How you know you've made it:

You get to stop doing business with assholes.

No asshole clients.

No asshole partners.

No asshole investors.

On Sep 3rd 2020 we closed on a 120k sf glove factory built in 1890 in a small NY town.

Has 45k sf of self storage inside and had $14k a month of net operating income at closing.

Let's breakdown this deal.

A THREAD on creating $2 million out of thin air in 18 months...

👇👇

First saw the property on Loopnet in mid 2018. I ignored it. Who wants to try to operate a business in an old factory in a dying NY town.

A few months later I reached out. Broker sent me financials. They were good. $24k a month in revenue and $10k in expenses.

So I visited the property. It was old. Needed a new roof. Full time manager. Only accessible to customers 9am-5pm M-S. No autopay. A lot of folks paying 1/2 market rent.

I loved everything about it.

But I knew they were going to have trouble selling this thing no matter the profitability, so on July 1 2018 I made a low offer. $750k + seller pays for new $250k roof + $20k in environmental work.

Countered at asking price + $100k credit towards roof.

I ignored the response.

Broker called me back mid September of 2018. Make another offer, he urged.

I knew it was a good biz so I got more aggressive - $1MM + seller pays for roof / environmental.

Declined. Countered with $1.2MM but they'd give me a new roof and do the environmental.

We've used "seller financing" on two self storage deals in the past year.

And it raised our cash on cash return by 20%+.

And lowered the amount of capital we needed by $500k.

Here's a THREAD about a deal of mine and how this magical debt structure can work.

👇👇

My method is simple. In the late stages of negotiation I submit two offers:

One at a lower price.

And one at the exact price the seller wants but with him holding back 10-20% of the purchase price in the form of a 2nd mortgage (with a second position to your bank loan).

Contrary to popular belief seller financing rarely includes the seller holding back 70-80% and acting as your bank.

Two reasons:

#1 most have some debt on the property.

#2 most want most of their money now.

Have you heard the saying:

"you name the price and i'll name the terms?"

This is a case of that situation exactly.

Lets paint a picture here:

Last week I was negotiating with a seller on a property in a small western PA town.

Not many interested buyers so I knew I had some leverage.

His asking price was $4.5MM. I wanted to pay $4.2M.

After a week or two and a lot of back and forth I found his lowest number.

The hardest thing about entrepreneurship, real estate, or anything else worth doing:

You have to be able to look at incomplete information...

Or a complicated problem without a clear-cut solution...

And make a good decision on which way to proceed.

A thread 👇👇👇

There is nobody who can take you by the hand and lead you through a step by step guide to win.

Everybody's journey is different.

The 1,000 important decisions I made to win will look nothing like yours.

This is why success is so hard to teach..

Because there is one skill you need to have to win:

Resourcefulness.

The ability to find what you need and figure out solutions to problems that there are no correct answers to.

Life isn't a textbook.

You can't turn three pages back and look up the answer. You can't ask a teacher.

When you are an entrepreneur there is nobody out there who can help you answer problems except YOU.

And this is the opposite of what most people are used to doing.

High school and college teach you to comply and look up the answer and memorize. Google gives us answers to any question we have at our finger tips.

Except what to do when a problem in your business arises.

Entrepreneurship culture in America is all messed up and it’s a shame.

TechCrunch. Product Hunt. Shark Tank.

It’s all about new ideas. Changing the world. Innovation. 0 to 1. Blue ocean. Venture capital and exits and scalability.

And ITS ALL A LIE.

You ask the average american who a real entrepreneur is they’ll say Jobs, Musk or Zuck.

We read their books and idolize them and hang on their every word.

So the brightest among us think they need a moat. A new idea. Something revolutionary.

Were setting them up for FAILURE.

I took an entrepreneurship course at Cornell in 2011. 24 kids with new ideas. Big plans. Pitch decks looking for series As.

I was #25 with a regular old-fashioned business.

When professors asked me what my differentiator was I didn’t have an answer.

I saw a company out there doing sweaty, non scalable work. They were terrible at it.

I started by trading my time for money. Bought a $1500 cargo van. Used the things I had in my life to make some profit.

I wasn’t trying to educate a customer base.

I wasn’t following my passion.

I didn’t need funding or a network.

I wasn’t competing against brilliant folks from Stanford.

I want trying to prove a concept.

I wasn’t emotionally attached to anything except adding value.

Too many folks set the bar way too high with entrepreneurship. The next million dollar company. The next sexy startup.

Forget all that.

Why isn’t the goal to build something that pays you good $ every year and requires only a few hours of your time per week to make it happen?

When you start a business your goal shouldn't be to get an article in TechCrunch or raise VC $.

It should be to make $1,000 as quickly as possible with as little risk as possible.

Trade your time for money to test an idea.

Speaking of ideas.....

Business ideas are OVERRATED.

The only thing a brand new, world-changing idea will get you is an interesting Twitter bio and very shitty odds of success.

We only hear about the unicorns like Jobs and Musk.

The successful entrepreneurs in your town all have something in common...

They did common things uncommonly well.

They did something that someone else was already doing and they just did it a little bit better.

Young entrepreneurs hear the same advice over and over again...

Change the world. Do something you're passionate about. Thing BIGGER.

That advice is BULLSHIT.

Shoot for the stars and the odds you'll end up with a JOB.

!!Decode/Thread (12/31/20)

Well this could be the LAST Decode/Thread of the Year ...

... Have a Happy and Safe New Years Eve ...

...

1/ A thread on $APY @apyfinance. I believe this could become a major DeFi bluechip, and I’ve been waiting since the 10th Feb for the price to settle before posting this! But it just won’t. So I’ll post it now, but please go slowly if you buy it. It just did a 5x in 2 days!

2/ So the APY platform is a yield farming aggregator that uses a single pool of liquidity and automatic rebalances the portfolio among different strategies to optimise risk adjusted yield revenues. It is basically like having an automated fund manager managing your portfolio.

3/ Today, if for example, you have funds in a yearn vault and you realise another vault launched with better returns, it can cost 100’s of dollars in ETH fees to switch between them. For anyone not investing huge amounts, this makes switching strategies completely unpractical.

4/On APY, with a single deposit, users funds will be spread across multiple yield farming strategies and automatically rebalance over time to optimise risk-adjusted returns. So users won’t need to keep track & switch between strategies (+pay for fees!) to optimise yield over time

5/ The genius step here is that the $APY algorithm will track not only the strategies % yields, but also risk scores taking into account financial, liquidity or smart contract risks, so funds will be re-allocated over time in order to maximise yield but also manage risk.

We all know no-one should profit from antisemitic hate speech right? Well, tell that to the @JewishChron.

In their media pack they advertise that they've run (at least) one event with Nigel Farage as a speaker. The JC is using their connection with an antisemite to make money.

Important bits first. The media pack has a 2020 calendar so it is probably just over a year old. Which means, all of our examples below bar one had been published when they tried to make money from an event with Nigel Farage. They knew what he had said and didn’t care.

You want one example? Here you go. The JC knew and even called him out on it. So why does their press pack, probably made just months after this and made to get people to advertise with them, show off their link to him?

What kind of advertisers do they want??

For anyone skim reading, let us make this very clear, using words from the Campaign Against Antisemitism. @antisemitism.

Ok, so now the attention-grabbing bits are done, lets dig deeper.

Is Nigel actually an antisemite, Geoffrey hears someone ask in terribly bad faith. Well, lets explore his history of antisemitism through the JC’s own articles!