The Entrepreneur DNA - Skate to Scale: Pursuing Purpose Over Passion | Mikey Taylor | EP20

Episode Date: May 13, 2024

My long-time friend Mikey Taylor, a former professional skateboarder turned multifaceted entrepreneur, shares his journey from the skate parks to the boardrooms of real estate investment. Taylor delves into the transformative lessons learned while transitioning from sports to starting his own craft brewery and eventually founding a private equity real estate firm. He emphasizes the importance of aligning business pursuits with personal purpose over passion, the strategic necessity of choosing the right partners, and offers his projections on the future of real estate markets. Alongside candid discussions about the challenges of entrepreneurship, Taylor also reflects on personal growth, the complexities of work-life balance, and the strategic moves that have shaped his successful career in real estate. - Connect with Mikey: Tiktok: @mikeytaylor Instagram: @mikeytaylor      

What is up, entrepreneur, DNA family? As always, I have a high-powered guest with me. He's a friend of mine. He's been in my world now for probably going on almost a decade, very close to it. He is an incredible real estate investor. He's a business owner. He's an angel investor.

He's a professional skateboarder. Mikey Taylor's in the house. What's up, brother? Hey, what's going on? Good to see you, my man. I wish it was in real life, but I'll take the digital version. We'll do it.

We'll figure it out. I mean, we are coast to coast, so we will find a way to get together and knock some more of these things out. Dude, I'm going to jump in. I think you're one of the more dynamic people that we have in the space of being an influencer, being a business owner, being in real estate. My audience is here to learn how to start, grow, and scale businesses. It's all about entrepreneurship, regardless of the vertical.

You're now a politician. Forgot to mention that in your intro. So that's fun. Have a good story about that. Don't turn the show off. Don't turn the show off once you hear that. But dude, listen, you started out as a skateboarder, turned pro, followed your passion, and here we are with the accolades that I just kind of mentioned. Let's pro followed your passion. And here we are with the accolades

that I just kind of mentioned. Let's start with with your passion, the skateboarding, and then how in the hell do you take something that is the passion of your life and say, you know what, I'm going to flip it. And we are going to get into business and I'm going to go this route and become wildly successful. So it, I kind of lucked out. I'm not going to lie. Like it's very rare for a passion to turn into a career. And I would have probably told you 10 years ago, find the thing you love and then figure out how to monetize it. I've completely flipped my stance on it. So I started skateboarding. I fell in love with it. I didn't want it to end. Luckily, I had a pretty big entrepreneurial spirit in me that I wasn't even aware was a thing. And then I just went out there and sold. Like I tried

to get sponsors to give me free products. I took the product, sold it to my friends in the neighborhood. Then I started getting recognition in the magazines. Then I had demand and then I created product to sell off that demand. It was kind of the perfect storm. But now if you ask me, I actually don't think you should make a passion your career. I think actually purpose is more important. Figuring out why you're on this earth and what you're meant to do and then tie in business opportunities to that? Because it's too easy for a passion to turn into a hobby that doesn't generate any money. And so I've kind of now separated the two. I do the things I love.

I don't even worry about making money. And then I try to align my purpose with what I'm spending my day-to-day time on. You know, so I'll add a layer to that. To me, it is the same when people ask me, you know, should I, should I go into business with my loved one, my wife, my husband, whatever, my brother, my sister, my answer is no for kind of probably the same reason that you kind of say, don't follow the passion and turn that into a business. Go, you know, have fun with your passion. Same thing.

Like I don't believe in now that's just me like i don't want to have my wife be my business partner because then we have to have these terrible dinners where we have to go over pnls and tough months and great months and i'm like god i just want to love on you and let you be my light at the end of the day not like shit we still have to knock out this meeting but i'm saying that just to say i also agree with you I've seen too many people that go after passion they lose their passion because now it becomes work now they don't have the thing of passion which leads to your purpose comment and now where's their purpose because they lost their passion and I tend to agree with you wholeheartedly now was the transition from sports skateboarding going into business just a brutal grind?

Was it just kind of throw it against the wall, see if it sticks type of idea? How did that transition happen? Yeah, so the first transition. So I went from being a pro skateboarder to starting my first business, which was a craft brewery. So two completely different spaces. The transition wasn't as hard as I thought. And I think that's because of two factors. One, I was naive. So I just believed that like anything was possible. And I didn't totally know how hard the business was going to be.

So I went in it willing to get it done. And then I would say probably the second factor is skateboarders and maybe just pro athletes in general. You're competitive. Like you are used to putting everything on the line to succeed and looking at the person next to you who's trying to do the same exact thing and trying to get one up on them, right? That environment makes maybe difficulty and challenge very familiar. It's a very common feeling for us. And that's what business feels like. Like business truthfully feels like nothing's working. It's an emotional roller coaster. You feel like you get a win one day and then the next day it's a total L. It's just, it's a little bit psycho. And that was normal for me. That's like what I experienced on a daily basis. And so the transition wasn't that bad. The biggest thing I had to learn was working

with people like coming from a, from being a pro athlete, I was in charge of myself. I negotiated all my deals. I went out and lined up a filmer and a photographer. It was me. I was in control of my success in a sense. So maybe if you're in business, I would be the solopreneur. And then when I started my first company, we brought a team on from the beginning. And so I really had to learn how to manage people. And really what that meant is I had to learn how to be a good leader. And I wasn't a good leader prior to that. Well, that's because you were being a skateboarder as a solo sport, right? And so you don't have the team, you don't have the leadership, but you were, you raised

yourself within skateboarding as being the solopreneur in skateboarding, right? And so you hired everything. You were the dishwasher, you were the CEO, you were the plumber. And so that transition is probably pretty normal. And by the way, you would probably agree to this. I think that's everyone's start of business and it should be. You need to be quite literally everything. You need to be the plumber, you need to be the CEO, you need to be the accountant, you need to be the dishwasher because that's the only way for you to really start a business. The question becomes when you were starting the hustle while still skateboarding, how did you find time? How did you make that work? I ask because I think a lot of our listeners and people that are watching on YouTube and everywhere else, they probably have a W-2.

They're trying to either figure out how to break into entrepreneurship or they are an entrepreneur and need to figure out how to scale it. So how did you make that work with a full-time crazy-ass schedule like skateboarding? Okay. So I'll start by telling you my model of success and what I really drove while I was skateboarding, which was just outwork. My whole thing was if the person next to me is willing to put in five hours, I'm putting in eight, like just be more than everyone else. And when I got towards the later half of my career, maybe I had four or five years left. I made the decision that I could give up some of the time that I was putting into skateboarding and allocate that into a business. And I felt like the time I was still putting into skateboarding was somewhat competitive with everyone else. But I wasn't able to run the business by myself. So I had to bring people in from the beginning, right? I had limited time. So I guess the best way to say it is this. You can either hire the help or you can educate yourself and do everything you. And I made the decision to leverage people and have them cover the time that I didn't have. I had to give up equity to do that. We had to give

up revenue to do that. But that was my plan so that I could create a business and spend, let's say, 50% of my time there and still have what would be the last four years of my skate career and put time there. So I brought in people and leveraged people. You bring up a great point that I mentioned a lot. You can spend time or you can spend money, right? And sometimes you spend both. But my guess, you probably didn't take a very big paycheck for the first couple of years of that startup business. I didn't, I paid myself zero. There you go. That's what I wanted to hear. Cause I think a lot of people don't even understand that they don't understand the sacrifice, right? Is to start a business. It takes so much sacrifice to your point. It's basically crazy. Uh, I told my wife the other day is like, are you ready for me to just go be a bartender on a beach? Like no

brains, no headaches, no worries. Like, we're out. Like, you ready for this? Because that's the reality is like what we do as entrepreneurs, it is a special breed that can really make it in the sense that you've been able to make it. And part of that is the sacrifice of even income, right? I would say for the first year, I didn't take a dollar out of my real estate investing business because there was no money, right? Yep. That's right. You posed the question about what do people do that have a W-2 job and want to create something. It's actually a perfect segue, right?

Bring people on to help you build it and don't pay yourself, right? You're paying yourself on the back end with your equity, right? Just keep in mind there's two times you get paid, on the front end or on the back end with your equity, right? Just keep in mind, there's two times to get paid on the front end or on the back end. And the back end is always the highest potential for it to be much greater. And so you have a perfect scenario where you have income coming in. You're going to have to put some time, extra time into the business, but it's not going to be enough for you to build the thing on your own. So bring partners in. I'm actually a big believer in that. Yeah, I actually more and more and more a big believer in that. The older I get and the

more opportunities I have. The starting a business to sell, you were able to exit that, right? And have a nice payday there. Was that by chance? Or is that like fully intentional? I'm going to build this brewer company to a place where a bigger distributor type company, I forget who sold to, but Anheuser-Busch or something. We sold to Coors. No, Coors. Coors. Yeah. So Coors bought you. Was that intentional or did you just kind of catch the wave of momentum and just kept riding it? Yeah. So when we started the brewery, myself and my partners didn't have enough money to start it ourselves. So we had to go basically raise money from investors. It's the first time I've ever raised money. And I learned very quickly that every single investor is going to ask you,

how do I make money? How do I get paid back? And you really have two options to present to them. It's either one, you're going to drive at an exit or two, you're going to build a cash flowing business, right? There's going to be dividends and potentially a sale down the road. The strategy that we presented is that we were going to build something to sell. And so from the beginning, you know, and we had multiple capital raises along the way. It was us stepping on the gas. It was raise money to build out our infrastructure, to build a bigger team, to get more product on the market. And that was it.

We stepped on the gas for three and a half years. And then because of that, and I think our thesis and our philosophy of what the opportunity was, we were very desirable. I mean, it was Budweiser, Miller Coors weren't a bidding war for us and it just kept going like this. Right. So, uh, to answer your question, we built it to sell. We had the right idea at the right time and we executed on it.

What, just out of pure curiosity, what makes a beer company buyable, like besides the flavor of the beer like i you know is your label better you have a cool label and they just want it like what makes that beer besides the actual taste okay so you have there's two different viewpoints on this one right i would say for most of the buyers like when you're talking about a budweiser or a Miller Coors, you could take it to any other industry. What they're really looking for is how much demand does your company have and what's our ability to scale it or how can we add distribution on top of your machine, right? For us, this was the thesis. At that time, every brewery was – it was all about like high alcohol beers. It was like a double IPA that you would drink one beer, put you on, it felt like you had a steak dinner, right?

And all of the emphasis was on the beer. And so we came in and went, you know what, let's flip the script. Like let's make beer easy to drink, which was suicide for the craft beer industry, because the craft beer industry. Because the craft beer industry looked at beer as a specialty. And if you created a beer that was easily drinkable, that felt like it was no longer a craft beer. You were one of these like Miller Coors, like light, you know, lagers. But our view was, no, you could still make a good beer that's easy to drink. And then on top of that, we put more emphasis on the brand. So we didn't want the liquid itself to sell. We wanted to create a community and an

experience so that when people drank our beer, they felt something about it. The message that we were communicating is when you're drinking a St. Archer, that was our beer company, you are a part of California, but you're a part of California through the lens that we see it, which is surf, skate, snow, music, art, culture. That's our lane. That's our vibe. If you're one of us, you're about it. And so what that ended up doing is it created a ton of demand and we held it in California. So our idea was if we own California and create demand throughout the entire country, then when a company comes to acquire us, they're going to go, wait a minute, you guys have demand in every other state and you don't offer it?

Okay, we're going to get behind you. We're going to buy it. We're going to open up distribution and that's how we're going to make our money. So that was our thesis. It worked. And it worked. And yeah. How many years did you have to be in the trenches?

36 months? It was about three and a half years in the trenches. And then we all lasted about a year after they bought us. And then we all left. You left or they said goodbye? Not a good fit. It was, no, we all left. Like, look, selling a business is awesome. It's really awesome if you have investors,

but no one can run your business like you can. And it's, it's hard to find a buyer that's going to allow you to do your thing. Very common. The buyer comes in and all of a sudden they run your business like they run every other business. And then you ruin the thing that got you there. So unfortunately that happened. What's that? All right. So you had this crazy life-altering event. You have an actual exit, which is very, very hard as you're well aware. What's the next step now? Do you kind of go off in the wilderness for a little bit and do some soul searching or where do you go from here? I took about eight months and it was soul searching. It was absolutely soul searching. I had to work through some emotional issues that I just wasn't aware of. It's very common for pro athletes, but for us, our sport becomes our identity, right? Like I always viewed myself as Mikey Taylor, the skater,

and then to take it even further, the pro skateboarder. And so when you lose that, very often we feel like we lose ourselves. And so I had to kind of find myself. I had to discover who I really was and what the point of all of this is. And that took about eight months. And then after that, I felt like I was finally in a position to create the right business that complemented my purpose, as opposed to trying to start a business to become my new identity. And that business ended up being a

private equity real estate firm. So I started a company where we were going to go out and raise money from investors who wanted to invest in real estate and earn passive income and build their wealth through appreciation and get some tax help, but didn't want to do the work. And so we started that. The two asset classes we focus on are similar to you multifamily and storage. And it's been, you know, again, stepping on the gas. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, it's been a fun road. I mean, you know, listen, I think it'd be interesting to hear, you know, your projections of what's going to happen in the next 24 months. But building a company like that, where did you start? You kind of have this idea now, what's your starting blocks? Where do you go from there?

On the new company? No, no, no, no. Just when you started the- Private equity firm, Commune? Yeah, private equity. Okay. So basically, I know what I'm good at. I know my skillset. I know what I'm not good at. And what I am not is I am not an operator. I am not the person who's going to make sure we're being efficient and creating systems and managing those systems, not me. And so whenever I start a business, my first person I'm bringing on is going to be ultimately the COO.

I need to find the person that's going to keep my ideas and my energy moving in a straight and forward path. And so I looked for that person. And then the second person I looked for was the analytical type. I wanted somebody who was a monster when it comes to underwriting deals, creating complex structures. That was going to be another key component to this. So I went out and found those two. And then I looked for somebody that was going to manage all of our development. And then from there, we started building the business. And then the second we could bring people on to help, we started doing that. And you were just acquiring assets at that point, apartments, storage.

Well, what we look for, and I think this comes back to the entrepreneur in me, I want to build stuff. I like creating. And so our thesis on multifamily, we want dead assets that are not producing revenue. We want to scrape them and we want to build new apartments. On the storage side, I want something similar. I want a big box retailer like Kmart's or a Bed Bath & Beyond that went vacant that doesn't have any revenue coming in. I want to buy it and I want to repurpose it into storage. So we're a group that is very willing to do the hard work because quite frankly, I want bigger returns than the market has to offer. Oh, there's no doubt in that, that, um, again,

toys, RS or Walmart or whatever. What a great model where you, and you build out the interior of those stores to be storage facilities. I just think that model is incredible, but to your point, you know, a heavy financial lift out of the gate. I mean, you're not raising a million or two, right? You're really going for it. Oh, yeah. Big raises. Big raises.

What's been your most fun, enjoyable project for your private equity so far? Good question. We had a really hard one. It's always the hard ones that you remember. It's never the easy ones. That's a funny. I answer the same had a really hard one. It's always the hard ones that you remember. It's never the easy ones. That's a funny, I answer the same way a lot of times. Yeah, we had one a few years ago that it was three vacant apartment buildings right next to each other in a really desirable, like high end market. And we came in, we were going to, you know, we worked out a deal to keep the owner in the deal.

And we're going to scrape the apartments, build one big structure on it. And in the ninth inning, it looked like it was all going to fall apart. And so we looked at the partners and went, what the heck are we going to do? We were up all night with our attorneys, which meant a very, very expensive night. And we got very creative with the financing. And we ended up basically getting the deal done. We got all the investors in, we started building it. We're about four months away from completion. But that was one of those deals that reminded me why everyone doesn't do this. That was a hard one. So I remember that one.

And then we have one deal right now that I'm really excited about. It was a boatyard in a market called Ventura. It's, you know, one of the most undersupplied cities in the entire country. And it's just now starting to blow up. And so we have a couple projects out there where I think we're perfect timing. The demand is super offset on where supply is. The city is finally going, please build. And it's close to my backyard.

It's 20 minutes away. So we have a handful of stuff out there that I'm really excited about. But the project we did in Mar Vista was one of the more complex and difficult deals to do. That's always the best answers is when you go and you say, well, it was probably the one where, you know, whether you lost money or more complex or it was just the toughest one, that's the reality, kind of getting back to this entrepreneurship. Everyone who's in business right now knows those days, the dog days, the days are long, the years are short type of concepts. What's your big push right now? And by the way,

if you guys are liking Mikey, you need to be liking him. You need to be following him all over TikTok, big following on TikTok, big following on Instagram. He puts out incredible content. So make sure you do that. Where else do you want to drive them real quick? You can find me at any platform, just Mikey Taylor. Our company is Commune Capital. We're on all the other platforms as well. So if you want to learn about investing, we put out a lot of content that's educational. And if you're looking for a group to invest with,

do your research on us, see if we're a good fit. And, you know, I'd love to tell you about it. So you can find us through any platform as well. You know, what's the, why am I driving so hard right now? That was the question. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Four kids, multiple businesses, just going for it in politics. So I have this, I have this personal view that we were all given our talents by God to go out and use. And I think he has this idea of what we look like when we capture as close to our potential as possible. And so I don't know, I want to finish the race and go, I got as close to that example as I possibly could. It's exhausting. It's hard. I would say out of

everything I'm doing, the hardest thing is probably the parenting. It's difficult being a dad. You know, you're building up the next generation and they catch some of your qualities and they catch all your flaws. And so that's humbling by nature. I would say for the business, this is probably the most unique opportunity I have seen in my investing lifetime. In the last 20 something years, I've never seen anything like this. And what that means specifically to what we're doing, there is the most extreme housing shortage that many of these states have ever seen. That is not normal. And 2008, I was investing. Looking back, I wish I could have gone back to 2008 and went after it as hard as I possibly could. And so not knowing how long this moment's going to last, where supply is so below demand,

it's difficult to get deals done. I want to finish this race and go, oh my gosh, we went after it as hard as we could. We got 20 new properties at a discount as opposed to five. And so we're really trying to capture the opportunity. We're doing more deals than we've ever done. It is difficult to do them though. In the moments where it's challenging, it means deal flow is up and it means it's hard. It's never easy in the good opportunities. So our heads are down. We are as a firm really, really going for it right now. No, I'd love to hear that. I think I feel the same way. You know, it is, I'd actually, the secondary question to that is,

where do you think the real estate market, the financial market, the interest rates, where do you see them? And no one has a crystal ball. I get that, right? Yeah. Where do you see them going over the next, let's call it 24 months? What do you think it looks like? Okay, so I have never been, the interest rate thing, I think interest rates are staying. I

don't think they're coming down like everybody thought. If I were to guess and I could totally be wrong, I'm not sure we'll see the interest rates we saw in 21 ever again. I think that was probably a once in a lifetime opportunity. I think interest rates of four and a half, 5%. What's the real estate market going to look like? It depends on the sector. If you're an office, I think you are smoked. I don't think there's any, I don't think there's anything in the near future that looks like we're going to get out okay. I think it's going to be a decade of trying to figure out this asset class. If you're in storage, if you're in multifamily, even single family, right? I think we're totally fine as long as you know how to do this.

If you're a group that understands that things don't go right and you're planning for the unexpected and you're removing as many of the options that are going to force a sell, you are going to do so fine. I mean, look at Blackstone. Blackstone just committed, what, $10 billion into multifamily. If you have a long-term outlook and you know how to do this, I think you're going to make a lot of money for a long time. Yeah, I think at the end of the day, Wall Street money is going to keep coming. I know I just posted a real deal article that said like the House or the Senate or whatever is trying to stop them from being able to buy single family homes. And that just, in my opinion, anything could happen. You're in politics, you would know.

But like, no chance. They have the checkbook that keeps the people in office. So they're going to be able to buy as much as they want of any asset class because that's how those people stay in office. So they're going to say, no, we want $10 billion worth of multifamily. So we're going to go get it. Yeah, that's right. But I follow the money. Go ahead. No, I do the same thing.

I follow the money, right? Look, we talk about smart I follow the money, right? Like, you know, look, we talk about smart money and dumb money, right? The smart money is long term. They don't look at things on a five year hold. They don't look at things at a 10 year hold, right? They're looking at a 20 to 30 year outlook. When you're playing the long game, like a legacy outlook, it is very hard to lose, or I should say it's much harder to lose. So, you know, you can, you talk about some of the people getting impacted right now, because I think this is a great opportunity. It does not mean everyone is winning in real estate.

You have a lot of syndicators right now that were buying products on bridge debt that had some type of value add. They were in, you know, these Midwest or Southern markets because they were hot. They're getting smoked right now. They are no longer doing distributions. They're doing capital calls. They're having to restructure their debt. I mean, that's a very different experience for investors that went there than what I think a lot of the smart money is doing. So just keep in mind that because there's an opportunity, that doesn't mean everyone's making money. It doesn't mean everyone's doing well. Like it's usually the short-term outlook, which we all fall victim to, which brings on a lot of risks and which ultimately means you have the potential of losing money. Yeah. I mean, listen, starting a business in general,

you have the potential of losing a lot of money, right? A lot of money, energy, and time. And so whether you're in real estate or otherwise, you always have to know the risk. And what I think is what people should be hearing that he's not saying directly is just don't have the microwave society immediate gratification outlook on this. If you have the longer term outlook and in the single family space, that would be more of a BRRRR model. Buy it, remodel it, refinance, rent and refinance, right? You're just going to hold it for a long time, but you forced appreciation through the renovations. That is a better business model than just a hope and a prayer, right? I love fixing and flipping, but at the end of the day, if you can withstand slowly building and accumulating

wealth, then there's your model. I have something that I try to do, which is I try to accumulate the smaller priced assets for an exit to go into the bigger assets, to go exit those to go into even larger assets. But it's because it will have equity. So would you agree that some of this smart money is because they can create the equity?

Because then you don't have to get forced to sell regardless of the economy is get something that has a lot of equity. I'm a look, I'm a big believer in that. I mean, the if you can create value, you can create wealth, right? Whether that's business, whether that's real estate, I'm a huge, huge believer in that. So yeah, the more equity you have in something, the less the market has, no, the more the market has to drop for you to lose money, right? I mean, you have 50% equity in a deal, the market turns by 10%, you're not tripping at all. So it is always safer to have more equity 100%. And I think, you know, you touched on something important. Like, you know,

for you, for example, you've been doing this a long time. Do things go wrong on a deal? Of course. Of course. Every time, by the way. Just every time. So when you move forward on a deal, you've been doing this long enough where you're going to look at all the potential factors and you're going to plan for them, right? And if you still have a project that can succeed or survive with adversity, you move forward.

The challenge is for a lot of new investors, they look at the market, they look at people making money, and they go, I have to get in. And the fact that they're not in yet, there's an extra emotional push to make you basically get your first deal. And a lot of times they buy a crappy deal, which means everything has to go perfectly right, or you're losing money. And that is a one in a million type of shot. And so that's more what I'm referring to. It's just, unfortunately,

the newer, inexperienced investors that don't know that things go wrong, and don't have the discipline created yet to say no. Yeah. You know, that is the hardest, even for myself saying no is one of the harder things that I have to do. I have a great deal. Like today, for example, I get sent to deal in West Palm beach. The numbers look great, but it's a stick built, not a brick built. And I'm just like, that is the one thing I didn't want to see on that property. Right. And so you go, God, okay, well, what is the biggest downside and what is my downside risk? And you have to figure out if I'm going to say yes to that, I have to be willing to take this downside risk and to be able to willing to

have this lower return or whatever the case may be. Um, what's next for Mikey Taylor? Where are you going? Like we, we just joked about, but you are actually in politics. You have a city council role. Uh, but. But what is the next, you know, finishing out this girls, which are nine and 11, I'm going to be

entering the teen stages. In the next 10 years, my oldest is going to be 21. And so, yeah, it's going to be a lot of emphasis on making sure we're instilling the foundation that is going to put them in a position where when they get thrown curve balls or they get any factor in life that's gonna basically be difficult, that they can get through that. So parenting. On a business side, we have a goal. We wanna get to a billion of AUM in the next five years is our company goal.

I really wanna do it in three years. If nothing changes and it's just business as usual, we'll get there in about eight. So that's kind of my more current business goal. We're getting close to about 300 million right now for contacts. I still have a little bit of room. And then on the city council goal, I want to, ultimately, I want my kids to have the option to stay here, right? Like I live in a city that is a little bit more affluent. It's an older demographic. We're aging. And so a lot of like 18 to 35 year

olds leave and then they don't come back. So I want to create a place where, you know, our kids and the next generation actually want to live here and create business here, create families. So I would say that's my city goal right now. Can you get to that billion dollar mark faster? Yes. I mean, the answer is yes. It just, it all comes down to really deal flow and capital, right? Do you have access to deals? And then can you fund them? And then the timeline of it, because we do development and I'm going to get a little bit into the weeds here.

You're holding at cost until you get your project reappraised. So, you know, for example, we have one project right now that's going to cost us about $40 million to build, right? So we close on a deal, we bring investors in $40 million total cost takes two years to build another six to nine months to stabilize, then you get it reappraised and refi. So you're three years out from having the opportunity of turning that $40 million cost into a $75 million value. And so we have a handful of projects that have that type of growth potential. It's just the time. You can't speed up the time on development.

Yeah, there's no doubt. I mean, that's kind of, do you buy something turnkey, more of the Grant Cardone style, or you go buy 500 doors at a time? Yeah, that's a different story. Yep, then it's a different story. Then you just find deals, raise money, and close. But where we're at, which is I want a bigger return, you just have to be willing to put in the time. And so I think it's going to be, it'll probably land at four, if I'm going to guess. I wanted three, goal for the company is five. I think it lands at four.

Well, so listen, you're talking about creating value in these properties, but I think that's something all business owners need to understand is you want a bigger return. So you're creating the value in these properties you're buying, you're developing creates the value. You are your income, what you earn, the wealth you accumulate is in direct relation to the value that you're providing the marketplace. And you are providing the value by buying, scraping and building. And maybe you're not scraping all of it and whatever. But

the point being is you're increasing the value of the marketplace. So you will get compensated as such. Same place for some of you people who are trying to buy rentals, single family rentals. I love single family rentals still. Great asset class, great dollar amount. People always need somewhere to live. So run the BRRRR model, force appreciation, create the value, refinance out. It's all the same thing. But if you're listening to this and watching Mike Taylor on YouTube and all these different things,

understand what value are you bringing to the marketplace? You have to ask yourself that. I don't know. I know what Mikey brings. I know what I bring. What value are you bringing? And if you need to do some self soul searching, then do it. Cause I almost guarantee you, you'll make more money and create a better life. If you do that, um, dude, any parting words, this is, this has been great. We've hit all sectors here. We got

family, we got work, we got business, we got sports, we got politics. Any parting words for the people out there listening to Entrepreneur DNA? I'm going to end on this one and it's going to be kind of a sideball. But if you're an entrepreneur, you're going to have a different type of challenge when you get into the field of getting married and having kids. And this is going to be the advice I would give you from the last 14 years of being married. When you are with your wife, when you're with your kids, give them all of your attention. It's difficult for us. We're wired a little bit differently, but put them as the priority. And then here's the second part. You're going to go through challenges in a marriage.

It's inevitable. If you're willing to get through them, what my experience is, is you have a refining fire moment where everything sucks, you work with your wife or your husband to get everything better, and going through that type of challenge together, what you experience on the other end

is more powerful than what you had prior to the challenge. And once you go through it once, your outlook on the future for upcoming challenges actually becomes pretty encouraging because you no longer look at a winter season in your life as the thing that's gonna break you up. You look at it as another opportunity for you to become even closer with this person.

So entrepreneurs keep that in mind. Having a relationship and building a business is tough. Treat it like you're dating. Constantly date your partner. Take her or him out and work through the conflict. You'll be completely blessed if you do that. My man, that was a hell of a way to end this episode. Everyone needs to go find Mikey Taylor on TikTok,

Instagram, and all the social medias. Brother, I appreciate you being on. And we got to stay way closer connected. That is for damn sure. It's good to see you. I miss you, my man. Miss you too, brother. Appreciate it.

All right, y'all. That's it. See you on the next one. Peace.