Real Estate Exit Strategies & Wealth Secrets with Brad Weimert – EP 199

Justin Donald: What's up, Brad? Good to have you on the show again.

 

Brad Weimert: Thanks, man. So many things. So many things.

 

Justin Donald: Yeah. Well, we were just hanging out off-stage, off-air, chatting about life and it's always fun to do an episode with you or hanging out with you and talking about life, doing deals. And by the way, very few people have ever been like a two-time guest here. And I'm excited to be able to do this for a second time here because we got into a little bit about you, the company, kind of all that stuff round one but this time I feel like there are so many other avenues to go on and so many deals that you and I have partnered on together that I think it'd be fun to talk about.

 

Brad Weimert: I love it, man. Well, I feel privileged to be on a second time. And the only reason that I started recording things in general in my life that turned into the Beyond A Million podcast eventually was because I had so many great conversations with friends, people like you, you specifically, that I realized like I didn't even have an ambition of a podcast. I just wanted to capture the conversations. And we actually have a recorded conversation from years ago pre-podcast for both of us.

 

Justin Donald: That's right.

 

Brad Weimert: That fit into that bucket. I probably recorded 15 different things before I ever decided on a podcast.

 

Justin Donald: So fun. I love it. Well, we're sitting in your studio but it's kind of funny because it's kind of both of our studios. I just don't really sit in often because I do most of my interviews via Riverside and people in different locations but I love the feel of in-person.

 

Brad Weimert: I do too. There's a distinctly different… I was talking earlier today with somebody about this but it's actually Daven Michaels who we're going to roll out an episode with him on Beyond A Million. He’s a long time…

 

Justin Donald: I love Daven.

 

Brad Weimert: You love Daven? Awesome.

 

Justin Donald: Yeah. Fantastic. I believe you introduced us in the first place. And then he and I have gone down a lot of rabbit holes on tax strategy and crypto and you name it.

 

Brad Weimert: I love that, man. Yeah. So, he's a long-time friend, long-time client but he records all of his stuff in ABC studio so like full production. Yeah. Big stage. And there's something unique about that but it's also kind of a high-pressure, inauthentic environment, right? It's a crafted environment. And the remote is super low-key but it doesn't have the same gravitas as being in person. It also doesn't have the same connection. And so, the small studio setup, I just feel like you kind of get the best of both worlds. It forces you to be present and beyond and you get the full type of communication where it's not just visual over Zoom.

 

Justin Donald: Totally. And also, the last time, I mean, I guess we just recorded an episode on your podcast, Beyond A Million, but the time before that, we got into some champagne, some wine, some bourbon. So, it's fun to be able to cheers glasses and just chill out and talk about life.

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah. For clarity, we did not drink all of those three things in the same episode.

 

Justin Donald: Yeah. Separate recordings. That's probably good to clarify. Well done. Well done. Well, I'm so excited that you are now part of the Lifestyle Investor Mastermind. And I'm curious about I want to get into your story and where your business is but I also think it's fun that the last time we spoke, you were on the outside looking in and you had attended some events, you had met a ton of the people. I would host little meetups. And I'm always like, “Brad, come to this or come meet these people.” But it's cool that you're officially a member now. And I'm curious, you know, I know you're newer so you haven't really gotten a chance to dive in a ton yet, but you have a little bit and you've gotten access to the group and some of the educational sessions and some of the deal. So, I'm curious, your thoughts?

 

Brad Weimert: Well, as you said, I have a unique perspective, and it's not really fair for me to take it all with a grain of salt. One is that I have not participated much at all since I've been actually a member. And, two, one of the reasons that I wasn't a member previously is we're close friends, so it's like, "Am I really going to get any extra benefit?” Because a big part of these groups for me is the network, right? It's being connected to people. And we do dinner and drinks and connect with other people and introduce people to each other all the time. So, I thought, "Okay. What's the point, really?” But I want to highlight two things about the group. One is your operator, Ryan Casey, goes out of his way to try to get me to get as much as possible out of the group.

 

Justin Donald: I love that.

 

Brad Weimert: That, in and of itself, is a really valuable asset. The other and it's hard to identify this with you, and I can't say that I necessarily have noticed, but I will say that a philosophy that I've adopted is I do not want to get the buddy hookup from people. I want to pay my friends to deliver the service that they always deliver, not ask for a discount. And the reason for that is I want them to prioritize the service just like they would with any other person, and maybe more because I'm a friend, but I don't want a discounted version of the service. And so, I think that you have to look at incentives. And even though I believe that you would keep making the introductions, we'd still hang out. We still have dinners. Being a part of the group aligns incentives, and so I like that too.

 

Justin Donald: Oh, that's cool. Well, it's just been fun having you in the group because now any event that we do, you're there, which is a blast. And now when I reference someone, "Oh, you got to meet this person,” you're like, "Oh, yeah, we actually just connected.” So, it's neat seeing my world and your world kind of converge in terms of network, people, all the kind of cool stuff that we're each up to, and the people that can help support that work, which is fun. So, we're sitting in an office space that you run Easy Pay Direct out of. It's an office building that you and I own together. With this really cool studio that you've done an incredible job building that I need to use more clearly. But you have some really fun plans for this area.

 

I think one of your gifts, Brad, is you can future-pace things well. You can see what is going to come. I've said that I feel like a lot of the success that I've had in investing and in life is that I have seen some early trends before they were actually mainstream, such as mobile home park investing, single-family home rentals as an asset class before it was an asset class and building a business out of there, getting into AI early, getting into robotics early, some of those things. And there's cannabis investing early. But you also have an eye for the future and trends. And specifically, here in Austin, I think you've got a great eye for like what areas are going to be up and coming that maybe aren't yet or on the rise or in time. It only makes sense that this would be a certain area be a good area even though aesthetically it doesn't look that way. And so, I'd love to hear your thoughts about where we are right now in Rosewood.

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I mean, I think there's the known adage of location, location, location with real estate. And I think that you can correct a lot of mistakes in real estate, a lot of missteps by being in a good location. Right now, Austin is in a sort of depressed period, as most of the country is, from a growth perspective. And some of that is timeline, some of it's just interest rates, I think. But when I initially moved to Austin, I was very committed to being immediately downtown. And the reason for that was I was sure that downtown would keep growing. And sure enough, the number of cranes in the air in Austin, even through this period…

 

Justin Donald: It’s crazy.

 

Brad Weimert: It's wild. And if you look at…

 

Justin Donald: You've got like 15 downtown right now as we speak, and that's just downtown. That's not even on UT’s campus. I mean, it's nuts.

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I have seven on my street downtown on Rainey. So, all these towers are going up, and the writing was on the wall for that years ago. So, it's not like these towers got planned last year or two years ago, right? This stuff was the land was assembled a decade ago. They went through all the zoning and permitting issues. Then they waited, they raised money, and then they built, and they started to build. So, downtown, it was very clear to me that with the people coming in, anything that was four stories or under was going to get knocked down and go vertical. So, I made some real estate plays then around that.

 

What I was hesitant to do was to buy things outside of the immediate downtown area. And that served me very well but things outside of downtown also grew. And I think that through COVID, for example, it's a different asset class, right? So, a lot of A-Class commercial went up downtown. Who knows what's going to happen with that, short run and long run? And I think when you move out of the city center, you start to get exposed to other things. And so, Rosewood is sort of really close East side. We’re two blocks from Franklin Barbecue, which is this iconic barbecue place in Austin. There's a line that starts there at 8 a.m. every day. So, I think, generally speaking, we're kind of in this 80% of the way through gentrification, which creates a safe play for people without living in an area that's really mixed with different financial classes.

 

Justin Donald: Yeah, I love that. And this location is a really cool location. The office building that we're in is kind of like it's deep and the lot is deep. But you've been scooping up other lots right here that are tied to that are parceled right next to this lot with an idea or a play of something much bigger. Maybe it's a boutique hotel. Maybe it's some sort of bigger play for office space or whatever it is. But it could be multifamily because there's right across the street a huge multi-family development. So, tons of opportunity. But it's interesting because even a few years ago when we were looking at this area, even just two years ago, it did not aesthetically look that great but you're so close to downtown, it just makes sense that it's going to be a thing.

 

But now all of a sudden, we got these killer restaurants popping up. You got PAPERBOY right over here. You've got Hillside Farmacy right over here. I mean, just tons of restaurants popping up left and right all around here. So, I think you saw this, but you've done something really unique with previous office spaces, and this one is no different. You've got a plan. So, you're here. You run your business here. At some point in time, you're going to outgrow this space and/or the purpose of this space, the use of the space, you can capitalize on it greater, tear this down, build something, build four or five or six stories, whatever is allowed here. New zoning laws are going to kind of help with that. So, I'd love to hear some of your thoughts long term on what this could be.

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah. So, for starters, a friend and client that I had that I interviewed a few weeks ago or a few months ago, Cody Sperber, said, “You own a business for the real estate, not for the business.” And I don't absolutely agree with that but I absolutely agree that if you own the real estate under the business, it is at a minimum for savings account. And at max, it can be a huge wealth lever. And you have to pay somebody anyway if you're going to have an office. So, I love the idea of owning the real estate. The other part of it is that with most things that I do in life, I'm looking at multiple exit strategies. I'm looking at sort of what if it all hits the fan, what are the likely scenarios there, and what are the variance of success in an exit.

 

And on real estate, there are tons of different options, right? There's holding or selling but then there's holding and long-term renting. There's holding and short-term renting. There's holding and repurposing the land and using it for something else. And then selling, you can sell it as these different things, right? If it's raw land, for example, you could sell the raw land immediately. You could build a spec home. You could just build a home and then sell it with a home. And that would be a different thing. You could rezone the land. That would be a different thing, right? And so, you've got all these options that you should look at and some make more sense than others in these environments.

 

So, the initial plan with the office building, it's about 18,000 square feet, the lot. The building is 4,300 or something. Small building. And the initial plan was because the lot is so big was to knock it down and build a bigger office building, as you know, because you own part of it.

 

Justin Donald: That's right.

 

Brad Weimert: Despite the fact that you've never been here.

 

Justin Donald: But I have good friends like Hans Box that rents out an office here for his company. I feel great about that.

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I love it.

 

Justin Donald: Our mutual friend, David Lawver, is here. He's brilliant in so many ways, especially on the financial front. So, it's great having people. And then coming in today, I get a chance to see all my friends.

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I love it. I love it.

 

Justin Donald: But good reminder, I need to come in more.

 

Brad Weimert: You should. Yeah. You should. You're here later this week, too.

 

Justin Donald: I am.

 

Brad Weimert: I love it. So, for me, that was the initial plan was, well, at a minimum, I look at, okay, we can't redevelop for some reason or it doesn't happen, we keep it. But we had a pretty strong charge towards we're going to buy it. We're going to systematically redevelop. As we got into looking at the bigger picture, it just became a tight lot and we couldn't put that much more space on it because of parking requirements, etcetera. And then a number of things happened but I started looking at, well, what if I owned more space around it? What if it wasn't just this lot? How would that change things? And as life is, there were other levers, other reasons for it. Not levers. There’s just other reasons that I wanted to do it.

 

And the big one was that I want to see my folks more. And as life progresses, you have less of an opportunity and window to spend time with the people you care about, specifically your parents. I'm building a house across town but I didn't want to wait for the house to be done to have them present. And so, I started thinking, "Well, how do I get them here? And how do I get them to be here for longer periods of time?” And for me, personally, not everybody feels this way about their parents, but for me personally, I want them to be as close to me as possible when they're in town. And it's because I actually want to spend time with them but I want to do it in a way that doesn't feel like it's taking away from the rest of my life.

 

So, those sort of net moments, no extra time moments where I just see them in the morning or I just see them in the afternoon or like I slide some minutes in, in the middle of the day, that's how I want that to be in my life. And so, they can either live with me and I don't have space for that in my current place and there are four dogs or I can have, and I couldn't wait for this house to be built, or I could buy the property immediately next to the office and have them stay there. So, I spent many months sending letters to the house next to the office, which is about a 9,000-square-foot lot and a little 1,200-square-foot house. And eventually, over the course of time, there's a longer story here, but I managed to buy that property and then quickly gutted it. And now it's cleaned up and ready to go. It's main house/guest house.

 

But as I said, I'm looking at kind of what the exit paths are there, and one is I've got the immediate use case for my parents to stay there. When they're not there, and now I own a house immediately next to the office building for my staff to stay when the out-of-town staff is in. When I'm not doing either of those, I can short-term rent it. So, I've got immediate utilization there. But now I've got more footprint that allows for a different development on the existing office building and that's also a dynamic that had to be looked at when I was doing that. So, that in and of itself kind of opened the door to, "Oh, instead of us being able to redevelop and put an office building here, now I can put more space.” The parking requirements also happened to change in Austin. So, we can just put a lot more on because I own a little bit more land now.

 

Justin Donald: So, talk about some of the changes to the code that was just recently passed. And in fact, this is going to be hot off the press. I mean, most people that I talked to, even in Austin, even in real estate, aren't even aware of these new changes. But these are very favorable to real estate investors, very favorable to people like us that have capital that we want to figure out where and how to deploy. And I really think long term it's going to raise the value of the lots here as people kind of figure out this little hack.

 

Brad Weimert: I know. I'm hesitant to tell people because…

 

Justin Donald: Well, we don't have to get into it.

 

Brad Weimert: I don't want the competition. No. I think the real answer to that is that there is no scarcity. There are roughly 25,000 lots in Austin that have sold for $450,000 to $750,000. And when I say lots I mean single-family homes all over Austin. So, there's a huge space for this. But Austin did a couple of things with their zoning adjustments. And the entire time I've been here for ten years, they've gone through iteration after iteration after iteration of trying to get the code right. And there's always friction. There's always people that hate it. There are always by-products that don't work. It's like trying to find the right incentive structure. There's going to be nasty byproducts, always.

 

Two big things happened, though, that are relevant in the residential space. The first is that I don't know if it's 100% but they basically got rid of parking requirements on residential lots. That's a crazy shift. And it allows for more density. It's a very forward-thinking shift. If you are over the age of 35 and probably if you're under, you have been to an office building or a retail location where you went to go park and there was no parking and it was super inconvenient, or you went to somebody's house and there was nowhere to park on the street, and it's inconvenient. And I guess it applies to all ages but I single out that age group because those are the car drivers, generally speaking.

 

It's forward-thinking because we're not all going to drive cars in the future. And so, the need for the parking is going to disappear. And we might have some short-term negative impacts from that but I think long run it's a really good play. The other thing that they did is really leaning in the direction of increasing density, and that is that I believe it's any lot that's over 6,000 square feet or in that ballpark. Previously, the rule was that you could have a main house and what they call an ADU, an additional dwelling unit, or a guest house. And they had specs on how big that could be. And generally, it was like 1,100 square feet was the cap on it. Main house, little 1,100 square foot guest house.

 

The change gets rid of that square footage requirement. It reorients the whole thing and says now you're allowed to have three buildings on a lot. And instead of mandating the size of any of them. It's three buildings total and the coverage is 65% of the square footage. So, if you have a 6,000-square-foot lot, that's something like 4,200 buildable square feet. That math might be totally wrong but something like that. The big thing here is that the value of the land, the value of the lots in what people are purchasing per square foot because of this code change is now in misalignment. So, now there is an arbitrage to come in and fix that and that's a big opportunity for investors.

 

Justin Donald: Yeah. So, you're getting land that can produce more income than what the price is showing in value. So, you can come in, buy something for less than it's actually worth without a whole lot of competition because the market hasn't caught up and then you can make it a higher income producing piece of real estate strictly based on the fact that you can have three structures on it or three rentals on it makes it more valuable. So, it's more valuable right out of the gates, right when you purchase it. But you can actually now create even more income-producing assets that are going to drive that cash flow, which is nice. And then one other code change is in certain areas where you are only able to have four stories, you're allowed to add that fifth story, right?

 

So, like on South Congress with our new friend, Rob, who owns a ton of the hotels in real estate there, they're now able to, and as they do their redevelopment, that I don't think we can get into a lot of detail. I think it's going to be really cool kind of like Music Lane but even cooler, even sleeker. He says more mystery to it.

 

Brad Weimert: I'm trying to get him to build a tunnel from his property to my house over there.

 

Justin Donald: Well, that would be really cool because you own a couple of lots right over there, which is so nice.

 

Brad Weimert: Immediately next to the property. Yeah.

 

Justin Donald: But he said that they'll be able to add a story to each of theirs.

 

Brad Weimert: I didn't know that.

 

Justin Donald: So, I mean, yeah, this guy owns…

 

Brad Weimert: Congress.

Justin Donald: Yeah. Period. Like, I mean, many blocks of South Congress, it’s very cool, and some historic hotels. Yeah, so that’ll be fun as that project gets underway. I mean, he even said, “Hey, we think the Lifestyle Investor group could be a perfect partner for a lot of what we’re doing.” So, I’m like, “Hey, let’s talk about this. In 18 months, when the trolley is being added, that’s when they’re going to start that phase of development.” So, pretty cool.

 

Brad Weimert: This is why we do dinners with cool people.

 

Justin Donald: That’s right, that’s right. And by the way, this has all kind of started, actually, from the mastermind from Doug Deaton, who we do a lot of work with and think highly of and…

 

Brad Weimert: Full cycle.

 

Justin Donald: Full cycle. I introduced you to Doug. Doug and you hung out. You went to an event, met him and another guy who actually reached out when you get together with him as well. We went and did dinner. You set up a dinner, and then, subsequently, followed up with additional meetings and hanging out. I think there’s going to be a lot of business to be had here.

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I love it. I love it.

 

Justin Donald: This is life. This is what I love, like, doing deals, doing life. Just so much fun.

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah. No question about it.

 

Justin Donald: I do want to also highlight one other thing. So, we’re talking about this office space, but I think you hit a home run. Maybe we even call it a grand slam on your last office space. So, instead of just renting space, you have done a good job in these last couple of buying the real estate, buying the building and in this last, not this current office, but the office before that, because the one before that, you rented, right? So, this past one, you ended up having a piece of a building on the east side of downtown.

 

Brad Weimert: Right downtown. So, inside of the central business district.

 

Justin Donald: So, killer location. But I think you got good pricing because the area wasn’t maybe the creme de la creme of the downtown, but it’s not bad. I mean, it’s right next to Eddie V’s.

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I know I got crushed on pricing.

 

Justin Donald: Oh, you did, okay.

 

Brad Weimert: I overpaid.

 

Justin Donald: You overpaid. Okay, well, based on the end result, it wasn’t an overpayment. But I guess I was under the impression that maybe you had finagled a good deal, but neither here nor there. Talk about that because getting and building it out, you spent a ton of money on the build out, and it looked great. You were able to host a bunch of events there because you had cool hangout area, but then you started snatching up little condos in this building along the way and getting some sort of majority ownership. So, talk about– I mean, it’s minority ownership, but enough to actually be able to sway things from a vote standpoint.

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Yeah, so there’s a little element that I’ll omit because I have to, but the– I don’t know when I started respecting NDAs, but maybe I’ll respect this one. The first thing I want to point out is you said I was renting before that, and I think that that’s really important because I was renting before it on either month to month or annual leases. I was doing that because I did not want to put myself in a position that would get in the way when or if I wanted to buy something. And that’s really important. But I think that that lesson is a general framework to live by, because there are lots of things that people do, and they don’t realize that it’s conditioning you to miss other opportunities.

 

And for people in college, it’s picking the wrong path. Sometimes it’s getting the wrong white-collar job and getting golden handcuffs. Sometimes it’s getting a blue-collar job and not realizing that when you wanted to paint cars when you were 18, it was going to lock you into something at 25, right? And I think it’s really important to be thoughtful about those things and kind of give yourself a way out if you need it. So, I was renting and I rented probably four offices while I looked for an office building. And how many realtors do you think told me that I wasn’t going to find an office building in my price range right in the central business district of Boston?

 

Justin Donald: Tons. All of them, yeah.

 

Brad Weimert: All of them. 100%. All right. And so, they kept trying to show me stuff in East Austin or North or South, and they’re like, “Nah, you’re really never going to find something like this.” Okay. And ultimately, I bought this little tiny building that was 2,000 square feet. It was part of the condo regime. So, there was a big, probably a 40-unit condo building, and then this standalone building that was two stories, that was the only thing on this half block zoned as commercial. And then the main office building was residence. This was owner’s commercial. The main building was selling at call it 300 bucks a foot at the time. My office, the person selling it wanted 450 a foot.

 

Justin Donald: Geez.

 

Brad Weimert: Right. And so, way “overpriced” for market. But there are also no comps because this thing was zoned commercial. So, what is the value of real estate? Whatever people will pay. And I was willing to pay it because when I looked at the exit, I thought, okay, well, first and foremost, as I mentioned before, this is a three-story condo building. This one’s two that I’m buying. The likelihood of a developer coming in and knocking this thing down is really high. And if they don’t do it now during this cycle, we’ll hit a recession because the last boom was really long, right? So, everybody was waiting for this thing to collapse. And I was like, if we don’t hit it in this cycle, I’m totally comfortable owning a building immediately downtown until the next cycle. I own it for six, seven, eight years, and then I deal with it then.

 

And then COVID hit. And so, there were offers from a developer that were on the table. COVID hit, they all went away. And when the economy started to come back up from that and the craze behind COVID started to dissipate, we got another offer. And there’s a longer version of this. But when I saw the writing on the wall, I started aggressively pursuing other units in the main condo complex.

 

Justin Donald: Smart. I love it. That’s another example of how you saw what was going to happen in the future. You’re able to kind of future pace and say, “Hey, someone’s going to redevelop this.” So, I love this. This is another thing where it, again, proves the point that you see things further out than what they are today, which has led to a lot of success for you.

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah. And do the math, like I think that there’s a difference between pure speculation and objective analysis when you’re looking at a speculative investment, right? So, the objective analysis here was, if I hold this thing for five, six, seven, eight years, what’s the damage from the holding costs? And if, let’s say, I buy a couple of units and it doesn’t sell, I can rent it for under market, bleed a little bit, and ride that out over six, seven, eight years, and then it will sell and, net-net, I’m still ahead, or net-net, I barely lost or whatever it is, right? But I did look at that.

 

Yeah, and ultimately, that gave me enough, it gave me 11% of the vote in the ultimate sale. And in this condo regime, you needed 80% to sell. So, you needed supermajority to sell. And that 11% was big because it came down to a couple of people who didn’t want to sell. And whether I wanted to sell or not, controlling the vote, which gave me some leverage. But yeah, it was a good– we talked about this actually when we were recording the Beyond a Million episode that’s going to drop here. And you said your line, which I thought was great, was wealth creation often comes from a singular focus, but wealth management and growth comes from distribution. And this was one of these singular hits that provided a chunk of cash that could be leveraged into other things.

 

Justin Donald: Yeah, and I know you can’t talk about what the return was, but this was a huge return. I mean, I remember you sunk like 200,000 or 250,000 into just building out a really cool office. And then just in a couple of years period of time, you were able to sell that thing for a real nice profit. So, well done.

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah. It was a, yeah, multimillion exit. And the other thing about it, dumping a bunch of money into a property like that, a lot of people have this mentality of, I don’t want to spend money on this because I’m going to knock it down, or because I’m going to sell it, or because I’m only here for X period of time. And you have this beautiful frame of basic passive income, lifestyle passive income, or surplus. And I think that when you’re in the later stages and even when you’re in the former, you have to look at the return on your lifestyle as well.

 

Justin Donald: Yeah, 100%.

 

Brad Weimert: And I don’t need to eke out an extra point or two on the return. If it goes from a, in this case, like 300% return instead of 312%, or in a normal investment, if it goes from 14 down to 12, okay, if I got to have a doper place in the meantime.

 

Justin Donald: That’s right.

 

Brad Weimert: You know?

 

Justin Donald: Yeah, that’s cool. I love that. Well, and all of this, all of your original capital came from you deciding to start a business in what I have to imagine at one point in time was a crowded space in the credit card processing sector, but you have emerged victoriously as one of the go-to companies, one of the go-to guys, I mean, a bunch of these groups. And anytime someone says something, I want to be real quick to be like, “Oh, my friend Brad owns Easy Pay Direct.” But there are so many times where someone actually beats me to the punch. So, I mean, you have so many raving fans that are out there.

 

And by the way, even from a clientele standpoint, you’ve helped with launches with Tony Robbins and Grant Cardone and Dean Graziosi and, I mean, just tons of big names, Cole Gordon. But one of the things I think differentiates you is your customer service, your client appreciation. I’d love for you to talk through a little bit about your industry and also, what makes you guys unique, because anyone who’s an entrepreneur listening should be considering working with you. And I also say like, your fees are better than any other group out there. You look at Stripe, I mean, you guys are a world, a whole different class. You’re not the size that they are. But because of that, you’re more nimble and you can do things that they can’t do. And from a fee standpoint, you guys win.

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I appreciate that. I can tell you kind of from a business philosophy perspective, what’s changed over the years, because I think that that’s where my head is right now. Anybody listening that has a business, Stripe is not doing you any favors when it comes to fees, at all. So, it’s a crowded space, but it’s a crowded space with low barriers to entry. And what that produces in any given vertical are sh*tty business people if the barrier to entry is low. And it means that to be good, you just need to be better.

 

And so, good customer service, good tech, good communication are at the core of that. I would be remiss to not at least mention that the core issue, if you are somebody like yourself that does live events, creates content, coaching, consulting, Stripe verbally doesn’t want to do that type of business. And they auto approve accounts so they frequently don’t know that you have that type of business. So, if you Google Stripe held my money or Stripe closed my account…

 

Justin Donald: There’s thousands.

 

Brad Weimert: Millions.

 

Justin Donald: Maybe millions. Yeah, I mean, it’s just crazy.

 

Brad Weimert: It’s unbelievable. But it’s a byproduct of the business model. And Stripe’s a great product. It’s just not for every industry. And if you’re doing e-com or content creation or coaching or just a whole variety of different things, it’s not optimal. And so, reducing the likelihood of getting closed, reducing your costs, increasing the amount of transactions that get approved, those are all things that Easy Pay Direct facilitates. As the business evolved, my perspective changed. And we were talking a little bit about incentives earlier, and I want to get back to that because we weren’t talking about it on your podcast.

 

But we look at everything internally through the lens of our client experience. So, the way that we attempt to be better in addition to technology is to look at the lens of A to Z. What is the client’s experience in working with us? And when we train people, internally, we look at the client experience end to end, and then we look at the staff experience behind it, and we say, “Okay, what is each staff’s responsibility in each role? And how does it map directly to the client experience that we’re trying to facilitate?” And over time, we’ve gone through that over and over and over and over to see where we can kind of get the gunk out of the transitional items to make that a smoother process. And it’s never ending, as you would imagine. But that’s the core focus now.

 

And what you brought up that was good is inside of the Lifestyle Investor group, you are very focused on your staff’s incentive structure. And so, sort of thinking about that all the time, like, what is the best incentive structure? How do you get your team to win? And this was a significant shift in my mentality in business because like you, I grew up in commission-only sales. And so, for me, the game was, how do I make more, right? How do I do better? And it was a team of one, really.

 

And you quickly got into management. I spent many years just selling, and then struggling through figuring out management. But in the more recent years, sort of in my head, what I keep thinking is, how do I leverage the profit and how do I get the staff rich? Because that’s the best lever of time is, if their incentives are in alignment to make a lot more money, they’re going to do more work to do it.

 

Justin Donald: That’s right.

 

Brad Weimert: And I don’t believe in altruism. Like, I’m not doing it to be a nice guy. I mean, I could just keep all the money. But I’m doing it because I think it creates the biggest win-win for everybody.

 

Justin Donald: That’s right. They win. And if you can incentivize someone to win and you say, “Hey, here’s a result we need,” I’m really less concerned how you get there. Do it morally, ethically, you will have people that go the extra mile. And I think that’s it. That’s what you want is the people that are going to go the extra mile, and then they benefit from that. So, I love that.

 

I’m curious, so you have a podcast. We were talking about how– one of the last times we were together on air, I guess two times ago, neither of us even had a podcast. So, how has content creation played a role for you and for the strategy for your business, for Easy Pay Direct? Having Beyond a Million as a podcast, I mean, your viewership, your listenership has grown tremendously. I’m curious what that looks like.

 

Brad Weimert: Well, you mentioned two times ago and that was our hidden episode, which is nowhere to be found. And you’ll appreciate this and, yeah, I think your group will. So, honestly, it started because we were, I think I mentioned this, but I just wanted to record good conversations. And it started because it was December 27th and it was the first year that I had a significant tax liability. And I thought, what do I do? And of course, December 27th is not the time to be tax planning, though you and I did some of this last year.

 

Justin Donald: Yes, yes.

 

Brad Weimert: Almost embarrassing.

 

Justin Donald: It is really hard, just for the record, when you wait until the last minute. The best tax planning you can do is before it happens, give yourself a runway of a full year. Especially those of you that are going to sell your company, it is not sufficient to do your tax planning after the sale, right? It needs to happen well before the sale. But for a lot of people, they’re so busy with work and they’re like, “Oh, yeah, by the way, I’ve got a week or three days or five days and busy days and holidays and I got to figure out this tax thing.”

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Yeah, so…

 

Justin Donald: Luckily, we have solutions for that too, but it puts a little bit of stress on things.

 

Brad Weimert: It does. And those solutions frequently involve spending money.

 

Justin Donald: Oh, yeah.

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah. So, we’ll leave the tax advice for another episode. But I had this problem and I was talking to people, and somebody was like, “Well, the last thing that you should do is just go buy the sh*t that you might otherwise buy.” And you can rationalize it a little bit better. And that’s terrible tax planning advice, but it is true that at least you don’t pay tax on that thing if it’s a write-off. So, I decided that I was going to build a studio in the office, and it was in that last two-story office building. I closed off a stairwell to add a little more floor space and built this little studio. But I did it just because in my head, I was like, I just want to capture these conversations. No intention.

 

And then as I started doing it, I thought, okay, well, I want better, I want to capture a bunch of really good conversations. And the reason I wanted to do it was because I wanted to create more content for, as these evolve, more content to get in front of the Easy Pay Direct potential clients. From a follow-up sequence perspective, you can only say, “Hey, do you want a merchant account? Hey, but really, do you want a merchant account?” So many times, before people opt out, and it’s just not valuable to keep saying that. So, I wanted to get other business content in front of them.

 

So, I started recording content with friends around other business topics – sales, marketing, operations, technology, and taxation. And we got some great content. Then I realized it’s harder to get people on a show, or it’s harder to get people to record things when it’s totally self-serving. So, we launched the podcast largely because it was easier to get people on the show. But it was still all just about creating content for the business. You go up one more level. I started to realize, as the flywheel started spinning, that it was a really good client acquisition mechanism, right? It’s easier to ask somebody to be on a podcast than it is to reach out to them cold and say, “Hey, do you want to be a client? Can I sell you something?” So, it was an authentic, organic way to build a relationship with our target market. And that was kind of lever number two, create content, then client acquisition.

 

And then the third arm that sort of Beyond a Million serves for Easy Pay Direct is what I think most people think about from a content production perspective. And that’s top of funnel, right? That’s getting tons of eyeballs on you, on your stuff that, ultimately, you’re going to funnel back into a larger client acquisition strategy. But for anybody that’s gone down this road, it’s a long path, right?

 

Justin Donald: It takes time.

 

Brad Weimert: It takes a lot of time.

 

Justin Donald: It takes money. I mean, it doesn’t just happen overnight. In many cases, you got to be 100 episodes deep. You got to really nurture that network.

 

Brad Weimert: I think for almost everybody, that’s the case. And they’re the select few that just blow up and make it happen fast or they seem to. But for most people, you’re right. It’s 100 episodes. It’s longer. I think Hal was at, like, Episode 150 or something. I mean, he had done something like 150 podcast episodes. I think other people’s before Miracle Morning got any traction.

 

Justin Donald: Wow.

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah.

 

Justin Donald: Yeah, well, he put in the time, there’s no doubt about that. And it’s kind of cool to see that if you put in the time, even though it may be delayed, you can have this huge success. And that is also true of, I believe it’s Atomic Habits, James Clear’s book, where it really didn’t have much traction for years. And then all of a sudden, in the end of year two or the beginning of year three, I think is when it really took off for him. I just heard that from a friend here recently.

 

Brad Weimert: Well, the interesting thing about James Clear is that, unlike Hal, he had a very strategic plan about creating a perennial seller. So, I’ve listened to him get interviewed around this topic. And he deliberately wanted to create a book that would be notable, that could be shared and could be reused, and he was looking for things that would create virality in sales. Hal learned some of these lessons afterwards. Hal was sort of bewildered by why the Miracle Morning was so successful.

 

And we’ve talked about it quite a bit at this point, but he’s given a talk about the lessons he learned from doing it, and they basically are the same lessons. He was like, “Oh, sh*t, I did this accidentally,” and created this thing that built habits into people’s lives that they could get indoctrinated into, that they felt good about sharing where they saw progress. It’s interesting.

 

Justin Donald: Yeah. And you can see results right away, which is huge. Well, this has been just an amazing episode. It’s always a blast getting time with you, Brad. Where can people learn more about you and learn more about Easy Pay Direct? And again, I just want to go on record and say I highly, highly, highly endorse you, Easy Pay Direct, your customer service, everything that you guys do. And for anyone that is an entrepreneur or has a side gig, a side hustle, or whatever, all of you should consider Brad.

 

Brad Weimert: Appreciate that, man. EasyPayDirect.com, obviously, BeyondaMillion.com, or you can find us on all the podcast channels, as well as the YouTube channel if you want to watch it, and Brad Weimert on all the socials. So, Instagram is me being Brad. And then, there’s lots of Beyond a Million stuff all over.

 

Justin Donald: I love it. That’s awesome. Well, this has been a blast. I love ending every episode asking our audience one simple question. So, the question is, what is one step you can take today to move towards financial freedom, to take a step in the direction of living life on your terms, so not like most people do, living a life by default, but rather a life by design. So, pick something that Brad said today, implement it immediately. And we’ll catch you next week.