Optimizing Your Real Estate Business To Live Life To The Fullest With Chad Weeden

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There’s nothing wrong with working hard to grow your business. But as Tim says, the business is the vehicle, not the dream. One man who’s got that concept down is Chad Weeden of Fusion Real Estate Investment Group. In this episode, Chad talks with Tim Herriage about how he’s optimizing his real estate business to make time for what matters most: family. By automating processes, getting marketing down, and having a trusted team, Chad has built his business to function in a way where he can make spontaneous plans and still get things done. He even spent a month vacationing without his business missing a beat. If you want to learn how he did it, tune in to this episode! Be moved by Chad’s philosophy and learn the strategies to help you live life to the fullest without compromising the growth of your business.

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Optimizing Your Real Estate Business To Live Life To The Fullest With Chad Weeden

I’m here with my friend, Chad Weeden. Chad, thank you for being here.

I appreciate you having me.

Chad, why don’t you take a second and tell everybody a little bit about yourself?

That’s a long story. I’m a former military guy who somehow ended up in the car business. I was a finance manager for a long time. I’m a failed business owner the first time around, broke as hell, and found real estate investing. That’s the shortest term.

I’m not going to steal your story, but folks, I’m here with the greatest dad I know. We’re going to talk about that in a little bit because it’s a big part of my passion for this business. I start every week with a session I call the Bottom Line Up Front. As a military guy, you know what I mean. General, we’re in the tent, we’re briefing, mortar rounds come, and the general has to leave. I got to make sure he knew the most important thing.

I want you to share the most important things happening now in business, the things people need to be focused on, things they need to be thinking about, and maybe things they should be trying to avoid. Impart your wisdom and the things they need to take away what’s happening now.

I’ll start with my focus. I was in the car business when the crash happened in 2008. My focus now is to be smart and make sure that I’m not missing out on any opportunities. I feel like I don’t want to get crazy and out of hand, but I don’t want to miss the boat. Back then, I missed the boat on some things out of fear. For a lot of us as entrepreneurs, fear is a driver. It can stall your trajectory on what you want to do. Outside of that, I’m still looking to capitalize on all of the things that are right in front of my plate.

One thing I don’t want to lose track of is why I got into this business and why I got out of the business that I was in. We’ll probably touch more on that. I’ve focused on chasing time. That’s been my number one thing, chasing time for my family. We’re blessed with an autistic little guy. Our whole family is totally blessed. That’s been my life focus now, going on what we’re doing. I try and intertwine and weave in and out of life, with that being my main focus. I would say don’t miss on opportunities, but don’t get too crazy. That’s all I have to say.

That was great. You brought it up, so we’re going to go straight there. Many people get into this business. On my personal website, the headline says, “The business is a vehicle, not the dream.” I’ve been there. I’ve got lost in the business I claimed to have created to spend a lot of time with my family. I never saw my family because I was working in the business. Did you spend how many days in Florida?

We spent six weeks roughly in Florida and a whole full month in Key West. We pretty much hung out on our boat every day.

It’s the Salt Life.

It was incredible.

It’s you, your wife, and your kids. Did you shut your business down during that time?

No. The investments side of my business never skipped a beat. I got back home, and I was behind on some stuff, but we still bought as many houses as we were going to buy, regardless of whether I was in the Keys or sitting in my office in the basement of the house.

Your wife, Wendy, is a realtor.

She’s a multi-state broker in Denver and South Carolina. We both have teams. It’s amazing. One thing we’ve figured out, and I do this to my wife a lot, is, “Drop of a hat.” We’re going to be gone for a week. We’re going to hit the road. We do these road trips. For example, I’d booked Airbnb for a month, and we’re going to live somewhere for a month. I always get this same response from her, “What? Can we just stay home?” I am not a homebody. I’ve crafted my business to be able to live that way because I’ve sat in the office and the car business for so long, chained to a desk, that I envy people that could travel and do what they wanted to do.

I love my children and my dogs, but I’ve told my wife that when the young one is no longer in school, we’re going. I’m going to be up in the Northeast during the summer. I’m going to be in the South in the winter. Part of that, which I’m guilty of, is making excuses on why I can’t do it now. I could find someone to board the dogs. I could find someone to watch the kid or take the kid with me. How have you navigated the demands on your time, brain, and energy in your businesses and been able to do the week in a month in an Airbnb somewhere else?

A lot of investors fail to realize what they are. As investors, I buy houses, but we’re just marketers. People figure out that you can get this marketing machine going and whatever median of marketing that you’re doing. You can get that dialed in and craft your business around that. For me, for example, I do a lot of Google pay-per-click. That fires off a lot of automation on the back end. Even when I was a solopreneur, it didn’t matter where I was. I could be sitting with Todd Swagerty in San Diego, hanging out on his boat, working from my phone. I bought houses from the ski slopes when I was first a solopreneur.

2019, I bought four houses literally from the ski slopes, talking to customers or sellers on the lift. I’m taking a live phone call, and Google ads on my phone pop up. I’m taking the call, “I’m on the mountain. I’m in Breckenridge right now skiing.” They didn’t know that I lived in Colorado, “I’m going to be taking a lunch break here in a few minutes. Can I call you right back?” or I’d get their information right there. I’ve done all that. I’ve done this virtual buying stuff long before all these gurus were doing it because I had to do it.

You probably get into the reason why I had to do that. That’s how I do it. That bled over into my team at the end of the day. They handle all that stuff now nowadays. I don’t have to manage that a whole lot. We all got to manage those things in our teams, but I have a lot of confidence in the folks that are with me, them making the decisions to help us move our company forward.

You mentioned Denver and South Carolina. Would you tell me the name of your company and where you operate, and what all you guys do?

I own Fusion Real Estate Investment Group. On a whim, I took a job in the Finance Director position in Colorado. That job lasted two weeks at that job. I packed my things up in my office and left. That’s how I ended up. I was already investing in South Carolina, but I had moved my family 1,600 miles across the country and then quit my W-2 job. I called it my prison job. I was going to do it for 2 or 3 years, make good money, and grow my real estate business using that W-2 income, but after two weeks, I couldn’t do it. That’s how I started. I quit my job and had to keep that engine going because I had no income now.

That’s how I started investing virtual. I was buying houses 1,600 miles away literally from my iPhone, “Do you have an iPhone?” I’m talking to sellers. “Do you have a Gmail? Let’s do Google Hangouts. Can you give me a tour of the house?” I contract people right there on the phone. I’ve done that so many times. It was an easy transition. Maybe I had an easier time because I was in the car business and I was king of sales. I’m good at sales. Maybe that’s why I had an easier time. Maybe God blessed me and put me in the right spot to make a decision to change my trajectory.

You said we’re all marketers, but then you said you’re the king of sales. In your mind, the acquisition business, as most of us know it in the real estate world, is it a sales business? Is it a marketing business? Which is it?

It’s both. It’s the reality of business, and I learned this in our first business. We owned a bunch of gyms. We had a lot of moving parts for a lot of people. One of the things we learned in that business was that we were marketers driving traffic to those locations, but the only people who seemed like they could sell were my wife and me. You’re not selling $30 gym memberships. We owned a bunch of CrossFit gyms. You’re selling gym memberships for $200 and $250 a month in a market where gym memberships were $75 and $99. We came in, and we’re selling gym memberships double that. It’s both. You have to be a marketer and drive traffic, but you also have to be able to be a closer on the back end. That’s where sales come in.

Chad, I want to dive straight into the thing. I’d seen you at a couple of the masterminds, and we hadn’t talked, but then I started following you on Facebook. I started seeing all these posts about dad life and autism dad. It seemed like you were at a different sporting event every other day. I was like, “This guy doesn’t work.” Why don’t you take a minute or two to share your focus on your family and where you’ve gotten there?

Let’s blow this myth out of the water that I don’t work. I’m an early riser. I do work. I love when I’m home because I’m usually up between 4:00 and 5:00 in the morning. I’m in my office getting busy work done a couple of hours before the kids get up and your day starts. I do get a lot of work done in those few hours. I love that time of the day. It was a treat to go to a Broncos game, and it wasn’t my family taking me. It was a friend’s dad going. I’m 6 miles from Downtown Denver.

Our kids love to go. Those are things that my kids will never forget. Ava, to this day, still talks about going to an overtime Avalanche playoff game in 2019. Right. That’s what motivates and drives me because I think about all the time all things I did as a kid with my dad and my parents. I was focused on building a life of memories for my kids. That’s been my number one focus.

I’m with you. We were at this conference, and I was all on my team the whole time we were here about how important it is to attend to every single thing on the agenda every minute. I’m like, “My son has his first middle school football game tonight. I will not be there.” To the RCN Capital CEO’s credit, we were reviewing some of our conference schedules because business can get way in the way of life. I was like, “I wanted to go to the BiggerPockets conference, but I can’t.”

They got a Monday game that week. I said, “I have no problem hopping on the red-eye and coming out there after the game, but I can’t miss the game.” He goes, “I don’t want you to miss the game.” It’s alignment in business with priorities. The whole team, from top to bottom, being aligned on those priorities, creates successful, happy companies. Would you agree?

I agree. I always said we could all live the life that we want to live. We’re task-based. We have to get work done and do these things throughout the day. To be honest, I don’t care if you do it at 7:00 in the morning, 4:00 in the afternoon, or on the weekends, but number one, let’s not miss deals, and let’s make sure we work every lead as hard as we can and keep all those processes and all the things that we do on a daily basis. Keep that aligned. If my assistant wants to go out of town for three days, it’s no big deal. She still gets stuff done.

Unfortunately, we’re in the business where vacation is really a vacation. I was in Key West for a month, and we still did work. We did it in the morning. We still get things done. That’s where people started what I fell victim to before in prior business, which is to start chasing money. It’s amazing when I started chasing time when all those things started falling into place. I feel like you got to be careful on we’re in a mastermind together, and you see somebody that’s 150 rentals.

They’re doing all these things. It’s easy to get sidetracked and want to chase that. I want to chase that, and I am chasing that, but sometimes I have to step back and say, “Chad, when you first started this, you’re literally trying to replace $200,000 a year.” That was maybe 5, or 6 houses flipped a year. I’ve tried not to lose focus on that. Should I be a lot further from where I am in my investment career? Yes. Am I competitive as hell? Yes. My wife’s like, “You’re insane with your competitiveness.” From prior business failure, that needed to happen because it helped me. It grounded me.

The scars of business experiences are a perspective that, all too often, young entrepreneurs can’t listen to because they think they know more. It is what makes us entrepreneurs. Some of the best businesses I’ve started or run were the ones that failed. My wife will tell you if you know what you don’t want, then you know what you want. There are a lot of people out there talking about they do 200 houses a year, but they operate on a $3,000 net margin. That’s only $600,000.

You may be reading and thinking that’s a lot of money. It is, but I know people doing five houses a year and making $1 million, and they work little. Be careful. I highly agree with measuring yourself up to someone else’s numbers or lives and personally too, because they may look like they’re super rich, but they may be completely miserable.

I’m super broke because I travel all the time. We love doing that. We’re not broke, but could we have a lot more money in the bank? I love spending time and traveling with everybody.

On that note, was it intentional the way you set up your business where you could travel? Did it just happen?

Looking back on it, it was intentional. It didn’t feel like it at the time. The analogy I can use is the day I quit my W-2 job. I was driving up Highway 6 in Denver to Lakewood, and you’re driving towards the mountains, and it’s August. I’m sitting there, thinking. I moved back after being in the military, gone for twenty-some years. There’s going to be snow on those mountains come November. How am I going to feel driving towards those mountains every day to go to work, thinking I should be up there skiing?

That’s how I started that. From there, it became intentional at that point. It’s intentional because, in our previous business, I realized that all I did was buy myself another job as the owner. We were working 12 to 15-hour days. My day started at 4:30 in the morning. I didn’t get home until 10:00. It was worse than being in the car business. For me, it’s been very intentional. Throw in our little autistic guy. I needed to be home. My wife spent so many years as a single mom.

Chad, I’m with you because we, as the man in the family, sometimes can take on the world and leave those others behind. It’s time for the Money Minute. Imagine there’s a young Chad that’s getting out of the military and joining that finance business or even in the military or maybe going to take on a job that takes him away from those families or even is struggling out there in this economy, not knowing which way they want to go. Pour into the audience the only advice they get all month. Tell them what they should be doing.

It goes back to the previous guest you had. Kevin talked about passion. That’s what I’ve been passionate about. I’ve been passionate about being intentional with my time. Young Chad, I would say, when you were first working with the sheriff’s office, working extra duty, and you’re sitting there driving around in this big neighborhood wondering what all these people did, these big houses, you should have chased that then. Chased that being, “I should have educated myself back then. I should have read more books.” Now is a great time for young people to get engaged. There’s so much content on social media. There’s so much information out there that you can have an opportunity to change your trajectory by digging in and learning from other people and getting around other people to help get you to the next spot in life.

That’s great. I want to dig straight into something you said. You said, “Chase that. Ultimately, as entrepreneurs, we chase things. Often, it’s the shiny thing or the thing that someone else is doing. Other than the big house and the nice neighborhood, what are some things you wish you’d chased earlier on?

Early on, I wish I had chased an education and financial background. You’re talking about young Chad. I feel like if I had known then what I know now, I probably could be just sitting in Key West and putting $6 gas on my boat and not giving a thought about it every single day. In life, when you’re talking about chasing things, we all chase. We’ve all done it. You start off on one path chasing one thing, and then it turns into what you feel is a dead end, but it’s not a dead end. It’s a learning lesson. It’s a total learning lesson, whether that costs you money, time, pride, or all three at one time. I’ve been there, done that. Everything’s not perfect. For folks getting started and even folks who are in the business, you got to be a little bit more intentional on time.

A lot of people in the masterminds don’t even realize that I’m not a lender and that I started buying houses several years ago. I’ve looked back after this record run we’ve had. I’m like, “If I had kept one more home per year.” In some years, we were wholesaling or flipping 200 houses. I could have kept 10 or 15 then, but let’s say 1 home in those 20 years. There are houses that, when I started this business, I was buying for $35,000 and $40,000 that now sell for over $400,000. The compound effect of delayed gratification in this business is the ultimate time purchase. You get to a point where you’re clipping many coupons. If you won’t, the parachute stringing is right there.

I am 100% with you. In fact, I dug into that pain point and went through my deal logs for the past few years. I’m like, “If I would’ve kept that one, that one and that one, 3 to 5 properties a year and BRRRR-ed out of them instead of flipping and taking the cash on the front end.” I was trying to build my business and build my machine. That was my thought then. That’s painful. I turned my computer off. I wanted to drink a beer.

This guy named Mike Hambright, who you know, talked about feeding the machine when he was our guest here. Many of us get caught in the trap of feeding the machine. This is what I get from you, and I’m hearing it. I’m almost repeating it so that I can remember it. Sometimes we end up creating things through a series of choices we never wanted. All these expenses, all this overhead, we do this because that’s what we do. If you can pull yourself out of it and look at it, you’re like, “I don’t want to do any of that.” In my presentation at these events now, I go through my years-long entrepreneurial journey. I point out how I quit the first 5 or 6 things I did. I quit because it’s easy to get down a rabbit hole, and you don’t even realize what you’re doing has nothing to do with what you wanted to do.

It’s important to recognize that in your growth, whether in your entrepreneurial growth or growth as a person, I look back at when I first started in the mastermind where we’re in an investor field, “I don’t want a team. I don’t want this.” They’re telling me, “You’re a lifestyle guy. You have to have an assistant.” I didn’t listen to these people for two years, and finally, I hired an assistant. It’s like, “That was dumb. Why did I wait so long to do that?” It was offloading things off of my plate. It’s super important that when you get to that rabbit hole, you step back and recognize the changes that need to be made in what you’re doing.

We’re going to get into Rapid Fire. Do me a favor and keep your answers brief. Early riser, is that a military thing or a lifestyle thing?

It’s not a military thing. I hated getting up early when I was in the military. When I was in the car business, I was not motivated to go to work. I wasn’t motivated to be up. I loved what I did in that business. I loved the people I worked for. I loved everything about that, but I got to the point where I wasn’t looking forward to going to an office every day. I was sleeping until 7:00 or 8:00. As soon as I quit that job, all of a sudden, I started wanting to get up. Some mornings I get up at 3:30, 4:00, or 4:30. I wake up. It’s because I look forward to the day.

I want to tackle my day right in the beginning because we have a lot of life to live after 11:00 AM. I want to have all my stuff done. If it’s going to be an office day or a workday and I’m not doing it on the fly from our handheld computer or phone, I want to have all my work done by lunchtime. Whatever I got to do to get that done, I want to be done. When my kids get home from school, I want to be intentional with that time. It can be last minute, like Rockets games, Nuggets games, whatever we’re doing. I want to be available and free after a certain point in time of day.

What kind of boat do you have?

Not a big enough one. We have an offshore center console boat. I tell people that was the stupidest you’d ever done with cash, but it has been the best thing for our family unit. The memories are worth every penny of that. Even if the boat market took a dump now, I wouldn’t be upset.

Sitting in the masterminds with you, I noticed you’re a big giver. It is funny. You’ll stay in the back of the room. You won’t say much, but when Chad speaks, everyone is quiet and looks. You seem to care about it. Can you tell me why?

I don’t know why everybody listens to me because I’m not that smart. I’m a knuckle dragger. When I want to finally pipe up, it’s out of wanting folks to be intentional. I love it when folks do that to me, too, because I was prior military. If I’m not doing something or need to be doing something, I love when my buddies, and that’s where our mastermind is, get in your butt too. I love that. People listen to me because they see all the time that I’ve been intentional about living. It was weird. When I first started at Fuel, I was in the platinum group, and I was like, “I don’t know that I should be in this group.”

In my first meeting, I get this Go-Giver award. I’m like, “There are people in here doing 200 to 300 deals a year. I’m an average Joe, and I’m getting the Go-Givers.” A couple of meetings after that, it’s like, “I love what you’re doing. I want to be like you.” I’m like, “Yes, but you have 150 rentals. I don’t have that many rentals. What makes you want to be like me? What makes me want to be like you?” It was also an eye-opener too because when you talk about being intentional when I got into that group, they were awesome people. There were a lot of people in there that are so enthralled in their business that they were watching life pass them by.

That’s probably why I get passionate about it because I was that guy in my first business. There were a lot of pain points there in that first business, having to shut down our business and going back to a business I even said I would never go back to. You never say never. I’m not going to say I’m never going to go back into the car business, but I can tell you now that if we were at the point we’re in, in 2015, I know that I can go and bootstrap in the real estate game and never have to go back to that game. I didn’t know that back in 2015. That’s probably why I’m so passionate about it.

It’s growth. It’s the building block. I love the way you say chasing time. Speaking of time, we’re out of it. Do you have any parting thoughts or parting shots?

Be passionate about what you want to do and the direction you want to go, and chase the hell out of it. You never know where you’re going to end up.

It’s chasing time and chasing passion. I appreciate you being here. It means a lot to me when people like you will take the time to help me pour into the audience. I’d appreciate it. Thank you again for coming by. Thank you for reading. Remember, your network is your net worth, and you’ve been growing both. We’ll see you next episode.

Important Links

• Fusion Real Estate Investment Group
• BiggerPockets
• Kevin Lee – Previous Episode
• Mike Hambright – Previous Episode

About Chad Weeden

Husband, Father of 3 kids, Veteran, Real Estate Investor, Time Chaser.

The following podcast program is furnished by RCN Capital LLC.  The information provided is for general educational purposes only and does not constitute any legal, tax, financial, investment or other professional advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed of any speaker are the speaker’s own opinion and do not represent the views, thoughts, and opinions of RCN Capital LLC.   No information contained in this episode should be construed as financial, investment or legal advice from RCN or any individual, author, host or guest. You should always consult a financial advisor before investing.

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