Interviewed at The Fearless Pursuit Of Freedom Podcast
Brandon: Hey guys. You’ve found it. Welcome to the Fearless Pursuit of Freedom Podcast. I am your host Brandon Richards. I am a real estate investor and avid entrepreneur in Dallas Texas. My company is Fearless Properties and we rehab, wholesale and hold rentals. Listen in as I interview the nation’s leading entrepreneurs and discuss the monumental battles of business and life.
Brandon: All right guys, we’re back. It’s another episode of the Fearless Pursuit of Freedom podcast. Today’s guest is of course another high-level entrepreneur out of the … well, you’re not even out of Dallas. You’re in Texas but you’re out of Texas, and you’re doing big things down there with real estate and your new realtor team, DXP. I’d like to welcome you on to share with the audience how you go to where you’re at and where you plan on going in the future.
Brant: Yeah man, thanks for having me on. I was actually born and raised in Dallas. We moved down here to Houston in my freshman year in high school. My dad lost his job and we lost our house and foreclosure and all this kind of ugly stuff, which going back, man, still kind of drives me a little today. Some things I went through in childhood leads me to do some of the things I do today.
Brandon: Yeah.
Brant: Don’t want my kids to experience it, right. Tell me how much you want to share or not share, but man, my background was … usually when people ask my story I start back at high school because I had no direction in life.
Brandon: Yeah.
Brant: No one in my family went to college, anything like that. I had no intentions to go to college. I didn’t like school. I barely got out of high school. I graduated from high school and actually moved back to Dallas. Lived with my best friend. We got a job in a warehouse, loading trucks. I’m like, this kind of sucks.
Brandon: Right.
Brant: I was looking at dudes who were old to me at that time. They were like in their late 20s, late 30s, maybe in their 40s. They just didn’t seem very happy and they were working hard and not making a lot of money. I’m like, man, I guess I need to think out this life thing a little bit harder. I decided to go to school. Got accepted into junior college, which was a pretty big deal for me. I got into college and actually did pretty well at college. After working that full-time job loading those trucks and seeing the real world for a while, and then having to pay for my college I’m like, I need to take this pretty seriously. I did pretty good at school.
Brant: Yeah. I really didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I went into law enforcement. After I graduated, it was great. I was in law enforcement for seven years. I absolutely loved it, man. For about the first five years, I loved it. I was a single guy and just having fun. You work night shift, late shift, tons of overtime making money. It was really cool, but then I got married. My wife and I had our first child, and it’s not a great life obviously, for the married life working weekends, holidays, night shifts.
Brandon: Yeah.
Brant: Then there was … Really there was this politic game that was going on that I couldn’t play. We had a new Chief and he was so PC and I couldn’t stand it. Didn’t really fit in with that, so I’m like, I gotta bounce. I gotta go. I just made up my mind and I told my wife, I said, “I gotta leave, I gotta check out.” She’s like, do what you got to do. Put in my two weeks notice and I was like, all right, I need to figure out what I need to do because we can’t really pay the bills.
Brant: I went into corporate America. Went to corporate America and I remember it was like this big Fortune 500 company. Good company. My father in law worked there, he got me the interview. Didn’t get me the job, got me the interview. I remember coming home first day at the job and my wife was all excited because I have this corporate sales job. We’re going to have this white picket life now with this white picket fence. Just normal life. She’s all excited, I come home and she’s like, “Babe, how was your first day on the job?” I’m like, “I think I hate it, now that you ask me.” I kind of threw here … blindsided her with that response. I said, “But it’s okay. Don’t worry, I’m going to work there, I’m going to do well, but I’m going to find something else.” I was at that company for four years and I did really well. I was like top performer every year and I worked my butt off, but I started figuring out what was my side hustle going to be until I could leave my job.
Brandon: Right.
Brant: Like you, myself, and probably a lot of people watching this, we turned to real estate. 2007, that’s when I dove all-in to this thing. I started out buying rental properties. I bought ten rental properties my first year working my job. Then I began putting together partnerships because I couldn’t get financing anymore because it was just a whole different time and era.
Brandon: Right.
Brant: Putting partnerships, and then the third year, 2009 … Beginning of 2009 I left my job. I learned how to raise private money at that time, and that’s where things like, took off. We started scaling the business up. Flipping a lot, renting, learning owner financing. Started adding some layers to our business, which our company name is called Invest Home Pro. We’re here in Houston Texas. We essentially have an acronym in the office, it’s called ICE. We make money off ICE. It sounds illegal but it’s not. We make money off of investments, construction, and education. I’ve always loved to speak and teach in front of others. What we’ve done over the years is kind of build out the systems to run our investment business, and then we added services to clients, students, through construction and educational services.
Brant: When I tell my story also, I like to say I’m a big mindset guy. From what I’ve seen, man, it’s like everything is up here, because when I got started … I love when people come to me like, “Oh, I can’t get started in real estate because I don’t have any money.” Well, when my wife and I got started, when I finally made my decision, my wife and I were living in an apartment. We had no money in the bank. Like, just to pay our bills month to month because we had been paying off student loans. Me and her both had student loans. We had bad credit cards, just stupid mid-20s kind of debt stuff that we had. We had finished paying that stuff off. We had our first kid, we were trying to start a family. We had no money. I remember I told her, I was like, “I’m going to buy ten rental properties this year.” I don’t know how she didn’t bust out laughing at me but she didn’t. She kind of kept a cool face and she was like, “That sounds really great. How do you plan on doing that?” I was like, I don’t really know.
Brant: I remember it sounds stupid, but I went and got a cheap poster board. I got a piece of paper right here and so I’ll kind of show you what the poster board looked like. I went and got this big poster board and it just had ten squares drawn on it like that. Hung it on the wall of our apartment and it was like, hideous to look at but she let me do it. I told her, “Every time I buy a house I’m going to fill it in.” I did. That same year, later that year at the end of that year in December I closed on my tenth property. I was just like, holy bleep. This mindset stuff works. I had just started listening to Tony Robbins and Kiyosaki. I’m like, I’m just going to test this stuff out and see what happens. What do we have to lose? We don’t have anything.
Brandon: Right. Right.
Brant: That was it, man. That was kind of like the beginning of the story where my entrepreneurial journey really began by just diving into this thing.
Brandon: Yeah. That’s awesome. Yeah, a lot of people are starting in the wholesale out the gate with no money. It’s pretty awesome and badass and impressive that you pulled off ten rentals your first year. Are those all bank-financed, I assume, yeah?
Brant: Yeah. It was 2007, so I tell that to some people right now and … especially younger people who weren’t really there. They were like high school kids or something. They don’t understand 2007. It was a different day and age. That was not a major accomplishment, what I did the first year. I mean, it was a lot of work but yeah, I was able to get bank financing because my wife and I always had good credit we just didn’t have any cash.
Brandon: Yeah.
Brant: I failed to mention too, the first deal I had, I had to borrow … We just finishing paying off these credit cards so I had to borrow like seven grand on that credit card to use it as a … essentially my earnest down payment on that first deal. Then after that I negotiated with my hard money lender. I cut him a check, borrowed another five grand. Cut him a check that he kept as his office in his desk just in case I didn’t perform. He would always float me not having to put any money down on my next deals.
Brandon: Nice.
Brant: I was kind of able to negotiate 100% financing. I buy them in hard money, refinance them, rent them out. Then I could only do ten that way with Fannie Mae. Then I hit that wall in 2008, like everybody did. I was like, holy crap man, what am I going to do? That was a whole new thing, because I knew nothing about partnerships. I didn’t know about private money. Man, I was so wet behind the years. I just started having conversations with anyone who would give me the time of day and just started putting together some partnerships. I put together three partnerships in 2008 to buy rental properties. That kept me moving closer to my goal. I got to 2008 and I’m like, all right, I bought ten more. I’ve got these properties, it’s cool. A ton of equity now because the market was shifting. I’m like, but, I’d rather just keep the whole deal. That’s when I discovered private money. That was like the big light bulb. I just redirected my efforts to just hardcore pursuit of private money. Yeah, so that was kind of the progression.
Brandon: Yeah. Up until this point you had been a sole entrepreneur basically, just you? Or did you have a team by 2008?
Brant: 2008 the only person … I was doing everything for the most part. I was working with wholesalers. You mentioned I was in wholesaling. I couldn’t do everything.
Brandon: Right.
Brant: Kind of the mentoring I was getting at that time was to buy rental properties. I was like, all right, this dude is much more successful than me, I’m going to do what he says.
Brandon: Yeah.
Brant: I started on that path and I really didn’t learn how to market for deals until about 2010, 2011, because I didn’t need to. I had really good wholesalers and I worked with them exclusively. 2010, hedge funds starting coming to town. The market started coming back so the wholesaler deals weren’t as good. They were charging more for them, etc, etc. That’s when I started learning how to market. Honestly, for people just starting out who are watching this, that’s the progression I recommend for most people, depending on where they’re at cash-wise, time-wise, is to get in wholesaling. If you can learn how to market, you can predict your future, right, for the most part. If you don’t have the ability to market, you’ve really put yourself in a dangerous spot whenever markets shift and things like that. If you’re dependent upon others to bring you deals, it can get hairy in times if you don’t have that ability to market.
Brant: In 2008, I brought on … he wasn’t an employee. He was kind of one of my subcontractor guys. He was a sales guy. I started paying him to manage my rehabs. Not even much, like two to five hundred a job he’d go and check on a couple times a week, give me updates, started finding cheaper labor. That was my only employee, or he wasn’t an employee … We ended up creating a partnership and creating a construction company in 2009. Three years later insert bad partner story, criminal activity, had to get rid of him kind of thing.
Brandon: Yeah.
Brant: At that point in time it was me, him, and I hired my full-time assistant 2009. By the end of 2009 I had three construction managers, a sales guy, and an assistant. I had five people at the end of 2009. Full-time employees.
Brandon: That’s crazy. That’s good. That’s massive growth, especially for the construction.
Brant: I realized I knew nothing about really running a business and we almost went out of business in 2010 for a little bit. We had too much fat that I had to cut, and didn’t know. I wasn’t managing it all.
Brandon: Right.
Brant: [inaudible 00:13:31] work week and I brought in all these people and just hired them and wasn’t watching my numbers. Learned some pretty valuable lessons that year.
Brandon: Yeah. I’ve noticed that within my business as well. I owner operated a franchise for a while, four years in Arizona. Same deal, it was just me myself and I doing everything. There was never any growth. It was consistent, at best, for four years. When I jumped into real estate I was like man, I’ve got to do something different. I didn’t know marketing with the carpet company. I didn’t know that your database was your number one source, so I would never call old clients or prospects and say, “Hey, it’s the six month mark.” I didn’t know all that crap then. Now it’s definitely not perfect but followup is one of my biggest deals, and then marketing. I started out the gate in real estate trying to learn marketing before I learned anything else. That’s been one of my factors.
Brandon: At what point did you … You started a brokerage, correct?
Brant: No, never started a brokerage. I got my real estate license 2009. January of 2009 … January one. That’s when I was like, I’m quitting my job this year. [inaudible 00:15:00]. That was still … man, that was a very scary time in the world, and in the real estate world especially. I remember, it was doom and gloom. I was doing well with my corporate job and I remember, I made up my mind and said I’m going to quit my job. I told my wife, told my parents. My dad’s like, “What the hell is wrong with you? You’ve got this good job, why would you leave it? You could, you know, make a good living there.” I love and honor and respect my dad but I’m thinking, I’m like, “Dad, I’ve watched you at a job for 30-something years of my life and you’ve essentially been miserable. Been laid off multiple times. That’s a hell of a lot more risky than me going out and doing this full time.”
Brant: I remember, I’ve got this little graphic that I share at speaking events, and I shows when I quit my job, the market … consumer index was at the lowest point it had ever been since the Depression. In March of 2009, so that’s when I quit. I was a little bit nervous, man. I said, let me go ahead and get my real estate license just as a hedge against if all goes wrong.
Brant: I banged out those classes. I don’t know if you can do this now or not, but I told them, I’m like … It was the first week of January I’m like, “Pretend I’m not here this week. You’ve got to take care of the kids because I’m coming home from work, I’m locking myself in the office, I’m banging out these classes.” I banged out all the classes in five days online. Took the test in February, passed. There’s two tests. I passed on with a 70. Got my real estate license, and honestly I barely ever used it. I still had an agent that I was working with. Discounted agent, whatever, that I worked with for many years. He did a good job so I just sent him all my stuff. I didn’t do a lot with my license but I was licensed until about two years ago. I had a full-time agent on staff. Never used it. I was sitting in a continuing education class and I said, why am I here? Why do I have this license? Being an agent wasn’t helping me essentially accomplish the two main reasons I got into real estate, which was for freedom and wealth creation.
Brandon: Yeah.
Brant: I deactivated my license and just focused on my business until … what people are looking at watching this online with that little eXp logo above your head. Until that thing kind of blindsided me and that business model … then I got back, I reactivated my license. Yeah, so here we are now both doing the eXp thing.
Brandon: Yeah. Really? I thought for some reason you already had a brokerage going and that side, you killed it so quickly. That’s even a better story right there, having to reactivate your license.
Brant: No. My last broker would tell you that I’m the worst real estate agent in history, man. [inaudible 00:18:08] fill out the forms, man.
Brandon: Yeah.
Brant: Definitely was never trying to go the brokerage route. Nope.
Brandon: That’s awesome. What interested you or what piqued the interest with eXp?
Brant: Oh, man.
Brandon: How long did it take you to think or see that you could push forward and make it something that’d be worth it?
Brant: For me, it was pretty much right when I saw it I knew it was going to be something big. I didn’t want to do it, only because of time. I looked at it, I saw it and I remember telling my wife. I’m like, “I need you to watch this video. I already know what you’re going to say,” because she was going to say, “That sounds great, you need to do this.” I remember telling her, I was like, “I need you to give me some reason why I shouldn’t do this.” Like, you’re focused on other things, everything’s going good, you don’t have the time. That was really … I was like, I’m not really trying to start something else right now.
Brandon: Right.
Brant: I was like, man, it’s like they say … They, people the eXp say once you see it you can’t unsee it. She looked at it and she watched the video and she was like, “No, you better do that.” I was like, “I know it. I know it.” For me it really came down to this, was, I got started in real estate really … like I said, to create freedom first and foremost. Absolute number one thing is to control time. Number two was like, to create wealth and passive income. When I saw eXp I’m like, this will help me create more freedom, create wealth, passive income. It checked all the boxes of everything I was wanting to do. Also, just my personal mission statement man is … like with coaching people. I love to motivate, educate, inspire, and mostly equip people to go out and create what they want to create. The eXp business model, it does that. It does it absolutely. It just fit in really well with what I’m all about, what our company is about, and what I’m trying to create in my life and business, what I’m trying to help other people create.
Brandon: Yeah.
Brant: It checked all the boxes man. When we come across opportunities like that as an entrepreneur it’s like, it’s what we do.
Brandon: Yeah.
Brant: For me it was a no brainer after a little bit of trying to fight it. It was a no brainer for me.
Brandon: Yeah. Man, I had the opposite. Well, I wouldn’t say the exact opposite. I got approached two years ago by Chris Sawyer. He brought me and I think it was … Who was it? I’m pretty sure it was Rob Flick or Jean Frederick. He brought them out to Forney, where I live, and we had a lunch and learn. I was like, I mean, this sounds badass but is this guy really traveling the world right now and getting paid whatever he was getting paid at the time? Like 60 grand a month? I’m like, no. That’s BS, I’m just going to stick over here. I had just switched to another brokerage firm that kind of specialized in investments and I was happy there. I brushed it off for the longest time. Chris stayed on me forever and then he finally gave up. Then I don’t think you were there, but January I went on the Caribbean cruise with the financial friends-
Brant: No, I wasn’t there.
Brandon: Yeah. Connor brought it back up. He’s like, “Dude.” You know Connor, dude. He would not stop talking about it.
Brant: Oh, yeah.
Brandon: I’m pretty sure he had everybody hating him by the end of the cruise but it stuck on me big-time then. He hadn’t even done it yet but he was dead adamant that this was his end-all be-all and he was going to drop everything and do it. I was like, yeah, we’ll see. Within … I forget his story now, but within a few weeks he had already finished his classes and by week five or six he was licensed and already on the road and running. I think it was within a month of that I was like, I guess I gotta go give this thing a shot.
Brandon: I got into it pretty quickly. Me being … I’m fairly introverted. I don’t do cold reach outs. Cold calling within my own real estate business is a real pain point for me, but fairly quickly I was able to get over ten agents just by sphere of influence. It was pretty easy. Then I started thinking one day, how do I help people see the light? They see the technology. Technology is the way into the future. It seems to attract a lot of investors. Then I came up with this deal, because you know most investors are buying these 100, 120, 150 thousand dollar houses to try to get 250 to 500 bucks in passive income a month, net.
Brandon: I was like, think of it this way. Every single time you bring on an agent, you just added one more property to your portfolio as long as you brought on a producing agent. We’re averaging, I don’t know, I think once I got 18 bucks from one but then my latest one was 400-some odd dollars from one closing. That’s essentially, in my mind, I just brought on a rental portfolio without having to raise money and then hit that ten rental property ceiling like you did your first year, whereas this is massively unlimited and growing insanely.
Brant: Right. Yeah. What I tell agents … I mean, I first heard the model from Connor. He does such a great job of communicating really the opportunity. He put it in a good light for me, and so that was helpful. Then I really looked at it just as an entrepreneur, as a business owner, what’s my risk and what’s my reward? There was no risk at all, other than time. For people out there who are already a licensed agent, what is your risk? There’s nothing to sell or nothing to buy. You have to have your license hung somewhere. It was like, there’s essentially no risk but there was a massive, massive possible reward in this thing. There was a huge upside.
Brandon: Yeah.
Brant: Rob Flick’s numbers of monthly passive income and others who’ve grown substantially by the time I saw [inaudible 00:24:57] what people were making … I was like man, even if I can hit like five or ten percent of that, I think I’m pretty happy because I have zero investment in this thing.
Brandon: Right, yeah.
Brant: I’m like, why wouldn’t I try it out? That’s what I tell agents that I talk to. I’m like, what’s your risk and what’s your reward? You can always leave. They’re like, what if the company goes out of business? I’m like, all right, then take your license somewhere else. The revenue share is paid monthly. I’m six months into this thing and I think I’m going to hit two grand this month. Like, you can’t do that in residential real estate using 100% leverage. If you’re like, some trust fund baby and you’re slapping cash and buying properties, yeah, go for it. I wasn’t that way. We fully leveraged properties and that’s how I was raised in the real estate world. You get two or three hundred bucks, maybe four hundred bucks or five hundred.
Brant: We both know that the word cash flows means that cash flow needs, when it’s a rental property … For me, they didn’t teach me this in the courses I took. I absolutely teach my students, cash flow from rental property does not need to flow into your pocket. It needs to sit in your bank account for vacancies, repairs, evictions, all that kind of stuff that’s going to be necessary. Make-readys, all that kind of stuff. If you’re fully leveraging rental property … for the most part, an average rental property is going to provide like a six to ten percent return. Somewhere around there. You think about, if you’re an investor and you’re cost to capital is say, seven or eight percent, is that thing really cash flow? It’s like a break-even thing. Now you’re getting appreciation tax, I get it. I buy a lot of rental property. I love rental property, but it’s not going to create this cash flow kind of passive lifestyle unless you’re buying a massive amount of real estate and you really know how to scale a business.
Brandon: Yes.
Brant: Entrepreneurs don’t have that skillset or they’re not really committed to that. Trust me, it’s not always a fun business. You’ve got to be committed to it. I’m looking at eXp and I’m like, huh. Six months, two grand, no risks, no investment, having a lot of fun doing it. Kind of liking this.
Brandon: Yeah, I know a lot of people and a lot of mutual friends that are within the Financial Friends network that have been in real estate 20-plus years in the single family world and then they’re like, “Man, I just want to sell it all now. I want to get over this.” Whereas eXp is … dude, it’s forever. Was it five years you’re vested or three years? I forget.
Brant: What was it? Three years.
Brandon: Three years vested, yeah. I mean, the real estate world as we know it would have to implode for it to slow down. It’s impossible. eXp has got so much cash on hand now, crossing fingers, not much can go wrong. They just built the company so strong and it was built for growth.
Brant: Yeah. Some of the other things too is … To each his own. Everyone needs to look at what their goals and their dreams and their aspirations are. For me, I absolutely teach and coach and train my students to learn, to invest in rental properties. We still do. I buy them every single year, but I have a different outlook for my rental properties. We have a different game plan and a different strategy than when I got started. The misnomer of this cash flow thing and this passive income, it doesn’t exist with rental property for the most part. It’s not been my experience.
Brant: As we’re all getting older, I’m trying to move towards … I want my business to be more passive every single year. When I got started I was 100% active, 0% passive. Each year I’m trying to catch up to the active part going down, where I’m able to outsource and employee people to do things I do. Really, just spend more time on truly passive investments. We started converting … five or six years ago I learned about owner finance so we started converting rental properties to owner finance. That’s what we do now. I absolutely love that model. eXp just fits the passive category. My wife and I have five kids, so finding passive opportunities, it’s not really even an option for me. It’s mandatory, because I desire to spend more time with my wife and kids, doing stuff I love to do. I love to exercise and take trips and do all that kind of stuff, so it’s just a necessary thing.
Brandon: Yeah, I think that’s why I would say most entrepreneurs get into building their own business and their own brand or whatever it is, for their form of freedom, whether that be time, money, whatever. Yeah, we’re always looking for what makes more sense for us. If there’s no capital out of pocket and very little time and not having to worry about raising money and leveraging, then it’s a no brainer. Not to mention the splits are far great than a lot of these franchises out there.
Brant: Yeah, definitely man.
Brandon: Well, we’ll jump off eXp so we don’t bore a lot of people here. You wrote a book, your private lender book. You want to go into that for a minute?
Brant: Yeah. I wrote a few books. I’ll kind of show how that book came about, I guess. I don’t know, like six, seven years ago I started doing a little speaking stuff and doing a couple little small events. People call you and they’re … probably like they do with you all the time. “Hey man, can we go out to breakfast or lunch,” and that kind of thing.
Brandon: Yeah.
Brant: Honestly most days I don’t eat breakfast or lunch so I’m like, yeah, you know. I got this kind of itch to write a book, so I wrote this book several years ago called “How To Flip A House.” I just started sending it to people who were like, “Hey man, tell me about this.” I’m like, “Let me send you my book. That’ll answer all your questions.” I wrote that book and a couple other little books and I really kind of just discovered I like writing. It was very therapeutic for me. I don’t know man, it was weird. Growing up I would hardly read a book. You’d force me to read a book. Now of course I love reading and I love writing. I don’t know, like two years ago … I’m pretty active at Quest. I do a lot of speaking with Quest RA, that you’re familiar with.
Brandon: Yeah.
Brant: I was doing this thing in Houston here called Private Lender lunch and learn. We started doing it like every quarter. We just had a great response from lenders. The event was going pretty well but every time we’d do the event … We’d initially set up for a 60 or 90 minute class and the very first time that we did it we stayed over two hours for the first class. When I say “we would do it”, me and Nathan Long who is a CEO, we would hold the class. We started doing it monthly. We’d pack the house, people would stay after answering all these questions. I just got with Nathan. I’m like, “Man, this is a really important thing for lenders to understand this,” because a lot of private lenders and soon-to-be private lenders don’t truly understand the opportunity. All the ins-and-outs and the mechanics of how it works. A lot of people in the marketplace don’t even understand this opportunity exists, but when they really understand it I don’t think there’s a better investment out there for people … something that’s secured, has incredible rates of return. It’s a local investment. They can drive by, see it, touch it. It’s going to appreciate. All these things. There’s equity in it.
Brandon: Yeah. Yeah.
Brant: I just told Nathan, I’m like, “Look man, I’m going to start working on a book. I want you to contribute a couple chapters on the [inaudible 00:33:33] thing. We’re going to do this.” He’s like, “All right, let me know what you need.” Went to work and put together the Private Lender Playbook. We were able to launch that early last year. It’s been pretty cool.
Brandon: Yeah. Don’t want to take too much more of your time, but what do you plan on doing moving forward 2019 and beyond, just figuring out more ways to get yourself out of the business, or growing into different niches, or what’s your plan?
Brant: Yeah. Always looking for ways to carve out more time in my business. That’s a never-ending pursuit, because there’s always … we’re changing some software, there’s some change in the market or whatever, what have you. We’ve been focused though on ICE for a long time. Investments, construction, education. Just growing those three businesses, scaling them.
Brant: Then of course what’s new to me is eXp now, just kind of integrating that into what we’re doing. For the most part, that’s it. I guess the only thing I would share is our theme this year is … I think it’s important not only to have a mission statement, core values and things like that, ours are hanging on our wall … I create a theme of the year and really for me, this year, I realized some areas where I was kind of getting stagnant or just comfortable. When we get comfortable, to me that’s really a dangerous place to be.
Brant: Theme of the year this year is playing to win. If we’re going to do it, if we’re going to spend our time, energy, effort and resources doing something, let’s go all out. Let’s play to win instead of kind of that playing not to lose thing. The whole prevent defense thing, man. Whenever you’re trying to prevent a loss, you’re just guaranteeing that loss. We’re trying to keep going up rather than plateauing and playing not to lose. That’s the theme of the year, by just doing what we’ve been doing. Just trying to enjoy life and each and every day, because it truly is man-like. Life is a gift. Life is a blessing. I feel fortunate where we’re at, and I try to do my part to share and give back, as do you, man. Just encourage people and go out and do whatever they’re doing. Those that are stuck working jobs, burned out, whatever it is. You don’t have to settle for that.
Brant: I was talking to a guy yesterday and he was an electrical contractor, he said for like 33 years. He made a comment, he was telling me about what he does, what is his experience, he wants to get into real estate. I’m like, how long have you been doing that? He’s like, “33 bleepity-bleep miserable years.” I’m like, it may sound insensitive but it’s a choice. It’s a choice that we all make. I know it’s hard for some people to fathom leaving that job and that stability for something that seems a little uncertain, but that’s a choice that essentially most all of us are faced with. I was at my job and it was still scary to leave, but I was looking at the risk versus reward and I’m like, “I can always go get another job.” For me, the risk was creating a life that I loved and enjoyed and financial freedom and all this kind of stuff.
Brandon: Yeah, I’d have to agree with you. A lot of it, I would say, is definitely choice. Inner demons, battling. You have to battle against it to weigh the pros and cons. Ultimately a lot of people succumb to those cons. The what-ifs, the unknowns, and stuff.
Brant: Yeah.
Brandon: Well, we’ll wrap it up. I always ask everybody one question. If you had six months to live, the doctor said this is affecting your ability to live past six months, what would you do with that six months?
Brant: Man, all right. If I had six months to live … I mean, honestly? Do more of what I’m doing right now, but be present in each and every moment. Here’s what I mean by that. Four or five years ago I went through a pretty bad burnout stage in life. I went through a pretty bad burnout stage in life where business had plateaued because I burned out. I was like, all right, making money is not that … that is not going to make you happy. I went to this point where I was working hardcore just trying to make money, create wealth, where I was beginning to burn bridges relationship-wise with my wife and other areas of my life. Drinking a lot, just my health was like, really in a bad place.
Brant: I hit this quote/unquote “bottom”. On the brink of divorce and things were getting kind of ugly. I didn’t even love what I was doing anymore. I was like, I don’t even like real estate, it sucks and I’m just going to go do something else. Been there done that kind of thing. Really what I realized, and I went through a lot of deep soul-searching … I’m talking meditation retreats, seeking mentors, and just spiritual training. All this kind of stuff. What it really boiled down to, I was neglecting core areas of my life. I really learned this a few years ago when I went through this. I’ve been applying it some days, some weeks, some months better than others, but I always apply it.
Brant: It’s this, there’s basically essentially four core areas of life that we operate in, or that I do. For me, it’s in my faith, like who am I called to be and what am I called to do. What is at my core, what am I creating with my time here? With my relationship with God and my time here. It’s my faith, it is my family, it is my fitness and my health, and it is my finance. I operate in all four of those core areas.
Brant: What I did for a long time only operate really financially. I was just so focused on that I was burning these other areas down. What I do is make a commitment to invest in those areas daily. Into my faith, my family, my fitness, my finance. Making sure I’m spending my time with God and my beliefs and strengthen that area of my life and make sure I’m fulfilling that purpose. Make sure that I’m investing in a relationship with my wife, with my children, with loved ones, with friends. Make sure I acknowledge and appreciate and honor those that I need to honor and appreciate in my life. Spending time in my body, which essentially turns into exercising, challenging myself. Scheduling things like to … dude, I’m not going to do the stuff that you do. I’m not jumping off cliffs and all this kind of stuff.
Brandon: Right.
Brant: I’m like, kind of the Iron Man of … compete in Iron Man competitions. Got in MMA cage fights, got my ass knocked in the MMA cage fights. Go train with Navy Seals. I like to do stuff like that-
Brandon: Yeah, that’s cool.
Brant: -just to challenge myself, and then invest in my business. When I say I would do more of what I’m doing, I just would be more present doing it.
Brandon: Yeah.
Brant: I would pursue those four areas of my life, like hardcore with a passion. Just without fear, man. I think that’s what I would do. I don’t know exactly all the exact things I would do … like laser-beam focus on those areas until my last day.
Brandon: Yeah. Well man, I appreciate your time.
Brant: Yeah, man. I really enjoyed it.
Brandon: Yeah. If anybody wanted to reach out to you, what’s the best way?
Brant: Man, I’m on the Google, Instagrams, Instabook kind of places. You can go to BrantPhillips.com, that’s the easiest place to go. BrantPhillips.com, you can get all my contact information there.
Brandon: Cool. All right man, I’ll tag that below. All right man, I appreciate it.
Brant: Yeah man, likewise.
Brandon: Yeah. We’ll speak soon, man.
Brant: Appreciate it. Thank you.
Brandon: Yeah. Catch you later.
Brandon: Hey guys. Hope you enjoyed today’s content. I want to thank you all for listening in. As the great Les Brown stated, if you are not pursuing your dreams, you are literally committing spiritual suicide. We’ll catch you on the flip side.