Turning a Cabin Property Into a Profitable, Purpose-Driven STR Brand

0:00You know, throughout my real estate career, it's, you know, it's been this this effort of me developing a brand and bringing investors and team and like being the visionary and trying to drive forward. And it took it took a lot for me to rec to learn how to run businesses and lead teams and build brands and create a product that that solves a problem and, you know, attract the right people into it. It took a lot of trial and error. Most error like most things I've started up until the last couple of years have been failures.

0:35And now like with what we're building with Free Wild, we see the momentum. We see the impact and like and I can expand that out over the next 20 30 years and can see like oh this is this is where we're heading. This is where like we have a real business now. So So yeah, like my real estate career started in house flipping. I bought a couple of vacation rentals before Airbnb was a thing. Then I got into partnered with some some guys out of hope in New Jersey and we started buying flips all throughout the state of New Jersey that moved into apartment buildings.

1:07— And I thought the dream was to own apartment buildings and cuz if you read Rich Dad Poor Dad, that's how he made his millions and like you know all of that. But then the buildings that we were buying were in essentially the ghettos of New Jersey. They're just in a really rough areas. We started renting it out section 8 and like we would go in here with the pride of like, hey, we're buying this old building and we're cleaning it up and we're renting it to locals and supporting, you know, supporting individuals. And that just led to one issue after another.

1:42To where, you know, one building that we bought was turned into a crack house within two weeks of us renting renting it out and another house got burnt down within a month of us renting it out. And I'm just like — I'm like I want to do the complete opposite of this. I want luxury. I want beautiful properties and I want to get out of here. I want to be on the beach somewhere. And long story short, I was invited to a mastermind in San Diego. Flew out here, met a real estate investor, and this is right as Airbnb started becoming a thing, right?

2:14And he's like, "Oh, yeah. I own I converted all my apartments into Airbnbs, and we're crushing it. We're doing like two, 3x market rate rents." — Wow. — So, that turned into me. Then, I'm like, "All right, screw it. Moving to San Diego." moved here, moved into Entrepreneur House, and I started renting out all the vacancies around town. So partner with real estate investors and I would rent all their vacancies, get their approval to stage it and then rerent it back out on Airbnb. It's called arbitrage. It's popular now.

2:45Back then there was only a handful of people doing it and that just blew up and we started making money for the first time ever and cash flow started coming in. And then I I saw the writing on the wall that arbitrage is a model that is very it only really works in markets that are growing. And luckily right before COVID, we switched to a property management model and that consulting model where we started helping companies grow. So we we've kind of I've had my hands in all different types of areas of short-term rentals from us running property management companies and arbitrage to helping over a thousand companies start and scale their short-term rental businesses.

3:28And through that I I fell in love with three main things. One is going back to my roots of owning the real estate because everything up until Free Wild I was either either leasing or managing other people's properties. — So I'm like, hey, I want to go back to my roots and start buying real estate and developing a legacy business here. Two is I love design forward properties, right? And I wanted to create something that I didn't see the industry having. And then three, I wanted to develop a brand that people could really connect with.

4:01So and there there's a whole story of how I came across all that, but I I drew the during COVID, I drew a line in the sand and I shut down our educational company. I stopped managing other people's properties. I went all in on this concept of Free Wild and we started building it. Found the investors, found the property, launched the brand, and it's been unbelievable. It's been amazing. So, yeah, super pumped about it. — Yeah. There's one thing you said there. You when you moved to San Diego, you said you moved into an entrepreneur house.

4:35What What is What was that? — Yeah. Yeah. It's actually still going. People can check it out. I think it's on Instagram. It's called the Epic Entrepreneur House in San Diego. So the whole concept, it's kind of crazy that it's still going. It's going on like 10 years now. But the whole concept was my friend Chandler Bolt and Austin Netsley entrepreneurs they have awesome awesome businesses. The idea was like how do we bring together startup entrepreneurs or entrepreneurs that are doing six figures or more and and bring everybody together in one place.

5:15We all live together. We work on our businesses and support each other in our businesses. We leverage our network to grow our networks. And then we pull all of our resources together. So like we rented this six-bedroom house in San Diego. It was like a you know just a speck house essentially. Huge property. Everyone had their own bedroom. But then we all pulled our money together and we got a full-time chef and a full-time house assistant and then we would host masterminds and all of that.

5:46So it was pretty incredible, man. You know like essentially living in a mastermind for four years and you know we've had so many people go through that you know the founder of Dr. Squatch. My good friend Jack was there. Massive massive company. He moved in when he was just doing a couple million a year. — to other companies that are like medtec companies and real estate companies. And so it's pretty cool to to like live part of that. And that that was like my MBA in entrepreneurship was living in that in that house.

6:21— Yeah. That's funny. I I bought a house last year from a guy who's one of the biggest — suppliers of soap to Dr. Squash. — Oh, nice. — Here in Indiana. Yeah. Actually, yeah, that's where they're from. — Yeah, that's funny. — Yeah. So, Jack Jack is a good friend of mine that I met at — the entrepreneur house and that was the whole idea of like how do you bring highly intelligent and ambitious entrepreneurs together and cut out all the noise and — yeah, — it was pretty incredible. It it shaped me into the the entrepreneur and business owner I am now.

6:55— Wow. Yeah. I mean, they say you're you're the combination of the five people you spend the most time with. So, Exactly. If you want to level up and, you know, be around people who have similar goals, what a what a great concept. I assume you weren't married at the time, though. — No, everyone everyone was in their early 20s, you know. The house is still going, actually. No one is married there. I mean some girlfriends and boyfriends are living in the house and all that stuff but every year it turns into like a its own thing right so right now it's more there's there are entrepreneurs but they're also more lifestyle and health focused where when I was living there with Jack Austin Bolt Shiv like these are very very ambitious entrepreneurs

7:44That were all in their 20s we had no restrictions so we're all in on our businesses. — Yeah. — and it was incredible. So, and ever since I left that house, I've been trying to figure out how to develop that community again. So, we're, you know, we're doing some stuff up here, for the married entrepreneurs, you know, — the people that can't fully commit to that, but want a community of entrepreneurship. — Yeah. Yeah. It's a tough thing to replicate, I'm sure. — so you mentioned that you went you went all in on Free Wild.

8:19You kind of cut the ties and cut all the burned your boats on on all the other income streams and potential things that you could work on. That's pretty interesting. Like a lot of people would be very reticent to do that. You know, it'd be it it'd be pretty scary, I think. How long did it take you once you made that decision to start seeing traction with free? — Yeah. No, great question. So this was during COVID and a big part of our business was also doing live events and inerson masterminds and stuff like that.

8:54Our other company is called Overnight Success and that was our educational company where we're helping short-term rental companies grow brands and build systems and teams and all that. So COVID hit and travel industry stopped and then live events stopped and we were kind of in a spot again where we had a lot of money out on the street and we're upside down on leases. We were upside down on event centers that we were renting all of that and kind of like same thing when the 2008 market crashed and I was upside down and I had to it it's it's shock you know everyone went through it co was just so shocking for for everybody.

9:33So, I started asking the question of like, you know, if the world can stop at any time, you know, like if things are out of my control, like we have no idea what's coming next. Like, what's the thing that I'm truly passionate about that I would want to work on? And I remember we were going through I I was just miserable, man. I was like 50 pounds, you know, overweight. I I was depressed. I was drinking, eating like crap, just not happy. But I was making a ton of money. And my partner asked me, he's like, "Hey, how much money do you need to make to for you to enjoy this?" And he just started going down the number.

10:08He's like 5 million, 10 million, 15 million. And I just remember as he was going through this, I was just like, I don't I don't care how much money we make. I don't want to do this, right? Like there was no excitement behind what I was doing. — The overnight success work. Yeah. Got it. — Yeah. Because it's, you know, doing the educational side, doing events, like, you know, the the coaching side is amazing, but to scale it as a company, it's a, it just wasn't really what I wanted to do. I always wanted to own real estate.

10:39I always wanted to cultivate beautiful properties around the world. — So, yeah, I drew the line in the sand and I stepped down as CEO from that company. And we decided to stop growing that and I went on a road trip to try to figure out what I wanted to build next. Luckily we had some reoccurring money coming in. Not a lot, but enough to sustain my life. There was no extras, but it gave me six months to 6 months to almost a year to work on this passion project which turned into free wild.

11:15So, — it was pretty incredible. I left a lot of opportunity to dive into this and we found the perfect property in Ottawa, California, the perfect investor who just wanted to support the vision of what what we were building. We bought it, renovated these properties, we launched it, and it just immediately did better than anything we expected. But then that turned into another challenge, right? Because as you know, buying real estate takes a long time. Takes a long time for you to cash flow those businesses and all of that.

11:49Part of our property up there is we're building more cabins, right? So, we focus on buying cabin communities, renovating what's there, building out our free wild cabins on there. And then we learned that like, hey, it's going to take us a long time to get to cash flow for us to build the team and and hit the levels that we want to hit. So we either have to go raise money from VCs and investors, which I just didn't want to enter into that, or we have to figure out how to cash flow. So we took we took our skill set and we focused on developing a service side of Free Wild for the Airbnb industry.

12:28So we developed out what's called Free Wild Foundry. I know I'm telling a lot here, so stop me detail. — That's really interesting. So we recognized for me to grow what I wanted to build with Free Wild, we need cash flow. And to develop cash flow, we started asking ourselves, what's one thing that we can do better than anybody in the industry? And we've recognized like even though we built this incredible brand and design and all all this other fundraising, the revenue management side was a big blue ocean for us.

13:00We developed a strategy that helped us price our properties and outperform our market by over 100%. So then we rolled that out to a couple of clients and started getting incredible results and now we're scaling that side of the business. So we're we're managing over 60 million in revenue, about 1,700 Airbnb listings worldwide. And that part of the business is now funding the real estate side, right? So that's the traction that we have.

13:32— And it's it took us about two years from when we bought the property to where we're at now with our current property and Free Wild Foundry to to be in the position that we're in. So it it moved pretty pretty quick. It moved pretty quick. — Yeah. Wow. So can you explain that to me again? I feel like Michael Scott here maybe explain it to me like I'm a 5-year-old. Yeah. — But, so that you you created the first Free Wild site that was how many cabins was it?

14:10— So, active right now there's four cabins and we're in the process of building trying to get approvals right now for 10 to 12 additional cabins. — Okay, got it. Okay. And then you decided to take is it essentially management of other cabins that are have a similar feel or what did that what did that — Yeah. So so stepping back a bit like my vision for Free Wild is to expand this model globally, right? We want to buy these old cabin communities in nature locations that are 2-hour drives from big metro areas, right?

14:48Okay. And the whole concept is that we're bringing together people into a free wild community, cabin community. All of our properties are unique and different and design forward properties. I'm obsessed with detail and and design. And then the main part of our business is helping guests when they travel to our properties disconnect from technology. So we have a way that we help them lock their phones away and be present in the moment. — So I have a grand vision on scaling that. But for me to to accomplish the goal that I want to do on the real estate side, I need quite a bit.

15:24I I need a powerful team in place to help us with that and we need some capital to start buying these properties, right? So, again, we were looking at do we raise money or do we figure out how to self-fund this this vision? And Free Wild, the real estate business is a generational company. They have a 20 30 year horizon on this, right? So — that's why we decided not to go VC and decided to fund it ourselves. — So we launched what we call Free Wild Foundry, which is our service side of Free Wild, right?

16:00And essentially what we did is we built out a team of revenue managers and we work with the top 1% Airbnb companies around the world and we price all of their properties. So, for example, most of our clients have anywhere between 10 and 300 listings. We'll go in, we bring our revenue management team in there, and we'll price all of those properties to maximize revenue. — And most clients that we work with, we're raising revenue by 10 to 20%.

16:32Well, 10 to 30%. So if you you know a company that's doing a few million dollars a year that's hundreds of thousands of dollars being added to their top line. — Yeah. — so we have a way that — that we're doing that strategy that we developed with our cabins. But now that that's growing we have 1,700 listings there. By the end of this year we'll probably be about 4,000ish listings. It's we developed this model that is bringing incredible value to people but also lots of profit to us.

17:07So next year we're going to be in a better position to start buying more hotels and getting better financing and so that's our our long approach to developing out free wild so we can control the entire thing ourselves.