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In this episode, we had the pleasure of hosting Ian Djuric, a titan in both waste management and real estate industries. Ian’s journey from revolutionizing waste management to overseeing the Djuric Family Office’s vast portfolio offers invaluable insights into rapid, scalable growth and efficient operations.
Ian’s career trajectory is a testament to his prowess in transforming companies into multimillion-dollar ventures. From the rapid ascent of Waste Market Group to a staggering $40M in annual revenue within two years, to the creation and sale of Bob’s Trash Service to an industry competitor after reaching 12,000 customers and $3M in three years, Ian’s ability to catalyze exponential growth is exceptional.
During our conversation, Ian shared insights into his strategies for driving growth, managing operations, and fostering a culture of excellence. His expertise in operations leadership, sales management, and team development provided a goldmine of wisdom for businesses aiming to scale rapidly while maintaining efficiency and quality.
Ian Djuric’s story is an inspiring testament to the possibilities of visionary leadership, meticulous operations management, and unwavering dedication. Tune in to this episode for a masterclass on scaling businesses and optimizing operations for sustained success.
In This Episode
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His transition from waste management to overseeing the Djuric Family Office.
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The importance of building and nurturing high-performing teams.
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Integrating values into company culture and decision-making processes.
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Ian’s predictions and insights into the economic and market landscape for 2024.
How’s it going everyone, welcome to another episode on wealth strategy secrets, in this episode, we had the pleasure of hosting Ian Djuric. A titan in both waste management and real estate, Ian’s journey from scaling Waste Management to overseeing the Djuric family office’s vast portfolio offers invaluable insights into rapid scalable growth and efficient operations. Ian’s career trajectory is a testament to his prowess in transforming companies into multi-million dollar ventures and his unwavering philosophy on wealth and the family office.
During our conversation, Ian shared insights into his strategies for driving growth and fostering a culture of Excellence as well as his strong core values that are the foundation of all his ventures. Ian’s story is an inspiring testament to the possibilities of visionary leadership, meticulous operations management, and unwavering dedication. Tune in to this episode for a master class on scaling businesses and wealth for sustained success.
Ian, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me Dave, I appreciate it.
Ian. I know the audience is going to enjoy hearing about your epic journey through the waste management business as an entrepreneur, scaling those businesses, and getting into real estate, and what you’re doing today in terms of your family office and being an operator and everything. Super impressive background and I think people are going to enjoy hearing that story.
Why don’t we start there and take us back a little bit, talk to us a little bit about your background and how you got here.
I’m essentially a street hustler who made it big. That’s it. But no, I started on the street. I was a door-to-door sales guy in the waste and recycling industry. I was sitting at my door, and someone knocked on it and said, hey, what’s going on? Said, hey, nothing much, what you want? I was like, hey, selling trash service door-to-door. Are your parents home? Nope, can’t help you.
I said, cool. He’s like, Hey, do you want a job by chance? I’m like, no, I’m making $6 an hour. I am great. He’s like, well, hey, I make about a thousand dollars a week. And that stopped me in my tracks. And this was way back in the day. A thousand dollars a week was insane. I was like, let’s do this. I’m going to go see what door-to-door is all about. The next day I went out, watched this kid make $300 in a day and I was hooked. How do I continue to do this?
Swim out there, and spend the rest of the summer selling door-to-door, doing phenomenally well. Best life lesson ever, because you learn how to take a note so immensely quickly because 80% of the people slam the door in your face, and curse you out. My favorite one is when you go up, you knock on the window, you’re kinda looking in, and they walk up, they peer in, they see you, they wave at you, and they keep walking by, and like, hey cool, not coming. Just nice and polite, so turn around and walk away.
But it was a phenomenal time to learn how to take a note and get some core basic sales skills because you’re having 80 to 90 sales interactions a day, so highly recommend door-to-door if anybody wants to get a career in sales, it was a phenomenal awareness for me. But got smart and wanted more. I started my own sales company.
We had 144 kids doing door-to-door and business-to-business sales for waste and recycling companies up and down the East Coast. We work for small companies, so we also work for bigger companies like Republic Services. They’re the $9 billion second biggest trash-land company in the US. Went to college, eventually got smart, and understood what reoccurring revenue was. It was great making several hundred thousand dollars a year doing the door-to-door, and running my company, and I was killing it in college.
But I kept seeing this trash, like, you know what? I’m sending people to contracts, and they’re getting that monthly revenue every month, making profit every month, theoretically, forever. These contracts oughta to be renewed. I’m like, let’s be smart, let’s go ahead and do this, go for it. I started my first trash recycling company from the ground up. We were bootstrapping it with about 400 grand.
It was 400 grand. And we came in, came in strong. The sales team was destroying it. A big local, trashy guy said, Hey Ian, come into my office. This is about three, or four months in. And I was what’s going on? Like I’m in this space. It’s my first big meeting, per se. He sat me down and said, Hey Ian, thanks for coming in. I’m like, cool, is that a beer? I’m going to buy your company today.
And I think I sat back and I was like, wait like this is a this is a surprise, like, it’s cool. Not what I thought we were going. We’re also not for sale, by the way. Never crossed my mind to sell something. It’s really simple. We’ve done my market research on you. You’re a phenomenal sales guy. You’re great at customer service. You guys are going to come in and do an absolute ton of damage to this market. But you’re bootstrapped. You can only grow as fast as the money that you have, and you’re eventually going to peak out and then have to take money in.
Here’s my solution. I’m going to give you five million bucks to go away. This is going to save me a lot more money than it is to have you come in and take way more than my customers. Five million dollars should be a lot for you, but he broke it down to me simply. This is a two-hour conversation.
He’s like, hey, take five million bucks, go to a different market, and then look at your ability to grow off that five million dollars, versus you trying to grow off of the 4 – 500,000 dollars that I had, and I was like, that would simplify my life, allow me the greatest bootstrap ever, and I wouldn’t have to take on any kind of investors for the near part of it, because we had a great base to it.
After a couple of weeks, we took the deal. We moved over to a different state, started up, and ended up building one of the top 100 trash recycling companies in the US. Never took on an investor, and took a big exit.
Sorry, it’s a super long story day. we sell the Trash Company and we’ve been at LP, our limited partner, for a long time. Very big trash company, doing very well. We are a limited partner in venture debt. We have stocks and bonds like everybody else has. LP and a variety of real estate from self-storage to multifamily.
And we had a whole bunch of single-family homes. I started collecting up because that was the thing to do: own small residential real estate. And it was kind of the bait of my business was running those single-family homes. And because I didn’t have a system, I didn’t have a process, I was snapping them up, putting long-term tens in them as fast as I could. And then I was outsourcing all of the hard work and the rented collections. Not by the system, but by accumulating wealth.
Sold the Trash Company, I kind of sat back and I was like, what do we want to do now? How do we pivot? How do we grow? How do we start a new company? And I loved Multifamily from being a past investor in it, watching the systems and the processes and how they get the scale. Because it was a similarity of kind of how you grow another kind of company. Different classes of assets, but growing one empire to another has a lot of similarities into it.
I sold all of my single-family homes, and I went to my two favorite multi-family sponsors and I said, here’s the deal. I’m going to fully fund your deals. You can keep your fees, your promotion, and your profit sharing, it’s all yours. But I’m going to run these and you can babysit. They’re a bit shocked at first, but getting a fully funded deal from one person is not a bad deal, especially when I didn’t want anything special. I was willing to take the deal as is, no negotiations. After a couple of weeks, we agreed to it.
I spent upwards of $27 million and went to town the very next week. I started off doing leasing. The number one core basic thing of all apartments is, that a lot of apartments are sales, We have to lease our units, we get people to move in, and then the biggest thing is, we can talk about it later, but you make your money in the renewals, not in the original leases. All of our money’s in renewals, so we get people to pay more to stay.
That was the biggest thing for me. We did that more in the assisted management role. Assistive management is delinquency and renewals. Then kept working my way up to property management, then focused a lot more on the asset management side and construction.
And learned a lot of lessons about over-renovating because I did a lot of that in about 20 units and did not get the ROI I wanted for the amount that we spent. We spent a lot of time with sponsors, came back to a realistic market plan, and spent about $9,000 to give out a $225 rent premium. That worked out well.
Success is about hustle, learning, and seizing opportunities to scale smartly.
And realized that I didn’t have to upgrade things to an A-class standard on a 1982 product, lots of great lessons learned. Was super lucky that I was able to do it with my own money, and be able to afford to buy my education. I wasn’t someone who would have done well in a syndication class or a weekend mastermind. I’m super hands-on, and I still am today. That’s the core basic story.
Fast forward to today, we have $2.2 billion in asset center management, primarily the Southeast and Texas, about 70% multi-family, and then some development and building to run from there.
Awesome. And there are so many golden nuggets in that journey, starting when you started, which was, hearing about taking on rejection, and I find that that’s so interesting, especially as we’re all raising our kids today, And, right down to the soccer field.
Whereas like, everyone’s a winner, and in sports these days, they’re not letting kids even learn that lesson of there’s a winner and there’s a loser. But you learn that lesson early on and learn how to handle rejection and everything, which is just such a powerful lesson. And I think a lot of people today are even afraid to take on rejection. There’s always some kind of fear kind of holding them back. I think powerful lesson there.
And then I think it’s insightful how you can just be so hands-on and take all of your experience from the waste management business. And operating a business, and then bringing that into real estate and taking a unique approach to it by completely lifting the hood and looking at everything inside and out.
And, occasionally you hear stories about people doing that in the restaurant business, they’re like, they’re working everything from the waiter to the prep and the sous chef, and all of these different things.
If you don’t have that experience, how can you direct teams, how can you optimize, and things like that? A super, unique approach, and 95% of the people out there aren’t going to do that hard work to get into it.
Absolutely. To be fair, a lot of both those companies were sure I had a great skillset, but it was building those phenomenal teams that the team that we had the trash or cycle was great. And the team that we have now in place today is there’s that there’s that book out there. It’s I always forget the title of it. It’s not how but who something similar to that title is,
Oh, who not how? Yeah. Dan Sullivan.
Yes, I love that book and love the concept, and Bringing in a phenomenal team has been a key thing for the love of our future success.
It’s really in the people. Building a phenomenal team is a key thing to a lot of our success.
For sure. And especially as it relates to wealth, it’s awesome that you’ve created your own family office as well and created a structure around that. And what I found, speaking about who, not how, when I kind of went through my journey too, anytime you would talk to a typical, advisor, it’s either an assets under management, stock advisor, only recommend the products that they’re selling to you.
They’re not being a true fiduciary. Or when I exited my business, I got all kinds of recommendations to here’s an M&A attorney, here’s the tax attorney you should work with. But they don’t know anything about true tax optimization and a lot of strategies that are out there for business owners and everything.
It’s such a key concept, not only who, not how, but building a dream team, around your wealth that’s going to support you on the journey, wherever, you are today, and wherever you want to get to just, you get so much leverage by bringing in that specific expertise.
I’ll give you a wild story on that exact topic. I was with my dad this past week in West Palm Beach, Florida, and he has considerable wealth as well. Not the same scale, but some very, very well in his life. He has an advisor at UBS. My dad has 10 figures in stocks and bonds there, and his advisor never recommends anything that’s not a stock bond or something in that overall UBS stock portfolio that runs and manages.
At the same time, Blake works with UBS for alternative products. We can get our syndication or deals done through UBS clients. But because my dad’s advisor isn’t involved in those kinds of deals, he doesn’t share any of that because he would lose his profitability on my dad’s portfolio by having to invest outside of it. It allows us and try to make Trulia’s fiduciary have access to everything that you should be able to have access to, regardless of their end means.
Such a great story. Can you tell us a little bit about what was your inspiration for creating a family office? And there are so many different structures out there when it comes to that. I know it’s kind of confusing for a lot of people, but what was the vision that you had for yours?
Two parts, I mean, starting the family office was, once you realistically get 30 million or nine figures, your wealth is going to affect future generations for the most part, unless you go spend all your money in yachts and planes, your wealth should take care of your generation or at least affect it positively. Kind of forming the family office was to force myself to not be an entrepreneur but to be a realistic future planner for myself and my family.
I’m generation one, which means I have this huge amount of capital that I’ve worked hard for, but I don’t have experience or previously didn’t have experience managing that kind of capital, being an alternative investments person. We set it up into a very kind of haven, more of a hub and spoke model for it. But we still have a lot to go in terms of planning for how we’re going to allocate out for kids.
Do we let children touch the principal? Is it interesting? out to manage themselves, is it going to be done through everybody else? It’s a mix of a living trust, irrevocable trust, a terrible trust. There’s a large amount of structure of trust within our main profile. And we could probably talk for two hours about structuring all those different trusts.
But a lot of ours is still yet to be done to be very fair. Primarily because I’m 38 and where we’re kind of going with the wealth and growth of the different companies is still kind of to be determined. My kids are eight, seven, and five. They’re still way too young to get involved. I think we’re still trying to teach them our interest in what wealth is as a concept and eventually kind of move in.
For example, we met up with a great family office a third generation one of the sons was 35 and 36, they’re worth about eight hundred million dollars and the younger generations all work in the family office. Their associates were retired like that’s how you get at that stage and he wanted to invest in a deal or do a JV with us but his family wouldn’t give him access to the capital directly.
He came out with us so we had to go meet with five other people and sit down with his dad and their CFO and other people and that led me to think of how is that going to help me treasure my my family office. Like my kids are involved every day, do you give them access to the principal? Or do you allocate a set number of profits or exits a year that comes along that goes into a money pool so they can go to them and allow them to allocate their bucket? I want my kids to be involved early, but at the same time, as soon as you let somebody touch the principal, that’s how you lose money.
Big mindset shift for me of watching it happen to other people, watching frustration, watching excitement, and then how do I learn these lessons over the next 10 years so when my kids start turning 18, or 20, I can implement a structure properly for them at that time.
The statistics out there are not pretty and that, 75% of wealth is lost in G2 and by G3 it’s 90%. it’s so great, that you’ve proactively taken on strategy and what I, what I find, fascinating, about the whole family office space and this concept. And even if you don’t have 30 million and you only have 1 million in net worth, you can still use a lot of these principles as well.
And one of the biggest principles I think is really, creating a family constitution and creating values in your family. As entrepreneurs, we all do it in our business is one of the first things we do. It’s creating this vision statement, we’ve got a corporate culture, we’ve got values and we’re trying to live it and put incorporated into our businesses, but not everyone is doing that with their families.
And what’s most important? It’s your family because I think if you can nail those value pieces, and then the mindset piece, I think that’s going to help people retain that wealth in future generations.
I couldn’t agree more on the value set. Naturally, having the kids be involved in the creation of those values or adjusting those as you go along every five, or 10 years. But I was talking with Logan Rankin last week in Naples and he was going through how he has kids in similar age ranges. I think they’re a year or two, younger than mines.
But slowly sitting down every year and walking through each of their family values and which ones were most important, the ones they wanted to work on for the year, and the amount that he has his kids involved in kind of drove me to want to spend additional time in what I already do, driving those values home and what they truly mean and how we interact with those values in our daily lives.
For sure. We’re recording this here right before Christmas, and it’s one of the opportunities that I’m going to take because my kids are a little bit older in their 20s right now, and I’ll tell you, if you don’t get those values in place by the time they even hit high school, it gets increasingly harder, because they go their ways, they don’t wanna listen to what mom and dad have to say.
But we’re trying to take every opportunity we can to reflect on those values, to have examples of how we can live those in our daily lives. Gratitude is so important having that vitamin G in everything we do. And it’s interesting because we have four kids, but as diverse as our family is, the one thing that cuts through all of the noise and everything is value systems. Because if you can hold that core, that’s at the essence, that cuts through these issues that sometimes can seem, so emotional or so divisive and things like.
Absolutely to that. Here, you can answer your question for me for this one, Dave. We’re sitting down talking about the upcoming Christmas now and one of the struggles I have with my two oldest, they’re Irish twins, both born the same year, eight and seven, is we’re always talking about family first, always having your brothers and sisters back regardless of the situation.
They’re both in elementary school, the same school, and different friend groups, different likes and activities.
Occasionally one of them is something stupid or goofy, other ones are embarrassed by it, or someone might make fun of them for something, but it’s having each other’s back regardless of what they did, no matter what. What kind of value would you call that?
That might be loyalty. I would probably put that under loyalty as a good one.
Now, that’s my biggest thing for the challenge of the year, is focusing on having that loyalty to the family. It’s great to ensure that we all do the correct thing, but regardless, people make mistakes always being there for each other no matter what, because none of us are perfect. We all make mistakes daily.
Exactly. And I’ve found that using examples or storytelling is super helpful with the kids so that they can get it at whatever age that might be for the kids. But creating those real examples of how to do that can be pretty powerful.
Good stuff. Let’s transition a little bit into your real estate and tell us about your view on real estate right now as an operator. Super challenging year on the real estate front, especially with multifamily, what’s going on with the interest rates and things like that. We’re hoping rates are going to come down next year, but what are your thoughts if you could share? your crystal ball into 2024.
I mean, everything’s a presumption, everybody has their own opinions on it. Happy to share ours. I’d say 2023 is probably our slowest year. Probably the second half of 2022 and 2023 is our slowest year in terms of doing deals, especially in multifamily. I think we only did one multifamily deal, which was the best thing in Iowa since then. I think it was the most important thing we did.
Multi-fibers are extremely difficult at the time right now. Especially if you’re using JV or institutional equity, they require a six in and a six out, which nothing will underwrite, regardless of what you want to do. It won’t underwrite that. JV equity is sitting on the side would love to get into it, and would love to buy more units, but you’re not seeing the distress. Like people are looking for the 0708 distress and we’re not seeing that. Even if you are buying a deal from the bank back at someone losing all of their equity, that deal is still not necessarily priced appropriately.
You could be coming in and buying something that’s still $10,000 or $15,000 store overpriced because somebody paid dramatically overpriced in early 2022 and gave it back. Doesn’t mean you’re getting a fair deal. It may hypothetically be a discount but it doesn’t mean it’s correct in today’s value and you’re getting a discount. You can still be overpaid by 15-20%.
We were pretty big in the bill to run in 21, early of 22 and we’ve kind of made a big pivot exit. we work with Yield Street a lot, they have a pretty big portfolio across the board as well in the space and when we were underwriting built-to-rent exits in 20 to 22, obviously institutions were buying built-to-rent spaces at 3.5 caps, 4 caps, phenomenal return rates.
When you reach a point where your wealth can impact future generations, it’s no longer just about growing money—it’s about creating a system of values and a plan to ensure that legacy thrives responsibly.
And even if we were underwriting to a 5, ourselves being conservative at that time right now you can’t exit that profile. You’re looking at a 5.5 to a 6% exit cap kind of across the board strategically depending on where you’re at whether it’s Huntsville, Florida, Orlando, Houston we took the pivot of let’s take a safe exit Lenard, Dier Horton, Ryan, all the big builders even the smart local ones are a massive need of lots for upcoming 24 And they want these neighbors to do build to sell versus build to rent
We got one offer in early. I mentioned Yale Street, their partner of ours, and they’ve been doing this on a couple of other assets already. They said, hey, this is an option that we’ve been doing across our board. There are equity and deal, we think this would be good as well. We’ve seen some sheets, but we’re not quite sure. We take the early exit, we push it through, and we’re going to exit about 1,200 lots, that would have been built around home sites from Savannah, Huntsville, and Winter Haven, Florida.
And we’re going to return about a 24% to 27% IRR selling the lots. Exit is about two to two and a half years versus a five-year plan. But again, it’s all about pivoting in the right position to take any safe exit, take any return, and then not be able to redeploy that capital in a space to have a better understanding of where we’re at, where we’re going to be at for interest rates going forward somewhat.
Self-storage, we’re pretty bullish on new development because most people want climate control and the ability to kind of add on. The 1990s is the older product where it’s all the roll-up or the non-climate controlled roll-up dirt all in the ground or even if it’s paved.
We don’t see the ability to kind of create value, force rents up in today’s environment, or anything on there. We’re letting that sit and dry. And our big, especially it’s kind of been in new construction, primarily in condos. I think trying to do multifamily new construction in today’s environment is incredibly, incredibly difficult because of interest rates, you’re almost at 10 to 11% on new construction debt. And you’re going to have to carry that set a variable rate.
And then two is, I don’t know how in the world you forecast a multifamily development cap exit three years from now. The risk profile in having to lever up your stack with family development doesn’t hit a profile for us. But we’ve done pretty well with our Tivo and Lofty projects. Let’s race for those. And we have two more upcoming in 24 that we’re rather excited about.
Those are a little bit easy for us because we pre-sell those and then we build them, so take away a lot of the risk profile. But very excited for 24. We’ll see what it holds for multifamily and obviously interest rates. We’d love to buy more, but depending on the Fed drops down to four and a half, we’re still seeing rates at five, seven, five, six. kind of excited to see where it goes.
What, specifically would make you a buyer in multifamily in 2020?
I think it allows me what our investors require. An institutional investor requires kind of a 15% IRR kind of drive at a minimum. They want you to be able to have a successful underbred exit of six cap sales price. And if I can underwrite that, I’m a buyer all day because we have hundreds of millions of dollars of capital waiting to come into these deals if we can underwrite to it.
That’s probably the biggest thing. I think a lot of it’s also going to be the right situation. I think there are still a lot of builders out there who built brand new, beautiful products that finished in 22 that they were looking to sell at these four caps.
We own a property in Friends with Texas, we bought it for $220 a door, late 21, and they built a, I think it was sort of Baybrook, they built behind us. It’s a little bit nicer, they’re both Class A products. And their original price was $282 to exit. That’s what they planned to come in and sell for. They tried to sell about a month and a half ago, they kind of maxed out around $220 a door. over $50,000 a door, less what they wanted to. And they ended up not selling.
But a lot of these equity groups that are in these deals don’t want these, they’re not operators, they’re builders. They’re merchant developers. They come in, they build multi-family. They lease stuff as fast as they can. They leave plenty of meat on the bone for us to come in, buy them, and move up rents to market. But they’re stuck operating because they can’t exit at the pricing. And I think a lot of the equity groups are going to say, hey, you know what? We don’t want you to operate this project for another two years, I’m also stuck in this terrible debt, I have to payoff with no cash flow at my three-year-old, and now it’s in turn to a five to six-year-old.
And my IRR every year is ticking down because of the longevity of the deal. I think a lot of people like Carlisle and some of the other bigger groups that have been the equity for us are going to say, hey, you know what, we’re going to take an 8% return, 10% return, let’s exit, take your money back and go redeploy into a more realistic new build scenario. And I think being able to snap some of those up at a phenomenal basis level will make me a huge buyer.
We love the new product, and we love A-Class, obviously because it’s right around a 32% expense ratio versus when you look at C-Class or B-Class, you’re at a 45 to 55% expense ratio. We love to be in the 30s and can kind of come in and get some realistic cash flow on the class that you need to have stuff. Those are probably the two scenarios in which we’re a very excited buyer.
Insightful. And are there any specific markets? Are you still feeling strong about those markets you’ve been operating in historically? Do you feel that those are going to be bubbles in the Southeast or Southwest, or are you still focusing on those markets?
I don’t think things are going to bubble as much as people are kind of saying. For example, we have 3,000 units in Houston. I still love the market.
However you look at insurance, one of the biggest reasons we’re able to survive in that market where some people went from $500 a unit to $2,200 a unit and got wrecked is we have these big natural insurance policies across five or 7,000 units or we’re able to do one-off things with smaller local insurance providers in those areas. Little people are not. But with that and property taxes and the over amount of fraud in Houston, I don’t think we’re a dramatic new buyer in Houston this time.
Do I still love Texas? Yes. Maybe a little Fort Worth, Dallas suburbs. We’re always a suburb buyer. We’re not an urban buyer. I’m not a high-rise multifamily guy. It’s not our concept. But I still love Texas. I still like Jacksonville, Florida. If pricing comes down a little bit further from where it is.
I still like that the Burbs of North Carolina were passed on to South Carolina this time, and were passed on to Vegas. Done very well with our latest deal in Iowa and watching a bunch of other deals, the rent growth people are achieving in the Midwest. So, we team up with a great operator called Chris Salazar who’s done seven deals in Des Moines, Iowa. And that’s kind of how we wanted to enter the market, was with another seasoned operator so that we were one off by ourselves trying to learn the market.
We came and teamed up with him and that deal is going phenomenally, the organic rent growth is off the charts. We were underwriting $135 in rent premium with a renovation. I think we’re spending about $6,000 on those. We’re getting $145 to $150 in organic rent growth. And then when we do the renovation, we’re achieving about 230 to 225 with the renovation. Super excited to kind of explore the Midwest further. Because the opportunities and rent are worth it there.
Those interesting thoughts there. Ian, if you could give one piece of advice to our listeners about how they could accelerate their wealth trajectories, what would it be?
Such a tough question, but I’ll give it from a personal standpoint versus an overall thing. And people may disagree that I’m okay with a little bit of risk. It’s okay to be a little bit uncomfortable with what you do. Take a small portion of your allocatable money and take a little bit of risk with it.
My dad’s return profile off is eight figures in the stock market is 4% a year. And he’s super happy, safe, and comfortable, but he’s not creating wealth. If you allocate even a million dollars of that into a hard money fund at 11%, the amount of wealth creation you’re making, if you let that money combine and continue to grow, and even if you’re not taking the cash out, you’re saying that you can grow on top of that or compound, you’re trying to create wealth. don’t be afraid to take a little bit of risk.
I love that Ian. I was reading a book this week that talks about the psychology and the fear of change, and how strong that is for humans. And it becomes, your subconscious. And we will do anything to avoid change in our lives. And as much as we’re talking about alternatives and real estate on this show, I know there are a ton of listeners out there who still have the majority of their asset base in government-sponsored qualified plans or the market, especially right now.
I mean, we heard at the Family Office Conference the other week, I mean, there could, there’s a correction coming in the market. I think that’s for certain, could be pretty significant as well. There is always some degree of risk, but, as you said, allocate some portion to taking on some risk, moving out of your comfort zone, and trying to learn something new. And then, see how it goes and learn from there. Appreciate that. That’s that sage advice for all. And appreciate you coming on the show as well. Ian, some great pearls of wisdom that you shared and I think that’s super helpful for people to learn on their journeys wherever they are Trying to take some of those valuable lessons in their own lives.
If people would like to know connect with you or learn more about what you guys are doing. What’s the best place?
The best place is our website, blakecapitalgroup.com or feel free to shoot me an email, [email protected], Happy to connect and offer value however we can.
Awesome. Thanks so much, Ian, appreciate it.
Thanks for having me on Dave, I appreciate it.
You bet.