Just Don’t Quit: Houston Investor Andrew Gardner on Real Estate, Failure, and Building Freedom

Andrew Gardner (00:00)
What you do to overcome it is just not quit. That’s you just don’t stop. Like that’s kind of it. ⁓ there’s nothing magical about it. Yeah. Real estate is super hard. I mean, we started marketing. ⁓ so like there’s kind like a buildup obviously getting some of like our back systems, you know, worked up. So we have like our CRM and like we’re a mail provider. We do direct mail marketing. So figuring out like we have to create our brand.

Quentin (00:02)
Welcome to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I am your host Q Edmonds, and I am excited to be here today. I have another fantastic guest. And you know, this is the part that excites me the most, is when I get to learn about people and their journey, their experience. And y’all that’s been following, you know, I put a premium on stories. So when I get the chance to learn people’s stories, I put a premium on that because stories literally change the world.

Kobe Bryant said before he passed away, nothing in this world moves without story. And so I’m so glad I have another person here that’s going to share his story with us. And so I’m so excited to introduce you all to Mr. Andrew Gardner. Mr. Andrew, how are you doing today, Absolutely.

Andrew Gardner (02:39)
No, I’m doing great. Yeah. It’s the first podcast

I’ve been on super excited to be here and I’ll tell you everything I can.

Quentin (02:45)
I love it, man. This is going to be great, man. So glad to have you. listen, Andrew, I’m the type I like to dive right in. Right. So I would love for you to tell the people what are your main focus these days. Also, if you can give us a little bit of an origin story, kind of how you got to the real estate, how you got into the space that you’re at. We love the hero’s journey, man. And then also tell them what part of the world you’re in. People love to know where you are geographically. So what you’re up to, your origin story and where you are.

Mr. Andrew, you have the floor,

Andrew Gardner (03:17)
All right. ⁓ yeah, let’s dive in. So I’m currently in Houston, Texas, actually live up in the woodlands, which is just a little bit North. And I run a small real estate company. We flip houses wholesale and focus primarily on single family mobile homes, some vacant land, infill lots, that sort of thing. So pretty standard stuff. And we kind of got here over, man, I’ve been excited about real estate since I was in middle school. For some reason, it always kind of drew me in.

And so after college, I worked for a big general contractor for about seven years doing commercial projects and things like that. Saved up enough money. And then in 2021, I quit that job and came out to Houston. Kind of just did a full send. Hadn’t really started the business yet. I’d done one flip before, but just drove out here, started marketing and we’ve been operating ever since.

Quentin (04:07)
Love it, man. I love it, sir. Nice clinic, concise. Thank you for telling us the journey. As you was talking, I was just writing some things down. I love you flipping wholesaling. ⁓ You’ve been excited about real estate since middle school, after college, ⁓ got hired by with a general contractor. And I think you started your own personal journey kind of beginning, I believe you said, in 2021.

Did I hear that right? Correct. So, yep. And thank you. Thank you for sharing. I regurgitated those things back to you because, Mr. Andrew, I often say destiny has no wasted moments. Right. Meaning no matter what we go through in life, momentum is building to the moments where we are now. And we borrow from every moment of our life. Like nothing is wasted. It even reinforces our mindset, our passion.

Andrew Gardner (04:36)
Yep.

Quentin (05:49)
It gives us our why.

So I would love to know about your journey in real estate so far. What has these moments taught you about yourself? Has they taught you resilience, discipline? Like what has these moments taught you about you?

Andrew Gardner (06:03)
Man, I think it’s really taught me, let me just kind of back up and add some context. So obviously like a lot of people in real estate who go off on their own, like hyper ambitious, big dreams, want to take over the world, want to make X, Y, and Z. And they’ve got these numbers, whether it’s deal volume or how much money they’re going to make, like all these different things. And I think what I’ve realized in this is,

I’ll kind of make an analogy. So sometimes I feel like I feel like Russell Crowe in the Gladiator and having to like fight for my freedom, right? To like get out of the Coliseum and what real estate and started out with like kind like all the sexy stuff, right? You get attracted to like what the possibilities are. You’re like dreaming like I’m going to do everything and then like along the journey somewhere like I kind of have to stop sometimes. They still have that like it’s never going away entirely. But what I have learned is

Like how much I value just my quality of life, my lifestyle, my ability to do things, my ability to do things on my own terms. And what I value now more than any specific target is just being able to get our business to a place where that all feels good. And we’re doing it very well and it’s stable. Kind like I was mentioning before we hopped on here. It’s just like, how can I create like the best overall lifestyle and don’t get me wrong. Like, I’m still going to push, know, like we’re, still like, I still got my ambitions.

Quentin (07:05)
Mmm.

Andrew Gardner (07:28)
But I can find a lot of peace and happiness and excitement and like fulfillment in just like the execution of the business in like a pretty good way. Right. You don’t have to be the biggest guy on the block. And I think there’s, there’s a lot of diminishing returns for sure. You know, talking to some other friends who are the huge operators doing, you know, over 300 deals a year and just kind of like the way, like what their thought about their businesses, the pivots that they’re making and just is really

Quentin (07:29)
Yeah.

Andrew Gardner (07:57)
enjoying where we’re at currently and recognizing like how great of a life that this can make for yourself.

Quentin (08:04)
so well said, I think what we do, it should buy us back our time and time gives us options. So everything that we do are tools for us, you said, for us to be able to do what we want to do, like to get our time back, to make decisions that best fits our lifestyle. Because for so long, many of us, we have been trading our time and leveraging our time, which is like going to work every day to get paid.

Now it’s like, no, let me, I’m gonna give you my time, but I’m gonna get paid and paid on my time. And so I think that’s what the beauty of this that we do is for us to get our time back and make the decisions. My wife has a saying where she says, your presence is a present. And so with that in my mind, everything that I do should develop my presence to my family. If it’s taken away from my presence, then maybe I might need to rethink.

going around a rat wheel or whatever. So I need to put myself in a position where I get my time back. So let me ask you this, Business owner, adversity finds every business owner. So how has adversity looked in your world and what have you done to overcome it?

Andrew Gardner (09:05)
Yeah.

Absolutely.

⁓

you do to overcome it is just not quit. That’s you just don’t stop. Like that’s kind of it. ⁓ there’s nothing magical about it. Yeah. Real estate is super hard. I mean, we started marketing. ⁓ so like there’s kind like a buildup obviously getting some of like our back systems, you know, worked up. So we have like our CRM and like we’re a mail provider. We do direct mail marketing. So figuring out like we have to create our

Quentin (09:25)
⁓

Come on. Yeah.

Andrew Gardner (09:45)
got to figure, okay, like, right. We kind of like lay the foundation for the business.

But we started marketing right at very beginning of 2022. And as anybody who’s been in real estate knows, the interest rates spiked in May of 22, something like that. So basically, we started

few months before the actual peak of the market. And it’s been hard ever since. I think that we didn’t really get any sort of tailwinds. been fighting headwinds the whole way. I’ve chased deals that I shouldn’t have chased. I’ve gotten us involved in deals we shouldn’t have been involved in.

Quentin (10:40)
Yeah. Yeah.

Andrew Gardner (10:52)
Contractors I’ve had been in one lawsuit with the contractor I’ve had another one steal 80k and didn’t even pursue the lawsuit that I knew how that panned out I’ve lost, you know multiple six figures on a multifamily deal I’ve ⁓ I lost 34 can of flip we sold three weeks ago. So it’s adversity comes at every stage. It’s just part of the process man. There’s nothing to do but keep going

Quentin (11:16)
That’s it. Man, I love it. And obviously you have kept going. I mean, thank you for sharing some of your adversities. And obviously you keep going. keep going. Andrea often say failure is fertilizer, right? it’s just, you know, and when you examine fertilizer, some of it is just dung. You know, it’s stinky. It’s, you know, it’s smelly. You know, you don’t want to get it on your hands. Like you wear gloves. But here’s the thing. Once you put the fertilizer down and you put the seed in the ground,

Andrew Gardner (11:29)
That’s a good one.

Yeah. Yeah.

Quentin (11:46)
Before you know it, if you let the nutrients from the fertilizer work, it creates something that’s plush, something that’s beautiful, greenery that you would never imagine. And so sometimes going through the hard lesson, it’s just fertilizer. It’s just growing you. And if you allow it to grow you, you’re going to look back and you’re going to see the plush, the plushness of what has developed. And so, I hear you, man. Thank you for that message to keep going. Just keep going, people. Just keep going. Yeah, absolutely.

Andrew Gardner (12:13)
Absolutely. Well, like the

plant doesn’t grow without fertilizer, which means that you don’t grow without your failure. So it’s like, I don’t know why everyone tries to avoid them. It’s like everyone, there’s like a sense of like a weird sense of embarrassment or it’s like your shame that comes with for a lot of people who think they’re supposed to get it right. Like you’re not supposed to get, mean, eventually, well, you’re supposed to get it wrong a bunch of times first and everyone gets, everyone’s like afraid of it for some reason. You know, it’s like, it’s like, it’s like when you go to school and like you got the

Quentin (12:37)
enough.

Andrew Gardner (12:40)
It’s like getting the wrong answer on a test. Like it was bad in that context, kind of, like got a bad grade, but like this is the real world. That’s just, you got to cut your teeth on it. You don’t get to go around it, you know, enjoy it.

Quentin (12:47)
Yeah.

Yeah.

And I love the analogies you use because in our conscious, we know in school, we know this is where we’re to learn, right? This is where we’re supposed to grow. But somehow we think in life, life lessons are not where we’re supposed to grow at the same time, too. So it’s our mindset. We got it in school, but we think in life, this is not. I’m supposed to have it all figured out. No, you’re still growing. And I love the word you use. You used the word shame. So one of my… ⁓

Andrew Gardner (13:02)
Bye.

Quentin (13:21)
heroes I love to listen to is Brene Brown. And Brene Brown, she talks about shame. And she said, there’s a difference between guilt and shame. Shame is when you personify your failures. Shame is when you say, I am a failure. I am a failure. I can never get things wrong. No, that’s what we’re not. Guilt is, know, yes, I’ve done things wrong. Yes, I’ve messed up, but I am not a failure.

I have failed, but I’m not a failure. So I think people allow that guilt to determine the shame and they personify that and they get stuck. But you are not, you are not a failure. You just failed. And we just say failure is part of the process.

Andrew Gardner (13:55)
Interesting. Yeah, yeah.

I’m gonna do a bunch more. I don’t know what to tell you. I’m not done, so.

Quentin (14:06)
I love it, man. So well said, sir. I appreciate you, Let me ask you this. What is the next real goal for Leap Property? Like, what are you guys looking to solve for scale next?

Andrew Gardner (14:18)
So we really want to, so the goal for us right now is to try to stabilize around like, you know, like maybe between 40 to 60 deals a year, something like that, you know, might flip half of them wholesale about half of them, try to net, you know, about 750, you know, we, or we at least last year we were about like a 69 % profit margin. So about a million gross, you know, about 700, 750 maybe net somewhere in that ballpark is what we’re targeting. And really I’d say the main

Quentin (14:25)
Yeah.

Andrew Gardner (14:48)
What’s the main bottleneck? know, construction was a bottleneck for us last year. We were taking on a lot bigger projects and in doing so we kind of came to the conclusion that to scale that up, we

it’s, we could potentially try to cycle through contractors and find different people, but they come and go like they’re not stable forever. Right. They’re just, every contractor has got like a lifespan on it. Right. And they’re going to either do some of the screw stuff up or they’re going to get too good and they’re going to start charging too much. There’s like a sweet spot in there. And

That’s a vulnerability that I don’t love is we’re trying to scale a business. So from my perspective, in order to scale up the flipping side, we’d really need to bring that in house, but that takes like a certain level of expertise. takes a certain level of overhead. So there’s a lot of, just, it adds, it adds a level of strain and a little bit of vulnerability to us. helps in a lot of ways too. And so that we kind of ran into that bottleneck and based on just kind of like, don’t know if you’re.

was it fixed? Is it fixed this next or good to great to talk about the people on the bus, one of those two bucks. anyway, ⁓ but it’s like, yeah, it’s like, who do we have on the bus right now? And between being my partner, Kevin, like neither one of us are like, work for general contractor doing commercial projects. It’s like, know basic project management, but it’s not really my, that’s like not my, why I’m here. I’m not here to like manage projects and be like a construction manager. I’m much more, I like, I like the hunt. I like to find deals. Like I’m more like an acquisitions deal type guy.

Quentin (16:31)
Gotcha.

and

Yeah.

Andrew Gardner (16:56)
He’s

more like a backend, like marketing, like AI type person. Right. And so based on who we had on the bus, rather than try to optimize for construction and get really good at flipping properties and add our value to the market that way, we’re adding our value to the market by marketing and acquisitions. Right. So we’ll still do some light flips. Like we know enough to be dirty, right? We’ve got the right contractors do small projects so we can do the lipstick jobs all day stuff. That’s an easy turn. We’re not getting into any sort of like structural things or like major rehabs that would delay our cash cycle.

So what we’re solving for now is really just trying to like shorten our cash cycle, doing so through wholesales and doing throws. So through simple flips. And I would say like our current bottleneck is really on the disposition side for wholesaling. We got away from that for the last couple of years for a number of different reasons. It’s like a whole podcast in itself. That was just a, it was just a, it was a lot of the last couple of years. And we pushed really hard into flipping. We’ve probably flipped like 20 something houses last year. So like not like a huge amount, but like

Quentin (17:44)
Hehehehe

Andrew Gardner (17:54)
Decent, know, like mid-level, you know, mid to small level operator type. and it just, wasn’t great for our business. It might be a function of the market today with how hard things are to sell on market, even the, know, but sorry, I’m kind of rambling on, give you some context, but really like after deciding, Hey, like we don’t want to get into these big projects to push our cash cycle out, make it harder to market because we don’t have the cash coming back in. Let’s shorten that. Let’s move the wholesaling for half of what we’re doing.

Quentin (18:10)
You good? Nah, you good?

Andrew Gardner (18:23)
But in order to do so, like we have to get really good at this position side. Right. And actually because like we’re spending our cost per deal for SEO is about three grand. Our cost per deal for mail is like five to seven, somewhere in there, kind of depending on where we’re targeting. And it ebbs and flows a little bit. But in order for us to be able to continue cycling that we’ve got to get that cash back in. Right. And if we’re spending, you know, five ish thousand dollars per deal, I’ve got to maximize each wholesale deal. I’m not flipping them. So I don’t get all the meat off the bone.

So now it’s like we’re going super hard into our cash buyer searches, reaching out to cash buyers, like all the Facebook posts, but like going into the data side of things like skip tracing LLCs and doing all that stuff to like really figure out, how can we squeeze another like maybe like three to five grand out of each one of these deals, right? And just kind of like increase our deal size and just that that’s been our strategy that we’ve refined or kind of refining as we speak starting about this year, kind of January, when we really kind of went this direction most intentionally.

Quentin (19:21)
Yeah. No, I love it, man. I love what you guys are doing. I love the vision. I love the way you’re strategizing. And I love how you keep saying we. I love how you keep saying we. You mentioned your business partner. So I would love to get your thought on the philosophy of relationships, relationships within business. Have it served you well? What is your perspective and philosophy on relationships within business?

Andrew Gardner (19:44)
The relationships are the best and the worst thing about business. They’re the things that will make you the most money, the things that will lose you the most money. And it’s really, and most of them will probably lose you money. And then there’s a few good ones that will make you like, they will change like the way that you operate, but you’ve got to sort through that. By Achilles heel starting this was I was way too trusting. took a, I just, gave people way too long of a leash and I was mentioning earlier, like, I mean, I’ve had one contractor is like,

Quentin (19:51)
Mmm.

Andrew Gardner (20:13)
30 K extra that we shouldn’t have paid to one contractor got involved in a lawsuit. Another one walked with $80,000. Like this is all just based on trust, right? And like trust that got violated essentially in me. So it’s they’re great. And like, I am, I am incredibly fortunate to have my partner, Kevin. We’ve been working together unofficially for about three ish years. And then officially as business partners for it’s been about a year and a half now coming up on two years and

It’s taken, it took a long time to get there. We did it very delicately, very slowly for all of the right reasons. Like it wasn’t about like hype and excitement and like, yeah, like we both see eye to eye. Like we can do business together. Like we’re going to crush it. it wasn’t that it was like, it was like a nervous tip toe towards the partnership line. And it was for, because we are like, we hold the same values, but we are wildly different people on the surface. And, and I think that it is.

Quentin (20:57)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Andrew Gardner (21:12)
For a guy like me, it’s critical to have the other kind of like backend systems like data, analytical type person involved in the business, because that’s where I’m going to screw it up. Right? And like, I can do it with brute force, but it’s not going to be pretty. We’re going to take a lot of lumps. And it is like, I would say partnerships are like critical, but they’re so over hyped in a lot of ways. And I think that

people oftentimes get in them way too quickly because they’re trying to compensate for something that they should be developing on their own first. So it’s, yeah, it’s, yeah. That’s my speech on partnerships.

Quentin (21:48)
Yeah, no.

Well said. I

appreciate that. I think it was so eloquently said, And I really appreciate your approach to that. Y’all was like doing the dance. Like y’all was, in a sense, dating. And me and my wife, say dating is gathering data. We gathering data. We doing the dance. Yeah, absolutely. To see if we can really be dance partners in this thing called business. So I love it.

Andrew Gardner (22:08)
Mm-hmm. Well, there it is.

Yeah, but one

more note on that before I get off it, going back to the failure thing, like you are looking to get involved in a partnership and you think this is like, go for it, do it, it’s probably going to fail. You’re probably going have a few of them first, but that’s okay. Like no one’s going to listen to what I say. No one’s going to listen to what Quentin says. They’re going to hear, then they’re going to do the opposite. Then they’re going to learn that lesson retroactively. So just like hear it, go do it, go screw it up. And then eventually you’ll find the right one, but you got to date. You got to have a lot of bad exes first until you marry somebody.

know just know what’s coming that’s all know what’s coming

Quentin (22:50)
So well said, my man. So well said. Well, listen, Andrew, man, if someone wanted to reach out to you, connect with you, collaborate with you, and learn more about what you’re doing, how can they get in contact with you,

Andrew Gardner (23:04)
Yeah, reach out to us like, you know, Facebook, Andrew Taylor Gardner, I think is my name there. On Instagram, I’m DrewsFoodz. DrewsFoodz is like a number behind it. I’m trying to get better about my social media, as you can tell. But yeah, our company’s LEAP properties. So you can always like, I mean, go to the website, www.selltoleap.com. Check us out there. If anybody’s in Houston, want to do some deals together, I’d love to buy them. I’d love to sell them to you. So feel free to reach out. Yeah, we’re always open to it.

Quentin (23:32)
I appreciate you so much. Listen, let me say three things to you, First, thank you for your time. You you can be doing anywhere in the world. We talked about time. Time is our most precious commodity. So thank you for giving us some of your time. Really appreciate it. Secondly, thank you for your story, man. Thank you for the gift of your transparency, the gift of your vulnerability. I believe stories, like I said at the top of the show, I put a premium on stories. I believe stories have a way of getting to the soul of the matter and planting seeds in people’s

hearts and minds. And I really believe you planted some seeds today. So thank you so much. Lastly, thank you for your mindset. Thank you for the way you think. I really appreciate you bringing that mindset to this platform. Thank you for coming through,

Andrew Gardner (24:11)
Absolutely man, it pleasure. I forgot to do it.

Quentin (24:13)
Absolutely. Well, listen, y’all heard Mr. Andrew looking at show notes. His information is there. Get in contact with him. But definitely make sure you are subscribed here because I promise you we’re going to continue to bring up amazing people just like Mr. Andrew. So, sir, I say thank you again. And everyone else, listen, you’ll have a fantastic day.