Real Estate Investing, Generational Wealth & Resilience with Aaron Chapman

Aaron Chapman (00:00)
So that morning I walked out of my house at 190 pounds, six foot one, a net worth of nearly $4 million with a credit score in the high 700s. Weeks later, I got wheeled back into my home in a wheelchair at 156 pounds, at a negative net worth of 1.5 million, a credit score in the 400s, and a memory that’d recycle every three to four minutes.

So I’d have to I had to work my way back from that to an industry that’s completely obliterated. There’s only two people left in the industry that I’d worked with. And what not only did I have to learn how to walk again, I had to carry around a notepad to write everything down because I would forget really quickly.

Issa Hanna (02:09)
Welcome back to The Real Estate Pros show. I’m your host, Issa Hanna, and today I have one of the most accomplished lenders, one of the most knowledgeable people I’ve brought on the show, Aaron Chapman. Aaron, welcome.

Aaron Chapman (02:19)
Thanks, man. I appreciate the opportunity to come chat with you.

Issa Hanna (02:22)
And I appreciate having you. true honor to talk to you. You were and you know, you’re one of the top lenders in the country. You’ve been in the game since ninety-seven. You saw it all. and you’ve been able to evolve with the game. I I love I love your story when you were talking. but for our viewers at home who who kind of want to get a glimpse into your world, can you kind of run down like a day-to-day in your world?

Aaron Chapman (02:43)
Day-to-day for me gets up at 4:30 in the morning, then from there it’s I start reading almost immediately. Well it’s prayer first, then reading, then from reading, then it’s a workout. And I try and as often, if not daily, but as often as possible, get outside, watch the sunrise, have that conversation with God during that moment, even though I already have prayer, but then you kind of start experiencing something different when you’re outside. So there’s that opportunity.

Then it’s getting my workout in, then it’s getting breakfast, and then getting in front of the computer and just getting at it. I’ve I’ve found that, at least my own personal opinion, is that we have this big, ominous, invisible foot that wakes up and just gonna kick your ass all damn day long. And if you wake up at like 7:45, you gotta be at the office at eight, you’re getting kicked the whole day. You know, if you ever notice people that are always rushing like that, they’re never ahead of it. Their entire day is always beating them up. So if I’m up three hours before that.

you know, invisible foot is, I’m well ahead of it. Now, now and again, I’ve noticed I still get caught. But if I jump up and start moving again, I’d find that that foot propelled me. So I’m able to at least advance on my day. If I laid there and lick my wounds, then then the day overtakes me. So I’m of the mindset is just you get up, get going, have a purpose and keep moving forward every single day. I live by a calendar. So when I get set down, I’ll look at my calendar see what I got to do. Typically my assistant doesn’t put me on anything on my calendar until about 8:30.

I’ll go right till five, six o’clock. And then I’m just I’m like three brain cells shy of a talking monkey by that part of the day because there’s constant problems that you’re you’re solving. So you’ve got your booked appointments like what we have here, but then you have right now, there’s stuff brewing. There’s problems happening right now. There is fires blazing. There is a large portion of my day is caught up with putting out fires I didn’t start and confessing for sins that I didn’t do. And what I found is really a

strength that has come from that is the ability to look at a day like that that’s full of nothing but issues and just, and once you’re solving one, another one’s right behind it, if not already on top of it, that there’s a strength that comes in the in the world of an entrepreneur when you can take that kind of thing on and willingly get up get up the next day and do it all over again and not feel like you’re just overseeing nothing but failure. Because when you start to in in in the business that we’re in, in finance and in real estate,

You can work on a deal for months and you don’t really get to see the progress. It’s not like digging a hole in the ground where every shovel full you see movement, right? because I used to do excavation. I used to run heavy equipment. I used to drive drive truck, used to work in the mines. You would see progress with every movement of your hands. You can’t see that in this world. And if the majority of your day is tacking up taken up by problems, you feel like you’re just live, you’re just miring in a in a dying business.

But for every problem you solve, there’s like five or six transactions that went perfect that you don’t get to be involved in. Your team gets to be involved in. They get to have that win and you get to hear about it after the fact. I get to hear about the problems and I am just riddled with them all the time. So that’s how my day typically goes, is just putting out fires and handling problems and and and trying to feel accomplished at the end of something like that.

Issa Hanna (06:42)
Definitely. And and with your experience, I I it’s one of the things I always say, we we get to be experts at putting out fires and then spotting a potential fire before it can even start. So the fact that you spend your whole day identifying problems or fixing problems for your clients and for your deals says a lot about your experience because you you know the exit strategy. You’ve been in the game since ninety-seven. It’s not much you haven’t seen. So when you encounter that.

You you you can spring into action. And another great thing I like, and a lot of successful people, the people at home, a lot of successful people do this. Your mind and your body have to be right in order for you to be good at your job and good at what you do. So you wake up at 4:30 AM, you pray, you need to pray, you need to have a relationship you know, with whatever your higher up is. And then also you know, you you get your workout.

So you get your sweat in, you’re ready to go already. You’ve already kind of faced adversity in your workout before before your workday even starts. So I man, I

Aaron Chapman (07:45)
You’re facing adversity even going to do the workout. Because believe me, it’s easy to not do it. we what I what people don’t realize is that you know you better than anybody. You know how to negotiate yourself out of something you don’t want to do. It’s harder to negotiate yourself into doing it than it is to negotiate yourself out of doing it. So having something that you do that you just don’t like, I’m not a fan of working on it. I don’t love it.

But what I do love is that last few sets. And today, when I looked at my workout this morning, I’m like, like, that’s a lot. Like, all right, I got going. And before too long, I’m like, wait a minute, I only got one more round left. That wasn’t so bad. Right. So yeah, it’s it’s coming to those points of like, crap, I’m almost done. That’s when it feels awesome. But it doesn’t feel awesome to think, man, I got to work out in an hour and I don’t wanna. But when you can get to the point.

where you can bring yourself to do something you don’t wanna, you can advance in any way you want you any way possible. It’s it’s very, very possible for you. But you gotta be able to convince yourself to do that and then stay on top of yourself.

Issa Hanna (08:52)
One hundred percent. I mean, you’ve you literally gotta show up. So, like, you know, you don’t wanna have that workout. If you wake up at four thirty AM, you don’t want to work out, you can easily tell yourself, I’ll do it tomorrow, whatever it is. But the fact that you show up and get ready for this workout that you didn’t want to do, you go to work and you put out fires that you already know how to put out. You’ve probably put out similar fires before. So it kind of makes it almost easier. You’re training your mind to take on

this adversity right away. So man, I I love that advice. we well we’ve been on for five minutes and you’ve already shared like golden advice with our viewers. I I love that. another thing that you talked about when when we were talking earlier is resiliency. You’re resilient. you’re always going to get back up. Can you shed some light on that?

Aaron Chapman (10:13)
So you may remember where you were at in 2008, right? What it was like to go through that whole situation. Myself, I still had a great working business up until August of 2008. And then August eighth comes around. Eight’s always been my lucky number. So it’s 8/8 of ’08. I’m jumping on the Harley. I’m gonna go ride for three days, gonna grow into New Mexico, ride through the mountains, just get my head clear for three days on the bike.

I was not on a bike but 15 minutes, and a 17-year-old in his dad’s truck wasn’t paying attention, put me into another vehicle on an Arizona freeway. So I went flipping down the freeway 80-plus miles an hour. I shattered both my legs from the knees down, broke a bunch of ribs. I took the hit here. I used to race mountain bikes. So I instinctively rolled and took that hit, but that pressure, you know, exploded my collarbone. A bunch of ribs broke, took a major impact on my head, which cracked my helmet. And I was

I’d laid there on the Arizona pavement baking, right?

So that morning I walked out of my house at 190 pounds, six foot one, a net worth of nearly $4 million with a credit score in the high 700s. Weeks later, I got wheeled back into my home in a wheelchair at 156 pounds, at a negative net worth of 1.5 million, a credit score in the 400s, and a memory that’d recycle every three to four minutes.

So I’d have to I had to work my way back from that to an industry that’s completely obliterated. There’s only two people left in the industry that I’d worked with. And what not only did I have to learn how to walk again, I had to carry around a notepad to write everything down because I would forget really quickly.

And so I’d see on my notepad that I had something that I had to do. And if I didn’t scratch it out, that means I hadn’t done it yet. And I had two people still left the industry that would recommend me for loans. It was my mother.

Which, you know, she didn’t just recommend me because I was her son. You had to be good. She would actually do business with somebody else because this is her business too. And I didn’t blame her. Another, her name was CJ Irby Coldwell Banker. And they both would call me up, say, Hey, I’ve got somebody for you to talk to. They call me back five minutes later. Do you write that down? Like, what are we talking about? She goes, Get your pad, write it down. And often I would make calls to people with some, you know, an unscribbled out thing on my pad and make a call and say, Hey, this is Aaron Chapman with such and such lending. Like, yeah, we just spoke. Mike,

What do we talk about? And then I have to explain to them my whole system because of my memory. And I’d have to convince this person that you’re still safe working with me, even though I forgot about you. So being able to come back from that, right? The the the situation where you lose everything. And you know, yeah, on the ver yeah, I didn’t file bankruptcy, so I had too too many assets. So I short sold a bunch of things. I was able to retain a bunch of a few things and then crawl back from all of that and rebuild a business.

go back to start working with then I started working with a lot of real estate investors coming into the Arizona from across the country because how cheap real estate was. And then not only was I working with real estate investors coming to Arizona, the real estate was like 60 grand average purchase price at that time. Nobody wanted to do those loans. I did, in fact, nobody wanted to fund those loans either. I had to convince banks to fund these transactions. I was fighting to get them done, fighting to get to get the business in.

And it wasn’t as hard of a fight to get the business in because nobody wanted to write those deals because there was no money in it. I’d make an average of $250 a transaction for the first couple of years there after that. But I built that back up. Where then I’m closing, you know, a few years later, ranked in the, you know, the top nowadays 1%, number one real estate investment lender in the United States at one point, top seven in the in the industry as a whole, doing $250 million a year in business, doing just single family investor loans.

And so that’s where I focus my energy at. And so if a person wants to talk about resiliency, you know, if you can take that kind of a beating, walk out of your house and have that kind of an outcome, and then have your attorney say, Hey, this was somebody else’s fault. We can go after them and here’s the family assets. And you look at that and say, Hey, will this make me whole? He’s like, Not by a long shot. So then what do I got to sign to let them go? I had to discover an understanding of what Christ said when he said that the the meek shall inherit the earth.

And I didn’t understand what a meek person is. That’s not a person who’s weak. That’s not a person who’s lowly. That’s a person who has the the capability and the justification to act, but chooses not to. And I didn’t realize I was abiding by that principle. At that time, when I chose to let that family go and not pursue them legally and take everything from them, I could only put myself in the position of that father and understand how he was probably thinking at that time. His son.

Could have had him lose everything and he didn’t. I can imagine the sleeve things. I can imagine the worry that they had, the conversations in that household. I’ve never talked to this family. I have no idea where they’re at or what’s going on in their world. But I do know this. I’ve never had to deal with the same. And I know this because of God’s hand in that whole thing. Did I not have to see my four children? My young my oldest at the time was like nine. And now my old now my youngest is twenty.

And none of them had to experience that. And I and I and I 100% attribute it to that whole situation there. So the blessings that I’ve experienced in my life, not only of business and resiliency and knowledge that’s come here, but then also knowing the hand of God and other things because of how we choose to act. So there’s knowledge that I’ve gained in those kind of things. That there’s there is something to living by the precepts that we’re taught. When we go to church or read the Bible or other scripture, when you put that to work in business, it works.

And it works in a lot of other fa other other things. So the person asked me about that particular subject, that’s the best story I can possibly offer. Now there’s other things, there’s other things. I’ve had to had to restart in business several times. I have partnerships go bad. I’ve lost millions. But that right there probably was is the best illustration I can have for that.

Issa Hanna (16:41)
Definitely. And and and you’ve seen it recently with a guy like even Ben Askren. If you guys follow the the wrestling and the you know the combat sports, the guy had a double lung transplant and and just in in in a year, a little over a year came back. But your story even just wow, it hit me. You we didn’t talk about this in the in in the pre conversation we had before we went live. the fact that you can go out, you’ve already built such a net worth.

a bigger net worth than most people build in their whole lifetimes. you know, you had such an accident, lost forty, fifty pounds, lost financially lost everything, and I’m assuming it’s because of the medical bills and and whatnot, you know?

Aaron Chapman (17:24)
Medical bills on the market. The market was taking everything from everybody. The difference that I had is right, while everybody’s suffering in the marketplace because of what’s going on in the market. I had the blessing of a being able to fax over my first week’s medical bill of $1.7 million. So when I had creditors call me up saying, Hey, what’s going on? You need you owe us this, you owe us that. And I just, hey, you got a fax machine or a fax number said, Yes, I’m faxing it to you now. I will wait. And they would look at that and say, what can we do to help?

I had the people that were known for going after people legally and ruthlessly to say, How can I help you? You can’t tell me that’s not a blessing. You know, I’ve got the opportunity to see humans at their best while I was at my worst. And then I had the opportunity to in to treat somebody in kind. And it’s it’s an interesting dynamic that comes and it’s an interesting economy that comes when you use kindness as as the emphasis for your economic practices.

Issa Hanna (18:22)
Definitely. and a lot of people, I even built my career as a real estate agent in the early days doing it almost exactly the same thing. Every single client I had, I would treat them as family. I would treat them as if I was buying the house for myself or selling the house for myself. And and when you do that and then you put yourself in that father’s position, you didn’t want to take everything he had. You could have, it would have helped pay off your debt, it would have helped bring you back, but

Look at the blessings you’ve received. You’ve been able to build something that’s eclipsed the original stuff that you lost. and now you are helping people and you even wrote a book. tell us about the book.

Aaron Chapman (19:04)
So how that all started, I’d written some other things. So you have an experience like that, what I just shared, and you have young kids, you want to explain to them what you got from that. So I sat down, I took a tablet, and everywhere I go and I’d have a thought I’d just be writing on this tablet is like a Samsung, something other tablet. And I type, type, type, type, type. I had 370 pages written on this tablet. Then in 2016, I’m at an event in Colorado and Dean Graziosi is speaking. He’s talking about, you know, publishing a book. I’m like,

Maybe I should do that. So I started asking questions and people connecting me with somebody to help me do that. And as a result of that that 370 pages, I created these little, little like dime novels. They’re like 30 pages apiece. And I believed nobody’s gonna read anything more than 30 pages. So you can get these on Amazon. I have eight of them, but there’s only four published so far. And, you know, I had a great mentor at that time and she has since passed, God rest her. but Anne fought with me on how I wanted them done.

and I end up doing it in a way that she’s like, No, I don’t know that’s the best way, but you do you. And so I did it. And then I go to another event in 2019, I think it was our 20, and Robert Allen speaking. And I never met Robert face to face, and I didn’t really know what he looked like. I knew the name, I knew the book. And somebody comes up and introduces me to them. They were excited to introduce this guy, Greg. And I started chatting with Robert, and I hit me who this guy is. I’m like, that’s him. He’s like the OG of investment real estate. So I

Couldn’t wait for his keynote. I thought his keynote was going to be on investment real estate. I’m like, you know, as a real estate investment lender, I can get some stuff from this guy. And he talked about the 10 mistakes authors make. And then, so I got to talk to him about about this, these, this speech. I said, those 10 mistakes, I made all of them right here. Anne was trying to convince me, but she didn’t convince me well enough. So I still made the mistakes. I said, what can I do to take these back from my publisher and have you help me fix these? And he goes,

Let think on that. And he got back to me later. He goes, Yeah, well, I don’t do that kind of thing. It’s like, what do you mean? So I don’t help people fix that kind of stuff. He goes, but after talking with you, you’re gonna write another book. I’m like, the hell I am. I done wrote this shit. I’m not writing another book. He goes, Yes, you are. And we went back and forth. And by time before long, we did an outline together. He goes, Okay, start writing. So I would write and I’d send him the chapter. He goes, That’s perfect. Keep going. I’m like, no critiques, no change this, no get rid of that. And he goes, No, you keep going. So we knocked out.

13 chapters in five months. And he’s like, okay. and I wrote 100%. All you do is just read it and tell me to keep going or flesh out this story or whatever. He goes, okay, now I recommend you get this illustrated. I was like, Well, do you know of any illustrators? He goes, No, I’ve never illustrated, had a book illustrated. So, do you have a suggestion? He goes, Call an artist. I knew one artist, and that was my younger brother. And he’s a brilliant artist. fine, fine oils is what he does. He’s got, he’s got,

art in galleries in Scottsdale, in other parts of the country, as I’m in Europe. He’s got some amazing art out there. I say, hey, do you do illustrations and books? He goes, I done it once and I’ll never do it again. I’m like, well, will you do will you do me a solid and just read a manuscript and tell me what you what you would do? He goes, whose manuscript? I’m like well, it’s mine. He goes, okay, I’ll take a look at it. A week later he said he called me up and goes, I will illustrate this book. I’m like, well what what do you plan on doing? He goes, I don’t know. We need to spitball it.

By the time we’re done spitballing, we came up with the with kind of like the illuminated manuscripts from the 1300s. You know, those religious texts that had the big letter on it before it starts the chapter. That’s what we did, but a real hardcore redneck groove. So here’s, you know, you got the copy of the book here, and here’s what it is now. It’s called Redneck Economics. And it’s basically the economy of an ass beaten.

is really what it’s about. A lot of people think that because I’m a lender, I’m gonna talk about the and I speak a lot on the economy. I speak a lot on inflation, leverage, amortization, where your true value of real estate is. It’s not the cash on cash, people. That’s the cherry on top of the Sunday. It’s the amortization and the appreciation. That’s where your main value is. So everybody thinks I was gonna talk about that. But no, I’m talking about the economy of an ass beaten. If you have not taken a beat and you have no idea what it is to get back up.

And that’s what this whole book is about. Now I’ve got another book in the works that has to do with you know what to do with all this information and resiliency. but yeah, that’s basically what that is. And I met it, I I happen to be at another event. I’ve been getting people to read the manuscript and write write recommendations. And those who were willing to do that, we did an actual oil portrait of them and put that in the book next to their recommendation. And then I’m at an event where I’m speaking and I meet Sharon Lechter.

And Dolph de Roos. And it turns out I’m speaking after Dolph the following day. So we’re chatting, and after we spoke, and he hung around for my speech, he’s like, that was he was he came across very rather genuinely impressed. He goes, That was some remarkable information because I’d never thought about that way. And we got to talk and I asked him, and so I feel felt comfortable asking, Would you mind reading my manuscript and do a recommendation? The man wrote a three-page afterward. So

My brother did the artwork for that. So we’ve got the forward has been art has artwork done. So what he’d do is he’d read the forward or the chapter or the afterward, and then he’d paint what he read, what his mind created. So you get to see what his mind creates when he reads this. So there’s a lot of little Easter eggs in it. It’s a pretty spectacular piece. And then my my publisher insisted on my fi picture being on the cover. I didn’t want that at first, but that’s how it ended up. And we end up on Amazon’s number one bestseller.

in f was it I was it was a best seller in seven categories for a week straight.

Issa Hanna (24:40)
Wow. Wow. And your brother. your brother’s name, if if we got some people that that are interested in his artwork, can you give it to us?

Aaron Chapman (24:47)
It’s Eric Chapman.

Issa Hanna (24:48)
Eric Chapman. So you guys

Aaron Chapman (24:49)
You go to ejc-art.com. Nice. And you can see some of his art. It’s pretty amazing. If you want to check out the book, of course it’s on Amazon. So you can go and get the hard copy. Dolph and Robert and myself read all our parts and with the audio is there. So if you want to listen to us for three and a half hours, you’ve got that. you can check it out on quitjerkinoff.com. You can get the book from there as well. You can order it directly from my publisher.

Issa Hanna (25:14)
Definitely I’m gonna check this book out. Somebody that has the the wealth of knowledge you have in our industry, but not just in our industry. how to carry yourself, how to get up from from an ass kicking, like you said, how you know these are are valuable lessons that when people have been through something like this, you you’ve got to listen because they know. And then the debt, you know, you can’t claim bankruptcy. You have too many assets. How do you get out? How do you get your credit score back up from the four hundreds?

to to seven eight hundred, you know? How how do you build yourself back up without claiming bankruptcy? You were able to do that. That’s that that in itself is super, super impressive because that was in a lot of people for the vote.

Aaron Chapman (25:57)
took me that took me from 2010 till 2016 to get back to where I could then invest again in real estate, get all those things cleared on my credit and have the capital to reinvest. And when I had that money set aside to start investing again in real estate, I pivoted just a little bit and I went into a whole life policy first, put the money there, then borrowed from the policy to buy the real estate, and then took the returns from the real estate and 10% of my income.

put it back against the policy to pay down the note to do it again and again and again. So that’s where I’ve created this this whole process there. And now my investment process is different. I had did have real estate in six different states, over 200 doors in vi in various different things, whether whether it be single family and some apartment buildings and some other projects. But now I’m consolidating a lot of it and moving some of my assets into one area. And we have taken, you know, I’got, like I said, adult children.

You know, 20 years old, 25, 27, 29. And I’ve got three grandkids. And they my grandkids range from one to four. And I’m looking at this, and when my my children started to get married, my son and then my my my second, my oldest daughter, so have one boy and three girls, they decided I bought a house next door to where they grew up, rehabbed that house. I moved in, they flipped a coin to see who got to live in the house that they grew up in.

My daughter won. So my brother’s in my my son and his wife is in an apartment. And I’m watching them here in Arizona pay more for a two-bedroom apartment than what my daughter was paying next door. I’m like, this sucks. I don’t like this. This is bothering me. So I pulled the family together. So I’m going to sell some real estate that we have here in Arizona. And I’m going to put those assets into Missouri because buying more real estate in Arizona at the time didn’t make sense. The cost of it versus what they would have to be charged to live there didn’t make sense.

But I could buy houses in Missouri close to some property I already had. So my oldest and then my third, then my third child, who’s married who is married with her husband, we bought two houses a mile apart from each other in Springfield, Missouri. We put them in there and they we signed a lease with the trust. So now we all live in houses owned by the family trust that I created. We all pay $200 on top of what the trust, the payment is to go into the middle of the trust to build up a home warranty, if you will.

So if something breaks on one of the houses, we just pull from the from that to be able to pay for it. And it’s been working out very, very, very good for us to do that. And now that’s my entire objective is to make sure that not a single person with my blood in their veins ever has to wonder where they’re going to live. I’m not going to provide them the housing. I’ll provide no opportunity to rent from the housing, rent those houses from the trust and then also be beneficiaries of that trust. So ultimately it’s theirs anyway. So that’s that’s my ultimate goal. And I’m helping a lot of people do the exact same.

Issa Hanna (28:50)
Love that. I mean, it’s all about family. your family’s paying the family. They’re paying themselves. They’re not no interest, no rent, no nothing. It’s it’s literally going through the same blood, like you said. You’re building generational wealth, and you’re creating a legacy, you know. this Chapman legacy, you know, 100 years from now, you guys might be the new Rockefellers or something, with the foundation that that you’re laying. And you did say you can’t.

build a skyscraper on what did you say, a four foot foundation?

Aaron Chapman (29:18)
You can’t put

a scarscraper on a four-inch slab. Dig it to bedrock. In my opinion, digging it to bedrock is getting the getting the life insurance policy. So every single member of my family, when they get married, you have to get a life insurance policy on you and on your spouse. And you have to use 10% of your income every year to fund it. And then that way, you know, you’re you’re following the pattern that we established. You’re building up that that that that pattern in your life.

Issa Hanna (29:21)
All right.

Aaron Chapman (29:42)
Putting money aside. Also, you’re protecting each other and protecting yourself at the same time. And then it then when you have that windfall, because I’m not gonna last forever, even though I’ve I’ve tested the durability of this carcass, eventually it’s gonna give up. And when it does, there’s gonna be a windfall of capital comes into them. They need to know what to do with it at that point. So you need to put that, be able to put that to work and continue to perpetuate it. So we set the systems now. So I’m selling out of the rest of my Arizona assets and I’m moving everybody up there to to to Missouri because.

With my grandparents and possibly yours, died the hierarchy of the family. It used to be that the elders had status that everybody down the line to the toddlers knew you don’t mess with the elders. When they say it, it’s it’s law in the family. We would have big family reunions with on my mother’s side, and we’d all get together and there’d be you know over a hundred people there on this 40 acres out in the middle of New Mexico, and there would be rival gangs represented there.

Right. You would see opposite colors and they go to fighting with each other. And the elders would roll over in their wheelchairs with their oxygen on. They just point and they would stop and they would separate. And then later on, you’d see two separate cliques together, you know, arm and on saying, hey, talking about cuz, not not their their their their colors, right? That was powerful. But when they died, my grandmother, her sisters, and her two brothers passed. That died. That doesn’t exist in our family anymore, doesn’t exist in hardly any families anymore.

In there’s not even houses that are together. You’re not even going to see parents together. So I I’m taking it upon myself to change that for my family. So they’re going to have that. I’m bringing everybody together from my grandchildren all the way to us as grandparents. They’re going to have the influence of their grandparents. They’re going to have the influence of their aunts or their uncles. They’re going to have the interactions with their cousins. And they’re going to have and I’m going to be there for my great grandchildren. I’m going to see that happen. I’m going to reinstill that. I’m going to help everybody I can to do the same. And it starts with just one person, which is me.

I can’t control everybody else, but I can control Aaron. And that’s the only thing I can control. There’s things are gonna get in my way. They’re gonna make it tougher. You’re gonna have to deal with with a lot of other problems. But I don’t know that any other problem will ever be as big as what I already experienced, which is waking up in a hospital bed, adhered to the sheet because of all the burns and the road rash and everything that was I was healing to this sheet. They’d move and peel that off me all the time and not know where I was at and starting it over at less than zero.

So there’s none of these problems that I feel would be be insurmountable once I’ve overcome that.

Issa Hanna (32:12)
Definitely. man, such an inspirational guy. Great, great future plans, for like I said, generational wealth. You’re setting them up for a hundred plus years. I mean, indefinitely if they listen to your to what you know, you could write a constitution for the family and have them stick to it like like we do with our country, you know, ’cause not many people in their life acquire the type of knowledge that that that you have, Aaron. And

And to be so humble and and and so God fearing about it too. I you know, you don’t see that. A lot of people get prideful, boastful. but we all didn’t

Aaron Chapman (32:49)
It’s

because Aaron didn’t do this. You know, this was not me that did this. This was by the grace of God, has I has I I’ve been led here by getting slapped over here and slapped. I’m literally getting beat down the pathway to get where I’m going. I’m I’ve not been on the right path, I don’t think, ever in my life by my choice. When you look at the Ten Commandments, that’s I mean, you can honestly say, especially when you hear what Christ says, if you’ve just even thought it, right? If you ever had it in your heart, then you’ve committed it.

I’m guilty of everything, right? We’ve broken all of those. Every single one of us has. And so when and we and we come to the realization that you’re not going to make it past this life or anywhere in the next without that grace, it’s impossible for me to have an attitude about this and be walking around pound beating my chest because it’s I shouldn’t be here. But I’m here for a purpose and a reason. And this is what my reason is, this is what drives me every day to get up and get moving, is this more than anything I’ve ever had. I want to see that end.

I want to see those kids running around in the the Ozarks having fun and enjoying each other, but then being serious about what we’re going to do here. I want to see the changes that happen within our with our own family. And that’s what drives me more than anything. No, there’s the habits that I’ve built in, but you know, I’ve eventually become a slave to those habits. You know, we talked about, you know, having the guts to get up and work out. For right now, for me, the toughest thing is have the guts to actually stop and rest.

Instead of work out some mornings when I’m beat and I’m like my body’s aching, you gotta let it rest. Like, no, but I gotta work out. You have to be able to know when’s the time to actually take a break and not take a break. So that’s another tough thing we gotta do. But again, it all just I I give all all credit to God as it was not none of this is eat. This is me. I’m just a person that’s just just a l in the meat bag moving. That’s it.

Issa Hanna (34:34)
Truly inspiring, Aaron. the humility and and and and the truth, you know, the truth that you bring. the grace comes out of the screen. I mean, you can you can see that. you are you are one of the you know, a pure man with great intentions. I love that. And I was starting to say earlier, it’s a long bumpy road like we’re talking about to get here, you know, to get to the mountaintop. We all start at the bottom of the mountaintop.

We talked about your accident a and that part of your history, but I want to dig a little bit farther back. How did a young Aaron get started in this industry period?

Aaron Chapman (35:11)
That’s also an interesting story. So, you know, grew up in a very blue-collar family. And in the in in 1989, or 90, one of the two, my family had an opportunity where they went into a partnership running cattle out of central Utah. So we moved from Arizona to central Utah and we ran this cattle operation on a just shy of a thousand acres, about 500 head of cattle every year, and I loved every bit of it. You know, the agricultural industry is a lot of fun. You’re getting your ass handed to you on the daily out there.

But you’re seeing things get accomplished. And I loved what I was doing. Sometimes didn’t love it a lot, but looking back on it, every bit of it was awesome and I miss every bit of it. But came a point where that relationship wasn’t working so awesome with the partnership. And my dad decided to pull out of the partnership. They all sold out and I moved on. So we went back to he went back to running to working in the mines. I ran heavy equipment. I drove truck. Then I ended up in the mines in northern New Mexico alongside my dad. And I loved that job.

Absolutely loves you. You’re underground by several hundred feet. It’s just you and a and a rock tunnel. We called it the a heading because you’re going on the a compass heading, right? And you’re driving that tunnel with with a with a what they call as a rock gel drill or a jack leg drill. It’s just you in this 160-pound machine that you’re drilling six foot holes into the rock. It’s only about that big round, enough to fit dynamite in it. So you’re doing 30 some odd holes in it in a specific pattern.

You’re loading it with dynamite, you step around the corner, you blow it up, you dig it out, support the ground, you do it again. And it’s just you and the rock. And I loved every bit of it. But then it comes to a point in the market where what you’re mining for doesn’t have the same demand. So when the market changes and you can’t get as much for the ore as what you’re getting before, and it costs too much to get it from the underground to the surface, they shut down the project till the till the demand goes up.

So they lay everybody off. Well, you got to do something, right? So I came back to Arizona. My wife and infant son was here. It was a 10 hour drive. I go there for 13 shifts, come back for six. This time it was indefinite. So I started looking for a job. I had an amazing resume at 23 years old, right? Cattle ranching, truck, heavy equipment. I worked in the oil fields in Wyoming. I now worked in the mines. I should be able to get a job anywhere. Because of that fact, I couldn’t get a job anywhere because I was overqualified for everything I qualified for or I applied for.

It got to a point where I was overdrawn on my checking account. I went to go apply for a job driving a truck hauling landscape rock for $10 an hour in South Phoenix. And I and it takes about 20 minutes to drive where I was living to there to do this application. And I got the exact same response from that general manager that I got from everybody else who overqualified. I finally had to ask him, what does that mean? What does it mean to be overqualified? He can either do the damn job or I can’t. He goes, it means that you could easily get another job that pays more tomorrow.

And I would lose out on another, another applicant. Like, that makes sense. It doesn’t help me, but it makes sense. So I accepted that and I walked out of there trying to keep tears from flowing because I was literally destitute financially. Got in my truck and I had this coupon for free diapers that my wife had found in the paper that day that I can go get diapers because I was almost out at home for my son. So I fired up my truck. I’m driving to a grocery store in Chandler, Arizona, and my gas light comes on in my truck.

I’d not driven this truck very far in a gaslight, so I had no idea how far I could go. So I hurried up and found the grocery store that had a gas station outside. So I pulled up to a pump. I pulled out the only form of payment which I had was his debit card. And I knew that account was overdrawn. So I said a quick prayer, knowing that God’s got to answer this prayer. Swiped my debit card and I still got to decline. So in my mind, it was not answered. So I rifled through my truck looking for some lost change.

Found a few coins and I started walking that that store parking lot for seemingly a couple of hours to get enough change for a couple of gallons of gas. Now, this was back in 1997. People still carried change and gas was under a dollar a gallon. So you could literally find the money you need to get gas just walking a parking lot. So by the time I got my gas, I went into the grocery store. I found the diapers that corresponded with the coupon. I stood in line, right? You know, know how that feels. You just spent the last couple hours.

trying to avoid the gaze of anybody who’s watching, you pick up that penny, that nickel, that dime, that quarter. Now I’m paying for the for the one thing with a coupon. I finally got it and I got out of there. And I had my head down, not making eye contact with anybody. I heard the worst thing I could possibly hear in my life, which was my own name. Somebody recognized me in that position. And they approached me. And this is the guy who used to run the office when I ran heavy equipment. He was the guy who would dispatch us to different jobs. He asked me how things were and I sugarcoated the hell out of it.

And he asked me if we want to go to dinner. I’m like, dude, I’m not really in the best position financially to go out to dinner. He goes, No, I got a gift certificate. Let’s let’s go on Friday. So my wife and I went to dinner with him at Red Lobster on Friday night. He had a gift certificate from a client. It turns out he was in the mortgage industry now. So he introduced me to this, gave me the business card for a branch manager of a broker shop. So from there, I scheduled the interview. I cut a foot off of my hair. I shaved.

My mom bought me some business like clothes and I started as a telemarketer in December of 1997. And now we’re almost 30 years later, here I am, doing the exact same thing, but doing it differently where I’d started. I started being a telemarketer, picking up these lists and just calling people, seeing what they want to refinance, and then slowly getting trained on how to do the loan and all these things. And then it wasn’t long. I’m watching all the people I trained with falling out of the industry, and I’m the only guy left. There’s none of them in the industry anymore.

so I’m really all that’s left in that from all the original guys where I started.

Issa Hanna (40:44)
Wow. How inspirational, man, from from couponing for diapers. And and as a man, you know, it’s it’s not easy to be in that position, you know. sucks. You have it sucks. You have pride.

Aaron Chapman (40:56)
Sucks. You feel like the ultimate failure. I gotta, I mean, dude, I I can run any piece of equipment there was. I I worked underground with explosives and I’m having to walk a parking lot for change. I mean, and when you look back on that, it’s like, think about this for a second. I said a prayer to get my debit card to work, and instead, God gave me an opportunity to see Keith. If I if people drop more change and I found more faster, I would have been out of there before Keith even went to the damn the damn store.

Right. If it took me longer to find that, I would have definitely seen that some bitch walking from across the parking lot and I would have known that was him and I would have avoided him. It was perfect. There’s absolute perfect timing. So you want to talk about prayers getting answered. They were answered and it set me on a path that was not easy. This whole path coming down this was not simple, but I know damn well there’s no way I’ve gotten where I’m at by running heavy equipment or working with my hands somewhere. Not that I don’t enjoy working with my hands, not that there’s anything wrong with it. I love all that. I still do a lot that I can now.

I run sitting, love sitting on a piece of equipment out my place in Missouri or working, building a building trucks and cars and stuff here. But what this has afforded me is the opportunity to speak like this and about our creator and about the blessings that come now. Sometimes the prayers are answered in ways that just feel shitty. You know, we we pray and we beg God to help us move this mountain. And sometimes you have to just have faith, the fact that he handed you a shovel and you can get it accomplished with his help, but you still got to do something.

You can’t just lay there and pray and then just move on their own. You got to do something too. And it took me over a decade to really build it. And once I built it, it started to really get moving on you. And then, you know, you have crashes, you have COVID, you have things happen. You make bad decisions. You don’t involve God in what you’re doing. And you destroy it for a little while and you go back and start building it again. That’s life. That’s the existent we’re we’re in. We’re here to get our ass kicked. And you’re here to learn something from and pass that on.

Issa Hanna (42:50)
Definitely. And and boy, are you passing on. What what is what an inspirational story. I mean, walk in the parking lot for change, couponing for diapers, you know, prayer answered in this meeting that got you into a whole nother field that you probably never would have thought, you know, back then, 20 years down the line, hey, you know, where you’re at right now. So unbelievable. It it’s fate and it’s a you walk that road and and like you said.

Kind of got dragged and bumped down that road, but you you went down it with faith, and here you are now, leaving behind for generations to come of your family a lot. So unbelievably inspirational story, Aaron. I want to ask you one thing before we’re gonna close out. advice. There’s people that are at home watching this right now, like, man, that guy is inspirational.

They just got their real estate license. They just got into, you know, or they just became lenders. Maybe they just thought about buying their first rental property. what advice do you have for them on building business relationships, fostering them, and then growing their network?

Aaron Chapman (43:56)
So I don’t look at myself as a lender. I don’t look at myself as a good businessman. I don’t look at myself as a really as much of an entrepreneur. I look at myself as a people collector. I know that the only wealth we get to take with us is who we became in this whole disruption world that we’re in, the relationships that we’ve made and the experiences we have with them. Seek to have good experiences with people to benefit them, and you benefit as a result.

Don’t seek to how do I get paid. the other, the other thing that I I’ve really, really tell people when it comes to success is it’s the start that stops most people. Just getting up and doing something is going to make you more successful than you were five minutes ago. So just get going. And a lot of times you’re going to be you’re going to be offered opportunities to take, take meetings. They’re just, I don’t want to do that. That’s going to be a pain in my ass. Take the meeting, get a relationship out of it, get to know somebody out of it.

Figure out ways to talk to people. That’s not your normal, hey, well, the weather sucks, right? Or what what brought you here? Figure out other ways to communicate with people and be genuinely interested in them more so than in yourself. Cause if you show interest in them, many will show interest in you. So that’s the best advice I can offer to anybody is just getting moving and get moving, getting to know other people.

Issa Hanna (45:12)
Definitely. And it’s not what they can do for you in the beginning. It’s what you can do for them. truly come with pure intentions, not just making money. Cause you can have the one client in the one transaction, but your goal is to be that family’s guy, you know. When when you close that transaction for the one guy, he likes you so much, he calls somebody, say, Hey, I got a guy, I got a guy. Word of mouth is the best, the number one.

advertisement in our business. So man, I I love this advice. And now for people at home who who wanna check you out some more, maybe go to your website, can you plug your website or how can people get a hold of you, Aaron?

Aaron Chapman (45:52)
aaronchapman.com is the best way to find me. [email protected] is the best way to get a hold of me. schedule an appointment there. I’ve got my assistant Bree who manages my whole day. I now and again will book something on my calendar and I’ll screw it up. I let her handle it. In fact, my wife even says, Hey, we got such and such coming up. I’m like, tell Bree. She goes, and she at first was getting insulted. I’m like,

If it’s that important, it has to be on my calendar because it’s not on my calendar, it doesn’t happen. And I pay somebody a lot of money to make sure it’s on my calendar. So if it’s really that important, you tell her, not me, because we’ve already proven I’ve had eight concussions, one of them broke so bad that I had a memory recycled for almost a year. Don’t trust me with it. I trust that it’s important enough to you. So I want to make it important enough for me. So I hand it off to Brie to make sure I make it on my calendar. Brie used to be like my personal banker at my credit union.

And she did such an amazing job. And I’m not gonna hire you to run my life, which is what she does. She runs my email and she runs my runs my calendar. My personal banking sucks now, but all the other parts of my life is taken care of very, very well. And I really highly encourage person, if you really want to get serious with your business and with your life, find a Bree. Somebody that can communicate for you, it can act in your behalf on a lot of things. And that

Issa Hanna (46:59)
Why?

Aaron Chapman (47:07)
She has a way to give a person a hug over a text. I don’t know how she does that, but she just loves everybody and that’s the type of person you need in your world. So if you want to really, really take off your business, delegate small things like that so you can be focused here. I’m right now my business is running. She’s handling all my emails and my my calls and things like that. I’ve got a staff that’s handling all the transactions themselves. Everything’s working while I’m talking to you.

That’s what a person needs to do to become successful. I don’t care how much money I have in my bank account. I don’t care what car I drive. I don’t care how many watches I have. It’s having something for other people to do, having something to pass on to the next generation, and having some the ideas that others can walk around and say, Yes, I heard this here, and it’s made my life better. That’s where success is. And for me, success is grandkids. The fact I have grandkids, my grandkids love me. They scream Papa when I walk in the room. There is nothing on the this world can give me that’s better than.

Issa Hanna (48:00)
Nothing. You can’t buy that feeling. and and I don’t have grandkids yet, but children and and I hope to one day be the role model that you are for for my bloodline. So Aaron with that, I

Aaron Chapman (48:13)
Well

let me give one little bit of advice before we close this puppy out.

Issa Hanna (48:16)
Yes, yeah.

Aaron Chapman (48:17)
You will finally understand what it is to be a father when you become a grandfather. I realize that after the fact. I raised my children to adulthood. I don’t have kids anymore, I have adults. But what I do have now in these little critters, these grandkids that I love as much, if not more, than my own kids and oftentimes. But what I have to do is I have to be right with giving them back to my children to raise them.

And I have to then wonder, okay, how are they going to take care of them? Because I know who raised them. And they’ve got the ideas that that guy who raised them, that’s not the guy that sits before you. The guy who parented those children is not the guy who’s sitting here now that knows all about parenting those children now after looking back on it. I see every failure, I see every mistake. What’s interesting about our lives is we don’t see the things we did right. We see only the things we did wrong. And man, there’s a lot of them. But what I did do right is I got grandkids and they keep coming back.

My children love to be with us. We love to have dinner together all the time. They that my grandkids love to be with us. I’m gonna do everything I can to make sure that’s still the thing as I age and as I get older in this life and that they get to experience the same thing. Look forward to this, but also know there’s a lot you don’t know. Especially you, you parents out there. You’re you’re just doing the best you can. And I I tip my hat to you while you’re in it, but enjoy every second of it because it’s gonna be gone real soon.

Issa Hanna (49:37)
Definitely. Man, Aaron, such a such an interesting, inspirational person. man, it was a true honor to have you on the show today. I I just love talking to you about all this. I’m definitely going to bring you back as a guest because we’re we’re not done talking. Thank you. no problem, man. I mean, thank you for coming on the show. And to our viewers at home, if you guys enjoyed this conversation with Aaron and want to see more like it.

Make sure to hit like and subscribe. I talk to people every day that could bring us different knowledge on every aspect of the real estate industry and life. Until next time,