For today’s episode, we will be discussing the people who Invictus serves as apartment syndicators.
This is going to be an interesting conversation to see how we think through who we believe is best suited for Invictus.
New book LIVE! Passive Investing Made Simple: How to Create Wealth and Passive Income through Apartment Syndications.
[00:01 – 06:30] Opening Segment
- Bad investing tips
[06:31 – 10:12] The Investors That Work With Us
- Business owners are the target
- Entrepreneurs who have built something
- Dan’s first business
- Anthony’s first business
[10:13 – 12:39] Dan’s First Business
- Personal Training
- Coaching
- Matching corporate salary
[12:40 – 15:34] Anthony’s First Business
- Window washing partnership
- Realizing relationship between business and real estate
[15:35 – 34:52] Closing Segment
- Live event in November
- Book recommendation
How to Make Offer so Good People Feel Stupid to Say No
“the problem is so people have static investment parameters. Right. And they don’t change. So the market dynamics can change. The world can change.” – Dan Kreuger
“It’s very simple. Do two things. Build a business, invest in real estate. If you do those two things in a long enough time frame, you will be wealthy.“ – Anthony Vicino
“This is like the target is business owners, small business owners, medium business owners, entrepreneurs, people who have built something.” – Anthony Vicino
“At some point, you start to lose sleep at night because you realize, oh, my goodness, I have laid a giant golden egg into one single basket. I am the golden goose if somebody plucks me, what happens. If somebody takes my basket, what happens?” – Anthony Vicino
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Who Actually Invests With Invictus
Anthony Vicino: [00:00:14] Hello and welcome to multifamily investing made simple, the podcast, it’s all about taking the complexity out of real estate investing so that you can take action today. I am your host, Anthony Masino of Invictus Capital, joined by the one the only. Dan, where the heck am I? Kruger.
Dan Krueger: [00:00:31] I’m in Hollywood. That’s where I am. I’m on a set. There are lights. There are cameras. There are really good mikes. I’m sure I’m crystal clear.
Anthony Vicino: [00:00:39] Let me just ask a question for our podcast audience, because, you know, presumably they’re listening to us right now. They’re not looking at us. So they don’t have any clue what we’re talking about. So let me just ask you. We did exactly do we sound good? Do we sound better as you’re on the treadmill or driving to work or whatever you’re doing pontificating about real estate? I hope so because we have today is the inaugural voyage, our brand new podcast studio. And it’s very exciting for both Dan and I. We have better mikes, better cameras, a pretty cool little setup here.
Dan Krueger: [00:01:10] I don’t know if we’re any better, but all the equipment is Wingard.
Anthony Vicino: [00:01:14] You do not expect higher quality output from us. Just a nicer video. So if you want to watch the video, go check it out on YouTube. Come see what we’re talking about. It’s pretty cool. We partnered with a local fella here, Ryan Grams of Call Upgrade to create this amazing podcast studio. And it’s pretty stellar. So hopefully you guys enjoyed the upgraded call quality, quality, quality, quality.
Dan Krueger: [00:01:43] We’re that hard to say, but I think you’re trying to work in his brand there.
Anthony Vicino: [00:01:46] I was trying to give him a plug.
Dan Krueger: [00:01:48] We got to give this guy a shout-out, because the reason we sound and look well, they look amazing. But the video quality is amazing is because the rocks are right. So we got to she did a fantastic job call, upgrade, search, Remon, Instagram, LinkedIn, all the things.
Anthony Vicino: [00:02:01] So we’re talking about now, if you’re listening to this, are probably like, wait a minute, I tuned in to listen to a real estate podcast. And now these guys are just talking about sound quality and video, like, I don’t care. You just give me the goods on real estate. But before we get that, before we get to the real estate, then you know what time it is. Mm. Do you know or actually do you know what time it is you’re not wearing the watch?
Dan Krueger: [00:02:24] No, I never wear watches and I’m. So you’ve been here all day? I’m not
Anthony Vicino: [00:02:26] Ok. Well, let me inform you what time it is. It is bad investing advice of the week time
Dan Krueger: [00:02:32] Favorites and horrible investing I’ve tons about.
Anthony Vicino: [00:02:34] It’s true. He’s not very good, but he’s falling forward. And that’s key to life. So then what’s your best advice this week
Dan Krueger: [00:02:41] About his base is going to be I always struggle how to word these things, right, because I’ve got all these ideas in my head and it’s kind of complex. But how do I distill down to one piece of bad investment advice? And that is stick to your investment parameters. That’s not a bad piece of advice. Right. Well, that’s good advice.
Anthony Vicino: [00:03:00] That’s. Are you telling me that’s bad advice now? Well, I wrote that in a book.
Dan Krueger: [00:03:05] We got to do a second decision. Okay.
Anthony Vicino: [00:03:07] So everybody, if you already went out there and picked up passive investing, made it simple, throws in the garbage, it’s garbage. You don’t want to read it. I’m going to have a second edition coming out at some point. So thanks, Dan. Welcome. Ok, so it set me straight. How how is this advice bad sticking to your investing parameters? That seems like a good idea.
Dan Krueger: [00:03:23] It is a good idea. But the problem is so people have static investment parameters. Right. And they don’t change. So the market dynamics can change. The world can change. And if you are sticking to your rules of thumb and I’m talking specifically about, you know, underwriting on deals like ours, if you’ve got you you know, your fixed vacancy assumptions, if you got your fixed cap rate assumptions, if if you got your fixed, specifically, what I was thinking about when I said this, your fixed inflation assumptions, when we’re looking at expense inflation, that’s something that I’ve been doing a lot differently lately, because I know if anyone’s noticed, we’ve been printing a lot of money lately. And so that standard two percent that people have built into their models needs to be changed. You know, the Fed, same transitory in all this. But what I mean when I say is, you know, don’t stick to your investment firms and say don’t get too stuck on these little rules of thumb, that people have to be ready to pivot. Be aware of what’s happening on the macro level. Zoom out and change your investment philosophy to match the market that you are in.
Anthony Vicino: [00:04:20] I actually do agree with this. And we talked about this a long time ago, which was it’s like playing football, which I know you do a lot of Dan plays a lot of the pigskin and he throws it everywhere. Can’t get it out of his hands. It’s crazy. But it’s like if you were playing football and then the league comes out and they decide to change some rules and they’re like, you can no longer do this or do that other thing. Right. The game has changed. The rules have changed. And so you should update your playbook if you’re going by the same plays, when the rules are outdated, you’re well, you’re not pivoting, you’re not adapting. And really, at the end of the day, there’s a Charles Darwin quote. It’s a falsely attributed one. He didn’t actually say this, but it’s something that I think is so on point that I’m going to give him credit for anyways. It is. He said no, he didn’t say that. It is not the strongest that survives. It’s not even the smartest. It is the species most able to adapt. And so who said that? That I did just now. Beautiful, meaning quoting Charles Darwin, quoting Dwight Schrute. Probably.
Dan Krueger: [00:05:22] You know, Dwight Schrute has had some of the most profound philosophical statements,
Anthony Vicino: [00:05:27] One of the clearest thinkers of the 21st century. No doubt. Ok, so let’s get to the meat and potatoes of today’s episode. Today, we want to talk about something kind of interesting. It’s something that we’ve been thinking about a lot recently, which is who do we serve at Invictus Capital? You might be familiar with what we do generally as apartment syndicators. So that means we go out there. This is the first time ever listening to us. And you’re like, I had no clue what that means. Let me just give you the rundown. We go out and we buy apartment buildings here in the Twin Cities. We have an in-house property management team that goes and operates these assets. And we buy these assets by partnering with passive investors, people who just put money in. We go buy these buildings and everybody profits. It’s great. So the question is, who do we really serve as our investor, avatar or prototype? And this is going to be an interesting conversation and might be illuminating for a lot of people who are listening to us. Maybe you’ve listened to a lot of our episodes to see how we think through who we believe we are best suited to serve.
Dan Krueger: [00:06:31] Yeah, and it was illuminating for us, too, because this is a new kind of realization that we had because we were kind of operating similar to like my bad investment advice. We were kind of locked into this kind of preconceived or, you know, this assumption that we had in the past. We’re like, OK, this is these are, you know, the main people that come to us through, you know, through the investing piece. So we’re not really talking about who we serve on the property management side really today. We’re talking about the investors, the investors, investors that work with us. And, you know, early on, we form some assumptions about what, you know, who we thought they were based on who we were having experience with. But then when we sat down and really looked at everyone that we’ve worked with and we talked about it, we kind of came to a realization that actually there’s a really big, you know, demographic or avatar, whatever you want to call him, that has been consistently showing up. We’ve had a lot of consistent types of people. There was one in particular. That when we noticed it, we’re like, wow, that that’s really good to know, but also it’s us it’s it is us in action. Yeah, it was super cool.
Anthony Vicino: [00:07:30] And it’s fascinating. I think a lot of syndicators in the space, they’ll say things like we help busy professionals generate wealth and passive income. They’ll say something vague like that. We’re busy professionals like lawyers, CPAs, doctors, high net worth individuals. And that’s not very descriptive. It’s not very helpful. Like who actually do you serve for us? Recently, we had the revelation as we looked through all the investors. We’ve all served a hundred investors at this point. Do you realize that? Yeah, this is kind of it’s really crazy. We’ve served almost a hundred individual investors. And as we’re looking through the data now, there are doctors in there and there are CPAs and there are lawyers. And what we do to conserve all of them. But we are seeing a recurring theme. And once we figured this out, it was very invigorating because Dan and I, see a lot of ourselves in it. And so this is who we serve better than anybody else. This is like the target is business owners, small business owners, medium business owners, entrepreneurs, people who have built something. They’ve built a business and they’ve generated good income and over the life of their career, they’ve just kept reinvesting back into their business because that’s the thing that they know the best. And they know I can generate better returns by putting it back into my business than I ever could in the stock market or Krypto or real estate. And so that’s what they’ve done for years. And they’ve built trust more than yourself. Exactly.
Dan Krueger: [00:08:55] They’re going to invest in anyone. There’s no better steward of your money than you. So it’s a great philosophy for a certain period of time until you get to a certain point. And then at some point, you just way to concentrate.
Anthony Vicino: [00:09:08] Exactly. At some point, you start to lose sleep at night because you realize, oh, my goodness, I have laid a giant golden egg into one single basket. I am the golden goose if somebody plucks me. What happens if somebody takes my basket? What happens in twenty with Covid? There were a lot of business owners who really struggled during that period of time. And so one of the things that we realized now is like, oh, that’s who we really help in a lot of cases is people who have these businesses who they’re doing really well. But now it’s time to start putting some of those golden eggs into a different basket. And that’s where real estate really comes in. And I’ve said this before like this is this is the entirety of my, I would say, personal brand thought leadership platform, which is to generate wealth. It’s very simple. Do two things. Build a business, invest in real estate. If you do those two things in a long enough time frame, you will be wealthy. And so it’s been really cool to like have that revelation of like, oh, it’s business honest because that’s us. Then tell us about your entrepreneurial journey, like because this isn’t your first endeavor, right?
Dan Krueger: [00:10:13] No, no, it’s not. And it’s interesting to me. It is because I didn’t know I was an entrepreneur until I was, you know, well into the corporate life. I was very much of the mindset because of my upbringing and the type of family I was in. And just the environment I was in. The concept of going to college and getting a job was put up on this pedestal because I came from a family of artists. Everyone in my family went to art school. And, you know, I don’t know if you know this, but most artists don’t get really rich. You know, they’re called starving artist
Anthony Vicino: [00:10:47] Banksy is Banksy Rich thinks he’s doing. He might be doing pretty well.
Dan Krueger: [00:10:51] Really good. But yeah, those are the statistical outliers. Right. That’s not the norm. If you’re an artist, you’re not in it for the money. You’re in it because you’re passionate about, you know, building something and creating something, which is great. But at the same time, you know, I grew up in a family that was a very modest income. And so, you know, getting out of that kind of scarcity type of environment was something that was kind of, you know, promoted for me. I was really encouraged to go into college and go to corporate. And so I did that. And I always thought that something other than a salary was risky. Right. So that mindset for a long time and it wasn’t until well into my corporate career that I had an organic entrepreneurial endeavor kind of just happen. I started dating somebody who’s very active on social media, and all of a sudden the world had a window into what we were doing. And at the time, it was fitness. We’re working out a lot. We’re dieting, we’re taking that really seriously. And we were getting, you know, really great results because we were just obsessed with it. If you get obsessed with something, chances are you can do pretty good. And so, you know, once the world could see what was going on behind the curtains, we start getting questions like, how do you do this? How was that done? And so I just happened to into, you know, actually coaching people in a for the first time, I saw there was a direct correlation between how hard I worked and how much wealth I could create. Not really wealth with that business. It was just, you know, income. But that’s not
Anthony Vicino: [00:12:14] Something I would at that time. It probably felt like a lot to you where you’re like, oh, wow,
Dan Krueger: [00:12:17] I matched my corporate self. Yeah. Pretty quickly. And I was like, that was a direct result of. Exactly how hard it worked, and I could work twice as hard on my corporate job and being in finance, you know, in sales, it’s different, but if you’re in finance or if you’re in marketing or something like that, you could double your output and you’re not going to double your income. But if you’re an entrepreneur and you double your output, you’re probably going double your income, if not triple or quadruple. And then I was hooked and then shortly thereafter found the real estate.
Anthony Vicino: [00:12:40] Yeah, I told the story about my first entrepreneurial adventure was a window washing company. But what I haven’t really talked about a lot in that context was my buddy had actually already started that company a little bit before. And what really attracted me to it was looking at him and seeing the life that he was already getting to live at that point, where he had the flexibility to make a schedule and do what he wanted during the day. And he had this figured out where he was hiring and bringing on rock climbers to go and do all the actual work. And he was just staying at home and handle all the scheduling and the marketing. And I was like, holy crap. He’s making good money. He has control over his time. Like that’s great. But another person and I haven’t shared this story ever. I think on this podcast, the other person that had a fundamental shift in my way of viewing the world was at the same time, right after I had just moved out of the van. Right. Like my fiance had left me. I was living in the van down by a river. And I was I hope so. It’s not too far from a lake, but it was parked in the back of a climbing gym. And I had an electric cable running into the building for power. I would shower in there and they would have four a.m. cross-fit classes right outside my window. Wonderful. So that was where I was living.
Anthony Vicino: [00:13:52] But I moved into this house and I only just realized recently within the last couple of weeks that this is what happened is I moved into this house with this guy who owned it, and he had no job. He was renting everything out by the room. And we all thought he was a drug dealer because we could not figure out how he had bought this house and like how he could wake up every day, go surfing and then work on his motorcycle and just live this really crazy, cool lifestyle. And we’re this like, how is he afforded this? How did he buy a house? And I was like, we just assumed he was a drug dealer. But it wasn’t until years later when while he might have been. But looking back on it, years later, when I was first getting into real estate, I was thinking about him subconsciously and recognizing like he had created this life of abundance and freedom. Just do this one thing. And so I dove into learning about real estate. And that was like the pivotal moment where real estate and business came together. Yeah. And so but it’s interesting when we talk about avatars, when we talk about who is the ideal person that we can serve, it’s really us in the sense that the majority of our investors, they do have some entrepreneurial streak in them. They do have some business, but not all of them. In fact, I would say a close second is probably medical device salespeople.
Dan Krueger: [00:15:10] Yeah, that was one of those that was so consistent. It was almost funny because I could almost hear it coming when we had, you know, conversations with people as they kind of come into our network. I started to be able to kind of peg it. Yeah. Because it’s a very consistent narrative coming from these guys. And they’re all really great. They are.
Anthony Vicino: [00:15:31] But think about it. But think about it. And there’s they’re pretty much entrepreneurs. Yeah. Right.
Dan Krueger: [00:15:35] Like sales really is an entrepreneur. Exactly. So this was so exciting for us to kind of nail this down, because like I said before, this is effectively us. And so the question becomes like, you know, when you’re a business owner, you’re trying to figure out, you know, who your customer, your client, your your your you know, your avatar is that you’re trying to serve you. I was trying to figure out how do I communicate with them? What do they want? And when you realized that that person is effectively you, it gets really easy because you’re like, what do I want to do? I want. Well, that’s what we can do about that.
Anthony Vicino: [00:16:05] It’s pretty cool. And so this is one of the reasons that I wanted to share this today on this particular episode is because with this in mind, we are going to we’re going to host a live event in November alongside our partners at the RGA, which is a Minneapolis based brokerage. So if you’re in Minneapolis or if you’re want to come to Minneapolis and come join the event, it’s going to be focused on business owners and not really just talking about passive investing in real estate, which is great. We love it. But honestly, go listen to the podcast or read the book. But it’s going to be around other topics, too, around asset protection and inheritance planning and all these topics that entrepreneurs, business owners of all sizes have to deal with at some point.
Dan Krueger: [00:16:49] Yeah. Yeah, a hundred percent. And you’ve heard it before. At least I hope you have. If you’ve listened to our Core Values podcast, one of the most important things for us is to lead with value. So our goal with these events isn’t necessarily to get up on stage and pitch ourselves and sell real estate to the world. Our goal is to provide the valuable resource that we wish we had earlier on our entrepreneurial endeavors of, you know, how do you deal with, you know, having a successful business? It sounds like it should be a good thing, but it’s also kind of a stressful situation and a lot of people don’t really start thinking about it. These types of things till later in life when they’re doing estate planning, but you need to especially if you have a family, you’ve got to start diversifying so that if something happens to you if you get hit by a bus, you know, you’ve got to get yourself diversified out of just your business so that you can be financially sound. It’s really important. And so this is all about really just trying to provide value for this. This, you know, for us basically give a try to produce the thing that we wish we had access to and provide a ton of value. And if people end up coming into our circle after that, great. If not, if we could just have them be set up better for the future, then we’ve accomplished our goal.
Anthony Vicino: [00:17:57] At the end of the day, and I’ve shared this a lot, I don’t know if I’ve shared it recently, but my big belief in life is that if everybody could wake up every morning and not worry about where their next meal was coming or how they’re going to pay their bills or the next vacation or the next weekend or anything like that if they could just wake up every single morning and dedicate their lives to solving the problems that mean the most to them like we could make a ridiculously cool world. But the problem is, most people don’t have that ability because they have to go to work that they don’t love with people they don’t like. They have to save money for a future to be able to enjoy this life that is passing them by. And for me, if you’re listening to this and any of this is resonating with you, I want to strongly encourage you to do one of two things, or maybe both. To build a business, invest in real estate. You do those two things and they will give you both the financial security, but also the time security to go and work on the things in life that mean the most to you.
Dan Krueger: [00:18:56] And think of me. You do not need to get up and quit your job. We’re not one of those people that’s saying, oh, get out of your job, your life stinks. Like, no, no, we’re not trash talking jobs. But our point is that we want to give people diversified. So, you know, I was working a full-time job as a financial analyst at a part-time job because there’s been a lot of student loans and running aside, as you can do that, and if you have kids cut out, that’s a part-time job. But these days
Anthony Vicino: [00:19:20] That you were to take it out, the kids.
Dan Krueger: [00:19:21] I don’t have kids. Well, depends on the kids. Maybe, maybe. Anyways, it doesn’t need to be a binary thing where you’re like, OK, I’m going to be an entrepreneur today. I’m going to quit my job and go start a business-like. No, no, no, no. I’ll do it on the weekends, in the evenings. Do something entrepreneurial on the side. If for nothing else, just to diversify your income. Right. People think that a full-time job is a secure endeavor. But in reality, you only need to get fired once you get a full-time job. Yep. Just one other revenue stream, whether it’s real estate or a side hustle of some kind. You got to get fired twice if you start a business. A lot of different clients. And this is what I realized when I had my coaching business. Like I would have to have been fired, you know, February thirty-five to forty times. Right. So it’s probably more secure if you’ve got all these different clients, all these different revenue streams, as opposed to just having one job that appears. So do yourself a favor, start a business, even if you’re not trying to get rich, just diversify a little bit. And then if you don’t invest in real estate, do
Anthony Vicino: [00:20:15] That, too. If you’re listening to this, you might be interested in passive investing, but there’s a good chance that you’re not. Maybe you want to be like us. You want to be an active investor, in which case that’s the business that is both a business and real estate. So it’s kind of like a twofer. Yeah. Yeah.
Dan Krueger: [00:20:30] Get a little
Anthony Vicino: [00:20:30] Good, too. I love a good tier. Yeah. All right. So that brings us to the end. Well, we buy books now. Books. Now, I got a really cool book last week, actually. And this guy, he came onto my radar a couple of weeks ago, maybe a couple of months ago. And I have just been concerned. I am just such a fanboy. But it’s so good. I do believe his content is some of the best in the entrepreneurial, how to build a business and how to invest better space, which is Alex Hamady, who you look at him and you’d be like, oh, he looks like a bro. He doesn’t look like somebody I want to take advice from on anything, investing or entrepreneurial. But the dude is sharp and the book is 100 Million How to Make Offers So good people feel stupid saying no. So if you want to build a business, there is some really good gold that might be the best actionable marketing advice book that I’ve ever read. And so,
Dan Krueger: [00:21:24] Yeah, I haven’t read it. And I’m going to have to because you’ve brought up multiple times now. We’re actually doing it officially on the air. But I will just kind of double down on this guy’s content in general. He gets the point in everything he puts out. He distills some concepts that, you know, if you’re going to other people’s social media channels reading their blogs or reading other books or a lot of people feel like they need to embellish content with fluff to make it seem bigger. You know, he does the opposite, which all the great people that I really like do very well, which is they take something perplexing and they distill it down to its simplest form. So you can take that information and be actionable. And he’s a classic, you know, don’t judge a book by its cover kind of thing. Yeah, I was like I said before, I was in the fitness industry. So this guy was on my radar because he was in the fitness industry for a long time as well. And I would see him in the thumbnails. I’d see him on social media, just his pictures. And I formed a judgment based on how he looked. And if you look him up, you kind of see the. I looked at him and I was like, OK, I got ahead and then I just happened to have one of his videos on YouTube, Roland, because I listen to it almost like podcasts. And it just started on autoplay. And I listened to I was like, that is really good stuff. It’s really smart. You could tell he’s very well-read and he’s put himself around a lot of really intelligent people and has accumulated a ton of really valuable knowledge. Yeah.
Anthony Vicino: [00:22:45] And, you know, he’s one of those guys who isn’t just talking about the thing. He’s doing the thing. He’s built a portfolio of businesses that do over a hundred million dollars a year in revenue. And he has my favorite thing about him is that he has nothing to sell you. Like they say that that’s a stick and no way to start. It’s a good way to start. And it’s in it. But I will say this. He is a gym owner and entrepreneur in the gym space and technology, but he passively invests as of this year in apartments and occasions. Yeah. So there you go. If he does, it’s good enough for everybody. Ok, so that’s going to do it for us here at multifamily investing made simple. Hopefully, this is an episode that didn’t teach you a lot about real estate investing per se, but maybe give you a little bit of insight into how Dan and I ended with this capital, how we approached the act of what it is that we actually do and why it matters. And so if you enjoyed this at all, if you take any nuggets of wisdom or just nuggets of stupidity that made you laugh, then do us a favor. Go leave a review on iTunes.
Anthony Vicino: [00:23:45] And also here’s my shameless book plug, because you can’t make it through an episode with an author without getting a book plug. We don’t actually have one on the table, but that’s OK. Amateur hour. So, yeah, well, we’re going to up our production value in the future. So good. Check out passive investing made simple. If anything that we’ve talked about here today resonates and you’re like, I want to learn more about how to do this book about it’s about learning how to passively invest. Yeah. Also here. Yeah. If you’re an active investor and you want to raise money from investors, that’s also going to be a really cool resource because it’s going to give you a lot of scripts and frameworks for how to explain complicated topics in simple ways, which if you’re listening to me and Dan, you know, we are just two simple dudes. And if we can do this, then you can do basically. We’re basic. So that’s going to do it for us. We appreciate we love each and every single one of you. Make sure that you go hit the like button, the subscribe button, the bell, the all the buttons are just pushing all the things. And we will catch you next week.
