Episode 084 – Paul Moore

Paul Moore  0:00  

I think the common enemy will be this – when we actually hit a recession. Investors, if they knew what we knew, if we could convince them of what we have proof of internally, they would be investing more than ever. But almost everybody knows. And Warren Buffett talks about this all the time, almost everybody is fearful, when they should be greeting.

 

Richard Matthews  0:29  

… 

 

Hello, and welcome back to The Hero Show. My name is Richard Matthews. Of course, I’m on the line with Paul Moore. Paul, are you there? 

 

Paul Moore  1:39  

I’m here. 

 

Richard Matthews  1:40  

Awesome. So glad to have you here, Paul. For those of you who are following along with my journey, we’re still out in the Midwest just north of the St. Louis on our RV travels. Paul, where are you joining us from?

 

Paul Moore  1:52  

I’m in Central Virginia near the Blue Ridge Mountains and if you’re going to travel this way we’d love to see you over here just off the Appalachian Trail and The beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains and the Shenandoah Valley.

 

Richard Matthews  2:04  

Absolutely we’re working our way down to the Florida Keys. We’ll be there mid-May, we’re going to go all the way up the East Coast this summer. So I’ll be going through Virginia as far as I know. 

 

Paul Moore  2:13  

Okay. should be good. 

 

So let me go ahead and introduce you for our guests who don’t know who you are. So, Paul Moore. So you graduated with an engineering degree and then an MBA from Ohio State. You started on the Management Development track at Ford Motor Company in Detroit. After five years, you departed and started a staffing company that you’ve then sold publicly for 2.9 million five years later, and you were on the finalists for Ernst and Young’s Michigan Entrepreneur of the Year, two years straight. And then you got into the real estate investing sector where you’ve done everything from, you know, show up on HGTV to rehabbing to flipping to what is it multi-family and self-storage and even we call it syndication and there was one other one you’ve started your own investment fund, as well. Is that right?

 

We have three investment funds where we invest in syndicated real estate. I can explain that if you want.

 

Richard Matthews  3:07  

Absolutely. I actually know what syndicated real estate is, but I don’t know if all of our guests or all of our listeners do. So to start off with our first question is basically what are you known for? What’s your business like now? What do you do? So, hopefully that’ll give you a place to answer that question.

 

Paul Moore  3:22  

Okay. So, we are known for helping people protect and grow their wealth in the commercial real estate space. So we, Wellings Capital. We have these funds, and we go out and spend an enormous amount of time vetting sponsors, which are operators of commercial real estate, and then we invest with them. The way we do that is we invest our money along with our investors. And we put that into deals that we think are the very best safest deals in the areas of self storage, mobile home parks, and apartments. And then we give our investors returns from the profits.

 

Richard Matthews  4:06  

Interesting. So, in in terms of real estate just for for our, our listeners, one of the things I talked about regularly is if you were to put real estate investing on like Robert Kiyosaki, the ESBI thing you have the operators, which are generally the business side of real estate where someone – they’re generally facilitating a deal. They’re putting it together, they’re operating the thing, they’re finding the investor money, they’re finding the people to do the capital improvements and all that kind of stuff. They’re the ones who are actually running the business of real estate. And then you have the investor site, which is the one who was doing the paper asset of the real estate where you’re coming in and you’re putting your money into the business and realizing return on that. And if I’m understanding correctly, you are helping facilitate that investor side of the real estate deal. Is that correct?

 

Paul Moore  4:50  

Right. For example, I just spoke to a guy today who’s a plastic surgeon, he has millions of dollars to invest, but he is not sure who to trust. And he doesn’t have time to figure it out. So if he trusts us, he can understand that we have vetted all these operators and that we are going to give him diversified returns from these various operators, deals, assets, I mean, these various geographies, etc.

 

Richard Matthews  5:19  

Absolutely. And just for explanation’s sake, one of the things that has always blown me away is like looking at the person who’s putting in their money like that, it’s a really cool way to get their money working for them. One of my clients does commercial real estate investing, and he was talking like they bring in investors to close gaps between how much the bank will put up and how much they need to get a deal going. And, just as an example, they put in, it was a multifamily property, and it was million bucks and they needed to put a million dollars worth of work into it. So it was like 2 million in. And so they had the investors put up the other million.

 

Paul Moore  5:59  

Right 

 

Richard Matthews  6:00  

And they gave him a 10% equity stake on the property. And so, and it took him 12 months to -I’m not sure what the term is, to turn it around to bring it to them – to turn it around. I mean, at the end of the 12 months, they do a cash out refi. The investor gets his original investment back, but he keeps his 10% stake. And so he got his money back in 12 months, and over the 12 months, he also got his 10% cut of the cash flow. And then over the next five years, that project tripled in value, and they sold it. So they made the investor make his money back, and made 10% cash flow for five years. And then when they did the sale, he made 10% of the final sale, which was like four or $5 million. So for essentially what was 12 months of having his money sitting in something, he got paid for five years and realized five or 600% return on the original amount of money they put in which is just super cool because they’re not doing anything.

 

Paul Moore  6:13  

Right. 

 

Richard Matthews  6:16  

It’s literally just their money working for them.

 

Paul Moore  7:10  

It’s very similar to what we do. We give them actually quite a bit higher cut than that. But the investors get, well north of 50%. And even if they get cashed out, they keep a very high stake, like in that range of 50 to 75% of the property ownership as long as we own it. That’s a very common structure. And,  when it goes well, it works very, very well. I think it’s one of the reasons, Richard, that almost all of the Forbes 400 wealthiest people in the world invest in commercial real estate.

 

Richard Matthews  7:47  

Absolutely. And it’s actually on my last mastermind, we’re out this year, my group of entrepreneurs that I work with. One of my goals was to take profits from businesses here and find a way to get them into commercial real estate. It’s one of my next next goals personally.

 

Paul Moore  8:03  

Awesome. That’s a good goal.

 

Richard Matthews  8:05  

Hopefully. So we’ll see how that goes. So what I want to talk about a little bit is your origin story, right? We talked on the show all the time, every hero has their origin story. It’s where you started to realize that you were different that maybe you had superpowers, maybe you could use them to help other people. So how did you get started into this world of entrepreneurship?

 

Paul Moore  8:23  

So even when I was a kid, I was always the one who was out selling raffle tickets in the rain or just really busting my butt. I think my mom really drove me. My dad was incredible, wonderful influence on my life. We’ll maybe talk about that again. But my mother really drove me to be the very best I could be. And so when I got into college, I found myself during college starting like a business to sell Easter baskets to kids at Easter. I sold into their – to deliver to their door or birthday cakes and baloons to deliver to their dorm room on their birthday. And so I found myself at Ford Motor Company really enjoying it and really liking it but 30 to 45 days I think after I started I was already a little bored at Ford. And I started thinking of ways I could start a side business. So I started spending evenings and weekends trying to research. Trying to start an oil change shop in Farmington Hills Michigan or a tax property tax consulting business in Dearborn, Michigan. Those were two real ones. And over that next five, four and a half, five years just kept chipping away at that till we found one that was worthwhile and then both my business partner and I quit Ford and the rest is history.

 

Richard Matthews  9:51  

It’s amazing how common that is in the entrepreneur space where you’re like, I think people who are getting into the world often of entrepreneurship don’t realize it happens this way that you have to- those stats that like one in 10 businesses fail in the first five years. A lot of that is entrepreneurs being like trying something like that doesn’t work, try something else that doesn’t work, try something else that doesn’t work. Try something else that doesn’t work. The businesses that fail or don’t work or they don’t materialize? Well, it’s not necessarily an entrepreneur that fails. I’m sure they got other things that they’re doing. Try to figure out

 

Paul Moore  10:26  

I mean, we’ve all heard the quote from Edison, about how he didn’t really fail. He just found 10,000 ways not to do it, or whatever it was. But I think I mean, Richard Branson, look at him. I mean, I don’t have the exact stats, but I think I understand that he’s had something like half of his business ventures fail yet he still has hundreds that have succeeded.

 

Richard Matthews  10:50  

Mine is much lower than that. But I have over the course of the last 10 years have several of them that just didn’t go the way I planned and right now I’m doing the things that are working really well. But  that’s the way it starts off for most of us. 

 

Paul Moore  11:04  

Yeah. Right. 

 

Richard Matthews  11:05  

Trying a bunch of things until you find something that works. So in that sort of exploration and finding your first, because your first business was the one that succeeded, was the staffing company, right? So talk a little bit about superpowers. So your superpowers are what you do or build or offer this world that really helps solve problems for people. And the way I’ve been framing this for guests lately, is if you think of your skill sets, like all the skills that you have, there’s probably one of them that really energizes and empowers the rest. Like for me, that was systems and processes. I’m really a system process guy and realized a lot of my other skills I had developed because I was able to see the systems that other people didn’t see and really learn things quickly. And which meant a lot of my skills were derivative of that one skill in the systems and processes. And I had based a lot of my businesses under creative skills, and I didn’t really start growing until I focused my business on the zone of genius, so to speak. So with that kind of framing, what would you say your superpower is?

 

Paul Moore  12:09  

I had created and sold that business. And years later, I had already started flipping houses. And a friend of mine was standing on my back deck. And I remember he said, “You’re really creative.” And I said, “What?” I said, “I’m not creative at all. I can’t draw. I don’t do art. I don’t do ” and he’s like, “No, I know.” Because he was really a good artist. He said, “No, but you’re really creative. Look at all the businesses, you’ve started looking at all the writing you do.” Because I think I was just about to write my first of three books. And I said, “Really, seriously?” And then I started thinking about it, I realized, you know, I had so narrowly defined creativity, as being something about art and being a great musician and all that. And I realized No, no, what I was doing was creativity as well. I mean, it was having the ideas for new businesses thinking of new ways to do things, setting, finding shortcuts, finding faster, better, cheaper ways to produce something that’s better. And so I think creativity, if I had to put a general like a generic term on it, that’s where I would go with that, Richard. If I was going to be really more specific, I would specifically say writing because I do a lot of blog posts. I’m working on my fourth book. And so I would specifically say the writing realm.

 

Richard Matthews  13:39  

So in the world of creativity is something my wife and I were just talking about the other day, because we got four kids in homeschool. So we talked a lot about things we can help –

 

Paul Moore  13:47  

We have four kids in homeschool too. 

 

Nice. 

 

Richard Matthews  13:51  

And one of the things we were talking about was how creativity thrives with limits. And when you take “limits off,” creativity dies. And I’m just curious to get your sort of, your thoughts on that. And just, for context sake, some of the things that we’ve talked about is like when you have a goal for something when you say, “Hey, I need to get this accomplished by X-Y-Z date.” That’s a time limit, you’ve put on something which gets the creative juices flowing. Children, for instance, when you put them in a park, when you let them out for recess or whatever, they’ll just stay on the concrete path unless you put a fence around the grass thing, and then they’ll go out on the grass, right, because limits actually help people thrive and help productivity thrive. I’m just curious what your thoughts are on that.

 

Paul Moore  14:45  

I think that’s absolutely true. Because I mean, I have a daughter who’s very creative, she likes to draw and do all that kind of stuff. But if I don’t give her some kind of structure, like for example, I started having her draw pictures for my blog post, she would draw like cartoon images for the blog post. And that just gave her all kinds of ability to thrive. And we’ve all heard the stories about kids, putting kids out in the street, they’ll huddle together in the middle. But if you put a fence around it, they’ll, you know, go and explore every corner of it. So I think that’s absolutely true. And I don’t know exactly how it applies to me. I know that if I didn’t have writing deadlines, that would be a real problem. I know, if I didn’t have goals set up for the blog posts I want to post and the emails I want to get out, that would be a real problem. So I would say that is true.

 

Richard Matthews  15:42  

And I know, for me, looking at some of the stuff we do in our business. It’s like, I’ve got this process and my goal, I have one of the limits I put on all the processes that we build is I want my people to only do what only they can do. And, so it’s a limit. It’s an artificial limit, right? So you could make, I could make, they could do all sorts of things that aren’t their zone of genius. But when we’re building processes, I’m like, how can I make it so this person is only doing things that really only they could be doing? And it’s a limit that really unlocks the creative potential of building a good system in your business. So each person is only doing that. And I find that whenever I’m approaching something, the first thing that I start with is what are my limits? Where are the things that I want to do, what do I want to constrain it with? Because it’s those constraints that really allow you to develop something cool.

 

Paul Moore  16:34  

Dan Sullivan, who is the head of Strategic Coach talks about how do you find those exact limits, and one way is to find out what you constantly procrastinate. And if you’re constantly procrastinating something that might be assigned to that it’s something you need to offload. And instead of saying, Sullivan says instead of saying, I’m going to outsource or delegate this to you, and basically It makes me miserable. Let’s say it’s accounting. It makes me miserable. Why don’t you be miserable with it? Instead, look for the person who loves accounting, and then just set the limits, you said around them and say, “Look, this is all you’re going to do just what you’re really, really good at, it energizes you and gives you joy.” So when that person goes home, they’re full of energy and joy, because they did what they were created to do. And I didn’t do what I was not created to do, which is –

 

Richard Matthews  17:30  

It’s a powerful way to think about it. I know, there’s definitely a lot of things in my business that I’m so glad I have people do for me now. So just out of curiosity, I know there’s a lot of things in the real estate business like everything from acquisition to dispositions to doing the research on products and doing your due diligence and whatnot. What’s your least favorite thing to do in real estate that you absolutely have to have a team member do for you or you would just not survive?

 

Paul Moore  17:55  

I would say, it would probably be ongoing property management. And this is actually why we’ve changed models, we don’t actually own and operate our own properties anymore. We have, we work with third parties to do that. So we are the people that are creating content, we’re talking to investors, and we’re vetting operators that we love all three of those. And that’s what we do really well at, but if I had to be a property manager or an accountant.

 

Richard Matthews  18:25  

I just wouldn’t work out.

 

It would not be good. So just curiosity on your business model. If you’re giving the investors a big cut, and obviously the operators still have to make their cut, how do you guys get paid in the work that you do?

 

Paul Moore  18:41  

So there is, as an LP investor, we’re getting a very small slice of a whole lot of projects. So, like several years before we went to this model, we were getting, let’s just say 20% profit from one deal or two deals, but with this model last year, we were able to invest in about 45 deals. And we were able to get a very small sliver of, let’s say, 45 deals. And by doing that, and by and this is one of the keys, Richard investing in projects that have outsized returns, and I mean, returns where if the investors got 15%, they’d be really happy. We’re investing in projects that had been averaging, you know, 30-40-50% annual returns. And so by being able to get those higher returns, we can give the syndicator, the sponsor a nice return, the investor way more than they ever dreamed, and then we get a small cut, as well.

 

Richard Matthews  19:50  

So do you find just personally that doing the smaller slices of more projects is more profitable than the large slice of fewer projects?

 

Paul Moore  19:58  

For us. It certainly is, but I think the key to that is that we’re not the operator, like I said, we’re finding the very best in class operators we can.

 

Richard Matthews  20:09  

So if you guys were operating it that would just change the profit potential significantly?

 

Paul Moore  20:14  

Well, it would mean we’d have a huge internal staff –

 

Richard Matthews  20:18  

And you have overhead.

 

Paul Moore  20:19  

Management staff, we’d have all the overhead and all that. And so we’re working with people. I mean, I’m working with a young guy who’s in his mid 30s. I mean, I think he’s going to be like one of the next Warren Buffett’s. And so for us to be able to identify him at this age and be able to pump a very large amount of money to him. I mean, we gave him well over well north of 10 million last year, to be able to operate that was a huge thing for him. And I mean, he was able to really put that to work and do very well with it.

 

Richard Matthews  20:53  

That’s awesome. So it’s an interesting business model that you have because most like I work with a lot Real estate investors and not many of them are doing it. I don’t think I’ve talked to anyone who’s doing what you’re talking about doing here. Most of them are either the operators who are bringing in investment funds themselves. So, it’s interesting to have like a third party who’s putting the funds together, and I’m investing that way. So I’m just curious, have you seen any or do you see any potential in the commercial space? We’re moving into, say, the residential assisted living? Or what’s the other one that’s that seems really, really good, the drug and rehab?

 

Paul Moore  21:35  

A little bit about that. So we’re always thinking we’re really slow to move into a new realm. But we’re always thinking about, Okay, self storage, mobile home parks, etc. Multi families already so overheated that there’s gonna come a day when those are overheated as well. What are we going to do next and so I’m already looking at senior living?

 

Richard Matthews  22:03  

The senior living is the one that I’m really excited about.

 

Paul Moore  22:06  

We have an operator. So we have actually, I should say an investor, one of our large investors who happens to be near St. Louis, and he is an attorney. And he actually is looking really hard at the senior living area. I mean, he actually has been looking at it for years investing in it. And now he’s leaving his corporate job to go raise money full time for senior living deals. And the deals he showed me are really, really impressive.

 

Richard Matthews  22:36  

The only thing that scares me about the residential assisted living or the senior living is that it’s two businesses, right? You got the real estate business and you have the care business but it’s also what makes a residential home that if you were a single family, investing it you might have 1200 and 1500 dollars profit at the end of the month. But that same property when you’ve turned it into residential assisted living is now 20 or $30,000 a month revenue.

 

Paul Moore  22:59  

I’m aware of that model and the one we want to invest in, Richard, is actually not the kind where there’s healthcare professionals there. This is more like a step before they would get into really assisted living. This would be more like senior residences, like flats, town, like condos for seniors. And that’s worked out really, really well. Now, it’s funny, because one of the reasons mobile home park investing works so well is that as sad as this statistic is six out of 10, so 10,000 Americans turn 65 every day. It’s up to six out of 10 of them have zero or under 10,000 actually is a number saved for retirement. So how are those people going to afford senior living? Well, my answer is they don’t have to. A lot of them can probably only afford to stay in their house or get a mobile home and why mobile home park investing works so well only a tiny slice of that population has to be able to afford these senior condos to make the model work. It would only be a small percentage of the population.

 

Richard Matthews  24:14  

And I know the thing that’s excited me about assisted living is, you mentioned the thousand seniors a day are turning 65. And the same thing is happening, we’re like that number is going to hit 85. Right? It’s gonna be 1000 seniors a day hitting 85 here in the next 10 years. And they’re saying at the end of this next decade, it’ll be closer to 10,000 people a day that are getting into their 70s and 80s. And requiring more assistance to get – they call it activities of daily living. So it’ll be a huge market. And the last I looked at the statistics, it was something like, for every one bed in a town for seniors. There’s generally demand for 15 today.

 

Paul Moore  25:01  

Really? 

 

Richard Matthews  25:05  

Seems like you almost can’t open assisted living facility without a waiting list. Almost anywhere you go,.

 

That seems to be what’s happening. And so, I mean, I think it’s gonna be a with healthcare, with biotechnology changing at the rate that it is. And with the rate of healthcare improvement, which is just stunning, if you’ve read some of the recent stuff on this. I think that lifespans, they’re talking well, north of 100 just being right around the corner as a normal lifespan.

 

The doctor I’m working with right now, who’s a performance doctor. Like his goal is for his clients to live to 120. He’s like, he started with me in my mid 30s. Right. He’s like, if we do everything, if you keep some of this stuff going until, on top of the technology that’s changing as we go, he’s like, there’s no reason why you can’t live to be 120. And he’s like some of the people who are in their 80s now who’ve lived their whole life destroying their bodies, but don’t have don’t have that same opportunity. But for someone at my age who’s looking at what we know now and what’s changing over the next 10 to 20 years, he’s like, “There’s no reason why you can’t live to be 120 if you follow some of this stuff properly.” 

 

Paul Moore  26:20  

I totally believe that.

 

Richard Matthews  26:22  

It’ll be fascinating. So so I’m gonna move on a little bit and you know, if your superpower is one side of the coin, the other side of that coin is your fatal flaw. So just like Superman has his Kryptonite. And if you said you’re not familiar with superheroes, kryptonite basically makes Superman not function at all right? So my curiosity for you, is there something in your life or in your skill sets or whatever that you think has been holding you back from success? What is it, and more importantly for people who have struggled with it and who are listening, how did you deal with it and overcome that?

 

Paul Moore  26:57  

So I’ve got a podcast called How to Lose Money.

 

And so we talk about failures, pain, loss, agony on the road to success with entrepreneurs and investors and business managers. And we, in fact, we just interviewed Gino Wickman, the guy who wrote Traction, and we had a wonderful time doing that. But I find that people learn more from talking about their failures and their Kryptonite, if you will. So I’m happy to talk about this. For me, it has been a combination of being really relational and trusting people too easily number one, number two, being loyal, too loyal too quickly to some of those people. And number three, chasing shiny objects. So here’s where that comes together. Over the years, I found myself and I’ve got systems and people in place. To make sure this doesn’t happen now, but over the years, I would let’s say, I really like somebody, let’s say I had dinner with somebody or lunch and I just really liked a guy and he had a real idea for a new business. And let’s say it was just what you said, assisted living. So I would be like, by five o’clock that day, I would have already started researching it by the weekend, I would have stacks of information about it, I would have bought several books on Amazon or eBay. And I would be within a week setting up an LLC to go into partnership with them. And so that’s my tendency. That’s my Kryptonite. And so now that we partner with operators, in self storage, mobile, home parks, etc, etc. I had to get rails in place to make sure I wouldn’t do that. And so one of the ways I did that was I hired, five years I hired a wonderful guy who’s almost the exact opposite of me. So he’s not super relational. He’s all about the numbers and the facts and the books and the statistics. And he’s like, his attitude, although I’m oversimplifying it significantly, his attitudes like, I don’t care if you like him, I don’t care if you had a great lunch and coffee, and I don’t care if he goes to your church or whatever, I don’t care. I just want to know the facts. And so it’s been great because it’s just helped. Both of us have helped each other so much because we bounce back and forth and we, even though I’m the majority owner in the company, I made him a junior partner recently, and he has ownership because of these guardrails I wanted to set up for my Kryptonite. I actually made him a 50-50 voting partner. So he and I both have to agree before we’ll invest $1 in anything. And that’s been so good.

 

Richard Matthews  30:07  

And that’s awesome. And it’s interesting too, because it’s actually the same solution that I had for my Kryptonite. So my kryptonite tends to be perfectionism. Where I’m like, I want something to be exactly the way I think it should be in my head before I bring it to market. And we all know that’s not a realistic goal. Like there’s no such thing as perfection. And so one of the things that I did was I had to bring on people whose job was to publish right just to ship. And so I was like, I can get it someplace in like and handed off. Because that last 10% where it needs to be like I would spend days, sometimes months on something trying to massage it into what I thought was perfection. And really, it just needed to be shipped. And so now I’ll get something to wear like, “Hey, this is where I want -” get it somewhere. And then the last bits of it, I always hand off to someone else so they can do the last bit of it and publish or, ship or whatever the thing is.

 

Paul Moore  31:07  

That’s a great I find Richard when I’m writing a book, The when I think it’s done, and I mean, literally done and I and I think, this could be on Amazon in a week or a month, I find that like half of the time I spend on it is from that moment till it hits the bookshelf. And that’s just, not because I’m a perfectionist, I just find that there’s so many details, and the last at the very end, before you ship it, and I think that’s a great way of thinking of it. 

 

Richard Matthews  31:40  

So it’s interesting that you can bring someone in to help sort of shore up your weakness there, and whatever that is, and, and it really helps you grow your business and succeed that way. So let’s talk a little bit about your common enemy. So common enemy, the way I frame this for our guests, is in terms of your clients, right? And so, for you, I would imagine your clients could either be the operators or they could be the investor. So I’ll let you pick which one you want to talk about. But if you could remove one thing from your life that from their lives that would just help them either understand what you do better or get better results from the work that you do. What is that sort of thing that you keep beating your head on the wall against with the people you work with? You have to fight against it all the time. 

 

Paul Moore  32:24  

It’s interesting when I had a staffing company, we would take over the payroll taxes, benefits workers comp, 401k, etc, for people and we would actually put these people on our payroll and the common enemy was so easy to identify as the CPAs and attorneys. Because they would try to talk to the client who I had already finished selling, they would try to talk them out of it before they signed the contract and more often than not, they did talk them out of it. Because they had a many year long relationship with them. We don’t have that in this business. I mean, I love the operators we work with. And I love the investors we have. And so I’m really scrambling here to think about what it might be. I’m going to predict. I’m gonna predict ahead a little bit we have a recession resistant fund. Self Storage was written up today in the Wall Street Journal, as the one — that’s actually going up during this huge downturn as we record this. Of course, the Dow lost 6% today alone, and it’s lost a lot more than that over the last two weeks, actually three weeks almost now. But Self Storage was written up and then a few weeks ago, mobile home parks were written up as having huge gains during the last 12 years since the recession 40-100% for example for some communities. So I think the common enemy will be this, when we actually hit a recession. Investors, if they knew what we knew, if we could convince them of what we have proof of internally, they would be investing more than ever. But almost everybody knows. And Warren Buffett talks about this all the time, almost everybody is fearful, when they should be greedy. And that’s the problem, because they’re greedy when they should be fearful. Warren Buffett is greedy when he should be fearful when others are fearful. And he’s fearful when others are greedy. The problem is so many people get fearful when others are fearful that they don’t invest and that is going to be the problem in the next several months or possibly years, depending on how long this sort this hopefully short term crisis plays out.

 

Richard Matthews  35:01  

Hopefully. And then that’s the result of the coronavirus pandemic that everyone’s been scared of. But it’s interesting. And I like that sort of thinking on what the problem is because it’s sort of like a meta level problem and people are afraid to invest when right now is a perfect time to invest. Right? Which is so it’s interesting. So the common enemy then, technically is fear. Right? And how do you overcome that and deal with it? And do you struggle with that much with your investors where they’re actually afraid to invest in you have to do some selling on why it’s a good time to invest, or most of them just ready to go.

 

Paul Moore  35:44  

Now we really don’t sell. I mean, we really just present the opportunity and almost everybody. I mean, I shouldn’t say that. Everybody who invests sees it on their own and they’re excited to invest with us. I will say, this week with this big stock market drop, we had one investor who had committed and signed the paperwork. And he decided to pull out because he said he lost so much money in the stock market. He just felt like he didn’t want to now right now, take his stocks, cash come in and invest with us. He felt like he wanted to hang in there and see if he could make his money back. So I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s a form of fear. But that’s a one time thing out of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of investors though.

 

Richard Matthews  36:32  

And I could see that with a massive couple point drops that we’ve seen over the last couple of days. It could correct itself pretty quickly. 

 

Paul Moore  36:40  

Yeah. 

 

Richard Matthews  36:41  

So he might get his money back and maybe next month.

 

Paul Moore  36:43  

Yeah, right.

 

Richard Matthews  36:46  

That’d be nice. So my next question for you is if your common enemy it’s something that you fight against, and we talked about fear. Your driving force is something that you fight for. Right? So just like Spider Man fights to save New York or Batman who we mentioned earlier fights to save Gotham or Google fights to index and categorize all the world’s information. What is it that you guys fight for with your investment firms?

 

Paul Moore  37:04  

So with our investment firms, I have some personal things I’d like to circle back to but with our investments we fight against number one overpriced real estate. I wrote a book called The perfect investment which is about multifamily. yet here we are several years later, seeing multifamily being overpriced, overhyped, and a lot of people who are actually new in real estate investing are now deeming themselves gurus and people are actually following them. And so we’re fighting against this overpriced hysteria specifically in multifamily but in other forms of real estate, as well. So we’re fighting for people realizing that there is a better way to invest. One of the reasons self storage and mobile home parks are so strong right now is because mom and pop operators are bounding in these asset classes, which means we can acquire a very fair price, a mobile home park, let’s say for example, we just bought one for 7.1 million three weeks ago. Six days later, right in the middle of the stock market meltdown, we got an offer. Remember, we bought it for 7.1. We got an offer for 9 million. Because, first of all, it was very fair to the seller because – she hadn’t even visited the place in five years.

 

Richard Matthews  38:34  

So did you do any turnaround on it, or did you just put it back on back on the market.

 

Paul Moore  38:38  

Six days. No, we didn’t put it on the market. It was an unsolicited offer. We turned it down flat, because it should be worth $12 to $14 million once we make three very easy changes.

 

Richard Matthews  38:50  

Nice. 

 

Paul Moore  38:51  

So those are the type of deals we see in self storage and mobile home parks that it’s very hard to find a multifamily. So, I’m fighting for recession resistant assets that are good in good times and do well in downtimes, as well. And these are the two that we’ve found. Now, we’re also fighting for transparency. For good reporting, a lot of operators are known in this world to not keep their investors in the loop to not pay out the dividends they say they’re going to and then not even be reachable by phone or email  we are the extreme opposite, I guess we over communicate a little bit and that’s something that we make sure our operators do with us, as well. Now on a personal level, I discovered something about four or five years ago called human trafficking, and didn’t know much about it. I assumed it was something that was happening in a far corner of the world. But you know what I found out, Richard, I found out that if you take the record profits of Nike, Starbucks, Apple and General Motors. You add those together, you double that number that’s the approximate revenues annually generated by human trafficking. It is a huge, huge problem. It’s happening right under our noses. I’d like to believe if I was alive in the 1800s, I’d be an abolitionist fighting against slavery. And if I was an adult in the 1960s, I’d be for civil rights fighting against oppression. And this is oppression. This is a civil right, it is slavery. And it’s these lives have been ripped away from 10s of millions of people. In fact, since we started this podcast, a couple hundred people have been enslaved. And so it’s a huge problem. And I want to tell the world about it. I’m also working with a group called https://www.freedomplaceproject.com/ We’re building a large the plan is at least to build a large office tower in Dallas, and actually use 100% of the profits to fight human trafficking and rescue its victims. 

 

Richard Matthews  41:16  

That’s amazing. One of the things that I’ve always been blown away by is- And actually the sort of the impetus for creating the show in the first place. Is this idea that culturally at least in America, entrepreneurs have been regularly villainized, and even if when you get into the comic books, like this show is based on comic books, a lot of the comic book supervillains are always entrepreneurs, right? They’re business people. And you go back to my childhood and we had TV shows like, what is it Captain Planet. And Captain Planet all their bad guys are always business people. And we rightly call people like doctors and veterans and police officers and firefighters heroes, but very frequently, we look at entrepreneurs and be like those guys. They’re the devil. Right? They’re the worst. And it’s always struck me as the world doesn’t work that way. Most of the entrepreneurs I know. And most of the entrepreneurs, you see, they build big businesses and create. They give more money than anyone else to causes they believe in, and they build businesses to help solve problems. So their business solves problems and then they take the profits and then personally like, you don’t need that much money to do whatever it is you want to do. So all the extra goes into stuff that you really care about. And that it’s something that we have – we run a supplement company, right, and one of our things that we do is every time a bottle is sold, we take a quarter and we put it into a fund that goes to Vitamin Angels and vitamin angels. The leading cause of death in children under six years old worldwide is lack of Vitamin A. Because vitamin A keeps your immune system going and several hundred thousand a year die from lack of vitamin A, and it costs a quarter to give a child enough vitamin A to survive for a year. So, we donate a quarter for every time we sell a bottle. And so we have a little program called buy a bottle to save life. And, it’s amazing to me that entrepreneurs are villainized when most of the time entrepreneurs are doing the kinds of things that you’re talking about, and this kind of thing. So anyways, that’s, I just really appreciate that kind of honesty and realizing, that’s why I do this right to lift people like you up and show that hey, actually, entrepreneurs are the superheroes. They’re the ones that are really fighting and finding ways to make big changes in the world.

 

Paul Moore  43:42  

Wow, that’s awesome. That’s really inspiring what you’re doing, as well. That’s wonderful.

 

Richard Matthews  43:46  

Thank you. So when it comes to your driving force, I’m just curious when it comes to something like the fighting human trafficking, one of the things that I have always loved about entrepreneurship specifically, is it allows you to create tremendous windfalls of cash, more cash flow that you can’t create in other ways. So I remember as a child thinking, at church, they pass around the plate, you put $5 in or whatever. And personally, that always bothered me. Not because it’s not a good idea to put $5 on the plate, but because I didn’t want to be the kind of person who was like, all I’ve got is $5 to put on the plate. I wanted to be the kind of person who could buy the damn building. 

 

Paul Moore  44:31  

Yeah. 

 

And so I was like, I could keep the $5 now and invested into something like real estate or building a business and do those kinds of things. And then on the other side, take the revenues that turn into hundreds of 10s of thousands of dollars and be able to do big things. Has that ever been a motivation for you realizing that entrepreneurship allows you to do big things?

 

It absolutely is. In fact, it’s one, Jim Rohn said and I’m very much paraphrasing; “But the reason we set goals is so that we can become the type of person who could get to that level who could reach that goal. And so, one of the reasons I want to be a better entrepreneur is so that I can eventually contribute 10s or even more than 10s of millions of dollars, to fighting human trafficking and rescuing its victims and some other things I’m passionate about. So, absolutely. I completely agree with you. And I want to be in that position. I mean, obviously, Bill and Melinda Gates are the very best example that I’ve ever seen of this. And then too many people surprised Warren Buffett followed them, and they’re doing really, really big important things in the world. And so I’m really impressed with what they’re doing. And I would love to –

 

Richard Matthews  45:53  

It’s an interesting motivation for sure, because like for someone like me, it’s still far away. It seems like it’s far away to be a point where you can make a map have an impact on something. But you realize that like, it doesn’t take a huge amount of money to, for instance, control the conversation nationally, right to have an impact on what’s being talked about. Just as an example, if you remember back in the 90s, the truth campaign about cigarette smoking changed the course of human history. 

 

Paul Moore  46:22  

That’s right. It worked. 

 

Richard Matthews  46:24  

It worked really well. And there’s a number of things that probably could use that kind of push. And it’s not outside the realm of possibility for someone like you to put together the funds for something like that with the success of a building, like when you’re talking about in Dallas or things like that. So anyways, it’s really cool. It’s a high level topic, but it’s fun to see that sort of what we’re building towards is how can we make big impacts?

 

Paul Moore  46:52  

That’s awesome.

 

Richard Matthews  46:55  

Moving on a little bit in the interview, I know we’ve only got a few minutes left. You got a – about 10 minutes. We’ll move through these slides. a couple of questions quickly. This one’s practical. I call it the heroes tool belt. Maybe you got a big magical hammer like Thor or a bulletproof vest like your neighborhood police officer. What are some of the tools you use on a regular basis, in your business that you just couldn’t do what you do without them? So for me a lot of times it’s like I couldn’t live without my calendar, couldn’t live without Zoom and we do our podcast on some of the things that you absolutely have to have nowadays that really enable your business to let you do what you do.

 

Paul Moore  47:26  

So one thing would be following the principles laid out by Jay Pappas on and Gary Keller and The One Thing and that would be just basically being a part of the one thing mentoring group that has been really helpful. Another one is HubSpot. We use HubSpot quite frequently and really love that tool. Of course, we use Zoom, I use Google Calendar. Email has been sort of the Achilles’ heel of my existence. Because I need it. I love it. I have to have it at the same time, it’s the thing that if any one thing gets in the way of me getting my big, big goals and my big rocks moved on a daily or weekly basis, it’s unexpected emails. And, I’ve come to expect them of course, but of course, just using email software would be another one for sure. And then, if I was going to pick another one, I guess Microsoft Word would certainly be one of them since I’m constantly writing.

 

Richard Matthews  48:37  

So for your email challenge, if you haven’t picked it up, what’s his name? It’s gonna come to me. Tim Ferriss is a Four Hour workweek book. 

 

Paul Moore  48:45  

Yes.

 

Richard Matthews  48:45  

He has a whole section in that book about how to offload your email to someone else. So you only see the stuff that you need to see. That might be useful.

 

Paul Moore  48:52  

You know, I need to revisit that. I told Ben, my partner here that I really, really need to revisit that book. And I remember that being in there. I think I saw that book back in 2011 or so, after it came out. Thank you for reminding me of that. 

 

Richard Matthews  49:09  

He’s got a whole section in there. And he just goes over like, here’s how he handed his email off to someone else. And, that might let you move some rocks forward.

 

Paul Moore  49:19  

I need to do it.

 

Richard Matthews  49:20  

So, my next question here for you is your own personal heroes. And so, it’s like Frodo had Gandalf, Luke had Obi Wan Kenobi, Robert Kiyosaki had his Rich Dad, who were some of your heroes. Were they real life mentors, speakers or authors, peers who were a couple of years ahead of you parents? How important were they to what you’ve accomplished so far?

 

Paul Moore  49:39  

So my mom and dad, as I’m already already mentioned. My dad had such incredible integrity. He only had a high school education, but he rose to being right under vice president of several large companies and I got to work in summer jobs at one of those companies. And it was a fairly radical union environment who really, generally hated the owners, hated management, hated the company. And yet every time and it wasn’t because I was standing there. In fact, it would have been the opposite if they didn’t like him, but every time my dad’s name came up, and he was the HR director, so he had to deal. He was the head of management union relations, now. So he was butting heads with them regularly, daily. And every time his name came up, they were like, they said it with such respect. And they would say, “This lying company lies all the time, but whenever your dad speaks, he tells the truth and we know if he says it, even if it’s not in the contract, he will never break his word.” And that spoke to me so deeply and that has just been an amazing, mentoring thing for me. Other heroes, I already mentioned, although I wouldn’t really consider them heroes, I think what they’re doing is so amazing. That’s Bill and Melinda Gates they could have so easily everybody knows this could have so easily rode off into the sunset, bought a Hawaiian island or something by now and, and just enjoy life. Instead they’re going around the world making a real difference. Warren Buffett, his investing strategy, I’m actually writing a book called Warren Buffett’s Rules for Real Estate Investors. I’m translating what he’s done in stocks and buying and selling companies into the real estate realm. And so the more I read about him, the more I am amazed now I wouldn’t necessarily consider him a hero in my personal life. But certainly as far as his investing strategy, I really would. Another would be Heidi Baker. Now you might not have your readers or your listeners might not have heard much about Heidi Baker, but Heidi Baker is a modern  day Mother Teresa. She works in Mozambique. She went there, she grew up wealthy. I think it was in Newport Beach, California, something like that. And she had every privilege possible. She gave all of it up to live without electricity, extremely poor, in Mozambique for decades, and she has literally shifted the entire country for the better, for the good. And it’s so amazing. Look her up. Her name’s Heidi Baker, and I would say she’s certainly one of my great, great heroes.

 

That’s awesome. It’s amazing that one person who takes a stand can change the course of history. I’ll have to look her up. Maybe we could get her on the podcast. I don’t know if that’s a thing we could do. 

 

Won’t that’d be great. It’s Heidi and Rolland Baker. That’s her husband. 

 

Richard Matthews  52:50  

So last question for you. Since we’ve only got a few minutes left. Your guiding principles, what are the top one or two principles or actions that you put into practice every day that you think contributes to the success and influence you guys enjoy with your companies, maybe ones you wish you’d known when you first started out on your entrepreneurs journey.

 

Paul Moore  53:07  

So one would be certainly, Warren Buffett said that really successful people say no, a lot. And the very most successful people say no, almost every time. And so that is one that we live by. That is why we’ve met so many potential operators to partner with, to invest in. But we say yes so infrequently. Because we usually- we’re going to find reasons to just pause we would, and then a second related rule, or principle would be that we would rather not invest at all, than lose money. In other words, it’d be better for us to do a sin of omission, not investing, then commission. And that’s investing in the wrong project or with the wrong partner. On a grander scale, I would say that one of my guiding principles and everybody, my company’s guiding principles, we really believe that we were created by a loving God, and we want to honor Him every chance we can. So we want to do everything we can to honor him whether anybody knows or not, we want to do what’s right. So that’s really important to us. 

 

Richard Matthews  54:34  

That’s awesome. And I feel the same way. And it’s interesting to see how that affects your decision making too when you believe that every person you’re working with was created with that same spark of divinity. And so it doesn’t sort of forces you to treat them fairly and treat them as equals because they are.

 

Paul Moore  54:57  

Absolutely.

 

Richard Matthews  54:59  

I really like the rule about saying no more often than yes.I had a friend of mine, who has been a really good friend and coach in my business life. She mentioned to me that the most successful business people in the world will generally do just one thing, right. And they’re militant about the one thing that they do. And they won’t do anything else. And it’s along the same lines. They say no to more things than say yes to because if it doesn’t fall inside their zone of genius, they don’t do it. 

 

Paul Moore  55:28  

The dream, Gary Keller said that those who really succeed, say yes to one thing and no to 10,000 distractions along the way.

 

Richard Matthews  55:40  

I can see that and I need to work on that in my life personally. Me too. So that basically wraps up the interview. Thank you so much for coming on. I got one last little thing we do called The Hero’s Challenge. The Hero’s Challenge is really easy. Do you have someone in your life or in your network that you think has a cool entrepreneurial story? Who are they? First names are fine, and why do you think they should come on our show and share their story.

 

 His name is Barry. And it’s actually, Barry Farah, Barry Farah ran for governor of Colorado two years ago. He didn’t get into the final round. But he has done an amazing job as an entrepreneur. He’s been able to share and move and he lost money. And he’s made money. And he’s just always bounced back. And I’ve always really admired him. And so yeah, I think you should definitely have him on the show, if you can.

 

Awesome. We’ll reach out to and get contact details later. So thank you so much for coming on the show. Paul. Last thing here, where can people find you, if they are interested in picking up any of your books or if they’re interested in working with you as an investor, and I guess more importantly, who are the sort of ideal people to reach out to?

 

Paul Moore  56:46  

Accredited investors who want to diversify into commercial real estate but they don’t know who to trust, where to start, where the on ramp is, that would be the people we want to work with and they can reach me at my website it’s https://www.wellingscapital.com/. That’s W-E-L-L-I-N-G-S Capital.com/

 

Richard Matthews  57:09  

Awesome. And I assume that if you’re listening to the show, you know whether or not you’re an accredited investor. 

 

Paul Moore  57:14  

Yes.

 

Richard Matthews  57:16  

So, if that’s you, definitely find Paul and reach out to him. I personally know commercial real estate is a huge goal for me. And if it’s not for you yet, it is a fantastic place to put your money and have it learn to work for you. So take the time to reach out to Paul. Again Paul, thank you so much for coming on the show. We’ve hit the top of the hour. I know you got to go before we do you got any final words of wisdom before that stop record button?

 

Paul Moore  57:41  

I think I said it was as far as staying focused on your one thing saying no a lot and learning the difference between investing and speculating. Investing is when your principal is generally safe, and you’ve got a chance to make a return. Speculating it’s when your principal is not safe, and you’ve got a chance to make a return. Stick with investing. You’ll be happier in the long run.

 

Richard Matthews  58:03  

Awesome. Thank you so much, Paul, for coming on the show.

 

Paul Moore  58:04  

Thank you Richard. Okay. Take care.