Investing Smart: Timing, Temperament, and Housing Trends

Stephen Schmidt (00:02.922)
Welcome to the show where we interview the nation’s leading real estate entrepreneurs. It’s your host Stephen Schmidt and I’m back at it like a bad habit. We’re in the studio with an absolute legend in the real estate space. He was the host of the nationally syndicated radio show Real Estate Now with Bill Barnett for seven years. He’s worked with some of the other real estate investing greats, the tycoons such as Donald Trump.

Bill Barnett (00:11.056)
Thank

Stephen Schmidt (00:30.432)
Robert Allen, Russ Whitney and Ron LeGrand. He’s also got an incredible story of really how you can live your life and let real estate fund how to do it. He also is the nationally bestselling author of Are You Dumb Enough to Be Rich? Which sometimes I wonder if I’m too smart, but I’m working on getting more dumb. So we’re going to roll right into it. I got Bill Barnett in the house. Just remember before we get into our conversation at Investor Fuel.

Bill Barnett (00:49.62)
Yeah.

Stephen Schmidt (00:57.602)
We help real estate investors, service providers and real estate entrepreneurs, two to five X their businesses so they can build the businesses they’ve always wanted to do exactly what we’re going to talk about today, which is live the lives they’ve always dreamed of. And with that being said, Bill, welcome to the show.

Bill Barnett (01:11.53)
Thank you, Stephen. Great being here.

Stephen Schmidt (01:15.166)
I am incredibly excited to get into this conversation. We had a great pre-show conversation prior to us hitting record. And let me ask you this, Bill, just so our listeners have a little more context. I don’t think anybody has as long of a rap sheet as you do with all the accolades, but how did you get into the real estate business and how did you get to where you’re at now being someone that’s coached thousands of investors over the last 30 years?

Bill Barnett (01:30.516)
Yeah.

Bill Barnett (01:42.752)
Well, I was in investment banking in the 90s, in the early 90s, and was living in LA. And in 70, excuse me, in 97, the Whittier earthquake hit. And being a boy from the deep south, when the earth starts to move, gets your attention. So I had just my oldest boy was about five weeks old at the time.

I was like, man, this earthquake thing doesn’t work for me and moved back to Texas and had a started an investment banking firm here. And in 97 decided that we sold off those. My partners and I split our ways. We sold our company and I was just kind of hanging around looking for something to do. And my dad rehabbed several houses when I was growing up.

And my dad also would tell you to the day he died, he was not a real estate investor, but he flipped several houses and I thought, well, you know, I’ll pick up a house and do a little of that stuff that I did as a preteen and teen with my dad, just kind of on a whim, bought a hut property. And it just escalated from there, fell in love with it, made all kinds of amazingly dumb mistakes.

And just went, but I fell in love with what I was doing. And the years progressed. started, I realized if I was gonna do this seriously, I needed to get some education. Started getting everything, buying every book I could get my hands on. Started getting introduced to people like Robert Allen and Ronald Grand and Russ Whitney and going to these events and just took off.

And several years, know, that about four was all it was three and a half, four years into full-time investing. was at a Ronald Granavan in Atlanta, met a guy who was an agent for real estate speakers. And he said, you know, what are you doing? And, and I told him, and he said, so why are you talking to me? And I said, I think I would like to do a little speaking. And he said, okay, here’s, here’s several things you got to do. Then come back to,

Bill Barnett (04:04.864)
Talked to me and said, here’s the first one and this is the one that kills everybody. So I’ll tell you this right off the bat, go make a million dollars profit in your real estate business and then come back to me. And I’m like, okay. And I just stood there and he was like, so go do that. I’m like, I’m there, I’m past that. He goes, really? And so we started, we ended up spending about 10 hours together that day and.

Over about a couple of months he called and said, I’ve got a guy, it was Russ Whitney, he said, I got a guy that I want you to meet and we’re gonna put you to work over there and start training some people with real estate. And that, it took off from there and I had that opportunity to, by the way, the guy that was the agent is still one of my best friends today. We do business together.

got a Mark Dove out of Vegas who’s just a hoot. so, yeah, that started it and just kept doing deals and realized how much fun I had talking about the deals. And that’s really all the teaching and consulting was about was that show them their system, know, which Robert Allen or whatever. And then of course, through all of that, I developed my own stuff.

but saying, hey, here’s what I used to buy this. Here’s what we did to it. Here’s what we did with it. Here’s the exit strategy that we used. And then as you know, when you go through this business, I teach this thing that I call the arc of real estate. And it’s where you start and you gradually go through.

a lot of the different types of real estate. So I got started in HUDs doing flips. I still do flips, still do rehabs, love them. I still do some section eight stuff, but I’ve also progressed and gotten involved in apartment buildings and raw land, doing a development right now. So you kind of own this scale or this arc of all the different opportunities. A lot of people stop somewhere along the way. I’ve just…

Bill Barnett (06:20.724)
kept going, I like accumulating some stuff here and then trying this, see if I like that, and not getting rid of all that other stuff, not stopping doing that, but adding to it and adding to it. So here we are 30 years later.

Stephen Schmidt (06:36.172)
What do you think separates the people like you versus the people that fall out of the business during times like 08 through 10?

You know, I think a lot of people are predicting a very volatile market in the next three to five years, which is many with as many conversations as I have is right now the best time to get into real estate. Would you be waiting to see what happens? Because obviously you’ve kind of also passed that arc of you could take some hits and not go under. So for that person, that’s

really wanting to pursue it maybe, what separates, it’s a two-parted question, what separates the people like you and the people that fall out and then is right now really the best time to get involved in real estate or should people be stacking cash and waiting for the fire sale?

Bill Barnett (07:26.496)
So the difference I think, and it took me a long time to really understand and realize this, because when I first started consulting and coaching and teaching, I would say, anybody can do this business. And from an intelligence standpoint, anybody can do this business. It’s a very straightforward, simple business.

Stephen Schmidt (07:42.67)
Mm.

Bill Barnett (07:53.67)
separates everybody in my book is temperament. There’s a lot of people that have no business trying to do our business because they don’t have the temperament for it. So I, through the years have realized there’s also a group of people that I prefer to work with. So I work with a lot of people that have a military background, they have an athletic background, law enforcement, a lot of medical, firemen.

Stephen Schmidt (07:57.945)
Hmm.

Bill Barnett (08:21.972)
people that have pilots, people that have a background where they’ve been trained to do a specific thing, a specific way, and they’re not into, yeah, well, I don’t wanna do it that way. They wanna do what works and they’re looking to you who are at a different level than they are to teach them this is what works. And so that temperament of, you know what? I may be smarter than you in some things.

and you’re going to be way smarter than me in other things. So, you know, if I’m talking to a guy that is a pilot, I’m like, look, I can run circles around you in real estate, but I’m going to teach you how to do that. But I can’t fly a plane and I’m not really interested in learning how. So you have a different skillset. I have a different skillset, but the core of what makes our skillset work is extremely similar. So I

Tell people now, there are a lot of people that you’re not cut out to be an entrepreneur, whether it’s real estate or anything else. You don’t have the temperament for it. If you freak out over the least little thing and the people that I rag on the most and I do this to their face is accountants and engineers. I? Because real estate is not a business where the numbers all add up perfectly. If you’re an engineer, everything’s not square. I hadn’t found a square house yet.

Stephen Schmidt (09:31.213)
Hmm.

Bill Barnett (09:52.928)
So, you you’re not going be able to sit down and it matched the blueprint perfectly and what you think it’s going to look like. So temperament is the answer to the first one. And then the second part about when’s the best time to get in. It’s always now. It just, if you’re not, I had this years and years ago when I was working for Robert Allen and Bob’s still a good friend of mine. just did an endorsement on his, his new book called number one bestseller.

Stephen Schmidt (10:10.253)
Hmm.

Bill Barnett (10:23.232)
If anybody out there wants to write a book, there’s a good place to go. But Bob told me one day, said, hey, look, say yes to the opportunity to clean the mess up later. And it just, it resonated instantly with me. And I’ve used that in my life for 20 plus years since I met Bob. And it’s one of those things that’s the, so what does that mean? It means now. So.

Tony Robbins talks a lot about take massive action, but take it now. You we all try to get as prepared as we can be. And a lot of times we use that lack of preparation to push off and say, well, I’m not ready yet. I don’t know enough yet. Well, you’re never gonna get there. And I compare that to having kids. So Steve, you got kids? Okay, so.

Stephen Schmidt (11:20.544)
I do.

Bill Barnett (11:22.846)
when you had your first child, you go, man, I’m ready, I’m prepared, I know what to do, I know how to handle this, did you feel that way?

Stephen Schmidt (11:31.662)
Stephen Schmidt (11:35.854)
Truthfully no, I would like to say yes, but that’s because I got married and I got married into two kids So I kind of had a little bit of an idea Because I but I would say if you talk about having my first kids as as the ones that I married into then hell no

Bill Barnett (11:37.446)
Yeah.

Bill Barnett (11:44.04)
okay.

Bill Barnett (11:56.032)
Yeah, I mean, you just look at that. I know when I had my first one, I was like, man, this poor boy is going to be and I didn’t know it was going to be a boy that this poor kid is going to be so screwed up because I don’t have a clue. And that’s kind of the way it is. know, women will tell you and they’ll tell other women that, hey, no two pregnancies are alike. No two pregnancies for them between kids or two women talking to each other. No two pregnancies are alike. And you can get as much advice as you want.

Here’s what it’s gonna be like, here’s what’s gonna happen. But then when it happens, it’s completely unique. Real estate’s a lot that way. And so, when you look at the timeframe, when do I need to get started? You need to get started now. The only thing that happens with the market, and yes, we are gonna go through a downturn. I mean, look, we’ve had 10, 12 plus years of great market.

We’re way due for a market correction in the real estate world. It’s gonna happen. It’s nothing, it doesn’t matter. I was talking to a guy who was shocked. said, well, you know, it’s the political environment. And I’m like, no, it’s the business. It’s a cyclical business. All businesses are cyclical. And we’ve had this really long upcycle. We’re due. And it’s here. And it’s gonna be three, four, five years.

But it’s also a great time to do some things. It’s a great time for if you’re light buy and hold to start accumulating. It’s a great time to do seller financing. Because what you’re gonna find is that as the market goes down and credit tightens, fewer and fewer people are gonna be able to go out and just pick out the house they want, get a mortgage, boom, it’s a rate I like, and they’re done.

gonna get fewer and fewer. Well, when we come along and we have the opportunity to show them how we could do seller financing, which is one of my favorite things, you end up being able to help people get into a property, make a really nice profit on that property and monthly income. But that happens because the market’s turned against us, makes those opportunities available. So there’s always a section of the market

Bill Barnett (14:19.968)
that is working and working very nicely. So I was telling my fiance, she was like, and she’s a real estate agent, she’s a real estate agent, and she was like, oh man, the market’s so tough. What’s the house, what’s it do to your business? And I said, well, I hate to break this to you. I love it when the market’s down, because that’s when my business explodes. It’s good when the market’s good, but it’s way better when the market’s not.

And it’s just the opportunities because real estate investors don’t fit the norm. We have the ability to be unique in how we handle situations and how we present property to prospective buyers and how we present to prospective sellers.

Stephen Schmidt (15:08.046)
Sure. think one of the things you mentioned there in the first portion of that answer in terms of who you like to work with, one of the key differences between that group of people and some of the others as well is that all of those things you mentioned are people that are disciplined by choice or not into doing things even when they’re hard. Right?

So I think that’s a very interesting thing I wanted to point out because every single one of those groups of people is military first responders and the rest of that list, they’re all people that are disciplined to do things no matter whether they’re hard or easy and to do them with a process, a repeatable process that they know works, which I think so many people miss. So many people are too busy trying to reinvent the wheel that they forget that the wheel is off of the car. You know what I mean? Yeah, so.

Bill Barnett (15:52.768)
Yeah.

Bill Barnett (16:01.44)
That’s where the book came from.

Stephen Schmidt (16:05.086)
And then my follow up to the second part of that question would be, with seller financing, because that’s obviously always going to be when the rates are low, you can find the deal. It’s going to be a great place to go buy, right? But what niches would you be really focused on for somebody that’s

Maybe they’ve got a little bit of money, not deep pockets, they’ve got maybe a hundred grand, let’s say, and they’re really looking at, I wanna start securing my deals, because I know the market’s coming down, I’m gonna be able to buy these properties better, what niches would you really be focusing on right now?

Bill Barnett (16:41.556)
Well, rental when the downturns happen always takes off. So whether it’s single family and I really caution people about buying just a single family house, I really push them toward look at duplexes, trips and quads when you get started because it’s just gonna help you make more money and make it more safely because I’ve got a single family house and it’s empty.

I’ve got 100 % of my rental income is out. If I got a fourplex and I’ve only got two families in it, well only 50 % of my income, first of all, I got more income period, but only half of it’s missing. And I got a much better shot of getting it full and making more money and being able to leverage that into more property than if I’ve just got the one property. there are people, Russ Whitney’s a great example.

Stephen Schmidt (17:24.728)
sure.

Bill Barnett (17:41.344)
built his wealth buying one house a year. And he looked up several years into it, one rental property a year, and he had eight or nine rental properties that were paid for. And he’s like, holy cow, I’m making really good money. I like to move a little faster than that. Of course, St. St. Russ has just been a rocket ship for years since then and still is, still does the business all the time. He’s doing a big development in Costa Rica right now.

And I like rental. I think that’s one of the places that you look at. Of course, I like seller financing. If you’ve got the opportunity for land, right now, something that we’re doing is, now there’s a thing in Texas called barn dominions. And a barn dominion is basically a metal building turned into a house. I really spent a lot of time looking at container homes, thinking about, you know, here’s something that’s really interesting looking.

haven’t done any of that yet. Maybe that’s something I want to take a look at on that need that I have to keep pushing the boundary. And in the process of that, I bumped into Barn Dominiums and fell in love with them. And they are just one cost efficient to build. Now you gotta check with your city to make sure that some cities are freaky about metal buildings being lived in. But as far as it…

Stephen Schmidt (18:55.49)
Hmm.

Bill Barnett (19:08.896)
looking like a house and being a house like a stick-built house, they look the same way when they’re done. And they just turn out gorgeous and every place in the country pricing is different. So I get a little cautious about talking about the pricing, but I talk about the square footages. So you’re looking at 1500 to 22, 2300 feet in Texas, you can get that shell, which is

Total frame, metal roof, doors, windows on your foundation, your plumbing stubbed out. You can do that from anywhere from 40 to 60 bucks a foot. Well, that’s a nice price because you can’t touch that and stick build. So fell in love with the barn dominiums. That’s the development we’re doing right now. We’re building 11 barn dominiums to see if that’s the…

Yeah, if the public’s gonna like it as much as I do, it sure seems like a lot of people. When you start looking at, can I get a new house on a standard subdivision lot, a 50 by 100, 60 by 100, ours are 60 by 100. If I can get a standard lot and got a new house and I can get it under 300, in most parts of the country, that’s a home run. And it certainly is in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Stephen Schmidt (20:33.752)
for sure.

Bill Barnett (20:34.314)
we’re gonna be able to do that and have some variety in doing it. And so, excited about getting the first of those on the market. Now we’re still turning dirt. I did that for a while too. I sold land to a national builder, one of the top 10 builders. When they came in to North Texas, I was there, they called me and said, hey, your name keeps coming up. Do you wanna be our land buyer?

And I’m like, if I can still do my stuff, then we have a conversation. And they said, well, let’s have a conversation and see what your stuff is and if it competes. And so I added that on the resume for a while and had a ton of fun doing that and learned a lot about a different part of the business. And that was the raw land and the development side. And so when the opportunity came to, I got the barn dominium bug.

There was a lot of those things that I needed to learn that I already had a chance to learn. So I’d say now is absolutely the best time. Reynolds and Sulfonade.

Stephen Schmidt (21:36.494)
Sure.

Hmm.

Stephen Schmidt (21:45.006)
Would you trade all of your wealth and what you’ve done to be 22 again?

Bill Barnett (21:53.351)
So 22 with the same knowledge or 22 if I could have the same knowledge. Oh yeah. Oh, that’s not even a doubt. Now.

Stephen Schmidt (21:57.921)
Yes, yes with the knowledge. Yep. What would you do different and what would you do the same?

Bill Barnett (22:08.448)
The thing that I would do different is that I would go straight to real estate. No, no, and I had a very good career, a very good life in investment banking, but it was all consuming. We did a lot of international business, so there was nothing for me to set my alarm at 3 a.m. and get up and call a guy in Germany or a guy in Australia and…

Stephen Schmidt (22:13.454)
You wouldn’t mess around with investment making?

Bill Barnett (22:38.152)
So there was, it was 24 seven. Yeah, was a ton of real pressure because you were dealing with millions and millions of dollars for, and affecting companies that might have 500 to two or 3000 employees. And you’ve got an impact on what their life is going to be like. So there was a great deal of pressure there. But yeah, I would.

If I got to keep my knowledge, you bet, I’d jump on that in a heartbeat. Cause I just had, I’ve had too much fun. And so that’s the thing I would do differently, straight to real estate, keep your head down. You know what can happen. And if I had the ability to say yes more often.

There are things that I passed on that I look back and just go, dude, you’re a knucklehead, know? What the world were you thinking? One of my really good friends started a very nice company that makes about 12 million bucks a year for him. And when he started that thing, he called me and he said, here’s what I’m gonna do. And I’m like, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, okay, okay, okay. He said, I want you to be my partner, but I want you to be just a money partner.

I don’t need help running it or anything, I just need some help. And I’m like, okay, tell me because I need 25 grand. And I’m like, okay. And I said, here’s the thing, I don’t really understand your business.

So I’ll pass.

Bill Barnett (24:20.768)
And it was one of the dumber financial things that I’ve ever done. But I looked at it and I said, know, I talk to the guy all the time still, you know, good friend. said, Bobby, I don’t understand big concept. I get what you’re doing, how you make money out of that, that part I’m not getting. And he crushed it. And for 25 grand, could have been his partner, 50-50 partner.

I look back on that and laugh pretty good.

Stephen Schmidt (24:53.406)
Wow now you talk a lot about the enjoy like What I get from you to as bill is that you you just exude Positive energy and someone that’s genuinely enjoyed the journey But nobody’s life is without bumps in the road. What was the hardest? What was the hardest thing that you went through?

Bill Barnett (25:15.148)
yeah.

Divorce. I was married for 21 and a half years and my wife decided that she had had enough of my bad jokes. so I got divorced and you know, that was tough. And it was really, it affected my business greatly as well. I lost about, I’m gonna say around four years of focus really.

The positivity thing, it really kind of clicked with me when I had just gotten my driver’s license. And we lived in Birmingham, Alabama, which is I’m from. And we lived outside of the city a little bit. My dad had a nice property, little seven acres and a little pond on it, blah, blah. And I dated a girl in town. And so one Sunday afternoon, I’m getting ready to go to…

to hang out with her and it’s raining like crazy and I’m just grumpy. And my dad’s like, boy, what’s wrong with you? And I’m like, well, it’s raining. You know, I want to go in town and see my girlfriend and it’s raining. And he goes, well, yeah, do something about it. And just turned around and walked off. And I was like, well, I can’t do anything about it. And it clicked. Yeah, handle the things that you can handle, the things you can’t handle.

Let them go. The ring didn’t care what I wanted to do and I wasn’t gonna be able to change it. And it it helped start understanding being positive. And I got saved when I was 11.

Stephen Schmidt (27:04.515)
Hmm.

Bill Barnett (27:05.856)
If you’re a Christian and you’re not positive, you need to sit down a little bit and have some conversation with God. Yeah, because when you know the end result and you know the final score, like Paul said, anything that happens to me here, and I’m paraphrasing greatly, anything that happens to me here doesn’t matter, because I’ve got that at the end.

Stephen Schmidt (27:13.059)
whether or not you’re a Christian.

Stephen Schmidt (27:28.321)
Right.

Bill Barnett (27:35.954)
I had this wonderful relationship with Zig Ziglar. He was like my second father for about seven years. And we did a lot of traveling together and doing events together. And he was telling this story and he tells it publicly too. This wasn’t some private thing, but he was huge Dallas Cowboy fan, just over the top. And so Sunday afternoon,

Cowboys are on, he’s in the den watching them and his wife, Jean, comes in and Cowboys play in the red stands, they’re behind, it’s late and he’s just calmly watching the game and she goes, are you awake? And he goes, well yeah, I’m watching the game. And she goes, well, I can’t believe you’re being so quiet. They’re behind, it looks like they’re gonna lose. And he goes, no, they’re gonna win. She goes.

Well, you don’t know that, yeah. It’s a replay. He’d already seen the game. And it’s like, wow, when you know the final result, you don’t have to worry about what, you know, if somebody like Roger Staubach got sacked during that game, didn’t matter. He knew they were gonna win. So same thing in life for us. When we’ve got that relationship with Christ, we know we’re gonna win.

Stephen Schmidt (28:42.254)
Ha

Bill Barnett (28:59.016)
And so it puts everything else in a perspective that changes everything that we do. Everybody that we come in contact with and every situation that happens to us, it has a direct impact on that. And it had not been for my faith, I would have lost my mind in the divorce. So that was the hardest thing I’ve ever gone through.

My boys came out of it in good shape, which is the main thing, and life goes on.

Stephen Schmidt (29:35.18)
you’ve got. Wow. Thanks for sharing. That’s a very, very vulnerable thing to share too. That’s incredible though. I’m a big Zig Ziglar fan too. I know out of all that, that’s what I stuck on. But you know, him talking about the red head and all that back in the tapes. I grew up on the tapes in the CDs. So that’s really neat.

Bill Barnett (29:45.087)
Yeah.

Bill Barnett (29:51.05)
Yep.

Bill Barnett (29:56.958)
So Zig, so I’ll give you a quick Zig story on the side here. So I’m out of college, went to Alabama, I’m out of college and I met this guy who was about my age. We hit it off and we started promoting concerts together. And so we were working with a guy named Harry Chapin. If you ever heard the song, Cats in the Cradle, that’s Harry Chapin and BJ Thomas. And we did that for a year or so together. And then I bought him out.

Stephen Schmidt (30:20.216)
Mm-hmm.

Bill Barnett (30:27.398)
And I started doing that on and on and on. And I had a guy that had, I played ball with Alabama, had a guy that was about five years, six years ahead of me and we had met each other out of school. And I named Wayne Rhodes and Wayne called me one day and he said, hey, my wife and I want to invite you to go to this event with us. And I’m like, okay, tell me about it. He what’s called Positive Thinking Rally? And I’m like, yeah. And he goes, well, it’s these.

gonna be eight speakers there, it’s gonna be incredible. It’s Paul Harvey, it’s Art Linkletter, it’s Dr. Norman Vincent Peel, it’s there all night and go, I mean, it was the who’s who. Now that didn’t mean anything to me. And he said, and Jerry Clower’s gonna be there. Now, Jerry Clower at the time was a country comedian. And I’m like, well, I’d like hearing Jerry, but I don’t care about anybody else on that. even know who they are, Paul Harvey and Art Linkletter.

Most of those people, I don’t even know who they are. Zig was on that lineup. Now, Zig was really just breaking into the national scene. And it was so long ago, had jet black hair. There wasn’t a gray hair on his head. so, I passed. And they called me back and like a week later and said, man, we really want you to go. We think this would be great for him. I’m like, nah, I’m good. And about the fourth time they called, they said, here’s the deal.

We’ll buy your ticket. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to pay us back. Well, they shamed me into going. And so I go and I was surprised. I was like, it was pretty good. enjoyed it. Boom, I’m learning stuff. And then Zig comes on and blew me away. So over the next two months, I start reaching out to Ms. Lori, who was his personal assistant and the only person that worked with him at the time. That’s how big they were.

Stephen Schmidt (32:13.07)
Mm.

Bill Barnett (32:23.936)
was him and her and that was it. And about getting him to come back to Birmingham and to do a day or a half day. And we finally struck a deal, which is a great story in and of itself, but we finally struck this deal out where he would come back and do a three hour evening session. And he said, how are you gonna put butts in the seats? And I said, well, I’ve been doing concerts. I’m gonna do it just like a concert. So I bought radio time and.

We sold about 3,500 people, sold it out. And after it was over with, Zig was like, would you like to go to dinner? And I, it’s 10.30. Would like to go to dinner? We’re like, yeah, sure. So we had it at the Hilton downtown Birmingham and walked across the street and had it at the restaurant out there at the Hilton. he said, you know, I know guys that put the positive thinking rally on. I know all those guys real well.

If you have any interest, I think they’d love to have somebody like you working with them. And I’m like, yeah, sure. And you had no idea what I was saying, yeah, sure, too, other than the fact that I was gonna be able to have some time around Zig and these other guys. And so from about two weeks after that till possibly thinking rallies, quit doing them, which is not quite four years.

I was out with them all the time and we were doing these events, 15 to 25,000 people all over the country. what I did was sales, and so we would be in a city for about six weeks at a time. But man, what an incredible education I got from not only the work, but from being around all those people.

and getting to rub shoulders and be on a first name basis with Paul Harvey. My mom and my aunt came out to Charlotte, North Carolina to an event we did there. We had it sold out 16,000 people. And I asked my mom before she came, I was like, so here’s the lineup, who would you like to meet? And she said, I’d love to meet Art Linklater. So.

Stephen Schmidt (34:20.802)
Hmm.

Bill Barnett (34:46.996)
At one time, Linklater was the number one TV star in America for years in the 50s. So my mom was in that period where she just was like, man, this would be great. I picked him up at the airport, got him to the event, got him back in the green room, and Mr. Linklater was already back there. Art was already hanging out. He didn’t go on till he was usually last or next to last. And Paul Harvey would always be in the middle.

So we kept the crowd, see him, and then we had the link letter at the end there. And so he was already there and he hung out for five, six hours, just shooting the breeze with my aunt and my mom, and they were just over the moon. And so you got to meet and find out, and by the way, Art and Lincolair, if you ever get a chance to read about him, incredible businessman, incredible.

Disneyland opened in California. He and Walt were buddies and Walt asked him to host the TV show that introduced Disneyland to the world. And he said, well, I’ll do it for scale. Well, scale for him was 15 grand. And Walt said, I can’t do that. I’m broke already. I don’t have any more money. And Linkletter worked with one of the big camera companies with Kodak.

He was a corporate spokesperson. So he cut a deal with Kodak and with Walt Disney that he would get 1 % of all of the film sales in Disneyland. And in the 90s, we were doing an event together and I had not seen him for years and years. And he brings this story up on stage and he goes, you know, that little deal right there, that 1 %

is a little over 43 million now. That it just keeps coming in and coming in and coming in. Man, just a brilliant businessman. So he had, at one time he owned more self storage units in California than anybody else. So when you start looking at all the opportunities that are coming our way in real estate, all the ones that are here now, you can’t do all of them. Find something that you have a niche at.

Bill Barnett (37:14.154)
Find something that you enjoy, jump in it, and then slowly expand out.

Stephen Schmidt (37:22.748)
So to wrap the whole show up Go do something about it and with that folks. We appreciate bill coming on and being here bill working these folks connect with you for more

Bill Barnett (37:27.444)
Yeah!

Bill Barnett (37:33.24)
So the easiest thing to do is jump on a couple of my sites. One is 10K, the letter K, 10Kmonthly.net. So you can just jump on there and that gives you a way to see what we’re doing and be involved with that. That’s a division of 40ROI.com and that’s another one you can go to. For guys, I love the 10K monthly because what we…

is how to add $120,000 to your income. Not replace your income with this, how to add that to what you currently have. And then you can start looking at, okay, what opportunities are coming my way? What opportunities are coming for me personally to be able to improve my life, change my life, change my family, change my legacy?

Stephen Schmidt (38:31.522)
Thanks so much for being here bill we appreciate you coming on dropping a bunch of nuggets of history and all all the in-between and Folks, I know you got a ton of value out of this show. We’ll see you in the next episode

Bill Barnett (38:33.29)
back.

Bill Barnett (38:41.44)
Take care now.