How to Rebuild a Real Estate Business After Adversity | Alex Van Breukelen

Mike Hambright (00:33)
Everybody, welcome back to the show. Today I’m here with an old friend, Alex Van Breukelen . We’re gonna be talking about just pushing through adversity. I think a lot of folks have been through challenging times over the past few years. Some people are doing really well and crushing it. A lot of people have had a difficult time. And the reality is is those times can either crush you or they can make you stronger. And so we’re gonna talk about pushing through adversity today with Alex. So Alex, welcome to the show.

Alex Van Breukelen (00:56)
Pleasure to be here. Definitely appreciate you having me on.

Mike Hambright (00:58)
Yeah, good to see you. I you were on the I think you were on my Flip Turn podcast a long time ago, right? It’s been a long time.

Alex Van Breukelen (01:02)
It’s been a while. It’s probably been, you know, eight years, almost ten years.

Mike Hambright (01:06)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I’ve been podcasting now. Well, since 2012. So the reality has been 14 years. It’s kind of crazy. I was just talking to a couple of friends like Joe McCall and guys that that started their podcast right before me. But at that back in those days, there were only like six of us that had podcasts. And now I think there’s like six thousand real estate podcasts. But yeah, yeah. So cool. Well, hey, great to see you in

Before we kinda jump in, I know we’re gonna talk about a little bit about some of the challenges that you’ve had and kind of worked through over the past few years and and maybe some tips for folks for how to kind of fight through those situations and come out better on top. Before we jump into that, maybe just tell us a little bit about your background as a real estate investor.

Alex Van Breukelen (01:42)
Sure. so been investing now for about ten years, which is actually not true. I bought my initial investment property in two thousand four. While I was deployed, I had my sister close on the property and that was a rental property in Jacksonville, North Carolina. came to Maryland in two thousand seven, got stationed here and bought my first rehab, did that, did another one in two thousand eight and then took a nice little break from everything real estate related. And then in twenty sixteen I jumped in, you know, head first right into the waters and have been just building.

built consistently from twenty sixteen all the way through twenty two. started buying rental properties and then wound up doing a couple of flips and then realized hey I got a I’ve got a lot of leads here. So I started wholesaling afterwards. So I kinda took a an alternate path to what a lot of people do. And then just kind of built the wholesaling business out and then had a had some life changes in in twenty two and twenty three.

Mike Hambright (02:30)
Yeah. And I know we don’t have to dig deep, but I know you went through some personal challenges. I think a lot of people, you know, a lot of people have different things in their life. like you said, like I know my mom passed away three or four years ago. Quite frankly, about three and a half years ago, I’ve never, you know, it’s left a hole in my heart, right? It is just like things that happen in your life. And and I think the the whole point is that’s life. You’re not gonna be able to avoid some of those things, right? But it’s to play the long game.

and be able to push through those situations, right?

Alex Van Breukelen (02:58)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it’s it’s one of the things that has kept me going is the being able to be resilient and looking at the the the negative things in life and being able to figure out how do you I don’t wanna say turn a negative into a positive, but look at it and figure out how do you learn from it, how do you grow from from the the negative experiences ’cause you’re gonna face Everybody’s gonna have some some negative things. So

Mike Hambright (03:19)
Yeah. I I think like maybe to share some thoughts on like how to because you think of that differently now probably than when it happened to you. And I can tell you I I won’t say I I I’ve often said that anything bad that happens in your life, there’s a silver lining of something. And I’ll say this like I don’t believe that’s true with losing a parent or somebody dying. Like there’s no silver lining in that. But a lot of things that have happened to me in my life, like getting fired from a dream job or things like that, at the time, it feels like death. It just feels like a kick in the gut, right?

But there often is with time, there often is a silver lining. And some of it is because you were able to reinvent yourself. Some of it is because it wasn’t as great as you thought it was. And and it just like it opened up opportunities that maybe you didn’t even know existed. You meet somebody that you never would have otherwise. Whatever, right? There’s a lot of things there. May maybe just talk a little bit about like for anybody that’s going through those types of things.

how to turn that into a positive if possible.

Alex Van Breukelen (04:15)
So for me, I’ve dealt with negative things my whole life. I’ve been through a lot of trauma long before I’ve got into real estate. and yeah, you have to look at the events of life is is everything happening for a reason. You know, I’m I’m very happy where I am right now, even though the last couple of years were rough. And I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the the the the traumatic things that I’ve been through. That includes you like like Lou I lost my dad, you know, in twenty ten, you know, suddenly out of nowhere and and that

That hurt, like that, that cut deep. You know, I spent a good amount of time in combat. I’ve lost a lot of friends in combat, you know, and that that affects me. I lost my little brother. You know, it’s it’s been one trauma after the other. And each one of them has always posed an opportunity for you for me to be able to learn something about myself, learn something about other people around me, how to interact with other people, and and as it allowed me to grow. Whereas I can look at other people that have been through similar situations.

And they’re devastated and they can never pull themselves back up. For me, I look at it and I’m like, I I I can’t imagine that because you only have one life and that’s it. And you cannot change the past. So I think for me, that’s the biggest thing. I cannot change anything that’s happened. I can’t. I I made a decision in 22 to leave my wife, and it was a hard one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make. And I look back on it and sure, or the things I would have done in the process.

little bit differently, yes, but I wouldn’t change it. I definitely wouldn’t change it because I am where I am. I’ve rebuilt. I’m in an amazing relationship. My kids are healthy. My kids are happy. And who knows what would have life would have been like. Because you can’t you can’t sit on the, you know, I coulda, shoulda, woulda. You you just gotta take action and then move forward and then figure out how to to to enjoy it.

Mike Hambright (05:58)
Yeah. And and would you say, ’cause I I’ve thought about this a little bit lately, just there’s obviously been some challenging times, obviously in the marketplace and the economy, is I’ve kind of found myself using the phrase, you know, control the controllables. Like there’s a bunch of stuff that you can’t control. And I think there’s a lot of people that ended up that end up focusing on things that they just can’t control. When there are things you can control, and if that’s all you can do, why focus on

Stuff that you just no matter how much you dwell on it, you can’t change it. But I I I I know that’s it’s way easier said than done. But at the end of the day, that is what you have to do.

Alex Van Breukelen (06:30)
Absolutely. And and it’s so not just the controllables of the past, because you you it it’s in the past. It’s already happened. You can’t change it. In what you’re looking at today. So I tell people this all the time. You hear you hear people in every different walk of life talking about the news and about the president and about world events and about all these things outside of their control, completely and totally outside of their control. And that’s my first question is it is does it directly impact you right now, or can you directly have an impact on it?

If you cannot directly have an impact on it and you spend half of your day worrying about it, focusing on it, what are you really doing? You’re spending all of your time and energy focusing on something that you have zero control over. Focus on what you can control. Focus on your environment, focus on your circle of influence that you can reach out to the people that are directly around you. And when you go through a trauma, you realize that as well. There’s a lot of stuff that you just can’t control. And you have to be able to accept that.

Mike Hambright (07:21)
I’m not definitely not an expert, but you know, I have some arrow wounds in my back and things as well. Like when you go through life, it it happens, right? And so I I feel like, you know, kind of the guidance that I typically give people. And sometimes when I I was talking to a friend yesterday and I was giving him advice on this because he’s Man, I just feel like I’m kind of lost right now and spinning my wheels. And I was like, you know, I was talking to him, I was like, I I gotta let you know. I’m talking to myself while I’m talking to you right now. I’m kind of telling myself some of these same things. But what I’ve kind of found is just clarity in your vision. Like

Hey, things are changed now. What is it that I want? Like, what do I want? Like, where do I want to be? And having that North Star allows you to look forward. Otherwise, if you’re looking backwards, like you said, you can’t change it. But if you’re looking forward and you can start to find clarity and is like, well, with this new circumstance that I find myself in, where am I trying to go? What would make me happy? What does my business need to look like? What does my personal life need to look like? Just having that vision and clarity and what you want your overall life to look like.

then allows you to start kind of healing or moving forward or improving things, right?

Alex Van Breukelen (08:19)
Absolutely. So bringing it back to on the real estate style real estate side of it, right? So I look back at what my vision, what my goals were before a I decided to to go through a divorce. and my goal was 240 single family rental properties, a million dollars a year in passive income, $85,000 a month. I mean, I anybody I would meet in the real estate industry, I’d be like, this is my goal, this is what I’m gonna do. After the divorce, I sat back and I looked at that goal and I’m like, why?

Where did that come from? I that was such an arbitrary number that really meant nothing. It didn’t do anything for me because even if I hit those numbers in the the situation I was in in life, I wouldn’t have been happy. So now I sat back down and I built those goals out differently and I looked at what do I need right now to be content? And my I brought that number from 240 single family properties down to 75. And at 75 single family properties, I have the money I need to live on. I have the money I need to invest, and I have the money I need to travel. And I’m like,

Okay, that’s let’s go. We’re we’re we’re gonna hit this thing in the next three years. So that’s in and it it’ll it really and the only reason I’m able to do that and get refocused afterwards is because I was able to reshape those goals and tie those goals to something that was more realistic and and tangible.

Mike Hambright (09:30)
Yeah. And I think th there’s about I just was talking to my eighteen year old son about this last night because he’s like, you know, trying to find his way and and he has like these huge goals. And I was like, you know, in my experience, because I’ve coached a lot of people in real estate as well, and sometimes like there’s this there’s this thought of this big, hairy, audacious goal, right? The BHG goal. Like and and and I and I get it. we all c it it’s good to dream big, especially as an entrepreneur. But sometimes people dream and I’m not saying that you did this, but sometimes people dream so big that they

They get discouraged when it looks like they’re not gonna hit that goal. And if it knocks you out of the game, it’s like, well, that big goal was too big, right? I mean, it’s not that you can’t get there, but like get from A to B and don’t worry about A to Z and when you’re at B, decide where you go from there,

right? Yeah.

Alex Van Breukelen (10:12)
Yep. Yep. Yep. So it’s it’s funny.

I I sat I had a six hour drive with my kid yesterday, my sixteen year old son. He talk about big goals. My son decides that he wants to create a a quantum computer. And I know I mean this is a field that goes way over my head. I know nothing about physics or anything else. And he starts spurting

Mike Hambright (10:27)
Yeah, yeah.

Alex Van Breukelen (10:30)
off all this stuff about how he’s gonna create a quantum computer. So I went and looked it up online. Sure, he’s gonna do it. You need millions of dollars in backing, you need a a helium suppressed room and all this other stuff. So I’m like

Good kid, keep on wishing. But he probably will achieve it at some

Mike Hambright (10:42)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, let’s talk about

Alex Van Breukelen (10:45)
point.

Mike Hambright (10:46)
Yeah, that’s great. I mean, I think I think part of it is is, you know, with him and with everybody, with you and with me too, some of the stuff you’ve been through is you make mistakes. And I often talk about like mistake like failures are not final unless you quit. Like and the truth is, is people learn more, I know I do, from my mistakes than my wins. Like when I win something, sometimes it just feels like that was too easy, unless you’ve lost a bunch of times and you’re like

Finally all those losses turned into a win. So I think failures are often just stepping stones to your successes. And you have to have those things to pivot. And so I know we were talking a little bit a ahead of time of just the importance of learning from those mistakes and pivot, pivot, pivot, change whatever you need to change to get towards your goal. And so, but I also know that there’s a lot of people that go through some of the stuff that you’ve gone through, and you mentioned it up front, is sometimes people just curl up and they just they can’t move forward, right? So just

Maybe talk a little bit about in your experience and maybe some tips for others about how to learn from those mistakes and take the next step, take the next step instead of curling up in a corner and pretending like it didn’t happen.

Alex Van Breukelen (11:46)
So on the business side of it, it’s very difficult as a a business leader, a small entrepreneur, even if you only have two people on your team, when you’re responsible for somebody else’s, you know, food on their table and your personal life, the things going on in your personal life, whether it’s a death or divorce or whatever it is, cripples you to a point where you are I don’t want to say sacrificing, but you are letting go of the people

That you that you had that are relying on you, that takes a mental toll that a lot of people don’t talk about. And it’s it’s something where it’s if you look at men, and I’m just gonna say men in particular, that go through a divorce, and what happens to them, both in their personal life and in their business life, a lot of things don’t get talked about. You know, a lot of the the emotional side of it don’t get talked about.

A lot of the the weight that is on people’s shoulders on the divorce side of it, for some reason, the expectation is that the business side can continue on. Right? And it really can’t. While a lot of people say, you need to be able to separate the two of them. What you have going on in your personal life shouldn’t affect what’s going on in your business life. I found and I tried that. Like I I put the diligent effort in. I decided in May of 22, okay, I’m gonna leave my wife.

I’m gonna get a divorce, I’m gonna buy a new house. By November of 22, I had moved out. Thought that I was able to do that because that’s what I had been taught, that I have to keep my business life, my personal life separate. so in November of 22, when I moved out, I still was telling my team everything was fine, everything was good. and I kind of continued that charade through the beginning of 23 until I just completely and totally fractured. And when I did, I let down my entire team.

And I literally had to let my entire team go. and none of it was pretty at all. You know, I wound up you know pretty much shutting down all the operations. So the the biggest thing for me in that one is if you’re facing a trauma, if you’re dealing with some stuff, whether it’s divorce or death or whatever it is, you can’t just sit there and be stubborn and say, nope, I got this. Because you don’t. We’re just human beings, and that’s it. And at at the end of the day, you know, no matter how big your business is, no matter how

much of a badass you are and everything else, you have to be able to go out there and get help in a situation like that. And I think that if I would have not been stubborn from the the minute that I decided to end the relationship with my ex-wife, I I think that I probably would have been able to salvage the business then and not had to rebuild everything. But again, this goes back to what we were just previously talking about. I can’t change it. I made those decisions

Who knows what it would have looked like, even if I did that at that point. So I can’t have regrets about it, but I know that God forbid if anything anything happens again, I would not do that same thing again. So

Mike Hambright (14:23)
Yeah. I I think and there’s lessons to learn from that, right? I mean, hopefully you never go through a divorce again. But like I talk

Alex Van Breukelen (14:29)
it definitely won’t.

Mike Hambright (14:29)
a lot about scaling your business, but I I I also talk about it not from the chest thumping standpoint of like if I scale my business, I can get a Lambo. Like I don’t care what you get, but the truth is is like you need to be able for most entrepreneurs, my advice to them is usually build the business so you can buy back your time and get yourself off the org chart as much as possible. Because, you know, one, none of us get into business to have a job.

But most people get stuck there. They get stuck in the self-employed box. And but two, the goal was to be able to control your time, right? When people got into business. Most never get past a point where they they can. I mean, they might have some flexibility here and there, but they can’t necessarily leave for a couple of weeks at a time or whatever without the business struggling from that. And so I think, you know, the the point of scaling is to be able to take yourself out of the business. So you’re not.

the bottleneck on a bunch of stuff, including if you’re having some challenges in your personal life. Could be you know more common is probably health issues, like health issues that you have to step out or health issues of a loved one or something like that. where you have to care for your family or your parents or ch children or whatever it might be, then the business struggles. It’s like to build the business up to a point to where, you know, you’re maybe you’re still needed, but you’re not necessary at every point to where the business is going to collapse if if you are going through something or you have to step away for a little bit.

Alex Van Breukelen (15:43)
Yeah, absolutely. And and as I’m sitting here listening to you, I’m like, yep, I’m still that bottleneck right now in my business. Not for all of the aspects

Mike Hambright (15:49)
Yeah. Yeah.

Alex Van Breukelen (15:50)
I was before, but on certain aspects. underwriting.

Mike Hambright (15:53)
Right.

Alex Van Breukelen (15:53)
Right now I’m I am the only one underwriting in my business. And God forbid if something happens to me, that is a major shortfall that we have. I’ve been able to make enough changes on the sales side of it and on the admin side of it.

Well I’m not that bottleneck, but at without a doubt, as you’re saying that I’m sitting there listening and I’m like, hm, yep. Something happens right now and no underwriting gets done. That means no warfare’s get placed.

Mike Hambright (16:13)
And I know that yeah,

and I know that you that you’d said we were talking a little bit up front is like, you know, you you were prop you had a great team, but it was more on the administrative side. and my guess is that is that you were the the best sales guy and the sales drives the drives the bus, right? In this business and a lot of entrepreneurial businesses. And so I know you said, you know, kind of going forward you’re you’re making an a change to being more of a sales driven business where you’re not the bottleneck on that. And tell tell us a little bit more about that.

Alex Van Breukelen (16:41)
Yep. So right now I’ve got two amazing folks on the sales team. I had to let one go recently, probably should have let him go, you know, eight, nine months ago. but I had them filling an alternative role as well on the property management side of it, so it was worth it until it wasn’t. so now I am actively on the hunt trying to find that that last salesperson to bring on the team that’s gonna be an absolute killer. and that’s what I’m looking for right now is somebody else to augment my team with that is gonna get in here and

You know, fill in the systems that we have, fill in in in the processes that we have built out already, jump on the database that we have. I mean, we have I don’t even know how many thousands of of existing leads that we have built out from the last ten years of doing business. we’ve got a good amount of new incoming leads. So I need somebody that’s willing to step in and absolutely swing for the fences. Somebody that’s gonna be in here at nighttime, in here on the weekends, hustle like I had hustled when I first built the business, when I had to rebuild the business.

that’s what I’m gonna be looking for is somebody to to fill those shoes and and if I not if when I get that position filled, then it’s gonna allow me to truly sit back and start scaling again because I’m not anybody new on the admin side of it. My admin overhead now is all old either overseas or AI based ’cause I’ve been pushing heavy on AI. and all I’m gonna do is just augment the sales team and just keep

Mike Hambright (17:57)
Yeah.

Alex Van Breukelen (17:58)
growing that way.

Mike Hambright (17:58)
Yeah, ’cause it it sucks when you’re and and I’ve been in this position before where you’re you’re the key person that’s responsible for sales and you know, you either have to step out of the business or something’s going on or you go on vacation or anything, like the sales stop, right? I mean, we often don’t feel it because there’s some there’s a pipeline there somewhere of some stuff that kind of comes around, but you’re robbing yourself from the future because you’re not generating maybe you’re not generating leads or you’re not planting, you know, you’re not

building up that pipeline anymore while you’re kind of pulled out. And so I think that’s the problem with most small businesses is they’re not sales focused enough that the pipeline is always full or they’re always focused on filling it up. And and and that as the owner, sometimes you’re the you’re the bottleneck on that. And if you step away, then, you know, you can say, I remember times where we we were fortunate that, you know, from the time my we started a business when my son was one. So by the time he was five, we’re traveling to Europe. We’re like,

doing a lot of things and and

Alex Van Breukelen (18:48)
Yeah, yeah.

Mike Hambright (18:49)
it felt great to be on vacation, but the truth is I was on the phone the whole time. I was just working from a beautiful place, somewhere somewhere else, right? And it felt cool to say, I’m an entrepreneur and we’re traveling, we get to do all these things. But the reality is is it’s not as glamorous as it would have been otherwise if I didn’t have to like be chained to the phone still because I was I was the critical person to generate leads for the business or generate sales for the business, you know.

Alex Van Breukelen (19:11)
Yep, completely understood. And we I just got back.

Mike Hambright (19:12)
Yeah. Yeah.

Alex Van Breukelen (19:13)
I spent four or five days in upstate New York, relaxed, had an opportunity to get out and just be in the woods. And I I know that my team, they got some stuff done on the phone. They were definitely on the phone moving the needle forward and and which is great, but none of the stuff that I needed to get done got done. None of the underwriting got done. So right now, today is Tuesday. There should have been three, four offers going out today. It didn’t happen. And it’s it’s all on that’s on me.

That’s not that’s not on my team. That’s on me because I don’t have the numbers written for them to go back and make offers on these properties. So

Mike Hambright (19:41)
Yeah. Yeah. So let’s talk about one of the things that we talked about up front is is just, you know, to learn from your mistakes and to take advantage of a challenging time to refresh. And that is to put some maybe it’s new people, systems, processes in place, some new clarity on your vision or whatever. So I know you’ve been focused on we talked a little bit about kind of changing your team, being more sales focused. You’ve been implementing AI and trying to find, you know, opportunities to optimize where maybe you weren’t before. So

That is one of those silver linings. A difficult time allows you to rethink how you do pretty much everything, right? And so maybe talk about some of the things you’re doing and then how others can use that opportunity to refresh.

Alex Van Breukelen (20:19)
Yep. So one of the biggest things that has allowed me to to gain some of my time back is better utilization of my VA team. So I’ve had I I’ve had one same VA now for six years. She left for a little while. When I shut everything down, she left, went with somebody else for about a year and a half. She came back to me afterwards. but outside of her, all the rest of the team, I don’t think I was using effectively. I was using the VAs as if they were

Task-based creatures that could only do what I told them to do. And that’s so far from the truth. So now I’ve got them to where they each have their own responsibilities and they’re each running their own sector of what we’re doing. the one girl, Denise, I have right now, is pretty much killing it on the marketing side of it. I I have zero impact or zero, you know, hands in one of our marketing programs. She’s taken it and completely and totally run with it.

I’ve given her her right and left lateral limits and I said, you’ll work within these constraints and get it done. She’s killing it. brought on a new property manager, a virtual property manager, where she is absolutely killing it as well right now. So again, I’ve given her those right and left lateral limits and I said, These are the things you can’t do. Please stay within those boundaries, create the process behind it, document everything, and and go from there. And that’s been a big part of it too, is getting everything documented that I did not previously have documented.

So that if I do have that turnover, I know I can get somebody else to jump right in there, get the training done, and pick up and running. That’s all on the admin side of it. On the sales side of it, similar, similarly, I don’t know if I said that properly, we’re documenting our sales process now. So we we formalized our sales training to where we I’m not trying to pitch them or anything, but Sales Gravy, Jeb Blount’s company, we decided to jump on board with them.

So we paid a a couple of bucks to get into sales training and we do sales training every week. We we started about five or six weeks ago now. So every week on Fridays, we sit down and we do formal sales training. Where we’re we’re practicing scripts and we’re gonna be talking talking through problem sets and building out our, you know, rejections and building out our objections and rebuttals and the whole nine yards. So that to me has been critical on this this next stage is formalizing it because

For a while I thought I was a sales trainer and I would get up and I would talk to my team, and this is in the in the past iteration, and I could I know what I’m doing in my mind. I can articulate to myself what I’m doing on the phone, but I was I am not a damn sales trainer. Not never

Mike Hambright (22:45)
Mm.

Alex Van Breukelen (22:45)
have been. So having somebody else to be able to speak in a training methodology has been huge. So that is one of the biggest things is

I can get on the phone and I can hear somebody’s tone on the phone and I can know what the next steps are, but being able to train somebody on that, I wasn’t good at it. So that’s the the biggest thing is

Mike Hambright (23:02)
Mm-hmm.

Alex Van Breukelen (23:03)
as we’re rebuilding on the sales side of it, focusing on that, putting money towards that and making sure that everybody on the sales side is getting the training they needed, continual training on sales.

Mike Hambright (23:12)
Yeah. Yeah. That’s great. Well, Alex, I know you you operate in the Baltimore area. If folks want to connect with you in any way, like, where can they go?

Alex Van Breukelen (23:20)
Well sure. If so if anybody’s in the sales world looking to get into real estate, you can go to victorbravorei.com. you know, and you can check us out there. That’s just like an application page. My main website is victorbravo.com. we’re on all the social medias. We’re just starting to push out some new content on TikTok because what we found is just over the last handful of of weeks, months even, the algorithm in TikTok seems to have changed to where everything is localized now.

So before we were getting people from India and all over the world that would see the TikTok posts. And now it seems like everything is local. So we’re gonna have a new another marketing push here in the next couple of weeks where we’re gonna be pushing out, you know, sell my house type marketing on TikTok itself. So so you can check us out on TikTok as well.

Mike Hambright (24:01)
Yeah, that’s great. Awesome. Awesome. Well

you’ll have the links down below. So thanks for joining today. Thanks for getting vulnerable a little bit, sharing your your story. the truth is is there’s a lot of people out there that are in some sort of struggle. Like most people are going through something, right? And I think on social media, it looks like everybody’s life is great.

Alex Van Breukelen (24:17)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Hambright (24:18)
quite frankly, a lot of the masterminds or communities that are out there are are a little bit more ego driven. I would like to say that Investor Fuel is very much not. Like we really try to

I allow people to open up because the truth is is like we all have junk going on in our lives and unless you can kind of face that head on. Like you said, your business is going to struggle if you can’t fix those issues. So anything that people are going through, we tend to be a little more on the vulnerable side because quite frankly, if you have junk going on in your life, like your business is gonna struggle too. Quite frankly, if if your business is going great and your life isn’t, then what’s the point of the business? All right, the other way around too. So your business really needs to serve you is kinda is kind of what

like to say. So but thanks for joining us today.

Alex Van Breukelen (24:54)
Mike, thank you very much. I definitely appreciate it. And hopefully we don’t have to wait so long again for us to to get on the call. And I j I j I’m gonna leave off by saying this as well. So for any of your audience that’s listening to it as well, I first met you almost ten years ago when you reached out to me about Investor Fuel and I and I shared with you w this with you a little bit earlier as well. I had a very hard decision to make, and that decision was to go into your mastermind and go into another mastermind, and I went into the other mastermind, and this goes back to the whole I I can’t live with regrets.

I can’t live with man, I coulda, shoulda, woulda. But like and then it I’ve gotten so much value from that mastermind, but I do know some other people that are in your mastermind in Investor Fuel and man, I have seen them absolutely explode and the value that they’ve gotten from from everything inside of there. So if if if anybody inside of your mastermind hasn’t told you yet, I’m sure that they all greatly, greatly appreciate the value that you pour into them. So

Mike Hambright (25:46)
Well, thank you for saying that, man. Yeah. So there there’s always we talk about playing the long game and learning from your mistakes or decisions. So

Alex Van Breukelen (25:52)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (25:53)
we’re not done yet, Alex. Maybe we’ll get you in here. So but

Alex Van Breukelen (25:55)
We’ll be in touch.

Mike Hambright (25:57)
yeah. But everybody, thanks for joining us today. If you’re going through anything, I think the important thing is just to have people in your life that you can surround yourself with that that you can talk to ’cause it it is easy to put on if you’re especially if you’re a a guy, to kind of put on your your machismo costume and pretend like nothing’s bothering you and

The reality is you know, it doesn’t have to be that way. So appreciate you guys for joining us on the show today. We’ll see you on the next one.

Alex Van Breukelen (26:18)
Take care.