Closed! How I Made $607k On My First 4 Deals

[Matthew Drouin]

If you only knew…

How long it took me to achieve this (10 years+) and how much work it was…

Quite frankly, you wouldn’t be impressed. I just closed the sale of the first four investment properties I ever bought.  It was hard to say goodbye to my babies

I started this journey back in 2006 (18 years ago) The truly sobering thing about this event is that I was able to achieve these same financial results in ONE year with my first larger commercial deal; and replace my wife's income with that deal.  All that opportunity cost incurred because I didn’t feel ready to go big.  I try to imagine where I would have been if I just would have started my go big journey sooner, but then I just get mad at myself and makes me a little sick...

Here are the things I learned:

1.)  You can start doing larger deals much sooner than you think.  It took me 11 years, 25 properties, and 76 doors before I thought I was ready.  Don't make the same mistake I did.

2.)  You do not have to be a syndicator to raise capital.  I've raised millions of dollars of capital and built a $16M portfolio without ever having to do a complicated syndication.

3.)  Stack up as much cash as you can while growing your empire.  When you do a cash out refinance on a deal, DONT take that cash and plow it into another deal.  Asset rich and cash poor works for a while but at a certain point it doesn't.  This is actually why I sold these properties.  As my relationships started growing with banks they started becoming more scrutinizing on me; my liquidity and my balance sheet.  I had a wake up call last year when our lender required us to get an additional guarantor on a commercial deal.  We had the capital raised but the bank didn't like our liquidity position.  We had to give up substantial equity, just for this signature on the debt.  Maintain a fortress balance sheet; therefore your strength as a guarantor and keep most if not all of the equity in your deals. (this whole sale where you see the proceeds pictured above, was I realized I had to get more liquid and retool my balance sheet for long term growth.  I made the goal to become liquid by seven figures plus last year and just accomplished that.)

4.)  Use other people's money always.  Even if you have the money to put down on your deals.  There will be a point in time as you scale where you WILL run out of money.  It's best practice to start early and build those relationships.  As you over perform for your investment partners, the well will get deeper and wider.  For instance, 4 years ago I was doing a raise of $400k.  One high net worth investor wouldn't give me more than $50k for that deal.  I almost passed on the opportunity to work with them.... Fast forward to last year they wrote a check for $1.5M for a deal that we did, where that one deal alone added over $1.7M to my net worth alone.

If you are interested in learning more about going big on your goals and deals, I'm going to start documenting more of my journey here.

Hope you enjoy!