Master Commercial Real Estate: Proven Strategies for New Entrepreneurs

Brett McCollum (00:00.749)
All right, guys, welcome back to the show. I am your host, Brett McCollum, and I’m here today with Matt Buchalski. And today we’re going to be talking about building businesses in commercial real estate. Before we do, guys, at Investor Fuel, we help real estate investors, service providers, and real estate entrepreneurs to 2 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 of. Without further ado, Matt, how are you,

Matt Buchalski (00:26.7)
I’m good, Brett. Good morning. How are you?

Brett McCollum (00:28.621)
Man doing good. Thanks for hanging out with me today, man. This is gonna be a I’m genuinely excited. It’s gonna be a good show. There we go. Yeah. I know, right? Yeah. So we got to catch up a little bit ourselves, you know, before the show and everything like that. Can you do me a favor? Let’s kind of back up rewind a bit. We catch people up to speed a little bit. Who’s Matt Buchalski?

Matt Buchalski (00:33.93)
I hope so. am too. That’s You have things in common way to start the show.

Matt Buchalski (00:51.342)
So I live in North Dallas, Texas. I’ve been here 10 years, relocated from New York on a Reload package from a tech company I was working for at the time. I’m 46, father of two, soon to be three. I’m getting married to my gorgeous and wonderful fiancee here in about 12 weeks.

I, like I said, grew up in New York, have been in sales literally a week, since a week after I graduated high school, making cold calls at stock brokerage firms and have been, you know, very blessed in my career to work for some amazing companies and build some amazing businesses. I am an aspiring home chef in between, in between work. can probably catch me watching like beat Bobby Flay or Chopped or

Brett McCollum (01:32.993)
There you go.

Matt Buchalski (01:39.084)
one of these other kind of low attention span, but yet incredibly enticing cooking shows. I love, I literally love to cook. I do it as often as possible. I’m a gym rat. I’m at the gym every day, no matter what. I love spending time with the kids. I love to read and I love to talk real estate.

Brett McCollum (02:00.869)
That’s awesome. So a couple things. before we get into some of the other stuff. There’s no shame in the Chopped game, okay? Listen. It’s on repeat in our home. And now our children, albeit they’re younger, when they go outside to play, do you know they’re playing? They’re playing Chopped, but they’re grabbing stuff from outside. Mulch in.

Matt Buchalski (02:03.8)
Shoot.

Matt Buchalski (02:12.654)
I’m

Brett McCollum (02:29.543)
leaves and all these things and they’re pretending to make like in our in your ingredient basket we have and then they make up stuff kid you not and it’s routine you know and the next thing is I don’t think I ever want to arm wrestle you in real life you know I have a little kid but no that’s super cool man like yeah so you mentioned outside out of high school like right out of the gate into sales is that right

Matt Buchalski (02:44.617)
Hahaha

Matt Buchalski (02:57.646)
Yeah, right out of the week. Cold calling Dun & Bradstreet leads to high net worth individuals like, you know, positioning. There was a cold callers and then there was brokers, right? You couldn’t sell stocks until you had your series seven and 63. So I was just generating leads for the broker that I got aligned to making 300 phone calls a day, you know, no voicemails, just super high volume, you know, trying to get 10 leads a week for the guy that I worked for at the time.

Brett McCollum (02:58.989)
What were you doing?

Brett McCollum (03:04.756)
Okay.

Matt Buchalski (03:26.476)
Man, that business gets a bad rap, but I’ll tell you that there is a lot to be said for having that have been my first job. Like I learned the value of peer-to-peer feedback. I learned the value of making a lot of touches on a day-to-day basis, being enticing in the first 30 seconds of your engagement with a prospect or someone that you’re meeting with or having coffee with.

Brett McCollum (03:33.653)
Okay.

Matt Buchalski (03:54.092)
So many things still follow me to this day. definitely what turned out to be an unscrupulous experience, didn’t realize that when I first started, tremendous experience nonetheless.

Brett McCollum (04:04.653)
Yeah, dude. 18, you’re calling high net worth people.

Matt Buchalski (04:08.609)
Yeah.

Brett McCollum (04:10.573)
Did you always have a, or is it more blissful, like ignorance, like I didn’t know? Cause talking to high net worth people at 18, when you’ve not done anything in your life, you know what I It’s like, who am I talking to? Was it just young ignorance or is it like, no, it was just extreme confidence? Like how were you able to do that?

Matt Buchalski (04:28.642)
Yeah, great question. You know, I think there’s definitely some limiting beliefs that you have to get over early. But at the end of the day, one of the things that they really, you know, grill with us is that the person on the other end of the phone puts their socks on every day, just like we do. Right. And quite frankly, they probably even have more interest in making the right investments and diversifying their portfolio.

Brett McCollum (04:39.671)
Ahem.

Matt Buchalski (04:58.414)
One of the most important things I learned at that stage in my career was don’t think about the other, the person on the other end of the phone having the same finances as you do. And so when you’re calling people and you’re presenting an opening, you know, an opening trade, I got my license before I was 19. You know, when you’re presenting an opening trade to the tune of a hundred or $150,000 over the phone, right? It’s important that you act as if and, and sound very confident.

And that’s one of the things that they really trained us on every day and it works.

Brett McCollum (05:34.157)
Yeah, incredible. Yeah, I mean, and I think those are like the building blocks of, know, I know me at 18, I was, I had no idea what I want. I had no idea. You know what mean? I was playing, I was still playing baseball. went to college, played ball, did that. But that’s what I thought I was going to do forever. You know, like, no, didn’t have any really, any real professional aspirations other than I’m going to play sports forever, you know, and to start getting the experience of real life.

you know, what a real business looks like at that age. Man, that’s an, looking back in hindsight, I’m sure that was invaluable, you know, really cool.

Matt Buchalski (06:10.808)
Yeah, totally. And, you know, I think one of the things that’s played out, so that was really my first opportunity in my career to raise money, right? Calling people and asking people for money over the phone. I went from that, I moved on to collections, and I went to, you know, several different other, you know, opportunities in my career. But what’s interesting is I think, and still to this day,

Brett McCollum (06:20.236)
Yeah.

Matt Buchalski (06:35.24)
as we syndicate deals, as we raise money, as we find investors and other things, I feel like there’s two main categories of investors. There’s a group of investors that want to know that you have a track record, that you are credible, that you can play in the same pond as them.

And then there’s definitely some investors that appreciate the up and comer, right? Maybe they have a little bit of a wider risk tolerance, but they appreciate the hustle. Maybe they have some money, but they’re just too busy to deploy it properly and you come in and while you may not have the same finance or financial profile or success levels as them, they’re willing to give you a shot because you bring the hustle. And so I think it’s important that you identify which of those markets or which of those baskets you, you know,

Brett McCollum (07:03.042)
Yeah.

Matt Buchalski (07:26.116)
to most and then stick to it. That’s one of the things that I learned early in that business. Obviously it was a lot more of the former example, but something that has continued to play it out in my career over time.

Brett McCollum (07:40.417)
Yeah, so you’re doing this for a little while, different sales gigs more or less along the way. How did you end up landing into the real estate space? When was that by the way? Because I know I’m trying to remember, we talked about pre-ta.

Matt Buchalski (07:52.878)
Yeah, my first single family in 2016. And so the way that happened is when I lived in New York, I would put together these annual tuna trips, right? We chartered this gorgeous boat and a bunch of us would go out overnight tuna fishing and it wasn’t cheap, right? And there was this guy who got invited to a friend of mine and we were talking on you know, on the trip, the drive down to New Jersey.

Brett McCollum (07:56.812)
Okay.

Matt Buchalski (08:20.3)
And he found, I found out that he owned 50 single family homes on the East end of Long Island. And that was 10 years ago, right? Like, so I can only imagine what those things are worth now. And we had a chat on the boat. told me exactly what he did and why he did it and changes that he had made in the business. And I was just enamored. He had it down to a formula. And on the way, after the trip, we had a great trip. says, if you’re interested in getting started, you know, I can put you in touch with a broker of mine and see if he’s got anything for you to buy.

I took them up on it. A couple months later, the phone rings and this guy, Mark, says, hey, I got a property for you. It’s perfect. You should buy it. So I sent my mom out to take a look and she didn’t really know what she was looking at, but she called me. She’s like, this is so motivating. I’m so energized. You should definitely do this. I’m like, done, let’s go. And I bought my first property living in Texas. That was all the way out of the East End, Long Island. And it’s been pretty much nonstop since.

Brett McCollum (09:17.485)
Wow, dude, so okay, so you’re running the charter trip. Was that a Texas thing you were doing or was it a New York connection that you’re like?

Matt Buchalski (09:27.798)
No, that was a New York thing. I had been doing it for six or eight years before I moved. And that was probably the last one I had done just because life gets in the way. I started to have kids and stuff. But yeah, it was weird too, because at the same time as that fishing trip, I was working for a big tech company. I had like an $80 million quote or $70 million quote. I remember, I forget what it was.

And then one day we were talking, we were on the earnings call and we did 25 billion in revenues that year. And I said to myself, know, I’m busting my butt to do a great job at this company. And whether I hit or I miss my quota, and I very rarely miss, my business is a rounding error in the grand scheme of things, right? So how do I take my skills, my passion, my extra bandwidth?

Brett McCollum (10:02.402)
Wow.

Matt Buchalski (10:24.3)
the finances that I had gathered at the time and really do something for myself so that I could be my own boss at one point and one day achieve this concept of financial freedom. shortly after I had that kind of light bulb moment or realizing that I wanted more, I crossed paths with Pete. We had the fishing trip and it was just kind of like in life, I think you start to see these signals that something is starting to line up.

Brett McCollum (10:45.869)
timing.

Matt Buchalski (10:50.964)
And it did. And I’m so thankful for Pete and that conversation that we had on that fishing trip.

Brett McCollum (10:55.585)
Yeah, so that’s perfect. I mean, I think that’s how it goes too. It’s the idea of when you go and buy a vehicle, you didn’t see, like I bought a whatever it is, know, doesn’t matter. You know, and then you don’t ever see those vehicles until on the road until you bought yours, you know, now you see them everywhere kind of thing, right? You start to see these things like, I don’t know, I forget what the psychologist called it that, but yeah, that’s the, think that happens a lot is you made the decision to do this and now you hear it everywhere, you know.

Matt Buchalski (11:13.486)
Yeah.

Brett McCollum (11:25.089)
You hear a lot of real estate investors like, how did you get your start, Matt? they, so many people, a lot of them come back to you, rich dad, poor dad. So they read rich dad, poor dad. And now they’re like, I hear about real estate everywhere. I’m like, dude, it’s been going on this whole time. You know? Yeah.

Matt Buchalski (11:40.224)
Yeah, where do you live? Somebody owns the place that you live if it’s not you, right? And I think it’s also really interesting, Brett, I was just, I was at a speaking engagement over the weekend and what I find very interesting about real estate, and this is a pattern that’s gone on now several times over last eight or nine years.

Brett McCollum (11:46.571)
Yeah. Yep.

Matt Buchalski (12:04.468)
is when you’re focused on doing a deal, right? You become so excited and people ask you what’s going on in your life and you talk to them about it. And I feel like you put good things out into the ether and then sometimes things go back, right? So Pete put me on, got me connected with this broker. I bought that property in April of 2016.

You give me a formula, buy in these zip codes up to this price point, you do section eight, so on and so forth. And I was like, does this really only work in New York?

And I started to take that same criteria and look in neighborhoods in Texas. And the rent profiles were a little different, and that’s okay, but so are the price profiles. 90 days after I bought my first one, I bought my second one much, much closer to home down here in Garland, Texas. And every time, I can tell you that not every time, but five times in the last eight or nine years when I bought one deal, I bought a second deal inside of 90 days. Yeah.

Brett McCollum (12:49.185)
Right.

Brett McCollum (13:05.645)
Isn’t that funny? Wow. Yeah, I was gonna ask you that. So how long were you investing in the single family space before you kind of made some shifts?

Matt Buchalski (13:14.124)
It was actually like less than a year. Yeah, I was listening to Bigger Pockets. I started to listen to some other podcasts and there was an eight unit that was available a couple of miles west of Jerry world, AT &T stadium here in Arlington. And so I made a blind offer on it, got declined.

Brett McCollum (13:16.119)
Nowhere.

Matt Buchalski (13:36.256)
seller came back to us like three weeks later and said, the buyer dropped out, lost their earnest money. They’re to willing to take the earnest money off the top of the price. They just want to get out. Do you want it? And so I had gone to take a look and I realized it was going to be a heavy lift and it was going to take every dime that I had at the time to acquire this property and then rehab it and bring it up to par.

And I remember an episode of Bigger Pockets, Brandon Turner said, 50 % of a deal is better than 100 % of no deal. And so was getting friendly with my buddy Mike, who our kids were in daycare at the time. And we had lunch one day and long story short, we bought that one, cut our teeth on it. We ended up doing a handful of single families after that, but just because we’re kind of buying up the block on this certain street in Richardson.

But ever since then, once we got that conveyor belt going and that rent roll going strong, we’ve been in multifamily since.

Brett McCollum (14:34.443)
No way. Yeah, so let’s talk about that from the beginning of your multifamily journey. Like what was your main focus? it apartments? it, know, quad stuff? Like what was your start?

Matt Buchalski (14:47.02)
Yeah, we, it was usually larger, well, I don’t wanna say, it was larger multifamily than single families than we were used to, right? So the first one was an eight unit, then we bought up half the street on single families. Then our next deal was four units. This was in COVID, the early stages of COVID.

And then it was a 16 and 18 and eight, a 24 or 32. And then we recently, yeah, we recently bought a hundred space RV storage facilities south of Fort Worth. So, you know, we’ve, we’ve wanted to grow the portfolio and we’ve done so through transaction volume, Brett. What’s interesting about investing in North Texas is there’s, know,

C-class products 60s 70s, maybe even early 80s then there’s very little 90s product because of banking conditions at that point in time

And then you jump to 2000s product and when you jump to 2000s product, those tend to be much larger deals, right? 150, 200 units, 300 units. And especially over the last 18, 24 months, we haven’t wanted to get too far over our skis and do a big raise as capitals become more and more difficult to raise. So we’re kind of staying in our sweet spot, but we’ve definitely shifted our focus to focus just on 70 units and up so that

70 to 100 units where it’s probably a four or five million dollar raise. You know, that’s right in our strike zone right now

Brett McCollum (16:23.245)
Yeah, that’s per him. was literally just going to ask you like, so bringing it up to speed with the rate changes, interest rate change, because that’s a lot of people in the multifamily space right now. Like they bought him in, let’s say it was 2020, 2021, right? And they have a five year horizon on them. And then they go to do their, you know, refis and all that’s like, now the rates are, you know, seven and change, you know, and they bought them at four, you know, and

Has that impacted you guys in any way? And if so, have you navigated that? Like, what’s that look like?

Matt Buchalski (16:56.792)
For the most part, it has not, but the one time it did, it was very, very stressful. So we bought a 16 unit and 18 unit back in Q4 of 2021. We bought it on bridge debt. It’s 60s product. We put a million dollars worth of CapEx into the 34 units, interior and exterior. It was two years with two one-year extensions.

Brett McCollum (17:07.84)
Okay, yep.

Brett McCollum (17:17.783)
How long was the bridge?

Matt Buchalski (17:23.246)
We got through the two-year term, we extended for one year, no problem. The lender was like, they didn’t even, they’re like, just send us copy of your insurance and send us the one-point extension fee, no problem. Fast forward to the second one-year extension. They originally said that they would give us the extension, but the rate was gonna go from like 5.75 up to 11 and a half, right?

Brett McCollum (17:48.909)
yeah. Yeah.

Matt Buchalski (17:50.444)
And then we appealed and said, what’s different this year than it was last year? The asset’s performing, right? We’re on time with all our payments, blah, blah, blah. And so we got an email from them, good news. Leadership has said they’ll honor your original rate. Just send us proof of insurance, appraisal, all that stuff.

Then at the last minute, they retract that and say, whoops, sorry, we’ve taken another look at this. Leadership has had a change in policy. Your rate’s going to be 11 and 1 half percent. So luckily, we were already kind of knee deep in a refi as kind of our plan B. And we had to get into some passionate conversations with the lender to give us a couple of months worth of extensions. 11 and 1 half percent money would have just put us out of business.

Right? And long story short, we ended up closing the refi two days before Thanksgiving. We’re like on the phone with the bond trader that day locking in, you know, what was a fantastic rate. It 5.93%. So we had forecasted the refi to be at 5.75. So to get 5.93 done was not that far off what our three year assumptions were.

Brett McCollum (18:57.303)
Wow, yeah.

Brett McCollum (19:06.477)
feel good, yeah.

Matt Buchalski (19:10.114)
The difference was though that because lenders tightened, it was the LTV that we did not achieve what we had forecasted in the refi. So because of that, it wasn’t necessarily a cash out refi, but we got it done and we got it over the finish line and now it’s history. Now we got plenty of time to get that property performing. I’m sorry.

Brett McCollum (19:30.221)
Breathe a little bit again, right?

Yeah, I you can breathe a little bit again finally, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Buchalski (19:36.588)
Yeah. And other than that, everything else is on long-term debt, know, knock on wood. you know, what we have seen though, especially in Dallas and the surrounding areas is the occupancy has dipped pretty significantly, depending on who you talk to occupancies dipped anywhere from 2 % to 6 % with all this new supply coming online. So I think as, as that supply continues to get absorbed later this year, early next year, we’ll start to see some rent growth come back.

hopefully, you know, middle of 2026.

Brett McCollum (20:08.525)
Do you think that the occupancy, do you think that’s market specific or do you think that’s, are you seeing that more nationally or?

Matt Buchalski (20:17.71)
I think it’s market specific. And I think the areas that have seen the worst of it is because you have all the supply coming in. I live in McKinney and there’s like 10,000 units.

Brett McCollum (20:33.793)
Yeah. Yeah. Here in Florida, it’s insane.

Matt Buchalski (20:41.548)
that either have or will be delivered between 2024 and 2026. And that represents a 33 % increase in the number of apartments in McKinney alum.

Brett McCollum (20:52.213)
Yeah, yeah, we’re having that here in Florida as well. Seeing that a lot. I think it’s this what’s so interesting to me is like you kind of were doing a lot of things during the COVID run of things. And we saw Florida, Texas, Arizona grow like crazy through COVID, right? And it’s funny as those are the three, some of the three states that are taking the biggest hits right now. In the risk and the turn response, right? So it’s real. It’s very interesting. So

Matt Buchalski (21:09.923)
Mm-hmm.

Matt Buchalski (21:15.383)
Yeah.

Brett McCollum (21:22.007)
Talk to me a little bit about some of the, cause you got your, you know, your irons in the fire on multiple things. I see it on your shirt. You got Ongo going on there. Catch me if you can on that.

Matt Buchalski (21:32.398)
Thanks. Yeah, so I recently completed a four-year run at one of the big property management software companies. Built out an amazing organization there and you know this opportunity at OwnWell, I’ve always really continued to consider myself a builder.

And I never really wanted to be, you know, kind of a cog in a wheel. And so I worked at a business intelligence startup back in 2018 to 2020. And at that point, like I just, I was bitten by the opportunity to have a thumbprint on the growth of a company. But you know, in the middle of COVID, there was really no startup opportunities available, which is why I joined that, larger company that I mentioned. Ownwell has

tremendous leadership team. Our CEO worked for a billionaire family office and really saw how the rich are able to

Work the system and hire great people to save the money on things like property taxes, right? And our CTO Joseph is PhD in computer science He’s figured out how to build, you know LLMs and machine learning and leverage AI to help us, you know get the most accurate data Possible, right? So we’re really on the forefront of leveraging we’re a tech first company trying to help people save money on their property taxes and

late over the summer last year Colton and I connected and they had this growing commercial real estate business that was just kind of happening by accident and they really wanted to make it a you know focal point for the company so we joined forces and I’m proud to be you know VPSLs for the company and every day I’m talking to owners and operators and property management companies commercial real estate and helping them understand what we do different in the market to help

Matt Buchalski (23:28.772)
them save money on their property taxes.

Brett McCollum (23:30.445)
Love that. Yeah, I think that’s a, you know, it’s funny and I hope, I don’t think you’ll be offended by this with your sales mind and as you know, we talked, you know, before the show, that’s my mind too. Property taxes is not a niche that anybody really ever thinks about when you’re talking about real estate, right? It’s so overlooked. It’s it’s typically an afterthought even when you’re going to, when you’re selling or buying, nobody’s thinking about taxes.

Right. Nobody. It’s not a thing like or that and maybe insurance when you’re getting property like nobody thinks about it when they’re buying a property. I forgot about the insurance. I forgot about the taxes. I think the most exciting sales opportunities, in my opinion, are those niches of places where you can fill in something that people don’t even realize that they don’t have. Is that something that Owen Wells what you’re seeing like we have a space there that we’ve carved out that

Matt Buchalski (24:21.261)
Mm-hmm.

Brett McCollum (24:27.689)
Nobody’s able to compete with us on or is that pretty competitive? What’s your what’s your losing?

Matt Buchalski (24:33.39)
Yeah, that’s a great question. So look, I think there’s no shortage of property-plex appeal companies out there. I had been working with one group on my residential, on my home, and another group on the commercial side. That said, Brett, there’s no company out there that’s doing what we’re doing. And I say that with pride, and I say that because I did the homework before betting my career on OwnWell between the…

Brett McCollum (24:37.056)
Okay.

Matt Buchalski (25:02.488)
We intake data from 150 different public and private data sets in order to keep track of how assessments are trending, pull and justify comps, build models in real time, monitor assessments in our target counties. And we’ve literally built a tech company first to help with something mundane like property taxes. On the commercial real estate side, I think it’s a little different than residential property taxes.

of folks out there that kind of scoff at the fact, yeah, it’s only a thousand bucks a year, takes a lot of time to do. not with own well. On the commercial side, property taxes are typically the number one largest expense for an operator on their T12.

And if you’re focused on asset management, which we all should be, right? Mitigating each and every dollar on your T12 should be of the utmost importance to you, right? Like Robert Martinez from Rockstar Capital, he’s always been very, very outspoken where at a six cap, every dollar that you make or dollar that you save is worth 16 on the balance sheet. And, you know, one of the things that I think I’m very proud of with OwnWell is that we take a buy investors for investors type of approach.

And I personally know the impact of every dollar saved on a T12. And I’m advocating for that for all of our clients.

Brett McCollum (26:26.369)
Yeah, dude, that’s so interesting. You say it like that too with the fact that I do this to carries a lot of weight, right? I know in salesman and the things that you know, we do and stuff like that. Being able to say I am one of you. And then you have real life examples like you will prove it. You know, because people want to hold your feet to the fire, they may not say it outright, but that their objection is really I don’t believe you, you know.

Matt Buchalski (26:55.928)
That’s you’re exactly right. And, and, and what you just said, right, is, is like, I don’t have a job. I don’t have a career. Now I’m on a mission, right? And like when I was selling big tech and I go talk to a CIO of a fortune 1000 company about transforming their data center, I couldn’t say, Hey, Susie CIO, check out my data center too. I have one of those with a thousand servers in it because they didn’t. Right.

Brett McCollum (27:04.513)
Yeah.

Matt Buchalski (27:25.474)
What I can say, and to your point, I think this is definitely true selling with empathy is that, know, hey, Brett, I’m an investor too. I have all of my assets and my partners have all our assets with this company. We’re drinking our own Kool-Aid because I believe in the cause and believe in the mission. And I think there’s a lot to be said for that. Not a lot of people get to have that opportunity in their professional career. And I’m super fortunate to say that I do.

Brett McCollum (27:55.141)
That’s incredible. And that just makes it the pride, you know, shows right when you speak when you’re there, it just in that translates in your conversations, I’m sure. Talk a little more about some of the like you’ve got take flight, you’ve got deep blue, like, you know, what does that look like for you now?

Matt Buchalski (28:11.714)
Yeah, so I started Take Flight Properties with my buddy Mike. Mike is…

super smart guy. runs global development operations for one of the big consultancies. We got to a point, we built a portfolio, or my friend Chris that I worked with 15 years ago, he kind of came on and we morphed into Take Flight Capital. And the three of us really got very, very specific about our risk profile, the types of assets we wanted to buy together, so on and so forth. And at the time I had this really big funnel.

And so I get emails from brokers, every single one of them in Texas. And so I found this deal and I found some other guys that were interested in doing the deal with me. And so we got together, we started Deep Blue Capital. We’ve done some deals collectively together too, which is awesome. And so Deep Blue Capital, we started that in 2023. We acquired a student asset down in Waco. We acquired this other asset in Garland last year. We did a storage deal last year.

And so out of that, we started the more doors podcast. We’re about 65 episodes in, and we’ve profiled some amazing investors. Zach Hapton stole from rise 48 equity, Tony Castro, Novo, Gino Barbero. We’ve had some life coaches on the show. Brian May Oro from sell up down in Austin, Tony Robbins coach. And it’s like, it’s a way for us to scratch the itch and learn from others, but while giving them the limelight for an hour. And again, it’s like,

Brett McCollum (29:40.493)
That’s right.

Matt Buchalski (29:45.92)
It’s good for them, but we get so much fulfillment and learning from it that it’s a great passion project.

Brett McCollum (29:54.027)
Yeah, you know, it’s so funny nobody guys. I’m sorry if I’m exposing some things that maybe you don’t know yet if you’re listening to this but as a podcast host one of the most Wonderful things and albeit it is a selfish thing in a man I think you’ll agree with me is like you just said is I learned so much more by doing this and talking with people every day I I have to get better

because I’m interviewing all of you like industry titans that are doing something and I’m like, good, yeah, there’s stuff that you don’t even know about, know, and you think you know things. And this, like, this is just as much for me as it might be asking you all these questions and stuff like that and giving you that limelight, like you say, but this is just as much for me, you know? And it’s funny you said that because I’m like, yep, I totally get that feeling, for sure.

Matt Buchalski (30:26.807)
Mm-hmm.

Matt Buchalski (30:42.38)
Yeah, so do we. we’ve had, I’m part of a mastermind group, I’ve gone to a bunch of the events and having a weekend retreat or a weekend mastermind meeting or whatever, those are great.

Brett McCollum (30:52.736)
Ahem.

Matt Buchalski (30:58.218)
And I think there’s great networking. There’s a lot of great content. But what I have found personally, it’s much easier. Like if you’re having an active discussion like we are now, like to zone in for an hour, right? Put everything else on do not disturb. There’s no room. There’s no questions. There’s no people sneezing, right? It’s just us. You’re able to like have great conversations and routine so much more.

Brett McCollum (31:13.271)
Yes.

Brett McCollum (31:20.447)
Intentionality, man. That’s it. And focus. Yeah, that’s the sweet spot. Yeah. And most entrepreneurs, if you’re like me, Matt, is, I don’t know about you, but intentionality and focus are not always my chief skills because my mind is in a hundred places. Yeah.

Matt Buchalski (31:34.926)
You’re telling me. We were just talking before the show, have six email boxes and I knew we were talking this morning. I couldn’t find the calendar invite to save my life. This was the last email box that I checked. I’m I got to figure out a better way to manage that because it’s getting crazy.

Brett McCollum (31:45.963)
Which one? Yeah, dude, I. Yeah, I I feel that that to my core, so anyway, Matt, if people like we’re kind of at that point in the show, if people want to connect with you, get to know you a little bit more, follow along, that’s that’s good for that to happen.

Matt Buchalski (32:02.326)
You can find me, I’m on all the socials, probably most prominent on LinkedIn. So just search for my name, Matt Buchalski, B-U-C-H-A-L-S-K-I. If you have questions about investing or anything on property taxes or anything like that, you can hit me up at matt at ownwell.com and I’d be happy to talk to you.

Brett McCollum (32:22.093)
They did an incredible, and guys, we’ll make sure that’s in the show notes for you guys, but follow along, do that. Wealth of information, Matt. I mean, I know you have, I can just see it come off of you. I know you have a lot to offer and give people, so guys, don’t hesitate to reach out. You won’t be sorry you did. But man, Matt, I know we could do this for hours on end. I’m confident on that, but as they say, all good things, right? But man, I appreciate you being here with us.

Matt Buchalski (32:48.14)
This was great, Brett, thanks so much. And look, I can always tell when I’ve had a good time by the enthusiasm and the energy that I portray on these things. And you definitely got me going this morning. It wasn’t just the coffee, I promise. No, it wasn’t, I promise. This was a great time, Brett, thanks for having me. I hope.

Brett McCollum (33:00.905)
I was gonna say maybe it was just the coffee. Aw man, no, you’re the best. I appreciate it. Well guys, it’s been a great episode. I appreciate you hanging out with us and we’ll see you on the next one. Take care everybody.