There should be a healthy fear of the risks. Now, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it, like learning the business, learning some of the steps, but also having connections, having people that have done it before you, help you and show you the way is the way we mitigate those risks.

Can you share maybe one or two key strategies that have been the biggest impact for you this past year?

You need to get into somewhere where you can hone those skills, get yourself back in, tune up, train, but yourself, you got to really build yourself.

How important is it for you to have a community?

I can 100% tell you that our success came from getting connected with other investors, other people that are doing what we’re doing, but also that are ahead of where we are, as well as the people that are right behind you. There’s something about teaching and showing that helps, again, hone your own skills. Putting revenue in first position, making sure that the revenue is what you are going to get, and then once the revenue comes in.

What’s going on, guys? We have Andrew Lucas with us today, a real estate investor out of South Carolina, does a ton of deals. Andrew, I’m very curious, I ask everyone this to open the pod. How did you get into real estate in the first place?

Well, thanks, Noah, for having me here. I’m excited to be on this podcast. I know a lot of people you’ve had, a lot of people you’re going to have, you guys do great work. So I hope this will be helpful for anybody listening, but I got into real estate, I think by accident really. You hear of accidental landlords, but what happened to me was I was in college and I had an entrepreneurial bug, so I was looking for things, ways to be a little different. I was in hospitality, went to school for hospitality, but I was looking for, could I own my own business? Could I do something on the side? And for some silly reason back then, this would’ve been like early 2000s, I though landlords were just filthy rich. I thought they were making all kinds of money with my $700 rent payment that me and my friends were paying. And turns out, no, they were making nothing back then. It’s different now. So I thought, you know what? That’s what I’m going to do. I graduated, moved home for two months, and that was awful. And so I immediately was like, I’m going to buy a house and I’m going to rent the rooms out to my friends because right after college, we were still really connected and they were all paying rent. In 2007, anybody could get a mortgage if you just asked and said, please. They were like, oh sure, here you go. So they did. They gave me one. I probably should not have had one. I had a repo on my record, just barely had a job. It was pretty wild back then. But immediately I was renting out a room. We made a lot of mistakes. We actually turned a three bedroom into a two bedroom because we needed more room for the ping pong table, of course, which everyone should do when they’re in college. So that was first house. And 10 months later, I got another job out of town and immediately I said, “I’m not living here. I need someone to pay this full mortgage, not this half sea thing.” So we added the bedroom back and rented out to another group of friends. And so that was a rental property and that just kind of kept me inside of real estate for the next few years. And I’ll kind of fast-forward to Michelle, my wife in about 2015. At this point, we had gotten four rental houses, little single family houses with the same thought process of 30 years from now, the debt will be paid off because of these tenants and we’ll have a retirement system. We’ll have our own retirement from these properties. In that mindset, it was so wrong. It was terrible. It was awful way of thinking because what that did to us is we were negative cashflow. We were managing it on our own, not making any money, going doing repairs ourselves, also not making money for that and spending the weekends doing turns when people move out. And it was stupid. It wasn’t a business. It was worse than a hobby. When I look around, I was that seller, that owner that I now buy from because I hated it. It was terrible. And we weren’t making anything. So Michelle and I, we had two young kids at the time. We said, “Hey, this is not good. Either we’re going to sell these and just be normal, work W-2 jobs and be normal, or we’re going to make a business out of this.” And an agent friend of ours had given us a book, actually have it right here, this book here that actually shows in details and has the math of how you can make money today with your rental property. And so read that book, devoured it, probably the first book I ever read all the way through and said, “We can do this.” And we started, from that day, we said, “We need 35 rental properties with a $200 a month cash flow.” And to do that, Michelle would be able to go part-time and we could be half in real estate and half in W-2 jobs. That turned into, I quit my job, I started wholesaling. We got to 35 rental properties, then we got to 105, and we haven’t looked back since. We do dozens of flips. We partner with people and we have a property management. We’re just all in on real estate now full-time since 2018. So that’s the whole story.

Awesome. And what does the business look like today exactly?

Yeah, so we are keeping right around owning somewhere around a hundred units. We kind of like that number. We’re not trying to be the biggest landlord in town, but we do want to be efficient. And so we’ve got some small commercial, small multifamily, just trying to make the right choices there. We have a property management company that manages those and others. We still have a home buying business, which started out as that wholesaling business that I kind of mentioned where now we buy them ourselves and close on them and we partner with people to help them learn the business and we’ll do flips with people. So that’s kind of our big picture of the company now. Deal Finders Club is the name of our meetup. And so we’re in Columbia, South Carolina. Anybody and everybody is welcome. We do weekly meetings and meetups and we just bring investors, managers, lenders, you name it, into town. And we have a great time. We just have a great time getting connected with people that want to use real estate for their wealth generation or their income or just their extra cashflow. We love getting together and doing that here. So our businesses help us and help us do that.

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What was the main problem that you were trying to solve when starting the business?

So the problem was in 2015, again, we had two youngins and I was in hospitality where I managed, in my opinion, maybe I’m biased, the best hotel in town. I was the chairman of the state board of the Hospitality Association. And I was kind of at a place where if I was going to go up the corporate ladder, if I was going to get, well, if I was going to get paid more, essentially that’s really what mattered. If I was going to get paid more, I was going to have to move because there was not another spot here in town that I would go to. So it was either we would pick up and move or I would have to travel. And so I’d travel weekly to be like a VP or something like that. And so that’s where Michelle and I, we had some time together, had some prayer time and really talked through it. And we agreed that we weren’t a family that we wanted to have half of us gone every single week. I didn’t want to travel three days a week and she didn’t want to be home alone three days a week. So that was the problem we were solving. I knew God had made us for more. We knew that we could do more, earn more, impact more, give more. We were just bottled up with all this potential, but that W-2 job wasn’t going to, we couldn’t get any bigger. And so that was the problem. And real estate was the solution. Going into real estate as a full business was the way that we could change that.

That’s awesome. When it comes to flipping in your experience, for someone getting into it, what’s the most common misconception about the difference between someone that’s wholesaling and someone that’s actually fixing flipping?

The misconceptions getting into flipping I think is probably that it is a lot harder than you think. And even wholesaling, it’s a lot harder than you think. And I think that comes, there should be a healthy fear of the risks. There should be some fear of the risks. Now, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. It just means you need to mitigate those risks. And there’s a lot of them out there, but education, learning the business, learning some of the steps, but also having connections, having people that have done it before you, help you and show you the way is the way we mitigate those risks. So I think that this comes just where we are today, that TV shows and YouTube and TikTok and whatever, you name it, it sells better when it looks easy. And so people get a little bit of a false representation. Even wholesaling, it is a hard, hard job. It sucks. I mean, it does. It’s awful. It’s terrible because you’re under pressure, you’re under the gun, you’re dealing with people that are also under pressure and stressed out, very, very high stress. And you relieve that stress when you finally get the deal sold. But in order to have a business or have consistent income, you dive right back in. You’re always in this pressure cooker and most people just can’t handle it. They just can’t handle. They can’t stick around long enough to see the benefits of it and see the fruits of it. And so I would say to that regard, flipping is easier than wholesaling because you don’t have so much pressure constant on you.

Yeah, I like that. Well, typically, we usually at this point have a word from our sponsor. Today we actually have a 10X TV client on. So if you don’t mind me kind of putting you under pressure and on the spot here, if you don’t mind sharing a little bit about what 10X TV is for you and what it’s done for your business.

Sure. And I don’t know how long I’ve been a client, but it’s been a while. It’s been a minute. I think I was probably one of your first ones, especially on the East Coast. But the reason we went to TV is because we are a local business. And again, coming from hospitality, from the very beginning, we were building a local business where we wanted referrals. We wanted the community to know who we were, trust us, and come to us to help solve those problems. So we were sending postcards and we got a really good website that ranks really high, but there’s nothing like seeing the same people on TV over and over and over again to build trust in a local community in this atmosphere. So we jumped in and here’s the thing that we haven’t done is we actually haven’t changed the commercial in three years. I know, I think it’s been three years, the same commercial because people, they recognize it, they know it, and they still ask about the kids and stuff. And my kids grow fast. So they’re so much bigger. They look totally different. They’re not as cute anymore. So that same commercial is still providing our deal flow to the tune of, which I just told you before we started recording, 30% of our deals of the leads, not the leads, the actual closed deals, 30% came from TV leads. And it’s a consistent thing. I mean, yes, we have to pay the bill. I guess you have to do something, but it’s the same commercial that’s just been repeating over and over and over again. So I love it. I love the simplicity of getting it out there and let setting on repeat. And we have been kind of wanting to change the commercial, but I hear, I think you’ve probably heard it, Hormozy say by the time you’re tired of your marketing, 95% of your clients haven’t even seen it yet. And I still to this day get people that say, “Oh, I saw your ad for the first time.” So until I don’t hear that, we’re going to stick with the same thing. We’re going to send the same check every month or every whatever the billing is, and we’ll keep closing deals. We’re closing more this month. That’s a pretty good ad. And I know you didn’t pay me for that, but just be transparent. I’ll share with you guys. Anybody that has a question about it, feel free to reach out.

I love it. I love it. Goal, can you share maybe one or two key strategies that have been the biggest impact for you this past year?

So we just talked a little bit about this. We had some struggles, some challenges this year, and a lot of people have. Ours were a little bit self-inflicted where we’ve had a team, consistent team for many years. And like I said, it’s a hard business talking to sellers, going straight to sellers who are in, they have challenging lives, finances, family, these things, these issues. We were not spending enough time upgrading our skills, going over our script, reviewing our offers and the way we talk to people and the way we, not close the deal, but close the gap between what they need and how we could help. So we didn’t spend enough time upgrading ourselves this year. And so we paid a little bit of a price to that. We are kind of turning the corner on that. But I would say if a strategy for anybody, even probably more so if you’ve been doing this for two or three years, you need to get into somewhere where you could hone those skills, get yourself back in, tune up, train. I mean, AI of course, I’m not even getting into that, but yourself, you got to really build yourself even if you’ve been in this for a while. And if you’re brand new, if you’re just getting started, you better believe you got to get some training, get some coaching courses, mentorships, whatever that is, get it all, learn it all, read, read the books that are out there because otherwise you won’t be good enough in today’s age. I think you just won’t be good enough to make the business work.

Yeah. And I know you’re in a bunch of masterminds, as are we. What’s the biggest thing you would say to an investor that isn’t in a mastermind? No matter what the mastermind is, everyone’s got their own one that they like, everyone’s got their community. But how important is it for you to have a community? It doesn’t matter which one, but what’s that like? And talk to someone if they’ve never done that or maybe scared to put out the money to get in one, what would you say to someone in that position?

I mean, I would say scared money doesn’t make money is one of those things. I don’t know if that’s the right application, but I can 100% tell you that our success came from and continues to come from getting connected with other investors, other people that are doing what we’re doing, but also that are ahead of where we are, as well as the people that are right behind you. There’s something about teaching and showing that helps, again, hone your own skills. But that’s why we started our local meetup back in 2017, 16, 17 when we started flipping houses so that we could buy rentals. I mean, I looked around and there was not another group. There was nobody that was just coming together to talk to help. And when I was in hospitality, managing hotels, I told you I was on the association of multiple things like Governor’s Council for Housing. I was inside of these different groups and plugged in. And of course you’ve got the meetings and the big events and conferences, and there was nothing like that for us as an investor. And so we started that, and then we got this great little group here locally, and then it’s blown up to what we do today. But when we were coming together, a guy who was in Charlotte, but he did his deals here. And so then he connected me with a guy who’s in Charleston that’s doing deals here. And then we hired a coach and a mentor from that group. And then that guy introduced me and told me what the word wholesaling was, which I had no idea what that even was. And then we do a wholesale deal and then I find Wholesaling Inc. Who teaches me how to do wholesaling. And without that, we would not have been able to quit.I wouldn’t have been able to quit my job to do wholesaling full-time. We wouldn’t have this home buying business. We wouldn’t be able to do the flips at the quantity that we do where I’ve bought the rental portfolio that we’ve bought. So it all came from just getting plugged in to people that are doing similar things either right ahead of me, right behind me, or doing the exact same thing, following the same steps. So I like doing it local and I like doing it national because you got to see what else is going on out there. So we’re in a couple of masterminds, a couple groups, local and national.

Awesome. What mistakes do you often see that investors make that you think can be really easily avoided?

We see this a lot, and I’ll just talk to the flippers in the group that go, they dive in and don’t do proper due diligence. And due diligence doesn’t just mean do an inspection. There’s a lot that goes on. Due diligence means how are you going to get in? Where’s your money going to come from to get in? How are you going to finish it? Money, contractors, style, materials. But then also, how are you going to get out? So what’s your exit strategy? And so all that is done. That’s all due diligence. There’s a lot of steps to that, and that’s one of the big reasons why people asked us to help them and show them. And that’s why we partner with people on these deals because we take them through all these processes and steps. But you see it everywhere. If you go and look on Zillow right now in your neighborhood or your community, there’s probably a house that is half done or three quarters done, and they got to put it out there because they’re out. They’re losing money. They can’t finish. And it was not because of the markets changed or they found something crazy. It’s usually because it didn’t start off with the right strategy, right plan in the beginning. So I know that it might sound basic, just saying it out loud like, oh, start with the end in mind. But we get excited, I guess. People get excited. The money’s easy. And you know this. If you have a good job, you can get a loan to do these flips. Doesn’t mean you should. Doesn’t mean you should.

For sure. Well, there’s a lot of onesie twosies in this business that do maybe a deal or two a year, and then there’s a lot of people that do a lot of deals per year. What do you think separates those top operators from the onesie twosies that do a couple deals a year?

Well, and some of it is that exact thing is the strategies. But I’d say most of it is the desire. As I say, I get old, I’ve got this thing, my knot on my forehead that’s telling me how old I am now. My hair’s going away. My kids are picking on me every day. But as I get older, I feel like we are defining what we actually want. We don’t have a desire to do a hundred flips a year. We don’t have a desire to own 500 rentals. Those might’ve been some goals or some thoughts back a few years ago, but what we’re finding out with the new information we have today is that that’s not needed nor necessary for a incredible life, an incredible business to make a huge impact on our community. We have, I don’t know, six, seven, eight, maybe seven or eight people on our team that we employ. They get an income from what we’re doing here. And so you can make incredible impact in business with much smaller numbers than what people think. So I think you need to be aware of that and build based on what you actually want and desire. And so in order to be a two-deal flipper every year, there’s a certain level of skillset, certain level of connections, certain monetary needs. But if you’re trying to do 200 or 2000 a year, you’re looking at a massive business and lots of employees. It’s a total different skillset where at that point, the property doesn’t matter anymore. It’s how can you manage people? And then how can you manage people to manage people? And so I don’t want that. And not many people are built for that. Real estate’s easy. People are hard. And the bigger you get, the more people you get in the way of doing real estate.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. What do you think the biggest challenge or change that you’re seeing in the real estate market right

Now? The market is very interesting right now. I don’t know when this will air, but we’re like, is the rate going up? Is it going down? Are we going to have a crash? Are we going to have a correction? Are we going to just go keep going up? There’s a lot in limbo. I think the way to succeed in a market like this is to keep doing great work and be aware of pricing. So yesterday’s comps don’t necessarily make tomorrow’s appraisal or a value. So typically our market isn’t up and down. The January is the fewest houses sold and June is the most. So it just kind of goes up now. So we are already making price or value adjustments because of the cyclical nature. And I think if you are going to be in this business, you’ve got to look at what other factors could be out there. And so just taking that into consideration, saying, all right, if this house, it’s the exact same floor plan six months ago, go sold at 200,000. Well, I’m going to give a little buffer. I’m going to say, I’m going to sell it at 195 and I’ll run my math that way and then make sure I do great work and then I can be sure to sell it or rent it out, whatever you’re trying to do. So I think you got to look at it that way. The challenges beyond just the economic craziness out there, I think it’s the same challenges we always have where again, it’s people. I think when things are going great, you’ve got people that come out of the woodworks and that’s where bad work comes in. You get contractors that shouldn’t be doing it on their own. They maybe don’t have a license or shouldn’t have a license. And so there’s pieces and parts of that. So I think that if you’re going to treat it as a business, you need to run it as a business. So inspecting behind people, making sure your contractors are doing what they say they’re going to do, when they say they’re going to do it, that’s always going to be a challenge. But I think because things were good for the last few years, some of those people have come and they proliferate. There’s more of them.

Yeah. Yeah. When it comes to the word success, obviously everyone’s got their own definition for it. Everyone strives for it differently. How do you define the word success and how do you strive for it every day? Because even from what you said a couple minutes ago, it’s like you don’t need to do that many deals. You don’t need to have that big of a business to have the lifestyle that you want. I’d love for you to touch on that a little bit because I know a lot of people get into this business for time freedom and then they spend 80 hours a week trying to do as many deals because they want to, whatever the case may be. So I’d love for you to touch on that, define success and how you strive for it every day.

Yeah, I think just what you’re mentioning is the people that start running 80 hours a week. It’s because we start, and I’m guilty as well, is we start putting things ahead and saying, “Oh, well we’re going to do these flips, so let’s go buy that or let’s invest in that. Let’s do this. Let’s build this.” And you end up putting your expenses ahead of your revenue. And then you are trying to catch your expenses and you start running faster and faster and trying to work longer hours, do more deals because you’ve put something, some sort of expense. Could be monetary, it could be your time or whatever, but you put something in front of the revenue. And so putting revenue in first position, making sure that the revenue is what you are going to get. And then once the revenue comes in, then you allocate it. We ascribed to the profit first model, which is you give yourself profit, your business should have some profit, you pay your taxes and all this stuff. If you set it up that way, then you’re not leaning over your knees. You’re not having to go forward and that hustle is a season kind of deal. You can hustle for a little while, but if you find yourself continually chasing, it’s because you’ve put something out of whack. And again, guilty, we’ve done it. Everybody’s probably done it at least once or twice. It’s recognizing it and figuring out how to pull back. And so for the question of success for me and us as we, again, get a little older, I’m looking at how can we have the business that supports our lifestyle in a manner that we are comfortable with? And so our comfort is changing. Our kids are getting a little older and the amount of time we want to work is actually going down a little bit. But we’re looking at now is how can our businesses start to work without us? And so that is our next level of success. I don’t know that you can actually get success and say, “I found it. I got the flag.” I don’t know that I feel that that’s possible, but our next level of success is going to be businesses that run without our 20, 30, 40 hours a week. And I say our, my wife and I run the businesses. So that’s our next level. And that’s because that’s where we want to be in our life. And so a few years ago, we wanted a business to support our lifestyle, which we were working as much as often as possible. And so that changes, but our success model right now is a business that is going to run without us and support our lifestyle in that manner. There’s a lot of the little things that come with that. So you can’t just put a big thing up there and say, “We’re going to go do that.” There’s got to be steps along the way.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Cool. I’d say you were going to start from scratch. Businesses are gone. You get to keep your knowledge of everything that you’ve learned over the years, but the business goes away. What would you focus on first to rebuild?

Businesses go away. I keep the knowledge. Do I keep my Rolodex?

Yep, you can have your Rolodex.

Yeah. I’m going straight to the people I know and I’m going to say who has a need that I can fill? And because of the knowledge I have through multiple different businesses, operationally, financially, sales, I would look for someone, a high net worth individual or a high earner, someone that would value my knowledge. Rich people have rich people problems and they pay rich prices to solve them. And so that’s where I would be looking is who has a high net worth or a high income earner that has a problem that they need solved? It could be sales, it could be operations, whatever that is. And I would attempt to get started there. And honestly, I’m not married to real estate. Real estate is great because the system is set up for us. The tax system, everything is set up for us. And that’s where we dove in. Yeah, all the skills and the things that we do here are transferable to any and every business. If you’re in another business and you want the tax benefits, the great appreciation and all the stuff that comes with real estate, bring your skills over. They will translate. They will absolutely translate.

Yeah, for sure. What drives you to keep personally innovating and helping others investors succeed? I know you have your Deals Finder club. What pushes you to keep helping other investors?

There’s a little bit of competition in there. Just growing up playing sports or whatever, there’s something about not losing and being number one in a market space, in an area, in an arena. There’s a little competition. And I think most successful business owners have competition because it may not be competing against other people or other businesses, but you’re competing against yourself and making yourself better and making your business better than it was yesterday. There’s a lot of that in, when you say innovation, I think about the things that our companies that we saw or I saw and I said, “Hey, this looks like something.” And we are quick early adapters, whatever, something like TV. We didn’t invent this, but we saw a benefit and we jumped on it. A lot of the reason, and I’ll be honest on that. The big part, big reason why we came and got on TV is because I didn’t want anyone else to jump and do TV in our market. And that was a little bit of competition. And it wasn’t because I wanted to be on TV. I don’t watch TV. The only time I’ve seen our commercial is if it’s playing if we’re at a restaurant or something and it’s going on TV. We watch football games or Hulu movies or whatever with the kids. So there’s got to be some competition in that innovation. That’s I think just trying to make sure we’re ahead and we don’t get caught or get left behind is probably one of my big drivers for that.

Yeah, for sure. Where can people learn more about you if someone is interested in the Deal Finders Club or just interested in talking to you about anything else? Where can people find you? Where can people learn more?

Yeah, you shoot me a text at 216-5750. Find me on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, you name it. The AndrewRlucasdealfindersClub.com. We have our Facebook group, REI Dealfinders. If you can’t find me, you probably didn’t look hard enough. Not that I’m great at social media, but my wife has put it out there. We have another company that puts me out there, so I’m out there somewhere. Just reach out.

Awesome. Well, any last or final advice for anyone that’s looking to grow, scale, or maybe simplify?

I would say, and we talked a little bit about this, but don’t try to be a maverick and do it all, figure it out all on your own. There is most likely someone that’s already done what you’re doing, unless you’re Elon and Musk or Elon and Bezos and you’re going to Mars, right? Someone has already done what you’re trying to do or what you’re thinking of pivoting to or your niche or your tweak to the business. Get plugged in, get connected, ask questions, don’t go it alone.

Yeah, that’s awesome. Well, Andrew, thank you so much for coming on. Everyone, thank you for watching and we’ll see you next time.

Yep. Thank you guys.