Successful Investing Partnerships

Mike H: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the show. Today we’re here with my buddies, Bill and Mike and we’re going to be talking about, these guys are partners in West Virginia, and we’re going to be talking about what makes a good partnership. There’s probably nothing, not really a better structure in real estate investing than having a partnership. Could be with a spouse, could be with best friend, father, brother, things like that. But there’s a lot of things that can cause that to go south, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today.
Professional real estate investors know that it’s not really about the real estate. In fact, real estate is just a vehicle to freedom. A group of over 100 of the nation’s leading real estate investors from across the country meet several times a year at the Investor Fuel Real Estate Mastermind to share ideas on how to strengthen each other’s businesses, but also to come together as friends and build more fulfilling lives for all of those around us. On today’s show, we’re going to continue our conversation of fueling our businesses and fueling our lives. I’m glad you’re here.
Hey, guys. Welcome to the show.
Bill: Hey, Mike. Thanks for having us.
Mike W: Thanks for having us.
Mike H: Yeah, good to have you guys on here. And this is a topic that’s kind of near and dear to my heart. I work with my wife and there have been challenges through the years. We’ve been doing this for 12 years. So challenges and you know, after a while you either, we all know people that,” I used to work with my wife, but if we stayed working together we were going to get divorced,” or like “It just wasn’t a good situation.”
And not everybody should work with their spouse and not everybody should be in a partnership, but you guys have made it work, and I think you guys have a lot of things that are aligned and that’s we want to talk about today is how people that are working with somebody else or want to even bring on a partner maybe can structure things so that it kind of stands the test of time. So, before we jump in, why don’t you guys kind of introduce yourselves, let’s start with you, Mike. Tell us a little about you and your background and how you got into real estate investing.
Mike W: Sure. My name is Mike Webb and I live in Maryland. And I’ve been investing just pretty significantly since about 2013, but I got started because my parents actually owned some rental properties back when I was in high school and college. So I got to see that side of it for a little bit. And I worked full time as a career firefighter outside of like the Metro DC area and this lends itself well to being able to have a full-time job while still investing. So I was looking for something that I didn’t have to trade time for money and real estate kept coming back up.
Mike H: Awesome. Awesome.
Bill: Yeah, and my name is Bill Kenny. We’re partners here. I live in West Virginia, so it’s kind of how we got the name Maryland West Virginia Homebuyer. We both live there and that’s what we do. But I was originally in logistics management and I did that for many years and got to the point where I got really burned out on that and was looking for a different pathway to financial freedom in the end. And I found real estate and I had gotten my real estate license.
So currently I’m a realtor with Keller Williams, but the government contract that I was working for actually ended. It ended about a week after I got my real estate license. So Mike and I were loosely partnering at that time and I said, well, let me just go be a realtor. Like I don’t want to go back into this nine to five type stuff. That’s where it kind of all started for me, you know, kind of figuring out how to be a realtor, and then it really blossomed into the investor side of the business.
Mike H: Yeah, that’s pretty common. There’s people that are either a realtor and they find their way into investing or they’re investors and they see the value of being a licensed agent too, so they go get their license.
Bill: Yeah, it was always investor for me first. I had rental property first and we had loosely been aligned at that point and so we thought having the real estate license would help our wholesaling business.
Mike H: Yeah. So some people, you guys were both had interests, you were both doing some things, like what made you decide to kind of partner up versus just being, you know, friendly allies in this industry.
Bill: So we actually met, it was very, very odd. We both got into it more aggressively at the same time. When we met on BiggerPockets, went out and had lunch. We knew we were in the same area. We had joined the same local REIA group at the very same time. Got in there, and we both had the idea of, you know, rentals, passive income, and we learned wholesaling.
And so we both tried individually with very little success. And during our conversations we were like, “Hey, let’s, let’s partner up and wholesale together.” And so that’s kind of like, that’s kind of what I would say was our dating period. You know, it really worked out for like that five-year period where . . .
Mike W: Let’s have a lunch.
Bill: We were just wholesaling kind of loosely. And then, you know, about a year and a half ago we really said, let’s turn this into something a lot bigger.
Mike H: Yeah. And what are some of the benefits that you found kind of so far of being . . . in this business, there are a lot of, that’s one of the things I explained with when I talk about my wife and I, is there’s always kind of like front end of the business, like lead generation and lead intake. Then there’s acquisition side or there’s dispositions. There’s very clear kind of departments, if you will, that split off of this business and kind of chop up. But are there some things that, you know, one of the times that partnerships fail in my experience is when people are, this is the . . . sometimes people are really good friends, but they’re very much alike. And so they’re good at the same things, but they’re also bad at the same things.
Sometimes the partnership doesn’t work in that regard because you’re like, well they both are good at acquisitions let’s say and they both are terrible at kind of the administrative side of the business and it’s like, okay, well, you need to focus on that part and then they hate doing that or you know, they find a way. It’s better to part. That’s one of the things with my wife and I is she’s very organized, very structured, financially savvy, a whole bunch of things that I can do, but it’s not really what I prefer. And so we kind of found a way to split it up, but are there any kind of thoughts on how you guys complement each other that made this making it work.
Bill: I think that really just naturally split itself out for us because with Mike having his job, he didn’t have as much time and I had had to learn to be a realtor, you know, had to learn to talk to people and learn the scripts and we’re meeting with sellers all the time that it naturally just kind of fell out that way. And I know he’s a lot more structured than I am, so that lends a lot more to side that he handles, which is a rental management and all the rehabs because you got to be really structured with that. I mean you’ve got to be on both sides, but it kind of just naturally fell to me the sales and acquisitions and to him, the rentals and the rehab part of it. It just kind of built it’s way out [that way 00:06:57].
Mike W: And we both had been just trying to figure out like how do we make this not a hobby and like an actual business, you know? So we both have struggled and grown through that process together. He’s more of the front end of the business, once it comes on board, then I pretty much take care of it, whether it be a rental or a rehab or whatever the case may be. Or as dispo goes, he handles that and I still hop in there, you know, because like you said, we’re wholesaling loosely together but him and I each had a little bit different contact pool.
So that’s pretty much how it worked out. But yeah, I think he’s right. Like if he hadn’t accidentally on purpose become a realtor full time, he wouldn’t have had to go out there and be like that acquisitions guy that now is actually been a blessing.
Bill: Because I think a lot of times people get into the investor’s side because they like the numbers. So that doesn’t really lend them to be a typical salesperson, which I’ve had to force myself to become that to make it work for me as a realtor and make it work for our business. But you know, through repetition, you figure that kind of stuff out, but that’s kind of naturally how it’s split out and it works really well for us.
Mike H: Yeah. That’s great. So Mike, one of the things that people that I’ve seen, you know, if I kind of compare to partnerships that fall apart, like what are some common reasons? So one of the big ones is just not having the same kind of goals like where does somebody want to take this business?
I mean, a partnership in a business is very much like a marriage, right? Like you want it to last forever and it’s just important to have the same kind of values and same goals and things like that. So let’s start with, and we’re going to talk about some of the things like clear communication and stuff like that, but let’s just focus on goals.
So how did you guys know upfront like or what kind of discussions did you have and maybe even if you kind of look back and say, “Well, we did it the wrong way but it’s worked out,” you know, which kind of happens sometimes is what would you advise to people that are thinking about partnering up or that are kind of partnering right now but not sure if it’s working? Like what does that discussion look like to kind of evaluate whether you’re a good match for each other from a goal standpoint?
Mike W: I would say first and foremost because we both have had experiences, you need to make sure you’re on the same page when it comes to like how you operate with whether it’s a business or just ethics all around. So when we first started, we didn’t have a fancy business plan or anything of that sort and we just basically said like, hey, at the end of the day, if we can’t go to sleep at night with something we’re doing or not doing, then it’s probably not a good decision for us. So that was kind of like, I’ll call it like our guiding theme there for a while until we started to formalize stuff and we both knew we wanted to, like he said, acquire enough properties or a passive income if there is such a term that we could . . .
Mike H: Just a term. It might not be a reality.
Mike W: Yeah. Wait, that’s a whole other discussion. But anyways, we both knew that’s where we wanted to go. There’s a slight age difference, so like when he wants to exit might be slightly different than what I want to exit. His kids are older than mine, my son. So there’s going to be a little bit of probably difference whenever it’s time to exit. However, we’re still marching towards the same goal, and that goal was kind of defined early on before we ever really said, hey, let’s start a partnership. It just kind of presented itself to where like, hey, we’re both going in the same direction. We might be able to get there faster if we do this together. And there’s things absolutely I guarantee we’ve done wrong and are still doing wrong but that’s how you, I guess fail forward, right?
Mike H: Yeah, absolutely.
Mike W: Like we don’t have a super defined exit strategy. Now, we had, you know, all the legal documents and stuff drafted up and who’s got the first right of refusal and all this other stuff but at the end of the day, man, I think at least from our standpoint, like a handshake still goes a long way. And I want to say like whenever it was time to exit, we would just sit down and like say, okay, like what makes sense? But, you know, I guess every partnership you want it to last forever, but every partnership ends. It’s just let’s have a clearly defined way it’s going to so there’s no real surprises or any problems at the end of that.
Bill: We’ve had those conversations. We haven’t actually initiated, you know, what that looks like but we’ve had those conversations with our attorney and our insurance.
Mike W: We’re just trying to get through every day. We don’t worry about the exit.
Mike H: Yeah, no I get it. I get it. Yeah. Some of it is, Bill, sometimes . . . Like you know, how do you decide things like, and I know you guys are very much aligned because you talk all the time, but sometimes there are people that we know that are in the industry that are more of the lifestyle side. Like they’re like, “Hey man, I want to make a quarter million dollars a year and I want like, I want my time.” I mean not that you guys don’t want your time, but it’s just like some people are like, “I’ll go balls to the wall as hard as it takes because I’m going to do this for 10 years and then I’m out.”
Or you know, even things as simple as deciding how much should we spend on advertising next month. If you’re partners, you’re probably splitting it so somebody could want to spend 3000 and somebody else wants to spend 15,000 or whatever. So you have to kind of do that dance to make sure that everybody’s happy. How do you kind of balance those things from a goal standpoint?
Bill: It’s almost like when you’re doing this, every day is a new day and a lot of those things we don’t know. So the things we don’t know, we reach out to our mastermind group, but in general we’ll just have conversations. If I’m unsure, I’ll ask him and I’ll defer to him on certain things that I don’t feel confident about or I think his dad has been in the industry and is very savvy financially and has had a lot of property and he can lean on him.
If it’s something that may be I have done in my realtor business and I have some experience with, maybe he’ll lean on me or you know, in the beginning he knew all about the marketing and I had the private money lenders. So, you know, it’s just like who had what and who had the experience. We just lean on that and we have a deep respect for each other. We truly do. I know that. If he’s very adamant about something, then I just let it be just because I respect his opinion.
Mike H: Right. It’s almost like you’ve got to pick your battles too, right?
Mike W: Yeah, exactly.
Mike H: Yeah, it’s interesting. I’ve found, because other than my wife, I’ve never been in a business partnership before. Not really. And I am in one now with Jason Lewis who you guys know is in the group. We’re forming a new business. It’s kind of re-inspired me because I found that by having a partner like outside of my marriage, you know, having a partner, it’s like I’m inspired by us coming together instead of like, sometimes if it’s just me, I’m like, ah, you know, it’s easier for me to let myself down than to let my partner down.
And so that’s one of the things that I found kind of recently here in this new venture is that like, I’m thinking way bigger because I’m like, there’s just this energy of coming together. If it’s just me, sometimes I’m like, I don’t know if I really want to do that or I want to bite that off by myself, but kind of having somebody that you’re working with can help inspire you too.
Bill: Procrastination is a massive battle we all fight every day. And for me, having somebody to be accountable to helps me through that. It’s like, I just can’t let this sit here, you know, this long. This really needs to get done because I’m letting my partner down. So yeah, having that accountability on the other side just from a personal aspect is important
Mike W: And now, not only that, like, you know, this kind of went from like super part-time to full-time business, right? And we have people now that depend on paychecks every week by what we do or don’t do. And that’s something I don’t think either one of us takes lightly, right? So if we don’t do our job, they don’t get paid, they don’t have a job. So every Thursday we have our team meeting and we don’t want to be the choke points and the team meeting, like all that didn’t get done, this didn’t get done.
Bill: So we have to set a good example for our team members.
Mike W: Yeah. Exactly.
Mike H: Let’s kind of jump into the next, the next thing we’ll talk about was really communications and some of that is through a regimented meeting, right? It kind of helps force issues, but also just kind of talking about like how you communicate to one another to where it kind of keeps the partnership on track or you know, being able to talk like, hey, we’ve got a problem or address it or sometimes people keep things.
I would say we talked about this up front, like contractors or partnerships like the biggest issues for any relationship ultimately comes down to money or poor communications. And so how do you kind of keep those communications clear so that everybody’s on the same page and nobody is letting anything fester?
Bill: Yeah, there’s nobody I talk to more in this world than Mike. And we have an app that helps us stay in communication. That helps us get that, you know, while we’re thinking about and get it out there and then he can respond to it when he wants to. But we have different channels for different people on our teams. And sometimes we’re saying, hey, where are we in the right channel here?
Mike H: Are you using Slack?
Mike W: We use Voxer.
Bill: Voxer.
Mike W: Yeah. So like we’ll have a rehab group, a rental group, you know, him and I conversation, you know, just to whatever team member it involves. Now we have an all message to goes to everybody but you know, we try and just communicate there that way things don’t get fragmented. You get something in email, you get something here and get some there. And he’s on the road like 26 hours a day so it’s very difficult for him to stay up with email or text messages. So it’s just kind of like a good clearinghouse is to just check Voxer.
Now I’ve tried to make it a point like compartmentalize stuff. If it’s something like he doesn’t need to deal with or know, I just don’t even discuss it because then it’s like taking up bandwidth that he doesn’t . . .
Mike H:Just clutter. Yeah.
Mike W: Yeah. So and he does the same when it comes to like once we get a rehab on the market and it’s under contract to sell, there’s a bunch as you know, stuff going on back and forth. This agent, that color, whatever. And he doesn’t get me into that much. So I end up just deciding what is need to know versus what’s just noise.
Mike H: That’s a good point with partnerships is sometimes you got to shield each other from like, “Hey, I could dump this on you, but I know it’s going to be a huge distraction.” So like, you know, you can do that like, hey, we have a meeting in two days. I want to tell them it’s not urgent. It’s not like we had a house burn down yesterday that’s like, hey, all hands-on deck, but it’s like this thing’s coming up. We need to deal with it. You just got to protect each other. I think once you really value your own time, then you start to understand the importance of protecting other people’s time too because you want them to do that for you, right?
Mike W: Yeah. And that’s something you fight every day trying to use your time wisely.
Bill: And we also have a structured weekly team meeting every Thursday morning. So everybody knows when it is and we have a agenda. So everything is discussed, every part of the business. And then even higher level than that, every time we’re heading to Investor Fuel and every time we come back, we are setting new plans where what do we want to learn this time and what do we need to fix about our business and implement. So those are like a higher-level conversation heading there and coming back, which is extremely valuable because we’ve made so many changes in our business.
Mike W: That usually takes place on the flight down and the flight back. But no, that weekly meeting is huge. We do the scorecard and everybody, you know, it’s very binary. People can see yes or no right or wrong, what happened for the week. And then also our assistant does an excellent job just creating the agenda, updating the agenda, and then literally just providing us a printout every Thursday for the meeting. And if we do it virtually, she sends us the Google Drive link. Boom. Everybody can follow along. But frankly, we don’t give them enough credit like some of the team members, because they really do help us just stay on track. We’re regimented and we’re goal oriented but most investors, some of the details can fall through the cracks.
Mike H: Oh no doubt.
Mike W: They really help a lot.
Mike H: Yeah. Talk about, so the meetings, do you guys kind of follow that? You follow like the EOS system or some variant of that?
Mike W: So I’ve [inaudible 00:19:30] Fuel and all that stuff. So we do to some extent. So yeah, we just go over, like you said, each department of the business. Well, let me back up. We start with the scorecard. That’s like 10 minutes. Boom. Everybody can see what we did last week and that’s broke down into departments. So like the rentals, the rehabs, the appointments, etc. And then we just go over, basically we got stuff for the rentals, we got stuff for the rehabs, we’ve got stuff for new offers, wholesales, meet up and just unclassified business that needs wrapped up or something like that. And then you know, for kind of like give of the order and then . . .
Bill: Just to get everybody on the same page and figure out where we were, what the hot issues are and where are we going next week.
Mike W: And when we started doing those, probably about what, eight months ago, whenever we instituted the KPI presentations at Fuel, that’s when I’m like, listen, we need to get a hold of this because we’re not managing it. We can’t measure it. None of this.
Bill: That’s a huge eye opening.
Mike W: Huge.
Mike H: Yeah. So that stuff is really critical is to like look at a scoreboard, everybody’s accountable to a number and if you’re looking at it every week, kind of back to the partnership, you don’t want to let each other down. Like you’re more likely to do, like I found, I’m more likely to let myself down than somebody else. And so that level of accountability, like, hey, I’m either going to come here and let people down because I didn’t do what I said I was going to do or I’m not.
And so, but one of the things that I saw that you guys shared at this last Investor Fuel meeting is you had KPIs for your meetup group, which I had never seen that before, but it was beautiful. It was like this conceptually it’s like you guys get deals . . . So you won’t have probably a lot of time talking about that but you guys run a REIA club and you get deals through that through people that are in your group and you JV people or they bring you deals and you know that at the end of the day you can get more deals if you can get more people at your REIA club, right?
So you guys are tracking the social media posts and stuff that you’re putting out there to drive people to your REIA club. How many signed up, how many actually showed up? It’s just basically like all sales, right? It’s a lead generation funnel. Like a lead comes in. Some of them go to the next level, some of them go to the next level. Some of them go to the next level, some of them turn into a deal. It’s the same thing, but I had never seen anybody kind of have KPIs and that was amazing.
Bill: We kind of reverse engineered that, you know, just very quickly, you know, everything’s a lead measure and a lag measure. Like what are you trying to get? Well, what are the activities that bring you that? And for some of those things that are not very quantifiable, you have to dig down and figure out how he could quantify it. And that’s what we did on that.
Mike W:Just to be clear, you never started it for that reason. We just wanted to drink a beer and talk about real estate with people, kind of morphed into that.
Mike H: A lot of things turn . . . You know, even real estate for lot of people, it’s a hobby at first and you’re like, huh, how do I get serious about this or how do I make this? And it either gets real or it doesn’t eventually. So yeah, all those things, you know, even like things like the podcast, like eventually I’ve been doing this for so long now across all of our podcasts we’re somewhere around 1500 shows, you know, but a couple of years into it I realized like this is a lot of fun. It’s kind of like a boat. It’s like a really expensive hobby. Like just the time it takes to produce and pull them together and all that is like, well, ultimately there has to be a business case for it. So yeah, that’s awesome.
So I wanted to, you guys talked a little bit about, I want to talk about kind of clearly defined roles which you guys talked about a little bit up front. But one other question is with your employees, how do you deal with it, or do you ever have any issues where they don’t know who their boss is because they have two bosses. How do you deal with that?
Bill: We have people and depending on what part of the business in, that’s who they’re going to report to. So we have a realtor assistant who works under me and she’s good at marketing, so she handles all the marketing and she reports to me. We have an investing assistant who handles all the property management, all the financials and she pretty much reports to Mike. And then we have an acquisition guy that reports to me and we have a lead . . .
Mike H: It’s kind of by division, if you will.
Bill: Yeah, it’s kind of by division. But you know, if there’s an issue, you know, I’m going to reach out to him and say, “Hey, what do you think about this?” Like, or do you want to go with this? So, you know, they may report up to me or up to him, but we’re going to collaborate and make a decision if it’s something high level.
Mike H: Okay. I know sometimes with partners, people they have like one central office manager admin and they are like, one person’s telling them something to do and they’re like, well, this other person told me to do it a different way or I’m too busy to do that because this other person gave me some task or something like that. I’ve seen something like.
Mike W: We may get to a point where it needs formalized a little bit more but right now it hasn’t been an issue.
Mike . H: You guys have a good enough relationship where it’s not like you’re not aligned.
Bill: He’s dealing with a lot of contractors and they’re all just talking to him because I’m not going to be the one to talk to. So pretty much based on what job duties we’re handling or what divisions we’re in charge of.
Mike H: Yeah. Yeah. So one last thing I want to talk about before we start kind of going wind things down a little bit. It’s like checkups, like how do you like this? Some of this is a little bit academic, but I kind of think like when I’ve seen partnerships break up or even marriages or relationships, it’s usually something festered for a long time and the person just like in the back of their mind, they were irritated and they just didn’t communicate it back.
And it’s almost like an oil change like you got to have regular checkups in there and you got to like, you know, do some fine tuning every once in a while. Do you guys do anything like that where you have some place where you can kind of have airing of the grievances to like say, how can I do better? You know here’s what I want you to do better or some way to check up so you don’t let things just kind of fester.
Bill: I think we’ve kind of just found a way that works for us and it’s more just like a respectful communication, “Hey, where are you tracking on this?” You know? And if he’s asking me that, I’ll know that, oh, maybe I missed something or I forgot something. I’ve got to get on it. I think it’s more of a respectful type of conversation and just if something is getting a little off track or something or hey we need to look at this. I don’t think this is working the way we thought.
And we’re both open to anything to make this business work. So neither of us have a big ego from my perspective. We don’t, so we don’t care. You know, we’ll talk through things and tell me if I’m doing it wrong and he’s the same way. It’s been easy I think because of our personalities. I know there are people that I know that would have a problem with being called out, but I don’t think either of us would ever had that problem or are trying to not put ourselves in that situation with our partnership.
Mike W: But one thing we did do, and we’ve never kind of like gone off site for like a development or growth retreat or whatever you want to call it, but I forget, what was the actual prompting for it. I think it might’ve been coming back from Fuel one time. We like to this place offsite, we took everybody on our team and it was like this real nice setting, overlooked a river. It was beautiful. And that was just like a good way to get out of the normal environment and just like kind of like take a fresh look at stuff. Like let’s break this and rebuild it so that it’s right. And stuff like that.
I think that might be something that we could do in the future like him and I and maybe like we’ve kind of called it like our informal board of advisors, like just some people we really respect. Many in the room that we share with you. Like to just kind of like talk about stuff, get a fresh perspective. Because like with anything, him and I are, yeah, we’re trying to like move forward, but there’s still a lot of days where you’re just getting water out of the boat enough to keep it afloat. That’s just the way all business is sometimes.
Bill: And you don’t know what you don’t know a lot of times. So, you know, putting yourself around those kinds of people or asking people to help you and say, look, look at this, tell me what I’m doing wrong. We’re definitely open to that.
Mike W: And they just might be fundamentally off and just say, if that’s your goal, why are you doing this? That’s a good question.
Bill: We’ve had a lot of those conversations at the Fuel meeting where people say, “Well, why aren’t you doing this?” Like, I’d never thought of that.
Mike H: Yeah, that’s a good question.
Mike W: I was asking myself the same thing.
Mike H: Awesome. Awesome. Well, so you guys are obviously members of the Investor Fuel Mastermind. We just had a meeting here a couple of weeks back. Would you mind just sharing a little bit of maybe a testimonial on how Investor Fuel has impacted your life and you know, why you think it’d be a good fit for somebody that is actively investing right now and needs to take their business to the next level?
Mike W: We could each give a little bit of a blurb. I think it’s probably echo the same sentiments, but you know, it’s like you said, I’m dealing with a lot of contractor issues. We’re dealing with a lot of business growth issues and I look at it as kind of like a support network, right? I firmly believe like 95% of the stuff we’re dealing with or deal with on a daily basis, I could solve it with one phone call, a text message or a post in the private group and I guarantee I’m going to get some response and at least some ideas on how to fix whatever we’re dealing with. So to me, it’s like you can’t put a price on that. It’s in essence it’s our support network.
Bill: Yeah. When we sat down to build this business, we just kind of sketched out some big things. Here’s what we want to do. We want to do this. We want to build a meetup. We want to get this much passive income. We want to join a mastermind. And that just kind of came from a lot of books we read. It’s in “Think and Grow Rich,” you know, the value of a mastermind, those kinds of things. These are like the big things. Let’s do this when we get this started. And so that’s when we started reaching out to people in our network asking, you know, what do you know about different groups, and that’s when we found your group.
And then once you get in there, like there’s things you just have never thought of or things that things people are doing that like, I need to adopt that and well, how do I do it? Well, talk to this person. Like there’s so much value in just having someone to reach out to ask questions for rather than struggling with that or you know, us trying to figure it out, researching it on the internet or whatever you want to do, just reach out to this person, post it on the Facebook group, this person is really good at this. There’s your answer. And you can move forward so much quicker in a group like that.
Mike W: And we never even anticipated. We’ve done a couple of deals now with people in that room. Like we never even entered it with that thought process but we have.
Bill: The relationships you make just turn into valuable business relationships.
Mike H: That’s awesome. How has being a member of Investor Fuel impacted your business, would you say?
Mike W: Wow. Yeah. Well, let’s put it this way. When we started, we were scrambling around on legal pads left and right, and last month we had our first ever, not last month, a month before our first ever six figure net profit month. So we’ve never done that. So to take in essence of business partnership that started 18 months ago formally, and to net six figures within that amount of time, I think that’s enough and it’s right there.
Bill: That’s all you need to say.
Mike W: Yeah, I mean, now we’ve got to string those together, Mike.
Bill: It’s very hard to quantify it, but there’s just so much that you wouldn’t even know what to expect until you get there and you’re exposed to so much people doing big things that you never thought were possible. And how that just kind of finds its way into your business and fuels you.
Mike H: Yeah. Awesome guys, thanks for that. Good stuff. By the way, you guys, as you know, one of the things we do, I’ll just tell people that are listening is we give away. We really have this culture of giving. We really know that by giving you’ll get more out of everything and the culture is really kind of taking that to a whole another level and to the point now where we give away these biggest giver awards for people in the group.
The whole membership basically votes on who gave the most value at a meeting and Mike and Bill were winners of the biggest giver award at this last meeting because they were just sharing how they use KPIs and some of the other things that they do. And these are the types of people that are constantly asking others like, how can I help you or I heard you say something, can I share my thoughts on that or whatever. And so that’s one of the cool things we do. So congrats on your success.
Mike W: Thank you.
Bill: Thank you very much.
Mike H: I know you guys knowing you guys, I know you’re still just the tip of the iceberg. I know you guys are going to continue to grow and crush it, so that’s awesome.
Mike W: Thank you for that.
Bill: Thanks.
Mike H: Yeah. Well, if folks want to learn more about you, I know you guys have a mastermind group. I mean a REIA group and obviously your house buying business, your realtor business. Like where can people go to learn more about you?
Bill: Our website is mdwvhomebuyer.com. So that’s where they can kind of find out a little bit about our business. I’m on Facebook, Bill Kenny, K-E-N-N-Y and I’m also on Instagram. Bill Kenny REI. So people can find us there, reach out to me there.
Mike W: Sure. And then like Bill said, mdwvhomebuyer.com. That’s a good place to find us on social or if you want to reach out to me personally. I’m the Investing Fireman at Facebook, Instagram, online, whatever.
Mike H: Awesome. Racing you guys with Instagram content, trying to trying to light it up out there.
Mike W: Yeah, it’s good.
Mike H: I haven’t used it for a long time and now I’m really getting after it. So I appreciate you guys sharing your story with us today and wish you nothing but the best on your continued success.
Bill:Thank you, Mike. We look forward to seeing you the next Fuel meeting.
Mike H: Absolutely, absolutely, everybody that’s listening today, thanks so much for joining us on the show today. If you got some value out of this, if you haven’t yet subscribed to us on iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Google Play, YouTube, anywhere where you could watch or listen to this. Of course, you can find all of our shows at investorfuel.com and at flipnerd.com you can find all of our shows there. I’d love it if you give us a testimonial and some feedback and gives a positive review. We’d appreciate that. Until then, see you in the next show.
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