Jeff Schechter: It’s Never too Late to Start a Million Dollar Business

Disclaimer: Transcripts were generated automatically and may contain inaccuracies and errors.

---

Today’s guest Jeff Schecter, AKA Shecky has had the entrepreneurial bug, his entire life. Jeff started for his first business, right out of college. And over the years has developed sales and marketing strategies. That I’ve worked well across many industries and ever the entrepreneur. Jeff has been involved in numerous business ventures.  

And in addition to those and investing Jeff operates a private consulting practice, and he believes that he’s been blessed to have coached hundreds of business owners and help them realize their potential, not just in business, but also in all aspects of life. Thanks for jumping on Jeff. I’m happy to be here.  

So in talking to you offline, you obviously have a ton of experience in real estate. And I like to talk about that briefly, but what fascinates me more of your experience is your marketing background. So maybe we start with real estate question and that might transition us into a broader marketing talk.  

So what. Is the better investment. You know, a lot of people talk about real estate. I think that just about anybody in the business fear has a general understanding of the potential value of real estate. But, but is that something you can compare apples to apples, um, you know, real estate versus an existing business?  

I don’t think so. I mean, you know, obviously I’m an investor too, and I, I think real estate investing is an amazing way to build wealth. You know, if done correctly. Um, however, if you’re a business owner, there’s no better investment than in yourself or in your own business, because the, the potential ROI is so much greater.  

Um, you know, you could go, let’s say you had, for an example, $50,000. And you could buy a little cash flowing rental property from us for that $50,000. Well, it would make you a nice return, but if you add your own business and you said, okay, I’m going to put $50,000 into marketing and advertising and you have a reasonably profitable business, depending on what your margins are like your potential to make.  

Money in that regard is so much greater and it produces more customers and that produces repeat business. So your ROI on that might be 10 times potentially what the ROI is on that, on that investment property. So I would vote for investing in your own business every time. Now has, has your background, did it start as w where did you start in the real estate world and then did that evolve into treating real estate, like a business?  

And I guess what I’m getting at is, have you always had that opinion or maybe 20, 30 years ago? Did you, did, would you have said, yeah, real estate is better than a business. Um, I don’t think I knew as well back then, or wasn’t mature enough to really understand that distinction 20 or 30 years ago. So, um, my foray into real estate is probably like most people just kind of hacking  

So, you know, I’m an old fart in way back in the 1980s. Uh, I did some house hacking and, you know, being a single guy and not having kids and not having those responsibilities. Like, okay. I can live in a construction zone. I, you know, I can, I can live without them a bathroom for a few days, you know, I’ll just go to the hotel down on the freeway.  

And so there were some stuff that I did that, um, allowed me to make some good money live in a property for awhile and eventually flip it and sell it and move on to the next one and do it again. So it wasn’t really a full time gig for me, but I was always. Interested in it. And I was pretty good at the, just sort of having the vision of what a remodel might look like and what might be attractive to the next buyer.  

And so that worked well for me, but that’s kind of how I initially got the real estate bug. I’ll tell you I can do the sweat equity thing. Um, you know, you talk about back when you were younger and doing that live in a construction zone. When my wife and I bought our first house and before we had kids, uh, we didn’t buy like a fixer upper, but there was opportunity for improvement, dude.  

I can’t do it. It’s similar. It’s horrible. When we bought our next house, I bought like a totally finished house. That was twice as large that we need that we could grow into. And I’d never have to touch another house again. I don’t blame me. I’m doing it. Another one right now. Um, I I’ve actually got up really cool.  

Um, 103 year old property that I Oh, wow. Somehow, I got some wild hair out my butt and decided that I was going to bring back all this original woodwork in this album that I found. And it, it, it needed a lot of work and been lived in for 15 years. It had been completely work it up, you know, nothing but a family of raccoons was the only sign of life in this place.  

And it was nowhere even close to livable. I mean, no plumbing. No, HVHC no nothing. And no windows. Just boards. Is that because people stole everything or it was just that all that it never had, you know, central units installed, it never had the central units installed. And it, it was just one of those properties that, you know, every major city has got those, you know, there, there are some urban blight that starts happening and then the neighborhoods start kind of coming around again.  

And this was just one that I happened to find actually riding my bike and it backs up to the Creek. So that was kind of what got me interested. The backyard was really cool. And I just saw, again, wild hair. I just found the property on the tax rolls. I wrote to the owner and I said, Hey, I’m, I’m interested in buying this property.  

And he answered me and it kind of all started from there. And that was, you know, as of the recording of this podcast, that was two and a half years ago. And it wasn’t even until. A year ago. So I had a year and a half of working on it without living in it. Wow. Hey, a mortgage on it, paying hard money costs, all that kind of stuff at the same time that I’m renting another apartment primary residence.  

It is now I’m living in it now. And yeah, it’s probably, I would say 90% finished phase one, but when I moved in a year ago, which was right around Christmas time. I basically had one little bedroom that could kind of sort of work as a bedroom and on the same floor, but not attached over on the other part of the same floor.  

There was one functioning bathroom. That was it like no kitchen? No, no nothing, no. You know, bathtub, like it just was disgusting. Um, but you know, it’s a really cool house now and, uh, I’ve got some pretty good sweaters, equity, and, and I, at least I like to think so. And, uh, but it’s just like this gargantuan pain in the ass  

Yeah, and it, you know, I think there’s an opportunity cost there too. I could see why you don’t want to do it because it requires so much focus and bandwidth and a million different decisions that it takes you away from other stuff that you could be doing that are that’s productive. Exactly. Yeah. All right.  

So let’s see if we can kind of transition into some of this marketing talk. So, um, you know, you’ve developed marketing strategies across different industries. So I want to hear more about what those industries are and maybe some examples of the strategies you develop, but why don’t we start with, you know, how you got from real estate over to the marketing world?  

Yeah. So the interesting story, I, uh, Was working, um, in San Antonio at the time, living in San Antonio and had a flipping business. So eventually I transitioned out of house tacking instead. Hey, you know, I had had another business, very successful business for many years. I sold that off. And I said, Hey, it’d be fun to just kind of do some flipping.  

Okay. Know that market a little bit better. I’ve got some experience with house hacking. And I, I partnered up with another guy who handles small construction company. Yeah. And as we went into business yeah. In 2006, probably the worst time you could have possibly gone into a business like that, but we had no idea what was coming.  

And by 2008, we pretty much had our asses handed to us on a silver platter. And it was. Really, really a challenging period. You know what I mean? My lost everything credit destroyed. Um, yeah, I was pretty down in the dumps and I just said, Hey, you know, I, I’ve got to reinvent myself and versus Oh eight Oh nine and the Internet’s growing like a weed at that point.  

And that was still in a period where there were still some people leery of online shopping, unlike the way things are today. And. I ended up connecting with some people in Austin, just a few miles away from San Antonio. And there was an incredible entrepreneurial and digital marketing community there.  

And so I started going to some of their meetup groups and whatever, and ended up ultimately moving to Austin to work on some projects with some other people. And I would work for cheap just for pennies and just cause I wanted to learn. And I ended up going to work for a buddy of mine that had a Facebook ad agency and I saw.  

That he was spending most of his day with a phone growing out of his year, giving a lot of free advice to his clients. And he had an agency in Oh nine. Yeah. This was probably more like fast forward to 2010, 2011 now. Okay. So I was doing mostly Facebook stuff back then and um, I said, Hey bro, you got.  

There’s a lot of opportunity here to teach people this, rather than just give the information for free. So do you need our consulting division? And he’s like, okay, cool. Shecky, why don’t you start it? So I did. So I had this consulting division under the umbrella of this other company, and we worked on all kinds of stuff.  

I mean, we had people in the weight loss space, we had people in the, um, uh, you know, kind of, uh, nutrition and supplement space. We add people in the, um, um, what, what you call it like the preppers, you know, people that are like, you know, looking for doomsday and how to check yourself. Yeah. And, uh, so then we were across a lot of different things, did some stuff in the real estate space did some stuff in that, you know, kind of the online guru space and helping people market that are teaching marketing, which there’s, there’s a pretty big irony in that too.  

But I got really a great, some really great insights into how that worked because the guy that I worked for is definitely, and still to this day would be considered a guru in the marketing space and. I won’t mention any names. He’s a great guy and he’s got a lot of value to what he offers, but I also got a chance to see behind the scenes of the guru business, which is a lot of smoke and mirrors.  

Okay. Since you said you don’t want to name names, all, avoid it too, but does he have a bald head now? Okay. Cause there was a guy that we have mutual friends with. Oh, I’ll ask you offline. And I was going to, I was going to ask you how, you know, cause I, cause I worked with this gentleman now, now the audience is, is hanging, not knowing what’s going on.  

But I worked with the gentleman about the time you’re talking and he was a guru and I did email and banner ad designs for him. So yeah. And he’s in the guru space. So we’ll talk about that later. All right. So, so you’re working with this guy you learned about smoke and mirrors. Yeah. So I’m, I’m one of the guys that was, um, I was consulting for.  

So basically we are the, you know, Ascension model, right? So we would, we would do a free class. People would come to the class online. It’s like, Hey, you like what you see? You want to learn more stuff. We’re doing an online class. So pay money to us and we’ll put you in a class and we’ll give you homework and do all this stuff and we’ll teach you how to do this marketing stuff.  

And then of course, from there, there was escalation into, Oh, you want some private consulting classes. Great. You can buy up for more. But if you really want to do it, right, you’re going to work with somebody one on one and really build out all your stuff. And so, you know, of course there was a smaller percentage of those students that bought up all the way.  

One of them was this really cool guy out of Michigan named Jack. And so Jack was very big in the network marketing space. And if you know anything about network marketing, you know, that most advertising platforms hate network marketing, right? They don’t, they don’t want anybody going on their site and going like, Hey, look, I need a sponsored 4,000 million people in signed up 23 customers, ask me how.  

Yeah, it just, it just becomes, it’s like use that spreads very, very quickly when you allow that to happen. So Facebook, as an example of nip that stuff in the bud, very early on in terms of their advertising platform and put in a lot of things that would not allow for that to happen. So you had to be pretty crafty in terms of.  

Content and recharging and things like that and how to do that. So I was working with this guy and helping him with his marketing. We really great guy. And we had a really, really nice relationship. Yeah. And one day he died. I want to preface it this by saying that I had pretty much sworn off real estate after that debacle in Oh eight Oh nine.  

I was like, I’m never doing real estate again. This sucks. And he reaches out to me and he goes, Hey man, I’ve been, I’ve been buying some properties in Indianapolis from these guys that are calling themselves like a turnkey operation. And I’ve been getting some pretty good returns. You know, they buy the property, they rehab, they do all the property management and he said, They’re, you know, the I’ve recommending some stuff to friends and family and stuff.  

Well, my other distributors and do you know, I think there’s a business here. Would you take a look at this? And I said, yeah, let’s just get on the phone and brainstorm. I’ll tell you what I, no charge for the call. I mean, you’re a great guy, great student. I have a great relationship with you. Let’s just get on the phone and brainstorm.  

So that’s what we did and I booked an hour and I remember it turned into like, Three or three and a half. It was just an incredibly great conversation. And there were some really great energy. And so afterwards I just, as a courtesy, I typed up all the ideas. That came out of that brainstorming session.  

I’m like, here you go, Jack. Here’s the avatar. We discussed some of the advertising angles, some of the audiences, you know, just basic marketing stuff. And 24 hours later, he writes back and says, okay, let’s do it. You know, and I’m calling them up like, okay dude, WTF, let’s do what. And he’s like, well, let’s just go into business together.  

I’m like, what are you talking about? He goes, well, look, I’ve got this other business. I’m very busy. I make good money. All the stuff that you presented, mrs. Classic marketing here is fantastic, but I can’t do it myself. So I think you and I, I mean, I know you from being on the phone with you and working with you, I respect what you know about business.  

I respect your work ethic. I respect your ethics in general. You’re the kind of guy I’d like to have in my camp as a business partner. So I was like, wow. Let’s and an offer. And ironically, about six weeks earlier. I had had a little, like sort of mini blowout with my band. I wouldn’t even call them employers, but you know, the marketing guys that I was working for and, you know, just like in classic form with small business, they were jacking with my pay and.  

You know, I would bring in these big classes and they would, you know, they would be very profitable and do well, and they would write me nice sized checks it, and everybody was great and happy about it. Um, until they got to a point where they didn’t like writing the nice sized checks, you know, and they started saying and stuff like, well, Shecky our accountant saying we got to make you an employee.  

And I’m like, Yeah, F that, do you know what I mean? Come on. Really? That’s just a matter, you just don’t want to pay me. So like, okay. I get it. Just be honest with me, you know, like stop making up all this bullshit. So anyway, um, we, um, I, at the time that that happened, I just wrote a bunch of things up on my whiteboard in my office at home.  

I was obviously not in my apartment and I just said, Hey, you know what? I want to go back. Fully being in business for myself. I don’t really want to work for anyone else. And I don’t really even want to work under the umbrella of another company’s business. I want to sell a high ticket item. I want to be the best in my space.  

I want to leverage it, my consultative selling skills. I want to leverage my digital marketing skills and Oh, by the way, I don’t want to work alone. I want to have a badass business partner. I didn’t even rent down real estate or anything like, and so when Jack came to me and said, let’s do it. I, in that first day of being in a day is getting that offer.  

I was walking around my apartment and I happened to glance up at the little notes that I had written, you know, a few weeks earlier. And I’m like, Holy crap. I’m looking at this list. It’s like check, check, check, check, like everything I wrote that you wrote that list a couple of weeks earlier, before you talked to Jack, it was about six or eight weeks earlier.  

And, um, and I just put it up there in my little lefty chicken scratching, and I was just large enough that I could barely read it. It was off to the corner and I just kind of forgot about it. I guess. I, you know, in spiritual terms, just put it out there to the universe. And, um, it just fell right in line.  

So that’s how I ended up in the business that I’m in now. Alright. So, so you get into this business. What is this business? So what are you in Jack end up moving forward doing so we just, we just perfected what this, what these other guys were doing. We initially started pedaling their properties. They were what would be called a.  

Turnkey investing company, meaning it’s a service that’s done for investors. So as you know, there’s look at your initial question, should it be business? Should it be real estate? Almost everybody understands that you can build some pretty good wealth by owning real estate. Almost everybody wants to do it, but there’s a lot of knowledge and gurus and things out there that can sometimes put up barriers to even doing that.  

Um, Almost everybody wants to own a good piece of solid performing rental property for longterm cashflow, but they don’t understand how to buy and they don’t understand rehab processes and they don’t understand relationships. And they also don’t live in areas where the numbers to do that are attractive.  

Like you can’t, you can’t buy a little house in Los Angeles right now. And even with the rents, as crazy as they are still come out, there’s no way. I mean, you’re going to pay a million and a half bucks for a piece of crap and you’re going to spend another 400 K fixing it up. Now you’re in it for 1.9 and you’re going to get maybe $3,500 a month in rent.  

The numbers just don’t work. So becomes a big loser. So. Where I live now and now I live in Indianapolis because our, our, our operations are all here and it’s a fabulous city for that kind of rental property. The prices are cheap. The opportunities are large. And the more importantly, the price to rent ratios are very, very attractive for investors.  

So we just decided to make this our base of operations. And we eventually got away from those original suppliers because they were just slumlords and we just. Learned how to do it ourselves. And we eventually developed our own acquisition teams and strategies and developed relationships with both in house and outhouse contractors.  

And we have a whole bunch of teams that work with us and for us, and we’ve developed, uh, we for a little while we even had our own little property management division and that turned out to be not as great as we would have liked. And we recently partnered with just. Amazing. Bad-ass national property management team  

That’s got so many cool initiatives in place. There they’re completely disruptive in the space and they’re doing things for our investors that nobody else can do. And we’ve just put together a system for success for investors, or we take, we do all the hard stuff for them and we just plopped them basically into a performing asset.  

So, what are some of the other areas you had talked about how you’ve developed marketing strategies across different industries? So what have you been able to take from your real estate experience and are there non real estate industries that you’ve applied some of this knowledge to. Well, yeah, back through in my consulting days back when I was working under the other umbrella, now I do far less.  

So because I’m so busy with this business, I’ve got maybe, you know, one or two, three clients that I talk to every once in a while just to check in. Um, but back in those days, like I said, we were across a lot of different industries and although many of them came to us for, uh, Facebook ads specifically.  

One of the things that I learned both the hard way back then and now, even in my real estate business is that it’s really, really dumb to focus on a single pronged approach or even a double pronged approach. We are now very, very big into multichannel type marketing, meaning that I know this is going to sound intimidating for a lot of business owners out there, but you really have to be on six, seven, eight different platforms.  

And really getting your name out there in a number of different ways to really have some effective exposure to your potential audience. And we do both paid advertising and a strong search engine optimization. And we find that the combination of both is a really, really good way to do things. And do you say that businesses need to be on so many platforms just to get in that, that brand reinforcement and those touch points?  

Is that the main goal? Yeah. Yeah. I, I, you know, the touch points, that’s a good word. I was on another podcast the other day, and we were talking about my marketing and this kind of stuff. And, you know, there’s an old adage from the old sales cycles that said, you know, you have to have five to seven touch points and told somebody who’s gonna even remotely be interested in buying from you.  

And I would contend that that is, is very, very old information. I think that was true. But now you have to be in somebody’s face all the time so that when they are ready to buy, you are top of mind. I mean, think about even just a, a small purchase. Like, I don’t know, maybe I’ll just use maybe a crappy example.  

You decide you wanted me, you need a new television. Right. So, I mean, you’re going to go online and search for, you know, 54 inch HGTV, you know, whatever it is that you’re looking for and, you know, four K five K whatever the latest and greatest is nowadays. And you’re just going to get some ideas, but now the smart advertisers have cookied.  

You. And they know that you’re looking for a TV and now all of a sudden, every time you go on Facebook, you’re scrolling through your feed and all you see is ads for TVs. And every time you go to other sites, there’s, you know, banner ads, things like that. So these people are retargeting you there. They understand that you’re ready to buy.  

Now you may not. Some of them may come up and you may go, well, crap. I’m not going to buy this TV for six more months. And. But for whatever reason, you know, you’re, you haven’t cleared your cache. The cookies are still there. Six months later, the place where you’re going to buy from is probably the one that you’ve been exposed to the most, where you said something in your mind, click like, yeah, these guys have pretty good deals.  

You’ve seen their logo a few times, um, or it’s a big box brand or whatever it is. But you remember seeing most of the TVs that I have looked at have been on this particular site. So you may have been on that site 30 or 40 or 50 different times over the course of those few months. It’s not five to seven when you’re finally ready to pull the trigger.  

Yeah. You’re going to maybe compare two or three, but one of those two or three that’s in there is going to be the site where you’ve been on the most times. And you’ve had the most exposure to. Yeah. I had heard the five to seven touch points and I agree it’s probably all there because I think one of the last pieces I read, it was like 27 touch points now.  

And even that was probably five years ago. So yeah, you got to get them and, and, and your audience is on so many different places and in such a good word, I heard at a conference the other day was the micro moments that they’re in and out of Facebook they’re in and out of LinkedIn. And so you don’t have the opportunity.  

To really create a huge relationship. And so you got to get in those multiple smaller touch points. Yeah. Micro-moments is a really good word too. And I feel like, you know, the other thing that we’re all fighting against as marketers is the fact that we’re using terms like micro-moments. So when you look at that, in terms of marketing, the most important currency in marketing is what it’s.  

Attention engine. Yeah. Yeah. That’s like, if you’ve got a way to get somebody’s attention, that’s huge. Cause it’s really hard to do nowadays. There’s just millions of distractions. So let’s talk a little bit about the different types of advertising, because I think that what a lot of business owners get overwhelmed by is it’s just, like you said, there’s, they should be on a lot of platforms, but which platforms and, and what’s the difference in intent and, and.  

What, what I’m curious about this is because I I’ve been an SEO for 13 years. And so I’ve obviously loved the world of search engine optimization, but I’m not one of those guys that says SEO is the only way versus the Facebook gurus that say Facebook is the only way. I think what a lot of people. A lot of business owners get overwhelmed by is, is it’s almost implied that it’s a zero sum game.  

So you have to do Facebook ads or you have to do SEO. Do you agree that it depends on your audience and your business and the different intent that the, the right combination that there is no one right. Answer. A hundred percent agree. Yeah. I don’t think there is a right answer and I think different businesses have different strategies.  

So, you know, obviously somebody that runs a restaurant. And it’s just trying to fill the tables is going to be very, very different type of strategy than say, somebody like me, who is wanting to sell investment properties to end investors. Those are, those are completely different games. And so we may share some cross platforms.  

Um, we don’t, we do very little advertising on Facebook. Um, not to say that investors aren’t there, they are. But most of that is just putting good content in front of someone so that we it’s just more of an awareness piece. Um, but yeah, you know, whereas the restaurant might be doing things a little bit more pointed to a Facebook audience saying like, Hey, here’s a great review that happened for us, that we got.  

Written up in the local paper and somebody might see that in their newsfeed and go, man, I I’ve been meaning to go to go eat at one, two, three main street. You know, it’s like, it puts a seed in your head. Like this is a good place to go eat. So there there’s just different strategies. And, you know, as you know, search engine optimization is great because it’s, you know, when somebody is looking and doing a search.  

That’s when you have somebody that’s probably close to buying right there. They’re actually proactively typing in a search term. So if you can get something in front of them, that can cause them to buy. That’s really fantastic. It’s not the same play as just a content piece. Same thing with Google ad words, you know, it’s there, they’re going there because they’re searching and that’s, I call that almost like the paid version of SEL, because they’re, they’re on the same platform.  

They’re searching by. You’re just, you’re putting an ad in front of them. That’s just higher up. That appears like it’s a search engine result, but it happens to be a paid answer. So again, different strategies for, for different kinds of things, different kinds of businesses and different strategies for different kinds of content.  

All right. So you recently had, or have an upcoming birthday, is that right? Well had one in the summer, but, um, I don’t ever count birthdays anymore cause. I don’t have that many fingers or toes. Well, well, well, the reason I ask is the person that introduced us for the podcast had mentioned that you’re you’re are you 60 now?  

I am now 62 62. Alright. So in your sixties, You obviously have a lot of experience, but you’re still going at it. So how do you maintain like that? I, I even hate to say these words. I made a post yesterday saying, can somebody invent new words for hustle and grind because they’re starting to sound a little douchey, so great.  

But how do you keep the whole hustle and grind mindset? When you know, a lot of other people are getting ready to throw in the towel, um, I don’t have a clear answer to that. I think let’s start with the fact that I’m ridiculously immature. That counts part of it. Um, I, I was never married. Didn’t have any children.  

And, um, got to say that I wouldn’t do it. I’d probably still do it a side comment, but is that like a wink, wink, nudge, listening then, you know, you can find me in the show notes. Um, the, um, no, I, I I’ve always had, I’ve always been an entrepreneur my whole life, so I’ve, it’s been a very, very rollercoaster thing.  

And when Jack. Made me this offer, which was now three and a half years ago, I was in, you know, I think 59 at the time. You know, it’s like when most people are looking to retire and I was like, this is a fantasy classic opportunity and I’m really want to sink my teeth into it. And I’m already, now that we’re.  

Got some good traction with us looking at other businesses in the future too. So I don’t know necessarily what the secret is, but for me, I can’t, I don’t know what it’s like for anybody else. For me, there’s a few things that have gone on. Number one, I’ve been into yoga for a lot of years and I think physically that’s helped keep me rather young.  

And I’ve always been interested in natural health. So from a, from a, a logical standpoint, I, in fact, I just had a physical yesterday and my doctor told me like, you’re basically body-wise, you’re in your early forties. So it’s like, okay, I’m good with that. Um, my numbers were fantastic. Um, So I’m really happy about that because I come from a family.  

That’s certainly had plenty of health challenges and I’ve had plenty of them too. And, um, the other thing is I tend to hang out with a lot of people that are younger than me. I mean, that, that was maybe just luck of the draw, but when I moved to Austin, To go into the, you know, really get deep into the digital marketing.  

We’re all. I mean, all of my cohorts were 20 somethings and some 30 somethings. And, you know, I’m like the old man that they would make fun of. It’s fine. You know, got, thankfully I’ve got a pretty good sense of humor and I can take it, but I just like, you know what, man, that’s, you know, you can give me shit, but it’s like, I’m hanging with you guys, like it’s cool  

You know, I’ve got the same skills that you do now. And I, you know, I can drink just as much coffee as you can and stay up just as late if I need to. I don’t want to. And you know where the difference is going to be as you’re going to go out on a bender and go drinking all night and I’m going to be in bed by 10 o’clock and we’ll see who’s sharper at 8:00 AM tomorrow morning, because it’s going to be me.  

Yeah. And so I guess I’ve had that sort of nice mixture of kind of being very young at heart. And, you know, it seems like all the women that I date are always younger than me. I know women my age here that, and they end up hating me about it’s like, it’s just the way it worked out. You know, you think that D do you think that is because your personality attracts a younger crowd?  

I think that’s part of it. And I think, like I said, I’m just young at heart and I, I stay active and fit and, um, you know, I don’t partially don’t look my age and all that. And so, um, yeah, I just like one of my best buddies in the world and who’s, who’s in Austin who I, uh, we actually worked at the same company, you know, when I was running the whole, um, consulting side of it, he was actually running the agency.  

Uh, we became like best friends. He’s like the greatest guy, like super brilliant guy. And, um, I talked to him all the time. He’s now wow. 36, 37. Like he’s, you know, he’s 22, 23 years younger than me. And we’re like best friends. Like I don’t feel that age difference. So. I don’t know that there’s necessarily any kind of secret, but you know, like take care of yourself, stay on, hanging out with people that are younger than you, you know?  

And then it just, you know, that becomes your normal. Yeah. I like it. All right. So as we get kind of closer to wrapping up, I think this is good segue, you know, being in your sixties is retiring on your rate. So two part question. Um, so the first question is, is retiring on your radar and then what, regardless of your answer to that, but still related for those people that might be in a comparable situation or in their sixties and, uh, or whatever age they want to speed up their retirement with some sort of income property.  

Is, is there a way to make that happen? Okay, well, the answer there, you asked two questions or so let me address them separately. So am I looking towards retirement? The answer is yes, but with my own definition, It is not what you would call the typical American retirement where, you know, I’m going to hang out with some condo in Florida and, you know, just drink my ties.  

Um, that’s not me. Um, I love a good challenge and I love business and I love marketing. So when I look at what we’re doing with our company, I work a lot of hours now and I’m pretty busy cause we’re still building out a lot of the infrastructure of this company. So, you know, it don’t be full of any good real business, takes a few years of really building out that infrastructure in order to really have something solid.  

So I look at that as you know, I’ve got a couple more years of some pretty hard work to get this to a point where I can just be quote unquote, the dude. Yeah. The dude is the guy that shows up. Does the video, does a few podcasts talk to the odd investor. That’s about collects big checks and that’s about it.  

You know, I can pretty much work from anywhere. Uh, I am currently I’m the dude and the CEO and the marketing manager and the construction manager. So it’s like, it’s really, really busy right, right now. But I, I am planning for the day when I’m not wearing all those hats. So is that retirement? No, I’m still a business owner and I still want that, you know, it’s part of my retirement in terms of throwing off cash and giving me the freedom that I want to live my life, the way I want  

That’s what most people are. Defining as retirement or success or whatever, but in, in my world it still means business ownership. Um, yeah, it’s still the kind of thing that allows me to go out and look at other businesses too and say, okay, like, are there other undervalued businesses out there where I don’t have to do everything on the plate, but with my marketing acumen, can I come in and buy a company?  

You know, make the marketing turnaround help that become a really good turnaround story and then flip that business and sell it and make a bunch of money doing that. That to me is like, that’s a fun game challenge. Like I just think that would be a cool thing to do. And so I’m looking at that stuff, but as it relates to your part B of your question with real estate, The answer is absolutely.  

So just like anybody else, me too. And I’m an investor. And as I go out and make money, I’m buying rental properties, just the exact same ones that we’re selling to our investor base. I mean, I’m not any different than our customer and maybe that’s partially what makes our company successful is we are also customers.  

So we’re, we understand that exact same mindset of that investor and those challenges. And yeah, I go out and am always looking for a way to add another property to my portfolio and. How can I create more passive cashflow? You know, I’m thankfully being 62. I also have that advantage of no matter what happens.  

I’m three years away from also being able what to collect social security. So, you know, I’m, you know, I’m not going to say no to that. You know, it’s, I mean, hopefully that becomes a very, very small percentage of my overall income, but heck I’ll take it, you know, I’ve paid into it all my life. Why not? Yeah.  

Yeah. Well, cool. Um, Shecky, Jeff Schecter. I want to give you the opportunity to throw out your contact information if listeners want to learn more. Yeah. So the way to find us is very simply is just called highreturnrealestate.com and, um, there’s contact form on there. You can always find me there  

Um, and we also have a podcast in the real estate investing space, speaking specifically to all the nuances of buy and hold type stuff like what we’re doing. And it’s the same brand as our company. And it’s called. The high return real estate show, which I do with Jack and is found on all the normal podcast channels.  

So, um, either of those two ways there’s contact forms and you can, you can always find me there. All right. Thanks so much, Jeff Schecter, everybody.