What Entrepreneurs Get Wrong About Marriage

Steve Trang: Hey, everybody. Thank you for joining us for today's episode of Disruptor's Remarkable Influencers. Today, we have Chris and Patty Rood, couple of the biggest influencers in the real estate space, and they flew in from Lafayette, Louisiana to talk about entrepreneurship and marriage. If this is your first time tuning in, I'm Steve Trang, sales trainer to some of the top investors in the country, and I'm on a mission to create 100 millionaires. If you get value out of this show, please tag a friend below or share this episode right now.

That way we can all grow together. You ready?

Patti Rood: Yeah.

Chris Rood: Let's do it.

Steve: Alright. So let's talk about how you guys initially got into entrepreneurship.

Chris: Well,

Patti: You were always head

Chris: Yeah. I mean You always head.

Patti: You always head.

Chris: I mean, in in fourth and fifth grade fourth, fifth grade, I was selling baseball cards out of the back of my book sack at spot price saying, hey. This this rookie card, the Shaquille O'Neal's gonna be worth more. And then and then next year, you better grab it for $5 now because it'd be worth 20. But it's only worth, you know, $4 right now, but you can buy it right now. But because it's rare.

Right? But anyway.

Steve: You're selling you were selling Shaquille O'Neal rookie cars.

Chris: I was really yeah. I was selling Shaquille O'Neal rookie cars out of that.

Steve: That's awesome.

Chris: So, not even know what I was doing, just by pure Avastance. But I think, you know, and it I've I've always been entrepreneurial. I've always been, very, salesy, very, trying to, like, make a profit, you know. And, from there, it kinda graduated into when I was in high school, I knew I was gonna start a business, and I I would always tell my friends, I'm gonna start a business. I'm gonna start a business.

What were they saying? Well, they laughed at me or told me I was crazy.

Patti: But your parents your parents had businesses too. So you grew up experiencing that.

Chris: Sure. Yeah. I mean, yeah. My my parents are entrepreneurs, both sides. And we, you know, I I kind of, I guess they inspired me in in a way to to be entrepreneurial for sure.

But, when we got when I got into college, I was working for my dad. And in my sophomore year in college, like, I wanna start a business. I don't know what it is, but I'm gonna start a business. And I literally went, got the oil change in my dad's my dad's truck because he sent me to the quick lube, and people complained how long it took. And I was like, I'm just gonna go to people's houses and start changing all of the back of my truck.

And that was, like, the start of my entrepreneur. So

Steve: you saw there was an there was some pain, there was an opportunity, and I'm just gonna start changing people's oil at their house.

Chris: At their house. And and that branch into washing a car, and then we started a glass business where we replaced and fixed the glass if it broke. And then that turned into buying physical locations. And then we had a really big business at one time in that space. And then we kind of branched off into real estate.

Well, we got into real estate before then, too. But but, yeah, that's kind of the the 50,000 foot view. And you're you guys were high school sweethearts?

Patti: Yes. We've been knowing each other since, what, 14? 14 years old. Yeah. So we've been friends for a long time before we started dating even.

So you

Steve: got to witness all of this?

Patti: Yes. And yeah. Yeah. We and we started a family early too. I was pregnant at 17.

And

Chris: Steve, she got me pregnant when I was 17. Let's just call it for a witness.

Patti: It's not my fault.

Chris: The funny part of funny story about that is though in eighth grade, I told all my buddies that she was she was she was a hot thing back in high school. Right? I was I was younger. I was in eighth grade. She was a sophomore.

I would I told all my buddies, I'm gonna marry that girl one day. Yeah. And the universe has a strange way of making things happen to where you get what you want. Right. And she ended up getting me pregnant.

Yeah. We got married.

Steve: So you got to witness and experience this whole thing with the oil change. I mean, it started

Patti: Yes. And it wasn't I I was not all for it before. Like, I was like, whatever, Chris. At the time, we're both still in college too, and we both had I think we were working, like, four jobs.

Chris: Yeah.

Patti: And,

Chris: Carrying eighteen hours.

Patti: Yeah. We we were just hustling. Right? And so he would always have these different ideas, and I was just like, okay. Whatever.

You know? I always loved real estate, and I knew eventually I would get into that category because I was it was in my soul. But when he started with the car wash thing, I was like, I don't know if I like the old like, I just didn't find a place there.

Chris: Mhmm.

Patti: So while he did that, I just kinda I was having babies. I was, getting my real estate license. So I was doing other things, but I always was just, like, you know, letting him do his thing. You know?

Steve: So you're there. You're a part of it, obviously, because you guys already had family together.

Patti: Right.

Steve: You weren't in love with it.

Chris: No. Well, no. Especially when I come back home and I was drenched in oil from head to toe. Yeah. Like because I would I would go change, like, big 18 with little oil changes because you can make a lot of money on those.

It's like a a $300 oil change. Okay. And I'd come back just oiling my hair and all of my suit.

Patti: Wasn't the kind of environment I liked.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah. But it was paying the bills.

Patti: But it was paying the bills and it was he was growing and, you know, we made it work, and he enjoyed it for a while. The hours were tough.

Steve: Yeah. So but let's talk about that. Right? I mean, even though you guys were really young at that time, I mean, this is what a lot of people that when they're starting their entrepreneurial journey, there's some start young, some start later, some have a full time job, and they're like, should I go should I quit my job to go chase this dream? I wanna talk about some of the biggest challenges.

You guys were married at this point?

Chris: Mhmm.

Steve: Yeah. So what was how was that affecting the marriage? You're working long hours and you're drifting oil.

Chris: Yep. You want me to touch on that first or you want to?

Patti: You can go.

Chris: I think for us, I think the biggest challenge is to give value to people that listen. If you're going to be an entrepreneur at a young age, it's your environment. Right? Because you're going to get a lot of kickback from family, friends, people that have good intentions that truly love you, but they're going to they're going to be worried about you for one. And two, you're going to have people that are gonna get kicked back that just have bad intentions.

Right? Because, anytime somebody rocks the boat, entrepreneurially speaking, and tries to go and make more money, it it makes people around them that are not trying to do that insecure. Mhmm. And then they try to pull the rings back on you. Hey, why you wanna do that?

Hey, that's a bad idea. Hey, that you probably shouldn't do it. That that's for rich people or you're stupid, right? So I think for a lot of people is you you gotta you gotta put blinders on. And for me, it from like and I was a wild kid.

It's from 17 to 22, I was a rock I had a rock, you know, rock star with no guitar kinda. I was a party. I was I was just I was wild. I was

Steve: like Rock star with no guitar. I haven't heard that before. That's awesome.

Chris: Yeah. So, it wasn't a good thing. I mean, it was really bad. Like, I

Patti: He had to focus that energy on something like this, which Whatever always good for me to see him doing that.

Chris: I'm an extremist Yeah. Steve. Whatever I do, I'm gonna be I'm 120%. You know, if we're gonna party, let's party. If we're gonna, you know, start a business, we're gonna start a business.

And we're gonna we're gonna go and we're gonna take it far. So for me, when I when I found something pro survival to focus on my directed, you know, supposed ADD energy into whatever that means, then I I once I focused that into something that was productive instead of counterproductive, then it it sort of is paying all dividends in my life. So once I did that, you know, my life expanded in a sense because I was doing things that were pro survival, making us money instead of, you know, conscious survival, maybe hurting my body and partying. But I think for a lot of people, they they gonna have to put blinders on and block out the noise and get super intentional about what they wanna do in life.

Steve: And how did but being, you know, super intentional, super focused on that, how did that that the family because, you know, and a lot of entrepreneurs when they start a business, the business is also a baby. Yeah. Right? So how does that affect things?

Chris: You know?

Patti: Because we had two kids.

Chris: Either you're Steve. You're either gonna be super intentional about your life, or you're gonna fall under other people's intention of what they want you to be intentional about. Mhmm. So does that make sense? It does.

So you you have to block out other people's intention. Figure out what you want. Me and my wife sat down and said, hey, look, we wanna live an awesome life. We wanna make a lot of money. We we had this conversation.

We want a beach house in Destin. I mean, this is when I was 22 years old, you guys.

Patti: We always Yeah. I mean, we do.

Chris: We do.

Patti: But we always had a big vision, and we always worked on our mindset first to help us create that vision and make it a reality. And so but we knew it was gonna take hard work. I mean, it was not easy because weekends, there was a lot of weekends you had to work in that.

Chris: I mean, at 22, I literally stopped talking to any any and everybody I knew from my past. I stopped. I mean, I I I stopped partying. I stopped doing every all I did was business seven days a week. I mean, I'd wake up on a Sunday morning, and I'd go wash some cars.

Like and I just focused all my attention. And that that's what I think a lot of people are gonna going to heavily under think how much effort it's gonna take to get it off the ground. Mhmm. Like a lot of people, oh, I wanna start a business. It sounds sexy.

Right. Until you guys start doing the work. And you're gonna have to ground yourself to realize and humble yourself, you're gonna put in 10 times more effort than you would probably at a job. Because being an entrepreneur is it's a lot harder to be an entrepreneur than to have

Patti: a job.

Chris: And then it gets having a job. It's great. But you're gonna have to understand that you're gonna work to you're gonna work so much that it's gonna be exhausting, and you're gonna have nights where you don't sleep, and you're gonna and you're gonna it's gonna test your marriage, your mental state, everything. I mean, we almost bankrupt twice in my entrepreneur career. Right?

Steve: And you wear a lot of hats that people don't realize. They think that they want to just I just wanna call sellers and just go to contracts. And I'd say it's like, no. There's, like, a whole bunch of other hats you have to wear too.

Chris: Yep. Yep. So, you know, so we got very intentional. We now started changing all the back metric, washing cars. You know, I I knew a lot of people in the office.

My family was working in office. I'd go and drop off cards at people's businesses, and I started building up fleet accounts. Right? And I was servicing, like, a 100 and something vehicles every month in between going to college. So I'd change all, go to a class.

But by the time I was, you know, a couple years passed, you know, we graduated college, and, I realized I needed physical locations with real estate. I can't scale on-site chasing. I had two and two or three guys helping me, but I I just couldn't scale that because I'm chasing. So I wanted to get a physical location. And we end up, you know, catching a, a really good motivated seller from a lube shop that the the tenant wasn't paying the rent, and I caught one of it.

And I called the owner and say, hey. Kick him out. I'll pick it up. And, that was our first shop we picked up. Doubled my income when I got that shop.

And it and it condensed time because I didn't have to go and do all the on-site stuff. Although we still did on-site auto glass repair and replacement, but I didn't have to chase for the oil changes and car wash. They would come to me.

Steve: So for you Mhmm. Right? I mean, so he's chasing this dream.

Patti: And and So I was raising two to three kids at within those those years. And I think the good thing about Chris is it's hard raising all those kids, especially by yourself when he's working all the time. It's like he knew when he came home, he had to prepare that I was probably gonna be upset, aggravated, stressed out, but he just gave me grace. And I think a lot of it is grace. You just he understood where I was coming from, and I understood he had to work.

But it still sucks. You know? I mean, there's still a suck element. And you just have to both agree. Well, this sucks.

It's not your fault, but it's not my fault. It just sucks, and we have to get through it. And the more we work, the faster we can get help and all those other things that'll make it easier.

Chris: It's struggle and resistance. Right? You have to you have to understand as an entrepreneur and when when you're starting this journey, you know, especially when you're married a marriage is struggle and resistance. It's pushing through the struggle and resistance long enough to where the resistance and the struggle and the barriers disappear. And then you said you have a new struggle and new barriers, but then once you got past them all previous barriers and struggles, you've opened up more freedom Mhmm.

Because you're making more money. So, like, it's a little bit easier, but then you set new goals. But so I think you just have to have that mindset. I have resistance, and I'm gonna have struggle in my marriage, my business, as an entrepreneur, everything. And just, like she said, accept the suck and just push through.

Mhmm. Were

Steve: you, like, when Chris was walking through the door, you're, like, just throwing the baby at him?

Patti: Well, after he bathed because he was a mess because I'm I'm weird like that. But, yeah. But he was always a hard worker. I mean, he he's great with his kids, so he always made an effort to have time with them even though he was working a lot of the time. So I never really had to push for him to, like I never had to force that on him.

That was something he was naturally great at.

Steve: And, you had not started the real estate agent thing yet?

Patti: I would after the third baby was born, I did. I did I got my real estate license, and I slowly got help with the kids. And my older two were older, so they were in school at that point, so it was just a little one that I had. So I would I started, like, you know, being an agent, selling houses. And that was truly, like, I've always wanted to be in real estate.

I had a natural, like, knack for it, I guess. And I was waiting tables at a place where there was tons of realtors that would come in, so I would get, like, feedback from how they liked it. And so I just thought it was some it would be something I would enjoy. And I still enjoy it. We've just kinda progressed into different type of an agent a different type type of agent.

Like, I just do listings now. She just

Chris: list our flips

Patti: pretty much. So, but that's when we started to convert our business into more real estate and less.

Chris: Yeah. I mean so after I got that first shop from a motivated seller from, you know, kicking the the tenant out, they didn't pay then. That was around 2,005, right before the crack, the the big, big crash. Right? We saw that the writing on the wall, people selling that.

They buy a house, they sell it three months later, make $20,000, you know. But we had we had built a spec home previously, like we had lived in a house with five years maybe. And, I told my wife, I said, we got to sell this property. And we painted a few rooms in the landscape, we put it on the market, and I think we're 25 at the time. The house sold for sale by owner within thirty days, and we made a $125,000.

It you know, 25 that's a lot of money for a 25 year old back in 2005. A lot

Steve: of money right now for me as a 40 year old.

Chris: Yeah. Yeah. So and I think this is the pivotal thing. I think that people can get a lot of, you know, this is very pertinent in that a lot of people are taking that 125,000, you know, especially the age we live in now and buy, you know, a Lambo or go buy a $25,000 watch. And and it's just not it's not real in a sense that there's just no return on that.

We took that 125,000. We bought an $850,000 We leveraged that and put as a down payment. We bought an $850,000 shop on the busiest intersection from another motivated seller from a a guy that wasn't paying his taxes that we called when because we knew some of his employees. So I

Steve: I You just had your ears everywhere.

Chris: Yeah. So I contacted him and and said, look, I'll I'll buy you out. I know you're in a bind. Let's just let's make the deal work. So, you know, I was fortunate enough that I had good credit at the time.

I called SBA, got an SBA loan, I put 25% down, gave them that $125,000 bought that shop doubled my income again. Right. Then from there, I started building up a lot of capital. And then we were picking up shops

Steve: and

Chris: started built up to like four shops. And I think that's a key. For me, I just leave back my journey as an entrepreneur is reinvesting your profits early back into your business and back and not even just that back. Like, I was going to seminars. I was taking classes.

Like, I when I say I was a, like, a freak when it came to, like, personal development. I was doing this at 22. I was taking class on business, entrepreneurship, sales, like, all kind of stuff. We dumped every penny we had into either personal development or real estate in their business.

Steve: Did you graduate college? Yeah. Okay. So you did go through finish all these?

Patti: I finished his last year. For him?

Chris: Last year. Yeah. Just to be completely transparent. I cheated my way through college. I'm I'm not the sharpest

Patti: I did all his online classes because he was working so much, and I was like, dude, you have to finish. You only have, like, three classes left.

Chris: Yeah. I'm I'm I'm not that bright when it comes to, like, you know, schooling. Mhmm. But I can get shit done.

Steve: Yeah. Well, that's the reason why I'm asking this question. Right? Because, like, today, right, if you were to talk to, 18 year old Chris, will you still push him to college?

Chris: Oh, man.

Patti: Not 80%. Actually, neither one of us truly really wanted to go to college. My parents insisted.

Chris: Folks, college is a scam. Yeah.

Steve: I'm just

Patti: Not for everyone.

Chris: Listen. No. No. Not for everyone. I'm not generalizing.

But for 80% of people, you should be not not going to college. Right.

Patti: It was my parents' dream for me to go to college, and they paid for it, and I went Right. For them. But I never used it.

Steve: Yeah. And that's not uncommon, right, if you're an entrepreneur. It's like you did it

Patti: Yeah.

Steve: Because you're supposed to.

Chris: Exactly. It's one of those, you know, those things that you're supposed to. It's your parents supposed to. And and they and they love you for it, and they and they think they're doing what's best for you. But it goes back to that what I was saying earlier, like, you know, their intention that you get caught up in somebody else's intention of what they think is the best intention for you, which is not always the best intention.

Steve: Right. And so then going back to f twenty two, as a business owner, now you're investing in your education.

Patti: Right.

Steve: But this education is pertinent to what you're doing. Exactly. Absolutely. Yeah.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, look. Nothing against if you're 19 and your mom's saying you need to go to school and you wanna be a nurse or an engineer or you specialize in being a doctor, an attorney, that's sure. You need to go to college. Yeah.

But there is guys and girls I know out there right now that went to AC school that makes $650,000 a year and live a better life than some attorneys.

Patti: And and there's lost trades out there. Like Pete, they need people in those industries. And it's just not pushed enough

Chris: like the carpenters.

Steve: I mean,

Chris: there's so many those lost arts that that that are we can't find nobody to do it now.

Steve: Yeah.

Chris: Because everybody's got a college degree making $50 a year, and and they're broke.

Patti: And no skills.

Steve: Right.

Patti: Yeah.

Steve: So you're starting the the the real estate agent thing. And then how long were you showing buyers and sellers before you're like, you know what? Let's just focus on the investment side.

Patti: Well, in the meantime, we were still buying investments. So when we sold that one house and flipped it in, we bought, a foreclosure that needed work in a great area, and we also bought a piece of property. So we were still intermixing, like, the investing during that time. And so we flipped that house within I think it was eighteen months or so. We flipped that house, sold it.

Chris: We $65. We bought another put down payment for another shop on that one.

Patti: And then we've sold some land.

Chris: Yeah. Made $25.30 grand.

Patti: Yeah. On that one. That was easy quick sale. So we were doing it on a small scale. Would like, I knew it was something I wanted to do, but we were doing it just one at a time, small scale.

And then when the shit hit Was fan and Our

Chris: 2,008 went that bad, to be honest with you. Like, the all field carried the South.

Patti: Yeah. You

Chris: know, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, we did we did fairly well during the 2008 crash. Our 2008 crash was 2014 when oil went from a $128 a barrel to $28 a barrel. We lost thousands of jobs in the South. Lafayette got crushed. My shops got crushed.

I mean

Patti: You lost all our oil fill accounts?

Chris: Oil fill account. I mean, 70% of my business was oil fill accounts. And and I just had my third baby with her. And, it was scary. And, and this is, right around the time I had during that whole right before I think to from 2012 to 2014, I bought, like, $3,000,000 of the single family homes just as investments, making a bunch of offers on MLS.

But and I bought them, like, I didn't buy them. I didn't know the wholesale model yet. Right? Mhmm. That's that's where the if that if I tell anybody, learn how to go direct to seller, and the name of the game is motivated seller.

Right? And I didn't know what I was I did that. I applied that with the with the business model for the oil change in the mechanic shop. I found motivated sellers. Right?

Mhmm. That model goes you know, it transcends every every other model, but I was buying properties I should had had no business buying because I know I was doing. I was just making a bunch of offers, buying them at $80.85 cents a dollar. Well, $80.85 cents a dollar on the top end of a market when the market pulls back. Right.

And that's what happened in 2014 for us. I lost a bunch of oil field accounts, all the the houses I bought that I was bringing out to oil field workers that that were going offshore making, you know, eighty, hundred, hundred and twenty thousand a year that was getting fifteen, seventeen, two thousand dollars a month they couldn't pay.

Patti: And I think you you held a lot of this in with, because I I had more babies at that time too. We had a lot of little ones at home, and I don't think he told me everything Mhmm. Because he didn't wanna bring that stress on me. He took on a lot of that stress by himself, just because he felt like he was protecting me. So

Steve: And so how do you feel about that? Like, knowing that now. Right?

Patti: No. I mean, I I know I know he did it for good reason. Like, I I mean, you know how it is out there. Maybe you're an emotional mess already. So he knew that I couldn't handle it.

Steve: Asking this question because I think a lot of husband and wives right? Like, one thing that we talk about, you know, the trials and tribulations. It's tough being a business owner, entrepreneur. Right? But I think it's harder to be married to one, and I get to witness it every day Yeah.

At home. So, you know, like, knowing what you know now, was it the right thing for him to do to kinda hold back how bad it was?

Patti: The right thing to him to do knowing myself personally? Because I'm I'm an anxious person, if you can't tell. So and I just had, you know, a baby, and he just didn't wanna put that pressure on me. He knew he could handle it on his own. So I'm not upset for him doing that.

I I know why he

Chris: did. You know? It was it was bad, Steve. I mean, half the rentals went empty, so I had to pay cover notes on that with no rent. Every quarter when since that crash, I was losing, like, you know, 15% revenue.

And then it got to a point where down the road, I think what is it, like, a year later, like, I was losing $2,030,000 dollars a month. But by the grace of God, I I saw the writing when 2,014 hit, I was like, okay. Like, this game is over. We had a good long run. I made money for, you know, ten years and all the changes.

I had a great life. It gave us a great a great way of living. But as when that 2014 hit, about three months into, I was like, I have to do real estate full time.

Steve: Yeah. So you you saw the right in the wall Yeah. And you made the pivot. Yes. Got it.

Yes.

Patti: And I was all for it because that was a part of it I love that I could get into because I could be more involved than how it was with the shop.

Chris: Yeah. So started started wholesaling, watch a bunch of guys on YouTube, started wholesale on my own, did it a little bit, then I made a little bit of money, then hired a bunch of mentors, then I started slaying it. I was making $70.80, 50, $100, you know, a month, and I was able to cover all those losses. Yeah. So that saved me.

And from there, you know, we she she started coming on board on, you know, let's okay. I said, this is the winning this is the winning horse. This is this is the new business. Let's focus all of our attention, all of our mental capacity and bandwidth into building a real estate empire. And And that's when you

Patti: got started going to masterminds and focusing that together. Yep. As a team.

Chris: And I think that's important what she just says. Very pertinent. You guys watching together as a team. You notice I bring my wife everywhere with me because it's not just because she's better looking than me. It's because I want her to grow with me.

Yeah. Right? You know, two, you know, two horses, you know, pulling in the same sled versus just one horse is is totally different. And it'll give you extra horsepower if you bring your wife with you and do these journey. This is just journey together of entrepreneurship, personal development.

You'll get a lot more done and your your your vision will be pushed harder.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris: So Go ahead.

Patti: And I loved it. It it was like our first event, I was because I had never been to a a mastermind or any kind of event like that before. And I was like, man, it's like church for business. Like, I loved it. I was like, I could get into this.

Like, it just because I was in mom mode for so long that it gave me like a new passion, I guess. And and that was like, I'm on board.

Chris: Well, and Steve, and just because I'm thinking I like because I wanna make sure we do the sequence of events correctly and give value. Like, people probably saying, well, how are y'all doing this with five kids?

Patti: Yeah.

Chris: And we're doing this because it takes a village. Right?

Patti: Mhmm.

Chris: That's the only way we do it. We don't just like our kids were with two nannies right now, and we have full time nannies. And I think for you guys and we spend a lot of time with our kids. But you have to have help.

Patti: Yeah.

Chris: And help cost money. Mhmm. But when you start making money,

Steve: you can, you

Chris: know, as a you know, and look, I I consider myself a high performance person. I I consider our marriage a high performance marriage. It's not for everybody. I'm not claiming it to know it all. I'm not saying that this is the way you should do it.

I'm just saying this is how we do it, and it worked for us. And we just wanna give perspective on and how that works because some people like, well, how can you leave your kids and do this? And

Patti: we created the ideal scene to make it okay to leave our kids. And we But we

Chris: bring our kids with us a lot

Patti: of times. We do. We bring some of and more now because they're getting older that we could bring them with us. But we just create an environment that's workable for our life.

Chris: Well, let's talk about what that environment looks like. Yeah. That's that's what that environment looks like. Controlled environment. That's what that environment is.

It's it's me calling me and my wife calling all the shots. We know what's best for our kids, not a government. Right? We're we homeschool them. We have two nannies.

We control everything that goes in and out of their mind. They see us doing everything we do. And they they're gonna they're gonna think that's normal when they get older. You know, they don't know. They don't even know what they don't know right now.

But mommy and daddy have to, you know, argue about a deal tonight because something went wrong. That's just normal with that. You know? That's that's how Part

Patti: of the business.

Chris: Part of the business or, you know

Patti: They're they homeschool in our office. So we have a private teacher that comes to our office, our real estate office. So they see rents being dropped off. They deal with the drama. Absolutely.

Don't wanna pay rent. They see all of that too. You know, they they see how hard we work, and they they have their environment is school and work and us. So we're all commingling all of that together to where it works, and so it's like a life work balance. And that's been the best way for us to do it.

We've tried so many different things.

Chris: Steve, we where is the golden impression.

Steve: What did you try that didn't work? School.

Patti: Well, at one point, we had them in private schools, and it was like there were four different schools. I was having to drop them off at four different places every morning, picking them up at four different places. It was costing me a small fortune, constant complaints, drama with school. It was just like, it was sucking the life out of me, honestly. My soul was like The kid

Chris: can't sit still. Well, no shit. He can't sit still. He's nine years old. He wants to run outside.

Patti: So we were during work, we were getting calls like that. We're having to, you know, do you know, stop everything. We don't wanna do that or we couldn't travel as much because of that. So we're like, there's gotta be a better way. So I'm like, why aren't we just we're paying all this money in private school tuition.

Yeah.

Chris: I mean, the amount of money we're paying, yeah, we could hiring

Patti: our own teacher. Like so just put it out there. I'm like, I'm looking for a teacher, and I want her to be able to teach all my kids. You're gonna have a flexible environment, and you're gonna be able to create your own little entrepreneurship class within this school. You know?

And we found the perfect person, and it has been awesome. We've been doing it for this is our third year, and we'll never go back. It's like, this has been life changing for us. We can work more and see our kids more

Chris: and Travel.

Patti: They Our kids are happier. They get to they get to, you know, do more sports.

Chris: More well, more sports and more activities.

Steve: They can do do what they want. They can do more activities. Yes. Because you're homeschooling.

Patti: Right. Yeah. Yeah. I

Chris: mean, the amount of schooling, you know, sitting in a class for eight hours is just I I don't think that's healthy. Like, I don't I mean, I think kids should have that should be cut in half, and the other half should be in activities. Yeah. And that's what we do.

Steve: So what was really cool is that when you guys first started, you guys had a conversation about the entrepreneurial dream, the vision, and working together and acknowledging that it was gonna suck for quite some time. Yeah. Absolutely. I think that's awesome.

Patti: Had a vision board, and we knew it was gonna not be easy.

Steve: But it wasn't perfect this whole time.

Chris: Well, let's back up a little bit about that vision board. We we watched when I was when I was 23 or 24. We watched this movie and you probably know that the secret that really resonated with me and Patty. Yeah, the book in the movie, the city we watched the book in the movie. And I'm not saying it's hocus pocus, I'm not saying it's real.

But I can tell you it's been real for us because we've applied those principles. We've had a vision. We work out every day. We put it on a board and I actually sit there and daydream about it and visualize it and manifest it into our lives. And we have done every bit of that.

And it works, right? The vision works. The action behind the vision is secondary to the vision folks. You know, we live in a world of, you know, of science and thoughts are things. You know, physics has proven that it's a vibration, it's a frequency.

Steve: Mhmm.

Chris: And whatever you put out there as a thought, a vibration and frequency, you will attract people, happenstances, events, and things you want into your life. So you gotta be careful about what you think about and what you don't want and what you want. Because the problem is, I think a lot of people think about what they don't want more than what they do want, and they pull you know, they they maybe manifest that more.

Steve: So Put in your head. Really important.

Chris: Absolutely. So it's the mindset behind what you wanna do. Right. And then it's the action and I think and then a tertiary to that, I think it's it's controlling your environment Yeah. And staying

Steve: away from

Patti: huge that's been our biggest struggle, honestly, With our marriage is is the environment.

Chris: You you gotta you really gotta cut everybody out your life. Like, you you you mean, I'm just being honest with

Patti: you. It's a horror lesson.

Chris: It's it's you you listen. Was a lesson. We we don't people. Right? I just don't we don't people with people

Patti: who like to

Chris: who like to people. I'm not a people person. You most people hang out with me like, dude, what is wrong? I don't people. I don't hang out.

I don't I don't sit down and and drink and hang out and sit drink a six

Patti: pack, watch sports. Him a hangover.

Chris: It gives me anxiety when I tried to to, like, hang out and chill. I can't do it. I I have a panic attack as

Steve: well. Earlier.

Chris: Like I think about all the stuff I gotta do in the back of my mind.

Patti: Like Yeah. Like, you can't just chill at the beach. Like, we have to be working while we're there too. Like, it's just that's just how we

Chris: We talked about that earlier.

Steve: Yeah. We can't can't just pause. Right.

Chris: No. It it's built in, and and I'm not saying it's right or wrong or it's just who I am. And I'm not gonna validate who I am as a person. So

Patti: But going back to environment, like, for us, our struggle was family coming into our marriage, like, bringing that third party problem into the life we're trying to create to young people. You know? And that was, like, that was when we could turn the corner is when we learned, like, how to put a barrier between those people and just focus on us.

Chris: You just said a good point. You got it. In a marriage, you gotta have barriers. And especially if you're gonna be an entrepreneur, you gotta have some super barriers of where the breaking point is, where people can't cross that line or people can't get inside of your head or your marriage. And good, bad or ugly, you know, your friends, family, you know, mom, dad, brother, sister, they may have good intentions towards you.

But if they're not entrepreneurial, they will not relate to you. And they're going to think you're batshit crazy.

Patti: They may not create problems.

Chris: So you you cannot

Steve: They were just inserting some seeds of doubt.

Chris: Yeah. What? That Seeds of doubt and just, you know,

Patti: just Random. It's just it's just Trouble? Yeah. I mean, it's just How you raise your kids.

Chris: Right.

Patti: What you doing to

Chris: As you grow up, I mean, I think parents have good intentions. They they having to let go of their kids. And you're your own family now. We want to raise our family and do the things we want to do. Right?

Not what you want us to do goes back to intention. Right? And then other people's intentions. So we we really we we put up strong heavy barriers. Nobody comes in my space.

You you can't get in Chris Roode's head. Like, I know what I want. And she knows what she wants, and and nobody can tell me different.

Patti: Right. Yeah. Like, that was I feel like that was the turning point of when we could really just peak because we just stopped getting rid of all the drama. Like, that took up so much time and stress and anxiety.

Chris: Even even our friends from high school and, like, you know, people's drama, like I'm like, why do we hang out with these like, because we went to high school. We or we're eight school. We supposed to keep hanging out with them after high school.

Patti: Because their drama became our drama, and here we are trying to work. You know? Like, okay. We don't have time for all this. Like, we need to Remove

Steve: the negative energy.

Patti: Focus on us, and that's what we did.

Chris: Yeah. The

Patti: barriers and focus

Chris: on us. Younger people, they they still do the same things they did in high school that they did in college as they did when they get married. And then they they wake up, they 35, 40 years old, and they still in the same place they were twenty years ago. Like, you gotta move on. There's there's levels.

Patti: Yeah.

Chris: Yeah. And and those levels contain different people in them. And you gotta move on and get better quality people in your life, you know, get the get the junk and out of your space. And and people are problems, Steve. I'm just the more people, the more problems.

Yeah. That's I've experienced that firsthand. I want high quality, high level people in high level conversations. My you know, I I say this a lot. I don't have friends.

I have allies. If you're not having sex with me, giving me value, or making helping make money, I ain't got nothing to do with you. And that's a hard pill to swallow those people. That sounds like shit, Chris. It works for me, guys.

Steve: You know, it's it's actually And

Chris: thankfully for her, she's the only person to have sex with. Yeah.

Steve: There was, someone was asking me in a coaching call, and it was like, I'm having a hard time, like, you know, I'm losing friendships and this and that. Like, how do I become a better friend? And I was like, you're asking the wrong person. Like, I just don't know how to be a good friend anymore. Like, we have allies.

Like, we're all going towards the same mission. We're all got the same goals. We're all in alignment.

Patti: Yeah.

Steve: But, like, if you're not on that same, you know, boat, train, whatever, you're not on it with me, it's kinda hard.

Chris: It is, Steve. And and if if you if you're watching this and you think to yourself, man, that makes a lot of sense, Chris, you think about it. What is the value of the relationship you have with that person? Is the value a hangover, or is the value maybe more money or an opportunity? And that's how you have to weigh out relationships.

Right?

Patti: Well, and a lot of people, I think, in marriage of more focused on their friends than they are their marriage. Like, that's your friend. That's your best friend. Like, focus that attention that you're trying to give to someone else, to your spouse.

Chris: And and to add to that, Patty, you know, I think a lot of people struggle with their marriage. I mean, most of our friends that got married in high school and college, they're all divorced. I'd say at least sixty percent of people we know that got married are divorced now. And like, I'm not that smart, Steve. What I am is very observant.

And I know that I don't know and I like to learn. Like, I'm a ferocious learner. Like, I read for two to three hours a day. And it is my hobby. Like, that's what I love to

Patti: do. Don't mess with him.

Chris: And I get angry if you mess with me. Like, I mean, she knows firsthand my kids. Like, I I get it. That's what I do. I like that.

So I wanna learn, and I learn number. And I just I just wanna know what's going on about life. So I just look and read. But anyway so the the point is is that, I lost my train of thought on that. But You

Patti: gotta focus on your internal learning and your relationship. All that energy you're bringing outside to friends and Yeah.

Chris: We're talking about friends.

Patti: Family members.

Steve: Taking away from it.

Patti: Your spouse. Or your partner or your kid.

Chris: Yeah. So that that's what I meant to say. So, basically, what I've noticed about marriage and is that if you're not you know, you you have to, it came to me and I lost it again. Shit, Steve. I'm drinking too much coffee.

Steve: Well, let's talk about, you know, you guys started off again, you know, with the marriage, and you guys were very intentional with it, and you guys were very clear.

Chris: That's what it was. I mean, before I forget, Steve, secrets. That's what I kept kept popping in my eyes. Secrets. Secrets destroy marriages, folks.

Yeah. The reason why you can't keep your marriage together, and I've seen it with all my friends that have gotten divorced. Mhmm. They got nasty, dirty, hairy secrets. And that goes on a lot in marriage, and that's what that slowly erodes the integrity of a marriage

Steve: The trust.

Chris: And trust. And it may take a year, two years, five years. But once you have once you have those dirty secrets, and you're not, you don't have clear open communications about what your struggles are, like we talk about

Patti: everything.

Chris: There's nothing I hide from my wife, nothing. If I have an insecurity, I'll tell her. If I if I felt like I did something wrong, I tell her. And that keeps that that bond strong and and the secrets And

Patti: then there's nothing in between that's

Chris: Yeah.

Patti: A struggle. You know, I'm not hiding from him. He's not hiding from me. There's no

Steve: So let's go back to what we're talking earlier, though. You know? When you were having financial struggles

Chris: Yeah.

Steve: You kept that from her. Right? Did that cause problems?

Patti: Well, okay. Let me let me Sure. Elaborate on that. He did tell me that we were you know, we had to calm down, like, with our spending. Like, he would he didn't tell me the ugly truth.

Mhmm. He told me

Chris: There was no need to to send things again.

Patti: There's some things that you don't need to scare the other person. Like, if you know

Chris: It wouldn't add value or hurt her by telling her you're about to go bankrupt. Yeah. And she just had a baby. Yeah. It's just not necessary.

Yeah.

Patti: Right? So it's like he gave me the cliff notes, but he didn't tell me the whole book. Yeah. I just didn't need to know that at that time. And I think we know each other good enough that we can feel those things out.

Steve: Yep. So I wanna ask, though, like, it it it wasn't easy this whole time. No. Right. So there must have been some low points or some extreme challenges in the marriage because that's what I really wanna focus on.

Like, people that are business owners and are married, like, there is some massive adversity.

Patti: Yeah.

Steve: What were some of the biggest challenges?

Patti: Well, I think the the the other people coming into our marriage giving us opinions like, you know, maybe I should be parenting this way or I should be doing the things this way and then Or

Chris: that business is this a dumb idea. You know?

Patti: That I mean Everybody's so dumb. Biggest downfall, our first year of marriage was, you know, people trying to tell us how to how to parent and what we needed to do in our life. And we were like, hey. Hold up. We're two young people and we each had like four jobs at the time.

Clearly, we were doing something right. We were like hustling our asses off. Our kids were taken care of. So we didn't need outside help telling us all these things. And so we would argue about those outside ideas that we knew we didn't agree on anyway.

So once we took out that outside person and put that barrier there, and and it's not just one person. It's

Chris: been set up. Multiple. I mean, it's just yeah. I mean, it's you're gonna have new people that

Patti: are barrier is there. And that was it. We like really never had any marriage struggles.

Chris: And this is why we don't hang out with other married couples and chill, right? Like, that's, that's recipe for problems, right? Like, we were so busy in our business of living and building wealth and doing real estate deals and trying to leave a legacy and just be a great example to our kids. We don't have time to hang out with people and we don't have friends or hang out with Merry Cup. It's like it's just When

Patti: you have extra time, we are with

Chris: our kids. We're with our kids. Right? We mix business with with pleasure with with real estate with our kids, like everything is mixed up. Like, it's just, and I feel for me and Patty, we've created the ideal scene for us.

And I love my life. Like, I'm a happy man. And I can honestly say that Steve, like, I'm not some like bullshit guy saying, like, I'm living my best life. I'm 40 years old. You know, I got five kids.

I got a beautiful wife. I make millions of dollars in real estate every year. I'm building my net worth every month. We're buying millions of dollars of real estate every other month. Like, I'm a happy man.

Steve: Right? So then let's I mean, we've been talking about this. Right? But if you could just articulate maybe in in a few sentences, like, what is the key from each of you. Right?

I wanna hear from both of you guys. What is the key then to creating a great marriage inside entrepreneurship?

Patti: Well, we we have this common goal that we wanna you know, we we love real estate. We wanna keep on doing real estate, and we wanna do it together as a team. And we we just we created that ideal scene on a sheet of paper just like a vision board. Right? This is how we want our kids' school to look like.

This is how we want, our vacation homes to look like. This is where we wanna retire. This is what we have that all mapped out, and we just focus together as a team and do all that together. And it's just we have the same goals. You know.

Chris: Let me see if it's a commonality of goals and purposes for we're both aligned in in in a sense that, we're very purpose driven. We know we want something. There's no there's no noise in the background. Like, that's what we want. Like, we're not sure.

It's a lot of people walking around life, and they're not even sure what they want. And that's the biggest problem. You don't know what you want yet. Figure out what you want. Put it on paper.

Have a purpose. Just put and just focus. Hyper focus on that, and and get away from being pleasure driven. Right? Be purpose driven.

A lot of people on this planet are pleasure driven. You know, you see it all over the everybody wants to, you know, go hang out and chill all the time. And there's nothing wrong with that.

Patti: Can be your pleasure too.

Chris: Right. But but if you but you you gotta have a a equal combination of of purpose driven and pleasure driven. Right? Because a lot of people, it's all pleasure driven, and they get nothing done in their life. They wake up and they're 50 years old, and they what where'd life go by?

Like, build something of of of integrity and Well, I think, you

Patti: know what hurts me the most that I see is, okay, I see people who hate their jobs every day. And I'm like, man, how do people wake up every day going to a job they hate? Like, clearly, they have not found their purpose. Like, that is not what I wanted to do with our life. Like, we love real estate.

Like, we get giddy in the car when we find a deal. Like, we, like, act stupid.

Steve: And I

Chris: would literally get out of the car and start dancing.

Patti: Yeah. Yeah. Like, we we just love it. So I just I think we can be happy because we are truly happy with what we're doing. You know?

And I think I love real estate, so it helped. Like, for instance, we couldn't take the oil change shop to the next level. Yeah. Because I just it wasn't for me. It was like, I couldn't really get into it.

It was not a I

Chris: don't know.

Patti: It wasn't my purpose.

Chris: And I think figuring out the money piece. Right? Yeah. I mean, because it money is a big deal in marriage. I think I think half the marriage thing one I think one half is from cheating and other half is is money problems.

Right? And so it's like, but nobody wants to talk about it because it's a dirty word. Like, you gotta figure that piece out. You gotta have an abundance of money to live a good life. Like, I mean, is is money everything?

Patti: No. But it's not paying for problems and things are

Chris: expensive. Babysitters. I can get, you know, my house clean. I mean, I'm so busy. I don't have time to clean my house.

I mean, I haven't cut my grass in fifteen you know, ten, fifteen years. Like, I don't have time to do all that. But being that I'm making a I do well and I make an abundance of money, I can get people to do all that.

Patti: Saying in the beginning, that's where all the arguments are. Why not cutting the grass? Why not clean the house? You know, those are the arguments.

Chris: Like, we're waiting go away.

Patti: Yeah. Exactly. And that's and we always had an agreement like, okay. We want people to help us do this. Like because we don't want

Chris: the highest and best use of our time at all.

Steve: Do you guys have family meetings? Do you guys have, like you know, we talk about in business, you have these weekly level 10 meetings. Do you guys have family meetings?

Chris: Steve, that's an all day, everyday occurrence. Like, we don't set up a time where, like, I'm in meetings all day. Like, I tell her, like, I I'm a repeater. I talk to myself, and she just listens a lot because I'm I could give you very aggravating in a sense that I repeat myself. I'm like, hey.

I'm gonna do this, Patty. I'm gonna do this. Okay. Chris, you told me that 10 times. So we are always in a meeting.

And we're not in the meeting. We're working on what we've been talking about all day in the meeting. So did we have a designated time?

Patti: Every once in a while, we did it for a while with the kids for, you know, when we were acting when they were acting rowdy, we would kinda sit them all down on on Sunday nights and stuff.

Chris: We did we did that for a while. But they're getting older.

Patti: They're getting older.

Chris: Life is getting more stabilized. I'm 40. Our kids are out of diapers.

Patti: I wanna put this out there too. Okay. It's really, really, really hard raising little ones. You know, it really is so hard. I think the reason why we were able to make marriage work in all those times too because he gave me so much grace, because I was not like mother goose.

Like, I wasn't like awesome at being a mother. Like, he wanted all these kids and I was like, I mean, what do I even do with these kids? Like, you know, so I he gave me a lot of grace with that. I think it

Steve: He wasn't coming home. It's like, why is my dinner not ready?

Patti: Exactly. He no. He his expectations were rational. You know what I mean?

Chris: And sacrifice the Yeah. Sacrifice. Like, you want a great life, you want a great marriage, stay disciplined and sacrifice sacrifice against

Patti: And we remind ourselves that too. And when when something sucks, they're like, man, this is a

Chris: Something big is coming. Yeah. Anytime there's resistance in your life, you're up against a barrier because you're about to break through to the other side of that barrier, which is massive freedom.

Steve: I love that mindset. Yeah. So I think the key here then, the big thing really is just the intentionality of

Patti: it. Yes.

Steve: It's just you guys are very intentional about your business, but you're also very intentional about your marriage Yes. Your kids, your family.

Patti: Yes.

Steve: Person like, it's it's the top of mind. Yes. It's not like, I'll get to it.

Patti: Completely open about everything when it comes to that.

Steve: Yeah. So I wanna, hit on a couple other things too because you kinda mentioned earlier, it's 10 times harder. And, you know, there's obviously a book a guy that wrote a book about that. And so you were, like, on his channel, and you're the go to guy for wholesale. If someone asks Grant Cardone about wholesale,

Chris: it goes to you. Right.

Steve: How did you create that relationship?

Chris: With Grant? Mhmm. This would be a hard pill for most people to swallow. Buy your friends, folks. Yeah.

You want the highest quality allies and friends? Buy them. Buy your way into rooms. Buy your way into masterminds. Buy your way into a relationship that creates a barrier.

What happens on the other side of barriers if you can get past them? More freedom. Mhmm. So I intentionally seek out extraordinarily awesome, interesting people on this planet, and I want to be around them. Yeah.

Because I want to steal their knowingness. I'm selfish in that way. You know? That's why I come over here and hang out with Steve Trang because he's got some I don't know. He's got this this awesome podcast.

Right? Yeah. But I wanna be around extraordinarily awesome people. I've got maybe forty, fifty years left on this earth, and I wanna live the best life I can. And it's not gonna be at the bar.

It's not gonna be at the, you know, ice hockey game or football game. It's gonna be in a controlled environment where there's a barrier to get in there, and I wanna be in that room.

Steve: So then are you saying you bought into a mastermind? You bought Yeah.

Chris: So I basically went to the first 10 x, right, in Miami?

Patti: You bought the most expensive ticket.

Chris: The most expensive ticket. I sat right next to Tim Grover, me and my wife, the whole, Michael Jordan's mentor the whole time.

Steve: Is that next to Tim Grover the whole time?

Chris: Mhmm. The whole time.

Steve: So I was idea which

Patti: way you went through that. I was like, oh, okay.

Steve: That must have been so intense because Tim's a super intense guy.

Patti: Oh, yeah.

Steve: You're a super intense guy. I mean, I just imagine middle.

Patti: It was interesting.

Chris: Yep. No. He's he's phenomenal, man. I mean, he's he's a he's a man.

Patti: He's awesome.

Chris: You don't have results like that if you're not an extraordinary person. Right? Creates a Michael Jordan, a Kobe Bryant, all the other guys he's working with. But it attracts the the best people in a room when you when you can go to these events. But I went to the next GrowthCon and because I had my eye on Grant, you know, this is probably what, five, six years ago.

Because he was saying things that resonated with me, but nobody else is saying it. Mhmm. And I think that goes for a lot of people that that followed Grant.

Patti: I think y'all had a y'all have a similar

Chris: Yeah. We had he would talk I mean, I had like, I had a a a lot of similar thing. Yeah. I mean, he had you know, he said he's on drugs. I think a lot of people can relate to that.

I I've struggled with drugs when I was younger, you know, from Rockstar without a guitar. Yeah. I mean, you know, I was a, you know, I'm a weirdo, Steve. Like, I'm a strange dude, you know. And and I think that I resonated with him in a sense that he said it's okay to be strange and weird and just fucking go for it.

Patti: Mhmm.

Chris: And when somebody starts talking like that, it got my attention. Yeah. And when I went to the 10 and, like, ten x this and yada yada, I was like, man, this fucking this only this makes sense. Like Patty said, it's like church for business. That's how I felt when I left.

And when we left there, we, we booked a meeting with Grant to talk to him about what we're doing. And, you know, you could do a mastermind for an hour with Grant. So I I bought a I bought I paid $5,000 to spend thirty minutes with Grant. Mhmm.

Patti: And

Chris: I was probably one of the best, you know, $5. And then from there, he got to know who I was, my wife. He liked us to build a relationship. Like, man, I like what you're doing in the wholesale. I don't know.

I haven't even heard of wholesaling. This is totally new. Why don't you come and let's do something together, you know, in my studios, and you can start teaching my audience what wholesaling is. One thing led to another. I started doing that.

And then, we sponsored Growthcon. Growthcon too. I mean, it wasn't cheap. It was a $100,000. I struck the check for a $100,000 to sponsor Growthcon.

But I knew I was gonna get around a lot of awesome people, that I was gonna put myself in a room amongst extraordinarily awesome people, and that was the fastest way to level up and skill up. And that's the cheat sheet for life, is to buy your way into

Steve: It's a great lesson, and I think that people don't appreciate it enough. And that was the it leads me to my next thing because, Max and I, Max Jimenez and I, like, you know, we came down to Skillathon. And what I said to everyone was, like, that was an event that was way better than I thought it was gonna be, you know, as, like, you know, Chris' event is gonna be awesome. But the people that were on the stage speaking, it was crazy. We got was it Miguel?

Yep. Right? With the the solar? Yep. We got Judge Graham.

We had, Vic Tiptonas. Yeah. Vic Tiptonas. Like, it was just mind blowing, the people that were there, and it's all goes back to buying your way into

Chris: a room. Yep.

Patti: We met all those great people, a lot of them through the Growth Gone events too.

Chris: Highest quality people on the planet, I believe. I truly believe go to masterminds

Patti: and Yeah.

Chris: Events like that.

Steve: But we were blown away. I mean, like, Max and I, we came back, we're like, okay. We suck. Like, we're not like, we're on our way, but, like, man, those guys, they've arrived. They're not, like, on the way.

Like, they've arrived. I mean, it's all on your or they were doing, like, 8 figures a year annually, like Yep. Or no. 9 figures. Yeah.

Right. They're doing 9 figures a year annually.

Chris: Yeah. They had some guys speed on stage doing yeah. Those numbers. It's and and that's the thing is you gotta humble yourself. Most of those guys make more money than me.

I don't care. I wanna know what they're doing and how they're doing it. Mhmm. Exactly. Show me what you're doing.

Like, and and I think that's what you have to do to humble yourself because you you hear this all the time. Like, you know, because this is a big thing too. If you're trying to do this, you're gonna get a lot of kickback because I got kickback even when I started spending a lot of money on getting into rooms and doing sponsoring I sponsored Girls Gone twice. That's $200,000. I'm once I sponsored it twice.

Wow. And for people that try to go to Masterminds, especially if they're young, even if they're not young, their wife may tell them, their mom or dad may tell them, that's stupid. That's a scam. How many times you heard that, Steve? It's a scam.

You're gonna get ripped off. Yeah. It's a scarcity mindset in that person's mind that's either intentionally or unintentionally trying to hold you back from doing and living your best life because they just have some insecurities, man. And and that's what it boils down to.

Steve: It's a scarcity and mindset. And I think the the big thing kinda like you you mentioned a moment ago is once you buy your way into that room, the other people that are also buying into that way into that room

Patti: That's right.

Steve: Are such abundance minded people, such great givers that, like, the fact that they'll just tell you they'll just like, here's what I did. Exactly. They'll give you the roadmap.

Chris: Iron sharpens iron. On Robert Sisler. That was the other guy.

Steve: Yep. Yep. Robert Sisler. Yep. Yeah.

Alright. So then the other thing that was really cool, which is not entrepreneurship, was that, I'm not a crawfish person. Like, a lot of people in my family are crawfish people, but you're like, you gotta try this crawfish as if you gotta try it. You gotta try it. I was like, alright.

I'll try it. And I think I had three servings of it.

Patti: Everybody has at least two servings.

Chris: We have never had anybody come to our Massimo to come to our events where big mama big mama rude has this famous crawfish etouffee that is insane. They can never never heard of crawfish, you know, they think it's a mud bug or whatever, and it's dirty. They're eating like, what is this stuff?

Steve: Yeah. That was an incredible meal. I told my wife, like, you know, if we ever go back to New Orleans, like, we have to. Or or Louisiana. We have to get this.

It's you don't I don't know where else they sell it.

Patti: Well, you have to make sure it's

Chris: It's Louisiana.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that was that was also a life altering experience.

Patti: I'm glad because we wanna do that. We wanna bring, like, our heritage to other people when they come to it's just a little bit of us Right. That we get to enjoy with other people.

Steve: Yeah. So, is there any well, I guess right now, you know, you got that cap.

Chris: Yep. What

Steve: are you excited about right now?

Chris: You know, I'm excited about the opportunity there is in affordable housing. It's funny we woke up. I mean, we we got to our hotel. I'm over here because I gotta speak at another event. Carlos, Ray, and all of them.

I'm seeing their Mhmm. Momentum thing tomorrow. Right when we got to our room, Patty puts the TV on. We don't have cable at our house. We're like, Patty said, put TV on.

We don't get anything else to do. The first thing that comes on in the news is update. Arizona massively needs more affordable housing. Got my attention. I was like, Patty, we're in the right direction.

We move in the right direction.

Patti: Yeah.

Chris: And for me, you know, I've been doing mobile home park investing now for about four years, four and a half years. And what got me into mobile home park investing is Warren Buffett was talking about this five and six years ago, and I read an article about him saying that that mobile home park is the mobile home parks and mobile homes are the last vestiges of affordable housing and that the way the demographics are going because demographics don't lie, right? That there's gonna be a huge housing crisis soon. And when I saw that, that made a lot of sense. I had just finished doing a bunch of apartments and single family homes, and the returns are lackluster.

Right? For me, I can buy a mobile home, you know, and we do a a ton of wholesaling and flip it in the South. We just started doing it, you know, nationwide virtually. But for me, before I got into the mobile home park model, I would get these leads from mobile homes, and I didn't know what to do with them because they needed to move them. And I would just I don't do that, ma'am.

Now, like, we buy these distressed mobile home parks, you know, twenty, thirty, 40 units. Maybe they're missing five, ten trailers. Are they we have to haul out five or 10 because it's too messed up. I can pick up trailers for $5, $10 I've even paid $2,500 for trailers I bought a 2009 trailer Clayton two bedroom two bath literally it's hardly lived in because it was a camp it's in mint condition I paid $5 for it they paid 32,000 for it back in 2009 I hold it for 2,500. I set it up for another $3 closing costs.

I'm all in to, like, 11,000. I'm getting $8.50 a month on $11,000 investment. What does that in real estate? Nothing. Nothing.

Nothing. Nothing. So that's when a light bulb, you know, like that so for me, I'm excited about that right now, Steve, is that I know I'm moving in the right direction.

Patti: Well, we had lessons learned. Right? Because we had nicer rentals, single family. And when the economy shifted, nobody could afford that anymore. Yeah.

And so we wanted to put our place somewhere where we weren't gonna get hurt again. It was it was like we're we're gonna be at a level that anybody can afford, and it's needed and wanted. And that's where we're gonna focus on.

Chris: I've, you know, we've I've been through three two or three crashes now. And and that stuff hurts, and it doesn't feel good mentally as an entrepreneur. And I wanna be in a position where I can not stress when the economy crashes. And and I proved the model during COVID. I mean, our our rentals stayed full for for the mobile home parks.

We we actually we the the the, it got full. Like, we had, like, maybe 8%, where we the percentage of our rentals that didn't were weren't occupied. And they all went they all got filled up because people got scared, and they downsized their rentals. So I know we're moving in the right direction. I I wanna you know, I'm just going around trying to spread the good news, so to speak.

Yeah. That kinda make mobile home parks great again because they're needed and wanted, folks. Like

Steve: I mean, I think the point you're talking about with the rentals is kinda like for me as an investor, if I'm gonna flip, you know, I love to flip in sub median. Right? Like, our median right now is $3.97. So I feel comfortable flipping $2.50 to 300 all day because no matter what happens Yeah. Someone needs a house between $2.50 and three hundred.

Yep. So for you here, no matter what happens, someone needs to rent in a price point that's affordable. Yeah.

Chris: Yeah. And and with all the political environment that's going on, I think in in just overall, as as the world changes, everybody's gonna need a place to live. Is it gonna get better or worse as far as living conditions? I'm of the pessimistic view that I don't think we're headed in the right direction as far as economic wealth building for individuals in America. And I think the standard of living as a whole is probably gonna come down as long as this political environment sustains itself.

World history tells us that's gonna happen. I don't mean to get all political, but I mean, you know how pretty vibrant I am on social media.

Steve: As you are. I love it, actually. I love your message on

Chris: I've read enough history to know, you know, I I I'm not talking on my ass. I've read hundreds of books Mhmm. On political environments, revolutions, and we have a, you know, a communistic style revolution going on right now. Well, you

Steve: know what I do. I look at it. Right? And all I do is I just like, man, it sucks right now if you're

Chris: Well, Steve, if you have a w two. Experienced that.

Steve: Well, I have. Right? So I just look at it, but, you know, it sucks if you're a w two. Like, that's how I see it. Like, with inflation going up, literally, you're making less every year.

And then so for me, it's like, all we can do is just stack cash. Right? Yep. If we make as much as money possible, then you don't have to worry about it. But it sucks that most people don't have that option.

Chris: They don't.

Steve: And I

Chris: I've been I've been telling my wife, I said, we gotta stack the cash for the crash, baby, because it's coming. Yeah. And it's gonna be crazy. I think it's gonna be crazier than 2008. And, it'll be interesting.

We live in some fantastically interesting times. I have the mindset of I am pessimistic, but I'm also opportunistic in a sense that I think I'm gonna make more money than I've ever made in my life.

Steve: Well, that's

Chris: kinda how

Patti: it felt. More multifamily in I

Chris: bought yeah. I mean, we borrowed we bought 10 almost $810,000,000 worth of mobile homes during the crash of twenty twenty last year. Like, everybody got like, I had been working mobile homes for, like, ever, you know, like maybe six, eight months a year. You know, they never wanted to sell. They wanted a premium for it.

But when that when that crash came and COVID hit and people stopped paying, I doubled down. I went all in and we we bought a bunch of parks. We bought, I think, five, six parks, a total of $8.09, $10,000,000 in in valuations, and we got fantastic deals on them. But that takes timing. That takes preparation.

That takes courage.

Steve: And Well, you had to be prepared for it, and that's the big thing is most people are trying to prepare when it's too late.

Chris: Yes.

Steve: So then what are you guys' biggest struggle right now?

Chris: Biggest struggle? Oh, man. She doesn't make out with me anymore, Steve. I'm trying to figure out why she don't kiss me anymore. She probably

Patti: say,

Chris: you don't kiss me anymore. I like

Patti: a peck or two.

Chris: That's really honest. I mean like

Patti: the full little kiss. Do you

Chris: not even kiss me no more? What? I got back to when we 18, 19 years old? I'm a I'm a very, I'm an affectionate person. Right, Steve?

I need lots of love for my wife.

Patti: He needs lots of love

Chris: and she

Patti: is hard to keep up with.

Chris: No. And she's, I mess with it. Like I'm an open book. Like, I don't hide nothing about a marriage. I love my wife.

I love my life. Our I think our biggest struggle for us is, you know, chasing the the dream and making sure that I'm doing in the correct manner. Like, I'm not leaving anything on the table. Like, am I really going like, let's let's go. Let's let's freaking buy the best deals as fast as we can.

Let's how do we get more deals? How do we raise more private money? I think we're headed in the right direction. So our biggest struggle is to make sure that we stay on track and that we know where we came from and we continue the journey of growing together and leave a fantastic example for our kids. For me, you know, that's things I worry about.

I want my kids to remember me a hundred years from now, two hundred years from now. Like, remember my Papa Roode? Mhmm. You know, it says, you know, 2020 you know, '22, '22, and it's two hundred years from now, like, yeah. Papa Roode.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Chris Roode. Yeah.

From yeah. Back in in the early two thousand. Yeah. He's he's the one that created all this wealth for us.

Steve: You know, I I love the it seems like a lot of, entrepreneurs are at least the drivers. You know? Like, our biggest fear is not realizing our potential.

Chris: Mhmm. Yeah.

Steve: And it seems like that is

Chris: Ed is it either Edgar Allan Poe or one of those guys said, humanity's biggest downfall is unfulfilled potential. I'm probably butchering that because I don't know if it was Edgar Allan Poe's, one of those guys, and it sticks in my mind that is so true. Mankind's biggest, you know, downfall is just unfulfilled potential.

Steve: Yeah. And that's I know that's something that in in my own marriage, right, my wife's always like, why do you want more? Why do you want more? Like, like, we're good. Why do you want more?

I was like, because I can't.

Patti: Well, it's a game. Alright? It's a game. It's a game. It's a game.

We talk about just all the time. The game. Like, it's fun. Like, we we're not dead yet. Like, we gotta still keep going.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, it's but it's because as soon as you stop, you see this all the time. These people stop. Maybe they're 65. They made a ton of money.

Stop, and then they die the next year. You're living your best life now. I'm having the time of my life now. I'm not trying to go arrive at a certain wealth performance. I'm living my best life now.

I'll look back when my body is old and decrepit like we had the time of our life, Patty. Why you know? So let's just go. This is the best part. Let's just keep going.

Steve: Living your life with no regrets. Yeah. What is your biggest struggle right now?

Patti: Biggest regret right now?

Steve: Struggle. Struggle.

Patti: I find, like, this is so important on why we create barriers because when we have to let those things in, that's our struggles. Like, you know, we've had some random struggles with hurricane issues and stuff like that, but it's always an outside influence that brings the struggle. We usually always are pretty solid. So whenever we have an outside issue and it brings a struggle within, we just kinda talk ourselves off the edge. Right?

Right. That's gonna fix itself. But, honestly, that's probably been

Chris: When you said the struggle, she's talking about referring to the hurricane. We had we had bought another short term vacation rental on the beach in Gulf Shores, Alabama last year, and we bought it before we even use it. It got destroyed by a hurricane. We to the it's a year later, almost a year later, we still have not gotten any money for that. I had to come out of pocket spend.

We spent $120,000 on the rehab. I had to come out of pocket. Insurance still has not given us our

Patti: That's

Chris: a barrier. Right? That's just that's And it's just

Patti: a lot of it's stressful.

Chris: It's very stressful, but I we play at a high level. We play a big game. You're gonna have things you can't predict. Right? And we're we're supposedly supposed to get the money, you know, for the all the money we got out of pocket, you know, next week, but it's always been it's it's just like one thing after another.

And we had a struggle. It's things you can't control.

Patti: Yes. Those are the struggles that the things we can't you can't control are fine. But it's all those outside influences that you can't control.

Chris: And that's and that's what they we should talk about to those guys that you're gonna have things you can't control.

Patti: Yeah.

Chris: So you gotta harden yourself because life is hard by itself. Right? And you gotta be harder than life is because I don't care

Patti: how much each other. You have to help each other out because there are some days after dealing with attorneys and insurance and all that stuff bullshit.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, we had to we had to sue the insurance just to get our money.

Patti: It's been like it's, you know, it's stressful and it it it it aggravates me and he has to, like, talk me off the ledge, you know? Yeah. But I I'm appreciative that he'll do that and give me that time because he he doesn't hold he doesn't he lets kind of stuff like that go.

Chris: Yeah. If I if I can't control it, I let it there's no point in putting energy on it.

Patti: Not for me. I'm like, oh, no. Like, I don't wanna be I don't want anybody taking advantage of me. Like, so so he has to talk me off the ledge, but we help each other out.

Steve: The, I can't it's something prayer. Right? It's like, god give me strength. Yeah.

Chris: The whole thing. Yep. And That's a great verse. Yeah.

Steve: Serenity Yep. Prayer. Yeah. And for me, that's the big thing because, like, there are times where, like, people were, like, freaking out. I was like, why aren't you upset about us?

Because I can't do anything about it. Yeah. I can't do anything about it. I'm over it.

Patti: Yeah. So Yep. Absolutely. With that.

Steve: Yeah. So awesome. Is there any message, Jeju? I mean, I know we hit on a whole bunch of different things. Entrepreneurship, Maresh.

Is there anything you wanna leave the listeners with? I'll start with you, and then wrap up with you.

Chris: I think, find people in your life that inspire you and get around them no matter if it costs money, you know, takes, you know, effort and or no matter what people tell you, that is gonna be the cheat sheet for life. You know, people are human beings are amazing creatures. Like, you know, you can get around one person or two or three people and it can change your life. So if that costs $5 to do or $10 or 20 or something, in my case, a $100, it'll be life changing for you. So in most cases, you know, your mom and dad are probably not gonna be your biggest influence.

That's just honestly how it is. You know, you don't ask a dentist about having brain surgery. Right. If that makes sense what I'm leading to. You go straight to the so if your mom and dad are not where you want to be in life, or even your brother, your sister, anybody, or your friend, don't get advice from people that are not doing what you want to do.

Don't have high level conversations with low level people and I'm not being derogatory about that. It's a different wavelength. It is different frequency and vibration when you're talking to somebody that's on a high level versus your mom and dad who just genuinely love you and want you to go to college and get a job and make $80 a year for the rest of your life and that that worked for them. But if you're entrepreneurial like me and Steve and and and you have that thing that goes off in your head like you're not doing what you're supposed to do and it's aggravating and you don't know why, but you have this internal, like, aggravation, you're probably an entrepreneur. Yeah.

And you need to find other entrepreneurs just like you because we're rare breeds. And it's lonely at the top. Like Steve said, this is why I go find my entrepreneur buddies and allies because I'm lonely. And I need love and even from my entrepreneurial buddies. So I come meet Steve out here and and other guys and speak because you you can be black, white, Chinese, Mexican, fucking purple Martian.

If you're an entrepreneur, you're my dog. Yeah. Awesome.

Patti: I think for me is if there's something in your life that's making you unhappy, causing you struggles and stress, like, be willing to think outside the box. We have always gone outside the box in our way of thinking, our way of living, like, with the schooling, for example. Like, it wasn't working for us. We had tried it all. I'm like, okay.

So there has to be a better option. And you you when you go outside the box, sometimes it's where the golden goose is. Right? And for us, that's what it's been. Like, we've always gone outside the box.

Everybody else thought we were weird. You know? Now a lot of my friends are doing the same thing with homeschooling. So it's like you have to be that first person to to think outside the box, be willing to fail or lose, but to try something to make things better around you.

Chris: You're you're gonna lose. I mean, you get it get it out of your mind. You're going to lose, but the mindset is you never lose. You only learn. Mhmm.

If you understand that, you'll you'll

Patti: And then sometimes you do win, and and you find it like, wow. Why didn't I do this years ago? I'm so much more at peace and happier with my life this way. And so, I would say just think outside the box and don't go on that same when everybody goes left, we go right. Yep.

We have always done that even from 17.

Chris: It works.

Patti: And it's been our best path. So be willing to take that path is where I would like to say. Yeah.

Steve: And if someone wanna get a hold of you, how would they do that?

Patti: I'm on Instagram. Living the real estate life is my IG, and I'm also on Facebook, Patty Rude.

Chris: I'm at on Instagram, I'm Real Estate Rude. And on Facebook, Chris Rude Entrepreneur and then my personal Chris, I'm Max and I'm friends on you just press the follow button. So and, you know, if you wanna come to one of the make mobile home parks great again mastermind, inbox me. I think we got one coming up here soon. And, yeah, come come

Patti: We do four events a year.

Chris: Yeah. Yeah. Come come be an ally with me and and hang out with me and and let's let's make some stuff happen. Awesome.

Patti: And I'll cook you some crockpot

Chris: cheesecake. Oh, man.

Patti: Mhmm.

Steve: Awesome. That alone is worth it. Thank you. Alright. Thank you.

Thank you.