How to Build a Diversified Recession-Resistant and Inflation-Hedged Portfolio

-Johnny Nelson: Good morning, everyone, here at the Investing Stuff You Should Know podcasts. We have a pretty cool guest with us today, another mechanical engineer. I know the audience knows that I have a bias and like those kinds of people. I love having them on, they’re precise, they’re technical, and Patrick is another level of expertise in the investing, the real estate space. And I love his, if you follow some of the online syndicators and multifamily panels, Patrick has made appearances on there and always has something very valuable to add. So Patrick, thank you for being here with us today.

Patrick Grimes: Glad to be here, Johnny. Looking forward to having this chat with you.

Johnny Nelson: Fantastic, man. So we know that just to share with the audience, you started your life as a mechanical engineer, and I think even that still goes on today. But then what does snag Patrick to look at this alternative space called real estate investing?

Patrick Grimes: Well, actually, so I have full-time real estate, so I don’t know if that makes me uncool, and if I can send me on your podcast or not.

Johnny Nelson: Very close. I should have screened better.

Patrick Grimes: Yeah, it’s like when I went from electrical engineering to mechanical, I said I saw the light, and an electrical guy said I saw black light. And now I’m going from mechanical to real estate. I don’t know what I’m looking at now. So I mean, there’s a lot of similarities, honestly, in the way that we do real estate to the way that we analyze engineering problems center, at least in my mindset. But what was your question?

Johnny Nelson: Yeah. So obviously we were both career guys and I left my full-time engineering job about nine months ago, and it sounds like you recently left as well. But also there was some point in our history where something grabbed our attention like, “Oh, I need to invest in real estate too.” And then all of a sudden that…

Patrick Grimes: Oh yeah. So my story goes back a little way. My first deal was back in 2007 in real estate, 06 and 07. And I had been a snot-nosed mechanical engineer at a machine design automation and robotics company. I continued to be a snot-nosed mechanical after that, but I’d been only in the engineering world a couple of years before the owner of the company I was working for, Dave Karlberg, was just a genuine guy, love him to death. He told me I needed to invest as soon as I can, and as much as I can into real estate. And while cognitive rewarding and fun is high tech and automation and robotics, and we were involved in all kinds of stuff, satellites, and medical devices, I mean, all over the place.

Johnny Nelson: That’s cool stuff. I got to be careful, we’re going to nerd out and geek and the rest of the podcast will be on that. But yeah, so careful there.

Patrick Grimes: And so then I did it, I did some research, and I was like, “Oh, I’m young, let’s get aggressive. Let me go big, let me take that chip, slide it over to green 24 and spin the wheel.” I actually did a lot more analysis than that, and I got into what it was a pre-development, and what should have been pretty sure bad, personally guaranteed it. And I did drive, did get rigged over the Kohl’s drug through the gutter pretty bad. And the following years, 09, 10, and 11, came crawling out of that a few years later, learned about recessions, learned about resilient markets, learned about recourse loans, about debts, and learned about buying for cash flow. And buying in the right locations, and building a diversified, sustainable portfolio. And I was convinced that the tortoise will outpace the hare. So that’s what led me down the single-family by existing construction instead of new construction predevelopment, and trade from there into larger multifamily deals in recession-resilient markets.

Johnny Nelson: Awesome. And I want to double-click into that here. So there was an analogy that I was going to use here, maybe it’s good, maybe it’s not. But we know some of us have known people, maybe our grandparents, great grandparents, that lived through the depression, and they had this very, very saving mentality, maybe back when we were real young, save cash and that’s how they invested. Or basically, that’s all they did. They didn’t spend a lot and they saved. I feel like folks like yourself that have lived through hard times have a fundamentally different perspective and philosophy on how to invest. And I’d like you to share that. The school of hard knocks and also your different lens through that you view how to invest. If you could share that with the audience, I would love to hear that. And contrast that with what you see in a lot of newer indicators and new operators. If you could elaborate on that, your own personal philosophy was born out of hard knowledge.

Patrick Grimes: Yeah, and you probably saw a couple of my panels, because I was talking on economics in Chicago recently, and a couple of virtual ones. And it’s the truth that a lot of the stuff I look for, and the questions I ask, if I’m talking to a newbie, oftentimes they don’t even understand the question. They don’t know what I’m asking and why I’m asking it.

Johnny Nelson: What are two questions that hit people, the newbies, that you can always tell it’s a brand-new person? What are the questions you ask?

Patrick Grimes: Well, so I look at…

Johnny Nelson: I want to make sure when we meet, then I can answer the question, I don’t want to let you down.

Patrick Grimes: Okay, right.

Johnny Nelson: I want to know I had a question.

Patrick Grimes: Yeah, you talk about stress testing, you talk about break-even occupancies. And so I talk about what are the stress-tested break-even occupancies over the course of the strategy, right? And they’re like, “Oh, it’s this leverage and blah blah blah blah,” but I want to know at the end of the day in the market that they’re at, where the market vacancies have fallen in prior recessions, and are you structuring this deal with the right kind of debt long enough to withstand a rebound that’s typical in that market and a vacancy that’s typical in that market.

And first of all, you’ve got to be built on a strong foundation. And if you know property occasionally floods, you’ve got to fortify that foundation above the flood zone. And so similarly, if you’re putting a deal together, you got to fortify that deal to weather the storms that have come, and that may come in the future. And oftentimes they’re just so stuck in, “Oh, we got this rit bump, it’s un renovated, da da da da da,” the stresses component is a whole strategy that should be done first, that should be looked at as a primary driver, primary criteria for the deals.

Johnny Nelson: And so that someone might counter Patrick, they say, “Well, I would never get any deals done,” or, “It’s so much work and so many so variables.” What’s your rejoinder to that kind of a little bit…?

Patrick Grimes: If you can’t find a deal that can ride out another recession, you shouldn’t be doing the deal. I think it’s a very backward perspective. It took me two and a half years when I decided to trade from a single family to a multi to find the right kind of deals with the right kind of markets, with the right kind of partners, and structure them in the right kind of way. So just be patient and work harder.

Johnny Nelson: I love that patience idea. Let’s elaborate on these. You mentioned four things there. The right, the right, the right, the right, like that. What is the right market for you?

Patrick Grimes: Well, so like I said, I look for example in Houston when if you look at the past recessions, it’s got diversified employment that has shown built-in insulation for market volatility, a diverse set of employment. It’s not a Detroit or a mining town. Or even in Orlando, where it’s heavily weighted in recession-affected service and hospitality tourism. You got logistics, you do have some oil, which is on a completely different market cycle, but got the largest life science center in the world. Actually, the busiest life science center in the world is in Houston.

Johnny Nelson: Wow. I didn’t know that.

Patrick Grimes: And aside from the energy, it’s got the high tech. And you’ve got logistics. So you’ve got all these different… And education, which is a very strong presence there. All these different pillars have shown, and so if you look at past downturns, you saw that Houston drove on similar, strong, tried, and true growth curves. And then in 08, 09, and 10, it actually leveled off. Didn’t even dramatically fall before it started going up a couple of years later. In other markets that were very high-tech and manufacturing bases like Phoenix, it took 12, or 15 years for it to just barely recover. Ones like Vegas, hospitality, and tourism, 12 years to recover. And you saw some 70% vacancies in those markets. You didn’t see that in other markets. Dallas is another one.

Johnny Nelson: Very practical knowledge. So you mentioned that diversity, the uncorrelated type of industries too, again if someone was to listen to this, and I want them to walk away with, “Okay, how does Patrick view the world?” And yes, you give us a concrete example, which is fantastic, but then that’s a such key actionable item there. So then moving to another one that you mentioned, what is, in your mind, what is the right team, Patrick?

Patrick Grimes: Oh, well, and I said this on a panel recently that I did. I said, “What’s interesting is everybody on this panel that’s brave enough to talk about how to do deals in today’s economics, all of this have been through a downturn.” And that to me is the right kind of team. Somebody who’s failed… And we come from the high tech space, Johnny, and in Silicon Valley where I was educated, and I started out, a lot of the venture capitalists and a lot of the startups, they won’t invest in CEOs that haven’t failed before.

Johnny Nelson: Failure is a huge thing.

Patrick Grimes: They’re not humbled, right? Two, because they don’t know how that person behaves during the failure. I didn’t go bankrupt. I fought hard through it, but I ended up doing debt forgiveness and fell through foreclosure. But I was able to maintain and I have ponied up where I could and how I could, and I stayed at the table. I didn’t go dark, I didn’t hide. Actually, I hired an attorney to go hunt down the lender because it was out and sold three times. So you want to see how the people had behaved, how they operated, did they stay in communication, did they fight their way out of that hole, and how did they recover. Are they back in the game? And that’s because of communication and how people… And I think that the most important thing is whether have they seen failure. And oftentimes I’ll ask my sponsors if I’m either partnering, or I’m so, “Hey, when did things go really south for you? What’s the situation with your properties? Are you distributing? And then what’s your communication been like?”

And what you’ll find is that sometimes I’ll hear, “Oh, we didn’t really have anything to say because it wasn’t good news.” I’m like, “Well, no, that’s not right.” So with sponsors, I look first, for us, and are they gut feel or are they calculated? Are they measuring the market models? Are they modeling the markets? Are they applying volatility to their deals? And then it’s, are they low-leveraged? And are they conservative? Are they putting in long-term debt? Are they underpromising and overdelivering consistently? And I would rather, for example, we’re buying a property at five and a quarter million discount instead of leveraging at the hilt, we’re doing lower leverage. Instead of getting a loan for all the CapEx, we’re raising the CapEx.

And instead of taking the six to 800 rent bumps in the comparable set, we’re only showing in the modeling three to 400 rent bumps. And by year three, instead of saying, “Hey, the market’s going to stay flat and the cap rates are going to stay consistent,” we’re actually saying, “Well, maybe what happens if the cap rates inflate, which means the prices go down.” So we’re actually modeling in a year or two-year inflation. So we’re not buying and then just hoping that the market drives us. We’re not buying, leveraging it to help, squeaking every last penny out of the deal, and then putting a best-case projection. We’re actually putting if there’s a market downturn, this is how the deal will pencil.

Johnny Nelson: A question that pops into mind then, Patrick, or right there, Patrick, is, and this is a little bit from a different perspective of, I guess just partners, I guess more may be on the GP side, is then what is your secret sauce then that you can execute on when you don’t max out the leverage, and do max out the rent bumps, and take advantage of all the things that, I guess from a stock market perspective, you didn’t keep investors maximum returns in mind. But then the answer to that of course is like, well, we have a longer-term vision, we have sustainability, we have safety in mind. So that’d be the answer there. So how do you guys then execute and make these deals work and then have this safer approach?

Patrick Grimes: Yeah, well, so there are two pieces I think to that, right? One is finding the deals, and that is…

Johnny Nelson: A robust methodology process to find good deals?

Patrick Grimes: And it’s relationships, for the most part, most of the deals that come around, when they come to us, it’s literally finding that needle in a haystack. There’s a couple hundred to 300. And I got the sun rising here right behind me if you’re on video.

Johnny Nelson: It actually makes you look a little bit angelic Patrick. So just going to bask that.

Patrick Grimes: Right. I’m feeling it right now. So yeah, it’s finding the right kind of deals and it’s working harder. Sometimes I’ll talk to newer guys and they’re like, “Oh, I found a deal.” And I’m like, “What do you mean?” “A broker’s phone me, it’s a pocket listing,” or, “The broker told me it’s off-market.” Well, all that means is the broker talked to an owner and said, “Would you be interested in selling?” And the owner said, “Maybe, why don’t you give me what you think you could sell it for?” And then the broker just sends it out there. So that’s actually not under contract by the broker. There are a lot of off-market deals, or pocket lists, really not deals. And so it’s about working harder, finding to sift through the nonsense, and once the broker sees that you’re a no-nonsense guy, then they’re going to bring you the right kind of stuff.

And then when you develop a track record of closing, then they’re going to bring you the ones that they need you to close because it’s a distressed operator, it’s a distressed owner, and they need you to close it. And you get stuck to your guns. Regardless of that, you got to give a price you can follow through with, which means you’re still giving them prices below what the broker wants. And then typically that means they give it to the next guy, but then that guy may falter, and then come back to you, and maybe one out of 10 or one out of 50, but it only takes one every now and then for a business to be had. And so it’s about working a lot harder and being a lot more patient on the deal side. And then being a reputation for a closer. When a broker brings something to you, the fees that he’s going to get it’s what puts food on the table for his family.

And if he fails to close, the owner’s going to be pissed. Maybe he uses it one more time, maybe that’s it. And so you’ve got to stick with that broker. You got to deliver on the price that you gave, which means you got to do the work upfront. We were living in Oahu through Covid, and I was literally red-eyeing out, it was laying flat seats, and wasn’t too rough, but it was tiring from Oahu to Houston or Florida, or wherever else, Charlotte. I mean, it’s like six to nine hours from California. This was pretty rough. But I would show up and I would walk those units, and I would check those deals out firsthand. And then, I mean, I remember walking three different properties in Houston flying back with my tail between my legs and being like, “No, this is a bad deal.”

Johnny Nelson: Wow. The more you, of course then built incentives, the more you do that, then it’s like the team’s waiting on this, I think we can make this work. We waited too long, right?

Patrick Grimes: Yeah. Because maybe we tweaked that, right? So that’s the general tendency. But I said, if you think about it systematically and you stay very disciplined in your ways, then they’ll start only giving you stuff that won’t waste their time to air your time. And then once you can close on a deal and then use a broker on the sale, now you’ve made a partner that will build a career. So that’s on the deal side. And we’ve gotten deals from lenders. I had one property in Houston where it was a 19% bad debt. The guy stopped taking care of the property, there was a stack of unanswered maintenance requests to think it was a ream of paper.

And I flew out there, we walked, and the guy really pissed me off. But at the end of the day, it’s a cleaner, safer, and improved living experience for the residents, because he lost his building and we took it over. So the lender told us about that one. We had one, it was just a lot of different ways that we hear about deals. But on the other side, it’s about finding more patient investors.

Johnny Nelson: I like that.

Patrick Grimes: And that’s the other side. It’s about finding like-minded, it’s working harder to find ones that if we project to 15, 16, or 17 or 18 IRR, but they look at the deal and they see that there’s upside if the market goes north, there’s upside if we get all the way to the rent bumps; there’s upside if we are able to get a tighter expense ratio than we’re projecting. The underwriting is conservative in a way where every step of the way we see the upside, and they see, “Well, what’s the downside?” Well, the way that they’ve leveraged this, the way that they’ve put the debt on this and they fixed it and they’re paying an extra million for a cap, or they’ve got fixed interest rates. In fact, if there’s a market dip, if the market slows down, they downsides. We’ll be able to hang onto this building. We got a 65% break-even occupancy, which means we can have 35% vacant, and still pay our bills. 

And we’ve put an extra reserve account on top, which is an extra million, two million, six months’ worth of operating expenses. We can flip the property for six months that we just put in a savings account. Investors are like, “Well, where’s that? Well, you are going to raise that for me? That’s just going to lower my return.” Well, you’re the investor for me. I want an investor that’s willing to take a reasonable return instead of squeaking every last little penny out of it. So that even if we hit the bottom of a market, and we’re at our break-even occupancy. And then a building burns down, or when a tornado hits, we still have a million, $2 million in the bank to rebuild while we wait for the insurance to provide for replacement costs and loss of ranks.

Johnny Nelson: Yeah, let’s talk about, and you kind of mentioned at the beginning there, finding those patient investors, Patrick. Let’s talk about that. So something else we talk about a lot on the show is capitalizing, of course. And then typically we’re going out and finding people with capital, people with maybe additional, they’re a high net worth people or they have a high W-2 income, and then they’re looking to put some of that passively into these types of investments here. How do you attract those people? How do you attract those kinds of patient investors that reflect, I love this business model that you’ve laid out, this patient more diligent, careful way of investing? And then of course it needs to be matched with this whole set of investors that want to see that. How do you attract those people?

Patrick Grimes: Well…

Johnny Nelson: How have you done it?

Patrick Grimes: Yeah, so in my past, all of our deals we have a couple of partners, and we all kind of chip in on the capital. And it’s important we get the right partner, they’re going to have the right investors, and that’s another piece. So I mean, I’ve raised almost $50 million in the last couple of years for deals from these kinds of investors. And so I started machine design automation, and robotics, and then got into single pre-development, tanked, and then the single-family I could do with all my own money. And then when I made the bridge to something that would scale, and I did my first 86 unit deal from three bedroom, one bath, two bath to 86 units, the engineering calculus was very, nothing in here makes sense, only is here. But here, I’ve got to use other people’s capital because they don’t have enough. Right?

I can 1031 exchange, my single family’s, I’ve been in these multi-family deals, which we do a lot of for landlords that are dealing with tenants, toilets, and trash and want to trade up as a partner, but I need to get other investors. So I started reaching out to not family and friends necessarily, but friend colleagues from my automation, and my master, I have a master’s in engineering and business. I started reaching out to people who I’d worked with on the engineering side, the high-tech side, entrepreneurs, owners, vendors, that kind of stuff. And said, “Hey, so I’ve worked on projects with you before that have been more volatile, more risky, new development, innovation stuff, but I’m working on it, what are you doing for your portfolio? Because I have some real estate stuff that is much sure, but very resilient. It’ll be there in a market crash when we’re all waiting to come out of it on the high-tech space.” And that was very powerful because I had developed respect in that area, delivering on some very challenging projects.

Johnny Nelson: That’s a very, very compelling message. The linking of the two is here. And then also that delivery of just, I guess, elaborate if you would just a little bit more, and yes, you brought… So you just have that casual conversation, or would you say, because I’d be like, “Okay, I’m going to pitch ex-colleague or whatever on this. Do you want real estate investment?” And I feel like I’m on TV, “Hey, do you want to invest with me on late-night TV?” But the way you said that just right now is very natural, very compelling as well. How did you bridge that in your own mind of, hey, I know we’re engineers, professionals, we’re in the space, and maybe a completely another space, how did you bridge that gap, in your own mind? Or maybe just natural for you like, “Hey, I know we like robots and programming, but what about real estate”? How did you bridge that?

Patrick Grimes: Well, similar to real estate, high-tech space was also a good community of people. And I’ve always been a community builder. Even my birthday, before Covid, at least, my birthday every year was 12 years in a row of taking 30 of my friends, 30, 40 of my friends up to the wine country in northern California for a wine-tasting trip. And that was three days, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, I had three nights. It was an amazing time.

And so I’ve always been that kind of community builder, and I would bring people from my work, from my school, and all my friends. And the same thing in the automation world. I’m always out there kind of, “Let’s do dinners,” “Let’s do lunches,” “Let’s catch up,” “Let’s talk,” “Let’s build lifelong friendships with individuals.” And so I had a series where I had been saying, “Oh yeah, so what I did is I took some of my bonuses and I dumped it into a single-family home, and I did this. What are you doing?” And so it had been a progression, it got to the point then when I had several people investing, and I was talking to others, I was like, “Hey, such and such and I am working on a real estate deal together.”

Johnny Nelson: Right, right.

Patrick Grimes: And then doing the kind of relation, “So what are you doing?” And I was sincerely interested, because even today I’m not entirely in real estate, and I’m not entirely in high tech. And we actually also have an oil and gas fund, and because diversified de-linked recession resilient investments is what I’m about. And so somebody’s interested, then give me a call, and somebody else is doing something else, I love to learn. So I did that. And so it got to the point where it’s kind of the social within my inner group of trusted people that I knew for greater than 15 years, and then greater than 10 years, and then greater than five years, and then it was their friends or their colleagues.

And then what happened was that was not powerful enough. Then I started getting my name out there. I started doing podcasts, I started talking about recession-resilient investing, inflation hedge investing, and protecting against interest rate increases. I wrote a book in Amazon’s number one best-selling with some great guys, there’s Def Leppard, and you can have a free copy of this if you go to investonmainstreet.com/book.

Johnny Nelson: We’ll put that link in the show notes for you, Patrick. Yeah.

Patrick Grimes: Use promo code Johnny for that one. Yeah. And just put the promo code, Johnny, invest on main street.com/book. Persistence, Pivots and Game Changers, Turning Challenges and Opportunities. NFL, and NBA players, wrestle… from the Real Estate Guys, lead guitar in Def Leppard Phil Collen. Finally, I did that. I write for forms. I got a half dozen, or almost a dozen now, articles and forms.

Johnny Nelson: I saw that, man, that was pretty exciting. I saw that like, “Oh, cool.”

Patrick Grimes: And then I started getting asked to talk on stages, and I had my head to the grinding stone. Nobody knew about me for 13, or 14 years in real estate. And then all of a sudden I realized, “Well, you know what? I want to scale. I need to use other people’s money. I need to retract the right kind of people. Let me get my message out there.” And it was a little scary. And because, obviously, I was still doing automation and robotics.

Johnny Nelson: It was scary in the sense of, Patrick, of what would your professional colleagues think of you talking on panels? Was that the scary part? What was scary personally for you?

Patrick Grimes: Well, first of all, I’ve identified as an engineer my whole life and a high-tech guy. And now all of a sudden I realize the people are like, “Wow, he’s got…” I mean, right now we’re at over 500 million in real estate, right?

Johnny Nelson: Yeah. That’s incredible.

Patrick Grimes: And so the mental shift in people’s minds is, “Well, that’s not a side gig. That’s your new gig.” So that happened.

Johnny Nelson: Were you concerned about, I guess the dissonance there that people might perceive of you may be professionals like, “Well, that doesn’t make sense. He’s actually in real estate. Is he going to be committed to the project?” Was that part of that fear as well?

Patrick Grimes: Yeah. Well, I wanted to continue to do engineering. And it took me a while because real estate was always kind of a fun side project, and I have always had fun side projects. But then when I started going all in, I started talking on stages, I was admitting to myself that I was doing more in this now than in engineering. I was writing articles, I was speaking on panels, which I was doing to a smaller extent engineering, but this is now my primary gig. And there was kind of like a journey I went through.

And I talked to some friends of mine who made it out of engineering, became entrepreneurs in other areas. How did you guys go through this transition? But you know what, when I finally made the leap over and never look back, I mean, what’s great about real estate is not only are you making a cleaner, safer, and improved living experience for the residents, which is a core value of us in all of our decks, and that’s part of getting the right kind of investors because we spend money for that. Part of the return goes to improving the communities we’re in.

You also get to return great returns to the investors and build long-term legacy wealth and a tax advantage and inflation hitch way. But the other piece is, we get to work, Johnny, in this great community of multi-family abundance mindset, great people of like-minded investors, and we get to network, talk, and share our stories and our journeys. And so it’s kind of like a win-win-win in this space. And it really drew me every step I made to get further and further out of my hobbit hole, I was just more and more in the light until now I’m basking in the sunrise.

Johnny Nelson: Oh, that’s such a good analogy of actually what’s happening there. So that’s great, man. Hey, and just to share, I have the same struggling journey, as well. You’re jumping on Facebook or LinkedIn, or sharing with people at events, maybe even colleagues, actually at work. And I was reluctant. I didn’t know how I would be perceived, what other people might think, and are they seeing that I’m on the way out, and this, that, and the other. So I also, not that I went on the same journey, but I mean, a similar path that we all had to explore and commit to myself.

And nine months ago, of course, as I said, I left my corporate job, but also it definitely is a journey. And I love that you nailed that key point of, what do we identify with? And yes, we have this persona we built up in our minds and our heads, that’s the same thing, mind, head, whatever. But that’s what we identify with. So we have to decouple and tear that apart and say, “Hey, I’m now a real estate investor,” or, “I’m now an entrepreneur,” that type of thing. And that’s challenging for people. That’s very challenging.

Patrick Grimes: Also to your other half, right?

Johnny Nelson: Oh yeah, for sure. Yeah. My first message to my wife about us doing real estate investing was not well-received. And I’d been into bigger pockets and reading these different things. And of course, that’s something I cautioned people against as well. So make sure your spouse is coming along with you on your journey and that they’re not too far behind. And especially if you grew up in a traditional house where it’s like, yes, go to school, and get a degree, and et cetera, there’s like throwing a grenade in that whole architecture, that whole hierarchy, of how we’re supposed to do our lives, and also is like, “No, I’m going to be an entrepreneur,” or in business, which is real estate is just simply a business. And that’s a seismic shift in how that whole framework.

Patrick Grimes: Yeah, hundred percent, and I can tell you that it wasn’t any different over here, because actually, so I’ve traveled a lot of, I don’t know, somewhere between eighth and a quarter of the world’s countries at this point.

Johnny Nelson: Oh wow, man.

Patrick Grimes: So I’ve been very, I just loved immersing into international cultures. And I met my wife who’s from Beijing in California when she was going to CalArts to get her master’s in animation. And I was just so intrigued. And I spent a lot of time in China. Turns out we like some of the same foods, like hot pot and stuff. And so we hit it off, and she was there for my last single-family closing. And I was like, “I can’t moonlight my wife, I’ve got to make time.” So that’s literally why I stopped doing the single-family journey, and I was on the other side of it, I traded up, and it’s something that was more sustainable and scalable, and lower risk, and multifamily. And so in her world though, in China, her parents worked in the job literally that their family said, “This is what you’re going to do. Your dad’s going to be a doctor. And he worked, he’s still a doctor.”

He wanted to be a computer scientist, but no, he’s a doctor. And you work until the government says, “You stop now. And then we pay you until you die.” So there’s also such thing as financial freedom, and there’s also such thing as passive income. There’s also such thing as a vision board, there’s also such thing as any of this stuff. And so when we started going to conferences and I started bringing my wife with me, bringing her on the journey, these things were brand-new, trying to explain…

Johnny Nelson: Even more so, Patrick. I mean, literally cultural barriers, you were smashing through that or trying to smash through that. So holy smokes, that journey for you guys must have been very steep.

Patrick Grimes: Yeah, well, it was not the analytics that won the story. And even though she’s brilliant at math, and animation, all at the same time, and now she works as a production manager for a feature-length animated studio, she’s very driven. And way up there at Disney, Dreamworks, and Nickelodeon stuff.

Johnny Nelson: Awesome, man. Cool.

Patrick Grimes: Yeah, so she’s very driven, but even with, and she’s good at math, but it wasn’t the analytics which really drew that, broke that down. It was when we went to a conference and she started seeing the possibilities for our life on the underside of it. It was more of a mindset shift. And then she came home one day and created a vision board. And that’s when I had her on the journey but pushing side by side, “Let’s do this. We’re going to make this happen,” and all of a sudden, it was just such a cool transition to see make happen.

Johnny Nelson: That’s an incredible line. And that’s a great point to just wrap the show up on that high family note. We each shared something personal, but it’s also powerful and it’s also relevant to a lot of professionals that you and I know on how that could happen. A lot of people don’t even know about this. We’re both passionate about the educational piece of sharing this with others, whether it’s STEM professionals, or beyond. And yeah, it’s so powerful to even have your spouse come along the journey, and then share it with other couples, and other families, and just spread the word, and enable this type of very powerful financial freedom. That’s what I think of it as.

Patrick Grimes: Absolutely.

Johnny Nelson: Anyway. So man, what’s the best place for people who get in contact with you? I was on your website, fantastic website, there’s tons of education. Share that with us and any other things you want to promote as we wrap this up.

Patrick Grimes: Yeah, investonmainstreet.com. That’s invest on main, and then street, all spelled out, dot com. As you said, we have a passive investor guide. We also have a bunch of investor resources there for you, as well as our latest investment opportunity at the top, you can opt-in. I’d love for you to set up a meeting. If you go to investonmainstreet.com/calendar, you can set up a meeting with me, we can chat. If you go to the book page that we’re going to put in the show notes, we will send a signed hard copy of this Amazon number one bestselling book. I believe in the content, so many great stories from successful people doing incredible things, and I’m in there as well. Actually, I have a wig on here on the cover page… I’m just kidding, back when I had hair, a year ago. I took that picture. But anyways, I would love to sit down…

Johnny Nelson: Good thing you got that pick in time.

Patrick Grimes: Yeah. Wherever you’re at in your journey, I’d love to have a chat and see if I could contribute.

Johnny Nelson: Awesome. Awesome, man. So yeah, that’ll do. That’ll wrap it up here for us, folks. We thank you for listening to another Investing Stuff You Should Know podcast. Give us a like, subscribe, and give us a genuine comment. Hopefully, it’s nice, but if not, then let me know. I want the feedback as well, so we can continue to have great guests, intelligent guests, and guests that really have a lot to share, like Patrick with us. So until that time, thanks all.