Structure & Leadership: Key Investor Strategies for Raising Capital & Market Domination

Hey, welcome to another episode of Making Billions. I'm your host, Ryan Miller and today I have my dear friend Jim Manning.

Jim is the founder of multiple funds in the real estate and debt space. He's managed and sold over get this $250 million in real estate and this guy is just getting started.

So what this means is Jim understands real estate funds, debt funds and how to manage large conglomerate companies. He's about to give you a masterclass on both. 

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[THE GUEST]: Jim is the founder of multiple funds in the real estate and debt space. He's managed and sold over get this $250 million in real estate and this guy is just getting started.

[THE HOST]: Ryan is a Venture Capital & Angel investor in technology and energy. He achieved market-beating placement growth in his first 5 years in the industry.

Transcript

Ryan Miller  0:00 
Hi, my name is Ryan Miller and for the past 15 years have helped hundreds of people to raise millions of dollars for their funds, and for their startups. If you're serious about raising money, launching your business or taking your life to the next level, this show will give you the answers, so that you too can enjoy your pursuit of Making Billions. Let's get into it.

Ryan Miller  0:22 
Your ability to effectively run your business or invest in funds comes down to many things, but the main one is your own self awareness. Join me and my friend, Jim, as we chop it up on how he built a $250 million Real Estate Fund and you're gonna want to tune in to the end where we go really deep. All this and more coming right now. Let's get into it.

Ryan Miller  0:42 
Hey, welcome to another episode of Making Billions. I'm your host, Ryan Miller and today I have my dear friend Jim Manning. Jim is the founder of multiple funds in the real estate and debt space. He's managed and sold over get this $250 million in real estate and this guy is just getting started. So what this means is Jim understands real estate funds, debt funds and how to manage large conglomerate companies. He's about to give you a masterclass on both. So Jim, welcome to the show, man.

Jim Manning  1:07 
Ryan, thanks for having me, man. I'm really excited to be here and the Making Billions podcast is one of the few podcasts that I've actually listened to multiple episodes and really have enjoyed them. And it's really my the mission of what I'm trying to do, I'm trying to turn myself into a multimillionaire into a billionaire, actually. So what a great community. What a great mission that you have to help us millionaires turn into billionaires, right. So thanks for doing this.

Ryan Miller  1:33 
You're welcome. It's so great to have you and yes, we're all brothers on that path. Man. We're on our way and we're trying to bring as many people with us as possible. And we've risen to the top 2% in the world all because of amazing guests like you. So we're certainly honored to have a man of your caliber and really quickly, just maybe 30 seconds is bring up to speed. What are you up to? What's in Jim's world? Bring us up to speed before we address the beginners?

Jim Manning  1:55 
Yeah, absolutely. So I've founded five real estate companies, four of which are run without me and the biggest thing that I work on now is a real estate fund that helps people buy and hold on to real estate. We have a special niche in the lease purchase department, that strategy that helps us put the tenant in the place of a homeowner and pay for all the repairs and maintenance and we give just cash flow real estate with with a group of us. So yeah, that's the thing that I spend a lot of my time on. Now I have a podcast called, The Passive Wealth Show, where we talk about passive investing, and what are some strategies and good ways to generate passive income without doing any of the work as well?

Ryan Miller  2:31 
Yeah, I love that. So you know, for the beginners out there people who are looking at you, or myself or anybody that are just like, hey, I would like to head in that same direction. So for people who are just starting out really feeling that bug of inspiration, you and I've been there before, too, are young, younger men and we thought you know what, that'd be cool I think I'm gonna pursue this career path. For your career path, real estate, passive investing, debt funds, all of these things, you're really on fire, bro and you're just getting started? What would you tell the beginners in the early days, if they're investing in real estate or whatever it might be? What would you tell them on: A. how to win and B. how not to lose? What would you say?

Jim Manning  3:04 
Absolutely. So right now, there's a strategy called creative financing in real estate that's incredibly powerful. And it's something that I would definitely be focused on those looking to do my own deals, because one, you can do deals without any of your own money and then two, it allows you to leverage interest rates as assets. So what I mean by that, like, you can go to a homeowner that has say, a 3% interest rate, and you can say, hey, what, what price do you want for this home, it's a $300,000 home, I'll give you $300,000 for this property is you give me a better interest rate than what I can get on the open market and a lot of people don't realize that that you can sell your property. And maybe let's say sell it at a 5% interest rate. If the property cost you a 3% interest rate, then you can make, you can make a profit, you can turn a house sale into passive income.

Jim Manning  3:51 
We did that with actually a fraternity brother of mine named Devin and I was able to get him exactly what he wanted for his house. And he was able to go from a $300,000 house to a $500,000 house and his monthly payment actually ended up staying the same. So he almost doubled his price point and didn't have to pay any more per month by making this move. And it's all because I've studied and I understand what creative financing is, how to buy property subject to and how to have a homeowner owner finance the property. So I get it, especially if you're a beginner, I'm throwing a bunch of industry jargon out at you. It's a really powerful market opportunity and regardless if you even want to get into real estate investing or not, if you own a home at that lower interest rate try remember that your mortgage is an asset now that interest rates have gone up and don't just sell your property a traditional way you can sell it and then make some passive income by doing some creative deal structure.

Ryan Miller  4:45 
Man I love that and so that's some powerful ways on how to win. What about how do you avoid losing and just some of that downside risk in the early days. What would you say?

Jim Manning  4:55 
Yeah, I think the one of the keys is controlling the exit strategy that you use, so when we were flipping properties like you see on HGTV, we would buy a property, we would fix it up and then we would sell it all within a three to six month span. And when you're at this rate is that tight, we had to be perfect on the construction budget, we have to be perfect on what our after repair value was. And if the market would shift at all, you know, our profit margin could go from making $80,000 to $50,000 or $50,000 to $20,000 or if it was a thin deal, because it was a lower price point, even down to breakeven. And so the so in real estate, a good rule of thumb is, the shorter the exit strategy, the more the more risk you're taking. The longer the exit strategy, the less risk you're taking. So if you think about 2006 to 2008 to 2009, the market went down about 20%. Well, if you bought a rental property in 2004, and you owned it 20 years later, is that and you owned it today, you're probably feeling pretty good about the investment, even though you maybe bought it and the market went down a little bit for for a few years, because the market over time ends up appreciating, right. So and then one of the ways like, as I mentioned, my friend Devin, of what we've also been able to do on deals like that is we go to a homeowner and we say hey, we'll buy your house creatively. If we'd like to sell properties on a lease purchase strategy, if we can't find a lease purchase tenant, we're not going to execute on this contract. So it's contingent on us finding the end buyer for the property. So that's a way to get a property for no money and then also if with the right contingency in there only do the deal if it's already sold on the back end. So there's there's ways to do it to just dramatically lower your risk and, and make it really, really hard to lose.

Ryan Miller  6:38 
Man, I love that. So really just when you're starting out learn to leverage the power of creative financing to get some early points on the board right? So it's relatively affordable so you don't have to have millions of dollars to start. But you do it right, you just might end up with a few bucks in your pocket. And then, you know what, there's always risk, you're an investor, absolutely, we're not giving financial advice, we're just saying for Jim's experience, what we can say is learn that exit strategy. Really understand what it is that you're up to and all of those dynamics, working with those two things will definitely give you a great launch so that you can be a fund that has one too.

Ryan Miller  7:10 
So moving on to the market, what would you say as far as where it's at? What are you seeing out there right now? And then maybe we'll talk about where where do you think it's going?

Jim Manning  7:19 
Absolutely, yeah so when we talk real estate I want to do the caveat is like, anytime you hear blanket statements, it can be dangerous, because real estate is so local, right? As there's going to be exceptions to this and different pockets that will behave different, I think it's really important to understand the macro trends, then also make sure you align yourself with someone that has special localized knowledge with the market that you're into okay. So for for this purpose, we're gonna, let's get specific here I'm gonna talk single family real estate, I'm not going to talk commercial. That's really my area of expertise and I'm going to just talk on a macro level what's happening in the United States, not necessarily what's happening in California versus New York or anything like that. And what's interesting is, is that interest rates recently went up quite a bit, there was a lot of uncertainty that entered the marketplace. And a lot of people were like, oh, I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know what we should do, maybe we should just kind of sit on the sidelines a little bit. 

Jim Manning  8:10 
My knee, the knee jerk, I think with that as oh, well, if interest rates go up, home prices are going to just go down because the cost of money is more expensive so the assets were worth a little bit less. The interesting thing is, is if you actually study the statistics, there is no correlation between rising interest rates and what home prices do. Sometimes when interest rates have risen over the last 50 years, home prices have gone down, sometimes they've stayed the same. Sometimes they've gone up, the single biggest driver on what the housing markets going to do is actually the amount of buyers to the supply of houses and that's supply and demand has much more of an impact than when interest rates are doing. So what interest rates do though, is they shrink the amount of units that are sold. If a market is used to selling 1000 houses a year, maybe it's going to sell 800 or 600 houses that year. So it does slow it down but slowing it down doesn't necessarily mean that home prices are going to to get worse.

Jim Manning  9:01 
So as far as the market goes, let's talk about the demand. So NAR did a study that over the last 10 years, there was an extra 5.5 million houses that needed to get built that just worked. We're in this housing shortage, we're in this housing crisis just went before interest rates went up, everyone was talking the housing crisis. And the number that's interesting that people don't talk about as much and I spent hours and hours and hours researching this, because we're making investment decisions. You know, we're buying millions of dollars of homes a year so I wanted to feel confident on whether we should be buying right now or not so, so I did a ton of research on this and I found a study by Harvard that suggests that there's another 21.7 million homes that need to get built through 2038. And the reason is, is that Gen Z and Millennials are the biggest demographics right now. They're in their peak home buying years, so 5.5 million houses should have been built another 21.7 mil houses need to get built. That's right around 27 million houses through 2038 and there's a slight problem, who's going to build them? So I was talking with my friend, his name's Gary, he has 40 years of new construction experience here in St. Louis. That's the market I operate in St. Louis, Missouri. I said, hey, how are you guys doing? What's going on? And he said, well, our company has 500 employees, and we have enough demand for 1000 people to keep them busy all day without even thinking about it. And I can't find a 501st person to hire. I don't know where they're at, there's no one to build these houses. So with the supply and demand challenges, I think it's it's a pretty logical conclusion to realize a whole prices aren't going anywhere. We don't know how steeply they're going to appreciate. But we certainly can feel very confident that they're here to stay for a little while.

Ryan Miller  10:44 
Man wow. So there's a big, big short supply in all of those by the sounds of it and large demand so we've got a problem. Typically, when there's a shortage, large demand short supply, prices go way up. So if you want to be an investor that can be somewhat challenging if you're just starting out, but as you get going, the lot of appreciation, especially in that single family space, if would you say that's a fair summary?

Jim Manning  11:08 
Yeah, absolutely and that's so I mean, another strategy we're doing is we're trying to just buy and hold and think of it like a big land grab, right? We're just trying to buy and hold as much as we possibly can right now. And, and there's a lot of fund structures out there right now that are trying to do the same thing by the way. There's Vanguard and a couple of the other bigger players, there was a study that was done by I think it wasn't that life insurance, or they're estimating that that bigger funds are going to, you know own, 30% of all single family real estate by 2030.

Ryan Miller  11:35 
Wow.

Jim Manning  11:36 
And, you know, those those funds out there that have their analysts, they understand what supply and demand can do to pricing to you, right, it's like the wild wild west or something. You know, it's, you know, it's a shame, because the American Dream is something that's really important to me. I think owning your own roof, under you know, owning your own roof is a really important thing, to have that pride of ownership and unfortunately, affordability for starter homes, I don't see it getting better, it's going to continue to be a challenge, you know, for the next couple of decades. You know, and this is my crystal ball. That's as good as anybody's I suppose but it's hard for me to imagine this scenario where affordability gets better.

Ryan Miller  12:15 
So would you say that maybe looking forward based on that where the markets going? I'm putting myself in a Gen Z,  Millennials position being like, how am I going to afford this? Well one, you're you were originally talking about owning your own home but maybe as an investor, which you are, which I am, maybe there's more syndications. Do you see your you know, as you look into your crystal, your metaphorical crystal ball, do you see more syndications on the horizon? Or where do you see the market going from 2024 and beyond?

Jim Manning  12:41 
Yeah, I mean, I really think the syndications, the fund structures are really going to continue to be a big player and create more and more competition and more and more buying demand for these properties that, quite frankly are a lot of the industries are irreplaceable right now. You can't build a $200,000 house starter home anymore, inflation's private and lack of labor, in short, the labor shortage is a price that out now. So for me, it's an amazing investment opportunity, just buying hold on to a fixed inventory that cannot be replaced. Yeah, we can start getting creative and doing tiny houses, yeah, Elon, or somebody might create some robots that will build houses. These are all potential solutions that entrepreneurs and can come up with but I don't see robots building anything in the next couple of decades. Haha you know, figure that out and then to get it going and putting millions into it and everything like that right. So what are you seeing Ryan on this? Like, like, like, what, what are you thinking?

Ryan Miller  13:35 
You know, I, you know, all's I was thinking was I'm looking forward to the day when I just drive by and see robots building neighborhoods. So I'm on the venture side so of course, robotics gets the blood pumping for me. So yeah, but we see you know, what, in all seriousness, though, so I pay attention to interest rates, so we might see some softening. I know, elation actually started to tick up again, that just came out recently, maybe today. So we see inflation is still climbing up rearing its head so yeah, that's gonna be tough. This is really, really hard for regulators to do, as the saying goes regulated being regulators a hard job, and they just keep tapping on the brakes till something flies through the windshield. So they're still tap it on the brakes a little bit, trying to get that interest rate, right but as you know, I'm sure anyone in a highly levered product in real estate or private equity, this is going to be a bit of a challenge for them. It's not it's not, you know, a destroyer of worlds, but definitely we got to switch our game up so we're gonna see a lot of investment funds in the world that you and I operate in, Jim, a lot of people in highly levered products are really going to have to maybe might shift their thesis or their strategies or just how they calibrate their portfolios. That's going to be increasingly more important on these highly, highly levered alternative assets. Now, hopefully, 2025 it's going to have some softening there in 2026, as far as these highly levered interest rate dependent type of industries like yours, hopefully by then we're gonna see a nice ramp up but maybe less, less spicy with inflation. So hopefully, we'll see some nice growth without breaking Main Street.

Jim Manning  14:57 
Yeah, it's amazing doing this as long as I've been doing enough 17 plus years like this, the hustle just changes like, like when interest rates were low was the last thing in the world, you had to think about trying to get the lowest interest rate possible or whatever. And now, you know, interest rates are up so now maybe you need to go talk to negotiators, to start negotiations with three different, three different banks or, you know, like to try and get one every little payday you  can and every market personalities, you know.

Ryan Miller  15:23 
Yeah, you know, I thought a lot about this and you see Jamie Dimond, so talking about, you know, traditional banking, a lot of regulations coming out that traditional bankers are upset because it's gonna push a lot of people into private lending. So you might see a pickup in private lending, given these regulations, you also might see some tax incentives. So if the interest rates are high, so if really, if they're, whoever's in office, is in charge of that, if we're seeing high inflation, they're gonna hammer the crap out of it with high interest rates, right, they're gonna get that down. However, if you leave that alone, you have not fixed in fact, you may arguably have made these this housing shortage worse.

Ryan Miller  15:59 
And so what you may see is simple things like a lot of industries, there's taxes are always a great lever to influence industries. So you might see some accelerated depreciation, things come online for anyone who wants to be a builder or an investor who builds homes and so there may be some help, may be some help, but it's going to take a while, because they can't just keep, you know, hitting the interest rate button over and over and expect all of the economic problems to go away it will solve it typically is good for solving runaway inflation, but it could pick up problems in different areas. So you may see a combination of high interest rate, but also tax incentives for specific industries. So I would look at those two things, so not just highly levered, but also what are the tax incentives? And this, my friends, so we talked about changing structures, you respond to that, Jim, you asked my opinion, so so we're gonna let her rip, you may see a lot of different tax systems. And this underscores the change in fund managers, fund structures or alternative asset managers is now we can say, you can have an okay investment thesis an okay offer that is supremely well structured that is very finely tuned to the most modern tax incentives, and you might be able to pull out some alpha. So that's what I hope for, and I know hope is a horrible strategy. So that's not a strategy. I'm just saying, they got it, they got a lot of headwinds. So you're gonna see interest rates go up to hammer that and you may cross your fingers may see some better options on the tax front to better structure or just invest in existing ones and expand those out like 1031 opportunities zones. There's a lot of other incentives through venture capital. But again, if you're in a highly levered product structure in a high interest rate, Environment Matters. Would you agree?

Jim Manning  17:34 
Not only do I agree, but that is why what we just heard there, ladies and gentlemen, here's why I call you and get advice from you every chance I possibly can get. That was very well said and I have learned there's things I'm really good at. I know investing we know advanced real estate investing strategies. But what the nuance of what you just described there, my goodness, I have to have the right people around me because that's, you know, I can negotiate a creative financing deal on real estate all day. But that's that type of stuff, Jimbo needs some help.

Ryan Miller  18:05 
All right, you got it. Before we hit record, I promised you I'd use big words and try not to embarrass my mother, so there we go. So this is awesome. So yeah, so that's our market prediction folks, Jim and Ryan, we're just shooting the breeze just given our friendly opinion here. But we're not done yet my man. So you've been doing this a while. I've been doing this a while. I'm really curious if you had to start over or anything at all. If you just summarize, if someone's like, dude, give me in 5 or 10 minutes, just tell me the most effective stuff, summarize in three points, what have you found from all of your experience that you can leave for our listeners to help them to gain a competitive advantage from you? What would you say?

Jim Manning  18:42 
Yeah, absolutely. What a great question. So the first thing is, I would call it like finding your honey hole, finding that right niche that meshes with what are the markets? What I mean by that is like so when I first started out shortsea, in real estate, short sales, were half the market, we got really good at doing short sale deals. And what a short sale deal is, for those of you that don't know is  if a bank if a loan on a property is $200,000, and it's worth $100,000, it's talking to the bank and saying, hey, will you agree to sell the property short of the loan amount, so we got really good at that it was within our our natural skill set of running numbers and being investors that if you fast forward to today, for sales are non existent because people have more equity than they've ever had.

Jim Manning  19:25 
When I talk about finding like that right niche that meshes with today's market. It's having an awareness, there's not every strategy, not every business model is created equally. And whenever I've gotten out of what the market of the moment is, has felt like I'm like pulling teeth and I'm trying really hard and I'm just I'm just I'm making some profit, but I'm just not quite making as much as I as I feel like I should. And whenever I'm into a market, like we got into the lease purchase model, that's one of our real estate funds. We put a property up and we started marketing it and we had two different tenant buyers fighting over the property one offered us $30,000 before they moved in on day one, the other offer just $40,000. It's a lot easier to make money when you find a niche and a market opportunity that's underserved and has crazy demand. That's something that I've learned the hard way and I didn't have an awareness of how important that is, until gas has taken me 17 years to really, to really understand that and become aware of it.

Jim Manning  19:25 
And the other part of it is it's a combination it's not just what the market opportunity is, there's also an honesty part to it. I think you need to be brutally honest with like, hey, what's my team good at? What am I good at? What are my strengths? What am I not good at? Is this something that can financially drive my business. And when I get brutally honest, and in this, there's a sweet spot that happens when you mesh, something you're really good at with a market opportunity that's underserved and you're solving a problem that has a lot of financial upside, my goodness, the magic happens.

Jim Manning  20:58 
That is Ryan, how you go from a millionaire to a billionaire, when you're able to solve a problem for a niche like that underserved and when you hit it, it's just like putting gasoline on the fire and it's not like pulling teeth. It's like, oh my gosh, like like we're dealing with scaling up problems right now. Like, oh, my gosh, how do we raise 64 million dollars for our deals that than what we did last year, and we raised it and last year, we raised double the amount of money we have ever raised ever before. Like, like, but we've hit a nerve, we've hit a demand and it's not like pulling teeth. It's like, oh, my gosh, I we've caught fire. Does that make sense Ryan? How important that is?

Ryan Miller  21:35 
Absolutely.

Jim Manning  21:35 
Like, have you ever had some of the same experiences with any of your businesses? Have you, have you fought a market versus really got in sync with one?

Ryan Miller  21:42 
Yeah, fighting a market is never good. As they say the trend is your friend only if you're on the right side of it. If you're not on the right side of that trend in the markets moving in a direction you're moving in others, that's really hard to do. Now, it's not impossible to make money, because we have a word for that and it's called Contrarian investors is basically betting against the market. But that's not enough, you actually got to be right, imagine that. It's not enough just to be a rebel without a cause. You have to be that contemptuous, which I am at sometimes. But however, you really want to make sure that when you're going against the market, you gotta be right. And that's hard to do, right? Because emotionally, you're like, Am I crazy? Maybe I don't know, what am I doing and so going against the market.

Ryan Miller  22:18 
Now working with the market, especially in venture capital, but this goes in any kind of fun that you're working on. It is so so important to align with the market and VC, we call it product market fit, right? So we got to be like, cool. So there's you can build a thing, you could probably make money at this thing but do people want it? I don't know. And so really understanding that, is there a market which may not be the market? Like you said, it's regional? Is there a market that is very welcoming, accepting and looking for our solution? That's typically where I like to go? I'm not I mean, I'm a rebel at heart. But at the end of the day, the trend is my friend, we try to find what those are and make sure that there is some desirability for what it is we're putting out to the market. So that would be my approach.

Jim Manning  22:59 
Yeah and I get it. That's not what you said, isn't easy. I mean, that's what solving problems is. That's what being an entrepreneur and a business owner is. I promise you when you find that nerve, like I mean, our properties, or at least purchase deals, we're getting over 70 inquiries on every single one we put in and like there's five amazing people we could put in these properties. And gosh, like I would love to tell you I was smart enough to learn this lesson that we're talking about here, guys. Like when I started out, oh, I learned the hard way. And every time we start to like get to get a little stuck. It's like, okay, my has the market shifted a little bit of my you know, maybe, we have to pivot a little bit. It gets you know that what's that saying? A rising tide raises all ships, like a rising market raises all ships and you can be an av, there's certain markets when they catch fire, you can be a very average company and make millions and millions of dollars just because you hit the right market at the right time.

Ryan Miller  23:52 
Yeah and as the saying goes, Jim, the riches are in the niches man. So I like what you're talking about is just finding that niche, that niche though.

Jim Manning  23:59 
Absolutely.

Ryan Miller  24:00 
So the first one is just finding that niche that market fit, finding where those riches are, what else would you would you say if you had to start over or have somebody asked you to summarize your best advice.

Jim Manning  24:10 
When you're hitting a ceiling of achievement for your business. We talked about the market. So that's a component of it. There's also how you've structured your business. And businesses go through different ups and downs and ebbs and flows but to grow and scale, there are certain bottlenecks that you'll inevitably come across one of our first ones. So when we first started out, we were able to grow our business to do three property flips at a time, which for a 24 year old, the 20 were 24-25 Like, we're pretty proud of that. What we were doing was we were we had a private lender that was lending us 100% of the purchase price. And then Ryan the co founder with us me Ryan Wessels and myself, we were out of pocket funding all the repair costs, okay, so we were able to make profits and then we reinvest those profits so we can scale and grow and and start to make more money. That was great and we were very restricted within that model.

Jim Manning  25:04 
So we wanted to do more deals and as we were thinking about it, I thought, well, we're getting 100% money from our lenders, they trust us with that wonder if they would trust us to just give 100% of our repair money, why don't they just give us 100% financing on everything. And we talked to the guys that had already been lending to us for a number of years, they trusted us, you know, we had always done what we said we were going to do and gave them the returns, we promised we don't have for 17 years. Now, by the way, that's one of my really proud achievements but then what was amazing about that was the bottleneck that we had with the amount of deals that we could do was restricted the amount of money that we had suddenly became, we can do infinite deals, if we can raise infinite capital. So we're only restricted now by the amount of capital we can raise. And that's a whole lot faster to do that than to then to take six months or 12 months to do a deal, take those profits, put it into another house and then build it that way. And we went very quickly from doing three deals at a time to about six years later, we had 120 flips going at the same time. This was back in 2017, I think we had that many properties going and that was that was just such an amazing like so that was such an amazing learning opportunity for myself that a lot of times it's not work your way through real problems to scale up. It's it's think your way through it, and take the time to not just do do do do it's okay, wait, what's going on? What's what is the hidden bottlenecks that if I just thought about my business a little bit that I need to remove that I needed that I need to clear out so then the team can kind of get to the next level they can think and grow to the next height? So I do try it. I try to do that now. Like, hey, the billion, you know, we're working on growing our companies into a billion dollar organization, you know, what's getting in our way? Like, you know, what do we need to do to unlock the greatness within that, within this niche that we stumbled on that we can rock and roll?

Ryan Miller 26:51 
Man, I love that. Yeah, so really asking effective questions and that says, you know, you've been doing this for nearly two decades, asking a better question gets you better answered. So I loved exactly what you just said. You said, like what is stopping us? I know the vision, I plan the vision, it's a billion dollars, it's more of a goal. But either way, I'm sure there's a vision attached to it. and it's amazing. But if with that goal, whatever that is, we're just like what's standing in our way real talk. And so the great thing about not only making billions, but also leadership, and this is something we don't talk a lot about. But also in that leadership, scaling bottlenecks could be leadership, but it could also be propelling to it could be really good. And so asking that through effective leadership is just ask better questions, right? Jack Welch was known as that, right? So he would walk around and ask people questions be like, hey, what are you doing? I used to do that. I'm still recovering CFO. So I'm still in recovery. But I'm, I'm making it through with the proper medication and therapy. I think I'll be just fine in a few years. But in all seriousness, what, what I would do the similar thing, I had no idea Jack Welch would do that. But going around and just asking better questions. That's exactly what you've done. Am I asking better questions, folks, if you're a leader or you aspire to be, don't ever set the precedent that you have all the answers? In fact, if you're good, and you stay close to your team, just like Jim demonstrated, you would ask what's standing in our way? You'd be surprised through effective leadership, you can get the answer.

Jim Manning  28:06 
I love that you shared that, Ryan, because it actually reminds me of one of the biggest leadership flaws that I've had, that I've had to overcome. I don't know about you guys, but for me, like, Oh, I'm, I took the visionary test. I'm a 98%, visionary, visionaries had all the strategy and all these ideas, and, and I had a lot of my personal worth tied in, that I was the guy, I was the guy that had the idea. And ego will kill a company faster than anything.

Jim Manning  28:32 
And what Ryan said was so powerful was, hey, he would ask questions, and let the answers come from the guys doing that function every day. And tapping into the brilliance of the team, there can be an idea that like maybe Ryan or I could have for our company, and maybe it's a little bit better than what a team member would have. Let's just stroke our egos a little bit and say it's a little bit better. But if that team member doesn't have buy in, because it wasn't their idea, and they don't truly own it, the execution of it will likely be far worse than if it was their idea, not quite as good, but they have 100% ownership of it, to be able to like take it and put it into the company and grow and and that was that that had we talked about bottlenecks earlier we also we we create our own bottlenecks as leaders often and that was one that really was a massive blind spot for me till we hired our current CEO. I didn't see it, I didn't realize that how many problems I was creating because of that. Yeah, it hurt my ego quite a bit because I had to take a step back and and realize that I was trying to be this know at all and, and I was masking it as all I'm just trying to contribute. I'm just trying to help others or help the company. When, yes, the pitches were probably good and at the same time, trying to make myself feel pretty good and be the guy with all the answers. So yeah, thank you for sharing that. I mean that that is something that I think holds more leaders back than just about anything. I know what held me back.

Ryan Miller  29:53 
Yeah, you know, you reminded me in an earlier episode, I talked about the five things in Episode 100 The five things that hold us back very often, we like you said, stand in our way. But one of the things that we talked about, and this was a big one, for those of you who are listening to me, Jim, we're both executives, we're both CEOs, we run our own funds, we do all these things. Sure, we're busy but we're really trying to make a difference. But one of the things that I would challenge many of you, first of all, go listen to episode 100, but if not, let me summarize it. Remember, really check on yourself. You can't tell me and Jim, Jim and I are being very vulnerable right now, as executives, we're also human beings, when you're doing something, check inside yourself, are you doing it for love, or from love? So difference, often as executives will be like, I'm doing it from love. I love my people, they're awesome, they're amazing, I love my team, they really do! But sometimes you can get caught in that place and I'm not saying anyone, you or me or anyone, Jim are doing that. But I'm just saying challenge yourself because often we all we're humans we like to be liked and often we do these things out of obligation, trying to get love or approval. And that typically doesn't end well. I don't know about you. It's never ended well for me. But when I come from a place as a leader, and I come from a place of love, rather than doing things from a place for love, it's complete gamechanger. And people notice it without realizing they're noticing it that you can feel the authenticity of leadership. So what does all this mean? It goes right back to what Jim was talking about, identify the bottlenecks, even if that is you, especially if that is you?

Jim Manning  31:12 
It's most likely, you.

Ryan Miller  31:14 
It's most likely you, yeah. All right, everybody, it's your fault, just own it,  just take that one on the just take it all, but that's the extreme level of ownership. That's what leaders have to do, you have to be above the rest, not in the ego or your self worth that's not what we're talking about, we're just saying your standards need to be high. And you have to have that extreme level of ownership and accountability on your self, to make sure that you've tended to the garden, the soul, make sure that things that come from the inside out, really do demonstrate a lot of value and create that leadership, my friends can create a ton of value. So identifying those bottlenecks. If it's you, it's your leadership team, if it's the way your corporate structure, I mean, there's a lot of ways. But I think what Jim is saying is, don't forget to turn that magnifying glass on yourself as a potential possibility as a bottleneck, let's just assume you are the cause of some bottlenecks, and then work backwards from there. Would you say that's a fair summary?

Jim Manning  32:05 
It's eloquent and eloquent summary.

Ryan Miller  32:08 
Thanks, brother. Awesome, man. So I, you know, I tease you with with three items. I know there was a time in early in your career you shared with me and I was wondering, maybe for the third one, if you wouldn't mind sharing, as you're on Making Billions the time that you had the fortunate opportunity to work directly with a billionaire, maybe share that.

Jim Manning  32:27 
Okay. Yeah, great. So, you know, it's a perfect topic for this, because because if you're listening to this show you you're crazy enough to have that goal, like the pinnacle of business achievement, you know, building a business into a billion dollar enterprise as a 22 year old. As luck would have it, I ended up getting a side gig for a self made billionaire. And so what I did was I worked for him for two weeks, and I would take a bottle of wine out, I print out a label and I put the what the wine was and like how much it was worth, I put a little sticker on it, and I put the wine bottle back in. At one point, I was flying on his private jet drinking $1,000 bottle of crude champagne and unfortunately, I just graduated college at the time. So I wasn't sipping it and enjoying it. I was just chugging it. So if I could could get my my 22 year old self some advice. Enjoy the $1,000 bottle of champagne don't, chug it like, frat guy. But like the amount of like the wine collection at one point, I had 250 grand in my hands and it took me it took me two other guys, three of us two full weeks of taking a bottle out it putting a sticker on it and putting it back in. That's how much money this guy had and as a 22 year old, it's like, whoa, this is this guy's incredible. Like, I had no idea. I'm from a middle class family. And I didn't know this existed, like, America lets you do this, this is unbelievable. I went to his penthouse, I met his girlfriend, which was more attractive than any girl I had even thought entertained and I was a collegiate athlete was in great shape. But just like completely gorgeous and this guy is in his 60s. He's wider than he is tall, you know, completely bald and, you know, I just didn't know what to think of this guy other than like, man, I'm kind of starting to idolize this guy. This guy is like, maybe my hero. I don't know, I've never had a hero before but he could be it, you know.

Jim Manning  34:18 
So then as I continue to work for him, I saw the dark side of what becoming a billionaire can be and as the onion peeled back, and I got to know him more, I realized, wow, this guy's miserable. His wife hates him shocker, his daughters won't talk to him and he's hanging around with me building like a relationship with the help with his 22 year old kid that doesn't know anything. It's just a 22 year old kid, you know, looking for some beer money, right? Because he has no one else to go to no one else to talk to and so on one hand, I got the man this is a guy. This guy puts on one pant leg at a time, he's just a guy like, like an American dude can do this. If he can do it, I can do it. I can become a billionaire. And then on the other hand to get that experience of what that cost potentially could be robbed of all joy, robbed of your family.

Jim Manning  35:09 
So I had this experience, and then the gig and the two weeks was over, I flew back in town, and I got like, 2 o'clock in the morning, I got back and I started my corporate America job, my college job the very next morning, and I got there and I knew within, I literally knew within an hour of being at the place of corporate America is not for me, I need to do my own thing, I have to run my own business. And as I built up for it, I did my first real estate deal I got in, I made a promise to myself that, that I'm going to strive and go after that billion dollar enterprise. And I'm going to waive the success by what I gave up to get it. Wow. So really, the goal of what I'm trying to do on the Making Billions is to to have that joyful environment for my kids, the way I have the way most of our way many middle class people have, like the downside of of building an enterprise right can be a tremendous cost. And so like I have that in mind going into it, and the only way I've been really able to achieve this so far. And as the business continues to grow, like I constantly have to battle, this is like I will work, I mean, I'll work 80 hours a week and not even care because I'm building something and I have fun with it. I'm solving problems, right?

Jim Manning  36:20 
What I learned from a mentor is to not just do a business vision. So the business vision is one component of it, but what about a personal life vision as well. So if you do a personal life vision first and figure out who you are as a person, what you want your family life to be like, right? Then stack on top of that business vision and our business vision, by the way needs to serve the personal vision. If it doesn't, then the business strategy, like it needs to change because you said like, hey, this is the vision for my life and what I want to do. So that's been an amazingly important thing that I've implemented, and that I'm really proud of like, I coach, I coach, my kids, my daughter's softball team, I go to my son's baseball team, I go to almost all their games. And it's not that I don't have different seasons, like this year, I'm in a season of work. And I sat down with my wife, I said, I'm going to work more than I have the last couple of years because we're at a tipping point in our business is getting ready to explode and it's just going to take an extra lift this year. Are you willing to be in that with me and she agreed.

Jim Manning  37:17 
Now, the only the only agreement that I have in my head is like, I'm going to be there for dinner time. If my wife needs some help, I'm picking up a kid or something like that. That's great and yeah, maybe I'm working at 10 o'clock that night after the kids go to bed because I'm into spam in a sprint right now. But I'm going to look at my personal life with the same regard the same goal setting the same intention, as I do my business. And I can't, that's the only way I've been able to let go of feeling guilty that I'm not working and building my business when I'm at home. And then being at work and feeling guilty that I wasn't I'm not as present as I need to be with my kids. I'm sure as entrepreneurs, everybody's had that feeling where it's like, like you're not fully present in either world, right? Where I literally I took my personal life and I gave my absolute and and I said no. Okay, this is a weekend, my intention or my goal is to be a dad today and I need to achieve that today just the same way like I'm trying to make a sale. And it's a little bit strange of a way to look at it I think I think most of the population that's entrepreneurs, a lot of y'all listening get it? I know you do. But that has worked at such a high level for us, it's been and it's a way to avoid burnout I had coffee with, with an individual that he has a very successful business that runs culture for a fortune 500 company that is known for culture. I didn't even know this company outsourced culture, but his company runs it for the entire for this entire airline. And he told me, he said, hey, you know, I have just a lot of a lot of friends, one of my buddies is worth over $500 million and he's completely burned out, he's absolutely miserable. He doesn't have any he doesn't feel like he has any friends. And you know, he doesn't have a relationship with his kids or his wife and, and he literally would give it all the way to have more friends and have a connection with his family. It would literally throw 5, write a $500 million check if he could do it and unfortunately, the bridges have been burned and he can't.

Ryan Miller 39:12 
That is a powerful, powerful final note. So I'll have a few comments on that but before we do before we close everything out. Is there anything else that you'd like our fans around the world to know anyway? If they can reach you or any anything at all?

Jim Manning  39:26 
Yeah, absolutely. So a big part of like, why I'm getting on podcasts is to just provide value for people. It's one of the best things about Ryan about you, Ryan, you're very much a giver and you try and provide value and and so if you go to jimmanning.com I have a lot of just have a lot of great gifts for you. I spent hours and hours and hours researching the real estate market. I have a free white paper on there. In 2022 we generated millions of dollars of passive income using three strategies. I have a free course on that if you're interested in on investing in real estate funds. I have a course on that that's very comprehensive that I can teach you how to analyze different funds and look out for different risk structures. There's also information if you have an interest in investing in real estate and want to learn more about our funds, they just go to jimmanning.com and there's a whole lot of capital out there, right. So the goal of it is like, I just want to provide value and I want to help and if the stars line up, or we have some deals and somebody has some capital, great we can, we can do some things. But if not, if I can equip you to be a smarter passive investor, to know what to look for, to know what some of the risk factors are, to allow them to do other deals like like, like, without me, I don't care, I just, I just want to help them provide value. So we are going to have a cost to them on on my main podcast, but Ryan, for you as a gift to the Making Billions community. If you go to that jimmanning.com, you can get it all for free and you don't have to pay the it's about $2,500 with this stuff. Just put in your name and your email, and have fun with it guys.

Ryan Miller  40:54 
Awesome. Wow, thank you, man. That's very generous. So just to just to recap everything I want to mention something I'm going a little off script. That story you mentioned of the billionaire, I think there are a ton of lessons all summarized from literally every episode I've done in the show comes down to this, there is a difference between being rich and being wealthy. While both rich and wealthy people have a lot of money, you got to be very careful on the goal you set, I would challenge you, anyone listening to the sound of my voice, do not set a goal to just be rich. Nothing wrong with tha but I think if you're listening to the show, you're looking for a little bit more instead, while rich people have a lot of money. Wealthy people have an abundance of life. Wealthy people have an abundance of relationships and capital, and time and they take that capital and reinvest it in improving relationships, and saving their time.

Ryan Miller  41:45 
And so I would challenge all of you don't just set a goal to be like that guy who's made all that money wildly rich. But unfortunately, with all that money, he never achieved real wealth, did he? With all of that money, he was ready to give away his riches because he, like many of you climb that ladder reached the top only to realize he leaned it against the wrong wall and I've been there. And maybe many of you listening to it are there right now. So my challenge to you, all of you listening to me right now is remember that real wealth is in a family that will talk to you, right? Or whatever those relationships are, maybe it's not family, maybe it's friendship.

Ryan Miller  42:23 
So remember, it's not enough to make billions just in capital. But make sure what you do with it improves the relationships around you and improves the time that you spent. And so the easiest way I've always found I'm a big fan of investment funds is you want to own assets or companies that other people run. Be an owner, not an operator. That is how you go from just being another rich guy to someone who's wildly wealthy, tons of capital, love all around, great friends impeccable reputation in a wonderful set of relationships, you do these things, and you too will be well on your way in your pursuit of Making Billions.

Ryan Miller  43:09 
Wow, what a show. I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did. Now if you haven't done so already, be sure to leave a comment and review on new ideas and guests you want me to bring on for future episodes. Plus, once you head over to YouTube and see extra takes while you get to know our guests even better. And make sure to come back for our next episode where we dive even deeper into the people the process and the perspectives of both investors and founders. Until then, my friends stay hungry, focus on your goals and keep grinding towards your dream of Making Billions.