BiggerPockets Money Podcast - 17: Building a Lean Business With (Almost) No Capital with Alan Donegan

Episode Date: April 23, 2018

On this week’s episode of the Biggerpockets Money Podcast, we chat with Alan Donegan. Alan Donegan watched - and helped - his father run a super-successful sportswear company, until the economy shifted and they lost everything. Determined to not... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Bigger Pockets Money, show 17. Do a mini experiment. Like literally do a mini experiment. Let's try and sell it. If it sells, you've got the start of a business. If it doesn't sell, we haven't lost anything. So build a free website, get a free pitch, borrow some space. Do a free version of it and try and sell it. If it sells, you've got a business. If it doesn't, you haven't lost anything and you've learned a lot. So if there's one concept I'd love to leave with the audience, it's the concept of the mini business experiment. It's time for a new American dream, one that doesn't involve working in a cubicle for 40 years, barely scraping by. Whether you're looking to get your financial house in order, invest the money you already have, or discover new paths for wealth creation, you're in the right place. This show is for anyone who has money or wants more. This is the Bigger Pockets Money Podcast. How's it going, everybody? I'm Scott Trench. I'm here with my co-host, Miss Mindy Jensen. How you doing today, Mindy? I am doing fantastic Scott. I just got back from Portland. I just flew in last night.

night and boy, are my arms tired? Oh, geez. Yep, that makes sense because you were flying with your arms. Oh, my goodness. That's like the one bad joke that I know. I mean, I know a lot of bad jokes, but they're just usually not funny. That one's really bad. Okay. Well, we got a great show today, right? We got Alan Donagan from Pop Up Business School here to talk about how to start a business. I'm looking forward to that. Yes. You know, Alan has a really great backstory in that he has father, he saw his father be extremely successful and then kind of lose everything. And that really affected him similar to last week's episode with Joel Larsgaard. Similar to that, except Alan was in college or out of college after that happened. So it affected him in slightly different way.

But yeah, it's a great show today. Alan just can't stop giving out great information. And the way I like to kind of think about this show is we, Bigger Pockets Money in general, our job is to encourage you, the listener, to adopt. good financial habits so that you can save a greater percentage of your income. You know, hopefully improve it your career and go on to earn greater income kind of actively. And then, of course, invest that in an intelligent path, whether that's through stock investing, maybe index funds or real estate or one of the multiple other ways that you can invest your money.

But at the same time, if you've got a passive approach, if you've got a strong savings rate and you've got a good job, there's this other option that you can kind of pursue with your free time, which is side hustles or starting small business. And Allen's, I think what Alan really brings to this discussion is the ability to do this at such a low risk and with so little money in. And so this definitely jives with my philosophy of just, hey, I'm going to try a bunch of things. And hopefully one of them will work out over a long period of time. And again, none of these things have significant risk. I'll actually talk about a little bit about some of the things that I've tried personally over the years later on in the show as well.

But this is an approach that I think is a really good additional piece for those of you who are trying to pursue financial freedom and already have the other three things, earning, saving, and consistent investing on lockdown. Yeah, this is such a great show because of all the information that Alan shares with you about, you know, in America, go big or go home is like our national motto. And that's not actually necessarily the best way to start a business. And he said, don't start it big, start it small and see what happens. Start things for free. Borrow things instead of buying them right out. Because if you borrow something and it fails, you just give it back. But if you buy something, now you own it and maybe you don't have the money for it, you know, to cover those costs.

And that can be a huge detriment to you ever starting another business. Yeah. You can prove the business model before you spend several hundred thousand dollars investing in a physical space and decking it out and all that. Or you can discover it. your business model is going to work before you spend all that money. Did I say that backwards? No, you said that correct. That's, you know, figure it out, figure out if it's going to work before you invest a ton of money. But a lot of times it's really difficult to do that. How do you, using one of the examples from the show, how do you start a restaurant without investing in all by a space, get all the kitchen equipment, you know, do all of that. Alan has a great story about somebody who was able to start a restaurant without doing any of that.

That's awesome. And it's just thinking slightly outside the box. Yep. I think that's exact. And that works. You know, we've heard real life examples from Alan. We'll hear him in a little bit about how that works at the individual level. And guess what? We hear at bigger pockets run our business basically the same way. We try ideas out and then scale them once and then invest in them once that they've proven that they have all that potential to grow and serve you guys, the listeners and the users effectively. Yeah. That's how this show started out. Yep. We just tried it out and it worked. Okay. So before we bring Alan, and Scott, I want to continue on with what we'd started last week, which is asking a question of our community. And I'm going to ask you to start off. What is your top easily implementable money tip to help people get started on the path to financial independence? So I think we had, I think you and I shared one last week where it was start tracking your saving. After that, you know, my quick tip would be listen to this episode and then go out and find someone who's started a side hustle that has been successful or a small business and take them out to lunch or coffee or a beer and just

hear their story. You know, I think there's something about hearing it on the podcast here, but there's another thing, there's another kind of side of this about hearing it from a live flesh and blood person face to face and hearing their story that makes it all that much more attainable for you. Yes. And, you know, having that face-to-face conversation, I've listened to podcasts where I'm listening to them, ask the question, here's the answer. And I'm like, well, the most obvious follow-up question is this and then the host doesn't ask it. And I'm sure we've done that too. When you're in that conversation with the person, you can ask the most obvious follow-up question. You can ask and keep drilling down. Sometimes questions just get asked at the top level and you don't really drill down

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That's perfect. Mindy, should we go ahead and bring Alan in now? We should. Alan, welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money Show. How's it going? I'm excited to be here on Bank Holiday Monday, Easter Monday. Ah, there you go. I didn't realize it's holiday.

Okay. Yeah, we get a day off in England. We actually get Easter Friday and Easter Monday off, so I've had a four-day weekend this weekend. Oh, wow. We could learn a thing or two from you guys because we only got Fridays off. We have a lot of holidays. I think I want to move to England, Scott. Fair enough. Yeah, we were to be worth both Friday and Monday here, so dang. Yes.

So I guess maybe we could start from the beginning here. What was your kind of introduction to money and how did you kind of become this business school guru kind of guy? How did that come about? Oh, interesting. Well, I think my dad was an entrepreneur, and he definitely influenced the way I went. But even at school, if you look way back to when I was sort of eight or nine, my mum had a recipe for Marsbar cake. And one of the school projects was to make food. So I made Mars Bar cake, which is Rice Krispies and Melted Mars bars all made into like a cake thing,

and then took it into school and sold it. And it was the best business model ever because my mum paid for the ingredients, and it was all profit. I first of all, I need some of this Mars bar cake because that sounds delicious. Is the Mars bar in America the same as the Mars bar in England? Exactly. You melt it with butter and pour it over rice crispies. And then you have an incredibly fattening dessert. Oh, that sounds fantastic.

Those are my favorite desserts. That's fantastic. And were you making these or was your mom making these? Well, she taught me how obviously and she was a big influence, but I was actually doing the labor and making them and then taking trays into school and selling them, I think, for five or ten cents a time, ten cents a time for a little square of them to the other kids in school. It's funny how you hear about a lot of entrepreneurs, how they got started at these very early ages with these kind of business ventures. And that's when they think about like, oh, that's when the kind of one of the bug got started and all that. I find it fascinating.

I didn't have that entrepreneurial bug myself. But if that's your first million, how did you make your second? second million in business. There was definitely not a million pounds in Mars Bar Cake. Definitely not. So I went and worked to my dad business Saturday mornings and he used to pay me like six bucks for an entire morning's work. He got slave labor out of me. And then I think he was having hard times. And he said instead of having pocket money, so like in England, it's kind of traditional to get pocket money each week if you're a young kid. He said,

said instead of having pocket money, you can have access to the products from our shop and sell them. And anything you sell over X price, you keep. So instead of like, he probably didn't have enough or didn't want to give me pocket money, but he gave me an opportunity to earn, which definitely influenced what I did. And I went out and sold shirts and sold sportswear at school and college. And then, yeah, some months in college, I made more than my first full-time job. Oh, so what was your dad's business? Sportswear. Yeah, he was a bit of a Del Boy, a bit of a dealer and a trader,

and he started buying sportswear from Europe that was left over at the end of the season and then selling it on. And he was one of the first people ever in sort of reselling sportswear. So the shop would get the first season to sell it and then you sell the end of the season stuff off. And he would go over to Europe and buy up all the stock from the shops, bring it to the UK and sell it off.

Okay, that's funny that you call it Europe. I call the whole thing Europe. Yeah. I'm American. I'm like, wait, what do you mean he went to Europe? Did you live in America when you were a kid? Okay, sorry. Okay, so sportswear, like regular clothes or like sports jerseys, like sports team wear? So just we're sorry.

Adidas, Nike, football shirts. Yeah, Puma, like, sports. All sorts of branded sportswear. He would buy it from sneakers to shirts to jog pants to in the 80s. You'd have shell suits. They were very fashionable back in. Okay. So like athletic wear?

Yeah. Athletic wear. Last season's athletic wear. And then he would sell it. Did he have an actual storefront? So he actually did really well in the 80s. And he built up. He had 20 sportswear stores, actual shops, plus three warehouses across England.

London. In the 80s, he was turning over 20 million pounds plus. Oh, so this, this wasn't just small beans. This wasn't just one little shop. No, he was quite good at it. Wow. He was very good at it. Okay, so that's how you're a millionaire then. You just invented the sportswear shop. Unfortunately not, he took on a lot of, actually Katie, my wife and I were discussing this today. What could we learn from what my dad did? He went bankrupt in the 90s in the first recession of the 90s. And he'd signed up for a lot of high-value leases on these stores. So in the boom of the 80s, everything was going well. He signed up for a lot of high-value leases. He had incredibly high fixed costs that he couldn't alter. So when the crash of the 90s happened, people stopped

buying sportswear overnight. And he was left with all these fixed costs and hundreds of staff. And he very quickly went bankrupt for a large amount of money. That's terrible. How would you, like, that's fascinating concept, though, that, hey, business is booming, things are going well. You assume a lot of these fixed costs, these leases or mortgages, if you're a real estate investor, and then suddenly the sun stops shining and you're left holding the bag with all of these expenses.

How would you say that that kind of lesson maybe has shaped kind of the way you approach business nowadays? It's very much shaped the way I do business. If things are going well, you can't assume they're going to continue to go well. It could change at any time. Interest rates are historically low. They could go through the ceiling. Who knows what's going to happen next, and you can't predict that.

You've got to be flexible enough to change. My business today, I have a team of 10 that helped me run a pop-up business school around the world. We've never had an office. Seven years of running this, we've always met in a cafe, at Starbucks. We've never had fixed costs. My only fixed costs are people. So that has definitely affected the way I run. their business. Oh, that's really interesting. So with your business, though, you don't need a

location. Like, you could have everybody over at your house. That's interesting. Well, actually, we thought, so the original plan, this business pop up business school, we travel around the world teaching people to build businesses. It basically was born out of the several reasons, but one of them was we didn't feel education actually taught people what they needed to be successful in life. So it doesn't teach you finance, it doesn't teach you sales, it doesn't teach you networking, it doesn't teach you investing. None of this stuff is actually taught at school. So my original plan was to set up a business school.

But when I looked at it, like a minimum, we needed a quarter of a million pounds, so $350,000 to get a building, to get people to set up this place to sell spaces on the course. I needed a massive amount of investment. So actually, instead of looking to do a permanent location that would cost a fortune to invest, we chose to do a pop-up version. So we borrowed other people's spaces and did two-week pop-up versions. And that was our way of starting without investing a fortune and having high fixed overheads. So I really want to get into this and learn more about your business and specifically hear

about how our listeners can go about building pop-up businesses, startup businesses on the side. But before we get to that, can we go back one step here and talk about your journey to starting that business? So it sounds like you had this kind of entrepreneurial streak as a child. You were selling the sports apparel in college and maybe a little bit thereafter, I guess. What was your journey like out of college or university to the point at which you began this business school? It was a whole mix of tough times with my father's business going bankrupt. he went bankrupt for 3.6 million pounds, so four and a half, five million dollars, which is a significant amount of money to lose.

And unfortunately, that debt was tied to the family home. So I had a dark time after college with that particular bit. We had to do car boot sales. I guess I don't know what the equivalent term is. in America. Garage sales where you're selling off your things. Yeah, you kind of turn up in a big field. Everyone turns up in their cars.

They open the trunk and you start selling out of them. So we used to go and sell off stuff to earn enough money to be able to buy food each week. So that was a challenging time. And then the bank started to close in and try and take the family home that I lived in. And I actually spent about 10 years with my mum and my brother fighting with the bank to try and keep our family home. And that debt was secured against the home. So they were trying to take it away from us, sell it to cover some of the debt. So spent about 10 years doing that.

And that definitely affected the way I run business. And I've seen so many people have started businesses, borrowed a lot of money. and that money, the business fails, you still owe it. You still have to pay it back. And I've seen what that can do to a family and how it rips it to pieces. So that has absolutely affected my philosophy. And I've wanted everyone to be able to start for free without ever having to experience going through that debt.

That's an incredible story. I mean, there's a lot of tragedy there and a lot of lessons to be learned. And I guess maybe kind of moving from there, what kind of businesses did you start maybe prior to or in conjunction with this pop-up business school? Did you have any other experiences? And to tag on to that, did you ever consider traditional employment, like getting a real job? Yeah, absolutely. So I actually like my dream when I was at school, I saw how successful my dad was. I'd always wanted to work with him.

I worked with him for a few years. But then he went through his second bankruptcy. see he was getting divorced from my mum. Being in the family business when people are getting divorced is not a good time. Like, avoid that at all costs. So I left. And I did the traditional employment thing. I did tele sales for about a year and a half.

I did field sales, not selling fields, but like going out and seeing people and selling photocopiers. I ran a pub for a little bit. I did after-school clubs for kids. I did recruitment for six months. I ran a landscape firm and was a general manager for a landscape firm. So I had 30 men in white vans. I told which grass to mow each day.

So I tried just like I tried lots of jobs and I had no idea of what I wanted to do. So I just kept trying things. And I think one of the biggest things for me is that if you don't try it, you'll never know if it's any good. So I just went out and tried lots of jobs. jobs. Eventually, I got fired from my last job, which turned out to be an absolute blessing, because that firing made me look at the industry, look at the market, and go, I don't want to do any of that. I want to start my own thing. And that's when I started the first business, which

was in training, which eventually led to pop up business school. So what is your degree in? You went to college, and I know college and university is different in England. Isn't college like junior college and university is like college? College for us is 16 to 18 and then university is 18 plus. Okay. But yeah, college. I never went to college. I barely made it through 16 to 18 year old.

Barely made it through and just left. And that's, I think a lot of people think you need a great education. You need lots of education to be able. able to go and do things, that's not been my experience. I have no degree. I have none of those qualifications. And yet I've run training courses to some of the biggest companies in the world. Like, that has never stopped me, never stopped me. Yeah, I think it's all mindset. I mean, it's not all mindset. You can't just be like, I'm going to be a physician. So I just know I can do it. You have to go to school for that. But, you know, when you're running your own business, when you're

doing these non-traditional jobs, I really think you need more hustle. than, you know, formal education. I went through the formal education system all the way through a bachelor's degree, which is a four-year degree here. And I don't use any of it currently. I studied fashion design, which is what all good podcast hosts did. It's, yeah. Scott, Scott uses his degree.

What is your degree, Scott? So I actually have a, I have two majors, two minors. I have majors in economics and history. and then corporate strategy and finance. So I use those a little bit. Oh, that explains a lot. Wow, okay. Yeah, so I actually do use a little bit of what I did,

but I went into finance after graduating college and all that. Okay, so we have listeners who want to be on the path to FI, to financial independence. How can they start a business? It sounds like you are preaching this. Don't go out and buy $3 million. pounds of inventory right before a crash, which is great advice, but nobody can predict the crash. Tell me a little bit about how somebody can start a business. What kind of businesses are being

started at this pop-up business school? So I guess just before I say what businesses start, there's many different ways to financial independence. You can invest in property. You can start your own business. You can get a well-paying job and save it. You can even get a bad paying job and save a massive percentage of your income, there's no right way to do it. Just the way we help people getting going is starting businesses. And we kind of do it on the let's start for free.

Let's get you going without spending any money. We've helped people start food businesses, cleaning businesses, escape rooms, and drone flying schools. And like, you name it, we've helped people start it. But one of the foundational bits is there is always a way to start without spending any money. And I think that for me is one of the key bits. If you're going to test running a business, test it without quitting your job, test it without spending a lot of money, test it quickly and see if it works.

And if it doesn't, kill it dead. And there is always a way to put it out there and try quickly. So I really like that. Test it without quitting your job. That is, what is it? 90% of all small businesses fail within the first two years or something like that. And, you know, I think that some of that is just really poor planning or just a monumentally bad idea. Typewriter repair in this day and age is not going to make you a millionaire.

Even TV repair. We're a disposable country. We're a disposable society. So, you know, some ideas are just past their prime. But there are other ideas could work really well, but don't quit your job to go run, you know, Alan's typewriter repair in the middle of downtown New York. I mean, you'll get the hipster crowd. And so there's two right there. But there's, you know, you need to branch out a little bit more. Scott? Yeah. And the 90% of businesses fail thing. I mean, what Alan's saying here is fail fast, I guess, and fail for free so that you can learn from that experience. And you can try again and again and again at extremely low risk as a nice addition to your otherwise quality financial plan. Is that a somewhat accurate statement, Alan? Absolutely. And like if we were to

summarize our entire strategy, it's fail fast and fail cheap. If it's going to go wrong, get it done quickly and inexpensively. And the opposite of that is the traditional business model. So if you were to write a business plan and spend several months writing a business plan, how much money you need to borrow, go into debt and borrow a significant amount of money, invest it in stock and premises, and, you know, the typewriter example, buy a load of typewriters, buy a shop, invest all the money, then open the doors and try and sell, where is everyone? That's slow and expensive. If that goes wrong, you're failing slow and expensive, and that's when people get into trouble.

If you do it a different way, and just to take the typewriter example, I've never started a typewriter business, but if I was, I would not open a shop. There's so many different ways to do it. You could do it with a website online. You could do a pop-up version in a bookstore and borrow a little bit of space. That would be where all your customers go anyway, I'm sure. There's so many ways to start and test without spending any money. And with, I know, five, six, seven weekends of time, you could see if it actually works or not.

And like the typewriter idea does have one thing going for it. It's a niche market. Like you could find typewriter lovers quite quickly and easily because I bet you they talk about it online. Oh, I bet they. No, you had me until online because that's so, okay, so there are people, I think it was, did JK Rowling type out all of her Harry Potter? Did she handwrite it? Either way, like there are people, like you said, that's really interesting.

There are people who want typewriters and you could probably have an entire typewriter repair company covering like all of America, but you don't want to be in New York City in the super high rent. You could do it from your house just as easily and you're going to get just as many walk-in customers to your house as you will, you know, walking past the store. I think a couple more people just coming in thinking it was an ironic name. So can we walk through like an example of, like say that I'm a student and I want to learn how to start a business. What's an example of a path that someone's gone through where they've maybe failed a couple of times and then hit on one after, you know, multiple attempts, kind of using this model.

Well, let me give you a real life example. Feel free to look them up online. They're called Time Trap Escape Rooms in Reading. Incredible what they have achieved. They came to our Reading Popup Business School. The lady's name was Andrew, Andrew and Katie. Andrew at the time was doing lampshades that she hand-painted. She launched that business.

She did reasonably well at it, but not particularly scalable. And she actually went to one of her other passions, which was escape rooms and designing games. Now, I've actually got a friend who launched an escape room in the traditional way of doing it. And what he did, the row business plan, he borrowed a lot of money, he spent all the money on a big building and a big launch. They didn't get enough customers. They couldn't pay back the loans. bankrupt, they closed the business. Katie did it the complete opposite after working with us. And she actually, like, she wanted to do a pop-up version. So she went round the entire of the town

in this country, the city called Reading, and she knocked on all the doors, met the restaurants, went travelling around trying to find space to do a pop-up version, got rejected all day long until she was just walking back to the car with Andrew. And there was one last host. hotel called Great Expectations in Redding. She went in, she told the manager what they wanted to do. The manager actually said, well, we have a room we're not using at the front. You could do it there. And they did a deal for a six-week pop-up version of the escape room. So they did spend a little bit of money decking out the room, but it wasn't a significant amount. But they got the space for free. What the hotel got out of it was that the hotel, like after the escape room, people need

drinks and they need food. So it brought a whole host of customers into that hotel that wouldn't have been there without the escape room. They did the six week pop up. It sold out, went brilliantly well. From that version, they earned enough money to put down their deposit on their own building in Reading Town Centre. They've got their own building now and they're looking at another building, got about six or seven staff running escape room games. They're phenomenal little bit of business. But they started for free, well, for virtually nothing. And they did it with a pop-up version. They did not start with heavy debt and risk.

That is such an awesome story. I think that's fantastic. And exactly what you just said. Like you just try it with very little risk. It's something that sounds like a fun side project. This does not sound like it was started out as a full-time business, but it has the potential to grow into one. Right.

So can we just fire through like three or four more examples of success stories like this? Yeah, I mean, it depends what industry you're in, whether you're selling food, what you're doing. One of the most successful guys on the business was in retail consultancy. And if you're being a consultant, you literally need nothing other than a laptop. He built himself a website. He worked on the search engine optimization through our course, and he got himself to the top of the Google rankings for the term retail consultant. he landed two big retail chains in his first year and made 100 grand in his first year. Equally, you do see people who do it and they fail.

And I'm really happy about that because they haven't lost anything. They've got a learning and they can move on to the next thing. All sorts of different soap businesses and different things. Some work really well and they sell lots. Some don't sell anything. And they haven't lost particularly much. but they've learnt what doesn't work. And I think if I could give anything to your audience,

it would be do a mini experiment. Like literally do a mini experiment. Let's try and sell it. Let's try and sell it. If it sells, you've got the start of a business. If it doesn't sell, we haven't lost anything. So build a free website, get a free pitch, borrow some space.

Do a free version of it and try and sell it. If it sells, you've got a business. If it doesn't, you haven't lost anything. and you've learned a lot. So if there's one concept, I'd love to leave with the audience, it's the concept of the mini business experiment. So what's a mini business experiment? Like, walk me through something that, you know,

something that's a success and then you turn it into something else. Was it like the escape room? I mean, it seems like she would have had to deck out any escape room, even if she had rented the space, put down a deposit and all of that, versus getting the space for free. So it really seems like all of her costs were costs that would have been either way. So she got a free space.

And actually we talk about five different ways to get stuff to be able to start. So one of them would be get free stuff. You can build a website for free. There's plenty of them out there like Wix and Weebly and there's all sorts of different ones that will get going for free. You can do promotion for free on Twitter and you can share it with friends on Facebook. There's always a way to do all that stuff for free. you can borrow stuff.

So if you were decking out an escape room, then why not borrow the curtains from your parents' house? Borrow the bookcase. Borrow the different stuff. You don't have to buy new you can borrow. And to give you another example of the business that borrowed, there was a guy that wanted to start a restaurant. He didn't want to do it the traditional way. So what he did was he looked to borrow a restaurant to start his own. And you're probably thinking, how do you borrow a restaurant?

He found a cafe that was open from 7 in the morning till 4pm in the afternoon. And the owners didn't want to open in the evening. They'd earned their money. They worked really hard. And it was shut from 4pm. So he actually went in and did a deal to do a week-long pop-up version of his restaurant. So he borrowed the whole restaurant. He borrowed the plates.

He borrowed the cutlery. He borrowed a kitchen. Even more importantly, he borrowed food hygiene certificates. Like it was already certified. I like that. Yeah. Don't bother doing paperwork unless you need to. So he borrowed everything.

He started, did a weak test to see how it would go. It went so well. He made money. The week turned into a month. The month turned into actually a couple of years. and within that time he earned enough money to be able to get his own restaurant. But he started with a pop-up version borrowing everything. So, like, there is always a way to start for free if you're creative enough.

So get free stuff, borrow stuff. You can barter for things. So bartering is swapping a skill you have for something else. And every single one of you have a skill, that is incredibly valuable to other people. You've just got to exchange it. So these businesses, these guys, we have an escape room, we have a consulting gig, we've got a restaurant.

Do these people that are starting these businesses have any prior experience in these fields or any related interests? Do these businesses at all synergized with what they were doing before, the ones that were, that are successful? So actually, we have three main groups of people who come along to our courses. We have the group of people that have no idea. what they want to do. They just know they need to do something

other than traditional employment. They just want to do anything. We have the people who've had an idea for 20 years, but they always thought they needed money and they didn't know how to start. And then we have the people who've been doing it for a while and they've traded a bit. They've not really gone big.

They've not made much money. The people who are successful, like if you're looking for a trait of what makes the ones actually succeed, it's the people who take action. I've met so many dreamers, I've set so many talkers. It is actually a rare skill to be able to take an idea, even a simple one, and put it into practice. And if you were looking for one difference, it's the people who take big action. How much time do these take? Is this a second to full-time job that I'm going to be working

for the first couple of months to get it off the ground? Or what's that kind of investment of time look like? Well, I guess it depends what you want to earn, which I think is always one of the questions, and going into it with your eyes open, if you're selling soap that you make at home, you can do okay, but you're probably not going to become a millionaire unless you launch a massive brand. If you're doing art and selling pictures and selling paintings, like some people do really well in that, but the average person doesn't. But then equally, people, like some people just don't need to earn that much. money depending on their lifestyle. One example of that, we had a lady with fibromyalgia, which is a

condition that stopped her from getting a traditional job. She didn't always have energy. And she started a social media business from home. So she could do other people's social media from bed if she wasn't feeling well. And she didn't need to earn that much, but she was just happy earning a few thousand pounds. So I guess the question is, is how much do you want to earn? And that will definitely affect your choice of business. Tax season is one of the only times all year when most people actually look at their full financial picture, including income, spending, savings, investments, the whole thing. And if you're like most folks, it can be a little eye-opening. That's why I like Monarch. It helps you see exactly

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slash money-free and start building something amazing. Get more with Northwest Registered Agent at Northwest Registered Agent.com slash money-free. Marvel Television's Wonder Man, an eight-episode series, now streaming on Disney Plus. A superhero remake. Not exactly what we'd expect from an Oscar winning director. Simon Williams, audition for Wonder Man. I'm going to need you to sign this.

assuming you don't have superpowers. I'll never work again if anyone will fall now. My lips are sealed. Marvel Television's Wonder Man. All eight episodes now streaming, only on Disney Plus. So what is the difference between a pop-up business and more of a side hustle? So I guess we use the term pop-up to mean physically popping up in a space. For me, a side-hustle is just something you're running.

on the side of your full-time job. A side hustle has the chance of turning into a full-time business. A pop-up version that you do at the weekends has a chance of turning into a full-time business. And actually, like a lot of this depends on the term business as well, because business is such a nebulous broad term that could mean one-man band. It could mean Microsoft. It could mean anything.

So I think going into it, knowing, and this is probably one, one of the mistakes I made. I didn't really know what I wanted to create. Do I want to create a lifestyle business that makes enough money that I can live happily? Do I want to create something that makes millions? Do I want to create a giant business? Like going into it, knowing what you're trying to create helps. But I would still, no matter what you're trying to create, do a test version, do a mini experiment and see how it goes. So over the years, I've kind of adopted, I want to hear what kind of your feedback on my approach because I've got a lot of these. I think it's a similar mindset, but I kind of want to understand. So I, when I started my first job at a Fortune 500 company,

on the side, I would try a little things like tutoring. You know, I try to start a little tutoring business and tutor high school kids. You know, that did prove to be very low dollar per hour, not as rewarding as I hoped. So I moved on to driving for Uber, which was a little part-time job, not certainly a startup business. It's kind of, it's considered like a contracting business It's good learning. Yeah. Then I started a T-shirt company, which I think still exists, but I haven't sold T-shirt in years with some little jokes on it.

And then, you know, that would cost me $800 to start and print all this stuff and store them in my garage. And then I tried to sell winter attire for driving. It was ridiculous business model. I tried to remarket it online and was, you know, unsuccessful, spent like a couple hundred bucks on advertising and didn't sell anything. Then I got my agent's license. and then I've written a book.

And that's the story over the last five years of kind of my little ventures there. And a couple of these, my agent, and it seems like people are enjoying the book, have worked out. But those other failures are kind of in the line of what you're talking about where they didn't really cost me anything except for maybe a couple dozen to a couple hundred hours

over the years and maybe like a total of $3,000 or $3,000 invested. Is that kind of the approach that you're talking about here? I mean, it doesn't, it's not all pop-up businesses, but they're kind of side hustles. Yeah, there's small businesses where you're learning, and I love that. And everyone, you've learned something. I think there is an important bit that people forget to do after they do something like this, is to sit down with a blank piece of paper or a notebook or whatever and go, what did I learn?

What went wrong? What went well? What did I take out of this? And I think where this gets really exciting is if you can apply that, not only to your own side hustles and businesses, but look at other people's and learn from them. So I take what my dad did and go, okay, he was an amazing salesperson. He was charismatic.

He was full of energy. He networked, like phenomenal skills I can learn from. Equally, he had no idea how much money he was making at times. He never planned the full costs. He never saved and invested. Like, there's a whole host of stuff that I could learn. And I've taken time to sit down and take my learning. out of that. So I think you're exactly right, those small bits of let's have a go, let's do if it

works. The really important step is, what have I learned? And can I apply that to the next version to make it better? And if you do that, you'll always close in on where you want to get to. Is there a theme for a successful business idea? You said take action as a successful personal trait. Is there a successful idea or a successful genre or, you know, because I've had a lot of really awesome ideas and I currently are, am pursuing zero of them because they didn't, they didn't pan out. I mean, let's be honest, I wasn't, you know, as excited about them as, you know, it was more like, oh, I could do this. I could do that. So is there a successful business idea that, that you've seen over and over, like, just take the bunny and run?

So we actually did a study recently of businesses we helped start in a town in England. We started 122 different businesses over three courses. And I thought there would be a theme like there's 10 of these or five of these. Actually, every single business was different, every single one. And I really do believe that's because one of the foundational questions we ask is what excites you? Not what do you love, not what's your passion. what excites you. Because if you can build a business doing something that excites you,

when you get out of bed on Monday, you want to do it. And I've had jobs, plenty of them, where Sunday night comes, and I'm thinking, I really don't want to get up on Monday morning, please don't let the weekend end, just anything to avoid Monday. But there's this amazing thing that happens when that reverses, that you want to get out of bed on Monday. that when you're falling asleep at the end of the day, you're actually like, I don't want to fall asleep.

Please don't let me go to sleep. I'm enjoying this. So if you can start a business doing something you enjoy, and I don't care what it is, and to give you an example, we asked one lady, like we were in Kent, and I said, so what excites you? And she kind of went,

not sure if I should say this. Cleaning. Oh. It's like, okay. We can start a business around that. Yeah, it's like, I know plenty of people that hate cleaning. We can do that. And her name's Cherise.

She runs a cleaning business called Cherise Sparkles in Kent. She's doing really well, cleaning. So it does not have to be a game-changing idea. It just has to be something that gets you out of bed. You want to do and you enjoy. That's fantastic. And we have actually a study of that here in Denver. I worked at a charity called Upstream Impact, and one of the clients of this charity went on to start her own cleaning business and now has a small little fleet of cars and a couple of employees.

And it's like, yeah, they're like, you know, like, what do you like to do? She's like, I don't like to do anything that makes money. All I like to do is clean. Light bulb, you know, all right. There's people who will pay. Oh. Have you clean? So, and she's been very successful at that.

So I think that that isn't an awesome point that, hey, there's things that if you like doing them and you follow them, there can be. the odds of success. But I also wonder if there's this, you know, I want to get your opinion on this, if you begin to enjoy doing whatever it is you're good at, is it chicken or egg, do you get good at something because you enjoy it or do you like something because you've been doing it for a well? My example for this is in high school I was a wrestler and I hated wrestling. I hated a freshman year. I hated it sophomore year. I hated junior year. And then senior year, I got really good at it and started winning all my matches. And I loved wrestling at the end of high school. And so I want to know, is there, you know, do you find that is the case at all where, you know, some of these folks maybe just they want to do a business because they think it'll be a good idea, don't like it, work at it, work at it, work at it, work at it, and one day find themselves in love with what they're doing and it's very successful at it.

So I do think that it's worth looking for the intersection of does it excite you and are you any good at it? if you're not any good at it, but you're very, very excited about it. You're going to have to go through a long learning curve to get good at it, to be able to do it. You went through a long learning curve to get good at wrestling and you got good at it, you started to enjoy it,

and then you achieved some success. If it truly is your passion and you love it and you're engaged in it and you're excited about it and you're willing to put in the hours anyway, then go for it. You can build a business for it, but it might take a while to get going and you might take a while to get good at it.

Like, equally, it is strange what you learn to enjoy. So my example of that, I read a book, actually by Tim Ferriss, the four-hour body. It was about losing weight. And one of the things he said to do was to give up dairy during the week. And I always used to drink giant, great big lattes filled with milk. That's how I loved my coffee, milky. and he said give up dairy and I'm like, I don't even know if I like black coffee is a bit weird.

I want milky coffee. So I tried black coffee, which I didn't really like for the first week, but forced myself to drink it. And then I just got into it. And now, if you hand me a latte, I'm like, I don't want that. Get rid of it.

I love black coffee. So I think it really is interesting, what you train yourself to enjoy and how you do it, if you're starting a business and you start something you've already got on enjoyment around it, I always find this an interesting debate because some people say, well, don't follow your passion, you should follow the cash, or follow this or follow that. Like the last thing I want for anyone is for them to build a business that they don't enjoy. That seems to me the most stupid decision ever.

I know what. I'm going to build a business doing cleaning and I hate cleaning. I just think I can make money at it. like this you can make money at anything literally anything i have seen it and i don't care what it is so why pick something you hate pick something you enjoy and actually didn't you feel good about it in the mornings and i don't care what it is one of my passions is lego like i like lego i'm building some lego at the moment um i have so many ideas for lego businesses when i'm done with pop-up business school i might go and do that but like literally

I don't care whether it's pizza, barbecue food, Lego, cleaning. An incredible young guy who came on our course in Glasgow. He runs a blog reviewing mattresses. That's what he does. He runs a blog reviewing mattresses and makes his money on affiliate fees. You can make money doing anything. Sounds like he's sleeping on the job. And getting paid for it.

Why wouldn't you? That's awesome. So, yeah, I do agree with what you're saying because I hate cleaning. I want Cherise to come over to my house and she can go crazy cleaning. My sister loves cleaning. She can't go to sleep without all the dishes being done and everything picked up. I have no problem going to sleep without all that stuff being done. So for me, I couldn't imagine starting a cleaning company because, yes, I can make money at

I probably couldn't make money at it. I'm the first cleaning company to go out of business. I can make money at it, but I would hate getting up in the morning. I would hate going to the job. I would hate every bit of it because I hate to clean. So, yeah, I think that following your passion is a really, really strong point. And like you said, the whole point of your pop-up business school thing is to try it out, try it quickly, fail fast if you're going to fail, and then figure out what you learned. Move on to the next point. Move on to the next idea. I mean, your new idea doesn't have to be a complete 180. It can be like a slight pivot. You know, let's go over here. This didn't work, but what if I did this?

So it doesn't have to be all or nothing. Okay, before we get to our famous four questions, do you have any other high-level pointers you want to share with our audience today? I would add one other thing to that last point, which is there are some people that just love running businesses. And it doesn't matter what the business is. They love getting the deal, running the business, organizing the business. the stuff. And if that's you, go find someone who's passionate about something and run a business with them because it doesn't matter. And like to do what you love bit, do what excites you can be,

you might be excited about selling. You might be excited about marketing. Like it doesn't really matter which bit. So I think some people go, well, I'm not, I'm not excited about Lego. I'm not excited about pizza. Like, well, that's fine. What are you excited about? And they might be excited about running businesses or hiring people or firing people or whatever it is. There is always a way to make money doing it always. And there are many, many different routes. I guess my closing thought, there are so many different routes to financial independence, so many different routes. Just pick one that excites you. If real estate flows your boat, then throw yourself into it. If business floats your boat, throw yourself into it. If none of that excites you, then get

job and go and make money doing that, there's so many different routes to the same outcome. Be flexible, stay focused, and you can make it anyway if you give the energy time and commitment. Perfect. I always wonder if that big soap company just followed this advice directly and just dove right in. And that's how they got as big as they are. It's a dirty business. Quit. It's going on. Okay. It is time for our famous four questions. These are the four questions that we ask every guest. We don't know how to count. So they are actually five, but we call it the famous four anyway. What is your favorite finance book? So this is finance as in like cash and investing and stuff like that. Like a money, general money topic.

Cool. So I guess. one that's had a big impact on my life would be Jim Collins, the simple path to wealth. That changed the way I looked at stocks and shares. And actually, I'm a heavy investor in Vanguard now based on his advice. And he has definitely changed my investing future with that business, with that book. I love Jim. And that's an excellent book. I believe in a diversified portfolio. And he, picking stocks is a gamble. It's like the roulette wheel. And he, He gives you ideas for investing in stocks without having to pick individual ones. I love that you mention that book as well because that book speaks to a solid financial foundation.

It really speaks more to like the traditionally employed person. And this, what we just talked about today is something that that person can, hey, you can go and do and follow the simple path to wealth that Jim Collins talks about. And then also be trying your hand at this time after time after time as a passion product as your life. and lifestyle allow to just to increase your odds of success with a very low amount of risk. So I think it's a fantastic, I think it's great that you mentioned that book in particular. All right, moving on to the second question. What was your biggest money mistake? Number one was actually being persuaded in the early days to invest in a high-cost fund of funds,

a high-tech, high-cost fund. and I put about a lot of money at the time, enough for a house deposit in there. And just before the market crash, the money vanished and it never returned. And having read Jim's book about low-cost investing, like, I never would have done that if I was introduced to his material before then. That cost me a lot of money. And I should have invested in a house or something else. Okay.

Can you share what high cost and low-cost mean? Like, what cost are you talking about? So there is an annual management charge normally on stocks and share funds. A fund like Vanguard just mirrors the market and they have a very low cost like a 0.05% cost for owning the fund and that's what you pay each year to manage the fund. A high cost one is where you get an individual dude that you're paying for that pick stocks and shares and they're meant to outperform the market. that can cost you like one and a half to three percent.

And like that's an incredible difference. I picked one of those. He invested and he chose high tech, high growth stocks. And as Mindy just said, that strategy is like gambling. And he lost the gamble, which meant I lost the gamble. And my money vanished and never recovered. The house always wins. The house always wins.

He got paid, right? He got paid. He gets paid whether he performs or not. He gets paid whether that fund goes crazy or goes bankrupt. So that's the job to be in. Teach me how to be that job. I just pick stocks all day. Throw a dart at a board.

Okay. And the second one, like I was thinking about this the other day and it keeps heading in my head. It was actually a missed opportunity that I didn't. take. In my hometown, I spotted a block of flats, a block of apartments that was undervalued, significantly undervalued, like 30 or 40 grand. There was lots of them on the market, and I was reading a lot of property stuff at the moment at the time talking about getting below market value houses and how you have to get a deal if you're going to do it. So I was desperately trying to negotiate them down even further. And by doing that, I missed the opportunity

and they all sold to other people. And actually, what I should have realized was they were already below market value by what they were selling them at. And I completely missed that opportunity out of a session to get the lowest amount. So I just think, like, talking to real estate, if you know it's a good deal, take the deal. Don't try and squeeze the last cent. out of it. That was the mistake I made and I lost a lot of money by doing that. That's a really excellent point. Yeah, I love that you mentioned opportunity cost in this. And I'll say for listeners, you know, a lot of our listeners come from the bigger, you know, the bigger pockets world and they're interested in real estate investing. Know your market because this data is public. You can tell

if you're getting a way above average deal. And if you try to get the best deal that sells all year in your market, that's going to be a crap shoot. And you may lose out on big opportunities like this. If you know you're getting a great deal, it can be time to move. And the only way you can do that is by knowing your numbers ahead of time and being ready to act when you're in position. And then learn from Allen here. Yeah. Well, and I hear this a lot. Liz from Frugal Woods was telling the same story, except she did end up taking action. And she did, by the luck of the draw, get the lowest Price House in the Cambridge, Massachusetts area in like three years or something like that. But that's because she knew the market.

They went to open houses. Like, that was their Sunday. We go to open houses every single one. And as soon as we see something that we want, we snatch it up. And that was a huge benefit for her. But yeah, and now you know the next time you see a really awesome deal, Alan, jump on it. By law. Go for it.

Yes. Okay. What is your best piece of advice for people? people who are just starting out? For people who are just starting out, don't be impatient like me. Start where you are. Start small and give it you all. If you've only got 10 bucks to invest, invest in a Vanguard fund and get on with it. If you start a business, start it very small and just start, start where you are. I think people are so desperate to get to the end goal and to get there, and this was me as well, that they forget, they're aiming huge.

and they're not starting where they are. So if you're just starting out, invest $10, go to meetings and talk to people, try and sell some books, try and sell whatever. Just start small and start where you are. And if you take action, you'll get there. If you'd constantly try and jump to the big bit, it'll go wrong. Start small, start where you are, and have fun along the way. That is some of the best advice that I have.

That's one of the best answers that we've gotten for that question. The problem is you have this great British accent and you're able to get, start where you are, start small and give it your all, all to rhyme in a way that I can't. I can't. I want to quote you on this, but I'll figure out. I'll figure it out. We'll sound bite it afterwards for you. No, that's awesome. I love it. And then add on to that, when you start small and give it your all like that, you have this, when you start small and give it your all like that, you have this ability to see compounding results that, you know, people. always want the big multi-million dollar portfolio and all the, you know, the superstar success. You get there by getting to that first small milestone and then, you know, doubling over a year or two from there and then doubling again after a year or two. And the growth really does go a lot

faster, I think, than people realize. But you have to start somewhere and give it your all. I mean, just do exactly what you said. Start where you are. Start small and give it your all. It's exponential. It really is. Like you could, if you tracked my network, worth like it would bubble along the bottom in 20s and then it would bubble along a bit in the 30s and then it would start going up and then it would start going up and then the last three or four years it's kind of done that so it's definitely been a nothing happened nothing happened and then all of a sudden and I think the frustration when nothing's happened is what drives people insane starts more stick with it keep working and the magic does happen if you keep throwing energy into it

It's tuition cost to financial freedom. Sorry, so moving on to the last question here, and the most difficult, what is your favorite joke to tell at parties? I have two. I have a clean version in case you want to use it, and I have a dirty version in case you want to use that. So the clean version for those of you in the audience would be, what do you call a fish with no eyes?

I don't know. Fish. A fish. I love it. Of course you would love that, Scott. What did that fish say when he ran into the wall underwater? I don't know. What did the fish say when he ran into the wall underwater?

Damn. Ha ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. All right, what's your second one? Okay, so the slightly rude of one, which is a set of three jokes. What do you call a deer with no eyes? I don't know. No idea. Ah, I have the idea.

What do you call a deer with no eyes and no legs? I don't know. Still, no idea. What do you call a deer with no eyes, no legs having sex? I don't know. Still no fucking idea. That was fantastic. That was the best.

I don't know if you can broadcast that, but it's my favorite joke for parties. We'll broadcast it. We'll give a little disclaimer ahead of time that, hey, there's a joke at the very end that contains some language. If you have any kids, turn it off at the end of the famous before here. Yes. Get the two and then watch out for the third. Or we could just bleep the you out of that. No.

Yeah. Okay. Alan, it was lovely to have you here. Thank you so much for your time. Where can people find out more about you? So actually, if people need help starting an online business, we've been writing a course. We've stuck it all up online for free.

Just go to popup business school.co.uk, or just Google popup business. You can find us there. Basically, the model of the pop-up business school is we find people with money to pay for our services and then we give it away for free. So no one has ever paid to come on a pop-up business school ever. And I love that idea of giving it all away for free.

So that's where people can find me if they want help. If any of your listeners actually want to bring a pop-up business school to their area, like one thing I would love to ask of the audience is if you know someone that would love to sponsor a pop-up business school to come to a certain area, that enables us to then give it away for free. So if anyone would like to help you. With that, I really would love that.

But just find us on popupbusinesschool.co.uk, and all our details are there. Okay, and I'd like to point out that you're not just a UK company. You will go to other places such as the US. We ran the first one ever in Longmont in Colorado last year, and it's looking like this year we'll have one in Florida, one in Texas, and one in Colorado again. So there are actually events in the states. they are all completely free if anyone would like to come. Oh, that's really interesting.

Okay, that's awesome. And my husband actually went to the one in Longmont and had a fantastic time. He didn't actually start a business, but that wasn't his goal. And he just said that the amount of information flowing through that was amazing. Yeah, he's an absolute legend. He was great fun for two weeks. Yeah, and I promise not to sell anyone anything if they come along. And I think that's really important.

Like you go to these free events and it's just sales, sale, sales, sales. And you leave and you're like, well, I didn't get anything out of that. That's not the case with the Papa Business School. You really get a lot of information out of it without the huge sales pitch. Yes. There's no sales pitch at the end. We have actually I don't have anything to sell anyone at the moment. I might write a book at some stage.

But I have nothing to sell. I get people like councils, governments, housing authority. corporate sponsors to pay for the courses, and then we give them away for free. So we literally have nothing to sell to the people who come on the courses. Nice. That's awesome. I love it. We'll put a link to all that in the show notes so you guys can find that if listeners, if you're interested in learning more about starting a pop-up business. Yes, and the show notes are found at biggerpockets.com slash money show 17.

Okay, Alan, thank you so much for your time. I don't know how time zones work. I know you're in London right now or England, some part. of England. I'm American, so I don't know anything about there. But it's like midnight or something, right? I'm in Basingstoke in Hampshire. The current time is 5 o'clock on bank holiday weekend. So I'm actually going to wrap up now and go for dinner with my wife and just chill out for the evening. I'm quite excited. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for your time. I hope you have a lovely dinner. It was lovely to speak to you, Scott. Lovely speak to Mindy. Thank you for today.

Thank you so much. Thank you. From what on. Learn to son. We'll talk to you later. Bye. Bye. All right, that was Alan Donagan from Popup Business School. What did you think of that episode, Mindy? Every time I talk to Alan, my heart just sings. He's got so much information and he's such a giving person. I mean, he started this whole pop-up business school to help people reach their dreams,

to help people, you know, fix their finances and start the business that they want to start. I love the cleaning business idea. I mean, I don't love it. I don't want to do a cleaning business. I want to hire a cleaning person. But I love that idea. I just love to clean. Great.

You can make money doing what you love if you do it in a smart fashion. And she loves to clean. We'll go crazy. No, I loved it. I also loved the fact that he was very well prepared with jokes. Well, yes. Got a couple of new good ones there. A couple of good ones.

And there's the one not so family-friendly joke. But there were three good ones before that. So I would like to thank the listeners for making it all the way to the end. I really appreciate that. And also, I would like you to think, who do you know that could benefit from listening to this show? I know six people that I'm going to send a link to as soon as this show comes out to tell them, this show can help you start your own business. It can help you make your business better.

It can help you better your financial life. So the show notes are BiggerPockets.com slash Money Show 17, Money Show 17. and send people there. You can listen right from the show. You can download it to your favorite podcast app. And you can leave us a note at the end of the show. Awesome. And then, you know, I'd like to throw a pitch here for some guests.

We are looking for a couple of specific situations that we've got requests from that we really haven't been able to find a good guest for yet. And, you know, for example, one of those is can we find someone who's got a family, maybe a family of four or even more children that has gone from earning kind of a good a median or upper, you know, $50 to $100,000 a year salary range and has been able to go from kind of zero to hero, make this journey to financial independence with those children in place, make those choices that move them towards financial freedom from that position. If you know anybody that's like that, please send them along and we'd love to interview them.

Similarly, I got an interesting request from a divorcee. And this fellow would love to hear from someone who's kind of in his situation where he's divorced, can't move to kind of lowers cost of housing because he wants to be near his kids and learns that kind of median income. How can we get a guest on the show that has gone with kind of those sets of tough circumstances and still found a way to make things work by embodying sound financial choices and making those decisions? That's awesome, Scott. I am working on a couple of specific guests that'll help answer these questions. But yeah, it's been a little tough finding people who are willing to share their story, who feel like their story is

worth sharing. So a couple more things, we're looking for somebody who's really excited to tell their story. Oh, my life is horrible and this is the worst thing ever. Nobody wants to listen to that. So if you've got an exciting demeanor or you can just tell it in an enthusiastic way, that'll make for a really great show and that'll make for a very listenable show. Absolutely. Yeah. We're looking for a charismatic, if you know somebody who's charismatic, loves life, and yet has still overcome these challenges to move towards five from a position of disadvantage, whatever that is, please send them along to us. That's what we want to hear from. And that's who we think you guys want to hear from to help inspire you. Yes. And one last thing. If you have a suggestion for

child care, this is something that I see a lot in the forums, in I get a lot of messages, Mindy at BiggerPockets.com. I get a lot of emails where people asking me, how do I pay for child care? How do I afford child care? How can I work that into my FI path because it's so expensive to care for children, you know, until they are from birth until school age? So if you've got a really great way to pay for child care, hit me up, Mindy at BiggerPockets.com. Yeah, and please send along any guest recommendations to either Mindy at BiggerPockest.com or Scott at BiggerPockets.com or ideally both. And if you have a terrible joke, those go to Scott at BiggerPockets. com.

Yep. And please let us know if we can attribute you or if you want to remain anonymous because we will read them. Alan was very well prepared for his jokes, but not everybody is. Sometimes people just don't have a joke to tell. So Scott won't let the episode go without a joke. All right. Should we get out of here, Scott?

Let's get out of here, Middie. Okay. Thank you. So much for listening to the Bigger Pockets Money show for Bigger Pockets Money, episode 17. This is Mindy Jensen over and out. You know,