Wealth Made Simple

The Wholesaler Now Building Dutch Bros Locations | Cody Sperber

• Karlton Dennis

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The people building nine-figure fortunes right now are not who most of "hustle culture" pays attention to. Roofers. Plumbers. Solar installers. Flooring guys. They are quietly walking away from their businesses with $90M, $150M, and $200M exits while the loudest voices online are still arguing about stocks versus real estate.

In this episode of Wealth Made Simple, I sat down with Cody Sperber, serial entrepreneur, CEO of Floor Daddy, and one of the original faces of real estate education online. Cody walks through how he scaled Clever Investor to eight and nine-figure events, sold the business twice and clawed it back once, and why he is now betting on flooring and commercial development for brands like Chick-fil-A, Valvoline, and Dutch Bros. We get into what he learned inside the $100M mastermind about the "new rich" who nobody is watching, why leadership is a systems problem before it is a talent problem, and how bonus depreciation on commercial real estate is quietly wiping out millions in tax liability for the operators who actually study the code.

If you are building a business, buying real estate, or trying to figure out which asset class actually matches how you are wired, this conversation is worth your full attention. Cody does not sugarcoat the payroll math, the emotional discipline it takes to run a real company, or what separates the operators who scale from the ones who stall. If you want to go deeper on the tax code side of what we discussed, you can grab a copy of my book, The Art of Legal Tax Avoidance, at the link below.

#wealthmadesimple #codysperber #realestate

SPEAKER_01

This is what it takes to build a $5 billion business. And then the reality of it, I I scaled to a million five a month very quick. Then at the last minute, canceled and pissed off the brokers of the banks, and the broker called us and said, All right, young bucks, you guys think you want to play in this fucking game? Let's see if you're serious. Right? Like who would do that?

SPEAKER_00

Cody Sperber, serial entrepreneur and the CEO of FloorDaddy.com. Cody Sperber, thank you for joining us.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, yeah. Thanks for having me on.

SPEAKER_00

Absolutely. I'm gonna jump right in, man. You're you've been in real estate for quite some time. Talk to us what it was like getting into real estate and where we're at today, because a lot of people feel like real estate's dead, and we have people like Graham Stefan coming on the internet saying, I'm taking all my money out of real estate and putting it into stocks.

SPEAKER_01

Uh Graham Stefan's a fucking idiot if he's saying that. Uh, I I don't think there is one right or wrong way. It's like, who are you to say, get your money out of real estate? At any point in time, I'm making a fortune in real estate right now. At any point in time, someone's getting paid on that transaction. A lot of people, right? There's always a buyer, always a seller. It's just, are you do you have the right strategy? Do you have the right unfair competitive advantages? Do you have a brand? Do you have money or no money? Are you creative? Are you clever? Are you are you able to see hidden profit centers that 99% of the world, like Graham, doesn't fucking get? And if you have the skills and capabilities, you could do really well. And look, I like I actually like Graham. I I think he's cool, you know. This is love, by the way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not I'm I'm I'm just being real. If that's what he said, I would I would I would challenge it.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, he did say he took his money out of real estate, or he he looked at over the last five years what his return was in real estate relative to his return in the SP 500. Yeah, yeah, that's his return.

SPEAKER_01

That's his return. Those aren't my returns, yeah, right? Those aren't my return. And so it's a are are you in the development game? Are you in the buy and hold game? Are you in the apartment game? There's so many verticals in real estate. Everybody's got a different thing. And and look, I'm not an entrepreneur supremacist. I don't care what your hustling is. If you're in the stock, like my girl, so into stock trading, it's crazy. All day, every day, obsessing, learning. It she's like me when I was first getting into real estate. I love that for her. I tried to get her into real estate. She's she started doing some research, and she's like, I'd rather die than do this. She's not lit up at all. Yeah, so you have to listen to your inner voice that lights up that says that like for me, when I found real estate, I was actually going to school for finance. I was going to only do stocks. Yeah. Every part of my soul was screaming at me saying, I hate this. Um, and then um grew him, grew, and Nick Fisher was my uh Nick Fisher was my uh CMO. Wow, yeah, gave him four million dollars a year to learn how to run Facebook ads. Yeah. Did well, man. Guy was a big loss when we lost him. Yeah. Um, but uh yeah, so uh did the education thing for many years, 23 years in in regular residential real estate. Okay, about you know, maybe seven hardcore years in bigger commercial deals, lots of development, lots of wait, like we like Chick-fil-A, Farmer Boy, uh Valbeline. Um I'm building nine Dutch Bros right now. They want us to build 90. So what's a Dutch Bros? Coffee shop. Okay. Drive-thru coffee. Any quick service drive-thru restaurant is our client. So it so essentially on the development, so the fund, it all the reason I'm prepping you is just because it all ties together. So it started with just house flipping, then it moved to rehabbing, and then it moved to commercial. I'm sorry, then to spec building. And while I was building that out, I was wholesaling and then I started teaching people, and then that business blew up. And so I ran real estate and the education parallel for since 2009, and then um uh started other little a bunch of little businesses that fucking sucked and failed, and yeah, whatever. And then um uh a couple years ago, I sold I started selling some businesses, and that gave me some freedom to start new companies. So Florida is what I actually run on my day-to-day right now. I actually I sold clever twice, actually. Took it back. Your business I didn't buy it back, he had to give it to me back and walk from millions and millions and millions of dollars that they paid me. And then uh I took it back, fixed it, and then resold it and flipped it again. And now I own 20% of it. So I didn't know when I sold it the first time, I didn't own any. I was out, and now I can't I'm staying in to make sure it's good and it's very profitable now. We're scaling like crazy, and so that's blowing back up. But during the break of selling it and then taking it back a year later, I started Floor Daddy, yeah, which is scaling like crazy. We're the fastest growing flooring brand in the country right now.

SPEAKER_00

What made you get into flooring? Let's talk about that. Flooring, yeah. Uh someone that's doing real estate to then sit stop and say, I'm gonna go do flooring.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, well, I mean, it's think about it. Or run it alongside. I love things. I love um future-proof businesses that are scalable, automatable. Um, if you really think about any of the home service home improvement space, uh at Clever, I was I was I scaled that business so big, and our events were all the events today in the real estate space model our events. We were, you know, 3,000-person mega events, where we're renting out clubs and bringing on celebrities and doing all this crazy shit. We were making like eight, nine million at an event, which back then was a lot. And um were you hosting them here? All over, all over the country. And uh we uh at the events, sometimes we'd sell a mastermind, right? And so um, and I got to know like every major player, every major speaker in the gang, like all the big authors, everybody wanted to speak on our stages, and so uh became really good friends with Dan Fleischman back in the day. Um, and we just became like brothers. And for many, many years we just supported each other, helped each other. And then one day he came to me and he's like, I got this idea for this crazy mastermind. It's it's gonna be like unlike any other mastermind in the world, it's gonna be called Hunter Mill, and I want you to be part of it. I need I need your help. And so I was the him and another guy named Joel owned it, but I was the third partner behind the scenes that actually ran it, like ran the ran the uh the back end part of it, the digital part of it, all that stuff. And so uh we started running these masterminds and it was a hundred thousand dollars of joining. It was a hundred spots. We went up and down California, we sold it out within a month. And uh I'm like, who the hell pays a hundred thousand dollars to be part of a group? Right? Like, who would do that? And I meet these people and it's like, oh, I sold my roofing business for 150 million. I'm like, damn, roofing? That's crazy. Oh, what do you do? I sold my plumbing business for 90 million, I sold my, you know, solar business. It was like all these like home service and home improvement businesses. I'm like these businesses. I'm like, damn, this is the new rich. I'm over here in this digital world, this real estate development world. I'm not even paying attention to like the blue-collar millionaires that are just absolutely murdering it right now. And so I started to pay attention and I realized it's a very scalable business, private equity loves it. It's AI is not going to disrupt it anytime soon. And you're if you have good marketing skills, you're competing against like Bob's flooring company. It's some mom and pop technician that started a business and grew it to a little re like a little, you know, couple, maybe a couple stores or something. And I'm like, God, their marketing sucks. They have no clue what they're doing on digital, social. And I've been like basically practicing for 15 years on how to run ads and how to generate noise and take the oxygen out of the room. And so I was like, I think I could scale this and sell it very quickly. And plus, I'm a branding guy, you know, all my companies have cool names. Oh Snap, Liquid Nutrition, Snap Packs. We're we're cutting edge technology delivery vehicle for liquid nutrition. Clever investor, you know, it's it's catchy. Everybody jumped on board with the Clever Investor bandwagon when I launched it. And we created a great community, great brand. Floor daddy, sexy, fun, playful name, yeah, you know, very easy to remember. And when I was starting it, I went around to just people like you, just like, you know, like somebody sitting at a table. I'd say, hey, I'm just curious, can you name a flooring company in town? And they what's that one with the jingle? The jingle, or something on TV, 1-800 Express? Yeah, something like that. Express flooring or the Empire, you know, call it everyone. Yeah. And it's like they maybe can name one or two. They couldn't name three, four. Absolutely not. And so I was like, Oh, there's a massive opportunity to just dominate. And then the reality of it, I I scaled to a million five a month very quickly, which is insane. I was when did you start the business? I'm now two years old. Well, okay, wow. Yep. And so I I I I I did 13 million my first year, and you know, it it was like a pretty fast progression to get up to a million and a half dollars a month, and I fucked everything up. It was uh school of hard knocks education on like how does this actually work, right? And what you realize is like any business, there's a million moving parts. Installation is the Achilles heel, sales, branding, marketing, all that's easy. Getting the opportunity to pitch somebody, easy. Even yeah, closing the sale, fairly easy, a little bit more challenging because you're up against some big dogs with big money and a big brand. But I didn't find that too challenging. Then you get to okay, now we got to perform and we got to do it at a standard and a level. And because for me, when I looked around at my competitors, they had thousands of negative reviews.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

And I was like, I want to create a standard so insane. Like if I had it my way, I would have every single one of our people, if they ever walked into your house, they would wear a full hazmat bunny suit. I want them to treat your house like it's the greatest thing that ever they've ever stepped into. The palace. They protect it. It's not feasible in real world, but that's how my standard is. Like, I want them, I don't want to sell flooring. I don't want to compete in the flooring space. I want to sell a flooring experience. I want people to go, what the frick just happened? How did that? Not only did you transform my homes, because I think the floors are the smile of your house. Yeah, absolutely. You walk in, it's like, oh, this is a nice place.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Right. And you could radically transform somebody's house by their floors. And it's a big investment. That's the other thing I looked at. When you when you sell a t-shirt and you make three bucks or two bucks a shirt, you have to sell a gazillion of them. Yes. When I sell a floor, my average ticket is $11,418. I know exactly on average what we're gonna do. Yes. And so it's like, okay, if I can sell it with the right profit margins and really dial in the installation standard, the communication standard, and just be so world-class at everything else, I can create a billion-dollar national flooring brand in five years. And so that was my goal.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

And but the reality is it's much, much harder to do that because you have so many people involved in the transaction. Right. And they're not, and it uh it takes somebody, just an enigma like me, who's just an obsessed, crazy human, uh, to set the ceiling so high that the floor has to fight to keep up with me. And that's what I'm doing. I'm just I I I I created something called Razzle Dazzle. What is this? Well, I stole it from Andy Frisella. Um, like if you know you know Andy first form, you know, Andy's been a great human friend to me. He's been uh uh somebody I I've always looked up to. He's been very kind every time I asked him to do anything, he gets on a jet, comes and speaks on my stage. He never speaks on anybody's chick. He does it, and you know, he he's just special human, you know? Yeah. And one time I had um a mastermind group I brought to him and I said, I want to come to your space and tour your facility at first form. And uh then I want to end up in your garage with all these humans, and I want to be in your bajillion dollar car collection, and I want you to just mind fuck us and you know, give us the goods. Yeah. And he was like, Cool, come on down. And so we we made the pilgrimage to first form headquarters. And when you walk into that place right away, you realize it's different, you realize why it's a four to five billion dollar company. Yeah. You and it takes leadership like Andy, who's just a savage, to get the culture so bought in that when we were touring the facility, he has this a magnificent gym. And I was talking to Andy about man, I would love to have my own personal gym in my office, like what he has with my logo on all the weights and all this. I mean, it was just beautiful, beautiful. And it's a massive building. I mean, he has like six massive buildings, but this building's massive, and there's like offices and and and cubicles and stuff, and then there's this gym. Well, I picked up the weight when I was talking to him, and I looked at it and I said, I want to get a logo on it. I put the weight down and I just started walking with Andy. I see this young kid from a football field away running full speed towards us. Walks over, picks up the weight, turns it a quarter turn, sets it back down, stares at it for a second, then leaps all bolts all the way back to the desk. And I go, What the fuck was that? I was like, what just happened? And he goes, Razzle Dazzle. And I go, What the hell's razzle dazzle? And he goes, That's our standard. I want every person that walks into here to have the same experience as you. That's our attention to detail here at first forum. And I went, fuck, I am not playing this game. I am still stretching before the game. Like, I'm not in the game yet. Like, if this is what it takes to build a five billion dollar business, I'm not there. I will, I wasn't mentally thinking like that. Wow. And so as soon as he said it, I was like, I'm implementing Razzle Dazzle into every single thing that I do. I love that. It was it was unbelievable. It it radically shifted me as an entrepreneur. And so since then, Razzle's been part of my whole culture. And so we actually trait marked it. So we we we we we implemented Razzle at FloorDaddy, which is our core values, our standards, it's our it's our software system that we built out of AI. It's our lead super sale. So if you go to FloorDaddy.com, you're gonna see, you know, the Razzle Dazzle super sale, and it's all these value ads. Because the way I look at it is I'm not gonna compete on price and do a race to the bottom. I'm going to look at my brand and I'm gonna say we're gonna be a little bit more expensive at times, not always, but look at all the value we bring to the table. Look at the standard of quality and excellence and communication standards and all that shit. Go look at everybody else's shitty one-star reviews and and actually take the time to read them. Yes, about how much they fucking hate those companies. And then if I have a bad review, number one, I'm gonna obsess over it until I fix it. Number two, because it's inevitable. I'm doing I'm doing a hundred and I'm doing 30 installs every single day of the week at all times. And I'm trying to uh right now, let's say I do 115 installs a month. I'm trying to get that to 250 with the big docs. And you're gonna have 10 to 15 go sideways at any point in time because you're ripping up people's house. Yeah. Asbestos, whatever, you know, um uh leaks, water that have you know, there's so many things in construction that could go wrong, and they do. And you got contractors and vendors and and and new flooring materials that act different in heat and cool, cold, and all this stuff. So there's a lot of things that could throw off a deal. And um, so, anyways, it was like I wanted to focus so much on this this excellent standard, yes, that I can control every part of the process.

SPEAKER_00

So, how can you control when you have contractors though, and they are 1099 and not W-2? That's a hard part because they get to control their own schedules to a certain extent, and you may have a standard, but they may choose to still do things a little bit their way. How do you kind of whip that into the way you want it to be?

SPEAKER_01

And not only do they do it their way, they fuck it up, and then you get the blame because you're the brand. Yeah, so yes, that is a challenge. Building in world class in-house crews, creating a school. I'm an educator, yeah. Well, let's let's educate our own in-house teams, grow them inside while we're still forced to use the vendors and stuff. Because, you know, even if I have 10 in-house crews, if I'm doing 30 installs, I you know, I I have to use some so you created an internal training to bring the Raz, the Razzle to them.

SPEAKER_00

Yep. How or else how else would they be able to experience that?

SPEAKER_01

They weren't there with you at the Andy Frazella Cilly. We're building it in real time right now. So it's it's my number one mission right now for the next probably six months is to continue to build this out. And it's gonna be a lifelong process. It's it's it's just something that became once I mapped out what Razzle is and how it's gonna work and what my vision for the future is. I believe that as an entrepreneur, you have four jobs. And if you pull these four things off, you're gonna be able to scale any business in any niche, it doesn't matter what it is. And so for me, obviously, job number one is to have a vision so fucking clear that I can enroll everybody around me into this vision. And so it's like I need to know exactly what we do with clarity, and I need to be able to transfer that to you and get you so excited about it that I enroll you into this concept. Yep. I need to know how we do it, right? I need to be technically able to pull off the vision. Yes. I then the Simon Cynic piece, which is why do we do this? What is we just doing this for money or is this bigger than money? Right? What what what's the purpose of this organization? And for me, every part of every organization I create is a for-purpose business. And what that means is there's a uh a charitable component attached to it, right? So it's like for me, I'm a veteran, I want to help veterans. I love animals, I want to help elephants, I want to help animals, I wanna I want to clean up the ocean, I want to do certain things. So there's a a charitable component to every transaction. It's built into the model, it's kind of like Tom's shoes. Yeah, buy a bear for me, I donate a pair.

SPEAKER_00

I like that, right?

SPEAKER_01

And so it's like getting clear on the why. Part of it is our team, part of it is we could do things better, and our customers deserve better, and the art of it could be charity and other things you you tie into it. But it people will give you more if they are fighting for more than just their paycheck. Yeah, absolutely they will. And then the last part, which is the hardest part for entrepreneurs, and and it's because a lot of times we're starting a business and we don't have the answers. We don't know what the fuck we're doing. And I speak on stages with all these guys. Everybody looks super polished, super amazing. Like they go on stage, they murder it, they say all the right words with the right tonality and the right things, and then they get off stage and they're a fucking duct tape disaster, just like me. And I'm like, oh, you a real motherfucker. Like, you just like me. I thought, I thought by if I just watched you for 45 minutes give your speech, I would have thought, dude, this guy is murdering it on every level. Perfect family.

SPEAKER_02

Perfect.

SPEAKER_01

Shit ain't perfect. As soon as they get on, I'm like, oh, you you're a mess, too. I I I like you. You're real.

SPEAKER_00

You deal with the same problems I deal with. You struggle to get off your cell phone just like I do. You have all the same things that we all deal with.

SPEAKER_01

That's exactly it. And so it's like the last part is the what's in it for you if you do it with me. And this is the hardest part to transfer because it creates alignment. But if I'm unsure, if I don't have certainty in my numbers, my KPIs, my, you know, you're you got an accounting financial background, it's like that's the hardest part. That actually knowing your numbers so detailed and where you can trust them that I can look at you and I can say, you're an entrepreneur, I'm an entrepreneur, here's a big vision, you got a big vision. I'm gonna pick your vision inside of my vision and create that alignment. And alignment equals velocity. And that's the only way to scale quickly, in my opinion, is get those four things dialed in. And then it becomes a game of are you? I'm I never shut off the hiring machine. I just I'm constantly hiring for every position in the company. It pisses people off because they're like, dude, I'm so sick of interviews, and I'm like, I don't really care. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Get the callus, dude, because we're not stopping these pull-ups, like we're just going to be age, always be hiring, always be hiring. And why is that? Because it's just the same philosophy that your girl does to you. Your girl wants you to know that there's a bunch of guys that want her. Because if nobody else wants her, I don't know if I want you either. If I'm being honest, I'm a hunter. All of a sudden, right now, right? Right? If all of a sudden, right now, I'm like, oh shit, somebody went and talked to you at the gym, and fuck these McLoon get to the gym, get to the gym, go do some more pull-ups and we're gonna get the lays real quick.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01

It's so it's like that's so that's human nature. And so it's like they're gonna fight harder for their position, and they're also gonna see, hey, I'm doing this for us because if you're doing your job well, yeah, I already have created a path for you to the next level and we need to fill your spot.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

And so you don't want to stay here, do you? You want to get paid more, don't you? You wanna you wanna grow with this organization and become a valuable person that when we sell this bad boy in five years, we all eat. Yes. And that's in and if I could do that correctly by uh by constantly moving people around and putting them in the right seats of the bus and making sure that alignment is and you got to fight for it every day, just like in your relationship at home. You got to fight every day for alignment with every team member. Wow. It's hard. It's the hardest thing I've ever done.

SPEAKER_00

Yes. But what you're saying right now is how you can scale because it's alignment. And one of the things that I'm reminded of is casting the right type of vision to your team and reminding them ruthlessly, ruthlessly of that vision. I'm going through business planning right now with my business coach. And one of the things we're identifying is, you know, we we announced our vision to our team members in our company right at the beginning of the year, right at the start of 2026, like everybody else did. Well, what habits or exercises are we putting into place to keep our team sold on the vision? And it sounds to me like you built processes that allows for alignment inside of your company, or maybe you can share with us those processes.

SPEAKER_01

I mean, it's this it's it's like uh dozens of things. It's not one thing, right? So, first off, the second you get hired, you go through a pretty heavy onboarding process. And part of that is I'm gonna give you a book that I made of how to work with me, Cody Sperber. Okay, the CEO and founder of this company. And it's about this thick, and it has all the rules of engagement. It is complete clarity. How do I think? What are my standards? What are our core values? Why do we have these core values? Why do we do marketing the way we do? What happens if you have a challenge? You know, do you have complete clarity on the entire process flow of what we do for a customer? So it's like if I'm in sales and there's uh fulfillment over here, right? And this is in installation in Florida, or if I'm in sales and clever investor, and here's mentorship over here in the mentoring department. If mentor if this department doesn't know what this department does, and this department doesn't have clarity on the steps that this department does, it's all made up in their head. And so I have to show them the whole customer flow chart of every step the customer takes in a transaction with us. So everybody goes, Oh, that's kind of okay. I see what we do. Then it's all of our software systems, and then it's what do you do if you have a problem? What is the process for you to overcome your problem? And so we map out how to overcome your own problems. It's sad that you got to go this deep, but you have you got to go this deep, and it's like you have a big vision. It's like otherwise they come to me and they go, Here's all my problems, and they take their monkeys off their back and they hand them to me, right? And they're like, What do I do? And I'm like, I already fucking hate you. Like, get get out of my office. Like, what do you mean? What do you do? Yeah, you better come with a better plan. Yeah, you better come with something, otherwise, why do I need you? And you're not training leaders, yeah. And so when you map all that stuff out, and uh they go through this onboarding, and then it's then it comes down to a meeting cadence and true leadership of what are the words you say to them. Like, for instance, today I'm having challenges with installations for many reasons. I have this team of world-class people, 37 in-house team members, all very talented with 15, 20, 25, 35 years of flooring experience. And we have all these self-inflicted communication challenges. And in what what happens is everybody's like writing reports about what happened instead of just fucking fixing the problem and making sure the customer is happy. And I'm like, dude, if I get one more stupid TPS report about the problem, I get it. Trash was left, somebody ate the ladies' cookies, they fell asleep on the lady's chair. What did it-da da-da-da? It's like, what do you what what are we doing here? And so I had instead of coming, guns blazing, because that's after like the 100th time repeating yourself, what you want to do at these meetings and say, Are you guys all fucking idiots? Yeah, what's the matter with you? This I'm paying you guys premium rates, premium, and you're all got all this, but we can't talk to them like that. That's not leadership. Yep, that's not leadership. So, what you got to do is you gotta step back and think, how do I get the most out of people? Well, first off, it's not a talent problem, it's a system problem. I had to go back and say, guys, I gotta take ownership here. I'm I got a world-class crew, very talented group of humans working the wrong system. And so we're gonna go back to a bet, we're gonna we're gonna implement a better system. And in order to transition from here to here, where I want us to go, we're gonna do a daily meeting cadence with a hot list of every problem flooring installation thing that we have. We're gonna we have a list, let's say there's 70 things on this list. We're gonna will it down to five over the next 30 days by meeting every day at 4:30. And we're not gonna have a bitch fest and we're not gonna have any issues. We're gonna have a what is the challenge? What is the solution? What is it, what who owns it, who owns it, and what is it gonna cost to complete it? And what is the completion date? Yeah, and we're gonna go through the hot, and we're gonna b-b-b-and. All of a sudden you feel this group of people and like they're bracing for like this ass kicking, and they're like, fuck yeah, we could do that. Now we got a plan, we got a better system. And I only bring that up because if you want to be a great entrepreneur, you have to control your fucking emotions. It's the hardest thing to do when your money's on the line. People Pipolf says a great line in one of his songs. He says, When you get pregnant, everybody wants to congratulate you, but nobody asked you how you got fucked. Think about that for a second. Nobody wants to glamorize payroll cleaning out your bank account, getting sued by one of your competitors because they don't like how fast you're moving and they think you're taking market share or whatever. One of your team members or employees, whatever you want to call them, stealing from you and going starting a hustle just like yours. They don't want they don't want to know about all the pain and and and and and the problems and the and the loss of sleep and the stress that you carry while they're getting paid on a Friday and you can't even fucking breathe because you ain't you they just your bank account's cleaned out. That's real shit. That's real entrepreneurship. And you know, you have to get out of that feeling of scarcity and fear and all this stuff, and you have to get back to being very stoic, yeah, and learn how to control your emotions at all times, no matter what is happening around you. Yeah, hard to do. One of the hardest things you'll ever do, especially as a man. I think. Yes, it is, yeah. And I could do it. It it's taken about a decade of losing great people because I said some dumb shit, losing millions and millions and millions of dollars, making the wrong decisions, overreacting, panicking, you know, whatever that was. Um in ten years of time before I finally got there, to where I'm like, now people will hand me a lawsuit and I'll be like, throw it in the pile of the other ones. Let's go. I don't, you know, this is just business. Somebody, you know, I had a girl quit the other day. Everybody was panicking. Oh, I think, I think one of our ex-employees recruited her. I'm like, one, I'll get to the bottom of that. And two, you need to lower your people expectations because people are gonna come and go, yeah, this thing. And my only goal is if they get off this bus, that I leave them better off than I found them.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

If I do that, then I'm good. And we're gonna keep this party train moving forward because I got a very clear mission of building a billion-dollar flooring brand.

SPEAKER_00

So stay on mission. Yeah. I feel like there's a lot of entrepreneurs now, uh, Cody, that are trying to build an exit. Talk to me a little bit about your strategy and what you're trying to do with your business.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, so you know, coming from a creative real estate background, you know, I I learned I started doing creative real estate 23 years ago. And part of not having money is you have to become very resourceful very quickly. And I think the best entrepreneurs are very resourceful. You know, most of my friends that are great entrepreneurs sold drugs, you know, they, you know, sold candy, sold drugs, started little hustles very early, uh, and then they smartened up and they applied their hustle to something more productive and and better for their for their lives. And um, you know, when when you're when you don't have a lot of resources or money, all right, you have to get resourceful. And so in real estate, you never have a money problem, you have a creativity problem. And what I learned through my mentor is there's a lot of ways, a thousand ways to do a deal that don't involve cash or credit. We're here in Pace Morby's office, right? Yeah, you know, you're great friends with him, king of creative finance, right? Whatever he wants to call himself. But you know, it's it's true. He he goes, he he he's bought hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of houses without ever signing his credit or putting up big money, and figures out a way to make a lot of money from them. And so when you when you grow up in that environment, and I've done 2,500, 3,000, I've lost track deals at this point, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them sitting at a kitchen table just like this, wheeling and dealing. You get pretty good at being creative. That's why I called my company Clever Investor. There's a lot of ways to do it, and I took that same skill set over into the flooring business in any of all my companies. And so my first few companies I sold, I didn't know how to sell a business because it's not like somebody teaches you this shit. No, so I'm just like, okay, what do you want to pay me for it? You know, uh, I don't know. Uh, what is it worth? I think it's worth $15 million. Okay, I'll uh I want to pay you six. All right, well, give me, give me nine, give me ten, give me whatever. Well, I don't have 10. Okay, what do you got? I got a million in cash. Okay, pay me a million in cash, 100 grand a month, 7% interest rate. I'll carry back. So my first few businesses I flipped was all just seller carry back, creative finance, just anything just to get money in the door with a bunch of clauses and stuff that says if you fuck it up, I get it back, you know, yeah, immediately. Yes. And um, and so that's how I was originally doing it. And then through that process, you end up getting a lot of the companies back, and you're like, oh shit. All right, this isn't the best method for doing it. And so now with Fordaddy, I mean, we're taking it very serious. Um, so first off, the accounting's got to be done the right way from the beginning. Yes, it does, and that's the hardest part because when you're gap accounting, yeah, exactly. And the hardest part is you want to run everything through the business to get all these extra benefits and expenses as an owner, and then it lowers your EVITA. Exactly. And you kind of treat it like a personal piggy bank. You can't do that if you're really being serious about scaling a real company. And and so, you know, like with FloorDaddy, my partners, I have great partners, and none of us take a paycheck from the company. Not one of us. And I went and partnered with one person in particular. His name is Tommy Mello. He's a very successful entrepreneur in the uh home service, home improvement space. In fact, he's one of the largest in the game, owns the number one largest garage door repair and sales company in the country, doing well over a hundred and something million dollars in EBIT per year. Uh it's called A1 Garage Doors. And so about four months, five months into me running the business, Tommy called me up and he was like, Sperber, what the fuck is Floor Daddy? And I'm like, it's exactly what you think. I'm playing in your world. And he's like, I want in. You know, he's already exited from A1 Garage Doors once. He still owns a large percentage of it. He might have a few more exits. But I'm like, okay, Tommy, if you want in, I want to know how to do what you're doing. And the reason I'm bringing up this whole story is we don't know what we don't know. And I needed great mentorship, like I did in real estate, like I did in the supplement business, like I did in the social media game. You need great people around you because your inputs determine your outputs. And so I'm just like, look, I'm gonna go find the biggest, baddest motherfucker in the game. And I just was, you know, when Tommy popped up, I said, that's him. That's him. I want to give you equity. He was trying to buy in it. I'm trying to give him equity in this cut phone call. And I'm like, I want to do exactly what you did. I know how to grow a business. I've done what I've done. And my my best years, I was bringing in, you know, $25 to $28 million a year. But I've never done $100 million in a year. Yeah. I've never done $150 million in a year, $200 million in a year. I want to get there. So I really don't need help for my first year to first two years. I pretty much know how to start and scale a business pretty damn good. But around the two-year mark, I want to start a meeting cadence with your entire leadership team. I want you to be up my ass with our financials and make sure that I'm I'm running our books exactly how private equity and investment bankers would want us to do it based on your experience of already scaling and selling at the highest level. And it was very difficult for us to implement. I hated it.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. Changing your accounting is so difficult, especially when you're in a cash basis and you got to go over to accrual basis and you're switching to gap accounting. It's tough. And then you're untraining certain things that you were normally used to doing.

SPEAKER_01

And bringing in a real CFO who had been doing it for the last six months now. So for the first year and a half, we kind of just ran it. It just got the business, the brand, the infrastructure, software, and all that stuff built. And then the last six months has been unfucking ourselves from our own bullshit that we did. Yep. And we're not quite there yet, but we're probably two months away from uh really dialing it in. You know, we're we're profitable. We weren't profitable through the first probably like eight months, nine months of the business. We're now very profitable, and we're getting more and more profitable by the day because we're focusing on the right things. I meet with, I actually met with them today. We meet with his entire venture, uh he calls it TMV ventures. It's his venture capital, that private equity little thing he's got going on. Uh and uh and they give us a lot of financial advice. They talk, we talk about sales, we talk about marketing, we're talking about financials.

SPEAKER_00

So he became, did he be end up becoming a partner, Tommy? He's a partner. Wow. Yeah. So do you feel like it was the right time to bring him in? Is 25 to 28 million where you feel like you were kind of hitting a ceiling on your own based off your own knowledge and you wanted to go push past it, you're looking to bring somebody in that can help you grow up?

SPEAKER_01

Well, uh when I did the 25, 28 million, that was with Clever Investor. Okay. I was it with another company. Um, and I've sold, you know, I've sold over 1 I don't know, 80 million dollars worth of online education since 2009. You know, well, way, way more than most almost anybody, uh, just because of the length of time, you know. But my in one year I did you know that a little past 25 million. Well for daddy, we're we're only at like 14 million a year. That's where we're at. So it was it wasn't about the money or the timing, it was about the person. I was look I was ready and willing if the right person showed up or I could find the right person to really give me the mentorship I'm looking for. Yeah, yeah. The reason I got so good at real estate isn't because I'm so great. I was a dumbass kid that used to sell weed out of a Burger King drive-thru window. Yeah, got lucky enough to go to the Navy and get out of that shitty environment. And all my friends went to Julian jail, and me and a couple buddies that went into the military got away from that shit. And, you know, and then after the military, I went to school and I started taking school serious for the first time in my life. I got straight A's and at ASU, graduated top of my class, straight A's on Sumacum Laudi, and uh got a degree in finance, a minor in accounting, got into creative real estate investing, and struggled for 14 months, couldn't do a deal to fucking save my life, quit and unquit 75 times, complained for all 14 months, and uh and and then around towards the last around the month 12, I met my first mentor. His name was Lyle Wall, and he showed me things you can't learn in books. He had real wisdom. You know, he wasn't trying to sell me on anything, he poured real love in into me and really helped me get out of my own way and clarified a bunch of stuff and put blinders on me and and forced me to do the real needle moving activities. And even when I was trying to veer off, he just course-corrected me back. And he was a very Socratic mentor. He up, he he never talked at me. Yeah, he just coached me in the right way that worked with my personality, and within two months, I got my first deal for $40,000 and it changed my life. You know, my whole life changed. I was I had never held that much money in one second. How old are you?

SPEAKER_00

Twenty two and a half, maybe something like that, twenty-three. You just got a forty thousand dollar check at twenty-two and a half. What was going through your brain?

SPEAKER_01

Uh Roger Bannister running the four-minute mile. It was like, holy shit, this is real. Yeah, I could do this, and I knew if I could do it once, I could do it again and again. You know, it was this feeling of like hope going to knowing. This transition of all those fucking sleepless nights, all those fucking asshole friends talking shit about me behind my back, all those moments my parents sat me down and said, I think you're making a mistake. And I was defiant and said, No, I'm not. I know I can make this real estate thing work. You know, my girlfriend making fun of me. Oh, are you drawing your pretty little pictures again? No, bitch, I'm blogging. When blogging was a thing. I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm trying to do anything and everything just to break through and get this thing to work. And then all of a sudden it happens. And you look around and you're like, I told you, motherfuckers. I told everybody. I knew it because I sat in those. I'm the one who went and $30,000 of credit card debt. I'm the one who took my ass on a plane that looked like I was 12 fucking years old, and I went to that seminar scared to death. And I sat in the back and I paid the $500, and I'm at the Sheraton Airport in and Reno, Nevada, Nevada, by my fucking self at a real estate conference that I found in the back of the classified section in a newspaper when everybody was telling me you're nuts for going. And I was defiant, I was like, I can make this work. Real estate was the first thing that I ever lit up over. And and when you finally have it happen, because I sat there and I watched the people going across the stage when I said, These people aren't any different than me. Why can't I do it? And the reality is, once you do it, you realize that planes fly. You realize that I was my own worst enemy. I was in my own way, the way I thought about things, my negative mindset, my over-preparing, over-planning, over-complicating, fucking asking everybody their opinion and and getting distracted and becoming a professional vehicle jumper. It's like today it's stocks, tomorrow it's econ, next day it's crypto. It's like you gotta fucking lock in. And when you do, and you start trusting your intuition, because your your intuition is God's voice, right? It's it's it's screaming at you like you're in the right seat or you're in the wrong seat or you're with the wrong person, or these people are bad for you. You gotta stop with the porn and stop with the alcohol and stop with the drugs. It's screaming at you, but you keep self-sabotaging and fucking staying in that shitty mindset or shitty environment or falling back to your bad habits, and eventually you just get fed up. Yeah, you know, and you get to a point where you're like, enough's enough. I'm done with this shit. And you draw that line in the sand and you finally lock the fuck in.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

And Lyle helped me get there faster. And once I started having some success, I started to collapse time. And it was like, oh shit, this is way easier than I was making it out to be. Yeah. So from your first deal, what happened next? Um, did you go down to flipping more real estate or were you? So in the beginning, no, no, no, no. So in the beginning, I really wasn't doing real estate. I was doing a process called wholesaling, which is oh, you were wholesaling. I was just flipping contracts. So I never actually owned the property. Can you explain what wholesaling is for somebody that doesn't have to be? Oh, great question. So it's it's real simple. And this actually, I was going to college and I was I I was doing my degree in finance, and I thought, uh, maybe I'll be in stocks or something, but I fucking hate stocks and I hate I even hate finance and I'm horrible at math. And I'm like, not even I'm not smart, I'm not a book smart person. You know, I had to study till 1:30 every single morning just to pass a test, you know. But I was so hell hellbent on getting an A. And then as soon as I got the A, all that shit went out of my brain. Like that was it. And uh, but then my friend Jeremy says, You want to go to lunch, bro? I got something I want to share with you. I said, Yeah, sure. And so we went to lunch and it pulls open a dope ass Mercedes. And I'm like, How'd you get the whip? And he's like, I flipped a house, I made 80 grand. I got another one that I'm about to do, make a bunch of money. I said, I don't get it. You got real estate like Or something, like, where'd you get the money? How'd you buy a house? Like back then, houses were like you know 200 grand, and I thought that was a crazy amount of money. I'm like, you we were just fucking getting blasted in Old Town, you know, chasing chicks like a couple months ago, and now you're over here with this cool card, you're making all this money.

unknown

How?

SPEAKER_01

He pulled out a napkin and penciled out wholesaling. If if something is easy enough to explain on a fucking napkin, pay attention, right? Especially if there's big money about okay, and he said, and it essentially works like this. Okay, right now, if you look, if you're standing on any street in America and you look down that street, at any point in time, all of those houses that are owned by an owner, 80% of them at any point in time, their life is going pretty smooth. If they ever decided to sell, they're gonna go the traditional route. They're gonna hire a real estate agent, they're gonna fix up their property, they're gonna wait whatever time, they're gonna market it, they're gonna have showings and open houses and all this shit. And eventually, if they get the right offer, they'll sign on the dotted line. Okay. Those are non-motivated people. They're never gonna sell to you for 50 cents on the dollar or some crazy fire sell. At any point in time, 10 to 15% of them. Divorce, uh, medical issues, fire damage, flood damage, tax problems. I mean, if you just think about the average human, you could probably come up with like 9,000 things that fuck their life up at any point in time. And when that happens, they take the gold watch and they go to the pawn shop and they pawn that shit, right? And yeah, the watch might be worth $30,000, but they're gonna take 18 right now because they need cash by Friday. Same thing with their house. And unfortunately, most Americans are awful savers, and all their value that they have saved is trapped in equity in their property. So, you know, when that moment comes, if you're a good marketer and you can get in front of the right person at the right point in time and they call you and you can say, Hey, I can cash you out quickly, save as a pawn shop and anything else. I can let men come over, let's meet, let's see if we vibe, and then let me walk and look at the house. What does it need? Most of these houses need a lot of work, and uh, and so that wholesaling is essentially finding those motivated sellers at the right point in time in their life, working out a deal to put their house under contract. And if I work out a deal with you, let's say your house is worth 250, but it it needs 50k worth of work. You haven't taught you bought it used and you haven't really done much to it, and you've owned it for 12 years, and now you're in the situation where you just got fired from your job and you got a new job in another state, and you gotta you gotta get out of town yesterday. Okay, I'm gonna work out a deal. It's worth 250, it needs 50k at least. I'll give you 150. And you might say, uh, that's much lower than what I want, but I you might only owe 90. Yeah. And so you're looking at it and you're like, okay, I won't take 150, but I'll take 170. I'm like, that's not enough. And we land at 160. But just say, for instance, so I write you an offer for 160. I then now control your real estate. Because in the United States, when you put a piece of real estate under contract, you gain what's called equitable interest. I now control your real estate as if I'm a tenant renting it from you. You can't rent it to somebody else. When I have a contract, you can't sell it to somebody else.

SPEAKER_02

Yes.

SPEAKER_01

And I don't need a real estate license to do a transaction in my own name for my own benefit. And so I put it under contract and I have a special contract that allows me then to turn around to somebody else and say, hey, cash buyer, typically a rehabber, like you see on TV, you know, where they're gonna fix a property up and sell it for a profit, or a landlord, somebody looking for a good rental property. These people have more money than time. So it's my, you know, I'm like the middleman. I'm Costco. I'm gonna go hunt down the best deals, negotiate the best price, lock it up, and turn around. And I might mark it up five, seven, ten, fifteen, depending on the spread that I created. And then I'll I'll serve it up on a silver platter to you, Mr. and Mrs. Cash Buyer. Now you don't have to hunt for a deal. You just say yes or no. And if you say yes, your money flows right over to the seller, and whatever's left over gets released to me. It's that simple. Wow. And I'm in the middle of the transaction. And once he penciled this little stick figure thing out on a napkin, I was like, so that's it. I just got to find people and find buyers. And he's like, That's it. You play the middleman, middle woman, and you create a spray.

SPEAKER_00

So let's break this down. So there's two parties at play here. You have the buyer and then you have the seller. And what you're doing is you're finding motivated sellers and you're matching them up with people that have more money than they do half time. So if I can find somebody that's willing to buy a deal that might be an off-market deal, that's a really great deal for them that might be a little bit lower than what the market rate is because I was able to find a distressed seller who just needed to get out of an opportunity. I pencil in a contract without me actually owning the property. Then I go find this the buyer and say, Hey, do you want to purchase this property? I'm gonna acquire this for 160, but then I'm gonna sell it over here to him for 200K. And that spread is what I actually make my profit on without ever actually boning real estate. That's it.

SPEAKER_01

That's it. And yes, you there is some expenses. You gotta, you know, you want to start a business, right? You have an LLC to protect yourself, of course. You you're gonna need it, what's called an earnest deposit, which is some form of a deposit because in in the United States, it has to be in writing, they cannot be um drunk or you know, on drugs or anything when they're signing the contract. And there has to be what's called consideration passed. Consideration is the earnest deposit, it could be as low as $10. So if you got $10 and a contract and some training, you can go find this. And when you get really good, you do what's called reverse wholesaling. I know you, you're doing well, you got lots of money. You're like, like, let's say we were talking and uh and networking, and you're like, dude, I'm looking for a new project. Yeah, tell me everything that you're looking for. And I write down like a buy box, your preferred type of deal. And then I just go shopping for it. And then I say, dude, I found it. Here you go. That's it. And you're like, you can make a decision real quick because I'm basically hunting the deal for specifically you. Right. And so you don't need like a billion cash buyers, you need three that are actively doing deals. So, like right now in my real real estate business, I have two development companies. So, one is a residential development company, one's a commercial development company. Um, I just I just sold my last residential. I don't do as much residential anymore as I do commercial.

SPEAKER_00

Why? I've been seeing pace move out of residential too. So talk to me about why you moved out of residential.

SPEAKER_01

You know, I've done it for 20-something years. Uh, I've done thousands of transactions. My last deal, I made $1.8 million spec building a luxury property in in Prime Arcadia, which is the nicest area here in Phoenix and Scottsdale.

SPEAKER_00

It's a good deal.

SPEAKER_01

And uh, you know, made a fortune. It's still not even close to what I make on commercial. I'll do one commercial deal and I'll make five million dollars. Like it's it's a big difference, you know. And wow. Um, and so you just finally build the skills, the network, the money to be able to move into the bigger deals. I should have done it about 15 years earlier, but I was so good at the residential, it was like printing money. And then I had the education business that taught people how to do it. So it was like a symbiotic thing. Like, hey, look, I'm doing it, I'm doing it. But it kind of stuck me into it for longer than I should have. And then I started buying apartments and I got up to like 900 apartment doors, and I I owned my a bunch of commercial. And uh, I was like about five years ago, five and a half years ago, about five years ago, residential kind of got tough. And I had I was building about 20 houses at 20 to 26 houses at a time, depending on the moment, all two to three million dollar semi-luxury spec bills. Yeah, COVID made it really hard because the uh supply chain, I had to pre-pay for garage doors, pre-pay for fans, pre-pay for this and that. Well, when you have 20 projects going, I was floating 10, 15 million out of time. Oh, it was it was and it's very scary. People go, developers go in good times, they make a fortune, and bad times they go bankrupt real fast.

SPEAKER_00

Wow.

SPEAKER_01

And so we saw the writing on the wall. I wound down to like maybe four or five at a time, and I started focusing on commercial. And it's like a burn the bridge moment where it's like, guys, if we're really gonna take this serious, let's just burn the boats, burn this bridge, go all in on commercial moving forward. Well, we need to raise capital to do that. And that's when I really got heavy into starting funds and understanding funds. And okay, how do we start a debt fund? How do we start an equity fund? How do we start a flex fund? And how do I raise capital at a much bigger scale? Uh, having a personal brand really helped me a lot. You know, I was the first real estate influencer in the country to break a million organic followers. Even before Grant? Grant wasn't in real estate back then. Yeah, he didn't sell. He was in sales, so uh no, not before Grant. Um, but Grant wasn't known for real estate in 2013. I was. Yeah. And and and I know Grant, and I look up to Grant. I think he's done, he, he, he, he opened up my field of potential.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

You know what I mean? He 10x'd my vision, which I love, you know, uh love him or hate him. He did that. Yes, he did. And so for me, uh having all of that, my I have a million people on my email list, you know, it's like I've spent probably 25 or 30 million dollars just on Facebook ads and and and growing that list. And I probably built a list of five billion, but I got a million active. Yeah, you know, and so uh to be able to send an email and just print money or send an email and raise capital, really valuable. And uh, and so that that is helpful, but it it is symbiotic with the commercial. So, like, take the commercial game. When I first started trying to break into it, nobody wanted to fuck with me. And I had all this credibility in residential in residential and all stuff, but I didn't have any credibility in commercial, and that's a that's the big dog game. Yes, and to them, they're like, yo, cool, you got you're like a social media guy with some you flip houses, you wholesale houses. Like, I'm like, no, I I spec built you know 300 homes, and they're like, it's not the same. We're not gonna speak in the same language, you know. And so, like all new beginners, I had to humble myself, I had to go back to the beginning, and I had to I I would show up with like $10 million to uh to buy a bank, an old bank building. And I thought I was the fucking man because I had $10 million in cash. Yeah. And I would show up, here's my proof of funds. I'm gonna buy this two million dollar bank. Here's a $10 million proof of funds, I can afford it. And they're like, dude, do you know the guy right behind you has a $200 million proof of funds? I'm like, so not give the bank, like, you're not getting the bank. And you know, I bid on the banks for probably a year and a half, two years. Why did you want banks? Um, it was a niche I saw potential in. Yeah, if you think about it, uh banks are downsizing, they're moving into grocery stores and smaller footprints, or there's a lot of old banks and they always have the best real estate. It's always out. So the the real estate we love is the little single tenant triple net lease parcels that are in a parking lot of a main anchored tenant, like a Walmart or a Sprouts or a Whole Foods. And if there's an old Chase or an old Wells Fargo or an old bank sitting out there, 100,000 plus cars are driving right in front of that bank every single day. And so we looked at it and said, How do we become a preferred developer of old bank buildings? And we started bidding on them, and it's a it's like a closed bidding system, and we got told no, no, no, no, because we weren't part of the good old boys club. And it took us, let's call it a year and a half, two years before finally one guy bid and won on two banks, then at the last minute canceled and pissed off the brokers of the banks. And the broker called us and said, All right, young bucks, you guys think you want to play in this fucking game? Let's see if you're serious. If you buy both these banks, which need to close by like yesterday, because this dude just backed out, we'll fuck with you. That's how it worked. And I'm like, we don't have necessarily the money out of the bottom. This moment are two banks, but the capital we created it real fast. In real estate, you don't have a money problem, you have a creativity problem. Always, and so right away my brain went to we're gonna create this money one way or another. I don't care what I gotta do. And we did it, and so we bought two banks, and then it was like, okay, now we're in the game, we're part of the developer list, and then I bought a third bank in San Antonio for 4.3 million or whatever we paid. Yeah, and that like you know, one bank I flipped to desert schools, another bank I flipped to Circle K, another bank we are tearing it down, we're splitting it into three lots. I already have two of the three lots pre-sold. I'll make eight and a half, nine million dollars on that play. And it's all horizontal development. I'm not building vertically, I'm just doing all the land entitlement bullshit that these quick service drive-thru restaurant chains don't want to fuck with. And so we had to build a team, we had to learn the game, we had to raise the capital, we had to get in the good old boys club. I thought, oh, this is gonna take us five years to really get this machine up and running.

SPEAKER_00

For someone who's getting into real estate right now, Cody, and they want to just get their footprint in, would you still tell them to start in residential, or would you tell them it's better for you to find a really great operator and just learn real estate passively through a segregation or a fund? Depends.

SPEAKER_01

There's so many uh variables to that question. First off, what's your personality? What do you want the outcome to be? What is your current time availability and resources? If you don't have a lot of resources, but you got a lot of time and you're hungry and you're willing to stay the course, because I'll tell you this right now. More people get into the real estate game and quit within the first, let's call it eight months than almost any other industry in the world. They just don't, they think it's so easy. They see somebody like me with fucking Lambos and all kinds of crazy shit on social media, and they're like, Oh, this is real estate, this is all I do. I'm right now, like the big thing is section eight, right? You see all these like young kids popping bottles in Miami. Oh, my my government's paying for my yacht and my models and bottles, and it's like, uh-huh. That shit is like brain damage, it's the hardest game in the world. Yeah, section eight sucks. Like tough, it's tough. Yes, if you get to 50 of them, can you start to get a lifestyle? You get to 50 of anything, you're gonna start to get a lifestyle. So it's like, you know, I would say to a new person, if you're like me and you're and you know your personality and you're hungry and you're willing to stay the course and not pick your fucking head up for 24 months and not change directions and not be a little bitch about everything and not turn small things into big things and not to listen to anybody else, and don't don't get distracted at all. I would say you're gonna murder it in real estate because once you break through, time does collapse, the relationships start to get built. It's like bamboo. You planted those seeds, and all of a sudden it's like boom, in one year, your whole life changes. I'm the first millionaire in my family. I retired my parents the first year from the time 14 months, no fucking deal. I did a 40k deal, then I started clipping deals. Maybe it took me two months for the my next deal, and then one month, and three weeks, and two weeks, and then boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, I got really good. 12 months later, had 1.3 million dollars, retired my parents. Best move I ever made. 99% of people would have quit within 14 months because they would have. You're absolutely right. And I'm just dumb enough to stay the course. I'm just hard-headed enough to believe. And if you're the same as me, you're gonna do great no matter what niche you're in. Even flooring. Flooring is very difficult. It's not it's not I make it look easy. That shit ain't you know, it's the hard one of the hardest things I've ever done. I'm I'm being pushed and pulled and stretched in so many directions, and I fucking love it. Yeah, so you have to be kind of a crazy enigma to be an entrepreneur. Yes.

SPEAKER_00

We have a lot of people that are watching this right now, some that are inspired by your background in real estate, and some that even see that you've created these other businesses and you've been able to scale them. For someone that wants to get started on building wealth, they want to become a serial entrepreneur, they're struggling right now with everything that they're seeing online AI, all this trust culture. Everybody's popping a script into a teleprompter and trying to start a personal brand. Where would you tell somebody to get started if they want to become successful? What do they need to do and what do they need to clear on?

SPEAKER_01

Well, I don't think you find your purpose. I think you create it. And I think it's created through getting in a lane and obsessing over that lane. And so if you wanted to get into real estate, you need to uh you need to become a person that takes massive daily action in just the that vertical of real estate, because there's a lot of verticals, right? It's like I could do multifamily, I could do commercial, I could do wholesaling, I could do flipping, but you can't do it all. And most people think they can. And they want to try a little everything and they want to have 10 side hustles and all this shit. It's like, no, no, no. Lock in, get one thing, become the world's greatest at it, pay whatever price it takes to get proximity to other power players that are doing that thing at world-class levels. I don't care if you have to work for free for as long as it takes. I don't care what you gotta do to serve your way into that inner circle or borrow money and pay to get and pay for speed and get into the mastermind, get into the room. Uh I'm a cute, I don't, I'm a huge fan of using money as a tool to go further faster.

SPEAKER_02

Yes.

SPEAKER_01

I think I think I don't give a fuck about money. I never have. I came from nothing. I'll go back to sleeping on the couch. I don't care. Like that none of this shit matters. The I dress and I I like it. I want it. I want it all.

SPEAKER_02

Yes.

SPEAKER_01

You know, who doesn't? I do too. I want nice shit. And once you sit in first class, it's hard to get in the back of the fucking plane. Very are you. You know, but sometimes you gotta remind yourself where the fuck you came from and be willing to go back there. And I'm I'm I'm willing to bet it all, risk it all, and play full out because you either exist or you don't. You know, you are you either lead a life that's memorable that people want to fucking write books about and build statues over, or you don't exist outside of a five-mile radius. And that's just the reality of the world we live in. And every single day you gotta wake up and say, yesterday doesn't fucking matter, and tomorrow doesn't matter. I got today, right now, to play full out Super Bowl mode, and I'm gonna go fucking full, full as aggressive and forward as I can today. If I only you know run that five thousand mile race, I only take 10 steps, that's okay. Yes, that I'm gonna, I'm gonna end my day so exhausted from those 10 steps. And if you do that every single day, all of a sudden you look up and you're like, holy shit. It's like for me, I could have made I could have made 200 million dollars with my brand, the amount of people that came to me and said, I'll pay you to do this, I'll pay you to promote this crypto, I'll pay you to promote these e-com stores, I'll pay you to this, uh look at look at all the money we can make for this fucking quick grab. And I'm like, bro, you're playing a small game. This little money grab shit is to me not it. I'm running, I'm I'm I'm running a lifetime-long marathon building real a real brand with real integrity that people trust, that I look back on and I'm proud of this shit. It's a marathon, not a sprint. And I locked in. I locked in. I didn't do all this weird shit because you see it happen all the time, and then they get caught because the crypto coin crashes or the e-com shit turns out to be a fucking scam. Yes, and then your reputation is fucked, and you can't ever get that back, you know? And so I just what do you do? I do real estate and flooring, bro. Like that's it. I don't fuck with nobody, I don't come out for anybody, I don't want to speak on your stage, I don't want to watch fucking sports with you or drink a beer with you. If we're making money together, let's hang. You know, if we if we got common alignment and and our our uh our core values and shit, I'm open to like, you know, maybe doing some stuff. But the reality is I've gotten to a point now where it's like I don't fuck with nobody, I don't want to be your friend unless you know we're we're gonna go build something epic together. Yeah, and then you're my best friend. We're not like kind of friends, like we're getting matching tattoos and shit like that. Like we're besties because otherwise, like, what are we doing here? Yeah, right. And uh I see it happen all the time. Some dipshit with the ring light and the chat GBT script is they're given bad advice on social media, you know, and they look cool. That's the problem with the world. I look at you can. Say the dopest shit. I can say the dopest shit. And you get fucking no reach. And you you get a lot of reach. You know, you I've watched yourself. You get a lot of reach, bro. You've you you you came in. It was kind of cool. Thank you. Not everybody's got that gift. But people if you and it's sad because you can look cool, you can have the chains and the cool tattoos and the cool hairdo, and and the algorithm will push you, right? If you say the right words. But the reality is after somebody watches that shit for a little while, they realize this motherfucker is fake. This shit ain't real. This ain't you. That's not you. You you haven't built anything real. Show me your business, show me the team you created, show me, show me your team members win. Show me the the company that you scaled and the people you gave opportunities and jobs to. Right? Show me, let me let me watch your brand over 10 years and see if you don't fumble that football.

SPEAKER_00

And opportunity.

SPEAKER_01

And then if and then if if if I see you and you're authentic, then I'm like, that motherfucker's real. I got that shit. Yep. And that, and I think people are more dialed in than ever before to what is real. They're hungry for where they are. So that's the best advice. Be authentic, be enthusiastic, and be the loudest motherfucker in the room. If you really believe in your shit, yeah, you need to be the biggest cheerleader in the game. I don't shut the fuck up about Floor Daddy or my, you know, clevercapitalfund.com.

SPEAKER_00

You know, and I don't shut up about the differences between a tax accountant and a tax strategist. I get ripped online, but I'm not stopping because I know what I know is right. And it's helping so many people wake up to the fact that their CPAs aren't doing shit for them. They're just filing their fucking tax returns. There's a difference between someone who's working in engineering to help you reduce your tax bill versus somebody who's literally there to just tell you what you owe and file the fucking return. There's two different fucking business models at play here, and most people don't even realize that. And they get trapped into the mindset that their CPAs tell them of you're just successful, you're just supposed to pay fucking taxes, where you have billionaires on TV telling you, no, I haven't written a check in in ages.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

That's the reality.

SPEAKER_01

And and the hardest thing for somebody who starts making good money is to find you. Because I was in the for 10 years, I was in the pay taxes rat race cycle. Paying, I got up to a point where I was paying well over a million dollars a year in taxes. Yeah. And I was hating it, million five, million six, million three. And I'm like, dude, this is the worst. The world my only plan was make more money next year. Like, but that was my only way out. And then I met somebody like you, and they're like, Oh, how much heavy equipment you got? I'm like, what do you mean? He's like, Man, let me show you this game over here with heavy equipment. How much commercial real estate depreciation you got? Let's get you some commercial. Oh, like last year I bought I bought a million dollars worth of AI pods, server farm shit, RD. Yeah, and it's like all of a sudden I'm getting all this bonus depreciation, 100% this and all this. I'm like wiping out millions of dollars in taxes. I'm like, thank god there's somebody smarter than me in this shit. Yes, and it it's a game changer, and people don't fucking they they want to complain online, they want to roast you online. Yeah, they turn out to be your biggest fans the second they start making money. They're gonna be your biggest fans. It's like Drake. Everybody's talking shit about Drake right now. Oh, this shit's whack. This shit you haven't even listened to the whole thing yet. Shut the fuck up. Let it ride for a little while. You're gonna turn into a huge fan. Do your research, figure it out, you know. And so I just want to give you some kudos because keep screaming your message until everybody finally goes, Yeah, you're right. I don't want to pay taxes, and I want to play a bigger game, and I want to the tax code is created for people who actually study it to gamify it. It's such an easy game if you actually find the right people to help you decode it. Yes. That's it. That's the whole thing. It's like you, if you're bragging about paying taxes, you're a dumbass. You should be bragging about, dude, I'm not paying now. I I I definitely want to roads, fire, cleece. Of course, all the you know, military, all the shit. 100%. I'm not trying to send a missile to some fucking poor country somewhere because some dipshit politician, you know, overtaxed me and you can control that.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. Brother, thank you so much for coming onto our podcast show and ripping with me. And I just want everybody to be able to follow you from here. Where can everyone go follow you back?

SPEAKER_01

Um, if you need floors in Arizona, floordaddy.com. If you want to give me money and have me invest in commercial real estate, clevercapitalfund.com. I got a brand new flex fund that's pretty dope. Um, gives you a lot of flexibility where you could participate in a single asset, one of our big commercial developments, or you can have your money spread out over all of them and earn great IRRs. Everything's on uh clevercapitalfund.com and um at official Cody Sperber on Instagram. It's pretty much the only place I I hang out. I really don't fuck around with social media too much anymore. Yeah, I let my team run ads and do all that other stuff. But if you want to personally interact with me, I'd love to meet you and and hear your story. And I'm in my DMs, you know. And I'll talk shit to you, by the way. I'll I'll I'll I'll I'm I'm pretty I pretty much don't give a shit. So I'll hit you back. People ask me for advice all the time, and I call them little bitches. And you know, I'm like, I'm just trying to cut through the noise because sometimes you gotta be called a little bitch. Yeah, sometimes you gotta be like slapped around a little bit.

SPEAKER_00

We've been a little bitch uh in our lives before, right? And needed to be told to stop being a little bitch. Dude, I love when my friends are real, yeah. And they're like, Spurbs, this ain't it, bro. You gotta check your shit. And I'm we need people in our lives to check us. Yeah, hold us accountable too.

SPEAKER_01

Oh, yeah. Yeah. So uh, you know, I love, I love yeah, I have a very heavy entrepreneur and real estate following. So if you're really trying to light up in the world, you want to be motivated, I mean, come over and say what's up.

SPEAKER_00

Absolutely. Cody Sperber, thank you guys so much for joining us for this episode on Volf Made Simple. If you guys would like to follow Cody, feel free to go to his Instagram page, floordaddy.com, as well. You'll be seeing that business everywhere, I'm sure. Thank you so much for joining us. Appreciate it. Thank you.