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Transforming Challenges into Opportunities: Brian O'Neill's Inspiring Story · 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: Welcome to this episode of Go Big With Gibb.
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: Today, I've got a very special guest with me, brian O'Neill.
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: Brian, how are you today?
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: I'm doing great, gibb, good seeing you.
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah, good to see you.
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: It's great to catch up.
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: Brian, if you could just give a brief introduction, introduce yourself to the audience.
• 0:29
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so my name is Brian O'Neill.
• 0:31
  Speaker 2: I'm sort of a serial entrepreneur.
• 0:33
  Speaker 2: I graduated from Cal Poly with a construction management degree back in 2006.
• 0:38
  Speaker 2: Worked for a full-time big national company for one year and since then I've owned everything from an IT company, a construction company to a few restaurants, and now I'm in the real estate development and syndication world with apartments and self-storage land deals, stuff like that.
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: So, brian, let's go back and talk a little bit about your business experience.
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: What was your experience like running those three businesses that you ran?
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: And I want to kind of talk about how you transitioned from that into passive investing as well.
• 1:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:12
  Speaker 2: So I don't know.
• 1:12
  Speaker 2: I started out not knowing what I was doing.
• 1:14
  Speaker 2: I didn't realize it was an entrepreneur or just that was the role I was going to take.
• 1:18
  Speaker 2: I thought I was going to build houses for a national home builder.
• 1:20
  Speaker 2: It was 2007, 2008.
• 1:23
  Speaker 2: So we know what happened around then.
• 1:24
  Speaker 2: So I think we had 140 people in our division and I was the last guy hired.
• 1:29
  Speaker 2: I had a position where I got to go around in different departments and one of the departments I could go into was the accounting and the finance people.
• 1:35
  Speaker 2: They weren't talking about that.
• 1:37
  Speaker 2: Every time we'd sell a house, we would actually write a check to the bank for like 10 or 15 or 20 grand.
• 1:42
  Speaker 2: We were losing money on these things and I was like, man, this does not look good.
• 1:45
  Speaker 2: And then they started a first round of layoffs and we went from 140 people to 80 people and then, I think, to like 60 people and I was still employed.
• 1:52
  Speaker 2: I'm like I don't know why they're keeping me on, like I gotta get off this ship, it's gonna sink.
• 1:57
  Speaker 2: So my dad was building a house and he wanted to do this home automation audio video thing in the high-end homes and we couldn't get a vendor to go to this location.
• 2:07
  Speaker 2: It's in Oregon on the Rogue River, so I rented a one-hour conference room in one of those regal office places and convinced one of the vendors that we needed that.
• 2:16
  Speaker 2: I was real and I was starting a company and I needed a vendor account and he gave me one and that started my company called Link systems, and we ran that through the housing crash.
• 2:27
  Speaker 2: So that was a an interesting time.
• 2:30
  Speaker 2: I didn't know any different.
• 2:31
  Speaker 2: I thought that was just that's how business feels.
• 2:33
  Speaker 2: You know it's always feels like you're you're gonna die every week.
• 2:37
  Speaker 2: We successfully navigated the housing crash and built that company for 10 years and I got stuck in the e-myth a lot.
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: So I built a company that worked around me.
• 2:48
  Speaker 2: My dad was a dentist, so, just like a lawyer like yourself, he was trading time for money.
• 2:54
  Speaker 2: So that was the model I followed.
• 2:56
  Speaker 2: So I had employees and installers and salespeople, but it didn't run without me.
• 3:01
  Speaker 2: So I attempted probably twice to.
• 3:05
  Speaker 2: I read the books and everything and started to hire more staff and grow it and really try to pull myself out of the business and it made less money.
• 3:12
  Speaker 2: So at one point I just made it smaller and went back to like, okay, like I'm making really good money, I'll just keep the staff this size.
• 3:19
  Speaker 2: And I got a little discouraged.
• 3:21
  Speaker 2: I guess you would say, just like, well, I guess I'm just gonna have work this job.
• 3:24
  Speaker 2: I was making great money and I had a buddy that was going to franchise restaurants in California and I had a goal when I turned 35, I wanted to buy an Aston Martin.
• 3:34
  Speaker 2: So I set the goal and got the jobs done and the money was sitting in my bank account to buy that car and instead I invested it in a restaurant, which most people would think is the stupidest thing you've ever heard of, right?
• 3:50
  Speaker 2: But what I saw it was a franchise model and I was still looking for some way to like exit the e-myth being stuck in your business.
• 3:59
  Speaker 2: So that was my step into the restaurant industry, which we'll pivot into a whole nother story if you want to go into that.
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: You saved up all the money that you needed to purchase an Aston Martin and you had the money in the bank and then pivoted at the last minute and took, I'm guessing, probably every penny of that money and invested it into the restaurant.
• 4:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it was a used Aston Martin, just to be clear.
• 4:23
  Speaker 2: They're still expensive used, but you know a few hundred grand.
• 4:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we were mountain biking down in Santa Monica on a weekend break and I'm fielding phone calls from installers and customers and stuff and this guy has managers that's running his businesses yes, they're restaurants and he's making good money.
• 4:41
  Speaker 2: I'm like I want that.
• 4:43
  Speaker 2: I'll risk the money for the car to try that.
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: Sure, the car's a depreciating asset anyway.
• 4:50
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's going to lose money either way, so let's risk it on this new business idea.
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I like it.
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: How did it go?
• 4:55
  Speaker 2: I was just supposed to be a passive investor.
• 4:57
  Speaker 2: I owned it it was my LLC, I owned it 100% and I licensed with him and his company ran it as the management and they were in the process of franchising and they had a franchise lawyer and then when they were going to get the full franchise up and going, it would turn into a franchise model and I would get all of Northern California and the Bay Area as my territory as part of the deal of being the first guy in.
• 5:19
  Speaker 2: That's why I did it is I wanted the Bay Area basically, and I was just going to sell off those franchises and then, you know, make my money.
• 5:30
  Speaker 2: Basically turned out they didn't get the franchise off the ground.
• 5:32
  Speaker 2: There was all kinds of stuff like things didn't get honored, things didn't happen.
• 5:34
  Speaker 2: I ended up with a 6,000 square foot full-service restaurant that I needed to run and we ended up renaming it.
• 5:40
  Speaker 2: So I exited their brand and turned into my own brand and stepped in trying to figure out how I'm going to save my investment, because I just didn't want to quit.
• 5:50
  Speaker 2: I just won't quit.
• 5:52
  Speaker 2: And there were things done and said during that time that sort of pushed me against the wall a little bit, and when you push me against the wall I fight three times as hard.
• 6:00
  Speaker 2: So I figured out how to run a restaurant, lost more money, put more money into it.
• 6:06
  Speaker 2: Luckily I had my other business link systems that was doing well, so I would go to work there at 8am to like 5pm and I would go to work at the restaurant from 5 to like 10 or 11 or midnight, doing what day.
• 6:18
  Speaker 2: It was every single day basically, and did that for a few years until I figured out how to hire managers that don't steal from you, how to hire staff.
• 6:28
  Speaker 2: And I mean, when I took the business over they didn't have operating manuals, they didn't have correct HR hiring practices, all kinds of stuff going on.
• 6:37
  Speaker 2: I had to step in.
• 6:38
  Speaker 2: Luckily that's my strength because I like running the back end of the business, but I had to learn.
• 6:43
  Speaker 2: You know how to be the front end of the business, but I had to learn how to be the front end of a business.
• 6:46
  Speaker 2: People like in restaurants, when the owner comes to your table and talks to you, and I'm an introvert so that's difficult for me.
• 6:52
  Speaker 2: It takes time and it takes energy to do that and I learned how to host this and I was a busboy and I was in the kitchen expoing which is prepping the plates before they go out to the customers.
• 7:03
  Speaker 2: I just learned all that finally got it from losing money to breaking even and then got it to making money.
• 7:12
  Speaker 2: I got married, had a kid and we decided that living in California with three businesses doing this was not sustainable.
• 7:19
  Speaker 2: So we decided that we were going to sell everything.
• 7:21
  Speaker 2: So we sold our house.
• 7:22
  Speaker 2: We actually moved into a big, beautiful RV because we were going to travel around the country to figure out where we wanted to live.
• 7:28
  Speaker 2: We thought maybe Tennessee or Texas or Idaho.
• 7:30
  Speaker 2: But we didn't want to make that move just on a weekend flight.
• 7:33
  Speaker 2: So we said let's just buy this big RV and go travel around the country for six months.
• 7:38
  Speaker 2: So we literally sold our house and then the business was we're all in escrow.
• 7:43
  Speaker 2: And during the due diligence phase, covid hit and everyone disappeared.
• 7:47
  Speaker 2: We went from hey, we made it, we're finally good, making the adjustment and now we are living in an RV in California with the businesses in COVID times and of course they shut everything down.
• 8:00
  Speaker 2: I basically went mentally from.
• 8:02
  Speaker 2: You know, I worked six years, got these restaurants up and going and sellable and now I'm going to go bankrupt literally because of a few weeks timing, but kept going.
• 8:12
  Speaker 2: Basically, about a month into it I had a month and a half into it.
• 8:16
  Speaker 2: We were doing the whole to-go thing but my rents between the two locations were $38,000 a month.
• 8:21
  Speaker 2: You're not doing to-go to cover these numbers and that's just rent.
• 8:25
  Speaker 2: You have insurance and electricity and all kinds of other stuff.
• 8:28
  Speaker 2: We just adjusted.
• 8:29
  Speaker 2: Every single day.
• 8:30
  Speaker 2: Every single day, my mentality was everyone around us just is hunkered down.
• 8:35
  Speaker 2: The business owners they're like oh we're, you know, we don't know what to do.
• 8:38
  Speaker 2: Someone needs to tell us what to do.
• 8:39
  Speaker 2: And I decided that that we're going to go out of business if we do that.
• 8:44
  Speaker 2: We can't just do what everyone else is doing.
• 8:47
  Speaker 2: I'm going to go down fighting, basically.
• 8:49
  Speaker 2: So every few days we would come out and change something.
• 8:51
  Speaker 2: We'd change a menu item, marketing, whatever it was, and throw it against the wall and see if it stuck.
• 8:56
  Speaker 2: We had this huge patio that was outside one location and before anyone else was doing it, I went online and bought the biggest tents I could find.
• 9:04
  Speaker 2: We had an outdoor bar built.
• 9:10
  Speaker 2: We moved.
• 9:10
  Speaker 2: We had live entertainment in our locations.
• 9:11
  Speaker 2: We moved all of it outside, got waterproof lighting, just moved it outside and our calendar basically said you know, we're not going to fight you if you open.
• 9:16
  Speaker 2: And we ended up opening, at the request of our customers actually, and our staff like I never told the staff to come back said hey, you want to stay home on unemployment, go for it.
• 9:23
  Speaker 2: If you want to come back, you can.
• 9:25
  Speaker 2: We ended up opening.
• 9:26
  Speaker 2: It went viral so it went from being a total disaster to our revenue doubled and we made it through COVID and we became more well-known and I ended up exiting, found new buyers.
• 9:38
  Speaker 2: We went through two or three escrows, I think, during that time because COVID kind of simmered down and we got back into escrow with someone and then COVID popped back up and people backed out and the banks were super leery about, you know, financing a restaurant right after COVID but ended up selling it, I think, for three times what I originally was going to sell them for.
• 9:58
  Speaker 2: So being able to exit that with no debt and sell them was probably my biggest career win, I would say, considering I have no restaurant experience.
• 10:08
  Speaker 2: So it was quite the adventure.
• 10:10
  Speaker 2: And we were living in an RV for what?
• 10:14
  Speaker 2: Two years or something, a year and a half, and it was stressful because I didn't know it was going to work till the very end.
• 10:19
  Speaker 2: So now I have completely changed careers.
• 10:22
  Speaker 2: And my goal was to not work for six months and figure out what I wanted to do for the next career.
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: That's really a story of perseverance.
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: So you were the first restaurant in your area to open and I guess you said you posted that on social media and the post just went viral.
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: Tell me more about that.
• 10:43
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so we were doing to-go and we have this huge patio so we were following all the rules California wanted, as well as all the other restaurants around us.
• 10:52
  Speaker 2: A lot of them weren't even open, they were even attempting to do it and we'd have people come in order to-go, walk outside and sit on our patio and we were doing all these family meals and we were doing like family.
• 11:03
  Speaker 2: All these family meals and you know we're trying everything we could like we are a lot of our business and restaurants, especially with high rents, like that you have to sell alcohol like you have to have.
• 11:13
  Speaker 2: The bar is what makes you your profit.
• 11:14
  Speaker 2: So when you strip that away with to go, what do you do?
• 11:18
  Speaker 2: So california, surprisingly, allowed us to go cocktails.
• 11:21
  Speaker 2: So most people are putting them in like like styrofoam cups with like a straw in them, like not attractive right Part of having a cocktail or going to a bar is like the look of it.
• 11:29
  Speaker 2: So I found the company that kind of makes the same like juice, like a naked juice, like the cool bottles with the safety cap.
• 11:39
  Speaker 2: I had labels made.
• 11:40
  Speaker 2: They're all professional looking.
• 11:41
  Speaker 2: So look at that like a professional product, basically, and we would handshake and have hand mix all the cocktails right before they would be sent for to go.
• 11:48
  Speaker 2: So we're selling hundreds of these things.
• 11:50
  Speaker 2: People are just coming and buying them and sitting on the patio it basically came down to.
• 11:54
  Speaker 2: I was like there was a few small restaurants and one was owned by a pastor and he had already opened and he was getting so much flack because he was very flamboyantly presenting that he was open and giving the middle finger to the governor on video and stuff.
• 12:13
  Speaker 2: So he was attracting all the attention of alcohol beverage control.
• 12:16
  Speaker 2: That's the basic arm that California was using to go after restaurants was hey, we're going to pull your alcohol license, which are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it's going to basically put you out of business because our county wasn't really going to get involved in that fight.
• 12:30
  Speaker 2: So I kind of saw him.
• 12:32
  Speaker 2: I saw my for that particular location, $21,000 a month rent bill on top of everything else.
• 12:38
  Speaker 2: It was basically 30 grand.
• 12:39
  Speaker 2: I had 30 grand of fixed costs.
• 12:41
  Speaker 2: If the doors were just locked and nothing was happening, it still cost me 30 grand.
• 12:44
  Speaker 2: It's like I don't have, you know, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars to just weather this forever.
• 12:49
  Speaker 2: And this was before PPP and all the EIDL loans were mentioned, like there was no lifeline.
• 12:55
  Speaker 2: Um, so I basically said we're going to go out of business, like I can't keep financing this.
• 13:01
  Speaker 2: So we're going to open the doors and we're going to serve food outside, because our customers were asking us that that was the thing we had so many customers like can we just sit inside?
• 13:08
  Speaker 2: It was like summer Can we just, like you know, just sit in the corner?
• 13:12
  Speaker 2: We won't do anything Like we need to just go for it.
• 13:16
  Speaker 2: So I saw this little guy doing it and like I'm going to do it as well.
• 13:18
  Speaker 2: My rule was if ABC calls twice, I'm going to close.
• 13:22
  Speaker 2: Cause I heard what's interesting all the restaurants which normally compete we don't talk to each other formed like a coalition in our area.
• 13:29
  Speaker 2: We all talked every day through texts.
• 13:30
  Speaker 2: We had meetings like what are you doing?
• 13:32
  Speaker 2: What's working?
• 13:33
  Speaker 2: We had a text chain Like if ABC was hitting the restaurants around the area, we all would get a notification.
• 13:43
  Speaker 2: Basically, I said to the staff I said, hey, if you want to come back to work, you can.
• 13:45
  Speaker 2: You don't have to.
• 13:46
  Speaker 2: It's totally up to you.
• 13:47
  Speaker 2: A lot of them said they did, they wanted to.
• 13:49
  Speaker 2: So we did that and to get a restaurant off the ground, going from to-go back to full service.
• 13:55
  Speaker 2: You've got $20,000, $30,000 in food in the fridge.
• 13:59
  Speaker 2: You've got to get everything clean and back up and going.
• 14:01
  Speaker 2: It's a lot of work.
• 14:03
  Speaker 2: It's basically like starting the restaurant back up and going.
• 14:05
  Speaker 2: So it takes weeks, weeks to do it.
• 14:07
  Speaker 2: So we had planned to do it and I had planned okay, we're ready to go.
• 14:13
  Speaker 2: Staff was back and we opened on a Monday and that Monday we didn't really advertise it.
• 14:17
  Speaker 2: We just kind of we had always been.
• 14:19
  Speaker 2: We've been doing social media posts every single day and we started just posting pictures of the interior and pictures of, like, a person inside, just very subtle things that our followers we had 11,000 followers on our social media account for our little market, it's a lot and just started kind of putting out there.
• 14:37
  Speaker 2: I just told the regulars and they started to hear it.
• 14:40
  Speaker 2: And then someone posted on nextdoorcom like hey, what's open?
• 14:43
  Speaker 2: Is anything open around here we can go sit down.
• 14:45
  Speaker 2: And nextdoorcom went viral and, depending on the county you're in, that could be suicide.
• 14:50
  Speaker 2: But we were in a very conservative, pro business County so they're supportive of it, which we.
• 14:55
  Speaker 2: That was a lot of feeling the market type thing.
• 14:58
  Speaker 2: Like we knew there'd be haters but there was a lot of demand for it.
• 15:02
  Speaker 2: So we never actually posted online.
• 15:03
  Speaker 2: We were open.
• 15:04
  Speaker 2: We just started slowly, kind of showing the tents outside, showing our outdoor bar.
• 15:09
  Speaker 2: People would call me hey, open for outdoor dining, and our hostesses would always just say we are accommodating people however they feel comfortable.
• 15:16
  Speaker 2: So that was our thing.
• 15:18
  Speaker 2: Well, what happened was we opened Monday and on Thursday our county said we are dropping the emergency declaration at the county level against the governor's wishes, basically.
• 15:30
  Speaker 2: So the county sort of stepped in and I think this whole time was foggy, but I'm pretty sure that they also opened for outdoor dining is what happened.
• 15:39
  Speaker 2: I can't remember if it was just our county or if it was the whole state, but basically like the risk to us was much lower, basically, and we had already built this huge thousands and thousands of square foot outdoor dining area.
• 15:52
  Speaker 2: That was beautiful.
• 15:53
  Speaker 2: It wasn't like shady, like kind of garbagey like a lot of people did.
• 15:57
  Speaker 2: It was a beautiful tent.
• 15:58
  Speaker 2: We did lighting and a sound system and a huge projection screen for the fights and outdoor band area and outdoor bar.
• 16:06
  Speaker 2: Like it felt really cool.
• 16:08
  Speaker 2: So then thursday comes along, we're like hey, we're open and the floodgates just flooded and our neighboring restaurants were getting calls like hey, you guys open too.
• 16:17
  Speaker 2: And like no, we're, like we're not even close to being able to open, like we have no idea how they opened within two hours of the notice coming out.
• 16:25
  Speaker 2: So it took that restaurant four plus weeks to open after the state said you could, or the county said you could.
• 16:32
  Speaker 2: So that time we just took all the business in, basically, and we had a much more fun experience than most people did and it just went on from there basically, um, we had vandals hit our outdoor area and steal a bunch of stuff and I posted posted something like hey, I'm brian, I'm the owner.
• 16:48
  Speaker 2: You normally don't see me, but I'm the guy behind the scenes basically makes this place run.
• 16:52
  Speaker 2: And just you know it's hard to be a business right now.
• 16:55
  Speaker 2: It's hard to be in this industry and these suckers are stealing stuff from us and our cameras had caught the images of them.
• 17:03
  Speaker 2: I posted it on the video and people, just you know it was a support small business type thing.
• 17:08
  Speaker 2: So I think all the news agencies got a hold of it.
• 17:11
  Speaker 2: We were on the news and stuff.
• 17:13
  Speaker 2: So I'm not a social media guy Like I never was the face of the company.
• 17:16
  Speaker 2: I I'm not a social media guy.
• 17:20
  Speaker 2: Like I never was the face of the company.
• 17:21
  Speaker 2: I liked people not knowing that I would walk around and be the bus boy and they had no idea I was the owner and I liked that Like I was.
• 17:22
  Speaker 2: I'm an introvert, like I don't need to be the face of things.
• 17:24
  Speaker 2: So it was very during COVID I had, I was on video all the time.
• 17:28
  Speaker 2: So, yeah, that's how we grew it and went through that whole period.
• 17:33
  Speaker 2: So just changing, you know what I mean.
• 17:35
  Speaker 2: Hey, I gotta be on social media.
• 17:37
  Speaker 2: Here we go, I gotta do this, I gotta take a risk Like I'm not gonna go down, go down cowering in the corner.
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: This episode of Go Big with Gibb is brought to you by Irons Equity.
• 17:47
  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.
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: If you want to secure your financial future, go to investwithgibcom to schedule a 30-minute introductory meeting with me.
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: Gib Irons Again, that's investwithgibcom.
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah, no, that's great.
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: Yeah, no, that's great.
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: That's what it takes to be a business owner, and an entrepreneur is just to keep on having a ton of perseverance, like you did.
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: Really cool how you did that.
• 18:27
  Speaker 2: The one thing I'll add to that and people have asked me this a few times, like what was the difference?
• 18:33
  Speaker 2: I think the fact that we were going to go out of business and we didn't do anything, the risk to try was lower, and I think that's something to take out of that.
• 18:45
  Speaker 2: That's why I've taken out of it.
• 18:46
  Speaker 2: I think, if you take that perspective on growing a business or making a change, is that you have to realize that you have to keep trying things and just know that most of the time, things you try as an entrepreneur aren't going to work like.
• 18:56
  Speaker 2: You have to realize that.
• 18:57
  Speaker 2: I think the more you do it as an entrepreneur, you realize oh, most of the things we're going to try aren't actually going to work and I just have to try them and adjust and adjust.
• 19:04
  Speaker 2: And as you're a newer entrepreneur, you think that most entrepreneurs are like geniuses and they're not.
• 19:08
  Speaker 2: Most of them you talk to they've had tons of failures and things that didn't work and they just keep trying and trying.
• 19:14
  Speaker 2: So that's what I took from it and that's what I do, going forward a little better, cause I definitely was one of those guys that like it has to work.
• 19:21
  Speaker 2: I don't want to fail.
• 19:22
  Speaker 2: I don't want something not to work like that's failure and it's just part of it.
• 19:26
  Speaker 2: You have to try.
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: Well, yeah, I agree, you've got to be agile and, um, willing to adjust your play call at the line of scrimmage, so to speak.
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: I mean, that's what it takes and I love that you did that, just transitioning a little bit.
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: I'd love to hear more about how you got into passive investing, what you're doing now, and how that's changed your life in terms of your work-life balance and those types of things.
• 19:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so when I was doing those three businesses and all this stuff, I wasn't married, I didn't have kids, I liked to work, so that was, it wasn't that big of a deal.
• 20:01
  Speaker 2: But then once you have kids and get married, get a little older, it's like, okay, I got to dial this down, like this is not sustainable, because at one point I think I had almost a hundred employees, like I said, I was working from 8am to midnight most of the times and I was just not sustainable.
• 20:16
  Speaker 2: So, like I wouldn't suggest most entrepreneurs like hey, sell everything, like I did, and go directly into passive investing, like if I wasn't planning on moving out of california, which is what I would have kept those businesses and probably changed my structure, basically, and still got into passive investing but used those as income sources to do it.
• 20:34
  Speaker 2: But because I sold everything and I sold it because I needed to move, I spent six months.
• 20:39
  Speaker 2: Well, I told myself six months.
• 20:41
  Speaker 2: About three months into it I started getting the itch to do something and I started going down the same path.
• 20:45
  Speaker 2: I started looking at like franchises or like, hey, you know, should I start back up in the restaurant industry or another construction company?
• 20:51
  Speaker 2: And I realized I was just repeating the same mistake.
• 20:53
  Speaker 2: Like lots of employees, lots of headaches.
• 21:00
  Speaker 2: You know I'm still building a business that I need to make sure I'm not in the center of.
• 21:04
  Speaker 2: So I started going to conferences because I had obviously some big checks that I got from selling these businesses and I originally used a financial advisor.
• 21:12
  Speaker 2: I gave him a chunk of the money and I'm not a real fan of financial advisors I just wasn't confident.
• 21:17
  Speaker 2: Six-figure numbers I've been investing in the stock market and doing my own thing, but when they start getting the seven-figure numbers I'm like I don't know if I'm qualified to be making investment choices off this stuff.
• 21:29
  Speaker 2: So I found a financial advisor that I thought wasn't a typical financial advisor.
• 21:32
  Speaker 2: Turns out he's had better marketing.
• 21:34
  Speaker 2: Kept the money with him for about a year and realized I'm paying lots of fees and lots of sales pitches that were carefully crafted.
• 21:42
  Speaker 2: Basically, I want to do oil and gas investing is what it came down to and he told me I could only do 10 percent of my net worth in oil and gas.
• 21:48
  Speaker 2: I was like why?
• 21:49
  Speaker 2: And he quoted some you know, supposed sounding SEC thing and turned out it was just some recommendation that his firm that is behind him his brokerage won't allow more than 10% alternate investing.
• 22:03
  Speaker 2: It made it sound like that was the law.
• 22:06
  Speaker 2: You couldn't do that.
• 22:07
  Speaker 2: When I realized, no, that's just his restriction that's being placed on him.
• 22:10
  Speaker 2: That's when I was like, forget this, I'm going to do this myself, and pulled the money out my own direction.
• 22:16
  Speaker 2: So then I started going to conferences because I was like every client I had, um, in my construction company was fairly high net worth.
• 22:24
  Speaker 2: They all had real estate.
• 22:25
  Speaker 2: They all had businesses or some career they made money from.
• 22:27
  Speaker 2: But all of them built that wealth into something else.
• 22:31
  Speaker 2: They either had invested in other people's businesses or venture like they're angel investors or venture capital or a lot of them had real estate, like some of these homes in Truckee and Tahoe that we were working on, which anyone doesn't know is a very nice high end area above the Bay Area.
• 22:46
  Speaker 2: Basically, people the Bay Area that want to go the mountains, go to Lake Tahoe and they build these giant houses, but a lot of them are still investments.
• 22:53
  Speaker 2: They're still real estate.
• 22:55
  Speaker 2: So I started going to real estate conferences trying to figure like, okay, how can I, how can I learn how to passively invest?
• 23:00
  Speaker 2: And I went to apartment seminars.
• 23:03
  Speaker 2: I went to someone's self storage and I started investing passively by meeting the people at these conferences.
• 23:09
  Speaker 2: People like you give you know the same deal, going and meeting them.
• 23:13
  Speaker 2: And then I started to realize like well, you know I'm going to invest passively but I kind of like the gig these guys have.
• 23:19
  Speaker 2: Like they have very few employees, they're using their business owners.
• 23:23
  Speaker 2: Typically they come from some other industry.
• 23:25
  Speaker 2: Like me, it's analytical, it's numbers driven, the back end of a business where I like to do my best the numbers and the math.
• 23:34
  Speaker 2: So I saw a lot of operational things that can be involved.
• 23:37
  Speaker 2: So I decided I was going to take an active role.
• 23:40
  Speaker 2: I still invest passively a lot, but now I am a general partner.
• 23:44
  Speaker 2: I take more active front end role in in these real estate developments and syndications and things like that.
• 23:50
  Speaker 2: And I do it just because first I had these big checks need to place and I get better returns in real estate.
• 23:59
  Speaker 2: Also, I just want something that I can see how it works and I can control.
• 24:04
  Speaker 2: As a passive investor, I can control who I pick.
• 24:07
  Speaker 2: Obviously, as an active investor, as a GP, I'm actively involved in basically the business.
• 24:14
  Speaker 2: When I look at real estate, everyone thinks of real estate as an asset, and that's what I thought too as a business owner.
• 24:19
  Speaker 2: Oh, that's just an object and a thing and I realized, like it's not.
• 24:23
  Speaker 2: This is a business Like.
• 24:25
  Speaker 2: First and foremost.
• 24:25
  Speaker 2: This is a business.
• 24:26
  Speaker 2: The P&Ls look exactly the same, the employee issues are the same, the finances customers coming in, revenue, expenses, profit at the end it's a business that just happens to be based in real estate.
• 24:38
  Speaker 2: So that makes sense to me.
• 24:39
  Speaker 2: So once you realize that as a business owner and just look at it, it's like how does this function as a business?
• 24:43
  Speaker 2: Don't look at the doors and the paint first, look at the business and the numbers.
• 24:48
  Speaker 2: I like that because it made sense and it was very controllable.
• 24:52
  Speaker 2: I just felt like the stock market is, so it's so based on media.
• 24:56
  Speaker 2: I would invest in companies.
• 25:03
  Speaker 2: They would have a great quarter, a great year, and my stock would go down.
• 25:07
  Speaker 2: And it was like I don't understand what is going on here and I can't predict it well enough.
• 25:12
  Speaker 2: Where I can predict if rents go up, my expenses stay the same, my profit is going to go up on a piece of real estate.
• 25:17
  Speaker 2: I can predict that and I can control it more.
• 25:19
  Speaker 2: So that's why I tilted more towards real estate Plus with inflation.
• 25:25
  Speaker 2: I've been talking about national debt and inflation way before COVID.
• 25:28
  Speaker 2: You can go to my social media pages and actually you'll see back in like 2008 or nine.
• 25:31
  Speaker 2: I'm posting national debt comments talking about how this is not sustainable.
• 25:35
  Speaker 2: I really want to be into something because I'm 40, 42.
• 25:38
  Speaker 2: I think I'm 42.
• 25:39
  Speaker 2: Yeah, 42.
• 25:40
  Speaker 2: Now when are we going to be in 25 years with debt and the power of the dollar and inflation, the devaluation of the dollar?
• 25:47
  Speaker 2: I really think that for someone in my age group, that has to be considered a lot more in what you invest in.
• 25:54
  Speaker 2: Then, like my dad just retired, he only invested in the stock market.
• 25:57
  Speaker 2: Okay, it worked.
• 25:59
  Speaker 2: I think in the next 25 years, if we don't really pay attention to where the value of the US dollar is going to be in our investments, you're going to be hurting, probably.
• 26:09
  Speaker 2: So that's why I look into things that are assets.
• 26:11
  Speaker 2: Actually, look at other countries that have gone through debt crises.
• 26:14
  Speaker 2: What investments held up the best, and that's why I try to focus on that a little more, because I think we'll have a debt crisis in the next, within before I retire.
• 26:23
  Speaker 2: So I want my savings and my retirement to hopefully make it through as little damage as possible.
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah, no, I love that.
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: I love your outlook on things.
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: That's a really good perspective that you've got there.
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: I, of course, feel the same way.
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: I feel much more comfortable investing in real estate and hard assets, opposed to the stock market, which is so volatile.
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: We've got a few minutes left, but before we sign off, I want to make sure to ask you.
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: I know you've got a project that you're working on right now in Logan, Utah, where you live, and I know it's a development project.
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: I'd love to hear a little bit about that.
• 27:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so it's not locked in yet.
• 27:05
  Speaker 2: We're still in the negotiation offer phase.
• 27:07
  Speaker 2: I was looking around this area and Logan is a city that's in a valley surrounded by mountains, basically north of Salt Lake City.
• 27:15
  Speaker 2: It has an amazing economy.
• 27:17
  Speaker 2: It actually has hit a bunch of top 10 lists for cities that are the safest, best economies type things.
• 27:23
  Speaker 2: Utah in general has a great economy economies type things.
• 27:28
  Speaker 2: Utah in general it's a great economy.
• 27:29
  Speaker 2: But there's a bunch of biotech up here and space defense and it's a thriving town.
• 27:31
  Speaker 2: And I was looking for 10 acre plots of land because I want like a ranchette style sort of outside the city and looking for things like that and they just very hard to find.
• 27:41
  Speaker 2: Developers are only doing quarter acre, half acre lots.
• 27:44
  Speaker 2: That's the easiest thing to do with sewer and in the city.
• 27:48
  Speaker 2: And then when you go outside the city in Utah you have to use wells for water and water rights are very restrictive so it's harder to divide a piece of land because you have to then find the water rights to divide across all the different lots.
• 28:03
  Speaker 2: So I found a piece of property that I think I can subdivide.
• 28:05
  Speaker 2: I'm pretty confident I can subdivide in 10 acre lots.
• 28:06
  Speaker 2: So I found a piece of property that I think I can subdivide.
• 28:08
  Speaker 2: I'm pretty confident I can subdivide and tinker lots and I've used some of my marketing experience from other businesses.
• 28:14
  Speaker 2: I've been running Facebook ads to people in the area and other different ways to get these water rights, because water rights in the area are separate from the land, so the water and the land do not go together so so people can sell their water rights.
• 28:27
  Speaker 2: If you don't use the water rights you have in Utah, the state takes them back.
• 28:31
  Speaker 2: So it's not like I'm stealing them from farmers.
• 28:33
  Speaker 2: It's literally people that aren't using this water that you either sell it for money or you can just it's gone after a while.
• 28:40
  Speaker 2: So I'm pretty sure now I've located enough water rights to be able to subdivide this land in 10 acre lots.
• 28:47
  Speaker 2: It's 260 acres.
• 28:48
  Speaker 2: All the lots are view lots, so we have the Wasatch range here, these beautiful, you know, rocky mountains, and every lot is up on what they call the bench or the shelf kind of.
• 28:58
  Speaker 2: As the valley goes up towards the mountain it's not as steep.
• 29:00
  Speaker 2: So 10 acre view lots with water and I can sell them for all day long for a good number and still make a great profit.
• 29:10
  Speaker 2: And because they're considered rural, I don't have to put in anything but streets and electricity.
• 29:16
  Speaker 2: So there's a lot less restriction and cost and risk.
• 29:20
  Speaker 2: And I'm pretty sure I've negotiated with the seller that until I get the permits in hand I don't have to buy the land.
• 29:25
  Speaker 2: So I've taken most of the risk off of it of entitlement.
• 29:28
  Speaker 2: Basically I will not purchase anything until entitlement's done, so there's less risk that the county will say no.
• 29:34
  Speaker 2: So that's my current project I'm working on.
• 29:38
  Speaker 2: It's a little deviation from apartments.
• 29:40
  Speaker 2: I'm still into apartments.
• 29:41
  Speaker 2: This is more a.
• 29:42
  Speaker 2: It started selfishly at first like, hey, I want to find 10 or 20 acres, I can't find it, so let's go develop it.
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's huge.
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: So, Brian, are you planning to do any kind of like?
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: Are you going to bring in any investors in this deal, or is this something that you'll probably do with inside your personal portfolio?
• 30:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's too big for me to do on my own.
• 30:03
  Speaker 2: Obviously, we'll use the bank, so we will be bringing on investors.
• 30:07
  Speaker 2: I'm currently talking with a few people, so if a few larger investors step in, we'll do it with just them.
• 30:15
  Speaker 2: Otherwise, I'm going to be syndicating it as well and I'll do a syndication and bring people in at $50,000 to $60,000 each.
• 30:20
  Speaker 2: The more people bring in, they'll have a priority on purchasing a lot.
• 30:23
  Speaker 2: So I've talked to people that want to purchase a lot.
• 30:26
  Speaker 2: So a good way of doing that it's like hey, put the money in that you would use to purchase the lot in the syndication.
• 30:31
  Speaker 2: You're going to get a return on that and then we will credit that to you.
• 30:35
  Speaker 2: Basically, when you're ready to go, and because you're an investor, you'll get higher preference on selecting a lot before the general public.
• 30:41
  Speaker 2: So a little incentive there for people in the area.
• 30:45
  Speaker 2: Plus, it's a good investment.
• 30:46
  Speaker 2: You can always flip the lot and sell it.
• 30:48
  Speaker 2: Land in this valley is very restricted because there's only so many places you can build and a lot of land is held by almost generational wealth.
• 30:57
  Speaker 2: There's a lot of older family wealth in this valley, so not a lot of land comes up for sale a lot, so land is actually a very good investment in this area.
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: So do you have like an anticipated hold period on your investment?
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: Do you think it'll be, like you know, two years or 18 months?
• 31:16
  Speaker 2: I mean for two years.
• 31:17
  Speaker 2: The development doesn't take very long.
• 31:19
  Speaker 2: The roads are already partially in.
• 31:21
  Speaker 2: I just have to pave them, put utilities in, you know, get it surveyed and off we go.
• 31:26
  Speaker 2: It's mostly the absorption how long it will take for those lots to sell.
• 31:29
  Speaker 2: So the current model I have is two years.
• 31:32
  Speaker 2: Investors will get a 20% per year return, so pretty good, and yeah, haven't sold in two years.
• 31:38
  Speaker 2: Basically.
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: That's awesome.
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: So, brian, for people that have listened to the podcast today that want to know how to get a hold of you, what's the best way for them to contact you?
• 31:48
  Speaker 2: My business is Passive Capital Partners.
• 31:50
  Speaker 2: That's a long name, so you just go to business2wealthcom and I'll send you to the exact same spot.
• 31:55
  Speaker 2: I'm also on social media under Brian O'Neill Investor on all the major platforms and, yeah, you should be able to find me there on all those three spots.
• 32:04
  Speaker 1: Fantastic.
• 32:04
  Speaker 1: Well, Brian, look, it's been a pleasure having you on the podcast.
• 32:07
  Speaker 1: It's always great to catch up with you and I wish you the best with your development project.
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: I look forward to following that and hearing more about your success with it.
• 32:17
  Speaker 2: Yeah, sounds good.
• 32:17
  Speaker 2: We'll have it on the website here soon.
• 32:19
  Speaker 2: Good seeing you again, gib, all right.
• 32:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah, thank you, Brian.
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to this episode of Go Big with Gibb.
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: If you haven't already, go follow us on social media at Gibb Irons.
• 32:34
  Speaker 1: We'll see you next time.