Aileen (00:00):

Thank you, everyone for joining today’s episode of the, How Did They Do It? Real Estate podcast. We are your hosts Seyla and Aileen and today’s guest, we have Jacob Blackett. Jacob began his real estate career in 2010, starting with fix and flips to buying and holding a single family home to multifamily syndications. Since then, Jacob founded Holdfolio in 2014 and SyndicationPro in 2018. Today, he manages over 1200 multi-family units and has placed over $40 million into income producing real estate. Very happy to have you here today, Jacob, welcome to the show.

Jacob Blackett (00:34):

Yeah, thank you very much. I’m looking forward to catching up with you guys and seeing if there’s any, any good pieces of advice or any learnings that we could get out of the call.

Aileen (00:45):

Definitely. Thank you so much. So can you start off by telling the listeners a little bit more about your background and just how you got started in real estate?

Jacob Blackett (00:53):

Yeah, sure. So I was born and raised in Reno, Nevada, and I actually stayed local. I went to the local university there in Reno, the university of Nevada. When I graduated high school going into college, this was in 2008, I remember thinking my biggest goal in life at that moment was to be able to just simply move out of my parents’ house and kind of just pay my own way through college. I thought that that was, that was like what I was gunning for. And so when I turned 18 in June of 2008, I went out and got a job at a Walmart distribution centre. So I remember very close to my birthday that you were required to be 18 to apply to that position. So I applied very soon. Thereafter ended up starting the reason I wanted to work at Walmart distribution centres, because it was kind of out of town.

Jacob Blackett (02:00):

The wages were actually really good. I was, I was earning about $20 an hour, maybe a little bit, a little bit more than that, even, but to top it all off, they had the shift that was Saturday, Sunday and Monday. So it was three days. And I thought that would be really nice to kind of just get the work during those three days and then have the rest of the week for, for college classes and just trying to enjoy that experience. And so, so that was, that was what I started out with. The college I had that I moved out and, and kind of fulfilled my, fulfil my goals. And it was during my freshman year of college that I saw an infomercial about, about fixing and flipping real estate. And, and so up until that point, quite honestly, I’d never thought about real estate. I never met anyone who was working in real estate. That’s pretty foreign to me. And actually at the university I was studying finance. I was a business major. I was thinking about finance and accounting. And there was, there was nothing about real estate, so no course offerings. And so I saw that, I saw that infomercial at that peak that piqued

Jacob Blackett (03:19):

My interest. Of course, if you’ve ever seen a fix and flip infomercial, I think that it’s, it’s definitely something that you take a couple, they take a second look at. So that’s the goo real and making money. And I thought that was interesting science. So I did a free one-night seminar where they kind of taught you a couple of things, but really it was the, it was a sales pitch for the weekend for the weekend day. And so it was nine 95 for the two day, the weekend two day. And so I put it on my credit card and I did the weekend today day, and that was really my, my entrance to real estate. So, so, you know, we can kind of break down my experience through college and early experiences, but long story short, I did a couple of fixed and flips through college.

Jacob Blackett (04:10):

Once I graduated, I had the decision of either going out and getting a CPA license and kind of getting into investment banking and private equity and kind of in that world, or just going and doing some real estate, just building up a fix and flip business in empire, right. And, and going that route. And so when I graduated, I decided that I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t get a job and actually tying this back to Walmart distribution centre at that position, I worked from 2:00 PM to 2:00 AM on Saturday, Sunday, Monday. And, and, and we, we would, we would swipe in at 2:00 PM, right? If swipe out I think our lunch was 7:30 PM. Swipe out, swipe back in, everything was trapped. So you wore a headset, attracts all your motion movements through the warehouse and it would time you, so it would like give you, it was all task-based.

Jacob Blackett (05:13):

So you’d get a task. It would time you, how long it took you to do that task, get a new task. And then it would PR percentage, it would give you a percentage, like, are, are you being efficient enough? And it was, it was great. It was, it was exercise. Like it was a nice big warehouse. I can be quiet. I can have a lot of energy at sometimes. So it’s nice to, just to just be able to be in my own head space and just kind of do this. It was a good summer job, but I mean, not a good college job, but I just started really despising the fact that if I wanted to take a Sunday off, for example, the hangout family and watch the super bowl, right. I would have to go Against some type of vacation allocation. If I was sick, I had certain

Jacob Blackett (05:58):

Allocation of how much time it could be sick. And I actually had just started to grow to despise that feeling that I have to show up at this time. And I just thought, man, I want to decide when I show up like an and the only way to really do that successfully is to be a business owner, is to go out, make your own, make, make your own plans, be accountable to yourself, decide when, when you show up. And, and so it was actually through that, through that position at Walmart that I really started considering, how do I control my own time? How do I never have to worry about vacation allocation, vacation days and sick days? And that’s really what I, what I got fanatic and, and of course, real estate doing fix and flips that kind of fit into that equation. I could visualize where, yeah, I could have some more control over my time. And so that’s kind of how everything came together and in my decision to ultimately start doing fix and flips. Full-Time when I graduated college in 2012.

Aileen (07:06):

Well, that’s great because you, you learned that really quickly that you don’t want to be, you don’t want to be in a W2 and have someone else control your full time and you want to have control of your own time. So that’s great that you learned that really early on. I know a lot of people wish that they had learned that earlier on.

Jacob Blackett (07:27):

I think. Yeah. If, if you’re in college and you have your Saturday, Sundays blocked out, you very quickly start learning, man. This sucks to not, can I work Monday and Tuesday this week and just have my week in this one this one time? No, it’s not possible. So yeah, it’s it, it probably didn’t take too long before I was thinking, man, I can’t wait for, to have this flexibility.

Seyla:

How did you find out about multi families and then transition to the multifamily space?

Jacob Blackett (08:25):

Yeah. So in 2016 I was listening to podcasts. I just was searching real estate podcast and, and I saw this podcast about multifamily real estate. And I started listening into it. I quite honestly, I’d never met anyone invested in multifamily. Maybe I had brushed shoulders with people at events who did that, but it was a different world.

I’m in single family homes doing fix and flips and single family rentals. You’re talking about millions of dollars of property, big loans. That’s just, I thought, well, that’s not me now. Maybe in the future, it’s a future step. Like as we, as we grow, we’ll be growing into that realm. And so quite honestly, I just started listening to the pot multi-family podcast thinking, let me start getting some foundational things in place. This is, this is kind of a stepping stone for maybe, maybe I was thinking within, within years, maybe within the next five years, we’ll be at this level. And I think I’d been listening to the podcast for a few months and the host is actually Rod Khleif, lifetime cash flow podcast. He was offering a free call where you could, you could actually go schedule a call and he would have like a 10-minute call with you.

Jacob Blackett (09:20):

And, and so I took, I took him up on an, I scheduled a call and at the time I was, I was doing buy and hold single family homes. And I was doing that with investors. So I would bring investors in, I was North of a hundred that I owned at the time with investors on average, I would keep about 30% ownership of the properties, but my investors would fund would fund the deals. And so I could scale. And I was thinking my goal at that time was to get to a thousand single-family home rentals with that, with that model. And so I was sharing that model with, with Rod and, and anyone who knows rod story, he also started single-family homes also had a big portfolio that he lost in, in the great, the great recession. And so he was pretty adamant in saying that he basically said, you’re wasting your time.

You’re going, I think, word for word, you’re going brain dead with the single family homes. And I was thinking like, this is pretty cool. I have, I feel successful. I feel like I’m doing something unique and cool, but rod said, you’re, you’re, you’re wasting your time. You’re going brain dead. You own, you know, a hundred single family homes and all of your experience, you have more than enough competency and knowledge to go out and buy multi-family. You just need to go do it. You have all the, you have all the building blocks in place to do that. And so I went out and looked for an apartment and within, I got very lucky. I had, I had, I had known an apartment in a neighbourhood that we were buying single family homes. Then I drove driven by it a lot. It was, it was mismanaged, just kind of really an eyesore.

Jacob Blackett (11:17):

And so I had thought about that property and it just so happened that the owner was, was thinking about selling. And so it was perfect timing. And so it was a 46 unit all day family, 46-unit apartment with the single family homes. Like we’re talking about this transition from single family homes to multi-family with single family homes. I didn’t use debt. So I just went all cash on these properties. We are able to get seven to 9% yields. And I just, if I didn’t have to put a loan on it, I didn’t want to. And also single family home debt. Isn’t great. Like you really have to work hard to get some decent terms and that doesn’t, you don’t really scale single family home. It’s great for primary residency, maybe for your first investment property or two, you could talk a lender into some good terms, but that scale it’s difficult.

Jacob Blackett (12:10):

And so that was never a part of my business model. And so going into this first multifamily property, 46 units, certainly there was a big chunk, a big part of that was going to need to be a bank loan. And I actually remember thinking, being kind of intimidated by that fact. And so I just went to the seller and I told them it was mismanaged. It was about 50% occupied. So it was not in good shape. And so I didn’t even talk to a bank, but I just told the seller, Hey, there’s I I’ve talked, I’ve talked to banks, so she, no way, no one’s going to loan on this property because the occupancy and the work that needs to be done, so you’re going to need to carry, you’re going to need to carry 70% of the purchase. And I think he agreed to that. And so that was my first, first multifamily deal that was in early 2017. We actually closed. So we were under contract in 2016, rolled over into 2017. We closed in, I think, January or February of 2017.

Aileen (13:17):

Wow. So how did you find out about the seller? How did you, how did you make contact with him directly?

Jacob Blackett (13:23):

So I Googled the property and then I noticed that it had an expired listing. And so I searched the address that was listed with the entity. So it was owned by some LLC. I searched the address and it was a local address and it was a collection business. And so I called the collections business saying, Hey, I noticed that the, that this address is associated with this apartment. I was actually looking to get in touch with the owner. And so that’s why I’m calling you, do you know how I can get in touch with the owner? And the guy was like, yeah, I own it. And it’s like, great. Well I’m very familiar with your property. I’m interested in buying it actually. And he was actually using, working with a broker at the time, which was the family broker, one of his family members.

Jacob Blackett (14:22):

And, and so he put me in touch. We chatted for just a few minutes. He put me in touch with his, with his relative, who was the broker to get more details. And then I, I just kept that relationship. So every time I want to add a question or, or want to get in touch with him, like after we did, I went through the broker to do and schedule like our inspections, our initial walkthroughs. And then we actually drove over to the collections business is it was local and towns. We drove up there with a little thank you note, and just to get some face time with, with the owner. And so we knocked, Hey, we just toured the property. Just wanted to say, you know, thanks, thanks. Thanks a lot of years. And he invited us in, we sat down in his office and he just, he just talked for like an hour about how he’s wanting to focus on his collections business and how he’s getting out of these, out of his holdings. And, and I think that was a big something that really helped when it came to asking or telling him that he was going to have to carry a note, is that we had the ability to connect and, and, and kind of develop that relationship with that.

Seyla (15:45):

Thank you, Jacob. And so you got your first apartment in 2017. So since then, how have you been able to scale up your business to over $4 million today?

Jacob Blackett (15:58):

Yeah, it, it really, so we started with that 46 unit, our next property that we purchased with a 50 unit and a couple 80 units and 136, a unit close, 156 units at the end of last year, but really in terms of being able to scale up there’s operational needs. So what we did early on is find a really good, so I don’t enjoy. And don’t like spending my time doing property management and operational things related to properties, but it’s a very important pillar of owning investment properties is being able to manage them. So we had hired on a property manager who was actually a regional manager before we brought her on board. She’s actually now a partner in the business is a really important part to our model. So one part of being able to scale up, I think, is it’s a filling these pillars or these needs and kind of how I visualize that as such the operational pillar.

Jacob Blackett (17:09):

So who’s going to be, who’s going to be responsible for day to day operations, everything from typical property management, things through and through to insurance and, and different policies. So the operational pillar, then there’s the finance side of things, which is which of, which is kind of two-fold one is bank or debt financing. The other is equity financing. So, so really investor relations, getting, getting more investors, making sure we have good relationships, the inks who were alone on our properties and then, and then acquisitions. So making sure that we’re out there doing things that other people aren’t doing getting ahead of ahead of brokers ahead of other people uncertain on deals. And we always took the approach of going direct to a direct owner. So we have very, very elaborate system where we do a lot of cold Colleen. We do a lot of data aggregation and searching too for different ways to get in touch with, with owners.

Jacob Blackett (18:27):

So I think those are, those are really key parts. We definitely leveraged technology. So we do all of our capital raising online. For example, we have a website that, that focuses on the investor. Like if someone is coming to our website, Hey, they heard from us from a, from a colleague or a friend. We want to make sure our website captures their attention, speaks to them directly and has call to actions. So a lot of people, I think, might not have that in place where they’re not, they’re not able to fully capitalize on what they’re doing because as their investors talk to their networks, the there’s no it’s difficult for their network to then go home and say, Oh, someone had mentioned that they invested and let me Google that company. Like, did you show up, is that a website? Like, can that person now learn more?

Jacob Blackett (19:28):

Can they take kind of take the initiative to sign up with you? So that that’s been a big, a big part of, of growing our investors, our investor base as well. So, so yeah, I think it really comes down to having the key people on board, understanding, understanding these pillars and making sure that that someone is, is owning it and really pushing, driving those forward. And, and I’m always a deal by deal guy from my first fix and flips and wholesale deals. I really just take a deal, deal by deal and, and just try to stay focus on those, those big picture fundamentals and make sure that we have that we’re moving forward on, on, in, in the right direction.

Seyla (20:13):

So you mentioned about technology. So one of the tools that you created along your real estate journey is the syndication pro what was the motivation to create such a tool? And will you be able to give our listeners a little bit, a little bit of an overview of the application itself?

Jacob Blackett (20:33):

Yeah. So what happened is I, back in 2013, 2014, I saw the, the very first real estate crowd crowdfunding sites come online. And I thought that concept of investors being able to view deals and invest in deals directly online was something that I wanted to implement in my business. I, I wanted my website to be a tool for me to be able to attract investors, have them register and actually raise capital right there on my side. I didn’t, I didn’t want to be making all these calls and, and having all these, all these individual meetings, it, you can be very successful doing that. It’s just kind of not what I wanted. And so withhold folio my real estate company. We built out our website to do that. So in 2014, 2015, when we started doing our first deals, we did those through our website. And so our investors from day one could create accounts.

Jacob Blackett (21:37):

They could view our deals. They could invest with us right through our website. We could provide updates through the website and kind of help manage those relationships. And so what happened is that number one, it was built out for, for my own needs, for my real estate company, as, as an edge, as a way to create better systems and just, and just be differentiated. And then I had colleagues asking me other real estate colleagues, other real estate firms asking me how to replicate what I had built with hold folio. And so that’s really started in 2015, 2016, 2017. And I, I kept having people ask me how, how to replicate what we were doing. And I didn’t have a good answer because I had spent so much time and money building out hold folio. But with, with the, with the engineering team, way, way more time and money than I had ever thought of initially to make that happen.

Jacob Blackett (22:36):

And so I couldn’t recommend that someone go do that. Number one, I couldn’t just say, Oh, here’s a copy of my code. And just, just give it just to give a giveaway the site. So I thought, so actually, what happened is in 2017, I heard of an investor management software and it had an investor portal. And so I went ahead and at that time I was thinking, this might be a good, a good time to go ahead and step away from what we’ve built to get into the, kind of this more institutional professional software. This might be the next step for us to continue scaling. It might be a good strategic move. And so I ended up doing a demo and it was an hour long demo. And I remember thinking that then this, this, it doesn’t look good. It’s not as easy to use because after an hour of demoing this, like I still don’t know if I completely grasp what’s going on, or there’s still like a lot of buttons.

Jacob Blackett (23:40):

I see that I have no idea what, they’re, what they’re for a lot of terminology that I’ve just never heard of. So let’s just, it just feel, it just didn’t look good. It felt bulky and complicated and, and it was also really expensive. And so it was actually after that demo, kind of to this set, I kind of sat back for a second, said, man, what, what I’ve built with, hopefully though, I think it, I think it’s a lot better on, in many ways. And so I went to, so I was thinking if there’s other people looking for this service, and this is what their options, I think, I think we could do better. And so I went to the owner of the web development company that I was using for years as a meat. And I said, hey me, I, I think number one, I have some friends and colleagues asking how to replicate, hold fully what we’ve built here.

Jacob Blackett (24:36):

Number two, I just demo the best alternate, the best investor portal, the best investment manager software. And, and I shared my findings, like exactly what I’ve said. I said, I can, I think we could, what we’ve built, I think is very competitive. And I think that I have, we could make a business of it. I think that’d be a lot of people interested in it. And so that’s what we did. We launched a MVP, it took about three or four months. We signed up and a handful of my colleagues, people have been asking, asking about that. And then that grew word of mouth. So our MVP started growing. Like we had had some more science nuts. And, and so we basically confirmed, I learned that there was this need, that there was demand. And so we doubled down and created syndication pro hired a, hired a big team of developers and engineers and designers and, and the suspend off to the races.

Jacob Blackett (25:33):

But, but what it does is it’s really, it’s really just an amazing infrastructure for, for anyone raising capital for projects. So mostly it’s real estate firms using it, but, but if you could raise venture capital for your business, use that infrastructure, but for the most part it’s real estate. Yeah. And there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of built in things from being able to capture leads on your website. For example, having a registration process, having a sale, a CRM that’s tailored for capital raising. So it has like helps you manage relationships, helps you manage who’s accredited and, and notes and email sync and all this CRM, basic all these CRM function functions that, that you get. So and so much more, right. You’re, you’re able to actually post your deals and, and accept investments provide a really great service to your investors. So it’s a great infrastructure to save a ton of time, raise capital because of the infrastructure you have in place, being able to set, set a better tone and better brand image. And, and, and really just across the board, it it’s, it’s a foundation for anyone raising capital for real estate deals.

Seyla (27:00):

I saw the demo last week and it seems very easy to use. And you’ve streamlined the entire process for all the real estate syndicators and not just syndicators for managing the business in general. Like you mentioned, if someone wanted to use the syndication pro how do they proceed in contacting you and what pricing are they expecting?

Jacob Blackett (27:25):

Yeah. So syndication pro.com would be step one. So we have a lot of explanations on the features and the benefits are, you’ll see, you’ll see the ability to schedule a demo on there. You’ll see even the ability to start a trial. So if you, if you want to just start a trial and start using it and just feel it feel hands-on, you can do that. And our pricing is pretty simple. We have, we have two options. You can pay monthly, so you can pay month, month to month, it’s $95 base fee. And then you pay a hundred dollars per offering that you’re managing per month. Alternatively, you can subscribe to our annual plan, which is $6,000 for the year. And that includes unlimited offerings. We don’t count your investors or contacts or there’s mass email built in. We don’t count how many emails you can sensitive. So it’s kind of all all open for you, but that that’s our price. And so, yeah,

Seyla (28:30):

There you go, listeners, head to syndicationpro.com right now, and start your trial. So Jacob, you did the fix and flip, wholesale, and now jumped into the multifamily space and you own a software company. So what is next for you?

Jacob Blackett (28:49):

I think, I think what’s next is to continue to build the real estate holdings so that what I’ve found with real estate is that it’s not, it’s not really you’ll, you see kind of get rich quick schemes, right? And, and I think real estate a lot of times is, is in that realm of get in, make big bucks and do it quickly. I, I don’t feel that way about real estate. I think, I think if you keep your head down and work at it, then in five years or 10 years, you can look back and really have done a lot, but it takes time. Like if you’re working really hard and one year, and you turn around you, you might not have a lot to show that two years in my turn. I don’t have a little bit more, but still like, man, I’ve been working two years on this, what what’s going to give.

Jacob Blackett (29:39):

I think it’s more like five, five years and beyond is really when you start building. So for me, I’m going to continue to, to whittle away at my real estate portfolio, continue to add holdings. It’s need to focus on that. Syndication pro is, has been a blast. It’s, it’s completely different business model. It’s software. It’s more scalable. It’s a product that people are using. So there’s different kind of intrinsic value propositions that, that are involved. So it’s really fun. Continue to focus on I’m a product guy. So I focused on the product that I’m honestly not a salesperson. I just want to build the best tools, the best infrastructure for my own business and also for other people’s businesses. So I really enjoy doing that. So I really want to continue to build a product that has just leaps and bounds ahead of anything else out there. Just the number one software for real estate firms. And so we’ll continue to do that. And then I have other businesses, other, other ideas. I want to continue to build businesses, to create wealth of course, and provide value to others. And I think we’re doing that with the real estate company, with the software company about, but there’s certainly other, other businesses that I think over the next few years also be getting, getting, going and, and managing.

Seyla (31:10):

Since you started your real estate career, how has your real estate investing impacted your life so far?

Jacob Blackett (31:17):

Yeah, that from early on, it got me out of my hourly controlled job. So it gave me some amount of freedom in time. And as I’ve been able to scale that, especially now at scale with over 1500 units and a team, and it’s, it’s really recurring revenue, recurring income, and, and you hear a lot where people are looking for that passive income or that passive income stream. And so, so what it’s given me at this point is basically that financial freedom to know that I have income streams coming in month over month. So as long as, as long as we’re diligent from our management perspective and taking care of taking care of our residents and, and, and being, being hand hands-on and, and careful with our, with our management then, and we’re in a pretty good stuff month over month, we’ll have our revenues were cash flow positive, for sure.

Jacob Blackett (32:21):

So, so that’s a great, that’s a great place to be in. And so I think that affords me the ability to stay creative, start a software company, for example, and, and just, just also have control over my time. And I have a 10 month old at home, my first, my first foreign, and while we were at home with her for the first six months, I basically the first three months I was, you know, I was present basically on leave just maintenance now an hour a day or so I’m on email, just making sure that things are taken care of. And then the next three months was more kind of a part-time fie hours a day. I’m not really spending more time. So I think that also has afforded me the ability to just be there more with my family. It’s, it’s tough with the pandemic, not being able to travel and not be able to see a lot of people. So that’s been tough, but yeah, I think it’s really just from a financial and a time perspective. I think that’s what real estate has done for me.

Seyla (33:28):

What is one thing that, you know now about real estate that you wish you knew when you first started?

Jacob Blackett (33:36):

That’s a great question. I think that I wish that I had initially realized that real estate is a very collaborative sport. It’s, it’s a team sport, right? There’s you don’t need to be doing everything yourself. There’s a lot of ways to partner with other people. And so the reason I say that is because a couple of my early, at first deals weren’t successful. And I, I was taking, I was taking an approach where I was just trying to do everything myself and I was new and I was novice. And I, I just, it there’s so, so much risk in that when you’re just out there doing it yourself, because you haven’t been through the cycles and you haven’t been through a deal and you haven’t worked with contractors. And so if I had known early on that, Hey, if I, if I focus on finding a good fix and flip deal, I could take it to some people already doing fix and flips and we could partner on it.

Jacob Blackett (34:40):

You know, I could, I could leverage their experience and their track record of successfully doing these things. And maybe I could, I could offset risk and, and, and avoid the potential pitfalls of, of doing next incorrectly. So I think anyone starting out getting started, and even, even moving up laterals suite, we took down a 420-unit deal. That was with another company, right. I didn’t feel like we were at a place where we could just go and take down three, 400-unit deal. We didn’t have enough. We didn’t have enough capital relationships. We didn’t have enough financial wherewithal. So instead we partnered with another firm who was, who is much bigger, much, much longer track record. And so I think that’s an important thing for anyone to consider is that you don’t have to, you don’t have to do real estate alone. And in fact, there’s a lot of, a lot of good that comes from getting other people involved in your deals.

Seyla (35:41):

So what is one thing that sets the successful people apart if they wanted to start in the real estate investing business now,

Jacob Blackett (35:51):

I think, right. I think right now in over the most recent couple of few years, it’s certainly been a sellers’ market. So, so in coming out of the great recession and, and own in, in 2010, 11, 12, 13, it’s really heyday when it came to deals. If you want, if you want to go find a deal, you didn’t, you didn’t have to work too hard. You had to go do some things, but you could find deals where most recently it’s been harder. So I think what’s separating people at this point in time is people who are just willing to go the extra mile, put in the extra effort, not get discouraged. Maybe, maybe in 2012 you would get, you would get one deal out of every 10 that you tried. And so you had to put up with nine rejections. Maybe now it’s, it’s one in 50, maybe. So you’ve got to have some thicker skin. You’ve got to be more determined. You’ve got to be willing to just put in that extra bit. So that’s probably, what’s separating people at this point.

Seyla (36:57):

So what tool or techniques have you used to improve the efficiency of your business or personal life?

Jacob Blackett (37:04):

Yeah, there’s a lot. And actually I say that, but maybe there’s not a lot. I’m, I’m pretty simple person. Quite honestly. I, I look for the one tool, right? I, I don’t like using a lot of tools. So from our, from our property management perspective, it’s good property management software. So, so we use, we use property where with real page, there’s a few really good industry leading software. So if you are managing properties directly leveraging some property management software to do that’s a no brainer. That’s really going to create the foundation on that side. When it comes to our capital raising and, and our investors, it’s syndication pro we, we live and breathe in syndication pro it, it really that’s our foundation for success there. So that’s an amazing tool. And then when it comes to personal art or additional tools, I, we use, we use G suite or Google workspace as they’re rebranding it.

Jacob Blackett (38:08):

And so some tools that I use of course, outside of sheets and docs, and just web based apps is school tasks. So the tasks, if you use G suite or Gmail, there’s a little side pain that hangs out there, there’s a task manager. And so I create, create different groups of tasks, for example, syndication pro and hold folio, there’s tasks grouped by, and then I also have one called today. And so each day I, I review, I get away from the inbox, get it on. I have, I have a tab called, go get it on. It is specifically for tasks and projects. So I kind of turn off the inbox, but I’m looking at my tasks. I’m looking, and I’m trying to prioritize for today. I’m grabbing five to 10 tasks out of my, out of my, out of my other list that I’m going to get done today or focus on.

Jacob Blackett (39:05):

Right? And so that’s been a huge, a huge tool to be, to, to number one, capture thoughts, and to dues so that you’re not carrying around this mental baggage, right? You need a place, there’s an app on the phone for tasks. It’s on note, it’s on the desktop. So you need a place where you can just throw it, throw it, throw it in a list and not be kind of burden mentally with, with trying to juggle all these things and then being able to manage those daily, those daily tasks that’s helped a lot. And then I also use a keep Google keep. It’s just a note, it’s just a notepad. And so that that’s been really helpful primarily because I have a one, one of the notes, I call it a hot sheet, but it basically it has, has my highest value activity. So like what, what handful of things are pushing my businesses for that I need to focus on on a day to day basis.

Jacob Blackett (40:06):

Cause you can get, you can get into the weeds and in the minutia of the day and, and just be busy all day, but not take steps to actually move your businesses forward or move you forward. So I keep track of what those highest value activities are. I, I keep track of some, some KPIs, key performance indicators that, that I should be, that I should be tracking. And then I have a, a grateful list. So, so I try to look at this daily, but it’s a list of everything I’m grateful for all add to it, adjusted as I review it, I have long-term goals, short-term goals. I have some reminders of, of like leadership skills and, and some of my strengths and some of my, my kind of a workplace and character strengths. There’s value, value propositions for my businesses, for example, why, why do I own and manage hold folio, right? What is it, what is it serving to people? And so I find, I find that it’s helpful to, to keep that in mind and remind myself of what we’re doing and why, and, and what impact we’re having. So I keep track of those, those statements. And, and so it really it’s, the idea is to kind of have a place where you can, there’s, there’s some affirmations in there as well, but really have a place where you can kind of be grounded, re-cantered focused. And so that’s what I find really helps me.

Seyla (41:40):

Thank you, Jacob for joining us on the call today and talking to us about your real estate journey, syndication pro, and also share your tools and techniques and your wisdom with us and our listeners. We learned a lot from you. And so if our listener wanted to learn more about you and your company, where can they go?

Jacob Blackett (42:00):

So you can go to syndicationpro.com or holdfolio.com there’s an about us page on either site about those businesses, you can learn more about the businesses. My cell phone and email are actually on both of those sites. So if you do want to drop me an email, feel free to do that. More than happy. But yeah, this has been a pleasure. Thank you so much. I hope that the listeners out there being able to get down a nugget or two. Something that will, will help them move forward.