SPEAKER_01 0:00

Nobody's gonna look out for your financial well-being but you. You can't control everything. You can just control how you respond and how you react and what you do. Turns out not many people want to take life advice from a 26-year-old. How did you go from 100 employees to five and make more money? Go strategic partnerships. The biggest cost of a company is turnover.

SPEAKER_00 0:19

What's up everybody? Grant Wise here, back again for another episode of the Partner in Profit Podcast. Today I'm excited for my conversation with Brandon Cobb. He is a coach, and he's gonna get into his background and everything that he does in the real estate spaces. And I'm excited for the conversation today. I met him in uh a mastermind uh that is ran by Tom Kroll, Coaching Inc. And uh just really excited for the conversation today. So, Brandon, man, thank you for being here.

SPEAKER_01 0:44

Hey, pleasure is all mine. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_00 0:46

Yeah, so for anybody that's listening to this and doesn't really know who you are, give us a little bit of the backstory, man. How'd you get to where you are today?

SPEAKER_01 0:52

Yeah, so you know, it's an interesting story because if you told me 10 years ago that we'd be inventing new neighborhoods, I'd have looked at you like you had seven heads. So uh I'm actually a medical device sales rep turned real estate developer. So, you know, two completely different worlds. So I got into real estate development, but did have zero experience whatsoever uh in it before uh I got started. I'm what you probably call an accidental entrepreneur. I don't have some story about working in a corporate culture that I hated for decades, and I have some dream to go start a company. No, that's not me at all. I spent my younger years working and slaving to break into my career dream job, which was medical device sales. It took me years to get in, and man, I had what I would call a really good gig going. I love my boss. He was like a father figure to me, right? He was training me. He's like the guy that gave me that shot to break into the industry. And you know, it was like, well, it's not the love. I was a young guy wearing scrubs every single day to work, rubbing shoulders with orthopedic surgeons, getting to be in surgeries every day, training the hospital staff on my product. I thought that was the coolest thing in the world, right? There's a lot of intrinsic satisfaction. I was selling something that I believed in. And then one sunny Friday afternoon, my boss calls me over to the Starbucks over in Weston and says, Hey, you know, meet me after work. And I pull up and it's sunny and I could smell the coffee. And it was one of those days where I was like excited to tell my boss how much money I'd made him. You know, you like had a killer day as a sales rep. And all you want to do is just, you know, make your boss happy in those days, right? And uh he fires me. Oh, and I was completely shocked for several hours because this job was like my blood, sweat, and tears. It was like, I mean, it was my dream job, and I was like, all I could think about that day, the thought that ran through my head over and over and over again, which I'm sure has happened to a lot of people, was what did I do wrong? Like, what did I do wrong? What did I do wrong? Like, that's all I could think about. I was like, dude, I loved what I did. I was passionate about it, I worked. And, you know, after the shock wore off, I learned something that I will continue to carry with me for the rest of my life, and that's that nobody's gonna look out for your financial well-being but you. So um I took that advice and I was jobless now. So I started a few things. I started a how to break into medical device sales course that failed. I said, you know what, I'm really into the whole motivation, Tony Robbins stuff. Maybe I'll uh I'll get I'll do an online motivational blog. That failed. I said, well, maybe I'll be a life coach. I really like that. I was really into coaching. And Grant, you're not gonna believe this, but turns out not many people want to take life advice from a 26-year-old. So that failed too. And then I discovered this powerful vehicle called real estate. And you know, at first I made all the mistakes. I sold all my retirement accounts to like buy my first flip. I paid like the taxes and stuff. It's just stupid. Don't do that if you're listening, by the way. Do not sell your retirement accounts uh to invest in rules that you can actually use them to invest and not pay the penalties. I wish I'd known that. But that was the start of my house flipping company. So I built that up for you know a year or two, doing like 30, 40 flips a year, graduated into doing new construction, and we started scaling that business, had a need to raise capital. So we started HBG Capital. Um, that's our investor-facing firm, and so we started syndicating funds, starting funds and syndications and raising money in order to grow and scale that new construction business. And then, you know, one day we had all this land that we were developing, getting ready to build homes on, and we started getting boom, boom, boom, knock on the door. It was from a national home builder, like you probably heard of them, right? They're publicly traded, and they said, We really like your development. We want to buy it, we want to build the houses. And we were like, get lost. No, uh, we're gonna do it. And they came back with a contract and said, Well, what if we paid you this for it? And my partner and I look at the contract, we look at each other, we look at the contract, we look at our other, and we said, It's for sale, you can have it, we'll sell it to you. And do you want the one across the street too? Because we'll we'll develop and sell you that. So that's how we got into doing land entitlement and land development. It was by accident. And uh, you know, I I tell you this uh this story um just because you know, if a guy that is has no background or experience whatsoever can do in it, like you can too. So, you know, fast forward today, one of the favorite things that uh we get to do that I love is just seeing these new communities come to life.

SPEAKER_00 5:12

That's really cool, man. That's a great story. I I I'm sitting here wondering, like, did you ever get to figure out why you're you got fired from the dream job? That sounds crazy.

SPEAKER_01 5:21

So for whatever reason, my boss he did tell me something that day. He goes, Look, Brandon, I just I don't think that you are a fit for our company any longer. And uh I hope you learn something from this. So for whatever reason, he thought I wasn't a culture fit from it. Yeah, you know, and um, you know, I had gotten like the rookie of the year sales award, you know, like six months ago, so I was all like jazzed up. So I was like, you know, is it me? I know my sales weren't that great for the first six months, but it's how you end the year, you know, kind of not how you start. So, you know, maybe maybe I wasn't as good as medical device sales as is like I thought, but for whatever reason, you know, it was it was a it was time to let me go. And you know, I I don't blame him at all, right? I appreciate the opportunity and everything that he did for me, and of course, very thankful that that happened because uh look at everything that's to come since then.

SPEAKER_00 6:05

You know, one of my favorite things that I was taught from a coach, uh his name was John Sheplach, he taught me something called duality, which he learned from a woman, I believe her name was Debbie Ford. And when I started working with him, he was like, make a list of all the stuff that's ever happened to you in your life that's bad. Just make a list. And then write out what good came from it. And it was a very um interesting exercise. It took me about a week, and I I came away, I think I had like 12 to 15 pages of stuff. And uh those lessons of like, okay, but this is the bad thing that happened, but here's the good thing that came from it, have just been invaluable to me uh as life has gone on, because bad stuff happens all the time. You know, you can't control everything, you can just control how you respond and how you react and what you do, you know, from then on. It sounds like you uh you you know you found your thing and it's it's probably for the best.

SPEAKER_01 6:54

Oh, it's it's powerful. I can share a lot of my own stories around similar stuff, I'm sure. But you know, there was one one thing really powerful, and I learned this at a Tony Robbins event. If you haven't picked up, I'm a big Tony Robbins fan, right? I've I've probably spent more money uh on his programs than some people spend on their cars. But you know, in it, one of the most powerful things that I saw was an exercise that he did where you know a lot of people, um, everybody who am I to say, we tend to hold on to past life events, grudges that happen, maybe abandonment, whatever that may. I mean, people can treat you very uh very wrong. You know, fathers can abandon their kids. And there was a woman on there who had just this grudge again against her father. So, you know, she uh she was gay, and when she came out as gay when she was younger, her father kind of like disowned her, just stopped talking to her, yada yada, and like she it you it just affected her her entire life, right? Her relationships, everything. Well, you know, during the event, you know, Tony did something really powerful, which was like, well, if you're gonna blame him for your problems, you're gonna blame him for all the good stuff too. And he flipped it, and it was really interesting. And what she came to find going through that exercise was that that that anger that she had had from this, that she just carried, you know, she harnessed that into professional athleticism, and she ended up like competing and winning a lot of very serious Ironmans and triathlons, and was very astute, and that led to getting a lot of um sponsorships, you know, that paid her really well. And so when we flip that swap and all of a sudden become grateful for the bad things that have happened to us, it reframes everything. So very, very powerful. I started doing that too. If you're gonna blame somebody for all the bad crap in your life that they've done to you, you got to blame them for all the good stuff that have come from it as well.

SPEAKER_00 8:37

100%. Oh man, I couldn't agree more. Okay, getting back to um the accident, the accidental entrepreneur, you know, land developments. So you said land entitled developments, is that the way that you phrase that?

SPEAKER_01 8:48

Yeah, so you know, development's this tricky word that no one really understands. I think that it's it's like there's a lot of things that fit into it. So let me just break it down. It's very easy. There's there's three phases to develop. We do all three, okay? Land entitlement's phase one. That's where you take a piece of raw land and get it approved for a community. And you can sell it and make multiple seven figures on deals. So you're just taking a piece of farmland, taking it to the city, going, how do I create a community out of this and get it approved and just sell it? And so that's land entitlement. No construction whatsoever. You can just sell the approved paper and go. Phase two is where you do what I call all the horizontal development. And this is what I think true development really is. It's when you're grading the land, smoothening output the roads, the utilities, all that. You're basically creating a neighborhood with no homes. So that's phase two. And then there's phase three. That's when you actually build uh the homes. So we do all three, but over the last several years, we've predominantly been focused on phase one and phase two, and we're selling that land to national home builders. So we entitle land and we sell the paper, and we actually develop and sell the lots to a builder. We're actually in the middle of selling 74 lots right now that we develop for a builder.

SPEAKER_00 10:02

I love it. Okay, so how have partnerships and relationships as you know, a growth vehicle, how have they been a factor in the business models and the businesses that you've tried to grow? Uh particularly too what you're talking about with your development company.

SPEAKER_01 10:18

Dude, it's I mean, it's a game changer. If you look at the number of deals uh that we have, a lot of them are coming from those partnerships or those relationships, right? You know, the deal we're working on right now, we found this because um, you know, we were out in the community and just trying to figure out who had land, and we got introduced to somebody, and boom, um, all of a sudden we're buying this land, we're taking it through. It has completely reshaped our business, actually, Grant. So you talk about you know partnerships. One of the things that I changed, I um, you know, several years ago um when the market turned, you know, things weren't going so hot, right? And we're just kind of riding out the coattails of that interest rate hike and everything, all the damage it's done. And I was listening to a presentation of a guy who owns a family office, and he said something that really caught my attention and stuck with me. He said uh he he went bankrupt in the early 90s during the savings and loan crisis, and he was talking about his journey, and of course, now he's obviously done really well. And uh he said he remembers when the light bulb moment went went off about how to pivot and restructure his business. He goes, I went from having a hundred employees to having five, and I made more money with five employees than a hundred. Yeah, and uh actually ended up chasing him down and getting him on a phone call eventually and asking him, like, can I follow up with you about what you said? Because I was kind of going through something similar. You know, we we had uh built this big monster. We had we had the acquisition company, which was great, acquiring land, then there was the general contracting company that was developing it, and then there's our capital raising company. And uh I just realized that what was gonna get us to 20 million, uh what got us to doing 20 million dollars per year was not what was gonna get us to doing 100 because I saw the amount of people and the overhead in this monster, and I was like, dude, if that's 20 million years, like what is a I gotta 5x this thing? I don't want to do that. So I was kind of at a point where I was like, gosh, you know, what do I do to grow? And what he said really made sense. And so I was like, dude, so how did you how did you go from 100 employees to five and make more money? He goes strategic partnerships, outsourcing and doing partnerships. So uh that was the first thing he did as we completely shut down the general contracting company. We shut that down. That was the biggest hindrance to our growth and the time suck, and quite frankly, um, 95% of my stress. So um yeah, uh, you know, I've screamed at five grown human beings my entire life. Four out of those five are all construction, you know, true story. So I'm not very good at that. So, you know, my partner does that, but we outsource that completely. So we'll we'll bring in a strategic partner into the organization to be able to handle that and we'll completely outsource it. So no salary, no overhead, but we'll we'll you know, we we want A plus opportunities for A plus players. So instead of bringing that in-house, we outsource pretty much everything. Then, of course, the people in-house are in charge of managing uh them. So strategic partnerships are 100% how we're growing and scaling now.

SPEAKER_00 13:20

So it's it's really it's it's really a big form of leverage for you guys. You're getting the same or better product without all the overhead responsibility. Is that what you're saying?

SPEAKER_01 13:31

Essentially, yeah. And I'm fine giving up a bigger piece of the pie uh in order to accomplish that, right? So like a lot of these national home builders that we work with, they do it all in-house.

SPEAKER_00 13:43

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 13:44

Right? You know, they they've got the the land guy in-house, they have the project manager, you know, like one project manager can build a whole neighborhood and you pay him $90,000 a year, right? You know, 40 homes or something. He's got you know two of them. You know, I'm fine paying a builder 20 grand a house, and if it's you know, 50 homes, well, that's a million dollars compared to you know 160,000 that the national might pay. But I'm fine with that. I want to do those types of deals. I want to structure it in a way where all the strategic partners benefit and they're all incentivized to perform. So when the project does well, everybody does well. Did was there a period of time where you weren't okay with that where you were like, no, I want to make the larger dollar amount instead of the and so we were the the whole reason we vertically integrated was we had just heard horror stories, uh especially in the construction industry. I mean, it's hard to get away from horror stories with contractors, right? And we're like, oh, like I'd heard of so many people paying contractors and builders and then walking away with the money and then liens and all that. I was like, dude, let's just do it ourselves. That way we don't have that issue. And quite frankly, it worked up to a certain extent. You know, we were able to make deals out of a lot of uh uh a lot of land that people couldn't because we were the GC, we were doing it at cost, you know. Um so it worked really, really well up to a certain point until it didn't, right? You know, you build the big machine, and you know, again, what made us comfortable pivoting to the strategic partnerships is act once we've done it, you know, once you understand construction and cash flow and budgets and tracking and you know having a controller in place to manage everything, we felt comfortable moving on to that point. You know, we could have very easily gotten burned had we started, but because we came uh to the table with that background and experience, we knew how to control the risks, which made us more comfortable.

SPEAKER_00 15:42

Did you identify that the construction arm was the thing you wanted to cut just because it was the biggest headache? Or is that what it is? Like purely simple as well.

SPEAKER_01 15:50

Overhead and headache. I mean, it was so easy. Overhead and headache, like it was very easy to identify uh which piece of the vertical integration we wanted to get rid of.

SPEAKER_00 16:00

That makes a lot of sense. How do you identify the strategic partners that you know you want to you want to work with? So I I talked to so many people, and you know, it's like, how do we use partnerships to grow? And I think a lot of people are thinking about you know, we grow our business through client acquisition, but there's multiple ways to grow, right? And you're talking about using strategic partnerships to grow through the leverage it creates so you can ultimately do more deals because you had your strategies, and maybe partnerships and relationships are a way that you get customers too. But what I hear you saying is we're using this as a vehicle to create leverage, and that really changed everything for us. So it's a different way that you're growing, not necessarily by new client acquisition, but by creating partners inside of the business that help you uh release these big headaches and these big overheads. And so I'm curious, like, how do you identify who you know you want to partner with? And have you ever had any of those deals go south? Everybody's always got a partner story that when I talk to them, but I'm curious, I'm curious with you.

SPEAKER_01 16:56

Just to be clear, they're you know, the type of partner, when I say we uh have strategic partners, like they don't own a share of our business, right? Right, right, yeah. So like they they're not an actual general partner in the company with duties and responsibilities. You know, they're hired pro rata based on whatever project we're tackling or whatever thing we're taking on. So uh as an example, one of the things that we look for is alignment of the long-term vision. They've got to be able to obviously perform on whatever it is we're asking. Like that's very important, being very, very clear about what it exactly is you need and can they deliver on that, and do they have the track record and background to be able to do that? But there's got to be long uh-term incentives, right? As soon as, and this goes for partners in your business too, as soon as the long-term vision starts to stray and the partners have different visions, those are the cracks that start to form to tell you that the partnership is not gonna work out. So that's a very important uh piece. Uh another important piece is alignment of core values. So you you've got this skill set area, right? That's that's kind of the all right, can they actually do it? And then you have the value-based system. You know, am I gonna work well with this person long term? Um, I've I've gotten out of partnerships where uh I found out that my partners uh did some sketchy stuff that was in what we would call like the gray area of business. And I'm uh I'm not a gray area guy. Uh I'm like, no, absolutely not. I'm you can you can argue it both ways, right or wrong. I don't care. Like, I'm not in the gray area, I'm out. So, you know, I've I've got that core value, you know, let's call it high integrity, right? Don't do what you wouldn't want published in a newspaper. And I'm like, I don't want my name attached to that published in a newspaper. So I'm I'm out. See you later. Having those core values is really important because you don't want to be working with people that are going to do some things that you may or may disagree with. And so uh I we can go into like how I sit down and do that, but spending one, being honest and knowing what your core values is is the first step, and then having a system in place to be able to filter for those core values is like the second, and part of that is spending a significant amount of uh time with them. So that's those are the two things that we really look for: the the skill set, long-term vision, and the core values.

SPEAKER_00 19:19

I um I talked to so many people that do not do the three things that you just said, Ever. They don't really have an understanding of their core values, they don't have a system for validating that in people that they hire or people that they partner with, and they don't have the patience to spend time with people to make sure that everybody just seems like, no, let's just go do it. Whatever's on my mind, let's go, let's go do it. And so I would imagine just taking your time and doing what you've you've talked about makes a massive difference in identifying good strategic partners. And then I would imagine the relationships last so much longer too.

SPEAKER_01 19:54

Yeah, well, it's like the biggest cost of a company is turnover, and you don't want that with your partnerships as well, right? You know, you you want to find somebody in a long term. So a lot of the contractors that we work with locally, like we're in it for the long haul, right? Like they see the long-term vision and and they see how much work we're doing to find these deals and put them together, and and you know, they they want a piece of that, they want to be involved in that.

SPEAKER_00 20:17

That's fascinating. How much time would you say that you typically I you know spend with somebody before you're like, okay, I got a good feeling here? Is it a day or is it a year?

SPEAKER_01 20:25

Um It's not a certain amount of time. You definitely so yeah, like I meet people and it's usually a significant amount of time before I'm actually doing business with them. So we're typically uh like I'm always looking for partners. Like I don't need one right now, strategic partners, but I'm always looking for the right investors, the right contractors, the right, you know, whoever it is. And so I've got you know people on my radar, and you kind of follow them and you keep up with them for a couple years, and then you know, that need finally arises, and you're like, all right, you know, I got a pretty good feeling about this person, and uh, you know, I've seen them for a while now, and you know, now we can actually start to maybe do something, right? You know, so like HPG Capital, for example, one of the reasons we raise a lot of money is people have just been following us for years, yeah. And you know, they've seen what we do and and how we communicate when uh things are going really well, and how we communicate when things aren't going really well, and you know, that goes a long way with people. And so a lot of people want to come and be a part of that and you know help raise funds for projects. And so we you know, we're getting to see the success that comes from, you know, again, just acting out your your core values and um yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:32

I love it. Man, this has been uh this has been an awesome conversation, fascinating. I've I've always been very intrigued by you know what you guys do. Uh you know, land entitlements and horizontal development, if that if that's the way that you just if the if I'm remembering correctly, if that's the way that you you had said that. My brother, he's he's pretty big in the real estate space and he's always looking to buy a piece of land and flip it to somebody else that's gonna do something with it. It's uh it's a fascinating I say it's a game, it's fascinating business, fascinating game, fascinating story. I really appreciate it. I appreciate you spending some time with me today. It's uh it's definitely been interesting. Yeah, no, I appreciate the opportunity. I I always like to ask this question before we sign off is you know, for anybody that's listening to the to the podcast, how can we partner with you? What what is something that we can do to walk alongside you and help you?

SPEAKER_01 22:17

You know, that that's a great question. You know, I tell people like there's two people that that we serve, and uh, you know, with the capital stuff, it gets tricky because you know we can't pay people for referring investors to us. That's a no-no, you get in trouble with the SEC. You know, but there's two people that we serve. Number one is investors. So if you like the idea of investing in projects that you know, Lenar and DR Horton are gonna buy, you know, name brand, Wall Street funds, uh, you can go to hpgcapital.net forward slash wait list. Um that's pronounced Harry BobGary Capital.net, Harry Um HPG Capital.net, and you can watch the video there. Um, you know, happy to have any any referrals that people want to send if it's a fit. And then the other group that we help are people that want to learn um how to do what we do. So, you know, for that, we can pay referrals for that, and we pay very generously. So, like if you know somebody who uh is a real estate entrepreneur and wants to get into development and you refer them, like you know, we um you know we pay uh 25% of the you know the cost of um joining our mastermind program. So we're very generous with it. So if you want to learn more about that, then go to learnlanddevelopment.com. Um we've got a free course called Land Development 101. Go grab it. It explains how to get started doing all this stuff. And if you want to book a call and learn more about the mastermind, you can watch the video on the website and there's a little request invitation button and uh we can chat.

SPEAKER_00 23:37

I love it. Well, we'll make sure uh that we link up all of the ways that people can connect with you and do that. And uh anybody that's listening to this, I definitely encourage you to. Uh Brandon, it's been awesome to get to sit and chat with you for the last little bit. I really appreciate it again, man.

SPEAKER_01 23:50

Hey, thanks. Appreciate the opportunity.

SPEAKER_00 23:52

Yeah, yeah. And thank you all for continuing to listen to the Partner Profit podcast. I'll see you on the next episode.

SPEAKER_01 23:58

Peace.