Real Investor Radio Podcast

Craig Fuhr (00:12)
Hey, welcome back to real investor radio joined again by Jack, BeVier and Ron Phillips. If you haven't had a chance to go back and listen to our wide ranging conversation with Ron Phillips on the previous episode that we'll post, I would highly encourage you guys to do that because we covered a lot of ground. And Ron has just been a great veteran of the business stand up guy tells it like it is for what

20 years now, Ron, 25. And he's only 30 years old, which is, which makes it all the more amazing. So, right. And so we wanted to do another episode with Ron because, you know, if you, if you get a little chance to go back to the, to the last episode, you know, it hasn't been all, you know, gumdrops and lollipops. If you were an investor starting in 2004,

Ron Phillips (00:40)
25.

Yep. Some of us started young.

Craig Fuhr (01:05)
you know, Ron persevered through a lot, had to pivot several times in his business, but ultimately landed on, really attracting better investors, to purchase, basically single family and multifamily, right? Right. Ron with, well, than me doing the talking, why don't you talk about sort of the genesis of RP capital, and how you grew that business over the years.

And really give us some serious facts because it's honestly staggering what you grew. then we'll transition into the project that you're working on today, which is pretty exciting stuff.

Ron Phillips (01:38)
Yeah. So I kind of got, and this, this is like, think every major pivot other than the last one, I kind of have been forced into, like, it wasn't like, I didn't make this great decision. Hey, I'm going to do this thing over here. That's way better. Like the, the market or something shoved me into it and moving from

you know, rehabbing properties into the rental world. You know, some people show up at masterminds where they say, Hey, you know, you should invest some of your money into rentals. This is a good idea. Nah, that's not how mine worked. Mine was, you're out of business.

because you can't sell these things anymore on the loans that you were using. And these people can't get loans any other way. So you're done. and by the way, all of the stock that you have that you're rehabbing right now, you still get to finish it, but you don't get the cash out of it and get all the money that you just took all of your money and put into these 13 houses. You don't get any of that. So what are you gonna do? And so we had to reinvent.

You know, it's funny because when I was rehabbing houses, I would make fun of the, the landlord people and like me, you're getting like two, $300 a month. You're an idiot. I'm going to get 30 grand on this house. Now all of a sudden I am one and I had to try to figure out what are these people doing? Why are they doing it? How are they doing it? And I pretty quickly realized they had a pretty cool life. You know, when I was out, uh, you know, dropping flyers and

hanging bandit signs and you know, running contractors and you know, all this crap, they were collecting, you know, checks from the houses that they owned that were going up in value. And, all of a sudden I, because I was in this world, I was meeting people in this world. met a guy who was selling rental properties to people out of state.

And interestingly enough, he was, lived in Kansas city, he selling properties in Boise, Idaho to people in California. And so he, he, he shared with me why he was doing what he was doing. And I said, well, why don't you do anything in Kansas city? He said, I don't know, man, I just, I just haven't done it. And I said, how about if I do it? And,

We worked together from 2005 till the end of 2011. So seven years. Grew a multi-million dollar business. we, you know, he was selling tons of properties in Boise. Our first year we sold 250 houses in Kansas City.

And then we continue to do that in 06 and 07. but we added Omaha, Nebraska and Oklahoma city. And we sold the groups on the West coast. but in 2007, I, I just said, man, these guys are teaching the most psychotic stuff. We need to be teaching the right way to do this.

because this is like, I had no idea that 2008 was gonna happen. But what I did know, I'll tell you another story. I was standing in one of these events, one of these buying events and they had a guy go up there and warm up the crowd, know, tell them how great this is. This guy standing up there, I don't know, he's kind of a clown, but.

He had this spreadsheet. The only slide he had was a spreadsheet of all these like there was like 30 or 40 properties on this spreadsheet. And he was showing the numbers, right? Like what was happening with them, how much equity he had. And at the bottom, I remember I stand in the back. And I remember he was laughing about his negative cashflow number. It was like an astronomical number.

a number that would sink any human being like, you know, like, over $10,000 of negative cash flow a month. And what he was doing is he would cash out refinance one, and that would pay for his negative for the year on all the others. And so he's, he's just laughing about it. He's like, look at all this equity that I'm building up. And all it costs me is this and this one property pays for these other 29 properties. I'm standing in the back.

And I looked at my partner and I was like, this is like the credit card scheme. And I'm like, the thing that people don't ever say about the credit card scheme is that at some point they're going to stop giving you loans and you're going to have to pay all of this crap back. And it was that day we were like, we've got to do our own thing. And

Jack BeVier (06:06)
That's great.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Ron Phillips (06:30)
We knew that the way that this worked was that people in highly appreciating markets where the cashflow didn't work, were buying in markets where the cashflow worked and the properties were less expensive. They could buy more properties. And can so we lived, we both lived in Kansas City, so we couldn't do Kansas City. We could sell Kansas City, but we needed buyers.

So I went out, I flew out to Salt Lake City, Utah, and I did my first event out there. And it was the biggest bomb. So we spent all of this money, we had this hotel room, three, no, three people showed up.

Craig Fuhr (07:02)
You didn't have a whole lot of money back.

Ron Phillips (07:06)
three. And I remember we had this room set up for like 60 people and three people showed up. And, cause we didn't know what the hell we were. I we didn't know how to run an event, you know? but there I am in my suit, you know? And, so I sat down in a chair with these two guys, with these three guys, and I gave them my presentation kind of like just a couple of friends and I sold two of them.

And then we figured out how to actually do our own events. And we did that for the next, many years all over Southern California. moved to Utah to kind of create an, own club out there, so to speak. And then we would set these clubs up, you know, wherever we would do events. And then when we would come back to do the events, we would do a club meeting along with the event. And so we were growing these groups of investors in each one of these areas when one in

Irvine, California, one in San Diego and one up in Seattle and then one in Salt Lake. And we sold hundreds of properties a year to our own groups, which means we got to keep more of the money. we, we, we, so we grew this bigger and bigger and bigger. Um, but I was getting sick of the road, man. And in 2011, towards the end of 2011, my partner and I,

Well, we just, we just didn't agree on the direction of the company and we parted ways. Um, yeah, that's a whole other story, but it was another forced reset. And Luch is kind of the story of my, my, my career, right? I was, I had to start over and you know, it wasn't like it was a super amicable here. You get your share and you get your share. Like I got no share. So I had to start over with nothing, with nothing. Um,

And I just went and did the exact same thing over. built my own group and just did it again. But this time I decided I'm going to do this online at the same time and see if I can make this work, which was my idea because I wanted to get off the road. And, what do you know, it worked much to this degree. And I think of my former partner and actually worked really well and I didn't have to travel anymore. So I continued to my group local in Salt Lake. So was super easy.

Craig Fuhr (09:09)
work pretty well.

Ron Phillips (09:19)
Um, but then we would just, we would, we would do online ads, um, and, and grow our group and we grew it all over the place. Um, and I, and I've been doing that ever since, um, 2012. So this, that was 2012, January of 2012. Um, I think I did my first meeting in February or March, one of the two. And that was interesting too, because like, I, I didn't have any money, you know, and it costs 25, $30,000 to do an event.

Jack BeVier (09:31)
What years are this?

Ron Phillips (09:49)
and I, so I went to, one of the, one of my buddy of mine and I said, Hey, fund my event. I'll split it with you 50 50. And he knew what I had been doing, that we had been speaking that we'd been successful. And so he, he threw a flyer and bet on me and, we did really well on our first event. Cause by that time I actually knew how to run events. And, and so we, did really, really well.

I think we did three with him before we had enough money to be able to run our own.

Jack BeVier (10:20)
Who taught you just, I'm going to curious who taught you how to do events? Did you just like trial and error it until it worked or was there like a formula?

Ron Phillips (10:26)
Yep.

Yep. We realized that we didn't do any follow up to get people. just thought people would, you know, they sign up, they show up when that's not really how it works. you actually have to do some. Yep. Yep. and so we just, we trial and error it. and we did, we are the guys who, did our mailers and things like that. They knew, so we would, we would ask them how to do things. They would introduce us to people.

Jack BeVier (10:34)
You got a reminder that things coming up the things coming up the things coming up

Ron Phillips (10:50)
who could give us some more tips and we just, you know, we just kind of kept going with it. Um, every time we at least broke even, most of the time we made money as we were growing that. and since it was local, we were able to grow it organically too, which, helps out a lot. We did much radio ads too, uh, in, uh, in salt lake.

Craig Fuhr (11:11)
So Ron, talk about over, you know, sort of the, the time that where you and I met, how, how your business had grown considerably. your investor base had grown considerably. your reputation, you know, was, you know, obviously very good because you had a lot of repeat investors, buyers, if you will, and then sort of what the business model looked like.

And frankly, you know, we don't have time to really get into it, but Ron was doing, you know, some of his highest volume of business where I think you also, you know, led a pretty great lifestyle at the same time. And I don't mean that by, you know, all the, you know, the bells and whistles of life. meant that you spent.

an above average time with your family and friends and you know you were able to be around the house rather than sort of you know chasing this thing that everybody this this freedom thing that everybody gets into the business for right.

Ron Phillips (12:07)
Yeah, I mean that was really one of the things that led to the dissolution of my partnership is that I was never home. I mean, I was always on the road and you know, I first started speaking and traveling. It was fun. It was cool. You know, that stopped being fun and cool pretty quick. and so when I, when I was able to do it online, it, it, it changed it so that I had more time and I could hire people and

You know, those people could do a lot of the heavy lifting that I had been doing in our other company. and, we could, and we could grow. And one of the things that we did right was we treat our clients right. And, know, really proud of the fact that somewhere between 65 and 70 % of the people that buy one property from us, buy multiple properties from us. And so it reduces the workload and the expense to be able to generate business if your customers keep buying from you. And so,

A lot of people in the industry would burn people, you know, they'd sell them a house. wasn't a great house. And we did, we did a lot of work on the front end to be able to get really good inventory. So that. And good property managers and you know, everything constantly working, you get the best financing, the best insurance and the best, everything that you need to be successful so that people could do well.

Craig Fuhr (13:07)
Sure.

truly have a turnkey experience that paid off for them. like bring us up to like 2016, 17, 18, you what type of volume were you doing then? I think you.

Ron Phillips (13:28)
Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, we,

we, we sold some, we, we sold somewhere between 300 and 700 properties every year. and, most of that very variation was, market dependent, know, when, when, when the market got to the place where any, like you can put your house on the market and 30 minutes later it would sell, it's really difficult to get inventory. and our numbers, numbers went down.

In addition to that, um, you know, our commissions on those properties went down because they, you know, they don't, they didn't need us. Right. Well, I mean, that's changed dramatically today, right? Like, um, there's a lot of standing inventory where all of a sudden where, know, these national builders wouldn't give you the time of day. Now that now they're like, Oh, you know, we're the hot, we're the hot chick at the dance again. We get, we get the party like everybody else. Um, and,

Craig Fuhr (14:24)
You can buy 20 at a time?

Ron Phillips (14:31)
And all of a sudden they, they realized they need us to move properties. so, yeah.

Jack BeVier (14:35)
How was the, how was the buyer profile changed over time, particularly over the course of the past four years, given the rising interest rate environments, are people buying less? Did certain people just stop buying altogether? I mean, you know, when you're dealing with a high six is low sevens handled the SCR rate, you know, ain't a whole lot of nine caps out there. So like, how's, how's that going?

Ron Phillips (14:57)
Yeah, that's a really good question. Um, and I'll tell you a couple, a couple of ways. so one of the things that we've noticed over the past, probably five to seven years is that the buyer profile has, has gotten much, much younger, much younger. So where, when I first started in business, probably my first 10 years in business, almost everybody that we sold to was 45 to 65. And most of them.

on the 50 to 65 end, really trying to figure out how to retire, you know?

I'd say half of our business are like between the ages of, of 25 and 40 and they are aggressively investing. Um, yeah. Well, I think, I think that the reason, and there are people like that. Absolutely. Yeah. Um, because they live in an,

Jack BeVier (15:43)
super interesting. Like they're still renting. They're still renting. They don't own their home yet, but they've got three rental properties.

Craig Fuhr (15:44)
Yeah. What's your take on why Ron? Yeah. Right. Like.

Ron Phillips (15:56)
They live in an area where they, you know, to afford that they can't have the investment properties. They choose the investment properties. I think there's a few reasons. I think the,

I think the promotion of Coinbase Robinhood apps that the, that the young crowd are investing. Like I didn't know, but my son, like when I bought some Shiba Inu, which is the dumbest thing I've ever done. Probably I still own it. I'm holding, I'm holding man. I'm long-term investor. Yeah. ⁓ anyway, he was like, yeah. And he was teaching me how to use Coinbase. The kid had

Jack BeVier (16:21)
You're holding, you're holding it, you're a long-term, you're a long-term investor. yeah, it just, yeah.

Ron Phillips (16:32)
to investment account. Like I didn't know he had an investment account. They're marketing to younger people, which opens their eyes and thought process to investments where when I was young, nobody even thought about investing until they were like 45 or 50. But these kids,

Jack BeVier (16:49)
Yeah.

Craig Fuhr (16:49)
And your blue

collar dad wasn't really even talking about it. yeah. Right. Exactly.

Ron Phillips (16:52)
No, because they had a pension, right? They had like

back in the day when we actually had manufacturing in this country. They had pensions like people were taken care of. It wasn't a big deal. Today. It's a big deal, man. If you don't do it yourself, it ain't going to get done. And kids today understand investing on a level we didn't. And so that's, that's one of the reasons now has the have they have they changed because the properties and the interest rates and the cap rates have changed.

Craig Fuhr (17:00)
That's right.

Ron Phillips (17:21)
Yes, to a degree, but even the people who bought way back Jack, which is which there's a segment of them that are just not going to buy anymore because they can't get this deal and they're spoiled on a 12 % cap rate, right? But the people who bought those 12 % cap rates are now sitting on equity of like $300,000 on a $100,000 deal that they put 20 grand down on, right? And now we're we're we're

helping them over the years, we've educated them about return on equity and yeah, you had a, you had a 12 cap, but you don't anymore, right? Your rent hasn't gone up that much. Your cashflow hasn't gone up that much to compensate for the fact that you have $320,000 of equity. And when you divide the equity, now you're getting like a 2 % return. So can we, can we take that and turn that 2 % return on $320,000 into a 7 % return?

Jack BeVier (18:02)
Yes.

Ron Phillips (18:18)
levered and now you have four assets that are. Yeah. I mean that it's just math, right? And so they're, while they would love to go get another 12 cap and do 20, 22%, you know, cash on cash return. Those days will probably never come back. And so it's,

Jack BeVier (18:18)
Right. Turn that one house into three. Yeah.

Yeah. Now they

got now the opportunity cost of their stock equity is what they need to go unlock. That's the right. That's the intelligent decision. Yeah.

Ron Phillips (18:40)
It's massive. And I

don't, I don't think many people out there are educating folks about that. You know, they're, still trying to, to people aren't in the same bucket. If you bought from us 10, 15 years ago, and I'm still telling you the same story, well, the story is still true, but you need a different story because you're in a different place now.

Craig Fuhr (19:04)
Yeah. Talk about Ron. Sort of the one of the things I was always fascinated that you did over the years was you you really set up like a platform for your investors to one have a real time sense of what your inventory was if they were looking to purchase. Then not only that, they were able to go into sort of like, you know, their portfolio that they had.

and get real time stats on sort of where the properties were and their return so that they can understand the investments that they've made. I'm just scratching the surface of what your software did at the time. And then we'll transition into what you're working on now.

Ron Phillips (19:44)
Yeah. I mean, every year we do annual reviews, kind of like a wealth advisor would, you know, we, tell people where you're at and, and then, you know, we, we initially, when we sit down with people, we build a wealth plan out for them. We, we help them say, you know, here's your assets. Here's what you could do with them over time. And here, here's the plan. Let's help you work the plan. Right. And so every year we do kind of an annual review on where they are with the plan and every year.

We're calling up realtors in local markets and we're trying to get, you know, CMAs, trying to figure out what, you know, their properties are worth and so that we can do calculations for them. And as you can imagine, as this thing scales, like it becomes an absolute nightmare trying to time suck. And not only for us, but for these poor realtors we're calling, trying to get CMAs. And then we're like, well, we're gonna have to start paying these people to do CMAs. And, finally, I'm just like, is there a

like a tech platform that does this. And when I was looking many years ago, there wasn't, there was nothing. And so, you know, the institutional investors, they start buying, you know, and they've got all the tools because they built them. And I thought, well, I just build one for our people. It's can't be that hard. you know, I don't know.

well over seven figures later. It's a little more complicated than I thought it was, but like you said, Craig, we did build it and our people loved it. And so I was trying to figure out how to roll this out and I was gonna.

Craig Fuhr (21:09)
Yeah.

Can you talk briefly though about like sort of give us a comprehensive sort of scope of what the platform that you built did for your investors that was so revolutionary.

Ron Phillips (21:26)
Yeah, so here's the problem. And if you're, if you're an investor, you will relate to this. Every month you get a P and L from your, from your management company, or if you're a landlord, you know, from your bookkeeper, wherever, right. And when something breaks, if you have to replace a refrigerator now, and you had $200 a month cashflow, well, you just spent 1200. Now you have a hundred dollars cashflow and you're pissed.

But why are you pissed? Well, you're pissed because there's three returns you don't ever see and you never focus on. The only one anyone ever reports to you is your P and L and your P and L doesn't even really give you a true cashflow because the, property manager doesn't have your taxes, your insurance and other things that you pay for personally. So no one that I, that we talked to on an annual basis has any idea what is going on with their property. Right.

Jack BeVier (22:18)
Yeah.

Ron Phillips (22:19)
They also don't know what is their return on principal reduction. that, that, that residence has been in there paying your mortgage for a year. What did that do for you? And what is the return on that? Like what's the percentage return? What's the percentage return on the, on the tax benefit that you got from the property that year? What's the benefit on, on the appreciation? And do you even have any idea what your property is worth and how much equity you gained this year? They don't, and they still didn't even have a true cashflow.

Jack BeVier (22:23)
Right.

Ron Phillips (22:48)
So what we solved for was like, kind of like Robinhood, right? What, what can I open up something, look at it and say, this month I made this much year over year. I'm up 20%. Now replacing the refrigerator for 1200 bucks. It's not that big of a deal. And when you put it in perspective, people in real estate make so much money and they don't realize it.

Jack BeVier (23:06)
Yeah.

Ron Phillips (23:17)
And it's, and it's a shame because they would do it way more if they knew. And so my population was.

Craig Fuhr (23:21)
They don't recognize all the

returns. Most of them are just a lot of people like you said on the last episode were just looking for appreciation. They don't realize that there's three other really great returns that they get.

Ron Phillips (23:30)
Yeah, and then.

Jack BeVier (23:31)
Yeah, they get focused on that

check. And when they have a negative cap, you know, they're like asked to cut $1,000. They're like, Oh my God, this thing cost me $1,000. Like, no, no, no, no, you made 15 grand this year and we need 1000 to pay for some current expenses. Yeah.

Ron Phillips (23:43)
Yeah, you made

15 this year and you invested 30. That's a 50 % return. Let's keep this in perspective, right? and to that point we were talking about, I think in the last show we were talking about these people who invested years ago, how much money they've made over the years. We'll imagine if those people knew every single year, how much they were making, imagine how many more properties they would have invested in and how much further ahead they would be.

And then you get into reporting return on equity so that people don't have to calculate it. And it's just not this mystical magical thing, right? It's in their face all the time. They can watch their return on equity drop as their equity increases, which like melts people's brains. Sometimes like my, my return on equity should be going up. getting more equity. No, it actually gives, it goes down and here's why. So having a tool where they can actually see this in real time.

did not exist except for, institutional investors. And so, so we built it and you know, the, next piece of the pie was like, how do we get this to the, to the investors? Like, how do you actually get something like this out to people? What do you charge for it? Like how do you build a business around this to, to be able to deliver this in a way that is meaningful to people? and I'd been thinking about that for a year because you're not spent

Craig Fuhr (24:44)
And it was revolutionary.

Ron Phillips (25:08)
seven figures on this thing and, and, you know, my investors were using it, but nobody else was, you know, and I, I'd been telling a few friends of mine about what I built. One of my friends said, man, you gotta meet this other guy. He keeps talking about, he's going to build the exact same thing and he's in our space. And, but he's a tech guy. he has a tech company that, that,

markets to property management companies. And I really think the play is management companies. So we all three flew out to Scottsdale three years ago and we met for a couple of days and white boarded this business. And man, I'm sitting there where all three of us are white boarded and I'm just like, this is A, this is a massive problem all investors have.

B, this is a massive business because of the size of the problem. And the real way to get this thing delivered to the masses is through the people who are managing these millions of units.

Craig Fuhr (26:15)
Well, let stop there. Jack can jump in here, but property managers are, they're always seen as sort of the wicked stepchild that is necessary for mom and pop investors who don't want to go out there and deal with tenants and toilets. And I think that

you know, for the smaller guys and even for the mid-size guys, you often wonder like, what am I getting? Am I really not dealing with all the problems? Because I still get the phone call from the guy when there is a problem. I'm kind of dealing. And so to be able to bring that value proposition to a property manager and now give them real value that they can deliver back to their clients, think, Ron, I think it was a stroke of genius on your part.

Ron Phillips (26:57)
Yeah, man, imagine if you're a property manager and you have to call about the refrigerator that broke. You know you're going to get yelled at. Like every day, all you do is bad alligators. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. and so.

Jack BeVier (27:03)
Right. You get all kinds of static. Yeah. Yeah.

Craig Fuhr (27:05)
all the static.

You found the tenant. Why'd break the, you know, Mr. Property Manager?

Jack BeVier (27:16)
But if you're, but if

you're, but if you're delivering, but if the only report card that you're delivering to the property owner is the net check or is, know, is the cashflow conversation, then yeah, like, you know, the, perceived value is much, much lower. You're only

Craig Fuhr (27:29)
It's a loser every time.

Ron Phillips (27:33)
Yes. So

imagine you're the property manager. Now you're calling them out this and you, and you call up and you say, Hey man, congratulations. I was just looking at your profile and you've made $15,000 this year on your property. This is so cool, man. I love, I love my job. I get to call people and give, give them good news all the time. Hey, we've got it. Yeah. We got to do some capex to keep this thing, you know, and keep your tenant happy. And, and, so we're, we're going to do a new refrigerator, but now I get to tell this person.

Jack BeVier (27:43)
Right. Right.

Great.

Craig Fuhr (27:50)
That's the good news.

Jack BeVier (27:52)
No one is.

Ron Phillips (28:01)
Hey, that's capital expenditure. It doesn't even, it goes on your balance sheet. This isn't even an expense, right? This is a capital expenditure. I get to have a different conversation with my investor because guess what? That investor also can see that every month when they log in to make sure that their money came, they can log in and go, hot damn, I'm up 15 grants. Because so why is Robinhood so, the app Robinhood, why is it?

Jack BeVier (28:11)
yeah. yeah.

Ron Phillips (28:28)
Like people use it all the time. People are always looking at their money. Well, there's nothing like that for real estate, but now there is. Now I can look at my real estate all the time and go, gosh dang, like we're killing it. Babe, we should buy another property because we're killing it. And you know, these poor property managers, they just get abused and it is such a necessary, they perform such a necessary, brutal job.

Jack BeVier (28:35)
Yeah. Yeah.

Craig Fuhr (28:51)
thankless business.

Ron Phillips (28:57)
On our behalf as investors and and they literally just get abused from both ends. Like on a good day, they piss off everybody. They piss off the tenant. They piss off the investor and they don't get any love from anybody. Right. Well, and what we're doing is we're changing that. We're turning the, we're turning it around. Right.

Craig Fuhr (29:11)
All right, so.

So you have the great experience now of building a platform for your investors. You meet the guy in Scottsdale, you hit it off and you come up with the company that I believe is on your shirt right now, but this is not an overnight thing here. It's called Lineage. And as always, Jack and I aren't here to sell you anything, but we just think it's one of the coolest ideas ever. And we are in...

Ron Phillips (29:27)
It is on my shirt. ⁓ It's called lineage.

Craig Fuhr (29:39)
No way affiliated with anything that Ron is doing. just big believer in the guy.

Ron Phillips (29:43)
Yeah,

unless you're a property manager. I mean, if you are, we should talk, but unless you're a property manager, can't buy it anyway.

Craig Fuhr (29:45)
Yeah, right.

think Jack

does manage a few properties, but yeah, anyway.

Jack BeVier (29:53)
Yeah,

I want to know what this I want to know. I this data. I have to I have to tell myself this story every year. I have to like remind myself that like it was worth it. It was where I promise it was worth it. I'd love I'd love to actually be able to put some numbers to that.

Craig Fuhr (29:56)
You

Ron Phillips (29:59)
Ha ha ha.

Craig Fuhr (30:02)
Hahaha! ⁓

Ron Phillips (30:03)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's, so much fun. you know, as we, as we, you know, I've been hitting the property management circuit, you know, everybody has their own events and everything we go, we, and we talked to these property managers, like all, all of the property managers that we talked to, none of them wake up and say, I you know what? I'm going to do such a crappy job today that everybody calls pissed off. No, none of these managers wake up every day saying, I really hope I can piss everybody off today. They wake up.

Craig Fuhr (30:34)
true.

Ron Phillips (30:36)
and they want to do a really good job for their investors. And what we're delivering to them is a tool, but not just the tool. Like we have a whole business model built around helping property management companies grow and helping investors grow their portfolios at the same time. Very few property managers out there actually can help.

their investors grow because they just don't have the capacity to do it. They're constantly working on all the operations of this business.

Craig Fuhr (31:10)
And some of them, frankly, you know, don't have the chops, right? Like they don't have, they manage real estate, you know, they may or may not be investors in real estate, right? And so.

Ron Phillips (31:20)
No,

it's amazing. actually asked at one of the events that I spoke at how many people in the room, they were all managers, right? How many people in the room actually invest in real estate themselves? It was a very small percentage. It's just like realtors. why don't realtors invest? I don't know the answer to the question. just, nobody has told them the reality of these. Like you make more money owning than selling, right? That's the reality.

Craig Fuhr (31:36)
Shock.

Ron Phillips (31:50)
But I'd like to think that lineage is going to change that. I'd like to think that as the property managers start to look at what their clients are making, not just the P &L, but like really what they're actually doing, the property manager are going to start buying more of their own properties because they can see just how good this is. Even when it's bad, like Jack, you were just talking about, and some years I'm just like, yeah, why am I doing this? But

but you know that your properties went up in value, which is, that's where almost all of the wealth comes from.

Jack BeVier (32:21)
Yeah,

20, 20, 20, 20, 20, late 2021, 2022, early part of 2023, we saw immediate mark to market in expenses, right? Like expenses went up significantly because inflation was up and labor rates were up. so immediately the maintenance guys knew that they needed a raise, right? But rents, you know, creeped up slowly over time.

So for like a two and a half year period, I was just sucking wind from a cashflow perspective. Cause my rents immediate, or I'm sorry, my, expenses immediately marked to market. My rents were taking their time getting there. And so all of a sudden I went from like cashflow to like almost no cashflow, paying the mortgages. But then, and if I don't tell myself the story, if I don't remind myself that yeah, but also like the, but the house has went up pretty significantly. And also you still got that tax benefit to like offset this other part of your business.

you know, have to remind myself, cause if I just look at the checks during that period of time, I'm pissed, you know, for like two and two years, I'm not in a good mood as a long time.

Ron Phillips (33:25)
Yeah. And and on almost

on, on almost every one of those properties, you're getting a minimum of a 4 % return just because someone's paying your mortgage. Right. And, and since you've had them longer than that, you're getting probably a higher return than that, on that piece because of the amortization, keeping the whole story in focus allows us as investors to go, okay, this isn't that bad.

Jack BeVier (33:35)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And then these days, yeah.

Ron Phillips (33:53)
And actually, I made money.

Jack BeVier (33:55)
Yeah.

Keep your, keep your mind on that long-term, right? Like help keep that, keep that mind's eye 10 years out.

Craig Fuhr (33:59)
Mmm.

Ron Phillips (33:59)
Here's

the other thing, like...

Craig Fuhr (34:04)
Talk about it all the time on the podcast, yeah.

Ron Phillips (34:06)
I mean, Craig, when you buy a stock, like all of you listening, when you buy a stock, this is so funny because when we buy real estate, it's an investment, stock's an investment, right? We buy a stock, stock goes up and down all the time. We don't feel like throwing ourselves off of a building when our stock goes down. We're just like, yeah, it'll come back up. Well, in real estate, when we have a rough cashflow year,

Which I mean, stocks generally don't even produce, right? We mean, sometimes you're going to get a dividend stock, but it's not going to grow very well, right? And so our cashflow gets hit a little bit. We don't make as much money as we were going to make in cashflow. And all of a sudden, like the world's ending, but the piece of it that acts like the stock just, I mean, it went up still. And the cool thing is nobody pays off your stock.

for you like nobody's buying your stock for you and someone in real estate is literally buying your asset for you every single month. And people just forget it.

Craig Fuhr (35:10)
So we've now got, you're now arming property managers with just better knowledge, deeper knowledge, deeper data where they can have, know, unprecedentedly, that's a great word, Jack, I don't even know if it's real, they can have these conversations that they never would have had before with their investors. they have, you know, the better property managers have many investors. And so,

So that's one part of the puzzle of lineage. But the other part of the puzzle that's fascinating is that, you know, Ron Phillips is still very much selling great properties to investors. so lineage now is not only a tool for property managers to be better property managers and asset managers as well, right? But it's also a tool for investors still to buy from you.

And one of the things, and I don't know how far you want to go with, is it live yet? Is it live yet, Ron? And so talk about a typical transaction now, if you can, with one of your investors who's looking to buy another property. And they go to lineage now, rather than the platform that you have built in the past.

Ron Phillips (36:10)
yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, so

one of the things that we do with the property managers, we don't just deliver a cool tool, we deliver a service. It's a done for you asset management service where we do the outreach to their customers for them. We educate them about the platform and we help them understand how to read the numbers and what the numbers mean.

Craig Fuhr (36:39)
Mm-hmm.

Is that sort of by way of this sort of the similar approach that you've always had, you just get these people on a webinar or is it?

Ron Phillips (36:50)
Yeah,

to individually and in group setting, right? So we do high tech, high touch approach. And we want these people to know every year that someone's got their back and someone's watching what's going on with them. And then we them grow their portfolio. So we have a platform, it's an end to end platform, right? So yeah, we report data, but we also say, hey, when you're ready to buy another property, here's

Here's a platform of curated properties all over the country, off market, great deals, already have awesome management because all of the managers are chosen to be on our platform, right? And we also have access to all of the data on performance. So we know who the best property managers are and who is not doing well, right? We have all of the data. we're mining that data. And then

We also have gone out there because of the volume and we've been able to get ridiculous, great insurance rates, that everybody that buys on the platform has access to, awesome loan products. everything that you could possibly need to, to be successful in real estate is all on one platform and it is literally as easy as the click of a button. You can have access to any of it.

Craig Fuhr (38:04)
you mentioned, you mentioned before the show that

that you can literally go end to end on a transaction in just a few days. I don't know if that's the norm for you. But that's pretty incredible if you can do that.

Ron Phillips (38:11)
Yes.

Yeah, with alone, which is, which is insane. and so, and we're, we're, we're actively compressing that timeline, every, every, every day, we're, actively trying to compress that timeline. We, we want, so, I mean, lineage exists to help everyone in the investor life cycle create generational wealth, hence the name lineage, right? and

That means the property manager. That means the investor. That means the lending company. That means the seller of the property. want everyone to be able to create generational wealth and all grow together. Right. And that's one of the reasons why we're working with property management companies instead of trying to vertically integrate our own huge gigantic property management company. We want to choose the best local expert property management companies that there are that there are available.

and we want to help them scale and grow and be an awesome partner to all the investors that are out there and deliver the tools necessary to be able to do this in a big way. Just like an institutional investor would, but do it, you know, with however much money you've got, right?

Craig Fuhr (39:26)
Absolutely. Jack, I'm sorry. Go ahead. Anything, Jack?

Jack BeVier (39:30)
No, that's fantastic, man. is the, I guess, what's the, how many transactions are going through the platform right now? I'll start with that.

Ron Phillips (39:37)
Yeah, so we're running about 50 a month right now. that's scaling as we bring more property managers on. I think our goal in 2026 will be somewhere close to a thousand.

Jack BeVier (39:40)
yeah.

That's awesome. What's a how many markets are you guys operating in currently?

Ron Phillips (40:00)
Yeah, we're in 12 right now.

Jack BeVier (40:03)
And these are property managers that you've been working with for a long time.

Ron Phillips (40:06)
Some of them, some of them are new.

Jack BeVier (40:09)
Are the folks who are the properties that you're selling, are they affiliated with the property management companies? Sometimes, always, never?

Ron Phillips (40:18)
Almost, almost never. Yeah, almost never.

Jack BeVier (40:20)
wow. Okay, cool. So you have

like, whoever's providing the turnkey is they do that. You have it a property management company that you think is the right provider. They do that. They specialize in that. That's great.

Ron Phillips (40:30)
Yeah, you know, because

if they're together and one of those things doesn't work as well, that's a weird situation, right? Because the reality of situation is that the best property management company in Kansas City may change.

Jack BeVier (40:37)
Yeah, sure.

Right? Yeah. ⁓

Craig Fuhr (40:45)
Ron,

sort of the, what are you excited about from opening up? So the 12 markets that you're in currently, are they markets that you were already fairly familiar with? And then sort of what's the outlook on going into markets that you would like to get into?

Ron Phillips (41:01)
Yeah, I mean, that's the beauty of going into markets where we're going in with property management, right? So we're going in with a really awesome local expert on the rent piece. The construction piece, I mean, that's easy, but marrying the two together and making sure that you've got all of your numbers right, that's the critical piece. so having,

moving into a market with a a property manager who has already bought into the platform and understands how this works. It makes it easier for us to scale into new areas.

Craig Fuhr (41:34)
How can you be sure that what's the criteria on sort of being sure that you've partnered up with great property management? And when I say partner, I use that very loosely, but you know.

Ron Phillips (41:41)
Yeah, it's a word.

Yeah,

it's it. We've been doing this for 20 years, so we have a pretty good. ⁓ We have a pretty good criteria, but the other really neat thing is because of the tech. We don't have to. We don't have to trust that they're doing the numbers that they say they're doing. We have access to it. We know what's going on and we can. We can see if if things start to go. The wrong way.

Craig Fuhr (41:49)
That's the criteria.

Ron Phillips (42:08)
And then, you know, ultimately, hopefully we'll be able to have the resources to help them pull it back in and continue to scale. We want everybody on our platform to do really, really well. And that includes the managers. ⁓

Craig Fuhr (42:19)
Yeah,

Jack BeVier (42:19)
Are you like?

Craig Fuhr (42:20)
the reason why I asked was I feel like there's a real, there's a position that where you would really have someone who understood property management and then understood obviously the investment side and could really bring property managers up to the sort of the next level of service, which I don't think that, you know, based on the ones that I've known, I'm not sure that they would have gotten without sort of some direct training on that.

Ron Phillips (42:46)
Yeah. So, so right now we're, you know, we're, heavily involved with, NARPM, which is the, national association of residential property managers. those people are actively trying to, they're, they're part of an association that's trying to better the industry. and, and so we're, we're able to onboard property managers that are, that are, that are trying to do it the right way.

Craig Fuhr (43:07)
That's great.

Ron Phillips (43:08)
And then

have access to help to be able to do it the right way. Um, the person who's in charge of our onboarding owns a property management company. Speaks the language, understands it, knows what's good and what's not. Um, I mean, we have, have industry experts leading our company in, every single piece of the company. Uh, and, and that makes a massive difference too. Uh, I think, I think people have jumped into this from.

Jack BeVier (43:12)
Mm-hmm.

Craig Fuhr (43:28)
Mm-hmm.

Ron Phillips (43:36)
You know, the institutional world and, and tried to communicate effectively to the, you know, small scale investor, small scale investor and the small scale property manager are different people. They, they, they think about things completely different. and communicating to them is, is, is, it's just different. How to reach those people is not the same as how you reach people on wall street. It's a completely different thing.

Jack BeVier (44:02)
having a annoying details question, cause that's me. the data that you're getting, cause you're trying to make this integrate, you know, seamless from a data, from a data information flow work workflow perspective. you like integrating the property managers that you work with have to be on a certain, tech platform for you guys to create the integration so that you're pulling the data directly from their system and you don't have to rely on some human like typing in what the net income this month was.

Ron Phillips (44:26)
Yes, so we're integrated with four, the four major platforms, and we'll continue to scale that out. ⁓

Craig Fuhr (44:35)
This is basically

just an API from lineage into those four major property management platforms.

Ron Phillips (44:41)
Yeah, if they have an API and if not, we have tech that can get the information.

Jack BeVier (44:46)
Which forum? Just curious.

Ron Phillips (44:48)
So AppFolio, Rentvine, RentManager, and Buildium.

Jack BeVier (44:52)
Yeah, cool. Yeah, covers a big chunk of the market there.

Ron Phillips (44:56)
Yeah, I mean, just app, just at Folio covers a big chunk of the market. Rentvine is an awesome platform as well. They all do something a little bit unique. They're all great platforms and that's one of the reasons why this is really difficult to solve because the property management itself is really scattered and the systems that run it are fragmented. All good systems, but they're fragmented and

so it's really difficult for the investors out there to actually have, anything that, that, functions for them. Right. so because we can do this across platforms and from third party sources, we, we feel like we can, we can really drive value to the market.

Jack BeVier (45:36)
Very cool.

Craig Fuhr (45:37)
So, you know, Ron, as I sit here and listen, I'm going back to conversations that you and I probably had in, I guess, 2019 and 2020 about this idea. Does that sound right? I, you know, look, even if you're listening to the podcast right now and you're saying to yourself, man, that sounds cool, but, you know, I'm just kind of passively listening. I think the bigger lesson here that I always loved, you know, especially you and Jack, frankly, is that

Ron Phillips (45:51)
Yeah.

Craig Fuhr (46:06)
Every idea, every great idea, you know, there's a lot of great ideas. They don't always come to fruition, you know, without a lot of hard work. And going back to our conversation with Brenton Hesjack, that time on task, and I'm sure and I remember talking to you sort of, you know, over the course of a year, year and a half as the idea, the partners, the partnership was evolving.

And there was this tug on you that like, knew you had something great. You know, you really did. And it was clear. Weren't sure how it was all going to come together. You really know all the moving parts to get it to, where it is today. But one of the things I just admire about you is that there's this tenacity that like, Hey, if I put my mind to it and I put the hours to it and I get the right team put together, you know, I can pivot once again, frankly, and do something.

you know, that might be the most special thing I've ever done in my career. Use all the experience that I've had over the last 20 years, all the ups, the downs, the pivots, the forced pivots, the market, and really take all of that and put something so vast together. That's really special. And I would and anyone listening to the podcast now, if you're like the guy who's got 10 rentals, and you want to scale to 20 or 30 or 40, it's a great idea.

you know, if you think you're that guy, you just have to prove it and put yourself you know, and use all the experience that you've brought to the brought to the table to get to that next level. And Jack, I would say the same thing about you, frankly, and Fred. And so it's just it's just an admirable thing, man, I couldn't be more excited for you.

Ron Phillips (47:48)
Thank you man, I appreciate it. I haven't been this excited about anything in, gosh, probably 12 years, man. mean, it's just...

Craig Fuhr (47:53)
I know it's. Hey, look,

I mean, there was a time where you and I first met that you were like, yeah, you know, I'm good. You know, like, I don't have to really do this. You know, I don't I could probably sell my business, make a lot of money. The business ran great. It ran really well without you. And like, I know that there was some of those considerations as well. And for you to dive back, dive back in, frankly.

Jack BeVier (47:58)
Okay.

Ron Phillips (48:03)
Yeah.

Craig Fuhr (48:18)
you know, probably 10 times working, working 10 times harder than you had worked over the past few years. Right, right. Like you had a great lifestyle and a lot of time to spare with the people who you love the most, which is your family. You know, Ron's, Ron's an incredible family man and he's, and he's very gracious to all of his friends as well. And so to you, for you to tackle this and have such a great vision and bring it to fruition.

Ron Phillips (48:24)
many years. Yeah.

Craig Fuhr (48:45)
Jack, not at all unlike the vision that you had in 2015 for Dominion Financial, frankly. You know, it's the same thing. And so, very apt.

Ron Phillips (48:55)
I it.

Jack BeVier (48:55)
Hey, Ron, when'd

you start grinding on this again?

Ron Phillips (49:00)
Like re like really grinding, um, last year, uh, like we, we started, we started, um, in 2023, we had a small team. started really working hard on it. Um, but in, in, 2024, it got real. Like the tech was to the place where we could actually bring on, um, you know, some, some trial, some beta testers and.

Jack BeVier (49:05)
How many years had it been?

Ron Phillips (49:28)
You know, then we realized, okay, we're like, it's go to market time. I mean, that's, know, we, we, we raised some money and, um, and really in, in, 2023 and we really built out the tech. Um, yeah. And then we, I mean, we, we went from four people to, uh, we're 32 now and, yeah.

Jack BeVier (49:34)
Mm-hmm.

32, holy.

Craig Fuhr (49:52)
Mwah.

Ron Phillips (49:56)
Yeah. And, and that number, on the back half of this year will, will grow pretty dramatically. Just, just, just the sales, just the sales people that we need to be able to manage onboarding the property managers and then helping the investors on the, on the backside. it's a lot of people, a lot of people, and we're gonna do a lot of it with tech. Like we talked about, you know, before the show, Jack, there's a ton of this that we're able to do with tech, enablement, but the

Jack BeVier (49:56)
Let's go.

Ron Phillips (50:20)
tech development team has to grow to be able to make that happen, right? So, and we're actively using AI to, to, augment everything we're doing. And so it's fun. It's been a ton of fun.

Jack BeVier (50:28)
I, ⁓

I know we're, know we're getting close to wrapping up here and I, we've taken a ton of your time this morning. So I really, really appreciate it. But I got to ask like how, how, prior to last year, when it got real, how much time had it been since you last, you know, really dove in like that.

Craig Fuhr (50:47)
to work. Yeah, yeah.

Jack BeVier (50:48)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Ron Phillips (50:51)
When I started over in 2012 was the last time like, and I, and I worked like a horse for probably a couple of years to get that back up and running. And then it didn't run with a ton of my involvement ever since.

Jack BeVier (51:01)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Craig Fuhr (51:09)
Well, I think I

jacked quickly. I think one of the things that Ron has always been admired for when he started really doing volume at his last company, he just built a culture of success, where everyone in the company just knew it wasn't like some mission statement on the side of a wall, you know, on a poster, right? It was like, no, these people, it was in their DNA that they were like ingrained to do great things for the client and do great things for the company and

And I frankly, you know, met a lot of investors all over the years. You and I both have and so has Jack, but I've never seen a company like yours where culture of success and sort of like, you know, we're serving a client here was so ingrained in every person in your company.

Jack BeVier (51:54)
What, um, what's a, what was it like, was it that this idea where you like, you know, were you, I assume you're having, I assume you're doing it because you're having fun, right? Like that, guess I'm coming in with that presumption, right? You don't have to be doing this right now. So like why I presume it's because you're having fun because you've, know, an idea has captured your imagination. You want to see the thing, you know, become reality and you're going to make that happen. What was it about?

Ron Phillips (51:54)
Appreciate it.

Jack BeVier (52:23)
you know, from but from 2018 to 2023, you know, that was like an interim period where you had not you weren't captured by something right like

Ron Phillips (52:34)
Yeah, there's, there's a couple of reasons. the, the scale to scale what I was doing direct to consumer, it was really hard. I mean, it's really hard and the payoff for that, you know, really what I was building there was a brokerage and you know, I could sell my brokerage. but

growing it for the multiple that I would have been growing it. The reason that we grew it the way we grew it is because we enjoyed helping the investors. Financially, it was never gonna be a big hit. In addition to that,

I mean, I couldn't go raise money to make that thing go big and help a lot of investors. Can't do that because the payoff again, that's not an investable business. But when I kind of latched onto this tech and I started to understand the world of tech, just how wide we could go, how many people we could help.

And especially once I realized we could deliver to property managers, we get a two for every time the multiple on how many people we can actually affect. It's dramatic. And really with the amount of work and effort we're putting in while it's, you know, remarkable amount of times more than what I was doing still for the impact in the industry. It's nothing because of because of the way that we're able to deliver.

this tech platform and so I honestly believe that you know we're gonna change hundreds of thousands of lives in America and you know and it and because of that it's an absolute blast

Jack BeVier (54:17)
that that intervening period, because I feel like I had an intervening period and I'm like grinding again and it's fun and I'm having a I'm having a blast. But that intervening period, that's the boring part, right? But that's the one I want to talk about. What was it about? Like what were you doing mentally? you were you? Did you were you spending your mental energy searching for the next idea? Were you even searching for the next idea? Were you just enjoying life or were you trying different

different things to like find happiness and engagement? Did you feel lost or were you just like going along and then all of sudden this shiny object really, really captured you and pulled you in? Like what was that intervening period like?

Ron Phillips (54:57)
Yeah, I think guys like us are always looking for opportunity. Like always. Even when I was in the intervening period, I was, I was looking for opportunities. I'm mostly bought real estate and invested. but once I realized that my business didn't need me to run, it was a very weird, awkward situation. I did feel a little bit lost. also felt unneeded and,

You know, kind of like when you're, when your kids grow up and they leave the house, it's a weird feeling. Like I'm proud. And at the same time, now what am I supposed to do? Like there's, cause there's a period before the grand kid comes. Now that the grandkids here, I'm having an absolute blast with like way more fun than I did with my kids. I'm having fun with this grandkids because I'm in a different stage of life. And I think I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm kind of there with business too. You know, I've

I had a break and I did have a lot of fun. Like Craig said, I've rehabbed this ridiculous project. I did things like that. I had a lot of fun, but there's only so much fun you can have before you realize like, I need to do something else. And so you're always looking for opportunity. And this thing,

I mean, I knew that it was needed in the market. I just didn't, I don't think I realized the scope. And once I actually realized the scope and I knew it was bigger than me, that's when I started reaching out. was looking for a way to do this because I couldn't do it on my own. needed, I needed people with other skillset and I needed people with, with, with different life experience.

to be able to help me do it, because it was bigger than me. And that's a place that's scary. when you're like, it's either, and Craig talked about this in the beginning, like I had some, like, do I even do this thing? Because it was bigger than, it felt bigger than me. It still feels bigger than me. But.

Jack BeVier (56:52)
Mm-hmm.

Craig Fuhr (56:57)
You know, and Ron,

one of the things that you haven't spoken to is like, you know, you're not a big, I think you're a guy who understands the value of partnerships, but it's not as if you've had any partners over the last several years. You know, you've kind of run your own show and that's done very well for you. Yeah, you did.

Ron Phillips (57:13)
Look, I swore off partners after my last partnership

dissolution. It was, it was nasty. it was not fun. And, yeah, to open myself up, I think it took me a while Jack to be able to get back to a place where I would even think about that. and I've gone all in, like my, my other company is, is a part of this company. Like I don't have anything that's, that's Ron's anymore. This is, know, we have investors, we have a board, like this is a whole different

Jack BeVier (57:32)
Mm-hmm.

Ron Phillips (57:38)
ball game than anything I've done. Like this isn't your, your run of the mill, you know, LLC, you know, lifestyle business. This is, and I knew that was where this needed to go and I couldn't take it there by myself, which is why, why I looked for the partners that I did and they're fantastic people. the people on our border, fantastic people from the industry.

Jack BeVier (57:46)
Mm-hmm. Right.

Ron Phillips (58:04)
who have done really big things. mean, we have a, we have a powerhouse team at the top of this company and I'm the weakest, I'm the weakest link. So the, company is, is well represented.

Jack BeVier (58:13)
That's the goal.

Craig Fuhr (58:16)
and the most humble. Jack, I loved your question. And again, I, you know, don't want to go too long here, but talk about your intervening period.

Jack BeVier (58:27)
yeah. So I just, I guess similar in some ways, like we been growing the business and there'd be a period of like, you know, when there's like it, where it needs me. Right. And then I, and I jump in because I can, you know, should recognize the moment, you know, have been able to recognize the moment where like it needs me. usually like stages of growth, but then when we stop growing because, which we've paused at different points in time or like,

pulled back a little bit because we thought it was imprudent to have our foot on the gas at particular points in time. I get bored really quick, right? And then I start searching around and I get anxious and I'm looking for opportunity. Sometimes I feel like I'm just, sometimes I find something. Sometimes I spend a bunch of energy chasing shiny objects that end up being stupid ideas. Cause they're not as good as the core thing that I'm already doing. And just have to like wait some time out before.

the market conditions come back around to where it's time to grow again. And I, I struggle in those intervening periods because I get bored. I have the most fun when we're growing. Like that's where, you know, business is my like creative outlet. And so not having a creative outlet is a, are challenging times for me. And, I still haven't figured out, how to master myself in those intervening periods.

And at the moment I'm not in one at the moment I'm having to grow and like growing like weeds and I'm having a blast. and so I'm just, know, I was asking for advice, right? For the next time, you know, two years from now, you know, I'm, I'm still trying to, still trying to figure that one out.

Ron Phillips (59:59)
Yeah, I'm not, I'm not sure I got it figured out either. I just, I'm just in the middle of it again. I think there's just phases. There's just stages and you got to roll through them and growth growth always comes when, when you're uncomfortable, you gotta, you gotta make yourself uncomfortable. So I made myself comfortable for so long that it was uncomfortable to still stay there. And, and, and, and that, you know, that you have to move into discomfort.

Craig Fuhr (1:00:21)
There was a one hour, one hour

window per day that, you know, Ron was, was even going to pick up a phone for, for a while there. So, you know, yeah, I could see where things would get sort of, sort of boring for you pretty quickly, especially the way I think I your mind works as well as Jack, but dude, I, I just think this has been two of the most fascinating and perfect episodes. If I may say so myself, having you on.

Ron Phillips (1:00:32)
Mm-hmm.

Craig Fuhr (1:00:47)
you know, a year and a half ago as one of our first guests, I, you know, I'd look back on those episodes and I would say that they were great, but these two just provided insight. I frankly, for any listener, you don't have to be a turnkey guy buying turnkeys. You could be any entrepreneur out there trying to figure it out, trying to scale, trying to get to the next level. You've got this brilliant idea. You're not really sure. I just, I just find that, your transparency and the, everything that you've shared today.

It's just been spot on for folks like that. So I can't thank you enough for it, my friend.

Ron Phillips (1:01:18)
Yeah, appreciate

it guys. Happy to be here.

Jack BeVier (1:01:20)
Thanks, Ron.

Craig Fuhr (1:01:21)
Alright guys, that's two great episodes with Ron Phillips and Jack Bevere. Hope you enjoyed it. We'll see you on the next ones.