Partnering 101 for Real Estate Investors

Mike Hambright (00:00.856)
Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. Today I’m with my buddy, Jaden. We’re gonna be talking about the right and wrong ways to partner. Jaden’s done a ton of different partnerships from a business standpoint and his goal is really to be more of the investor side and share his knowledge and maybe money to kind of operate things but not be stuck in the day to day. So we’re gonna talk about some of the lessons learned and the pros and cons of partnering. Jaden, welcome to the show. Good to see ya.

Jaden Ghylin (00:25.799)
Thanks for having me. Good to see you as well.

Mike Hambright (00:28.63)
Yeah, yeah. So I’m excited. I found out I’ve known you for years and found out some new stuff about you in the last five minutes and a bunch of stuff that you’ve kind of partnered and that I even know about. Obviously, I know your partner James and Minnesota Home Guys, but I’m excited to talk about this because I think, you know, there’s not…

maybe similar to you, you do a lot of partnerships, is there’s a point in my career where I kind of passed this point. like, I don’t want to do anything unless it’s some sort of collaboration or partnership because the truth is, it’s just more fun with somebody else. Helps hold me accountable and it’s easy to let myself down, but I’m never gonna let down anybody else, right? And so it kind of allows me to stretch things further than maybe I would do on my own.

It sounds like you’re in many ways kind of have the same mindset.

Jaden Ghylin (01:17.916)
Yeah, exactly the same. was in corporate America when I left and went real estate full time. started, you know, I was working for these huge corporations and I was like, I just want to work by myself. I was tired of all this bureaucracy. So I went into house flipping because I’ve been flipping houses on the side for years and I started flipping houses by myself. It was the first project, the second project, I was like, man, this sucks. Work it by yourself. Look, I just go to work every day by myself and get no one to talk to. It was pretty lonely, pretty fast.

Mike Hambright (01:41.826)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (01:47.81)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jaden Ghylin (01:49.09)
So basically after the first house or two, I was like, I’m going to stop doing this because this is so fun. And I’m like, and I met my, my neighbor and I didn’t know he was in the construction. We were playing boot hockey together and he mentioned he wanted to help me out with some flips and stuff. And so that’s kind of how it evolved into, you know, starting a business and partnering is I was basically going to just walk away from it. And then he got involved and like, well, if I had a few people to talk to all day, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, you know? So that’s how I got into business.

Mike Hambright (02:09.452)
Yeah, yeah.

Mike Hambright (02:13.964)
That’s right, yeah. It makes that real work a little more tolerable.

Jaden Ghylin (02:18.816)
yeah, it’s just like night and day. He’s like, I went from working by myself to like, you know, we had a little office and we turned his office pretty much into a cigar lounge with like a red velvet couch. And we didn’t actually smoke cigars, but it felt like that. And we just hang out, you know, underwrite deals, analyze deals. And was just, I don’t know, it was a good time.

Mike Hambright (02:20.76)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (02:28.748)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (02:36.726)
Yeah, yeah, that’s cool. Hey, before we get too far down this path, I’m excited for you to share your knowledge on partnerships today and learn more. Let’s start with your background, like how you got into real estate in the first place and maybe what you did before that.

Jaden Ghylin (02:51.705)
Yeah, so, okay, that goes back to, I got into real estate in 2005. was, my career was in electrical engineering. My degree was in electrical engineering. I started my first job out of college down in Cedar Rapids, Iowa at an aerospace company. And after going through school for four and a half years, all this work, like really hard, that’s a very hard degree to get. So I got the degree and was ready to get to work and make some money. Started my first week on the job. Yeah. And I was like, I can’t do this. Like I can do the work, but I can’t physically.

sit in this factory with no windows all day. I just can’t do it. So after a week, I’m like, oh, this is not good. So somebody mailed me a book from Kiyosaki, Rich Dad Poor Dad, just like serendipitously showed up at my doorstep that first week I was on working. I was like, I don’t know what this is, but I’m going to read it. And I read it. I’m like, oh, I just have to buy real estate. Like, I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m going to buy some real estate. So I went and bought it.

Mike Hambright (03:25.272)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (03:44.086)
Hahaha

One week into the job? mean, how long before you started doing deals?

Jaden Ghylin (03:52.152)
I went and bought a property in like three weeks. I was 23 years old. I had no clue I was doing. Yeah, it happens. Yeah, I just went and like, I called a realtor and I’m like, hey, I need to buy a rental property. Like, like my hair’s on fire really bad.

Mike Hambright (03:55.441)
wow. In Iowa?

In Iowa? Okay.

Mike Hambright (04:07.566)
Yeah, wow. So I don’t know if you know, obviously I grew up, I grew up about 45 minutes or an hour from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. So the Quad Cities, but on the Illinois side, but right on the Iowa border. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jaden Ghylin (04:14.517)
Which time were you in?

That’s right. I think you mentioned that to me. I forgot that, thanks for bringing that up again. No, I’m very familiar with Quad Cities. mean, when you’re in Cedar Rapids, there’s not much else around there. So it’s Quad Cities and Dubuque and that’s about it. So yeah, pretty interesting. So I like, I bought the rental property and I was like, my thought was I was 23. didn’t know anything about anything. So I’m like, if I just buy a house and don’t lose money, you know, I’ll learn something by doing this. And so I bought a house. It was like a little Rambler like ranch on Slab on Grade.

Mike Hambright (04:26.761)
Right.

Yeah.

Jaden Ghylin (04:47.959)
just a little like 800, what, 1000 square foot I think. And I was like, well, there’s not much that can go wrong with this thing. There’s no basement. The utilities were in like a little room, laundry room kind of thing that like if something goes wrong, it’s not gonna flood the house. And I just, I fixed it up myself, which I didn’t know how to do that either, but I’ve figured it out kind of. And did all that and spent six, I don’t know, six months messing around with all that, rented it out and all these things. And got it up and running by the end of the year. And I was like, man, I think I’m like 300 bucks a month.

Mike Hambright (05:05.678)
figured it out.

Jaden Ghylin (05:16.982)
cash flow and I was managing it and doing everything and I’m like, would I make way more than that in my job? I was like, how does this replace my job? You know, this book told me this is the way to go and I wasn’t seeing it. So I figured that didn’t fix my problem. So I was like, well, I’m of stuck in this engineering thing for a while. So I went and found a different job with a different company, small business in town and oh, I got a window office. And I was like, oh, I don’t need to quit engineering. This is way better.

Mike Hambright (05:19.597)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (05:38.744)
They had windows?

Yeah, there you go.

Jaden Ghylin (05:46.803)
Yeah, I got my own office with a window, like just this little factory was just amazing. Just really cool place to work. Military company, but it was a small business. know, when I started, it was like 30 people working there. And I was like, this is awesome. Like I can do other stuff. I don’t have to just do this one little job. had, you know, windows and it’s just different things like, I guess different things for different people, right? I just can’t work for a big company is what I figured out. I just can’t do it. So.

Mike Hambright (06:04.237)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (06:14.03)
There’s a lesson there, same in real estate, sometimes you gotta take a different approach than what you’ve done. It’s not necessarily what you’re doing right now, it’s just maybe the way you’re doing it.

Jaden Ghylin (06:23.026)
Yeah, it’s amazing because I was doing kind of similar work, but it was just a different environment. know, and I just I went from hating my job to loving my job real quick. So that was pretty cool. Then when I was there, I got to. It was such a small company, I was able to maneuver into other roles in the company really easily because it was kind of like wherever there’s wherever you need help is where you can push into big corporations don’t work like that. You can’t just push yourself into sales, you know, very easily.

So I pushed myself into sales at that company because I just thought it was interesting. So I started helping out with that. Then they just ended up creating a new job for me, calling it a technical director and made me a technical director, which was really like a sales job. It was just disguised. So all my time was spent with potential customers on the phone or on site with them.

Mike Hambright (07:12.526)
Yeah. you were, but you kept doing real estate like on the side, is that right?

Jaden Ghylin (07:17.585)
Yeah, so I just had that one rental property in Iowa there and I just, my intention had been to get more. But after I switched jobs, I was liking that, you know, better and I didn’t have, it was an emergency to do more real estate. And then we were going to have a kid and move to Minneapolis at some point. So I was like, I don’t want to buy more real estate here if we’re going to move. So I started researching the real Minneapolis market and learning as much as I could about it from, from Iowa. And I basically spent like a year and half just becoming the expert on the Minneapolis real estate market, reading all the

realtor reports, all the stats, everything. And that was like…

Mike Hambright (07:49.262)
So Jaden, were you from Minneapolis? I just assumed that, but were you from Iowa? okay. Okay. Okay.

Jaden Ghylin (07:53.858)
North Dakota. Bismarck, yeah. Yeah, from North Dakota originally. So Minneapolis is like the big city that people move to from North Dakota. There’s really nowhere else to go, you know. So, yeah, I I became the expert of that market and we moved in this was like 2008, 2009. So like the sky is falling, the world’s falling apart. And I was like, OK, this is a really great opportunity I can see developing here. And I was watching the Minneapolis market was just cratering. So

Mike Hambright (08:03.896)
Yeah.

Jaden Ghylin (08:23.954)
When we moved in 2010, I was really well positioned to understand what to do, I thought, as well as I could. And so I started buying my, I was going to buy as many rental properties as I could, knowing what I knew about how to buy rental properties, which was not much. So I bought 10 properties just using like bank financing and, you know, just like trying to figure it out. I didn’t know what private money and hard money and all this stuff. So I bought 10 properties from like 2010 through 2013, which was like fast and a lot for me.

Looking back on it, I’m like, I could have probably done 10 times that much now. So that’s how I got started was doing that, buying rentals. I bought some of these rentals and my realtor said he could resell them for a big profit if I just painted and carpeted them. And I’m like, OK, we’ll give it a shot. He did one. I think I made 40 grand the first time he did it. It was like, OK, that’s like 10 years of cash flow for a rental right there. Or 20 years. So I was like, OK, I’ll just keep buying rentals and if they make sense to sell, I’ll resell. And I ended up reselling like.

Mike Hambright (09:14.638)
All right.

Jaden Ghylin (09:23.002)
I mean, every other one or so I’d have to flip because it made sense to sell it. So that’s kind how I got started out. And I was working in sales engineering the whole time I was doing all this. So this is just my side business. And then I ended up partnering with a company, a construction company, but we got into a foreclosure program where we were getting like these off market deals from this program. And we started to do a little bit of volume, like five houses a year or whatever, which I couldn’t do by myself. So they put up the construction funds. I like financed the project and then

they’d run the entire project for me. I would do nothing and they knew how to like stage and color, know, interior design, all this stuff. So we did that for a couple of years and I just kept working. And then the market got too high for me to buy rentals anymore in like 2015 or so. And then I started not liking my job very much because I figured out like when I can do real estate on the side, I enjoyed it. And when I couldn’t do real estate, then it wasn’t as much fun to do my main job. So in 2016, I also worked for a big company then Intel.

And the big company thing just, I don’t know why I learn my lesson, but it doesn’t work for me. So I ended up leaving Intel and just going, going to real estate full time without really having a plan and had to figure it out. So that’s kind of how I really got started full time into it. And I was like, well, I had flipped houses on the side for-

Mike Hambright (10:36.576)
Yep. And pretty soon into that is when you met James and you guys formed a partnership there.

Jaden Ghylin (10:41.49)
Yeah, so when I left Intel, me and friend James were friends, played Mubaka together, but I didn’t know, like he’s a firefighter, you I didn’t know much more about him than that. But when I started doing this and I told him I had to run to these projects and stuff, he’s like, well, why don’t I come with you and I’ll help you, know, swing the hammer a little bit or whatever. And so I had him do a project. I was very resistant to this, by the way, like I told him no, like five times. Finally, I him come with and he did some projects that I was like, he’s really good.

high integrity, I could trust him. If he said he’s gonna do something, he would do it. He’d show up, all the stuff. I hadn’t found anybody like that before. And so I was like, okay, let’s do some more stuff together. And we did a couple more projects and he was just doing the actual construction work. And while we were doing a project, one of these, was getting leads, this lead called me in one of the towns in the area and it was like a good lead. So I’m gonna run over to the of this lead and see what’s going on. And he’s like, well, I gotta run to the hardware store anyway, so I don’t know his ride with you and we’ll go together.

And we’re at this house and he just starts chatting her up and they apparently went to the same high school and we’re there for like an hour and a half. He gives her a hug on the way out and I’m like, I go into these things like I’m taking pictures, I’m running numbers and I’m just business. You know, I’m just like, here’s what I can pay for it. Take it or leave it. I’m busy. I’m going to leave. And he’s like doing all this relationship building and stuff. And I’m like, I think that’s probably a lot better for sales. That’s doing it that way. You know, I have.

Mike Hambright (11:53.912)
Right.

Mike Hambright (12:04.654)
Yeah, that was the engineer in you.

Jaden Ghylin (12:07.422)
I have sales experience, it’s selling to engineers. That’s not the same as selling to anybody else. Engineers are logic and numbers. That’s all it is. So, yeah, so I saw that. I’m like, wow, you’re okay. You’re good at construction and sales, like really good at sales, I would say. Cause I worked with a lot of like actual salespeople that were good at sales. He was, he has the natural talent for it. And I knew I wasn’t that good at that part of it. So I was like, well, why don’t we partner and start a business and just do this together? So that’s kind how that started.

Mike Hambright (12:10.84)
Right.

Right.

Mike Hambright (12:24.482)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Hambright (12:35.106)
That was the birth of Minnesota Home Guys.

Jaden Ghylin (12:37.803)
Yeah, and didn’t know him that great. I didn’t vet him or like any, you know, it just kind of worked out. You know, it worked out pretty good.

Mike Hambright (12:42.892)
Yeah, yeah. For a lot of people, doesn’t work out. mean, it doesn’t work out long term. You guys have been together for a long time now. So what are some of the things from a partnership standpoint that you’ve learned that you really need to have to stay together? Because you’ve seen, you’ve known people too that are partners that didn’t work out.

Jaden Ghylin (13:02.855)
I think, I mean, for me, the number one thing is like integrity and transparency. It’s like the most, for me, it’s the most important thing by far. And I think, I guess I I didn’t vet him, but I did know he had integrity because I had him work on a couple of projects for me and it was like, you know, I didn’t have to babysit him. didn’t have to, I could trust what he said. Like I could trust him. I was very clear pretty quickly that I could trust him. And if you can’t trust your partner, like you don’t have a partnership, it’s not going to work. So that’s.

That’s huge. some people just can’t be trusted. So that’s, you know, you gotta find the person that you can trust. I think the other thing is, you know, not being a, not sure which way to say this, but like not being a super self-centered person, like not being a selfish person. Cause in a partnership, you can’t really be selfish. Like you gotta look out for the partnership. You gotta look out for each other. And then you look out for yourself last. So if you’re, if somebody is very self-focused.

Mike Hambright (13:35.98)
Yeah.

Jaden Ghylin (14:01.022)
you know, that’s not going to work out very well. And I had one experience with a person like that. It was not clear that that was the case when I first worked with them, but it became clear over time. you know, there’s certain things people will say that will kind of like indicate that, you know, like, what do I need? Like, this is what I need. This is what I want. This is what I want to do. Like, lot of I words and mean. OK, that’s, there’s more than one person involved here, so.

Mike Hambright (14:25.43)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think business partnerships are just like a marriage, right? I mean, you gotta have clear communication. And like you said, you gotta have the same kind of values for sure. you gotta have clear expectations is one of the things that I’ve seen that have torn people apart where, you know, somebody inevitably feels like…

We’re supposed to be 50-50 partners, but I feel like I’m doing most of the work and you’re getting most of the benefit or whatever. It’s just expectations on who does what.

Jaden Ghylin (14:49.426)
Ew.

Jaden Ghylin (14:52.669)
Yeah.

I think there’s always some level of that because I was gonna be some level of someone’s contributing more than the other person or whatever. I think I’ve seen it go for me back and forth. Like sometimes I feel like I’m doing more. Sometimes I feel like I’m doing less. And I’m not sure how to resolve that. It’s more of just a trust. That’s the trust thing. Like you just trust that someone’s not taking advantage of you on purpose. If they are doing less, it’s not purposeful. if that’s the case, they’re just doing less because they’re not skilled in that or whatever, then okay, I can kind of look over that.

Mike Hambright (15:25.164)
Right. But yeah, if it’s like they’re just slacking off and like he’ll get it, you know, it’s like the equivalent of the person that lets the dishes soak versus the one that always cleans up the mess anyway, right? In a marriage.

Jaden Ghylin (15:30.813)
Yeah.

Jaden Ghylin (15:37.223)
Right, yeah, the intention of slacking off would be not good. I really haven’t seen that in, I don’t think any of my partnerships I’ve seen that actually. I have not seen that. I have seen like a different, some people will do more, some less, whatever, but it’s usually, there’s pretty good reasons behind it usually.

Mike Hambright (15:45.848)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (15:51.566)
For sure. Yeah. Yeah. I think, and I think one of the big things is like, you know, sometimes in relationships, that’s one of the things that I have that’s really good with my wife, Lindsay is like, you know, she’ll, if she’s mad about something, she’ll let me know. And then we just talk it out and we figure it out. Usually ends up with me saying, I’m sorry for whatever I did wrong. But,

Jaden Ghylin (16:12.806)
Of course.

Mike Hambright (16:16.27)
It’s just being able to have that communication because I think sometimes people will let even in a marriage do they’ll let things fester and They just like they’re angry, but they don’t talk about it they won’t let it out And then it the situation just gets worse to where there’s no going back It’s just like this is only gonna badly, you know, and I think in a business relationship. It’s a partnership It’s the same thing you like like look if if there’s something I’m not doing right like you need to tell me like let’s talk about it so you almost have to have like a Periodic, you know maintenance

Jaden Ghylin (16:30.298)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jaden Ghylin (16:43.065)
Yeah, I guess that’s one thing with my business partner James is that he’s super blunt and he’s also like has no filter. So that’s actually helpful for a business partnership because he’s not going to hold something in. He’s not even capable of holding it in. It’s going to come out at you. And I’m not as blunt as he is, but I’m pretty transparent. both of us, can be blunt with each other and not take offense. Or you may take offense for a very short period of time and then get over it.

Mike Hambright (16:58.732)
Yeah, that’s true.

Jaden Ghylin (17:13.421)
That’s really critical to be able to share your problems or opinions or whatever and know that the other person isn’t gonna, you’re not gonna set them off for a month or something. It might be an hour or something.

Mike Hambright (17:23.458)
Right, right. So what are some of the, you obviously have done, and I know you told me, like, let’s talk about high level, like other partnerships that you’ve been a part of. You said you’ve got partnerships with, I just wrote this down, sober housing, addiction treatment centers, Amazon businesses, a land business, like you’ve done partnerships in a lot of different areas. Yeah.

Jaden Ghylin (17:46.764)
Yeah, yeah, I I looked at them like, like I said, at some point I learned, I realized that, well, if I want to get into something, there’s people that are already doing that thing. okay, so it takes like self storage, for instance. If I want to get into self storage, I can just go try to get into self storage and figure it out myself, which I’m smart and I can probably figure it out. But there’s people that are doing self storage that have been doing it for 30 years. Their whole career has been this. So if I get into do that, I’m competing with them.

Okay, and I’m starting from scratch with no knowledge. So at some point I realized, I’m like, wow, it’d be way better just to go partner with somebody like that, even if I’m making less money. It’s just gonna be so much faster and easier for me to not screw up and to get to success faster. And the success might be lower or something, but it’s gonna be faster and then can grow from that. Whereas doing things by myself, like it’s just painful and you could have a lot of failure. You have to look for a lot of failure when you’re starting from scratch by yourself.

And I’ve I’ve had a failure in my business life. I don’t do it anymore.

Mike Hambright (18:48.888)
Yeah. Plus, once you’ve done enough stuff, and this is where you were, I’m sure, too, is like, you know what you’re good at and what you’re not good at, right? There’s just certain skills. You’re like, I could figure that out, but that’s just not me. Like you, just like you said with, with James, like, he’s just a natural salesperson. You’re the engineering mindset. And so it’s not that you can’t sell, but it’s like, why not partner with people that have, they’re like a yin to your yang, right? Yeah.

Jaden Ghylin (18:56.481)
Right.

Jaden Ghylin (19:12.311)
That’s right. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Like with that partnership, we did a personality test after we got partnered. You know, we did a personality test in like Myers-Briggs. We’re like opposite quadrants on the Myers-Briggs. Like completely opposite. Every letter is opposite. And but it’s funny that we get along really well. So maybe because we’re opposites. I don’t know. James has always been like, why are we friends? We’re so different. I think that’s why we’re friends. So we’re so different.

Mike Hambright (19:23.394)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (19:31.66)
Yeah. But one of the problems is, like a lot of the partnerships that break up is people that are like, that’s like their best friend and they have the same exact traits. The problem is, is they’re good at the same things and they suck at the same things. And so, you know, inevitably somebody has to do the stuff that sucks and they resent the other person because it’s them doing it, but they’re not good at it, right?

Jaden Ghylin (19:43.808)
Yeah.

Jaden Ghylin (19:47.796)
Jaden Ghylin (19:51.988)
Right.

Jaden Ghylin (19:55.618)
That makes total sense. think me and James are so different. So I respect him because he’s good at sales and he respects me because I’m good at numbers and operations and finances, all the backend stuff. And he’s like, he’s like, I couldn’t do any of that stuff. And I’m like, I don’t want to do sales. So it works out pretty good.

Mike Hambright (20:09.772)
Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that’s one of the lessons learned is like, if you’re going to partner with somebody, don’t partner with somebody that is like identical to you, like your twin, you know.

Jaden Ghylin (20:19.839)
Yeah, you don’t want to have a partner that’s similar to you. So I did partner with a guy in one of the hotels I bought who’s also an electrical engineer, like very similar background to me. And we were, I remember having lunch with him and he’s like, he’s like, we could partner, but we’re pretty similar. So like, does that make sense? And we talked it through a bit and I’m like, we’re different a little bit. And that specific business, it was more of an investment business than it was an actual operation. Cause we hired a project or a property manager to run the business.

So wasn’t as important to have different personalities on that one. For the most part, it hasn’t been a problem. And then after working with him for a while, did find he is, I’m an engineer, but I don’t like accounting and bookkeeping and stuff like that. And he loves that stuff. So there are still differences there. Anything like that kind of stuff, I’m like, okay, you got it, man. I’m not touching that at all. And I’ve got more of a sales marketing mindset and background, and he doesn’t. So even though we’re like,

Mike Hambright (21:04.95)
Yeah, sure.

Mike Hambright (21:10.337)
Right.

Jaden Ghylin (21:16.189)
both electrical engineers, he works with aerospace, very similar backgrounds. We’re still different enough that it works.

Mike Hambright (21:23.244)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yep. So I know that you guys have evolved now to start licensing your business model out to other investors. And so that’s just one more form of partnering, where you’re basically partnering with people on their business by teaching them all the things that you’ve learned. So let’s talk about that a little bit, because it’s really cool. I think, and I’ve done a lot of coaching as well. that’s why people hire coaches, or they license business models or whatever, or franchising or whatever, is because it’s in many ways, people are just buying your knowledge or

Jaden Ghylin (21:50.65)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (21:54.888)
access to your insights that, again, they could gain, but the learning curve is so much shorter if they work with you because you’ve learned. They’re going to have to go figure that out on their own otherwise.

Jaden Ghylin (22:01.549)
Yeah.

Jaden Ghylin (22:08.167)
That’s right. know, yeah, thanks for bringing that up. So when we first started the business, I actually met you in like 2010, I think it was 2010 or 2011 because you were working for Homevestors or working with Homevestors. Yes, yeah, 2010 or 2011 in it was a Homevestors like a happy hour social thing in Dallas.

Mike Hambright (22:17.772)
You met me in 2010?

Mike Hambright (22:25.814)
Yeah, they call it like Discovery Day probably. Yeah, I didn’t know that.

Jaden Ghylin (22:28.03)
That’s what it was, Discovery Day. Yeah, I met you. And you were like the, I thought was like Sales Guy signed to me. I don’t remember his name, but you were above him or something. Like I think I talked to you on the phone too. And I saw, my initial thing was to, I was gonna go do a home besters franchise. Cause I just wanted someone to show me how to do the business and I’d go do the business. You know, I went to that and I went through the whole process, got the big stack of FDD forms and all this stuff and went through it.

Mike Hambright (22:44.898)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (22:48.536)
Yep.

Mike Hambright (22:53.975)
Right.

Jaden Ghylin (22:55.613)
And I was already doing a bunch of real estate at this point. Like, I might have a 2012 or 2013. The year might be off a little bit. I was reading through that and it was like, well, any real estate business you do has to go through this franchise. Anything you do anywhere, like, I’ve got 10 rental properties. What if I sell those? You got to pay us money. Like, got to pay you money to sell my own rental properties that I already own? Are you serious? Like, literally, I’m like, you want to check with somebody? That doesn’t make any sense. Yeah, I checked with them. They said you have to.

Mike Hambright (23:10.75)
Everything. Yeah.

Mike Hambright (23:16.846)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (23:22.104)
Yeah.

Jaden Ghylin (23:24.779)
That’s a non-starter for me, buddy. It’s not gonna work. And I honestly thought, I’m like, you’re not gonna let a sale go just because something this stupid, like this is dumb. And I’m like…

Mike Hambright (23:26.283)
Yeah, yeah.

Mike Hambright (23:34.126)
It’s a different world for sure.

Jaden Ghylin (23:37.178)
I was running to write up a huge check to get signed up and you give them a part of my revenue all this stuff and they’re like, nope, you got to send us money on your rentals. like, this doesn’t, no, I can’t. Not happening buddy.

Mike Hambright (23:47.286)
Yeah, but what I mean, but you guys are, you you kind of learn from that and now you’re, know, you were about to essentially license somebody else’s knowledge, right?

Jaden Ghylin (23:55.964)
I was going to do exactly what we’re doing now. I was going to do that. I saw the value of it to do that. What I didn’t like was the bureaucracy and the paperwork. Yeah, all this stuff.

Mike Hambright (23:58.456)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (24:04.876)
It was very rigid. Yeah, it was like an even. Yeah, they need a little they needed a little Doge in their life.

Jaden Ghylin (24:09.966)
Yeah, so, you know, ever since we started the company, I had this in my mind, like, maybe we can help people with this like they’re failing to, you know, and we got into the business. We were competing with home investors when we got into the They were the biggest. Well, their second biggest in Minnesota when we started. And I think we were partly responsible for them kind of exiting the business because they’re really not present up there. I think it’s happened across the country, but we were very successful competing with them, which is surprising.

that we were and they really aren’t around anymore in Minnesota. So that worked out pretty well. I took all the experience I had with them and said, well, if somebody was going to license with us, how would we make it not suck? let’s make it as simple as possible. Take all the bureaucracy and rules and garbage out of it and just provide the value and make it easy. Like our contract is like three pages or two pages. It’s very, very small.

Mike Hambright (25:07.966)
Right. Yeah.

Jaden Ghylin (25:09.752)
It’s not 200 pages. I talked to an attorney in Wisconsin a few years ago about this idea and he said that he, I just happened to find this guy randomly, he said he doesn’t really like franchise, like he does licensing, which he calls it like micro-

Mike Hambright (25:23.084)
Yeah, I think I told you guys that too when we talked about it. like, don’t do a franchise, just license your stuff because you get rid of all of the government baloney, all the FTC crap.

Jaden Ghylin (25:28.728)
Yeah, yeah. So he told us that like. He told us that seven or eight years ago and it was in my head ever since then. So when we finally got the point of doing this licensing, I just emailed him. Hey, we’re ready to go. Let’s do this licensing thing. He called it a different name for like micro franchise. Like he was the word franchise since people would recognize what it was. It was like un-franchise or whatever, something like that. So, yeah, we called him and he wrote this little two, three page document and we’re like, well, what?

Mike Hambright (25:52.002)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jaden Ghylin (25:57.027)
What do people need to get started with their business? Like here’s the packages, all the stuff you’re gonna need. And this is, we’re gonna give it to you. And we’re not gonna put all these rules on. So like if you wanna run your business a little bit differently or whatever, have at it, know, go for it. We’re not gonna tell you exactly what to do. Just don’t like, don’t do anything illegal or unethical and don’t harm the brand. It’s pretty much, pretty much the rules. But we’re gonna give you this business that you can take and run with.

Mike Hambright (26:20.429)
Yeah.

Well, let’s talk about, I know you guys look at your licensees that are signing up for Home Guys as partners, right? mean, if they, you know, I don’t want to go down the path of talking about my home investors days, you know, a lot, let’s just say there’s a way to structure things where, you know, you don’t win unless other people win. And there’s a way to structure it where you always win even if they lose, right? So that part’s not cool, right? And so you don’t have

Jaden Ghylin (26:47.832)
Correct.

Mike Hambright (26:51.437)
Because you don’t have every incentive in the world to kind of help somebody and so I know you guys are The other way around is like you you want people to win and you’re not gonna win unless they win Right. Yeah

Jaden Ghylin (27:00.824)
Yeah, that’s right. We, I felt Homevestors was kind of the other way where it was, they kind of win no matter what happens, you know, it’s what I felt like. And we’ve, since we’ve been in the business and even before, we’ve heard, a lot of people like, I spent 20,000 bucks or 40,000 bucks on this program and I still don’t know anything. So I don’t know what I’m doing. my program was probably developed in 1987 or something like that. You know, this, this industry changes every week, it seems like, you know.

Mike Hambright (27:26.712)
Yeah.

Jaden Ghylin (27:27.509)
You can’t buy some program from 10 years ago and expect to be, this just doesn’t work that way. But we felt, you know, we’ve met a lot of people through the local Rias and stuff and find out like they spent all this money, these different things and didn’t get them any further than they were before they started. It was like, this really felt bad for these people. And so.

Mike Hambright (27:43.949)
Most coaching programs, I mean, I’ve coached a ton and I know a ton of people in the space and there’s just a lot of coaching programs that don’t really teach people how to find deals. Like they teach you the fundamentals of real estate investing, which you could learn that online ultimately. But if you can’t figure out how to get deals, like what are you gonna do? Like you’re dead in the water.

Jaden Ghylin (28:00.554)
Well, think some these coaching programs, the coaches aren’t even real estate investors. You know, they’re just coaches. They probably coach for other things too. But even like, think 10 years ago it was almost more common to have education. Like you pay for an education program or whatever. Coaching has become more common more recently. Coaching would be better if you had a good coach, I think. But we just ran into that all the time and I was like, well, if we’re ever going to do something, we’re not going to be, we’re not doing that. I don’t need to feel responsible for somebody, you know.

Mike Hambright (28:04.312)
Yeah. Right.

Right.

Jaden Ghylin (28:29.045)
losing a bunch of money and not being successful. So we set our program up to make people successful. We can’t guarantee success, obviously. And that was one of the challenges we had early on is we’re like, what if they’re not successful? Well, at end of day, we can’t make anybody be successful. We finally realized that we can’t force it to be successful, but we can do everything in our power to make them successful. And we do. the first year we did it last year, we took out one licensee. We’re like, we’ll have one company.

That way we could just pour everything into it to make sure that they, you we’re going to make sure that it goes well. And it did, it went really well. And we didn’t have to pour as much into it as we thought we would. It was three guys that had almost no real estate experience. So it’s worked out pretty well considering their background wasn’t very strong in real estate. So yeah, we’ve done that. And we’ve, like said, we’ve launched San Antonio pretty recently and he actually has more business background. And then the Orlando guys have a ton of real estate flipping experience. They worked for like Zillow and stuff doing

They were like contractors for Zillow, I think. So they have a lot of experience with flipping, actually flipping houses. yeah, so that’s, if we can find more experienced people, then it doesn’t require as much from us. And so we’ve, we’re learning a little bit on the process, like who we want to work with and who maybe we don’t want to work with. And a lot of that’s, you know, values too. Like we won’t just work with anybody.

Mike Hambright (29:47.83)
It’s exactly what you said when we talked about your partnership with James and other partnerships is like clear communications, having the same values, being clear on the expectations, like all those things, because, you know, right or wrong, there’s other systems out there that’ll take anybody’s money, like whatever, right? And you kind of know sometimes when you talk to somebody that’s like, they might be okay, but I feel like we’re not gonna gel well together. And you know, you guys are not…

Jaden Ghylin (29:55.75)
expectations.

Mike Hambright (30:15.596)
You guys have even told me, because we’ve talked about this, like, you’re not, you know, you might want to bring on 10 licensees this year, but you’re not trying to add 100 at all costs. Like, if they could fog a mirror and they’ve got the money, like, let’s do it, which is the right approach.

Jaden Ghylin (30:23.142)
No. No.

We don’t have, we don’t need to, there’s no reason. Yeah, we don’t have to do that, you know. I know some these, some guys will, if you get like private equity or something comes into your business to help you, then you’re gonna be forced to grow faster and maybe faster than you really can. So we don’t have that, we’re just doing this internally. And so we’re gonna grow at the pace that we successfully can grow, where the people that we work with are successful. And we’re gonna work with people that we wanna work with, that we, you enjoy talking to, because, you know.

We come to work every day and we want to enjoy the people we work with and stuff. We want to bring somebody into our world that we don’t want to talk to every day. So we’re pretty picky about who we work with.

Mike Hambright (31:00.844)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Any kind of tips or words of wisdom, and we talked a lot about partnerships today, but what folks should, I guess that we haven’t said yet, but what folks should look for in terms of ways to partner with people to kind of, you know, start off on the right foot.

Jaden Ghylin (31:22.277)
Just as far as vetting, making sure it’s the right fit. I think, yeah, for me, it’s like I said, the values are really huge, integrity is really huge. I think one thing that I would mention too is your faith background, I think could be pretty important. I’ve partnered with a number of people that, like I didn’t seek them out because of their faith, but they have similar faiths to me, I’m a Christian. And if someone’s a Christian and they’re a strong Christian, strong in their faith.

Mike Hambright (31:24.556)
Yeah.

Jaden Ghylin (31:51.596)
It kind of answers all the other questions for me. know who they are. That helps me a lot. Because then I’m to know how they’re going to react to most situations and how they’re going to think about most things. So if someone’s not a Christian, and I’m not opposed to partnering with people who aren’t Christians, I certainly have partnered with other people. But now I’ve got to go, OK, now I don’t know how you react to things. I don’t know how you think. I don’t know how you check the boxes. So I got know you better. And even with the Christian thing, like,

When I say that, don’t mean just somebody says they’re a Christian, because anybody can say that. you have to know, like, yeah, and you have to understand, like, OK, I’m not not to a higher or anything, and I’m not a pastor, but like you can say you’re a Christian and not really be a Christian. So I got to figure out if you actually are. So once I figure that out, it doesn’t take that much to figure it out. Like you usually can get a pretty good sense of people just, you know, in a 20 minute conversation. It’s pretty, pretty easy to tell. So that’s.

Mike Hambright (32:24.459)
Many do.

Mike Hambright (32:34.434)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (32:43.948)
Yeah. Yeah. But it’s back to the, what you’re saying is back to the value side, like, you know, the values and, and, and not that non-Christians don’t have values, but it’s just, you understand, you know what you’re getting into, I guess. Right.

Jaden Ghylin (32:58.457)
They see things differently. People can see things differently. And some things that would be not acceptable to a Christian might be acceptable to somebody that’s not a Christian. Certainly, if I look at how a lot of modern society operates, there’s a lot of things that a Christian would not be okay with. And most of modern society would be like, well, that’s just normal. It’s normal for some people. So that’s pretty helpful. actually…

Mike Hambright (33:20.898)
Yeah,

Jaden Ghylin (33:26.255)
I don’t know, think God just brings people into your world that are aligned with you too, because like the Knoxville guys called us and they didn’t know that we were Christians and we didn’t know, I mean we found that out on the first phone call, but they were like the first people to call us about this, you know, and it happened to be that they had three Christians like, well hey this is good, this is a good place to start, you know, and it made it much easier for us to work with them.

Mike Hambright (33:47.81)
Yeah.

Yeah. So if folks want to learn more, thanks for sharing your insights today. You’ve got, you’ve done a lot of amazing things in the real estate space and, and lots of partnerships too. And so I think hopefully folks learned a little bit today about what to look for in a partner and, kind of how to navigate those waters. I think just focus on clear communications and setting expectations about who does what and really focused on the kind of values and integrity or probably the, the cornerstones of finding a good, a good partner. Right.

Jaden Ghylin (34:18.359)
Yeah, for sure. Absolutely.

Mike Hambright (34:19.32)
Yeah, if folks are interested in learning how they might partner with you guys on your home guys business, your licensing business where you can help people get up and running and they use your brand and everything. I know you guys had your, you guys were like the caricatures of the brand, right? And so started to roll that out to other markets.

Jaden Ghylin (34:35.819)
Yeah, yeah. It’s interesting to figure out how to make this like transferable nationwide, because it’s like our our caricatures on there and the state of Minnesota on there and it’s called Minnesota Home Guys. How do you transfer that? So homeguys.com is the national website. And when you when someone starts with us, they get their own. They’re not using our logo. We have a national logo that’s just kind of like a house that says home guys. And you can use that if you want. But everybody gets their own local logo that has their state.

Picture on behind it and then has their caricatures. So there’s new caricatures created for them And there’s a reason for that when we first started the business we found that Having a local feel was was helpful and people like people really love to see like the state they live on like on t-shirts and different things just gives like a local connection is helpful and then also when we first started like people weren’t really putting their faces on their business they were kind of Almost hiding in the background behind their business. So we’re like we’re gonna put our faces on the logo

Mike Hambright (35:31.416)
Yeah.

Jaden Ghylin (35:34.411)
Because this industry, there’s some shady things that happen in real estate investing. We’re like, we’re going to put our faces on the logo, and we’re going put our bios on the website, so you know exactly who we are. So you know, hey, we can’t really do shady things. You know exactly where we’re at and how to get a hold of us. So that’s kind of how we run the business for everybody else. This is a high integrity business. That’s the whole model.

Mike Hambright (35:38.979)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (35:56.908)
Yeah, yeah, that’s great. People want to work with people ultimately. I think, you know, at the end of the day, like people in this world of like social media where everybody is like friends with everybody, but nobody really knows anybody. Like people want real people wanted to work with real people. Yeah, especially on, you know, something as big as selling a house. Yeah.

Jaden Ghylin (36:10.165)
Yeah.

Jaden Ghylin (36:13.663)
Right. Yeah.

Oh yeah, for sure. They want to connect with, like, for example, a house, you’ve got to connect with somebody. They to trust you, you know. So.

Mike Hambright (36:23.374)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, Jaden, thanks for sharing some insights today on partnering and sharing your story. I’ve known you for years, but I didn’t know that we met in 2010. I didn’t remember that. least I apologize and learn some new things that some new businesses during that I didn’t even know about. So that’s one of reasons I do the podcast is like there’s it happens all the time. I’m like, I thought I knew you, but I don’t know you at all.

Jaden Ghylin (36:29.023)
Yeah, thanks for having me.

Jaden Ghylin (36:33.727)
Yeah.

Jaden Ghylin (36:46.364)
Well, it doesn’t help that I’m pretty quiet, especially in big groups, so it doesn’t surprise me.

Mike Hambright (36:50.334)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. So guys, hope you got some good value today from learning about partnerships with Jaden and, again, they have a pretty cool model where they’re licensing their brand and helping real estate investors get started or ramp up really. And so you can learn more about that at homeguys.com. We’ll add a link down in the show notes here. So Jaden, thanks again, my friend. Looking forward to seeing you soon in person and everybody hope you got some good value today. We’ll see you on the next show. Take care.

Jaden Ghylin (37:09.383)
Yep, thanks for having me.