Matt Bowles: Welcome to The Maverick Show!

I’m Matt Bowles and this is the weekly show where I’m going to interview today’s most interesting real estate investors, entrepreneurs and world travelers and pull out actionable tips and advice that you can apply in your own life today.

I’ll release a brand new episode each Monday where you’ll meet an interesting guest and hear their personal stories about their worst failures, biggest breakthroughs, amazing travel adventures, and most valuable lessons learned on their journey to financial success, location independence and lifestyle freedom.

So, my guests could include real estate investors who travel the world on their passive rental income talking about exactly how they built up their real estate portfolio to the point that they could leave their job, or could be location-independent business owners that have built their dream company giving you a behind the scenes look at exactly how they did that, or could be long-term digital nomads who slow-travel through the world’s most epic locations on their own terms.

And as the host, I’m going to drill down with each guest and pull out the specific tactics they used to get where they are today so that you can learn how to do it as well.

And for each guest I’m also going to ask for their personal recommendations for the most influential books, resources, tools, hacks and practices that can help you take your real estate investing, entrepreneurship and lifestyle design to the next level.

Now this show has been a long time in the making, so let me start with my back story of why I decided to create The Maverick Show.

I’ve been a real estate investor since 2004. And at that time I was working at a full time job in the non-profit space and I just started reading everything I could on real estate investing. The first property I ever bought was a 4-bedroom house that I lived in, but also rented out the other 3 bedrooms to friends of mine, so I had 3 streams of income. Now, when that house appreciated substantially in the first year, I was then able to do a cash out refinance and began buying out-of-state rental properties. Now, I made all the mistakes in the book myself, I learned through doing and I got my real education in the trenches. But I came out of that having learned the most important lessons including how to buy cash-flowing rental properties based on real estate fundamentals as opposed to speculation, and how to mitigate downside risk when buying out-of-state properties. And what happened as I continued to buy cash flowing rental properties across different states is that my friends approached me and asked how I was doing this and if I could help them do it as well, so I said sure!

Now my job was blissful for a number of years, ok my full time job was a situation where I was working with great people and doing important work that was affecting positive change in the world that I was really passionate about. And it was great, right up until it wasn’t. All of a sudden, virtually overnight, that all changed as there was a change in management and all of a sudden I was on the outs. And so, long story short, one day I walked into work and was unexpectedly fired from my job. I was completely blindsided by it. I was told at 2pm that I had to turn in my only phone (because it was a company phone), get all my stuff and be out of the office by 5pm.

I literally had to drive from the office to the Verizon store to buy a phone so that I could call my mother and my best friend to tell them I was fired. My head was spinning, but that day, on that drive, I decided that I was not going to apply for another job and I was never going to work for anyone else ever again. I decided on that day that, at the age of 30, that I would completely pivot, change direction entirely, and that I would start my own business. Now, there was only one problem…I had no idea how to start a business.

But I knew that I was good at helping people invest in rental properties and that I could probably build a business around that. So, that day, after I got my new phone, I drove straight to the book store and started reading books on how to start a business.

Now, as I was reading through these books, I realized a second problem…I did not have most of the skills that were required to start a business. But I knew what skills I did have, and fortunately I knew other people who had the rest. So, I teamed up with two business partners and in 2007 we founded Maverick Investor Group to help individual real estate investors buy turnkey rental properties in the best U.S. real estate markets regardless of where they live. Now, my business partners and I have helped individual real estate investors buy over $100 million worth of residential investment property across 15 U.S. states.

Now, as entrepreneurs, we realized from the very beginning that we did not just want to have a business goal of generating revenue and be a traditional real estate company. Our vision was to build the business in a way that would maximize our location independence and give us (and all of our staff) total freedom of mobility to live wherever we want and travel at will.

So, even though real estate is not traditionally a ‘virtual’ business category, we didn’t let that stop us. We wanted to fundamentally disrupt the traditional category of real estate because we didn’t think it had to be localized and geographically-restrictive. We had a transformative vision for what real estate investing could be, both for us and our clients, and we decided to start with our end goal in mind and reverse engineer our business plan.

So, for our real estate investor clients, we offered a ‘turnkey’ opportunity for them to buy new or fully renovated properties with tenants and local property management already in place so they don’t have to be the landlord or the rehabber, and therefore don’t need to live near the properties. As a result, most of our clients evaluate deals and close on the properties sight unseen. They always do their due diligence of course, hiring professional property inspectors and appraisers, but most people, although they’re welcome to fly in and walk through the property and see it themselves before they close if they choose, most of them decide that they don’t actually need to see the property themselves before closing as long as they have a team of professionals conducting their due diligence.

So, similarly with our business operations, my partners and I have never lived in the same city for a single day since the founding of our company, and our staff lives all over the U.S. and all around the world. We have staff that have been working for us for over 5 years that we’ve never even met in person. Likewise, while we have great relationships with our real estate investor clients– have regular phone calls and video calls with them, and many have bought 6, 7 or 8 properties from us over the years across different markets, we have never met most of them in person, and we don’t need to, because the virtual communication infrastructure works just as well.

Now, the final piece of the puzzle that was imperative for me and my partners from day one, is that our business venture would be affecting positive change in the world. If we were financially successful, we wanted to ensure that we were giving back to causes that are important to us, and so we decided to institutionalize this so that as our company, when it does better, so to do the causes we care about. So we donate 10% of our net revenue (before the Partners are paid anything) to causes that are close to our hearts. So, we’ve been able to donate tens of thousands of dollars to important charities and ensure that those contributions will always continue for the life of our company.

So in order for the vision to be totally congruent, the core purpose of our business had to be really meaningful, we had to get the “why” right, and so we established those 3 foundational pillars from day 1:

• Creating total location independence for the Maverick partners and Staff
• Helping our clients use real estate for building their wealth, creating their own location independence, and designing their dream lifestyle.
• And donating 10% of our net revenue to causes we care about so that the better our business does the more positive change we are able to affect in the world.

And, in over a decade of running Maverick Investor Group, we’ve been through real estate boom and bust cycles, and ups and downs of the entrepreneurial roller coaster, and we have learned tons of lessons along our journey.

I’ve also had incredible experiences travelling the world throughout that time. Since 2013 alone, I have lived in over 50 countries and had really epic adventures….but even more amazing….has been the people I’ve met along the way. Extraordinary real estate investors, business owners, and digital nomads who are travelling the world on their terms, for real. I’ve often found myself in amazing conversations in incredible places, like….over a bottle of wine on a boat in the Mediterranean sea at midnight, or in a penthouse overlooking the Swiss Alps, or on a rooftop lounge in Thailand, with brilliant, funny, talented people who were telling incredible stories and giving me amazing wisdom and insights, and I thought…”wouldn’t it be amazing if I could record these conversations and share them with you”…And So….that is what this podcast is all about. I’ll introduce you to these amazing people and share a new interview with you every Monday!

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And please let me know what you think of the show by giving it an honest rating and review on iTunes to let me know if you like what we’re doing.

Enjoy the show!