From Employee to Entrepreneur

Here's a short story of mine that hopefully, you're going to find some valuable lessons in. I've been in real estate business since 2003 and I've been an entrepreneur for quite a while. When I was 27, I bought a medical clinic and started branching off with that, so I kind of split my time between real estate and the medical clinics. Medical clinics take about 20% of my time, the other 80% goes towards building a real estate business and that adds up to about probably 25, 30 hours a week. I got into real estate when I was about 40 years old, realized I didn't have a retirement, kind of started freaking out, I had three kids and starting to get a little older and my dad retired, he's 55, I could see that age come and had a little freakout and decide I need to figure something out. 

So I joined HomeVestors, franchise, where we buy ugly houses and they taught me how to buy houses and since that time I've wholesale deals of flip some houses, not a big fan of flipping houses. So I decided later, to become wealthy, you have to buy and hold, so I started buying and holding houses, got about a hundred houses now that I'm just working on getting paid off. So now just recently, about two years ago, I decided that I wanted learned about multifamily, so I started reading books and attending seminars for multifamily and trying to get educated on the ins and outs of multifamily syndication. Multifamily is a whole other animal when you're coming from single-family homes, you have to really rethink things and really shift your focus and learn a whole different aspect of real estate investing.

And I've always known, I make a terrible employee, I went to college and I worked for about five years as an insurance claims adjuster. And I was terrible at my job, didn't want to be there, sat in a cubicle and just dreamed of ways to get out of it. So one day a buddy of mine was a chiropractor and getting out of school and he didn't have any direction, so I said that I know the business end, so let's partner up. And it was my leaping off faith point getting out of the corporate world and, got rid of the suit and tie and was really happy to do it. And so I always knew when I was younger, I just didn't want to work for it, be a cog in a wheel for a big corporation. I think some people know right away that's what they want and some people, it takes a while to figure it out. I always knew that I didn't want to do that, it was just kind of a way to get started. I started with corporate in the corporate world but wanted to get out really quick 27 and I'm 54 now, it's been a great ride. I love being self-employed. It's true freedom.

Let me know in the comments below if you enjoy being a business owner and what do you like the most about it?