To venture out-of-state at this early stage of your business adds complexity and chaos that you simply don't need when the focus should be on building your reputation, credibility, and knowledge/skill set.The Tampa Bay market and Florida in general is in a housing crisis and inventory is at historical lows - and has been for a decade.

Because the fed has already announced intent to raise, we can predict with near certainty the rates are going to rise. the current inflation is higher than it has been in decades.  

Appreciation is of course no guarantee but it has been consistently very high for many decades.

You're asking someone to spend a lot of time and energy to share what they've spent years - maybe decades - learning and developing.

I'd rather just use my money and pay cash rather than mortgage, but not sure if that'll be possible to get to my goals with cash alone.I don't mind playing the property manager role for the next decade if the properties are close enough.

Some of the lessons from Set For Life (about net worth that's not accessible for decades) have me questioning whether to max out my 401k & save for rentals or contribute up to my 401k match and then save an extra $10k for rentals per year?

Telling people that their properties did not go up in value, their stock market portfolio did not go up value, and that their monster cash flow properties do not cash flow when all of it actually happened, happened over decades, and continues to happen is ineffective commentary. 

ya no kidding not many business's like this operate for decades at least with the original principals.

Network is Networth as they say, and for the past decade or so I've been fairly introverted mostly because I trained myself on the online solopreneur model but I need to get outside of my bubble and BP is my first foray back into networking really.. 

There is a lot more resources out there now then a decade ago so you have that going for you right now!