Pathway To Financial Freedom With Russ Morgan And Joey Mure

Episode 553: Pathway To Financial Freedom With Russ Morgan And Joey Mure

 

People wish for financial freedom, but not everyone knows the shortest path to achieve it. How are these people able to generate income without waiting for retirement? What strategies should you use? Russ Morgan and Joey Mure, hosts of Wealth Without Wall Street, share their wisdom on walking the pathway to financial freedom. And for what it’s worth, the failure to achieve it only happens when you quit pursuing your dream. So it is never impossible! This episode answers questions to help you achieve financial freedom with passive income from multiple income streams. Tune in now and join Russ and Morgan as they lead you to the life you want, away from the shackles of your 9-to-5 jobs and big corporations.

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Pathway To Financial Freedom With Russ Morgan And Joey Mure

I’m on the line with Russ Morgan and Joey Mure. They’re with Wealth Without Wall Street. I had the pleasure of attending their get-together up in Austin. It was called the Passive Income Retreat. Russ is the idea guy. Joey is the implementation guy. He does all the work. Russ goes out, gets drunk, goes on LSD vacations and comes back with all these ideas. Poor Joey has to go out and get it all done.

It’s close. Most of the time, it’s either driving in the car or standing in a hot shower. That’s where most of the ideas happen. Things happen.

Russ, your background was a financial guy, financial services, financial tools, which is a great background for any kind of business. Joey, you’re a great entrepreneur from day one. You’re the author of the book Wealth Without Wall Street. You come up with all these podcasts and online ideas to generate income, education and a following so that people who are interested in getting rid of their job can maybe start to contemplate how that might happen.

All of us had a job at one time. I certainly did. I had plenty of them. When someone’s ready to quit their job, what are some of the factors they have to have within them before they take that leap and start to even contemplate leaving their job? Russ, what’s your opinion? What has to be brought in them? I have a definite couple of things that have to be in them or they’re not going to make it. What do you think, Russ?

At first, they have to have a wide big enough that’s bigger than the why not. At the end of the day, failure mostly happened when people quit. I don’t mean quitting a job. I mean quitting on themselves and the pursuit of the dream. Somebody who has grit and determination has the ingredients to make it happen. There are people that we see in our community every single day that are firing their bosses. Some of them are highly paid professionals, people who went to school for hundreds of years, it seems. There are some who right out of high school went to work and got to a point where they were fed up.

Most of them want something greater than what they have and they’re seeking it. They’re an avid learner. A big thing is that you have to be willing to learn. If you feel like you have the knowledge and all the information there is in the world, you’ll probably fail because you won’t be willing to absorb the information. As you’re making those failures, you won’t be learning the lessons from them. There are a lot of other things but that’d be my shortlist.

What about you, Joey?

It’s okay to have a big why but then you have to have a picture of what the alternate side will look like. It can’t just be about, “I don’t like this about what I’m doing.” It’s about, “I’m going towards something that is a far better reward.” That’s important. The second thing is having a plan that is crystallized by understanding who I am as an investor. What Russ and I created is the investor DNA profile to help people figure out who am I as an investor. Mitch, you have an amazing gift to create owner-financed homes that not everybody can do and not everybody should do because they’re not built like you. They don’t have the same skillset, experience and knowledge.

They might need to go into a more passive nature business because it fits who they are as investors. The more you know about yourself, the more you can dial into that. Be confident. When things get rough, you go back to that. It’s like an anchor that you say, “I have to keep going because this is a good fit for me. Even though I ran into some difficulty, I’m going to keep pushing through because my goal is big and the reward is big on the other side. I know that this is a temporary setback.” Those are my thoughts.

This is a good time to bring up the giveaway that we have. It’s called the Passport Challenge. It’s all about getting clarity and the goal so you know where you’re going because most of the people that hit it big had a plan to get somewhere. Ken D’Angelo, the Founder of We Buy Ugly Houses, said to me one time, “Entrepreneurs rarely end up with the idea that they start with. They keep morphing to the path of most money with the least resistance.” It can be a different business but they get into the business and these avenues, opportunities and doors start to present themselves. That’s when you maybe find out where you were headed. You make some adjustments along the way. Goals are about adjustments if you ask me.

Failure mostly happens when people quit pursuing their dream, but someone with grit and determination has the ingredients to make it happen. Share on X

Joey, in your comment you said investor DNA. Is it possible to substitute the word entrepreneur instead of investor? A lot of the people that I met at your passive income retirement were not real estate. They were doing other things, which was cool because they had this different set of eyes that they were looking at what you’re saying. They come back with this input that you might’ve never thought of because they’re not exactly in your business but there are parallels in other businesses. Tell us about this giveaway, Passport Challenge, all about clarity and setting your goals.

There are a lot of people that quit dreaming. Would you say that that’s a true statement for most people?

Yes. I see it every day.

You’re big on social media. You post a good bit. There are people on there that love to watch somebody else’s dream but give up on theirs. That’s what the Passport Challenge is to me. It’s a way to slow down and get clear on what would I be doing if I had these 40 hours a week back. What would it look like? Whom would I be? What would I be doing? What would I have?

Those are the three components of this Passport Challenge that challenge you to think about those key aspects and then say, “Put visuals into a place where you can be reminded of that every single day.” We include a tool that you can put on your desktop every day so that when you’re looking at it, you’re like, “That’s where I’m headed and where I need to become. There are steps I can take every day to get there.”

A cool idea is to put it on your desktop. When you open up your computer, it pops up. Here are the pictures of the places that you want to head towards. To get to this Passport Challenge, there’s a free giveaway. Go to 1000Houses.com/NoWallStreet. Joey hit a great point. I had the honor to be on the panel at your last Austin Passive Income Retreat. I was honored before I got there because I know you guys but when I got there and saw the caliber of the people in the room, I thought, “I better go back and get my things together here because these guys are not dumb. These are some smart guys.”

It’s almost intimidating, even for me. They were from many different walks of business that I recognized immediately. You better be on my game. One of the things I said on there was, first of all, financial freedom happens when your wants and needs are exceeded by, I used to say passive income but I don’t believe the word passive so I put cashflow. First of all, that means financial freedom doesn’t mean you have to be wealthy because I reached my passive income of $4,500. I realized if I lowered my overhead, I could get free sooner so I cut out about $1,000. At $3,500 a month, I was able to quit my job. I had to create this thing coming in on the weekends and after hours. Why was that so important? It gets right back to what Joey said.

It was because it freed up 2,600 hours so I could figure out whom I was supposed to be on this planet. Instead of giving all that time to my boss, I was able to free up 2,600. Some people do the math and they go, “40 hours a week times 8 hours isn’t 2,600 hours. It’s less.” I said, “If you’re going to be the kind of guy that’s going to quit a job and go on your own, you better be the kind of guy that even though you were required to work 8 hours, you put in 10 because it wasn’t right yet. You got to have a little more than 8:00 to 5:00 mentality for sure.”

I want to digress way back. One of the things I noticed is that the people that make it when they’re contemplating quitting the job, the ones that do it are the ones that have a certain amount of angst. It’s pissing them off. They’re sick and tired. The “I’ve had enough of this crap” meter is pegged over in the red. They’ve had enough of people telling them what time they need to get up, what time they can go home, when they can watch their kid’s soccer game, how long their vacation can be, when their vacation be, how much money they can make and what they have to wear. They’re sick and tired of that crap. I noticed that all the time. The ones that are sick and tired of it seem to have a better chance to get to where they’re going outside that other box they’ve been living in.

Some people are running away from something that they’re sick of. Some people running towards something is so much better. Equally, they can be as powerful depending on which side you’re on.

 

I learned something from shows all the time. That’s the reason why I do this. I don’t do this for the money. I do it because I get to talk to smart people. I always get ideas from the people that I’m talking to for my business or life. I am going to make a collage of where I want to be. What else do I want to do? I’m going to have it on my desktop because when I was building the house that I’m in, I built it out of my pocket $1 at a time. I’ve been in this house for many years. I’m almost finished. It keeps me in addition and things. I made a collage. Back then, the collage was some poster board. I cut out the pictures from the magazine and glue them onto the board.

I found that collage in my attic, digging around for something. I brought it down and unrolled it. Lo and behold, every room was like I said I wanted that room. I walked through the house with my wife and said, “Isn’t this amazing? Do you remember when we made this collage board? We were living on a concrete floor and we could see every stud in the wall. We could look up and see all the studs and the wires and the ceilings. Our kitchen sink was held up with four 2x4s and a piece of plywood with a hole cut in the middle of it to hold the sink.” She was like, “Yes. How can I forget?” I said, “Look at what we planned back then and look at what we have.” It was almost identical. You got a picture of a bathroom. Yours is a little bit different but the same.

You didn’t mention the mirror though. Look in the mirror and see the stud stare back at you. You’re staring at all the studs on the walls. That’s making sure you didn’t miss the one in the mirror.

There were a lot of changes in that thing too but most of it, you couldn’t see because it’s the biggest change in the world. People think it’s cliché but it’s in your mind. The first thing you have to do is believe it can be done because if you don’t believe it can be done, then you’re pissing in the wind. That’s what masterminds do like the ones that you hold. They lead you to the conclusion, “I can do this,” and then you get more involved. That’s the first thing to decide. You see other people and you’re like, “That guy doesn’t seem that much smarter than me. Look at where he’s going. If I even get half that far, I’m better than my job. I can do this.” You got to go home and convince your spouse.

One of the things that are valuable about being around others as high caliber as yourself is that you realize quickly that maybe your dream is not big enough. When you come to an event like this, you think, “I achieved a lot. Maybe what I have achieved or what I’m seeking to achieve is higher than I believe is possible.” You go share it with someone like yourself at one of these events.

They put their arm around you and say, “That’s cute. I like that idea. Let me give you this vantage point. Let me let you see from my eyes what is truly possible for you.” It’s so much higher than you would have ever anticipated. At that event, we had real estate investors who have reached hundreds of millions of dollars in sales, who have tens of hundreds of thousands of dollars in passive income or income coming in or cashflow, however you want to say it.

You have guys who’ve sold businesses for ten figures. There are levels at everything you go to. What I love about this is that you get around people that give you a vantage point that maybe you didn’t have before. When you’re able to network and truly mastermind, it’s like the masterminding ideas that Napoleon Hill talked about. Some of the wealthiest people in the world are sitting down and having conversations, usually around a hunting cabin.

Joey and I spent a week over in the coastal areas of Georgia and went to Jekyll Island where the Carnegie, the Rockefellers and that whole group would get together for three months out of the year and sit down at a breakfast table, lunch table and dinner table and truly mastermind and share ideas. There’s so much opportunity for people in that but they don’t have that environment. Their natural circle either is at the same level they are or way below them. Their lid is limited because of that.

People say, “I don’t have friends that run in those circles.” That’s what these masterminds are for. Go make some friends. You’ve got to show up, write a little check and get in the room with these multi-millionaires or millionaires. Some of them were close to billionaires. They’re on their way. Make no mistake about it, I don’t go there to meet people that are doing less than me. I go there to meet people that could wipe their backside with my financial statement.

In the greatest room, I’m the least guy in the room. That’s the room I want to be in. I’m the smallest guy in the room. It’s a little bit embarrassing maybe but shun that real fast. Get on with the introductions, meet people and find out whom you have in common. I hate that. You’re like, “I don’t know people like that.” There’s your first goal. Get in some rooms where there are people like that.

You fail when you’re unwilling to absorb the information as you're making those failures. Share on X

They’re also the humblest people. They’re the people that have achieved far greater than you could imagine and yet they’re also looking at the room and saying, “I took away this and that.” You’re like, “That person still has a lot to learn and they’ve achieved so much more. What about me?” It’s a litmus test that we can all take away value from that kind of room in that environment. You’re included in that, Mitch. We see you as the guy that added so much value to the event and at the same time, simultaneously, you’re sitting there telling us what you walked away with was valuable. That’s a win-win for everybody.

That coaching student that I had had over 2,000 apartment doors. That’s under control. That’s running without him. He’s got that figured out. He’s still relatively young and still not done yet. He wanted to go buy owner-financed houses and shortcut the whole thing. He says, “Let me get with you. You kick me out of the ditch here and show me what I need to do.” Those guys are the best students in the world. I’m not into one-on-one coaching to see if my game is for them. It’s too much money for me to gamble on someone to say, “Let’s see if it works out for you. Pay me this check.”

I like to get people. I already know they’re doers. They already know how to write a contract and all this stuff. They have a game already. They just want to up their game. I’ll spend 45 minutes talking to them. If I think I can up their game and get them back the money that they’re paying me, then I’ll say, “My hat is in the ring. Why don’t you go home and think about it? I know I can get you back what you’re going to pay me in a relatively short period from what you’ve told me.”

“There are things that you’re not doing. There are things you don’t know. There are corners that you’re not even looking in that produce more money than what you’re even talking about and they’re right in the same vein.” That’s what I do in those 45 minutes. That’s what I like about what you do. You’re not in it for the check as much as you are for the effect. At some point, another $1 million isn’t going to change your life at all. There’s got to be a higher reason why we do this stuff.

Russ and I would say that if you knew us a few years ago, you’ll say, “They’re doing okay.” What we did is we started to implement the things that we talk about. Mitch, you run across a lot of people like podcasters. If you ever dig a little bit deeper below the surface, they don’t even do what they talk about doing and practice what they preach. What Russ and I said is if we’re going to teach people how to get to financial freedom, we have to have passive income that exceeds our monthly expenses. We started doing that.

A couple of years ago, we went from $2,500 a month in passive income to over 50,000 a month. We started reporting it, which also keeps us accountable. It comes down to the fact that Russ and I don’t have anything special. We’re just one beggar trying to tell another beggar where to find the bread. That’s how we think about this whole game. We’ve been blessed with something. How do we pass that on to the next person and give them hopefully a shorter path to get there than what we had to go through?

No matter what room you’re in, there’s someone bigger than you or 1/2 mile down the street, maybe multiple people. I’m very much aware of that. What I know is some people would love to be at my level. I’m holding a hand down to help them up the ladder but there are people way above me. I got my hand up and I’m trying to get a hand to the next rung on the ladder up from me. When we talk about numbers or passive income, don’t look at it like we’re sticking our chest out or anything. We’re trying to tell you where we’re at.

If you’re beyond that, maybe you need to find someone else that’s way up there. If you haven’t reached that level, say $50,000 passive income or cashflow, then this is might be a good place to start. I like talking about the numbers but I don’t want anyone to ever take it like I’m bragging about it because there’s nothing to brag about. There are Donald Trumps in the world that would laugh at me and wouldn’t spend a second with me. They’re all over the place. You don’t know.

$2,500 sounds like a lot to the person who has 0 but for the person who’s been going down this road for a long time, $2,500 is nothing. It’s a fraction of what they have or what they would need to have. Joey and I were at a podcast conference. We met two guys and they were publishing their passive income reports right on their websites. They were bringing in over $100,000. One of them was almost $300,000 a month.

Joey and I were blown away, even considering that as an option. Not your active business but a passive or less evolved business that is producing that amount of cashflow every month. We thought, “What an opportunity?” You got a chance to meet a guy while you’re there in Austin who shared something with Joey and me a long time ago. He says, “What you track grows but what you track and report on grows exponentially.”

 

You don’t want to be made up falling backwards or slipping. You got to be growing.

That’s the reason why we share the numbers. One, we want to be accountable to the numbers. We want to grow the numbers to grow exponentially. Also, we want to inspire people that are around us to say, “I’ve heard you guys in stories. I’ve listened to your background. There’s nothing special about you. You didn’t grow up with a father or a mother who are experts in this area. You grew up in upper lower class and maybe it was middle-lower class.”

We didn’t have a lot growing up. Our parents didn’t understand money. They didn’t teach us about money. It was only through our desire to be around people and learn that this happened. God is blessing us with people like yourself that have shared ideas with us and have given us an ability well beyond our natural giftings.

There are so many strategies out there. Where do I begin to pick a strategy? I’m talking about the real estate segment, not any other segments. I started thinking about that and I said, “Maybe the first decision is you decide, do you want to be a cash guy or a cashflow guy?” Either one you pick will knock 50% out and then a little narrow the field by 50%, I’m guessing at that percentage. I wish I would have understood that what I wanted was cashflow all my life. I didn’t know that for a long time. I was inventing service businesses, getting paid and then having to do another job kind of business or make a sale and didn’t have to sell another one to make some more money.

I finally figured out that I don’t give a thing about how much cash is in the bank to date. I want to know how much is coming in every 30 days. That’s the number I want to work on. I have 300 mortgages, on average, say $500, positive cash flow mortgage, which I am not a landlord. I’m collecting the payment because people make payments on my houses to me for many years. I took my money. That’s all with borrowed and private money. I bought storage because that was a forever cashflow stream. Notes are in when someone pays you off or when they expire through time. They’re temporary. I said to myself, “I need a permanent cashflow business.” I picked self-storage and semi-truck parking.

I rent dirt for people to park their cars on. I rent 10×10 cubicles for people to store their space in. I’m happy to report that I have 1,300 doors or 1,300 spaces I can rent. I paid them all off. I average about $100 a person. I don’t have a partner in that business too. It’s like a snowball. The bigger that you get your cashflow, the easier it is to improve the cashflow because the money starts stacking up in the bank. The secret is to mitigate your lifestyle long enough to make a real business. You can go out and buy a boat in the first year but why don’t you put the boat off for a little while, rent one a couple of times a year but keep rolling the money back into the business?

In my storage business, I didn’t take any money out for twelve years, except for once a year when it cost as much. It still costs about this much in 2022. About $2,000 to $2,500 to $3,000 for a week-long vacation all-inclusive resort in Mexico, that’s the only thing that the storage business ever gave me for twelve years. Once a year, it would give me a vacation with my wife and me. I rolled it all back in to adding on, building better, buying dirt, whatever it was. Let’s talk about delayed gratification.

You got to think about the opportunities. You would see that the successful people who found a way to delay have been able to avoid shiny object syndrome. A lot of times, people see yourself and others and say, “Mitch is in storage. He’s over here in large truck parking but also, he does owner finance homes.” I’m sure there have been some other things you’ve done over time. They say, “I need to be in 4, 5 or 6 different things. That’s the way I made money.” The answer is no. People make their money on one thing. They do it well over and over again. Once they got to that point, then they find alternative avenues to create cashflow.

You have to be dedicated and determined. You have to match up what you’re investing in with who you are and what your natural giftings are. If you’re able to add value to the world, then you can create the income streams that you want and find things. I have a friend of mine who sent me a picture of one of these new Humvee convertible truck deals. He’s like, “What do you think about this? This is my new asset.”

I’m struggling but wait until you hear the rest of the story. He’s like, “It just came in. The guy is going to pick it up in the morning for $70,000 more than I paid for it. I did that with the Ferrari for $140,000 more than I paid for it.” I hadn’t even considered that. He said, “We should be driving the liabilities and selling assets.” What he was talking about is like in markets where crazy things are happening in the car world. This got falls into money but he’s figured out that the game is that he had the $1,000 deposit to buy that truck with and sold it. He said, “If it would’ve come earlier, I could have sold it for $140,000 over sticker.”

It's okay to have a big why, but then it has to be going towards something far greater. Share on X

That was one of the things too at the retreat that I went to with you. There was a guy who had some big cars and a lot of stuff but he was always Airbnb-ing out his car for the weekend. He was riding the car off and appreciating the car. If you wanted to drive it when it wasn’t rented, he could take his wife to the evening on the town in the Lamborghini but he was renting it out and depreciating. It had all these tax reasons.

He’s turning all of his liabilities into assets. That was his talk for sure. That’s a lesson we can learn. If you’re reading this and you’re like, “These guys are talking about cool strategies. Which one of these applies to me?” All of them do at some level but this one, for sure, what liabilities do you have that are adding to the right side of the equation, the monthly expense column of your financial freedom formula? Passive income has to be exceeding your monthly expenses but you have things that are adding to that liability column that could be used on the passive income side in some way. How do we get creative about that? How do we start thinking differently about the things that are right there in our control and making them work for us?

Let me put this in perspective. You can get a car that costs you $800 a month but you can take the money that you bought the car with and buy an apartment complex or a rented house that makes you $800 a month. That’s a $1,600 a month swing from spending $800 to making $100. The cost of what you did with that money wasn’t $800. It was $1,600. People don’t add the other lost opportunity because they didn’t spend it on something that made money. It’s easy. Kiyosaki made it simple. An asset brings in more than goes out. It’s not hard. When I asked you what your assets are, you have to put a boat on there. Remember, if it’s not bringing in more money than it’s going out, it’s not technically an asset. That’s why we’re all screwed up. They taught us wrong.

Unless you figured out how to create a boat rental business and then you get to rent it out.

He has a meeting in San Antonio where he has Tommy’s Car Wash franchise. He invited me to go. Do I want to be in the carwash business? No. Will it hurt me to understand how the car wash business works? Not at all. It’s worth my day down. Who might I meet in San Antonio while I’m listening to that thing? Let’s digress a bit. I talked about being in multiple businesses. I want to go back. I would have been so much further ahead if I’d stayed with owner financing, bought an owner financing for the first 8 or 10 years and got it down to a science. I got off track many times trying to do a 2nd thing or 3rd thing that costs me a lot of time and money.

One of my friends says one of the biggest threats to an entrepreneur is spare time. They’ll go off into ventures that they know nothing about because they’re bored. He said the biggest thing was boredom. I have a quote. No one knows it because I’m not famous but it is, “The hardest thing an entrepreneur will ever do is have one great idea and finish big.” We see opportunity in everything. The businesses I did get off to were closely related to the business I was in. I was in the self-storage business but semi-truck parking is not the same business but it is kind of the same business. I’m renting pieces of ground. The same software and management company works for it. I could plug it in.

I was diversifying within my business. There’s self-storage, boat storage and open parking for RV trailers and boats. All of a sudden, semi-truck parking. What I love about semi-truck parking is I’m always looking at what the downside is. What happens in a downturn in the economy to this business? I love the storage business. It’s a little iffy but it stays even. When people are growing during the boom times, they need storage.

When it’s the bad times, they’re downsizing but we’re Americans. We’re not going to get rid of our junk. We’re going to move it to storage. It stays flat. What I liked about the storage truck business was if those trucks are rolling, they need a place to park. If the economy comes to a screeching halt and not a truck is rolling, they have to have a place to park. Either way, they’re parking.

That’s genius. Since you shared that at the retreat, I don’t doubt it. I have been keeping my eyes open for places like that around town that I was like, “We got to find a place like this. This makes all the sense in the world. Mitch is a genius.”

It’s not that. We bought a piece of dirt. We didn’t have any idea what to do with but it was 12 acres. It was right on I-35, a major highway. It had three buildings on it that if we rented them would cover the costs. My partner, Mike, negotiated a $650,000 sales price with $200,000 down and financed the $450,000 for 20 years at 6% and with a substitution clause that if we ever wanted to move the debt to something of equal or greater value, we could. It was a non-recourse loan. We bought it but we didn’t have any idea what to do with it. We just knew that we were going to at least break even. It wasn’t going to kill us until we figured out what to do.

 

One day, Mike’s getting ready to leave the place. It faces I-35. He stopped because he was on the phone and was talking. He was watching the highway, semi-truck after semi-truck. We found out later that 100,000 semi-trucks a day go past that lot. We’d never been in the truck business and never thought about the truck business. The business was right there and because we’re entrepreneurs, he picked up on it. We didn’t even know it was going to work.

Here’s a cool thing, we rented the big 5,000-square-foot metal building to a diesel mechanic. We put 200 semi-trucks behind him in a parking lot. We didn’t just rent the place for what the normal rent was. We rented it because it was a built-in clientele and business. The guy that moved in had his previous customers but he had 211 people that he’d never met before. The cool thing about that semi-truck business if you’re a mechanic at the front of the land is you can take a lawn chair, go out, set it to the back of the building and turn it around to face the trucks. You can sit in that truck, crack yourself a cold beer and watch those trucks break.

That’s like being a jet ski mechanic down at the lake. You can’t have enough business. There’s an endless supply.

We waited to see if it was going to work and then we bought another place but it wasn’t on the highway. It’s much more difficult to fill up. It’s working but we had to pay some advertising money and stuff. Talk to me about your offshoots. You started with a core something and then made a little offshoot. Do you have an example of that?

One of the things that you were talking about in different areas is we’re in the podcasting world. Through podcasting, we interviewed someone in the short-term rental space and were fascinated by that because Joey and I both have large families. When we travel, we can’t stay in hotels. Hotels are not large enough for us. We’re always renting a house through a channel like Vrbo or Airbnb. For us, the thing that we thought of is, “How do we build that business ourselves? How do we create it?”

We started an Airbnb short-term rental business and have grown it to over 26 units. As an offshoot to that, as another strategy to create cashflow and help others, we’re naturally podcasting already. We’re talking to people who are interested in ways to take maybe a hospitality nature and maybe an apartment or a home they already have and turn it into cashflow.

We had our operator record what he was doing, built out this whole course on how to get your first unit up and running and multiply it. Every time he did anything for our business, he would go back and make an update. “We’ve added this software. It’s helped us do this.” Through that whole process, not only we’ve improved our short-term rental business but also, we’ve created an avenue for all of the people in our community to take a course and it creates cashflow. It’s an amazing side-by-side item for us to be able to do. There are probably 100 other ideas but that for us was a natural fit.

There’s another thing that we learned through podcasting. As you know, we’ve got our start talking and learning how to implement infinite banking. We teach people how to do that. We have coaches that are full-time that implement this for people and do that. We had a lot of capital that we had to get to work. As we were interviewing all these people on the podcast, we started hearing these passive income ideas.

One was short-term rentals and the other was land flipping. You know your good friend, Mark Petoskey. Over the course of a couple of years, we were like, “How do we implement this? We don’t have the time. We can’t do this on our own. We have to have a team doing this for us.” Over time, we built a relationship with Mark’s team. They created a done-for-you land flipping business for us. It’s something they implement for a lot of people. It has created over $22,000 a month. We never talked to a buyer, create notes or any of the process. They do it all. It’s 100% run by their team.

You’re just putting up the money as a partner?

No people make their money on one thing. They do it well over and over again. Once they reach that point, they find alternative avenues to create cash flow. Share on X

We’re the money side of the partnership. They’re the operations of it. We have a split based on that. It’s one of my favorite things that we ever do.

In the area in which we have experienced, Joey and I come both from business backgrounds. We think operationally, marketing and management. It’s finding investment opportunities that some people would be pure investors in but for us, we liked the idea of adding value from our experience. We like putting together business operations and partnerships.

Being a part of those relationships not only can we negotiate probably better deals than the average person because of that experience that we have but also, we find ways to bring in strategic partners and use influence to enhance the overall goal of the partnership. We find that’s one of those offshoots. There’s a gifting that we have. We understand financial data may be a little better than an average Joe. We apply that to the businesses in which we operate.

I used to try to start an offshoot business and then bring it into my infrastructure we all ran, which was a disaster because every business takes everything you have. What I learned was if you’re going to start a new business, your partner has to be the guy that knows how to run it from the top and the bottom. You either are supplying the money or the customers from your residual leads. That business has to be able to stand alone without me.

I have a business to run. That’s when I started being successful at the little offshoot businesses. I was collecting 300 mortgages and 1,300 payments from storage people. I was a professional collector and but it got to where in the mortgage business, I needed to have TMO, The Mortgage Office, which was a $27,000 software that required $5,000 worth of training for the people. I needed it for my business.

Once you learn that software, you can manage 2,000 properties for the same amount with the same people because the software is so effective. I thought, “I’ll buy the software, get the people trained and then start servicing other people’s notes in the State of Texas.” It’ll pay me for my software and the people that run the servicing I need. Plus, on top of that, they’ll even still make money servicing other people’s notes.

I got rid of my liability for managing my notes. I bought the software but I got it paid back to me. I even make money, $20,000, $30,000 a month because I got someone to handle that business. It’s one office down from my assistant’s office. The key was I found someone who knew the business that was working for someone else. I went and poached them. That’s the other thing I learned. Don’t try to train someone to do a business that you’ve never been in before. Poach someone that can come in and show you how this business is supposed to run and pay them well.

The who, not the how. That’s important.

How much staff do you have? How many people does it take to keep you afloat?

We have many different businesses. Wealth Without Wall Street is an information company. We also have an insurance arm. We have an investment arm. We have a wing for masterminds and things like that. Our main core team though is made up of about eight people. They’re all remote and operate fairly independently. We get on calls once a week to have a powwow and organization for the team. We use the software to communicate with each other. Each of the other little businesses is may be as little as 1 person up to 3 or 4 people.

 

It’s a real trick running lean but not being understaffed. It’s the constant.

One last thing that we learned a long time ago is when you’re in partnerships or you’re hiring people, to understand if that person will be successful, we use a tool called Culture Index. Culture Index is a tool that helps you match up someone’s giftings with the jobs and the duties which that job would require to that personality. They’re way more effective when they’re working in an area that they already have compared to trying to train them to do things that they’re not naturally gifted to do.

One of the things we do before we go into partnership with anybody in an investment or we bring on a new team member is Joey and I take this job questionnaire, “What would the ideal candidate look like?” It asks these series of questions over six pages and then it spits out a profile and says, “Here’s what the ideal candidate looks like.” He will do it. They’ll usually have a third person do it. That way, we make sure that we have a blend of what we all believe that that job requires. We have every candidate take that survey or application. It will match them as to a percentage of how close are they to what we want.

Anybody that’s less than 75%, we don’t even interview them. It doesn’t matter what the resume is. We never even get into a conversation with them. We know that that person would not be successful because they don’t already naturally possess the things that we’re looking for in that specific role. That has helped us save so much money and kept us out of bad deals that we would’ve never understood. Sometimes you can talk to people. People are deceiving. People have the ability to sweet talk you and share good things, ideas and strategies but you don’t know if they can back it up or will they back it up when everything goes crazy. A tool like that has been super helpful for us.

I was the worst person to hire ever. I picked people I liked. They were great but couldn’t do the job. Finally, we started testing people. It said this one guy was an engineer but he was going to make a great acquisition guy. I thought, “This is not going to work.” He’s been with us for seven years, one of our top producers. I said, “You made me into a believer. Don’t ever ask me whom to hire. Take the test.” We were taking a DiSC or a personality test. How does that differ from the Culture Index? Is that the same thing?

The Culture Index tracks more things than the DiSC profile. For instance, how autonomous are they going to be versus how much did they value being on a team? How much they are driven by interaction with people or not? Do they need less time with people or more time with people at their pace? Something I never saw in a DiSC profile was how quickly they want to implement something. Lastly, how much do they tie to a process? Do they conform?

Those things are super helpful to know. They also track how much their energy units are. How much do they expend on their work every day versus how much do they need for the role? You can see, “Does this person have a lot of energy left over? Is this job taxing on them or is it way too taxing? We need to have a conversation about that.” There are many insights into it.

This is interesting for our readers. If someone wants to use this system, do you go to CultureIndex.com or buy it? Does it cost so much to test? What is it?

It’s a licensed item. You can type in Culture Index in Google and then it would come to it. It’s a licensing item you get with whatever the rep is that you connect with. We met one, it was a client. He works with typically companies with 100 people or more. He’s using it with those larger companies to help them understand their management team, who is a good fit on their management team, who’s not, who’s likely to quit and who’s somebody they need to fire. He can give crazy insight into what someone’s thinking by their dots.

He was telling me about a scenario where he went up to this guy who had been looking at his thing. He said, “Do you have a notebook sitting on your bedside table?” The guy goes, “That’s crazy. Why are you asking me that?” He goes, “Just answer the question.” The guy goes, “Yes. How did you know?” He’s like, “I can look at your dots and tell that you’re the type of person that wakes up in the middle of the night, thinking of ideas and you’ve got to get them down as fast as you can.”

Find ways to bring in strategic partners and use influence to enhance the overall goal of the partnership. Share on X

He looks at me and says, “I guarantee you, you’re a challenger. If I wanted you to do something, all I need to do is bet you that you couldn’t.” I was like, “What do you want to bet me?” He knows that intuitively about you. Tools like that that you can say, “Is this person a deductive thinker? Is this a critical thinker? Is this someone who’s going to be a verbal processor? Are they project-oriented? Are they task-oriented? Are they future-oriented? Are they past-oriented?” That’s important.

Every role has a need. You don’t want someone who’s very project-oriented in a task-related job. You tend to hire people that are similar to you. Unfortunately, if I was trying to hire people that were similar to you and me, Mitch, they wouldn’t want to follow through on anything. They would want to be dreaming of the next idea. They would want to be talking.

I still want to drive this point home a little bit. Can you give me a ballpark about what it costs to put a person through the process or get the ability to put a person into the process?

It’s around $10,000 for an average company size of 25 people or less. I do think that they charge based upon the numbers if you had a company that was 500 employees. They would do workshops and training. The cost per year would be more. I’m grateful to share our contact with you.

The most disheartening thing in the world is to spend 3, 4, 5 or 6 months with someone trying to get them acclimated to do a job and then they don’t pan out. It’s horrible and demoralizing. It’s like, “I got to start this all over with someone else. I’ll get someone else at my office to do this position. I’m tired of this.” Sometimes spending a little upfront to get the right person or hold off until you find the exact right person gets my vote.

If you can apply that same tool, we use it within our mastermind of helping our mastermind members understand their natural gifting and how they see the world. Even though it wasn’t meant for investments, it still tells you, “Are you a patient person? Do you like to work on things? Do you like change? What are the things that you’re going to be more aligned with?” When there are things that you get that person who’s hands-on, driven and likes to touch things, they would need to be in business operations.

If you put them in syndications that they can’t touch at all, it typically frustrates them so they put little amounts of money in them. They never see the value out of them. That’s the way I was at least. I like businesses where I get into partnerships. I don’t want to necessarily do the job but I would love to be a part of the conversation and at least have the person listen to my idea about where they implement it or not. I will put lots of money into things like that. You could see how that translates to your speed to financial freedom.

I want you to take advantage and get your free Passport Challenge. It’s going to open your eyes to how to achieve clarity in your goals. Give yourself a better chance to get there. Clarity is everything. I’ve never been good at it. I never set big goals myself. My goal is always how to be better this year than I was last year. Let’s see how far it goes. It took me to places I never dreamed of. If you’d asked me many years ago, I couldn’t fathom where I’m at. I wouldn’t have been able to handle it either. It’s a growing process. You mature into these places.

To get to that, go to 1000Houses.com/NoWallStreet and get your Passport Challenge. If you want to learn about the Culture Index, they’re going to put that in there or if you want to learn about the Passive Income Retreat, wherever it’s at, this one coming up on September 29th and 30th, 2022. They have them around the country. They had them in Austin one time when I went. Don’t be afraid to get over there and get this information. They also have podcasts and a lot of different things they offer. Also, infinite banking, where you use insurance policies to fund yourself. All kinds of ideas.

If one of them seems like might be for you, go ahead and pick up on it. Study on it, get what you can and sum it for free. If you want to go further, we always have to pay a little bit more but think about college for four years. What do you get? At least in these circles with shows and all the online people that are offering education, you can find what you want and spend all those hours drilling down on the one thing, the one strategy and becoming an expert. That’s my opinion of it. Joey, Russ, I’m sorry that I missed you at the ranch the other weekend.

 

That was a big letdown for me. I was looking forward to that but I understand our time got taken out from us.

The invitation is still open so anytime. Maybe you need to come down for that.

That’s what we should do, for sure.

Call me sometime. Did I miss anything you want to cover before I go? Did I leave anything out? We could talk for two weeks.

Unless you want to do a series, we’re good for now. I want to encourage you as you’re reading to take action. Good information is good information but by putting it into action, you’re going to learn as you go. Don’t be afraid to fail. We’ve all failed. We didn’t have time to get into all those. Join us on the journey. We’re happy to support you in any way we can.

Speaking of that, failure is part of the plan. When I wrote the book, Failing Forward to Financial Freedom, I didn’t know it but I was trying to figure out how I was going to go trial this stuff. I knew I was going to fail but how do I keep from going under? I didn’t mind failing but I didn’t want to lose my house, get a divorce over finances or be on a street trying to figure out how I was going to eat. I’m willing to fail but I didn’t want to lose everything.

I came up with the moat theory. I got $3,500 coming in. I never gambled it. Anything I made over $3,500, I could go out there. If they stole it from me in the streets, it was okay. I come back into my little castle. It’s all paid for. I figure out how to make a little bit better plan than that last one because the last one sucked and I lost my money. If you could live a life failing like that, it won’t be long before you figure it out. You’ll be on your way. That was the point. What would you say to the young entrepreneurs out there that want to quit their job before we wrap it up, Russ?

You don’t have to be great to start. You have to start to be great. That’s Zig Ziglar. What the hand does, the mind remembers. That’s Maria Montessori. Both of those things are great ways to live by. Pick action upon that and you’ll be on your way.

Other people put their hands on the burner twice but eventually, we figured out that that burner is hot. We probably shouldn’t do that. It works on the left hand too twice. I want to thank you so much for taking the time. It’s an honor to have you. Your mastermind Passive Income Retreat in Austin that I went to and the caliber of people there was great. I encourage anyone to go there. Learn about it at 1000Houses.com/NoWallStreet and get your Passport Challenge. That’s it. We’re going to wrap it up.

If you like what we’re doing and you want to do me a favor, go hit a like button somewhere or post a favorable review anywhere. It helps out tremendously. I’m not famous by any stretch of the imagination. There are people out there looking for this kind of information. They just don’t know it exists. Help us out if you have a mind to. We’re out of here.

 

Important Links

• 1000Houses.com/NoWallStreet
• 1000Houses.com/Coaching
• 1000Houses.com/Livecomm
• 1000Houses.com/TFF
• 1000Houses.com/VAHelp
• 1000Houses.com/AOF

 

About Russ Morgan and Joey Mure

Wealth Without Wall Street’s Founder and Partner, Russ Morgan, is known as “The Idea Guy.” Russ began his professional career as an investment advisor in 2004 after graduating from Auburn University 4 years earlier. Russ gave up his Certified Financial Planner designation after realizing that financial planning the Wall Street Way was a sham. True freedom comes from having more passive income than monthly expenses. This concept is in direct opposition to the fee hungry model of mutual funds and brokerage accounts. Since 2017, Russ and his co-host Joey Mure have interviewed hundreds of entrepreneurs on their podcast Wealth Without Wall Street. Along the way they have built numerous 7 figure businesses and shared with the world how to do the same. Russ is married with 4 kids and his hobbies are starting new businesses and watching the Atlanta Braves lose again in the playoffs.

Joey Mure is a serial entrepreneur, co-founding businesses like Wealth Without Wall Street and Wake up In Birmingham. He is the co author of the soon to be released book “Wealth Without Wall Street, 3 steps to freedom through passive income” andthe top rated podcast, Wealth Without Wall Street. Joey got his start in the financial world as a mortgage loan originator shortly after graduating from college in 2003. After 11 yrs in the industry and seeing personal financial success, Joey left to help found Wealth without Wall street in 2014. Joey’s true success is found in his marriage of 18 yrs to his wife Jessica and in being the father of 5 beautiful daughters. His hobbies include golf, travel, and reading. Financial freedom for Joey means he can impact the world for Christ in giving, sharing, and spending quality time with his family and others. He lives by the simple idea that to “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, lean not on your own understanding, in all your ways acknowledge Him and he will direct your path.” (Proverbs 3:5-6)

 

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