Unlock Financial Freedom: 7 Skills for Success in Skilled Trades

John Harcar (00:01.662)
All right, hey guys, welcome back to our show. I’m your host, John Harcar, and I’m here today with Clayton Abernathy. And what we’re going to talk about is besides his what sounds like a long and very interesting journey in business and real estate, we’re going to talk about how he feels the importance of the skilled trades, right? And why we need to really focus on those. Remember, guys, at Investor Fuel, we help real estate investors, service providers, I mean, really all real estate entrepreneurs.

two to five extra business by providing tools and resources to both help you build the business you want to have and live the life you want to live. So Clay, welcome to our show.

Clayton Abernathy (00:42.428)
Thank you for having me. Appreciate it. Excited to be here.

John Harcar (00:44.052)
Yeah, I’m excited to talk about our topic today, the skilled trades. yeah, I kind of get your feeling on how we’re kind of losing those a little bit. But before we talk into all that, why don’t you tell our audience about your background, what you’ve done, how you got into real estate and business, and we’ll brought you to today.

Clayton Abernathy (01:03.694)
Sure. I’m entrepreneur by trade, started my first business when I was 10 as a professional clown. Did that for almost nine years. Decided that being Bozo the Clown when my kids were born probably wasn’t the best idea and I got started into Kukko Cutlery, Vector Marketing. And yeah, I’ve got about a million dollars in knife sales underneath my belt in the two years I was there.

John Harcar (01:26.68)
Vector marketing, yeah.

Clayton Abernathy (01:33.95)
and, and I got out of that and I just got burnt out and I, I ended up moving to Rocky point, Mexico and living on the beach in Rocky point for about a year. And I ran out of money. And, and so me and a buddy, that lived down there with me decided to start selling real estate down there. And, the federal lease, got, got, a hold of the fact that a white guy was down there, without a visa. And they showed up at the real estate office and tried to deport me. And, the.

John Harcar (02:00.82)
Wow. Wow.

Clayton Abernathy (02:03.246)
told me they’d throw me in jail just long enough to make sure I didn’t want to come back. But luckily the real estate office that me and my buddy were at had a big time attorney there and was able to stop them from deporting me and throwing me in Mexican jail. And after that, me and my buddy decided to do it legally and get our visas and everything to make sure that didn’t happen. But I wanted to get one up on all the real estate people down there.

John Harcar (02:18.249)
man.

Clayton Abernathy (02:30.03)
Was in Rocky Point I was the first person ever on an MLS system So if that tells you that the type of real estate we were doing down there where we weren’t we weren’t negotiating commissions We were saying well, how much do you want to sell it for a hundred grand? So if I sell it for 300 I keep 200 and I give you a hundred grand so I came up to the states to To get one up on everybody down there and I started

John Harcar (02:40.212)
Yeah.

Clayton Abernathy (02:57.57)
To get my real estate license because nobody nobody was licensed down there and and I started learning about financing and hundred percent financing and and realized it and this was I was I just turned 21 and I realized the amount of money that was in United States down there yet at that point time you had to have a sack of cash and so I decided well, I never went back so I started selling in Phoenix and and Really really did very well within within about a year or two. I pulled myself into multi-million

John Harcar (03:00.298)
Mm-hmm.

Clayton Abernathy (03:26.766)
assets and and sales and and I started recruiting and training agents how to do that over the next five years and and You know current to date I’ve got about 200 plus million dollars in personal sales So I’m probably like 210 million dollars just on selling buyers and sellers and I’ve I flip large scale commercial buildings and flip lots of little residentials and

I’m not one of those guys that does 400 flips. I’ve got friends that do that. I just do the ones that have lots of money in them. I’m not trying to run a beast. And then I started a trade school because that was something that’s on the radar that we were gonna really have some problems in the trades and people not having any skills. So that’s kind of the background of me.

John Harcar (04:03.604)
Yeah.

John Harcar (04:19.168)
Cool, we’ll get into that. And if you watch any of my podcasts, I like to go back. So let’s talk about the soul clown thing. How did you talk? How did you start? I mean, so you were 10 years old.

Clayton Abernathy (04:25.431)
Alright

10 years old, yeah.

John Harcar (04:29.952)
10 years old and you’re out there hustling, making money, being a clown. I’m just curious, where did the whole clown idea come from?

Clayton Abernathy (04:33.74)
Yep.

Clayton Abernathy (04:38.74)
So I grew up really poor, very poor, like the kind of poor that, you know, we didn’t have hot water or telephone and, know, church church giving us food and those kinds of things. And, and so I was, if I ever wanted something, I always had to find a way to do it. And I, I don’t know why we were at Barnes and Noble, but my family’s at Barnes and Noble and I, there was a book and it had making balloon animals on it. And I convinced

my mom to give it to me and I had been saving money from mowing grasses and things like that and I paid her back. And I learned every book, every balloon in that book and started going to neighborhood and kids and things like that and saying, Hey, can I, can I do this? And one of my neighbors knew a guy that ran a business doing it and he was in her high school and make a long story short, they were looking for high school kids to come and make balloon animals at restaurants and spring flings and things like that.

And she said, well, I got someone younger. So by that time I had turned 12 and he recruited me and he taught me every balloon trick there. And he introduced me to one of his friends that was in the Ringling Brothers and taught me how to do all the stuff. then me and my dad worked on juggling and I was Snappy the Clown. I got purple hair and Snappy the Clown. And my first real gig, I made $65 an hour as a 12 year old.

John Harcar (05:56.0)
Snappy the Clown.

Clayton Abernathy (06:05.102)
And that’s what my going rate was at 12. And so I was working, I’d work a couple hours on the weekend and then I started working Tuesdays and Friday nights at restaurants. I was, between 12 and 19, I was doing really well for myself, making balloon animals and goofing off on the weekends.

John Harcar (06:05.12)
Wow, not bad.

John Harcar (06:25.15)
Where did all this entrepreneurial spirit or drive come from? I were you a parent’s entrepreneur? Did you have any exposure in your life, early life to that?

Clayton Abernathy (06:34.35)
It will be in broke helps. If mom can’t give you any money and you’re unwilling to ask mom for money, then you gotta find other ways to make money. My parents owned an Arthur Murray’s dance studio and then it wasn’t a good family life and they left that life. And then my dad just did odd jobs, things like that. My mom too, just to support the family. I come from a family of six.

John Harcar (06:47.839)
Okay.

Clayton Abernathy (07:03.522)
And so there wasn’t a lot of money to go around. being the youngest one, you see the drain that everyone’s putting on. I never would ask my parents for money. I’d always go find a way to get the things I wanted.

John Harcar (07:15.508)
get it. Love it. So you’re in Mexico and you’re broke and how can we decide to start a real estate business versus you know a taco stand? Any other type of business?

Clayton Abernathy (07:26.946)
You know, yeah, everyone says if you want to be rich, real estate, real estate’s the way to go. And we just kind of fell on it. In all honesty, we were down in Mexico for a friend’s 21st birthday and I had just gotten out of cutco. I was working 100, 100 plus hours a week and had some money saved up and, and he said, Hey, why don’t we stay? And we had, we had had a really good time in Mexico and I was like, I’ll stay.

This guy’s a go-getter. He’s still selling he’s still selling beachfront properties like crazy. He’s probably the the biggest guy down there and And I saw y’all stay and so we we we just stayed and he he rustled up There was one guy that looked like Billy Idol walking around there with half a shirt on Crack crack Billy Idol more or less if that kind of looks thinks of what he looked like and we asked him like what are you doing? He’s like I live down here and I saw real estate so we went and

John Harcar (07:58.208)
Really, really.

John Harcar (08:12.757)
Mmph.

Clayton Abernathy (08:22.862)
tracked down the company that would hire this guy. thought, well, you could hire us. We’re 21 years old. We’ll go getters. And they did. They gave us a little stipend to start selling real estate. And Kenny, my good friend, stayed down there. He’s still down there 20 plus years. And then I just came up and started doing real estate. So that’s kind how we fell into it. We were really just trying to be cool.

John Harcar (08:28.138)
Yeah.

John Harcar (08:39.616)
That’s awesome.

John Harcar (08:45.344)
So then you come back up here and then you start did you open up your own broker brokerage? Did you go to work for somebody?

Clayton Abernathy (08:50.68)
So I did, I worked for a place called New Home Information Centers in the East Valley where it was just blowing up. They’re no longer in business, but got a really good broker there. I was also teaching dance at Fred Astaire at that time, supplementing my income. And I just learned the ropes as best I could. No one really teaching me. Just looking at this place is booming. So it was really hard to make a bad decision then when prices were going like that.

John Harcar (08:56.885)
Yeah.

Clayton Abernathy (09:20.894)
But I was just eager, eager to, to, to continue. then within, within a few years, I opened my own broker in Arizona. You have to be a licensed real estate agent for three years. So a lot of what I was doing, I had to. Yeah.

John Harcar (09:31.26)
to open your own brokerage? Yeah, got it. Okay, very cool. When you started doing flips, how did you learn to do that? Or did you just do that and learn that kind of as you went?

Clayton Abernathy (09:43.212)
Yeah, kind of the same, same, the same way, you know, it’s, I didn’t have any money when I first did my first flip and, and I found a place that did a hundred percent financing. and, and so was like, okay, well, location’s good, a hundred percent financing. so, what, was there really to risk? And so I just was, I just looked at it, how, how a buyer would look at it. And that’s really how I became really good at flips is.

the more people you walk through real estate houses, they tell you what they like and what they don’t like. And so it was easy as you’re walking through properties and going, well, people don’t like this. Oftentimes people don’t know why they don’t like it. And like the baseboards are off or you got two different kinds of things or, know, in Arizona we get lots of Mexican colors. So one of the rooms is bright orange and one’s purple and one’s green. And, know, and these are cosmetic things that are very easy to fix, but people are like, oh, I don’t like the house. I’m like, but you just…

John Harcar (10:14.888)
Exactly. Yeah.

John Harcar (10:31.008)
Right.

Clayton Abernathy (10:38.182)
loved the one for $50,000 more that was the exact same model, just different colors. Yeah. And I’m like, well, I can paint this house for 50 grand. Siding me up. So it was, yeah. And so really what, how it come was just hustling. I was just hustling people, you know, to, to, be a good agent. And as I was doing that, I was just fumbling through this and going, well, and I couldn’t convince me. was

John Harcar (10:42.506)
Just painted differently, yeah.

John Harcar (10:48.714)
Yeah, I’ll take it.

Clayton Abernathy (11:04.472)
I was trying to convince people like just buy this one and they’re like no no I want the one with the nicer refrigerator in it. I’m like yeah but that’s that fridge is three grand you’re paying 15 grand for a nicer fridge like all right I’ll buy that one and so I did I just and so every and a lot of the greatest deals I did I was showing I was showing other people houses and I’d be like and and ethics say I can’t buy it.

John Harcar (11:08.842)
Mmm.

John Harcar (11:14.08)
Yeah, for a refrigerator.

Clayton Abernathy (11:28.16)
And so I would just ask him, I’m like, you should buy this. And they’d say, no, no, I don’t want that one claim. Like, all right, are you okay if I buy it? I’d write up a contract for them on one and I’d write one up on me and I’d 100 % finance it until eventually I didn’t need 100 % financing anymore. I used all of the people out there that, there’s, you I think you guys do financing too, right? Through Investor Fuel. Yeah, you know, I’ve never used you guys, but I happen to get that and.

John Harcar (11:48.01)
Yep. Yep.

Clayton Abernathy (11:53.036)
So what a great opportunity, right? You know, somebody’s gonna give me money and all I gotta do is some hard work. And so I did that, just kept doing that until, you know, was doing five or 10 and built a little crew. you know, I had my rules of, you know, what I would buy and how I would buy, but location never mattered to me. It was only how much money I could make off.

John Harcar (11:58.708)
Yeah.

John Harcar (12:10.218)
No.

I was going to ask him and he said, just said you had your rules on what you buy and whatnot. Are, you looking more at doing like cosmetic stuff as opposed to getting into like full rehabs or, do you.

Clayton Abernathy (12:22.698)
I love full rehabs. mean, if there was a cathedral that would let me, you know, rehab it, I would do it. It’s like my passion. My dad, he passed away a little while ago, but he’s an artist. And I always, people always say, well, how’d you get good at this? My dad’s an interesting character. He was a dance teacher for a long time. And then just, he was colorblind and he’s one of the best color artists you could ever imagine. And I could never figure that one out. But I remember asking him going,

John Harcar (12:27.37)
haha

Clayton Abernathy (12:51.072)
Well, I wouldn’t even ask. He would always tell me what was wrong with things as we’re walking down the street. He’s like, you know, see that that’s wrong. You know, girlfriends couldn’t have a girlfriend that was ugly because he’d be like, her nose is too big or ears are wrong or you know, and so people always ask, well, how did you understand this stuff? And I’m like, I think it was my dad who was constantly telling me, well, that building’s off or this is put there wrong. And it was, I mean, and I hated it growing up, but

I mean it made me a fortune later in life was because they were always he was always pointing out what was wrong with something and so then it was like it just became second nature for me

John Harcar (13:20.884)
Yeah.

John Harcar (13:27.54)
Yeah, it’s funny how those things that like we look back when we were younger going like, man, that sucked then. But now you’re like, God, thank God that happened. Thank God he did that. Thank God we did that. So what does your business look like today?

Clayton Abernathy (13:35.67)
Yeah, exactly. Very grateful for those.

Clayton Abernathy (13:44.13)
Well, so I still own an insurance company. So I also own an insurance company where we do property insurance. It’s called Minova Insurance. And then I own a real estate brokerage to Minova Realty. But I’m a joint and I just I also own a publishing company where we publish books and things like that Abernathy Publishing. But to release my newest book on all of this stuff. But most of my time is put into the trade school now.

John Harcar (13:50.762)
Okay.

Clayton Abernathy (14:14.126)
I made a lot in real estate and I always find that if I’m not challenging myself, then I’m not growing. so we’re in a world of hurt in the trades. And so I spent a lot of time building a new trade school where people are actually building. so my business, and I also own a property management company. So I spent some time in running those ones. I’ve got great people that are running actually all of them.

And so a lot of it is just big picture stuff. Like, okay, well, how do we get this to go to the next level? And the only way I actually built myself to be a big picture person was that I had to do it all. I mean, was a real estate agent. I was the broker. I had agents underneath me. had the insurance company. There was a time where I was my sole insurance person and my sole real estate person. I was selling seven to eight houses a month and I was selling 20 to 40 policies and insurance a month.

John Harcar (15:00.576)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (15:08.714)
Jeez, how’d you keep all that hair, man?

Clayton Abernathy (15:13.326)
You know that that’s why it’s long. I you know you go through this midlife crisis. I’ve been growing out my hair So I don’t know it’s gray. It’s gray underneath the headphones

John Harcar (15:17.63)
Yeah. Right.

John Harcar (15:23.348)
OK. So cool, man. you got so what like prompted you to say, I mean this I need to build a trade school, right? Because that’s just not like something everybody decides on a whim. So there had to be some need that you kept seeing that wasn’t being met.

Clayton Abernathy (15:39.778)
Yeah, I mean if you ever have a whim to kill yourself and lose all your money, that’s a great way to do it. Start a trade school. So what happened in 2008, we had the recession that happened in 2008 and had we not had a recession, we would have had a decline in civilization due to the fact that we lost our trades. I remember back prior to that, you could build just about anything.

John Harcar (15:46.9)
Why?

Clayton Abernathy (16:07.822)
and you’d have great people that did it. But in 2008, a lot of people just got out of the trades and they never came back. And while I was recruiting real estate agents, so I was trying to, I was actually trying to create a better real estate agent. That was my goal. I wanted a real estate agent that understood insurance, that understood construction, that knew why that light turned on and how it turned on. I wanted one with sales background. So what I was actually recruiting to do is I was trying to make a better real estate agent.

And what happened is I dug into these weird numbers and the numbers were actually very scary and frightening to me. What I found out was that 75 % of all high school students went directly to college. 75%. Nope, no pass, go directly to college. Out of those 75%, less than 40 % finished college and less than 20 % of them actually needed their degree. And yet…

John Harcar (16:57.492)
Mm-hmm.

Clayton Abernathy (17:03.72)
All of them were in debt till they were 40. And I grew up being told if you got into the trades or you gained any kind of skill, then you were a second class citizen. Well, what they didn’t tell me was that construction is the highest GDP in the entire world. They didn’t tell me that it’s 20 % higher pay than any other industry combined, even the medical industry. So it’s the highest paid industry. They didn’t tell me that in school.

John Harcar (17:16.064)
Hmm.

John Harcar (17:21.715)
there.

John Harcar (17:32.714)
No, of course not.

Clayton Abernathy (17:32.748)
The reason is because you can’t go, know, state run universities, you know, all funded by the state. Well, they don’t, they don’t want you to, they want you to go to college because that’s how the state makes money. And so they didn’t tell me any of that, that stuff. And I was always told, well, you know, if you don’t go to college, you’ll never be successful. I didn’t make, I didn’t go to college and maybe I’m not successful. Some people would think I’m successful. Some people would say that I, that I am or not, but what, what ended up happening was we, we

John Harcar (17:56.48)
I’m sorry.

Clayton Abernathy (18:03.874)
All of that translated to the fact that not enough people were going into the trades. And as I was starting to build and develop things, I realized that we became babysitters of people who should know what they’re doing, but didn’t know what they were doing. And that generation where people could build things and use their hand were disappearing. And they were leaving the industry without actually transferring that information back into the next generation’s head. And I thought, well, crap.

That’s devastating. That’s going to be a very difficult life that we’re all going to do. You know, they say the Romans forgot how to build the aqueducts. Their civilization crumbled beneath them, not because they were conquered, but because they didn’t pass on skills to the next generation. And they got lazy and we have not passed down the skills. mean, and it’s, it’s when we, and we figured out how to do that. So we started, we opened our, that I’d worked on this, this for almost 20,

John Harcar (18:48.34)
Yeah, I got lazy.

Clayton Abernathy (19:02.978)
Well, 17 years before I opened it, now we’ve been in business three years in that.

John Harcar (19:06.566)
Okay, so you’ve been had this plan for a long time.

Clayton Abernathy (19:09.742)
Yeah, originally it was 2005 I was trying to create better real estate agents and I owned a construction company trying to do that. And so I learned every way not to get skills into people, apprenticeship programs. I used to pay people to try to learn things and you know, there had to be a way to do it. And the way I did it was really the only successful way to do it. And we’ve hundreds of people in that program. They all got jobs. We placed a hundred percent of our people that wanted jobs. Yeah, it’s pretty cool.

John Harcar (19:14.014)
Right, okay.

John Harcar (19:22.88)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (19:34.24)
I was going to ask, do you have placement for them as well? That’s awesome.

Clayton Abernathy (19:39.276)
And they build. So in six months, they come in and they build anywhere between five and 15 homes. So it’s just welcome to the, welcome to school. they start cutting wood and framing things and on day one, it’s crazy.

John Harcar (19:53.632)
And then do you go out and just receive, obviously go resell those homes and to areas, cities, mean, investors.

Clayton Abernathy (20:00.332)
Yeah. Yes. So we develop, we either develop with them, whether we sell them to investors or we sell them to people who are doing infill projects and backyards. know, somebody, yeah, ADUs, all of them. And it’s considered affordable housing. And all of our stuff is, they’re not manufactured homes. They’re considered site built buildings, even though we build them in a factory. So.

John Harcar (20:09.92)
Okay. ADUs, those type of thing? Yeah.

John Harcar (20:27.872)
You know, they’re prefab, yeah.

Clayton Abernathy (20:29.6)
Yeah, so there’s no reg- if you can put a single family home, you can put one of our homes there. It’s pretty cool.

John Harcar (20:35.422)
That’s awesome. You give skills, also you’re also doing impact to the community or investors as well, right? To be able to help and afford that affordable housing. Cool. What advice would you give anybody wanting to get into fix and flip, anybody wanting to get into any type of business today? What kind of things do you recommend or resources could you refer them to?

Clayton Abernathy (20:46.433)
Right. Right.

Clayton Abernathy (21:01.55)
Yeah, so I mean, I’ll give you my rules and I cover this in my book too, but my rules are pretty simple. If you’re gonna buy, if you’re gonna flip a house, if you can’t make $20,000, then don’t buy it. That’s number one rule. And when I say $20,000, I’m talking being a negative, a pessimist. I’m not looking at the highest comped house versus this house. I’m looking at the crappiest house. And assume that if you’re a

first flippin’ or maybe you’ve done one, assume you are the worst. Do not assume that you are good at it. Because once you open that wall or you do something, there can be a $10,000 screw up around. if comping the lowest, crappiest house there and what you buy it from along with your fix ups and you can make 20 grand, well then it’s a buy. And as far as location goes, I don’t care.

John Harcar (21:35.626)
Mm.

John Harcar (21:44.511)
Exactly.

Clayton Abernathy (21:59.31)
If it’s in the hood, I don’t care. Can I make 20 grand? Is it a fourplex? Can I make 20 grand? Okay, that’s that’s rule and then for my rental properties is if I can rent it for $300 over the over the mortgage if I can get all my money back out mortgage it and rent it for more than 300 bucks then I do that one too and so and oftentimes those things go hand-in-hand and then and then My my other rule is if I made a dollar I consider my success successful

So if I did everything wrong and it didn’t cost me anything, even if I only made one dollar, well then the experience and what I gained was well worth it. And so if you’re gonna get in, big deal, yeah. Because I’ve made a ton of money on buying people who thought they knew how to flip. And I’m like, buy it, flip it. That’s fine, call me when you screw up and I’ll take all of your, you know.

John Harcar (22:38.24)
That’s a big mindset thing right there.

John Harcar (22:51.424)
Mm.

Clayton Abernathy (22:54.21)
I’ll take all of your mess and because people just like, I watch HGTV, I know how to flip homes. That’s not where those people are making their money on flipping homes. Those numbers are not correct. So yeah, those are my rules.

John Harcar (23:04.714)
Yeah, not so much, not so much.

Cool. Well, and speaking of your book, how do people get a hold of your book? How do people get a hold of you? Is there a way that they can reach out and talk to you about anything that you’re doing?

Clayton Abernathy (23:21.71)
Yeah, you know, I’m always interested. You can email me at just my name. It’s Clayton J Abernathy at gmail.com. My book’s actually right there. You see it. Look at that. Yeah. It’s called eyes, hands, body position and run like H E double hockey sticks. Cause, cause point point in my life, I decided to stop swearing. So we got H E double hockey sticks in there and it kind of goes over my life and the things like that.

John Harcar (23:33.726)
Yep, there you go.

John Harcar (23:39.552)
Mmph.

John Harcar (23:44.416)
They ain’t see double hockey sticks.

Clayton Abernathy (23:48.638)
it’s a it is in its third revision with the with the editors right now it’ll be available in the next six months so just keep your eye out on it for it’ll be on amazon it’ll be in all of your normal retail places

John Harcar (24:01.78)
Well Clayton, I mean I appreciate you coming on here sharing all that knowledge, bro If guys if you’re listening to this and he took some notes great But I would say reach out to him if you got any questions you want to just talk about business or whatever Clayton thank you again, man. I mean I had a really good show and I hope you all did too. See you on the next one

Clayton Abernathy (24:16.227)
Yo.

Clayton Abernathy (24:20.418)
Thank you guys.