0:01

Welcome to the three degrees of freedom podcast, where we explore lifestyle engineering with our expert guests to bring you in alignment with your own three degrees of freedom, location, time, and financial independence.

Derek: 0:14

All right. Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the show. Today we are joined by a family man, accomplished entrepreneur and real estate investor, Mr. Adam Zok. Adam is not your typical businessman, for he places family above all else, a practice that we can all take inspiration from. Having retired from civil engineering at the tender young age of 32, Through astute real estate investing, Adam has built an impressive portfolio of 50 plus single family rentals across 13 States and holds various alternative investments. His superpower is building time freedom through systems, people, and unwavering focus. And with a robust strategy of reverse investing and a drive to help other fathers achieve time freedom. Adam’s really, an inspiration in the world of financial independence and lifestyle design. So I’m looking forward to the show with Adam. Adam, how are you

Adam: 1:03

today? I’m doing well, Derek. Thank you for the, very flattering introduction. I love the, the colorful language. Very, very,

Derek: 1:10

very, very good. Yes. I wish that I could take all the credit for it, but I have to admit that there is some Claude and chat GPT in there that really helped

Adam: 1:17

me with that it’s fantastic. A lesson we could all learn. Absolutely.

Derek: 1:21

So let’s start where we always start with all of our podcast guests, which is our first question of which of the three degrees of freedom currently available to you, which is location, time and financial, do you feel that you’re the strongest in right now? And which one would you like to develop further?

Adam: 1:35

I would say location for sure. In fact, 10 minutes ago, so right before we jumped on this, my wife wrote on the whiteboard here, which was the summer of 2024. Do we want any sort of childcare? What sort of trips are we going to go? Whose family are we going to stay at? What sort of vacations? And the fact that we do everything with a computer. If I’m needed besides signing on the dotted line, which is ironic when we drove to, to Austin, Texas last year with our three young kids, I ended up having to buy about four properties because I have to physically sign. So we’re like driving by UPS stores and doing notaries and mailing stuff, you know, along the way. So minus that, you know, stop where you can pretty much do it in any city or state where I was signing documents along the way. The ability to have the people and be able to do this anywhere is for sure that the strongest. And then I always kind of have a toss up between time freedom and financial freedom because depending on what measure stick you’re using. So I would say I am actively going after financial freedom more right now, even though I feel pretty good about it. Because I get to wake up every day and say, what do I want to work on? Which is my favorite thing from a time

Derek: 2:46

perspective. Yeah. You know, it’s amazing. And it is a privilege compared to many people who are in the situation that we both were in a few years ago or many years ago, uh, in the corporate world. Right. So for those who are listening, this could be a roadmap for you to eventually escape your W 2 as well, if that’s what you desire, there are plenty of people out there that like what they do with their W 2, the point is that you have to enjoy what you’re doing and follow that. Out of lifestyle design, right? So anyway, let’s go ahead and jump into some of these questions here that I pre prepared, for you after looking over some of your information. So how has your transition from civil engineering to real estate investing contributed to your pursuit of time, freedom, financial freedom, and location freedom? And what advice would you give to other people who are in a similar situation and wanting to make that shift?

Adam: 3:35

So on how it’s contributed is it’s. Immensely helpful on almost every degree. From my health, to my relationship with my wife, to the kids. When you don’t have to have two working spouses being somewhere at 8am in the morning. It is tremendous what you can do with the extra time with the young kids that we have at home. And so whether it’s me, I still enjoy waking up at four or five o’clock in the morning and getting all the time in before our young kids wake up. And so I really enjoy that. But just having that. Freedom to pursue what we find meaningful. I just went on a date, , not too long ago with, you know, with the wife where we can do that during the day, we can do various different things. So on almost every level, it worked out incredibly well for us because we had that vision. It was a 10 year plan to get out of our W2 jobs. It only took about five years, but we had that 10 year plan. And so if someone was thinking about it, I would say. I was sitting there and I was in engineering and I knew that I was pretty happy, but I knew there was something more in that, like, there was like my foot just starts tapping under the table where you’re like, man, I’m designing this water tower, but it’s this really what I was put on this earth to do. So maybe a little bit of purpose, but also just a little bit of. Maybe worldly recognition for what I was doing. If I put up a water tower and people got water pressure, they’re not calling me to say, thank you. This was awesome. Versus if we put someone in a house where they could have never got it without a bank loan. And Adam was the only person uniquely qualified to get them into that house. The level of intentionality and intensity of like a scale of one to 10. It was like a one before. And now it’s like a nine where it’s like I’m impacting someone’s life, their family, their livelihood, where they live. And so that was a pretty big. Draw to me, but I also got coached early on not to jump too early. Like I got my first rental property. I started listening to bigger pockets. I was like, Oh, this is it. Like, this is it. It’s real estate. This is so easy. I’m just going to jump. And I had a lot of wiser mentors that were like, Hey, you have a great engineering job. Let’s come up with like a 10 year plan, buy two properties a year for 10 years. And if you do that, you know, you don’t need to get there in six months. If you got there, you know, by the time you were 35 and you retired at 40, like. Isn’t that still really good? And so it helped manage the expectations of just those excitement of you start doing some real estate. You get really excited and it’s leveraging what you currently have, which was a really good high paying job being very bankable and leveraging that stability that it provided the family as we were growing our family into different things. So I and The one piece of advice that I’ll say is if you’re thinking about leaving your job or one of the first steps to leaving your job, if you want to, is to get really good at your job. I know almost no one that was a terrible employee that made a great entrepreneur. Typically, in my experience, it’s like you’re a player, you’re a linchpin, you’re like crushing it in sales or engineering or product development or a team member. And you’re like, man, my ceiling’s capped. I want to do something else. And you either start your own business, you get into real estate because you realize that you could do insider trading. You could do the research, the investment, all that, and you can maximize your ROI that way.

Derek: 6:40

I love this. This, , reminds me a lot of what I did as well, because everything that you said there, I’m 100 percent with you. The important thing here to note, for all the listeners as well, is that just your approach is similar to mine. There is a purpose for W2 and for 1099s. There’s a purpose, right? There’s a map. And I appreciate that you mentioned that your mentors were like, You know, like slow down, let’s go ahead and try to build something out of intention and just make, instead of just making the jump. Cause I had a similar situation, Adam, where like, I thought that the only way to build wealth was through the Dave Ramsey method. And as soon as I found or read, you know, rich dad, poor dad, and started to kind of put together some of the mindset pieces and figuring out that there’s alternative ways to create income. Thanks to Cashflow Quadrant and Rich Dad Poor Dad, all those books like kind of like hibernated these ideas and started marinating them together to put them into a situation where you can put a plan together that includes a W 2, right, to help build up some of like your experience and asset and it’s going to hurt for a little while because you’re going to have family, you’re going to have your side business and your main thing all at the same time while still being an A player. And you’re absolutely right on that as well. Yeah. So there’s this huge glut of time and energy and effort that’s going to be there for the next five years, right? Or seven years or 10 years, however long it takes. But it’s absolutely worth it as example, an example of that would be you for sure. So let’s explore that a little bit more. I want to find out more about like what your journey is. Can you talk to us about like what happened when you started investing in the side with your full time job? And then walk us through to where you are today and what you’re doing today.

Adam: 8:15

It started off with this slow itch where I was like, I got to do something else. So it was like, I just started doing like fantasy sports and getting deep into like betting on players. And then it was like day trading stocks. Then it was like, Ooh, I could create this new product. And it was like, almost just like mental stimulation. It was like, I’m doing engineering, but like, I don’t, it’s a little bit of a stereotype of men in general are driven, just driven individuals. We have ambition. We want to go further, faster. And if I’m not getting that in your career, if you’re getting that in your career and you love it, like kudos, like you can climb up, you can be doing great work. And so I figured I wanted to do both. I equally wanted to give my employer the better end of the doubt. And I had even larger ambitions with huge and larger goals. So I just became magnificently obsessed with creating enough cash flow that I didn’t need the job and then I could decide what I wanted to do. Because I, and selfishly is I wanted more control. I didn’t want to have to lose a job or God forbid my, something happened to my wife or my kids. There’s medical debt or different things and I had to be somewhere and I didn’t have enough PTO to do it. And so with that drive, it was You know what? It turned into equally what I want and equally what I’m willing to give up. And a lot of that was I was willing to give up friendships, social time, news work, movies, networks, different things, and just happened to go to bed probably on average between 8 and 9 p. m. for five years waking up between 4 and 5 a. m. And someone might just say, I have no desire to do it. For me, I, it was, it’s to this day, I don’t set an alarm clock when you go to bed at eight or nine o’clock, like your body just like wakes up after seven hours, which happens to be three, four or five o’clock in the morning. Just don’t set an alarm clock. Haven’t sent one for years. And it’s through that. That was like, I read books to my kids. Now, and it’s just like, we go to bed at the same time and now, because we have that, we have the freedom, my wife and I get to spend a lot of the time during the day together, or we do lunch dates, or we do breakfast dates, or different things, but it started, you know, way back then, which is like, you have almost, your most precious thing was time. Not capital. Like at first, when you get into investing, it’s like, you know, I can’t find the right deal. Then you deploy your capital, you run out of capital. So now you’re like, ooh, what am I gonna do next? So now you have to figure out how to get private money or how to stretch your return on investment and then it turns into You got a return on time invested if you can get another thousand dollars a month through real estate, but you’re spending another thousand hours That’s a bad return on time investment Just like you’d be better off just putting your money into the stock market and not touching it or doing anything so for me, I got really meticulous with delegating anything that was below My engineering hourly wage of 35 an hour. It was cleaners. It was people doing stuff around the house. It was, you know, trying to get other people at work to do different things. And it was like, I was super, I was either a family man and engineer or a real estate investor. And I almost left no time for anything else. There were still some personal development in gym and different things that helped, you know, make some of those things work, but I just got laser focused on here’s the things I’m willing to give up, which happened to be a lot of friendships and social media. And now it’s like, okay, I kind of only hang around, you know, a certain amount of masterminds and groups, but it all came at a price and a cost. So a lot of that was just, you wake up early, do the real estate stuff, do the family, then it’s engineering, then it’s family, then it’s bed. And so I kind of created that rhythm. And then there was the different versions of real estate where I took just massive action, failed very fast on, Hey, the first five properties that we bought in our LLC, probably are gonna make us no money, but through that. You can only learn so much by listening to different podcasts, but the learn by doing is what I definitely learned, which was like, Oh, you can’t buy a 1910 house and expect 10 K in rehab to fix the whole house. It’s like, Oh, I got four windows and it’s like, I didn’t touch the bathroom or anything else and gutters and siding. And it’s like, okay, well, I’m not going to do that again. And so it was kind of the school of hard knocks that way, but it was just through that repetition and experience that then led us into buying homes for college kids where they’d. Pick out a house, we’d buy it and rent it to them at the 1 percent rule. So now we kind of had a little bit of deal flow, and then we started getting into rent to own, and then we started doing some flips. And so it’s kind of transitioned from that, Hey, it’s cool we have one property, to now kind of getting the hockey stick where, Hey, you know, we did 30 properties last year, and we’re going to try to do another 40 this year. That’s amazing.

Derek: 12:40

Yeah. I, I just have to pick up another common thread that I can see across all of this, for the listeners that are listening that want to do what Adam is doing at this point. That means that you’re not going to have to, you’re going to have to basically for forgo some of those Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad and some of those free time sinks, I’d like to say, and be super intentional. I think The major theme that I’m picking up behind this, Adam, is that your intention was just there. I wanted to ask you, was there any point in time in which you became super intentional out of reason? Like you said that, you know, at one point you picked a point in time where you said, anything that’s below my, my, my wage, for what I’m making as a job, like I’m going to outsource or delegate or get some help or eliminated or, you know, however, where did this inspiration come from? How did you get this mindset for this?

Adam: 13:30

I would say I came in three phases first, to be honest, a hundred percent selfish. I liked it because I was good at it. It was money. It was a little bit of greed and it was like, hey, I wanted control and freedom and it wasn’t so much about me and my wife or the kid and you know, we were just on the verge of, you know, getting married and having our first kid. I would say through college I was a, I was an extremely self centered individual. I was like, hey, My goal is just to have fun, right? And it was like, Oh, I’m succeeding at that. But then it’s like, okay, then what? And it’s like, Oh, well, I need more money to do it. So then it was like, it was almost the corridor principle of like you open the first door and you realize, Oh, well, it turns out like money doesn’t do everything. It turns out just going for fun in life only gets you so far and you’re kind of left empty. So it’s like, Oh, I should, you know, really figure out, okay, what brings me most happiness here in life? And it’s usually health and relationships. All right, let’s look at romance. And once, once I started marriage, it’s like, Oh, it turns out I’m not the center of the universe and how much more impactful and fulfilling that was for me, my wife. But then having our first child born, that was a big one where it was like, you have this amazing creature. You want to spend a ton of time. And that’s really when you start getting pulled on. I thought I was busy before kids. If anyone says that they are busy and they don’t have kids. I was always like, you’re both right. And, I think your level or description of you don’t have enough time, is a little bit jaded. So, cause like, it’s, we’re all busy no matter what you ask anybody and they’re like, they’re busy and it’s like almost like this epidemic of everyone’s just busy because you’re always doing something. But there’s a special, extra pull when you have marriage or especially young kids on just the amount of attention and time that they need. And then third is I have a rare condition called best eye disease, where Anytime in the next year or two, I could completely go blind. And I’m doing eye injections that I get every 12 weeks. It’s literally a needle to the eye, which is again, not one of my funnest things, but it’s the, hey, this is helping it. So I thought of like, what happened to me and what would happen to my family? In the event that my income completely was gone, and I want to set up the families to have, if they wanted to sell everything, if they wanted the passive income, to still have accustomed to some sort of lifestyle that doesn’t just go into absolute chaos, and whether it’s my blindness, whether it’s a sickness, whether, if my health or something were to happen, I like being prepared, knowing that we have X amount of income, X amount of wealth to be able to handle what life has to throw to us.

Derek: 15:54

That’s incredible. I, first of all, thanks for sharing that. And, I wanted to explore this a little bit more. You have a family, you’ve got kids, you now are married, you have all of these things going for you. Can you talk a little bit about how your typical day looked and what type of systems you built? to enable you to operate at such a high level. When you had your job, you had this business that, you know, remember whenever a business is getting started, like there’s a lot of thrust in the launch. It’s kind of like, you know, if you’re, if you’re trying to launch a rocket ship, right, it takes so much energy and effort first of all, to get the rocket ship together and get it off the ground. Then you have to make sure that it’s pointed in the right direction. But then once it is, and you have enough thrust and you’re moving and you put all that energy and effort into it, the air gets thinner and thinner until eventually you’re out into the atmosphere, right? Into outside the atmosphere, and now there’s no resistance at all. During that first phase of having all this thrust, you have your family behind you. You’ve got your disease that you’re worried about always at the back of your head and all these things that you just mentioned. Um, what did your day look like? How did you structure it intentionally? And what systems did you use to kind of like make sure you got everything done?

Adam: 17:02

Sure. There was, there was, there was two parts. Appreciate you asking. And as I went through this, two things come to mind. It started off with a strategy. That I then built the systems. And so the strategy was, okay, what, what system has really high leverage? And it happened to be real estate. Okay. Within real estate, what has really high leverage? Is it property management? Is it turnkey? Is it rehab? Is it wholesale? Like which one requires very little of Adam time. You know, to be able to do that, and then how can I achieve it? It was like, Ooh, do I build a team? For me, it was selecting and finding a business partner. In 2017, we formed a partnership that we still have to this date. And I bet is the single greatest thing that has led to the success and being able to do this. I oftentimes take it for granted and I forget. Doing this ourselves is extremely hard. And I know Dave Ramsey will say the only ship that doesn’t sail is a partnership. And I was like, well, you could say that about marriage. You’re right. And I was like, and you know, it could be a little pessimistic or optimistic, but similar to marriage is like, I’m trying to get my wife the better end of this deal. And I’m trying to show her love, similar to my business partner. I’m like, I’m trying to give him the better end of this deal. We have complimentary skill sets where he’s like the operator. I’m over there trying to be more of like a salesman or visionary. If you’re familiar with like visionary and integrator, and that worked out so tremendously well that when I was stressed or if I wanted to be out and when you’re a solopreneur. I think it’s extremely hard because I did that, you know, for a year or two. And it’s like, I could talk to my wife, but she really didn’t want to hear about it. And so you can join masterminds, which I would strongly suggest, which, which is what I did. And so once you did that, then it was like, okay, what are the, what are now some of the systems and techniques? And so it was like, how can I automate things in the calendar? How do I automate things at work? And it was like using Zapier. It was, you know, nowadays it’s using chat GBT. And so I think we have like 2000 zaps running every week. Which is like you have Google ads going, which so Adam’s doing nothing. And we have probably two to 300 people on our website right now. Like that is awesome. Then out of those two or 300 people, I bet 10 people today are going to reach out and say, Hey Adam, will you or your company buy our home? Then I have a sales and. By the way, once they did that, they went on to the website that read our copy, our testimonials. They filled out this form that talks to our CRM, and as soon as they filled it out, it gave them this questionnaire, and they’ve gotten a text already, probably while we’re sitting on here. All that power through some CRM, some Zapier, and then, if they’re qualified, because I think in marketing, you’re, you’re equally disqualifying people as you are trying to qualify them, so we actually try to DQ really hard. I’m trying to Qualify as hard as I can on Google ads where I’m saying, Hey, if you make at least 10, 000 a month and have 20 grand to put down, I want to buy you a house. And if someone who doesn’t make 10 grand a month and doesn’t have 20 grand to put down, they still click on the ad, but it’s less, right? Cause I’m trying to not get them to click on the ad. So it’s like, Ooh, how do I use that strategy and system? So now they’re all the way through. They’re a warm body. Now Joe our salesperson is booking a call with them to have that conversation. All while Adam used to go to every loan officer and agent, give up my personal sale. And then I just had this backlog of text messages and man, I suck at follow up. It’s usually you’re really good at one. You’re either like a quick starter or really good at follow up. I know there’s some rare breeds that say they can do both. But for me, Adam, I can walk into a room, I could do a podcast and just live zero prep and like, that’s my, you know, as, as Dan Sullivan and Cole, like kind of my unique capability is I have that. But if I’m going to follow up with someone like seven times with an email or a text, like I can’t log it in my brain. I suck at a spreadsheet. I don’t have like a system for categorizing that my business partner and our team has basically used technology so that my brain is for creating ideas, but not for storing them. So it’s like, get all those things out, have the team in place to be able to do that. So a lot of those, technology ones, but otherwise it’s been, yeah. How do you leverage other people’s time, money, and resources?

Derek: 20:51

Yeah, so these are in the questions that take a lot of intention and a lot of experience, too. You have to know exactly what you’re doing in order to be able to build the systems around it, because there is a level of understanding for doing a thing, but then there’s a higher level of understanding for automating the thing, because you have to understand all the inputs that are coming in any potential situation that comes out, because you’re building a system that’s meant to scale. No matter how many inputs coming in, You have the outputs coming to be the same. So I can totally relate with all of that. Is there any systems do you put in place just to ask the question again, in different way, any systems you put in place on your personal side, you know, not for business, but things that you did like simple things, maybe time blocking or Calendly or things like that, that you use to help manage your time when you were at an crunch time where you had the side business, you had your full time job and your family and your kids were young.

Adam: 21:40

Anything sure. Yeah. It’s, I’m a big fan of the one thing, which is make in the morning and manage in the afternoon. So no meetings in the morning, maybe an 11 o’clock meeting, but in general, it was like eight to 11, man, you’re, that’s like your superpower, you know, depending on what time that you wake up. And for me, it’s like, I tried to get two of those where I tried to get that between like five and 6 00 AM. And then again, from like nine to 11, I feel like you get 80 percent of your work done during that time period. And the rest is just that like shut off, like the no email on your phone. Notifications, that’s a game changer. Like, make more time. You know, the book where it’s like take off all the notifications besides if my wife is calling and, you know, really limit what those are. Put it on, do not serve, whatever you gotta do. And for two hours, you’re just, what’s my one thing. So for me, it was like waking up, figuring out what are the three things I want to do today. It’s some prayer meditation. It’s a little bit of exercise. It’s going through that, but it’s no meetings in the morning, if I can help it and then no meetings after five o’clock, because that’s when Adams off. And when he’s. And he’s with family. And I’ve actually noticed that even though my brain doesn’t shut off and I’m working on being more present with the kids, I’m physically there with them every time from five till they go to bed at seven 30 or eight o’clock. It’s like, I’m physically there. And so I’m working on, you know, being a little bit more intentional. So those, those were some, you know, maybe key things on the, on the time blocking thing, but it’s really hard to think of like. What are three things I’m going to do? And before you delegate something, do it yourself. It’s really easy to say, Hey, go find me a property. Okay. Well actually go find a property. Do Oh, loom videos, pay the 20 a month. I was just about

Derek: 23:14

to mention that. Yeah.

Adam: 23:16

And, and, and. It’s so crazy. You’re like, if you’re about to do a task and you’ve already done it more than once, literally hit record, it’s got your video, it’s got your audio and it’s got your screen and you just tell them exactly what you’re doing for prospecting for a task and it turns out it’s going to get wrong. But here’s what you’re doing. You’re doing 10%, somebody else is doing 80 percent and then you’re going to come through and do the last 10 percent all you’re looking for you. It’s really hard at the beginning. Cause some people just want to delegate a task and just expect it to be perfect. And I was coached 10. It’s like, you just, you got to get it started. Do the video, say, this is how I move. This is the resources. Here’s the expectations. Let them take it to 90%. And then you just got to realize you got to finish it off. But if you just do that on enough tasks, 80 percent of your work is done, which is a hundred percent awesome.

Derek: 24:01

It feels like I’m talking to myself here. Which is amazing. We have systems as well that are very similar to this and the extra layer that we put onto this is after the task has been done effectively about four or five times. I’m meeting with my virtual assistants once every two days. So we meet three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and every time they complete a task. Increasingly more so. I’ve been asking them to document what they did, even if there was a loom video. We use a sauna. I know there’s Monday. There’s click up. There’s all these other tools out there that you can use to help manage projects, especially if you’re delegating highly recommend you need to get away from email. Just putting that out there to the audience. Email is You got Slack for direct communication, which is much better. Then you’ve got, you know, Asana or some of these other things, these other tools to help manage workflows. Right. And I guess going back to what I was saying is that once we record a Loom video and the process has been followed correctly, I asked, I actually have them build an SOP inside of our library with that loom video inside the description, and then they break down subtasks that way we can refer to that task in a sauna as an SOP and other tasks inside of a sauna. So if you’re familiar with the way a sauna or Monday or go, some of these other platforms work. You can basically create cards with links to SOPs that when you duplicate them, like say this is a podcast production, right? I have a step by step process where the podcast SOP is embedded right inside of the actual recording for the podcast that moves through my Asana platform and then every time that gets duplicated with a new guest, right? The SOP stays right there and so do the steps and they move along through each one. You can follow the process. So, and then I’m big about batching as well, doing as many things as you can at one time and using the process flow to help do all of this. So it feels like I’m really talking with someone who understands me, which is, which makes me feel special. So no,

Adam: 25:52

and I love the intentionality of having, Hey, I did the 80, 10, 10, and then you go back and like, I’m first going to show you, I’m going to teach you. I’m going to show you, you’re going to do it. I’m going to watch, but then it’s like, okay, now do this in your own words. So that they own it, I think is a great super hack because, Hey, even if your virtual assistant isn’t there, the next person that’s going to come along, they didn’t just take your information, do their own filtering and figure out what their answer is going to be is now they have, you know, kind of the, the filtered version of what this, how this person interpreted your message and what they were doing with it. That’s exactly

Derek: 26:23

right. That’s the reason that we did this is so that if that assistant ends up needing to move on, or ends up leaving the organization or gets promoted out of that spot right where they’re not responsible for it anymore, and we need to add people that way, you can plug them right in directly with it. And everything is right there in the task. And there’s only very little training necessary anyway. We can talk about this for a very long time. So I, but I do want to move on here cause we have a lot to cover.

Adam: 26:48

And one thing, if I may add to that is I think I got hyper assessed with efficiency versus effectiveness. I remember when Stephen Covey in the book was talking about like, yeah, like imagine you climbed up this ladder in 4. 2 seconds and you’re like, man, I really thought I crushed this and it turns out it’s against the wrong wall. And that really challenged me to be like, Oh, effective Trump’s efficiency all day. You know, he’s like the worst thing you can do effectively, or the worst thing you can do is do that efficiently would not need be done at all, which is like 90 percent of emails, which is like responses. And the other hack was, I want people to communicate to me in written, but I want to communicate to them in voice because I want someone to articulate very well because it’s hard to write concisely and put your pens and thoughts. Who, who was it? Was it, was it Teddy? It was like, I would have written you a shorter letter if I had more time. And it’s, it’s really hard to condense thing, but if I’m talking to someone, it’s really easy to use voice because I can then delegate really fast, but I want to read, through text. So just a couple of things there on effectiveness and efficiency. I love it.

Derek: 27:55

You know, there is one episode of the Tim Ferriss show where he brings on someone and I’m thinking of it right. I’m actually trying to look for the episode as we’re talking right now. Um, but it goes through what the founder of, I think it’s a biotech company, or something like that, but they have a system where they don’t even have meetings at their company. Everything is loom videos and asynchronous communication to one another. So instead of meetings, it’s all just loom videos. And the way that this guy like breaks all this down, I’m probably going to end up putting it in the show notes. Or if I can actually find it, I’ll go ahead and mention what show number it is, but it’s awesome. It’s one of my favorite episodes ever, and I highly recommend it. Anyway. Let’s let’s move on. I want to talk a little bit more before we go away from this like, you know, crunch time where you’re in the middle of your career and trying to build a business. Your family has had some influence on you. And can you talk a little bit about anything? Maybe we already covered it. About how your family helped influence the way that you were living or helped influence your systems or processes. Was there anything that they injected as far as wisdom goes or helped you realize anything outside of what you already mentioned? Or do you think you covered it already?

Adam: 29:06

I was working for an engineering firm and the CEO and founder of 20 plus years took it from 0 in revenue to like 40 million in revenue, this engineering firm. And I had a personal relationship with this individual. He was charismatic, he was dynamic, he was a super savvy and I would call him a role model. Figured out then that he ended up getting divorced and never saw his kids when he was younger. And he was just absolutely miserable. And I was like, and this whole narrative built up. Cause when someone said, Hey, Adam, where are you? I’m like, Oh, I’m an engineer and I’m doing real estate. Oh. And I happened to have a family and I stumbled across. You know, the front row dad’s mantra, which is, you know, family, men with businesses, not businessmen with families. And that really resonated with me. It’s like, Oh, like you have this delayed gratification always going on and it’s like, Oh yeah, no, I’m doing it for the business. I’m doing it for the family, but it’s kind of this false dichotomy. And then it turns out if you don’t see the family along the way, like just how empty that is. And so living that. firsthand was even though you maybe don’t want it, like you, you probably know what’s good for you in the end. And so just that discipline of delayed gratification just to start off, because to be honest, I enjoy real estate. Would I give it up? I would for my wife and my family. I’d be really sad, but I enjoy it. But I also realized that you got to have some balance. And so for me, it’s like, as long as I’m doing 40 hours of work and 30 hours of family time, like that’s a pretty good balance for me is if I’m getting 20%. You’re 20, 20 hours of personal time as well. So I kind of have this five, four, three, two, one, time allotment that I use just for allocating the hours for my week, just to make sure that I’m in some balance, but that’s really what hit me is I started to just, you know, understand and then fall in love with this. This these trio of legends that I’m crafting here. It’s almost like my own little experiment I’m like running little marshmallow tests on my toddler of like hey, if you don’t eat this one marshmallow now I’ll give you two later trying to figure out and like instill delayed gratification and watch them squirm and be like How long can you wait, you know to see if you can get you know A second marshmallow and so like and and I can honestly say that I’m their best friend Like, I play dolls, I play, you know, horses, my son likes to, you know, wrestle and do dinosaurs and different things. And it’s just, it’s fallen in love with that. And man, the amount of pure joy that they can teach me and just raw emotions and zest for life is just unimaginable. And it’s that engineering side of me that it’s always transactional and very low relational. And it’s tapping into that other side that I was like, this is awesome. And it’s a part of me that, you know, was. Maybe hidden a little bit or it wasn’t kind of the strengths and so I kind of, you know, tucked it away. And so once I realized that probably 80 percent of my happiness here on earth is going to be my health and my relationships. That it’s literally written up on my wall that I’m looking over my computer right now. It just says, remember, Adam, your health and relationships will determine the majority of your happiness here on earth. And just remembering that is, is so huge.

Derek: 31:56

There’s so much to unpack here. First of all, kids teaching us presence because there is no one in the planet that can be as present as kids are, you know. They tell you what they think right away, at least when they’re very young and before a lot of that programming that we put into them about, you know, white lies and things like that, you know, as, as the socialization happens, it’s really amazing to watch that unfold. Second thing is, just how important life is, like the true currency in life is not money, it’s time, and it’s relationships and health. And so those three things that you nailed down are the intangible things that really make it worthwhile, because in the end, no one’s gonna care what your bank account is when you’re dead. And living a life fully lived is one where you have full trust of your partner, full relationship, like, you know, outwardness and value adding, which I can see is also a common theme. Throughout listening to you talk and then just having full control of your health and making sure that you’re very extremely healthy on all of that. I have an unfair advantage because my wife is a naturopathic doctor, so I’m very lucky to have her, help me out a little bit from time to time. but I think that it’s really important to emphasize that priorities are priorities. And yes, there’s times where you need to start focusing on your business plan to get you to a point where you’re at right now, Adam, right? Like, obviously you may need to go out of balance a little bit. That’s what’s mentioned in, the one thing. Like, I don’t know if you remember that page where you have like a line down the middle, that’s perfect balance. And the, I hate to say unsuccessful people. They never like very strict, very far from that line. But then you have very successful people that you have family on one side and business on the other. And this line in the middle is your time balance. And you generally like stay pretty close to it, but you’ve way you’d go way out on at some points of time, according to the points of need. Right. And I think that’s the way that true balance is like balance, not from a day to day basis, but from a year to year basis. Like, what are you focusing on each year, each month, and what’s your intention? And as long as you have those on your radar, I think you’re doing well. And then. Last thing I’m going to mention here is that episode that I recommend that you listen to is Tim Ferriss show episode number 694 with Sam Korkos, the founder of Levels. He talks about virtual assistants, 10x delegation, and basically getting freedom by letting go. So lots of awesome stuff in there that I think you would dig as well as the people in the, in listening to this podcast right now. Okay.

Adam: 34:27

It’s, it’s great. I love, I love the inspiration.

Derek: 34:30

Awesome, man. Yeah, I think, I think you’re gonna love it, and you gotta let me know how that works out for you once you listen to it. And by the way, if you’re working with John Vrolman, love all the work that he’s doing, because, he actually was involved in some of, like, the Mastermind groups that I was a part of many years ago. And, yeah, Front Row Dads is a great foundation. I encourage everyone out there to go ahead and check it out because they do some really incredible work. Very incredible, like uplifting, tear invoking work actually. So it’s very, very good stuff. All right. Now let’s back up a little bit more. I want to talk about business again. Managing 50 homes or 50 plus homes. Now I imagine across multiple states requires these effective systems that you kind of like talked about before with like your acquisition process. Can you talk a little bit about how you’re managing all of this in house? Like once you have the acquisitions here, what does it look like once you know that sale begins? Because it’s When I do my apartment syndications, there is a lot of work that goes to do the acquisition, but then that’s really just the beginning of all the work because the asset management and the ongoing decisions you make once your owner, or once you’re basically a key stakeholder after making the sale done, that’s where the true like money is made. So can you talk a little bit about like, first of all, your overall process, like. You know, what your business does and then how you have systems built out for that.

Adam: 35:48

Sure. So two, two things right away. Number one, my business partner handles a lot of it. So substitute that for property manager or your general partnership team. And so like, number one, the fact that he enjoys that or is willing to do it is just like a God said, number one. And so that’s why I, again, if people are thinking, you know, on the fence about business partnerships, like if you can find the right one, it’s, it’s such a game changer. Number two is we act more like a bank than a landlord. And the amount of responsibility that a bank has is like, are you paying the mortgage? Yes or no. And if no, like it’s a problem, if it’s yes, it’s like, great. But that way, when there’s repairs or maintenance or different things, you eliminate a lot of those stresses on the tenants. And so the fact that we’re selling these on a contract for deed, or at least with an option to buy significantly reduces the amount. Of work and property manager that we have to do. And it also increases some of the ROI. And so once we get a home under contract or once we’ve closed now, it’s just a matter of getting them mortgage ready, which pairing them up with a loan officer is again, , a fairly helpful endeavor, but as far as the acquisition of it for us, that’s the most, work for us. And so we have this kind of 47, you know, checkpoint list. We have the people that we’re working through and. Just anything buying a piece of property is, you know, fairly convoluted. So I’d be happy to dive into any of those specific areas if you wanted to go a little bit deeper. Let me know which one would be more

Derek: 37:07

helpful. Yeah, sure. Well, I guess for me, can you, so I know that you described it briefly how that, how the process works. Just out of curiosity, because I’m in this, what happens if you, like, is this, are you trying to match individual people? Who don’t qualify to try to get them with a lender who doesn’t, who, who can like has a little bit of flexibility on this with the asset. Obviously, the asset needs to be good. I’m sure that’s part of your, your, your, like one of your list items there to do this. What about, would you guys work with like private capital as well? Or, you know, private lenders, like maybe funds or something that would offer more commercial rates to get these, these people into a point where they are financially ready, over like a blueprint and. Okay. I have another question to that. Maybe you can answer. So private money is the first thing. And the second is, if you maybe have like a second phase where like there’s a training for them, like for the residents that are trying to get this loan, like maybe they have credit score issues or maybe like they need mentoring. Like, what does that look like for those people who are moving into the homes?

Adam: 38:13

Sure. So for the people moving into the homes, the residents, we call them tenant buyers. So, and I, and I’ve been using that vernacular, so I’m going to use that a little bit, and then we have individual real estate investors. So actually what we’re doing is almost like the bank is kind of just, the loan officers are kind of shuffling. They’re going to Fannie Mae, borrowing the money, they’re packaging up his mortgage backed securities and then these big venture funds are buying them and they’re getting their 4 percent or 7 percent or whatever the numbers are. We’re trying to do the same thing, just on an individual basis, so right now, Adam Czach could not get a conventional loan, because on paper I look like crap. And so ironically, I might go to Derek and be like, Hey, Derek, could you go get a commercial loan, a hard money loan, a private money loan, and buy this house for me, Adam Zock in Fargo, North Dakota for 400, 000. Here’s the deal. I’ll give you 20 percent down. You just go get a loan for 320, 000, whatever your principal insurance taxes and insurance or principal interest taxes and insurance payment is. I’ll pay that plus 500 a month. So you’re into it for 0. You own title. I’m renting it, but just give me the option to buy back this 400, 000 house for 430, 000 anytime in the next three years. And that’s all we’re doing is we’re first finding the tenant buyer who can’t get the bank loan that’s okay, paying 7 percent interest plus 500 a month. And then we’re going out and we’re pairing them with real estate investors who are like, I can’t find a cash flowing deal in this market to save my life at a 7 percent interest rate. And we’re just saying, Hey, go to your bank, borrow at 7%. But we’ll hand this person to you. We package everything together, take an assignment fee, and that’s how we’re connecting these individuals with the whole goal of transforming renters into homeowners. And so we screened more than 500 of these, completed, like, the full cycle more on 20 deals where they’ve actually moved in, got a loan, bought back the home. Not everyone works out perfect, but we’re batting extremely well. Given that given the traditional rent to own models, kind of like a scam. And so we really set them up for success and it’s usually credit score, debt to income ratio. So whether that’s getting them into credit repair, whether that’s understanding if they need two years of tax returns. And so that’s just the niche that we eventually landed on. But the whole goal is get someone into a home, build their wealth that way. So they have to move multiple times and it is a little bit of a, I’ll call it a luxury. Like we tell people that find us were like, if you can get a mortgage or you want to wait. Just do that. However, if you’re moving from Tennessee to Texas, like this family was, that’s making 300, 000 a year, that’s like, I don’t want to pick a rental. I want to pick a home listed for sale. Just give me two years until I get my tax returns, or because I was switching jobs, Fannie Mae doesn’t like that, so you have to get six months of, you know, the job history before you qualify. Perfect. They’re willing to pay for that premium to pick out a 500, 000 house that they get to move in with their

Derek: 40:57

family. Yeah. Wow. Cool. Very cool, cool stuff. I appreciate you explaining the process a little bit easier for me. I, I kind of, I’m a little bit slow when it comes to new concepts like this. So I appreciate you breaking it down for me and maybe some of the audience member who wanted to pick up more of what you’re doing. So, this has been awesome. I know it’s already been like about 42, 43 minutes so far since we hit the record button on this. But I do have some questions here in the rapid round, which is the same five questions that I ask every single one of my guests, and they’re meant to be answered in a very quick manner, about 30 seconds or so. So if you’re ready, we’re just going to go ahead and rapidly ask them to you. Are you ready? Ready to. All right. Number one, name any resource that was, or still is essential in your journey to pursuing freedom. Five minute journal. Great. Awesome.

Adam: 41:42

Why is that? So the idea of what’s my three things that I want to do and what are the three things that I’m grateful for, or I like to, I like to change that hack. If you’ve said it was three things, I’m grateful. Oh, my family, my health, my time. And it’s like, instead of doing that, say. What, when I think about it, makes me smile and just a different twist on the gratitude to, uh, to actually get you to get into a state of

Derek: 42:05

gratitude. Love it. Yeah. I also like the focus on something that’s tangible. So you don’t keep using the same thing every day, right? Like you’re, you know, the experiences that you go through each day to day. It’s about the phrasing of the question. For what you’re going to be grateful for, that will help yield some of those like different answers that, that help get the juices flowing. So I love that. Number two, if you woke up and all of your business was completely gone and all you had was 500, a laptop, a place to live and some food for your family and everything, how would you rebuild first?

Adam: 42:34

I would first start off by getting the highest paying job that I could given my current skill set in probably an employer employee situation for stability and then use all of my free time to probably do some version of wholesaling or sandwich lease option to accelerate my active capital. While building a business is kind of the third leg. So I would go for stability. I would then go for how to juice the income. And then I would go for wealth building or passive income is kind of pillar. Number three.

Derek: 43:05

Yeah, great. Great answer. Number three. What does your self reflection and goal setting practice look like if you have one from day to day?

Adam: 43:13

Oh, I am so deep into goal setting. I, I might be 1 percent of the 1 percent where I’m having quarterly, yearly, semi annual and reflections. But if you’re, if you’re looking back, there’s a simple hack of looking back through your photos with your wife, you know, or, or your missus or just yourself for the last 12 months. So there’s some reflection there. I keep, you know, in the reminders app. I, I, I create a new reminder that’s just gratitude and wins and it has to be, if I read it, I have to smile. And so that reflection is like, I ran a half marathon on zero prep and ran a nine minute mile. I look at that and I’m like, man, I just channeled my inner David Goggins, got super blistered. But you know what? I’m just super proud of it. Or we went horseback riding with my wife, with our three young kids. And it was a perfect Minnesota, leaves are changing colors. It’s like 60 degrees, no wind. And my wife looks at me and she’s like, Hey. I’m really happy with you and what you’ve built for us and like words of affirmation love language like that really rings a bell for me. And then for goal setting, I go deep every quarter, every year into what I call my life plan, which includes my 25 year vision, my beliefs, my values, my affirmations, my why, my skills and weaknesses, five year vision, and then goals. Which is all in this 20 page document that I have that I call my life plan. That’s

Derek: 44:27

great. I love that. That’s amazing. We need to talk a little bit more after this recording is over. All right. Number four. What are the core work habits that you attribute or I guess personality traits that you attribute mostly to your success?

Adam: 44:39

I would say building the team around me. And then leveraging into my strengths, the idea of doing self assessments was so critical to me, whether it was the disc profile, what was the enneagram, whether it was the strength finders. And I was like, cool, I’m really good at getting results. I’m really, you know, high achievement motivated. And I’m really good at starting things and I’m really good at maximizing things. It’s like, cool, the more I do that, you know what I hate details. And it’s like, and I used to struggle and beat my head and just like, I would just do it because I was an engineer and I learned how to do it and I could kind of grow up through it. But man, it drained my energy really quick. So you figure out what you’re really good at. And then you find different people that you can surround yourself with that you can be held accountable. And it turns out they actually like it. They’re like, Oh, I’m introverted. My wife’s introverted. She does like taxes and our P and L and different things. Like she’s, she’s way better at it and she enjoys it. And I’m like, God bless

Derek: 45:32

you.. Love it.. All right. Last question for you for today. What tool or process has become one of your most time money or energy saving ninja magic tricks that you use every day?

Adam: 45:41

I would say recently it’s the power to say no. So I used to be Mr. Yes, man, and I don’t know how many people every day are asking like, Hey, can I buy you coffee? Can I do lunch? Can we do this? Can we do that? And it turns out that if you say no to like 90 percent of things, it’s amazing how much your calendar frees up. So it used to be like calendly. It used to be, Hey, I’m just going to focus on my three things and get those done. But now it’s more strategic of, it goes on a future maybe list. Every time I have an idea, every time I have a request and it turns out in that moment, it always seems like, oh yes, I’m just saying yes, but you realize if you’re saying yes now, you’re saying no to something else in the future and so that’s probably been the biggest time hack is like I found myself just over committing to everyone else. Do

Derek: 46:27

you, where do you, just from my knowledge, because I’m definitely going to be doing this, implementing this, and this is the solution to a problem I didn’t know I had, what, what tool do you use to actually put this down? Are you using, like, an app or, a Google Doc, or how are you capturing these in the moment?

Adam: 46:42

Sure. So there’s two things. There’s the quick capture where I say, Hey Siri, remind me. And it might go off here, but, or it’s just it’s the quick capture. It’s on my brain. Somebody asked me to do something. It’s a text. I hit red and it’s like, Oh, I don’t want to hit unread, but I want to maybe think about answering it to him. So it’s like getting out of there and it’s just. Into this depository. And from there, I then sorted into business or personal. And then I have, which are like personal someday or business someday. And you sort those into that category. And right now it’s just on my phone because I can do it here and it’s in reminders and it’s really quick cause I can use voice to get it onto there. And then of course with emails, you can sync them up. And then I use, you know, click up to do, uh, you know, a few other things. But in general, that’s the process of just capturing it first. And then it’s organizing it second. And if I’m then going to say yes on it, it’s like, Ooh, if I move it off of my list and it comes back up again, then it’s a maybe, but then every now and then you’ll sort through it and be like, Oh man, I thought this was like a nine out of 10 priority turns out. It’s like a two after 24 hours.

Derek: 47:39

It’s funny how, like, the time and the wisdom piece will eventually, like, kind of show and reveal to you what really is important. Like, if it’s something that was important to you three months ago or two months ago, there’s Siri, chiming in, right? I’m listening to your whole thing. That’s so funny.

Adam: 47:54

Got the whole thing. I was like, man, that’s the longest blog I think I’ve ever

Derek: 47:56

had. That’s funny. It’s like a chat GPT prompt, you know? That’s right. So, anyway. Well, yeah, no, I, I was just going to say that, um, you know, it’s, uh, Having a place to sort it out where if it’s true, um, two months from now or three months from now, then obviously it’s something that needs to be acted on, right? But if it’s something that’s like, yeah, this isn’t an issue anymore, or I’m not feeling this, or this isn’t the direction I want to go, then that’s a perfect way. So I love that maybe list. That’s a great, great technique.

Adam: 48:25

And in a more recent hack is it’s tough because I feel like every six months I switch like productivity hacks. Cause I’m like, Oh, this one’s the greatest it’s ClickUp. Then it’s Todoist, then it’s iCloud reminder. So it’s like, it just happened to be whatever flavor I’m on. Cause every time I hear something new, it’s like, Ooh, that sounds great. And this will solve all my productivity problems and you kind of jump ship. But, the one theory that from Todoist that I held true was any new tasks that I’m added is assuming it’s a priority number four. Which means it’s one’s the highest. So if I add anything, it’s assuming it’s a default four. I have to go in there and change it to a one, two or three, which is just very helpful for me personally. Just knowing that anything new is always less important than what I previously set up was going to do. And just by using that order, I then have to mentally like, Oh, you know, it turns out this one actually is a priority two and it’s above this priority three, but just by default, everything’s less. Less, less of a priority than anything I previously committed to.

Derek: 49:22

Amazing. Adam, man, it’s been fun having you on this podcast. Like the time has flown by. I can’t believe it’s already been, you know, almost an hour here. But what I do want to do before we go is allow the people to hear from you where they can learn about what you have going on, where they can find out more about what you have. Um, so I’ll just give you the floor for just a couple of seconds here to share with the audience where they can get to you. For

Adam: 49:45

sure. So I wish I was better at social media and different games, but I’m on LinkedIn and Facebook and, you know, whether they’re on the show notes or you’re searching for Adam Zok, I’m the co founder of home equity partner. If you’re specifically into lease option agreements, you can go to home equity partner. com slash investors. And we give away a. Attorney a vetted lease option agreement. So whether you just want it for your real estate contracts, you’re like, Hey, what’s a lease with an option to buy? And I want to do that on a single family or a commercial or any sort of business. You can look at like the different terms that are going through there. So I would say that would just be a helpful resource. If people want to download that, just just do the email. And of course, if you want to reach out, there’s other ways to reach out on the website to at home equity partner dot com.

Derek: 50:25

Amazing. And of course, I’ll be linking to all of the links that you mentioned, Adam, at least if they were in the production form that you filled out before you came onto the podcast so that you all can get to them easy on the podcast show page, which is available anywhere you got into this podcast. So whether you found us on YouTube or Spotify, please check that out. I also want to remind you all that, We really appreciate engagement, and we really want to hear from you. So wherever you’re listening to this or watching it, please make sure that you engage with us. You give that lot, the thumbs up, the like, comment, hit the notification bell. Anything that you can do to interact with us will help appease the algorithm gods so that we can get more incredible guests like Adam on the show and also appeal to more. other amazing listeners like yourself. Thank you, dear listener for listening to us all the way to the end of the show. And Adam, it was such a pleasure having you on. Thanks for coming on, man.

Adam: 51:18

You’re welcome here. Can I’ve been on a lot of podcasts and I think your listeners already know it and the fact that we’ve only done this, but I think you have the most unique blend of humility and intelligence I’ve ever had from a podcast host is because I feel like you’re trying to not show how smart you are. And then you like can’t help it. When you start talking, you like your systems and automations and your intelligence starts showing through, but you’re extremely humble about it. So I appreciate it. Just wanted to applaud you. For, for, for having a, a great show here, making it super easy. And, I imagine you’re going to have just a tremendous amount of success in life.

Derek: 51:53

Thank you so much. And likewise to you, man, such a great compliment to end it. I think this is a great time. I think I’m ready to call it a day at this point. Thank you so much, Adam, for coming on and thanks listeners for listening. We’ll see you guys next time. Take care. Yeah.