[00:03:00] Henry Washington: Once I truly figured out what being a lawyer meant and how much studying and reading I would have to do, I was out for that, but I did find a love for technology as I was growing up. And so I think I did what they expected me to do, which was to go into some sort of technological field. And so I did what they thought I would do.

[00:03:20] Patrick Donley: But you grew up around a family of entrepreneurs, right? Didn’t your dad always had a side hustle? And he talked to me a little bit about that and how that influenced you. 

[00:03:30] Henry Washington: So my dad was a high school art teacher. That was his day job. He’s always been an artist and, had a passion for art and teaching art, but teachers don’t make a ton of money.

[00:03:41] Henry Washington: And when you’re a husband and you got two kids. you got to figure out a way to make money and my dad liked to travel and do all these things. And so I wanted to figure out a way to live, to afford a comfortable lifestyle on a teacher’s salary. And that meant he was going to have to figure out other ways to make money.

[00:03:58] Henry Washington: And so he did. He, he’s done a lot of stuff. He used to grow plants at home and then sell them at the swap meet. He used to own an arcade back when you had to go to arcades to play games, we owned a barbecue restaurant for a good portion of my youth. So I grew up watching my dad and my grandma run this barbecue restaurant.

[00:04:18] Henry Washington: Yeah. He always had a side business, but never we’d never talked about me being an entrepreneur, owning a business. That wasn’t something that like he made it a point to. Teach me about because of what I said, he wanted us to go to college and get a degree, right? That was an opportunity that wasn’t afforded to people like him or his age when he grew up.

[00:04:39] Henry Washington: And so he wanted to make sure that was something that would be within reach for me and my sister. And so that’s what he pushed us towards. 

[00:04:46] Patrick Donley: So you fulfilled his expectations, went along a traditional path. Tell me about that, that next chapter of going into the corporate world and settling in there and just what your mind space was at that time.

[00:04:59] Henry Washington: I graduated and I did, I get enough grades to get a decent job. And in my first year, I didn’t make much money, but I’d say about 5 years in, I was making pretty decent money, 6 figures, but didn’t have a financial education per se. And I think when you come from nothing. And then you build something, there’s a challenge to that, right?

[00:05:25] Henry Washington: Cause you’ve got to build something out of nothing. And then that causes you to like respect and appreciate what you have. Like it’s a different challenge. The challenge that I had was the opposite is that I had a pretty upper middle class life because of my dad’s side hustles coupled with his.

[00:05:40] Henry Washington: Teaching salary. Plus my mom had a really great job. She worked for the county and was a high position within the county. And so I didn’t want for anything. I had everything I needed. When I got to the point where I was out on my own, I was accustomed to a certain lifestyle and almost felt entitled.

[00:06:00] Henry Washington: To continuing to have that lifestyle even before I could afford it. And so I lived above my means, so I would, I had a much nicer apartment than, or a nicer and bigger apartment than probably I should have afforded or paid for. I had probably a nicer car than I could have, should have paid for, I didn’t want to lose my lifestyle and I felt like I got a good job.

[00:06:22] Henry Washington: I should, I can pay for it. So I’ll do it. But what I wasn’t doing was saving any money or positioning myself to be able to buy a home or do anything that’s going to require me to think beyond just. This week, what happened was I got married and I got married pretty quick. So I went from single to married in a matter of 365 days.

[00:06:41] Henry Washington: And that kind of really shined a light on the fact that. You have made poor financial decisions and up until this point didn’t matter because it didn’t matter to me. I would live with the consequences of it, but now the consequences of those poor financial decisions were affecting somebody else. And it really shined a light on what that was and made me think, how am I going to solve this problem of not understanding money and not having enough of it to afford the lifestyle that I want?

[00:07:07] Patrick Donley: At what age was that when you got married? It was a little later, wasn’t it? 

[00:07:11] Henry Washington: Yeah, I got married later. I was 20. What’s it? I’ve been married for nine years and I’m 43. So do that math. 

[00:07:19] Patrick Donley: I don’t do public math. 

[00:07:20] Henry Washington: So you got married 

[00:07:23] Patrick Donley: later. So you led a really good lifestyle. You’ve got a good six figure salary.

[00:07:27] Patrick Donley: You’ve got a nice apartment, nice car, eating well, all that. Taking nice vacations, get married. Talk to me about that transition because I recently got married too. And that does put a spotlight on your own financial habits and just makes you make changes almost. So tell me about that. What happened when you guys, you become married and.

[00:07:48] Patrick Donley: How do you change? you’ve recognized you’ve got some issues. 

[00:07:52] Henry Washington: I think the solve for me was like, I just need to figure out how to make some more money. I just thought the more money I make, I’d be able to solve the problems. And so essentially what happened was I had a conversation with my wife about our financial future.

[00:08:05] Henry Washington: So what we were going to, what’s our dream house, where’s it going to be? How many kids are we going to have? Like the newly married talk, right? Where you’re like, let’s plan our lives together. And I was just realizing through that conversation with my wife that, I don’t think I can afford any of these things that you or slash we want.

[00:08:27] Henry Washington: And that led me to a literal, like a real life freak out panic attack at 3 in the morning because, we’re men and we feel this pressure of having to provide and. Then not realizing how I’m going to be able to do that led me to thinking, your brain one’s wild and it’s she’s going to realize that I can’t provide for her.

[00:08:47] Henry Washington: And she’s going to realize she made this big mistake marrying me. And she’s going to leave me because I can’t do any of these things and just had a full fledged panic attack at 3 in the morning. And so I just Googled, how can I make extra money? Because. I think the first thing I Googled was side hustles.

[00:09:05] Henry Washington: Like what are some good side hustles that I could, and I just kept seeing stuff about real estate. And so I was like, all right, what’s this real estate thing about? Because every time I see something about real estate, I see words like cashflow and passive income. And I’m like, that sounds like the ticket right there.

[00:09:22] Henry Washington: Like making money without having to do a bunch of work. Sounds great. And as I started to dive into these articles, I was just learning that I was just seeing that this is something normal people do. I just never viewed real estate as a viable option before. I thought you had to have a bunch of money to go do it, and I didn’t have a bunch of money.

[00:09:41] Henry Washington: And so I just thought rich people invested in real estate in businesses. I didn’t think like normal people did. But as I was reading these articles, I was seeing, I was like, all these people have figured out how to do this. And some of them said they didn’t have a ton of money. So If they figured it out, I got to be able to figure it out.

[00:09:56] Henry Washington: They’re no smarter than me. And so I don’t know, man, I just had this piece about being able to figure out how to do it. And I can’t really explain that other than I think just God gave me a piece about it. because that was the path I was supposed to go down. And so I literally calmed down and was like, all right, this is, must be what I’m supposed to do.

[00:10:15] Henry Washington: I’m going to be a successful real estate investor. And so I just made a decision at three in the morning that I was going to figure out how to do it. And I went to bed, woke up the next morning, told my wife I was going to figure out how to be a real estate investor. And she’d always liked real estate and her family has some background with owning real estate.

[00:10:31] Henry Washington: So she was like, yeah, let’s do that. And so that’s how we started down the path, man. 

[00:10:36] Patrick Donley: But prior to that, you had no interest really in learning about finances or reading, studying, things like that? 

[00:10:43] Henry Washington: Let me put some perspective on what I just said. No part about that decision makes any sense. I didn’t know how to invest in real estate, no clue, right?

[00:10:55] Henry Washington: When I made this decision that I was going to figure it out, I didn’t have any of the things that would lead you to believe that I should invest in real estate. I didn’t have a big savings account ready to use for a down payment. I had $1,000 in a savings account. That was it. I didn’t have good credit. I still had a sub 600 credit score and something in me was like, you know how you’re going to fix your financial problems?

[00:11:19] Henry Washington: You know how you’re going to fix the problem of you not being able to be on the loan for the house that you’re currently living in? You’re going to buy houses. That’s how you’re going to fix it. Like it made no sense. But that’s the level of crazy you need to have in order to take on something like this.

[00:11:36] Henry Washington: it’s, we don’t get to know how, we’re not supposed to know how, but if you make a decision, your decision can lead you to the how, right? And I think that’s, I know that’s what happened is I’ve, I turned my brain on to the concept, to the idea. But I was going to figure this out.

[00:11:56] Henry Washington: And so like, when you do that, it’s like you’re turning your most powerful weapon in your body, which is your brain into a tool that’s helping you. that’s what you’re doing when you make a decision. I don’t think people realize how powerful just making a decision is if you truly make it in your, with your words, with your actions behind the words and with your heart, like when you decide, cause think about thing, we all have done that.

[00:12:21] Henry Washington: We’ve all made a decision and put our foot down about something. And fixed it or changed it or did whatever it was once we got there. And that’s just because of the decision. That’s not because you knew how to do whatever that thing was. It’s just because you said, all right, enough is enough. I’m going to go do this thing, fix this thing, take care of this thing.

[00:12:38] Henry Washington: You have to do that when you think about doing something like starting a business or investing in real estate because of how challenging it is. 

[00:12:46] Patrick Donley: What do you think it was about real estate though? you’re looking at a lot of different side hustles and passive income methods of making money.

[00:12:54] Patrick Donley: What was it about real estate that like rang your bell or, let you up? 

[00:12:58] Henry Washington: I think it was a combination of how much I enjoyed what I thought real estate was at the time. And I enjoy it. we had, the house we were living in, we hadn’t been in it that long. And so we had just gone through a whole, house shopping phase.

[00:13:14] Henry Washington: And then we ended up picking a house that we ended up building. So we went through this whole build process. And I just know how much I enjoyed all of that process, looking at houses and evaluating houses and talking to the builders and the lenders. I just enjoyed the whole process. And I was like, I know I enjoy it because I just did it and now I can do it in a way that’s going to make me money.

[00:13:37] Henry Washington: I was just excited about that. 

[00:13:39] Patrick Donley: You have this panic attack. You start learning about real estate. What happens next where you’ve made this, you’ve made this commitment to real estate. 

[00:13:48] Henry Washington: It just magically falls in your lap. After you make a decision, the heavens open up and deals fall from the sky.

[00:13:56] Henry Washington: And then money comes out of nowhere. And then you’re successful. I like to talk about this through story, because if I just tell you what I did, it sounds super simple and people go, Oh, okay, of course you did that. Here’s what actually happened. I decided I was going to be a real estate investor, woke up, told my wife, and then she goes, that’s great.

[00:14:18] Henry Washington: How do we do it? And I go, I have no idea, but people around here are doing it. So let’s talk to somebody who’s doing it. And so I went and I had a meeting with the person I knew who was a, she was a commercial real estate broker. She worked at Walmart like I did too. So she sat in the desk next to me and so I told her, I was like, Hey, I want, I’m going to invest in real estate.

[00:14:39] Henry Washington: I know you do some of that on the side too. can I just talk to you about it? Maybe you can point me in some direction. And she was like, hype. She was like, yes. And so we went to dinner and she brought a box of books, a literal box of books. And she was like, pick one of these books and read it.

[00:14:53] Henry Washington: And if you read it, I’ll help you. And I was like, cool. And so I was like, I think I’ve heard this title before. And what did I pick? 

[00:14:59] Patrick Donley: Rich dad, poor dad, I think. 

[00:15:02] Henry Washington: Absolutely. I knew nothing about it. Like I literally, all I had thought was I’d this name sounds familiar. And so I read that book. So no one had told me this is the real estate book to read.

[00:15:12] Henry Washington: Like just happened to pick it, read it, blew my mind. And so from there I was like, all right, who else around me is doing this? Like in my brain, I was like, I just need to be around people doing it so I can see what they’re doing and start to apply some of those things. And so I just started Googling real estate investor meetups and I would go to these meetups and I would be super intentional about what I wanted to get out of these meetups.

[00:15:37] Henry Washington: So I forced myself, I said, if I’m going to these meetups, I’m not here just to sit in the back and try to, learn by osmosis and maybe somebody will say something of value. I was like, I got to be intentional. So I don’t know nothing about nothing. I was like, you’re going to sit in the front and center because who sits front and center?

[00:15:55] Henry Washington: Like in school, who sits front and center? The nerds, right? Because they’re like, they’re not afraid to be called on. They know the answer. And so I’m like, I’m going to go sit in the front. So the people up front either know something or they’re doing deals in my head. So I’m like, I’m going to go sit by them so I can just start asking them questions.

[00:16:09] Henry Washington: And I was like, I just started asking them about their deals or like what they’re doing. Cause I didn’t know what to ask. And what I learned was real estate investors will tell you everything. Like they’ll tell you everything. And so I’m like, yeah, what, what was your last deal? What’d you do? And they go, Oh, I bought this house in this neighborhood and I paid this.

[00:16:27] Henry Washington: And then you put this much into it. And then I sold it for that. And then I did this one and I rented it for that. And then I did this and I was just like taking all these notes. Cause I’m learning like. What good deals look like? I’m learning where people like to buy properties in my area. I’m learning what kinds of properties they’re buying.

[00:16:41] Henry Washington: I’m learning how much money they’re putting into them. I’m learning what they’re doing to make money on them. They’re exiting. I’m like, I was just like half of it. I didn’t know what it meant, but I was just like, I was writing all this down. And so you would tune it to let’s say real estate investing is the puzzle, right?

[00:16:55] Henry Washington: It’s a whole puzzle, but I don’t know what any of the pieces mean. So I would go to these meetups and start asking questions and everybody would give me pieces of the puzzle. Yeah. I didn’t know where they fit yet, but I was just collecting pieces of the puzzle. And then as I would do more research in terms of podcasts and books, the frame of reference would start to come into play and I’m like, Oh, this piece goes here.

[00:17:15] Henry Washington: Oh, this piece goes here. And so all the context started to start to make sense as I got more information from learning plus the conversations I was having with people, but what really was important about the meetups was I was intentional about going to every single one, no matter what, I didn’t just go to one here and there, like I was at every meetup.

[00:17:34] Patrick Donley: Were these like several a week that you were going to? 

[00:17:38] Henry Washington: Yeah, so I would go to the meetups and then I would ask the people in the meetups who were doing deals what other meetups they were a part of. And so they would tell me and so I just had this list. And so I would go to probably one to two meetups a week.

[00:17:51] Henry Washington: I was just at them. Every meetup, every sub meetup of a meetup, like I was in the room. Because I’m like, Hey, I got to learn what happened again. this is all, if you look back, it seems like it’s I had this foresight, I didn’t, I just wanted to be around them. And so but what happened was.

[00:18:10] Henry Washington: Yes, I started to get the pieces, but real estate investors truly do want to help other real estate investors be successful. And so when people got used to seeing me at these meetups and they started to just assume that I was a successful investor doing deals, because I’m just out there all the time asking questions at every meetup.

[00:18:29] Henry Washington: And so when they started to realize, like I had never done a deal, they were like, Oh man, we got to help you get a deal, man. Like we got to do this, right? cause they just wanted to see you be successful. Cool. And so I just built this network of people who wanted to help me, not because I just showed up one time, but because I was, they could see me putting so much time in and I didn’t have a result yet.

[00:18:50] Henry Washington: And so they were like, this is somebody we want to help get a result because they’re putting in the effort. And so that’s how I built a network and started to learn and then on top of that was researching on my own and doing podcasts and books and things. So that was like, really step 1. 1 of the other things I did was I was intentional about what I told people, even though I had never done a deal, even though I had only been to a couple of meetups.

[00:19:12] Henry Washington: I started to just introduce myself to people as a real estate investor. you probably go to meetups today and you’ll see somebody there and you’re like, Hey, what do you do? And they’d be like, Oh yeah, I’m a stockbroker. And, I got a couple of rental properties. Oh yeah. I’m a software developer and I got a coat, and I flip a house or two.

[00:19:27] Henry Washington: I didn’t want that to be my persona. My persona was, I am a real estate investor. I buy properties here and I buy these kinds of properties in these neighborhoods. And I’m a software developer for Walmart, right? I wanted my persona to be that of a real estate investor because this, I do know like the way the world works.

[00:19:45] Henry Washington: And I didn’t know at the time. The way the world works is you get what you give. And so if I wanted the things real estate investors have, I had to put out into the world that I’m a real estate investor and then the world would return those things to me. And so I was just, I would tell everybody I’m a real estate investor just because I wanted to get the things that they have.

[00:20:04] Henry Washington: And between telling everybody I was an investor building the network, I got a call one day from my buddy and he said, Hey, we worked in the same office, but he called me. He’s Hey, somebody told me you’re buying houses. And I’m like, yeah, I am buying houses. It was like, dude, I got to sell my house in the next 30 days.

[00:20:23] Henry Washington: And I was like, what? Cause this is a buddy of mine. I knew him. I knew I’ve been to his house. Many times. It was like, yeah, man, I moved out of my house like a year ago. I’ve been letting this guy live in it from my church. He was supposed to be getting his credit together. So he was going to buy the house because I need that money from that house to go buy this property.

[00:20:37] Henry Washington: Okay. For this new church was started and I was like, okay, so what’s going on? It was like, his credit’s not together. He’s not really taking care of the house and now I got to have the money because we got to buy this property. So I need the money in 30 days. He was like, so I can sell you my house if you want to buy it for $116,000.

[00:20:57] Henry Washington: It’s worth probably $165,000, $175,000, but I’ll sell it to you for $116,000 just because I got to have that money and that’s the exact amount of money I need if I sell it for that for me to go do my next, for me to go buy this land. And he was like, so could you buy it in 30 days? And I was like, yeah, I can buy in 30 days.

[00:21:15] Henry Washington: Of course. With a thousand dollars in your bank account. With a thousand dollars in bad credit. So he was like, all right, what do we do? And I was like, hold on. Hold on. And so I went back to my desk and I Googled like, how do I buy a house without a real estate agent? And it was like, you got to put it under, you got to put it in escrow and under contract.

[00:21:33] Henry Washington: And I was like, what’s under contract. And it was like, you got to sign a purchase and sale agreement. And I was like, where do I get a purchase and sale agreement? Like it was literally Googling everything, downloaded a contract off the internet, printed it out, signed it at work with me and him that I was going to buy his house for $116,000.

[00:21:49] Henry Washington: And closing was in 30 days. And so I was just sitting there now with this signed contract at my office for this house. And I was like, all right, guess I’m buying a house now. I got to get $116,000. And so I need $116,000. I know I got $1,000 in savings. So now I need $115,000. So where am I going to get $115,000?

[00:22:14] Henry Washington: I was like, all right, people go to banks when they need a loan for a house. So I’ll just go to a bank. And so on my lunch break that day, I went to the closest bank to my office, just cause it was the closest bank to my office and I walked in there with the contract and I was like, Hey, can somebody help me buy this house?

[00:22:31] Henry Washington: I literally walked in the office with the lobby with the contract and it just happened to be a small community bank. I did not know. That’s what that was. When I walked in and I just happened to talk to the commercial loan officer who was in the lobby, he was just in the lobby talking to the tellers.

[00:22:46] Henry Washington: And so he was like, yeah, man, let me, take a look at that. And he looked at it and he was like, come to my office. And he put in the address and he was like, dude, this is, this house is worth a lot more than this. And I was like, yeah, absolutely. That’s why I want to buy it. Yeah. And he was like.

[00:23:02] Henry Washington: we would be, I’d love to loan on this man. He was like, and so he just started to tell me how it works. He was like, we would lend on this. We would lend you the money, the 85 percent of the purchase price. We would lend you 100 percent of the money you need to fix it up. So all you need to bring is a 15 percent down payment.

[00:23:19] Henry Washington: So we’re going to give you the money to buy it and the money to renovate it. You just need 15 percent down payment. And I was like, cool, how much is that? And he was like, it’s going to be about 15 grand. And I was like, okay. He was like, do you have 15 grand? And I was like, yep. So I was terrified, but excited.

[00:23:37] Henry Washington: I was excited because I walked into the bank needing $115,000. I walked out needing 15. I’d found a hundred thousand dollars in my mind, so I was like, I’m getting there. Now I got to figure out where to get 15 grand in 30 days. That number is drastically dropped in a matter of hours. That’s when I went back to this network of investors.

[00:23:59] Henry Washington: I was like, I was excited. I finally had a deal. They wanted to help me. And I was like, great, now you can help me. And so I went and I was like, how are y’all doing this? How do I get 15 grand in 30 days to buy this house? And they sat down with me and just started brainstorming ideas. You could do this, you could do that, you could do it.

[00:24:15] Henry Washington: I’m like, that won’t work. Don’t have that. That won’t work. And then my buddy was like, you could borrow it from a 401k. And I was like, I don’t want to cash out the 401k because you got to pay penalties and fees and interest and yada, yada, and taxes right off the top. And it was like, no, You can borrow against your 401k, like a loan to yourself. It’s your money. You borrow a percentage of it. And then your company will take the payments out of your paycheck automatically. But if you rent that property out and your tenant’s paying you X, Y, Z rent. That cashflow you get actually covers that payment.

[00:24:46] Henry Washington: So you’re actually not paying it back. And I was like, let’s do that. I just got to find a 401k now because I didn’t have one, but my wife did. And so now I went to her and I said, Hey baby, you know how your voice gets higher when you need it. And I said, Hey, remember that time when I was like, we’re going to be real estate investors and you were like, yeah, We need to borrow 15 grand from your 401k so we can buy this house.

[00:25:14] Henry Washington: And I explained to her everything and she was like, yeah, let’s do it. And we had the money in we had the money in a week. We bought the house, raised the rents to market, rent, cashflow, the property. And then the bank called me after we closed and was like, Henry, this is a really great deal. We want you to bring us more deals like this.

[00:25:35] Henry Washington: You should consider taking out a line of credit on the equity that you bought in this house. And I was like, what was that? And he explained to me what a line of credit was. And it was like, so the way it would work is you go find more deals like this. We’ll fund the same thing. 85 percent of the purchase, 100 percent of the rental, and then use this line of credit from us to pay that 15 percent down payment.

[00:25:53] Henry Washington: So you’re not actually coming out of your own pocket to buy the house. And then you’ll fix the house up and you can either refinance it and you can pay off the line of credit, or you can fix the house up and sell it. And you can pay off the lending credit and I was like, yeah, let’s do that. And so I had now found and learned the power of small local banks.

[00:26:14] Henry Washington: He, this guy, he was teaching me so much just by explaining this process because essentially what he was saying to me was like, Hey, if you bring me deals like this, I looked like a rock star in loan committee because I’m going and I’m saying, we’re going to land this guy on this house. That’s worth $170,000.

[00:26:30] Henry Washington: We’re only loan in 116. If he forecloses and doesn’t make his payments, we’ll probably make more money just repossessing the house and then selling it on our own. Versus the interest he’s paying for it. So I’m bringing them these safe investments that they want to fund because local community banks have to lend to local businesses to stay in business.

[00:26:49] Henry Washington: They don’t do what the big banks do, which is sell off their loans. They keep them all. And so they need to service safe loans. And so I was bringing them safe loans. So he was like, bro, you can be leveraged a hundred percent. If you’re going to bring us these good deals. And then you could buy these great deals.

[00:27:04] Henry Washington: You could start making money. We’re going to make money. And so I just learned a lot about the financing aspect of using small local banks. This guy was kind enough to talk me through some of that stuff. And so I started to go out in the community and build more relationships with these small local banks.

[00:27:18] Patrick Donley: There’s so many things I love about your story. The first thing is like you took on the identity, like a new identity of real estate investor. I think that is huge. The second thing that’s super interesting is like the absolute commitment you made to it to making real estate happen for you. And then the third thing is just like surrounding yourself with other people, this network that you have going to all these meetups, I interviewed this guy, Scott Young, who came out with a book recently called get better at anything.

[00:27:44] Patrick Donley: And it’s all about how to learn, it could be anything, but like the best learners get themselves around the people that are like top in their field of doing what they want to learn. So in your case, you want to learn real estate. You surrounded yourself with people and it’s like you just get it by osmosis in many ways.

[00:28:02] Patrick Donley: I love your analogy of the puzzle pieces. It’s like a little, you get a piece here and you piece here, you put it in your pocket. the lender also sounds like he was a. A great resource, obviously, like not only from a funding standpoint, but just as a teaching you a ton. 

[00:28:17] Henry Washington: I like telling that story because the lessons in it are very basic and very easy to do.

[00:28:23] Henry Washington: And if you just say the lessons, like if I’d have just said, Oh, just go find some people who are doing it and surround yourself with them and you’ll learn what to do. Oh, and just don’t take no for an answer and you’ll get a deal done. Like the lessons in there. Yes. I surrounded myself with somebody, but I think that one of the biggest lessons is I didn’t know how, and I didn’t make decisions.

[00:28:41] Henry Washington: For other people about my wealth, I didn’t let what would people would consider common sense stop me from pursuing the only thing that was going to stop me from pursuing was somebody who was a barrier to entry actually telling me, I can’t and here’s why what most people do. Like in this situation, if you put another person in the same exact situation when their buddy would have called him and said, I need to sell my house in 30 days and they were in my financial situation.

[00:29:09] Henry Washington: The 1st thing they would have said was, man, I’d love to buy it, but I only got it. I don’t have the down payment. I can’t make the down payment. how do you know you haven’t even shopped for a loan yet? You don’t even know if you need a down payment. You have no clue what kind of loan you’re going to get, right?

[00:29:23] Henry Washington: Or they would have said, man, I want to, but my credit’s not in a good place. nobody’s going to give me a loan. How do you know you haven’t applied for a loan? You haven’t talked to a lender. You haven’t pulled your credit and see what you can do to fix it. Like you’ve done, you’ve taken none of the steps to actually learn if that’s actually true.

[00:29:39] Henry Washington: But we make decisions for other people all the time. Most people would make that decision for a bank. They haven’t talked to yet. The bank. I don’t even know that I would talk to you. It’s not going to give me a loan. That sounds crazy. Like I didn’t make decisions for other people about my wealth. I was going to go down this path until somebody who held the key for me to get through that door was telling me it was locked in.

[00:29:59] Henry Washington: There’s no way I was going to get through it. 

[00:30:01] Patrick Donley: Yeah, that absolute commitment is amazing. I wanted to talk about the lady that gave you the box of books or, showed up with a box of books. Kanisha Robnett. Kanisha, did you do further book studies with her? And did you continue to read books? And was she a mentor of sorts? pushing you along? 

[00:30:21] Henry Washington: Yeah, she was like my first, my first, unofficial mentor into real estate. I don’t even know if she knows that. But yeah, her excitement about it when I told her that’s what I wanted to do made me feel good. she’s, yeah, she absolutely put that book in our hands and she sat next to me at work.

[00:30:39] Henry Washington: And so like I was just able to chat with her and talk to her about, what we were doing along the way. Yeah. From there we read, so we read, I say we, because my wife and I read them at the same time. We both just, I did the audio book and she like actually read through it. And so from there, we read that the next thing we read was richest man in Babylon.

[00:30:58] Henry Washington: And then I read Gary Keller’s millionaire real estate investor, and all of these things just started to again. These they were the books were giving me the context and I was getting the pieces from people doing it. And so that’s what really helped me put the puzzle together and learn like what everything really meant.

[00:31:16] Henry Washington: But yeah, she was instrumental. I don’t even know. She knows how instrumental she was. 

[00:31:20] Patrick Donley: That’s awesome. I wanted to talk a little bit about just the role of faith in your own life, like how that has impacted you and affected your business life, your real estate career. Like you said, a lot of people would have hit that first door.

[00:31:34] Patrick Donley: They would have said, I don’t have a hundred and $15,000, I have no way to get it. You definitely had this faith that you could figure things out and make things work out. So talk to me about that. Just like how your own faith has affected you along, your path. so much. 

[00:31:50] Henry Washington: Bro, you’re trying to get me crying on the show.

[00:31:52] Henry Washington: I think the best way I could paint it is right after we closed that deal, I told you about that first deal and the bank called and talked to me about the line of credit and then I got asked and then I got approved for the line of credit. I remember sitting there looking at this $25,000 to $30,000 that I had access to on a line of credit.

[00:32:13] Henry Washington: And just sitting here thinking 90 days ago, you had a panic attack because you didn’t know how you’re going to take care of your family financially. And now 90 days later, you own a house, use very little of your own money to buy it. That house is paying for itself and paying you cash every month and now you’re staring at $30,000 in the face and I just became overwhelmed with a sense of responsibility.

[00:32:45] Henry Washington: I was happy. Don’t get me wrong. Like I felt like I knew I had found the thing that was going to take care of my family financially for the rest of my life. I was happy. But the main feeling I felt. It was this weight of responsibility. And when I thought about why, all I could think of was like, when I had that peace of mind of knowing real estate was the path I should go down, I was like, that was God telling me this is the path I should go down and sitting here now, 90 days later, I’m not sitting here.

[00:33:18] Henry Washington: Cause I’m some financial genius. I am only sitting here in this situation because he showed me the door and I walked through it and he kept opening the doors for me to walk through. And so I just kept thinking, why me? Like, why did he do that for me? And I couldn’t come up with anything other than I think I’m supposed to let other people know.

[00:33:42] Henry Washington: That this is a reality for them to, there has to be other people who are in worse financial positions than I was in, who have no idea that they could be 90 days away from changing their financial future forever. And I think I’m just supposed to share this with people. And so that’s what I’ll do. And that’s when I started my Instagram, I didn’t start it.

[00:34:07] Henry Washington: Cause I thought I was going to get a hundred thousand followers and make a bunch of money. I started it because I had no idea how to share this with anybody and people are on the internet. And so I’ll just put it on the internet and hopefully it helps somebody. And since I did that, life has changed in terms of I just think that’s the path I was supposed to go down was to show people and help people.

[00:34:31] Henry Washington: And the more I do that, it seems the more things continue to work out. I just think, and what I’ve learned since that is that, yeah, I’m supposed to share it, but that’s what everyone’s supposed to do. Maybe not in the sense of everybody needs to start a social media account and start sharing on the internet, but that’s what life is about.

[00:34:55] Henry Washington: That’s what wealth is about. Like we are on this planet, not for what we want and get, but for what we get to do for other people. Like wealth isn’t about us. Wealth isn’t about what I can accumulate so that I can take care of my family. Wealth is about expanding your capacity to give and help. And it’s something we’re supposed to give away.

[00:35:23] Henry Washington: We get to leverage it, utilize it while we have it, we get to enjoy it while we have it, but it’s not for us. It’s for us to do for other people. And so I’ve just tried to continue to do that. 

[00:35:37] Patrick Donley: Kind of reminds me like the parable of the talents, a lot of people just bury their talents. Like you took your talents and you’ve, multiplied them.

[00:35:44] Patrick Donley: And it’s God says, good, well done, good and faithful servant. Yeah, it’s pretty cool. Pretty cool story. And all the things that happened along the way, you look back and it is like a God thing. It’s I couldn’t have, written this story on my own. No way. 

[00:35:59] Henry Washington: And that’s, the other thing too, is people are so scared to start because they don’t know how, They go, I want to invest in real estate, but I have no idea what to do. And I don’t have all my, I don’t have all my ducks in a row. And we forget that, the whole point is that you don’t have all your ducks in a row. you don’t, you’re not supposed to know what the ducks in the row are. If this would have depended on me and my plan, do you think I’d be in the position where I get to do things like work for BiggerPockets and talk to you on this podcast?

[00:36:28] Henry Washington: this wasn’t in my plan. I wasn’t, my plan wasn’t to be speaking on stages and sharing this with thousands and hundreds of thousands of people like that wasn’t in my ducks in a row. you don’t want, you don’t want your plan’s not good. You don’t need to know how you just have to decide and let him tell you what the steps are.

[00:36:49] Patrick Donley: I want to take a kind of step back. You’re, at Walmart, you’re working in the IT department. It sounds like you’ve got this first deal. You’ve got the bank telling you, dude, come on, bring us more deals like this. Tell me more about like, how do you, where we’re generating the deals. You’ve got the book that’s coming out, so we’re going to get into the deal maker book, but I want to just hear about those next steps you were taking along the way to, to build out your portfolio.

[00:37:14] Henry Washington: Yeah, that’s a perfect transition because the book is about, it’s called real estate dealmaker because it’s about finding deals and funding deals, right? Half of the book is about how to find good deals. Half of the book is about how to find the financing for the deals, right? And the reason I wrote about that specific topic was because those are the two problems.

[00:37:32] Henry Washington: Like when I was going to these meetups and I was networking, this is what I was hearing. And this is doesn’t matter the market cycle you’re in. Everybody says these two problems, no matter what’s happening, right? Like back then, this was seven years ago. It was so easy to find deals then. But everybody I talked to was like, I can’t find anything to buy.

[00:37:50] Henry Washington: There’s no good deals out there. And the other half of the people were like, Oh man, I just, I don’t have the money, I can’t find the money. So I was like, all right, my corporate life, what they taught us, like at Walmart, we weren’t allowed to say problems. If there was a problem, you had to say, we have an opportunity.

[00:38:04] Henry Washington: Like they drilled that in our heads. So they did that because they want you to see your problems as not a problem, but what are you doing to fix it? How are you fixing it? What’s the opportunity that we’re seeing here? And so I was like, all right, the opportunities I see are people can’t find deals and people can’t find money.

[00:38:19] Henry Washington: So if I can get really good at one of those, then I know I’m going to be able to make some money because I have a whole bunch of people who have a need. Now that I’m able to service, right? That’s business one on one, find a problem, figure out a way to solve it. So I was like, okay, now that I have this small local bank, what I’ve solved is the money.

[00:38:36] Henry Washington: Now I know I have the money. And so the other problem I need to solve is to find the deals. Cause I got the money. I going to go find the deals. So I focused my entire business on figuring out how to get really good at finding deals. And so I started to study the people who are good at finding deals in real estate and the people that every research I did, all the signs pointed to wholesalers were the people who got really good at finding deals.

[00:39:00] Henry Washington: And so I studied how to be a wholesaler, not because I wanted to wholesale. I don’t wholesale. I’ve never been a wholesaler. I’ve assigned some deals, but like maybe 10 ever right of the hundreds of deals I’ve done. I didn’t study wholesalers to become a wholesaler, studied wholesalers to figure out how they do their lead flow.

[00:39:19] Henry Washington: And then I just said, if I can do that and I get good leads, then I can cherry pick the ones I like the most and I’ll sell the rest to all these people around me who said they can’t find deals. Or pass on the leads and monetize them that way. And so that’s what I did. I started to figure out what wholesalers were doing to find deals.

[00:39:34] Henry Washington: And I started to figure out which, which of those methods made sense for me. And I just went really hard into direct mail at the time. 

[00:39:41] Patrick Donley: I was going to ask. So what were those methods that work really well? It was direct mail. 

[00:39:46] Henry Washington: Yeah. For me, and it’s still direct mail for me. What I learned was there’s a bunch of different ways to find deals.

[00:39:54] Henry Washington: And so I wanted, and also what I learned was real estate’s cool in the sense that we don’t have to guess if it works because it’s been working for decades. It’s worked before we were born. It’ll work after we’re gone. How we do it is the same little nuances of it change with technology. But the root is find someone with equity and motivation and then make offers.

[00:40:19] Henry Washington: that’s what you do. And so I was like, okay. I just need to trust that this works. So what method makes sense for me? And so as I started to analyze the methods for finding off market deals, I was like, I don’t want to do door knocking because that ain’t me. I’m not that guy, right? I don’t want to lie to myself.

[00:40:37] Henry Washington: the big motivational speakers would tell you, suck it up and do it. Just knock doors until you die. And you’re right. But I’m like, I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to lie to myself about who I am. And I’m like, all right, so that doesn’t fit me. And so I would just go through each method and think, is this something that I can do for a long enough period of time for it to produce results?

[00:40:57] Henry Washington: Because part of the research I was doing was like, what do all these methods take to work? They got to take some, like, how long do they take to work? I want to do it right. And so through my research, I realized direct mail works in terms of my personality because I don’t mind talking to people if they’re calling me.

[00:41:14] Henry Washington: I don’t want to cold call anybody again, not in my personality, but if they’re calling me, I’m cool with it. Even if they’re calling me to curse me out, I’m cool with it. You picked up the phone cause you wanted to talk to me. So let’s talk. And what could I afford? What I started to learn was that finding deals, no matter what method you choose, whether that method is free to do or not, it still costs you something.

[00:41:36] Henry Washington: It’s either going to cost you time or it’s going to cost you money. There are absolutely free ways to get deals, but if you want it to be any sort of sustainable deal flow for you, you have to put enough time into it for it to be sustainable for you. And where people fail is they don’t fund their strategy appropriately with enough of the resource that it takes.

[00:41:58] Henry Washington: So people, they go, I’ll try some mail and they might send a few hundred mailers for a couple of months. That’s throwing money in the toilet. You didn’t fund it with enough resources. You didn’t give it enough time to work. And so I was like, what do I have in terms of a budget of time and money? And so I take stock of that.

[00:42:16] Henry Washington: And then I go, what method fits the budget and the personality that I have for me, that was direct mail. And I said, okay, I’ll just hit this relentlessly consistently until it works because it works. It’s not just going to stop working for me because I tried it. All these other people are doing it. It’s working.

[00:42:35] Henry Washington: So it’s going to work for me. I just have to trust it. And so that’s what I did. And I did get a couple of deals out of my first campaign, but we still continue to do it. 

[00:42:45] Patrick Donley: So you studied the best techniques of the wholesalers that were doing really well. Were you sending out postcards or what was your direct mail strategy?

[00:42:55] Henry Washington: Direct mail strategy at the time I was trying to find. So what I would do was I was thinking, so as I was researching, cause I would listen to podcasts of anybody doing direct mail marketing and I would just I would literally go seeking them out. If you were a guest on a podcast talking about direct mail marketing, I probably listened to it back then.

[00:43:13] Henry Washington: I was trying to figure out who are these people reaching out to? what are the lists that they’re using? And so I would literally listen to these podcasts and I would write down the lists that they were mailing to. And so I just had this list of like criteria that people were mailing to. And then I looked for the common denominators, right?

[00:43:32] Henry Washington: and I would see, all right, it seems like 80 percent of the people are doing absentee owners, right? That was the absentee owner and absentee owners. And I was like, okay, cool. That’s what I’m not going to do. So I figured out what everybody was doing, and then I figured out what are the ones that people are doing that they say are working that I see the least on this list because I have to compete with seasoned people.

[00:43:56] Henry Washington: And so I don’t want to mail the same list. That the big guys are mailing because they’ve got more time and the time in mail, they got more expertise and knowing what kinds of mail they’ve got more expertise and talking to sellers. I’m not trying to compete with them. who can I send mail to where I’m either going to be their very 1st piece of mail or their last piece of mail?

[00:44:17] Henry Washington: that’s where I want to be right at that time. I was picking mostly all single family homes. Owned in people’s personal names that they had owned for a long period of time that they were still occupying. So I only did owner occupies and I wanted the sellers to be at least 50 years of age or older.

[00:44:37] Henry Washington: All of those filters work because you assume the longer they’re in the home, the more equity that they have, right? And maybe the more distress they may have and lack of time, resources or patients to actually fix the distress. That was what I did. 

[00:44:51] Patrick Donley: On a thousand postcards. What would be the metrics would you say on average, like early on?

[00:44:57] Patrick Donley: what kind of metrics were you getting out of a thousand or 10,000? I don’t know what your numbers were, but 

[00:45:02] Henry Washington: My very first campaign, I said, a thousand pieces of mail, I got about 50 phone calls. I saw 20 ish houses and made and got two deals from it. My very first campaign. 

[00:45:16] Patrick Donley: Not bad. You’ve got this bank though.

[00:45:18] Patrick Donley: That’s funding you. You’re finding these great deals. Were they still willing to work with you? 

[00:45:24] Henry Washington: Yeah, they were. And then as I started to increase the deal flow, I would bring in a different bank. And then I started to learn even more. I even, Oh, I found a bank. Essentially what would happen is right.

[00:45:35] Henry Washington: You’re doing these good deals. They want your business. Yeah. And so I found, I would find other banks and they would give me similar terms. And then one time I got a deal on a multifamily and, an eight unit building in the bank I had been using. The bank I had been using wanted a 15 percent down payment, but it was, for the deal, I needed 50 grand.

[00:45:58] Henry Washington: And I was like, I don’t want to put 50 grand down right now. And so I ended up finding another bank who would let me do the same terms, except Bye. Bye. You Put 10 percent down and so I went with them and then the bank I was originally using got wind of that and called me and they were like, Hey man, I heard you, bought this, one, two, three main street and you used such and such bank.

[00:46:18] Henry Washington: And I was like, yeah, and they were like, why didn’t you come to us? And I was like, I did, but you wanted 15 percent down. These guys gave me 10 percent down. And they said, what do we need to do so that you bring us your deals first going forward? And I was like, okay, let’s talk. And I said, if you can figure out a way where I don’t have to put anything down or very little down, I’ll bring you every deal first.

[00:46:38] Henry Washington: And she said, okay, and she went back and she worked out with her bank. And so what they came back with was we will lend to you at 75 percent of ARV of the after repair value. And so as long as you’re buying, as long as what you need to purchase and renovate falls under 75 percent of the after repair value, you don’t have to bring anything.

[00:47:00] Henry Washington: Okay. And so what I heard was, all right, if I bring you a house that’s worth a hundred and I’m buying it for 50 and I need 20, then I don’t have to put any money down because that’s $70,000. That’s less than 75%. I’m in done. And so that’s what I would go do. I would go find deals that are under 75 percent of ARV and they would fund 100%.

[00:47:17] Henry Washington: And I grew my business a lot with that bank. 

[00:47:20] Patrick Donley: So had you been renovating all your rentals? Like the first couple, did you renovate all of them and do a value add when you purchased them? 

[00:47:28] Henry Washington: Yeah, we do mostly value add. that’s, if you’re going to get deals at that deep of a discount, you’re going to end up with value add.

[00:47:35] Patrick Donley: It’s interesting. So you’re, at Walmart. How are you doing all this? You’ve got a full time job. You’ve got a family. People’s questions are going to be like, how did he do all this? what was your time management like? And what was a day looking like for you, 

[00:47:48] Henry Washington: Bro, man, you make time for what’s important to you period point blank.

[00:47:52] Henry Washington: And so what it looked like for me may not be what it looks like for somebody else. Like you got to figure out, you just got to do it. And so for me, the way I managed it was luckily I had a job where if I needed to take a seller call during the day, as long as I wasn’t in a meeting, I could do that.

[00:48:06] Henry Washington: Nobody was. looking at me like, Oh, you’re on your phone. So I could take seller calls at work and then I would schedule showings to look at houses and make offers on my lunch break. And after work, that’s just what I do. If I needed to go see a house at lunch, that’s what I did for lunch that day.

[00:48:20] Henry Washington: If I needed to go see a house after work, that’s what I did right after work that day. And then that’s when I’d go see houses and make offers. And then after work, I’d hang out with my family. 

[00:48:28] Patrick Donley: So you know eventually you were going to leave Walmart. At what point did you have a number, like a monthly income number that you thought once I hit that I’m gone or how did that unfold where you left your W 2 income?

[00:48:41] Henry Washington: I fortunately enough enjoyed what I did enough to not be in a rush to leave. And so I didn’t leave until it cost me money to have my job. That’s when I left. I wanted to keep it as long as possible because having the job makes you more bankable. I was using banks like no matter how much I could make a million dollars in real estate, they were more comfortable with the $100,000 I made on my W2 than they were with the million dollars I was making in real estate.

[00:49:12] Henry Washington: So having the job helped me stay bankable. And so it made it easier for me to grow and scale. Plus, I liked what I did plus benefits because health care is expensive when you don’t have a job that’s paying for it out of your body. And so I didn’t necessarily want to leave until I couldn’t stay anymore.

[00:49:30] Henry Washington: And so what happened was everybody knew what I was doing. I didn’t hide what I was doing from anybody. Obviously, I told everybody what I was doing. And so it got to a point where my company called me and they were like, Hey, No, we need you to put some more focus on this job. We think you’re spending too much time doing some other things and we want you to put that time into here.

[00:49:49] Henry Washington: And so we need you to put some more hours in. And I was like, all right, let me figure out what that costs me. And so that’s when I went and did the math to figure out, all right, if I give you more hours, am I losing money? And when I did the math to figure out what I’m making outside of real estate with those hours versus what I would be making by giving them those hours, because they weren’t increasing my pay to give me those hours.

[00:50:10] Henry Washington: They were just more hours. I was going to have to give them. I was like, man, I make way more outside of here. the opportunity costs I’d be losing by giving you more hours doesn’t make any sense. I was like, If you, that’s really what you need from me, then I’m probably going to have to put in my notice.

[00:50:23] Patrick Donley: So when was that? How long ago? 

[00:50:26] Henry Washington: 2021. 

[00:50:28] Patrick Donley: I want to keep talking about the book. Tell me what it was like writing it and then who it’s geared towards and then what your hopes are for it. 

[00:50:36] Patrick Donley: Yeah, man. Writing a book is hard. Probably one of the hardest things I’ve done in business. Maybe because my expectation was that it was going to be easy because it’s like it’s on finding and funding deals.

[00:50:46] Patrick Donley: Like I do that in my sleep. You just think you’re just going to just sit down, knock it out, write it out. Boom, bang, all done, man. Like writing, teaching something in book form was just a challenge and it’s time consuming. It was hard. It was hard, but rewarding. 

[00:51:01] Patrick Donley: Bigger pockets does such a great job with the whole process.

[00:51:03] Patrick Donley: It seems like they’re, they put out really high quality books. 

[00:51:07] Henry Washington: Yeah. Yeah. They make it easy. They make it easy, easier than if it’s still, 

[00:51:10] Patrick Donley: you got to do the writing, but 

[00:51:12] Henry Washington: it’s hard. Yeah. But now for, ever my kids will be able to walk into a bookstore and see a book that daddy wrote and that’s worth it.

[00:51:20] Henry Washington: But yeah, no. So it’s called Real Estate Deal Maker. The whole premise of the book is it is, it teaches You what are all the ways you could potentially find deals? And then how do you pick 1 of those ways or 2 of those ways and then implement them successfully so that you can get really good at finding deals.

[00:51:35] Henry Washington: And then the 2nd half of the book is on funding the deal. So how do you find the funding for the deals? The whole premise of the funding is. You don’t just want to know one or two ways to fund deals. I think that’s what’s happening a lot right now because of the interest rates. People are like, Oh, I need to get really good at, creative finance or, seller financing or sub two.

[00:51:52] Henry Washington: And then they, get their seller finance or sub two hammer and create a finance hammer. And then they’ve got their conventional loan hammer and they’re just hammering every deal they find with one of these two types of funding. And. The way funding should actually work is you need to be a fundamentally sound investor.

[00:52:05] Henry Washington: So you need to know what are all of the ways that I could potentially underwrite this deal. And then let me use the financing that makes the most sense for that deal and my financial situation where those two things intersect. That’s the best funding for that deal. Cause seller financing sounds great.

[00:52:23] Henry Washington: You can get a low interest rate. That’s awesome. Until you’re buying a house that needs $100,000 renovation, seller ain’t going to finance $100,000 renovation. Now you got to go find $100,000 that’s not secured by real estate. That’s a hard thing to do if you’re a brand new investor, right? Like I’m not saying it can’t be done, but that’s probably a more seasoned investor who has to go do that.

[00:52:40] Henry Washington: That may not be the best financing solution for you and your deal. And so you need to understand what are all of the ways I could do it. I could have. as an example, I bought two duplexes very close together, very similar in price. I use two completely different types of financing to take down each one of those duplexes.

[00:53:01] Henry Washington: Why did I do that? Because each deal was a little bit different. The situation was different. One deal was a lead that came to me that was also sent to several other people and it was a good deal. If a good deal is sent to you and a bunch of other people, what do you immediately have? You’ve got competition.

[00:53:20] Henry Washington: And so I said, how do I get this deal and not my competition? And so the way that I thought I could get that deal was to use speed. And so I contacted the seller and I said, Hey, I see your, and I knew I needed it a little cheaper, even though it wasn’t a good deal. And so I said, Hey, Mr. And Mrs. Seller, what if I could buy this house $7,000 less than you’re asking, but you could have your money in seven days.

[00:53:43] Henry Washington: I’m not going to inspect it. I don’t even, I’m not even going to go see it. Like we can put it on a contract today and you can have your money in seven days. Everybody else might give them a full price offer. But they’re going to do a 30 day close. They’re going to send their, they’re going to go out there.

[00:53:56] Henry Washington: The contractor is going to go out there that, that’s going to get appraisal and there’s all these barriers. And so I said, you can go that route, but I can use your money in seven days. So they took my offer. And so I closed that deal. And the way I did it was I used a private money loan, two different private money loans to take that down.

[00:54:13] Henry Washington: Cause I knew I could get access to that money. Close it in seven days. The other duplex, similar price. I just used a normal construction loan with that one 30 day close, 15 percent down, that was better for me because then I don’t need the timeframe. I don’t have the competition on this deal. I can take this deal down with longer term financing off the top.

[00:54:33] Henry Washington: It’s a little cheaper for me in the long run. Takes a little longer to close this other deal. More costly for me because now I got to go turn around and refinance this deal later, but at least I got to refinance a good deal that I have instead of a deal I didn’t get because I was going to use the only other financing I knew.

[00:54:47] Henry Washington: So you got to know all the ways you can finance deals and then use the right financing for the job. 

[00:54:52] Patrick Donley: Yeah. It sounds like a really good book. you’re, writing about the two biggest problems, like you said, finding deals and then funding them. I wanted to talk more about the podcasts that you’re up to on the market.

[00:55:04] Patrick Donley: How did that get going? Like, how did you end up becoming a host? And then I wanted to hear just some about like your biggest takeaways from some of your favorite guests, like what you’ve learned from them that you’ve implemented in your own life. 

[00:55:15] Henry Washington: That’s good. That’s good stuff. Here’s how I just operate.

[00:55:20] Henry Washington: In general, as a person, so you’re going to meet a lot of people along this path, right? It’s networking, right? Your goal in networking should never be what you get. Your goal in networking should be about what you can give. If you consider every relationship that you come across as how can I be of service to this person and then actually do the things, be of service without asking for anything in return and do it quickly.

[00:55:50] Henry Washington: a lot of the times, I don’t know if you’ve read the book good to great, but a lot of what it says is it doesn’t take that much effort for somebody to see an encounter with you as a great encounter versus a good encounter. Typically, like if somebody says, if I hear something that somebody needs. I’m not even going to ask them if I can help, I’ll just help whether they take me up on the help or not.

[00:56:09] Henry Washington: It’s up to them. But the fact that I did it resonates with people and then human nature kicks in because I go, this dude, I didn’t even know I tried to help me with X, Y, and Z problem. And so They naturally will want to help you or will be willing to help you if and when you need help. And so I think that’s how it happened with BiggerPockets is I met the producing team and the hosts at a conference and then ended up on the podcast and just always try to figure out a way to be of service.

[00:56:39] Henry Washington: And so I knew that there were some investors within the ethos fear of BiggerPockets who were interested in doing deals in my market. And I was like, I can help by connecting them with people in my network who can help them with their goals. And so I just made lots of connections for people. And I think that helped me stay on top of mind and showed them that I, I wasn’t asking for anything.

[00:57:00] Henry Washington: I was just helping. And so when it came time for them, when they needed help, in terms of new hosts and things they thought of me, so I think that’s just part of it. networking is about what you give. I still do it to this day. I just this morning connected somebody to another resource.

[00:57:17] Henry Washington: I heard a guy speak. What a good speaker on a really cool niche. Of real estate investing. And I was like, man, that’s super cool. That’s some stuff I’d like to learn. And so after he spoke, he’s surrounded by people, Who are like, talk to me more about this thing, like people wanting to take, And I was like, all right, what am I going to do? So I go up to him, I introduced myself and I say, Hey man, that was really powerful. What you just talked about. I think you just helped a whole lot of people. I appreciate you. That was it. And then as I was around this person through the conference, I heard him say, Hey, I’m, he was talking to somebody else.

[00:57:50] Henry Washington: He wasn’t even talking to me. I just heard him say, after this, I’m headed back to Dallas. And I was like, Oh, I’m going to Dallas after this. I’m going to a real estate. I’m speaking at a, mastermind. So this was a higher level mastermind I was speaking at with other high level investors. And I was like, Hey bud, how’d you say you live in Dallas?

[00:58:05] Henry Washington: I’m actually head there after this. I’m speaking at this mastermind with these high level investors that are in your market. I’d love to just pay for you to have a ticket to go to this mastermind so that you could network with these people. And he was like, man, that’s amazing. So I did that. And so I paid for him to go and now he’s making these other connections with these other investors.

[00:58:23] Henry Washington: And it’s good for him. I haven’t asked him for a thing. I haven’t asked him for a thing. But do you think if I did, he would help me? 

[00:58:30] Patrick Donley: He’s going to say yes. Yeah. 

[00:58:33] Henry Washington: 100%. So that’s how I think it all happened with BiggerPockets. 

[00:58:37] Patrick Donley: I wanted to tell you mentioned masterminds. There’s a lot of people that are maybe skeptical of masterminds, but I want to hear how they have impacted your life and really accelerated your career.

[00:58:48] Henry Washington: Yeah, man, they’re super powerful. Don’t join them. If you’re not ready to do something with the information, because I think sometimes people think of spending money on education the same way they think of spending money on something at the store, right? Like I spent the money and now I have the thing.

[00:59:04] Henry Washington: That’s not how it works with masterminds is you spend the money. And what you’re paying for is the relationships and the information, and then you have to go act on the relationships and the information. if you’re not in a position where you’re in a place to be able to act on any of that, then don’t spend the money on masterminds or education.

[00:59:22] Henry Washington: But if you are, then boy, it can help accelerate you because. Look at every successful business person, no matter real estate or not, if they’re successful, I guarantee you, you’ve heard them say at some point. When I was talking to my coach, like they’ve all got coaches, they all have somebody in their life who’s been where they are and who can help them with the challenges that they’re going to face.

[00:59:48] Henry Washington: And so investing in education is super, super smart, but there are a lot of people out here who don’t do what they teach or who just aren’t good teachers. And so I tell everybody, if you’re going to look at a coaching program or a mastermind, Hey, make sure that they’re actively doing the thing that you’re trying to do in this current market because the market’s changing pretty fast, month to month right now.

[01:00:12] Henry Washington: And so if they haven’t done a deal in 2 years, the environment is different. They may not be able to help you right now. And the 2nd thing is like, when you’re having a conversation with this person or this person’s team, if you are not on fire about the opportunity or the possibility to work with them, that’s not for you.

[01:00:29] Henry Washington: And it’s not necessarily that they may mean me bad. It’s just there’s somebody for everybody, go find the coach that sets you on fire. That’s yes, what you were saying and how you were doing it. That’s what I need. But if you’re not super hype and ready to get, if you’re not feeling it with that coach, then that just may be not the coach for you.

[01:00:46] Henry Washington: It doesn’t mean real estate is not for you. Just go find the, find the one who lights you on fire. That’s where you need to be. 

[01:00:53] Patrick Donley: You mentioned something in your interview with Brandon Turner that I liked that you said you hired hearts. What did you mean by that? Hiring hearts? 

[01:01:01] Henry Washington: Yeah, and this may not be the best business practice guy.

[01:01:03] Henry Washington: So I like but I want to hire good people and I can teach them a lot of the hard skills now This doesn’t work for every position like your COO probably needs to know a little bit about your business or your industry or your niche but So like my acquisitions manager, I didn’t hire her because she’s some hard nosed closer’s, going to go out there and land every deal.

[01:01:29] Henry Washington: I hired her because she’s got a good heart. She’s going to care about the people she’s talking to. She will be an accurate representation of me and how I would do things. I can teach her how to have conversations with sellers. I can teach her how to close deals. Can’t teach you how to be a good person.

[01:01:48] Henry Washington: Can’t teach you how to care about other people. And so I hired her because of her heart. And I’ll teach her the hard skills. My project manager is a friend of mine has been a friend of mine for a long time, and he’s just loyal to a fault almost, but I’ll never have to question, is he working hard? Is he going to take care of my money?

[01:02:08] Henry Washington: It’s going to take care of my business. Is he going to make decisions based on what he thinks is in best interest of the company and not himself? I never have to question that his heart is in the right place. I can teach him how to manage a project. I can’t teach him those other things. 

[01:02:22] Patrick Donley: Yeah. I love that.

[01:02:23] Patrick Donley: I want to hear before we wrap up, just how you think about your why or your legacy, what are you trying to do? And when you look back on things, like what’s this all about for you aside from the financial rewards? 

[01:02:34] Henry Washington: Yeah, no real estate. I am fortunate enough that like I’m passionate about real estate and I’m passionate about teaching people about real estate, but I don’t think that real estate needs to be your passion for it to be something you do and can get good at.

[01:02:52] Henry Washington: What I love about real estate. And why I do this as my daughter walks by is I want them to be able to be the people they’re called to be, and not do the thing and be the people they have to be to make money. So if who God wants them to be requires them to do something that doesn’t produce a lot of income, I don’t want them to not be able to go do or be that person.

[01:03:22] Henry Washington: I want to build a portfolio that produces income so that if they need to go do something that isn’t going to make them a bunch of money, but that’s what God’s calling them to do, then they can do it. 

[01:03:34] Patrick Donley: That’s great. Henry, this has been a lot of fun. I really appreciate your time. Was there anything you wanted to touch on that we didn’t get a chance to discuss?

[01:03:42] Henry Washington: No, man. I think, this was great, man. You can order the book at biggerpockets.com/dealsbook. D E A L S B O O K. 

[01:03:51] Patrick Donley: And it’s Real Estate Deal Maker, correct? 

[01:03:54] Henry Washington: Real Estate Dealmaker. Yep. 

[01:03:57] Patrick Donley: On presale now, it’ll maybe by the time this comes out, it’ll be available on Am. What would you recommend BiggerPockets? Order it? 

[01:04:04] Henry Washington: Yeah. Yeah. Go to biggerpockets.com/dealsbook. That’s the best place. I know people say, go to Amazon so you can make the Amazon best sellers list. I don’t care about any of that. I just want people to get the book. 

[01:04:14] Patrick Donley: And then your socials. How can people get in touch with you? 

[01:04:17] Henry Washington: Yeah, the Henry Washington on Instagram.

[01:04:20] Henry Washington: And then, if you want to learn more about how we teach people how to do this, you can go to seeyouattheclosingtable.com. Just all spelled out S E E Y O U A T the closing table. com. seeyouattheclosingtable.com. 

[01:04:34] Patrick Donley: And are you a little active on Twitter? I think I’ve been seeing you posting there a bit lately.

[01:04:39] Henry Washington: Very, little active on Twitter. I’m more, an Instagram guy, Instagram. And it 

[01:04:44] Patrick Donley: Seems like the BiggerPockets people are mostly Instagram people. 

[01:04:48] Henry Washington: Yeah, I, never really got into Twitter. I tried. I wanted to, it just wasn’t my thing. 

[01:04:54] Patrick Donley: Cool, Henry. Thanks so much. And best of luck with the book.

[01:04:56] Patrick Donley: I really have had fun talking with you here today. 

[01:04:59] Henry Washington: Thank you for everything, man. This has been great. I appreciate you. 

[01:05:02] 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. 

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