Starting & Scaling a $650M Real Estate Empire with Brandon Turner – EP 100

Interview with Brandon Turner

Starting & Scaling a $650M Real Estate Empire with Brandon Turner

Today is a major milestone for the podcast, as we’ve reached 100 episodes. And to celebrate, I’m speaking to the one and only Brandon Turner.

Brandon Turner is widely regarded as one of the top authorities in the world on real estate investing. He’s the bestselling author of several real estate books, with over 1 million copies sold, and is the former host of BiggerPockets, the #1 real estate investing podcast with over 100 million downloads.

Brandon is also the founder and managing member of Open Door Capital, a private real estate investment firm that helps clients achieve superior risk-adjusted returns through the acquisition of value-add assets nationwide.

In this episode, Brandon shares how he got started as a real estate investor and went from buying his first single-family home to building a real estate empire comprising 7,400 units and $650M AUM.

We discuss the process for buying real estate with no money down, how to leverage the power of who, not how to scale your business, why Brandon made the difficult decision to leave BiggerPockets, and the most powerful question you can ask to achieve extraordinary levels of success in business and life.

Featured on This Episode: Brandon Turner

✅ What he does: Brandon Turner is a real estate investor, podcaster, author, entrepreneur, and speaker. As the host of the BiggerPockets podcast with over 100 million downloads, Brandon is widely recognized as one of the foremost experts on real estate investing. He is the best-selling author of several books, including “The Book on Rental Property Investing,” “The Book on Investing In Real Estate with No (and Low) Money Down,” “The Book on Managing Rental Properties,” “How to Invest in Real Estate” and “The Intention Journal.” Brandon is also the founder and managing member of Open Door Capital LLC, a private, well-capitalized real estate investment firm that helps clients achieve superior risk-adjusted returns through acquiring value-add assets nationwide. Years ago, Brandon swore he would be around for his kids and wouldn’t miss out on the valuable time with them because he was tied to a desk. Real estate brought him that freedom. Now he helps others find that freedom – through real estate investing education and providing passive investment opportunities.

💬 Words of wisdom:  ”I just hire people better than me, and I get out the way.” – Brandon Turner

 🔎 Where to find Brandon Turner: Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn | TikTok

Key Takeaways with Brandon Turner

• A commitment as a community to donate billions of dollars to charity—and how a single group of people raised over $1.7 million in 1 hour for the Tim Tebow Foundation.
• The moment Brandon Turner decided he wasn’t going to law school and would become a real estate investor instead.
• The no money down real estate strategy Brandon Turner used to buy his first apartment complex, quit his full-time job, and achieve level one financial freedom.
• How Brandon helped BiggerPockets go from a one-man operation to a multi-million dollar organization.
• Why obtaining financial freedom leads to bigger and bigger opportunities.
• Why Brandon Turner left BiggerPockets? The BIG question: What do you need to let go of to get to the next level in your life?
• The mindset shift Brandon made to build a $650M real estate portfolio with Open Door Capital—and how does he only need to work 5hrs per week?
• How to scale your business by hiring smarter people than you and getting out of their way.
• Investing in mobile home parks vs. apartment buildings
• Being intentional about creating magical moments with the people you love.

Brandon Turner on How BiggerPockets Became a Multi-Million Dollar Organization

Brandon Turner Shares His No-Money-Down Real Estate Strategy

Brandon Turner Tweetables

“I would not have taken that risk to join some little one person startup, with no guarantee of future income, had I not already obtained financial freedom.” - @BeardyBrandon on joining BiggerPockets Click To Tweet “Sometimes you do things in life where you don't know what you're necessarily going to get. It's not a tit-for-tat. But when you curate experiences with amazing people, that will forever change the directory of your life.” -… Click To Tweet

Resources

• Brandon Turner Website
• Brandon Turner on Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn | TikTok |
• Open Door Capital
• Cabana Club
• How We Bought a 24-Unit Apartment Building for (Almost) No Money Down: A BiggerPockets QuickTip Book by Brandon Turner
• BiggerPockets
• Real Estate in Your Twenties
• Front Row Dads
• Cloud Camp
• Tim Tebow Foundation
• The Firm: A Novel by John Grisham
• Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not!
• The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers’ Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success
• The ABCs of Real Estate Investing: The Secrets of Finding Hidden Profits Most Investors Miss by Ken McElroy
• How I Built This
• Jason Drees Coaching
• Who Not How: The Formula to Achieve Bigger Goals Through Accelerating Teamwork
• Kiawe Outdoor

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Read the Full Transcript with Brandon Turner

Justin Donald: All right. What’s up, Brandon? So glad to have you on the show today.

 

Brandon Turner: Dude, this is amazing. I have honestly been looking forward to this show more than probably any other podcasts I have ever done. I’m not even kidding. Like, since the first time I met you, I’m like, dude, I need to do that show. So, this is a dream come true. Thank you for having me.

 

Justin Donald: Well, thank you for the kind words. I’m just as excited to have you on the show because you have done so much cool stuff that I want my network to know about. And then you’re just a great human being. I just had the luxury, the privilege of spending four days with you at Cloud Camp. For those that are unfamiliar, it is the Broadmoor. So, the Broadmoor is the longest-running five-star, five-diamond resort in the US. I mean, this thing has been running consistently for like, I don’t know, I think since the 50s or something, like 1955 or 1956. So, it’s like the most highly acclaimed resort in the US and one of the most highly acclaimed resorts in the world.

 

And so, they have this property. So, that’s at 7,000 elevation. If you go up the mountain that is right behind the Broadmoor, you go up another 2,000 feet elevation and you’re at another property called Cloud Camp. So, it’s 9,000 elevation and just incredible. Just beautiful. And Brandon, you and I had the privilege of joining as founding members for a really special group called the Wellspring. And I’m excited about that and excited about all the cool stuff we’re going to do in the world.

 

Brandon Turner: Yeah, man, that was quite the epic adventure. It was like going back to church camp as a kid, wherever, like for grown-ups who are highly successful. But yeah, what a crazy coincidence too, about like you and I hadn’t texted for, I don’t know, a couple of months at least. And then you texted me, like we chatted about this podcast, about bringing it back, like that day.

 

And then, I’m like, what are you up to these days? I’m like, oh, I’m in Colorado in the mountains for a retreat. And I’m like, I’m in Colorado in the mountains for a retreat. And like two hours later, we’re hanging out together. Like what a crazy set of coincidences? And that kind of thing happened so many times in the past week. It blows my mind, the number of connections and coincidences that happened over the past week. It’s mind-blowing. So, I’m pumped.

 

Justin Donald: There’s no doubt. And so much synergy and I’m just excited about the future. I’m excited to be hanging and partnering more with you, and for anyone who’s unaware, like this group, I mean, we made a huge commitment as a community that we’re going to donate over a billion dollars. All right. And what was great is as we were talking about a billion dollars, you were like, wait a minute, I think a billion is too low. Like we’re thinking too small. You’re like, it should be many billions of dollars. And I just love that we’re part of something with big thinkers and with people that are so generous with their resources that we can help solve or at least support and come alongside a lot of people, organizations, situations that need the help.

 

Brandon Turner: Yeah. Because at the end of the day, like, the reason I pushed Pete on the billions thing is because I’m like, well, there were many in that room of 55 people. I would say a good chunk of them will be likely billionaires someday. Like when you’re young and you’re like in your 20s or 30s or even like 40s and you have the knowledge of how to build wealth and how to grow wealth and how to do multiply wealth, like the next 40 years, many people will end up compounding that into billions of dollars. And I’m like most of us are going to give most of it away. And so, I’m like, there’s almost no chance in my mind that we’re not giving billions and billions in our lifetime away. So, it’s cool to be a part of.

 

Justin Donald: Yeah, so cool. I’m so glad that Pete Vargas started it. And what a great guy he is. So, I’m just thrilled. And to have the opportunity to hang with Tim Tebow was just incredible. I mean, that guy is on fire. He is doing so many great things to save and help people, specifically in the human trafficking realm. I’m just impressed with the Tim Tebow Foundation, the 28 partners that they have for all the different locations all across the globe where they’re primarily saving women from sex trafficking, which is such a shame, but the work they’re doing is incredible and I just feel blessed to be part of that.

 

And what a cool experience where in like an hour’s time, we hear Tim speak about what he’s doing and just the invitation. This was totally unscripted, just the invitation for us to show up and donate to his charity. And in an hour, we raised as a group over $1.7 million to donate to his foundation. It was just incredible. And he was speechless. I mean, he was in tears. It was so cool.

 

Brandon Turner: Yeah. When I look back at my life, I tend to when I’m on podcast and stuff, I’m talking about my story, I talk about the three phases of my career, which kind of I can bucket the three-phase, which was like phase one was all about like me and my wife together building our rental portfolio. She’s working at Starbucks, I’m working at a bank and Cold Stone Creamery for a while. I’m like, we’ve built our whole rental portfolio up to 30-something units, right?

 

Then the second phase was like my BiggerPockets years, where I went and started the BiggerPockets podcast with Josh Dorkin, who owned BiggerPockets, and we grew that thing to one of the biggest podcasts in the world, and it was amazing and I learned so much about business and stuff. I didn’t do a lot with the small real estate. I just do flips and rentals here and there.

 

And then like the third phase kind of morphed into this. It’s like, I’m going to build a commercial real estate empire. I’m going to buy thousands of units, I’m going to raise money. And now, for the past three years, I’ve done that, we’ve bought $650 million of real estate and raised money from 1,300 people. And I think we raised $250 million so far just for the real estate. So, that was like phase one, two, and three. And I assumed in my life that phase three was the ending phase of my life, I mean, that would carry me on to still billionaire status or whatever I’m going to go to.

 

And what happened on Friday night with Tim Tebow in that speech is I realized, like I entered a fourth phase, like I didn’t expect. I mean, I used the word sparingly, but it truly was life-changing and that I will look back 30 years from now and say, that was the night that my life entered phase four and took a different position. It’s all about that change of significance and what are we doing with our time and with our money and with our energy? And so, yeah, I’m super, super fired up right now about kind of phase four. It doesn’t mean phase three is over or even phase two or one. It’s an addition of a new phase in life, and I’m excited about that.

 

Justin Donald: Yeah. And we need these new phases that we can get excited about, like the way you were once excited about phase one. And you and I had really a funny conversation about that because you’re like, my wife and I, we worked so hard to build these and that was the beginning. And now, I kind of don’t care about it because I’ve got all these other things.

 

And it’s funny because I’m the same way. Phase one for Jennifer and I was we were building our portfolio. And I’m the same way where it’s like, yeah, it doesn’t have the meaning that it had before. That was so great in the season that I was in and in the season of never having done this before. And I’m so thankful for that. But what it did was it opened up a door for me, and I assume you too to think bigger, to learn, to figure out the next thing that could capture our passion and enthusiasm.

 

And so, what’s cool about this phase four you’re talking about where you’re giving and you’re giving up your resources, your time, it’s engaging the passion side of things, but also the compassion side of things. And it gets you to a point, for me at least, where I wasn’t just giving, I was joyfully giving, like I was so happy to give. And it makes me want to partner up. And Tim was so cool. He invited me to Jacksonville to come hang out with him some more, meet his team, spend a day with them, and like, that’s a guy I just want to come alongside and partner with. And I just see him continuing to do great things. He already has. And I think more is to come and I want to be part of that. I want to be part of that movement that inspires me.

 

Brandon Turner: Yeah, totally the same. Yeah, it was. And that I’ll never forget. So, I’m glad I was with you for that one. That sparks a whole new level of brotherhood, right? When you’re with people in those life-changing moments, none of us will forget that. And it forged some bonds that I don’t think can ever be broken. So, yeah.

 

Justin Donald: That’s right. Totally. And the conversation you and I had directly after that, even just talking about what our businesses mean and what that income really can stand for and how much of it do we need versus how much of it can we give beyond ourselves and not consume? And for me, I’ve been a huge proponent of like, I feel very blessed and the fact that I’ve got real estate, I’ve got private equity, I’ve got senior secured, I’ve got all kinds of investments that cover my lifestyle. So, everything that comes in from Lifestyle Investor is just above and beyond.

 

And so, for me, I’ve lived in a place where I haven’t spent any of the money of Lifestyle Investor. Like, to me, this is all a gift and I don’t need it. I don’t need it for consumption. So, every dollar of Lifestyle Investor has either gone to some charity or it’s gone to some investment, some entrepreneur. It’s gone somewhere other than the Donald family consumption, and the things you and I talked about what this could look like in the future and what the business arms that we operate in could produce for others, I think, is just powerful.

 

Brandon Turner: Yeah, totally agreed, man. I’m excited about the next few months on– yeah, I’m excited about it, man. My world is upside down. I spent three hours last night talking to my wife in bed, just explaining where my heart’s at and where we’re headed in. Yeah, man, it’s going to be exciting.

 

Justin Donald: Yeah, that’s awesome. Well, let’s get back to the beginning. You started from humble beginnings, and you and your wife really had to kind of scrape by in the early days. So, how did you get into investing? How did you start in your real estate pursuit? Was there a tipping point? Was there something you did before where you’re like, this just isn’t cutting it? I need more, I need better, I need different. What was that? I’d love to go through these phases. We just talked about phase four. Let’s talk about phase one, two, and three.

 

Brandon Turner: Yeah, for sure, man. It started with John Grisham, I’ll start there, the book, The Firm from John Grisham. Fiction book. But a lawyer who goes and works for the mob, Tom Cruise played him in a movie. He played the character. But it started there because I went to college, I met my wife in college, graduated college, trying to figure out what to do next. I got a history degree and like planning you do the history degree is like either be a teacher, be a lawyer, or be homeless. And so, those are like the three options you have.

 

So, I’m like, I guess I’ll be a lawyer. They make money. And so, I took the LSAT, I started studying for law school, kind of applying for law school. And I bought a house in the meantime, just like a simple, little cheap, crappy fixer-upper house because it was 2007, they were giving mortgages to anybody who just breathe. Like if you had a breath, you could get a mortgage, something like, well, I guess it’s cheaper than renting, so I’ll buy this crappy house.

 

And I rented out the bedrooms to a bunch of buddies. And I read The Firm, and it’s a fiction book, but he makes his point in every one of John Grisham’s books, especially like about how horrible life is for an attorney. They go through like four or five wives and they work 100 hours a week just to get partners when they’re 60 years old. And then they work 80 hours a week until they die.

 

And when they die, they’re the richest person in that graveyard. They rolled in there on a Rolls Royce. And he makes this kind of like a tongue-in-cheek story about every lawyer in those books, how horrible their life is. And the more I thought about that, it impacted me at this deep level. Maybe it’s a little bit exaggerated, but probably not that far. They work a ton of hours and in my soul, something was like, that’s not the way life was meant to be lived. Like, there’s more to life than working in a cubicle until you’re too old to have fun in life.

 

And around that time, I bought that first house and I sold it. My wife and I wanted to go travel. And so, we sold the house just thinking we’d go travel Europe for a while, which we didn’t because we sold it and made 20 grand, which actually just paid for the wedding, but we sold it and made 20 grand. And I was like, well, shoot, I just made 20 grand out of thin air. And now, granted, I’ve put in a lot of work to fix that house up, but basically, I invented $20,000 out of nothing.

 

And I was like, this is way better than law school. And if I could do it once, couldn’t I buy several houses and flip them every year and make more than a lawyer? The bully from high school, like in middle school, high school, the guy who bullied me the most of anybody in middle school, I mean, throwing my books down in the hallway, making fun of me my entire school career. This is now like three or four years after school. He gets out, he messages me on Facebook. He’s like, hey, man, I thought you bought a house. You ever heard of that book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad? I’m like, no. He’s like, yeah, check it out. It’s life-changing.

 

So, I’m like, the guy that I dislike the most in my entire life, literally like back then, led me to this book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, which was the opposite of The Firm. The Firm was like, my soul was like, do not do that. And then Rich Dad, Poor Dad was like, that’s what I was thinking, makes more sense. Like that you can buy assets and then over time, they get better and you get more money and you have freedom to do what you want to do in life. And it blew my mind and it put words to that groaning in my soul that there was more to life than what The Firm was offering.

 

And I jumped in with both feet. I called my parents, I’m like, I’m not going to law school anymore. I’m not doing that. I’m going to be a real estate investor. And my dad was like, that’s a terrible idea. People lose money in real estate. And yeah, it started that way. I started buying rentals. I bought a duplex. I lived in half of it, rented the half out. I lived in a 400-square-foot side of a duplex in the alley in this terrible location and got to live for free. And it just fired me up, man, and just kept me going on that kind of first phase.

 

Justin Donald: Yeah, and it’s great because in that moment, I think we’re always comparing now to what was. We had referenced the gap in the game before. A really good book, where it’s easy to focus on what you don’t have and what the gap is. But it’s sometimes hard to remember where you came from, the gain that you’ve had. And so, that’s a great instance where it’s like, look at your excitement for that 400-square-foot room because you saw what was coming and you saw where you were compared to before. You’ve got rental income coming in covering the place. And yeah, that’s so cool. So, how many units did you and your wife buy as you were kind of, I guess, before you entered this next stage of BiggerPockets? And like, how did that even come about?

 

Brandon Turner: Yeah. So, we had roughly 32 units, I think, when I quit my job and obtained financial freedom. When I say that, there’s like three levels of financial freedom, I definitely say. The first one is like, you can quit your job. The second one is you can like buy a jet. And then the third one is like you can buy the New York Jets. These are like three levels. Like, I can pay my bills, I’m rich, and then I’m absurdly rich.

 

This is just phase one. I’m making $3,000 to $4,000 a month in profit. In there, I bought a 24-unit but that put me over the edge. I bought a duplex, then a triplex, then a couple of houses, and then I bought a 24-unit with seller finance since I don’t have to get a loan on it. They carry the contract, which means that I don’t have to come up with a big down payment. I don’t have to get any of that. It was very much like a god thing.

 

Like literally, I was at church talking to this old couple and they knew I was interested in real estate so like they would kind of talk to me a little bit about real estate once in a while. Like they would ask me how I’m going to do with my houses and the guy even is the first guy ever. When I bought my first house, he showed me how to paint with a paint sprayer. He came over and showed me how to use a paint sprayer. I had no idea they were in real estate.

 

So, I mentioned them. I’m like, yeah, I just read this amazing book yesterday called The ABCs of Real Estate Investing and it’s by a guy named Ken McElroy, and it’s all about buying apartment complexes. And I want to buy an apartment complex someday. I’m fired up about apartment complexes. And they looked at each other, they looked at me, and they were like, huh, that’s interesting, because we actually have an apartment that we want to sell. I mean, that’s how that came about. It was strange, like the awkward, greet the person next to you kind of moment at church, like in the middle of the church, like they had an apartment they wanted to sell.

 

So, they actually carry the contract. They help me figure out how to do it. They mentored me into owning that property and then that got me over the number that I needed to be able to quit my job. At that time, I was at a bank, terrible job at a bank. So, I quit the job, fixed up that 24-unit, and then at 27, I was like, I’m done. I got all I ever need in life. I quit. And I sat on the couch and watched Law & Order for six months. That’s where phase one kind of– it didn’t really end because I kept buying units once in a while after that. But that’s where the transition happened, phase two. You want me to go into that?

 

Justin Donald: Well, real quick. So, did you not have to put any money down for that 24-unit?

 

Brandon Turner: So, here’s how this works. I love it. It was such a creative strategy. So, here’s what happened. So, they didn’t need a down payment. What they wanted was to travel. They wanted to get an RV. They were 75 years old. They want to travel around the country in an RV and go south for the winter and that kind of stuff.

 

But they couldn’t do it because they had this apartment complex that was driving them crazy and had to deal with all the problems. And they had sold it once before, like 10 years, and the guy who bought it from them on seller finance, he just drove it to the ground. So, I was solving their problem. Somebody they trusted, they’d see me do years and years of hard work in the industry, which is such a powerful lesson. It’s like the whole like you don’t know who in your future is watching you today and watching how you do things, like how you do anything and how you do everything. They were watching me for five, six years build up a reputation as somebody who does what they say they’re going to do, somebody who takes action.

 

So, like, I didn’t even know that, that they were watching me and that something was being orchestrated here. So, then all they needed, they didn’t have a lot of money either, but all they needed was enough to cover the closing costs, like to pay the county, the taxes, whatever. And it was like $10,000 or $15,000. Why I didn’t have that? I mean, I didn’t have anything.

 

And so, what we basically agreed to and this was like their idea, they said, well, why don’t we just do a lease option? So, like a rent-to-own situation, a triple net lease option where you take over everything, like right now. And this is like six months after we started talking, about six months to nine months to actually pull it all together. But you take over the whole property right now, you get all of the income that comes in, it’s all yours. And then you pay all the expenses. But we’re not actually selling it to you. You are having a master lease over the whole thing. So, that’s what we did.

 

And then they also agreed to pay what they called it, I don’t even know the terminology, but a step-up mortgage. So, in other words, they said, the mortgage payment is going to be like $4,500 a month, whatever it was. They knew that the property couldn’t handle that even at the time because half the units were vacant.

 

And so, they let me pay $1,000 a month for the first year, and then it was $2,000 a month for the second year, and then $3,000 for the third year. They let me step it up slowly so that it would actually cash flow. I took all that cash flow, saved it up for whatever, nine months, six months, whatever. And once I had that $10,000 needed for the down payment, I then gave them that.

 

So, they let me build a down payment out of the rent that came in, the profit that came in that I was working to get as I fixed up units. And yeah, it was a cool kind of mentor-mentee kind of a situation, and both of us had our problem solved. They got to then travel. They went and took the RV, went around the country. And I took care of their property for them, eventually became my property. And that led me to level one financial freedom.

 

Justin Donald: So, this is such a great example. I love that, Brandon. First and foremost, for those of you watching or listening, it’s important to realize that these people are out there. I talk about in my book, The Lifestyle Investor, the fact that you can get deals done with no money down. I’ve done several of these deals. I’ve had some really cool opportunities. Most of the time, you got to put money down, but for the right deal, for the right situation, I think that’s great.

 

Second thing is, most of the time, the needs that people want in that are different. So, when you’re in a negotiation, it’s important to ask questions and get clarity about what someone else wants because if you can solve for them, you can make it very advantageous for you. And so, you were able to do that.

 

Third point I’ll make is a lease option is a great way to buy, especially if you’re going to buy something that’s like this is a super turnaround, so that way, like if you had to walk away, you could walk away if it’s like too heavy of a lift, but you have the right to buy it. And the terms, you can work your initial payments in as part of it. I mean, there are all kinds of ways to structure it. But the bottom line is you’re in first position to buy this property. So, if you can, in fact, turn it around, it’s yours. And so, it’s a brilliant strategy that I don’t see happening very often.

 

Brandon Turner: Yeah. The lease option thing is not super common. I mean, lately, a lot of guys have been talking about the seller financing thing, pace more of this Internet kind of celebrity guy TV show, but he’s really pushing this movement up of subject 2 which is a different strategy similar to lease options, but yeah, lease options are still, I think one of the most underrated powerful tactics out there, especially if you can do what’s called like a lease option sandwich is where like you rent a property for somebody, then you re-rent it out to somebody else and you get a lease option on the front and the back, and you’re the middleman. There’s some cool stuff there.

 

One more piece of creative strategy I used on that, there are actually multiple strategies I use to pull this off, which is a lesson in itself. It’s rarely in the world of no money down real estate, it’s rarely one strategy. So, here I am buying this property, but I’m 25 years old or something like that at the time. And I didn’t have the money to fix it up. Like, where am I going to come up with all the money to fix it up?

 

So, I went to actually my parents and I said, hey, you guys want to partner on a real estate deal? I said, I just need access to about $50,000 in a line of credit that they had on their house. They just had a home equity line of credit. So, I borrowed 50k off that line of credit and I said, someday, I will give you 50% of the profits of whatever I make on this property.

 

Now, it could have been my parents, it could have been with anybody. That was a pretty stupid good deal for them because they get 50% of a deal off no money. It’s just not the line of credit that they had. But they trust me, right? I’m a 25-year-old kid and like they should get paid for that. So, it was really a few years later, be able to get my check for a couple of hundred thousand dollars and say thank you for trusting me seven years ago when I sold that property for a lot more than I bought it for.

 

So, that was the cool thing, actually. I actually thought if anybody wants, like I don’t make any money either because I think it’s only $0.99 and Amazon takes 70% of it. But there’s an e-book I wrote years ago when I was in BiggerPockets. I wrote in the blog post, it’s called How I Bought a 24-Unit for Almost No Money Down. I wrote the blog post, but then I found out Kindle had this thing called like Kindle shorts and I wanted to test it out. So, I threw it on Kindle. I think it’s $0.99. It might even be free on Kindle. But just look for my name, you’ll find it. It’s like I’m way more detailed, maybe 5,000 or 10,000 words explanation of how I pulled off that property, all the details. So if you’re interested in that story, it’s kind of a fun story.

 

Justin Donald: That’s cool. I absolutely love that. So, question for you. All right. So, you now have financial freedom or level one of your financial freedom. How did BiggerPockets come about? What did that look like?

 

Brandon Turner: Yeah. So, BiggerPockets started years earlier. Remember, earlier I said, my dad thought I was kind of crazy for growing a real estate. I remember the words he said. He said, what are you going to do if tenants don’t pay rent? Like you don’t have a job and tenants don’t pay rent, you’re going to not have any money to pay the bills. And I’m like, oh, you’re right. Oh, trump card. Oh, man, I’m done.

 

So, I go to the Internet and I’m typing like Google or Dogpile or whatever the search engine was at the time. AltaVista, maybe. And I’m like, what to do when tenants don’t pay rent? And this little forum out there comes up called BiggerPockets. And there was a small little site, super ugly of just people talking about real estate in a forum, just talking to each other. And the forum topic was what to do when tenants don’t pay rent. And there was this long post all about what some landlord does when tenants don’t pay rent.

 

And it wasn’t even the content of what he wrote there that mattered, what mattered was I saw that there were answers to the negativity that people have about almost anything in life. Like virtually, real estate, like even people listening to the show right now are probably going, yeah, Brandon, but what about this? Everyone’s going to like gotcha when it comes to real estate or when it comes to any business.

 

But the truth is, like the more you get into these industries, whatever it is, there are always answers to the gotchas. I’ve got them from like, yeah, well, Bitcoin is blah, blah, blah, and somebody who knows Bitcoin would look at me and go, yeah, but, and they’d give me a really good explanation. I’d be like, oh, you’re right.

 

So, anyway, it taught me that there are answers to the problems and that it’s still doable. So, I was a BiggerPockets member, just like a free member on the forum before with a blog, long before the podcast, before it was anything. It was just a little forum. I was a member, one of the earliest members of that community. And so, I just kind of use it.

 

You can go back to my old forum post. You can see like, hey, guys, I’m thinking about buying a 24-unit. I got some couples from church wanting to sell to me. I don’t know what I’m doing. Like I’m asking all these, the newbie questions. So, the point is I came from within the community, and then when I was sitting on a couch for a few months, bored to death, watching Law & Order every day, I decided like, well, three grand a month is nice to pay my bills, but it’s not really enough to go and have a jet or travel the world or anything.

 

So, I’m like, how do I make more money? So, I remember downloading too much of e-books online on how to make money and how to make money online and day trading work and all that stuff. And marketing just appealed to me, the idea of making money on the internet and blogging and forums and like that whole world of internet marketing really appealed to me.

 

So, I started a little blog called Real Estate in Your Twenties. You’re just like, hey, this is how I, in my 20s, build up a small portfolio and got financial freedom. And I started writing blog posts. No idea what I was doing, did not really write a blog posting like that, but to grow a blog back in the day, and maybe it’s still true today but not as much, you would go and post on other people’s blogs, you would guest post. Similar to the way that I go on your podcast today, and then some people might come and listen to my stuff because they heard me on your podcast. That’s what you do in the blog world.

 

So, I went and posted and I asked Josh Dorkin, who had founded this BiggerPockets, if I could post on their blog. And so, he let me. Once a week, I would post an article on his blog, and then some people would come back. Well, that led to me being Facebook friends with Josh, which led to one day him writing, hey, I’m looking for someone to help me edit blog posts. Anybody got free time that wants to make a little money? I’m like, I’ll do it. I’m going to do blog posts.

 

And the thing was not true at all. I was terrible at spelling and grammar and writing and all that, but he allowed me to come in and help him. And that’s where BiggerPockets started, like the next phase of the BP, which was a few months later. Me and Josh in there, we meshed so well. We were so excited about what we were doing. We were working 15, 16-hour days every day. Our wives just think we were crazy because we were just so in love with what we were building. And we started the podcast then and it just– I remember our goal was to be within, I think it was within two years, I want to be in the top 100 of business podcasts.

 

And the first day, we were number six. And we in nine years have never dropped below number 15 of the biggest business podcasts. For most of that time, we were number two or number three. It was like Dave Ramsey, us. So, that took off in a way that I could have never expected. And I watched and I kind of helped BiggerPockets grow from one-man operation, Josh, to today, they’re a multi, multi, multi-million-dollar business that will be a billion-dollar business if they’re not there already. And I got to be along for that entire ride, which is amazing.

 

Justin Donald: That is so cool. I mean, I love that story and I love the fact that you were just open to whatever. Hey, I don’t even know how to do this, but I’ll figure it out. This is an opportunity that I want to take. These are people that I want to rub elbows with. And that’s powerful.

 

Brandon Turner: And here’s a cool lesson I can pull over. Like I could not, or maybe I could but I would not have taken that risk to join some little startup with one person with no guarantee of future income had I not already had obtained financial freedom that first level. I was able to take that risk because I had level one.

 

Now, level one was not going to make me millions and millions of dollars in my life. Maybe if I would’ve kept those properties forever, they would have. But like that was simply the stepping stone needed to get to the second level. And the second level or the phase was the stepping stone I needed to get to the third. And interestingly enough, the third now is what’s going to get me into the fourth.

 

So, just like what we talked about earlier, those phases are for nothing, but they get you to the next level. So, anyway, just interesting to look back on that to see like I could not have done that. So, if there’s any reason to do, like to obtain financial freedom and to put the work in to get it, it’s for the opportunities that it will allow you once you have it because you can take risks. You can take those chances on a long shot that may pay off a hundredfold.

 

Justin Donald: So true. Once you buy your time back, you’ve opened up so many additional doors and paths that you can take. And so, that’s why I really encourage everyone to like whatever you do, don’t get lost in the allure of investing in the stock market with the vast majority of your assets over the life you’re supposed to– the life, your investment till you retire, you’re supposed to make 10% return on average, which, by the way, it doesn’t really work out to that. Or even these long-term investments, maybe super high-risk angel investments in a seed round or maybe it’s venture capital, venture investing, which is like 10 years before you’re going to find out what happens.

 

And so, I think it’s just really important for the beginning of the investment dollars to actually produce some utility today that it cash flows, that it buys your time back because the moment you own your time, that’s when all these other doors open. And it’s incredible. And I love your story.

 

For the record, I can’t remember if BiggerPockets was the first podcast ever got into or the second podcast. So, it was either how I built this or BiggerPockets. Those are my one and two podcasts. I can’t remember which was which, but I used to listen to those all the time. And so, as I was like getting into real estate, BiggerPockets was really helpful for that. And as I was starting and scaling a business, how I built this was really helpful for that.

 

And so, I switched from listening to music to listening to podcasts and feeding myself, going for education over just random pleasure or enjoyment and that really served me well because I consistently fed myself and allowed myself to be in a space where I didn’t know it all, I had a lot to learn. And every day, I want to learn more. I don’t just want to go to school when I’m in college. I want to be in school every day in my life, the rest of my life because I choose to be curious and I choose to recognize that there’s always someone who knows more than me in some area, and I would like to learn what they know.

 

Brandon Turner: That’s so good, man. Yeah, there’s that lifelong learning that drive to know more and educate yourself. Like that’s what makes people successful, wealthy, better parents, better spouses, like it’s that never-stop-learning component. And I see that in you. And I didn’t know that about you in BiggerPockets. I had no idea you were a listener back in the day. So, that’s awesome, man.

 

Justin Donald: Yeah, really fun. Really fun. So, it’s cool kind of going full circle and meeting people that you maybe heard of or heard about. And at that point in time, I didn’t really connect anyone to anyone. It was just like, these guys are feeding me with information that I want to hear and I want to learn, so really special.

 

So, you scaled BiggerPockets. This is like it becomes one of the biggest podcasts in the world and you then leave. So, why leave? And what did that exit package look like? I mean, this had to have been at least a pretty decent exit. I mean, you could be as general, vague, or detailed as you want. I’m just curious on whatever you feel comfortable sharing.

 

Brandon Turner: Yeah, sure, man. I left for a number of reasons and we can talk about, I mean, I’m really open about all of this. I left for a number of reasons. One, I have two kids now. And I was noticing this trend that I was spending way more time in my office on podcasts and on meetings and all that than I was with my kids and I didn’t like it. And the reason I got into real estate in the very beginning was because I wanted to someday have kids and be there for every dance recital, every ball game, every ballerina thing, every field trip, whatever. And I started missing them.

 

Like now that I actually did have kids, my daughter would go off to her dance class, and I’d be like, hey, sorry, honey, I can’t go. I got a podcast. I realized like the very reason I got into real estate, I was now like– you know that passage in the Bible that said, like, it’s talking about the sower and the seed and it’s like the whole analogy just gives about seed that lands on the road and a bird snatches it away. It’s basically like what do you do with information when you hear it, like the gospel, but they say like something about like the seed lands in the weeds and then the weeds grow up and choke out the seeds or never grow them. It chokes out from the wealth of the world or like the wealth of life chokes out like your mission, essentially, the deceitfulness of wealth.

 

And I feel like almost like that’s what I was noticing. It’s like this drive for more and bigger and scale it was choking out my purpose, what I was meant to do, which was to be a father and a husband first and foremost. So, that was one reason. And now, normally in business, I could have found ways out like, for example, it wasn’t like– I mean, I’d started building Open Door Capital, which is my real estate company, which by the way, for people listening, it’s not the same as Opendoor, which came a few years. I actually had the name first, and then Opendoor is a big billion-dollar company that’s struggling right now.

 

So, I keep you an article in the news about Opendoor, like getting sued from the FTC, and I’m like, that’s not me, Justin, that’s not me. But anyway, that’s a whole different thing. But I sort of build in that. But here’s the difference. I didn’t own BiggerPockets. I have some equity in there, not a lot, but I have some equity in BiggerPockets. But that’s Josh’s thing. And Josh sold to some private equity company, a big chunk of it to private equity, and that’s their company now.

 

So, I didn’t have ultimate say. I was the face of it, but I didn’t have ultimate say. And so, unlike Open Door Capital, which I could build without me being in it, I couldn’t build BiggerPockets without being in it because it wasn’t mine. Like I imagine me calling a private equity firm, like, hey guys, I know you try to go into a billionaire company, but I’m going to only work five hours a week now, so I’m going to hire a bunch of people under me that are going to– and they’re like, no, you’re building this for us, so we only have to work five hours a week, right? So, that was a big component too.

 

It’s like my identity as a leader and as a visionary didn’t have a role in BiggerPockets. They already have a visionary and a leader. So, like there was that. So, the family thing, that thing, and yeah really, the last thing was I have a performance coach. His name is Jason Drees. I’ve been working with him for five or six years now. I love the guy.

 

Justin Donald: I met him.

 

Brandon Turner: Oh, did you? Yeah, good.

 

Justin Donald: That really cool dinner that you threw with your crew from Maui. They came in and just cooked this epic meal. We should talk about that next. But yeah, talk about Jason.

 

Brandon Turner: That was a really good night. Yeah, we’ll talk about that, for sure. That was a cool night. Something I want to do more of in life. But yeah, man, the last reason why I left, I guess, is performance coach Jason Drees, and Jason said to me, Brandon, to get to the next level that you want to be at in life, what do you need to let go of? And that question kind of like rocked me, and I thought about it for a long time. And I’m like to be the next level of fatherhood, the next level of my fitness, the next level of my business of Open Door capital, as a leader of Open Door Capital with my team.

 

Why do I need to let go of? And the answer I came up with was, I need to let go of the identity that’s connected to BiggerPockets, not just like BiggerPockets entirely. Like I still love them, I want them to succeed and I still have equity in there. I still have my equity inside of BiggerPockets, but I needed to tear that identity away and I couldn’t do that.

 

This was like a year before I actually left, he asked that question, and I knew I needed to really get to the next level of my business. I needed to let BiggerPockets go. But I couldn’t do it because I just could not tear my identity. It was like a cloth has been sewn to another cloth and it’s hard to see where one part and another goes.

 

But what happened then is back in November, Jason asked me, I was stressed out about something and he said, it sounds like you just need to take a month off, just a one-month sabbatical is the word he used, a one-month sabbatical. And I was like, you know, you’re right. Like, I had never taken a time off the podcast. I missed like one episode ever and that was when I went on a cruise one time and they had to get an episode out.

 

But I did not miss an episode because I’m not somebody who misses episodes. Like I show up, I’m a big believer in that, right? So, I was like, fine, I’m going to take a month off. And what that did is it tore that cloth that was so connected, it tore it just an inch, like just an inch. It didn’t separate at the time. I just undid the thread that connected it. So, it was an inch apart. And it allowed me to see myself as separate from BiggerPockets. And it tore that identity a little bit.

 

And within 24 hours, I had committed to leaving entirely because I just needed that little bit. I could not go from Brandon in BiggerPockets as one to Brandon completely on his own. I couldn’t do that, but I could do an inch. And then from there, I could do more. So, the last thought, I guess I pull it out is people listening, maybe are in a similar spot. They’ve got a job that they really feel connected to, but they don’t like. They don’t want anymore. Maybe they don’t even need anymore, but they had that identity is tore into it. So, it was like that little stepping stone or that little thing I’ve just taken a month off was enough for me to rip identity apart so then I could leave entirely.

 

Justin Donald: Oh, it’s awesome. And it took a powerful question to get you there. So, what is it that you need to give up to get to where you want to be? Or what’s holding you back? What’s the thing that you need to give up in order to become who you want to be or that’s holding you back from who you want to be as a father, entrepreneur, or husband? I mean, that’s a powerful question. And I think if we ask ourselves the right questions, we’re very wise, like all of us.

 

We have this intuition, but we often don’t slow down. And so, it’s like autopilot, one thing after the next. It’s not a life by design, it’s a life by default. It’s just literally one thing to the next, to the next, to the next, not even building the time to think and plan and be intentional. And by the way, I’m guilty of this. I share this because I know it. I’ve lived it. And everything changed for me when I created that space in that time and I created it before I got to financial freedom. That’s what helped me gain financial freedom. And then once I had financial freedom, it allowed me to take it many layers deeper or to go many levels higher from the standpoint of surplus income. So, I love that story.

 

And you said something before that I want to make sure people catch, which is this, and by the way, I hope everyone asks themselves that question that your coach, Jason, asked you. Just write it down. Pause this right now and ask yourself that question. What is it? What’s something you need to give up to get to where you want to be right now?

 

But the other thing that you said is, and I’m going to paraphrase, I’m going to say it actually a little bit differently. I’m not even going to paraphrase. A lot of people invest in real estate for financial freedom, but they end up building themselves into a job. So, they pursued whatever passive investments, cash flow, whatever, for this freedom, but they buy enough of it, and then the real estate owns them. And I think you’ve got to be really careful there that you’re not buying yourself another job. And a lot of people I see them buying businesses because the opportunity is so great, but in order to get to where you need to be, it’s like a job all over again.

 

So, I just think I want to caution people to be careful about buying another job, but at the same time make moves that get you into a better situation and position than you are today. And so, even if you short-term need to work more or need to transition your time, I think it’s okay if there’s a plan long term to get out of it.

 

Brandon Turner: And the way that I did that is really two things. And then maybe this isn’t true for everybody, but this is how I got like and what I couldn’t do at BiggerPockets and I could do on my own, and that’s leadership and scale. In other words, like the answer to working less and having more freedom in my life was leadership and scale. What I mean by that is like I needed to lead and not do, I needed the who, not how.

 

So, when I built Open Door Capital, I started with that end in mind. And actually, there’s a great little story I’ll tell real quick. So, when Josh sold part of BiggerPockets, the private equity, there’s this guy named Mike who ended up being chairman of the board. He was like an outside guy that just does this for a living. He’s chairman of a lot of boards and been in business for 50 years, very smart dude. Like he’s been around, he understands business.

 

And so, the first day at BiggerPockets, like when we had our meeting with the private equity team, he’s there and we’re telling him all the things we got. We got these many developers, we’re going to do this with it. We got this much cash in the account, we’re going to do this with it. We had these many marketing people, we’re going to do this with it.

 

And after a little while, he holds up his hand and he says, guys, guys, just stop telling me what you have and what you’re going to do with it. He said, tell me what’s possible and what you need to get there. We’re just going to give it to you. But that’s it. And it blew my mind. I don’t know why I never thought that way before. I’m always like, this is what I got, what can I build with it? And I was like, it’s a different mindset.

 

So, I didn’t even apply it to the BiggerPockets. I’d sit there and I applied it to my real estate. I was like, what’s possible? And I said, $50 million of real estate is possible. That’s huge. I could buy $50 million of real estate in three years. I set this goal for myself and I said, what do I need to get there so that I’m not the one getting me there? What do I need to build? What machine do I need to have built?

 

And I built from the top down. I hired my buddy as like basically CEO essentially, and he then hired some VPs who then brought in some more people. And we had five or six people on the team. Like, what do you need to build a $50 million portfolio? You need an analysis guy like an underwriter. You need somebody who’s good at finding deals. You need somebody who can run the whole operation. You need somebody in charge of asset management. You need maybe a bookkeeper, somebody to handle the money side of it, maybe an investor relations guy to handle like talking to investors about raising the money.

 

And if you have that, could that give me the $50 million? Well, I mean, the $300 million in the same time frame. I said $50 million, we got $300 million. Today, we’re at $650 million, now only nine months later from that first goal. So, we’ve more than doubled, like it’s crazy. What happens when you think about it is what’s possible. What team do I need to get there?

 

So, again, what got me out of having to work every day at Open Door Capital and why, you typically put in less than five hours a week at the entire company, despite us raising hundreds of millions of dollars and all this, it’s because I learned how to scale. And when you scale, you can get big enough to hire the right team in which you lead. So, scale and leadership is what made it so that we can grow.

 

And some people were like, well, yeah, but you’re only working a few hours a week. How do you know what’s going on each part of your business? I’m like, well, one, we operate within a very good system. We use EOS. So, like I know what everyone’s doing all the time and everyone’s got goal that are tracked, the 10-year goal, three-year, one year, one-quarter, weekly stuff. We got meetings that I attend a couple of a week. And the real answer there though is I hired every single person is smarter and better than me in every regard. Every single person is better than me.

 

They’re like, what? I’ve looked at underwriting and I’m like, oh, you know what? You only have $450 dedicated for paint. I think it can be more like $500. What do I know? This guy has been underwriting hundreds of deals a month. He’s so much better than me and he’s built to do that. Like, he’s infinitely better. And so, as an entrepreneur, I just had to know, like I need– and people say this, but like I really feel like I did a good job of it is I just hire people better than me and I got out of the way. That’s the vision.

 

Justin Donald: And this is Open Door Capital. And so, you guys have invested in mobile home parks, I think, and you’ve done well with that. There’s probably something to be said on a commercial level that it’s much easier to manage multifamily, like apartment complexes. And so, I would imagine that’s probably why you’re looking to scale more on that front. Even though I like both asset classes, technically, I just love mobile home parks because of the opportunity.

 

But from a management standpoint, if you’re not building in-house, it is really hard to manage them. And so, is there anything else you want to share about Open Door because you guys have a great reputation? It’s a bummer that you have this other company that swooped in on the name that’s creating [inaudible 00:46:11]. By the way, I actually think it’s really cool that you’re rebranding. And I know, we may not get into the specifics today, but I’m excited about all the things that we discussed last week with name and brand and opportunity and all the cool stuff that you’re rolling out. So, I’m thrilled.

 

Brandon Turner: Yeah, it’s been fun. It’s been the coolest thing I ever built up until now. It was Open Door Capital. Just to see what happens when you get the right people around you and you lead them well within a system that doesn’t allow anybody to slack. I mean, like a month ago, we had a big challenge. We had a bunch of apartments, by the way, yes, you’re 100% percent right.

 

So, out of my team of 70 people, 60 of them are on the mobile home park side, yet apartments make up more than half my revenue. So, it’s like an 80/20 thing. Like that’s why apartments, I just want more scalable. Actually, it’s less work to buy a $90 million apartment than it is to buy a $3 million mobile home park. It is less work to manage a $90 million apartment than a $3 million mobile home park. And we’re buying over $100 million a year of mobile home parks. We just can’t buy more. Like we’re not slowing down. I just can literally not buy any more mobile home parks. I’m sure we’re the biggest buyer in the world for mobile home parks right now. Like, I don’t know anybody. Maybe Blackstone’s buy more, I don’t know. But we just can’t buy more.

 

So, the question is if we can raise more capital, we have a lot of people begging to put their money with us. I mean, like we could sit and not take it, which would be fine. Or I could scale and I could go into apartments. That’s why we got into apartments. And I like both, I’m not going to stop at mobile home parks, but man, the apartments are way easier. Yeah, man, it’s been a ride, it’s been a trip. And I’m excited to see people [inaudible 00:47:54] which I will buy $10 billion of real estate in the next decade. That’s the vision. So, $10 billion in 10 years.

 

Justin Donald: That’s incredible, Brandon. Well, I’m not only thrilled about the fact that we’re in Wellspring together. You’ve recently joined Front Row Dads, one of my favorite groups about being family men first, businessmen second, which that’s you through and through. And I love that you’ve made decisions that prove it.

 

But third, I’d love for you just to share real quick about the team that you have that hosts these epic dinners. You live in Maui, right? You just bought a place, a secondary home in Coeur d’Alene, which is super cool. So, you get a couple of different seasons, a couple of different landscapes, but you spend most of your time in Maui and you’ve got this team there that just is, I mean, they make incredible food on open fire and just so much, it was delicious. It was an incredible experience. And you host it outside under the starlight. I’d love for you to give props to them.

 

Brandon Turner: Yeah, man. So, this one, my best friend, his name is Yeshua or Yahshua, but he goes by Yeshua. Anyway, he’s one of my best friends in the whole world and I met him out here in Maui and he was a sommelier, whatever they call him, like the wine guy at the Four Seasons, the nominal, like one of the top wine guys in the world.

 

But he started the side hustle that ended up becoming like a really incredible business called Kiawe Outdoor. It’s K-I-A-W-E_outdoor on Instagram. So, look up kiawe_outdoor on Instagram, everyone. But they were just like, dig a big hole in a field and then throw a bunch of kiawe wood in, which is like a Hawaiian mesquite wood that’s invasive. And they’re just like tons of that, like big, huge fire. And they would string up meat and vegetables and fruit over the fire and they would just cook outside and tell stories and like how these really epic long tables with the party lights and like the whole thing, it’s a vibe. Like, it’s a vibe.

 

And I went to one of the events and I was like, this is the most life-changing dinner, like, this is unreal. And the connections and the camaraderie you get with the people around you at these outside dinners for four or five hours. I mean, people don’t do four or five-hour meals anymore with wine and good people in conversation. That’s what they’re curating.

 

So, I became really good friends with this guy. I hosted a lot of masterminds out here in Maui. In fact, I have three in the next three weeks. We have a group called Cabana Club. It’s anybody who invests a high amount into our deals, we call them the Cabana Club. And they’re all coming out. We got 70 people coming out next week for our Cabana Club, just meet up. It’s a way for us to reward kind of our top investors.

 

And so, like, we’ve got a massive a big dinner on the side of a mountain with the most incredible view with food and wine with this company. So, yeah, and then I had this crazy idea, like, I got a lot of friends in Austin. It’s like I had my buddy issue and I’m like, hey, what if you and Matt, he was the partner on there? And I’m like, what if you guys flew to Austin? I just hosted a big dinner with us out there. And they’re like, yes.

 

So, I ended up doing two that week in Austin. Now, it costs me a lot of money. I think I spent $50,000 on two dinners. And can I look and say, this is exactly what I got out of it? I mean, three people invested in my– and I don’t know the tangible what I got out of it necessarily, but here you and I are sitting here chatting. I don’t know if we’d be here right now. And what’s our relationship worth? What would we do together in the future?

 

I mean, maybe we would have run into each other at the Wellspring, but we wouldn’t have had the same connection. We may have never even talked there. So, the point I make about that is sometimes you do things in life where you don’t know what you’re necessarily going to get. It’s not a tit-for-tat. But when you put out good amazing experience is what– I think, was it Freud that said, he called it like peak experiences. It’s his moment of life where it’s just like your elevated moments. Peak is great, like the whole mountain peak.

 

For us, last week was a peak experience, but there are other times, and when you curate those in your life with amazing people, family, friends, like business people, whatever, on average, that is going to forever change the directory of your life. Maybe not every single one will, and maybe in ways that you don’t even know. But if you just commit to a life of curating peak experiences, your life 50 years from now, 20 years from now, will be radically different. And so, that’s what our event was all about. And now you and I are sitting on a podcast together because you show up.

 

Justin Donald: I love it. Curate magic experiences. I tell people in my community all the time, I don’t need more stuff. I want experiences and I want it with the people that matter most to me. And I actually want to help create those experiences for people that may otherwise never get to experience that because maybe they can’t afford it or they never thought of it or it’s something that had to be put together creatively. And so, I love that you’re doing that. Brandon, I got…

 

Brandon Turner: Real quick and I tell one more story in there.

 

Justin Donald: Yeah.

 

Brandon Turner: Josh Dorkin and I were in the back of an Uber 10 years ago probably. Josh has had a BiggerPockets. And I flew to Denver for some meeting thing. I never really lived there. While we were building BiggerPockets, that’s where he was at. So, I flew to Denver. We’re in the back of an Uber and we had this conversation, and this conversation, it was so subtle at the time, but man, how it impacted my life. And what he said was and what we talked about, but what he said is when you’re a teenager, those magical moments just happen spontaneously, like, you know, Taco Bell at two in the morning when you’re sitting with your buddy after they closed and you’re just having a conversation about life and God and family and your future, and you don’t notice that in the moment, but it is magic. It is magic.

 

Those happen all the time when you’re a kid and when you’re a teenager [inaudible 00:53:20] and you get to college and there might be a few of them and you become an adult and they stop. They almost entirely stop because you just get busy writing life and they’re very rare. And so, as an adult, we need to be intentional about curating magical moments, or more of intentional about it and creating moments in which magic happens. Like that night was freezing cold, it was like ridiculously cold when we were in Austin and we had this amazing dinner. And there’s no guarantee it was going to be a magical night, but it was a magical night because we set the environment correctly. And that is what Kiawe Outdoor’s all about. They magically create these moments, these little settings where we intentionally enter a place which allows magic to happen. And that, I’m just so passionate about.

 

Justin Donald: I love it. Brandon, I could talk to you for another hour or two, and unfortunately, we’ve got to get running at this point. But can you please share with my audience where people can learn more about you and Open Door Capital?

 

Brandon Turner: Sure, man. I’m a social media junkie, I love it. So, I’m on Instagram and TikTok and all that good stuff. It’s BeardyBrandon, beard with a Y at the end, BeardyBrandon. Yes, I have a beard if you’re not watching this, you’re listening to it. I have a very homeless-looking beard. And then ODCFund, Open Door Capital, so O-D-C Fund dot-com is where everything real estate business-wise is put, so check it out there.

 

Justin Donald: I love it. So cool. And for anyone listening, for anyone watching, if you’re curious, how do you learn from more amazing people like this that are smart, that have kind of figured the game out, that have incredible deals and incredible deal flow and can save on taxes and have tax strategy and you’re looking for other like-minded individuals that are playing the game of life and business at a higher level, I really encourage you to apply to join the most exclusive mastermind that turns everyday people into savvy investors, where you get a chance to check out private deals, things that are just, I call them invisible deals. They’re not open to the public, and the terms are specialized and preferred. They’re pre-negotiated, they’re de-risked based on those terms, and just so much advantage with getting a quicker return and getting a lower fee or a lower minimum type of access. Feel free to apply at LifestyleInvestor.com/mastermind.

 

And just to wrap things up, as I do every week. I’ve got a question. The question’s the same every week. What’s the one step that you can take today to move towards financial freedom and to live a life that’s truly on your terms, a life that you desire, a life by design, not by default? We’ll catch you next week.