The Team Sport of Syndication

The one thing with syndication that I knew it was going to be very difficult for me when I thought about doing it as a business was, I never want to ask anybody for money. Just not the type. I’m just not the guy who says, “hey, why don’t you join me in this?” It’s just not my thing, it’s just kind of – it feels weird to me, it’s awkward. But I think for me, it’s really quite simple, I talk what I talk about, people learn how I think, more and more people listen to my podcast and if they like the way I think, they begin to trust me and they join the investor group. I never go out there and say, “hey, you know, invest in my deal. I just don’t do that.” I get people who come to me and they say, I want to invest in stuff and then we have webinars and there’s opportunities and if they want to participate, they participate. And so, the beauty of it for me is that I’m putting things out there that I can stand behind and that I’m putting my own money into and I only offer opportunities, which I think are compelling for some reason and it’s very easy for me to talk to people about something when I truly believe in it like anybody else. But at the end of the day, it’s all about something completely different, people who are syndicating and doing multi-family, you see ads for opportunities and reg D506(c) and having proformas and stuff. I don’t do that. Everything we do is reg D506(b), you have to be in my group before you ever see a deal.

Listen to full episode: https://lifebridgecapital.com/2019/10/ws347-the-team-sport-of-syndication-with-buck-joffrey/

All of our webinars first and foremost are educational. I think whenever we have an opportunity, we’ll have somebody, the operator, maybe he’s talking about a specific deal, but I’m on the webinar every time and I’m talking about things I like about and I’m explaining things, explaining how things work and explaining why I think things are good. It’s not just a guy with a bunch of stuff on a screen telling you what it is. It becomes more of a conversation; it becomes more education. In fact, I will say that I really believe that if just even watching our webinars, I think our investor group has gotten very sophisticated. Because we talk about a lot of the same concepts over and over and how to look at things, as a limited partner. And so, they become very demanding, but that’s good, because at the end of the day, you want people who invest in your offerings to believe in it the way you do. You don’t want a bunch of lemmings because if you have a bunch of lemmings and something for some reason goes wrong then they’re not going to be very understanding about it.

I think sometimes you just want to make sure that I just like to make sure that investors, before they invest really understand the deal. After a while, if investors start believing you and trusting you, they’ll a lot of times invest in pretty much anything that you do. I have people like that, but I let them do that because I also know they’ve been around for long enough to understand, they have a level of sophistication and understanding what they’re getting into. But I think having people actually who are too willing to give you money, so sometimes is a problem and you need to be aware of it and it’s sort of counter intuitive as a syndicator, but you have to make sure everybody is aware of the plan. Because sometimes it can be a pain, I mean, we’ll have opportunities where we know that there was no real plan for a distribution in the first year and then if you get an email from an investor four months later saying, “hey, I haven’t seen a check yet.” “Well no kidding, go back and watch that webinar.” It’ll just drive you crazy. You just get on and make sure everybody understands.

The biggest tip that I can give everybody out there, understand what your niche in the business is in this whole business of acquisitions. And you know, running a company that we’re running, whatever company it is that you do, are you a deal guy, are you a guy who has got a recent capital? Are you the guy who is really good at due diligence? I think, trying to identify what it is that you’re really good, usually something that you really like to do. And then I think really just understanding what your weaknesses are and then finding people as partners to do that because I think the challenge is people get sometimes get greedy, I think, “well gosh, you know, if we get too many partners and then we’ll get paid less and all that.” But you know, first of all, you’re going to do a much better job if you have the right team in place and second of all, I mean, you can do a lot more deals, right? Like I said, we’ve raised probably about 70 million in the last 12 months. I mean, I couldn’t do that if II didn’t have substantial team to go out there and execute all this.

Listen to full episode: https://lifebridgecapital.com/2019/10/ws347-the-team-sport-of-syndication-with-buck-joffrey/