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MJ DeMarco
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FASTLANE INSIDER
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Note from MJ:
Our next FEATURED USER is another forum legend who has been around since the forum's origins. Pay close attention to his story as it contains many nuggets of UNSCRIPTED wisdom; from freedom and autonomy, to value providing, to failure.
If you like or rep this post, all will be transferred to JScott from Myself.
HERE IS JASON'S STORY:
BACKSTORY
My wife and I both left the corporate world back in 2008, when we decided to get married. She was a marketing exec, traveling nearly four weeks a month for her job. I was traveling about three weeks a month for my job. It only took a five minute conversation for us to agree that we needed to quit our jobs so that we could focus on building a family. We knew too many others in our position who were working 14 hour days and letting nannies raise their kids. We weren’t going to be those people.
We gave up a lot of money in bonuses and stock by not waiting another year to leave our positions, but it was still an easy decision. A couple months after that first conversation, we had resigned from our jobs and were moving across the country to get closer to our families. In that time, we started talking about “What’s next?” We knew generally what we wanted – to be successful entrepreneurs with the freedom to put our family first – but we weren’t sure how we’d accomplish that.
REAL ESTATE INVESTING
I had always been intrigued with real estate investing, and my wife thought that might be interesting as well, so we started researching. It wasn’t long before I found this very site, which MJ had launched just a few months prior. Thanks to the contributions of some of the legendary contributors here, we decided that real estate investing was going to be our first entrepreneurial venture. Soon after, my wife and I decided that flipping houses was going to be our investing niche.
As a math guy, and as someone who likes to both learn and teach, I documented much of my early research here on The Fastlane Forums, posting dozens of threads detailing my business plan, investing analysis techniques, spreadsheets, etc. The feedback and advice I got was invaluable, and gave us the push we needed to keep moving forward. In August 2008, we purchased our first flip property. Knowing that we had a lot to learn, and wanting to share everything we were learning with others, I documented the project in detail in this thread:
The Corn House (A real-life experience in rehab and flip)
I took a bit of beating throughout that thread by some (much) more experienced investors who felt that scaling a flipping business would be tough – and who thought that it would be near impossible to make flipping houses “Fastlane.” In retrospect, had I known more, I probably would have agreed with them… But, my wife and I were (mostly) able to do it. We were never able to fully remove ourselves from the business, but we came pretty close. With a small team of employees and a large group of dedicated contractors, we’ve completed over 250 projects (with all but one being profitable) in the past eight years.
Fun fact: We almost did a reality TV show, but we couldn’t come to agreement with the production company or the network about the content – they wanted a typical real estate show where we looked like idiots for the first 20 minutes of the show, and then miraculously figured out a way to make $100K on each project. We wanted an approximation of real life, which obviously doesn’t appeal to reality TV producers. Here’s the “sizzle reel” that HGTV put together for the show concept:
THE BLOG & THE BOOKS
But, it was actually a related venture that taught me more about entrepreneurship than real estate ever did. The day my wife and I decided to pursue real estate, we launched a blog (www.123flip.com), where we documented our real estate “adventure” in gory detail. We documented every project down to the penny (up through our 50th project), all of our successes, all of failures, everything we learned, etc.
At the time, there were no other real estate bloggers offering that kind of “open book” view into their business. With our blog, readers came to realize that flipping houses is a tough business, and that it was all quick and easy money like it was portrayed on TV. I posted on the blog nearly every day, and we gained a big readership. In 2012, one of my readers suggested I take the material on the blog and turn it into a book. It took over a year – and the book ended up being so long that it required two books – but in March 2013, I released The Book on Flipping Houses and The Book on Estimating Rehab Costs.
And that’s when I learned the importance of offering value. While I hadn’t much thought about the value my blog was providing to my readers, they certainly appreciated it. When I sent that first message to my mailing list about the release of the books, I received literally hundreds of messages back from readers who couldn’t wait to buy their copies, if only because they wanted to give back for all the time and effort I had put into the blog over the years. I had readers who told me they decided not to pursue real estate investing for one reason or another, but still looked forward to reading my blog posts and newsletters. I had other readers who were never interested in real estate, but who liked to live vicariously through my deals my wife and I were doing.
You see, I didn’t write the books to make a lot of money; I simply wanted to offer a better experience to my readers who were interested in learning the flipping business step-by-step, as opposed to reading five years of blog posts and random articles. But, my audience was thrilled to give me money in return for what I had given them first.
In four years, we’ve sold over 100,000 copies of the books, and it’s been the most popular house flipping book on Amazon for most of that time. As of last month, my wife and I can officially say that we have made over seven figures in book royalties. Simply because we were willing to spend years giving value without asking for anything in return. Our readers appreciated it, and once we gave them an opportunity to reciprocate, they jumped at it.
MOST RECENT FAILURE
While you’ll never hear me complain about my life, that doesn’t mean there haven’t been setbacks and failures. Like I tell my kids, if you’re not failing every single day, you’re not trying hard enough. And as anyone who has followed my real estate adventures knows, I’m not ashamed to admit my mistakes…
Two years ago, a good friend and I launched a tech company aimed at designing and manufacturing products to teach engineering to kids. We validated our market, designed a great product and launched with a decent amount of exposure and good press. Unfortunately, we failed to realize how difficult it is to break into the education market without an experienced sales and marketing team, which we didn’t have. In retrospect, it should have been obvious (it was), but my friend and I both decided to put off that concern in hopes that we’d figure out a solution by the time we launched the product.
Long story short, despite having a great product and end-users who want the product, we have been unsuccessful at getting enough of the product through the decision makers and into our end-users’ hands.
We are currently evaluating our options for the business. Best case, we license our intellectual property or find a buyer for the business; worst case, we shut down and lose two years of effort and a decent amount of personal investment. Either way, we have learned a tremendous amount, and we can add all of our mistakes to the “stuff we’ll know better next time” list. While failing sucks, it’s a good reminder never to get complacent. And some big failures make the successes feel that much sweeter.
TODAY
These days, my wife and I focus on a number of different businesses. We still do real estate deals (mostly as partners, investors or lenders), I’m working on salvaging the tech business, I still do some writing (I just released my third book, The Book on Negotiating Real Estate), we do some angel investing (mostly in the tech space) and my wife and I are getting ready to launch a new business in the next couple months in an industry that we know nothing about (but we’re looking forward to the challenge).
Despite everything we have going on with the business side of things, my wife and I never lost sight of our original goal for venturing out on our own. We have two boys – ages six and seven – who spent every waking minute with us, participating in our businesses deals, going to real estate closings, going to meetings with us, coming with us to speaking engagements, etc. I’ve never missed a parent/teacher meeting, a violin recital, a little league baseball game or a birthday party. I was there to hear my kids’ first words, watch them take their first steps, help them learn to ride their bikes and teach them to swim.
Being entrepreneurs has always been about freedom for us. Not just financial freedom, but time freedom. The freedom to focus on the important things in life and not let the unimportant things get in the way. There are weeks where I work 60 hours and there are weeks that I work 6 hours – the important thing is that it’s always my decision, not someone elses.
FASTLANE MEMBERS
As long as I have this little soapbox, I want to mention a couple people from this forum…
There are two people here that graciously took the time to sit down with me nearly 10 years ago to help me figure out this real estate stuff -- @SteveO and @phlgirl. I owe them both a tremendous debt of gratitude for helping my wife and I tackle this business and come out relatively unscathed. While I hadn’t seen phlgirl since she and her husband spent a full day with us in 2008, her husband came out last week to see my wife and I speak in New York City. It was an awesome reunion. Hopefully, she’ll come back and visit the forum sometime soon – they are absolutely killing it with their Phili-based real estate development business.
Also at the New York event last week to support us was @Yankees338. He was a high-school sophomore when we started messaging on this forum back in 2007. He ended up attended my alma mater for college, we’ve kept in touch over the years, and he recently quit his corporate job to become a full-time real estate investor.
Finally, @Russ H and I have stayed in touch since our first meeting on this forum long ago. I’ve gotten a ton of advice from him over the years, and while we probably communicate at least weekly, it wasn’t until a few months ago that we finally got a chance to meet face-to-face when he stopped through my town on one of his (many) around-the-world adventures with his family.
Our next FEATURED USER is another forum legend who has been around since the forum's origins. Pay close attention to his story as it contains many nuggets of UNSCRIPTED wisdom; from freedom and autonomy, to value providing, to failure.
If you like or rep this post, all will be transferred to JScott from Myself.
HERE IS JASON'S STORY:
BACKSTORY
My wife and I both left the corporate world back in 2008, when we decided to get married. She was a marketing exec, traveling nearly four weeks a month for her job. I was traveling about three weeks a month for my job. It only took a five minute conversation for us to agree that we needed to quit our jobs so that we could focus on building a family. We knew too many others in our position who were working 14 hour days and letting nannies raise their kids. We weren’t going to be those people.
We gave up a lot of money in bonuses and stock by not waiting another year to leave our positions, but it was still an easy decision. A couple months after that first conversation, we had resigned from our jobs and were moving across the country to get closer to our families. In that time, we started talking about “What’s next?” We knew generally what we wanted – to be successful entrepreneurs with the freedom to put our family first – but we weren’t sure how we’d accomplish that.
REAL ESTATE INVESTING
I had always been intrigued with real estate investing, and my wife thought that might be interesting as well, so we started researching. It wasn’t long before I found this very site, which MJ had launched just a few months prior. Thanks to the contributions of some of the legendary contributors here, we decided that real estate investing was going to be our first entrepreneurial venture. Soon after, my wife and I decided that flipping houses was going to be our investing niche.
As a math guy, and as someone who likes to both learn and teach, I documented much of my early research here on The Fastlane Forums, posting dozens of threads detailing my business plan, investing analysis techniques, spreadsheets, etc. The feedback and advice I got was invaluable, and gave us the push we needed to keep moving forward. In August 2008, we purchased our first flip property. Knowing that we had a lot to learn, and wanting to share everything we were learning with others, I documented the project in detail in this thread:
The Corn House (A real-life experience in rehab and flip)
I took a bit of beating throughout that thread by some (much) more experienced investors who felt that scaling a flipping business would be tough – and who thought that it would be near impossible to make flipping houses “Fastlane.” In retrospect, had I known more, I probably would have agreed with them… But, my wife and I were (mostly) able to do it. We were never able to fully remove ourselves from the business, but we came pretty close. With a small team of employees and a large group of dedicated contractors, we’ve completed over 250 projects (with all but one being profitable) in the past eight years.
Fun fact: We almost did a reality TV show, but we couldn’t come to agreement with the production company or the network about the content – they wanted a typical real estate show where we looked like idiots for the first 20 minutes of the show, and then miraculously figured out a way to make $100K on each project. We wanted an approximation of real life, which obviously doesn’t appeal to reality TV producers. Here’s the “sizzle reel” that HGTV put together for the show concept:
THE BLOG & THE BOOKS
But, it was actually a related venture that taught me more about entrepreneurship than real estate ever did. The day my wife and I decided to pursue real estate, we launched a blog (www.123flip.com), where we documented our real estate “adventure” in gory detail. We documented every project down to the penny (up through our 50th project), all of our successes, all of failures, everything we learned, etc.
At the time, there were no other real estate bloggers offering that kind of “open book” view into their business. With our blog, readers came to realize that flipping houses is a tough business, and that it was all quick and easy money like it was portrayed on TV. I posted on the blog nearly every day, and we gained a big readership. In 2012, one of my readers suggested I take the material on the blog and turn it into a book. It took over a year – and the book ended up being so long that it required two books – but in March 2013, I released The Book on Flipping Houses and The Book on Estimating Rehab Costs.
And that’s when I learned the importance of offering value. While I hadn’t much thought about the value my blog was providing to my readers, they certainly appreciated it. When I sent that first message to my mailing list about the release of the books, I received literally hundreds of messages back from readers who couldn’t wait to buy their copies, if only because they wanted to give back for all the time and effort I had put into the blog over the years. I had readers who told me they decided not to pursue real estate investing for one reason or another, but still looked forward to reading my blog posts and newsletters. I had other readers who were never interested in real estate, but who liked to live vicariously through my deals my wife and I were doing.
You see, I didn’t write the books to make a lot of money; I simply wanted to offer a better experience to my readers who were interested in learning the flipping business step-by-step, as opposed to reading five years of blog posts and random articles. But, my audience was thrilled to give me money in return for what I had given them first.
In four years, we’ve sold over 100,000 copies of the books, and it’s been the most popular house flipping book on Amazon for most of that time. As of last month, my wife and I can officially say that we have made over seven figures in book royalties. Simply because we were willing to spend years giving value without asking for anything in return. Our readers appreciated it, and once we gave them an opportunity to reciprocate, they jumped at it.
MOST RECENT FAILURE
While you’ll never hear me complain about my life, that doesn’t mean there haven’t been setbacks and failures. Like I tell my kids, if you’re not failing every single day, you’re not trying hard enough. And as anyone who has followed my real estate adventures knows, I’m not ashamed to admit my mistakes…
Two years ago, a good friend and I launched a tech company aimed at designing and manufacturing products to teach engineering to kids. We validated our market, designed a great product and launched with a decent amount of exposure and good press. Unfortunately, we failed to realize how difficult it is to break into the education market without an experienced sales and marketing team, which we didn’t have. In retrospect, it should have been obvious (it was), but my friend and I both decided to put off that concern in hopes that we’d figure out a solution by the time we launched the product.
Long story short, despite having a great product and end-users who want the product, we have been unsuccessful at getting enough of the product through the decision makers and into our end-users’ hands.
We are currently evaluating our options for the business. Best case, we license our intellectual property or find a buyer for the business; worst case, we shut down and lose two years of effort and a decent amount of personal investment. Either way, we have learned a tremendous amount, and we can add all of our mistakes to the “stuff we’ll know better next time” list. While failing sucks, it’s a good reminder never to get complacent. And some big failures make the successes feel that much sweeter.
TODAY
These days, my wife and I focus on a number of different businesses. We still do real estate deals (mostly as partners, investors or lenders), I’m working on salvaging the tech business, I still do some writing (I just released my third book, The Book on Negotiating Real Estate), we do some angel investing (mostly in the tech space) and my wife and I are getting ready to launch a new business in the next couple months in an industry that we know nothing about (but we’re looking forward to the challenge).
Despite everything we have going on with the business side of things, my wife and I never lost sight of our original goal for venturing out on our own. We have two boys – ages six and seven – who spent every waking minute with us, participating in our businesses deals, going to real estate closings, going to meetings with us, coming with us to speaking engagements, etc. I’ve never missed a parent/teacher meeting, a violin recital, a little league baseball game or a birthday party. I was there to hear my kids’ first words, watch them take their first steps, help them learn to ride their bikes and teach them to swim.
Being entrepreneurs has always been about freedom for us. Not just financial freedom, but time freedom. The freedom to focus on the important things in life and not let the unimportant things get in the way. There are weeks where I work 60 hours and there are weeks that I work 6 hours – the important thing is that it’s always my decision, not someone elses.
FASTLANE MEMBERS
As long as I have this little soapbox, I want to mention a couple people from this forum…
There are two people here that graciously took the time to sit down with me nearly 10 years ago to help me figure out this real estate stuff -- @SteveO and @phlgirl. I owe them both a tremendous debt of gratitude for helping my wife and I tackle this business and come out relatively unscathed. While I hadn’t seen phlgirl since she and her husband spent a full day with us in 2008, her husband came out last week to see my wife and I speak in New York City. It was an awesome reunion. Hopefully, she’ll come back and visit the forum sometime soon – they are absolutely killing it with their Phili-based real estate development business.
Also at the New York event last week to support us was @Yankees338. He was a high-school sophomore when we started messaging on this forum back in 2007. He ended up attended my alma mater for college, we’ve kept in touch over the years, and he recently quit his corporate job to become a full-time real estate investor.
Finally, @Russ H and I have stayed in touch since our first meeting on this forum long ago. I’ve gotten a ton of advice from him over the years, and while we probably communicate at least weekly, it wasn’t until a few months ago that we finally got a chance to meet face-to-face when he stopped through my town on one of his (many) around-the-world adventures with his family.
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