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Mastering Market Shifts with Sam Silverman · Go Big with Gib Podcast

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Go Big With Gibb podcast, where we talk to professionals, business owners and entrepreneurs about their big wins.
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: Hey guys, what's up?
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: Welcome to this episode of Go Big With Gibb.
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: Today I've got my friend Sam Silverman with me.
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: Sam, how are you today?
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: Good, gibb, thanks for having me on.
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: It's a pleasure to have you on, Sam, if you would tell us a little bit about your background and tell us who you are.
• 0:30
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 0:30
  Speaker 2: So on mine, I think I've always been entrepreneurial since a really young age.
• 0:35
  Speaker 2: Right Going from, I built an event planning company in high school that we built up and actually sold.
• 0:41
  Speaker 2: Then kind of in school, played baseball in college, figured I was going to go work myself at some point again and had no clue what I wanted to go do, so naturally got into sales and I think sales is a great place in terms of you know, first, few roles you're paying the phones, right, you're cold calling, you're.
• 0:58
  Speaker 2: You know you're using LinkedIn, social right, just trying to go book appointments for more senior sellers.
• 1:04
  Speaker 2: It gives you a really good picture of how to go hunt.
• 1:07
  Speaker 2: So that for a while eventually started leading my own teams.
• 1:10
  Speaker 2: Doing that.
• 1:11
  Speaker 2: We built a team from about zero to a hundred or so in a public company on the inside sales side of the house and you should have a lot of exposure to people, to prospecting right that whole side of the world.
• 1:23
  Speaker 2: And you know, during that time I started building up a portfolio of single family houses right.
• 1:29
  Speaker 2: That was my idea of passive income, which I quickly learned is in no way passive, you know, fast forward about a year, sold all those homes off and like my moment was, we were doing like board prep meeting.
• 1:44
  Speaker 2: We were, you know, that time of the quarter in sales and I had a tenant drunkenly drive over a sewer line with a lawnmower and I think I probably got like 20 calls that week between a property manager the tenants not got my phone number.
• 1:58
  Speaker 2: Different vendors were approving things and I quickly realized that just wasn't what I want to go do with my life and time, so switched over to passive investing, realized I liked that a lot more sort of partnering with people on their projects and fast forward to now we're working in both the real estate and private equity space in terms of syndicating our own projects across a variety of asset classes, most recently in the service business sector, physically focusing on paving, and also look at future opportunities there as well.
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: So, sam, talk to me a little bit about, you know, being a sales leader.
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: I know that on your LinkedIn profile it says former sales leader, retired by the age of 28 through passive investing.
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: So tell me a little bit about that.
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: Like I know, that's part of your mantra.
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: Tell me a little bit about what that means yeah.
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: So the way I viewed retired there's more so independent from needing corporate America and on my end.
• 2:53
  Speaker 2: But I left my corporate job in record.
• 2:55
  Speaker 2: I turned 28 and it was because I had enough money coming in passively that I can go support myself, to go make that jump, to go decide to do my own thing and kind of build something else that I want to do more.
• 3:08
  Speaker 2: So, yeah, I think I'm in 65 deals or so as an LP right now across real estate debt, private equity.
• 3:15
  Speaker 2: The cashflow from those allowed me to go make that transition a lot more smoothly, like I was someone who hung on to the day job actually for a really long time while I was building up my business on the side.
• 3:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so I kind of moved on from the corporate world and now focus exclusively in this space myself.
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: So let's talk a little bit about that 65 deals that you're involved in and I know that spans a lot of different asset classes how many years, I guess, did it take you to get to the point where you had 65 deals that you were invested in?
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: I know some of them have probably gone full cycle and are finished, but how many years did it take you to do that?
• 3:54
  Speaker 2: I probably started in early 2019, so almost five and a half years now.
• 4:02
  Speaker 2: So 65 probably total deals give or take.
• 4:05
  Speaker 2: I think I've had 13, 14 deals go full cycle.
• 4:08
  Speaker 2: Obviously, far less have gone full cycle in 2023 and 2024.
• 4:12
  Speaker 2: I just had one sell this past week which was great, kind of seeing the markets open back up.
• 4:16
  Speaker 2: But a lot of those holdings are tied to real estate and real estate what we've seen is just that values have gone down overall as it ties to interest rates right.
• 4:25
  Speaker 2: A lot of deals are.
• 4:26
  Speaker 2: We got spoiled early on from like that 2019 and 2021, 2022 portion of the world where you can go buy a deal and people were selling them in 12, 18, 24 months in terms of turnaround time versus a five-year projection.
• 4:41
  Speaker 2: So we have to cycle capital pretty quickly at that time and now you're seeing deals go for a true five, seven years to get back to the place they were or to show some profitability.
• 4:51
  Speaker 2: So just kind of the ebbs and flows of the market cycles and how things shift in that sense too.
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: So, sam, what would you say?
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: Can you give us an example of one of your deals that's gone full cycle that really turned out well for you, where you felt like man?
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: This is just like one of the best outcomes I could have hoped for.
• 5:09
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think the good comes to the bad, too, right, when you look at those deals we're referring to.
• 5:14
  Speaker 2: So we invested quite a bit in Phoenix, arizona, where, if you look from 2020 to 2022, the cap rates went down by what?
• 5:23
  Speaker 2: 150, 200 basis points.
• 5:25
  Speaker 2: So what you saw was that property values were going up by 30, 40, 50% year over year.
• 5:31
  Speaker 2: There, where you could buy anything and if multiple you were selling the property for in the future went up, things turned out very, very well, which happened quite frequently.
• 5:42
  Speaker 2: So a handful of deals sell there pretty quickly, right?
• 5:45
  Speaker 2: Looking at rough numbers, some deals doubled within a year and, in terms of investing a dollar, getting $2 out, I think we've seen now is that it can take far more of that true five to seven year timeline for projects like that to go get to that place again as well.
• 6:01
  Speaker 2: I think you saw a lot of good market conditions in terms of really, really big tailwinds that were helping out quite a bit.
• 6:09
  Speaker 2: I think now what you're seeing on the real estate side is that the operations are becoming crucial, buying deals that are truly a good value and also seeing how much of an impact operations can go make as well.
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, great point.
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: So, sam, you've done something really interesting in that you've pivoted in a large way.
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: I mean, you've invested in a ton of different real estate opportunities I think probably some multifamily, some as investing in debt.
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: I know you've just done a lot of different things within the asset class, but recently you said you've been buying service industry businesses.
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: Talk to me about what's the difference like, comparing for people that come from a multifamily background, what's it like buying a business?
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: Can you talk a little bit about the similarities and the differences?
• 6:57
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 6:57
  Speaker 2: So how?
• 6:58
  Speaker 2: I think that at a high level, right Multifamily if you're looking at deals and I probably review I probably see 100 plus deals a year in multifamily space, assuming they're all on roughly a five year hold period.
• 7:10
  Speaker 2: What you're seeing is that the standard deviation of returns is really compact, like most deals.
• 7:16
  Speaker 2: You'll see if you're using purely money in versus money out as investor most model to say, 1.8 to 2.2.
• 7:26
  Speaker 2: And there's a range in terms of what they fall in between those and you're usually pretty confident that, hey, we can get to something around this range.
• 7:35
  Speaker 2: Right, in terms of getting that deal there.
• 7:38
  Speaker 2: In the private equity world that range is massively different.
• 7:42
  Speaker 2: You have, I think, a little bit more risk at times.
• 7:47
  Speaker 2: You also have more levers you can go pull, for example, when looking at multifamily, when you go buy a property, there's only so many things you can go do to that property to increase the value.
• 8:00
  Speaker 2: You can go update all the exterior, you can go put washer and dryers in, fix the kitchens up, put new floors in some new signs, but you're really capped out based on what the market itself will go pay for a comparable unit somewhere else.
• 8:14
  Speaker 2: You can go if the market itself can only absorb $1,200 of rent and that unit you build is worth two grand, you'll probably only get $1,200 of rents.
• 8:22
  Speaker 2: You'll probably be pretty occupied, but you only going to get $1,200 of rents, right?
• 8:25
  Speaker 2: You'll probably be pretty occupied, but you'll only get that $1,200 cap.
• 8:29
  Speaker 2: In the private equity world, as it relates to returns, you can see returns that are astronomically higher, right, because part of what you're doing is at least how we see it.
• 8:39
  Speaker 2: For example, in the paving sector we can go buy companies off market between three and five X EBITDA, whereas in the real estate world you're buying companies for a cap rate, so inverse of a multiple right.
• 8:52
  Speaker 2: So if you buy a property for a six cap, that property is a 16 and two thirds multiple on that upper income similar function to EBITDA in businesses.
• 9:02
  Speaker 2: So that three to five X you're buying.
• 9:04
  Speaker 2: In that you can go get a level of scale in a portfolio.
• 9:07
  Speaker 2: Say you had about $10 million in EBITDA, $12 million in the paving sector.
• 9:10
  Speaker 2: That's likely now worth between 8 and 13x when looking at the valuations.
• 9:15
  Speaker 2: So essentially it's going back to Phoenix in 2020 of the cut your cap rate in half right when looking at the exit piece of it.
• 9:24
  Speaker 2: So for us we see that as an opportunity where two plus two actually can go equal eight or 10 or 12 when looking at the exit potential for it by finding companies that are owned by retired baby boomers.
• 9:36
  Speaker 2: They've had that same company for 20, 30 years.
• 9:38
  Speaker 2: They built it as far as they can get.
• 9:40
  Speaker 2: It been in great capital business for them for so many years.
• 9:43
  Speaker 2: But now there's opportunity to go bring in modern marketing systems, back office and go pool through their companies that fit a mold really well together.
• 9:53
  Speaker 2: You can go then package up and go sell in the future to a middle market private equity firm that'll pay you a premium for hunting companies down and doing that legwork for them.
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: So what does it look like operationally, sam?
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: When you acquire a business like that, does the owner, who is the seller, do they typically stay on for a period of time?
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: Talk to me a little bit about that.
• 10:14
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 10:15
  Speaker 2: So all the deals that we've done and plan to go do, there's usually a level of seller carry, seller rollover and seller earn out and what that means is that a lot of the actual exit price is tied.
• 10:28
  Speaker 2: I can give an example the last company we purchased was $6.5 million.
• 10:34
  Speaker 2: $3 million to $6.5 million is tied to performance incentives over a two-year period for the former owner to hit benchmarks in a period of time to get paid out that money over a window.
• 10:46
  Speaker 2: So what that does is that reduces our risk massively in terms of how we buy the company itself.
• 10:51
  Speaker 2: It also allows us to use leverage for that remaining $3 million because the bank will then lend on that based on where EBITDA gets to.
• 11:00
  Speaker 2: So it allows us to really go work hand in hand with that seller to make sure the business is transitioned in a positive way.
• 11:07
  Speaker 2: We also structure earnouts and promotional packages for the top five members of the companies that we're acquiring, making sure we're keeping key staff in place, that they're bought into the vision and, if they're not, figuring out quickly replacements to go fill those roles as well.
• 11:24
  Speaker 2: So we see it as a great opportunity to go have really aligned incentives across the board to go make sure that transition goes really smoothly and having a fallback plan in case it doesn't, as it relates to purchase price, earn out structures, seller rollover, et cetera in that process.
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: So why paving companies?
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: I know building infrastructure in the United States is super important, as it is in any country, and I know that it's profitable.
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: I don't know, maybe a lot of it is government contracts.
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: I could be wrong, though, but tell me why specifically you guys decided to target that small niche.
• 12:04
  Speaker 2: A lot of it is government contracts on the bigger, bigger scale Right now.
• 12:07
  Speaker 2: It's not playing heavily in that space right now.
• 12:09
  Speaker 2: So what we found was that we wanted a line of business that you had years and years of history.
• 12:17
  Speaker 2: Right, the roads aren't going anywhere.
• 12:19
  Speaker 2: There's more and more need for quality roads everywhere.
• 12:21
  Speaker 2: Right, you can't be replaced by AI and it's something that will outlast for a very long period of time when looking at the need for it.
• 12:29
  Speaker 2: So what we found was that it was a very fragmented market.
• 12:32
  Speaker 2: So when you look at a market to go into, you want to understand the competition there of who else is me trying to go buy the same companies or opportunities that you're trying to go buy.
• 12:39
  Speaker 2: They typically fall into two main categories, one being the mom and pop shop.
• 12:44
  Speaker 2: We're buying companies in that, you know, one to $3 million revenue range, which is, you know, much smaller than we want to go target ourself, and there's a lot of competition for that $50 million plus revenue range type companies.
• 12:57
  Speaker 2: So where there wasn't competition was where we're living right now in that 10 to 25.
• 13:03
  Speaker 2: And what we saw was that we can be more buttoned up than the mom and pops and we can really relate to these owners, much more so than the institutional type buyers who have to deploy bigger checks and view them potentially as a number on a spreadsheet.
• 13:18
  Speaker 2: So that's focusing very specifically on one sector.
• 13:22
  Speaker 2: We felt the opportunity of buying.
• 13:24
  Speaker 2: We can get companies between that 3 and 5x range.
• 13:27
  Speaker 2: We have a really good opportunity to go focus in geographic area, create synergy in terms of companies we're acquiring, and what I mean by that is that some companies focus primarily on the ground grading and earthwork side of the house, some focus on the site prep side of the house, some focus purely on paving and some focus on the maintenance side.
• 13:47
  Speaker 2: We felt for us we can go get a level of synergy by acquiring a paving company and a groundwork company and a maintenance company and in turn they all feed each other.
• 13:58
  Speaker 2: When looking at the flow of revenue and also looking at a big piece of this too is that in the construction world I'm sure you're familiar with too is that you have some dead days right when projects get stalled or things happen.
• 14:11
  Speaker 2: The ability to go in and transfer workers and resources between sites that you have and different types of spaces.
• 14:17
  Speaker 2: That's a huge, huge, huge economy of scale that we feel confident we can go bring in.
• 14:21
  Speaker 2: The main reasons are the valuation we can go acquire them for our competition and the potential interest from future buyers.
• 14:29
  Speaker 2: We see already from private equity-type firms as well.
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: This episode of Go Big with Gibb is brought to you by Irons Equity.
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: At Irons Equity, we specialize in helping investors like you create long-term generational wealth and save money on taxes through recession resistant real estate investments that create passive income for you and your family.
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: If you want to secure your financial future, go to investwithgibbcom to schedule a 30-minute introductory meeting with me.
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: Gib irons again, that's investwithgibcom Interesting.
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: So when you said the $10 to $25 million range, is that the range in terms of what they're doing in top-line revenue in a particular year Top-line correct.
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: What is the hold?
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: Are you underwriting these for like a five-year hold, similar to what you would do with a multifamily?
• 15:21
  Speaker 2: So on our end, we try to make it look as similar to real estate return profiles as possible when looking at how we structure the deal itself.
• 15:29
  Speaker 2: Right, put everything down to our fee structures, to our hold time, to our preferred return and profit sharing split.
• 15:35
  Speaker 2: Therefore, after we try to make it look really similar to a multifamily deal in terms of how someone would use it Obviously numbers are different, right, business plan is different we try to make it really comparable for someone.
• 15:47
  Speaker 2: If they're used to only seeing Dallas multifamily, they can go look at this and see okay, this is how it stacks up relative to the multifamily deal they've seen over and over again.
• 15:56
  Speaker 2: On their end, Sure, sure.
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: So I guess you're using the same nomenclature, things like equity, multiple IRR, things of that nature that would make the multifamily people feel comfortable with, the kind of like comparing apples to apples.
• 16:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's our goal, right, Obviously there's nuances that go into it, but in terms of how we present the opportunity, our goal is to make it digestible for someone who may not have as much familiarity in this space if they're used to primarily investing in real estate.
• 16:25
  Speaker 2: So we saw as an opportunity to go help people get exposure to this asset class and help kind of bridge that gap near transition from potentially investing in multifamily or traditional real estate to more of this structure.
• 16:37
  Speaker 2: And yeah, we're modeling between a five and seven year hold period.
• 16:41
  Speaker 2: Obviously, our incentives are aligned where if we get an offer that makes sense to exit earlier, we'll definitely entertain that, similar to how people do in multifamily or real estate as well.
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: I take it, based on the numbers that we've talked about, that the potential upside of investing in a business like this could be significantly higher than what you would traditionally see in a multifamily deal, like if a multifamily deal does really really well.
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: We talked about that equity multiple of 2.2 might be your equity multiple instead of 1.8.
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: And that's a very small deviation.
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: Talk to me about the upside of these types of investments.
• 17:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 17:20
  Speaker 2: So on our end we're modeling a four and a half even multiple at the exit of our portfolio, which we believe is comically low, and basically we think we can end up getting double that multiple going forward.
• 17:35
  Speaker 2: So for us it's basically the equivalent of, if you think, your exit cap rates at seven in a multifamily deal, making it 14 with how we view the level of conservability that we've taken.
• 17:45
  Speaker 2: And on our end we see a range of between three and a half to 4X at the investor level right when looking at the potential within that range as well.
• 17:57
  Speaker 2: So if we can actually get closer to an 8, 9, 10 multiple, those numbers jump up dramatically.
• 18:02
  Speaker 2: We want to just be as conservative as possible when looking at the underwriting behind this, where it leaves a lot of room for error to still get to those numbers and a lot of upside therefore as well.
• 18:12
  Speaker 2: So on our end, part of what we thought of this as well is that people are used to seeing multifamily return profiles in that 2x range give or take where if we start showing a 7 or an 8, people may be almost scared of those investments when looking at they feel it's too far off what they're used to seeing.
• 18:29
  Speaker 2: So part of what we wanted to do is hey, let's be super conservative, give ourselves a lot of room to outperform and also make it more digestible to someone who may have not seen yields like this in the past.
• 18:40
  Speaker 2: They feel like, okay, this is actually attainable based on this business plan, depending on how much knowledge they have, and explaining hey, these are the levels in which we're being conservative, in that we have buffer room in each area where, if things go right, we've got a lot of room for them to be very right as well.
• 18:53
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so, sam, I know you've got a lot of room for an empty very right as well.
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: So, sam, I know you've got you know a wealth of experience in investing.
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: You've also done a lot of other things.
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: You're the host of the fully funded podcast and you've got a mastermind fully funded.
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: Tell us a little bit about that.
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: What was it like starting a mastermind?
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: From what I hear, it went really really well for you and that it's just kind of taken off, and I hear great things about your content.
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: I know you've got the inaugural summit is coming up this week, which I hate it that I can't make it.
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: But man, yeah, tell us a little bit about Fully Funded.
• 19:33
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so my background is in leading sales teams.
• 19:37
  Speaker 2: I think a lot of what people may have gaps at times when looking at the real estate private equity capital racing world is understanding how to go market right, understanding it in front of the right people, attract investors right.
• 19:51
  Speaker 2: Essentially, you'll learn how to go sell yourself when looking at connecting with people.
• 19:56
  Speaker 2: So we saw a huge opportunity to go build educational content and create community.
• 20:01
  Speaker 2: I can think a big thing that I've always has helped me is getting access to being in the room of people who have been there and done that and it really helps you in terms of having peers you can go relate to.
• 20:12
  Speaker 2: I always give the example right Like, say, you know your wife or your spouse, your friends who really care about you, and you start something new in this space.
• 20:21
  Speaker 2: You tell them about what's going on.
• 20:23
  Speaker 2: They may want to be as helpful as they possibly can be.
• 20:26
  Speaker 2: They're very empathetic, they care about you, but they can't really offer you much actionable support for most people's friends.
• 20:33
  Speaker 2: So we view this as a way of getting the room people who are all involved in the space bring in myself and other coaches who have great competencies in certain areas, like my background from the sales world, very heavy on LinkedIn, and we bring in people who have other great skill sets to go help on the coaching side, that are far better at those areas than myself, and so we saw this opportunity and for me, I guess we meet a ton of great people, right, the pay was actually formed out of the community itself too.
• 21:00
  Speaker 2: Right, in terms of myself, my two partners there as well.
• 21:02
  Speaker 2: I'm actually meeting in the community and we've seen a ton of great partnerships.
• 21:06
  Speaker 2: People found capital partners there, operating partners, one-on-one, new skill sets, friendships, so we've seen a lot come out of it.
• 21:15
  Speaker 2: Our goal there is making it really accessible.
• 21:16
  Speaker 2: I think some other communities are priced to the point where it's so much restrictive for people who are looking to go get involved in this space, whether it be the pricing side, the access side.
• 21:23
  Speaker 2: For us we want to be really accessible for both real estate operators, private equity investors and people who have a great pedigree, say from the sales world, or they're a great lawyer or a doctor, and they're like, okay, I'm getting involved in this space, how do I go do it?
• 21:38
  Speaker 2: So our roles have been solid for that.
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: Yeah, no, that's awesome.
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: Was it something that you always knew you were going to do, like, hey, I'm going to go out and start a mastermind, or did it come about more organically?
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: It was something.
• 21:52
  Speaker 2: I always knew I was going to do at some point.
• 21:55
  Speaker 2: I used to do a lot of consulting in this space and what I found was that the rates I had to go charge for doing it were way too expensive for people to go justify paying in terms of.
• 22:08
  Speaker 2: It was way too big of a burden financially.
• 22:10
  Speaker 2: What I also found was that I didn't enjoy the one-on-one piece of it as much, because a lot of it was the same conversations over and over again.
• 22:16
  Speaker 2: So rather than making it prohibitively expensive to justify my time spent and effort and also prohibitively expensive for them to go actually receive services there, I'm like we can do a lot of this at scale make it more accessible, bringing people besides myself, because a lot of it's a few common themes we typically see in this space, and also the community piece of it too is there's a huge, huge value of being around people.
• 22:38
  Speaker 2: You know, right now we've got about 150 members in the community and the connections that are made from them is hugely, hugely valuable as to the education or content they receive.
• 22:49
  Speaker 2: So we found that we can go offer way more value, way more accessible right and still provide a lot of help to our community members one-on-one too yeah, no, that that's awesome.
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: So you mentioned earlier how active you've been on linkedin and before I was even doing anything with linkedin, I was watching what you were doing.
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: You really have found a way to.
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: I mean you've gotten a lot of investors from linkedin.
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: You've grown your investor base through linkedin gosh.
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: I mean you've gotten a lot of investors from LinkedIn.
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: You've grown your investor base through LinkedIn Gosh.
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: You've grown your mastermind through LinkedIn.
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: Talk to me a little bit about, like, how long have you been on LinkedIn and been active in it?
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: What benefits have you seen from it?
• 23:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so probably 2016, when I first got into the tech sales world.
• 23:29
  Speaker 2: I think LinkedIn is so impactful because you know, say, instagram, say Facebook or Twitter or whatever platform that you're on, it's really tough to go sort by who a person is right.
• 23:43
  Speaker 2: If you give me someone's LinkedIn or give me, I can go create a list in two seconds that shows you know, for example, my background's in tech sales and most of my investors come from that space as well.
• 23:53
  Speaker 2: I can go create a list on LinkedIn sales navigator that shows you know they're in the United States, they're in tech or software, they're at least this level of seniority, they're in sales, they're in these types of companies, right, and I can go see a list of a half million people in two seconds.
• 24:09
  Speaker 2: It'll probably make at least 300 grand a year, right?
• 24:13
  Speaker 2: So, in turn, I can be very accurate with who I want to reach out to.
• 24:17
  Speaker 2: Right, I can go have that story.
• 24:19
  Speaker 2: I can go see their background.
• 24:20
  Speaker 2: At the same time, too, I have to have you know, speak their language, be relatable to them as well.
• 24:25
  Speaker 2: So I think LinkedIn is huge in terms of being able to curate the network you want to go have, and also it's great in terms of being able to speak to that audience too.
• 24:37
  Speaker 2: So, for example, if you would do a LinkedIn audit, if you're like, okay, I've got X number of connections and X percent of those connections actually fit the profile of you know investor avatar, customer avatar that I want to speak to, the more you then start sharing content, the more people that actually fit your buy box start seeing that content.
• 24:54
  Speaker 2: So I think it's really great when you look at you know one-to-one outreach, building a personal brand on there, just sharing what it is that you're doing, I think is hugely valuable on a place like LinkedIn.
• 25:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah, one thing I've noticed you do a lot of is talk about the deals that you've already done, like you will talk about.
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: Okay, we've got this opportunity that we did, and here was the pro forma expectations, and then here's how we exceeded those and I think that definitely builds a level of confidence in the audience.
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: They're like you know, look, here goes Sam again with another opportunity and this is what he was projecting on the opportunity and this is how they exceeded that.
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: Has that been really effective for you in sharing that kind of stuff?
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: Because people don't really get access to that kind of information unless they invested in the deal absent some sort of post like what you've been doing?
• 25:48
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it's also just builds a level of social brand there too, and brand equity.
• 25:50
  Speaker 2: And what I mean by that is that I like investing in people who have a level of social brand there too, and brand equity.
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: And what I mean by that is that.
• 25:55
  Speaker 2: I like investing in people who have a lot of brand equity out there, so, for example, they can't go hide if something goes wrong.
• 26:02
  Speaker 2: Right, people often ask you know how much capital is invested in that deal?
• 26:05
  Speaker 2: I think that that's actually less relevant and less important than how big the person's brand of a deal you're investing into.
• 26:12
  Speaker 2: And the reason I say that is that that social brand takes a while to go build up and if anything ethically you do wrong, anything that you don't feel is right there, there's a lot of risk that goes into having to go rebuild that trust that you built.
• 26:30
  Speaker 2: So the social piece, that actually is a huge weighting, in my opinion too, where people can get to know you really quickly in terms of seeing who you know, who you are, how you post, how you speak.
• 26:41
  Speaker 2: Part of what social does is you you know.
• 26:46
  Speaker 2: Someone first has to get to know you right In terms of knowing who you are.
• 26:48
  Speaker 2: They then start to see okay, I know Gibb, I see everything that Gibb's saying.
• 26:56
  Speaker 2: Right, it goes from okay, gibb seems like a decent guy to okay, gibb's speaking about all these things.
• 27:00
  Speaker 2: These are his values, or this is how he thinks.
• 27:02
  Speaker 2: This is his philosophy on things.
• 27:03
  Speaker 2: Now it gets to the place of, hey, do I align to those things?
• 27:06
  Speaker 2: If yes, do I actually like Gibb?
• 27:08
  Speaker 2: Right, do I keep following along with him?
• 27:09
  Speaker 2: Do I agree with all of this stuff?
• 27:10
  Speaker 2: And then that takes that conversation from someone who is, you know, a stranger to you.
• 27:16
  Speaker 2: Can get a phone call now I'm like, oh yeah, great to hear from you, right, that relationship is already partially there.
• 27:21
  Speaker 2: And then, hearing you speak right from your podcast, your LinkedIn post, they start to know who you are.
• 27:26
  Speaker 2: And that time, going from first contact to you know, partner or not, right, I can go move very quickly then because of it.
• 27:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah, no, I totally agree with that.
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: Talk to me a little bit about your investor calls that you do these days.
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: I know that you're kind of a big proponent of getting up and getting out and not sitting in front of the video conference all day long.
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: So it sounds like you do a lot of your calls on the move, kind of out, getting some exercise and doing some things.
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: Have you seen any?
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: I mean people say statistically that you are more likely to close a sale if you do it like on a video conference than a telephone call.
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: What's been your experience with that?
• 28:08
  Speaker 2: That may be true and I've also realized I'm okay if I have a little drop off from doing it on phone calls from like the lifestyle piece of it as well, right?
• 28:17
  Speaker 2: So part of why I dislike Zooms at times is that if you hear this in the background, you don't have their attention.
• 28:27
  Speaker 2: I think most people I've worked with they're VPs of sales, cros.
• 28:30
  Speaker 2: They're high level sellers where their Slack or their teams, their texts are dinging nonstop and if they're by their computer you don't have their attention.
• 28:40
  Speaker 2: They're likely seeing all notifications from their team, their people and, luckily, by their desk all of the day too.
• 28:46
  Speaker 2: That's how I used to be myself.
• 28:48
  Speaker 2: I just prefer to be outside.
• 28:49
  Speaker 2: I think way more clearly when I'm pacing around, and also I think people appreciate times too.
• 28:55
  Speaker 2: It's like hey, giv, you know great to speak to you today.
• 28:57
  Speaker 2: I'm actually on my way outside to go for a walk.
• 28:59
  Speaker 2: If you want to join me, that'd be great, right?
• 29:02
  Speaker 2: Because if they're outside walking around, I have their full attention, where so many conversations actually stop in the past and you hear typing in the background like, hey, are you doing something else right now?
• 29:11
  Speaker 2: If so, totally fine, and we can reschedule, right?
• 29:14
  Speaker 2: So part of its personal preference, and part of it is more the attention grab of being a bit different.
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: In that sense too, so, sam uh, you know right now we're in november of 2024.
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: Talk to me a little bit about what goals you have for 2025 and kind of where you see yourself going on your entrepreneurial journey.
• 29:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 29:34
  Speaker 2: So part of what we're looking to go do is do more with less things right.
• 29:40
  Speaker 2: So going deeper versus going wider.
• 29:42
  Speaker 2: So for us it's going to be, you know, much more so heavily diving into scaling and rolling up service businesses, and then on the other side of the house is scaling, fully funded and making it just a continually better community for our members, growing some new verticals as well.
• 29:59
  Speaker 2: Historically, a lot of our focus has been around people in real estate.
• 30:02
  Speaker 2: Now we're looking at opening up to people in private equity, startups, products, businesses.
• 30:08
  Speaker 2: We think we'll see a lot of a big trend going there that's not being served today.
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: That's awesome.
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: That's awesome, sam.
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: Well, it's always a pleasure to be with you.
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: Look for folks that want to reach out to you.
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: What's the best way for them to contact you?
• 30:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah, best way is on LinkedIn.
• 30:25
  Speaker 2: We're super active on there.
• 30:26
  Speaker 2: My virtual assistant, Kim, manages my inbox 24-7.
• 30:30
  Speaker 2: So if you reach out, she'll get back to you within, you know, usually an hour or so.
• 30:35
  Speaker 2: So, uh, LinkedIn is definitely the easiest way to reach us.
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: Great man.
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: Well look, I really appreciate you coming on the show today.
• 30:45
  Speaker 2: It's been a blast to catch up with you and, um, thank you.
• 30:46
  Speaker 2: Yeah, thanks for having me on.
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to this episode of go Big with Gibb.
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: If you haven't already go, follow us on social media at GibbIrons.
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: We'll see you next time.