He Lost $1 Million in Business — Here’s How He Came Back | Tye Shumway

Mike Hambright (00:33)
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the show. Today I’m here with my buddy, Tye. We’re going to be talking about a little bit about his story. ⁓ He’s a builder, does a lot of interesting things, real estate investor, and just an overall entrepreneur that’s had some good and bad experiences like we all have. And that’s what shapes us. And that’s why we do this show, is to bring you some stories and insights from other investors and other entrepreneurs that can help you maybe find your way forward. So Tye, welcome to the show.

Tye Shumway (00:59)
Hey Mike, thanks. Appreciate you having me on here. I’m excited. This is awesome.

Mike Hambright (01:02)
Yeah, always good to see you, buddy.

So I’m excited to talk about this today. it’s interesting because I know you’re doing a lot of construction stuff and you’re also an investor and you want to do more investing activities. And I think there’s a lot of investors that want to do more new construction activities. So it’s one of those things where it appears the grass is always greener to the other person, right? But.

Tye Shumway (01:22)
Yep.

Mike Hambright (01:23)
but you’re doing some really cool stuff out there in Moab. But before we get started, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your backstory.

Tye Shumway (01:31)
Okay.

Alright, yeah, I’ll give you kind of the quick and dirty of here. But yeah, I’ve been in construction my whole life. I grew up going and living with my dad during the summer times, digging sprinkler system trenches. He put a shovel in my hand. I’d have to dig the sprinkler trenches by hand. Then we grew up. As I got older, we did apartment buildings, but I was always doing construction from about 12 years old on. By the time I got watching my dad getting out of these trenches and working

with

him I said dang I think I need to get me a piece of paper because my body’s not gonna last that long so I decided to go to college got myself a construction management degree and started drinking the corporate ladder Kool-Aid where I’m like all right I’m gonna start where I work for a construction company work my way up the ladder and I did that for a number of years

for different commercial contractors did that. When I graduated, a couple different people built bridges, concrete water tanks, schools, worked for all these different kind of guys. And that’s what brought me to Moab is basically one of the corporate jobs ended up bringing me here before I decided to go out on my own. There’s a couple ups and downs throughout that story. Well, that’s kind of the gist of where I’m at and how I’ve spent my whole life in construction.

Mike Hambright (02:46)
Mm-hmm.

Tye Shumway (02:54)
I did the classic rich dad poor dad in 2017 where my mind flipped and said, oh, I gotta stop working for money and start making money work for me. And so that’s when my real estate journey started was in 2017 and trying to figure out how to become an investor from a contractor. yeah, I got about 25 years worth of contracting business that I’ve been doing throughout my whole life.

Mike Hambright (03:04)
Yeah.

Yeah.

I know it’s interesting when I talk to folks that how many similarities we a lot of us have. Not everybody has a corporate background, but I do too. I kind of refer to myself as a corporate refugee and got fired from what I thought was my dream job. Now, in hindsight, we talked before we started hitting record here about silver linings. Like at the time, I thought it was like the worst thing that ever happened to me getting fired. In hindsight, it’s actually one of the best things that ever happened to me. But it doesn’t feel that way at the time, right? And so talk to us a little bit about how you

Tye Shumway (03:28)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Mike Hambright (03:48)
your transition from corporate America into real estate.

Tye Shumway (03:51)
Alright, ⁓ yeah, it’s kind of a story, so hold on.

Essentially, I graduated and then ended up moving back to my hometown working for a commercial contractor for a number of years, was his right-hand man, until I got sweet-talked into moving away from another corporate contractor. We moved to Vernal, Utah. They doubled my wage and sweet-talked me, saying, hey, you’re going to come up here, open up our office. And so we’re like, all right, so we uprooted the family for where both, me and my wife, were both raised.

And we had built our first home together there, uprooted everything and moved into a town where we had no family, no friends to start this new life.

A year after we did that, found out the company that moved me there decided they didn’t want to have a satellite office there anymore and said, hey, appreciate what you did, but we don’t want this anymore. We’re going to go in a different direction. And so I found myself without a corporate job. And then to kind of…

make it sting a little bit more, ended up losing our son, our 16 month, three year old son, 10 days later. Excuse me, and so the world kind of came crashing down all within 10 days. And we moved our family out, we had nothing, I don’t know. It was a very low point in our lives in trying to figure things out. So we had a really rude awakening.

there so we had to kind of pick ourselves back up, pieces back up. After trying to figure it out I kind of sulked around for a couple weeks trying to figure out what I’m gonna do with life. Wasn’t really sure how to continue on but it makes a difference on who you marry. For sure my wife’s strength is amazing and so I was able to lean on her.

Mike Hambright (05:33)
Yeah.

Tye Shumway (05:38)
and we’re able to pick ourselves back up and figure it out. We looked at doing our own thing at that time, but I ended up getting lucky enough and had built some relationships with another construction company where I ended up working, going to work for them. I commuted from Vernal to Salt Lake City for,

for about nine months before the family moved over. We ended up getting a job and while we’re trying to put our lives back together, we have two daughters and we did have our son. So was me and my wife and our two daughters that we were trying to figure out. And it really kind of opened up my mind, like, what is this corporate thing? Like I thought it was job security, you know, I didn’t think any accidents would happen, but they do. Job security is not there, even in the corporate life, they could just change your

Mike Hambright (06:21)
Yeah.

Tye Shumway (06:22)
It kind of got my mind thinking, like, it really, was my only source of income. It was, I had no idea. I didn’t really, I thought that’s what it was about was climbing yourself up this corporate ladder and you make it, you you work hard. And I was always kind of a blue collar kind of guy. I’m a hard worker, grew up in the trenches. But…

Mike Hambright (06:34)
Yeah.

Tye Shumway (06:40)
But then my mind said, hey, even a corporate job can just disappear in a day. So was like, holy cows. So, oh yeah, for sure, especially these days, you don’t know what’s gonna happen, especially when people went through that COVID, you just never know kind of what’s happening and everything and we can go down that. So it my brain thinking and I started trying to figure out some stuff, other ways of income. And that’s when I read like Rich Dad Poor Dad and started thinking about, or I had that in my

Mike Hambright (06:45)
Yeah. Yeah. Especially these days. Yeah.

Tye Shumway (07:10)
I don’t just have to work for money money can work for me and I started going down the rabbit hole of listening to like bigger pockets and all these real estate things and I’ve been in real estate under the construction side but never really the investing side and and I didn’t know at the time what a I want to say I almost want to call a superpower knowing construction is I thought I thought knew I thought everybody knew what construction was it’s like in there and

Mike Hambright (07:35)
Right.

Tye Shumway (07:37)
It

just goes together and it’s easy and because it always was for me I just grew up and that’s the way the world was and until I started getting into the vesting world I realized oh this is constructed a little bit of super found not everybody knows how to go and stuff Yeah, yeah most really don’t and so kind of helped open up my mind that that I had an advantage to be able to find properties and be able to do a lot of value add through the construction journey and through the skill set of what construction had me so we were able to

Mike Hambright (07:50)
Most don’t, yeah.

Tye Shumway (08:07)
start picking up our first little investment property. We were able to do some value add, little single family 900 square foot, two bedroom, one bath, 1906 home that we picked up. But it was on a big lot. We were able to add a triplex onto the side of the lot and then convert their garage into a unit. So I ended up going into five unit. But that’s kind of where the journey went. Like you were talking silver lining stuff.

is it opened up my mind losing losing my son and losing our job that there’s other ways to look at it and we had to be purposeful on it it just life wasn’t just go the way we want it because we thought we deserved it or we thought we worked hard life will shake you up and make you really kind of dig down and see who you really are right

Mike Hambright (08:48)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, thanks

for sharing that man. I can’t imagine losing a child. I I can’t imagine. So I appreciate you sharing that. And I think if there is a silver lining and there’s probably, you know, a lot of times when bad things happen, there’s a silver lining there. I think, you know, one of the things certainly with like me losing a job is, it, toughens your skin up a little bit as to like, well, like once you realize that like, that wasn’t the end of the world. Like I thought it was.

then it’s like, okay, you become a little more risk tolerant, right? You’re just like, well, what’s the worst that could happen? mean, as an entrepreneur, it’s like, you just like, you get to a point, not everybody’s like this, but I think, you know, I’m often swinging for the fences, because I’m like, well, what’s the worst thing that could happen? Like, I’m gonna crash and burn. It’s like, well, I’ve done that before, you know, it made me stronger, so I don’t want it to happen, but if it does happen, I know there’ll be an upside to that as well. Would you agree with that?

Tye Shumway (09:44)
Yeah.

Yeah, 100%. Yeah, you hit it right on the head. It’s like, yeah, you’re

Yeah, you’ve hit your lowest. You’re like the worst has happened, right? Like you might, it’s something I don’t ever wish on anybody and I never thought I could go through it if you would have ever asked me. And the worst has happened. I’m still here. Luckily we’ve got some great strength. We really lean on our faith a lot to get us through that. But yeah, it’s one of those things. You don’t want to go through it, but when you’ve gone through it and you see the other side, you see the blessing.

me and my wife, my daughters are more purposeful. We take more time to spend each time with each other. We took trips that we probably would have never taken before and made that time to spend the time with each other. And we took risk that the worst has happened. If everything else goes bad, the worst has already happened to us. What’s gonna happen now? We can just keep going forward. And luckily, we’ve been super blessed with great opportunities, great people in our lives.

Mike Hambright (10:42)
Yeah.

Tye Shumway (10:48)
have really helped out and we’ve been blessed and lucky that a lot of these risks we have taken have paid off.

Mike Hambright (10:54)
Yeah.

Yeah. And at some point, they’re, I mean, not, not at some point. I mean, the reality is they’re all calculated risks. Like they’d be risky for somebody that didn’t know the construction side or kind of jumped into that without knowing and having the skills that you have. But it’s kind of funny because as a real estate investor, like I have still a lot of friends and most of my friends are most of my, you know, network.

Tye Shumway (11:14)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (11:15)
is

not like, I guess, pre entrepreneurship is still not, they’re still not entrepreneurs. They’re in fact, I just ran into a couple of old friends the other day randomly at an airport in California that they live in New York. We live in Dallas and ran into an airport in California. I super random. Hadn’t seen them in 20 years, but they’re in corporate America and they’re just like, you guys are like, run your own business. And we’re like, I mean, we’ve been doing it for 18 years. It’s just like, it’s not really a thing now. It’s just, it is what it is. But,

I think ⁓ it’s calculated risk, Like you, it’s really not that risky because you’ve got the so-called deck stacked to your favor.

Tye Shumway (11:51)
Yeah.

Yeah, I really do. And I kind of talk a little bit about that as I’ve learned and growed, growed, I don’t know that’s the right word, but learning, growing. But yeah, like that, like, yeah, it’s become a superpower. But I have, always, I always kind of tell people like when they ask me what I do or what, kind of things that going on. And I have what I, got my stool and there’s always three legs to a stool, right? So it’s a nice stable stool. And I talk to people like they’re like, well, I’m like to make my, my stool

Mike Hambright (11:59)
you

Tye Shumway (12:21)
stable, it’s not just one corporate job. have my construction company, which is one leg of it. And then we have our development company that we develop raw land or…

kind of do some of these fix and flips kind of things right there. And then we have our real estate holding company, that is the third leg. So we have these three legs and as long as I can kind of keep things going through there, it’s calculated risk. know how to build it and I know what it takes to build it and I know what it takes to hold it. And if I can keep doing that and then we can kind of grow and.

and make it happen. I do feel, I feel blessed and almost a little guilty because I thought everybody could do that. I thought everyone could make things like that and it was something that I didn’t take advantage of and I’m trying to take advantage of that now so we can help other people and keep growing and do what we can.

Mike Hambright (13:03)
Yeah.

Yeah, let’s talk about, we’ve had a couple of conversations about construction, but creatively. Like you even talked about the first deal that you did, it was a two one and you turned it into something bigger. You added on and you added something else on the lot. I think not everybody thinks that way. Like they often are like, like I flipped hundreds of houses. I did everything I could to not even move a wall for.

most of those, because I’m like, I just know it opens up a can of worms. But again, construction wasn’t my background. I have a financial background, so I’ve got an advantage on the numbers side because I’m a numbers guy, maybe, right? ⁓ But just talk about like creative construction or looking at deals and seeing another use for it and not being afraid to move walls per se or add walls or add on to find a way to add value.

Tye Shumway (13:46)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Mike Hambright (14:00)
because that is unique and I think it’s becoming a more important skill as prices kind of go up. You’re like, well, I mean, for example, in the coastal markets like California and other markets, and it’s starting to be that way more in Dallas, I’m actually doing it right now with a rental. like, you know, I’m adding on a bedroom and a bathroom to a house. I would have never done that in the past. So it’s like, well,

The market price is 250 a square foot now and I can add this on for half of that. So why wouldn’t I add more value trying to utilize something? A house I’ve owned for 13 years, it’s super random, but that’s just kind of how we’re adding value now when we’re looking, what can we invest in? It’s like we can invest in our own deals by making them more valuable. But anyway, go ahead.

Tye Shumway (14:36)
Real.

Yeah, no, no, I appreciate you sharing that. Yeah, it really, it was really something that I didn’t understand until I got into this real estate and started going to meetups and talking to people. Because every time I would go and look at a at a project or a piece of land or something, my brain would be like, ⁓ okay, we could do this and do that. I actually had a late partner who would be actually my best buddy. And he calls me up on the days, hey, let’s go for a drive. And I’m like, okay, so we’ll go

driving takes me to this bare lot he says what do think we can do with this bare lot I’m like

Let’s look at it and I didn’t know at the time but he wanted my creativeness of like, okay What what are we going on here? It was a little two acre lot that was that he found on a tax sale and He had the idea and he said hey we could buy this and he got that all figured out But he didn’t know what to do with a lot. I said well dude, we need we need housing I know our area needs housing and it’s before this was this was back in right in

2019 we first looked at it and then ended up buying it in 2020.

we did but we ended up developing a 47 unit condo complex on this two acre lot. We did what I call up micro units like one bedroom, two bedroom studio apartments for our area because we have a lot of transient people come in for the tourist season. We have our river, we have our mountain bike and we offer rooms so we got a lot of people that come in that need somewhere to stay. They’re not bringing huge families but we had nowhere for them to stay and so I was like, yeah dude, we could probably fit.

I had at first I was like maybe 30, maybe 40 and then we ended up being able to be 47 legally without having to do any up zoning on that. And he’s like, dude, I knew you’d come up with an idea. I was like.

What do mean? Everybody can come up with this like this if you know what’s going on. it’s really been a lucky and it’s been a superpower that we’ve had. So that was one creative idea, just kind of looking at some raw land and if you your due diligence and it’s in the area that I like Moab is where I live and I invest in. I did look outside the areas for a while, but I found out it’s really the riches are in the niches. If you know your niche and you know what to go after, that was one of the things that’s kind of made me just

where I’m at and it’s been really lucky.

Mike Hambright (17:02)
Yeah, that’s great. So I know

The journey you’re on now is to pull yourself more out of the business. And obviously as a member of Investor Fuel, we talk about that type of stuff all the time. Like use your business as a vehicle to give you the life that you want to live. Like the business should be to kind of fuel your life, right? And so I know you’re on that journey now. I mean, I know that I also know you had this kind of story about losing a million dollars. I think that’s probably some of the catalyst. I don’t know if you want to share that one. But I think when you, when stuff like that happens, you’re like, okay.

Tye Shumway (17:31)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (17:34)
It’s another reality check and there ends up, know, ideally being another silver lining behind it. Not that you, not that anybody wants these bad things to happen, right? But maybe, maybe you can share that story.

Tye Shumway (17:42)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. there’s one of the yeah, losing a million dollars. That’s never something I ever planned on doing when I went into business. I don’t plan on doing it ever again, because it was a hard journey. And it’s still a little bit of a hard journey. We’re still feeling a little bit of the repercussions of that. It’s a let’s see. Well, how did that even happen? it’s a

Yeah, it was 2022. Ended up meeting a guy that wanted to build a bunch of stuff. it was a guy that said, hey, and he took me out to some lots. What do think we can do with this? And I took my creative brain and said, oh, well, we can do this. We can do that. And ended up doing some work together. I ended up having five projects going on with him at the same time. We had three remodel projects. Sorry.

Yeah, three remodeled projects, two ground up construction projects and ready to start two other ground up construction projects with them. I was like, yeah, look at this. started my company. I actually went full time in my business 2020. I’ve had it since 2011, but it was more of a side hustle. But I was able to get lucky enough and leave corporate in 2020. We had enough real estate that kind of basically let me start this or go full time in this.

Instruction company because we have enough passive income that I’m like hey I want to start a construction company to help out my local local blue-collar people so we can kind of build this thing together and and we 2021 I met this guy we started building we were building 2022 and all of a we started getting Invoices weren’t getting paid as quickly and things weren’t moving as fastly and and I’m I’m kind of the redneck by heart and

and hands and like, dude, is everything good? yeah, yeah, good, all right, okay, we’re gonna keep going, because we were gung ho, we were doing all these things full bore. Like we had got things happening, we got our first remodel done, because he’s putting them on these nightly rental markets and we have deadlines, he’s already rented out this property, I know the very first property I did for him, he had it rented out and I’m there until two o’clock in the morning, wiping counters down, checking light switches, making sure everything’s good to go. We move on to couple other problems.

projects, come to find out.

I trusted way too long, went about six months in and about a million dollars deep in a hole that he had owed us in invoices. Just gave us enough just to kind of keep us going until I realized like, oh dude, my company’s gonna go down if I don’t stop this. So we ended up having to pull off his projects, re-figure out our company. I had to re-look at everything that we were doing. We had a lot of, we were just blowing and going, thinking like, oh yeah, this was just gonna happen, right?

and come to find out, yeah, he never ended up paying those invoices. And so we had to restructure. We really figure out how to dig ourselves out of the hole. And luckily, I’ve got some really good people that work with me, work with me, work for me, like just some really solid people, hard workers that we were able to find some other projects, pivot, really showed kind of the weak links in our company and were able to build some systems around it.

we

were able to pull ourselves up and keep going and keep moving forward. And we actually had another client almost try to do the same thing, but we were able to build a system from our experience that we learned and decided not to go down that road with that client because it looked like it was going to go down the same road. So we were able to put a system in place that we didn’t have in before. We say, hey, no, you didn’t pay your invoice. We’re off until you pay that invoice. And it really saved our bacon because it happened two or three times.

and now we’re ready to keep going and keep growing. But yeah, that was a hard lesson, and it’s still a lesson we’re trying to recover from, but I think we see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Mike Hambright (21:29)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, sorry that happened. there’s a, mean, you know.

bad things happen to good people, right, unfortunately. But again, back to the silver linings, like I think, I don’t know if that was so much the catalyst, but you start to put processes in place for how to do things. And then I think, I know where you’re at now, is you’re trying to find ways to pull yourself more and more out of the business so that your team can run it and do what all of us want, which is that kind of time freedom, right? So tell us a little bit about just kind of the journey you’re on to build processes, put the right people in place to allow you to kind of buy back.

your time and do what we all want which is whatever we want to do outside of work you know.

Tye Shumway (22:11)
Right, yeah. That one is definitely not my skill set. That is the hard thing that I try to do in It fights. I can go put a bag on and build something all day long, but if you want me to sit down behind a desk and build a system to do, it’s one of the most difficult things I have to do. Because I’m man, how does this work? And I don’t hold anyone accountable. But luckily, I was able to sit down. My right hand guy, Shae Batt, that guy is an amazing miracle worker.

He sees what we’re doing and once he does and he’s able to make the systems and the processes. So we’re the classic, I’m the visionary, here’s all the great ideas and he’s a classic integrator and is able to and he can tell me close enough to my face, he’s like, hey Tye, you aren’t hold yourself accountable, you’re not holding these people accountable. This is what our system is, step back and follow the system. And so I’ve really had people that have come in and built those systems for the company. They see what’s going on, right?

It’s me, it’s more some people. And finding the right people and the right skill set that you work with, find those who have what you don’t have and work with them. That’s how we were able to kind of more scale our company and build those systems in that have been able to work through it and make it happen.

Mike Hambright (23:24)
Yeah, I think the important thing is that entrepreneurs kind of know that if that’s not your strong suit that you find it, whether it’s a partner or a spouse and or or just an outside resource that you can hire to come in and get some of those processes built because it’s usually like you could probably talk to everything you do, but creating a systematic approach, detailed checklist processes for each thing, maybe some video training like it. It’s academically. It doesn’t sound hard,

Tye Shumway (23:46)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (23:53)
But when you got a million things going on in a day and it’s your best intention to get to it, but you don’t get to it, well, that becomes a problem too.

Tye Shumway (24:00)
Yeah, one of the things that is another problem other than building a system is actually once you build the system and let the system go, like instead of holding on to it, that’s something that I’ve learned. I don’t know if you’ve learned this, Mike, but like I actually just, made a phone call, I think it was last Thursday to my right hand guy, Shae. I’m like, hey dude, I’m just calling you up because…

Mike Hambright (24:09)
Yeah.

Tye Shumway (24:21)
there’s nothing panicking going on. Like, I don’t want to create a fire and call you to create a fire. I’ll just call you to let you know, like, I wanted to talk to someone because I’m like, I’m not panicking right now. Like everything, like the system was working. Our crews were on job sites, things were getting ordered. Clients were happy. And I call up my kind of like, dude, what’s wrong here? Something’s not panicking. You know, so we had this like, we had. ⁓

Mike Hambright (24:25)
Right.

That’s how it’s supposed to be,

Tye Shumway (24:46)
Yeah, yeah, and that

was the dream. So we lived it for about a day, and we’re like, ⁓ sweet. And ⁓ he actually reminded me this morning in our little meetings, I do, don’t create a fire where we don’t need one, all right? I’m like, okay, all right, you guys got this. And so I actually stepped away from a meeting today because he’s got it and I don’t need to be in it. And so yeah, it’s one of those things, if you build it, you also gotta be able to let people run with it and trust that they can do what you’ve built, right?

Mike Hambright (25:12)
Yep, yep,

that’s great. Some great lessons learned. Well, Tye, if folks wanted to connect with you, looking to do deals in Moab or just follow along with what you’re doing, where can they go?

Tye Shumway (25:24)
I’m on all the social medias Try to do try to do my best to keep upgraded with what TWS is doing, but you can go I’m on Instagram Tye Shumway Just my name you can I’m in LinkedIn you reach out to me there But you can also call my cell phone text is the best way for me to get back to you And you can call me up four three five four five nine nine seven two four And if you have you if anyone wants to do with anything in Moab, I’ve always got about ten

things going on and I can only do one at a time so if anyone wants to team up or have something take over like there’s there’s Moab’s growing and it’s blowing up and I can’t I can’t take advantage of all the opportunity here it actually pats me out night sometimes I’m like man there’s this and there’s this and there’s this how am I gonna take advantage of this I need I need more people they be able to help me out or I need to help out more people so we can do it kind of thing

Mike Hambright (26:06)
Yeah, that’s great.

Yeah,

that’s awesome. Well, thanks for joining us, Tatey.

Tye Shumway (26:21)
Yeah, no problem. Thank you. Appreciate your time. This was awesome.

Mike Hambright (26:23)
Yeah, great to

see you, man. Always great to see you. So hopefully our paths cross again here soon. ⁓ Everybody, hope you got some good value from today. I think some of the lessons learned here are, I guess that life is a series of lessons, But you have to learn from them. You can’t just have things happen to you and not learn from it. That’s how evolution works. If something happens and sometimes bad things happen, unfortunately, we don’t wish that on anybody. We don’t want it for anybody. But the worst tragedy that can happen from all that is you don’t.

Tye Shumway (26:28)
Yeah, for sure.

Mike Hambright (26:49)
your life doesn’t improve from that lesson, right? You just kind of keep going down the same path you were going down. It’s a blessing in disguise sometimes, something you wish never happened, but if it does, make sure you learn from it and you continue to grow in your personal life and in your business. So, appreciate you guys. We’ll see you on the next show.