From Cubicle to Freedom: Kevin Hart on Building Real Estate & Service Businesses

Kevin Hart (00:00)
When I was doing solo, so was solo about five years, you kind of get the ceiling or at least I did. I was a realtor, I was flipping, I was my own project manager and I was wholesaling, which meant I was my own acquisition, my own Dispo person. I was everything and trying to be a good dad and husband. So you hit that ceiling where I think the best year I did by myself was $300,000. But there’s no way I could physically push beyond that until I got a team.

luckily I met my business partner. So it’s been a very yin and yang mesh to where we can grow together. And he’s, he’s phenomenal in the acquisition side. I’m more on the disposition side and the project management side. So we have a good mesh there.

And then the coaches have just come in and taught us really how to be better leaders for ourselves, better leaders for our team, for our family. And that’s how we find those A players.

Kristen Knapp (02:16)
Welcome back to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I’m Kristen and I’m here with Kevin Hart, who is a wholesaler and flipper. He has, he’s a part of the Joe Homebuyer franchise as well as Dumpster Day. So we’re going to talk about all of his ventures and thank you so much for being here, Kevin.

Kevin Hart (02:29)
Yeah, appreciate you having me on, Kristen.

Kristen Knapp (02:31)
Let’s go back to beginning. What got you interested in real estate?

Kevin Hart (02:33)
So I have out of college. I went to the University of Kentucky. I graduated with an accounting and finance degree because I just thought that’s what you’re supposed to do. So I went and worked in corporate America for a couple of years and quickly realized that cubicle life wasn’t for me, nor did I like accounting despite that’s what my degree would being. So I actually got recruited to go work for State Farm and got into sales. So I just I knew I wanted to do something sales. I knew I wanted to be out and about talking to people, controlling my income a lot more. And so I got hooked on sales, working in insurance with State Farm and

Kristen Knapp (02:38)
Okay.

Kevin Hart (03:02)
Did that for about five years, started getting burned out a little bit and always just had this urge to go flip houses. Cause I’m a pretty handy guy. It always seems like something that’d be fun. So finally in early 2019, me and ⁓ my wife decided we’re going to give it a shot. We went and found a couple of wholesalers to help us find a deal. Found a good one. Worked with a hard money lender and started flipping houses back in early 2019 and got addicted to it.

Kristen Knapp (03:24)
That’s amazing. what was that first flip like?

Kevin Hart (03:28)
Uh, terrifying to be honest, but it was good. had, I luckily had some good contractors on that one. Um, we found a nice deal. 2019 was obviously a lot easier to find good deals. feel like there was deals everywhere back then. It’s a little harder these days, uh, with the margins, but found a good deal. Uh, pretty rough house over in South Louisville. We spent, think we bought it for like 80,000, which depending on who’s listening, what city you’re listening to this, that’s super cheap here in Louisville.

Kristen Knapp (03:29)
Yeah.

Kevin Hart (03:55)
But that’s why Louisville a good market because you can find cheap properties. But we put about 40 into it. And luckily, after about six months, which is about three months longer than it should have been. So I learned how to manage a project a better on that one, but we were still able to clear about $25,000 and move on to the next few.

Kristen Knapp (04:10)
I mean, three months longer than it should. I mean, that’s, it could have been much longer. Yeah.

Kevin Hart (04:14)
Yeah, I’ve definitely had worse ones since.

luckily the first one was pretty successful. ⁓

Kristen Knapp (04:19)
Yeah, that’s awesome. And do you still work alongside your wife?

Kevin Hart (04:22)
So my wife’s never really been too much of the business. She’s been just a huge supporter in the background. But obviously on the first one, because that kind of started a big career change, leaving insurance and going full-time real estate, she was a little more involved on the decision-making part of just jumping into it. But no, she’s just my biggest cheerleader. Yeah, definitely.

Kristen Knapp (04:37)
That’s amazing. It’s great to have that support. And then when

did you start getting into wholesaling?

Kevin Hart (04:42)
So after about a year and a half of flipping, realized that there’s just like too many up and downs and flipping and it just takes too long to get paid. So I started diving into wholesale and did one of the Brent Daniels Wholesaling Inc, a little masterminds. It was like $4,000, but kind of taught you the basics of wholesaling. And then just started marketing like crazy and searching Facebook and talking to people around town. And luckily I was able to find a few deals pretty quickly and realized that I could make

$5,000 at a time, $8,000, $10,000 within three, four weeks. And I got hooked on that. So I just, from there, pretty much paused flipping for about a year and dove headfirst into wholesale and just so could learn the business as best as possible and kind of get that side of the business up and going.

Kristen Knapp (05:15)
That’s it.

That’s amazing. it’s definitely, you can do a lot in a short amount of time.

Kevin Hart (06:17)
Yeah, I mean, it’s just a lot easier to understand how you’re getting paid and how soon when you’re wholesaling as opposed to, you know, I could have five flips going, but all of them could be next year, but it’s not gonna get paid. Who knows?

Kristen Knapp (06:20)
Yeah.

Great,

totally. And talk more about how you kind of built up your network to be able to do this.

Kevin Hart (06:32)
So I’m a natural introvert. So I have to force myself to go like meet people. So anyone else who’s like not, you know, Mr. Shaddy charisma, that’s not me. Like you just have to set goals for yourself of I want to go meet two investors every single week or two contractors every single week. So early on back in like 2019, 2020, I would just go in bigger pockets, see who was operating in Louisville and either just take them to lunch, buy their coffee and just kind of, you know, buy 30 minutes to an hour of their time. And just from there, that’s kind of how I’ve grown my network.

Kristen Knapp (07:01)
Yeah, and then the same people come back to you.

Kevin Hart (07:03)
Yeah, you meet a lot of same buyers. know, once you’re out some good deals, people, people know your name and they want to work with you a little more. Um, just meeting other new investors and you kind of grow up together through this business. Uh, it’s pretty cool to see it. There’s a handful of us. I feel like they all started about the same time. They all, you know, might have multiple employees or just have million dollar wholesaling companies going now. So you just kind of stick around with the same people, but Louisville has a really good investor community.

Kristen Knapp (07:26)
Yeah.

Yeah, talk to us more kind of about that market and what makes it special.

Kevin Hart (07:31)
Yeah, so Louisville and when we expand in Cincinnati, it’s a very similar market. So a lot of this can go for both markets, but Louisville, just think where we are, we’re four or five hours from six or seven different major cities. So we’re just a very central, I think just where we’re at, we’re very insulated from some of the huge price spikes that people saw over the past few years. like coastal cities were appreciating 40, 50%, but then they’re dropping that amount. Now we saw like 12 to 14 % appreciation during that time.

Now we’re kind of back to the standard three to 5 % appreciated every year. So our market just stays a lot more consistent than some of the bigger cities does, which makes it a great market where you can just consistently buy.

Kristen Knapp (08:10)
Yeah, yeah, that’s amazing. so bringing us up till today, are you still doing everything or are you focusing more on wholesaling or are you flipping as well?

Kevin Hart (08:19)
Still do a little bit of everything, but over the years I got my real estate license as well, so I was working with investors. in early 2024, I actually joined up with my business partner, Mike Corius, and that’s when we bought into this Joe Homebuyer franchise, because he was newer to the business. I’d been doing it for a few years, and both of us just really wanted to learn how to scale a wholesaling and flipping business into a true company. So there’s a lot of real estate investors out there that they’ll wholesale their entire lives, and it’s just them. And then at some point,

Kristen Knapp (08:31)
Yeah.

Kevin Hart (08:45)
I guess you just quit, you walk away because you’re tired of it. But we didn’t want that to be us. So we joined Joe Homebuyers so that we could learn how to grow a multimillion dollar company with employees so that me and Mike can go out with our wives and go travel and the business is still churning while we’re gone. So that’s been the focus the past year and a half was growing our Joe Homebuyer franchises. And now we have three salespeople and two admin.

Kristen Knapp (09:07)
Wow, yeah, and tell us more about, I mean, I really like the idea of starting a franchise to learn more and, you know, actually take in the information because I think a lot of people kind of feel like they have to do it all by themselves from the beginning. And I think this is a great middle ground.

Kevin Hart (09:19)
Right.

Yeah, I’m a big proponent of franchises. That’s another reason why we bought dumpster today. It’s just cause it was a franchise model is when you have someone that tells you like, here’s the business in a box. We’ve been doing it. We’re high level operators. We’re already making millions of dollars. Why would I not want to just go listen to them and see how they did it? So at dumpster today, you know, we, joined on a, you have Mark Stuber and Cody Hoffine who started, who started Joe home buyer. You know, we get direct access to them. We can pick their brains on whether self-development or just how to.

how to tweak our acquisitions process, how to improve our dispositions process, and then all the team below them as well. Like they have a great COO, they have all these different guys who are very experienced. And plus you get to hang out with, know, we have a top producers club where it’s like the top 10 to 15 franchises and networking with all of them has just expanded our knowledge as well and just be able to improve our business every single day we hang out with them.

Kristen Knapp (10:48)
Yeah, and you still get autonomy and you’re still running your own business, but you just have the support of, you know, a bigger company behind you.

Kevin Hart (10:54)
Exactly. Yeah,

it’s 100 % our business. We make every decision, but then we at least have someone to call if we’re in a bind.

Kristen Knapp (11:01)
That’s amazing. No, I think

that’s such a great option. think that people don’t really think of that when they’re getting into this business. Tell us more about

Kevin Hart (11:07)
Yeah. Especially in real estate, it’s not

something people like, they don’t really think of a franchise model for wholesaling, especially when you’ve already been doing it. like, well, how would I want to give away a small percentage when I’m already doing this? And the way you got to look at it is, yeah, we pay a small percentage on every deal, but what we’re getting in return is like an insane amount of coaching. And I could go spend $250,000 on the best business coach in the country, whereas opposed to now I have in-house coaching every second of the way, every single day.

Kristen Knapp (11:13)
Right.

Great.

Kevin Hart (11:34)
and they’re helping me build exactly what I want to build.

Kristen Knapp (11:36)
Yeah, it’s kind of that, you know, it’s that model of like, would you rather own 100 % of a grape or half of a watermelon? It’s like you can scale much bigger when you have more people behind you.

Kevin Hart (11:42)
Exactly. ⁓

Right. And at some point you’re going to have to pay for education, such as whether do you want to pay for it in-house in a franchise or do you want to go buy that expensive business coach? think either way works, but I don’t think any wholesaler or flipper has ever went and built a massive company without some type of coaching.

Kristen Knapp (11:50)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, tell us more about that. Tell us more about the importance of having a mentor.

Kevin Hart (12:06)
think you get to the point. like

when I was doing solo, so was solo about five years, you kind of get the ceiling or at least I did. I was a realtor, I was flipping, I was my own project manager and I was wholesaling, which meant I was my own acquisition, my own Dispo person. I was everything and trying to be a good dad and husband. So you hit that ceiling where I think the best year I did by myself was $300,000. But there’s no way I could physically push beyond that until I got a team. So.

At that point I was like, well, my wife and kids are going to hate me and I can go become a multimillion dollar or I can actually do this correctly

and go find a coach who can teach me how to hire, how to find the A players that need to grow his business. and luckily I met my business partner. So it’s been a very yin and yang mesh to where we can grow together. And he’s, he’s phenomenal in the acquisition side. I’m more on the disposition side and the project management side. So we have a good mesh there.

Kristen Knapp (12:37)
you.

Kevin Hart (12:55)
And then the coaches have just come in and taught us really how to be better leaders for ourselves, better leaders for our team, for our family. And that’s how we find those A players.

Kristen Knapp (13:04)
Yeah, and your family doesn’t hate you that way. That’s amazing. So tell us more about the drama home buyer franchise that you guys have or you’ve built.

Kevin Hart (13:06)
Exactly. And I leave work at about 3.30 every day.

Yeah, so we started here in Louisville before we expanded up to Cincinnati. And we primarily try to wholesale everything. That’s always our number one goal, because obviously time is money, so wholesale is speed. But then we look at every single deal is, how much are we going to make on the wholesale side? How much can we make if we flipped it? Is it worth it to hold as a rental? So we look at all exit strategies, but we still try to focus primarily on wholesaling. And then flipping kind of falls in there.

Sometimes I’ll still get nice referrals that’ll come to me or I’ll buy from other wholesalers. So we do continue to flip constantly just so we have that streaming income always going year round.

Kristen Knapp (13:47)
Definitely. And then tell us about Dumpster today and kind of how that sparked.

Kevin Hart (13:52)
Yeah. So I was previously in a mastermind called GoBundance, all of 2024. And that just kind of opened my eyes to if you really want to, anyone can become a millionaire in real estate, but if you want to become a Deco millionaire and bigger, you really got to have businesses that you can buy and sell. And GoBundance kind of opened my eyes to that, seeing how these guys were starting tech companies and selling them off for crazy multipliers or buying an HVAC company and selling it off 10 years down the road for, you know, 5X what they bought it for. So that kind of got.

in my brain of like, I do want some businesses outside of real estate. Again, also to diversify a little bit. If something happened to real estate, we just completely crashed out. I want to have some other type of income, something to fall back on. Not that I think that’s going to happen, but we really liked the idea of a trade, something that’s not ever going to go away. Can’t be taken away by AI, can’t be taken away by some other lack of labor force. And so we looked at a bunch of different trade opportunities and fell onto dumpsters. So one, it’s the least skilled labor.

We really just need a driver and that’s about it. And then everything else is run in house with our office manager over the phone. And so dumpster today just gave us the best options for you’re looking for. They had all the latest tech we were looking for. It’s a great app. can order and you can order your new rentals and pickups through the app. You can online. They offer us an in-house call center, which helps us handle all the inbound calls, which is huge for us because dumpster today is a secondary business for us.

Kristen Knapp (14:49)
Great.

Kevin Hart (15:54)
Joe Homebuyers main focus dumpster day secondary. So being able to have a call center to fall back on helps immensely. And then so they the tech, the call center, and then it’s just a beautiful business in a box. They told us what trucks to get, what dumpsters to buy, how they do it. They gave us a CRM. So it was just everything we needed. So all that we had to do is start going and talking to people and telling them we’re the new local guys in town. And luckily with our existing connections, we had a ton of business come our way pretty quickly.

Kristen Knapp (16:00)
Yeah.

Wow, that’s amazing. So I was gonna ask that. So that was easy for you to kind of plug and play with what you were already doing.

Kevin Hart (16:25)
Yeah, so when we we launch our second location Dayton next week, that’s going to be a little more effort going and meeting and greeting a lot of locals just because we’re not up here. But when you’re already in the flipping and wholesaling space in real estate, I mean, I could I could name off 20 contractors are in my phone. I could aim off another 20 flippers. And so most of these people are just care about relationships. If you’re going to provide good service and they like you and your local, they’re going to come work with you, even if you may be 20 bucks more than some other dumpster company.

Kristen Knapp (16:51)
Yeah.

Kevin Hart (16:51)
So we were able to bring

Kristen Knapp (16:51)
Right.

Kevin Hart (16:52)
on a lot of our friends and existing contacts and they’re great repeat clients.

Kristen Knapp (16:57)
Yeah, I can see how it definitely is a business where it’s really about the relationships that you make because at the end of the day, the dumpsters are probably pretty much all the same. It’s not like, you know, yeah, I don’t think that’s true. Well, that’s I mean, that’s amazing. That’s not nothing. But yeah, it’s really I mean, I can see how it really gets down to how people just like you and want to work with you and you’re reliable.

Kevin Hart (17:07)
Yeah, essentially dumpster is a dumpster. Ours are pretty in orange, so we do have that beat on some people.

Yeah. In any sales job, it’s like how many people, how many people can you get to like you? And they’re most likely going to buy from you. And with dumpster companies too, like there’s a lot of big companies town just like every city, but there’s not a lot of dumpster companies that are out actually like walking into a roofing company, shaking hands, being like, Hey, I’m your local connection. Here’s who you’re going to be talking to every single time. Our office manager, Becca is the one answering the phone here locally. And we have a lot of our clients just like, I love it that I can call and Becca’s answering the phone every single time.

Kristen Knapp (17:37)
you

Right.

Kevin Hart (17:50)
And that’s just a big difference than, you know, they’re calling one of the huge companies where they’re like, we got to wait on hold. We don’t know who we’re talking to. Like they may not be local. So there’s just a lot of aspects of the local homegrown business that people will just instantly latch onto.

Kristen Knapp (17:50)
Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah, and now you’re launching in Dayton, Ohio, and you’re kind of shifting your model to be more remote now.

Kevin Hart (18:08)
Yes.

Yeah, so our goal is not to have to be up there very often at all, so we’re still going to run operations from our little office here. And again, that’s where that dumpster today franchise model comes in place. Since we already have the call center lined up, we know we don’t have to really put someone there and see the local employers just be our driver. So we’re meeting with some drivers later this week. We’ve already got a couple final candidates and you know, as long as the driver does their job and communicates well to us and takes all the pictures are supposed to take on the app so that we know exactly where dumpsters are and what.

Kristen Knapp (18:15)
Yeah.

Mm.

Kevin Hart (18:40)
how full they are and what they look like, then we should be able to run it 99 % remote.

Kristen Knapp (18:44)
Wow. Yeah, that’s amazing. mean, it’s definitely, it’s also a good lesson where some of the most stable businesses are not the most shiny, sexy things in the world. Yeah.

Kevin Hart (18:54)
Exactly. I heard on another podcast

of a guy buying a restaurant hood cleaning business. And because that’s like federally, like the government requires you to clean your cooking hoods. Like he’s crushing it. It’s the most boring business I ever heard of is cleaning restaurant cooking hoods, but something that the government requires. So it’s never going to go away. And same with trash. Trash is never going to go away.

Kristen Knapp (19:01)
Okay.

Mm.

Hey.

Yeah, you just, exactly.

You just have to identify the needs of people.

Kevin Hart (19:20)
Yeah. And there’s a really big opportunity now with a lot of the boomer generation retiring. A lot of these folks that started these ground up businesses 20, 30 years ago, and a lot of them don’t even realize they can sell their business. So there’s just tons of these businesses popping up that if you find the right operator that they maybe will sell their finance to you, maybe they’ll help you run it for the first six months so you can transition over. But there’s a lot of businesses that are going to be for sale in the next five to 10 years.

Kristen Knapp (19:31)
Mm.

Wow, that’s amazing. so to kind of wrap this up, what would be some advice that you wish you learned earlier in your career?

Kevin Hart (19:52)
think find a good partner. think that’s something I struggled with early on, but once you have that good partnership, I just feel like the weight of the entire business is off your shoulders, or at least half the weight is off your shoulders. And I think it just helps you run a smoother business and really scale a lot faster.

Kristen Knapp (19:53)
Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. And kind of going back to our conversation about just relationships and mentors, like just having more people is always better and more perspectives. Awesome. Well, tell people where to find you.

Kevin Hart (20:16)
Exactly.

main on Instagram, ⁓ kevin_rei I pretty active on Instagram. That’s really the only social media I like to use.

Kristen Knapp (20:29)
Amazing. Well, everyone, please check out his social media and thank you so much for being here today, Kevin.

Kevin Hart (20:34)
Awesome, I appreciate it, Kristen.

Kristen Knapp (20:35)
And thank you everybody for listening and we’ll see you next time. Bye.