For today’s episode, we are going to be talking about our three uniques. The three things that make Invictus Capital, and what we do are unique.
We will be going over why you have to understand what makes you unique. Why should people do business with you? Hopefully, this gives you a little bit of insight into how we think about that.
The audible version Passive Investing Made Simple: How to Create Wealth and Passive Income through Apartment Syndications coming soon!
[00:01 – 15:39] Bad Investing Advice: Read An Article And Then Go Buy The Thing
[15:40 – 21:23] Unique #1: We Are Local
[21:24 – 28:07] Unique #2: We Are Vertically Integrated
[28:08 – 50:01} Unique #3: We Are Impact Driven
[50:02 – 52:26] Closing With Book Recommendation
The Scarlet Lay of Wall Street
“What’s my outcome? I would sit and reflect and say, What is it that I’m doing right now? Why am I doing this thing? What am I? What am I trying to get out of it?“ – Anthony Vicino
“So before they ever go to market, we’ve probably already seen them. And so that’s a very powerful advantage.” – Anthony Vicino
“It wasn’t until I got really focused on psychology that I actually got good at it. And I think that’s what most people miss is they think that they need to figure out the technical aspect of it.” – Dan Krueger
“If you’re an out-of-state investor, it’s really tough to pick up on those little, those little nuances of those neighborhoods, those dynamics and just kind of knowing that” – Dan Krueger
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The 3 Uniques That Make Us Truly Unique
Anthony Vicino: [00:00:16] the Simple to podcasts. It’s all about taking the complexity out of real estate investments like you and taking action today. I’m your host, Anthony Finger Guns, CEO of America’s Capital, joined as always by Dan. I brought finger knives to a gunfight.
Dan Krueger: [00:00:32] Kruger, these finger dives, they’re now.
Anthony Vicino: [00:00:35] I guess. I don’t know. This is already off to a strange, peculiar start. As I have created, I’ve invented finger knives.
Dan Krueger: [00:00:44] Yeah. Scissors. What scissors? Edward Scissorhands?
Anthony Vicino: [00:00:47] Finger scissors. Yeah. For our listeners that only know of us as a podcast, they don’t actually watch the video on YouTube every week, which if you guys didn’t know, you should go subscribe to the YouTube channel. Multifamily investing is made simple. You can consume all these podcast episodes in video form, so you get to see all the physical humor that we do.
Dan Krueger: [00:01:07] Well, I think the main thing is we spent a lot of money on this hanging bookshelf. I mean, this is not this is like twenty-nine dollars a target.
Anthony Vicino: [00:01:14] So if you’re listening to the podcast, you’ve probably never seen this bookshelf behind us. Now you need to go to YouTube and Google. The multifamily investing made a simple podcast so that you can see this bookshelf.
Dan Krueger: [00:01:28] I mean, in all seriousness, there were a lot of conversations around that bookshelf. This is there’s a lot of thought put into this thing, which you’d never think about to set.
Anthony Vicino: [00:01:37] Yeah. And maybe we maybe went overboard on an audio-only program. But all of that put aside, just know that there are other resources out there for consuming this material. If your ears are not enough, get your eyes, some candy. Now let’s talk. Stock, real estate. Let’s talk investing. Let’s talk entrepreneurship. That’s what we’re here for. Not interior decorating. Not shelving. Right?
Dan Krueger: [00:02:00] I mean, we’ll talk show after the show because I’ve got a lot of input on that.
Anthony Vicino: [00:02:05] All right. We will shelve that for now.
Dan Krueger: [00:02:09] You and your dad jokes
Anthony Vicino: [00:02:10] Your finger guns. Anyways, let’s talk about our bad investing advice for this week. But before we do, that is just planting the seed just so, you know, bad investing advice. It’s incoming, but today we are going to be talking about our three uniques the three things that make Invictus Capital, and what we do unique. Now, this is not just going to be a sales pitch. The reason that we want to do this, this episode is just to give you guys a little bit more insight into how we think about our company. And if you’re an active investor out there that wants to, you know, do what we do, then these are things that you need to be thinking about as well. Because in a crowded marketplace and good golly, Miss Molly Syndications multifamily investing, is a crowded marketplace with a lot of people. You have to understand what makes you unique. Why should people do business with you? Hopefully, this gives you a little bit of insight into how we think about that.
Dan Krueger: [00:02:59] Mm-hmm. Yeah, it’s really important. You guys have heard us talking about Mr. Alex or Mosi a lot on the show, and he’s he made this comment in either a book, podcast, YouTube video, or something. But he was making the point that you need to find some sort of niche, something that makes you special in what you do because if you don’t, you’re effectively going to be a commodity in the marketplace and people are just going to price shop you. And unless you are the cheapest, you know, the Walmart of your industry, then you’re not going to have much business. So you’ve got to find something that makes you unique, something that sets you apart so that people know what kind of unique value you can provide. And that’s the justification for working with you. So no matter what you’re in, whether it’s real estate or you run a gym or a hardware store or something like, you know, figure out something that sets you apart from the other gyms or other hardware stores, the other syndicators out there.
Anthony Vicino: [00:03:52] At the end of the day, I think when it comes to syndications, in particular, we have a tendency to look at the returns and say, Oh, this is a 16 percent IRR. This guy over here is giving an 18 percent, so I’ll go with that 18 percent, like that’s a really boiled down stupid way of deciding between two deals, which we’ve talked about at length in another podcast episode called How Not to compare two deals, like just looking at the numbers, but it is a human tendency just to look and say like, Well, this one is cheaper or this one’s a better return, and therefore I’ll go with that. The three uniques that we’re going to talk about today are differentiating factors that people can look at and say, You know what? That 16 percent return actually is better to me because it’s with this group who stands for these three things, and they’re unique. In this way. I’m getting this unique value and I want to do business with them. So I think it’s going to be really interesting to kind of share our thought process. Our three uniques. But before we do that, hmm. Let me go back. Not yet. Time to get into some bad investment advice and for once. Dear listener, I get to give bad advice.
Dan Krueger: [00:04:51] Oh man, it’s me. Haha. Here we go.
Anthony Vicino: [00:04:56] This one is actually really close to me because I’ve been in. Dan has as well. In the last six to seven-eight months. We’ve been learning more about crypto and investing in crypto, and I found myself the other day in my bad investing advice. Is this. Read an article on the hot thing and then immediately go buy that thing. Read an article and then go by the thing
Dan Krueger: [00:05:24] That’s not what you should do.
Anthony Vicino: [00:05:26] That’s not. I stopped. I literally stopped myself as I was pushing like the buy button, and I stopped and I said, Wait, why am I doing this to question it? Yeah. Like, why
Dan Krueger: [00:05:38] Not give me your money? I don’t. You don’t need
Anthony Vicino: [00:05:39] To spend my money. I’m not going to get the returns of that good, good Dogecoin. But what happened? And it was really interesting because sometimes investing, we get into these emotional loops or sometimes just unconscious loops where we’re doing a thing without really stopping to say, like, what’s the logic behind why I’m doing this? And if you can’t, if you come to the other side of that, that question with an answer that you’re not proud of, then don’t do the thing. And for me, what it was as I was scrolling through my phone and I came across an article and they were like, this new thing, blah blah blah blah blah. And it was something that I already own a piece of. And so it was confirming what I had already thought about the thing, and I was like, Oh yeah, I totally agree with this, of course. And so I immediately opened up my app and I was like, Buy more. And then I stopped and I was like, Wait, why am I doing this? All they did was confirm. What I already thought I knew about this thing. I already have a position in it. Why am I now going and doing this when I didn’t intend at the start of the day to go and put more money into this thing, right? So that’s my bad advice.
Dan Krueger: [00:06:41] That was really good advice. Your unpacking of that is really good advice. I think it’s just so much so important. This kind of gets missed so much with what we’re talking about on the show all the time, which is real estate, which is a very slow-moving process. And there’s not a lot of emotion in something where the transaction takes months. Right. But with any other publicly traded thing, whether it’s crypto stocks, futures, forex, whatever it is, options, whatever your thing is, that stuff, you have the ability to just act on immediately. And I’ve been really into this for a long time, which I’ve mentioned a little bit here and there, but it’s a real estate show, so I don’t talk much about it. But I’ve spent, you know, 10 years playing around in the financial markets, and I’ve been doing it consistently for that entire time. And it wasn’t until I got really focused on psychology that I actually got good at it. And I think that’s what most people miss is they think that they need to figure out the technical aspect of it. They need to find the patterns, they need to figure out a strategy. They need this, that or the other. But the reason most people fail at it is that they forget their brains. They don’t address the mental side of it. And it’s all a mental game that’s 90 percent of it. Like, I can boil down my trading strategy to four steps. There are four things four boxes I need to check to execute a trade. It’s incredibly simple, but the hard part is controlling. Your lizard brain, right, because when emotions pop in, you start to do things you just started, you know, transacting because you saw something that gave you an emotional response. And it’s subconscious, right? And you caught it because you’re a smart guy. Most people don’t catch that and they think that that’s what investing is. That’s what trading is. It’s like, No, no, no, no. Make it very simple. It should be very boring. Keep the emotion out.
Anthony Vicino: [00:08:25] It’s really, really tough. You said something there, and I really appreciate it. You said I’m a really smart guy, so I just want to end the episode there. Thank you very much for coming and we’ll see you next week. But it’s actually I don’t think it’s about my about intelligence.
Dan Krueger: [00:08:37] So it’s really dumb people that are really good at this stuff.
Anthony Vicino: [00:08:40] Exactly what it is like many years ago. I get this question all the time is like, what’s your number one habit for success or anything like that’s that gets asked a lot on podcasts. And it was. This is that many years ago, this was like almost a decade ago. I start I started this process where I would program into my phone the question, what’s my outcome? And it would go off at different times throughout the day randomly, and it would stop me in the middle of whatever I’m doing. And it would say, what’s my outcome? And I would sit and reflect and say, What is it that I’m doing right now? Why am I doing this thing? What am I? What am I trying to get out of it? And it would. It was a pattern interrupt that would stop me sometimes from scrolling Facebook. I’d catch myself and be like, Oh my God, why am I doing this? And sometimes it would catch me in the middle of like, you’re in a conversation with a friend. I’m like, What is my outcome? What am I trying to accomplish here? Am I trying to go deeper into this relationship? Ok, I need to focus and get the present right. And so what I actually did over many years was build a muscle of stopping in the middle of things and saying, What’s my outcome? And that’s what saved me at that moment was I stopped right as I was about to do it and I said, What’s my outcome? And I reflected, I was like, oh, I’m not in control of it. This is not what I intended. This is not why I’m here.
Dan Krueger: [00:09:52] Yeah, that’s FOMO right there. I did something actually very similar on my end. Over the past, you know, pretty much all of last year, and this was part of me buttoning up my training techniques. I have about eight million alarms in my phone that are labeled mental state. And what that does is very similar to yours. But instead of asking myself, you know, what’s my outcome, an alarm would go off and would say the mental state, and I would stop and I would write down how I’m feeling, what I’m thinking about. If I’m anxious, if I’m bored, if I’m angry, if I’m feeling greedy, if I’m feeling sad, and it would just make notes on that. And if I uncovered anything that was anything less than completely neutral, right? That’s a signal that you need to reset. Or at least this was somebody who was sitting there trading actively in the day. So this isn’t something that most people need to do for themselves. But it’s still a good practice to force yourself to stop and think about why you’re doing something. You know, whether you’re trading with your investing or you’re just in a relationship with somebody and you want to make sure that it goes well, right? Make sure that you kind of stop and ask yourself why you’re doing things the way you’re doing them. Is it because of an emotional thing, or is it because of logic? And if it’s because of emotion, maybe it’s not the right thing to be doing.
Anthony Vicino: [00:11:05] This is all about making the unconscious conscious. And I was listening to something the other day. In this, there are four paradigms of skill acquisition and growth. There’s when at the very lowest level, at the very beginning, you’re unconsciously incompetent, which means you suck and you don’t even know it. We know many people like that.
Dan Krueger: [00:11:26] I’ve heard a variation of this before, and it’s great.
Anthony Vicino: [00:11:28] And the next step is now you’re consciously incompetent, which
Dan Krueger: [00:11:31] You realize how much you suck.
Anthony Vicino: [00:11:33] You realize how much you suck. Next from there is your conscious competence, which means when you’re conscious of what you’re doing, you’re you can be good at that thing. And in the highest level is to be unconsciously competent, which means you’re just it comes so naturally that you don’t even have to think about it anymore. And I don’t know what exactly this has to do with investing or real estate, but I do know that if you can think about where you are on that paradigm of your investing skills or your mindset like it’s not just going to make you a better investor, it’s going to make you a better person because I think so much of what makes life rich and enjoyable and that pursuit of like a fulfilling life is on the other side of making the unconscious conscious.
Dan Krueger: [00:12:19] Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think I could fit it into real estate. I mean, it’s really similar to, you know, the act of trading stuff I’ve done where at a certain point it becomes quite simple and it appears very easy to other people, right? Right now, I can just spend ten minutes in the morning getting acquainted with things. I know what I’m looking for and I just have my screen up and when I see something, execute it and I’m done, it takes a couple of minutes out of my day. It’s nothing but early on, it’s got to be like a full-time job of consciously engaging in this stuff so early on. Whether it’s real estate or whatever, you’ve got to spend a lot of time going through all the steps and the motions and make sure that you’re doing things the proper way in a logical, well-thought-out way. And then at some point, you can kind of trust your gut, but it takes a while to get there early on. If you trust your gut, you’re going to do the wrong thing, but it is until you become consciously competent or I’m sorry or unconsciously competent that effectively you can start to trust your gut because you’ve ingrained these really good habits where they’re kind of like Autopilot now, like, it’s like brushing your teeth, doing the right thing with trading or investing in real estate. You’ve got to get to that point where you don’t have to think about how to move the brush in your mouth, but. With investing right, there’s a lot of things that you need to early on really actively think about, but later in life, you just trust your gut. And so you see some of these old guys where they’ve been, you know, investing and doing their thing for years, and it appears so easy when you’re watching them. But that’s because they’ve turned everything into a habit and they don’t even think
Anthony Vicino: [00:13:42] About it anymore. Here’s a cool little pro tip if you want to learn something as you were talking about the brushing of the teeth, this is totally tangential. But so far this episode has been kind of tangential. So that’s OK. We’re going to keep running with it. We have yet to get to the point but to get to the point, that’s OK. Wait, I think we’ve given some bad and some bad good investing advice or some good bad investing advice. If you want to learn something, an interesting technique is to if you are reading something or you’re trying to like, do mental math or something like that, trying to acquire a new mental skill is to couple it with an unfamiliar, familiar habit. So what I mean by that is like brushing your teeth, but doing it with your left hand or your non-dominant hand, let’s say so that you’re like, Have you ever tried to brush? Sounds like a non-dominant hand.
Dan Krueger: [00:14:22] Sounds like a disaster.
Anthony Vicino: [00:14:24] That’s really difficult. It’s really awkward. But if you combine something that you’re consciously competent at which is brushing your teeth, but something that you’re unfamiliar with, which is your non-dominant hand while simultaneously trying to learn like you’re activating so many neuro neuronal pathways that actually makes skill acquisition of the other thing that you’re trying to do is that’s like algebra.
Dan Krueger: [00:14:43] So much struggling to brush your teeth while studying a new topic makes you learn that new topic is better because you’re really.
Anthony Vicino: [00:14:51] Yeah, yeah. So what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to get your full body involved like all-new, all your different modalities. And so like your physical kinesthetic sense along with like your mental cognitive. So if you can couple these things together, but if you’re just doing something that you can just do naturally like, I’m really good at walking and chewing bubble gum, it’s kind of my thing like, I’m not going to, it’s not going to help me learn. Now, if I try to do backflips while chewing bubble gum, well, calculus, here we come. I don’t know. Anyway, this was very interesting. Let’s get to the meat and the potatoes of this today’s episode, which again isn’t specifically about multifamily investing, though we’re going to tie it into what we do with real estate. So what are the three uniques, the things that allow us to compete in the marketplace, not just on price, not as a commodity, but as a unique golden goose?
Dan Krueger: [00:15:40] Well, we brush our teeth with our left hands, even though we’re right-handed. That’s pretty unique. No. But really, should we name them off one at one, one at a time? Or do you want to just give them all three all at once?
Anthony Vicino: [00:15:50] Let’s give one at a time. That way, people won’t just take our three uniques without an explanation.
Dan Krueger: [00:15:57] Turn off absolutely out
Anthony Vicino: [00:15:58] Like, I need you guys to stick with us through this. Yeah, trust me, it’s going to be worthwhile.
Dan Krueger: [00:16:03] So number one is
Anthony Vicino: [00:16:06] We’re local,
Dan Krueger: [00:16:08] We’re local, we are local, we are in the market that we invest in physically live here, work here. I mean, that’s unique. I think at least in our area because we’re some of the only we know a ton of investors where we live here. But I can only think of one or two guys out of all the guys that we know here, who are real estate investors who actually invest in this market and even those guys are still pretty active in other markets, too.
Anthony Vicino: [00:16:34] It’s so simple. We’re local as a unique like you would think, like, why is that all that special? But if you think about it as we increase in the last 15 years, I would say like to do business with local businesses. Why? Because they’re familiar. They are right down the street. We have a connection with them. That’s great and all. But for us, it it’s not just about the community which we’re going to talk about in one of our other uniques. It’s about the fact that we know this market really, really well. And as a result, we’re able to express our unique advantage in ways that if you weren’t local, you couldn’t do. Now, why is that such a big deal in this space, like Dan said? We know very few operators in the twin cities who invest and operate in the backyard, and this is the case, I’d say all across the country. It’s like a lot of people who live in New York or San Francisco or like all these other cities, they investing in Austin and Tennessee and like a non-local remote. And there’s nothing wrong with that, that there’s nothing wrong with them not saying like, we have the right answer and they have the wrong answer. All I’m saying is that our uniqueness is that we stay where we are.
Dan Krueger: [00:17:45] Yeah, I think one good example of this is, I think, you know, everyone knows, you know, in the town that you live in, there are certain spots where just it might be a great neighborhood, but there’s a certain building or a certain block where no matter what, everything fails. And so it might be a restaurant that changes over every two years like clockwork. And those little nuances, those little block by block or even building by building nuances are really tough to know about. If you don’t have some really substantial boots on the ground presence, right, whether it’s you living there as we do in our area or it’s a partner, if you’re an out-of-state investor, it’s really tough to pick up on those little, those little nuances of those neighborhoods, those dynamics and just kind of knowing that, OK, this block, even though it’s, you know, half a mile or a quarter mile from this block is substantially different. So those little nuances, I think, are a big deal in being local. That’s one of the many reasons that it’s a powerful tool for us is that we just know the market really, really well. I mean, personally, I was born here. I’ve spent my entire life here, and so I know this area really, really well. And there’s a bunch of other reasons why being local is important as well, which for me and off to you for,
Anthony Vicino: [00:18:59] That’s all I got.
Dan Krueger: [00:19:00] That’s it. I got more for me.
Anthony Vicino: [00:19:03] You know, that’s one aspect is de-risking the investment thesis, which is we know the market really, really well. And then the other part of it was community. I think it’s really cool to be able to go over and see our assets at any given point to go physically, touch it, to go and see the families that we serve, which ties into our second unique, which is that we’re vertically integrated. So no one is we’re local. Number two is we’re vertically integrated
Dan Krueger: [00:19:28] And just real quick before we finish up on the local thing. Another piece from an investor’s perspective, I think, is worth noting a local investor is going to be able to get to a good deal a lot quicker than an out-of-state investor. So our ability to form relationships with the owners and brokers in this area and really cultivate those and keep those strong is is, you know, head and shoulders above every other operator, no matter how big they are, who might be coming in from out of state, you can get there faster. We’ve got a better relationship with all these guys and we can execute quickly. We don’t have to hop on a plane and go through all this rigmarole to get to a deal. Yeah.
Anthony Vicino: [00:20:05] And I guess staying on that point because that is a really good one, is that a lot of the deals that we do are with local old guard investors. You guys know this about us. It part of what makes us again unique is and I’d say I tell this to people all the time when they’re trying like new investors that I work with on my coaching, they say, like, where should I be investing? Should I invest in my backyard or remotely? And I’m like, Here’s the thing about me in us, investing in our backyard is like you. It’s our home-field advantage. You can’t compete with us here. We know where all the potholes are, and we know who is doing what and where to get the deals from. So before they ever go to market, we’ve probably already seen them. And so that’s a very powerful advantage. So when you’re looking at just the metrics on a performa in one group says 16 percent, the other says 17 percent. The 16 percent might be better because they have a broader picture of all the risk profiles that are associated with that particular market, whereas the only one? Maybe not. And that is again, just another reason why you don’t want to use simple numbers on a spreadsheet to make an investment decision, especially in this space where numbers don’t lie. But I can make them say whatever I want. That’s I’m going to tattoo that on my year.
Dan Krueger: [00:21:17] So it sounds like a painful spot to get a tattoo.
Anthony Vicino: [00:21:20] Have fun. It’s important to remember.
Dan Krueger: [00:21:23] No one’s going to see it.
Anthony Vicino: [00:21:24] Ok, so we already alluded to our second unique or we’re local and we’re vertically integrated. The vertical integration for a lot of people, they don’t know what that means. They’re like a vertical integration.
Dan Krueger: [00:21:35] It sounds fancy. It does
Anthony Vicino: [00:21:36] Sound fancy. It just means we’re controlling freaks in that as much as possible. We want to control as many different aspects of the machine as possible. So that means instead of outsourcing the third party management, we have staff in-house that handles leasing and property management. Maintenance repairs those types of things. So at the end of the day, we’re are the ones that are boots on the ground working with residents, and that’s very different than a lot of other operators in the space. Again, I am not suggesting one way is better or worse than the other or right or wrong. It’s not that it’s just what makes us unique is that we control that part of the machine. And honestly, it’s the difference between a million-dollar idea and a million dollars is one million dollars of execution. And so for us, that is the most important part of the machine is actually managing the assets. So to be able to control that. Makes us sleep better at night, knowing that at least we’re in more control, delivering expected returns to investors.
Dan Krueger: [00:22:36] Yeah, we don’t really like handing off responsibility to other people, to be perfectly honest. We trust ourselves more than a lot of other people. And so really, we just don’t trust our assets or our investor’s capital with a third party group that may or may not have, you know, interests align with ours. Not to say the third-party management is going to be bad. However, when the management piece is in-house with the operator, there’s zero conflict of interest there. You don’t have to worry about a property manager that you’re getting through a third-party company, potentially taking a resident lead to another property that you don’t own, right? They are obligated to help out all of their customers so there could be a potential conflict of interest. But really the biggest one is the cost. If you can do it in-house, it’s going to cost you significantly less, which means that we can operate the same deal as another group that has third-party management at a lower cost, which means it’ll look better for us. It’ll look better for our investors. But I think the biggest thing is just really controlling that resonant experience so that we can take responsibility for that, which is going to tie into our to our next unique. But we really want to make sure that we control the resident experience. So it’s as good as it can be, and that’ll benefit everybody, the residents and the investors.
Anthony Vicino: [00:24:03] I want to suggest a new phrase that I just came up with right now. It is a nexus of potentially catastrophic failure. Now let me unwind this. Let me unpack this a little bit because I can see you guys in podcast land being like, it doesn’t sound good. Nexus of potentially catastrophic failure in manufacturing. When we started building that business, we said, we’re going to try and control as many different aspects of this as possible. We’re going to cut out the middleman suppliers and everything. And it was very, very hard in the early days. And it made growth very, very slow and cumbersome. But in twenty, you know, what happened is that all the other competitors who are outsourcing and reliance on suppliers and middle people, suddenly the supply chain died overnight and there was the nexus of potentially catastrophic failure, which means they had all their eggs in the baskets of other people and they had no control and those businesses went under. And as a result, they couldn’t get the products that they needed to stay in business. And so what happened? All of their customers came to us and our business in 2020, quadrupled, and we were already very large in the industry at the time. So that was really crazy. Now the reason I want to share this is that let’s say you have a thousand units that sound great and you’re using third-party management.
Anthony Vicino: [00:25:25] And we struggle with this all the time is that we can’t scale as quickly as other people can because we have to bring on people to run the assets. And it’s frustrating. We’d love to grow faster and just bring more assets, more assets, more assets. But we always have to wrestle with how are we going to actually operate these things now if we were outsourcing this to a third-party property management company? We had a thousand units and we just kept throwing another 250 here, 250 there. And just like throwing them on and they were running all these assets. That’s great. But what happens if one day you get a call and it’s like, Hey, we’re going, we’re bankrupt, we’re closing shop, we’re done all the property management for your thousands of units gone just like that, and maybe you have some backups in the area, but how hard is it going to be to get them up and running across all those units? So when I look at this, I say, what’s the nexus of potentially catastrophic failure? And it’s putting your eggs into somebody else’s basket and not knowing what they’re doing with that basket.
Dan Krueger: [00:26:23] Yeah, I mean, that’s it, really. You know, I said it before. We just don’t like handing off that responsibility to other people. And that’s part of it there. Like when we know that we’re taking ownership over this responsibility, we know that we’re going to do it no matter what. We’re going to do everything it takes to make things happen and get things done. I don’t know if I can say that to other people. I don’t know if I can. I’d like to think so. But when it comes down to it, if you know the shit hits the fan, do we swear on this podcast?
Anthony Vicino: [00:26:52] We sure
Dan Krueger: [00:26:53] Do. If the shit hits the fan like, I know I’m going to bust my ass, do whatever it takes to get it done. I don’t know if XYZ Corporation Management Company would do that. I mean, do they care about our properties as much as we do? Probably not. We own them. Here’s the crazy thing
Anthony Vicino: [00:27:09] I’ve we’ve done a number of acquisitions through the years, and one of the interesting things I’ve learned is that you do not know-how, how well a business is being run until you own that thing and you see the books. We bought a mini-company where we looked at it and was like, That is a big competitor. They’re killing it, they’re crushing it, they’re doing awesome. We look at their books. I’m like, Holy crap, they’re days away from. Bankruptcy, you do not know how anybody else’s business is being run until you see their books and you’re not going to get to see the books on a property management company or anybody else. And so all that’s to say are two unique so far or local or vertically integrated, the long-winded answers to like why exactly. But that one’s really close and core to our soul. And number three, and this is probably the most important one. This is really the why that gets us out of bed in the morning. Like we don’t wake up in the morning being like we’re local. And I don’t wake up in the morning, go like we’re vertically integrated. Like, that doesn’t get me going. But this one does.
Dan Krueger: [00:28:05] If I did that, we, my wife would have a lot of questions.
Anthony Vicino: [00:28:08] Liz would look at, you be like, What? What’s wrong with you? She’s going to take Coco and be like, Don’t grow up to be like your daddy. I’m no, no. Number three is we’re impact-driven.
Dan Krueger: [00:28:19] What does that mean?
Anthony Vicino: [00:28:22] I’m glad you asked. So this is something that we’ve been we’ve been wrestling with a lot recently in terms of the verbiage, and so this is subject to change, but this is how we’ve been thinking about it and impact means a lot of things when you get to a certain point in your business and in life. And if you’re looking at investing in real estate, you might be there like chances are, you’re in the upper echelon of humanity if you were to rank all the humans on the planet. If you’re listening to this podcast right now, you’re probably in the upper percentile. You’re doing pretty good and you get to a point in your life when it’s not enough just to make money. It’s not just enough to do well and to provide for your family. It starts to be about what’s the impact that you’re having on the world at large, on the community and your network, your relationships. And for us, real estate is that vehicle that allows us to have an infinite impact. And I’ve talked about this before where everybody, everybody in the world has a relationship with real estate. It could be. I live on the street and I can’t get into that real estate. I’m homeless. That could be. That’s a relationship, right? It could be. I rent. It could be my own. It could be. I invest in or, you know, I’m just going into the here to work like we all have a relationship with real estate. So the opportunity for impact to make a meaningful difference in people’s lives, whether that’s residents that we serve our employees, I get to serve our families that live in these units or it’s our investors. It’s like infinite impact and impact for us is we’re trying to break it down into a fancy pneumonic where each letter stands for something. So it does not just impact, but it’s capital impact. So what am I stand for?
Dan Krueger: [00:30:00] I stand for improving lives. Yeah. As Anthony said, this is big because making money kind of becomes boring once you’ve made enough, like, you know, it’s fun, you can kind of gamify it. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t really get you out of bed in the morning, right? It doesn’t make you excited once you’ve got enough to live on. And like Anthony said, once you can provide for your family and you can live the lifestyle that you want, which for us is not that boozy, know a few vacations and, you know, to eat some food and
Anthony Vicino: [00:30:29] I just need a Bugatti. That’s it.
Dan Krueger: [00:30:31] Yeah, just a couple, Bugatti. A couple of days. Yeah, I mean, at a certain point, like it’s not about making money, it’s about trying to improve the world around you. That’s what really gets us excited. And so the for the eye in impact, we’ve got improved lives now. That’s so kind of high level and vague, so we can kind of unpack what that means for us. But if we are actually improving somebody’s lives, somebody’s life and making and making them better or making them feel better or making them or empowering them, that’s what really gets me going. That’s what gets me excited. You know, money is great. It pays the bills and keeps the lights on. But having an impact on somebody’s life in a positive way is an infinitely better feeling than getting a big, fat cheque. Big Fat cheque is fine, but making someone’s life better, it’s just it transcends that feeling exponentially, I feel like. And so the improving lives like Anthony said, it relates to the residents, it relates to the employees, it relates to our investors. So, you know, on the resident side, if we can give them a better place to live, a safer place to live and a better experience with respect to customer service and maintenance and all that stuff, that’s big, especially in the C plus b minus class that we invest in. Usually, you know, management’s kind of subparts, a lot of mom and pop operators, it’s usually like, you know, people keep the building operational, but they’re not really going above and beyond to provide exponential, exceptional service. To know if we can bump that up and improve the lives of our residents. That’s, you know, a really good place to start for us. And then we’ve got the employees and investors, too, if you want to speak to those.
Anthony Vicino: [00:32:14] Well, I don’t I don’t want to speak to them because you guys, I probably get this like like, I don’t need to explain like how we’re trying to improve the lives of our employees or our investors. But another one I want to point out, which is maybe not so obvious, is you guys listening to this right? You might have no intention of ever investing with us. So we can’t improve your lives financially from that perspective. And that’s OK. Like, I don’t care. That’s not going to I’m not going to lose sleep over that. But if you’re listening to this, hopefully, we’re bringing you some value that’s helping you build better tools to go out there and build a better life. It’s one of the reasons why this book that again if you listen to the podcast, I’m pointing to the shelf behind me. There’s a book called Passive Investing Made Simple Go get it on Amazon. What’s so awful about that book is that it’s allowing us to make an impact at scale, so it’s not just one-to-one conversations is why this podcast is so cool for us is it’s like we get right now. We’re in the earholes of thousands of listeners, and that is amazing. That’s so cool. Like, we can’t serve thousands of investors right now. We can’t serve thousands of families or thousands of employees, but we can serve thousands of you guys. And so at the. Or that gets me out of bed in the morning, like this podcast is a very visceral thing that I get really excited about, so that’s the improved lives part. Mm-hmm.
Dan Krueger: [00:33:30] Yeah, it feels amazing. Yeah.
Anthony Vicino: [00:33:32] Thank you guys for listening, by the way. All of you. I appreciate it. Number two, I’m not number two. I’m of impact is we are mission-focused. What’s that mean, Dan?
Dan Krueger: [00:33:44] Hmm. Mission focused. That’s a good question. What does it mean? Honestly. Have we really flushed this piece out, this one’s a
Anthony Vicino: [00:33:56] A little bit less. I feel like we’re. And here’s the thing, guys. This is all a learning process. It’s all an evolution, so. When I think about mission focus, it’s about setting a target, it’s about having goals. It’s about having objectives, about what it is that we’re trying to build and not just going willy nilly and trying to improve. Like if we wanted to improve lives, we could just run out into the street and give people money. We could do that. We could run out and give people high fives, and that would be a chance for lives. We could go start a widget business. We could do those things that would improve lives. But the mission focus for me is about multifamily investing, like staying in the lane of what it is that we do and how we improve those lives and not getting just sucked into all the myriad ways that we could improve lives or do what we do. But saying, like, what’s the mission? And being very clear about that so that everybody on the team and you know, you guys that are listening to this, our employees like we, we know what we’re driving towards.
Dan Krueger: [00:34:55] Yeah. So our mission that we’ve established for our company is, you know, so we’ve put together a game plan for the next three, five, seven, 10 years, right? And kind of mapped out what our growth is going to look like in the future here. And so we’ve kind of pegged a goal or mission for it in the future to to to be impacting X number of people via our properties, right? So we want to improve the experience of our residents on X number of units, which was like our ten-year goal.
Anthony Vicino: [00:35:28] And it’s going to tell you what that is. Top secret.
Dan Krueger: [00:35:29] Yeah, it’s top secret. And I don’t have it right in front of me. We were just mapping all this out the other day.
Anthony Vicino: [00:35:37] But I don’t want to share it because I’m not a big fan of throwing out big, audacious goals publicly.
Dan Krueger: [00:35:43] It doesn’t. Yeah, it doesn’t really
Anthony Vicino: [00:35:46] Doesn’t matter what you need it, but don’t. But it’s one thing to be like. I want to build an I’m going to be a billionaire and like, you see people on Facebook, I’m like, OK, we’ll get to a million first. Yeah, I don’t know. Go build the thing.
Dan Krueger: [00:35:58] It doesn’t really matter what the number is, but our goal is that, OK, based on the ten-year goal we’ve got, we’re going to have X number of units, and that means that we have the opportunity to positively impact the lives of X number of residents who are coming through those units in the future. And so that’s kind of our mission. And as Anthony said, we want to make sure that’s woven into everything that we do, and so we should be able to stop and ask ourselves at any point, does this align with the mission and the vision of our company? And that’s I think that’s the key takeaway is we want to make sure that’s worked into every decision, no matter how small that we make throughout the day as it relates to our business. So that gets factored in at all times. Kind of like when we were talking about before you had that alarm that went off and said, OK, what’s my what’s Malcolm like having that same kind of strategy or philosophy with respect to all the work you’re doing throughout the day, like stopping and making sure that it’s in line with that, that long term mission statement, it’s a
Anthony Vicino: [00:36:53] Discipline at the end of the day, like the ability to stay focused on the mission towards the vision. It’s hard because there are so many things that are going to crop up in the day-to-day that could take you away from that.
Dan Krueger: [00:37:03] You just get caught up in the weeds throughout the day, just putting out fires and answering emails, doing all the things you kind of forget. Like, Is this really in line with the bigger picture? Like, you got to kind of zoom out every so often to make sure that all that stuff is in alignment? Mm-hmm.
Anthony Vicino: [00:37:19] All right. So we have improved lives. We have mission-focused and the P in impact is a premium experience. This is important to us. The premium experience in the sense that a lot of retail investors, nonaccredited investors in particular, and if you’re an unaccredited investor, you get this is like you get shafted in the grand scheme of the investing universe. You don’t have access to all of the wonderful investment opportunities that accredited investors do. They get the cream of the crop. But only 10 percent of the population qualifies as accredited. And Uncle Sam says You know what, for you guys that aren’t making fat stacks already, we need to protect you from yourselves. And so you don’t get to see all these opportunities. And what that does at the end of the day is it creates this. Subpar investing opportunity environment for the majority of investors. They get just treated like garbage. At the end of the day, you can go invest in Robin Hood and get your app, but if you want to like
Dan Krueger: [00:38:19] There’s no customer service, there’s no customer service. Literally, you could try to call them. You won’t find a number.
Anthony Vicino: [00:38:24] And so for us, the premium experience is recognizing like we do five or six B offerings, which means that we can bring in non-accredited investors. And that’s because we have family, friends, siblings that don’t have $50000 sitting around. They’ve not accredited investors. And so how are they going to get into these deals? Well, we’re going to provide the opportunities for them, and the premium experience is regardless of how much you invest, whether you’re investing a million dollars or you’re investing $10000, you should be treated equally. Awesome. You should have an awesome experience when you invest.
Dan Krueger: [00:38:55] Yeah, and it’s something that does not take a lot of effort, time, or capital to do. It’s just that it’s not really the standard out there. So most people do the minimum to just kind of be on par with the rest of the competition out there. But you know, if you go to a nice store like we’ve got a nice men’s boutique store in our neighborhood that I live in called Martin Patrick and you walk in and they’ve got little free little machines with little chocolate all over the store. They’ll give you a glass of wine. They’ll give you free water as if you’re just walking down the street and going well. They give you free wine. If you’re buying things, that’s a winery. They got wine. But the point is like how much haberdashery? How much does this stuff actually cost? You give someone some chocolates, a glass of cheap wine and maybe a water. I bucks, and that’s being generous, it’s probably less than five dollars. It doesn’t cost much, it doesn’t take much time or energy, but just providing that little something extra makes you feel special and it makes you want to go back versus going to Nordstrom’s, where they’ll just they’ll sell you a thing and you get your receipt and you leave. So I think that’s really the big thing is, though, we don’t want to just do the average right. We don’t want to just do what everybody else is doing. We want to go above that to make it a better experience because then, you know, why not everyone likes it? We feel good doing it. Our investors and partners appreciate it because it’s completely unexpected.
Anthony Vicino: [00:40:17] So you’re not a no. At the end of the day, you might be investing, but you’re worth is not derived by the amount that you’re investing. It’s just not. Yeah. So to bring a that’s our goal is to bring this white-glove concierge-level service to investing so that when you invest, you feel special because you should.
Dan Krueger: [00:40:38] Yeah, I mean, we don’t. We don’t. The trust that people place in us with their capital is not unnoticed, right? And so we want to make sure that we express that. We appreciate that because it’s a big deal. If someone’s going to hand over their hard-earned capital to somebody else, to be a steward basically means that that deserves the utmost respect. And you should at least give somebody a little something back to say thank you. I appreciate that because trust is one of those things that is is really tough to get. And it’s really easy to lose it. And so we have a lot of respect for people who have chosen to trust us with their capital. So, you know, doing a little something extra to make them feel good. It’s a no-brainer, yes.
Anthony Vicino: [00:41:24] So if you’re listening to this and you’re invested in one of our deals with us, I just want to say a special shout-out to you. We love you. Thank you very much and back to the show. All right. So an impact as a hard one to accentuate is accountable for everything which ties back into vertical integration. The control freak Invictus is a poem. So the word Invictus people always ask, like, how did you come by the name? We have a funny story for that, but one of the reasons Invictus means a lot to me personally is one. It means unbeaten and unbreakable, and I think those are great concepts. But there was a very famous poem and you guys have all heard it. I guarantee you’ve heard it, and I can’t quote it all right here. But the punch line of the whole poem is that I am the master of my fate. I’m the captain of my soul, and it’s a poem about extreme accountability at the end of the day like we are in control of this thing called our lives, and we try to bring that philosophy to everything that we do from beginning to end. This part was why we were vertically integrated is we are accountable for everything that we do, and when there’s an opportunity to improve, we look at square in the eyes and say, Let’s do that, let’s get better. And when we screw up and we do screw up because we are not very good in the grand scheme of the universe, like there’s a lot of room for improvement, both as individual humans and as operators, as business people like we always learning and growing and getting better. But when we fail to stack up, we look that we own it, we claim it and then we say, this is what we’re going to do as a result of this.
Dan Krueger: [00:43:01] And this one just aligns with my personal philosophies so much. It’s just that I don’t know when this happened for me because I wasn’t like this as a child, but I’m the type of person who will take responsibility for everything I do. I don’t look to place blame on any kind of external factors, and I go as far as to take responsibility for things that other people should technically be responsible for in order to get the thing done that I want to be done. So some someone might look at that as a good thing. Some people might look at that as a bad thing, but it means a lot to me to just care enough about getting the thing to where it needs to be, regardless of who was supposed to do the job right. I’m the type of guy who wants to get it done. And if Joe Schmo over here isn’t doing his piece, I’m going to make sure it gets done to spite him. So this whole accountability for everything we do, the thing just speaks so loudly to me because it’s exactly how I approach life. And it’s we want to make sure it’s crystal clear to our investors and our residents and our vendors and everybody that is in our sphere that that’s our philosophy. It’s a big part of who we are as people, and it’s not the case for a lot of people out there. So I think it’s something that’s worth kind of putting up the on the front window of the store that, you know, these guys, they take responsibility.
Anthony Vicino: [00:44:18] Well, here’s the other thing too is like by putting this out there, we are inviting you, the listener. Our investors are the people in our sphere of influence to hold us accountable to the standard that we’re setting for ourselves, right? Like guys, this is something that we really, really value. So if you see an opportunity to hold us accountable, to put our feet to the coals, do it. We will respond in kind, but.
Dan Krueger: [00:44:42] Don’t actually put hot coals and repeat, that’s kind of aggressive.
Anthony Vicino: [00:44:46] Don’t be weird, guys, like that, ‘s torture.
Dan Krueger: [00:44:48] Tony Robbins being
Anthony Vicino: [00:44:50] Says that’s his shtick. Leave that for him. Yeah, yeah. Ok, now for the C in M in
Dan Krueger: [00:44:57] Peck, you almost gave it away there.
Anthony Vicino: [00:44:59] Yeah. Careful. We are. Community-oriented, this is just another riff on local experts, local-focused. Yeah, we love our community and everything that we’re doing, and this podcast in the book and the investments in the residents, it’s like all about building community and making an impact. On this global community of investors of.
Dan Krueger: [00:45:24] Of people, yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s really woven into everything we’ve kind of talked about here. And I think especially when you’re looking at out-of-state operators, this is something that definitely kind of help bolster our us a little bit. I guess it just kind of helps differentiate us because if we are local investors, I would say it’s a safe bet that we’re more inclined to care about our impact on the communities that we’re investing in than somebody who isn’t local, right? So a non-local investor might come in and just, you know, kick everybody out of a building and completely revamp it and yank the rents up. And yeah, they might make a lot of money, but if those are, your neighbors probably wouldn’t want to do that right? If this is a mile from your house and you live right by where this is happening, you might feel differently about that kind of business plan. So I think it it’s important for people to to to to have that kind of community-focused aspect in their business, especially when they’re landowners or property owners, because, you know, your kind of you’re going to dictate the quality of the neighborhood based on what you do with the properties that you own. And since we’re local guys and we love where we live and we want to make it a better place, then you know, right off the bat there’s a nice alignment of interest between us and the rest of the community, so something to be aware of.
Anthony Vicino: [00:46:41] I’ve talked about this on social media and I’ve written some blog posts on it and done some videos. But I think the three most important investments that you can make and you’ve heard me say this before is one in yourself, and we did a podcast episode on this, so go listen to that. No one is in yourself. Number two is in your network and number three is in your community. I got nothing else. Yeah. So let’s go to impact not. We’re transparent, or at least we strive to be transparent. Mm-hmm. What’s that mean, Dan?
Dan Krueger: [00:47:11] You can see right through us so transparent as you go.
Anthony Vicino: [00:47:15] I can’t see
Dan Krueger: [00:47:16] You. I’m transparent. I’m sorry. We’re going off the rails. Transparent is basically just, you know, being an open book, whether it’s your investors, your vendors, your residents, anyone in your sphere. We don’t. We don’t hide things from people. We don’t close ourselves off. We want to make sure that people can peek under the hood. They can take a look at our underwriting, they can take a look inside of our buildings. We’ll show them all the things that we’ve done. We’ll answer any questions. There’s a lot of people that are not quite that transparent with their business for whatever reason. Maybe they’re just, you know, kind of private about that because, you know, it’s money, right? If you want to, you know, take a look and see what’s in some of this portfolio, how much they have, what their debt is, you know, all these questions, they’re very, very money-oriented. And there’s a lot of people that aren’t super comfortable sharing everything financially with the world. But we pride ourselves on just being an open book with everything that we do because honestly, there’s no secret sauce that we’ve got. We’re not really trying to, you know, keep our secret strategy away from everybody else. It’s like it’s we’re not really doing anything, you know, super special here. There’s we’ve got some things that make us unique, but we have nothing to really hold on to. We gain so much more from sharing everything with everyone around us because of what we said before having that, that that impact and wanting to improve people’s lives like you’ve got to be open and just share all your knowledge and everything you’ve accumulated over the years with those around you to really have that kind of impact. So we pride ourselves on it.
Anthony Vicino: [00:48:51] Yeah, I got nothing else to add there. That sounds good. I like that. So that’s impact. Repeat from the top. We improve lives. We’re mission-focused, premium experience, or accountable for everything. We’re community-oriented and we’re transparent. And at the end of the day, those are our three uniques. I know the impact that was actually like, was that six little caveats there, but from the top, again, we’re local, we are vertically integrated and we’re impact-driven. And it’s really that last one, the impact-driven that really gets us out of bed. That’s the way that’s the source. If there is a source, that’s a drug. Yeah. So hopefully this episode was insightful, was interesting. Maybe it was even entertaining. I don’t know. I can’t speak for you, but hopefully, you enjoyed it. And if you did, you should go leave a review. You definitely should come on. Give us a little bit of love now. Maybe I could bribe you. Maybe I could bribe you for a review. What do you think? Tell you what. If you go and leave a review on iTunes, say five stars, then I’m going to give you a great book recommendation in five seconds. Ok, I’ll wait. You go leave a review. Five-four three. Ok? All right, let’s get to our book recommendation.
Anthony Vicino: [00:50:02] Thank you for the review. I appreciate it. Now, for those of you watching the podcast, I was looking at the wrong camera. I’m sorry. All right. So the book recommendation this week is the Scarlet Lady of Wall Street. This is a really interesting story about the Erie railroad line, and like the eighteen hundred nineteen, there was nineteenth-century so like. Is through 1819 900, and it was a fascinating story when Wall Street was really still young. Vanderbilt was building his fortune and all of these shenanigans were happening. It is a ridiculous story. It reads exactly like fiction. It’s so peculiar and strange and crazy to believe that this world once existed and that people were doing these things. So if you’re a history buff, you want to learn about Wall Street in the early days and like it was like the Wild Wild West and how Vanderbilt went on to become one of the richest men of all time and how that actually played out. Go read the scarlet lady of Wall Street doesn’t have anything to do with real estate, but it is fascinating nonetheless. So who’s it bad? Well, God, his name is actually something really cool, but I cannot remember it off the top of my head.
Dan Krueger: [00:51:08] Scarlet Lady of Walls
Anthony Vicino: [00:51:09] James Diamond Gordon or something like
Dan Krueger: [00:51:11] That. That’s a name.
Anthony Vicino: [00:51:13] Whoever it was, I remember thinking, that’s a heck of a name. Now that’s it. Thank you for leaving your review. If you didn’t leave a review and you just sat there while I gave you the book recommendation,
Dan Krueger: [00:51:24] You should feel bad about yourself
Anthony Vicino: [00:51:25] With you. Ok, here’s your chance to redeem yourself now. Go over to iTunes. It just takes 30 seconds and leaves a review. Five stars you can take. I don’t need less. Just give us five. And that’ll do. All right. So that’s enough of us. We appreciate you guys taking a little bit of time out of your day. Hopefully, this episode was interesting. Truly, it means the world to us has to take this time out of your day to join us and to listen to give us feedback. And I just can’t express
[00:51:51] Exactly how much it means to us. But thank you. Thank you. Thank you. See you next week.
