Transforming Your Career: From Contractor to Successful Investor Broker

Brett McCollum (00:01.14)
All right guys, welcome back to the show. I’m your host, Brett McCollum, and I’m here today with Michael Dunn. And today we’re going to talk about transitioning from contractor to investor broker. Guys, before we do, at Investor Fuel, we help real estate investors, service providers, and real estate entrepreneurs to 5X their businesses to allow them to build the businesses they’ve always wanted and allow them to live the lives they’ve always dreamed up. Without further ado, Mike, how are you, man?

Michael Dunn (00:29.073)
Doing great. How you doing, Brett?

Brett McCollum (00:31.232)
Man, doing good. We were talking pre-show, getting to know each other a little bit. Man, have a, I’m genuinely really excited to talk with you, Mike. You have a lot of information to offer and I cannot wait to get into it. That being said, man, like give the people a little bit of history. Who’s Michael Dunn? Like, you know, who are you, man? Catch us up.

Michael Dunn (00:44.349)
Fantastic.

Michael Dunn (00:52.413)
Cool. All right, just to try and keep that short. I mean, I am a father. My kids are the most important thing in the world to me. And everything that I do is really for them, right? And what am I, you know, I’m big into music. I’m a martial arts guy. I do some yoga, you know, hit the gym. love hiking. You know, that’s all my pastime sort of stuff.

And I’m just immersed in real estate day to day.

Brett McCollum (01:26.894)
Love it. We didn’t talk about this pre-show. Now you got my, my, you know, Q double. Yeah. You pooped my camera. So I’m a, I’m also a musician. Uh, what, what kind of music are you into Mike? What do you, what do do with that?

Michael Dunn (01:31.143)
I got you interested.

Michael Dunn (01:40.109)
I am a hard rock blues kind of guy. Yeah. I play some guitar. I play some bass. I love banging on drums. Yeah.

Brett McCollum (01:51.993)
Sounds like we need to be best friends. That’s, yeah, so all right. All right, so you’ve got, know, husband, our father, you got, you know, the music thing, you know, martial arts, so you got a lot of history. Real estate, that’s the show. That’s what we’re here talking about, obviously. But man, that’s no less interesting. I love your, I love the side stuff that we both have together.

Michael Dunn (01:54.247)
Sounds good. Let’s do it.

Michael Dunn (02:07.889)
Yes. That’s what we’re here to talk about.

Brett McCollum (02:18.136)
Catch me up on that a little bit. I know we talked free show, your exposure to real estate’s been kind of, your dad was a builder or something? What was going on there?

Michael Dunn (02:26.129)
Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I grew up swinging a hammer. I mean, I’ve always been involved in houses and, you know, just trying to figure life out as a teenager or whenever you’re supposed to figure out, you know, what do you want to be when you grow up? Yeah, right. Like if you still try to figure that out. But, you know, listen, I’m on the road right now because I’m driving for dollars.

Brett McCollum (02:46.926)
We’re kind of still figuring that out, aren’t we?

Michael Dunn (02:54.773)
And you know, I pulled over obviously for the podcast, but if I look around anywhere, anywhere in the world, what am I surrounded by? Well, it’s buildings. It’s houses, it’s buildings. It’s a no brainer that these things are being built, they’re being bought and they’re being sold no matter what the economy is doing, no matter where I am in the world. So that seems like a logical thing to be involved with, right? It’s like food, clothing, shelter, farming is hard. So I think I’m just going to stick with the houses.

So my father, what’s that?

Brett McCollum (03:24.824)
But it wasn’t always that way, right?

For you, like it wasn’t always that mental like, like real estate. Like it wasn’t always that for you, I’m sure.

Michael Dunn (03:33.691)
Yeah, I, I get my father was a builder. I grew up swinging a hammer. I was renovating houses with him, learning the trades. And I saw the guys who were doing this for 20, 30 years. And I said, listen, the utmost respect for people who, who work in the trades all of their lives. But I also saw people who were just physically exhausted. And a lot of these guys hadn’t gotten that far.

And I said well gee, you know, I’m a pretty bright kid. I probably should go to college So I went to college and I studied what interests me. But what interests me is anthropology Well, what are you gonna do as an anthropologist? I didn’t want to actually be like a professor or anything Being surrounded by college-age girls for the rest of my life might not be good idea so You know I said

Well, so during the course, listen, I came from, I had nothing. There’s no seed capital with me. I was paying for college out of my pocket. So it was tough. I ended up starting a painting company. And you know, of all of the trades, I just find painting a rather Zen thing to do. I don’t mind doing it. And I’m pretty good at it. I did some tile and flooring and stuff too. But anyway, I started this painting company.

This is in Albany, New York in, I wanna say 2000, 2001, 2002, I wish that I had bought everything I could get my hands on at that time, but I didn’t know what I didn’t know. But what I did learn was I’m painting these apartments for, guys, it turns out they’re investors, right? So they own multiple buildings, they’re three or four family houses.

Brett McCollum (05:02.936)
Okay.

Michael Dunn (05:30.813)
It’s a big college market up there, lots of student housing. And, you know, I end up getting to know one of these guys I’m talking to him. He’s picking these things up at auction for like 20 grand. said 20 grand. It had never even occurred to me that I would be able to buy a house. just wasn’t in it was not on my radar as something that was achievable for me at, you know, 21, 22 years old. So.

Brett McCollum (05:52.182)
was in my mind. Yeah. Yeah.

Michael Dunn (05:59.961)
And I didn’t buy that. I wish I had, but I didn’t. But what it did was it planted a seed. That I wanted, I want to be that guy. I want to be the guy who owns the house, not the guy painting the house. Right? So I was able to leverage all of that construction experience and I was getting tired of Albany. So I said, I had actually found an opportunity in New Jersey. So I come down to Jersey.

Brett McCollum (06:13.944)
Right.

Michael Dunn (06:29.629)
I grew up on Long Island. I’ve lived downstate, upstate. So I’m here in Northeast New Jersey. I’ve got family roots here. So I ended up getting an opportunity to manage and eventually get seller financing on… There was this business owner. wanted me to run the business and then eventually he’d sell it to me.

This was in the restoration business, fire, flood, mold, right? So I took that company over and I turned it into one of the biggest restoration companies in the state of New Jersey. That business can be very profitable, but it’s very, very draining. You’re dealing with people day in and day out who have had a disaster.

Brett McCollum (07:01.047)
Okay.

Brett McCollum (07:19.149)
Okay.

Michael Dunn (07:23.195)
It’s not Mrs. Smith who’s happy that she’s getting a new kitchen. They had a fire, they had a flood. Plus you’re dealing with the insurance companies and that’s not fun. It’s a lot of toxic environments. There’s a lot of toxic chemicals in that business. I got tired of that. But before I got tired of it, I bought out a competitor and

Brett McCollum (07:29.324)
Right. The insurance companies, Yep.

Michael Dunn (07:51.866)
I ended up, long story short, over the span of 15 years, I bought, built and sold three companies.

Brett McCollum (07:59.297)
Okay.

Michael Dunn (08:00.847)
I wanted to get out of the restoration side of things and just flip houses. So I ended up getting my real estate license because I started talking to agents. I started flipping houses. I did a couple of flips.

Brett McCollum (08:19.294)
Let me pause you for a second before we get too far into the flipping thing. right. So buying and exiting three different companies. wow. Also, I don’t want to gloss over that too quickly. Like that’s pretty cool. what were those three, like what three, types of businesses were they?

Michael Dunn (08:21.105)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Michael Dunn (08:27.367)
Yeah.

Okay, yeah.

Michael Dunn (08:38.685)
Well, they were, I believe the term is vertically integrated, right? Where they feed into each other. So I had the restoration company, I had a cleaning company, and I had a construction company. Those businesses all feed each other. But they were all independent at the same time. And I used each one of these

Brett McCollum (08:51.884)
Wow.

Brett McCollum (08:55.512)
but they’re all independent at the same time, yeah.

That’s right.

Michael Dunn (09:05.553)
businesses to extend the coverage of the other businesses. right, so they each of the companies were about an hour.

Brett McCollum (09:09.603)
Got it.

Brett McCollum (09:13.996)
Did you sell them at separate times or at the same time?

Michael Dunn (09:22.309)
I wish I had done things differently. So actually, I think business brokerage is attractive to me now as a business because of the experience that I had and the lessons learned and lessons learned from doing some things wrong, honestly. Those are the best lessons you can learn, honestly, right? So, no, but they’re incredibly valuable. It’s like, listen, not only did I learn what not to do,

Brett McCollum (09:24.823)
Okay.

Brett McCollum (09:37.622)
Right. 100%. We don’t want to learn those lessons, but they’re the ones we need. Yeah.

Michael Dunn (09:50.607)
I learned how to recover from doing that. Like I made a mistake and I learned how to handle that when things go wrong. And the knowledge of how to handle when things go wrong, there’s things to do and there’s things not to do that will make your situation even worse. I wish things had played out a little bit differently, but that’s too long of a conversation to have right now.

Brett McCollum (10:10.466)
Yep. Yep.

Michael Dunn (10:20.401)
But these were three complimentary businesses and they were in areas that were about, you you could triangulate, you know, an hour apart, right? So they extended the coverage area of the other two businesses. I would have loved to have been able to pull all of that into one entity, let that, season that for a couple of years and then sell it. That was my intention. Things did not go according to

All right, that, you know, sometimes that happens. One of the guys who did that, yeah, it’s a long story. It’s a long story. It’s a good one, but I’m not gonna get into it right now. What I ended up doing, yeah. What I ended up doing was I said, listen, I’ve got this real estate license in my back pocket. And I’m really not impressed with the caliber of agents that I’m meeting.

Brett McCollum (10:58.446)
Sure, sure.

So in the, yeah, go ahead, go ahead, sorry.

Michael Dunn (11:21.593)
So I said, I think I can do what they’re doing a lot better. So like I said, I wanted to move away from the insurance restoration business and start flipping houses. So I did a bunch of them. And I said, I like this. Yes, I still had my contractor’s license, but what I had done was I had dialed my business way down. I leaned it out. You know, I think there’s something to being in your 20s, 30s,

Brett McCollum (11:35.714)
Were you a contractor at this point still? Okay.

Brett McCollum (11:44.366)
Sure.

Michael Dunn (11:50.673)
where you just wanna build the biggest freakin’ thing that you can.

That’s not where the sweet spot was. So I did that. I built that and I was like, I have created a monster. It owns me. It dictates where I go and what I do. It was too much. So I went back to a time where I said, you know, this was the sweet spot. had an admin, had like four or five guys, but they were really good. That’s it. That was the sweet spot. So I took that.

Brett McCollum (12:06.978)
Yeah.

Brett McCollum (12:23.662)
you

Michael Dunn (12:26.959)
And I started really leveraging subs more and I started flipping houses and utilizing my real estate license myself to go get those houses and to sell those houses.

Brett McCollum (12:37.826)
Yeah. And the fact that you have your contract, you know, your contractor license, you know, exactly. Hey, I know exactly how the, the B step one, A to Z exactly what to do. I’m making sure that it’s done right. want to double back though for two seconds. That, that part, that’s a fact. I’m going to double back on something, Mike, for a second.

Michael Dunn (12:53.821)
and saving that 20%. Yeah.

Brett McCollum (13:02.592)
You made comment like in your 20s and your 30s just building the biggest and craziest and awesome most awesome thing and then You know looking i’ve heard more people You know that have went through that had that that life experience and that’s not to say that scaling business is bad at all but it sounded it sounds like what you’re saying is like Create like you said you created a monster you did this like you know And there was no peace in that at the time like when you look back at it and you now you’re going i’m searching for

Michael Dunn (13:19.292)
No.

Brett McCollum (13:33.12)
opportunity that both provides income but also peace.

Michael Dunn (13:36.604)
piece. Yeah, you nailed it. You nailed it. Every day was just constantly putting out fires. There’s always something burning. When you’re running something that big, something’s always on fire.

Brett McCollum (13:49.454)
And that’s why I brought it back up because the people, the audience that you guys that are listening here, I want you to hear somebody that’s been through that and can say, you know, and I’m not, hey, listen, neither one of us are qualified enough to say this is exactly how you guys should do this. But I do think it’s worth hearing it again. Peace is more important than chaos.

Michael Dunn (14:12.039)
Peace is more important and I’ve got a lot more peace now and I’m making just about as much money as I was, but I come and go as I please and I’m home to watch my son grow up. I started off by saying, like I do internal martial arts, I do yoga, I meditate, I do breath work, like I’m a pretty chill guy and

Brett McCollum (14:25.078)
I can hear it in your voice, Mike. I can hear it in your voice. You don’t have that tension in that. Yeah.

Michael Dunn (14:41.509)
I’ve got this beautiful son at home who, you know, now he’s seven. So when he was born, it’s like, I want to be here for this. You know, and now we’re homeschooling him because thankfully I can pay the bills, you know? So my wife is home with him. I see him all the time. I’m a part of his life and that’s, I’m not gonna have that if I’m running around 60 hours a week trying to run this big machine for.

Brett McCollum (15:02.318)
That’s me.

Michael Dunn (15:11.357)
Like for what? So I, I’ve met guys, I’ve met guys at, at, uh, you know, investor fuel events who are running huge companies and they’re chill dude. They’re doing it right. So I’m not saying it can’t be done. I’m saying when I was 34, I don’t know, I didn’t know how to do it the right way. And I had nobody guiding me and I, I didn’t seek out a mentor. didn’t seek out a coach.

Brett McCollum (15:24.856)
Yeah, there’s a way.

Brett McCollum (15:33.091)
Right.

Michael Dunn (15:40.377)
And that was all a failure, I also think hindsight being what it is, I also think that if you think back like 10 or 15 years, the concept even of like coaching and mentoring, it wasn’t quite as forefront as it is now. Now we have that understanding and there’s so much, I think because of social media, right?

Brett McCollum (15:42.264)
Hindsight being what it is, right? Yeah

Brett McCollum (16:07.587)
Right.

Michael Dunn (16:09.177)
Now we know once you reach this certain like you’ve got to have a coach. You’ve got to have a mentor. Even people at the highest levels, but I don’t know. I just didn’t know that then and I think I would have benefited from that. But again, that’s one of those like hard lessons learned, right? So.

Brett McCollum (16:28.152)
Right. Right.

Michael Dunn (16:32.497)
Yes, so where am I? I you know, so I was flipping houses and then, you know, started. OK.

Brett McCollum (16:38.03)
Yeah. So you’re at the con. So you’re, you, you kind of exiting out of those three businesses, you’re flipping houses now. You still have the contractor thing. How do you fit into the, the broker side of things now? Like that’s cause I know pre-show when we were talking, like the difference in, know, I did this, I had, you know, I was doing this talking about a little, and then the broker thing is your eyes are bigger. You know I’m like? Oh man, this is so we’re catching me up to speed on that. What’s going on with that?

Michael Dunn (16:45.383)
Yes.

Michael Dunn (17:02.525)
Yeah, because

Michael Dunn (17:08.643)
You know, I tell you this, let me preface this by saying, it isn’t necessarily my goal to be a top producing realtor for the next 15, 20 years, right? It’s not. I’m very grateful for the success that I’ve had in the business. It is a means to an end. What I wanted to do was find more peace in my life. And I thought to myself, of all of the

tools that I have in my toolbox, all the tools I keep picking up. What’s the one that I actually kind of like using the most? And it was the real estate license. It sounds simple, but I like looking at houses.

Brett McCollum (17:42.146)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Dunn (17:54.959)
I enjoy that. like for myself shopping around for a house. I like negotiating a deal. I like the excitement of, we going to get it? And then when we do get it, the negotiations along with the inspections and the back and forth, and then the excitement of closing day, whether it’s my deal or somebody else’s, I like that part of the business.

Brett McCollum (18:19.128)
Right.

Michael Dunn (18:23.805)
You know, at some point, like a lot of us, know, flipping single family houses, we’re going, don’t know, the commission this guy just made is pretty nice. And it’s not like, it’s not like this business is not without its headaches. wow. They’re there. But the thing is, it’s all relative. Relative to what I come from and what I was dealing with, this is a breath of fresh air.

Brett McCollum (18:49.155)
Right.

Michael Dunn (18:49.543)
for somebody who was coming from maybe a low stress kind of career and you try to become a full-time real estate agent, strap yourself in because it’s a bumpy road. It’s intense. It’s a bumpy road. There’s a lot of feelings. It’s right. So I’ve done a few commercial deals too as a broker and is less feelings on the commercial side. I think I’m inclined. I may go in that direction.

Brett McCollum (18:58.478)
Trap in, right? Yeah.

Brett McCollum (19:11.896)
Yeah, I’ve heard that a lot, yeah.

Michael Dunn (19:16.879)
And with my brokerage, can make the switch over to commercial. And we’re nationwide. So anyway, I enjoy the brokerage side. And for now, I’m happy doing it. I have no overhead. I have no employees. I have peace of mind. I come and go as I please. I work every day, but I work when I want. And like I said, I’m making as much money now as I was before.

And I’m not babysitting 28 carpenters. I have peace.

Brett McCollum (19:48.354)
but with peace behind it. Yeah, and I love that, man. That’s experience that leads you to that. And so I think, I was talking with somebody recently and we were talking about this very thing. It’s almost a little bit cheesy to say, right? We’ve heard it before, but the things that you’ve been through didn’t happen to you, they happened for you. And maybe the things that you went through and the things that I go through, that we all go through, maybe you didn’t get to this.

piece that you’re at today without having to know how to look back at something, that hindsight we talked about. It’s all perspective. It’s all how you decide you want to go back and look at it. And now you’ve got your boy at home. You’re able to spend time there. You’re able to enjoy that moment of life. Because I’m also a father. I have four kids myself. And I can tell you in seasons of stress,

Michael Dunn (20:22.194)
yeah, yeah, 100%.

Brett McCollum (20:46.144)
I don’t like the father that I am versus seasons of peace. And my kids deserve that side of me. You know, and so you’ve done it, man. Like I’m proud of you. Like I know we don’t know each other that well, but I’m proud of you, man. That’s super cool.

Michael Dunn (20:48.679)
Yeah, right. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. 100%. Right. Thank you. Am I showing up as the man that I want to be? You know, when you’re raising a girl, you’re like showing her what she should be looking for in a man.

Brett McCollum (21:16.27)
Dude. Yeah.

Michael Dunn (21:18.395)
And when you’re raising a boy, you’re showing him, you’re demonstrating to him what a man should be. So what are those examples that I’m setting? Like, how am I showing up for the people who I would rip my heart out of my chest and hand it to them if they needed it? How am I showing up for them? Right? Like you can count those people on one hand and

Brett McCollum (21:36.663)
Right?

Brett McCollum (21:41.514)
It’s important too that we show up for them in seasons of difficulty and they see how we handle it because… Yeah.

Michael Dunn (21:46.065)
Yes. They see how you handle that. that’s a guess. They knew what I was dealing with and you grow. You grow through adversity. only get stronger through adversity, right? I mean, that’s, that’s martial arts, right? I come from Kung Fu. So, I mean, that’s so like, like the, the, the bamboo that never gets blown around by the wind, you know, can’t, can’t handle the

Brett McCollum (22:04.258)
Yeah. Yeah.

Michael Dunn (22:15.221)
You have to grow like a tree that grows with indoors. You grow a little tree indoors, right? It’s weak. The tree that grows outside on the top of a mountain that the winds and the climate and dealing with all of that is the strong wood. It’s just like that with, I mean, that’s life.

Brett McCollum (22:36.322)
Dude, that’s powerful. I think it’s important. There’s a lot of people out there today that, some people have it all together, sure, maybe. Most of us don’t. We’re still growing, we’re still learning, we’re still evolving. I like the ability to be able look back and say, this is what I went through, this is where I’m at today, and then I’m still looking forward to the future. That’s exactly it. We’re never, I mean, you’re only done when you’re

Michael Dunn (22:59.815)
Yeah, yeah, I’m not done yet.

Brett McCollum (23:05.89)
You’re only done, sorry to be morbid, you’re only done when you’re You know, and man, and I was going to say, and even then if we did a good enough job as, you know, husbands and fathers, we leave a legacy behind that that carries with us too, right? So yeah, man, this has been phenomenal. I’m glad we got the chance to catch up and talk, Mike. You know, we are to kind of wrap things up a little bit though. If people were to want to reach out to you, get, you know, this resonates with you guys and want to connect with Mike in some way, what’s the best way for that to happen?

Michael Dunn (23:07.825)
Yeah, true. Yeah, I’m not even sure you’re done then for what it’s worth.

Michael Dunn (23:36.359)
Yeah, man, I feel like I could talk for another hour. I’ll just give you my cell and I’ll give you my email. I’m fine. Anybody who wants to reach out to me. Like I said, I’m a full-time agent and investor. I still take on projects. I’m here in North Jersey. My brokerage, I cover the entire country and I’ve gone out of my way and put a lot of time and effort into connecting with awesome agents all over the place.

Brett McCollum (23:38.787)
Definitely.

Brett McCollum (23:44.281)
Cool. Yeah, we’ll put it in the show notes.

Brett McCollum (23:57.646)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Dunn (24:04.869)
So if you’re looking for like an investor minded agent anywhere in the country, hit me up. I will connect you. My cell is 201-693-6278. Text me please, not random phone calls. Yeah, cause I schedule all of my calls. I got a bunch of email addresses. The best one is going to be flippartnermike at Gmail.

Brett McCollum (24:18.402)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yes, please.

Brett McCollum (24:30.83)
Perfect. Yeah, we’ll make sure that goes in the show notes and guys seriously I connect with Mike. I mean he’s Run that he knows his stuff like you go when you’ve built houses since you were like knee-high to a grass opera and now you’re you know what I mean and at the experience level that you’ve got there’s just so much to Glean information out of him from so I encourage you guys to connect with that But man Mike, it’s been a great show again. Thanks for Thanks for having us, you know today and guys I look forward to

Michael Dunn (24:54.461)
Great chatting with you, Brett.

Brett McCollum (25:00.098)
catching you guys up on the next one. Take care everybody.