Kase Knochenhauer - Firing Himself Everyday To Live Life On His Terms

LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE ON:

Kase Knochenhauer has been in real estate for 6 years. He's worked long hours, taken on too much stress, and described launching a brokerage "a massive failure." He then found a great integrator (read Gino Wickman's "Rocket Fuel" book), made more key hires, and has been working to fire himself each day. By aligning with great people, he's been able to work less, love life more, with the goal of working 15 hours a week and traveling with his family 4+ months per year, while his company is still flipping 60+ homes per year in Michigan and acquiring 120+ rental units. That's the power of great leverage! In fact, he's loading up his Toyota Tacoma near the end of the year to travel with his wife, 2 sons, and dog and live life to the fullest.

 

In this episode, hosted by Mike Swenson, we discussed:

• Partnership is a great key to the growth and success of his flip business
• Employees are different from each other and they're often better than you, when they bring skillsets that compliments yours
• Employees who add value and bring great past experiences and knowledge far outweigh hiring the cheapest employee
• How Kase created an investment platform for employees, so that all of them can participate in what he's building
• Kase found balance in work & life to create a lifestyle that works for him and his family
• Growing the number of flips was unreasonable without changing the structure of his team
• In any marketing funnels and industry, the cheaper the lead typically means the higher up the funnel they are
• When you underestimate a property, you will never get the returns you expect
• In his ownership structure, it's important to have one person who is the decision maker. In Kase's business, it's his business partner 

 

Timestamps

0:00 – Intro to Kase’s Career
1:24 – Getting into Real Estate
4:16 – Finding His First Deals
13:25 – Being Dynamic in Decision Making
16:30 – Division of Properties
22:57 – Hiring and Building People
25:54 – Kase’s Plans in the Future
29:50 – Reaching out to Kase

 

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Full transcript here:

Mike Swenson 

Welcome to The REL Freedom Podcast where we inspire you to pursue your passion to gain time and financial freedom through opportunities in real estate. I'm your host, Mike Swenson. Let's get some real freedom together.

 

Mike Swenson 

All right, welcome everybody to another episode of The REL Freedom Podcast where we're talking about building wealth and creating time and financial freedom through opportunities in real estate. And today, I've got Kase Knochenhauer here, and he is a great example of this. You've built and grown a business to the point where you and your family can go travel this fall, and then we'll talk about that a little bit later. But flipping 60 homes a year, you've acquired 120 rental properties. And since then, you've you've enjoyed the freedom here, which I love. In your bio.

 

Mike Swenson 

It says since the pandemic pandemic, you've purchased a commercial airplane fuselage, a 42, foot school, bus and ambulance, imported $900,000 In classic rent land rover defenders, and purchase 14 cubic yards of winter beanies. People that don't have time and financial freedom can't do that kind of stuff. And so we're excited to hear why you're doing that, how you're doing that and how you built and grew your, your business to have that freedom. So welcome Kase we're so excited to have on the show.

 

Kase Knochenhauer 

Thanks, Mike. I appreciate it.

 

Mike Swenson 

Share about your background, getting into real estate, how you've built and grown your team, you're very purposeful in how you've done it.

 

Kase Knochenhauer 

So I didn't know I'd be in real estate seven years ago, eight years ago now. So I 2016 accidentally became a real estate agent, when I was telling a friend of mine to go be a real estate agent was trying to figure out what he was doing with his life. And he didn't do it. So I did it. And here I am. So it's been 2016 was sort of a disastrous year for me at a lot more education than I did prospecting. And so I believe I sold three homes my first year, kicked it in gear, and we ended up I think, sold 40 or 42, or something like that. And I'm like, Oh, this is great. But I was working too hard. So I'm like, I'll start a team. And then I had real estate team. And a year later, we opened a brokerage. And that was the year I realized, like, I don't like being a team player. It was, I found out that the profits were just, it was challenging. I was trying to do everything myself, we grew. And I probably wasn't as selective in terms of my hiring as I should have been.

 

Kase Knochenhauer 

But yeah, it was just it was a lot of growth very quickly. And it was fun. But it was also extremely stressful. And I did taxes, you know, in April or May or whatever it was. And I looked at both of my income. And I made more money flipping houses. And I think I sold like four flips that year than I did in my flip business, or I'm sorry, my real estate team. And I'm like, oh, yikes. And I need to figure something out. So I happen to read a book 8020 Sales and Marketing by Perry Marshall, very good book. And he talks about how like, you know, 20% of the efforts get the 80% of the profit. But it's also fractal. So you know, if the 5% of the 5%, or 20% of the 20% gives you 5%, which makes 50% of the results come from just 5% of the effort. And so I started doing the math on like holy cow, like that's, that's like perfectly accurate. You know, 5% of Africa gave me half my profit. So we rapidly changed. I brought on one of my agents partner, and he's now the integrator in my business.

 

Kase Knochenhauer 

But since 2000, late 18, we've been really focusing on flipping so I don't list my own houses anymore. We hired we have a broker to real estate agents that work for us and we have we outsource all our listings to a third party team. So yeah, that's sort of how our team has changed and modified and, and, you know, the idea that's purposeful, I didn't know I'd be here. But we've definitely purposely been changing our business to meet our lifestyle. And, and I didn't know I'd be here and I kind of know it next year and the year after it looks like but you know, people talk about three and five year vision and that's a that's a challenging thing for me to really know where I'm even going to be in three to five years.

 

Mike Swenson 

So talk about you know, as we dig in, how are you starting by finding the properties that you're going to work on? I know so many people always have questions it's how do I get started? How do I get started? How do I get started So where were you finding those first initial deals and then as you grew the flip business, how did you find the crews and all that to be able to do the properties to where now you have a scalable flipping business

 

Kase Knochenhauer 

so I found mine accidentally my first few

 

Mike Swenson 

you got into real estate accidentally found your first flip but it's just the stars are aligning for you.

 

Kase Knochenhauer 

Yeah, no, it was you know, I listed a house. Thing is a for sale by owner and it was just it was in rough condition and needed new septic system women knew well, and was on the market long enough, she got sick and tired of it. She's like, Oh, I just want to sell this thing. And so she started naming numbers and like, well, I could maybe pay that. And so I bought it. And, and that was my first flip. But so that was on XML, let's talk about today. So we do everything people ask me a lot, like, what's the right form of marketing? And Mike in case, you know, our form of marketing might be different. And it's okay. And so a lot of it comes down to really two things and it's, do you have more time? Or do you have more money and, and we balance it, I guess we'll back up a little bit in talking about a funnel.

 

Kase Knochenhauer 

So you know, marketing funnels, and any, any industry, the cheaper the lead, the higher in the funnel they are, and the more expensive the lead, typically, the lower in the funnel they are.

 

Kase Knochenhauer 

And then what sort of time do you have because there's a lot of ways to find deals for free. I mean, I'll give you an example. We bought 14 houses off the MLS this year. And, you know, we, as an agent, have no more ability to find homes on the market than any Joe Schmo with no real estate license. Because it's all total on solid line. It's available on Zillow and realtor.com. And everything I see you guys can see. So we have 14 houses and most people are like, Nah, it's impossible. But our average profit actually

 

Kase Knochenhauer 

And so, when it comes to like, you know, real estate team, if you guys are looking for buyer leads, you know, Facebook ads might be a great way to get really cheap $3 Facebook leads and, and you know, you have to get to 200 of them to get a car to get a contract or something. But a really intentional seller would be like, perhaps a Google PPC on like, best agent in Minneapolis or something like that, right? So that's somebody that's gonna be a lot lower down the list, in terms of, of moving forward. So when it comes to like, how do I get started? The first thing I've looked at is like, are you broke? Do you have money? Do you have any knowledge? That's a big thing?

 

Mike Swenson 

a lot of our investor deals to have come from the MLS. Yeah. Yeah.

 

Kase Knochenhauer 

I think we we flipped like 14 houses. And I think we acquired 30 rental units or something last year and a bunch of small Maltese. But yeah, MLS deals are, you know, often not a slam dunk, but you can get good deals we made. I think we had a $70,000 Flip and Kalamazoo last year off of an MLS purchase. And it was $220,000 house that we bought it for. So it was like the margins were great. And we that was our I think our most profitable flip last year was an MLS deal. So yeah, they're everywhere. And you know what marketing source? I can't really answer. Because if you got no time, I'm going to tell you something else. If you have no money. You know, there's a there's lots of lead free lead sources out there.

 

Mike Swenson 

Yeah. So okay, so then as you guys were developing your rental business, how are you deciding? What are you looking to just flip and sell? And how are you deciding what to keep now? Are your rental properties that you're keeping? Is this just you and your family? Or do you have partners on certain deals? Or is it kind of a hodgepodge mix

 

Kase Knochenhauer 

 Yeah, its a hot, it's a hodgepodge mix. So my partner, Tyler's the integrator in my flipping business, I he and I own, I don't know, 3040 rental units together, something like that. And then my wife and I on the other 60, some, in terms of making a decision, some of it comes down to what type of money we have. So if we don't have the money available to purchase a rental at this point in time, you know, sometimes I need to have the cash that will sell it as a flip when I meant to buy it as a rental. Some of it's down to 1031. I are closing two properties a week from today. And we're doing that on a 1031 exchange. And I wouldn't have bought one of them as a as a as a rental for sure. But to meet the guidance and requirements of a 1031 I have to use it as a rental.

 

Kase Knochenhauer 

So I'm gonna use that as rental for a little bit. And it's going to, you know, the numbers don't cashflow as well as I'd hope. But I'm tying up a lot of equity and I can avoid the capital gains on that. So it works. So sometimes it's taxable benefits. We also, you know, now that we're to, I think we've sold some so we're down to I think 95 units at this point, but some of it's just yeah, cash cash availability, but I also balanced our purchases, because we do cost segregation studies on the purchases we make to offset our income. And so a lot of it's like, how much have we bought this year to offset our flip income? And so, yeah, it's just a number of variables. But you know, in general, we sort of aim for at least the 1.2 or 1.4% rule. You know, some people look at like one or 2% rule. So that's kind of our numbers if it's not going to be at if the rent is 1.2 Or maybe 1.4% of the purchase price that may make it Good rental just in general for us.

 

Mike Swenson 

Yeah, I mean, I know a lot a lot of places around the United States can't even blink or can't even find a one percenter. So yeah, 1.2 to 1.4. That's awesome.

 

Kase Knochenhauer 

Yeah. And we get that we get a handful it, you know, class, you know, solid class C's at 2% or something like that, but they're rough. And I've unfortunately found that, you know, when you underwrite a property like that, you never get the returns, you expect. I bought a 24 unit, apartment complex, class C, and my goal is to turn it into a class B, but I expected like 50% payment. So 24 units, and I thought 50% of them would pay me. I thought that's really pessimistic. There's no way it's under that. My first month, I got three rent payments,

 

Mike Swenson 

out of 24 units

 

Kase Knochenhauer 

out of 24 units And yeah, turn out the seller was like criminal and absolutely a slumlord. So I feel really good about improving the neighborhood. But, you know, unfortunately, when you buy these properties that can be very lucrative, often you have a lot of those much larger problems that you didn't calculate for,

 

Mike Swenson 

you know, I think somebody that is outside looking in looking to get into real estate looking to get into investing is like, Oh, here's, here's this guy that's got this great portfolio. He's got some time freedom. Oh, everything, like the stars have just aligned for you. And that's how you're able to make that happen. Well, here's a great example of yeah, not not every deal is a slam dunk, you're gonna have to overcome challenges. And yeah, when when it turns out, you get 12% people paying rent in a month. You gotta you got to figure that out. So yeah, you haven't had anything just kind of handed to you or just all that, like I said, all that luck is kind of lined up, you've had to overcome some challenges.

 

Kase Knochenhauer 

Yeah, we started from scratch. We've our first rental we bought, we paid cash for it, which sounds like oh, well, you're lucky. But we did it by creating a home equity line of credit, we bought our house off of a teacher salary. And we opened a HELOC on the property and use that to buy a 82 or $84,000. duplex, we then cash out refi it so we did a burr on that home. And that was our first burr property, I think we've done 30 Cash outs, you know, at this point we everything we're doing is DSCR you know, debt now. So we don't qualify, I don't qualify for mortgages, which is I laugh at, it's all portfolio refinances. So right now I think we're refinancing seven or eight properties that we own cash, and we're just pulling their money out and recycling it to other ones.

 

Kase Knochenhauer 

So most of the properties we buy are value add, I don't buy anything turnkey. So I go buy a property that you know, let's call it 100 grand. In fact, I'll give you a real example of buying a duplex for $120,000 on Friday. And we'll be putting probably 60 into it. So we'll have 180 into it. My ARV on it should be somewhere between 250 and 300 When I'm done with it. So I expect to cash out refi that in you know, November or December, so about three months from now. And my goal is to get all my money back plus a little bit more. Now what's cool, though, is this is a 1031. So I'm gonna buy it with cash, reef, rehab, the property rented out refinance, and now I'm gonna get all of my refinance money tax free. And all I did is replace it. So like the great thing is, you know refinances are non taxable events. So it's the burper process is just really, really a miracle. Sort of,

 

Mike Swenson 

it's a two questions here that my first question is, you had talked about doing doing some deals with your peers, your work partner here? What advice do you have? Or what what was your logic around that we have this conversation, my mindset, typically has been, you know, with my teammates, I want to try to grow that we always talked about growing the pie together, let's focus on growing the pie together. Some people will say, Well, why would I give up a certain percentage or something like that? What was the conversation you guys had when it came to doing a deal together? And you know, there's a lot of horror stories about having partners and not working out, obviously, yours is working out? Well. So talk about that dynamic a little bit in the decision making in the thought process around it.

 

Kase Knochenhauer 

Yeah, so in our flip business, most of the time, Tyler's final decision, so I'm, although I'm the majority owner of the company, because he's the integrator, and he's involved in a small details of the company 95 times out of 100. So I think you're going to be the person to make this decision. And as the visionary have sort of been up to me to, like, rein him in and not have them be so overly detailed that we track like everything, right. So, so that's been really important. And I think the same thing is true, is you know, we know who's in charge of making decisions in the flip business. And so in our business, we know like, okay, Kase, ultimately can say Tyler stopped doing that.

 

Kase Knochenhauer 

And so what we did when we decided to start investing together as I turned the tables, and although we're 5050 partners in our operating agreement, he's the deciding factor. So I did that because I'd didn't want to be the boss who owned the property and could decide when to buy or sell. And so I'm probably a year and a half to two years in front of Tyler and in our investment, sort of path. And so I wanted him to be able to sort of choose what those assets look like, are we buying value add properties, and rebind, small Maltese and returning are small things and new apartment complexes or triple net investments. So the idea was to sort of have him drive that portfolio. And but it's hard though, right?

 

Kase Knochenhauer 

Because when you're when you're friends with your partner, and your partner is either in front of you ever behind you, sometimes you do investment things that you otherwise wouldn't have done. And, but the key I think, is making sure that there is a decision maker all the time, never do a 5050 partner, if it's a third, a third, a third, I don't care what the ownership structure is, make sure that there's one person as the dictator. And so for me, I didn't want to be the dictator. So Tyler, Tyler's in charge, and can sell without my permission. So partnerships are great, they are the rewarding. In our, in our flip business, we scaled because we brought on another investor that funded our flips. And in exchange, we gave them a percentage of the profit. We were able to go from, you know, X to 3x. Because of that. And yeah, partnerships have been key to the growth and success that we've seen. Yeah, cuz like I, I'm a very small part of the picture when it comes to the business that we run

 

Mike Swenson 

the follow up question, and then I'll get to my second question. Follow up question on that is, how are you deciding what properties are going to be for you and your wife and your family in which ones are going to be apart with your partner,

 

Kase Knochenhauer 

like my wife and I are really trying to focus on apartment complexes at this point. And we'd like to start moving our funds into triple net assets. So it's very rare that we go buy a duplex. So right at this point, we've got our two entities a very different focus, it's very clear, who falls under who I bought a duplex and a single family as part of this 1031. But as more of a weird tax circumstances than anything, they're just small properties. And I couldn't elect something else. So I just picked the wrong asset, which I don't really want, but it works, okay. We also do compensate. So because our flip company generates these leads, when I buy a property or my partner and I buy a property, we're paying our flip company compensation through either a commission or a wholesale fee. So we make sure that each entity sort of separate so if I buy something that flip company still earns from the the acquisition. So then

 

Mike Swenson 

as you guys are doing all the work on the homes, is it your you have internal crews, or you have folks that you've partnered with, you know, vendors that are doing a lot of the work? How are you deciding who's doing the work?

 

Kase Knochenhauer 

Yeah, we've got nine construction crews across most of the West half of Michigan. And they're sort of all geographically centered in Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, Muskegon or Holland. And so most of them are willing to travel about 45 minutes. And so we're able to use those crews to coordinate our turns. So those nine crews are constantly turning properties.

 

Mike Swenson 

So these are crews that your your company owns, and pays them out of, or are they their own company?

 

Kase Knochenhauer 

That's correct. Yeah, they're 1099 contractors, so I can pay them either as an individual or as a 1099. contractor, you know, as a company. But yeah.

 

Mike Swenson 

they're not like your real estate company, hires them as w two employees.

 

Kase Knochenhauer 

29 contractors, not w two. So we thought about hiring like a 10 or a W two handyman, so that we can move him around to sort of wrap up jobs, because we can be a little more selective with movement. Because like, I have to call a contractor and ask him if he wants the job. Right? I say, Hey, I got a job. It's, it's a little further the I got a contractor that's traveling an hour and 20 minutes right now, which they don't like, right? So I have to be super nice to him. Because if they drive that far, to flips in a row, they're gonna be pissed. They're gonna stop working with me. So everything's about making sure that's a win win relationship. So I talked to the contractors two to three times a week at minimum. And I've actually, I don't think it takes that long to manage crews, we thought about hiring somebody. But we use a program called company cam, so that our contractors take pictures and we can see the status and where things are. But they're sort of what the construction teams look like. Anyway,

 

Mike Swenson 

talk about the evolution here as you went from kind of agent to team to brokerage, that seems to be a path that a lot of folks as they get into real estate take care of. I know. You mentioned about the broker piece. So I'd love to just kind of hear hear a little bit about that experience for you in the decision making and the thought behind it. And yeah, what what was what ended up going wrong on that path there?

 

Kase Knochenhauer 

I think the path I took was because that's what people did. Not because I was thinking right So, when I went from I was a very profitable individual agent, very profitable, like zero expenses, because all I did was called fizz bows and expired. So like, my, my running costs was like, you know, $200 a month of technology. It was like it was crazy. I'd love to have $200 a month now of expenses. And my growth, the team was like, Okay, well, that's the next step, right? I hire an assistant and I hire this and like, that's what's known in the real estate injury industry, then I've been an agent for three years, and like, I'm paying, like, so much money to this brokerage.

 

Kase Knochenhauer 

And they also don't like the team. Because when you when you disrupt an industry for the good or the bad, you piss people off. And so I was tired of people complaining, to be honest, I'm like, Oh, I mean, I just go get my own office. But they told me I couldn't, unless I was my own brokerage, selling art, whatever, I'll do that. So we opened a brokerage. And it was we actually brought in a national franchise a low cost, you know, fixed per, per transaction fee. And that was my disaster. There are good brokerage, I think I was the right, I was the wrong person in the right seat, if that makes sense. And so anyway, yeah, I just found it to be a big expensive mistake. And I think a lot of people think like, this is the next step in real estate, but they're always thinking going forward. But sometimes we need to turn.

 

Kase Knochenhauer 

And so the facing like, Okay, I'm going to start acquiring properties. And I'm going to start like, like, I bought sort of a couple as a real estate agent. But it was more like it was my investment, not my job. And so I realized, like, oh, man, I could, I could do this full time. And the realization that like, okay, and I work really hard to make 100 grand or 150 grand, like I worked my tail off as an agent. But I can go buy three flips, and I can make $30,000. And that's not very hard work. And so I just kind of realized, like, wow, this is there's less friction, there's less competition, it's higher risk. But you also bring in partners to help absorb that. And so that's sort of the the path that I took. But I also had the experience as a real estate agent to know what a team looked like.

 

Kase Knochenhauer 

So without having run in disastrous brokerage, I would not have been able to grow the flipping team that I have now, because it oddly looks extremely similar. We have, we have a transaction coordinator. I have our contractors, of course, we've got four virtual assistants from the Philippines, that are run part of our sales team. And then we have to local, my partner is one of our sales guys. And then he has an assistant. And so yeah, they run our whole sales department. And so amazingly, like we run, we run a, like extremely similar to a small three or four person real estate team.

 

Mike Swenson 

And kind of along that note, you know, we had talked offline about kind of this this visionary integrator type role, and, and the importance of that, and how that works. Well. So talk about now that you kind of mentioned the team here, talk about just your thoughts on hiring, building people helping train them and also to like, you seem to have a good sense of no one to get the heck out of the way, and let other people do what they're supposed to do. You know. And so I'd love to just kind of hear you chat about your,

 

Kase Knochenhauer 

I hope. So I hosted Tyler Tyler, I think sometimes things I go a little bit go, I'm a little too involved, I disappeared for a week, and the team had more contracts than when we started in more properties under contract and more money. And I'm like, Oh, this is great, I need to go on vacation more often. So I've learned that like, with employees that they're going to do it differently in difference, okay. And they're often better at it than you are. And, and just because it's different doesn't matter. But in general, the mistakes I've made is I've tried to hire the cheapest employee that can do the job. But it's a lot better to wait over pay your employees and offer massive flexibility in terms of vacation in terms of pay in terms of investments.

 

Kase Knochenhauer 

So like we are actively creating an investment platform for our employees, everything from my partner to our lowest paid Filipino employee, we want them to have the ability to invest at a rate that they're expecting, and make it competitive, and then also invite them into share with the profit share. So that's been really important part of it is have them like an employee owned portion of the company. So we, for the most part, I think all of our employees have some sort of profit share that are involved. Actually, everybody locally is our Filipino staff our bonus but there's not a it's not a written part of their contract. Yeah, partnership. So I, Tyler and I sort of run together and as best as I can explain, I sort of make a big mess in front of him and he sort of picks up the pieces and and makes it really understandable for the team behind me. And I'd say that's a pretty easy picture of what a relationship looks like.

 

Mike Swenson 

That's actually an analogy that I use a lot when talking about kind of that visionary integrator type role is you know, it's it's that balance that makes things working Well, and I was actually just listening to podcast and they said, you know, if you hire two of the same people, you really don't need one of them. And so what you need is that different dynamic, you need a kind of the Yin Yang type mentality where it's, this person completes me, because my strengths are over here, their strengths are over here, and we really enhance each other. And, you know, kind of that one plus one equals three type mentality.

 

Kase Knochenhauer 

Yeah. And like, we use the DISC profile. And so oftentimes, you'll see, like, people want to hire the same disc as they are. But it's a very bad idea, you know, hire somebody, that's the absolute opposite. So if you're a high D high C hire and is because you need the sales guy, or somebody that understands people. So yeah, so that's the that's the interesting thing. Yeah, you're exactly right. And that's my husband wife's are often so different. When one is strong, the other is weak. And the same thing is true in a business partnership.

 

Mike Swenson 

Okay, so So talk a little bit about the future here, I'd love to hear where you see this going. And then let's talk about your trip, you know, being able to, you know, we want, we talked about the time and financial freedom through the opportunities here in real estate. So talk about how what you've worked on over these last few years have allowed you to do what you're gonna do here, this this upcoming fall into the winter.

 

Kase Knochenhauer 

Yeah, the last four years, I've worked a lot, you know, me, for me, I've worked a lot. So I'm, in my mind 45, or 50 hours a week is like a terminal point that I I'm no longer productive, and I enjoy working. But I also have a two and a half and a four and a half year old at this point. And they they're going only getting older, and we're not having any more children. So it's important that I spend some time and, you know, take time with them and be purposeful with it. So I've adjusted my schedule, and I'm breaking the rules a little bit right now. But I work my goal is between 5am and 9am on a daily basis, and then between one and three. So I'd actually like to get my afternoons down to a whole hour, which would be fantastic.

 

Kase Knochenhauer 

And so that's the, that's the new schedule that I've set, you know, when I do that six days a week, and I found that I'm able to be almost as productive as when I when I work full time. And then I'm, I'm present and therefore my wife and my kids. So that's been the new goal as of the last few weeks, which is very exciting. So that's in preparation for a road trip in a Toyota Tacoma with a little slide in Canada and Allah cab, Kaya, which is pretty sweet. So yeah, we, the four of us in our dog are going to go and we're going to travel for two and a half months straight. And then also a couple small week or two week trips between the spring in the fall.

 

Kase Knochenhauer 

So that's sort of my personal side. But yeah, the the whole design of the business at this point has been creating a life and in not having so many people report to me that I have to answer my phone constantly. And that's what I realized as a team leader is people want to talk to Kase, right, it was all the time. And like, owners pissed, sellers, pissed, buyer's agents upset, talk to Kase like the team leader. And so by, by turning our company into a company, nobody knows who the Kase is. And so everybody handles the problems on their own. And then when something really bad happens, most of the time, it can wait till our Tuesday meeting. And so we run through an EOS program, which we started about 12 months ago.

 

Kase Knochenhauer 

And so most of the time, our problem solving is on Tuesday, and almost everything can wait till the next day now, which is very exciting. I'd like to turn my phone off at four o'clock. And I almost never have missed calls the next day, which I can't, I would never have happened three or four years ago. So moving forward, though, I think our teams get to continue doing what is doing. I think growing in the number of flips is probably unreasonable, without really changing the structure of our team. So we'll probably just look at larger acquisitions, you know, what's it? What's it look like to flip an apartment complex? What's it look like to move to larger industrial assets. So I think our team as it sits probably won't change in a significant manner. Maybe one, possibly two more hires. But, you know, as it stands, we have a sales manager and Operations Manager. And then they sort of all have three, three or four people underneath them. So they at this point, really handle the team very nicely.

 

Mike Swenson 

It seems to be a natural progression in terms of, you know, the smaller stuff to the bigger stuff, just the economies of scale, kind of doing the same amount of work. And it's just more units and a little bit of diversity too. You know, when you've got a duplex and there's, you know, somebody that's not paying rent or problem that's 50% of your your cash flow, if you've got a 10 unit or a 20 unit or more. There's a little bit more diversification that happens there. So yeah, that that makes a lot of sense. Thank you. Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your wisdom if people want to get a hold of you or kind of learn more about you Where can I do that?

 

Kase Knochenhauer 

Yeah, absolutely. My wife runs our Instagram page. And it's nothing but family pictures on our on our overland trip. So yet so overland investor or at Overland investor or something like that. And then if you do want to talk about investing with us, we have partners that come on and invest with us and can earn either profit share interest, and you're able to do that at Overland investor.com.

 

Mike Swenson 

Awesome. Well, thank you so much Kase for coming on and appreciate it. You've got an awesome story to share and just a great way of being efficient with your time I think, you know, so many people tried to do so many things and you've followed a logical process and built and grown nicely for you. So congratulations on that and best of luck to you guys in the future.

 

Kase Knochenhauer 

Thank you.