152: Henry Washington Reveals the Secrets Behind His 130+ Property Empire – 8FE

What does it take to scale from 0 to 130+ properties?

In this episode of Beyond A Million, Brad sits down with real estate veteran and BiggerPockets co-host Henry Washington, who has built a massive portfolio from scratch. 

Henry explains how he used creative financing strategies to jumpstart his investing career and breaks down his three-phase framework for real estate success: accumulation, stabilization, and protection. 

Ready for another episode jampacked with valuable business advice? 

Let’s jump right in!

Inspiring Quotes

• “The best part about real estate investing is the impact that I get to have on people’s lives.” – Henry Washington 
• “You need to know how to trim the fat in your portfolio.” – Henry Washington 
• “When you are winning, you get to do things that are of service to other people.” – Brad Weimert
• “You have to decide you’re going to succeed before you even know how to start.” – Henry Washington 
• “If you have deal flow, you have money flow.” – Henry Washington 
• “You get what you give.” – Henry Washington

• 00:00 Intro 
• 01:15 Best and worst parts about real estate investing
• 05:29 Biggest mistakes in real estate investing 
• 12:28 Midterm rentals 
• 13:55 Henry’s journey into real estate investing
• 23:12 Henry’s first deal 
• 33:29 BRRRR method
• 34:43 Scaling to 130 properties 
• 38:25 Wholesaling vs. flipping 
• 41:16 Three buckets of real estate investing
• 43:56 Real estate education 
• 57:55 Advice for young entrepreneurs 
• 59:20 Outro

Henry Washington 0:00
I think of real estate investing in three bucket you’ve got your bucket of accumulation, and you’ve got your bucket of stabilization, and then you’ve got your bucket of protection. The most important thing for you to focus on is a you need to decide that you’re going to do it and be successful at it before you start, before you even know how to start, before you even know if you have everything you need to start. And then all your focus needs to be on is learning what a good deal looks like in the market. You want to buy them, and then learning one way to find those good deals and doing it relentlessly consistently until it works.

Brad Weimert 0:29
Congrats on getting beyond a million. What got you here won’t always get you there. This is a podcast for entrepreneurs who want to reach beyond their seven figure business and scale to eight, nine and even 10 figures. I’m Brad weimert, and as the founder of easy pay direct, I have had the privilege to work with more than 30,000 businesses, allowing me to see the data behind what some of the most successful companies on the planet are doing differently. Join me each week as I dig in with experts in sales, marketing, operations, technology and wealth building, and you’ll learn some of the specific tools, tactics and strategies that are working today in those multi million eight, nine and 10 figure businesses, life can get exciting beyond a million. Henry, Washington, it is good to meet you. I appreciate you carving out some time. Thank

Henry Washington 1:13
you very much. Man, happy to be here

Brad Weimert 1:15
you are in this bucket of people that I love talking to, which is real estate investor, business person that is just kind of interesting in general, and I want to talk about like the origin story, but quick stats, you’ve got 130 plus rental properties. I have heard of you through creative finance, through being very good at finding deals, and also being a co host on the bigger pockets the market podcast. All of those things independently are kind of interesting to talk about before we get into history. What do you think the best and worst thing about real estate investing is?

Henry Washington 1:51
The best part about real estate investing is the impact that I get to have on people’s lives. I do what I do, which is single and small, multi family real estate, not because of the money it makes you. And I don’t say that the money is the best part, because literally, every niche in real estate makes you money. Like no matter what you want to do, you can make a lot of money in real estate. That’s not the best part. The best part is the impact I can have on people. So because I do single and small, multi family real estate, I can be very, creative and very helpful to the people. So I can buy a home from someone and then let them live in it for two or three months after I close on it, after they get their money, while they figure out what they’re doing with their lives, where they’re moving to or how they’re taking care of their family with that money, before they can move like I get to truly be of service to people. I can buy a I can buy a house, fix it up, and then put it back in service in that community, but not at a price point where that community can’t afford it. So I can put it back in service in rent, but not make the rent so high that people in that neighborhood are priced out. Or I can put it back in service in that community for sale, but not at the tippy top of the sale price market, because it’s single family and small multi family real estate, I’m not pressured to have to give it all of its value, whereas, like in large scale, multi family, like you’ve got to add value and then you’ve got to put that thing out there to make the most money possible, because you Typically got investors to service. And it’s about managing a P and L while single and small multi family real estate. It’s truly about the business of leaving things better than you found it, and it’s just extremely rewarding for me. That’s the most fun part about this to me, Well,

Brad Weimert 3:32
I love that, and I appreciate the distinction between small multi family and large scale multi family. I have a good friend in town that has done a couple billion dollars of transactions in large family, large multi family. And interestingly, his driver is very similar to yours. I had him on the podcast recently, actually, but his driver is very similar, and he feels like he can make huge impact in these larger communities, and is very driven by it. But to your point, a the type of impact you make, necessarily, is different. You don’t have the same type of control. And B, I think you brought up a really good point, which is that if you have investors just like a public company, you then have some responsibility to the quote, unquote shareholders in that consideration, and that changes the dynamic. And I suppose you could address that through the raise, right? So your shareholders, you could just say, Look, if you’re interested in getting into the fund to have the highest return possible, you could probably go to 1000 places. Know that my driver is XYZ, but that makes for an interesting fundraising. Okay, so what’s the worst part about real estate

Henry Washington 4:40
investing? The worst part about real estate investing to me is when I have to, when I have to evict somebody, you know, because it is a business and life happens man. Life starts life into people. And you, you, you want to be able to. Be as helpful as possible, but, but I’ve had to learn the hard way that sometimes you know when you are helpful, you provide a crutch for people, and sometimes they take advantage of it, and sometimes I’ve been able to be helpful and they were able to get back on their feet. But at the end of the day, it’s a business, and you can only be you can only bend so much in those situations. And I and I just hate when I have to draw a line in the sand, and, you know, make a tough business decision to have to evict someone, you know, because life is life. Yep,

Brad Weimert 5:29
I appreciate that. I used to feel that way about terminating employees, and as you were talking about that, my brain was going to that to try to draw a comparison, but it’s, in fact, a totally different thing? Yeah, totally. Because if you’re terminating an employee, it’s because they’re not a good fit for the role, right? It, period. And when you’re evicting somebody, that’s not the case. No, that makes sense. What do you think the biggest mistake is that people make when they first start investing in

Henry Washington 6:00
real estate? Boy, can I get I can give you a list of like 20, but I think so for a really new beginner, I think one of the biggest mistakes people make is they try to get all of their ducks in a row before they start, and that gets them focusing on the wrong things. So in most things in life, what we do as people, as we say, Hey, here’s this thing I think I want to try right? And then we research about how to try it. And then we say, all right, for me to try this, I need these things. And then we try to line up as many of these things as we can. And then we give it a go. And then we fall on our face, because that’s what happens, right? But to be truly successful, it’s kind of has to work the opposite. You have to make a decision that you’re going to do something regardless of what punches you in the face, and then once you make that decision, you just need to start focusing on the thing that’s the most important first step until you successfully do that thing. So in real estate investing, the most important thing for you to focus on is a you need to decide that you’re going to do it and be successful at it before you start, before you even know how to start, before you even know if you have everything you need to start. And then all your focus needs to be on is learning what a good deal looks like in the market you want to buy them, and then learning one way to find those good deals and doing it relentlessly consistently until it works. And I think the big mistake people make is they want to learn. They know they need to find a good deal. So they’re doing a little bit of that, but they’re also looking for a little bit of money, and they’re looking for a contractor, and they’re looking to build their team, and they’re doing all these things, but all those other things that aren’t finding a deal don’t matter until you have a deal. And so if you just take all of your focus and figure out how to figure out what a good deal looks like, and then what’s one way I can use to find a good deal until it works, you’ll get to your success a lot faster. I

Brad Weimert 7:43
think that that’s a sort of a universal truth in a lot of things for humanity, and I think ultimately it’s rooted in the fear of failure. I think it’s this idea that, like shit, I don’t want to fuck this up, so I’m gonna push really hard and line up all the things, as you said before I actually pull the trigger. And same thing happens in business, right? It’s, it’s the aim, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim, and then

Henry Washington 8:08
you still miss, which is the just total, just shoot your shot, bro,

Brad Weimert 8:12
yeah. What’s the biggest mistake people make once they’re way down the path? So let’s say you’ve got 10 properties, and then you’re trying to go from 10 to 130 present

Henry Washington 8:23
company included. I think what happens is you you know you want to grow and scale, but you don’t really know what that means. You just know you want to grow and scale, right. And so you start doing that right? Because once you get to 10 properties, you figured it out. You know how to find the deals, you know how to find the money. You know how to get the deals. Then you got to renovate them. You know how to monetize them. So now it’s just about, like, systematizing your business so that you can do it at scale. And so you do that, and then it starts to work. And then you’re buying a bunch of properties, and then you look up and realize one day that, like, I got more money going out than I do coming in. Because big, big portfolios have big portfolio problems. You know, if an HVAC goes out and you have, you know, like, for me, I don’t just have one HVAC go out when the summertime starts, you know, I have, like, 20 right at five to six grand a pop, right? So you quickly start to realize a couple of things. One, there are assets that no matter how much they cash flow, you’re going to hate owning them. So you’ll learn what you like to own and what you don’t like to own. You scale, but you also need to understand what you like to buy. You need to know how to trim the fat in your portfolio. So many times we get focused on scaling that we don’t analyze our portfolio and see what are the deals that I have that are actually producing the income I underwrote them to produce, once I’ve stabilized them, and then what can I do to either get them to produce the income I need them to produce or cut them from my portfolio. And then, when you’re growing and scaling, you’re not worried about internally analyzing what you have. You’re worried about buying more and buying more and buying more. And if you’re not internally analyzing what you have and then making decisions on what you want to continue to buy based on how your current portfolio is growing, then you end up in this, this, this growth phase that’s actually hurting you more than. It’s open. Yeah, I love

Brad Weimert 10:01
that. So in in any business and the rest of business, and I think it’s important to draw the parallels, because at the end of the day, when you’re investing in single family homes for the sake of cash flow, it is a business model, and we can talk about kind of the differences and the investment side of it versus the business side of it, when you’re looking at scaling or going through that proposition, one of the things that I find interesting is sort of the disparity between the entrepreneurs that grow at all costs or the ones that really slowly grow because they’re methodically afraid of making a mistake. And another way to say that is that they’re looking at all of those details of the portfolio or of the business and trying to cut costs on every independent thing instead of just focusing on growth. So what do you think of as sort of the checkpoints of when to focus on growth and when to analyze the portfolio or analyze the business for efficiency?

Henry Washington 10:56
Yeah, I think at a minimum, you should be looking at your portfolio twice a year and figuring out are things working the way you want them to work. The more you grow, you probably need to make that quarterly. But as you’re growing, if you can look at your portfolio at least twice a year and say which of the properties that I own are actually producing, what I want them to produce, and which ones aren’t, and why, you’ll learn something. So for example, as we started to do that more diligently this year, what we learned is that our midterm rentals are producing amazing cash flow, and our long term rentals are pretty steady. There are some that aren’t. And we also noticed that insurance was our highest expense across all of our properties. And so what did that help us do? It helped us to be able to go shop around insurance to make sure that we can get the same or better coverage at a lower price to reduce expenses. That doesn’t impact my portfolio, but it puts more money in my pocket, but also it forced us to look at, okay, well, instead of going and buying another property to grow and get more cash flow, I can probably spend less money just furnishing another unit that’s close to the area where these midterm rentals are doing well that I already exist, and then increase the cash flow. So my cash on cash return on spending $10,000 to furnish an apartment that I already have, that where I’m going to go from $1,200 a month to $4,000 a month, my cash on cash return is higher there than if I go buy another distressed asset that I have to renovate and put in services a long term rental.

Brad Weimert 12:28
That’s super interesting. I don’t I’ve never really thought about the midterm rental market. So you’re talking about sort of corporate housing. Yeah,

Henry Washington 12:34
corporate housing is one of the things. So we’re talking 30 day stays to less than a year stay. So that’s that typically more than 30 days, less than 12 months. And typically what we’re saying is people booking our place for for 30 days, and then they’re there. A lot of the times they’re extending for another two weeks or a month, you get corporate stays, because we do have big corporations here, sending people in. But you also get construction. So if there’s big construction projects going on in your town, a lot of the times these these companies will hire people out of state, bring them in and have them work on the project, depending on how big it is, and so, like right now, in one of our midterm rentals, we have four construction guys that are that are staying there. They’re working on a big project that’s walking distance to where the house is. You get traveling nurses. You get military. There’s a lot of a lot of military will send people to different areas of the country, maybe for training or something else. And so they’ll, they’ll, they’ll give them a place to say, there’s so many use cases for midterm.

Brad Weimert 13:32
Where do you market midterm rental properties?

Henry Washington 13:35
Yeah, right now we just marketed on Airbnb. But typically there’s Airbnb, there’s furnish finder, and then there’s just doing it yourself by reaching out to these corporate companies and these construction companies and letting them know that you have property available for for their workers to come and stay at. And a lot of the times, they’ll just call you

Brad Weimert 13:55
directly. Oh, that’s interesting. I like that. Cool. Okay. Why real estate? How’d you get into it? What’s the backdrop? How’d you get here?

Henry Washington 14:07
Yeah, man,

Brad Weimert 14:08
how’d you start Yeah,

Henry Washington 14:11
I started in 2017 about my first house, prior to prior to that, buying my first house, a lot happened in my life. So I was single, and then I got married pretty quickly. So I met my wife, and then 365, days later, we got married. And so I made this transition from a single guy to a married man fairly quickly. And as a single person, I was very, very good at not being good with money. So I spent all of my money I just like I would get paid. And it goes to a little deeper story. We can talk about it another time. But I was amazed. I was raised upper middle class, and that created a different problem for me than people that were raised, you know, with nothing and had to grow something. Being raised upper middle class, I was used to having things that I enjoyed and felt entitled to have them before I had to earn them, like my parents had to go earn them. And so when I got a good job out of college, making six figures, I bought all the nice things that I was used to, like a bigger place than I needed to live in. I lived in, like, a three bed, two bath, two story town home by myself, right? Because I could afford it. I drove a nicer car than I needed. I ate out all the time, right? And as a single person, I was fine with that. I would get paid, spend all my money. If I ran out of money, I’d use credit cards, and then I would get paid again. Well, I quickly learned that my wife didn’t want us to do that when I got married, so I had to make some financial adjustments. Imagine that. Imagine that. But the real wake up call came when we tried to buy a house together. The Bank essentially called me and said, If you want your wife to be able to own a home, you can’t be on the a home, you can’t be on the loan. Your credit’s terrible. You’re hurting her chances of home ownership and so and so I did. I had to not be on the loan. And so my wife, as gracious as she is, bought the house and allowed me to be her roommate. And so I we lived in this house that I couldn’t, couldn’t help by and and as we were new in this marriage, started having conversations about our financial future. You know, as you do, you dream as a couple, right? Where are we gonna what’s our dream home gonna look like, and how many kids are we gonna have, and where are we gonna go on vacations? And I couldn’t afford those things at all, and so I freaked out. Had a panic attack in the middle of the night about not being able to earn enough money to keep my wife happy, which was a total BS, but that’s still like where my head went. And so I had a panic attack about money at three in the morning. And I don’t know what anybody else would do when you have a panic attack about three in the morning about money, but I started to Google, how could I make extra money? And all of these, all of these magic words that I’d known about in the past, but didn’t pay attention to it really started to sound good, like, you know, passive income and cash flow and equity and appreciation. And I started to realize that the common denominator among all those cool words that I wanted to be able to have in my life was real estate. And as I started to dig into like real estate investing, I quickly saw through bigger pockets, forums and posts and things that like regular dudes, regular people owned real estate. Like, I didn’t pay attention to that before. I just thought, like, if you were rich, you could buy real estate that you didn’t live in, or if you could, you know, all I thought about real estate before is, if you get rich, you can buy a beach home somewhere, right? I never thought, you know, you could own a house next door to where I live and rent that thing out. And so I was like, well, if all these regular people figured this out, like I got to be able to figure it out. I’m just as smart as the next guy. And so I don’t know. I just had a piece about that decision that I would be able to figure it out. And decided at three in the morning I’m gonna go figure out how to be a real estate investor. And I woke up in the morning and tapped my wife on the shoulder and said I had an epiphany last night. We’re gonna be real estate investors. And she was like, Yeah, okay, cool. Anything better than what we’re doing now, sounds amazing. So like, well, and what were you doing? Then I was designing software for Walmart,

Brad Weimert 17:50
okay, yeah, what? Why Walmart?

Henry Washington 17:55
They So, I went to school for Computer Information Systems. I went to school to be a software developer. Essentially, my specific role was to be the middleman. So like, software developers are super, super nerdy and don’t understand business and business people are super businessy and don’t understand software developers. And so there’s this role called the business analyst, who’s like a middle person who understands the technology but also has a business background, and so you talk to the business people, figure out what they need, and then you tell the programmers how to make it a thing, right? So that was the job I learned to do in school, and hadn’t had a chance to do it yet in my career, Walmart called me out of the blue one day, a headhunter called me and said, Hey, we got a job in Arkansas. I was living in Virginia Beach at the time. I said, Hey, we have a job in Arkansas that we think you’d be a good fit for based on your resume. Would you like to talk to somebody about it? And I heard Arkansas, and immediately thought, no, but I have that’s what I would think, yes, yes, but I have a rule, and that’s, if somebody wants to interview you, you go on the interview whether you want the job or not, because the best practice for job interviews is job interviews. And so I was like, Yeah, I’ll take the interview. So I took the interview, did well on the phone interview. A week later, they flew me out to Arkansas for an in person interview. Again. Didn’t think I was going to take the job, but I’m not going to pass up a free trip and a job interview. So I went. And when I got here, I was like, well, it’s not as bad as I thought, but still, no thank you. And then when it when they made the offer, like, a week later, it was offering substantially more money than I was making in Virginia Beach, in a place where the cost of living was about half of what it was where I was living. So it was like getting two raises. Like I couldn’t not do it. So my plan was to just go for a year, save a bunch of money, and then move back to Virginia Beach, and then when I got here, it was amazing. So I

Brad Weimert 19:40
never left, awesome. So two questions on that. The first is business analysts in my world and smaller companies. I guess that’s not true. Just explain to me the difference here, I think about product managers often being the bridge between software developers and business that’s the new got it? Okay, yep, that’s the evolution. Of the business analyst correct

Henry Washington 20:01
now? Now, the business analyst typically owns a product or a suite of products, and then they meet with the business to show them how those products can meet their needs. But yes, got

Brad Weimert 20:10
it. Okay, thank you. The second one is, we talked a little bit about this before we kicked off, but you know, Walmart has terrible press in a lot of different spaces, yeah, because they’re aggressive in business. Is Walmart a terrible company? Absolutely,

Henry Washington 20:27
not. Absolutely. What

Brad Weimert 20:28
do you like about them, or what? Tell me, tell me the good things about about Walmart.

Henry Washington 20:32
I had an amazing experience working for Walmart. They offered me so many opportunities to grow myself, personally and professionally, like there was all kinds of free training. I got to do one of my first one of my first gigs was to go to Brazil and work with Walmart International in Brazil and help them with a tax solution. Taxes in Brazil are super crazy, and so we were trying to iron some of those things out. And so the one thing I learned that was really cool about Walmart that I didn’t experience with any other company, is like, once you get a job at Walmart, they will literally help you do any job you want to do within the company. Most companies I worked for once, they brought you into a role and use your talent in that role like they were trying to hoard all the talent in that little area of business. They didn’t really want you to grow or expand in other areas. And Walmart was like, soon as I got there, they were like, I remember one of my first interviews with my manager. He was like, So what do you, what do you want to do in the company? And I was like, this, like, what do you, what do you mean, what I want to do? He was like, No, you could. Like, they will literally help you do anything. Like, if you wanted to be a pilot, they would help you figure out how to go, you know, be a aviation pilot for Walmart, like there was, they would just make a path for you to grow and do anything within the business. And so I thought, from a corporate standpoint, I thought that was really brilliant, because you’re fostering this talent you spent time bringing into your company, and you want them to be their best self, but within your company. And so why not help them do that? I thought that I thought that was really cool.

Brad Weimert 22:03
So what roles do they have in place at Walmart to help facilitate the growth of an employee in any direction they want? Yeah,

Henry Washington 22:11
yeah. So what they what they would do is, once you, you know, kind of talk to your manager about what your goals are. Let’s say I did want to be a pilot. Well, my like, my manager would literally call over to the Aviation Department and see if he had a contact there that he knew, and say, Hey, I got a guy who’s working on being a pilot and would love to learn more about being a pilot. And they would just let you go shadow or any and volunteer your time shadowing in any role you want to. Like that was a normal thing. I had people from other areas of the company come and just shadow me and what I did in my role, because they wanted to come develop software, it was just, it’s very normal. It’s very accepted.

Brad Weimert 22:49
That’s a trip, man, I think that’s awesome. And there’s sort of a comparison there with, you know, Google’s 20% time allowing employees to work on whatever they want of the time. Yeah, the the problem with that, pragmatically, from a small business perspective, is you don’t have 20% of extra

Henry Washington 23:05
time. No, you do not know. You do not that’s a Walmart’s got a little more overhead than than a small company.

Brad Weimert 23:12
Tiny, tiny bit. That’s crazy. Okay, so back to back to the storyline. Talk real estate investing a little bit more. But and the rest of your business, which I also want to talk about. So you, you found real estate investing, and you realized, Oh, damn, this whole world is there is a whole world here investing in real estate, and it’s actually accessible to a lot more people than I thought it was. How did you learn it, and how did you start in it? And I’m asking this for a couple reasons. One, because anybody that watches the show or listens to it knows that I have talked to a ton of people that are real estate educators and real estate investors, and I always want to know what infomercial they saw, yeah, or or whatever, what podcast they listen to. But yeah, tell me that. So

Henry Washington 24:03
I’ll tell you the story of my first deal, because it’ll answer all those questions. Great. So after the panic attack, and I woke up and told my wife we were gonna be real estate investors, and she was like, Yeah, okay, whatever. I was like, All right, well, now I have to figure out how to do this. I have no idea how to do this, but clearly there’s got to be people here locally who know how to do it. And so the first thing I did was call up a friend who I knew invested in real estate, and asked them if they could point me in a direction. She talked to me, and she was like, Yes, I would love to help you, but you got to help yourself first. So I want you to read one of these books. And once you read one of these books, if you get through it, I’ll help you. And so she like, brought this box of books, and I was like, ruffling through it, rifling through it, trying to find some semblance of a title that I might recognize, like they were all kinds of books. And so I was like, Ah, this Rich Dad, Poor Dad. I think I’ve heard that that title before, right? Like I had no clue what it was. And of course, I read it, and my brain exploded. And I was like, Oh my gosh, right, I gotta do this. And so the next thing I did was I started. Go into every real estate meetup in my area that I could find. Like, I was like, Dude, if there’s real estate investors in a room, like, I’m gonna be in that room, like, I’m gonna be friends with them, I’m gonna find any way I can to help them, just so that I can learn from them. So I started going to real estate meetups and, like, just finding ways to help people and just be annoying until you know people would help me. And what I learned was, like, real estate investors just want to help other real estate investors. So I started to just build this network of people who really wanted to help me. Because I saw like, when I say I went to every meetup, like my local real estate investment Association has four meetings a month. I went to all four every month. I went to every every meeting that there was like I was in the room. I was on meetup.com just looking for a random real estate investor. I got everywhere. And so I started to build this network of investors. And then the other thing I did was just something that I believe in life in general, like I just believe the world works. You get what you give. And so I knew, all right, I want the things real estate investors have, and I can’t do that unless I put out into the world that that’s what I am. And so I just started telling everybody that I was a real estate investor, even though I’d never done a deal or not knowing how to do a deal, I just assumed that identity so that the world would start to bring to me the same thing it brings to real estate investors. And sure enough, about 60 days after that panic attack, I got a call from a good buddy of mine, and he was like, Dude, I heard you’re buying houses. Now. I was like, Yeah, I’m buying houses. And he was like, Dude, I gotta sell my house. And like, this is a good friend of mine, like, I know his house. And I was like, Well, what’s going on with your house? And he was like, Yeah, I moved out about a year ago, and I rented it out to a guy from church. This guy was very, very heavily involved in his church, and the goal was for him to fix his credit so that he can buy this house for me at this point in time, so that I can have the money from that sale, and I have to buy this other piece of property for my church. And so this was this new church that they were starting up. And so I was like, all right. And he was like, and he hasn’t fixed his credit, and I got to sell that house in 30 days so that I can get the money I need to do this transaction. He was like, so look, I’ll sell my house to you for 116,000 it’s got to be worth at least 160 165,000 I don’t care, as long as I sell it for 116 it gives me the exact Money, money I need to go do this. So can you buy my house in 30 days? And I was like, of course, I can, I can absolutely do that, right? And so that’s because you had $116,000 just, yeah, I just had $116,000 under my pillow, the exact amount. And you know, I had, I literally had $1,000 in my savings account, and I still had subpar credit. And so I was like, Yeah, I can buy it. I did not know how to buy it and but he was like, All right, so what do we do? And I was like, well, I’ll be right back. And so we were both at we worked in the same building, so I ran back to my desk and I Googled, like, how do you sell it? How do you sell out buy a house without a realtor? And it was like, Well, you have to sign a purchase and sale agreement. So I googled, what’s purchase and sale agreement? And then I found one online, and I downloaded a contract, and I filled out our names on this contract, I downloaded off the internet, and then I was now under contract to buy this house, which is not great legal advice, but great action. That’s great action. And so and so I’m sitting at the desk, and I’m like, All right, well, cool. So now I need money. So buying this house for 116,000 I have $1,000 in my savings account. So how much money do I need? More 15,000 right? And so I’m like, Cool, I’ll go to a bank, because banks give you money to buy houses, right? Like, and that was my thought process. And I said, Cool, there’s a bank literally across the street from where I work. I’ll just go to that bank at lunch, and I will see if I can get a loan to buy this house. And so I walk into the bank, and so this bank just happened to be a local community bank, and the person who happened to be in the lobby when I walked in with this literal, physical contract in my hand was the commercial loan officer for this local community bank. And so they were like, gonna help you? And I was like, Yeah, I want to see if someone can help me buy this house. And I held up the contract. The guy grabs the contract from me, takes me back to his office. He Googles the address, and he was like, you know, this house is worth a whole lot more than this, right? And I was like, yeah, yes. 100% that is the point. That is exactly why I want to buy it. And he was like, Well, man, we would love to need some work? And I’m like, Yeah, I don’t need a little bit of work. And he was like, well, we would love to be able to lend on this property. So what we would do is we would give you a loan for 85% of the purchase price and then 100% of the renovation costs. So all you would need to bring is a 15% down payment. And I was like, Okay. He was like, Do you have a 15% down payment? It’s gonna be about, you know, 1516 grand. And I was like, yeah, yeah, I did not have that. But I was very excited, because up until that point, I needed $115,000 and now I only need about 15 or 16,000 right? So I found the majority of the money that I needed. I then went to my network of real estate and. Investors that I’d been building relationships with and going to lunch with and shadowing and learning from, and said, How the heck are y’all finding these down payments for these properties, like, what’s the way I can get access to this money in 30 days? And so one of the parents, one of the people, sat down with me, and he just literally brainstormed with me all these ideas. Well, the first thing he did, well, after we brainstormed the ideas, and none of them were gonna work. I said, Well, look, I told my buddy I could do this, and if I can’t do this, can you just buy it? Because I know you’re more prepared than I am to do this. It’s a good deal. And he gave me my first lesson in entrepreneurship, and it was like, Henry, I will buy this house, if that’s what it comes down to. But if you’re gonna do this business, then you need to figure it out. He was like, we’re not always, you know, this is you’re not always going to know how to get something done, but you’re going to have to figure out how to get it done. So you need to figure it out. And so we ended up talking again at another date and going through ideas. And he was like, Well, dude, you work for Walmart. Just borrow from your 401, K. And I was like, what’s that mean? And he was like, well, instead of, instead of cashing out your 401 K and paying penalties, you can borrow against it, and you have to pay back the payments with interest, but it’s your money, so the interest goes to you. And he was like, technically, if you just rent this place out and it cash flows, your cash flow will technically pay back your 401 k loan. He was like, and you can usually get access to the money fairly quickly. And I was like, what that sounds like, the winner. I just got to go find a 401, k, because I do not have one. And so I went to my wife, who does, and said, Hey, remember, I said, we’d be real estate investors. Well, we need to borrow 15 grand from your 401, K, so we can be real estate investors. And she said, okay, and in two weeks, we had the money. We bought the house, we raised the rents to market rents. It cash flowed enough to pay for itself, pay for the hip 401, k loan payment, and put a little cash in our pocket every month. And then that banker called me and said, we want to do more deals like this. If you can bring us more deals like this, we want to finance them. I want to give you a line. Want to give you a line of credit on the equity in that home. And I was like, Cool, what’s that? So he explained to me what a line of credit was, and he essentially gave me access to about 20 something $1,000 on a line of credit that I could use. And he explained it to me, he said, so here’s what you can do now. You can go and you can find more deals like this. You can bring them to us. We’re gonna do the same deal. We’ll finance 85% of the purchase, 100% of the renovation. You bring 15% down payment, except you can now use this line of credit as your 15% down payment, and so that way you’re not having to use any of your own money. We’ll finance the deal. And then after you’re done renovating it, you can either rent it out, and then you can refinance it on a 30 year fixed and pull out your cash so you can pay back off the line of credit, or you sell the property as a flip and pay back off the line of credit and you keep the difference. And so he was technically explaining to me how to do the burr method as a real estate investor, before there was a cool, fancy term for it, like he literally explained how to leverage other people’s money for me to do real estate deals and how to work with small local community banks to do real estate deals. And taught me why small local community banks want to do this, because I’m bringing them such a safe loan, such a safe deal, that he looks like a rock star at loan committee, saying, Hey, we’re going to give Henry $116,000 but we’re going to have a house for 100 and that’s worth 175 If Henry sucks and doesn’t make his payments, we’ll just take the house back, sell it for 130 and make way more money than we would have made on his interest payments anyway. So it was a win for everybody.

Brad Weimert 33:29
That’s an awesome story. I love it, especially because at almost every turn you didn’t know what the fuck you were doing. Yeah. No, yeah, yeah. Couple of things I want to hit on real quick, and then I want to hit on the entrepreneurship side of it. But the first is you mentioned an equity line of credit on your house, otherwise known as a HELOC, for anybody that’s familiar with that term or has heard that before. The other is the burr method you mentioned. Can you very quickly explain that? Just because I hate throwing acronyms out that nobody knows.

Henry Washington 34:00
Yeah. So the burr method is a fancy way of saying you can buy a property, so that’s what the B stands for. You buy a rental property, and then you renovate that property, so that’s the second R, fix it up, and then you rent that property out, and then you refinance that property, and you refinance that property at its new higher value, so it’ll be worth more than it was when you bought it. And when you refinance it, you pull, essentially, pull your cash out that you have into the deal. And now that you pulled your cash out, you now have more cash to do the final R, which is repeat the process. So burn method, love it. That’s

Brad Weimert 34:34
awesome. Buy, renovate, rent, refi, repeat, yep, look at that. Look at that memory.

Henry Washington 34:39
There you go, killed it.

Brad Weimert 34:43
Oh, wait before we get to your real estate, I have to highlight the entrepreneurship lesson you got. So the lesson was, you’re not going to know what to do, and you need to figure it out. Earlier today, I was talking to somebody, and they said, the. There was literally nothing else I could do. And I stopped them, and I said, this is the biggest problem that you’re going to have in life, whether it’s right now or it’s later, somewhere else, this is going to be your point of failure. This is the reason that successful people continue to thrive and other people don’t. It’s the difference between a successful entrepreneur and a failure, or an employee in many cases, and somebody that excels. If you allow yourself to think that you literally could have done nothing else, you’re going to fail. And I sparingly believe in absolutes in almost all cases, but I believe that one of them is that you literally can always do something to impact your outcome, and sometimes it’s tiny and sometimes it’s huge. But if you, if you sustain the belief that you can do nothing, you are doing yourself a tremendous disservice. Absolutely, could not agree. So I think that’s that’s a great first lesson, like a phenomenal first entrepreneurship lesson. I love that. Okay, so back to 130 properties. What was the big gap that allowed you to move from one property to what was the first plateau, and how did you get through it? Prior

Henry Washington 36:08
to us doing that deal, remember I told you, I woke up, told my wife would be real estate investors. So we did sit down and kind of write out our goals and what we wanted to get out of real estate investing prior to doing a deal, those goals were to buy one house a year for five years, and then in 30 years, those would pay off, and that would help supplement our retirement. And then after we bought this first 190, days after having a panic attack, now owning an asset that was paying for itself and paying us cash flow and access to $20,000 on a line of credit when I didn’t have any money before, was so mind blowing that my wife and I were like, okay, one deal a year for five years was a good goal for someone who didn’t understand the value or the impact of real estate investing. Now we need to figure out how to do this again a lot right now, and so I know I have the money. The bank has told me we will give you the money so the money problem is solved. In order for me to then do this, I have to find another deal like the one I had. And so how do I find good deals? And so that’s what I started to research who is good at finding good deals in real estate, and what are they doing? And then how can I study them? And so what I learned through Google searching was that, like wholesalers, are the people who are typically really good at finding the deals. And I said, Well, I don’t want to wholesale as a business practice, but I do want to operate like them, because if they’re finding the deals, I want to be that person finding the deals. And so I read every wholesaling book I could find, every book on real estate marketing, typically, was all geared towards wholesalers. And so I literally was just reading wholesaling books, listening to podcasts about wholesaling, not because I wanted to wholesale. I still don’t wholesale to this day, but I wanted to set up my business marketing like a wholesaler does. And so that’s when I learned all about the different marketing strategies, and was able to learn how to get really, really good at finding good deals. And so to this day, that’s what I do. I market like a wholesaler. I get great deal flow. I buy every everything that makes sense for me to buy, or that’s a deal, I’ll typically buy it, and then I’ll monetize it in some way, whether I’m going to rent it, whether I’m going to flip it, whether I’m going to, you know, very rarely, I’ll assign a contract, but I’ll do it when I when I need to, but most of the time it’s I’m I’m buying it, and then I’ll either put it back on the market as it sits, or renovate it and put it back on the market or renovate it and stick a tenant in it. That’s just truly what we do to this day.

Brad Weimert 38:25
Cool. So from a and I want to talk about the other side of this as well, the education side of your your business, because I know you have a the closing table mastermind, yes, sir. But why not wholesale? So in for anybody that doesn’t know the basics here wholesaling is finding the deal and selling it to somebody that actually wants to flip the property or clean it up and rent it or whatever. Wholesaling is a very quick transaction. It is a business, and it’s not really investing in real estate. It’s just lead generation and selling it real quick. But you know, at scale, you can flip those contracts quickly and you’re completely hands off, and that’s it. Why not wholesale for cash and then invest in real estate from there? How’d you end up with the flipping side of

Henry Washington 39:11
things? Yeah, again, I like the warm fuzzies, right? Wholesaling doesn’t give me any impact on people like it’s just a transaction. Now you can’t argue that you are helping people. You are helping a seller by helping them get rid of a problem property. You’re just not the one buying it. So, but I just, I don’t feel the impact the same way I do when I work with the seller directly, buy the property and then renovate it and put it back in service to my community. That’s one reason so, so you’re selfish. You just want to feel I just want to feel good. I just like to feel good. And then the other the other thing is, in Arkansas, wholesaling has always been gray. Legally, yeah, legally, legally, gray area. You can do it, but you can’t do it. There’s two parts of wholesaling that are pretty gray in Arkansas. One is you. Can get in trouble if you put something under contract and you can’t prove that you have the means to close and the intent to close on that property. And those are two very gray words from a legal perspective, right? You have to and so if you every infraction you have on a deal, if it gets brought up to the board of real interest can cost you $5,000 fine. So you have to a would you put it under contract? You have to have the means and the intent to close on it, because legally, you can assign a contract like that’s contract law. You can assign any if I have a car that I want to assign a contract for, you can. So they’re not saying you can’t assign a contract. They’re saying you can’t put something under contract if you did not intend to close on it and you did not have the means to close on it. And then the other part that’s great is you can’t market a property for sale to someone, whether it’s the contract or the property, without a real estate license. And so if they catch you marketing it as a property for sale without a license, you could essentially get yourself in trouble. And I just never want someone to think that I’m doing something not above board, and I know that I could do it, and it would be totally fine and okay in a lot of cases, but I just don’t want people thinking that my business is operating in the gray so I just don’t do

Brad Weimert 41:16
it. I love all that. And also, to be clear for anybody that heard that, that’s specific to Arkansas, and there are some other states that are similar. If you’re investing in real estate, and you want to just period, if you’re investing in real estate, you better know what’s going on in your state if you’re doing it locally. Okay, so I’ve heard you say that, you know, the the plan is build a big portfolio and kind of for for keeps and flip houses to generate cash to keep building the portfolio for the long term. Is that more or less the case? Yeah,

Henry Washington 41:50
man, I think of real estate investing in three buckets, right? So you’ve got your bucket of accumulation, right, or growth scale, whatever you want to call it. And you’ve got your bucket of stabilization, which is making the properties do what you underwrote them to do. And then you’ve got your bucket of protection, which is you got to pay them off because you don’t own them if you have a mortgage on them, right? Yeah, someone can still take them from you. Yeah? So as a real estate investor, you’re going to find yourself operating about 80 to 90% in one of those buckets at a time, and then the other 10% in an ancillary bucket. So when you’re first starting out, you’re going to be mostly in the growth bucket, right? You’re going to be accumulating and growing, and then a little bit of stabilizing, right? Because you’re going to be stabilizing some of those assets that you’re buying as you buy them. And then at some point you’ll realize, okay, I’m good in in in how many I have, I don’t need to accumulate anymore, but I need to focus on stabilizing the ones that I have and making them actually produce the cash flow that they’re supposed to produce. So you’re mainly operating in stabilization, and then a little bit in the protection right, starting to pay some of those off. And then at some point, you’re going to shift to these are now stabilized. They’re doing great, and now I want to focus on paying off as much as I have. And so where I’m finding myself right now is more so in bucket two and starting to work on bucket three, because and all across all three of those buckets, you need to be bringing in money in order to help you sustain. So flips are what I do in order to help me sustain. So I’m flipping properties to help me accumulate. And now that I’ve done it, or now that I’m close to being done accumulating, I’m still flipping, but the flipping is now helping me make sure that I’m stabilizing, and going a little bit towards that cash is going a little bit towards paying off those assets, and as they’re more stabilized, then I’ll flip to help me accelerate paying off the assets. And then once I’m paid off several of the assets, then I don’t need to flip as much. I can back off on the flipping and actually live off the cash flow, because now I have assets that are cash flowing with no mortgage, they’re going to cash flow amazingly. And then at some point you shift totally into living off the cash flow, and you don’t have to flip

Brad Weimert 43:56
anymore. Yeah, that’s a that’s a cool framework, and I think that for a couple reasons. One, it’s important for people to think about the longevity of this, in addition to the short term liability and and there is short term liability in almost all investments, no matter what you know, it’s a risk reward proposition. The other is, I’m not going to reduce this to because it’s not true, but to the idea of it takes money to make money, but without question, the best mechanism to protect yourself and allow you to invest is to have strong cash flow, and you find it All internally through real estate. For the business world, the answer for most of the people that I interview or know that are not solely real estate investors. There, they have a core business or two or three, but it’s usually a core business that is a beast with cash flow, and it’s just spitting off cash. They use that to invest. And other things, but they have one engine that’s spitting off cash that’s doing it, and for you, that engine is flipping Yes, correct, right? Yes, dope. I love that. Okay, so why bother having a mastermind and teaching people then and how much of your revenue comes from that side of things, versus real estate itself, going

Henry Washington 45:18
back to that first deal that I told you that story about and then when the bank called me and gave me, told me about the HELOC, and I got access to that money. Once I got access to that he lock, I was just overcome with emotion, right? Because, remember, 90 days before that, had a panic attack about not knowing how I’m going to take care of my family financially. And then now I had realized that I had found the thing that was going to take care of my financial future, for my family, forever, right? And that’s a short turnaround for you to have that kind of a realization. And I remember I was happy, but that wasn’t the emotion I was experiencing. I was overcome with a huge sense of responsibility. At that point, I knew almost immediately that I was not led down this path so that I could figure out how I could become wealthy and solve my financial problems. I didn’t think that all those doors opened so that I could know how to be wealthy. I immediately knew that all those doors opened for me to learn this so that I could show other people that this is something that they can do too. There had to be people who were in way worse financial situations than I was, who were so close to changing their lives forever and had no clue that this is something that they could do, and I felt like I was supposed to share that with people, and so I just at that point. That’s when I started my Instagram. I was never a social media guy before this. I didn’t care about it wasn’t a thing for me. And then that’s I still don’t even have much of a Facebook presence, but I only do really Instagram and Tiktok, because that’s what business requires. And so that’s when I started my Instagram, because I was like, I don’t know how to show anybody anything. I was like, I’m still new at this, but I can share my journey. I can at least share the path that I’m on, and let people see what I’m doing. If I’m failing, if I’m succeeding, whatever, just share that. It’s possible. And so I was like, I’ll just put stuff on the internet, because that’s where people, that’s where I can reach the most people. And so that’s when I started my Instagram. So Instagram. And then that just, I just went on this journey of like, learning more and more how to share. And so I always wanted to share, but mostly for free, and if I was going to charge, it was typically at a much lower price point than everybody else was charging for I never wanted someone who had to go to work every day and work with their arms and their back, to make not a whole lot of money, to then see something that they think can change their life and then feel priced out of it because they work so hard and don’t make enough to be able to afford that information. And so I gave a lot of I still do. I give tons of information away for free on social media. I try to make my videos actually helpful and give helpful information. And and then I was, I was, I was, when I, when I got to a point where I would sell courses, well, I did. I used to do one on ones when I first started for free. Then I would do one on ones for like, 20 bucks for people. And then when I started to sell courses, and people were selling courses for, you know, 397, and 997, I was selling them for 40 bucks, right? I still think you can buy one of my courses right now that’s out there for like, nine bucks. It’s still like, it’s like, I was just trying to price it where I felt people could afford it, but get access to to good quality information. And then I started the mastermind, because through selling courses, you’ll always realize that, like, there’s a percentage of people who will buy a course from you that want higher level help, and if you don’t provide it, they’ll just go get it from somebody else, right? Like, it’s not that they’re not gonna go buy what they need. It’s that they’re gonna go buy it from somebody else. And so I felt like I was doing my customer base at the service by not having a higher level program. And so that’s when I came with the mastermind, and we’ve been doing it for a few years now, and it’s just been really, really fun and rewarding.

Brad Weimert 49:17
Yeah, I mean the other, the other reality of education is people value what they’ve invested in more than they value free. And that’s a kind of a shitty human dynamic, but it’s real. Yeah, yeah. Well, what? What are the highlights of your mastermind? So there are 1000 real estate education masterminds, and they’re they all have a different spin. Well, not all of them are just literally a copy and paste bullshit thing from somebody else. But yeah, let’s the good ones all have a unique spin or good at something. What? Why do people go to yours? Or. What do you like about it? What do they like about it? Yeah,

Henry Washington 50:03
I only want to teach people who want to build wealth and time freedom so that they can, right? I tell people I’m interested in your so that I can. I don’t care if you want to make money investing in real estate. That’s cool. There’s a million people who can teach how to make money investing in real estate. I want to spend my time helping people who are going to be good stewards of that wealth and that time freedom, if I can help people who are going to take that wealth and time freedom and use it to improve the lives of their community and the people around them, then I get to kind of create this ripple effect of goodness. And so we do have an interview process, and I have interviewed people who wanted to give me money who I didn’t think would be a good fit, and we didn’t let them in, because I don’t want to kill the culture of my community, which is, we are a community of really good people helping, helping them build wealth, and they are impacting their communities in positive ways. So that’s that’s one of the reasons people work with me. The other is like, I tell people, like, if you want someone to come and teach you how to walk into somebody’s house and know exactly what to say to every objection to get them to agree to your sales price, to teach you to be the best sales tactician you can be, to get deals closed. I’m not your guy. I’m just not I’m going to teach you how to walk into somebody’s home and not see that appointment as a transaction you need to close, but see that appointment as an opportunity for you to be of service to that person who’s reaching out to you, because there’s some level of pain. No one wakes up in the morning and goes, You know what? I feel like selling my house for $50,000 less than what it’s worth. And so I’m gonna give this guy a call and sell him a deal, right? There’s no one’s doing that. They’re selling their home to you at a discount because there’s some level of pain. There’s a problem that they’re problem that they’re trying to solve by selling the house. And a lot of the times, what you’re going to realize is there is an opportunity for you to help that person that doesn’t involve you buying their home. And I want you to be able to do that too. I want you to be able to figure out how you can help somebody, whether it means buying their house or not, and then do that thing I’ve walked into people’s homes and done everything I could not to buy their home. I’ve paid their mortgage for a couple of months because they didn’t want to sell. They felt like they needed to sell there because they were going to lose it and they needed more time. So I bought them more time by paying their mortgage. Was that the right thing to do? I don’t know, but I knew buying their home wasn’t the right thing to do, so I wasn’t going to do that. I’ve walked into people’s homes and one time because he needed to fix his car, because he needed to fix his car so you can go to work. If you’re going to work, it’s not going to make any money. So he figured, I’ll sell the house. I’ll go live in an apartment. I just need my car to work. Buy his house. I fixed his car, right? Did I make any money? No, it cost me a couple grand, but that’s okay. That was the right thing to do. So I tell people. I’m going to teach you how to build wealth while being of service to people and not forgetting that there’s a person at the other end of your real estate transaction. There’s a person’s home at the other end of the wealth you’re trying to build, and let’s make sure that we’re good stewards of that. And so I teach a very honest, brutally honest people approach to making offers on properties and telling them exactly what all of their options are. So I sat down with a lady, middle lady, just yesterday. She just called me before this podcast to thank me for being so honest with her. I did not buy your house, right, but I made my offer, and I explained my I explained to her every little detail about why I needed to make my offer at the point I did because of all the things that I have to pay in order to give this property where it needs to be. And I told her exactly how much money I would want to make, and this is why I’m making this offer. But then I also walked her through what I thought her other options were. I said, you can, I think if you fix this thing and this thing and this thing, you can put this home on the market, and you can sell it for $120,000 I’m gonna try to sell it for 200 if I fix it all up, but if you fix these little things, and here I’ll give you a contact of a person that I think can come and fix these things very inexpensively for you, so that you can list your home for 120 and you’ll make about 50 grand more than I can offer you. That’s what I would do if I was in your shoes, right? And so I’m able to just be brutally honest with people and give them all of their options, whether it means I’m going to make money or not. Sometimes that means I get great deals. Sometimes it means that it doesn’t, but it always means I get to sleep here at night. So that’s what people come to me to learn.

Brad Weimert 54:09
Well, there are a lot of people that I talk to that I usually don’t verbally call bullshit on, but I think it and I can hear and appreciate your authenticity. I will also say that it’s a lot easier to be able to make decisions like that when you are working hard and have deal flow. You know, if you if you have a sense of scarcity and you’re concerned about getting a deal done, then you are. It’s much harder to look for the win for everybody involved, because you’re so concerned about yourself, and it’s sort of the hierarchy of needs mentality. But I generally look at it as a that as a rationalization to work harder because you get to make decisions. Where everybody wins, and you get to do things that are of service to other people when you are winning. And I like to say that in many situations, this isn’t about altruism. It’s because me doing the right thing for other people ultimately makes the business model work better for myself. The

Henry Washington 55:18
money comes, man, it comes in droves when you do it. And yeah, it’s a tough lesson. It’s hard look if you’re in survival mode like you got to get out of survival mode before you can do something like this, right? But you know, once you’re out of survival mode, you really do kind of have to make this shift into understanding that you’re here to be of service to someone. And the more you do that, the more money you’re going to have to make, the more opportunity. I can tell you how many opportunities, you how many opportunities I’ve had and deals I’ve been able to get because I walked into somebody’s house and didn’t buy their house. That brought me several other deals down the road.

Brad Weimert 55:51
Yeah, yeah. I have a number of stories down that vein, but I know that we’re coming up on time. So let me ask you a couple quick ones. And what you just said might be the answer to this question, but I’m gonna ask you anyway, what? What is something that you do that most people think is a bad idea?

Henry Washington 56:07
I will lose money, from a business perspective, to take care of a person, if I can. And I know that people have like and I had a lady in a house that I bought. She was a quad Plex that I bought, and she was paying $400 a month, right? This is in 2022 which is absurd, right? Like the apartments that I rent in that building that weren’t hers, I was getting 900 to $1,200 a month, right? And so she had been there for she raised her son there. Her son was like, in his 20s, so like, she had been there for a long time. And so I bought that property, and I did not raise her rent. I should have raised her rent, but I did not raise her rent. She had raised her entire family there. The last thing I wanted to do was go raise her rent. And so I renovated every unit around her without raising her rent, I let her stay there, and then I waited until the last possible moment to have to have her move. And instead of just giving her 30 days, I gave her 90 days to find a place to live, because she was old and she hadn’t looked for a place to live in 20 some odd years. Like, it’s it’s different. It’s hard, right? Like, and then we helped her. I helped, I had my management company also help her find a place to move and still never raise her rent. And then her last month, I didn’t even have her pay rent. That’s a terrible business decision, right? And my property manager all this time was like, hey, you need to, you know, you need to be getting more money out of this. And it’s just not something I wanted to do. So there’s been lots of situations like that where, you know, I don’t, it’s not I tell in my business, I say, we don’t always make the best business decision, but we will always make the best people decision, and if that costs us money, then we’re okay with that. So we try to live by that

Brad Weimert 57:55
awesome last one. What advice do you have for a 25 year old that’s starting out in business today.

Henry Washington 58:01
25 year old starting out in business. Man, first of all, you’re way smarter than I was at 25 I wasn’t thinking about owning anybody’s business. So if you are in that boat, congratulations, make the decision that you’re going to be successful at this business right now. Before you know anything else about it, what you know about it doesn’t matter, right? Like we have got to train our brains to help us figure out how to be successful. And so making that decision will then turn your brain on to helping you figure out how to get it done. So it may seem overwhelming and non thing, but you got to make a decision now you’re going to be successful first, and the second thing is, is figure out what the lowest common denominator is to success, right? So in real estate, the lowest common denominator to success is real estate deal like that’s what you need, no matter how you’re going to make money in the business, if you have to get a good deal, focus on the lowest common denominator to success in that business, like in real estate, the lowest common denominator to success is a good deal. And so we focus all of our time and our effort, all of our time and our effort in the beginning stages on getting really good at deal flow, because we have deal flow, we have money flow. So figure the lowest common denominator out in the business that you’re approaching, and then focus the majority of your time and effort when you’re getting started on solving that problem of the lowest common denominator. And then that will help propel your success and show you what the next step is once you solve that problem.

Brad Weimert 59:20
I love it. And Henry Washington, I appreciate you carving out time. It’s a great to hear some of your story and find out that Walmart is, in fact, a great company. Lots of lots of great lessons through that. Man, I appreciate it. You’re welcome. Where do you want to point people? Yeah,

Henry Washington 59:37
if you want to learn more about me, what I do my program and check me out on my website, www, dot Henry washington.com, or you can find me on Instagram. I’m at the Henry Washington on Instagram. Love it.

Brad Weimert 59:50
Thank you so much, man. Thank you, buddy. I hope you enjoyed the episode as much as I enjoyed doing it. I need your help. There are three places you can find beyond a million. The podcast itself, beyond. Million.com which has some cool free resources, including a free course, and we finally launched the beyond a million YouTube channel. I would love it if you would go there and subscribe, and if you don’t want to, you still will probably enjoy seeing the visual content. Check it out, youtube.com, forward slash at beyond a million.