3 Degrees of Freedom

Ep 80 - Capital Raising as a Scaling, Family-based Side Hustle RECAP with Derek & Sophie

April 15, 2022 Derek Clifford Season 2 Episode 80
3 Degrees of Freedom
Ep 80 - Capital Raising as a Scaling, Family-based Side Hustle RECAP with Derek & Sophie
Show Notes Transcript

On this recap episode of the Elevate Your Equity Podcast, we digest all of the wisdom given to us from Mike and Kristy. Our top takeaways include doing the upfront that most are not willing to do builds confidence and trust from your investors, how your relationships from the professional world bleed over into the investing world (and why that's important), and the importance of keeping yourself organized.

Having Mike and Kristy on the show led to some great lessons that we hope you can also take away.

Unlock 3+1 degrees of freedom (time, location, financial + health) with our 5 Point Blueprint! https://elevateequity.org/podcastgift

If you really enjoyed this content and are looking for more, you can continue to learn more about us in several different places for free!


If you'd like to have a FREE copy of our 7 Ways Commercial Real Estate Syndications Protect and Build Wealth, simply click the link below. We are here and vested in your long-term success! elevateequity.org/7waysEbook

Unlock 3+1 degrees of freedom (time, location, financial + health) with our 5-Point Blueprint! https://elevateequity.org/podcastgift

If you really enjoyed this content and are looking for more, you can continue to learn more about us in several different places for free!

If you'd like to have a FREE copy of our 7 Ways Commercial Real Estate Syndications Protect and Build Wealth, simply click the link below. We are here and vested in your long-term success! elevateequity.org/7waysEbook

Derek Clifford:

Welcome to the Elevate your equity podcast, where we, as married busy professionals, leverage real estate investing to unlock the three plus one degrees of freedom, help, location, time and financial. Hello, everyone, and welcome back. This is Derek, and this is Sophie and we are here to break down the episode with Mike and Christie, this Rosiers, we had an awesome time talking with him, every time we've got couples on the show, we have this great energy going between the four of us. And it seems like we're doing this mini mastermind, which is super, super cool. So there's a lot of takeaways from this. So let me just jump right into it. The first one that at least I was able to see is that upfront pain or work leads to direct experience and extreme amounts of knowledge. So if you're looking at this huge mountain of work in front of you, no matter what it is that you're doing, and you know that it's going to be painful to do that, try to look beyond that. Right? I think the main thing is to see the mountain and understand that it's a mountain for a reason. Only the people on the other side of that mountain are respected and asked questions. And so the juice is worth the squeeze. And so I love what Mike said is that he likes to serve as investors and his partners well, by doing all that upfront work, and he has earned it because he's done all the work. And now he understands what to look for and what to see. And now people recognize him as an authority. So that's something that I wanted to hammer home. I don't know if you want to add on to that at all.

Sophie:

Yeah. And so the upfront pain component, like Derek was saying, you know, it really lends to your own experience. And it kolender To the empathy and to the stacking upon future knowledge. And so, you know, we talked about in the last episode, where it's really great to use systems. But it's I mean, I see it as a combination of using systems and your personal experience, before delegated out completely.

Derek Clifford:

Yeah, absolutely. The second thing that I took away from this podcast was don't get discouraged, make sure that you're using your spouse, right as a trusted soundboard to vent for help and to get ideas. And one of the things that they mentioned, the show that we really liked, because we used to do this, and I think we're going to get back into it now that we're talking about it was that they would go on walks together in the evenings, right? To kind of vent their frustrations or to like kind of help work through a problem, or at least get it out in the open. And I thought that was super cool. So make sure that you're leveraging your spouse as much as you can or as a trusted partner. And just don't get discouraged, keep moving. When you're looking at that big mountain of work. It's hard for a reason. And it's okay, it's okay to feel frustrated. So that's that lesson they took away.

Sophie:

It just made me think of as as listening to Derek speak, it made me think about when I was in graduate school, trying to get my doctorate. You know, when you think about oh, my gosh, you have four or five years ahead of you all of the schooling and all of this, all of this knowledge to learn. He said, We'll think of your degree and your diploma, as like, you know, every day, every test is like a little piece of that diploma, that you're just piecing together as a mosaic. And with everything we're doing with this industry, I don't see it being any different. And I like that perspective, too. Because you know, when we're on this journey, there is no set structure, we don't know how long it's going to take to hit the finish line. Or if there's even going to be a finish line. So perhaps looking at the whole journey as like, every step you take every transaction every every moment of that feels like despair, or, you know, every up and down that you have, that's all a piece of that overall, and journey that of that destination that you've worked so hard to get to. So I don't even know if that makes sense. But no, it

Derek Clifford:

does. To me, it's like all one, if you visualize what your goal is, and know that every step you take is an active participation piece or something required in order to hit that goal. Or hit that that end result. It's really important to see and visualize that that you're making progress, right? Because sometimes it doesn't feel like you're making progress at all.

Sophie:

Yeah, have you ever had times where you felt that way?

Derek Clifford:

Oh, yeah, for sure. When you're doing work, or when I'm working on, you know, the the business here. Let's take for instance, that you spend all this time and energy putting together a letter of intent or putting together doing an underwriting. And then ultimately you find out that you don't even make the best and final like you didn't even make like the top five offers on the deal. That can be demoralizing, because it doesn't seem like you're making progress. But the truth of the matter is that you are you're putting together stuff on the back end, you're gaining experience, you're looping more people into your team, they're learning to know your style more, and the broker is doing the same thing. So they're learning more about you as well. And you're learning more about the market and what would make sense and what wouldn't so you just have to make certain that you're that you're taking advantage of of the fact that you are making progress Absolutely. The third thing that I learned from our conversation was that keeping yourself organized with Google Docs, Sheets, and drive and using Active Campaign or some sort of CRM is an absolute must, you really have to make sure that you're going to be minimizing your administrative time by properly utilizing these tools. And so I really liked that I just wanted to make sure that that gets passed along to you. And there's a lot of videos and stuff that you can listen to on the subject. But it is super important to keep yourself organized. So you're not looking for stuff and spending all of your real estate time looking for things. That doesn't sound right to me. Yeah, what

Sophie:

I'm hearing with using Google Docs, Sheets, and drive and even Google Calendar, is that everything syncs up, right. And so everything communicates with each other.

Derek Clifford:

Yeah, and in addition to that, if you have team members that can all edit documents at the same time, which is super cool. Or you can edit a different amounts of time, the same document, and then there's a revision history, I just can't say enough about Google Sheets and Google Docs, they do an awesome job, great collaboration tool. And I would also add on that list is slack, Slack has been completely up ending our lives, it's been incredible to use that tool. So just thought I'd throw that out there. Number four, is you got to build extreme trust. And one of the ways to build extreme trust is getting involved in asset management calls as a as a sponsor. So if you're a capital raiser, or if you're looking to be one, there is an upfront amount of work that needs to be done that you raise capital, and you get all the money together, and you put it with the sponsor, and then the deal closes. But what did the what happens after that, that's what I love about what Mike and Christie are doing, they're going above and beyond, because not only are they just bringing capital, but they're also getting involved in the operations to make sure that the people that placed money with them in their fund or in their structure, are getting well taken care of, and their voices getting heard. And so I just love that whole philosophy there. Because, again, going back to our first point about upfront pain, they're doing all that pain for the investors. And so I just completely admire their their approach.

Sophie:

And it just goes to show, you know, it says a lot about their integrity, first off in terms of the amount of work and the amount of understanding that they put into it so that they can really that and communicate that with limited partners and silent investors. So they have their investors best interests at heart. And I think that's what I love most about our conversation was just you could just feel their integrity.

Derek Clifford:

Yeah, it was bleeding through the camera was amazing is great. And speaking of that, relationships, right, this is my fifth point here, relationships tend to spill over from the non real estate world into the real estate world. This wasn't something that they said specifically, but I took away from our conversation with him that if you're good at building trust, right, relationships will start happening automatically enable you to do incredible things in turn, like, you know, just something from my personal experience is that people knew me before I was a capital raiser. And they understood that I was a person of trust or of integrity, at least I tried to be as much as I could. And as soon as I crossed over into the real estate world, right, I'm still the same person, I still have that level of integrity and trustworthiness and, you know, wanting to help the investors in visibility and transparency and everything, I still had that philosophy. And so if you're a person that has that type of reputation, or that mindset, I think that's something that you could leverage, but also something that spills over into the real estate world. So I just wanted to make sure that you guys captured that. All right, number six, the last thing that I want to mention is that you should focus on what you do best if you're working together with your spouse. I know it seems pretty obvious. But for me, it took a really long time for me to understand that there's actually two roads on this. I was the one that was doing everything right on this journey. And I wouldn't even ask Sophie what her opinion was on stuff. And without her there's no way that this business that we've grown into where where you're listening to us right now wouldn't be possible because I didn't trust myself to delegate it to anyone else. And that's a fallacy because if there's anyone to trust on this planet, it's got to be her. So all I gotta say is that if you can focus on what you do best and rely on your spouse for anything else that you need, and then fill in the spaces, I think that's what is going to help you move the needle a little bit more. Did you want to say anything about that I've

Sophie:

been talking about and you know thank you for for such kind words. Because I honestly like I think he gives me a little bit too much credit because he really does. The reason why I think you feel like you do all the work is because you're good at a lot of the work the underwear Ready the just the deal finding the asset management and everything. And so part of that plays a role into, you know, knowing where you stand. Are you an integrator, you're a visionary, what are your strengths? What are your skills, a lot of the couples we speak with. In the beginning, it's actually pretty normal, they step on each other's toes, because they're not sure who's doing what sometimes they're doing the the work that their spouse has already done. But that's the journey that you go through when you're starting this up together. Because you're not only life partners, now you're becoming business partners. And so the days blurred together, like the life partner, the business partner, there's very little delineation between the two. And so that's I think, like, Derek was saying, you know, at some point, you do have to trust and you do have to delegate. And this is where the communication opens up. And this is where the bonds of your life partnership becomes even stronger. So yeah, just wanted to add that, yeah,

Derek Clifford:

it's so totally true. And then you know, just to wrap this up, and adding on to Sophie's message, whatever you like to do, or you do best do that, that's one thing you hold on to, and then let your spouse or your partners, let them do what they do best. And then that's always like an evolving process. Because sometimes, you know, people like what they're doing originally, and then they learn more about it. And I'm like, I don't like that. So

Sophie:

sometimes it comes down to, if what you do best is to support your partner is to give them space is to provide them the opportunity to do what they love. That's a big role in and of itself. And please never never discount that.

Derek Clifford:

Yeah, it's huge, actually, you know, that without having that, like, no success is possible. Right. So that support there is incredible. So yeah, thank you for bringing that up. That being said, you guys, again, there was so much takeaway from that episode. But these are kind of the highlights that I wanted to impart upon you. So again, I'll keep bringing this up. If you guys like what you're hearing and you love this content, please engage with us wherever you're listening or watching this, because we want to hear from you. If you want to find out more, click the links in the description below. We definitely want to work with you more and find out more about who you are and what your goals are. And so come join us on our free mastermind on our Facebook group every Wednesday, and you can find us there and we're looking forward to having you on there to actively participate with us on several topics with a lot of guests. And that's going to be a lot of good fun. So anyway, thank you guys for listening. This is Derek and this is Sophie and we're signing off. See you guys