Ep. 10 Madison Brown | Picking Mentors, Bootstrapping Interesting Startup, Investing In Real Estate

Andres Sanchez  [00:00:00]:

Let's talk about trading.

Mack [00:00:01]:

I actually had a mentor. He was this old guy that used to work on Wall Street. He always kind of got me into that stuff because I always had a knack for business. But he was able to kind of actually dissect the true stuff behind it, like, kind of what skill sets were important to be successful in that field. A lot of people make a lot of money or, like, if in a trade or something, but then are they going to take the money or are they just going to leave it there? And you would think a lot of it has to do with just math and analyzing and just kind of X's and O's and stuff like that. But that's only part of it. There's so many other aspects behind it. Started dabbling a little bit more into the stock market because, one, I just was making money, finally was making money with my job and had a little bit more free time on my hands. So that same mentor, I would call up and be like, hey, what's your thoughts on the market? And he would just give me picks, like, hey, I really like these companies. Name, like, five companies, and I just started kind of buying it, like, okay, let me just trust his knowledge, but knew nothing really about it. And then once I started seeing how the companies went up and started making money, I was like, whoa, this is pretty interesting. Like, I'm making money from my phone. From that, I kind of just started getting a little bit more curious into it.

Andres Sanchez  [00:01:24]:

Welcome back to the Virtual Ventures Podcast. I'm your host, Andres Sanchez. Today we are joined by Mac, a successful entrepreneur. Mac, it's a pleasure to have you on the show. I'm really excited to get to know you a little better and hear about the things that you've done and let the audience start to gain some knowledge from you. So how are you doing today?

Mack [00:01:43]:

Awesome. Well, thank you for having me. I appreciate it and doing well. I can't really complain. Just another day life working and kind of trying to stay busy. How about yourself?

Andres Sanchez  [00:01:52]:

I'm doing great. Same shit, very busy. Just trying to keep going in the right direction. So happy to hear that from your end, I guess a great way to start because for people listening, mac and I have really only connected virtually. So this is kind of an intro for me too. So that's where you'll see a lot of my questions coming from. And I guess a good place to start is just tell us a little bit about yourself.

Mack [00:02:12]:

So yeah, just a little bit about me. I'm 27, born and raised in New Jersey, so Jersey pride here. Currently I live kind of on the border of Manhattan and New Jersey, so it's in a city called Union City. Kind of allows me to kind of be in and out of Manhattan all the time. It's where I kind of like to spend a lot of my time and also my full time job, which is based in New Jersey, but I typically do for full time work. I'm a technology consultant or in the tech sales industry. So I've been doing that for about five years or so. Just kind of keeping busy, bringing in money, trying to kind of fund kind of the other things I like to do on the side. But for the most part it's remote. So I work remote about three days or so a week. And then the other two I'm kind of commuting to the office. But obviously in my free time, I like to spend a lot of my time hanging out in lower Manhattan.

Andres Sanchez  [00:03:03]:

Awesome. And we got to connect offline because I actually work in tech sales as well. So maybe we can line up on a few things. So that's your day job. Everybody's got that day job. That hustle. But I know you're an entrepreneur at heart. So like me, the day job just funds the shit we could do after work. That's really exciting. So maybe let's start with Manhattan, New York. What's it like growing up in New York? I'm a big Miami, Florida person, so I got my Miami pride. But we have a lot of people from New York. I love going to New York. I'd love to hear a little bit of insight on just your experience in New York.

Mack [00:03:34]:

Yeah. So started kind of young being that I'm from New Jersey, grew up with divorced parents. My dad actually moved to one of the boroughs in New York City when I was really young. So kind of just visiting him and staying with him a lot. Spent some time over there as a young and just kind of curious and just seeing kind of how the city life was. I actually grew up in the suburbs in New Jersey, so got the best of both worlds. One, being able to kind of see the suburb life and kind of successes of my peers and stuff like that, their families and just kind of seeing that. And then also on the flip side, being able to kind of see city life. So being able to go to New York kind of inspired me just from obviously the music, which is a big part of New York. The culture, I'd say fashion as well. That was kind of at a young age growing up, just essentially being there and seeing kind of the freedoms and kind of seeing how a lot of the stuff I was really into online, seeing it in real time was very inspiring. I'd say growing up.

Andres Sanchez  [00:04:30]:

Yeah, for sure. And you said touched on a good thing, the fashion part. I follow you on Instagram, and I'm sure people after the episode will as well. You've have some amazing clothes. I see you in Chrome Hearts everything, like amazing sneakers. You definitely have the right mindset when it comes to this fashion stuff that aligns with me because I do love all those brands like Chromeheart Supreme Offwhite, like all these awesome brands. How has clothing played a part in you turning into the person you are now? I know you said that you kind of started with that at a young age.

Mack [00:05:03]:

I would say just from the expressive standpoint, just being able to kind of express myself and stand out. Actually, another part of that was it was like my mother, she grew up with four sisters. So just them being always when they were younger, my grandmother used to always dress them up and they always had this thing where they're like, oh, we were always the best dressed kids in the school. So just kind of from that mindset. And my mom kind of getting me into clothes even when I didn't even know, and know clothes, like just kind of dressing me up and having me look cool. I look back at a lot of pictures I have when I was younger. And it's so funny because even when I was younger, I was always dressed in something cool. So that kind of played a big role in it. And as I grew up, just again, being into hip hop and being in just like internet culture and again, I like to give a lot of credit to just the hip hop culture because I was always into music. So being into music got me into just seeing music videos and seeing rappers and other artists and stuff like that, kind of what they wore. And that always sparked my interest at such a young age as well.

Andres Sanchez  [00:05:59]:

That's awesome. It's funny now that I get to meet you here actively, we actually are pretty similar. Like, I've been a hip hop fan pretty much my whole life. A lot of the reason why I got into sneakers and why I got into clothing was hip hop related. So that's really cool. Kind of jumping from the personal side of things. Let's talk about business. You have your regular day job. What do you do on the side? What are some things you're really interested hobby wise or maybe even companies that you have?

Mack [00:06:25]:

When we dabble into business, that was another thing that was kind of learned at a young age from my father's side, just kind of him being so one fashion was always a big thing, but for him, he was always reselling stuff. So when I was younger, he would resell like Von Dutch and stuff like that. So that kind of just sparked my interest in business. He actually ran his own landscaping company as well. This was all kind of on the side when he was into like he was like a tech for hospitals and stuff like that. So he was in tech and always on computers, but on the side he was running a business. So kind of reselling stuff and he always wore cool clothes and nice stuff. So that kind of got me into it. Just kind of being able to be, I guess versatile is the word. Always believing that I could always kind of do everything that I'd like to do. Never really kind of forced in one specific direction, I'd say. But currently I've been able to find myself dabbling into outside of obviously my career in tech and tech sales and stuff like that. I have a landscaping company that I am a co owner with. I have a business partner. He handles a lot of the day to day operations stuff. But I kind of still every day we're on the phone communicating, going over leads that come in and stuff like that. I handle more of like the administration side, marketing, branding. So I creative directed the logo, did the marketing campaigns for it, designed like the pamphlets, the clothes, kind of help generate the leads and then kind of bring them over to my partner to kind of estimate and kind of close the leads and stuff like that. So that's kind of one thing that takes up a lot of my time as well. And another really important thing just because again, that it runs every day, five days a week, 8 hours a day, it's a full time thing. And yeah, it's kind of cool kind of being able to operate something like that on the side while still being able to work full time job. And it's been years coming. I think we've been running the company for about five years now.

Andres Sanchez  [00:08:17]:

Awesome.

Mack [00:08:17]:

And it's just one of those things where my buddy and not he's into real estate and stuff like that, but when we were younger, about a little over five years ago, we kind of were like, how can we get more money and whatnot? So we started kind of cutting grass and for side gigs and stuff like that. And eventually it kind of built up. And again, like I said, my dad, when I was younger, did the same thing with his company. So I kind of just saw that from him and kind of got some guidance from him on that and then we were able to kind of turn it into a full time operation. Then the same business partners, me and my best friend, we are business partners with everything. So the landscaping company, we also have a multifamily investment property. So that came out a little bit after the landscaping, I'd say. So landscaping about five years. We've got the property in 2021 about two years ago. Kind of wanted to take advantage of the low interest rates and kind of the market being hot and everything, kind of everyone making money and stuff like that. So decided to kind of go. Thought it was a perfect time to kind of dive in. Was able to kind of lock in a nice multifamily in New Jersey. And ever since then, it's been kind of running smoothly, thank God. Fully rented, kind of cash flowing. So kind of a home run play for our first deal and definitely more now, but obviously with the interest rates, like, doubling, it's a little bit more difficult.

Andres Sanchez  [00:09:35]:

Yeah, for sure.

Mack [00:09:36]:

The two major things I've been doing on the side, business wise, entrepreneurial wise, outside of my full time gig. And then obviously there's like the trading stuff that I'm into a lot, too. I'd say that's more of a hobby, like fashion.

Andres Sanchez  [00:09:50]:

Got it.

Mack [00:09:50]:

I'm not a professional trader or investor, but I do kind of look at it every day, kind of analyze charts and stuff like that, dabble into crypto and stocks kind of every day. So I kind of look at it a little bit more like a hobby just because I'm already stressed out with everything else. But definitely down the road, I plan to kind of take it a little bit more serious and hopefully do that full time once I'm kind of a little bit more established.

Andres Sanchez  [00:10:13]:

Awesome. I mean, there's a lot of great points there. I want to go back to the landscaping business, something that I like to highlight just because, again, our audience is majority people interested in entrepreneurship want to get into entrepreneurship. A lot of people in this day and age think that your startup needs to be some sick, SaaS company or it needs to be tech related. It has to have all these cool bells and whistles. And I think we've forgotten that the bootstrap businesses that go out and get it done, that's when people call them the sweaty startups actually do the best. And like your landscaping company, people right now, my age, younger, maybe in their younger 20s, who were drinking from this entrepreneurial Kool Aid, they would probably not think twice about starting a landscaping company because it isn't really sexy or cool, but those are the businesses that you can really make some serious money. Because I think something that we kind of overlook as younger entrepreneurs is we constantly want to innovate. We constantly want to go find that next cool idea. But there's so many businesses that have been operating for 5100 years that could use some major updating, and people like ourselves can go into these businesses, bring some of the entrepreneurial, younger minded thought processes, leverage technology, and blow up some of these businesses like this, like landscaping. So I think it's awesome that you and your buddy kind of said, hey, let's turn a little way to put some extra money in our pocket into a huge company. So kudos to you for that. Yeah, for sure. And then from the perspective of the trading, that's another awesome thing that I think we align really well with. I love stocks. I'm not a professional trader, but I do like to look at the market every day and kind of go through and learn those things. And then lastly, the real estate. But I myself am looking to get into real estate, and I almost did pre COVID, unfortunately. And I also it's funny. Again, another thing as we line up here, I have a best friend who's been my business partner on some ventures. If you're listening to this episode, he's on the last episode, episode Three Elmago Cigars. And we were actually about to go buy our first rental property. We had just graduated high school. It was our first year of college. We had saved up money. We had a private lender who we were going to get a loan from. And our thought process was, let's go get a college, like apartment. Let's go get one that we think we can rent to college students. We went we had, like, no knowledge. We went through, we found the one we wanted, we put in the offer, everything got approved. And then the inspection came, and there was a $5,000 AC unit. Well, that's what was quoted to repair it. And they lied to us about the year and everything. So we started penny pinching, and we said, hey, that's $5,000 on a $71,000 condo. That's like a big number. It's not going to work. And then things went sour and a bunch of other stuff, and we lost the condo over the $5,000 of penny pinching. And looking back as a learning situation, the condo sold two weeks later for 84, and now you can't find one there two years later for less than 110. So US. Penny pinching over five K costed us what could have been an easy $10,000 flip or an easy 30 $40,000 flip in a year. So I think that's cool. But I'd like to hear you from your perspective. Like, you seem like you got a pretty good first win. How is the experience of identifying the property? How's the experience of finding the renter? Like, all that good stuff?

Mack [00:13:35]:

It's good, so it's actually funny. So everything kind of is similar with us. So I was on the route of when we were looking, I wanted to originally find something around college and kind of like a college rental. Just because I always thought of the idea of not having to keep it perfect and super modern while also not really having to put much money into it if they're going to kind of just kind of be young and kind of not trash it. But you know what I mean, kind of not take care of it as well. So I always thought of the process of just kind of charging a little bit higher and not having to do much work to it. But then my partner and I, we kind of just went over stuff like turnover a big thing. So the one thing about college is you always got to find new tenants, maybe every year or so, unless you hope that they fill it themselves. But if not, then every year or two years. You're always kind of flipping it for tenants. And typically when you flip stuff to new tenants, you kind of got to repaint it and fix everything before. So that kind of might have been a pain. And then we were penny pinching a little bit too, where we were like, oh, the ones that we were finding weren't the perfect fit. So I think the patience kind of helped out a lot at the right time. Because then there was one where my business partner actually found the deal, and it was, like, not off market, but it was for sale by owner. So he kind of looked a little bit into, and he was like, yeah, I think this is the one. And I'm like, all right, let's check it out. And the numbers made sense. Everything made sense. The only thing was, the lady was like, she wanted no conditions or nothing in the contract. She basically wanted to sell it as is. So kind of threw a red flag in my head. I was like, I don't really like that. What if there's something wrong or a big issue and then we get screwed over? And my partner and I kind of kept kind of butting heads about that part as we were going through the closing process because it was already approved. The lady liked us a lot. She was like, I just want to move to Florida. I'm over it. Blah, blah, blah. We're like, but we need to do inspections and stuff. And she was like, no. She was saying no to everything. She was like, I just want it off my hands, and that's it. And we're just like, oh, my God. So we're kind of pushing back on it a little bit. And then eventually my business partner was like, because he's a contractor as well. So he's like, I walk through it. Everything looks good. Like, screw it. Let's just go in and not do any inspections. Let's just get the deal done. And I'm like, no, never that. We start trying to butt heads on that. Eventually we kind of told the lady that we just need to do an outside inspection, structural inspection. So she finally gave into that. She's like, fine. Just a structural inspection. The inspector comes fortunately, or coincidentally, the inspector was actually somebody that was friends with us, friends with my buddy. His son went to school or played sports with him. So he ended up doing a full house inspection. He was like, I'm already here. I might as well just do the full house inspection. The lady freaked out. She's like, Are you kidding me? I thought it was only outside. He was like, oh, well, I was already in here. Whatever. She ended up getting mad about it. Whatever. But moral of the story was, everything checked out fine anyway, so ended up going through with it and then miracle the market kind of skyrocket after that, so the numbers made sense. A lot of the times what we do is we kind of analyze the numbers first to see if it at least cash flow, just how it is. So from our numbers and seeing the market rents and stuff, we were able to see it was going to cash flow from the start. But the crazy part was that we underestimated what the market rents were. So once everything kind of got a little bit renovated and fully rented out a year or so later or not a year later from closing, like a couple of months later, we actually were able to get way more than we thought we were and it ended up being like cash flowing significantly. So I'd say it's a little bit of luck, but I think just from being prepared and kind of doing numbers before you jump into something, I learned that, like you've kind of mentioned before, the penny pinching part, in the long run, it doesn't even matter. When the numbers kind of start making sense, it doesn't even matter. You kind of want to just lock in the deal. So I think we kind of got lucky on that one just because my business partner was a little bit more aggressive. I'm more of the conservative one, but I think his aggressiveness kind of played out to our benefit a lot.

Andres Sanchez  [00:17:31]:

So that was kind of yeah, that's awesome. And again, hilarious. It's the same dynamic between me and my best friend. He's definitely the far more aggressive one. I'm usually the conservative looking for the absolute worst case scenario, but I think that's good when it comes to a business relationship because you need to be able to push each other out of your comfort zones and see opportunities that maybe one of you sees, the other doesn't. So I think that is extremely important and it's awesome that it worked out for you guys and it went really well because, again, if I was in your shoes, I would be pushing back at my buddy saying, hey, dude, there's no way I'm buying this without some type of inspection. We could buy it today and it could fall over tomorrow. I'm happy that it all worked out and that's really cool and it's just awesome how you have your hand in so many different areas. I think that's super important. You have your hobbies, your passions, you have your day job, which is a great day job. You have a profitable, sweaty business that's out there doing it, turning some money, and then you have real estate and you're also a trader, like 27. Dude, that is amazing. Those are some huge accomplishments. So I want to give you kudos from that perspective. But again, like I said earlier, some of these interviews are selfish for me because I like to learn and get the insight, because all this stuff is cool for me. Let's talk about trading. How'd you get into it? Are you huge into crypto? Are you huge into stocks? I already know the answer to that, but I think it would be good for others to hear it. Why are you into these things? Talk about that journey.

Mack [00:18:59]:

Yeah, so in regards to trading, I got into it from stocks. So even when I got into college, I always knew I was into stocks and business. I actually graduated college for global business back in 2017, but I actually had a mentor that lived that was like one of my next door neighbors. He was this old guy that used to work on Wall Street. Very funny. He was like a comedian in a way, like very had no chill, say whatever, joke around about whatever. But he always kind of got me into that stuff because I always had a knack for business, but he was able to kind of actually dissect the true stuff behind it, like kind of what skill sets were important to be successful in that field. Kind of zooming back to today. Looking back on that period, I see it now because a lot about stocks is really just about yourself in a way, because a lot of it is like psychological and knowing when to kind of take your money, knowing when to kind of take an L, take a win. It's actually a lot harder than you think because a lot of people make lot of money or like in a trade or something, but then are they going to take the money or are they just going to leave it there? And there's so many tips on the market taking the money back faster than you got it. And there's a lot of just little different things that you would never expect, you would think a lot of it has to do with just math and analyzing and just kind of X's and O's and stuff like that, but that's only part of it. There's so many other aspects behind it. But I never got my feet wet in the market personally until I'd say about 2020, honestly. COVID so I always kind of knew about Bitcoin and had crypto just like from a zero knowledge perspective, like maybe put like $200 in it, like Coinbase, like 2012, something like that.

Andres Sanchez  [00:20:42]:

But oh shit, hell yeah.

Mack [00:20:44]:

I started dabbling a little bit more into the stock market because, one, I just was making money finally, like, was making money with my job and had a little bit more free time on my hands. So that same mentor, I would call up and be like, hey, what's your thoughts on the market? And he would just give me picks like, hey, I really like these companies. Name like five companies. And I just started kind of buying it, like, okay, let me just trust his knowledge, but knew nothing really about it. And then once I started seeing how the companies went up and started making money, I was like, whoa, this is pretty interesting. I'm making money from my phone just off my, you know what I mean? So from that I kind of just started getting a little bit more curious into it, trading more, looking up YouTube, I'm really big into just self learning and stuff like that. So YouTube, videos, podcasts, a lot of YouTube, honestly, a lot of podcasts, a lot of Audible books and stuff like that. And just finding more mentors that kind of I like to find mentors that are kind of just like me. So people that trade stocks but also are into clothes and also into traveling and stuff like that and just do the same thing. And just from there, learning month after month mistakes, losing a ton of money, making a ton of money, making the amount of money I'd make in a month, in a day, just all these crazy things that I kind of saw that was possible. So that piqued my interest and then started dabbling a little bit more into crypto after that because I'm a tech guy at heart. So just kind of being in technology and understanding crypto from a technical perspective and then also with the interest of economics, having that perspective. So just those things altogether kind of played a big role into kind of just helping me self learn. So give a lot of credit to kind of just mentors teaching me and kind of just putting a lot of effort into kind of just understanding the bigger picture of them.

Andres Sanchez  [00:22:30]:

That's awesome. And I am a huge advocate for mentorship. I think it's extremely important. I like what you touched on there though, that you take into account the mentors other interests. A lot of people just go pick on mentors because they have a big following, they have a big name that mentor might not align to you in any way and might be a waste of your time and sometimes money. And you never know who's going to be a mentor in your life. I've had plenty of people who I would have never thought would add value business wise to my life that were just friends or dads of a friend or moms of a friend. And I've gained tons of knowledge and tons of things that I can go and improve myself with. So I think it's something I stressed in episode a few back with Casey Adams is like be very intentional about the mentors that you go and pick out because it's your time too. Time is valuable. So if you're giving your time away to somebody because you thought it was a big name or thought it was really cool, it might actually be unbeficial to you in the long run. So I love that you're very passionate about that and that a lot of your successes came from finding a great mentor. So that's amazing. Something I like to do at the end of every episode is. Ask one simple question, the answer can have nothing to do with what we talked about today or everything to do. It is very simple. What are you excited about in the near future?

Mack [00:23:52]:

That's an interesting question because I don't expect anything. In a way, it's funny because a friend asked me this a week or so ago and I was like, I feel like I'm going to be doing the same stuff even in a couple of years from now. Because it's really just the passion of building in a way. So there's not really any expectations. I kind of know that when you just keep working at it and doing it over and over again and working at something for time, it's kind of like success is guaranteed in a way as long as you keep doing it. So there's not really an expectation. I would say just the things that I would be excited about is just seeing the growth from kind of just the years now because we all know time flies. Just kind of seeing the growth a few years from now and just looking back and saying, wow, just kind of seeing where you came from. Because things again, you learn from yourself and you learn from your mistakes. So just kind of over time, just kind of being able to put the puzzle together after the fact, I feel like is kind of the most rewarding part because a lot of people say like they get successes and whatever, but then the best part is always kind of the come up. So I try to kind of cherish that now and kind of always remind myself like, this is the best part, like working hard and kind of building something. Because again, the only thing that you really need is to work on something in time. So with time, it's kind of as long as you worked on something, that equation kind of always be in your favor. So I'm excited to kind of just look back on kind of where I started and see where I'm at then.

Andres Sanchez  [00:25:17]:

Dude, that is awesome. I want to make sure people can follow you on whatever socials you want and feel free to shout out the landscaping business or anything like that, maybe what's your Instagram? And then I'll make sure everything is linked below that you want linked below. So if you're listening and you made it this far, all of Max information that he wants out will be linked in the description. And then feel free to shout out your Instagram for anybody listening that's too lazy to go in, read something.

Mack [00:25:43]:

Yeah, well, again, I appreciate you for having me and kind of listening to what I have to say. And I appreciate you because I learned a lot from you as well. But you could find me at MTB. Mac on Instagram. So that's MTB. Ma C K, that's kind of my handle on all my socials. So I'm on twitter a little bit more active about finance and NFTs and crypto and stuff on Twitter, but Instagram is where I kind of talk about everything about my personal life and stocks and fashion and traveling and stuff like that. So feel free to follow me and I'll definitely tap in with you guys as well.

Andres Sanchez  [00:26:17]:

Awesome. Thank you so much. Also, if you made it this far, I never remember to do it at the beginning. Make sure to, like, subscribe comment, all that good shit. That helps me out. Mac, it was a pleasure talking with you today. I'm sure this is just the start of us speaking more, so I really appreciate you coming on, and I hope everybody else really appreciated this awesome story. So thank you.

Mack [00:26:36]:

Awesome. Thanks. Andres, appreciate you.