How to Buy Big Things With Little Money⏐Ep. #273
00:00One of the questions I see most often in my messages is, Chris, I want to start a business or I want tobuy a business, but I don't have any money. And you know what I would say to that? Good, because constraintsequal creativity. And that's what this whole episode today is about. I'm going to call it how to buy bigthings with little money, whether that's a piece of real estate. Maybe you're buying a business. Maybe you'rebuying equipment or assets needed to start a business. Maybe you're trying to buy equity for a businessthat you work for, you want to buy a franchise, I don't care. This episode is where you will go to learnhow to buy big things with little money. And I would know because A, I grew up poor,B, I'm cheap. I don't want to pay full price. And if I do a whole bunch of research and I
00:39come to the conclusion that this initiative that I'm looking at is not as risky as it looksfrom the outside, then I'm going to be willing to take some risk to make sure that I get what I want.So if you're looking for an episode where you talk about, oh, have you heard a Kickstarter? Have youheard of seller financing? No, this isn't going to be generic. This is going to be creativeand it's going to be very tactical. And everything I'm about to tell you, I actually have experiencewith guys. I've been buying real estate for 17 years. I've been buying RV parks and mobile homeparks for the last seven years. I bought an $800,000 business for $50,000 down. I invested in mybest friend's business that was worth $2.2 million. He only put 10% down and he financed almost all
01:17of that from friends and family. I have been in the weeds of buying big things with little moneymy entire career. So if you're looking for just a video where I just regurgitate things thatChat Chupitee tells me, and go somewhere else. Before I get into these tactics, I want to tell a couplestories to illustrate where I'm coming from here. When I was 21 years old, I had just spentthis summer reading books about entrepreneurship and real estate. And I had moved to Alabama. Ijust got married and I was fired up to make something happen to start a business to buy real estate,whatever. Turns out 2008 was not a great time to buy real estate, especially if you are a brokecollege student with student loans waiting tables for 2.13 an hour plus tips. But sometimes ignorance
02:00is a superpower. And my wife and I started looking on Zillow. We found a house, this house right here,if you're watching, 1805, 21st Avenue East, and it was $90,000. And we bought it for three and a halfpercent down. We used grants from the government to pay for it, plus a little bit of savings from ourserving job at a Thai restaurant. And we bought something big with little money. And thenPresident Obama had a first-time homebuyer tax credit, which basically meant you got $8,000cash after you bought your first home. And so about nine months later, we got a check in the mailfor $8,000. And we put that towards a home about five minutes away, our first rental home.We were still broke college students, still making $2.13 an hour, but we owned two homes.
02:42We just kept talking to bankers until we found one that said yes. So we finally found a bank that said,yes, but they said, Chris, you're going to have to pay PMI. What is PMI? It's mortgage insurance.It's going to bring your payment from $535 to $700 a month.Now, as a broke college student, that extra $160 a month was just a non-starter.So I said, well, I don't want to pay that.How can I get around that?Well, you can't.You have to pay 20% down if you don't want to pay PMI.
03:07And I was just like, no, I read that I don't have to pay that.And they were like, ah, all right, I don't think it's going to work, but let me see if thereare other options.Guess what?magically, there were other options.I got to pay 3.5% down.I didn't have to pay PMI because they had to choose.between that and losing my business entirely.
03:24And in the wake of the financial crash,I'm sure they were thrilled to even have this tiny $90,000 mortgage.That was one thing that I remembered from all those books that I read at Barnes & Noble.Many loans require you to have PMI,but almost all banks have other loan options that don't require that.They don't want to give you the option of those loan packagesbecause it's not as profitable to them.But if they have to choose between losing your business
03:48and giving you a less profitable loan,they're going to give you the loan you want.I ended up owning that house for 11 years and renting it for nine of those 11.Fast forward about eight years and we were in the middle of building our dream housewith a custom home builder, the one I'm sitting in right now.And I'll never forget, I was getting this office designed and they had already laid the foundation.I think the drywall was even up and they were about to lay carpet.And I realized at the last minute that I wanted a floor plug right in the middle of the room
04:12because I knew my desk would be right here where I'm sitting today and I wanted to plug my MacBook in the floor.So I went to the builder and I said, hey, is it too late to have a floor plug?because like, doesn't that need to go in the foundation or something?I don't know how it works.And he said to me, we can reverse, change, fix, add anything at any stage in the build process.Literally, anything can be fixed or changed.The only question is, how much are you willing to pay?And for whatever reason, that line stuck with me.
04:40Everything is figure outable.Everything.Whether it's buying a home on 2.13 an hour as a broke college student with no assets to your nameor adding a simple floor plug at the point your house is on.almost finished. Constraints equal creativity. Now just one more analogy before I get into the tactics.Vexillology is the study of flags. Now when a flag designer is designing a flag, they have to startdesigning it on an index card. They have to shrink it down all the way to an index card.Because if your flag doesn't work or if it doesn't look good when shrunk down to the size of an index
05:12card, then it's not going to look good as a flag. It has to make sense in one second. It has tolook good while flapping in the wind. It has to be stitched and not printed. It has to be drawn by achild and it has to be recognizable from far away. So we're not doing tiny details or gradientsor clever explanations. It's got to be simple. Shout out to my friend Bill for that analogy.So trying to buy something that's very expensive or invest in something when you have no money oralmost no money is the index card. You can't rely on big down payments or perfect credit orstandard financing terms, you're forced to ask better questions. What does the seller actually want?What part of this deal is flexible? What part is negotiable? What part isn't? Instead of adding cash,
05:56can I just remove some risk? Can I change the timeline instead of the price? Can I change theterms instead of the price? You've probably heard the phrase, my price, your terms, or your price,my terms. That's just a small part of what we're talking about here. And this is why I am soadamantly against raising money for your startup.in 99% of cases because it removes the need to be creative.That's why venture-funded startups statistically have no better chance of succeedingthan bootstrap startups.Because once you get a few million bucks in the bank, you don't have to be creative.
06:29Let's hire a marketing guy.Oh, we need our profit and loss statement?Yeah, let's hire a CFO.All right, so let's start covering these tactics.And I'm going to save the very best for last.Number one, do it publicly.A while back, I had an episode with my friend, Isaac French.and he built this property called Live Oak Lake, just outside of Waco, Texas.
06:46It's, I think, seven beautiful cabins.They're Scandinavian style.He bought kits.He shipped him overseas.He dug out a pond.This property was like five to ten acres and it had these mature oak trees on it.Long story short, two years after building it, he sold it for seven or eight million dollars.And his costs on all of it was like one and a half or two million.
07:07So one deal that took two to three years of his life provided him life-changing money.enough money for him to retire and he had very very very little money to put in guys ifyou're liking this so far please hit subscribe or follow or whatever share with a friend it wouldreally mean a lot now if you want to hear that story i'll link to it below but this tactic i'm tellingyou about is actually from one of his friends that wanted to do something similar they wanted to buildthese beautiful short-term rentals but they didn't have any money so what did they do they startedan instagram account with zero followers and they just started documenting their process with their iPhonesno fancy editing, no fancy equipment, just talking to the camera, showing what they were doing,
07:45hey, we're building a property, we want to document our journey. And this guy built an Instagramfollowing of 130,000 people, just showing them what the process was like of dreaming,building, planning, trying to raise money for this short-term rental property. By the time he wasactually ready to launch, he had tons of people ready and willing to give him money to launch hisproject or to be his first customers at his project to go stay.in his property. If you bring the world along with you through these free media platforms likeFacebook, Instagram, TikTok, whatever, then you can skip the line. The downside to this is it's publicaccountability. You might fail. You might feel embarrassed if it doesn't go well. Maybe the algorithm
08:26never picks up your videos and you feel like it was a waste of time. But this is an asymmetricbed. There's a lot more upside to posting free videos on the internet, spending a little bit of timedoing so than there is downside. Now, one of the most valuable things you can do is justto start following a bunch of peoplethat are doing this on Instagram.What are they doing?What are their hooks?What background music are they using?
08:48How often are they posting?What days are they posting?What type of asset are they building or buying?And what do the comments say?Right?Open up Instagram in your browserand copy all the comments,paste them in the chat, GPT,
09:02and say what are some trends or themesfound in these comments that I can learnwhen making my short form videosthat are in the same niche as this guys?Maybe all the comments.comments refer to the fact that he had to quit his job to do this. Well, if you're quitting your jobto do this, then you should talk about that in your content a lot too because it clearly resonateswith people. Maybe people in the comments are just talking about how cute their dog is in the
09:22background of the video. Maybe you need a dog in the background of your video. I'm serious.Getting a like on social media takes a millisecond, but getting a comment takes seconds,five to 50 plus seconds, right? So that's a signal to Instagram, Facebook, or whoeverthat you are keeping people on the platform longer than average. So we're notoptimizing for likes, we're optimizing for shares, because shares also keep people on the platform,and for comments and for average view duration, aka how long people spend watching your videoas a proportion to how long your video is. But one thing that you can't skip here is you got to shedyour ego, you got to shed your pride, you got to remember that people aren't thinking about you,
10:00it doesn't matter, they're not judging you, and if they are, who cares, it doesn't matter,you'll never even know about it. And this doesn't just apply to short-term rental properties orreal estate. This applies to any business. If you're starting a business, if you're trying to buy abusiness, if you want to buy a franchise or sell your business, just document the journey, try to makeeach video better than the last, copy the same formats that other people are doing in that niche,and given enough time, you will win. The second strategy is to be loose, be flexible on the assetthat you're trying to buy. If you say to yourself, I really, really want to own an RV park within anhour of me that I can stay at, that I can have my friends come at, like, that is my dream,
10:40that is my passion. But the problem is, maybe you live in a more rural area. Maybe there are only fourRV parks within an hour of you. And what is the statistical chance of you twisting the armof one of those four sellers and forcing them, aka convincing them to sell? It's not great. You'rereally constraining yourself here. And you can't remove the agency of another person. You can'tforce someone to sell their asset. So before you do a lot of these other steps, you've got to bewilling to be flexible, either on the geography, the price point, the type of asset, the size of theasset, etc. I think as long as you fall in love with an asset class like self-storage or singlefamily or RV parks or pest control business, whatever, and you're willing to be flexible on the geography
11:26or the size of the investment within that asset class, you should be fine. But the most important thingyou can do throughout this entire process is to find an owner that likes you, that is willing to get toknow you, and preferably you should like them as well so it can be an authentic relationship.Here's another analogy for you. Let's say you really needed $1,000. You just had to have$1,000 for something important. You've got two options. Number one, your mom. Okay. Number two,a stranger. From which person are you most likely to get that money from? Of course your mom. She knows you.I hope she loves you. There's a relationship there. There's a history. Whether she's wealthy or not,if you really needed that money, you could almost certainly get it from your mom, right? What about the
12:10stranger? Well, no, because who were you? But there's a spectrum, right? The strangers on this end ofthe spectrum, your mom's on the other end. So if you really want to buy big things with little moneyand you want to get creative, then it's all about getting the stranger, in this case, maybe the seller ofthe asset, from this end of the spectrum to that end, a little closer to where your mom sits. If youdon't do that, then everything else I mentioned in this episode is going to be significantly harder.That's the whole secret. That's the crux of it all. You've got to be willing to build a relationshipof trust. You don't need to be likable or extroverted or super engaging or energetic. Those things help forsure. But if you don't have those things, you just need to find that other weirdo in the world that is kind of like you,
12:55that identifies like you, that says to themselves as they see you and talk to you, man, that kid reminds me and me when I wasthat age. That's who you need to find. Offer him value. Tell him what you're learning about hisasset class. Adcknowledge that he probably knows way more than you do about the asset class. Don't shrinkfrom that. Compliment him on his property, on his asset, whatever it is. Visit him in personmultiple times. Follow up with him. Bring your spouse and kids, if that's the case. Back to my analogyof the $1,000. If you spent some time with that stranger, told him who you are, what your story is,Why you need the $1,000, pointed out what you have in common.You could probably get him from a 1% chance of saying yes to a 10 to 20% chance of saying yes.
13:39That principle is still true, whether it's $1,000 or a million.Tactic number three, I want to talk about seller financing.You probably already know it exists, but I want to talk about different types of itand how to increase the likelihood of someone saying yes to it.Now, I will tell you straight up that your best shot,of being able to buy something big with little money is seller financing, preferably as close to100% as possible. Yes, 100% seller financing is very possible. It depends on the asset class.If we're talking about a business like a service business, that's going to be easier to get 100%
14:16seller financing for. But if we're talking about a piece of real estate, that's going to be a bitharder because there's more at stake than just goodwill. Now, there are some levers you can pullwhen seller financing real estate to increase the likelihood of them saying yes, many of theseyou probably haven't heard of yet. But even so, if someone tells you 100% seller financingfor real estate is super commonplace, happens all the time, super easy, 20, 30, 40% of sellers say yesto it. They're lying. It's not true. Because at the end of the day, the majority of people,when they go to sell a piece of real estate, they just want their cash. They have to pay off theirnote and then they want cash for their checking account. Now, before I get into the particulars of
14:54seller financing. Let's talk about the alternatives. One, you can borrow from friends and family.Now, I'm not a big fan of this because A, it means you need to have friends and family with money.B, you need to be able to convince one or more of them. How much money have you lost this yearfrom calls you didn't answer? Think about it. A customer calls, you're busy. They hang up and theycall someone else. And you'll never even know it happened. That's why I suggest using Quo.And by the way, thank you to Quo for sponsoring this video. You might remember me talking about itback when it was called open phone. Same company, new name, way more features now. Everythinglives in one inbox, calls, texts, voicemails, notes. Your whole team can see what's happening
15:34with every customer and nothing falls through the cracks. Also, Quo has an AI agent calledSona. It answers calls 24-7 when you can't. It helps qualify leads and sends a follow-up textto book appointments. You can also set up a custom call tree so callers get routed instantly.So whether you're running solo or running a small team,it makes your business sound established from day one.90,000 businesses use Quo.So if you're losing customers because people can't reach you,go try Quo for free at Quo.com slash TKO20,
16:07and you'll get 20% off your first three months using MyLink.And C, you're going to have to risk your reputation with them.And you'll need to ask yourself if that's something you're willing to do.Oftentimes these situations can be asymmetric bets in the wrong direction.The downside of losing these valuable relationships and friendships is much, much greater than thepotential upside of the asset that you're trying to buy. With seller financing, there's much lesssurface area for risk. So if I need 500 grand to buy something, then let's say I'm going to need10 different friends and family members to give me 50 grand each. Well, in order to get that,
16:41I might need to talk to one to 300 of them. That's a lot of surface area for risk and for reputationalloss. Whereas with seller financing, you're interacting with one.one person, one party, the seller, and you probably don't know them.And they can still be protected.We're not framing this like, this is a zero-sum game and maybe you win and they lose orvice versa.No.Oftentimes when we go to ask a seller for seller financing, like we shrink from it, we frame it in a way where it's like, listen, I know this is an ideal, but no, like you've got to own it.
17:14You've got to frame it in a way that really highlights the positives for them, both the tangibles and the intangibles.When having this awkward seller financing conversation with someone, one of the intangibles can be your story.Sell your story.The story of you riding around and your dad as a kid in his truck fixing up rental properties,that could be more valuable to the seller than proof of funds or an extra $5,000 in down payment.That story could be worth thousands or tens of thousands of dollars.And so often we all have stories like these, but we don't think to use them.All right, let's talk about seller financing structures for a second.
17:51All right, you've got the balloon payment structure.With this structure, you're going to pay little to nothing down.Initially, you'll make small monthly payments for a few years,and then you'll have a large balloon payment due at the end of the term,whatever you guys decide up front.And the idea with this structure is to either refinance or sell the asset before then.For example, let's say you had experience in the landscaping business.And you approached the landscaping business owner about his business,
18:15and you knew that he's not running Facebook ads,because anyone can see that.He's not running Google ads.He's not on Android.he's list, yada, yeah, yeah. He's not doing all these things. You're just relying on word of mouth.And you're fairly confident that you could buy this at two times annual profits. Let's say his annualprofits are 100,000. So you can buy this business for $200,000. You can add all these marketingtactics. You can reduce some of his costs, increases yearly profits from 100,000 to 200,000,
18:41and that you think you could also do a better job at marketing the business for sale. You want toflip the business. You don't want to hold it long term. You want to flip it two years later.And you're going to sell it for three times annual profits of 200,000.$200,000, which would be $600,000, right? So you're buying it for $200,000. You're selling it for $600,000.But you have very little money down. Well, you put in $10,000 to him. You pay him $5,000 a month as his payment,the balloon payment. So that's $60,000 a year. That can come out of your profits. So that's not comingout of your pocket. You only have to have $5,000 to do this deal. And let's say the balloon paymentis due in four years. Well, two years later, you've turned around revenue and you've sold it for
19:21$600,000, that balloon payment has never due because you pay off the rest of the note at closingwhen you go to sell the business. And the logic holds true with an RV park, mobile home park,self-storage facility, multifamily, duplex, fourplex, whatever. Now the risk with this is, of course,what if you're not able to refinance or sell by the time the balloon payments do? Well, it's due.And if you don't pay it, then they're going to get the asset back in most cases, unless you'reextra savvy and that's not worked into the contract, which is not likely. They're probably going to bein first lean position on the asset, which means they are the first person in line to get it backshould you default on those payments. Okay, the next structure, interest only payments. That's,
20:00it is what it sounds like. Instead of paying the interest and the principle, you're just payinginterest for a set amount of time. Now, this is great because if you're in a tighter cash flowbusiness, you're not as constrained to make that payment. But it's not great because your interestkeeps compounding and you're never cutting into that principle. So this works very similarly to the balloonpayment that I just referenced because at a certain point, that note is going to be due.Now, the third structure I really like as part of seller financing is what's called graduatedpayments.That's when you start with small payments that increase over time.
20:32And these payments can start like ridiculously small.$500 a month for six months, then $700 for six months, then $1,000, then $1,500, then $2,000.Believe it or not, these graduated payments go a really, really long way at showing legitimacyand goodwill to the seller,aka you're showing them from month onethat you're not a scam.And I really mean this in the contextof comparing this to a deal
20:56where you make no paymentsfor the first six months, right?He's going to have some heartburn about thatbecause he probably doesn't know you all that welland he's not going to know for six monthsif you're actually a good honest person yetor at least if you're going to doto this business or real estate,
21:12what you say you're going to do.You're going to add value.You're going to improve it.He won't know that for six months.So if you're having trouble,with the trust part of a seller financing structure like this, then suggest graduated paymentsbecause they can almost have the same purpose, which is to save you money in your payments up front,but it can go a really, really long way at buying some goodwill. Okay, the next structure is called
21:33a partial seller carryback. Now, this is called a half a dozen different things. That's what I call it.And this is using a combination of traditional financing and seller financing. So here's an example.Let's say you found an apartment complex for a million dollars. You think it's worth 1.2.as it is today, and you think you can get it to be worth two to three million after some valueout of improvement. So a million dollar apartment complex, you've got 50 grand to put down,but the bank wants 200 grand, so you're 150 short. Well, a partial seller carryback would befor the seller to put 150 grand on the line and say, all right, I'm going to basically do a sellernote for 150,000. You put in your 50. The bank puts in 800 and you buy this for one mill.
22:14Now, one big problem with this, one potential problem with this is that the seller is almostcertainly going to be in second lien position, as in their second in line to get their moneyback should you default.The bank is almost always going to want to be first in line, which means the sellers kind ofbe left holding the bag.They're not going to have anything if you default.So it's definitely not impossible to get this structure.In fact, you're more likely to get this, in my opinion, than to get a 100% seller financing
22:42deal.but it's just harder because they're second in line. But my best friend did this with the business he bought.He bought a business for $2 million in change. He used an SBA loan, which is backed by the governmentfor I think 80% of it. The seller held 10% of the note and he only had to put in 10%, which was $200,000.Where do you get that $200,000? Well, he had a bunch in savings. I invested some myself and some otherfriends and family invested some. So that's something I haven't even talked about yet is using friends andfamily to fund the down payment and then using a traditional bank to fund the rest.All right, the next seller financing structure is called a shared appreciation mortgage.
23:19Now, this is where the seller agrees to take a percentage of future profits instead of takinga higher sale price today.So if you're really good at selling your story, if you have some sort of industry experienceor knowledge that you can lean on, but you don't have a lot of money in the bank, then you can say,listen, I really think this million dollar apartment complex you have, I can make it be worthtwo million, but I only have 50 grand to give you today. So how about this? Once I get rents toX, Y or Z, or once I get the value of the property to X, Y, and Z, I will start sending you Xpercentage of the rents collected or something like that. Oftentimes you can use this structure
23:55kind of against them in a way, or you can use their information against them to get a betterstructure because oftentimes people will say, oh, dude, this thing, this park is so much better thanit looks right now. Like, all you have to do is this. You just have to do this. And then instead of itbeing worth one million like I'm selling it for today, it's going to be worth $3 million. Well,if you want to be a jerk, you can say, why don't you just do these things yourself? But if youwant to get the deal, you can say, awesome, that's amazing. How about you give me better terms on theseller financing? And then I cut you into those future profits, right? So the next creative sellerfinancing structure is a lease to own or a master lease agreement. I almost did this exact
24:31structure on a really large RV park I was looking at once in southern Louisiana. It was a $2 millionpark and once it was fully performing and 90% occupied, it was worth about $23 million.But there was a huge amount of risk.It was a massive park.It was pretty rural.There was a lot of work to be done.We were going to have to buy trailers, move them in there, do seller financing.And so I negotiated this deal with the seller that said, hey, I really think I could get
24:56this to be worth $20 million.But it's a big risk and it's a big gamble.And they knew it.It had been listed for sale for like two years.And so we said, okay, today, the rents are $12,000 a month.That's what you're collecting today in rents, right? Correct. Cool. I'm going to lease this from youfor two years at $7,000 a month, which is just going to come right out of the gross rents that you'recollecting today. You're still going to own the park. The title is in your name. And no, I'm not going to
25:20give you $2 million today for it, but in two years, I'm going to give you $4 million for it. Or I'm going towalk away, right? So worst case, six months later, I just don't do what I think I'm going to do.You will have made $7,000 a month for this over that same time frame, which right now you're making.nothing for it. It's just listed for sale. It's probably still going to be listed for sale in sixmonths. So you'll have made $42,000 for me. And I'm just going to come to you with my tail betweenmy legs and say, sorry, I thought I could turn it around, but I couldn't. It's yours. Give you thekeys back. You still have what you had six months before, plus $42,000. No harm, no foul. That'sworst case. Best case is in two years or maybe even less. Two years from now, I buy this from you for
26:0250% more, an extra million dollars, $3 million. But I'm de-risk.because clearly my plan is working and I think it can be worth a lot more.So under this scenario, you're not even seller financing or buying anything.You're just leasing the entire property.It's a master lease agreement with the option to purchase at a predetermined price at a certainpredetermined time in the future.This works with real estate, businesses, anything.Okay, the next type of seller financing structure is simply zero down,
26:32aka 100% seller financing with either a higher interest rate,or a higher price. They want 5% interest and 10% down. You say, how about 8% interest and 0% down?Or you want 300 grand and 5% interest and 20% down. How about 400 grand, 7% interest and 2% down?Chad GPT is great at taking structures like these and spitting out a thousand different ways of craftingthem. The next type of seller financing structure could be an asset swap or services in lieu ofdown payment where you offer consulting or marketing, agency services, or something in lieu of a downpayment. Or, heaven forbid, you offer collateral, a vehicle, a house, a different piece of real estate.All of these are on the table. Another creative structure is a sub-2. In other words,
27:21subject to existing debt. The seller has a loan on the property. You take over the seller's payments.The debt stays in the seller's name and you come out of pocket little to nothing. This works great whenthe debt on the asset is low and the seller is just tired. Another thing you can do is a delayed down payment.Hey, this thing's a million bucks. You want 20% down? I don't have 200 grand. But how about I give you the down payment 12 to 24 months from now?And if it never comes, we take the property back. You're in first lien position anyway.With any of these structures that I'm talking about today, one of the most important things you canremember is to not get emotionally involved or invested in the asset class. That is where allthe mistakes will happen. Don't put your blinders on. Don't act like this is the best deal. It's
28:05the only deal. It's either this deal or bust. You've got to be willing to walk from any deal at anytime. It should only be math to you. That's all for today, folks. I hope you learned something.thing, go out there, buy big things with a little money, and here's your disclaimer.All of this stuff carries risk, right?Know what you're doing.Know what you're getting yourself into.Everything I've told you is the tip of the iceberg.It's all going to depend upon you and your situation, your risk tolerance, et cetera, yada, yada.
28:29Not financial advice.Thanks for hanging out on the Kerner office.
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