A Student Success Story

Okay, so back in 2020, I’m at this crossroads in my life. I have to decide what it is I’m gonna do next with my time and my energy. And up to that point, for the last three or four years, I’ve been focusing very, very heavily on growing escape climbing, which is our manufacturing business. And we were in a hyper growth phase where we went from $300,000 to about three to $4 million in top line revenue in just a span of three years, which, in a manufacturing environment, required a whole lot of infrastructure investment. It was very difficult, very complex process, something that I had no experience with prior to that. And we had succeeded in getting to that level of scale where the team was able to continue building the machine without our direct input. And so I was finding that I had more and more time on my hands, and a decision had to be made about where I was going to allocate the freed up time and resources that I now had available to me. And initially, it was really difficult.

It was really difficult because there was, like, this mindset that I was more valuable to the equation than I really was. And so there was a little bit of ego wanting to hold on and say, I’m needed here. You guys surely can’t do this better without me. But it became clear in 2020, when we went into the pandemic, that my ego had no basis in reality, that the truth was I wasn’t necessary. The machine was growing just as well, if not better, when I wasn’t in the office, when I wasn’t involved in the day to day operations. This became clear because with the pandemic, a lot of gyms shut down. A lot of businesses got wrecked during that time, but our business actually flourished. It expanded exponentially.
And the reason for that was because up to that point, we were one of the very few companies that serviced both gyms and the direct to consumer. And so when all the gyms closed, all the people went home and they decided they wanted to build climbing walls at home. And so suddenly, we got access to all that business. All our competitors went out, the large market share. Right? So 2020 was an incredible year of growth for us. And in that year of growth, our systems expanded and stretched to capacity, and I got to see how the team would rise to the occasion without me. And so all that to say, long story short, is I had a decision that I needed to make, which was, what am I going to do with this next phase of my life? All right? And up to that point, I had been growing my own real estate portfolio for a number of years, just buying and managing the assets with my own internal resources, my own money, my own team. And in 2019, I started entertaining the possibility of raising capital for my friends and family and just bringing investors into the deals that I was doing.
And so in 2019, 2020, I partnered with my partner, who I’m still partnered with to this day, Dan. And we started raising capital. We started syndicating, we started raising funds for our real estate. In the last four years, since 2020, we’ve raised around $50 million of capital and acquired over $100 million of assets. So it’s been good, right? I share all that because back in 2020, I met this kid. This kid, we were doing these weekly multifamily roundtables where we’d get together, we’d bring in some industry experts. We’d do like, a virtual Zoom networking event, right? During 2020, you couldn’t really go to networking events. So we started being the host of the party, started throwing that.
And there’s this kid. He comes out of nowhere here. He’s a local kid here in Minnesota, and he would start coming to those Zoom calls. He didn’t have any real estate at that point. He just had a dreams and ambition. Just young guy. I don’t remember how old he was, but he’s probably, like, in his early twenties. And he was working H vac.
So he was working as an H Vac maintenance engineer. He was making pretty good money doing that. But he wanted to get into real estate. He wanted to diversify into an investment portfolio. And he started showing up to all these weekly calls, started making himself part of the community, started asking questions. And he did everything that he could to get close to me in particular, to learn and grow from what we were doing on the portfolio side. And I just took a liking to this kid. He had all the energy, all the ambition that you need to have to succeed within that space.
And so I took some time with him and kind of, like, pointed him in a direction, started helping him a little bit with underwriting and, like, some conversations with brokers, and helped him to, I think, avoid a pretty bad deal that he was about to hop into back in 2020. But all that’s the same. It’s like, fast forward a couple of years, and this guy, he’s acquired a couple of quads. He’s managing those in house, and he’s doing very, very well. But the reason I wanted to do this podcast today is I wanted to share a little bit about his story that has just played out over the last couple of months. And I think it’s a very, very powerful story to understand and apply in your own life. So back in July. So now it’s September.
Back in July, June ish, maybe. I was talking to him and I was like, dude, what are you doing? What are you doing with your life right now? Because you have this real estate portfolio that you’re growing. You’ve also started becoming a real estate agent, trying to sell houses, and you’re still working as an h vac maintenance engineer guy. Right? What’s the goal? What is it that you’re trying to accomplish? I know he’s so entrepreneurial. He has so much capacity and potential. If he would just focus on the actual business of his investing and the business of his real estate agency, rather than trying to do all three simultaneously. And he was like, yeah, yeah, I’m going to do this. I’m going to do this.
I’m already, I’m putting the money in the bank right now. I’m planning on leaving my job in a couple of months and all that stuff, right? And I said, listen, I need you to join the beyond the apex accelerator. It’s a big investment for you, and you’re, you’re not quite to the level of all the other entrepreneurs in the group quite yet, but you’re going to be there really fast. But the reason I need you to do this, the reason I need you to make this investment right now into yourself, is because I know I can help you, not just on the material, physical system side, but on the mindset side that you need to have to make that jump even sooner. He said, okay, let’s do it. So he jumps in to the group and we sit down for our first strategy call. Actually, it was right here at these tables. He comes over to my apartment building.
We sit here looking over the river, the great view, and we sit down and do a brainstorming session about what’s your goals, what do you want for the next year? And we laid out a really aggressive strategy that said, you’re going to leave your w two job, your h vac job this month, in the next two, three weeks. And we set that target for the end of July. And he wasn’t ready when he got there. At that point, he was scared. Remember, he comes to a coaching call and he wasn’t quite ready to do it yet, but he did it and he pulled the plug and he left his w two and he started building the plane on the way down. And something remarkable happened in that time. He has flourished in the last month, he’s only, he left less than, like, just a little over a month ago. And in that time, he has already gotten these premium luxury real estate listings.
One listing, if he sells this thing, will make him more off that one listing than he made an entire year working h vac. And so he was so afraid of, like, how am I going to replace my income if I leave this thing? And as soon as he did that, these opportunities started to expand because that what you focus on, it becomes your reality. What you focus on expands. And he said, I’m going to make this work. And next thing you know, he has all this traction. He’s getting great social media attraction. He’s getting all these big, luxurious premium listings that are practically going to sell themselves like it’s the creme de la creme of listings because they’re so easy to sell, because they, they’re just so highly desirable, so highly sought after. So he’s on the right side of that transaction.
And I wanted to share this with you because you might be on the fence right now considering a big life change. And as entrepreneurs, it’s hard to know when is the right time to pull the plug. And I’m not saying you should go do that prematurely. I do believe you need to have the foundation set so that you can see when I pull the plug, I have the means to fail rather than just plummet to the ground. If you need help with that, if you need that mindset shift, get around people who have done that, who’ve made that shift before, so that you can share from their collective wisdom, you can get their gift of perspective that they have, you know, as a result of standing maybe just a slightly higher on the rung, on the, on the ladder than you can. They can seal a bit further, get that around yourself that you can have the confidence that comes from their success, but also you can get the vision for your life that they have for you, which is further than you can see for yourself. And that right there, I think, is the, the best gift that you can have from a mentor or a coach. So that’s going to do it for me, guys.

And, guys, I appreciate you. We’re back in Minnesota. It feels good. The weather is crisp, much better than it was in Italy. So really, really feeling the vibes here right now. But I appreciate you guys. We’ll see you in the next episode. Until then, stay hyper focused, my friends.