. And because I'm very diversified in my income, I can make money in any market. Josh St. Laurent: I feel like it sounds like a lot of learning lessons along the way. Like I think one of the very first things you mentioned was how important persistence is. And I mean, I think that you're really demonstrating that. And now, you know, fast forward to today, you've built multiple businesses across multiple industries. So you mentioned persistence, sales, marketing, like, you know, what were some of the skills, techniques, practices that were, you know, most important, I guess, for like the long term success that you've learned over the course of, you know, kind of like failing, coming back, doing it better, learning more, like what are some of the things that listeners can implement in their own business or real estate ventures? I guess that you've learned. Shane Wilson: So let's just take a real estate investor. If you want to be a successful real estate investor, you have to find deals. And the number one question any new beginner is going to ask is Shane, how to find a deal. And the answer is actually very simple. You're looking for what's called a motivated seller, a motivated seller is the one who has to sell their house. They don't want to sell their house, but in their mind, they have to sell that house. They're moving, they're behind. There is a reason that they need to get rid of that house. They want to be a don't want or they don't want that house anymore. So you got to find those people. What's the skill sets you need to find those people? You need to have marketing skillsets to target those people. So now you have to think about where is that target of people at? What are the people that are potentially, you know, motivated to sell? Nice start thinking for closure list. Who's behind on payments? Shane Wilson: The worst list, the worst people, when they split, they just want to split the property a lot of times. Probe people inheriting properties often just won't cash and won't out of it. There's plenty of places you can go. You've got to start thinking. And then you start thinking the next step is how do I reach these people? Is that going to be social media ads? Is that going to be door knocking? Is that going to be direct mail? And then the next step after that is how do you craft the message for that person to get them to respond to you? And that also is a lot of experience. You can cheat a little bit if you could find a good mentor or a good teacher or by a course somewhere that will get you ahead. But still it really does just take that experience of just doing it day in and day out and learning for mistakes. And you could start anywhere. If you have no money, you can go knock on a door. It works. It's time consuming, but it works. If you have money, you can test out marketing. So you find the Motive as seller. Well, now you found on that's the marketing part. Now you got to get into the sales part. You've got to meet that Motive as seller. Shane Wilson: You got to find out what they need. How can you get them what they need so you can get the deal that you need in a win-win situation? So now you're getting into sales. And a lot of people demonize sales. It's being this bad thing that you're trying to do a win-lose situation. Anytime you're talking to a Motive as seller, talking to a spike in a situation where they are potentially losing their house or they need out of their situation, you have to be, you have to have a lot of empathy when talking to them. So you can work out these win-win solutions. So those are the steps you take as far as learning. And that's just what I've done throughout my career is every business I've taken, who's the customer, who's the person I'm trying to reach, and then how do I create a win-win solution? So whether it's being a real estate investor, whether it's being a real estate agent, whether it's being an insurance agency owner, we're actually getting into business brokerage. It's all the same thing. How can you help people? How can you find those people that you need to help? Josh St. Laurent: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I'd love to dig even deeper into what was the catalyst for you? Was it a mentor? Was it a course? Like what was the journey for you into this marketing? Because I talked to a lot of real estate investors and you're absolutely right. One of the hardest things is, hey, I can't find a deal or I don't know how to find a deal. Where do I begin? What was that like for you? How did you start? Was it door knocking or maybe something else? Shane Wilson: One of the reasons I went to, this older gentleman, he was an attorney probably in his 70s. He stood at the front of the room. He lifted a piece of paper and said, this is a signed contract. This is a deal. You know how I got this deal? I made an offer. I can tell you how many deals any real estate investor has or will do by the number of offers they make. The reason most people don't find deals is they don't go and make offers. When I went to that, it just clicked in my head. If I take the action, then I'll get the result. A lot of it is just going out and taking the action. Be willing to not have the result because you're going to take the wrong actions. When I first started, it was actually a different error. Shane Wilson: So the real estate investors I knew back there were not as forthcoming with their information. You didn't have large masterminds that you could join. You didn't have all the information on YouTube. I had to pick and pry a lot of investors their brains and try to figure out what they were doing and piece things together. I had a few teachers at our local area that were very, very open. Bill Cook started the rea night area. He was very open about what he did and I learned a lot from him. I also learned a lot from a website called dealmakerscafe.com. This is back in the days where you had to go and type on the internet questions and answer questions by typing. Stone Age, compared to where we are today, where we're chatting back and forth on video right now. That's just amazing to me how far we've come and how open things are. People are willing to share now. So if you want information, it's not information that's stopping you. It's the action taken. You've got to take action. Shane Wilson: So when it comes to marketing, copyrighting, I just bought courses and I studied all the material and content in there. Way back in the day, there was a course called How to Find All the Motivace Seller as you can handle. And it was just a book and it had all kinds of different letter templates and marketing. So once you start doing it, you don't need to use the exact templates. You need to phrase it in your language. So when you do talk to the person, it's congruent. So when you start doing that and you do it enough, you start picking up and learning a little bit. And let's be honest, it's even easier now because guess what you have? You have AI. AI is the equivalent of a tractor compared to a plow. Back in the day, a farmer would try to use a plow. Shane Wilson: And then a tractor came alone and just goes, and now, field or seeded, right? Same thing with AI. You can go to AI and you don't want to copy it exactly because people who do know AI can pick up on it. But it's a tractor. You can put it in there and you have a work in template. So then you could just work off that template a little bit. So there's plenty of places to go and it's just a matter again, of going to all the different courses, going to all the different places, compiling that information into your brain and then actually using it. Because if you don't use it, it doesn't get tweaked to what you are and who you are. What I found is the courses I attend, the information I attain, I don't do things exactly the same as the person I learned it from. Very similar, but it's got to be tweaked to what you do to make it work for you. Josh St. Laurent: Yeah, I love that you talked about how, you know, without, you know, taking action is just a plan, right? Like you actually have to get out there and do it and make offers. It's so true. And I wanted to ask you about something that you actually brought up earlier in our conversation. How you sort of went through the 2008 crash, right? Sometimes a lot of real estate investors I talked to, that's where the story ends, right? But you got back out there, started over. What were some of the big lessons? Do you do anything differently now having kind of lived through 2008? Do you do anything different now with your investing to safeguard or protect yourself on the downside? Shane Wilson: So again, the biggest thing I learned back then is to diversify my skill sets. So I have multiple skill sets now and multiple income streams. And also back in a day, back then, it was, it was very much, let's be honest, real estate investors have egos. We have big egos. We love when we accomplish something. And back then, it was very much, I'm a real estate investor. And that's what I do. Actually, real estate agents and real estate brokers were demonized. People were real estate investors always put down real estate agents, real estate brokers. So when you develop a ego that this is who I am, this is what I do, it closes your eyes, it closes your mind to other opportunities that might come up that you can see and you could take advantage of. What I like to do now is I like to build a business and then build adjacent streams of income that fit within that business. So like a giant corporation has different divisions. For me, I have a real estate investment division where I will find a good deal. I'll act on it. But I'm not out trying to buy one house per month. It's much easier to just be in real estate, know a lot of people and then I stumble across a few deals throughout the course of a year. Shane Wilson: And then I have a real estate agent team. So I have agents who go out and produce commissions for me. I personally didn't enjoy being an agent as much, but I have some really good agents under me. So that's another income stream. Also, low leverage. Whatever reason back in 2008, we just went, we just bought houses and the banks were just giving us loans like crazy. I'm very much against being overly leveraged at this point. It's probably held me back a little bit actually from my real estate investing side because I'm just very cautious about getting into and longer turn deals like that. Consider it PTSD at this point. But I like diversifying out. So we have the real estate agent side. I don't have to have any debt for that. I just got no sales and marketing, get my team leads and then they also develop their own leads. The property management is a cash flow business. Shane Wilson: So if we go into a downturn where houses stop selling, then I still have money coming in because investors still own these properties. Investors still have rental income coming in. I still have cash flow. That all fits within my brokerage. That all fits with the real estate investing. I started the insurance agency to help landlords with their insurance needs because I'm a property manager, right? I've got all these landlords. Why don't I market an insurance business to go along with this as well? Higher out a really good producer and then I could be the face of the company. Go out, talk to people, send the leads to her and then she could run the leads. So a lot of this was what I'm trying to do. How can I systemize it out and then you've got to find a really good person to put in place. That's the key. If you try to go out and do five things at one time, you're going to fail doing that. You need to focus on one thing, get it going really well and then get some that you can insert in there to cover about 85 to 90% of things, maybe two people if you need it and then move on and it's like a scaffold. You want to build another level that you can add onto and if you do that, that really fortifies you for downturns and for market cycles. Another thing I did one time is we're a HUD listing broker. For closures or a style right now when it comes to RIOs, but that is another track I took from a brokerage to help pit us that if the market went down, would be in good shape. So and the thing the other thing to remember too is I've been at this for 20 years. So you're not going to go do all this in one year. It takes time, but that is the path that I've laid out for me that works for me and again, everybody's got to find their own path. But obviously being shaped by going through a huge economic crash where I just got completely obliterated, completely crushed. My biggest lesson was I needed to diversify and I don't want to ever be in a situation where I only know how to do one or two things again. Josh St. Laurent: It seems to me that you keep bringing up the teams that you've built in place. You've got your realtor team, you've got your property management team and I would have to imagine that is a huge part of being able to scale. So can you talk a little bit about, I mean you scaled your property management company that I think goes over 400 units. You've got this top producing real estate team. What are some of the steps along the way and some of like just the key points. A lot of people try to build teams and struggle with, hey, I can't find good people or I don't know who my first hire or my next hire should be. What have been some of the learning lessons for you along the way as you've scaled and built some of these teams? Shane Wilson: Making mistakes. When you make a ton of mistakes, you figure out what not to do. So going back to that property management company that had 400 plus units. That was the one that had the bad partnership. We had three employees. They were all in one office. They didn't get along. We had fights. We had drama. And this of course was when everything else was going down. So it was complete chaos. And what I learned from that is I prefer much smaller teams and I prefer to keep people in their lanes. I'm not going to scale 100 million dollar business doing that. But I can create multiple streams of pretty good income. And I can have one or two people, but they're in their own lanes. I'm very big into remote. All my agents were remote. And I could deal with them one on one. I don't have to worry about office drama doing that. The people I've hired over time have been people that I ran into over time. So my first hire for that property management company back in a day, she's actually my top commercial agent. She does millions of dollars in sales each year. And I help her on the back end whenever there's something more complex in the deal that she might need my brain on. So we work to get her really well on that. Shane Wilson: I have a couple of our agents that do a few deals here and there, but she's my primary one. We've worked together for over 15 years now. And then my property management side, I have an agent who was on my team in 2017. Her and her husband built a house in Atlanta. COVID made that equity go way up. She stopped being a real estate agent. Sold her house. They went into an RV, traveled across America, you know, and they were young. Love that they did that when they're young like late 20s. But she wanted to work remotely. So I said, great, let's work part time as an adjunct from our property management company. And as I've been able to grow that property management company, she did the traveling for like a year and a half. Now they're back in Atlanta, settle down, looking to have a family soon. Now I've been able to make her full time because we've grown so much. And then we hired on someone. What I did for that is I don't think I'm very good at hiring people. So I actually made her interview everyone. She picked out one or two that she liked. And then I interviewed them with her. And then we settled on someone. So that helped me out a little bit too. I tend to see, I tend to be overly optimistic in people. And I am very bad about missing blind spots. And I think as entrepreneur or real estate investor, we tend to be that way a little bit. A lot of us anyway tend to see the opportunities tend to see the good side of people. And I think that's a blind spot when trying to hire people. So I don't have a really good answer on hiring people. But the key people in my organization, I have met over the years. And I grew to trust them. And they just wanted to stick with me and work with me. And then my insurance side, same thing. She wasn't agent for me for a while in the real estate side and helped me in my property management side. She went elsewhere for a couple of years. And then got her insurance license because I was doing insurance company. So she put her insurance license with me and helps me with that. It's a little bit of happenstance to people I get. They like work with me because I'm not a high pressure person. I'm not going to come in and berate people every day. And I'm not going to come in and talk down to people every day. And I think in the current society we're in, you get a lot farther, propping people up. You still got to hold my cannibal. You still got to have boundaries and have, you know, things in place. But it doesn't work to just beat people with stick. If you try to beat people with stick with power, when you do that, people want to get revenge against you. Power and authority works. But people are always trying to get back at you. What works better is if people lock you and people want to work with you. You put those two things together with a touch of authority. And then it works very well when you got a small team going. Josh St. Laurent: So when any entrepreneur real estate investor is building out a team, do you think it's reasonable to say that they should be looking for people on the team who are sort of offsetting maybe skills that they don't have or things that they would rather not be doing or maybe aren't the best at should be trying to go out and find people to sort of balance, I guess, for lack of a better word, the team and find those people who sort of compliment the things that you are good at. Shane Wilson: The way I organized things is very selfish, completely 100% selfish. I didn't like being a buyer's agent. I hated it. I showed this one gentleman over 30 houses. He was qualified 450,000. And I decided I was not going to show a buyer ever again if I could help it because it was exhausting. I didn't enjoy it. I started finding people to build a team at that point. So a lot of the reasons that I put people in places, I don't enjoy doing certain things. And so for the real estate team, I didn't enjoy being an agent. I didn't enjoy answering to 10 different people just to try to get a deal together. As a real estate investor, we're talking to the seller. We're talking to attorney. We're closing the deal a lot of times. If there's no other agents to stuff involved, as a real estate agent, you've got a seller, you got another agent, you got a title company, you got a lender a lot of times. I mean, you've got all these moving parts and still enjoy trying to maneuver within those parts, whereas a real estate investor, you tend to be in control. Your contract is more controlling. You tend to be in control of the deal more. And that way, I just didn't enjoy it, but I knew it was still profitable. I knew I still wanted to keep it going. So I kept the agents with me. I actually broke up my team from three or four people because the other thing that happened with that is I had three or four agents. But when I tried to go on vacation, I'm the one who has to put the fires out. And when you have three or four agents, you have 10 deals under contract in the pipeline. There's always something going on. So I was getting phone calls left and right. So I learned from that experience. I only want to have one or two agents that I know that I can work with that can handle their own stuff pretty well. And I kept those and I actually broke that team up a little bit. And then for the property management company, Rebecca is a bit of the opposite of me. Again, as entrepreneurs, as real estate investors, we like focusing on the goal going out, you know, hunting and killing it, but we don't want to come back and deal with a lot of the details. So she's a very detailed, organized person. And she'll bug me about those little details that I don't want to deal with. Shane Wilson: But she'll keep bugging me enough until I get it done, you know, paperwork, contracts, we're in compliance. This that, this that. And she's very good at that. And we've worked together for a long time. So she's to observe me at that. And then again, it's stuff that I don't enjoy doing. With most of my businesses, at this point, I'm very much on the overseer part, but I don't construct my businesses where it's totally relying on one person. If one person did walk away, it's not an overload. It would be annoying. It would be difficult. I wouldn't want to do it, but I can step in and keep things going until we figure it out. Vice I would give is don't overload. And in my 20s, I thought I'm going to be on the beach, sip and drinks and my businesses are just going to run on their own because Rich Dad poured that says so and because E. Miff revisited says so. And it doesn't really work on the smaller scale to do that. You really need to keep your hands involved, keep an idea of where things are going, use project boards. And you can trust them to go out and do it, but you got to keep your eyes on it. I found where your attention goes, this work, things grow. So if you're looking to grow something, you got to keep your attention on it. Shane Wilson: But it can function without you to some degree, but you're always the one that's got to put the fires out. So it's building and designing the businesses like you want that fist the lifestyle you want with the people you want. And that sort of the happy point I'm at as far as my businesses and my life is it's very much tailored to what I want. How I want to design it and put things together. I love that. That's a big part of what we help with is the designing like you're talking about, hey, you got to set this up from day one to support the lifestyle that you want. I'm curious about the time management piece of it. You've got all these different businesses and teams and kind of different directions that you're going. How do you manage the time aspect of it? Josh St. Laurent: I'm curious about the time management piece of it. You've got all these different businesses and teams and kind of different directions that you're going. How do you manage the time aspect of it? Shane Wilson: So again, I'm not building a hundred million dollar business. A lot of these businesses are on the smaller side, right? So they're bringing in smaller income streams. You could consider my property management company a seven figure business based on Reynolds coming in, but you know, the net's only six figures. Shane Wilson: And it runs fine because we're systemized out and processed out. So on the property management I meet with Becca probably for about an hour each day or every other day. And then between her and Rodrigo, which manage our business, they've got it because we have systems in place. She's been with me long enough. She knows what to do. She can talk to my owners. She's my key person there. Again, if I lost her, it would really be difficult back step in. And then my hours per day would go up from, you know, maybe one every other day, I would have to come in and work maybe through four hours each day and take her place there. Shane Wilson: So that's my time management and property management for the real estate agent business. Andrea Nicole, my top commercial agent, it comes down to her deal flow. So how much we got going there and the complication of the deals if they're not very complicated deals. A lot of that is very systemized and more complicated deal. Then a little bit more of my time that goes involved there. Let's call it maybe an hour or a day on that. The insurance agency is new, but I have a producer there now. But that business is new and I'm actually still learning that business. So a lot of my time for that business is a lot of education, a lot of knowledge, a lot of learning. And then also coordinate and figure out systems for that. So that's sort of our baby business that we're kind of working on growing. Very low revenue business, very low premium that we've written that, you know, this is like a 10 year plan on that business and the property management business to just grow them over the next 10 years. So I'm not in a rush. I'm not trying to kill myself going back to what I said earlier. It's difficult to find a house to buy every month for the numbers work. It's not too hard to find one or two a year. So same thing with my other businesses. My property management company now, my new one that started a few years goes only at 120 units. But it's very profitable. It's very lean and it works. It's a really good income stream. Shane Wilson: And then on the investing side as a fine deals, you know, hours very based on what I find. I'm looking to picking up a property this month. So I got some time going in on that. It varies day to day. And that's what I actually enjoy about this business is that it does vary. Now if you put things and they all domino and fall, that means it's going to be a very long day for me. But for the most part, most of my days are pretty much, you know, six to eight hours. But stuff that in joy doesn't feel like work to me. A lot of what you talked about goes back to the team, like having the systems processes, the right team members in place makes a lot of sense. You can't do this alone. You're going to be in business and you actually want to keep your sanity. You can't do it alone because if you try to do every single thing yourself, when you're young, you kind of have to do that. When you're in your 20s, you need to be working those 10 to 16 hour days because you don't have the skill sets. You don't have the knowledge. Shane Wilson: But as you get those skillsets and knowledge, one thing that really had to get over was my mindset of I could do this better than anyone else. And I would get frustrated trying to let other people do it and they wouldn't do it up to what I thought the standard should be. What I had to shift in my mind was how can I train my people to do this well? So a lot of my time is actually going in, doing screen recordings of this is wrong. This is how we need to do it better. This is incorrect. This is what we need to do. So I spent a lot of time doing that. And instead of going in and fixing it myself, I explained what was wrong and then I do recording. So it takes more time to do that. But in the long run, once you get someone trained up like Becca on my team, your time is massively freed up when you can do that. Josh St. Laurent: Makes a lot of sense. I want to transition a little bit and ask you about in today's market conditions, kind of what you're looking at because you've gone through the sort of this feast of famine and back again through the market cycles of real estate. You've been doing it a long time. What are you looking at in today's environment? What is attractive to you? Shane Wilson: Let's actually add a little clarity to real estate investing. So people say real estate investing, but there's real estate investing and running a real estate business. So if you ask me about real estate investing, I'm looking to pick up right now maybe one, two properties a year that I plan to hold and eventually just pay down. I prefer to be at 50% equity to loan to value ratio. So if I have debt, you know, everything combined, I want to be at 50%. That makes me happy. It makes me sleep well at night. A lot of real estate investors, which you're in finance, I think you can attest. They underestimate risk. We love to go out and take risk, but we actually underestimate risk. We underestimate that when you take out debt, that debt is an added risk factor. And a lot of people don't take that into consideration. So when it comes to what I'm looking for, I'm looking for really great deals. And I just buy one or two. I don't go out trying to buy on her houses a year. Shane Wilson: Taking the ego out of it again, real estate investors, we have a lot of ego. And it's really difficult when you're like at a re and you hear people doing these big deals and everything. I will say the next sort of angle that I'm looking at right now is partnering up with a contractor to build duplexes. And we're going to do a partnership and that his labor on the duplexes will count as equity into the partnership. And then that way that should be a very nice cash flow and property. And it's a new venture for me as well because I've never actually done new builds. And I love exploring every 35 years new things come up for me to find and explore and a new build is something I haven't done yet. So that's the other area that I'm looking at right now. It's a very difficult market to find. We were talking about motivace sellers before. Well, right now everybody has jobs. Shane Wilson: Everybody's able to make their payments. And if they're not, there is such a massive equity gain from COVID that most people are able to sell. But I think that's going to start changing because the past couple of years, at least in my market, the values have went up. They're back to regular upticks. They're not doing this crazy 10% per year, 15%, 20% even. I mean, that's insane. And a lot of people who start in COVID don't realize that's not a normal market, not a normal rental market. That appreciation is insane. There's normal upticks, but people who bought a house say two years ago, if they're wanting to sell right now, they don't have as much wiggle room. So if there's anything wrong with that property, they don't have as much room to make things happen. So I think there's going to be more opportunities coming forward. And if unemployment ever jumps up, then there's going to be a lot more opportunities coming forward. But as far as motivace sellers, that's why a lot of people have been complaining, even experience investors about not finding deals is there's just not a lot in the marketplace because everybody has jobs and there's a lot of equity. So if you do need to sell, you can sell. So that's lower than number of deals in the marketplace. And a lot of investors are really looking at building right now compared to buying on the markets, what I've seen in my local area. Josh St. Laurent: Yeah, I agree. It's very similar out here. And I think where I want to go, like just hearing what you're saying, I want to ask you about sort of this analysis paralysis. Josh St. Laurent: It's new investors for sure, but even experience investors to your point equity has shot up and you know nationwide really. What do you tell newer investors or even experience investors who are kind of struggling with this analysis paralysis and can't find cash flow? Shane Wilson: It goes back to making offers. I mean, investors who are experienced are still getting deals. It's just the ones I've talked to are just not getting a number of deals I used to do. You know, also the other thing is a lot more competition on marketing. A lot of investors do direct mail now. A lot of investors do paper click now for somebody's wanting to get advantage. I really believe in door knocking. If you're newer, you can get ahead of all the other investors who are experienced because we're lazy and we don't want to go door knocking anymore. But just by going and knocking on doors knock on pre foreclosure doors. Another really good hidden market to find deals moving sales. If you go to a moving sell, sometimes there is a reason that they're moving. They're about to lose their house. Shane Wilson: Go to a moving sell and say, why are you moving from this nice house and dig into things. Even, you know, within just walking in a neighborhood and knocking on doors and saying, Hey, you know, I'm just looking to buy a house in this neighborhood. Do you know anybody that happens to be selling? We've looked at everything on market already. And sometimes you can find things that way. I think the number one thing a new investor can do is get out and just start talking to sellers. When we start talking to sellers, start making offers to sellers. And if you do that enough, you will find a deal just because it's more difficult right now. Does it mean deals are not out there? The very experienced wholesalers are still finding deals right now. So if they're doing it, you can do it too. But if you're newer, I wouldn't try to compete on a direct mail, large marketing scale because a lot of wholesalers went out business trying to do that. I think you really need to focus down and get more face to face. I think that's where you can get it at right now. Josh St. Laurent: I love that advice in this age of AI and automation. That's one thing that they can't be replaced. So I really like that you went there. I'm going to sort of transition to these three questions. We like to ask towards the end of the show. And the first one is, what does living a wealthy life look like for you? Shane Wilson: So back in my 20s, I was determined to not live an average life. That was my mantra back then. Different phases of my life. I've had different sort of models or marchas that have driven me a little bit. And in my 20s, it was, I did not want to live an average life, a typical life. So for me, freedom is the ability to do what I want to do on the terms that I want to do it. You know, in my 20s, I thought that was going to be sitting back on the beach and sipping drinks. But actually, if you start working and you start developing a passion and a love for what you do, you enjoy working. And believe it or not, when you do start traveling and you start doing things after a while, the world is actually smaller than you think it is. Which you start traveling to multiple locations in different places, they all start to the same after a little bit. Shane Wilson: Every place has a Walmart, every place has a Starbucks. So you have this idea that you're doing this so you can just buy all these houses and then go travel the world and never work again. But almost every real estate investor who has retired or taken off, they tend to do something. They come back a year or two later and they start doing real estate again or start doing something related to real estate is what I found. So if you are looking to do this business and design it in a way that fits your lifestyle, I think that's what my drive was. I didn't want to work for someone else. I was terrible at it. That security guard job I mentioned earlier, I got fired from it because I'm a terrible employee. But I love what I do when it comes to real estate. I love waking up and well, if I got going on the day, doing what I want to do. But at the same time, I have my time. Shane Wilson: And that's the most valuable thing this business gives you if you structure it right is your time because last year my dad had kidney cancer. Most people can't be there for their parents, can't be in a hospital every single day because they have a job because they have financial obligations because they can't be there. For me, I was able to be there every single day. I was able to research and study everything and talk to the doctors on the doctors level because I had the time, I had the teams in place, but I had the time to be there. So the freedom to have your time to develop your life the way you want to do it, that is the most powerful thing this business can give you. But it takes time to get there. It takes work to get there and you're not going to get there in your first two years. I think that's a misconception. When you're looking at the end result and not enjoying the process, not enjoying the work, you're probably not going to get there is unfortunately the truth about it. Josh St. Laurent: The time freedom is invaluable. If you could give one message to someone working to gain financial freedom, who isn't there yet, what would it be? Shane Wilson: Be relentless. Shane Wilson: A lot of people have a mindset. I just want to be happy, but happy is actually a very nonproductive state. You want to be relentless. And what I mean by relentless is if there's a wall in front of you, it's not sitting here and banging your head against a wall. Relentless is there's an instruction how can I find my way around and then you find it that's it and you go. That's the difference between banging your head on the wall and doing the same thing over and over again. If you're relentless, you're determined you're going to get there. You may feel bad, but you know you got stuff to do, so you go do it. You may be having a bad day, you get up and you go do it. If you're relentless, you will eventually get there. You can't keep making the same mistakes because you'll be out of business. But if you're relentless and keep driving forward, keep moving forward and keep pushing forward to find solutions to keep finding a way to stay in business to keep afloat, you're going to eventually develop those systems. You're going to eventually find those people put on your team and you'll eventually be successful. Shane Wilson: The main thing is most people don't allocate enough time to go do it. If you are in the nine to five right now, you're going to have to put your weekends aside. You're going to have to put your evenings aside to figure this stuff out and it's going to take some time to get there. The reason most people fell, like I said, is they don't put enough time into it. They give up too early. They're not relentless or they misconstrued the finances. They don't have a cash flow under them to actually make it work. Shane Wilson: And I've seen so many people, you're in the financial advisor business. When people tell me, should I quit my job to do real estate, I always say, no, because believe it or not, if I had a job and had actually just invested in real estate, not ran a real estate business, but invested in real estate, I would probably have a higher net worth than I have now because I wouldn't have been through all the roller coasters. I wouldn't have been through all the market cycles. I wouldn't have been through a bankruptcy. And the most successful investors I've seen do invest. They have a standard job or they have another business that's a cash flow business and they buy properties on the side. It is very, very tough to see as a real estate investor. You can do it. It's possible, but it is very, very tough to do it. So it's not a road for everyone, but if you really, really enjoy it, you can go down that road and march down that road, but it's not going to be easy. It's going to be bumpy, but it's totally in my view and my life, I wouldn't I wouldn't change a thing because it's made me who I am today. Josh St. Laurent: I love the answer of relentless because after hearing your story, I mean, you're living that out. And I'm curious to hear this third question, what your thoughts are here. But if you only had a thousand dollars and you're starting over, what would be the first thing you would do with that money? Shane Wilson: I would actually not do a thing with that money. I'd go find a real estate investor and say, what can I do? Shane Wilson: Find a experienced real estate investor. If you've got no money, but you've got time, again, you find somebody who's been in this business for 10 to 15 years. I don't want to go knock on doors anymore. Shane Wilson: But you know what? I could work with you for an hour, show you what to do, show you what to say, and then send you out there. And if you find a deal, I will certainly give you some money out of that deal. Shane Wilson: You don't have to spend any money that way. You just have to be willing to go and put the work in. You have to be willing to go and do it for free. Everybody expects to be paid, but if you do it for free, there's a guy in our local area. That's exactly what he did. He started just doing stuff for very experienced, very wealthy investors. And he's involved in so many multiple projects right now because in a experienced investor, we see people come in day in and day out who say they're going to do great things and they never do a single thing. But if you actually show that you're willing to do something, an experienced investor will teach you because it's actually fun to pass on knowledge. It's fun to help new investors. The problem is it's just a waste of breath most of the time. So if you can prove that you're not one of those, save that thousand dollars, go find somebody who knows the market, go find somebody that you can help. Whatever it may be, just try to help. Shane Wilson: If you follow someone on social media that you know is a successful real estate investor, and they post something like, hey, do you know where I could find a clean out crew? Or hey, I need a few guys to do this on this day. Raise your hand, message them, beat their door down and do it because they see you're taking action and then don't take a dime from it. Because what's that's going to create is you're doing something for them, but they didn't pay you. Just what human nature is. If you do something for somebody, the other person wants to do something for you. So instead of taking currency, ask for knowledge, ask for help, ask for guidance. And if you do that, you'll find somebody who will help you that will give you the knowledge that will get you started on your track. Shane Wilson: I would just save that money because you're just going to throw it away, trying to figure it out yourself. And the world we're in is very different. People are willing to share knowledge because we know it's all out there now. We can't hide anything. There's no secrets. Go to YouTube and search everything's out there. What you need is somebody who's compiled that information, who knows the markets and has developed a system that you can learn from. So save the money and go learn from somebody's words. Josh St. Laurent: Just I love that answer for someone listening who wants to connect with you. Where's the best place to find you online? Shane Wilson: I have a website called Shane Wilson Training.com. I actually have nothing for selling that website right now. It's just a group in community website that I've got going. I'm putting free content, recorded content on that website so you can sign up completely free. I'm also on all the social media, as a course, Shane Wilson real estate or Shane Wilson Training. You search those up. You'll find me. I don't actually have anything that I'm selling at this point. I just enjoy doing these talks, doing these interviews and I love real estate questions. So if you find me, send me a message. I'll be happy to answer a question. But I do want you to be an action taker. If you're not going to take action, you're not going to take advice. Please don't waste my time. But if you have a question, you actually are legitimate. Send me a question and I'll answer it. If I answered a question, though, and you send me another question without doing the steps in the first question, I'm probably not going to answer your second question. So again, you're an action taker and you want to learn real estate. Shoot me a message and I'll talk to you. But that's pretty much it. You could find me, Shane Wilson real estate, Shane Wilson Training and my website Shane Wilson Training.com. Josh St. Laurent: Perfect. Thank you. We'll drop some links in the show. It's make it easy on the listeners. But I just want to say thanks for being here. This has been really fun. Shane Wilson: Yeah, I've enjoyed it. Josh St. Laurent: This has been the Wealth and Yourself podcast where we help people to design their ideal life and take control of their time and money. Our guest today was Shane Wilson. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time. Josh St. Laurent: The Wealth and Yourself podcast is hosted by me, Josh St. Lorenz, an edited and produced by Ray Hakecraft. To learn more about how to make your money work for you, visit us at www.WealthInYourself.com and connect with us on all social media at Wealth in Yourself. This podcast is educational in nature and is not meant to be investment advice. Please do not construe anything said to be advice and the opinions of the guests may or may not represent the opinions of Wealth in yourself. This podcast and the information presented are separate for my employment at Golden Gate University. Still, they are part of my mission to make no-cost, financial knowledge more accessible. If you like the show, please take a moment to leave us a review. We read all of your feedback and we want to make sure we cover the topics that matter most. If you have a specific subject you'd like us to explore or a guest you'd love to hear interviewed, don't hesitate to shoot us a direct message. And as always, thanks for listening.