John Casmon is a real estate entrepreneur, who has partnered with busy professionals to invest in close to $90 million worth of apartments. John hosts the Target Market Insights podcast where he covers multifamily and marketing insights. In addition. he is the co-creator of the Midwest Real Estate Networking Summit, a no pitch event to connect like-minded investors. With a background in marketing, he has overseen campaigns for General Motors, Nike and Coors Light amongst others. John was even recognized by Black Enterprise Magazine as one of the “Top Executives in Advertising and Marketingâ€.
Take Away:
- He moved to Chicago and bought a duplex. Two years later bought a triplex; the next year, a eight-unit building.
- John uses his marketing background to pair deals with investors and turn them into opportunities.
- Adding value is more than sharing posts or likes. Test the waters, put out original content and see what works.
- Building a brand gives you confidence, credibility, connections, and shows you care.
Snapshot Round:
- What is your number one failure? Partnered with another developer for his first flip. Gave too much control to another partner. Always make sure your voice is heard.
- What is your number one success? Family pride is his success.
- What is your dream? My dream really is to relax and travel the world.
John’s Contact:
- Website : https://www.casmoncapital.com
- Email: https://john@casmoncapital.com
- Podcast : Target Market Insights
Transcription:
Welcome to another episode of the Lessons and Real Estate Show, I’m your host, Anthony Pinto. And today we are joined by a fellow multifamily investor podcast and marketing expert, John Casmon, John.
Welcome to the show
Anthony. Thank you for having me on. I’m excited to be here.
Of course. Of course.
I am a big fan, John, and I’ve been trying to work up the nerve to talk to you for a while. So I’m glad we got finally got this to work. So can you tell us a little bit about your background and why you’re such an awesome guest?
Well, thank you. First and foremost, I appreciate you being a fan and checking out our content. We always try to give great knowledge and value to other people. So I’m glad you’ve been one of those people we’ve been able to touch.
To tell you a little bit more about my background, you know, my background is in marketing. So corporate America, where, you know, after school I really wanted to get into marketing. So I went to an advertising agency. I did that for a little while, ended up going client side. So I worked on the client side of the business for about four or five years, went back to the agency side and it was kind of skipping quickly past some of this. But one of the things that happened when I was on the client side, I actually worked for General Motors when we went into bankruptcy. So for anyone who was paying attention at that time was kind of right during the economic downturn. And one of the big challenges was you really didn’t have a lot of options, at least I didn’t have a lot of options. And I really realized how important it was to have control over my finances. And what I mean by control is I needed to have my own income, my own secondary income coming in and not necessarily worry so much about my W-2 job. So at that moment, I made it a point to really focus in on real estate investing. I moved to Chicago shortly after I bought a two unit building two years later about a three unit building. I think the next year, about eight unit building. It really started to build the portfolio from there. But it really took kind of that that time sitting in Detroit, looking at myself saying, what are you going to do it? And luckily I didn’t lose my job like some other folks did actually thrive during that time period. But nonetheless, when you realize that you don’t have as many options, you really need to create more options. And that’s what I really started to focus in on, is creating more options so I could stay in power and control my life.
Well, that’s that’s really interesting is I feel like a lot of people I’ve talked to when they want to get out of that job is because they don’t spend enough time with family or they want to make, like you said, they have more control over their life or they don’t really fully enjoy that, too. And for you is more of a necessity because you’re kind of your future was less uncertain than what was going to happen with General Motors and marketing. So you’re almost forced into trying to find another avenue to make money and that and it’s interesting. And I’m sure that that kind of with that in the back of your mind, kind of pushed you to really dive fully into real estate, because really there is.
What’s the alternative now?
Well, it’s all of the above, though. I mean, everything else you said was absolutely true for me, too, right? It’s not like I, you know, took that moment and went all in the next year or something like that.
It took me some time to build up the portfolio, but it was the same thing. You know, I recognized the kind of lifestyle I wanted to live, the kind of freedom that I wanted to have. But it took time to build it up, you know, and I wasn’t I wasn’t so gung ho to just say, let’s report it and let’s just make it happen. We built it up systematically over time, you know, but to your point, that time with family, you know, not having as much passion for your job, which I enjoyed my career, my job. But there’s certainly aspects of any I think anyone who’s working a job or aspects that you don’t enjoy. Right. But there are things that you love and you absolutely enjoy. But the freedom was also what we were shooting for.
Yeah, makes sense. I mean, it’s a same boat for me, trying of trying to find an avenue to be able to travel and see the world. I’m still young and in real estate as an option for that. So I want to kind of dig into a little bit of your background here.
So you are the host of the target market and sites where you talk with multifamily experts and kind of give us market insights to what’s going on with the real estate market in general.
And you’re also the co creator of the Midwest real estate networking site where you connect like minded investors. And I know pitch of that.
But I also say that, you know, not just General Motors, if you’ve worked for a lot of big names, people have heard about you, Nike, Coors Light. So with that in mind, how have you used your marketing background to bring success in your real estate investing career?
Yes, great question. Right. So real estate and marketing may not necessarily seem to go hand in hand right away.
And if they do, you’re most people think about like being a real estate agent and marketing properties and things like that, but not so much the pure investing side of it. The marketing side has been absolutely beneficial to me, though. It primarily is, because you really have to break down what I do. So let me just talk holistically about multifamily and what we do is really multifamily syndication. So with that, we’re really pairing deals with investors and just putting them into opportunities. And you’re always looking for more of both of those things. You’re either looking for more deals or looking for more investors to pair together with those opportunities. So marketing is one of the ways that we help ourselves to drive that growth. You know, from a deal standpoint, some of that is more relationship driven, you know, working with brokers, getting to know brokers, getting to know other operators that we might decide to partner with, really building connections with sellers. You might do direct mail campaigns depending on the size of the property that you’re looking for, but really starting to understand how do you increase your deal flow, the number of deals that you have access to that you can consider investing in or talking to your partners. Then on the investor side of it, you know, for us, we partner with other investors.
So part of what we’re trying to do is connect with them, stay engaged with them, understand what they’re looking for. But then also, you know, you call it lead generation or getting leads, but it’s connecting with new potential investors, letting them know what we do, getting to know them, and then finding out if what we offer is going to be a fit for what they’re looking for. So we’re always looking to do those things. And then for me, being able to tap into the marketing background has made it easy to think about things like CRM. Right. Many times people haven’t even heard of the term CRM. It’s just customer relationship marketing. But for me, it’s something that I’ve known for over a decade. And what that really means is you have a client or a customer and there’s a marketing campaign or marketing system that you do to manage the relationship with that customer. So coming from the automotive space, which is really critical because in automotive you’re talking about a high value purchase, right? A thirty thousand dollar car. You’re talking about something as infrequent. Right. So you’re only buying that car or whatever. If you’re leasing it, you’re doing every two to three years.
But if you’re buying it, it might be every five, six, seven, 10 years, who knows? But cultivating that relationship and being patient for when that relationship can kind of turn into a client again is a really important thing. We would do events where we would get leads, but we would know if anybody was ready to buy a car the next day or the next week or the next month or the next year. We would have no clue when someone’s ready to buy a vehicle. Right. So you try to engage with them and you try to get them into what we call a funnel. And that’s where you engage with them in communications up front. And then depending on where they’re at in the funnel, they’re either interested to buying right away. Hey, they’re not interested right now, though. They may be interested later down the road. Or maybe they just bought. But whatever wherever they’re at, you’re trying to figure out how can you add value to them? How can you solve any problems or challenges that they’re facing? And you want to make sure that you stay top of mind and you stay in front of them for the opportunities when they are ready to become a client or to become a customer.
It’s interesting, I never really thought about the connections between selling a car and pitching a deal as a multifamily syndicator, the similarities you, the big purchase, the not very common that the frequent buying that goes involved with real estate.
So that’s really interesting that you make those comparisons, because I never really thought of that. So you brought it up?
Yeah. My time in the automotive industry was very, very interesting to give me different perspectives.
Most definitely interesting. So with that in mind, what what marketing strategies or techniques have you found work or don’t work in the real estate realm?
Yeah, I mean, I think the first thing is just understanding that.
What works best is just being human, right? I mean, just connecting with people, caring, you know, building true connections with individuals, getting to know them, understanding what they’re looking for and being transparent.
So those are really the most important things, is really looking at it from a people standpoint, saying, how can I help this person? What are they looking for and not focusing so much on, you know, either the investing side of it or what you have to gain from it. But just really understanding what are they looking for and how can I help? Right. Once you move on from that from a pure hey, this seems to work pretty well for us. You know, I think staying in front of people works great. Right. So if you think about building relationships, you know, doing events is a great way to connect with people. If you can get in front of people face to face, they can get to know you. You know, they can build some rapport. You can talk to them more about what it is you do, but they can read your body language. It’s just much easier to build a real connection in person. But sometimes that’s not always possible. Right. So the podcast is another great way for people to get to know you are through video or social media content. I think it’s pretty much all the same kind of thing, basically, as an opportunity for someone to get to know you through the post of the content that you create and learn more about who you are, the way you view the world, you know your knowledge. You know, whether you’re a conservative or a bit more aggressive, just really learning who you are. So giving people the power really to consume the content that they want and whether or not you’re creating stuff that is very valuable for them or if it’s just white noise or spam for for their needs.
Interesting, so I’ve gone to a few conferences and I made a few high, high level real estate investors a syndicate. If you want to call them that. And it seems there’s kind of a split between just constantly getting inundated with emails and calls from people.
And then the people where I see, like maybe something once every three months or so. And it’s almost like they’re they just kind of, you know, go dive under the sea for like a three months and they come on surface and then they shoot me this whatever. Right. And so I see kind of what have you seen works better in terms of that kind of strategy, have you? Because for me, I’m not looking to read all these emails all the time because my inbox is full of all these emails from people to kind of shoot me deals or talk about their next webinar or whatever that they’re doing. And sometimes it’s just like, OK, I’ve gotten the fifth email this day from this guy. I’m just going to start out unsubscribing. Right. So where have you found that there’s that sweet spot between trying to be as involved as possible and putting out as much content as possible, but still at the same time respecting people’s time and not wanting to completely be out of their mind when someone a deal actually comes up and you kind of really want to put the true content out in front of them.
Yeah, I mean, I think that’s a phenomenal question. It’s something I think every marketer or every investor has to deal with in the multi-family spaces. How much content is too much content?
Right. There are people who put out stuff every single day. There are people who, like you said, you really only hear from them when they have an offering or maybe a holiday email or something like that. You know, I think that if we say in everyday email is probably way too much and hearing from you twice a year is probably way too infrequent. You know, somewhere in between there is the sweet spot. And what I would say is it really comes down to what you have to say and whether or not it is valuable to the end user. You know, there’s some folks in my database who they would probably love for me to email them more frequently. And we do once a week right now, which I just started doing once a week before we were doing monthly. We were doing monthly. But between the show now going to twice a week on our podcast and the type of content that we’re putting out there, we feel that we now can create real value on a weekly basis where it’s not just us advertising our latest episodes. If you can create value and you can get it to the point people want to see it, then I think you should focus on that cadence. The numbers don’t lie to you, though. You know, if you and whether you use Mail Chimp or whatever source you use, you can take a look at engagement. Engagement ultimately will suffer if your value, if the content you’re giving is not valued. So I would say, look at it. You probably want to test a couple of things to see what’s working well, what’s not working, what are people responding to? And it’s not just like open rates and click the rates, which are great.
But are you getting people to comment or are people replying to you, hey, this was a great you know, thanks for sending that was great information or anything like that. Are you getting actual responses or is it crickets every time? Right. So I think you definitely want to kind of pay attention to that, watch the cadence. But I think the biggest thing really is value. If you’re just sharing stuff and you’re not really adding value, then it’s it’s not something that people are going to love to read. The other thing I will say, if you’re going to share stuff more frequently, then you should probably keep it shorter and sweeter. Right and tight. That way they can consume it, they can move on. And it’s easy if you’re going to do once a month and yet you probably are jamming a lot of stuff in there. Now was something else we looked at. You know, I was doing a once a month newsletter, but it started to get long because I’m like, here’s some of our latest deals and here’s, you know, the last six episodes we did that you didn’t see. And here’s a blog post we did. And I spoke at this event. And next thing you know, it’s like this long, long thing that no one wants to read because it’s just so long and cumbersome and people just delete it. So it’s like, well, you know what? It might just be easier to do it once a week. The other thing I will tell you, this is a really good secret here. So for anyone who’s listening, really want to great marketing secret, here’s a secret. And this is something that also goes back to my marketing days. You need to segment your customers.
So everyone in your database, you want to segment, especially with email particularly, but segment them because everyone needs something different. That person who’s ready to invest today, who eagerly awaiting your next deal, they’re ready to go. You want to send them different communications than your mom’s cousin or your mom? A friend who just happens to be on your list and they’re just, you know, they’re just there to support you and they haven’t hit the unsubscribe button. So you need to send different messages to different people based on what they need, what they’re looking for, what they want. So the better you can segment your audiences and segment your list, the more valuable your content becomes. If I’m if I had an email just for other multifamily syndicators and we were talking about this kind of content, they would probably love it.
Right. Hey, guys, here’s our drive. Better engagement with my investor database. OK, they would love that content. My passive investors, however, probably don’t care. Right.
And in fact, they may do more damage because it may seem like. Oh, so that’s what you’re doing, you know. So you kind of have to be mindful because people don’t want to feel marketed to. And it is about the relationship. So you do have to manage some of those things there. So I would say you really need to understand your audience, segment your messages, understand what your passive investors want.
It makes you can deliver on that, understand with either other potential partners and brokers, whoever else is in your database, figure out what kind of messages they want. The more you can segment, the better your content is going to be for the individual.
Interesting, yeah, I’ve never really thought about that, I just I just recently got into Mail Chimp and I love the functionality of it, how I can make a template, I can make it automatic, I can target certain individuals.
But I basically just data dumps all of my email list into there and I just shoot out a monthly newsletter.
So far, I never really thought about trying to target individuals like that and specifically putting out content that people who know all the real estate terms and are actually interested in real estate versus people who aren’t and maybe don’t know all the terms. And it’s just kind of like white noise when you’re putting out, hey, we’ve offered this cash on cash return in this market of all of these very nuanced kind of real estate terms that are really investing terms in general that my cousin doesn’t really care about. But they’re there to kind of support me and kind of like Facebook. They just kind of check up on me and see how things are going. And so I have something to talk about the next Thanksgiving. And I think that’s something I should personally I’m going to definitely take that on board, because it’s I found that, you know, another thing you could see a mail chimp is how many people have unsubscribe.
Right.
And I’ve found that after a certain kind of concern, I put out that I’ve had a little more unsubscribed than not unsubscribe. And maybe that’s just because the people that I put in there just don’t care at all about what I have to talk about. But at the same time, maybe it’s just the content.
And so kind of taking an analytical look at, OK, we put out this much content in the past month, what is actually working? What are we how many views are we getting on Facebook through our videos or our content or an Instagram or even in that? What is working better? Facebook, Instagram, email, all of these different platforms that we’re using in it. And I’ve definitely started looking into that a lot more as we as we put out more content. But on that note, I never run into this problem myself is how do you make or how do you create value or how do you add value?
Because as someone who’s a new real estate investor, who’s just trying to learn the ropes themselves, how do you create value to people who probably have decades more experience or I would say decades, but years more experience in you in real estate or have a more financial background than your investing background or those passive investors that know what they’re doing already? Right. And you need to put yourself out in front of them. How do you go about creating that that value?
I think one of the most important steps that people should take, especially multifamily syndicators, but I’m going to say any marketer, you have to have a sense of who your customer is, OK? Who are you talking to? If you don’t know who they are? How do you know what to say? That’s the problem you’re talking about, right? If you don’t know who you’re talking to and what their pain points are, what they want to know about what they want to learn. Notice I didn’t say you and what you want to talk about, what they need to learn about, know about hereabout. That’s where you start. If you want to make great, compelling content consistently, it starts with the end user. It’s not you. So if you understand them, then you will have a sense of what to say. Let’s take that cousin you just mentioned. Right? Cousin may not care at all about real estate, but if you can talk to the cousin about putting another ten thousand dollars in her pocket so that they have money to go do X, Y, Z, whatever. And if you can frame it up that way and illustrate how investing in multifamily, not just from a passive income standpoint, but through the tax advantages that are prevalent with multifamily investing, how this is a vehicle that will help to put more money in their pocket and buy a new car or, you know, get closer to retirement or financial freedom, whatever that they may have more interest in.
So it’s all in how you frame the discussion, but you have to understand what they’re looking for. So you might have a group of people in your database who are not interested in a real estate. So you take all your little techie terms and you throw them away. Right. I did an interview with the woman, Michelle Weinstein, and she talked about that the pitch came and she talked about from a conversion of sales standpoint, most professionals get in their own way because we talk about ourselves, our credentials and the information we think is important. And the other person, they don’t care about that stuff as much. They care about whatever in goals they have in mind. So if you can attach it to what they want now, you have a chance to actually have a conversation and get them to listen. You mentioned also what if you’re talking to somebody who has more experience than you, you know, or more money or more knowledge, whatever the case may be? Well, part of it is you have to understand, is that person your target? Because they may not they may already have other folks or other resources to invest there.
So maybe they’re never going to invest with you until you get 10, 15 years experience. Sometimes it’s just that’s just the reality. Now, with that said, there may be folks who maybe they are willing to invest and maybe they are willing to work with you a little bit more and to help you understand what other people who are more experienced are doing. So you kind of have to just get to know them a little bit. But go back to the other part of your question there. I think one thing that you can do is document your experience, you know, your early on in your career, you know, or early on in anything, building it up, documenting your experience, the steps that you’re taking. That’s a great way to create content. It doesn’t have to be this polished, you know, piece of content. It’s polished video, polished blog all the time. I mean, right now you’re doing this podcast in Japan, right? You’re in Japan shooting this podcast. That is great content. You being in Japan, traveling around, you know, working and trying to figure out multifamily investing and building while you’re there, the behind the scenes of that will be great content.
Your life in Japan, you know, I mean, like blogging and just documenting that people want to get to know you, you know, and I think sometimes we get too caught up in, hey, I need to educate people to show them that I’m credible. I got to get my credentials up. People just want to get to know. I want to get to know you. They want to understand what you know. They want to, you know, really get a chance to understand the way you view things, the way you view life, the way you view the world.
And if they get to know you, that’s when they’re going to build a rapport. And then they’ll be open to learning more about what you do on this real estate side. I think the biggest mistake I made was, you know, really trying to educate people on multifamily investing where they really didn’t care about real estate investing. They didn’t. And I was like, no, you don’t understand. So here’s what we do. We bought a property and they were going to invest this amount of money into it. And never I mean, just looking at me like, OK, OK, go and like, oh, OK. So you’ve asked me zero questions. I mean, you probably have no interest in this.
Right. So but that’s one of the things. Right. But let them get to know you in that capacity. So just because it’s your friends or your family, part of what you have to do is you have to get them to see you as a multi-family investor. But you also need to be a relatable person just like anyone else, you know. And I think those are the things that you want to play up in your life so people understand who you are, what you do. And then let’s get into the brick and mortar of, you know, your numbers and what the investments look like and what you look for and all that kind of stuff.
The really interesting point, it’s I feel like a lot of people think when they try to find investors, they have to be in sales mode.
The whole conversation is like, OK, I have an angle of mine is I want this investor to invest this amount of money or I want them to follow up with me on this property. Right. Are really just get them interested in real estate in general. And I’ll tell you about the interaction I had before I left to come here to Japan.
I gave a presentation to a bunch of entrepreneurs and stuff and I was kind of put on the spot because I don’t really know what to talk about. So I got invited to talk about whatever I was doing in my business.
I just talked about multifamily and I just kind of realized that talking with these people and telling them that the benefits of multifamily, a lot of them, which is going is going straight over their head or they just didn’t care about. Right. But there are a couple that we’re kind of interested in that. And one in particular was a local commercial. It was a real estate owner himself, and he owned a commercial property. And but he really didn’t know how to get into multifamily side of it because there’s still a little bit different. And so we had a conversation. We sat down and was like, hey, you know, I have these deals coming up. All of us are getting into that pitch mode with him. And it just kind of realized that that’s not how he was being receptive to what I was doing. He was more wanted to hear about me as a person. Why should I invest with you? What is your experience? What is your back and your education? And so I just started talking about that and I realized in that conversation that he was a new investor and he wasn’t looking to get into a big deal right off the bat. Right. And I even told them that I was like, hey, do we have all of these deals available to you? But I know how you are and I know that these deals aren’t going to be the best for you. Right, because they’re they’re going to be high stakes to be a lot of money. And it’s probably going to scare you right off the bat. Right. So I told them, hey, you should you need to get your education first and wrap your head around what you want to do with your finances is the worst thing that could happen is you get pushed into a deal that ends up causing you to get scared.
And then what do you make money or not? Right. You get scared in the whole process and now you’re lost from real estate or forever.
Right.
And so I kind of realized that as I’m talking with this guy and I and I talk with more people about real estate is you know what is the angle of the investor rather than what is the angle rather than what is the angle of me as a as a syndicator or a person looking for that investor? So I think that’s a really good point you bring up there.
Yeah, I think, you know, when you start from the perspective of how can I help this individual, that puts you in a really good perspective to step back, take your own personal bias and personal needs away and figure out what is it that this person needs. And when you get clarity on that, you’ll be able to see who is your ideal investor, who’s not your ideal investor. You can help that individual without necessarily trying to get them in your deal or anything like that.
So that’s really the key is really being in a position to serve people, understanding their needs, what they’re looking for, hoping the benefits will fit for them to join and be a client of yours or an investor. That’s great. Obviously, everyone wants that. But if it’s not, you can help them. And there may be other opportunities down the road just building off the relationships.
Exactly. Yeah. I went to a conference recently and the guy talked about that business is two things as people and processes. Right. So if you have both of those two things in place, whether that is a real estate business, marketing, it could be baking.
It’s all about being able to connect with the people and being able to build the processes to be successful. And I think that’s absolutely true. And whatever really in anything in life is people and processes. Right. Whether that’s family aspect, church or spiritual side of it, it’s really just connecting with people. In the end. That’s really all it is and getting to know them. So.
So, John, I have one more question here for you before we get into this snapshot around.
So as you talked about, you are you have your background and marketing and you have your podcast and you’re putting out content and you’ve really kind of built up your brand.
So in that kind of process, what is some lessons learned that you’ve kind of or some lessons learned in the networking side, podcasting, building your brand that you want to share with the listeners?
I got to tell you, just listening to you say building your brand, I kind of smirk a little. It’s it’s silly to me in some ways because I’ve been very against. Trying to build a brand, and this may sound silly, you know, kind of crazy coming from the marketer, but I’ve spent all my career marketing companies and brands, so I understood that.
And I never saw myself as a brand. I never wanted to be a brand. I never wanted to be kind of in front of the camera like that. I really thought that, you know, I would just talk to people and everything would manifest itself because I was hoping that it would. And I think the biggest thing for me was just really. Getting more comfortable with myself, getting more comfortable, sharing my truth, being more comfortable really just talking to other people about what I’m doing, what I found is it really takes for things to be successful as a multifamily syndicator. The first is confidence, and that’s confidence in the knowledge that the analyzing of skills, the market information, just what you’re doing. You got to have the confidence right. Second thing you need is credibility, because if you have if you’ve never done a deal or you don’t have a good team in place, you’re just simply not going to be credible. So you have to give credibility. The third thing that you need is connections. You know, if you don’t have the relationships with the right people, whether that’s on the investor side, the broker side, property managers or the vendors, then you’re certainly not going to be successful.
The last thing those care. You know, if you really want to raise money and get to know people and get great deals, you have to care. People have to know that you care about them. And if you do that, they are willing to work with you. So for me, with that care part of it, part of what I had to do is be willing to be vulnerable, put myself out there and get in front of a camera, do interviews, do the podcasts, do all those kind of things that otherwise I didn’t really want to do starting out. But it’s made me more comfortable and I think it’s allowed me to build this brand and to really just let people see more of what we’re doing. And I don’t see it so much as building a brand. I know it is, but I really see it as allowing people to get to know me on a scale, you know, on a mass level. And if they can get to know me on a mass level, it’ll be a little bit easier to do the business that we need to do.
And I would say to flip the paradigm of the way I viewed it, I think starting out, I looked at it from, you know, we’re looking to raise money for our deals to now we’re looking to help families create reserve wealth through multifamily investing. The first is about what I want. The second is about serving others, and I think coming from that place of serving others and saying, how can I serve others? You know, that’s a place where I can continue to fill my cup and it pushes me to do more because I can’t serve the amount of people I want to serve if they don’t know who the hell I am. So I kind of have to push and get the name out there and do those different things versus if it was just about me, then once I hit my number, I could stop. You know, I already got what I want. I’m done now in this position. It’s not really about me. How do I help other people? So it’s not really a limit or max on how many people we think we can impact.
Absolutely. And if you guys don’t pick up on that, just this the wording that he uses there and then how is general attitude?
It it’s not about finding investors to put money into a deal. It’s about providing opportunities for individuals to generate long term wealth. And that’s really that frame, that mindset that really makes the difference between are you going to be kind of that sales a type of shark always looking for the next day on the next investor versus are you the individual business owner who cares about his people? Right. Who cares about the investors getting a return on their and their investment? Right. Because ultimately, those are the clients, right? Those are the customers are your investors. And it’s not necessarily about the deal. The deal is just a vessel to get them to provide money for both sides. Right. To be mutually beneficial, really. It’s about the clients and the people. And if those people think that they don’t care about them or you just in it for the money. Right. They’re not going to want to do deals with you or if they already have, they’re not going to want to continue doing deals with you. And and I think that’s absolutely key is what your mindset is in your framework for how you approach these investors, because really, at the end of the day, they are your clients. Right. And the customer is always right. So I think you absolutely need to keep that in mind.
Well, John, we’re going to get to the snapshot round really quick, you’re ready? I’m ready. All right. Here we go. First question, what is your number one failure?
Oh, man. My first slip was a big failure. So I think that was the biggest one.
And I think the main takeaway there was I partnered with another developer, so I really gave them or they had the responsibility to execute the flip and do everything there. And it just didn’t work out very well at all. So I think the biggest thing is, you know, trust yourself, trust your progress, trust your processes as well. And even though you work with someone who has more experience than you, you know, you should always make sure your voice is heard and always work with people who respect you and respect your voice. And, you know, when you go to your screening process to go back to what you just said, you know, we look to screen is not just about expertise, but we look for people. We want to do business with, people who know life, trust and respect us and vice versa. So we want to make sure that that respect is a very strong element of who we do business with and how we do business. And it’s a core fundamental learn from that first failure.
Excellent. All right, what is your number one success? Well, you know, I think my number one success is.
Out offering this mineable success is seeing the pride in my, my and my parents in particular, you know, you start out with just a little bit in life and you can, you know, claw and do the things that you know, that society tells you to do. And then you figure out that the rules aren’t quite what society said and still have success with it. When you can’t go against the grain and make decisions that are unpopular in your family and have success and see the pride that that that that gets instilled from that, that’s big. We just moved to Cincinnati about six months ago and had my birthday party here at the house. So I had all my family down here and know, just seeing them all together, you know, at the house. And they were all very proud of what we’ve been able to build with their grandkids and all of that. So I think that was just that’s really the biggest success.
Excellent. Yeah, that’s gone back to family. I love it. All right.
What is one nugget of investing knowledge you want to give us that you haven’t already told us about?
Investor cash flow. You know, even if you to take it back to the flip we just talked about.
But the biggest issue really is if you have us for cash flow looking at income producing assets, and that’s the main criteria, you can pretty much weather through most other storms. You know, if the if the market crashes, if you know, cap rates, you know, expand interest rates, drop whatever rate rise, you can navigate through most of the other things as long as you have a strong cash flowing asset. So make sure you kind of stress test the cash aspect of it. And if you have that, I think you can work through many other challenges that arise.
Absolutely. Absolutely. I see a lot of people, especially when they’re getting started, it’s like, yeah, I want to get in to Dallas and Atlanta and Florida and all these markets because they’re blowing up right now.
It’s like, well, you think if you’re thinking that other people are thinking that as well. And it’s like a lot of people are just buying for appreciation. There’s a lot of big sharks and a lot of small pools. And I think a lot of people kind of look at the huge amounts of money they can make their appreciation rather than the cash flow side of that. And what is that? What happens if you can’t sell it in a year or two like you thought you were going to, and now you have this property that isn’t making any money. Right. And you have all these investors who are expecting you to provide for them. So absolutely. By cash.
And then last question. What is your dream, John?
Man, my dream is it’s a good question, I was thinking about that, so my dream really is to relax when my kids are out of the house. It is to really just travel the world and relax. You know, we spent a lot of time right now grinding, working really hard and want to continue like I enjoy working. I don’t think I’ll ever stop working. I enjoy what I do because while serving. Right.
And I think any time you have a chance to do that, it’s great. But they have the flexibility to just go wherever and do that, which we had for a little bit of time. But then we have kids who are in school. So I’m like, OK, I don’t want to put you out of school, but that’s really the dream. I think the biggest thing, though, is to help people understand how their finances can be impacted and how they can live a life of their desired, you know, and how real estate could play a role in that. It doesn’t have to be real estate, but it’s the one thing that I think is easy enough for most people to figure out and scale and to get into. So for me, it’s how many people can we impact? My goal right now is to impact a thousand families. So that’s something that we’re working on. If we can help a thousand people, you know, get into real estate investing passively, actively, we’re trying to do that. So that’s something that we have as kind of a nearer term goal, but trying to impact a thousand people. So that’s kind of our dream right now.
I love it. I love the man and sounds like you’re well on your way to to get in there. Working in trying to get there.
Well, John, I appreciate you coming on today.
It’s kind of a long episode, but we’ve unpacked a lot in this episode from the marketing side, hasn’t really been as focused on real estate, which is kind of my intention. So I’m glad that we got to hear a lot from you on on how you kind of took your background and apply that to your real estate, real estate investing career and your lessons learned along the way. So if people want to hear more about you, where can they contact you?
Yeah, if you guys want to check out our shows called Target Market Insights, multifamily marketing podcasts, you can check that out anywhere you listen to podcasts.
You could also go to our website, Casmoncapital.com. And if you’d like to reach out to me a note, you can email me at John@CasmonCapital.com.
Excellent, excellent, well, close in the show notes as well. Well, John, it’s been a pleasure.
I said I’m a huge fan, so I’d love to continue seeing how you keep blowing up the real estate career and making your name known. So and how I actually help the people as well along the way.
So, John, I appreciate you coming on and I hope you have an awesome day.
You do the same or I thank you for having me on. Take care. Of course. Take care.
