Lessons From Millionaires

PREI 172 | Lessons From Millionaires

Thomas Stanley, the author of The Millionaire Next Door wrote, “Before you can become a millionaire, you must learn to think like one.” Clark Sheffield and Jace Mattinson, hosts of the Millionaires Unveiled podcast, have talked to over 100 millionaires about their stories and strategies of success in real estate. Tapping into their brain, they have pulled out amazing nuggets of information of how they started their journey and how they got to become millionaires. In this episode, Clark and Jace share how they came up with the idea for their podcast and reveal the common denominators they have found amongst all these millionaires they’ve interviewed.

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Thomas Stanley, the author of The Millionaire Next Door wrote, “Before you can become a millionaire, you must learn to think like one.” What would it be like if you could interview successful everyday millionaires and hear their stories on how they got to where they are? What were they investing in? What were their investment strategies? How did they allocate their portfolio? How did they get started and what decisions did they make along the way? My two guests did just that. They’ve interviewed over 100 everyday millionaires to ask them those very questions and many others. What I wanted to do is ask them what they learned from their many interviews that they did with those same millionaires. Maybe think of this interview as a cliff notes version of lessons learned from everyday millionaires. I hope you enjoy this.

If you missed our last episode, be sure to listen to Lessons Learned From Jim Rohn and Other Great Legends with Kyle Wilson.

Enjoy the show!

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It’s my pleasure to welcome Clark and Jace to the show. Clark Sheffield is a CPA and completed his undergrad in accounting from Brigham Young University and his Master’s in Accounting from the University of Notre Dame. Jace Mattinson graduated in Accounting from Brigham Young University as well and started his career with PricewaterhouseCoopers. He’s an active CPA and the current CFO of his company. They are both the hosts of the Millionaires Unveiled podcast where they have talked to over 100 everyday millionaires about their stories and strategies of success and real estate. Guys, welcome.

Thanks for having us. We appreciate it.

I’m excited to have you on because who else do I know, which is nobody, that has interviewed over 100 millionaires and tapped into their brain to pull out those amazing nuggets of information of how they started their journey and how they got to become a millionaire. I’m excited to ask you some questions here.

We’re at 100 interviews or so. It’s been a good journey so far.

Why don’t you both tell us a little bit more about your background, what you guys do and give my readers a sense of who you are.

I went to BYU, Master’s from Notre Dame and then came out to New York and started working in accounting at KPMG, just a big accounting firm. I left after a couple of years to lead the accounting and finance at a multifamily real estate investing in a property management company here in New York City. We buy multifamily assets of about 35 buildings all in northern Manhattan and the Bronx. I lead the accounting team here and then Jace and I decided to start the podcast and have been working on that on the side.

I graduated from BYU and accounting as well and started my career at PWC or formerly known as Pricewaterhouse. I stayed there for a couple of years and then went to an outsourced accounting firm where I was a partner and then went on with one of my clients in somewhat of a turnaround situation. Now I’m a CFO of a company and we own and operate building materials supply centers and hardware stores throughout Texas.

You guys have an interesting podcast idea and that was to interview millionaires and you refer to them as everyday millionaires. Either way, it’s a very interesting idea and a cool topic. Here you are interviewing this millionaire demographic and you’ve got me curious on so many levels that we could probably talk for, but we’re not going to do that. Let’s start with the mindset because I always believe that you should invest in yourself first before you invest in other things. I’m always intrigued by people’s mindset, their mentality, their upbringing and all that good stuff. After interviewing 100-plus millionaires, what things have you found to be common amongst all these millionaires you’ve interviewed? There must be common denominators that you found, I would assume.

Let me just back up and say why we started at first and then we’ll go into it. Initially, Jace and I were starting to grow our careers and had enough income where we could invest on the side where we could start buying real estate, investing in the market or whatever else we wanted to. We started looking out and saying, “What do we want to invest in?” That took us to know some allocations of some people. Some of these people post how they invest online. You have different podcasts where you can hear about these things. That led us to say, “How do all millionaires invest? How do people who have been successful, whether it’s a net worth of $1 million or $100 million, how do they invest in? What’s been their journey?” That was the goal of the podcast initially. As we’ve been interviewing these millionaires, you pick up so much additional information from them. One of that’s being the mindset. Sometimes we think these people are all so driven, so focused, the goal set and they work on themselves but that’s not always the case. I think a lot of them do.

A lot of them set goals. A lot of them work on themselves, go to seminars and this and that, but a lot of them aren’t big into goal setting. I’d say, and Jace can speak for himself, but a couple of the things that stood out to me or have stood out to me if we had done these interviews is their intentionality and they’re focused. Everybody’s different. Whether they invest in the market, whether they invest in real estate, whether they invest in their small business, whether they’re somehow split, whether they inherited their million dollars, whatever it is, they’re intentional about what they’re doing with their money. That’s probably been the biggest thing that I’ve taken away from the podcast and all these interviews. People know what they want and sometimes they switch and they move around, but they’re a go-getter and they’re driven to succeed.

Did you say they’re a go-giver or go-getter?

Go-getter but they are a giver. They give a lot too.

I’m going to get to that here because it’s one of the things I’m curious about as well. I don’t know if you have anything else to add to that, but my related question to that is about their backgrounds. It must be widely varied, but do you find a wide variety of backgrounds or do they all come from a common starting ground?

I think the interesting thing is they have various backgrounds. Some people grew up and stayed, some people didn’t. Some people grew up in wealthy households, some didn’t. I think the common denominator amongst all these people is his work ethic, to be honest. A lot of them have a very good work ethic. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they developed that when they were ten, but they definitely at some point developed a work ethic to become good at their craft or their career, whatever it might be. The background for all of them, I would say, hasn’t held anyone back one way or the other. We’ve had people that have come completely out of poverty and we’ve had people that have grown up super wealthy but didn’t receive any inheritance at all from their parents or family. We’ve also had people that have come on our show that have inherited a substantial chunk of change but have continued to work and continue to build their wealth.

That’s a very varied background. It’s not that they all had a silver spoon in their mouth. They may have come from well-to-do families, but they didn’t necessarily get a head start from their parents, like for example, President Trump, from what I understand had a loan from his father.

A small loan of million dollars.

PREI 172 | Lessons From Millionaires — Lessons From Millionaires: Millionaires are intentional about what they’re doing with their money.

Relatively speaking, that’s a great catalyst to get someone launched, especially if you know what you’re doing and you have connections. Other people may have come from a poor family and they just had to claw and work and struggle their way through to get off the ground and then build it up.

I think there are a few people that have built it up and then lost it. We interviewed a guy who was over-leveraged in 2008, 2009 and lost it all. He’s since built it up and is now worth about $5 million. For the most part, it’s just been slow and steady. They started a career just like you or me and they just built it up from there.

I think there’s a lot of truth to the fact that a lot of successful people failed at least once in their past and probably multiple times. I’ve also heard statistics that a lot of people who are very successful who are millionaires or multimillionaires have filed for bankruptcy at least once in their past because they just took a risk and tried to knock it out of the park. Things didn’t go their way. They failed. They were underwater and they got themselves in a situation where they didn’t have a choice but to file for bankruptcy, whether it’s personal or business. I think you are more prone to fail trying hard to succeed, but it’s those people that try hard and fail that ultimately do succeed because they are there trying.

Jace, correct me if I’m wrong, but the two people that come to mind that have filed bankruptcy and have since rebooted, and I think that goes back to the mindset and the intentionality and the work ethic. They were going to go all out and try and succeed and something didn’t happen and these two gentlemen that we interviewed went bankrupt. It wasn’t long after that they got back on their feet and were wealthy and successful again.

I would just add that Clark and I both like sports and I think there’s a common phrase in sports sometimes that you play the game to win instead of playing in fear of losing and whatnot. I think a lot of these millionaires really take that to heart. They are playing the game to win versus trying not to lose, if you will. Whether that be investments or career or whatever, they’re willing to take those big risks to play the game, whether it be real estate, putting money in the market, equities or even their own business versus trying not to lose. You’ll definitely see that more and more as people have gotten wealthier and wealthier. They’re playing that game to win versus trying not to lose.

That’s a huge differentiator and that parallels the saying that successful people have an abundance mindset rather than a scarcity mindset. Because when you have a scarcity mindset, you tend to play not to lose because you want to preserve what you have. You’re not trying to grow what you have or what you could potentially create. There’s a lot of truth I think in that saying. In terms of habits, are there some common habits that attribute to these people’s success? Is there more to it than what you just said or does that summarize the whole thing for millionaires?

I don’t think there’s one thing that stands out just because they all come from totally different backgrounds. Maybe Jace will think differently. I think a big part of the habit is just they keep going. Maybe we think of that as an easy thing to do, but these guys just keep going and they’re relentless. They’re tracking their net worth. They’re talking to people that are successful, they’re hanging out with good people. They’re trying to learn. They’re reading books. Maybe reading is a habit that we’ve all noticed. When we ask, “What are your favorite books,” they all have something to say. They learn from their mistakes. We always ask, “What are some of the mistakes you’ve made?” It’s been a joke on the show a little bit because I think they’ve all made so many. They all say, “I can’t just pick one.” I would say probably reading, learning, pushing themselves and surrounding themselves with good, successful people that they can learn from is probably the things that stand out to me.

To add to that. For the most part, I would say a lot of them are frugal or at least were very frugal when they were just beginning. They didn’t buy those luxury items when maybe they hit that first home run or even that first double. Those luxury items, if they ever came waited definitely towards the later chunk of their wealth building, if you’re looking at it in innings. The other thing that I would add to that as well is these millionaires, Clark alluded there just not really one thing. Some people say, “Millionaires always get up early and they always go to bed early,” and all these things. What we’ve seen is it doesn’t matter. What matters is figuring out what works for you, whether in terms of your habits, tracking your net worth every single month, you don’t track it all or waking up at [spp-timestamp time=”5:30″] in the morning because that’s the time you like to get up and get to work. Maybe you’re a night owl and you like to work until [spp-timestamp time=”2:00″] in the morning. We’ve seen stuff all over the board with that. The same thing with investments. It’s just like a muscle. How do you want to work out these different muscles and figuring out how that works best for you and we’ve seen things all over the board amongst all these millionaires?

That’s a very interesting observation that there is such a wide diversity in characters, personality types, habits and maybe even belief systems that you can be successful regardless of who you are. What your background was, whether you’re a morning person or a night person, what your investment strategy might be. I keep coming back to this myself. It comes down to persistence. If you have a strategy and even a half-baked plan but you’re persistent with it, I think ultimately you will achieve a certain level of success. Persistence is probably one of the biggest drivers I have found, at least in my experience with the people that I know, that have led people to be successful.

Continual persistence and being intentional about what you’re going after. I think they all have some element or some goal they’re reaching on. I wouldn’t say that they sit down every morning and review their goals or even that every year they’re there making goals. I think big picture, they’ve thought about it and they’re persistently trying to get there.

Let me quickly flip that question on its head and ask the opposite type of question. What were the worst habits that held these people back or caused them to fail?

I’d say probably laziness has come up more often than not. They are maybe jumping in too quickly to something that they didn’t understand, trying to invest in the markets or real estate or Bitcoin or something without fully understanding it. I think you’re spot on that if you just keep grinding and keeping persistent and keep going at it, eventually some level of success comes. I oftentimes think when these people are grinding, they get an opportunity or they meet somebody and their career or their path to success goes down a different road. It’s not necessarily something that they had planned on, but it just went that way. I think laziness of people not putting themselves out there, that’s what has held them back.

One of the posters I have on my wall says, “Greatness demands everything.” If you think about that, you realize that you can achieve almost anything you want, but it requires almost everything you’ve got. You’ve got to be a player, not just a fan.

It’s hard. Everybody has had a successful day or week where someone said, “I worked hard this week,” or you worked hard at completing something or you procrastinated a task and then you got it done. Everyone knows that feeling of when you get it done and you feel fulfilled. I think that’s what a lot of these, at least the people you’ve interviewed and obviously successful people anywhere, that’s what they’d done. I think they’re just focused on their tasks. They keep going, they keep grinding. That’s hard to do continually week-after-week, year-after-year.

There are times where you get burned out and people will think, “Why am I doing this? It’s just too much work. It’s just too draining. Too much energy. I’d rather hit the pillow than hit my laptop and create something.” Those are the people who become very successful. You look back and you realize that it was worth those years of pain to now have that financial freedom. Time freedom for the rest of my life and then be able to pass that along to my heirs, my children, their children. It’s worth it.

Jace mentioned about frugality a little bit. I guess the other side of that is probably those who aren’t frugal or you don’t necessarily have to be frugal if you’re making a ton of money. If you’re not making a lot, then you have to be a little bit more frugal if you want discretionary income to invest. There’s probably a lot of people that we could be interviewing that we’re not because they’re chosen to spend their money versus investing it. All of these people have chosen to grow their side income or live frugally so that they do have the income to grow and invest.

My last mindset-related question is something that I think about from time to time. It came from Robert Kiyosaki, who I know reasonably well. I’ve had dinner with him many times and hung out with him a lot. He talks about this misconception that a lot of people have, that people who are rich or wealthy or millionaires are greedy folks, that they’re all about themselves and whatnot. My question to you is did you get a sense in all these interviews of how many of these people donate to charities or give back to the community in other ways?

I would say that nearly all of them donate to charity or give back to the community or provide essentially, “Free mentorship,” to other people to help them be successful or give up their time and other ways. I think the higher you go up that ladder, you see a lot of these people become more and more worried and concerned about maybe their “legacy” if you will. A lot of that legacy revolves around giving. They want to give and they want to give back. There’s something that happens in our brains when we do that and a lot of people enjoy that. I honestly can’t even think of anybody we’ve interviewed that was like, “I don’t like to give back. I like to keep it all for myself.”

I had no idea how you’re going to answer that question, but your answer doesn’t surprise me. I’m happy to hear what you said because it really dispels the myth that some people have. I don’t want to paint a picture of a certain demographic, but I think as you get down the economic scale or ladder, if you will, to people are not well-off and maybe struggle living paycheck to paycheck. They have this false belief that people who are successful because they’ve worked hard for it, are greedy people. They don’t actually contribute or give back to society or help out in any way. That’s so far from the truth that I wish that everybody knew how much these people did.

Much of it is financially, so much of it is given to tithes, offerings or given to different groups or youth groups. Much of it too is just being willing to teach and help and share their story. I’m sure you know this because you’d done so many interviews, but so often we talk to these guys. You’re interviewing a guy who is worth $10 million, $12 million, it seems like you could keep them on and ask anything. He’s so willing to help and he’s so open. I think that’s so valuable. Sometimes we think of these uber-rich people being like, “I don’t have time for you,” but they’re so willing not just with us, but other people. They want to help. That’s been their whole life, their whole story. I think that’s a lot of giving back that they do as well that’s maybe not talked about as frequently as I should.

Let’s shift a bit here. Let’s talk about more of the investment side of the equation here with these millionaires. Let’s get into how and what. Based on all these interviews, what does a typical asset allocation look like? I’m sure this is probably very diversified and there’s probably no one size or model fits all, but what have you seen across all these interviews in terms of asset allocation?

It’s totally different. Some people are 100% invested in the market, some people are 100% invested in real estate. Some people are 60/40, some people are 40/60. Some people are in small business. Within that, of course, there are several different buckets. If they’re invested in the market, are they invested in retirement accounts or outside of their retirement accounts? Are they invested in health savings accounts or 529 plans? Are they invested just in the traditional market? If I were to sum it all up, I would say if we were to average everything, I bet you it’s 70% in the market or 65% in the market and 35% in real estate. Of course in real estate, stop me here if I ramble on, but there are so many buckets and just for this interview because I know you’re so heavy in real estate here and that’s probably what a lot of people reading is. I’ll just briefly run down some of the investments that we’ve heard of. Single-family investments, do you self-manage it or do you hire a property management company? Have you turned your primary residence into a rental? You bought your second house and you decided, “I’m going to rent out my primary residence.”

Some of them have been accidental landlords. They bought a house or they got a new job and they moved and they didn’t want to be a landlord, but they ended up being a landlord. That ranges from people with one single-family rental to a guy that lives abroad and owns twenty single-family rentals and hires a property management company to take care of it. Outside of single-family you have multifamily. That’s anything from syndicated to non-syndicated to owning a quadplex and living in one of the units, house hacking. Beyond that, you have people that have an Airbnb strategy or they own mobile home parks, they own a self-storage, they flip land, maybe they own a commercial property. One guy comes to mind with that owned a big commercial office complex and 70% of his net worth was in this one commercial office complex. All across the board, I’d say probably the average is, Jace, maybe you think differently, 65/35 market to real estate, maybe 70/30, but guys that are 100% real estate and the guys that are scared of real estate and won’t touch it.

I think the thing I would add is more often than not, the people that are in real estate are heavy in real estate, 90%-plus probably. The people that whether they’re W-2 or self-employed and they invest in the market, their allocation will be slighted probably 75% more towards the market. Part of that because they maybe haven’t got the real estate investments rolling yet, but they typically will go to the market first and then start looking at real estate as they progress in their career. Same thing with business owners. Business owners typically will choose one or the other from what we’ve seen. We call it the three-legged stool. We haven’t seen very many of those allocations where they typically are trying to maintain somewhat of a healthy allocation between the three buckets. The other thing I would add too is a majority of them keep probably 20% to 25% or less in their home equity or home value, if you will.

Are you saying they keep 20% or so of their net worth in their principal residence or are you talking about the equity within their principal residence, they keep it low?

Yes. Both, basically. If they’ve got $1 million net worth on average equity in their home or if it’s paid off is going to be in that $200,000 to $250,000 range or less.

All these people that you interviewed are involved in real estate to some degree or maybe entirely, how many of them are what I refer to as active real estate investors versus passive. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, just ask me. How many?

Let’s say we take that to 100 people we’ve interviewed, and I don’t know Jace, maybe 70 of them are in real estate and maybe there are 25 or so that haven’t been. What do you think, Jace, 20% are active?

The people that we’ve interviewed tend to invest more passively, whether it’s via crowdfunding platforms or turnkey providers or syndications. They typically will invest more passively than actively.

They own single-families, but they hire a property management company. They don’t self-manage it themselves.

I find that to be pretty typical anyway. Even with active real estate investors that are creating their own deals, buying distressed, fixing them up, regardless of the size of that asset, they tend to hand it over to a management company and not self-manage, but they go onto the next deal or the next business idea, whatever they do. Passive investing seems to be very popular and certainly the most dominant form of real estate investing.

I’d say that’s what we’ve seen as well.

Here’s a similar question. Do you have any sense of how many of those real estate investor millionaires you’ve interviewed are local investors versus investing long distance? Do you have a sense of the mix in their portfolio of how much is local versus out of their local area?

I’d say it’s split. It’s something I’m interested in because I’m in New York and so I’ve often asked, “Do you invest out of state or what are your concerns if you do invest out of state?” I’d say seven or eight out of ten of them invest out of state. I know you talk about that a lot is investing not necessarily where you live. That’s okay. You know a lot of people do them. A lot of people do that. The one that comes to mind is a guy that’s in Korea that works in the military and he owns twenty single-family rentals in the States. He’s kept buying them. Another lady owns eight across several different states, single-family rentals and she hires a different property management company in each state that does that. It’s definitely there.

In wrapping this subject about investing, what do you think has contributed more to a millionaire’s net worth and success? Was it investing in a particular asset class or was it investing in a business that created their income and net worth to grow their net worth in other asset classes?

I think that’s a tough question because you definitely see the ones that have created a business get on the higher echelon, had higher incomes, they are able to put more capital to work as an investment in certain asset classes. I think we hit on it earlier in terms of just building in general, it’s the consistency and the persistence. Whether that’s building a business and taking excess cashflow out of your business and investing it in real estate or in other businesses or whatever else or whether that’s taking that cashflow and investing it back in your business to grow it. Those are very consistent approaches that we’ve seen. Somebody who started super young and invested some of their W-2 income, time grows. Time helps money grow. We’ve seen some of them, especially with this last bull run in the market. Some of those people have done significantly well.

The other thing we don’t mention or that we haven’t mentioned that we’ve seen. We’ve had a lot of people that have either gotten some sort of stock options or whether it be a little bit of equity in their company that then went and sold or when IPO. There are quite a few of those. You see a bunch of them in the media because it’s very popular for somebody to go work at a tech unicorn and then cash out. For as many of those that are successful, there’s also a bunch that isn’t. We’ve also talked to some people where they didn’t have a unicorn exit but they had a little bit of equity in their company. That ended up being like these had $10 million sales and they had a $400,000 personal exit from that company, which is a sizable chunk of change when their salary might’ve only been $100,000. That’s one other way that we’ve seen several millionaires get to that mark is being able to cash out some sort of equity at some point, even if it wasn’t their own business.

Owning a business is a fast track if you have a successful business. We all know this. If you can build a successful business, which granted is a hard thing to do and takes years to get to a point where you’ve passed critical mass and now you’ve got that rocket launched in the air. It’s a matter of more sustaining the business than it is trying to force build it. Those people who are professionals have high incomes, even if they’re W-2 or have successful businesses have more working capital along with the credit to build that portfolio so they can fast track their success. For everybody else who’s, I hate to say, just on a W-2 income, you’ve got to manage your expenses and make sure that you can save as much as you can, as fast as you can, so you can deploy it into growing assets like real estate. It’s not an unfair advantage. It’s just a matter of choice. It’s what people chose to do. They took a risk and built a business and maybe they became millionaires faster than the W-2 person, but it’s all doable.

If they’re making more on a W-2 job, then they can do it as well. We have people that are high W-2 earners and that’s what they do. The people that it takes longer and they struggle to get ahead faster are the people that are lower W-2 earners. That’s just how it is because they can’t put as much aside and they can invest it, whether that’s in the market or real estate or starting their own small business, it gets harder.

After doing all these interviews, what has been your greatest lesson or take away from them?

In looking at it, Clark and I were interested in the allocation and how people did it. For myself, I’ve been investing in the markets. I have a paper out starting at ten or eleven. I had a lawn care business stuff, so I’ve been putting money away into a Roth IRA since I was twelve, thirteen years old. I’m just ingrained into that market a little bit and I get the public markets and some of the things that I’ve invested in have performed really well over the twenty-year span. I think the one thing that’s for me personally that I’ve learned, especially more so from some of our decamillionaires and some other people that have allocated this way, it’s to reevaluate my allocation. What I’ve chosen to do with that is adopt the three-legged stool and have those tax-protected retirement-type accounts that are going to stay in the market. I may end up self-directing some in the future, but there’s one thing that is great about though or terrible about those and that’s that they don’t provide cashflow, which other assets do. I will continually have that bucket there. I’m not going to cash it out and I don’t plan to self-direct any of that to the point that I’d try to co-mingle it with personal money so that I can get some cashflow. It’s led me also to take the approach that I’m going to invest, at least try to keep around a third of my net worth in cashflowing “passive income” real estate.

Another third, which may end up being a lot more than a third just because businesses grow faster, but in business equity. That even means going as far as such as buying and acquiring businesses with excess cashflow, whether it be an online business or taking a chunk of money every year and investing in something that I want to start up from the ground up. I don’t know, that’s a really interesting question, but I’ve moved into that boat. The other thing I think that I’ve learned a lot is the value of having health savings accounts for those people that have a high deductible plan. The government allows you to pay for healthcare with tax-free money. If not, you can invest that money in various asset classes. There are very few investments where you can put away money, the earned income like that, and let it continue to earn tax-free forever as long as it’s used for healthcare. It’s pretty inevitable that all of us are going to have some sort of healthcare expense now or in the future or both. I think that’s one thing. There’s a lot of millionaires we’ve interviewed that that’s one part of their portfolio. They’re always like, “I wish I would have done that,” or, “I wish I would have grown that,” or, “I wish I would have done something with that.” “I just started one last year. I wish I would have done it several years ago,” thing.

I didn’t know HSA was so popular amongst other millionaire people.

I think oftentimes we get this question like, “What have you learned?” “Tell me about your typical millionaire. Who is it?” Like, “You’ve interviewed so many, who is it? What did they do?” I think a big takeaway is, and it’s not a sexy answer necessarily to give, but there’s no one way. All these people have done it so differently. I think the trade, and we’ve touched on this several times, is they’ve been persistent in what they’re doing. Some people have done it all through real estate. Some people have done it all through W-2 jobs. Some people have been at all through their own business, but they’ve all done it differently. I think it’s great to hear tons of stories.

People do it differently. How did they do it? Some people had tons of failures, some people only had a few failures. Some people have tons of advice to give and some people say, “I got lucky.” It’s tough, there’s no one way. There really isn’t. I think I’ve learned that cash is king. All these people are able to get to where they are because they have the cash to invest. Regardless of how they got it, it doesn’t matter. They had to invest and they put it to work and that’s how they’ve grown their net worth. Whether it’s through properties, something in the market or a small business, they’ve saved cash or they’ve got cash. That’s what has helped lead to their success.

In terms of favorite books, you probably asked this question a lot and you probably hear the same ones come up over and over again. What would you say are the top two or three books that you hear more often than not?

I’d say the top two are probably Rich Dad Poor Dad and Millionaire Mind or Millionaire Next Door. A lot of these guys are reading biographies. That’s something I’ve taken away too. A lot of them are reading about successful people or lessons from successful people. Warren Buffett’s essays come up a lot on the show as well. I think Rich Dad Poor Dad’s probably the number one book that comes up over and over again.

What about influencers? Do they have favorite influencers? People that they follow that they use as mentors?

I think that’s an interesting question as well because I wouldn’t say that there’s one person or one thing. What we found, and this is funny as people really relate to somebody who’s in their shoes or has gone their path. I think overall, we have these people in the social media space that have big followings Gary Vaynerchuk, Grant Cardone comes to mind. Don’t get me wrong, people read their books and follow them too, but for most people that we interview, those people don’t really relate to. They’re trying to find somebody or pick somebody out, whether it be a blog or somebody that has an Instagram account that they really relate to. Whether that person’s gone the similar route that they want to go or is going or they’re around the same age or age group. Maybe there are leaps and bounds ahead of them in income, business or net worth. They try to follow in and class bond to lessons that they might learn from that person.

Last question, and this is pointing the spotlight back at you. Based on the interviews you had and everything you’ve learned from all these millionaires, what advice would you give my readers to help them get to that next level in their financial journey?

I’m going to circle back to intentionality. That’s something that all these guys, whether you’re young or old and whether you’re trying to buy if it’s a real estate. Let’s say for example, if you’re trying to buy your first property or invest in something. You got to set a goal. The people that set goals and are intentional about what they want to do, that’s how it happens the fastest. If the goal is, “I want to buy my first rental,” work towards it and make that be a goal and do what you need to do to get there. That’s what these people do. That’s what the successful people do is they wake up every morning and they grind it out. They go to work, and they have these goals in mind and they say, “I’m going to keep going until I reach it and when I reach it, I’m going to do the next thing.”

My advice is to learn from successful people. Do what you can, whether it’s podcasts or reading. There are so many free resources right now with podcasts and blogs and everything that’s out there. There are so many free resources and so much available to everybody. Anybody who wants to be successful can be. Anybody who wants to be successful in real estate can be. Anybody who wants to be a successful investor in the market can be. If you want to have a successful W-2 job, if you want to make $1 million a year in your job, it’s all successful. You can do it, you can be successful. I think you just need to focus on it and be intentional about what you want. That’s probably the first place to start is what do you want. If the goal is to own a ten-unit property and that’s the only goal, you can get there. You’ve got to take the steps and be intentional.

Jace, what about you?

I would add to that, growing your circle of influence, I don’t know that people realize how much the people that hang out with and talk with really influences their mindset and decision making. If you grow that circle of influence, that can be making new friends, that could be finding somebody online that you like, that you take a liking to and get to know them better. Go meet them at a conference, take them out to lunch. Clark and I could share numerous stories of people that we’ve been in contact with or in the room with or talk with or whatever that we would have never ever thought possible. All of it led to that point from growing that circle of influence. One thing I think that I’ve heard a few people talk about, and I this has worked for me. If there’s somebody you want to want to hang out with or want to get to know better and you’re really not sure how to approach it, donate to their personal charity or some sort of event they’re putting on. Try to get your foot into the door that way with them.

Anything else you want to add?

I think that’s good. Thanks so much for having us. We really appreciate you taking the time.

Thank you.

Tell our readers how they can find out about what you guys do or find out more about what you’re all about.

We have a website MillionairesUnveiled.com. You can find the podcast there. They’re also on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, anywhere. We’re redoing the website so that people can go on and read these summaries of each of the interviews that we do. You just search Millionaires Unveiled, you can find us.

I appreciate you taking the time to come on. It’s very interesting stuff. Clark and Jace, keep up the good work. I love what you guys are doing.