WS975: Why It Is Important to Have a Strong Personal Brand with Samson Jagoras

EPISODE 975

[INTRODUCTION]

0:00:00.0 ANNOUNCER Welcome to the Real Estate Syndication Show. Whether you are a seasoned investor or building a new real estate business, this is the show for you. Whitney Sewell talks to top experts in the business. Our goal is to help you master real estate syndication. 

And now your host, Whitney Sewell.

[INTERVIEW]

00:00:24.0

Whitney Sewell: This is your daily real estate syndication show. I’m your host, Whitney Sewell. Today our guest is Samson Jagoras. Thanks for being on the show, Samson.

00:00:32.0

Samson Jagoras: Yeah man, I’m pumped. I’ve been following you for quite a while now so I’m excited to be on here and chop it up pretty honored to be chatting with you today. So, thanks for having me on.

00:00:41.0

WS: Yeah, I’m honored as well. Thanks for listening to the show. But it’s just amazing to see so many guests now have been listening for a long time and, you know, and are doing amazing things in the space like yourself so a pretty amazing background that you have. So honored to have you and a little about Samson, he’s an entrepreneur, RE/MAX commercial real estate broker and president, and founder of Growth Vue Properties. Over his 12+ year career in business, executive leadership & entrepreneurship, he has served as a professional Futures & Commodities broker, actively invested in real estate, and acted as the Chief Strategy Officer for Madwire, an INC 500 marketing, and technology company located in Fort Collins, Colorado. Samson currently puts together large commercial apartment investments throughout the United States, opportunistic land development, fix n flip and buy/hold deals in Northern Colorado; and sits on the executive leadership team at Madwire, where he helped grow revenue from 7 million to over 100 million & grown the employee base from 35 employees to 600 employees in ten years. 

I mean that’s pretty incredible that that alone is impressive 7 to over 100 million and then just say employee count as well shows the just a massive amount in the scale of the company growth, you know in a 10 year period there. So I look forward to getting into that a little bit Samson and even how you’re applying that now to your real estate business. Also maybe once you fill in some of the gaps there of how you got to the, you know, the multifamily syndicating operator that you are now. Let’s jump in.

00:02:10.0

SJ: So, I grew up in Los Angeles, California, you know, this is based on a heavy dose of punk rock and skateboarding played a lot of sports. And about my freshman year high school, I fell in love with football I didn’t even like football growing up but I found it, I loved it, and all I wanted to do is play football in college so that set me on the path that led me to, I got a scholarship to go play at Western New Mexico University. And then my sophomore season was not happy playing D to football walked away from my scholarship took the walk on at the University of Colorado, which is how I ended up here.

Thankfully, I met my wife. We’ve been together for 16 years getting ready to celebrate our 12 year wedding anniversary this year.

00:02:47.0

WS: Congratulations, by the way. 

00:02:50.0

SJ: Yeah. Thank you. Probably my most, one of my most proudest ones, that and being a dad. And I was going to school studying integrated human physiology; I wanted to be an orthopedic surgeon, trying to play football.

00:02:47.0

WS: I was gonna say what is that?

00:03:01.0

SJ: It’s basically like human physiology is it makes it like Kinesiology and all that good stuff. And so I thought I wanted to be an orthopedic surgeon. Looking back on it and then I’m very grateful that I didn’t land in that career, partially because my grades determined whether or not I was going to go to med school, playing football and trying to keep it all together, was tough. But I’m just such an outgoing type of person I love people I love building things, and being a doctor would probably be the death of me. So I graduated on a Friday with a degree of human physiology and I walked into a futures and commodities brokerage on a Monday. About six months before that I didn’t even know what a future commodity really was, let alone that you could trade those types of things, and about three months into my career on September 29 2008, Dow Jones fell 777 points in a single day, which set up the economic housing crisis so I got my baptism in economics and real estate investing and all that stuff in the middle of one of the most tumultuous times in history at least as it relates to real estate. But, that’s really what put me on the path to being interested in owning hard assets, all my investors who continually made money, they owned commodities, they hold assets right they were pig farmers, gold producers oil producers, cattle ranchers, right, they grow corn, etc.

Those guys made money. The people that consistently lost or the people who were speculating, right, they were just banking, it’s really easy. There’s a saying in the stock market or stock trading that everybody’s a genius in a bull market. You know, you could literally close your eyes at some points in the market and just bought anything and been successful and you watch people run their account from 25,000 to a million and a million back down to 25,000. But the people that were consistent were the ones that always made the most money, those are the producers.

So, that’s what kind of drew me towards that. But right at the time was I was coming to the career of commodities broker and the housing market crashed. We had the evolution of real time quotes, so companies like E-trade, TD Ameritrade, they were all coming out with technology which allows you as the customer to literally see in real time, what the market was trading at. The age of calling down to the floor was dying because everything was moving electronic. And so the value of being a commodities broker was fading, so we had to do a lot more money management, trading systems, and training programs, selling newsletters and things like that which we did really, really well. 

The problem is when you’re sleeping with a laptop next to your bed because markets like the coffee market which we would trade, open it like one and two in the morning. It really starts to crush your quality of life, really starts to eat into your marriage, and things like that so I was burnt out to say the least, making great money, did very well in the industry. But, I was ready to leave and I was going to go be a financial planner. So, what I wanted to go do. And then, I was approached with this opportunity to join a startup called Madwire which focus specifically on marketing and technology for small to medium sized business.

I came in and help scale up the marketing arm of that business and scale it from what it was, then eventually took over recruiting, took over training, and then led a team of about 350 marketers with a couple other people towards the tail end of my career. And then actually officially stepped out of that business and in 2020, to just focus everything I have entirely on syndication and real estate and multifamily in general. I just love, I love the industry. I love all the benefits that come along with owning it. I love selling it I love talking about it. I love putting deals together and love teaching people about it. So, I’m just on a mission now to just really share that message with the world. And then, on top of that just bring good deals to our investors. 

00:06:037.0

WS: Yeah, no, that’s incredible path to getting to where you’re at now. No doubt about it, you’ll learn a lot along the way and I could have gotten so many different directions. Incredible that you landed up at, you know, as an operator you know syndicators, and so you know I just, I love the experience to that you gained, know, scaling that company right. You know being there through all that you know through the marketing side and just the employee growth as well you know. I would love to hear you know some tips on scaling and the marketing side that you are now using as an operator and as a syndicator because I know that’s a question I get so often personally to from other people that are trying to get into space and clients and say, you know, I want to scale right what’s the next, you know, how do I scale faster and do it right and those things. And so, with your experience there I’d love to hear about that and just how you what you’re implementing what you’re taking from marketing and scaling, you know, and now pushing your multifamily syndication business?

00:07:27.0

SJ: Yeah, you know, when you’re first getting into it I was, I was 26, 27 or so when I was jumping into that world in that in that role and, you know, you’re just full of piss and vinegar, but you don’t really know a lot. Yeah, I’m a lot wiser now. You know, building a great company, ultimately comes down to who you have on your team and at the end of the day if you’re getting into the world of syndication or building the business, you’re not trying to create another job for yourself right, we’re all chasing one thing which is ultimately time.

And so you have to be judicious in knowing how to delegate and when to delegate. You want to delegate early and often in your business. So what I know now is business really breaks down into three categories – sales and marketing operations, HR and finance. And within that just like you do in the syndication space, you can source aspects of your business and you can outsource aspects of your business right? If your syndicate are really focused on being an asset manager you’re focused on leveraging third party property management a lot of cases because it offers you a lot of scale.

What I know from experience is building and people have the business is a lot of fun and I love people, but it creates a ton of dynamics. When you go from 30 employees to 100 the dynamic shift when you go from 100 to 600, I would spend a lot more of my time managing people than I would actually doing other parts of my job, basically. And that was the appeal honestly to, you know, being in the syndication space is the economics, you can manage 500 million in assets and have 10 people on your team, five people on your team, you know you can really do it and scale really well so the, you know, when you, when you know that your business kind of breaks down into three pieces sales and marketing operations HR and finance, then from there you can start to define the key roles. Right, who, who is going to own that aspect of the business who’s responsible for raising capital, who’s responsible for sourcing deals right who’s responsible for underwriting acquisition startup, right, turning over the property, who’s responsible for dispositions and everything on the back end.

When you know what those positions are sure when you’re starting a business is going to be wearing multiple hats, but you can quickly start to delegate and off of those other people on your team that can just simply do it better than you. It’s really hard to be the CEO or the president of something and simultaneously be in the trenches, you need great people on your team. So I’m all about great partnerships and hiring great people on your team and just like you would make any other investment, putting those dollars into somebody or giving up some equity right in your deals just like you would have like a KP or something like that, to have somebody who brings more value to the team into the stack, right. Most people have never thought that far when they get into start a business they just think about the numbers and how great they want to be in blah, blah, blah, blah. And my dad is a testament to this. My dad is one of the most incredible craftsmen I have ever met. I mean he’s literally been building and crafting things since he was 13 years old and he’s tried to be an entrepreneur over the years. And he was never able to get out of the trenches right i’d say you’re, you’re incredible like why are you working on one job right now? It’s like, because you know I’ve got to get in there and pay those guys how am I gonna pay myself? Like, because you would have 10 jobs right not just one job right.

And its scale and its thinking beyond those things and building a team and so there’s a great book if you haven’t read it if you’re getting into the business and you want skill it’s called Traction. And it’s talking all about the entrepreneur operating system, EOS. It’s a great starting point. If anything to give you a framework on how you should operate your business. And then from there you just hire and fire off of gets it wants it capable, does this person get it? What are they capable? Sometimes, you have great people and they just need to be moved to a different seat.

00:10:59.0

WS: I love that. You’re going to say so, a lot of that gets it, wants it, and capable, is that what  you said?

00:11:01.0

SJ: Yes, correct.

00:11:03.0

WS: Now that’s awesome and it sounds so simple right we just need these departments and I don’t say this again like sales and marketing HR, finance operations, you know, and then you talked about who owns each part of those things. I think it’s so crucial because in the beginning, if you’ve never operated a business, like, you don’t think about that, you know. Or maybe you bring on an assistant, you know somebody that first hire, and it’s like you’re not really clear with them what their job description is or what’s expected of them, and it leads to so many issues right? You know, and it’s just poor communication they don’t know what’s expected and you’re upset because they’re not doing what you want.

00:11:35.0

SJ: Expectations is definitely key, but most, you haven’t actually thought about that so it’s pretty hard to tell somebody what to do. The other reason why that slows down your scaling is because what you do in your training is you use the watch me method. Hey, just watch me do it. Hey, I’m just going to jump on the phone and I’m going to call this guy, and then just do it like me, right? Well, that’s not repeatable, and ultimately your job as a CEO or somebody who’s running a business is to create a business that ultimately does not need you, right? If I got hit by a bus tomorrow, could the business continue to operate without me? Until you got to build with the end in mind. Sure, you might not be able to afford it or you can’t afford to hire that person right now and you’re wearing multiple hats, but as soon as you can, that’s where you should be rolling back your profits in your equity is back into hiring another person.

00:12:19.0

WS: talked about hiring and especially starting with VAs, virtual assistants and executive assistant those things for a long time. But I’d love to hear because I get this question all the time is you know who’s my first hire, what should they be doing for me as I’m getting started into this business, and really breaking helping the listener break through that thought process of why I can’t give that thing to somebody else to do, you know, I’ve got to do that thing myself?

00:12:40.0

SJ: The best it was ever explained to me was, is this $10 an hour work, or is this $10,000 an hour work? Not to say that the $10 an hour work is meaningless or lesser. It’s just your individual skill set, or your time is not best spent on that $10 an hour task right? An example would be, you probably could get on Squarespace and build a website, probably could. The amount of time investment, it would take you in order to actually do that job. What does that cost? Because if I just gave it to somebody who was an expert in that and pay them a premium pay them $1,500 bucks to do it. And they did it in a day. Right? That would be a much better use of my time, right? Time cost quality. You can have two, but you can never have three of those things all at one time so you have to make a decision on how you’re going to invest your time because time is ultimately money.

And so for me it’s always just been about that as I’m. It’s really hard. An example would be in the commercial brokerage business. The Curse of success, you’re getting successful you got bookings listings, you’re meeting with clients your networking and you have a zero time to prospect. Right? So, what do you need to do you need to find somebody who has the time and invest in them to call and prospect constantly so that the funnel is constantly full, you know what I mean. And so, if you read the book Traction, you start to look at scoring your business on a, on a weekly and quarterly basis and you start to break down issues, the better you become a business, the better you become at solving problems. That’s it. 

00:14:22.0

WS: Who was your first hire, like for your syndication business?

00:14:23.0

SJ: It was actually a partnership. So we were all on this on this path kind of working together towards being in the syndication space. And my one of my partners, Jeremy Cisneros. He is literally a commercial loan originator, the guy underwrites for a living. I can underwrite, and I can, I can look at a multifamily performer all day long. But I’m never going to do it as good as that guy. And, it’s an opposite of that his skill set is not jumping out in front of people talking in front of people, he just hadn’t had that experience and it’s also not really his nature his character.

So, you know, we quickly learned that that’s like an operational type of role, you’re underwriting acquisitions that whole process. So he leads it when he says, Hey, I need you to go get him the quote on insurance or I need you to call the, the assessor and get some tax numbers for me right or I need you to call the PM, we all fall in line, because we have already defined what the roles and responsibilities are and who owns what. When I say hey we’re going to do X, Y and Z for marketing and sales to go raise capital or I’m going to go on 24 podcasts in the next six months to really develop the brand around growth few properties. Everybody falls in line to support it. That makes sense?

00:15:31.0

WS: Makes complete sense, I love that you have to delegate you have to know what you’re responsible for and kind of stay in your lane a little bit. I have a very, very similar, you know, structure in our company as well and my business partner is the numbers guy. I can underwrite, yes, but I’m never going to be as good at it as he is. And I don’t want to be, it’s not, you know, it’s not where I want to spend my time. But I need him right and he needs me or like very different roles and we can scale faster and better and provide better service to investors because of it.

Speak to the marketing side a little bit and know some of the investors right now that that are or operators that are listening are saying, you know what I don’t understand this marketing thing, you know, some don’t want anything to do with it some do, some don’t understand it. Lay out some basic things that we should be thinking about as operators, as far as obviously we’re everybody’s trying to raise money trying to build that trust with investors right?

How have you done that, well, you know, what’s been some key things that you learned maybe from your marketing background that have helped the most in this business?

00:16:26.0

SJ: Yeah, I think the first one is just building a brand, you know, you got to have an identity, right, like who you are and what your messages. The reason we’re called Growth Vue and it’s v-u-e right, it is vested united equity. Most people when they’re getting into real estate investing, what do they think? I gotta have all the money. I got to get the loan by myself. I gotta go find this property myself I have to take notes is very close mindset of I have to do everything myself. But when you have a growth view or a growth mindset or a growth perspective, and you realize that if we can if we go bigger and we get more scale, we can all make more money right by coming together investing our equity together united right. So I think the brand is important because it sets the stage for what you believe as an organization, it’s also just how you show up, you know. If you’re going to show if you’re a new syndicators and you’re showing up to talk about raising capital or something and you’re like oh yeah I’m just putting together real estate deals it’s like, it’s uninspiring and, and there’s nothing for people to really latch on or remember or, or think about.

And so, brand is, in my opinion, important, how you show up matters. Yes, you need a website. Yes, you need to brand. Yes, you need to make those investments in some advertising and some content that a Facebook page and the LinkedIn page and all those things in order to just tell your story because what most people don’t understand is 90% of the research process is done. This is just statistics before the customer ever picks up the phone.

So if you know you’re going to go meet with somebody and you’re talking about they know you’re coming to talk about raising money or investing in multifamily deals, guess what they’re going to do? They’re going to Google you. Right? They’re going to do some research, go Google me and see what comes up I’ve been very intentional about the content that I put out there, and the brand, so that I can control the narrative around me and I can control the narrative around growth. That’s a big part of that. Go ahead. 

00:18:21.0

WS: No I like how you mentioned I love it, you said it’s about how you show up, and I appreciate you even giving an example there. I just how you present yourself right and you know how you say what you do, is it compelling? Is it catchy? and you know what about how do any other ways how you did that how you show up, you know, in a way that attracts investors and build your brand?

00:18:39.0

SJ: I think it’s just getting out there and creating content you know doing a lot of what we’re doing right now it’s one thing that you do very, very well that’s obviously helped you as you know you have a podcast and you give away a lot of information for free. And it’s funny in the world of at least the commercial brokerage business, there’s this sense of like oh we can’t give away our secrets. Right. But the entire brokerage business is becoming marginalized as on the residential side as Zillow Redfin start to come into the brokerage business. Everybody’s lowering their commissions in order to compete, right, starting to happen on the commercial side, Luke nets becoming the authority people are actually really starting to go there to syndicate their listing it’s becoming the MLS of commercial right costar pretty much owns the market real enemies coming out there with good data and information.

And so you have to provide something beyond just conditions and the old school I got we have the biggest network and we do that blah, blah, blah, blah, we have the biggest team, that’s great. But at the end of the day, I want to work with the best. I want to know who the authority on the topic is. So, authorship and content creation is probably the next most important piece, and it’s beautiful because it doesn’t cost you anything it’s literally just getting out there and giving some of your times I’ve been on a podcast for 30 minutes with a guy like you, you know what I mean.

00:19:52.0

WS: For sure, no doubt about it. It can be extremely inexpensive just to get your brand started and get your name out there but a lot of just thinking about how you show up. No doubt about it. You know, Samson. What about any anything you would have done differently on your first syndicated deal, and now that you know what you know?

00:20:09.0

SJ: I think partnerships are key, you know the hardest part of getting a deal done is you don’t have any track record. Right. And so, you know, being on the commercial brokerage side, understanding what goes through brokers mine, the broker cares about one thing. Can you close? Because he don’t get paid, unless the deal closes. So, how do you add people or partnerships to your team that are going to help you do that? So, one of the groups that we partner with is a group out of New York. They have 40 years of syndication experience; they manage 750 million in multifamily assets that have 160 million that they personally own.

So, when I come to the table and say hey here’s our, here’s our investment partner, that is empowered to it. Right. People take you a little bit more serious. That’s a relationship that’s been fostered over years right, I mean we meet regularly we send them deals we co underwrite stuff together we talk through it. They give us a lot of their feedback and expertise. We do the same because we understand the core markets were in. And, and it’s vital you know so people partnering with guys like you have track record right I mean, one of the beautiful things about this business, at least that I’ve come to experience is everybody’s willing to help each other. I have yet to meet a syndicator it’s just like, screw you, I don’t want anything to do to help you. They’re always willing to help each other because they all know what it was like when they were just getting started, there was nobody else there to really help them, you know they needed somebody to support them or just say hey come on cosign on my deal, you know.

00:21:36.0

WS: That is a pretty amazing part of our industry I agree, it’s just amazing the friendliness and, and people that want to help, definitely helped me to get started. No doubt about it. How do you and looking at a new project now, you know, especially knowing what we went through over the last year, how do you prepare for a downturn?

00:21:51.0

SJ: Well, I lived one in 2008 so I’m incredibly risk averse. In 2018, I was literally downsizing my entire life. I literally we sold our primary residence. We literally move to cash and we said, Hey, we’re just waiting for a rainy day I don’t know when it’s going to happen. And people were like you’re crazy. What are you doing the markets incredible right now? I mean this is that’ll never happen, and history doesn’t repeat itself but it definitely tends to ride, it’s not going to happen just like it happened before, right, Covid who saw that coming? I look like a genius, but I literally two weeks before that we’re standing at a meeting, and I was speaking to the City of Fort Collins, and I was talking about how we needed to drive more economic growth through small businesses in Northern Colorado in order to be competitive in the market.

And I literally said, I told the story about the Dow Jones falling. You know 777 points in 2008, and I said that would be equal to the market falling 1800 points today, and two weeks later, it happened, literally, 1800 point falling in one day. Because people, we have this tendency as human beings to constantly, it’s called rosy retrospection, we look back and we tend to see the past in a better light than it was actually happening. It’s an important part of the human condition, because otherwise every hard thing that happened to us we just put us into a depression. Right. And so we have to be able to look at that in that way, but it’s also a fallacy because we look back on things and we kind of run out the parts that we don’t…

00:23:27.0

WS: A blessing in disguise right, you get a little bit of it.

00:23:30.0

SJ:  Totally, and so you have to constantly be going back and doing that, and you need to be judicious in your underwriting, you know, paying a premium on cap rate to buy something just to get a deal done is a recipe for disaster. I mean there’s a reason that you your exit cap rate is generally worse. Right then, what you’re getting in that because you’re anticipating something worse but buying something and betting on the come the cap rates are going to compress them it’s going to get better for you is a recipe for disaster. I said it before and it said again, everybody’s a genius in a bull market right. If you, for the last 10 years you could have went, I’m going to buy you could have bought something in Detroit, and made money, right, because that’s just how the nature of the market is going but the dynamics are this is uncharted territory.

We have never seen this, we have investors, international investors coming into our market because they can’t get yield anywhere else, that are coming in and competing for this stuff so they’re willing to pay a three cap and a five cap market. They don’t care right because to them it’s about capital preservation; we’re printing money at an insane rate, right, and inflation costs are going through the roof. So, I’m not even concerned about inflation as much as I’m concerned about stagflation where things get so expensive, that nobody can afford to hire, nobody can afford to run their business, which I afford to build. And so the demand build up is going to continue to be there because we need like 4.6 million new apartments by 2030 in order to keep up with demand. 

00:24:54.0

WS: A lot of people talk about an affordability crisis, you know, things like that, and it’s a lot It sounds like a lot of what you’re saying as well it’s so interesting. On that same note, seems in any, any big predictions for you or small, over the next six to 12 months in the real estate market?

00:25:10.0

SJ: You know, I think that the biggest opportunity right now is, we all know that net migration pretty much determines you know where the path of growth is going to be where the opportunity exists. And so, I’m personally seeing that people are exiting the coasts and moving inward and that just kind of causes a ripple effect and so I think the Midwest has a ton of opportunity right now. You can still find some good cap rates; you can still find some reasonable price per doors. And that’s where the most upside potential exists, and I also see that conversion projects are probably going to be the number one opportunity to take maybe an old hotel and convert that into something like an apartment complex that offers affordable housing. 

00:25:42.0

WS: What about any daily habits that you have that you’re disciplined about that has helped you achieve success?

00:25:46.0

WS: The number one habit that helps me achieve success is there’s really like seven categories of goals or pillars in my life that I tend to follow which is my faith, my family, my finances, my career, my social life and my mental health and growth, and my physical health. And, I’m not much of a similar, but I take every day, I try to take inventory, I hit those seven bullet points, and I go How did I do in this area yesterday or how am I doing this week on this thing. And where do I need to get better? I have watched too many friends and too many entrepreneurs let one aspect of their life dominate and sacrifice something like their marriage or their family, to just build an awesome business right. That’s not worth it to me. Right? So, this allows me to actually get the balance that I need and say, Wow, I didn’t give my family enough attention this week I’m going to spend a little more time there, I need to back off a little bit of what I’m doing on my work before it’s too late.

00:26:41.0

WS: Yeah, I appreciate that perspective and thinking through these things is credible you can just name those things off to that you have that kind of thought or site on those things parts of your life. I think that’s, that’s impressive by itself. What about your best source for meeting new investors right now?

00:26:54.0

SJ: Well, you know, what’s interesting is as we’re coming out of the Covid pandemic. People are craving coming together. And so I’ve always been a great connector. So I spend a lot of time just connecting people through hosting meetups through hosting happy hours. Even with some webinars educate education but really trying to do more in person stuff to just really bring people together within your community, I think we can go too far hyperbolic like if you go on LinkedIn and makes me want to vomit because that nobody’s there to actually connect anymore they’re there to just push their narrative about their business or whatever. And so how do you take something from maybe an online connection and convert it into a phone call, which then convert into an in person meeting right. How do you jump on a podcast with somebody who happens to be an operator going to ton of real estate down in Colorado Springs, say the next time you’re in Denver, you know we should connect because maybe we can do something together a JV or a deal or do something like that. So for me, just getting back to the basics I tend to marketing’s funny because everybody tends to like jump on the bandwagon to do these things and then they go too far in that direction. And so when everybody’s going that way I tend to go the opposite way. Like, direct mail personal letters, there’s a great book called Blue fishing if you haven’t read it, it’s amazing. And it’s just all about that personal touch and wowing people and making them feel special. I think is really the key and then investors are everywhere. I mean there’s so much dang capital on this island right now just waiting to be deployed. So if you’re an authority, you can create content you can educate people on the power passive investing, it’s pretty much a no brainer like they’ll trust you to place capital so…

00:28:24.0

WS: I appreciate the book recommendation as well it’s awesome. What about the number one thing that’s contributed to your success?

00:28:28.0

SJ: Honestly, just consistency and continuity. It’s easy to not perfect but the trap of, you know, not having patience, and the delayed gratification of doing stuff. If you are a syndicators and you were getting started in 2020, and you were going full tilt on this, and your whole world got turned upside down, you know, you might have given up halfway through it’s like this is frickin hard like, I can’t see me deals, you know. But I’ll tell you what the number of deals that we underwrote in 2020 is less than what we’ve seen in the first quarter of this year, right. So consistency is ultimately the superpower, you have to find a way to just do something every single day to move the business forward doesn’t have to get done now, especially when it comes to syndication right.

If you were out there trying to do single family homes, like you might do one or two deals a year right and after 10 years you got you know 15-20 apartment complexes, or properties in your portfolio. Or you could just spend three years of your life dedicated to raising capital building partnerships sourcing and screening deals. And in one deal, you have ownership of more properties than you ever did. Just by feeling the need to do something, or get something done, when the reality of it is you never you miss side of the big picture, like what we’re really trying to accomplish.

00:29:38.0

WS: Samson, how do you like to give back?

00:29:40.0

SJ: I like to get back with my time.

11:27:12 Just involved in my church quite a bit. And I think one of the things that I’m most excited about is we’re focusing on building our own endowment fund right it’s one thing to give to a charity it’s another thing to build in a dominant that not only can invest in your deals but also make investments in charities that we care about in perpetuity. And so yeah, I can pay the government taxes or I can build an awesome endowment and help a lot of people so for me it’s about building just an awesome platform where I can help people and just honor God honestly. 

00:30:12.0

WS: Awesome, I love that why and that the way you you’re giving back there are incredible idea as well and just appreciate you just honoring the Lord and that that be giving back in that way and helping so many others so Samson great show. I just appreciate you just really highlighting your expertise and experience and, you know, and how you brought that into syndication business and scaling and hiring people and the departments I think just thinking through that as a syndicator like how are you delegating these things into different departments and who’s responsible for those things so important. You know, building the brand you talked about you have to have an identity, I love it.

You mentioned, it’s all about how you show up, and I’ve talked about that numerous times on the show and even related it to when I was a police officer and how your uniform can save your life people talk about me the shiny, how shiny my buttons work will saved my life. And some people think it’s crazy but it’s so true. You know, when you’re on the side of the road and you’re dealing with professional criminals when our dealing with professional investors right, you know, instead of just appreciate you talking about that. How can the listeners get in touch with you and learn more about you?

00:31:11.0

SJ: So if you want to learn about what our groups up to, you’re going to head over to thegrowthvue.com, that’s vue is in v-u-e dot com. But if you want to really get educated on passive investing we are building out our own course, which is basically helping build sophisticated investors helping them understand how the game is played how to be a good passive investor how to be a good LP, and that’s over a passiveinvesting.pro, we’ve put together a masterclass that you can take over there and some cool little nuggets that I think you’ll enjoy.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[OUTRO]

0:31:40.0 ANNOUNCER: Thank you for listening to the Real Estate Syndication Show, brought to you by Life Bridge Capital. Life Bridge Capital works with investors nationwide to invest in real estate while also donating 50% of its profits to assist parents who are committing to adoption. Life Bridge Capital, making a difference one investor and one child at a time. Connect online at www.LifeBridgeCapital.com for free material and videos to further your success.

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