[00:02:08] Patrick Donley: I was happy to have you here. You’re known as the car wash guy on Twitter, and that’s how I came across you.

[00:02:13] Patrick Donley: I’ve really loved your content. You’re a great writer, and we’re going to get into writing a little bit in the interview, but I wanted to start off. You’ve had a really interesting life, and I wanted to talk about your early days. You remind me of a Mike Rowe, what was that, Dirty Jobs guy, right?

[00:02:26] Patrick Donley: Yeah. Like you’ve had a lot of interesting different jobs, like early on in your, let’s say your twenties, even teens. So I wanted to talk about that, just like your early days and just growing up, like some of the jobs you did and some of the experiences you had. 

[00:02:39] Kriss Berg: Great. Because that’s what informed my work ethic.

[00:02:42] Kriss Berg: Now. My first job, I was 12 years old and my mom came home and said, I got you a job. There was no question of whether I could take it or not. It was, you have a job. You’re supposed to show up this Saturday morning and it was at a veterinary clinic. It had some kennels in the back and my job was literally just to scoop the poop.

[00:02:58] Kriss Berg: So I was a pooper scooper. I’m born and raised. I did that. Until I was 18 years old every weekend. And if I couldn’t make it, I had to find somebody who could. And then a lot of those dogs were sick. So you can imagine the mess I had to clean up and then summer jobs were on a farm. I worked on a garlic farm.

[00:03:15] Kriss Berg: This guy grew organic garlic back before anybody knew what organic was. And then, you had to move irrigation water and there were horses. So you’re bucking hay and all this stuff. And it was in Southern Colorado. So it was really hot in the summer. And then in college, I got into the mining business. I was actually a mining engineer.

[00:03:32] Kriss Berg: And part of the education there was you had to mine. You would drill, load up the face with explosives, blow it up, and then take in the equipment and shovel out the rock and go dump it and process it. It was really cool. So I had a lot of dirty jobs early in my life. So I can see why you get the micro thing.

[00:03:53] Patrick Donley: Yeah, and then your first entrepreneurial venture, tell us about that. Wasn’t that excavating? 

[00:03:59] Kriss Berg: Yeah, it was excavating. Yeah. So I had a kind of an early life crisis when I was 27, quit my job, quit my girlfriend, packed up my truck and moved back home. And this guy that I moved in with had just bought a lube oil shop with an SBA loan.

[00:04:12] Kriss Berg: And he said he was Living a pretty good lifestyle, making good money. And I thought I could do that. I found an excavation company back in the very first iteration of bizbuysell. com. This is 2003 and went to his same SBA lender and they backed me. I, it was a whopping 180, 000 business, but that’s what they grossed and that’s what they sold for.

[00:04:33] Kriss Berg: And I put down about 50, 000 and got. A couple trucks and a mini excavator and a couple skid steers and off I went and we dug sewer lines and water lines and our unique thing was that we had permits to go into the right of way so we could cut up a street and fix a sewer line or a water line. That turned out to be a good differentiator because.

[00:04:55] Kriss Berg: We could charge a lot more because we could then patch the asphalt and the concrete. And so I did that for four years, an extremely stressful business, and I will never recommend that to anybody. But I basically turned that 50, 000 into about, after it was all said and done, it was about 650, 000 when I sold the business four years later.

[00:05:15] Kriss Berg: I grew up from the top line of 180, 000. I grew it up to about 2. 6 million and sold it. And after all the debt was paid and all the taxes and everything, I had a nice little nest egg. And that’s when I went off the grid. Literally, I got so sick of living in the city that my future wife and I moved into an off grid home.

[00:05:32] Kriss Berg: And we lived in a solar and wind powered home for the next 13 years. 

[00:05:36] Patrick Donley: So tell me about that. I had the same experience, not quite like yours. I was still in Ohio, but living off the grid, it’s always, it had always been like a dream of mine, and I don’t even know what inspired it, but just this return to simple living, maybe like reading Walden and Henry David Thoreau was like always a big influence for me, but tell me about that.

[00:05:54] Patrick Donley: So you guys, how did you convince your wife, first of all, to go do this? And then tell me about the experience. I want to hear more about it. 

[00:06:01] Kriss Berg: Yeah, actually it was her idea, so I didn’t have to convince her at all. She was not a city gal. 

[00:06:06] Patrick Donley: And you guys were living where, in Denver? 

[00:06:08] Kriss Berg: We were living in Denver, we were living right in the city, a very busy part of the city, if anybody knows Wash Park, it was essentially right in the city and extremely noisy, there was quite a bit of crime, you got police helicopters floating over, all this stuff, cars were being broken into.

[00:06:22] Kriss Berg: This was in about 2007, sold the business and we just Decided to move up into the mountains and the off grid thing was a little bit of an accident because it was one of the few places we could afford. We were looking at Stingboat Springs, Colorado, which is in the Northwest area. And for our budget, which at the time was like 400, 000.

[00:06:43] Kriss Berg: It was either. A house in the middle of nowhere that didn’t have grid power or a condo in town and we were looking for the full mountain experience. And so this off grid house was really all we could afford. And so we thought we’ll figure this out. This will be cool. It’s a fun thing to tell people we live off the grid. And it was a baptism by fire too, because we moved there in January of 08 and Steamboat had the snowiest winter on record. And when it snows, you don’t generate a lot of solar power and it’s solar power was all this place had. It had a backup generator, but the guy who had.

[00:07:18] Kriss Berg: built this place, just didn’t know what he was doing. There’s all these problems. So we had to dig in right away, figure things out. We were constantly on the phone with tech support and our neighbors jumped in. Luckily they didn’t even know us yet, but there were probably about 10 houses who were also off the grid in this area.

[00:07:35] Kriss Berg: And it was wild. It was a really cool way to live, but I’m glad to be back on the grid. 

[00:07:43] Patrick Donley: And that lasted 13 years. Is that what you said? 

[00:07:46] Kriss Berg: Yeah. 13 years. Yeah. And then we had kids starting in 2014 and it just got harder and harder, especially in that climate. We’re 45 minutes away from our kids’ school.

[00:07:55] Kriss Berg: It snows a lot in Simoe Springs, Colorado. If you want to go skiing, that’s the place to go because it snows a ridiculous amount. And the moving of the snow and the driving in the snow just got really old. So we moved in. 2020, in the height of the pandemic, moved to the western slope of Colorado, which has a much milder climate.

[00:08:13] Patrick Donley: Gotcha. So you sold the excavating business, and went off the grid. You’re still an entrepreneur by heart. It seems like you have this mentality of just, I’ll figure it out as I go along. I don’t get the sense that like with the excavating company, it was like, you figured it out, the business, like you bought it, figured it out, grew it.

[00:08:31] Patrick Donley: What did you do next? Like after the excavating company? 

[00:08:35] Kriss Berg: Yeah, that’s an interesting question because when I had the excavation company, I was really burned out and I was looking around at other things to do and I was admiring the guys who were doing it in the Wash Park area of Denver. It’s called a scrape off.

[00:08:51] Kriss Berg: They would buy the worst house in the nicest neighborhood. They would tear it down and they’d put up essentially what was a McMansion. And, yeah, We would do a lot of the concrete and sewer work for them. And I was just watching these guys as a lifestyle. And a friend of mine who was doing it, his name is Chad.

[00:09:08] Kriss Berg: He would, he would have two houses going at any one time. One would be in the beginning stages. One would be in the ending stage. And I would quiz him, what are you doing? And I basically figured out that he was making about eight or 900, 000 a year. And although construction is not easy by any means, he lived two blocks from most of his projects.

[00:09:26] Kriss Berg: He could be there. in two minutes to answer questions. And he lived this tremendous lifestyle. So I moved, we moved to Steamboat and I thought that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to start building houses just one at a time. And I’ll figure this out. I didn’t know a lot of the construction practices. From the ground up, I knew everything under the ground, but I had to figure out framing and all this stuff.

[00:09:45] Kriss Berg: I figured, I can figure that out. So this is 2008. And little did I know that ain’t nobody gonna build any houses anytime soon anywhere in early 2008 for really the next five years. Yeah, so I bought a lot that was zoned for duplex and I had plans drawn up and I had all this stuff and this, even in March of 08, the bank said, yeah, I think we can do this deal on a Friday afternoon.

[00:10:08] Kriss Berg: They said, come in Monday and we’ll get some paperwork going. Come Monday. And they basically kicked me out of the bank. They were like, we don’t want anything to do with this kind of deal anymore. We’re not lending on this. We’ve shut down this whole division. Like this guy was worried about his job. He wasn’t worried about my money.

[00:10:21] Kriss Berg: That shut down in an instant. And of course, thank goodness I was early in that process. I really would have been upside down on that project. Right about that time, I read Tim Ferriss’ 4 Hour Workweek. Just on a whim, it had just come out recently. This is 2008 again, I think, or 2009, somewhere in there.

[00:10:38] Kriss Berg: And he was talking about these online businesses. And I lived off the grid in the middle of nowhere. It’s not like I could go get a job, and I was unemployable at that point. Anyway, I’d been an entrepreneur for four years. So I read that book and found a website for sale that was selling solar powered gear.

[00:10:54] Kriss Berg: It was solar kits and stuff like that. So I bought that. It cost me, I think I paid 150, 000 for it. It was, had all this SEO going on and it had orders coming in, all this stuff. And that was my first foray into online business. And I was really hooked because we could travel anywhere. I went to Thailand for a month.

[00:11:10] Kriss Berg: We went to Europe. We went, we went all over the country and went to the beach for a month and I could work there. It was a game changer for me. I didn’t know anything about websites. I had no idea. And in 2008, 2009, you still had to know a lot of HTML, like even WordPress really wasn’t even that popular at that point.

[00:11:27] Kriss Berg: So it was, there was another baptism by fire. You’re probably going to pick up on that. There’s a lot of that going, but that was my first foray into that. And that was a game changer. 

[00:11:35] Patrick Donley: One thing that strikes me about you is that you’re this, like a continual learner. I was looking at some of the certifications that you’ve had and talking to me about that.

[00:11:43] Patrick Donley: Like just being a continual learner, like that hunger and drive to just to learn. Like you, you’ve done a lot of different certifications and I think it’s awesome. 

[00:11:52] Kriss Berg: Yeah, it’s been interesting because a lot of my friends, I went to an engineering college in Colorado. And a lot of my friends got advanced degrees.

[00:11:59] Kriss Berg: They got MBAs and they got PhDs, a lot of them. And I didn’t like my area of study, which was mining. I didn’t like that enough. I wasn’t even making a living at that, but I was still interested in learning and I always wanted something to show for it. So I think my first one was the LEED certification.

[00:12:17] Kriss Berg: Which is the green building certification. I got that when I thought I was going to be building houses. And then I went on to get my EMT. I got my firefighter one certification. I got a certification in nutrition and personal training. I’m sure I’m forgetting some, it just, it was one of those things.

[00:12:33] Kriss Berg: I was an Eagle Scout when I was a kid and it was like getting a badge, it was that pat on the back, you passed a test and you studied and yeah, good job. It was that thing. It was that. That accolade that I missed, because when you’re an entrepreneur, you don’t get that at all.

[00:12:46] Kriss Berg: If anything, you get the opposite, right? So yeah. So now I’m getting a certification in psilocybin facilitation because I host psychedelic retreats. I’m sure we’ll get into that later, but it’s just been a, I have an insane, insatiable curiosity and. This is a cool way to do it and check a box, get a little accolade and, I haven’t used all that stuff that much for prolonged periods, but it’s always cool.

[00:13:10] Kriss Berg: And I always learn something and I always meet new people and it’s fun. 

[00:13:14] Patrick Donley: I see all the books in your bookshelf there behind you. You had mentioned the Tim Ferriss book, obviously that made a big impact on you. And it sounds like you got into lifestyle design and time independence, financial independence at that point.

[00:13:27] Patrick Donley: Yeah. I heard you mention Ready Fire Aim as a book that was an influence. Are there any others that come to mind? 

[00:13:34] Kriss Berg: Yeah, I’ll rewind. The first seminal one for me was Rich Dad Poor Dad. I think that came out in the late 90s, I want to say. Maybe early 2000s, whatever it was. And that was seminal for me because My dad was a poor dad.

[00:13:47] Kriss Berg: He was literally, and his family was all poor dad, that education was the only thing. And I had zero entrepreneurial training, zero entrepreneurial impetus for my entire life. But when I had that crisis, when I was 27, I just realized I hated having a boss. I hated my conflicts and all my jobs throughout my whole career was with the boss and then being really set in their ways and really.

[00:14:10] Kriss Berg: They were political creatures, not really production creatures, right? They were bred to fit a system, not to actually get things done. And I was all about productivity and getting things done and doing things in a new way. So reading that from Kiyosaki was like, wow, okay. You don’t have to follow this path.

[00:14:27] Kriss Berg: You can do, you can follow your own path and you can, he was doing it with real estate, but that was the kickoff to my entrepreneurial career. And then Ready Fire Aim is. literally a manual for growing a business from zero to about a hundred million dollars. Like it covers probably three quarters of the issues that any business will come across in that journey.

[00:14:50] Kriss Berg: And the name comes from just getting started. I’ll aim and then fire, just fire, get some customers, get a product out there, whatever it is, get started and worry about the details later. And that was also a game changer for me because most of the books Even now are about, setting up a business and hiring an attorney.

[00:15:10] Kriss Berg: And there was all this bureaucracy associated with starting a business. I think most people get it now, but in the early 2000s, if you were going to start a business, you needed a business plan, right? And you needed an attorney to do this document for you. You had to have an accountant set up all these things for you.

[00:15:26] Kriss Berg: And this book said, just go get a customer, just go start earning something and then worry about all that crap later. And that was a huge game changer for me. 

[00:15:35] Patrick Donley: So your background was in engineering. Like, how did you, and you obviously have done really well financially. How did you go about just teaching yourself financial literacy?

[00:15:44] Patrick Donley: That’s one thing I think is woefully lacking in our culture. The lack of financial education. 

[00:15:50] Kriss Berg: Yeah, I, I just continually read. I read one, another book that was huge for me was the Millionaire Next Door, the E Myth. is another one. Just constantly reading. And now that engine for me, like I don’t read that many business books anymore, but that engine for me is really Twitter, right?

[00:16:07] Kriss Berg: And acts, whatever you want to call it. There’s so many smart people posting so many, and there’s some, honestly, there’s some dumb people posting dumb things too. You can tell fortunately, but I’m just that curious again, just reading and learning. And frankly, at this point of 21 years in my entrepreneurial journey, just a lot of mistakes and screwing up.

[00:16:28] Patrick Donley: So I wanted to hear what happened after you got into the solar business, you’re living off the grid. How did that unfold? And you’ve gone on to do many other businesses. So let’s talk about the progression a little bit. 

[00:16:39] Kriss Berg: Yeah, I’ll rewind real quick, because I know a lot, you have a lot of real estate investors, right?

[00:16:44] Kriss Berg: So in Denver, when I had the excavation company, one of the first things I did when I started making a good income. I bought a triplex and my house was hacked. That’s not what we called it back then. It was just called buying a triplex, but I lived on one side and rented the other two others. It was an up- down duplex on the other side.

[00:17:02] Kriss Berg: And then I got in with a good realtor and I wanted to buy another one and I bought another duplex in the same case, in both properties, the worst house in a really good neighborhood. The one was literally. The worst house, it was probably the worst house in the city at one time. Legally had a bed bug infestation at one time.

[00:17:19] Kriss Berg: I got a lot of stories about that. But real estate really kicked off the net worth that I was eventually going to build because it was work for sure. And I don’t recommend it to everybody, but it was an incredible investment, especially with Denver real estate really just exploded for the last 20 years.

[00:17:36] Kriss Berg: So I had that going, even when we moved off the grid, I still had these properties at three or five units in Denver and that kicked off cash the entire time. And then when we finally sold it, we had a really nice nest egg too. So that was part of that journey. So you asked, I had an online business, we’re living off the grid and I was selling solar panels.

[00:17:55] Kriss Berg: And right around that time I had a bunch of health issues. I was having, at the time , a gluten problem, in which nobody knew what gluten was in 2008. And I was having digestion issues, and I was really overweight, and I, even though we were living in this off grid place, I was just fat and sick, to be honest with you.

[00:18:13] Kriss Berg: And being the curious guy, I dug into my health, and that’s when I got the nutrition degree. That’s when I started studying personal training. And I started talking about it. I had a blog back then. It’s long gone now. What year would this have been? This was 2009 2010. So the solar business is going well, but I was having all these health issues and I had this big list of email addresses because I was constantly gathering emails from my solar website.

[00:18:38] Kriss Berg: And I started talking about health stuff and I thought I would get booed, shut up and stick to solar. And some people did say that there was a huge response. of people saying the same thing that Western medicine had let us all down. Like we couldn’t figure it out, I went doctor after doctor, nobody could figure out what’s going on.

[00:18:56] Kriss Berg: And finally I went to a naturopath and got all these tests and figured out it was gluten, blah, blah, blah, got better. And I talked about that journey on my blog and it had an enormous response. And so I started coming up with health products. I found a manufacturer. I made an early version of what’s, which is very similar to athletic greens, but it had a big shot of protein in it too.

[00:19:18] Kriss Berg: And I started selling that to my solar clients. And. People were buying it almost by the pallet load. And I was, I would eventually just call people like, why are you buying 50 bags of this stuff? And it turned out a lot of these people were survivalists because they had solar, they had a little cabin or something.

[00:19:34] Kriss Berg: They were setting it up with solar. Now they needed the food and they were buying all this stuff. And so we realized it was just a huge overlap with these people. And so that’s how my health company works, and now we’ve been doing that for 14 years. I’ve been, so that’s my nutrition background and all that really played into it.

[00:19:50] Kriss Berg: So now my main job is actually this health company. I’m known as the carwash guy, but I spend more time researching health ingredients, creating health products that can lower your blood sugar or help bladder control issues or pain. We have a lot of joint pain products. And so that’s actually my main gig now is helping.

[00:20:09] Kriss Berg: And that’s super rewarding because I got an email. Friday from a guy who’s, he literally doesn’t need a walker anymore because our joint pain product helped him walk again. It’s wild. So that’s the most rewarding thing I do. The car washes and the real estate now are really a side gig and it’s very fun, but it’s not as rewarding as my main thing.

[00:20:30] Patrick Donley: So when you first developed the product, was it to solve your own problem? Basically, like you were having these health issues. Were you manufacturing all of this? 

[00:20:40] Kriss Berg: I combined it. I used my kitchen as a laboratory a little bit and found the products I wanted because at the time I couldn’t eat any dairy and most protein comes from whey, which is basically a milk product.

[00:20:52] Kriss Berg: And so I had to figure out how I can get all this nutrition without using dairy products and gluten products. So I turned my kitchen into a lab and then I found a real lab with formulators and they were approved by the FDA and all this stuff. They actually created the product that was called American Natural Superfood.

[00:21:11] Kriss Berg: And so we actually just discontinued it last month. That’s the last two customers, but we’ve got a ton of other products now. So that I was the guinea pig. I’m still the guinea pig for most of our products. 

[00:21:22] Patrick Donley: And that takes up the brunt of your time, even though you’ve got all these other entrepreneurial ventures going on as well.

[00:21:28] Kriss Berg: Yeah, and right now, Patrick, I’m actually paring down. I think if you follow me for a while, you know that I had five or six or seven things going on, I think. We sold out of the financial, I had a financial newsletter company. We sold that a month ago. We’re looking to pare down, simplify.

[00:21:44] Kriss Berg: Really? And so if I had my druthers, it would be probably one or two online businesses. And then the car wash thing over the next five years. 

[00:21:53] Patrick Donley: And is that because it just became too much like doing all these different projects or why did you decide to pare down? 

[00:22:01] Kriss Berg: Yeah, I think that the shiny object syndrome is fun for a while.

[00:22:06] Kriss Berg: And I think it’s a pendulum. I swung into, especially when I got super active on Twitter, all these opportunities cropped up and I jumped into all these things. And honestly, they’ve been lucrative. Like I’ve made money off of them and I don’t regret a single one of them, but now I’m swinging back, I’m simplifying and I’m really enjoying focusing on just a couple of different things.

[00:22:25] Kriss Berg: And that, but honestly, I think if you, if we were to have another call in 10 years, you’d say how many things you got going now? And I’m like, Oh, I’m back to seven or eight things. 

[00:22:36] Patrick Donley: Yeah. The shiny object syndrome is a real danger on Twitter for sure. I want to get into Twitter a little bit.

[00:22:42] Patrick Donley: When did you get into it? Why did you get into it? Did you realize the power of it as you got into it, or did that kind of develop over time? 

[00:22:50] Kriss Berg: That developed over time. I got on in 2011, I want to say, and it was for years. It was just a way to argue about sports. And, it was, back then it was a ton of people just telling jokes.

[00:23:03] Kriss Berg: It was like comedians workshopping their jokes. So it was just a fun thing. And then, in about 2019, 2018 or so guys like Nick Huber sweaty startups, And some people really started posting valuable business stuff. And I realized I could contribute to this. I have quite a bit of experience.

[00:23:20] Kriss Berg: I was learning a ton from these people and I thought I can share it too. And so about two years ago, I want to say I started really sharing my stuff, my journey, and my experience. And I shared, my health supplement company at the time in 2022 is doing like 18 million or something.

[00:23:36] Kriss Berg: And so I was talking about that, but nobody cared. Nobody wanted to hear about that. I think I had 2000 followers and I would get like 4 likes on something. And I thought, okay. And then. About a year and a half ago I’ll rewind, about two years ago, I started following, there’s, self storage just blew up on Twitter.

[00:23:54] Kriss Berg: Everybody was doing it and during the pandemic, it became just red hot. And so I thought I could do that. I’m in a sizable town here. I’ll find a self storage facility. And I found a friend of mine who wanted to partner on it. We could do this, right? We looked and everybody who had a self storage facility was so completely unrealistic about what that thing was worth.

[00:24:14] Kriss Berg: That we couldn’t make anything work. It was ridiculous. What did they want? What they wanted for their properties and that didn’t work. But in the process, I met an agent, a commercial real estate agent, and he said, you should look at this car wash. I’m sitting in the market. It’s a pocket deal now, but it was on the market for 9 months and we just never got any action on it.

[00:24:32] Kriss Berg: And so I looked at it and forgot about it. And I came back to it and we realized that it wasn’t on Google Maps. They hadn’t updated the pricing in a decade or more. The guys who worked there didn’t even know how to update the pricing. That’s how long it had been, and they had been there 12 or 13 years.

[00:24:49] Kriss Berg: And it was just your basic kind of case of neglect. The owners literally owned a bank, so they had much bigger fish to fry. And this was a side gig for them and they just ignored it, essentially. So we bought the first one in April of 2022 coming up on two years ago. And it was just fun. We, all these little levers you could push, you could, the guys who work there, the attendant said we haven’t updated these soaps.

[00:25:14] Kriss Berg: We got to get better soap. Everybody hates our soap. That was easy. We just buy new soap. We gotta fix this thing. The old owners never wanted to spend any money. Can we fix this thing? Fix the thing. And before we knew it, we had increased the business 70%. We put it on Google maps. We increased the prices a little bit.

[00:25:30] Kriss Berg: We just improved the customer experience. Before we knew it, we’d almost doubled the business. And so another car wash came up for sale. It was almost a carved copy of the first one, the same builder. And the same original owner bought that one and then it was just this nice little side gig and then in December of 22, I do what everybody, what everyone on Twitter does is email your accountant and say, okay, what’s the damage?

[00:25:54] Kriss Berg: How much am I going to owe come March for the tax bill? And she says, I don’t think you’re going to owe anything. And I had been used to a mid to low six figure tax bill for years. I’ve been paying. I pay for the nutritional products and all the online businesses are generating this cash flow. And I was just, we’d make our quarterly payments as you’re supposed to, but there was always a big check to be written in the spring of the following year. And I said, what do you mean I’m not going to owe anything? And she said there’s this thing called bonus depreciation. Did you know about this?

[00:26:22] Kriss Berg: And I had heard about it, but 2 years ago, it wasn’t quiet, there weren’t all these cost seg companies and like people were talking about it, but I didn’t truly understand it. So I called her. And I said, what are you talking about? And she said, yeah, the appreciation from these car washes are going to wipe out your entire tax bill.

[00:26:38] Kriss Berg: And you’re going to get back all these payments you’ve made out throughout the year. And that was when I was like, okay, car washes are really pretty cool. I liked them to that point, but I was like, Oh my God. And so January 23, I was like, Hey guys, I just figured out this crazy thing. I had no idea it was going to be this cool.

[00:26:59] Kriss Berg: And so that caught fire. All of a sudden I had 12, 000 followers and I was like maybe I should just be the carwash guy. And then that’s how it’s, that was how it started. And so since then we bought one more, we’re trying to buy four more this year. And that’s, it’s become a life of its own. 

[00:27:14] Patrick Donley: So there’s a lot to unpack here.

[00:27:16] Patrick Donley: I want to talk about the first one. Tell me about just how you’re finding these deals, how you’re going about, I don’t know if you’re. financing them with a partner. Talk to me a little bit about the mechanics of getting a deal done and getting one under ownership. 

[00:27:30] Kriss Berg: Yeah. So the first one had been listed, but he basically unlisted it because it just sat for a year 

[00:27:36] Kriss Berg: on 

[00:27:36] Kriss Berg: the market.

[00:27:36] Kriss Berg: And so they had taken it off of all of it, but I had contacted him when I was looking at self storage facilities. So the agent still knew I was in the market for something, but he was what he called a pocket deal. And we see this a lot in bigger metrics. That’s it. And a seasoned agent in a certain niche, like car washes, or gas stations, or self storage.

[00:27:59] Kriss Berg: will not list it in the public listing because he doesn’t want the tire kickers. They don’t want the incessant phone calls and emails from all over the world that I’m sure they get on deals that are listed in LoopNet and Crexie and all this stuff. So when I tell people, if you want to look for a car wash deal, in general, you can start asking around to commercial agents on who are the local people who handle these deals.

[00:28:25] Kriss Berg: There’s usually in any major area, there’s usually a handful of people who will handle the majority of car wash deals. And oftentimes they have pocket deals that they don’t want to list, but are indeed for sale. So the next two deals actually we found were listed, they were both listed on crexi. com. And so you don’t have to go off market to find these deals.

[00:28:46] Kriss Berg: But this year we’re going to be sending, we’ve had, I have had a VA in Pakistan, All the Car Wash ownership listings, we now have the owner’s home address or their headquarter address. So we’ll be sending personalized letters to all those people. That’s another way to do it. Now is this all over, or is this just local to you, or how do you? We’re just looking at Colorado right now.

[00:29:10] Kriss Berg: I get a lot of deals sourced because of my Twitter profile from all over the country. And eventually I’m hoping to buy some of those deals. But right now we like locals because we’re building up a system. The idea is to build up a system to manage a car wash from anywhere. And we’re still in the process of doing that.

[00:29:25] Kriss Berg: So we financed the first deal with bank financing. We put down 25%. It was 650K. The second deal, we were only required to put down 20 percent in these next. Couple deals we’re hoping to do. SBA, and there’s a program for the SBAI, I’m forgetting, I think it’s seven A or something. Maybe you know what it is, but it’s one of these classifications, but specifically for real estate businesses, based businesses.

[00:29:50] Kriss Berg: And for those you can put down 10%. So we’re gonna do that on the next couple deals. 

[00:29:55] Patrick Donley: So far, how have the banks been viewing, like in your experience so far, how do they view car washes? Are they pretty eager to lend to you? 

[00:30:02] Kriss Berg: Yeah, certain ones are. It’s funny that you’ll come up across some banks, and some of these banks we’ve had relationships with in my other businesses, so you’d think they’d be primed to lend to me, but some of them say, oh, no, Car Wash.

[00:30:14] Kriss Berg: And then others are like, Car Wash, let’s do it. We love them. Bring us all the Car Wash deals you have. So I’ve always said you can’t have too many bankers. I still believe that. I think you only need one accountant. I probably only need one lawyer for most business, but you need a ton of bankers if you’re going to get deals done because they all have different requirements and different niches they like.

[00:30:34] Kriss Berg: And so we’ve got a great lender now called Oakstar. They’re regional, they’re based in Missouri, but they’re regional, but they seem to love car washes right now. So we’re working with them right now, but we know that it tends to be a kind of a localized regional lender. We have not had any luck with the big nationals, Wells and First and U.

[00:30:53] Kriss Berg: S. Bank, and they don’t seem to have any appetite for this kind of stuff. So when 

[00:30:57] Patrick Donley: you’re doing value ads on car washes, basically, right? It’s a value add deal, essentially. 

[00:31:02] Kriss Berg: It’s a value add. Yeah. It’s classic value-add real estate. 

[00:31:06] Patrick Donley: And so when you are, when you say car wash, like I think of the big, we’ve got in Columbus, Ohio, like the big one is called Blue Car Wash, where they Go through the tunnel and they, you just sit there in your car, put it in neutral and go, that’s not what you’re buying, right?

[00:31:22] Kriss Berg: No, those have been overbuilt. And I think a lot of your listeners would probably agree, like, why are you buying car washes right now? They’re building them everywhere. Those are called a tunnel or an express wash. And the car pulls in and you’re basically pulled on a conveyor belt through and you spit you out the other side of a clean car.

[00:31:39] Kriss Berg: Those have been overbuilt primarily because of this tax break that we’ll get into that I’m benefiting from too, but we like the self-serve slash touch free car washes. When you drive in, you wash your own car, there are a huge percent of the population still like to wash their own car. They don’t want to go through those big tunnels because they do tend to damage vehicles and there’s a ton of people who just get a lot of satisfaction from washing their own car.

[00:32:05] Kriss Berg: And then we have the touch free on 1 side and it’s just what it sounds like. There’s no brushes that can damage your car. So they are a lot better. We have this kind of dumbbell clientele. We have the lower end who want to spend 2 on a car wash or maybe 4 and wash their own car. And then we have people with really nice cars who would never trust that car to go through a big tunnel.

[00:32:28] Kriss Berg: So our business is steady. This side of the business is growing generally, but it’s a completely different niche. It’s a completely different customer from those tunnels. 

[00:32:37] Patrick Donley: I mentioned my uncle who had a couple car watches. I think he built them in the 80s, had them in the 90s, and 2000s. He had a more and almost like a tertiary market out from, in I would say like a blue collar area.

[00:32:49] Patrick Donley: And it was like guys in their trucks and like that was his market guys coming in with their ATVs or whatever, like spraying down the back of the bed of their truck. Is that kind of your target market? 

[00:33:01] Kriss Berg: That is 100 percent our target market because that guy can never go through, he can’t even go through a touch free wash, right?

[00:33:07] Kriss Berg: And they have this big muddy vehicle, they need to spray it off themselves. A lot of contractors who have big trucks that just can’t go through any kind of automated car wash at all. And then a lot of people who have just a custom car who just love to spend an hour on Saturday wiping it down, so that’s 100 percent our market.

[00:33:26] Patrick Donley: So we touched on the value add, you’ve mentioned a few things like new soap. What else are you doing to do the value add and boost the value of these things? 

[00:33:34] Kriss Berg: Yeah, I’ll break it down into three apps. So it’s modernized, modified, and marketed. So modernize is to upgrade the soaps and it’s really focused on improving the customer experience.

[00:33:45] Kriss Berg: And so much of it is just fixing little broken stuff. And anybody who’s ever gone to a self serve car wash will tell you they went up to them and this didn’t work. My credit card wouldn’t swipe. The soap wouldn’t come out. The brush was broken. There was mud everywhere, right? So we’re just improving the customer experience.

[00:34:03] Kriss Berg: And then you can raise prices. That’s the modification. We raise the prices. We’re almost always slightly above market rate because our car washes work better. And people who want a functional car wash are willing to pay more, right? Then we install a membership program that’s been really popular. We started in November.

[00:34:19] Kriss Berg: We now have about 75 members between our two local washes. We’re going to put it into the third wash. Probably next year. And then the marketing is to get the Google listing up. If it doesn’t have it, get five star reviews, and then we run a little bit of AdWords. We’ll run some direct mail, stuff like that.

[00:34:38] Kriss Berg: We put better signage, like one of ours, the new car watch we bought is one block off a really busy road. We just bought an A frame sign and just put it right on the busy corner. And more people are aware of our watch now. So the marketing and all this stuff is really simple. If you have any experience marketing a business, you’ll look at our methods and think that’s, this is like one on one stuff.

[00:34:59] Kriss Berg: And that’s all it is. Then car wash owners don’t do it. 

[00:35:02] Patrick Donley: It’s a little like just the mom and pop self storage owners. Like they’re just not optimized. And those are the ones you want to buy because you can add the value of the three M’s that you’re talking about. It’s not like brain surgery, right?

[00:35:13] Patrick Donley: But it takes energy and effort. That’s what you’re doing to enhance the value. 

[00:35:18] Kriss Berg: Yeah. There’s a whole generation of people who thought when they bought real estate. That the real safe itself, the simple location of it was all the marketing you ever had to do. And they also thought that most of this real estate was passive.

[00:35:32] Kriss Berg: They were told that A, you just show up and empty the quarter bands, or you just show up and you cut a lock off on the self storage unit every once in a while. Or you show somebody a space once a week or something. And our generation and the millennials are now coming in and saying, if you treat these businesses as active and you’re active in it.

[00:35:50] Kriss Berg: You can completely revolutionize the business in a matter of weeks, almost, and you just show the most basic effort ever, and it’s, you’re rewarded. You can double and triple the value of these places in a short period of time. 

[00:36:03] Patrick Donley: So what’s your endgame or exit strategy with these? Are you going to just continue to hold on to them?

[00:36:08] Patrick Donley: Are you going to package them up at some point and sell them off? What’s the end game? 

[00:36:12] Kriss Berg: Yeah it’s a classic roll up scenario now. So I’m hoping within the next decade that we can get somewhere between 20 and 30 of them. And if we can do that right now, these places, I’m going to do some math here.

[00:36:26] Kriss Berg: Hopefully you can follow on if you can’t, but hopefully your audience knows a little bit about a cap rate. It’s basically a multiplier for what a property is worth. We’re paying a 10 cap, which is. 1%, 10%, sorry, not 1%, 1 or 10%, which basically means a 10 X multiple price. So if it’s EBITDAs, which is profit before debt service, if its EBITDAs are 50 grand, we’ll pay about 500 grand for that property.

[00:36:55] Kriss Berg: Okay. So we hope to get it. Somewhere 20, 30 of these, and we hope to get the EBITDA of the entire roll up somewhere in the three or 4 million range. Let’s just say for easy math, it’s 3 million EBITDA across all these locations. They’re all branded the same. A member who is a member at one car wash can go to any of them in our network.

[00:37:17] Kriss Berg: And we have done the classic 3M strategy to all these places. We’ve increased the EBITDA radically. Okay. If we had a 3 million EBITDA. Now the cap rate gets compressed. And we’re seeing some of these chains sell for a 5 cap, which is 5 percent or 0. 05. Now, if you take 3 million and you divide it by 0. 05, it’s the same thing as multiplying it by 20.

[00:37:41] Kriss Berg: Now, all of a sudden, this is a 60 million enterprise. And we’ve paid far less. We’ve paid somewhere, less than half of that. And we’ll still have some debt on it. But the numbers get really interesting on some of these roll ups. That’s the plan. Nobody’s really done this for self serve car washes though.

[00:37:58] Kriss Berg: Not at this scale. So there is no precedent that I know of here. If one of your listeners does, please tell me because I’d love to do a case study on it. But we may be pioneers there. And if that happens and nobody wants to buy this thing, fine. We’ll just, we’ll have this tremendous cash flowing asset and we’ll just keep it.

[00:38:15] Patrick Donley: And so you’re branding them all the same. You’re using the same name. I like the idea of the membership that you can go to any of them. What’s the biggest challenge right now as you, is it finding them, finding like the ones that could be a good value add? What’s the, is it the operations?

[00:38:30] Patrick Donley: Like what’s the hardest thing right now? 

[00:38:32] Kriss Berg: It’s a little bit of a mixed bag. The probably the biggest issue is the pricing. Most people want to sell one unit for a six cap, which just doesn’t work for anybody right now, especially with interest rates where they are. So you have to wait for them to come down.

[00:38:45] Kriss Berg: You got to wait for them. You got to find one that’s a little bit of a pig, right? That’s got some kind of problem on it. The one we just bought, it had somebody in 2021 and wiped out any kind of business. for that place for nine months. And so they had, they didn’t have three years of clean books. So we had to do some fancy financing there, but we got a good price for it.

[00:39:09] Kriss Berg: Now, the one we’re looking at in Denver right now that we’d like to buy, it’s got some issues with the pricing and the ownership. There’s no labor involved. Nobody knows who’s going to actually work there. So it’s got a little bit of a problem. And anybody who’s done real estate for any amount of time knows that.

[00:39:27] Kriss Berg: You want those deals with a little bit of hair on it. You don’t want some big hairy environmental disaster going on. You want the ones that are going to scare off the retail investors that are like, No, I don’t know how to figure that out. We know now we know how to figure out this stuff. 

[00:39:42] Patrick Donley: So that’s where we’re looking for.

[00:39:45] Patrick Donley: As far as operations go, who’s handling that aspect? 

[00:39:49] Kriss Berg: Let’s say the hose goes out or the water’s down or soaps out. We always have an attendant on site. Not always, but I would say, about 40 hours a week, sometimes 50 hours a week, there’s an attendant on site. That differentiates our car washes too, because most of the self-serve car washes you go to, it looks like they’ve been abandoned, right?

[00:40:07] Kriss Berg: You don’t know if anybody’s ever been there. The trash is overflowing and all this stuff. We have attendants on duty during most of the busy times. And they are fixing that stuff. They’re emptying the trash bins. And then my partner Alex really handles a lot of the mechanical issues, the crop up, how are we going to fix this, that kind of thing.

[00:40:26] Patrick Donley: Let’s get into what makes car washes attractive, like you backed into it, it seems to go into cost segregation for me, talk a little bit about it and what the advantages of it are. A lot of people don’t even know about cost segregation, so bare level, 

[00:40:39] Kriss Berg: The bonus depreciation allowance.

[00:40:42] Kriss Berg: That is now, it’s going to be 60 percent this year. It was designed to spur investment, and so it was basically telling business owners and real estate investors that you can deduct a certain percent right now. And normally when you buy a capital asset like this, a big expensive asset like this, There’s a schedule that you get to depreciate, depreciate it on in commercial real estate.

[00:41:03] Kriss Berg: It’s 39 and a half years. That’s a long time. So what this bill did says you can depreciate all of the improvements and equipment on certain assets in year one for 100%. Now it’s, last year it was 80 percent and this year it’s 60%. Okay. It’s confusing, but follow along. For a lot of assets, like a storage facility, that meant certain percent of the buildings and the improvements, the gate, that kind of stuff.

[00:41:34] Kriss Berg: And what a lot of people ended up having to do was get a cost segregation study because You had to figure out what was depreciable when and you literally need a certified engineer on some of these properties to go in and figure out this is depreciable this way. This is depreciable this way. And it was a kind of a calculus car wash for whatever reason, the entire property, except for the dirt on the ground is depreciable under this rule.

[00:42:00] Kriss Berg: Now, that means the building, the equipment in it, the hoses, the paving. The concrete, everything. So you don’t need the cost of segregation study. All you need to know is what the dirt is worth. And that’s on the auditor’s website, right? Yeah, that’s on the auditor’s website a lot of times, or that’s, you can find an empty lot in a similar neighborhood and say, okay, that’s worth it.

[00:42:22] Kriss Berg: That’s what it’s worth. Yeah. And so you just subtract that from the price and there you go. That’s really what you get to depreciate. So that’s it. One reason why car washes have become very popular over the last few years, they’re the easy part. 

[00:42:36] Patrick Donley: Of all the potential real estate assets you could invest in, in terms of cost segregation, car washes seem like the easy, no brainer.

[00:42:45] Patrick Donley: It’s the juiciest one to do, right? 

[00:42:48] Kriss Berg: Yeah. Now, a lot of people are afraid of them because there’s a lot of mechanicals involved. You need a full time employee, you can really run a self storage facility with somebody part time for the most part, right? There’s probably a guy who checks in on it, maybe daily, but there’s a lot of, I know a lot of operators who don’t have many full time employees at all, and they have five or six properties.

[00:43:07] Kriss Berg: But with ours, you need, we do have somebody answering the phone all the time. We have somebody on the site the vast majority of the time, so it’s definitely more involved. It’s a little more business than real estate, but it’s a nice combination of it. 

[00:43:21] Patrick Donley: And you backed into it. It sounded like you were trying to find self storage and nothing was coming up and this carwash popped up on Crexie.

[00:43:29] Kriss Berg: Yeah, we don’t let the tax tail wag the dog, we don’t, we’re not in it just for the tax benefits. It’s a very good cash flowing business on its own, and it’s a relatively easy business to run and to grow, but the tax benefits really tipped it over into this. Okay, now this is all I want to do.

[00:43:46] Kriss Berg: I want to generate income with my online business, spin that into the car washes, and the car washes will then remove the tax bill from the other businesses, and I have this beautiful flywheel. 

[00:43:57] Patrick Donley: So you had mentioned you’re used to paying, pretty big tax bill, buying these car washes, doing the cost segre or not cost segregation, but because of the bonus depreciation, what’s your, What’s your tax bill look like now?

[00:44:10] Kriss Berg: I had zero tax bill for 22. For 23, it looks like it may be 40 to 50 grand when I should have paid probably 450 grand. It’s massive. 

[00:44:22] Patrick Donley: I had a call today with a guy who is a tax attorney and he was talking about cost segregation and he was actually working for a cost segregation company early in his career.

[00:44:31] Patrick Donley: He told some investors about it, their first question was like, will I go to prison if I do this? Does it seem too good to be true? It was like. Nope, this is like part of the IRS code. You can do this. 

[00:44:43] Kriss Berg: Yeah. And honestly, I have a little bit of guilt about it because I use the roads and I use the government services.

[00:44:48] Kriss Berg: My kids go to school and all this stuff and I do have a little bit of guilt in that. But we also drop off some big checks to our local homeless shelter, the local animal shelter. And so we support a lot of our local charities in our own way. But it’s wild. It’s legal, right? And that’s, that was my big question too, was like, how is this legal?

[00:45:07] Patrick Donley: Yeah, but the idea though is to, like you mentioned earlier, it’s to incentivize real estate investment and like you’re buying these crappy, car washes and turning the, doing a value add, making them nicer, like going on to buy more, like it has a net benefit, obviously, otherwise the IRS wouldn’t have it in place.

[00:45:25] Kriss Berg: I totally agree. And now this bonus depreciation thing is working its way through Congress. Looks like they may re-up it and may go back to a hundred percent bonus depreciation. So I do think it’s a net benefit, but like I said, this is still a great business without that tax benefit, but it’s really nice.

[00:45:42] Patrick Donley: Any other parts of the car wash business that we didn’t touch on that you’d want to talk about? 

[00:45:47] Kriss Berg: No, that’s probably it. If you’re interested in learning more about this, I would go to a tax free cash cow. com. I set up a website where I talk about. I’ll give you the whole playbook on how to do this, how to find, buy, and run your first car wash, tax free cash cow.

[00:46:00] Kriss Berg: com. I’ll give you the whole playbook of it. It’s a course that I’ve created. I got a million DMs on this when I started posting about it. And so I had to build a course to really do that, but it’s, and you can set up a time, you can get a one on one consultation from me as well. 

[00:46:15] Patrick Donley: And I heard maybe, correct me if I’m wrong, it’s 300 bucks.

[00:46:18] Patrick Donley: And if people don’t like it, whatever you give them, you’re giving them their money back. 

[00:46:22] Kriss Berg: Yeah, my reputation is, it’s actually 200 bucks right now for a little bit of time. But yeah, my reputation is worth way more than 200 bucks. So if you get into the course and think it’s crap, I’ll just give you your money back.

[00:46:32] Kriss Berg: I don’t want people to be unhappy. So I’ve only given two refunds and we’ve sold about 45, 000 worth of it. But if you’re not happy, just email me. I’ll just give you your money back. 

[00:46:44] Patrick Donley: I wanted to talk a little bit about masterminds and groups and talk to me a little bit about, are you involved in a mastermind?

[00:46:51] Patrick Donley: And has that played a big part in your development as an entrepreneur? 

[00:46:55] Kriss Berg: Yeah, I’ve done masterminds on and off. My first one was Entrepreneur’s Organization in 2004 or 5 when I had that excavation company and it was transformed for me. There, it’s hard to find the right mix of people.

[00:47:08] Kriss Berg: Entrepreneur’s Organization actually does a really good job of that. If, and if you’re a young entrepreneur, I would encourage you to check that out. Now I’m doing the psilocybin therapy with. a group of entrepreneurs, it’s called Breakthrough. And we take psychedelics, psilocybin, which is known as magic mushrooms.

[00:47:24] Patrick Donley: Which is legal in Colorado, correct? Is it? 

[00:47:26] Kriss Berg: It’s legal in Colorado. You can do it legally here. I’m getting certified in this. It’s one of the other certifications. So it’ll be completely legal. I guess it won’t be completely legal, still illegal at the federal level. But in any case, it’s been transformative for me and the other people that are doing it.

[00:47:41] Kriss Berg: We have one guy whose life has completely changed. He was completely lost in his marriage and his business. Now he and his wife are closer than ever. He’s completely changed how he thought of his parents, his children for the better. Another guy, a military veteran with a lot of trauma and everything was really lost.

[00:47:59] Kriss Berg: He’s. Just eight months later, he’s got a successful business, a coaching practice of his own, and is completely off medications. Another guy had a lot of issues like with his business. Do I sell this? Do I scale this? What should I do? He’s now doubled his business in the past few months. So it’s been transformative and it’s an instant community.

[00:48:18] Kriss Berg: We lack this so much, this is what we really all want on Twitter, right? As a community, a tribe, and it’s got, it’s given to us for these people. We’ve been texting all day. members have a kind of a family crisis right now. So we’re all helping him through that. So it’s radically changed how all of us live.

[00:48:35] Patrick Donley: So you call it like a breakthrough event and tell me a little bit more about it. Like you guys are getting together, like in a retreat type setting or how’s it, what’s it look like? 

[00:48:44] Kriss Berg: Yeah. The name of the organization is breakthrough. We’ll grab an Airbnb somewhere in the mountains, remote, and we’ll all gather there for two nights and two and a half days.

[00:48:53] Kriss Berg: And there’s no alcohol. It’s not a party. It’s not a rave. Yeah. We take the substance very intentionally, and some people take a little, some people take a lot, some people don’t take it at all, and we all just talk about what we’re experiencing, and then the next day, we set intentions for how we’re going to integrate these findings, you get a lot of insights, both during the trip and after, and you can really set, you can really change your life, and so we have another session coming up in July, we have a couple open slots, if anybody’s interested, we’ll show you how to contact me.

[00:49:23] Kriss Berg: At the end of the show here, but it’s been transformative. It’s like control, delete for your brain. And for some people it’s 10 years of therapy, 10 years of top therapy. Not everybody. And I’m careful saying that, but there are some people who have done therapy for years and just two nights with this group has done way more than they could ever get from a psychotherapist.

[00:49:46] Patrick Donley: That’s awesome. I’ve heard it described as like a reboot, rebooting your brain in a way. Control Alt Delete. And it’s another, you mentioned for our work week in Tim Ferriss, that’s another thing that he’s into. And I think, spends a lot of money actually on encouraging and supporting psilocybin research.

[00:50:02] Kriss Berg: That’s right. Yeah, he is funded because he’s, he is very wealthy now, and he has funded a lot of the studies that are going on at Johns Hopkins that shows how this works. And so there’s, for people who are skeptical, to jump on Johns Hopkins, which is, It’s one of the most prestigious medical schools in the world, and they are conducting random controlled trials every day on psychedelics, and the findings they’re coming up with are just mind blowing.

[00:50:29] Kriss Berg: It’s absolutely revolutionary for people who are on death’s door. and are struggling people who are not responding to any other kinds of therapy. They’re having their lives changed by this stuff. It’s really cool.

[00:50:41] Patrick Donley: You had a really interesting post about friendship and loneliness that I wanted to touch on a little bit.

[00:50:47] Patrick Donley: Tell the story about it. You had a birthday party and. 

[00:50:50] Kriss Berg: Oh, yeah. 20, I think it was like 2017, 2018, somewhere in there. My wife said, your birthday’s coming up. Do you want to have a party? And I said, sure. And the date was approaching and we hadn’t talked about it. And I think it was actually the next day.

[00:51:02] Kriss Berg: And I said, so who’s coming? And she broke down. She said babe, I’m so sorry, but nobody’s coming. There’s nobody. And I just realized that I just didn’t have a lot of friends anymore, or they were far away, or I was ignoring them. So why wouldn’t they ignore me? I hadn’t gone to their birthday party.

[00:51:17] Kriss Berg: So it wasn’t their fault that they weren’t interested in coming to my birthday party. So I made a pact then that I was going to find more friends. And so what that entailed was, I was this, I was living off the grid in the middle of nowhere and I was becoming this proud loner, like I don’t need anybody, and I realized I was really lonely.

[00:51:35] Kriss Berg: So I started being more outgoing. I started going to my son’s birthday parties. Are you an introvert? 

[00:51:40] Patrick Donley: Like on your Myers Briggs, are you an introvert? 

[00:51:43] Kriss Berg: Yeah, I was actually on the, I was like right in the middle and. So I would be an extrovert and introvert at different times, but I hated going, I hated mingling. I hated small talk.

[00:51:51] Kriss Berg: What do you do and where are you from? And like that 90 second interaction that just gets awkward really fast. I hated that. So I would avoid it. So the revolution for me was like, I would go into those situations now and just try to have an interesting conversation. I realized the best way to do that.

[00:52:07] Kriss Berg: was to just ask interesting questions and not worry about telling my story. Get it out of my head because so many people are just waiting to talk, right? They ask a question and they’re just waiting to answer it themselves, right? What do you do? I can’t wait to tell you what I do. And so I just Wipe that away.

[00:52:23] Kriss Berg: Forego any intention of talking about myself. And I just ask people interesting questions and it can start in a traditional way. What do you do? But then you take it in. Did you study that in college? Oh what did you want to be in college? What did you want to be when you grew up? Where did that take you?

[00:52:37] Kriss Berg: Why aren’t you doing that? And then you really get into people’s motivations and thoughts and what they started off doing. It’s always interesting to see what they studied in college versus what they’re doing now. And it’s always an interesting journey, how they got there. And then you can get into, where did you grow up and what was that like?

[00:52:51] Kriss Berg: And naturally would progress to what do you do for fun? And that would transition into usually, especially when you’re in the mountains of Colorado, people have really fun. Hobbies. And I would ask them what that was. Sometimes it was mountain climbing or backcountry snowboarding or motorcycle riding.

[00:53:06] Kriss Berg: And I said, Oh, that sounds fun. I’d like to try that. And invariably, if they were nice, they would invite me. And eventually I would go and all of a sudden I would have one friend and he would introduce me to his other friends. And now I have this. groups of friends that we go motorcycle riding, we go backcountry snowboarding, we do all this stuff and we go and eat mushrooms in the mountains.

[00:53:27] Kriss Berg: And so I have now had several tribes of friends have great birthday parties, and I feel like I’m really close to, Probably 20 people that I didn’t even know back when I was having terrible birthday parties. So just getting out of my own shell, asking people interesting questions, being willing to do weird things and follow people into weird activities and hobbies has completely changed my social life.

[00:53:52] Kriss Berg: And now I’ve, I feel really fulfilled and I definitely don’t feel lonely anymore. 

[00:53:57] Patrick Donley: Yeah, and it makes for a really interesting life, but to your point about conversations, like I think people are starved for this, like people aren’t listened to. And when someone actually asks real questions like you do. And it’s actually curious and interesting.

[00:54:11] Patrick Donley: It’s Whoa, I, this is new because to your point, like most people are just ready to one up, like you did that. Oh let me tell you about what I did. 

[00:54:19] Kriss Berg: Exactly. That’s exactly the problem, Patrick. That’s exactly it. It’s the one upping and the, let’s turn the conversation back to me now.

[00:54:27] Kriss Berg: Enough about me. What do you think about me? Like they got to tell a lot of people. And so if, yeah, if you can show a genuine interest in people, first of all, you’re instantly likable. Even if you don’t ever talk to that person again, and if you never see them again, or if you never hang out with them again, they’re going to like you because you showed an interest in them.

[00:54:45] Kriss Berg: Okay. And that’s a big part of just having a social circle is having people like you. And I, men in particular, don’t need people to like me. I don’t give a hell. I don’t give a damn what anybody thinks of me. That was so toxic for so long. And it just ended up to be a lot of loneliness for me. Yeah.

[00:54:59] Patrick Donley: It’s a trap for entrepreneurs too. You get so caught up in your business and growing it. You don’t make time for your friends and maybe even family. Like it can be a real trap. 

[00:55:09] Kriss Berg: Yeah, absolutely. You have this self reliance that you think should carry over to everything that you don’t need friendship and companionship.

[00:55:17] Kriss Berg: And it’s completely wrong. It’s a horrible way to live. 

[00:55:21] Patrick Donley: This is a good place to put a pin in it. I really have enjoyed talking with you here today, Kriss. So for our listeners that want to learn more about you, learn about car washes, what you’re up to, what’s the best way for them to get in touch 

[00:55:31] Kriss Berg: So 

[00:55:32] Kriss Berg: jump onto X or Twitter, whatever you want to call it, and search for Car Wash Guy. You’ll see my face with a yellow background, hard to miss. My name is Kris Berg. You’ll see it on the video here if you want to search. It’s Kriss Berg tweets. It’s my handle there. And check out, go ahead and follow me.

[00:55:46] Kriss Berg: And then check out the highlights. Twitter has a cool new thing called highlights. If you jump onto my profile, you’ll see the highlights. All of the threads that I’ve done over the years. Not all of them, but most of them are there. The loneliness thread is in there. The big rundown on all the car wash stuff we’re doing, my supplement business, a lot of stuff is in there.

[00:56:04] Kriss Berg: You’ll also see a link for my newsletter. These days I’m breaking down interesting businesses. I just broke down my friend’s business. He does. He profits 600, 000 a year working 10 hours a week on his plumbing business. I actually did a thread on that today. Today is February 26th. So you can rewind the clock when this comes out and check that out.

[00:56:21] Kriss Berg: And that’s it. And talk to me on Twitter and DM me and say, Hey, I enjoyed the pod with Patrick. Here’s my question and I’ll probably answer it. 

[00:56:30] Patrick Donley: Yeah, I’ve DM’d you and you’re like, you were real quick getting back to me and I really encourage people to follow you. Your content’s really great.

[00:56:36] Patrick Donley: You’re a really good writer and I appreciate the craft of writing . Being able to write on Twitter and provide value is, you’re definitely doing that. Thank you. I’ve gotten a lot out of it. Anyway, thanks for your time. This has been fun. Thanks, Kriss. 

[00:56:48] Kriss Berg: Me too, Patrick. This was great.

[00:56:50] Kriss Berg: Thank you.

[00:56:51] Patrick Donley: Okay, folks, that’s all I had for today’s episode. I hope you enjoyed the show and I’ll see you back here real soon.

[00:56:58] Outro: Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to follow Millennial Investing on your favorite podcast app and never miss out on our episodes. To access our show notes, transcripts, or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decision, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by The Investor’s Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.