Why Syndication is NOT Always the Answer for Growth with Jen and Stacy Conkey, Ep 69

Today's guests are  Jen and Stacy Conkey. Jen and Stacy are the founders of Warriors of Wealth and Multifamily Investing Academy. They have over 20 years as entrepreneurs and real estate investors. 

Armed with that experience, they have taught thousands of people across the globe what it takes to succeed in multifamily real estate investing, with actionable strategies that make cash flow real estate fun!

Jen & Stacy have taught thousands of people across the globe what it takes to succeed in multifamily real estate investing, with actionable strategies that make cash flow real estate fun and easy!

In this episode they share their inspiring journeys into multifamily real estate investing, discuss the value of starting small, busting syndication myths, and the power of joint ventures. 

Learn about the importance of experience, teamwork, and clear exit plans, and discover how mindset and time management play a crucial role in achieving success in this dynamic industry. 

Don't miss their insights on building confidence, fostering mentorship, and the Remote Multifamily Investing Academy's mission to support aspiring investors. Tune in for actionable advice and captivating stories!

Episode Topics

[01:12]  Meet our guests,  Jen and Stacy Conkey
[01:55 ] Unlocking Real Estate Success: Inspiring Journeys
[08:06]  Starting Small, Scaling Up
[17:52]  Apartment Investing
[21:17]   Bigger Isn't Always Better
[27:37]  Mastering Multifamily Real Estate Investments
[31:00]  Real Estate Triumph: Mindset, Time Management, and Focus
[37:14]  What is one red flag every investor should look out for?
[38:21]   What is a myth about the real estate business?
[43:18]   Connecting to  Jen and Stacy

Notable Quotes

• "I knew that was not what I was supposed to be doing, but I didn't know what I was supposed to be doing." - Stacy Conkey
• "Get out of that scarcity mindset of, hey, this must be impossible because there's nothing in my neighborhood that I can buy and start looking out in those concentric circles." - Tim Little
• "Start with something manageable and doable where you'll get more out of it than you realize." - Stacy Conkey
• "Unit count is a vanity metric. It doesn't actually mean a whole lot." - Tim Little
• "It's not just about chasing external goals; it's about having compelling reasons why you must achieve them." - Jen
• "Entrepreneurship requires creating your own structure and mindset, which is easier said than done."  - Tim Little

Connect with  Jen and Stacy Conkey

• LinkedIn:  Jen and Stacy Conkey
• Website: https://rmfiacademy.com/
• Email: hello@rmfiacademy.co
• Facebook Group:PassiveIncomeRealEstateInvesting
• Book: Multifamily Freedom Hacking

👉 Connect with Tim

• Linkedin: Tim Little
• Instagram: @tim_at_zana
• Email: tim@zanainvestments.com
• Visit www.ZANAinvestments.com for more info on Tim and how you can passively invest in multifamily real estate
• Get your Passive Investor's Cheat Sheet FREE

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https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/journey-to-multifamily-millions/id1634643497

Transcript

Ep 69 - Jen and Stacy Conkey (audio)

[00:00:00] Stacy Conkey: my opinion is that starting small, even though maybe that 5 to 10 units isn't sexy, our students all the time are starting with, to 10 to 15 unit buildings. That's probably the most common size that we see, but they quickly move into larger buildings because of how much knowledge they gain, which gives them confidence. And then they also have credibility. With the realtors and brokers with the lenders and with the other potential JV partners, and eventually they're limited partners if they go to syndication. Hello everyone. And welcome to the journey to multifamily millions. I'm your host founder and CEO of ZANA investments, Tim Little. And on today's show we have with us a double header, Jen and Stacy Conkey. Jen and Stacy are the founders of warriors of wealth and multifamily investing Academy.

[00:01:22] Tim Little: They have over 20 years as entrepreneurs and real estate investors. Through their diverse real estate experiences, Jen and Stacy know what it takes to identify deals and make offers on properties that will build a long lasting wealth portfolio. Jen and Stacy have taught thousands of people across the globe what it takes to succeed in multifamily real estate investing with actionable strategies that make cashflow real estate fun and easy.

Jen and Stacy, welcome to the show. 

[00:01:51] Jen: Thanks for having us, Tim. Thank you for having us, Tim. 

[00:01:54] Tim Little: Yeah, and it is great to have you. So I gave everyone a high level overview of your background. But on this show, we really like to get into the details of how you got started on your journey. So please take us back to the beginning and tell us how you got to where you are today.

All right. 

[00:02:10] Stacy Conkey: We both started it on our own paths. We didn't know each other when we started 20 years ago. And this is Stacy and I'll start. So back in 20 or 20, 2003, I went to a Tony Robbins event and unleashed the power within. And the biggest thing I got out of that is that I was just on the wrong path.

I was in corporate America, climbing the corporate ladder, doing all those things. And I just, I knew that was not what I was supposed to be doing, but I didn't know what I was supposed to be doing. But, one thing led to another. And I ended up listening to a speaker once who was talking about a fourplex.

It was a big financial seminar. About 95 percent of it was on taxes and stocks. And then one tiny little speaker on real estate. And I was just like, I was like laser focused and I was like, Oh my God, that is. That is so logical. And I, have an accounting background logic is appeals to me. I was like four rents coming in and one mortgage.

Oh my gosh, real estate. That's it. So that just, that's what got me started. Then I read, rich dad, poor dad, which I see in your background and joined an investor club. And one thing led to another, I ended up investing in my education, which wasn't great, left out a lot, but I just got started. That way, and it's hard when you're brand new, cause especially if you're a high performer in what you do in life, and I, we find that a lot of real estate investors are it's hard to be back in a place where you don't know, you're used to being really good at what you do.

And now all of a sudden you don't know anything and everything you do you do it wrong as you stumble through and figure it out. But that was how I got my start. I lived in a market where cashflow really wasn't a thing. I lived in Sacramento, California at the time, the market was very hot and the prices were just like, they were out of reach for someone just getting started and it just didn't cashflow.

So pretty much right off the bat, I ended up looking in, thankfully, I found a mentor who was, who taught me how to do this, but I started looking in outside markets and that was really from the very beginning, all of my journey has been doing. Real estate investing remotely. So I don't necessarily buy where I live.

And for a long time, we lived in San Diego. So you really can't cashflow there. But everything that, that I've done over my entire 20 year career has been remote. And leading team. So anyway, but that was my start. It was bumpy. It was hard, but I just kept at it. And I was really determined at that time because I felt like my education was missing 90%, like 90 percent of the details.

They just didn't talk about or teach. So I had to learn everything the hard way. And I was like, gosh, darn it. If I ever figured this out. And I was not convinced at the time I would, but if I ever figure this out, I'm going to go back and I'm going to make sure that the next generation of investors come in, understand, and know all these things.

Cause it shouldn't be this hard. Anyway, that was my 

[00:04:57] Jen: beginnings into all of it. Yeah, this is Jen. So for me, I started back in 2002. My brother came over and he said, Hey, I need to go to the store. And I was like, all right, I'll go with you. At the time I didn't have kids and I was in my early twenties and we went for this ride.

And six hours later, he drove me around driving for dollars. Because he had this idea of fix and flip. And I was like, what in the heck is a fix and flip, because I worked in corporate America. I was an executive leader in corporate America for 22 years. And at the time, that's all I was obsessed with was climbing that corporate ladder.

And there I was in this car with him for six hours. And at the end of it, I was Hooked. So I was like, how can we do this? Let's do this together. Let's go form our LLC. Let's go right now. Cause I'm once I'm decisive on something, I just go for it, and so my path was not as sophisticated as Stacy's.

I did not hire a mentor and it cost me a lot. So ultimately we got into our first flip. It was my, it was me, my dad, and my brother, we did a lot of DIY. It lasted seven months. It was the flip from hell. And at the end of seven months, we made 1500 bucks and it was just, it was ridiculous. And I thought to myself, why in the heck would I ever continue to do this?

But there's gotta be a better way. There's gotta be a way that I can do this more efficiently. How can we streamline the process, become more efficient? So that's what I set out to do. And then I continued to flip, but then I saw that there was a lot of value in wholesaling also. So I wholesaled and did some flipping and just worked my way, stair stepped my way into my first duplex, which I ended up taking some money out of my 401k and buying it for 40 grand.

There was just a stair stepped approach to this and I never really found the help that I needed. Ironically though, when I went to sell one of my flips, one of these, the realtor said to me, Hey, you should hold this. And this is what got my mind thinking about it and he was like, you should hold this and I was like, Oh no, I don't have time for that.

I've got to move. I'm getting relocated and I wish I would have held it because then I would have, I would still have that asset probably to this day. And I just, it opened my mind and he was like, Oh yeah, we, I've got this mentorship program that you could be a part of. And I was like, I don't need anybody to teach me that I'm trying to become a CEO right now.

All of those things in the beginning, I wish that I could go back and just fix and enroll into something where I could have got the guidance like Stacy did. And I probably would have scaled a little bit faster, but that's okay. So I did it for 12 years by myself alone. So that feeling of alone and every single little hiccup, every single little hurdle, it started to weigh on me.

I didn't feel like I had anybody that I could talk to. So that 12 years was really lonely. It was not as productive as it was in 2015 when I realized. I could actually leave corporate America. So in 2018, I left and pursued multifamily investing full time. At the same time, I had just met Stacy. She was talking about remote investing.

And I was like, what I got to date her more, learn from her, these strategies. And then that's literally how we came together and decided she was training people at the time. And I was like, wow. So can you teach me your ways? So ultimately at the end of the day, I've learned a lot of what I know from her when it comes to apartment investing.

And we decided to start the academy because she wanted to disrupt the education space based on the poor education that she got, I wanted to create a community. I wanted to create a community where there was people and as they're in deals. And they need help. They have someone to lean on. They have somebody to talk to bounce ideas off of to find out if the first answer is actually the right answer if they should go with the second, third and fourth approach.

And so that's literally how our vision came to be for the remote multifamily investing Academy. That's where we are now. 

[00:08:21] Tim Little: Yeah, and that's awesome. Because two different paths, right? But there's, I think, lessons, different lessons that can be taken from each of your journeys so far that a lot of people would probably relate to.

Stacy, I relate to a lot of your background in terms of how you got started. You heard about four plexes, right? So you started small. And I think a lot of people take what I consider those baby steps, right? What I see so often is people start with.A single family home. Maybe it's, they moved, they kept the house, they became accidental landlords, and they're like, Oh, okay, maybe they're cash flowing. Maybe they're not. Oftentimes they're not because they didn't go into it with the intention of it being an investment property.And those are two very different things. But then eventually, Okay. Like I bought my first duplex and like you, Stacy, I was living in Washington DC, which was prohibitively expensive. And after reading rich dad, poor dad, I was all about it. And all these other books, I was like, okay, I need to go out and get one.And I'm looking around that's not going to work. I was in, corporate too, but I wasn't at a level where I could afford to, throw a couple hundred thousand down for, a down payment. And, as most people know, especially with an investment property, you're talking 25%. Down payment, unless you get creative, which, that stuff is out there. So I think that's the first important point for people to remember is, get out of that scarcity mindset of, hey, this must be impossible because there's nothing in my neighborhood that I can buy and, start looking out in those concentric circles, preferably something you could drive to check out. But even if not, if you have a competent audience. Property manager, which is a challenge in and of itself, especially, at the smaller level, then it's certainly doable. And it's a great way for people to get started. And I also resonated with this idea of starting over, right? You feel very confident in what you do at your corporate job every day, you might be a manager, whatever the case is, you're the go to person, and then you hop into something different like this, and you're starting at zero and you're trying to educate yourself, work your way up in order to become a subject matter expert on this, so I think that makes a lot of sense too. And I really like what you guys talked about the stair step approach and Jen, I understand I think that cable television has a tendency to glamorize the fix and flip thing 

[00:10:58] Jen: actually another  job, right? 

[00:10:59] Tim Little:And that's, people get, sold into this. Oh, these people on, HGTV can do it.

Why can't I? And I think for a while, there was like this period where everybody thought they were a flipper for some reason, until they got done with their first flip and most of them quit, if they had a flip similar to yours, where they realized the level of effort that they put into it.

Compared to the reward and then there's the tax treatment, et cetera. So no, I think that's really awesome. So tell me more about how you guys got started with your coaching program. And what did that look like? Did you wait till you were, had a bunch of units under management first, or did, were you more focused on getting that word out so that you could educate people on how they could start to do this as well?

[00:11:50] Jen: what really happened was that when we first started dating and I realized that she knew apartment investing and she was already had a course out for that and was teaching people by the time we got together. And it was a very one on one approach and she had to travel a lot. And for me, I thought what if we could do one to many?

And that's literally what the first question was like, how can we, how can I have more people so that when I'm out there doing it, I can bounce ideas off of people and they can bounce ideas off of one another. So at that time we already had assets, we had already been, God, you started in 2010.

So she had already been doing it for seven years before she started coaching. And then we decided that we were going to, we're going to go for this. And we decided to learn syndication together. And at that time when we, cause she had been doing this really cool way of doing joint venture on smaller apartments.

And for me, I thought that, wow, that's brilliant. You don't hear about that. Like ever, you never hear that all you ever hear is syndicate, you don't even need money. Go find somebody else's money. And I drank that Kool Aid I went there and it was, that was the first formal education that I got was my commercial training and it was not bad training.

I'm not going to even imply that it was bad. It was very informative, but when it came time to go implement, it was like, Oh man where do I, wow, it's, I got to make a, I got to do all these things. I got to get an SEC attorney. I got to get a PPM. I got, I just, I literally went to the point where I was like I feel like I want to just stick to JV on small apartments until I can get enough money and won't need a sponsor.

So that's what we decided to do. And then once we did that and we realized, oh, we could teach other people how to do this. That was the thought we're going to teach people that they think they need syndication which in my opinion is a myth And we need to debunk it because if you start small and accumulate those assets the lenders are going to look at you differently because you have the asset and pretty soon you don't need a sponsor to come in and see you or help you with this.

You can just do your own deals and get the lending that you need. So for us, we saw a huge opportunity to do that, to help people the way that we didn't really have that roadmap when we both started even individually and we had made our individual progress. And then when we realized I actually had the distinction of we could do exactly what you've been doing because that's what I was doing in two to four unit, let's just do it in apartments and build that up first then.

Go to five, five to 10 units after we get one of those, let's go to. 12 to 20 and stair step it and double the door count. Maybe not even double the door count in the beginning, because let's be honest, we got to figure out how to manage the assets. So we don't become a motivated seller. So we really just dialed in our process from 2015 to 2019.

And then said, let's do it. Let's go with it. Let's go one to many and stop training people one on one and. And then COVID hit. And so we decided to do it online and do it in zoom. And we leveraged that and built a huge community that we have to this day, that it's like we hit both of our goals. We, our vision is just, it's out there now.

So then we, we decided to write a book about it and help people with that. It's just, it just keeps getting better. All based on us actually teaching what we implemented. 

[00:14:52] Tim Little: Yeah, and I think what you discovered was like this hole in the education market, because there seems to be a lot focused on the single family space, bigger pockets and all the educators associated with that, which is huge, and then some people kind of spill over eventually into that commercial multifamily space that is primarily Focused on syndication.

There are some exceptions that deal with that. Say, I don't know. Five, five to 50 unit space, but it's much smaller and not a lot of people play in that space. So I think it provides you a distinct advantage and you just recognize that there was a gap there. I'd like to ask you about JVing and I've done both.

JV and syndication, and I think there's merits and downsides to both. Can you talk to me about what some of those pluses and minuses are versus syndication? 

[00:15:53] Stacy Conkey: Yeah. So let me back up a little bit. It's like one of the, because we have the Academy and we have people coming to us and we do a lot of talks and things like that, people will come and say, I just, I want to get my first 100 units.

I'm like, that's awesome. That's a fantastic goal. But let's talk about like, how you can do that in a way that will actually allow you to have the 100 units, which is not go close on 100 unit building as your first deal, which that would, of course, require syndication because the amount of funds you'd need to raise would be large.

When someone is getting started Tim, if you've been doing this, the learning curve is it's astoundingly steep, like even in your first duplex, not that it's so difficult, but the amount that you learn going through that process to close that first deal, you learn so much. It's incredible.

So same thing when someone moves from, single family to two to four unit to apartments. They don't have to start with something huge and they can get all of the benefit, probably more than they get in a hundred unit by starting with something that's, we say five to 10 units, but what are five to 20 units, whatever, something that is like they can wrap their mind around it.

Because sometimes it's a mental game. We do a lot of mindset work 

[00:17:02] Jen: sometimes 80 percent of the time. It's in your head. It's right. Yeah, no, 

[00:17:06] Stacy Conkey: that's true. So if you're starting off with something that is. Five to 10 units or 10 to 20 units. That project is going to be too small to do a syndication on like the cost of syndication.

It's very expensive to hire the attorney and get the PPM and the portal and all of that on top of the learning curve. That's a whole other thing. So for smaller apartment buildings, it's just, oh, if you don't have all the capital yourself, we find that most people don't Either don't have all the capital to do it, or they want to be able to spread their money out into a few deals.

But either way, you're going to need other people to come in and partner with you so that you can take that across the finish line financially. But once you've closed that deal and you've stabilized the asset and you've dealt with like leading the property management team, the amount of knowledge you have is It's huge.

And then you can take that and you take it into the next size building. Maybe that's, 10 to 20 units and then 20 to 40 and then 40 to 80. And when you take that approach, every level, there's like a new level, new double, right? There's something to learn at every single level. We really encourage people like, look, if you want to get into a hundred units, that's amazing.

That's awesome. Unfortunately, I don't know that I've ever met anyone who their first deal was a hundred units. I'm not saying they don't exist, but that's a very big. And difficult undertaking. But if you'll start with something that's a little bit smaller and actually legitimately learn how to manage an asset.

And I don't mean, and Tim, I'm not, cause we don't drive to our properties. We buy properties that are way too far away to drive to. So we literally manage our team. So when you learn to do that on a smaller building and you learn that inside and out, you are so much better prepared to go to the next level.

And then the learning curve is a little bit more because there's a few different things and then you take it to the next and the entire time you're doing that you are, you're serving, not just yourself, but your investors, because you are taking the time to legitimately learn the business, as opposed to let me go get 100 unit and raise a, raise a ton of capital, but not really knowing what you're doing, which really puts So, yeah, I think that's it.

Thanks. All of your investors at a tremendous risk. So my opinion is that starting small, even though maybe that 5 to 10 units isn't sexy, our students all the time are starting with, 10 to 10 to 15 unit buildings. That's probably the most common size that we see, but they quickly move into larger buildings because of how much knowledge they gain, which gives them confidence.

And then they also have credibility. With the realtors and brokers with the lenders and with the other potential JV partners, and eventually they're limited partners if they go to syndication. So it's my opinion if someone's doing apartment buildings that they should, do a handful of smaller apartment buildings and stair step your way up.

And then when you're like, you know what, I got this, you're going to go to the next level of size, which there'll be a learning curve there, but the syndication part. In and of itself. Yeah. That's a, it's a big learning curve and we've done both as well because I think for me because my passion is so much helping that new person get that first deal and successfully close it because it's such a pipe dream for people because they don't have the right education and they just can not get there or they try it and they lose a ton of money and then they quit.

And that's that's even worse. I always want people to start with something that is actually manageable and doable where they're going to get so much more out of it than they even realize. And that sets them up for absolute success for growing into a portfolio. You can get to doing a hundred unit deal within I'd say a year or two, probably more like on the two-year mark, depending on if you're being active, but taking that time to truly learn it and have a network around you and people to support you and teach you when you're.

When you're doing something wrong or you don't know what to do, there's always challenges. It is the worst. It's the business is very lonely. It's very lonely. I was lonely too. It wasn't, I didn't, that wasn't my reason for starting the academy. I just have the passion for making sure people don't quit that they have the support and help and that we can coach them.

But Jen's right. Like the community part of it is. I wish I would have had that because there were lots of times when I wanted to quit and I had nobody to talk to. I got my education and then that was it. There was no ongoing support, training, mastermind, anything. And it's hard to navigate through that.

Anyway, I feel like I got off track, but that's the main reason I talk about doing, joint venture and then moving into syndication because you're so much better prepared when it comes to syndication. If you've done some apartment buildings. They are a little bit smaller, so you really learn it all.

[00:21:32] Tim Little: Yeah, and I agree, especially, with the learning curve piece. I think some of the folks at the, I hate using the word gurus, but most of the educators at the big conferences and stuff will try to tell you that it's just as easy to do, a 300 unit building as it is to do a three-unit building or whatever.

And it's nonsense. Because you can't understand all of the concepts, and mechanisms involved in a syndication versus that smaller property. I think the, what you also said about knowledge bringing confidence to makes a big difference because. Like you said it's about getting that first deal done.

It almost doesn't matter, what it is that it could be that first duplex, or it could be a 10 unit, or it could be a hundred unit. But I had to laugh when you say, that they want their first hundred units, because for me, it's do you have the right goal? Let's ask that question first is that really what you, it may be what you want, but is it what you need to meet your higher-level goals?

And most of the time, I would argue it's not because, dirty little secret, unit count is a vanity metric. It doesn't actually mean a whole lot. I throw them out there too, because it's just part of the system, it's usually those things that are listed, but in reality, if you own 20 percent of a hundred unit building.

Or I'm sorry, if you own 20 percent of a 10 unit JV deal, that may be the equivalent of 1 percent of a hundred unit deal in terms of the amount of money that you have, it's just different things, different amounts of equity that you have, but it's. Just based on size and that's it.

[00:24:00] Jen: Absolutely. I see that all the time, Tim. I see that all the time. Everybody's chasing down a door count because they want to be like Grant Cardone. Grant Cardone's been doing this for 45 years. He has a jet because he's been doing it consistently over and over. It didn't happen overnight, and they want that big door count.

And, my first question is what percent do you own of that door count? What cash flow do you actually materialize and realize from that door count? Versus just having the door count, because anybody can buy into and have 2. 5 percent of 100 unit building and say, I've got a hundred units.

Okay. But what's your experience, right? So I totally feel you on that one. 

[00:24:37] Tim Little: Yeah. And so I enjoy syndication because unlike say, like the single family space where it's every man for himself, every woman for themselves, the syndication space feels much more communal because you have to work together in order to take deals down.

So it's impossible not to work well with others. You will fail. So there's that aspect, end goal, like I'd rather own bigger percentages of properties, i. e. Joint ventures that I'm buying on the side for 10 year terms, 15 year terms versus five to seven, with one, 1%, 2 percent equity in these really large deals, they look cool.

[00:25:14] Jen: Don't get me wrong. Don't get me wrong. We definitely, we have roles as GPs, co GPs and LPs. I am not bashing syndication at all. We actually do it and teach it. But I would like to just point out that in the joint venture strategy, it's also a team approach. You can't do joint venture by yourself.

In fact, Everybody has to have an active role in the deal. So what we teach is like a team of three. And obviously in the beginning, it's a team of two, cause it's smaller, it's a five to 10 unit. But once you get above 40 units and up, there should be somebody who's the acquisition manager, somebody who's a capital raiser and someone who's an asset manager and that team of three can really take down two to three deals a year and stabilize them.

And keep going and build that together. And that's what we teach in the academy. We have a group that is, I want to be, I identify as an acquisition manager, it doesn't change our pronouns, but, and then the other ones, like I identify as a capital raiser, I identify as an asset manager.

And then we have events four times a year where we group them together. And we do speed dating so that they can find the person that, they're going to last a six hour car ride in. So they could probably do a deal together. Because it is a team sport. It's not fun solo you're going to make more mistakes and you need a brain trust.

Everybody calls it a mastermind. I'm more like, it's a brain trust. Like you can bounce ideas off each other and approach it. But yeah, the community and the team approaches where it's at. It makes it fun. And you have it on both sides of the world, JV or syndication. Yeah, you need both. You need the team.

[00:26:38] Tim Little: Yeah, and Jen, you brought up an important legal point. I think sometimes people get involved in JVs and they think they're going to be passive. But from a legal perspective, like you said, every person that's in that joint venture has to have an active role. They better be doing something and there, there better be some way.

To, quantify or to capture that they're doing something in 

that. 

[00:27:03] Jen: Absolutely. Yeah. And that 

[00:27:05] Stacy Conkey: They should be and stay informed, especially for anybody who's listening. And you're like, yeah, I can get involved in a deal. I'll just put some money into it. That might be what your primary that might be what your primary role was, but you want to be informed because the more that you can learn, the better questions you can ask the better investor you're going to be overall.

And you need, and everyone needs to have some kind of. Active, even if it's doing the minutes or being responsible for the tax return and getting taxes done or talking to the property manager there's lots of, smaller roles, but you want to stay informed and everybody on a JV needs to have the voting rights to make sure that the deal is being run the way that everybody in the deal intended for it to.

[00:27:42] Tim Little: Yeah. And so when you are coaching on these JV deals. What is usually the exit plan is are you guys, usually teaching I don't know, a 10 year old adding value throughout that period and maybe a refinance somewhere along the way so that they could pull cash out and buy another property.

What does that look like? 

[00:28:03] Jen: Yeah, that's basically it right now. I wouldn't do it beyond. I wouldn't do less than 5, ideally 7 to 10, given interest rates and economic factors but, we really just, we encourage them to determine that amongst themselves, when they're coming up with their operating agreement and they're determining how things are structured and what they're going to do.

And as they're underwriting the deal, they have to have that exit strategy clear. Before they even go and move forward with it. So it's if you're going to hold it for five years to 10 years, what if you decide at seven years that you want to sell it, what does that look like amongst the team, how are you going to vote on that and how will you decide that if it's outside the scope of what you originally agreed to, so instead.

Put it in there that's what you're agreeing to that, ideally we want to hold it for seven years, but we're going to adjust and see what's going on with the interest rates or what's going on. Maybe we'll hold it for 10 and then what would that look like? So we do, we encourage them to it's not a, where we blanket it, we show them how to think and how to operate as a team because it's deal by deal.

It might change. Yeah, and there when people's 

[00:29:03] Stacy Conkey: goals are different to like within part of it is because we've been operating the academy for going on four years last three and a half years. Everybody's different. Some people are like, I have no interest in don't bring me a three year deal or a five year deal I if it's less than 10.

I don't want to talk about it and really I would like us to just keep it forever so there's some people that are. That's their goal. Like when we bought our motel with our partner, we're just keeping that forever. It's just going to be in the family. But there's other people like Marietta, one of our students who like, she, this, she's all about the value add and raise the value and then sell it.

She's an apartment flipper. Yeah. She's an apartment flipper. Like on her first seven unit deal, she ended up. Making 350, 000 in seven months. She just, she hit the timing of the market like so perfectly. And she was, after that she was hooked. So everything she does. So when she talks to partners, it's always about, I'm always looking for big value add deals where we can make a lot of money and in as short a period of time as possible.

So we really have just a wide range. Jen and I feel like we can best serve like the investing community and our students by teaching them. Yeah. How to think. And we also, we obviously teach them all of we are extremely prescriptive, like ABC, the EFG, but depending on what your goals are and what you're trying to accomplish, it's a different set of 

[00:30:22] Jen: ABCs to go through.

Here's the boundary. This is the ABC like tertiary plans that you should do. And. Coach ' em through that. 

[00:30:31] Tim Little: Yeah. That creative problem solving, because like you said every property may be different, but they have to be flexible enough to adjust to current situation. The rates change, whatever Absolutely they need, take that into account so they can maximize value on their investment.

Alright, so on the, the coaching aspect, I imagine you guys have had a lot of students. What would you say is the key. To success among your students which students or what are the attributes that they have or the things that they do the ones that are successful versus the ones that maybe aren't as successful.

[00:31:06] Jen: I would have to say that it has to do with mindset. So when it comes to our academy, we are heavily geared towards mindset. I'm a master practitioner of NLP and hypnotherapy. And I bring all of them like we have a mindset course, we do all things mindset and the very first thing that we make sure that they do is do they have the right motivation.

And what I mean by that is they have their external goal that they're chasing to but do they have their compelling reasons why they must do the work to hit those goals, and also are their expectations aligned if they have the wrong expectations, like if they expect to just get a hundred unit right away, then they're going to be sadly mistaken.

But if they have the right expectation that there's going to be a glass ceiling at, on every deal for my first deal, I'm going to have to just break through each glass ceiling. And that's the mental perseverance that they have to put forward. You know what? My first big win is going to be when I pick a market that works.

My second big win is going to be when I finally put in an offer. My third big wins when I finally finished due diligence and my fourth big wins when I close. A lot of people when they first join in the students that just go for all I got to do. I'm not celebrating until I close, right? I always try to course correct them back to, you know what, let's talk about what you've gained.

They're focused on the gap. I haven't closed. I haven't closed. I haven't closed. I'm like, it's been 45 days. What have you actually accomplished? And let's look at the gain versus that gap. So it gets them back in the right mindset of, you know what, there's going to be hurdles along the way.

And every little hurdle that I conquer is a hurdle that won't be so hard next time, because I've already been through that. I've experienced it and I probably won't give up because now I've got the reps, and the other thing is like a lot of them that come in, if they don't know how to manage their time properly.

So I do a lot to teach them about time blocking. First of all, we plan. Everything in 90 day increments. It's like a 90 day year for us. We sit down and we plan out every 90 days, four times a year. And within that 90 day time frame, you've got your monthly goals and then weekly goals. And there's a way to actually go about planning that every week and then doing the work and celebrating when they're 90 percent to a goal versus.

Because if you celebrate it 90 percent to the goal and then plan the next goal, you'll have momentum. But a lot of them will just be like, I'm just going to sprint all the way to the finish line to close. And as soon as I do, I'm going to pull the pole out of my butt and I'm going to fall on the ground.

And I'm just like, Oh my God, I did it. But then 30 days goes by and they've stopped making any type of momentum to continue to go forward. And then things start to become hard and the sky is gloomy. And now they're in the middle of a rehab and all they want to do is go get their next doors.

But. If they approach it from the mindset of this is what I can expect and this is exactly what I'm going to do, they get they're very successful. And a lot of them have that are successful. They might have had a limiting belief in the beginning. One of our most successful students is a couple, both of them with limiting beliefs about money and raising it.

And when they first started, they were so upset because for four months, they didn't get into a deal. And then when they finally got there the funding ended up pulling out the rug from under them and they were distraught they now have a 96 unit and they have so many doors, so much success, they've gone all the way through their first syndication and done all of those things.

Because I had to get that limiting belief popped out of him like he believed he came from a poor family and could not ask and was not worth anybody else's money and would not be responsible enough to be a good steward of their money and give them the return he thought that he would fail. And and because he believed that's what he was achieving.

So there's a lot of mindset work that goes into it when they're when the students that are open. To releasing or, first of all, exploring what might be limiting them in their head and then being open to releasing that through the work and then taking action so that we can recondition their mind into their new identity.

We do a lot of identity work. In fact, to the point where we do crazy stuff at our events four times a year. I got people that I walk them through what's your extraordinary life looked like. Why do you even want that? What are your compelling reasons? What's something that you think could never happen for and draw it, draw that whole life.

They draw it and then I get them either on their get on the stage and with me one on one while everyone is watching and they either break a board or they break an arrow with their throat to because if you can break a 40 pound arrow, that'll kill a grizzly bear with your throat. You can do anything right?

And so that in that moment, they're like, Whoa. And everything shifts for them. And those that don't do the mindset work, they stay stuck. They continue to have that friction and that unnecessary suffering. But those that are open to just really doing the work and changing the way they see the world or believe in themselves or believe in others, man, they take off.

That's our biggest, I don't know if I, if there's anything else, but what I see from, as the mindset person, and we even have mindset coaches that we've put through education so that they can come into the academy and help me because as the academy grows, I realize I can't be the only one doing mindset work,

So now we have a army of mindset coaches. We also have a, an army of coaches that do our work. Some of them we've been doing deals with them for 15 years. So as the academy grows, we have our support network of mindset. And then the actual logistics and implementation of multifamily investing. And because we have those two, it differentiates us.

And those students that do both, they're the ones that are the most successful head over 

[00:36:16] Tim Little: heels. Yeah, and so what I'm hearing are basically, mindset is the probably the biggest one, but also time management and focus, and I think, they're intuitive we're like, Yeah obviously, you need those things to be successful at pretty much anything.

But when you're working at that corporate job, or wherever you are, there's a structure in place that kind of forces you into a groove, so that you don't have to actively do almost any of those things. Yeah. You just do what you're told or what needs to be done. And so I think that's where really the challenge of entrepreneurialism come in, at least in my experience, and it sounds like from what you're telling me from your students, is creating that own structure for yourself and get, getting in the right mindset for yourself and forcing focus on yourself is a lot easier said than done.

Absolutely. It takes conditioning. Yep. All right. Hey, this has been some awesome conversation, but we do need to move into the turbo round. All right. So I'm going to ask you three questions that I ask every guest that I have on my show. And I just asked for a quick, honest answer. You ready for the first one?

Sure. All right. What is one red flag every investor should look out for? 

[00:37:33] Jen: Okay. 

[00:37:34] Stacy Conkey: I want to roll with this one. Go ahead. If you are ever dealing with a seller, 

[00:37:38] Jen: We, we do 

[00:37:39] Stacy Conkey: everything through agents and brokers usually. But if you're ever dealing with someone who wants to limit your inspection period or have you not do an inspection period, I would 100%.

No, thank you. There's plenty of other deals for you to find. That's the biggest red flag ever is limited inspection period because you really and truly need to understand what you're buying to be successful. 

[00:38:01] Tim Little: Yeah, no I agree 100%. It's almost like that whole, are they hiding something?

Because if they're trying to stop you and I tell anyone who's inspecting, like apartments, for example, every unit, I don't care if it's A duplex or 150 units, every single unit, cause that those one or two units that, Oh, they just can't get to right now or locked up for some reason.

That's the one that's going to cost you like 20, 000 each to fix that you didn't account for. Agreed. 

[00:38:33] Stacy Conkey: A hundred percent. 

[00:38:35] Tim Little: All right. Second question. What is a myth about this business that you would like to set straight? 

[00:38:40] Jen: I would have to say it's the, that you have to do syndication. I would just, I would say that if you have to, you can, you don't have to play big first, you should stair step. And that door count is not the end all be all it's really like cashflow. How much is it cashflow? What's your return? What does that look like? So I would have to say that you don't have to go straight into syndication. You have to raise money for both anyways. Start small and stair step it up.

[00:39:03] Tim Little: Yep, totally agree. All right. Finally, what does success look like to you?

[00:39:11] Stacy Conkey: We've been doing this for a long time. And, in the beginning for me, Especially coming from corporate America and always wanted to climb climb achieve money was definitely the measuring stick 20 years in when the money isn't as relevant to every day in the beginning.

It totally is because you're trying to replace your income to get out of your job and stuff. But later when to build a substantial portfolio. You start to realize that money isn't the only thing. And one of the things that Jen and I really created in our own, for our own business, and also what we teach our students, and we try to teach really everyone, is it's not just about financial freedom.

Success for us is you've achieved financial freedom, time freedom, and location freedom. For us, it doesn't matter where we are in the world. We can, as long as we have an internet connection, we can do business. From anywhere and we have so we've been able to take, extended vacations or, we have four kids take our kids somewhere and go somewhere for three weeks or a month and it doesn't matter.

Our real estate doesn't stop as a result. We, and we can work whenever we want because it's, passive income or passive real estate is a little bit of a misnomer sometimes because you still need to be checking with your property managers, reviewing your reports, dealing with your contractors, things like that.

But it's a lot different than when you're, grinding at a job. So there's things you need to do, but The timing of it is very flexible. So we've built a life around that. We have time freedom. We have financial freedom. That was the first thing we were going for. But we also have location freedom, because the one thing that I find a lot of people when they're getting started and they've done most of the people that come to us have done.

Some kind of real estate deal, like a single family, not everyone, but a lot of people, but they've done it in their home market where they live. And now they're a landlord and they're realizing, Oh my gosh, this is a lot of work. And I can't, especially if they start building a portfolio at home, they can't leave.

You can't go on a cruise for a month. You can't go to Europe for six weeks. You can't go on a two month RV trip around the country. Like we just did this summer with our kids. Two months is too long, by the way, but for sanity's sake but that's really it traps people in and you realize financial freedom just isn't the end.

I'll be also, I think for success for us is it's really having the the total picture, time, location, and financial freedom. 

[00:41:24] Jen: I would like to add that, that for me it's that it is that. But it's also because it's not about money anymore. For me, I'm just at an age in life, like I turned 49 in three days.

And for me it's about impact. So being able to help others, serve others, bring them up, but help them create the wealth and become wealthier together. And then actually give back and do something in the world to help other people that are facing adversity. So for me it's all of that. It's the location, freedom, time, freedom, financial freedom.

And because of those three things, being able to then give back in meaningful ways, that to me is success. That and being better than I was yesterday, just against myself, like always being better tomorrow or today than I was yesterday. 

[00:42:09] Tim Little: Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. And I think a lot of people, it just it turns into this phased approach to success, or goals, right?

A lot of people seek out that financial freedom so that they can get to that place, like you were talking about mindset wise, where they're like, okay, now I can focus on this because the essentials are taken care of. And I think most people want to get to that place first, and then they start looking at that time freedom.

And then also, like you talked about, Jen, that whole like giving back piece. Some people, they feel like they don't have the time or money to do that when they're in a, where they are now. But maybe once they get to a certain point, they can focus more on that. So it's almost this different phases of success.

But I think they're all of those are really important. All right. Hey guys, this has been awesome. I really appreciate all your insights, especially when it comes to, JV deals and how those can be such a valuable stepping stone for people moving into multifamily and then the education piece too, and also the mindset, because I think people discount how important It is because I believe you're right.

If you aren't in the right mindset, then you'll never get that first deal done. And if you never get the first deal done, then you go nowhere. So Tell people how they can get ahold of you and if you have anything else that you would like to share with them. Oh, sure. The first thing that 

[00:43:33] Jen: I wanted to say is that speaking of Mindset and the playbook for anybody that's trying to get into it, we have, we did write a book.

Multifamily Freedom Hacking it's your playbook to unlock long term cash flow from rental properties, little plug there. The first six chapters are about Mindset and there's, it's not just a book. This book is actionable and there are questions in there. You fill it out. It is, it's 200 and something pages of just.

Amazingness. So you can get them on Amazon. If you just search it in Amazon, you can get it. And then I think the best place to find us and hang out with us is that on Facebook, we have a group. We have a Facebook group. That's got probably close to 27, 000 members in it. Active investors. Also anybody in the service of multifamilies.

And then you've got lenders, brokers, like all kinds of people in there. You can come there. It's literally apartment investing with Jen and Stacy. If you go and search for that. We'll be in there and then just request to join. And if you add your email to it, then you'll get I think weekly training updates from us, or you can opt into our weekly trainings cause we do them on Fridays. All right, 

[00:44:33] Tim Little: great. We'll definitely have all that information in the show notes. We'll make sure we get the link to the book in there as well as the Facebook group. I appreciate you guys coming on and I really look forward to continuing to see you guys do big things on your journey to multifamily millions.

Thanks. Thank you, Tim.