The Iced Coffee Hour - Meet The Laundromat Kingpin Making $100,000 Per Month

Episode Date: November 29, 2021

Get your free article on 5 things investors should know before investing in startups: http://invest.startengine.com/tich Shake up your ritual today with 10% off their essential protein for your first 3 months! https://ritual.com/ich This week we are joined by Investment Joy, the mind behind several crazy viral financial videos where he explains how he runs his laundromat business and explains how much he makes. He also has over 100 rentals, and recently bought a car wash. He talks about how how went from being evicted to now a millionaire, how he got into the businesses he currently owns, his start on youtube and much much more! Investment Joy: https://www.youtube.com/c/InvestmentJoy Add us on Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/jlsselby https://www.instagram.com/gpstephan https://www.instagram.com/alex_nava_photography Official Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeBQ24VfikOriqSdKtomh0w DOWNLOAD MY NEW FINANCIAL APP: https://hungrybull.page.link/graham GET YOUR FREE STOCK WORTH UP TO $1000 ON PUBLIC & SEE MY STOCK TRADES - USE CODE GRAHAM: http://www.public.com/graham  MY NEW COFFEE IS NOW FOR SALE: http://www.bankrollcoffee.com/ Join the 2x weekly mentorship group: https://tinyurl.com/yaexko4o The Equipment used: https://tinyurl.com/y78py5g2 Audio Equipment Used In Podcast: Rode NT1, Rodecaster Pro The YouTube Creator Academy:   Learn EXACTLY how to get your first 1000 subscribers on YouTube, rank videos on the front page of searches, grow your following, and turn that into another income source: https://bit.ly/2STxofv $100 OFF WITH CODE 100OFF  For Podcast Inquiries, please contact [e-mail] *Some of the links and other products that appear on this video are from companies which Graham Stephan will earn an affiliate commission or referral bonus. Graham Stephan is part of an affiliate network and receives compensation for sending traffic to partner sites. The content in this video is accurate as of the posting date. Some of the offers mentioned may no longer be available. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Amazon presents Laura versus Fruitflies. Swarming your fruit and terrorizing your kitchen. These little freaks multiply at a rate that would make a rabbit say, yo. Chill. But Laura shopped on Amazon and saved on cleaning spray, countertop wipes, and fly traps. Hey, fruit flies, your baby boom ends here. Save the Everyday with Amazon. Welcome back to the iced coffee hour. I'm Brandon with investment joy. And so far the ice coffee

hours made $164,123. That's the closest guess we've had so far. That is actually true. Oh, good. It's $124,000. $124,000. Yeah. And if you guys are wondering why this is the exact same as last episode, that is because we are doing back-to-back episodes. Never done before in this, you know, this quick a time. So welcome. Okay, cool. So I can feel uncomfortable because I was like, Oh my gosh, I'm coming on the heels of someone much, much more affluent, famous than I am. Do you not realize? In the list of everybody else. You don't realize how internet famous you become.

You are like the TikTok sensation. You just did a million subscribers on YouTube. Your videos are going more viral than any of ours ever have by a magnitude of like 10. Yeah, but it's all from YouTube shorts and those like really don't count. But it doesn't matter. Here's the thing. I bet a lot of people might be watching it. like, oh, whose investment joy?

Where have I seen him before? Well, almost guaranteed. If you've opened TikTok, almost 100%, you've seen how much your laundromats make, or how much the, the one I really enjoyed from you was the game where you put in a quarter. Oh, yeah, the quarter pusher.

The quarter pusher. I loved that. You own a multitude of business. You were looking at a car wash. You own real estate. You're basically the go-to of viral content. but it's business related. It has to do with making money.

Yeah, I mean, wow, you really talk me up. I need to hire you guys from the service for my stuff. No, it's incredible because I remember, and you are actually one of the first people to go like mega viral on YouTube in the finance space. And it was your video. How much do you make with a laundromat? And I remember that video just, I think it was like four million views in a few days in the first few days. Yeah, at peak, if memory shows you right, it was October the 19th, 29th.

very shortly after I was on a certain other podcast. We have to provide some proper background to this because on the second channel, when we first started it, we used to do these things where we'd get people to call in. And then Graham would basically provide financial advice. Not financial advice. Right, okay, not financial advice.

Entertainment. Right, to talk about finances, maybe what the caller could be doing better. And it also didn't necessarily have to be about finances, but just general taking calls. Kind of like Dave Ramsey, right? And you came on the, I organized your call to come on.

And I think you had at the time like 500 subscribers, was it? It was a little over 2,000. Oh, was it over 2,000? Yeah, it was over 2,000 subscribers, but they weren't doing anything. I sourced all my subscribers essentially from posting on Reddit all the time. Got it. Okay. Yeah, but it just wasn't enough watch time.

That was the problem. I had subscribers, but not watch time. So you came on and you talked about owning what was like 60 or it was like 100 rental it was almost at that point. That was right before I bought the trailer park. So I was at like 90 rental. and then the title said, what's it like owning almost 100 rentals?

Yeah, and you were considering buying a trailer park, and I thought it would be an interesting call. So I scheduled you in to talk with Graham. You came on, and this was our first real introduction where we got to know you, and this was about two years ago. And since then, your channels have just, or your channel, and you're just following.

Off of every platform has just exploded and especially TikTok, how many followers do you have at this point? It's 2.7 million, but it should be rolling up like any moment now to 2.8 million. which is insane because it's just the viral growth I've seen on TikTok is just crazy compared because the first real viral video I had on TikTok it was the magic penny one where I took

the briefcase full of cash and then showed what happens if you take a penny and you double it every day for 29 days. I remember that. It was like a four-part video, which is insane. And I uploaded that and within three days of memory surgery, right, had 20 million views in the whole series. And I was like, what the crap? Why would anybody watch a 59 second video?

And I'm like, it's just basic math. Granted, I have the aspect. I've got a briefcase with a bunch of money in it. I can get a little bit of attention that way. But it's just the viral growth was there. I was like, holy crap, this is insane. And then, you know, just kept going on with my regular collection videos, regular cycle and just started just continuing on with it.

And it's been insane. And it's just so weird because I get stopped. When I blew up, the rumor was with TikTok that everybody was. a bot like 90% of your traffic was bots and there's just this room and I'm like how no one's really real and then I got stopped at Walmart and so it's like it's the laundromat guy I'm like yeah you watch me on YouTube like you're on YouTube what did you see me oh I saw you on TikTok me and all my friends watch you on TikTok and I'm like oh my gosh they're not bots I can't believe this it's a really surreal moment like oh wow here's this new platform it was you know relatively

new, generally speaking, and I've got all this viral traffic off of the people recognizing who I am, and I'm like, I prefer them to be on YouTube, but I'll take what I can get. It's interesting. We had Zach King on a few days ago, and he was talking about that he was on YouTube, and then his TikTok is what's turning out to be, like, more popular in terms of followers, and people will come up to him having no idea that he is a YouTube channel. He just know him from TikTok. 90% of the people that I talk to that watch me on TikTok have no clue I'm on YouTube. So there is almost no intermeshing.

And I was talking to Ask Sebb. I was talking to Ask Sebi like a couple hours ago. And I was like there's no intermeshing because he was talking to a couple other creators on TikTok and they said that they just, TikTok traffic sucks because no one will go to your YouTube channel. Like TikTok traffic doesn't suck because there's attention there. You got influence over people. But the problem is they don't want to pull people off your platform. Like everybody knows YouTube wants to keep all your views inside the YouTube platform. and TikTok is like twice as bad.

They want to keep all your traffic in browser. So guess what happens? You go to YouTube on the in TikTok browser. You can't subscribe. You have to log into your YouTube account from TikTok. And it's just practically impossible because you have to go through the Google authentication. I had no idea.

It's interesting. Yeah, it's very, very difficult because I've found people that I want to subscribe to from TikTok. And it's just this mess. So I copy and paste their name. from TikTok into YouTube so I can subscribe to them. And then what you have to end up doing is, I mean, there's a whole other procedure you have to do with it.

But it's just one of those odd things that I run into because I'm like, well, and I run into people that are arguing and throwing a fit over. I'm like, well, just use the traffic that you have on the platform. There's, I mean, you have a million subscribers on there. You can make all the money you need to if you run, treat it like a business. Why don't we go back to the very beginning? How do you get involved in doing all of this? Do you have a degree?

Okay. Tell us, tell us the backstory. Do you want the 30 second sales pitch? Do you want the five minutes? I think the five, how about the five minute one? Five minutes. Okay, so.

Give us a five minute version. Okay. So my name's Brandon. I grew up 20 miles south of Columbus. My dad was a truck driver. My mom sold Avon. grew up outside of a little town called Circleville, Ohio. We're famous for pumpkins.

We all worship pumpkins. Anyway, so my dad drove truck. My mom sold Avon. We were always really dirt poor. When I was six years old, we got evicted. We ended up moving to literally the middle of a cornfield. my parents were able to find a house so they could kind of afford. Lived there for quite some time.

Then, long story short, my dad had a heart attack. When I was 18, we lost that house. We got evicted out of that second house. With my dad's heart attack, he just was, he couldn't work anymore. So my brother and I, we had to go immediately go get jobs. I started working up at a warehouse in Groveport, Ohio, just like an Amazon warehouse. Because I talk very favorably about working for Amazon because all these people. I talked to a lot of people on social media.

I just work at an Amazon warehouse or I work at a fulfillment center. I'm like, hey, I did that for three years. So I worked at a fulfillment center for three years. My brother picked trash for the city municipality. So I did that for three years. And then I was like, you know, I'll never be able to raise a family on this. I need to find out something that I can do, that I could support a family. And I've always had this dream of having a one-income household.

It's typically, you know, any more modern society, have a two-income household, husband and wife work. It's hard to raise a family and all. that different stuff. I'm like, you know, I think if I do, I get a real estate license. And even in my small town, you know, this is 15 plus years ago, everybody that was in real estate drove a Cadillac and they had nice clothes. I'm like, well, hey, even in my small town, they've got Cadillac. So everybody in real estate must be rich. So I ended up spending three weeks, three whole weeks going and getting my real estate license. So that was 2006. And then after I got real estate, I came to the really

quick determination that the salespeople, there were a few that were wealthy, but it was practically all investors that were wealthy. I ran into a janitor of a hospital in Columbus, and he was a janitor, and he came to my office, and this is like 07, 08, I got my license in 06, and he's like, I need to buy, I want to buy some getaway land down on the hills. I'm like, okay, whatever, you know, that's fine, go get prequalified for a mortgage. And he's like, what do you mean by? I said, go get prequalified for a mortgage, and we can talk about what you can for, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he throws a freaking checkbook at me. And he said, look at it. Like, okay, what? And I open up this guy's checkbook that he threw up me to take a look. He has

half a million dollars in his checking account. And I'm like, what the heck did you do? You're a janitor. And he said, I invest in real estate. And I'm like, you invest in real estate. He said, yeah, I buy houses close to the hospital. And we flip them. And I'm like, oh, my gosh, I don't need to be a real estate age. I need to be an investor. So from 07-ish, I spent from 07, to 2013, just like Tryfurt. How do I get money to invest? And there's a lot of other stuff that went on. I got into building websites and online marketing and stuff. While I kept having my real estate license, I got in big into selling foreclosures doing bank BPO's broker price opinions for banks doing foreclosures, ran a foreclosure blog that was decently popular for a while, all trying to

figure out how do I get money to buy rentals. And I just couldn't do it because I just kept getting more money, couldn't go and buy anything. But first, I want to thank our sponsor, Start Engine. Alex, do you know what I'm super excited about this holiday season? That you get to eat an entire Thanksgiving turkey by yourself and nobody's going to judge you for it? No. Well, yeah, but... Is it the thing that you told me not to talk about in the podcast? What are you talking about, man? There was nothing there. Oh, well, is it our sponsor today? Start Engine? Yes, Alex, it is. You see, I've been so interested in startups and equity crowdfunding. But the problem is for a long time, those investments have been reserved for accredited investors with huge net worths.

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Thank you so much StartEngin for sponsoring this episode, and back to the podcast. Around 2013, I finally figured out, you know, I can go out and get investors. I can go out and get capital a different way. And at that point, I was able to go get investors. And then we just kind of meandered on, picked up the landlord from when I was six years old, the one that evicted me. He became one of my investors. And we started to buy more property and all that stuff.

So in that process, I started in 2013, about a house July 2013, I think about two in 2013, four or five in 2014. Then I just kept scaling. And every year I've got more except I think 2020. I only bought, I didn't buy anything in 2020. I don't think I bought anything in 2020, which is weird because I figured if I was going to have growth on YouTube channel, I'd just be constantly buying properties and showing people what it's like. And I've bought less stuff since I started like really doing well on YouTube than I've ever done.

So that's what I'm trying to hopefully get back to is buying more stuff. I mean, we've got the laundromat and I did buy the two car washes. But it's just been an odd thing. I bought like a vending machine here and I bought an arcade machine here. And I'm like, you know, I really want to go out and buy another apartment complex. I want to go and buy some different kinds of real estate that I always wanted to try and dabble my hands in. I just can cross monetize it with YouTube. And that's kind of where I want to go.

But it's just been a slow process because of coronavirus because I've at up until recently, essentially self-managed everything, which has been a nightmare during coronavirus. How many doors do you have at the moment? It's like 138 or 139. And if you were to buy currently, would you use investor money still or would you just use your own funds? It depends. Like right now, I'm still once in a while taking capital. And it's usually because I want to try and build a relationship with somebody if I, like, I've got, well, the landlord evicted me.

I want access to a little more money. So I called him. Oh, gosh. What was that call like? Like, hey, you evicted, you evicted us. Can I get some money? He called me. He did.

Yes, he did. He said, I've seen that you're really good with money. And he said, I know that you don't know me very well, but he said, the next time you've got a deal, give me a call. So I was like two or three months later, I was like, really, am I going to let this guy back in my life? I was like, you know, if I would sit down and analyze, why somebody would evict my family? I thought, I'm not saying I would evict my family, but I'm like, I sure as heck would not have done what my parents wanted to do because they wanted no money down land contract with no credit. I would never do that in a million years as an investor. And my parents, for some reason, thought that you could do that.

You can't do that. If they really wanted the house that we got evicted out of, they should have got qualified for a mortgage. Totally would have gone. USDA, they could have put 5% down in the 1990s, and they could have bought it. They could have done it.

Instead, the landlord needed cash. You wanted to sell the house out. So you evicted us. It's just, it's a logical procedure. All this business stuff is a logical procedure. And if you are in the driver's seat, it makes sense 90% of the time.

there's a disconnect between your average person, I think, and the person that's in business because you're never in the driver's seat for the money and the finances. And sometimes you should have to make hard choices. I have to make hard choices practically every day, at least every week within my business, of who gets qualified, who doesn't get qualified, where am I going to take this money, what am I going to do with it? And sometimes there's just no good choice, just have to make a choice and let the chips fall where they want to.

Wow. Oh, so at what point did you start getting into car washes, laundromats, arcades? And why? So the laundromat that I own right now was one that me and a buddy tried to buy back in 2018. And the guy that owned it, Trippy, the guy that owned it before I did, he passed away in 2017. And his mom took over the estate as an executor. We tried to talk her into doing, selling us the laundromat, and we offered like 50 grand.

And she didn't want to do it because she thought I didn't have the money. And this is 2018. I could have wrote her check. I could have bought it, you know, paid her cash. And she didn't want to do it. She went with somebody else. And as a part of that process, we got the books on it. We saw that she was turning in $8,500 worth of quarters a month for the bank.

No. Yeah. And, I mean, it was to the point that she couldn't bear, she, like, taking them in little buckets and all this different stuff. And I was like, holy freaking crap, it's a $50,000 property. I don't care what I have to deal with headache wise. The ROI on that's extra comical. It's like a one-year repay. So I didn't get it.

She went with another investor. The other investor could not make a run of it. Why? Just he outsourced all of the business process to a family member, which I have found out the hard way does not work in a lot of cases. He outsourced the entirety of the business process to a family member they ran into the ground tour. I wasn't making any money.

They closed it down for a year and a half-ish, and then I took it over. I bought two other laundromats that were absolute failures, and we've liquidated one of them. We're in the process. I'm actually land contracting it to a guy that works for me because he doesn't want to use it as a laundromat. Now that I know a lot more about laundromats,

I never would have bought those two, but looking at the one that was making $8,500 a month, I was like, oh, man, these things are cash cows. So I bought two other laundromats and they didn't work out too well, but I could see the numbers as I did resource. I'm like, man, I buy one good laundromat. It'll make those other two crap deals work out. So I got this, the guy that owned it was selling it. And I convinced him to sell it to me with seller financing in place.

So I didn't get it for the 50K that I offered, but I got it for 15K down. And then he's carrying back 75,000 on a really good note. So, and it's just, it's worked out really, really well. and we've gone through, we've renovated it. We got a laundry consultant guy, Danny. He flew into Ohio because of my YouTube channel and kind of went through the whole laundromat and said, hey, you suck.

Go and do set up this process for your laundromat. And now I just did my last video. The first nine days of this month, we brought in $3,000. So it's on track to do. What did he walk in? What was bad about it? He is big on like all new machines. Make it look really nice.

nice and clean and get new machines, and that's kind of big thing of it. Yeah, what more could a laundry consultant really advise? Not to discredit a laundry consultant. Let me educate you, Jack, really quick. Because what was interesting when you called in on our first conversation was because I seriously looked at getting a laundromat, I think it was 2014 or 15. And I really considered it. And I found there was a laundromat forum and a whole bunch of people.

And a whole bunch of people were giving advice on how to find laundromats. And then through that, everyone recommended a laundromat consultant. And I met with a guy and he walked us through one of his laundromats that he like, I don't want to say like he managed it, but he helped put it together. It was a nice place. But everything from like right when you walk in, how does the flow look like, where do you put the security camera? What type of machines do you use? Whereas the dollar thing, is there a restroom on site?

Does the door lock got a certain hour automatically? Do you have a... It's insane. But I almost got... After that consultation with him, I almost felt like I know nothing. First, we have to thank our sponsor, Ritual. Guys, let me tell you about my morning ritual. I wake up at precisely 6.49 a.m. every single day.

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That's ritual.com slash icch. Go ahead, try them out, guys. Thank you, ritual for sponsoring this episode and back to the podcast. Like, you would think that it's easy. Yeah. But I was, it was the amount of work. And I looked into it and believe it or not, like, remember, I would tell all the time that before I got into real estate, I would go to open houses, like, every single weekend for months. Guess what?

I went to laundromats. And I would go with a buddy of mine and we'd go together. And we'd just, like, every single laundromat, we'd walk in and just look around to see, like, what was good, what was bad. And you learn a lot from that. But it's a business. And you can't. hire it out. It's very hard to.

And that's the thing that I'm finding out. It's just how bad I am at finding good people. But it's something that I'm very conscientiously trying to concentrate on and solve within my own business because I've got where to the point that I can either blow up my social media stuff and make way more money with it or I can blow up my real estate business side of it. I'm trying to do what I can to make sure things are segmented right so I can make the most profitable choice for me.

It'll probably be social media for it. Now, what did the laundromat guy do, though, for your business? What did he say? What was his advice? Get rid of all my crap machines because we were constantly having one, two, three machines down constantly. And he said, look, no one uses a laundromat that always has machines down. You've got to have everything working.

The only way to do that is get all new machines. And the problem is with laundromats is one machine could retail for $20,000. It's like, oh, you need 20 of these machines. It's like 20 machines at $20,000 a piece, it's $400 grand. Like, I don't want to spend that money. And he's got a really good system of this is what you offer. This is how you negotiate to get those machines. Here's how you can get them financed from the factory, like with very minimal money.

He helps you negotiate leases. He helps you just do all these different things because unlike my situation in Southern Ohio, I won't buy something unless I own the dirt underneath it. I want to buy the real estate, I want to own the land. That is very much not normal in the United States. Most are in leased facilities. And you guys know, I'm sure you can get screwed over on a lease six away from Sunday, especially in the state of California.

Because what they'll do is they'll break community fees, water fees. There's like all these different, like, they would be like HOA fees in Ohio, but there are other like CAM fees and just all this different stuff. And then they make you think that you're getting an all-inclusive price on the least. And then you find out there's all these backup fees. And so your lease just goes from 5,000 to 10,000 just at the drop of a hat. And he comes in and helps you get a really, really good lease on the property. So if you've got a 20-year lease on a property and you're only getting like a 1% acceleration a month or a year.

And your landlord initially asked for six. You know, you start figuring out what the in dollar amount is after 20 years. It's just an insane difference. And a lot of people just don't understand that that's kind of things. can happen. So how much do you think this consultant saved you and how much did they charge? They didn't charge me anything because it's my YouTube channel, which is nice. Wow. Yeah. So want to plug him? May as well plug him. It's Danny DeAngel and I'm going to his house tomorrow. So like right after I record this, we'll go do a live stream tomorrow.

Cool. So I brought all my camera gear. Is he in Vegas? No, he's in Phoenix. Oh, I got excited for a second. I'm sorry. He could be in Vegas. He lives in Phoenix and he comes to Vegas with his wife like all the freaking time. What's interesting to me is that you're a finance YouTuber and TikTokers. and you have a huge following, but at the same time, you are very, very smart with investing. And I think you could be the only finance YouTuber

that makes, well, like real genuine finance YouTuber that makes more money from your investments and your non-like YouTube job than you do from YouTube ads and sponsorships. Oh,

we need to hear this. What do you think, Graham? How much, oh, wait, okay, you know what, I'm going to guess. Oh, please don't. I'll guess. Social media, we're counting everything.

so including sponsorships and everything. I'm going to get social media probably pull in $40,000 a month on that. I was going to say $30. All right, you're going to say $30. Oh, you tell us that first. Try about $25. You're close. Because YouTube shorts are killing me.

They're killing my long format content. And that's going to happen for a while. And I've kind of resigned myself to the fact that my shorts are going to hurt my long format content and add sense income for a while until I either back in people and I get them in a sales funnel and do something else with the traffic, or I wait until YouTube fixes their shorts, and then all of them delicious money starts coming back. So I think 30, well, that's what I said, 30 for the social stuff.

And then for your, you know, non-social media stuff, I think you're probably making 45 or 50. No, I think, I'm going to guess, we're talking net. Can we talk about? Oh, gosh, I don't even know that number, because I'm spending so much on CAPEX right now. Yeah, so I'm, gross, gross has to be about 150,

but I'm going to guess of that net in your pocket has got to be about 80. Yeah, that's a little high. It's like, I'm in the like vicinity of 100, 120 gross. And then if I wasn't spending so much on CAPX, it should be like 50, 60 a month net. And that's with all the things I'm in. And then I've got some partnership agreements where I don't get the whole thing. And then my debt service, I pay like $17,000 a month a debt service.

but a lot of it's amortizing and we're getting close on several loans just closing them out so then my monthly net's going to drop increase more but suffice to say my net's probably two to three times a month on my investments versus my YouTube income

but the thing is it's like with my social media stuff I spend no time on it my time commitment's almost next to nothing other than editing I spend no time when shooting my content half of it's with my cell phone that's incredible to me because when I watch your videos, it's like you've done everything right from what.

Because when I'm talking to Zach, Zach King, he told us that he does like 90 takes on stuff. It's really, it's planned out. Everything you see is purposeful. And like he gets the, I don't want to say he gets the algorithm down, but he knows exactly what to do, which points to make it work. Yeah. But yours is just like, yeah, I'm just going to film with my iPhone, spend it a time.

And that's good. That's where I've got to, I've got to resign myself to that's how my content's always going to look. And now I'm trying to figure out what does the systemization of that look like. And realistically, it's going to be someone following me around with a camera one or two days a week. And just doing all the stuff. They're going to edit it on the back end, make it look authentic because it will be authentic. And then hopefully I'll get to the point that I'll be getting out the volume of content that I need because I'm lacking severely in the volume. I would like ideally to have four short format a week and then three long format

content content a week. I agree with that. If I can film for 16 to 18 hours a week, then I'll be good. And then just outsource all the editing, which is where I'm going. Now, my ultimate goal is to do the whole thing live because I really, really like Kevin's engagement. I've partially stalked Kevin on the stats for YouTube. And I know what engagement he's at.

I've talked a couple people about that do live streams, and they've said, yeah, you know, if you would do structured live streams, you would get about 10x what you do now. I can pull in 6,700 concurrence on just a random live stream. I did a random live stream the other night at the laundromat because I had to go fix something. I just turned on my cell phone, had 700 concurrence and 18,000 watchers over the 45-minute stream, which was good. And the YouTube's increase the RPM rate for live streams at a ton. so I get the good engagement. It goes out to my YouTube short followers and it's just going to work out really well.

So if I can figure out like a multi-cam format live stream, I think that'll be exactly what I want. And if we can do it in high enough quality, then we just can go and we can take all the content I need, get the episodic stuff and then just get it out. But I like the idea of having a live stream that where people can ask questions. Like, why are you doing this thing, Brandon?

Why are you weighing the quarters in a bucket? That's because if I did it with machine, it would take me an hour and a half. I can do this other thing in five minutes. It's more time efficient for me. How accurate can you get when you weigh quarters like that? Oh my gosh. It's really close within 1%.

At that point, it cares. Yeah. I use my machine because I have to separate quarters, nickels, and dimes. And plus it's fun, I like the sound. And when you go to a bank with like a bucket full of quarters, do you hate me? Do you wrap it up? You don't wrap it up.

Oh, wow. I specifically went through every bank in my county and figured out who would let me bring in the bulk coins. So how do they do it? But then they have to wrap it. No. No, they've got a deal. If they can get it to an accurate amount, they can give it to Brinksler-Lumus,

and they'll take it to the federal depository. Because we've got a federal depository in Cleveland, which is really that far from me. So then they take a bulk bag. It has $1,250 worth of quarters in it, and they just put in the bulk bag, throw in the... But they have to still count out... The Fed does. $1.250. The Fed does it. That's why we have a quarter shortage right now, because they're just in the bulk of the...

Because these banks take our coin shortage. They take the Fed bags. They take them to the depository. And they're so far behind on counting those quarters. And they're not bringing enough surplus or enough volume from the mint and new coins that we have a short. I didn't know that. Yeah, I had no idea either. Why don't, so here's the thing.

I've always believed that they should get rid of change. How do you feel about that? Like at least get rid of the penny. Yeah. You can get rid of the penny. We don't need that. But also it's like usually change. You just don't need.

At some point, I think it's going to be just a tap card, like a credit card. It's going to be... It's like credits, yeah. Yeah, that's social credit thing, yes. Want to go electric without sacrificing fun? That's the Volkswagen ID4. All electric and thoughtfully designed to elevate your modern lifestyle. The Volkswagen ID4 is fun to drive with instant acceleration that makes city streets feel like open roads.

Plus a refined interior. With innovative technology, always at your fingertips. The all-electric ID4, you deserve more fun. Visit vw.ca to learn more. SUVW, German-engineered for all. I think that probably in 20 years you'll probably see coins like they are disappear, but you'd be shocked at the municipalities and areas that are very, very strict. They absolutely want change.

New York City is one of them. As many digs as I have against New York City, they kind of demand that laundromats and other business like that except quarters and money. They don't want to go tap to pay because there's a lot of people that are on SSI and stuff. They absolutely don't want to use a card. They want to use cash. So it's kind of like a disenfranchisement deal if you don't accept cash in a business. You know, legally it is, you know, they have to accept that tender.

There's ways to kind of, there's some flexibility on those laws. But I would like to see, I guess, probably rounding up to a nickel rather than just, doing away with all change and then just go to five cent and twenty cent coins. But you don't really have to like bring a bunch of quarters to the bank because what I find funny, for some reason I just find this so so hilarious is that people will go in with dollars and then they'll put it in the machine and then they'll get quarters out and then they'll spend quarters in the laundromat. And then you cycle those quarters in the laundromat back into the machine where they put their dollars in. Yeah. So it's literally just moving the same quarters. Have you just kept you up late at

It hasn't kept me up later. I just think it's so funny that the quarters literally just go from the machine to the laundromat or to the laundry machines back to the machine. Until my competitor comes in with $100 and 20s and tries to run me out of change. No. Oh, you know what? I want to hear about the dirty. Let's talk about the drama. It's the dirty tricks.

Believe it or not, I've heard so many stories. Laundromat owners are ruthless. There was one story that I heard. And this was on the forums, by the way. And this was like the top, the laundry mat forums. the top thread was about a guy someone wanted to put their savings into a laundromat they thought they'd done all the research

and some guy wrote like this essay on why he shouldn't do it and one of the reasons was that there was there was one owner of a laundromat who had like six or seven of them in this one like big big it was a big enough city and he had like the monopoly on this well someone else opened up a laundromat

in his territory and he didn't like it so what he ended up doing is lowering the price of all of his laundromats. Oh, yeah. To basically run this person out of business. Oh. And so what happened is, apparently the guy was warned.

If you open up here, I'm doing this. Don't open up here. And the guy was like, no, it's, you know, how bad could it be? The guy literally ran him out of business just by lowering his prices. And the guy was like, I have all the money in the world. You, like, it's going to hurt you more than it's going to hurt me. I don't care if I don't make money for a year, but you're going out of business. Yeah.

Sure enough, nobody went there. Yeah. I mean, there's dirty tricks in that. Yeah. Let's hear them. I want to... Yeah, what's the drama in the laundromax? I mean, I mean, car washes too.

I mean, oh, well, we'll get to that. Let's be honest. It's about any business where you've got people potentially with old money that can just, just be mean and be angry at people. I mean, what isn't there? You go and pay a... Gosh, I don't want to get demonetize like a... We'll be careful. I don't know if you guys watch my channel.

I call them People of the Rock. Because we can't use that word. On YouTube, we get demonetized. You don't watch any of my stuff, do you? People of the Rock, people that use a certain kind of rock in their life that's an illicit substance. So addicts. Yes.

Of a substance. Okay. Yes. So, I mean, there's, it's nothing to give somebody a hundred bucks and ask them to go burn down somebody else's laundering. No. I mean, gosh, you guys. So you're saying people. You don't deal with competitive.

No. You're saying people that are addicted to substances and struggling. They'll do anything for money to get more of the substance. They will be paid by your competitors to burn down laundromats, car washes. Yeah, sure. That is absurd. Why laundromats out of all things? Because they're profitable.

I mean, but let's go back to what I said, starting off this leg here, is people with old money, can, they get to this point that you've got all this money, and you can spend on whatever you want. You've done, had a lot of them for 30 or 40 years. And some whippersnapper comes into town and they're trying to take over your business. And you can just spend money to the point that they go bankrupt. Or you can pay somebody to do something they shouldn't be doing. Or you can go, there's all sorts of ways you can do it.

And I'm not saying, let me be clear. I'm not saying this happens very often, but it does happen. And it's, but it's just, it's with any kind of business that's out there that you have people with old money. I've seen it with rentals. I've seen people underpriced their rentals, $200, $300 a month because someone bought a property they didn't like. So what are the other tricks, though? You mentioned putting $100 bills and running out of change.

Oh, I'm sure that I've had people come in intentionally and damage my equipment. I don't know for certain that is a competitor, but it's just, and you know, and what's so funny is people, it's not just with laundromats, people have like, they are a big brand supporter of a competitor. And so, you know, if they accidentally throw, I don't know. Rags in a dryer with oil on them and then accidentally sets it on fire, you know,

there's people that will support a brand and they'll just damage equipment. That's crazy. Holy cow. You people, if someone goes to a laundromat for 20 or 30 years, the same one, and they kind of come to the decision that the other person is going to put them out of business, the one they've been used for 20, 30 years of the same side of town, might as well go break the crap. That is customer loyalty, if I've ever seen it before.

Gosh. That's, what about carwax? I mean, unless there's anything else with the laundromat, I'm, I still rocking my mind. Like I said, I, I had the onset of this.

I'd go for like five hours. I want you to tell us more of these stories. What I've seen is on your Instagram, and I think also your YouTube videos, you have security cameras that catch the wildest things. Oh yeah. Happening in your laundromat. Oh, yeah.

Can you provide, like, maybe like the craziest thing that happened in your laundromat? Or maybe two? We'll be monetized. Say it. Say it. Well, just say it in like the kid version.

If there's a way. When a mommy and daddy, love each other very much. I don't understand. I'm Jack. I'm kidding. Jack's parents never. Okay.

Oh, they watched this, Graham, they watched this. I've had that habit a couple times. I've had people concoct substances on the floor. Like they were cutting their materials with credit cards and debit cards on the floor. Yeah,

but not the high quality stuff, like the cheap stuff. I've had those two. I've had a lot of people, like, throw a party in my laundromat. What? I absolutely laugh. They come in with, like, a 12-pack or 24-pack of beer. Isn't that almost like a good thing?

Like, doesn't that help? I mean, like, you know, that's kind of one of those situations. I'm like, is this a bad thing or a good thing? Because they really like my laundromat. I was about to say. Like a laundry party. Did they do laundry or do they just go and party? Some of both.

They just kind of go. I would be happy with that. Like, if someone came in with a six-pack, with their buddies, and like, at least one of them. them is doing laundry. And customers are not turned off by that or they're welcoming. That would be a memorable experience. That's been funny.

Those are kind of my more memorable things. The one that I still get angry at is we had to put a quick set key code on our bathroom. So now you have to call a number to get the code to use the bathroom. We had to do that. And I've never talked about this on the channel. So it's a Graham-Sephan exclusive. Oh, nice coffee. Exclusive.

Hit the like button and subscribe for this. Yeah. So we put the lock on it because I found out later on, at some point probably in the past year, that people were going into my bathroom and they were hiding baggies of illicit substances in our drop down ceiling. And they were popping out the panels hiding it up there. And then someone was coming back later and they were like cash-happing each other. Because someone was like, oh, yeah, they're cash-happing each other for the substances. They're hiding up in your drop ceiling.

Wow. I wouldn't even think about that. I would, you know, why not anywhere else in a park? Anywhere else? That's no camera. It's guaranteed. Not in the bathroom, but I got them in the hallway. I got them all over the laundromat.

People know. I even got the security cameras wired up to TV, so when you walk in the laundromat, you see yourself on the camera. They still did it. And I'm like, oh, my gosh. So if I would have known it, because we figured this out when we're renovating the laundromat, if I would have known that, I would have taken a live stream camera, and I would have hit it above the drop.

ceiling with a light trigger on it. That would be amazing. I would have got a notification on it. Is that illegal? No, no, not there. In the state of Ohio,

we're one party wiretap state and it's great because what it means is as long as there is an expectation and by, as my understanding of a legal expert, under Ohio revised code, it essentially says if you, there is no expectation of privacy,

then none is a, So if you're at a business, unless you are in the bathroom, that confines the bathroom, then there's no privacy expected. So it's anywhere in the grounds of laundromat, I can do whatever I want to with recording. So it's like, really, you expect privacy in the drop ceiling. You can't say anything else. We set the camera up, so that's all we get is the hand up there. And it's just, but the problem is, is do I want this drama and this spite to drive my content?

Or do I want to be the happy guy with the quarters? That's the problem because if you get on the wrong side of that, like let's say, because it's not just the guy. It's the guy who then gets it from somebody else, who gets it from somebody else. And that top person's like, who's this guy? And why does this have 20 million views? And why is my guy's hand on there and my business? And then all of a sudden, then you become a target of that. Yeah.

And it's just, you know, if I let it, all the drama and the problems will overwhelm me and overwhelm the channel. And it's like, I cut back on a lot of the drama. It's going back to this, having a camera on following me around. Both good and bad stuff. I only, like, put, like, I figured it up as, like, 20% of it on YouTube and TikTok. Like, I've got 80% more stuff that I was like, man. It's like, for instance, right before I came here, we did a craft show with my 10-year-old and 12-year-old.

They baked bread. They made chocolate. And they took it to this craft show. And we were there for, like, an hour, hour and a half. They sold $8. And I said, you know what, guys? You know, it would be fun. And they said, what?

And I said, me to show you guys how daddy sells things. And they said, what do you mean? I said, all right. I said, I want you to fill up a basket with all your bread and all your different stuff. And I said, we're going to go make some money. And they said, okay. So they made $8 on an hour and a half. And so I said, and they said, my 12 year, I said, or I took my 10 year old first.

And she said, so how are we going to make money? We're not selling anything. I said, we're going up to every single person in this building and say, hi, I'm Brandon's daughter. And me and my sister baked bread for this past week. And we made homemade chocolates. Would you please buy some? I made $80 an hour doing that. Yeah.

Yeah. And I'm like, and it was very uncomfortable for him. I was like, guys, this is daddy's job. This, when daddy goes, daddy sells something. We were all at some point in our life going to be, we're either selling our time to an employer or we're selling a product to somebody. It's all life comes down to is selling a time selling a product. And I'm like, this is what daddy does. And we just had an absolute blast at a craft show selling homemade bread and chocolate. And my kids made enough money. And they're like, they came home and like, Mommy, we got enough money by a switch now. Each my kids can. you know, now I'll afford a switch because I'm a cheap skating and won't buy them stuff. Anyway, so it's like we didn't record anything for it. It's lost the time. Except the stories. So I got the stories. So that's nice. And I could do the stories.

That's good. I like that. Will you please buy some? Because it's conveying the message. They're asking for it politely. And it's hard to say no to that. Yeah. Will you please buy some?

Instead of, would you like to buy some? No. Would you please buy some? Yeah. Yeah. And see that little shift there? Yeah, yeah. It's smart.

Because especially coming from a. kid. It's like you can't say that as like an older person, but from a kid, it's like you can kind of demand that. Yeah. Right? Because it's like innocent. It's funny. We're guilt tripping them in. It's it's exploiting their. They're innocent. I look at all the kids that do lemonade stands. I love kids that do lemonade stands. But I also feel bad for them because a lot of them are bad at sales. They just don't know what they're doing. And it's like I wish that every kid that would have a lemonade lemonade stand would know how to sell because man, that would be a great point to start off your

life and just considering the possibility of having a career that deals with sales. I've done so many lemonade stands and the hardest part is getting people to stop their car. Yeah, but then that kind of can be a location thing and it can kind of be a logistical thing. You know, if you could go up to the cars and sell it, then it might be more, more advantageous. I did a YouTube video forever. We parked cars for our big festival or from where I'm from. And my Brandon's great idea was, you know what? We should go get a bunch of stripe readers for our cell phone so we can take cards.

So we were the only parking lot in the whole entire town that would take credit cards. And all the people that were working for me during that festival, they're like, this is the smartest thing ever. I'm like, kind of stupid that no one thought that you can get a card reader for five-d-up bucks. And, you know, we made extra $1,000, let's say, just for a $5. Swipe reader that we got from Walmart. It's just those kind of little tweaks, and that's kind of hopefully, I feel like about it, do a bad job presenting it on my YouTube channel.

But there's all these little tweaks and little things that you can do in a business that improves your margin. If you think that you, my thing that I always try to do is look at something, figure out what the average is, increase your sales 10% or 20% over the median or whatever the average is and try to decrease your expenses, 10 or 20%. If you could just take any business, like with someone that has a 10 cap rate or an 8 cap rate, you drop your expenses 20%, you increase your sales 20%. Those numbers start to become super, super powerful, especially if you leverage it.

I ran into a guy that did spec construction in my town on a Chipotle, and he sold it at a 3% cap rate. I thought, I'm in a small town in Ohio. Why would anybody buy a commercial facility on 3% cap rate? They said, you know, they've got a 3.5% yearly acceleration clause, and they got a 20-year guaranteed lease from Chipotle, which is backed by McDonald's. You start penciling those numbers. It's like 75% increase. And in the gross rent rate over the next, what, 12 years or so, it's just a great. The way the number start working.

And a lot of people don't take that math back and think, oh, wow, I just have to do a little better on my sales, that a little better on my expenses, and you can rule the world with it. There's just so many businesses that could take that efficiency gain. But people need to be encouraged to have a feel like they can do it. That tends to be like a mental block. Smart man. Very smart man. I don't know about that.

What? You should see the dumb stuff I do. I would love to hear about the dumb stuff you do. Yeah. Tell us about the dumb stuff. Oh, when I was six years or seven years old, I felt like I needed to retire on my GI Joe's in an honorable way. So I poured a bunch of gasoline on them. And I went and got my dad's bow and arrow wrapped a rag full of gasoline around it and shot the flaming arrow into the big stack of G.I. Joe toys.

I missed. Had to go get the flaming arrow back up. I went up to the big giant pile of toys with gasoline on it and found out the hard way that vapors get generated from that. And I woke up unconscious under a tree missing my eyebrows. I blame that on, that's one of the reasons I think I'm bald today. That's probably it. I get rid of off more stories of my less than stellar intelligence, but I don't even know what to say.

What's your favorite business to run? I don't know. I like the car washes. They're pretty fun. What about the stories of the car washes, like the shady stuff and car wash? We've heard laundromats. I mean, it's the same. The big thing is, and I, I'm going to get hate mail,

is so many of these businesses, people are underreporting their income to the IRS. I mean, I think it's assumed with laundromats. I mean, yeah, especially. But grocery stores and car washes and laundromats and vending machines, a lot of people would under report their income, some like severely. And what bugs the heck out of me is when you go in to buy one. And you're like, I want to offer you X, Y, Z amount of dollars. And they're like, okay, I'm like, can you give me a tax return?

Because I want to go get SBA financing or I want to take it totally. bank. And they're like, well, there's a problem. We don't have any money. You know, and you have nothing to show. So you end up with this point. And I make this point on a lot of my videos, number one, to get the IRS off my back. Granted, that hasn't been too successful because I did get audited last year. But it's over Bitcoin, so it's all happy. So, but they underreport their income. Yeah. And the income is time to sell. They lose so much equity in the business, if they would have just properly reported and get a good CPA, that'll, help them do cost segmentation, track their depreciation appropriately, expense things that are

appropriate to provide corporate perks, that you can take a lot of different things off your taxes. I mean, you take any, what was a 1065 statement to your self-employment or business income statement, you take it to bank. The first thing they do is they take off depreciation. So if you can get that depreciation number up high enough to minimize your tax liability, you're good as gold. You don't have to worry about it. I dealt with one of them

because we got a statement from one laundromat and the same thing. And the guy who we had helping us said that it was so common just basically don't ask for a tax return. It's not going to be accurate. Instead, what he recommended doing

was hiring somebody to track what sort of business they were doing over the course of a week or it was like over a month or something and you extrapolate based off that. Yeah. And you can do back in engineering on water reports.

You can go just like, scan the barcodes for all the washers in the facility. You can pull a PDF file from the manufacturer of it. You can say, oh, this washer uses 45 gallons per cycle. Well, come with a median figure and it takes like 10 minutes to do on a spreadsheet. Call the water department because most states have a law that you can request water statements on everybody. And then you just kind of do the algebra on the back end and figure out how many cycles they've run. Look at their median prices and you can get that.

It was interesting because I remember at the time, this was 2013 or 14, there was a big difference. There was starting to be a shift between the coin operated machines and the card operated machines. And I remember his advice being stick with the coins because if you get audited, there's less of a trail. Yeah. And it seemed like people were also very resistant to doing the card machines because

it's trackable. It seems like a lot of people in that industry were like, we just want the cash and still that way with a lot of people. Right. Yeah. But the big thing is, if you take. cards and you do a rewards program, then you can collect a float. Oh, yeah.

Cards. And I've heard some numbers thrown out there, and they're at one person. I don't trust what they say, but they said they had a 20% float on the redemptions for the laundromat. Wow. That would be so worth it if you had a 20% float on your laundromat cards or car wash cards. I haven't heard that number thrown around ever for a car wash.

I've heard like a 10% float on car wash production codes. But tell us about the, shady stories or funny stories with car wash. I like your stories. I like the worst one that we've gone through is someone intentionally ramming our car wash. And it was like it's probably, we don't know what the insurance number is going to be,

but it's going to be six figures, probably $100,000 or $120,000. Ramming the car. Like, how does that work? Yeah, their machine was stopped. Someone had bumped it with a pickup truck because it can only, the old machine that we had in there

can only take vehicles up to 19 feet. No one knows how long, do you know? I would. You own a vehicle, right, Jack? Yes, I do. Okay. How long is it? 16 feet?

No, that's 16. Do you realize how big 16 feet is? That's a pickup truck size. How long is it? Your car? I'm guessing your car is probably about 10, 9, 10. It's 2006 Lexus Rx 330? I'm going to take a guess and say it's going to be 12 to 14 feet.

Okay. But for the most part, no one knows what their vehicle length is. Yeah. But if you have a pickup truck, a quad cab, they're right at 19 to 20 feet. So they come in and they bump the machine. Their hitch bumps the machine. It just stops. So machine stop guy pulls out of the car wash.

This other vehicle just comes up, it just runs right through it. And this big machine sitting there doing nothing. And what it is, there's an overload that gets tripped, and you've got to just turn it back on. And it's this big giant thing. He just had this idea that you could just kind of ram it. And he rammed it three times. And it did just an astronomical amount of damage.

It did tons of damage to our car wash, but we've got 4K security cameras on everything. It really didn't look like it did much to the guy's issue. But now, who pays for that? His insurance, because we got the license plates. Wow. Yeah. What if he's underinsured?

I mean, if you say 600, $100,000 in the minute. We have really good commercial insurance. Like, our adjuster could not believe how over. insured we were, because we were like, someone's going to hit these machines. Like, it's guaranteed. We're new operators. Bad things are going to happen and took three months. And then someone ramped it.

How much did you buy this car wash for and how much is it making for a month? So this is public record. We paid $675,000 for both locations plus the storage locker facility. I will get in trouble if I tell you guys how much it makes because my business partner wants me to put it behind a paywall. We could block it out. You just get our, we'll just get our reaction. But also, but also why, why behind a paywall? What's the, because I want to do training for car washes and profitable businesses.

And it's like, I really need to explain to people. I'll do the reaction shot. We were doing about a month off the car washes. Yeah, I mean, but here's the thing. To me, that seems it's profitable, but it's nothing that I would be like, oh, my, now here's my thought is that it, it should tell people how much it makes because that would be, that would be so much more enticing to people than...

I know. Believe me, I know. And well, you could show him this. Why do you even need a partner on that? Because I'm not mechanically inclined enough to service car wash policy. Oh, it's so expensive. So I also looked into buying a car wash and I think it was 125

and it was in Downey, California. And it made a lot of money. I think it was like, it was supposed to make like 30% a year or it was like, It was some amount where it was like, or no, it was like $50,000 a year for a 125 car wash.

But the thing was that maintenance was so high. One thing is not, yeah. And he, my business partner is so good with the mechanical stuff. He's found and he's got a guy trained. We got a part-time maintenance tech. And I haven't had to do anything.

I didn't collect money for probably like, well, I had to show up twice in the past five weeks, but I went three weeks to do anything. And we're trying to do is come up with a car wash system. so we can just go and buy all the car washes in our region because they're just, you don't want to proper maintenance cycle

when you do the right things, then they just print money. What other businesses have you thought about getting into? What about gas stations? I would like to buy one just to have one. Gas stations, just to have one. Just to put that in the collection. Yeah, it would be fun.

I think it would be fun. One of the things I talked to like the ATM kingpin of Nevada before I came here. I liked it probably five hours ago. And he's was, we were talking numbers on those and oh my gosh. And he's doing Bitcoin ATMs and all this different stuff. We just talked about all these crazy things.

How much is he doing? Oh, he didn't tell me a number, but it's millions a month. How do you, how do you, just in fees? Bitcoin ATM at Cannabis dispensiaries.

Because it gets around the banking law. How smart is that? Oh my gosh. Yeah. It's the stuff I do. I don't even think about that. That is absurd. I'm not, but he showed me one and I'm like, and it can read checks.

It can take cash deposits, give out cash deposits. It's like we got a nice chase branch where I am in Ohio and it like spits everything out. You can tap to pay, get money out of it from an ATM, check cashing, all this different stuff. It's like that kiosk, but it's self-maintained. I don't get why the cannabis dispensers. don't just have their own Bitcoin ATM if it's that profitable. I think that it's a violation of banking laws because whenever you, I'm sure, I mean, the forms are federal.

Does your business involve the sale of, you know, gambling and marijuana and things like that? There's like a list, do you do these things? And if you check that box, then boom, you're not getting an account. So that's why most of these cannabis dispensaries are transacting everything in cash. they're paying gobs of money to like, I don't know that they do Lloyd's of London. I think they just do Loemus and Brinks, like the cash transport services.

Those fees are, in some cases, worse than credit card fees, like the interchange fees and everything. They can be like two to three percent, like just to handle the cash. And sometimes they're more, like it's 3% on cash stored. So what happens is if you can transact on site and you're acting as kind of an intermediary

and you can kind of transact with Bitcoin, or you can do something that isn't actual physical cash storage. It's just there's so much opportunity that's out there, but it's, you know, just it comes down to can you figure it out? Can you structure it? Can you find a way to scale it? And if you can get to the point that you can come up with a scale model, then all of a sudden, magical things happen.

And I know people that have fending machines. I mean, I think you did on the Graham Steffen show. You had Jaime Ibanez. Yes, we did. Back in 2019. And he came to Ohio, and Jaime and Liz and I, we talk back and forth, and he's like scaling and scaling and scaling his vending business.

I think he's up to like, I could be wrong, but just on his vending side, he's making like $300,000 a year. And it's his time commitment from my understanding continuing to not be terrible, like 20, 25 hours a week. I could be wrong there,

but it's not a lot. And it's because he's figured out the scale and he's figured out the logistics to make sure everything's efficient inside that operation. It's something, it's with vending machines. Vitting machines have been around, almost 100 years, but he's efficient about it.

Laundromats have been around since the 30s, and there's people out there, they're just killing it because they're finding out how to be efficient at scale. And Car Wash is the same thing. Mr. Car Wash recently had an IPO, and their market cap is higher than what the car wash industry produced in 2019. They got like a $40 billion market cap,

and the car wash industry as a whole did like $10.5 billion in 2019. Wow. Yeah. So they're doing Forex of what the, entire car wash industry made revenue-wise, not net. These are incredible businesses. You don't even think about it. That's what I like about it, is that these are businesses that you walk by it all the time.

And no one ever tells you, hey, maybe own an ATM. It's weird. It's like I never use ATMs. I don't need it. I never use laundromats. I have maybe once or twice. I rarely ever use car washes. Believe me, my family used the laundromat once before I bought one.

one. He's a car wash like once or twice year to get the salt off my car because I live in Ohio. Like maybe used car washes 20 times in my entire life. Then I bought one. Um, got into rentals and my family pretty much grew up only in rentals. Then my parents had owned house till, like 2005. So doing all these things. I have no, no experience in, which I would think gives hope for people because you can do things that you have no experience. You just, you know, got to learn quick, but you can do it. So can you say your total portfolio value. Oh, it's like a, gosh, I keep doing revaluations because my area of Ohio keeps going up higher and higher and higher.

But it's about six, I'm talking about $8 million at this point. And how much? My debt service is probably $2.5, $2.6 million. Like $6 million? Yeah, that's like your, that's like your net worth. Yeah, there's some caveats in there. Like, I've got some equity loans with people and they get like 25, 35, 35, 40% of whatever a individual property sells for. so then that's not on my general debt service because that's what I'm paying on just like my loan

balances. But I've got a few of those deals, but they're not, it doesn't kick my net worth down severely. But what's amazing to me is how much of that was created based off of active income versus like, I mean, one could argue that like owning a laundromat and, you know, buying rental properties and stuff is somewhat active because you're always working on it. But versus like a salaried income or some sort of income where like you had to work for it, like when you're a real estate agent or something like that. What percent of that growth was from something like that versus just buying a property and then, you know, it's cash flows and more passive investments. The actual true passive investment site, it's all from equity growth. And it's like you go out

and you buy a car wash and you spend 600,000 on it. And then you go and if you buy it on a 10 cap rate and then all of a sudden you're doing a 25 cap rate and the business truly was worth let's say we should use better numbers let's say you buy a car wash it's a million and you're at a 10% cap rate so it's clearing net 100k a year and you double that net at 200k a year you've gone from a $1 million car wash to $2 million car wash and that is not hard to do at all one of our locations right now we're up 45% in terms of gross sales. And then we've pulled, our expenses actually drop down

because my business partners, why I like him so much, he has gone through and he has chased down every problem, like water leaks. Found a garden hose that was going full blast to the storm sewer for no reason whatsoever. Turn that off, tracked it down, shouldn't have been on.

That saved like $500. $500 a month for a year, $6,000. You drop your cost basis down $6,000 a year. on you take that off of your 100,000 a year. Now you're making 106,000. It's amazing to me that you've been able to build a $5.5 million, like, net worth, basically all off of like, in the beginning, like you had investors and stuff,

and you started investing in real estate, and then slowly just like growing your own portfolio all the while. It's like, that is, that's absurd to me. Congratulations, kudos to you. Like, that's amazing. I mean, realistically, I think it would happen to anybody if you'd own as many properties as I do and you waited long enough because now I'm,

now I'm in the process of selling down my single family detached because there's just so much equity in them. So we'll, I'm in the process, we'll sell about a million dollars worth. And if my math's right, we should clear like a net is $650 on it. So $350,000 of debt, principal curtailment,

then with all clear 650 on it. But my cash flow is not going to be hurt really too much at all because our, are my apartment segments just getting better and better and better. We're going and throwing $10,000 into unit. And we're seeing like a 20 to 30, 20 to 40% increase in gross rents. And it's just, it's incredible.

This makes me want to invest. Me too. Seeing what you've done is just, we could just give you money and, uh, so, you know, how much do you do a syndication when I go home. I know. What about self storage? Storage facility. Do you own any of those?

Yeah, I got a 38 unit. 38 unit. How has your experience been with that? It's good now that I have an assistant. It was bad when we took it over because all the people were elderly. They were paying by checks. No one was on the same date. And then I had my assistant say, hey, guess what?

You now get all of the late fees. So I want to make sure that late fees are applied to every account as per the lease agreement that we took over from the facility. We want to make sure that each unit's rented out an appropriate time frame. We'll give you the tools to advertise on Facebook. We're going to buy banners. Whatever is necessary for you to be able to advertise them, you're going to do it. And we're going to pay your regular rate plus bonuses based on not so much performance, but figuring out how to fix the problems, the underlying problems

within self-storage facility. So we took it over and we're probably at 30% vacancy. And I think I looked at the chart before I came on Monday and I think I grew up like 95%. But I'm probably going to take the remaining five for my rental stuff because we are rates lower than the median. We probably should raise rates, but we just don't feel like it. And it's overall, it's a well-performer. but what we're wanting to do is come in with like some security features and whatnot.

The storage industry can be a big money maker, but I don't see a lot of money being made for taking over and doing value ads. I mean, there's plenty of value ads that are out there. I don't see them. All the big money to be made from my perspective is a new construction because there's still a huge difference between an efficient build versus what the markets can bear in a well-billed-well. built out location that there's a shortfall of storage units.

What's your advice to somebody watching who's going to hear your story? They're going to be, I want to do that. What's the first step? What business do they go into? How do they learn about this? What should they avoid? How do they start out? Let's say they have a few grand saved up.

My big thing is like, if I get this question, I'm sure you could do too. It's like, what would you do if you're me? And it would be, I'm going to tell you the most boring thing ever. I'm going to go tell you to put all your money in VTI or VOL. And then spend the next six months and figure out, look at vending machines or car washers or whatever. Find something that you think you can be really passionate about. Do all your research. Do all the legwork to see if there's an opportunity out there.

There might not be an opportunity out there. There's plenty of locations where vending can't be done or ATMs can't be done. You can't do a car wash. You can't do a laundromat. You can't. There's just no opportunity out there. at least you've made some money on that money and you you're not pressed for time because people were like I got $2,000 burn a hole in my pocket.

I'm going to buy a vending machine. I'm like, you don't know a single thing about it and you don't know anything about location. You might not be good at prospecting or talking to business owners. I mean, you just might suck at it. There's a certain personality that you need for ATMs of vending. You might not have it. So it'd be really stupid for me to tell somebody, just go out, you know, this is what you have to do. but I think if you take that pressure off

and you can see a little bit of money growing, even if it's just a couple thousand dollars sitting in VOVTI, they did pretty good the past two years. Then that way, that pressure's off and you can go out and you can find something to get into. I know people in Southern Ohio, they flip cars. I could not flip a car to save my life. If my life depended on, I would die if I had to flip cars.

But I know guys, and that they make a killing off just buying cheap cars and reselling them. There's certain cars they like and they just have two or $3,000, just constantly cycle the money over. I don't have the personality for that, but they sure as heck do.

I know guys that they flip mowers. They go out and they get riding lawnmowers and push mowers, and they just have a little nest egg of cash and they flip small engines constantly. They just love it and they make money at it. And there's so many of the things that I've seen out there like small engine repair flipping,

they can make $100, $150 an hour doing it. But it's hard for me to say this certain personality subsets exactly that you have to do this. or you have to do these things. Just go out and explore the things, see what your personality meshes with. Practically everything you can learn is on YouTube right now.

The knowledge of the world's on there. And then just find something that your personality meshes with. But then don't be so afraid that you're going to fail. Because, I mean, I've got all sorts of business I failed. When I was 15 years old, I ran on online paintball store and absolutely obliterating crash into the ground because I didn't know anything about accounting. If I knew now what I knew about counting,

I'd probably been a multimillionaire. because we were selling stuff on eBay back in 2001. Oh, wow. Yeah, back in the wild Westings. Yeah, it's crazy. Okay, I have a question for you. Yeah, yeah. Okay, yes.

I have $10,000 in my Robin Hood now. Okay. It's money that... Congratulations. Thanks. It's money I don't really need investment. Like, I have retirement accounts. Obviously, I need the money.

I'm not like... This is play money. No, it's not playing money because I'm not like super wealthy. Um, but honestly, I'm thinking of pulling all my money out of Robinhood and using it to, to generate more money. Because I, I need to bring in more more money. Like totally passive or are you wanting a moonshot? That's the problem. I mean, um, I would have to be something I can do on the weekends.

Okay. So you want a little business you can do on the weekends. Yeah, because I used, uh, when I first started making money, I used about $10,000 to launch my wedding business. Okay. I moved out here. I closed my wedding business. But I also can't spend 80 hours a week on this business. What do you recommend?

Yeah, what do you recommend? Go rent some TikTok people that don't understand business. Go on. Buy their channel. License their content. Buy their channel and then repurpose it. Set up a business plan for them to monetize their content. They're currently not monetizing.

I don't get it. Could you explain that? Yeah. Can you please explain that? I love that. What? Okay. I'm not going to say this person's name.

I know a guy on TikTok, he's got 750,000 followers. He posts any video, he gets half a million views. Last time I had the conversation, he's been on TikTok for two years. He's made $6,000. That level of influence is worth a lot more than $6,000. I think anybody in Alex's situation where he's got a phenomenal eye towards artistry, he's got a good understanding of the back end of the business. I would go and take $10,000, and I would go find, let's say, two people,

on TikTok that aren't making any money. Just go send out DMs to a lot of people and say, are you making the money that you want to on TikTok? I want to license you. I want to pay for low ball and $50 a video for the next, I want to own the next 100 pieces of your content. Find people that are good at their content. And you can field this.

You understand what's good. Say I want to prepay or I want to buy the next 100 TikTok posts. And then you help them segment their content. to something that can make money. And I don't know what that is. I was talking to somebody just trying to get them set up with an Amazon affiliate store

because they were talking about things that were highly sellable, not big money, but you know, Amazon affiliates who make 6%. And just doing the math, they should be making probably $2,500 a month off their channel. And they just could not do it.

They didn't have the ability to set up the Amazon affiliate store, nothing. So I would take, your skill set, I would take that $10,000 of vicious money. And then I would go in and I would start, you know, let's call it a mini influencer agency. And then I would just rent TikTokers out, set up some offers and go.

And you'll make all the money back, but then you'll help people grow the brand. And then they can maybe slowly step out of, it's amazing how many people I run into on TikTok and even Instagram to a point. They just don't have the business understanding, but they've got the audience and you can rent audiences. I had that same idea. Did you? Yeah, a few months ago. There's a lot of people had the idea,

but it's like everything else. Ideas are a dime of dozen. Yeah, and it's the implementation. As time goes on, I just get aggravated because I got all these crazy ideas. I've seen people do that with OnlyFans is that they've gone to some creators and basically said, well, if we split the income that it makes,

I'll make sure you make five times more. And you could use the houses, the cars, these connections, we'll use this promotion, but we just split a 50-50. And there's a lot of people that are famous out there that aren't making the money. I don't want to third names around, but TikTok very recently lost their top influencers to Hulu. And the problem is it's like TikTok,

if the only reason they left is because they weren't making enough money. And I've talked to quite a few people, and they either handle the influence and the traffic very, very well or they just don't. What's Hulu doing? they probably paid between $50 and $100 million for a show. So now, you're doing a Hulu show. So now they're top-tier content

is going to be on. Hulu. I'll do a show. Give me a show, Hulu. I'll leave TikTok. So it's just an influence deal and how you're using your marketing and your brand because everybody, if you'd really think about

most people have a personal brand, at least as far as your professional network goes, you know people. you have at least a little bit of influence on people. And you can utilize those connections. You know, when you were doing real estate, you had influence. You know, real estate full time, you're using your influence and your personal brand to convince people to buy a house through you. And people have that in their own life, but they don't understand a lot of times how to make any money off of it.

My mom cleaned people's houses when we were, from the time I was probably 16 to the time I was 21. My mom cleaned houses. and she just could not ever accept the fact that she was worth three to four times more than she was charging people. And I look back and like, well, I really wish you would have charged more for what you were worth. You had the appeal, you had the brand, you had the following. Why didn't you act? Why didn't you do it? And her way, well, I just didn't think I needed to.

I'm like, mom, you're cleaning houses for rich people. And we were dirt poor. We could, I mean, we had holes in our wall growing up. There was, there were, I don't know that was specifically the time saying my mom was cleaning the house because I think we eventually fixed it with duck. tape, but we had holes in the wall and my brother and I sleep on diesel furnace exhausts. I'm like, you know, Mom, it would have been pretty cool if you would have charged more to clean people's houses. It would have been nice.

And, you know, as much as I love my parents, I'm like, you know, she didn't understand that she had that influence and that appeal, that she had that, she had a product that was great, but she didn't understand the worth of her own value. And a lot of people run into that problem, if we'd be honest about it. They've got, they've got the product and their brand appeal, but they have very strong difficulties monetizing it. And it's like, I wish that I had the logistical ability and the time to go through and just make those connections. And there's a lot of people sit in the background that are doing very well off YouTube.

They don't have a channel. They don't do anything. They just connect people. I've known some guys and they're beasts right now setting up like creator houses. They're going and doing real estate deals and providing housing for YouTubers and people on TikTok. So they have a place to create content with no over. overhead and then they're kind of taken percentages of people's channels based on the fact that they're providing the housing and the equipment and I mean just I was talking to somebody about that two weeks ago

three weeks ago maybe like man that's an insane play and then their statement to me was you know you have all these rentals in southern Ohio like we should start sending people to you and then that'll fix all your editing problems and all your content creation problems like wow gosh you know just go and do it for me because I have I don't have the time but it's just there's just the bigger to me it's like the bigger you grow in social media influence and all that different stuff, what happens is you just realize the fields are wider and bigger and more robust. There's just more stuff to do. I imagine if you were, someone like Elon Musk,

he probably has 20 times more ideas that are on the shelf beyond, you know, Tesla, SpaceX, the boring company and whatever else he's in. You know, I'd hate to be in his shoes with that mental capacity and that ability. I'm sure there's all these things he's not able to exercise and even worse, not be able to find the right people to mesh with them. You know, it's really funny. When you were talking about promoting on Reddit, I remember there was a guy promoting on Reddit

and I was really jealous of him because he had 200 subscribers and I had maybe 50. And you were doing, I'm guessing it was you. Was it you? Because I did comment on that channel. I was spam and read it like crazy. Yeah. I got banned.

Yeah, because I was like, this is self-promotion, and, like, I got my post removed where I did something similar to you. And they removed mine, but yours was up there. But yours was up there because I'm guessing it was you because you wrote a whole novel in it. That was you? And you went in through these houses. That's crazy. So this is when I was like 20 subscribers, 30 subscribers. It was forever ago.

Very, very beginning. I'm not sure what happened because you could go on YouTube and you could. can sort your comments by subscriber count. So it would show the top creators first on your YouTube account. And at some point, number one was Graham. And I was like, oh, my gosh, this is cool. And I sent you a screenshot on Discord. And at some point, it disappeared because I tried going in like a month or two ago when

we started talking about getting this setup. And I was like, oh, I want to find this screenshot so I can make sure that I've got a document because I thought it'd be fun for this podcast. Yeah, this was it. Oh, yeah. There we go. February 16th, 2017. You were the one who I saw on Reddit.

I've never put the two and two together until just now. And it's funny, you mentioned that because I was thinking, who is that guy? And I was like, I wonder where he is now. Do you have any advice for us? What could we be doing better? I don't want to tell you to make shorts because then you'll start beating me out. So we should make shorts? I mean, I think that...

People have been telling us. Yeah, I should know. I think shorts will do very well. I think there's, I think there's still a lot of room for them to grow. They'll peak and they'll decline kind of like vines did, but I think there's the ability to get a lot of traffic off of them. Then the other thing is I would start work on more digital products, hire a guy to run a sales funnel for you,

and then just start doing a sales cycle on digital products because you've got enough of a following, but then you've got to kind of decide whether you want to trade some of your influence equity to people, but you could make a crap lot of money off that. I like the shorts idea I'm good with the shorts. I don't think that Graham would want to do it you would want to do it though.

I think you want to make money. Well, depends. Yeah, anyway, thank you so much. Thanks for coming on. I really appreciate this, man.

This went so well. You are one of the smartest guests I think we've had on. Genuinely. Genuinely. I took an IQ test before I came and it came back negative, so I was really starting to call it question of sanity.

That's impressive. That's actually so impressive, I would consider that genius. Thank you, man. Now, do you want to tell them to subscribe? Subscribe button? Yeah, please smash the like button and subscribe to the ice coffee hour. Because Jack, Jack needs, Jack needs some money.

Jack needs money. Today, we hit 200,000 subscribers. Thank you guys so much. That is absolutely amazing. We really appreciate it. Thanks for coming on, Brandon. Nice to meet you in person after talking to online for so long. for so long.

We're talking on Discord for a freaking two years. And with that said, you guys, have a great. Get your free talk down below in the description center for public. Mentorship group, link down below probably. Yeah, you should sign up to the mentorship program and talk and to them and gain valuable insight.