1188: Automate Your Way to Real Estate Success with UGro and Grocapitus Founder Neal Bawa

Robert Plank 0:00 Music. Welcome back. We're here with Neil Bawa, and he is the CEO and founder at UGro and Grocapitus. Those are two commercial real estate investment companies. Neil's companies use cutting edge real estate analytics technology to source and acquire or build large commercial properties across the US for over 800 investors. Their portfolio is 4800 units and AUM value upon completion of over $1 billion Neil has a lot of things figured out, from the real estate to the marketing and the selling and the teaching and even being on podcast. So we have so much to talk about. Neil, glad to have you.

Neil Bawa 0:41 Well, thanks for having me on the show. I'm very, very excited to be here.

Robert Plank 0:46 I'm excited to have you, and I'm curious. Just about whenever I talk to a real estate person, they always seem to think a lot bigger, right? It seems like some of us kind of have like, a ceiling as far as like, Okay, well, here's what I can accomplish, here's what I can do. Here are the leads I'm going to pursue. Here's the clients I'm going to serve. But a lot of these real estate guys, they just have, like, this growth mindset, and it's, like, so big and it's crazy. And I mean, have you seen this? Or can you speak to this whole idea of just like, thinking bigger and better?

Neil Bawa 1:14 I think that it's the company that you keep. Real Estate is an area that where people have seen astonishing levels of success. So I want to point out to you that the worldwide real estate market is three times the market cap of the worldwide stock market. Real estate is the largest asset class in the world. The stock market, worldwide stock market is a little over 100 trillion. Real estate is at 326 trillion. So it is 3x the size of the entire world stock market, right? That's the kind of success that people have had. Seven out of the top 10 richest people in the world are were very involved in real estate. Actually, richest people in America, some of the richest people in the world haven't been that as involved. But if you look back at the last 100 years, more than 60% of all wealth created, all wealth created is in real estate. So people have had astonishing success in real estate over the last 100, 200 years. And so that translates to a feeling of can do, translates to a feeling of big numbers. I mean, you know, my portfolio, it's actually not a billion. Now, we've sold a lot of properties because of, you know, the the prices had gone up so much in 2022 I sold a bunch. It's about six, $50 million in real estate. It's actually not very hard to get to that point. I know dozens of friends that all have portfolios larger than mine, right? So the mathematics of real estate is very compelling. So it's very It's not difficult to get to larger numbers. For example, we buy two properties a year. Typically, we buy them for 30 to $40 million each. So if you do an okay job in a year, you know you're not going for big growth. You're still buying $80 million worth of properties, right? So it's not terribly hard to get to large numbers. And again, I'm not saying that what I do is easy. I'm saying it's fairly common to see numbers in the billions in real estate, and also fairly common to see numbers in the 10s of billions,

Robert Plank 3:06 wonderful. So keep that company about people that are doing better than you. That way they will pull you up, and that way they won't pull you down. And so you're doing these massive deals, right? You have this huge portfolio, relatively speaking, you have these trends that are bigger, but you have all these accomplishments, why not just cash out, hang out on the beach, or if you're still working on the business, why do the publicity like this? Why appear on podcasts? Why not just make deals all day?

Neil Bawa 3:33 So, couple, couple reasons. Firstly, I've already retired. I've you know, I sold my I'm a technologist, so computer science degree, data science is my background. I've run a technology company for 14 years, sold it, you know, at class leading valuations retired. The first month was great. The second month, you know, was boring. Third month, my wife was trying to kill me. Fourth month, I was trying to kill myself. I just don't think I'm a fit for retirement. So what I did was Robert, is that I have automated large portions of my business, to the point where I work about six hours a day. I don't work Fridays, so work about 24 hour weeks. And this is what I like, because when I do less than this, my brain starts to rot, and it doesn't work so well for me. So I like the fact and I take about six weeks off a year. We spend summers in Europe, winters in Asia, and this is what I like. This is I've reached the point in my life where I don't want to work any less, and I don't want to work anymore. So hopefully that answers your question. You know that for everyone, there is a point that works, and yes, for some people, it is sitting on a beach. It's just not. For me, my brain is very active. I need to do certain number of things every day. The second piece is, you know, why market yourself. Why not? I think that I'm not obsessively tied to growth, but I'm a Systems guy. So you look at me, you're basically seeing somebody that's 99% robot and 1% human. I am tied to systems and processes of all kinds. Everything that I do, I have systems work. I. Systems for my personal life. I've, you know, you know, habits tied to habits, and marketing myself has become a habit. So for 10 years, you know, I appear on, you know, I've appeared on 300 podcasts so far, and this isn't something that I do. There's a team of people that has been chasing Robert plank for a while to say, hey, we want to get on your podcast. And they've been sending my content out to you. I'm not the one doing any of that work, Robert, right. I'm just here for an hour speaking to you, sort of sharing my thoughts, my systems and whatever happens after this. When Robert records this and sends it out to my team, my team will take about 45 different actions with that, you know, one hour broadcast, and they will publish it all across the web. 10s of 1000s of people will see it. None of those are things that I do, but they're all things that I initiated. So what I do is create systems, and now I'm incredibly powerful. I feel like I'm 10x as powerful since November 30, 2022 when chat GPT came out, because I write five to 10 chat GPT specs per day, per day. Right now, custom instructions for chat GPT for my company, plugged in already. I use both chat GPT and perplexity. So instead of telling people going into a meeting and or calling a meeting, Robert, I don't call a meeting of my marketing team anymore, I, you know, use my phone open chat GPT voice type for about five minutes, just talking, just talking about what I want to do, what my vision is, what's the team, what's the timeline, what's the deliverables. Is this something that needs to be repeated? Maybe it's in marketing, right? And I say that, and then at the end, I say, you know, imagine that you are the most savvy business person in the world, right? You have to tell chat GPT what what to think of itself and and structure this as a spec for my team. It does that. I copy, paste it into Word. I send it to my project manager. He's in Pakistan, and he creates a Slack channel and a kickoff meeting. Sometimes I go to the kickoff meeting, lots of times they don't, you know, the spec is clean enough, and they're now working on it, because it is now in Asana, which is our project management software, and a project manager is leading it. He doesn't just create a list of tasks. He makes you know in every spec I say, is this something that I want to know you to do forever? Is this something I want you to repeat once a month, once a quarter, once a year, right? I give them that frequency. And the project manager, his job is not just to create the new project, but to create a template so that every time the tasks are complete, the template is recreated, maybe after a month, after a quarter, after a year, whatever the frequency is. And so now I never have to worry about this ever happening again, because that's the project manager's job, right? So I never send any of my specs to my marketing team, my sales team, my operations team, I always only send it to the project manager, because after that, I know that if I've said it, this needs to be done monthly, it will be done monthly, and there'll be a Slack channel. And I always have with every spec a report, and I visualize a report, I say something like, I want a weekly report, and this report should say, show these four metrics. And I would like a bar graph on the left and a pie chart on the right. And please don't give me any numbers. I hate tables. I hate Excel. I just want to see a dashboard. And my definition of a dashboard, Robert simply, is something that where I can see insights in five seconds or less. If you're giving me something too cluttered, I can't get a five second. Remember, in a car, that car dashboard, you have 1/10 of a second to look down, learn something and put your eyes back on the road, 1/10 of a second, because one second is too much. I mean, right? The car in front of you breaks. You're dead. So my dashboards are all graphics, no data, right? And they're in Slack channels. And the project manager job is to make sure that people are publishing this, this stuff. So to go back to your question, I know long answer, but, but a lot of people are about why, you know, why market? Why not just buy deals? The answer is, why not market? I'm buying deals all the time, right? But, but the point is, you should never stop doing the things that make you successful. There is no ceiling. There's only the ceilings that you create for yourself, and I'm not about to create a ceiling for myself.

Robert Plank 9:05 That's amazing, and there's so much to unpack in that. And so you figured out these good habits. You figured out the right sizeness of your lifestyle, right the months that you want to work, the hours in the day, and then the tasks that you do, and then the whole piecing it together. I mean, I use all these tools, but I probably have them connected, maybe, like, 20% as well as as you do. Like, I mean, I use chat GPT every day, but the whole Speaking of not making the spec, giving it to the project manager, I haven't bridged that gap. We use the Slack channel, we use Asana, but not to the extent that you have. So that's that's I need to, like, go back and just watch that little clip there, and kind of reinforce the the strengths that we have. And kind of get, get this, this all figured out, because you, you hear all these plots all the time, right, that you should delegate, but then many times there's the, the not letting go of enough control. And so this, it's an amazing assistant that you've. Out there. And so what would you say, Man, this is going to sound like a job interview, but like, what are your weaknesses? Are you like, like a FOMO guy? Are you impatient? Are there too many good ideas? Like, where do you struggle? Still?

Neil Bawa 10:14 I think I struggle in actually delegating too much. So what I like to do is, you know, I've been making up for my weaknesses over the last couple of years in building a middle management infrastructure of people to make sure that once I fire it, I can actually forget it. So that's been my weakness for a while, and and what it's cost me is, you know, there are certain projects that have been running poorly, and my I didn't have the middle management so people didn't update the reports. There was a report format that was not giving me the truth. It was giving me information. But information is worthless. You're looking for truth, right? So I've had to, over the last couple of years, build a middle management infrastructure which involves the project manager, but also other people. And what I'm telling them constantly is, whatever spec I created a year ago or two years ago, you have to look at it every quarter and say, Does this need to be changed, improved? Is this data actually useful? Is it showing Neil the truth? You know, if it's not showing him the truth, what needs to be on there? So that was really the weakness, right? That I felt like once I fire my gun, everything will just happen. And some middle management was needed, including that project manager. So now it's fixed. Now it seems to be going smoothly.

Robert Plank 11:29 So you're figuring out how to do those adjustments. And I can definitely relate. You look at an SOP or a Google document from three years ago, and it just looks old, right? It even just kind of feels like you're, you're looking at out of date inputs and outputs, and so you're, you're getting all these things accomplished and solving the hard problems. And so as far as real estate goes, like, Can you unpack that a little bit more like, I mean, I'm sure you've been on quite a trajectory working these big deals. I don't know if it's stressful or it's exciting, or it's challenging, or it's a mix of all that. But tell me some stories. I mean, what? What kind of adventures have you been on as far as real estate investing?

Neil Bawa 12:09 Sure, so I'll give you a little bit of a backstory to so that you have context. So 2003 I was running a technology slash healthcare company, you know, in in Silicon Valley. I live in Silicon Valley very, you know, very technically savvy because of my computer science background. I have hundreds of employees and and I get started in real estate in the reverse fashion. So almost everybody that you've ever talked to get started in real estate, either by buying a single family rental or they're doing a fix and flip right, or maybe lending. I got started in real estate when the senior partner in the firm I was the junior partner, said, we're not going to rent, we're going to build our own campus, right? So we were rich. We had plenty of money, very, you know, company was very profitable, and so we didn't have any investors. We just basically said, we're just going to build a custom campus for our use for scratch. And the first one we built from scratch was 27,000 square feet. We paid maybe $7 million for it. We basically built it in the evenings, because you had to be in a business to run hundreds of employees. So you know, eight to six we're working our business six to 12 at night. We're working on this campus when it was ready as this junior partner. I was shocked by the depreciation benefits that came from that real estate because, you know, I had the big fat tax salary, and I live in tax California, so I was paying, you know, 40% of my income to state and federal, and all of a sudden I was paying a lot less. Why? Just because I built a campus for my company, because the depreciation was wild. And I was like, wow, this is really great. We should build more campuses. So between 2003 and 2009 I built seven campuses, built or improved seven campuses. And every time I did that, my my salary went up because those campuses were helping drive growth. But my take home, you know, my take home went up a lot faster because I was paying a lot less in taxes. So you know, in that 2004 2000 in eight time frame, my take home was increasing rapidly. And so by the time I realized I'd hit more than a million dollars just sitting in the bank, it was 2009 so my timing was ridiculously perfect, right? Because, and starting 2009 I was buying a single family home every single month. And what's interesting is that that in that time frame, you know, I would go to a party with my with my family, with my big fat family, and I'd start talking about real estate. And you know what I'm buying, and you know how it's it's so compelling. And here's my data, and my family would get pissed off at me, because in 2009 it was all gloom and dune everyone was saying, real estate's crashing, it's going to get worse. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. Can you please look at this spreadsheet? This spreadsheet saying this is the best time to buy real estate in 100 years, right? I'm buying something that costs two and a half times more than my purchase price to manufacture, to make, right? But the cost of construction is 250,000 I'm paying 90 Look, look, look, look, people get pissed off at me. They would get really, really angry, and that. And they would tell me off, like, Don't say stuff like that in our parties, because you'll, you know, bankrupt all of us if we follow you. And that bothered me, Robert, because I, you know, the data clearly pointed to me being right. So I'm like, Okay, I'm just going to go out and buy a huge amount of this, but I'm also going to start publishing this data. I need other people to validate this. Maybe there's something I'm not seeing, and maybe I am the greater fool. And so what I did was I, I opened a meetup group. This is 2009 2010 and it was in my campus, right? So I have these big conference rooms. So while other people travel an hour for a meet up in the evening, I was traveling 150 feet from my corner office to to this conference room. So it was very convenient, right? And people would come and I would, I would basically share my methodologies. And you know, first time I did a meetup, Robert, there were four people. Next time, there were 20. And the third time we did the meetup, there were 100 people with standing only room, because, you know, this is Silicon Valley. It's filled with geeks and nerds. Everybody likes a geek who's sharing a very geeky, nerdy, you know, methodology of how he's finding and buying real estate. And so we did that for a number of years. Nobody sold anything to anybody. We weren't allowing any kind of pitches, right? But people were coming from Apple and HP and Google and, you know, all these super powerful companies, and they were all making a lot of money, but they were all paying a lot in taxes. So I would tell them my story, and they'd be like, oh, let's go off and buy stuff. So, like, we became friends with a lot of other people that were buying stuff. I wasn't buying their stuff. They weren't buying my stuff. Everybody was buying independently. But we were all making shit tons of money, right? Because we were buying properties and immediately getting cash flow, like $1,000 $1,500 in cash flow. And so lots of people were buying a property a month, because, you know, this is the richest part of America. And over time, one of the guys from Apple comes to me and says, you know, this methodology that you created is really good for people like us who are data scientists, but can you convert it into something that is so and that the word he used, I didn't like, he said, idiot proof that anyone from anywhere in the United States could, in 10 minutes, compare any two cities in America for real estate investment. Because that's, that's what I was focused on. Robert, I was focused on, how do I compare cities in the United States? Because the question I kept asking I became obsessed with it was, how many cities are there in the United States? Well, the answer is 1033 Okay, which of these is best for real estate investment at any given point of time? Well, everybody's answer is different, right? My answer is no, no. From a data perspective, they can only be one answer, or maybe there's two different methodologies, in which case there's two answers. How can there be hundreds of answers? Right? So I became obsessed with that idea. So I'm like, How do I get data on 1033 cities? Well, as it happens, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the bls.gov site, publishes all of the demographics data. It's free, right? You just have to go in there. So we wrote a script, and we would scrape the website, and, you know, we crashed the website, and we received a call from the FBI, and we explained what we were doing, and then we slowed down our software, our scraper, so that it wouldn't crash their website. We gathered terabytes of data on cities all around the US. We stuck it into a, into a software. I was a, it was a statistical software. It's called R. That's the name of the software R, and it would start giving us insights correlations, right? And we were looking for correlations between real estate profits and everything else. What correlates is it income? Is it job growth? Is it home? Price growth? Is it crime? Is it schools? But what is most correlated with profit, right? Nobody else seemed to be asking these questions. And I'm a dork, a geek, I'm asking all these questions, and it's spitting these interesting cities out to me. And I'm basically, every time I see a very interesting city like Provo Utah, I go and do a meetup, and 100 people show up, and before we know it, everyone's like running off to Provo Utah to invest. So, you know, 2014 we picked Provo Utah. All prices have tripled, right? Like, you know people about multi family, they're probably made 10x 15x and so these weird places that nobody knows we're getting, you know, spit out, Elkhart, Indiana, Provo Utah, you know, Charleston, South Carolina, you know, Rogers, Arkansas. Nobody knows these places, right? But these places had incredible numbers in our software. And so eventually somebody says, Can you turn this into something that anyone can learn in 10 minutes? And that was really hard, because, you know, we're talking about data science. So we invented a system. We called it location magic. And what it does is it takes all of the work out of it in the background, and people only do the front stuff. So we gave people an Excel spreadsheet, and people loved it. We called it location magic. I would teach it around the Bay Area. I'm still running my technology company. So there's no investors, there's no money. I'm just like, this is really cool stuff. More people need to know about it. And so before I know it, Robert, people are inviting me to conferences all over the United States, and I would tell them, Look, I am not a real estate guy. I don't have any investors. I'm just buying stuff for myself and a bunch of friends and family. And they're like, Yeah, we love that, right? You should come to our conference. So I'm getting all these business class tickets and, you know, all these free, you know, tickets and airfare to go to real estate conferences. I'm like, the the token dork that they that they have to have, you know, this, this, this, you know, nerdy nerd, really nerdy guy with this pocket protector that shows up and basically talks and, you know, is different from all the hype that goes on at real estate conferences. And I was having a blast, so I did that for a number of years, and that's really how I got started. I mean, I haven't told you the rest of the story of what, how I got into it on a full time basis, but hopefully that answers your question. It was just this passion and desire to ask the question, what is the best city in America for real estate investment? And it made my career.

Robert Plank 20:34 You're a problem solver, and I love this story, and I would just it's your your the fun that you're having and that you're expressing that you had. It's kind of contagious just to hear about your momentum and like saying, like, here's my goal, here's the question I want to answer. Let's figure it out. And then as you're figuring it out, you just kind of teach this and you figure out ways to continue on that path, and saying, like, where should we have the meetup? And these things just kind of growing organically, and I almost want to say by accident, but it's not accident, right? Like, maybe at first, like, accident, like, implies a random chance, but you're like, Hey, I'm I'm looking at what the data is here, and if the data says that I need to run these meetups and be social and network and get my message out, then I'll do more of that. It's like we said earlier about how you still do the publicity, because that's like that that feeds the other stuff. And if you have something that's working, then why let opinions take over, right? Like your own opinion or the opinions of others, and why mess things up? If you say, like, hey, well, I don't know why this works. I put the input in and I get this output. I don't want to change too many factors, because I might, like, blow up the whole system and then realize years later, Hey, maybe I should, maybe I should have kept doing the meetups, and so I want to, I was, like, a million questions to ask you, and I want to pack it all in. But we also kind of do, like, a 20 to 30 minute podcast. You don't go a full hour, so in our last few minutes here, what do you think would be the like, the best use of our time, like, what has you the most excited? Or,

Neil Bawa 22:03 what should I be asking you right now in our final minutes? Well, the first thing I want to tell people is the opportunity right at any given point in time. But what's the great opportunity? It changes, right? Obviously, you know, and I'm, you know, I'm no expert at all different kinds of opportunities. But what I'd like to tell people today is, because of what happened to interest rates. Land in the United States became illiquid, the most powerful opportunity today, and I rarely say this is not to buy properties. It's not to build properties. I do all of that, and I've done that hundreds of millions of dollars of both. It's actually to buy land, but not to pay for it. So right now, I have a team of six people full time, all they do is they churn through 5000 parcels of land and make underwrite about 500 of them. Make about 80 offers a year, and we put about a dozen pieces of land in contract. Here's the cool part. We don't pay for any of them on all of those dozen parcels of land. We have 21 months to close. Normally in 2022 you had three months to close, 90 days at most. Nobody give you, you know, nobody let you buy anything for more than 90 days. But today, the land market is illiquid, and so all of my contracts, Robert, are 21 month contracts, six months to do investigations, 12 months to get land approvals, and three months of extensions, 21 months. So I'm holding on to 10s of millions of dollars worth of land. Haven't paid for any of it. That's an incredible opportunity, because most of this land, all I'll do is maybe just permit it and get it zoned, and then I'll just sell it, right? I won't even build anything on it. That kind of opportunity is extraordinarily red. I have not seen it in my career. It only happened because interest rates are this high, and obviously they're going down now, the Fed cut rates day before yesterday. So I think the opportunity just disappears in a year. But it's a phenomenal opportunity. I'm pushing my team very, very hard. It's like, I want to get two dozen pieces of land in contract, because I'll probably flip, you know, 80% of these for, you know, 10, $15 million profit, and the rest of them will just build on them. So we'll keep the best ones and build and everything else will just flip. Anyone can do this, because the land market is illiquid, anyone?

Robert Plank 24:14 And how do we do it? Like we like you're here on a podcast. We get a little bit of a taste, right? We hear your story. We get some facts, we get some inspiration, motivation. But at the end, it's like, all right, man, this guy, Neil, like he's got some stuff figured out. So how can someone find out more about how to participate in this, or what you have going on?

Neil Bawa 24:33 First learn you don't need me to do this. Bottom line is, if people are looking to invest with us, they will find Neil Bawa. I'm the only Neil Bawa on the World Wide Web, so just Google my name. You'll see my companies. You'll see my returns. We're very transparent. If we don't do well, we publish it, and you can join us and benefit from all the stuff that we're doing. But honest answer to your question is, you don't need me at all, right? Anyone can basically do what I'm doing. So essentially, what you're doing is your first learn, the best way to learn, chat GPT, basically say, I want to be a land developer, right? Tell me everything I need to know about land development. Spend two hours quizzing, you know, chat GPT, then spend two hours going on YouTube, repeating the whole process. Everything you asked. Let chat GPT. Ask YouTube. You'll see great videos now that you've learned a little bit about things like zoning, entitlement, permitting, right? What do these things mean? Right? You know, how do you get land to shovel ready so you can sell it? You're not trying to build anything. You're not trying to be a developer. That's expensive, it's dangerous. You need to know a lot. What you're simply trying to do is take a raw land and get it up zoned so that you can build apartments on it, right? Up zone, right? And you're trying to get it to shovel ready for as low a price as possible, and not build anything. And when it's shovel ready, a lot of people will take it off of your hands. Why? Because they're rich, they have lots of money, and they don't have the patience. Because it takes two years these days to get the land to that point of time. Hence the 21 months, because you're trying to sell it at the end of that time without ever owning the land. Bottom line is, there's land all over the United States, right? Don't go to expensive markets. It'll be very expensive, and your deposits will be big, like when I buy a $2 million piece of deposit land, my deposit is about $40,000 maybe you start with a $250,000 piece of land. Therefore you should go to inexpensive places. So look at markets where growth is very high. Land prices have fallen anyway, because of interest rates, right? And people will give you that time. So bottom line is, you've got to go find brokers there and start making offers. I usually make off whatever the Whisper prices on properties, I go 10% below. The Whisper price on land, I go 50% below. So if the Whisper price is 2 million, I put in my bid at 1 million, I lose my bids 100% of the time. And that's what I want to do. I want to lose all of my bids, right? So if I put together, let's say somewhere around, roughly, we'll make about eight offers a month, nine offers a month. I want to lose all nine, right? But then what we do is, in the second month, once after we lose the offer, we go back and we raise the price by 5% so now that $2 million whisper price, instead of a million, I'm going up to 1,000,050 or a million, 1,000,001 and then another month later, we go up and raise it by another 5% now I'm 40% below what they're looking for, and I almost inevitably get it, because I'm chasing that piece of land, and nobody else is buying land right now, right? This is doable. Anyone else can do it.

Robert Plank 27:21 This is very cool. I love your strategy and your gamification and your repetition of saying, like, instead of looking out or trying to get like, a windfall cast, you're like, Well, hey, here's what my SOP is, and here's what we're going to do. And like, here's what that leads to. And I mean, it's amazing to get a peek inside of your head. And as you said, look up Neil Bawa. That's first name N, E, I, l, last name B, A, W, A, check him out on LinkedIn, check him out on YouTube, and that chat G B T strategy especially, I mean, I thought it was pretty good at using chat G B T. Now I need to up my game when you say, well, you want to do this, ask it these questions, and kind of go back and forth for two hours, which will lead you to what else you need to know, and the keywords to search on YouTube. And then once you get through that, then figure out what your action will be, figure out what your game plan is, and then a strategy will develop. And then, heck, once you start doing that, then now the team building aspect that you mentioned earlier comes into play, right? You speak it into chat, GPT, you tell it you're this kind of expert. Formulate it into this document, give it to your project manager, get it assigned in Asana, get them to then create your weekly or quarterly reports. Make the dashboards that you can way you can easily see how that's working. I mean, this are, this is our some cool thoughts and strategies that you have, and so you're sure you don't want to plug a URL to we don't want to send people to grow capitis or any other additional resources

Neil Bawa 28:47 go to multifamily University. So type in the words multifamily University, click on the website, you'll see a dozen webinars that we do. They all involve powerful money making strategies that we give away. We are not actually involved in most of them. But when we come across the strategies, we give them away. Why do we give them away? Well, it gives us a massive audience. So we have 82,000 people following us, and those 82,000 people, 1% of them, become investors with us, and our minimum investment is 50 to $100,000 so that 1% is all that we need. We've raised $325 million using this strategy. The remaining 99% just get stuff for free all year round and follow us. You know, you can, I'm the only Neil Bawa on the World Wide Web. So you can follow me on any social platform that you like, Instagram, tik, Tok, YouTube, you know, LinkedIn, whatever platform you write with there. I'm I've never actually been on social media myself. I've never installed any apps, but I have systems, I have processes, and I have staff. And so people think that I spend 24 hours a day on social media, and I answer every single response. Nobody is actually writing those response except for AI. But you know what? We're on there, right? I'm not spending any time on marketing. I'm spending time on thinking about marketing and creating systems around marketing. I think those are useful to learn. We also, every once in a while, do a webinar on that. We use an army of virtual assistants. I own a company in the Philippines. We teach a webinar about that. And that's very, very powerful. I think 10, 15,000 people have taken that webinar on how we recruit them, how we train them, how to be, make them accountable. All of that is multi family University. That's the best place to start.

Robert Plank 30:29 Very nice. You're on fire. I love your focus and your leverage and just your passion and just what you're doing here, changing the world and giving by giving away the information, but also helping the people that need it. So multi family University, do that Google search, it will take you to multi family u.com where you can see about the 811 investor club members, 19,743 Facebook group members. But there's even just this larger scope, this larger world to think about Neil, about your habits and your productivity and your mindset and just how you tackle these big problems. It's it's got me so I need to go outside and run like three miles just to, just to burn off the the excitement, because it was really, really cool to think about. So Neil Bawa on LinkedIn and on social media, but before I let you go, Neil, it's time for the grand finale, where I put you on the spot a little bit, I like to ask my guests near the end for a fun quote or lesson that has helped them, that they can pass on to us. So what comes to mind for you, as far as a fun quarter lesson?

Neil Bawa 31:31 I've only come up with one quote in my life, but I think it's a good one, Robert. And the quote is, the Bible got it wrong by one letter. The Bible got it wrong by one letter, Robert, because it is not the meek that shall rule the earth. It is not the meek that shall inherit the earth. It's the geek. It's the geek number one, richest man in the world. Geek number two, richest man in the world. Geek number three. Geek, you see a pattern there? Robert, you do you see a pattern, right? It is the geeks that are ruling the earth. The more you turn yourself into a robot, the more happy you're going to be. Ironically, I think it's artificial intelligence and robots that are going to be the happiest people on Earth. They're not real people, but you know what I mean. So I think that the more you structure your life, the more people think that this is actually going to be grungy. It's the exact reverse.

Robert Plank 32:26 I love it. They say discipline equals freedom. And so with that in mind, seek to be more of a geek, more of a robot. You'll achieve more in life, and you'll be happier. And you can find out more about Neil by searching his name. He's, as we said, He's the only Neil Bawa out there and multi family University, very educational and entertaining. Speaking with you, Neil,

Neil Bawa 32:46 thanks so much for having me, Robert.

Robert Plank 32:51 This is Robert plank from the marketer of the day podcast, which you can find at marketer of the day.com for more episodes and dfy podcast.com, forward slash free. If you want to know more about running your own podcast or running a better or more fun or easier or less time intensive podcast, go to dfy podcast.com/free to find out more, write this instant you. Transcribed by https://otter.ai