This Simple Mistake Cost One Business Owner $800,000 with Bobby Casey, Ep. 799

Speaker A: And he's like, well, how much is that? And I said, well, the registered agent, service and compliance and everything is a couple hundred bucks a year. And he's like, oh, no, that's too much because he ended up settling that lawsuit for about $800,000. Welcome to multifamily Insights, the show to help you succeed as an apartment investor. Listen in as John Kasman interviews experts to help you find the best places to invest, attract investors and scale your portfolio. This is Multifamily Insights with your host, Jon Kasman.

Speaker B: Welcome to Multifamily Insights. I'm, um, your host, Jon Kasman, and I want to thank you for joining us for another great episode. If you are enjoying this show and getting some great value for your investing journey, let us hear about it. Give us some honest feedback with a rating and review. It helps us, but it also helps other listeners find this show for their own investing goals. And listen, if you haven't done so, make sure you hit that follow or subscribe button so you don't miss an episode. Now, we've got a great show today. We're going to be talking to Bobby Casey. When you think you found a great deal, asking the right questions could be the difference in finding a stud or a dud. Uh, listen, we've put together a new guide to help you out. It's called seven questions you must ask before investing in apartments. Now, in this guide, you're going to learn how to uncover red flags, quickly identify underwriting risk vet sponsors and team members, and confirm key assumptions. Now, this is the guide that's gonna help you be a better investor. Whether you're an active investor or you're a passive investor looking to partner with other operators, asking better questions is the key to identifying great opportunities. So download this free guide. Go to our website, kasmancapital.com seven questions. That's the number. Seven questions. And you can access this free guide today. To make it easy on you, though, we've put a link in our show Notes. So you go to a show notes, you can click that link and access the guide right now. This guide's gonna help you make better investment choices, asking the right to build your portfolio. So be sure to download it today. Bobby Casey is an international tax strategist, lifelong entrepreneur, a managing partner of Global Wealth Protection, and the founder of Business Anywhere, helping entrepreneurs legally reduce taxes, protect assets and run borderless businesses. Let's welcome to the show Bobby Casey.

Speaker A: Hey, John, thanks for having me today. I appreciate the opportunity to get on here and talk to you and your people.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Bobby, it's great to have you on the show and I, uh, gave a little bit about your background, but take a minute or two and fill in some of those gaps.

Speaker A: I am an entrepreneur, lifelong entrepreneur. I say this kind of jokingly, but not really. Like I've never had a real job. I mean I've had jobs, but I've never had a professional job. I've always had my own business since I was a teenager. But I started my first quote, real company when I was 19. I was raised in a pretty entrepreneurial family. So for me growing up, it wasn't ever the mindset to like get that good job, go to college and get the good job and all that stuff. I just always had the mindset, like for me it was always looking for what business am I going to start? Where's the opportunity in the business? I was always looking for that. So yeah, I've had a bunch of different businesses over the years and now what I do, it's just like anything in an uh, entrepreneurial journey, it's always an evolution. You start with something, you evolve, you learn some new things and so on and so forth. And that's pretty normal. And for me it was like that. When I was in my 20s, mid to late 20s, I had a couple of different businesses that were doing well and I ended up hiring somebody like me to help get my situation sorted out, like from an asset protection standpoint and privacy, a little bit of, uh, company structure, planning, stuff like that. I hired somebody like me. I think I was like 27 or 28, something like that. And I became really fascinated with that process that we went through to quote, solve my puzzle. And the guy kind of became a mentor. And all my friends were entrepreneurs. So I went to them and said, hey, why don't we do the same thing with some of my friends and we work together. That's how I got started kind of doing what I'm doing now. But back then it was just kind of a quote side hustle on top of, you know, I had three other businesses at the time. And then over the next couple of years I ended up selling those things at a restaurant which I sold. I had some real estate, uh, business that I sold and then I had an installation company that I sold. And I just decided the people I wanted to work with were entrepreneurs because I'm really passionate about entrepreneurs and investors because in my opinion, entrepreneurs and investors are the people who drive basically all human progress. I know that sounds kind of woo woo or whatever but in my opinion, entrepreneurs drive all human progress. Everything happens when an entrepreneur decides to build something, create or create something. And I just love working with entrepreneurs. I've always been involved with that. I've been in multiple entrepreneurs communities. I actually run an entrepreneur community now. I really wanted to work with those people. My previous company that I had, like, in my 20s and 30s was an installation company. And all my clients were big, like Fortune 500 companies like Home Depot and Walmart, Lowe's and places like that. And I just, I hated working with big companies. I hated it. I hated working with corporate people. I just really wanted to deal with entrepreneurs. And so I started doing the consulting, which was global wealth protection. Well, it was a side gig, and it became Global wealth Protection, um, where I do tax and company structure and asset protection, planning for clients, and then business Anywhere actually is a spinoff of global wealth protection. Because we've registered so many companies for clients. Uh, the process of renewing companies for clients. We had so many that we registered for clients. The process of renewing became so tedious every month that I hired a software developer to automate the whole process of filing annual reports and renewing companies and all that stuff. And when we built it, I said, actually, that should be a separate company. That actually should be. Because I started seeing that and I thought, actually, this is way better than my consulting business. Like, this thing is actually scalable and we can help a lot more people with this. So I still do the consulting, globalwealthprotection.com but I don't focus on it at all. Like, clients come to me like word of mouth, or maybe, I don't know, they hear me on a podcast or something. But we do zero marketing, zero ads. No, no, nothing of, uh, nothing for that business Anywhere. IO is our bigger company now.

Speaker B: Got it. No, I appreciate that, man. You talked about being an entrepreneur from a child, right? Coming from an entrepreneurial background and really understanding that space. From there, you talked about really learning more, man. You invest in some businesses, you sold those off. You had a background in restaurants, real estate, uh, doing some installations and other things like that. And by running your own. Yeah, but running your own business, bringing folks in to help you kind of get your paperwork together, your taxes together. You learned so much, helped out some of your entrepreneurial friends. That led you to global wealth protection. And then ultimately from that was helping so many of those clients that led to the business you're focused on today, which is business anywhere. And before you and I hit record, we were talking and I asked you, hey, where are you located? And you said, well, right now, North Carolina. But you've got a number of trips coming up. So I know you are an avid traveler. You spend a lot of your time in other countries. Talk to me about Business anywhere, kind of the premise and how you help other entrepreneurs.

Speaker A: So it's funny you said, I got a lot of trips coming up. I don't even look at it as trips. For me, it's just living in a different place. Like some people ask me all the time, hey, are you going on vacation? I'm like, I don't do vacation. And we're like, yeah, but you're on the beach in Mexico or you're in Thailand or whatever. I don't do that. I don't do vacations. I just live in different places. So I'm doing my work there. I go to the next place, I'm doing my work, but I'm enjoying a different environment. And it is related to business anywhere. Because a lot of our consulting clients, over the 20 plus years I've been doing that were increasingly becoming location independent entrepreneurs and investors. They work from home and you've got the location independent entrepreneur or investor who works from home. And then you've got the other side of it. You've got the people that just move to a different place, a different country. And what we found is some of those things like getting your company structured, having a registered address, registered agent service, having a mailing address in the geography where you need to have it, getting all your company compliance done, getting your banking done, your payment processing, all that stuff, it's tedious, or it can be tedious, like to get all the compliance stuff done, all the legal structuring done. And when you're location independent, you know, imagine you're, uh, an American from Florida who's in Thailand, who wants to start a company in the U.S. like, some of those things get really tricky. So Business Anywhere was literally started as a platform to make it insanely simple for people to handle all those tedious tasks and to make it super simple. Because like John, me, you and every other entrepreneur on the planet, what do we hate doing?

Speaker B: Well, there's a number of things we ain't doing, but definitely taxes, definitely paperwork, for sure. Administrative tasks for sure.

Speaker A: Yeah, administrative stuff. That's kind of the general umbrella of it is every entrepreneur hates doing all the administrative bs, right? We all hate that stuff. Like as an entrepreneur, what do you care about? You care about the next sale, the next hire, the next project, the next product Launch the next trade show. The next thing, the next thing. Right. Like you're forward thinking as an entrepreneur, as you should be.

Speaker B: Yeah. You're trying to grow the business. You're focused on tasks and outcomes that grow the business, not necessarily the paperwork that comes with it.

Speaker A: Yeah. And then somebody says, hey, your bookkeeping is three months behind. And what do you say? Uh, I'll do that next week. Hey, you've got some like technical issues with your company structure and your compliance. Yeah, I'll do it next week. Right. And so for us, we want to make that insanely easy for the entrepreneur so they can focus on the things that are important. That next thing. Right, that, that next forward thinking thing. And from doing it from anywhere, that's also where the name came from. Business anywhere. Like you can basically set it up and manage it and structure it from anywhere.

Speaker B: Bobby, for most of your clients, are they kind of US based and just looking for assistance in running this or are they literally trying to be location independent and travel the world or live elsewhere?

Speaker A: A little bit of both. I mean, by the way, we have a ton of clients that are not US persons. I mean like close to half of our with business anywhere anyway. Close to half of our clients are not US people. It could be like some Pakistani guy who has a software company and he wants to run it through the US because it has a better profile to be a US registered company and US Banking and US payment processing and stuff like that. It could be a German person who is traveling the world but wants to have an E commerce store selling in North America. It could be a Canadian who's got a US real estate portfolio that lives in Mexico. It depends. Our platform is built so you can do it everything, you can do everything when it comes to your company structure and compliance online. So. But then we also have the people who have a plumbing business in New Jersey who registered their New Jersey LLC with us. Or they've got, ah, their real estate investor in Des Moines, Iowa that has 12 single family homes. Or the real estate investor in Atlanta that's got three apartment buildings. It can be anybody. It's convenient for everybody. It's just for some people like you've got the German living in Mexico with the E commerce business in the U.S. some of those things are critically important that it's location independent for him, that we can do everything for them remotely. Whereas in Des Moines, like can you do it being geographically based? Sure. But it's also super convenient to do it all sitting on your laptop.

Speaker B: What I'm Hearing you say is like, hey, if you're in your backyard, right, and you're, you just want the help from someone to run this, that's awesome. You can help there. But if you are traveling, you live abroad, you have uh, you know, your business in a different country, then the complexities of that make it much more important to have the right people helping you. And maybe other firms who offer similar services, they don't understand that complexity as much as what your team does. Just based on your years and experience in the industry.

Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. And I will say too, even for the real estate investor in Des Moines with 12 single family homes, from an, uh, if we want to dig into the asset protection side, but from an asset protection standpoint, one of the biggest mistakes real estate investors make when it comes to building out their legal structure of their portfolio, one of the biggest mistakes they make is registering their own llc like the do it yourself. I'm just going to go on the Secretary of State website and do it myself. That's a huge mistake. So even if you are in Des Moines with 12 single family homes, going on the Iowa Secretary of State website and filing your articles of, uh, articles of organization for your LLCs, it's a bad idea to do it yourself from an asset protection.

Speaker B: Why is that such a bad idea?

Speaker A: Well, if you quote, DIY your own LLCs, I don't know if you've registered an LLC yourself or not, or if you've hired somebody to do it for you before. But if you've ever done it yourself, you know, when you're filling in the articles of organization, you're going to get to a couple of points depending on the state, but you're going to get the. Well, every state requires a registered agent. So in order to have an llc, we're going to keep picking on Iowa. But if you're in Des Moines and you want to register an Iowa llc, you have to have a registered agent in the state of Iowa. A registered agent. You can be your own registered agent or you can have what's called a CRA or commercial registered agent. That's uh, like a professional company that offers that as a service. If you do it yourself, you have to put your name as the individual on there as the registered agent. And then you need to put your address. In most cases it's going to be your home address or maybe if you have an office, it could be your office address. But it has to be a physical address. It can't be a PO box, it has to be a physical address. Because the legal requirement to be a registered agent is someone has to be available during business hours from 8 to 5, Monday through Friday. And, uh, because what a registered agent does, it receives the legal requirement for a registered agent. They receive legal notices related to your company, like Secretary of State notices, Department of Revenue, irs, and what we call SOP mail or, uh, service of process mail. Stuff that has to be signed for. So if you don't have a proper registered agent address, like for example, let's say you use your home address, but you're never home during the day, and somebody comes to deliver a piece of SOP mail, nobody signs for it, it gets returned to sender, back to maybe the Secretary of State, for example, it gets returned to sender. Well, the Secretary of State sees it got returned to sender, they're going to see that that's not actually a legal address to use for service of process mail. And your LLC is going to get revoked immediately. It'll get revoked if you don't have a legal registered agent address. A lot of people use their home address and they get lucky because they don't. You know, you don't get that much SOP mail, but it only takes one. That's one issue. Two is you register your own llc, your name is on it, your home address is on it, that becomes a matter of public record that anyone can pull up. Anyone, anyone on earth that can access the Internet can pull up your name and your home address. So that's terrible from a privacy standpoint. Number one, we could go down a big rabbit hole on that from a privacy standpoint. But I mean, that could be anywhere from somebody's trying to sue you and looking up your name and your name pops up associated. Like if I were a lawyer representing somebody suing you, John, one of the first things I'm going to do is I'm going to go to the Secretary of State website and go to the company formation site and look up your name to see if your name is associated with any company. If I see that your name is associated with whatever, John llc, I'm going to find the address. I got your home address super easy. And I mean, that's just if you're getting sued. What if you had something with more nefarious intent, your spouse has a stalker or something like that? There's all kinds of crazy things that can happen. But putting your name and your home address in public record is extremely dangerous. But if you register your own llc, it's required for you to do that. It has to be There. So that's one thing. And, uh, of course I know a lot of people are like, yeah, but who cares? Nothing will ever happen to me. I could give you hundreds of stories where people thought it was never an issue for them until it was an issue for them. Like, I have two clients with very similar issues. One client was an existing client of mine. We registered his company in Florida. He had a supplement company, and we were the registered agent on his company. So when he, uh, got sued, a class action lawsuit, he got sued, we got served. Because as the commercial registered agent, that's what you do. That's you receive that mail, as I was explaining before. So we received the mail. He gets that, uh, piece of mail saying he's been served this lawsuit. So he gets on a consultation call with me and says, hey, what are we supposed to do about this? And I told him, I said, look, class action lawyers are in 99% of the cases. They're frivolous litigation of people out there just seeing what will stick and trying to get something out of you. My advice is ignore it for a couple of months. Ignore it. I mean, worst case scenario, two, three months later, you answer it, you hire a lawyer, you answer it, you deal with it. But if you ignore it for a couple of months, usually what happens now, I'm not talking about all lawsuits. I'm talking about particularly these kind of frivolous BS class action lawsuits that people get. And I said, ignore it for a month or two. Let's see what happens. Well, he ignored it and it went away. The reason it went away is they couldn't find him, they couldn't attach it to him. He wasn't responding. It's like throwing a dart in the dark, like you don't know what you're aiming at. Like there's no human associated with the business. How are you going to get that person served? That kind of thing right. At the same time, it's ironic. I like this story because it happened to me in the same month I got another client, also in Florida, also with a supplement company, also with a class action lawsuit. This guy came to me for asset protection consulting because he personally, him and his wife both had been personally served and named in the lawsuit because he registered his own LLC in Florida, because he didn't want to spend the hundred, uh, or 200 bucks a year or whatever it costs for a registered agent service. And he registered himself because he was cheap and because his name and his wife's name were on there and his home address, the process server or, uh, the lawyer suing him named him and his wife personally in the lawsuit. So they personally served him, his wife, and the company at his home. So because he personally got served, he had to answer it. He couldn't ignore it once he personally got served. I mean, the process server, you've seen it in the movies, right? Knock on the door, you open the door, they hit you in the chest with a piece of paper. You've been served, and you can't do anything about it at that point. So it's a good illustration that having a bit of privacy upfront at least eliminates the frivolous litigation that can come after you. And, like, I had a consultation with the second guy, and he said, what can we do to fix this? I, uh, said, well, there's nothing we can do to fix what's already happened like that. Uh, if we did anything now, that's called fraudulent conveyance, but we can fix it going forward. In order to do that, we need to register a new company for you. We need to be the registered agent so that your name's not associated with it. And he's like, well, how much is that? And I said, well, the registered agent service and compliance and everything is a couple hundred bucks a year. And he's like, oh, no, that's too much. Now, I want to make a point here because he's like, that's too much, because he ended up settling that lawsuit for about $800,000. But in his mind, let's call it $200. $200 a year for a professional registered agent service was too much. Now, would it 100% have protected him? You don't really know that. It's one layer of an asset protection strategy. I, uh, look at it like putting your assets, like I always advise people, never own any assets in your own name. Nothing of nothing. Never expose your home address in public record at all, anywhere, ever. I look at it like this. You know, you've seen movies, like, with this medieval castle in Scotland. What do those medieval castles always have around them?

Speaker B: Guards.

Speaker A: They have a moat. Well, yeah, they have guards, too, right, but they have a moat, right? And then they have a big wall, and then they usually have an interior wall and a drawbridge. Like, all those things are layers of protection before you get to the king's castle in the center. Asset protection is kind of like that. You have layers of protection. One layer is privacy, keeping your name out of public records. Another layer is legal structures like LLCs, trusts, corporations, private interest foundations, those types of things. So you need these things. And the more assets you have, the more layers you need. I mean, sure, if you have one rental house and you make $22 an hour working at Home Depot, you probably don't have a whole lot to go after. But if you got a portfolio of 27 rental houses or five apartment buildings and you make a million bucks a year and you have $5 million in assets, you probably want to do something about it.

Speaker B: Bobby, uh, appreciate you giving us a little bit of context on, like, hey, here's the reason you don't want to register your own llc. Just to recap, you said, first of all, you can have your LLC revoked based on the SLP if they try to serve you. The second thing is you want to make sure your personal name, your home address is not in the public record, both from a lawsuit perspective, just overall safety, particularly your family members. So there are various reasons you want to avoid that, but you don't want to register your own LLC for that reason. I, uh, want to ask this. What's the most common mistake you see entrepreneurs make when it comes to wealth protection?

Speaker A: Well, to be honest, registering your own LLC is probably the most common mistake. I see. But I think that that is a little bit of a bigger issue. I think the bigger issue is, how can I say this kindly? It's being cheap. And what I mean by that is somebody goes on Facebook or Reddit or whatever and gets some information, and they're like, okay, I've got this going on. Or, you know, nowadays, right, we go into ChatGPT or Claude or whatever and ask these questions, and we say, okay, here's what I've got. Uh, I own five apartment buildings in Atlanta, and I do this, and I do this. What can I do to protect my assets? And don't get me wrong, I still think people should do that. I still think people should go on the call to ChatGPT and do that. But the problem with doing it or going on a Facebook group and asking that question or asking friends or going to a conference and asking people, I still think people should do that. But the problem with that is the full context of your situation is not going to be explored in that. Because if you go to ChatGPT and ask a few questions, you don't even know the right questions to ask. So you don't know the right thing to ask on how to do something. So what's the saying? You don't know. You don't know, so you don't know to ask that question? Well, ChatGPT can only give you an answer based on the. You know the prompt you give it. If you don't know the question to ask, you can't get it the right prompt prompt. You know what I'm saying? So, like, every detail matters when it comes to wealth protection and asset protection planning, like the nature of your business, who your clients are, where your clients are, how you get paid, what kind of assets do you have? How is that ownership of those assets? Do you have kids? How old are your kids? Are you married? What's the nationality of your spouse? Do you have more than one citizenship? Do you have more than one residency? Parents, grandparents? There's a million variables that go into there. And you can't know possibly how to ask all those questions unless it's something you already know how to do. So I think a lot of people, they go and ask a Facebook chat or questions on Reddit or ChatGPT and they get a very narrow answer and they start making decisions based on these narrow answers. I think you should still do that, but I think you should take those responses and answers to a professional and say, here's what I'm looking at. What do you think about this and what do you recommend? Because that professional who has experience dealing with the full scope of information is going to know the right questions to ask. And I think the bigger issue is when it comes to wealth protection or asset protection planning is people get cheap and they're like, oh, uh, but that guy's $500 an hour or $700 an hour. I don't want to spend $700 an hour. This might cost me $10,000 to get everything set up. But it's kind of like everyone knows this now. Every business owner knows this is an expensive CPA is probably one of the best investments you can have. People say, yeah, but that CPA is going to cost me $50,000 a year. Awesome. Because if that CPA saves me $400,000 this year, that's the best $50,000 I could have spent. That's. I invest 50,000 to save 400. What kind of ROI are you talking about? I mean, that's, uh, a eight to one ROI. I can't get that in the stock market. So I think sometimes people get a little bit too cheap on the front end. They're like, oh, that might cost me $10,000. I can't do that. But that $10,000 could very well be the cheapest thing you've ever spent money on.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's really good stuff, Bobby. Mean one, make sure you're making the right investment. And you mentioned don't be in cheap. You know, another way of thinking about that is make sure you're investing in the right things. Because when it comes to the information, there's really an overwhelming amount of access to information, even if you think back over the last 20, 30 years, but even like the last 15 years, I mean, prior to YouTube and Google really taking off, you had to research this information and figure it out. Well, now any one of us has the baseline information at our fingertips, and the challenge or the missing component of that is the experience and the nuance that comes with it, because everyone's situation is different. And I love your example with prompts and chat because, you know, even for stuff I know really well, when I get into chat, I'll get some of the answers. I'm like, no, that's not right. Like, you missed this or you forgot this or you didn't think about that. It's like, oh, you're right. And if you don't know what may be missing or what didn't inform that response, you may run with bad information because you didn't give it the right inputs. And that's the same even when you're working with a professional. If you don't explain your situation, your entire, you know, a financial situation, like you mentioned, marital status, children, grandparents, whether or not you have other assets, business partners, estate, uh, planning, whatever, all these things, they matter. It may not seem like an important detail, but all of it matters because it may take you down a certain pathway. I, uh, remember at an LLC that I formed some years ago for our coaching business. And I remember, you know, after a few years, I got really frustrated from a tax standpoint and we sat down and started talking about it and realized there were some assumptions made based on revenue and other things like that, which took us down one path which just didn't match the reality of how that business was operating. So we ended up having to step back and make some changes. And you really do need to, again, sit down, speak to your professionals, have these conversations that are more strategic in nature so you can get the best advice. And it's not the place to go cheap because you can try to go cheap and save money and end up either losing money or, or missing the ability to save more when it counts. Bobby, uh, we talked a lot about asset protection and making sure that we can operate from anywhere. What is the best way for our listeners to get in touch if they want to learn more about you or

Speaker A: your businesses, Business anywhere, is our main site. That's our main business. Now you can reach us there. Business anywhere. IO. I mean, we have a YouTube channel too. Just search business anywhere on YouTube. But yeah, we do a lot of YouTube videos. We're doing, to be honest, I don't know, five to ten videos a week. So we get a lot of content out there about that. We have, my God, at this point, close to 2,000 blog posts on our website. So we blast out a ton of content. But I want to preface this by saying we have a ton of content with a ton of information out there. But for the love of God, do not go listen to one of my videos or watch one of our blog posts and be like, yep, I need to do this because I watched Bobby's video or I watched or read Bobby's blog post. You can't do that because, you know, John, like you mentioned, you need the nuance, all the details of it. I mean, sure, like some basic things like, hey, I've got a rental house in Columbia, South Carolina. I need to register an LLC to own my rental house. Okay, sure, you can do stuff like that. I do still recommend using a professional so that you don't end up with some of those other issues down the road. But yeah, just make sure, whether it's us or somebody else, make sure you get some professional advice when it comes to bigger picture things. And then our other website, if you're interested, um, that's more involved like coaching and tax structuring and that sort of thing. That's globalloveprotection.com I want to make one comment here real quick about the being cheap thing, because I always think this is a funny analogy and I love using. This is proper planning to me, like from an asset protection standpoint, proper asset protection and tax planning. To me it's like health insurance or liability insurance or whatever. And very few people nowadays are going to live their life without having insurance. Let's, let's speak about health insurance for a minute. Very few people are going to like go without having health insurance. Right. Why? Because you want to be protected from that big event. Sure. Maybe you don't need it for the regular checkup and teeth cleaning and physical and blood tests and stuff. You can do that relatively cheap. But you know, if you get cancer or if you get in a big car crash and break some stuff, you want that coverage to protect you against any major financial loss, right? Well, asset protection planning is kind of the same thing, but for some reason people think about it in a different way. They don't think about it like insurance. And they think I'm spending all this money and it doesn't do anything for me. But isn't having health insurance kind of the same way? Because nobody gets health insurance and thinks, I've been paying this premium now for 10 years. I really wish I would get brain cancer so this thing would pay off. You know what I mean? Like, nobody thinks, man, I sure wish I could get in a car wreck and have a $2 million hospital bill. So this health insurance pays off. No, of course not. You want to waste that money. You literally want to waste that money, right? Because you don't want the bad thing to happen. And it's the same thing from asset protection planning. You want to waste the money. Nobody wants to get sued for $12 million, but if you do, you really, really, really hope you had some structure in place to protect you and your family's future if you get hit with that.

Speaker B: So give me a failure or an apparent failure that sets you up for later success.

Speaker A: So I had a business, an installation company in my 20s, 20s and 30s, and I started that company in 1995. And one of my biggest clients was Walmart. And in 2001, Walmart, I had diversified, I had some other clients at that point, but Walmart was still almost half my business. I don't remember the exact numbers, but it was still like a couple of million dollars worth of revenue in 2001. I mean, we're I think maybe doing 5 million or something like that. And I got a letter on December 27, two days after Christmas, certified letter from Walmart to my office that said, effective today, we're ending your contract with Walmart. Have your, have your employees out of the stores today. We will not accept any invalid voices dated after December 27th. They fired us, literally. We didn't even get a 24 hour notice. It was literally a same day notice. And a big lesson I learned from that is I always want to diversify my income. Maybe I want to focus on one business, but I want to diversify my streams of income within that business. So like with business anywhere, we look at it like, like this, we get traffic and leads from different places. So I don't run only, let's say Google Ads or I don't run only Facebook ads. We have like eight different channels where we get leads from. So I look at it from a diversification standpoint. I also look at it from an income diversification standpoint. I want to have multiple streams of income. I've got business one Business two, business three. I've got real estate, I've got a stock portfolio, I've got a crypto portfolio, so on and so forth. So that was a big lesson. That was a big slap in the face to me to be like, hey, wake up. You can't have all your eggs in one basket. I mean, it's a stupid cliche, but

Speaker B: it's real, makes sense. Give me a digital or mobile resource you recommend for our listeners.

Speaker A: If your business involves any type of SEO or running ads or online traffic. Traffic you can't live without. Ahrefs, in my opinion. I don't know if you're familiar with Ahrefs. It's a H R E F s dot com. It's analytics. Analytics data you can't really get anywhere else. They own the marketplace for that type of analytical data. And having analytical data in your business, in any business, no matter what you're doing, business is hard and you got to make good decisions. And you can't make good decisions without information.

Speaker B: All right, give me the book you've recommended or gifted the most in the last year.

Speaker A: Oh, God, I read a lot. I'm going to give you three. I'm going to give you three because they're three completely different genres. But these are the three that I've, I have gifted and recommended a lot. Probably the biggest life changing book for me that I've ever read in my entire life that I read every few years and I recommend it is Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I don't know if you've ever read it or ever heard of it, but life changing book. But it is a commitment to read it. It is a massive book. It's, I want to say it's like 15 or 1600 pages or something like that. It's huge. But it's well worth it. It's a, to me, it's a life changing book. The way you think about the world, the way you think about economics, the way you think about business. It's a novel. It's not like a personal development book or anything like that, but it's a novel with a very clear philosophy and a very clear message behind it. That's number one. Number two is Atomic Habits. I forgot the author's name. I don't know if you've heard of it. Yep, I read that book like once a year because I find myself like getting out of good habits and I'll just think I gotta go. Ready? Read Atomic Habits again. Actually, I listen to it on Audible. Like I'll go For walks or go to the gym or whatever and listen to it. I think it's a must read. I do. I read it once a year at least. I'm reading it right now again, actually, or listening to it on audible. And the third one, purely for fun, because it is hilarious. And I do think it's important to let your brain relax and have some downtime. And reading for fun, entertaining things is great. Is Dungeon Crawler Carl.

Speaker B: All right. Three different books. But I love the varying interest of those books as well. Good stuff there. Give me a daily habit that helps you stay focused on your goals.

Speaker A: Gym. Go to the gym every day.

Speaker B: All right. Easy enough, straightforward. Give me your number one insight into building a business that you can operate from anywhere.

Speaker A: You got to find what you're good at. You've got to find your niche. Like, I got a good example, actually. I've got a client, he's a friend of mine and a client, Canadian guy from the west coast of Canada. And he had a landscaping company and had a, quite, quite a large landscaping company. He was doing really, really well. And he decided personally for his lifestyle, he just wanted to travel the world. Well, his skill set was in managing that landscaping company. Like, he was very good at dealing with that, like the technical stuff, but also managing the business, customer service, all that stuff. But the one thing he became exceptionally good at was getting clients and the process of onboarding clients, creating the proper funnel to onboard clients and stuff like that. And he just decided he didn't want to physically like drive trucks around and mow grass anymore. Right. So he developed a skill that was relevant to a niche he was very knowledgeable about, a digital skill. He developed a skill for lead generation and building funnels and onboarding. And then he went out and created a kind, um, of a digital marketing agency solely focused on landscaping companies. And now his business is bigger than the landscaping business and he travels the world. So the thing is, you've got to take something you're good at and adapt it to make it location independent building location, independent, income. It's not really that hard. But mostly I think it's up in your head because, you know, you think like I remember growing up, my dad was always the guy that had to be in the office with the suit and tie on at 7:30 in the morning, sitting at the desk. And if you weren't there by 7:30 in the morning, he just, just didn't think you worked. Like, he just thought you're not working. He used to be the CFO of my Previous. I hired him, like, a couple years later after I started the company of my cfo. And he would call me in the morning and say, why aren't you at work? And I'm like, I am at work. I'm working from home. And he goes, you can't work from home. You're not at the office. Right. And so having the mindset to be able to work and maintain your own mental focus and drive when you have the other distractions around you, that's the tough thing. But you got to develop a skill within your wheelhouse and maintain that mental focus.

Speaker B: All right, last one here. Man, you are in North Carolina, but you have been all over the world. This is going to be tough, but give me your favorite place to grab a bite to eat.

Speaker A: Man, that is tough because I have lots of favorite restaurants. I just had two pop in my head. I'll give you both of them. So the first one that popped in my head, there's a restaurant called Lido. L I D O. It's in Ria, Latvia. R I G A Laia. Laia is, for those of you don't know, it's in Eastern Europe. It's a Baltic country. It's also not well known for its food culture, but it is an amazing place to go for food. It's just. They don't export. It's not like Italians who go live everywhere in the world and export their food culture. Latvians don't export their food culture. But the restaurant Lido, it's dumb. It's a cafeteria, okay? It's just a cafeteria. You take the tray, you go through the line, you pick your meat, you pick all the stuff. But, man, it is incredible. I absolutely love that place. I have a home in Latvia, and when I'm in Latvia, I probably. Probably eat there three times a week. I love the place. And then the other place that popped in my head, it's the original pizza place, like, where pizza was invented. This restaurant has been in business for hundreds of years, owned by the same family, making the pizza in the exact same recipe for hundreds of years. I can't remember the name of it, but it's in Naples. The pizza is incredible, but it's a tiny little place. Like, it doesn't look like anything special. It's literally in the same building for hundreds of years, though. Uh, it's. It's wild.

Speaker B: Two great options right there. I love to hear that story, especially the original pizza place, right? The origin of the pizza.

Speaker A: Origin of pizza. Yeah.

Speaker B: There you go, man.

Speaker A: It's cool.

Speaker B: Definitely worth checking out. Great stuff. I mean, Bob, uh, we talked a lot about asset protection and, you know, how to make sure that you stay insulated from different challenges that can, particularly when it comes to registering your llc. We also talked about operating your business from anywhere around the world. For those of you who want to learn more, check out his website. Uh, he's got business anywhere IO and globalwealthprotection.com thanks again for being a great guest and coming on Multifamily Insights. We look forward to staying in touch with you, and I hope you have a great day.

Speaker A: Thanks for having me, John. Take care. Have a great one.

Speaker B: Thank you for listening to this episode of Multifamily Insights, the podcast to help you become a better apartment investor. If you like this show, I need you to do three easy things. One, hit that subscribe button so you don't miss an episode. Two, leave us a rating and review so we can learn what you love about the show and how to make it better. And three, just chill to the next episode.

Speaker A: Sam.