The Science of Flipping - Clear and Reload: The West Point Mindset Behind 300 Real Estate Deals a Year | Bobby Kough

Episode Date: March 5, 2026

In this episode, I sat down with Bobby Kough, a West Point grad, former Army football player, and real estate operator who’s done over a thousand deals and is now running a direct-to-seller business pushing 300 deals a year. We broke down the “clear and reload” mindset he learned through sports psychology at West Point and how that reset tool translates perfectly to real estate when you’re getting rejected nonstop or taking hits on deals. Bobby shared how he started during COVID, how a quick early win gave him confidence, how one ugly “dumpster fire” house taught him the hard way to build a tight buy box, and why going to work for a proven operator helped him shave years off his learning curve. We also got into what it really takes to scale across multiple markets, the marketing channels they’re using, why direct mail still works, and why leadership and people are the hardest part of building a real company. About Bobby: Bobby Kough is a real estate entrepreneur and operator who helps build and scale direct-to-seller home buying organizations in St. Louis, Little Rock, and Wichita. He played football at West Point, graduated in 2015, and commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Army. While serving, Bobby discovered BiggerPockets and began studying real estate in his spare time. He purchased his first property in 2018, saw early success, and used that momentum to start buying distressed homes. After completing several deals, Bobby made a major career pivot — walking away from an engineering path to become an acquisitions representative, where he learned the business from the ground up by sitting at kitchen tables with sellers. Since then, Bobby has partnered with operators to build full-scale organizations focused on sales, operations, and culture. Last year, his teams completed over 300 deals across multiple markets. Bobby is passionate about creating systems that serve sellers with integrity, developing strong leaders, and helping real estate teams grow sustainably while keeping people at the center of every transaction. Connect with BobbyInstagram: @bobbykough99 Podcast: The Knock Podcast About Justin: Justin Colby is the host of The Entrepreneur DNA and The Science of Flipping podcasts and a best-selling author. He is a serial entrepreneur with over and a seasoned real estate investor with over 20 years of experience. Driven by a passion to help entrepreneurs thrive, Justin created the Entrepreneur DNA community to support business owners in building wealth, systems, and long-term freedom. Through his podcasts, books, education platforms, and hands-on mentorship, he continues to help entrepreneurs scale with clarity and confidence. Connect with Justin: Instagram: @thejustincolby YouTube: Justin Colby TikTok: @justincolbytsof LinkedIn: Justin Colby Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What is up? The Science of Flipping Family. My guest today is phenomenal. Not only did he graduate from Army, not only did he play football at West Point. He's done well over a thousand deals in his entrepreneur journey as a real estate investor. Bobby Coe is here. What's up, dude? What's up, man? Thanks for having me all. Yeah, no, I love that you're already representing. Football season just passed. It was big for me. I'm sure it was big for you. But I love that you're already representing. Yeah, yeah, I mean, this is this is pretty much majority. It's your uniform. Yeah, exactly. I love that. The cool thing about us as entrepreneurs and what we do, like, even when we're on Zoom these days, it's become so acceptable to just be us, to be, you know, I think Gary V kind of made this a point. Like, be who you are, be transparent, be authentic.

Like, Bobby and Justin don't wear suits, everybody. We just don't do it. Nope. Nope. I would prefer not to. Did, by the way, just as a side note, did Army do very well this year? don't know. I'm genuinely... No, no. This season was a little bit of a rebuild.

It wasn't the season we had last year. Last year, last year was phenomenal. I actually thought, I was like, dude, I think you guys crushed it, but that was last year, not this year. Yep. Last year, our only loss was to, in-season loss was to Notre Dame. And, of course, we lost in-nady, which was an upset. This year was about a 500 team. We did make a bowl game, so a little better than 500, but looking for it in next year. There you go. That's right. Next year's about to happen. So there's that. You know what? Let's talk about that real quick because I think everyone has to have a short memory in an entrepreneur space. I talk a lot about entrepreneur beyond just real estate and coming from going to Army, coming from playing football at West Point. Talk to us a little bit about your mindset as an entrepreneur because I believe just like a great quarterback, just like the Tom Brady. You throw an interception. That is over in 10 seconds. You're on to the next offensive series, right? Talk to us the mindset of an entrepreneur and even more so of a real estate investor. It's not always it's not always puppy dogs and rainbows out here.

Yeah, absolutely, man. It was really, really cool. I had the benefit of going to West one playing football. We had sports psychologists that we would work with. And one of the biggest things that I learned is exactly what you're hitting on is kind of that clear and reload. Like that was kind of the concept. I even got it down to a point when I was. was playing where my clearing mechanism was like the velcro all my gloves.

So you would actually have a physical, I don't know what it would be act. Yeah. That would clear the game. You'd Velcro all your gloves like rip on, rip off, rip on, rip, put, like that was your way to reset. Yeah. Yeah. That was like my mental cue, if you will.

Yeah, I had my linemen gloves on and if I had a bad play or I just needed to just kind reset, I had that clearing mechanism, you know, unlatching them, tighten them back up. So you had that physical sensation as that reminder. Like game on, baby. Yeah. Dude, I actually, in, and you're right, it, it correlates and connects to the entrepreneur space so well, right? Like, there's, there's times, especially in real estate. So what I do is, is direct to seller home purchases. So, man, the amount of times that I get rejected, it's, you know, it's pretty frequent. So I have to have those kind of reset and reload cues in my mind. Now, they're much different. I'm not walking around wearing football gloves. That would be kind of weird. I mean, maybe you should. I mean,

they can't see you. Those homeowners aren't seeing you. Yeah. Yeah, maybe. But we've gotten to the point where I've talked to my guys who are who are on the acquisition side that are running and gun and, you know, buying houses. Um, They either have a song, a scent, something along those lines that is kind of like their clear mechanism. And we want it, we want it to be tied to the five senses. This is a little weird, kind of nerdy, you know, psychology stuff, but tied it to the five senses allows them to like, oh, okay, hey, I got to decompress. I got to let whatever just happen go onto the next one. So you had a team psychologist.

Was it a sports psychologist, team psych? Well, I mean, by definition, what were they? Yeah, yeah. I would say just sports psychologists while we're playing. They were teaching you guys as athletes. Yep. The way to reset your mind, reset your frame, reset is connect something, some level of activity. It could be a scent, could be your gloves.

I can't imagine much visual. But like something could be something you touch, you know, slap your helmet, whatever. Yeah. That creates your reminder. Reset, next play is the next play. Forget about the past. Yeah. Essentially.

I'm boiling it down. I'm sure there's plenty more. Well, no. I mean, dude, that's in a nutshell. That's what it is. I love that. And what do they call that? I mean, we just called it clear and reload.

Clear. Yeah, that's great. I think, by the way, anyone listening to right now, take that, like, I don't care if you're in real estate or not. Like, do that. I think that pertains a lot in human in life, right? Frustrating moments, hectic moment. Like, clear and reload. Like, reset yourself.

So, dude, that's massive. I'm even going to take that as something to, you know, as a father of two and running multiple businesses and a husband and they're like, fur, you know, it's like, all right, clear and reload. I love that, dude. See, this is why I have this podcast. Good stuff like this already comes out. Awesome, man. Yeah.

Well, so talk to me. Go ahead. No, I was going to say as a father. I mean, that's a huge application point. You know, being a father, the chaos of kids and. Yeah. Clear and reload. Be present.

clear and reload. Oh, 100%. Especially because my five-year-old daughter is just, we're in it. She just wants all the things, wants all the attentions. I have a two-year-old son. Like, hey, wait, look at me. Right. So it's just like, all right, be present. Listen, let's talk about the journey. You know, you graduate Army, you have a great football, West Point, all this kind of stuff. Let's jump into the real estate space. What got you into real estate versus probably having a plethora of opportunities or options? Yeah. So, you know, did the typical, hey, you graduate West Point, you commissioned as an officer. I was very much, like, I was trying to plan my future while I was at West Point. So I intentionally branched engineers.

So my whole thought process was, hey, I'm going to pick something that is going to set me up for a good job once I get out of the military. I had no intentions on being a career guy, a journeyman, if you will. I wanted to do my five, six years, get out. So engineering, I saw the path. I was like, hey, I mean, I can get a plethora of good high paying jobs. That was kind of my focus. COVID hits. And I was stationed at Fort Lenderwood in Missouri.

That's just where engineer, if you're an engineer, you're going to find yourself at Fort Lenderwood. And they came up with a really interesting rule that anybody that had a kid that was one year or younger, sent home. Didn't matter what you were doing. Didn't matter how essential you were to whatever was going on on post. They sent you home because at that time they just, yeah, they didn't know how the

virus could affect children. So I was an instructor at the time. I was teaching new lieutenants coming in. I was a captain. And I spent about a year just doing absolutely nothing. I started building chicken coop gardens.

Like, I was like, man, I got to fill my time, right? Drinking and doing stuff like that started to become very unproductive very quickly. Yeah. But by the way, I don't, I mean, not that you're self-judging. I would say 99% of society was that. Like, maybe that's extreme. Like, 90 plus percent of society was like, I don't know. The world isn't, like, everything just became like, I don't really know.

So, like, again, drinking more often than you normally would or building chicken. I love that. Building chicken coops, right? Where it's like at that moment, if everyone is listening and went through COVID as an entrepreneur or whatever the case, like, everything was an unknown. So it's kind of like, I don't know. I'm going to do this today or I'll do this today. Or I'm going to, you know, who cares if I have a cocktail at 2 p.m. on a Wednesday? Because really, I don't even know what the hell.

Like the world could end tomorrow. So whatever. Who cares? No, that's, that's normal. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that was the mindset.

You know, and I tried to justify it. as like, hey, what is going to make things sustainable if the world does end? Sure. They'll build a really big chicken coop with a lot of chickens. Hey, I got something I could trade with. That's right. So I started doing that and then I realized, okay, man,

I'm sitting here with my family. I got a newborn son. I need to start focusing on things that are going to set my family up for success long term. I started diving into bigger pockets. Sure. You know, bigger pockets and rich dad, poor dad, that combination has got a lot of real estate folks. Go on.

Yeah. Yeah. So started doing that. And then I just took a leap pretty quick. What I've recognized is zero to one is kind of like where I like to live. Yeah. Rims of like implementation. That's my sweet spot.

Just go. Anything after that. I'll pass the ball to somebody else. And now how do you learn that? because I think there's a lot of visionaries, right? So we would consider you a high D, high starter, high visionary, like whatever metric you're rating this by, right? There's all the tests. But how did you have to end up learning that?

Because that usually takes a long time for someone to realize, like, their strength and then their weakness and then give the, the, give away the control. Like, yes, it's my weakness, but I'm going to keep it on because it's my business and no one loves it more and I love it. And it's my, but dude, the maturity level, the emotional EQ, right? to be able to say, I suck at the operational. I would rather give up money and pay someone to do this because they'll do it better to me. Where do you learn that? Was that from college?

Was it from the military? Was it just like you literally have that good of an emotional intelligence? No, no. I would definitely say it's not that. No, I think so I didn't really learn it in the military. I didn't really learn it in college because you had to be detail-oriented in the army. You had no option, right? Like you had to, hopefully, you had to rough through it, especially as an officer, you know, planning missions, all that stuff.

Really, it was with some just awareness of some of the things that you talked about, some of those tests. And I think it was also just, hey, what, what got me fired up? Yeah. And what crushed me from just a morale. And not to focus too much on emotions because emotions could, you know, they're indicators. Like, you don't live and die by your emotions. But for me, if I were to go back to my younger body and say, hey, this is the way to figure this out, I'd say, hey, he's like, what do you get fired up by? And what is what is absolutely draining to you?

Yeah. Yeah. So did a coach give you that or mastermind? Like that comes from somewhere? Because there's just so many, especially in our real estate space, so many people keep all the responsibility and they're burnt out, they're frustrated. They really suck at one component of it. It could be even be sales, right? Now, the challenge is we'll get here about what your business looks like. like, but the challenge is I would urge most people to stay in the sales rule longer than they want. A lot of people aren't good salesmen. A lot of people don't like it. They feel like it's awkward and weird and uncomfortable. I get all that. But the challenge is that's where you actually make your money. Yeah.

And when you start to outsource that before you're really ready, then the business really kind of has some sort of glass ceiling because you didn't conquer that one thing. But anyways, I say that to say like, did a coach give you this? Is it, um, or are you part of any masterminds? Yeah, yeah. So we're part of the collective genius. Yeah. And one of the things that we really enjoy to do, myself and my partners, we like to reinvest in education. Yep. So I can't attribute to one specific coach. But we've heard that over time. You know, exactly what you're talking about, finding that sweet spot of when to delegate, like when to start, you know, building the organization.

I think everybody experiences challenges there. And the first part is being aware of, hey, being vulnerable and being able to look in the mirror and say, look, I'm not Superman. I suck at the, you know, pushing things into the goal line or, you know, to the finish line, whatever it is. And I need to get somebody else that could do that. So talk to us about your starting in real estate and then I want us to compare it to where you are today, right? So I want to take everyone listening right now on this journey of what Bobby has done, right? Yeah. So COVID happens. You jump into real estate. I think that's kind of where we ended. Like, all right, I'm going to do this thing. Yeah. How did you start? What were you doing? How were you finding leads? Who was the part of your team, if anybody? Were your wholesaling, fixing? Like, give us the run down there. And then I want to bridge the gap of like, dude, you did 300 deals last year, brother. Like, you were a stud, right? officially. So let's go from there. Yeah. Yeah. So started off with the intent to flip. I was just like, hey, you know, race. capital. I didn't, I was an army, army officer, you know, you can look up online what an army

officer in 2018 was making. It was, it was good enough to sustain, but I, I, I had a higher, bigger ambition. So build capital was kind of my focus. I really was just linked up with the realtor, kind of went like the very traditional route. And I saw a house that was foreclosure on, on auction and it hadn't sold yet. I think it went through auction, didn't get what it needed, and it was just sitting there as a listing. And I offered, I think, 20 or 30,000 under the ask price. The agent comes back and it's like, dude, they never ever accept these two hours later. Hey, guess what? They accepted it. So it was like, cool. I have my first house now. I was partnered with just a friend. She's still a friend of this day. But yeah, I was in a course.

So I was around a lot of different captains, and I found one girl, I was like, hey, do you want to do real estate? She was like, yeah. I was like, all right, let's do real estate. And then a week later, she's like, hey, I didn't know we were doing real estate that quickly. So we partner on it. And then we start working on it. Pretty standard flip, three bed one bath, get into it, make about 20, 25 grand. And it's like, wow, okay.

Number one, it wasn't that hard. Like this is this is the ego talking, right? First, first deal success ego. It wasn't that hard. Man, if I do this 10 times a year, like I'm starting to count the money. I'm like, okay, going from my army salary to this or supplementing it. It's like, hmm, this is starting to look pretty good. That false confidence led to immediate mistakes right after.

So we close on that house. We get that one. So it's like, okay, now this, this, my buddy Jen, And she's like, all right, let's go. Like, let's rock and roll. And I proceed to go by a absolute dumpster fire of a house thinking that I was like chipping Joanna Gaines. I could fix anything.

I was doing probably about 50% of the work myself at this time. And I buy this house that was built in like the early 1900s. And it looks like a house that you would see on a scary movie. And I decided to buy it. I still own it to this day. overtime, real estate. That's the best part. The best part is like, ah, this one,

I'm going to end up holding this one. Listen, all of us have that story, so please don't feel bad. I bought a home at auction that literally, when you walked to the home, it was a 2,300 square foot home, you could push the whole home and it would start to wobble.

Because basically it was like four, four by fours holding up sheet rock. Yep. Yeah, a lot of foundation work on that one. So, yeah, took some lumps. But again, you know, that's the beauty of real estate. estate, man, it's like you can make a mistake and then if you hold on to it for long enough,

just mitigate some risk, it's going to pay off. There's no doubt. And I want to talk about the taking lumps. Like, first of all, to go do your first deal and make $25,000, what I tell people that creates two things. So I've been coaching for 13 years. What I try to help people do is create certainty and confidence. And there's a difference. Certainty is you are now very clear that you can do this. Yeah. Confidence is now what propels you to do more of it. Right. And so, You gain certainty and probably overconfidence, right? Because it was easy and you profited so fast and it wasn't this crazy hurdle.

And then you bid off more than you can do, right? And so just like anyone, you know, in my seat after 20 years and the scars that I get to wear to help someone like a Bobby or any of you, don't go too fast, right? Like the lessons I've had to learn in the last even handful of years is I had a really large goal that I knew I was capable of. So I was running as fast as I possibly could. but by moving fast with speed for no real apparent reason but my own ego, it harmed me. Right. I had financial losses. And it wasn't because I couldn't or whatever the case was.

It was because when you're moving that fast, you're not really paying attention to the nitty greedy and the things that you need to. And you start to force square pegs and round holes and, you know, take flyers on deals. Oh, that's easy. I know that area that'll be. But all of a sudden you have a $15,000, $18,000 foundation issue, which totally blows the deal apart, etc. So speed isn't always your best friend. In a lot of cases, I believe in speed that you should be do that. And obviously you got well around this. You're crushing it and, you know, but a lot of people

they over adjust for confidence. Like, oh, I could do this at a big level. And just like you said, you know, they miss some things. Yeah. But you're right. You know, so what was the mindset that, you know, you take the lumps? Like, how do you get through that? How do you get through the mindset of taking a lump and keep going. There's so many people out there that quit. So many, I can't tell you, like, their second, their third deal, they lose money and they're like, dude, I don't know if I can do this. Yeah, yeah. And that's good. Even reflecting on that now sitting here talking to you, yeah, it would have been really easy to quit. You know, I just just had my son and I'm spending almost every waking hour at this house trying to be a contractor. So I got my wife complaining, you know,

the financials on the deal are falling apart. I think, I think, you know, for me, it was, it was a little bit of, of stubbornness. And, and honestly, I think it's pulling back from a lot of that just training. I think it became part of who I am to clear and reload. And it was like, okay, well, hey, you know, the first one, just because this one's bad, doesn't negate what happened the first time, right? So how can I be more diligent and focus on making sure that that first one is repeatable? Right.

And it was honestly, it was pretty easy to solve. It's like, hey, let's maybe not buy a house that was built in the early 1900s first off, right? Yeah, that's a big one for all of you out there. Probably stay away. Unless they are literally your sweet spot, you're in the, like, there are people that do very well at that. So I don't want to be so black and white. I get right.

You're in New York. You're in Jersey. You're in Philly. in these older Ohio, right? Like everything's built in 1910, 1920, 1930. But barring that, I would tell you, if you're any Middle America, East Coast, West Coast, stick to the 50s, 60s, 70s or higher.

Like, you just are going to, you're, there's still going to be problems, but you'll find less of them. Yeah, for sure. And to say all that, like, it was a change in my process, right? It was like, okay, hey, I got to create a little bit of a criteria. I got to give myself left and right limits,

so I don't go off the rails and buy a bunch of, one of my partners calls it, he calls them Boo Radley houses. Right? So I don't buy a whole bunch of those. So, yeah, man, I think it was. That's a great book reference, by the way. Yeah, that's all him.

That's all Jimmy Vreeland. None of that was me. But yeah, no, I think, I think just, you know, taking that, because looking back on it, it's like, man, I'm so glad I took those lines. I also realize I'm not a contractor. I don't want to be a contractor, right?

So I started being okay with paying contractors to do the job. Sure. Yeah, that was my initial barrier and why I wanted to do the work. I would get a bid and I'd be like, are you kidding me? Like this person's gonna, you know,

they're gonna charge me 30 grand at the time. Yeah. I'm like, oh, I can do it for 15. Where were you finding these deals? Like your first 10 deals. How did you find them? In 2018, 2019, I was finding them on just the MLS. Yeah, just MLS.

I mean, even now, there are still, now our business model is completely changed. We'll get into that. But even now, there are still good deals that pop on the MLS. There are great deals. It is underestimated, undervalued, and it is shocking to me. Because if you just know how to work with realtors and what you're looking for, what I would always impress upon people is it's not the listing itself that you're going to really have a big care for. You make your offer.

What you really want to do is people do deals, meaning the agent is the relationship you need to be able to work because they will bring things to market or give you insight on deals that are coming to market that you'll get first shot on. In the Blue Moon, you'll be able to make an offer or a low offer on a listing and it will work. You'll probably do a handful of year every year. but if you're ever going to get to a level of scale and you want to do you know one or two every single month from the MLS that's very viable but it comes from the people the agent and yourself building the relationship and that work but man the MLS always has deals you got to find them you got to be a good negotiator and

you got to show why your numbers where it's at well did I can give you a little bit of behind the curtain just just real quick I mean so we're direct to seller so we spend you know, well into the six figures per month on marketing, right? The amount of people that I talked to that maybe we are five to 10K off. And my numbers are, I got to pay a team of 20. Like we got to pay a lot of people, right? So I'm buying houses generally speaking like deeper than what Bobby, who was kind of solopreneur flipping would need to buy a house at.

The amount of people that I can't come to an agreement on because of a 5, 10, 15K difference that go and list their house for just that little bit of an incremental change in price, it's, I would say it's at least 25%. A hundred, yes, I don't even want to say 100%. There is this weird layer of like, man, five to ten grand makes or break a deal, but I will tell you, staying firm on your number is going to save you more money and more heartache, right? is those five or 10 grand that you realize at the end of the deal you would have needed because seller concessions or something or, you know, the appraisal comes in short.

That five or 10 grand, I can't tell you how often that would have been everything to the deal being profitable or not profitable, right? And so making that hard line, I know a lot of you guys and me, we want the deal. We're dealing with. Like, oh, my God, five grants. Who cares? I mean, I'm just, let's go. Yeah.

And then the appraisal comes in five grand short. and like, oh my God, right? That is definitely the deal breaker. Now, let's fast forward a little bit, right? MLS got you the first 10 deals. Maybe more, but let's just say the first 10. I echo that. I think anyone kind of starting out,

I think there's deals all over the MLS that you just got to be patient and you got to have fortitude and you got to, you know, I started on the MLS too. I was calling agents, 100 agents a day every single day. I was living on a couch. I was broke, blessed and disgusted. I just would do it six days a week and everyone else would do a five. So I had one full day a week.

that I would do more than everyone else, which got me our deals, right? And so I'm formally believe if you're starting the MLS is a great place. Now, let's fast forward. Bobby Co. 300 deals a year, well over a thousand deals in the career. What does that business model look like? Yeah. Well, so I want to touch on something that I think is, uh, it's just an important part of the story. I did that. I did my initial several deals and they were all good deals. Like, like, with the exception of the old house, they were all pretty solid deals. Then I made the decision, so I was at this pivotal point where I could have just tried to go by myself. I actually made the decision to go and work for somebody that had 100 plus houses already. So he's my now

partner, but I decided to stay in the Missouri area. I had a job. I had a job. I had a job recruiter hit me up and he's like hey man jimmy breelan's out here in st louis which is about two hours away and uh he he's doing real estate he has a property management company he's buying up a bunch of rentals um do you want to have a conversation sat down had a conversation with him i was like yeah like i'll definitely come work for you um now my wife wasn't too happy because she wanted to go to arizona that was kind of like the plan which on a weekend like this weekend it would have been nice to be in arizona yeah i bet but um you yeah Yeah, so it was an easy sell to my wife because I was like, hey, look, like, I've already had some decent success in real estate.

If I spend two years learning from a guy that's doing hundreds of deals already, I'm going to be able to take this and the sky's the limit, right? So fast forward. I'm working for Jimmy. I'm an acquisition direct, so I'm solely focused on the sell side at the time. And we're getting after it. We're starting to grow. Several years down the road, we end up partnering and really start building out this direct-to-seller model. And really a lot of the shift in focus, I know your question was, you know, hey, going from the beginning several deals to now, like what's changed,

it's really been kind of the model in turning what was kind of a hustle, I think, for both of us at different times in our lives into a business, right? So direct-to-sellers, kind of our bread and butter. We go out, Jimmy has a construction company and a property.

Well, I want to pause. Like, everyone hear what Bobby just said. There's a lot of people out there, like I need to learn, and most of them paid for coaching. And I love that. And I'm a coach, and I know you guys have your thing,

like, yeah, fine. But, man like there's there is another door right like everyone goes through the front door right us coaches we're great at marketing we're everywhere hey come blah blah blah but you decided hey why don't i actually genuinely learn and get paid to learn yeah like how brilliant is that everybody like he didn't say let me go cut justin colby a $25,000 check for coaching he said actually i can go get paid to learn how Justin Colby does his actual business because i can go work for him and paid by doing deals.

Yeah. Guys, think about that. Guys and girls, like, I'm all about coaching. I invest hundreds of thousands every single year, just like you do Bobby and masterminds and coach. I do that because I always want to get to the next level. And I'm unemployable. But, you know, for those of you that, like, maybe coaching isn't reasonable for you,

like go and find Bobby and work for Bobby right now. Go work for me. Go work for so many other people and learn the business by doing this. business under their protection, under their advisement, under their coaching, under their, and then you get paid for it. Yeah. So I didn't want to just skip over that. Like that is just not enough people even think that way.

So that's awesome. It's a fast pass. It truly is. And, you know, I get it, man. Especially in our culture today, everybody wants to be the entrepreneur. Everybody wants to be the guy or the gal, right? I don't want to work for anybody else. like I want to be the one to do it. And absolutely. Like I like like most most of my friends,

that's what they ended up doing. But I bet I could tell you, you know, you hear it from Hermosi. Like he'll he'll mimic the same exact thing. He'll echo the same thing. Go find somebody that knows what they're doing, go work for them, learn for them, get paid, all that stuff. I think if I were looking at things, and of course this is a little bit of a crystal ball guess, but I would say that this helped my trajectory by at least five years. at least. In terms of the amount of deals that we're doing, what I'm bringing home to my family,

I think it was a five year I shaved off. Yeah, and that should be, right? And I love that because most people, again, just try to say they can do it themselves and the reality is we all know life gets in the way. In other events, they have the best intentions. What's the age old saying of the road to hell is paid with good intentions?

Like, they might have intentions. But until you actually meet rubber meets the road, get on the field, do the thing, in my opinion, doing it under someone's umbrella to be able to learn that way, to speed this whole thing up. The reason why you buy coaching or invest in coaching, I should say, and the reason why you'd go work for a high-driven, high-volume company, same concept. Speed up your learning curve so you don't have to hit the speed bumps that you normally would do yourself. I've done this for almost 20 years. I have all the scars. You guys don't have to wear the scars,

right? Like, there's no reason to. I can just teach you or Bobby can just work with you. Like, There's no reason for people to be doing this alone without having someone holding their hands. Yeah. What you said there is, I think it's the most rewarding. It's also the most challenging thing to do. And I think the reason why it's the most challenging is man, like ego has to go away, right? No doubt. Working with other people, I think that's why there is.

There's so many people that want to be solopreneurs is because it's, I don't want Anybody else telling me how to do this? I don't want to, you know, be accountable to anybody else. And admittedly, it is the hardest part about this journey. There's no doubt. But at the end of the day, listen, I find it to be crazy that someone's willing, they sign up for a job that says on the job ad 40 hours a week, 150 grand a year. But they themselves know they're working 60, sometimes 80 hours a week, killing themselves. They're still making $150,000 a year.

Meanwhile, they can take on their own journey, put it on their own shoulders, and work 80 hours a year and make a million dollars a year, or 80 hours a month or a week and make a million dollars a year. For sure. Because it's their own, and they can execute, and they have the work ethic. But instead they get in the entrepreneur space, and they see all the bullshit on social media. They go, oh, I want to build my life where I'm on the beach.

I want to work 20 hours a week, 30 hours a week. I want a four-hour work week. Remember that book? Yeah. What a fucking crock of shit, by the way. Yeah. When you are growing a business and scaling a bit, there is no such thing. Not if you're going for something big.

If you're okay making 200 grand a year, is there a world online probably where you could work four hours a week? Probably. Be some internet marketer or, you know, trade crypto. or date, fine. But I just want everyone to realize, like, don't shortchange yourself because of your ego and you want to have this picture perfect vacation backpack lifestyle. Yep.

Then you're going to limit how much money you can make. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I've seen a lot of people chase the lifestyle businesses. And it doesn't work out. I have somebody said exactly what you said, yeah. Like, hey, you can do two, three, four deals. and if you're funding a staff of one and a BA,

and that's what you want to do, you know, T-Sha. Thank God. Good for you. I love it. If I could empower or Bobby can empower more of you to do one or two deals a month and have an executive assistant or a VA and you, and you're working eight hours a week and you do one or two deals. Yes, that is awesome.

But then don't complain or bitch about not making a million dollars here. That's all I would ask. Like, then live that life. You're crushing it. That is the life you are trying to build by design. Just don't complain about wanting more, right? Right. So.

Absolutely. So give me your business model. Sorry, we got off on this tangent about, like, lowering people, but give me your business ball now. You're spending six figures a month. What kind of marketing are you doing? Yeah. So we are, so we're in three markets.

We're in St. Louis, Little Rock in Wichita. Little Rock, I heard, is awesome. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's a little market to be investing in, wholesaling, fix, and flipping in rentals. Yeah. Sorry, saying that again? Just as Little Rock being awesome as a market, getting, buying rentals, fix and flipping and wholesaling. Yeah. Yeah. Really, all three of those markets are very similar. The only difference is MSA, like the sides of the, you know, areas.

So, so, yeah, we're operating in those three markets. We're spending a good bit of money on TV, direct mail radio this year we're really starting to kind of up our branding so we're doing you know billboards i have i have a wrapped car sitting in my driveway um just some of those things just to kind of get our name out there because we'll see more yeah yeah like um have you seen mark spain's billboards everywhere i have not so he's like a huge buy anyways so i say that just for branding sake having all that stuff works i love direct what are you guys doing with direct mail I absolutely love RIEI print mail. I believe you guys are using RIA print mail.

You can find them anywhere. REI print mail, it'll also be in the below because I'm a huge advocate of direct mail. It just works all the time. Talk to me about your strategy with direct mail. Yeah, I mean, our strategy is honestly lean heavily on REI print mail. That's a good strategy. I like it. Yeah, it's a great ROI.

Man, it's been what's cool about direct mail is, I think it's especially if you're trying to do five, ten deals a month. Like you're kind of in that, hey, I'm going to get going phase. Yeah. That's a hundred deal mark. Direct mail is a, is a requirement. Yeah. And it's scalable.

So you can start off with it. And then you can scale it to where, hey, we're doing 300. We're chasing 500 this year. And direct mail is going to be a huge attributor to that volume. But no, we're constantly adjusting buy box, you know, data. Data is huge, especially across three different markets. Hey, what are the guys and guys seeing on the ground, on the phone? We're adjusting our buybox with RIA printmail, meeting with them very regularly.

And yeah, man, just putting out pieces that, you know, we have a little test budget with them. Kind of let them play around with pieces. And, yeah, we just let the data tell us what works and keep doing more of it. The thing I love about RIA Primal for you guys probably, I'm assuming you use their whole complete thing, but for me, the complete thing is a game changer, right? So not only do they pull the data, show me the right data to send,

but then they also have the answering service. And the reason why for me, at least, now I would assume maybe for you guys, maybe not, but like I don't want the biggest operation with personnel. I've done that. I've had 28 people in my office. I've been there. I've done that. I would encourage most people not to do that at all

or anywhere close. I think most million to multi-million million dollar companies can run off four people for right and then the the founder or two founders right so whatever that looks like but you shouldn't in my opinion have some robust crazy amount of people because you have places like rei print mail that have a call answering service attached to their service that is really affordable really affordable and they will give you actual leads right where your team isn't have to figure out is this person actually a lead or are they just more curious about what potentially the value of their home is right yeah absolutely i just love that service because it

allows me to remove essentially two people that a lot like lead um i call them like lead managers they're managing the leads right that i remove them because this entire system of rye i complete do you guys use it no so so we do not um but the demand And I agree wholeheartedly with your advice right there. When I was saying earlier, like the hardest part of this entire game, like, it's people. A hundred days is. That's an business, by the way. It is not just real estate.

It's 100%. Being a manager and a leader at the same time is really hard. It is. And so if you are a leader, I would, I just based on our conversation now, I think you're more of a leader than a manager. Yeah. And don't try to trick yourself into managing when you're not. I've made that mistake. Yeah, I was going to manage, and I just sucked at it because I'm more of the leader.

I go show you how to do it. I'll be the first running down the mountain like Marcus Aurelius, right? I will lead the troops. Bro, if you need me to show you how to swing the damn sword, I'm out. Yeah. Same. We just got off that very fun lesson train really recently. We took our top performers.

We made the age-old mistake. of taking your top performers and putting them, turning them into managers. Yeah. And what happened as a result, revenue dropped. Everybody was unhappy. We realized, oh, wow, just because you're a top performer doesn't mean you're a very good manager. That's right. So, dude, we, yeah, last year, I would say beginning of last year.

So about a year ago, this time, we were kind of recovering from those bruises. Yeah. And that's, you know, you guys are a very impressive business. I think people are the hardest part of our business. And then if you reach can lean into smaller, a lot of times it's better because it's more profitable. Bigger's not always better because it's this ego driven. There'd be my two cents.

And you didn't ask for us. So it was unsolicited. Talk to us about what you're doing today and then how you see this 2026 year going. Are you making pivots? Are you adjusting? We just talked about leadership management. Are you spending more? Are you spending less?

Are you focusing more on wholesale than fixing flip are you what what does that all look like for you right now yeah i mean when i can wholesale i'm a wholesale like i think that's that's option number one every time hands down yeah absolutely um you know we we will flip we'll do hold tails like light flips um we'll we'll do some buy-in holds for sure but uh what we're really trying to develop is just a a sales and marketing just machine Just we're building our one of the cool things that one of our partners had, Jimmy, he has an education platform that allows people to kind of buy into like this one-stop shop. So construction, property management, you're a high net worth W2 employee.

You come. I need some tax, you know, write-offs, buy some real estate. We try to handle that. Obviously, we're continuing to build our local buying list. So that's that's kind of where where we'd like to go. It's been the majority of our business so far. But 2026, man, it's execution. Okay.

Or the same executed at a higher level. I don't think there's a whole lot of external things to be concerned about right now. Yeah, I think 25 and 26 are going to be very similar years. So for us, man, it's hey, what are the things that help us stand out? do we truly live by this idea that we're putting sellers first? Yep. So, man, it goes back to people. It's leading people well.

That's kind of the 2026 focus. Man, if you guys dial that in, I mean, it's a, it's just a game changer, right? The last thing, unsolicited advice, but like time to the bigger picture. If they're bought into the very bigger picture versus just a paycheck, leading people makes it so much easier. Like overall revenue, bonuses based around growth. equity. Maybe you start getting equity if you're a killer, X, Y, and Z. Like, tying people to your vision, they get bought in because now it's our vision. And our vision is much more empowering for those individuals. And so, this has been great. Everyone, make sure you, first of all, where should everyone

go find, Bobby? Yeah, for kind of like the real estate stuff, just at Bobby Coe, Instagram, I'm probably the most active. It is not CO. It is K-O-U-G-H. K-O-U-G-H. And then Bobby, I know you also have a podcast, don't you? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I actually have a faith-based podcast. Love it. Where, you know, we get people on and they talk about testimony. And, yeah, that's called the knock podcast. If anybody, if that's your cup of tea, it's ran by the Belknack. Yeah, the knock. K-N-O-C-K? Yep.

The knock podcast. podcast, Bobby Coe is the host. So check that out as well on all the platforms, I'm sure. Brother, keep doing your thing, man. Keep running fast, focus on execution. And happy to see you are just absolutely crushing it. Yeah. Thanks, man. I appreciate you having me on. It was fun. Hell yeah. That is Bobby Co. I am Justin Colby. This is the science of flipping. If this was helpful, share this with two of your friends. I'd appreciate it. See you on the next episode.