Aileen (00:00):

Welcome everyone to today’s episode of the, How Did They Do It? Real Estate podcasts. We are your hosts, Seyla and Aileen and today’s guest. We have Devin Elder Devin is the founder and CEO of DJ E Texas management group. It vertically integrated multi-family investment firm based in San Antonio, Texas since 2012, the firm has completed hundreds of successful investment projects, including several full cycle multifamily investments. Devin is a principal in over 2000 doors of multifamily. Welcome to the show, Devin, how are you doing today?

Devin (00:30):

I’m doing great. Thanks for having me on guys. Appreciate it.

Aileen (00:33):

Thank you for joining us. So before we get started, can you share a little bit more about your background and how did you get started in real estate?

Devin (00:40):

Yeah, my first real estate investment was a little single family rental with a $10,000 renovation budget. I was absolutely terrified by that. I thought I was crazy for getting into it, but I joined a mentorship group and that was the model they taught and I did it. And I think you see this a lot, but once people do that first one and it goes, okay, then that’s a big difference. There’s a lot of people that want to do real estate investing. And then there’s a much smaller subset that actually has done at least one deal. And when you do one deal, then if you are interested and want to continue doing it, that the subsequent deals get easier. All of this was kind of prefaced by years and years of researching how to get it out of my corporate job, how to become an entrepreneur, how to create passive income. I didn’t really know it was going to be real estate until I attended this one seminar and I actually paid some money to join a group. And that was a big catalyst for me and got me started in, in real estate investing.

Aileen (01:43):

So why did you decide to what was the trigger for you to decide to attend that seminar?

Devin (01:49):

I was, I had been searching for years. I’ve been inspired by some books like four hour work week and rich dad, poor dad. And my inspired by my older brother who was an entrepreneur to seek out the kind of freedom or lifestyle that I thought that I came to the conclusion that only entrepreneurship was going to be able to provide. I spent some, sometime in the corporate world and after a number of years there, it occurred to me that for my particular situation, there was no one coming to save me, right. There was no IPO that was going to happen. There was no lucky break that was going to happen for me and I was getting older and I just realized that there wasn’t going to be any lucky break for me. I didn’t come from any money growing up. So, and I’m kind of an impatient person. I couldn’t go fast enough in the corporate world. And I really subscribed to this idea that even if I could go fast in the corporate world, there’s still only so many hours in the day. And even if I got a really high dollar per hour job, first of all, it’s probably going to be extremely stressful. But number two, there’s still only so many hours in the day. Even if I work 10, 12 hour days at a high salary, there was going to, I was going to max that out. I couldn’t double that. I couldn’t triple that. I couldn’t 10 times that. Right. And so it just became obvious that the kind of freedom that I wanted, the kind of lifestyle that I wanted for myself, for my family and all this kind of stuff, just wasn’t going to be possible within the confines of a W2 income.

Devin (03:19):

And Robert Kiyosaki talks about that a lot. And then there’s also the kind of the tech side of the house as a W2 employee. You pretty much have no tax advantages and sadly not to get off on a tirade here, but there’s a, there’s a huge subset of the population of America below a certain income level that does not pay taxes. And then there’s a subset of people that make a lot of money and they don’t pay taxes either. So because they figured out how not to right through real estate investing. And then there’s this middle subset of really like hardworking people that have W2 jobs that are paying all the taxes. And I didn’t like that situation either. So I wanted to get out of that situation and I wanted to get out of that situation by moving up net rather than moving down.

Devin (04:02):

Although that’s not a bad deal, either living a simple life, there’s nothing wrong with that. I just knew that I wanted, I wanted to do something different. So it was, it was all those things, right? It was wanting to have freedom, wanting to get some tax advantages. And then I think at the end of the day, what really clicked for me was I some newspaper articles, I was reading our article. I was reading, but I’m just an entrepreneur in my DNA. And I worked a couple of different jobs. I just knew that I was never going to be satisfied working for somebody else. And that was a hard realization because being an entrepreneur is incredibly difficult, but I just knew that was it. I think I was just maybe born with it or had read enough about it and seen enough entrepreneurs.

Devin (04:44):

I had to do it no matter what, and that was it for me. So that was, I think my number one value is freedom. And I think money is just a component of that, right? Because I really early on got enabled with this idea of being able to spend my time doing what I want, how I want with who I want. And in my, in my plan that required some, some capital to do that in a team and then some investments to do that. So that was real estate just happened to be the vehicle that could kind of check all those boxes for me. So,

Aileen (05:17):

So as you were getting into real estate, did you just jump in with both feet while you were still working your W2? Or did you fully transition away from your W2 to focus full-time on real estate?

Devin (05:28):

Yeah. Great question. I spent about two and a half years doing both. So it was a much focused effort on building the real estate in every spare minute of time. And I really want to emphasize that for, for anyone listening that I just didn’t decide I’m going to quit my job and transition. I mean, it was extremely difficult learning process and transition for me, but one of the rules I had for myself was to develop passive income, to cover my expenses before it allow myself to quit my job. So I spent several years building up some, a small rental portfolio to do that. And then I started getting into flipping houses and then getting into multi-family during that time. And then it kind of became obvious in 2015 that my time at work, even though I was well compensated six figure W2 employee that still the, the, the opportunity costs there was too high to, to spend my time and energy at work.

Devin (06:20):

I knew that I could do a lot more if I focused full-time. So it took about two and a half years of call it burning the candle at both ends. I listened to somebody recently, who’s an entrepreneur and he talked about early in his career. He would literally run from one place to another in his house to save time. So he could be much that much more efficient. And I laughed about that because that’s how it was for me in those two years. I mean, if I could eat in the car or do sign a closing at a Starbucks to save a 15 minute drive, that’s the kind of things I was doing for years on end to, to try to, to try to save time and to, to build this thing. And so I think that’s was pivotal for me was a 100% commitment and that included liquidating retirement accounts, it included selling things to get capital. It included just an all-out war on getting out of a W2 situation and it did not have, and it was an all-out war sustained for years. Right. So I just don’t want to create any illusions for anybody that I just decided. One day I was just going to go buy a $10 million apartment complex. I mean, today it feels like that it kind of is like that. Now it’s like, oh, we’re buying this $20 million deal. And we’re just going to add another one of the portfolio. It does feel like that, but in the beginning and the transition, it was an all-out or two to get there.

Seyla (07:39):

So you mentioned at the beginning, you started out as a single family home and you work at W2 jobs for two years. At what point, how many houses are that you’ll pull, just doing that time. People you realize that, Oh, I need to jump into the multifamily space or you discover the multifamily space.

Devin (07:56):

Yeah, I think I had around 20 doors. I had a six unit apartment complex, and I think like 15 single family rentals. And so that wasn’t, it wasn’t millions of dollars or anything of cash flow, but it was enough to pay my bills. And when I had one was married and had a family and I didn’t have tremendously high bills, but that was very important to me, I think, because I’d read, if you go back to rich dad, poor dad, and the, kind of the definition of being financially free is having your bills covered by passive income. Right. I really was stuck on that. I really did not want to, I didn’t not want to leave my job without that, but I was also starting to flip some houses and there were seeing 20, 30, $40,000 chunks of revenue come in. And that’s that, that really helps too.

Devin (08:41):

What was passive income to just kind of get by cover my bills so that I wasn’t counting on a flip because flipping is a heart-breaking business. It can be great and it can be terrible. And I did not want to count on that revenue to bills. So as a baseline of passive income and then flipping some houses to supplement that and all the while the, the, the target was to get into these big multi-family deals. But I would see, I had some friends, I was fortunate to have some friends that were doing that. And, and this is hundreds of thousands of dollars required to kind of operate and get in these big deals. You might’ve put down a hundred or $200,000 earnest money on a project. And so I didn’t have that when I first started and I needed to build up, build up to that over time.

Seyla (09:26):

So was it really difficult to jump into the multifamily space?

Devin (09:31):

I went fairly slowly. The first thing I did, I mentioned that group. I joined, I learned about multifamily investing immediately, and I knew I wanted to do that. I just didn’t have the capital and I didn’t have the confidence. And so I surrounded myself with people that were in that space for years, literally just absorbing asking questions and learning without doing anything right, other than doing houses. So I was very, very busy doing houses because I needed to build up that capital. And then after having that kind of network built and having toured a bunch of deals, looked at a bunch of underwriting, seen a bunch of other investors do these types of deals, ask them questions, and it appear over a period of years of kind of learning this stuff. I bought a six unit apartment complex by myself with no partners just to try it out. And then the next project was a partnership on a 75 unit. And then the next project after that was 130 unit that I really didn’t have any partners on except investors and me, and a key principle. So, and then after that, it really got a lot easier because at that point I’d been training for years and then I kind of stepped into it. So it was definitely a long gradual process for me to get into. I think it can be done much faster than that, but that was just my process.

Seyla (10:46):

And you mentioned something about partnership and you did 130 units by yourselves and a key principles, and why you decided to do it by yourself and not having a partner.

Devin (10:57):

That was always the goal. If you look at kind of a typical equity split on a deal, my thought was, if you’ve got 70% of it, let’s look at the, all the equity in a deal. Typical setup is 70% is for the passive investors, 30% for the general partnership. I wanted to take down as much of that 30% as possible. And I thought, I think in a few years, I can get to this point where I can be at where I can have the whole 30%. Right. And so on the 75 unit, that was not the case. I had two partners, it was a smaller deal. It was a lot of work and a very small piece of it, but that’s okay. That was for the, I was committed to getting through this and getting the training. But yeah, my goal was always to be a, standalone operator that had the 30% and then have the investors for the other 70%.

Aileen (11:46):

So how are you able to build up your investor base to get to that? 130 unit? Yeah. Great question. So I started

Devin (11:54):

Like a lot of folks do when the S in the single family world, I start with hard money. I didn’t have any money when I started all this. And the hard money these guys would lend you the money at 12% and three points or something. I was fortunate to meet a gentleman at a, at a networking event. That’s the theme here networking, right. Always, always networking. Right. And he said he would loan me the money at a lower rate, and it was just an individual. And so that was great for me, frankly, it was less paperwork than dealing with harmonic. That alone was like, Ugh, I was so relieved that it was just dealing with one other person and an attorney, and that was it. Right? And so that was much better. And that really set the stage for me to go do, go on, to do eventually hundreds of, of single family projects over the years, because I realized, Hey, I have unlimited capital.

Devin (12:42):

If I could pay somebody 10% or 12% interest, there’s a lot of people that want to do that. And I started to realize that coming, not going up with money and having to kind of learn about finance and money in my thirties, really, it was a big revelation to me when I realized that there was this whole population of people that had the problem of too much cash, and they don’t know where to put it and all growing up and everything. I didn’t understand that that problem existed for people, right. But it’s a problem. It’s a problem for people where I’ve worked hard, I’ve built up capital, where do I put it? And I put it in a stock market. It’s maybe its good. Maybe it’s not, it’s an emotional roller coaster. There’s no tax advantages. And so for somebody to loan me money lend me a hundred thousand dollars on a house with a big cushion of equity. And they get 10, 12% interest on their money that was actually solving people’s problems. So I slowly sort of slowly sort of dawned on me that, okay, if I can solve these people’s problems that are, they’re older and have this capital not necessarily older, but did they have this capital? And they don’t know where to put it. If I could solve that problem for people now I have unlimited capital, right. And if I could do a good job and always deliver on what I say, then there’s no end to the amount of people that I can go solve this problem for. So it was years of doing that kind of a hundred or $150,000 at a time. And that it was very scary for me to go do that. I was terrified of losing anybody’s money, which I think anyone in this business should be right.

Devin (14:23):

And to this day, we’ve never lost any money because for investors, because I’m obsessed with losing money for investors. So it was gaining the practice of doing that over and over again, a hundred thousand dollars, give it back $200,000, give it back $150,000, and give it back. And then we might have 10 projects. We might have a million dollars out and say, Hey, I’ve raised a million dollars here. I have a million dollars of other people’s capital in these projects. They’re just different. So to me and syndication was like, now we’re just going to do 2 million, but in one address. And so I was able to just kind of transition those people. I’d built relationships with, to say, listen, I know we’ve done the lending thing, but, you know, you’re getting 10, 12%, but in the multifamily, we might be getting 15 or 20% or better. And it’s a longer hold, but there’s some tax advantages too. So it was kind of just educating people on that transition. And it was really just that network of small network of folks that I’ve built up. I mentioned that 130, 30 unit deal, we had about two, two and a half million dollars equity. And my partner on that deal did raise about half of that money, right? So that I raised a little over a million. He raised a little over a million and together we could go put that together. And he was also my key principal, but he was not involved in operations. So that was a good way to get that project done. It was a win for everybody involved. We sold that deal this year did real well for everybody. So that was a win. But, you know, to answer your question about how to go about getting investors, there was never a, any point in my career where it exploded.

Devin (16:01):

It really has just been one conversation at a time over and over and over and over and over. And then now the whole time building this business was to get to the kind of the point where we are now, where people are, we can point to the track record and people are referring their friends saying, Hey, you have to get in this deal because I’ve been with this guy for years, and now it’s like a snowball going downhill, right. It’s really small. And really, but now it has its own gravity and it’s growing on it. Like, like, I don’t have say on autopilot, but that was the point you want to get to. Then I wanted to get to with that momentum. And it started just one conversation at a time. And I always tell people that want to get in this business, like have a lot of conversations all the time, go to conferences, go to events, meet people, put a, put a sample deal, packets together, always be talking about it. And that’s same, same way it was for me, there was no, there was no magic. It was just, it was just having those conversations every day for a long

Aileen (16:58):

Definitely can appreciate that. Sometimes people think that this is an overnight type of business, but it does take a long, long time to build it up. And so, yeah, definitely appreciate that.

Seyla (17:09):

And you mentioned about you doing this by yourself without any partners. I just want to ask you how, how do you manage your day to days and when you acquire a new deals or a new opportunity, like from start to finish.

Devin (17:24):

Yeah. So I have a team now of a small team and I’ll talk, I’ll talk about that in a little bit, but there was a period there where it was just me and there was an investor base that I’d built. So I would, I would talk to the broker. I would go look at deals. I would make the offer. And then I would build the offering memorandum, send it out to my investors. I would do a webinar. I have a kind of a software it background and as well as some sales and marketing. And I think all of those things have served me well in, in when I started being a one man shop, right? I could do some web design. I could do some video editing. I could put together a webinar I could do. I could put together an offering, memorandum myself without having to hire a designer.

Devin (18:04):

And maybe it wasn’t the best in the world at those things. But I, there’s a concept called a talent stack where you have a little bit of a competency in a lot of different areas. And just based on my life experience, I had enough competency in a lot of different areas. I had done sales before, so I could, I could present something to groups. I had web design, like I said, I could do videos. And so that helped me kind of be a one man shop for a few years where, Hey, I’m putting together the offering memorandum, I’m setting up the email list. I’m doing the webinar, I’m managing this subscription process. And then I was using third-party management companies, which was in the beginning for me, was a necessity. I mean, there’s no way I was going to also do all of the property management, but as an asset manager and as a sponsor, there was a period there where as a one man shop now, today, my team consists of an office manager.

Devin (18:57):

And then we have an investor relations manager because we’ve grown to hundreds of investors and, and, and lots of properties. So it’s just, I couldn’t do it all myself. And we also have revenue in a big enough company to support that payroll right in the beginning, we couldn’t support that payroll, but now we can. And then I also started a property management company. So my day today is much different, right? It’s really being more of an executive overseeing projects, talking to certain key investor relationships, going on, podcasts, reviewing and approving things. I might see something hit my desk for a new monument sign that we’re putting up at one of our assets. And instead of the old days, it was me going to the vendor and me negotiating and Migos. Now it’s just, it hits my desk and it’s a, or B. And I go be that’s, it’s just more of an approval process approval level than, than doing all of it. But I have done all of it. So I’ve got experience in all of it, but my day consists of now we have an office in San Antonio, very comfortable office I’m in the office probably half the week. I might be out looking at different projects or might be out maybe out playing golf. You never know. It depends on the day, but it’s definitely more of kind of an oversight capacity over what the, what the team is working on.

Seyla (20:16):

And you mentioned about building up your team as well, as will you be able to share with us of how you structured your team and identify team members? What is the secret sauce?

Devin (20:27):

Yeah, I think the secret sauce is a lot of interviews. A lot of interviews and finding a needle in a haystack means that you look at every piece of straw in the haystack. Nobody wants to hear that. I don’t like it, but I think that’s it. Right. And so it’s also trying to, trying to balance payroll and when to give things away when to get things off your plate. Because I think as an entrepreneur, it’s important to starting out, to keep costs low and work your tail off. Right. I think that’s really important, but at some point in the cycle, that’s not sustainable. If you want to grow a business and that’s not why we got into this, we didn’t, we didn’t get into this to work 18 hour days forever for free. Right. What you’re kind of doing in the beginning. Right?

Devin (21:15):

So in terms of building the team, I think one thing that’s helped me early on was being extremely specific about tasks. What are the tasks? And then I would go through and I had a task of like a, I had a spreadsheet, like a hundred tasks in the business and I would rank them based on their complexity and their value to the business. And so anything that was like on a one to 10 scale, anything that was a below a five and complexity, I would say, I have to give this to somebody else. If it’s, if the complexity is low, I need to give it to somebody else. So I actually started out with a virtual assistant overseas and I created a lot of training videos. I mean, dozens of training videos that I could teach to her. And that worked out really well because it was low cost.

Devin (21:58):

And I could create processes for my business that I could just do a video and have somebody do. Now at this phase of my business, it’s really more about because the business has grown to the point where I can’t be involved in every single process. Like I used to be. Now it’s more about finding the right person that can run, that can build and run that process, which is a much more nuanced thing. You’re really, you’re really in the people. I’m really in the kind of the people team building process now. So I’ve kind of gone through the whole game and now really it’s about finding good talent and making sure that they’re happy and fulfilled in the, in the work.

Seyla (22:40):

So Devin, you mentioned you have gone through the single family home fixing plebs and multi-families, what is your current focus now for your company?

Devin (22:49):

Current focus is multifamily assets in San Antonio, B class assets and the 200 unit range. Or the last project we bought was 154 units. The project we’re buying now is 256 units. The average of those twos, 204 units. So we want it, we want to keep buying assets like that in San Antonio, San Antonio is a hard market to you. You can’t just do well in this market, in your sleep. You really have to work hard on operating the assets. So a lot of bigger players don’t want to be in San Antonio. They’d rather be in other bigger markets and that’s fine. That’s kind of our advantages. We’re focused on one market and really just kind of getting out of everything else, getting out of single family stuff. We’ve got some development projects and just kind of wrapping those up. Our goal for next year is just to buy for multi-family assets. One a quarter in San Antonio. Very simple. Not that it’s going to be easy, but it’s very simple business model. So during this

Aileen (23:46):

We’re right now, we’re currently in the pandemic. So has the pandemic changed any of your investing strategies during this time?

Devin (23:54):

Yes, it has. We, we had to stop looking at anything on acquisition side in March, and that was two-fold one, the debt markets and credit markets just completely froze up for re actually very short period of time, but we didn’t know. And then two, we just said, hey, we need to focus 100% on operations because we didn’t know what was going to happen. Right. Nobody knew it was going to happen. We paused distribution star investors, and we started doing updates a couple of times a week out to our investors on these projects. And fortunately the multi-family sector has held up extremely well. I mean, it’s this, it’s almost like the same as last year. And some, some properties are doing better. I mean, it’s, we’re extremely fortunate. And that’s part of our investment thesis and has been for years is that multi-family does well on in in uncertain times.

Devin (24:39):

And so far it’s held up very well. So we stopped for, for about five months there. And then our first acquisition, since COVID hit in March, we closed in September, went very well. Investor appetite was there and then we’re closing one more deal in December. So I don’t know, I don’t want to say its business as usual, but multi-families held up very well. It also in March of 2020, that was a scary time for everybody employees, business owners, everything. And I got very ruthless on cost cutting. We changed some vendor relationships. There’s an employee that I let go and we really streamlined everything. And there were some amazing things come out of that, including starting the property management company, which I’m extremely grateful, but there was some things that I only did because I had my, because I was forced to. And unfortunately I think that’s just how life teaches us lessons a lot of times and tells us where to go is through pain. Right? So I’m very fortunate to kind of have come out of that with, with a leaner cost structure for our whole business property management company and some other things. And then just, it’s just trying to cut off any, any other projects that we have done historically single family development stuff and just saying, Hey, we’re just going to focus on what we do, what we know and streamline that. And that’s kind of hard for me as an entrepreneur. I like starting things. I like starting new things, but that’s what it did for us. We just really cut costs, streamlined some processes and got real clear about what it is we do well and just, and said, hey, we’re just going to do more of that. And just focus on that.

Aileen (26:17):

That’s great that you were able to find the silver lining through all of this. So can you also talk a little about, you mentioned your property management company. Can you please talk a little bit about that and just what the focus is and how did it start up and everything?

Devin (26:31):

Yeah, so I never wanted to start a property management company, but I started looking at the fees. We’re paying across a number of assets. And then we had just had a really bad experience with a property management company. We had our, our net operating income look really good on a couple of properties and it’s because they weren’t paying vendors. So you have like, Oh wow, we’re doing great. And then when we, when we fired them, we discovered a, just a mountain of unpaid bills. Right. And so that, that was just, I’m glad we got out when we did, but what the Genesis of it was actually a relationship. And it was one person I had a relationship with that had worked for a management company, ended up leaving and he was a free agent. He didn’t have a job. And that was literally the Genesis, the management company. I thought I have to, I have to work with this guy. He’s great. And I thought maybe he could hire him as an asset manager or something. And I started running the numbers over the weekend. And I just said, if we could take over these couple of assets, I think, I think my expenses on a management company are going to be this. I’m not sure, but I think we can make it work. So during the middle of the pandemic, I wrote a check to a new entity. I formed to start a management. It was like the craziest thing that I was like, am I crazy? I’m starting a new company right in the middle of COVID. It felt crazy, but it ended up being a fantastic thing. So the way basically he reports to me and he hires his whole staff. He’s got his whole system. And that’s kind of back to my point earlier about I now more in the business of hiring the right people to build things, then building them, myself on a kind of systems, granular level. Right. I I’ve done all that stuff. I enjoy that stuff. But frankly, I don’t have the skillset personally to build out a management company, right. So I hired somebody that had that demonstrated ability to do that. And I said, hey, this is an opportunity for you to run a management company rather than work in some big corporate machine. We, for some big company and you got, you got three bosses and everything I’ve been in the corporate world too. It’s kind of a mess. Sometimes I said, this is this isn’t going to be an entrepreneurial venture. We’re only going to manage our assets. We’re not going to, we talked about taking on third-party clients, but we said, no, third party clients, just our stuff focus.

Devin (28:44):

And we want to promote internally. And we want to have a really good company culture. And we’ve already had a couple of promotions internally just in the short time we’ve had that company. And that’s what we want to continue to build over time. And that’s actually, that’s been a lot of fun, been very rewarding. Our company went from myself and two other employees to now with the management company under the umbrella. We’ve probably got 25 employees, which is like crazy. I never would’ve thought that, but I’m enjoying it quite a bit. And all of this is in service of improved net operating income for, for investor experience. I mean, this whole thing is because we have investors right, as the whole reason we exist. So the whole story and all of that is in service of better performance to the investors. Right. And if, as long as that’s happening, then we’re more in a good space.

Seyla (29:37):

That’s really impressive. You were able to start a new company during the middle of pandemic. That’s really impressive. Congratulations on that.

Devin (29:46):

Thank you. Yeah, it was terrifying, but I don’t know. There’s been a lot of terrifying moments in my career and you get on the other side and then you’re a little less, you just a little braver after that you discover, okay, it wasn’t that bad. And I got through it. What else can I do that I might be fearful about? And so it just builds that capability because really the only difference between an experienced investor and a new investor is just confidence, right? I mean, the numbers aren’t insanely complicated. I mean, its income and expenses and that’s, what’s left over is your, your cash flow. I mean, it’s not terribly complicated what we do, but you’ve got to kind of build-up that confidence over time. And I have found I think Gary Keller said in one of his books, everything you want on the other side of fear. Right? So I feel like I’ve been in a constant state of fear and overcoming fear and fear and overcoming fear and overcome for years now. Right. So it’s like, it becomes like a muscle. You develop it to where you can, you can do that. So it’s been, it’s been great. It’s a lot of fun.

Seyla (30:49):

It’s really awesome. How has real estate investing impacted your life so far?

Devin (30:56):

Yeah, in every imaginable way, I mean, I live a fantasy life. I really do. I work the exact amount I want to work. I have the greatest time with my kids. We have an amazing lifestyle, unbelievable lifestyle. And I don’t want to go on about kind of the material things as being the most important, because it’s not the most important thing, but in terms of cars and houses and vacations and stuff like that, it’s, it’s more than I ever dreamed, especially growing up without money. Right. I mean, it is a completely, it’s a fantasy life that I’m thrilled to be blessed to live. Right. But then there’s also other impacts. I mean, one of these things is my philosophy is that every day is a good day to die a good last day because I’m not trying to build up a hundred million dollars net worth and die with the most net worth.

Devin (31:46):

Right. I mean, I could die tomorrow and if I were to die tomorrow, I want to make sure that today was good. Right. I enjoy talking to you guys right now. I enjoy talking and it’s not work to me. Right. And so I want to make sure that every day that I’m enjoying what I’m doing and I enjoy mean, and I’m very busy, but I like that. I have, I have deals going. We have investors, we have employees, we have exciting stuff happening. I enjoy all that stuff. I’m one of those people I like to stay busy. I like to work. And so that’s rewarding. I started a foundation this year. Our goal is to give away a hundred thousand dollars next year, this year in 2020, we’ll probably give away half that $50,000. Right. But you know, in a couple of years, I’m going to be giving more away through my foundation than I ever did as an employee. That’s really exciting. And then would you coach you some coaching too, right. And coaching other people to try and do come through this and change their life if they want. And so I would say real, estate’s changed my life and in every imaginable way that that could be changed for the, for the positive

Seyla (32:46):

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

Devin (32:55):

Yeah, there’s quite a bit, I would say that there’s so much there, but I think you need, you need to get around people that have the result that you want and emulate them. And I, and I think you really need to be like around them and be friends with them. And so I think that’s, with any result in life, you just kind of mimic your peer group. So I think that that’s really, really important to, to, to be around the peer group that you want to, that you want your life to be like, because we just, we just copy our peer group.

Seyla (33:28):

So if someone wanted to style it with this business, what is one thing that sets those people apart?

Devin (33:35):

Yeah, this is not a fun answer, but it is an all-out commitment to it. And I don’t recommend everybody do that. Right. But the person that will succeed is the person that has to succeed. And I think that’s just the reality. There’s the, there’s that example of burning your boats and things like that. And the people that do that, that commit and go all in and it has to be successful are the ones that are the people that kind of try it out are not now if somebody just wants to invest passively or kind of start on the business and start networking and grow it over time. That’s great. That’s great too. And that person might even have more success over time, but the person that wants to go build and lead a big portfolio, that’s going to take a massive level of commitment. Right? So that person that’s, that’s all in committed. Fortunately real estate has got some different areas to play. I mean, people can, can participate in different ways. So you don’t have to go in and go buy a thousand doors or whatever. Right. But if that is your goal to grow a big business like that, it’s going to require that that a hundred percent commitment.

Seyla (34:50):

That makes sense. What tool or techniques have you used to improve the efficiency of your business or personal life?

Devin (34:57):

What I like is, is a ruthless elimination of things that costs time and energy. And I think anybody can find in their day, some things that are costing time and energy, that they could probably eliminate whether it’s watching TV or anything, even engaging in conversations. These last number of years has been very easy to get kind of lost in some political conversations. And I think it’s hard sometimes to say that’s costing and I’ve explained this to people a lot. I’m not going to have that conversation with you because I have a battery that’s full when I wake up and the battery is going to be drained when I go to bed and you’re asking me to spend my battery on, this is not improving my business or my family or anything I have to say no to that. Right. And so I think saying no to anything that’s draining your battery.

Devin (35:48):

That’s not either improving your business or making you happy. I think, I think that’s, I think that’s the key to efficiency is cutting all that stuff up. And then in your business, you can start looking at your tasks and really writing and making that spreadsheet of all your tasks and saying one technique that helped me many years ago, it was just saying, listen, I want to make a million dollars a year. And I want to work 30 hours a week. How many dollars per hour is that right? And so you take that dollar per hour and go, wow, that’s really high. Is this thing I’m working on right now at the office? Is this a, is this a $600 an hour activity? And most of the time, it’s like, no, it’s not. So you got to find somebody to do that activity besides you, because if you’re the $600 an hour guy, you can’t use yourself on, on all that other stuff. And so I think it’s very valuable filter to determine what you should be working on. And it’s difficult to transition tasks to other people. But once you get over that hump, it frees you up to work on that dollar per hour activity. That’s this very, very high.

Aileen (36:49):

Thank you so much. And so if our listeners wanted to find out more about you, where can they go?

Devin (36:55):

The best place would be our company website, D J E texas.com. Or you can just Google DJE, Texas. And we’ve got lots of content there and in some ways to reach out and contact us.

Aileen (37:06):

Awesome. Thank you so much, Devin. We really enjoyed our conversation today and thank you so much for all the knowledge and your story that you were sharing today with us. We really appreciate it.

Devin (37:13):

Yeah it’s a Lot of fun. I appreciate you having me on. Thank you.

Aileen (37:17):

Thank you so much.