Building a Lifestyle Business in Real Estate

Mike Hambright (00:00.684)
Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. Today I’m here with Rick Howell and we’re going to be talking about building a lifestyle business. Not just, you’re not just a real estate investor. You’re not trying to be the biggest real estate investor in the world. You’re doing it to you as a vehicle to build a business that kind of helps you live the life that you want to live. So Rick, welcome to the show, buddy.

Rick Howell (00:17.476)
Thanks, Mike. I appreciate you having me, man. I look forward to this.

Mike Hambright (00:19.862)
Yeah, me too, me too. So I’m excited to talk about this today because a lot of people, you know, some people do it this way. They like, they want to build a business that kind of, I’ve said this, I just said this to you a few minutes ago is like, a lot of people don’t want this business. They want the business can do for them. Right? Like this isn’t the thing. It’s the thing that gets you the thing. Right. And so, and then there’s some people that just want to be as big as they can possibly be. And then all sorts of challenges happen sometimes with which you have to have a bigger team and

you lose control a little bit and you might accept like small margins because you’re hung up on how many units you’re doing, right? And all kind of ego gets in the way. And so that’s not what we’re talking about today. And that’s not really the right way to run your business either. But before we kind of jump into these things, you and I spent some time together and I know a little bit about your background and I’m excited to kind of dig more into today, but tell us like who you are, like how you got to this point and what your path here looks like.

Rick Howell (00:55.362)
Yep. Yep.

Rick Howell (01:15.18)
My name is Rick Howell. I’m from a small little town in northwest Ohio called Toledo. It’s known as the number one most affordable city in the country actually.

So every wholesaler listening to this, you’re probably doing some marketing here. We’re buyers, by the way. So our stories, my story is pretty simple. I was a contractor and I was just trading my time for money, going to work every day, grinding as an electrician. And back in 2010, if you had gotten laid off at that time, I’m sure people anywhere near my age remember that time, you were going to be off for at least a year, sometimes two in the trades. That’s how it was. And I just knew, I had a great career as a union

made really good money, but I just knew that wasn’t the path. I knew I wanted more. I didn’t really know what I wanted. I just knew I wanted more than what I was currently getting. I went to school for 10 years to be able to do that and everything was going great, but you were always going to work every day. The job would be winding down and here would come the rumors, know, layoffs are coming. So and so got laid off, so and so got laid off. And that gut and your feeling expecting to get your check on that last day, knowing that you could be off for two years just didn’t sit well with me. So fast forward that, I didn’t know what it was going to transpire.

into but there was a guy in the job that was rehabbing houses just on the side doing a couple deals a year just doing it in his spare time and I really wanted him to learn what he was doing and how he got to do that and he didn’t know how to teach me but what he did do was he gave me the book called Rich Dad Poor Dad he’s like man I don’t know really remember how I got started but I got started because somebody gave me this book so I’m giving it to you so he gave me that book and that started the the

I say personal development journey, had a little bit of success and I invested in a coaching program in 2015. We were doing it all on our own, trying to figure out just YouTube videos and what the book said from 2010 to 2015.

Rick Howell (03:02.308)
And unfortunately I had a circumstance where I had a contractor steal some money from me and I was in a really bad spot. And everything happens for a reason in my opinion. I ran into somebody else out and about and he asked me if I have ever thought about hiring a coach. Well that time I didn’t know what a coach was. said, what’s a coach? And he said, well, there’s this company we hired as our coach. That’s how we got to where we are now. So right away I went and hired a coach and that had a little bit of success. What I learned was coaching no matter where, who,

it is, what it is, whether it’s a YouTube video or coaching program, coaching has nothing to do with the information you’re being given. All the information stays the same. Real estate’s real estate. It’s more about the implementation and if you’re taking it from someone that you resonate with. So we had a little bit of success because we just took action on everything that was instructed for us to do and ended up getting recruited by that real estate education company to travel the country for four years and coach and teach their students right up until when COVID-19

happened and then all that kind of went away.

Mike Hambright (04:03.898)
Yeah. Yeah. What do you, uh, I know we’re going to get into coaching and teaching other people and kind of your passion for that a little bit later, but, um, so let’s talk about just like using real estate as a lifestyle business to kind of build a business that does what you, you know, helps feed your family, helps pay for the things that you want in your life, gives you the freedom that you want. Let’s talk about what, you know, share a little bit more about your philosophy on that.

Rick Howell (04:27.076)
So the best way I could explain that is there’s a book written by Michael Gerber called The E-Myth. And what the E-Myth states is the true definition of an entrepreneur is someone who has built a business.

leveraging systems and processes to where they could remove their self from their business for a minimum of a year and their business will still continue to grow and operate and function without them physically with their hands on it. That’s the way that I was taught to do real estate. So everything was a system, a system for marketing, a system for hiring, a system all the way for how our rehabs run. So at the beginning, I didn’t really understand what any of this meant, but the best way to explain it would be this.

or a car going down an assembly line in a factory. It’s built the same way. The color might change, the accessories might change, but the process and system still stays the same all the way down the assembly line. And that’s how we’ve built our rehab businesses. And what that’s allowed us to do is we’ve, I would say scale. We’re a very small family-owned business. try to get up to anywhere from six to 10 rehabs going at a time with minimal staff. Our employees include myself.

My son, is on the acquisitions and he also he’s also our agent. He sells our rehabs and my sister, which handles all the property management and our books. We have one virtual assistant that handles all of our social media content and a little bit of admin staff things. But all in all, we’re a four person company with an also with an amazing team of subcontractors that are not technically employees, but they’re still part of our team. So we’ve leveraged systems to do this because

what we’ve learned is no matter if you have to change the person in the seat the system doesn’t change right and what that’s allowed for us to do is create a ton of time freedom for everybody involved that was always that that was always the goal was to design our lifestyle around our business

Mike Hambright (06:25.358)
There are, it’s really easy to, I’ve got people in my mastermind and friends that do hundreds of deals a year, right? I so there’s a lot of folks, but there’s this gap between kind of the lifestyle business and like the go big business where you have to staff up your team, you have to add complexity, naturally. You’re not trying to add complexity, it just happens, right? And you gotta go out to more and more marketing channels. And then you got this big monster to feed and…

Rick Howell (06:32.739)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (06:52.6)
You know, so the challenge is if you have a bad month, it could be really bad. And you end up in the the name of growth. Like sometimes people are basically trying to they start doing riskier things like taking on deals. It’s like, I don’t know. But yeah, let’s go ahead and do it because we need to we need to do it right. And so you kind of get caught up in the units thing and maybe lower margin stuff. And so not everybody, but those tendencies as you’re trying to do a lot more deals like those things tend to happen is like you start doing deals that

you maybe would have passed on if you were trying to be more of what you’re doing, more kind of lean and mean, just a small business operation. You just kind of cherry pick the best deals, right? So yeah, it keeps your life a little more simple, right?

Rick Howell (07:34.148)
It does. And we learn from mistakes. I was that guy in 2018, I think.

that wanted to scale and go big and start doing rehabs all over the country. Right? That was the thing. I was traveling the country, so I was meeting these people all over the place. And where my market is, again, the numbers are the median price point where I live is right at about 200,000, maybe a little less for an ARV. Right? Well, our sweet spot, every one of our jobs that we do, we have a max budget. We don’t do anything over a 275 ARV. And the reason that is for anybody listening is we do our deals where all the buyers are.

So we stay in the first time home by our price point, there’s a system for you. We don’t deviate from that. And the reason we don’t is because I thought it was a good idea at one time to do a deal.

in Indianapolis. thought it was a great idea to do a deal in Indianapolis with another guy. And, the numbers were awesome. This big $700,000 house, we were going to make all this money, but the same amount of work as we do here, it was just bigger. Well, we lost a quarter million bucks, man. And three years and three years of my life. So when you go through,

something like that and you lose money and get punched in the mouth like that, it teaches you lessons. And what that did for us was make us better real estate investors and just taught me to stay in my own little box.

Mike Hambright (08:51.608)
Yeah, everybody has stories like that. They touch the hot stove and they’re like, okay, don’t do that again, right? And so you just have to touch it. Sometimes people have touch it twice, but.

Rick Howell (08:56.77)
No, no.

Yeah, yeah, chase the bigger dollars. Usually you get taught a lesson. That’s what I learned.

Mike Hambright (09:05.069)
Yeah. So let’s talk a little about just the kind of the benefit of time freedom. I mean, it gives you the freedom to do what you want to. It’s cool that you have a family business. My people hear me talk about this all the time. I I, we only have one child. He’s 17 graduate from high school on the young side. Like he, we would love to, for him to be involved in the business and kind of the family business, but he’s, he’s at a point where he needs, he needs to go out and touch some hot stoves before.

Rick Howell (09:18.18)
Thanks.

Rick Howell (09:29.764)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (09:30.988)
That might work, right? But just talk about like, I guess what that does for your family is just to have kind of a family business and the business that you, the way you have it set up is like how it, you know, kind of feeds the lifestyle that you want to live.

Rick Howell (09:43.14)
So the very first time at a real estate event, I was sitting there with my son, my sister, and one of my best buddies. And the speaker was talking lifestyle design, right? That’s where I even heard the term. And my son at that time was, I believe, a sophomore in college, maybe a freshman, 2016, probably a friend, maybe a sophomore, somewhere in there. And it was a great idea. was like, man, I want to build something that my family can be proud of if something ever happens to me.

that they’re taken care of. We lost my dad in 2011 and he had a business and it didn’t go so well. So it all started with, just wanted to build assets for my family if something ever happened to me. And how Keith ended up working with me full time was he was in logistics, Keith’s my son. He was in logistics when COVID happened.

And anybody who knows when that all happened, well, the logistics industry just tanked. mean, they went from making great money to making nothing, right? The trucking industry was just, it just bombed. So it started off with, you know, let me create an opportunity for him. He went out and got his real estate license, right? That was the first thing. And then I’ve been teaching him acquisitions ever since. And now he’s starting to learn more of the project management slash rehabbing role. So it’s just been layers upon layers of teaching him the real estate industry over time. And,

Mike Hambright (10:43.832)
Yeah.

Rick Howell (11:03.652)
It’s been a great resource because now he’s got so much experience on the sales side of it. We keep all of our sales in house, right? He sells them all. So makes a commission on that. So he’s doing really, he’s doing really well. It’s a nice little family owned thing, but at the, at the end of the day.

I’ve always told them, take these experiences you’re learning with me, take these experiences you’re learning traveling and meeting all these people all over the place and build your own legacy through this. If you choose, if not, he’s going to learn a boatload of skills, right? the other person is my sister, God bless her. If it wasn’t for her, we wouldn’t be here. so I’m a old school construction guy. good with my hands, but I suck at everything else. The, organization books.

QuickBooks, all that stuff that has to do with numbers and computers and stuff on the back end is not my jam. She’s taken care of all that since day one. So it’s worked out well. I’m known for going out and making all the messes, right? The visionary dude that goes out and screws everything up. And then together, they keep us in line and keep us moving forward.

Mike Hambright (12:01.838)
Yeah, that’s kind of the description of my wife and I, for the past 17 years we’ve been in real estate. yeah. So you talk about a systematic approach to running your business. Share some of the things that you guys do that might be unique or kind of unique to you, at least, defining those processes and maybe even refining them, because things change over time. I mean, is everybody that, based on the role that they’re responsible for, is responsible for defining those and keeping those updated?

And the reason I ask is, in my experience, it’s been easy to create a process for it. And then we start to do it differently, but we don’t go back and re-document it. And next thing you know, we might as well not even have a SOP or a process because we’re off the reservation now.

Rick Howell (12:44.374)
One thing we’ve learned on like the actual project side of things, very important.

is we have a project review on every single deal we do. We usually do two at a time. That’s usually our goal. Like, well, Friday we’ll have a deal review where project manager will come in. My son will be here and Shelley will sit here and we’ll just literally go over the rehab. What went good, what went bad, what work can we grow and move on, right? The whole EOS thing. And we just literally, takes about 20 minutes per house. We go over the whole project, what went good, what went bad, were there any issues with deliveries, contractors, anything that can be improved on and that we document it. We use a very simple platform that I feel like everybody

doing real estate dealers to know about, and it’s called Basecamp.

Basecamp is just a project management software. It’s a very simple, user friendly. I’m not the sharpest guy in the world when it comes to tech. And we literally just have checklists for every little thing that happens. Like for example, we buy a house. We have an area that’s called admin project list. And then we have a construction checklist. So from the second the house is signed on at the closing table, there’s a next step. There’s a process, a box that has to get checked. And when that box gets checked, it

notifies the next person. And it works like that the whole way down the finish line, all the way to the sale on the backend. So Basecamp to us has been a godsend and that was shared with me by a good friend of mine out in Sacramento that builds these big multi-million dollar houses and still operates with a three-man employee staff and does probably 25 deals a year. That’s been our savior is just communication through a platform that everybody can see. That’s a lifesaver if you’re rehabbing houses.

Mike Hambright (14:12.961)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (14:20.546)
Yeah, that’s great. Interesting little side note, I have not heard anybody mention Basecamp in a long time, there’s a lot of different software that’s popped up over the years, but we used that a long time ago and that was like the industry standard for project management, especially in, not necessarily in real estate, but in lots of, mean, really any industry. So I worked for a tech startup before I got into real estate.

Rick Howell (14:32.611)
Yeah.

Rick Howell (14:38.081)
Everything, yeah.

Mike Hambright (14:43.374)
And that’s what they used to kind of manage all the projects and everything like that. And interesting little stories I have. A lot of the CRM providers in the country are members of my mastermind or friends of mine, right? And we’re talking lot about how when I started in 2008, there were no CRMs for real estate investors. And the company that was Basecamp also had a few other products that when you talk about simplification, they just made a decision at some point to like cut off all these other products. So like we’re winding them down. but they had like

Rick Howell (15:00.373)
I bet.

Mike Hambright (15:13.046)
I don’t know, tens of thousands or maybe hundreds of thousands of users and they’re just like, we’re turning it off. We’re not gonna, we’re just gonna go all in on Basecamp. I, but anyway, the first CRM that we ever used was called Highrise and it was the same company. And they decided to just kind of go all in on that one product, but it wasn’t a real estate CRM at all. It was just like a generic contact manager, but that was our very first CRM was a Highrise. yeah.

Rick Howell (15:34.116)
It’s just a thing, yeah. It was so user friendly and you know.

I come from running big electrical jobs where you’re running anywhere from five guys to 50 electricians. And back then we didn’t have all this tech stuff, right? You had like a notebook, you had a notebook and a calendar, you know? And so when I found that and Josh shared that with me, I’m like, wow, you mean that I can check this box and it’ll notify so-and-so that this has to happen? I’m like, I’m in, let’s do that. It just eliminated tons of phone calls, you know? And I’m not big on, I mean, I’m big on growth, but I’m not big on change.

Mike Hambright (15:47.884)
Right. Right.

Mike Hambright (16:04.632)
Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Rick Howell (16:09.872)
it works. So we’ve been using that for just years, you know.

Mike Hambright (16:13.506)
Yeah, yeah. it’s a natural thing. I some people like coaching and some people don’t like coaching and you have done both and you still do both. And I think it’s a natural fit. mean, I do coaching. I’ve done coaching for a long time. It’s a natural fit to kind of want to teach other people what you’re doing. Because a lot of us as entrepreneurs, we’re kind of on an island. Like we want to give back. it’s like, what’s the right way to do it? And you know,

Rick Howell (16:35.46)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Hambright (16:39.438)
I think a lot of us just want to share kind of our skill, like what we’ve done. Like I could share that with other people and there’s demand for that. Like people want to know that, right? And I think one of the cool things that you do, which I’ve done a lot of as well, is like right in my market, I find ways to teach people and then end up partnering with them, which creates, you know, I’m not just sharing information. Now we’re like business partners or we’re deal partners, right? And we’re doing things together. So share a little bit about like your philosophy on coaching and a little bit about your model there and kind of how you work with other people.

Rick Howell (16:48.366)
Great.

Rick Howell (17:09.004)
I’ll tell you what, when I was traveling around with Fortune Builders for years, there was nothing like the end of an event that someone coming up to you and saying, hey man, thank you because for you, now I believe in myself. Right? Like I said, the content, how to do a real estate deal. There’s so many people teaching exit strategies and creative finance and all this stuff. None of that matters.

Real estate is the industry and it doesn’t change no matter who you’re learning it from. The methodology, how you find a deal, fund a deal, whether you flip a deal, the exit strategy, it’s just real estate. And a lot of times people get so consumed in the weeds and they get so overwhelmed, they just don’t do anything, right? So when you can share something with somebody and they come up to you at the end of the day or at end of the meetup or whatever you’re doing and they say, hey man, thank you for simplifying all that. I see that you’re no different than I am.

I can do this too. That was just so powerful. And that happened week after week after week after week. So then when I was educated on like doing it in your local market, I’m like, that makes a lot of sense. At first, it was just about connecting people and being known as the cash buyer in the market, right? With all the people doing deals, everybody needs a cash buyer. I wanted to be known as the cash buyer. Then it turned into so much more than that. It turned into this little community of people that we have here in town.

that we’re teaching how to find deals, how to fund deals, connecting them with our vendor list. We have a vendor list that we’ve been building out for 14 years, right? And we share that with people and that helps our contractors now. So it just became like a little ecosystem of people making money through our industry locally. That’s how it all started. But it started just to drive deals locally, but then it turned into, it goes from more of making an income off of it to now we’re really making an impact in our local.

real estate market.

Mike Hambright (18:58.574)
Yeah, think it’s a big deal. feel like there’s a lot of coaching stuff out there. People can go online and learn stuff too, right? I always kind of say, all the information you need is online, but it’s just not put together in a roadmap. It’s not a blueprint how to do it. It’s like, if you think of a puzzle, like, the pieces of the puzzle are all out there, but when you put together a puzzle, you need to look at the box, like the picture, and you need to keep like, that’s your blueprint. That’s what you need to create.

Rick Howell (19:27.31)
Right.

Mike Hambright (19:27.918)
missing unless you hire a coach. It’s like the pieces out there, you just don’t know how to put them together and you don’t have anybody to call when you don’t know what to do. Right. And that that’s the main difference. And so I think it’s even better when you do it in your market and you’re like able to provide, you know, vendors and have them even come meet you at a house like all that high touch stuff. I mean, it really makes a difference, right?

Rick Howell (19:29.881)
Right.

Rick Howell (19:35.276)
Right.

Rick Howell (19:49.54)
Yeah, a hundred percent. it’s so much more. The reason I say it is because I didn’t even know what a coach was till after trying to figure out rehabbing for, from 2010 till the beginning of 2016. It was just construction guy. The book taught us to, how did we fund it first? The first one we funded off of home equity lines of credit, me and my partner, and because that’s what the Rich Dad book said to do. So we did that. And then we just bought it like construction workers. We didn’t know anything about analyzing a deal and we bought it and we thought, Oh, we think we can do it for this. We were the guys at Home Depot with the

big cart picking out our own backsplashes. I mean, it was a shit show. But that’s reality of it. That’s reality of it. Until somebody says, hey, man, you know there’s a way to make this easier. I’m like, well, how do we do that? Right?

Mike Hambright (20:21.944)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s how everybody starts.

Mike Hambright (20:32.322)
Yeah, yeah. So where do you talk a little bit more about like how you partner with students? Because I think that’s one of the interesting things is it’s not just coaching. mean, again, even if you hire a coach, sometimes it’s all the information, but just talk about like how you collaborate with them because they’re in your market.

Rick Howell (20:50.286)
So the way it starts is we do local meetups and we’ve just increased it to every other week now. Where I’ll take a topic, tonight’s building your team. I’ll take a topic out of our coaching program, I’ll teach on it for an hour, we’ll network for 30 minutes before and 30 minutes after, and just kind of relationship build, I’ll share the content. And what happens is, the way it started was, all of sudden wholesalers started coming. And we bought a couple of houses from wholesalers. Well that year alone, I think it was two years ago, I think we did an extra 200 grand.

just in deals that I bought from wholesalers that would come to our meetups, right? So I’m like, how do we do more of that? Okay. So it started off just being a buyer. Well now it’s, it’s kind of a, I’ll do a JV somebody deal based individually, one deal at a time where if they bring the deal and the numbers make sense, we’ll oversee and run the project with all of our connections, all of our vendors, basically like we do our deal and then split it with them on the backend.

Mike Hambright (21:27.009)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (21:48.268)
Yeah, yeah, that’s awesome. Rick, if folks want to learn more about you, what you’ve got going on, the opportunity to work with you, any of those things, like where can they go?

Rick Howell (21:57.208)
Social media, it’s just my name, Rick Howell, R-E-I on TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram, and also just my name on LinkedIn.

Mike Hambright (22:07.628)
Awesome, awesome. We’ll add links down below for that. So thanks so much for sharing your story with us today.

Rick Howell (22:12.652)
I appreciate the opportunity, Mike. Look forward to doing it again.

Mike Hambright (22:14.976)
Yeah, great to see you buddy. Have a good day. Everybody hope you got some good information from today. I think one of the lessons here is you got to define, you know, do you want this business to be all about the business and not give you the lifestyle you want? Sometimes you have a high level of success, but you’re not living the life you want. You don’t have that time freedom that you want. Or you can choose to kind of build a lifestyle business that enables you to do whatever you want in life. Kind of fund that allows you to kind of buy back your time and spend the time the way you want it. So I hope you got some good value from today, guys. We’ll see you on the next show. Take care.