So now our vision is to how can we help college founders that might not have access to significant resources, but they have great ideas. So we invest in early stage companies, college founders that are credible, that come from great universities with great ideas. People can really start to see, make money from one stream and then you redistribute it to another to kind of build more stability. A lot of buddies that are successful in tech successful in e-commerce, they found success elsewhere and then they want to pivot into real estate, but they don’t do the research. They don’t do the due diligence. They kind of jump in unprepared. That’s a huge mistake. When you measure success from within, you can really kind of have focus and have drive. And it’s easy to get up every day when you’re kind of chasing your own goals. Business is a lot like finding your way through a forest at night.

Camden Francis (00:46):
And when you have strong connections, it’s more like-

Welcome everyone back to the REM podcast. Today we have Camden. Camden, where are you out of?

I’m based in Boston, Massachusetts. Awesome.

And where do you invest?

I invest in the Cleveland, Ohio area.

Awesome. What drew you to this specific niche?

Real estate is something that once you accrue some kind of capital, you want to invest it somewhere that is stable. Real estate for me is a vehicle to kind of increase my wealth. So my journey started in the tech space where I was building various software companies. These companies are in different industries like advertising, travel. It really rages, but after a few company exits and some of the companies that have very high evaluations, we’re able to basically kind of take some of that capital and invest it elsewhere in kind of real estate and stuff like that. So my journey is, I wouldn’t really consider myself kind of a one trick pony. Let’s put it that way. I’m very kind of well-rounded. I believe in having a diverse portfolio and I’m using real estate as a mechanism to do so. So that’s really my strategy and I’d be happy to go into that a little bit

More. Yeah. Awesome. What does your business look like today?

Our business today really is a holding company. So Alec Vallow and myself, we founded Meridian Capital Partners, which is a holding company of like 20 different businesses. And that venture that is producing cashflow is allowing us to basically make other investments such as real estate property and investing some of that money back into other businesses and kind of doing that process over and over again. Now, the reason I chose Cleveland, Ohio is because the properties in Massachusetts are very expensive. However, that doesn’t mean that every area of the country is like that. So Cleveland, Ohio is a good place to get in the game. There’s a lot of kind of families that live there, so single family homes do relatively well. And for single families, you don’t have to handle some of the utilities like duplexes. I mean, we work with a property management firm so I can be based in Boston, kind of have progress, continue with Meridian Capital Partners, continue with my investment account with Fidelity.

Camden Francis (03:14):
I’ve been working with Fidelity for a long time now in terms of investments. So I really trust them. I have a wealth advisor there. We have a team that makes smart decisions. I have my kind of day vehicle with MCP and then we have real estate for long-term future planning. So that’s kind of my kind of lay of the land. And I want to be transparent with the viewers because I’m relatively young. I want to kind of allow people to see kind of how I climbed, but it didn’t really just start from, I would say, fortune. I first had a mentor and the mentor taught me a lot about real estate. I spent five years learning from her before I made any big decisions. I looked at all the options, how to do due diligence, how to do proper accounting, what to look for in a property management firm, and what to plan for, because things always go wrong in real estate.

Camden Francis (04:08):
Some of the properties might have high maintenance bills one month over the other. It may take a long time for tenants to move in. There’s always things that you kind of have to plan for in advance because real estate can be expensive. You have to have kind of money sitting around, which is why I also have Fidelity. So they’re investing money in a professional account. I’m taking those investments, pulling those into real estate. So it’s kind of playing that balancing act again and

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What was your life like before investing?

So before investing, I had a charity. This is going to kind of be a full circle moment. So I had a charity and it was really shortly after high school. I founded, was during and after high school. I founded Beyond the Crisis. And the reason I did that was because I wanted to give back first. A lot of people that go out, show success, don’t have a reputable brand, good connections, good network, trusted partners. And maybe they get that success, maybe they don’t. When I first gave back, I founded a successful charity. The charity was featured on the Drew Barrmore Show, Bloomberg, CBS, PBS. I got to meet with some governors, mayors, philanthropists, influencers, celebrities. I used those contacts to build my holding company because you need investors, you need credibility. And then after that, that holding company was a success. We needed to diversify even more, and we did.

Camden Francis (06:16):
So that’s a little bit about my background.

Awesome. What was the problem that you were trying to solve when you started your business?

It’s a great question. There’s always a problem that can be addressed. I think the charity, having such a profound vision there with giving back, helping people that are food secure, that is a mission that kind of gets you out of bed every morning. Understanding mission, vision, values. I was able to replicate that across my businesses. So Meridian Capital’s vision is to help, because it’s a holding company. We first founded our own companies, scaled those to success, and then acquired external companies. So now our vision is to, how can we help call as founders that might not have access to significant resources, but they have great ideas. So we invest in early stage companies, college founders that are credible, that come from great universities with great ideas, kind of like why Combinator, but why Combinator gets applications sent to them? We basically have people that do some reaching out here and there so we can kind of grow.

Camden Francis (07:22):
And some of our companies have great missions. The property management firm panning over to real estate now talking about real estate. The property management firm that I chose to work with, when they kind of pitched me on their vision, their values, their mission, it really stood out because they were a large property management firm that had a lot of experience. They would basically bend over backwards really to help their customers succeed, to help their clients succeed. And that is something that I realized that I needed. I needed people in my corner that were going to do the due diligence when I’m miles and miles away, and they’re going to work very hard and they’re people I can trust.

That’s awesome. What’s the most common misconception about what you offer?

I would say the most common misconception is I wear so many hats. There’s people from the outside looking in that don’t really seek it on how the business side operates that may kind of have preconceived notions about kind of what we do. But I think breaking it down kind of here today, people could really start to see you make money from one stream and then you redistribute it to another to kind of build more stability because businesses could go under, right? Some people invest in crypto. We have a small crypto portfolio, very volatile. You need something like real estate to really kind of ground the portfolio. And that’s exactly what it does. So very grateful to have advisors and mentors that kind of pulled me in early, to say the least.

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Noah Kesslin (09:52):
Again, that’s 10xtv.co. Awesome. Right back to it. Can you share maybe one or two key strategies that have made the biggest impact on your clients or investors that you serve?

Yeah. So for the kind of families that we serve, the families that rent our properties, we’re looking for properties in kind of good areas and safe areas to give families the opportunity to settle down and feel comfortable. So when our property management firm is doing interviews with our tenants, we really want to find good people, families that we trust, families that when they move in, they’re going to treat the property with respect. These people that are tenants for the properties that I own, they’re not college students throwing these big frat parties. And we’re happy about that, to say the least. They’re good families, good people. And that’s not going to say that college students that are part of yours are good people, right? But we want, again, people that are going to really take care of the investment.

Yeah, that’s definitely smart for sure. What mistakes do you often see investors make that could really easily be avoided?

I’m relatively young and I’m still learning every single day. So investors do make mistakes and I make mistakes, but I think not doing the due diligence, jumping into quickly. I have a lot of buddies that are successful in tech, maybe successful in e-commerce, they found success elsewhere and then they want to pivot into real estate, but they don’t do the research. They don’t do the due diligence. They kind of jump in unprepared. I would say that’s a huge mistake.

Okay. What do you think separates the top operators in the space from everyone else, in your opinion?

A lot of real estate investors, I know they have really great people skills. They’re great planners, they’re great salesmen, they’re really good business leaders. I would say that developing skillsets that take time, that take time to develop is something that really benefits you in the real estate space. It’s really a business. People differentiate real estate and business, but what you see is a lot of the really great entrepreneurs, Ryan Sirhant, Donald Trump. They’re in the real estate game, Grant Cardone, but they’re really good businessmen as well. You tend to see that.

Yeah, that’s fair. When it comes to the word success, everyone has their own definition of it. How do you define success in your life and what are you chasing for?

I think success for me is really measured individually every year seeing the achievements and milestones that are reached and attained. That makes me happy, that drives me. Every time I look at other cars, other vehicles on the road, Lamborghinis, Ferraris, Maseratis. To give an example, right? An example, you get distracted because there’s so much talent out there. But when you measure success from within, you could really kind of have focus and have drive. And it’s easy to get up every day when you’re kind of chasing your own goals, for sure, from what I’ve found.

Yeah. What do you think the biggest challenges you’re seeing right now in real estate?

Biggest challenges right now for myself, real estate price is relatively high, kind of leaning on a team. Again, I kind of heard a quote from this big entrepreneur and it really talked about teams, the importance of relying on other people. And I have friends in the government space and they kind of have a cabinet of people that they rely on. Teams in real estate, like teams in business is important because you might not have all the information and data at your fingertips, but if there’s someone in your corner that does, you’re fine. So I would say relying on other professionals and not really needing to feel like you have all the answers is why I had great mentors and is why I kind of work with a great property management firm today.

Awesome. I know you talked about AI before we started this whole thing. So when it comes to AI, how do you think that’s going to help the real estate game and how do you use it in your business today?

It’s a great question. There’s a lot of AI software right now in different industries. Some software in the real estate space that makes property sourcing easier. So I think that as technology, not just AI, but as technology kind of continues to advance, it’s going to make things easier for consumers, for people in the real estate space that are looking to move more efficiently. I’ll put it that way.

Awesome. If you were to restart today from scratch, what would you focus on first?

Yeah, I would say connections, building strong connections. Connections serve as a foundation. When you have a good network and people that you can rely on, the road gets easier. I would say that business is a lot like finding your way through a forest at night. And when you have strong connections, it’s more like having a tour guide kind of show you the way. When you have good connections, advisors and mentors and investors, it’s like having a tour guide show you the way. So I kind of put it that way. If I started all over again, I would need good people in my corner like I have today.

Awesome. What is something that people would be surprised to learn about you?

I would say a lot of the businesses that I’ve built personally were bootstrapped. I wasn’t always this kind of swift CEO with a bunch of businesses. The first business I built, I founded doing a lifeguarding job, opening the pool at 4:00 AM, getting paid $20 an hour and using that money and reinvesting it on freelancers to build my first company. So it didn’t always start with these large investors, nice real estate properties, this big Fidelity investment account with a wealth advisor. It didn’t start that way. And I think that a lot of people think of a 21-year-old trust fund baby, and that really isn’t the essence of my story.

That’s awesome. When it comes to drive, entrepreneurs in general usually have a lot of it. What drives you to keep pushing in and growing each and every day?

I think really when you’re in business for other people, we have a team that I have great mentors and their team grew up with them. So their team now is 40 and 50. Our team, we have a lot of 21-year-olds on board of our ship. And I grew up with a lot of those individuals and they were good friends before business. You want to basically do business with people that you’d starve with because there’s a lot of ups and downs in the journey. And for me, I think that having a team that I trust kind of makes waking up and going to battle every day a little bit easier, for sure.

Awesome. Who has been the biggest influence to you in the space?

In general, I would say my dad has been a big influence to me. He grew up in a one bedroom apartment in the inner city. Both of his parents passed away at a young age and he was adopted by his grandmother and he kind of found his way, kind of got financial aid, went to a private school, and then went to Babson College and Wellesley, taught business program, and then got a job right out of college at IBM and won awards there. When he was undergraduate, he was the president of his school. When he graduated, he’s on the board and he works for IBM, graduated early at 19 or 20, he’s sitting in a boardroom with people 40, 50, and he’s handed an award for excellence and achievement at IBM. And I think that drive, you see movies like that. I believe there’s a movie like Will Smith similar to that.

Camden Francis (18:18)
My dad lived it. And I think that seeing that American dream story wakes me up every day to go achieve my own.

That’s awesome. Where can people learn more about you? Where can people find you if they want to reach out?

Yes. So guys, go reach out. My website is www.camdenfrancis.com. Literally my name. My email’s the same info@camdenfrancis.com. Reach out. I love kind of checking your messages, kind of hearing from you. And this was an amazing experience. Thank you so much for having me.

Awesome. Appreciate you for coming on. Thank you all for watching and we’ll see you next time.