Forty years. Six hundred houses. Now sharing it with investors across America.

I bought my first house in 1986. I was twenty-six years old, three years out of Western Michigan University, holding a Business Management degree and a Michigan Builder's License my father had encouraged me to get. I had $4,200 in savings. The house — a three-bedroom ranch in Pontiac — cost twenty-four thousand dollars.

The middle stretch.

From 1986 to about 2007, I did what most Michigan investors did in those years: a steady mix of flips and rentals, mostly in Oakland County, mostly working out of a beat-up old Ford van with a clipboard on the passenger seat. I built a small network — a lender, a contractor, an attorney, a title rep.

There were two disasters in that stretch that taught me more than every successful deal combined. The first was a 1991 duplex in Pontiac where I missed undisclosed foundation work and ended up paying more on the fix than I'd paid for the house itself. I broke even two years later. The second was a 1998 over-leveraged stretch where I had four properties going at once and a contractor who walked off two of them in the same week. I almost lost the business.

I tell the people I coach about both of those failures early. The successful deals are useful for confidence. The disasters are useful for everything else. And the lessons travel — a missed foundation in Pontiac teaches you the same thing it would in Dallas or Tampa.

The thing nobody tells you about real estate is that the first decade is mostly survival, and the second decade is mostly leverage from what you learned in the first decade.

The 2007 pivot.

When the housing market collapsed in 2007–2008, most flippers I knew panicked. They had inventory they couldn't sell, debt they couldn't service, and a sudden realization that the buyers had vanished. Some of them got out of the business entirely. A few went under.

I leaned in. Specifically, into bank-owned properties — REOs — which were being dumped at numbers I hadn't seen since the late eighties. Banks didn't want to be landlords; they wanted houses off their books. Between 2008 and 2012 I bought sixty-three properties at numbers that, in retrospect, look like typos.

That was the decade that taught me the most important investing lesson I know: the time to buy is when other people are afraid. Markets aren't logical. They're emotional. And the patient operator with cash and a calm head can do more in a downturn than in five years of normal times.

Why I started teaching.

Around 2006 I started saying out loud what I'd been thinking quietly for years: I didn't want to spend the next decade just doing more deals. I'd done a lot of deals. I'd made enough money. What I hadn't done was teach anyone — and I had forty years of pattern-recognition that was going to walk out the door with me whenever I stopped.

I looked at the way most real estate "education" works. Courses. Masterminds. Group coaching. Five-thousand-dollar binders that mostly teach you how to sell five-thousand-dollar binders. None of it looked like how I actually learned this business — which was through proximity. Watching someone older do it. Asking questions. Doing the work badly and being corrected gently.

So I do it differently, and I do it for investors anywhere in the country. There are three ways to work with me. The first is a free call — that's the front door, and it costs you nothing. The second is coaching: a thousand dollars a month for unlimited access, or two hundred an hour if you'd rather pay as you go. Month-to-month, cancel whenever. The third is a Marketing Partnership.

What I don't do is sell you a $5,000 course. The front door's a free call, and when you want more of my time you pay for it directly, by the month or the hour. It looks more like the way I learned in the eighties — minus the cigar smoke — than any modern coaching program. And it's the most rewarding work I've ever done.

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If any of this resonates, the right next step is probably to see the coaching options — or, if you'd rather just talk it through first, a free call is the place to start. And if a deal partnership is more your speed, read about the Marketing Partnership.