Mike Swenson - 5 Ways My Life Changed Over The Past 100 Episodes

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We made it to episode 100! What a journey it has been, and so much has changed over the past 2 years. I'm sharing 5 big ways that my life has changed as a result of hosting the REL Freedom podcast. Spoiler alert: We also have a new business venture to share, which I do in the episode! I share how my mindset has changed, how our Elite Advantage Team real estate business has completely pivoted in a new direction, why real estate is an amazing way to build passive income to fund your future, and why it's so important to invest in your greatest asset - YOURSELF! A huge "thank you" to everyone that has added to this podcast over the past 100 episodes - the guests, our team behind the scenes for editing & marketing, and my awesome real estate team. I'm looking forward to the next 100 episodes to impact more lives to help you build time and financial freedom through real estate!

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

• Five Powerful Ways that Mike's Life Has changed Over the Past 100 Episodes:
  • Mindset
  • Team focus shifted to investors
  • Launching A Capital Company
  • Invested in Education
  • Talk what I've learned to help others do the same

• The importance of building and strengthening your mindset to gain focus and direction.
• Watching YouTube videos and podcasts about real estate help open you up to new ideas and allow you to learn from others that are further down the path.
• Keep moving forward despite challenges, rejections and managing the emotions involved.
• Align your vision and framework with what excites you.
• Design a path wherein you can do all the things you've wanted.
• Real estate investing is the best path to build wealth and cash flow stream for people who have all sorts of experience and knowledge in real estate.
• Real estate is a wonderful path that you can leverage the experience of a great investment team.
• Finding and building a team of like-minded individuals will help you hit your goals.
• Finding people to run alongside you takes time and an investment in building relationships.
• Be strategic on using your resources and understand that you can invest money in learning opportunities to grow quickly.
• Focus on analyzing and getting deals in front of the investors to make smart decisions on the properties they wanted to buy.

Timestamps

0:00 – Intro 
1:49 – 99 episodes Recap
4:46 – Overview of Lessons Learned
6:05 – Mindset
12:29 – Team’s Vision
18:42 – Elite Advantage Properties
20:32 – Partnership Opportunities
27:48 – Building an Investor Focused Real Estate Team
31:00 - How to Reach Mike

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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, everybody. Welcome to The REL Freedom Podcast where we talk about building time and financial freedom through opportunities in real estate. I am your host, Mike Swenson. And today is a very special episode, we are talking about episode number 100. And so here we are, what started as just a seed, a small idea in my mind, has turned out to 100 episodes. And so today, what I want to share with you are five ways that my life has changed over the past 100 episodes. And so a big part of that is because of what we're doing on the podcast, the messaging that we have the guests that we have. And so today's a big day.

Mike Swenson 

So I want to be able to share with you some of the lessons that I've learned. So real quick for those people that are watching this on YouTube, you can see I've got this awesome Award, a friend of mine gave this to me, just to commemorate 100 episodes. So podcasting can sometimes feel a bit lonely, you know, a lot of these episodes I'm recording here by myself in the office with with my guests over zoom. And it can feel lonely. So just nice to see this the support from somebody else to be able to share that. So I'm excited. It's going to be going on the wall behind us here. But yeah, just wanted to take some time. I know, often I'm highlighting guests talking about what they're doing sharing their stories.

Mike Swenson 

And oftentimes they don't get a chance to share much about me. And I probably should do a better job of doing that. So today's episode is just about sharing what's happening in my life, how things have changed on our team, and personally, and we've got some exciting news to share, too. And so we're going to cover that in the episode before we get started into those five ways. I just wanted to recap for people that haven't been here since the beginning. A lot of you probably haven't. Why did I start the podcast? You know, for me, I got into real estate now we're coming up on eight or nine years. And I saw people in real estate struggling financially, I had come from the nonprofit world, there wasn't a lot of money to be had there.

Mike Swenson 

And so I saw people struggling. And it surprised me, I didn't see how people could put together the pieces or hadn't put together the pieces yet to build wealth. I just assumed people were making money hand over fist, they knew what they were doing. And to see people struggling was was surprising. And so after being on a real estate team for six years, when I when I had this idea of starting the podcast, I was like I really want to share stories of people that are having success in real estate, and people who are choosing different paths, to build wealth and to gain time and financial freedom through opportunities in real estate. So that was really the key there.

Mike Swenson 

As I wanted to highlight stories, I want you guys to be able to hear these stories and think, Oh, I like what that person's doing or like the idea that they have there. And I can apply this in my own life. So my goal has always been to share a wide variety of stories. Now admittedly, over the last probably six to nine months, we've we've honed in a little bit more on real estate investing, versus other things happening in real estate, I still like to have, you know, different coaches, different leaders on mindset, we've got an episode here coming up talking about communication. So I'd like to sprinkle in other things that are helpful in a variety of ways. But really, the goal is to highlight great stories of people doing great things to inspire you. And while you may be pursuing another path within real estate, you can still take an idea and a concept and apply it to your own space to be able to build your business.

Mike Swenson 

And so that's been really the focus of that. The other piece was, you know, I had spent six years on the admin side of the world. And I wanted to be able to put myself out there a little bit more, I used to pride myself on kind of being the man behind the curtain running our our previous real estate team. And so it was a chance for me to spread my wings, get myself out there and experience a different side of the business and for people to hopefully learn some things that that I have to share. So that was kind of the reason why I started the podcast. And I didn't plan on necessarily going 100 episodes, I didn't know how long it was going to take how long I was going to do it. But I knew I was excited about the idea. And so if anything, I'm persistent and consistent and making sure that we get episodes out. And so a lot of podcasts don't make it more than five or 10 episodes. And here we are on number 100.

Mike Swenson 

So moving along, let's dive right in. So here I kind of highlighted five key categories, five key ways that my life has changed over the past 100 episodes. So number one, it all starts with mindset, right? So my mindset has changed a lot if you're not focusing on building your mindset, strengthening your mindset. That's something that you should really think about. And focus on, what you put into your head is what comes out. And so how are you strengthening? Are you putting in things like podcasts, books, training, there's videos, you can go watch YouTube videos about anything in real estate to really help strengthen your mind. And so it's intentional, I don't necessarily want to always listen to the latest podcasts. There's other things I would like to do, but I know that it's going to help me to grow. And so over time, I've put different things into my head here. But it's helped me to grow, it's helped me to develop, it's helped me to get stronger.

Mike Swenson 

There's a lot of stuff in real estate, you know, people think that Well, I just talked about, I see so many people in real estate, not making money, people outside of real estate might just think, Oh, everybody makes money all the time. But there's a lot of challenges that come with that there's a lot of rejection, that happens, there's a lot of emotions involved. And you have to be able to power through that pick yourself up, and to be able to keep moving forward.

Mike Swenson 

So mindset, super important. Align your vision and framework with what excites you. I used to think that to be successful in real estate, there were a lot of things that I didn't want to do, and I just had to do. And so you kind of go through this mindset of like to get to get the reward on the other side, I have to go through the chances.

Mike Swenson  

So don't believe that you have to do things a certain way, you might be able to do the things that you want instead. And so design a path where you can do both things, you can do all the things that you want to do. So it's taken a lot of work, a lot of podcasts, a lot of books, a lot of conversations to be able to get there. But just understanding that setting up that framework and that vision to align with your goals align where you want to go. And you can you can have that nice domino run, where you're able to tackle everything that you want to do in your career. In addition to that, I truly believe that real estate investing is the best path to build wealth and build a cash flow stream for people with with all sets of experience and knowledge around real estate. If I wanted to make money in let's just say cryptocurrency, as an example, there's a there's a large learning curve there.

Mike Swenson 

Now, there's a lot of challenges out there. But what if you could have your cake and eat it too? What if you could do something that excites you, and make money at the same time, and help people and accomplish your goals at the same time. So instead of thinking life has to be an either or what if it's a both and, and so my mindset has really changed in that direction where I can do things that I love doing, pursue the things that I love pursuing, and build and grow and design the life that I want, all at the same time. So yes, there's some sacrifices. But at the same time, I can't have a scoop of vanilla and a scoop of chocolate at the same time, instead of feeling like I have to choose one or the other.

Mike Swenson 

Now I guess I could I could invest with somebody that knows what they're doing. The nice thing about real estate is Yeah, you don't have to know everything about everything to be successful in real estate. There's people like me that this is this is my job, in addition to my passion. And if you don't want to know everything there is about real estate, you can just link arms with me, and I can help you hit your financial goals help you hit your investment goals, backed by, you know, opportunities in real estate. So I've seen the benefit of that. And just a kind of a quick and dirty math example. Sometimes I hate giving, giving numbers because we can pick things apart, I'd be happy to dig deeper with you guys offline and pick this this analogy apart. But think about this. If I have money in a 401 K plan, and my goal is to make a million dollars that then once I retire, I can pull out and live from right.

Mike Swenson 

So everything that I've done is, is to go get this million dollars and to be able to pull out and grab that money. Well typically what happens is kind of a general rule of thumb is you can pull out about you know, 4% per year, that gets you about 25 years. So if I decided to retire at let's say 60, and I thought I was going to die at 85, I could then pull out 4% per year for the rest of my life. Well, the problem with that is what if you outlive your money, you don't want to get to the end of your life and run out of money and not be able to do the things that you want to do. But just as a it's kind of a running rule of thumb here. Let's say you have a million dollars that that equals about $40,000 per year.

Mike Swenson 

Instead, what if I took that same million dollars, and I leveraged it into real estate. So just using a general rule of thumb, let's say I put 20% down on my real estate properties. So that million dollars can leverage into about $5 million worth of real estate. Now quick and easy math. Let's just do a rule of thumb if it's rental properties, a lot of times investors try to hit this 1% Rule late right i buying property where I can get rents about 1% of my purchase price. So if I use that $1 million, leverage it into $5 million worth of real estate, that now brings in top line revenue of about $50,000 per month. So $50,000 per month, yes, I have expenses. Yes, I have mortgages, utilities, and all that stuff that's going to come out of there. So you will have a profit margin less than that. But the other benefits that you experience in addition to that depreciation, right, I'm able to depreciate my asset. So there's tax benefits that come from that appreciation of those assets.

Mike Swenson 

So using a safe number of let's say, 8% per year of appreciation, $5 million of real estate appreciating at 8% per year is $400,000. So my real estate could appreciate $400,000 per year, as I'm moving towards retirement, that I can then leverage into buying more properties leveraged into more cash flow. So appreciation of $400,000 per year, you're also having all of your tenants pay off your mortgage. So your mortgage balance, if I didn't roll it into other properties is getting less and less. And then like I said, you can take any additional revenue, any additional funds that come in, you can do refinancing cash out refinance can do other options, and you can go leverage that into future property. So instead of worrying about how much money am I going to have left, am I going to kind of run out on fumes if I live a long life, what if I have that cash flow that's going to continue to build or worst case, you just continue to hold what you've already built, and live off of that cash flow year after year.

Mike Swenson 

So that's where I think there's a ton of benefit in investing in real estate. And I've been able to see that firsthand, working with investors over these last couple of years. So that's where I believe real estate truly is a wonderful path. Regardless of how much knowledge you have around real estate, you can leverage the experience of a great investment team, myself, an agent, property managers, lenders, that sort of thing to build your investments the way that you want it. In addition to that my mindset finding and building a team of like minded individuals will help us get our hit our goals. And for me, it's been about how do we focus on growing the pie together, versus being so focused on how big is my slice of the pie.

Mike Swenson 

So it takes time to find people and because our vision and I'll go over this in a minute here, because the vision of our team has changed over the last couple of years, it's been a bit of a moving target as we hone in on what do we want this team to be. And so finding people that want to run alongside you, it takes time, it takes an investment of time, it takes investment of building relationship, but it's a lot of fun, when you find those right, people that are getting excited about the same things that you're getting excited about. And then addition to the team, being able to find great vendors, great partners, other people that share the passion for the things that you do and are really just good human beings. It makes life fun. So instead of dreading picking up the phone and talking to a vendor, you're excited to have that conversation, and really help pour into each other. So from a mindset perspective, those are some things that that I've seen, those are some ways that I've changed.

Mike Swenson 

And it's really just given me more excitement and more fuel to want to keep going down this path number two, I alluded to this, our team focus. So our team focus has changed tremendously over the last couple of years as a result of doing this podcast. So we started out wanting to focus on doing residential real estate in the Minneapolis St. Paul Twin Cities area, primarily the Southwest suburbs, as that was kind of where we originally doing lead generation out of. And for those that don't know, my first day full time we had started the team. Previously, I was doing my previous role on the operation side, in addition to kind of kind of starting the boots on the ground of this team.

Mike Swenson 

But my first day full time running this team was the first day of COVID shutdown. And so we didn't really know what was going to happen. We hadn't yet really built up a database of people and those people didn't know if they could go look at houses and so it was an interesting beginning. And as we started to get going and build momentum on the residential side, we just realized that focusing on working with investors is probably going to better align with us hitting our long term goals and we'll get into the why behind that. So we moved from a residential team focusing on helping primarily move up buyers in a mid to upper middle class area of the Twin Cities to now we are exclusively working with investors so a big change our our current database kinda was was outdated In the sense of, Hey, are you looking to buy or sell your house or buy now we're, we're focused on working with investors building and growing their portfolio.

Mike Swenson 

That being said, we don't do a lot of listings, because most of our investors are building their portfolio, they're buying properties, versus selling properties, and a lot of our investors are out of state. So we're doing showings by ourselves. Taking videos, putting it in a Google Drive folder and sharing it with our investors to take a look at our team has changed quite a bit. So we still will work with residential folks, we love referrals. And yet at the same time, the new business that we're pursuing is working with investors, so much so that over the last kind of six to nine months, we've rebranded as an investment focused real estate team. So if you go online, you look at some of the content that we're putting out.

Mike Swenson 

It's videos about investment properties, short term rentals, What to Consider When getting your first investment. So all of that is leaning towards us. Now, being an investor focused real estate team, I kind of give the example. You know, if I were working in a residential team, let's just say the average person moved every seven to 10 years, well, if you only relied on those clients, for your business, every seven years, let's say you wanted to put 4040 transactions out per year.

Mike Swenson 

To do that, you would need to have a database of 500 people, 800 people, and even at that all of those people would have to choose you to be your realtor. So how do I maintain 500 relationships with people to choose me as a realtor, now I get it, you can find new people, you can get repeat and referral referrals from those database. But think about that maintaining a database of 500 people to 1000 people, that's a lot of work, that's a lot of time. What if instead, you could go find 20 investor partners that want to buy four properties per year, even 1010 investors for properties per year or maybe 20, investor partners at two properties per year, now I can go hit 40 properties, 40 closings per year, and I'm maintaining 10 to 20 relationships.

Mike Swenson  

So it allows me an extreme introvert, to be able to go deeper with those folks, build those relationships, earn their trust over time, and not have to cold call and pound the phones all the time trying to bring new people into the fold, I can just do a good job with the people that I already have. So that's kind of been the mindset of of what we've pursued over the last couple of years. And so that's where now our team is working with investors. In addition to that, you know, our investors are evolving as well. So a lot of folks, you know, maybe aren't looking for a single family property anymore, maybe they're not even looking for a duplex, we're working with a lot of investors that are looking for three, four units, eight units, 10 units, even up to 20 or 40 units, or even more as we grow, we're working on potentially doing some syndications and that sort of thing for some larger property.

Mike Swenson 

So, you know, I could have 40 single family homes and have 40 units, or I could maybe have 220 unit apartment buildings. And so in terms of an economies of scale, you'll probably get those units at a at a lower price per unit. And you only have to manage two buildings versus 40 separate buildings. And so it's that type of economies of scale mindset that our investors are growing into. And that's where we're seeing a lot of those properties are larger properties, more units. And so we're excited to help them excited to see those economies of scale, but our investors over the last couple of years to have evolved. And that's what we're what we're focusing on.

Mike Swenson 

So number three, one of the kind of new and exciting thing that we can share here about how our business has changed is we've started a capital company to help investors be able to purchase properties that that maybe they couldn't do on their own, or maybe they're not able to on their own. And so we've launched a Elite Advantage Properties, which is our capital company, where we're going to come alongside investors and really help them to grow their portfolio. So the way that this came about is, over the last year, let's just say calendar year 2021, we were really focused on analyzing deals, getting those deals in front of our investors, so that they could make smart decisions on the properties they wanted to buy. We calculated that we probably analyzed 3500 properties last year in our MLS, off market deals, and all that kind of stuff.

Mike Swenson 

So 3500 properties of those 3500 properties, probably about 10% fit close enough to numbers that we think investors would be excited about or would consider investing in. And so there was, you know, 350 properties that were like, hey, these could be solid investments for you if you guys are interested, and inevitably we didn't close on 350 property We closed on a lot less than 350 properties. And so what I heard from my team was, hey, I would really love to buy that property if I had the money. Or what if I, what if money? wasn't the reason why we couldn't purchase a property if everything checked those boxes? And so January 1, I had set out, maybe not exactly January 1, but I said 2022, my focus is going to be pursuing essentially that excuse. How do we go find good Capital Partners? How do we find good lenders?

Mike Swenson 

And how do we put together partnership opportunities, where when we see a good property, we can recognize that and can partner with somebody or can find the money to be able to make that investment. And so that's been a year long pursuit. Here we are. I'm recording this in August, the episodes releasing here in September. So we still have have more time left in the year. But we are now raising capital to be able to help investors. So what does that look like? There's a lot of people in real estate that do investment. They know the industry, they have the vendor connections, they have the property manager relationships, and they can do it all themselves. That's fantastic.

Mike Swenson 

Maybe you don't want to invest in your own state, maybe you see benefits of investing in other states. Well, when you invest in other states, you're relying on other people to help you insert us, we can help you if you live in California, and you want properties that cash flow, instead of just banking on appreciation, you can work with us, you may know a lot about investing, but you may not know a lot about Minnesota or the properties available. And maybe you don't want to do the boots on the ground stuff. So we come alongside, that's where we help you in the agent capacity, we go find those properties. We have great vendor relationships with property managers, different vendors, lenders, and we can essentially put you into that investment property so that you can work with a property manager long term and manage that asset.

Mike Swenson 

So if you have the time to devote, and you want to devote that time, fantastic, we'll help set you up to do that. There's a lot of people that are very successful in other industries, they've made a lot of money, they maybe don't have time, nor do they ever want to learn about real estate, they just want to know that they're putting their money into a good investment. That's where we can come in and help leverage that as well. Being able to earn double digit returns and investments backed by real estate is a phenomenal opportunity.

Mike Swenson 

So if you say hey, I want to take advantage of all those opportunities I mentioned for investing in real estate, I don't necessarily want to learn a lot about the market, I don't need to learn a lot about the market, I probably don't have the time available to learn the market to meet the people build those connections, essentially, here's the money. And let's work together, we have the opportunity to do that. And so that's where where we can really earn people's business and we can really do a good job helping them to build wealth is I've got the knowledge, we've got the time, we've got the expertise, we've got the connections, and financially, we can help you get where you want to go, where you don't have to do that all on your own.

Mike Swenson 

And so like I said, that's, that's the new company, Elite Advantage Properties. And so if you want to learn more about that, you can go to our website, elite advantage properties, HQ for headquarters.com. So eliteadvantagepropertieshq.com, you can learn about the company, the types of properties we're focused on, we've got a little investor questionnaire to fill out to learn more about you and your goals. And the story that I've kind of told all along work with working with investors is, you know, we are your real estate matchmaker. So everybody has different preferences. Everybody has different things that they want to accomplish in real estate. And so we want to be able to match up, what do you want to do, what types of properties what price points, specific areas, maybe that you're looking for. And we can help you find those properties.

Mike Swenson 

And so that's our goal. And to be able to do that and offer that for people that don't necessarily need to or want to learn more about real estate, they just want to know that their money's going in a good place. We'd love to have a conversation with you and talk about that. So that's exciting new endeavor, elite advantage properties, you can learn more eliteadvantagepropertieshq.com

Mike Swenson 

Number four way that our or my life has changed as a result of the podcast is I've invested a lot in education. So I've been in residential real estate for six years, I've learned a lot about residential real estate. I've learned a lot about building and growing and operating a real estate team. And now I'm adding on to that all the investor specific knowledge and so I've spent a lot of time we talked about this back in mindset, listening to podcasts, reading articles, connecting with people to be able to learn as much as I can as fast as possible about investment real estate now to backup I've done investment real estate now for 13 years.

Mike Swenson 

So even before I was in real estate full time, I had done flips, I had house hacked back before it was really called House hacking. And so we've done some things purchase a short sale. So there's other things that I've done in real estate before I got into it full time. But at the same time, I want to be able to do the best job the best job possible for our clients. And so I wanted to learn a lot more. So I will say there's a ton of people out there selling courses, mastermind groups, that sort of thing, you have to take some time and vet them out, I could go spend as much money as I could possibly make on trainings. But at the same time, I strategically selected some places where it was worth investing money, to be able to rapidly grow my knowledge in certain areas. So when it comes to investing, when it comes to multifamily investing, raising money, being able to do a lot of the things I've spent money, a lot of money on growing. And the other thing is

Mike Swenson 

you can compress timeframes so much more quickly, it might take me two, three years, to figure out the things that I needed to know. And now I can do it in 30 days or in 60 days. The other thing you know, that's really important that's helping to shape your mindset is being around like minded individuals, it's going to take some time to network with people, right? Meeting new people, like I said, I'm a I'm an extreme introvert, it's hard for me in a big group settings to to be the butterfly of the room. So being a part of a mastermind group, or being a part of a group like that I can meet the people that are doing the same thing that I'm doing really quickly.

Mike Swenson 

And so I heard somebody somewhere talk about, you know, building your network through buying your network. And so buying into some mastermind opportunity, some training opportunities, to be able to rub shoulders with the people that are doing the same things that you're doing in the United States or even around the world, it might take me some time to find locally, a bunch of people that are kind of in that same niche, that same spot that I'm in more quickly, I could find people through some of these group opportunities.

Mike Swenson 

And so I'm not saying go spend money on trainings all over the place, vet them out, be strategic in how you're using your resources, but just understanding that you can invest some money and learning opportunities to help you grow more quickly. And so whatever you're pursuing next, whatever your goals are, find those people try to find some of those opportunities. And yeah, you have to be willing to take a little bit of a risk to invest in your education. But if you select it wisely, it's going to help help you to grow faster, and help you get where you want to go more quickly. So that would be for me, number four, investing in some of that education.

Mike Swenson 

Number five, not that I haven't done this in the past. But having built an investor focused real estate team, having worked with investor clients, now raising money to partner with people on investments, I want to be able to help others do the same over the last two years, we've come a long way. And so if you're out there, and you're looking, thinking man investment, real estate would be pretty cool. I don't really know where to start, I don't know kind of which direction to go, maybe what niche I want to pursue, I would love to have a conversation and help you maybe self discovered maybe know which questions to ask to get a sense of where you want to go. It's really hard because there's so much opportunity out there, there's so many things you can do to be able to nail it down to what you want to do.

Mike Swenson 

And so however I can help you get over that next hurdle of what's stopping you from investing in real estate would love to have a conversation. So you know that that's another place where I feel like I can add value and help people along the way. And then the other thing I mentioned too, in terms of helping people is look if if you want to partner with us, we would love to do that the beauty of building an investor focused real estate business is an investor wants to find a good deal. And well Minnesota is a great opportunity. We're also in South Florida in the Fort Myers Naples Cape Coral area. Our investors will invest in other states too. And so they know when they work with us. They get knowledgeable agents great expertise, customer service, some good vendor relationships, we want to be able to help them achieve their goals.

Mike Swenson 

And for us, it's been it's been a two year long path to get there. So it's not going to be you have one conversation and all sudden everything changes. But it can help you kind of figure out that next turn of where you want to go. So I'd be happy to talk with you. If you want to learn how to scale. If you're looking for other like minded people would be happy to help. Also helping, like I had mentioned, helping with investments. If you don't know what to do with your money, you don't really know how investing in real estate works. I'm not saying use us. I'm just saying I'm here to show you, here's how you can invest in real estate. Here's how some of the numbers work. Here's a calculator for you to look at if you want to analyze a deal.

Mike Swenson 

And there's also other states out, there's also great locations. And so if I was focusing on building a residential business, if I moved to another state, I'm kind of throwing away that database that I've built, I can leverage some relationships, I know how to run a business, so I'm going to be able to get there faster. But when you have an investor business, it doesn't matter where the deal is, doesn't mean every investor is going to want to invest in every state. But we can, we can do that. So if you're excited about real estate investing, you want to work with investors, you don't necessarily know where to start, or you want to take your business to the next level, we'd love to have a conversation and partner with you, our investors love investments, we're growing in other states. So if you're in any other state, or even in Minnesota, in Florida, we'd love to still talk to you, you know, leveraging our experience our systems, and leveraging our existing database of investors that want to invest in real estate, could help your business move forward.

Mike Swenson 

So if that's you, if you're interested in that, feel free to reach out to me, we'd love to help. So all in all, you know, these last two years, the knowledge we've built the experience, we've built, the relationships we've built, we want to be able to help others. And so whether it's formal or informal, reach out to us, we want to be able to give back and help you. So that's number five of lessons that I've learned. So that being said, I want to acknowledge there's a lot of struggle along the way, while I'm sharing these great things, while I'm sharing all the positives, there's been a lot of struggles, too.

Mike Swenson 

So I want you guys to know, I've gone through a lot, I've come out stronger, there's been a lot of challenges. And so I don't want to gloss over that factor not not acknowledge that fact, told somebody the other day, I feel like sometimes I'm I'm in a 10 foot hole trying to climb out every single day. And so that's just what happens. You know, there's lots of ups and downs. And so, you know, I'm still excited about the future, there's still so many wonderful things. But there's a lot of challenges that happen along the way. And so if you're in that spot, don't feel like you know, you can't get through it too. So lots of challenges.

Mike Swenson 

That being said, kind of finally here. Before we wrap up for the episode, I just want to say a few thank yous. Number one, thank you to you guys, the listeners. Without listeners, we wouldn't have a podcast. And so I hope that you're continuing to get value from the guests that we have. If you have suggestions on guests, people that you want to hear topics that you want to hear. I'm trying to find a diversity of guests and topics in terms of what they specialize how they do it. So if there's people that you want to hear, feel free to reach out to me, let me know. But thank you so much for listening over these last 100 episodes, I'm so excited. I love to see the numbers as they come in and see how many people have been listening to the podcast. That's awesome. So thank you for that.

Mike Swenson 

A big thank you to our team. This podcast doesn't doesn't just happen automatically. And so all the people that have helped with booking, editing, promotions, graphics, my team that has been guests on episodes, thank you to all of you for all the work that you've put in. It truly is a team effort. And it's been so wonderful to work with you guys. And have you helped us along the way and make this podcast, something that I'm extremely proud of the content that we put out how we market it the advice that we share with people. And so I appreciate all the feedback, the thoughts, and the importing of information to be able to make this super successful. So thank you for that. And then also the guests that come on.

Mike Swenson 

You know, we always talk with our guests before and after the episodes a little bit here a little bit more about their story, their experience. And so just thankful that people are willing to come on a podcast like this, share their experience, they want to help others, they want to help you be successful. And so this is really a great tool to be able to learn and grow if you continue to pour in. And so thank you to all of our guests, we've had 99 episodes, we've had a couple people on a couple of times, but 95 Plus guests on the on these episodes, thank you to you and those that helped us get started and where we are today. So that is it. That's the episode five ways that my life has changed as a result of the last 100 episodes, and excited to be able to share this to share this award and looking forward to doing more episodes in the future.

Mike Swenson 

So thank you so much. I love you guys appreciate all that you're doing and would love to continue to see this podcast and grow and take it to the next level and do another 100 episodes and more. So thank you very much.