Jul 30, 2022
As the author of Building Indestructible Wealth, Jack Gibson’s goal is to empower people to make financially smart and strategic decisions. He is a highly regarded serial entrepreneur and financial thought leader, and he joins us to offer actionable advice to generate passive cash flow. Having experience in multimillion-dollar businesses, he also speaks about the importance of working with like-minded people and how they are strategically protecting themselves against the changes in the market.
Tune in if you want to know the secrets to lasting wealth!
[00:01 - 09:06] Surviving Income Inconsistencies with Investments
- Jack on starting as an entrepreneur in his dorm room to launching four companies
- His focus is to help business owners create multiple streams of income to protect their lifestyle
- Investing in cash-flowing assets is key
- Why Jack diversified into self-storage and short-term rentals
- He shares the pivotal moment that motivated him to get into real estate
[09:07 - 14:59] Finding the Best Business Partner
- To Jack, partnerships have never been a problem
- How Jack decided on the person he was going to partner with
- Partnerships will work as long as you share the same values
- Forming a great team is essential to scale
[15:00 - 17:47] Managing Risk in the Current Market
- How Jack and his team are preparing for a recession
- Why he thinks it’s still a good time to buy real estate
[17:48 - 19:15] Closing Segment
- Reach out to Jack!
- Links Below
- Final Words
Tweetable Quotes
“I'm never leaving real estate. It's just an incredible asset class, all the advantages. To me, it far outweighs anything else you can do in any other markets.” - Jack Gibson
“80% of your total investible dollars should be into cash flow producing assets, such as real estate.” - Jack Gibson
“If you're solo, I just see how you scale. You need to have a team.” - Jack Gibson
“Over the course of time,
your true colors come out. Those values come out through your words
and your actions.” -
Jack Gibson
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Connect with Jack! Head over to his website to find his podcast and his book, Building Indestructible Wealth.
Connect with me:
I love helping others place money outside of traditional investments that both diversify a strategy and provide solid predictable returns.
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Email me → sam@brickeninvestmentgroup.com
Want to read the full show notes of the episode? Check it out below:
[00:00:00] Jack Gibson: In any time you have a partnership, as long as that you both have the shared values. And this was a discussion that we got into in an entrepreneurial meetup group as well because there was some that were like, yeah, partnerships don't work. And then I was like, well, you know, they do work really well, if, and this is the most important part, is that you both have the same values.
[00:00:35] Sam Wilson: Jack Gibson is a serial entrepreneur. He has five companies in different industries. He has a strong focus on financial education for entrepreneurs to build multiple streams of passive cash flow to protect their lifestyle and normal income inconsistencies. Jack, welcome to the show.
[00:00:49] Jack Gibson: Thanks for having me, Sam. Pleasure to be here.
[00:00:51] Sam Wilson: Hey, man, the pleasure's mine. There's three questions I ask every guest who comes to the show: in 90 seconds or less, can you tell me where did you start? Where are you now? And how did you get there?
[00:01:01] Jack Gibson: I started at age 19 from my college dorm room. And I got a flyer from another kid that he was passing out. You know, he was recruiting for a health and fitness distribution business, a direct sales business. Got started in that, built up a pretty large business over the last 25 years. It took a while. The first year was really rough. And then since then, I've launched four other companies. And then my main focus now is trying to help entrepreneurs and, you know, earners that have income inconsistencies to be able to produce multiple streams of passive cash flow to help supplement or protect their lifestyle and build wealth responsibly.
[00:01:39] Sam Wilson: Is it that kind of the goal of the entrepreneur though, is to build income. And to build passive streams of income? So I guess the real question in that is, in what way are you helping them augment their passive income?
[00:01:54] Jack Gibson: Yeah. Well, no matter what business that you own, you're always going to have as an entrepreneur income inconsistency. If you're a commission sales rep, your income's going to flow in. It's going to add, it's going to, you know, go up and down. And that's even with my business, you know, 25 years in, you know, it's a more stable business, right? But it's still, there's some pretty dramatic swings in income. You just, you can't help it. It's business cycles, seasons, you know, et cetera. So what I found is that if you're relying on one stream, which is your business for your lifestyle and to protect your family financially. It's really tough because you just never know what's going to happen from month to month or year to year. So I really am strong on, when you're doing really well, you've got the harvest season and you're on your business, make sure that you discipline yourself so that you're banking that extra cash and then putting that into other cash flow producing assets that are going to create, you know, additional streams of income.
[00:02:56] Sam Wilson: Got it. That makes a heck of a lot of sense. Are you moving people into income, producing real estate, other businesses? What are you, what are you generally, you know, recommending for people?
[00:03:05] Jack Gibson: Yeah, I recommend the base level is always income-producing assets, generally real estate, and that's, you're always going to be your best, you know, income-producing plays. I love commercial real estate in terms of self-storage. No tenants, toilets, trash. You can, you know, sweep somebody's locker out in 10 minutes and then you got a tenant turn, right? So when they, they move all their stuff out. So with that, you know what I've found though, too, you know, it's, you got to be an accredited investor and a lot of those deals for syndication to do self-storage. So, that eliminates that option, unfortunately, for a lot of people. So they need to play the monopoly game, you know, start with the four greenhouses and work your way up, trade those in eventually for a bigger deal. But ultimately the goal in my opinion is about 80, 80% of your total investible dollars should be into cash flow producing assets, such as real estate. Short-term Airbnb rentals are great right now, mortgage-backed notes. We like those, you know, you, you've got a really solid return that you can count on each month. So then with those streams of income, if you want to get a little bit more speculative, you want to get a little more aggressive, take those streams and put it into things that can really, you know, 10x and really pop in terms of the appreciation, but are a little bit more risky, so you could lose the money. And then it doesn't matter because the income will just keep flowing back in from all your other cash flow-producing assets.
[00:04:40] Sam Wilson: Right. That makes a lot of sense. Five, you said five different companies. Was that in five different industries?
[00:04:46] Jack Gibson: Two of them are in real estate. We have the self-storage indication company and then the other is we have a company called high return real estate and we help investors get into turnkey, you know, usually single family duplex type properties.
[00:04:58] Jack Gibson: And then we also just filled out a brand new division for short-term Airbnb, and we help investors get into those as well. And the returns are looking really strong. I mean, we're, we're moving most of our long-term tenants and those types of properties, either selling them off or, you know, transitioning them as the tenants turn into short-term Airbnb, the yields are incredible.
[00:05:22] Sam Wilson: They really are. They really are. I've heard that from a lot of people you know, especially I think the pandemic really, really hyper fueled short term rentals in a way that we probably didn't expect. But tell me, I guess when you look at these various, 'cause I love what you're doing there. You've got the four, what'd you call it the four greenhouses to trade up for a red house?
[00:05:40] Jack Gibson: Right.
[00:05:40] Sam Wilson: Right. You can kind of service all your, you know, all the different investor niches, you know, with your different platforms there. You've got the single-family home buyer. It's like, Hey man, we're going to start with a single greenhouse. And then you've got your syndication business in self-storage where you say, okay, now you're an accredited investor. Now you can come in and do self-storage and then also move into short term rentals. That's pretty fun. Do you, are those all separate businesses with all separate teams operating and running?
[00:06:05] Jack Gibson: Yes. Yes. We've got a, for the short term, Airbnb rental team, we've got an acquisition team. We've got four or five different contractors that we personally utilized. And some of them we've utilized for over a hundred different deals. And then we have our property management team. So, you know, we have all those teams running that. So that's a pretty passive business for me at this point, once the teams are built out, obviously there was several years of hard work to build up, you know, the systems and the procedures, operations.
[00:06:37] Jack Gibson: And then the self-storage is a, a syndication fund that I put together. And then we invest into one of my longtime friends, Sean. Funny, I met him at in Mexico. We both forgot our passports and he was a baller, had his buddy fly into Canada, from another city in Canada, give him his passport, then he got on the plane and he made it. And my wife and I were stuck in Chicago for a day. So I'm like, I want to be like you, what do you do? Like, how are you a baller like that? He's like, oh, I do self storage. I'm like, tell me more.
[00:07:09] Sam Wilson: Tell me more. Right. I want learn from you. When you look back at your, you know, building out these different teams and, and especially having them in, in, you know, while it's all in real estate, they're all their own unique niche asset class with their own particulars inside of those asset classes. What was a pivotal moment for you? When it was like, Hey, you know, something was in the way. And I was able to just get that out of the way. And then you kind of had exponential growth. Was there ever a point where something, you know, switched?
[00:07:37] Jack Gibson: Well, if you track it all back, where everything switched for me in terms of my mindset is when the stocks that I was in, both of them had, you know, incredible drawdowns and value. This was, like, around 2012, 2013, and one of them got a short sale attack. So that dropped the stock by 50% within days. And then another one was called interval I was writing options on that, that dropped in half overnight. And I realized, wow, you know, I'm, number one, I'm an unsophisticated investor. I'm relying on the whims of the financial markets to dictate my financial future. And I don't like it I want to be in control. So that's when I really dove in, studied real estate, and turned that adversity, those setbacks losses, all of that. You know, I figured, okay, I can turn this into something better.
[00:08:27] Jack Gibson: This is the motivation that I needed to be able to learn real estate. So that's, honestly, that's what, like, that started everything for me in real estate. And then once I got in, even though we've had some, you know, I've had some rough patches trying to learn, you know, what to do. I'm never leaving real estate. It's just an incredible asset class, all the advantages. It just, to me, it far outweighs anything else you can do in any other markets. And I love, you know, I love crypto. I love stocks. I don't love crypto right now, but I love the future of where I believe it's headed. And those are, however, I can't build indestructible wealth with those types of assets. I need dirt. I need real estate.
[00:09:06] Sam Wilson: That's for sure. Tell me about your team. Who was the first person that you hired when you said, okay, I'm going into real estate. I'm going long, but I've got to, I got to build a team around me. How did you do that?
[00:09:17] Jack Gibson: Most important thing for me was just finding a great partner. And I know a lot of people say, partnerships, what is this, Dave Ramsey said something about partnerships sink ships, or it's a sinking ship, I think is what he says. Well, I have not found that to be the case. I have a great partnership with my wife for 18 years that you know, that's amazing. And I've had a business partnership with Shecky.
[00:09:41] Jack Gibson: He's called Jeff, but he goes by Shecky and we've been partners for seven years and we always work things through and work things out. So I recruited him. He was my digital marketing coach for my direct sales business. And I really liked his integrity. I loved his knowledge and I knew I needed somebody like him to help me market, really market, and scale, to build that business. So when he came on, I gave him 50% equity, 50-50 partners. And he said this is the first time that I've anybody's ever pitched me on like doing something business-wise with them. That actually benefited me too. Like normally people would say they'd pitch them, but it was always what's in it for them. And my pitch to him was, you know, he didn't come across that way at all. So once we had formed our nucleus, then we started, you know, building on all the other parts of the company as well.
[00:10:33] Sam Wilson: What were some things I'm sure that there were discussions early on that were, I love what you said there were like, Hey, you know, obviously it's going to be beneficial for your partners or for your partner as well. But what were some kind of discussions? Can you give some or if you can remember it, give some color to those early on discussions? 'Cause I think a lot of our listeners are probably, you know, in that early stage of growth. That's kind of the, the name of the podcast is How to Scale. Like, so people are out there thinking, okay, I want to grow. But certainly, I would imagine you had some discussions where it was like, Hey, what's this look like? Did you guys put in fail safe? Did you guys, you know, how did you hammer out the, what ifs in that scenario?
[00:11:07] Jack Gibson: You know, I think in any time you have a partnership, as long as that you both have the shared values. And this was a discussion that we got into in an entrepreneurial meetup group as well because there was some that were like, yeah, partnerships don't work. And then I was like, well, you know, they do work really well if, and this is the most important part, is that you both have the same values and therefore if you're operating from that base level, that foundation, then everything else that happens, conflict, conflict resolution, working through adversity, working through differences in opinions, all of those things can be no problem, instead of big problems, if the values are shared.
[00:11:53] Jack Gibson: So our values, for example, we both really believe in, no matter what the costs, we're going to do the right thing for our investors, and we've taken some real hits where things that we kind of came out, shelled out some money out of pocket just to help an investor, you know, that was in a tough situation, those type of things. Or something went wrong in a certain situation and it could have gone either way and we pay for it. They pay for it. We generally take care of it. So we always, you know, operate from that premise. And then both of us can work through, you know, any of those challenges together.
[00:12:30] Jack Gibson: So yeah, I think a team, though if you really want to scale, I mean, doing it by yourself, if you're solo, I just don't, I don't see how you scale. You need to have a team. Like I look at my other direct sales business. That's a huge business, but I put an incredible team of people around me that, in a lot of cases, they're more skilled and harder working more talented than I am.
[00:12:53] Sam Wilson: I like that. I love the idea of coming from, you know, the position of shared values. I think that's, that's a really key piece of advice. How did you discover or what did you do to determine that your partner had the same values as you?
[00:13:06] Jack Gibson: Well, I could tell the values, just kind of come through. I think anytime that you have beliefs or values or things that are internal, eventually, over the course of time, your true colors come out. You know, like those come out, those values come out through your words and your actions. So it was great because as him as my digital marketing coach for several months, I got to see firsthand, like, what is he made of? And I got to see how he handled, you know, himself in terms of, did he show up on time? Does he keep his word? Does he always thinking about how he can help me solve my problem first? Or is it, what's in it for him? So. I'm just looking at all those things and, and getting to know somebody like in that setting gave me the opportunity to kind of vet him, right, to say, do I want to extend an invitation to somebody like this to be a partnership? 'Cause if they're not on the same page as you, value-wise, beliefs, partnerships are going to be a pretty tough thing.
[00:14:10] Sam Wilson: Absolutely. That's really, really cool. Thanks for taking the time. 'Cause I think that that's not something we've heard a lot of here on this show. When, when you talk about building a team or surrounding yourself with people that are, as you talk about, better than you. You know, oftentimes think of that in the, in the hiring sense, but we haven't talked about it necessarily in a partnership sense. So thanks for taking the time.
[00:14:27] Jack Gibson: Yeah, my buddy, Sean, you know, he's got the, his self-storage company, almost hit a billion or hit a billion, you know, recently just in the last, you know, couple months. And I texted him and said, dude, like, that's incredible. A billion-dollar business. Like, wow. I mean, I met you 10 years ago and it was not a billion dollars. And I said you're my hero. He said, if you want to do that, you just got to get a great team. That's the whole key. Everything is who are the guys that you're putting around you and then are they smarter than you in certain areas?
[00:14:59] Sam Wilson: Yeah, that's absolutely it. I love that. Let's talk a little bit about risk, what maybe you see in the market right now. And again, you guys are diversified from single-family to short-term rentals to self-storage. Is there a risk in the market right now that you see that you guys are protecting yourself against strategically?
[00:15:18] Jack Gibson: Well, certainly there is an absolute chance of a recession. I think we're all, probably speaking it into existence.
[00:15:25] Sam Wilson: Probably.
[00:15:26] Jack Gibson: By what we're saying.
[00:15:28] Sam Wilson: Right.
[00:15:29] Jack Gibson: So I hate to even be a part of that narrative. However, I think that when you print 40% of the money supply in a couple of years, then I don't see any other case happening except something not good. So that's what we're starting to see is something not good is happening from all this free money that was injected. There is no such thing as a free lunch. So I, however, feel most comfortable in real estate, I think. Right now the financial market, stock market, crypto, I think there's some incredible deals and sales. Have we seen the bottoms in those markets? Who knows. I suspect probably have not, but either way, I'm not, you know, I'm not going to wait and try to time the bottom. So I'm, I'm buying into those asset classes. At the end of the day, I keep saying to myself, you know, this is still a great time to invest in real estate. There's a limited supply. They're not handing out, you know, money to people that, you know, should definitely not have the money. They're not doing that.
[00:16:35] Jack Gibson: Lending is a lot tighter. Supply is low, so I don't think we're going to see this big correction in real estate personally. I think we'll probably see something. However, if you are buying properties with a great value under market value, you're, you know, putting in effort to create value adds or increase the value through renovations or whatever else you can do to make the property more valuable and produce more income, then you're going to be fine.
[00:17:02] Jack Gibson: And if the market corrects, there's no problem. You have cash flow coming in. You don't care, you can ride it out. But those who are doing more speculative projects right now, I think you ought to be careful 'cause you know, we could definitely see something where your equity just collapses on those.
[00:17:19] Sam Wilson: Absolutely. And that's, that is something I've seen in all the investor conversations I'm having more and more of is that, even a couple of years ago, people were probably more focused on the, you know, equity multiple and things like that. And everybody I'm speaking to right now just says, I'm just looking for cash flow. That's it. Yeah, let me buy a property that produces an income, IRR, equity multiple who cares? I just want something that produces an income. So I love, love what you're talking about there. I think that's great. Jack, thank you for coming on this show today. Certainly appreciate it. It was great learning about you and your business, businesses I think I should say. You've given us a lot of things to think about, especially as it pertains to finding and having great partners here in business. And then, you know, really just how to scale and what you've done, certainly, certainly have enjoyed it. If our listeners want to get in touch with you or learn more about you, what is the best way to do that?
[00:18:06] Jack Gibson: My website has everything and I actually just launched a new book that's called Building Indestructible Wealth. It's the six-figure earners’ guide to a multimillion-dollar portfolio. So I just lay out the strategies exactly. Actionable strategies are in there. There's concepts, it's conceptual in nature, but there's also specific links to here, if you want to do this, here's where you go to do it and how to get this particular strategy up and, you know, implemented. So that's on my website. You can get the book right there. myindestructiblewealth.com. Also, I have a podcast called Indestructible Wealth and a blog. So it's all right there.
[00:18:45] Sam Wilson: Awesome, Jack, thank you again for your time today. Certainly appreciate it.
[00:18:47] Jack Gibson: Thank you so much, Sam. Appreciate the convo.