Welcome to the Purpose Driven Investor, where we build more than portfolios, we build communities. I'm your host, Robert Howell, a real estate investor and founder of Define Communities. Each week, we'll explore how purpose and profit connect through affordable housing, land home packages, and impact-driven investing. If you're a lender, land seller, or a partner who believes money should move with meaning, you're in the right place. Welcome to the Purpose Driven Investor Podcast, a show focused on the people behind the deals, their mission, their values, and the impact they're creating to real estate and entrepreneurship. Today's guest is a real estate investor, a team owner, and founder of Bird Dog Group based right here in Greenville, South Carolina. BirdDog was built around growth, not just in deals, but in people. Our guest today, Brian, is deeply passionate about helping others develop, build strong teams, and creating a real estate business that supports life, family, and long-term purpose. Outside of real estate, he's married to the brilliant and talented Kara, and together they stay busy with their three dogs, which is where the BirdDog group name comes from. Today, we're going to talk about the journey in real estate, what it takes to build and lead a team, and how a growing business can continue to grow without losing sight on what actually matters. So welcome to the show, Brian. Thanks for having me, Robert. Appreciate it. Good deal, man. I'm excited about this one. I think you can offer a really interesting perspective to the people that are listening and I'm sure I'll learn quite a bit along with everybody that's watching the show. Let's start first with your origin story and why real estate. Let's talk about your background. What were you doing before real estate and Yeah, for sure. You know what? I'll tell you what. I'm going to go way back. I'm going to go way, way, way back because this is truly my origin story. When I was like about nine, 10 years old, my parents split up. Things were tough. Single mom, two kids, worked a lot of jobs. And one of those part-time jobs was delivering papers. This is old school, but we used to get up at like three in the morning with her, get an 88 Honda Accord. I was in Lexington, Kentucky. That's where I'm born and raised. Drive halfway to Louisville, get the papers. We deliver them with mom. Sometimes we'd sleep, sometimes we'd help her. And we'd drive around, read the classifieds, look at the pretty houses. That was interesting. And when I got home, we had no cable, no internet, just rabbit ears. And there's like one channel, like Fox, that would come back in that time. And we still had a couple hours before school. So I'd watch TV if I couldn't sleep. And back then, it's like the late 90s. Only thing on TV at that time, that hour of the day was infomercials. And so, one, six out of my mind was like winning in the cash flow business. And I was like note investing and stuff like that. And I was young. I mean, luckily we didn't have any credit or credit card. I couldn't buy the course, but I could just watch it. Watch it and watch it and watch it and try to, like, just figure out, like, what are they doing? Like, what is this? And I know it sounds silly a little bit, but, like, it was those infomercials that inspired me to go to the library before school and start reading books and getting on old school stuff like club way back in the day. And it was around, like, middle school. that I decided I'm going to do something. I'm going to try to do this. I tried the wholesale. My first attempt at wholesaling, I sent out like 20 handwritten letters to my neighbors. This is in my center Parkway, Lexington, Kentucky. There's a lot of old rundown houses around the find. So I sent out letters and I got two responses. One lady called me, I had a nice combo. I'm like 12, but like, so it was whatever. It was like a no thank you. And then I got a mail, piece of mail back. It was a big envelope. And I was like, what's this? And I opened it up and it was this big yellow binder of papers with a sticky note to a page with a bunch of highlighted sections. And it was from the Kentucky Real Estate Commission. And it was pointing out like, you know, trying to sell real estate without a license. And imagine like, you know, showing that to your mom. I was like, Mom, help. We need to call somebody. They were cool. I think they knew I was just a super young kid and didn't know what the heck I was doing and all that stuff. But I share that story just because it took another more than a decade Before I kind of just always was still interested in real estate, but forgot about it. I actually joined boomtown really humongous company in the lead generation space. I was a search engine marketing analyst and that's what introduced me to the world of agency. I knew nothing about agency, knew a little bit about investing, but. I share that story just because, you know, back then, like, the knowledge and the accessibility and podcasts like this, like, it just wasn't there. It was a lot harder to learn about real estate. And if you grew up like me, you didn't have a family member in it or something like that. It was hard to even believe if it was real or is this like a scam or is this like, is this real? And so I tell that story just because that's what inspires me to do a lot today with like offering free coaching and a lot of stuff I do. I just wish someone would have sat me down a lot younger than when I actually started investing in real estate. I actually started being an agent and just said, hey, this is real. And if you stick with it and if you keep doing it and you solve these problems, there's a lot of opportunity here. Um, a lot of people, a lot of young people, especially don't, uh, they don't have that, that influence sometimes. So, um, that's, that's part of what inspires me and that late night infomercials, man, And I think, um, you know, I think that's a, that's a real interesting story. And I think you're spot on too, as you talk about. The opportunity today vs i don't know how long ago that was but i'm forty five and i was talking with somebody yesterday and i was like that's me what's one thing you wish. You can tell yourself and for me it was starting earlier. But 20 years ago, you know, let's say if I was in my 20s, early 20s, the access I had to information was so much less than today. Right. I mean, still, was there access to information? Sure. There's still people doing it. But today, there's just so much information available to get started, to learn, to And just the tools, you know, I talk to young kids all the time, like, yeah, I got prop stream and I'm trying this out. It's just kind of crazy sometimes what what technology is done, you know, and and I think that's still even today. I find for a lot of people, there's all this information on social media. I'm part of it. I. put a lot of content out there about real estate, but sometimes people need that guiding hand and they need that help and that mentorship to say like, you can do this. This isn't just hype, like this is real. Like I truly, truly believe real estate in all its forms is one of the most accessible wealth building opportunities most Americans have today. Like a lot of things like stock market and even college, the cost is, getting less accessible to people, you know, and you can go out there, you can get your real estate license, you can become an investor. There's you can buy a house and just understand the opportunity in that, you know, there's there's so many cool things. And that's what that's what motivates me to do what I do with the content I make is just sharing that message of helping, helping somebody say, yeah, I can do that. That could be me. I could do that. You know, I think that's really cool. That's Talk about, so you had real early experience with real estate, then you went with Boomtown, and you started to get, I imagine, more ingrained. What was the moment where real estate went from, oh, this is interesting to, Yeah, those early years was just a lot of young kid trying to hustle stuff. And then 2008 happened. As you remember, I'm 40, right? So I forgot about it for a long time. But when I moved from Lexington, Kentucky to Charleston, South Carolina, it's also where I met my wife, Kara, who's from the upstate. She's Greenville local. I was a self-employed affiliate marketer. I was doing that back when that was kind of a thing nobody really understood either. I was like buying ads on MySpace and Make money online is what we used to call it. But it was when I joined Boontown, one of my smartest friends, Brock Ward, he actually is in the leadership over at Housing Wire and Altos Research now. Brilliant guy. He started working there and he's my friend from Kentucky. He's like, you should get in on this. I'm like, okay, cool. I knew nothing about agency. I knew nothing about brokerages. I had no idea how any of that worked. And I started generating leads for agents. They were like, hey, here's 300 accounts, 10% conversion rate, $10 leads. It's our target. Have fun. Do your thing. You know how to do this. So I was like, OK, cool. And as I started to hear about the problems and the different things about the leads and stuff like that from the clients, I got more into that business. I'm like, I need to understand their business better. And I think it was about like six months in the boom town. And I think, uh, gosh, I think it was that first year, maybe I actually got the privilege to go like a Tom Ferry event too. And I was hooked. I was like this, I'm going to do this. Like, this is what I want to do. You know, I was like, I love digital marketing, but I was like, this excites me. Like, this is cool. And had that bug for a long time, and I'd started my career as an entrepreneur, but just, you know, I had Boomtown was an incredible company to be a part of, but just such a privilege to be there. I tell people in real estate like I cheated, you know, I had a 10 year head start with the best of the best of the best in the industry before I ever got my license, but did that. Gave me SVP over at Westcore product for a while and eventually launched a bird dog group. So I'd say, yeah, it was that that experience and meeting all those incredible team owners and brokers and coaches and industry people at Boomtown that that made me realize Yeah. It's almost like you, you had a, you had an inside view on what real estate can be and what success can be. Yeah, man. I honestly, it just like everyone, right. It's like, I still regret not even taking action sooner and recognizing that sooner, you know, like it wasn't until I was like, wow, all these people are paying so much money to go to these events. I could go free. You know, um, It's a yeah, so that was an incredible opportunity and the agency side was interesting for me because. It kind of was a little bit of best of both worlds, like, even the idea of starting the bird dog group kind of started from. Aaron, I have a few pretty small portfolio, single family rentals here in the upstate and we thought about well. Maybe instead of buying my next rental, I start kind of slowly growing a team or a business, use my lead gen background and do that. Life comes at you fast. I went through a layoff and just, well, that was like, okay, now we're going all in. Bird dog group is, that was a week after I like started taking my licensing courses and all that. It just, it was like, well, sometimes that's what it takes, right? Yeah. I got, got kicked off the boat, you know? And, um, Yeah, so that's what that's really kind of propelled me into doing what I'm doing now. And yeah, just today as a team owner, for me, the focus is is just as much on helping my clients be successful as it is helping my team be successful and helping agents be successful. That was the mission at Boomtown. Like we exist to make real estate agents successful as part of the team that wrote that. And that's So let's talk about bird dog. Um, what, what does the name bird dog group mean? I love the name, especially as an investor. Right. So, so tell us about why the name bird dog and what Yeah, so, well, Bird Dog Group, real estate term, we're finding the deals, right? And obviously we have three American Britneys, hence the dog in my logo. So there's a little bit of that dual inspiration. I think it was actually my wife, Kara, who came up with the names. I want to make sure I give her the credit for that, because I'm pretty sure when we were hashing through names and ideas, like she's the one who came up with that, and I loved it. So that's become the brand. And, you know, for me personally, I might be a little different than some agents where team ownership kind of becomes a path to growth and success for many successful agents. For me, it was step one. I started like any business owner solo, but then quickly hired our first agent. Shout out to Ryan Minch and also Emmanuel Garcia of my team. Great guys. And I'm privileged to work with them. Bird Dog, it was a couple things. It was creating a brand that was specific and local here to the upstate that people could identify with. And it was also about creating a brand that wasn't attached to me. I'm the face on the social media and a lot of content stuff we do, but that's kind of out of necessity, not by design necessarily. Like, no offense, anyone who operates this way, but I never intended to be the Brian group or anything like that. No, 1 could say my last name anyway, so it would work. Yeah, I know you handle that intro masterfully by the way. But even that aspect of it was, yeah, this isn't about me. It's about we and it's about, you know, the agents on my team becoming the star of the show. And my job is to build a brand they can operate under, give them the coaching and training they need and just the support to be successful. So part of it is also just making sure that it was something not attached to my personal identity as much and a brand I can be the owner and founder founder of and Got it. Okay. That's good. What, what do y'all focus on today? What's Well, we really do all types of residential. I mean, everywhere from Anderson, Pickens, Greenville, Spartanburg Counties, those are kind of our core areas we focus on residential purchase and sales. But I would say if we had a specialty, we definitely love the investment side of the business. And that's what a lot of people know me for. I make a lot of content about that. Investors of all shapes and sizes, everyone from people who are doing major acquisition operations, they need someone to list all their whole tail deals and their flips to a lot of first-time investors who just want to do their first buy and hold. There's a lot of people out there, for example, that they're probably not ready or even sure if they want to be in the business of real estate. Whole different animal when you start doing direct mail and all this, this kind of fun stuff. There's a lot of people to say, hey, I have cash to invest. I want exposure to real estate. I want to own and operate a property or a single family rental, short term rental. And we've helped a lot of clientele in the upstate make that 1st purchase or just even strategically do things. I've helped several people. Buy a new house, just represented them as their agent, but that conversation started with helping them realize their primary residence was actually their best opportunity to get a rental on the board. So I've helped several people do that and it's that kind of strategy and conversation. That's something we like to bring to the table. It's a, hey, we're here to help you buy and sell. If you want to buy a luxury property, great. If you want to buy an affordable house, that's great, too. But to us, to me and the rest of the team, real estate's not just a place you live. It's this vehicle for wealth and success and opportunity. And so we try to just share that aspect. with everybody. And we noticed a lot of our clientele, that's what they come to us I was going to say, I mean, I imagine that that perspective on investing and creating investment properties, it's clearly helpful in that arena, but also very helpful for your buyers and your sellers as you're, you're Because it is for most people, despite some of the narrative on social media about renting and investing and all this other stuff out there. Right. But I always like to bear on that. But, you know, that's the largest sum of money and concentration of wealth a lot of people have. And a lot of people, if they just knew some of the stuff we take for granted in the investment world, like some of the one on one, what's the burr method? how can HELOCs be utilized? Thinking about, do I really need to put a bigger down payment on a house or a smaller down payment? What is actually a more advantageous way to utilize my cash? Giving people that advice, even going into their first home purchase, is just such a game changer for a lot of people. Because a lot of people don't identify as real estate investors. They're not someone like yourself, Robert, that does the land home pack, like so much activity at such a big level. Right. For a lot of them, it's just, Hey, if you thought about your first home purchase or even your second home purchase a little bit smarter, uh, that could be a game changer for you. And we love helping people that way. Love it. That's great. Let's go into leadership team and the growth that you've had there at bird dog. Um, what's the biggest shift that you've had to make going from a solo investor or solo real estate guy to Yeah. You know, I think the biggest shift that even myself with the mindset of like, I'm starting a team from day one, like this will be a team I will like very, very quickly, for example, all my buy side leads started going to my agents. And then over the time, I've started doing the listing side. I think the challenge for a lot of people is that no matter what you do, you build relationships with clients. And it's that one to one relationship. And As any business owner, those relationships, especially in real estate, those are your baby. Like, you want to protect those and you want to be able to empower your team to take over, which also allows you to do more to serve your clients better. And I think sometimes that's the challenging transition a little bit for some agents. But I'm very proud of like, like Ryan mentioned, my team has, you know, over a million dollar plus property, a new contract right now, big development project, big risk project, one of our best clients and handling that masterfully. Emmanuel Garcia, same thing. When he joined the team, had him working actually with one of our larger. volume mobile home investors. So a lot of it is just for me, I guess the challenge is you have to remember like, hey, this is not about myself anymore. This is about everybody else. I'm here to coach, train and help them be successful and put them in the right position. So much of my shift in focus is it's a little bit of a transition from how do I get leads? How do I get sales? How do I get clients to My focus today needs to be, we're going to have the best stand-up ever today. I'm going to make sure the team's fired up, has their marching orders, know what to do, and they have a game plan. And I'm going to ask them the hard questions, like, what's holding you back from doing the thing you know you need to do? That's what becomes your focus, like you're someone's coach and mentor. And you got to resist any temptations to always want to step in and control everything. That's just like every business owner, right? You start from zero and you That goes into my next question in terms of how do you, I mean, clearly you're growing and you're growing at a pretty fast speed. How do you, how do you help others grow and grow your business without losing Yeah. You know, there's no right or wrong answer to that. I think it's kind of like. in a lot of ways, not that different than some sales coaching. You know, a good salesperson is a better listener, a better asking questions to help their clients or prospects you're talking to make decisions. Like so much of my business is decision making. And I think for me, it's just about, OK, staying looped in on what's going on and just asking the questions, like just asking the questions like, hey, do we cover these bases? Do we do this? Are we moving too fast? Encouraging people to just make sure, hey, they're capable, one, of meeting certain standards we hold in the group, but also I have to recognize always, like, this business, I am the bottleneck. So, if the whole company is based on my knowledge and my way of doing things, and there's a better way of doing things, one of my agents has, if I don't open up to that opportunity, we don't grow. You know, so I think a lot of it too is making sure I'm not. Delegating, it's more I'm listening and strategizing and coaching alongside. I think that's that's really the key. And that's like Brian and Emmanuel all the time. They're going to check me on stuff or show me something I'm not seeing. And that's the kind of people you want around you, right? Yeah, it is. That's what you want, you know. I don't want to be the mega agent that the whole brand and everything is built on me, and these are all my little helpers. That's just not my game plan. I want to build an elite group of elite people. And I would love to, over time, truly make it a goal where I'm not the smartest person in the room, and I'm not the one who has all the answers. I'm asking them, hey, team, what should we do here? And I feel like I'm already getting to that point as quickly as we are, which is amazing. But that's, I think, what a leader has to do. You have to let the business not be about you anymore. It has to be about everybody else and you're a part of the business. Not the old trolling being in the business. If you are, not a bad way to go, but that'll keep you small in my experience. I've learned that. Keep you busy too, right? Oh, man. Yeah, it will. I This is probably more of a question for me that I want the answer to, but as you grow, obviously, you get busier and busier. How That's a tough one. It's actually one I even spend a lot of time training my agents on. We focus on how do we maintain the amount of calls we need to make, things like that. For me, a few habits I've had to break, bad habits and things I've had to learn. Number one, I've got to use my calendar. and I gotta let that calendar have more control and influence over my day. It's that big difference between waking up on a Monday and saying, what do you got, inbox? Like, let's roll versus Sunday night, I'm gonna plan, I gotta do this, this, this, and this, and then, okay, I'll look at the inbox and the fires of today at this point in time. And I even teach my agents that same thing, because you can have one deal, and be completely busy where you can have 10 deals in escrow and be just as busy, I find. You can go looking for problems and stones unturned. You can sit there and wait for stuff to react to. But when you actually use your calendar to plan the most important things you need to do and you do it in advance, that's a game changer. But it's not the natural habit for me or for a lot of people. Sometimes we're like, I'm gonna wake up and wing it and do the work and I'll get good results today. You know, that's that's what you gotta gotta resist that temptation. Yeah, thanks for right and dedication. And just planning sometimes a lot of us are, I don't know about you, Robert, but I'm like, I've always been known to be the excited idea guy and all the stuff and. I'm the person who's hard to chain down to the desk and plan and process and put things on the calendar. So like that's for me, that's work. Like that's what feels like work. And I've got to do that work to make sure I can do the stuff I want to do and have fun and make content and all that kind of stuff. That's All right, let's let's move over to purpose life balance. We talked a little bit about balance already with time. But you're pretty open about being family oriented. Talk about how that's shaped You know, one of the tough things about Bird Dog Group, we talked about this earlier, right? Like the regret every investor business person has is I wish I would have started earlier. I wish I would have done more. And the battle we wage against life and time every day is Do I grind now to get more success later? Or do I enjoy some of the moments and the time? And where do you find the balance between all that? You know, for me, I think the lessons I've learned, like when I first started as an affiliate marketer, for example, my early 20s, right after I graduated college, I was in grind mode. I worked insane hours. But I really reached the point of burnout. You know, this was again, I was working from home. I was in a new city. I got kind of just completely burnt out to a point. And one of the big changes I made was, I'm going to just, I forget what book I read or something like that, you know, one of those things. And I was like, okay, I'm going to limit my hours to 10 to two these days. And those are the hours I get to work. Everything else, I'm just going to go have fun or go for a run on the beach or whatever. And I found that I got just as much done in like those four hours as I did working like the 12, 14 hour days. You know, and you always like, you know, I'm such a grinder. I'm such a I'm such a bad ass and all that stuff. But you realize, oh, most of the time was staring at numbers and hitting refresh and seeing if the numbers change or, you know, it's like you weren't really doing the work. So I think that's maybe one message for some folks listening. You probably have more time than you realize. It's just about you utilizing it smartly. And for those who have more responsibilities or have kids or people to take care of, parents take care of, anything like that, you know, end of the day, it's one of those things like, okay, this year I took my mom and brother and Cara to the Grand Cayman for a family vacation. And that was really, really fun for me. My mom is a beach person and she never left the country before. And I did that because, you know, I'd been saying to myself for like 20 years, yeah, I'm going to be successful and take care of my mom and do these things. And I kind of looked back and realized, I was like, I've been so focused on working, I never actually did some of those things I wanted to do. Like, you know, could run out of time. And that kind of shook me. You know, we had some family health scares. My wife, my father-in-law had a major cancer scare, and then my mom's sister passed away. And a couple of those things happened last year. And that kind of woke me up a little bit, just to say, I'm going to build this business. I can build the business, and I can have the time with my family. You know, and I can enjoy ski trips with my wife, Karen, you know, I can force myself to do those. And again, the calendar, that's the tool. My wife is one of those awesome people who always has a trip or a plan booked six months in advance. She's the opposite of me. So I just started kind of deciding to be like, I'm going to say yes to some of these things because I was so used to saying no. And it's so contrary to all the business stuff you hear. You got to say no to everything and shut everybody out. It's a little contrary to popular belief these days. But I found by saying yes and saying I can do this and this, it just forced me to find a better way. just like the compressing my work hours thing, it forced me to work a lot smarter, a lot more efficiently. So when you put those family trips on the board, when you say, I'm going to spend these hours with my kids every day, you find a way. You know, I'm always like Ryan and Emmanuel, my team both have lots of kids, and I am so in awe of how they do what they do and have their families and manage all those things at the same time. And I think that's just the The moral of the story, I guess, is that when you sometimes when you have to, you just find a way. And I think that's what a lot of business owners have to do at some point. We we have to decide what's the most important thing to us. And if we want to have it all, if we want to have both, you just kind of have to force the issue. You know, there's just no other way to do it, because if you say, I'll do this when I reach this milestone. You know, we all know how it goes, no matter how big you are, like the milestone gets bigger and further away. Like if you're a driven person, that's, you kind of do that to yourself. You just push the boulder further uphill. And, uh, so that's the balance for me that I've been trying to find is building bird dog group as quickly as I can, but making sure some of those moments and things that I know I'll So that, that being said, how do you define success outside of real estate? Oh, that's a good question. You know, I used to want to have a certain amount of money and a certain amount of stuff. And I think, like, a lot of people, it's same old story. You get older and older and you realize, like, the things that are really important are the relationships you have. the life you want to live, you know, so like, I'm proud to say, like, I'm, I'm extremely successful right now. I'm nowhere near where I want to be in some of my real estate goals. I got a long way to go, but, um, I've got a great marriage and a great family and great people around me. And I think that that has become to me better measure of success. And, uh, that's just really helped me a ton, you know, to me, that's, that's success. That's All right, let's move into some actionable insights here. Um, last section before we go into the rapid fire, what Yeah. Uh, PS quick little plug. I do offer free coaching for agents in the upstate. So if you literally want some one-on-one advice, book a call with me, you can, uh, they'll give us, I just do it. It helps me and it helps everyone else, you know, nine out of ten agents i talk to who are brand new in the business or new investors kind of the same thing a lot of times they're just ignoring what is actually the obvious solution to their problem what i love about this business is it's stupid simple i was doing technology and building crazy tools that stuff was hard and complicated this is actually pretty simple i have lots of conversations And the methods to get conversations these days, you can just go to chat and say, hey, what are the top 10 ways for me to generate leads? And you can say you have money or no money and it'll spit them out. And they're not surprises cold calling mail, social media, door knocking, you know, like a lot of these common tasks. And what I think an agent has to do is say. Now that I know what the task is and what the probabilities of success, I'm really big on preaching about probability. It's not just a numbers game. You got to know the odds of success. When you understand that, you can keep moving forward. But once you decide on the activity that works for you, like, don't pursue an activity just because so and so, you know, there's a million and one in both sides, the agency world and the investing world where it's like, Oh, I spent no money on ads and use this one weird tip and got 20 deals. Like there's all these things out there, but nine times out of 10, the most scalable things in real estate, pretty simple. They have their challenges. They have the pros and cons. Cole calling is tough. Like it's tough, but it absolutely works. Uh, social media is tough. So you have to do what I do. You have to be committed to doing a video like every single day without Expecting a result, you know, I probably didn't get a lead until I did like. 200 videos or something like that. You know, I've got over 800 on my channel now. And that's a focus right there. Yeah. And but that was the difference. I think that was the big benefit to me starting Bird Dog Group at almost 40 versus my first ventures as an entrepreneur, my 20s, my 20s. I would have tried and gave up really quickly when I started the Instagram channel for Bird Dog Group. I said, I'm going to do videos until I have a thousand videos. I'm not going to stop until then. And that will be when I make a judgment call. Like, after a thousand videos, I haven't even hit that yet. That's when I'll decide if I want to keep doing this or something else. And that's kind of the mentality I try to train people to. build themselves around is instead of doing things, hoping it will work, do the amount of volume of activity where you're like, how could this possibly not work? That's about the right level of activity. And it's a lot, it's way more than people expect. I saw a video actually, I was watching a video yesterday, Dan Um, and one of his videos was like, dude, I think it was him. It might've been somebody else, but it was like, film yourself three times a day for 30 days. And at the end of that 30 days, your life will, you won't recognize your life at that point. It'll be completely different. You'll learn a lot of things about yourself that you didn't know. You'll learn about your fears. You'll learn about what you love, what you don't love. And the result will be, you It is putting yourself out there on camera. It's it's hard. You know, I've. Again, I cheat. I've been doing this for 20 years. Uh, I was doing this stuff for Boone town. I was, I had a website way back in the day. I was doing YouTube content when YouTube was like new and it was automotive content. I should I started the YouTube channel in the automotive space. I made five videos and moved and forgot all about it. Came back six years later. Cause I started seeing some AdSense checks come through my account. I was like, what are these from? And the channel had 6,000 subscribers and a combination of 3 million views. And I was like, that to me, like for anyone out there who's like, Oh, I'm so scared to get started. Like, that's 1 of the biggest regrets of my life that I didn't just if I had the discipline and consistency I have now granted, the technology was different. It took me way too long to upload and edit videos from the Sony cam to. It was a, it was a nightmare back then, but I don't think doing 1 video a day was hard back then. It's just the upload speed, but if I had stuck with it. I can't think of what the possibilities would be. And so I was like, lesson learned. Never make that mistake again. Go all in and just stick with something that is proven to work. And if you do the work, it will always work. That's That's great. You talk about YouTube. I, um, my boys are in high school. One's a freshman, one's a junior, and they've just started getting into YouTube and I've encouraged him like, Hey, you stick with it. This'll be great. But my youngest son, he posted a video like two days ago. It's already at 7,000 views on it. It's like, man, like the possibility with social media content, whether it be Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, whatever it may be. But, um, Anyhow, so let's talk about you've talked about a few things that you believe that goes against the crowd. I don't know if this is a theme for you or not, but give us one thing that goes against the crowd that we're going to say, man, that's that's incredibly insightful. Or I should probably believe that, too. Okay, I'm gonna give you one. This one might be a little spicy for people on both sides of the aisle, agents and real estate investors, right? I think a healthy relationship with an agent and an investor is not built around an agent finding deals for the investor. I think it's built around providing services and guidance. And here's why I feel that way. I see a lot of people who get into real estate investing They make that post, we see 45 times a day in the Facebook groups. Hey, I'm a cash buyer looking for deals, right? I'll list it with you, things like that. We've all done that. I've done that, right? And agents kind of follow suit in that regard. But what often happens, a lot of times those relationships aren't very sustainable. They're not scalable. They can't grow because the agent will ultimately realize, I'm trying to find what the investor really wants, which are these off-market deals, right? These off-market, not just off-market profitable deals, but like the certain type. We can use the leverage we all want to use, right? And that's the margins on that. When you look inside the hood of a big investment shop, yeah, it's $2,000 to$5,000 cost per customer in a lot of cases. And going after that can be really difficult for agents. And so sometimes What I just see in a nutshell is, and I fell into that trap a little bit, too, like agents trying to provide something for investors that they really struggle to provide with consistency. And a lot of investors working with agents in a way that doesn't really foster a good vendor relationship over time. And so one big change we made in our business was, yes, like, hey, we come across deals. We send deals to our clients. That's part of it. But it actually It's more about when you have a purchase and you need our help, we're your guide. We're here. If you don't need me, awesome, go buy it. I won't be sad. There will be no, why didn't you use me conversation here. I think that's a ridiculous thing for real estate agents to say, why didn't you use me? Because I didn't need you. Or because you weren't the right fit. That's it. That's why it happened. When we had that realization in our business, that actually unlocked a lot of growth and a lot of better relationships with our investors that allowed us to say, hey, we're your listing partner where your guidance partner for acquisition where you're, you're. Guide for any advice you need, or just your execution if all you need is someone to get on the market and do a good job for you. You know, it's not about you have to use me for relationships and I think. I'm not, even though the name is bird dog, it's like, that's not necessarily the core value we provide to a lot of our investors. Once we understood that. relationships with the investors grew. We helped them be successful. We get to grow with them. And that's a great investor-partner-vendor relationship. I think that works for a lot of shops and investors who scale up things a little bit. I'm not sure if that's the most controversial take, but I think it's a I think that's an interesting perspective for sure. And one that, you know, I can see, I can see where you're coming from. Right. I mean, it's me as an investor. Yeah. I'd love for you and It would save me money. It would save me time, headache and so on. But I think your point of, Hey, that's not a scalable relationship. That's not a, it's not a predictable relationship, I think is a fair point. Because I could come to you and say, hey, I want to have X, Y, Z, and I need it in easily South Carolina, I need it in Greenville, but not I need it in all of Greenville, I need it in this specific area of Greenville, which makes it very difficult search and an Well, and that's actually why we started our acquisition group, actually under the guidance of Brandon Brinningham, one of my coaches, Upstate Property Solvers. And that allows us to actually go out and generate the type of deals and leads a lot of our investor clients are also looking for and do it in a more sustainable way. So that was the driver behind that. Yeah, I think really just for any agents out there who might be listening to this and thinking, how do I work with investors? I want to do more with them. Just remember, there's a great value you can add in execution. Plenty of investors, and I've been that investor, want to DIY everything, want to do it all themselves. Great. That's fine. That's not necessarily the target customer. There's a lot of investors though, and I find it's 10, it's like the most seasoned ones, like they still need help. They still need the guidance. They still need the person to help rerun their numbers and do all the different things out there. You know, that's, that's the value agents can provide. And I think on the flip side as an investor, my first deals, my first investment properties all came from great agents. Shout out Timster here in Greenville, like helped me locate some awesome properties. So I think there's just different ways to think about that relationship. I find sometimes agents and investors have an almost anti-relationship. And I think that Agents can be a great vendor and Yeah. All right. Let's go into the rapid fire. All right. And then we'll close up here. So let's start with the show here. It's called The Purpose-Driven Investor. So tell us about what Yeah, my purpose, helping people build wealth and success through real estate. That's that's what it means to me. I mean, that can mean helping an agent be really successful on my team or through coaching. And that can also mean helping a client buy the first investment property. I truly believe. that, like I said before, real estate is such an amazing opportunity to do so many things for so many people. And that's my purpose. My purpose is to get up every day and preach that and help people see the opportunity and guide them, even if it's not through my business, by the way. That's not the most important thing to me. If someone goes out there and says, yeah, I'm going to do this just because they watch one of my videos, that makes it all That's my purpose. Awesome. Biggest lesson real To be humble. To be humble, especially if you want to be a great agent. You gotta swallow your pride. Like you do, you gotta put that stuff to the side and you gotta remember, I'm here to help people make decisions. I'm not here to tell them what to do. I'm not here to make them buy into my advice or guidance. I'm here to listen. And that's been a great lesson I think real estate has taught me. It's taught me to be a much One habit that's made the biggest difference Consistency, You do anything with great consistency, you get great results. Like, that's it. If I could go back in time and tell my younger self anything, it would be, you're trying so many things. Consistently stick And successful. I tell people all the time, it's like, just show up, just show up every day. And if you show up every day, be consistent. Yeah. Ooh, rapid fire, I'm all stuck on this one. Overspending on a renovation project on one of our first gut job rentals, Kara and I did. I'm glad I made that mistake because it taught me a few things. It taught me when you have a long-term view in real estate, things work out better. Like we recovered from some mistakes we made in our first rehab, things like that. But I think it also taught me not to deny what's in front of you. Like a problem a lot of real estate investors run into is they crunch the numbers, but then they crunch them and crunch them and crunch them and crunch them until they start to somehow magically work a little bit better than they should. And oftentimes it's because you're denying the truth. You're trying to come up with the offer you think the seller will accept, not the offer you need to make, right? That project and going through that, I was thinking about that house in my mind. It had a roof that looked like it needed a roof, and I tried to convince myself, it doesn't need a roof. We can do a patch here and patch there, and it'll be just fine. No, it needed a completely new roof, had three layers of shingles. It's one of those, but it did. It just taught me, don't deny the truth that's in front of you. Solve the problems that are in front of you. Don't look for ways All right. Last question here. What's next for bird dog and Um, what's next is we're going to keep growing our volume and our team. And if you have an interest in joining bird dog group, working with me and the team, or even just getting some free real estate coaching, again, I truly offer that no strings attached, anybody, any brokerage, any purpose. Um, you can find me on pretty much every social media at bird dog group. Uh, we are hiring agents right now. So if you're interested, I'd love to talk to you, even if you're new to real estate. Um, and anyone out there who needs any kind of help with anything in the real estate industry, that's just what I'm here to do. No matter what, um, please reach out to me at bird dog group. Uh, that's the best way to get in touch with me, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, pretty much everything at All right. Well, Brian, I really appreciate you joining, sharing your perspective. I enjoyed it. I learned a lot. I'm sure everyone Thank you so much. It's been an absolute pleasure, and I'm just honored All right. Well, everyone, thanks for listening. I appreciate you joining and encourage you to continue to build wealth with intention and with purpose and join us on the next episode of the Purpose Driven Investor. Have a great day. Thanks for listening to The Purpose Driven Investor. If today's episode sparked an idea or inspired you to make an impact, connect with me at howellandsons.com. 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